Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Jim Simons: Life Lessons from the ‘World’s Smartest Billionaire’ (#054)

Episode Date: June 27, 2020

Mathematician, codebreaker, Professor, hedge fund pioneer, & philanthropist Jim Simons makes his first-ever podcast appearance on this episode of INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE with UC San Diego Professor Brian Keating. Learn about Chern-Simons theory, leadership lessons, hedge funds, and a dedication to serve the world through basic research from a master. It is truly a delight to share with you the more personal side of the man who’s been called The World’s Smartest Billionaire: https://youtu.be/gjVDqfUhXOY In this interview, we discuss heroes, fatherhood, leadership and the art of math.    00:15:15 Why he’d invite Abraham Lincoln to dinner. 00:23:42 Discovering Zeno’s paradox at the age of three. 00:34:28 Can math be beautiful? 00:46:25 Lessons from a master investor: alpha vs. beta. 00:56:06 The serendipitous Chern-Simons partnership. 01:03:18 A father’s love. 01:11:09 The legacy of a good example. Jim Simons earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from UC Berkeley at the age of 23. He worked as a mathematician for the NSA and as a professor and department chair at Stony Brook University. Simons earned billions after founding the hedge fund firm Renaissance Technologies. He co-founded the Simons Foundation with his wife Marilyn in 1994 to advance scientific research. The foundation provided funding for the Simons Observatory, a telescope array being built in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile https://simonsobservatory.org/ Simons also founded Math For America in 2004 to facilitate better math education. Watch a TED interview with Jim Simons https://youtu.be/U5kIdtMJGc8 Learn about the Simons Observatory, including the Simons-National Society of Black Physicists Scholars Program (SNSP) https://simonsobservatory.org/snsp.php Learn more about the Simons Foundation on the web: https://www.simonsfoundation.org follow them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimonsFdn Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome, everybody, to this episode of the Into the Impossible podcast, a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. I am your fearful host, Brian Keating, co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, a professor of physics at UC San Diego. And today's a very special day because I don't often get to interview people that have known. known me since before I was born and people who have played such a huge role in my life in particular, but in literally millions of people around the world's lives, and that's none other than Jim Simons, Dr. Jim Simons, who's joining us from New York, where he has been sheltering, I presume, for quite some time. Jim, welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast.

Well, thanks. Glad to be here. Glad to be here. So this podcast is really a discussion of ideas with great intellectuals and thinkers, and I always like to get to know people a little bit better. Usually I ask questions about their books or so forth. But what I want to start off with you is to kind of ask you if somebody, an alien abducted you and could speak English to you, and asked you, who are you? How would you answer that question? What defines Jim Simons to you? Who am I? And what, how do I define myself?

Yeah. Scientists, philanthropist. Well, I've been three things. I've been a mathematician. I have run an investment fund. And now a foundation, a foundation that focuses on basic science. of all stripes. So I've done three

things in my life aside from having a couple of children, et cetera. And, well, that's been my life. Someone wrote a book about me this past year, and I didn't want them to do it,

but it didn't come out too badly. So, you know, you could learn about me somewhat in that book. Yeah, we had, Craig Zuckerman, he was a guest on the podcast a few months back. So, yes, we did talk about that book. And, you know, but I've always encouraged you to write a book.

And I'm very interested to know. One of these days I'll do it. One of these days I'll do it. My daughter keeps urging me to do so. I'm going to retire soon from the foundation and then have more time to write my memoirs or something. like that. But I don't know what else I can tell you to describe myself.

I think I'm imaginative. I think I have a lot of imagination. And I've had my share of good ideas. Bad ones sometimes, of course. In fact, when you're doing science, you probably have five bad ideas for every good one. But my friend Lenny Baum said, he said, bad ideas is good.

Good ideas is better. No ideas is terrible. And when you're doing science, you have a lot of bad ideas. But you get some good ones. If you're a good scientist, then those carry the day. that's great and I like to think about you yes as a ponderer as an intellectual and I you know I guess I foremost think of you as a scientist because even in philanthropy and even in your role as a department chair and and your roles throughout throughout the you know the financial world

you have always adopted it seems to me a scientist mentality where you approach things Just as you said, I could replace what you said ideas with experiments. And you do many, many experiments, thought experiments, and some succeed, and some are actual experiments in real life. I'm not just talking about the Simon's Observatory, but I'm talking about running projects. And part of what I want to talk to you about today is this notion of leadership in these different communities and these different hats that you've worn. and whether or not you think there's some translation or some skill set that you had uniquely

that made you a good leader of these industries or professions, because people are lucky enough to have one career, let alone three. And I wonder, you know, were you just born with it? Was there something that was instilled in you by your parents or your upbringing, your relatively modest upbringing outside of Boston? Is there anything that instilled that? or is it just your nature that you were kind of born this way? Well, we're talking about leadership.

Well, I have a lot of imagination, so I've come up with some ideas that have worked. But my idea of leadership of an organization is to hire the very best people you possibly can. And I have a good taste in people. and then let them carry the ball. And when I became chair of the Stony Brook Math Department, I reached out for the best person I could possibly find, and he was your father. And I knew if your dad would come on board,

it would open up the floodgates of people seeing, oh, well, this department can really go somewhere. so I spent a lot of time courting your father and finally he said yes and then I was able to quickly hire three or four other outstanding people and we did that over the next couple of years I hired 10 people the first year 10 to second and I think maybe 10 people the third year and by then we built up an outstanding department that's kind of a well certainly it's very touching for you to speak about my father james ax in that way and and i know that you know you had always been described to me by my mother and um and even by my dad is having this preternatural ability to recognize talent and to but not only to like be the the chess player needs to know not only the names of the pieces and to that it's better to have a lot of you know queens than a lot of pawns, but actually how to implement them, how to recruit them into action,

and get them to do some of the work that is needed to be done for success on a project. You once told me that you read a fiction book called The Captain or something like that that was very influential on you as a leader. Can you remind me the name of that book? Because I haven't not been able to find it yet. Yeah, I can't remember that name either, but it was when I was about to become chair of Stony Brook, the math department. I was 30 years old.

