Tag: Silicon Valley

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Startups

Day 1936 and Life Inside The Jackpot or I Remain An Optimist

I did not expect to spend so much of my time on politics. Or maybe that’s the wrong word. I look being in voluntary service to American governance as my civic obligation. It can look like politics even when it’s mostly trying to be helpful to the running of our polity.

After 2016 I felt regular citizens like myself needed to recall Kennedy’s patriotic inaugural address from 1961. “Ask not what your country could do for you, but what you can do for your country.” America is a complicated place but we get a say in it. And I’d like to help people understand what I know so it might be useful in serving America in very strange times.

My mother loved Kennedy’s profiles in courage. Boomers have beautiful mythos on facing the new world together. He was the first president born in the 20th century. The social compact of America changed quite a bit then. I wonder who the first president born in the 21st century will be. Maybe it will be another young Catholic man.

The optics of progress aside, it was clear as a new generation in Kennedy’s era took on a new obligation to come together when the American experiment felt at risk. So much about who benefit from the military industrial complex rested in the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy.

I think the context is a little different when progress feels inevitable. Our moment is scary. Though the Cold War was not primarily optimism. They experienced as many breaks with institutional trust as we do in 2026.

Tines are different but I do not think the prescription is different. We owe it to each other to embrace change together. What can we do for America?

I am not the son of a mobster nor am I a nepo-baby of America’s great cultural surplus. I wish. I’m not presidential material or Tiktok star material.

I do have some singular cultural advantages. I am a regular person from slightly unusual circumstances that happened to enjoy some upwardly mobility which let me to participate as an equal in an important transition point. I am actually rather surprised to matter at all. But I do and I intend to advocate for America succeeding together in this change.

I do take technology as a force in society seriously. I believe surplus is an amazing thing. My life is completely different than my biological history. Given how my human DNA was programmed and what I can do daily beyond that you bet I take artificial intelligence seriously. Material progress is real.

I take the physics of demand seriously. It seems like not everyone is confident we can speak to the general public about what it means that the technology industry has found a way to automate itself. It is a scary thing to say. And we begin with ourselves. It is actually our jobs that go first. If we believe it can be better on the other side of the Jackpot live like it.

And I do. I live a little further from civilization for the peace and quiet and because I am a little uncertain. But artificial intelligence’s new incredibly malleable models have changed my capacity by an order of magnitude. How wish I could have had this when I was a software and cosmetics founder.

I am a heavy user of all the hosted commercial models because they are in fact very good. I can do so much more across all the areas of life where I have to figure things out on my own.

I have health problems that are expensive and challenging. I’m lucky to be able to explore extensively the web of issue that drive having a body which has decided it must overreact. And I am in the process of fixing it. In ways that I’d never have had access to before Claude or ChatGPT. I have comfortably setups in spreadsheets and web apps and we can map years of bloodwork and experiments.

I think America is having an autoimmune reaction to the idea of automation as the end product of artificial intelligence. We sense it as a threat and it’s both terrifying in its potential but also a bit of the optimism has waned as the culture of technology fails to engage the mainstream as normal or even beneficial.

It’s the same process of making life better we have run. We took all our brain power to make our physical jobs easier. This has largely been viewed as a benefit to everyone except by strict biological determinists. Bronze Age romanticism is just that.

Thanks to progress in mathematics, we can now make knowledge that was extremely expensive to find, query, and organize as as accessible as asking an expert a good question.

Which is actually still tricky. Most Arthurian legends seem to resolve on knowing what to ask in order to receive wisdom. Knowing what to ask is not easily solved by mathematics. It’s not actually a cheat sheet but rather a powerful way to enable yourself. If you wish to take on that responsibility.

I feel I am somewhere between Hill and Valley in that I work in this world and I chose to become civically engaged. And I am concerned about where we are at. I am genuinely an optimist though as I think humans are so very adaptable. So I try to translate between the tribes who run our system and the tribe of people who make the systems run by the first tribe.

Maybe it’s be being somewhat in between that lets me be a node between the hill and the valley in America. Or as others frame it as a tripartite of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. I think that’s a bit grandiose only because maybe empires run on roads and plumbing but let’s not get forget that power is diffused in a network era. Every node that can route information has power.

The criticisms technology rightly takes from our body politic is that we are going quite fast. I know. I am inside the Gibsonian Jackpot with you. And I know it’s hard to believe that living through the change can be good even if we have inklings of the way life is already better right now. So we have to work together to figure it out.

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Preparedness Startups

Day 1917 and Bragging

My brain feels pretty scrambled at the moment. I wish I could say it was over easy but I’m clearly closer to fried than coddled at the moment. Yesterday had some big news. Valar is prepared for a long slog and that means on paper I’ve got a unicorn and a fund returner.

There’s nothing quite so satisfying as becoming big enough that instead of listing the founder and the team, they mention the celebrity investors.

It’s good that people know we have dry powder for an important mission, just as energy insecurity becomes a real concern, along with all of the cascading effects of side products and elements that are part of the hydrocarbon processing chain. Don’t worry. They’ve got a plan for nitrogen if it comes to it.

And obviously I want to brag, as do all of the other people who took a risk on this exceptional team, especially those who wrote multiple checks (we followed on three times) when it was unclear how far we could go and how fast it could be given regulatory hurdles and funding constraints. Those are now gone.

I do feel like I paid a number of social consequences for being a loud mouth and also generally being anti-consensus during the first few years. And I am glad to have paid that price. Real reward comes from real risk.

I felt we had not adequately addressed American energy independence, clean energy, renewable energy, or any of the many effects of our rampant demand for energy.

I do believe that carbon heats the planet and we have to address it in a way that meets our demands and gives us abundant supplies. I thought well how we could possibly serve it in a way that is sustainable and clean without nuclear?

And I’m as surprised as anyone that the Republicans are the ones championing this but we’re in a place where it’s very clear that we have industrial needs and a geopolitical context that require us to go much faster and invest much more deeply in the solutions that we’ve put off for so many years.

I didn’t get into technology to do some set of financial arbitrages or eke out an extra few dollars so I could have status in the world. I know it’s naive but I’m not very transactional and I do it because I think it’s the right thing to do.

We need to slowly push the markets towards funding the things that are necessary and not just the things that give extra capital to people fighting for status and power. I hope that I can look back on the work I’ve done and feel proud that I tried.

Thanks to this blog God knows I’ve got the receipts for it. We’re barely out of the first quarter. Not even confident we’re at halftime. There’s so much work to be done but I feel like I’m playing the right game.

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Media Politics Preparedness

Day 1916 and Freaked Out Group Chats

I have made a little bit of a side hustle out of being at Cassandra. There was a lovely chunk of time in between Hurricane Sandy and the pandemic when people felt as if the weirdness was contained. It was quirky.

It was novel to know people who had decided to make changes in their just-in-time lives because of a climate catastrophe They had experienced it personally because it happened in New York so the media paid slightly more attention.

It lets media, and the readers of said media, indulge in the fantasy that they might actually change their lives by hearing a rational argument from someone like me. Look at tbis nice young woman didn’t have power after a hurricane in the center of civilization in lower Manhattan while Goldman Sachs glowed in the background, continuing to serve capital in the dark.

In fact I did have friends that had to go by foot to their offices while they went for weeks without electricity in other boroughs of Manhattan it was just particularly surreal to live near City Hall, have absolutely no power but still see the glowing lights of techno-capital operating in the aftermath of the crisis. My husband literally got buckets to remove water from the server room of his startup but the banks were fine.

I had a speech on entropy and chaos that was fairly compelling and turned out to be a very correct investment thesis. We might have to get used to more chaos in our lives because of geopolitical, climate and other instabilities that we could not entirely predict.

That meant getting out ahead of the major controllable factors we had at our disposal as individuals and as a nation. I actually meant it as did my husband as if it could happen in Manhattan imagine what it would look like elsewhere.

Having been a prepper before the pandemic gave a little bit of structure to the first months of the pandemic unfurling in which I had the tools to do a dry run and the experience. I got a lot wrong.

And you must remember we really did not know exactly how bad things would be. The things that actually turned out to be quite detrimental to the economy did not turn out to be the ones we thought. Much of the pain of the experience was self-inflicted. Sound familiar?

But we thought we knew more than we did about the situation we were going into. In reality, we had very little predictive capacity on that front because the last time we had had a pandemic of any novelty, the world wasn’t nearly so well connected.

We overcompensated for a lot in our fears and reactions. I suspect that is going to continue being the way we handle networked global crises of any sort.

The thing is, it’s getting harder and harder to pretend that the things that affect our global lives are not actually happening because people look the other way when their economic situation works well for them. It’s a bargain that democracies and authoritarian governments make.

So right now if you work in technology or finance, you’re in a bunch of group chats in which everyone is freaking out. Even though you could make good arguments that we’re the only ones that have a clear view of some of the contours of what we’re about to face it’s quite clear that our visibility is limited.

I don’t know a goddamn thing about Iran or how it’s going to react, but I know more than I ever thought I’d need to about energy markets because nobody in my line of work had much choice over the last three years if they wanted to be ahead of the computing demands we already struggled to meet.

Now this demand may be coming from America companies, but feeding it is a global phenomenon of investment. One that lets all of the worlds capital pile on into a country that has a few domestic issues.

We all saw changed coming the second we had a mass market, large-scale compute-intensive process that enabled artificial intelligence interface that users felt they could meaningful talk to at scale. There’s something amusing to me about that because in Star Trek’s goofiest movie, The Voyage Home, the chief engineer Scotty picks up a mouse and uses it as a speaker phone. Hello he says, “Computer, are you there, computer?” He then proceeds to type in a number of commands when he says, “Ah a keyboard. How quaint.”

I imagined we’d get to this phase of computing ourselves a little faster than we did, but it turns out that we have finally reached the point of knowing how to type in a lot of solutions that could give us steps and instructions to use tools to make transparent aluminum. I mean this metaphorically, not literally, as we actually do know how to make transparent aluminum.

Transparent aluminum is a polycrystalline transparent ceramic made from aluminum, oxygen, and nitrogen. It was developed independently and is commercially produced by Surmet Corporation. It’s sapphire and funnily enough we use it in bullet proof glass. Which I’m sure is a great business to be in these days.

So be as freaked out as you want in group chats because all kinds of weird shit is coming down the pipeline. If you work in finance or technology, you probably know that you’ve got about two weeks before some irrevocable decisions start cascading.

None of us have any idea what it looks like but you’re probably not as prepared as Elon Musk or Sam Altman. Nevertheless we’ll have to get through it.

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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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Politics Travel

Day 1904 and Ms Fredrickson Goes to Washington

I will be in our nation’s capital next week for a gathering called the Hill and Valley Forum. It’s been ongoing for a few years but I am not someone with a lot of exposure to Washington and wasn’t sure I should pitch myself when the forum describes itself as such.

We host public discussions, panels, and published dialogues that highlight leading voices at the intersection of technology, security, and geopolitics.

Perhaps it’s silly not to think of myself as a leading voice in technology but I don’t know much about security (or its cousin defense) and my commentary on geopolitics is for fun on Twitter.

However, having seen others fail where I have succeeded, in passing successful bipartisan artificial intelligence policy I thought this year I should throw my cap in the thing. It’s not a nice feather having successfully brought the right to compute campaign from citizenry to policy to law in Montana.

It is now succeeding at the national level as states like New Hampshire have passed it in their house and well respected bipartisan policy organizations like ALEC have recommended it as policy.

My husband made a pilgrimage to our capital as the gentleman from Montana to testify before Congress last spring. I was very proud of him. I suspect he is easily as proud of my work on compute policy.

So if you’d like to meet some real Americans (8 wasn’t aware we had fake ones) and are in Washington D.C. drop us a line. I’m hoping to do a little meetup maybe on Monday but not all of my in groups will each other so maybe I’ll do more than one.

But wherever happens I’m excited to share time with other patriotic Americans who do the hard work of making sure we are governed well.

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Aesthetics Politics Startups

Day 1898 and Please Copy Our Homework

Today has been a very gratifying day for a very strange intersecting set of reasons. You may know that I have spent several years working to pass a “right to compute” law in Montana. It was signed into law in August of 2025 by Governor Gianforte.

I was so grateful that a campaign I initiated became not only become a bipartisan policy but a law supported by many Montana citizens & legislators. Now to see it go national not only model policy for the American Legislative Exchange Council but now have a second state, New Hampshire, pass it in their house, gives me indescribable joy.

Just forty eight more states to go. Though I believe it’s going to be an uphill climb as the topic of artificial intelligence has well and truly become politicized which makes stating simple cases of shared values much harder.

Except this isn’t really about artificial intelligence. Compute is a much broader and bigger thing than AI. It’s the stuff of the modern world. But that doesn’t mean we can’t apply what we know to be core American values as the lens through which we see it. Indeed it’s crucial we do.

Last year people could easily see that this was a sensible law that reflected our American values. Because of this sensible approach “the right to compute” is a winning coalition. It was bipartisan. So naturally it became a culture war.

I urge you not to adopt that frame. The right to compute speaks to American’s most cherished beliefs. Recognizing that it is not a novel legal theory. It is the application of the Constitution’s oldest commitments—to expression, to property, to liberty against government coercion

Even if you do not understand how all of its parts work, most understand that the entire digital world, in its constituent parts, is mathematics executed on physical hardware.

When government restricts computation, it does not merely regulate an industry. It restricts the tools through which people think, express themselves, and make use of their own property. Through that lens it’s clear we as Americans decide ourselves how to use it.

I hope we can remember this as the world changes and political actors look to change your mind. I do expect this to become a very complicated and uncomfortable position to have staked out.

Yet I feel confident that we will be able to make the case that this is not only the most American way of handling our future challenges, but is also practically the best way to bring abundance in a chaotic world. America is a land of reinvention that changes material conditions. We need not seek doom.

I believe that I have articulated that vision over the last five years of writing and investing so you can see my revealed preferences. I called our fund chaotic.capital for a reason. It’s hard, weird, difficult and scary but it’s also possible to be a lot better in the digital world such that we can use those gains to make the material world better. We can be more than productive primates with jobs

From nuclear energy to compute, this is what I believe and where I have put my time and money. We are organizing our world of atoms through the power of compute. And that can bring about a materially better world for everyone. Which I want.

I have been thrilled to see so many different people come together around the basic premise that we are empowered to do things.

We can lean in to the accelerating changes, all while holding fast to the reins of the values that built America, so that we may steer ourselves to material success.

Travis Kalanick of Uber may be among the best founders to have ever played the venture startup game. Today he has espoused our thesis & reinforced the work of my friends & founders. To see a cultural program written by a big coalition be part of his return to startup life (though he was never gone) is validating. We’ve found a rallying call.

The way forward is through the application of math on real problems. We can dramatically reimagine outcomes and the pace at which we do it. It’s scary and will look different but our grandparents lived through a lot of change too. Their grandparents as well. It’s the human condition.

I believe all of this is grounded in a philosophical foundation that is a recommitment to America’s core constitutional values. We are free to make things. And sometimes, when we apply ourselves, the world really does change.

If you are a canny socialist thinking look at this useful idiot for capital, I am honestly surprised that dialectical materialism has become so disliked by its own movement. If states with conservative libertarians can see that culture only changes when material conditions improve why don’t you want to improve them? Please feel free to copy our work as we have studied yours. You can find model policy here.

Categories
Politics Preparedness Startups

Day 1887 and Trust Me Bro

I don’t feel terrific so I’ll keep this as a ramble but with some links. I fear some sort of Rubicon has was crossed, which we will only recognize in hindsight, in the fight for property rights in America versus the tyranny of failing state capacity.

I am referring to the contract dispute between foundation model developer Anthropic and American Secretary of War Hegseth that boiled over on Friday night as some sort of Murderbot surveillance subplot parsed only by lawyers, policy wonks and anyone who remembers the patriotism of Chelsea Manning.

Right before America and Israel went all Epic Fury on Iran over the weekend, somehow it was felt a messy public fight between defense contractor and the civilian oversight of our military was ok? Good thing everyone is too distracted to care.

Funny how one can go from cheering on our military’s capacity for innovation one week and the next to be waving one’s arms screaming “no oh no no no” but that’s just politics as run by the instincts of reality television I suppose.

The best writing on this so far has been Dean Ball (who worked in this Trump administration on its AI position statement not so long ago) who feels that Hegseth took an approach on renegotiating a contract with a frontier AI model developer that has consequences.

Loosely and I am missing much Anthropic had its previous contract to parse classified documents in the Department of Defense (now the Department of War) negotiated by the prior administration. Some aspects of this contract wasn’t going to work for the Trump administration. Anthropic didn’t want to change it and Hegseth threatened to call Anthropic a supply chain risk unless it complied. They didn’t and Sam Altman signed a deal.

Wrapped up in this is that of course we all eventually comply with Leviathan who has the monopoly on violence. I don’t claim any expertise here but lots of people understand defense contractor law.

On its face Anthropic looks like the moral high ground and the position all capitalists and private property respected would prefer. However, it’s in Dean’s words, a bit weird for a company to tell the state that a private corporation has a say in policy as opposed to our democratic institutions.

Anthropic is essentially using the contractual vehicle to impose what feel less like technical constraints and more like policy constraints on the military

This is all complicated by the model developer having wishes for frontier AI development to be nationalized and for their work in particular to be safeguarded by a different political administration. It has become a right versus left thing as it was bound to do.

Now Anthropic gets to enjoy the full throated defense of its industry peers and even conservative policy makers like Dean, because our current state capacity is not what I’d call excellent when it comes to our civilian government capacity. Honestly our military still seems to be crushing it.

Secretary Hegseth looked a bit like he was over reaching in his command that he get his demands met. Americans are very touchy about surveillance of if’s citizens and much less touchy about autonomous weapons so it’s natural to be a bit suspicious if you are a millennial who remembers the Global War on Terror. If you are Zoomer who doesn’t know who Chelsea Manning is please go ask Claude.

However it’s not at all clear that Hegseth’s original negotiations were out of hand as of course it’s the state who decides legal use not the private company and we are meant to have laws, judicial process and all the rest. It’s just that we don’t. So what on earth do we do about it? Trust me bro is not a policy.

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Startups

Day 1873 and Flying A Micro-Reactor on a C-17

I spent most of yesterday on an airplane. I flew nearly 12 hours along the polar routes to go from Heathrow to America’s west coast. I flew British Airways and was disinclined to spend the many pounds for internet access.

Alas this meant I missed the rollout of the joyful flight of one of my favorite investments. Valar Atomics began its journey from California to Utah just as I too was flying. Me and the reactor I angel invested in were both up in the air like bluebirds and sunshine.

HILL AIR FORCE BASE, Utah, Feb 15 – The U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense on Sunday for the first time transported a small nuclear reactor on a cargo plane from California to Utah to demonstrate the potential to quickly deploy nuclear power for military and civilian use.

The agencies partnered with California-based Valar Atomics to fly one of the company’s Ward microreactors on a C-17 aircraft — without nuclear fuel — to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Via Reuters

I tear up just thinking of the incredible accomplishments of millions of people coordinating together across centuries that these technologies represent.

