Tag: Press

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Aesthetics Politics Startups Travel

Day 1909 and All The Twinks Standing In The Line For The Bathroom

I am not an early riser, especially not when I’m out late for happy hours and dinners and the like. So I wasn’t planning on being at the 8am opening for the conference I’m attending in D.C amongst all the side programming.

I had a ten thirty talk I was particular excited to listen to as it was most salient to my work in artificial intelligence policy. Well, that was a dumb decision on my part. Not to arrive earlier.

I’ll take full responsibility for being a moron on that front, but I stood amongst a gaggle of gorgeous well dressed, well groomed and bright eyed young men hungry to build the world of the future. What a crowd of young people.

Being a chatty Cathy I asked about vintage Barbour jackets, bulldog ties, pocket squares, the merits of gel versus more advanced soft hold hair products, the declining quality of Moscot eyewear and other important topics to ambitious young men who are looksmaxxing to win the great game.

I didn’t have much else to do as the line was not moving. No one was getting in. Until people left no one was getting off the line. And that included others who had already been in and had their passes. The hottest ticket in town was perhaps a bit over capacity.

Someone rolled out a portable Starlink and we all piled in to tweet, chat, roll calls and (in my case) send tweets, Signal messages, and Slack channel responses. I got told my tweet about the two hour wait wasn’t ideal so I deleted it as I appreciate any attention to me running my mouth as I assume no one ever listens to me. I barely do.

But maybe I’m wrong? Last night checking into Butterworth’s, the woman manning check-in in lit up when I gave my name “I love your Twitter!” So maybe people do notice what I say. I still find that an a funny notion.

That said, it did take the full two hours to get into the giant event hall which made all the rush and planning a laugh. More people left the line and went back to work than stayed at 10am but everyone determined to participate seemed to make the best of it.

I asked if this was normal for a DC event and no one seemed to be from DC. So I didn’t get any good answers. This was an unexpected wrinkle that the venue was full was full up as an enormous crowd circled the block twice.

Since we remainders had decided to make the best of it we got to know each rather. Every man was quite a gentleman as we chatted oblivious to status till we were let in and others let us all know the pecking order. One of the young men I spent my wait, who is I learned later was literally the heir to one of the most important fortunes on the planet. Another was launching containerized autonomous weapons.

But that time of work and waiting was rather like being on an elevator stuck together, we might as well get to know each other. We are all equal before a tough door.

Thankfully we did get into the room before Jamie Dimon spoke. And he was the big boss of the handsome executive crowd.

I titled this “all the twinks standing in line for the bathroom” as yes a lot of handsome queer men were in attendance. But twink is an all purpose gender fluid aesthetic and not reflective of anyone’s sexual preferences.

And the line for the men’s y was a lot longer than the women’s. Ten to one ratios make me think this would be quite the dating scene for the ambitious woman.

But yes there are a lot of very well groomed young men in Washington D.C and everyone wants to build solutions for America. And being beautiful doesn’t hurt. To my single lady have you consider meeting a man in DC? Good odds and I doubt even a fraction of the twinks are gay.

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Aesthetics Startups Travel

Day 1905 and Run of Show

I have very particular traveling habits. I like things to be packed in cubes, labeled with contents and in a cascade of backpack, carry on and checked bags should something go awry.

As I’m heading to our nation’s capital soon I am taking extra care with my “run of show“ as I’ll have more varieties of events to account for over my stay. I expect humidity and rain so that should be fun for hair and makeup. All men need to worry about is sunscreen and maybe a bit of hair gel.

Now my travel wardrobe must account for visits to historical sites, nice dinners, late night parties, internet friend meetups (see you at the Polymarket’s Monitoring the Situation bar?) and a conference that is somewhere between startup event and defense contractor conference.

If you are a woman, you are probably nodding your head and thinking well that’s at least 4 different pairs of shoes and two purses. Then there is evening wear, day blazers and skirt suits, sweaters and other mix and match separates, and heaven forbid I find time to exercise so sweats and all the undergarments.

All that packing must work with the additional run rate risks of TSA slow downs (can Congress pass a budget) while presumably needing additional care and attention to security. Given we are embroiled in a war with Israel in Iran it’s hard to count on smooth sailing. So I pack as if I will encounter unexpected difficulties. Hopefully none more irksome than long lines.

As a woman who mostly spends her time in Montana or otherwise in the middle of nowhere, you can imagine that my makeup these days has a bit more in common with tinted sunscreen than it does with a smoky eye with a cut crease let alone a full powdered contoured beat fit for television. However I’ve heard polished full makeup is the preferred look on the hill including eye makeup basics.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to rely on my skills without additional practice, but I won’t lie I did a couple dry runs on new palettes I’d picked up and a few new colors. Very little new made the cut. When traveling, rely on what is reliable.

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Culture Internet Culture

Day 1902 and Cynical Victories for Hollow Lies

I know it’s sweet bordering on stupid to engage in good faith when it comes to politics, but maybe I’ve grown soft in my old age. I really do believe that Americans are capable of building wide coalitions in a pluralistic society.

Call me naive but most Americans, even most humans, have more to bind us together than to break as apart. We are social animals even the most introverted of us.

So I hate seeing groups who share common values fall apart over schismatic propaganda pieced together explicitly to worsen your weaknesses and widen your vulnerabilities till you are both tied to horrors you’d never have condoned.

The trouble with Utilitarians is they say up front that the ends justify the means. Thats your starting baseline. Which is at least clean. Then the Machiavellian’s say it’s alright to obfuscate. The noble lie and all. And then suddenly the enemy is inside your gates and you are being gutted.

This is roughly what is occurring between Bannon-world who hates technology so much they have accidentally teamed up with a gaggle of one world government rationalists to…use zoning rules to save the world from…industrial parks with rack servers?

I know it doesn’t sound very sinister but everyone involved is sure the anti-Christ is going to be involved. Peter Thiel is in Rome giving lectures so the buggy man has involved.

Folks must enjoy being useful idiots as it’s strange to me to think you might align with people you loathe just to fuck up the other team. The goal is flourishing for all no? You came at me and my boys for whom all I wish is flourishing.

Which is funny as I was always under the impression that end times eschatology required the Antichrist to be quite well liked. Everyone involved in this is universally despised.

I guess if you are certain that you are in danger of being stomped out by an evil, and believe any of your actions are justified by this premise, you may as well embrace all kinds of evil.

But you do have the options of not using millenarian tactics to scare the shire. Hobbits are brave or so said the neomonarchist who can’t tweet. But I won’t forget people who threw me over for propaganda they were too dim to understand or cynical enough to believe no one else would.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1864 and Retail Therapy in Fashion Exile Land

Maybe it’s because it’s been such a wild week in the financial markets, but I’ve been thinking back to one of my moves to San Francisco just before the Great Recession. It’s a story about buying clothing but I’ll get to that.

I had just come off the high of being the first publisher to break (by live streaming and photography) a new fashion designer who would become one of the biggest names of his generation.

The low hit me as I realized I was unable to afford any of the pieces in his collection. And nor was I able to buy them anyway as the whole collection sold out instantly in New York City. I look back on being backstage at his first (and subsequent) shows with much fondness. Once he threw a full on carnival in a parking lot! Imagine models tossing their size 9.5 Manolo’s on concrete to hop into a bouncy castle.

Those models were his muses and he was known for an off-duty model look. I am about a foot too short, 20-30lbs too fat, and three cup sizes too large to be mistaken for a model so not an ideal customer.

Normally one could politely ask for samples or gifting if one helped break a collection, but this was not a sample collection that would have fit me. I’m a size 7 shoe and those boobs do me no favors for hanger sizes.

Still I wanted one item badly. Even if I couldn’t afford it and I couldn’t find it in stores, I kept an eye out everywhere for it.

The coveted item was a pair of high waisted pleated black wool trousers (lined with an ample cuff) that was the wearable merchandising anchor to a collection that was otherwise a bit tricky for mere mortals to wear.

For the men (and some women) who haven’t given thought to runway models, the metrics are specific. You need to be over 5’ 10”, never over 115lbs and have an A cup to fit a designer runway model call sheet.

