It has been almost two years since POUNDS TRANSFORMATION invited my company to transform their kitchen in Glastonbury, CT, USA into a revolutionary extended reality (XR) space. We added a brand new solution - for the grown-ups who feel like they have tried EVERYTHING - to maintain a body shape they like. We added Virtual Reality (VR) tele-medicine and built them a smartphone app (Augmented Reality). We made some very interesting strides towards their patient’s goals and heart health improvement...(read the user story here or check out this video)

That also means it has been over a year since Dr. Charles Cavo, DO brought to my attention that, what I wrote about in my book, The Sindy Project addressing gamification and the art of collaboration, could be applied to his medical practice, and sustainable weight loss. Published in 2018, I knew that we needed apps to integrate XR tools such as the iWatch, Oculus headset and 3D printers with Machine Learning. We must re-dimensional-ize all the digital flat screens we are using today. Dr Cavo applied the tech to more than just zoom fatigue but to tele-medicine post-pandemic, to engage his patients in their health and wellness between visits.

I just imagined turning a Broadway musical into a world where we could walk amongst the actors and once we reached this capability, I assume that not too long later, humans won’t distinguish between the two “realities” because the proscenium between audience and stage will not exist. Think of how Spider Man is Peter Parker and Tom Holland at the same time and they are also in an old-school “movie” sometimes and also in a massive-online role playing game with you live anytime you want. I was stunned that my apps could be applied to solve my own greatest pitfall, maintaining my weight.

Since I saw y’all last, I drove across the United States of America with Reuben Steiger. Do you know him? We went to high school together and, because Princeton High is such a progressive edu and the adults that raise kids there are so intellectually curious, I attended high school with some very interesting folks (click to read my comparison of 3 that became ROCK STARS). These kids from my middle school choir got into fantastic endeavors as adults. There are too many examples to name. Many are serious intellectuals and Reuben is a prime example.

I hold my own in this world because I am a visual learner. Since I was very young, and, still to this day, I have seen objects and concepts materialize around us in real time. When I read a screenplay, I see the scenes as the audience will eventually. I can literally see every house my Dad and I moved into while he was divorcing my Mom and remarrying Kathi; and when it comes to food and other triggers, I feel like I am playing Rock Band, Beat Saber and Fruit Ninjas simultaneously and the pizza place is shifting itself in front of my path and hurling a chicken parm in my direction.

I went to fat camp in 4th AND 8th grade. Being metabolically challenged is a given for me so using the “metaverse” to take the weight off again has to be either funny or tragic.

Charles Kirby, pictured here before and after Camp Kingsmont.

That’s me right before I went to middle school. I promise you that is the same kid only 8 weeks apart. Look at the confidence improvement, let alone the reduction in pear-shape-ness. Spoiler Alert: I gained the weight right back, poured in humility but retained some of the confidence. And then 4 years later my parents sent me BACK there. Again I ran in circles on a dusty road but the second time I got to actually hook-up with girls and I starred as Oscar in a fantastic version of The Odd Couple (I remember being excited to eat the plate of spaghetti). I was attractive at fat camp because my body shame was normalized there.

Since fat camp, the second time, I have lost and gained over +30% of my Body Mass (BMI) on three occasions: once while I was living in Europe after college (22yo), again when my twins were little (34yo), and thirdly in order to convince my orthopedic surgeon to replace my right knee (46yo). And now I am 53yo and down -12% into my fourth “successful” attack to improve my heart health. This time I am doing it with these new XR tools and I want to share how you might benefit from these as well. But first I ask myself, what did I learn the first three times? And how about the 100 times I thought I was on the right track only to find myself unable to sustain the weight loss?

What’s your takeaway of this rollercoaster epidemic of obesity I am on? Are you on it too? Reach out in the comments below or anywhere you find ChuckieJabba.NYC out there. And if you do find me, you will learn that there is another difference in this 4th cycle of my life as a big man. I now have a crazy data point I cannot ignore from when I died briefly, September 3, 2022, in the desert outside Reno, Nevada and I also wrote this piece. My story is not done so I don’t know my own assessment, I would love to know your take. So...

