I’m deeply in the red on my energy stores. All my dashboards are flashing warning signs that I need to get in a good recovery.
I’ve up all my reserves to get myself to Utah and make a good showing to support team Valar Atomics. Ironic that I’m energy poor as all my effort posting (both online and in real life) is about a vision of cheap abundant safe and clean energy for all mankind.
What a privilege to say that Valar Atomics has been my everything for the last forty eight hours. Everyone is running on so little sleep but the outcome is a success that is undeniable. There are so many exciting interviews about our reactor and Isaiah’s from Ti Morse at Relentless (here on YouTube) to Sarah Guo at No Priors that you could spend a happy afternoon getting up to speed on the nuclear renaissance.
I hope to watch them all soon as I need some rest. So does the team. At team party after the big Nvidia event, much of the conversation turned to where everyone planned to enjoy their well deserved 4th of July break
Having served our nation by reaching criticality and generating electricity as ordered by the executive branch, this team as earned some leave. Hundred hour weeks have been the norm for many of them. This crew knows hard work. One former navy nuclear engineer joked that while the navy was tough, booting up a reactor from scratch was much harder.
Most just want some sleep but the diversity of plans was exciting. From touring Spain’s Catholic cathedrals to hiking in Alaska clearly a few had some energetic plans. But there was a lot of life basics like setting up new apartments and sleeping off an accumulated sleep debt.
I’m in camp sleep it off. Whoop is sure I’m either dying or super sick my metrics are pretty bad. Thankfully I’m going to be enjoying our nation’s birthday in the mountains with my husband and our friends. I will go from in the red to red, white and blue.
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.
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.
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?
I wrote these notes while a little bit high, both literally (a transcontinental flight) and figuratively (CBD & a THCa blend meant to give anti-inflammatory relief without hitting your mind but it probably does) but it’s hard to say if I’m less focused than when I’m on the ground. You be the judge of that. Nostalgia machine clicks on
Business class and its perks are lost on me as I don’t drink alcohol. So I had rhubarb and raspberry tonic water in whatever passes for cut glassware on airplanes now. I said no at the fancy lounges to very decent champagnes but I don’t want to get dehydrated. I got a sugar crash instead.
I’m listening to Ethiopian jazz as I find this piece relaxing in the context of airplane travel. Mulatu Astake is a master in a genre I don’t even like but this particular piece has always spoken to me.
Nobody paid me for the diffusion but I was paid for the original campaign. A lesson for anyone bitching about how their work wasn’t compensated by the artificial intelligence models that ingested their contributions.
How funny that I should manage a Club Monaco Facebook page involving a pop-up event for a chef that would go on to define so much of culture.
I worked with impossibly cool creative director on the account who was famous in Japan for his photography and also as the guy who made Pabst cool for hipsters. I sometimes wonder where he ended up when his talent set was so hype sensitive. But we were pretty ahead of the times on this one.
Before this fashion agency career, in the post GFC aughts, lived across from a weekend installation of a projected light Pabst installation when I was in North 7th and Bedford. My Turkish banker roommate and I used to throw raves there so we couldn’t exactly complain about the lights hitting our living room. But it was a good campaign in a good location.
I shot low budget fashion shoots during the day with a very competent hungry young editor. She worked as a waitress at night and for me during running our fashion editorial to get toehold in the business. It seems to have worked.
She has an amazing career, a handsome husband, a beautiful child and kicked it off with an impossibly stylish wedding which every hipster you knew copied till well past the Tommy Hilfiger event horizon of having no soul. We had a tortured Swedish nepo-baby photographer too. I adored him. It was a very “rents were cheap” time in hindsight.
Anyways, in transit through Heathrow, I picked up a raft of print magazines from the Cathay lounge which kicked off this nostalgia. I’d browsed Wallpaper but as I’m not a design person a flip through was fine.
The Cathay Delight is the same shade as this campaign from Van Cleef and Arpels.
But Condé Nast Traveler caught my eye as I went in to grab the pink Financial Times. I got Tattler as well as why else fly British Airways if you can’t get some gossip on this social hierarchy right?
It’s just that taste is so far down the commodity chain anymore it’d hard to know when and where to find any thing that’s not made to be sold to someone. The menu on my flight had basque cheesecake. That became a joke on a trip I threw together last minute for girlfriends in Corfu. Apparently it’s made it into the Club World menu much to its detriment.
The choices from Condé Nast on a perfect summer was so on the nose. Montana’s Rocky Mountain sybarism and off the beaten path Adriatic and Ionian options for exploring covers and lots of seafood.
The whole damn thing reads like my travel itinerary.
