Tag: Investing

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Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1732 and It’s Getting Hot In Here So Take Off All Your Clothes

You might want bring towel though, as our handcrafted Finnish sauna will need some use before the cedar is completely smooth. Yes, that’s right, the MilFred family Yellow Barn now has a sauna. And she is a beauty. Just check out the view we picked for her.

Alex and the wonderful family who built the cedar sauna structure placed her under the back awning of the big yellow barn today. Wiring and electronics are underway as I write.

We’ve been slowly but surely turning our barn into our ideal wellness center both for our own use and eventually for the wider community as well. We are privileged with skills, capital and loads of very expensive personal experience with chronic illnesses.

So naturally as geriatric millennials it is always our instincts to turn our pain into something useful and also if we are lucky pay back the expenditures and turn a profit. Which we can then reinvest. It’s the circle of life for a generation who found the circle of life to be a tad more inflationary than expected.

The man of action putting the finishing touches on the electronics. We don’t have anything in our home systems connected to the cloud, so he built his own fully local controller with
ESP32 as the brains, 60a 240v contactor for heater, RGBW LED controls
UI/ final control via Home Assistant and HomeKit. You can snag the code on GitHub

In true MilFred fashion, we are building and testing everything all on ourselves. An n of 1 is good, an n of 2 is better, and if you’d like to test it out hit us up while it is a work in progress. Build in public and beta test with your friends.

Tucked under the awning of the barn so one can easily pop in from gym, HBOT or cold plunge to warm cedar comfort and mountain views

We’d like to ultimately build a space for healing, relaxation and training for those who prefer time tested modalities like heat, cold, oxygen and pressure.

Friends and family can come and test out our now very impressive range of equipment as we build this all out.

We have one of the few hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers available outside of hospital use in the region. You can pressurize to 2 atmospheres and set a range of parameters for a range of treatments. I use it for my inflammatory condition while Alex is treating the remains of long covid. You’d be shocked what pressure and oxygen can do.

Our hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber

If you want a work out get in some squat reps in our power cage, take a swing at the punching bag or lengthen your spine on our Pilates reformer. You can even climb around on the rock wall built into the the barn ceiling (not even kidding that is the work of the previous family).

If you are looking for a spa day you can have a sweat in the sauna, do red light therapy on your face, chill out on a PEMF mat, and hopefully soon take a dip in a cold plunge. Though if you are ambitious you can sprint across the front pasture and jump in our pond but I’ll warn you that the ducks might not love it.

The pond is fed by a creek that comes from the canyon above our house

The point being that we are building by hand and through personal experience something that improves our lives and others and that’s a pretty hot thing to do. Don’t worry, we will provide towels and robes if you do indeed take off all your clothes. Just come on over and try it out.

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Finance Politics

Day 1729 and 6% of GDP Buys Quite A Lot

While I’m not economist, because, well there wasn’t money to pay for graduate school, so I could not dedicate myself to the study of monetary policy. I had to go make money in the markets like a capitalist should.

So I’m aware that my thought experiment is not how any of this works, it’s against free market principles to arrange markets like this, but let’s do a thought experiment about buying back our industrial capacity.

Being inspired by Roon’s tweet about Silicon Valley’s grand tradition of acqui-hiring and taking seriously the thesis of Dan Wang’s book Breakneck.

That “industrial process” is a technology that lives in the heads of people and that it was a mistake to let so much “low value” industry be offshored due to the loss of tacit process capital

So what kind of companies would America want to acquire if we were so inclined to pursue a strategy of industrialization? Our biggest success is that we are a highly financialized economy.

So why not use that cash to buy some shit? I know I don’t like planned markets either but for our industrialists let’s say we find a way for America’s markets to buy us back some process knowledge.

Let’s take a stab at what we’d even want in that day. For me my starting point is the top ten Korean chaebols, we take back AMD from Europe (we licensed it anyways) and look to acqui-hire former Nokia Finnish & Baltic system engineers.

Now maybe you want 1 or 2 Indian pharmaceutical generics providers to come to American. And for fun let’s buy the Japanese fastener company YKK. And also buy back the meatpackers. I asked Grok what it would cost and I was honestly pretty pleased by the price tag.

