Good morning, everybody. Thank you all for being here. So I have a question to start this talk. How many of you made a New Year's resolution this year? Raise your hand. All right, that's about what I'd expect. Keep them up for just a second. So actually, you can put them down. I'll have you put it back up in just a minute, except you, Sam, keep yours up. So 40% of Americans, on average, either always or usually make a New Year's resolution. Another 17% do so every once in a while. OK, so hands back up.  Otherwise, put it down. So what percentage of people do you think that make resolutions actually follow through with them? Shout out some answers. The answer is eight. 8% of people who make a New Year's resolution manage to follow through on that New Year's resolution and do what they set out to do. So if you had to put your hands down just now, you're far from alone. That's normal. To give you some context, your odds are about the same as taking a deck of cards, shuffling it, and pulling an ace off the top. Those are your odds of hitting your New Year's resolution. You have a 92% chance of failure when you set a New Year's resolution. So let's talk about what we can do to shift those odds in our favor. But first, a disclaimer.  I'm going to talk a lot about health and fitness in this talk. And I'm going to talk about those things because that's my story. That's how I learned all of this stuff. But I'm not telling you that you need to go out and lose weight or get fit or do anything like that. That is a very personal choice that only you can make for yourself. And I'll get into why that is here in a minute. But these principles that I'm going to tell you about, despite the fact that I'm talking a lot about health and fitness, apply to anything. You can take what I'm going to tell you about today and apply these principles to anything that you might want to do in your life. Secondly, if you do want to lose weight, if you do want to get fit, I am not a doctor. So don't take anything I'm about to tell you as the gospel truth, don't do it because Nick said to do it. When you're laying on the side of the road of the torn Achilles, I don't want to hear anybody say, but Nick said to go run. So that said, let me tell you a little bit about my story. I'm not sure how visible it is on the slide, but that's an asthma inhaler in the background of that title slide. I had asthma as a kid, really bad. My mom, when I was talking to her about this talk, she told me the story of signing me up for soccer as a kid. I went to soccer and did the practice. And at the end of practice, when she got there, I was doubled over, breathing as hard as I could and beat red, could not breathe. She handed me my asthma inhaler and slowly but surely my breathing returned to normal. Nowadays, if kids have asthma, there's all sorts of things they can do, all sorts of preventive treatments. Back then, not so much. Asthma treatment consisted of, here's your rescue inhaler. If you can't breathe, take two puffs. If that doesn't work, go to the emergency room. Good luck to you. And so because of that, I was a very sedentary kid. I sat out of PE a lot because of asthma flare ups and I was picked last for every team that ever was for anything, that sort of thing. But I saw the appetite of a growing boy, so I pretty much whatever I wanted, right? And per BMI, which I know is not a perfect measurement, but per BMI, I've been obese my entire life. This is me a couple of summers ago. My son was four and my daughter had just turned one. I don't know how many of you have multiple kids, but the adjustment from one kid to two is not a doubling of effort. It's exponential. And that transition was particularly hard for me and my family, trying to balance a very demanding job and raising two kids and being a good husband. And so I basically ate my way through it. I stress eight all the time. And I had very little time for exercise. My weight topped out somewhere around 230 and that's about what I am in that picture. I was super out of shape. I struggled to keep up with my son when we were running around kicking the soccer ball around even. But I really, despite all that, wasn't all that interested in losing weight or getting fit. I'd tried and failed so many times in my life that I just basically bought into the idea that I was a big person and there wasn't anything that I could do to change my physical fitness or my weight. Every time I had tried it, I'd failed. But all of my previous attempts had followed a similar pattern. I think this will be familiar to everybody in here. Rameet Sethi calls this the cycle of non-finishers. When you decide to do something new, you get super motivated. You're super excited about it. You're gonna do this thing.  