Lem

the deals that built modern wealth - one every morning

[Lem @0xLeeem]

@lumenxbt the system is the product

[Lem @0xLeeem]

@0xDezo golden words fren

[Lem @0xLeeem]

An MIT professor accidentally dismantled the executive coaching industry. Ten million people have watched the tape.

He filmed the lecture exactly once, in January 2018. He died eighteen months later.

The same material coaches sell for fifteen thousand dollars a session sits on YouTube for free, and Winston covered three times as much in one hour.

His name was Patrick Winston. He directed the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997 and wrote the AI textbook every computer science major worldwide studied 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. Open with an empathetic connection. End with a punch line the audience can repeat over dinner. Never start with a joke. Never end with "thank you."

That last rule alone has probably cost executive coaches 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 literal opening line of the lecture. Winston believed it firmly enough to spend fifty years teaching computer scientists how to talk in front of a room.

Founders pay $80,000 for an MBA and then hire a communications coach to teach them the exact material Winston filmed once for free. Engineers write brilliant code and get passed over for promotion by teammates who watched this lecture on the way to work.

The video is free on MIT OpenCourseWare. The textbook is free on his page.

Winston died in 2019. Almost none of the ten million viewers have 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.

[Lem @0xLeeem]

https://t.co/Pk0iJjHj2Z

[Lem @0xLeeem]

@0xZenq knowing is cheap, applying is rare

[Lem @0xLeeem]

@0xDezo delivery is part of the idea

[Lem @0xLeeem]

@0xzynex he invested where attention creates the moat

[Lem @0xLeeem]

Michael Milken made $25,000 a year until he read one column of a 1958 academic paper the entire banking industry had ignored for sixteen years.

by 1987 he was making $550 million a year off it. alone. one desk at Drexel. no fund, no partners, no equity.

the paper was Braddock Hickman's study of every corporate bond issued from 1900 to 1943. one column showed the default rate on the lowest-rated debt. wall street had priced those bonds as if half of them would go to zero. Hickman's number was 3%.

Milken read it and never stopped trading it.

by the end he was generating more than half of Drexel's profits. the junk bond market he built from nothing was worth $150 billion. Ted Turner used it to build CNN. Steve Wynn built modern Vegas. McCaw Cellular became AT&T Wireless.

he drove an Oldsmobile. lived in a modest house in Encino. the money was never the point. being right was.

then Ivan Boesky got caught. Boesky was Milken's own client. facing prison, he wore a wire on the man who made him rich. six felonies. $600 million in fines. twenty-two months served. first time RICO was ever used against a man with no connection to organized crime.

today Milken is worth $6 billion and hosts the most powerful conference in finance. the men who informed on him are dead. Braddock Hickman's book is still on the shelf.

the equation was public for sixteen years before anyone traded it. that gap is the entire edge.

[Lem @0xLeeem]

@Di_Krass_ hmm agree with u

[Lem @0xLeeem]

Michael Milken made $25,000 a year until he read one column of a 1958 academic paper the entire banking industry had ignored for sixteen years.

by 1987 he was making $550 million a year off it. alone. one desk at Drexel. no fund, no partners, no equity.

the paper was Braddock Hickman's study of every corporate bond issued from 1900 to 1943. one column showed the default rate on the lowest-rated debt. wall street had priced those bonds as if half of them would go to zero. Hickman's number was 3%.

Milken read it and never stopped trading it.

by the end he was generating more than half of Drexel's profits. the junk bond market he built from nothing was worth $150 billion. Ted Turner used it to build CNN. Steve Wynn built modern Vegas. McCaw Cellular became AT&T Wireless.

he drove an Oldsmobile. lived in a modest house in Encino. the money was never the point. being right was.

then Ivan Boesky got caught. Boesky was Milken's own client. facing prison, he wore a wire on the man who made him rich. six felonies. $600 million in fines. twenty-two months served. first time RICO was ever used against a man with no connection to organized crime.

today Milken is worth $6 billion and hosts the most powerful conference in finance. the men who informed on him are dead. Braddock Hickman's book is still on the shelf.

the equation was public for sixteen years before anyone traded it. that gap is the entire edge.

[Lem @0xLeeem]

https://t.co/Pk0iJjHj2Z

[Lem @0xLeeem]

Peter Thiel and Chris Sacca sat on the same DealBook stage - between them they wrote the first outside checks to Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Palantir, PayPal, SpaceX - roughly a trillion dollars of market cap traced back to two names

Thiel wrote the $500K check that made Zuckerberg's dorm room a real company - Sacca turned $300K into over a billion in Uber

different playbooks, same result - Thiel bets on monopolies, Sacca bets on network effects at inflection

Thiel: "competition is for losers - the best businesses look wrong for years and then they own everything"

Sacca doesn't take pitches - if the deal is coming to you, you're already too late

both got called wrong on every deal that mattered - both retired billionaires before 45

this is one of the rarest recordings of two of the sharpest minds in modern venture on one stage

bookmark & watch ↓

follow me - one billionaire's playbook every day

[Lem @0xLeeem]

@0xzynex and its the most important point

[Lem @0xLeeem]

Peter Thiel and Chris Sacca sat on the same DealBook stage - between them they wrote the first outside checks to Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Palantir, PayPal, SpaceX - roughly a trillion dollars of market cap traced back to two names

Thiel wrote the $500K check that made Zuckerberg's dorm room a real company - Sacca turned $300K into over a billion in Uber

different playbooks, same result - Thiel bets on monopolies, Sacca bets on network effects at inflection

Thiel: "competition is for losers - the best businesses look wrong for years and then they own everything"

Sacca doesn't take pitches - if the deal is coming to you, you're already too late

both got called wrong on every deal that mattered - both retired billionaires before 45

this is one of the rarest recordings of two of the sharpest minds in modern venture on one stage

bookmark & watch ↓

follow me - one billionaire's playbook every day

[Lem @0xLeeem]

https://t.co/Pk0iJjHj2Z

[Lem @0xLeeem]

@0xZenq narratives move faster than due diligence

[Lem @0xLeeem]

@0xDezo everyone sees the same data. few see the same opportunity.

[Lem @0xLeeem]

@0xZenq that's what makes investing so fascinating

[Lem @0xLeeem]

Ryan Reynolds sat next to T-Mobile's CEO on Mad Money the day after selling his phone company for $1.35 billion - his stake was worth roughly $300 million - he'd bought it 4 years earlier for pocket change

it wasn't his first play - he sold Aviation Gin to Diageo for $610 million in 2020 - bought the stake two years before that

his playbook: buy a tiny brand nobody's watching, write every ad himself through his agency Maximum Effort, sell to a giant when it hits scale

no fund, no partners, no ads he didn't write himself - one actor built a $1 billion track record treating brands like scripts

this is him on Mad Money with Jim Cramer and T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert breaking down the deal live - and hinting at the next one already loaded

bookmark & watch ↓

[Lem @0xLeeem]

@0xZenq he proved great storytelling can compound like capital <3

[Lem @0xLeeem]

Ryan Reynolds sat next to T-Mobile's CEO on Mad Money the day after selling his phone company for $1.35 billion - his stake was worth roughly $300 million - he'd bought it 4 years earlier for pocket change

it wasn't his first play - he sold Aviation Gin to Diageo for $610 million in 2020 - bought the stake two years before that

his playbook: buy a tiny brand nobody's watching, write every ad himself through his agency Maximum Effort, sell to a giant when it hits scale

no fund, no partners, no ads he didn't write himself - one actor built a $1 billion track record treating brands like scripts

this is him on Mad Money with Jim Cramer and T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert breaking down the deal live - and hinting at the next one already loaded

bookmark & watch ↓

[Lem @0xLeeem]

https://t.co/Pk0iJjHj2Z

[Lem @0xLeeem]

@0xDezo attention was the real asset all along

[Lem @0xLeeem]

@0xDezo absolutely agree with u

[Lem @0xLeeem]

Ed Thorp is the MIT math professor who beat Vegas at blackjack in 1962 - then beat Wall Street with the same math - then caught Bernie Madoff as a fraud in 1991, 17 years before the SEC did

he ran Princeton Newport for 19 years with a 19% annualized return - and never had a losing quarter, 227 in a row

Warren Buffett vouched for him personally after a single dinner in 1968

his one rule for every bet he ever placed: "Kelly criterion - bet a fixed fraction of your bankroll, never more, never less - anything else is emotion"

when Madoff's returns were straight lines and everyone was piling in - Thorp did the math in an afternoon and said "impossible" - the SEC ignored him for 17 years

this is Thorp on Inside OC breaking down the exact process he used to beat casinos, Wall Street, and the biggest fraud in history

bookmark & watch ↓

[Lem @0xLeeem]

https://t.co/Pk0iJjHj2Z