Riggs Douglas

California & Hawai’i

[Karl Matt Button │ Apex Fitness Adv. @KarlApexFit]

Back squats and deadlifts build the best physiques in your 20s.

They also build the worst MRIs in your 50s.

If you're 40+, you need exercises you can progress for the next 20 years — not ones that catch up with you in 5.

Here are the 10 best. One per muscle group:

= Thread =

[Matthew Zirwas, MD @MattZirwas]

I’m a dermatologist. I’m supposed to say there is no amount of safe sun exposure.

But I won’t, because that’s a lie.

The attached shows how much sun is safe in different cities at different times of year.

What do I mean by ‘safe’?

I mean this: UV causes DNA damage and skin cancer.

But, shockingly, your body repairs that damage. As long as the damage doesn’t outpace repair and start accumulating it shouldn't increase your risk of skin cancer.

Data just came out that tells us how much UV you can get without damage accumulating.

They took the people most susceptible to DNA damage from UV and exposed them to UV, then did skin biopsies to measure the damage, then more skin biopsies to measure the repair, and repeated it daily for 4 days.

At 1.6 ‘Standard Erythemal Dose’ (SED) there was no accumulation of damage.

So, the attached charts show how much sun it takes to get 1 SED in different cities at different times of the year at different times of day.

And there are extra safety margins built in. It assumes a perfectly clear day with zero air pollution and that the sun is hitting your skin perpendicularly. Unless you’re laying flat, most sun is hitting you at an angle, which isn’t nearly as intense.

But a bigger question you might be asking is ‘Why would a dermatologist be telling you to get sun in the first place?’

Because getting sun reduces your risk of death.

Mostly by reducing your risk of heart attacks and strokes. That is very well proven.

But it’s also very likely that sun exposure reduces your risk of autoimmune disease, dementia, cancer and depression. It’s just not as well proven as the protection against heart attacks and strokes.

And before you reply and say ‘just take vitamin D!’, know that it has been ROBUSTLY proven that vitamin D has little (if any) benefit for preventing any of the above. Vitamin D is mostly useful as a marker of if you’re getting enough sun.

What do I do myself and what do I tell my patients?

Get as much unprotected sun exposure as you can without getting a burn.

That’s my GUESS as to what has the best risk/benefit ratio. Dying of skin cancer is actually really rare, especially when compared to the risk of heart attacks, strokes, autoimmune disease, dementia and other cancers.

But I’ll admit it’s not for sure best to get as much sun as possible, since sun does increase the risk of skin cancer and it might be the case the benefits plateau at a low level.

So, if you’re really worried about skin cancer stick to the charts.

The best science I can find says that amount won’t cause skin cancer.

The takeaway?

