568: Meta Goes Nuclear, Inside Steve Ballmer's Brain, Amazon Logistics, David Senra on Growth vs Durability, Anthropic Claude 4, Vesuvius Scrolls, and Synesthesia

"relentlessly refined and tightly curated"

Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?

—Quentin Crisp

🛀💭🎼🎸💿 Here’s a shower thought for you:

I find it remarkable how little original music many of the most popular musicians have released.

Over the whole decade of the 1980s, which was their creative peak, Metallica produced only about 4 hours of music (on which they toured endlessly, and still do):

• Kill 'Em All (1983) ~51 minutes

• Ride the Lightning (1984) ~47 minutes

• Master of Puppets (1986) ~55 minutes

• ...And Justice for All (1988) ~65 minutes

You can even throw in the Garage Days Re-Revisited EP if you’d like (1987, 25 minutes).

In all of the 1980s, when he was at the peak of global fame, Michael Jackson only released two albums:

• Thriller (1982) ~42 minutes

• Bad (1987) ~48 minutes

That’s 90 minutes of music in a decade!

Pink Floyd, known for long albums, released seven albums during the 1970s, but that’s still only 5 hours and 49 minutes of music during their breakthrough decade.

The Beatles, one of the most prolific bands I can think of — often releasing two albums per year — only released 8 hours and 44 minutes of music during their historic 7-year run as a recording group (some of the early stuff was covers, but let’s count them because they made the material their own):

• Please Please Me (1963) ~32 min

• With the Beatles (1963) ~33 min

• A Hard Day's Night (1964) ~30 min

• Beatles for Sale (1964) ~34 min

• Help! (1965) ~34 min

• Rubber Soul (1965) ~35 min

• Revolver (1966) ~35 min

• Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) ~40 min

• Magical Mystery Tour (1967) ~36 min

• The Beatles (White Album) (1968) ~93 min (double album)

• Yellow Submarine (1969) ~40 min

• Abbey Road (1969) ~47 min

• Let It Be (1970) ~35 minutes

The entire Beatles catalogue is shorter than one season of prestige TV. And it’s not as though writing, planning, prepping, shooting, and editing a show like Band of Brothers is easy…

Obviously, there are many gating factors. I can guess some of them: touring, the creative process isn't linear, the raw material of songs is life, not every song you write is good enough to make it onto an album, etc.

These few hours earned their status by being relentlessly refined and tightly curated.

Still, you might imagine that full-time professional musicians, hanging out and playing together almost every day (before shows, on tour buses with an acoustic guitar, in the rehearsal space, whatever), would produce more than a handful of hours of music per decade.

I’m not saying everyone should be a young Bob Dylan or Neil Young, with songs pouring out all day long. And I’m definitely not saying quantity matters more than quality. In an age of infinite content, there's something beautiful about that ruthless paring-down.

Yet even accounting for that, I’m still a little surprised that the core professional output of a class of people at the very top of their field can be counted in single-digit hours per decade.

Enough to change music history, but barely an afternoon on a playlist…

This context makes the output of composers like J.S. Bach even more impressive. He didn’t record his music because the technology didn’t exist, but writing the parts for large orchestral ensembles with a quill had to be time-intensive. 🪶

Bach produced approximately 1,080 compositions, totaling around 175-200 hours of music (depending on the tempo of performance, which, unlike with recorded music, isn’t set in stone).

Closer to us, John Williams (who composed the music for 3/4 of your favorite classic films) has composed around 145 hours of music. Hans Zimmer is in the same range.

💚 🥃 🙏☺️ If you’re a free sub, I hope you’ll decide to become a paid supporter.

You’ll unlock access to paid editions, the private Discord, and get invited to the next supporter-only Zoom Q&As with me.

If you get just one good idea 💡 per year, it’ll more than pay for itself. If it makes you curious about new things, that’s priceless.

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🏦 💰 Business & Investing 💳 💴

🔌⚛️ Meta Signs 20-year Nuclear Power Deal with Constellation Energy for 1.1GW 🗓️🗓️💰

A few months ago, Microsoft made a deal with Constellation Energy (not Constellation Software, though that’d be nice diversification from VMS!) to reopen the Three Mile Island plant. Last year, AWS signed a 10-year deal to buy power from Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

Now Meta is buying 1.1 gigawatt of power over 20 years from Constellation’s Clinton Power Station southwest of Chicago. As part of the deal, they’re also investing to upgrade the plant and increase output by 30MW, which isn’t huge, but over decades, it adds up to a lot of extra clean power.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but a ballpark napkin-math guess probably lands in the tens of billions ($20bn over 20 years, maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

That’s a gigantic amount of clean, 24/7 power coming out of this one small group of buildings, about the size of a shopping mall, and power-hungry Big Tech has noticed just how valuable and scarce these assets are.

Hopefully, once all the existing available nuclear capacity has been snapped up, deep-pocketed, long-term thinking Big Tech and hyperscalers will turn more of their attention to new builds. That’s what will move the needle.

Buying existing assets just shuffles electrons around. The million homes that were getting power from the Clinton station will have to get it from somewhere else. Sure, there’s still value in having Big Tech secure the future of these assets that may otherwise have been stupidly shut down, but the *real* prize is with new builds:

With the guarantee that Clinton will continue to run for another two decades, Constellation is also evaluating strategies to extend the plant’s existing early site permit or seek a new construction permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to pursue development of an advanced nuclear reactor or small modular reactor (SMR) at the Clinton Clean Energy Center site.

The most obvious place for new builds? Existing nuclear plants.

Many were licensed with future expansion in mind, and already have the grid hookups, permitting history, and physical infrastructure in place.

An Energy Department report last year estimated that more than 60 gigawatts of new nuclear projects potentially could be located at 41 current and retired nuclear plants.

There have also been studies showing how the sites of decommissioned coal plants could be converted to nuclear more easily, thanks to existing infrastructure (transmission, rail, etc).

I wrote back in December about Meta doing a request for proposal for up to 4 gigawatts of new US reactors. They just gave us an update on how that’s going:

Through our RFP, we’ve received over 50 qualified submissions from a range of participants in the nuclear ecosystem – including utilities, developers and nuclear technology manufacturers. Responses have reflected a diversity of technology options, commercial terms and sites across more than 20 states.

This RFP, targeted at catalyzing early development activity for 1-4 gigawatts of nuclear energy projects, is prioritizing sites where nuclear development can be advanced quickly with high degrees of certainty on execution and timeline.

Meta has selected a shortlist of new nuclear projects across multiple U.S. states that represent some of the most feasible opportunities. Through these projects, we aim to activate investment in new nuclear across multiple grids and technologies, seeding new reliable firm power to support future data centers. We look forward to finalizing this process this year.

It’ll be interesting to see which of the Big Tech moves first with new builds.

My guess? Once one of them pulls the trigger, the floodgates open, and the others will follow.

Nobody wants to be left behind as the “energy poor” player in the AI race.

🏁🏃‍♂️ 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️ 🐢

🗣️ Interview: Steve Ballmer (!!!) A Unique POV of Microsoft’s History 💾 💾 💾 💾

I never was a full-on Ballmer hater, but I gotta say, this interview made me more interested in learning about him, and gave me more respect for the context behind some of the choices he made that, from the outside, may have seemed a certain way but were actually well-thought through even if they didn't work.

• 🎧 Acquired: The Steve Ballmer Interview

There’s a moment when Ballmer says, almost as a throwaway, “most businesses are one-trick ponies”.

I looked it up to see if he was quoting someone else, and apparently, he was quoting himself, from a 2017 Charlie Rose interview. He was praising Steve Jobs as a rare business leader with multiple “tricks”.

Here’s the full thing:

Most companies, he said, do a "single trick" at most. But that wasn't the case with Jobs, or $700 billion Apple.

"Most businesses are zero-trick ponies, successful businesses are at least a single-trick pony, and almost nobody does more than one trick," he said. "Steve Jobs did more than one trick. He did do Apple 2/Mac, and he did do the 'i-series,' iPhones, iPads, etc., and that's amazing, two tricks."

In any case, I *highly* recommend the Acquired interview, one of their best yet.

Ballmer’s a lot of fun to listen to. I wish more people were as expressive and modulated their voices like Ballmer. Life is all about dynamics. Let’s take ourselves less seriously!

It’s always good when an interview significantly changes your opinion of someone, rather than reinforcing whatever you already thought. In the parlance of Claude Shannon, this is an information-rich interview!

🛒🇺🇸 The Other Infrastructure Platform: Amazon’s Logistics Network 🚚📦📦📦 🚚📦📦📦 🚚📦📦📦

Look at this. From pretty much *nothing* just 10 years ago to about 1/3 of U.S. parcel volume today. Clearly taking share from both UPS and FedEx, and about to catch up to USPS.

And they’re not done!

Amazon recently announced a big investment in its logistics network in U.S. rural areas:

we’re investing over $4 billion to expand our rural delivery network, with a focus on small towns across the United States, to bring even faster delivery to our many millions of customers in less densely populated areas. At a time where many logistics providers are backing away from serving rural customers because of cost to serve, we are stepping up our investment to make their lives easier and better. This investment will also grow our rural delivery network’s footprint to over 200 delivery stations, and we estimate it will create over 100,000 new jobs

Source.

David Senra on Growth vs Durability (🚀 vs 🏛️)

There’s a good reminder on the importance of durability if you want to benefit from compounding in David’s recent conversation with Patrick O’Shaughnessy:

David Senra: It's fascinating that everybody in technology has read Zero to One, right. If you're only gonna read one book, probably that would be the one to read.

I think it's excellent. But they missed the part of what he says in there where he's like, hey, there's a big problem with technology companies, they optimize for growth at the expense of durability. But if you look at when do these giant companies, and he said tech companies, but you see this in all these companies, Raising Cane's is another example.

They actually make more money 3, 4, 5, 6 decades into the future. All the real money is out there. So therefore, if you're optimizing for growth at the expense of durability, you're never gonna get to the real rewards.

And the reason you do that is because growth you can track, and durability you cannot.

See also my podcast with David:

• 🎧 David Senra of Founders Podcast (Podcast #11)

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🧪🔬 Science & Technology 🧬 🔭

🥇🥈🥉 Claude 4 Finally Ranked on LLM Arena Leaderboard

It took a while after the models were released, but they finally got enough votes and debuted on the LLM Arena ranking.

The first thing to note: a surprising number of models are effectively tied on text performance.

Google and OpenAI are the current leaders, with Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3 tied for first place, but right below them, there are *five* models tied for 7th place.

Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet perform respectably, coming in at 4th and 7th.

But they don’t quite push the frontier forward on text, at least not in ways that LLM Arena’s crowd-sourced voting detects (maybe they do for your particular use case, which is why it’s always worth it to try new frontier models and see for yourself).

But when it comes to coding tasks (what they label WebDev), it’s a different story. Opus and Sonnet 4 are both tied for 1st place with Gemini 2.5 Pro, with Opus 4 taking the overall lead in raw score.

It underscores how Anthropic seems to have conceded chatbot dominance to OpenAI and Google, who benefit from the best distribution, and instead are focusing on coding, tool use, agentic workflows, etc.

But can they build a lasting edge there? 🤔

🧠 🟪 🟩 🟧 Synesthesia: Common & Uncommon Types, and I discovered one more kind I have…

This is a follow-up of the intro of Edition #567 where I mentioned my son’s synesthesia (as well as mine and my wife’s).

It’s generally said that about 2-4% of people have some form of it, but some researchers believe the true number is higher because many people don't realize their experience is unusual and, if it doesn’t cause any problems in someone’s life, there’s often little reason to find out. And nobody is screening for it, unlike, say, color-blindness.

If you’re unsure, you can take this online quiz developed by neuroscientist David Eagleman to determine if you may be a synesthete.

Talking about it with some readers made me curious to look up the different kinds:

🔸 Most Common Forms of Synesthesia

These are the ones most frequently reported in scientific literature and self-reports from synesthetes:

1. Grapheme–Color Synesthesia

   • Description: Letters and/or numbers are perceived as inherently colored.

   • Example: The letter "A" is always red, "B" is blue.

   • Prevalence: The most studied and commonly reported type.

2. Ordinal Linguistic Personification (OLP)

   • Description: Ordered sequences (like numbers, letters, weekdays, months) are associated with personalities or genders.

   • Example: "Monday is a grumpy old man," or "E is a confident female."

   • Prevalence: Common but less well-known than color-based forms.

3. Spatial Sequence Synesthesia

   • Description: Numbers, dates, or other sequences appear spatially arranged (like on a mental map).

   • Example: The months of the year may form a loop or a horseshoe shape in space.

   • Prevalence: Common, especially when explicitly asked about.

