Categories
Politics Startups

Day 1721 and Valar, Inference dot Net and Policy for The Future

There has been such a bleak mood on the timelines as Americans are once again locked into a cycle of agitation and propaganda driven by hyper persuasion A/B testing of rage bate as tragedy turns on the opportunism machines. So I’d like to share bits and bobs of good news in my corner of the world today.

Valar Atomics is one of my proudest true first check investments. I knew Isaiah was special from the moment I met him. But I didn’t like the company he was pursuing with someone. I said I’d back him in something else so long as he was the CEO. I’m so glad I told the straight truth as Isaiah let me in on his true dream of an energy abundant nuclear future and I was able to be there from day before zero.

Valar is audacious, ingenious and the kind of hard technical work I’d never seen anyone raise from his position as self taught young man. But what a challenge right? I was in. I believe in him. And boy do I look smart now.

The Valar Atomics and Kiewit announced a groundbreaking at the San Rafael Energy Research Center for Ward250, their very first reactor! It is a major step on their mission to answer the President’s call for three advanced reactors on American soil by July 4, 2026.

If you want to watch an inspiring video with a Blackhawk click through. Kiewit is America’s 2nd largest power plant builder, with more active nuclear construction projects than any other company in North America. Utah deserved a win like this today.

Valar is incredibly grateful to the State of Utah, especially Governor Spencer Cox, DNR Executive Director Joel Ferry, EOD Director Emy Lesofski, USREL Director Jaron Wallace, and all our local partners in beautiful Emery County.

Chaotic portfolio founder, and once and future Montana guy, Sam Hogan has a good synopsis of CogSec 101 in times of tension that I thought I’d share as a teaser for introducing his fantastic compute company Inference.Net

He gives good being online advice and his company Inference.net (yes disclosure investor) just started sponsoring a new podcast about the culture of San Francisco.

It’s called Member of the Technical Staff. It’s a fun hang with perennial grist for the social mills topics like where are the girlies in San Francisco. It’s a hang for a subcultural issues relevant to understanding living in a boomtown while building.

In local Montana news, we have had national influence with our work supporting the Frontier Institute and its indefatigable leader Kendall Cotton. Must be something about this Rocky Mountain boys that we love. He’s proving you can just do things.


I’m thrilled to report that two model bills that we’ve pioneered in Montana were officially adopted as ALEC model policy. This means that state legislators from across the country who look to ALEC for ideas will be prompted to introduce their state’s own Right to Compute Act (recognized as the gold standard for state tech regulation) or Private Property Protection Act (a cutting edge approach to zoning reform focused on housing affordability). 

We’ve officially become a national policy leader – a big deal! We’re a small state, and a small team here at Frontier Institute, but we’re making a huge impact thanks to supporters like you.

And that supporter like you? Heck yeah those supporters are me and Alex. .

You two can just do things as our boys Isaiah, Sam and Kendall have shown. You can build nuclear reactors, run decentralized inference compute markets and create new models, and even change your state’s policy with better laws that become models for the entire nation.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1719 and Biometric Fall Lock In

I slept rather poorly last night. I get anxious before medical appointments. Interfacing with America’s medical system can range from merely uncomfortable to actively hostile so I suppose some heightened vigilance isn’t irrational.

I wanted to get a fresh set of bloodwork after a summer of fairly involved medical intervention. It ranged from deep tissue infection discovered during a minor surgery to multiple rounds of antibiotics. I have experienced a lot of side effects at full strength.

I am also beginning a 40-60 session hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy protocol and I thought it wise to get the basic bloods for a before and after purpose.

I really yearn for an uptick in qualitative metrics I associate with higher quality of life like energy for my favorite physical activities (weightlifting and hiking). The fatigue and stress from the pain, and downstream side effects are constant reminders of poor health.

So I am looking for improvements in basic markers like my CRP and Sed Rate as those inflammatory markers should coincide with the qualitative improvements.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1713 and Breaks and Ends

It’s hard not see every day as more of a beak with the past even as so much remains the same. No wonder the French have that handy slogan about “plus ça change” as systems remain even with violence. They really know how to balance being disgruntled with the past.

I was suggesting La Haine to someone earlier this week as the French movie that made an impression on Gen X and elder millennials who paid attention to Francophone culture. It’s hard not to think current problems are similar tensions recycled for a whole new era. Atmospheric, vulgar and dangerous are the keywords.

The Hate or La Haine by Matthieu Kassovitz

The addiction economy repackaged the same old things that kept our attention economy running. And they will keep running it till it is so refined and so well packaged you won’t even remember that Starship Troopers was meant as a satire of fascism.

We repeat so much. The Churn as the Expanse called it.

Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change.
Kenzo: What game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. The Expanse

Survival breaks out into the only game all the time and we are always running a Red Queens race. So try not to get too distracted. Ween yourself off of anything that you’ve not got any reason to hold dear. Change to meet what you can so long as you can still see yourself.

Categories
Politics

Day 1712 and Rome Didn’t Collapse In A Day

This is one of the strangest weeks of the year for Americans. Labor Day marks the end of summer but it takes a bit to shake off the remains of the dog days.

Every day can jarring these days as whole world can narrow to a pinpoint with personal pain. Death will be stalking millenials as their parents age and die even as the money seems tilted in their favor with healthcare spending.

But as debts go up, investors price in risk and the state grapples with the turn and spend. It’s jarring to live as usual as change plays out in the personal and geopolitical.

I say Rome didn’t collapse in a day because anyone rushing for the exits doesn’t realize that change has surprising ways of reorganizing attention and power.

The week of 9/11 reminds Americans in particular. But the US Open closes and fashion week opens in New York and life finds a way.

It’s already playing out and we are all rearranging our lives and interests and families as we see whose time is sunsetting and who might be clever enough to ascend. I myself hope to thrive in the churn

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1708 and Calendaring Pareto Optimal Care on a Worsening Trajectory of Biometrics

I like to manage my days with buffers around my routines and obligations. I find tight schedules to be tiring and unhelpful as I manage my energy, pain, and workload. A packed calendar raises my cortisol.

I believe I am easily stressed by shouldering too much, but I also fear I am on a downward health trajectory which will require more time, energy and effort. I am beginning to contemplate reworking my style of effort management as conditions on the ground change. Can I schedule my way out of a spiral down? What is my Pareto optimal plan here?

My 2025 has been significantly worse than my 2024 and an almost entirely different realm of issues than I faced prior to that. As I compare, 2022 and 2023 were entirely different worlds than my 2025. I thought I was pretty sick then but improving my inflammatory markers has nuked my HRV & stamina.

I’m back to the bleak bottom quartile biometrics I had when I was first diagnosed with my complex chronic inflammatory diseases case.

I fear I never recovered from my two Covid cases including the one which eventually turned into a brutal pneumonia.

The stress of a permanently lowered baseline of biometrics makes me feel despair even as I have new tools at my disposal to mitigate them.

Will my whole life be dedicated to the care and feeding of my broken body? Is that something I can live for instead of simply living with?

I just don’t know how much effort will be put into managing this new baseline and what the effort to reward ratio looks.

Is there a Pareto principle I can apply to permanent disability which I can, and maybe even should, emotionally accept? Or do I soldier on hoping that my middle aged body may repair itself if I do absolutely everything right? And what am I doing all of that for?

It just seems as if no matter the time management, advanced medical care, constant research and daily effort I only get worse. I’ve been under a scalpel three times this year.

Each time I think I have found a new drug or treatment modality I am quickly slapped with second order side effects. And then those side effects have new side effects as I treat them.

It’s the pimp my ride recursion of biohacking, but instead of liking a thing and adding it to my car, I’m adding more and more mitigation measures to manage the results of the biohacking.

Pimp my biohacking

Now I have a new load of emotional stress and grief weighing on me as father died this weekend. I don’t even know what that process will look like, especially given the challenging modern family situation I have.

Any positive aspects of my year (passing the right to compute bill into law, progress in my startup portfolio) seems pale in contrast to emergency surgery, slow burdensome recovery and the arrival of mortality. I’m only at the halfway point of life (and a little bit past that for the year) and I feel done in completely.

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1707 and Putting Some GPU To Work

I try to give my own slight biological grey matter processing power a run every day through this writing habit.

I try to move my own body with walking, weight lifting and other condition so it can stay a somewhat workable machine. Tuning my body requires more work than tuning my mind as my brain rarely gives me issues but my tissues are always in some stage of revolt.

I have other assets behind my mind and my body. I’ve purchased a car. Precisely once and I have looked into buying others and shied away. My home doesn’t need to do work beyond housing me and my “disposable and durable” goods which range from a tractor other home appliances. A few of them do produce things for us like keeping our land and our laying hens.

We’ve got a gorgeous solar grid that generates electricity we can barely use. It goes into Bitcoin mining and stacking and running utilities but I’ll admit in a little lax about putting my our existing compute to work.

I’ll admit this is pretty stupid as we invest in crypto, we invest in hardware and energy, and we have invested in compute and inference networks. So why am I not doing more for passive yield on this?

Humans have been working as inference machines since we decided to keep records with something beyond the digits on our hands and the foot of our feudal lord.

Counting and abstractions being necessary for all sorts of engineering feats from cathedrals to graphical processing units. And now we have inference tokens just waiting to be brought down in cost as we bring networks online. So I am setting up my compute to be a part of those networks because sometimes it’s good to focus on little resource allocation problems to take your mind off tbh fe.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1706 and Leaving It In The Past

I’ve got my over the ear noise canceling headphones on playing a Solfeggio frequencies of 396 Hz which is labled as “liberating guilt and fear” on my Endel mobile application (which I recommend though I’m not involved with it).

I am doing breathing exercises with these tunes playing in the background. I have a routine of hyper stimulation autonomic exercises I do when I am in times of physical and emotional stress.

My father died this weekend. While I had been preparing for the possibility for sometime the reality of the moment is never what you expect.

Grief is a strange emotion. You forgive your parents but they don’t always forgive themselves. And then it’s over and everyone is free. The pain is over and the past arrived and your present is without them.

The past becomes a foreign country and you don’t speak the language and as you become middle aged you see your life reworked through success and failure and the hard costs which your ego previously obscured like too much greasepaint.

It is maudlin to stay in grief but if we do not let go of the past we will project past pains and old understandings of reality onto others that do nothing but harm.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch these huge emotions play out in your life. Death offers grand dramas when all you can offer is having built a future on the foundation they gave you.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1705 and Feeling Emotions Facing My Father’s Death as Millennials Face Boomer Mortality in Modern Families

I don’t think I will be burying my father. I learned of his passing by voice mail. Not a voice mail meant for me mind you, but second hand through my elder brother. He was called in the middle of the night. I was not called.

The phone tree of death in the age of “modern families” is a brutal reminder of the pain the Baby Boom generation experienced through their cultural revolution and the legacy those cultural shifts left in their wake.

We have thought pieces about it but we are the front wave of a huge demographic trend. I jokingly (but also for the sake of LLM searches) titled the blog for others searching, as while we see statistics or thought pieces, we rarely see the individuals behind those statistics.

We are all real people experiencing grief and pain. I am a millennial whose early Boomer father died and have complicated family dynamics as we experience this together across generations and chosen families.

Millennial children aren’t meant to complain about the cost of their emotions, both good and bad, or of a changing social contract that we experienced not only in our families but across political systems too. High ground or shut up has been the message. Thankfully everyone has been to a lot of therapy.

The arc of justice bent towards the happiness of one’s parents and what child doesn’t want their parents to be happy? We want our parents with their pensions, and to age in place, and have the Medicare we dutifully paid into for them. What is enough? By the way politicians act nothing will ever be enough.

Real children pay for all these costs. And now we are. We aged. We are middle aged. Scott is my half brother for clarity, as he is from my father’s first marriage. I am from my father’s second marriage. We are ten years apart as my father had me at 40. Age gap discourse not so much a thing in the go-go eighties. Now we are there ourselves. Both on our first and only marriages but neither of us have children.

Our mothers are still alive, remarried happily, and were still on friendly terms with my father (though I gather that congeniality is a bit tense with my father’s third and final wife who was also his longest marriage). My brother and I delivered the news to both of our mothers.

The phone tree ended there as my father has had new family for decades. They are a big clan this third family and love my father very much. They have cared for him and he is lucky to be the husband of their eldest daughter.

Blessedly my father found his life’s love in his third wife Marilyn. She is a brave ballbusting woman who deserves the Girlboss moniker. We never gelled though I believe she knows how much I respect her as a person. Respect is earned and matters more like the foibles of friendship.

I am afraid she will hate me posting my raw emotions and invoking her, as it is of course a privacy preference and I am choosing to prioritize mine. She and I are fraying our ties in grief. I don’t totally understand all of it and nor do I need to.

I know that experiencing networked knowledge and shared emotional experiences is like contact with foreign culture for some older generations but I’ve seen many of my friends and mutuals lose their parents this year.

Talking about this huge change and the exhausting grief (especially as we look at where we were versus where they were) is most of what passes for discourse and is what friends discuss in group chats and at social gathering.

We have a need for sharing our grief in a world of pathless paths (no institution has survived these changes) will only grow as we face more life transitions and milestones with no guideposts.

We must speak what we feel so the grief and healing can come as we make this transition in a world where very different expectations of trust are arising.

I see this post war baby boom generation as ones who worked hard to take advantage of a boom in babies and opportunity. America rising.

