Co-Founder & Adult Supervision @ No Nerds No Problem
SF Bay Area
Joined November 2022
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I’m American but when I lived in Spain, I had a British-born and -trained midwife who I saw privately for care in my 3rd trimester and after birth.
She pushed exclusive breastfeeding on me HARD. She authoritatively warned me against using formula in baby’s early days lest breastfeeding would be ruined forever.
I was a first time mom with no basis for comparison so what was I to do? I believed her.
Breastfeeding ended up not being easy for me. At all. In the weeks after my son’s birth, I drove myself to literal hallucination with constant ‘round-the-clock feeding for 2 months. My baby still looked so skinny and was fussy all the time. I felt something was very seriously wrong. But she dismissed my concerns saying that I was making some milk, which was true, so it would work out.
But after a visit with an old Spanish pediatrician, he sternly told me and my husband to feed our baby formula immediately. The only part of him that had grown was his head circumference!
After starting formula, my baby became happy and gained weight wonderfully. It took the stress away from breastfeeding so that it was pleasant bonding with baby.
Looking back, now after having more babies, I realize 1) how stupid I was and 2) how dangerous this was for my son. He truly could have died of dehydration or developed cognitive issues from starving for 2 months.
Thank God he is a perfectly healthy child now.
As it turns out, breastfeeding issues are extremely common. Needing to use formula isn’t failure.
But this was my first experience as a parent which show me that medical professionals will absolutely allow their dogmatic priors to obscure the reality of the patients in front of them. Don’t ignore your gut feeling.
What I also learned is that while there are some benefits to the British model of midwife-centered care, I ultimately prefer the highly medicalized models of care. For my subsequent pregnancies in both Spain and the U.S. where things are more medicalized, they monitored my babies’ weight gain MUCH more closely than the British midwife did. They encouraged formula along breastfeeding when necessary to keep my babies safe. Isn’t that the point?
BBC File on 4 on the horrifying number of babies readmitted with feeding complications and jaundice in the early days of life. 🚨👇
Why is this happening?
The File on 4 investigation ignores the elephant in the room!
🧵1/19
@deb_cohen, @BBCfileon4
bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0033z6…
Stephanie Knight retweeted
Democrats have a wishlist for AI that includes a federal permit to train a model, a Department of AI, 20-year prison terms for executives, kill switches, and ID checks to use a chatbot. Writing code is about to need a hall pass if certain politicians get their way.
reclaimthenet.org/democrats-…
Stephanie Knight retweeted
To reiterate a simple but useful heuristic:
The entire Democratic Party economic policy platform can now be accurately predicted by the simple methodology of looking at what Hugo Chávez was doing a couple of decades ago as Venezuela started to spiral
Please prepare accordingly
ALT Socialist Hugo Chávez Destroyed Venezuela's Power Grid. Now the Regime Hopes Private Capital Will Rebuild It. https://reason.com/2026/08/05/socialist-hugo-chavez-destroyed-venezuelas-power-grid-now-the-regime-hopes-private-capital-will-rebuild-it/
Stephanie Knight retweeted
Civilization collapses when the takers overwhelm the makers. Democracy provides the means by which that imbalance can become law, and eventually dismantle the very institutions established to constrain it.
Prediction on Congressional AI policy: Democrats will create an environment of regulatory uncertainty and pave the way for an incumbent-controlled AI cartel.
Top of the Democratic agenda on day 1 needs to be a pause on advanced AI development, regulation of this out of control industry, and a ban on artificial superintelligence.
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Stephanie Knight retweeted
We're in a new era of communication, and only one side seems to be living in it. The old guard consultant class is about to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
If you think that high prices lost the election for the right, you don't understand marketing. Humans have no problem paying a premium for a good quality brand. Notice the word "brand", not "product". Are Nikes better than New Balance? Nope. But the brand is better. And notice what happened when they tinkered with the brand and screwed their core narrative? Nike stock fell through the basement. Did the product change? Nope. The brand did.
It's not the product, it's the brand. Results don't sell the product, the storytelling does. Will these newly-elected commies lower prices? Of course not. Are they gonna get you free healthcare? No, your insurance is gonna get even worse, just like it did the last time they tried socialized medicine. They're not going to do anything they've sold you, but...like Saul Goodman said: if you're committed enough, you can make any story work.
The committed storytelling of a couple insane podcasters was enough to fracture an entire political coalition from their own side in less than 2 years...they have zero power, zero credibility, they've never actually governed anything nor produced any results, but...they're good storytellers, and that's all that matters. Are they telling a good story? No, it's atrocious, but they're telling their atrocious story effectively and compellingly.
It is 100% true that everything's too damn expensive, and we all know that inflated prices are always sticky. Does anyone know that it's entirely the result of shutting down the global economy over the flu and (both naive republicans and democrats) printing infinity dollars for several years? Nope...because nobody has effectively told that story, and it's an unsexy story to tell. "Free stuff!" is a VERY easy story to tell, and when everyone's gotta take out a second mortgage just to pay their insurance premiums, "free healthcare" is an unbeatable story. It doesn't matter that "free healthcare" doesn't exist and socialized medicine is a terrible product...it's not the product, it's the brand. And "FREE!" is a great brand.
You can't get mad at people for having the financial literacy of a 9 year old. I mean, you can, but they outnumber you a million to one, so it's not going to be productive. You need to figure out how to make an unsexy story sexy, or else the "free stuff!" crowd is going to eat your lunch every time. If you give people a choice between earning a six pack on a treadmill or taking Ozempic, they're gonna choose Ozempic...they don't care about the side effects. If you give people a choice between fiscal discipline or free stuff...guess what they'll pick? They don't care about the side effects.
