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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.

​There's a 50% off your subscription here, or 20% off your one time purchase​

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Time Saved This Week: 11 hours, 28 minutes

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​NEW Premium Notes​

​Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly, on GLP-1s and the Business of Pharma | Cheeky Pint with John Collison and Patrick Collison​

  • The pharmaceutical industry, deservingly so, has earned a reputation for being manipulative, greedy, and deceptive. Honestly, going into this, we expected Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly (the largest pharma company in the world) to just be another industry shill. We couldn't have been more wrong. Dave explains how Eli Lilly is openly combating the rigged U.S. healthcare system by eliminating middlemen through direct-to-consumer medicine, by being transparent about drug costs under a "one fair price" principle, and by creating reliable generics of its own drugs

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​Essentials: Breathing for Mental & Physical Health & Performance | Dr. Jack Feldman​

  • Huberman sits down with Dr. Jack Feldman, a UCLA researcher who basically lives and breathes the science of… well, breathing. The two break down why your body switches from nose to mouth breathing when you exercise, how CO2 levels (not oxygen) actually drive anxiety, and why breathing studies in mice prove breathwork really works without placebo effects getting in the way. They also get into practical takeaways you can use right away: quick 5–10 minute breathing exercises to reset your mood or energy during the day, and why magnesium L-threonate is so good for cognitive health

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​KneesOverToesGuy — Workouts That Produce Wild Results and Lessons from Charles Poliquin | The Tim Ferriss Show (#835)​

  • Ben Patrick, aka KneesOverToesGuy, is the rare guru who’s actually legit. He will help you achieve less knee pain and more knee ability, with or without equipment. I personally rehabbed my knee for soccer using his app that lets his trainers give you guidance on form/exercises via videos you share, and it genuinely made a difference. 10/10 would (and have) recommend

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Top Premium Takeaways Of The Week


​Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly, on GLP-1s and the Business of Pharma | Cheeky Pint with John Collison and Patrick Collison​

  • Why does running a clinical trial in the U.S. really cost over $40K per patient? (Answer: it’s not what you think)
  • Eli Lilly’s playbook for outpacing the NIH, and how they spot illnesses before the market does
  • The one stat that “makes U.S. hospitals look broken” compared to Spain or Australia
  • ​Premium Section — Upgrade to read the full breakdown, including:​
    • The 4 hidden costs eating up pharma R&D budgets
    • How electronic health records could actually save clinical trials in the U.S.
    • Dave Ricks’ hot take on why health care price transparency is mostly a “lie right now”
    • Full quotes from John Collison & Dave Ricks you won’t find anywhere else

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​Essentials: Breathing for Mental & Physical Health & Performance | Dr. Jack Feldman​

  • The belly vs chest breathing debate: yoga teachers and scientists are NOT on the same page
  • Animal studies prove slow breathing can change your brain, no placebo involved
  • ​Upgrade to Read More:​
    • The 30-minute breathing experiment that slashed anxiety in mice
    • How much breathwork (actually quantified) you need for real neural benefits
    • The simplest box breathing hack explained in one sentence

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​KneesOverToesGuy — Workouts That Produce Wild Results and Lessons from Charles Poliquin | The Tim Ferriss Show (#835)​

The first thing that got Ben off painkillers? Spoiler: you’ve never seen it in a gym class

  • “A lot of what people call inflexibility is just the body being smart”, here’s what that means​
  • ​Upgrade for the deep dive:​
    • How to build bulletproof knees (with no injuries after 100k+ sled sessions)
    • Tim Ferriss’ own “2% Rule” for long-term fitness upgrades
    • Lessons straight from Charles Poliquin & Ben’s most-watched video

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​Gavin de Becker: Operation Gladio, Vaccine Autism Link, COVID Control & AIDS Cover-Up | Joe Rogan Experience (#2411)​

“If you don’t have skepticism, the government runs us. We don’t run the government.” – Gavin de Becker

Here’s What’s in Childhood Vaccines Right Now (says Gavin): gelatin from boiled pig skin, chicken embryo protein, blood from hearts of cow fetuses, DNA fragments from human fetuses, oil from shark livers, proteins from worm ovaries, and DNA fragments from monkey kidneys

  • Other modern ingredients include: formaldehyde, polysorbate 80 (linked to infertility), potassium chloride (the third injection in lethal injections), sodium borate, Triton X (what’s in spermicides), and until recently ethyl mercury
“The death rate for vaccinated children with measles is zero. The death rate for unvaccinated children (of which there are 9 million in America) is zero.” – Gavin de Becker

Very Few Things Are Purely Organic Events... Any giant social movement like COVID (not the virus but the response) is not accidental

  • This is not people going “oh we thought this and we tried that and we were just doing our best to figure stuff out.” That theory is now impossible

There’s One Vaccine Gavin Thinks Is a Great Product: the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis

  • It’s used in almost every country on earth, it’s 100 years old, and it has other health benefits like helping with respiratory problems and bladder cancer
  • Guess what country it’s not used in? The United States of America
  • They would say “well there isn’t that much tuberculosis,” but there’s 9,000 cases a year versus tetanus with 13 cases every 10 years

The US Dropped Infected Ticks on Cuba?

  • Lyme disease is likely the result of experimentation (though some push back on this)
  • Plum Island was doing bioweapons research and one of the projects was taking ticks and infecting them so you could drop them off helicopters and overwhelm a medical system
    • This is established, it’s true. And Plum Island was right outside of Lyme, Connecticut

Quick Note on ChatGPT and Grok: the first answer you get will usually be the orthodox answer, the approved answer

  • You have to keep asking, you have to push the thing
  • Then you’ll get remarkable information that way, but you still have to check it all

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​Dr. Jennifer Groh: How Your Thoughts Are Built & How You Can Shape Them | Huberman Lab​

3 Reasons Why You Hate Your Recorded Voice:

  • The recording doesn’t capture the full spectrum of frequency content of your voice
  • Your brain turns down the volume: Your brain turns down the volume just before you speak, so you don’t get blasted by the sound of your own voice
  • Bone conduction: Some of what we’re picking up is through bone conduction

Headphone Safety Threshold: If headphones are loud enough that somebody besides you can hear that there is a sound (not even the specific sounds), you’re inflicting hearing damage

Are Bluetooth Headphones Safe? The amount of radiation coming from Bluetooth headphones is considerably lower than the radiation you’re exposed to all day, every day

  • Neurosurgeon Matt McDougall from Neuralink wasn’t concerned. Check out the notes here​

Earthquakes Start With Sound, Not Shaking... People don’t realize this if they’ve never been in a major earthquake. The first thing that happens is it sounds like a train is about to come through the room. Then the shaking starts shortly after

Theory of Why Rhythm Exists (Not Groh’s Theory): “Perhaps rhythm and music help us act in concert with one another and be louder than any of us could be by ourselves, and to scare off predators and competitors.” – Dr. Jennifer Groh

What Is the Optimal Thing to Listen to for Focus? The data basically point to silence is best

  • Groh’s workspace strategy: She works in her basement now. Set it up as an ideal work environment: no phones, no internet. When she goes down there, it’s just her and her thoughts. She allows some music. But the first 10-15 minutes are excruciating
“We’ve kind of eliminated boredom from life, and that might not be a good thing. Boredom is when some of our best thinking happens.” – Dr. Jennifer Groh

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​Todd Graves ‒ Raising Cane’s | David Senra #4​

Top Maxims From This Episode:

  • “Never sacrifice quality for speed.”
  • Focus on one thing and do it better than anybody else
  • Always be raising the bar; the best are never satisfied
  • Praise costs nothing but means everything
  • Stay in the game long enough to get lucky
“Nothing ever happens unless someone pursues a vision fanatically.” – Todd Graves
  • Fanaticism is what carries entrepreneurs, athletes, and artists through the hard times
  • The best are never satisfied; this is the common theme across the best athletes, celebrities, and founders
  • Always be raising the bar

​James Dyson Autobiography: this is David’s top book recommendation after decades of studying entrepreneurs

Keys to a Successful Business Partnership:

  • They 100% believe in what you are doing
  • You are certain that they are not going to sell that stock to somebody else
  • (It is very difficult to find a partner that can satisfy these two criteria)

The Importance of Quality and Focus:

  • History’s greatest entrepreneurs are obsessed with what they do; if often keeps them up at night because they cannot stop thinking about their business
  • He studied In-n-Out and learned that a successful restaurant could thrive doing one thing well
  • “Never sacrifice quality for speed.”
  • Focus on one thing and do it better than anybody else
  • The Raising Cane’s menu is focused, but it is not simple
    • The chicken comes from a specific kind of bird
    • Potatoes for fries are harvested at a specific time of year
    • Fries are a particular width
    • Bread is made by specific bakeries all over the country
    • Tea leaves are imported from three different countries
  • Quality ingredients create craveable products; make quality products that people lust over

The Best Thing an Aspiring Entrepreneur Can Be Told:

  • “I don’t think that’s a good idea, I don’t think you can do that”
    • Entrepreneurs have something to prove; they want to prove that their vision about the world is right
  • The best entrepreneurs treat every ‘no’ they get as fuel

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​Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (Paul Kingsnorth) | Charles Haywood (The Worthy House)​

What “The Machine” Actually Is...

  • The Machine is this huge force taking over humanity and it’s basically made up of technology, centralization of power, and the endless obsession with economic growth that’s consuming everything organic about human life
  • Kingsnorth says we created this thing ourselves but now it’s turning us into parts of a system instead of actual humans with roots and communities, which is pretty dark when you think about it

The Four Ps vs The Four S’s:

  • The four Ps were the foundation of premodern society: people, place, prayer, and the past
  • Now we have the four S’s which is basically the theology of the Mac