…back to Reuben Steiger. He came out of John Witherspoon Middle School and choose to apply his talents to building the Metaverse and he is XR Famous (extended reality). He was an early evangelist at Second Life and when we ran into each other last June he screeched to a halt outside my Mom’s house, rolled down his car window and said, “I have been thinking about you a lot.” After I realized the magnitude of his foray, I felt the import of his compliment.

A month later we got in my SUV and headed to DWeb Camp in the Redwood Forest of Northern California because Reuben said,

“DWeb Camp is where the cool people go before they go to Burning Man”

— Reuben Steiger

Jewel and Charles are speaking at the same conference March 3-5, 2023 in Philadelphia! Register NOW and read to the end of this story to find the PROMO CODE

I fully believe Reuben is at a different point than of me place & time. We are the same age but his ability to extend reality along the unseen Z-axis in addition to his spirituality AND his attitude, means that he functions on many planes at once. And since we agree that Einstein is right about Space Time Relativity AND that The Singularity has already passed, THEN Reuben’s Metaverse Commons is crucial to the future success of humans, nature and collaboration. When we got in the car together, I did not know how civilization and society related to the Commons. I grasped as he talked that it is the concept that all members of a society share ownership of air, water and the town square. And that the Tragedy of the Commons was written around the time he and I were born, identifying that if humans continued to compete to herd our own stuff, we would implode. I saw clearly by the time we reached Pittsburgh that history is repeating itself and that our GenX has perpetuated systemic problems.

Reuben has a clear idea of how to build out the rules of the town square when it exists only digitally (or something like that..ask him). But the cool part of the car ride is that , if we began to triangulate these concepts into a dimensional, pyramid of action, there is the opportunity to solve the largest problems of our time such as climate change, school shootings and obesity.

We stopped along the way, sold art to pay for gas, sang Jackson5 songs with bikers in Gary, Indiana and threw a few punches at each other and when he got out of the car in San Fransisco, I was happily on my own (see pics of it all below, follow our trip through my vlog or subscribe to Reuben’s excellent Substack Fellow Travelers). I pulled into the DWeb camp-ground alone, nervous and excited for the long weekend of post-pandemic in-person networking with Silicon Valley’s best and breathing the fresh air of Northern California.

The decentralized web is an important part of this story and a necessary aspect of any real solutions to these huge issues. That week in the forest, I learned that The Blockchain (which we built into my apps in order to stop the Deep Fake in Healthcare) was just the tip of the Web3 iceberg. I also met some amazing, West-Coast, trippy individuals who have known way before the Trump Administration about the evils of Web2 and it’s centralization (think Cambridge Analytica and Elon Musk carrying an actual kitchen sink into Twitter). Humans such as Bruster Kahle and Kaliya “Identity Woman” Young have been planning, pleading and building ideas, community and legislation for years. Significant people such as Noah Robinson who I ran into at dawn in the bathroom as he was was making a Go Fund Me to build water sculptures on the moon and Internet Archive superwoman Krupa Shinde. She and I bonded quickly and even shared our challenges with maintaining our weight and idealized how XR tools could help. She sees how decentralizing our medical care is on the list of systemic, institutionalized markets that are ripe for disruption. I also had the opportunity to feel how a conference can be decentralized and can spin out of control. This felt chaotic to me. I learned the hard way that DWeb was an Un-conference which I did not know was a “thing” (see my presentation as an example of the vibe). By the end I was raging.

Ignatius Jacques Reilly is something of a modern Don Quixote—eccentric, idealistic, and creative, sometimes to the point of delusion.

So I left and, following the cool people, I headed to Burning Man. Do you know the story of Ignatius J. Reilly? Just when I was beginning to think I was Jack Kerouac On the Road, I sat in the lobby of a Homestead Suites with Mark Kramer and his sister. His home was destroyed months earlier in a hurricane fire and the insurance company refused to pay for replacement; but they were paying for him to live in the hotel. He wanted to talk to an interesting human and so did I (more here if interested). We listened to each other’s story. He moved downtown in New York City a few years before I headed there in the 90s and he played in a punk band. He hates technology and likes people so he was skeptical about my current business venture with SindyXR, but he listened. And I was skeptical he would ever get FEMA or the homeowners insurance policy to pay out, but I was hopeful. He brought my attention to a famous fictional character that I was unaware of, Ignatius J. Reilly. Since I couldn’t find an audiobook, I haven’t ‘read’ it yet. But what I did grasp was that Mark saw me as a flawed adventurer, a bumbling oaf tilting at windmills.

