I wrote 8,000 words on Hayao Miyazaki’s creative process at Studio Ghibli. “Ideas rise to the surface from unknown places in the mind,” he says. “I mean the most primitive brain. The ancient, reptile part. It’s very savage, but it’s usually under control.”readtrung.com/p/hayao-miyaza…

The last three years, explained

Twitter servers right now

Christoper Nolan hates CGI and prefers to use practical effects for insane shots. Here are 5 gems. 1/ INTERSTELLAR: Nolan spent $100k to plant 500 real acres of corn in Alberta. After filming, he sold the crop for profit.

Facebook is going to go crazy when they see these tweets next month

an outrageous Linkedin work history

Nikki Glaser crushed Golden Globe roast: - “Ozempic’s biggest night!” - “You’re all so famous and powerful. You can do anything, except tell the country who to vote for.” - “The Bear. The Penguin. Baby Reindeer, these aren’t just things in RFK’s freezer.”

The timeline in past 24 hours has been unreal

There's a "Museum of Failure" in Sweden which highlights 150+ failed products. It's meant to show that innovation requires risk-taking and failure. Here are 10 gems you may not remember:

For anyone threatening to leave Twitter, good luck trying to find this fire content on any other platform

who did this?

Buenos Aires celebration packed with ~5m people. The Argentina team bus couldn’t drive through, so they had to call in helicopters 🤯

Time it took to get 100 million users: Netflix: 10 years Gmail: 5 years Twitter: 5 years Facebook: 4.5 years WhatsApp: 3.5 years Instagram: 2.5 years TikTok: 9 months ChatGPT: 2 months Pirate Bay: 1 day after Netflix cancelled shared passwords and Gen-Z discovered torrents.

Well, that escalated quickly

Lily Zhang’s parents get a Gold medal in Asian Parenting

this is art

never deleting this app

Never forget Tim Meadows as OJ Simpson writing “I did it” on the NFL telestrater (one of the best SNL opens). This was shortly after the verdict.

tbh, Tolberone shrinkflation is wild

Read a great Reddit thread putting historical dates in perspective. Here are 8 gems. 1/ The moon landing was only 66 years after the Wright Brothers first flight (1903-1969). Within a lifetime, humans went from having limited flight tech to travelling ~239k miles from Earth.

Tracy Chapman — who hasn’t performed live in years — just sang “Fast Car” on stage with Luke Combs at the Grammy’s. The backstory behind this collaboration is incredible. Combs’ first favourite song ever was “Fast Car”. He covered it in early 2023 as a country version and the song hit #1 on country charts in July. Chapman owns the song’s composition rights and became the first black female to top the Country chart as a sole writer. What did she think of the cover? Chapman told Billboard at the time: “I never expected to find myself on the country charts, but I’m honored to be there. I’m happy for Luke….and grateful that new fans have found and embraced ‘Fast Car.’” Combs honored the original version, which he first listened to when his dad popped a cassette in the car. “You want to just be mega respectful of the original song,” says the 33-year old country singer, per CMT. “That’s why in [my cover], it’s, ‘work in the market as a checkout girl.’ I didn’t change that…I really wanted to just do the original version of the song.” Them performing it together tonight is perfection.

I’m assembling a team

I’m assembling a new team

my work calendar completely packed this week

the Amish after flipping Pennsylvania

“Let me get this straight, you can buy a burrito on an interest-free instalment plan?” “That’s right, and we’re not even based in the Chipotle store.” “So, you finance this by packaging the burrito instalment loans into Burrito CDO A, which has part of Burrito CDO B and both get put into Burrito CDO C?” “Yeah. The original loans are backed by burritos. Chicke. Pork. Carne Asada. Whatever. But Burrito CDO C is a synthetic Burrito CDO. A CDO of Burrito CDOs.” “Ok, let’s say we have an underlying pool of $10,000 in burritos. How much money could be out there betting on instalment loans and your synthetic burrito CDOs?” “Probably $100,000,000.” “C’mon! How much bigger is the market for burrito instalment loans than actual edible real-life cheesy burritos?” “At least 100x.” “That is fucking crazy.” “No, it’s awesome.”

