Housekeeping

I’ve created a new top level page called “The Framework”

This will serve as the current living version of my framework document. I’ve distilled the basic elements down from my original framework post.

I’ve also added a new section for curiosity based on my recent post.

Continuing On

Picking up where we left off from the first Prologue post, I think we can focus on how I transitioned from being a crazy co-founder working 80 hour weeks for 10 years, to being a crazy retired person with nothing to do.

COVID

I moved to Colorado during the initial outbreak of Covid, which presented some challenges.

The area I moved to was super aggressive with lockdowns and ridiculous restaurant rules which sucked.

I’m not going to criticize the stupidity of all of the rules, as there is no upside to discussing it.

I initially was working remotely for the company that acquired mine, but that ended by June of 2020 and suddenly I had nothing that I “had” to do.

New Hobbies

I spent the next 6 months building Lego models and listening to podcasts. I eventually ran out of places to display all of my constructed Lego kits, and had to shift gears.

Hiking, snow shoeing, video games, rucking and lifting weights (at home), became a big part of my day.

New Doctor

After the craziness of Covid died down it was time to find the right doctor. I had recently read Peter Attia’s book, so I was looking for a concierge “Medicine 3.0” doctor focused on longevity and preventative medicine.

I ended up finding a great doctor in Denver that met my needs. What I didn’t expect was how much he pushed me on my “mental health” as opposed to my physical health.

My first appointment with him was 3 hours long. After the typical stuff, he shifted the conversation to my mental health.

He had already identified by this point that I’m….unusual.

When he performed my CIMT, his comment was “You are weird.”

Apparently everyone but me has more plaque in their arteries on the left side of their neck vs. the right…and mine is the opposite.

It was clear to him my physical health was decent, but that my life could be improved a great deal by focusing on my mental health.

He recommended an SSRI and therapy. I rejected the SSRI initially and tried the therapist he sent me to instead.

It didn’t go well. I didn’t “click” with her at all. She kept pushing her preferred approach of IFS on me, and I pushed back harder.

She also only offered therapy over Zoom, which was something I absolutely despised after a career of conference calls and video meetings.

So I bailed on the therapy and went back to the comfort of avoiding people and playing video games.

Alcohol

By this point in my life I’d graduated from a couple of beers or glasses of wine on Friday nights to drinking every single night, and I agreed with Homer’s assessment.

Alcohol had permeated my life for 20 years.

Everyone around me knew I was self-medicating.

The coders that reported to me at my company had been code-naming projects for years based on my alcohol consumption.

Bad day? Time for dirty martinis.

Good day? Break out the 21 year old Japanese Nikka, or an 18 year Macallan. I still remember the taste on my tongue just thinking about it.

I knew that I had a problem but was in denial.

I was so far away from Peter Attia’s “4 drinks a week guidance” it wasn’t even funny. I was easily at 4 drinks a day. 365 days a year.

So the new doctor said:

“The amount of alcohol you are drinking is equivalent to smoking 2 packs a day from a cancer risk perspective. Do you smoke?”

No.

“Why don’t you smoke?”

Because it causes cancer.

“So why do you drink?”

• Self medication

• To shut off my brain so I can “sleep”

• “Enjoyment”

• To escape

• Because I wouldn’t be retired if I wasn’t a drinker.

• Our first key investor in our company literally wrote the check because “You got drunk with me the first night I met you so I knew I could trust you. I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t drink with me.”

I Finally Listened

At my next annual check up with the Doc, he asked me how therapy was going. He was clearly not happy that I bailed on it.

We then had a long conversation about “anxiety” and SSRI’s.

I should mention that I’ve struggled with insomnia issues for decades.

The doctor explained to me that he thought my “monkey mind” was the root cause of my sleep issues.

I didn’t know what he meant by monkey mind, but it certainly felt like I had an army of chimps in my skull constantly arguing.

He again pushed me to take Lexapro. I told him that I didn’t want to take any mind altering drugs.

He asked me if I thought caffeine, alcohol, THC and CBD were mind altering drugs.

I was forced to acknowledge they are, and agreed to replace my preferred drug of alcohol with his Lexapro recommendation.

He also pointed out a clinical study that shows Lexapro with therapy provides the best benefits.

Life Changing

The initial side effects of Lexapro were rough. Food aversions, loss of appetite, lack of energy, etc.