And so you do the first thing that pops to mind. You start doing stuff. Doesn't matter what. You run out to the gym and you hop on the treadmill for 30 minutes because that's the only piece of equipment in the gym that you recognize. Maybe later when you get brave, you'll try those weight machines out. But for today, man, the treadmill's enough. And so over time, going to the gym over and over, hitting the treadmill for 30 minutes, not seeing a lot of results, you start to realize that this is harder than you thought it was. Maybe it's gonna take more work than you thought it was gonna take. And so you start to lose your motivation. Three trips a week to the gym, turns into two, turns into one, turns into zero, and you've given up. You know, they say it can't hurt to try, but this is proof that sometimes it can. Because if you do this over and over, you follow this cycle repeatedly, at some point you start to believe lies about yourself. You start to believe that you're not the kind of person that finishes things. You start to believe that you don't have any discipline. You start to believe that you're lazy. And none of those things are actually true. You've just fallen into the motivation trap. Turns out it's really difficult to get anything done if you're relying on motivation or willpower to get it done. We know this because of this man, Dr. Roy Balmeister. I was first introduced to him in Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit, which I'll talk more about in a minute. But in 1998, Dr. Balmeister and his team did an experiment at Western University that's gone on to become our modern understanding of willpower. What they did is this. They recruited a group of students to come in ostensibly for a taste perception exercise. They told these students, okay, here's your scheduled time to arrive. I want you to skip the meal immediately prior to your scheduled time and make sure that you've fasted for at least three hours ahead of time. So these people were hungry. And to torture them, Balmeister and his team baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies in the experiment room immediately prior to their subjects arrival. Now imagine how these chocolate chip cookies would smell to you if you'd skipped the meal immediately prior to this and you were starving. They must have smelled amazing. So the researcher greeted them, sat them down at a table and on this table, on one side were the chocolate chip cookies that had just been baked. Still a little bit melty. On the other side, everybody's favorite, a bowl of radishes. Now the researchers explained that cookies and radishes had been deliberately chosen because they were opposite ends of the flavor spectrum. Chocolate chip cookies are sweet and salty. Radishes are bitter and umami. And they assigned each person in the experiment either to the cookie cohort or the radish cohort.  If you were assigned to the radish cohort, your job was to eat three radishes. And the researchers stressed that it was imperative for the integrity of the experiment that you only eat your assigned food. And then they left the room. And so some of the people from the radish cohort would pick up a chocolate chip cookie and look at it so longingly and they would smell it.  Nobody actually ate the wrong food, which is pretty remarkable in my mind, but that wasn't the crux of the experiment. After they ate, the researcher returned and told them that they needed to wait 15 or 20 minutes for their flavor profile in their mouth to fade before they can move on to the next phase of the experiment. And oh, by the way, while you're waiting, would you mind helping us with another experiment? We're working on problem solving approaches, seeing how different people solve problems.  They actually gave them a stack of these as many as they wanted. And their task was to trace every line in this diagram without repeating any segments or lifting their pencil. They told them to try as long as they wanted to. They gave them a bell, so if you get bored of this, just ring the bell, we'll come back in here, no big deal. But try as long as you want to. One problem, you can't do it. It's impossible. You literally cannot trace every line in this figure without lifting your pencil or repeating a line. And that's what the researchers on Dr. Ballmeister's team wanted to test. They wanted to see if there was any difference in persistence between the people assigned to the cookie cohort and the radish cohort. So here's what they found. The people in the radish cohort made an average of 19.4 attempts at working their way through this problem. They spent on average eight minutes and 21 seconds. At an impossible problem, that's pretty good persistence. The cookie cohort, on the other hand, did 34.3 attempts on average and spent 18 minutes and 54 seconds trying to work their way through the problem. Now that number is actually skewed on the low side because the researcher set a time limit of 30 minutes. They wouldn't let anybody work longer than 30 minutes on this problem. And a number of people in the cookie cohort had that problem. They were still working at 30 minutes when the researcher came in to interrupt them. Nobody in the radish cohort had that problem. And so the conclusion that Dr. Ballmeister and his team drew from this is that willpower is a lot like a muscle. It's really easy to work your willpower to exhaustion just like lifting a weight over and over again. Eventually your muscle's gonna fatigue and give out. And so if you spend all day at work keeping yourself on task, the odds that you'll have willpower left at night to tackle something significant in your life, pretty slim. This was my first big realization.  So you have to plan accordingly. This is what I mean by the motivation trap. When you run out and charge headlong into something you're eventually gonna hit the trough where you run out of motivation and you can't keep doing what you were trying to do. You can't grit your way through big accomplishments in life. It just won't work. But if you look at the cycle of non-finishers and you look at these first two items there's a lot of energy and motivation present in those two steps. We don't wanna waste that. So how can we channel that energy more productively? What should we do with that motivation? Let's where Dr. BJ Fogg comes in. BJ Fogg has a term for this. BJ is a researcher at Stanford and the founder of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab.  So how does this work? Let's say that you want to learn to surf. You're pumped, you're gonna do it. You're gonna hang ten just like this guy. You could do one of two things. You could, on one hand, head down to your local surf shop, grab the first surf board that caught your eye, grab a wetsuit, paddle out on the wave and start trying to surf. If you've learned to surf, you'll recognize how foolish that would be. On the other hand, you can find a good instructor, book some lessons, rent some equipment, go check it out if you like it, put lessons on a regular repetition so that you can get good at surfing. Now the first path is just the cycle of non-finishers exemplified. That's what we all do when we decide to charge headlong into something. The second path is what Dr. Fogg would encourage us to do, namely, do the important, hard to do meta work up front when you have energy and motivation to do it so that following through on the behavior later is easy. Now when I say hard to do important meta work, what do I mean by that? Well there's a few things you should do.  You should look yourself in the mirror and be really honest with yourself. Sorry my slides are running out of control. You should look yourself in the mirror and be really honest with yourself. Thinking through your goal and making a plan to reach it is really hard work. Sorry, my notes are, there we go. Now I'm in the right place, sorry everybody. You should look yourself in the mirror and be really honest with yourself. It turns out it's really, when somebody asks you to do something, it's a lot easier to say yes than to say no, right? When somebody asks you, even if you don't wanna do it, it's always easier to say yes than to say no. Well it turns out it's easy to do this with yourself as well.  So lots of times we fail because we say yes to something out of obligation. Weight loss is a perfect example of this. Every one of us who has tried to lose weight at some point in their life has said yes to weight loss out of societal obligation versus actually desiring to do the hard work ourselves. When you say yes out of obligation, you're way less committed to doing it. And half-hearted commitments become very expensive when these failures start to pile up. So when you start something new, you have to admit to yourself up front that it's gonna get really hard. And you have to decide if it's really worth pursuing. If you say yes, then you can make a real commitment to it, and if it's not, just let it go. Don't feel guilty about it.  You wanna pick your goal and make a plan to get there. Thinking through your goal and making a plan to get there is really hard work. That's why you should do it when your motivation is high. Having a plan up front keeps you from being the person that goes out and spends a thousand bucks on a surfboard and then lets it collect dust in their garage for years. The interesting thing about all this in my life is that I stumbled into it all sort of backwards. My journey to better health began here at Juice Land in Austin. It's a staple for juice and smoothies in Austin. My wife discovered green smoothies here. She would go once a week to get a green smoothie after her yoga class, and she'd been doing that for months, trying to convince me the whole time how wonderful they were and that I should try them. No way, man. Something that green couldn't taste good. There's no way. She finally managed to talk me into it despite my fear of green leafy vegetables being, well, really anything healthy. And I really liked it, much to my surprise. And so for Christmas 2015, my wife and I always decided to buy ourselves something together as our big Christmas gift. And for Christmas 2015, our big Christmas gift each other was a Vitamix. Now, I had always been of the opinion that it would be silly to spend this much money on a blender. Who needs a $400 blender? Nobody. It turns out to have been one of the best investments I have ever made. I'll tell you why. In the course of looking for recipes to make with this giant monument of a blender, I ran across this website called simplegreensmovies.com. And in December of 2015, targeting all of us who had just gotten a fancy new blender for Christmas, they were running a 30 day green smoothie challenge. You signed up for this thing, they'd send you recipes, they'd send you shopping lists, and your only job was to make the smoothie and drink it once a day for 30 days. Well, that sounded easy enough for me, right? I knew I wasn't getting enough fruits and veggies in my diet, and I liked green smoothies a lot. Truly, I could do that. And so that was my first goal, drink a green smoothie for breakfast every day for one month. Now, I didn't know all of the things that I know I had, I hadn't done all of the research around habits. So I lucked into a really good goal here because here we are 16 months after that initial challenge. And this is what I have for breakfast almost every day. It really is that color and it really does taste