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Understanding Cryptocurrencies: Restoring fiscal discipline and growing economic freedom

Background

Friends and family will know that I’d gone down the ‘crypto rabbit hole’ in 2020, and I acknowledge I have positive bias for cryptocurrencies.

When we’d discuss topics like cryptocurrency, Bitcoin or Ethereum many times the comments were quite negative:

Cryptocurrencies are scams and many projects are fraudulent
Cryptocurrencies are pure speculation and promoted by individuals with vested interests.
The user experience is clunky, it’s ‘tech by techies’
As a Western person, it’s difficult to see what cryptocurrencies are for..

Meanwhile, while I see much validity in the criticisms, I was also disappointed, as it felt like a chasm of understanding.

My perception when I look at the current financial system is not flattering:

how the current financial system is skewed towards already rich asset owners
how wage earners have been basically shafted for the past 50 years
Every adult KNOWS that government fiat money is printed out of thin air, and many just accept the price gyrations and inflation that follow
Powerful intermediaries like banks, Wall Street use their power to cozy up to government and regulators, while curtailing innovation.

Just two brief charts here to illustrate the scope of the problems:

Chart 1: Networth of the top 0.1% of society tracking money printing:

Chart 2: Net Productivity and Average compensation trending closely 1948 to 1971. After 1971 productivity kept increasing, but Average compensation lagged badly.

Since 1971 we have seen the link between productivity growth and wages get severed. Productivity growth occurs when on an aggregate level in society, in companies we become more efficient, we can do more with less, whether it’s from working smarter , automating more processes etc. As we see from the chart this relationship used to track almost 100%. So some-one other than wage-earners must then reap the benefits of productivity growth.

I believe there is something fundamentally wrong in the current economic, financial system, and I intend to show in the book how what we consider ‘money’ is at the root of the problems.

While cryptocurrencies are no panacea, I see tremendous promise for cryptocurrencies:

how crypto can be part of solution to help curtail money printing, restore fiscal discipline
how crypto can bring economic freedom and opportunities around the world
how crypto can help decentralize and guide AI
how crypto can help skew the incentives towards wage earners again
how crypto can finally reduce the power of intermediaries with non-custodial, peer-to-peer technology.

‘Understanding Crypto’ book

So in March 2024 I set out to help bridge this divide with a book that covers the main aspects of these issues. The goal of the book is to try to give a smart person an overview of the entire space. If some-one is very familiar with cryptocurrencies they should recognize a lot material, but hopefully also gain new perspectives.

Right now the book is split into four parts:

Part 1: Exploring the history of money, history of financial systems and defining what is money. Included are definitions of relevant concepts such as fractional reserve banking, quantitative easing and inflation.

Part 2: A critique of the current financial system arguing it benefits asset owners and governments at the expense of wage earners and savers. Included are charts and statistics from around the world to support the arguments.

Part 3: Covers the foundational cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin and Ethereum – in detail, and provides example use cases in Finance, Social, Culture etc. It also covers the moral case for cryptocurrencies, and explains new concepts such as NFTs, DAOs and what the hell are LPs?

Part 4: Explores future scenarios of adoption and how cryptocurrencies play into the global currency arena, with some possible future scenarios.

I would be thrilled if you gave your email and joined me on this journey to ‘Understanding Crypto’ better.

Last rest for my Mom, Heidi

It has been a challenging past year, a challenging past few months, with no event more challenging for me personally than the passing of my Mom, our Famo – Heidi Engström.

We gathered on July 29th 2024, with a small group of family by Esbo Domkyrka, where we lay her to final rest. Her brother Kurt Röholm and her mother Lempi Engström are buried in the same grave.

While words can feel inadequate in times like these, here are the words I spoke:

We gather here today to give her final rest, and to remember the life of Heidi, our dearest Mom, our kindest Famo.

Who in life gave so much of her time, her effort so that we could all have better lives.

She showed us how to raise a family, even when she was by herself in the difficult years after the divorce – her number 1 priority was always us, the kids.

And we know that she could be difficult in getting things her way – “ta nu lite mera mat” .🙂. We remember the way she’d say your name “Oskar..Måste du nu… Ville, snälla..”

