​​Magic Mind​

Most “energy” comes from blocking adenosine with caffeine. That lifts alertness but can spike cortisol and crash later. Pairing caffeine with L-theanine promotes alpha-wave activity and smoother stimulation. Using tea-based sources like matcha slows uptake and reduces jitters for steadier focus.

Layering nootropics can target different bottlenecks. Citicoline supports acetylcholine for attention. Bacopa may aid memory consolidation over weeks. Lion’s mane shows early evidence for nerve-growth support. Adaptogens like rhodiola and cordyceps help maintain performance under stress without pushing the nervous system into overdrive.

Rounding out the stack, anti-inflammatories and antioxidants (e.g., turmeric, vitamin C) address oxidative stress, while B-vitamins back cellular energy metabolism. The best ready-made formulation I've found which achieves this and more is Magic Mind, it combines matcha + L-theanine with nootropics, adaptogens, and essentials in a small mental performance daily shot - scientifically designed to make your mind sharper, while helping reduce stress.

Time Saved This Week: 12 hours, 29 minutes

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​NEW Premium Notes​

​5,000 Startups Later: Tax Lessons Every Founder Needs | Joe Faris on Tech Finance with Sasha Orloff​

• Founders and entrepreneurs often get so obsessed with product-market-fit that they neglect accounting and bookkeeping. Yet even the most promising startup can be crippled by simple, avoidable tax mistakes. Joe Faris, founder of Accountalent, shares the most common errors he’s seen while helping over 5,000 startups achieve spreadsheet supremacy

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​Time Perception, Memory & Focus | Huberman Lab Essentials​

• Ever wonder why some days drag on forever while others disappear in a blur? In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, Huberman breaks down how the brain tracks time and what makes it speed up or slow down. He explains how sunlight and seasons shape energy and mood, when to schedule hard work, how long to focus, and how dopamine and serotonin change how fast or slow time feels

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​James Nestor — Breathing Protocols to Reboot Your Health, Fix Your Sleep, and Boost Performance | The Tim Ferriss Show (#829)​

• Tim waited to interview James Nestor because "Breath" reached him from so many different directions: friends, athletes, and doctors all pointing to the same book. He wanted to let it slow bake, to see how the ideas landed and spread before sitting down to explore what had stuck and what James practices personally. In this episode, he finally digs into the stuff everyone’s curious about, including ancient breathwork, extreme experiments, and practical ways to breathe better and actually feel better in your day to day

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Top Premium Takeaways Of The Week

​5,000 Startups Later: Tax Lessons Every Founder Needs | Joe Faris on Tech Finance with Sasha Orloff​

• When the economy tanked (like in 2008), companies would fire their full-time CFO to save money
• He would scoop up these opportunities on a part-time basis
• He could barely keep up with the amount of referrals he got

LIVING DEAD = a startup already through their series A & B that no longer needs a big firm to handle their taxes

• This was Joe’s bread and butter client for a long time

Common Startup Tax Mistakes:

• Payroll registrations are especially complicated when your business is located in a different state than your employees
  • Payroll systems (Gusto, ADP, Rippling) will often cut off their services if you aren’t compliant with the appropriate state and local tax agencies
  • “Payroll Medic” is a service Joe offers to help ensure startups are compliant with their payroll registrations

​[Premium: 2 more lethal mistakes including the 83b election deadline that can force you to dissolve your company, plus the stock issuance timing error that creates massive tax liability]​

​→ Upgrade to premium to read the full breakdown​

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​​Time Perception, Memory & Focus | Huberman Lab Essentials​

Circadian Time Cycle Is Probably the Most Powerful Rhyhtm None of Us Can Escape From...

• Every cell in your body has a mini 24-hour timer
• Morning and evening sunlight help keep that timer accurate
• Without light cues, your brain gets confused and your health suffers
• When your circadian rhythm gets thrown off, it’s not just bad sleep. It can increase cancer risk, mess up your mood, and even slow healing…

Tools That Help You Reset Your Clock (these small habits train your brain to know what time it is):

• Get sunlight for 10–30 minutes within an hour of waking up

​[Premium: 3 more clock-resetting tools, plus how dopamine and serotonin shift throughout the day to optimize your work schedule and why novelty stretches time in memory]​

​→ Upgrade to premium to read the full protocol​

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​James Nestor — Breathing Protocols to Reboot Your Health, Fix Your Sleep, and Boost Performance | The Tim Ferriss Show (#829)​

Tummo Breathing Has 2 Versions: the traditional one, where you breathe very slowly, reduce your metabolism, and somehow your body heat goes up (which shouldn’t be possible)

• Then there’s the Wim Hof style version which is intense hyperventilation followed by breath holds and building pressure in your body
• The traditional version is a much better kept secret; you won’t find many instructions online (Bon Buddhist monks just smile and say maybe if you hang out with them for 10 years in the Himalayas)

​Breath Came Out During Lockdown Depths... so James did nothing but podcasts all day, 3 to 5 a day for about a year and a half

• He’s spoken at medical schools, banks, hedge funds, and every single time there’s a line of people afterwards: “They’re all complaining about the same things, and they’re completely pissed off. They’re pissed off that they had to learn about this stuff in a book by a journalist and not from their doctor. And they’re angry. Their kid is super sick and didn’t have to be sick for the past three years.” – James Nestor

​[Premium: James's shocking ADHD revelation, the 2-minute at-home breathing assessment every parent needs, the complete tape-wearing protocol for sleep, and his full travel health kit with heroic vitamin doses]​

​→ Upgrade to premium to read the full breakdown​

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Upgrade to Premium to Get 3 Premium Notes Every Week, the Full Newsletter, Playable Timestamps, AI Powered Answers, Unlock 500+ Premium Posts, No Ads and MORE​

​DJ Shipley: How to Make Yourself Unbreakable | Huberman Lab​

His Morning Routine Is Stacked With Micro Wins: clothes laid out, water bottle filled, pills ready, toothbrush out… all prepped the night before

• “I do 25 things inside of my control before I even make my morning coffee.” – DJ Shipley
• Alarm goes off at 5 a.m. every day, no matter when bedtime was, even after late nights or travel

This Can Save Your Marriage: every night after dinner, he and his wife do a 20-minute walk

• 10 minutes for her, as soon as they start it: tell me about your day, everything she wants to vent through
• Halfway mark at the park, then his turn for 10 minutes
• Also helps circadian rhythm, helps digestion, and mental clarity
• No phone, no stimulus, watching the sunset

• Extreme effort is unnecessary. Even daily 20-minute walks or kettlebell sessions help a lot

The Key to Getting Through BUD/S Training?

• If you think about the fact that you have 3 more days of hell week left, you’ll quit
• But if you just think I can make it to breakfast, then I can make it to lunch, that’s manageable
• Breaking it down into small chunks is how you get through impossible things

Ibogaine + DMT were literally life-saving when nothing else worked

• They gave him his life back after years of struggling

Self-Respect Comes From Doing What You Say You’re Going to Do

• Every time you keep a promise to yourself, you build self-respect
• Every time you break a promise to yourself, you lose it

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​How Peter Lynch Became The Greatest Fund Manager of All Time | TCAF with Josh Brown​

• Know what you own!
• Knowing what you own is the most important part of investing
• If you do not know what you own, and the stock goes down 50%, you are going to make the exact wrong decision at the exact wrong time
• People spend more time researching a refrigerator that they are going to buy than the stocks they put their life savings into
• “Play the market” is a very dangerous approach to investing; in fact, this strategy is not as much investing as it is gambling
• How to increase your chances of success in the market: Buy good companies and know what they do
• Understand the companies that you are invested in so that you stick with them when other people are scared
• If you cannot explain to a ten-year-old, in a minute or less, why you own the stock and why it is going up or down, then you either have work to do or you should not be owning the stock and instead should buy in an index fund

Script Writing as a Form of Due Diligence: Practice writing a script for why the stock is going to work and why it has upside

• List the reasons why you bought the stock, and continue to add to your list of reasons with time as you are faced with new information

• Economists have predicted 33 of the last 11 recessions
• You will look terrific in the investing business if you are right 6.5 times out of 10
• Even being right half the time can result in success if your sizing is right and you let your winners ride

• There is no way to dance around the tumultuous times in the market; you have to learn how to live through them and learn from them

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​The Stoics Are Wrong – Nietzsche, Schopenhauer | Philosophize This! with Stephen West (#237)​

• Nietzsche says rationality is a useful tool, but if you think it explains all of reality, you miss the dynamic stuff happening in every moment
• You miss creativity, improvisation, instinct, passion, anything about reality at the level of becoming and emergence

Amor Fati: Two Different Approaches:

• Stoics say love your fate because it’s part of the rational order of the universe
• Nietzsche’s Amor Fati is way more radical; he wants to love his fate, whether it’s rational or not, whether it’s order, disorder, or chaos
• The challenge is to live so passionately that you don’t need a transcendent purpose to make things feel palatable
• “People that are often attracted to Stoicism are people that see life as a state of peril, something they need to escape.” – Nietzsche

Why Stoicism Isn’t Really Morality:

• A Stoic corrects judgments so they don’t have to feel suffering anymore
• A Christian sits in the suffering and works through it for a higher moral ideal
  • One sits in suffering and finds a way through it, the other constantly tries to fix it
• The Stoic approach is incredibly selfish, it’s always about me feeling less suffering
• Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus helped people, but why? Because if they don’t it might mess up their hard earned peace of mind
• To think it’s beneath you to emotionally grieve or feel compassion, to think you need to govern that away to be a better person, that’s not deep moral insight

When Your Biggest Goal Is Removing Suffering, You Miss What It Has to Teach You...

• Intense sadness teaches about striving and loss, compassion awakens your ability to read others’ suffering, loneliness strips away distractions and brings reflection
• Even Marcus Aurelius talks about coming up short until the end of his life
• Stoics often suffer more because they suffer twice, once for the thing normally then again trying to unnaturally suppress it (Schopenhauer)​
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