I have been called a delusional optimist a few times before so, maybe, if the shoe fits, then I’m Cinderella…no, sorry, I mean Ignatius. When I googled it I see Nick Offerman played him on stage at The Huntington and I love him (but when I couldn’t remember Nick’s name I “fat guy from parks&rec - you see where my mind was going with this?). Mark meant the comment about my Ignatius-esque thought process and the things I have produced as a compliment, but, as a person of morbid obesity (as defined by the CDC), you’ll see the insult. The disheveled genius. Do you hear it? If you have the same deep-seeded body shame and less-than-exorbitant self-esteem, you feel it too.

This is the part where it all ties together for me.

If I am a smooth blend of out-of-the-box thinking with bull-in-the-china shop physical manifestation then it is OBVIOUS that the tools of spacial computing are re-defining the neural pathways that make me feel bad. If I am able to get the same serotonin rush from Ozempic instead of McDonald’s then maybe I can keep the weight off this time.

All we have to do to solve the obesity crisis for GenZ and my progeny is to move everything to a place where their body is not the first thing people see/judge. An idyllic place where the context of every interaction comes along with a choice, dare I say a smart contract! Where individuals, small and very large groups can seamlessly integrate all of the dynamics of current life into a continuous state-of-flow. They can instantly agree to a set of parameters every time they enter a new time space continuum with other avatars/humans. The ability to allow consent and choice of how and when we talk, touch and think.

And this technology already exists!

Even Mark Zuckerberg can find his address in the Metaverse. Even JP Morgan is worried about ChatGPT as it demonstrates the power of Machine Learning and UnitedHealthcare is reimbursing for wearables. My Digital Twin is playing my app Check Yo Self! while I sleep.

The failure is that when I went down with a heart arrhythmia, I didn’t have a chance to log into my Northwell Health Patient-Portal before I passed out, so the amazing humans that brought me back to life didn’t know who I was or what medication I was on. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining but, it’s what happened next that I have a plan to improve because it has taken a lot of wasted time to get the team all on the same page.

So I am starting with my doctors as the beginning of this revolution. I need to own my own medical data, understanding deeper how my pancreas relates to my cholesterol AND integrates my mental wellness in real time. This is the only way I see to live going forward. If I can be SHOWN the many aspects of the problem, this will change the way I relate to the information. If I can hands on in building the solution, then I will own it. I need to have increased presence and have agency over the domain, rather than feel like Taco Bell is in charge.

Losing weight is the most dynamic of challenges. It takes some of the most difficult character traits for me to summon such as consistency and belief. This journey has hurt me so badly in the past, and, the world around me is so intricately designed for me to inject more corn syrup in my veins, that it is going to take a strategy new to me but maybe a strategy understood by you? At lest you not forget that, every time humans go through this cycle, our hormones and metabolism are slower than the last time we tried.

Since I lived, I have a new list of requirements to begin:

My physicians, coaches and family each need to have an on/off switch imbedded on their foreheads that I can reach out to get the inspiration I need at precisely the moment I need it
AND
I need to be able to duck the triggers they have the tendency to throw at me. I must wear always wear my brass bracelets to deflect, have my magic lasso to pull in the good vibes, access my forcefield at will and jump into my invisible jet quickly to get to a safe space. My avatar is Lynda Carter.

This is my car with a layer of dust it took an industrial car wash to remove.

The Nevada desert looks like a flat ski resort when the wind blows and visibility is severely limited. I walked around for three or four days at Burning Man. I don’t really remember a lot of it and I remember some of it better than I want to. The first night I got way out on The Playa. If you look at the map of Burning Man you realize it is a city of rippling streets that cascade out towards the Man in the shape of a clock and everyone talks about location as time.