And I found this book I think it might have been called captain about a young fellow in the Navy who became captain of a boat at quite a young age

and had to learn how to be a commander. And one of the things he learned is don't dodle too much about making a decision. Make a decision. It may be wrong, but it's better to make a decision

than just dawdle and dawdle and make no decision. And that seemed like an important lesson to me. And I've always been reasonably decisive. I consult with other people and so on as one should. But I don't just go back and forth and back for a long time. I make the decision. Sometimes it's wrong, but most of the time, my decisions have been good. Another lesson I learned from you a little while ago was, you know, when people have something really important to them, say, in a department, when you were chair at Stony Brook,

you would let them debate it. Maybe it wasn't at the top number one or two priority in your mind, but you could tell it was important to them and you'd let them discuss it. Instead of weighing in on every single decision that you'd let people to whom it made the most impact on make those decisions. And then when you would sit those out or kind of just share the meeting, so to speak, and then for the meetings that had something of great importance to you personally, then you would weigh in and you would have more gravitas. Is that something that you learned on the job? Or how did you come to that realization that that was an effective management technique?

Well, you did describe that exactly as it was. So here's how it was. Yeah. I learned quickly that when you have a department meeting, there are a lot of opinions. People like to argue, go back and forth on this and that. And so I determined that, okay, people like to debate. Fine, I'm going to let them debate.

But if it's something important, I'll make the decision in the first place, announce that we're going to do this or we're going to do that, and as the, you know, maybe the first item on the agenda of a department meeting. And then I was very happy to let everyone debate other things that were coming up, which I didn't think was so important. So, okay, fine. I argued this way, that way we come to a conclusion. But if it was really important, I would just announce it myself. And no objected.

So that was the way I ran department release. Interesting. When you had the opportunity to play a role in these three different fields, you know, philanthropy, finance, and academia, do you feel that there are commonalities? Maybe the point I'm getting at mostly is I think there's not, we never received training. Here's how you should be a department chair. You know, there doesn't seem to be a lot of, you know, mentorship or guidance. It's kind of like sink or swim.

you're thrown into this job, and you either perform or you don't. And even when you perform, you might be victim of the Peter principle. You know, you rise to the level of your incompetence, as it said. But, you know, do you think that that's something that's missing in academia, at least in science, maybe even in philanthropy? How do we cultivate the next generation of leaders? Well, that's a good question. And it's interesting in math departments, unless there's a lot of money available and you can really build up the department substantially.

Most people don't necessarily want the job as department chair. It's often saying, okay, it's my turn. I'll do it for three years or for four years. but I don't go, you know, I want to do research, teaching. I'm not so interested in administration. Now, in other fields, that's not the case. In biology or medical school, the chair of the department, that's really not only an important thing, but a sought after thing.

Yes. So when I was interviewing for chair, of the math department with the provost he said something very funny he said well Dr. Simons you're the first person

I've interviewed for this job who actually wants it and I said no I want it so they hired me so I don't know if there's if I think

people who rise up in academia get the experience they see, you know, what other people are doing and what mistakes they may have made or whatever and try to learn. And I think that's the way people rise up in any organization. So. Do you see it as a, I don't think of secret to it. Right. I mean, I just can't imagine somebody being offered, you know, CEO or managing director of Renaissance Technologies app.

I'm not sure. I got to think about it. Why do you think it is that people, you know, it's almost like a. you know, the booby prize in academia. If you're selected for department chair, it's like congratulations, question mark, or my condolences. But it really should be,

you know, if somebody offered somebody the CEO of Apple, I don't think they would say, oh, I really got to think about this. I got to talk to my spouse. Well, I mean, it's a different deal. It takes you being the department chair, at least in mathematics and perhaps physics or astronomy is it takes you away from your research.

And your research is the thing most people want to do the most. So they feel, okay, I have to do some administration. It's my turn. I'll do the best I can, but I'll be glad when it's over. So whereas running a company is a whole different deal. That's something that some people are good at and really want to do that and leave the company and make a lot of money. But academic departments don't make a lot of money. So that's the way I see it.

Last year we were together for the Total Solar Eclipse in Chile, and I asked you, if you could arrange a dinner party for a famous single person from history, you know, a hundred years or more ago, who would it be? And you basically instantaneously said Abraham Lincoln. And I wonder, what does he mean to you? And are there lessons in his leadership style that speak to you so loudly that he would be the historical figure that you'd most like to sit down with for a meal? Yeah. Well, I only really have one hero in my life. and it's Abraham Lincoln.

There's many people I admire and so on, but as a hero, it's Abraham Lincoln. And he had the following qualities. He had very, very good social skills. People liked to be around

him. He told a lot of jokes and so on. He was very smart. He was very smart. In his middle, before he became president, he decided to study Euclidean geometry and understand that much

mathematics, just on his own because he was just curious. And he was a very, very smart guy, good social skills, wonderful social skills, and determination. He had determination. There were so many times

during the Civil War where he could have just said to hell with it. Let's just have two countries. So many people are being killed in this terrible war. But he had a vision of America, and he stuck to that vision, and just wouldn't give up. And over time, he was right. And that held the country together. We won the civil war.

I say we won the civil war. The North won the Civil War. And then he got, with great effort, the amendment passed, which abolished slavery in the United States. Yes. And that was very difficult to get passed. But he knew he had to get it passed before the war was over. and there were a lot of southerners now back in the Congress, and it wouldn't get passed.

And he said to his guys, he said, this is very important. I want you to go out and do everything you can. Twist every arm. Give people this or that if they feel they need it. I'm the president of the United States. I'm infused with great power. use that power and get this amendment passed.

And it worked. So I think he was just a great man in every respect. If I'm not mistaken, the poem, Oh, Captain, My Captain, which has the title Captain from your book that you mentioned earlier, is it written about Abraham Lincoln. Speaking of books and Abraham Lincoln, is there any book, any book or biography of Lincoln that you recommend or a story about him by any author?

