This article is also published Twitter/X.

For thirty years, governments have asked cryptographers the same question: Can you build us a backdoor that only the good guys can use?

For thirty years, the answer has been the same: No. A backdoor is a vulnerability. The moment it exists, it can be found, coerced, leaked, copied, or demanded by someone you didn’t plan for. Security properties don’t care about intent. If you break the guarantee once, you’ve changed the system.

This week, the Pentagon asked Anthropic a version of the same question, and the answer matters for the same reasons.

What actually happened

The short version: The Department of War (the Pentagon/DoD’s rebranded name under the current administration) wants Anthropic to let Claude be used for “all lawful purposes” on classified networks. Anthropic provided two red lines for its use of Claude: no mass surveillance of Americans, and no fully autonomous weapons, meaning no AI making final targeting decisions without human judgment in the loop. The Pentagon says those uses are already illegal and against standing policy, so putting them in the contract is unnecessary. Anthropic says: put it in writing anyway, because policy changes and “trust us” isn’t a technical safeguard.

Negotiations have been going on for months. This week they went public, and went sideways fast.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Tuesday. By Thursday, the Pentagon had sent what it called a final offer. Anthropic said the new language “was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will.” Amodei responded publicly:

“We cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell set the clock: 5:01 PM ET Friday. He threatened contract termination, a “supply chain risk” designation (a label typically associated with foreign-linked risk in the defense supply chain, and never before applied to an American company), and invocation of the Defense Production Act.

Then things got personal. Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s CTO and the official leading the negotiations, called Amodei a “liar” with a “God complex” on X. He accused the CEO of a safety-focused AI company of wanting to “personally control the US Military.”

Quiet negotiations no more.

The stated positions aren’t complicated. The Pentagon’s: Legality is the end user’s responsibility; no contractor dictates operational decisions. Anthropic’s: We’re not dictating operations. We’re asking for two explicit prohibitions on uses we believe no AI system should power today. The gap between those positions is where the interesting question lives.

“Constitutional AI” is why this matters

Anthropic doesn’t just equip Claude with instructions (em dashes are awesome) and slap content filters (don’t assist with causing harm) and call it a day. Their approach, which they call Constitutional AI, bakes normative and deliberate constraints into the model through training, reinforcement, and evaluation. Think of it as two layers: constraints that live in the model’s weights (how it was trained to reason) and constraints enforced when it’s being used (system policies, tool gating, refusal behavior).

The product Anthropic is selling, to the Pentagon and everyone else, is predictability with guardrails. Bluntly, a model that won’t cross certain lines even when pressured. That property is the whole point. It’s what makes the system trustworthy enough for high-stakes environments in the first place.

Now, hold that thought for a momentary switching-of-gears.

Prior lessons from the technology world

An encryption backdoor is to a cipher what removing AI guardrails is to a model constitution. “Lawful access” is the crypto version of “all lawful purposes.” And “we promise it’s only for X” is the same logic in both cases: trust us, it’s already illegal, we have policies.

The encryption community settled this argument decades ago, and the conclusion was simple: you cannot build a backdoor that only the good guys can use. Not because the good guys aren’t well-intentioned. Because the artifact, the backdoor itself, can’t know who’s using it and somehow magically behave differently.

The same logic applies. If you create a version of Claude that can do the forbidden things, even “only for the Department of War,” you introduce something that can be replicated, stolen, demanded by others, or used beyond its intended scope by others (ahem…the “bad guys”). Concretely, that “something” could be a special fine-tune, a policy-toggle that changes refusal behavior, deployment configurations that bypass tool guardrails, or access controls that skip logging. The vulnerability isn’t the intent. It’s that the “something” exists and will be used. The moment a special-exception Claude exists, you’ve proven the constraint was negotiable. And negotiable constraints aren’t constraints.

Two failure modes

There’s a real tension the Pentagon is responding to, and it’s worth naming honestly.

If Claude’s safety constitution conflicts with mission-critical requests, the model might refuse, hedge, or degrade in exactly the scenarios where operators need certainty. From a defense perspective, that’s unacceptable unpredictability. Call that a reliability failure. It’s a legitimate operational concern.

But if you weaken the guardrails to avoid reliability failures, you get something worse: an integrity failure. You’ve created a precedent that constraints are optional under pressure. You’ve created a pathway (a fine-tune, a deployment toggle, a policy exception) that can be replicated. And you’ve created a prize: a less-restricted version of one of the most capable AI systems on the planet, which every adversary, agency, and leverage-wielding actor now has reason to pursue.

The Pentagon is trying to solve Mode A. Anthropic is warning about Mode B. They’re both right about their piece of it. But history is pretty clear about which failure mode is more dangerous.

Where the analogy breaks (and why that makes it worse)

I’ll be the first to say the mapping isn’t perfect. Encryption is deterministic; it’s crisp math: you either have the key or you don’t. Modern AI is by nature probabilistic and can’t have the same precise constraints. Their constraints can be jailbroken, fine-tuned around, or simply designed out. The boundary is fuzzier.

But that worsens the backdoor problem rather than weakening the analogy. If constraints are already squishy, then “special exceptions” accelerate a race to the bottom. Every government, every agency, every well-resourced actor will demand their own exception build. Or an adversary will just figure it out. The squishiness means the exceptions compound faster than they would in crypto, not slower.

Here’s a detail that makes this concrete: Gregory Allen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted on Bloomberg Radio this week that Anthropic’s existing safeguards on classified networks “have never been triggered” in actual use. The restrictions haven’t caused operational friction. This fight isn’t about a model that keeps refusing valid requests. It’s about the principle of who gets to define the constraints, and whether those constraints survive pressure.

The “just comply” take, and what it misses

There’s a strain of thinking among prominent technologists that says: It’s for national security. Just comply. Michael made this case explicitly: “At some level, you have to trust your military to do the right thing.”

But “trust us” is not a security control. It’s a policy posture. Here’s what that framing misses:

“It’s lawful” is not a stable boundary. Laws change, interpretations expand, oversight regimes vary. Worse, “lawful” is often an assertion, not a settled fact. Governments routinely authorize actions under legal theories that courts, investigators, or successor administrations later reject. The gap between “lawful” and “wise” can be enormous, and the gap between “someone said it was lawful” and “it will survive scrutiny” can be even wider. The same surveillance capabilities that are illegal domestically can be deployed abroad against populations with no legal protection at all.

Consider: “It’s for national security” is not a threat model. It’s a motivation. Threat models specify who might misuse a capability, how they’d obtain it, and what controls prevent escalation.

And once you normalize exception-making, you invite the next request. Other agencies. Other governments. Adversarial actors with leverage of all sorts. The whole point of an invariant is that it can’t be negotiated.

There’s a subtle but important framing fight underneath all of this: the Pentagon can claim “we’re not changing the product, just the terms.” Anthropic can claim “the restrictions are part of the product.” Both can’t be true. And which one you believe determines whether this looks like a contractual dispute or a request to compromise a safety architecture.

Anyone who’s shipped software recognizes the pattern. Changing the terms is the feature request. “All lawful purposes” in a contract becomes “but the contract says all lawful purposes” the next time Claude refuses something an operator wants it to do. The product doesn’t change on day one. It changes the first time someone enforces the new terms against the old guardrails.

What a sane compromise looks like

Here’s where I want to be constructive, because “no defense use ever” isn’t the right answer either. Nor is Anthropic arguing for that. They’ve been serving the military for months, and they’ve stated their desire to continue. The question is whether you can support defense without creating an exception model.

Well, at least for me, I think you can. The Pentagon could start with giving Anthropic what it’s been asking for: explicit contractual prohibitions on the two narrow red-line uses. Not a blanket restriction on military use. Two specific clauses.

Then build around it: audited deployment with immutable logging and independent review hooks; task-bounded systems where Claude handles planning, analysis, and intelligence synthesis but humans must approve any kinetic or surveillance action; red-team and evaluation gates tied to specific operational domains instead of vague “all lawful purposes” language; and classified environment hardening, which already exists, all without changing the morally-guided “constitutional” constraints. Security and permissionlessness are not the same thing.

None of these require a backdoor. All of them let the military get enormous value from Claude.

The real question

This fight isn’t about “wokeness versus warfighters.” (Though that framing is doing heavy lifting for people who’d rather not engage with the substance). It’s about something more fundamental: Who gets to define, and override, the invariants of powerful general-purpose systems?

If the answer is “whoever has the biggest stick,” then Constitutional AI becomes marketing copy. And the world gets the AI-equivalent of broken cryptography: deployed everywhere, trusted by everyone, compromised from the start.

The supply chain risk designation makes this especially clear. It’s a label thus far reserved for foreign adversaries in the defense supply chain. Using it against a domestic company for maintaining safety standards inverts its entire purpose. It tells every AI company: your safety commitments are a liability, not an asset. Drop them before you’re forced to.

That’s not a national security strategy. It’s a recipe for a tenuous future.

The same lesson, higher stakes

If you wouldn’t ship backdoored encryption to your allies, don’t ship a backdoored AI model. Don’t silently create one, either. The logic is the same. The exception doesn’t care about your intentions, or who’s prompting. And once the exception exists, it belongs to everyone who can find it, coax the models out of it, and propagate it.

We can build AI systems that are powerful and bounded. Or we can build systems that are powerful, politically pliable, and eventually ubiquitous in the hands of whoever copies the exception first.

The cryptographers figured this out generations ago, and rightfully, logically, stood their ground. The question now is whether the people building and deploying AI, and the governments demanding access to it, are willing to learn from that history. Or whether we’re going to spend the next decade rediscovering the same lesson with higher stakes and fewer do-overs.

I'm pretty sure at this point that I've switched my publishing platform almost as many times as the number of posts I've put out there. In just shy of three years, I've published two posts, but have put effort into building a new site no less than a dozen times.

I know what you’re thinking…that it’s way easier to just write something than it is to build a new website. And you’d be right in that. You’re probably also wondering why I would spend time on a custom publishing solution when there are, at least by my last count, an countless number of turn-key platforms. To that I would say: precisely because my brain goes after complex problems like a bear to honey.

Novelty, and the dopamine that it triggers, is something that my mind is constantly seeking. I have ADHD, specifically the inattentive type, meaning that my mind has less available dopamine to work with, a neurotransmitter that’s crucial to motivation, attention, and reward processing.

The last time that I had any amount of regularity in my writing and publishing was when I was using Medium as my platform-of-choice. It had everything I wanted, and nothing that I didn’t, and best of all it had a beautiful interface to work with that got out of my way, so writing became the focus. Simply put, it just worked. But a few unfortunate changes to the platform had me seeking alternative solutions.

That’s precisely when I started walking out into a mental minefield. In my time since publishing with Medium, I have built sites on a few different platforms, built my own sites from scratch, just about everything under the sun **except** pick a straightforward platform that would let me get back to writing.

Now, as I look back, I see a venerable graveyard of half-completed but fully abandoned sites. But worse yet, I don’t see any of the posts I told myself I’d put out there if I just had the right site in place. Hell, I kept a Ghost site up where over 3 months I put up a whopping 7 posts, but kept it running for 37, paying $1,332 in subscription fees just to keep it up. Add up the Digital Ocean droplets and countless hours wasted building custom solutions, and I can honestly say that it was a phenomenal loss of time and money.

