Author: Julie

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 319 and Chaotic Labor Markets

If you follow me on other social media you may have noticed that I recently launched and am fundraising seed stage venture capital rolling fund we’ve named chaotic.capital. Since this is a blog for my friends if you are an accredited investor I’d love for you wander on over to take a looksy. Or feel free to send me a DM on Twitter or slide into my email inbox which is just julie AT chaotic dot capital.

The TL:DR on the fund is that the world is getting exponentially more complex and that is making living life chaotic as fuck. Humans don’t like chaotic. We like predictable. So we invest in seed stage technology startups that help individuals, families, organizations, and even whole communities, adapt to living with chaos.

I’ll be talking about all the areas we invest I’m sure but today’s post is about about how we might adapt to a more chaotic labor market and what kinds of companies we’d like to see in the space to capitalize on the chaos of the future of work.

The pandemic has accelerated a lot in the labor markets. Hiring in developed economies has been getting harder. The great resignation has a large chunk of the skilled workforce in movement. But student debt is making it less appealing to pursue traditional credentials like a four year college degree. Skilled workers have at once never been more competitive in the labor market but it’s also never been more expensive to pursue those skills. Where there is tension there is opportunity.

So how do we get more people skilled and let those with existing skills deploy their labor more effectively? I think that web3, or if you prefer the decentralized web, presents a unique opportunity to decouple skills & compensation from identity and corporations. Flexibility drives innovation. Web3 let’s us step clear of concepts like one full time job per person.

Workers are seeking replacements for the centralized stores of skills & proof, socializing, and networking we’ve used in the past. The hodge podge of self reported credentials and certificates we put up on LinkedIn or a personal website is a mess and only allows us one centralized identity. That sucks for privacy and also for people with a diverse set of skills. Recruiters see what we present but that’s never the whole picture.

Some would argue that political polarization will require we either prove identity and in-group or lead us to pseudonyms (identity on/off switch) that let us be judged by work product and proof of skills rather than in group approvals and social validation. Regardless, regulatory capture and special interest groups are now being viewed negatively as younger workers see them as expensive obstacles to career progression. If Kim Kardashian can take the bar without ever going to law school why should you go to law school?

One reason that chaotic is particularly interested in is stores of identity, proof of skills and proof of work capacity is that Web3 and decentralization will pick up the slack in labor markets for younger people.

We won’t want to polish our entire lives in order to get one job with a single employer when we know corporations shows us little loyalty. We’d rather find ways to optimize for our preferred compensation package. That could be flexible contracts and hours, remote first work arrangements, healthcare subsidies, or maximum pay; whatever we chose there should be a recruiter that can find us a job and a workplace that will leverage our skills. If you want inspiration on how this might work I’ve got a list of crypto science fiction to read.

In order to avoid falling into low level service jobs we will need to pick up proof of work and proof of skill jobs. Automation is less of a threat than low level service jobs and dead end work for most young people. Finding ways to get get paid for learning is going to make the jump from play to earn video games to play to learn universities one day.

Portable and “fractional” identities will be required in a future where one person with one job isn’t the norm. So how do we build different identities that keep us safe from context collapse while still giving flexibility and portability on our achievements and documented skills?

All of the above is food for thought. If these problems interest you hit me up. I’ve got a request for startups below. If you want to talk about any of them find me on @AlmostMedia on Twitter.

Request for Startups

  • Skills repository Github for provable disciplines beyond coding
  • Web3 LinkedIn where we can turn on and off elements of our credentials
  • An identity wallet
  • A social capital wallet
  • Influence & social capital graphing & portability
  • Fractional identity platforms

Categories
Biohacking

Day 318 & Boring Health

The word wellness has become so comically performative that I cannot use it with a straight face. It would require so many disclaimers and apologies and contextual additions to move it beyond the associations with wealthy white women (thanks Gwyneth) it’s not worth the bother. But it’s also equally true most people do not feel well. The feeling of being healthy eludes us.

Our health degrades more quickly than we’d imagined, as if planned obsolescence wasn’t a term for software, but rather a term that describes our bodies as we move beyond our twenties. It feels intimidating to try to staunch the flow of time.

We acquiesce to our obligations, our stresses, our weaknesses and our limits. And our health degrades further. And with each turn of the wheel it seems even more impossible that we could feel any other way. But I promise you this does not have to be your life. You can feel well. I’ve come back from the brink of chronic disease. It is possible. It’s just all extremely boring and time consuming.

