November 2, 2022
Read time: ± 4 minutes
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The WC is a selection of five useful, interesting & notable insights, handpicked by our CIO Wyatt Cavalier and pumped into your inbox every Wednesday.
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Table of Contents
How much is inflation f*cking you?
Everyone’s feeling the pinch of inflation, but most of us can’t put a number on just how bad it is.
Enter Financial Times, who are more than happy to help quantify our misery:
How’s the pinch affecting your family?
Plants to the rescue
Continuing my slight obsession with companies that profit from climate change…
Who remembers M. Night Shyamalan’s awful film, The Happening? In it, [SPOILER ALERT], plants sort of decide that human beings are ruining the planet and the only solution is to produce a toxin that convinces them all to commit suicide.
While that may not be the ideal way for plants to help clean up the planet, two companies have come up with slightly less-homicidal ways for plants to do their part.
1. Neoplants designs and genetically modifies houseplants to absorb household air pollutants that mechanical air purifiers can’t handle.
Rather than breathing in the usual CO2, these plants suck up stuff like formaldehyde, benzene, toluene, and some other less-pronounceable stuff.
New parents in big metros are an ideal target market for Neoplants.
2. Terraformation, run by former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, is taking a global approach. They’re aiming to plant one trillion trees to offset carbon in the atmosphere.
Global native forest restoration is the lowest cost, lowest risk, and most politically feasible carbon drawdown solution available. And it’s shovel-ready. We scale natural carbon capture by solving the biggest bottlenecks to forest restoration, accelerating global progress toward this climate solution.
They sell software solutions, establish seed banks, and connect investors to carbon credit programs, among other initiatives.
Whatever your personal opinion around climate change is, it’s going to drive trillions of dollars’ worth of investment.
What has Elon got himself into?
Everyone seems to have an opinion about Elon Musk taking over Twitter.
I don’t really care about it from a political (or any other) point of view, but it does seem like a strange decision from someone trying to colonize Mars and reshape the auto industry.
Elon: if you don't give your all to Twitter, you're fired
— Chris Bakke (@ChrisJBakke) October 27, 2022
Also Elon: I am the CEO of 6 companies
It’s a quagmire that he’s going to get stuck in for possibly a decade. It’s his Soviet (or American, for that matter) Afghanistan.
He’s already getting into Twitter spats with Stephen King about a product feature everyone seems to hate.
Yishan Wong (from Terraformation, above) has an insightful thread on this from back in April:
I've now been asked multiple times for my take on Elon's offer for Twitter.
— Yishan (@yishan) April 15, 2022
So fine, this is what I think about that. I will assume the takeover succeeds, and he takes Twitter private. (I have little knowledge/insight into how actual takeover battles work or play out)
(long 🧵)
Seems like a bad idea to me.
What happened to that goldfish you flushed?
Most folks don’t think too much about flushing a goldfish down the toilet once its novelty has passed… But maybe you should.
While ubiquitous in American fish tanks, the goldfish is actually from China, so it has no natural predators in the US.
“They can not just survive but truly thrive under certain conditions, and may live far longer — and therefore grow far longer — than they ever would in captivity.”
It’s estimated that over 50m of the little guys have overwhelmed Lake Ontario, including this big fella:
So if you’ve got a dead goldfish (or one you don’t want anymore), do the responsible thing and swallow it.
Pokemon + Picasso
There’s a new It Kid in the art world, and he’s literally a child.
Ten-year-old Andres Valencia is regularly selling his figurative paintings for six figures and had a solo exhibition in the Chase Contemporary gallery this summer. All 35 works sold for between $50k and $125k.
Looking at his work, Picasso’s influence immediately comes to mind. However, that’s not Valencia’s only inspiration — the artist also cites Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Condo, Pokémon, and Click N’ Play army action figures as keys to his artistic development.
Life as a child prodigy is difficult, and there are 100 Ervin Nyiregyhazis for every Mozart, but perhaps this is the beginning of a special career.
If you want to place a high-risk/high-reward bet investing in one of Valencia’s pieces, reach out, and I’ll hook you up with our art broker.
What caught your eye this week?
Cheers,
Wyatt
