I have mentioned I’m a fan of Star Trek a few times. I am a genuine fan of the original series, the Next Generation and Deep Space 9 as well as many of the movies.
Gene Roddenberry pitched it as space cowboys but it’s become a template for entire generations for what competence in the face of the unknown should look like.
I’ll happily take either side in the Captain Picard versus Captain Kirk debates, because just as that fashion editor in Devil Wears Prada said about two superficially similar belts, “it’s hard as they are just so different!”
We are facing quite a bit of the unknown right now. Old hierarchies and expectations have changed. Or at least been revealed for what they are. We must ask what we owe each other and how we should expect ourselves to commit to a common cause.
I find myself considering the incredible competence both personally and professionally of the crews. I named this post NCC-1701-D for Picard’s Enterprise as that crew is famously a collaborative and high trust crew. Each one well developed with expertises professionally but also everyone was always trying new things and exploring new skills.
One of my friends accused me of having nerd “stolen valor” as I couldn’t have suffered for my affection for interests like Star Trek. Maybe it’s true girls don’t experience it the same way. Maybe I didn’t notice. I don’t think I cared. I’ll always be someone who sees 1701 and thinks “that’s the Enterprise!”
I have been writing every single day for seventeen hundred days. 1700 days is approximately 4.66 years or 4 years and 7ish months. Not bad right?
This is quite a bit longer than I anticipated when I first began writing daily with the relatively modest ambition to write once a day for a month.
I had done daily journaling in private for ten days and was interested in seeing if I could write in public every day for some period.
I wanted to create to synthesize what I consumed across the media landscape as I tried to make sense of a world deep in the throes of Covid.
This experiment was my second sustained blogging project as I had kept a WordPress blog in the glory years of 2005-2008 or so. Other social media was easier but I’d always liked the format of public long form writing.
I had a secret silent ambition to take the daily habit to one year. It seemed doable. I fantasized about making it to 1000 days, even from the start, but that seemed bigger and more likely to fail. But if Scheherazade could make it to One Thousand and One Nights maybe I could as well?
I set out with realistic expectations but big ambitions. And now here on a random August Wednesday I am deep into the depths of a daily habit that shows no sign of stopping.
I nurtured my early ambition by saying I’d take it one day at a time, while never pressuring myself into achieving it. A journey of a thousand miles (or in my case days) starts with a single step.
I don’t care for pressure. I never have. I believe those who are truly ambitious about themselves set their own standards. You make your own life.
I will do things in my own time and at my own pace. I have never been a quitter so it’s never been a problem that I go at my own pace. Life is about results not effort.
My tenacity remains a force in my life because I am comfortable tending to my will daily. We only make progress by nurturing the seed of a thing.
Not every day is a good day. We don’t always win. I have many days where I lose. But as Allen Iverson said “it’s practice” and you never miss practice. And practice adds up. I’ve done amazing things in the last almost half decade.
I hope that this aspect of my character is as clear to others as it is to me. If I sent out on a journey I will do what I can to make it. If I fail (and I might) it is because I couldn’t.
Maybe the timing isn’t always right or my mind or body isn’t right or the market isn’t right or I am not right. Full stop. But I’ll never let myself fail because I didn’t make an honest effort. And you make the effort every single day.
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?
I’m be seen a few “we live in post liberalism” takes” over the years and I take them with enough salt to rim a frozen margarita at Florida Boomer bar. Which is to say a lot.
Institutional power reflects different design parameters for civic institutions, but in the end it’s people who have power and you can count on human nature to be what it is.
I’m watching the same concerning set of competing interests ravenously infighting for strips of resources off the zero sum carcasse of the remaining social contract. That America is now “all exit scams” is simply too cynical a view. The future is arriving and we don’t have a clue what it will look like. Extraction and cannabalization won’t change it
Sure, you could say the sky is falling, the Federal Reserve is a political actor, it’s all for sale, and corporate interests drain our budgets just as surely as public employee pensions.
And yet I think we have a shot at making it through the turning. I frankly just don’t think all hope is lost. I am not here for an apocalypse in search of meaning.
Though I do think we have a much harder path ahead of us than the “uninterrupted prosperity” Americans, particularly Boomers and Gen X, have enjoyed. Artificial intelligence can scapegoat a few problems and mark my words it will be used as such, but it’s just that some debts come at a great cost to all of us and they are due.
I believe in positive sum outcomes for people willing to coordinate across networks. I wouldn’t be so interested in decentralization if I wasn’t concerned about how we coordinate in a low or no trust word.
Artificial intelligence may even help us navigate it with the computer demands and security that cryptography was always meant to provide.
If no one can hold a community together through incentives and our institutions make choices that consistently come at the cost of the whole it’s time for us to rethink. America is an experiment in which everyone being allowed to participate if they can decide on their own game. We are nodes ourselves in the network of America.
If a node cannot hold its place in the network the messages may get rerouted or degraded but nothing disappears forever. It just finds another path around the disordered nodes.
