The Economist latest cover story on solar energy is packed with interesting stats. 

▫️Solar energy will be the primary source of human energy use by 2040

▫️$500B spent on buying and installing solar panels in 2024 (nearly same “sum being put into upstream oil and gas”)

▫️Solar on track to produce “more electricity than all the world’s nuclear power plants in 2026, than its wind turbines in 2027, than its dams in 2028, its gas-fired power plants in 2030 and its coal-fired ones in 2032”

▫️Since the 1960s…the levelised cost of solar energy—the break-even price a project needs to get paid in order to recoup its financing for a fixed rate of return—has dropped by a factor of more than 1,000

▫️From the mid-1970s to the early 2020s cumulative shipments of photovoltaics increased by a factor of a million, which is 20 doublings. 

▫️Over the same span, the “prices dropped by a factor of 500. That is a 27% decrease in costs for each doubling of installed capacity, which means a halving of costs every time installed capacity increases by 360%.”

▫️The cost of a kilowatt-hour of battery storage has fallen by 99% over the past 30 years.

The chart below — which they made vertical (kind of weird) — shows global useful energy consumption over the past century.

I’ll add two more posts after this one with excerpts on obstacles and opportunities.

Full link: economist.com/interactive/es… Obstacles from abundance of solar: economist.com/interactive/es…

Details from Red Lobster’s bankruptcy filing are wild and so much mismanagement:

▫️$1B in debt, $30m in cash
▫️Previous PE owner sold land and leased it back to Red Lobster at “above market rates”
▫️$20 Endless Shrimp cost it $11m but the interesting part is that one of the chain’s owners is Thai seafood firm Thai Union (which also owns Chicken By The Sea) and it may have used Endless shrimp to dump its own shrimp supply through the 578 restaurants in North America
▫️Thai Union became the only Red Lobster shrimp vendor, overcharging for shrimp and skipping quality reviews (Thai Union has written off its $500m+ investment)
▫️Red Lobster has had 5 CEO in the last 5 years (!!!)
▫️Sales down 30% since 2019

Link: document.epiq11.com/document/getdo…
Red Lobster needed Yukitaka Yamaguchi — aka Japan’s Tuna King (sleeps 3 hours a day and knows where any fish is from on a single bite) — to run quality control.

This dude would not have put up with low-quality seafood slop. readtrung.com/p/becoming-the…

Eff it, here the best Scottie Scheffler memes: 1/n

https://twitter.com/shootermcgavin_/status/1791428018641965516

Steve Cohen’s setup includes renting a 2nd hotel room when he travels so his team can re-build a replica of his 12-monitor work station for him in it. From the book Black Edge:

And here are some details from a former SAC employee: amazon.ca/Black-Edge-Ins…
observer.com/2017/02/sac-ca…

Francis Ford Coppola’s new film “Megalopolis” cost $120m and he self-financed it (including money from selling his winery). 

Coppola is a legend of “going all in” and “putting skin in the game”. 

The GOAT example is “Apocalypse Now”, his classic 1979 war film with arguably the most insane production story ever. 

Let’s rewind to 1975, the year Copolla turned 36: he is on top of Hollywood after directing “The Godfather” (1972) and “The Godfather II” (1974). 

What does Coppola choose to do next? Make a film about the Vietnam War. The script was based on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, the 1889 novel about the horrors of colonialism in the Belgian Congo.

The major studios all said “no” to Coppola’s pitch for three major reasons:

1️⃣ He wanted full creative control
2️⃣ He wanted to own all of the film rights
3️⃣ The Fall of Saigon happened in April 1975 and the American audience wasn’t exactly asking for a Vietnam War film (the studios wanted Coppola to make another Mafia flick)

Coppola was undeterred and made a huge bet.

“The Godfather II” cost $14m and the director estimated that “Apocalypse Now” would be the same budget. 

He put up $7m (mostly from those sweet Godfather checks) and raised another $7m from United Artists (which bought domestic distribution rights for ~7 years). 

But the project was a disaster from the start. 

Filming started in The Philippines in March 1976 and was supposed to last 3-4 months…it would take 16 months: 

▫️Harvey Keitel was the initial lead but Coppola fired him after one week.

▫️Martin Sheen (Captain Willard) took the lead role but drank so much on set that he gave himself a stress-induced heart attack and almost died. 

▫️Dennis Hopper was doing 3g of coke and 20+ drinks a day while on set (him and Marlon Brandon also hated each other).

▫️A typhoon destroyed 80% of the set and delayed filming for 2-3 months. 

▫️Actual dead bodies — stolen from a local grave — were used on set and the Filipino government and its strongman leader Ferdinand Marcos threatened to shut down production after finding out. 

▫️Marlon Brando (Col. Kurtz) demanded a huge fee ($3m+ for 3 weeks of work and 10% of the film’s gross). He then showed up late, asked for rewrites, declined to read Conrad’s book and was so overweight that the costumes wouldn’t fit (to obscure his heft, Copolla filmed Brando in the shadows and had him wear oversized dark clothing).

The budget ballooned to over $30m.

To maintain creative control and maintain all the film rights, Coppola mortgaged his home and borrowed money against his ownership in The Godfather. 

After the success of “Star Wars” (1977), Coppola even asked his friend and business partner George Lucas — who was originally tapped to direct Apocalypse — for some funds.

I repeat: Coppola went ALL THE WAY IN and had SKIN IN THE GAME.

His wife Eleanor took recorded video of all the insanity and the footage was turned into a 1991 documentary (“Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse”).

The total cost for the film — including marketing spend — reached $45m.

Against all odds, Coppola finished the project and the film was released in August 1979. It grossed $105m and Coppola would make a fortune on future DVD, Home Video and other ancillary revenue streams (below is a trailer for a re-mastered cut from 2019).

During the Cannes Festival in May 1979, Coppola famously said of the film: “The way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.” Coppola also said at Cannes that “My movie is not *about* Vietnam. My movie *is* Vietnam”.

It’s def one of the best films ever but that is … a stretch of a comparison.

Anyways, the making of The Godfather was also insane and I wrote about that here: readtrung.com/p/the-godfathe…

When Iron Man came out in 2008, Robert Downey Jr. was *not* a marquee star.

He was rebuilding his career and paid a below market rate of $500k.

But the deal terms set him up for one of the great acting comebacks ever (while earnings $450m+ as Tony Stark).

Here’s the story 🧵

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) we know today was a long shot in the early 2000s.

Marvel was a public co. coming off bankruptcy in 1996 and had sold rights to its best IP (Spiderman, X-Men, Fantastic 4)

From 2000-07, films based on the IP minted cash but Marvel made little:

Wendy's pricing snafu is a reminder of how hard these fast food chains try to optimize menu design.

McDonald's — which sells to ~1% of the world every day — did a digital menu redesign a few years ago and it boosted sales.

Here are 6 design psychology choices it made: Background: In the mid-2010s, McDonald's sales were lagging. The brand turned it around with help of a multi-year menu & store redesign that:

◻️emphasized simplicity (sped up avg. drive thru time from 400 secs to 350 secs)
◻️highlights signature items (pricier = higher margins)

Masayoshi Son does the craziest investment swings:

▫️In mid-90s: invested $1.7B into 100+ internet firms (including a ~30% stake in Yahoo! for $100m)
▫️In 2000: was worth $78B at peak Dotcom and was the richest person in the world for 3 days (ahead of Gates)
▫️The bubble burst and he lost 99% of wealth
▫️In 2000, puts $20m into Alibaba for a 34% stake (sold out almost entirely by 2023 and made ~$72B)
▫️Lost $14B on WeWork
▫️Once owned ~5% of Nvidia but sold it all for $3.6B in 2019 (that stake would now be worth $90B)
▫️In 2016, Softbank bought Arm Holdings for $32B (still owns 90% and the stake is $114B, a gain of $82B)

Based on his ownership in Softbank and other investment vehicles, his personal wealth is currently ~$15B. Masa in the 90s:

Masa $72B Alibaba:

Masa Arm:

Masa wild daily investing routine during COVID: forbes.com/forbes/1999/07…
ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/masayoshi…
finance.yahoo.com/news/masayoshi…
economist.com/business/2021/…

Nearly 100% of intercontinental internet traffic goes through submarine cables. 

It is a robust system with many redundancies. 

There are 500+ subsea cables and a fleet of 60 repair shops on stand-by but Big Tech isn’t taking chances:

▫️GOOGLE invested in 25 cables (and owns 12 outright). Per The Economist, the search giant started its sea cable program in 2008.
◽META invested in 15 cables (owns 1 outright).
◽MICROSOFT partly owns 4 cable.

One of the 500+ cable gets cut every 3 days (most common reasons are shark bites, anchor drops and deep-sea fish trawlers).

Remote areas are still very at risk.

Example: In 2022, a volcano erupted near Tonga and a mudslide took out the only cable nearby. Starlink provided some free internet coverage while it took 5 weeks for the cable to be fixed (5 weeks!!). Full Economist read here:

Here is a cool excerpt of the deep-sea repair process…it’s no joke: economist.com/technology-qua…

Dyson created the first bagless vacuum and used the cyclone tech for related products: air purifier, hand dryer, fans and hair dryer.

It took a big swing on EVs and missed ($500m+ on R&D). There was also a washing machine flop.

But the most random product line? A strawberry farm that grows off-season so the UK can have local access to the fruit year round.

Dyson Farming was established in 2012 and — with 36,000 acres — is one of the largest farms in the country.

The semi-automated strawberry farm has 700,000 plants and will produce 750 tonnes of strawberry a year. My wife made me buy 4 of the aforementioned Dyson products. You can probably guess which ones.

They all have cyclone technology, which James Dyson borrowed from the sawmill industry…and it is my favourite cross-industry innovation: readtrung.com/p/11-types-of-…

The Palworld story is wild.

Dubbed “Pokémon With Guns”, the game has sold 6m+ copies in past 4 days (making its developer Pocket Pair over $100m on a ~$7m budget).

Some details on the game development process:

◻️ CEO Takuro Mizobe worked at JPMorgan Securities before launching a crypto exhange in 2014.
◻️He made some dough in crypto and used funds to launch indie game developer Pocket Pair in 2015.
◻️The original Palworld team was 4 people and started with $10,000.
◻️The main model developer is a high-schooler who the team met because he worked part-time at a convenience store they frequented.
◻️They added guns because to be a global success, it had to do well in America and the CEO said “Americans like to shoot things”.
◻️Asked about Nintendo, the CEO says they make innovative games whereas he is fine to chase trends (“I don’t [have a creative vision]. I just want to make a game people like.”)
◻️ There was no version control. The team saved files in a “bucket of USBs” and merged them to the main build when done.
◻️Switched from Unity to Unreal Engine late into the development process.
◻️ There are rumours that the game assets were mostly created by AI (but they deny it and there is little evidence).

Palworld’s early success is astounding when you consider triple AAA game titles easily break 9-figure development costs (eg. Cyberpunk 2077 has run $400m+)

Earlier today, Palworld peaked at 1.8m concurrent players. That’s the 2nd highest ever for Steam’s platform (ahead of CounterStrike 2 and behind only PUBG).

The next stat to watch: Nintendo released “Pokémon Scarlet and Violet” in 2022 and it has sold 23m+ copies.

Could Palworld top it? More from Gene Park / WP:

Dev details from screenshots below:
1.
2.

These details seem to be from CEO TV interview and his post here (in Japanese): washingtonpost.com/entertainment/…

https://x.com/bepdelta/status/1749566149535072417?s=46&t=RE6E3Q_cR7cBMUdQSiL7JA

https://x.com/seeth151/status/1749790030489600300?s=46&t=RE6E3Q_cR7cBMUdQSiL7JA

note.com/pocketpair/n/n…

TIL: AWS has 60,000 sales & marketing employees (~1/2 all AWS employees) From The Information:

AWS is at ~$90B annual revenue but still only 20% of Fortune 1000 spends at least $10m on its cloud (Amazon aiming to get that to 80% of Fortune 1000s in next few years) theinformation.com/articles/aws-o…

Gordon Ramsay tries a real Texas BBQ platter for the first time (Snow’s BBQ in Lexington).

He is shook by the portion size and pays respect to the pitmaster Tootsie Tomanetz.

Ms. Tootsie is now 88-years old and has been BBQ-ing since 1960s.

Her routine: Snow’s is only open on Saturdays and — on those days — Ms. Tootsie gets up at 1am to prep the pork and brisket.