It’s hard work and it’s boring and repetitive and frankly your work won’t show results for months or even years. But you are not doomed to lose your health to outside forces simply as a consequence of time, stress or overwork. I’ve written a beginner’s guide to biohacking as well as an introduction to supplements. Anyone can pick up the basics and begin to improve how they feel. Just don’t expect miracles. And yes it’s a position of privilege to pursue most of it. But there are ways.

If you look at one of my typical days I split a third of my life into some type of preventive work. Just in case anyone ever wondered why I don’t socialize much. I put most of that time into my body.

I sleep a full eight hours. I meditate. I go to therapy and group every single week. I do full body compound lifting three times a week. I do steady state cardiovascular work an hour every day. Ok that’s just a fancy way of saying I talk long walks. I take my vitamins. I eat protein and vegetables. I stretch. None of that is privileged or even interesting. It is just slow boring work that builds over time.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 317 Walk Without Rhythm

I struggle with accepting the reality that humans have natural rhythms. I struggle even more with the idea that living by them is to my benefit. Circadian rhythms and seasonal rhythms control our days and nights. The body craves the repetition that rhythm brings even as the mind rejects the idea that we are behold to it.

Call it a Calvinism of the body. We are predestined to our rhythms. We’ve got freedom to chose how we live, so even though rhythms bring strength to our bodies, our mind strains against the constraints. We must have free choice we say. Except what good does it bring us to reject our natural physical rhythms?

There are many types of rhythms. Our world is built out of them. Regular, random, progressive, alternating and flowing rhythms give shape and order to everything around us. All of our art forms leverage the beauty of rhythms freedom and constraints. Nothing is new under the sun but the combinatorial possibilities are infinite.

I’d do well to retain that sense of wonder at the infinite as I fight against the sense of indignation that I am limited by rhythms. We are all limited by the forms in which we exist. Until I get to discover what is beyond the veil of physical existence I’m stuck. Maybe beyond that I’ll find the formless freedom of pure comprehension. Or maybe I can learn that freedom always comes with the constraints of its medium. That doesn’t mean I’m not free to be creative within the form I have.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 316 and Prepper Intolerance

I came to the topic of preparedness through personal experience. I lived in lower Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy and lost power for over a week. My otherwise comfortable urban life had a wake up call as friends and neighbors suffered through natural disaster. So I got interested in how to prepare myself and my community from something worse.

Despite the clearly accessible resonance of preparing for storms and everyday issues like losing power or having food instability, preparedness folks are often not that focused on how everyone should be prepared. There is a purity politics in preparedness. They simply in it for the politics of what might bring on a social or economic disaster. And it’s fucking annoying.

You’ve got the gun folks who are concerned about their rights. You’ve got the gold standard types who think the Fed is driving us to an economic collapse. You’ve got the system is corrupt and cannot be sustained types. You’ve got the suspicion of globalization types. Admittedly it’s a diverse bunch.

But more recently as the culture wars rage on, preparedness communities are overlapping with variant politics of the American right wing. MAGAs came to the preparedness community sensing the possibility for affinity. So now you’ve got folks who whine shit like “all liberals are communist socialists” variant in preparedness with the explicit politics of things like a national divorce or the Boogaloo (that’s slang for civil war 2 if you don’t follow these communities).

Resilience and self reliance and the ability to survive should matter more than your opinions on Democrats. Sure preppers have traditionally had theories on why you should be prepared but it wasn’t obviously exclusionary. Well except for the militia dorks and the white nationalists but those weren’t preppers so much as people who had to be survivalists because they rejected society. Since well society hasn’t actually collapsed yet.

I think it’s a massive disadvantage to be intolerant in preparedness. Going on about how much you dislike “the libs” and your annoyance with various buzzwords just makes you sound like you are interested in resilience and preparedness not because you think it’s responsible but because your culture war opponents are coming to…I don’t know take our guns and insist your children read about racism? I honestly don’t follow the through line sometimes.

It’s not that I don’t sympathize with some of the political concerns. As libertarian I am for self determination and limited use of government at the federal level. I am a gun owner and supporter of the right to bear arms. I just don’t think that the culture wars are firm ground for community building.

