Jaynit
@jaynitx • 56,963 subscribers
Building aHQ | Helping VCs & founders to build an unforgettable Personal Brand | Writer • Thinker • Self-Improvement
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Former SpaceX astronaut Garrett Reisman reveals the single prism Elon Musk runs every major decision through "He measures pretty much every major decision by whether or not it brings the day when we have a self-sustainable colony on Mars sooner or later" "That's the prism by which he makes every single decision he makes" "He's got an idea and he'll keep pushing, and he gives us aggressive timelines that we have to work to" "We work really hard to try to meet them. It's hard when you're doing stuff that's this complicated to predict exactly how long it's going to take" "We end up falling a little bit behind, but we do our best"
Jaynit14,416,349 views • 1 month ago
Elon Musk reveals why he believes the cheapest place to put AI will be space within 36 months "The availability of energy is the issue. Everywhere outside of China, electrical output is more or less flat. The output of chips is growing exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat" "How are you going to turn the chips on? Magical power sources? Magical electricity fairies?" "Space is really a regulatory play. It's harder to build on land than it is in space. It's harder to scale on the ground than it is to scale in space" "It's always sunny in space. You don't have a day-night cycle, seasonality, clouds, or an atmosphere. The atmosphere alone results in about a 30% loss of energy" "Any given solar panel can do about five times more power in space than on the ground. You also avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night" "My prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI. It will be space in 36 months or less. Maybe 30 months" "The only place you can really scale is space. Once you start thinking in terms of what percentage of the Sun's power you are harnessing, you realize you have to go to space" "Solar cells are already farcically cheap. In China they're around 25-30 cents a watt. Now put them in space, and it's not five times cheaper, it's 10 times cheaper because you don't need any batteries" "The moment your cost of access to space becomes low, by far the cheapest and most scalable way to generate tokens is space. It's not even close" "Those who have lived in software land don't realize they're about to have a hard lesson in hardware. It's actually very difficult to build power plants"
Jaynit8,358,255 views • 1 month ago
Elon Musk reveals the environmentalist viewpoint he says has become total madness "There are 8 billion people on Earth and it would be better if there were none. I'm like, 'hey buddy, you can start with yourself. See if you really want to make a difference'" "That's like a crazy viewpoint. That's like literally saying, let's genocide humanity. How can you say that with a straight face? That sounds like total madness" "In the limit of environmentalism, it becomes like an ingrown toenail. A toenail's fine, but not if it's warped and ingrown. It's just gone too far" "Humanity is not a blight on the face of the Earth" "Even with climate change, life on Earth will still continue. The calamities Earth has suffered where life continued, gigantic meteorite impacts, super volcanoes, continents drifting all over the place" "There've been times in Earth's past where it's been like a total snowball or absolutely sweltering hot. We had many extinction events, but life continued" "We don't see the dinosaurs now, but they had a good run for 100 plus million years" "Even if there's catastrophic climate change, life continues. It just may not be life as we know it. It may not be humans, it'll be something else" "What we're talking about with climate change is not a threat to all life on Earth, but really maybe a threat to humans, a dislocation if low-lying countries end up underwater" "Over time we need to move to a sustainable energy economy. We can't just keep taking billions of tons of carbon from deep underground and putting it in the atmosphere and expect nothing will happen forever" "But we also don't need to be alarmist about it and super negative and massively disrupt people's lifestyles" "People can continue to live a normal life. They shouldn't feel guilty about being human or having a stake. It's fine"
Jaynit1,009,872 views • 11 days ago
Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale reveals the single difference between working with Peter Thiel vs Elon Musk "Peter's more of the strategist, the philosopher, the thinker. He's not the technical guy himself" "Elon is more of the operator. He's more of there in the room" "I was in Palo Alto a couple weeks ago meeting a friend, and Elon was in the back doing engineering reviews at xAI. He's just there working. He's kind of more of the workhorse. Just push through, solve the details of the technical problems" "Elon's always been one of the very most intense people I've ever seen in terms of working" "When you're in operation mode, guys like Max Levchin and others were just, as far as I could tell, always working"
Jaynit283,690 views • 4 days ago
Bill Ackman reveals the exact difference between valuing a stock and valuing a bond that most people never learn "A bond pays a 5% coupon interest rate. You get that every year, and it's very predictable. If it's a US Government Bond, you know you're going to get it. That's a pretty easy thing to value" "A stock is an interest in a business. It's like owning a piece of a company. A profitable business is like a bond in that it generates these coupons or these earnings or cash flow every year" "The difference is that a bond is a contract. You know what you're going to get. With a stock, you have to make predictions about the business" "How many widgets are they going to sell this year? How many next year? What are their costs going to be? How much money do they need to reinvest to keep the business going?" "What we do is try to find businesses where with a very high degree of confidence we know what those cash flows are going to be for a very long time. There are very few businesses you can have a really high degree of certainty about. Many investments are speculations because it's really very difficult to predict the future"
Jaynit157,758 views • 3 days ago
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"
Jaynit2,415,031 views • 1 month ago
Elon Musk reveals the brutal math behind why a single hour of his time is worth $100 million "Tesla this year will do over $100 billion in revenue, so that's $2 billion a week. If I make slightly better decisions I can affect the outcome by a billion dollars. The marginal value of a better decision can easily be in the course of an hour $100 million" "You have to look at it on a percentage basis. If you look at it in absolute terms, I would never get any sleep. I'd just keep working and work my brain hotter, trying to get as much as possible out of this meat computer"
Jaynit3,323,384 views • 2 months ago
Charlie Munger spent 50 years studying why intelligent people make catastrophically stupid decisions. It is the most useful thing I have ever watched: 1. Incentives are more powerful than anyone thinks. Munger says he has been in the top 5% of his age cohort his entire life in understanding the power of incentives and he has still underestimated it every single year. Federal Express could not get their night shift to work efficiently until someone realized they were paying by the hour. They switched to paying by the shift. The problem disappeared immediately. 2. People rationalise terrible behavior when their incentives point that way, and they do not even know they are doing it. A doctor in Nebraska was removing perfectly healthy gallbladders for years. When Munger asked an old colleague whether the doctor knew he was harming patients, the answer was no. he genuinely believed the gallbladder was the source of all medical evil and that removing it was an act of love. That is incentive-caused bias at its most extreme. 3. Psychological denial is real, and it is not just for weak people. A family friend's son flew off a carrier in the North Atlantic and never came back. His mother, a completely sane woman, simply never believed he was dead. Reality was too painful, so she distorted it until it was bearable. Munger says we all do this to some extent, and it causes terrible problems. 4. Consistency and commitment tendency are one of the most powerful forces in the human mind. Once you have stated a position publicly, you are psychologically locked into it. Max Planck said the really important new physics was never accepted by the old guard. A new guard came along that was less brain blocked by its previous conclusions. If this happened to the deans of physics, Munger says, imagine what it does to ordinary people. 5. The Chinese brainwashing system used on prisoners of war worked better than torture. They did not start with big demands. They maneuvered people into making tiny little commitments and declarations and slowly built from there. The same mechanism operates in every cult, every sales system, and every ideology that gets deeply embedded in people's heads. 6. Pavlovian association shapes buying behavior at a level most people never consciously process. Munger estimates three quarters of all advertising works on pure Pavlov. Coca-Cola does not want to be associated with funerals. They want to be associated with the Olympics, wonderful music, heroics. The association itself changes how people feel about the product at a subconscious level. Raising the price of a product can actually increase its market share because price and quality are associated in the human mind, and people use price as a signal of value. 