Phenethylamines I Didn’t Know About and Loved
Chapter VIII
त्वं सो॑म पि॒तृभिः॑ संविदा॒नोऽनु॒ द्यावा॑पृथि॒वी आ त॑तन्थ | तस्मै॑ त इन्दो ह॒विषा॑ विधेम व॒यं स्या॑म॒ पत॑यो रयी॒णाम् ||
Almost as soon as the clapping ended a hand shot up from an important-looking man in the second row of seats, and was selected—perhaps uncannily so—over a dozen other inquirers in the crowd.
“I still don’t really get why you’d use this over an Excel spreadsheet. The polycule I’m part of has been running on an Excel spreadsheet for three years and we’ve seen several partners come and go. It takes some work to set up but I don’t think you need special scheduling software for this.”
The founder cut the pause off as quickly as he could while trying to remain on the right side of the line between confidence and arrogance.
“That’s such a great point,” he said, his tone denying the possibility of any actual concession. “I mean, as everyone knows, you can do really amazing things with Excel—are you an associate at a firm?”
“I run a VC firm,” came the curt reply.
“Oh! Of course. Well, I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen all sorts of amazing tricks associates and analysts can pull with Excel, but it’s…I mean,”
The CEO of Polycel laughed rather sheepishly and took a sip from his water bottle.
“That’s not what Excel’s designed to do out of the box, right? I mean, you wouldn’t just hire any old business bookkeeper off the street and have them model company valuations for you. And I’m sure it takes a while to train interns to do it. It’s just like that. It’s a lot easier for the person on the street to use Excel to keep track of piano lessons or family dinners than to keep track of all the fluid possibilities of modern relationships. We’ve got a great data model that can keep track of primary partners, secondary partners, throuples, headmates, complex networking dynamics to make sure incompatible or jealous partners never cross paths…it’s been an exciting journey and we’re here to raise and, hopefully, also to hire.”
Another hand from the crowd. The head judge gestured in its direction, then glanced sharply at the CEO and tapped an invisible watch on her left wrist.
“You said you’re hiring, I assume that’s contingent on a successful raise. What are you looking for?”
“Well, we’re really looking for someone with experience with NoSQL databases and at least some understanding of advanced graph theory or queueing theory. I’m pleased to say we’re well into the dogfooding stage and preference will be given to candidates with latex experience.”
“Oh, no problem, I use it to typeset all my papers. And I think it’s pronounced—”
“No, I meant latex. And knots, knots would be a plus.”
“I did some work in knot theory for my math PhD.”
The buzzer rang.
“Let’s talk at dinner!—”
“THANK YOU, POLYCEL!”
The founders shuffled off stage back to their benches amid a second, somewhat more muted round of clapping.
“Next up we’ve got…Sunshine Industries! I believe they’re finishing up setting up some equipment…”
The powerpoint on the screen flipped to read SUNSHINE INDUSTRIES: PRODUCTIVITY FROM THIN AIR while a black curtain at the rear of the stage lifted to reveal a trio of men scrambling furiously to finish connecting a baroque complex of metal piping. After fifteen seconds their leader pronounced the job done and rushed to the judges’ table to fetch the microphone.
“Sunshine Industries, you have five minutes. Go!”
“Good morning good morning! I’m Hank Prockler, CEO of Sunshine Industries, and this“—he cast his hand over the apparatus behind him—”is the Amphetamatic 2000...”
A cofounder of Sunshine Industries pressed a large red button labeled Amphetamize, and a fan on top of the contraption began to whir vigorously.
“For decades, Silicon Valley and the American economy at large have specialized in working with bits. Meta. Google. The Everything App. The sharpest people on the planet come to the United States with nothing but a laptop and a dream, push their commits to main, and create trillions in value. We’ve gotten very, very good at it. It’s changed the world. But we’ve forgotten something important. We’ve gotten so good at working with bits that we’ve forgotten how to work with atoms.”
Murmurs of agreement rose from the crowd.
“Since the early 1970s, total factor productivity growth in the American economy has been a fraction of what it was in the decades after World War Two. Our infrastructure is crumbling. New power lines are snarled up in red tape. Manufacturing has stagnated. American workers work fewer hours than ever before, but they’re burnt out at their spreadsheets.”
The whir of the fan fell silent, and steady hums of a more cryptic nature announced that new and mysterious processes were now at work inside the Amphetamatic 2000.
“Sunshine Industries is rebuilding American manufacturing, American competitiveness and American pharmaceuticals with the molecule that brought us the Manhattan Project, took us to the moon, built the Interstate Highway System and won the Cold War. And we’re doing it the twenty-first century way—from scratch, decentralized, in your backyard.”
