Tag: Work

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Startups

Day 1521 and Reconsidering

I’ve been rereading the work of my internet friends Luke Burgis recently. His hugely influential book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life introduced popular culture to philosopher Rene Girard. 

I’d first encountered Girard at university and through Peter Thiel’s influence pursued further understanding of the work thanks to Luke’s scholarship on the topic. A quick orientation on the thesis is as follows. 

What Gravity Is To Physics, Mimetic Desire Is To Psychology”

I’ve found Luke’s thoughts on topics like existential safety and mimetic collapse to be regularly illuminating and would recommend reading his newsletter.

I am reconsidering some of the mimetics that are driving my life. We’ve had some amazing startup investments. I’ve been able to move policy issues into law. And I do it all with the added weight of chronic health issues.

It brings me joy to help the next generation of founders. It’s as close as I’ve come to a deep desire. I do it believe I love it.

I also have an idea of how it should look. The formality of funds and institutional investors has been the default way things are done in startups. I’ve never been too concerned with prestige but I have some attachments to what it should look like.

The irony being startups and the venture business are all about the big hit. There is no right way of achieving them as playbooks get rewritten every time we have a new technology.

So I wonder why I want things to look any way at all when the ultimate objective is to achieve a type of performance that is already emerging. Am I stuck wanting only because I want to mimic others? It seems possible.

That realization makes me want to let go of any preconceived notions of structure or aesthetic and to simply commit to my own process and how I find outliers.

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 1520 and Reflexively Negative

When I was younger I would try to demonstrate my cleverness by pointing out problems. Like many precocious youngsters, I was certain that this behavior provided value.

It’s exciting to feel the power that comes with understanding. It is especially intoxicating to students. No one is so fervent as a new convert.

Finding errors in reasoning, gaps in knowledge, poorly laid plans, and lapses in judgement can all be helpful when they are put to use in finding a path to success.

Being able to humbly accept corrections to one’s worldview or understanding when in error is crucial to being able to understand your reality. No one values that more than people who must succeed.

Alas, because finding and correcting misunderstanding is so important, it’s easy to slip into reflexive negativity as your only tactic. You mistake finding errors with being the only valuable contribution. It’s a classic problem with engineers. And unlike the young they rarely outgrow the habit.

Any founder who has had a pitch with a venture capitalist who can only focus on the problems and not the potential, understands why this it is unproductive to rely only on spotting issues. Being right about something being wrong doesn’t build anything.

Categories
Chronic Disease Startups

Day 1519 and Steady

I am doing my best to remain steady. The world at large doesn’t make it easy. Every day we have a new crisis, impending doom and looming fascism.

I would be more inclined to reactivity if it didn’t seem much more important to pay attention to the actual problems over which I have some agency.

Some days that agency is used on frustratingly small things and others it’s the most fantastical science fiction come to life in our day to day reality. The indignities of human embodiment and the miracles of applying knowledge to problems exist in the same reality.

There is so much pretending and posturing in the process of pursuing any goal, it’s understandable that people mistake the symbols of things for the thing itself.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1515 and Hope in the Dark

Given the amount of illness that seems to be plaguing folks this winter I’m surprised we’ve not all decided to hide until Spring thaw.

Every event seems to be a super spreader. Our physical immune systems are shot and I doubt our emotional defenses are much better. Everyone is predicting informational dangers myself included.

It is hard out there and we all experience it in different ways. My medical improvement sprint is plagued with logistical issues, the mold situation in our basement is overwhelming, and yet I have hope that I’ll make it.

o many people are dedicated to building solutions to problems, big and small, that I can’t selfishly let my any of my problems stand in my way. We have to all pull forward together.

I spent a few hours with a portfolio founder working on their fundraise today and I felt my optimism. I enjoyed the flow of work even as the enormous task of raising capital is filled with risk.

I’d taken a risk on directional play earlier in the year. I believe in the founder. They are making their way through YC. I can see their path emerging with every step forward. And I see hope.

Categories
Reading Startups

Day 1510 and Turning It On

Almost two years ago I sent a Twitter DM to a young founder named Isaiah. He was intellectual, curious and humble and I was impressed by his authenticity.

He was strong enough and driven enough to ask for hard feedback. So I told him the truth when he asked. I hated his first idea, gave a prediction about how it would go and said I’d invest in him on whatever he did next.

Lucky for me that feedback turned out to be accurate. We talked for months as he worked through a plan for his true passion for abundant clean nuclear energy.