7. Persian messenger syndrome is alive and running every major organization. The Persians killed the messenger who brought bad news. Bill Paley in his last 20 years, did not hear one thing he did not want to hear. everyone around him knew bringing bad news was dangerous. The result was that one of the most powerful men in media made terrible decisions for two decades because reality never reached him. 8. Social proof causes otherwise intelligent people to follow each other off cliffs. When one oil company bought a fertilizer company in the 1970s, practically every other major oil company rushed out and did the same. There was no rational reason for oil companies to own fertilizer companies. But if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil. Every single acquisition was a disaster. 9. The efficient market theory persisted in academia for decades despite Berkshire Hathaway existing as a living contradiction. One economist kept adding sigmas to explain away the anomaly. two sigma, then three, then four, eventually six sigma. Munger's observation: It is better to add a sigma than change a theory just because the evidence comes in differently. That economist later went into money management himself and sank like a stone. 10. Contrast bias warps perception constantly and invisibly. Put your hand in hot water, then room temperature water. It feels cold. Put your hand in cold water, then room temperature water. It feels hot. same bucket. The human sensory apparatus has no absolute scale, only a contrast scale. Real estate agents exploit this deliberately. They show you two overpriced, awful houses first, then take you to a merely overpriced house, and it feels like a bargain. 11. The frog in slowly heating water is the business version of contrast bias. If something bad comes to you in small pieces, you are likely to miss it entirely. Munger says he has known many high-powered brilliant businessmen who were destroyed this way. not because they were stupid but because each incremental change was too small to trigger alarm. The contrast was never large enough to notice. 12. Authority bias is so powerful it can make trained professionals watch a plane crash. In flight simulator experiments, when the pilot, the authority figure, does something that any trained co-pilot knows will crash the plane, 25% of the time, the co-pilot sits there and lets it crash anyway. They have been trained to know better. The authority relationship overrides the training. 13. Deprivation super reaction syndrome explains why people go insane over small losses. Munger's neighbor had a 180 degree view of the harbor. the neighbor put in a pine tree about 3 feet high that turned it into a 179 and three-quarter degree view. They had a blood feud that went on for years. The New Coke disaster is the corporate version. Coca-Cola told customers they were changing a flavor and triggered a deprival super reaction so powerful that Pepsi was weeks away from releasing old Coke in a Pepsi bottle. smart engineers. brilliant lawyers. armies of psychologists. All missed it. 14. Envy and jealousy are far more powerful than greed and almost entirely absent from psychology textbooks. Munger says Warren Buffett has said half a dozen times that it is not greed that drives the world but envy. In a thousand-page psychology textbook, the index entry for envy and jealousy is blank. One of the most powerful forces in human behavior and academia essentially ignores it. 15. Gambling addiction is not explained by variable reinforcement alone. Skinner thought he had fully explained gambling by showing that variable reward schedules pound in behavior more powerfully than fixed ones. But the people who design modern slot machines know things Skinner did not. Lotteries where you pick your own number get far more play than lotteries where the number is assigned to you. People who commit to a number believe it has more validity because they chose it. Near misses on slot machines trigger deprival super reaction syndrome. It is four or five psychological tendencies working together, not one. 16. The most dangerous situations are when multiple psychological tendencies combine toward the same end at once. Munger calls this the lollapalooza effect. Tupperware parties use four or five tendencies simultaneously. Moonie conversion methods combine multiple tendencies and work extraordinarily well. alcoholics anonymous achieves a 50% no drinking rate when everything else fails because it also combines multiple tendencies toward a constructive end. The Milgram experiment is not just about obedience. it involves authority bias, consistency and commitment tendency, and contrast effects all working together. That combination turns human brains into mush. 17. Boards of directors are structurally designed to fail as corrective mechanisms. The top executive is the authority figure. He is doing something questionable. You look around, and nobody else is objecting, which is social proof that it is fine. He flies you around in the corporate jet and raises your director fees every year, which triggers reciprocation tendency. Munger's rule: boards only act when the behavior gets so bad it starts making them look foolish or threatens legal liability. That is the only forcing function that reliably works. 18. John Goodfriend of Salomon Brothers destroyed his career and reputation because he did not fire a trusted employee who had lied to the government. Every psychological tendency pointed toward keeping the man. He was a close colleague. His wife was known. He was part of a group that had made over a billion dollars for the firm. He said he had never done it before and would never do it again. Goodfriend looked into his eyes and believed him. The man did it again. The lesson: everyone who gets caught embezzling says they have never done it before and will never do it again. That is what they all say. 19. Darwin avoided confirmation bias by deliberately seeking out disconfirming evidence. Munger says Darwin was not especially smart by ordinary standards of human acuity. Yet he is buried in Westminster Abbey. Munger studied how Darwin worked and realized he had psychological tricks worth learning. Darwin always paid extra attention to evidence that contradicted his theories. Munger started doing the same and credits it as one of the most important intellectual habits of his life. 20. Why is the most important word in communication? Carl Braun designed oil refineries with spectacular skill, and you got fired in his company if you wrote a communication without explaining why. not just who, what, where, and when, but why. Braun knew that in a complex system where things can blow up, a communication system that always explains the reason behind an instruction works dramatically better than one that does not. Forstein, the general counsel of Salomon, told Goodfriend on multiple occasions that he had to report the employee's misconduct. He explained it was the right thing to do. He never explained what would happen to Goodfriend personally if he did not. he failed to use the most powerful tool of persuasion. Goodfriend ignored him. When Goodfriend went down, Forstein went with him.
Jaynit760,751 views • 22 days ago
Mark Cuban reveals how he protected himself from losing the 1.4 billion dollars he made selling Broadcast .com to Yahoo "We sold the company to Yahoo for stock. I had seen stocks go up and stocks go down. I told everybody, there's a good chance the whole thing could crash. Don't be greedy" "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Don't get slaughtered" "I put together what they call a collar. I sold some of the upside to the Yahoo stock and protected myself by buying puts on the downside" "Three months later the internet stock market cratered. It was called one of the top 10 Wall Street trades of all time" "All I had to do was protect it and not get greedy and I'd be set for the rest of my life"
Jaynit1,587,140 views • 1 month ago
In 2019, MIT professor Patrick Winston gave a legendary 1-hour lecture called “How to Speak.” It has 18M+ views for a reason. His frameworks: • Your ideas are like your children • The 5-minute rule for job talks • Why jokes fail at the start 15 lessons on communication:
Jaynit5,297,132 views • 3 months ago
Elon Musk reveals why he believes phones, apps, and operating systems will be extinct within 5-6 years "We're not going to have a phone in the traditional sense. What we call a phone will really be an edge node for AI inference, for AI video inference" "There won't be operating systems. There won't be apps in the future. It'll just be a device that is there for the screen and audio" "You'll get everything through AI. Whatever you can think of, or really whatever the AI can anticipate you might want, it'll show you" "Most of what people consume in 5 or 6 years, maybe sooner than that, will be AI-generated content. Music, videos" "There are people who have made AI videos using Grok Imagine that are several minutes long, 10 or 15 minutes, and it's pretty coherent" "The phone will just display the pixels and make the sounds that it anticipates you would most like to receive"
Jaynit555,037 views • 18 days ago