Bro, cmon

Legitimately, the most insightful post have ever seen on Linkedin for leadership, management and how to motivate employees

Best part of “Interstellar” is still the fact that Christopher Nolan spent $100K to plant 500 acres of real corn in Alberta (instead of using CGI to recreate a field). Then, sold the corn for a profit after filming. Remains most profitable commodities trade in Hollywood history.

Word count NYT's puff piece on SBF: "Fraud": 0 "Enron": 0 "Crime": 0 "Illiquid": 0 "Stolen": 0 "Hidden": 0 "Criminal": 0 "Back door": 0 "He's getting sleep": 1

A 16-year old won Blender’s animator of the year with this video on a futuristic street food market. Gold.

Never forget the time Myth-busters proved that a car with golf dimples had less drag and drove faster than without

“Good morning. Your payment was declined for the 3rd time and this is your final reminder to update the credit card on file.”

The best part in movies is when the actor casually walks away from something they just blew up

Japan Twitter is lit: “a conveyor belt sushi restaurant where the audience also rotates”

Bentley will never recover from this nitter.app/beater_rides/status/17…

Every uncle in America today to their 20-year old nephew after they help download Peacock app to watch NFL Playoffs

Just updated my app folders

sorry

Huy Fong's Sriracha hit revenue of $150m+ a year...with no sales team, no trademark and $0 in ad spend. Its creator is Vietnamese-American David Tran, making the sauce's success a tale of immigrant hustle and a product that literally sells itself. Here's the story🧵

Someone discovered an arbitrage hack between Amazon and Temu

The market sell-off, explained

What is the equivalent of this 15 years from now?

Time Warner is renaming its streaming service HBO Max to Max. It’s a good move. The “HBO” brand is associated with some of the worst content ever: Sopranos, The Wire, Band of Brothers, Game of Thrones, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Veep, Deadwood and Silicon Valley. Good riddance.

This is officially the wildest Linkedin work history in the history of work histories

Since Studio Ghibli is trending, worth noting the mind-boggling effort Hayao Miyazaki and his team put into a film. Each 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. In the documentary “10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki”, the legendary Japanese filmmaker talks to one of his animators (Eiji Yamamori) after they complete the crowd scene. The exchange is gold: ▫️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. *** Link to doc: nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/…

In 1958, Warren Buffett bought this house in Omaha for $32k which he still owns (it’s now worth $650k). If he instead slept on Charlie Munger’s couch and invested those funds into Berkshire Hathaway, it would be worth $1.2B. Lesson: Don’t buy real estate.

Been parked outside of Wendy’s for the past 6 hours trying to time the perfect entry price for a Big Bacon Classic ($1.20 to $1.60)

the new re-captcha image puzzles are wild

think DeepSeek is mad at me

While Mark Zuckerberg was in high school, his dad offered him 1 of 2 options: ◻️Tuition for a Harvard degree ◻️Funds for a McDonald’s franchise He did neither and dropped out of Harvard to run Facebook. This year, his net worth has fallen $71B. LESSON: Listen to your parents

live footage of Twitter providing @elonmusk its raw data feed of 500m+ daily tweets

Theo Von just pulls out all the nuggets

Linkedin bios, explained

Costco has a “100% satisfaction guarantee” return policy with no expiration and people love putting it to the test.

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 🧵

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.

In 2004, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos met for a meal to discuss space. It was one of their few in-person interactions. That conversation perfectly captures the different approaches they've taken to space (and why SpaceX has pulled ahead of Blue Origin). Here's the story 🧵

Elon’s Yelp review of JPMorgan is lit

This looks incredible via MidJourney 6. Netflix’s “Lenin” starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

4/ TENET Watched the film twice. Have no idea what the plot is, but mad respect for Nolan crashing a real 747 into an airport hangar. Turns out it was cheaper to buy a 747 and crash it vs. doing CGI.

If your CFO wears any of these shoes, you will survive the recession.

anyway, remember that dude from Kentucky filming himself trying garlic naan and butter chicken for the the first time

“Vietnamese-American parent TikTok” is my new favourite genre of TikTok

Thought SBF speaking at NYT was absurd. But then I saw the rest of the panel.

The Costco hot dog combo is a legendary meme. But how does it still only cost $1.50? Introduced in 1985, the price of that combo should be ~$4.20 if adjusted for inflation. Thankfully, the $216B warehouse retailer has done everything in its power to keep the price down. And Costco sells A LOT of them: 130m+ hot dogs a year (more than all MLB teams combined). Many believe the $1.50 combo is a “loss-leader” for Costco, but this is incorrect. In a 2009 interview, Costco co-founder and former CEO Jim Sinegal told the Seattle Times that Costco doesn’t “engage in loss leaders” and “the only time we sell below cost is when we’ve made a mistake and have to mark it down”. However, the retailer does cap its margin at 14% and drives many products to near break-even. Here’s how Costco has managed to keep the cost of the inconic hot dog combo at $1.50: 1️⃣It dropped leading hot dog suppliers like Hebrew National and Nathan’s because they wouldn’t lower prices 2️⃣In 2009, Costco built its own hot dog manufacturing plant in LA (and has a second one in Chicago) 3️⃣ It got better pricing on buns, ketchup and mustard 4️⃣ It removed onions and sauerkrauts as free condiments 5️⃣ It dropped Polish sausages 6️⃣ The pop that came with the combo was swapped from a can to refillable fountain soda Costco’s effort to keep hot dog prices low is also the source material for the greatest quote in business history. In 2018, the current Costco CEO Craig Jelinek was recounting a conversation he had with Sinegal, who he just replaced as CEO. Jelinek told Sinegal he wanted to raise the price of the $1.50 hot dog and pop combo. Sinegal shot back, “If you raise the [price of the] f**ing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.” Costco has figured it out and, in September 2022, the company’s CFO Richard Galanti confirmed that the hot dog combo would remain at $1.50 despite rising inflation. “There are some businesses that are doing well with margin like gas business on a smaller way -- in the travel business,” said Galanti. “Those things help us be more aggressive in other areas, or as you mentioned, hold the price on the hot dog and the soda a little longer, forever.” Forever sounds about right.

The foundation under Venice is fascinating. There is the equivalent of 10 million tree trunks under the Italian city. At first glance, wood is an inferior option to stronger materials. But it has proven resilient since 5th century AD, when the wood was first gathered from from Northern Italy and the Balkans (leading to mass deforestation in some areas). How? Wooden piles are submerged and buried deep in the seabed’s clay, which does two things: 1️⃣ No oxygen: Bacteria rots wood but it needs oxygen to survive and there is none where the wooden trunks are buried. 2️⃣ Salt water: Exposure to salt water for hundreds of years has hardened the wood into a stone-like material. On top of the wooden piles are a platform made of wooden planks. On top of that is a water-resistant layer of marbles that structures are built on. And that’s how Venice — which is 118 small islands linked by bridges, walkways and canals — was built in a swampy lagoon.

Lifetime franchise revenue: Hello Kitty: $89 billion James Bond $75 billion Spider-Man (combined) Marvel Cinematic U

When a startup claims it has “AI” or “ML” and then you take a look at the actual tech

The FTX story just gets wilder. Earlier this year, SBF invested $11.5m in Farmington State Bank in Washington St. (nearly double the bank’s value). It’s the 26th smallest bank in the US. It serves a town of 146 people. Has only 3 employees. And looks like my parent’s garage.

me after bringing home a rotisserie chicken on “my night to cook”

Time it took to get 100 million users: Netflix: 10 years Gmail: 5 years Twitter: 5 years FB: 4.5 years WhatsApp: 3.5 years IG: 2.5 years TikTok: 9 months ChatGPT: 2 months Random Pirated Reddit Livestream for Chiefs vs. Dolphins instead of paying for Peacock: 7 minutes

2/ INCEPTION You know that spinning hallway where Joseph-Gordon Levitt is fighting some bad guys. Yeah, Nolan built a giant rotating centrifuge and put a hallway in it along with ridiculously expensive cameras.