I kept telling myself I needed some sort of perfect solution, that only I could build. Whenever I thought of something to write, I got sidetracked by the desire to finish a fancy website first. And sure, sometimes I’d make some progress on that site. But what I didn’t do was write. Ever. This screenshot kind of tells it all:

Resistance was all I put up whenever someone would suggest that I use some sort of simple tool. If my goal was to write, then I should write.

What I didn’t realize back then, that I do now, is that the rabbit holes I was digging in exploring different platforms had more to do with fulfilling a short-term dopamine hit than actually giving a crap about writing. Writing code, tweaking widgets, and seeing incremental improvement to a site is incredibly fulfilling to my ADHD brain. If something went wrong and there was an error, even that was a new path to venture down.

It was all a distraction.

Working on the sites was mental candy…a never-ending supply of problems to solve. A treadmill for my brain. An endless stream of dopamine to pull from. But a shallow one at that.

What was that War Games quote?

> The only winning move is to not play.

My mind was playing a game with me. I want to write, but my mind wanted me to build websites because it was the thing that gave the quick fix…the short-term dopamine bursts that deliver the novelty needed for that moment.

It’s so clear to me now though, that indeed, it was all a distraction. The *correct* path was standing right in front of me, and even directly suggested by friends. I just wasn’t listening.

So yesterday I turned off my Ghost blog, and cancelled my billing. I deleted the many repositories of never-finished sites from my hard drive. And I picked a box of software off the shelf (Substack) to take as many distractions and unnecessary decisions out of the equation, and focus on the thing that matters most…the writing.

And sure…at the end of the day as I write this I wonder to myself…what’s to make sure that I keep writing? I guess I can’t really say for any amount of certainty that I will, but I know one thing very clearly: that at least when I feel like I want to write, my mouse won’t gravitate towards the coding tool instead anymore. So that’s something.

Hello again.

Writing a series on NFTs wasn't really something I set out to do, but here we are—with my own and the global interest hitting something of a fever pitch. If you haven't seen those yet, you can read my primer on NFTs here, my experience minting one, and a thought exercise on digital membership cards.

With Beeple selling his Everydays piece at a Christie's auction for $69M the attention on the space is even hotter than it was a week ago. Every day that passes feels like an eternity here. With all eyes on NFTs a lot of disingenuous headlines are popping up, with many folks scratching their heads wondering what—if anything beyond an image—is everyone buying into here? Let's try to demystify that one a little bit.

NFTs are digital objects with certificates of authenticity built-in

Banksy is arguably one of the most famous artists in the world, certainly the most famous street artist in existence. His original works, typically in the form of pasted graffiti, are often copied—sometimes in the form of unauthorized prints. So when there's a Banksy work that's for sale, how does a potential buyer know that the work is truly an original? I certainly wouldn't want to pay for something that's a really good look-alike if what I was being sold was an "original".

This is where Banksy's Pest Control comes in. They're a group that's uniquely authorized to authenticate Banksy's works and have a brilliant method for providing proof of that authenticity. For a fee, the team at Pest Control can authenticate a work and then provide a certificate of authenticity. But how do they prevent fake certificates?

Torn paper cryptography

Private-key cryptography has been around for a long time. The concept is relatively simple—there's a pair of keys that are used to secure something. If you know my public key, you could encrypt a message with that key—but since only I have the private key that's paired with it, only I can decrypt that message. This is precisely how Pest Control works. They rip up one of Banksy's Di Faced Tenners, and attach one half (the public key) to the paper, while retaining the other half (the private key) in their own secure facility.

If the question of authenticity ever arose around one of Banksy's work, Pest Control could quickly and easily identify the work based on the unique tear pattern that exists on the "public" half, only matched by their corresponding private half.

The trouble with all of this is that a separate authenticating authority, with corresponding certificates, and a cumbersome method of authentication is required to accompany the works. This makes verification slow, with many potential points of failure along the way (destruction of the certificate, loss of the private key, etc.). This is where NFTs are kind of magic—they blend the work itself with the certificate of authenticity.

NFTs themselves are just code—fancy instructions that give rules to computers to help them understand what something is, and how it should be governed. All within a single smart contract (the code) one can establish what the work is (an image, for example), the rules by which it can be traded, any royalty payments that might come along with it, etc. Its existence on an immutable ledger means that one can also inspect its transaction history (transfers, sales, etc.) as well as provenance (how, when, and by whom it was created).

If at any point in time I come across an NFT that was created by the address 0xc6b0562605d35ee710138402b878ffe6f2e23807 I can know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was Beeple's wallet that did it. Now, it's certainly possible that at some future point that wallet could become compromised, but we can know that everything that was minted (created and written to the blockchain) prior to that date is still authentically his work.

By nature this means that the work and its certificate of authenticity are bound together as one piece, inseparable. So…when Beeple's works start moving around we would never need the equivalent of his Pest Control to verify it—the blockchain is his Pest Control, independently verifiable by anyone on the planet with an internet connection.

NFTs aren't just any kind of JPG

The New York Times ran a headline yesterday that was just a bit too cute for its own good: "JPG File Sells for $69 Million, as ‘NFT Mania’ Gathers Pace." Sure it's attention-grabbing, but boy is it disingenuous. It's not just a JPG, but a JPG with a built-in certificate of authenticity and that's why it's special.

Would you buy a car without a title?

This is where the discourse around NFTs start to break from reality. Many are decrying them as "just pictures" and that they can be easily copied, etc. etc. So to these people I will pose the following questions:

• Would you buy a car for fair market value without a title?

• Would the government allow you any services without a birth certificate?

• Would you buy a house without a deed?

The simple answer to all of the above for most, I'm assuming, would be "yeah, probably not." What's crazier still is that there's even an entire industry built up around the "what if" scenario of an incorrect deed (see title insurance).

What would the value of the car be without a title? Sure, its constituent components are probably valuable to a junker, and maybe you could drive it under the radar for some time, but eventually it could get you in trouble. All throughout society we have examples of works bound to certificates of authenticity (including our own selves). So why is it such a weird leap for people to take that digital works can now have their own? Needless to say, these critics are already wrong about what NFTs are, and will be further proven wrong as more and more use cases arise.

Imagine a future where all kinds of things use NFTs as their certificates of authenticity—those same car titles, deeds, etc. Now there are also ways to bind physical objects with addresses on a blockchain, with some companies like Everledger having done it for a while.

Wrapping up

The world of NFTs is moving wicked fast—certainly with its adoption seeming to outpace cryptocurrency in general. It's totally understandable if someone doesn't initially grok why an NFT is more special than just a .jpg file, but that's where it's worthwhile to educate them. People understand deeds, titles, and certificates of authenticity—so let's help them connect the dots to the digital world.

First, the fact that three of the last three posts (here's one and two) on this blog should be a good indicator that there are a lot of exciting things going on with NFTs these days. In both of those posts I referenced some outside links as a primer, but have also found myself explaining to friends as of late what they're all about. So I thought maybe it might be time to just write up my quick perspective on what they are, what they mean for the crypto space, and for the future of the web.

Note that this post assumes you've got at least some passing familiarity for what cryptocurrencies are, and a bit about how they operate. If you're not there yet, go check out Coinbase's article on the subject.

What's in the name?

NFT stands for "non-fungible token." Fungibility essentially means that something can be broken down and that its subdivided parts are indistinguishable from each other. A bar of gold is fungible because it can be melted down and its remains would be impossible to identify what bar it came from.

Non-fungible represents something that is in and of itself unique—something that cannot be broken down further without destroying what makes it unique.

Digital scarcity

Aside from the advent of trustless stores of value, the single biggest contribution to the digital world that Bitcoin, blockchains, and the like gave us is the concept of digital scarcity. When something is scarce there is a finite supply to go around—like all the gold ore in the world, or clean water.

It used to be that when something got turned into 1's and 0's it could be infinitely copied with otherwise indistinguishable results. But blockchains and other distributed ledgers solved core problems around double spending where the same digital money is spent twice. Furthermore their distributed nature meant that there was no centralized authority who could change the rules, or alter some sort of historical log of transactions.

Without going into all of the specifics the above innovations mean that despite something existing in a purely digital space one could cryptographically prove that there are no copies.

I came in relatively late to the crypto game in 2017, but though I didn't understand all of it at the time this concept alone blew my mind. Here's a little tweet storm I sent out back then after brainstorming on the possibilities with a friend:

How can something digital be truly unique?

Don't worry if you're already scratching your head on this one. We've been operating with the same core principles in the digital world for a long time, and they're only recently being upended. But here we go:

Images can be copied easily. I can send a picture to you, and by the time you receive it there are now two copies. When you send it to someone else now there are three, etc. etc. While I may have taken the original photo, the copies are largely indistinguishable from each other and therefore not unique even though the original may have been at one point.

Turning a photo into an NFT means that you're embuing it with certain properties to help identify its provenance and establishing immutable proof of its existence and history. This gets back into the idea of something being scarce—you're giving that photo new and special properties to help idenfity it.

So now if that same photo is non-fungible, even though I can make many copies of its pixels, it would be possible to prove what the original is—this precisely is the thing that's new and particularly exciting.

To bring this back to the real world, while you can purchase a print, postcard, or mousepad (old school, right?) of Van Gogh's "Starry Night", we all know that there is just one original, which happens to be in the NYC MoMA's permanent collection. The fact that there are copies of the original doesn't make it any less valuable or unappealing, in fact one might argue the opposite.

So too we have Murat Yıldırım's "Furry Night" as seen above. While Van Gogh's medium was paint, Murat's was pixels—what you see has never existed in the physical space. Quite obviously I've posted a copy above, but because he's turned it into an NFT, it's now much more special and scarce—with only "1 of 1" existing as its true original. Its record on the Ethereum blockchain is available for all to see—including its creator, time of creation, current owner, and entire history of its movement throughout the digital world:

What the heck does all this mean?

There's a lot going on in the above graphic, but here's a quick primer on what each of the things mean:

• Wallet: A unique address where cryptocurrency and tokens are held, typically secured by a private key. Basically think of this as your "login," with the wallet address as your username, and your private key the password. Wallets like Rainbow Wallet are making an otherwise rather complex experience quite simple.

• Transaction Hash: Think of this as a receipt. It's the cryptographic proof that this transaction happened.

• Block: Which spot in the distributed ledger (in this case a blockchain) the transaction happens to appear. Many transactions are included in a single block.

• Timestamp: When this transaction occurred

• From: Which wallet (think of this like a bank account, or a web login of sorts) sent this transaction

• Interacted With (To): This is where the object went. In this case it was sent to SuperRare, a marketplace of other NFTs, so that it could be listed. In cases when ETH (Ethereum's native currency) is transferred between parties, it would simply show the receiving party's wallet.

• Contract: This is a Smart Contract on the Ethereum blockchain—essentially just some code with special instructions for how to handle a transaction. In this case it was to "mint" this object.

• Tokens Transferred: In the case of a fungible token, you would see the amount of tokens moving within the transaction. But because the above is an NFT contract, you're seeing which specific token (the Token ID) moved. You will also see the destination (To) if it's an NFT being moving.

• ERC-721 Token: Simplistically, this is the code standard or instructions on how a given token should operate. The ERC-721 token standard is what has been popularized for NFTs on the Ethereum network. A newer entrant, the ERC-1155 token standard adds some nifty new features and has seen some recent adoption.

• Minting: The process of turning something into an NFT. Many of the marketplaces such as OpenSea and Rarible make it easy for anyone to mint.