Hank flipped the slide. Productivity from Thin Air: Dextroamphetamine Manufacturing for the Second American Century. Carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water molecules were shown combining with pure sunlight on the accompanying diagram to produce a benzene ring connected to a three-carbon chain with an amine group attached to the middle atom, enveloped by a golden halo.
“Simplicity itself! Productivity itself! No worries about contaminants, purity or assays. Electrolysis of water for the hydrogen. Haber-Bosch for ammonia to get the amine group. Fischer-Tropsch for nonane, some basic catalysts to get the benzene ring, and finally—pop on the amine group.” As a bell-shaped chamber on the machine began to glow a faint red, Hank flipped to a third slide, showing a full reaction sequence. “A single acre of solar panels can produce up to a hundred milligrams a day.”
A beep from the judges’ desk indicated a minute to go.
“We are looking to raise a seed round of fifty million dollars to build our manufacturing facility and for lobbying purposes. Big Pharma benefits from strict drug scheduling as a regulatory moat, and it’s time to disrupt the market. We—”
A bell rang.
“TIME! Thank you, Sunshine Industries! I do believe we have time for a few questions…”
“You mentioned using Haber-Bosch to produce the ammonia for the amine group,” asked a woman sitting in what was clearly the designated row of seating for investors. “Isn’t the market cap for fertilizer much larger than for a single pharmaceuticals?”
“Great point,” said Hank. “Yes, but the value added for fertilizer is much lower. Probably doesn’t make sense to decentralize it on an acre of solar panels. Possibly a few hundred. Next question…yes, you in the black t-shirt.”
“Won’t this require some reworking of the regulatory environment? I mean, dextroamphetamine is Schedule II…”
“Yes, we’re raising in large part because we’ll need lobbyists in DC.”
“Time for one more question,” said the head of the judges’ panel, inviting another member of the VC row to ask it.
“Yes,” said a man in a greying beard and official Ascended Degen T-Shirt. “You have succeeded in making the stuff, right? I just, I’d assume that it takes more than five minutes for the machine to boot up…”
“Great question. Yes, indeed, we have. In fact, we have some here for everyone to try,” said Hank, handing a small bottle of bright yellow pills to a member of the front row. “30mg each. Please take no more than one.”
“TIME!” said the head judge. “Thank you, Sunshine Industries!”
“I thought you were at the startup pitches.”
Von Pfiff, his hand on a large wooden barrel, turned around. It was Katzbube, sitting behind a table in the corner of the basement, his laptop almost completely obscured by a pile of print-outs and books.
“Ah, Winty,” he replied. “Good morning. Yes, I…”
Find a good cover story. Find a good cover story, dammit.
“...yes. They’re all very tedious, to be honest with you. Mostly business software. Not really my thing.”
“I thought some of them looked rather interesting. Pharmaceutical manufacturing from thin air, an agent that acts as fake work references for you to put on your résumé.”
“But you’re not up there?”
“No,” said Katzbube, “I’m working on one of my dissertations.”
“One of.”
“I’m technically in two PhD programs simultaneously. Economic history and Akkadiology. Haven’t yet finished the writing.”
“Well,” von Pfiff said in a deadpan tone, “if you are thinking of doing a third, I do know a few people at UVienna.”
“I might consider it. But three dissertations at the same time seems difficult to pull off.”
Von Pfiff paused briefly to reflect on this unfortunate truth.
“You’re not planning on finishing them? You’ve got to grow up and leave school at some point, you know.”
“It’s a quirk of my grandfather’s trust fund. I get sixty grand a year plus inflation adjustment as long as I’m still in school. It’s a much better deal than a postdoc, so I’m trying to make sure I’ve always got at least one dissertation outstanding until I’ve found another source of income. That was why I was working at Parentologist, I was hoping the equity was going to pay off and I’d be able to exit, but then they went under.”
An empire of permanent adolescents, von Pfiff thought to himself.
“You’re not aiming for a tenure-track job?”
“I’ve considered private-school teaching like my father. But it doesn’t leave that much time for research or writing.”
“Have you seen—” Von Pfiff paused. “Have you seen Comstock Gonzalez? I need to talk to him about Russia.”
“Clockjob not around?”
“Oh, who knows where Clockjob is,” said von Pfiff. “But trying to get a straight answer from him about the army in Moscow doesn’t seem as fruitful as getting it second-hand from the sultan, to be quite honest with you.”
All of a sudden a door at the far end of the basement opened and a young man in a large, black hat—its buckle in somewhat desperate need of a shine—approached, trundling a metal dolly holding a large wooden barrel somewhat greyer and larger in color than the ones already in the basement. Then a second, and a third, all wearing the same belt-buckle hats and dark velvet cloaks with breeches and transporting identical grey barrels.
“I see Brother Blayden has already ordered some preparations for the wedding tonight!” said the first man, addressing von Pfiff. “Have you recently accepted the Plymouth Covenant into your heart?”
“The wedding?”