It’s easy to think of ourselves as being small in the vastness of time and space. I almost cannot believe I was handed such gifts in this life, but I can claim a small but early part in Valar’s story.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Michael Duffey on board a C-17 cargo plane that transported Valar Atomics’ Ward nuclear microreactor from March Air Force Base in California to Hill Air Force Base in Utah, at the Hill Air Force Base in Utah, U.S., February 15, 2026. On the right, with the American flag and the Valar logo on his jacket is our CEO Isaiah Taylor

Just a little over three years ago I sent Isaiah a message on Twitter. We had a lot in common and I felt a kinship with this young entrepreneur. It was before he had even begun the incorporation work on Valar. He was working on something else, but I trusted his quiet intelligence and admired his humble inquisitiveness. We kept in touch as he mapped out his path.

His lack of ego instantly marked him as special, as it meant he could hear even the hardest criticisms. His fortitude was clear. He could incorporate what was necessary into his mission, a skill usually developed much later in life.

It’s rare to build trust so early on, and yet we both did. I told him I’d back anything he did so long as he was the CEO. Little did I know just how lucky I would end up as his very first backer.

You might think you will have doubts in high risk early stage investing. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t believe in him from day one. I knew he was on a mission bigger than any of us. I knew it and he knew it. For God and country as they say.

That faith was required, as it was tested in rapid succession again and again over the next three years. Chewing glass is part of every startup. Even when you go as rapidly as Valar has gone, there are harsh conditions, brushes with death, and moments of utter joy in between.

Not only did we write a first check in the angel round, but in tight spots before the seed closed we wired follow on within minutes when a concern about a cash flow question arose. We put together special purpose vehicles. Nothing could jeopardize this mission. I’d invest more if I could.

We weren’t always the ideal investors as we struggled to showcase to bigger and better firms our conviction. Not too long ago it was all about being asset light and software as a service. Thankfully the execution always outshone the skeptics and we were ahead of the times. And while the skepticism was fierce, Isaiah never wavered. Neither did I.

Today is day 1873 in my daily writing log. I first wrote about Isaiah on Day 1145 which means somewhere around day 780 or so is likely when we first met. I wrote on day 1510 almost a year ago about their seed round and the first successful thermal testing. On day 1721 they broke ground in Utah.

And you can better believe that I am looking forward to July 4th this year. We promised the president we’d be turning on the reactor, so there is much to be done between now and then.

Even the Department of Defense (War?) is writing swan songs about Valar from the Pentagon Twitter account

At March Air Reserve Base, California, yesterday, a next-generation nuclear reactor was loaded aboard a C-17 Globemaster III aircraft for transport to Hill Air Force Base, Utah. The reactor will eventually head to the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab for testing and evaluation.

The Ward 250 is a 5 megawatt nuclear reactor that fits into the back of a C-17 aircraft could theoretically power about 5,000 homes.

For military use, such a reactor could provide energy security on a military base ensuring the mission there need not depend on the civilian power grid, and in military operations overseas, such reactors would mean U.S. forces could operate without concern that an enemy might cut fuel supplies.

A reactor such as the Ward 250 also means greater energy security for the entire United States. It is firmly in line with President Donald J. Trump’s executive orders to reshape and modernize America’s nuclear energy landscape.

The president signed four executive orders designed to advance America’s nuclear energy posture, May 23, 2025. Those include “

Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base,

” “

Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy

,” “

Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

,” and “

Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security

.”

Michael P. Duffey, the undersecretary of war for acquisition and sustainment, said the partnership between the War and Energy Departments is critical to advancing the president’s nuclear energy initiatives.

“It’s clear to me that advancing President Trump’s priority on nuclear energy depends on close coordination between the Department of Energy and the Department of War,” Duffey said. “This partnership ensures advanced nuclear technologies are developed, evaluated and deployed in ways that strengthen energy resilience and national security.”

The future of warfare is energy-intensive, he said, and includes AI data centers, directed-energy weapons, and space and cyber infrastructure. The civilian power grid was not built for that, and so the War Department will need to build its own energy infrastructure.

“Powering next generation warfare will require us to move faster than our adversaries, to build a system that doesn’t just equip our warfighters to fight, but equips them to win at extraordinary speed,” Duffey said. “Today is a monumental step toward building that system. By supporting the industrial base and its capacity to innovate, we accelerate the delivery of resilient power to where it’s needed.”

