I’m having a Boomer moment. And I think I’m excited about it? I’m actually extremely excited.
It’s clear without a significant investment of time and effort, most millennials’ technical skills will be out of date in the next decade. I think it’s likely to happen faster but humans are slower than our tools.
The rate of change in artificial intelligence, and its subsequent impact on the business of software, is moving at such rapid clip that even if you put your total focus on the topic you will find yourself behind.
I doubt I’ll be the only millennial to find themselves up-skilling and re-skilling in this era. Hopefully we are quick enough on educational change for Gen Z and Alpha that they get exposed early.
And I am one of the lucky ones. I’ve been working in technology my whole career. I’ve been investing in the space for several years. I’ve been dreaming of the singularity since I was a kid. I just wish I had the neuroplasticity i did back then. But I know it will be worth the effort.
While I didn’t attend the University of Colorado at Boulder myself, as a townie kid it holds a special place as educational institution in my life.
Their libraries lent me books, I attended events like their famed Conference on World Affairs and I made use of campus facilities from sports fields to their planetarium.
CU Boulder helped make me who I am today. Which is apparently someone who is qualified to weigh in on challenging topics in technology and culture.
Tech” isn’t like other industries. In addition to money and products, it is now a source for politicians, policy, culture, and philosophies with unprecedented influence throughout the globe. Figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel hardly count as mere industrialists; they function as thought-leaders and government operatives.
This two-day conference gathers actors from today’s tech world–entrepreneurs, makers, thinkers, observers, and critics–to discuss the meaning of the tech counterculture, and what it might entail for the future of technology and American democracy.
The speaker line up is very impressive from politicians like our very own governor Jared Polis to journalists like James Pogue and entrepreneurs, operators and industrialists like myself.
My topic is first thing and the panelists are well worth being up early to learn from.
Technology can be a democratizing tool or a weapon of centralized authority. If those are perennial alternatives in technology’s history, which has predominated during recent years?
Panel: Michael Gibson, Jeff Schullenberger, Patrick Deneen, Julie Fredrickson Moderator: Paul Diduch
I spent the night in a port city in Greece as I am making my way back to Western Europe. I’ll be crossing by airplane via polar routes on my way to Colorado next week for an academic conference at my home town university.
I feel like I’ve made it when I am invited to speak on topics like Renegade Futurism. I’m now old enough to have lived a couple rounds in the “dissident technology” discourse so I hope to have something of value to say to new generations.
“You can’t get the little pricks generation gap you.” Molly Millions Neuromancer
On the long drive backfrom Istanbul I am listening to William Gibson’s Neuromancer to set myself in the right mood after the mix of antiquity and modernity I encountered this week.
One doesn’t cross thousands of kilometers and centuries of empires without requiring a bit of an aesthetic change.
Sunnier ports than in Gibson’s Neuromancer
The weather is more sunny Mediterranean Easter weekend than the non-climate skies of a future Japan’s Chiba and Night City, but with really any port city at night I can’t help but think of the famous first line of cyperpunk’s foremost novel.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
William Gibson’s Neuromancer
And so I tuned in to a story of oligarchy, artificial intelligence, dissident coders and cyborgs with mirror shades. In that near future the protagonists make a stopover in Istanbul too and it involves medically advanced nervous system treatments too. Gibson’s cyborg chop shops are almost as advanced as what I saw this week.
Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy
Gibson’s 1984 novel is as relevant in 2025 as it ever was. Our timeline has become his later work in uncanny ways but his cyperpunk aesthetic has become as timeless as the domes of Constantinople.
The elephants eye domes of a hammam
Whatever transition we are about to make as humans as our own Wintermute intelligences arrive will be rocky. I don’t know who will be the dissidents and how centralizing power may prove to be.
Overweighting the American markets has been the default in finance for decades. The growth of the magnificent 7, the “exorbitant privilege” of the American dollar, and the security of the defense umbrella of our alliances bolstered treasuries.
American exceptionalism has been rocked with Liberation Day and the subsequent fallout for many. Nobody in business in or with America slept for two weeks straight.
But for me it’s always traveling abroad that changes how I feel about America’s place in the world. If you’ve been following along with my hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy saga you may know I was in Istanbul touring a factory.
Seeing is believing. I’d heard Turkey’s clinics were the best in the world but now I know it. I cannot wait to come back for a more thorough look at my medical situation.
Being born an American has been the privilege of a lifetime. My passport has shown me the world. And even as I do what I can to help to make Montana the friendliest place to do the business of the future I can’t help but fear America has lost more than a step.
Istanbul feels like a modern city in the vein of Shenzen. Growth and construction is everywhere even as you can visit mosques and hammam from when Constantinople was the crossroad of empires.
I had not planned it this way but I had a repeat of the meiborn gland issue that got me sent to hospital in February. I had, in just four short days, a chalazion turn into hordeolum aka an infected cyst.
It’s probably a side effect of the IL-17 biological I am using. I had a mold exposure over the winter in our bed room so who knows. Sucks to be me. This is why I’m excited about new technology for healing like HBOT.
It needed a doctor to perform an incision and curettage. I asked the concierge at my hotel for a clinic and I walked five minutes to an enormous glittering skyscraper of a hospital. Many of those hospitals are run twenty four hours a day.
I walk in with no appointment. They immediately find me a medical translator. I’m checked in within fifteen minutes. I get a full eye exam and a seen by a doctor who instantly diagnoses it.
Next thing I know I’m in the chair with a local anesthetic and she is slicing, draining and disinfecting. She gets me my post treatment protocol. A pharmacy delivers the prescriptions in 9 minutes. Now this is healthcare.
Within the space of an hour I’m fixed up and sent home to eat. I’m sitting down to grilled octopus and prawns by the Bosporus in no time. I needed a protein filled lunch to take my antibiotics.
I am buzzing with energy as I spent my day touring the factory a hyperbaric chamber factory. I don’t want to get ahead of sharing details I haven’t cleared with them but I learned so much.
Istanbul is so far ahead on medical care delivery it is genuinely thrilling. There are 24 hour walk in hospitals. And
Which is good as the new IL17 inhibitor means to have a side effect of meiborn gland problems. In mere days I got another chalazion so I’d like that sliced out.
But my optimism about my immune systems capacity to operate functionally has taken a step towards optimism. That something so simple as oxygen and pressure has such significant benefits for our bodies is common sense.
How marvelous that the ingenuity of divers, doctors, athletes and under water workers to put together a treatment that is so effective it moved the biometrics of one of the healthiest men alive.
That only in the age of artificial intelligence did we get the inference capacity to show its efficacy is a real indictment of our academic and medical bureaucracy.
Concurrently we are moving through a massive global economic reorganization that impacts how one plans for even local businesses like a med spa.
So while we’ve purchased our first chamber before the tariffs have gone into effect, it seems reasonable to get ahead of the game and begin the sourcing process.
In a twist that one of my friends described as “an extremely Julie situation” I’m heading to Istanbul tomorrow. I’m in Europe so I’m actually going to drive. Any recommendations for hotels, great meals and must see sights are most welcome.
This then turned into an offer of a tour of the factory by their team (since we are in the market as we plan out our Montana medical spa) that was topped off by an offer to discuss the experience on my favorite podcast.
Apparently manufacturing complex medical equipment in this new era of tariffs and bilateral trade agreements is a topic of interest to many people as Turkey may end up a better trading partner than China for many categories of sophisticated equipment.
The Trump administration is making attempts to reorient more of the world under our trade & defense umbrella rather than China is obviously on everyone’s mind. Turkey is an advanced manufacturing industry from which I have imported in the distant past for textiles so I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from this trip.
I’m noticing a trend among more and more of my social circles of fear, confusion, depression and malaise. Which let’s be frank isn’t at all irrational given (hand waves) all this.
Rapid changes in technology are slamming into geopolitical changes and it is scaring the shit out of all kinds of people. Personal politics aside, many of the institutions, alliances and people we lived with our entire lives are changing.
But the rate of change is exciting! So much of what we took for granted in our youths is simply changing. Maybe (ok definitely) some of it will be worse for parts of it. It’s normal to be afraid of change. But what if we just need to survive the change?
I’ve been in tech my entire life. I was raised in it by my family. My father absolutely loved gadgets and hardware of all kinds and dove headfirst into selling software. I married someone who works in it with me.
I went to work in it by taking my skills in understanding new tools and translating it to an industry that adopted all of it. What an incredible privilege it was.
I worked in fashion and cosmetics so it was a mixed back but many incredible creative talents made and sold clothes that simply wouldn’t have been possible in an earlier more closed era.
The changes my father and I went through feel like slow lumbering industries compared to the rapid iteration of tooling we are seeing now. How we make things is being changed in ways that is almost impossible to keep up with.
I want to survive the Jackpot of change that is upon us. That’s a William Gibson reference. I agree with Bryan Johnson. Just don’t die. Imagine what we will find on the other side.
I’ve tried not to pay too close attention to the panicked aftermath of the new tariff regime.
I don’t trade the public markets actively and we’d already made preparations in our personal financial lives for a deleveraged dollar. It seemed clear where things were headed and weakening the dollar solves a couple problems for America.
I am a free trader. I believe in open markets as the most effective means we currently have at our disposal for large scale coordination that works with human nature.
Nevertheless the allure of central planning and collectivism is hard to resist for those in power. The market will adapt and find other ways of allocating assets but the wasted energy of a crisis frustrates investors. Damming the waters only impeded flow.
The exorbitant privilege of Bretton Woods comes with the fears of a centralized currency managed by technocrats who must give guidance to markets without providing too many surprises.
I grew up with a significant amount of skepticism around the federal reserve and its places to hippie parents and the University of Chicago but even I never thought I’d live to see this kind of test. And I am a Bitcoiner! Maybe Silicon Valley will finally find out what bargain we have with Uncle Sam.