With projected growth of 5%, the economy right now is stronger than it's been in generations. Is that the story you hear? Nope. Is that the vibe you feel? Absolutely not, especially when every time you fill up your gas tank, it feels like a diesel enema.
It's not the product, it's the brand. A great product can fall into oblivion with bad messaging...a single bad review from one effective storyteller can tank a restaurant. The "influencer economy" is lucrative for a reason; everybody inherently understands the importance of effective storytelling...except the right. Zohran Mamdani gets it...he has an army of influencers on staff. In a perfect metaphor of this transitional phase of old guard vs new wave political messaging, Zohran nuked the Vice President into oblivion with maybe the biggest ratio in the history of the internet. By simply posting the subway assistant meme, Mamdani got 2 MILLION likes, quoting a post from the VP that had only 10K likes. If you're reading that sentence thinking "this is fucking ridiculous, you're talking about social media likes as political analysis now?"...you are the problem.
Yes, this stuff matters. Rizz matters. The President did a masterful job of this kind of retail politics in his historic 2024 campaign...you can be angry that this is what politics has been reduced to, but you can either adapt or die.
"No the problem is, you didn't deliver enough for the American people!" Are you a moron? Since when does anybody care about that? What have democrats delivered for Californians in the last 20 years? Unmitigated wildfires, homeless drug zombies everywhere, roads that look like Fallujah in 2004...people don't care about results. They think they care about results. That want you to believe they care about results, just as Nike wants you to believe their shoes are better than New Balance...but at the end of the day, all people really care about is the swoosh.
Adapt or die.
Guys, I hate to break it to you, but most political advisors are so bafflingly incompetent, it would make your head spin. All the talented communicators go work in Hollywood or at Saatchi and Saatchi, and these political bros never tap these agencies for help...I've connected several campaigns with literally the best marketing geniuses in the game, got them discounted rates, even...and they just never even bothered calling. It truly feels like a lot of consultants and candidates just want to lose.
You ever wonder how my ads went so massively viral, but there's not been a single candidate who's come close to it? It's their dumbass advisors. I didn't go with any political advisors, and they were SO mad about it. I partnered with a filmmaker and marketing wizard, instead of political grifters. Why? Because I wanted our messaging to be effective. Political ads suck. Nobody watches them. I wanted people to want to watch my ads. The fact that nobody else understands this is...I honestly don't know how to explain it, other than they want to lose.
There are a bunch of candidates who love it when their party loses power. It takes all the heat off them, because then they can't be expected to pass legislation when they're in the minority, plus they can fundraise way better off of the rage when the opposition is running roughshod over the country. Baffling to watch.
Stephanie Knight retweeted
You should IPO in the Netherlands! Sure, the taxes are higher, but the regulations are also stricter. You'll need to fulfill diversity quotas but you also submit 50,000 pages a year of environmental impact studies. There's less capital here but also you pay $5b/yr in fines.
The insidious shift of marriage from a lifelong covenant to a short-term game is the root of unimaginable suffering.
Young adults are forced to navigate a cynical, transactional dating market devoid of trust.
Betrayed spouses are treated as disposable.
Children are damaged by broken homes.
Evil, evil message here.
"Call Her Daddy" host Alex Cooper & actress Sophia Bush: if a woman is questioning whether she can do better than her current husband, "the answer is always yes."
"This idea that it's too late or you're too old, or who are you to want more, that's patriarchy. That is crazy."
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Stephanie Knight retweeted
The moral case for capitalism is that your life belongs to you. Your work, your savings and your plans don’t become somebody else’s property because they have a moving speech about how they’d use them.
The human condition is understanding the Truth in quiet moments, but repeatedly abandoning it in moments of action.
The quality of your life will be determined by your ability to close this gap.
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Your responsibility amidst the unintelligible chaos is simply to carry your cross as humbly and faithfully as you can. Without hate, anger, or resentment.
I love Job for many reasons, but mainly because it does a very clever jujitsu move on you as a reader. You start out thinking you've seen behind the curtain -- the scene in heaven w/ God & Satan making bets about Job.
So then after Job's trials, as his four friends come visit him to give their theories of why Job is in the predicament he's in, you've got your own little theory based on the opening scene, right? You're essentially the fifth friend who has their own read of the situation.
Then God comes in at the end and is like, "all your theories are wrong. None of you were there at The Beginning, and none of you know enough of the real backstory to really understand what's happening here. None of you can actually tame the chaos monster and organize all the things into a coherent whole. Only I can do that."
You, the reader, think God is calling out Job and maybe his four friends. But He's calling you out, too. You, the reader, are in the same boat as Job and his four friends. You think you have enough info about what is going on with Job because you saw the opening scene in heaven, but actually you're just as clueless and limited as the story's characters.
So the opener of the story is actually a trap, and the conclusion springs it on you. You think you have the backstory via some special perspective, but you're just like all the other confused people in the story. You don't really know and you're not ever going to know, either.
Job's lesson is that not only does God not owe you a theodicy (so stop expecting one), but even if you could see into the unseen realm you still wouldn't have a clue. You're never going to have enough information to put the whole, chaotic picture together in some satisfactory way. It's never going to all hang together in a coherent way that makes sense.
In some ways, I think Job is a coming of age story. This is one of things you learn in midlife -- that the pieces actually didn't ever fit together like you once thought they did, and the fact that it used to make coherent sense to you says more about who you were in that phase of life than it does about any larger meaning behind the events themselves.
The Job story is literally yelling at you that you cannot organize the chaos of life events into a coherent "why" -- it's simply beyond you. That you once thought you could was the arrogance of youth. God is actually the only one strong enough to tame the chaos monster & split its carcass into a neat, ordered, coherent structure.
This isn't the answer anyone wants, but it's the only answer that's telling you like it is.
Anyway, Job is a great book. The haters are wrong. I like it because I don't like to be lied to.
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