Tag: Social Capital

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Startups

Day 2008 and From Running On A Dream to Running On Our Reactor

I’ve got to remember to keep tissues in my purse. I’m prone to crying when I’m proud. I am a crier by nature and the experience of pride and awe is becoming distressingly common. Woe is me right?

My very early bet on Valar Atomics (I wrote about it on Day 1145 but met Isaiah closer to day 900 early 2023) is paying off years, if not decades, ahead of my expectations. Never did I expect arguably the hardest operational bet in my portfolio to be such a fast breakaway hit. And I owe it to an executive order from Donald Trump and the efforts of patriotic Americans committed to regulatory reform. Which is crazy.

As it turns out, if the government gets out of the way of talented people, nay, if it demands that our state institutions help them, the impossible becomes possible in shockingly short order. The reports of America’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Today in front of a crowd of hundreds of current and potential investors, employees, Orangeville community members, government officials & scientists and most importantly our family members, we watched a reactor (that might not even exist without my first check), power an Nvidea Blackwell chip.

In a demonstration rivaling the greats (Ballmer, Jobs) Isaiah brought up NuclearWebsite.com and asked the audience to load it with him.

“Oh no it’s not loading?!!?” What’s happening? Do we have any electricity on site? Quick someone run the GPUs to the nearest electricity! Go go we can’t disappointment all these people!

And then the Blackwell is rushed into the Ward250 reactor. In real time the chip is run to the control room, gets hooked up and boom the website loads.

The first entirely privately funded nuclear startup was critical, stable, producing electricity and powering state of the art silicon.

We actually did it. The mad lads and ladies of Valar Atomics swept ahead of the competition in a frenzied year of progress (Day 1510) from seed round and Ward Zero to producing electricity to power GPUs.

After a twenty four hour travel marathon to get from the Ionian in the Mediterranean to the southern Utah desert, being back at the Valar Atomics reactor facility for a demonstration of this magnitude felt surreal.

Just a few weeks ago (Day 1969) the reactor was days away from being shielded and then fueled. We’d driven down to see her before she was wrapped up in shielding.

Proud first investors in front of Ward 259

Now not only has she gone critical (Day 1996) but I was able to walk into the running reactor room and see the live reactor for myself. The operator Ben (a former naval nuclear operator) seemed surprised and happy to see me. “Julie! Hi!” He exclaimed as me and the other early lead investors piled in for a tour.

I won’t lie it felt really cool that the team knows me on sight. The perks of being the very first believer (Day 1145) are worth the risk. Sure you get called crazy quite a bit, and only half the time does anyone mean the good kind of crazy, but sometimes you get to enjoy being right.

Jason Calacanis (also a master of the live demo) never lets anyone forget he invested in Ubers seed round. I get to brag I wrote Valar’s very first check

And while success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan, I’ll always enjoy the satisfaction of being the very first to take a chance on a long shot no one thought had any business even trying. And well they were wrong. And I was right. Not just right but really fucking right. I backed the long shot dark horse (somewhere around day 950) because my gut told me that the kid had the right stuff. And wow did he.

I only had a dim hint of exactly what we’d be seeing today as the invite said “Watts Next” cohosted by Nvidia and Valar. Clearly a number of us connected the dots because it was packed. The atom would power the compute and we’d get to see it live.

The team after the demo

Every existing investor, and quite a few later stage firms, came out to the middle of nowhere to see if these longshots had really done it. And indeed in just three years the impossible became reality. I’ve never felt prouder to be American. And clearly everyone around me felt the same.

This is a win for all of us. The families who gave up time with their loved ones so their loved one could pursue a dream. The policy makers and scientists who did everything in their power to prove we could make nuclear work again. The investors who wrote checks that no one else wanted to write as it was too risky.

And most importantly, it was a win for the team, led by the indomitable spirit of Isaiah Taylor. Their long nights and constant doubt paid off. The road ahead is long but no one is likely to doubt that we are serious contenders anymore.

