Tag: Culture Wars

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Aesthetics Preparedness

Day 339 and Doomer Optimism

I write a mini-festo for the Doomer Optimism community. I am sharing it here today as well as gosh darn it I wrote it so it counts.

I come from hippie utopian stock. My parents, both working class union types, moved us to the promised land of Silicon Valley right before I was born. The family lore concludes that my father had no job on the day I came into the world as he was pitching a startup. My parents believed in the promise of computing, and eventually, the internet, to connect free thinking humans in a culture of collaboration and self-sufficiency. The do-it-yourself ethos of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog combined with a heady blend of technical opportunity and growth that is well chronicled in What The Dormouse Said. This gives you a sense of cultural milieu in which I was raised. The sixties had long given way to the Reagan revolution and the rise of Clinton’s neoliberalism when I came on the scene, but I never forgot my roots. I invest in startups to continue that legacy of autonomy and freedom at my own fund chaotic.capital.

“Remember what the dormouse said: feed your head.”

For me doomer optimism is the continued braiding of those cultural strands. Each one of us is capable of connecting to each other and enabling ourselves, individually and collectively, to lead the life of flourishing and growth we seek. We want tools and information that feed our head but also crucially our heart. The key insight that these very different culture strains, hippie and technology, have shown us, is that individual empowerment is what ultimately connects us to our tribes. 

How does it work? Well, natural law is pretty simple. The laws of thermodynamics are clear.  “If you do not fuck around, you never find out.” As we cede autonomy to others, we cede our capacity to fuck around. The inexorable logic of that, means we also cede our capacity to find out. Without the natural chaos of energetic entropy pushing man against nature, we get stuck. We stagnate in the local maxima. 

And we long to find out. We want to find our communities, our families, our capacities, and our passions. That is how we build. That is how we invent. That is how we solve our problems. Humans are capable of huge creative leaps. Massive shifts in capacity have risen in a blink of an eye. We can solve our problems, and indeed have been doing so, for millennia. But the only way we do is if we fuck around. Otherwise we will never find out what we are capable of overcoming. No matter how dire our problems we can rely on the deep laws of energy. So don’t be afraid, go and fuck around. We are counting on you to find out.

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Emotional Work

Day 338 and Effort

The real world rewards talent. It largely doesn’t give a fuck about effort. Sure, we like it when someone with talent works hard at honing their gifts. But if you just work hard it is largely ignored. The end result still matters most. Talent more easily gets the desired outcome.

This is a sort of hard truth that isn’t particularly hard to grasp. Every bit of evidence you have from a young age indicates that we reward outcome. Even if you are in a school system without grades, like I was, we still know what a quality outcome looks like. But we spend all this time and effort lying to kids with this separate system of effort that suggests that working hard and putting in a lot of effort are the thing “good” kids do.

I’m not wild about praising effort and hard work on its own. Sure it matters, hard work honing your skills, even when you suck, has its own value. But not when it comes to what the world expects of us. We inculcate habits and emotional expectations that are basically cargo cults. No wonder kids, after being praised and rewarded for effort for a decade or two, are confused when they get their first job. I’d be fucking pissed if I were that kid. I’d slowly shaped my behavior around one set of expectations only to find it had no bearing on reality.

Why do we spend so much time cultivating the myth that effort matters as much as talent? Why do we praise effort so consistently among our youth when we know that at a job being told “well you work hard but…” is probably a prelude to being let go. You have to work hard and achieve the desire outcome. It’s enough to drive people nuts. It is literally crazy making to contradict reality with all these lessons on effort. We are gaslighting our youth.

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Media Politics

Day 331 and No Going Back

We were never getting rid of the downstream effects of the pandemic. All the joking about the “before times” was just our collective psyche exhibiting normalcy bias. There is no going back. Inequality is rising and people are struggling and attitudes have ossified. Not because of some bizarre conspiracy but because you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.

Every restriction and panic is just another day where the world gets more unfair and the prepared and the wealthy have more moves than those at the bottom. And so more people suffer and the gyre widens.

The thing about being privileged is that it compounds over time. Every instance of success and every lucky break build on each other. The math is an inexorable process that leads to one conclusion. The rich get richer.

The reverse is true too. Every barrier, every bill, every setback, every issue compounds too. An object in motion stays in motion.

If this all seems very unfair, I regret to say there is absolutely nothing any individual can do about the physics of success. The best you can do is try to bring others up with you. Educate them on the logic of success and arm them so they can begin to compound their own.

You can’t do it at mass scale. Individual outliers will distort every set of rules and every game within a handful of moves and the accretion of influence begins anew. There is no such thing as revolution. There is only hoping you can enable enough people to change the direction for good. That enough people chose collectively to make better choices for each other.

Anyone who preaches anything other than individuals aiding each other in freedom will have to acknowledge that all systems are prone to corruption and self serving. There is no level playing field.

Some of us just have enough ego to think if it is our people and our tribe or our political party in charge we’d do it better. That’s a lovely lie and history is riddled with the graves of societies that fell to egos of Caesars and strong men. Humans wouldn’t be interesting without our sins. We have to chose to overcome them and accept responsibility for their consequences rather than put our problems at the feet of elites.

And this unfortunate logic can lead one of two ways for America. We can either accept the personal freedom and self responsibility of each other. Or we can get smaller as a nation. What’s more likely to happen is the inequality widens. The rich and productive will write their own destiny. They will take advantage of the sifting sands. New fortunes will be built on pandemic logic and technology.

