First, I want to say how great the jazz scene is in New York. I caught a little Latin at my go-to Guantanamera last night, but the band seemed to be phoning it in a bit, so I walked over to Dizzy’s and heard an amazing big band performance by the Diva all-women Jass Orchestra, they had Clint Holmes leading vocals and I got Frank Sinatra / Count Basie vibes, so great to see such a tight big band.
Manager mode assumes that existing systems will surface the best options. When I was first diagnosed with cancer in 2022, I delegated the crucial analyses and decisions about my care to others. In late 2024, when my cancer reappeared and my doctors told me I had exhausted the standard of care and there were no trials for my situation, I realized that assumption might, quite literally, kill me. Founder Mode was my only option.
Founder Mode meant going deep on every diagnostic and treatment option. It meant assembling a team of physicians and scientists to work from first principles to understand what was possible beyond standard protocols. Together, we paved new roads to access the very cutting edge of science and technology. Today, thanks to the efforts of many people around the world and the support of my wife Karen, I currently have no evidence of disease.
Sid was already very inspiring before this journey, and this is especially impressive. Elliot Hershberg has the full story and analysis, including some predictions for the future of cancer treatment.
Since reading the Four Hour Workweek and Tim Ferriss I’ve been a bit of a bio-hacker, always trying weird and new stuff. Today was a new one! I did therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE), also known as plasmapheresis, which supposedly gives you all the benefits of parabiosis without, you know, needing to be a vampire or having a blood boy. So with the awesome folks at Extension Health I had my blood filtered and put back in, which took a few hours. My plasma was not as clear as Bryan Johnson’s, with 41 years of microplastics and mold and who knows what else in there. The process took a few hours, and afterward I got some chicken on rice from a Halal cart on Broadway so maybe it all evens out.
My friend Neal Mueller, who holds a Guinness World Record for longest non-stop row in Arctic open water—1,000 miles over 41 days in 2012—gave me the incredible gift this morning of introducing me to the Dolphin Club in San Francisco, which has a rich lineage of these hand-built rowboats and love of the craft of rowing. It was awe-inspiring. He then rowed me to Alcatraz! We saw a rainbow (third from last photo in gallery)!
We captured some Spatial Video that will be fun to look at on the Vision Pro later (mine just arrived, but I haven’t opened it yet).
I think what I learned this morning is there is something deeply profound about the act of rowing, of being in harmony and synchronicity with others on your boat, how good it feels when you’re in sync, and how obvious it is when you aren’t. I’ve done rowing machines before many times but never been on the open water, and I saw also the impact of the variability of the ocean, currents, and waves had on the rowing. I think there is also something related here to when autistic people (and myself!) rock back and forth when something feels like it’s in alignment.
Luckily I was with literally one of the world’s best rowers, so I always felt safe and was able to enjoy the feeling of being on the water, and really felt the heritage and respect of these beautiful craft we were on, Cronin-1938. I introduced Neal to the concept of the Ship of Theseus, one Matias and I love to talk about in the context of Gutenberg. One of the most beautiful days I’ve seen in San Francisco. Here are a few photos from this morning.
My sabbatical is off to a great start. ☺️
Burgers and fries have nearly killed our ancestral microbiome.
One benefit of working from home that doesn’t get discussed much is the ease of small, but frequent exercise activities through the day. I’m sure it’s not outlawed in an office to get out of your chair and do 20 jumping jacks, or plank for a minute, I definitely would feel awkward doing so. This is something on my mind as I’m working this week around ~400 colleagues for our once-a-year Grand Meetup.
When I’m home and have a ton of work to get through, my favorite approach is the Pomodoro Technique with 25 minutes on followed by a 5 minute break. (I use this app but any timer will do.) The 5 minute break is a fantastic time to do something small, like a few push-ups, squats, a plank, or even meditate. (The new Pause app is cool, and of course I love Calm.) You don’t have to do a ton, but over the course of a day or a week these 5 minute break exercises add up to be quite a bit and can kickstart a Tiny Habit. And don’t even get me started on the benefits of naps.
Again, not something that’s impossible in an shared office, just feels a lot more natural and less embarrassing in your private home office.
I’ve always been into personal analytics. From Wakemate to the Nike Fuelband I’ve tried pretty much every device that’s come on the market to help you become more self-aware of your activities, and hopefully improve them as well.
Lately I’ve settled on two that I think are really high quality: the Jawbone UP and the Basis watch. I would recommend either above the Nike Fuelband or Fitbit, but let me share some brief thoughts about my experiences with each:
The UP is beautiful — it’s easy to wear with pretty much any outfit, even with formal wear I find I can move it up my arm a little bit inside my sleeve above my shirt cuff thanks to the flexible nature of the band. The social app they have for it is cool, though it can be a little weird to see your teammate’s minute-by-minute sleeping habits (“Hey! I noticed you were up between 3:32 and 3:50 AM last night. How ’bout them Giants?”).
I’m very proud of my sleep.
The battery life is over a week so you never have to think about it, but you do have to carry around a proprietary connector for it which I keep losing leaving me (like right now) with an uncharged and useless device. To sync you plug the band into your phone’s headphone port and the sync takes a few seconds, it’s a fun process I do usually first thing in the morning to see how I slept the night before and it’s also fun to demo to friends. The first one I had was in their “mint green” color and I ended up wearing it out — it started to look dirty and I broke it where the headphone jack comes out making it difficult to charge and sync. That said, I was pretty rough on it. My new one is blue and I like it much better. My only big complaint about how the whole thing works is it doesn’t detect when you go to sleep, you have to press and hold the button on the end to put it from wake to sleep mode, which I would frequently forget to do. I really like the idea of the smart alarm and power nap features even though I never used them.
