Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on Rogan taking about how Netflix has changed filmmaking.

A major considerations is dealing with distracted viewers. To keep them tuned in, “you re-iterate the plot 3-4x in the dialogue because people are on their phones.”

Then, in action films, you change the ordering of climatic fights.

In traditional action films, you’d have “three set pieces” in every act (I, II, III) and each would “ramp up” (spend the big money on third set piece).

But streaming has to hook viewers within 5 minute, so the incentive is to put a major battle or action sequence much earlier.

Also, the directors have less incentive to make a film look great because so many people watch on laptops and phones.

They do say that streaming allows for more bets on risky projects since the theatre economics are geared towards IP, sequels and super-heroes.

Example: an independent film with a $25m budget would spend $25m on marketing (1:1 ratio). But since it splits box office with the theatre, the film needs to make $100m (1/2 of which is $50m) just to break even.

They’re realistic about the state of film and call it a supply-demand issue. If the demand is for at-home viewing (eg. Netflix 300m+ subs), then filmmaking approach will change to feed the algo.

When there’s demand for theatre, Damon will go team up with Christopher Nolan to make “The Odyssey”. A similar dynamic is happening to streaming TV shows. The incentives for story arc, dialogue and character types warped thr medium.

I explain it more here: readtrung.com/p/the-case-aga…

The Economist has a great piece on strategy sportsbetting apps use to throttle smart bettors:

▫️Skilled players are “sharps” and given “stake restrictions” if they play too well (bets are capped).

▫️Rest of players called “Square”.

▫️In 2025, 4.3% of active UK accounts had a “stake factor” below the maximum bet allowance of 100%.

▫️Sportsbook will take bets with a profit margin as low as 4.5%.

▫️If they are able to do good “player-profiling” and keep the “sharps” from playing, the profit margin can reach 10-20%.

▫️As important as keeping out “sharps” is hooking “whales”, the deep-pocketed players that are willing to keep playing (and losing) large sums.

▫️Some “whales” are actually “sharps” in disguise, though. They’ll lose a bunch of bets to lull the sportsbook then put down a massive bet when they have an edge.

▫️While there is a risk of a “whale” being a “sharp”, the value of a real “whale” is so high that sportsbook will take the risk

▫️“In March 2024 PointsBet, raised its share of online sports-gambling revenue in New Jersey from 11% to 24% after wooing a single cash-spouting customer away from DraftKings.” (I can confirm that this wasn’t me).

▫️How sportsbook profile players:

> Playing on Mobile is a good sign (where majority of people play)
> Playing on PCs is a bad sign (it’s easier to compare odds and run models)
> E-wallets are a red flag (sportsbooks prefer debit direct deposit that can attach a player to a single account; e-wallet is more anonymized and players can move cash between sportsbook more quickly to shop for the best odds)
> Women bettors are a red flag (most bettors are men and “sharps” often use women to place bets)

▫️First wagers are a major tells (typical bettors go after top leagues — NFL, NBA, EPL — and do so near the start of the game).

▫️Popular bets for “squares”: who will win, scoring margins and how star player will perform (also, they love multi-leg parlays).

▫️“Sharps” go after less popular leagues and place bets as soon as odds are published, when they are most mispriced. They also go after less popular bets such as “pts in Q3” or stats from a random player (“Sharps” rarely do parlays and don’t withdrawal winnings often).

▫️One gambling consultant tells The Economist that “By the time a customer places his first bet, [sportsbooks] are 80-90% certain they know the lifetime value of the account.”

▫️”Sportsbooks look at a player’s ‘closing-line value’ — a measure that compares the odds at which he bets with those available right before a match begins. If it is consistently ahead of the market over his first ten wagers, he is highly likely to beat the book in the long run.”

▫️Sportsbook mathematically monitor players and creates a new risk score every 6-8 hours (risk score = estimate of probability that customers will wind up unprofitable).

▫️E-wallet users, women and bets over $100 are flagged. These suspicious bettors are given 30% of maximum bet (and proven sharps only allowed 1%).

▫️High-skilled players will often get a “beard” to bet on their behalf. Most sportsbooks ban this practice but it is widespread.

▫️Safest “beards” are close friends and relatives because you can mostly rely on them to pay out any winnings. The “beards” try to look like degens (playing at 3am, bet non-stop and doing ridiculous parlays) before placing a winning bet.

▫️The most effective strategy for “sharps” is “whale-flipping”. Find a losing gambler, then ask to put a (likely) large winning bet amongst their pool of guaranteed losers.

▫️Once “sharps” max out the people they can use as “beards”, they tap professional networks called “movers”. These “movers” employ a bunch of “mules” who can put down bets on the behalf of the network. Low-end movers charge 10-20% while high-end movers charge 50% of winnings.

***

Lots other great details here: economist.com/christmas-spec… On a related note, I wrote on how slot machines make $10B+ a year in Las Vegas (~70% of all casino gaming revenue).

The history, psychology and design of the device…which went from a throwaway game to the industry’s “cash cow” and “gambling’s crack cocaine.”readtrung.com/p/the-ludicrou…

Satya Nadella on why Microsoft Excel has been so durable after 40 years:

> the power of lists and tables
> the malleability of the software (“a blinking canvas”)
> spreadsheet software is Turing complete (“I can make it do everything”)
> it’s the world’s most approachable programming environment (“you get into it without even thinking your programming”) fantastic pod ep:

The invention of bánh mì is a combination of climate, trade and urban layout of Saigon in late-19th century designed by French colonist.

When the French captured the area in 1859, most economic activity in the region took place along the Saigon river.

The population built makeshift homes tightly bundled by the river banks. Outgrowth from this eventually lead to narrow alleyways between many buildings that is trademark of the city (the Khmer named the region Prey Nokor then French renamed it Saigon and then it was renamed to Ho Chi Minh City in 1976 after end of Vietnam War).

Over decades, the French created European street grids and built wide Paris-type boulevards in the city to funnel commerce to larger markets (also make the city easier to administer).

It was at these markets that French baguettes were introduced and traded.

Bánh mì bread is known for being flaky and crispy on the outside while fluffier on inside (so god damn good).

Two features of Saigon helped create this texture:

▫️Climate: The heat and humidity in Southeast Asia leads dough to ferment faster, which creates air pockets in bread (light and fluffy).

▫️Ingredient: Wide availability of rice meant locals added rice flour to wheat flour imports (which were quite expensive). Rice flour is more resistant to moisture and creates a drier, crispier crust.

Fast forward to the 1930s: the French-designed street layout is largely complete. Now, the city centre has wide boulevards intersected by countless narrow alleyways.

The design was ideal for street vendor carts. These businesses were inspired by shophosue of colonial architecture to sell all types of goods as chaotic traffic rushed by.

Vietnam has some of the most slapping rice and soup dishes, but many people on the move in the mornings wanted something more portable and edible by hand.

Bánh mì was traditionally upper class fare but it met the need for on-the-go food.

Just fill the bread with some Vietnamese ingredients (braised pork, pickled vegetable, Vietnamese coriander, chilies) along with French goodies (pate).

Pair it with cà phê sữa đá (aka coffee with condensed milk aka caffeinated crack) and you’re laughing.


Haven’t lived in Saigon for 10+ years but ate a banh mi every other day when I did.

While there, I also sold a comedy script to Fox (pitch: “The Fugitive meets Harold & Kumar set in Southeast Asia”).

It never got made but fun story to retell: readtrung.com/p/im-making-a-…

the most underrated winner of the AI boom is the 15,000 person Caribbean island of Anguilla (which has a GDP of ~$320m) The research team is happy to announce that we’ve played our part contributing to Anguilla’s windfall.

We also paid $99 to GoDaddy to see if we could secure one more .AI domain. Bearly.AI

someone used Veo3 to make Moses as a YouTuber live-streaming the Exodus accent does change at end: reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/bO…

reminder that no “asian guy and stripper” story will ever top Enron Lou Pai’s “asian guy and stripper” story Totally forgot Lou Pai got the stripper pregnant.

If this story was transplanted to 2020s, Pai would probably have been a whale on OnlyFans and gotten got…anyways, I wrote about the economics of OF here: readtrung.com/p/onlyfans-sti…

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) trained an AI slideshow maker called “Decker” on 900 templates and apparently gotten so popular that “some of its consultants are fretting about job security.” Sorry, called “Deckster”. That excerpt was from this BI piece that also looked at McKinsey and Deloitte AI uses: businessinsider.com/consulting-ai-…

The Mckinsey chatbot is used by 70% of firm but same anonymous job board said it’s "functional enough" and best for "very low stakes issues." x.com/bearlyai/statu…

Norway discovered off-shore oil in 1969. It launched its sovereign wealth fund with $300m in 1996.

It’s since grown 6,000x to $1.8T or $327,000 per Norwegian (5.5m people).

The fund owns 1.5% of all global equities but, most impressively, had a UX designer put a real-time fund value tracker on its website landing page. Norway’s SWF roughly is 65% equity, 25% bond, 10% real estate/infra (all global).

Unsurprisingly, its largest holding is Apple ($47B, or 1.4% of the entire company).

On a related note, here is my deep dive podcast on Steve Jobs and making of the iPhone: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/caf…

never forget that episode of “Nathan For You” when he launched a fire detector product and tried to avoid import tariffs by turning it into a music device One company that has been very good at navigating international food tariffs/regulations is Trader Joe’s. Built its dairy and wine businesses by finding workarounds.

I explain in this deep dive podcast on Trader Joe’s business history and strategy: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/caf…

wow, found a rare interview of a DeepSeek co-founder talking about his first AI startup exit a few years ago Jian Yang is my 2nd fave Asian founder who created a food-related product.

The 1st is David Tran, who built Sriracha (great on hot dogs) into a $1B brand using $20k of gold bars he snuck out of Vietnam in milk cans.

I tell the full story in this podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/caf…

Bookmarked a bunch of great David Lynch posts in past 24 hours (RIP to a legend):

1/ Martin Scorsese Tribute 2/ Lynch on ideas

https://twitter.com/patrick_oshag/status/1880073459864351151

PayPal’s bland logo redesign was inevitable

https://twitter.com/dexerto/status/1836510230378602946

If you are the person that did the un-aligned letters for the previous eBay logo, please contact the research app team. We are huge fans of how un-aligned the “e” is with the “y”.Bearly.AI

Berkshire Hathaway board member Chris Davis once asked Charlie Munger why Costco didn’t drop the membership card.

Let anyone shop and raise prices by 2% (still great value), thus making up for lost membership fees (and more).

Munger said the card is important filter:

▫️“Think about who you’re keeping out [with a membership card]. Think about the cohort that won’t give you their license and their ID and get their picture taken.

Or they aren’t organized enough to do it, or they can’t do the math to realize [the value]…that cohort will have a 100% of your shoplifters and a 100% of your thieves. Now, it’ll also have most of your small tickets.

And that cohort relative to the US population will probably be shrinking as a % of GDP relative to the people that can do the math [on Costco’s value].”▫️

I have a membership but have been guffing on the math for a few years tbh. They keep telling me to upgrade from Gold to Business but I’m too lazy (even if the 2-3% Cash Back on Business pays back after a few trips).

This is a long way of saying Costco’s membership price hike effective today — its first in 7 years — is annoying but when I decide to do the math in a few months, it’ll be worth it.

***

Chris Davis’ remarks from this episode of The Knowledge Project: open.spotify.com/episode/6fJYHF… Anyway, here is something I wrote about Costco’s $9B+ clothing business my affinity for Kirkland-branded socks and Puma gym shirts. readtrung.com/p/costcos-9b-c…

One of the Team USA rowers who won a Gold Medal is an investment banker and actually did the “B2B SaaS Sales” joke on Linkedin. Legend. Here’s the rest of the post (perfectly formatted to show up in the feed as a shitpost): linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…

Explainer video on science of why the 400m sprint is considered the most painful track & field event.

