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

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: