Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1575 and Renegade Futurism

I spent my day at a conference at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Bensen Center for the Study of Western Civilization. It’s my hometown university and while I never studied there I was greatly enriched by its traditions of public and community programming. The land grant universities educated Americans like me even if we never attended them.

I suppose this is silly of me but I didn’t think an academic conference would actually be all that academic. I am used to financial forums and media shined up environments where doing the reading is sadly not a prerequisite. Academics very much do the reading. Or we said at my alma mater “that’s all very well in practice but how about in theory?”

I felt a little silly as the lone person on my panel who actually worked in industry and felt a little more acutely how absolutely unprepared our technical industry is for the task of running our elite institutions. We have on the ground knowledge and they have a very firm grasp of Hegel and Gransci. It’s a tension that has come to a head before.

And yet here our technical elite are gaining power and and a seat at the table and congratulations we’ve finished the long march through the institution. And somehow you still lost. We aren’t any closer to socialism or social justice. You know what happens in the dialect resolution next? Fascism. It’s like why pay the six figures for the degree if you don’t even read. Champagne socialists the lot of them.

But I’m also struck at just how divorced our academics are from the reality on the ground. We had an industrial class that founded private institutions that clashed with our empire elites before. How do you think we ended up with Stanford and the University of Chicago? Why do we continue this dance of institutional ownership?

And yet the cycle continues and we come up with new readings and new interpretations of how things should be optimally done. We have moral traditions and religious traditions and I’m sure this is an exhausting time to consider a new Pope so I’ll go light on my Catholic friends. Protestants just don’t understand. The future has arrived. You just didn’t notice it.

Categories
Politics Travel

Day 1574 and American HVAC

Being back in America after any amount of time in Europe is always a weird transition for me. I am in Colorado for an academic conference so I’m staying in a chain hotel.

Being accustomed to European systems that simply don’t work beyond a set range I turn the air conditioning on maximum before bed assuming at best I’ll achieve 22C (71.5 degrees in freedom units) as I like to sleep in a cool room.

I wake up with my Whoop warning me I have an “elevated body temp” and I think huh that’s weird it’s freezing in here. The room is 15C. That’s 59 degrees Fahrenheit for Americans.

Social media loves joking about PE HVAC takeover bros but a random conference hotel in Colorado has better air conditioning than the entirety of Western Europe.

You can stay in the best hotel in Frankfurt and it won’t get to a decent temperature. If you stay in an Airbnb and run an air conditioner you may even have troubles with the neighbors.

Isn’t it a bit odd you can be comfortable in a renovated 400 year old bank vault in Istanbul or a corporate chain hotel in American flyover states but Europe simply can’t manage climate control? Don’t worry though I’m sure NATO can re-industrialize no problem. Wink wink.

The way we virtue signal is so bizarre. Like let’s consider the 29 cent Dole branded banana I got at Trade Joe’s. It’s certified organic. The barcode tells me to look. Trader Joe’s is owned by a German conglomerate Aldi.

I’m Bob Dole.

The organic movement may be the original blueprint for ESG and DEI but it’s now so well accepted that hallelujah the mercenaries that guard the banana republic of Dole are verified socially responsible. It was only capitalism that ever forced their hands. Riddle me that my socialist friends.

And this brings me to my panel on Friday on whether technology can be a force used to counter culture. To which I respond with which culture are we countering and why?

Categories
Startups

Day 1572 and Re-Skilling

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.

Categories
Community Politics Startups

Day 1571 and Townie Done Good

I am excited to be a panelist at an academic conference at my hometown’s university later this week.

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.

The conference is called Renegade Futurism: Tech and the New Political Counterculture

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.     

Hosted by the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization on Friday April 25th and Saturday April 26th and it is open to the community so if you are nearby please consider registering and attending.

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.

April 25th Atlas Building ATLS 100 – Cofrin Auditorium

9:00AM-10:15AM “How dissident is today’s tech?”

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

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1569 and The Sky Above The Port Tuned To A Dead Channel

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 back from 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.

One can just start to see corporate post-nation states emerge. Maybe they will look like Tessier-Ashpool S.A. Maybe it will look like Elon Musk’s family office Excession. Of course, that’s an entirely different science fiction novel about artificial intelligence.

Polybius’s cycles of political revolution chart
Categories
Finance Travel

Day 1568 and New Era Exceptionalism?

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.

I happened to have a slight medical emergency when a meiborn gland infection popped up on my eyelid almost overnight. Walking into a hospital and receiving exceptional care in no time at all was mind blowing.

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.

Categories
Biohacking Medical Travel

Day 1567 and Turkish Health Tourism

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.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1566 and Oxygenated

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.

Categories
Biohacking Travel

Day 1563 and On The Road

Life has been screaming loudly at me to pay attention to hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy.

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.

Now I know this sounds crazy, but I’m driving through Greece to visit a factory in Istanbul that manufactures some of the best HBOT options available.

Sharing the road with sheep

Any good road trip is filled with unexpected surprises like sharing the road with sheep but by tomorrow I should be in a slightly more urban setting.

Categories
Finance Medical Travel

Day 1562 and Istanbul

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.

How I ended up on this last minute surprise journey is a long involved story that includes spotting a maintenance issue on a hyperbaric chamber, having a friendly mutual who swears by HBOT email the CEO to troubleshoot, and a long Twitter conversation to do said troubleshooting.

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.

One of the machines I’ll be checking out