I've read at least four biographies. Which ones did you like? I can't remember any of the names. I'm terrible. There's one called Team of Rivals, that by Doris Kearns-Goodwin. That's right. Team of Rivals. That's the most recent, interesting semi-biography of him

because it was about the other people on his. cabinet. But that was an example. These people had wanted to be president, at least a couple of them. And he said, look, you're the best guys around. I want you on my cabinet. And they came. And at a certain point, not too late in the game, Stanton became became the secretary of War, they called the Secretary of War, replacing a poor choice that he had made for that position. So that guy left and Stanton came in and got to know Lincoln.

Now, he had met Lincoln years earlier. Lincoln was a railroad lawyer, and he did a very good job in the Midwest representing railroads. and railroads were just coming into the United States and there were, you know, legal issues and trials and so on. So he was a very good railroad lawyer, but there was a big case with a big railroad and it was going to be held in Cincinnati. He was put on it, but then the railroad said,

well, we really need a big New York firm. We really need to put a lot of heft into this. so they hired Stanton and his firm. Lincoln was still on the job, but he just sat there and listened. And later said, you know, I learned a lot from that. But Stanton and his team, they just thought this guy was a dope. You know, he just sat there. He didn't say anything, whatever.

And later when he became in Lincoln's cabinet and understood who Lincoln was, He was quoted as saying, none was so wrong than we in Cincinnati. So that's what the trial was held. Right. And so Stanton, so his cabinet, you know, really was adored him, or maybe adored a Mr. Strong Ward, but sounds too rubby-dovey, but admired him. And he was just a great man. I could go on and on above him.

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Saturday, May 16th and 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. I'm sure. I want to touch upon what you mentioned before, and we had this conversation also. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson declares certain things as self-evident. And Stephen Shrogatz, who hosts the Quantum Magazine Joy of X podcast for Quantum Magazine, which is at least sponsored by the Simon's Foundation, Stephen points out that that very phrase, you know, we hold these truths to be self-evident, is really a reference to Euclidean geometry

where Euclid would prove things in his elements, which is one of your favorite books, I know, and he would say such and such is self-evident. And I wonder if we could segue into a little bit of a discussion about why math appeals to you and has from a young age, because if I recall correctly, one of your first realizations and encounters with math was sort of a realization of what we call Xenos paradox.

And I wonder, can you recount the story of when you basically at age, what, four or five, really kind of rediscovered or discovered Xenos paradox for yourself? And what did that do igniting within you and perhaps a love of mathematics? Well, first, let's go back to Euclid. What he said was self-evident were the axioms. The parallel is a maxim.

That was the toughest one. Two points describe a unique line and the intersection principle. So those, he said, were self-evident. But from then on, the theorems that developed from these were not self-evident. They were all, well, some of them looked obvious, but nonetheless, they were all proved using these initial, quote-unquote, self-evident things. Now, my

discovery of Zeno's paradox was when I was a little boy, maybe three or four, I was riding in the car with my father and he said he had a stop to get gas. I said,

well, why do you do that? He said, I don't want to run out of gas because, you know, the car won't run. And I said, well, why don't you just use half the amount that's in the tank and then use half of that, and then use half of that, et cetera, and you'll never run out. You'll never run out again. Now, I didn't think it further through and realize, yes, but you'll never get anywhere either.

But I could see that, you know, you just keep. cutting something down and happened, there's still something left. So that was something that I, also, when I was a little boy, well, a lot of kids did this, I think, just kept doubling numbers, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. I got up to 2024, I suppose, before I got bored with it. But I thought that was fun. But one thing, I used to think a lot. I would think a lot and sometimes talk to myself.

And when I went to bed, I often lay in bed thinking. And for some reason or another, and I couldn't have been more than 10, I'd heard the expression, pass it on. And I know, you know what that means, pass it on. But I lay in bed and said, well, how do you define that? If I say so-and-so is going to be married, pass it on, for an example. Well, you say, tell the next guy and tell him to tell the next guy and tell him to tell the next guy, et cetera. Recursively, yeah.

Yeah. And I tossed and turned for several days trying to get a definition of pass it on. Finally, one night I fell asleep believing I had it. But when I woke up, I forgot what I had the night before. So I finally just said to hell with it. But that a little kid would think about the question of how you define something is, you know, there's unusual. Yeah.

That's impressive for sure. And do you feel that that, I always see with my little kids, when they solve a puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle or a crossword puzzle like Marilyn, you know, must have instilled in me as a young person, and now my kids play crossword puzzles on their iPhones and iPads, when they solve it, they almost want to redo it because they get a little taste of excitement that mirrors and mimics. the excitement that they felt when they solved it the first time.

And I wonder if that encounter, that math encounter that you underwent at that young age, do you think that was an incisive event that had an impact on your later development into becoming a mathematician later on in life? Well, I don't know if that particular thing did. Or that way of thinking, that way of curiosity that you had. Yes, I think that's probably true. That was something that I never forgot, actually. But mathematics was the only subject that I liked, actually, in grammar school and even in high school.

I didn't like, science was not very well taught. and I didn't I was a voracious reader so I love literature but I didn't write very well but the subject that I love was mathematics and in those days when I was in high school the AP

thing was just coming into play right so and a few high schools had been chosen to pioneer this thing. And my high school, Newton High School in Newton, Massachusetts, was one of them.

So I learned calculus in high school, which today, you know, first year calculus, which today the AP courses take. It wasn't called AP. It was called the something plan. But whatever it was,

Kenyan plan, it was called the Kenyan plan. I don't know why. But so I took that advanced course and then went to MIT. And I learned later that I got my teacher in the 12th grade was one of the people who designed the test and then consulted with others. passed the test and who didn't. And someone told me, he said, Simon has to pass the test.

If he can't, that should be a level, he should pass the test. So his score should be a passing score. That was the standard. Yeah, that would be the standard. Calibration.

Yep. So and so I, Anyway, I went to college and studied math. In my freshman year, I took a graduate course in the second semester. And it said no, what do you call it? Audit.

No, you didn't have to have taken any other course. Oh, no prerequisites. No prerequisite. Yes. No prerequisite. And so I said, okay, to myself, I'm going to take this course. And it was on abstract algebra, group theory and some vector spaces and so on. And I was very puzzled by this course.

I passed it. I really didn't understand what it was all about. But that summer, I got a book on algebra. and within a couple of weeks I realized, oh, that's what it's all about. I just had this over the summer, this vision or whatever. Epiphany almost. Epiphany that this is what this is all about.

And from then on, the next two years, I took the most advanced algebra classes. And in my third year, it was with a guy named Iwasawa and it was topics in algebra it was called and I think I was the only person in the class it was a graduate class and I was in my third year

and I think I was the only one who solved all the problems and that was the homework so I was good at algebra but my I was also introduced to differential geometry in that same year and I loved it. I just loved it.

And I felt that I would do very well with that, which I did. When I learned Stokes' theorem, I thought that was the most beautiful theorem I ever saw. Stokes' theorem. It generalizes the fundamental theorem of calculus. It, you know, it's just the divergence. Stokes and so on, all wrapped up in Stokes' theorem and this notion of differential forms.

You know what the differential form is? Yeah, of course. We're going to talk about that next. Yeah, go ahead. Do you want to describe it for my listeners, though? The differential form and why it's so beautiful, as you say? Yeah, why don't you? Yeah, well.

I like how you describe it. So we talk about the, you know, kind of relationship. It's almost, you know, mirroring. I believe what Hilbert said, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in... No, that was Vigner. Oh, Vigner. Sorry, Vigner. It's almost, there's a second order unreasonable effectiveness of geometry and physics.

And we talk about our connection between geometric forms and their utility in geometry, general relativity, and more recently in terms of quantum field theory and understanding the properties of the behavior particles in these abstract spaces. And lately there's been a lot of controversy. There's a young, well, I shouldn't say young. He's a couple years older than me, and I'm not young. But there's a man by the name of Eric Weinstein, who I believe you know, and he's trying to develop what he calls a, really a geometric theory of all of physics. And it's very controversial, but effectively finding the analogs of particles

that we call fermions in an abstract 14-dimensional geometric space. And these connections, one forms, two forms, metric connections, these are vital attributes of this model that he's constructed. And some of it's an analogy with work that's already been done. And what he, what Eric, this Eric Weinstein has done is he's made a digital version of your, of the famous Simon Center for Geometry and physics has what's called the iconic wall of mathematics and physics. And on this huge wall, 465 square foot wall are the basic, and I'm going to have a link and I'll show images in the video of this conversation. You have the metric equation. You have Einstein equations, which are, you know, two forms.

geometric objects and differential geometry. And some claim that this is the pinnacle, not only of math and physics, but really of civilization, that the equations on your wall represent the pinnacle of what we've been able to achieve as a species. And you said something interesting a few minutes ago. You said, when you understood Stokes theorem,

it was beautiful to you. And I want to connect that to the Simon Center, the wall. Do you think of math as beautiful in the sense that art is beautiful? I mean, we often hear this debate, you know, is mathematics discovered or invented? I don't think people would say, Michelangelo discovered, you know, the David inside of a block of marble, even though he would say stuff like that. But he actually created it. But mathematics, and what's chiseled into your wall in the Simon Center, do you feel that that's, you know, discovered or really is it invented by the human

mind. And then the follow-up question after you answer that will be, is it beautiful? Does it rank alongside great music, great artwork? And if so, why? So first, is mathematics discovered or invented the way art or inventions are found? Yeah, that's a standard question. And it's both. how so? Every true theorem is out there. The number of true theorems is, I believe,

infinite. And the number of definitions that one can make is infinite. So all these things are out there. But on the other hand, you don't know this. There's no book of all these things

because it's an infinite number of possible theorems and definitions. The key is in doing mathematics to, let's say, find a good definition, a definition that will get you somewhere, a definition that would unify perhaps other things and so on. So that's a creative act. So it's a creative act to find something interesting in an infinite field, in an infinite collection of things. So it's out there, but you have to find it and have good taste in finding something that will really go somewhere.

So it's guided by wisdom as well as knowledge. I think that's interesting. And then the question, the follow-up question, is math a form of art? Does it have commonalities? Is it different than music or art? Does it move you? I've always been curious. Does it do you feel, does it invoke any emotions when you look at the wall, not just for its artistic beauty, which it is, but when you see the Ahara foam effect or you see the Iraq equation or just a pure mathematical relationship, Stokes Stokes theorem?

When you see these, does it evoke an emotion inside of Jim Simons? Well, I mean, I've seen these things so often. It's hard to keep getting emotional about it. I know, but yeah, but the notion of is math evocative to you? Are you an emotional person, first of all? And then, you know, does math evoke great beauty the way that great art or music does in some people? Well, math certainly evokes beauty. It's when someone does something good or whatever,

it's very often it's characterized oh that's a beautiful film and that's a beautiful result the word beauty is

permeates mathematics so I think there's an aesthetic to it that's why we use that word and of course art

regular art can be beautiful and poems can be beautiful and all those things but mathematics definitely is characterized by beauty. Excellent.

So the next question I have is just kind of a yes or no question. Don't feel obliged to elaborate too much. There's an often-said, you know, Kinnard or what have you, quip that mathematicians peak at age 30. That's the age that you started the math department at Stony Brook. Do you find any credence in that? My father didn't think it was true, but what's your opinion about this notion that,

oh, mathematicians do their best work by, 30? Mathematicians can do a lot of good work by age 30, but they can do a lot of good work at age 50 or 60. I've reached a point 82 where I really can't do math anymore, but I could up to my early 70s. So I got some good results actually when I went back to mathematics for a while. So I think, yes, young people can do terrific things, but the older people can do good stuff, too.