These aren’t aesthetic preferences, just that models are a glorified hanger and not a person for purposes of ease of fitting. Yes it’s a bit degrading.

And so I resigned myself to never getting those pants and having only the glory of discovery and first to market coverage. Though the proof on that may be debated.

But then a small miracle happened. As I was relocating to San Francisco (by the buyer of my first startup) I began to get invited to events and parties.

A brand new Barney’s opened up off Union Square in San Francisco. An old girlfriend who had just married and moved to San Francisco told me “you will love the shopping out here as the good stuff never sells out!”

Mind you the collection had sold out in other fashion capitals. I had called around. I asked all the major stockists. It just wasn’t to be had anywhere.

But the new Barney’s was very late in opening and had stock from the previous season saved. I missed the opening party but thought maybe I’ll see something from the newer collection and I’ll splurge.

Well I got even luckier than I imagined. The pants were not only at the new Barney’s but on the sale rack. No one in the market had even liked them.

The salesgirl said weren’t moving as they were too formal and too trend forward for the town. They were having trouble moving most of the pieces from the designer in fact.

There were multiple pairs of the pants in size 38. That is a size 6 in American sizing which is almost always the first to sell out. I purchased it without even thinking. They were 40% off.

I still wear them to this day. And anytime I visit a bigger city or capital with a retailer of high end fashion, or designer goods, I’ll go looking. Sometimes in the strangest places you will find the exact item you wanted marked off in the middle of February.

Categories
Emotional Work Media

Day 1859 and Crime Without Punishment

People tell stories of where they were or what they were doing when major world events happened. Most of them are silly and personal but necessary to ground the horrors of being connected at scale while still being such small bit players in the scale of things.

On 9/12 I had just left New York City to return home to Colorado to finish out the high school I’d dropped out of the year prior. My grandmother called me at dawn before I’d left for the annual start of school camping trip, distraught that we couldn’t reach cousins and other family who were first responders or worked downtown. Then we couldn’t get through for hours.

When Lady Diana was killed I was up early for a sports competition preparing my gear when the news broke. My mother and I watched in shock at 4 in the morning as we packed bags.

When Michael Jackson died I was in Miami on my first solo vacation between jobs having sublet a condo for two weeks while I sublet my New York apartment. The grocery clerk at Publix ringing me up asked if I had heard. I attempted to explain that I’d seen it on something called Twitter.

When Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself I was in the hospital. I had been entirely off social media but still listened to the five minute radio news update. I don’t know why but I told my doctor that he was dead and her immediate response was to swear. I recall us both being upset as she shook her head saying “now he will never face justice.”

The entire weekend was a deluge of people processing, concocting, and turning over the “flood the zone with shit” dump of files on Epstein. As if the Friday night “take out the trash” media playbook somehow still held sway over a population of networked humans.

Now we are a species who remember every Harry and tragedy both personally in the context of our own small lives and at large as it emerges into a wider understanding shaped by the contours of those who seek to distract or draw attention.

It’s no wonder we spellbound by conspiracies. I lived across from ground zero for years. Tourists grieved and paid homage next to soap box schizophrenia weaving tales. I grew up on forums dissecting every aspect of death and tragedy from princesses to the King of Pop. Why should the coverage of depraved sins be any different?

So I ask myself why should I believe any of it. Who should I give information dumps and theory threads and newspaper headlines any attention at all? I’ll never know if crimes were punished. Justice works slowly and sometimes not at all.

Categories
Media Reading

Day 1855 and Reading The Certain Uncertainty

My daily routine starts perceptually early when I am in Europe and perceptually late when I am in Montana. The world is currently rotating on the narratives of American Eastern Standard Time and that means I try to rotate with it too.

Alas part of me has always oriented my circadian rhythm around the full noon day sun as I’m I am not an early bird nor a night owl. So European hours work better for me than Mountain West Hours for some types of work.

Most notably the watching of flows of information, particularly from legacy media and its keepers in Washington DC and New York City.

I don’t know where I got the habit, probably from my mother or father, but I always start my day scanning the major newspapers.

