Toan Truong

I graduated at 16 & got my bachelor's at 18, now writing about education, learning science, psychology, and sociology. Writer at @GeniusGTX.

[Toan Truong @LearningToan]

I'm 18.

I’m obsessed with learning how to learn.

So, I spent 200+ hours studying how geniuses, prodigies, and high performers master their disciplines.

Here's what I found on how to master anything faster:

[vivek @itsreallyvivek]

https://t.co/ZhOgyq7Vgn

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

Jensen Huang opens up about his plan to upload his consciousness to a humanoid robot in space within his lifetime.

"It's a reasonable thing to expect the end of disease," Huang says.

"It's a reasonable thing to expect that pollution will be drastically reduced."

"It's a reasonable thing to expect that traveling at the speed of light is actually in our future."

The third one has a catch.

He doesn't mean speed of light for long distances. Even at light speed, the math kills interstellar travel.

He means short ones, where the destination matters. Like Earth to a humanoid robot Huang plans to launch on a one-way trip.

Then Huang explained the mechanism:

"Very soon, I'm gonna put a humanoid on a spaceship — my humanoid — and we're gonna send it out as soon as possible."

"It's gonna keep improving and enhancing along the flight."

"All of my consciousness has already been uploaded to the internet."

"Take all my inbox, take everything that I've done, everything I've said. It's been collected and becoming my AI."

"When the time comes, we'll just send that at the speed of light, catch up with my robot."

The humanoid is the carrier. The inbox is the passenger.

Speed of light is the courier.

And Huang says all of this is reasonable to expect.

P.S. Pull the thread on any story like this and you'll find the hidden incentive at the other end.

As Munger said: "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome."

So I wrote a short book on how to spot them and design your own.

Comment "INCENTIVES" and I'll send you the details.

If you're new here, follow @GeniusGTX for content on the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history.

— Jensen Huang ( @nvidia ), NVIDIA CEO, on Lex Fridman's ( @lexfridman ) podcast

[Toan Truong @LearningToan]

@georgewritess welcome back!

[Toan Truong @LearningToan]

In 1939, A research team began secretly stealing identical twins.

• The kids knew nothing.
• The adoptive parents knew nothing.
• Some were blocks apart. Some were in the same classroom.

Over 50 years later... The patterns they witnessed blew me away🧵

[Toan Truong @LearningToan]

One night in 1899, Nikola Tesla detected some mysterious signals from his tower.

He believed it came from Mars, Jupiter, or even aliens from another universe.

What he heard was much more fascinating: [THREAD] 🧵

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

Dwarkesh Patel says give any human 0.0001% of what an LLM has read and they'd produce thousands of new ideas.

But the LLM produces none.

"Give me one new idea, one fundamental new idea that's been generated."

Naval continues: "Every poem ever written by an LLM is garbage. I think even their fiction writing is terrible."

"They're very bad at actually distilling the essence of something and what's important. They don't have an opinion or a point of view."

"They are a fundamental breakthrough in computing. It is a different way to program a computer.

Rather than you explicitly speak its language and write the code, you just run enough data through it until it figures out how to write the program."

"But are they AGI? Not yet. And I don't see a direct path from here to there."

P.S. I made a playbook breaking down 100+ most powerful decision making mental models used by history's greatest thinkers.

5,000+ downloads. 113 five-star reviews.

Grab a free copy here:

https://t.co/u2q1uUm9vD

— Naval Ravikant ( @naval ), co-founder of AngelList, on Chris Williamson's ( @ChrisWillx ) Modern Wisdom

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

Elon Musk reveals Tesla is building a 30,000-robot academy where humanoids learn from each other.

Cars were easy.

Tesla had ten million on the road, beaming back driving data every second.

But humanoid robots? There weren't ten million Optimi yet. There weren't ten...

Robotics had run data-starved for decades. Tesla decided to fix it.

You couldn't train a humanoid that had never been deployed.

So Musk built a school for them instead.

"We can have at least 10,000 Optimus robots, maybe 20-30,000, that are doing self-play and testing different tasks."

Tesla called it the **Optimus Academy**.

Picture a warehouse the size of a chip fab.

Thirty thousand humanoid robots inside.

Picking things up. Folding clothes. Walking. Tripping. Catching themselves.

Failing in ways no human roboticist had thought to script.

Each watching the others, learning what the human body shouldn't have made look easy.

Every move generated a data point. Every failure generated a sample.

Every robot taught every other robot.

In simulation, Tesla could spin up a million robots overnight.

But simulated physics lied about friction, slip, and drift.

Real physics didn't.

Cars learned from drivers. Optimi learned from each other.

Each generation made the next one cheaper, faster, smarter.

By the tenth generation, no human would recognize the curriculum.

Recursive learning at electromechanical scale.

Musk, on closing the loop:

"You use the tens of thousands of robots in the real world to close the simulation to reality gap."

Whoever opened the academy first owned the species.

If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.

— Elon Musk ( @elonmusk ), CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Dwarkesh Patel's ( @dwarkesh_sp ) podcast

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

Elon Musk says three casting foundries broke America's entire AI power buildout through 2030.

Every AI company on Earth was racing to scale chip production.

Doubling. Then doubling again. Then doubling again.

Each cluster needed power the day chips arrived.

Musk says the math broke at the generator.

"Those who have lived in software land don't realize they're about to have a hard lesson in hardware."

Permits. Interconnects. Power lines.

The boring infrastructure decided who could turn the chips on.

Then Musk drilled down one more level.

The bottleneck wasn't power plants. It wasn't even gas turbines.

It was a single component inside the turbine.

"It's the vanes and blades in the turbines that are the limiting factor."

The whole AI buildout funneled through one part: the **turbine blade**.

Musk, who had ganged turbines together for Colossus, traced the supply line back further.

"There are only three casting companies in the world that make these, and they're massively backlogged."

Each blade had to survive 1,500-degree gas at 10,000 RPM, and casting one to spec required a process so specialized that only three companies in the world had mastered it.

Three foundries. All backlogged. Sold out through 2030.

After Musk traced the bottleneck, SpaceX and Tesla started casting blades themselves.

Sold out. Backlogged. Internal-only.

Musk, on what this meant for everyone else:

"In order to bring enough power online, I think SpaceX and Tesla will probably have to make the turbine blades, the vanes and blades, internally."

What's the supply line in your industry that's already booked through the next decade?

If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.

P.S. I made a free guide breaking down 100+ mental models used by history's greatest thinkers.

Grab your free copy here:

https://t.co/u2q1uUm9vD

— Elon Musk ( @elonmusk ), CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Dwarkesh Patel's ( @dwarkesh_sp ) podcast

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

Elon Musk says steel killed carbon fiber on Starship at one-fiftieth the cost.

Carbon fiber was supposed to be the future of rocketry.

Lighter than aluminum. Stronger than steel. Trusted by every Formula 1 team.

SpaceX picked it for Starship.

"Particularly if you go for a high-strength specialized carbon fiber that can handle cryogenic oxygen, it's roughly 50 times the cost of steel."

Then progress stalled.

The autoclaves needed to cure the resin had to outsize every autoclave on Earth, and the team couldn't even produce a clean barrel section without wrinkles.

Musk, watching the Mars timeline slip:

"At this rate, we're never going to get to Mars. So we've got to think of something else."

So he asked the question nobody at SpaceX had asked: "What about steel?"

It became known as the **cryogenic stainless flip**.

Musk, who had already shipped Falcon 9 in aluminum-lithium, broke with the textbook.

"When you look at the material properties of stainless steel, full-hard, strain hardened stainless steel, at cryogenic temperature the strength to weight is actually similar to carbon fiber."

Starship ran on cryogenic methane and oxygen.

The airframe lived at temperatures that flipped steel ahead of carbon fiber.

"You could smoke a cigar while welding stainless steel."

After Musk made the call, steel weighed less than the carbon fiber version.

Fifty times cheaper in raw material. Twice the heat tolerance. Half the heat shield mass.

Musk, looking back:

"In retrospect, we should have started with steel in the beginning. It was dumb not to do steel."

What "obvious" material in your work is silently costing you the project?

If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.

P.S.

I've made a free playbook on how to use and create your own mental models.

This includes the same thinking strategies Feynman, Munger, and Musk built their careers on.

Ttrusted by 5,000+ founders and investors.

Grab your copy: https://t.co/u2q1uUm9vD

— Elon Musk ( @elonmusk ), CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Dwarkesh Patel's ( @dwarkesh_sp ) podcast

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

This man who heals what doctors can't:

Carl Jung.

It's impossible to be psychologically trapped, stressed, or anxious after understanding his teachings.

Here's his 4-step approach to mental freedom and self fulfillment:

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

Could psychiatrists tell if someone was actually insane?

Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan wanted to find the answer...

In 1973, he sent 8 perfectly normal people to mental hospitals across the US.

What he found next exposed the secret side of psychology…🧵

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

Marc Andreessen says 2,000 American car companies launched in 10 years... but only 3 survived.

Between 1900 and 1910, 2,000 American entrepreneurs tried to build cars.

Three of them made it through.

A century later, no new American car company had succeeded.

Tucker Automotive was the last serious attempt.

It was such a disaster that Hollywood made a movie about how it failed.

Then a software entrepreneur from PayPal said he was going to make a car.

Andreessen, watching at the time:

"Obviously, you don't do that. Obviously, this is insane. And for a software guy to do this is insane."

He says the level of incredulity Elon faced in 2008 was "almost uniform."

Tesla shipped anyway.

Andreessen's verdict on Elon's method since:

"Obviously, it's working."

The 2,000 founders before Elon had every advantage.

They lived in the age of internal combustion. They were mechanical engineers.

Elon was a software guy.

He was the one who made it.

If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.

P.S. I made a free toolkit breaking down 100+ mental models used by history's greatest thinkers.

5,000+ downloads. 113 five-star reviews.

Grab your free copy here: https://t.co/u2q1uUm9vD

— Marc Andreessen ( @pmarca ), co-founder of a16z, on David Senra's ( @davidsenra ) podcast

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

I'm obsessed with cognitive biases.

A "cognitive bias" is a built-in glitch in our brain that quietly sabotages good decisions.

These are the 11 craziest and most dangerous cognitive biases I've found: 👇

1. The Cobra Effect

[Toan Truong @LearningToan]

@GeniusGTX Genius Thread

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

Marc Andreessen says Elon almost lit his entire $180 million fortune on fire with one decision.

His friend tried to stop him. The friend (Andreessen thinks it was Adeo Ressi) sat Elon down before he started SpaceX.

He showed him a compilation, pre-YouTube, of rockets blowing up over and over again.

"You're literally going to light your fortune on fire."

This was 2002. Elon had just sold PayPal.

The $180 million he walked out with was everything he had left after taxes. He spent it on SpaceX anyway.

The first three rockets exploded. The famous photo from this era shows Elon in shorts and a polo.

He's crouched in front of the wreckage of the third rocket.

Eric Berger documented the entire period in his book *Liftoff*.

Andreessen's take: "Nothing good in the book. It's just reading one failure after another, and one catastrophe after another."

Eventually the rockets started landing on their butt. Today, SpaceX builds its own city in Texas.

Starlink came later, which is a side project at the rocket company.

The friend who tried to save Elon's fortune was wrong about the rockets.

But he was right about the fire. What "you're going to light your fortune on fire" warning have you ignored and were glad you did?

If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.

P.S. I made a free toolkit breaking down 100+ mental models used by history's greatest thinkers.

5,000+ downloads. 113 five-star reviews.

Grab your free copy here: https://t.co/u2q1uUm9vD

— Marc Andreessen ( @pmarca ), co-founder of a16z, on David Senra's ( @davidsenra ) podcast

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

Marc Andreessen says AOL killed the early internet on a single day in September 1993.

Before that day, the internet had maybe two million users.

They were the smartest two million people in the world.

Andreessen says it felt like Athens in 500 BC.

"The most pure, clean, intellectual, vibrant space" since the Greeks.

No advertising. No commerce. No spam.

Just the smartest engineers, scientists, and academics talking to each other.

Then America Online bought a connection to it.

In September 1993, AOL pumped two million normal people directly onto the internet.

It became known as **Eternal September**.

Andreessen, who was building Mosaic at the time, watched it happen.

"That's the day the internet changed."

Pre-1993 internet veterans had a phrase. Every September, when the new freshmen got their college email accounts, the discussion forums would briefly drop in quality before stabilizing.

After AOL connected, the September never ended.

The smartest two million were swallowed by the next two million, then twenty million, then five billion.

Andreessen, looking back:

"I'm pro that. I'm glad that happened. But the pro and the con of that is that took the internet from this ivory tower kind of thing to this basically mainstream consumer ordinary people thing."

Was AOL right to open the gates?

If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.

P.S. I made a free toolkit breaking down 100+ mental models used by history's greatest thinkers.

5,000+ downloads. 113 five-star reviews.

Grab your free copy here: https://t.co/u2q1uUm9vD

— Marc Andreessen ( @pmarca ), co-founder of a16z, on David Senra's ( @davidsenra ) podcast

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

The man who heals what therapists can't:

Niccolo Machiavelli

It's impossible to be psychologically trapped, stressed, or anxious after reading his teachings.

Here's his 4-step guide to unlocking mental freedom and self mastery: 🧵

[Toan Truong @LearningToan]

@RyanHoliday Ryan is on Holiday

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

Marc Andreessen just revealed how Harvard Business School was built on a broken 1941 theory, and how it's now collapsing...

Andreessen co-founded Netscape in 1994 and a16z in 2009.

He has sat on Meta's board since 2008.

He has spent 30 years backing founders and watching managerial CEOs lose to them.

The pattern traces back to one book: James Burnham's *The Machiavellians* (1941).

Burnham argued every great company had been founder-run.

Henry Ford ran Ford. Bob Noyce ran Intel.

Today, Elon Musk runs Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink.

Then, he said, something broke.

Between the 1880s and the 1920s, a new philosophy replaced the founder. It was called managerialism.

The professional manager would now hold a portable skill, usable across any business.

The consequences were:

- Harvard Business School
- Stanford Business School
- Management as a universal skill
- The 1970s conglomerate

"That assumes the managers are going to do a good job," Andreessen says.

For 30 years, they haven't.

Managers can run something static, he says. Soup is soup. A bank is a bank. A car is a car.

But when the industry changes, the manager freezes.

Look at SpaceX.

"Imagine being a professionally trained manager, trained at a top management school, working for a rocket launch company, competing with SpaceX."

Then Elon's rockets started landing on their butt.

"Your management skills ... what good are they at that point?"

Andreessen's conclusion:

"You're much more likely to build something important in the 21st century if you start with the founder and train them on management."

What "professionally run" institution in your life has quietly stopped working?

If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.

P.S. I made a free toolkit breaking down 100+ mental models used by history's greatest thinkers.

5,000+ downloads. 113 five-star reviews.

Grab your free copy here: https://t.co/u2q1uUm9vD

— Marc Andreessen ( @pmarca ), co-founder of a16z, on David Senra's ( @FoundersPodcast ) podcast