4. Sound–Color Synesthesia (Chromesthesia)

   • Description: Sounds (music, voices, everyday noises) automatically evoke colors.

   • Example: A trumpet note might appear as a flash of yellow.

   • Prevalence: Frequently reported among musicians.

5. Number–Form Synesthesia

   • Description: Numbers are visualized in specific spatial arrangements, often forming shapes or paths.

   • Example: A mental number line curving off into the distance.

   • Prevalence: Sometimes considered a subtype of spatial sequence synesthesia.

🔹 Rarest Forms of Synesthesia

These forms are much less commonly reported and studied, sometimes with only a handful of documented cases:

1. Lexical–Gustatory Synesthesia

   • Description: Words evoke specific taste sensations.

   • Example: The word "jail" might taste like cold bacon.

   • Rarity: Fewer than 100 well-documented cases.

2. Mirror-Touch Synesthesia

   • Description: Seeing another person being touched causes the synesthete to feel the touch on their own body.

   • Example: Watching someone get tapped on the shoulder produces a physical sensation in the same spot.

   • Rarity: Rare and sometimes confused with high empathy or mirror neurons.

3. Auditory–Tactile Synesthesia

   • Description: Sounds induce tactile sensations on the body.

   • Example: A high-pitched beep might feel like a poke on the forehead.

   • Rarity: Uncommon and underreported.

4. Visual Motion–Sound Synesthesia

   • Description: Seeing motion generates auditory sensations.

   • Example: Watching silent animation may trigger a sound.

   • Rarity: Very rare, sometimes overlaps with audiovisual integration disorders.

5. Person–Color Synesthesia

   • Description: Specific people or personalities evoke colors.

   • Example: A friend named Sarah might be intrinsically “lime green.”

   • Rarity: Unusual and usually tied to strong emotional or identity associations.

6. Emotion–Color or Emotion–Taste Synesthesia

   • Description: Emotions (either experienced or observed) trigger colors or tastes.

   • Example: Feeling grief could evoke a dark blue visual haze or a bitter taste.

   • Rarity: Extremely rare and often difficult to distinguish from metaphor or mood associations.

While doing this research, I learned that I also have Spatial Sequence Synesthesia.

I had no idea it was uncommon! I thought everyone “saw” time in their minds 🗓️

My visualization of the year is centered around January, and is more-or-less based on the school calendar, with August on the left and July on the right… I guess it was imprinted in my mind when I was a school-age kid 👦🏻👩🏻‍🏫🚌

Do you have this kind of calendar map in your head?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

🏛️🏺🏺🏺🤖🔎📜📜📜 Interview: Dr. Brent Seales, The New Indiana Jones

This one has everything: Julius Caesar, particle accelerators, AI, and ancient treasures.

A great interview by my friend Alex Petkas (💚 🥃) with one of the pivotal figures behind the 'virtual unwrapping' of the Vesuvius scrolls, a treasure trove of new information about antiquity that could vastly expand what we know about the ancient world… and maybe even spark a new Renaissance!

• 🎧 Cost of Glory: The New Indiana Jones - w/ Dr. Brent Seales

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🎨 🎭 The Arts & History 👩‍🎨 🎥

🍄📲⏳ Sweet Film rec: ‘My Old Ass’ (2024) 🍿

I know! I'm not sure about the title either. But don't let that stop you, just ignore it.

It's a charming coming-of-age film mixed with a light dose of sci-fi/magical realism. It works better than I expected.

Sometimes I just want a movie with no guns, no explosions, no one crying over a dying child or getting a gruesome wound. A bit of mellow escapism is good for you sometimes!

It made me nostalgic for being that age and spending time with my family in the woods.

There is a lot of nice Canadian nature on screen. It feels grounded in a place in a way that too few films do. It's a lived-in world, and every secondary character feels like a real person.

I want to be very careful not to oversell it. Expectations are the real killer. It’s definitely *not* a masterpiece, but I enjoyed the writing and performances. A few first-time actors stood out, and I'm sure we'll see them again in bigger things.

It has 6.9/10 on IMDb, but that feels too low. I give it a B+ or 7.6/10.

This is a nice little film, good for date night with your sweetheart. Don’t expect too much, but I found it pleasant enough to recommend.

And it seems to be flying under the radar based on how it only grossed $5.7M at the box office…