So I don't think it's everyone, every mathematician did his best work when he was under 30. That's probably not the case. Okay, now we're going to transition a little bit into a later career, which was involving in the financial world. but we're going to connect it to a famous geometer in physics, and that's Albert Einstein. So our segue between geometry and finance will be none other than Albert Einstein, who once said that compound interest

is the most powerful force in the universe. Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it, he who doesn't pays it. Do you agree with that? I never heard that. You never heard that. Okay, I'll send you an email with a quote it. Yeah, so once again, compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it, and he who doesn't pays it. What is your notion of the, what's the most powerful force in the world, according to Jim

Simons? Well, the most powerful force in the world, according to me, is some physical force. I don't know which one could pick. But this, of course, is finance, and not. and not physics. So, gee, I've been pretty successful in finance. Yeah, you've had some success, I would say. I've had some success. Today, actually, I lost some money. Oh, no.

Not a huge thing, but I... I'm here for you, Jim, if you need anything. That was a losing day. I'm sorry. But, yeah, a couple of us. How do you think of yourself? So this segues into something that I think will be of great interest, not because of your total amassed wealth or anything,

but how do you think of money? What is money to you? Is it a tool? Is it a vice? Some people see money in a very negative way nowadays. How do you view money and what is its purpose as far as you're concerned? Well, most of the money that I've earned is, now in our foundations.

So I think I have only 10 or 15% of the money that I've earned that's not in the foundations. But that's plenty. Plenty for me. Look, I enjoy being wealthy.

I enjoy having my boat and my airplane at two houses, one thing or another. There's no question that I enjoy that. But I also enjoy the foundation and doing really interesting things with the money, as we're doing with your telescope project. That's very satisfying. So I think I like all aspects of money.

So, yes, yes, certainly, yeah, they say God bless the child who has his or her own. A question came in from a friend of mine who is in the financial industry, so to speak, and this person wanted to know about kind of the philosophy by which you run your life. I guess I would say first question was, do you have a set of routines or habits that shape your daily activities? Do you have space in your calendar for just pondering things? How do you organize your daily schedule in terms of your habits and tactics? When I was 70, I'm a smoker, as you might have noticed. Yes.

And at 70, I thought, well, maybe I should give up smoking. Now, Marilyn suggested, well, maybe you should take up exercise because that might help take your mind off smoking. So I did that. I got two trainers, and every morning I'd set my alarm for 6 o'clock and 6.30, I was with one of the two trainers. Wow. Now, after a couple of months, I went back to smoking.

I couldn't stand not smoking. But I loved doing exercise. Oh, wow. So I do that every single morning, well, five days a week. Yes. Wow. And I do a walk very fast, and then I do pushups and sit-ups and all that. kind of stuff.

So that's a regular part of my routine every morning for an hour. And the rest is totally disorganized. No. It's, you know, I have regular meetings with the different people I supervise at the foundation. Sometimes it's a weekly meeting or a monthly meeting, but that's the way I run things. But mostly, of course, as I told you, when you're hired wonderful people, you let them, you know, do that thing and don't stand up of the hall.

Let me know if you can find someone to work out for me that will actually do the exercise for. Let me know if you can find someone to do that. One of my listeners, friend of mine who hosts a podcast himself, James Altucher, wants to know the proprietary algorithms of the medallion. No, he wants to know, has it become harder for you? given the rise in quantitative hedge funds, and the thousands of PhDs trying to create new algorithms, has that made it harder to create alpha? So can you say what alpha means in the context of hedge funds

for people that aren't familiar and then answer that particular question? Well, when you say alpha, first you have to understand beta. And beta is the stock market as a whole. let's say the S&P average. So you could just invest in that, and you would be 100% beta. All your return would come from the, let's say, the S&P,

the standard and poor's average. Alpha is a source of earnings that is orthogonal to that. It's orthogonal to that. And so that's alpha. Now, some, our medallion fund is, I think, 90% alpha, or 95% alpha. It really doesn't matter where the stock market is going for the medallion fund. We have, now the medallion fund is only open to employees of the company, of Renaissance, and me, of course, as a founder and shareholder.

And we have some publicly available funds, which do have some beta. They're not 100% alpha. But, of course, they don't do as well as Medallion, but they do quite well until today. Today they had a bad day. I'm sorry. Again, I'm always here if you need a cup of sugar. I'm here, Jay.

So in that space, the question is, I've heard it describe that these supercomputers and computers in general are, of course, increasing exponentially, example of power, computing power over time, and cost is coming down. And yet the supercomputers themselves are suffering from the fact that there's more subscriptions. There's more people that want to use the computer now than in the earlier days. So it's sort of offsetting the exponential gains and processing power. And I guess James Altercher's question here is, has the just a net quantity of hedge funds and quant PhD?

Yes, I understand. And I didn't answer that question. Yeah. So I think the question is, do we have competition and how much competition has competition hurt us at all? Because there are more and more quantitative funds, up to a point. I think most funds are not quantitative funds, but there's certainly an increasing number of funds that are quantitative. And our secret is just to stay ahead of everybody.

The hire the best possible people. And the research goes on all the time, all the time. We're doing research trying to find new predictive signals. New predictive signals, for example, example, that's a big example. So a signal is, well, you know what a signal is. It tells you what's, a predictive signal is a signal that tells you what's going to, what's going to happen. With some probability of, right. With a probability greater than a half. And the more of these signals that you have, and independent, they're not correlated with each other.

If they're highly correlated, it's really just one signal. But the more you have. the better. As the crispy chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper?

If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet, no. Krispy, saucy, and $4?

Very. Only at 711. Valley 36-2326, Participating stores only while supplies last the app for full terms. And we have, I won't even say the number, and I'm not sure what it is, but it's a very large number of predictive signals. And they keep being developed. And sometimes these signals lose their power. Yes.

You have to discard them. Other people have caught on or whatever. in the earliest days of my trading, I traded commodities. And commodities had a tendency to trend, a pretty strong tendency to trend. So that was a good way to make money. You would just say, well, it was up last week. It's likely to be up next week or so on. But people gradually caught on to trending.