She had many ways of expressing her love for us: all the blueberry pie, the meatballs & mash, all the veggies and fruits she’d serve – was one way.

She showed her love for nature: tending gardens, picking up trash wherever she went.

Showed her love for family and friends by being very social, remembering everyone’s birthdays and name days.

She is not here with us today in her physical form, but I wish, so hard, that wherever she is now, that she’s happy and at peace.

But I know that us being here together, doing small good things to make the world a better place, that would make her happy for sure.

We love you Famo, älskar dig Mamma, Rest in Peace

My grandpa – Vaari

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, my Dad’s dad – my grandpa Vaari loomed as a large figure in my life. He had steely gray hair, always a ramrod straight back and blue-gray eyes that could pierce your soul.

He was born in 1910, when Finland was still under Russian rule, and he had become an officer in the Finnish army in the 1930s. When Finland was attacked by Russia in 1939, he was sent to the front. He was promoted to Major during the war – leading a signaling battalion, and eventually after the war to a Colonel.

When he met me he’d try out how strong I had become. He would squeeze my little hand, and see if I could make his hand hurt or see if I could stand him pinching my wrist.. I don’t ever remember seeing any reflection, any pain in his demeanor – but it was all done in a joking manner, and I have a sense that this was as much tenderness that he could muster, as much that he could allow himself to show.

In the mid-80s we’d spend summers together at country places on some island outside of Helsinki, and my grandpa, my cousin Jonni and I were the permanent inhabitants of these country houses. We’d arrive in June, when the Finnish seawater could still be around 12C and there’d be a chilly wind, spend long glorious summer days there, and we’d leave in early August when the weather would start to cool again.

Jonni and I would spend the days roaming in the forests, shooting bows and arrows, stealing some cigarettes when we could and have a bunch of fun. Our main duties consisted of helping Vaari with his fishing, which he took with utmost seriousness. We’d also cook together, but that was clearly less important to Vaari.

During the day Vaari would prepare the nets or the traps, and in the evening Jonni or I would row out together with Vaari to place the traps. Vaari would be very concentrated on getting the traps in the right positions, and would bark quiet orders to us if we didn’t row the boat to his high standards.

Early in the morning – around 6AM – we’d row out and pick up the traps to see what we’d gotten. Most mornings it was so still and quiet that you could hear the seabirds, hear the fishes splashing, and it felt like nothing else existed in the world.

In the evenings we would always heat up the sauna to a good 80C-90C, and jump in the sea between rounds of sauna. The smell of the wood-burning stove and the vihta (ask me if you don’t know..) are still imprinted in my mind.

As we got older – around 14, 15 we started to get curious about how things had been in the war – after all he’d spent four years at the front, as a commanding officer, so he must have seen some gory stuff? However whenever we’d ask, he’d deflect the question, and eventually go back to his tasks and his fishing gear.

I don’t really have an answer for why he didn’t want to talk about the war, only to say that perhaps he felt it was best to not dig into painful things that happened a long time ago. The thing that concerns me is seeing world events these days – knowing that the generation of my Grandpa has largely left this world, we could be careening towards bigger confrontations as the world is splitting into the blocks of the West (US, EU etc..) and the East (China, Russia, Iran etc..).

Today I remember my Vaari, and wish that he was here – so we could go fishing, and like him focus on taking care our families and this Earth.

And to remind this generation’s leaders of what happened 80 years ago, when nationalistic fervor gripped the moods, and too few people stood up for peace.

Peace,

Oskar

Lessons from “GenAI for developers” course by Google

I just finished the Google Cloud Skills path called “Generative AI for developers” and I wanted to write down some of the main lessons and impressions I had.

Overall I think the lessons were well-thought out, aimed at an intermediate audience like me, and I learned a lot about the various Google tools (here’s my cert). However there were also some technology snags along the way that detracted from the experience.

