[Music] humans suck at making predictions like they really really suck at it the only constant we are ever engaging with is change Tech and Magic are just separated by layers of abstraction Joseph Campbell has now run them up because every hero's journey is hitting up against every
other hero's journey it's just getting weirder change is scary and it's especially scary to people in power the future here it's just unevenly distributed the last sustainable Edge in markets is arbitraging human nature circumstances change Humanity doesn't plan
accordingly well hello everyone it's Jibo shasi with another episode of infinite Loops I have been waiting for this one because I get to talk all kinds of weird stuff uh with my friend Julie Frederickson managing partner partner of chaotic capital a seat stage fund that invests
in ideas that will help Humanity deal with complexity I hope so full disclosure oan Ventures is a limited partner in Julie's fund Julie welcome thank you so much I am super excited to be here so every superhero has an origin story so what's yours well uh I think I might be on like my seventh or eighth
origin story at this point I am not necessarily trying but it seems every seven years or so the universe throws me a moment in which I am required to transform all of my expectations so we could go uh a few years ago and say that uh my current origin story is I got very sick in the
wake of fertility treatments and had to reorganize my whole work schedule to Grapple with the changing body so that is my seveny year origin story but my uh origin origin story is I'm a second generation Silicon Valley person my family moved from Colorado to
California and uh wanted to participate in the glories that are changing as fast as you can so I got to grow up in a family that was uh both hippies and Technical and uh that's been a kind of a fun blend so first origin story and current origin story I love it uh hippies and Tech that
like I used to think that uh those would go together you know like peas and carrots in Forest gum language uh do do do you see any separation between hies and Tech so it's a very interesting history and I feel really lucky that I got to grow up in the history because I have my own
take of it and then can go back and read all the source material but uh if people are familiar with Stuart brand he uh is the creator of something called the whole earth catalog which was really uh this very foundational document for many of both the hippies of Silicon Valley
but also the DIY and Technical types who wanted to build things that didn't require intermediaries and uh whole earth catalog was about providing all of the tools to make the world around you the thing that you wanted so everything from seed uh and Homestead recommendations to
how to put together uh your own motherboard really it was a a pretty expansive document and uh the history of Silicon Valley has always really been that tension of people who believed you could have more control over your environment but also that maybe the environment was a little bit unknowable
that there were Mysteries That Couldn't necessarily be revealed and the only way to understand the Mysteries was to do things that you had to take agency and I think that was very much that hippie overlay on Silicon Valley because hippie likes to get their hands dirty techies
like to get their hands dirty so it's a similar mindset I could go on forever about the differences too yeah I I uh I know Stuart brand quite well I loved the whole earth catalog and then the kind of revised version that I know Kevin Kelly is a big fan of let's let's move on to Katic
Capital specifically uh you know we we really Vibe on a lot of things together that's why I invested in your fund uh and one of them is humans stuck at making predictions like they really really suck at it if you don't believe me uh just uh I have a book here
actually uh for the people who actually watch us um on video as opposed to listening to it the book I'm holding up it needs to rewrite because it's bad predictions and gang there are a lot of bad predictions uh but you also say that's not that's not the end of the
world we should focus on adaptability please expand on the difference so I will bring up one of my favorite props my whole life philosophy is summed up with the fdii really and truly uh and I know that sounds really dorky but this is like the landmark translation uh I have some adct Greek
but not enough that I could do the entirety on its own but my big takea away from the pelian War uh which is the history of Athens trying to fight the me Persians and uh not doing so well they lose and uh the entire experience is that circumstances change Humanity does not plan
accordingly and if that's all I got from a university education I think it was worth the time and the money because the only constant we are ever engaging with is change while at the same time we're dealing with bodies and brains that were not adapted for this moment I am talking to
you over what is functionally Magic and I know people that could explain all of the things it took to get me to communicate with you but I sure couldn't do it that's kind of the the beauty of how much we have changed our environment humans are so good at tools and division
of labor has been amazing for us creating new and more innovative ways of getting together but humans we're not that different in so far that I can tell from the animals running around outside so circumstances change Humanity does not and that's been true since athensville
yeah it's one of my favorite lines is the last sustainable Edge in markets is uh arbitraging human nature because markets Chang millisecond by millisecond human nature hasn't changed for Millennia basically I you know I love I love the uh fact that you love the uh
history of the war between Athens Sparta because you know I I've always had the theory that it was the loss that made Plato into a reactionary which is what he became when he published The Republic if you read it right like if you read it today I don't know God knows what the reaction would be but
but what else about that book like really helped you because like if if convince me to reread it do do that so one of my favorite uh party debates which I admit means parties at my house are probably not that exciting but I think it's fun uh is to debate
whether or not Pericles the sort of great general of an leader of Athens was wrong to back alabes from going to war uh because the swoosh through and obviously this takes place over quite a bit of time but alabes switched sides and alabes was the uh was was a protege uh of both you know
the infamous Socrates who gets killed um and came back with the 30 Tyrant to take over Athens and what would have changed if the existing aristocrat structure of Athens had made different decisions about allowing someone else to lead in this war and I think it's a really
Salient question now as we debate uh what generation is responsible for what aspects of civilization who runs government who runs industry who runs the home and the household and if uh I've been recently reading the uh new edition of uh the fourth turning thinking about what is it
that Millennials are supposed to do as they go into middle age uh and I'm really excited about it because I'm turning 40 this year so in my mind I'm like yes I am finally gonna be middle age this is terrific and then I realize that that's my own turning as to
understanding what am I in charge of what am I taking from the generations ahead of me and saying hey let's not have the same mistakes as Pericles while all measures was making the best decisions he could but what if alabes hadn't been put in charge earlier I don't know maybe maybe it
would have gone entirely differently that he would not have come back and reinvaded Athens and they they could have had another thousand years but they didn't and then you know we got Rong so sensitivity to yeah sensitivity to initial conditions I I I love that
because you know change is scary and it's especially scary to people in power I'm I'm currently reading uh a book about one of my favorite uh Mystics William Blake it's called William Blake verse the world and uh the author uh brings up rouso right who very famously said man has been born free and
everywhere is in Chains what I didn't know was that uh rouso in his book Julie I love the fact that it's named for you how did he know uh or the new Eloise I'm not sure how you're going to want to shift over toise uh was so popular that people had to rent it to to read it and
they could not produce enough books for the demand which made me fascinated because I think about wow if he had written that before the printing press yeah nothing right yeah after the printing press IE after the creation of this networked ability to time bind our ideas and push them into the
