Hey there! We’ve re-adjusted the post feedback system that we put together last week, so now at the end of each post you can indicate how you thought of the post (just clicking the links will register your opinion, no need to do anything else afterwards).

Michael is volunteering for for the Rotterdam Marathon today, and this week finished moving in with Sebastian in south Rotterdam! He wrote his piece on a life maximization framework called Die with Zero.

Someone complemented Juan’s shoulders the other day and made his day. It feels good to be objectified. He wrote his piece on why protein powder is bad for you (Michael is as of yet unconvinced).

Georg is our guest writer this week. Between running Mergers and Acquisitions at HousingAnywhere and spending more time skiing than working, he found the time to talk about a very personal stream of consciousness he had recently.

LIFE

Die with Zero

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— Michael

HEALTH

Stop drinking protein powder

Once again, I am here to ruin something you love. Just like I did in previous Newsletters for Podcasts and Sugar. But this one is very unpleasant, so tighten those glutes.

👿 Anything for money
You’ve all seen whey protein. But have you wondered what it is? Well, whey is a watery byproduct of cheese that you filter out into powder. But making pure protein powder from milk is expensive. So if you were a giant company like Optimum Nutrition, you knew that if you wanted to distribute your miracle powder to the masses, you would need to find ways to cut costs.

Instead of using expensive pure whey isolate powder, you started using something called whey concentrate, which has only 34% protein. Sure its less protein but it tastes better and its dirt cheap. The problem is that one scoop of whey concentrate would not give you the coveted 25g of protein that your customers expected.

You need to somehow increase your protein count while keeping your costs low. That’s where you found your special ingredients: Synthetic Amino Acids.

🤫 They are lying to you
You see, they way food regulators measure protein contents in food is not by the actual protein counts. They still use an ancient test that was invented in the 1880s, which measures protein count in food by how much Nitrogen it had. All proteins have Nitrogen, so this was a great way to get accurate measurements. But plenty of other things could have Nitrogen in them too.

So knowing regulators only care about Nitrogen concentration, you simply dump a bunch of Nitrogen-rich amino acids like Toine and Glycine. And boom, the protein count goes up in paper without extra costs. So out of the 25g of protein promised, you might get only 12g total.

🥛 Making it milky
You want a milkshake. So the first thing you need to do is make sure it has that silky smooth texture of a milkshake without breaking the bank. How? With Seed Oils like Soy Lecithin. Never mind that seed oils have been linked with cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s. All that matters is that milkshake feel.

😋 Hiding the awful taste
All that cheesy water and seed oil combination will make anyone puke. So you need to make it taste like Cookies and Cream or Chocolate Cream Egg. So how do you give it a Chocolate Cream egg taste without it containing any Chocolate Cream Eggs? You use Natural Flavours.

Natural flavours sound great. But in reality there is nothing natural about them. Up to 100 chemicals can be used to create these artificial flavours. Stuff like Benzoic Acid, that can literally kill you if you eat too much.

😨 Making it addictive
So now you have the texture and the flavour. Now you need to turn your protein powder into an addiction. The only way to do this is to add loads and loads of sweeteners like Acesulfame Potassium and Sucralose (the stuff they put int diet soda). Even though they have been linked to a 67% higher chance of developing Diabetes and obesity.

☠️ Plant based products are worse.
According to the Clean Label Projects, these plant-based protein powders are full of heavy metals and toxins like Lead and BPA. Lead causes damage to the brain and nervous system and BPA is a chemical banned from plastic production, but if it finds its way to plant based protein powder, that seems to be perfectly fine.

But it get worse. They found that 62% of plant-based protein powder had glyphosate, the toxic chemical in Monsanto’s pesticide that has been proven to cause birth defects, Leukemia and Cancer.

Yikes…

💪 The solution
We could avoid al these toxins by simply eating more meat, like we have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. A quality ribeye or some quality ground beef has all the best protein and micronutrients you need. Also, pasture-raised chicken eggs is one of the highest quality sources of protein. Simply 3-4 eggs is enough for 25g of protein.