Main topics of the course

The topics in the course are the following:

Introduction to Image Generation – with an Intro video + quiz re: how diffusion models are used for image generation
Attention Mechanism – Intro video + quiz re: how attention mechanisms work, and can be used for a variety of tasks from text summarization to translation
Encoder – Decoder Architecture – Intro video, Jupyter Lab (Python code) walkthrough + quiz re: how encoder – decoder works, and can be used in sequence to sequence tasks such as text summarization, Q&A, translation etc
Transformer models and BERT – Intro video, Jupyter Lab walkthrough + quiz re: main components of the Transformer architecture and the self-attention mechanism
Create Image Captioning models – Intro video, Jupyter Lab walkthrough + quiz re: how do use deep learning to create Image captions
Introduction to Generative AI Studio – Intro video + quiz regarding Vertex AI for customizing and prototyping Generative AI models.
Generative AI explorer – A set of labs using Jupyter Notebooks to explore different GenAI models, and try out prompting tools and various parameters (see below)
Explore and Evaluate Models using Model Garden – Using Vertex AI to try out different Foundation Models, tools and parameters (see below)
Prompt Design using Palm – How to design good prompts, setting restrictions and interacting with Palm 2, that has detailed reasoning, language and coding capabilities (see below).

Generative AI explorer – with Vertex AI

The lessons that I liked the most were using different examples to teach how to use the models in different use cases. Everything was run on Google Vertex AI – which is a unified AI platform, that allows you to:

Select from 100+ foundation models in the Model Garden
Try out code snippets with JupyterLab in the Workbench
Access every model with a simple API call
Train and deploy models to Production

Text generation examples

You can test any of the Text generation models by selecting the model in the top right dropdown. You specify the context (prompt) for the model, and provide input/ output examples if you prefer. Giving no examples is called zero-shot prompting, giving a few examples is called few shot prompting, which for most use cases is the better alternative.

Pressing the ‘Get code’ button also top right gives you the code snippets you need to connect to the selected model in your Google Cloud project:

Chat model examples

Under the Language models you can customize & test the foundation models e.g for customer service or support use cases. Some key parameters include:

Temperature: A lower temperature of say 0, 0.1 are better when factual, true or false responses are required. A higher temperature say 0.6 to 1 will give more imaginative answers, but will also increase the risk of the model hallucinating.
Token limit: Determines the maximum number of text output from one prompt, with one token equal to roughly four characters.
Safety Settings: You can define how strict the model responses are regarding potentially harmful content, such as hate speech, sexual content or harassment.

Codey – code generation, chat and completion

You can select between different code engines based on your use case:

Codey for Code Generation (6k or 32k token limit). Takes your natural language input and generates the requested code – example below:
Codey for Code Chat (6k or 32k token limit) – model chatbot fine tuned for helping with code related questions.
Codey for Code Completion – model fine tuned to suggest code based on the context, code already written.

Exploring the Model Garden

In the Model Garden you can try out different Foundation models such as:

Gemini Pro – e.g. for text summarization, text generation, entity recognition, sentiment analysis and more.
Gemini Pro Vision (Multimodal) – e.g. for visual understanding, classification, summarization and processing visual inputs such as photos, video, documents, infographics etc.
Claude 2: a leading LLM from Anthropic – similar to Gemini Pro
Llama 2: Open Source LLM released by Facebook / Meta that is fine-tunable to your use case/ domain.

There are over 100+ models to date, however the main drawback of note is that the Fine Tunable models (except for LLAMA2 and Falcon) are mostly just related to classification or vision detection/ classification.

Prompt Design

Some of the prompting lessons here:

Be concise
Be specific and well-defined
Ask for one task at a time
Improve response quality by including examples (few shot)
Use a Dare prompt – Determine Appropriate Response (DARE) prompt, which uses the LLM itself to decide whether it should answer a question based on what its mission is. Meaning that you send the regular prompt / context first, followed by the Dare prompt to verify that the output generated matches the mission.

Most of the example Jupyter Notebooks in the course can be found on Github here.

Conclusion

Overall I think the course teaches the material well – I liked the hands on Jupyter Notebooks better than the video + quiz sections as it’s easier to learn with concrete examples.

I’m most impressed by is the completeness of the Google Vertex AI platform, and I feel that I have a good basis to use the platform independently today.

Why provide liquidity?