Based on current data (Sep 2025):

  • Top 10 Korean chaebols (flagship mkt caps): ~$879B
  • AMD: $261B
  • Nokia: $26B
  • Top 2 Indian generics (Sun Pharma, Cipla): $61B
  • YKK: Private (N/A)
  • Major meatpackers (JBS, WH Group): $30B

Total: ~$1.26 trillion. Note: Estimates for groups; exact values fluctuates

We would probably need to buy the shareholders and the workers so let’s assume it’s kind of a buyout but you are getting the talent too.

We get the best possible new Americans and we make their shareholders money. Capitalism buys American bonds. Usually. So then I think how much of our GDP would that be?

Current US GDP (2024): ~$29.2 trillion. 2025 projection: ~$29.7T. The $1.26T total is about 4% of annual GDP. Affordability for acquisitions would depend on financing, government subsidies, or private capital, but the economy’s scale makes it feasible in theory

Now I start to get greedy. I want the top 10 best Shenzhen manufacturers and asked for Grok’s best estimate on cost. No facts checked here it’s vibe economics ok?

Based on Sep 2025 data and estimates (public caps in USD; privates approximated via valuations):

  1. Huawei (telecom/electronics): ~$300B (private)
  2. BYD (EVs/batteries): $133B
  3. Luxshare Precision (components): $70B
  4. Mindray (medical devices): $41B
  5. ZTE (telecom equip): $25B
  6. TCL Technology (electronics): $20B
  7. Inovance (automation): $20B
  8. Goertek (acoustics/wearables): $15B
  9. Sunny Optical (optics): $12B
  10. Han’s Laser (laser equip): $6B

Total est. acquisition cost: ~$642B. Feasible under your presumptions, ~2% of US GDP

So just vibe economics here but like how much did we spend on pandemic stimulus?

Total US COVID-19 fiscal stimulus (2020-2021 packages) was about $5.6 trillion, per Tax Policy Center estimates, including spending and tax relief. That’s roughly 19% of current GDP—way more than your 6% shopping list. Feasible in scale, if the will is there!

So again just vibes not how it works but stay with me here to keep the American consumer spending (which I am not saying didn’t work because it did) but we spent 19% of our GDP in stimulus. And we didn’t get better companies or better Americans.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical Preparedness

Day 1726 and Grief is for the Living

My husband and I are both sick. It’s the kind of “not quite respiratory, not quite sinus, not quite right” viral infection that always seems to take twice as long to clear as you expect.

Aging and stress is part of it but so is the damage we both have from covid-19 infections that turned into pneumonia. We’ve never been the same.

The good/bad news is that everyone we know seems to have the same basic set of physical degradations that we do. Varying levels of impact are met with varying levels of healthcare and wellness routines. From peptides to hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy, no one is taking this shit sitting down.

I was already chronically ill before the world changed forever. It’s now common to have a flavor of autoimmune inflammatory chaos. I feel both less alone but much more frustrated at the crisis in American healthcare.

My medical billing codes as ankylosing spondylitis (arthritis in my spine) and psoriatic arthritis (psoriasis but it’s inside your body and it hurts!) but the tldr is constant pain, occasionally losing the capacity to walk, and the persistent exhaustion of chronic inflammation.

As we both cancel travel plans (for a charity event we’ve supported for years) and struggle to manage food and medication, I am reminded of the grief we are all carrying around.

As the world goes on with the “before times” as l memory for older generations, and the idea of any kind of positive “before” is unimaginable to the young, the grief comes and goes. The elders we stopped civilization to keep alive are dead or dying and our youth are distraught.

My own father passed just two weeks ago. I am grieving his loss, as well as how the loss is being handled by others. But my grief is mine and he is gone.

I am not the one who gets to choose how to memorialize him. Life goes on and we make precious few decisions about how and when it ends.

I remember being so angry and afraid for him when he left for cruise as lockdowns went into effect. I begged him to cancel the trip. I was afraid he would get sick or die.

