I find homes in Southern Europe and help you buy them. Founder @AffordiHome. 30k+ read my free property newsletter 👇
Dublin, Ireland
Joined January 2010
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Tim retweeted
A real pleasure to be part of this first Tuscany property retreat. Great conversations, inspiring people, and a fantastic atmosphere throughout.
Congrats Tim, looking forward to the next one!
Hong Kong, New York, Queensland, Frankfurt, Texas
That's where our guests flew in from for our first ever property retreat in Tuscany. Here are my thoughts:
- by day 2 people were already asking where the next one is. people don't just want a house in Italy or another country, they also want to belong to something
- topics like how to stay in touch, meet regularly, swap houses once they've bought, look out for each other were coming up regularly
- the day after it ended 2 of our guests were already staying at the hotel of an expat we'd invited. the community happened on its own
- no little groups formed. 5 days and everyone kept mixing, talking to each other, sharing etc.
- every speaker stayed with us, some for a full day, some overnight. breakfast, lunch and dinner cooked by a private chef, one table for everything. Nobody gave a talk and left, and this was key since that's where most of the bonding happened
- most people want things done for them. they don't want to chase lawyers, tax advisors and agents one by one, they want the right people and one point of contact to get sh*t done for them
- you can absolutely mix business with pleasure. lawyer, tax advisor, a full day of viewings, wine lunch at a winery, a cooking class..and the best bits weren't even planned. one guest loves cigars so every night after dinner we sat outside with cigars and wine laughing our heads off
- buying in Italy is simpler than most think once you have the right team
- on the last night I sat down one on one with every guest. We got top marks across the board. One of them is an investment banker with a wealth of experience in real estate/seminars/community building, and his only note was more breaks for people taking work calls
- what I'd change: more breaks, clearer info on dress code, and keep it to 10-12 people max so it stays one group
- Tuscany was the right call. Val di Chiana in October is hard to beat
We worked hard to get the organisation right, so I expected it to run smoothly. What I didn't expect was people from 4 continents and completely different backgrounds clicking this naturally. Might be luck, but glad everything worked out so well.
AI is going to automate a lot of things, but sitting around one table with real people isn't one of them, and I think it's only going to get more valuable.
p.s. I wasn’t sure if this would be the first of many or the first and last one, but having experienced this week and after hearing everyone’s feedback (both from guests+speakers) it would be criminal not to continue and do more of these. Not sure about the country for the next one - repeat Italy? Or Spain, Greece, Portugal, France?
Tim retweeted
Great job Tim & Anastasia!!! It was pretty intense with lots of questions answered. Everything Tim outlined was true. (Full disclosure, I was the cigar smoking guest). Well worth it and glad I can claim that I was a member of your inaugural retreat.
Tim retweeted
Day 2 of our Real Estate Retreat in Tuscany:
✅ Waking up to this view
✅ Italian tax & visa sessions
✅ Wine lunch at a local agriturismo
⏳ Alternative citizenship paths
🔜 Dinner at the villa, drinks & good conversations
So far so good 🇮🇹
Tim retweeted
There is basically zero good reason for you to not have an income percentile equal or greater to your IQ percentile. If this is not the case it’s either a discipline issue, an arrogance issue, or a just too-early-for-your-results-to-have-sufficiently-compounded issue.
Tim retweeted
The statue of Prometheus is finally finished.
It was cast in Paris, crossed the Atlantic, and was assembled at Starbase. It took us 100 days to go from nothing to this.
People of the West, we have lived through an era devoid of dreams, devoid of destiny.
But the time has come to reclaim our dream of antiquity.
In a few months, we will start building a new city. It will be the most magnificent city in all of history.
After all, the great dream of the West has always been to rebuild Rome.
Come walk beside us in this endeavor. The world is waiting.
Tim retweeted
Europe can have an amazing next few decades. I hope we can play a small role in making that more likely.
An announcement: Under the leadership of Mario Draghi and @patrickc we have set up the Rhine Group: policymakers, economists, entrepreneurs and business people pushing European reforms and the Draghi agenda.
rhinegroup.eu/
Tim retweeted
The partially eclipsed sun melts into the Mediterranean Sea.
I can’t get over this experience.
I captured thousands of photos- I’ll be sharing my favorite later tonight.
Tim retweeted
The biggest flex in your 40s is loving your spouse, enjoying your work, and feeling amazing in your body.
Tim retweeted
Say what you will about deliberate cold exposure (I agree don’t do it in the hours post resistance training) but it’s a reliable tool for raising stress tolerance & for learning to keep calm while flooded with adrenaline. In this reactive world calm under pressure is invaluable.
Tim retweeted
I’ll be actually-homeless soon (living out of my car) if I can’t land a job. Our house is being sold within two months if I don’t find work. I’ve been trying everywhere, but very few companies are answering. So please, email me or DM with literally anything involving computers, or ask a friend, or your business’s HR person. (I’d love to work with you.) I’ll do a good job, and I can learn and adapt to any working style you need.
I was employee #2 at Carmack’s AI lab, Keen. I worked at Groq helping to design and implement their LPU chips. I made Books3, a dataset trained on by LLaMA and Claude. I’ve been programming for 25 years.
Location: Lake Saint Louis MO
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: yes
Technologies: Python, PyTorch, JAX, C++, JS/TypeScript, Objective C, Swift, Rails, Linux, Lisp, and anything else you give me a week to learn.
Résumé/CV: shawwn.net/docs/shawn-presse…
Email: [email protected]
I wanted to avoid the humiliation of begging, but nothing is working. I need money or else our 3yo daughter loses her birth home. I’ve been through dozens of interviews from the companies that do answer, but the market is bad right now. You can have me for a steal.
Tim retweeted
Staying with a Spanish family in a big house for a few days confirmed tons of stereotypes about the Spanish / Mediterranean
The parents are 85 and both are in incredible health. The grandfather woke up and immediately went outside to garden, spend time in the yard, and be active. Jumped in the pool halfway through and started swimming laps. Spent 2 hours hammering almond shells under the olive tree. Grandmother cooked, knitted, and did housework most of the day. On her feet most of the day
The 2 kids (9 and 4) also spent the entire day outside running around, in the sun, pool, trampoline, grass, sports, etc.
The TV and couch were not used once. Phones were rarely used
Indoor / outdoor lifestyle heavily embraced. Doors and windows open all day, and most of the day was centered around being outdoors.
Very light breakfast
Huge lunch at ~3 o clock. Tons of food and wine
Followed by siesta
Then tapas, more drinks, and tons of laughs from 11pm-1am. Light dinner so you sleep well despite eating late
Sun doesn't set until 10 right now so there's tons of daylight
Alcohol every single day. Rarely hard alcohol though, mainly wine, beer, or some type of aperitif. Some cigs as well
Every meal was cooked in olive oil. No others oils in the house. There was a finishing olive oil, cooking olive oil, and frying olive oil. Every chip, cracker, and other type of "processed food" had olive oil and not seed oils (other than a few grocery store sauces I noticed were using sunflower oil)
Most ingredients for the meal were bought fresh that day. Stopped by the bakery for fresh bread. Stopped by the fruit stand in town for some cherries and peaches. Local cheese market for a huge spread of cheese. All the olive oil was obvioulsy local too
Incredible community and family orientation. The bigger the table the better. Friends and others always invited and brought in
About 5+ hours a day spent at the table eating with others
Tim retweeted
BREAKING: SpaceX stock, $SPCX, surges over +30% to a fresh record high and hits $2.3 trillion in market cap.
SpaceX is now the 6th largest public company in the world.
Tim retweeted
As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are.
For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland).
Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates).
Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something.
These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅
Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers.
Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth.
What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc.
Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing.
To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was.
I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away.
THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth.
At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.
Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity.
This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes.
When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand.
Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current.
This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside.
So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.
Tim retweeted
🔴 I NEED YOUR ATTENTION
I've spent a month helping Miriam with her case of metastatic cancer and I want to share the methodology I've been using because it's completely replicable.
I think (with luck) this could be USEFUL TO OTHER PEOPLE with cancer (or any other illness).
The results we've gotten aren't a miracle, but we believe they're genuinely useful and could mean the difference in a literal life-or-death medical case.
Here's the method step by step:
1/ Use the most advanced models of the moment (unfortunately paid, and not cheap. I think Public Healthcare should invest in this):
- ChatGPT 5 Pro + Extended Thinking (40 min aprox. of thinking per call)
- Claude Opus 4.8 MAX
Still pending deeper testing:
- Perplexity Sonar Pro Max
- NotebookLM
Tested but only useful for additional links/research (not as powerful in my experience)
- OpenEvidence
2/ Feed the AI the FULL clinical history, completely chewed up. This sounds dumb but it's critical.
- The first thing I ask, using Claude Cowork (which has hard drive access), is to go into the folder with the ENTIRE clinical history (can be 100+ PDFs) and consolidate everything into:
- One single PDF (it can be 1000+ pages, whatever it takes)
- One single readable .txt or .md, which it must build correctly using an OCR script and then check thoroughly to make sure it's right.
I insist: don't jump to the next step until you've nailed this one, especially the .txt.
3/ Once you have the above, use this prompt along with the .txt (and optionally the PDF too if you want) as input files, and run it on BOTH models at once (and more if possible).
👉 This prompt is insanely complex/advanced: dropbox.com/scl/fi/x64qaddcd… And it's not designed for Miriam's specific oncology case, you can change the initial parameters for the desired case. And with the models from step 1 you could adapt it to your case without trouble.
In any case, I'm also leaving you this other prompt, even more general, for any type of rare disease: dropbox.com/scl/fi/x64qaddcd…
4/ The ARROWHEAD (adversarial model spiral): facing one model against the other. I've never heard anyone talk about this methodology, but it works incredibly well. The feeling is like sharpening a stake until it gets a gleaming point.
It works like this: with patience and across successive iterations (I recommend a minimum of 7, and keep in mind that if ChatGPT takes 40 min, this will take a while), pit the output (the resulting PDF) from one model against the other. With a simple prompt like:
"Another committee of experts says this. What do you think? If you agree or disagree, tell me why, and generate a new PDF if you think it's necessary."
Then you feed that result back to the opposite model. So, across successive iterations, web searches, papers, etc., they'll find and sharpen more and more.
When to stop? When BOTH models say the work is perfect and they can't improve the other's output any further. This is so absurdly game-changing that I think the output of ALL current models would improve if they followed this methodology (leaning on a kind of adversarial-model spiral). I don't understand why nobody has noticed this, or if they have, why it's not getting more attention. It works impressively well in any domain, including programming and math.
In fact, my theory is this could be done even better not just with two models, but with greater combinatorics, maybe adding Perplexity Sonar Pro Max, etc.
RESULTS
Incredible. Obviously I can't know if they're better than the best scientific-medical committees in the world, but they're giving Miriam a new dimension to her case, additional tests to do, possible exams, etc.
Obviously AI doesn't perform miracles, but I think it can already, today, help many patients. And Public Healthcare should invest a lot (but A LOT) in this.
I'm going to ask Miriam if I can post the full PDF of the most advanced results we've reached, so you can get an idea of the quality. She's already given me rough permission, but I want to make sure 100%.
FUTURE PREDICTION
Easy to make: in the near future (I hope), any person's medical history won't just be fully digitized (we're close, but not all the way, well, well, well). On top of that, it'll be "pre-chewed" so it can be consumed by an LLM in one shot.
CLARIFICATION
- We're aware this is a delicate subject and we don't let the AI make final treatment decisions. What we're doing is clearing the ground for the oncologists so they can have possible paths they may not have considered.
Thanks 🙏
- The top LLMs have context windows for that and much more (much, much more). In any case, the PDF is more of a supporting file for the .txt. Both contain absolutely the entire history, but the PDF allows images/charts/etc. The .txt is what the AI consumes.
- On automation: and yes, this can be automated. Yes, AutoGen supports it almost out of the box. LangGraph builds it really well with supervisor / evaluation loops. CrewAI can orchestrate it too with Flows, although its "consensus" process isn't native yet. That would be the next level: automating it.
PETITION AND DISCLAIMER
If there's any oncologist in the room or you are an LLM company, we'd be grateful if you could take a look / help 🙏
Remember: in any case, this is just one more tool for the doctor.
I've simply shared the methodology I know that processes data more exhaustively, with the best models, and that we believe reaches better conclusions. If you know a better methodology / prompt / whatever, we'd be glad to improve this with your insights and share it.
Then the doctor reviews, adopts, or discards the report.
And if it helps the doctor, it helps the patient. And if it doesn't, all we've lost is some time and tokens. In a case that's literally life or death, that's nothing.
Just plain common sense.
Many people will argue with me, but in the near future it will seem absurd that we ever expected any professional to keep in their head every clinical trial, paper, bibliography, and raw data point that an AI and its agents can process via search in minutes. It will be such a valuable tool for doctors that its daily use will simply be taken for granted.