So after several years or maybe 10 years after I started in the business, the trending in commodities had completely disappeared. Stocks never trended particularly, so there was no real trending stocks, but commodities there was. And so that's an example of a signal that just disappeared. So other people We don't We keep discovering new signals Other people Might find some of those as well

And that might The effect of that might be that the signal Kind of goes away Because too many people are using it But So we have awfully smart people And they keep coming up with new signals So that's

And we've stayed you know, we've stayed with ahead. Yeah. So the last section of the conversation I want to talk to you about, as B. Fitz the Father's Day podcast episode that I hope this will become, really revolves around, you know, the aspects of mentorship and fatherhood. And the first question I have is, what was Jim Simons like as a PhD thesis advisor? You mentioned that you didn't have a great.

deal of students in your career, but what was your style as a mentor to PhD students? Well, typically with a PhD student, you have to help him find a problem in mathematics that you think that was worth working on and so on. And then you'd meet with him every week or something like that and see how he's getting along. My first student, it was different. my first student was when I was, let's see, I was about 26, and I was working actually at the Institute for Defense Analysis as a cold cracker. I did that for four years. Yeah.

And he had just, he had taken a course from me at Harvard. He was, I think, two years behind me. And then he went to Princeton, and he wanted to do differential geometry, There was no one in Princeton at that time who was especially good at it. The faculty didn't have that much. So he asked that, you know, I could be his, he could be my student, and I gave him some papers to read and so on. And then one day he came in and he said,

I've proved such and such. He said, you prove such and such. That's fantastic. and it was. He got a great result. That result never occurred to me. And but he, so he was my best student by far.

He's won the Beblen Prize. He's had a great career. What's his name? Jeff. Jeff. Jeff. Jeff Cheever. Okay.

And so he was far and away my best student. The others, the others that I had, I had another pretty good one named John Nelson. But the rest were not especially good, and it was not so easy. But as I said, I only had maybe six or seven. And then on the other side, you know, for somebody who's seeking out a mentor or an advisor, did you have anyone, we'll talk about your father in just a second, but did you have anybody who was a mentor in the academic world and the financial world,

or are you just really self-taught? Well, I certainly had some mentors, his singer, of Atea Singer Index fame, was a good person for me, and this was at MIT, and so was his buddy, Warren Ambrose. He was an older guy, but the geometry. those two people were very influential on me. And it's kind of funny because we used to go to a delicatessen late at night when I was a student. And one day I saw Ambrose and Singer come in late at night,

and they were obviously doing mathematics. And I saw this on a number of occasions, and I thought, boy, that's, That's the greatest job in the world where you can just hang out at a delicate test of do mathematics at midnight. So those two people influenced me. When I got to Berkeley, so I spent one years of graduate student in MIT. I graduated in three years. I spent one years a graduate student. I worked with Singer.

But he suggested I go to Berkeley and work with Chern, who was just coming to, to Berkeley. Yeah. So, okay, I got a nice fellowship. I went to Berkeley. But regrettably, Churn was celebrating

his first year at Berkeley by taking a sabbatical, so he wasn't there. So I found someone else to work with a guy named Constant, and he influenced me quite a lot. I like the way he did things. And

there were various ways of doing geometry. And there was a statement from saying, geometry is a subject that's invariant under changes of notation. There were three

completely different notational things. And turn, like moving frames, whatever that was, I'd explain it a little bit. Vector bundles and moving frames. frames. The original thing was Christophel symbols or something.

But covariant differentiation was the way this guy Kostit approached it, and that's why I've always approached it since. And Kostit was a good guy. I came to him one day and said, I have an idea, and I showed him the idea, and he said, oh, that could be related to this outstanding problem. And he told me the problem.

But he said, but don't try that because it's too hard. Singer tried it. Burrell tried it. So that, of course, got me going. Yeah. And I solved that problem. And, well, Kastip was pleased and surprised. Yeah.

So he influenced me. Do you think if Churn had been present at Berkeley that perhaps your career might have taken a different turn, just thinking serendipitously, looking back with the benefit of hindsight? You know, I've thought about that. I don't know if I'd have done as good a thesis if I'd have worked under Churn. It could have been better. But I was very happy with the way it worked out. And I got to no churn in my second year there at Berkeley.

And it was my last year. It was funny. I was giving a seminar in the beginning of my second year, and this tall Chinese guy walks in. I said to the guy and I asked me, who's that? That's churn. I said, I had no idea he was Chinese. Chinese. If his name was Chen or Chan, I would have known. I figured he was some Polish guy who changed his name from Chernowski to turn.

He and I got to be friends. Of course, he was 25 years or 30 years older than I am. Yeah. But we became friends. And he followed my work. And I did some very good work in what's called minimal varieties, a minimal variety. is something that minimizes surface area or a higher dimensional area with respect to its boundary. You know, if you put a wire frame into a soap suds, a surface will form on that wire frame. And if it's twisted or something, it might look curious, but it has the least area of any other surface with that same boundary. That's called a minimal surface. and that was a very interesting field.

And I worked in that for five years and produced a really good result, a really good result. It's had, it still gets citations after 50 years. Wow. And it still got citations. I follow the growth in citations. Your H index is increasing. Yeah. So, and churn, he really ate that up.

He was, he wrote a whole set of notes on it. I thought, wait a minute, is he just copying my work? But no, it was just a good. So I didn't think he was still feeling my work. And then he and I, of course, worked together. And got these Jerry Simon's things. Right. Yeah, I just, I've thought about that in your career, you know, just from the context of, you know, my advisor probably would never respect me the same way that he would, or, you know, if I came to them as a fully developed scientist, whatever that means, just because they've seen me, you know, my advisor, Peter Timby has seen me at my most ignorant. And therefore, I always feel like, there's no way he could ever fully respect me the way somebody might meet me after becoming more developed.

So who knows, maybe Shurn Simons might not have occurred if he hadn't taken that sabbatical, and then the world would look very different, at least. That's entirely possible. Yeah. All right, go ahead. Yeah, so I was just going to segue a little bit into a different type of mentorship, which is father-child mentorship. So the first question I want to ask you, is there anything about your father,

the lesson or character trait that he instilled with you, I always think of our parents' job as to place a little voice recording in the back of our heads that will play at some time in the future when we're not around maybe. Are there any lessons that your father taught you that you find yourself saying or thinking even many years later? Yeah, my father and mother were very different. I was an only child. my mother

after I was born she had some miscarriages and then she had to have what's called a hysterectomy whether the uterus is removed so she couldn't have any more children so I was her project

and she didn't work of course in those days the mothers didn't work I was her project and she really was tough on me that I do my homework and so on

and I often didn't do my homework so she she considered me her project my father on the other hand just simply loved me for who I was whoever I was his son he called me son he never called me Jim he called me and he was just a lovely man.

And it was just a lovely man. And the only thing he taught me and was he was a salesman. He was a salesman for 20th century Fox, in fact. In those days, you'd go around to movie theaters to try to sell them the latest, 20th century fox movie or rented to them.

So he was a salesman. And he would say to me salesmanship is very important. He would frequently say that. I didn't know how it was only a kid or salesmanship. But it turns out salesmanship is very

important. And you know, it's good to be able to sell something. And even in science, you do some work and you want other people to appreciate it and use it. And so you're, you know, you're kind of selling. And, but my father was just a very, very peaceable man.

And I love being with him. We would go to be together on Saturday. That was our day. Or Sunday, I don't know, one of the two weekend days. That was our day together. And he took me to different places. and just, so I really loved my father. Unfortunately, you've got Alzheimer's at the age of about in his mid-70s,

and he went downhill rapidly. So that was unfortunate. No, I did love my mother. Don't get me wrong, but she was a tough customer. Yeah, I always say it's the toughest job, and we have so much writing on it. It's one thing, you know, when one of our kids was born, I didn't know what to do.

And we were both, actually, it was our first child, Isaac, when he was born. And I just looked, and I was in a stupor, and I said, get the instruction manual. You know, there's just no, there's no instruction. And it's the hardest possible job there is. And I wonder, you know, how, you know, it changes a person. And it makes some people more mature, some people less mature, but in a sense, you can't be as selfish as you were.

If you're a good dad, I don't think you can be as selfish as you might have been, even when you selected your spouse. You know, your partner, you can select a partner based on their looks or their money or whatever. And in other words, you can do it to fulfill a need or selfishness that you may have. But having a child, it's completely the opposite. I mean, there's no way they're going to give you anything except for a lot of sleepless nights and missed opportunities and so forth, at least for the first few years. My father used to say, I take an interest in a child when he learns geometry.

So hopefully, he got some satisfaction of my nephews, who did know geometry at a very young age before he passed away. I want to talk a little bit about legacy and maybe first what becoming a father meant to you and what it taught you when you became a father, you know, for the first time. time and how did it affect you? Did you have to make compromises in your work? How did things change for you? How did things change for me? Well, I loved being a father. I was a very young father. I was 22 when in those days that was not so young, but today 22 was pretty young to be a father. Yeah. And my wife was 19 when she became a mother.

I loved it. I love being with my kids. And so I have all kinds of adventures. And so I just really enjoyed being a father. Yeah, and you obviously had a big role in my early life when my father would go in on a Saturday. You know, my parents were divorced, so he would bring me and my older brother Kevin

to the Stony Brook Math Department. and he would always say something like, and I don't know why I kept working on me, but he'd say, come on boys, we're going to see, we're going to the amusement park with Uncle Jim. And we'd get there and he would, you know, he'd put us in his office on one of his swivel chairs and just, that's the amusement park.

And then he and you would go off and do some work on a chalkboard. I thought, this is a pretty bummer app for, you know, for an amusement park. But anyway, you guys had a lot of fun, almost like brothers themselves, as I imagine. Yeah, we did have a lot of. fun. Well, we were in graduate school together. Yeah.

We both finished in three years. And he went to Cornell and I went to he went to Cornell and I went to MIT. And we stayed friends. You know, we stayed friends.

Yeah. And then of course, yeah, I wouldn't have been born at Stony Brook if if you hadn't been able to recruit him using all these tools and tactics that my mom talks about, subtle, gentle manipulation, sending beach sand to Ithaca in the middle of a frozen winter to get my mom's interest. I did something like, but I got him out on the beach.

Yeah. He liked the water. Yes. You know, he had a small boat. Yeah. And he really liked the water. Yeah. It was a good swimmer as well.

Yeah. He was very athletic. He loved to play tennis and games and stuff. And yeah, I have very fond memories of that time in my young life. It certainly is a challenge growing up with parents that are divorced, but I think, you know, for that time period is very common back then. I wonder thinking a little bit more now about your children and kind of just greater lessons. You once told me that you want to live to be old enough to see your great grandkids

because you remember your great-grandparents. So that would be essentially eight generations, if I'm doing the math. That would be connected with Jim Simons in the middle. So great-grandparents, all the way to great-grandchildren. And that made me think of what you want to leave, not as your material will. That's not important to me in this conversation, but what's known in Hebrew as in Zava-a, it means ethical will.

And it's sort of like what Alfred, sorry, when Alfred Nobel did with his Nobel Prize, he gave money away, of course, but he also had a mission that the Nobel Prizes be used to better mankind. And I wonder, and that's sort of an ethical will as well. It's not just the material riches that he had accumulated. He had no children, no spouse, but he wanted to give away money to make a world a better place. But in your context, we know what you're doing in the foundation and philanthropy around the world. But I'm more concerned and questioning now, what would you like to leave as your ethical will? What values, what wisdom would you leave for your great-grandchildren, great children? In other words, a generation you're not going to meet,

the ninth generation, so to speak, your great-grandkids' children, what values, or even humanity as a whole, do you want people to know? I guess, I have to, you know, I don't go around thinking about lecture my children. I didn't lecture them. I wanted to be a good example to them. And of course, I wanted them to love me. As you know, I've lost two children. That's a horrible thing. The children that I have, I just hope they remember me as a person who accomplished a lot of things and was a good father. I, you know, bounce up sometimes. What has he accomplished? And, well, pretty pleased with what I've become in science and philanthropy.

I'm pretty pleased. Could be better. I think I think, except for my smoking, make a pretty good example to people. But I don't dwell on that question. I don't know. although I think with all the physics that Churned Simons has produced, I ought to get the Nobel Prize.

We'll work on it for you, yes. That would be a... I mean, there's even Churned Simon's gravity as a possibility, I think, there's an upper bound of what it could be, but there's Churned Simon's gravity, gravity. That was the most... amazing thing in my life

that this mathematics that we did began to apply to physics. I didn't know any physics to speak of. I mean, I don't know F equals MA or whatever. But, well, it does. But, so I didn't know much physics. And it's just astounding in how many areas of physics this has come to be used.

So a real surprise, right? What was that moment of discovery or invention like for you? I mean, was it slow in realization? Did you realize what you had come upon, or was it collaborative and therefore a little bit more pace slowly? Well, at first I was pleased with the math. I had started it. I had gotten some results in three to me.

dimensions. And then I showed it to churn and he said, oh, we can do this in all dimensions. We can't. Yes, I think they could. So we did. And so that was that. And I was very happy with that. And then Jeff Cheger and I worked together to invent something called differential characters. And that's been useful. But I think just in mathematics, I don't think differential characters have been useful. physics. But Witten, I think, was maybe the first one to start to start using Tern Simons. But then some Russians who were condensed matter physicists also claimed to me, oh, we were using it before Witton. So, okay, well, that's great. But it's just, it's one of those things that you never know where, basic science will go.

You just never know. Yes. And my favorite story is about I.I. Rabi. You know, I.I. Of course, yeah. And tomorrow, yes. So he discovered nuclear magnetic resonance. It was

a phenomenon. He won the Nobel Prize. Then several years later, two guys realized you could use it to analyze materials. They won the Nobel Prize. and then some years later after that two guys, one of them was at Stony Brook,

realized we could make pictures. They didn't want to call it nuclear magnetic resonance because nuclear frightens people, so they called it magnetic resonance image, MRI. Publicity, yeah? It's all over the place. Yeah.

So the story, there is a story, and I don't know if it's right or wrong, about Reggie, that in his old age, he had some problem with his shoulder. So we had to go and get an MRI. The idea that it was he who was the father of these zillions of machines all over the problem.

So you never know. Yeah, I always think about that story in context with Alfred Nobel himself, who suffered from angina, you know, heart condition, and was later prescribed nitroglycerin as an ailment. And that was, of course, a key component in his most famous, invention of all time, which was dynamite. And he used to remark on the irony, the great irony that he was treated with us. And they used to call it, you know, some healing potion or something like that, or

tri-nitrin or something. And for the exact same reasons that they changed NMR to MRI was for publicity, because seeing nitroglycerin scared off the public into thinking it was dangerous rather than therapeutic. So those two are connected in more ways than one. The last two questions, yeah, yeah, the last two questions I have, So one is about the great distant future where none of us will be around. And I wonder if you remember the movie 2001, a space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clark, based on his book, 2001,

where these monoliths, there are these structures that appear in the African savannah, and then there's one on the moon. And it turns out these are objects placed by alien civilizations deep in the ancient past. as sort of messages or warnings or we're not really sure what they were. They're kind of ominous, but also maybe cautionary. If you have an asteroid named after you. You're one of the few people I can say have an asteroid, although your lovely wife, Marilyn, also has an asteroid named after her. It's a smaller one.

Yeah, yours is bigger, that's true, yeah. But hers is faster. Hers moves really briskly. Charismos is, yeah, delicately and swiftly about the cosmos. On your asteroid 6618, Jim Simons, if you were to put a monolith and it was going to last for a billion years, what message or maybe an equation, or what would you put on it to signify perhaps the achievements of mankind or would you put a warning on it to, you know, to a future civilization?

what would you put on a monolith to last for a billionaire time capsule on asteroid 6618? Well, here's what I worry about in the future. So if you ask someone, what do you think the probability would be of a nuclear holocaust in the next year? And he would probably say, oh, that's very rare. So, well, give me a number. Someone would say, well, one in a thousand, one in a thousand. Okay, so that means if we go 500 years, there's a probability greater than a half that we'll have a nuclear holocaust and blow the whole thing up, and that'll be the end of us.

So I like to say that the most important science is political science. It teaches us how to live together. And I say, if we can't learn to live together, we're going to die together. And I really believe that. We have to learn to live together. So maybe that would be inscribed. Very interesting. We can live together.

So the very last thing that I ask all my guests on the Into the Impossible Podcast, relates to the name of the podcast into The Impossible. I mentioned when I emailed you to request this interview that Arthur C. Clark had many laws. The first one was any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. His second law is for every expert. There's an equal and opposite expert. There's a fourth law, fifth law. But his third law is the limits of the possible can only be defined.

by going beyond them into the impossible. And my question for you is now we're going to go back in time. What would you tell a 20-year-old, 30-year-old Jim Simons, what advice to your former self would you give that maybe seemed impossible at the time, but then you did it? What advice would you give to your former self? So I come out of nowhere and address Jim, let's say, when he's 20 or something like that. Yes, yes.

You show up. so I show up, I address myself. Of course, he doesn't know who I am. And what would I advise him? Well, I think it's very important to work and enjoy your work. So I would advise him to find some work that he really enjoys. And that's very, I kind of trite advice, but I think it's good. advice for anybody who's young.

You want to do something that, find something that you really like or better still really love, and then put your heart and soul into it. Thank you, Jim. This has been a wonderful conversation. Happy Father's Day, Jim. You've been a great force in my life. We talked about the greatest force in the universe. You're definitely in the top, very, very selective set in my life and in many people

around the world. You've done so much for society, for basic knowledge and the pursuit of wisdom, for autism, and now with the Flatiron Institute working so hard on issues of computational import. I think that's so commendable. Thank you so much, Jim, for sharing your time with me today in the podcast. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Imposteen, possible, please subscribe, comment, share, rate, and review. For a chance to win a free copy of our most

recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to info at imagine.ucsd.edu. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, go to imagination.ucsd.edu. Find us on Twitter at Imagine UCSD. Watch us on YouTube, listen on iTunes. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Viri, Director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, Associate Director,

produced by Stuart Volko.