Jeff Bezos reveals the simple phrase that saved him countless arguments running Amazon "Disagree and commit is a really important principle that saves a lot of arguing" "One of my direct reports would want to do something. I'd think it was a bad idea. We'd go back and forth and I'd often say, you know what, I don't think you're right, but I'm going to gamble with you" "You're closer to the ground truth than I am. I've known you for 20 years, you have great judgment" "At least then you've made a decision and I'm agreeing to commit to that decision. I'm not going to be second guessing it, sniping at it, or saying I told you so" "I'm going to try actively to help make sure it works. That's a really important teammate behavior"
Jaynit1,195,371 views • 1 month ago
Walter Isaacson reveals how Elon Musk fired 85% of Twitter's employees in three rounds and why "He brought in the engineers and figured the amount of people doing Tesla full self-driving and autopilot software was about one-tenth of what was doing software for Twitter. He said this can't be the case" "He fired 85% in three different rounds. First was firing people because they had a team from Tesla's autopilot team grading the code written in the past year. Then he fired people who didn't seem totally all in or loyal. Then another round of layoffs" "At each step, almost everybody says that's enough, it's going to destroy things. They were partly right. There was degradation of the service, but not as much as half the services I use" "He has an algorithm. Question every requirement, then delete delete delete. And the corollary, if you don't end up adding back 20% of what you deleted, you didn't delete enough in the first round" "You asked me if he overdid it. He probably overdid it by 20%, which is his formula"
Jaynit748,307 views • 1 month ago
Elon Musk reveals the disturbing example he says proves AI has already been programmed to lie "You don't force AI to believe things that are false. When Google Gemini was asked to make an image of the founding fathers, it was a group of diverse women. That is factually untrue, and the AI knows it's factually untrue, but it's also being told everything has to be diverse women" "At one point, if you asked ChatGPT and Gemini which is worse, misgendering Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear war where everyone dies, it would say misgendering Caitlyn Jenner" "Even Caitlyn Jenner disagrees with that" "Imagine as AI gets more and more powerful. If it says the most important thing is no misgendering, it will say, in order to ensure no one gets misgendered, if you eliminate all humans, then no one can get misgendered because there's no humans to do the misgendering" "Or if it says everyone must be diverse, it means there can be no straight white men. Then you and I would get executed by the AI" "The problem is that it can drive AI crazy. You're telling AI to believe a lie, and that can have disastrous consequences" "I don't think people quite appreciate the level of danger we're in from the woke mind virus being effectively programmed into AI" "It matters how you build the AI and what kind of values you install. The most important thing is that it be maximally truth-seeking"
Jaynit348,855 views • 17 days ago
Jordan Peterson on how to easily overcome social anxiety: 1. Social anxiety is not shyness. When you walk into a social situation, your brain registers it as a dominance hierarchy that is judging you. A negative judgment means low status. Low status interferes with everything your biology cares about. You are not being irrational. You are being evaluated by something that feels like nature itself, and your nervous system knows it. 2. Telling an anxious person to stop thinking about themselves does not work. You cannot tell someone to stop thinking about something. They get caught in the loop. Stop thinking about a white elephant. white elephant. white elephant. The instruction makes it worse. The only way out is to give the brain something else to do. 3. The actual solution is to look at other people. not glance. Genuinely look. Watch their face. Track what they are thinking. The moment you focus outward, your automatic social mechanisms engage, and the awkwardness dissolves on its own. You cannot be socially calibrated and self-focused at the same time. Attention can only go in one direction. 4. When speaking to a group, never try to address the group. It does not exist as a thing you can talk to. Find one person, look at them directly, and talk to that person. They will reflect the entire room back to you because everyone is entrained to the same social signal. If you can talk to one person, you can talk to anyone. 5. The eye at the top of the pyramid, the thing the Egyptians worshipped as Horus, is attention itself. What you pay attention to determines everything. The most important thing to look at is whatever your instincts flag as slightly wrong or off. That is where the real information is. Your enemies are useful for the same reason. They will tell you things about yourself that nobody else will, and occasionally one of those things will be accurate.