Yeah that’s my coastal move with friends and family. And I do rather loudly live in Montana. It’s like am I joke to their psychographic team? A department that has three people no less. And they only market to women exactly like me. Funny that. I’ll have to check up on their old editor Lilit. She was much better than whatever this nonsense of repackaged Julie seems to be.
I’m in a private terminal in a tier three European capital, as I begin the long transit back to the remote regions of America’s effort to reboot our lost industrial capacity. I am ready to celebrate our 250th birthday.
All this can be yours if you pay a few backs to cut the line in the former eastern block
You will find me in the desert trying to convince anyone who will listen of the many industrial and environmental benefits of nuclear energy. Might you be interested in particular of the learning we gain from repeatedly making thousands of small modular nuclear reactors? Scale baby scale.
I’m team Valar Atomics or bust, but I know it won’t be a bust as we have just had a race to criticality that half a dozen companies will meet for July 4th. And what better birthday present to give Lady Liberty?
“When you have the will of federal policy and the will of the people, these things can absolutely happen.”
The artificial intelligence intelligence revolution pretends we still have the height of America’s wartime Industrial & Management Revolution capacity for the build out still available within America’s heartland.
We don’t but I believe despite the bread & circus it might be possible. Lord knows we are trying to get back up and going. Just look how quickly we got our nukes back up in just one year.
Yes we got algae bloom sabotage on the bloom in DC, UFC fights on the White House lawn and some bizarro corruption but at least we aren’t having a Flamingo Revolution of Zoomers rebelling against oligarchs skimming too much from corrupt socialists who need to revamp their attitude. The Geopolitical Cousints get what I’m saying right Marko?
I rewatched season three & four of Apple’s For All Mankind alternative history of the space race as a hype effort to remember that we did indeed have other options for our near future and as the Abundance Institute reminded us all mere month’s ago history is giving us a second chance.
The Blue Sphere Transmission” is an electronic, modern-disco track by MelodiZenith that blends nostalgic 80s Eurodance rhythms (reminiscent of Bad Boys Blue) with deep house and synthwave.
Line dancing Euro-Disco Italian Pop on Mars? Now that’s a future I can get behind powering with SMRs by Valar
If professional class workers thin out as a function of artificial intelligence taking some of the work done by the professional management or PMC class, I suspect we will see nostalgia for the time they were seen as aspirational. I’d like to explore that near-future science fiction today with the PMC Olympics.
After the initial decade or two of upset (possibly even rage) at the power shifts & new status dynamics subside, we fondly remember business class types like lawyers & consultants with the same wistful fondness as we recall switchboard operators or the stenography pool.
I’d bet in the nostalgia wave, we see competitions, cosplaying and an equivalent of Renaissance Fairs or reenactments pop up where former PMCs and thr youth pretending to be them, compete in a cargo cult display of its cultural identity markers.
And when this does inevitably emerge as a cultural touchstone, I want to compete in the PMC Olympics with my husband in transcontinental logistics events. Think of it as figure skating but for married business partners.
I’m confident we would medal in the transcontinental travel logistics category. I’d get gold in the individual “cosmetic and liquids” category. Think of it as “uneven-bars” of the transcontinental logistics travel competition.
As part of this mirthful sci-fi exercise, I input a prompt to ChatGPT’s current image model and it gave me a very amusing montage of who might compete and win in just such an event.
Naturally the shining blonde California affluence worker (subcategory creative class) took the gold but let’s not forget the New York finance couple nor the European directorate class.
ChatGPT image prompted with: Make me an image of three sets of couples who are professional management class knowledge workers. They are on an Olympics podium receiving gold, silver and bronze medals for medalling in the “Transcontinental Logistics: Couples” event. I’d like two American couples (one New Yorker finance style and one California Hollywood style) as well as a European couple (Swiss) in the style of a Brussels bureaucrat. There should be suitcases, travel bags for laptops, a 1L cosmetics bag, a medication cold tube, and other travel essentials in the image
I know this sounds a little goofy, but the work that goes into managing what a couple need when constantly switching between personal life and work on the road involves a surprising amount of logistical support work. And that’s without children. I’d add a category with a toddler as the most extreme form of this event.
Just check this prompt I made for my own PDF for an event involving both industrial site visits and formal galas that I am attending after flying west from London. Some details are changed or redacted for modest privacy. Anyone can easily guess what I’m going to be doing.
Build a 8-10 day travel itinerary for a business trip departing from Heathrow London and arriving to Salt Lake City and a remote desert town in Utah, from June XX to July 2, 2026. Include a day-off rest plan for Salt Lake City, a Department of Redacted event logistics flow chart, transport coordination for a bus to small town and return back to the city on July X of event, and recommendations for high-quality food near event venues.