And so I had walked from my car thru Center Camp, under the Cricket, passed The Man and to the Temple. I wrote my ex-wife’s name and address on the wall but I didn’t get to see it burn. And I kept going. It’s far and I had not walked this far since the cartilage in my knees disappeared 15 years ago. But I felt compelled, so I kept walking.

And there was a weird vibe out there in what they call Deep Playa. People were remarkably selfish about resources. It was like we on Naked & Afraid with no camera crew. I was oddly embarrassed about my naiveté to be there without provisions. I met a ton of sweet talkin’ hippies but did not take any drugs. I finally got a ride with a boat and helped them perform a marriage ceremony. I danced as the sun went down at a kickin’ Black Lives Matter party.

It got really dark in the desert. I feel like a fool for not knowing these “realities”

And then I walked all the way back. I honestly don’t know how long it took. I played on lots of the art/sculptures but didn’t feel transported or transcendent. At one point I wandered into a tent and they draped lights on my shoulders so I wouldn’t get hit by vehicles flying by. I found my car, pulled my cot out and created a tent off the back. I have slept with a C-PAP machine for decades to keep from dying every night. In order to power the machine without the battery, I leave the car on. In the forest where I usually camp out, I sleep in front of the car so when I wake up throughout the night to start the car, I am not near the exhaust. Because the sand storm was so bad, I needed the tarp and couldn’t get it to work off the engine, so, maybe that added to my arrhythmia?

The second day, I stayed in the named streets. I stayed inside tents and followed the map from one bar to another. I ate and drank with some of the most progressive, innovative organizations and the people who built Black Rock City. Most of them had built this city many times before. It was such a density of ideas and characters that I felt boring. But I kept up the conversations, learned a lot and taught a bit about the impending metaverse and how I see it. The second night is fuzzy, I don’t think I made it back to the car.

The third day is just a series of images in my mind less clear than most of my dreams. It was like a wonderful, haunted house where everyone offered me a sticker and I want to stress, I did not get high off anything but life. I am often in a heightened state of awareness and don’t need to go further into my reality distortion field with hallucinogens. I am not against it, I just didn’t do anything but beef jerky and coffee at Burning Man. Sure, I may have had a contact high or had carbon monoxide poisoning but the next thing I remember I was shocked awake by the defibrillator implanted in my chest cavity with electrical leads that lead down into my heart.

This is my cup of water in front of one of my fav sculptures at Burning Man so I don’t think I died of dehydration and my ateries and valves were “remarkably clear for a person of my size”

The staff at the superior Renoun Health Center cheered as I jolted on the table. They called me Antler73 because they had no idea who I was. They did a full tox screen and ran cameras up into my heart and could not offer a clear reason that my heart raced so that day. In Nevada they are required by law to provide me with an itemized bill and that is a remarkable dataset. Eventually one of my friends called my cell and my amazing girlfriend was in the hospital room before I even knew where I was. In the gallery of pictures below you may note that I am not wearing pants so I am surprised that the phone made it with me in the medi-helicopter but it is at this point of the story I suggest you stop reading and establish your emergency contact in your phone right now. She saved my life.

Truthfully, we don’t really know, yet, what happened to me in the desert. Were you at Burning Man September 3, 2022? Did you and I see each other? Maybe you can help me piece it all together?

That amazing woman got me through the ordeal at the hospital and into a casino, in Reno. Any of you titillated by recuperating in a casino should think of me, not you. I was not glad to be there but they did have room service and I slept. A lot. And after a few weeks I admitted that this trauma to my system was not going away, I shipped the car back to NYC and I flew home; I didn’t feel safe to drive.

Even the simplest task of cleaning the car was difficult for me. I went to a laundromat and stared at the machines for way too long before I remembered which came first, washer or dryer. One of the nurses told me that arrhythmia are usually not as out-of-the-blue as they seem. My heart had not been in peak condition for a long time. He said that if I handled the recovery with care and sensitivity, I would probably feel more energy and function at a higher level than I had in years.