There is functionally no local paper to read any longer in most markets but I will take Bloomberg, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, along with NPR before I do anything else. If I’m feeling spicy I might even look through the New York Post.

It’s a habit I was encouraged into as my family was a household that always had a newspaper delivered. Whoever began their day together would share or sections, like a Norman Rockwell painting. I generally remember it being my mother but my father was a great reader as well.

What began with a local Colorado paper turned into many subscriptions. We subscribed to all sorts of magazines and periodicals when times were good and what we could not justify in the household budget, I was encouraged to pick up at the library after school.

Maybe this is why I am such an avid writer, as I am an avid reader. Although I don’t know if either of those habits will have much utility in the future as we transit into visual and oral communication methods. I am still reticent to scroll video platforms.

Now I begin the day not just with a newspaper scan but with every sources of information I can scan from commodity indexes to podcasts and social media.

I like to know where the discourse is being guided as early as I can. Obviously in my professional capacity sometimes I’m months ahead or even years, but I like to be ahead, at least, of the day’s news as well.

Increasingly it is hard to be sure that you are able to paint yourself a picture of what may really be happening as opposed to a picture of what somebody else would like you to think is happening. This was always true but now we are in the fog of war.

Hence my interest in being on European time zones. I can usually get a good grip on what may percolate up being ahead of the London broadsheets. Being just ahead enough of the largest media market (American media is mostly based in Manhattan) can give you a real sense of freedom in these very certain, uncertain times.

Categories
Politics Travel

Day 1838 and Tractor Protests of the Mercosur Free Trade Deal In Greece

As I continued my journey through southern Europe yesterday, I encountered one of the most striking protests I’ve ever seen. At every major intersection and city limit there were hundreds (if not thousands in instance) of tractors lining the streets.

From enormous modern combines to Jeremy Clarkson style esoteric speciality vehicles, I saw more tractors yesterday than I think I’ve seen in my entire life. It was majestic. And it continued for my entire drive through the country from border to port to border.

Mind you I drove a tractor before I drove a car, and I live in farm country so trips to the local John Deere dealership are a monthly ritual for us. And I’ve never seen such a variety of tractors. It made quite the spectacle and was deeply emotional seeing so many of them empty and lined up in a row in quiet dissent.

Crossing an intersection over Greek Farmers protesting the Mercosur trade deal

The tractors flew flags and banners indicating their disapproval of the signing of the EU-Mercosur Trade Deal. The European Union will be trading with the Mercosur bloc consisting of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. It is set to create the world’s largest free-trade area covering 700 million people. 

European farmers are not happy about it. Yet the protestors did not disrupt traffic at all. The roads were open and passable. A blessing given that in many areas it either snowing or had recently snowed and the temperatures were below zero.

Mediterranean olive land covered in snow on January 11th.

The snow is not a very common experience for an area that farms olives and grain. And yet on top of changing weather patterns, the Greek farmers I saw protesting (along with 27 other European countries who are signatories) must now contend with farmers in 4 Latin American countries that do not have their standards or rules.

Economic collaboration and global ties were touted in all the press from Brussels as they condemned America’s retreat from trade. And the part of me that is a committed free trader wanted to agree. But the part of me that struggles with illness and the American food system was on their side.

And yet Europe is saying damn their own farmer’s opinions, stick it to America and our government’s trade wars. Ursula von der Leyen will let in Brazilian fruit and glyphosate saturated grains come to Europe.

I am no stranger to protest movements from the Battle of Seattle to EarthFirst! I picked up Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as a child. I remember the era where organizations like the WTO were criticized and concerns about trade and agriculture were front and center. We forgot along the way and the politics went horseshoe theory but the problems remained.

I don’t farm or ranch, merely keep chickens, garden and maintain our land in Montana, but my husband’s beloved electronic free Deere is practically a family member. We are sympathetic to farmers and care about topics like soil earth, permaculture and the endless glyphosate lawsuits.

I’d rather America be trading with Europe than Europe be trading with Latin American countries. The land some of them work is meant to be rainforest not grain fields.

I’d be furious too if I were a Greek, Irish or French farmer under restrictions my competitors didn’t face knowing that they produced a better product on land cared for under high standards and almost impossible conditions. They know what they yield is destined to move on their ports somewhere. Thats what their ports do. But protest they must.

