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Culture Internet Culture Politics

Day 1588 and American Pope

I am not a Catholic (though I am a Christian) so participating in the ambient excitement of welcoming the newly chosen Pontiff feels like it shouldn’t be allowed. Not my pope, not my Conclave right?

And yet I’m I am drawn in by the enthusiasm, the general spirit of joy and welcome, and, yes, the memes about ushering in the Pontiff.

As soon as the white smoke had been sent up, my group chats, media notifications and social streams went wild as we collectively learned more about the new Pontiff and his history. It was announced that Cardinal Robert Prevost would be named Pope Leo XIV.


Pope Leo XIV appears on the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica after being chosen the 267th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, at the Vatican, Thursday, May 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

The details came quickly. And boy did the internet have questions (and a few answers). American Pope?! A Pope from Chicago?!

We soon learned he was a man who ministered to the poor in Peru for most of his life. He studied mathematics at Villanova. He went to seminary nearby my old university.

Blues Brothers Jokes were made as the Vatican must finish the work Francis had set in motion to modernize Vatican finances. A set financial troubles that has remained unfinished and is crucial for the pensions of the clergy.

Naturally many asked if the new Pontiff might be a basketball fan? A Knicks fan? Did he hoop himself?

Did he like Chicago pizza? He has eaten a hotdog at Weiner Circle according to Latin on their newly update sign.

The new Pontiff has a Twitter account. And boy does he Retweet some spicy stuff.

One of my girlfriends drove to see his childhood parish which is nearby her home. Chicago raised Catholics saving church finances so elderly clergy can retire in their home? I feel like I’ve seen this movie and loved it.

The symbolism of the Catholic Church and its representatives are clearly the stuff of which regular observers and semiotics scholars alike can read. Which made for an exciting day for everyone.

In the uncertain modernity we exist in the the Latin mass reassures many traditionalists but for everyone else a holy father who is relatable in interests, origin and culture brings even us Protestants a little closer to Rome.

Categories
Finance Politics

Day 1586 and The Gentleman from Montana

I wasn’t allowed to watch much media as a kid but some exceptions were made. Frank Capra’s oeuvre was one of those exceptions. Mr Smith Goes to Washington was a classic of civic duty. And now as a Montana citizen it has special meaning to me.

The film is about a naive, newly appointed United States senator who fights against government corruption, and was written by Sidney Buchman, based on Lewis R. Foster‘s unpublished story “The Gentleman from Montana”.[4] It was loosely based on the life of Montana US Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who underwent a similar experience when he was investigating the Warren Harding administration. Via Wikipedia

So it was with great enthusiasm today that I cheered on my husband Alex Miller who today was my very own gentleman from Montana. I was glued to CSPAN as I live tweeted his three hour testimony.

Mr Miller served as an expert witness before a Congressional House Financial Services Committee and Agriculture Committee Discussion on “American Innovation and The Future of Digital Assets.” You can watch it all if you’d like.

Screen grabs from the C-Span livestream on YouTube

When he was first invited to testify we weren’t quite sure if it would happen. Behind the scenes there is a lot of wrangling, preparation and negotiations from congressional staffers on both sides of the aisle.

Even then you can still be surprised at the last minute! What was meant to be a bipartisan subcommittee discussing digital assets became most Republicans and maybe officially a roundtable I think? Robert’s Rules nerds will know.

The minority chairwoman walked out with no warning though the rumors circulated late last night that she would protest President Trump’s crypto businesses by walking out. Which is a dick move when many regular developers and businesses are looking for clear regulatory guidance from our legislative bodies.

The poor decorum on the part of Congressional representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) sent the session for a loop as she left at the outset. It would have been more dramatic had it not also come across as a confused elderly woman being pushed around her staffers.

Nice suit though on Ms Waters

The session quickly moved on to its actual business at hand because as mentioned the future of digital financial innovation is bigger than any one man’s business dealings even if he’s the President.

The future is made by those who show up and departure of some of the Democrats from the hearing did not stop the future from arriving nor the expert panel from testifying. Including the witnesses the minority party called. Yeahhhhh they didn’t get to walk out like Ms Waters.

Experts from Haun Ventures, Hiro Systems, Coinbase and more

If you have never watched a 3 hour subcommittee hearing I honestly recommend it as an experience. I was very impressed by the questions and expertise brought to bear on the topic. Honestly I even enjoyed the whacky props like a wrapped gold coin from an Easter Basket as an explainer.

Congressman Nunn

It’s easy to make fun of our representatives for grandstanding, politicking, and general chicanery but it’s a serious deliberative body that makes the rules of the road for all Americans.

I got the sense that in this unprecedented moment for the American economy that everyone who stayed took that role very seriously. To which I say thank goodness!

We have no clear rules of the road in digital assets and cryptocurrency and the Securities and Exchange Commission has not helped.

With no regulations passed and the constant threat of investigations and court cases from the Securities and Exchange commission it’s been nigh impossible for American companies to plan and many digital asset firms have moved abroad.

You shouldn’t have to spend thousands of dollars and untold sums of time on $1000 lawyers to be told “we have no clarity”

It’s hurting American businesses as new digital companies move overseas. The Chairman asked “does the lack of clarity hurt consumers, builders and companies?” Every single witness said absolutely.

We need clear rules of the road and regulatory clarity. And we need to be sure as citizens we don’t let our rights be trampled upon in the process. Americans deserve the future of digital innovation being built here and built with our freedom in mind.

There’s a reason that the amendments that protect our core rights use words like “shall not abridge”, “infringe”, or “be violated” in their language as there’s a whole lot that government can do to restrict or functionally take away our rights without “prohibiting” them.

As I myself have worked to successfully passed right to compute work here in Montana I was beaming with pride as Alex fought for that future in Washington today Mr Miller is our gentleman from Montanan. He’s got a little less hair than Jimmy Stewart but he’s fighting for us all.

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
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
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
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

We are in a moment of narrative collapse. The elites who we’ve typically take our “consensus reality” cues from don’t know where to land in order to manage the revolt of the public and you can see the recycling of big ideas happening at a rapid pace.

If you’ve been on the internet at all recently, you were probably exposed to both Ezra Klein’s Abundance book tour and the Studio Ghibli mania using AI to turn iconic images into Miyazaki animations.

I think these two events are more related than you might think. Labor is becoming simultaneously more and less productive in the face of artificial intelligence. This naturally has consequences for power.

This progress is either “an insult to life itself” if you are Miyazaki or offers the potential to improve human productivity in ways we’ve not seen since the Industrial Revolution.

Which brings us back to the moderate state capacity liberals and Ezra Klein’s book tour. They are out in the cold politically and yet rather than produce a new narrative they’re re-heating the work of the meme movement effective accelerationism.

I’m pleased to see total narrative victory for e/acc over the effective altruists. Sustainability (or worse degrowth) has simply failed to resonate with our primate hierarchies that demand more. We want more of whatever other monkey’s have be it bananas or status.

Socialist zero sum politics encouraging sharing & collectively managing resources having been roundly beaten in the zeitgeist, the moderate left are insisting that actually public state mechanism are the best means to achieve abundance. Government is good actually.

Making the case for the state’s role in creating abundance is about all they have left while they wait for the pain of Trump’s tariff policies to kick in. The private markets not having the necessary time frames for long term planning is a perennial issue.

Even our most productive technology companies are feeling the pinch to perform immediately in the short term. Alex Danco dropped on essay on where we might be in the S-curve of artificial intelligence.

He argues that perhaps in the scaling of this infrastructure we may change our thinking around code as “the primary asset” of software companies and reorient it back to the shared labor, management and final product of the traditional corporation. Software companies were valued for capital efficiency by the markets but perhaps that constant no longer applies.

All this worry about creating abundance is a battle of who decides how we allocate future resources (which we don’t yet have) and who will receive the biggest share of power and plaudits in the process.

The fact that we can replicate aesthetics in an instant or do the document work of a dozen legal associates with a program isn’t really the issue at hand. We are worried that how we divvy up the sum of all our hierarchies is changing. Of course that worries every primate. It’s bloody stuff.

Categories
Finance Media Politics

Day 1539 and Institutional Trust

Continuing their exceptional data visualization work, the Financial Times shows how young Americans are losing trust in our institutions through a series of grim charts powered by Gallop polling. 

Gallop polling in the FT on young American’s trust

What a fun set of polling data on the day we have Tim Walz stomping around saying industry sucks. We have no future and the people who build just absolutely suck isn’t the best vibe from a vice presidential candidate. But it certainly seems to be a mood.

Why would anyone trust a system that proudly rolls out installment loans for food delivery aligned with payday schedules? The internet is making hay with the Klarna DoorDash partnership.

Decent people suggest we must protect the class of people so bad at math they would use this financial product. Well, actually…go a million nuanced credit understanders. Honestly I’ve never carried a credit card balance because I’m too afraid to do so. But some people yolo their consumption.

Abundance means we need to produce things. Which costs money. It’s hard to take say Ezra Klein’s Abundance tour too seriously when we make it impossible to finance housing but we can finance your burrito taxi. That’s not what anyone was hoping for when they gave all this power to our government. No wonder institutional trust is down.

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.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1512 and Thumbs Down

It’s been a bad month for me. It seems like a bad month in general. But that’s February for you right? It’s a thumbs down kind of month. I’ve enjoyed the nonstop snow but we’ve finally gone above freezing.

Icicles

As the sun melts down our power into icicles I’ll try not to dwell on the negatives.

Reading

The Brussels Effect or Denialism in Europe

Are you a Frankfurt School student? I certainly am. If you are, you may find John Ganz’s review of Alex Karp’s new book The Technological Republic to be an amusing read. His Substack also has some gems including this imagine of Adorno which I intend to use everywhere.

Theodor W. Adorno giving a thumbs down

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1496 and Maneuver Warfare

One of my Twitter friends John Konrad is a merchant marine captain and the owner of trade publication called Maritime News. I’m a nerd for a dozen different topics in his areas of expertise so I enjoy his perspective.

I’ve discussed my own theories of media like Thursday Styles Problem. Experienced media professionals know how narratives will play.

John has a long thread on how the media ecosystem creates and digests a news cycle and he mirrors a similar military command process.

I am called in as a subject matter expert so I found his specificity in reconstructing this process to ring true to my experience.

There is no media agenda as imagined in conspiracy theories. There is simply a consensus that emerges on what is happening and why. That consensus is malleable to certain incentives, which means it can be changed to fit different desired outcomes.

John discusses using maneuver warfare as the means of surviving in over saturated information environment. You must be prepared to intake and act on information to stay ahead. Close loops of information and action. What can look like chaos is actually swift well prepared action. Being in motion is the advantage.

And if it looks like we are in pitched battle over raw power it’s probably because we are seeing growing concern over the America’s debt, monetary policy and inflation, and the changes required for us to continue as a nation.

Eisenhower himself warned of the dangers in a private and public economy being intertwined. Plenty of Americans concerned about their future might reasonably wonder how it works and if we could improve it.

I’d hope no one wants to destroy an institution if it could be reformed. The future of how we use our existing American institutional power and how we decide who it serves seems salient to all of us. No wonder it feels like war trying to keep up.