He didn’t share those fears. He got stuck on the boat for an extra week or two, as no port would let them dock. He had the time of his life. I was locked in an apartment in Manhattan.

I don’t think he ever got Covid. For which I am grateful. I know far too many who did. I know many angry Zoomers grieving lost high school and college years.

Housing went up by 50% as we printed to survive the crisis. Strange times for us all and now we face the Great Ravine where the choices we made catch up to us.

My investment thesis of an increasingly chaotic world was novel when I first began and now it’s the same pitch every Tom, Dick and Harry espouses. What was once unclear is now the consensus. I am I am alive to see it and find no satisfaction in being right. The grief is all around us. Grief is for the living.

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Politics Startups

Day 1721 and Valar, Inference dot Net and Policy for The Future

There has been such a bleak mood on the timelines as Americans are once again locked into a cycle of agitation and propaganda driven by hyper persuasion A/B testing of rage bate as tragedy turns on the opportunism machines. So I’d like to share bits and bobs of good news in my corner of the world today.

Valar Atomics is one of my proudest true first check investments. I knew Isaiah was special from the moment I met him. But I didn’t like the company he was pursuing with someone. I said I’d back him in something else so long as he was the CEO. I’m so glad I told the straight truth as Isaiah let me in on his true dream of an energy abundant nuclear future and I was able to be there from day before zero.

Valar is audacious, ingenious and the kind of hard technical work I’d never seen anyone raise from his position as self taught young man. But what a challenge right? I was in. I believe in him. And boy do I look smart now.

The Valar Atomics and Kiewit announced a groundbreaking at the San Rafael Energy Research Center for Ward250, their very first reactor! It is a major step on their mission to answer the President’s call for three advanced reactors on American soil by July 4, 2026.

If you want to watch an inspiring video with a Blackhawk click through. Kiewit is America’s 2nd largest power plant builder, with more active nuclear construction projects than any other company in North America. Utah deserved a win like this today.

Valar is incredibly grateful to the State of Utah, especially Governor Spencer Cox, DNR Executive Director Joel Ferry, EOD Director Emy Lesofski, USREL Director Jaron Wallace, and all our local partners in beautiful Emery County.

Chaotic portfolio founder, and once and future Montana guy, Sam Hogan has a good synopsis of CogSec 101 in times of tension that I thought I’d share as a teaser for introducing his fantastic compute company Inference.Net

He gives good being online advice and his company Inference.net (yes disclosure investor) just started sponsoring a new podcast about the culture of San Francisco.

It’s called Member of the Technical Staff. It’s a fun hang with perennial grist for the social mills topics like where are the girlies in San Francisco. It’s a hang for a subcultural issues relevant to understanding living in a boomtown while building.

In local Montana news, we have had national influence with our work supporting the Frontier Institute and its indefatigable leader Kendall Cotton. Must be something about this Rocky Mountain boys that we love. He’s proving you can just do things.


I’m thrilled to report that two model bills that we’ve pioneered in Montana were officially adopted as ALEC model policy. This means that state legislators from across the country who look to ALEC for ideas will be prompted to introduce their state’s own Right to Compute Act (recognized as the gold standard for state tech regulation) or Private Property Protection Act (a cutting edge approach to zoning reform focused on housing affordability). 

We’ve officially become a national policy leader – a big deal! We’re a small state, and a small team here at Frontier Institute, but we’re making a huge impact thanks to supporters like you.

And that supporter like you? Heck yeah those supporters are me and Alex. .

You two can just do things as our boys Isaiah, Sam and Kendall have shown. You can build nuclear reactors, run decentralized inference compute markets and create new models, and even change your state’s policy with better laws that become models for the entire nation.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1698 and Capitalize On My Pain

We often talk about solving “pain points” when doing product development and market fit work for startups. We have popular metaphors in this vein. Start a company that sells painkillers not vitamins is so ubiquitous a piece of advice I can’t even locate its original source.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I personally apply this motto to the pain I’ve experienced in my own life. I’ve had personal pain points (travel and miniatures cosmetics sounded small but the market proved itself out) and now I am working on a medical spa concept as a side project in our barn in Montana.