This is a snapshot of the HEALTH folder on my iPad with some of the apps I find useful

In order to do that, had to forgive myself. I had never been so devoid of ideas and motivation and I had no indication that my grit or imagination would return. To get really honest with you, I have never felt mortal or regular; but this fall I was rudely reminded that I am not in charge. I considered the why of everything. I sat at a traffic light forever and watched the crossing guard with awe. It took me until Thanksgiving to even accept phone calls from my friends. I questioned why I had lived. As my best friend will tell you, my obesity is the only thing that was keeping me from being a total jerk as my confidence has continued to grow exponentially since fat camp. And I think she also means that as a compliment; but all of that has changed.

So now it is personal. The back-up battery in my chest cavity came with a wifi monitor called LATITUDE by Boston Scientific that lives next to the modem in our apartment that alerts my cardiologist if my heart rate spikes again. Intermittent Fasting was easier because I slept until noon and went back to bed 8 hours later. As my routine came back, I added bulletproof coffee into the mornings and eat strictly low carb meals at 2pm and 7pm. I added in Aloe and Magnesium to get my gut flowing, baby aspirin to keep my blood flowing and a half dozen other scripts. I am ramping up my dosage of Ozempic a GLP-1, eating Allulose swealthy Rx Stick 3 times a day which all seem to be reducing the amount of food I eat. If these yield another 20% reduction in my weight, I hope to get off of the pills.

I am now coming out of it and internalizing it all. The scariest part is still writing this piece and admitting to all of you that I am fallible. But I know you already knew that and so now I feel a responsibility to you, the people who carried me when I was down and also to myself.

I am so excited about spacial computing and the potential of XR in healthcare, but, I am overwhelmed by how disjointed my physicians are from each other. They seem to be neglectfully resisting a wholistic approach to my care plan.

Click here to see my favorite devices and how I am hacking my body with XR Tools

I am a fan of “Big Brother” monitoring that adds value to my health and wellness. My identity is inalienable. I have had my passwords stolen and my checking account hacked but no one ever got passed me to the money in my mattress. So assuming cryptocurrency is spendable in some marketplace somewhere, then its “real” enough for me but if Madison Square Garden wants to use facial recognition to keep out bad-acting lawyers, then they better be a private club excluded from the Commons.

And I like the idea of my body as a cyborg. Without my titanium knee I would not have been able to wander in the desert and meet all the cool people and if I had had the defibrillator installed, I could have stayed to see The Man burn. I weight in at Quest Diagnostics when I get my blood drawn on a super duper scale. I plan to inject an RFID chip in my wrist as soon as I am confident it will be beneficial to the physicians on MY team and covered by my insurance. So just because these technologies exist, they are not being adopted by mainstream physicians. The majority of big people like me are not aware of all these tools.

But this is an age old problem that all the physicians reading this are well aware of: progressive medicine is slow to be adapted. And the VR aficionados cry! “VR has been used by the Department of Defense for over 25 years!” And the movement to own our own medical data will continue until the patients rise up and demand better AS WELL AS the technologist continue to build the tools for patients to use for good, not evil.

In order for a systemic, institutionalized problem such as obesity to be “solved”, the new idea needs to be really good. It needs to be global. It needs to be a significant leap from the current technology and it has to empower the disenfranchised. At dinner parties, I tell people that I am building hospitals in the metaverse. But in order to genuinely disrupt the current imbalance - the power structure between someone like Mark Kramer and his homeowners insurance company - this solution needs to be huge. So sometimes I have the courage to call SindyXR a new kind of “web browser”. A browser that can optimize spatial computing and help you put all of your “room” in order.

Because if spatial computing really is scanning everything in real time using combinations of 5G, satellites and LiDAR, then we will need a bridge, a way to think about this metaverse, in relationship to what we currently use. I imagine all the “tabs” on this device popping into 6 sided cubes and falling around my feet. I stomp out the obsolete and use the size, color and position of the cubes to keep my focus (including making them all disappear when my gaze falls on the sunrise or on my children).

