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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: 7 hours, 42 minutes

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​NEW Premium Notes​

​Michael Pollan’s Best Writing Advice | How I Write with David Perell​

  • "Narrative depends on conflict." Without conflict, there is no tension. Without tension, there is no wonder
  • You must spread your exposition across your narrative. Too much in one spot and the narrative will ???​
  • A compelling introduction sets expectations, frames questions, and teases takeaways without giving them ???​
  • You want case study subjects who speak in vivid quotes and are beating the system in a ????? ???​
  • Try re-editing your entire piece every single day before writing anything new. He spends one to two hours doing this ?? ???? every day​

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​Dr. Layne Norton on the Science of Eating for Health, Fat Loss & Lean Muscle | Huberman Lab Essentials​

  • NEAT can account for close to ?,??? calories per day, more modifiable than exercise itself
  • Protein benefits plateau around ??.?g per kilogram of body weight
  • Most Americans get 65 to 70% of their protein at dinner. ????????? is probably where you have the most room to improve
  • An elegant study gave people access to ultra-processed food and they spontaneously ate ??? more calories per day
  • The creatine hair loss concern comes from a single 2009 study that measured ???, not actual hair loss, and has never been replicated

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​The Vatican Fired Him For Revealing What The Bible Really Says! | Mauro Biglino on Project Unity with Jay Anderson​

  • "When I started to write what I really read in the Hebrew Bible, I was fired in one minute"
  • Genesis 1:26: "Let us make men in our image." The plural form of Elohim is not his interpretation. It is simply ?????? ???????​
  • The earliest parts of the Bible are drawn directly from ??????? ??????, yet those same stories are dismissed as myth
  • "Bara" is often translated as "to create" but actually means something completely ????????​
  • "Nephila" in Aramaic translates to the Orion constellation. Nephilim would then mean those who came from ???​
  • Disclosure would not destroy religion. The Jesuits claim they would offer to baptize these "??????? ???? ??? ????"​

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​Dr. Paul Eastwick: The Science of Attraction, Compatibility & Romance | Huberman Lab​

What actually drives initial attraction most of the time is shared unique moments, not looks or status

  • A guy Paul knows fell for a woman because he watched her aliquot antibodies with tubes between her fingers while talking. They are married with kids now
  • Attraction forms through reciprocal experiences that pull idiosyncratic things out of each other

The typical first impression is middling, not electric

  • Most successful relationships started with "that seemed fine" and slowly accumulated from there
  • Apps turn dating into a job interview where you present your traits, but traits are not the life of the thing. The shared stories and moments are

Going on dates that involve doing things together gives you real data about how someone actually behaves

  • In Say Anything, the girl starts falling for John Cusack when she watches him quietly collect people's keys so they don't drink and drive
  • How someone treats other people when they don't think it matters is one of the most valuable signals you can observe

What people say they want on paper has almost no correlation with what they end up actually liking in person

  • Actual compatibility scores are basically a coin flip, maybe going from 50/50 to 53/47 at best
  • "We find the things we have in common, we focus on those, we convince ourselves those are the most important things in the world"

The biggest gender difference in swiping behavior shrinks dramatically in real social contexts

  • Women swipe yes on about 5% of men, men at about 50%
  • The conclusion is not that men and women are incompatible. Approaching strangers romantically is genuinely hard and not how we evolved to meet people

Feeling like your partner is uniquely irreplaceable is one of the strongest predictors of relationship stability

  • Social media constantly surfaces attractive alternative partners and that exposure is a real stress on relationships
  • The couples who do well develop a strong sense that their partner has qualities no one else can match, not that no one else is attractive

Physical intimacy is among the very strongest predictors of relationship stability, not just satisfaction

  • The subjective sense that your partner is a good lover is a very strong positive predictor of whether you want the relationship to continue
  • If that sense starts to erode it cascades negatively into other areas of the relationship, which is why it is worth protecting and cultivating actively

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​Joseph Pulitzer, the Inventor of Mass Media | Founders Podcast​

He came to America at 17 with no money, unable to speak the language, and knowing nobody

  • Two personality traits show up immediately and never leave: an insatiable love of reading and learning on his own terms, and a furious, volcanic temper
  • He once chased a tutor out of a window for insisting on teaching mathematics instead of telling war stories

With almost no money, Pulitzer does one smart thing: he joins a subscription library and spends every single free hour there

  • This is Carlyle's prescription that Munger loved: 98% of attention on the task directly in front of you, not on vague future possibilities
  • He so immediately exceeds expectations that the people around him are actually annoyed at how hard he works

What gives Pulitzer his edge is that he can do every single job in a newspaper himself

  • Unlike most newspaper owners who come from finance or politics and have never written a line
  • To be a newspaper editor was not just to report on the world. It was to shape it

He buys the Dispatch at auction and figures he has exactly 17 weeks before he runs out of money

  • Every single morning for the rest of his life he demands the exact same metrics: copies printed, copies sold, copies returned, lines of advertising, staff costs, paper costs, telegraph costs, revenue in
  • "The truth of the matter was that one did not work with Pulitzer. For him, surely, against him often, but not with him"

Pulitzer was a Democrat in politics, but a despot in the office

  • Loudly pro-union in his editorial columns, he fires his own workers the moment they try to unionize without hesitation
  • He attacks the wealthy and powerful in print while privately doing business deals with them and coveting their wealth and lifestyle

His formula for inventing mass media: write it simply enough that anyone can read it, write it colorfully enough that nobody forgets it

  • Vagueness was a sin. Not "a tall man" but "a man who was 6 feet 2 inches tall." Not "a beautiful woman" but auburn hair, hazel eyes, and a coy smile
  • He raises $100,000 to build the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty through mass crowdfunding in his paper. 120,000 people donate in under 5 months and circulation soars

The greatest failure of his life was his complete inability to ever enjoy any of it

  • He goes completely blind at the exact moment he is at the peak of his power, spending his last two decades running the world's most successful newspaper entirely through dictation
  • His son writes to him: "One of the strange differences between us two is the fact that you have never come near learning how to enjoy life"
  • "When we think that 100 years hence, not one of us now living will be alive to care or to know or to enjoy or to suffer, what does it all amount to? To a puff of smoke"

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​Ben Askren, Raw Truths From the Brink of Death | Modern Wisdom​

He walked into the waiting room and that is the last thing he remembers for 37 days

  • A small elbow infection entered his bloodstream and caused necrotizing pneumonia. His body was literally eating his own lungs from the inside out
  • "How could anyone ever guess, oh yeah, my back hurts because my body's eating my lungs from the inside. No one's ever heard of that"

He woke up to find out he had received a double lung transplant

  • Only about 40% of people who go on ECMO come off it. Ben was one of them
  • His wife had kept a day-by-day written journal of everything. Ben had to read through it like it was someone else's story

He lost 60 pounds and did not start walking unassisted for roughly two months

  • Walking at that point meant four steps holding a counter before stopping
  • He built back up methodically: 8 minutes of walking, then 10, then 12, then squats. The same way an athlete periodizes training

Ben credits his entire athletic background as directly crossing over into recovery

  • The discipline, the routine, the regimented mindset all transferred
  • Even on days he felt terrible he would still do something, because sitting on the couch meant not getting better

The median life expectancy after a double lung transplant is six and a half years. The record is 38. Ben's goal is 39

  • The main practical change after surviving was cutting obligations he was not passionate about
  • He now asks himself for every new opportunity: is this worth time away from my kids and family

Ben does not believe talent exists as a concept

  • He surveyed every Division I NCAA wrestling champion from the past 50 years and the most common answer was "your question assumes I was great, I never considered myself great"
  • The Polgar sisters: a man ran a social experiment to raise chess champion children, his three daughters became three of the five highest rated players of all time

"The point of life is not to arrive safely at death"

  • At every major juncture of his career the world offered Ben a chance to let that moment define him and he ignored every single one
  • He is making a documentary about the whole experience hoping to inspire people to stop living the life they think others want them to live

​

PREMIUM:

  • ​Michael Pollan’s Best Writing Advice | How I Write with David Perell​
  • ​Dr. Layne Norton on the Science of Eating for Health, Fat Loss & Lean Muscle | Huberman Lab Essentials​
  • ​The Vatican Fired Him For Revealing What The Bible Really Says! | Mauro Biglino on Project Unity with Jay Anderson​

FREE:

  • ​Dr. Paul Eastwick: The Science of Attraction, Compatibility & Romance | Huberman Lab​
  • ​Joseph Pulitzer, the Inventor of Mass Media | Founders Podcast​
  • ​Ben Askren, Raw Truths From the Brink of Death | Modern Wisdom​

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