Include transitioning time and necessary grooming required for a facility floor tour with safety gear and a change for a formalwear gala with an hour buffer assuming an event mid afternoon, there hours transit and evening formal event at 7pm.
July 2-5th include a secondary itinerary for a follow on mountain social event at 8,000 feet Utah mountains with outdoorsman activities.
Format as a structured PDF briefing with time-stamped logistics, travel maps, and weather-appropriate clothing advice for the city to desert climate shift as well as mountain elevation needs. Include medications, standard pharmacy and first aid needs, cooled medications for peptide regimen, sun safety, facility floor safety gear, day event makeup, formalwear makeup, possible television ready makeup as well as hairstyle needs based on 3 day warning cycle.
Make sure personal preferences for all clothing, sleeping, cosmetic, medication and other gear is accommodated in a carry on suitcase, personal bag and one checked baggage.
Pretty fun right? And I might add that it’s relatively easy to spit these itineraries out once you’ve harnessed your preferences and all necessary items in one’s personal stock keeping. Always take inventory regularly when on the road and unpack and repack quickly for fast turn arounds. Oh and use the three pack cascade system. To my fellow flying logistic Olympians I wish you safe travels while we still enjoy global transportation for capitalism.
I’ve been hiding out from the heatwave in a hotel room. I am one of the lucky ones. Europe is as diverse as America so it’s a little silly to discuss it as a whole but only 20% of Europe’s housing has air conditioning. Germany is at 3%. The United Kingdom is at 5%. Honestly the mind reels as in America 90% of our housing has air conditioning even if we can’t all afford to run it.
It’s not just the housing either. A hotel room with strong air conditioning is a rarity in Western Europe. They will claim they have air conditioning at corporate chains and in Airbnbs, but it is not always the air conditioning you’d expect in America where you have more control.
In Europe you have a few options generally. A corporate hotel will be controlled by a central HVAC system. They may pretend that you can change it but in Germany they won’t let you go below 72 degrees at a Marriott. Ask a United Airlines pilot in Frankfurt what block of hotels they stay at to get a decent night sleep. It’s a nightmare and hacks are numerous but usually fruitless.
Your other options are finding independent hotels or Airbnbs with a mini-split. But good luck with that. The Germans and the French will tell you off for running it. There are towns where you need to show a medical need. I once had this happen to me.
So yes it’s usual that I’m in a comfortable hotel with a central HVAC system with individual room controls (not a mini-split) that allows me to get it down to 18C. That’s pretty unusual.
Why am I so lucky as to have air conditioning in a European hotel room that is central air and not a mini-split? Well I picked the hotel that the diplomats stay at in the capital. They don’t suffer at all.
The private small independent hotel I am at has NGOs staffers constantly winding people in and out of. It is a well maintained beauty of an independent hotel in an era of corporate standards. So it has a wiff of the old patrician smell to it and they enjoy their perks.
There are zoomers outside protesting corruption but inside technocrats and policy analysts and other bureaucrats enjoy cool temperatures at their control as they go about their work being high minded about democracy and equity.
During the current record-breaking European heatwave, the European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters in Brussels experienced an AC system failure — or forced shutdown — on Friday, June 27.
Staff on floors 1–7 received an urgent text message at midday reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day” The Express
I’m glad my hotel was allowed keep its cool since her lower tier staffers don’t have that luxury. I understand why it’s a scandal. French and German cultural leaders can discuss their hospitals and schools without air conditioning with as much pride as they like. I am not buying it. Europe can fix this problem if it likes.
A vast somewhat intimidating vista is stretching ahead of me between two thousand days of writing every day and the possibility of reaching three thousand days of writing every day. One day and one post at a time right?
So like any sane woman setting out on a long journey, I ate a salad, had some protein and checked myself into a spa for a massage. No reason to start a long journey exhausted right? I need to pace myself.
I got a pedicure to immediately turn restoration to grooming necessities, but one can’t keep pool blue toenails all summer. Not every day is spent on the Ionian. Some days are spent at nuclear facilities in steel toed boots. Other days are spent in kitten heels inside conference rooms.
Just in case anyone does need to see my toes after those scenarios, I try to maintain a tidy nude set of nails. Isn’t it strange what expectations we have for women?
I may work remotely, at odd hours and in odd locations that allow the occasional eccentricity, but at any moment I might need to be on an airplane headed to parts unknown. You only get to be so weird when you have big goals.
In this case, next week I’m headed to a desert town and then a state capital. That’s state is becoming a more regular occurrence in my life. That’s a pretty big privilege for me.
