Why Your Morning Coffee Isn't Working(unless you are Marc Andreessen)
Most energy drinks just dump caffeine in your system to block adenosine. You feel alert for a bit, then your cortisol spikes and you crash. Not ideal.
Better move: pair caffeine with L-theanine. It promotes alpha-wave activity, which means you get the boost without feeling like you're vibrating. Matcha does this naturally: slower uptake, fewer jitters, steadier focus throughout the day.
Here's what actually helps:
Citicoline keeps your attention sharp
Bacopa helps with memory (takes a few weeks to kick in)
Lion's mane supports nerve growth (still early research, but promising)
Rhodiola and cordyceps help you handle stress without frying your nervous system
Add some turmeric and vitamin C to deal with oxidative stress. B-vitamins keep your cells running...
The best ready-made formulation I've found which achieves this and more is Magic Mind, it packs all of this into one shot (matcha, L-theanine, nootropics, adaptogens, the complete package). It's designed for mental performance without the crash or the pill fatigue.
“Not even the largest amounts of daily light activity can elicit the health benefits of moderate or vigorous intensity physical activity.” – Brady Holmer
Most people think vigorous means high-intensity training, but it actually covers more ground
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There Are Two Extremes When It Comes to Audience... and you do both depending on who you’re working for
(1) Totally manipulating the audience
(2) Total disregard, like you’re in an ivory tower doing your own thing
You Gotta Ask Yourself... why are you doing this, what’s your purpose, what’s in it for you
Are you doing it to learn?
Is there a contract and someone’s money on the line?
“I’ve always been of the persuasion that the more you know, the bigger your challenge.” – Twyla Tharp
Look at Beethoven’s early work versus his late work, totally different challenges
Early works: more classical coherence
Late works: taking the sound world apart at the end of his career
“People generally like to keep you where they found you.” – Gwyneth Paltrow
Cubby-Holing: everyone’s always asking for the hit because they want to touch upon what seems to be your greatest accomplishment, and it’s super aggravating
If you want to constantly be gaining attention, you do it by changing, not by reinforcing what people expect
Rituals, Gym, Discipline...
The 5am gym thing is not a ritual and she never enjoyed it, it’s a reality
You do it because you need an instrument that you can challenge and to challenge something you got to know how it stands
You just set the mechanism for the day, it’s kind of boring and kind of lonesome
If you don’t work when you don’t want to work you’re not going to be able to work when you do want to work, end of story
Embrace failure as discovery, foster insatiable curiosity, and iterate relentlessly
The core principle: break things, test repeatedly, and view each failure as eliminating one wrong approach
If you can dream it, you can build it through iterative experimentation.
Naive Optimism + Strategic Execution
Turn ideas into action by combining an optimistic vision with a practical breakdown: define your end goal, decompose it into simple steps, identify knowledge gaps, and test incrementally
Transform fear into curiosity through hands-on building and reflection on lessons learned, rather than ego protection
The Immersion Weekend Method: Dedicate 48 hours of complete immersion to explore new fascinations – consume every book, video, and resource available.
This intensive sprint reveals whether something deserves permanent schedule integration and helps you fall in love with the process of incremental mastery
Dual-Track Success Model
Avoid binary thinking: maintain steady employment while pursuing passion projects during nights and weekends until they gain traction
The most successful ventures pair a 10x visionary thinker with a logistics master (Jobs + Napoleon model), preventing burnout by keeping founders focused on their core love rather than pure management
Content that resonates triggers five core emotions: Adventure, humor, negativity, inspiration, or surprise
More broadly: control only what’s in your sphere of influence, commit to “hell yes” decisions exclusively, and recognize that outcomes revert to the mean
Things are never as extreme as they appear in the moment
The “Why Are You Gay?” Clip Is Still the Funniest Thing on the Internet?
...and Tucker says it’s because nobody in America is allowed to ask that question
Ask someone why people are gay, and they’ll say “born that way.”
Ask how that works and they have no idea and tell you to shut up
Nobody Is Gay? Milo says we’ve been encouraged to think of it as an identity but nobody is gay
With the collapse in people identifying as trans, you’re beginning to see what some have always known: this is a product
“In almost every case and in certainly in every male case, it is a trauma response. It is not a sexuality. It is not part of what you are or who you are.” – Milo Yiannopoulos
Black YouTube Honesty
If you want to know the truth about homosexuality, you’ve got to go to black YouTube and listen to the girls
It’s the only honest YouTube, the only honest anything
Black America is commendably impervious to a lot of woke PC language stuff
Very creditably skeptical of vaccines, won’t go along with this stuff
Black women voting against Prop 8 gay marriage in California
Why Is Washington, DC So Gay?
There’s a long relationship between conservative politics and homosexuality
It’s about the exercise of power over others; the ability to compel the wills of others is what homosexuals are seeking
They feel so powerless in their own lives, they’re broken people without agency over their own sex lives or bodies
“I don’t even have control over me, but I’m damn well going to have control over you.”
If you dovetail that with right-wing authoritarianism, some dimensions attract homosexuals to positions of power
Sam says the moments he’s actually changed the most are when he had a system (a trainer, a nutritionist, a written plan), not when he just relied on motivation or feelings
A good system makes progress more predictable by removing how you feel from the equation; your feelings on any given day shouldn’t dictate the actions you take toward your goals
In companies, salespeople have scripts, checklists for follow-ups, structured schedules (outbound in early morning, follow-up emails mid-morning), so they’re not winging it based on mood
“We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.” – James Clear
There’s a Step Before Systems:figuring out the right thing to want, because if you build systems toward the wrong goal, you’ll stay on the hamster wheel forever
You never want the thing itself: you want the feeling you think the thing will get you (the watch, the promotion, the relationship, the win)
“I think more often than not, the listener and you and me, we don’t need to be taught new stuff. We just need to be reminded of the same thing that we already know.” – Sam Parr
Why Is Sam Still Grinding on New Companies?
Sam’s priority list: #1 is that he doesn’t know what else to do with his time, feels like he’s missing out or not contributing when sitting around
#2 is “I’m not good enough,” and his self-worth is directly correlated to the success of what he’s working on, basically self-worth = net worth
#3 is more money does feel good, he does math all the time, saying “I don’t need more, I have everything I want,” but can’t break the pattern
How to Craft an Earworm:
Make America Great Again got repeated thousands of times, but was polarizing, interesting, repeatable, and something you could get behind
Chiasmus is a rhetorical device that creates earworms that stick in your brain for decades
Example: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” – JFK said it in 1963, over 50 years ago, and they could both recite it instantly
It’s an ABBA structure: first part is about asking (A), then “your country can do for you” (B), then you flip it to “what you can do for your country” (B then A)
Another JFK chiasmus from the same speech: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”
The key is that both halves have to individually make sense as valid statements, not like that viral clip where the girl says “don’t love your job, job you love” which doesn’t work because “job you love” is nonsense
Why it works: the brain loves order and structure, the same reason faces with perfect symmetry are beautiful