I always say there was never a doubt in my mind. I had faith. Isaiah joked he had moments of doubts. I say I’m blessed that I got to be that first believer to say “I think you can do it and I’m going to help.”

And whenever he doubted that we’d make it (there are always near death experiences in any startup) it was my privilege to remind him that doing the impossible is just what we humans do.

Like Captain Kirk, I don’t believe in no win scenarios. I hope you consider joining me for more impossible long shots. Because sometimes taking the shot is worth more than anything else you will ever do.

Want to run your compute on clean renewable cheap American energy?
Categories
Culture Startups

Day 2002 and Rolling Calls

One of my extended family members owns an agency where they represent some well known talent. I learned a lot from them in both my childhood but as I came into my own as a business person.

They were basically always on the phone. When I was younger it was in an office with an assistant (who I got to know and watch grow into a career) but these days being on the phone is a far more mobile affair.

This practice was referred to as “rolling calls” where the agent and assistant are constantly going back and forth like a switchboard operator with the set of people needed to get a deal done.

Agents were big early adopters of the BlackBerry and rolled those calls straight into the iPhone. Being of an older generation talking was the way call rolling worked with a side of email delivered by your mobile device.

I’d say it’s probably as much a voice game as it is a text game now. My version of rolling calls is rolling Signal chats and Twitter DMs. A couple of good group chats self organizing can make your day really fire. So I’m rolling calls except I’m rolling chats and texts. It’s still basically the same job. We ping until we find the person who gets us to the deal. And then you close.

Categories
Biohacking Chronicle Emotional Work Startups

Day 2000 and Don’t Stop Believing

Well I’ve done it. I have written and published to the internet a blog post every single day for two thousand days in a row. So I am going to toast myself to a job well done.

In earlier milestone posts, I was always surprised I’d made it, but now the harder thing to decide is if or when I’ll stop, not if I’ll keep going.

Half a decade goes by a lot faster than you think. The accomplishments actually do add up if you keep yourself pointed in the right direction.

In a personal capacity, we got ourselves to Montana, set up a life that let us live the way we’d always dreamed and invested in the future we wanted to see.

From a civic perspective during that time we helped pass meaningful reform in housing, testified for crypto rules of the road and worked to ensure Montanans have a right to compute.

A new era of networked algorithmic power has been building for many years and our rights to use compute as we see fit is bolstered by our 1st, 2nd and 4th amendments.

From an investing perspective, we have been first in Solana’s most crucial infrastructure player Squads. Because yeah crypto is going to matter a lot in an artificial intelligence age. We have stuck to our core mission of adaptation by backing the tools needed to benefit from our new AI speed run.

And yes we care about open source. From vector databases to inference labs to experimental dueling models, we have snuck into some strange experiments. And oh yeah we were the first check in a small modular nuclear reactor that is winning the atomics renaissance race (at least this week having achieved criticality).

There have been a lot of failures in those years though oddly not investments or policy. I have battled health issues and fought to not just maintain working capacity but to gain back the capacity I thought I’d lost forever.

I did woo woo whacky things from PEMF and HBOT to peptide stacks and traditional biologics. Thanks to the horrors of hormones and steroids I was early to GLP1s and made some good investments there too.

Maybe I’ll tag all of this more cleanly later but I do think it’s important to remember the days are long but the years are short.

Get on the airplane. Go meet up in person. Buy that dream house. Build a solar array and a sauna. Do wildly romantic things and go to galas. Say yes to more.

And open your heart to the heroic efforts others are also putting into making our lives and our world better. We live among every day heroes. And yeah lots of bad shit has happened in this time too. My father died. We failed for five years straight at getting a visa for a close family friend.

I am aware of the shitty compromise we all make to survive. But you have got to hold on to that feeling. So yeah on day 2000 I think I’ve earned the right to be corny as hell. Don’t stop believing.