And why “no person on the planet can run the 400m all out from start to finish".

The race pushes the way the body creates energy to the limit:

▫️0-50 meters: ATP-CP (energy system for very short and explosive movements; used up after 5-10 seconds)

▫️50-200 meters: Anaerobic glycolysis (burns glucose without oxygen, leading to lactic acid buildup and muscle fatigue)

▫️200-300 meters: Aerobic energy (uses oxygen to break down glucose, but cannot keep up with the demand)

▫️300-400 meters: Anaerobic energy reserves tapped while aerobic energy is too slow to fill the gaps (lactic acid buildup is going HAM)

Track athletes can pace for longer distances and shorter ones are just over quicker (obvs).

The Olympic record is a blazing 43:03, set by South African runner Wayde van Niekerk in 2016 (and 2024 Final race is tomorrow).

***

Full video from Outperform: Usain Bolt ran the 400m early in career but then said training was “too hard”.

The 400m Hurdles is a world of pain too for similar reasons — Vox has a good vid on it:

Here is a great breakdown of Wayde van Niekerk’s record run:

The amount of work Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli team put into a film is mind-boggling.

Each typically has 60k-70k frames, all hand-drawn and painted with water color.

This 4-second clip (“The Wind Rises”) took one animator 15 months to do. Insane. The docu “10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki” shows him talking to the animator (Eiji Yamamori) after its done.

It’s so good:

Miyazaki: “Good job.”
Yamamori: “It’s so short, though”
Miyazaki: “But it was worth it.”

The animator gets a second of joy (he’s pumped) but on to the next.

New York City paid Mckinsey $4m to conduct a feasibility study on whether trash bins are better than leaving garbage on the street.

The deck is 95-slides long and titled “The Future of Trash”.

Some highlights:

▫️The official term is “containerization”, which is the “storage of waste in sealed, rodent-proof receptacles rather than in plastic bags placed directly on the curb.”

▫️Two main types of containerization: 1) individual bins for low density locales; 2) shared containers for high-density.

▫️NYC needs to clean up 24,000,000lbs of garbage a day

▫️Containerization has only become the norm worldwide in major cities in the past 15 years.

▫️New York City first considered containerization in the 1970s but never conducted a feasibility study until now (Mckinsey’s sales team has been dropping the ball)

▫️Key considerations for container viability:

• POPULATION DENSITY: NYC has 30k residents per square mile (more dense than comparable big cities)

• BUILT ENVIRONMENT: Few places to “hide” containers due to history of infrastructure development.

• WEATHER: Snow creates challenges for “mechanized collection” in the winter.

• CURB SPACE: Mostly taken up by bus stops, bike lanes, outdoor dining and fire hydrants.

• COLLECTION FREQUENCY: NYC needs to double frequency of pick-up for estimated speed of trash that bins would accumulate.

• FLEET: A new garbage truck will needs to be designed to collect rolling bins at scale.

▫️ The proposed solution (literally garbage bins and shared containers) covers 89% of NYC streets and 77% of residential tonnage.

▫️The three case studies — because you gotta have solid case studies — are Amsterdam, Paris and Barcelona.

▫️There is a slide called “Why containerization matters” and three reasons are “rats”, “pedestrian obstruction” and “dirty streets” (the 21-year intern that did this slide billed at prob $10k an hour is my hero).

The study is actually pretty interesting.

I have no idea if $4m is a rip-off to learn that “yeah, we should put garbage in bins so rats don’t eat it” but I would have happily done it for 10-20% of that budget (and come to a similar conclusion).


It is actually an interesting deck. Just the thought of a 20-year old newly grad getting billed at an obscene rate to say”rats get to garbage” is kinda funny

Four more solid slides:
— By the numbers (daily garbage = 140 Statue of Liberty a day!!)
— City comparison
— Container comparison (looks like they did select the “scalable” trash bin)
— Curb side analysis

Full deck here: dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/upl…

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