Being a supporting player in a number of larger endeavors gives me the chance to add additional gravity if and when I might be useful. Even if it is just showing up as a cheerleader. I love trying to convince smarter, better capitalized and better connected players than me that indeed it is my startups are the winners in the grand game of macro-cycles.
I wrote that the world was getting to be a lot more chaotic when I first started this writing journey. Now that’s common knowledge. Then and now, I care about adaptability to this increasing complexity. This has turned out to mean compute, energy and decentralization.
The strength of your network is in the flexibility and foresight of its nodes. And I hope I remain a trusted node at the forefront of our long journey as a species for as long as I serve us well. I’ll carry on this Odyssey till then.
I am scouting real estate (it’s an involved story) and came upon a weasel or polecat who appeared to be become stuck in an empty pool.
The setting was a rocky, wooded coastal habitat which I learned is also exactly the kind of edge habitat where small hunting carnivores like weasels and polecats move between cover and human structures to hunt lizards, insects, rodents, and even snakes.
Little Rikki The Least Weasel needed some help getting out of an empty pool
The story is simple and timeless. A boy and his fearless animal bravely face down danger with love and loyalty. Rikki-Tikki is rescued after a storm by the family, with whom he bonds. It’s tale beloved by children as the mongoose especially cares for the child Teddy, and fiercely protects him from the danger of the poisonous cobras.
He spent all that day roaming over the house. He nearly drowned himself in the bath-tubs, put his nose into the ink on a writing-table, and burnt it on the end of the big man’s cigar, for he climbed up in the big man’s lap to see how writing was done. At nightfall he ran into Teddy’s nursery to watch how kerosene-lamps were lighted, and when Teddy went to bed Rikki-tikki climbed up too; but he was a restless companion, because he had to get up and attend to every noise all through the night, and find out what made it. Teddy’s mother and father came in, the last thing, to look at their boy, and Rikki-tikki was awake on the pillow. ‘I don’t like that,’ said Teddy’s mother; ‘he may bite the child.’ ‘He’ll do no such thing,’ said the father. ‘Teddy’s safer with that little beast than if he had a bloodhound to watch him. If a snake came into the nursery now
I did indeed feel safer knowing a least weasel was patrolling the perimeter of the property. The area had a large overgrown garden which must have had good hunting. So we set about finding an empty hose to give Rikki something to climb upon so he could make his way out of the pool.
The “least weasel”safely out of the pool or is he a genet or a mustelid?Curious as any polecat or genet he looked eager for help.Rikki Tikki Tavi keeping the Ionian save from snakes and lizards.
Thankfully the mustelid or young beech marten was every bit as curious and interested as the mongoose of Kipling. He ran right up to the hose, grabbed onto it and raced up just far enough to reach the height of the pool ladder onto which he leapt and scuttled up and over the poolside to freedom. He very nearly waved goodbye to us. I felt much safer exploring the overgrown garden knowing he was on the prowl.
I am in an all systems flashing red kind of place today. I slept poorly, my stomach and colon are tied up in knots, my HRV is in the basement around 12 while my RHR is in the stratosphere at 99bpm. It’s possible I’m sick on the road.
1871 days of Whoop and my metrics only ever seem to get worse
I moved from one crummy “luxury” hotel to another in an attempt to see the area and save a few bucks. I wanted to see the construction in a town where I’m interested in buying some real estate.
Why am I looking at real estate? Well it’s for both investment purposes and for freedom of movement Plan B scenarios for my extended family. And nothing makes you appreciate America quite like not being able to rely on America for your family.
So apologies to anyone who needs me on the grid. It isn’t going to happen for a bit. You can text me but I might end up ignoring you unless it’s an emergency.
I’ve holed myself up with instant ramen, Gatorade, some fruit, and a 12 pack of bottle water and I hope that’s enough to get me to the other side of whatever is ailing me. Maybe I can sleep through it.
Truth be told I think I’m just sad. Or maybe it’s hormones. Maybe it’s the frustration of making any sort of plans that don’t involve America as I hate being of the country. I love Montana. I love America. It’s just harder being away from home.
I have had a gut feeling that won’t shake off. I’ve been trying to stay off the radar and keep my head down for a couple of weeks with the ambition of scouting ahead on a few projects and preparing a few next moves.
I feel as if we have so much information at our disposal as to the direction of the future and so little real actionable information as to how these trends will turn out. It’s very nerve racking
Ask anyone in technology right now and it’s a raw guts driven sentiment out there. Anything could happen including some very bad outcomes. It’s a “who knows except God and the those who control the compute” sentiment.
I feel a little queasy about something but I couldn’t tell you why. I don’t think stuff is irredeemably bad but the mess of politics, culture clashes and other sundry disagreements between continents, companies, factions and individual contributors isn’t ideal.