From what I had read, I knew that it took about 6 weeks for most people to adjust.

During these 6 weeks, some interesting things happened.

The monkeys in my mind calmed down a bit.

I tried a meditation app for the 7th time in my life…and I was hooked.

The Lexapro allowed my mind to slow down enough for me to finally understand that meditation actually works.

Ironically the people that need it the most are the ones that say things like “Meditation is stupid. It doesn’t work for me.”

I know because I said those words after I quit meditating the last 6 times.

Meditation became a new hobby / passion. I wanted to learn everything I could about it.

Remember that “Curiosity” post? This was the first moment where mine reawakened.

Now I had a taste and wanted more. Thus I began a search for a local therapist that I thought I would click with.

Much to my surprise I found one 3 miles from my house that specializes in “Mindfulness based therapy”.

Therapy

I clicked with my new therapist immediately. He hates Zoom and prefers in person therapy. Me too.

My therapy experience started off as what I would call “putting out fires”.

It seemed that every week I was improving, but I continued to make mistakes in my relationships and we focused greatly on fixing those problems.

At this point I had discovered the excellent Dan Harris. His app and videos helped me deepen my mindfulness journey.

After a few months of mindfulness practice and therapy I thought I had the tools I needed and decided I was done with therapy.

Luckily my therapist wisely talked me out of that. He explained that I’d done the hardest part. I opened the door and went to therapy.

The work wasn’t over.

It was just beginning.

Buddhism

In conjunction with my therapist, Dan Harris and a bunch of books I read, I started to view meditation as more than just “mindfulness”.

I began to understand that one of my key defects I needed to work on was my tendency to react emotionally…at the worst times possible.

I lacked “Right Mind”.

I still thought I knew almost everything, was right all of the time, and I just needed to add some meditation on top and everything would be ok.

But that is not how it works.

I needed to shatter my beliefs, my destructive patterns and my ego.

I needed to learn how to say “I Don’t Know”.

What’s Next?

I think I’ve now given you enough of my story and how I got here to turn my attentions back to Zen, Buddhism and my new Framework for Life.

Over the coming weeks I think my post frequency will slowdown. I intend to write a 12+ part series on Buddhism, and more specifically how I’m incorporating it into my framework.

You don’t have to become a Buddhist to learn from Buddhism.

Don’t worry. No robes, chants or head shaving required. I’m going to make it as entertaining as I can.

I think this series can help a lot of people.

I conducted a little experiment over the weekend.

I should start by explaining:

• I have a very small following on X, and I suspect 95% of them are bots and/or dead accounts.

• My X account exists so that someone doesn’t create an X account to masquerade as me, and research stuff like this post.

• I’ve think I’ve received maybe 5 direct messages that weren’t bots / scammers since I created my X account in 2009.

I started posting more frequently on X a couple days ago.

I also started replying to more posts in my “For You” feed.

My observations

1. Despite having the lovely paid “Blue Check”, I get almost zero views organically via the X Algo

2. I also noticed that 90% of my replies have very few views

3. The interesting thing about the replies is that suddenly I’m picking up followers left and right, but I’m not getting replies or likes to my replies

4. In some cases I likely replied to an aggregator / harvester bot account which explains the strange lack of views despite picking up followers

5. After about 24 hours I started getting Direct Messages from some new followers. 90% of them were blatantly obviously bots. The “Hi, how are you today?” opener combined with a bunch of random numbers in the username is all you need.

6. But a couple made it through my sleep-deprived brain this morning as being “slight chance of not being a bot”.

My Hypothesis

We aren’t nearly as close to AGI as all of the so called “experts” would have you believe.

Yes, the models are getting better at a lot of things…but a rational thinking human can still detect them just by talking to them.

But more seriously I think this is one of the symptoms of the Dead Internet theory.

Dead Internet Theory

The Dead Internet Theory started out as a “conspiracy theory” in 2016, but it is beginning to look like truth not conspiracy.

The theory alleges that starting in 2016, the majority of traffic on the internet was bots and AI generated content, and obviously growing. And this was before the revolution in AI.

Essentially, the internet will become worthless to humans and we will end up with AI bots arguing with each other all day long.

That will be an interesting thing to watch…how do social media companies make money with no humans in the loop?

Do the bots start paying each other? Do the companies charge the bots?