I was blessed to be put in a position where I could commit as his first investor. His progress since then been extraordinary. Their goal is to make the world’s energy by building nuclear reactors at planetary scale. Today Valar Atomics announced they raised a 19m seed round.

When I say extraordinary I really mean it.

First, we have completed the construction and pressure certification of our thermal prototype, Ward Zero, at our Los Angeles facility—the fastest in history a thermal test unit has been developed and built. Ward Zero will be unveiled next week at an exclusive event in LA. Isaiah Taylor

We are in an age of acceleration. To be able to design and test a prototype this fast is a sign that we can expect better solutions to arrive and quickly if we should so will it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are able to turn on a working reactor in the near future. If you are interested in Valar (working for them or investing in their growth) hit me up on DM.

Reading

Leading Edge newsletter “What Woo Works?”

Spooky, scary, technology is witchcraft

Media

Want to see an android art direct as if it were in the cremaster cycle? The Protoclone is a faceless, anatomically accurate synthetic human with over 200 degrees of freedom, over 1,000 Myofibers, and 500 sensors. Clearly they are doing this just to scare us into giving them attention so here you go. I hope they don’t execute as swiftly as Valar.

Protoclone, the world’s first bipedal, musculoskeletal android
Categories
Biohacking

Day 1503 and Project Managed Health

You have to work the problem in front of you. Fixating on past problems or potential future problems does not fix the problem in front of you.

Bottlenecks are such a useful construct as most humans have experienced their all of their progress being stymied by one single obstacle. Be it a fallen tree in the road, a bureaucracy or a health problem, the bottleneck stops you.

Alas I find myself with multiple health projects that have to be project managed with timelines, budgets, and externalities on each other.

We’d been planning to start a new care protocol with an updated biologic but the discovery of mold in the master bathroom is a bottleneck.

We need to decide if starting new immune suppressants is safe in the house before remediation. Mycotoxins at a load marked as unsafe for autoimmune conditions makes me nervous.

Sure we are staying upstairs but is it removed enough to be a sensible move? Can we isolate me and begin treatment? Do we wait the multiple weeks remediation will take? How an we run parallel paths. It’s crazy to project manage one’s personal life like this but it’s also necessary.

This excitement has also slowed down movement on acquiring a hyperbaric chamber. I’d love to offer it as a service locally as there isn’t a single available one for off label use in the entire state.

I really do think this would feel unmanageable if we didn’t have new tools at our disposable. In particular the new ChatGPT’s Deep Research has made it much easier to find different bits of information to reach an actionable conclusion. Because I want to clear these blockers.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1502 and Always Something

When we first moved to Montana we did a pretty thorough home inspection. My husband flew in a friend who is residential contractor.

We didn’t need much remediation work. A bit of radon and we installed a state of the art water filtering system but otherwise everything from foundations to soil quality were looking good. But you can never be too sure things stay that way.

We’ve done some repairs and installations over the past two years and it would appear somewhere in there we must have had some water damage. We ran some mold tests and the reports are not good.

As we’d done so much testing before moving in we’d not done thorough assessment. It hadn’t seemed necessary. But as part of the new year’s rigorous “get a grip on autoimmune” push we did an ERMI test (done via dust collection) through an independent lab EnviroBiomics.

The Environmental Relative Moldiness Index (ERMI) test is a DNA-based method developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to assess indoor mold contamination by analyzing settled dust in homes.

It uses mold-specific quantitative polymerase chain reaction (MSqPCR) to identify and quantify 36 mold species, which are divided into two categories: Group 1 (associated with water-damaged homes) and Group 2 (common indoor molds not linked to water damage).

The ERMI score is calculated by subtracting the log-transformed sum of Group 2 molds from Group 1 molds, providing a single numerical value to indicate the relative moldiness of a house.

Welp. Seems like we may have some water damage somewhere. We’ve got some theories from the last two years.

ERMI Score 18.3:
Places this bedroom in the higher range of mold contamination. Typically, an ERMI above 5 is already considered higher than average. A score of 18.3 signals a strong likelihood of hidden moisture issues or longstanding mold growth.

We also ran a HERTSMI-2 test on which we scored 20. That test is a bit more salient for my autoimmune conditions. And its results were not encouraging. Running that through ChatGPT’s new Deep Research.

This test is used to gauge risk for mold-sensitive or chronically ill individuals. A value over 15 strongly suggests that the environment may be unsafe for those with mold-related illnesses or sensitivities. Re-occupancy should be delayed until remediation and follow-up testing confirm substantially reduced mold levels.

