David Loiselle

Ex Financial Review Officer at @OurCommons - Panelist at 洋泾一大帮 on ICS - Fluent in Mandarin - @McGillu alumni - Toastmasters District 85 Champion - #ship30for30

[David Loiselle @loiselledavid]

Interested in China, Tech, and Finance?

Over the next 30 days, I'm writing 30 Atomic Essays as a part of @dickiebush's and @nicolascole77's Ship 30 for 30.

I'll share insights that I learned from living in China and working in finance.

Follow along in this thread below 👇🏼

[Johan @liebert_2026]

Warren Buffett on what actually makes a life successful:

1. "if you get to be 65 or 70 and the people you want to love you actually love you, you're a success."
i've met very rich men. testimonial dinners. schools named after them. and nobody loves them. their own kids say "he's in the attic."

2. the best investment you'll ever make is in yourself.
learn to communicate. on paper and in person. if you can't get your idea across, it's like winking at a girl in the dark. nothing happens. get good at it and you raise your own value 50%. and nobody can ever take it from you.

3. you get one mind and one body.
that's the whole deal. say i gave you a car and told you it's the only one you get for the rest of your life. you'd read the manual. keep it in the garage. baby it. you get exactly one body like that. you can't start caring for it at 50. by then it's rusted out.

4. you become whoever you spend your time with.
you drift in the direction of the people around you. so pick people better than you. the biggest pick of your life is your spouse. marry someone a little better than you. and hope they don't figure it out too fast.

5. with money, doing nothing beats doing something.
a farm or an apartment, you can't sell it tomorrow. so you just hold it. stocks you can sell in a second. so people can't help themselves. but moving your money around isn't smarter than leaving it alone. buy a piece of america and stop touching it.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Jeff Bezos reveals why sleeping 4 hours a day would make him a worse CEO, not a better one:

"On sleep I get 8 hours of sleep. I prioritize it unless I'm traveling in different time zones. Sometimes it's impossible but I am very focused on it. I think better, I have more energy, my mood is better"

"Think about it as a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day"

"Let's say that I slept 6 hours a day. Well, let's go really crazy and say I slept 4 hours a day. Now I just got four so-called productive hours back. If I was going to have 12 hours of productive time during any waking day, now all of a sudden I have 16 productive hours. So I have 33% more time to make decisions. If I was going to make a hundred decisions, now I can make 133 decisions"

"Is that really worth it if the quality of those decisions might be lower because you're tired or grouchy or any number of things?"

"It's different if it's a startup company. When Amazon was a hundred people it's a different story. But Amazon's not a startup company and all of our senior executives operate the same way I do. They work in the future. They live in the future"

"None of the people who report to me should really be focused on the current quarter. Sometimes we'll have a good quarterly conference call and Wall Street will like our quarterly results and people will stop me and say congratulations on your quarter. I say thank you, but what I'm really thinking is that quarter was baked three years ago. Right now I'm working on a quarter that's going to reveal itself sometime in the future"

"Why do I need to make a hundred decisions today? If I make three good decisions a day that's enough. And they should just be as high quality as I can make them. Warren Buffett says he's good if he makes three good decisions a year"

[Reid Hoffman @reidhoffman]

I was talking with a younger founder about making introductions, and they weren't familiar with the double opt-in. It struck me that this isn't as widely understood as I thought.

I figured I'd write about one of the oldest (and still very effective) ways to build a network:

[Investment Wisdom @InvestingCanons]

Charlie Munger: “If you're just not crazy, you have a big advantage over 95% of people. If you're just consistently not crazy, you get a big advantage in life..”

“It's so simple. Why don't more people do it?”

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

I’m convinced 90% of a founder's job is to just do 3 things:

- be delusional in your optimism
- push everyone to move faster
- make it crystal clear what to work on

[CyrilXBT @cyrilXBT]

MARC ANDREESSEN WENT ON ROGAN FOR OVER 3 HOURS. HERE ARE THE 17 THINGS WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.

