An Accidental Futurist UPDATED with Monjaro Gut Health revolution
I had a rude awakening about a year ago
I got in a car with a guy I went to high school with in Princeton, New Jersey named Reuben Steiger, and drove across the country to San Francisco and the redwood forest. Reuben is a Web3 decentralization, kinda-famous for being an early adopter at Second Life, which was one of those Metaverse worlds before I knew the term Metaverse. [INSERT] Reuben and I spent a week talking about the Metaverse Commons, like, what rules should we take with us into the new world? And how his participation in a multi-verse had rerouted the neural network in his brain development and our fleeting wins as fathers of four teenagers. By the time we got to the forest for a week of camping with seemingly EVERYONE responsible for building the Internet for the 21st-century. I had a deep understanding of my position as an outsider.I’m a producer, a builder, a maker of things and I wanna be Web3.0 Famous too
I've always been deeply attracted to any process that puts me in a room with at least one or two other people, and we brainstorm, develop, and then align our ideas to not only solve the problem, but then improve upon that problem, and make something that is beyond anything that we could have imagined on our own. The art and now science of collaboration is dynamic and complicated. Sometimes it even confounds me but in the first quarter of the 21st-century, I have seen development that leads me to believe everything can change for future generations. [INSERT CYS tease here] Now for the last seven years, I’ve been building hospitals in the metaverse and want to be Web3 famous for building something that allows you to be biologically connected to your digital twin. I am committed to putting soul in your avatar if you want itThe Web3 community is building something that enables each of you to select the triggers and baggage that you and your digital twin take into every experience, every room, every space and every attempt you make to raise a family.
I hate pretentious Silicon Valley
As I came out of the redwood forest after camping with 1000 of the brightest minds currently building things I was furious. I hate the pretentious Silicon Valley impression that they all are the center of the universe and, as a proud member of Silicon Alley in New York City, I have a deep distaste for what I found out later is called an UN-conference. It makes sense. For people who are building an Internet that keeps my health records in servers on five different continents and uses the Blockchain to make sure all my doctors are transparent with their billing and CPT codes, camping with them would have to be nothing less than an adventure in illogical circles of humans discussing disparate threads of technology using acronyms unbeknownst to me. So obviously I got in the car with a bunch of them and headed to the desert.
LAUGH
BURNING the MAN
I know it’s not really obvious. I’ll remove that word from my vocabulary, along with “hysterical” and “healthier”. But I did head to the greatest sculpture garden I’ve ever seen: BURNING MAN It’s in the desert two hours north of Reno Nevada and I made it three days. Camping in my car had been going really well in the forest under the cover of those gorgeous trees. In the desert, it wasn’t the heat that was the problem I underestimated, it was the wind. Added to the list of physical reality elements that I had never seen before, as a man of a certain age and a certain size, I felt a disorientation and cosmic levitation that landed me in the cardiac unit of the local hospital.
Reno, NV
I don’t remember a week of my life that September. I jolted back to life on the metal slab to the cheers of the medical team that had just installed a Boston Scientific defibrillator or as I like to call it my backup battery, into my chest cavity. In the desert, I felt desperation and exhilaration in equal measure. The people, the art, and the challenge to my body was everything I could’ve asked for and more. You can read the whole sordid story in blog posts all over the Internet. Just Google XR Patient Zero: That’s me! [INSERT XR explanation here]
Eating my own dog food
But at this point, I think it might be best to go back and tell you how, as venture capitalists call it, I began eating my own dog food. No, it’s not because I ran out of beef jerky and seltzer in the desert, I had plenty of that, it’s that I realized that in my arrogance to drive across country, camp with other famous decentralization producer types and walk across the desert by myself: I could use the apps I built, and the tools available to me to sustain a weight and maintain a confidence using tools unavailable to any of us before now. I had accidentally been making things that would nurse me back to life and to this stage today.
SLIDE
Hi, my name is Charles. I’m An Accidental Futurist & —> (select one:)
I stumbled on a solution for those times when family planning is challenging & I inadvertently revolutionized Women’s Healthcare”
I stumbled into a solution for Body Morphia & revolutionized the sustainable weight loss business”
I stumbled onto a solution for the Deep Fake & I revolutionized the Future of Work”
I am a creative with a capital C
If you believe in astrology, then I am an Aquarius; if you believe in the bifurcation between art and science, then I am a “creative” and if you're a psychiatrist I have multiple personality disorder AND, if you believe that the remainder of this century is going to be as different as this same point in 1925, when the industrial age & Eistein changed everything human civilization had tried, particularly in regards to climate, economics and hierarchy, then, you must see the next logical question, which is: of all the baggage and triggers we have inside of each of us, which ones are we going to get rid of?
the Pandemic’s Silver Lining examples
Let’s start with what is possible:
During the pandemic, the reports of sexual harassment among Wall Street secretaries is way down. That’s a major accomplishment!
Now that work from home is a hashtag and zoom fatigue has been studied, pollution has been significantly reduced, and we can see the Andes from the city.
Camping, hiking, and swimming are all more fulfilling to me because they were taken away and now I realize the critical elements of physical reality but my number of dress shirts needing to be dry cleaned each week has been significantly reduced because most of the rooms I walk into during the course of my fundraising for my tech start up do not produce as much sweat as they used to. My body shape, and the implication that I am a failure because I can’t control myself at the drive-through window at Kentucky Fried Chicken has been reduced.