So why don’t these medical professionals want to coordinate my care? Why don’t they talk to each other? It must be simply about time and money. This capitalist answer leads me to want to blame the Health Insurance companies. But if independent wealth is why my medical specialists stay in their respective silos of my body, then I respect that, and look to the patient side of the equation for solutions. I guess capitalism does suck but it’s better than any other system yet. To achieve true equity for the disabled, those of us playing with a handicap and for real system change, we are going to need a vicious combination of apps.

“My fav three VR apps are TRIPP, SUPERNATURAL and Sindy in VR.”

All together these apps cost less than $500 per year. I have spent more on a gym membership I resented and yet kept paying.

I do the meditation in TRIPP sitting in my favorite big chair. It offers me peace of mind. During these moments (ideally for about 11 minutes 3 mornings a week) my mind-wandering goes deepest. The days I skip it seem to include more naps, Netflix and chill. There are visuals that pull me out of my current geo-location, music that washes out the surrounding chatter of NYC outside my window and guided activities that can be implemented with my gaze, hands or head movements. I can feel when my breathing changes and my blood pressure drops. I can identify the sequences in the app that achieve the most impactful results in the least amount of time. This enables me to get back to those elements when I am in a hurry. And by staying “in headset” afterwards, I am able to stay home, invite my girlfriend to join me when she needs it as well as track all of the biometrics so, when I meet with my psychiatrist, I am able to show her what worked and how it relates to my success.

With Supernatural, I clear the coffee table from the living room and stretch before I play and I can pick the music that fits my mood and energy level. It is frictionless - there are no excuses to not play - except in my own mind. Of course there are lots of times I don’t do it but, compared to how often I was walking up third avenue to NY Sports Club in the snow: zero. When I do play (average of once a week for 7-18 minutes) the endorphins from the cardio of moving around does everything I have always known. The muscles secrete something into my body that fights the depression. But I knew this the other three times I lost over 100 pounds and then gained over 100 pounds again. And I also knew that exercise has led to better sex, so I know it is a component I must include in the arsenal. The days I don’t exercise in VR, it is usually because I got my steps outside, meetings around Manhattan or other significant in-person connections. This makes me get the dopamine rush I need. The difference this time is that the gamification of the exercise has reduced the chance (in my mind) that I will give up.

And most important, the VR app I use every day are those that make me feel they are built for me by me. I have a dynamic cube of space in the metaverse that has everything I need to succeed at my fingertips: not only all of the asynchronous content but the accountability and responsibility that comes from building a unique set of spatial computing tools just for me. It feels like the room is the computer.

From Sindy in VR I get the independence to succeed and fail in the greatest extremes possible. It’s my safe space. I can put forward the best version of myself and I can think inwardly in equal measure. I can regulate the intensity of the moments of stress, good stress, as well as push myself. And at the end of the day, I can modulate the measurement of the data as well as internalize the analysis thanks to the machine learning. Every day I can decide whether I got better, or I didn’t; and this enables me to share this with my family, my therapist; coach, nutritionist and physician as I see fit.

And when I can’t get in, AR stays on my person. The mobile app helps me with the games on my phone to assess the why, on the go. It makes me pause and look in the mirror. I find myself more thoughtful about the people around me, my food and how it relates to my focus and energy level. It combines all of my wearables data and leaves it in the cube of space in VR when we all jump back in.

This combination has provided a brand new set of tools for me to improve my heart health. I am 53 years old and I learned something new! This old dog learned a new trick.

PRESS for IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Next week I am speaking on a panel about sustainable weight loss by optimizing Virtual Reality. Can I offer you a ticket? Would you like to join us virtually? Use PROMO CODE: happymama for an 80% discount and hear Jewel, Dr Walter Greenleaf and Fran Ayalasomayajula.

My panel will include Dr Myriam Modendestin-Sorrentino of the Princeton Perinatal Institute. I will be speaking about how Virtual Reality can change your Lifestyle and be applied to weight management. She characterizes obesity as one of the top 10 crisis of our lifetime and I agree. She and Dr Cavo from POUNDS TRANSFORMATION are both OB/GYN certified and have chosen to abandon large hospitals in order to treat obesity in sole-proprietor medical practices. They may be reluctant entrepreneurs but they are my doctors.