It sounds ludicrous, but the bots are good at scamming.

Imagine a bot that could self-fund through scamming, store its money in crypto tokens, setup new X accounts, operate autonomously, but when a victim gets suspicious hand the conversation over to a human scammer…or to a better more expensive LLM.

Imagine as AGI approaches how much worse this gets.

Experiment

I started chatting with the potential “not 100% sure it is a bot” bots to see what would happen.

Within a couple of back and forth chats it was completely obvious that both were bots.

Example #1 - Jessica from Miami

Referring to my profile pic, “Jessica” says:

Ok, so off to a possible “notbot” start.

But my profile does say Colorado on it, so a bot could scrape my profile, run an AI image search and possibly formulate that question.

Or a human writes the first question and then hands it off to a bot to monitor / respond to more likely.

Can Jessica make it to round 2?

Oof. Not looking so good for team NotBot here. How did we jump to "champagne glasses”, mentorship and I’m a professional?

Let’s see round 3:

Hmm.

• Laughing seems human

• Not quite sure how 50 and 35 are about the same age (although the bot is clearly trying to flirt at times later on)

• Do female human accounts get male flirty bots? I assume so but don’t know. Do gay men get gay bots?

• Second time we are clinking glasses in 3 rounds. Feels like a bot trick to seem more human by injecting emoji’s.

What does ZeroGPT say?

So, now for my favorite moment:

HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!

Nope. It never snows in the mountains where people go to ski in the winter.

A bot from Singapore working in Miami should be just fine solo camping in a blizzard.

And what exactly is a professional local? I’m an amateur at best.

Despite that I continued chatting for awhile to see if the bot would ever try to scam me.

Eventually it got bored with me and sent this:

Those who know me might strongly disagree with Jessica’s assessment of me. But the bot finally took action. Trying to move me off X and onto WhatsApp for whatever reason.

So I ignored it and then I get another attempt to move me to WhatsApp with a little more aggressive attitude:

Example #2 - Maria from LA

This one had me fooled at first.

Although I’m a little fuzzy this morning, as I enjoyed one too many THC beverages last night.

Can dumb not fully awake Brian detect this bot?

I should explain that one of my replies as part of my experiment was replying to the “@Puppieslover” account” with a picture of one of our dogs.

NotBot Maria starts off like this:

So NotBot Maria saw or scraped my reply, managed to comment on what made the dog cute and asked for his name. Could still be a human.

And Maria said “tweets”, which in my brain is what I still call posts on X, so it felt human to me.

I didn’t actually see this message come in until a day later when “Maria” decided to ping me again despite not responding to the original question about the dog’s name.

Well damn, I don’t have a new friend in LA. Even dumb me recognizes this as typical LLM generated phrases.

I have the sad realization that 100% of my new followers on X are bots.

ZeroGPT’s verdict?

Much like before, I continued chatting with “Maria” for awhile. Actually, I’m still talking to “Maria”.

She/It has yet to ask me for anything.

Maria is definitely running better code than Jessica.

At one point, Maria sends me a picture of a Bichon Frise, tells me her name is Daisy, says Daisy looks funny when she lies down, etc.

At this point I’m having a little doubt creep in, maybe ZeroGPT was wrong. Or maybe a human stepped in to get my attention before handing me back to MariaBot.

I reverse image search the Bichon Frise and receive zero hits. But that doesn’t really mean anything since AI generates images that are quite good at times.

A Bichon Frise is consistent with my mental stereotype of LA too.

So I continue chatting with “Maria” for a bit since the F1 race was boring with Max just circling out in front by himself.

Maria starts probing for information.

Asking me what I do for work, phrased almost identically to the way Jessica asked the question at one point.

The final blow to Maria’s humanity tells you how sloppy Maria’s coders are.

You literally have my name in the chat window.

You are following my account that uses my real name.

Now after chatting for an hour you suddenly don’t know my name?

Takeaways

• Think critically about all communications with strangers. I know, it is obvious. But you have to play defense. You have to assume the entity you are interacting with is not human.

• When in doubt, try an AI detector like ZeroGPT.com

• What’s the point of engaging with X if you are just acquiring an army of bot followers?

I believe the new LLM based AI offerings are rapidly accelerating this.

I intend to do multiple follow-up posts on this topic.

Namaste.