Categories
Finance Politics Startups

Day 1983 and Socialism is Bad

There is a lot of chatter as to the eventual ownership makeup of the frontier artificial intelligence labs and their economic surplus. One question that came up this weekend is whether equity in the companies should be owned in some portion at the nation state level. I am opposed to this for a host of reasons that I’ll try to get down in whatever garbled form.

I do not own a stake in any of the frontier labs other than owning ETFs that own Magnificent 7 exposure who own portions of the labs. I do invest in compute, nuclear energy and cryptography. I believe AI will change a lot about how we do business, my revealed preferences show I live remotely in Montana, I have a tendency toward emergency planning and Plan B scenarios. As a disclosure of my priors.

There are lots of competing interests in this and the self interests from the labs does no any favors. Especially after months, nay years, of overwhelmingly hyperbole about changing labor dynamics, the potential for mass layoffs due to automation as well as obfuscation and excuses about the reason for layoffs in existing companies. And that’s before we get the singularity which is a religious orientation toward making super intelligence that is Godlike in its framing.

I hate this entire conversation on nationalization and socialism. Part of it is that state actors desiring ownership of private companies reeks of the “you didn’t build that” malapropisms from Barack Obama’s presidency in which he attempted to articulate that America’s enormous wealth is built on generational compacts that no one individual could ever own outright. It triggers socialists and capitalists both.

We all contributed in our own ways to the shared infrastructure, institutions, education, cultural norms and the pluralism embedded in our governance systems that enabled the American Dream.

Unless you are a deep partisan, you understand Obama was trying to articulate that none of us made America alone. But the framing from liberals (and populists of all stripes) automatically make this conversation concerning.

Economics is complicated, central planning has a hell of a body count and your average American can only gesture towards the invisible hand and the benefits of self interested commerce. It’s easy to sell us bad policy from envy and fear.

So I must ask why are we acting like we have suddenly won a national level economic boom with clear winners whose spoils must be distributed by the nation state before we’ve even managed to understand how it will be used, at what level an AI model is a commodity and where the benefits will accrue?

Self interested pluralism with a system of checks and balances at the national federal level coupled with states exercising their own interests has been the bedrock of our national success. Changing this has not gone well for us as a nation nor do we have better examples in other nations.

Sure America has had a few twists and turns. The last time we made an attempt at a New Deal post Great Depression worked only thanks to a global world war industrial mobilization in which we won the war and all our other competitors were decimated on bombed our continents across massive geographical boundaries.

And that boom has been largely spent by the children of the generation that fought this war and their children are looking at a pretty significant bill. So why do labs suddenly want to “compensate” Americans and our collective contributions to the models?

And why are politicians taking this bait when we have so little insight into whether we should funnel cash into them in order to own them in trust for some nebulous future?

I have a few reasons in no particular order that I put on Twitter as to why I am opposed to this format of American state equity being the means through which we compensate the people who theoretically trained these models with our output on the wider open web and its content.

1) We don’t know who the winners will be or where the benefits will diffuse (as in post liquidity the current winners might not be the eventual winners) so compensation for model training when the eventual benefits disperse elsewhere isn’t ideal. Why aren’t taxes at state & federal level aren’t adequate enough here should be answered before we make moves

2) Existing IP law doesn’t account well for culture which is a shared co-creative process (i recommend Susan Scafidi of fashion law institute “who owns culture” ) so compensation is already not easy to track back

3) A state entity w the monopoly on violence can do a lot of damage on the margin by not fully understanding who created what and where it is applied especially in non deterministic systems

4) Much of what the models were trained on was open source licensing including the company where my own family made money Stack Overflow. We got paid sure, but none of this would exist without the effort of its users who contributed on those open license terms. But clearly the final value of the content created & company’s value itself were harvested much further down the line in enterprise contracts for coding models. It was not in the management of an open source license community product created by users or managed by engineers, so who should have been paid? The users who wanted their content to be open sourced? The volunteer moderators? The full time employees? The shareholders of the company, the buyer of the company or the users of that data set at Claude or Cursor or OpenAI? Or is it Americans that never even heard of SO? Where does value accrue over time versus point in time? It’s not an easy question to answer is it?

