Tag: Work

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Aesthetics Media Travel

Day 2007 and Notes While Airborne on Condé Nast Traveler or My Life Commodified Without Pay

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.

You may know it as it was featured in an episode of the Bear where a pastry chef is sent Copenhagen to study at maybe Noma. I’m annoyed that a cuisine and a composition I used for marketing fifteen years ago is now the stuff of prestige television. 

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. 

I brought the chef for a pop up event for Club Monaco sometime in the early teens before he was a full blown sensation (and well before the fall).

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.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Travel

Day 2005 and The PMC Olympics Or Transcontinental Logistics: Couples Event

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.

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
Startups Travel

Day 2001 and My Odyssey Continues

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.

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 Startups

Day 1996 and Criticality at Valar Atomics

I am going to be scattered and long winded so please excuse my exhaustion and joy, as I have used up all of my focus in the excitement of a truly incredible moment that represents years of work.

I watched “our” reactor go critical on a livestream with the Valar team. Yesterday midafternoon on mountain standard time (around 1:45am for me on GMT+3) in the beautiful desert of Orangeville Utah, Valar Atomics took its Ward 250 critical for the first time.

Mission Control at Valar Atomics

Moments ago, Valar Atomics took Ward 250 critical for the first time. This fulfills President Trump’s EO 14301, which called for 3 advanced reactors to go critical by July 4th.

This is our second criticality as a company, and an important step toward our goal of power by July 4.

This is a historic moment and the culmination of two years of work on the part of the Valar Atomics team. This is the most hardcore, intelligent, and driven people I’ve ever had the privilege of working with; which will be seen as we begin power ascension in the coming days.

Our mission at Valar Atomics is to make abundant energy for all mankind. The best way to make energy 10x cheaper today is to mass-scale nuclear fission. We began our mission by creating WardZero, our fully functional thermal prototype. Next, we took the NOVA core critical.

Today, we took the next step: criticality in the Ward 250 test reactor. Ward 250 is a TRISO-fueled High Temperature Gas Reactor (HTGR) designed for simplicity and scale, and is the first nuclear reactor ever air-lifted by a C-17.

We’ve been honored to be become part of the community in Orangeville, Utah, the home of Ward 250. Many thanks to all of our government partners who made this possible: hundreds of individuals across the Trump administration, the DOE, the DoW, and the government of Utah.

The list of individuals who have spent their time and energy and talents to accomplish this feat is too long to list in one post, but I am incredibly grateful to all of them.

Isaiah Taylor of Valar Atomics

I am one of those individuals who spent their time, energy, talents and capital to accomplish this incredible feat. Investing in Valar may well be the greatest accomplishment of my life.

You see I am Valar’s very first investor. Yes I mean I wrote the very first angel investment check from my small venture fund.

I know it’s a little crazy that a weirdo like me should be investing in small modular nuclear reactors built by brilliant young Zoomers and equally brilliant old timer experienced nuclear engineers, but weird is how I invest with chaotic.capital.

Crazy but possible makes complete sense to me. So I said he’s. And we chewed glass for a few years working towards the possible, while everyone told us it couldn’t be done.

Through the magic of Twitter DMs, I met Isaiah before he had even started Valar. He was working on another startup I didn’t love but I knew immediately that I loved him as a founder.

I was so impressed with his intelligence and his capacity to learn quickly. He had that ineffable “it” quality that all founders possess in some measure. He took feedback well but had a firm backbone. He listened to one piece of advice I gave him and based on that decision alone, I told him I’d back anything he did in the future and I meant it. I’ll admit I didn’t expect it to be “I’m building a nuclear reactor” but I am true to my word.

Fast forward several years and here we are. Just a few weeks ago I was racing through the desert to see the reactor our first check helped build the day before it was encased in shielding in preparation for criticality. It will be a memory I will treasure forever.

