James Carter

Things that sound made up until you see the math behind them.

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

https://t.co/aIls5GtiWv

[Levi @levifizg]

A billionaire sat for just 42 minutes and explained how the entire global economy works.. Better and simpler than MBA programs costing $200,000!

Without complicated academic philosophy or boring equations.. The real rules of the financial game and how wealth and debt move around the world like no one has ever explained to you before!

Three simple forces run every recession, every boom, every currency crisis in history. He breaks down all three in under an hour.

42 minutes that will change the way you understand money forever..
Save this tweet and watch the historic video right now!

Save this tweet and watch the historic video right now!

[Levi @levifizg]

$90,900 a year for the wrapper. $0 for the thing inside it.

That price gap sits inside one Yale professor's own career, and he is the one who created it.

In 2011, Robert Shiller filmed 23 lectures on how financial markets actually work and gave them away for free on YouTube. Two years later he won the Nobel Prize in Economics. This was not even Yale's first attempt at giving the course away. They filmed it once in 2008, then again in 2011, same professor, same price: nothing.

Enroll in the program built around these same ideas at his own university and Yale charges $90,900 a year. Not for four years. For one.

Shiller opens the free version with a line most tenured professors never bother saying out loud: "Finance, I believe, is, as it says in the course description, a pillar of civilized society." He is not being modest. He spends the next 22 lectures proving it, using the same material Wall Street pays analysts six figures to understand.

Later in that same lecture, almost in passing: "I think everyone should know finance. This should be a required course, actually, at Yale College." It never became mandatory. It also never needed to. Millions of people who will never sit in that classroom have watched it anyway, for free, on their own time.

He says one more thing that sums up why he keeps doing this: "I pride myself that I think I teach one of the most useful courses in Yale College." Nobody forced him to record that thought and hand it to strangers on the internet.

The tuition buys a diploma and a network. The free version buys the actual ideas, taught by the same Nobel laureate, recorded two years before he became one. He is not hiding the value. He is just not the one charging for it.

Follow so you do not miss the next one.

[Levi @levifizg]

Ask someone if a decision was "worth it," and most people answer with a feeling. Good idea. Bad idea. Gut check, nothing more.

Economists don't accept that as an answer. They want a number.

Jonathan Gruber teaches the method in his MIT public finance course. Add every benefit, subtract every cost. Whatever is left is your real answer, not your gut's. The real fight is over what counts.

And some of it is you. He puts it plainly: we cannot choose whether or not to value lives. Society does not leave us a choice.

Then he shows the receipts.

In 1993, GM weighed a $1 billion truck recall that would save an estimated 32 lives. That is $31 million per life. A $50 million alternative saved over 50. About $1 million each.

Childproof lighter rules cost about $140,000 per life saved. Mad cow disease rules, $250 million per life. Same government, prices nearly 1,800 times apart.

Even your time has a number. During the 1970s gas lines, people waited an extra 14.6 minutes to save 54 cents a gallon. That values their time at $27.50 an hour.

You make these trades every day on a gut feeling. Governments and corporations make them with a spreadsheet.

The full lecture is free on MIT OpenCourseWare. Most people will never find out what number was assigned to them.

[Levi @levifizg]

This 2001 movie scene explains compound interest better than the $497 course you almost bought last week

A bank representative walks into a primary school class and asks what the kids need money for.

A car. A house, preferably a big one. One kid says Santa Claus. Honestly, I'm on his side.

Then he says the real answer. Retirement. Save 50 cents a week, double it every three years, and in 25 years each of you has $727,000.

One boy stands up and says it's impossible.

He was right.

THE BANK'S MATH
Off by 18 times
50 cents a week is $26 a year. Doubling every three years is roughly 26% a year. Run it honestly for 25 years and you get about $40,000. Not $727,000.

The man from the bank promised children eighteen times what his own formula delivers.

MONEY THAT HIRES MONEY
The part he got right

Compound interest is when your profit starts earning its own profit. The line doesn't go straight up. It bends.
$1,000 at 10% for 25 years. Simple interest gives you $3,500. Compounding gives you $10,835. Same money, same years. Three times the result.

THE BOY WHO CHECKED
What he became

In the film, that boy grows up to be a mathematician building a formula to predict stock market crashes. And the bank that taught him compounding is the same bank that later destroys his family by pulling his father's credit.

The bank knew exactly how compounding works. It just made sure it worked for the bank.
YOUR SIDE OF THE MATH
The one you're already on

Every credit card balance compounds too. At 20%, a debt doubles in under four years. Most people learn compounding from the wrong side first.

A seven-year-old checked the bank's numbers.

When did you last check yours?
Follow for more on money.

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

Ask someone why you can't divide by zero, and most people say the same thing calculators say: error. Nobody actually explains what breaks.

Eddie Woo starts from something you already know without realizing it: division is just repeated subtraction. 12 divided by 3 isn't a mystery operation — it's asking how many times you can subtract 3 from 12 before you hit zero. Four times. That's the answer, and that's all division has ever been.

Now try dividing by zero using the exact same method. Subtract zero from 12. You still have 12. Subtract zero again. Still 12. There's no number of subtractions that ever gets you to zero, because subtracting nothing changes nothing — the process just runs forever without ever finishing.

That's not a rule someone invented to annoy students. It's what happens when you actually follow the definition of division all the way through instead of stopping at "you just can't." Woo pushes further into limits and sequences to show why the result isn't a big number, a small number, or even infinity — it's a process that structurally never terminates, which is a different kind of answer than "undefined" usually gets credit for being.

The rule was never arbitrary. It's just the first honest place the definition of division has nowhere left to go.

[Superior @andreysuperior]

https://t.co/rUN1cPDY65

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

Ask most people what happens when you divide by zero, and you get a shrug. It's a rule they memorized, not something they've ever actually seen happen.

Alan Becker's stick figure finds out by touching it.

Animation vs. Math has no dialogue, no narration, no equations written out to memorize — just an orange character wandering into a blank void, poking numbers and symbols like they're physical objects, and living with the consequences. He drags a 1 out of nowhere, watches 6 minus 1 repeated six times collapse into zero, then keeps subtracting anyway and gets swallowed by an endless stream of undefined division. Exponents become weapons. Sine and cosine become a wave he can ride.

It sounds like a kids' cartoon until you notice what's actually happening underneath: every fight is a real, correct piece of math, acted out instead of explained. The video amassed over 26 million views in its first month, and math professors started reacting to it — not to mock it, but because the sequences are accurate enough to teach from.

Nobody in that video says a single word about mathematics. That's exactly why people who normally tune out the moment they see an equation couldn't stop watching.

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

Ask most people what happens when you divide by zero, and you get a shrug. It's a rule they memorized, not something they've ever actually seen happen.

Alan Becker's stick figure finds out by touching it.

Animation vs. Math has no dialogue, no narration, no equations written out to memorize — just an orange character wandering into a blank void, poking numbers and symbols like they're physical objects, and living with the consequences. He drags a 1 out of nowhere, watches 6 minus 1 repeated six times collapse into zero, then keeps subtracting anyway and gets swallowed by an endless stream of undefined division. Exponents become weapons. Sine and cosine become a wave he can ride.

It sounds like a kids' cartoon until you notice what's actually happening underneath: every fight is a real, correct piece of math, acted out instead of explained. The video amassed over 26 million views in its first month, and math professors started reacting to it — not to mock it, but because the sequences are accurate enough to teach from.

Nobody in that video says a single word about mathematics. That's exactly why people who normally tune out the moment they see an equation couldn't stop watching.

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

https://t.co/aIls5GtiWv

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

@EndWokeness The timing of that post is wild. 👀 People are definitely going to notice.

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

Ask someone if a trade is "safe," and most people answer with a feeling. It looks balanced. It looks hedged. Nobody actually checks the math behind that feeling.

Peter Kempthorne opens his MIT lecture on linear algebra for finance with exactly that gap. Underneath every "safe" portfolio is a system of equations — and if that system has a solution nobody's using, it means somewhere in the market, money is sitting on the table for free.

That's arbitrage, and it isn't a trading trick. It's what linear algebra calls it when a system of prices doesn't add up — when the same future payoff can be built two different ways for two different costs. Kempthorne walks through exactly how vectors and matrices catch this: portfolios as vectors, prices as dot products, and the entire question of whether a market is fair reduced to whether a specific system of equations has a consistent solution.

It sounds abstract until he gets to the part that isn't: whether a "no-arbitrage" price even exists, and whether it's unique, comes down to the same math taught in every introductory linear algebra class — rank, solvability, whether a matrix can be inverted. Markets that look completely different on the surface, stocks, bonds, derivatives, all reduce to the same handful of questions about vectors and systems of equations.

The lesson isn't really about finance. It's that "free money in the market" and "an inconsistent system of equations" are the same sentence, just spoken in two different departments.

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

Ask someone if a trade is "safe," and most people answer with a feeling. It looks balanced. It looks hedged. Nobody actually checks the math behind that feeling.

Peter Kempthorne opens his MIT lecture on linear algebra for finance with exactly that gap. Underneath every "safe" portfolio is a system of equations — and if that system has a solution nobody's using, it means somewhere in the market, money is sitting on the table for free.

That's arbitrage, and it isn't a trading trick. It's what linear algebra calls it when a system of prices doesn't add up — when the same future payoff can be built two different ways for two different costs. Kempthorne walks through exactly how vectors and matrices catch this: portfolios as vectors, prices as dot products, and the entire question of whether a market is fair reduced to whether a specific system of equations has a consistent solution.

It sounds abstract until he gets to the part that isn't: whether a "no-arbitrage" price even exists, and whether it's unique, comes down to the same math taught in every introductory linear algebra class — rank, solvability, whether a matrix can be inverted. Markets that look completely different on the surface, stocks, bonds, derivatives, all reduce to the same handful of questions about vectors and systems of equations.

The lesson isn't really about finance. It's that "free money in the market" and "an inconsistent system of equations" are the same sentence, just spoken in two different departments.

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

https://t.co/aIls5GtiWv

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

@MattWalshBlog A $5,000 check sounds great until you remember someone has to pay for it. 💸 The real question is whether it creates lasting value—or just another inflationary spike. 👀

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

You didn't fail in your studies—the method was flawed from the very beginning.

Six hours of studying. Almost nothing remembered.

A freshman named Janette found that out the hard way. 1.0 GPA, so she started studying six hours straight every night, six to midnight, no breaks.

Her grades didn't move.

Marty Lobdell opens his lecture with her story because it's the mistake almost every struggling student makes — more hours, same method, same result. He taught psychology for 40 years and watched thousands of students do exactly what Janette did, convinced that suffering longer at a desk was the same thing as learning more.

His actual claim is almost insulting in how simple it sounds: most people can only study effectively for about 30 minutes before concentration collapses. Everything after that isn't studying. It's just sitting there, feeling productive, retaining almost nothing.

The fix isn't more willpower. It's structure — short, focused blocks with real breaks, a dedicated space your brain associates only with studying, and treating your own memory less like a hard drive you dump facts into and more like something you have to actively push information into, on purpose, using the parts of learning most students skip entirely.

Janette didn't need six hours. She needed to stop wasting five of them.

Money runs on the exact same trap. Working more hours feels like progress, the same way studying longer felt like progress to Janette — right up until you check the actual number and realize effort was never what was missing.

Below are the 7 rules that quietly separate the people who fix that from the people who just work harder at the wrong method for another year.

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

https://t.co/aIls5GtiWv

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

@SamsungMobileUS 😂 That comeback came pre-seasoned. Let us know when the leftovers are finally gone. 👀

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

@FoxNews @Brooketaylortv A “change of tune” gets noticed fast. 👀 If fairness and safety matter, the standard should be consistent—not political convenience.

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

@MattWalshBlog If the jurors really admitted to rigging the trial, that’s a massive issue. Due process matters—no one should be above scrutiny. 👀⚖️

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

@Nigel_Farage Face coverings in public are a fair debate—but the rules should be clear, consistent, and apply equally to everyone. 🇬🇧👀

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

@HouseGOP No room for communist ideas. Freedom and individual rights come first. 🇺🇸🔥

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

@Zlatan_Ibile So celebrities and superstars don’t get a free pass either? 👀 Fair enough. Everyone should be held to the same standard.

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

@RupertLowe10 Real change starts with people showing up. 🇬🇧 When communities get organized and involved, you can’t ignore them. 👀

[James Carter @JamesCarterCo]

@ChampionsLeague Vitinha just decided to turn into a magician. 🧙‍♂️🔥 What a player.