ACT 2
So…if you see that everything is changing…then I would like to offer an
alternative Theory to judgment of my Body Shape
I grew up in the 70s & 80s so thoughts like those in the new book “Fat Talk” SLIDE of Virginia Sole-Smith was not a thing. Shame wasn’t even a thing on the playground. But it was in my head. As my mind closed up in my late 20s, I began to apply a theory in my teaching: EVERYTHING IS A SPECTRUM and in this case, critically, SLIDE Spectrum of Judgment judgment was one of the first elements we built what we now call: the Art&Science of Collaboration, what academics call Sociology, that I began to extrude. Not just the nuances between negative judgment and suuuuper negative judgment but to expand the definition of the word as part of the process groups go through when they MeetUP, identify a problem/solution, then they build something and Make: Together. They have to know the “judgment” of each member of the team.
ColLAB101.org
Once we recognized the full spectrum within each of these 12 dynamics I identified a massive opportunity in this new digital, analytical, frontier for collaboration. We have the ability to now communicate with every style of learner, who we may be in a room with in a way that they can understand. A deeper understanding of the residence to dissonance spectrum within this room could be visualized as a wave form on the back wall. You could all be checking in and out mentally of this talk and I could be seeing in real time a simple sound wave above your heads that lets me know that I don’t have your attention anymore. For a kinesthetic learner like me, that’s gold.
Expand the spectrum of my body judgment
My bi-macro-poles of a rollercoaster is soooo much more dynamic than my weight/shape/size. As I give this speech today I happen to be on my fourth descent to a lower body mass index. I’ve spent over 40 years trying to find non-scale victories, and will do my best to spend this time we have together using metrics that are anything besides pounds, kilograms or stone. My second ride down the roller coaster happened to take place in London and I think, besides the horrible food there in the 90s, the fact that I really didn’t connect the metric/monarchy’s weight units with my childhood obsession with what the scale underneath my feet said about my success as a human helped a little. So I came up with ways to expand my judgment, your judgment, the judgment of my body and how it related to my self-esteem.
Pyloric Stenosis story
I was born at the Mizzou Labor&Delivery. At the time fewer than 1 in 1000 newborns were born with the pyloric valve clamped shut like a bad cramp but that’s what leads me to believe - and my mom & dad also agree - that in the first nine weeks of my life - that’s right, it took the doctors at the University of Missouri nine weeks to actually operate and it wasn’t any of them that really came to my mothers assistance. They just shamed her breastmilk and her latching failure and this shook her confidence in her motherhood. In another blessing for me, one of the students my dad was dating - I mean mentoring - was a student at Stevens Women’s College where he was the Campus Minister - thankfully her dad was the Head of Pediatric Surgery in Manhattan and he flew into Missouri and opened me up that same day. His daughter became one of my favorite babysitters and though I lived and was sent home with lots of powdered formula, we’re all pretty sure - including anybody that’s ever talked to me about nutrition or food - I’m pretty sure that the first nine weeks of life I didn’t get the hormone or imprinting I was supposed to get that tells me when I am hungry
CYS+Continuous Glucose Monitor
and so I don’t really know when I’m full or when I’m hungry. I know when my blood sugar drops cuz I feel shaky but I don’t really know in the same way that I see other people at the dinner table understand that they’re full or still hungry. I am forced to use other schemes to measure. I had to find alternative measurements to decide when I am “allowed” to eat more such as TIME. which everyone now calls intermittent fasting.
LAUGH?
Or like I try to push away from the table after one full plate or I get two plates in the buffet line and then go throw up in the bathroom afterwards cuz the third full plate was only my second serving and no, thanks, I’m pretty sure it’s not bulimia, its binging, like Netflix, and my psychiatrist and I are working on the proper vocabulary and thank you for worrying about me too. I turn everything into a game and I wish we had all started keeping score in 7th grade so we could play together.
Soccer, Pinball & Pizza Ninja
My first game was soccer (futbol). I never really liked to run, so they often made me the goalie. My second game was pinball at the pizza place. Not quite sure whether it had more to do with the pizza or the pinball, but me and my friends would go to Pizza Star in the shopping center in Princeton, New Jersey, and play for hours. Later, when I saw that trick in Halt&Catch Fire where you can put a string thru the quarter and drop it in and then pull it back out to get a free game I thought, oh my God, I could’ve saved so much money from my paper route.
Paper Route money on Snickers
In fourth grade, after my parents had split up, they sent me to Fat Camp in the beautiful Berkshire Mountains, for the first time. SLIDE Side by side fat camp The inciting incident was they found out how much money I was making on my paper route. My Mom&Dad had not been in the same room for a while so I knew I was in big trouble when he was sitting at the dining room table one night. The way paper routes used to work was the truck would drop off the big bundles before dawn in front of my mom’s house. After I wrapped them each in a rubber band and toss them into every driveway, I would go around once a week and collect payment. With wads of cash in my pocket I would head straight for the shopping center for pizza and snickers bars. Once a month or so there would be a bill on top of the bundles of papers in the morning and when I couldn’t pay it because I had spent the money on food, they got my parents involved. It was bad. My Dad was my lifeline at the time and he was pissed. But I didn’t stop eating. It gives me such joy and the impression that I have control of something.