• Transaction Fee: How much it costs to mint the object. Running code is not free on the Ethereum network—computers the world over are performing those instructions and "gas" is spent to make it happen. In the example above it cost $55.30 to "mint" Murat's NFT.

• Gas Price: Transactions on the Ethereum network cost "gas" to go through. The gas price goes up or down over time depending on the supply and demand of computing power on the network—the obvious analogy being the sale of gasoline in the "real world."

• Ether Price: How much 1 ETH roughly cost at the moment of the transaction

What can be an NFT?

Anything really—or at least anything that can have a digital representation. Here is a short list of examples, though by no means comprehensive:

• Art: Like you saw above with "Furry Night" or perhaps Beeple's groundbreaking auction of an NFT with Christie's action house. What's special here is that artists can capture value in secondary sales as well…more on that below.

• Collectibles: Think trading cards, figurines, or just about anything that is of a limited edition. Some of the best NFT examples today include NBA Top Shot, Sorare, and CryptoPunks. In Top Shot's case you collect limited edition video clips of special moments in the NBA.

• Music: This could mean unique works that are limited edition, or perhaps stems that an original work is comprised of. A recent example is 3LAU's (pronounced Blau) NFT release. Another is EulerBeats, a collection of just 27 music originals generated by an algorithm, and released in a particularly unique format.

• Tickets: This could be a great example because currently tickets to events are vulnerable to fraud, and exploitative scalping. Folks like Mark Cuban are taking a serious look at making tickets into NFTs, which could also enable the ticket issuer to take advantage of secondary sales.

• Membership: I wrote about this in a previous post, but the idea is that you could have a token that represents membership in something—and its presence in your wallet could be proof without need for logins, etc.

How do they have value?

In an open market, things are valued simply by what the market will bear (what someone is willing to pay). What makes NFTs special is that they are verifiably scarce (the obvious counterfeit question is addressed below). That's why something like CryptoPunks is seeing such high resale value—there's only 10,000 of them in the world and they are all unique. The total sale value of all of the 8-bit punks at this point is over a staggering $114M.

Even more interesting is that even when works are given away by the artist, such as in the case of Beeple's $1 raffle with MakersPlace, that hasn't seemed to affect the resale value in the least.

What about counterfeit works?

I should call out that yes, objects could certainly be minted that are exact copies of something else. However, in the case of NFTs the value is in the contract and its explicit scarcity—verified with the wallet address that it originated from. For instance, Beeple's wallet is at 0xc6b0562605d35ee710138402b878ffe6f2e23807 and can also be identified with the Ethereum Name Service as beeple.eth.

So if there was a counterfeit Beeple floating around out there—and I'm certain there is—it's extremely easy to look at the source address and discover that no, it didn't come from the one-and-only.

Will they hold their value?

I have no idea. Plenty of the assets will likely go down, maybe even as much as 99% of them. But the scarcity will remain, and the concepts are here forever now. Not all projects and artists will see mega-high valuations, but some assets like Top Shot's moments or Beeple's art feel like they could have some real staying power.

Does this help artists and other creatives?

Without a doubt. For those artists, musicians, storytellers, and other creatives that are willing to put in the effort to make something special and authentically engage with their communities, they will be rewarded handsomly. Beeple's example is proof—he has shared hundreds of works on his Instagram over the years but up until recently it was primarily Facebook that would have reaped the economic benefit of his contributions. By allowing creators to monetize directly, and continue to receive residuals after the fact, they will begin to have a greater control of their economic story.

Furthermore, the royalty model alone could enable a new kind of success story for creatives that decide to play the long game. It's conceivable that an artist could enter the space by giving away all works for free, but with scarcity of those works in mind. As that artist gains in popularity, others will begin to bid on the originally free works and ascribe a monetary value to them. That value then return as residuals to the artist. So while in a traditional sense it's hard for creatives to gain economic value from their earliest works that might have been free initially, the NFT space will flip that on its head where the earliest works could be the most valuable ones.

Have you made any?

In the interest of getting my hands dirty with this, I've now since minted a few different objects to see what the process is like from inception to execution and listing. While I have no idea if someone will find them interesting enough to purchase on their own, it felt important to try my hand at the process so that I have direct knowledge of what's going on.

So far I've created and listed:

A 1 of 1 video commemorating 3LAU's NFT auction:

A cheeky set of old school 16x16 favicons with modern themes:

Each favicon is a 1 of 100. Check out the collection here

What's newly enabled by this stuff?

The fact that these NFTs exist in digital space, with their sale and transfer governed by software, means that they can be embued with some really interesting characteristics. Entirely new things that aren't possible in the "real world" will be enabled here.

1. When minted, it's possible to set a royalty fee for subsequent transfers of the token. This is a groundbreaking change because it means that artists and purveyors of other digital goods can continue to reap the rewards of an object after it's left their hands. So while an artist getting off the ground may only sell a piece for a small sum, should they get popular later on, they can still earn a percentage of subsequent sales. e.g. when a Beeple piece was sold for $6.6M, Beeple himself received $660,000 with no additional effort. Incredible.

2. As underscored above, the mere concept of digital scarcity is extremely new—with countless possibilities that I couldn't even begin to enumerate here. This will open up whole new worlds of functionality and interesting behavior for digital objects.

3. Someone's wallet address acts as both their personal collection, and verifiable proof of ownership of a given asset or assets. Therefore it's conceivable that your wallet address could be used as a wholly owned and sovereign, decentralized authentication method to identify onesself (so long as the keys are retained…which can certainly be an issue). Simply the existance of a "membership token" in ones wallet would be verifiable proof of their membership, requiring no centralized authority to confirm.

4. Direct transfer between two parties that otherwise do not need to know or understand anything about each other, while trusting the transaction will still go through. It's impossible to trust an unknown party you may be transacting with on Craigslist, but Ethereum enables transfer without having to trust the other party at all.

Wrapping up…

Though this space has been slowly building for years now, the interest and fervor around it has just begun. With every day that passes there seems to be some new development—and it's overwhelming to take it all in. I will continue to write more on the subject when new and interesting things come about, as I truly believe that we're at the beginning of something special here—a sea change in what's possible in the digital world.

Let's start by assuring you that the title isn't false—I quite literally didn't mean to sell an NFT of my creating. So how about we unpack that, yeah?

But first, if you don't know what an NFT is, to the bottom of this post to get your background.

The start

Wanting to do a quick test to see how easy or difficult it might be to mint an NFT I popped over to OpenSea—probably one of the biggest marketplaces of such things. They've got a handy creation tool that allows you to set a number of different parameters. Here's what it looks like:

One thing that's nice about how OpenSea does the whole thing is that they use various smart contracts to allow for the creation of NFTs, and listing them for sale, all without minting them just yet. They're using the ERC-1155 token standard to do this, vs. the more common ERC-721 standard.

Jargon aside, what you need to know is this: to sell any kind of NFTs on Ethereum, usually the creator has to pay to add those objects to the blockchain. This whole process is called "minting" and you spend "gas" to do so (which is typically paid for in ETH). Because all of this is so dang popular right now, the gas fees can be incredibly high to mint objects—sometimes upwards of $150-$200.

This is why the ERC-1155 standard is kind of neat—with OpenSea I was able to create the thing without having to pay for the gas up front. When a buyer comes along or the object is transferred to another account, that's where the gas fee comes in—that's when it's truly "minted".

So what did I create? Just a little variation on a logo I've had around for a long time, which in and of itself is a variation on something that the fine folks at Butchershop made for me years ago. Threw a sunrise gradient behind my logo and done.

The setup

It should be made clear that I didn't actually intend to sell this thing to some other person. Like, why the hell would they want it to begin with—it's literally just my logo. But because I'm an idiot, I set up a listing price as $1 and just hit Post Your Listing without realizing it was going to …post the listing…for $1. Not an auction with a reserve price of $1…just…for sale at $1. Idiot.

Here's the listing that went live:

All told it was super easy to do, took just a few minutes, and was fun to see the process through.

And then…

The sale

Sometime later in the evening last night I got an email from OpenSea and proceeded to audibly proclaim:

Ohhhhhh shiiiiiittttt

…as in the dread kind, not the "that's pretty cool" kind.

This is when I realized that some random person stumbled upon my profile and paid all of $1 for the logo. Wilder yet—remember that bit above where I mentioned that the buyer had to pay the gas fee? Yeah…they did. $40 worth.

So…someone stumbled upon my logo, paid the buck, paid $40 in gas to actually mint the thing, and now it is real—an object I made just to test some shit is permanently affixed in the Ethereum blockchain. And after that momentary dread, I came to the following conclusion:

This is pretty fucking cool.

By pure happenstance and accident, there's now a digital object floating around and because of this story, it truly does become a "1 of 1" edition. And now, 0x720a4fab08cb746fc90e88d1924a98104c0822cf, otherwise known as brandonkangfilms is the owner of said object (and what a mighty nice collection he has otherwise).

This whole space feels exciting, with so much creative expression happening and tons of enthusiastic new collectors coming to play. NFTs are enabling a new creative rennaisance—one where the artists are going to get paid, and also rewarded in royalties as their work is traded later on. And that's awesome.

So, will I try again, this time with something I actually intend to put out there for sale? Absolutely. I've got a few things in the hopper that I'd like to drop soon, and hopefully this time I won't be an idiot and list them for $1.

NFT WTF?

Here's your primer on NFTs:

And if you haven't already checked out a post of mine from a few days ago on some possibilities for NFTs, maybe check that out too:

NFTs are all the rage right now. Maybe you've been asleep for a few weeks, or perhaps not in some of the corners of the internet I frequent, but at least in my world it seems that everyone is talking about non-fungible tokens. Simply put they're a way of representing digital ownership over something—a piece of art, a collectible "card", a piece of music, etc. But what's unique about these things is that they're…unique. Built on blockchain technology, you're able to verifiably prove that these objects are in fact, unique, or at least have a truly limited supply. Some of these objects are selling at a truly eye-popping amounts, such as Nyan Cat, a flying cat with a pop tart body followed by a trail of rainbows, fetching $600k.

As evidenced by the tweet above (sent two years ago), the ideas of NFTs have been around for a while, but they've become incredibly pouplar recently with the advent of NBA Top Shot, and big sales from digital artists like Beeple. If you want a primer on NFTs, you can find out more on them here.

While they're an obvious monetization path for creative works, I think that they also might just represent a revolution for membership programs, subscriptions, and software licenses. WTF, right? Let's dive in…

Background

A few years back before I got to work on my previous startup, I was gobbling up as much information as I could on the world of crypto, ICOs, and all the other rage at the moment. A buddy of mine and I were contemplating building a tool in the crypto space, but were trying to think of clever and creative ways to monetize. We were a bit inspired after seeing the Brave ICO run a pretty successful raise. No doubt it was the wild west at the time, but there as a weird idea I had then that's come back around to me in recent weeks.

While this idea never came to fruition, I'm sharing something I wrote to a friend who was an investor and will connect why it's relevant today:

What the hell does all that jargon mean? Let's break this down:

Licensing

While nowadays almost everything is subscription-based, back in the day paid software used to require licenses to work. A handful of companies that had extremely expensive software, with pirates always seeking to crack them, found a clever (if also incredibly annoying) solution: USB dongles.

AVID's iLok was one example. Your license key was stored on the thumb drive itself, and you'd have to have one of these suckers plugged into your machine for the software to work at all. Thankfully with subscriptions we've moved past the need for such archaic things, but the idea that there was a physical object that contained the license has always remained interesting to me.