And the insecurity of the chaos will erode the positions of most fragile members of society and they will fall further as we climb higher. We will force rules on them we don’t abide by. Masks, testing, vaccines, restrictions of movement become for thee but not for me. We will restrict their capacity because it doesn’t affect our lives. It’s corrosive and unequal and cruel. It’s entirely without empathy. And we are accepting that because our stars are rising. The money is being made off this societal transition. It’s already in motion.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 330 and Vitamin Not Pill

I was reading a fellow investor’s thesis page and noticed one lens they use for investing is whether a product is a “vitamin or a pill” with the insinuation that pills are inherently better investments than vitamins, as one is a nice to have for a business and the other is a must have. Now I can’t speak to this as an investment thesis, though I largely agree, but I do disagree on a wellness basis.

Preventative medicine is just as necessary as interventional medicine. In some cases more so, as getting ahead of a disease’s inflection point should be the humane way we handle our medical needs. We are just often too focused on short term impacts to see the value of solutions that build over time. Think of it as the quarterly reports of healthcare. Why build for the future when the market judges by each 10K?

The nature of panic may make us inclined to spend heavily on something that has become acute. But that does not make it inherently more effective or worthwhile. It’s just the immediately necessary. It just means we need higher minimum effective doses to see a result.

What we often ignore is compounding effects of wellness interventions are far superior to the mitigation of a pharmaceutical over time. Most of us would prefer to not require the costly (both biologically and financially) medicines that keep us together. This is not to say that I am not deeply grateful for all the drugs I take. But rather that I have seen incredible value in what we deem “lifestyle interventions” and other “nice to have” vitamin style supplements and protocols.

And while it takes much longer to see their effects, the compounding positive effects often wildly outperform anything that might be dubbed a pill. The trouble probably boils down to switching costs and time to pay off. Which is why an investor would prefer a pill to a vitamin. But just because something has a longer lifecycle doesn’t make it inherently less sticky. Or less effective. Or crucially any less profitable. The only way we ever see the deeply positive effects of habitual practice and dedication is to do the work. That work is boring, repetitive and low payoff. Until, most times years in the making, you see how putting your future self over your present self is what is giving you the future you always dreamed would be yours.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 326 and The Long Now

A culture lacking optimism is a culture without a future. Even before the pandemic, American youth had plenty of reasons to temper their optimism. Inequality, corporate dominance, rising debt particularly for school, unaffordable housing, lack of social support for family, the changing climate and the frequency of natural disasters all tend to weigh on you.

I’m a optimistic person so I always presumed I’d find a way around things. And I largely did. I got an education. I started my own company. I sold it. I found I had developed a valuable skill set. I met a man through one of my best friends and we got married. All was well in my American dream for many years.

But cracks had always been there. Little details that made me question common cultural, social and political assumptions. I discovered the limits of modern medicine with a chronic disease. I saw the disaster that financialization could wreck on families with a bankruptcy. I wasn’t naive about our systems and their inequalities.

But the knowledge that the future could be worse than today wears on you. Once you start living in a liminal state it gets worse. The pandemic made it harder for me to believe in the future because the present became a holding pattern. Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory calls this The Long Now.

The more we put off investing in a future the more the long now stretches on. We borrow against all the things that could build us a better tomorrow. And we fall back. We put off doing things that would make our future better because it’s rational to do so. What if things get worse?

I’m tired of living in the long now. I’m investing in myself. I have been investing in my body and my health. And I’m ready to invest in a home. Not because I particularly want to own property but because I want to stop the long now and believe that my future is something I can build.

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
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
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
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
Preparedness

Day 309 and Buying Land

Now that the pandemic has fully driven startup land to a remote first culture, I have no excuse to put off buying property. But it’s hard to figure out where to settle and when. Alex and I signed another year lease on the townhouse we have in Boulder last month which means the countdown clock is on.

I’ve been in Colorado a full year and I’ve got another one ahead of me as we ride out whatever the pandemic has left. So while I don’t think I’m headed back to New York City for full time living ever again, I don’t feel ready to buy a home yet either. It’s a big decision with consequences! And I’ve got no idea what to do. We want to invest in a home we can invest in for preparedness.

May the crypto and startup gods bless me with pied-a-terre money on the next exit so I can have access to New York City and live off the grid at the same time! But no seriously I don’t think I can settle in Colorado either. The last summer was unlivable between the extreme heat waves and the ozone pollution that comes from high heat combining with high altitude sun. It’s better in the high country but then you are in fire country. And we’ve had terrible fires in the last year. Apocalyptic shit frankly.

The Colorado of my childhood isn’t surviving climate change. And the prepper in me just isn’t willing to invest in putting down roots in a place with water shortages, drought, fires and the potential for civil unrest. Which frankly pisses me off. I’m sad I can’t just buy a homestead in the Colorado Rockies. I have a whole rant about Boomers and ruining my home but I’ll try not to piss off my elders. I just really wanted to be able to live here.

But that begs the question of where is a decent place to buy a home. Leaving behind civilization for Montana doesn’t feel feasible now either. Alex is too social for that kind of nonsense full time. Being in a small town in the middle of nowhere seems romantic until you want takeout. And frankly I like takeout.

But I also want to invest in more serious preparedness efforts. I want to be fully off grid. I want to invest in our water. I want to do the kind of regenerative agriculture and restorative land work that could lead to a self sufficient life if it came to that. I want a homestead. Heck right now I don’t even have a generator or a fire pit. Because I’m in a townhouse. Which is a lot better than being an urban prepper but I’ve got a taste for more.

But I’m also not ready to leave behind civilization. So I’ve got no idea what to do. Because I’m at the end of what kind preparedness even makes sense in a more urban location. And we don’t own it. So I’m feeling itchy. Should we buy something in Boulder that we can do some prepping on and also a piece of land in Montana? I’m not sure that’s feasible financially. I feel stuck on this one if anyone has got opinions.