Blog Posts

What the heck is going on? So, tell me if you’ve had this experience before. It’s a Friday night and you’re sitting down to watch the next episode of Black Mirror. I know, I’m a little late to hop on this bandwagon but at least I made it. And you grab a handful of dark chocolate chips to snack on during the episode because they’re not the unhealthiest snack. And part way through the episode you realize your chocolate chips are gone and are still a little hungry. You could wait until next morning’s breakfast, but you’ve had a stressful week and deserve another serving. So, you grab another handful to snack on for the remainder of the episode. As the episode concludes, you realize the handful of chocolate chips turned into a bag of chocolate chips and the regret sets in. You feel ashamed by your indulgence and almost hopeless about losing… Read More

Talkin’ bouttttt… protein. Protein! So, back in the 1980’s the government and processed food industry vilified fat intake in the standard American diet. Fat consumption should be drastically reduced to improve our overall health they said. And, so we responded by eating more carbohydrates and added sugar becoming fatter, unhealthier, and mode addicted than we were before. Since then, in the early 2000’s, the government and processed food industry has responded by vilifying carbohydrates and sugar intake in the standard American diet. Carbs and sugar consumption should be drastically reduced to improve our overall health they said. And, so we responded by focusing on protein and thus becoming fatter, unhealthier, and more addicted than we were ever before. But the vilification of protein hasn’t happened as profoundly yet… Read More

So, I’ve been pondering my financial future and attempting to determine how much I need to save to become financially independent. Financial independence meaning, I can live entirely off my investment without needing a job to sustain my lifestyle costs. Or how much money I need until I can live in my bedroom fulltime creating YouTube videos without any subscriber growth and still afford my organic plant-based dinners. This is more commonly known as retirement or my typical weekends. Traditionally, the 4% rule has been the basis for many retirement calculations but in 2021 with interest rates near zero, inflation spiking, and bonds producing little-to-no return, is this rule now too risky? What is the 4% rule and how much money do I need to retire? And what organic plant-based meal did I have for dinner last night that my 4% rule needs to account for… Read More

It’s 10:30pm. I’ve crawled into bed exactly when I wanted to. The lights in my house have been dimming over the past 2 hours simulating an apartment wide sunset. My thermostat is cooling my bedroom down to a chill 65 degrees and it’s as quiet and calm as it could be. I abstain from caffeine and alcohol, I haven’t eaten in hours, and I’ve put myself in the ideal position for a great night’s sleep. Here I am, primed and ready for the most restorative sleep of my life and my brain is somehow still on. It’s thinking about work, it’s thinking about golf, it’s thinking about improving my already ideal sleep routine. It’s thinking about the stock market and my next vacation. It’s 10:45pm and I’m still not asleep. I’m less sleepy now than I was 15 minutes ago. I’m starting to worry why I’m not falling asleep. I’m counting so many sheep it feels like… Read More

Growing up, I never enjoyed running unless it was 100m sprints. I would get cramps, my low back would ache, and it just wasn’t fun. So, unless I was at the track running 100m sprints or playing sports, then you wouldn’t find me running. That was up until a few years ago when I decided I wanted to beat my dad’s 5k record he set when he was my age. So, I started grinding out training runs and pounding the pavement. And what was interesting, is my preference for running changed just like taste buds changed from eating more plants. The more I ran, the more I started to enjoy it. Just like the more plants I ate, the more enjoyable they became too. And this has made me question whether we do things we enjoy, or do we enjoy the things we do? I know, a little bit of a paradigm shift there. But the more I’ve run the past couple of years, the more I enjoy… Read More

Back in 2008, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released their Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. In it, they recommended Americans get 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week. This comes out to about 20 minutes per day of brisk walking, cycling, or playing doubles tennis. But in previous years, the surgeon general and the CDC had recommended people get at least 30 minutes per day of moderate intensity exercise. So why were the guidelines lowered? Is exercising 30 minutes a day less healthy than 20 minutes? Can that extra 10 minutes cause debilitating consequences or increase my risk of injury and therefore I need to avoid this at all costs? Well… no. It was because only half of Americans were meeting the previous 30-minute per day guideline, and they wanted to provide more attainable guidelines to the general public… Read More

“We turn now to a potentially major medical breakthrough, the FDA approving the first new treatment for Alzheimer’s in almost 20 years,” ABC News. This drug approval which is supposed to slow cognitive decline in initial stages of Alzheimer’s disease has grabbed headlines from every major news outlet over the past week. At $56,000 per year, you get monthly injections that have only been shown to have statistically significant effects in a small subset of the Alzheimer’s patients. The benefits for that subset of people show that it decreases your cognitive decline by about four months over an 18-month period while causing 40% of patients to have brain swelling and many others to have brain bleeding. In many cases you’ll have to undergo regular, expensive MRI’s just to make sure your brain doesn’t sustain serious side effects with many physicians… Read More

It turns out that 10-20% of the U.S. population is now sensitive to gluten. This is causing a rapid rise in people going gluten-free and feeling better as a result. But gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye. And it’s also found in any products containing wheat, barely, and rye like bread, crackers, cookies, muffins, pancakes, and beer. And most people aren’t consuming raw wheat, barley, and rye in their whole grain form. They’re consuming these highly processed gluten-containing foods which we know without a doubt, are extremely unhealthy. So, by going gluten-free you’re likely reducing your intake of processed foods which can obviously make you feel better and healthier. But the more time you spend gluten-free, the more you learn that there are gluten-free cookies, gluten-free pancakes, and gluten-free beer. And as you… Read More

I was out with a coworker the other week when she asked me which Jeep rims, I liked better. It just so happens that two identical white Jeeps were parked next to each other with the only difference being their silver or black rims. And my response was, “I guess the black are cooler because the silver ones are stock.” And afterwards I thought about how stupid that answer is. Like, if I knew the black rims were stock and the silver were extra, then I’d think the silver were cooler? Like what even is cool and how am I determining that? And this reminded me of a dilemma I once had when buying my Chevy Malibu. At the time, I spent weeks pondering whether I should pay an extra $3,000 for the upgraded cooler-looking rims. In my head I knew I was going to keep this car for 5-10 years so having ones I liked made sense. But after weeks pondering… Read More

A couple of weeks ago I was looking over a list of the top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization when I saw a coin called Shiba Inu. It had just broken into the top 20 largest cryptocurrencies on earth out of the thousands that exist. And I was so confused because Shiba Inu is the breed of dog that mascots the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. And Dogecoin is a joke cryptocurrency that was made to counter Bitcoin. And if you have no clue what I’m saying, we’re on the same page. Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency, or digital currency, on earth. A joke cryptocurrency, or digital currency, was created to rival Bitcoin called Dogecoin. And then another joke cryptocurrency, Shiba Inu, was created to rival the current joke currency Dogecoin. To summarize, we have a joke coin created after a joke coin created after a “real” coin… Read More