484: Thoughts on TikTok, Lessons from Nvidia's Jensen, Stripe & Adyen, Telegram, Cerebras, Meta AI, Studying Expertise, and Villeneuve

"Don't mistake the thorns for the flower."

Narcissism is always enacted at someone else’s expense.

—Stuart Schneiderman

🏆🔍 Valuable and hard?

Probably rare.

Valuable and easy?

Probably common.

Hard and worthless?

Surprisingly common.

Don’t mistake noise for signal.

Don't mistake the thorns for the flower. 🌹🥀

🍽️🗓️🍖 Everything is a trade-off. I’ve decided to experiment with alternate-day fasting for a while to see how it works for me.

For years, I did a mix of time-restricted feeding (usually about 8-16) and longer fasts (water + electrolytes only for 4-5 days about once a quarter). In recent times, I’ve cut back on it because I’ve been trying to build muscle mass and strength.

While that’s been going well, the trade-off is that I’ve gained a little bit of undesired weight and I’d like to stop that trend before it’s harder to deal with. To lose that extra 15-20lbs, I’ve been trying to follow simple heuristics like don’t eat after 8PM (also to improve sleep). *If* I could stick to it, it would put me in a slight caloric deficit because I love my nighttime snacks…

But it’s been difficult and my success rate isn’t great. I find it a lot harder to eat all day and then rely on willpower to stop than to not eat at all for 24-36 hours from the moment I wake up.

My new plan is to not eat every other day until I reach my goal, with a break on weekends. After one week of doing this, it has been going well. The way I’m wired, it’s probably the easiest way for me to maintain a caloric deficit for long enough to see results. However, the real test will be over a few weeks/months…

If you’re curious about fasting, I recommend this conversation between Jason Fung and Peter Attia, it covers a lot.

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

😎😅😩 Jensen Huang on ‘resilience in the face of pain and suffering’

Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia and the “it” guy these days, recently spoke at Stanford. The video of the fireside chat was published a week ago.

Pain and suffering don’t exactly have the best PR these days, but they serve their purpose — the concept of “post-traumatic growth” is often overlooked in favor of its mirror image. Jensen tried to balance things out a bit.

My highlights: