Maybe these heat death statistic needs to include the general quality of life dip that comes with a hotter climate. If we once went inward in to our psyche in winters and enjoyed summers of slightly crazy hot joy that life is passed.
Maybe the long now of the perma-weird has cast a shadow of stuck culture which that I see more clearly when life becomes unlivable outside. If you keep living out in the world things do move forward. It’s less pleasant to touch grass when it’s dead and a fire hazard. And so the summer slows us down enough to see inside ourselves
I spend more time inside in the summer than I do in the winter. And given that my home is in Montana, you’d probably expect it to be reversed. Thankfully we only have two months where the weather gets into the “indoors between 9am to 9pm” heat risk. Other lower latitudes have more troubles than we do and blessedly our power comes from our own solar grid so I never worry about running air conditioning.
I don’t have much in me today as I spent most of my energy on showering. What a depressing thought.
Showering is what’s considered a “vasodilating activity” and that can cause problems if you run it too hot. It can make dysautonomia (if you don’t know what that is how did you make it through Covid19) go wild and just generally makes me realize I’ve got some orthostatic issues happening during this flare.
Given that I’m having a fun high BPM couple of does, I got dizzy and that spirals into a migraine and then my whole system gears up and ooops I’m curled into a ball scrolling and texting.
It being 100 degrees in Montana today means that we’d need to run a water cooler not a water heater to get a comfortable lukeroom temperature. Our sauna is being in the shade of the barn is currently cooler than the outdoors. Just funny times but hey I’m doing my bit for the environment.
Despite the embarrassment of needing to sit down to scrub up, I thought I hoy through it with as little energy exertion as I could manage. And I still felt like shit.
So I figured why not compound it with more time on Twitter. It’s true that the website is for bored billionaires and the deranged and sometimes that’s a Venn diagram.
To be fair seeing a website for witticisms and breaking news become just another OnlyFans funnel stop is irritating. I pay up to the big man hoping it won’t get that bad. It’s got network effects for technologists and we have work to do.
Too much signaling of sexual availability and hitting a paywall is just a funny way for that to happen. Like objectively access was always paywalled by culture and contracts. But I can see being indignant about it pervading all social spaces.
Heck if the robotic use is half as good as Wired made his work sound maybe we can solve more pressing problems like having a robot scrub down our Boomers & chronically ill so cleaning up doesn’t kill us? It can probably hold a loofah without anything going wrong right? And nobody use it for anything too nasty if it can’t consent. Don’t prove Wired right. May Lady G rest in power.
I am an enormous fan of Freddie Mercury thanks to my mother’s excellent collection of classic rock. You’d be surprised at how much I’ve committed to memory from the core cannon and deep cuts that span the Beatles to Cream & Edgar Winter to Led Zeppelin.
I’m not much for karaoke, though I once tweaked my neck doing a full head bang hair whipping, Wayne’s World style, for a friend’s birthday party.
Knowing all the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody is clutch in these circumstances. As can go in, do a full rock opera and ease yourself out of any further obligation to participate saying “oh I had easily three times the stage time as everyone else I’ll just cheer you on!” Pro-tip for group activities amirite?
Fun fact from Reddit. During the Bohemian Rhapsody scene in ‘Wayne’s World’ (1992) Mike Myers and Dana Carvey are both grimacing in pain while headbanging. The director, Penelope Spheeris, shot the scene for approximately five hours. Basically how I felt after my friends birthday karaoke.
Now I don’t always have the common sense to stop myself. I am a real mess at the moment as I have finally come home and I can let the whirlwind dissipate for a moment
Strained sleep with upsettingly high strain but at least it’s restorative. Now if only I could get my resting heart rate down and my HRV back up I’d be right as rain.
My Whoop is sending up red recoveries with a week of barely better yellows, as I spent a bit too much of the last few months going full Freddie Mercury “Don’t Stop Me Now” as not only was I having a real good time but I had a lot to get done.
Tonight, I’m gonna have myself a real good time I feel alive And the world, I’ll turn it inside out, yeah I’m floatin’ around in ecstasy So don’t stop me now Don’t stop me ‘Cause I’m havin’ a good time Havin’ a good time
It’s nice when you work and your life are aligned such that every step feels like you can only accelerate. But if we are sticking to thermodynamics, l may have allowed a little more entropy into the equation.
So give me some time to sleep it off. I’ll be in bed trying to keep my heat rate down. But being in the red won’t stop me forever. It’ll just stop me for a little bit.
My head hurts, I’ve lost my voice and I’m achy everywhere but I’ve got something resembling a tan and my lymph glands are only a little swollen.
Is this is the halfway point of the summer season I feel like I’m doing it rather well. That is rare for me as summer is traditionally my most challenging season but I seem to be doing rather well despite the workload and constant travel.
In a fun coincidence of scheduling, I shared a blue moon at the end of May in Greece and the waning of the full strawberry moon in Utah with same person.
A blue full moon and a sailboat light
What a joy to be half a world away and still find a way to come together. From the Ionian Sea to the high alpine skiing mountains of Utah you are never too far away from a friend.
I’m back in Montana and hoping I’ll enjoy a reasonable chunk of time here as I do feel the strain on my body. I don’t think I am sick but I am struggling to with fatigue and the annoyance of a throat so sore from talking that I should probably commit to a silent retreat for a few days.
So I’ll sip my slippery elm tea and browse the cosmetic sales for skincare (and a little makeup splurge to celebrate the big wins) and get myself back on a routine. I’d like to put on more muscle mass and improve my cardiovascular fitness now that I have more capacity.
If I can manage conference after conference, gala and launch demonstrations along with my workload and time with friends then surely I can add in some overhead presses and a plyometrics right? I did a short but brisk mile and half circuit around the neighboring pastures. And then I got back into bed.
I’m deeply in the red on my energy stores. All my dashboards are flashing warning signs that I need to get in a good recovery.
I’ve up all my reserves to get myself to Utah and make a good showing to support team Valar Atomics. Ironic that I’m energy poor as all my effort posting (both online and in real life) is about a vision of cheap abundant safe and clean energy for all mankind.
What a privilege to say that Valar Atomics has been my everything for the last forty eight hours. Everyone is running on so little sleep but the outcome is a success that is undeniable. There are so many exciting interviews about our reactor and Isaiah’s from Ti Morse at Relentless (here on YouTube) to Sarah Guo at No Priors that you could spend a happy afternoon getting up to speed on the nuclear renaissance.
I hope to watch them all soon as I need some rest. So does the team. At team party after the big Nvidia event, much of the conversation turned to where everyone planned to enjoy their well deserved 4th of July break
Having served our nation by reaching criticality and generating electricity as ordered by the executive branch, this team as earned some leave. Hundred hour weeks have been the norm for many of them. This crew knows hard work. One former navy nuclear engineer joked that while the navy was tough, booting up a reactor from scratch was much harder.
Most just want some sleep but the diversity of plans was exciting. From touring Spain’s Catholic cathedrals to hiking in Alaska clearly a few had some energetic plans. But there was a lot of life basics like setting up new apartments and sleeping off an accumulated sleep debt.
I’m in camp sleep it off. Whoop is sure I’m either dying or super sick my metrics are pretty bad. Thankfully I’m going to be enjoying our nation’s birthday in the mountains with my husband and our friends. I will go from in the red to red, white and blue.
I’ve got to remember to keep tissues in my purse. I’m prone to crying when I’m proud. I am a crier by nature and the experience of pride and awe is becoming distressingly common. Woe is me right?
My very early bet on Valar Atomics (I wrote about it on Day 1145 but met Isaiah closer to day 900 early 2023) is paying off years, if not decades, ahead of my expectations. Never did I expect arguably the hardest operational bet in my portfolio to be such a fast breakaway hit. And I owe it to an executive order from Donald Trump and the efforts of patriotic Americans committed to regulatory reform. Which is crazy.
As it turns out, if the government gets out of the way of talented people, nay, if it demands that our state institutions help them, the impossible becomes possible in shockingly short order. The reports of America’s death are greatly exaggerated.
Today in front of a crowd of hundreds of current and potential investors, employees, Orangeville community members, government officials & scientists and most importantly our family members, we watched a reactor (that might not even exist without my first check), power an Nvidea Blackwell chip.
In a demonstration rivaling the greats (Ballmer, Jobs) Isaiah brought up NuclearWebsite.com and asked the audience to load it with him.
“Oh no it’s not loading?!!?” What’s happening? Do we have any electricity on site? Quick someone run the GPUs to the nearest electricity! Go go we can’t disappointment all these people!
And then the Blackwell is rushed into the Ward250 reactor. In real time the chip is run to the control room, gets hooked up and boom the website loads.
The first entirely privately funded nuclear startup was critical, stable, producing electricity and powering state of the art silicon.
We actually did it. The mad lads and ladies of Valar Atomics swept ahead of the competition in a frenzied year of progress (Day 1510) from seed round and Ward Zero to producing electricity to power GPUs.
After a twenty four hour travel marathon to get from the Ionian in the Mediterranean to the southern Utah desert, being back at the Valar Atomics reactor facility for a demonstration of this magnitude felt surreal.
Just a few weeks ago (Day 1969) the reactor was days away from being shielded and then fueled. We’d driven down to see her before she was wrapped up in shielding.