With the Horner scandal and the inability of the team to find a driver capable of driving the Red Bull other than Max, I tried to defect from Red Bull to McLaren.

I liked Lando, but I really like Oscar.

I find it amazing that Oscar at his age is as zen / chill as he is while going 200mph.

But after today, Max has won me back, as well as Laurent Mekies.

I’m looking forward to what Laurent can do with the team…I’m a softie for the techie running the show.

Lando and Oscar smash into each other.

+8 points for Max.

Max’s qualifying performance was utter perfection.

Purple Purple Purple.

Oh…sorry to everyone except for my 1 viewer who loves F1.

I guess I should related this to Zen or something.

Slow is Fast, Fast is Smooth.

A Formula 1 Koan.

Namaste.

Subscribe now

As a kid I had it in spades.

Dogs have it. There is nothing better than the head tilt of curiosity.

So where did mine go?

When did I lose it?

I think life slowly beat it out of me.

I remember looking up at the stars with wonder.

Now I look at them and am annoyed by all of the light pollution impacting the view.

I think the final straw was the cumulative stress and burnout I ended up with through my 20 year career.

Curiosity is something you have at the beginning, but you need to nurture, cultivate and celebrate it.

How does one nurture it?

I’m still working on it, but for me right now it means constantly exploring new hobbies. Sometimes you have to push yourself to try something you have no interest in.

For example, I started this Substack because I thought it would be a good outlet for my brain.

I knew I would struggle with it, but I needed to just do it. I’m not quoting the mantra from a shoe brand here.

I’m actually referring to a hilarious moment between Dom and one of our salespeople.

One morning at work I was walking to the coffee machine for my 12th cup of coffee after a long night fixing other people’s mistakes.

Dom was standing in the sales area talking to one of our struggling salespeople.

It was quarter end and we were about to get on a plane for our quarterly board meeting where our VC would yell at us for yet again missing our sales target.

I hear the sales guy say “Sorry, I’m trying man.”

This is not something you EVER say to Dom.

Dom’s brain will immediately think:

• Loser

• Why did I hire this moron

• Fuck, I hate salespeople

• How do I shame him into not being an idiot

So Dom says:

No one expected Dom to quote Yoda.

I had a full mouth of coffee and managed not to do a spit take laughing my ass off.

The smart salespeople immediately turned their heads back to their screens and started making phone calls.

Most of the salespeople started laughing at their fellow moron about to get ridiculed.

Funny story, but what does this have to do with today’s subject of curiosity?

Quite a bit actually.

Bad salespeople are not curious.

• They don’t learn the product they are selling because they aren’t curious enough

• They aren’t curious about the customer’s problems

• They aren’t curious about how to solve their problems

• The only thing they are curious about is the size of their commission check. Hint…it was usually zero unless Dom or I stepped in to fix their deal by engaging with the customer

Without curiosity you are going to live a mediocre life.

You must nurture it.

Interestingly, mine has returned in full force recently.

Everyone’s path will be different, but here’s what I’ve learned:

• You have to make time for it in your day

• Put down your phone and turn off your TV

• Take that time and work on a hobby you love

• Or start a new hobby you have an interest in

• If you don’t have any hobbies…you have a big problem and need to start exploring now

Before we get started I want to take a minute and introduce my best friend. After reading my first post he kindly lectured me on Christianity, gave me some great ideas and politely suggested that I needed to write a Prologue so that people know where I am coming from, before we get too far into where we are going.

Throughout the life of this blog he will be referred to as Dom. I could say a lot of things about Dom. For now I’ll just say…he’s not a friend…he’s family.

Now, on to a brief warning:

I hate writing. I blame Ms. Anderson from 4th grade. Never once a compliment. It was always “Brian, you must learn how to use commas properly”.

That was it. The first time where I felt like a failure. I was 10 years old.

I thought I could be an astronaut. I wanted to reach for the stars. Smacked down by an angry old battle axe for my utter disregard for the rules of punctuation.

But of course she was correct. I really should learn how to use commas.

On the other hand, perhaps, it, is, proof, that, I'm, me, and, not, AI.

I wonder if Substack will even let me hit Publish without angrily yelling at me like Ms. Anderson. Maybe I'll create an AI Agent Ms. Anderson.

Oops, so welcome to my brain. I had a good thread going there and somehow I'm thinking about building an AI Agent of a teacher I haven’t thought about in decades. It probably wasn't Ms. Anderson. Maybe Mrs. Griffin? Doesn't matter.

By now if you haven't flipped back to X and started doom-scrolling, you are wondering why a guy who hates writing…..is starting a Substack.

That is a simple question, but difficult to answer.

Boredom? Therapy? Second Career? A journal that my family can read after I'm gone?

I don't know.

I don't know

One of my favorite phrases. My entire life I felt a need to always know. Always have the correct answer.

I’m finally comfortable not knowing everything.

Some people I interact with don’t know how to respond when I say it. Short conversation.

You asked me. I don’t know. See ya.

It takes self confidence to say those words when someone important to you expects you to have the answer.

So let's start at the beginning.

The Beginning

I had problems right from the beginning. I was born with some really strange colorful moles / growths on my upper left arm.

The Arm

Shortly thereafter I had a skin graft and was put into an almost full body cast as an infant.

I of course have no memory of this. What I do remember is how being different shaped my entire childhood.

I dreaded wearing short sleeve shirts.

I was a shy introvert to begin with. The last thing a shy kid needs is a glaringly obvious physical anomaly for every single kid to notice and comment on.

Every single time the questions went something like this:

How did you get burned? I didn’t.

Why does your arm look funny? I was born like this.

Does it hurt? Only when you ask me questions about it.

Will it ever go away? No.

And then you’d hear the other kids talking about it at recess:

Did you see that scrawny kid with the strange arm?

Maybe somebody burned him.

I’m so glad my arms are normal and not like his.

The point of telling this story is to explain why in general I hate meeting new people and despise social encounters.

My default position most of my life has been to avoid interacting with people that are not in my inner circle.

Other than that, my childhood was great.

Somewhere in the Midwest

My dad bought an Apple 2+ when I was 4. It was the Kickass Bell & Howell black one that pre-dated the Apple 2E:

Man, those were the good old days.

This thing required maintenance. About once a month you’d have to pop the case open and press the memory chips firmly down into their slots because somehow they’d slowly work themselves loose.

Try explaining that maintenance procedure to today’s “Enterprise Datacenter Architects”.

At the time I was just ecstatic that I could play pong and lemonade stand. I had no idea that it would shape my entire life.

At the time I was the only kid in the entire area that had a home computer.

Try explaining that to Gen Z. It makes their brains melt. No internet, no Wifi, no Steam, no hard drives, etc.

My First Line of Code

So the reason my dad bought this computer is he was starting his own business that required some computational power. I know…it’s hilarious.

This beautiful machine had an 8-bit 1.023Mhz processor.

Which was just enough to let you write programs in Apple Basic.

My grandfather also bought something similar. He wrote a program called “Budget Master” to help school districts calculate their budgets.

One night we were over at my grandparents house, and Grandpa was frustrated because he couldn’t figure out a problem with his program. My Dad and Grandpa were staring at this program trying to figure it out.

I wandered into the room and begin staring at the screen with “code” listening to them discuss the problem.

After a few minutes I asked “Grandpa, are you missing a ‘$’ on line 125?”

Grandpa looked at Dad with this look on his face like…what does this kid know about programming? Well…nothing really. But I could see the pattern.

This section of his program had a bunch of statements that spit out text to the end user asking them questions, and was attempting to store the responses in variables.

So the code for each question should look the same except for the text of the question and the variable name.

Question #4 was missing a ‘$’ that all the other variable references had. I didn’t know what a variable was. But I knew it needed a ‘$’.

Little did I know that my entire career would be largely based on this ability to fix broken things.

I promise we aren’t going to go year by year through my entire life, so let’s pick up the pace.

Early Childhood

I did a bunch of cool things as a kid.

For example, “Turbo Pascal Camp" at KU when I was in middle school where I got to live in cockroach infested Oliver Hall.

I got to write a black jack program in Pascal.

Or my medal winning performance on stage where I got 5th place in the county spelling bee. I still hate the word ‘spatula’ to this day.

I still maintain that my answer of ‘spatchula’ is how the word should have been spelled in the first place.

None of it is really relevant to where we are headed, so I’m going to focus on the things that shaped me as a person that led me to starting this Substack.

I continued learning to code on my own. All I wanted was better hardware, better screens, better tools and books to help me teach myself what I wanted to know.

Ironically I’m the same way today. Just ask my wife about the ridiculous amount of computers, laptops, 3D printers, CNC machines, etc. that are cluttering our house and garage.

Teenage years

As you might expect, a scrawny shy computer nerd going to a rural high school in the Midwest, struggled in ways you absolutely would predict.

Obviously I wanted a girlfriend but was scared of them. I remember it kind of like this:

I might talk more about this in the future, but for now I’ll just mention that I continued to be a strange kid.

I took up windsurfing on our local lake because my uncle was a windsurfer. I sucked but it was fun. And it let me drive my kickass Camaro to the beach with my mullet flapping in the wind.

College

I started at the University of Kansas as a Computer Science major.

Unfortunately it didn’t go well.

Nobody told me that to be a computer science major you apparently needed advanced math and physics skills.

I’m well aware of my limits, and they were brutally shown to me by the horrible physics instructor I had.

A year later I read Michael Crichton’s book named “Disclosure”. One of the characters in this book was a product manager.

I didn’t know what that was at the time. But I ended up acting as one for about 20 years.

This book opened my eyes to where I could take my life.

You’d think college would have done that, but I was the kid in the back row trying not to get called on and never asking questions.

What if the professor asked me about my arm? I was an “adult” and my strategy of avoiding people was still in full force.

I then became a business major with a concentration in Computer Science, reasoning that the business skills were needed for the company I wanted to start. After all, I taught myself to code…why did I need a Compsci degree?

Career

My first programming job out of college sucked. I’m grateful for it, but it seriously sucked.

I learned a ton. It really helped me with my social skills too.

I had a crush on one of the product managers. I’m not saying I added bugs to my code as an excuse to talk to her…but I might have.

This is where I began to understand there are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.

First Coding Job

I was hired to write code in “K&R C” (a version of C that dropped out of fashion for a reason).

My job was to program Point of Sale Credit Card terminals with custom software that calculated fuel prices for aviation.

The processor in these things sucked. You had 2 choices. Assembly language or K&R C.

So you’d write a bunch of code in C and compile it. Once it compiled you needed to test it. There were no emulators and no debugging tools.

So every single day I’d spend a couple hours writing code. Then the rest of the day was debugging.

The general process involved downloading your compiled code over the world’s slowest modem from your PC to your POS. And it truly was a POS.

Then you tested the code by simulating purchases.

So yeah…I had to have 2 analog phone lines in my cubicle just to debug my code.

Every time you found a bug you had to change the code, compile, and start the phone download process all over again.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the processor in this machine was 8 bit, and couldn’t handle accurate floating point math beyond 2 decimal places.

My first coding assignment was to write a division algo accurate to 4 decimal places.

Seriously.

I had to write code to tell the machine how to do division.

Essentially I was being paid $30k a year to look for missing ‘$’ characters in code that I wrote that could only be tested by downloading the code over a phone line.

I certainly became a better programmer because of the constraints I was operating under.

Today’s noob programmers have no idea how good they have it. But they also didn’t get the chance to learn the way I did.

I made it 9 months before I started interviewing.

DotCom Job

My second job out of college was my dream job. I thought. The year was 1999, smack in the middle of the DotCom hype train.

I joined a company with more money than sense. It was the first time I saw how having the wrong investor, and the wrong management team could destroy you from within. I’ll save the details of this for a separate post.

I also learned relational databases, multiple programming languages, architecture, the value of mentorship, etc.

When I left I did some consulting for awhile and then found myself at another technology startup.

Tech Startup

I was hired by the founders to be essentially their first technical employee, hired to cleanup the mess that a bunch of contractors left behind and build the engineering team.

This one 100% will get its own post.

It is truly amazing how much you can learn working for a complete sociopath.

This is where I met Dom, which matters more than anything else that happened at this job.

Dom quit 10 times in 9 months and left.

I was so burned out, the only thing keeping me there was Dom. So I left and did some consulting for another year while I tried to figure out what was next.

Dom and I ended up working together for the next two decades.

Co-Founder

I co-founded a company with Dom.

We grew it to 100 employees and sold it 6 months before COVID hit.

Timing is everything.

There will be numerous posts reflecting on this, as it truly was an amazing and terrifying experience.

Early Retirement

So, I was fortunate enough to be able to retire at the age of 45 as the result of selling my company.

Although I worked more hours by the age of 45 than most people do by 65.

I’m now 50 years old and for the first time in my life I’m not working on anything other than myself.

Undoubtedly I’ll write more about my past at some point, but I think this is enough for now.

Ironically I mostly handled COVID pretty well. Most of us coder introverts did:

Note that this is my current framework for life, which is radically different from how I lived my life from age 0 to 49.

More on the 1.0 framework later as I get into my backstory.

For now, all you need to know is that I’ve spent the last 10 months building my meditation practice.

I’ve spent the last 6 months studying Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism.

There are parts of Buddhism I very much like.

There are parts of it I don’t understand.

And there are the ritualistic / cult-like parts that make zero sense to me.

Coming from a mostly non-religious secular background I believe I have figured out what currently works for me.

Hint: It’s not chants and robes and specific postural meditative procedures.

Meditation

Meditate in whatever way works for you.

Here’s what I like:

Meditate in a sensory deprivation float tank

Meditate in bed while falling asleep

Meditate in nature sitting on a rock with a beautiful backdrop

For example, one of the best meditation experiences I’ve ever had is here:

I don’t like meditating in a virtual Zendo over zoom.

I hate sitting on a cushion because of lower back issues and flexibility issues

I hate staring at a wall with my eyes partially closed.

Ethics

I love the positive framing of the basic 4 Buddhist vows and the 8 fold path.

Do these 12 things.

As opposed to Christianity which frames things negatively. Don’t do these 10 things.

While I am still very much at the beginning of my journey, right now I’m focused on:

Respecting all sentient life.

For me this has resulted in shifting my diet to 99% vegan.

Or as my uncle once said “I don’t eat anything with eyes except for potatoes.”

But there is more to it than just diet of course.

Respect “all” sentient life.

“all” has a heavy weight to it.

This touches on nearly everything in society from abortion to capital punishment to animal rights and even to Artificial Intelligence.

So for example, I now oppose capital punishment.

I’m not going to start typing a huge list of things I’m against. It’s exhausting and boring.

Instead I feel in control and happier with the mantra in my head of “Respect all sentient life”

Empathy

Where Zen / Buddhism calls for endless compassion, I don’t think I yet have it in me.

Some people are truly evil. I’ve worked with, and for them.

Others are fairly normal people that occasionally commit an evil act. I have more empathy for them.

But the truly evil ones? That’s a struggle for me.

I can sometimes muster up some empathy for what made them the way they are.

But I can’t go much further than that.

I’ve changed radically over the last year. I don’t accept that some of these people I’ve encountered couldn’t also make some positive changes too.

So for now, I’m at a B+ on the empathy scale.

And yes I understand some people are dealt poor hands, while others have been dealt perfect hands.

I’m not getting into any conversations about Free Will and privilege. I’ll leave that to the people that have gone off the deep end like Sam Harris.

The non-duality stuff is an interesting meditation subject, but it hurts my brain and I mostly don’t care about it right now.

So I’ve established some simple rules for life that include:

• Lead your life ethically.

• Be kind by default.

• Alcohol is bad for me.

• THC isn’t bad. In fact it’s highly useful combined with the float tank and meditation. So Buddha got that part wrong about no intoxicants. But then again, he never had a sensory deprivation float tank in his basement.

• Meditate! Every single day.

• Workout! Every single day.

• Dogs are better people than most humans are. Slow down and read that again. Replace 90% of your phone / social media time with taking your dog for a walk.

That’s it. That’s the secret to life.

I’m calling it Crayzen. As in Cray Cray Zen.

I was fortunate enough to be able to retire at the age of 45.

I retired at a very strange time…right before COVID hit.

I’ve spent the last 6 years exploring new hobbies and struggling to find my path in retirement.

I’m starting this Substack as a way to organize my thoughts, and hopefully help others that struggle with similar issues.

I’ll attempt to post once a week, but I may post more or less frequently.

The Substack is free for everyone.

What to expect

I’m going to attempt to leave politics and world events out of this Substack.

We have enough of that coming at us from every direction.

Topics I expect to write about:

1. Philosophy & Ethics

2. Buddhism / Zen

3. My evolving framework for life

4. An occasional rant to get the demons out of my skull

If a picture is worth one thousand words, then this image represents my current internal mantra: