Michael569

@Ulax depends for what purpose. Plenty of high quality books in the Book List. In terms of books on friends-making, loneliness etc. I haven't really read much material from there but I think Covey's old 7-habits masterpiece covers some of that stuff to a degree. Also the basis for good friendship making is strong self-efficacy so that one is not pulled towards groups who just prefer idle socialising and wasting time talking shit....For that purpose, "6 pillars of self esteem" might be a good one -> It is one I am going through right now. It takes about 3 months to complete all exercises if you do it properly but seems to be worth the effort.

It is manipulative. All the techniques he uses such as "say the person's name all the time" or "praise people" or "pay attention to them" in his agenda this is all to gain something in return. He is even giving examples of how Rockefellers would "successfully " disarm an employee mutiny (or something like that) by basically being fake to everybody, praising them with fake compliments and not willing to pay them a proper living wage. It is a manipulation book and it doesn't work on highly developed individuals. It is a book for mediocre managers in big corpo who think people are donkeys who only know carrot and stick. But like I said, if you are head of sales at Procter & Gamble or PWC, it may actually work perfectly to motivate all the young wolves in your team looking to screw customer over who actually thrive from that sort of shallow motivation. If you're in it to build high quality relationships, burn this book.

@Ulax i did about 4 years ago and it just left me with bad feeling in my mouth. Don't get me wrong there is usefulness there for corporate life for example and stage orange business but i just can't see it as useful for friendship making.

I dunno man. This books is shady as fuck. If you are in business of making genuine friendships, put any manipulation aside. This book was more suitable in 1960s to make people get to like you more so that you get more business opportunities and more people to work for you without resentment. It works on low consciousness individuals who are easily seduced by fakeness not on highly developed people.

Having a steady income makes you more suitable in the eyes of the girl. I think that matters more than how much you actually have on your bank account at the time of the date. It shows that you are responsible and reliable and can take care of her and her baby if needed in the future. If your dates seems to keen to know how much you actually got, take that as a red flag. That being said, spending some money on nice clothes, perfume and clean shoes is fairly important. Not expensive, just clean and fashionable to a degree.

This one can be powerful. Women like when men know how to cook and especially when they like it (shows you would be a good father and caretaker) Few conditions: it is preferable you no longer live with your parents make sure the place is vacant for whole night if you have roomies you got to clean up your entire house/flat you actually need to know how to cook it should not look like a direct sex invitation - actually the sole goal should be bonding and getting to know each other. If more happens, great but don't push it. I'd say ideally you want her to be around while you are about halfway through the cooking to give you guys enough interaction, light chat that does not require constant eye contact and kinda just causal fooling around, throwing food ingredients at each other etc . She may even volunteer to help which is already a initial bonding experience.

if you look at the current list (before new guys) up to half of those hardly come around anymore so it is nice to have more people that way especially in other than EST or PST zones so that at all times at least one person is out a about.

Welcome to the team guys ?

@LfcCharlie4 thanks for the tag. Great list of practical suggestions. Not much to add without getting lost into various rabbit holes.

I have to admit, I don't know know the full scope of that answer yet and cautious to do such recommendation on a public platform. You could go to Nutrivore's discord and ask him to make a video on that, maybe offer a $20 buck donation and I'm sure he'll gladly do it in his next life stream. I don't really know anyone else on the internet who has gone as deep and offered so much content into as he did. Maybe Avi Bitterman could do that as well. Everyone else seems to be cherry picking or biased into mechanisms. I definitely wouldn't trust populists like Eric Berg or Paul Saladino do give the answer. These creators are too biased into single perspective because it pays their bills to say certain things and omit other. You actually want a proper nerd who is really looking deep into this stuff. Someone who sucks at marketing, has low view-count and low subs number. That's the type of person you should be looking for in crucial topics like these.

I took a deep dive into that topic on my blog about a year ago. Basically the "feminising effects of soy" are just a mechanistic myth. Never been proven to happen. We have hundreds of thousands of people worth longitudinal data spanning across decades and most of them show only favourable (or neutral) effects of soy consumption. Even when testosterone levels are looked into in regular soy consumers, there just isn't difference. If anything DHT levels are lower which is beneficial as a protection from prostate cancer. Maybe. But phytoestrogens are not the same as oestrogens. They don't behave the same way. They don't dock as readily to oestrogen receptors as readily. And even if they do, they un-dock much quicker. In Japanese populations, soy consumption is often proxy for high sodium intake (e.g. eating soy sauce, miso and natto) that's the real issue here. Not the soy itself but the fact that people just eat too many of these fermented hypersalted foods. This is the same concern with pickles and pickled olives. There is an epidemic of stomach cancer in there. Japan has the highest rates o stomach cancer in the world (at least they did, maybe they are not number one anymore). That's probably more severe. I believe in terms of heart disease, salt alone is not sufficient to cause it. In western diet salt is proxy for things like red meat , processed meat and hyper-palatable diets which is the real issue. Japanese tend to be more pescetarian in nature so maybe their high DHA and relatively low caloric intake is protecting them despite the salt intake. But I have to admit I am not familiar with the Japanese epidemiology research when it comes to CVD.

Embrace the training, you may learn something new and stop whining about it Be grateful that you got the job. Plenty of people are struggling to find jobs for months (even years) and we are talking about qualified people. If shit like that is what it takes to keep an income then you do that until you've figured out how to be the sole provider of your own income without needing to be an employee. It's what all of us have to go through who are employed by large companies. Most stage orange companies don't really care about your professional growth other than to make you a more efficient money maker or money saver. They don't care about your personal level of development, although they may seem like they do. Individual growth is an individual responsibility that happens behind the scenes. It all comes down to "how to make employees better cogs to make us more $$$" Btw you'd be surprised how many people don't know how to use Outlook for anything other than sending and reading emails.

@StarStruck watch that video I linked above. I think he makes a decent case. Single study can't spit in the face of larger and more robust evidence that we already have.

Great example. I agree with everything you said there. It is very likely that the same compound that makes nuts so healthy is the same compound we blame in oils as "toxic" , linolenic acid. There might be other polyphenolic compounds but who's to say they are not in seed oils either? Yes, maybe they do. Let's agree that they do. But then you gotta ask "what is the concern with oxidation?" Is it a higher cancer risk? - PUFAs reduce cancer risk Is it a higher heart disease risk? - PUFAs reduce heart disease risk And you have to assume that in those studied where food frequency questionnaires are taken, they account for the fact that most people use PUFAs for cooking and frying so the oxidative factor is already involved. And yet they still come on top of saturates. Does not change the outcomes we discussed. Despite all of that, these oils do promote better health outcomes for people. Regardless of the mechanism. Regardess of the processing. Also, how do you know these methods make them unhealthier? Maybe they stabilise them in a way. Maybe they trigger internal antioxidant response to a degree that they actually benefit us. Like a hormetic effect. All foods do this. In order for an organism to thrive, it needs to be frequently put under the stress of adaptation. .....maybe all that oxidation actually somehow benefits us. Who knows. Either way, it does not seem to matter. But let's take another perspective. How much oil does an average person eat a day? A tablespoon? Maybe 2? It is a tiny proportion of calories. Now compare that to the number of saturated fats people eat and how much foods like steak, dairy and eggs take up from their caloric volume. Lot of these foods are still made on oils. Yes olive oil but if I am being honest, I don't think there is much difference between EVOO and safflower or rapeseed oil. It has just been marketed way more and tastes slightly better. Maybe the vit E content is also slightly higher which is definitely beneficial. But I don't assume to know the full scope yet. This is a very difficult topic to get into because it requires a high level of understanding of statistics and research methods as well as the knowledge of cardiology. This is a topic where I don't quite like the "see how you feel" approach because you don't "feel" plaque building up inside your arteries. We just have too much evidence pointing the way towards saturated fats being harmful for us to just discount it and rely on carnivore quacks on the internet and their mechanistic speculative theories. I think in here, we need to actually rely on empirical data and learn from the stories of those who went before us. And so far, the stories are mostly pointing towards one way. But hey, to each their own. In the end we are all masters of our own fate.

I gotta ask, why not just sign up with the gym? Especially since it sems like you are trying to replicate many exercises that would be much easier to do in there. You can still do bodyweight now you can then enrich your routine with few complex moves to stimulate more hypertrophy. But maybe that's not desirable so ignore this if not. Either way, I admire your dedication. Hope you'll achieve your goals whatever they may be

Are you healthy? If the answer is yes, then you don't need any tests and all that'll cause are just unnecessary anxieties. Doctors won't waste insurance claims on you if you don't experience any symptoms. Unless you go private which is always on-step into woo woo land if one is not careful. It is important not to test just for the sake of testing. Remember many tests are not accurate representation of long-term health homeostasis anyway. Focus on your diet & lifestyle with priority and you won't need to be tested.

I am yet to take a proper deep dive into the topic myself, it is planned for early next year as a part of my social media strategy so I'll know more then. But as of today I don't believe they are harmful, in fact they are probably health-promoting. Low intake of Omega 3 appears to be a much bigger issue than high intake of Omega 6. People with highest consumption of Linolenic Acid (main Omega 6 in oils) consistently show better health outcomes for heart disease, Alzheimer's & dementia, cancer and diabetes. I no longer think the ratio is important. Sufficient intake of Omega 3 is more important. Not something I'm concerned with anymore. If the oxidization was harmful, we would again see people who consume the highest amounts of seed oils have the worst health.....and we'll they don't. Once you start replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats, people get better (statistically speaking). We keep hearing about non-oxidising saturated fats yet highest consumption of saturated fats is associated with poorer health outcomes...I wonder why that is/ why is that a bad thing? half of the stuff we eat these days is processed but that does not make it bad either. Tofu is processed, dark chocolate is processed, canned mackerel is processed, and nutritional yeast is processed. I wouldn't say any of those are particularly unhealthy. Processing doe snot necessarily make foods worse. In fact, sometimes it makes certain nutrients more bioavailable and allows for a higher concentration of other components. It is overindulgence on sugar-loaded process foods or those that contain trans fats that I see as the real issue. Fibre deficiency as well perhaps. But I am not yet as confident on this topic as I'd like to be. I would suggest you watch some of "The Nutrivore"'s content if you want to learn more from someone who has gone down this rabbit hole.

yeah if you read my comments from 5 years ago, lot of it would seem like someone else was writing that What made me change my mind was just becoming more comfortable interpreting the longitudinal data and also relaxing lot of my previous anxieties about foods, food groups, toxins etc. I feel like in many things I've come back full circle. I've generally taken a step back from many things and have been taking a more chilled approach. Mentally speaking I feel much better not obsessing as much anymore. I believe such approach is also better for my clients so that I can offer less biased perspective. My diet is still about 95% plant-based I would say but I'm not giving myself hard time for occasional deviations anymore. Also, with cheese generally, unless people are loading 200grams of it on pizza each day or eating a block of cheddar I don't think it will lead to negative health outcomes (for non-allergic people). Cheese can actually often be proxy for healthy diet when used in a sort of Mediterranean type of eating (as pointed out by @Yarco above) People in traditional MeDi environment would eat cheese with lots of vegetables, oily fish, olive oil, legumes and on wholemeal products. In such combinations, more cheese often meant more fibre and more polyphenols so it would turn out to be beneficial, even tho (maybe) the positive health outcomes actually have nothing to do with the cheese itself and everything to do with it being a proxy for other healthy foods....maybe. If having more cheese allows you to have a bigger portion of vegetables, then go for it. I have a huge issue with modern nutritional reductionism such as "all seeds oils are bad bro" or "it is the gluten bro" "keto is the best bro, carbs are evil". I think we need to take a step back and look at the overall constitution of the diet rather than bickering over individual groups. Certain groups should still be treated with caution (red meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, trans fats, very high-fat dairy consumed in very high amounts etc) but overall I am kinda gradually leaning towards food guidelines model (with slight modification) as I see that the most realistic way to make members of general public who are not health nerds to eat healthily and not become a victim of premature loss of human life due to poor dietary choices. Unless there are existing ethical concerns, for example about not wanting to eat animal produce. Such a decision supersedes the above. Hope that makes sense

Cheese might be one of the foods where the benefits might outweigh the potential negative outcomes. (when eaten in moderation) When eaten in moderation, cheese consumption can offer an additional protection from colorectal cancer and has, I believe even been shown to mediate levels of LDL cholesterol. Small amounts mean around 25 grams a day which is very little if you weight it up. Go for high quality and avoid any form of highly processed shit cheese. Pay for premium. Use it as a taste additive and enjoy it when you have it Ofcourse this argument does not account for ethics. I was talking purely about health implications.

