the lich
@thelichhh • 5,443 subscribers
data analyst | AI | web3
Videos
A Nobel Prize-winning economist was seated in front of a television set from 1977 and was asked to argue for the idea that anyone should be allowed to own anything. Almost no one watches it. Friedrich Hayek is appearing on Firing Line three years after winning the Nobel Prize to defend the idea of private property against a live panel. There's no editing and no commercial break just four men in suits, one camera, and one hour of argument recorded on tape. Look at the stage at which he goes from property to knowledge. The argument is not that owners are entitled to it, but that no one can have sufficient information without it. People debate property online, and he did so on live television.
the lich344,208 views • 1 month ago
The most influential mathematician of his generation stands in a German lecture hall and explains a foundation he is rebuilding from scratch. Almost nobody watches it. This is Peter Scholze at Bielefeld University, November 2025, opening lecture of a new public series called Ars Mathematica. Scholze became a full professor at 24 and won the Fields Medal at 30. His work on perfectoid spaces reorganized entire areas of arithmetic geometry inside a decade. Condensed mathematics is his attempt to fix something deeper: the way analysis and algebra refuse to sit together properly. He is proposing new foundations for how mathematical objects carry topology. Watch how he pitches it to a general audience. No prerequisites assumed, no dilution, a working mathematician showing why abstraction opens rooms you could not otherwise enter. A researcher I know rewatched the middle section twice and said it was the first time condensed mathematics felt like an idea rather than a rumour. Free on YouTube from a university channel, subtitles on. Some people prove theorems. He is replacing the floor.
the lich380,277 views • 1 month ago
MIT filmed a calculus course in black and white decades ago and it still teaches better than most of what shipped this year. Almost nobody watches it. This is Calculus Revisited, Unit 1, Lecture 1, taught by Herb Gross. Analytic geometry from the ground up, chalk on a board, 1 camera locked in place. Gross built the course for adults returning to math after years away. No prerequisites assumed. Every idea earned in front of you instead of quoted from a textbook. The opening move is simple division written on the board. From there he shows why coordinates work at all, the thing most courses skip and every student silently fakes. Watch how slowly he goes. Each step spoken out loud, nothing left implicit, the pace of someone who expects you to actually follow. A backend engineer I know rewatched Unit 1 twice before touching linear algebra and said it fixed a gap he'd carried for 12 years. MIT put the whole course online free under Creative Commons. Production value aged badly. The teaching didn't.
the lich344,687 views • 1 month ago
An Indian institute of technology filmed a full course on how money actually moves through a banking system and released it for nothing. The course is Economics of Banking and Finance Markets, produced at IIT Kanpur under NPTEL, India's national open courseware programme. It runs in sequence as one continuous argument rather than a set of clips. A green chalkboard, a lapel microphone, a checked shirt, one fixed camera. He opens with the only question that matters at the start. Where does surplus money sit, who needs it, and what stands between them. Then he splits the answer in 2. Direct finance, where the saver reaches the borrower through a market. Indirect finance, where a bank stands in the middle and absorbs the risk instead. Everything after that hangs off the split. Time value of money, risk, information asymmetry, why institutions exist at all, and what regulators are actually regulating. The turn is what he does with information. Banks are not warehouses for money. They exist because one side of every transaction knows things the other side does not, and the whole industry is built on charging for that gap. It matters more now. Every fintech product claims to cut out the middleman, and almost none of them remove the information problem that put him there. Free, in order, subtitled, funded by a public programme. The banking system explained from the first principle, for nothing. Lecture 1. 2 channels. It is in the video.
the lich101,070 views • 1 month ago
One of the largest trading firms in the world teaches new hires poker before it lets them near a book. A newspaper brought a camera to the table and sat down to play. The men across the felt are working Wall Street traders. The firm is Susquehanna, which built poker into its training programme decades ago and still runs it that way, on the argument that the card room teaches something no finance degree does. Gunjan Banerji from the Wall Street Journal plays the hands herself rather than interviewing them about it. A green table, a dealer, chips, 4 people who do this for a living. No lecture hall, no slides. The teaching happens between deals, while money is actually at stake. They break it into parts on camera. Risk management first. Then bet sizing. Then patience, which sounds like the soft one and is not. Then reading the person opposite when the only data available is how they behave with money on the table. The section on patience is the one most people skip. Folding is the correct action in the overwhelming majority of hands, and almost nobody can do it for hours without inventing a reason to play. The same failure shows up in a trading account as overtrading, and it kills more people than bad analysis. Then bet sizing, which is where the video earns the watch. Being right about the odds is the easy half. How much you put behind a correct read is the part that ends careers, and they work through it hand by hand instead of describing it in the abstract. The turn is what the traders admit about being wrong. A good decision loses regularly, a bad decision wins regularly, and the only way to last is to grade the process instead of the result. Everything else in the video sits downstream of that. It matters more now than when the firm started running these tables. Every model prices probability in a second and hands it to you for free. Nothing on the screen tells you how much of your account to put behind the number, or what to do after the number was right and you lost anyway. Free on YouTube, produced by a newspaper, filmed at a real table with real hands. The maths is public. The sizing is the job. 1 table. 4 traders. It is in the video.
the lich62,689 views • 1 month ago
A Nobel Prize-winning economist was by himself on a dark stage and said to the audience that most of the things they believe about the Great Depression are incorrect. Very few people watch it. Milton Friedman discusses five myths: those concerning the robber barons, the Depression, the public's demand for government, the idea of a free lunch, and who in fact ends up receiving the transferred wealth. He states that the industrialists in the 19th century became wealthy through production rather than through appropriation, and that no other period achieved a faster improvement in the standard of living for the average person. When looking at the transition from the Depression to the free lunch, note that every way a government adopts to generate money eventually comes back to the same person, and he refers to that person. The stage is empty except for a lectern and a microphone, and he is not holding any notes. People repeat the myths and he recorded the arithmetic.
the lich39,177 views • 1 month ago
A Fields Medalist walked into a UCLA hall and explained prime numbers to people with no mathematics background. Almost nobody watches it. Terence Tao won the Fields Medal, mathematics' highest honour, then a MacArthur Fellowship less than a month later. He was UCLA's first professor to take the Fields. The talk is structure and randomness in the primes. Numbers that look scattered at every scale, yet obey rules strict enough to build cryptography on. That tension is the same one running through every model trained in 2026. Randomness with structure underneath, and the whole question of where one stops and the other starts. Watch how he pitches it. General audience, no prerequisites, one of the strongest living mathematicians choosing clarity over display. A cryptography engineer I know rewatched the middle section twice and said the primes stopped looking arbitrary. Free on YouTube from UCLA, 17 years online. The hardest minds explain most simply. The pattern never changes.
the lich50,394 views • 1 month ago
8 DGX Sparks on a desk just ran a frontier model at 400K context. A friend who owns the inference budget at a Berlin AI startup, $52K a month in API bills, sent me this at 2 a.m. with one line: "we're buying the hardware." It starts as a disaster. A mountain of cables burying $32K of NVIDIA silicon, nothing talking to anything. 54 minutes later the whole stack answers as 1 machine. 1TB of unified memory. GLM-5.2 loaded across all 8 nodes. The part that made him rewatch twice sits around the 25-minute mark, where 1 networking fix turns 8 boxes into a cluster. Most people quit exactly there. He paused it 4 times. Screenshotted the interface setup. Forwarded it to his CTO without a caption. The cloud bill was never the moat. The cables were.
the lich56,893 views • 2 months ago
A Fields Medalist stood on a stage in the 1960s and taught the geometry every gradient moves through. The film went missing for years. This is John Milnor, lecture 1 on differential topology, filmed by the Mathematical Association of America soon after he won the Fields Medal in 1962. He was in his early 30s. The same lectures became Topology from the Differentiable Viewpoint, a book still assigned 60 years later and short enough to read in a week. Smooth maps, manifolds, regular values. The vocabulary under every loss surface, every latent space, every paper with the word manifold in the abstract. Watch what he writes at the top of the board and how little he needs after it. No slides, no notation dumped on the room, each definition doing real work. A research engineer I know worked through the book alongside the film and said the two together beat every modern course he tried. The footage was unavailable for years. It sits free on YouTube now, black and white, 1 fixed camera. The best textbook in the field is a transcript of this room.
the lich29,983 views • 1 month ago
A mathematician solved a problem that stood open for over 100 years, then explained it in an Italian lecture hall to a few dozen people. This is Hong Wang, professor at NYU's Courant Institute and at IHES in Paris, delivering the Colloquium Patavinum on Kakeya sets in 3 dimensions. The question is deceptively small: take a needle of length 1 and rotate it to point in every possible direction. How little space can the set of positions occupy. The conjecture says the answer must fill full dimension. Wang proved it in 3 dimensions. The Salem Prize followed in 2025, the Sadosky Prize in 2026, and an invitation to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Watch how she frames the general statement about unions of tubes. The needle problem falls out as a corollary of something larger. A researcher I know rewatched the setup twice and said it was the clearest account of the result he had found anywhere. Free on YouTube from an Italian mathematics department. The problem was posed in 1917. She closed it, then took questions.
the lich13,485 views • 1 month ago
Richard Hamming stood in front of Navy graduate students in 1995 and explained why smart engineers build the wrong systems. The camera caught 45 minutes of it. Almost nobody watches it. Hamming ran computing at Bell Labs when Bell Labs was inventing the modern world. Error-correcting codes carry his name. Every hard drive, every satellite link, every AI training run leans on his math. This lecture isn't about code. It's about why teams optimize the part and lose the whole. Every startup drowning in AI agents that work in demos and die in production is making the mistake he names here. He was 80 years old. He'd watched 4 decades of brilliant people fail the same way and distilled it into 1 chalk talk for students who mostly forgot it. An engineering director I know stopped the video near the middle, screenshotted the board, and made it his team's wallpaper. The footage sits free on YouTube. Fewer views than a desk lamp review. The systems fail the same way every decade. The lecture doesn't change.
the lich10,846 views • 1 month ago
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