A few months ago this hanger didn’t exist

We’ve been there for every step of this amazing journey. It was an objectively insane thing to invest in. Yet the more time I spent with Isaiah the more convinced I was that he was a generational talent. The best part of being first is the opportunity to spend lots of time with a founder before anyone else learns of their genius. I learn as much from them as they do from me. And Isaiah is a quick study.

I wrote the check and went about the long grueling process of convincing others they should invest alongside me. It wasn’t easy. We got told no a lot. Failure lurked around every corner. People ranged from outright hostility to tempered skepticism. There were moments when defeat felt very close.

There were hard times. A lot of glass chewing. I never wavered in my belief that Isaiah would get it done. Alex and I were blessed with the opportunity to invest more and gladly wired in additional capital when others couldn’t see as far as we did. This may well be a career defining investment for me. I intend to keep putting in whatever Isaiah will allow us to invest.

Now three years into this journey, it’s clear to everyone that Isaiah is the talent I always knew him to be. I may have been first but I won’t be the last. This is the kind of company investors dream of finding early and Isaiah is a leader I am proud to follow. Valar is racing towards the kind of future I want to build for the next generation. Abundant cheap fuel can power a better cleaner world for all of us.

And to everyone who said it couldn’t be done, or that it was too early or too risky to invest in something as crazy as nuclear, please let me invite you to join us now. There is much more to be done. We will need all the talent and capital we can get to win this bright future for America and for humanity.

Categories
Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1994 and Wondering if 2000 Days Should Be The End? Or A New Beginning

I am getting closer and closer to a big milestone on here. Day 2000! I’ve been writing for two thousand days in a row and hitting publish. Five years and five months (almost six at 5.7 months) or 285 weeks of daily journaling in public.

I began in the height of the pandemic, and one can hardly recall just how bizarre those years were now. The great weirdening which began long before the pandemic arrived for almost everyone sometime in those long years.

Static and yet unstable. A long horizon of the long now, keeping us in semi-stasis as the institutional bulwarks cracked, and then crumbled, and then began accelerating into change. Everyone is holding on tight and pretending like it’s not a white knuckle era.

We are over the vibe shift, the Vibecession, and another vibe change after that and who knows what is coming next. I feel the same sense of being unmoored as I did when I started.

This despite having built a stable and thriving family and investing career. The biggest problems I had when I started (children, visas, family abroad) remains the same problems I have now. The temptation to simply change how we live is ever present. We escaped from some of flatland but more can be done to build communities and nations that are capable of thriving in the ceaseless change.

I still feel like I don’t know what’s coming, even as the future I sensed has come into being at an alarming right. But the perpetual not knowing can drain hope and energy if you are not careful to replenish. It’s exhausting physically too. The energy to understand what’s coming gets harder day by day and so we must get stronger ourselves.

I’ve probably put over a thousand hours of writing into this (maybe closer to 1500 as it runs from 20-45 minutes of time on any given day) so I’m a better writer but I don’t know if I’ve become a more palatable or appealing one. I don’t care too much as this is for me more than it is for any audience.

Most humans seem to prefer smoothed algorithmic writing over hand crafted artisanal human writing. Which is fine by me, as I don’t necessarily want to change my personal spaces to pander to anyone.

I was on a podcast recently where I reiterated my hope for being a node in the future. I want us to hope for the best by seeing clearly about the worst. That focus on solving problems is replenishing for the soul.

I’ll remain a little under the radar as a specialty node broadcasting to my oddballs. I’ll feel better about broadcasting know that is the long. The longevity posting, the nuclear posting, the odd travels and strange people posting will continue. I will try to broadcast on the pirate wires of the human web.

Categories
Travel

Day 1988 and European Interstate Highway System When?

I had a long travel day. I didn’t expect it to be long as the drive on Google Maps estimated it to be around 5 hours or so. That’s barely a third of my waking hours so I can easily shove that into an early morning and get a workday in right?

Alas I didn’t take into account that in America that’s four to five hundred miles of well maintained interstate travel. Easy peasy especially with a Starlink for rolling calls.

But in Europe it’s a whole other beast requiring concentration, quick corrections and constant change. Roads are a mishmash of local jurisdictions, variable paving quality and constant switches in speed limits and limited straightaways.

