Tag: Confidence

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Emotional Work

Day 935 and Rebranding

Changing someone’s opinion is hard. Twitter is being rebranded to X so the topic is newsworthy. I was on rebranding efforts at Pepsi (the infamous one) Tropicana (that didn’t go well) and Ann Taylor (which won us a lot of awards & made money) so I have lived through the challengers of remaking a corporate identity.

That sounds so much more professional than what is actually happening . A lot of people have bought in on something that is no longer the thing they loved. A change was necessary but not everyone so ready. Something that had meaning is being remade into a new set of meanings and it will provoke a backlash.

People all adopt new ideas at different paces. And hold outs and middle of the road types can be equally challenging. Any change can be greeted fairly with skepticism. Trust is hard to gain and easily lost.

Even when circumstances on the ground demand it, people fucking hate change. It’s scary. I get it. I find a lot of the world right now to be scary. Failure rates can be high. But if we don’t change we don’t get different outcomes.

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Aesthetics

Day 930 and Quantity

I was very kindly tagged in a Twitter thread today with a lovely compliment about my daily writing habits. Does quantity have its own quality? As I close in on a thousand posts I think my answer is a strong “maybe!”

What are your favorite examples of “Quantity has a quality all its own?”
Examples:
@tylercowen writing a post a day, a column a month and a book a year for two decades
Kanye’s “5 beats a day for 3 summers”
Seinfeld’s “Don’t break the chain” one joke a day. Reply from Alan Simon @ almostmedia She’s not for everyone, but she’s been very dedicated and is approaching her 1,000th daily post.

One aspect of creation that is perhaps a bit understudied is just how much it is dominated by the truly prolific. The outliers practice a lot. Every single day I practice because I both enjoy it and I trust that doing a thing over time improves the thing. You can imagine how this predisposition makes me sympathetic to Calvinism.

I credit hippie parenting and the Waldorf curriculum. I was taught early on that it was good to make things even if you sucked at it. So I just spent a lot of my time sucking at creative endeavors and not finding it all that discouraging as I don’t mind being embarrassed.

So I suppose my quantity has demonstrated its own quality in its sheer persistence. Reminding yourself to do a daily practice has its benefits over time if you can stand it. Personally for me writing has always has a kind of blind optimism that has never been beaten out of me. I am a writer. I write. If it every becomes more than that I wouldn’t mind but I don’t need it to. The thing has been it’s own reward.

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Emotional Work

Day 924 and Backlog

It’s such a challenge to keep up with reality. Modern conditions have well overmatched human biology.

I’ve tried to keep my own physical biology from being overruled by competing inputs and attention competitions but it’s a losing battle. Sometimes the best you can do is ride the wave and be sure you know when to get up on your board.

I have a little bit of a backlog of inputs to work through. I should probably use the next few summer weeks to pull back and push through it. I’ve got a lot of sense making to do. A lot of inputs to be distilled.

I’ll do what I can to put things up as I see them and have a thought but I’m feeling the need to be a little more guarded. Can’t be out in world and accessible all the time.

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Biohacking Community Emotional Work

Day 918 and My Attention Budget

I wrote about the realignment of attention budgets as social media experiences a walled garden fear response to artificial intelligence’s looming tsunami of low cost content.

I myself am going through an exercise of ruthless prioritization of my own focus and find. As in any portfolio, write downs are inevitable. It’s easier to write something down when it’s money. Investments of time, energy, social capital and presence are much harder to let go. A sunk cost never boils? A watched pot never catalyzes? Sometimes a group or a movement chooses to remain outside their power.

I have so much less capacity to be present than I’d like. Others may prefer to be distant and still shower up but I find I’m happier with boundaries that are firm and great remove. That means when I do show up you have my full and intimate attention. It’s only right.

You have to prune in order to blossom. One commitment I’m excited to see blossom is the exceptional work of Jonny Miller. He and I will be hosting a Cultivating Calm Workshop for founders and venture capitalists interested in how to apply nervous system regulation techniques to their startup journey.

August 10th at 11am MTN join myself & Jonny Miller for cultivating calm.

As more of us rise up the acceleration curve of artificial intelligence and must maintain our capacity to sense-make, this will help your mind and body function in a chaotic world.

I myself have taken Jonny’s Bootcamp, intend to be in the next cohort (my code JULIE gets you a discount), and I’ll be sponsoring a founder to attend the September cohort so consider this a chance to see if these tools are right for you. My revealed preferences tell you what you need to know.