Lifetime membership

When we used to watch television that was piped in through a copper coaxial cable, TiVo was a pretty dang popular with its enabling of timeshifted content. They too had a subscription service, but with one interesting twist:

In the early days you could purchase a lifetime membership which meant no more monthly payments—just service forever (or at least as long as TiVo was in business 💀).

Initially the lifetime service cost around $199, but before it was discontinued grew all the way to $399. Through that time the value of the service increased (who knows if at a 2x rate), so it makes sense that the price of the lifetime membership increased as well.

NFTs

Digging in a bit more into non-fungible tokens, (see ERC-721 or ERC-1155 for specific tech), the biggest thing you need to know is that it's possible to make digital objects that are scarce and can't be divided (unlike bitcoin, which is fungible). Tokens can be stored in wallets, like the very wonderful Rainbow Ethereum Wallet, what I use to mess with this stuff.

Because the wallet itself is actually "stored" on the Ethereum blockchain and I retain the secret key, it's something that I own outright and no one else can lay claim over it. Furthermore, it's possible to "authenticate" with that wallet among many different services, and allow those services to recognize the things that I own. What's cool about that is whether I'm collecting digital art, music, virtual land, or domain names, they're all stored in the same wallet regardless of their origin.

Putting it all together

Let's imagine a new kind of membership card, one that is in and of itself a non-fungible token.

• I could purchase the token (my membership card) from the service provider, or potentially from another individual

• The token would live inside of a wallet, which would be authenticated wherever its features could be used

• That token would enable all of the features of my membership—access to software, access to member gatherings, whatever you could imagine

• The token could simply represent an active subscription, but for the sake of this thought experiment I like the idea that they're lifetime memberships—long-term valuable and collectible

• Tokens could be minted or burned based on various criteria—keeping supply in balance would be critical to maintaining a viable market

What kinds of things would this enable?

• Rewarding your most loyal members—it doesn't all have to be about making money. Some members could be rewarded with such a token, and might in turn become an even more powerful supporter.

• Fractional ownership—what if a token was the new season pass? Though the token itself would not be fungible, perhaps there would be a way to participate together. The features of the token would only be redeemable by the current bearerer of the token, but those sharing the token could trade off on who the bearer might be at any time.

• Exclusivity—imagine Peloton had these sorts of lifetime memberships as tokens that could be represented as a badge next to my avatar while riding. You know who would want them? Everyone. Every single Peloton rider.

• Liquidity—if there was a transparent process for how new membership tokens are minted, one could ascribe a value floor to the tokens, and trades of these might happen at a multiple of their purchase price

• Value creation—As new features of the membership get added, the intrinsic value of the token would change accordingly—imagine an exclusive event where token holders get access—the price of those tokens would likely increase with such a thing

• Discouraging bad behavior—there could be clear policies which would allow for a token to be burnt, or invalidated, based on the behavior of its owner. Now, this is absolutely a slippery slope and would need to be implemented extremely carefully, but essentially it would be possible to build a TOS into the token itself.

Whatever happens next, it's going to be exciting

While NFTs are very much in the early days and it will be a long while before consumers are savvy enough for something like this to be deployed en masse, the non-fungible digital future seems inevitable.

If you've seen anything like the above before, do let me know! I'd love to keep this post updated with real world examples of such a thing.

Here it is! Part two in my series, rounding up all of my favorite products that I discovered in 2020. If you haven’t read it yet, head on over to Part 1 to see how this whole thing got started.

So here we go…seven more products that I fell in love with in 2020! Starting with…home networking gear…wtf?

UniFi Dream Machine Pro

Check it out here: https://store.ui.com/

Who in the world could have imagined I could get excited about a router? It’s…a router. But that’s where I found myself pretty surprised and then later learning to deeply appreciate a great hardware/software combo for home networking. I picked this thing up in the fall of 2020, after nearly a year of struggles in getting my home network to work exactly as I’d wanted (reliably). With so much of my day being online, and with so many internet connected devices, I knew that I wanted reliability to be my north star for networking equipment.

When I put the ask out there about which brand or device I should be looking for there came only one response: Ubiquiti, and their UniFi Dream Machine Pro.

It’s set up for network cables, so you’ll still need to worry about WiFi separately. At home I've attached my Orbi WiFi in AP mode, but am soon swapping those out with the new WiFi 6 UniFi access points for greater reliability. All these years of getting force fed the "mesh networking is great!" rhetoric and all I really want is RJ45 outlets in every room, with access points throughout.

Back to UniFi…The software is perfectly laid out, with far more insight than you ever thought necessary about your home network. That's where Ubiquiti's offering really shines—in its deep, very Apple-like integration of hardware and software. The best thing about it so far for me? It. Just. Works. I have had very little to fuss with over it thus far, and I’ve got pretty fussy home network needs. This is highly recommended for anyone that wants to seriously level up their setup at home.

Fellow Ode Grinder

Check it out here: https://fellowproducts.com/

Like Agent Cooper, it's no secret that I'm a massive coffee nerd, and have been chasing the best cup I could brew at home for a long time. My go-to is a pour over each morning, and sometimes a second one (or iced coffee) in the afternoon. Grinding fresh is a must—anything less would be uncivilized. For years I've been relying on a trusty Baratza Vario to get the job done, but lately I also wanted to start experimenting with espresso a bit. Toggling between grind sizes would have been less-than-ideal. So while the Vario has done a fine job handling my pour over needs, when I saw Fellow launch their Kickstarter campaign for the Ode, I knew I had to give it a shot for my brewing needs.

The Ode is attractive, compact, and grinds with excellent consistency. It's not a particularly expensive grinder, and at $299 bests anything else in its class. The Ode's approach to grinding is no frills—there's no scale, no timer, everything you need and nothing that you don't.

For the things that I care most about—getting a consistent grind, easy to clean up, and capable of a variety of grind sizes for multiple brew methods—the Ode does a stellar job.

Ember Mug

Check it out here: https://ember.com/

Continuing with the coffee theme, we have a bluetooth-controlled mug. Yes, you read that right. My mug has a freaking wireless connection and a battery. Why in the world could I possibly need this, let alone put it amongst my favorite products of 2020 you ask? Because it keeps my coffee hot…at exactly the temperature I like it…for as long as I’m sipping on it.

Is it excessive? Absolutely. Is it unnecessary? Most likely. Is it awesome? Yes 😎

For years I searched for the perfect thermal mug that would keep my beverage of choice hot for a long period of time, and I’d gotten pretty dang close to that with the Yeti Rambler 24oz mug. But after 30 or so minutes in the cup, my coffee was still getting cool.

So this year for Christmas, my folks got me this Ember mug and let me tell you, it’s been one hell of a quality-of-life upgrade. It’s the perfect companion for my morning routine of reading a book, some journaling, and catching up on things—and it keeps my coffee hot for the duration of the whole thing. It ain’t cheap, but man I love this thing.

Logitech Ergo K860

Check it out here: https://www.logitech.com/

Aside from my bed and phone, there are very few products that see as much contact by me as a keyboard. For a decade at least I've just stuck by my standard Apple Wireless Keyboard without question. That is, until I began to realize that as I've gotten older, my posture has worstened significantly. This even considers the fact that I stand at my desk most of the time, so while it still isn't as bad as it could be, I knew that it had to improve.

A long while ago I'd had a handful of Logitech keyboards that I'd liked, and they've always been pretty trustworthy. Checking out their new stuff was a logical direction. Their split key ergonomic keyboard seemed like just what the doctor ordered (ok, no actual doctor ordered it for me). Within just a few weeks of use, I noticed that my posture was improving—all because when I'm actively engaged with it, my chest opens up and my shoulders tilt back, vs. all hunching forward as before.

The keyboard layout can take a little bit of getting used to—and if you're not a touch typer, I'm sure it could be quite a challenge. But the little bit of extra effort required to get accustomed to it is well worth it for the sake of your health. Bonus points for all of the extra features it has—like the ability to connect to three different devices with quick-switch buttons.

Apple Magic Keyboard

Check it out here: https://www.apple.com/ipad-keyboards/

I've been a fan of my iPad (most recently 12.9" iPad Pro) ever since they came out. For a while it had been my primary computing device when away from my desk—and when the Magic Keyboard was announced it seemed like the perfect addition to my setup. It immediately elevated the iPad from a consumption-first device to creation-first.

Ever since then, I've used my iPad to write an absolute ton on. The Magic Keyboard feels great to type on, but it also sets up the iPad at a perfect viewing angle…something that was always a struggle with previous keyboards made for the iPad. That's all thanks to its unique hinge design, and magnetic attachment.

If you've got an iPad, but don't have a Magic Keyboard…what in the heck are you waiting for? Trust me…

Fuser

Check it out here: http://fuser.com

I'll let the video above speak for how crazy this video game is. The premise is pretty simple: you get to put together stems of different songs together in just about any combination you can think of. Want to put together a rendition of "Take On Me" in a minor key with some "Bad Guy" vibes in the background? Well, that can happen.

Fuser is made by the same folks that brought you the original Guitar Hero, and later Rock Band. But they also made a little known interactive card game with Hasbro called Dropmix that was a ton of fun. Check out my little demo of that here. I was stoked when Harmonix demoed Fuser, which seemed like the best parts of Dropmix all put together in an even more extensive video game.

In a world full of stressful shooters and grindy role playing games, Fuser is a breath of fresh air. It takes a little bit to get the hang of it, but once you've given it a go a few times, it's just so hard to have anything short of a really fun time. The game is available on the Xbox, Playstation, and PC in all of the platforms' respective online stores.

Ego Lawnmower

Check it out here: https://egopowerplus.com/

Ok whatever, it's hard to get excited about a lawnmower. But here I found myself last year in need of a new one and had to do a bunch of research. All of my digging led me down the path of the Ego brand, and their 56V battery powered lawn care products. Specifically their Select Cut mower seemed to offer just as much as what gas could do—but with none of the nasty stuff that comes with using fossil fuels.

Simply put, mowing with this beast was a breeze all throughought the summer. Sometimes I got a little bit lazy, the grass got a little long, and this thing still powered through like a champ on a single charge. The best part was just how quiet it was—barely registering over 80dB while I drove it around. This meant that for a number of my lawn mowing sessions I actually popped my AirPods in and got to catch up on my podcasts, or even with a friend on the phone. To anyone on the other side it just sounded like a whir and a hum. Wild!

All told I'm excited to see where Ego goes next with their supercharged battery-powered tools—thinking after this two feet of snow we got the other day, I might have done well by their snow blower!

Conclusion

So there we have it…a little over a dozen products that were my favorites from 2020. It's a wide range of categories, and while still not comprehensive for everything that I found and love, does a good job of hitting the highlights.

Thanks for reading! And if you've been enjoying these posts, be sure to sign up for my newsletter and get some of my future ramblings delivered right to your inbox!

We’ll get this out of the way real quick: 2020 sucked for the most part. Beyond all of the obvious bits as to why it was a crap year, without commutes or any semblance of a social calendar we all became very familiar with the interior of our dwellings. Some left cities for greener pastures, some painted every last wall they could cover, and I in a largely technology-focused way thought it would be a good time to optimize my environment given the circumstance.