Sun is good for you, just don’t get a burn.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. Something just happened today that I genuinely did not see coming — and it could change the future of preventive medicine more than anything I've written about on this platform.
Midjourney — the AI company that became famous for generating images from text prompts — just announced a medical hardware division and unveiled a working prototype of a full-body scanner unlike anything that's ever existed.
It's called the Midjourney Scanner. And it works like this.
You step into a shallow pool of water. You stand on a platform that slowly descends — about two inches per second — through a ring containing roughly half a million tiny ultrasonic transducers, each the size of a grain of sand. Every one of them acts as both a speaker and a microphone, sending ultrasonic waves through your body from every angle and recording what comes back.
60 seconds later, you step out. The scan is done.
No radiation. No magnets. No claustrophobia. No IV contrast. Just sound, water, and an almost incomprehensible amount of computing power — roughly 2 petaflops processing 17 gigabytes per second of raw acoustic data — reconstructing a 3D map of your entire internal anatomy down to half a millimeter resolution.
Organs. Tissues. Blood vessels. Bones. Muscle. Fat distribution. All segmented by AI in real time.
As a cardiologist who has spent months writing about how the standard screening playbook misses the majority of future heart attacks — this is the technology I've been waiting for without knowing it existed.
Here's why this matters for the future of your heart.
Right now, getting a detailed look inside your cardiovascular system requires either a CT scan (radiation), an MRI (magnets, claustrophobia, 45-60 minutes, $1,000+), or a coronary CT angiogram (radiation, IV contrast, limited availability). These are powerful tools. I order them regularly and they save lives.
But they're reactive. You get them when something is already suspected. They're expensive. They're uncomfortable. And for most people, they happen once — maybe twice — in a lifetime.
Imagine instead: a 60-second scan with no radiation that you could repeat monthly or quarterly. Tracking cardiac structure over time. Watching body composition shift. Detecting changes in organ size, fluid distribution, or vascular architecture before symptoms ever develop. Building a longitudinal dataset of YOUR body that AI can analyze for patterns no single snapshot would reveal.
That's what Midjourney is building toward.
The company plans 50,000 scanners worldwide over six years, with capacity for a billion scans per month. The first location — the "Midjourney Spa" in San Francisco — opens at the end of 2027 with 10 scanners alongside saunas, cold plunges, and a gym. The scan costs a few dollars. The experience is designed to feel like wellness, not medicine.
The technology is built on Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip platform — 40 modules per scanner — combined with Midjourney's own AI segmentation and reconstruction stack. David Holz, the founder, claims the system aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many aspects but at nearly 100x the speed with zero radiation.
Now the caveats — because I'm a physician and the caveats matter enormously.
This is a Gen 1 prototype. About a dozen people have been scanned so far. Current scan time is actually closer to 20 minutes, not 60 seconds — the system is bottlenecked by bandwidth and reconstruction algorithms. The 60-second target is aspirational for future hardware generations.
It is not FDA-cleared for diagnostic use. Midjourney is starting with body composition maps — a category below diagnostic imaging in the regulatory hierarchy. The path from "beautiful 3D body scans" to "clinically validated diagnostic tool that your cardiologist can act on" runs through years of clinical trials, comparative studies against MRI and CT gold standards, and FDA review.
No independent clinical validation has been published. The imaging claims come from Midjourney's own demonstrations. Comparative data against established modalities does not yet exist.
And the privacy implications of full-body internal scans at planetary scale — a billion scans per month — is a conversation that hasn't even started yet.
So I want to be precise. This is not ready for clinical medicine today. It may not be ready for years. Many ambitious medical hardware projects have failed in the gap between prototype and product.
But.
The fact that a working prototype exists — producing real segmented 3D anatomy from sound waves and compute alone — means the physics works. The engineering works. The question is no longer "is this possible" but "how fast can it be validated and scaled."
And if it is validated — if the resolution holds up against MRI, if the AI segmentation proves reliable, if the regulatory path clears — then what we're looking at is the most significant new imaging modality in 50 years.
For my entire career, preventive cardiology has been limited by the fact that seeing inside the body is expensive, slow, uncomfortable, and infrequent. We catch disease late because we image rarely. We image rarely because imaging is hard.
A 60-second, no-radiation, spa-based full-body scan that costs a few dollars would demolish every one of those barriers.
I've written about AI detecting inflamed arteries. About gene editing curing cholesterol. About GLP-1 drugs rewriting metabolic medicine. About cellular reprogramming reversing aging.
This is the missing piece: the ability to see inside every human body, routinely, safely, and affordably — so all of those interventions can be deployed before the disease arrives instead of after.
The company that taught AI to generate images from imagination just built a machine that generates images from the human body.
The future of medicine showed up today from the last place anyone expected.

[shirish @shiri_shh]

They are putting DATA CENTERS in the ocean now.

Panthalassa, a startup from Portland, just raised $140 MILLION.

what they do: build floating platforms that sit out at sea and run AI. no power grid needed. the ocean waves make all the electricity. the seawater keeps the chips cool.

How it works: big floating balls bob up and down with the waves. that motion makes power. the power runs the AI chips inside.

backed by PETER THIEL. company now worth almost $1 BILLION.

land is running out of room and power for AI. so the next move is simple. go to the sea.

[Slime🐍 @ItsKingSlime]

Olivia Wilde reveals to Alex Cooper that the moment she realized her relationship with longtime fiancé and father of her children Jason Sudeikis was over came when he didn’t get her a birthday gift because he no longer knew what to get her 😳👀

“we were driving home from my birthday party, and I said, ‘Did you give me a birthday present?’ And he said, ‘What would I get you, Olivia? I don’t know you.’ And he wasn’t wrong. We didn’t know each other anymore.”