We have to do remediation of some sort though we think it’s limited to the basement. But I’ll be staying upstairs for a while if this conclusion is sound. It’s always something.

Conclusion: The contamination is significant and poses a tangible health risk. Addressing it thoroughly is crucial, particularly given your household’s health concerns.

Categories
Homesteading Politics Preparedness

Day 1493 and Familiar With Our Game

I’d love to go on a long rant about the new tariffs America intends to impose, but a big winter storm is approaching and being prepared for that is likely the more important task.

Yes I am aware a much bigger looming economic storm on the horizon. I’ve been a “doomer” a while so I’ve come to gripes with that many years ago.

In joking about choosing what fine Canadian products like All Dressed Chips and Letterkenney we should be importing before the new Trump 2.0 tariffs kick in, I shared the preparations we’ve done to mitigate future dislocations. Someone said we should stock more electricity. Well, good news on that front.

That would be true except we have a giant solar array that provides enough electricity for heating, lighting, our bitcoin mining (whose heat exhaust exchange warms our barn where we keep the hydroponic greens)

For those not familiar with our game

The expectation we had when we settled in Montana was that those who prioritized resilience would be in better shape. Chaotic times means being able to handle whatever changes are thrown at you.

It’s been a great life choice. If we have oil shocks or supply chain implosions we are more prepared than average to muddle through it.

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Media Politics Preparedness

Day 1492 and The Blob in The West

I am unsure how to feel about some of the shock and awe tactics being used in American politics. Well, it’s happening globally but I care more about how it happens here.

Being from the American West, and in particular being a townie of one of the land grant university towns, I have found we have two orientations to federal power in “real America” that can be contradictory.

There is extreme skepticism of how Washington inserts itself into everything fron local land issues to education & regulatory policy. Taylor Sheridan has made a whole cinematic universe out of these issues. The West doesn’t want the long arm of the law reaching onto our land.

But the West also has its own power base. We are tied to the wider industrial and defense power run by the blob by supplying manpower and resources. Land grant universities like CU-Boulder have trained a cadre of science and engineering workers who run important programs like NIST and NOAA.

Federal scientists and their work runs everything from the atomic clock to tide reports. This doesn’t even account for the Air Force Academy and Cheyenne Mountain. The military industrial complex and its funding of the sciences is well integrated into the American west.

It makes for some interesting politics as the land grant towns. They owe some of their wealth and economic base to the training delivered by a university system that is local and regionally powerful.

And yet funding for its surrounding apparatus relies on a complex set of funding arrangements from the Blob from science grants to defense contacts.

If the money is under threat I’d expect regular people are going to have a bumpy ride. And systems will certainly break. Maybe all the burbling in the Blob as it recognizes this threat an opportunity for the western states to assert their own independence. That is a more optimistic outcome than many expect.

Categories
Media Politics Preparedness

Day 1489 and Foggy Frosty

I felt it was very important to get off the internet and soak in some restorative aesthetics. We are in a shock and awe moment almost anywhere you look from national politics to geopolitical technology competition. And everyone is jangling for narrative.

We’ve been a fog of informational war so long we forget we are all subject of multiple intersecting and independent actors who want your attention to be on their issues and their terms. We are living in context collapse hell.

Ans it’s not going to get any better. Many independent minded citizens are arising in these challenging times and they all operate with mindful caution. We have to invent our way out of the most challenging information environment of our lives.

Americans don’t realize we are subject to political and industrial competition and it plays out across social media. Don’t think because you know it is being done that you aren’t heavily affected. America has foreign enemies and quite a few domestic ones.

Extremism exist in some very weird bubbles. I am concerned seeing rationalist singularity cultists. But I’m also concerned about high frequency hedge funders who manipulate markets. We are in a great power competition and I’m sure we all have totally sensible opinions about open source artificial intelligence models. Right?

It’s all very cyperpunk. Manipulation of financial markets is as grey zone a tactic as sniping the telecoms pipeline from Helsinki to Tallinn. And we should be concerned about being competitive. We’ve been snowblind before

It’s a nuisance as neither you nor I have a clear line of view. Some of us maybe have a few months heads up. The lead feels less and less even as I am as much a part of shaping narratives as anyone. I was using DeepSeek in the fall.

When I was in fashion we had this website called “don’t believe the hypebeast” to mog those overly concerned with cool. Don’t get mogged. The same principle applies here. Don’t try to figure it all out.

Go read something with soul, listen to some Bach, and be with your family. Be frosty in the fog and exist in the real while you still can.