21st September, 2025

🍽️ Consume, 🏳️ Concede, 📥 Triage

🍽️ Consume

I spent ten minutes this morning scrolling LinkedIn, before I caught myself. I realised that I hadn’t actually read anything. I’d skimmed a long list of posts, but would struggle to recall any of the details. Sound familiar? While the volume of content we consume has exploded, the quality has plummeted. We’re not reading, we’re grazing.

It’s difficult to out train a poor diet. We are, broadly speaking, what we eat.

Nutritionists break down the various things we consume into three macronutrients or “macros”:¹

• Carbohydrates

• Proteins

• Fats

Most meals contain a combination of these things. What’s the ideal mix? That’s a complicated question. Even experts are divided. Their answer is very different depending on whether your goal is to lose, gain or maintain weight. But most agree, all three have a function.

Here is a decent summary:

During digestion, your body breaks down macronutrients into smaller parts that it uses for specific functions. Carbs are the main energy source, proteins help build and repair tissues, and fats insulate organs and make up cell membranes.

Just as nutritionists can analyse our food intake, we could apply the same logic to our information diet. We agree, broadly speaking, with what we consume.

In the past people consumed their daily news from the same places - if we extend the metaphor we could compare mainstream broadcast media to the traditional home cooked meat-and-three-veg dinner.

Now, for most of us, it’s predominantly social media. That’s complicated because each of us has our own “feed”, customised in part depending on who we choose to follow. But we can still break these down into “macros”.

Here is a quick tally of the first 100 posts I saw on my LinkedIn feed this morning:

• Posts - 4

• Comments - 7

• Ads - 15

• Likes - 74

It’s tempting to think that when we use social media we’re consuming content directly from people we choose to follow. But, as this shows, a smidge under three-quarters of the content I was fed is second hand. It’s the content equivalent of junk food.

Why does this matter? When we “like” a post, we’re making a split-second decision, often based on the headline or photo, or maybe a quick skim read. But the network amplifies that weak signal by pushing the content to exponentially more feeds. It’s unlikely to be the most valuable or accurate content. It’s not a thoughtfully prepared meal, it’s the brightly packaged sugary snack that catches our eye while we’re waiting at the check out counter.

This creates a vicious cycle: We’re all incentivised to cook up like-able content rather than valuable content. Complex ideas get boiled down into bite-sized absolutes. Nuanced discussions become polarised hot-takes. And we all get malnourished on a diet of content that’s been produced for maximum palatability. Like cattle being fattened for sale, we're served whatever keeps us consuming.

What would a nutritionists say if we consumed a diet of 4% protein, 7% complex carbs, 15% added sugars and 74% fat?

What can we do? I’m not sure I have a hopeful answer to this, unfortunately. Everybody who understands the health consequences of our deteriorating diets have been warning us all about this for decades. And yet, today Coca-Cola and Novo Nordisk are both $500B businesses - one fattening us up, the other slimming us down.

What’s the social media equivalent of Ozempic? Asking for a friend.

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🏳️ Concede

This time last weekend I was in Wellington, recovering from the trauma of the second half of the All Blacks vs Springboks match at Sky Stadium. It was painful viewing.

This was the first match I’d watched live since seeing them lose to France in the opening game of the 2023 Rugby World Cup at Stade de France in Paris.

Maybe I’m the problem?

This is actually a question that has hung over me for decades…

Between 1998 and 2002 I attended six games and saw only two wins - one of those was the 54-7 drubbing of France at Athletic Park in 1999 (later that year France would knock us out of the World Cup with their stunning second-half comeback), and the other was the scratchy 40-29 win over Ireland in Dublin in 2001 (which was also Richie McCaw’s first match). One of my friends asked me to let him know which games I was planning to attend so he could place the appropriate counter-bets at the TAB!

In total I’ve attended 21 games in the professional era. I’ve seen 14 wins, one draw and six losses, meaning my success rate is notably below the team’s record, although I’m not sure you’d call that statistically significant.

