Tag: Chaotic

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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
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1564 and Driving Along the Wine Dark Sea

The road to Constantinople is long. Whether a knight on horseback crusade bound or a bitch in an Audi, it’s a long haul to Istanbul.

That’s not me flexing honest just that the rental guy sold me on the quattro as a comfortable ride for long hauls so for you cavalry types it’s the destrier of our times.

My route is basically hugging the Aegean. I drove down the Adriatic, nodded at the Ionian and spent an evening on the Aegean before breaking at Thessaloniki. The reverse was no picnic for Odysseus and he started in Troy. Which is around the corner relatively thinking.

Unlike our friends in antiquity, I have further to go to make it to the capital of empires that is Istanbul.

I’m excited for both the work on the ground but also to see the sights. Making it across multiple border crossings is absolutely worth to see the intersection of so much history. Oh and also to tour a factory.

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
Categories
Culture Startups

Day 1561 and Just Don’t Die

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.

Categories
Finance Politics

Day 1558 and Basis Point Bullying

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.

Each basis point drop saves America 1 billion according to Secretary Bessent. So we’ve an incentive to nuke 30 basis points and keep yields low. And yet the 10 year is still stubbornly high.

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.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1550 and Fools, Drunks & The United States of America

Americans are mere days away from the dreaded April 2nd tariff reveal and the mood could not be more sour.

If only America was a few good zoning reform bills further along. Then we could house 700 million more people and our Abundance bro moderate liberals would be in a better mood. Alas it’s easy dunking for most of us when Matty Yglesias weighs in late to the party

I’ve spent the last half decade preparing for a more chaotic world. How it would play out and what would be the driver was anyone’s guess.

I made plenty of bets that energy, compute, and decentralization would be the way in a multi-polar world, but I don’t want to count America out just yet. That’s why we made our last stand in Montana.

“God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Otto von Bismarck

The amusing bit of Trump’s mercantilism is literally only he and a small band of trade administration aids actually think this is sensible economic policy. While I know a tariffs bro personally and I appreciate him as a friend they know I think this approach is dubious.

You know it’s bad when even the king of outlier events Nassim Nicholas Taleb is fretting for Treasury Secretary Bessent. Who is at least qualified to manage the a massive currency crisis.

“He probably gets that whether tarifs make or don’t make sense is irrelevant: any ABRUPT introduction of steep tariffs must lead to a CASCADING & GENERALIZED price action.”

We are damned if you do not because tariffs are the wrong tool for this moment (though most of them are) but because markets like predictable things and cascading price action everywhere makes us dizzy.

Rather like the drunks and the fools mentioned by Bismarck, we’d better hope providence provides in this topsy turvy moment.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1546 and Present Ephemera

I am backing off some of my “current thing” hyper vigilance for a moment. I need to shake off the noise and find my signal.

The band of possibilities is simply so wide that it feels pointless to react. Who you are will determine everything from here. You must go into the future based on your values. I must strip back to see myself clearly.

The complaints about our geopolitical moment (true and righteous as they may be) are set against a great power conflict that will play out over multiple decades of technological change.

It’s yet unwritten though I have some ambition that we can all play a part in the restructuring of a knowledge abundant world.

The trouble with accelerating into the turn is the sheer stress. We know we need change but how we achieve it is messy.

It seems in some areas we will take the low road. It is a reasonable worry that we are seeing all of the downsides of American choices while the upsides are harder to see. I feel as I’ve only seen the fears I’d had and the changes are made at great cost.

We fucked around and it is finding out season. The present is all ephemera. I need to hold it lightly. The stress it induces serves no purpose. It will pass. I will adapt.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1537 and Copy Cats

A friend of mine has managed a career as a tastemaker of the sort that hardly exists any longer. It’s hard to find a term that’s even appropriate without both identifying them and understating the power of their influence.

Influencing the direction of culture isn’t so much a job as a point of view with a paycheck. It used to be a bit simpler. We had a hierarchy of influence caped by physical realities.

Maybe your pastor or your employer influenced your daily culture. Even when I was younger it wasn’t much broader than your local news and what you could get at the library. Now we live in a mass market of influence.

Influencer, creator, journalist, editor, blogger, hell we even have Twitter accounts that move culture now. So it’s not surprising that it can be hard to keep track of who is truly influential and who is just popular.

Being heard out and being really listened to and considered are very different things. It’s a weird moment for taste. Especially culturally. We keep having vibe shifts. The people who are paid to make sense of it all are as clueless as the rest of us.

The only thing anyone can seem to agree on is that it’s all very chaotic. Which is a point of view with which I’m quite familiar. And naturally that unsettles me. Once everyone agrees on a cultural moment is exactly when the tastemakers look for something new and when the masses really come with the big bucks.