HeyJaredThe Important Thing
The Important Thing with Michael ("Rands") Lopp and Lyle Troxell. Let's spend a few minutes of your life listening and learning about an Important Thing.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 4
- Latest publication
- Aug 14, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
Latest episodes
The Promotion Paradox (opens the original)
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In our 101st episode, we kick off a new era of episode titles as your best engineer becomes the interim manager of their own team — delegation, one-on-ones, the three-year rule, a visit from Chili Palmer, the Cadillac of minivans salesman himself, and the only question that matters: do you actually want this job? Down the rabbit hole: Sometimes Your Job is to Stay the Hell Out of the Way , the wolves post Rands published the day this was recorded Sometimes Your Job is to Get in the Way , the dir
The One About The Important Thing (opens the original)
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One hundred episodes. For this occasion, years in the coming, Lyle and Rands talk about the thing itself — the nuts and bolts of the podcast, including how the robots now do an alarming amount of the work, what a hundred episodes taught us, and why we use the "The One About…" naming convention. 🎁: the show has a home at importantthing.show . Deep-link a favorite or just scroll through a hundred episodes of history. Stuff that came up: Riverside , where this show has been recorded since the We Ar
The One About the Pro Leisure Circuit (Again) (opens the original)
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In our 99th episode, Rands is back on the Pro Leisure Circuit — infinite time, a suspicious amount of Arc Raiders, and no wind in the sails — and we wrestle with what actually motivates a person when the engine of work goes quiet. The usual suspects: Arc Raiders , absorbing ten-hour days like it's a job Rands Leadership Slack — 35,000 leaders, 7,000 a week Daring Fireball , John Gruber's one-person media entity Ray Kroc , who started McDonald's in his fifties CalArts , where Lyle's daughter lear
The One About The Joy of Bots (opens the original)
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In our 98th episode, we list the things we've been building with our robots and figure out who we're really yelling at when it all goes wrong. Mentioned, referenced, or obsessed over: Planetfall , the Infocom game that gave Floyd his name Rands Leadership Slack Managing Humans Railway Supabase Bear Ghostty Cory Doctorow on centaurs and reverse-centaurs Related Important Things episodes: EP 73: The One About Robots EP 83: The One About Your AI Tools
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