BUILD BRAIN

“So you see that aerobic training or interval training seems to benefit the hippocampus and memory function. Resistance training seems to particularly benefit the white matter of the brain, which is kind of in the middle of the brain. That's where all the myelin is. That's responsible for fast connections and some of our more complex cognitive functions. Resistance training improves the structure and function of the white matter and with that improvements in things like executive function.”

“So in this essay, he's talking about, you know, if if you gave a biologist a radio, what they would do is they would, they would take it apart. They would look at all the individual components. They would count them. They would look at their colors. They would, like, change the color of the transistors to see if that affects their function and all this kind of stuff. But in reality, what they would have is just like a bunch of bits, and they wouldn't necessarily know how they fit together.”

“When you look at, like, brain volumes, you again, you see something similar. So lots of studies now done in the UK Biobank where if you're averaging up to one UK unit of alcohol a day, which is eight grams of ethanol, which is about half of a US standard drink, which is 14 grams of ethanol, If you're averaging that amount, no real effect on brain volume or dementia risk. If you're drinking more than that, brain volume start to decrease and dementia risk starts to increase.”

“However, lactate gets straight into the brain through monocarboxylate transporters, the same transporters that take ketones into the brain and switches on the production of BDNF. So lactate seems to be this key, like, messenger from, like, more intense exercise through to the production of stuff like BDNF in the brain.”

“And so he talks about the idea of cognitive prosthetics versus cognitive orthotics. A prosthetic is something that you use if you are missing a function. An orthotic is something you use to boost your function. And so we can use AI as orthotics. We can do the work ourselves and then, you know, say to whatever tool it is, you're like, what am I missing? What can I do better? All of this requires you to be engaged in the work to actually think yourself, and you're building your skills.”

“You need to make sure that you have the right hardware. So we have a Mac Mini here, we have two DGX Sparks from NVIDIA, and we run it on local inference. This is what we run it on for my agent fleet, for example. And the thing is these local models, by the way, they're getting a lot better, like Google's Gemma. The cost savings are going to get better and better over time.”

“Month one, when you're trying to roll this out, it's going to be tough. There's going to be a lot of hallucinations. Things are going to break. You're going to have to reset the models. Then month three, the flywheel starts to spin and then you're starting to see major lifts in terms of what you're doing. It's going to find 10x opportunities on the sales side and content opportunities because it's learning to work with you better.”

“So nicotine can acutely boost cognitive function. There are some studies that kinda suggest that chronic nicotine users have a lower risk of of, Parkinson's disease in in particular long term. I will say that we know nicotine is addictive. We know that it it produces tolerance and withdrawal. So you need higher doses to have the same effect, and then you get significant withdrawal if you stop taking it.”

“But then when we do these big studies looking at what determines, or what predicts how well their brains function later on in childhood, the biggest predictor or the most important factor is the home environment. And there are different ways to to measure this, but it's basically then related to socioeconomic status, reading, education, nutrition, all that kind of stuff that happens in home is, at home is more important than what happens in the hospital. So, like, even if you had an imperfect start to life, the the environment you go back to is the most important thing.”

“So this study, they took older and and younger expert and amateur pianists. So so you have, four groups. Right? Old and young, expert and amateur. And what they found was that when they were looking at complex skills related to piano playing, the older and younger well well, the experts outperformed the amateurs, I as you might expect. But the older and younger experts, and so, like, the the younger experts were in their twenties and thirties, the older experts were in their fifties and sixties. They performed just as well as each other.”

“Alfred here ran the quarterly Vendor and Ops Audit. It found three immediate savings: redundant CRM licenses, 12 unused seats at 43,000 dollars per year; overlapping SEO tools, three tools doing the same job at 18 grand a year; and then underperforming ad campaigns. Total savings that you can get is 500 grand a year. Basically, we had Alfred do a CFO analysis and it saved, I kid you not, 500 grand.”

“This Single Brain, you have all this data from within your company. It could be your CRM, all your chats, all your analytics, your Google Docs, all these things. They are feeding into this Single Brain over here. And then your entire team can query whatever data that they want throughout the Single Brain. They can ask about how sales is performing or what are the deals in our pipeline right now that are stuck?”

“If a brain doesn't have good memory, well, it's only as good as the memory. And so what I'm using is Obsidian. And Obsidian is great for creating markdown files of a lot of the skills that you have, a lot of documentation. You work with these agents all the time. They forget what you're talking about and you need something like this that's going to remember. It's extremely high leverage because it's able to get the information you need faster.”

“My my definition of of a healthy brain is, is a brain that does what you wanted to do when you wanted to do it. And it's kind of less, like, slightly adapted from there's, like, a WHO brain health definition or something. But I put it in put it that way because each of us wants our brains to do different things.”

“What I will say is that there are lots of studies that show that when we use stimulants to improve cognitive function, we think we're performing better, but often we're actually performing worse. So we've they've seen this with caffeine. They've seen this with, methylphenidate and many of the others. And it it's the same with creativity and cannabis. Like, you think that your brain is working much better, but then if you, like, objectively score cognition, it's actually worse.”

“The Single Brain concept, not only that, you have a fleet of agents that it's also powering. So this fleet of agents, they are the ones that are doing the thing. So we have our agent called Alfred, and then we have Arrow here for sales, we have Oracle for SEO, Flash for content side work. I mean, look, this piece over here, by the way, this piece got 354,000 views. This was created by Flash.”

“All these capabilities, all these SOPs are all documented for you. And you want to put these all into skills.md files. So they should all live within a skill.md. The better you are at one, doing your job, but two also documenting what you do. I highly recommend making a bunch of Loom videos or just dictating using whisper flow, just saying what you want to say and making them into skills.”