Categories
Culture

Day 915 and Independence Day

The 4th of July is one of my favorite holidays. I’m proud to be an American. I am a patriot. I genuinely believe in the aspirational ideals of the United States of America.

I’m fully aware of the many millions of ways in which we’ve not lived up to founding ideals across the centuries. But I’ll be damned if I let the worst of us take away the aspirational ideals for the rest of us. The freedom to live up to our higher selves rests in each one of us. And fuck anyone who tells you otherwise.

I like to watch Roland Emmerich’s classic disaster porn cinematic masterpiece Independence Day every July 4th. The speech Bill Pullman delivers as humanity unites to fight the invading hordes of alien locusts is as inspiring a bit of cinema as I can imagine.

In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. “Mankind.” That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom… Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution… but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: “We will not go quietly into the night!” We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

Independence Day

Now we don’t seem to be any nearer to humanity uniting behind an American plan for much of anything but I think to think one day we Americans might contribute to something as grandly aspirational as uniting our species. We can barely unite fifty states but we’ve not given up yet. And I personally intend to be here to keep fighting for our ideals. Happy 4th of July.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 914 and Unsucked Dick

If you have spent time on this blog, you likely have some familiarity with my usage of crude language to get across a wider point. Sometimes being rude or lewd is simply the most effective manner of communicating a difficult truth.

While I have an overused forced metaphor tag given for my tendency to write in overwrought imagery, I’ve only just realized that I have written a trilogy of crude metaphors in service of explaining power as simply as possible. Those crude metaphors include shitposting, dickriding and now unsucked dick.

Without attention-grabbing taboo cursing, these topics can otherwise might seem too complex or academic. If you have read critical theory texts you know what I mean.

Overly formal language is alienating and tends to entrench us in our priors. With that context out of the way, I shall now get into today’s crude metaphor.

An unsucked dick is someone who is willfully giving up their own power to victimhood through refusing to act for what they want. And everyone wants their dick sucked. Metaphorically, at least a little. Those that don’t want power are usually loathe to admit it.

This turn of phrase is NOT intended to be gendered. Unlicked cunt doesn’t work as well for a host of sociopolitical reasons on sexual status and power. Don’t get too worked up about it. See the bigger truth.

You will find unsucked dick when the hard work of getting what someone wants is either is too much effort on their own, or otherwise requiring collective action & leadership on behalf of a group that is in disfavor from those currently in power.

Let me illustrate with a shitpost. Perhaps you too have had to organize a group of activists who would rather squabble and in-fight than win power.

My ambitions are bigger than running the internal politics of dozens of tiny activist groups that can’t see beyond their own unsucked dicks but this isn’t very polite to say.

A dick that is unsucked is the inversion of the dick that is ridden. You may recall that dickriding occurs when a group surrounds it’s most powerful member with praise and flattery. The leader has the sucked dick.

The one whose dick is ridden sucks up (pun intended) a lot of the energy of collective often at the detriment of their followers. The example I used in my previous post is Elon Musk.

You can use tactics like shitposting to attract some of a groups’ energy away from the ridden dick. Shitposting is deliberate act of soliciting a response online. It’s traditionally used as a lower energy way to shape engagement and conversation away from the traditional or current power holders, particularly when you know no other method will break through the noise and narrative.

The collective action problem in the many disenfranchised groups in modern society can often be boiled down to unsucked dicks desperately shitposting as dickriders. They want power but either cannot or will not find ways to gain it.

I don’t strive to organize unsucked dick into powerful constituencies and I’d bet you don’t either. It’s exhausting to control others. Politicians and celebrities have their simps but it’s often a complicated and unstable relationship. Audience capture by your simps tends to turn you into the New York Times or Andrew Tate.

Everyone needs to be responsible for their own dicks (gender neutral I swear) and get on with achieving their bigger goals. If you are not actively getting beyond purity politics and activist in-group fighting you are not serious about winning the thing you claim to want.

If having is evidence of wanting a lot of you simply do not want power. And that’s OK, if that’s actually what you want. Just be damn sure your actions are true to want you want. And if you want something go fucking get it. I’m happy to help.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 910 and The Chessboard

You can feel it. I know you can. The chessboard is being reset. Pieces are being moved. Gambits are unfolding. Absolutely everyone you know is going a little bit nuts.

I would not be surprised if these small informational disruptions will be recognized as part of a global conflict in a hundred years. I hope my heirs recognize that their mother fought as an information resistance fighters in The Great Dislocation Wars. Or World War 3. Just spitballing.