Have you ever wondered how some crypto sites can offer ludicrous APRs? Here’s a short primer to dive in – and as this is a primer, some concepts/ background are edited for clarity.

Some of the most promising sites/ tech in DeCentralized Finance (DeFi) are DEXs. A DEX (decentralized exchange) facilitates trading round the clock, every day of the year, without requiring a username or password. You retain custody of your crypto on your own cold wallet hardware (say Ledger or Trezor). Once the transaction is recorded on the blockchain the ownership/ settling of the asset is done automatically – there is no T+2 settlement like in TradFI (Traditional Finance).

Let’s use GMX (on Arbitrum / Avalanche) as an example – if you want to swap say your ETH to USDC, you go to the Trade page and execute your trade just like you would on a centralized exchange:

Now, you may ask yourself – all these centralized exchanges (Coinbase, Binance, Nasdaq, NYSE, GS dark pools etc) – how do they make money? Well, they make their money on trading – pairing Bob who wants to buy ETH for $2000 from Alice, and charging a fee (price difference or transaction fee) for the service.

Imagine that all for example ETH owners, including Bob, could “Pool” their ETH (in a Liquidity Pool), allowing them to earn fees on ETH trades. Essentially the ETH is placed in a ‘vault’ or smart contract that pools your ETH with other DeFi users. Then you as a “Liquidity Provider / LP” earn a good chunk of the fee revenue that accrues to the pool – as a percentage of your ownership in the pool.

Throughout history a centralized/ third party has earned these fees. With DeFi you still custody the assets (you are the only one with the private keys). This is at the core of DeCentralized Finance – getting rid of the intermediaries, and allowing the actual owners of the assets to benefit.

So what kind of rates can earn in these pools? On GMX V2 pools today:

And we’ve heard Ethereum transactions are expensive right? GMX runs on Arbitrum – an ETH Layer 2, and transactions are normally 10c-20c… (and will get cheaper..).

Remember these are new technologies, where some sites/ users have been hacked, you take on smart contract risk, risk of owning the crypto asset etc, but it’s not ‘Fake SBF / Terra Luna’ yield, it is native yield based on fee generation. Always do your due diligence on the sites you use – personally I prefer the larger DeFi sites with a higher TVL (total value locked), higher revenues, clear open-source code on Github for all key functionalities etc…

Finally – this is NOT financial advice, be careful out there 🙂

Taylor Swift – charting a Community-Centered Music Revolution

Introduction

Taylor Swift isn’t just a music icon; she’s also on the front lines of changing how stars and fans connect. She’s created a passionate community, taken on big music companies, all while being aligned ethically with what’s called Web 3 – let’s dive in how…

Building a Fan Family

Taylor’s fans, the “Swifties,” aren’t just cheering from the sidelines; they’re part of the conversation. She talks to them straight through social media, not just to share music news but to get their take on things, too. Swift’s approach to engaging with her community directly, without going through traditional media or platforms that might act as intermediaries, also aligns with the Web 3 principle of decentralization. This creates a tight-knit fan club – whereas Web 3 technologies can provide the tools for online communities to decide how they want to govern themselves, how the community is built etc.

Cutting Out the Middleman

Taylor’s bold move to re-record her old songs is a game-changer. It’s her way of taking back control and getting closer to her fans without the music industry’s big players calling the shots. In 2019, Swift spoke out against the acquisition of her master recordings by Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings as part of its deal with Big Machine Records. She emphasized the importance of artists owning their masters to control their work’s usage and financial benefits. It’s similar to what Web 3 wants to do—cutting out the unnecessary middleman and letting creators sell their art to their most hard-core fans. Imagine owning an NFT, that for example gives access to alternative versions of songs, or allows the owner to receive a share of the song’s royalties.

Music for Everyone

Swift’s ethical alignment with Web 3 is underscored by her advocacy for artist rights and fair compensation. Her public battles against inequitable streaming revenues and ownership rights echo the Web 3 emphasis on fair value distribution and transparency. For example in 2014, she removed her entire catalog from Spotify, protesting against its streaming royalties’ distribution model. In the Web 3 world, smart contracts on blockchain platforms could ensure artists receive their due share without the opacity that sometimes shrouds the financial flows of the music industry, or could allow the platforms themselves to be owned by the artists and fans.

