Hey all I'm hoping someone has enough experience with Cake PHP to make this work. 

I'm working on something that at the moment could affectionately be called a twitter clone. Essentially I have a set up like this. 

Users have many friends. This is a many to many relationship to the user table. It is stored in a link tabled called friends\_users with columns user\_id, friend\_id. Users is a table with column user\_id. 

Then I have a table called tips which associates to a user. A user can have many tips. 

I want to figure out a way to do a find on the Tip model that returns all tips owned by the userid i pass in as well as any tips owned by any friends of that user. 

This SQL query works perfectly - 

```
SELECT *
FROM `tips`
JOIN users ON users.id = tips.user_id
JOIN friends_users ON tips.user_id = friends_users.friend_id
WHERE (friends_users.user_id =2 or tips.user_id=2)
LIMIT 0 , 30

```

That returns user#2s Tips as well as the tips of anyone who is a friend of User 2. 

Now how can I do the same thing using `$this->Tip->findxxxxx(user_id)`

I know I can use `Tip->query` if need be but I'm trying to learn the hard way.