Also a lot depends on which country is in the EU versus Schengen zone (so many border crossings) versus just a NATO ally but neither EU nor Schengen.

Then finally you must factor in how corrupt its various elites happen to be at any given time versus when they are in a debt restructuring and revitalization phase. A corrupted ally might have much worse roads than a debt restructured southern EU member.

I did a cruising tour of coastal roads in the Mediterranean last summer from Croatia through Albania to Greece and then another run from Tirana to Istanbul so I’m not a total novice to grand tours.

But today felt exhausting as more need kept coming in and then my rolling calls got interrupted by my “hold on lemme get through this border crossing” as rather expectedly borders were on a bit of a high alert.

Thankfully I’ve made it to my destination just as the markets wrap in American after having stopped for a dinner I’d hoped would wrap quickly but turned into a leisurely discussion of the various news items of the day between Dutch, British, Swedish, Albanian, Slovenian and Greek tourists. They all seem to enjoy a long dinner while I just wanted to get my butt into bed so I could do some actual work and also write my post. So my duty is done. European driving in a nice Audi is harder than American driving in a base model Subaru. Fancy that.

Maybe Brussels should consider an interstate highway system for the European Union if they are serious about shouldering more of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization responsibilities. Eisenhower did a good thing making America’s system so free hero status to however can manage it on the continent.

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
Culture Travel

Day 1978 and In And Out of Reality

The “circuit” of conferences, events, parties and social goings on can make you feel like a consummate insider or give you social anxiety. For some of us, a given circuit is an exercise in social overwhelm, and for others it can be highlight of their calendars. It takes all kinds.

The “circuit” is a part of life for every industry. For some it’s a bit more glamorous; oh yes I’m off to such and such fashion week for cruise. And for others it’s much more pedestrian. A cash bar with drink tickets in a Courtyard by Marriott surely does the trick for state level budget professionals.

At a certain point, you realize there is always another room and a better party and a circuit inside the circuit and you get rid of the highs and lows of the experience and simply learn to live with the iron law of the circuit and schedule life around various aspects where real life and circuit life intersect. Everyone is on some part of the circuit.

Many places are aggressively part of the circuit. My hometown of Boulder lobbied hard to take on Sundance from Park City. I was just in Deer Valley above Park City for a new crew of energy policy folks. Swapping Hollywood schmoozing for nuclear energy seems like a wise move though I don’t know how Boulder will handle an event of that size.

Meanwhile, I learned that Athens is booting up a new technology conference that I just missed. Right before summer high season is an excellent time to bring folks down to the Mediterranean before jumping off to private islands and yachts.

I wonder about other mainstays on the circuit sometimes. Austin won’t host SXSW forever one imagines. But where should it go and should it split up? March will never be the same.

Burning Man is changing, maybe forever, and even storied camps are selling their vehicles. It’s a great week on the circuit and that time will surely be coveted. If I were Wyoming, I’d been keen to extend folks out from the Federal Reserve contingent within the western region but one doubts Nevada coordination with Wyoming is a top priority amongst old party hippies and economic enthusiasts, but you better believe the overlap includes a few folks.

Not that the circuit is a geographically constrained issue for most people on the most serious aspect of the circuit. And if it is you probably fly private or have excellent transit logistics. Bouncing from Fashion Week to Word Economic Forum isn’t a huge stretch if that’s your world.

I’m thinking about the circuit because I was on a chunk of business that was circuit related most of the spring. There was a brief pause in international traffic as the Iran situation worked itself out but everyone seems to be back to normal travel again.

The friction of coming in and out of reality is surreal. The circuit is not exactly part of normal reality as if you only participate in a few events it is the unreality of your calendar which makes it so special. If you live entirely outside of reality, it’s not quite so special.

I myself always find reality special but the dip in and out of unreality is jarring. I find one foot in each is hard to manage. I’m in unreality at the end of the circuit. And I need to reach again for reality even on vacation in unreality land.