[Shawnee Gregorio @ShawneeMG2]

A lot of people don’t know this, but weak hips cause all sorts of problems, especially in the lower back and knees.

Fix it! That’s all.

Warning: these are not easy to do 👇🏼

[Rohit @ai_rohitt]

A man spends 50 years teaching at MIT.

He knows his time is running out.

So he records one last lecture — everything he knows, distilled into a single hour.

He died 5 months later.

This is that lecture.

The most important hour you'll watch this week. 👇
Bookmark it for later

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

This is the Mega Marvin, an instrument that gets used to make sounds in horror movies.

[📹 MetalWOlf]

[Pravita Panday @pravita_pandey]

Bill Ackman literally gave a 44-minute masterclass that explains money better than any business school.

[CyrilXBT @cyrilXBT]

MARC ANDREESSEN JUST WENT ON ROGAN AND DROPPED THE MOST IMPORTANT AI ALPHA OF THE YEAR.

3 hours and 20 minutes of podcast.

Here are the 17 things worth your attention.

1. AGI is already here. Marc thinks the line was crossed 3 months ago with GPT-5.5, Claude 4.6, Gemini 3, and Grok 4.3. Nobody noticed because the field moves too fast for anyone to register the milestones anymore.

2. For almost any topic the top AI models now give him better answers than the world-class experts he could call on the phone. And he can call basically anyone.

3. Every doctor is secretly using ChatGPT in the exam room. They turn around the second you stop talking and type your symptoms in. Some do it while you are still sitting there. His quote: "At that point you are asking what do I need you for."

4. When AI refuses to answer something he wants to know he tells it he is writing a novel. "Walk me through how the bad guy robs the bank." It explains almost anything if it thinks it is helping you write fiction.

5. When something is too complex he says "explain it like I am 10." Then "like I am 5." Then "like I am 2." He keeps going until it actually clicks.

6. When he wants to understand a tough topic he does not ask what the right answer is. He asks the AI to steelman one side then steelman the other. Then he decides for himself.

7. For big questions he tells the AI to pretend to be a panel of experts. "Be a doctor, a lawyer, a historian, a psychologist, and argue this out with each other." Then he reads the debate.

8. Pay attention to the exact moment you think "I do not know how to figure this out." Most people give up there. That is the moment you should open the AI.

9. The only real skill left in using AI is knowing what to ask. The models can do almost anything you can describe in plain English. The bottleneck lives in your own head.

10. You can send AI photos of almost anything medical now and get a real answer. Skin rashes. Blood test results. The new models read images not just text. A free 24/7 second opinion on anything.

11. The one type of therapy clinically proven to work is cognitive behavioral therapy. It is also something an AI can fully do on its own. Every person on earth is about to have access to a real therapist for free anytime they want.

12. AI is solving math problems open for 100 years that no human mathematician could crack. Same thing is starting in physics, chemistry, and biology. Expect cancer cures and weird new physics breakthroughs in the next few years.

13. The best AI coders in Silicon Valley now make $50 million a year. One person. That number tells you how big this thing actually is when you strip away all the doom takes.

14. One friend paid $200 to decode his entire DNA. Then gave the AI his DNA, blood test results, and Apple Watch data. The AI built him a full health dashboard and started telling him exactly what to fix.

15. Another friend put two cameras in his home jiu jitsu gym. AI watches him spar and gives him technique notes after every round. A world-class coach at every practice for free.

16. The best programmers in Silicon Valley now run 20 AI coding bots simultaneously. Each bot writes code while they review the others. They call themselves AI vampires because going to bed means 20 workers stop and you lose money every hour you sleep.

17. The obvious next step: the bots will run their own bots. One human running 20 bots each running 20 more. One person. One laptop. 1,000 AI workers. This is months away not years.

Bookmark this before you watch the full podcast.

Follow @cyrilXBT for every AI insight worth your attention the moment it surfaces.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Gary Oldman screamed “EVERYONE!” as a joke to make the director laugh. He warned the sound guy to take his headphones off, then yelled as loud as he physically could. The director loved it. The take ended up in the final cut of Léon: The Professional.