Advocating for Fellow Artists

In 2015, Swift wrote an open letter to Apple Music, criticizing their policy not to pay artists during the service’s free three-month trial period. Apple reversed its policy following Swift’s letter, agreeing to pay artists even during the trial. This action reflected a Web 3-type advocacy for transparent and fair compensation models that benefit all stakeholders.

Avoiding scalpers

With tickets to concerts often costing $1000’s of dollars due to scalpers, blockchain-based systems can enforce identity verification and purchase limits at the point of sale. Smart contracts can be programmed to allow only verified users to purchase tickets and limit the number of tickets each user can buy. This reduces the likelihood that scalpers can buy large quantities of tickets for resale at inflated prices.

Challenges to Think About

The music industry is deeply entrenched in its ways, and a single artist, irrespective of their influence, can face significant hurdles in changing the system. Additionally, the Web 3 space is still in its infancy, and its principles, technologies are yet to be tested at scale, especially in creative industries.

Conclusion

Taylor Swift is not just writing anthems for generations but also rewriting the rulebook on how artists and communities interact in the digital age. She’s showing us a peek into a future where music and the internet can be a place where everyone wins, with artists in charge of their own music and fans getting front-row seats to the show.

Thanks for reading,

Oskar

On Recovery and Lessons – Oct 2023

Hey, thank you for reading today. This post will summarize the aftermath, the lessons that I’m drawing from my 2nd cardiac event that occurred on Wed Sep 20th, 2023.

On Recovery

This time around the healing has been centered around healing from the trauma of the events, where my heart was shocked back into life repeatedly on Sep 20th, 2023.
It feels as if the CNS (central nervous system) is still very raw. As an example on Friday we were out at a noisy restaurant – first time since the 2nd incident. Suddenly I felt like a lightning bolt of fear ran from my neck down my spine. It was the reptilian/ CNS part (fight or flight) trying to protect me from further trauma/ injury.
In the week after the event there were nights that I could not fall asleep at all. It felt as if my body was on high alert, for any signs of ‘wrongness, illness’, a constant scanning of threats. It is now early October, and it feels like the highest stress days/ weeks are behind me, but the events still linger in the background.

On lessons

The overriding importance of focusing on the present, versus spending so much head-space on thinking about the future, scenarios, wishing etc. Yes there is a time to plan, a time to dream – but most of the time that will just be a waste, something that draws you away from the only thing that really ever exists: the present.
The importance of the core relationships for me: My wife, my son, my daughter. My family, close friends, my extended family. I want to build on relationships, make existing ones stronger, and nurture new relationships where they feel right.
All the BS falling away about making more money, and becoming a big success in society. Yes we need the money to support our family, but it should not be at the cost of spending time with family, at the cost of your health.

On things that have helped me

Writing these blog posts have helped me tell the story – mostly to myself – about how the events happened, to give them perspective, and through that give me distance from the events.
Thinking about myself as a survivor, rather than a victim of these events. In the beginning I would think ‘why did this happen to me, I’ve lived healthy’ however with time I’ve been able to become more accepting of where I am in the journey of recovery, of life.
Twice daily meditation – 10-15 minutes, morning and evening with the Calm app. Especially the meditations on Loving Kindness and anxiety relief, as well as having a ‘rain sound’ on when trying to fall asleep. I feel concretely the level of anxiety in my body is lower after a meditation session.

We are all works in progress, learning new things as long as we’re alive, and I wish you dear reader a peaceful, calm day wherever you are on your journey.

My ICD saved my life

It was the morning of Wednesday Sep 20th 2023, and we’d gone out for a walk with Jolene at 7.25AM. I had eaten my breakfast (yogurt, chia seeds, flaxseed, blueberries) and taken my morning medicine of metoprolol – a beta blocker, and a baby aspirin. After the heart episode in Finland, these were the medications ascribed to me.

I had regularly felt a pain in the chest/ thyroid – about 5-7 minutes into starting a walk/ exercise, and I had equated it with the beta blocker medicine (metoprolol) kicking in to do its job. I’d take a pause, breathe and after a minute or so the symptoms would go away. We’d walked about 10 minutes or half-way when the symptoms kicked in.

This time the chest pain got worse and worse, until I felt the ICD (intra cardiac defibrillator) kick in. It felt like my whole body was jolted. However the ICD did its job, and my heart rate returned to normal.

The ambulance showed up quickly, and the EMTs were able to confirm my heart was back in sinus rhythm, my EKG was normal. I did feel a little shaky still so we took it slow and drove ourselves to the closest ER/ hospital – at Baycare Countryside.

In the ER

In the ER the staff took us in and did some basic EKG, bloodwork etc. Jolene was with me the whole time, and we held hands as we discussed. Around 9.30AM we started discussing a topic that caused me some distress, and I could feel the familiar chest tightness, and heart racing symptoms start again.

The ICD fired three times, and brought my heart rate back to sinus. I only felt two of the ICD jolts, but each threw my body in the air with the kick.

At this time the staff put me on an Amiodarone drip, and transferred me to the Intensive Cardiac Unit. The next 24h-48h were very stressful, filled with anxiety as I wondered how my heart would perform, whether I would get shocked again.

Medications

Now armed with the additional information we had about the chest pain, Dr Hazlitt – an electro-physiological cardiologist, together with Dr Bruno (internal medicine) put me on two different medications: 800 mg Amiodarone to keep the heart rate down, and avoid fibrillation, and 4 pills of Imdur (Isosorbide dinitrate), which is used to prevent chest pain (angina) caused by vasospasm. It works by relaxing and widening blood vessels so blood can flow more easily to the heart.

The flowchart of issues as we can best tell today is:

I was released from the hospital on Saturday September 23rd, starting another journey of recovery. Even though my body felt battered, and scarred – I felt like a survivor, some-one that had gone through some traumatic sh*t. I’m hoping this tale can be informative and helpful to others who are going through similar or other difficult circumstances. I will write more about the recovery and lessons in an upcoming post.

Peace & Love.

Oskar

Recovery and lessons August 2023

As I was dis-charged from the hospital, we’d arranged for the kids to fly home by themselves, and we’d stay in Finland with Jolene until I’d have permission to fly. I started to direct my energy towards recovering, both physically and mentally.

I was very happy that we got to see Ville & family, Mom, uncle Lasse & his family. We met most of my Finland friends (Peter + Erika, Björn + Kati, Basse + Virpi and Lasse) for a great, close-knit dinner at restaurant Kuu – before flying off back to Tampa on August 12th, 2023.

Something that I’d not considered before – was the many different types of recovery that needed to happen:

Recovering from the electro-physiological (EP) exam included not stretching the groin area in order not to open up the wound in the femoral artery. The EP exam itself was very stressful in that the doctors essentially stress-test your heart to try to replicate the V-fib (ventricular fibrillation) conditions, so my heart rate was between 30BPM to 330BPM, and you feel like you are reliving the traumatic event.
Recovering from the surgery to install the ICD – Intra Cardiac Defibrillator, which sits above the left pectoral muscle. The surgery itself was carried out while I was awake, and I was discharged from the hospital the next day. I was instructed not to raise my left arm above 90 degrees and not put strain on it for some weeks.
Recovering from the mental, psychological stresses of having been so close to dying. In hind-sight these have been some of the most difficult aspects.
Dealing with the uncertainty of not knowing what caused the Ventricular fibrillation to occur.
The uncertainty of not knowing how much the entire hospital stay, and all procedures were going to cost.

However as we got back to Tampa, as the weeks progressed, I started feeling better and was able to start slowly exercising again – initially just stretching, but working my way up with lighter weights and less strenuous cardio like walking, and eventually Zone 2 cardio. Unfortunately I was also sometimes feeling pain in the throat (thyroid) and chest pain, however I assumed it was part of the medication (beta-blocker) side effects..