I’m much more concerned with issues like infrastructure, the increasing frequency of natural disasters, and unsustainable macroeconomic conditions. That’s why I’m a prepper and why I want more people to get into it. And a lot of the politics of the American right wing is hostile to traditional prepper topics like climate change. I don’t see how you overcome some of that cognitive dissonance. So my fellow preppers I hope you won’t engage in purity politics as it’s not going to help your build out the resilience and diversity of skill set required to manage something catastrophic together. Being welcoming on the other hand will do exactly that.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture Startups

Day 315 and Probably Nothing

The aesthetics of most crypto backlashes feel easy to dismiss if you have bought into the optimism that web3 might release the stranglehold of the Big Tech monopolies. Bomers & losers griping are just copium right?

Bitching about scams and grifters is fair. But every leap the tech industry has ever had has come with it’s share of idiotic opportunists. They usually get wiped out out. Well except the accidental millionaires. You kind of have to learn to live with that. Plenty of underserving fucknuts will be richer than you. NFT parties in New York isn’t inherently stupider than Comdex. Life is unfair. And yes it sucks. Go to therapy.

The reflexive criticism of crypto tends to break into more nuance when it goes from “but scammers” to “but utility!” But no one thought Twitter would be useful either and most of my social and actual capital has been derived from social media. The downside of web2 is that only a small portion of people benefited. And it’s true that the rewards weren’t terribly even. The accumulation of power and capital has been disastrous. But that should be more of an incentive to push for a decentralized future not less.

I had a lot more thoughts on this topic earlier in the day and I had planned on diving deeper with citations but I’m tired so I think I’ll leave it at that. If you are angry and defensive about something new it’s worth asking yourself why it scares or upsets you. Maybe the defense mechanism is hiding something important from you.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 314 and Circadian Psych

I’ve been off since Daylight Savings on Sunday and I’m a little grumpy about it. All of my sleep metrics have been down by about 15%, which you wouldn’t think would make a dent in your day but somehow absolutely does. I’ve always been a winter person so I tell myself I don’t mind that it’s getting dark at 5pm but the adjustment is always brutal. Clearly my body minds.

I figure this will all pass in a few days but I resent the feeling of having my body not quite understand the rhythms of the day. It’s like having mild jet lag for no discernible reason. It messes with everything. The sun sets and I think oh it must be dinner time. Except it’s only 5pm and I just ate lunch a few hours ago.

It’s been combined with a few other changes in my routine which has probably compounded the issue. I tell myself I shouldn’t let it get to me. I keep trying to slide myself back to proper regimens. I am getting up at the same time even though it’s an hour earlier. I’m going to bed at the same time. And I’m sure it will pass. But god damn am I in a fucking foul mood. Your body really does keep the score.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 313 and American Grocery

I drove into Denver today for a doctors appointment. On the way back my husband Alex and I decide to stop at Costco. It’s not that far out of town but it’s still easier mentally to make the trip out to a box store when it’s on the way from somewhere. As someone who identifies as a prepper Costco is one of my favorite places.

I didn’t have anything specific in mind that I wanted (other than a few winter preparedness items), Alex and I just like walking the aisles of Costco. I worked in retail for many years so I enjoy seeing what brands have convinced the king of American retailing to stock their products. Because of their unique stocking and sales methodology it’s almost always an adventure.But it’s also a fairly good indication of where taste is at in America.

America is ready for the holidays if Costco is any indication. Despite it being the second week of November it was decked out in full holiday season merchandising. And not just peppermint bark (which I bought) and colored lights. Costco thinks we want a gourmet Christmas. We saw an entire truffle packaged with a grater. We saw entire cured Spanish hams. We saw tins of caviar stocked in the cheese aisle for $50.

An entire Spanish Serrano ham for $99 at Costco

I always wondered if the story of Khrushchev knowing the Soviets has been beaten when he toured a grocery was apocryphal. Apparently no one knows for sure if the visit happened. But it is true that supermarkets only exist in their modern form because America subsidized the farming and agriculture system as part of a farm arms race against the Soviets.

As amazing as a supermarket is it can be a bit horrifying to visit an American grocery store. Fresh markets that focus on meats, dairy and vegetables always feel like a race against time. Using traditional retailing methods of completely filled aisles bursting with perfect merchandise shouldn’t work when the product was once a living thing. And yet that’s exactly what we have. It’s astonishing the variety of items we stock in an American grocery. That we subsidize and allow for food waste when we still have hunger seems a grave injustice. We have food deserts. And yet our grocery stores are full.

Costco only sells in bulk so it’s mostly given over to packaged foods and dry goods. If you want fresh food you better be prepared to buy several pounds of it. I bought 2 lbs of blueberries. It’s going to be a challenge to eat it all before it goes bad.

Given that most of the news has been focused on the current supply chain crisis it felt odd to stand in a store surrounded by incredible luxury. Maybe it was the calm before the store. I did go on a Tuesday so maybe it has just been restocked after a busy weekend. Maybe folks just aren’t ready to buy their gourmet foods for the holidays yet.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 312 and Future Perfect

After a disastrous year in San Francisco, in which I broke up with a cheating boyfriend and discovered I was almost completely incapable of integrating into the culture of the startup which has purchased mine, I fled to Williamsburg Brooklyn.

I had rented, sight unseen, a bedroom in a large converted industrial loft on North 6th and Berry off of Craigslist. The lease holder was bald Turkish hipster with a corporate job working IT at Bank of America. He loved partying and dance music. We rarely saw each other. It was an ideal home for a 24 year old.

The loft was above a furniture store called The Future Perfect. They had extremely expensive, extremely tasteful shit. The owner David was very nice but he probably knew that his neighbors would never be able to afford the designs he stocked and curated. Well, at the time.

The building shared a courtyard backyard so I got to fantasize a little about having great taste through exposure. My proximity to Future Perfect’s design slowly shaped my taste, even though I slept on a $300 futon whose defining feature was pebbled black pleather.

I never really believed I’d live a life where I had the stability that investing in furniture required. I mostly had sublets and moved by trash bag and taxi. My godfather introduced me to his “guy” for moving which let me acquire some Ikea but otherwise I didn’t invest. I was used to instability having moved a lot as a child.

Maybe that’s why the furniture store spoke to me. Future Perfect. A future that is perfect is one you will never live in. So it’s safe to indulge in the fantasy, knowing you will never take any real steps towards making it reality.

An older male friend of mine, who I had wanted to fuck but who never reciprocated, bought a couch from Future Perfect. I was impressed by his good taste and capacity to invest in real furniture. He had taken on a lease in a building in SoHo with plans for spending part of his time in New York. He let me stay there when he wasn’t. I luxuriated on the couch. I remember reading Watchmen for the first time on it.

At some point he decided New York just wasn’t for him. Or at least having a lease there wasn’t worth it. He asked me if I had a moving guy. I gave him the name of the guy my godfather has introduced me too. I got a phone call a week or two later.

“I’ve got a couch for you. Can I bring it up?” My mind was blown. My friend had just given me the couch. He didn’t even make a big deal about it. He just paid my moving guy to pick it up and deliver it to me. I cried. I loved that couch. It was the first truly nice piece of furniture I could ever call my own.

Sometimes I think about how my friend had more faith in the future than I did. That he was willing to invest in making his current moment perfect in a way I never could. I still have the couch. I moved it cross country with me to Colorado. It’s no longer the nicest piece of furniture I own. But only just. I invested in a working desk a few months ago. But nothing will ever rival the Future Perfect couch in my heart.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 311 and Conspiracy Care

The current “news” cycle is up in arms about a football player taking medical advice from a podcaster. Depending on who you read this is either a very bad thing or a fight against woke mobs and cancel culture. If you have no idea what I’m talking about there is no reason to dive in further. Don’t upset yourself.

People take advice from people they trust, and sometimes we trust people we perceive as being smarter or even as having higher social status than us. Shortcuts are part of life. And if you have access to someone, say through a parasocial relationship like social media, that you perceive as being well equipped to solve problems you will probably listen to them. Which is a point Eric Weinstein made about Joe Rogan and healthcare that I think is especially salient.

I think we have to understand that people are also looking to Joe as a pass-through for concierge medicine. If you have brilliant Uber-rich people in your life you hear a lot about medicine you can’t afford. Whole body work ups. Multi day examinations. Lots of medical gear.

I didn’t used to have much health care. I went to free clinics and doctors who I could pay $50 cash to for antibiotics without a hassle. It’s probably little wonder that when I had real health care issues I wasn’t prepared for just how bad most care in America is even with health insurance. I thought I’d get good healthcare with a nice insurance plan. But it mostly sucks. I got dismissed, ignored and generally not diagnosed for almost a year. And then I figured out how wealthy people do medicine. And I began healing.

