Would you be a successful time-traveler?
That, plus a January-reset meal, a French classic cocktail, great music/book/movie recs, and more! It's Friday at the ACBN.
I’ve been thinking lately about how long—and yet how short—a century seems.
This was spurred by the recent death of former President Jimmy Carter, the first holder of the nation’s highest office to reach 100 years of age (and arguably, based on his post-presidential philanthrophy, the first to earn it.) It’s amazing to think about the world that Carter was born into, and how different it is from the one we live in today. (He was the first President to have been born in a hospital!)
Less intellectually, it got me to thinking about comedian Nate Bargatze’s old bit about how bad he would be at time travel (starts around 3:00 in this clip).
I’ve thought a lot about the premise he poses here—if I were transported back 100 years, to the year after Jimmy Carter was born, what would I even be able to do? There’s the natural inclination to think that knowledge of our present-day world would allow us to easily become robber barons in the past, but as Bargatze hits on—how much do we actually know?
Take me, for example.
In my non-newslettering life, I’m an architect. That’s a job that existed back in 1925, which puts me slightly ahead of some more-modern professions. I design buildings to contemporary standards, though, with contemporary building materials and methods, using computer models and operating in the business and regulatory framework of this time. If you throw me back to the dawn of the skyscraper age and put me in front of a drafting desk? I might be able to fumble through, but I’m not gonna be great at it. I haven’t hand-drafted since college. No one’s gonna hire me to design the Empire State Building.
If I were suddenly transported back to 1925—and I mean right now, with no time to study up—here’s what I think I would do.
Start a pandemic
Not on purpose, mind you. But I’ve probably got some stuff floating around in me that people then didn’t. I don’t currently have COVID-19, but I got it a couple years ago. Would I be Patient Zero for them? Maybe. Not my fault. Just had to mention it.
Moving on.
Try to invent something
This feels like the most straightforward play. I’ll take credit for something that exists in 2025 that didn’t in 1925, and make millions (millions back then being even more.)
Of course, I don’t know how televisions or rocketships or computers or nuclear bombs work, so I’d have to invent the Pet Rock or the Slap Chop and hope that’s enough.
Gamble on sports
We all naturally go here—the Biff Tannen strategy. I’m not a fan of gambling in our present day, but with knowledge of how events in the past are going to play out, I’d be a fool not to, right?
Here’s the rub, though: despite a huge portion of my brain being dedicated to Old Sports Facts, I do not recall much of anything about the 1920s. I know the New York Yankees were very good, but that’s not something you’re getting life-changing odds on. Do you know who won the 1925 World Series? I didn’t!
(The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Washington Senators. I never would’ve guessed that.)
I suppose I could go to the Kentucky Derby every year until I heard a horse name that sounded familiar, but that’s gonna take a while and a lot of trips to Kentucky.
Short the stock market crash
Okay, there’s one thing I specifically do know about the 1920s. I know the stock market crashed in October 1929, and I know it happened on a Monday. I can narrow it down to one of four days. All I would have to do is short the market, something people like Percy Rockefeller, William Danforth and Joseph P. Kennedy did to great success.
The only problem is that I have no idea what “shorting the market” actually means. I suppose I would have four years to figure that out. In the meantime, I would have to make money with which to short the market (I assume you need money for it), and so far in this thought experiment I haven’t made any betting on sports or inventing the Koosh Ball.
Steal someone else’s intellectual property before they write it
I could come up with Superman. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster didn’t create the character until 1938. Thing is, I don’t know if coming up with the character really matters if I can’t get it to market. Surely there were other people coming up with comic-book characters back then—Siegel and Shuster just did it better.
Same issue with me stealing the idea for Harry Potter. (Also, I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books, so I’d be guessing.)
Kill Hitler
You kinda have to try if you have the opportunity, right? He’d be 36 years old in 1925, so it’s not like you’re killing Baby Hitler like people often suggest. Morally, you’re totally in the clear to kill Adult But Not In Charge Yet Hitler.
Of course, I’d need money to get to Germany and I don’t speak German, so I’d need money for lessons too and I guess a gun or something as well.
Invent a food
Back to the inventing thing. I understand the basics of food way better than I do like, cathode-ray tubes. I could probably do this one.
Behold, everyone—I give you: the hot dog!
[1920s voice] we already have that
ah nuts
Become a scammer and/or cult leader
Okay, here’s one that might work. Over the course of a century, our scams, grifts and flim-flams have undoubtedly gotten more sophisticated. People in the past, conversely, have less experience with scams we would consider obvious. I could probably run a straight-up Ponzi scheme or a Music Man-like sales fraud.
Write science fiction
Barring all that, I could get an audience penning laughably-fanciful predictions about the future, things like “we’ll land on the moon someday” or “people will play a sport called pickleball” or “some day you will have a black rectangle in your pocket with which you can talk to anyone in the world but you’ll mostly use it to get mad at stuff or order burritos to be delivered via private taxi”.
There’s a market for hogwash in any era.
Speaking of hogwash…
Friends, it’s Friday at The Action Cookbook Newsletter.
You’re back safe and sound in the year 2025, and your pal ACB has some great stuff lined up for you today, including a healthy-but-satisfying January-reset meal, a French classic cocktail, great music/book/movie recs, and more!
Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.
The January Reset
I know that normal food isn’t how I made this newsletter what it is. The Action Cookbook Newsletter’s sterling reputation [citation needed] was built on stunt food—things like the Kentuckiana Hot Loin, Loaded Bacon Cheeseburger Picnic Pie and Cincinnati Chili Arancini.
I’ll have you note, though, that none of those recipes were posted in January.
No, I haven’t forgotten my roots, but this is the time of year when we all reset. I mean, for heaven’s sake, I bought a 15-pound jamón serrano in December, and spent weeks carving bits off of it. (I sneakily offloaded the rest of it on my brother-in-law at Christmas.) This time of year calls for recipes that won’t kill you.
It’s with that in mind that I share today’s, a reset meal that my wife and I have been tinkering with versions of for years—a simple hash of sweet potato, kale, mushrooms and black beans that’s both satisfying and convincingly non-fatal.