We’ve just had a beautiful snowfall in Bozeman. If you are back up on the mountains at the edge of the valley you are enjoying a mystical winter wonderland.
Alas I am not long for cosplaying Frozen (blessed) as I am headed west. No, I am heading not to Seattle the most important city of the 90s. I am headed to Joan Dideon land. I’ll be in California.
I’ll be in Los Angeles for the week or so if you happen to be on the west side. I’ll then be headed up to San Francisco.
It will be a little whirlwind of family, friends and hopefully some useful business. I’ll be visiting start ups. Going to YC Demo day which I have not done in person. Meeting up with anyone who might want to be a node in our network.
I am game to meet up with folks working on weird shit and are looking to build it. I am also looking for LPs in our next fund so we can keep funding the weirdos who build things.
The virtuous cycle of techno capital starts long before an opportunity is clear. If you have something chaotic in your heart send me a DM
We both like to tinker with new artificial intelligence features and I have got a large training set with lots of tagging.
The synopsis it kicked out of two chatting AI hosts makes it sound like I have written a New York Times bestseller on the cultural and emotional adaption in the Great Weirdening.
So naturally instead of sharing those wins with you I’ll show the emotional underbelly. He asked it to generate my blind spots and boy did the AI read me the riot act.
Beware the AI knows you better than you know yourself
I don’t know if I am blind to these as I see them as faults. I can easily go down rabbit holes and overextend myself. I worry about my physical capacity constantly. That’s why it’s such a clear theme in my writing.
I definitely recommend this as an exercise if you have enough personal content to feed into the generator. Seeing clearly into your blind spots gives you a chance see around the corners of your own life. It’s not quite the same thing as therapy but maybe just as useful.
I sit in between half a dozen different community nodes thanks to my interests in open source software, decentralization, crypto, and autonomous systems technology.
This set of interest covers a lot of ground from ecosystem level collaboration in financial organizations like DAOs and to player versus AI agents coordination to peripheral control of drones and machinery.
Many different demographics are attracted to these frontiers for different reasons. Hackers have a very different mentality than mercenary technologists looking for maximum margin.
Open source has traditionally struggled more from a lack of financialization than from an obsession with it. Which seems less true in the crypto era than in previous more academic and defense oriented eras.
There are classic open source business models and anyone with age and experience in startups has some opinions which I leave as an exercise to the reader. They occasionally fail and an open core loses more than they’d like to professional services. I am writing on WordPress.
One strange aspect of what drives these frontier spaces to interact is that depending on how much leverage you find in building a network you may have different incentives than other builders and users. Expanding out to scaled use may drive a lot more value than the resources required. How the surplus gets divided is always contentious.
For some, the most crucial cultural goals is expanding access to automation and ripping away as many of the services and middle men as is feasible.
Decentralized systems make it harder for middle men to maintain monopolies. Thats its own goal for true believers. For others the goal massive financialization that drives network connectivity is the benefit. Self interest driving common goals is perfectly acceptable.
As I watch the current season of hyper self interested memecoin cryptomania engage with the academic utopian open source artificial intelligence community, I am reminded of so many of the classic issues we have in financing and sharing in the spoils of common infrastructure. Who benefits is a question we should all be asking more regularly
I am always shocked when people say they read anything I write. This isn’t because I don’t think I’m worth listening to but because I know attention is such a scarce commodity.
It’s so valuable we have entire industries dedicated to grabbing your attention. We don’t need to keep it necessarily we just need you to get distracted.
We downplay how well we know what works by indulging people who think they are immune to such things. Of course marketing on works on fools we sagely nod.
Of course we don’t want you to know how effectively we can move your attention let alone your opinion! You thinks anyone wants you to know propaganda works? Dunk on Jaguars new futura font. Scoff at those bot accounts.
Just know that most of marketing is Cocomelon, slot machines and dopamine hits. You can’t fight that without developing discipline which isn’t an infinite commodity. Most people don’t have much of it and aren’t even encouraged to develop. Good luck out there.