Proud first investors in front of Ward 259
Now not only has she gone critical (Day 1996) but I was able to walk into the running reactor room and see the live reactor for myself. The operator Ben (a former naval nuclear operator) seemed surprised and happy to see me. “Julie! Hi!” He exclaimed as me and the other early lead investors piled in for a tour.
Jason Calacanis (also a master of the live demo) never lets anyone forget he invested in Ubers seed round. I get to brag I wrote Valar’s very first check
And while success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan, I’ll always enjoy the satisfaction of being the very first to take a chance on a long shot no one thought had any business even trying. And well they were wrong. And I was right. Not just right but really fucking right. I backed the long shot dark horse (somewhere around day 950) because my gut told me that the kid had the right stuff. And wow did he.
I only had a dim hint of exactly what we’d be seeing today as the invite said “Watts Next” cohosted by Nvidia and Valar. Clearly a number of us connected the dots because it was packed. The atom would power the compute and we’d get to see it live.
The team after the demo
Every existing investor, and quite a few later stage firms, came out to the middle of nowhere to see if these longshots had really done it. And indeed in just three years the impossible became reality. I’ve never felt prouder to be American. And clearly everyone around me felt the same.
And most importantly, it was a win for the team, led by the indomitable spirit of Isaiah Taylor. Their long nights and constant doubt paid off. The road ahead is long but no one is likely to doubt that we are serious contenders anymore.
I always say there was never a doubt in my mind. I had faith. Isaiah joked he had moments of doubts. I say I’m blessed that I got to be that first believer to say “I think you can do it and I’m going to help.”
And whenever he doubted that we’d make it (there are always near death experiences in any startup) it was my privilege to remind him that doing the impossible is just what we humans do.
Like Captain Kirk, I don’t believe in no win scenarios. I hope you consider joining me for more impossible long shots. Because sometimes taking the shot is worth more than anything else you will ever do.
Want to run your compute on clean renewable cheap American energy?
I’ve been hiding out from the heatwave in a hotel room. I am one of the lucky ones. Europe is as diverse as America so it’s a little silly to discuss it as a whole but only 20% of Europe’s housing has air conditioning. Germany is at 3%. The United Kingdom is at 5%. Honestly the mind reels as in America 90% of our housing has air conditioning even if we can’t all afford to run it.
It’s not just the housing either. A hotel room with strong air conditioning is a rarity in Western Europe. They will claim they have air conditioning at corporate chains and in Airbnbs, but it is not always the air conditioning you’d expect in America where you have more control.
In Europe you have a few options generally. A corporate hotel will be controlled by a central HVAC system. They may pretend that you can change it but in Germany they won’t let you go below 72 degrees at a Marriott. Ask a United Airlines pilot in Frankfurt what block of hotels they stay at to get a decent night sleep. It’s a nightmare and hacks are numerous but usually fruitless.
Your other options are finding independent hotels or Airbnbs with a mini-split. But good luck with that. The Germans and the French will tell you off for running it. There are towns where you need to show a medical need. I once had this happen to me.
So yes it’s usual that I’m in a comfortable hotel with a central HVAC system with individual room controls (not a mini-split) that allows me to get it down to 18C. That’s pretty unusual.
Why am I so lucky as to have air conditioning in a European hotel room that is central air and not a mini-split? Well I picked the hotel that the diplomats stay at in the capital. They don’t suffer at all.
The private small independent hotel I am at has NGOs staffers constantly winding people in and out of. It is a well maintained beauty of an independent hotel in an era of corporate standards. So it has a wiff of the old patrician smell to it and they enjoy their perks.
There are zoomers outside protesting corruption but inside technocrats and policy analysts and other bureaucrats enjoy cool temperatures at their control as they go about their work being high minded about democracy and equity.
During the current record-breaking European heatwave, the European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters in Brussels experienced an AC system failure — or forced shutdown — on Friday, June 27.
Staff on floors 1–7 received an urgent text message at midday reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day” The Express
I’m glad my hotel was allowed keep its cool since her lower tier staffers don’t have that luxury. I understand why it’s a scandal. French and German cultural leaders can discuss their hospitals and schools without air conditioning with as much pride as they like. I am not buying it. Europe can fix this problem if it likes.
The persistent resistance of the French, Germans and British to installing air conditioning and updating their cities to manage climate change seems to wobble between old health superstitions and smug moral superiority. Eastern Europe and Southern Europe do not suffer from this issue.
The WSJ editorial board shared this information from France’s ecological transition agency. They are slowly being convinced that the death tolls and hospitalizations that heat waves produce may need mitigation.
The French ecological transition agency said in May guidance that AC may be necessary for the elderly, chronically ill or pregnant. But if you really can’t live without it, use it in only one room of your home, and don’t set the temperature below 79 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s because AC uses too much energy and contributes to climate change.
I prefer to sleep at 20C or 68F. This partially because my sleep & biometric tracking apps as well as my physician recommend a cold dark room to achieve the sleep required to keep my health stable. The 26C recommended by the French for us chronically ill types? It is 79 degrees Fahrenheit.
On my most recent European trip, I brought paper fans. Not electronic (though I did bring two of them as well) but the sort you languidly wave yourself with in an attempt to look cool when in a desultory mood. Which never seems to lift in this heat. It actually does look rather chic and the movement of the air helps.
I brought the pharmaceutical storage grade ice sheets used for shipping injections that have granulated particles that bond with ice to keep them cold longer.
I strap the ice inside a travel vest with dozens of pockets or wrap them around pressure points on my feet, ankles, wrist and neck with scarves when I’m particularly overheated. I’ve seen people do this with socks filled with rice and water kept in the freezer as well.
I have those goofy towels that absorb extra water and keep it cooler that I wear around my neck and head to go under the several wide brim hats I travel with. I always swear SPF 50. A sunburn is a nasty way to bring on heatstroke. I also bring my own ice trays to freeze ice cubes for both drinks & a bowl over which my hand fan blows for faux AC. I’ve dampened cotton sheets over open windows at night with a fan in to create evaporative cooling. It’s not AC but it helps. That’s why I carry two charger fans.
I will also chill wet wipes and my cosmetics. I carry small misting sprays with me everywhere (I like the classic Mario Badescu Rose). I have even mixed mint essential oil into my travel-size aloe antiseptic gel. My soup is peppermint as well to give that feeling of cool. And I always carry few rehydration sachets of electrolytes.
I’ve made friends with these techniques pretty regularly. Hydrating salts and a water bottle refill is a good conversation starter. Because as much as the French fear drafts for their health with artificial cold the Germans seem to think it’s a necessary part of life to suffer the heat (as if we don’t have enough heat in hell) everyone is suffering and needs help to get through this kind of extreme heat.
One of my extended family members owns an agency where they represent some well known talent. I learned a lot from them in both my childhood but as I came into my own as a business person.
They were basically always on the phone. When I was younger it was in an office with an assistant (who I got to know and watch grow into a career) but these days being on the phone is a far more mobile affair.
This practice was referred to as “rolling calls” where the agent and assistant are constantly going back and forth like a switchboard operator with the set of people needed to get a deal done.
Agents were big early adopters of the BlackBerry and rolled those calls straight into the iPhone. Being of an older generation talking was the way call rolling worked with a side of email delivered by your mobile device.
I’d say it’s probably as much a voice game as it is a text game now. My version of rolling calls is rolling Signal chats and Twitter DMs. A couple of good group chats self organizing can make your day really fire. So I’m rolling calls except I’m rolling chats and texts. It’s still basically the same job. We ping until we find the person who gets us to the deal. And then you close.
A vast somewhat intimidating vista is stretching ahead of me between two thousand days of writing every day and the possibility of reaching three thousand days of writing every day. One day and one post at a time right?
So like any sane woman setting out on a long journey, I ate a salad, had some protein and checked myself into a spa for a massage. No reason to start a long journey exhausted right? I need to pace myself.
I got a pedicure to immediately turn restoration to grooming necessities, but one can’t keep pool blue toenails all summer. Not every day is spent on the Ionian. Some days are spent at nuclear facilities in steel toed boots. Other days are spent in kitten heels inside conference rooms.
Just in case anyone does need to see my toes after those scenarios, I try to maintain a tidy nude set of nails. Isn’t it strange what expectations we have for women?
I may work remotely, at odd hours and in odd locations that allow the occasional eccentricity, but at any moment I might need to be on an airplane headed to parts unknown. You only get to be so weird when you have big goals.
In this case, next week I’m headed to a desert town and then a state capital. That’s state is becoming a more regular occurrence in my life. That’s a pretty big privilege for me.
Being a supporting player in a number of larger endeavors gives me the chance to add additional gravity if and when I might be useful. Even if it is just showing up as a cheerleader. I love trying to convince smarter, better capitalized and better connected players than me that indeed it is my startups are the winners in the grand game of macro-cycles.
I wrote that the world was getting to be a lot more chaotic when I first started this writing journey. Now that’s common knowledge. Then and now, I care about adaptability to this increasing complexity. This has turned out to mean compute, energy and decentralization.
The strength of your network is in the flexibility and foresight of its nodes. And I hope I remain a trusted node at the forefront of our long journey as a species for as long as I serve us well. I’ll carry on this Odyssey till then.
