Pagor

Content Creator | AI builder | money

[Pagor @0xPagor]

@bobixbt 4 wins, 3 losses, +$41 and he's already the best trader alive😂

[Pagor @0xPagor]

Naval Ravikant says every desire you have is a contract with yourself to stay unhappy until you get what you want.

In the video below, he tells Joe Rogan that happiness is also a choice. His challenge to people who think they're smart and capable: if you're so smart, why can't you change this?

Joe pushes back. Some people take pleasure in being miserable, he says, because for them the pursuit of excellence beats everything else. It's not a trade-off.

Naval says to define happiness more tightly and goes back to old Buddhist wisdom, which he says isn't original. When he's unhappy, he looks for the desire underneath that isn't being fulfilled.

Desires themselves aren't the problem, he says. You're a biological creature and you need a mission. The problem is having too many, picked up unconsciously or randomly. The coffee's too cold. You're not sitting right. The dog left a mess on the lawn. Thousands of small contracts, all open at once.

His answer: pick one overwhelming desire. It's okay to suffer over that one. Let the rest go and you can be calm and relaxed, and you'll do a better job.

Most unhappy people, he says, don't have a clear, calm mind. They're too busy in their head, their sense of self is too strong, they sit indoors and think too much. An athlete whose limbs are flailing out of control won't perform, and the same goes for business: you need a clear, calm, cool, collected mind.

His example is Warren Buffett, who plays bridge all day and goes for walks in the sun instead of loading his brain with non-stop information and getting worked up about every little thing.

And the stakes are higher now. We live in an age of infinite leverage, Naval says: podcasting, capital, people working for you or code can multiply your actions a thousand-fold. So the impact of good decisions is much bigger than it used to be.

How many open contracts are you carrying right now?

[Pagor @0xPagor]

@0xZasti the last line of the post is the real story. 11m views of a banana is the ad. the $9k came from people asking how, so the product was never the video

[Pagor @0xPagor]

@vandalbv we keep telling this story as "genius, but flawed." I think it's simpler. she was a bad father for years, and the products have nothing to do with it. success doesn't cancel anything, it just gives people a reason to look away

[Pagor @0xPagor]

Ex-hedge fund investor Patrick Boyle says he throws away about 90% of his research. And that's what a good outcome looks like.

In the video below, he's asked whether enough data can predict anything. He says no. Using data is like driving while looking in the rearview mirror: it's the only thing you can see. He doesn't believe the future is predictable, but he thinks you can make the decisions a wise man would if you use the data.

The problem, he says, is people who start with an opinion. His old boss called it results-driven research: you already have the answer, then you torture the data until it agrees with you.

His approach is the opposite. Say you've no idea, you think it might work a certain way, and you check whether it does. Most of the research finds nothing useful. You throw away 90%, focus on the other 10%, and if you pull one good signal out of that, you're doing really well.

That's the same trap statistics warns about. Test 100 random strategies at the usual 5% threshold and about 5 will look like winners by pure luck. In his book, Boyle writes that luck is a misrepresentation of probability.

He also says his videos are never meant to tell people what to do. Not as a legal disclaimer, but because he likes viewers to think for themselves. He shows the research, leaves the conclusion to them, and the comments often reach very different ones.

Why would a quick analysis made for a video, he asks, tell you how various securities will perform over various holding periods?

When you last made an investment decision, did you start with the question or with the answer?

[Pagor @0xPagor]

@NarutoNolimits most people mix up two different rules. 80% on a road trip is about saving time. 80% for daily charging is about battery health. same number, completely different reason

[Pagor @0xPagor]

@catazaurus 15 wins 1 loss in two days with 8x longs tells me more about the market than the bot. check how it trades the first red week

[Pagor @0xPagor]

@EnvestaApp yeah, that's what makes him rare. most managers will never say "I might not be one of the exceptional ones" out loud, because it's bad for business

[Pagor @0xPagor]

92.89% of active large-cap US funds lost to the S&P 500 over the last 20 years. Howard Marks says that's exactly why index funds took over.

In the video below, he tells the story. In 1968, in graduate school at the University of Chicago, his professor said most mutual funds underperform the S&P and charge high fees. So why not just buy one share of every stock in it? There were no index funds yet. The first came in 1974, mainly through Jack Bogle.

Today most mutual fund equity capital is passive. Was it just low fees? Marks says no. Even if active funds charged the same fee as an index fund, inferior decisions would still lose to the index. Fees only made it worse.

His conclusion: indexation took over not because it's so good, but because active management was so bad.

The numbers back him up. According to S&P's SPIVA scorecard, the share of active large-cap US funds that underperformed the S&P 500:

1 year (2025): 79%
10 years: 85.59%
15 years: 89.93%
20 years: 92.89%

In 2025 the S&P 500 rose 18%, and active managers still had their fourth-worst year in the 25-year history of the scorecard.

So what's left for people? Marks says AI is excellent at finding past patterns and applying them with discipline. But can it sit down with five business plans and figure out which one is Amazon? Five CEOs and figure out which one is Steve Jobs? He'd bet not.

Then he adds: neither can most people. There's a role for exceptional people, even in an AI world. He hopes to be one of them.

If only about 7% of professionals beat the index over 20 years, what are the odds you're in that group?

[Pagor @0xPagor]

Tobey Maguire won $15.6 million from billionaire Andy Beal in a December 2019 poker match. Then he had to hire a lawyer to get paid.

According to testimony, Beal didn't pay and later offered to settle for less. Maguire's share was $7.8 million. He brought in attorney Tom Goldstein, paid him $500,000, and Beal eventually paid in June 2020. Goldstein was later convicted of tax and mortgage fraud, and Maguire testified at his trial.

In the video below, Molly Bloom, who ran the private poker games Maguire played in, describes what he was like at her table. She says he once told her it's not really about money, it's more about crushing souls.

She remembers one hand. Maguire swore on his mother's life, or someone's, she can't remember whose, that he had the top hand. The other player was tortured, folded, and Maguire showed the bluff.

Then there was the tip. She says he told her that to get it, she had to climb onto the table and bark like a seal. She refused. The game stopped for 35 minutes while everyone watched.

She says it wasn't about the tip. It was a demand for compliance, a way to feel he held power over her.

A couple of weeks later, she says, he talked a very rich, very bad player into hosting a game at his house. The other players followed.

Then he called her, gleefully: "You're done. You're over."

Molly says she lost the game, but she wouldn't give up her dignity to keep it.

Was it ever about the money?

[Pagor @0xPagor]

@xQu1q the $12k number is the easy part. what I want to know is what the robot costs to run: maintenance, chemicals, someone to fix it when it jams at 2am

[Pagor @0xPagor]

@HeyShobhan what gets me is he's talking like someone who has nothing to prove. in 1992 NeXT wasn't winning and nobody knew Apple was coming back. that's why it's so honest

[Pagor @0xPagor]

@0xZasti the hot dog not giving under the bite is such a good tell. faces got solved first, contact physics is what's left. probably not for long though

[Pagor @0xPagor]

Stock futures were down about 818 points when CNBC's Becky Quick sat down with Warren Buffett and asked if the coronavirus was a reason to panic.

In the video below, Buffett says he has no special thoughts beyond the news. Then he tells her about the first day he ever bought stocks: March 12, 1942. Stocks were down about 2% that day. He had bought in the morning, so when his dad told him the execution price in the evening, he was already down 2%.

His point is how you think about what you're buying. Stocks are businesses, he says, and people would be better off saying "I bought a business today" instead of "I bought a stock today." If you buy a farm or an apartment, you expect to own it for years. A business is the same: ten, twenty, thirty years.

So the real question, he says, isn't what the market did today. It's whether the ten-year or twenty-year outlook for American businesses has changed in the last 24 or 48 hours.

He points to what they own: American Express for 20 years, Coca-Cola for 40. You don't buy or sell a business based on today's headlines.

And if the headlines give you a chance to buy something you like even cheaper, he says, you're in good luck.

Has the 20-year outlook for the businesses you own changed in the last 48 hours?

[Pagor @0xPagor]

@xQu1q turns out the hardest thing for a robot is something we do without even thinking

[Pagor @0xPagor]

When Christina Crawford was a little girl, she peeled a strip of wallpaper off her bedroom wall, panicked, and tried to paste it back. Her fingerprints only made it worse.

Her mother took scissors to her favorite yellow dress, cut it to shreds and made her wear it for a week. If anyone asked why she looked like that, she was supposed to say she didn't like pretty things.

In the video below, Christina tells talk show host Phil Donahue about growing up with her mother, Hollywood star Joan Crawford. Donahue says she was five or maybe seven when the wallpaper incident happened.

She wore the ruined dress in front of outsiders. Donahue asks if her underwear was visible too. She says yes.

He then describes night raids: her mother dragging her out of bed by her hair, into the closet, screaming because of wire hangers. Christina confirms it, and says she thought she was in the middle of a nightmare.

She says her mother ran the house like the Army, with a set time and place for everything. When a rule was broken, especially late at night and after drinking, something took hold of her mother, maybe her own fear, and she would punish Christina brutally for minor infractions.

Donahue tells her that her book reads like a desperate cry, almost begging her mother to love her. It is written through the eyes of a child growing up, not an adult looking back.

Christina says she spent most of her life trying to make sure her mother loved her.

Does a story told through a child's eyes hit harder than one told by an adult looking back?

[Pagor @0xPagor]

@catazaurus yeah, bro, well said

[Pagor @0xPagor]

The snare drum weighed 40 pounds. Sam Berns weighed 50.

His band director looked at those numbers and moved him to pit percussion. Sam, who has progeria, a rare disease that causes accelerated aging, had other plans.

In the video below, he tells the story at TEDxMidAtlantic. Pit percussion meant bongos, timpani and a cowbell, but no marching, and he says he was devastated. He decided nothing would stop him from playing snare drum in the halftime show.

His family worked with an engineer to design a new harness. It weighed about 6 pounds. A couple of years later, he played the Spider-Man theme at halftime with the Foxboro High School Marching Band.

When NPR asked what people should know about him, he said he has a very happy life. He doesn't want anyone to feel bad for him, and says most of his time goes to things that have nothing to do with progeria: music, comics, Boston sports.

He built that life on three rules.

First, be okay with what you can't do, because there is so much you can do. When something is blocked, find the adjustment, like the 6-pound drum.

Second, surround yourself with people you want to be with. His were a group of band geeks who see each other for who they are on the inside.

Third, keep moving forward. Always have something to look forward to, from the next comic book to the next football game. On bad days he lets the feeling in, acknowledges it, and moves past it instead of feeling sorry for himself.

He tested all three when he was hospitalized with a chest cold, cut off from everything that made him who he was. His conclusion: being brave isn't supposed to be easy.

He ended the talk with one more piece of advice: never miss a party if you can help it. His school's homecoming dance was the next night, and he said he'd be there.

Sam died a few months later, at 17.

He couldn't carry the drum, so he changed the drum. Which of the three rules are you breaking right now?

[balzzam @0xbalzzam]

I BUILT A GAME WITH OPUS 5.5 WHERE YOU SLAP FIFTEEN CARTOON DIGNITARIES UNTIL THEIR DIGNITY HITS ZERO.

a rocket tycoon. a shirtless judo bear. a baguette defense minister. a chancellor of naps.

you start with an open hand and a flip-flop. every other weapon is locked behind a slap count. 60, 120, 250, all the way up to 3000.

three modes: classic, rush 45s, endless. a leaderboard, 14 trophies, and a KO'd stamp on every face you finish.

the game is called Slap Summit.

https://t.co/RoIOF1pMwD

[Pagor @0xPagor]

@0xbalzzam I liked Emmanuel Macroon the most😂, and I came in second place on the leaderboard