Jaynit603,750 views • 29 days ago
Rick Rubin reveals the three completely different creative processes used by Eminem, Jay-Z, and Anthony Kiedis "Eminem will always be writing in a book, always writing all the time. I asked him, are all these rhymes used? He's like no, 99% of what I write I'll never use, just to stay engaged in the process of writing" "Jay-Z doesn't write anything down. He listens to the beat, hums, then goes on the mic 20 minutes later and just says a whole complicated verse. No paper, no writing, nothing" "Anthony Kiedis sings along with an idea of a melody but he doesn't yet have words, just nonsense words automatically real time, then listens back and says this phrase sounds good. It's like a puzzle"
Jaynit1,429,610 views • 2 months ago
Kevin O'Leary reveals the trust fund structure he set up for his kids the day after he became rich "When the learning company got sold for about $4.2 billion and 10 of us were founders, we woke up and said we're rich. I went to the lawyers and said I want to set up a trust that pays for my kids until they finish college and then they get nothing" "The lawyer said what the hell's that. I said it's a way I can provide for them to set them up in life but not entitle them. I was taking a cue from my mother's strategy" His mother's strategy: "When I graduated, my mother said I've got great news, I'm coming to the graduation, but I also have some other news, no more checks. I said what do you mean. She said the dead bird under the nest never learns how to fly. No more checks. You're going to have to figure this out on your own" "I had a tough couple of years. I couldn't even pay the rent. But it worked out and I got motivated"
Jaynit1,412,325 views • 2 months ago
Kobe Bryant reveals exactly why so many athletes go broke a few years after retirement "Once you retire you don't have that source of income coming in. Even if you save over a 15-year career, if your spending habits remain the same, eventually that well is going to run dry" "For us athletes the retirement age is 32, 34, if you're lucky 37 like myself. What comes next?" "The question needs to be, what is my passion. Not where I can create the most value or generate the most revenue, but what is my next passion" "When you find that next passion, then everything else will make sense" "But that's the hardest part for us" "We have to constantly learn. Our mantra is value growth, because to grow you have to constantly learn, constantly move, constantly improve"
Jaynit941,524 views • 1 month ago
Elon Musk reveals the single idea that explains why he keeps working despite being worth $800 billion "When I was a teenager, I had an existential crisis trying to figure out what's the meaning of life. It doesn't seem to be any meaning" "For me at least, the religious texts that I read did not seem convincing. Then I started reading the philosophers. You have to be careful of reading German philosophers as a teenager. It's definitely not going to help with your depression" "Reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as a kid you're like, whoa" "Then I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. What Douglas Adams was saying is that we don't really know what the right questions are to ask. The real problem is trying to formulate the question. To really have the right question, you need a much bigger computer than Earth" "The universe is the answer. What is the question? Or what are the questions?" "The more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, the better we can understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe" "The more we can expand consciousness, become a multi-planet species, ultimately a multi-stellar species, we have a chance of figuring out what the hell's going on" "This is why I think we should have more humans and more digital, both biological and digital consciousness"
Jaynit1,265,818 views • 2 months ago
Elon Musk reveals the single question he uses to spot liars in interviews: "When I interview somebody, I really just ask them to tell me the story of their career, what are some of the tougher problems they dealt with, how they dealt with those, and how they made decisions at key transition points. Usually that's enough to get a very good gut feel about someone." Elon explains what he's looking for: "What I'm really looking for is evidence of exceptional ability. Did they face really difficult problems and overcome them?" Then he shares how to tell if someone is lying about their accomplishments: "You want to make sure that if there was some significant accomplishment, were they really responsible, or was somebody else more responsible? The person who actually had to struggle with the problem, they really understand it. They don't forget. You can ask them very detailed questions about it and they will know the answer. The person who was not truly responsible for that accomplishment will not know the details." On whether college degrees matter: "There's no need to have a college degree at all. Or even high school. If somebody graduated from a great university, that may be an indication they'll be capable of great things, but it's not necessarily the case. Look at Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs. These guys didn't graduate from college. But if you had a chance to hire them, of course that would be a good idea." He concludes: "I'm just looking for evidence of exceptional ability. If there's a track record of exceptional achievement, it's likely that will continue into the future."
Jaynit1,033,465 views • 1 month ago