Tractor and Silo on Thede Technologies

The future of healthcare is prevention

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is an entry in my Tractor and Silo record for a work offsite on Wednesday, May 6, 2015. Moves captured it.

On May 8, 2019, I added a note to it. Here is the entry, with the note as I wrote it.

Lewis Communications, Nashville
Wednesday, May 6, 2015, 10:00 AM to 1:03 PM. Captured by Moves.

“Work offsite when I worked at Vanderbilt. I think this had something to do with our research and dive into what we perceived the future of healthcare to be. My answer: The future of healthcare is prevention. I couldn’t believe more strongly in that. It’s just so true. Today is Wednesday, May 8, 2019 … four years later and I still stand by my belief from this experience.”

Be Your Own Historian

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have been saying a version of the same sentence for fourteen years, and the sentence has gotten shorter every year. It started as a product pitch. It is now four words: be your own historian.

Here is the long version, which I will spend the rest of this essay defending.

In a world where intelligence is cheap and getting cheaper, the only thing that stays scarce is the record of a particular life. It cannot be generated. It cannot be bought. It can only be kept. And the person who should own it is the person who lived it.

The Memex Has Been Waiting 80 Years for This Moment

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In July 1945, an engineer named Vannevar Bush published an essay in The Atlantic called “As We May Think.” It is one of the strangest, most hopeful documents I know.

Bush had spent the war as the director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. He oversaw the entire American scientific war effort: radar, the proximity fuse, penicillin manufacturing, and, indirectly, the work that would end the war the same month his essay was published. The atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Bush’s essay came out a few weeks earlier. He could feel what was coming. He wrote the essay anyway, and what he wrote was not a triumphal account of what science had done. It was an almost embarrassed argument that the same instruments scientists had built for destruction could be turned, just as easily, toward the preservation of human knowledge.