Fat Camp the first time
At fat camp the first time, I stayed 8 weeks, won all sorts of awards and if I remember correctly, I lost like 20% of my body weight or something crazy. At some point in middle school I remember trying to play lacrosse so I know I must have had more confidence and maybe run a little faster than before.
My middle School definition of success
But, ultimately, I put some weight back on, so after eighth grade they sent me back to Fat Camp again. By 8th grade I was judging everything/my success by the girls around me and how far I could get with them. I got more play at fat camp that summer than any other time in my life. And I lost a bunch of weight again. I remember my sneakers pounding against the dry gravel “loop”, a dusty road we had to run around multiple times a day. I remember nutrition discussions and lots about the food pyramid but what the greatest impact on me was how I defined being successful.
I was #1 @ Fat Camp
I was popular at my school and church back home but there was an exhilaration in being #1 at Fat Camp. I played the lead in the play, the captain of the baseball team and won another bunch of awards. When people see this picture now, they describe me as “husky” – not THAT fat – and I hate this discussion. I hate the past. I hate the 20th century society’s rules around divorce and the stigma applied to big people. I resent the addiction nature inflicted on me. I succeed DESPITE my body shape.
SLIDE Confidence :: Popularity = Self-Esteem :: Body Shape
Wow you look great insult
In the real world, YOUR world at the time, my outward appearance suggested I was succeeding. The scale under my feet said I was succeeding. Whenever someone says to me, wow! You look great now! All I think is…what did you think about my look before?!? And as that fear of success grew, I began to have other crises of conscience like, will this talk be too Tony Robbins-ish. I don’t want to lose a bunch of weight and then have this speaking tour work out because I SUCCEEDED by the only measuring stick that matters to non-food addicts: The Scale Victory. 3x I accomplished what society wanted for me and I am still not satisfied with myself. My 7th grade girlfriend, now my best friend, says that being fat keeps me humble – so what happens when I am skinny??? I don’t know, I’ve never been skinny.
And don’t weep for me
PLEEEEZE. I am not telling this story today for your pity. I want to reframe the way we think about solutions going forward. The unexamined failure is a wasted design opportunity. I am a man of a certain shape and a certain age and I know that when I felt, over the years, that I had tried EVERYTHING, I was stunned to be offered new tools.
“G_d I got this”
Every time I ride the rollercoaster up and down I think: “God I got this” and that Fall I charged into High School – Captain of our Freshman Football team leading two-a-day workouts and elected President of the Class on Student Council. Confidence was not my problem. I stood in front of everyone and gave a speech like,
If I can lose this much weight in one summer then
imagine what I could do if I put my mind to
getting soda machines in the cafeteria!”
But Susy still didn’t let me kiss her.
The Friend Zone
I played God in Joseph's Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Princeton United Methodist Church when I was 11! They gave me a microphone and I huddled behind their podium and played the voice of God and people still tell that story today. I was the spotlight operator for some now very famous rock stars and I was the captain of the football team and president of the choir by Senior Year. But when it came down to the real measuring stick for this teenage boy, failure was measured being stuck in the friend zone with Angela Coin and Kate Stockwell and Susy Fox which made me feel like a _________.
My relationship with the truth
and by that this point I am seeing a kind of overarching theme of my relationship with the truth. Even though I may be outwardly successful by your judgment, I am not fine. When I was teaching at Collegiate, a fantastic guidance counselor called it the F word. She got those private school, UWS boys to tell her how they were really feeling when they said they were, “fine”. When I tell you I’m fine, I'm covering up something that threw me off my game.
Outer success :: Inner Questioning
SLIDE Ride up the Flume In my 20s and early 30s, I continued outward success and inner questioning. After that second Fat Camp ride down the weight loss rollercoaster, I rode back up. I began to understand that my body shape was the only thing to hate about myself. I began to embrace the drama. I began to celebrate the ride itself and my manic rants were passion or, as the astrologists in the audience know, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. I am still a card carrying Aquarian but I also carry Xanax cuz this weight is also my shield against super anxiety & a deep fear of success.
Shout out Diagnosis
So is it imposter syndrome or just the typical ups and downs of life? Is it a medically defined addiction or the trauma of growing up a latch-key kid? What kinda human stands up here, preaches about improving global healthcare with Web3.0 decentralization and is also triggered by the buffet in the lobby? Go ahead, shout out! What do you think?
LISTEN to the AUDIENCE
Cheers to you and thank you, deeply for your concern.
At this point the SLIDE adds in: The Body Morphia Rollercoaster video in the upper right quadrant of the screen & then it changes to Resonance::Dissonance waves, LiDAR Scanning, CYS games driving by KFC, PinCUBES etc…
SU, Arielle, WW & Thematics
So I went to Syracuse University Undergrad. I knew that I loved making things with other humans so I studied Technical Theatre. After graduation I formed a small startup firm we called Thematics & built that into a career as a Lighting Designer off-Broadway, off-West End and even Independent-Film Art Director. I lived in London with my college girlfriend - the woman I thought I would marry - for a couple years and I don’t know whether any of y’all have ordered a meal in London but, I know it’s better now, but, the food was not only bad, but significantly lower in its importance in their society.
Arielle and I decided to do WW - sorry, Weight Watchers. The gamification with the points were really helpful because I’m not exactly sure how much I weigh in kilograms or stone but I lost like 45% of my body weight. I came back a few years later, she broke up with me probably another serious chink in the charleskirby armor, but I rebounded, married in my late 20s and had an experience while I was in graduate school at NYU Tisch in the Design for Stage&Film program.
Act3
PCOS
I came home late one night to find my wife curled up in the center of our bed weeping. She had been to a routine GYNO appointment, and a spiritualistic, hippie, trippy midwife type, diagnosed her with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome just by looking at her. We delayed a few months to let me finish up grad school, and then derailed my Career with a journey that stretched every ounce of both of our core values. I don’t mean to suggest that our journey was any harder or easier than anybody else's getting pregnant and the great news is that Max Oliver and Anna Juliet are recent college graduates from public universities, and I haven’t talked to her mom for years so it’s all good news.
LAUGH
Y2K & 9/11
But the rub was…do you guys remember Y2K? Ok well you certainly know about 9/11? My twins, Anna and Max were born right around that time and what I think we all learned was that Y2K was much ado about nothing and that 9/11 was the end of the belief of/in coincidences. As we all watched THE FIRST PLANE HIT, we prayed it was an accident, BUT WHEN THAT SECOND PLANE HIT, I felt abruptly that none of the events I had ever witnessed were coincidences at all. At this point in this time&space, I am going to try and remove that word from my vocabulary too. There are no coincidences. So began connecting the dots in a unique manner.
SIP COFFEE
Life really is an MMORPG
Between all that and the toddlers in our NYC apartment, G_d’s Plan was crystal clear, the only real winners are gonna be Mother Nature and Father Time. I am killin it in the game inside my head! It feels like the wind is literally at my back as I choose the road less traveled and the cutscenes are leveling me up on the regular and this can absolutely be true for you too if you wanna play with me. If life is like an MMORPG, better put your seatbelt on, Charles!
Pulling the Thread
But not so much for my ex and not always for my family. It was impossible for me to watch these first 16 years of the 21st-century go by and not begin to connect these dots. Do you know in crime dramas when there’s that scene and the detectives are pinning all the Post-it notes and the pictures of the mafia family and then when they come back from commercial there's a ribbon some rookie put up to connect events no one else saw? I hear, there is actually a term for that in police stations called “pulling the thread” and as we get into the last 5 years and my Tech Startup Experience, I will try during this speech to distinguish between charleskirby-isms and other data points because I am kind of known for making up words but once Jack Dorsey took the word we all knew that testing meant birds singing and made it into the AP Newswire for GenX, then I’m fine with calling collaboration in virtual reality SLIDE of bouncing GIF in RGBCMY CollabRjabbR, that’s it.
The 1st 16 years of the 21st c.
So, through seemingly disparate ideas I began to see, literally, in my kind of visual-learner-kinesthetic-mind’s eye, I could pull the thread through her PCOS diagnosis and the Twins wanting to join Disney’s social network of that moment, “Club Penguin” – thank you for laughing GenZ - you remember Club Penguin as Noggin passed you off to Nickelodeon which passed you off to Disney – I watched as a solid GenX-er I can tell. Yeah, I was the spotlight operator for GenX Jam Bands like Blues Traveler & the Spin Doctors & the Laurie Berkner Band – thank you to the Millennials who are parents for laughing at the Laurie Berkner Band and you breeders who had kids in the 2010s – GenAlpha – see how it's an obvious conclusion assuming you also are seeing all of this? Pulling the Thread thru all of this. Visually is an incredible State of Mind psychologically and I thought what if we could do that in three dimensions? Extrude the Z-axis in my mind. Today cops always have the pictures of the mafia guys on like a white board or a wall – why couldn’t we extrude that investigation? Now with Spatial Computing, we can.
Moneyball for Creatives
Basically if you read my last book SLIDE Front&Back cover of my book you’ll see that the games I make and all the different apps required by Apple, Google, META (formerly FB) or X (formally Twitter) were, at the time of publication in 2018, focussed on the “future of work from home” and building a science for collaboration for Creatives offering us predictive analytics to measure our ColLABs. Remember that Brad Pitt movie Moneyball? What Michael Lewis brought to light there is what Billy Beane and Sabermetrics basically made obvious is that while we’re trolling Microsoft OUTLOOK, partially listening to TEAM meetings and Explaining Everything with a DECK, if our digital twin was representing us in a Secure Digital Cube of Space that has all of the dynamics we used to have when we commuted to the office, that too would engender in the next generation of workers, an agency and presence necessary to keep engaged in our businesses. When I’m acting as my FB Profile or using my camera on Zoom we MUST have agency and presence to be even half as engaged as you are at a fantastic conference like this one in Fhyisical Reality. And then I thought, why not use those tools to create presence and agency for Health Care too?
Do I need to define Digital Twin here or did I already do it?
