Trung Phan
@TrungTPhan
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Write on business with @workweekinc. Building an AI research app (https://t.co/fZ5ObIyBGI) and LLM API management platform (https://t.co/VTMMh1VdHR)
Joined December 2017
Hermès has perfected the psychology of scarcity and demand. The CEO of the ~$250B French luxury giant says Hermès “creates desire” by selling “time”. This concept of “time” means heritage, craftsmanship and making customers wait. I wrote more here:
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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.
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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.”
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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:.
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For anyone threatening to leave Twitter, good luck trying to find this fire content on any other platform
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Buenos Aires celebration packed with ~5m people. The Argentina team bus couldn’t drive through, so they had to call in helicopters 🤯
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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.
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Lily Zhang’s parents get a Gold medal in Asian Parenting
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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.
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tbh, Tolberone shrinkflation is wild
Fewer Doritos in your bag. Fewer Oreos in your box. Less toilet paper on your roll. You aren’t imagining it—big corporations really are making you pay the same amount (sometimes more) for less. It’s called “shrinkflation,” and we’ve got to crack down on it.
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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.
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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
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I’m assembling a new team
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“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
DoorDash, $DASH, and Klarna have signed a deal where customers can choose to pay for food deliveries in interest-free installments.
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Legitimately, the most insightful post have ever seen on Linkedin for leadership, management and how to motivate employees
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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
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A 16-year old won Blender’s animator of the year with this video on a futuristic street food market. Gold.
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Never forget the time Myth-busters proved that a car with golf dimples had less drag and drove faster than without
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The best part in movies is when the actor casually walks away from something they just blew up
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Japan Twitter is lit: “a conveyor belt sushi restaurant where the audience also rotates”
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Every uncle in America today to their 20-year old nephew after they help download Peacock app to watch NFL Playoffs
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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🧵
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Someone discovered an arbitrage hack between Amazon and Temu
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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.
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This is officially the wildest Linkedin work history in the history of work histories
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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
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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.
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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)
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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
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Costco has a “100% satisfaction guarantee” return policy with no expiration and people love putting it to the test.
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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 🧵
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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.
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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 🧵
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This looks incredible via MidJourney 6. Netflix’s “Lenin” starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
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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.
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If your CFO wears any of these shoes, you will survive the recession.
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anyway, remember that dude from Kentucky filming himself trying garlic naan and butter chicken for the the first time
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“Vietnamese-American parent TikTok” is my new favourite genre of TikTok
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Thought SBF speaking at NYT was absurd. But then I saw the rest of the panel.
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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
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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
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Lifetime franchise revenue: . Hello Kitty: $89 billion. James Bond $75 billion.Spider-Man (combined).Marvel Cinematic U
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When a startup claims it has “AI” or “ML” and then you take a look at the actual tech
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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.
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me after bringing home a rotisserie chicken on “my night to cook”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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A classic consulting case study question: how many iPhones can you fit in a 747?.
Apple reportedly flew in 5 planes full of iPhones into the U.S. to avoid tariffs
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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.
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What is your favorite celebrity quote?.
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NBA superstar Joel Embiid taught himself to shoot by watching YouTube vids. His explanation is amazing.
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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
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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 🧵
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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🧵
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TikTok users learning the US Surpreme Court upheld the TikTok Ban and they have only 48 hours left to post .
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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
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In hindsight, peak woke was when startups were renaming their monthly all hands meetings to all hearts because not everyone has hands. Good riddance.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Zara’s new transparent LED storefront in NY. WTF is going on? haha
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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.
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Christoper Nolan famously prefers practical effects over CGI (somehow, “Oppenheimer” has no CGI). He took the approach to the next level in “Interstellar”. Instead of digitally recreating a corn field, Nolan spent $100,000 to plant one and sold it for a profit afterwards. Why
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Zuck after a decade and $50B spent on a VR platform watching Tim Cook scoop him with the category-defining Apple Vision Pro.
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The “Home Alone” house in surburban Chicago is for sale for $5.3m (and is big enough for a half basketball court and home theatre). Still makes you think what Kevin’s dad — who took 9 people to Paris for X-mas and wore a Burberry jacket with a wad of $100s — does for a living.
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