There is a symmetry to those matches - starting in 1996 with the (at the time) biggest ever win: 43-6 over Australia at Athletic Park, and ending with the biggest ever defeat, 43-10 to South Africa.

I was interested to observe the response in the stadium to the result last weekend - and the second half in particular. It was quiet. Resigned, almost. We were sitting in front of a row of obnoxious Springbok supporters who tried their best to trigger a response, but they were mostly ignored.

I was at the same venue in 2000 when John Eales converted a last minute penalty to win the match for Australia. We were sitting not far from the spectators who started throwing things at the referee Jonathan Kaplan as he left the field.

This time around there was no disputed penalty. No forward pass. No Susie. Just an appreciation, I think, that we were comprehensively beaten by a better team. Again.

Since the 2023 Rugby World Cup final defeat, the All Blacks have lost six games. It’s simplistic analysis, but just looking at the points differentials from the first and second halves of these matches paints a stark picture:

As Sean Fitzpatrick drilled into those of us who have been fans for a while:

It’s a game of two halves!

Some of the responses have been much more emotional than statistical. For example, this from Gregor Paul in the NZ Herald:

Rugby is just one more part of New Zealand in decline: One more thing eroding while everyone deludes themselves otherwise. Delusions of grandeur are perhaps a geographic hazard of being a small, isolated island in the far reaches of the Pacific Island. It’s easy to develop a superiority complex when there are so few external factors to regularly make comparisons against.

This is maybe why New Zealand can tell the world it is clean and green while it repopulates its urban car fleet with double-cab utes and plans to drill into the ocean floor, or indeed anywhere it suspects a fossil fuel may be buried. This is why it can see hundreds of thousands of its best and brightest leave for Australia, but give visas to a few digital nomads and mad millionaires escaping what they think is an impending Armageddon and say New Zealand is the place the rest of the world wants to come to live.

Yikes! Are we ok?

At the Olympics last year the Black Ferns were the tonic, that helped us all quickly forget.

No such luck this year!

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📥 Triage

Finally! After nearly 3 years, I’m excited to announce an updated version of Triage - first aid for your inbox.

You can download it on the App Store now.

What is Triage? The best description I’ve heard is: Tinder for Email.

Rather than drowning you in a long list of messages Triage presents unread messages as a stack of cards, and let’s you focus on these one at a time: swipe left to archive; swipe right to keep; tap to expand and reply or forward.

It’s fully customisable, so you can create your own workflow by assigning different actions to the left + right swipes - whatever works for you.

It’s still the first app I open every day.

A brief history… Triage 1.0 launched in 2013 under the Southgate Labs banner. John Gruber from Daring Fireball, who got an early preview when he spoke at Webstock that year, published this review:

Since I’ve been using it, I’m more caught up on my email than I have been in years.

That generated a huge amount of interest for the first weekend, at least.

Why did this update take so long? Partly because I’ve been working on other projects. But also, if I’m honest, because code that isn’t maintained has a half-life, and the longer I left it the more yak-shaving that was required each time I came back to it.

Minor fixes turned into archaeological expeditions. While it seemed a shame to let it wither, the work required was starting to feel insurmountable.

A few weeks ago I decided to use this as an experiment with Claude Code, and I was blown away by the results. Very quickly I was able to sort out the issues which had defeated me, get it building again, and implement the long list of improvements I wanted to make.

What’s new? It’s cliche for release notes on the App Store to reference “bug fixes and performance improvements” but in this case that’s actually 100% accurate - the previous version was sluggish, but this version is blistering by comparison. And, as the rest of the release notes say, “we’re setting the scene for some more substantial updates to come. Stay tuned!”

Try it today! If you struggle to keep on top of your inbox, or are just curious to try a different workflow, I hope you’ll take a look. I’d love to hear what you think.

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1. The fourth thing sometimes included in this list is water, which (provided you don’t drink it mixed with sugar) doesn’t contain any calories but is obviously vital for our health and wellbeing.