Question&Answer Break in the 50 minute Keynote
Act 4: Current tech you should use in your StartUp/Family Planning/Weight loss (ad)venture
An Accidental Software Developer
The Stages of Brain Development
But I skipped a critical step that at some point in my late 20s, after my brain had closed up and I peaked – I know y’all probably understand developmental stages and how somewhere between sort of 26, 27, 28 years old you’re done developing physiologically and your brain has gone from the beautiful conical thing with with that soft spot AnnaMax had in the NICU to something that you can repeatedly hit against another man as long as you have your helmet on! And then, the brain is really closed up completely which, for me, that became a thick, hard-headed core of stubbornness around 38 years old when I completed the extraction of my children from my “marital home” on Long Island, got out of academia, and began my journey as An Accidental Software Developer.
Current SindyXR, inc.
So now we are kinda caught up to what I think internally with my company as Sindy3.0 solutions/tools/games which are kinda aligned with Web3.0 and the A.I. post chat-GPT & post-XR cumulatively = what Apple’s new AR Googles call “Spatial Computing” and the post-factual era as President Obama brought to my attention when Donald Trump got elected.
Sindy is an acronym for Seamlessly INtegrating DYnamics by optimizing Xtended Reality. What are the dynamics in your world? We are focusing in on the moment that a human learns they’re pregnant. For a lot of you it might’ve been when you were too young and weren’t ready. For some of you it might’ve been like me after a long incredibly observed-by-medical-people journey that reduced what used to be fun sex to something that was mechanical and you know all of a sudden had to always be done missionary style and then she had to flip around and put her legs up on the headboard and I often had to finish in a closet at the fertility clinic.
Pee-on-a-stick
What’s the best I can observe as a DUUDE, that journey for all of us is unique. Some of you might just pee-on-a-stick in the bathroom by yourself and then go through all of the amazing questions that you guys have to ask yourselves like should I tell my partner? am I gonna keep it? I am I got am I excited am I scared? Am I nauseous from everything because I hate this or I am preggers? of course the answers might be yes yes and you are thinking all of those things. And then…what happens next and where technology should be helping is if you want to come out of that bathroom and co-parent with me, then we are immediately in the most collaborative situation of our lives.
Coparenting is the most difficult, mind-blowing project even if you’re in total alignment with each other or when you’re the partner that just lets the other do whatever they wanna do. But either way, raising chitterlings is hard and, it’s something we’re built to do but it’s not something we have to do in this day and age. You can get kids lots of ways and I don’t think it is restricted to the human you happened to get pregnant with.
REMINDER: let’s take a break and let me answer some questions if you have any. I hope you thought about your question. I want to reinforce that even if you wrote down the most brilliant futuristic, accidental sustainable weight loss specific question and you think it’s stupid I guarantee it’s a fantastic question because this is a big accident that we’re talking about so please raise your hand and hit me up and for those of you that have written down a question and you don’t want to ask if that’s cool too.
Amazing. Thank you all for your support of me as a human and you are engaged fully in this moment.
Where we are now technologically
Let me tell you a little bit about where we are now and the technology that I see that should be supporting everyone in this audience. and then if we have time I’ll try to tell you about what I see coming next because if my book predicted the WFH acronym and the Zoom Fatigue hashtag then I may parlay this accidental futurist thing into a role improving global health&care. I have no idea if I’m gonna be right again, but I at least should give you all the respect to tell you what I think is critical and bring it to your attention.
XR Tech is on your side
What I am definitely correct about is how you should be using XR technology to your advantage. You should be tracking yourself. You should have a hospital in your apartment. You should be thinking about baby proofing even though those kids are gonna cross the threshold of your house for at least eight or nine months, and then not going to actually crawl or you know get anywhere near the toilet for another two or three years but, all of the ideas and all of the research and all of the work that has to be done with this coparent is beautiful and precious and can be codified in the game if you really want to play together.
Keep score as you Play adulting Game of Life
I know it might seem crazy but why not keep score? Winning feels good, produces dopamine for you and happy mom, happiness for all! Who’s winning who is losing and what is my mother-in-law had to do with it? OK, maybe I’m taking it too far but imagine back to the six sided Pinterest board. You could walk inside of a robust dynamic room SLIDE: PinCUBES GIF and in that cube you could meet with all of the medical professionals that are required to have the baby you and your co-parent choose to have and simultaneously in synchronous communication could celebrate those moments with your mother and his mother and as you have more kids, the impact of the second third fourth baby or the twins like I had that knocked me on my buttocks could kinda cut&paste the surprises. I still have a little trigger when I can’t find an even number of socks.
LAUGH
Lamaze on UWS in 2000
Well, either way the funny part of the story in regards to building community before technology was really even as good as it is now at building communities, I thought I’ll tell you a little anecdote we were under the care of MFM (Maternal Fetal Medicine) specialist Dr. Melissa Dworkin at St. Luke’s Roosevelt on the Upper West Side in Manhattan and she was a high-risk pregnancy specialist because we had been with Dr Happen, the Columbus Circle Endocrinologist - REI (Reproductive Endro ______). Anybody know what that actually stands for?
We were part of a Lamaze class that was 12 couples having twins or triplets, and the night that Max and Anna‘s mom‘s water broke – which was gestationally at 28 weeks – three other couples were also having babies delivered by Dr. Godwin so on September 8 at the beginning of this Millennium - 7 babies were born within like 13 minutes of each other – 506 and 508am for my two, and I’ll tell you I watched them get extracted – it was a C-section – and I saw the cysts on Amy’s ovaries and let me tell ya THAT is an indelible experience for a visual learner like me. But all of a sudden we had two premie babies – small, but not sick as the amazing nurses in the NICU told me – and they lived and grew and signed up for Club Penguin and then Apple Music and now whatever is next: maybe SindyXR.
VR tele-medicine
And imagine if you do have all of those medical appointments in that robust dynamic cube of space where it’s filled with everything that you’ve learned over the month since you peed on that stick and got that plus sign and when you were excited about it and shared, and when you were terrified and crawled back in bed. Then, the community of people that you’ve built from your Lamaze class or endocrinologist or however you got into building your metaverses and selecting the baggage you are going to take with you and when you pull out which resource/weapon or whatever gamer terminology you want apply to your healthcare depending on how critical the diagnosis may be and how much you can handle that day.
My 4th ride up the log flume
Confidence Inversion
There is something in here about the ride up in weight and the confidence inversion. In Feb 2021 my friend from college, Dr Charles Cavo OB/GYN turned Endocrinologist Board Certified in MORBID OBESITY, invited our SindyXR team to be in residence at his weight loss practice. This pushed me to my limits.
Michelle Cavo, CEO
Pounds Transformation in Hartford Connecticut is a beautiful community of people. There are three locations around Hartford, a few dozen nutritionists and Botox people and medical professionals run by my friend's wife CEO start-up Founder Michelle Cavo, and they brought me in in early 2021 to solve their telemedicine zoom problem. SLIDE: Cavo quote on our website He refers to patients stuck in those augmented reality little Zoom boxes that we’ve all gotten used to living in: Flat Stanley. Another joke for the parents in the house.
The Magic Pill
He introduced me to hundreds of patients, primarily moms in their 40s, because his former practice was as an OB/GYN and they have lots of the people that had had babies just wanted to keep off the baby weight and what they do at Pounds Transformation is lean in to non-processed, whole foods and sort of what I think of as Atkins + Keto with a Bulletproof Coffee twist. They think of it as just simply The Magic Pill SLIDE: Magic Pill documentary. The food is the medicine. That’s a fantastic documentary. If you haven’t seen the magic pill, check that out on YouTube but here are the important take-aways for me and supporting my theory that Life is a Game and how I have incorporated this all into apps you can use too.
SLIDE of Indigenous Communities
SLIDE of Corn Syrup Subsidies
SLIDE of _________________
@421 I was confident?!?
So now I am know in these Web3.0 circles as XR Patient Zero. This was seemingly my only choice and so we forged ahead and re-built all the games around me and my experience with Emily Woods on point with all of their “young” patients, we put a pair of Oculus2 Virtual Reality headsets in the lobby of each location and, most excitingly to us, again in a weird attribution to the pandemic, their
I made a pass at one of the nutritionists and was accused of sexual harassment and the business synergy halted abruptly. The ONLY REASON IN HELL I would tell this story to an audience would be because I can’t come up with ANY OTHER WAY to convey that my confidence was through the roof at the same time as my weight. She was obviously not into me or she would not have asked her boss to yank me and all our work from their facilities.
I had been internalizing their Wholistic-Unprocessed-Fatty diet into my own life and struggling tremendously. I didn’t know any other way to build games for that target audience. Could my work from home meta cubes be used for Sustainable Weight Loss!?? And everytime we would get to a most complicated yet critical story about insulin resistance or carbohydrate threshold or eating windows they would either talk in a further abstract or use me as the example. So the answer is yes and please for details, check out the User Story at SindyXR.com.
But for me it was cutting into me in 3 spots:
the entrepreneur Dr Cavo’s wife illuminated the nightmare current healthcare is a broken business model
The 12 nutritionists inability to act appropriately for patient’s mental health while they manipulate
and, most impactfully in my brain, those patients.
Those interviews included discussions with mostly women, mostly younger than me who had dealt with a range of pregnancy experiences unlike my own but that was just a short time period in their lives. What we had in common was that we all fought the lifetime struggle with judgment, body shape, shame and our relationship to the rollercoaster, the most personal of deep cuts. And this was now something I had to expose in order for my business to succeed?!!!
Pizza Ninja
And all that was like pizza ninja on level 1000. I had every trigger from my deepest darkest struggles: body shape, judgment spectrum and my fear of success all flying at me and I was taking out my mythic quest, double-edged sword and swiping at Chicken Parm Heroes while having in-depth conversations about sex with people that I didn’t even know who wanted to use MY apps, and then at the end of every day that I would be there at POUNDS with Dr. Cavo and he would want to know how the technology had gotten better by my unfettered access to his patients and how my tech team serviced those patients and later as we rolled it out they all just complained to his wife about how shitty my apps work...Trigger trigger trigger trigger…go ahead it’s funny laugh because if we don’t laugh right now, then I’m gonna cry and I try to reserve that for our second meeting.
But here I am eating my own dog food and the answer is Yes we can! use these apps not only to apply to the billion dollar industry of diabetes, perinatal and morbid obesity with a sustainable weight loss solution as well as now to the recovery of my thoughts after Burning Man!
Act 5
Imagine a World
I’m going to ask you to pretend with me that we are just a few years in the future and also project your perspective into the eyes of a 15-year-old. Not yourself at 15 years old but a 15 year old in the not so distant future. This 15 year old has grown up with
Rose McGowan and Harvey Weinstein
Greta Thorberg and Climate Change’s inevitability and
Richard Sackler and how unregulated prescription advertising perpetuates bad actors and they have seen an amplification of all the opinions and all the feels ebbing through social media, giving them no excuses or corners of ignorance. And now they are going into the last stage of cognitive development with a native understanding of augmented reality. They know that before they choose to settle down and raise a family. Their health records could be tracked by every wearable they’ve ever bought, on a cloud accessible by Microsoft and they will wear eyeglasses that shape over 90% of their day in a digital space.
Tear down the moats & the financial fences
These young parents, having decided who they are going to procreate with, have a pretty good idea of their ability to right the wrongs of the world around them. Their power to select how they leverage surveillance for good causes, and how they protect their families is evident in how the first quarter of the 21st century has stripped the castles of their moats and the ivory towers of their financial fences. Between every class at Stamford being globally available on YouTube, and every résumé hiding gender, race, and color, they have no excuses. The question is: what will they do with this great power? And for me and us here today, what can an old white guy raise money to build that will push them in the right direction?
Thanks to the Manyverses, life&death are now healthier. (OK maybe I can’t remove that word from our vocabulary!) By establishing a digital twin for your toddler, forcing their pediatrician to begin playing this game with you, they will add their own INTELLECTUAL Property into the Generational wealth you are passing down. They will have that Ready Player Me avatar running along side them the whole way along, and even after this body is ashes.
Will my thoughts return?
When I got home from Reno Nevada, I slept for weeks. I refused calls from friends and family, and wondered existentially whether my ideas would ever come back again. I genuinely didn’t have any new ones, but I realized, very slowly, that the games I had been building in order to expand the reality of remote work and then re-designing for dieticians to enable sustainable weight loss with the gamification of healthcare might be my personal path back to producing again.
My current favorite XR wearables
The three main solutions relate to physiology, psychology, and sociology. This is probably obvious, but in my cubism, I had to add in nutrition, education and genuine lifestyle change in order to track myself and measure my success or failure in relation to key performance indicators, not from the National Institute of Health or Apple but, for myself, my family, my team.
Your Digital Twin can help you live&die more gracefully
I am on a mission to leverage the hopes and fears currently swirling about Artificial Intelligence and get my digital twin to work on the greatest future problem:
In regards to physiology, I added in the practice of raising my heart rate without ever leaving my bedroom. When my cardio for the day isn’t satisfied through sex, I put on a virtual reality headset and box against Michael B Jordan. I can’t tell you how many months I have paid for my equinox membership and not left my apartment to utilize any of the machines they have there. In the metaverse, my Digital Twin and I meet with a coach who is driven by artificial intelligence and is available to me when I can handle what they dish out. DEMO Supernatural
Regarding my psychological health, I meet with my executive coach and my psychiatrist in spaces that keep all of the motivational and educational tools they dispense during our 50 minutes 2x a month in the space where we meet. Everything they think I need plus all of the information and side effects about the medication that I take in real time at my fingertips not only when I am with them live, but also available to me 24 hours a day seven days a week. DEMO Tripp and/or PINCubes
Regarding my nutritional health, in addition to In my monthly meetings with my endocrinologist, I use my Check Yo Self! app to track not just my glucose or but also my feelings of success when I don’t drive in to KFC and use that dopamine rush when I feel a failure in my choice to ask my Uber driver to pick up Dunkin’ Donuts. DEMO Insulin resistance VR explanation
Educationally I am able to access all of these experiential learning techniques at my fingertips. I live with a theory that we all should have five devices: a laptop, a big screen we can connect it to whenever we are sitting at home but squinting at the screen, wearables that give us data to inform each of the metrics critical to our success that provide data to the right team member at the right time and a pair of glasses and a pair of goggles that mount on my head. Each of them has to have a battery and has to add information into my surroundings in real time. I wear the glasses when I go outside and I wear the goggles when I want to escape into a different place. DEMO 5 devices
And lastly, sociologically, I am identifying the qualities and quantities of each and every dynamic along the spectrum with each and every team I collaborate with, and measure those data points with predictive models as well as apply what baseball managers call the eye test in my collaborations. This gives me power to choose which triggers you get to push when and what luggage I’m carrying with me when I’m my digital self and what qualities are critical in physical reality. DEMO Heyworth-Beyonce sketches?
U Can Do This NOW
So I know I am blazing thru some of this stuff for time but here are some of the games I highly recommend:
Tele-medicine can be concurrently billed in your own space in the Metaverse. Tell the doc to open the zoom call at the same time they put on the AR/VR Headset.
In order to make that worth it for them, build a space filled with all the links they gave you in the PDF when you first signed up as a new patient and tell them they could copy that meetup for all the other patients with similar diagnosis.
Cigna’s My Chart gives you the ability to connect CYS with 2 tangible + 1 intangible data points. Give each of your medical providers the EQ and IQ to build AI for YOU.
Build your own group therapy chat in that same space with humans going through the same journey as you and your team.
Share.
Your own cloud
And again back to imagining… If you and all of the medical professionals meet in your cloud, and you get to save the information in your cube of space and you get to go back there any time, then you own your medical data and you don’t have to spend any more time sitting on the other side of a desk, staring at the back of a Dell monitor, and that Physician doesn’t have to take on the liability of that data, they can focus on your health. You own the liability for yourself and you can solve any of the problems for you, your partner, and whatever kind of family you want to build.
FINAL SLIDE: My QR Code Thank you so much for the applause but honestly, I only have a few minutes left and I want if you haven’t already tuned out due to lack of understanding or boredom or because you already knew all this shit and you’re already doing this at home which I am thrilled and please hit me up ChuckieJabba.NYC or my cell phone is 917-453-4762. Call me anytime.
Your investment in your future
What I like to leave you with is a world that I’m hoping for, and, more than hoping, I’m looking for you to invest in. If we all invest our resources into the future of healthcare, then my kids will benefit when they wanna have kids if they want to have kids and if you buy in and put your money where your mouth is then all of the Silicon Valley types and all of the Silicon Alley Wall Street adjacent devs like me will too.
Performative Nature of Insta
The last 25 years have overcomplicated outward impressionism. The Performative Nature of Instagram is a travesty. The Spectrum could be conceptualized as Thoughts::Visual representation. Let’s build a future that helps future generations focus on the inside of the humans - their thoughts, their sympathy and empathy, the care for each other and the vision of a future where no matter how we are represented, Ready Player Me::Charles IRL, they are seeing visions Better Together. Wherever.
THE END.
Prescriptive Analytics
How well will my movie do at the box office if I get more sleep?
How many more contracts will I close this week if I drink more water?
If my eating window is bigger/smaller will I be a better spouse/father?
Measurable Health Outcomes
Readiness Score + Anxiety + My Mother (CYS Q19 re: people around me adding value) = ______
Standing minutes/meetup + Water bottles/hour + Cardio Time in Morning = ________
Eating window/day + Q11 Self Reported stress + GPS of KFC = Confidence Spectrum
Heart Rate differential + Orgasm + CYS Q8 Body Saying = Quiet Spectrum on Zoom Calls and my ability to listen/acute assessment of what needs to be said
Packets of Allulose + Bulletproof cups of coffee + Cravings for processed food = Lower Carbs/Day which is synonymous with feeling good about myself
Xanax needed + Gut progression/Fullness + Diarrhea/Vomiting/Binge = Too much bread
Ketones + Walking Pains + CYS Hierarchy Q2 = How many times I lash out at employees
OURA readiness LOWER + Weight HIGHER = confrontation of difficulty tasks
Tools I measure with
CPAP Machine Panasonic Dreamstation
Apple Watch Series3
Hidrate Glo
Check Yo Self app
OURA Ring
Defibrillator Latitude
Continuous Glucose Monitor
Oculus1 Headset
Biosense breathalyzer
GLP-1
Things I debate measuring
Comfort cuz on some level it’s always more comfortable sitting with heat on my feet and cool air on my face
Ease cuz it’s always easier to walk up&down steps when I am lighter
Gigs
Girls
Society
True Hormone Stories
But the kicker in the last six months is Mojarro and the enhancement of the GLP one in my gut as well as the Aquamania in through probiotic. And you guys all understand this better than I do, but visualizing it not only with my own endocrinologist and nutritionist, but then being able to invite my psychiatrist and my speech writer into the same virtual space And show them visualizations of the plume as my pancreas produces ketones, and my bacteria allows the oil to go straight from my mouth to the toilet I think that not only the privacy issues, but also the ownership and understanding of it in a multisensory way I’m a kinesthetic learner, but the ability to have the discussion with my entire medical team whether they approve of meeting together or not, and then to be able to meet in that same space and share those sameunderstandings and learnings with a group in a wellness circle once a week. That’s the game changer.
Thought leadership for the 20c.
In the late 1940s in New York City a TV production assistant graduated to become a thought leader on communication and the distinction between television radio magazines books Théâtre cinema :: things that used to be called “media”. Marshall McCluan’s macro-takeaway-best known takeaway is THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE. I learned about this from a fantastic theatre piece by SITI called THE MEDIUM. Hopefully you can see that in post modernism of the last quarter of the 20th century these thinkers are struggling to define what you all now call content and that they are playing with the word media to encompass everything from Sean ace leaders who comm with the dead to social media and the masses being able to reach each other.
Last year a new thinker from the Mellenials demographic wrote a fresh incising summary of what we all should have learned in the last 75 years which is that the message has now taken over the mediums. I will paraphrase inaccurately on the regular so please take this SLIDE: Two Book covers from McCluan and HARI
what I say next as my takeaway of Johann Hari’s fantastic book STOLEN FOCUS as a tweak directly connected to how FB (formerly META) is good for gathering long-form text-based opinions about family&the news from people I met in my formative years say 16-26 ish - my silo if u will - Insta is good for kinesthetic learners who gather more from images than words TWITTER/X is good for actual news from a wide ish swath of sources I deem credible and TikTok is good to see what is making the young people feel great this week.