The Thesolonikki Port as seen from a hotel

And yet here the farmers were, placing their precious equipment on the roads silently condemning the entire lot of politicians who care neither for the people or the land.

Seeing like a state means we are just numbers to them. I couldn’t count all the tractors I saw. There were too many. At every crossing I saw there were more. And that’s the point. It will affect all of us in the local and global balance of the land and the people it feeds.

The land and its stewards ultimately don’t matter where no matter what Brussels says. Neither does America’s politicians and their economic foibles. It’s all a numbers game.

So the farmers showed them their numbers every where I turned. I noticed them. And I hope others do too. What we can do is not for me to say. I see them and am sharing so you can too.

A gas station stop in the middle of nowhere
Categories
Biohacking Media Medical

Day 1832 and Beaten With My Own Measuring Stick

It being the new year “the new thing” to talk about is “the new you!” As if you weren’t the same person as you were a few days ago. But you have this convenient convention that allows you to decide now is the time for change.

I used to call this time of year “eating disorder season” but GLP-1s have turned down the volume on that noise. We still have New Year’s resolutions and media just love having a topic tentpole to discuss new trends, habits, and opportunities.

We may not have as much of the fat chatter to contend with anymore (thankfully) but I do have reams of biometrics and plenty of concerns about my own health so the season of changing yourself remains even if the material conditions have improved. The app chatter is still in my head.

My Whoop continues to nudge me on the “aging” metrics and which ones are hurting my healthspan the most. I hide it for a peace of mind but on the latest update it is openly admitting that it’s given me goals that are impossible for me given my limitations.

It’s a relief to see the application get better but of course I’ve know the algorithm and my limitations don’t always mix. It’s been workable when I’m in Montana walking outside but it swings my numbers a lot when I’m in a small apartment in a polluted city. It’s a “short hallway” problem.

I move a lot inside (safer and less polluted) but it doesn’t those short bursts and turns as steps so I push to get more steps counted and it overwhelms my nervous system and immunocompromised state.

I am being beaten by my own measuring stick. I always suspected this was the case but at least now Whoop can talk back and tell me just how it nudges me into worry and concern. Which is a good lesson for all of us.

Categories
Finance Startups

Day 1775 and It Is A Lot Easier To Just Be First

I often wonder how it is that venture capital remains so male-dominated when most of the work is the same skill set as a fashion editor or a style writer.

Sure, you occasionally see a man with good taste, and the twinks and gays are obviously the best of breed in both venture and fashion. But the game is basically the same. And yet fashion is dominated by women and venture as an esoteric sub-asset of private equity is very much not.

Let’s compare. Venture is a small, tight-knit group of people, who run on backchannels and gossip, and absolutely everything is determined by being the first person to land the next hot thing.

Now there is an avant garde who sets trends which then get validated with market success. In venture these are the earliest angel investors. In fashion, it’s the indie publishers who slog through the upstarts and pick who to champion.

The angel investor hopes their deal will go to later stage investors just as the trendsetting editor hopes their designer pick makes it to Vogue. Picking the next “it” thing and riding the wave to fortune is the goal for editor and designer, just as it is for investor and founder.

I personally think my skills are validated just as much being the person to get Mansur Gavriel added to the right boutiques as I am being the first check into Valar Atomics.

I took my bag to a breakfast at a boutique investment bank (you know the one with the summer camp) and happened to be meeting with an investor who loved the bag so much that the founder of their luxury ecommerce investment picked up the bag to stock immediately. Well over a decade later, I still carry that bag almost everyday and so do millions of other women.

Now ask yourself if this next story sounds pretty similar. I sent a direct message on Twitter to a young founder who seemed interesting. He had a quickness to his thought I respected as well as humility that set him apart.

Alas I didn’t like the company he was working on at the time and I didn’t like that he wasn’t its CEO. Sounds like “the food was bad & the portions are so small” sort complaint right? Well, I just thought he was so good he should be the lead in whatever he did next.

