Your calendar was full at 21 and empty at 26 for a reason MIT discovered in 1950. Researchers studied a housing complex called Westgate and found friendship was predicted by one variable above everything else: physical distance between front doors. Students living near stairwells and mailboxes made the most friends. Shared interests, values, personality? All downstream of foot traffic. They named it the propinquity effect. Researcher Rebecca Adams later distilled friendship formation into three conditions: proximity, repeated unplanned interactions, and settings where people let their guard down. A college campus delivers all three automatically, dozens of hours a week of engineered collisions. Adult life delivers zero by default. That's the entire mechanism behind days blending together. Your brain registers novelty from unplanned human contact. Remove the collisions and time loses its texture. The fix is repetition. One dinner party changes nothing. The same gym class, same coffee shop, same pickup game at the same time every week rebuilds the structure school gave you for free. Friendship grows from accumulated accidental contact, so frequency wins. College handed you a collision machine. Adults who stay social just rebuilt one.

Congrats dude @elonmusk

I studied Physics, Math, and Economics

Running it back on Thursday. Are you going to give it a chance this time? x.com/i/spaces/1nKOLLQarDOGR

This is a fantastic thread on sun exposure

This is Dr. Alexander Wunsch. A German physician and photobiology researcher who has studied light's effects on health for 30 years. His message? Both the mainstream & the biohackers are wrong about sunlight. Here is his framework: 🧵

Jocko Willink dropped one of the most powerful mindset shifts I’ve ever heard: When someone attacks you and says “This is your fault” — even if it isn’t — take full ownership anyway. Feel your ego flare up? Anger rising? That’s your red flag. Call it out, detach, and respond with: “Yes, this is my fault. Here’s the mistake I made. Here’s exactly what I’m doing to fix it.” Even when you’re not fully to blame. Because the second you own it, you stop being the victim and start controlling the outcome. You win. Lewis Howes was visibly mind-blown listening to it. I was too. Extreme ownership isn’t just theory — it’s a weapon you can use in arguments, work, relationships, and life. When was the last time you took full ownership in a tough situation even when it wasn’t entirely your fault — and what happened?

The best early stage hires are radically different from a few years ago: multi-hyphenate, commercial generalists. The engineers want to talk to customers and the business people write code. High agency and AI native instead of heads down 10x performers.

You dont want a yacht. You dont want a big house. You dont want a super car, a $40,000 watch, or shoes you worry about getting dirty. You want free will. You want to wake up naturally on a Tuesday and you want to go to bed when you’re done having fun. You want to say yes to everything that excites you without having to request time off. You want to go to the the gym at noon, in absolutely no hurry. You want to spend 18 hours a day doing what you love. You want to be exactly where you desire being, always. You want to spend as much time with the people you care about as possible. You’re saying you wanna be rich? In what?

New podcast on sales - Sell the Truth. 00:00 Be Credible 03:18 “Yes, And” 04:31 Selfish Honesty 05:37 Charisma Is Confidence Love 07:56 Don’t Manage, Lead 11:16 Hunt Together 14:51 Feed Your (Good) Obsessions 18:57 Sell the Truth 21:07 Good Deal or No Deal 23:39 The Age of Nonlinear Returns

Osso Buco is the most underpriced cut of beef It’s commonly sold as “soup bones” or “cross cut shanks” My local rancher sells grass fed ribeye @ $32/lb & Osso Buco @ $4/lb The Osso Buco takes < 10 mins to prep w/ an Instant Pot & provides bone marrow, broth & collagen rich 🥩

These two dudes were benching next to each other at the gym today One of them had 225 on the bar The other had 375 on the bar Between sets, the dude with 225 on the bar looks at the guy with 375 on the bar and says “How the fuck did you get so strong???” Dude with 375 on the bar: “I pick a weight that’s hard for about 5 reps…once I can hit 8 or 10 hard reps I increase the weight. I’ve been doing this for 20 years.” This is it, people…this is IT

Excessive money can only "buy so much." Time, health, and love above all else. Every billionaire wants to be a podcaster / go on Joe Rogan. Obviously money did not fill that hole in the soul.

this is the beauty of X, you learn about these incredible stories that capture the depth of tradition and noble qualities

I'm 22 years old and Claude Code is deteriorating my brain. Every single day for the last 6 months I've had 6 to 8 Claude Code terminals open, waiting for a response just so I can hit 'enter' 75% of the time. And it's doing something to me. In convos with a couple of friends, it's been a point that's been brought up pretty frequently. None of us feel as sharp as we used to. I don't know if it's just us, or others in their 20s are feeling the same thing, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot. P.S. I know this is a problem with my reliability/usage of it, not Claude Code itself, but the effects are real nonetheless

Single guys need to be joy maxxing. Hanging with friends. Grilling. Lifting weights. Eating steaks. Enjoying a hobby. Grabbing beers. Hitting on girls. Getting rejected (the right one won’t). Laughing about it. Wood working. Side hustling. Reading. Learning niche facts. Locking in. Working hard. Just fully living and enjoying their lives. It’s very attractive when you love your life. It’s very attractive when your life is full. Law of attraction baby. You attract what you are.

USVC is a new fund being offered by Naval, it's been discussed widely on X. I have some thoughts and why people should look into it. I have no connection with it and not being paid to shill. Back when I started dating my wife, I told her to set up a Roth IRA and buy Apple. Every year, I'd have her put the max limit into a Roth IRA and buy Apple. Apple was $20 or so. When I checked it earlier this year, I was blown away. It was a small mount of money that grew into something nice. Apple, Facebook, Nvidia, Tesla, etc. would IPO early. You could have MASSIVE outsized gains if you were investing in the early 2010's. You couldn't get into them pre-IPO unless you had a connection. There are people on this site who pretend to be geniuses because a friend hooked them up with a tag-along investment into the seed round of Uber. It was a bro favor, good for them, they do leave that part out tho and let the false narrative of being a genius investor flow through. You used to be able to buy in pre-IPO with a small check. Now it's almost impossible unless you have a friend, and they set up an SPV, they are usually doing you a favor, because huge funds and institutional investors gobble it all up. (This has also lead to the VC class screwing themselves over, because if you can't buy today's version of Apple at $20, because all the big gains are sucked up before the public offering, then why do you have buy in into this entire system?) You could, as a small investor, get huge results pre-IPO via a small check, or also do well after the IPO, because companies IPO'ed earlier. Ie Apple at $20, Amazon in the 20's, etc. It's very hard to get big gains now, because companies remain private much longer. Many companies don't want to IPO and then deal with the hassle of lawfare. Look at what happened to Elon in Delaware. For us, as an ordinary person, this means that by the time a company goes public, we are "last money in." This is why I always tell friends and family to buy SPY (or FXAIX) and QQQM. Don't day trade. You won't beat the market. (Everyone who claims they do are lying, they use a short timeline and never mention all of the losing trades. Or they are insider trading or beating the market by a relatively small amount. For most of us, day trading is the way of death.) With USVC, regular people can get into some of the companies that will IPO, eventually, at high valuations still, but pre-IPO. I've read all of the negative commentary about the fund. I don't understand the "illiquid" complaint. If you started your own business and bought equipment, you wouldn't be paying yourself. If you really had to expand, you might not pay yourself for years. When you put your money in, it's locked up, you grow out the company for several years. Hopefully you can afford to pay yourself after a couple of years. If you QSBS'ed it, maybe you sell in 5-10. Who knows. In the meantime, yes, your money is gone. Every business owner knows this feeling. Your company is "worth" some amounts on paper, and you pay yourself a salary to live on. That's if things are going well. There's also a lot of discussion around carry and fees. The question is will those fees be less than what the post-IPO price of the companies will be is. That's up to everyone to decide for themselves. In any case, I have no financial interest into this fund. I am not telling you to buy into or not. I do like to flag stuff like this for people who read me, operating under the rule that, "Cerno writes for the version of Cerno who did not understand any of this stuff, but sure would have liked to have." As an example, I didn't know what QSBS was until it was too late. [Frown face.] And I didn't buy Tesla at $2 [panic attack], despite wanting to, because a financial adviser friend told me, "You shouldn't invest on a feeling, you don't have any edge here." I would tell my prior self: You can't invest EVERYTHING based on vibes, but you can and should absolutely do so now and then. (Note: If you have an addictive personality, this is bad advice. But I am only addicted to X and See's Candies.) But I will post the negative comments about the fund. I don't want anyone to ever read me and obtain bad information. Everyone has to decide for themselves what to do. I've also learned from experience that if something goes well, nobody sends me money or a box of cigars as a thank you. It was their brilliance that led them to the big gains. If it goes wrong, then the fault is all mine and people hate me for it. That's also why I don't even want to post about the fund at all, but here goes.

My information consumption is now 1/4 X, 1/4 podcast interviews of the smartest practitioners, 1/4 talking to the leading AI models, and 1/4 reading old books. The opportunity cost of anything else is far too high, and rising daily.

LLM Knowledge Bases Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So: Data ingest: I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them. IDE: I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides). Q&A: Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale. Output: Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base. Linting: I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into. Extra tools: I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries. Further explorations: As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows. TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.