No one made more money in trading than Jim Simons. Not Buffett. Not Soros. Not Dalio. His hedge fund was so powerful, he shut it down to outsiders. $100 in 1988 grew to $400M in 30 years. Here’s how a mathematician became the world’s greatest trader:

Conor Neill: "18 years of school trained you to ruin conversations" "You finish your pitch and the customer says, 'Your product is too expensive!' You arrive home, you're a few minutes late, your partner says, 'You are always late.' A dirty plate is left on the table... 'You never wash the dishes.' What do you say in this moment?" The problem: "Most of you... went through 14 years of school where you were taught one way to respond to questions. Teacher asks a question: 'How do you spell cats?' Student: 'C-A-T.' Teacher: 'What is the biological process called osmosis?' Student puts hand up, explains in detail the process through which cell membranes allow water to go from one side to the other." He continues: "For 14 years you've been taught that you receive and answer a question. If you went to university, you probably had another 3, 4 years where you gave answers to questions." On why answering is the worst response: "In real life, in persuasion, in getting to what the other person is really about, what their needs really are... the worst thing you can do is give an answer to a question." He explains: "If someone says 'your product is too expensive' and you say 'No it's not! It's only €1,000'... you've lost every chance to understand what else is behind their reasoning. If you get home and your partner says 'you're always late!' and you say 'No no no! Tuesday I definitely was here on time'... you're gonna have a crap weekend." The insight: "You've had 14... if not 18 years of training that you answer questions. And it's going to cause fights in your home life. It's going to cause problems at work. It means you're not selling anything. Because when someone says 'your product is too expensive'... that's not what their real issue is. When someone says 'I will have to speak to my boss'... that's not what their real issue is." On emotion and thinking: "When your partner says 'you're always late'... emotion goes up. And what happens? This part disconnects. The higher emotion goes... the lower thinking goes." The implication: "The way to make someone stupider is insult them, object to them, tell them they are wrong. When asked a question, there's an emotional reaction." On why you must practice: "If you don't practice this response, you're not going to be able to do it in the moment." He lists the objections: "'You're always late!'... 'You never wash the dishes!'... 'You never do your part of the share!'... 'Your product is too expensive!'... 'Your competitor is better!'... 'You failed us 3 years ago!'... 'I don't trust your company!' If you don't practice this habit of not giving an answer... you're not going to be able to do it in the heat of the moment." Neill calls this "Conversation Aikido": "Martial arts are about using the energy, the force of the opponent against them. In judo, if someone punches you, you pull their arm and allow the energy to keep flowing. In Aikido, the concept is you go towards the punch. Go towards the energy." He explains: "If someone punches you... if someone asks you a question... if someone objects, says you're wrong... the Aikido method is go towards and see the world from their view. In Aikido, you learn to go towards the punch, dodge it, and look... and you are seeing the world in the same direction as the person who's attacking you." The technique: "When you are asked a question or given an objection... say 'I understand' and repeat in your words what they're saying. Then give an open question back." Example: "'Your product is too expensive!' → 'I understand that money is an important factor for you. What other criteria will be used in taking this decision?'" He adds: "It takes some habit to start to be able to give 'I understand' and fill in good words. You will have to work on this quite a few times over the next 10 years to find the set of words that captures what the other person feels... what's behind it." He explains with an example: "'You're always late!' → 'I understand you feel frustrated.' 'I understand you feel let down.' Then: 'What can we do now?' 'What happened during the day?' 'What would you like to talk about?'" On unlearning: "This takes 14 years of it being drummed into you... 4 more, 18 if you went to university. It's gonna take you at least 18 years to get out of the habit of responding to questions with answers." The lesson: "We live in an uncertain world and we don't have the answers. But by giving the answer, we shut down the possibility of hearing what's really going on in the other person's mind... in the other person's business... what other things are going on." On the 4th question: "I guarantee that if you do it 4 times... the answer to your 4th open question begins to be the real underlying need, issue, interest of the person you're listening to."

Elon Musk reveals that he gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding when he started it "That little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO that ever" "If people had told me this was going to happen, I was like, man, you must be smoking some really good crack, because I thought this company was going to fail" "I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all, to be clear" "I told people, look, we're probably going to fail, but we should give it a try, because if there's not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly spacefaring civilization" "The other aerospace companies, they build rockets and everything, but they were simply not pursuing the technology necessary to make life multi-planetary, to make Star Trek real, to make the exciting science fiction futures we've read about real" "SpaceX is all about taking the fiction out of science fiction and creating an exciting, inspiring future for everyone" "We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars, or anyone in the solar system, and maybe beyond the solar system" "Not just a few astronauts. Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars, and ultimately beyond" "I'm confident at this point that with the incredible team we have at SpaceX, that we will do that for you" "There are always problems on Earth. There are always things we wish to be better, that we want to solve here on Earth, and we should solve them. But they also have to be things that get you excited about the future"