Information being networked provides hope and agency for those searching to add to the whole. For those willing to exchange attention and currency we can provide temptation and distraction. The devil doesn’t need new tools. The old ones worked just fine. But networked information isn’t evil in and of itself.
Don’t be afraid of the knowledge we have chosen to accept. The only thing ever standing between you and connecting to a network is your capacity to access the information available and play where you land in the game. Maybe you get a shitty hand or your starting position sucks but we have the chance to speed run now.
I wish more people saw the opportunities we have in front of us. I know it’s harder to imagine a good life when so much is out of reach but we know many good paths already.
There are no set game plays in an open world even if you can find and mimic what has worked in the past. It’s a foreign country you cannot visit anymore.
Love your people, learn skills that help them, and stay connected to each other. Divisions don’t protect us from change. We protect each other.
Let me set the scene for you. Alex and I are in a classic old Mercedes black sedan I’d describe as “oligarch or drug dealer chic” trying to navigate a steep 700m downhill drive in a tiny Balkan village when the GPS sends the driver (a friend of ours) down a set of stairs.
Confusing signage and incorrect GPS data
We are stuck. The signage pointed confusingly to not enter the other round, the high noon sun meant little to no shadows cast by the small steps, and the GPS insisted this was the way down. Mistakes were made but we learned later we weren’t the only ones who made them.
The village springs into action. Our driver stopped the moment it was clear the directions were wrong and he’d gone down a step. We got out and within moments we have locals trying to bounce this heavy monster into a low rider to get unstuck. This does not work but looks cool and feels very cool.
We are now entering peak male “helping” in which a variety of men, young and old, are watching, commenting and a few are in fact helping contribute to solutions.
Within no more than ten minutes, a couple village guys have shown up with a truck and we are looking at tow options and reverse pressure solutions.
We end up hooked up to the truck as a counter weight with a rope and a block. This is promising. We have half dozen, if not a full dozen dudes helping and watching. A few women watching become women clapping. It worked! We are rolled back.
Young and old come came together to participate in the age old ritual we Twitter types call #DudesRock and got the beautiful old Mercedes safely out. The road is fine too.
How did we get saved? Well a woman who owned a restaurant in the village saw us and sent for some friends. She apologized profusely saying she couldn’t stay as she was opening shop but said don’t worry she will send help.
And she did! And so swiftly. They came ready with a block, a rope, and a truck in no time at all. Alex being a man of action got as dirty as anyone wrangling the solution.
It was like being in a lost episode of Top Gear where a gangster car is stuck in an old village and the wise elders descend with a few able bodies to save Jeremy Clarkson. Some just watch & comment. The car is miraculously running even better at the end. Everyone vows to do more coastal drives along the Adriatic and Ionian seas.
It’s a shame that National Public Radio is going out in a Trump fire as used to regularly produce reporting that I find informative. Look at this old piece of reporting. We have seen a steady rise of disability rolls.
Thanks to their work I was made aware of the disability industrial complex and I was introduced its scope and cost. Even 2013 National Review was singing its praises. And it is staggering that disability has become the fall off program for those who only have unskilled labor to offer. Disability replaced welfare. And it’s not gotten any better.
I think about how easily I could have ended up on disability myself given my health issues if I didn’t work an information economy type of job you can do sitting day.
But I also know there are ranges of accommodations for most of the work I have now. Things could change and that work might be less valuable. I’m sure many Americans are considering this as automation and artificial intelligence threaten knowledge work.
I was somewhat aware of the relationship to welfare burdens being shifted from the federal government to states during the Clinton era for the rise of disability as it is still paid at the federal levels.
Naturally it meant a growth in disability as Washington D.C. has more money than say Washington state. But to realize just how much money disability rolls have grown and how tightly related they are is salient in our current financial and budget situation.
Comparison of lowered welfare rolls to the rise of disability claims. Source: Social Security Administration Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on disability doesn’t cost the state a cent, because the federal government covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save money by shifting people from welfare to disability. And there are whole corporations that exist to make that transition seamless.
We are burdened by the unfit to work as manual labor has nowhere else to go but we will find other disabilities and other ways to get around labor if the contribution to rears ratios don’t work out in someone’s favor. After Covid this calculus got a lot worse.
Especially if health insurance continues to skyrocket. Better a live of poverty and healthcare than a live of poverty and no healthcare. But who knows if we choose to tackle this problem and when. If it’s all about getting what you can and we are in the exit scam era of America I am afraid to learn about the privileges of working while disabled.
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.
I’m a mess and somewhat scared. This abcess saga has grown from dismissive preventative care visit (which I did did out of an abundance precaution) and ended with me meeting a general surgeon at a Turkish medical tourism hospital tomorrow to discuss labs and my ultrasound. It’s my second time this year so that’s quite an endorsement as a revealed preference.
I was afraid she would be a box checking paper pusher afraid to give an opinion. But maybe younger doctors are afraid to treat that way given our system. I needed to know is it worth getting a clearer diagnosis before it is a crisis? Is imaging necessary? I have a set of drugs I take with these specific side effects. Given that risk profile and nuance at hand needed the interpersonal relationship that would guide me.
I do endorse SkincareMT’s cosmetic practice, and Addison in particular is fantastic, but their healthcare wing is clearly designed to extract maximum Medicare dollars from Montana seniors.
My failure to get an ounce of prevention means I’m flown to Istanbul to attempt to get a pound of cure. Don’t worry I was already in the Mediterranean. Not in the way way some think though.
Yesterday we found out by pulling teeth that I had a problem. It’s clear I need this excised and quickly. The ultrasound is gnarly. Drainage, removal of the foreign object, and potential curratage to make sure the walls of the cyst are removed forever are what is needed.
The sprawling medical tourism complex in Istanbul is amazing and I trust them more than any other system or talent pool on the planet right now. What they have built is an incredible achievement and in challenging conditions.
Doctors who listen, who educate you on your options, and most importantly are up to date on current research and global innovations so don’t give you glassy eyed stares when you mention a new medication like a next generation IL-17 inhibitor it’s exotic side effects. American doctors like that are rare and their hands are often tied by our horrific mess of state failure and lack of market innovation.
I’m relieved to have choices like “general surgeon or gynecological surgeon” and texting discussions with my case lead (a full time liaison for you and your family on the entire case) on how we will handle excision and culture pathology.
It does feel like I’ll have good choices. But it also seems like I booked less time than is necessary and I don’t know how I feel about that. A week of waiting on labs in a hotel while in pain is scary. Sure I can work and be productive and maybe even do some tourism but I just want this shit sliced out, an IV of the right antibiotic that will work and some sleep.
I’ve been doing some crazy bi-phasic sleeping as the Mediterranean is hot as hell from noon to 10pm. So I’ve been doing a bit of staying up late and sleeping in to avoid the heat. It’s not clear how much it’s messing with me yet because I’ve got all these odd infection fever doctor nonsense. A quick surgery and some answers can’t come fast. Thankfully I’m at the crossroads of empires.
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.
I was hit hard by a week of poor health which meant I missed a policy gathering in Helena today which I was really excited to attend. One of the topics was autonomy and choice in medical care and health.
He is an excellent public speaker and has a rare gift for clarity which benefits the entire software ecosystem. And we are an industry who disproportionately see the value of sharing in real time the changes we are seeing as we build. This generation built the networks and seeded the data with our content that enabled these models.
I saw in the talk the long lineage of technical cycles, access expansion and autonomy expanding that I have been a part of since my childhood. I’ve seen a few development and deployment cycles to use the theories of Carlotta Perez
Each cycle granted more power to sharing. The excess value generation of making our tools open to more external use has proven itself. And that has generally made for cycles of innovation that are shared mid deployment by the people as it happens.
And yet we still struggle with the right way of interacting with the tools. Math is fairly abstract. Your average human doesn’t much care for conditionals. We developed mathematics over such odd timeframes that it’s somehow easier to think it’s not in tandem with a culture and a commercial environment.
Maybe some only look at the industrial or military applications for tools and they care little about how they were made. The level of autonomy and control and abstraction that is enabled by software baffles. The more accessible something becomes the more we need to think of the user of the tool. Specialists can use special tooling and need not be so accessible. When it becomes a tool for masses things change. And we are in a changing moment for software as a tool just as the world has the highest expectations for them. Because we are perhaps at the edge of the great buildout.
Karpathy said that working with LLMs can feel like using the command line. It’s an intuitive framing for many programmers. He believes we have not yet found the graphical user interface for this era even as we are perhaps building new operating systems.
A screenshot from Karpathy’s YC Startup School 2025 talk
That change in access built enormous businesses and was the stuff of nasty backstabbing in the commercialization processes and the competition was very sharp in personal computing era. My father sold software through an old school reseller called Ingram and I gather it was a pretty wild time in the eighties.
But the fresh paradigm is always beyond reach. It’s there waiting to upend your entire world.
We were all off the Batch, and on the Command Line, interface now—my very first shift in operating system paradigms, if only I’d known it.
We are in an operating system shift now and we don’t know what to think about it it’s structure. It’s modeled on humans so it has all the same problems we have. It has cognitive deficits just as humans do. This annoys normies who don’t understand how it’s built.
We are interfacing with a new kind of compute output and it will slowly change everything around it as the abstraction layers bring more people into the effort.
We don’t really know what it looks like at this order of magnitude but the change is here and we get to make it. It frankly seems exhausting to ponder and a much much much harder problem set for power than generalized intelligence.
How does this relate to medicine and autonomy? Well, it’s become clear that medicine will be one of the areas that benefits from new access.
I care about the way we develop tools for the entire stack of medicine from pharmaceuticals to patient data. I don’t want another era of regulatory capture. The way we build applications affects how much autonomy and freedom we can give both doctors and patients. I know don’t want to be stuck with what we’ve got. More people should benefit from the changes ahead.
