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- The Good Times: Nuclear Fusion, Cocaine Bear, and a Letter to Stella
The Good Times: Nuclear Fusion, Cocaine Bear, and a Letter to Stella
Ed Festa
March 04, 2023
Welcome to the Good Times, your stop for great writing, amusements, and fascinating stuff from the last few days (in 5 mins or less).
Yes, we're doing this to amuse America (and ourselves), but we also donate 10% of our revenue to education and affordable housing charities. So kick back and enjoy.
The Good Times Roundup
Scout makes a comeback - VW backs a startup to recreate the iconic SUV as an EV. Get yours for ~$40K (in 2026).
Cocaine Bear gets a Funko - Brand extensions! (that's what a $23.1M opening weekend will do). Two new Cocaine Funko dolls are available: a chewed-off leg version and another with a rainbow bag.
AI attributes antique store painting to Raphael - Via brushstroke analysis, software concludes the painting was almost certainly done by the master (with a 'probability of 97%'), but the art world's wary given 'legal and financial stakes.' Job security went unmentioned as a concern.
Nuclear fusion (with magnets, not lasers): The race to scale nuclear fusion's on. Private investment's pouring in from the likes of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Peter Thiel with two competing approaches:
One calls for high-intensity lasers to trigger a series of reactions that slam atoms together many times per second. The other would use super-strong magnets to contain a cloud of plasma that burns hotter than the sun. While lasers were used in the recent breakthrough, many experts are skeptical of the commercial prospects. The better bet, they say, is magnets.
How We Feelin
The University of Vermont has tracked 'happiness' on twitter through a word scan going back to 2008. Peak happiness? Christmas Day 2008 (score: 100). And total misery? May 31, 2020 during the George Floyd protests (score: 0). We aim to boost those numbers, current status:
With every newsletter we'll run a featured article on topics ranging from kids, dogs, news, sports, or anything in between. We aim to amuse - put another way, if Mark Twain were alive today we'd desperately try to hire him. Thanks for reading and without further delay...
Today's Article: Quittin Time, a Letter to Stella
This is a series of Letters to my toddler daughter.
Stella, once upon a time your Dad was an actor, a wildly unsuccessful one with a career marked by part-time jobs and the occasional Del Taco audition.
Acting wasn't a flight of fancy though, I loved it starting at age 5, and it truly was my early life’s dream. So after a year behind a desk after college, I dropped it all and moved to LA.
LA was spectacular in 2004. Under blue skies and 72 degrees, I remember standing in Santa Monica in December wondering 'why would I ever leave,’ but the weather wasn't what brought me there, of course. I was there to act, and after the excitement and optimism of arriving faded, I sorta looked around for what to do next (or as Stephen in Braveheart says 'Fine speech. Now what do we do?').
Professionally my life was a mess, a veritable Jackson Pollock painting of short-term paychecks. I took acting classes and went to the occasional audition when I was lucky, and it was fun in the beginning. But as the years passed the hard questions grew louder in my head - what exactly am I doing? Or more pointedly, what can I reasonably expect to achieve?
The adage goes you need three things to succeed as an actor: talent, luck, and endurance, and talent's easily the least important.
I had some of one (the least important) and could control only one of the other two (endurance). But endurance didn't seem likely to tip my odds much either, so that left luck. Could I be happy with a life waiting for a lucky break? I pondered that for a hot minute. And then I bought my first GMAT study book.
My first two Letters celebrated risk-taking and grit, but quitting deserves its day too. Credit to author and former pro poker player Annie Duke for this - she just published a new book aptly titled 'Quit, The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.'
As a culture, we generally scorn quitting and lionize winners who defy odds, but between those two groups is an ocean of failers (not sure that's a word but I'm going with it) who probably could've used some quit along the way.
In her book, Duke talks about Mt. Everest expeditions who ignored turnaround times to pursue the summit (they died). She talks about cab drivers who burn time on low-traffic shifts for the mental reward of 'putting in the hours.' And how countless startup founders persist in fruitless endeavors because quitting's unthinkable.
It's nonsense of course - if it’s losses all the way down, the sooner you cut them the better. Or as WC Fields put it, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.'
So what happened after I bought that GMAT book? Funnily enough, I almost quit business school before I ever started.
The night before I was due in Charlottesville I had a mini panic attack (1st and only in my life). I thought business school was all wrong for me and I feared I was giving up on acting too easily, but eventually I made a deal with myself to just go for a semester. I'd know then if business school had been a mistake, and I could return to acting in a matter of months, worst case.
That 'deal' got me out the door, and 14 years later, I've never looked back. It’s been all ‘business’ ever since. No temptation to turn around, or work acting back into my 'new' life, just plowing forward with family and career.
I never would've predicted that. What I thought I wanted and what I actually did were different things, and quitting made me realize it.
'The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging,' Warren Buffett once said. True, and after you climb out, find something else to build and give yourself another shot at happiness. You may find it faster than you expect.