I started talking to a therapist about all the events, the stressful things that were bothering me. The therapist recommended that I write letters to Sam, to Kate, to Jolene about these events, how much they meant to me, and how much I still wanted to do together with them. Especially the letter to Sam felt very meaningful as I genuinely think that he saved my life with his actions. Overall it feels like we’ve become closer as a family, and Jolene as ever is my partner, my rock, my love. I am also so thankful to Ville who really stepped up during this difficult time. I also wrote a letter to my Dad, hoping to get closer to him. I’ve invited Dad over to Florida to see his older son, his grand-children – and I hope he follows-through.

I returned to work on August 14th, 2023, which in hind-sight probably was too early. Even though my work is fun, intellectually challenging most days – I’ve in particular enjoyed the building aspects – there are stressful days/ events as well.

I’d become a hugger, I no longer wondered if it’s OK to hug, I was hugging friends and family more than ever before. I’d become more emotional, and was crying in random movies or listening to music. I’ve become much more cognizant of the briefness of this human life, and what a fool I was to think I could know how long I would live. Even though heavy emotionally, these factors felt that they were helping me mend psychologically.

Practical advice that I’ve learned the hard way:

If you go out to exercise, bring a friend or family member – it just might save your life.
If you have things you need to tell some-one – do it today, give them a call – you don’t know if you’ll get another chance.
If you feel something is wrong, speak up and tell a doctor, get the symptoms checked out.

As we shall see in the next post, this story continues..

The day I almost died

This is the story of the day I almost died, and how I’m so grateful today to be writing about the event instead.

I’m a 49 year old Dad, IT professional and athlete, living in Tampa Bay, Florida. I’ve generally been healthy all my life, and as written about in my health test, I thought I was doing well.

In July 2023 we came to Helsinki, Finland to spend our vacation, to visit our family and friends. We had Penny & Liam with us, and every-one was excited about visiting Finland/Sweden and in general spend time with family & friends.

On Wednesday July 26th, we spent the day doing sauna, cold water swimming and eating Nepalese food. On Thursday July 27th 2023 – we’d decided with Sam and Liam to go jogging/ workout, so I woke up the boys and we headed out after having a small glass of water to drink.

I felt fine, except some carby bloat from the Nepalese food. Otherwise I was in excellent shape for a 49-year old (or so I thought). We jogged down the slope to Mannerheimintie, I suddenly started feeling unwell and passed out. This has been told to me later:

EVENT

Sam notices me collapse on the ground, panics and then quickly alerts a bystander to call an ambulance. He tells Liam to run to get everyone else.

I’ve been hit with ventricular fibrillation, which reduces the heart to a quivering mass of jelly, unable to pump blood. VF leads to Sudden Cardiac Death, with a mortality rate of 95% after 15 min without resuscitation. As I’m convulsing on the ground, start foaming from the mouth, Sam and the bystander start to perform CPR/ chest compressions. Minutes tick by like an eternity.

The ambulance arrives, and the Emergency medics rush to the scene. They assess the situation and give an electric shock which resets the electrical circuits in the heart. I’d spent about 10 minutes in V-Fib. I’m rushed to the hospital, in a state of shock and confusion. After a couple of hours my state is better, the confusion is lifting, and I’m able to see my family again. I spend 24h in the Cardiac Intensive Care unit, unable to sleep with the noise and beeping around me. I feel scared and anxious as I’m not sure if I will wake up if I fall asleep.

AFTER

The evening of the event the cardiac surgeon performed an angiogram, and found only mild changes related to coronary artery disease, but nothing that would explain the cardiac event.

An MRI was performed on Monday July 31st – with no indications of root cause. On Wednesday August 2nd, a electro- physiological stress test was performed on my heart – also here the heart performed well. This test though is no walk in the park – as you are given electrical shocks and chemicals to your heart, and it feels as if you are relieving the event all over again.

I was also given a neuro-psychiatric evaluation, and thankfully no loss of function/memory/ability was found.

Finally on Thursday August 3rd, an ICD (Intra Cardiac Defibrillator) was operated into my chest. The ICD monitors the heart rate, and in case the heart goes into fibrillation again, the ICD can give an electric shock to reset the heart. I was shell-shocked, very raw emotionally, but at the same time so grateful to Sam, to my family, to the first responders etc.

There are many lessons, and a journey to recovery from this, that I’ll write about in the next post.