Almost every Stansfield moment people still quote was made up on the spot. The Beethoven speech about insects in the grass, improvised. Different version every take. The scene where he sniffs the dad’s face like a dog to figure out he’s lying, also improvised. The actor playing the dad wasn’t warned. His discomfort on screen wasn’t acting. Natalie Portman, 12 at the time, said about her one scene with Oldman: “I don’t think I had to act at all. He really does what he does well.”

Director Luc Besson designed it that way. He built the film around Jean Reno playing the assassin as quiet and childlike, barely speaking. Besson said Reno had “no room to play.” So he built Stansfield as the opposite. A character where “anything was possible. Anything.” Stansfield was meant to carry the film’s dark humor. Besson said: “A movie without humor somewhere, is not a movie.”

The pill Stansfield pops before every kill is Librium, a 1960s anti-anxiety drug. Oldman plays it like getting high. The neck cracks, the back arches, the eyes roll. Physical bits he made up himself, scene by scene, to show his grip slipping.

The same year Oldman played a psycho cop obsessed with Beethoven, he played Beethoven himself, in a movie about the composer called Immortal Beloved. Both came out in 1994, three months apart.

Oldman calls his acting method the “pain bag.” He pulls from memories that hurt. His father walking out on the family when he was young. Things to do with his son Alfie. Then he layers physical prep on top. For Darkest Hour, where he played Winston Churchill, he smoked so many of Churchill’s cigars he gave himself nicotine poisoning. For Stansfield, he didn’t go that far. He just got out of the script’s way and kept making things up.

Tom Hardy said every drama student in his class did Oldman-as-Stansfield impressions. Entertainment Weekly gave it their “Best Overacting” award. Time magazine called it “divinely psychotic.” Empire magazine called it “astonishingly histrionic” (basically: way over the top, in a great way). The reviews all said the same thing. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

Besson summed it up years later: “To some people, it was a silly character. But Stansfield is the one that everyone on the street wants to talk to me about. Gary made it iconic.”

[Camus @newstart_2024]

“You only have to rebound for one minute in the morning to get that lymphatic system activated for the whole day.”
— Barbara O’Neill

She explains that rebounding (even a gentle “health bounce”) opens every single gate in your lymphatic system when you jump and closes them when you land — acting like the body’s natural vacuum cleaner flushing out waste. It strengthens your calves (your “second heart”), improves balance, eyesight, and circulation with almost no joint impact.

The lymphatic system lacks a central pump like the heart and relies almost entirely on physical movement and muscle contractions to circulate lymph fluid and remove waste.

Most of us live sedentary lives with sluggish lymph flow, so waste can build up. A few minutes on a rebounder can help kickstart your body’s natural detox system every single day.

Many people report feeling noticeably lighter and more energized after regular rebounding sessions.

What about you — have you ever tried rebounding, or is this something you might look into?

[Metabolic Factor @MetabolicFactor]

Here’s how to make a highly nutritious, protein-rich salmon salad sandwich filler.

[andrew engler @aerockrose]

In 2007, Stanford's Joel Peterson gave a 68-minute masterclass on negotiation under pressure.

Most operators negotiate from desperation.

His frameworks:
- "Don't get in that position"
- The unempowered lieutenant
- The ferret brand

12 lessons:

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

This NFL player reveals the only exercise that sculpts abs for life, and it's surprisingly simple to do

[bodila @51bodila]

Citadel CEO shares a secret with Stanford - how his fund uses AI to control $69B in capital

42-min AI masterclass from the founder of one of the world’s top investment funds

Bookmark & watch it - it’s the best interview on the use of AI in finance. Then listen how Ken Griffin borrowed $265k and turned it into $90B

[StripMallGuy @realEstateTrent]

Something I’ve noticed over time:

As people rise in social status, they start filtering who they respond to, how quickly they respond, and how open they are, largely based on the other person’s status.

And that bar keeps moving.

The people who made the cut six months ago suddenly don’t anymore as their own status rises.

Texts go unanswered, calls don’t get returned, and access changes.