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1982 and Gate Keeping Is Back

One of my most disappointing life lessons remains the value of gatekeeping. Sometimes the fences do indeed make good neighbors and Chesterton may have had a point.

My ambition coming out of school was to be in media, more specifically I wanted to be a fashion editor. A job a million girls would kill for right? No, I am not falling for the nostalgia dross of the Devil Wears Prada sequel.

A not uncommon response to growing up in a mountain town or remote place, is the desire to is escape to bigger places. Media used to be the portal to the stories about the wider world. You found new worlds in books, magazines, movies, television and eventually the internet. Many of us want to reach broader culture of the world.

Alas I was immediately confronted with the reality that those jobs were glamorous and thus badly paid. I couldn’t afford a job at Vogue nor did they want me so I made websites instead. I became a fashion editor after my own fashion.

Like so many millennials, I had naive expectation that if we could simply open up the gates keeping regular people out of these rarified closed worlds we’d not only bring more beauty to regular people but the beauty of regular people would also improve culture.

Yeah, that’s not how social media turned out is it? I still feel some guilt over how much the “here comes everybody” age of social media degraded many of the spaces I aspired to be inside.

And I am witnessing a new wave of closed spaces and gatekeeping emerge in order to nourish the cultivation of culture that gets crushed under the weight of algorithmic speed and microsecond trend cycles.

The rise of the group chat is an immune response to a world without any sort of borders or checkpoints for quality control except the pricing mechanism. Why cultivate taste if we can cultivate cost? If we haven’t figured out a taste barrier a price one will have to do.

I am personally opposed to price being the barrier function to culture, but if no one is willing to enforce standards in any other manner I am not shocked that we will go further inside perceived safe spaces in order to avoid the harsh glare & garish expectations of mass market access at all hours to all people.

I am trying to remain committed to being accessible to others by remaining online but even I gate-keep myself now with little litmus tests and hurdles to keep from being flooded by asks and audiences. The private world of access cycles will come and go and for now the fences have gone back up.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1958 and Skymall Kities

My father loved gadgets. He was always tinkering with something and was always upgrading his electronics to some new specification.

Is it any wonder that I married such a handy husband? Men love futzing around with stuff. Sometimes they have daughters and then you’ve got women like to mess around with projects too.

I am sure we will have endless rounds of nostalgia for the eighties and nineties era gadget, electronics and novelty shops. You could get lots of mileage out of building your own computer.

But even setting up something silly from Skymall or Sharper Image captured some of the joy. The novelty of a new invention was visceral. I wouldn’t say no to a Hammacher Schlemmer renaissance myself.

I didn’t love it when we remade that style of retail into quirk chungus millennial fandom but I didn’t hate getting Star Trek tchotchkes either. And now I dearly love websites that my friends have built like WireCutter.

My husband was humming the tune to a piece of YouTube esoterica that is a deep cut to the original editor of that bastion of shopping guides. Choire Sicha launched the WireCutter but it’s in some ways the least soulful of his franchises. A Mike Albo shopping column already nailed the bit we’ve just been redeeming it since then.

Choire gave us Gawker 2.0 before his his incredible era of independent publishing streak making properties like the Awl and the Hairpin.

In a world with more shops and essayists than good shoppers or readers, Choire found the good ones and shared. And one of his discoveries was Nina Katchadourian’s work.

And so now my husband sings the tune of SkyMall Kitties and he sometimes can’t get it out of his head.

Maybe that is my own submission to the “thing I think about too much” essay franchise. It’s my own personal Negroni season or Supreme’s clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers.

I’m sure we will enter an exciting new era of curating down the perfect piece of cultural detritus with artificial intelligence. But I will always be grateful to electronics dads and savvy buying guides for teaching me to enjoy the joy in making something. Even if it is profoundly uncool. I’m still team Barbara Kruger though. Don’t believe the hypebeasts.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1947 and Pretty Skills

I have been feeling rather sad. I am stymied on a few matters (family matters, visas for said family) and absolutely wretched over the state of artificial intelligence. The successes are in shadow and so I need to cheer up.

In an effort to do, I have a little group chat going for women interested in having friendly conversations about pretty skills. That’s right being pretty is a skill set. From nutrition and exercise to scalp care and makeup, looking good is a series of skills that can be taught.

If one feels like personal agency is a stretch, nothing is quite so fine a balm as learning a new skill. And might I suggest your personal appearance as an easy uplifting place to start?

Pulling together a beautiful look is not just some genetic privilege meted out by fate. Our presentation is something we sculpt with attitude, posture, movement, care and thousands of tricks and tips that add up to a lifetime of skills. Pretty is a skill set.

If you didn’t learn those from your mother or aunts or an elder sister. Or if you learned everything and want to pass it down. It’s safe to share and learn the skill sets you’ve picked up that make you feel pretty. It’s in your hands.

So if you want a space to learn more about those skills there are a bunch of women who want to be friends with you.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture Startups

Day 1946 and Cultural Appropriation Wars

I wish I hadn’t signed online today. I participated in the basest form of attention grabbing virality as I needed a distraction from Bernie Sanders “America and China Need to Stop Artificial Intelligence” press push colluding with the “foot in mouth” disease of Silicon Valley.

So naturally I got caught up in bizarre intrasexual and intersexual competition schemes. Two absolutely bizarre stories dominated the feeds. The first is Asian women in California and the appeal of the ABG. The second is the alleged fantasies of an Indian banker who wanted us to “believe all men” but like Penthouse letters, it seems too good to be true. An Albanian baddie at JPM wouldn’t be that careless.

No clue what I mean? Let me urge you to stay that way. But I’ll put down some thoughts.

If you are a Subaru driver and Vin Diesel fan, you may dimly remember that they were once rice rockets and not lesbian all terrain vehicles. California has diverse homegrown culture of Asian American women who embrace bad boys, fast cars and their East Bay neighborhoods.

The controversy? The ABG culture is being appropriated by striving Product Mommies who believe their B2B SaaS baes will enable their inner Asian Baddie Gangsta ways. I am not from this culture so I can’t exactly say. I think it’s fine if you want to improve your looks in search of a specific aesthetic. There is even an event you can RSVP to attend.

Now the other horror show I mentioned is about intersexual competition schemes from a different Asian culture. Ink has been spilled on western portrayals of the sexuality of Southeast Asian men, specifically how Anglo culture emasculates them. Well, that’s how the story started out.

It began as a “believe all men” tale of Indian man who was a direct report to a blonde Albanian woman at an investment bank. He alleged being forced into sexual contact with his female superior and it is so salacious my best recommendation is to watch it via anthropomorphic fruit. Well, the internet moves fast.

And as the day went on it turned out that it might be some very lurid erotica written by a rake and the very attractive blonde Albanian banker has in fact had her good name besmirched.

Now why am I associating these two stories? I think that identity in Anglo-American dominant cultures has often flattened the experiences of assimilation into our melting pot. London, New York, the Bay Area all have unique flavors of this blending.

And a cultural niches like East Bay Asian gangster baddies (Los Angeles also has its own variants) being consumed as an identity by other Asian cultures as a way to “be bad and sexy” seems harmless. But it’s also consuming a culture you didn’t create. I understand the annoyance.

The upsetting story coming from banking may be a very different way of embracing and reinforcing sexual narratives for southeast Asian men, but it is still fundamentally a story of belief about sexual identity and how it gets used in the workplace. H

ad it not been so incredibly salacious, we might have considered his side of the story a little bit longer, but it is now a piece of culture that reinforces some of the most negative perceptions of southeast Asian men.

Everyone is free to form their own identities and preferences, but it’s a fascinating day when the two major stories running rampant on social media are examples of constructing westernized, fetishized identities to get ahead.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.