This is a mechanistic theory that started in the 90s when phytoestrogens were discovered and a biological resemblance to mammalian oestrogens was observed. Since then, multiple studies have taken a dive into trying to keep it regular soy consumers have lower testosterone levels, and they don't. There are several reasons (mechanistically speaking) why phytoestrogens don't behave the same way oestrogens do: biological hormones are tightly regulated system by the so-called HPO-Axis (Hypothalamus-pituitary-gonads), and while some foods may have a negligible and temporary effects on them, overall, this is a closed loop and tightly regulated, although synthetic hormones (e.g. oral contraceptive pills or HRT/TRT) can interact to a significant degree The docking of phytoestrogens to Oestrogen Receptors is short-lived (about 1/1000th of the duration of Oestrogen docking) Phytoestrogen preferentially docks to Oestrogen Receptor Beta (ERβ), which is associated with cancer prevention. In contrast, excessive docking to Oestrogen Alpha Receptor may be associated with breast cancer, prostate cancer and ovarian cancer (it is more complex than that). Having too much natural biological oestrogen produced by the body or having oestrogen being recycled before being eliminated (extreme concern on low fibre diets) or just having a health condition that leads to this - can be a driving mechanism for oestrogen-driven cancers Phytoestrogens are also found in legumes, mushrooms and even some fruits and vegetables - would you say those make men feminine? I would argue they don't. People who consume less soy tend to consume more things like beef, which has been associated with increased colorectal cancer risk across epidemiological research. Maybe soy is just a proxy for a healthier lifestyle rather than having any impact; that is certainly a possibility. People eating more soy will tend to (probably) eat more vegetables, fruits, oily fish and less meat and saturated fat. Men who eat more soy are more protected from cancer of all kinds, especially prostate, lung and gastrointestinal systems. If soy were driving the feminisation of men, you would see a high amount of gynaecomastia (man boobs) in populations like Japanese and well..you don't. At least not until we started feeding them Mcdonald's and beef burgers. I would argue that the feminisation of men is caused by obesity, excessive calories and a shit diet. (soz for the long technicla post, but I hope that helps clear it out) - if you want to see some references, I wrote an entire in-depth two-part series on this here and here.

ah I remember the first time I tried Brendan's pizza I was like "wtf is this shit" but with good processor it can be made into an amazing meal. Good book

Good list overall but I'd remove soy from the negative list. Soy is an extremely health promoting food and all the fearmongering about phytoestrogens needs to die. Soy actually increases levels of SHBG-bound testosterone and normalises levels of DHT (both are protecting you from benign prostatic hyperplasia. Not sure about fish, eggs and garlic - I don't think either has been proven but maybe through their zinc content? It is possible. Perhaps mor like "normalise" rather than increase. For men who are already at healthy levels and have no symptoms of hypogonadism excessive stimulation via artificial means could be asking for trouble.

Sweet. One pot cooking rules

Short term usage is safe but long term can cause issues. Obviously for a fever that is extremely high (above 39 degrees) they may help but for milder colds and flus, usually not needed. They may even slow down the healing. There are herbs that have comparable efficacy for mild to moderate colds such as elderflower and echinacea. Short periods of sickeness are totally normal and usually don't require meds. Just take it easy, drink a lot of liquids, rest and it'll go away. As already said above by Eric and others, chronic overuse of this stuff can be extremely toxic and problematic. If you are having to use painkillers daily make every attempt to identify and eliminate the root cause driving the pain/inflammation rather than use this stuff to mask it up

This stuff is mostly hit & miss. I've been very disappointed with how overhyped these things are being, considering the real evidential basis is extremely low. The price tags some companies put on mushrooms are just outrageous, considering one is often buying overpriced polysaccharides grown in a warehouse on haystack, not in woodlands. If you want to cognitively optimise, take cold showers, optimise sleep, and daylight exposure, practice regular mindfulness, avoid using social media early in the morning and clean up your diet. Supplements are less than 1%