future um you know huge uh the Vatican of course help sales dramatically by putting it on the band book list uh and and but but it made a like a real difference and the connection to Blake was you know they had Blake himself lived through this uh series of riots in uh London in
1780 uh it was essentially the biggest week-long of rioting in London's history they called it the Gordon riots and what the mob and it started predictably religious right Protestants ver Catholics but it it took on a life of its own and and so they they raided prisons Newgate for example released set
them on fire uh released all the prisoners and and they wrote released on the authority of king mob and and as I was getting ready for talking with you I I thought wow there's a real synchronicity that I read that last night right so explain a little bit about why I think
that well I'm fascinated by how quickly we con convey information now because every Revolution we have had has been about networking together ideas and spreading them and thinking of how uh challenging it was to move information in Athens I that's where we get Marathon
someone literally had to run a marathon and that distance became you the the sporting later and now I can just take my uh Star Trek tricorder send you a text message and halfway across the world someone has the information and I think that the complexity of information that's being
conveyed is so fundamental to how we think about any kind of and I mean investing in the broader sense of investing our time our energy our emotions our family what do we think we're capable of sustaining in the face of of one idea often uh that what's the
the saying that a lie can travel Halfway Around the World P tr get bants on or shoes well now everything can travel halfway around the world so I I I think that the this is what I'm taking from it that we're we're in a moment in which we don't know how these egregor of ideas
are going to come together and change something on and die the uh experience of watching Silicon Valley Bank go through what is it's a complicated situation but you know over over the spring it there was something that looked like an old tiny bankr that was being coordinated over I
don't know text messages I was not in the group chats Al last so I do not know how it was coordinated but this idea that an institution can so quickly have what looks like a firmament under it turned to sand I think we're going to be experiencing so much of it and if we can't and if
we're bad to the point of making second order predictions we certainly can't make third and fourth order predictions like we we have calculus but the complexity of knowing what is going to Ting Ting Ting Ting across all of the different inputs in the system we have no idea all we can do is
figure out an adaptable plan to the changing environment circumstances change Humanity doesn't plan according yeah yeah and uh that's another area where we really resonate uh because you say uh you don't want chaos but listen uh we're going to have a
bumby ride as America deals with the can we've been kicking down the road endlessly infrastructure education Supply chains Logistics I mean that's just uh the tip of the yeah yeah yeah everything and I I like your ideas about um you know uh Tech and Magic are just separated by layers of
abstraction um and it made me think of Jed McKinna who said uh consensus reality is like paper money it has no value at all except uh that everyone believes it does and then he had another quote that I thought was great which is crazy is a numbers game uh like if enough people do it then it's not crazy
anymore yeah so I think being being ready to watch what emerges right that's the getting ready part uh is probably going to serve you far better for what I call the great reshuffle but you call the great weiry expand on expand on the great weirding for me so uh I did not
come up with the term the great weirding uh I believe another guess on infinite Loops uh venites raal uh I frange because I'm such an internet person in my head I'm like at vgr uh he he described the great weirding as this moment in which the timeline just jumped
tracks and not necessarily that jumped tracks is were on the wrong timeline but things started to get weirder and weirder because the dominant narratives were harder to hold that previously it was actually quite possible to have really large scale World historical narratives things like
neoliberalism was a a narrative that we all got really comfortable with okay Francis fukiyama says end of History even though uh you know depending on your your reading of that he definitely meant this was going to be the end of history that was going to get weirder um
but we had a world viiew of uh this is how things are going to be um and in in in um I'm just going they at beer and at Beer's approach the great weirding uh was harambe being killed the uh gorilla where it was just such a weird uncomfortable strange horrifying thing
that we never really believed we would go back to a sense of normaly and I saw this everywhere so the last thing I did before uh pandemic lockdown was I went to see William Gibson discuss his newest novel last big public event uh it was called the peripheral and he admitted that when
Trump got elected he had to scrap an entire book because it was such a weird outcome so confusing to his entire worldview that he just the future that he had written because he writes near future science fiction um he's known for you Neuromancer um Johnny neonic is the one
movie he really got made of the peripheral has been made into a TV show alas canceled but the first season's good and he just thought ha this one change means that like the near future I wrote just doesn't make any sense anymore and I think that this is happening constantly that something will
happen last week and I think my gosh I have to rewrite every expectation I had about what is going to happen because this great weirding is every single moment of the timeline is now running on these competing narratives and I tend to think of it as being a little like
Joseph Campbell has now run a muck that this idea of all of the great archetypes and everyone's on their Heroes Journey but everyone's hero's journey is colliding on Twitter and on substack and on YouTube and on podcasts and the New York Times and because every hero's
journey is hitting up against every other hero's journey it's just getting weirder everyone now has the chance to push up against reality and change it which like how cool is that I never thought we could have that much power yeah I think it's amazingly cool I I think that uh have
you read the fifth science by exer I have not okay he's he's got a great quote in there about narrative collapse and basically he says when a world becomes too interconnected exactly what you just described happens and and so people get UNM moured because Back To Human Nature
uh human OS right yeah uh what one of the things that we want and and really need many unless you can meta reprogram s is the illusion of control yeah and when we lose the illusion of control things get really scary for humans in general and I'm a human so for all of us right and and so
it it also Spurs like uh uh Nostalgia for example uh and and Nostalgia is is basically uh you know I remember a a time where I was not it wasn't then it isn't now it never was at all basically what we do is we manufacture uh memories Andor stories in our own head about these stimler times
when you know things everything worked and everyone believe you know I'd like to buy the world to Coke and everyone lived in Harmony and like that's total [ __ ] that timeline never existed it's only only only in our imaginations right and you know I think back to to that I I'm
not sure if it was Russo who wrote it but basically the quote was the world of reality has its limits the world of imagination is boundless and and and and so the the idea though that there was this kind of like harmonious perfect time is absolutely an inversion of the way the
world really was yeah and to the point where we have pastoral um pastoral literature goes back thousands of years that uh there there is a a Greek myth called dhis and Khloe about uh this you know beautiful perfect pastoral their their sheep their Shepherds and uh it
was meant as this if we could just go back and you think boy if we're going back uh to a pastoral life that never existed two or 3 thousand years ago how long have we been longing to go back my presumption is is that we're just longing to go back to the womb uh but
that's a whole separate conversation of how much uh your mind really understands that it's even changed realities from being in a safer place yeah I I I I that you might be right about the go back to the womb right because that was kind of the last place where everything was like perfect we
lived in this perfect environment and you know everything was taken care of for us and you know beats Will C and then bam bam yeah and it's like b b everywhere I think that my whole approach on on on Founders on investing on life in general has always been that the people
who have a what the [ __ ] moment and think huh how can I change in reaction to this are the ones that are going to make it because uh there's been this whole conversation about non-player characters over the summer uh partially because as artificial intelligence has been able to give more more um
probabilistic thinking to non-player characters in games basically um but you know NPCs can be anyone and the idea that you can get out of being a non-playable character that you yourself came with a set of programming and the set of programming I assume that I came in you know even
straight out of my mother was human that was evolved to to survive as an animal on the Savannah and then it turns out a lot of that programming wasn't particularly useful I had to go through and learn a whole set of histories and experiences and I had to become a
playable character in my own life I had to develop my own agency and so this idea that we are all programmed is true we're all programmed not only by our biology but the books we read the people we talk to everything is adding just a little bit to our programming and then
we have to decide is that actually the character I want to play is that the thing that I want to do how much agency do I really have and then you you know you bounce against consensus reality if it's too far off consensus reality is probably going to take take a couple
decades to get people to come to you if you can get other people convinced that this reality is there but it's a and yet it still moves that sometimes the reality that we can all see eventually does we do align on it and that's the question is who alignment who agency who's
programming as I don't think those are easy questions no they're like I'm fascinated by all those questions and spent a lot of time thinking about them writing about them because uh you know all of the old models are collapsing and that's another uh thing that is causing of this sense of uh
anxiety the sense of stress that I see in in in many people's uh likes um the there's an interesting book by Will store called scientific storytelling in which he he basically posits that hey we're all telling ourselves the story of ourselves and for most for most people we're the hero of
the story and and uh but then the the questioning of beliefs I I did a thread on on Twitter called The Thinker prover uh which uh worked on uh a guy named uh or's idea which was popularized by uh Robert Anton Wilson that like we once the Thinker can think anything he
wants right anything it can believe three impossible things before breakfast as lisis Carroll might say yeah uh but the minute The Thinker decides right which in Latin it comes from d means to cut off that's an interesting thing to cutting off your
Timeline exactly right so you decide what happens is it gets kicked over to the pr and of course for my more uh literal uh listeners and viewers this is a metaphor right this is just try to explain it gets kicked over to the pr and what does the pr do it makes what you believe
real and all it wants to do it basically you know that the old saying uh seeing is believing well really it's the other way around believing is seeing and and if you you literally in many instances cannot see what you do not believe which yay there we go right so the pars ofal
question if you don't know what questions to ask you don't know what you can believe exactly and and then the other complication comes from the idea that you people sometimes often believe that they can't reprogram their beliefs I I passionately believe you can because
I've done so and have uh worked it it's not easy but but it's very valuable in many many way WS talk a little bit bringing it back to uh Venture Capital um what were your biggest surprises uh when you came into Venture Capital because one of the reasons we became an LP is you are
very very different than other funds so let's talk about that for a little bit well so I'm thinking of the U the ways in which we change who we are because going back to the earlier like origin story I did have to change who I was in the last seven years because I was diagnosed with an autoimmune
condition called ankos and spondilitis which isn't a very serious disease it's basically arthritis I have arthritis in my spine and it's kind of uncomfortable and requires some medication but medicine's pretty good these days but one of the things that I had to reorient who I was to fit around this
new reality ity is uh I'm a workaholic I just really really like the grind I I picked doing things that I thought was fun and there's nothing that I think is more enjoyable than talking to someone who's really passionate about what they're building but what I had to learn
in the adjustment of my own health is that everything is Downstream from making sure that I can show up and if I can't show up through Force like grind it out be like yeah my 90h hour weeks you know I'm just going to push through it became impossible and so I threw myself into
therapy went to a a number of coaches and thought how do I find a way to take what drives me which is finding all of these weirdos and learning their passions without having to do it with brute force and then the answer ended up being hey we have all of these tools uh the
the internet is really good at connecting you to people if you are capable of broadcasting who you are other people who want what you have are going to find you so I have the tendency to think of myself as being a lighthouse that I'm just broadcasting this message out to every other weirdo
who wants to make something really strange because I think thesis investing is a a little bit of a fantasy in some ways because the thesis is just the particular lens on the world that's working this decade or maybe this year or even maybe this quarter and as we're
all free agents interacting in this system what is going to emerge might look really different and so there's still plenty of standard Baseline things you have to do in order to understand if something is workable and I should caveat all of this with I had a long career as an operator I had some
startups that sold successfully and made money I had some startups that did not successfully make money and I was able to come out the other side of it with 15 years of this is what it looks like this is what it looks like to just objectively fail and here are the ways
that uh the markets are immun capitalism provides you with immune you don't have to have one the markets already there and she speaks to you constantly and so my Approach has been and the muses keep speaking to me such that I can speak to a Founder who hears
a similar Muse and says that my worldview is going to become consensus reality and that's where you know William Gibson has had such a huge impact on my life with his quote the future's here it's just unevenly distributed and so I'm just living it used to be two or three years in the
future now I think it might be like two or three hours but even the ability to just be ahead enough and signal to the other people I'm here I want to hear how your reality is going to affect my reality such that everyone's reality changes yeah we Again by uh on that as well we
sort of look at all of our uh internet activities like my prior guest we just uh had on last week uh was saying that the internet is a is a fabulous Network and then you add in AI which is a fabulous matching ma machine and and we're going to get like uh an amazing result from that because it's
going to I'm I'm extrapolating from what he said here but the way I think about it is like put your beacon up uh and then amplify it as much as you can and guess what happens you create a fantastic loose network of people who see the beacon ID you know Vibe with it
go say oh what's going on here they either like it or they don't right they're self- selecting out if they don't like uh what they see but self- selecting in if they do and and I think this I think we're still in in the reality tunnel many people are still in the reality tunnel of you know am has to
be huge no actually it doesn't uh if you can find the the right fit and what you said about the market I believed all of my career I came from asset management and I always one of my primary uh uh beliefs or operating instructions to myself was if you think one thing and
the market thinks another you're wrong and and and it's just it's it's a really easy humoristic because yeah there were maybe one or two times I thought one thing and the market thought another and I was ultimately right but but all all of the other thousands upon
