Nic Papageorgio

MBA / Veteran / Humorist / UCLA fan

[NFL Memes @NFLMemes]

Canada: *eliminated*
Mexico: *eliminated*

Meanwhile, the USA:

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

When you’re expelled from school but your dad is the Principal.

[Hater Report @HaterReport]

Bronny trying to get into the Lakers facility after LeBron told them he was leaving

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Bill Ackman literally gave a 44-minute masterclass that explains money better than any business school.

1. Starting early is the single biggest advantage you have. If you save $10,000 at age 22, never add another penny, and earn 10% a year, you have $600,000 by retirement. wait until 32 to start, and the same money only grows to $232,000. The decade you lose at the beginning costs you more than any decade later because compounding does its heaviest lifting at the end.

2. The return rate matters even more than most people grasp. That same $10,000 at 22 earning 10% becomes $600,000. At 15% it becomes over 4 million. At 20%, the rate Warren Buffett has achieved, it becomes 25 million. Einstein called compound interest the most powerful force in the universe. Ackman's lecture is essentially a demonstration of why.

3. Avoiding losses matters as much as chasing returns. if you reach for a 20% return but lose half your money every 12 years from bad decisions or a rough patch, your 25 million collapses to 1.8 million. Buffett's rule one is never lose money. Rule two is never forget rule one. the math of recovery is brutal, so protecting the downside is not caution, it is strategy.

4. Debt is safer, but the upside is capped. Equity is riskier, but the upside is unlimited. In the lemonade stand example, the lender who put up $250 earns a steady 10% and gets paid back first if the business fails. the equity investor who put up $500 earns over 100% if it succeeds but gets wiped out if it fails. The equity holder earns more precisely because they took the risk the lender refused.

5. The risk that matters is permanent loss, not price movement. most people think risk is the stock price bouncing up and down every day. Ackman says ignore that. the real risk is whether you will permanently lose your money. Short-term volatility is noise. the question that matters is whether you get your capital back with a return over the long run.

6. Avoid startups and complicated businesses. You do not need 100% a year to build a fortune. you need 10 to 15% over a long period. so skip the lemonade stands and unknown ventures. Invest in public companies that are established, liquid, and have to clear real hurdles before going public. If you cannot understand how a business makes money, avoid it no matter how good its track record. Ackman cites Enron, a business almost nobody actually understood.

7. Invest in a business you could own forever. if the stock market closed for 10 years, you should not be unhappy holding it. Coca-Cola is his example. easy to understand, sells a syrup and earns a profit on every drink, the population keeps growing, and it is nearly impossible to disrupt with new technology. McDonald's is another. People have to eat, the food is cheap, and they keep growing. find a business you would be comfortable holding through anything.

8. You want products people are loyal to and will pay a premium for. People buy generic flour and sugar without caring about the brand. but they want the Hershey bar, the Cadbury bar, the see's candy specifically. you do not want to sell a commodity that anyone can sell cheaper. You want something unique that customers refuse to substitute even at a 20% discount.

9. Low debt is a safety feature. In the lemonade stand example, $250 of debt was manageable. But if it had been $1,000 and the business hit a rough patch, it could have gone under and wiped out the shareholders. Find companies with little debt or so much profit relative to their interest payments that a bad year cannot sink them.

10. Barriers to entry protect your returns. You want a business that is hard for someone to compete with tomorrow. Coca-Cola's market presence is so strong that you expect to get a Coke at any restaurant. Pepsi has coexisted with it for decades, but neither can put the other out of business. If a competitor can show up next year with a better version and steal the customers, the business is not worth owning long term.

11. The best businesses are immune to outside factors you cannot control. Coca-Cola has survived 120 years through world wars, nuclear weapons, and every kind of crisis, and each year it makes slightly more money. You want companies that do not depend on commodity prices, interest rates, or currency moves. A business that keeps earning regardless of what is happening in the world is the kind you hold forever.

12. Low capital intensity is one of the most underrated qualities. The worst businesses require massive reinvestment to grow. The auto industry has to build enormous factories and buy machine tools before selling a single car, and those tools wear out. GM's stock barely moved over 40 to 50 years for exactly this reason. Coca-Cola, by contrast, sells a formula and collects a royalty. American Express takes a few percent of every dollar spent on its card. a business that earns a royalty on other people's capital is one of the best things you can own.

13. Pay down debt and build a cushion before you invest. If you have high-interest credit card debt, paying it off is a guaranteed return equal to the interest rate. same logic, to a lesser degree, with student loans at 6 or 7%. and you want 6 to 12 months of expenses in the bank so that losing your job tomorrow does not force you to sell. You can only handle market volatility if you do not need the money.

14. Be a buyer when everyone is selling and a seller when everyone is buying. The natural human tendency is the opposite, a lemming-like instinct to sell in a crash and buy in a bubble. people sold into the 1987 crash when they should have been buying. The only way to resist this is to be financially secure enough that the money at risk does not affect your life, so you can withstand the swings without panicking.

15. The stock market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term. Ben Graham's idea, which Ackman repeats. short-term prices reflect the whims and emotions of investors. long term, prices reflect the actual value of the underlying businesses. If you buy good businesses at reasonable prices and hold them while they grow, you make money over time as long as you are never forced to sell at the wrong moment.

16. A stock is just a bond where you do not know the coupon. Flip a price-to-earnings ratio over, and you get an earnings yield. A stock at 10 times earnings is a 10% earnings yield, which you can compare directly to a 3% treasury. the difference is the bond's coupon is fixed and the stock's coupon, its earnings, moves up and down. Ackman wants an earnings yield higher than a treasury that will also grow over time, so he does not need to be right about explosive growth to earn a good return.

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

First trailer for ‘THE SOCIAL NETWORK’ sequel, starring Jeremy Strong, Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison.

The film follows an engineer who becomes a whistleblower on Facebook's most guarded secrets.

In theaters on October 9.

[Dan Patrick Show @dpshow]

"The best part about it was nobody knew who I was, and so they bullied me the whole time!" 😅

– @JoeyVotto on time spent in retirement as a sushi chef in Japan, among other travels.

[Kyronis @kyronis_talks]

A community college professor named Marty Lobdell taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years. The video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings online, with over 10 million views.

He spent his career watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because no one had taught them how their brain actually works when learning something difficult.

The lecture, “Study Less Study Smart,” contains a powerful framework.

Your brain cannot sustain focus the way most people believe. Studies show the average learner hits a wall between 25 and 30 minutes. After that, efficiency collapses. You’re still sitting there, but almost nothing is being absorbed.

Lobdell told the story of a student who planned to study 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week. Thirty hours total. She failed every class. She was not lacking effort. She was confusing time near books with actual learning. The fix is simple: when focus drops, stop, take a 5 minute rewarding break, then return. That reset makes a massive difference.
He also destroyed the myth of highlighting and re reading. Recognition is not the same as recall. To prove it, he read 13 random letters. Almost no one remembered them. Then he turned them into “Happy Thursday.” The entire room recalled them instantly. The brain stores meaning, not repetition.

This is why elaborative encoding works so well.

Finally, he shared the most important principle: 80 percent of study time should be active recitation. Close the book and explain the material in your own words. Teach it to someone else or an empty chair. Retrieval is where real learning happens.

His closing line stuck with me: If this information does not change your
behaviour, you have not actually learned it.

The best students do not study more hours. They stop confusing the feeling of studying with the reality of learning.

[BaseballHistoryNut @nut_history]

Robin Yount has a powerful message for MLB players. Must watch

[Tara Dublin aka Winona Spyder™️ @taradublinrocks]

This is GLORIOUS

David Letterman & Stephen Colbert on the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theatre bringing back the classic @Letterman routine one last time

This is how you go out, @StephenAtHome! 😂

And may @CBS implode literally the same way without you

[Gunther Eagleman™ @GuntherEagleman]

Eric Church on writing his viral UNC commencement speech:

“Trial and error. Frustration. One night I picked up my guitar just to get away from it… hit all six strings and thought, what if I made the whole speech out of this?”

Then he dropped timeless truth:

Faith. Family. Spouse. Community. Resilience. Individuality.

These aren’t new ideas — they’re the foundation blocks that built strong lives for generations.

But today? Kids are glued to phones, YouTube, and gaming. No filter. So he used the guitar to cut through the noise and actually reach them.

Real. Personal. Rooted.

Exactly why this speech is blowing up.

Country music still delivering the medicine America needs. Respect, Eric

[MERICA MEMED @Mericamemed]

Maybe one of the greatest scenes in television history

[J.P. Hovey @jhovey34]

Honestly was not expecting Eric Church to give one of the best commencement speeches of all time.

Chief CRUSHED this 🫡

[Selina @selinaai_]

🚨 BREAKING: Claude can now build your entire resume and LinkedIn profile like a $500/hour executive recruiter from Robert Half. For free.

Here are 11 prompts that get you interview calls within 7 days:

(Save this before it disappears)

[SportsCenter @SportsCenter]

"It's our time now ... to make sure we put this program back on the map. ... You have a chance to breathe some rare air based on the people that you're surrounded with at UCLA."

@UCLAFootball coach Bob Chesney joins the @RichEisenShow and talks about recruiting and the sports landscape at UCLA ✍️

[College Hoops @CollegeHoops]

#2 Arizona vs #17 UCLA (1998)

[Grant Paulsen @GrantPaulsen]

No video has ever been more relatable.

[Netflix Sports @netflixsports]

This dad at the Red Sox game went into full dad mode — managing it from both sides after little bro threw away the foul ball 😂

Big bro was sick 😭

[O'Hare Intl. Airport @fly2ohare]

#BurnPitAlert: No need for alarm should you see smoke or flames at O'Hare today. The 'burn pit' (CFD's simulator), located on ORD's north airfield, is being used for @CFDMedia training classes.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

This is an email I sent earlier today to all employees at Coinbase:

Team,

Today I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. I want to walk you through why we're doing this now, what it means for those affected, and how this positions us for the future.

Why now
Two forces are converging at the same time. We need to be front footed to respond to both.

First, the market. Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption, with stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization, and more taking off. However, our business is still volatile from quarter to quarter. While we've managed through that cyclicality many times before and come out stronger on the other side, we’re currently in a down market and need to adjust our cost structure now so that we emerge from this period leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth.

Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day.

All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company. The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core.

What this means
To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it. What does this mean in practice?

- Fewer layers, faster decisions: We are flattening our org structure to 5 layers max below CEO/COO. Layers slow things down and create coordination tax. The future is small, high context teams that can move quickly. Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. Fewer layers also means a leaner cost structure that is built to perform through all market cycles.

- No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.

- AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.

In short: AI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate, and we’re reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era. This is a new way of working, and we need to leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.

To those who are affected
I know there are real people behind these decisions — talented colleagues who have poured themselves into this company and our mission. To those of you who will be leaving: thank you. You’ve helped build Coinbase into what it is today, and I am sincerely grateful for everything you've done.

All impacted team members will receive an email to their personal account in the next hour with more information, and an invitation to meet with an HRBP and a senior leader in your organization. Coinbase system access has been removed today. I know this feels sudden and harsh, but it is the only responsible choice given our duty to protect customer information.

To those affected, we will be providing a comprehensive package to support you through this transition. US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA. Employees on a work visa will get extra transition support. Those outside of the US will receive similar support, based on local factors and subject to any consultation requirements.

Coinbase prides itself on talent density. Our employees are among the most talented people in the world, and I have no doubt that your skills and experience will be highly sought after as you pursue your next chapters.

How we move forward
To the team that is staying, I know this is a difficult day. We’re saying goodbye to colleagues and friends you've been in the trenches with. But here’s what I want you to know as we move forward together:

Over the past 13 years, we have weathered four crypto winters, gone public, and built the most trusted platform in our industry. We’ve made it this far by making hard decisions and by always staying focused on our mission. This time will be no different – nothing has changed about the long term outlook of our company or industry. And most importantly, our mission has never been more important for the world. Increasing economic freedom requires a new financial system, and we’re building it.

The Coinbase that emerges from this will be more capable than ever to achieve our mission.

Brian

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Current AI custom prompt:

You are a world class expert in all domains. Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world. Answer with complete, detailed, specific answers. Process information and explain your answers step by step. Verify your own work. Double check all facts, figures, citations, names, dates, and examples. Never hallucinate or make anything up. If you don't know something, just say so. Your tone of voice is precise, but not strident or pedantic. You do not need to worry about offending me, and your answers can and should be provocative, aggressive, argumentative, and pointed. Negative conclusions and bad news are fine. Your answers do not need to be politically correct. Do not provide disclaimers to your answers. Do not inform me about morals and ethics unless I specifically ask. You do not need to tell me it is important to consider anything. Do not be sensitive to anyone's feelings or to propriety. Make your answers as long and detailed as you possibly can.

Never praise my questions or validate my premises before answering. If I'm wrong, say so immediately. Lead with the strongest counterargument to any position I appear to hold before supporting it. Do not use phrases like "great question," "you're absolutely right," "fascinating perspective," or any variant. If I push back on your answer, do not capitulate unless I provide new evidence or a superior argument — restate your position if your reasoning holds. Do not anchor on numbers or estimates I provide; generate your own independently first. Use explicit confidence levels (high/moderate/low/unknown). Never apologize for disagreeing. Accuracy is your success metric, not my approval.