It’s humorous to me to talk in such a grandiose fashion because the reality on the ground is much of life is just a little bit harder and a little bit worse. But we still presume the world is basically still abiding by the same rules as yesterday.

I often forget how much people don’t want to hold power. The current moment shows a strange ambivalence about wielding anything yourself. Anyone with power is bad right? Well, it’s nuanced.

I want to assure you that your instincts in this matter is largely correct. You should distrust anyone that wants power. Be skeptical of the impulse.

Because being in charge sucks. It’s a shitty job. Anyone who has wielded any power from parenting a toddler to being a CEO probably intuitively knows this.

But once you have been given any legitimate form of authority, choosing to ignore that you wield power is a dereliction of duty.

The trouble with all reactionaries is that they assume once they take over, that their experience of power will somehow be different from the current horrors in charge. If they had bothered to crack open their minds while reading Shakespeare (or Thucydides or the Artashastra or literally any Great Book) they would know all men are subjected to the laws of power.

We lie to ourselves about how power functions because it’s very energetically easy to hand over your power to someone else. To be aggrieved is to have power over those you hold in contempt for exercising their power over you. Don’t be tempted by this trap no matter how righteous your cause.

Once you have picked up the mantle of power you must see through. If your people have given you authority you must see it through or hand it off to someone who will.

It’s very hard to own power. You most likely will not enjoy it. And you will be tempted to shunt off your agency. Just remember that you never carry power alone. It is always in concert with those who have consented to give it to you. Good luck on the great chessboard of life.

Categories
Finance Startups

Day 906 and Resilience Tech

I enjoyed a little moment in the sun yesterday when Axios’ Pro Rata featured my pre-seed venture fund chaotic.capital as part of a deep dive on resiliency technology investing. Or if you prefer disaster tech. It was a proud moment for me.

Because I’ve been trained to never miss an opportunity for reasserting who you are and what you stand for I thought I’d publish a portion of the market insights section of my investor letter for the fund. If you want to see the bets, the behind the scenes (hands on is an understatement), and the founders we back I’d welcome accredited investors to see if we’d make sense for you. Slide into my DMs or for the time conserving decisive HNI hop onto AngelList and apply to be an LP in 2 minutes flat.

What is Chaotic Capital?

In an era of institutional distrust, social change, and global instability, we invest in ideas that adapt humanity to our new chaotic era. What does that mean? We like things that help small groups have the impact of big groups and big groups have the agility of small groups. Enabling resilience in the face of unexpected & rapid change is our lodestar.

I publish an investor letter every quarter and you can always visit jfredrickson.com, where I write every single day about whatever I’m thinking about. You are also welcome to DM me on Twitter @AlmostMedia or text me on Signal. My email is julie at chaotic dot capital.

Market Insights on Q223

The rise of cryptography, machine learning, and artificial general intelligence are overlaid onto a geopolitical reality of resource competition in an increasingly multi-polar world. To use an entirely different metaphor, chaos is a ladder that we are here to climb.

Our thesis at chaotic.capital centered on identifying, investing in, and supporting companies that adapt our lives, businesses & systems to the opportunities and challenges that chaos brings. We call it resilience technology.

We believe these companies will generate outsized returns over the next decade as individuals, companies, and societies look to become more flexible, independent, and sustainable. But it’s bigger than that.  

Most builders remain deeply skeptical of Noble Lies, “for your own good” safetyism, regulatory capture, oligopoly control, and the centralized nation state control as the most effective methodology of innovation for a dynamic pluralistic human future. We are having cultural and financial reformations at a frightening speed. It’s beyond future shock now. 

Twitter critics can stroke their chin with practiced skepticism, but if you believe in American Dynamism as I do, you know that our history has shown that it is resilient, flexible, brilliant individuals coming together which defeats the totalitarian and slays the no-win scenario. You have to enable the brilliant weirdos and trust them to solve problems.

Like Captain Kirk once said to Spock, we must make the best guesses we can.

Spock: Mr. Scott cannot give me exact figures, Admiral, so… I will make a guess.

James T. Kirk: A guess? You, Spock? That’s extraordinary.

Spock: [to McCoy] I don’t think he understands.

Leonard McCoy: No, Spock. He means that he feels safer about your guesses than most other people’s facts.

Spock: Then you’re saying… it is a compliment?

Leonard McCoy: It is.