thousands of times the batting average was just so great you go with the batting average right yeah and and so what do you look for though okay so we've got the beacon we've we're vibing on on the current view of the world which changes dramatically if you are a
probabilistic thinker as opposed to a deterministic one so so where what what's what's happening now where are you seeing like residence yeah so I do search out the probabilistic and not deterministic thinkers because I don't think that linear there are many processes that
look linear that are not fundamentally linear and figuring out where they change is more of an art than a science uh but what I'm generally looking for is someone and it's funny too because uh during like the hype of 2021 I didn't write any checks and one of the reasons that I didn't write any
checks is that some of the basic parameters of what I thought was going to be necessary because like you're still dealing with reality right like there are starting prices there are end prices and you have to be able to still figure out in a 10 to 15 year time
Horizon maybe it used to be eight but it's a little bit longer now for liquidity event you have to able to be sure that where you're starting from who have the end point of if you're starting at like a $200 million valuation is a series a kind of situation uh Your Capacity to make money
off that is now it it's got to be a trillion dollar company it's you got to turn into apple and I'm not saying that some Founders can't turn into Apple I oddly have met many people who have turned things into in incredible successes Beyond like Wildest Dreams
that's the hardest part of Silicon Valley is that you spend all of this time around people who really are these s tier crazy they can have the outlier of it but because what I'm doing is usually before companies even formed before they've even so much as thought of like
what their first valuation is going to be what I need to see from them is do they just keep showing up and I know that sounds really really simple but I even put it in my FAQ where if you need to if you need me to write a check on day one I don't have enough time to get to know how you get to day two and I
need to know how you get to day two I need to know how you get to day 10 and the founders that I've most loved working with have found me six to nine months usually before they're doing something and they will come to me sometimes daily more often weekly and we will just work together saying hey
you know this is this or of the product that I'm struggling with or I don't really understand my audience because my superpower in particular is I'm really really good at getting attention I kind of came up through marketing and comms and have many Dark Art wit uh chaos
magic around that because you know attention is a discipline um and can be cultivated and has pretty simple ways of making sure you get it so I try to offer up the set of skills that I have to the founders and say work with me I'm going to take the time because un unlike
larger funds with much more AUM you know chaotic is is very small like five million is we topping out the goal is that we write 10 checks give or take a year and I spend a ton of time with you because the only way you're going to get from zero to one I'm not like a series a
investor in which I'm like well I don't know how they GNA like pull up with this one and I'm not necessarily sure you you know how all these stats are that's a different problem for somebody else my problem is can I see you showing up every single day and making just a
little bit of progress think people so underestimate the value of compounding if you just do a little bit show up do something show up the next day it changes everything and that's why I say linear processes aren't always linear because at a certain point compounding starts to look
really interesting and it's not in day one and two it's definitely as you get to day one you know day 1000 day 10,000 again I I we're we're not going to have too many disagreements here because I definitely agree uh I often say that we are deterministic thinkers living in a
probabilistic world hilarity or tragedy often ensues and sometimes the same time yeah and so it it be becomes uh a challenge uh when you are when you are of that frame of mind or that's your reality tunnel uh to to even like H how do you disambiguate like when you're talking
with the founder for the first time how how how do you sus out that they are truly uh weird to use uh the term that you that you like and I like uh and and and and probabilistic and the idea itself like is is there a process for doing that yeah and and the process is not
necessarily very pleasant for them I am always trying to trip up expectations because what will usually happen it's fine I I brought like all the books that I'm currently like running through and there's a I think we even had tweeted about it once that there is a whole fusils a tour through
the American class system hysterical hysterical book which is uh it's a little bit dated but one of the sort of helpful approaches that it has is that everyone has an expectation of how things are meant to be and uh what signals mean and you know who you are
and I noticed because I have so much information about me online because I'm constantly broadcasting people will come to me with an idea of who they think I am and they will then put on this mask of what's going to be most appealing to Julie and I'm sure that everyone who's
ever had something that somebody wants that's that's what happens you want to appeal to your audience and I will deliberately upset the apple cart of saying no these are just the class signifiers that you have these are the social signifiers and I'll try to explain Concepts like semiotics where no
the symbol of what you're saying isn't actually the thing they're different uh and if a founder can kind of wrap the head around oh I'm actually not trying to impress her by showing how aligned we are I am trying to show her how much I could think around what I thought she wanted is
usually the first step and once they've stopped trying to impress me like oh it's like it's so chaotic I'm like yes yes the world's chaotic let's one more down uh I'll try to pick a problem that they're struggling with where maybe they haven't gotten very good at uh articulating the
specific product that they're building yet and I will say okay uh who are you selling the product to pretend I'm that person sell it to me now that I'm that customer and we'll just go through endless revisions of okay now here's a different slice of reality how does it
change your product how does it change your go to market strategy how does it change your expectation of the market all of these plans that you told me of the capital that's required to make that happen do your expectations change now that you have the discovered there might
be a totally different customer base for it and I don't necessarily want them to always know right because it's possible that the customer doesn't exist yet that the market doesn't exist yet and for me those are always the most exciting ones is if they have so much trouble if it's
like a three hour meeting and I Come Away still not knowing what the product is that's usually a good sign because it means that there's more space to mold and so people have this idea I think that ventur is is like really formalized Finance discipline uh I I I wish that it
were because then at least you could be a little bit more predictive about it but you're looking at nine of them are dying one of them succeeds wildly if you're really lucky and in truth it's more like 99 die 100 die but it's a little too Bleak to consider and you just have to be ready
to have agency and say okay now that you have worked through these problems with me are we going to do this are you ready to jump in and then I'll then I'll fund raise for them then I will run out and find all the people that I think they're going to match with and I'll I'll go
through the whole round process with them that's it's a really interesting way to do it and I have found uh agency is a great sorting mechanism uh you know if if you if if I sense and I and I have a lot of specific questions that I ask when I'm dealing with Founders uh that are are really
different uh ways of asking about agency um and uh persistence is another one that I have great admiration for if you have uh agency and persistence and an open mind uh that can uh quickly iterate um oh we thought that was true but as you mentioned about Silicon
Valley Bank it was built on S uh and uh what are we G do yeah exactly what are we gonna do now so uh agility is the term I use that I look for I want a very agile B I want a very agile team that understands that we can't predict the future it's not linear and the ability