Holy shit is it night and day different what spending real money outside of your health insurance will do. Like Joe I get concierge care. And to the advice I get is pretty far off what you hear from a baseline healthcare practitioner like say the doctor who can only see you for 20 minutes and can’t risk anything that isn’t clearly proven and approved. But someone who doesn’t answer to a big hospital system? They turn out to be much more flexible and will help you work through the risk and reward (and also cost benefit) of a host of different tests, treatments, supplements, devices and diagnostics.

And over the course of about three years I went from functionally disabled and completely unable to work to, well, basically fine. Three years ago I could barely walk and now I’m back to powerlifting and hiking. But the sick thing is I am certain if I were a plebeian I would be on disability for life. I would have at best been prescribed pain medications and left to rot and potentially develop an addiction or two.

So is it any wonder that in a country with a mass chronic disease issue we’d look to wealthy proxies like Joe Rogan and imitate what he says is his care? Fuck no. It’s downright immoral and condescending to suggest that the victims of American healthcare systems shouldn’t try to help themselves. No one else is stepping up to pay for their healthcare.

What is a genuine issue is that without context and a team of professionals you might accidentally become a victim to conspiracy theories. Which is exactly what we’ve seen with a number of Americans. But the line between conspiracy and simply untested or unproven treatment is a lot blurrier than I expected. I had concerns I’d be taken advantage of by functional medicine doctors and holistic practitioners. And surprisingly that just didn’t happen. I was always given context, research, second opinions and supported in making as informed a decision as possible. Doctors are collaborative by nature and my team has encouraged me in my efforts to test and trial a lot.

This kind of care does not come cheap. I’ve spent close to $80,000 on concierge care services over the past year. This includes everything from diagnostics & testing to compound pharmacy and off label pharmaceuticals (get metformin just trust me), to a host of medical devices and treatments as well as the hourly cost of a primary care physician, a prescribing & case physician (it’s not uncommon for different doctors to do medicine management so as to monitor your entire case for interactions) and clinical nursing. Like I said, if I didn’t have money I would still be on disability. I’d estimate only 20% of my progress came from before I went to a more personalized approach. Medicare for all isn’t going to deliver you the kind of care I got.

I don’t really have a takeaway or solutions here. Most people don’t have complex chronic diseases nor do they have the need for the kind of last 20% health optimization that the billionaire class go in for either. But you can do a lot on your own. A lot of health is just preventative care.

I’ve shared a basic biohacking guide for beginners before. Replacing fat with lean muscle and getting your basic nutrient and fitness profile improved should do a lot for many of you (not true of chronic disease patients that’s complex). After you’ve done the basics on your fitness, body composition, and sleep hygiene for 3-6 months you can move on to supplements. You maybe surprise at what you learn and how much it deviates from what is common knowledge about health. Here is a little hack to save you time. Eat protein, lift weights and get sunlight. And stop looking down on people just trying to survive. That makes you feel better too.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 310 and Short Burnouts

Is it possible to have brief periods of burnout? I’d always associated it with the years on the other side of a startup. If you’ve put in long hours for an extended period it makes sense to have a year or more of recovering from dipping into reserves for too long. But I wonder if it might be possible to have a week of burnout from a couple intense months.

I wrapped a few big projects last week. It was easier than anticipated and I felt a real sense of joy and accomplishment. But then this week I was a bit of a mess. I had several days of terrible sleep. Then I burned my hand making breakfast. Fun fact blisters are a form of burn, which finally made sense once I experienced a real burn as it’s healing looked exactly like a blister you get from a hiking boot. I’m feeling a sense of overwhelm with the drumbeat of preventative care and appointments that comes from 20 months off from things like dentists. I just felt like I got nothing done that was important to me this week. It was one thing after another. And it seems like others are feeling the stress as well.

Maybe it’s alright to have a week of feeling unproductive. I was very on for all of September and October and then I wrapped some stuff so it’s possibly normal to feel like all focus and willpower has gone out the window. But the temptation to force a fix on it is quite strong.

I’ve got a habit of turning everything into an opportunity for self improvement. I’ve been concerned about my capacity for using self control as a way to abuse myself. It’s been a running theme that I find myself concerned about the work that goes into keeping myself productive and healthy. So maybe it’s just par for the course. But I’m already worried about next week as I’ve got 4 fucking doctors appointment including one that involves a long drive. Maybe there is never a world where productivity is easy to come by and I should let go of the worry. The days are short but the years are long. And progress compounds over time.