Isa
@isssa0x • 2,352 subscribers
fintech | ml | quant finance
Videos
Insurance is the oldest of the four ways. It is a nine-trillion-dollar global industry. The equation underneath it was invented in 1560 by a broke Italian gambler. His name was Girolamo Cardano. He wrote a book called Liber de Ludo Aleae. A short manual on how to win at dice. Nobody in finance read it for four hundred years. Then in 1996 a ninety-year-old man in New York wrote a book that traced every modern risk model back to that manual. He called it Against the Gods. One thesis. Every dollar of premium ever collected on Earth is a footnote to a gambler scribbling in Milan. His name was Peter Bernstein. He founded the Journal of Portfolio Management in 1974 and ran money at Bernstein-Macaulay before that. Wall Street called him the historian of risk. In 2008 a small production company filmed him for thirteen minutes. He walked through the entire five-hundred-year arc. Cardano to Pascal to Fermat to Black-Scholes. Then he stopped and said the industry had built glass towers on the back of an idea a broke Italian scribbled to settle a card debt. He died the following summer. Age ninety. Reinsurance premiums crossed six hundred billion dollars last year. Every actuary on Earth prices catastrophe risk with the same expected-value framework Cardano invented to shave the house edge in Milan. The video is thirteen minutes and twenty-two seconds long. Free. Eleven years on YouTube. Twenty-nine thousand people have watched it. Almost none of them work in insurance.
Isa1,230,296 views • 5 days ago
A dead MIT professor accidentally destroyed the $20 billion executive coaching industry with one hour of lecture, and ten million people have already watched him do it. He filmed it once in January 2018 and died eighteen months later. Executive coaches charge fifteen thousand dollars a session to teach a third of what he covered in that one hour for free. His name was Patrick Winston. He ran the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997 and wrote the AI textbook every computer science major in the world read for thirty years. Every January for four decades, he gave a lecture called "How to Speak." His entire framework fits on a napkin. Do not read. Be in the image. Keep images simple. Eliminate clutter. Start with an empathetic connection. End with a punch line the audience can repeat over dinner. Never open with a joke. Never end with "thank you." That last rule alone has probably cost the executive coaching industry a hundred million dollars. "Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas. In that order." That is the actual opening line of the lecture. Winston believed it strongly enough to spend fifty years teaching computer scientists how to talk. Founders spend $80,000 on an MBA and then hire a communications coach to teach them the same material Winston filmed once for free. Engineers write brilliant code and lose promotions to teammates who watched this lecture on the train. The lecture is free on MIT OpenCourseWare. The textbook is free on his page. Winston died in 2019. Almost none of the ten million viewers have actually implemented the four rules on the napkin. The napkin is free. The willingness to actually use it in your next meeting is the entire edge.
Isa528,056 views • 7 days ago
Six billion people cannot access three of the four ways to make money. The reason was diagrammed in a French history book in 1979 and drawn on a Yale chalkboard thirty years later. Wall Street built its entire marketing on pretending the diagram does not exist. The historian was Fernand Braudel. Three volumes. Thirty years of work. He called it the bell jar - the invisible container of laws, courts, and enforceable contracts under which capital, arbitrage, and insurance actually compound. He died in 1985. Nobody in finance picked up the book. A Yale professor named Douglas Rae taught the whole theorem in a forty-five-minute chalkboard lecture in 2009. He drew the bell jar. Inside: transparent property, courts that will jail your business partner, contracts that outlive their signers. Outside: everyone working for their next meal. Labor works everywhere. Capital, arbitrage, and insurance work in maybe forty countries on Earth. That is why a factory worker in Ohio compounds more wealth in five years than an equally skilled worker in Lagos compounds in twenty. Every emerging-market economist on Earth knows the theorem. Every VC pitching in Nairobi is quietly repricing Braudel every time a limited partner asks about jurisdiction risk. The lecture is called Braudel's Bell Jar. It has been on YouTube for fifteen years. Free. Twelve thousand people have watched it. Almost none of them are the ones outside the glass.
Isa41,505 views • 4 days ago
One billionaire. One whiteboard. Forty-two minutes. Three lines. And Wall Street spent the next decade pretending this video didn't exist. He didn't sell a course. He didn't plug a fund. He had no sponsor. He walked on stage, picked up a marker, and in half an hour explained why every crash since 1929 happened exactly when it did, and why the next one is already visible if you know where to look. Harvard MBA charges $220,000 to teach half of what he covered in the first 15 minutes. Six of the models he drew on that board are still classified as proprietary inside Goldman, JP Morgan and Bridgewater. Analysts at those banks sign NDAs on those exact models. He put them on YouTube for free. The part nobody says out loud: two years before 2020, he drew on that same whiteboard exactly what happened. Rates at zero. The Fed running out of tools. The money printer. Deflation drowned in inflation until you get hyperinflation. He drew it in 2018 like he was reading tomorrow's newspaper. A partner at a top-three fund told me over whiskey, one line: "every new analyst on my desk watches this video on day one. Not CFA. Not the Bloomberg training. This." Nobody pays him to recommend it. He just knows that without those 42 minutes, a person doesn't see the market, they see charts. Forty million views. Of them, at least 39.9 million people still cannot name the three forces he draws in the first ten minutes. Those three forces explain everything. Every crisis. Every bull run. Every Fed move. Every bitcoin cycle. Every tech crash. The video has been sitting in the open for 12 years. It is still free. And it is still the one thing no MBA will ever put on the curriculum. Because if they did, the MBA would lose its point.
Isa94,579 views • 14 days ago
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