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said that with small reactors like those transferred from March Air Reserve Base to Hill Air Force Base, the United States is aiming for a nuclear energy renaissance.

“The American nuclear renaissance is to get that ball moving again, fast, carefully, but with private capital, American innovation and determination,” Wright said. “President Trump signed multiple executive orders that have unleashed tremendous reform of all the things that stopped the American nuclear industry from moving.”

Part of that effort, he said, will mean that by July 4, three small reactors will be critical — or running smoothly.

“That’s speed, that’s innovation, that’s the start of a nuclear renaissance,” Wright said. By

C. Todd Lopez

, Pentagon News

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Community Politics Travel

Day 1840 and Firm Planning Over An Abstract Constantinople

A friend of mine James Pogue published an opinion piece long in the making about a new kind of Democratic. He deeply investigates the subtly misunderstood Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington.

I was really moved by his sincere engagement with a new kind of Democrat who is really an old kind of Democrat who spoke to America s who lived closer to the land and took pride in a type of communal and conservative stewardship of our country.

I felt it very deeply as someone between two worlds. I sense the grief and loss I carry everyday. If the nation had chose a different path, I wouldn’t have been shunted up and out in The Sort.

Maybe I’d have married to my high school sweetheart. He’s an EMT, didnt go so far from home and is a passionate outdoorsman. We were on different paths as is clear from where I landed but my respect for the life he leads endures.

I live an amazing life with a loving dedicated husband with whom I pursue a deeply aligned set of life goals. The blessings that have been showered on me by the Sort have been substantial. We we have almost maximum freedom to pursue our lives while.

I thank God that despite the changes that have ravaged much of the America, I grew up in most of what I know is incredible agency and comfort.

But there are other Americas who are not so lucky. I hold that William Gibson saw Cyperpunk as science fiction rooted in Appalachia. I see how he writes the near future and it’s one where the past still exists but some of us have been sent forward to the future.

In his almost present maybe I’d have in-laws I grew up with and maybe I’d have my parents nearby because we’d never have lost the house in Boulder and staying close would have made economic sense. Hippies really did want that world.

Maybe a world where “right to repair” has been enshrined would have allowed me to build and own the work I could do on the farms that surrounded our defense industrial focused land grant university. It’s hard to imagine what I would do in that other America.

I’d manage the organic school farm I worked to gain permits for that my mother built from the first year. It mostly existed to produced fruits and vegetables for those who worked it. Itd a fantastical idea that has little basis in economic reality but it’s a life that would make sense to almost anyone.

But instead I was off to acquire an enormous debt that was hard for me and my family to fathom to take huge gambles that I’d be a winner. And I was.

But I’ll never have my family, childhood house, or my town back. That America is gone. And when I wanted the pickup truck of the past I had to import it from the fucking Balkans. It’s expensive to be able to repair what you’ve got.

I’m writing this from a hotel in a trade capital where Alex and I are working while doing our yearly “firm” planning for the family because it was the best place to meet up based on his travel and mine as we run the ancient trade lines that have always ruled the world. That we can plan is a dream.

We aren’t aristocracy but agents of them. And if they ever tried to take our trucks or our guns what else would we have left but being “in service” and tut tutting over a lie of moral superiority for having achieved high rank by serving our betters.

I’ve never felt more America than in this moment, even though I’ll never ever get back the American whose logic forced me into achieving a bigger life than I’d ever imagined.

I just happen to know that it was achieved at the expense of my home and my family and a future that would have also been a life of beauty and meaning close to the land and a town that has benefited from an American government that worked a little bit more for the people around me.

Just because I have thrived doesn’t mean the cost wasn’t great. That would be a dismissal of the material reality that I know to be true. But isn’t it nice that I will be treated as a respected trader representing capital interests in some great capital. It’s freedom most certainly, but not the freedom that America promised. That one might be a little less grand. It’s a little bit firmer. And I am in the realm of the abstract.