Weekend Reading #99

Photo by Mohammad Naderi on Unsplash

This is the ninety-ninth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 26th December 2020.

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What we're doing.

As the festive season is upon is, we have frantically been completing our plans for 2021 (and beyond) across the business. Planning and milestone setting is a key part of making sure we execute on our vision. We will be making our first few hires since the founding team and as such setting job specs is a key part of this process. Stay tuned for more on this as we hope to use our community to help us recruit people. Regular readers know better than anyone exactly what we are about! We are also putting together the next phase of our software development plans for completion in the first part of the new year, amongst many other things.

After our push to get this done we will be taking a rest over the season to think, spend time with our families and recharge, ready for a roaring start to 2021. The next newsletter will be on Saturday 9th January when we will be starting the new year off with a bang by sharing our 100th newsletter!

We wish everyone a restful break over the holiday season. It’s time to eat, drink, and be merry!

What we're thinking.

Do miracles happen? We have been pondering this question in recent days as we look back on the Year Of The Coronavirus and consider the miraculous development of a vaccine (in fact, several of them) that should enable us to return to business as usual during 2021.

COVID vaccines are not miracles, being the product of a global pharmaceutical ecosystem. But they are certainly miraculous. We are the first generation of humans alive who has been able to respond in real-time to a pandemic with efficacious medicines. That’s mind-blowing!

We are grateful to everyone who has sacrificed time, money, health and energy to combatting the virus and its second order impacts, and we’re looking forward to turning the page and beginning a brighter year in 2021.

What we're cooking.

For many of us, Christmas this year will be a very different affair – no big lunches or dinners also means that the menu changes drastically. Whereas a turkey might do the trick when feeding 20 people at a go, the highly contested opinion that some of us have is that turkeys aren’t really all that delicious – rather dry, some would say! Smaller groups also make for the opportunity to make dishes that don’t necessarily have the “economies of scale” of simply putting a turkey in the oven. It also means that when heading to the wine rack, we can actually pick a good bottle rather than the ones that we have many bottles of.

Just as Covid has reshaped work, perhaps it can reshape Christmas menus too. On our home-made Christmas menus this year: gratin dauphinois, cote de boeuf, and chocolate cheesecake.

What we're baking.

Here is a great recipe for chocolate cupcakes to try with small kids. Its quick and easy and doesn't even need eggs! Our small kids loved doing it themselves.

Fudge Cake

Ingredients:
+ 1 cup self-raising flour
+ 3 T cocoa
+ 1 cup castor sugar
+ 1 cup water
+ 1 t imitation vanilla essence
+ 1 T white vinegar
+ 1 cup vegetable oil

Method:
+ Turn oven to 180*C [ 350*F]
+ Put the flour, cocoa, castor sugar and water in a bowl
+ Add vanilla essence, vinegar and oil
+ Mix it all together (can mix with a whisk)
+ When smooth pour it into the tin bake for 25 minutes.
+ Cool for 10 minutes then take it out of the tinICING:
+ Mix:
- 1 cup icing sugar
- 1 1/2 T cocoa
- 1T butter
+ With a little hot water (use more hot water if you want the icing runny)
+ Ice the cake

What we're reading.

A truly astonishing event unfolded this week with the launch of Mr Beast’s very own burger brand. For those of you who don’t know who Mr Beast is, we suggest you do a quick google. He is one of the world’s top influencers with nearly 50m followers on his Youtube channel, 13m on TikTok and 8m Twitter followers. He launched with 300 virtual “restaurants” nationwide and queues ensued pretty much immediately. Feeback on the burgers is that naturally they are, well.. a bit average in terms of tase, but most important is that this new generation of influencers can turn anything they touch into gold. Watch this space as these types of commercial successes are only beginning!

We read What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami at least once a year. It’s a meditation on the joy of long distance running, written by a writer who considers his day job of writing books to be, in many ways, similar to the way he trains for running races. In order to improve at both pursuits, it takes a heck of a lot of hard work, time and consistency. Murakami believes that being good at one makes him good at the other, strengthening his resolve when he either sits down at his keyboard or when he laces up his trainers for a run.

The passion that Murakami espouses for both running and writing will make you want to sign up for a marathon and write a book. If you're short of 2021 New Year's resolutions, we think you'll find it an inspiring read.

Do you ever find yourself wondering how life got so complicated? If so, pick up a copy of Essentialism. In this book, Greg McKeown, a leadership coach based in Silicon Valley, introduces the concept of “the disciplined pursuit of less”. This means challenging the core assumption of ‘We can have it all’ and ‘I have to do everything’ and replacing it with the pursuit of ‘the right thing, in the right way, at the right time'.

The book isn’t the most thrilling read, and like many books these days, could probably be distilled into a long blog post, but we did find some of the ideas useful. Ray Zinn’s concept of “tough things first” is particularly relevant as we approach a critical phase in Three Body Capital’s development.

Zinn is Silicon Valley's Longest Serving CEO and a man who has spent his career prioritising the tough things at the start of his working day. It can be easy to defer unpleasant or arduous tasks, but confronting them head on, when you first arrive at your desk, is incredibly liberating and empowering. We’re looking forward to adopting this tactic for our own business from January!