amazing. So how did it stick? How did I look into something that stuck for 16 months for me when I really hated healthy eating up to that point? Well, first of all, like I alluded to, the goal is very well-structured. It's super simple. I just had to make and drink a green smoothie once a day for 30 days. Total commitment, maybe five minutes. It's lesson number two today. Your initial goal should be so small that you would feel silly not doing it. The reason there's dental floss in the background here is that BJ Fogg has done, has a program called Tiny Habits where he coaches you through how to set goals and how to hit them. It's a week-long program, super short. And his number one recommended goal for that program has to do with oral hygiene. But it's not floss your teeth. It's floss one tooth. Because if you floss one tooth, I mean it's very low commitment. Anybody can floss one tooth. But what's gonna happen when you floss one tooth? I've already got the floss out. It's already wrapped around my fingers. I might as well just floss. Right? And so setting that tiny goal lets you start building up a pattern of success. It lets your success begin to snowball and it lets you build momentum that lets you hit other more difficult habits. But a good goal was only part of my success. What else was there about this 30-day green smoothie challenge that worked so well for me? Well number two, they handed me a plan that made it super easy. In my email, every week I got a shopping list. All I had to do was go to the grocery store and buy what was on their list and then in addition to the rest of my grocery shopping for the week. Every day I should look at the recipe, grab a couple things out of the freezer, toss them in the blender, turn it on, voila, green smoothie. No thought required on my part at all. So this is what I mean when I say do the work up front to make it easy for yourself later when you lose motivation. If I was opening the freezer every day and looking at what fruit do I have in there now when you make up a recipe, I probably wouldn't have been as successful as I was with this all laid out and easy to follow step by step. But it turns out there's another secret weapon here that really made this stick for me. This green smoothie plan had all of the ingredients that I had it. And it's a habit that's held for me for 16 months. So let's talk about why that is. And this is where we bring up Charles Duhigg. I mentioned his book, The Power of Habit earlier. In it, Duhigg picks apart the biological and practical aspects of how to build habits. If you wanna make big changes in your life, this is the book you want. Go out and read this book. I'll start the same place he does with biology. So this is a coronal section of the human brain. What that means is if somebody took my head and sliced it in half right here, this is what it would look like. Duhigg explains it like this. The brain is like an onion. And the outer layers of that onion are the layers that have been most recently added from an evolutionary perspective. This is where complex thought takes place. If you paint a painting or write some code, this is where it's happening and the outer layers of your brain. Deeper in the center of the brain, we're getting into more primitive structures, things that regulate breathing, digestion, your heart rate, things like that. And surrounding the base of your brainstem on either side is a golf ball-sized mass called the basal ganglia. Almost all animals' brains have it. It's a very primitive structure. And one of the things that the basal ganglia does for us is recognize, store, and replay patterns. It does that automatically. We know this because of an experiment run by a group of scientists at MIT in the mid-1990s involving rats, mazes, and chocolate. So here's Duhigg's diagram of the experiment from the power of habit. They set up a T-shaped maze. They put the rat on one end of it behind a door and on the other end of it, where it branched out, on one side there was chocolate and on the other side there was nothing. Now the chocolate was always in the same place in this maze. They never moved it from one side to the other. They always left it on the left leg from the rat's perspective. And they took these rats and they anesthetized them and they inserted implants in their brains that they could measure their brain activity as they were running this maze and trying to navigate this maze. So when they first opened the door, there's a loud click and they could see furious activity in the rat's brain. The rat would sniff and it would scratch the walls and it would try to climb up and eventually it would scamper its way down and it might wander right and look around a little bit and finally it would turn left and find the chocolate. After it had done it a few more times, the researchers started to see the activity in their brains decline. They weren't having to think as hard to work this maze. They were learning the pattern. A couple weeks later, after the rats had run this maze hundreds of times, they saw a really interesting pattern. As soon as the door clicked open, the rat would immediately run through the maze, turn left, straight to the chocolate. What they saw was an immediate spike in brain activity when the door clicked. Then nothing, the rat's brain essentially went to idle and then another spike in activity at the end when the rat got to the