to adapt one's underlying business model in the case of venture uh or beliefs in the case of other aspects of Life uh is going to serve that person really really well and as I was listening to you about showing up you know there's the famous Woody Allen even though he's been
cancelled I'm still going to quote it uh uh showing up is 80% of success is just showing up and I was always struck by that quote because I when I was younger I didn't really believe that I I I believed that no man I my ideas are better my everything is better that's the world is gonna beat it B to my door
yeah no it's not yeah a lot of people one of the best parts of being trained on knowing that that's not how it works is it super freeing the expectation that like your talents don't matter in the grand scheme of things means oh I want just Freedom experiment [ __ ] around and find out
totally totally right and and it also just makes you and that's where agency comes in right because when you have that realization and you realize that your great ideas are not going to have the world beating a path to your door people used to when I was uh right
before I published what works on Wall Street I had any number of people saying you are insane don't publish that like that's that's incredible proprietary IP why would you ever publish that I would just laugh and I would say I could take out Billboards in Time Square I could
shout from every Rooftop in the [ __ ] world and people would like look at yeah whatever whatever yeah well and I I I think it's um the Field of Dreams problem is kind of how I refer to it where uh you know if you build it they will come is this fantasy that has just gripped tech for so long
and I don't know if it was because you know Y combinator is a very powerful process uh within silicon valy and uh Paul Graham had this expectation that a good product sells itself and uh yeah a good product will enable itself to be sold by people use it find
utility and what to tell you about it but if you don't come up with stories about the utility you're you're in pretty rough shape it is not you you are not Kevin cner the people are not just going to show up and you're not going to be able to play the baseball game unless
you tell people hey hey come this is like a game you want to play You're going to have fun it is going to be enjoyable and just that I think is often the first step of agency that people forget that people don't care they're so wrapped up in their own world because it's yeah
it's a weird time right like we're all just trying to survive and being able to show up every single day and tell a little bit more of your story is eventually going to get you to the point in which which you actually have a product that people have interacted with this is why I say the
Market's a muse right the market has to be constantly giving you feedback that you're taking and it doesn't have to be totally hued to the market because you know maybe the Market's wrong obviously you wouldn't be starting a company if you thought the market was perfectly
efficient because there never be no money to be made so it's it's the difference between the uh I'm moving people to my reality but also I know that that reality has something because I have been told by countless people countless customers that they want that they want this
thing um that's one of the things that I love about using the market as a views uh in that you immediately can get feedback that is ridiculously beneficial if you understand that what you're seeing right so we have an investment in a company that uh uh teaches uh chess back Hammond
Dungeons and Dragons to little kids and literally they do it through storytelling and the the results of it were immediately apparent and and it all happened it you'll love this story because it all happened accidentally as you know here in New York there's a lot of creatives who are
they want to be the next big play right or director or actor or dancer at all and right so New York is a magnet for those kinds of people and obviously not all of them get to do that and so they take other jobs and the founder of this company Thinking Cup Labs uh basically
got a gig uh where he's a chess player and he got a call from a friend he goes hey there's this lady on the upper west side who wants you to teach her how to play chess the pay is great it's an hour and he's like super I'll show up so he goes there and he finds that his friend
was misinformed because the uh lady introduced him to her I think four or five-year-old son and he he like he like literally freezes because he went there with the expectation of doing a traditional chess lesson and he's like there is no [ __ ] way I'm going to
teach a four-year-old how to play chess the traditional way so on the spot he made up a story and he had the child sit down the chess Borg was there and he told a story that he made up on the spot about each piece so I was uh I can't remember the king's name but the king
had very brittle bones and so he surrounded himself with pillows and when he walked he walked very carefully and slowly and this story continued with each piece and the mom came back in and said well what did you learn today and he goes oh I heard a story and the
mother looked a little floxed right you heard a story and then uh our founder said show your mom how the piece is move how does the king move boom one step one step at a time all of the child knew how to move every single piece and and so boo like this mother at a very wide social network so they
were inundated with requests and then another great The Muse of the market showing them oh this is really GNA work they decided without without a dashboard without a business plan without anything you know what we should probably open a store let's open one in Brooklyn see what
happens that was it why not and and they and they opened the store first day l around the block and so that's a classic example of the market is a muse listen to The Muse ignore the Muse at your own Peril right but you know worldbuilding communication again something you're really good at I
always think of my friend Lulu uh mxi mury uh who is I love her because she's like guys you're the insurgents here you're not the incumbents the Insurgent the insurgents can't use corporate speak if you use corporate speak you're sticking a dagger in your own heart
please point the diap away or gun away from yourself what it do you have a strategy for that when you're working with your Founders or is it unique to each founder that you're working with every founder has their own voice and Mak sure that they are brave enough to use it is actually one of the
heuristics that I apply because this um you know it's interesting for much of my history online there was little fear around saying whatever you wanted because we had avatars and anonymity and uh we could say things in very specific contexts because it was really only
nerds using the internet right and suddenly we get to 2016 the great weiring uh the you know all in these moments of changing and realizing that uh we had context collapse that the context in which we felt safe isn't the default context for everyone and it created this fear and I
I feel really um just in my heart had that there's this generation who was so convinced that woke speak means they can't say what they want yeah because I think of it as just being a little bit of an excuse that if you're afraid that your story will hit because it's a bad story or you know
you're saying something that's wrong speak you're either too afraid to be yourself or you're too afraid to show the underlying empathy of the position that you have and that even if it's not going to be empathetic to everyone you're still to find some kind of
audience and in hearing this this chess story I was reminded of um there's a science fiction author I really love uh called Charles stth and he had one of his first books was called Singularity Sky uh which was as you would imagine about the AI Singularity and the opening line to the
book is the AI coming to sentience and it says tell me a story and I thought of it as being you fundamentally uh in the beginning there was the word but we're always starting to what is the word what is the story that we're telling because we all want to understand the context in which all of
these because any individual data point can you know mean functionally anything right lies damned lies and statistics is true that depending on you know the yarn that's being woven we really need to understand all of the con EXT of what we're coming from and to be afraid to
share your context you have to lose it the founder has got to learn to be brave enough to go out and be cringe fail be embarrassed because you're going to be embarrassed all the time if you're doing it right I definitely even coming into this conversation I'm like oh gosh he's