Running a startup, for all its supposed glamour, is mostly an exercise in learning how little you know.
Sure there are playbooks for some of what you will do. As the technology industry has grown and startups have become an appealing career choice we’ve filled out how-to guides for everything from fundraising to operations.
Alas all advice is specific to the giver’s experience and untangling biases to make advice relevant to your specific needs is quite hard. That’s where it helps to have more experienced operators on hand to call bullshit.
At chaotic.capital we pride ourselves on being investors who “have a guy” for even the most esoteric possible requests. Playbooks can only you so far when you need an expert.
Just in the last two days we’ve worked through how one hires a chief of staff, what to do when letting go of counsel who made a mistake, installing appropriate security procedures for digital footprints, and the resale brokers for a rare commodity.
We like to problem solve and the weirder the problem the more fun it can be. Removing obstacles and clearing bottlenecks is satisfying work. And knowing guy who knows a guy is a heck of a fun game of social geography.
I’m in a terrific mood. Maybe it is just the hormones cycling up. Maybe the red lights we installed in the bedroom are actually improving my sleep quality. Maybe it’s getting a foot of powdery snow over the weekend.
So much of life seems to boil down to manage my own circadian rhythms even as I plug myself into the hiveminds of my favorite corners of the internet dutifully everyday. And my body likes short days, long nights and the bitter cold.
Certainly success is contributing to my buoyant mode. All of my founders are soaring (which seems statistically rather unlikely given the choppy markets) and the vibes are good. My chaotic.capital clique is thriving.
It’s getting to the point where I think we should host a portfolio dinner or something. Though that would be challenging as we are a distributed group. Alex realized recently that we only met one of our portfolio founders in person before we invested. Can you even imagine that in a pre-pandemic world? Our deal flow comes from the virtual worlds I live in daily.
Being snugly ensconced inside several areas of with macroeconomic tailwinds doesn’t hurt but most of those choices were made two or three years ago so I’m simply directionally correct, well connected, and unafraid to commit once I’ve satisfied my own process. Everyone has a long way to go but it feels wonderful to enjoy their success.
It’s fun watching an entire nation realize none of our citizens functionally have opinions of their own as all of the tribalism of the American system slides off the board into the swamp of personal animus.
The great realignment is in full swing. And no one is sure where they stand. The worst thing you believe about your enemy is surely true just as only the very best things about yourself count.
Ego versus ego blunders against each other. The slow glugging of inertia and bureaucracy and nihilism begins to tug. First time?
“We are so much worse off than the Athenians during their similar stages of decline. Thucydides once wrote, “The Athenians, who were the most democratic of all the Greeks, were also the most prone to make mistakes, for they were always in a hurry to decide, and were swayed by the emotions of the moment.”
The political satire of the poets in Athenian theaters heavily influenced the city’s political decisions, just as TikTok and the Guardiansway millions of malleable minds now.”
What do we believe as RFK Jr discusses previously quite left wing coded hippie truisms about industrial agriculture and pharmaceutical company incentives.
The institutionalists are the left now and oddly they like Monsanto. But now Bari Weiss is arguing for the value of institutionalists against Peter Thiel. Are we really in for a new era of anti-institutionalism? Do we know where the board even is anymore? Don’t slip and slide into the swamp because you don’t like someone.
I’m not quite sure how I got a bug but I seem to be running a fever. It’s possible it’s passing and I’m on the mend but I still feel a little “delulu” as the kids says.
I was taking a constitutional walk Saturday after eating and my heart rate spiked to 180bpm. I wasn’t exerting myself in a way that would normally bring it above 90.
I have a habit of walking after meals as I feel it aids digesting. Nothing intense as it’s more of a habit than exercise. So I was surprised to find myself getting faint. I found myself on the ground.
I don’t take it particularly seriously. I blamed PMS and the stress of the last two weeks. But then I got a terrible night of sleep and my Whoop score matched how I felt.
I spent Sunday faffing about on the internet as watching reality television. I was definitely sick. What else was there to do but shitpoast and watch the price of Bitcoin go up.
Now that felt like a fever dream. If you are a crypto true believer you have experienced more than a few boom and bust cycles. Holding on tight is part of the game.
I suspect that we are in for more of a ride and I was not one to get too ahead in other bull runs. But I did let myself buy a bunch of cosmetics so I’d look for a recovery in LVMH stock if there are enough women who hold Bitcoin.
Many of us read significant amounts of “need to know” publications for our professional lives. I myself read Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal every day along with more specialized media like Axios Pro-Rata and various venture and startup specific media.
Culture is different. Wanting to be in touch with the ideas that shape a nation is a luxury you don’t need to be wealthy to enjoy. To engage in ideas is to have the means to enjoy a life of the mind. You must choose to spend your precious time on it. Time is the only luxury which can’t be bought.
Media is changing as news and cultural content diverge. We used to be awash in a sea of periodicals. As a child I’d bike to the Boulder library and read it all. Thats how I became a fan of the Economist. I loved culture magazines just as much. Some still retain their pride of place through institutional nostalgia like Vanity Fair and Vogue. But can the New York Times hold a grasp on culture like it used to do?
As we face down an election with clear cultural and political bifurcations, what does it mean to be a consumer of not simply news but the culture of the moment?
Someone told me they don’t always open Dirt because it’s not framed as “need to know.” Yeah, that’s why it’s luxury content, because you don’t NEED it. Take your ass back to Axios
To be au courant means deciding where our time goes when it’s not an obligation. And I’m sorry to say to Condé Nast that their grip on culture looks more tenuous than ever.
Telescope, Arena, and Palladium are all pointing to new appetites. We want the luxury of futurism. To be caught only in the moment is to reveal a perhaps embarrassingly high time preference for algorithmically forced immediacy. “I want it now!”
Doom scrolling the news may be fun. Many billionaires spend time on Twitter because of its close proximity to sentiment. We all need to know the narratives catching attention.
But want do we want? Well who rather enjoy an essay from a writer who shows you the culture beyond your feed? Giving your attention to those who respect it will always be a luxury.
Running red light for 2-3 hours before bedtime may help lower cortisol levels and increase melatonin production. Plus it gives your bedroom a fun boudoir vibe so we thought why not try it?
Philips Hue 60W Bulbs
We bought a set of Philip Hue bulbs for the three lamps in our bedroom. They sell their own automation systems to manage your thoughts but we already use Home Assistant from the Open Home Foundation for automation because it allows us to run basically everything entirely locally with no cloud dependence or internet access.
For our existing lighting we use a combo of Lutron Caseta (for built in lighting) and Philips Hue bulbs (for plug in lamps). For the purposes of the red light experiment in the bedroom, we are using all plug in lamps.
For the Hue bulbs, instead of using the Hue Bridge and the Hue App, we use the built in Zigbee radios to pair directly to Home Assistant.
Phillips should be commended for using open protocols and enabling users to use these non-proprietary standards. Interoperability is good.
To achieve the light color changes we wanted, there is a plugin called “adaptive lighting” that automatically color and brightness shifts the bulbs through the day (subject to plenty of configuration options).
In our case, Alex set them to go very red (1000K) while also limiting the sunrise to no later than 6am and the sunset locked to 630p in order to fit into our routine and preferred bed timings.
iPhones have an automatic white balance on their cameras but it is actually quite red at night
The lights mostly work automatically but for when manually control is wanted, there are Zigbee remotes on each side of the bed as well as Home Assistant bridged to Apple HomeKit so everything can be controlled via the Apple Home app or through Siri.
It may sound complicated but there are plenty of tutorials in the open source community to help guide you. As we get more data from our own biometric tracking I’ll be sure to discuss it here and on Twitter.