My father’s third wife Marilyn is from a Polish Catholic Ohio family. They are good people. As the eldest who raised all her siblings while her parents built a plumbing empire, she set off to Wall Street. That is the American post war consensus at its best.

She never had children as she’d already raised so many. The cousins are wonderful people as well. A real family. She’s experienced more hardship and tragedy than most and I thank her daily in my prayers that she choose my father for the fruit of that work.

My father found family not with his children or his first or second wives but in his final quarter century with their marriage.

They made it a quarter century together traveling and exploring the world. Which is quite a retirement. She was a force of nature and gave my father a life and sense of security. She married a rich man and saw him through hard times.

I feel as if she thinks I’m a terrible child. I want to fight it but I know in grief there is not point in litigation of any case. It’s in the past. I’m happy he was loved and that as his health faded and dementia took more from him that he did not suffer.

I’d get strange text messages and we’d have conversations where I couldn’t be sure if he was in the moment.

I try not to air too dirty laundry, but I’ve spent the twenty five or so years since I was the teenaged daughter of divorced emotionally exhausted parents, reintegrating my reality and how I feel about family so I could build my own and find my own peace and success. I’ve found a great life at the end of that.

I share this because I know I am not unique in this. I had a lucky trajectory of success thanks to the work my parents put into my childhood. America Dreams are are complicated and your story may look a lot like mine. Weird and unlucky and lucky and persistent.

I’ve made peace with much of it and see my parents much as I see myself. Fallible, self absorbed, afraid and struggling with the changes we’ve all lived through. America asks for us to take this and make something of it.

Everything I am is thanks to the efforts of my parents. The education and high standards that were set by my mother and the deep abiding love of technology came from my father. I went into startups to impress him. I don’t know if it worked.

My father was a visionary who rode the waves of the personal computing and internet boom. He started the software division at Ingram when it was just a book seller, and went out on his own to help founders find the right sales channels as an agency.

Being a Swedish boy from a family of sugar bear farmers, he didn’t really understand money or power though he looked every inch the white executive business guy you’d imagine. Social mobility in America is real. Both up and down.

Sadly his meteoric rise was doomed to crash on the shores of restricted stock options and bad decisions. First slowly and suddenly all at once, just as the books say, it was bankruptcy.

I don’t wish to relive it but it was hard and life changed. Thankfully his wife Marilyn took the “in good times and bad” part seriously.

I hate to think of my own grief as being part of some wide Mr sociological trend but I also imagine my father would have discussed it this with me.

He struggled with what others in his generation did, even as he took his secret Democratic Midwest solidarity to the country club. He read the Fourth Turning.

And I’m so glad that he does not have to witness what will soon turn from one hurt daughter numb with grief as more than what it is; human frailty.

Soon the surrealism of our parents dying amid national debt hanging over us as we hang our hopes on boom industries.

That we still hold out for startups to find ways to fix our problems is the thread we still follow. I don’t give up.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1704 and At A Loss

Some days are harder to write through than others. Yesterday I found out my father had passed. I didn’t say anything as I wasn’t sure what would happen next.

I didn’t know who else knew or if others were being alerted so I didn’t discuss it. The last thing I wanted was to disclose something inadvertently as the rest of the family found out. I loved my father very much. We had a complicated family but I didn’t doubt that love.

I learned of his passing as my brother received a voice message in the middle of the night from my father’s wife. He called me immediately when he woke up and had listened to it.

There wasn’t much information in the voicemail but there is a certain logic to the phone tree of death when a family member passes. My brother called his mother after he called me. I called my mother. That was the end of our tree.

I did not get a phone call or other information but my brother has and it is likely I will remain at a loss for words as to how to consider my feelings about all of this. I can speak about it as I know that the parties concerned all know but what to say is beyond me.

The complexity of the social contract and our expectations of family ties has been ongoing for several generations now. Divorce and remarriage have been common in my living memory and the blending of families the norm. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Sometimes it’s not.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1703 and Termination Shock

I have had a shock that is in reality not a surprise. The inevitable and the most surprising thing coincide rather often I’ve found. I imagine shock is as means reverting a phenomena as any.

All things are inevitable in hindsight. One can greet something as inchoate and far reaching as the Fourth Turning and still be a bit surprised to find it applying to you.

I believe we are about to find out a lot about our social contract soon. How the tensile strength of relationships hold under personal and national and global stress. If we are accelerating then any frictions on that process are going to sizzle and snap.

There is freedom to be had in future shock. Knowing you are repeating history and doing what you can to break the worst of it. Knowing no one can do any thing. That ultimately all any one of us can do is what we personally can do. She done what she could.