like in my mind you you know this this Titan but also like in my heart you're like my friend on Twitter right and this this tension of like biting of Industry dude that I enjoy exchanging meem with is part of that tension of oh the stories and the fear and can I be who I
am will he understand will I understand can we tell a story that brings each other together enough that we can share the same piece of reality that's a great way and thank you for giving me the pull quote Jim as a Titan we're gonna we're gonna lead with that kid kiding all you have to do is
come spend any time with my family and they will remind you that I am a legend only in my own mind not in my own time so fun I think about being able to experience people in so many different context this is a little bit risque but my most successful blog post of the last year
was a post that I titled dick writing which is a I love that I read that one yeah so um it had to be reformatted uh for to go into like another press story and I was trying to think of how to explain it to my mother and saying uh you're riding someone's
coattails where we have this idea that you know these people that have uh all of these you know signifiers of class and audition and wealth like they're so much better than we are and it's not to say that people aren't that people do not cultivate genuine virtues and truth and Beauty are things
to strive for and that people don't have things in their lives that they are genuinely better at and just head and shoulders but also they're still human all of us have the same basic functionalities we still sleep we still eat we still have families we still have
friends we saw fears and so this temptation to assume that you can just ride on the efforts of somebody else and everything will be okay it's just another form of thinking that control is even possible it's not don't ride the coattails yeah and let's step back to
something that has really bothered me too and you just articulated it quite well this idea of preference falsification vers preference revealed preferences right yeah so like I always try to look only at revealed preferences every time I read anything see anything I always I program myself to ask the
question why am I seeing this now and who benefits if I I believe it and and that opens up a whole different aperture of your ability to see what's really going on or think you do and then you pull on the thread and sometimes you're right many times you're wrong but but if you get in that habit I
mean what advice would you give your fellow Millennials to to move in Because by the way your statements that you requires bravery and courage uh you know someone ruined by a certain someone's comments about the arena but you know read Teddy Roosevelt and and what Teddy
actually said about the arena and it's it's quite true right it takes a great deal of courage to be creative to take a chance to you know expose yourself to embarrassment failure mistakes all of those things you know if you read Claude Shannon's information information Theory
carefully you see that information is novel right if so by that we could use the analogy if you read a brilliant poem it's filled with information if you read a political speech it has zero information and and so how do you find novel information by creating novel
mistakes like most of the things that I've learned in my life and reoriented and reprogram myself around was after making a massive mistake or error and and so like that's where you learn that's where all the learning is in my opinion I how how would you give guidance to your fellow Millennials who
and and Everyone by the way it's not just limited to Millennials uh to to to make that move to okay here guess what guys my reveal preferences are exactly what I'm talking about right now yeah I think agency is a muscle I think that's really what it comes down to and
that you cannot expect on day one to uh be a strong man you're not going to go to the gym and deadlift 400 pounds on day one uh you're probably not going to deadlift 400 pounds on day 300 uh that's you know a lifetime kind of achievement for most people and I mean I actually regularly will
tell people that everything you need to know about me is in my revealed preferences and you can see it behind me one of one of the things that I am the theory that I'm working on is that if the world is getting to be more chaotic there's more change there's less
predictability not iing there was predictability beforehand but it definitely feels like there's less predictability I wanted to make sure that all of my edge cases if everything just goes to Total hell or taken care of so that I can spend the rest of my life being fully invested in
building for a future that is not a disaster so I like to say you know sure I'm a little bit of a Doomer but you know I'm a Doomer Optimist but also the tension of me believing that better Futures are possible means I want to accelerate into those things so you know
the effective accelerationist uh fight against the Doomer Optimist fights the there's all these little schisms but here I am I live just outside of a town called Boseman which is basically like yepy build it's the yuppiest town in Montana but I live far enough out on
my own piece of land in which we are the the power that is powering this interview right now is from a grid that we installed we have our own solar we have our own well we have water rights to the creek we own all of the resources that we need here if something just goes
really weird and you know it hasn't so far so it's mostly just fun to be like yay I have my own solar power it's neat it's a lot cheaper than natural gas right now and uh I it Powers a hydroponic system in the garage so I'm I'll get to enjoy things like fresh lettuce so those are like my revealed
preferences right but I think the stuff of life you should have a plan for if something bad happens and for me it was really simple my husband and I went through Hurricane Sandy in New York and I was without power for 10 days and we were like you know what that was a real
bummer he literally had to bail water out of the server room of stack Overflow to keep the website up and we thought hey all right that's probably going to be more likely it sounds like with you know climate change there's just more likely that things are going to be weird so we just
went and built things that were a little more resilient to weird so that we can get back to focusing on the things that are going to make the world less dangerous really because the dangers are only increasing but we still have the same needs I still need to be
able to get online I still need to drink clean water I still need to eat like those are all really basic things and so I kind of think that if you're not living the values that you are trying to ask your entrepreneurs to have you've already failed and so I want entrepr to see that
I think it's possible to build for a future but you should still be concerned that weird things are going to happen do you believe that you have taken the necessarily steps to playing around them and it's a little bit of a test right because like I'm not expecting everyone to live on a
rural Montana Homestead that's preposterous but I totally want to hear the oh yeah so you know if this happens this is my plan I want them to feel comfortable sharing it and like by looking a little bit crazy I'll hear the craziest version of their brand I love it um so uh uh just so much
to unpack there like people have in their mind right when when you say prepper right if you're my age I'm 63 which I look at by the way as a huge Advantage because I still have a lot of context and memory from you know the the time before uh and so it appears to be
in I'm lucky in many respects because I can obviously see those old models not working and like when I watch the world economic Forum with the you know it's 2030 and you'll own nothing I just lap my ass off because like they are so tin heared and they're spending so much
money on a campaign that basically simply provides memes and gifts right like everybody knows the market Ms has said nobody watch it exactly they listen to the market exactly right and and I get a big kick out of it h because like wow you are just burning money and
you're not g to change anybody's mind because you are Tona But but so we do all of us again I always include myself because I'm not saying you have it wrong over there you human I'm a human too and I probably even have it more spectacularly wrong than you do so people think
preer and like there's a lot of negative things associated with that because in the early days Preppers uh or the let's put it this way let's put the shoe popular imagination yeah the the popular imagination but also the imagination of you know the FBI uh had a had a hard time with Preppers