Been looking at the most expensive real-life film stunts ever. Here are 9 wild ones. 1. MATRIX RELOADED (2003) For this chase sequence, a fake highway was built at a dis-used naval base in California. The 1.3 mile loop highway cost $2.5m and was fenced by a 19ft wall.

Will Ferrell’s blooper outtake from “Eastbound & Down” is up there with hardest acting challenges ever. Danny McBride and Craig Robinson use every bit of willpower to not laugh as Ferrell tries to break them. Robinson told Vulture about the experience: ➡️ “I remember standing there, trying to keep it together. I’m busting a brain vessel trying to stare in the face and eyes of Danny McBride, while Will Ferrell is deliberately trying to murder us, trying to ruin the take. You know, talking about [doing Ferrell’s voice], ‘My plums have a bluish hue. Sun dancing off them just right. And my son Gabriel!’… You got to understand this was all new, fresh stuff — like, what the frick?! And he’s laughing and checking in on us. Oh man, it was a beautiful day of laughter. But I felt horrible. I was trying, man. I was trying so hard. Tears came down my eyes.” ⬅️ Over 50x views, this clip has a 100% hit rate of making me lose it too lol

A classic consulting case study question: how many iPhones can you fit in a 747?

Tiger Woods after turning down $800m from Liv Golf so he can protect his PGA legacy…watching Liv Golf buy out the comically hypocritical PGA.

NBA superstar Joel Embiid taught himself to shoot by watching YouTube vids. His explanation is amazing.

Straight out of “Office Space”

This Twitter exchange is gold

This is John Lyke, who has a very cool niche. He went to film school and was a pro rollerblader & snowboarder. This venn diagram of skills makes him an expert “blade camera operator”, a job that involves filming with a $100k camera while on roller blades. You may have caught his footage in HBO’s fictional re-telling of the 1980s LA Lakers (“Winning Time”). The basketball scenes are lightly co-ordinated and — to keep the action as real as possible — the players just go hard for 10-15 plays in a row and they take the best footage to edit. End result is 💯.

The most cursed Linkedin CV bio ever

IKEA is the world's largest furniture brand. With annual sales hitting ~$50B+, it's the King of "buy stuff you never planned to buy". Unsurprisingly, IKEA designs its stores with various psychological tricks to get you to spend more money. Here's are 12 of them 🧵

A Netflix user will browse the app for 90 seconds and leave if they find nothing. Thumbnail artwork is actually NFLX's most effective lever to influence a viewer's choice. A user will look at one for only 1.8 seconds, so NFLX spends huge to optimize them. Here's a breakdown🧵

TikTok users learning the US Surpreme Court upheld the TikTok Ban and they have only 48 hours left to post

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: piped.video/D0Zh0bT8OuM?si=24Dp…

Spray-on Condom (2006-2008) Step 1: Insert junk into spray apparatus Step 2: Spray on melted latex Step 3: Wait 3 minutes for it to dry Step 4: This is the most insane thing ever seen in my life

Just so we’re clear, the South Korean Air Pistol team of Oh Ye Jin and Kim Yeji (hat) took Gold and Silver for the 10m Air Pistol competition at Paris 2024. One wore her daughter’s elephant doll while the other’s pistol sight had a pink heart. This is the hardest shit ever.

people that set the price of airplane wifi

Just spent the past 12 hours backing up my Twitter. I hand-wrote each of my 41,214 tweets individually on to cue cards and organized them in a drawer.

Zara’s new transparent LED storefront in NY. WTF is going on? haha

“mystical land pirate”

3/ THE DARK KNIGHT Batman flips Joker’s 18-wheeler truck. To get the FX, a piston was put under the trailer with TNT. When the TNT blows, the piston hit the ground so hard, it flips the truck. The only CGI used was to *remove* the piston from the shot.

Annual streaming prices