Tag: Energy

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1398 and Overstimulated Nerds

Introverts don’t do well with social overstimulation. Any time I attend a gathering where the majority demographic is nerdy, weird, and autistic I find myself feeling the collective vibes of the overstimulated. And it’s not always good vibes for many of them.

I am doing everything I can to take care of myself, be kind to others and still be gently socializing. But it’s not easy.

I’m exhausted from the effort, even with my attempts to practice productive habits like nervous system exercises and getting adequate sleep. No amount of supplements can fend off a collective sense of fear.

I always notice what a rude demographic we introverts can be in these circumstances. Everyone is doing their best to be present and do delicate dances of parasociality where you know each other from the internet but do not wish to intrude or interrupt someone doing business.

In the cases where you are socializing with friends in real life and the rest of a group “knows of” but doesn’t know actually someone you find yourself surrounded by defensive social postures. Plus-ones with little contribute make it even worse.

And I’m not even going to touch the social dynamics of status. Insecurity seems to run rampant in all human groups, but nerds who have known social precariousness are the worst offenders in these situations.

Fear over one’s place within a group that has a wide variance in status can be intense. I don’t like seeing anyone feel left out. I like to be welcoming to everyone I encounter. Even when I’m an overstimulated introvert.

It’s especially important to me to be nice when it’s a group where the capital that provides status (social, literal) rises to celebrity or billionaire.

It can feel paralyzing to interact with anyone who has some degree of status if you don’t want to make someone uncomfortable. The awareness of social graces isn’t always enough.

It’s just as likely that someone will put on airs and over estimate their status as they are to offend the actually important guests.

I dislike watching people police their own social status but it’s even worse when someone polices the status of their friends. It creates cliques and ostracism in the best cases. Cutting off access can help when someone is just an overstimulated introvert but in practice makes the entire environment more fearful.

These social fears can really gum up the works when it’s nerds concerned over their own place within an event let alone in society.

I feel pity in the most awkward of cases but it’s really born of sadness. Cool is a bit like grace. We do little to deserve its bounty, grasping at it only shows our hubris and it doesn’t work in any case. I wonder if that’s a heretical opinion.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1397 and the Jungle

I’m in Miami for the week to attend a gathering. October is as fine a time as any to visit what is otherwise a very humid and hot climate. I’d prefer midwinter but I’ll manage with late fall.

I went to eat lunch at a friend’s home. Even with fans and very breezy weather I could still feel the humidity doing battle with my body. Ancient trees covered in moss kept off the sun as best as they could.

Welcome to the jungle

And still even a little bit of movement is enough to trigger sweating in such a climate. Which just leads to itching and inflammation so I’m being careful to not get myself into much trouble. I’ve got my hats and sunglasses and sunscreen and I move slowly.

I understand why the whole town has a hospitality aesthetic that the done up in whites. Anything to keep the sun from overheating you and let the breezes flow.

Whites on white in our room

If you are in Miami let Alex or myself know. We have a conference that you may be attending as well so we’d love to overlap. I’ve proud some amusing outfits and all kinds of cosmetics I hope I have time to apply and enjoy.

Velvets, pinks, and prints for the adventurousness
Categories
Travel

Day 1395 and Not On The Calendar

I am aching from doing too much packing in one day. Somehow a flight didn’t make it into my calendar and I thought I was flying Monday and not Sunday.

I usually take multiple days to pack things not because I’m unsure of my choices or dawdle over it but because the bending and picking up of things is hard on my spine.

I try to do these kinds of activities in 15-20 minute increments with an hour or more of laying down flat to recover.

Presume that packing for women requires extra effort when there is formal wear and cosmetics involved and I need a few hours to dedicate to the effort.

Chop it up into increments and well you can see how it becomes a thing I need to split up over a few days. I don’t think of myself as disabled but requiring breaks to rest my spine probably suggests it.

Alas the work and rest cycle wasn’t possible today as I had to get it all done in one go as my flight is at dawn. I am sure I’ll pay for the strain tomorrow. Which isn’t ideal for flying which is stressful enough without additional pain.

Thankfully it’s done. Now that this is all squared away I am in bed at 6pm and planning to go to sleep as soon as I can dampen the pain. Since I’ve got to be up at 5am a nice long sleep from 7pm seems perfect. And I’ll be adjusted to my new time zone.

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1394 and Wiped

I’ve had a great year. I’m having a great month. I had a great week. I’m absolutely obsessed with my portfolio and the founders in it. Every new opportunity makes me feel better about the future.

And I’m so tired from processing all of that that it’s little wonder my body is grinding out hours of REM sleep a night.

I’m in the middle of a tight circle of artificial intelligence memetics thinkers which has been enthralling. Machine minds needing machine money has been such a pat truism that when a genuine breakthrough shows up it’s easy to focus on the wrong thing. It’s not about memecoins. I almost feel as if I’ve been preparing for this moment my entire life.

In the middle of this virtual drama I am trying to remain focused on human concerns. Repairing boots. Doing chores. Preparing for a gathering in Miami next week.

Somewhere in the middle of this work gets done, an election is will be decided and I’m just wiped.

Categories
Emotional Work Travel

Day 1385 and Adrenaline

It’s lovely to have the occasional day where you are running on adrenaline. I myself am not a big fan of stress as I don’t see it as a “good” in and of itself so much as a tool to be used to accomplish certain ends.

To that end, I live a mostly quiet life. I love being far off the map in Montana precisely because a routine with its habits allows me to take certain kinds of risks (particularly as an investor) in the wider world. A calm life lets me find early stage investing to be exciting rather than anxiety inducing.

It’s no coincidence that while I called my fund chaotic I prioritized calm in my own life. Why go looking for trouble when your professional life is all about the edge?

But sometimes it’s nice to experience the visceral risks of life. I’m in New York City and running from event to event and meeting to meeting. It’s all smiles and adrenaline and enjoyment for me. I’ll go home to Montana soon enough to my calm life. A little bit of chaos is a treat.

Categories
Finance Startups

Day 1376 and Q3 2024 Investor Update & Market Analysis for Chaotic Capital

Welcome to the Q3 2024 update for chaotic.capital LPs. I’m choosing to post a selection of our reporting publicly so prospective founders and LPs can see our thinking.

You may be invested in chaotic.capital because we invest in ideas that adapt humanity to our new chaotic era.

Enabling resilience in the face of unexpected & rapid change is our lodestar. It’s a simple heuristic that yields a complex thesis: that technology is a tool for increasing leverage. 

In addition to these investor letters, 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 any time.

Q3 was another strong quarter for chaotic.capital. Our ability to identify and back founders early remains core to our success and we’re seeing it both with the inbound flow from founders (as seen in the two new deals we did this quarter) as well as the progress from our existing portfolio, with four new markups this quarter and substantial business progress on those and others.

The markets are increasingly focused on power and compute. What was once a contrarian focus on energy, infrastructure, crypto, and artificial intelligence has now become a core narrative among informed investors.

We believe the future of compute—particularly in relation to crypto and AI—will increasingly be viewed as a basic right, not a privilege, as these technologies scale to mass adoption. 

As governments grow more cautious about debt and monetary risk, individuals and organizations will turn to trustless systems to ensure secure transactions and autonomy.

This is why we focus our investments in the space on foundational layers that will power the next generation of applications.

With portfolio companies like Squads providing on-chain economy tooling, Kuzco reducing reliance on intermediaries while creating an open market, SFCompute pricing compute and creating spot markets, and Chroma becoming the go-to choice for open source vector databases, we see the intersection of crypto and AI creating secure, scalable systems for individuals and organizations alike.

Access to compute is quickly becoming synonymous with freedom of speech and, ultimately, the freedom to transact. 

These open trustless systems enable efficient transactions and verification, a crucial development as geopolitical multipolarity continues to rise, and more people need to ensure their interactions are secure without reliance on the state.

While Americans might not yet fully appreciate this, we’re seeing growing demand for these alternative systems and open models from those who are navigating increasing regulatory pressures and instability.

Europeans, whose governments are deploying strict limits on AI models are beginning to understand, those from countries facing geopolitical uncertainty (e.g., Israel, Ukraine), live it already, and those in countries with unreliable currencies and legal systems have been navigating anarcho-tyranny for decades.

But it can be precarious in the US as well, in California it was only the intervention of a veto from Gavin Newsom that prevented SB-1047 from restricting compute and hobbling the development of open source models.

Looking forward, this ability to access compute at scale may well parallel the right to transact. As nations confront their own risks, network state behaviors will become more prevalent, driven by the need for secure, decentralized systems that ensure autonomy in an increasingly unpredictable world.

We’re excited about the future of chaotic.capital and the opportunities ahead. As always, I’d love to talk about any of this with your discussions with you, so feel free to reach out. We’re just getting started, and there’s much more to come.

Categories
Biohacking Medical

Day 1375 and Titration

My joyful excitement over finally wearing a bathing suit I’d never worn? The peaceful swim in the salty sea ended in disaster within just a few days.

On Friday the allergic and autoimmune symptoms were so bad I took 5mg prednisone. On Saturday they were no better and I upped the dose by 2.5mg to 7.5mg. I moved forward my absurdly expensive biologic injection by a day. I haven’t been able to convince my health insurance to get them more frequently so it’s a risk.

I’m doing better today. My pain is abated to an almost unnoticeable level at a 2. That’s rare for me. And it makes me want to rush into as much work, chores and activity as possible just to enjoy it.

I’m typically working with a 5-6 level of pain on any given day but I can work (with medication) up to a 7 within reason. Past 8 I’m in bed and struggling.

The downside is of course that prednisone just sucks. It messes up your appetite. You balloon up almost instantly with side effects like moon face. And your body develops a dependency quite rapidly.

Titration off of steroids like prednisone require a steady and slow discipline so you don’t get “blow back” as it can make your symptoms even worse.

I’ll have titration for a few days ahead of me. But maybe I’ll get to enjoy the lack of pain. Already I’ve cleaned for an hour, done laundry, checked off a number of small “to do” list items and I am blessedly free of the exhaustion that comes from working with moderate to severe pain that is my normal daily experience.

I was sent a study in the journal Nature about a team who used CAR T therapies to achieve total remission in 3 patients. And I see hope on the horizon.

One woman and two men with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells1. The three individuals from China are the first people with autoimmune disorders to be treated with engineered immune cells created from donor cells, rather than ones collected from their own bodies. Nature

Categories
Chronicle Travel

Day 1364 and Full Speed Ahead

I am in a good vibes places right now. I am a bit tired from some whirlwind pacing but feeling very good about how a number of projects are playing out from an amusing purchase to more serious matters of fundraising and deal management.

I do feel the fatigue that comes with running at full speed. I have been hitting it hard in writing and at work this week and it’s only Tuesday (not that I am one for weekends).

It’s the end of my workday as I’m on European time and I still have a few miles to go before I can be done so I’ll keep the post short. If you want to see where my head is at check the links as I did some good work this week.

On a housekeeping note, I’ll be in New York the second week of October and in Miami the last week of October if anyone is either city would like to meet up. I’ll be prioritizing LPs for chaotic as we are raising along with founders and weirdos of all stripes. Just hit me up on DM on Twitter. Or email me but I’m more likely to respond to DM.

Categories
Emotional Work Reading

Day 1361 and Temporal Distortion

I dislike how illness messes with your sense of time. One of the themes of the pandemic was how it affected people’s perception of time. We measure time but our experience of it is harder to pin down.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly distorted people’s perception of time. Many experienced a disconnection between objective time and subjective time, often feeling that days blurred together or that time moved unusually fast or slow.

Perplexity Recap

Temporal disorientation feels as disorienting as spatial disorientation to me. Getting lost in your own personal time fucks with the reality of consensus reality time passing.

Every time I have a couple of sick days in a row I am fearful. You can reorient if you are lost on a road but the world moves even if you don’t. How do you reorient yourself to time?

We humans live forward. If we somehow find other ways to experience the fourth dimension I’d question if we remain human through that. We understand time dilation but living with time as a concurrent dimension to space and having it be mutable warps the mind a bit.

It’s a rich space for science fiction for a reason. Edwin Abbot’s Flatland is a classic of geometry. As a child I was fascinated by the idea of a tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time. A hypercube is a heady concept for a tween.

All this is to say, I was outside some slipstreams of time and I am slipping back in and seeing if I can flow with the tides.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1356 and Sick Sad World

Current ways of knowing are (maybe rightly) under scrutiny. Some of us attempt to source truth by look backwards citing Chesterton’s Fence.

I’ve been skeptical of romanticizing the past as traditional ways of knowing can be bad cultures too. Sick societies are a constant companion of human nature no matter how we long for that Paradise Lost.

Maladaptive cargo cults are everywhere (Silicon Valley has dozens of flavors) and these superstitions ca. reproduce for generations if nutritional gradients are surplus.n

Noble savages are as silly a concept as high minded aristocracy. You probably know a few maladaptive emotionally sick types within your own communities.

Next on Sick Sad World

Remember the long running joke of Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert? Truthiness. Emotive truthiness reigns supreme as “news-like” content bubbles in the Internet of AI slop battle out the truth of an issue not with verifiable facts but verifiable feelings. Which one is more maladaptive?

We were subjected to a week’s worth of BBQing content which was digested by the American psyche until we switched to the new cycle of a crazed would-be assassin and his failed attempt to kill former president Trump.

If so much of our society is maladaptive copies of civilizational failures, the best any of us can do is pray we are humble enough to see truth and we willing to adapt our ways to it.