Eventually, their entire circle becomes a reflection of status, and not character. Without shared values or real connection - just proximity to perceived importance.

At some point, you’re no longer choosing people. You’re choosing status.

And the reality is, the same people you chose for their status are doing the exact same thing.

The second yours slips, they’re gone.

And then, who’s left?

[health_booster @healthh_booster]

90% of your muscle will be built doing TWO exercises:

Chest:

1) Chest press of any type
2) Incline chest press of any type

Back:

1) Rows of any type
2) Pulldowns of any type

Shoulders:

1) Lateral raise of any type
2) Shoulder press of any type

Quads:

1) Squats of any type (leg press is a type of squat)
2) Leg extension

Glutes:

1) RDL
2) Glute bridges

Hamstrings:

1) Seated leg curl
2) Lying leg curl

Calves:

1) Standing calf raise
2) Seated calf raise

Biceps:

1) "Palms up" curl of any type
2) Hammer curls

Triceps:

1) Skull crusher
2) Pushdown

Core:

1) Back extension
2) Decline sit ups

2 exercises
2 sets each

Apply progressive overload (once you can do 8, or 10, or 12 reps, increase the weight)

You don't need to do 4 exercises of 3 sets each for each muscle.

It's a waste of time and all it does is tire you out.

A sample program is attached here. Done once every 5 days.

Upper
Lower
Cardio
Break
Break

Repeat

[FoundMyFitness Clips @fmfclips]

Hanging from a bar for three minutes a day, total, may be one of the highest-ROI inputs for upper body mobility

People who regularly hang tend to report less shoulder pain, less neck pain, and better-functioning backs

Spread it across the day in 30–60 second bouts from a doorway pull-up bar or playground rig

If a bar isn't accessible, downward dog is the functional equivalent

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

When you stay "locked in" long enough that the pain flips into pleasure, your body is making its own version of weed. Same chemical family as the THC in marijuana. Researchers nicknamed it the "bliss molecule."

People used to credit endorphins for runner's high. Endorphins can't even get into your brain. They're stuck in your bloodstream, too big to cross from your blood into your brain tissue. In 2015, German researchers found what was actually doing the work: your body's homemade weed chemicals. Small. Fat-based. They slip into the brain easily and bind to the same receptors as cannabis.

In 2021, the team ran the human version. 63 people on a treadmill for 45 minutes, with a drug in their system that blocks all opioid effects. The high still happened. The cannabis-like system in your body drives this state.

Chemistry explains the high. Your brain explains why work feels effortless.

Behind your forehead sits a region that runs your inner critic. The voice that judges you. Tracks time. Second-guesses every move. Overthinks. When you go deep into a hard task, this whole region quiets down. A 2008 study at the National Institutes of Health put six jazz pianists in a brain scanner and asked them to make up music on the spot. The scan showed huge chunks of the front-brain going quiet. Inner critic offline. That's the "no thoughts" feeling.

Every burst of pain triggers an opposite wave of relief afterward. Every burst of pleasure triggers a small dip. A psychologist named Richard Solomon described this in 1980. With repetition, the pain side weakens. The relief side grows enormous. The first hard run hurts a lot and the relief is mild. The hundredth one barely hurts and the relief is huge. Pain becomes the entry fee for a much stronger pleasure response.

Dopamine has its own twist. If you treat the effort as suffering to endure for a payoff, dopamine waits until the payoff and the grind feels heavier the whole way. If the work itself starts feeling like the win, dopamine releases during the grind and your baseline rises. Cold showers work the same trick. One plunge raises dopamine 2.5 times your normal level for two to three hours.

DARPA, the US military's research arm, ran a project to teach soldiers to enter this state on demand. They used real-time feedback on the soldiers' brainwaves until they could hit the right pattern. Novice marksmen doubled their accuracy.

One catch. Only about 7 in 10 long-distance runners report ever feeling this state, even once. Skill must match challenge. Stakes must feel real. Distractions gone. Feedback immediate. Most lives don't have all four lined up most days.

The same brain pattern shows up in meditation, hypnosis, dreaming, jazz solos, and being high on weed. Front of the brain quiet. Deeper systems running. The point where grinding flips into fun is your brain running closer to its actual ceiling.