The Basis is a bit clunky and retro looking, but functionality-wise it provides some really cool data: it tracks your heart rate, skin temperature, perspiration level, steps, and sleep. It detects automatically when you’re asleep, no buttons to push. The data is presented in a really cool web app that lets you compare some of the data points and that I learned cool things from, like my heart rate jumps about 20 beats per minute when I wake up, and I’m most warm about two thirds into my sleep cycle. There don’t appear any social features that I’ve seen in the software, though its habit formation tracking seems pretty slick. The way the “buttons” work on the device is pretty cool, the silver dots in the corners are touch-sensitive. There’s a button on the side that I haven’t figured out what it does yet. Syncing and charging is much worse than the UP — it’s got an even clunkier proprietary USB thing that both syncs to your computer and charges, but because the display can show you how you’re doing as you go throughout the day I don’t feel the need to synchronize it as often. The heart rate tracking is by far my favorite feature. It’s comfortable to wear, but doesn’t disappear like the UP. Finally, as an added bonus, it tells the time. (Surprising useful.) If it somehow merged with the Pebble I’d be in geek heaven.
If I had to pick between the two I’d just use the Basis. The awkwardness of the device is outweighed by the richness of the data it provides. For right now I’m not choosing: I wear one on each wrist and compare the data. (It’s always within a few % of each other for things they both do.) If I were hiking in the woods for a week I’d probably just take the UP as its battery would last the entire time. It’s really illustrated for me what a silo each of these systems are, they don’t talk to each other at all and it appears unlikely they ever will.
Long-term I think we really need an open source package you can run on your own servers that can ingest the data from all of these services, say from back when I used to use a Wakemate sleep tracking to today’s Fitbit Aria scale, the meals I track in the UP app with my Basis heart rate data and Runkeeper and Hundred Pushup logs, and provide you with a single data store for all the personal analytics you generate across various services. I think there’s going to be a lot of competition in this space in the next few years.
My favorite story from last year was at lunch I noticed this amazing looking device that was totally readable in broad LA daylight sitting on a table. I was gawking at it and a voice behind me said “Pick it up! You can play with it.” It was Jeff Bezos with his trademark laugh and the device was a Kindle. He gave a personal demo and I was sold, I pre-ordered one as soon as I got online and have loved it ever since. (Except it’s broken now, but that’s another story.) Registration is currently open here.
If you ever wanted to see me talking about cooking, specifically tsatziki, or in an apron. (Which is probably the most complex thing I could make.) Luckily I had some professional help. Thanks to KTEH for the opportunity.
My Kindle is quite broken, not sure how it happened, probably it got pressure in my bag or something? Since I’ve been professing my love of the Kindle to anyone who will listen maybe Amazon will send a replacement, if not I’ll try to go through support when I get back to the states. In the meantime, back to reading dead trees (or more likely not much at all).
There’s no correlation between hours worked and work done. I think this is why traditional corporate structures are starting to crack at the seams, and the distributed model companies like Automattic, MySQL, SocialText, and many others use will start to gain real legs and acceptance. The best example of this was at a place I used to work: after lunch everything seemed to shut down. Several people obviously got very sleepy after lunch and would spend 2-4 hours of the afternoon on auto-pilot. (This was me sometimes too.) It would have been infinitely better for them to take a one hour nap and get back to productive work than spend 3 hours in an obviously hampered state. Happy, healthy, well-rested people work orders of magnitude better.
Well, it’s happened again. I should have seen it coming, the signs were all there, but I hoped “Not this time, it’s different.” However here I sit with what is most likely strep throat, judging from my track record and the terrible pain every time I swallow. This was not entirely unexpected, as every year for the past five or so I have contracted some alphabet letter of strep combined with something else, the worst being last year when I actually ended up in the hospital, on Valentine’s day. This year has been my healthiest ever though, and I’ve hardly gotten a cold or a sniffle for almost a year, so I was hoping this wouldn’t happen. That said, the timing could have been worse; I’m glad it wasn’t at SxSW (like poor Jane or Ernie); I’m glad it wasn’t on Valentine’s day; I’m glad it wasn’t during an “important” school week; I’m glad that you’re still reading at this point. I’m going to try and get some more rest. Updates will either be light, or come at a Kathyesque rate—we’ll see.
Well the good news is that Helsa is home now, and is getting more care and attention than she could ever receive at vet. Like I said before, the main problem right now is that she lost so much weight and her body has been using her fat for nutrition, and the lipids have overwhelmed her liver. The solution for this is for her to eat and give her liver a break, but the problem is that she really doesn’t want to eat. For several days they did force feeding, which is basically where you squirt the food in the cat’s mouth and even though they don’t want to eat they swallow it because, well, it’s there. Needless to say the cat in question generally doesn’t like this.
It became harder and harder to feed Helsa until the decision was reached that the only way to get her the nutrition she needs was to do a short surgery and set her up with a feeding tube, which is exactly what it sounds like. So many times a day she gets food, water, and medicine through the tube, and after 2–6 weeks her liver will finally recover and she can begin eating on her own again. The time range is uncomfortably big, but there’s no way to predict when she’s going to recover.
Well we transferred Helsa from the hospital to her regular vet today. She was perfectly behaved the entire way over and she acted very normal. The vet said they’ll probably leave her on IV the rest of today, but they’re going to keep feeding her with a syringe (as opposed to a feeding tube) and if she keeps it down then she might be able to come home as soon as tomorrow or Wednesday! I couldn’t be happier. Thank you to everyone who sent kind words of support.
I’ve always been into personal analytics. From Wakemate to the Nike Fuelband I’ve tried pretty much every device that’s come on the market to help you become more self-aware of your activities, and hopefully improve them as well.
The Basis is a bit clunky and retro looking, but functionality-wise it provides 