so so educate me um what what is the what has prepping evolved into is it is it simply self-sufficiency uh you know having a a a regret minimization plan or or is it something very different than that and and I'm very and I will say I'm I am admittingly ignorant about this
well regret minimization suggests uh that you would regret being in a situation in which you can't really plan for right uh and so I I think prepper is a little bit of a silly term because what are you preparing for what are the most likely scenarios is it even in the realm of
possibility that you're going to experience something and so for me is it in the realm of possibility that I'm going to experience power loss yes I have experienc lots of power loss over the years is it in the realm of possibility that we could have shortages
on food because Supply chains got a little funky yes I have just experienced several years of that and so I tend to think of it within the if you still need to go about the day-to-day business of your life and you do not have the things that make your life possible can you do it because
during Hurricane Sandy I still had to go to work there was no power in lower Manhattan but one of my clients Uptown Ralph Len still had power and they still had Del literales and you know collections needed to to get out the door you know Commerce doesn't stop and
this this fantasy that the world will stop and it's going to be this Mad Max thing always seems a little bit more like yeah that's a good good movie but the reality of people still need to be fed and kept warm and alive and deliverables are still there you just want to have some of that but I will say
I definitely picked up a lot of this uh because one of my mother's deeply held personal philosophies was prepare and the opportunity will come and opportunity isn't always a good thing right if an opportunity comes to you and you are not prepared for it you might
not have the chance to leak at something that could change your whole life so I tend to think of preparation as being am I ready when the universe sends me a piece of good luck have I done the work that I am stable and healthy and capable such that if my dream moment happens I am there I am
ready so there's there's the positive alignments of it too totally um and do you think that you miss anything by not being in Silicon belly by not being in Manhattan and not being at you know one of the centers because you know one of the things that I really like
about living where I live is that you know this we we we've been talking about beacons all the time like New York is a massive beac for crazy people creative people and Innovative like way out there thinkers great operators do you think that on balance the uh the trade is you know definitely
worth it or are you here often are you in Silicon Val I travel a ton yeah so uh one of the this is where uh to to use a over you know overused term this is why I'm very privileged um I am I I I travel a lot every quarter uh I am somewhere else I I don't necessarily spend 365 in
Montana although I would love to because that would be very cool uh but one aspect of I think the social and political and uh economic muu of Silicon Valley is that it has become an idea and not a place and one reason I'm I'm kind of comfortable with that as a framing is
that my parents moved us to Silicon Valley I was born in Fremont before Fremont was like the nice part of town it was definitely where like if you were poor you know it was the trailer park side um and it was this amazing experience of showing up and being at
Ground Zero of this entire flowering um and thinking of being able to go back in history I'm so grateful that I lived through things like the browser board like that was something I experienced as a kid and so now when I see Microsoft having this big chunk of open AI I'm
like what does that remind me of I've seen this play before sta look at you dog I know what we're doing and I like that you know history Rhymes and I I think it's fun to be able to have that but silicon Do's great ambition wasn't to be a place it was to be a state of
mind and I think that Stuart BR understood that intuitively that we were giving people tools to take the state of mind and I don't know if uh B's Network state is going to manifest In Our Lifetime but he has this concept um that states won't be defined by geographies but will be defined by
interests and I think that it is possible we're seeing some of that already that there are people who are you know copyists uh fandom stand communities like the musical communities are these really intricate social phenomenons that are incredible economic drivers I mean Taylor Swift
single-handedly pulled a a great summer of economic activity out of you RoR and so the idea that you have to be somewhere isn't always going to be a physical experience it may be that you need to know how to show up and it was my real great fear right because if if
my whole stick is living a little bit in the future then I need to be wherever the future is happening and if the future is happening in a specific place I get on an airplane and go uh in next week I'm flying to the baltics because I am interested in experiencing the the
engineering culture that's happening out of talin uh out of hellsinki and there is a a group of people that sort of migrated out of Berlin that are some of the most effective machine learning scientists in Europe and I want to go and learn from them and see if there's something
there and that's just sort of part of my experience of you go you you go where the action is so if I were trapped here that's a whole different problem and I can be trapped here in a mad ma apocalypse and it would be great but know Boseman is a billionaire Town
there's a lot of lights out of it also great place to for billionaire LPS you know if that's something that you know you have to concern yourself with which you know I do kindly recommend coming out for August fed week uh Boseman and uh is is a fun town and I love Montana uh so uh I I totally
get that aspect of it what what what are you most excited about right now and and hopefully tell me tell me something that you think I'm gonna think holy [ __ ] that has like zero chance of happening so uh I have been a real fan of Open Source as uh an ethos I guess
just I owe a lot to seart Brand I should probably like find some way to send him some cash at some point because what I'm really excited about is that in AI there's this huge discussion of the alignment are we aligning machines to us and my great fear in all of this is that if we're aligning it to someone
like me or someone like you or someone in the wider sort of Finance Silicon Valley cohort we're 1% of Human Experience we're very far removed from what regular people experience and my concern is that if the alignment is happening through these large corporations through regulatory
capture if Microsoft does with open AI uh what they did with Internet Explorer and there's no alternative option there's no Netscape that emerges we might be in a little bit of trouble because the AI will be aligned to you and me and not everyone and so I'm kind of in this
moment where I think when did we last experience the downsides of trying to have one group of people plan things and actually I have totally a book for it Marxism and modernism that this idea that we can plan for a better life hasn't really gone that well and so
it's a a study of Benyamin and adoro and like BR and all of these um Marxist critical theory Scholars coming through with the idea that modernism was really hostile to a lot of people because they didn't necessarily feel like they would be included in the wider world of what was
the median 50% right but like maybe they would be outside of it and so uh one of the craziest I hope he turns into one of our Founders at some point uh is this uh Italian kid who's working on how do we make sure that reinforcement learning doesn't make the machines crazy because
we're asking the machines to do all sorts of things with what are conflicting messy human viewpoints and I think that we might genuinely make them just deranged by trying to just perfectly align it to people like you and I the alignment has to be all of us so I'm
spending as much time as possible trying to find the open source communities the weirdos who want to make sure that the Primitives of this are as open as possible because the only way we do align is if every single person being asked by the machines tell me a story tells their story because if it's only
you know 10 stories that to me is where we're going to get into trouble that's where atrocities happen that's where it is good to learn from the mistakes of Marxism the more we decentralize it the more likely we are that we all survive again uh you had me at hello there I