The young man had partnered with an experienced elder (which was probably wise for that industry) but the founder was clearly the dynamo in that situation. I told the founder that straight up. He had earned complete candor from me.

We began talking about what he really wanted to build. His intensity was awe inspiring. And his vision was just so crazy that I knew I had to back him. Many phone calls and strategy sessions later I wrote a check. It would take less time than I’d dared dream for others to see what I saw first.

Two years and change later, that young man is the founder and CEO of Valar Atomics which just raised 130 million dollars to make small modular nuclear reactors. Isaiah Taylor may have been a diamond in the rough when we first met, but I knew he’d sparkle in any setting.

To see him now as the jewel in the crowns of many much larger funds and backed by much more impressive and capable people than me feels amazing. I’ll always have the satisfaction of being the first to know he was going to be the next big thing.

And that’s not so very different from helping select the hottest hand bag of the last decade. Like Jeremy Irons’ character in finance classic Margin Call, I know the value of being first.

There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.

Now, I don’t cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first.”

If Isaiah’s work is successful, it will be an awful lot bigger than the hottest handbag. It will materially change the conditions of fueling our lives.

And while I am pretty smart, I knew enough to act first. Because it was a hell of a lot easier to just be first. And if I’m lucky, I’ll carry my bag and own equity in Valar for a long time to come. Read the full story in Bloomberg with a gift link.

Categories
Culture Reading

Day 1758 and Fluctuation in Society

I was ordered into bed for a couple of days by not one but two doctors. As I mentioned yesterday, a small incision for testosterone pellets must have let in a small amount of bacteria.

Maybe we didn’t pick the correct antibiotics (or maybe it was an inadequate dose) so what looked like healthy healing turned into a subcutaneous infection just as it was all look well which needed managing and cause me a bit of trouble.

So I’ve been catching up on costume dramas like The Gilded Age about the 1880s boom times in America. I’m on the third season of it and while not quite done but I’m enjoying it.

It’s provided me inspiration before as I’m fascinated that corporate charters are what lead to America’s experiment in self governance and each new era of technological and commercial development seems to kick off new organizational opinion of how best to manage society.

No matter the era or the people involved, humans will always find new ways to organize themselves into hierarchies that reflect changes in technology and material conditions.

As eager as we may be to unravel past cultural ways of organizing our status and importance, we always find new ways to set new standards of who matters and why and the same human nature finds a way to creep back in.

Position, birthright, inheritances and other ways of marking nobility and aristocracy manage to find a way to accommodate wealth and power lest they lose all status.

And who has wealth and power in this century whipsaws so fast, it feels like change is as seasonal as the weather. Even if in reality, society changed little if at all. Money and birth still matter quite a bit no matter how many followers someone has on the latest attention gathering platform.

I’ve mentioned my fondness for Paul Faussell’s Class: A Guided Tour Through The American Status System as a good jumping off point for understanding how American has organized its flavors of granting social capital within our supposedly classless society.

The Gilded Age attempts across the seasons to show that our society is always changing with subplots about rising in society through invention, intellect, political organization and sheer force of will.

Gilded Age’s director Julian Fellows also directed Downton Abbey which famously showed a British aristocratic family struggling with money, social change and war.

Both shows may show ways of changing one’s position in society but the skeptics exist at every turn. Even Fussell has Class X in his guide who exit rather than participate in what he calls the charade of meritocracy.

Fussell argues that it is essentially impossible to change one’s social class —up or down — but it is possible to extricate oneself from the class system by existing outside the system as a X person. Wikipedia

I find this particularly funny as we have entire institutions dedicated to deciding how we see and experience class and their luminaries hate how society organizes itself as much as anyone. The New York Times’s infamous columnist David Brooks finds Fussell’s book a “caustic and extravagantly snobby tour through the class markers of its time” which strikes me as especially funny as he once dedicated a column to worrying if he’d put his assistant into an awkward spot by presuming she wouldn’t know how to order in “gourmet” Italian deli.

Bourgeois bohemian that Brooks was, it never occurred to him that an Italian deli might actually be a lower class marker for plenty of people. American Society being filled with semiotic markers in America to ever really manage a static set of signifiers for all that long.