The launch of Cyberpunk 2077 by CD Projekt can now be considered to have been nothing short of a disaster. Possibly the most anticipated game of all time has received mixed reviews since its release a week ago. The controversy surrounds the old generation console games and in particular the PS4 and Xbox versions which are dramatically inferior to the PC and PS5 versions. The feedback is consistent. The game has huge potential, the story is beautiful and the ambition of the studio is immense, but the game is simply not ready. Despite being delayed multiple times, the game is extremely buggy and has led to lots of anger from gamers and investors. There are even talks of a class action suit against the company for misrepresenting the game pre-launch. Now all this is very sad, coming from the studio that brought The Witcher 3 into the world – one of the most successful and loved games of all time. Time will tell whether the company is able to redeem its reputation. They have offered refunds to all console players but despite this have still managed to sell a massive 13 million copies. There are a number of examples in the past of games with poor launches that have ended up becoming wildly successful but at this stage it seems the company has its hands full putting out fires. We will be purchasing our copy shortly, having delayed it until some of the bug fixes have been released!

And in another interesting application of the smartest non-human brain around, GPT-3 is back again, this time having been tasked to write the Queen’s Christmas speech. The product is here – to imagine Her Majesty actually saying those words is interestingly not that much of a stretch!

What we're watching.

This week we revisited one of our all-time favourite movies.

The Prestige is a 2006 mystery thriller directed by Christopher Nolan (and written by him and his brother, Jonathan) based on a novel by Christopher Priest. It follows a pair of rival stage magicians in London at the end of the 19th century. Both men are obsessed with creating the best stage illusion, engaging in competitive one-upmanship, with fatal results.

It’s a rare movie that manages to make you feel creepy, exhilarated, sad and uplifted all at the same time. Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman and Michael Caine carry the film superbly well and the twist at the end (if you don’t see it coming) is incredible, forcing you to see the story in an entirely new light.

At its core, The Prestige is about the human need for performance, recognition and praise, and the lengths that people will go to in pursuit of fame. It’s a cautionary tale, but one that manages to entertain just as much as it preaches.

2013’s Elysium, starring Matt Damon, is an exciting portrayal of the growing disparity between rich and poor in a dystopian sci-fi thriller in which 2054 Earth is ravaged with poverty and disease, meanwhile the elite live on a shining space habitat in orbit, able to cure themselves of any diseases. As Matt Damon fights to save his own life and bring equality to the masses, he must battle against Sharlto Copley’s chilling character, Kruger, a relentless South African mercenary and a brilliant fit for the role. Having watched the film several years ago when it released, it was great to re-watch it now in our current times as we ponder how lovely it’d be to have an all-healing medical bed to get out of this mess!

If you find yourself with a spare 4 hours over the Christmas break, the BBC drama, Roadkill, could be the perfect filler. Hugh Laurie plays a bad guy, which is always fun, as he takes up the role of Peter Laurence, a power-hungry Conservative politician, who is gradually coming to terms with a past he had chosen to forget.

Set in the present day at a time when our politicians are under a microscope that’s more forensic than ever, it’s fun to watch Laurie squirm and worm his way in and out of trouble. As things unravel (as they inevitably do in a drama series like this), his ambitions only seem to heighten and the number of people that need to be removed from his path increases at a rate of knots.

Well worth a watch for Laurie’s performance alone, the fact that this mini-series is only four 1-hour episodes makes the whole shebang digestible, thoroughly entertaining and the perfect accompaniment to a cold turkey sandwich.

Lastly, it wouldn’t be Christmas without watching some of the all-time Christmas classics. Elf, Home Alone 1 & 2, Die Hard and the Grinch... introducing our kids to these gems from yesteryear has got us feeling that real Christmas feel for the first time this year. In fact, it was an absolute shocker for us to read this week that Elf had been crowned the most overrated Christmas film of all time in the Metro and even more surprising when we discovered that it was released in 2003!

What we're listening to.

The Moment podcast by Brian Koppelman fits a nice niche in our podcast library, finding a gap somewhere just shy of the often overhyped and evangelical creativity- and productivity-themed podcasts that have become so popular this year.

Koppelman is a screenwriter, famous for the film Rounders and the television series, Billions. Yes, he created Axe Capital’s Bobby Axelrod! The neat thing about Koppelman's podcast is that it engages with a very broad range of interviewees, finding interesting conversations and it always tries to pin them down by asking them what was the pivotal moment (hence the title) in their life that led them on the path towards their career and their success. It’s fascinating to hear Damien Lewis describe the moment he knew he wanted to become an actor or General Stan McChrystal state when he knew that the life of a soldier was for him.

If you've never listened to the show, then there is a monster back catalogue waiting for you to explore, with our highlights being a recent conversation Koppelman had with Elvis Costello, any of the many chats he's had with Seth Godin and a fascinating interview he did earlier this year with VC, Ben Horowitz. The guest list is varied – but the theme of the programme is always the same and always hunts for that one moment in a life when a person’s destiny was revealed.

And of course, we’ve been listening to far too much Christmas music this week!