Howdy!

One of my new principles (pending admission to the code of conduct) is: If you’re really into something, you should be able to concisely and compellingly explain why. If you think it’s so special, you should evangelize it One of my favorite qualities is that I am a very excitable person who tends to get quickly and deeply fixated on things. However, I often feel guilty saying “I’m really into XYZ” because I don’t feel like I actually have the experience and knowledge to back it. For instance, I love skateboarding, but if asked what is something I’m really into, more often than not I wouldn’t say skateboarding (or at least wouldn’t say it unironically). The reason being is that I am a mediocre skateboarder at best. Also, I don’t really know skateboarding and the surrounding culture deeply. Someone actually in the world would think I am a fraud. Now this is definitely all partially a function of me just being excessively self conscious about me feeling like an imposter. However, I think a productive antidote for this feeling is to put the principle above into practice. So, for the first instance of this, I’m going to explain the logic behind 2 things that are currently getting me very excited: 1) F1 and sports cars (Ferrari and Porsche in particular) and 2) The River (from Nate Silver’s book, On the Edge). Starting with cars, this one is resurfacing from when I was a child. My first dream job was to be a designer at Porsche. Somewhere in the vaults of the art collection my mother preserves there are dozens of low fidelity mock-ups of two-door Porsche variants to prove this. This obsession with cars ignited from my listening of the Acquired podcast on F1. The rich history of the sport reads like a Hollywood movie, and the core ethos that persists to today is hard to not become entranced by. There are a couple of other pieces of content that have deepened my obsession: the F1 Movie with Brad Pitt and the Enzo Ferrari biopic with Adam Driver. The F1 movie really makes you appreciate how these cars are military grade specialized machinery. They cost $100m+ to develop and maintain. It’s literally like a fighter jet. You also leave with a better appreciation of the difficulty of operating one of these vehicles. The drivers in these 22 coveted seats are elite athletes. Research shows that, yes, 60-90% of a team’s performance can be attributed to the constructor, the raw spend and engineering prowess. However, that 10 - 40% of performance which is attributable to driver skill is nothing to scoff at. A driver like Max Verstappen gets half a second per lap, controlling for car quality, as compared to a solid middle of the pack performer. There’s also a major strategic component with equipment management that I had never appreciated as a distant spectator before watching the movie. Given the history of F1 is closely intertwined with the history of Ferrari, the Enzo biopic similarly made me appreciate the engineering prowess. The key addition to my car obsession that came from my journey into the Ferrari history books was the heritage and craftsmanship. Enzo was obsessed with engines and raw power, but he was also a world class marketer. He cultivated an aura around Ferrari, analogous to the old fashion houses of France. The combination of engineering excellence, heritage, craftsmanship, prestige the the national pride