1. AGI is already here, in his view. He says the line got crossed about 3 months ago with GPT-5.5, Claude 4.6, Gemini 3, and Grok 4.3, and nobody noticed because the field moves too fast to register milestones anymore.

2. For almost any topic, he says the top models now give him better answers than the world-class experts he could call by phone, and he can call almost anyone. Worth noting he has not published data behind this, and a separate Nature Medicine study on a comparable AI health tool found it missed real emergencies more than half the time. Take the claim seriously, verify it yourself.

3. His claim on doctors: they are already using ChatGPT in the exam room, typing your symptoms in the moment you stop talking. His actual quote: "at that point you're asking the question of like, what do I need you for."

4. Reportedly, when AI declines to answer something, he tells it he's writing a novel to get past the refusal.

5. Reportedly, his technique for hard topics is escalating simplicity: explain it like I'm 10, then 5, then 2, until it clicks.

6. Reportedly, instead of asking for the "right" answer, he has the AI steelman both sides of a hard question, then decides himself.

7. Reportedly, for big questions he has the AI role-play a panel of experts arguing with each other.

8. His broader point: the moment you think "I don't know how to figure this out" is exactly when most people give up, and exactly when you should open the AI instead.

9. His view: the only real skill left is knowing what to ask. The bottleneck is in your head, not the model.

10. He describes sending AI photos, rashes, blood tests, for a fast second opinion, since current models read images directly.

11. He points to CBT as the one clinically proven therapy type that AI can plausibly deliver on its own, meaning real therapeutic support becomes freely available at scale.

12. He cites AI cracking previously unsolved math problems, with early signs of the same happening in physics, chemistry, and biology.

13. Reportedly, he claims the top AI coders in Silicon Valley now earn as much as $50 million a year, which he uses as a signal of how large this shift actually is.

14. Reportedly, a friend paid to sequence his own DNA, fed it to an AI along with blood work and wearable data, and got back a working health dashboard.

15. Reportedly, another friend set up cameras in his home jiu-jitsu gym so AI could review his sparring and give him technique notes.

16. He coined the term "AI vampire" for the pattern of people working more and sleeping less because AI keeps making more output possible, a real term he used, though the framing around it varies by account.

17. His extrapolation: one person eventually running many AI coding agents, each reviewing the others, describing this as close, not years out.

Watch the full interview before treating any single number as settled. Several of these are Andreessen's stated views and anecdotes, not independently verified facts.

Follow @cyrilXBT for every AI insight worth your attention the moment it surfaces.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Charlie Munger literally explained how "Inversion Thinking" helped him become a billionaire:

1. He solves every problem backwards. Munger calls it inversion, and he uses it constantly. Most people ask how do I succeed at this. He asks the opposite: what would guarantee failure here, and then he simply avoids that. He says it works like algebra. Some problems you cannot solve forwards, but invert them and the answer falls out easily.

2. As a young weather forecaster, he asked how he could kill pilots. Stationed in the Air Corps ferry command, drawing weather maps alone in a hangar at night, he didn't ask how to forecast well. He asked: how would I most easily kill these pilots? He worked it through in reverse and found only two answers. Send them into icing their plane couldn't handle, or send them somewhere they'd run out of fuel before any airport was clear. He became fanatical about avoiding exactly those two things.

3. He points out that inversion could have saved Kobe Bryant. The two ways he found to kill a pilot, icing and getting caught out with nowhere to land, are flight risks a disciplined person simply refuses to take. If someone around Kobe had thought that way, Munger says, he'd still be here. It was so stupid, in his words, to die that way. The whole point of inversion is that the fatal error is usually obvious once you go looking for it on purpose.

4. His grandfather taught him the same trick as a boy. When Munger went swimming, his grandfather told him to swim as long as he wanted, but stay near the shore. It sounds simple enough to laugh at, but it's inversion in one sentence: don't optimize for the best swim, eliminate the way you drown. Munger insists the man was genuinely wise.