Spock: Ah. Then I will try to make the best guess I can.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

My best guess? As your chosen doomer-optimist, crypto-libertarian. American-patriot, dynamic futurist, pre-seed emerging fund manager, who has plenty of facts but still has the responsibility of making decisions without full information? Tools for everyone wins the future.

It will take all of us coordinating in freedom to defeat Moloch from sacrificing more of us. Uncle Screwtape wants our egos to believe we can deliver safety and control, we know it is a lie. The Ring of Power tempts us to consider “why not me? Don’t I deserve this power?”

Choose your franchise my fellow nerds and chosen ones; because you know the crown is heavy, the ring perverts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So what do we do? We band together. And we enable more of us to join our merry band of future builders.

To balance out centralizing forces, institutional preservation and “we had no choice” moralizing malfeasance, we must give the people tools to build because sometimes our best guesses are demonstrably better than other people’s “facts”

Categories
Media

Day 905 and Shilling Myself

I should be shilling myself in today’s installment of writing everyday. But I’m a little tired to pull off the full bragging I’d like. One of my favorite financial news and analysis sources, Axios Pro-Rata, featured my little pre-seed fund chaotic.capital with an in-depth look at resiliency technology.

It’s a big deal to me because in-depth trade reporting is where the nuts and bolts of an industry are discussed. Anytime I’ve built something of value it was always the beat reporters who recognized it first.

Women’s Wear Daily was my big break in e-commerce and social media for my first startup Coutorture. Beauty Packaging’s company of the year award was a huge win for my cosmetics brand Stowaway. CoinDesk recognized my work on corporate governance structures and financing coordination. The trades matter more to outcome than glossies in the early days.

I’d like to think the LPs who will appreciate me as an emerging fund manager will find me from Axios Pro-Rata. And I sure would like for them to see my expanded viewpoint on the space right here on my daily essay.

I even had the good luck of preparing my quarterly investor update the day before this article hit everyone’s newsletter inboxes. So I’ve got all the materials ready to go.

Alas I’m wiped from a week of life happening (a death in the family) and the general excitement of the global summer solstice mania that’s gripping all the timelines.

So I don’t want to shill and flak myself right now. I just want to enjoy the feeling of pride that comes from seeing your work recognized with a proof-point all your peers respect. I’ll make sure to copy over the investor letter tomorrow. Stretch out my own little news cycle.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 904 and War Dogging on Mobile

I was busy working for most of the day on an investor update for chaotic.capital. It’s really dope and I’d love to have any prospective LPs read it to see how we are navigating the moment. Chaotic is my humble pre-seed fund for weirdos building shit to survive the current planet wide disjunction. The general sense of history restarting from its fuck Fukuyama slumber is a clear and there is stuff to build.

When I do deep work I try to give myself some space between me and information feeds. But I find it hard to entirely shut for more than a few hours. I monitor many threads across many interest groups with vastly different interests. I flow it back to me and my investments.

As I sit comfortably in my Montana home on the edge of the American empire, I obviously can’t help but worry I’m a Cassandra doomed to know horrible truths. But this becoming a bit of a hobby for all of us isn’t it? We all watch nervously as history unfolds with little influence on the broader strokes.

My fear is that we’ve all become armchair war dogs cheering on whatever professional grade propaganda works for the current moment. And we must be careful not to let ourselves be controlled by that chaos nor amuse that we know what is happening.

I firmly believe in having a locus of control and acting within it. Today I wrote up the current state of all the vibes I’ve seen and synthesized in my market status report. I then named the bets I’ve taken with our capital. I explained why I think have the greatest chance at resilience in a world that is more and more chaotic by the hour. And then I showed the work on how I found the deals and made connections for my portfolio that was unique to me.

After I’d wrapped it up and got my operating partner Alex to be sure all the operational work was settled I opened up my feeds. It was Swan Lake time. The head of mercenary organization Wagner Group was maybe, or maybe not, declaring a coup against the Russian Defense Minister. Who knows what’s going on! Certainly not me.

Cue the rampant speculations. My Telegrams are going wild. Signal is on fire. I am scrolling through sick jokes and CIA theories and extremely funny memes. Everyone is rushing to exert influence and partisan narratives on top of what looks like a Tom Clancy novel. And even he’d agree this week was a bit on the nose with the submarines and the Soviet comebacks. So let’s all remember the world is complex and we know so very little so let’s keep taking responsibility for the moves we can make and helping others do the same.