mean that was what motivated me the fear like I have five grandchildren and I've been fascinated by Machine learning for a long time and what motivated me to invest in stability AI which is an open- Source uh uh large language uh generative AI uh company
multimodal but all open source right because I feared the panopticon and I did not want my my grandchildren to grow up in a world that was controlled by just a few viewpoints and and I did not want them to grow up in a world where you know they were being fed consistently helpful
uh Happy lies as opposed to inconvenient truths and and no Noble lies no Noble wies exactly and and you know one of the things that that I also reflected on because you know I do have that kind of side of my personality that it's like okay where's the empirical proof here
well okay LX is running the internet you want empirical proof open source Microsoft did everything it could to kill Linux everything could uh you had recapture yeah right exactly they went boom let's go there right away let's kill it in its cradle because you know what they knew
how much better it was and you know so like uh Balmer Linx is communism and all of these types of things and look I if I was in his position at uh Microsoft and I had a predatory mindset I would have probably done the same thing but my OB Ive in investing in stability AI was
also practical like yeah you know there's this idea that cognitive diversity if you don't have cognitive diversity you're not going to get to the best outcomes right you need the mutants you need the mut abolutely you absolutely do and one of the things that really intrigued me about AI was at the
beginning the plan was oh no no no no we're going to have models in every language we're going to have every story from every culture that we're going to use as Source material and you know just the simple idea that it's a great quote I've got to I've got to look up and
remember give the author credit because I've used this quote a lot and I'm not giving he or she credit uh but it's like no matter how brilliant somebody is no matter how in you know inventive or uh have however great their imagination you simply cannot ask them to come up
with a list of things that would never occur to them and and and there is the unknown unknowns you'll never know you're just an N of one no matter how good you are and of one exactly and you know you here's a book you might like because Genius of the Beast the radical
revision of capitalism by Howard Bloom and and I love this book because he he makes the point really elegantly that listen guys if you want to understand why free markets work so well H understand Evolution understand the way things actually transpire as opposed to this top- down idea right where all like
all markets life every part of it is a complex adaptive system and complex adaptive systems emergence comes from below not from above I ironically I learned that in fashion I had this this vision of when I was a teenager that I really wanted to go work for VOD because they were the
people who set what taste was and then I realized that taste absolutely could not be set by one person that it wasn't Anna winter and that I had been raised in a culture of always contributing more and that I had a Blog I could put up my own style I could contribute any kind of
looks that I wanted and realized that I had so much more control over the outcome even in something as top down and hierarchical as something like fashion and this idea that we can all contribute that we're all actors in this system you can choose any lens through
which to figure that out like the fact that I found it out through Vogue and fashion is like oh well that's kind of cool and cute and fun like there's just so many ways to realize that you have so much more power at your fingertips to change something by saying Hey what if you consider this and it
just shifts everything and I just I I think finding the people who want to keep shifting shifting shifting and come back every day to do that shift I I personally think that you know as much as I want to be down on where we are are in history have no reason to believe that
it's any different than any other time it's just happening harder and faster and weirder and so we have more chance to be adaptable we have more chance to change and we have more chance to P all these little changes I just think it's so much fun I'd meet to again that
and I couldn't agree with you more I am I am so happy to be alive at this particular time in history because it is so fil it is so filled with such amazing possibilities and you know if as you point out you know with your Vogue experience yeah you know what if you just presented a little bit this way a
whole new thing can emerge and so that's kind of like why I set up sh C Ventures the way I set it up right I I I I want to root for things not against against things you know it's so much it takes so much more courage and persistence to build than to burn and like it's so easy
to burn it's so easy to say oh that sucks that [ __ ] I hate that but people don't really understand that they're programming themselves when they continually say that and guess what the universe is going to say oh you think that everything sucks and everything is [ __ ]
guess what yeah that's the program track you're on run that down exactly well listen Julie I am watching my my clock here I could talk to you all day long and I will right here and right now invite you uh again to come back because there's a whole host of non uh V VC type
stuff that that I wanted to chat with you but this has been so much fun that we didn't get to it um tell tell our our Watchers listeners how to find you I I know how to find you but some people might not I do try to be as available as possible because one that's the beauty
of the internet that you can reach out to anyone and they're right there so uh my my personal website is a j fredericks.com where I write every single day uh I I've not taken a single day off today is day 994 but you can find me on Twitter I still hav an adjust into calling it X
I'm I'm not sure that I can um but my handle on Twitter is at almost media uh generally speaking that's my handle on every platform almost media because yeah it's almost a form of media and uh if you want to learn more about the fund I'm very proud of that domain
chaotic. Capital pretty easy to find that's a great domain that lucky you um I I'm sure that if you've listened to the podcast you know that at the end of each one we we make you the Empress of the world but just for a day um you you can't yes we're setting the crown on you
right now my Empress uh you can't kill anyone you can't put anyone in a re-education c you can't uh like the Canadians seem to I I love Canada and Canadians but they seem to be doing like really weird [ __ ] now like throwing books out of libraries that were before
2008 and like I I saw that I couldn't believe it and you know what I immediately thought of was oh yeah I can think of another guy who tried to reset to year zero his name was Paul pot and he killed a third of his own population like that's really weird uh anyway you can't kill anyone you can't
go all Paw poot and re-educate or reset years to year zero but what you can do is we hand you a magic microphone you can speak two things into it that every single human being on Earth all eight billion of them are going to wake up the next day whenever their next day is and
they're going to think I've just had the two most wonderful ideas that I'm going to act on them agency right now what what two things are you going to incept in the world's population I'm keep it really simple be nicer to people just be kind I'm not an inherently nice person
I'm kuddly and cranky and have all kinds of weird ideas and I still at the the only thing that really ever gets me feeling like the world is worth living is the reminder that you as much a human as I am and that I'm as much of a human at to you and that you can't treat
anyone like their non-player character we're all characters we all have agency which is be nice to the other players of the game I love that uh I I I would change it to kind because I think that there is a significant difference between kind and nice uh but I I get it okay so
that's number one people are going to be more kind to one okay what's number two squat it is the most effective form of exercise if you just get up and squat once or twice a day your health will be dramatically improved be kind and squ squat I love that comination that's one
of the better ones I think that that I've ever had well Julie this has been absolutely a pleasure thank you so much I'm delighted to be an LP in in your fund uh and I can't wait to see all of the adventures uh that I get to go on with you and your team so thanks for coming on thank you so much for having me