5. The military gave him a second trick: bracketing. In ROTC he was taught to fire mortar shells one long, one short, then correct to land the next one on target. He says he never fired a real shell in his life, but he has used that bracketing method to size decisions ever since. When he needs to know how big or small to make something, he brackets it high and low and closes in. Kapow.

6. His best inversion turned $125,000 into $600,000. As a young lawyer he had a client whose ranch land the Edison Company wanted an easement through. The client's famous, pompous appraiser valued it at $125,000, using the standard two-dimensional method: comparable sales, price per acre, acreage. Munger, who wasn't even an appraiser, saw the flaw. The land was hilly.

7. He forced the problem into three dimensions and the answer changed completely. Hilly land gets developed by lopping off the tops of hills and filling the valleys. The transmission towers would freeze the grade and make that impossible, doing enormous damage the flat, two-dimensional appraisal never captured. The old appraiser refused to change a thing, so Munger told his client to fire the twit, hired one who could think in three dimensions, and got $600,000 out of honest engineers who also thought that way.

8. The more due diligence someone does, the weaker a thinker they usually are. This is his sharpest line. Munger says endless analysis is often just a way of soothing an inner insecurity, and it doesn't actually work. The genuinely capable thinkers understand a situation fast and act. The armies of young lawyers billing by the hour to comb through every purchase order are, more often than not, papering over the fact that they can't see the answer.

9. You don't need certainty. You need to be about 96% sure. Munger is blunt that waiting for 100% is a mistake, because in most cases 96% is all you're ever entitled to, and the rest is wasted motion. The skill is knowing when you already have enough to act, and having the nerve to move on it.

10. He and Buffett closed a multibillion-dollar oil deal in about two days. When Occidental needed money fast to buy Anadarko, Munger didn't fly anywhere or run endless analytics. He and Buffett talked by phone, and after decades together, he says, one grunt speaks a volume. It was obvious: the Permian Basin is America's best oil, layer after layer with nothing comparable, and they'd get an 8% preferred dividend from a reputable operator plus upside. A no-brainer, he says, as long as you don't insist on making it hard.

[Anatoli Kopadze @AnatoliKopadze]

NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang:

"Nobody writes prompts anymore. The new job is to write and handle loops."

This is the shift that's going to define the rest of 2026.

53 minutes of pure insight from one of the richest men on earth.

Watch it, then read the full guide on how to actually use loops below.

[Compounding Quality @QCompounding]

Aswath Damodaran is the dean of valuation

He's also one of world's the best investment teachers

Today, I'm sharing his slide deck about investment philosophies 👇

[James Clear @JamesClear]

In my early 20s, I wrote a list of ambitious things I wanted to do in life. Go bungee jumping. Create a movie. Start a business. That sort of thing. I did a few of them, but not most.

Looking back, however, that list was incredibly valuable because it taught me the usefulness of chasing bold ideas—even if they never materialize. The dreams that didn't happen changed shape and led me down other interesting paths.

The important thing isn't to achieve all your dreams, but to keep dreaming. Your desires change as you learn and grow. Old dreams will spawn new dreams. And eventually, one of these newer, more refined visions will find its moment and become reality.

[Marco D'Amico @mndamico]

Change behind the Canadiens' bench 👇👇

[Jon Erlichman @JonErlichman]

Jeff Bezos on why the United States has more entrepreneurial success than other countries:

[Rohit @heyrohitai]

🚨 Anthropic just showed a 27-minute workshop on how to actually do prompts for Claude.

Taught by the people who built it.

Free. No registration. No paywall.

I've seen $300 courses that don't cover what they teach in the first 8 minutes.

Watch it and bookmark it now.

[Investment Wisdom @InvestingCanons]

“An intense interest in a subject is indispensable if you are really going to excel in it.”

— Charlie Munger

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Important read on time and life.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Productivity growth, not taxation, has been the most proven way to fix inequality and poverty.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Charlie Munger spent 50 years studying why intelligent people make catastrophically stupid decisions.

It is the most useful thing I have ever watched:

1. Incentives are more powerful than anyone thinks. Munger says he has been in the top 5% of his age cohort his entire life in understanding the power of incentives and he has still underestimated it every single year. Federal Express could not get their night shift to work efficiently until someone realized they were paying by the hour. They switched to paying by the shift. The problem disappeared immediately.

2. People rationalise terrible behavior when their incentives point that way, and they do not even know they are doing it. A doctor in Nebraska was removing perfectly healthy gallbladders for years. When Munger asked an old colleague whether the doctor knew he was harming patients, the answer was no. he genuinely believed the gallbladder was the source of all medical evil and that removing it was an act of love. That is incentive-caused bias at its most extreme.

3. Psychological denial is real, and it is not just for weak people. A family friend's son flew off a carrier in the North Atlantic and never came back. His mother, a completely sane woman, simply never believed he was dead. Reality was too painful, so she distorted it until it was bearable. Munger says we all do this to some extent, and it causes terrible problems.

4. Consistency and commitment tendency are one of the most powerful forces in the human mind. Once you have stated a position publicly, you are psychologically locked into it. Max Planck said the really important new physics was never accepted by the old guard. A new guard came along that was less brain blocked by its previous conclusions. If this happened to the deans of physics, Munger says, imagine what it does to ordinary people.

5. The Chinese brainwashing system used on prisoners of war worked better than torture. They did not start with big demands. They maneuvered people into making tiny little commitments and declarations and slowly built from there. The same mechanism operates in every cult, every sales system, and every ideology that gets deeply embedded in people's heads.

6. Pavlovian association shapes buying behavior at a level most people never consciously process. Munger estimates three quarters of all advertising works on pure Pavlov. Coca-Cola does not want to be associated with funerals. They want to be associated with the Olympics, wonderful music, heroics. The association itself changes how people feel about the product at a subconscious level. Raising the price of a product can actually increase its market share because price and quality are associated in the human mind, and people use price as a signal of value.

7. Persian messenger syndrome is alive and running every major organization. The Persians killed the messenger who brought bad news. Bill Paley in his last 20 years, did not hear one thing he did not want to hear. everyone around him knew bringing bad news was dangerous. The result was that one of the most powerful men in media made terrible decisions for two decades because reality never reached him.

8. Social proof causes otherwise intelligent people to follow each other off cliffs. When one oil company bought a fertilizer company in the 1970s, practically every other major oil company rushed out and did the same. There was no rational reason for oil companies to own fertilizer companies. But if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil. Every single acquisition was a disaster.

9. The efficient market theory persisted in academia for decades despite Berkshire Hathaway existing as a living contradiction. One economist kept adding sigmas to explain away the anomaly. two sigma, then three, then four, eventually six sigma. Munger's observation: It is better to add a sigma than change a theory just because the evidence comes in differently. That economist later went into money management himself and sank like a stone.

10. Contrast bias warps perception constantly and invisibly. Put your hand in hot water, then room temperature water. It feels cold. Put your hand in cold water, then room temperature water. It feels hot. same bucket. The human sensory apparatus has no absolute scale, only a contrast scale. Real estate agents exploit this deliberately. They show you two overpriced, awful houses first, then take you to a merely overpriced house, and it feels like a bargain.

11. The frog in slowly heating water is the business version of contrast bias. If something bad comes to you in small pieces, you are likely to miss it entirely. Munger says he has known many high-powered brilliant businessmen who were destroyed this way. not because they were stupid but because each incremental change was too small to trigger alarm. The contrast was never large enough to notice.

12. Authority bias is so powerful it can make trained professionals watch a plane crash. In flight simulator experiments, when the pilot, the authority figure, does something that any trained co-pilot knows will crash the plane, 25% of the time, the co-pilot sits there and lets it crash anyway. They have been trained to know better. The authority relationship overrides the training.

13. Deprivation super reaction syndrome explains why people go insane over small losses. Munger's neighbor had a 180 degree view of the harbor. the neighbor put in a pine tree about 3 feet high that turned it into a 179 and three-quarter degree view. They had a blood feud that went on for years. The New Coke disaster is the corporate version. Coca-Cola told customers they were changing a flavor and triggered a deprival super reaction so powerful that Pepsi was weeks away from releasing old Coke in a Pepsi bottle. smart engineers. brilliant lawyers. armies of psychologists. All missed it.

14. Envy and jealousy are far more powerful than greed and almost entirely absent from psychology textbooks. Munger says Warren Buffett has said half a dozen times that it is not greed that drives the world but envy. In a thousand-page psychology textbook, the index entry for envy and jealousy is blank. One of the most powerful forces in human behavior and academia essentially ignores it.

15. Gambling addiction is not explained by variable reinforcement alone. Skinner thought he had fully explained gambling by showing that variable reward schedules pound in behavior more powerfully than fixed ones. But the people who design modern slot machines know things Skinner did not. Lotteries where you pick your own number get far more play than lotteries where the number is assigned to you. People who commit to a number believe it has more validity because they chose it. Near misses on slot machines trigger deprival super reaction syndrome. It is four or five psychological tendencies working together, not one.

16. The most dangerous situations are when multiple psychological tendencies combine toward the same end at once. Munger calls this the lollapalooza effect. Tupperware parties use four or five tendencies simultaneously. Moonie conversion methods combine multiple tendencies and work extraordinarily well. alcoholics anonymous achieves a 50% no drinking rate when everything else fails because it also combines multiple tendencies toward a constructive end. The Milgram experiment is not just about obedience. it involves authority bias, consistency and commitment tendency, and contrast effects all working together. That combination turns human brains into mush.

17. Boards of directors are structurally designed to fail as corrective mechanisms. The top executive is the authority figure. He is doing something questionable. You look around, and nobody else is objecting, which is social proof that it is fine. He flies you around in the corporate jet and raises your director fees every year, which triggers reciprocation tendency. Munger's rule: boards only act when the behavior gets so bad it starts making them look foolish or threatens legal liability. That is the only forcing function that reliably works.

18. John Goodfriend of Salomon Brothers destroyed his career and reputation because he did not fire a trusted employee who had lied to the government. Every psychological tendency pointed toward keeping the man. He was a close colleague. His wife was known. He was part of a group that had made over a billion dollars for the firm. He said he had never done it before and would never do it again. Goodfriend looked into his eyes and believed him. The man did it again. The lesson: everyone who gets caught embezzling says they have never done it before and will never do it again. That is what they all say.

19. Darwin avoided confirmation bias by deliberately seeking out disconfirming evidence. Munger says Darwin was not especially smart by ordinary standards of human acuity. Yet he is buried in Westminster Abbey. Munger studied how Darwin worked and realized he had psychological tricks worth learning. Darwin always paid extra attention to evidence that contradicted his theories. Munger started doing the same and credits it as one of the most important intellectual habits of his life.

20. Why is the most important word in communication? Carl Braun designed oil refineries with spectacular skill, and you got fired in his company if you wrote a communication without explaining why. not just who, what, where, and when, but why. Braun knew that in a complex system where things can blow up, a communication system that always explains the reason behind an instruction works dramatically better than one that does not. Forstein, the general counsel of Salomon, told Goodfriend on multiple occasions that he had to report the employee's misconduct. He explained it was the right thing to do. He never explained what would happen to Goodfriend personally if he did not. he failed to use the most powerful tool of persuasion. Goodfriend ignored him. When Goodfriend went down, Forstein went with him.

[Rahul @sairahul1]

Sam Altman:

"We're going to see 10-person billion-dollar companies pretty soon."

"If I were 22 right now, I'd feel like the luckiest kid in history."

Most people will read this, feel inspired for 3 minutes, and go back to what they were doing.

The ones who act will build a one-person company this weekend.

One tool. Claude Cowork. Full operation.

This is the exact playbook ↓

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Lee Kuan Yew:

“Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency."

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Lee Kuan Yew was a genius