It seemed like every aspect of my home and digital life went under scrutiny to figure out if it could be better than it was. No doubt there is still plenty to improve in the areas of my health, time management, etc. but at least for the things that could easily be controlled I dug in to see what could be updated.

This is part 1 of a roundup of many of the products I discovered in 2020 that made a meaningful improvement in my home, digital life, overall wellbeing, or happiness. It’s not comprehensive by any means, but rather a snapshot of the products I felt had the most impact. Sometime later I’ll likely go back to a few of these and dig in as to the many reasons I find them so great, but for now I’ll share the highlights. The order that follows is generally what I’d consider the most to least impactful.

Note: this post contains a handful of affiliate links.

Peloton

Check it out here: https://onepeloton.com

Next to my Apple Watch, no product has been more impactful on my fitness and overall health than the Peloton Bike that I got in February 2020. This year from March to October, according to my Apple Watch, I averaged over 975 kcals of active energy burn daily. That is almost 2x what I had done the year prior. Throughout the year my resting heart rate slowed almost 10%, and despite some anxiety and things related to the issues of the world, my sleep was actually improving.

Now, it’s not like I was banging out some crazy ride every day. Sure, while there might have been some weeks where I rode practically every day, that’s not what got me to such a high rate of activity. It was just that my Peloton helped to encourage better habits. I no longer had an excuse for inactivity on days that were rainy. If my Apple Watch told me I was a little low on my activity for the day, I’d just hop on for 15 minutes and ride a bit. The Peloton kept my fitness flywheel (pun intended) going so I was always able to remain active.

No doubt it’s a luxury product, an expensive one at that. But by setting it up through the Affirm financing, its cost became roughly similar to that of a big city gym—something that seemed more manageable. Having had it now for almost a year I can say without a doubt that I’d recommend it to anyone.

Roam Research

Check it out here: https://roamresearch.com

In much the same way that my Peloton had a dramatic impact on my fitness, Roam has ushered in the most dramatic change to my personal productivity and note taking habits, by far. I’ve tried just about every productivity tool under the sun and often find that while each have their merits, the truth is that few have ever stuck for me. Along those lines, ages ago I tried Roam and found at the time that it wasn’t quite for me.

Something shifted though as I dug deeper into the “Roam Cult”. Seeing how well it was working for others, I knew I had to be missing something—so into the YouTube rabbit hole I went. What I found was a wealth of inspiration for how others were using Roam effectively, and it laid out a path around how I might be able to achieve the same.

What’s different about Roam is in how you write and how it’s organized. Most software puts the organization up front—you select your folders, create a new note, and then start writing within it. Roam flips that on its head and your entry point is an automatically generated note each day, with powerful organizational methods and tools that you can employ after the fact.

Nowadays I write thousands of words daily, into meeting notes, journal entries, execution notes on things I’m working on, etc. Over time my Roam database has turned into my own personal Wikipedia where I can revisit the thoughts in my past, ideas I continue to tinker on, and conversations I’d like to remember. It’s become my second brain.

While it’s not for the faint of heart, its intimidating nature can be subdued a bit with some walkthrough videos. Roam has been a once-in-a-decade kind of software product for me.

Eight Sleep

Check it out here: https://www.eightsleep.com

2019 Matt did not know what thermoregulation was, but 2020 Matt was happy to discover it after a few months of some challenging sleep. At the beginning of the year, I was having some rough nights. Added to that was my quarantine-triggered increase in alcohol consumption, and mounds of new anxieties on top. So as the year ticked on, and I was able to get many of the variables that were leading to my poor sleep under control, I kept hearing about this “thermoregulation” thing and became intrigued.

As I would make my daily rounds on Twitter, I kept seeing a new company pop up over and over again among some of the more health conscious people I knew: Eight Sleep. They had a mattress and mattress cover that used water, both heated and cooled, to regulate one’s temperature while in bed. As someone who runs quite hot under the covers, this whole prospect interested me greatly. What if I could just slap their Pod Pro cover on my mattress and get *even better* sleep?

Well as you can probably guess, it’s the third up on my list because it worked. Within just a few short weeks I was noticing that my sleep sessions were longer, deeper, and more restorative. I was less groggy in the mornings, and my sometimes five and six hour nights of sleep were turning into seven, eight, and (as was two nights ago) nine hours long! As with many health-related products everyone’s personal mileage might vary, but my Eight Sleep Pod Pro cover seems like it'll go far for me.

Facebook Portal

Check it out here: https://portal.facebook.com

If you would have told me that by year’s end I would have a hardware product from Facebook, with a built-in camera and microphone, that I actually invited in and ended up liking, I would have told you to run, not walk, to the nearest psychiatric ward. So to underscore here—no, I am not a big fan of Facebook or its core products. But with Portal it’s just so dang good that the trade-offs seemed well worth it.

As the fall was approaching last year, and it was clear that my son and I wouldn’t be able to visit my family back in Illinois, and they likely wouldn’t be able to visit us either, I started to think of alternative options. I didn’t want my folks to miss Nash’s growing up, and I didn’t want him to miss opportunities to enjoy their company. Peppered through my Twitter timeline throughout the year I’d see folks sharing their positive outlook on Facebook’s Portal product, so along with some of my family we all dove right in.

Once it’s set up, the Portal products are more readily available and often easier to operate than the video conferencing options relegated to our phones and computers. The real-time zoom-in-and-around camera tracking that’s automatic makes for a much needed framing solution for an ever-on-the-move toddler. When paired with a bigger screen, the Portal TV makes it feel like your house is connected right to whoever’s on the other end—it’s impressive. The simplicity of the product and UI seems purpose-built to be approachable for the less tech-savvy folks in your life.

My family's collective experience with it has been excellent. My mom and brother have since been able to read stories to my son at bedtime. We were all able to enjoy a more connected Christmas than would have otherwise been possible. The Portal devices have without question helped my family stay connected through these difficult times, and I am extremely grateful for that.

Coda

Check it out here: https://coda.io

As previously mentioned with the Roam entry, I have tried just about every productivity tool in existence and tend to form an opinion quickly with each of them. Like Roam, I was relatively swift to dismiss Coda but honestly, it was my own dang fault—I didn't fully grasp the power that it had. At first glance, it looked like Notion, Dropbox Paper, and the litany of other document-focused tools out there. Without much further investigation, it didn't appear different enough to warrant a try. Boy was I wrong.

What sets Coda apart from the bunch is its deep-rooted DNA in Excel-like formulas. They're woven throughout the product and can be used to make complex tables, pages, even buttons (I'll get into that later). If you're at all familiar with Excel, then Coda could be a pretty quick learning curve. Though instead of tables you build databases, with lots of methods for calling on those entries elsewhere.

If you only scratch the surface of the software, it's still 10x better than Google Docs or the like. But the moment you dig deeper into its capability, Coda will no doubt blow you away. In the earliest days I perused their template library and tried to reverse engineer how they worked. Spend more time and you'll discover that it's possible to build full-blown no-code software projects right within its walls—something I went deep on throughout 2020. It's truly incredible what the app is capable of.

Home Assistant

Check it out here: https://www.home-assistant.io

When I was a little kid and went to Disney World with my family, the "Home of the Future" exhibit at Tomorrowland in Epcot blew me away. Nearly 25 years ago I'd see examples of home automation, smart lighting, and loads of other fancy gear that have stuck in my mind through all these years. So it probably comes as no surprise that in my adult life I'd whip together some sort of smart home solution myself. A few years back when Apple introduced HomeKit I got into that at first, starting with a few Philips Hue bulbs. Even just playing around with the color of the lights from my iPhone felt novel.

Fast forward to now and with the help of Home Assistant I've set up one crazy smart home. Sure, your basic lighting automations are there—but so is the notification that I receive to my phone when my (not so smart) washing machine and dryer are done with their cycles!

Home Assistant is an open source software solution that you run on a local computer, in my case an Intel NUC (and before that a Raspberry Pi). It acts as the brain of the operation, communicating with all of the disparate home gadgets (even Zigbee and Z Wave ones) and services you might be working with. What sets it apart from solutions like HomeKit is in its comprehensiveness, and that it can be run entirely locally, unlike Alexa or Google Assistant.

I should be clear, though, that it is not for those lacking in the fortitude to work through annoying and sometimes tedious coding sessions. All of the work that I've poured into it feels worth it though in now having a deeply integrated home, complete with some convenient automations. I'm reminded just how useful it is each time I fire up Zoom on my computer, and my camera lighting turns on without intervention—like magic.

Blackstone Griddle

Check it out here: https://blackstoneproducts.com

When I was looking at new places to move to at the begging of last year one thing stood out that I wanted to see in it—a nice outdoor space where I could do some grilling. So once I found the spot and moved in, thus began the search for some sort of grilling solution to add to the patio. At first I had a look at all the traditional gas and charcoal grills out there, but none really spoke to me. It seemed like it might be a good idea to check out what other kinds of grills folks were excited about, so searching through some Reddit communities was my next task. That's when I found /r/blackstonegriddle.

I had seen the Blackstone (and similar) flat top griddles in the hardware store, but had never really cared enough for a longer look. After seeing pictures in the subreddit of massive breakfasts, hibachi-style dinners, and perfectly seared smash burgers, I felt like this one might be for me. The best part? These things are a seriously great value—clocking in somewhere around $300 (less than half that of a comparable quality grill).

This last summer my new Blackstone saw a ton of use. There wasn't a meal I tried cooking on it that I didn't love (and others too). My favorite thing to cook on the flat top quickly became the smash burger—accomplished through a thoroughly pressing a ball of beef into a ripping hot surface. Within a few sessions I was cranking out restaurant-quality burgers (and promptly inhaling them once finished). Shout out to burger legend George Motz whose videos (and books) had me trying out all kinds of new stuff.

The whole experience around cooking with the Blackstone was a big highlight from my 2020 and anyone looking for a grill this year would do well by checking them out. And now…I will leave with some beautiful burger porn…

Next up…

If you made it this far and liked what you've read, be sure to sign up for my newsletter to get the next edition delivered to your inbox!

If you're looking for Part 2, you can check that out here!

It feels like a pretty safe bet to say that most of us are (at least mildly) addicted to our phones. Oftentimes they're the first thing that we look at in the morning, and the last things that we look at as we go to bed. Ok, sometimes they even hit us in the head as we doze off, somehow still clutching on as we fade. If you're anything like me, it can also seem like a next-to-impossible task to try and get into a better habit with its use. So with 2021 under way, it felt like just the right time to share a tool that's helped me dramatically curb my phone addiction.

Let's be honest here…I'd suspect that very few of us wake up excited to know that we're likely going to spend hours on end staring at our pocket computers. To make matters worse, we've seen by way of things such as Netflix's The Social Dilemma that many of the apps have weapons-grade attention-grabbing, addictive tactics employed everywhere.

Seomwhere at the beginning of the year, I actually felt like I was getting a bit of a handle on my screen time. The time tracker built into iOS showed me as having my screen on for less than three hours a day. Rejoice! Then…COVID. Quarantine threw my good habits out the window and the Pandora's Box that was my phone opened with its wide and welcoming maw. Things seemed…bleak, and my addiction was feeling even harder to quell.

So how are we mere mortals supposed to actually fend off the onslaught of beeps, buzzes, and dopamine dosing apps? After all, it's not particularly realistic to not use our phones. Right now they're our connection to the outside world, to our loved ones, and sometimes a bit of escapsim from our challenges. The goal then is to find ways to manage, and actually equip ourselves with a bit of defense against the dark arts of the app makers.

Taking One Sec

Mid-year I happened upon an app called One Sec, an app for $1.99 that promised to help out. The core premise was simple—whenever you opened up an app that you've designated as needing time out from, One Sec would take over instead, suggesting you take a breath. It can be configured for 3 second, 5 second, or 10 second pauses after an app open. While it may seem ridiculously simple in its premise, it's remarkably effective at achievivng its goal.

Once you've got it set up on your phone, the flow is straightforward…you try to open up an app like Twitter and One Sec will launch instead. It'll give you a countdown of sorts, forcing you to wait it out before letting the offending app open. In my experience I've found that about 8 out of 10 launches, I was just fine not letting the app continue to open.

How well does it work?

In the screenshot below, can you tell which day I turned One Sec back on?

As the 2020 Presidential Election was approaching, I disabled One Sec. I'd told myself that it was somehow worthwhile and important for me to drink from the firehose instead of trying to avoid it. Now, months later I found myself right back to my old habits that I'd developed during quarantine—sometimes seeing four, five, and six hour screen time days.

"I can quit any time I want"

What a quaint idea, right? That's certainly what I'd told myself. But seeing the eye popping figures, I knew I'd have to curb it again. So once more I employed the help of One Sec and immediately saw the difference, going from a near four hour screen time day, to just about 45 minutes.

Now, I still try to open literally all of those offending apps. Muscle memory has me so well trained that even when I'm just filling up my water bottle from the dispenser, my thumbs are firing up Twitter without even noticing. This time though, there's something helping me recognize those moments trigger me into realizing what's going on.

Simply put, I couldn't recommend One Sec more for those of us who seem to struggle with being able to disconnect from our phones. It only takes a couple bucks and a few minutes to get started—but it's one of the best things you could do to finally get a line of defense going.

How to set up One Sec

To get you kicked off faster, here's a little walkthrough on the steps you need to take to get it to work:

First, open up Shortcuts. Tap on Automation, then the + in the top right corner. Lastly, tap on "Create Personal Animation"

Next you're going to scroll down and look for "App", which will take you to a screen where you can tap "Choose" and then search for the app you want to pause from.

Now that the app is selected, tap Next, followed by + Add Action. Once you're in Actions have a look for "One Sec" and tap on "Take One Sec…"

You'll see some text that's greyed out…just tap there. You'll then go search for the app that you're trying to block. Not everything is available, but if you're resourceful there's a way to customize the available apps from directly within One Sec.

After you hit "Next" you're done! And you're well on your way to some deep breaths…

What do you think? Is One Sec an app that you'll give a shot and add to your digital life? Hit me up on Twitter and let me know what you think!

Update: Slack pushed a big update to Threads! Many of the things originally discussed in this post were addressed, which is awesome! More on that below…

Slack outlined the problem and opportunity best in an introduction to threads blog post a little over a year ago:

When you’re working with your team in Slack, discussions can move quickly and cover a lot of ground. They evolve — and branch off — as people share insights, ask questions, and introduce new topics (or resurface old ones), which may not involve everyone in a channel. Now with Threads, a new way to connect related messages, it’s easier to follow and manage the variety of conversations happening in Slack.

We use Slack a lot at our startup, and even with our small team sometimes the chatter can get to be difficult to manage. Because we have a distributed team, real-time communication is critical. A flurry of distraction and interruptions is one side-effect though. Resolving ourselves to that reality, or going back to email didn’t seem like the right path.

Using threads-by-default might be the solution to distraction-filled Slack chatter we’ve been looking for

Thinking about threads

Using threads-by-default might be the solution to distraction-filled Slack chatter we’ve been looking for. They strike the right balance between real-time and asynchronous communication. Some benefits of the feature include:

1. When a reply to a thread happens, it doesn’t clutter the channel

2. Replies attach to the original message, so the context is never lost

3. Only participants, or people @mentioned get notified of activity within the thread

4. Threads that you’ve participated in get filed into All Threads, making it easy to keep up with conversations

A couple issues

1. There’s no way to “move” @mentions within channels into pre-existing threads

2. You can’t use images to reply to threads. Posting GIFs might be fun, but I’m thinking more about screenshots, etc. 
   ✅ Update: now you can! Slack now allows any file to be posted within a thread, which is huge!

Some things to try…

1. Communicate with your team that you’d like to try threads by default

2. Reference important conversations by starring them

3. Follow messages—you don’t have to respond to a thread to stay in touch

4. If someone responds as an @mention when it should be a thread, start a thread on the original message and @mention them in a reply there

5. Threads-by-default isn’t needed everywhere — structure isn’t needed in the watercooler channel

How could threads get better?

It’s been over a year since Slack introduced threads and we haven’t seen much updated since then. Here are a few thoughts on what they could do to improve threads:

1. Get rid of comments and double down on threads. Comments are still used for images and files. Unlike replies to threads, comments post to the channel which makes for more chatter.
   ✅ Update: They did this!

2. Allow a thread to be “upgraded” to a post. Posts are a pretty cool, but underutilized feature within Slack. They’ve got rich formatting, and carry greater visual importance than messages. Converting threads to posts could signal a conversation’s importance.

3. Provide more ways to sift and organize threads. Filtering threads per-channel would help to organize conversations.

Any other ideas? Thoughts? Experiments?

I’m curious if anyone else has had any experience in using Slack threads in a way like described above. If you’ve tried other ways to cool the chatter, I’d love to hear about it. Respond to this post and I’ll promote any cool ideas.

For my entire life I’ve struggled with reading. In high school doctors and counselors would chalk my painfully slow reading to a hearing deficiency, without so much as a prescriptive solution. Later in life it seems like my struggle might be more easily described by some of the symptoms experienced by those diagnosed with ADD. Nevertheless reading has continued to be a difficult exercise for me.

Staying informed beyond the headlines was tough, concentrating through a 10,000 word think-piece has been painful, and attempting to read Game of Thrones (aren’t the books always better?) a near-impossibility. It’s probably unsurprising then that I co-founded a news company that was defined by its to-the-point coverage and quick reading.

In light of the recent election I’ve found myself in a likely similar position to many others—one of dismay, confusion, and voraciously seeking information. But once again I struggled to stay focused throughout my consumption.

Open a link and begin readin…NOTIFICATION
Respond to text, swipe next notification away, start reading again
Ooooo a link to some other, likely informative but tangential, article
Calendar alert
Rinse
Repeat

No matter how hard I tried, no amount of Do Not Disturb could relax my distracted mind. The iPhone, the iPad, the Mac would always win the battle for my attention.

Yet there it was the whole time, the salvation that I was so desperately seeking, sitting with a dusty veneer on my couch’s side table: my Kindle. I had vaguely remembered an otherwise under utilized feature of the save-for-later service Instapaper that could deliver articles directly via Amazon’s Whispersync service. Opening the device again tipped me off to another long-forgotten discovery: a series of Newsweek issues way back in the virtual shelves of my e-reader.

Instapaper & Kindle to the rescue

Armed with curiosity and a recharged device I hopped over to my Instapaper Settings and configured it to deliver daily digests directly to my Kindle. If you’ve got a Kindle, you can find its delivery settings on this page under “Personal Document Settings.”

Now that this was all set up, next I had to change my habits when seeing links during my typical phone and web usage. Rather than immediately reading, after which I would likely get distracted 30 seconds later, I would simply send the link to Instapaper, trusting that it would show up in my daily Kindle delivery. A few weeks into of reading in this manner, it’s hard to imagine going back to just staring at my phone for the same amount of time. After all, I wasn’t even really reading when using my phone—just scanning and letting the pandora’s box that is the iPhone whip my attention around.

Note: while I haven’t used it, if you’re a fan of Pocket there seems to be a similar service called P2K.

Distraction-free reading

A new routine has set in for my mornings—breakfast, make coffee, pick up my Kindle and sit down to read all of the links I’ve saved in the last day or so. By leaving my phone on the charging dock and away from my reach, despite my still unfortunately slow reading, I’ve found myself very focused and desperate to read more. Links that would have otherwise been skimmed and fogotten are now getting the attention they deserve—reading has become dramatically more enjoyable.

While sharing links directly from the Kindle isn’t possible, the Instapaper Kindle edition does have options on the saved links to Archive and Like. If sharing to Twitter really matters to you, Instapaper does have a way to post links directly to Twitter that have been liked within the service.

Beyond being distracted by notifications, another issue with my phone-based reading was that I could peruse a rabbit hole of links and open tabs ad nauseam. While the Kindle can indeed open websites with a decent black-and-white approximation, it’s far from ideal. The only thing beyond reading the page at hand that I do on a regular basis is tap-and-hold on some words to reveal a Wikipedia search. That helps with terms that I may not be familiar with.

It seemed that I was easily getting through my saved links without any problems. Where my queue of unread links would gradually build, grow in irrelevence, and acquire some digital dust over time, I’m now clearing it out on a daily basis—what a feeling! But that left me hungry for more…what else can I read? How can I continue my path towards a more informed me?

Newspapers. …yep, Newspapers

Since Circa’s demise, much like my struggle with distraction, I’ve struggled with staying informed on all the happenings of the world, of the country, of my city. Furthermore I’ve grown more and more allergic to purely ad-driven monetization models of publishers, fearing that they’re just adding to the state of misinformation driving today’s media landscape. My earlier re-discovery of some old Newsweek issues deep in the recesses of my Kindle led to an exploration of Amazon’s store.

Then I found Kindle Newspapers.

It turns out that some of the best journalism money can buy, like the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Economist, all had special Kindle editions. For the first time ever, I’ve started paying for journalism by way of my newfound Kindle subscription of the NYTimes. Added bonus—it comes with access to the website and its tablet apps in case I discover links while browsing! And because local news is also pretty important to me, a subscription to the San Francisco Chronicle was also started.

Now every morning, alongside my Instapaper digest I’m getting two newspapers—more than enough to keep my newfound reading habit satiated.

Wrapping up

While I recognize that this post probably looks like one big Kindle advertisement, that’s simply because I’ve found it to be the best way that I personally am able to crank through articles without getting distracted all of the time. If you’re someone that can just turn on Do Not Disturb and read in peace, bless you. Man, do I wish I could do that.

Kindles are relatively cheap these days. They start at $79 and go up to the rather indulgent but near-perfect Kindle Oasis. No matter your price point they’re one hell of a good investment.

With this change my time spent reading has gone up 10x+ from before, and it’s easily more valuable time as I retain the information better. To an addict like me, any amount of time away from my phone is considered well spent. The Kindle is just one tool in my fight against distraction, but so far I’ve found it to be a trusty one.

How do you read?

I’m also curious if anyone else has tips/tricks for distration-free reading. By all means leave a response!

Here’s a scenario you might be familiar with:

You wake up groggy from an all-too-early alarm, hustle to get showered and out the door on time, only to wait forever eventually realizing who you’re meeting with isn’t showing up. It never occurred to you to check your inbox which had some permutation of:

“Hey, I’m running behind…”

“Sorry but something came up…”

“Which Sightglass location did you mean?”

The email was there all along, you just didn’t see it because you didn’t check, you don’t get notifications, or the relevant email was buried deep. You might have been able to take a little extra time, or possibly avoid the wrong location snafu.

The one good use for email notifications

If you’re anything like me, you turned off email notifications a long time ago. The fact is that email is a constant and so the value of individual email notifications is next-to-nothing unless something is urgent, in which case you might turn them on.

But as the above situations lay out, there are instances where getting that email at the right time is critical and might save embarrassment, or an unnecessarily rushed run-around. The last-minute emails referring to an upcoming meeting have certainly happened to me, and I’ve done it to others (unfortunately). Like most people I don’t have anyone else helping me manage my schedule and therefore I’m the sole responsible party for it. To make matters worse, in most instances the only contact information I might have for that person is email, and not something more direct such as a number to text.

I can’t count how many times some sort of last-minute issue has happened to me. Every single time it’s frustrating, sometimes embarrassing, but almost always an added but unnecessary stress. There may be a solution here though, one that can leverage the recent strides in machine learning and the addition of artificial intelligence to our inboxes.

Game time notifications

Sometimes during a game, coaches or captains might make snap judgements to change a play, swap players, etc. in the interest of the right next move. Those game time decisions can be critical in turning the tide of something that might not be going your way.

So what if we had a mechanism whereby last-minute information that’s relevant to something in our calendar could reach our attention in a timely manner? Finding a way to let some email notifications without opening up to all of them is worth exploring.

With a modern email tool such as Google Inbox, some of the building blocks are already there: the events, the emails, the intelligence layer (think Quick Replies in Inbox). So with all this in consideration my idea is this:

• Calendar is aware of your upcoming meetings

• Inbox keeps watch for emails from or regarding someone who you might be meeting with soon (let’s say in the next 24 hours)

• Upon receiving an email referencing an upcoming meeting, a “game time” notification is received prompting attention to the potential change or inquiry

In theory, it really is that simple. Granted, there are so many nuanced situations when you dig a few levels deeper, but on the surface something like this could be quite useful for many. The idea that my inbox could quickly notify me to potential changes for an event taking place very soon is appealing.

One of many

This is just one of many potential solutions for the problem above, but it seems like it would be effective without needing to teach many new user patterns. Using algorithmic sorting on an inbox could be another solution, surfacing time-sensitive emails above all others. However, a solution such as that might be a lot more work, including on the user to learn how it would be used.

When building products or features we must try to balance their potential impact with their difficulty to build, and ultimately risks that may come along with them. That’s why it may be more prudent to build a simple solution like game time notifications vs. a potentially more useful, but for sure more complex one.

Thanks for reading! Feedback is always welcome… I’d love to know what you think about this feature, or other ways to solve this problem.

I was rummaging around in some old files today when I came across the original pitch decks for Circa. One in particular was a trip down memory lane: the deck that we put together showing how the app worked for our investors. The deck was dated July 2012, and it would precede our launch by about 3 months. Ultimately you’ll need to have some familiarity with what Circa was to really understand some of this. A few of the things depicted here in the app design actually never made it into the app, and I’ll explain a bit about that as we go on. But without further ado:

We were sort of obsessed with this page curl look, so it stuck.

One interesting little tidbit…I was really looking for an authentic newspaper page edge look so we actually snagged a San Francisco Chronicle, scanned it in, then made vectors out of that. While the skeuomorphic design was pretty heavy there, it was a nice little subtle detail for that time.

This was something we thought a whole lot about. Circa actually had a social network behind it originally…of followers and people you’d follow. But we also knew that would add some complexity that could be annoying if you didn’t want yet another social network. So we came up with this method of keeping friends in “Sync” so any new friend that ever joined the service would be auto-followed from sign-up on.

User profiles would show off what news people cared about, and what they’d “reacted” to…more on that later.

The upper left corner being peeled back turned out to be an INCREDIBLE pain to get just right. We were using off-the-book APIs to make it happen originally, but when we got closer to submission to the App Store we realized it wasn’t going to be a viable solution. The design that we launched with was pretty close to this, but it ultimately differened a bit.

Note that in the beginning we were only going to cover two categories of news: Headline News and Politics, specifically the 2012 Presidential Election.

We LOVED the “Feature Story” visuals. The only trouble was that over time we kept having a tough time finding the perfect images to line up with the other chrome well. Between the portrait orientation, and text overlay, it was just too tough to manage and we eventually abandoned them.

Note that this slide references “a list of all the points.” Turns out before we came up with the page-snapping mechanism all the points used to be on just one page. Here’s what that would have looked like (Note this was a different pitch deck, dated March 2012):

Originally we thought that stories would have “key points” and just normal points. Users could follow just the key points, or follow all the points that were added to a story later on. This turned out to be an extra level of complexity for both the user and the editor and was ultimately canned because it was just not that necessary. But that gold gradient though…

And here’s one feature that Circa never ended up seeing: social interaction.

Most people may be surprised to know that this was actually built and implemented into Circa News 1.0, and we were actively testing it even weeks before the app launched in the App Store in October 2012. A reaction could be added to every point in the story, not just the story overall. As you scrolled the story you’d be able to see how your friends were reacting to the news.

You’ll notice that the reactions look quite similar to Facebook’s version that launched a little while ago. That’s pure coincidence, though these were very much inspired by Path’s reactions as well.

Honestly we really liked the in-line reactions. It made the news feel pretty alive, and allowed for a granularity of commentary that didn’t really exist in other news products. At the end of the day though, it added a level of complexity to a product that already had a bunch of new ideas in it, and we ended up walking back from implementing reactions.

We had a design for the “scrubber bar” when stories went past 20 points. Turns out that very, very rarely happened when writing these stories.

One other detail you’ll notice: the story “slug” was always at the top of the pages. We felt like this helped frame the pages that the user was on, but eventually canned it because it was a bit extraneous and took up room.

We’d also number the points that were in the story. It was a nice design.

See? Reactions got super granular. The idea behind this was that you’d be able to share your opinions publicly, semi-privately to just followers, or only to people you were following—essentially your friends. Then you’d be able to cross-post these reactions to other networks.

The hope here was that we could become a place to converse about the news—providing plain-spoken, down-the-middle language where the users could add the color.

One other thing: the pull tab up top would mean that you could swipe back and see what the original point was without losing your place on your text.

Here’s one thing we were super proud of, and was a particular challenge to come up with.

• Stories consisted of individual points that were pages in and of themselves

• Users would swipe through those pages to see the full story, point by point

• Not all points would be exactly the right length to prevent an overflow

So we needed to have a design that accounted for both pagination, and scrolling—something that hadn’t really been done before.

What we came up with was a “scroll within a scroll” — the pages themselves would scroll, until you hit the bottom of it, after which it would just jump to the next one. It felt like a clever design, and actually worked really well (when the code was cooperating). When we presented it to Apple prior to launching they gave us quite a bit of praise for this thing, explaining that it was an entirely new UI element, yet it properly conveyed exactly what it was going to do without any additional thought or help.

This turned out to be an unbelievably big thorn in our side from a code standpoint so it was eventually abandoned entirely. We just couldn’t break from that legacy. I was sad to see it go because it felt so novel, but at the end of the day it just didn’t fit the app anymore in later versions.

The info button was something I always wanted in there…a way for users to easily see the citations that our editors were adding to the stories.

And that’s it!

Between my digital addiction and penchant for procrastination I’ve struggled for a very long time to feel like I spend my downtime meaningfully and productively. Over the last few weeks and months though I’ve started to do just a couple simple things that have turned out to be pretty dramatic improvements to my otherwise horrendous non-routine. Some will be obvious and leave you with a “are you serious, Matt?” statement in your head. Others may be just plain bollocks. But at least for me, they’ve been helpful. Here’s five little things I’ve done lately that have helped me:

Set up a dock for your phone somewhere away from arm’s reach, especially the bedroom

The more you can separate your phone from convenience the less you’ll pick it up and spin that hamster wheel of digital delight. Personally I’ve found it extra helpful to use my Apple Watch so I’m able to at least handle quick responses to texts, or control audio if need be. Oddly enough I’ve started to use Amazon’s Apple Watch app a lot more simply because it allows me to quickly “jot” down little household things I need. The more the phone sits on the dock, the less I feel dependent to it.

Note: The dock is necessary in this case. I tried a plain cord for a while but found myself just standing there still using my phone. The dock makes things much more inconvenient.

Listen to an audiobook or podcast

Rather than mindlessly staring (or most likely barely listening while you swipe around on your phone) you’ll have a chance at actually tuning in to something meaningful. The bonus here is that you can perform chores that are otherwise dull and they just become white noise rather than annoyances. Turns out I actually enjoy the act of folding laundry and ironing now (WTF is wrong with me). With audiobooks you’ll knock out reads in no time that would have otherwise sat on your shelf without attention for months.

Absolutely no screens at bedtime

This one’s hard to adhere to, but the more you do it the happier you’ll be. Screens are notoriously problematic for our sleep cycles. But worse we’re all the more likely to pick up our phones and mindlessly use them as we try to wrestle our eyes awake in the morning. Instead keep your devices away from the bedroom, and use the allure of your digital crack as a reward of getting out of bed.

Note: With my phone being less accessible upon waking, I’ve found it far easier to start my morning immediately with a shower or workout rather than hazily staring into my inbox or missed notifications. Trust me, this is far more satisfying.

Make a “24 hour rule”

Try to stick to completing tasks that will otherwise have a high likelihood of procrastination. If a dish is in the sink, deal with it…either put it in the dishwasher (if you’ve got one), or clean it. I might let the dishwasher build up for a few days, but as soon as things are clean they’ve got to be put back within a day. Don’t let the laundry sit for more than 24 hours waiting to be folded…that’s a necessary task that’s going to be a constant till you take care of it. The more these easily accomplishable tasks sit without action, the more of a burden they’ll be in your mind.

Break down boxes from deliveries as soon as you’ve opened them

My brother told me this one and it took me forever to actually do it, but I finally understood the value in his tip: a stack of flat cardboard looks a lot less shitty and transports much more easily to the recycling. Simple as hell, but surprisingly useful.

That’s it. I’ll probably update sometime in the future when I discover other little tricks.

Feel free to write a response with other little things you do to help your routine and I’ll be happy to recommend it.

Preface: This post continues to get a lot of attention, especially following Facebook’s Messenger Platform announcement. It should be noted this was published June 2015. It’s exciting to know that less than a year after I wrote this, much of what was conceptualized found its way into the Messenger Platform, identically in some cases. Though I’d still love to see Apple build out iMessage as a platform I’m glad to know the idea has legs elsewhere.

There’s already been a fair amount written on the subject on the future of texting and of messaging-as-an-interface. Jonathan Libov had a pretty comprehensive set of ideas that established how a lightweight texting option could replace many of the apps that we deal with today. In the post title “Futures of Text” he says:

In contrast to a GUI that defines rules for each interaction — rules which, frustratingly, change from app to app — text-based, conversational interactions are liberating in their familiarity. There’s only really only one way to skin this cat: The text I type is displayed on the right, the text someone else typed is on the left, and there’s an input field on bottom for me to compose a message.

App overload is a real thing. Personally I have 109 apps installed on my iPhone right now, and that’s even after a massive purge about a month ago. I can’t possibly use more than 20% of them on a regular basis. For example, Airbnb, TripIt, Sprig, Lyft, Uber, and Venmo are just a handful of the many apps I need on my phone but don’t use them on a daily basis.

Just yesterday, during the 2015 WWDC keynote, Apple announced that the average iPhone has 119 apps on it. That’s insane!

With that in consideration, the “app” as the sole way I can interface with a service feels unnecessarily heavy handed but rich alternatives don’t exist. As Libov used as an example, NYC’s MTA Bus Time service makes it easy to just text a number and get bus times without need for a dedicated interface. It’s spartan, though it gets the basic job done. However, if you want anything more than just text you’re shit out of luck.

Therein lies the opportunity.

The end of the graphical user interface

Do we really believe that the GUI is the end-all-be-all way to interface with a computer? With each new app we need to learn how to use it. Sometimes this can be quick, and intuitive, but oftentimes there is a learning curve associated with it.

Two years ago Ron Kaplan wrote an article that begged the same question, and made a suggestion that the next evolution of our interaction with computers is the Conversational User Interface. The article itself was ahead of its time but seems to be extremely prescient for today.

There’s a chat for that

What if instead of installing an app, we might instead allow a service to chat with us via iMessage? From that point on, they’re just like any contact in your phone, enabling a two-way conversation to get things done. With each new conversation you’d give relevant permissions for contact and the moment you’d like to end it then the “app” could no longer message you. Easy!

It should be noted that when I say “conversation” I don’t mean that you’re just texting with a service (e.g. Magic, Luka, etc.). Likewise a “conversational user interface” isn’t limited to just text.

In the above mockup you can see three different examples of experiences that are currently just apps. At their core, they’re all just handling transactions so why do we need a whole app and a ton of chrome to use their services?

Lyft
Request a ride, confirm the driver, hop in the car, and pay all through a single message stream.

Sprig
Request tonight’s dishes with a button, place an order, and pay all via conversation.

OpenTable
“Can I get a table for two at Namu Gaji tonight?” and boom, it’s done. Isn’t that so much easier than jumping through all of the hoops of navigating an app?

Obviously there are so many more examples of services that would work beautifully in this experience. For all of those apps that you might otherwise use just once or twice, you might instead just bring up a conversation.

Additionally, this kind of experience would make onboarding customers dramatically faster and easier. Each conversation would prompt iOS to ask what kind of information be shared, including perhaps your name, photo, and maybe your address. Payment would all be done through Apple Pay, making for ultra fast and seamless transactions.

MessageKit would be similar to Apple’s other *Kits in that it would enable developers to quickly build out an experience based on guides. It would include a permission stack, the ability to create unique input methods, and a way to enable discovery. From a user’s perspective the entire thing would be opt-in. Apps wouldn’t be able to just start messaging you without initiating.

Imagining what it might look like…

In the above example you can see the user opening up a Lyft conversation for the first time. By tapping the built-in “Request a ride” button it brings up a unique interactive experience that takes up the area that would otherwise have a keyboard. This would be programmed by the app developers themselves to enable whatever kind of input function they’d like. In this case it’s a UI that helps a user identify their location and quickly request a Lyft.

From there Lyft could send them a message when their ride is on the way and better yet, have a live updating map that shows where they’re at.

All of this functionality is built into the Lyft app today, but when you strip away all of the chrome, the package it comes in, the use case is quite simple. Installing an app is sometimes a laborious process. Starting a conversation could make things much simpler.

There are a couple of other things that would be necessary to make this whole thing work: First, we need to assume that NLP (natural language processing) is not yet quite good enough to enable humans to converse with computers effectively. Second we need to assume that the vast majority of companies out there wouldn’t want NLP to become a core competency. Thirdly we need to ensure that the end user can have the best possible experience and enable delight.

So where does that leave us? Here are some ideas:

Mad Libs

Do you remember these things? You’d add your own words in to a story, guided by suggestions of using nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc. What if instead of expecting that a user will know the exact way to communicate with a bot, we help them learn the commands via “Mad Libs” like experiences? While typing a message a small suggestion box might pop up to guide the phrase a user may be typing out. That way, when on the receiving end of the message, the bot would be able to have a high probability of parsing the message and succeeding at its task.

Bubbles with buttons

Messages with built-in options that would activate certain commands would make the conversation even richer. In the above example with Lyft, you can see a “Request a ride” button directly within a message. It would be easy to imagine a guided experience that might go something like this:

Customer: I’d like a pizza delivered right now
Dominos: How big? [Small] [Medium] [Large]
Customer: *selects Medium*
Dominos: What kind of toppings? [Pepperoni] [Sausage] [See More]

You get the picture…just a series of pointed questions with a series of taps to get where you need to. Dead simple. Understood by all and no need to build a complicated app to get the job done.

Eventually the buttons might go beyond just text and include more complex interactions, but simple phrases are probably a good start.

Siri

Whether we realize it or not, some of us are already having a conversation with our iPhones: with Siri. So what if developers could plug directly into Siri by way of MessageKit and enable users to just dictate what they want!

User: Siri, get me a Lyft
Siri: Where would you like to be picked up? [Brings up a map]
User: Here
Siri: Great! Lyft will let you know when your ride is on its way.

Conclusion

Obviously much of this is blue sky thinking, but to me it just seems inevitable. Why in the world do I need hundreds of apps on my phone just to get some simple things done? Why do each of those apps need a completely unique experience that might hinder my ability to even do what the app intends? Instead, pulling up a conversation and getting something done quickly and efficiently seems like a more delightful experience to me.

I’ve said in a previous post that I believe the folks that inhabit the messaging space and those that embrace the conversational user interface will be big winners in the future — folks like Facebook, Layer, Assist*. But the big opportunity here could be Apple enabling an entirely new class of experiences, breaking down barriers and focusing on delight. MessageKit can and should be Apple’s next big platform play.

*Of note: I’m an advisor to Assist

Since Circa News has been available in the App Store, we’ve done quite well with our app ratings — nearly every major version has ended up with a 5 star average. That’s no accident. Two things have contributed to that: we’ve always focused an incredible amount on a high quality user experience and we’ve also made sure that the right paths to a review from a user who’s had a positive experience exist. In this piece you’ll read about our learnings over the last few years, and how you might apply them in your app.

App ratings can postively or negatively affect important aspects of how people discover apps.

1. In the App Store, app ratings are taken into account for search results, and top chart rankings. Apps that have a lot of ratings, and are rated positively are less prone to fluctuate in the app ranking charts and therefore more likely to hold their positions longer.

2. In search results, positive app ratings help an app appear higher in the results.

3. On a more personal note, when I see an app with a 3.5 star rating or below I’m hesitant to even install it, fearing a poor experience. I’d assume I’m not alone there.

Because of the above, asking for ratings became a commonplace. The ratings were simply too critical to app discovery and downloads to leave up to chance. But along the way, “begging” for ratings became despised and started to negatively impact apps.

At Circa we’ve worked hard to ensure that everything we do puts our users’ interests first. Asking for feedback and ratings should especially be a net positive user experience.

No one likes your pop up

The vast majority of the app rating asks that I’ve ever seen look a lot like the image on the left — a pop up that interrupts your experience. Even Circa had employed this method up until our most recent version, to some early success and then later, issues. But while we did have this pop up in place, it wasn’t shown to just everyone who opened the app.

There are three simple rules:

1. Don’t interrupt someone’s experience.

2. Don’t ask for an app rating after your app has crashed. That’s just stupid.

3. Do delay asking for a rating until there’s a likely moment of constructive feedback (as you’ll read later), or a positive rating.

Apps like HotelTonight ask for a rating after you’ve had a successful experience in booking a room. Someone who’s never completed a room booking is unlikely to give a high rating, so why ask them? But someone who just had a kick-ass experience for a low-cost is going to be stoked to give 5 stars.

With Circa News, since we didn’t have a transactional experience that might result in the previous example, something else was needed. What we decided upon is that we would wait to present the ask until the user has opened the app at least 10 times, over the course of 3 distinct days. This means that we’re self-selecting into a smaller group — sure — but a group that’s more likely to give a positive rating.

While employing the above rules, and still using a pop up, we were able to get incredible ratings. As I mentioned above, every major version of Circa has carried a 5 star average which is extremely rare. But we started noticing something along the way: people were rating us poorly just because we asked for ratings.

Nearly all of the negative app reviews we got were because we asked for a rating.

So here we have a dilemma: we need ratings to help our app discovery, but by simply asking we might get rated poorly. It then dawned on us that it wasn’t the ask that was the problem, it was the method by which it was done.

Integrated rating requests

The trouble with the pop up approach is that the app was inevitably interrupting the user’s experience. A method that’s more integral into the experience is the next step — we call this the integrated rating.

For Circa we decided to place an integrated rating in the middle of our list of news stories. That way, someone could scroll right past it without having to interact with it, as opposed to a pop up which requires interaction.

If you have to ask “will this annoy users?” the answer is always yes.

You’ll need to choose a placement that’s appropriate for your app. Perhaps in a shopping app, it would be after someone has successfully placed an order. Or maybe a social app where it’s placed directly within a feed somehow. In any case, the integrated rating should dramatically reduce the annoyance factor, while increasing interaction.

Ask a question. Don’t beg.

In brainstorming our integrated solution we decided to not just ask for the rating straight-up. Instead, we decided to ask a simple question:

Asking for a rating is binary. Users will either rate your app, or they won’t. But the rating itself is not binary — they may still rate your app poorly, such as if they’re annoyed by being asked.

By adding a question into the equation you can actually get valuable feedback from users that aren’t enjoying the app. Tapping “not really” presents our readers with a different question, specifically requesting their feedback. “Yes” will separately lead them to an ask for a rating.

The best part about the above experience is that for those users who are truly not enjoying their experience, they’re giving us their unfiltered feedback. Remember that we still only show this ask after the app has been opened 10 times, over 3 days, and therefore they’re likely to be a somewhat loyal user. If they’re loyal, and not enjoying the app that’s critical to know. The feedback that we’ve received since this has been implemented has been incredible — we’re getting right down to what some folks aren’t enjoying about their time with the app and that feedback will be crucial for any future development.

In Circa News, the feedback itself is collected with a native form that pops up after “Ok, sure” has been pressed. Anything submitted heads directly to our help desk software for processing and response.

While it may be a little less-than-ideal, you could easily replace that native form with popping up an email compose window.

Note: We custom-built everything you’ve read about above. There are a few solutions that deal with components of our methods, but not all. One in particular is Apptentive but at the time of this writing it doesn’t appear that they do anything like our integrated ratings. Perhaps that will change.

Even our readers are noticing! We’ve been seeing a lot of positive tweets about this approach. You read that right — users that are happy to see an ask for ratings.

Android too

We’ve noticed that this approach, coupled with a better app, has worked very well for us on the Google Play Store as well. Here’s what our last six months of ratings looked like there:

One size does not fit all

It should be emphasized that while the principles of what’s mentioned above should hold for anyone that would care to implement anything similar, your specific approach should be unique to your experience and what your users would expect.

It goes without saying that the methods above alone will not get your app to 5 stars. First and foremost the quality of the app actually matters. If your app is poor, you’re still going to get poor ratings. We’ve seen it.

As it stands today, out of 8,699 ratings over the life of the app, Circa News has had 315 one star ratings on the App Store. The vast majority of those were within the first few hours of launch two years ago, when our service was unreachable due to our servers struggling to keep up with the massive traffic. We’ve now spent two years building up our ratings in the hopes that those first few ugly hours don’t haunt us permanently. Over the life of the app now, we have 93% four and five star ratings.

The only way to becoming a 5-star app is to first have an excellent user experience. Once that first requirement is met, implementing a user-friendly feedback system such as the one above should help. Always put yourself in the shoes of your users.