People start buying at 8am and Snow’s serves until the food is gone, usually by noon (~200lbs of meat sold).

During the week, Ms. Tootsie keeps busy by working as a janitor at a local high school.

Everyone knows her as the “Queen of BBQ”, though (she was featured in Netflix’s “Chef’s Table” and once shortlisted for James Beard Award).

She’s an absolute legend. From Gordon, Gino and Fred’s road trip show:

Goldbelly has a good 2.5 minute short on her cooking:

And this platter looks insane (if you’ve been, Im very jealous):

snowsbbq.com/meats/

The Microsoft Excel Championship wrapped in Las Vegas last weekend.

Andrew “The Annihilator” Ngai won his 3rd straight title.

The Australian actuary beat 14 opponents in various 30-minute case study challenges.

Funniest part: this clip of live-stream announcers losing their minds over pivot tables and data labeling.

What did Ngai get for winning? A $15k cash prize and a glorious Wrestling Championship Belt 😂 WSJ has a really funny article including this line “to watch Excel athletes sit before computers onstage and “spreadsheet” like there’s no tomorrow.”



And here is the entire 3-hr livestream: wsj.com/tech/microsoft…
youtube.com/live/UDGdPE_C9…

The iPhone camera uses computational photography, applying software to every snap.

This wild photo is an eery example: the subject tries on a wedding dress and each mirror shows her in a different pose.

Why? Apple insider says it’s a “mistake” in the computational photography pipeline:

➡️ “The iPhone camera doesn’t realize it was taking a photo of a mirror, so it treated the three versions of [UK actress Tessa Coates] as different people. Coates was moving when the photo was taken, so when the shutter was pressed, many differing images were captured in that instant. Apple's algorithm stitches the photos together, choosing the best versions for saturation, contrast, detail, and lack of blur.” ⬅️
More from Apple Insider:

Here’s original post. Coates asked audience if they could see the problem and the first reply is hilarious: appleinsider.com/articles/23/11…
instagram.com/p/CzPGNmJIebC/…

This is officially the wildest Linkedin work history in the history of work histories Will have to update my Linkedin is Cringe article…

After interviewing this individual to figure out how became the Forrest Gump of corporate blowups.readtrung.com/p/why-is-linke…

The iconic Windows 95 startup sound was created by composer Brian Eno, who worked with U2 and David Bowie.

Microsoft’s brief to Eno was kind of absurd:

“A piece of music that is inspiring, universal, futuristic, sentimental, emotional…and only 3.25 seconds long.”

Eno made 84 versions of the sound.

He told SF Gate that it was “like making a tiny little jewel.”

Microsoft paid him $35k for the sound, which has probably been heard by hundreds of millions of people.

But the real benefit to Eno was that the Windows 95 sound unlocked a creative block he had with his main music projects.

“I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music,” Eno said. “I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.”
SF Gate interview:

History of Microsoft startup sounds:

And here is my favourite composer-tech company sound ever - Hans Zimmer making a movie theatre length version of Netflix’s ta-dum intro (must have got paid for this one!): sfgate.com/music/popquiz/…

The first scene for 2010’s “The Social Network" is ~6 minutes.

It shows Mark Zuckerberg getting dumped in a Harvard bar (and with some creative licenses, how that leads to Facebook).

Director David Fincher did 99 takes of the scene (yes, 99).

For some, that's Fincher being a perfectionist.

For others, it's Fincher wasting people's time.

Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay and has a fascinating recollection of the scene:

➡️ "An average screenplay is about 120 pages long. My screenplays have higher page counts because there’s more dialogue and less action. By the rules of screenplay format, dialogue takes up more room on the page and less time on the screen than action (which takes up less room on the page and more time on the screen).

"The Social Network" was 178 pages. And the studio said, “OK, the first thing you’ve got to do is figure out a way to cut 30 pages from this.”

And David said, “I don’t think so.” […]

He came over to my house with his iPhone set on stopwatch mode, and he said, “I want you to read the entire script out loud for me, at the pace you heard it in your head when you were writing it, and I’m going to write down the timing of each scene.”

So that opening scene...with Jesse Eisenberg (Zuck) and Rooney Mara. I read it and it was 7 minutes and 22 seconds.

In rehearsal, Jesse and Rooney would rehearse the scene, David would say great, and he would give them a couple of notes and always end with, “But this scene is 7 minutes and 22 seconds long, and you’re doing it at 7 minutes and 40 seconds. So I don’t care how, but you’re going to have to talk faster somewhere, because I promise you, this scene plays best at 7 minutes and 22 seconds.” ⬅️

With that context, the 99 takes is very understandable. It’s a combo of perfectionism and managing the shooting budget.

The final cut was shorter than 7 minutes and 22 seconds. But one thing stayed consistent throughout the shoot: Fincher told dozens of extras in the bar scene to keep the volume of their chatter high, as they would on any night out.

This forced Eisenberg and Mara not only to speak faster. But also louder, increasing the scene’s intensity.

It worked. I love a good first scene and have written about how Ted Lasso’s pilot nailed his 157-second intro:

Here is Sorkin’s full explanation on Social Network: readtrung.com/p/ted-lassos-p…
indiewire.com/news/general-n…

This is the International Fixed Calendar (IFC).

It splits the year into 13 months (each with 28 days). And the world was very close to adopting it in the 1930s.

Compared to the 12-month Gregorian calendar, IFC is much simpler:

▫️ Calendar is same every year
▫️ Each month has exactly 4 weeks
▫️ Every month starts on Sunday and ends on Saturday
▫️ Every date of every month is the same day (“16th” is a Monday)

The 13th month was called “Sol”, as the extra month fell between June and July, around summer solstice.

You’re probably thinking “28x13 = 364” (and “I’m learning way more about calendars than I expected today”).

To address this — and to get to 365 days — the IFC added a one-day world holiday (“Year Day”) between the last Saturday and Sunday of the year.

Kodak founder George Eastman was a fan of IFC and used the calendar for Kodak reporting. Eastman even convinced 100+ other companies to do the same.

Kodak kept the IFC from 1928 until 1989.

Why? Every month had the same number of days (and weekends), making it easier to compare income statements across months and years.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the IFC was the brainchild of an accountant (a British dude named Moses Cotsworth).

The IFC was ultimately scrapped.

Religious bodies couldn’t agree on standardizing certain dates (e.g. the one-day world holiday would change which day the Sabbath fell on every year; there was no agreement on Easter).

The business community also realized that existing bonds and contracts — using the Gregorian calendar — would be a pain to update.

Days and years follow the logic of the solar system. Months are way more flexible, and that’s how we almost had the IFC.
More here

Washington Post:

BBC:

Here is a Kodak IFC Calendar found at the company’s museum: washingtonpost.com/history/2023/1…
bbc.com/worklife/artic…

How hard is it to learn a new language?

The US State Department places languages into four tiers based on how long it is takes to learn: from 24 to 88 weeks.

Per The Economist, difficulty for English-first speakers is determined by:

▫️Different writing system: the hardest languages don’t use Latin alphabet (eg Mandarin, Japanese)
▫️Sounds that don’t exist in English (“clicks” in African languages; rising/falling tones in Asian languages)
▫️Grammar: Words that have different endings based on their use in a sentence (many Arabic words have different pre-fix and suffix, or vowels and consonants based on sentence placement)

Based on the fact that I’ve stopped and started Vietnamese on Duolingo over 1000x over the past 7 years, that’s the hardest language for me (State Dept. says it should only be 44 weeks).
More details in Economist article:

And here is an even larger graphic categorizing the difficulty of all the languages. economist.com/graphic-detail…

US consumers will spend $3.6B on candy this Halloween.

It is the biggest day for most candy makers. And privately-held Mars Inc. owns three of top 5 selling brands (**):

▫️Reese’s Cup
▫️Snickers**
▫️Kit Kat
▫️Skittles**
▫️M&M**

Mars — which does $40B+ of sales a year — plans for each Halloween two years in advance, per CNBC.

The prep begins right after one Halloween is done. Mars meets with retailers to talk trends and packaging.

All the planning mostly leads to the last week of October, when 1/2 of all the Halloween candy is purchased.

Anyways, here’s a video of how Snickers is made. I’ve also written on Spirit Halloween’s $650m costume empire:

CNBC on Mars:

Snickers video: readtrung.com/p/the-650m-spi…
cnbc.com/amp/2023/10/14…