“The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison” ~Ann Wigmore

Source: Jake Tran Youtube Channel

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— Juan

FRIENDSHIP

Stream Of Consciousness

Bereft of sharing any thought-provoking ideas from an inspiring book, you will instead join me on a small stream of consciousness, which I dedicate to the Ambitious Bois and all my other friends. 

As an aficionado of speech writing, I feel compelled to start off with a quote miss-attributed to the late Winston Churchill:

“When you’re 20 you care what everyone thinks, when you’re 40 you stop caring what everyone thinks, when you’re 60 you realize no one was ever thinking about you in the first place.”

Old Winston might not have coined these words, however, I believe that many of us would know the feeling of caring a lot about how you are perceived by the people around you. At least I do. Coming from a place where each person is measured based on who they are, who they know, and who they are wearing (IYKYK), it was tantamount to always try to do the right thing.

It is somewhat draining if not toxic… It came to a point where I looked around myself and asked why I was trying to impress these people. They did not share my passions and did not even have my best interest in mind.

Realising that, I feel that I have been steadily approaching 40 for a while (still too socially conscious to start an OnlyFans, come back again when I’ve hit 60). Instead of trying to find a group which would represent my whole persona, I have been seeking out characters. Characters that both inspire and confound me, coming in many different shapes and forms. These people make me see the world differently, make me think about new things, and inspire me to challenge myself.

Being on this path for an odd 5 years now, I have met some incredible people. One, I met for the first time one day after he had been released from a Mexican jail. Another has been in University for 9!? years, and a third is wanted back at home for burning down a bank… All of these, and many more of my friends, have this in common: they stopped caring what other people think and instead started wearing their independence as armour.

While mindlessly scrolling on Instagram one day, I came across a clip about relationships and how to know when you've found the right one. One of the questions – that was etched in my memory – was and I am paraphrasing, “Would you be proud if someone said that you were similar to your partner?”.

Certainly not the only metric to choose your partner by, however, I thought it resonated well with how I want to choose my friendships. Even though I might not want to be in their shoes (albeit burning down a bank sounds kinda cool), I would be happy to be compared to them.

As my stream of consciousness could continue forever, I feel that I should rest here. This being a monologue I can not really hear what you think… How do you choose your friendships? Do you agree with me, have you been convinced? Maybe you think I am as mad as a hatter. I take the latter as a compliment.

Stay safe!

“But the truth is, that no man is much regarded by the rest of the world, except where the interest of others is involved in his fortune. The common employments or pleasures of life, love or opposition, loss or gain, keep almost every mind in perpetual agitation. If any man would consider how little he dwells upon the condition of others, he would learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself”
– Samuel Johnson, 1751

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— Georg

TAKING ACTION

Sign up to our Accountability Clubs

Want a community to keep you accountable? Willing to put your money where your mouth is? 😂

How it works:
💸 Everyone makes the same deposit at the beginning of the month.
✅ Every day you succeed, you get paid back a small amount from your deposit PLUS the money from others who failed that day.
❌ Every day you fail, your money for that day goes to people who succeed.
🗓️ It is 5 times a week. Month-to-month contract. You can join or leave at the beginning of each month.

May Clubs you can join:
🏋️ Exercise 5 times a week.
⏰ Wake up early during weekdays.
📵 Digital minimalism during weekdays.
📝 Signup to join for May

Updates from this week:

We want to start some new accountability groups! So if you have some ideas for what you’d like to be held accountable for getting done, let us know 😉.

Exercise: The group has swelled to 11 people now! Lina, Anton, Nicky, Hunt, Michael (S) and Jonathan all joined recently. For the rest of this month we’re keeping it as is, but now we’ve decided that we really need to break these up into multiple groups.

Wakeup: We have some new joiners with Anton and Nicky. For the most part everyone is hitting their target times.

Digital Minimalism: Nicky and Michael are doing this one, and they’ve cut their average screen times down a ton. Mostly by pretty much eliminating the Instagram & Tiktok reel scroll (as compared to last month at least)

Highlights from Exercise Club: