1000 Episodes of Our Relationship Diary
Hello Shareholders!
Reminder: I’m Mike Merrill, the world’s only publicly traded person, and you are (or should be) a shareholder. This email is one in a series about trying to sell shares in myself and getting shareholders to vote on my life.
tl;dr - the 3 Minute Review podcast has reached 1000 episodes. we are in the midst of the first board meeting. some other thoughts. buy shares.
I’m writing this from the co-working space at the Los Angeles Athletic Club because Kathryn loaned out our house for a short film shoot by a friend of hers. After seeing the way they dressed our house for the shoot it made me want to rearrange my office furniture and make it feel like a movie.
🎧 1000 Episodes
To celebrate reaching 1000 episodes of the 3 Minute Review podcast we turned the microphone on a few of our listeners. I’ve collected all these special episodes here with a look back at the history of 3 Minute Review.
3 Minute Review is one of those crazy things that seems less crazy after doing it for a long time (like selling shares in yourself). It’s basically a daily audio diary of our relationship. In fact you can tell when Kathryn and I aren’t doing well by the gaps in the podcast!
Thanks again to those who listen. We have just under a 100 regular listeners and it’s big enough to keep us going but small enough that we feel like we can be honest.
🕴️ My First Board Meeting
We’re in the midst of the first board meeting and discussing things like the terms of the Board Seats, the launch of some committees, KPIs to keep me on track, and planning out the rest of the year and beyond.
Two big decisions that were made early this week:
Board seats will be for a two year term on alternate years. So every year we’ll have an election but board members will be present for no less than eight quarterly meetings. You can see the full board here (paid seats are still in development).
Board votes will be one person one vote. This means it doesn’t matter how many shares you have, all board members will treated equally.
👼 The Three Miracles
We’ve been working on the if/come project and one of the things Kathryn said that I love is that there are three miracles in Hollywood:
Miracle 1: 💰 You get paid. And beyond just getting paid, we’re talking about getting paid to work on your idea. Because most of the work you do is for free, or if not for free it’s for someone else’s thing. Getting paid to work on your own stuff is a miracle.
Miracle 2: 📺 It gets made. Most of what you develop will never made. Kathryn has written so much amazing stuff that just gets shelved. It’s heartbreaking. For everything that gets made there are maybe a hundred or a thousand projects that were bought but never put into production.
Miracle 3: 👍 It’s good. Everyone is trying to make good stuff, but making TV is very hard. Plus there are a lot of people trying to reduce risks, which ends up watering down good ideas. People get involved who are willing to spend millions of dollars but then they get a little scared and it’s just very hard to make something good at the scale of television.
We’re hoping to launch if/come soon, so if you want to learn how Kathryn has perfected her pitch process you can sign up at ifcome.substack.com.
🃏 Playing For Stakes
This is an except from the Shareholder Poker substack, which is mostly reminders about the monthly poker game, but I sometimes talk about other forms of gambling…
Star Trek: The Next Generation is famously Gene Roddenberry’s utopian fantasy of a world without money (listen to this Marketplace episode, or read Manu Saadia’s Trekonomics or The Economics of Star Trek by Rick Webb).
This idea got sidestepped in ST:DS9 with a deep dive into Ferengi culture and their love of “latinum”, but staying within TNG for a minute, how did the crew of the Enterprise play poker without money?
👍 Recent Highlights
Really enjoying the Shell Game podcast, where Evan Ratcliff creates a voice agent of himself to find out what happens when you take control of the technology that threatens to replace you.
Friends, frequent collaborators, and shareholders YACHT have announced a new record but the really fascinating part to me was when they were surprised by a new song that appeared on their Spotify account, and then later the new record got digitally leaked with no ability to take it down. These are new wrinkles in how we operate creatively in a world that just wants to produce content.
Back in 1999 I played a lot of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six with Josh, and we created a gaming clan called [Mish Joke] that would load up on smoke grenades and "party" in small rooms until someone found and killed us. What started as just me and Josh goofing around turned into a small group of strangers who adopted the clan tag and enjoyed subverting the rules of the game.
Later in 2002 I played Quake III as a pacifist, which meant trying to indicate peaceful intent in a game where the only form of communication is violence. It kind of worked, as a few players eventually learned I was more mascot than threat, but I died a lot.
I was reminded of these experiences while watching 'How to Disappear by Total Refusal' which does a much better job at thinking about and explaining what it's like and what it means to try to not fight in a war simulator.
📈 In Closing…
As the markets are pretty chaotic these days I have a recommendation for you. 🤑
Buy some shares of me! You can buy a share for just $6.35 right now (might change by the time you read this) and best of all, you can buy fractional shares, meaning you can just buy a bunch of shares for like $20 and not worry about it.
Here’s the link to buy. And here are a number of great reasons:
Shares in my have been pretty steady over the last six months. Sure, that might be because of low trading volume, but I prefer to think it’s because my shareholder community sees me as a solid and well performing person who is just waiting for the next big opportunity.
Upcoming changes to how KmikeyM works means you’ll have to have at least one share in order to see some of the interesting things coming up. When that requirement is in place and I do something interesting, it should raise the share price, so you can kind of consider the current price as “on sale.”
If collectively the people reading this buy just 22 shares it will push my share price up from $5.55 to $6.38, which is almost a 15% increase! That would be a wonderful counter to what’s happening to public stocks and crypto.
And honestly, what’s the point of getting this email if you’re not looking to buy a few shares every once in a while?
I remain profitably yours,
-K. Mike Merrill
PS: Kathryn and I are going to Canada to visit her parents for the last half of August where we will put the final touches on if/come and probably have a lot of special 3MR episodes with her family. Stay tuned for that and also I’ve been working on a pretty big shareholder proposal.
I like it because I wrote it.