The two growth areas in America, and soon I imagine the world, is artificial intelligence and healthcare for aging populations. I’ve been particularly interested in complex chronic diseases and the holistic approach required to treat them as I myself suffer from one.

If I experience a problem my instinct is to solve it for everyone. So I figure if the data coming from Jackson Hole is to be believed I should find a way to integrate what I know well (technology and complex disease management) and use that experience help our elders age with less pain. Literally painkillers perhaps in some cases.

I found this listicle in some dreck of an SEO bot optimized website so apologies to any original bloggers but it’s a decent list of how to think through why we like this metaphor. Skip if you just want my human written personal content. I’m just experimenting with including extra content from AI for my own recording keeping.

The Reality Test: Do users actively seek solutions, or do you need to educate them?


• The Money Test: Does budget appear instantly, or do they “need to think about it”?


• The Urgency Test: Do they want it this month, or is it “maybe next quarter”?


• The Solution Test: Are they actively looking for alternatives?


• The Decision Test: Do deals close in 1-2 calls?


• The Value Test: Can they quantify the cost of the problem?


• The Team Test: Does the whole team being sold on it want it?

Categories
Politics

Day 1662 and Class Consciousness Across The Atlantic

America is grossly class segregated in a way that I don’t think Europeans fully grasp but all Americans intuit even if they don’t understand all of its rules. Every time I find myself in Europe I learn something new about socialism and its trade offs.

Sure we talk a big game about the middle class but America has an enormous variance between our poorest classes and our richest. We are a country where capital decides your fate much more so than your birth station. And we have always had mad scrambles to the top between eras of consolidation and state intervention.

American aristocracy has been land owners but as of the post war years it’s been mostly making good financial decisions. Sure land ownership has been one of paths to better class positions but 2008 showed it is a policy choice from the state as much as an economic one.

Even in a middle tier city like the Seattle area you could once see wealth that ranged from Jeff Bezos to port and manufacturing line union workers. Maybe you don’t end up the richest man in the world but if you got a decent job at one of the many companies powering the metropolitan area from Boeing to the port authority you had a nice upwardly mobile life if you took the opportunities available to you.

If you made bad decisions maybe you ended up pretty far out of the city and can’t find steady work but you could find work if you could get to it.

Being poor when you have freedom of movement seems insane to Europeans who understand the logic of borders and state benefits in ways Americans and their interstate mobility don’t always.

You can with unitive move to better jobs and pick up marketable skills and send your children to decent schools. Maybe then they move from the factory line to engineering. In the next generation their kids go from engineering to founding their own company. Ever so the upward logic of American wealth goes. Naturally it’s not that simple but it’s a good story of competitive logic.

If you lived in a booming region maybe you moved to be closer to a core city. If you can move to opportunities you do so.

The question becomes if Americans can move to successful areas why don’t we do so? Some Europeans don’t understand attachment to place as their movements are either inside the Eurozone or a battle to get inside the Eurozone. That we might be attached to our mountain town and not want to move to Denver or Seattle might be a surprise. It’s all one country right?

Western Europe has had a safety net for so long that wealth is more of a choice than poverty. You have to make quite a bit of effort to get around the slow planned socialist efforts of older industrial concerns to become wealthy. But if you can become part of the social fabric you won’t starve or struggle to get antibiotics prescribed either.

If you are in society in Europe you can make through without a healthcare crisis, cut hours or an eviction notice upending your life. That is why there is a fight to be in the social contract of Europe. America has that fight too it’s just less intense as our benefits are about having our passport and are less about having social security. No one believes they will get it anyway.

Eastern and Southern European societies still know closed borders and poverty through restriction of opportunity. Intra-European strife is all about immigration just as immigration from the rest of the world now drives American fears. Who is part of the social contract and why?

Sure you see wealth in Europe but it can feel as if it’s either generational or corruption or both. In America you see how wealth might be both but you get to see how wealth can be series of good decisions.

If you can keep your shit together you can rise. So why don’t we all do it? It’s a mystery to everyone and no one. You either race to coordinate with capital or you opt out of it entirely.

That’s our class system in America and I think it has shown a lot of merit even as some of Europe doesn’t understand why we choose it. Why opt for competition when you can have coordination? Well maybe a New Yorker doesn’t want to coordinate with someone in Texas. We allow for some of that even as the federal tensions rise amongst our compact. Italy upsets Denmark too.

I don’t know how this class compact works itself out on either continent but I always find myself reaffirming my commitment to capitalism anytime I spend even a couple weeks in socialist countries.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1648 and Dystopian Doomers

I’m fairly well branded as a doomer, so I hate to break ranks with my preparedness brethren, but I’m absolutely sick of the powerful using fear as a tool to control people.

It isn’t a new problem. This is the go-to tactic our species has used insofar as we can verify with written history.

Any time we experience a change of circumstance, material reality or technology, we hear the braying of the old guard and the panic of the precarious.

People complain for two basic reasons. If you are doing well why change a system that benefits you? If you aren’t successful but equally aren’t comfortable with change, then you resent anyone who benefit from change. Fear and resentment are the shadows of the human soul. Envy is the sin of our time.

I personally feel I’ve invested a lot in doing my part to educate people on risks from climate to currency and compute.

I am politically involved in crypto policy as well as fighting fear in artificial intelligence. I helped pass the only piece of AI legislation in the world focused on liberty. I want people to have a choice for how they engage in a virtual future.

I’m not just a nerd about being prepared either. I’ve done my wilderness first responder certification. We left Colorado for Montana for a host of reasons but top of them was a better and freer climate both literally and figuratively. We live this way because it’s a great way to live and when change happens we are hoping to be resilient.

Having all that in mind I was offline for the 4th of July long weekend as it has been a busy year on all of those fronts. So I was sleeping it off. To come back and see a spate of conspiracies over cloud seeding technology was like a punch to the gut. And I’m already feeling like I’m on the outs with some community when it comes to technology and my intentions.

I’ve only met Augustus Doricko of Rainmaker a handful of times but his circle of young technical Christians dedicated to building solutions to our modern problems are why I remain optimistic in fighting for technology and the people who build it.

These kinds of communities of builders exist in an archipelago of anarchic communities across digital and physical worlds that interlay across many systemic problems. These places will succeed no matter the future we face because they understand it’s necessary to build. That is will.

I’ve been lucky to have been the first investor in Isaiah Taylor’s Valar Atomics. He is a part of this builder world and of a part of a clan of physical builders. He faces decades of fear with a cheerful heart. I believe in his vision for energy abundance.

Nuclear energy was buckled under an old environmentalisms that was a proxy for a fear of a future whose risks, however minimal, were too scary to embrace for those in charge and the public they controlled.

I believe in a vision of a better America (and a better ecosystem and a better economy) because we embrace change to build materially better conditions.

I have frankly seen too much pessimism from older generations and cynical power brokers to be silent. The complicit rancor is slowing us down and there is nothing Christian at all about standing in the way of delivering better conditions to our fellow man.

Paradise is lost. In a fallen world we work to do what we can. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s already lost. Now we work because we must. We aren’t building an eschatology to replace the Lord. We build because that is what we are called to do by him.

Categories
Internet Culture Media Startups

Day 1628 and Attention Whoring

Attention is a currency with an exchange rate so volatile even a hardened ForEx trader would find it exhausting.

There is a new set of younger founders who are taking the attention trade to new heights. Rate baiting marketing is to the 2020s what growth hacking was to the 2010s. Now a startup like Cluely could be the new the new Dollar Shave Club with its viral success. Or could go the way of Clinkle.

Because who cares how you widen the top of your funnel as long as you are getting enough such that down in the trenches of conversion you have enough leads.

Surviving as a startup isn’t easy and you should grab the opportunities you are given. Yet I imagine you end up with the Glen Gary Glen Ross “the leads are weak” kind of situation, but does management care? Probably not.

And so we continue to coarsen our shared business environment but who cares right? Always be closing.

A lot of people do care though. I care quite a bit. Because it is a trade you are making. Something may work but are you sure you can live with the trade? I am with my anon friend here.

attention whoring founders with mediocre goals actually do drive us deeper into cultural nihilism. technology is powerful, and the preservation of healthy culture among technologists is critical for civilization.

opportunity cost is real. the more skilled you are the more it matters. metrics do not matter. what happens to people, to the world, matters. everyone is responsible for upholding standards. every VC hungry for a multiple, every pair of captive eyes, everyone slightly more willing to run toward defecting plays while chasing fool’s gold- Bayeslord

I’ll never begrudge a market. I believe we should have more markets. Go ahead and make concrete your implicit assumptions about the world and humanity. Own it. Show the revealed preference.

But it’s worth knowing how we do that price discovery on these attention trades. In this world we have grounding validity for all kinds of disappointing facts. The world is made up of many noble lies. We all decide how we want to make our trade with reality.

And as to attention whores? Well, the oldest profession surely knows a lot about the soul of man. I’m sure we all share a desire for a greater spirit of man and aspire towards something greater. But sex sells.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1625 and Hot and Cold

I am older than my husband but only by enough (a year and change) to let me land middle aged jokes. We celebrated his birthday at Costco. We are spending Saturday grilling. We own a Subaru. I think the jig is up.

I’ve been fighting to restore my body to “factory settings” since we made the mistake of messing around with fertility treatment hormones. Sadly why our middle aged jokes don’t involve children. Our civic contributions and investments in founders tie us to our future for now

And in our ambitions to be prepared for giving that future everything we’ve got, we are doing more and more for our health.

I started an earlier as my body gave out earlier but we are both doing more biohacking. We are slowly building out a collection of treatments and devices that we hope will end as a medical spa serving our region.

The hyperbaric chamber for oxygen therapy we purchased in January l has finally reached American shores. More sauna and ice cycling might be in our future too. On a “in the red” day I’ve been known to hit my recovery with everything I’ve got. Heat, cold, and pressure can fix almost anything. Add in oxygen and we might just survive whatever the future throws at us.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture Politics

Day 1624 and Stay Out of the Red

It’s been a busy week for the MilFred family as it has been busy for many families across the word. We are praying for you.

This morning Alex and I were excited to attend the “Digital Assets Public Hearing” in Bozeman put on by The Commissioner of Securities and Insurance Office of the Montana State Auditor.

That is big job and a large office and an important one even if it may sound a bit dry to the average person. They oversee everything from securities fraud and data breach reporting to Medicare and health insurance markets.

I overstrained myself the last couple of days (Alex’s birthday was worth it) so my Whoop was blinking red but but I wasn’t going to miss an important public meeting on a topic crucial to Montana’s future.

For me, the future hinges on to compute and energy. Montana is well positioned. We secured our right to compute this year thanks to State Senator Zolnikov’s bill. And the work continues to as our civil servants.

On June 13, 2025, at 10:00 A.M., CSI will hold a second public hearing in the Cottonwood Room of the Bozeman Public Library at 626 E. Main St., Bozeman, Montana 59715, to further consider the public’s comments regarding digital assets and possible regulation of such digital assets. 

It drew quite a crowd both in person and over the internet as Montana has quickly gained a reputation of being future and freedom focused. And quite reasonably so.

The Commissioner is the statewide elected official responsible for administering the Securities Act of Montana. As part of his duties, the Commissioner is responsible for the regulation of securities in Montana, including encouraging capital formation while also safeguarding Montana investors through mechanisms such as registration and disclosure, as well as antifraud enforcement powers…

The market for digital assets has rapidly expanded in recent years, and the unsettled regulatory landscape at the Federal level has left several questions open. Some bad actors have also exploited the market expansion and the public’s interest in digital assets in fraudulent ways.  The public’s perceptions, experiences, and knowledge of digital assets may aid the Commissioner in determining whether rules or definitions regarding digital assets may be helpful for the people of Montana.

The goal is to help the commissioner and his team understand this emerging market and make sure it works to the benefit of Montanas especially as the lack of federal regulatory clarity has been a challenge we are personally familiar with.

We hope we can help Montana can help her citizens flourish with the right tools. In the past we mined “pro y plata” with picks and shovels but in the future we may use Montana energy to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and tokens. So make your voice heard!