We’re handing the newsletter over to other newsletters this week. We’ve got one in finance, one in construction, and one in cooking (your reminder that it’s the Superbowl of dinners here in less than a week!).
If you learned something, found something amusing or helpful, please consider subscribing to their newsletters as well. Just don’t forget you sent you there.
Kyla Scanlon is a 25-year-old rock star. She started trading options at 16 and has published content on stocks, investing, and the economy since she was 20. She was hired right out of college by American Funds before leaving after a year and a half to start her own company called Bread. Now, she creates short-form and long-form videos and publishes a newsletter. I don’t think it’s much of an overstatement to call her the “voice of a generation” for the finance industry.
For example, we did our version of the FTX collapse last week. Here’s her short video on the same topic:
She picked up the story’s thread in her newsletter:
The reason I *personally* like some aspects of crypto (and this is my opinion) is because it dares to think about the world differently. What would it look like if there was more power distributed to people to control their own money, what does it look like to rethink privacy, what does it look like to redefine an ecosystem of money?
Of course, questions don’t always have immediate answers. And speculation can override any good intentions.
But even to ask a question into a world that boxes us up almost immediately - is brave. To the think beyond what we are and what we could be is inherently spectacular.
But of course, the world is woven from bad actors. They manage to thread themselves in, and when they unravel, so does everything else. Driven by greed, the endless pursuit for yield, the idea that nothing will ever be enough, so might as well take it all.
It’s really just begun to play out.
The exposure that FTX and Alameda had are interwoven into the VC industry (very specifically, Sequoia), the crypto industry, equities, and more. 134 affiliate companies creates a garden full of thorns. FTX was massive, and the funders behind them were too starstruck by number-go-up to notice the red flags - and if you’re not paying attention, the bull will charge you.
And with FTX and SBF, it’s worse than other times in crypto. It’s so much worse. They posed themselves as these people that were trying to make the world better. There’s a difference between crypto going down because no one believes in it and crypto going down because it’s systematically being rugged. As Vitalik said, “the fraud cuts deeper”.
It’s easy to look past the infrastructure that literally shapes our world. Particularly in the West, we take things like roads, bridges, buildings, and sidewalks for granted. They’ve always been there and there’s no reason to expect them to change.
Yet all of it was built. A team of people had to do an enormous amount of work and spend a bunch of brain power to make actually make the things we often take for granted into a reality.
Brian Potter writes a newsletter called Construction Physics and it is a fascinating look at how our world takes shape. For example, I never thought I’d be locked in on an article about concrete but, well… read it for yourself!
Reinforced concrete is, by a large margin, the most widely used building material on earth - by mass, we use as much reinforced concrete as every other material combined. One reason for this volume of use is concrete’s versatility - because concrete is placed as a liquid, it can be used to form structures of virtually any size and shape. Placing concrete thus requires some way of forcing the liquid concrete into the shape that you want it to take. This is traditionally done with concrete molds called forms or formwork [1]. Liquid concrete gets poured into the formwork, it solidifies [2], and the formwork is removed, leaving behind solid concrete in the shape of your structure.
The simplest way of using formwork is to just build what amounts to a liquid-tight box in the shape of your structure, then fill it full of concrete. This method for forming concrete dates back thousands of years - Roman builders would use timber forms to build foundations, walls, arches, and other structures from concrete (in some cases, the imprint of the formwork can still be seen in the concrete).
Similar methods of formwork construction are still used today - builders use a variety of materials (wood, steel, aluminum, plastic) to construct their forms. In some cases (such as with wood forms), the formwork gets built on-site, while with others the forms are prebuilt, and delivered to the jobsite and arranged in the proper position.
Cool right?Concrete is a liquid? I guess we sort of knew that but I never thought I could use the same term to describe the water in my glass as the core building material used to form a skyscraper.
Lastly, Dinner Superbowl is less than a week away.
And when you’re preparing for the Super Bowl, you need to make sure you have the plays that got you there down to a science and be ready to pull out something unexpected to keep your competition (disappointed guests, bad food, your grumpy uncle (nvm - that guy’s been a lost cause since 2003)) on its toes.
And so we turn to the pros and Alison Roman for your gameplan to shake up next week’s Big Meal.
Let’s just start at the top, shall we? Another very popular question this year was: “Turkey. Do I have to?” And my answer was and is a very loud: Absolutely not. In fact, you don’t ever have to eat turkey again if you don’t want. Not in a sandwich, not at Thanksgiving time. But turkey is tradition and I am a sucker for it (the tradition, not the turkey). I have let go of the idea that a turkey is ever going to blow my mind or be better than a perfect roast chicken, and accept that at it’s best, a whole roasted turkey is pretty good.
Several thanksgivings under my belt, by now any repeat customers know that I enjoy a straightforward and pleasingly delicious turkey experience: A 12-16 pound bird, seasoned simply with a dry brine, roasted in a 325° oven on a sheet pan with basic aromatics and a little olive oil. I will and would never suggest you grill, fry, smoke or otherwise do anything to your bird other than roast it in an oven. Not to say those things can’t be done and done well, but you just won’t hear that kind of cooking advice from me, personally. So if you’re looking for positive affirmation about a 3-day wet brine on your 22-pound spatchcocked grilled turkey, turn away now.
But this year, I did cave to the repeated request for a turkey but just like, LESS of it. Turkey, but like, what if you didn’t have to carve it? Turkey but for 6 people? Turkey, but like, tragically delicious? Turkey, but just the legs. Turkey, but roasted low and slow over four lucious hours in a bath of the fat of your choosing (duck fat, chicken fat, olive oil or a melange), until it’s so tender the bone effortlessly slips out in the most satisfying sensory experience you’ll have all year.
Here, I present to you my two favorite turkeys. One, a classic roasted bird (best for a larger crowd), and two, a slow roasted turkey, effectively turkey confit, two words that somehow feel weird when they sit next to each other (best for dinners with twelve or fewer).
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