3 ferrets in a lab coat

i recently went to a party, and it was very, very cold. so, after an hour of shivering around and holding a drink that i never drank, i decided to leave but on the way out, a woman collided with me, a women dressed head to toe in Rick Owens. i looked closely. her shoes were geobaskets, $1325. pants were creatch cargos, $1675. shirt, a level tee, $415. incredible. i asked for her name. it was Emily Maddow. i asked her what she was working on and told me that she’s a general partner at Candle Ventures, a deeptech venture firm investing in “companies building at the edge of epistemic legibility.” she said this with a deep sense of excitement, clearly eager for me to ask the obvious follow-up question to such a bizarre statement. i pondered to myself. i didn’t really care about epistemics or legibility or whatever lie in the intersection of two, and the personality behind the Rick Owens fit was not as interesting as i’d hoped it be. but it felt impolite to leave right now. and the room was still really, really cold and each second of not talking or interpreting what someone was saying made me feel colder, so i said, oh, how interesting, what does that mean? the words fell out of her mouth. she said to me that most venture firms only fund what she called “consensus science,” which meant anything that already had a wikipedia page. Candle, on the other hand, invested ideas that couldn’t be evaluated yet because the language to evaluate them hadn’t been invented. “we’re interested in the kind of biology that feels like mysticism now but will be standard by 2040,” she said. “we look for founders who are premature rather than wrong.”. i nodded, mostly to stay warm. her intonation had the charismatic warmth of someone who regularly attended chatham house rules parties at airbnbs shaped like shipping containers. but there was something crueler there, something unique to her and her alone. it sounded like Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance of Smaug in the Hobbit films; deep and ancient with hatred playing at the ends of it. i did not like those movies, but i did like the voice. cold was setting in again. i needed to keep things moving. i took a deep breath and said, ‘isn’t that every venture firm? isn’t everyone interested in finding premature ideas before the price of investing shoots up? i’ve never quite understood why everyone keeps trying to aggressively distinguish themselves. at a certain point it starts to feel like narcissism of small differences. does that make sense? everyone wants to invest in smart people doing interesting things. i don’t know. it feels like a lot of theatre sometimes. and this all isn’t to say that vc is bad. i think vc is great. but why have this elaborate performance around it? why not just invest in people you like and not even talk about what your own personal sense of esoteric taste is?’. she stared at me, long and hard, and then glanced down at my glass, still full. “you should drink that,” she said. “it’ll help with the cold. it’s got niacin.”. i finally did take a sip and my cheeks flushed with heat. she was right. but by the time i had looked up, Emily was nowhere to be seen, only a small pile of ash left where she was standing. the history of spontaneous combustion is somewhat fuzzy and mostly relegated to the outer provinces of 19th-century tabloid science, alongside mesmerism, orgone energy, and the idea that lightning could rearrange your personality if it hit you just right. but i’ve always found it curious how consistently the bodies left behind are described: untouched surroundings, the chair left intact, shoes perfectly preserved, just a small cone of human residue where a person used to be. which is all to say: i don’t think she burst into flames, but i think it’d make for a more exciting world if she had