“Oh yes,” the man said. “A bishop must be the husband of only one wife. That’s what Scripture tells us. Our dear church president, Brother Blayden, is marrying Sister Zephyr at five o’clock tomorrow evening. While communion will only be available for members of the church, everyone is invited to the reception afterwards for dancing and, if we can figure out how to get some, ale.”
“Dancing,” said Katzbube. “What—”
“It’s a fine Puritan tradition. They weren’t Victorians.”
“Fair enough,” Katzbube conceded. “But those hats are a Norman Rockwell invention, you realize.”
“A bit of anachronism,” the man said, “bears witness to the world. They didn’t have cryptocurrency either. But they would have appreciated it as a vehicle for thrift among the elect.”
“Indubitably,” von Pfiff said. “Well, I’m going to wander back up to the pitch competition, I think, if there’s no sign of Mr. Gonzalez...”
“I think I’ll join you,” said Katzbube. “Half a page done this morning and I’m starting to feel a bit boxed in.”
“Last but not—hee hee—we have…CRUSTARD…CRUSTORTION. Such a pretty slideshow…”
The man in front of the slideshow began giggling.
“Good—mroing…! I’m Elmer…I’m Elmer Harding! They’re so pretty…such pretty colors…we’re here…”
Katzbube cast his eye over the crowd.
“I think…I’m actually going to…Bzzzeeee!” Elmer exclaimed. “We’re making them stupider.”
He gestured to the slide, featuring the brand name CRUSTARDACEAN and a picture of a shrimp wearing a dunce cap.
“We’re looking for…we’re looking to rise! We’re looking to raise. We’re rising…so pretty!”
Von Pfiff suddenly felt a strong wave of relief that he had elected to skip the pitch competition.
“We’re using AI…” Elmer poked the projector remote, flipping through several slides in extremely quick succession. “AI! Large language model. Small language model! They’re all very very good.”
Katzbube could only catch Shrimp-Based Neural Model and Farming at Scale: $100B by 2040.
“That’s it!” Elmer exclaimed, finding he had fast-forwarded to the very last slide. “Bye-bye!”
“What on God’s green earth—” Katzbube remarked.
“Silicon Valley dot text,” said von Pfiff.
“Even by those standards.”
“That’s—tee hee! That’s it!” said the head judge. “I think you are all just fantastic. All of you are winners! Especially…Zunzhine…thank you so much! They’ll be around. They’re coming back! Who wants some music?”
A warm, dopey cheer arose from the crowd as the judge closed the slideshow and, after several unsuccessful attempts, hit play on a Spotify list titled Music to Experience Reality To. Electronic dance beats echoed across the grass pitch as the experience of reality, or at least an intriguing approximation thereof, came upon the attendees. Katzbube spotted Hank sitting on a hammock in the far corner and strolled over to meet him at last.
“Hank Prockler, I assume. Winthrop Katzbube, long-term blog reader.”
“Aha! Good to make your acquaintance. I’m guessing you didn’t, ah…”
“No,” replied Katzbube, “I was occupied with my dissertation. I didn’t know you’d branched out to other pharmaceuticals.”
“We didn’t know either. We’re still trying to find the right mix of catalysts. There’s really no way to get around using halogen salts, unfortunately.”
“So this isn’t standard…”
“We’ll do some spectroscopy when we get back to the lab. I’m guessing we got some methoxy groups on the benzene ring by accident. New research chemist.”
“Oh dear,” said Katzbube, unsure how else to respond.
“Well, when you have eight months of runway left and not enough manpower, you take whoever you can get,” Hank said. “We poached him off Twitter. Good at reading papers, wrote a few articles on geoengineering. But we’ve beaten the raise target as of an hour ago, so I can’t get too mad at him.”
“How much for?”
“A hundred million at a valuation of half a billion dollars. It’ll buy a lot of replacement gloveboxes, they’ve been blowing up ever since he got hired—”
“Congratulations!” spouted a voice. Katzbube turned to see a middle-aged man in a pair of khakis and a grey fleece, holding his iPhone and swaying cheerily to the music.
“Ah, Terry,” said Hank. “You’ve—”
A large, goofy grin spread over Terry’s face.
“Such potential…such consciousness! It’s in your inbox. I think there’s…”
“Let me see…”
“We added—I added some more funding as the CEO. I’m sure you’ll be thrilled.”
A pause followed.
“I think there’s been a mistake. The valuation is only half a billion.”
“Nnnnnope,” Terry giggled. “Added it myself. I thought to myself: it’s so pretty. It’s worth so much more funding than a hundred mill. We’re all in. Best pitch I’ve seen in years. Best of luck!”
A bright ping hit Hank Prockler’s inbox, informing him that a wire transfer for two billion dollars and zero cents exactly had hit the bank account of Sunshine Industries.
Continue to Chapter IX.