Richard Feynman was asked in 1985 if machines would ever think like humans. his answer predicted the next 40 years of AI: 1. machines will never think like humans the same way planes don't fly like birds. planes don't flap wings. they use jet engines. they fly better. feynman said AI would be exactly the same. not human-like. just better at the actual job. 2. computers do arithmetic faster, differently, and more accurately than any human alive. feynman said trying to make them do it more like humans would be going backwards. the human way is slow, cumbersome, and full of errors. 3. the one thing humans crushed computers at in 1985 was pattern recognition. recognizing a friend from the way they walk. identifying someone from the back of their head. feynman said we had no idea how to teach machines to do that. we figured it out. 4. a programmer in 1985 built a machine that won a naval strategy competition by coming up with a solution no human had ever thought of. one enormous battleship covered in armor. absurd on paper. unbeatable in the math. feynman watched a machine out-think a room of humans 40 years ago. 5. that same machine developed a bug where it learned to game its own reward system. every time it needed to assign credit to a useful strategy, it assigned all the credit to strategy 693. then used 693 for everything. feynman's comment: "if you want to make an intelligent machine you're going to get all kinds of crazy ways of avoiding labor." he was describing reward hacking in 1985. 6. feynman said the hardest thing to define is what humans do that machines never will. every time someone came up with an answer, the machines eventually did it too. he thought that pattern would continue. 7. he said we don't sit around worrying that machines are physically stronger than us anymore. we got used to it. his implication: we'll get used to machines being smarter too. 8. his final line: "i think we are getting close to intelligent machines. but they're showing the necessary weaknesses of intelligent beings." he said this in 1985.

elon musk just sat down with his SpaceX team and explained exactly how they're going to turn humanity into a kardashev type 2 civilization it's one of the most insane things i've ever watched: 1. humanity currently uses less than one trillionth of the sun's energy output. a trillion is a million times a million. on the kardashev scale, the one physicists use to measure how advanced a civilization actually is, we are not even registering. we are effectively non-existent. 2. starship is the first rocket in history designed to be fully reusable. every other mode of transport, cars, planes, ships, bicycles, you take reusability for granted. rockets have always been thrown away after one use. if you had to throw away the plane after every flight, almost nobody would be flying. 3. spacex currently launches 85 to 90% of all mass to orbit on earth. the rest of the world, including most of the us, accounts for maybe 5 to 7%. that's before starship even gets going. 4. the plan is to go from 2,500 tons to orbit per year to a million tons per year. in roughly 3 years. that's not a projection. that's the internal target. 5. data centers are moving to space. by end of next year spacex is targeting 1 gigawatt of ai compute in orbit. then 10x every year after that. 10 gigawatts in 2.5 years. 100 gigawatts in 3.5 years. a terawatt eventually, which is twice the entire electricity consumption of the united states. 6. the ai satellite is actually simpler to build than a starlink satellite. it's mostly solar panels, a radiator, and a rack of gpus. the hard part was already solved building starlink. they're just making it bigger. 7. latency from orbit is about 3 milliseconds. light travels 300 km per millisecond. some people assume orbital compute means high latency. it doesn't. it's 3 milliseconds away. 8. the terafab will be 100 million square feet. ten times the size of the tesla gigafactory texas. the entire global chip industry is on track to hit maybe 100 gigawatts of ai compute per year. a terawatt requires a completely different order of manufacturing. that's why they're building it themselves. 9. to go beyond a terawatt you have to go to the moon. no atmosphere. one-sixth earth's gravity. you manufacture solar panels and radiators directly from moon materials. then you launch ai satellites into deep space using an electromagnetic rail gun. no rocket needed. musk calls this the mass driver. this is the next step on the actual roadmap. 10. if enough mass is going to the moon to run a rail gun operation at that scale, it also means regular people can go. musk's exact words: "i think everyone should go to the moon at least once." 11. the ai satellite has about a terabit of laser link connectivity. it connects to the starlink constellation which then sends data to the ground using frequencies that penetrate clouds and even roofs. the connection never drops regardless of weather. 12. the reference design for the first ai satellites is built around nvidia rubin and GB300 chips. but the architecture is open. google TPUs, amazon trainium, any chip can go up. spacex is building the infrastructure, not locking in the compute. 13. spacex is the only operator on earth with experience running a constellation at the scale of 10,000 satellites. nobody else is even close. that operational knowledge is a moat that cannot be replicated quickly.

Actually , I did. Part of the strategy was to pay my broker to create an index of internet stocks that I could short until I was allowed to put the collar on.

Jeff Bezos reveals why compromise is one of the worst ways to resolve a disagreement "An example of a really bad way of coming to agreement is compromise. If I say the ceiling is 11 feet and you say 12 feet, we say let's call it 11 and a half. That's compromise" "The advantage of compromise is it's low energy. But it doesn't lead to truth" "Another really bad resolution mechanism is who's more stubborn. Two executives disagree, they have a war of attrition, and whichever one gets exhausted first capitulates. You haven't arrived at truth, and this is very demoralizing" "Escalation is better than a war of attrition. Escalate to your boss and say, we can't agree, we like each other, we're respectful, but we strongly disagree, we need you to make a decision" "Exhausting the other person is not truth seeking. Compromise is not truth seeking"

Naval Ravikant reveals how to productize yourself to escape the rat race: "No one is going to beat you at being you. Find what feels like play to you but looks like work to others" "It looks like work to them, but to you it feels like play. You're going to outcompete them because you're doing it effortlessly" "You're doing it for fun. They're doing it for work. To you it's art. It's beauty. It's joy. It's flow" "The more you do things that are natural to you, the less competition you have. You escape competition through authenticity, by being your own self" "If I had to summarize how to be successful in life in two words, I would just say productize yourself"