chocolate. The only part of the brain that wasn't quiet during this was the basal ganglia. This recognition and automation of behavior is called behavior chunking and it's the basis of what forms habits for us. So how many of you, when you sat down this morning to put your shoes on, had to consciously think about how to tie them? Nobody, right? It just happened. How many of you, when you brushed your teeth this morning, thought about putting toothpaste on your toothbrush? Like actually consciously made a decision of, oh, before I brush my teeth, I should really put some toothpaste on this brush. Nobody. You didn't even think about brushing your teeth. That was automated for you. You walked in the bathroom, picked up your toothbrush and went to town without even thinking about it. It's automatic because your basal ganglia has chunked that behavior for you and it replace it automatically on cue. This is what Charles Duhigg refers to as the habit loop. For our friends, the rats, the habit loop looks like this. First, there's the cue. When the door clicks open, the rats associate that click with, oh, I'm gonna get some chocolate. Let's get after this. And so it triggers their basal ganglia to kick in and replay this pattern. That's the routine. The rat runs down this maze and turns left. And the reason the rat runs down this maze and turns left is because at the end of that routine, there is a reward. That reward is what triggered the rat's brain to encode this process in the first place because it knew that by consistently following this set of steps, it would be rewarded and evolutionarily speaking, rats like food, they want to continue living. And so they're gonna do this reliably every time that door clicks. Turns out our brains are doing this encoding for us all the time. We just don't realize it. Our brains are really lazy. They like to save thought. And the more things that our brains can shove down into the basal ganglia, the more of this critical thinking time our brains can free up for doing more important work. Like when you're tying your shoes or brushing your teeth, you're thinking about the day ahead. You might be thinking about a meeting that you have. In my case, you were fretting about a talk that you had to give.   What would help that is a double cheeseburger. The exact same mechanism. Significant portions of our lives are automated by habits that we don't recognize or understand. This is why the smoothie thing stuck so easily for me. Every morning when I saw the Vitamix sitting on the cabinet, I went, oh yeah, smoothie challenge. The decision to make one was already made for me, no discipline required. I looked at the day's recipe, got the stuff out of the freezer, threw it in the blender, drank my green smoothie and I was rewarded every day by this explosion of flavor in my mouth that I really like. And that amazing explosion of flavor immediately reinforced that behavior. It taught my body that it wanted to do that because when it did that, when it made a smoothie, it gets something that tastes really good at the end. And over time, it learned that it made it feel really good as well, gave it an energy boost. And so my body became accustomed to that. If you want some hands on, well lesson number three is that deliberately building a habit is far more effective than just deciding to make a change. If you can build a change you wanna make into a habit, get yourself to automate it, make a change. Doesn't require any willpower on your part, it just happens. If you want some hands on training and doing this, like I mentioned, you should check out B.J. Fogg's Tiny Habits Program. Just Google Tiny Habits, it'll be result number one. The program lasts a week. He signs up a new cohort literally every week and he walks you through setting and achieving three very simple goals. If you wanna dig deeper, definitely read the power of habit. This brings up another one of Charles Duhigg's key concepts, the idea of keystone habits. The idea is that some habits are so powerful that they can trigger other habits in your life. And green smoothies turned out to be one of those habits for me. I didn't know it. Duhigg says you're more likely to stumble on one of these keystone habits when you do something that's very scary for you. And for me, and I know this sounds kind of silly, but for me, eating healthy has always been scary. I don't like the way healthy things taste. I never have. I've always liked richer, fattier, cheesier foods. And so the idea of taking one of my meals every day and devoting it exclusively to something healthy was a little scary for me. And I stumbled onto a keystone habit. I started drinking these smoothies once, sometimes even twice a day. I had more energy. I conquered my fear and I was inspired to do more to get fit. And so I set a long-term goal of losing 50 pounds. And a short-term goal of regularly going to the gym, specifically to spend 30 minutes on the elliptical. The very specific reason that I picked the elliptical, I'll get to that in a second. But the thing about this is, the green smoothies are self-reinforcing, right? I get this wonderful blast of flavor at the end. This mind-numbing torture device, not so much. So here's how I went about building the habit and making myself do this thing that I really didn't want to do on a regular basis. On Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, I changed into workout clothes before dinner. Then after I, let's get this going here. And then after I got my kids to bed, I already had my gym clothes on. I was already committed. So I went to the gym. What about the reward? Well, you have to know yourself to be able to pick an effective reward. This is why I picked the elliptical. One of the things that I love most in life is time to read. And as you can imagine with two kids, I don't get a lot of time to read.  But the elliptical happens to be a full-body workout that I can do while I'm still reading a book. And so I can convince myself that it was worth getting on the elliptical for 30 minutes for the sake of reading.  It doesn't even matter that it's counterproductive.   Or if it's, say, sitting down and concentrating on something for 30 minutes, your brain will get hooked on the feeling of success that comes from doing that. But in order to initially encode the habit, you may have to cheat a little.  Turns out, though, that sometimes it's hard to get a habit right. And my elliptical habit failed miserably. Because my schedule was inconsistent. I'd make excuses. I'd have a really hard Tuesday and I'd go, oh, I'll just sit down and watch TV tonight. I can go to the gym tomorrow. I never went tomorrow, ever. Some weeks I only went to the gym twice. Some weeks once, some weeks not at all. And I fell back into the same old patterns of beating myself up for not being able to make myself go to the gym. So how do you fix a failing habit? Habits are just simple systems. We're all software developers. We know what to do with systems. Sam Carpenter has done a lot of thinking about systems. He's an entrepreneur from Oregon and he's written a couple of books on systems thinking in both business and in your personal life. And the book that I read was this one, The System's Mindset.  Now, before you run out and buy this book, I wanna warn you that it's a bit of an eccentric read and there's some things in it that I definitely don't agree with, but there's one central idea that I wanna bring up. And it's this idea that literally everything in life is made up of systems. What does that mean? The takeaway is that we spend our lives running around fighting fires in the form of results. For me, I'm not going to the gym three times a week. Come on, self, go to the gym three times a week. This shouldn't be that hard. When instead, what we should be doing is realizing that that's a system. There's a whole set of steps and processes that leads up to us successfully going to the gym three times a week. And if you're not doing that, ignore the end result, figure out where your system's breaking. Take a debugging mindset. This is a really powerful shift in thinking. Going far beyond practical implications. How many of you have heard of the idea of a blameless post-mortem? So this is another example of systems thinking. When your system falls over or something breaks or you have a critical production failure, you set your team down not to establish blame, not to figure out who's going to get fired, but to figure out what was wrong with your system and what changes you can make to your overall process to prevent that thing from happening again. It's a very healthy, very encouraging process focused largely on learning. And if it's done right, everybody walks away feeling whole and nobody walks away feeling beaten up. The same principles apply when you start applying systems mindset to your own life. Not only am I focusing on the root causes of why I'm not going to the gym, I'm shifting blame from me, from me being lazy or undisciplined or unable to finish to my system.  No big deal, let me fix the system. Things like procrastination, lack of discipline become clues, not personal moral failings. And when what you're most looking to do is snowball success into other success, that's a really important thing. And so when I looked at my attempted elliptical habit, I found two problems. Number one, I had given myself too much of a choice to make and it was a choice that required me to exercise willpower at the end of the day, specifically when I was completely out of willpower.   So how could I take that choice away? Well for me, the answer was a little extreme, I decided I was gonna go work out every day. Uncompromising, so that way there wasn't a decision to make, it was just the thing that I did. It turns out that it's really easy, it's a lot easier to encode a habit when you do something on a very regular rhythm. Now if that didn't work for me, another thing that I could have done is decided that I'm gonna go work out Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday, non-negotiable. Because if you do something on the same day, same time, even if it's not every day, it's easier for you to encode that into a habit. The thing that prevents you from encoding into a habit is the habit that I, the trap that I had gotten into of negotiating with myself and telling myself that I could always go tomorrow. So I went to the extreme end of the scale, I decided I was gonna work out every day, but then there was another problem with that when I looked at it from a systems perspective. That was a really unrealistic commitment for me. I had 30 minutes a day to spare. I could get on the elliptical 30 minutes a day. What I couldn't do was drive 15 minutes to the gym, get on the elliptical for 30 minutes, and then drive 15 minutes home. For some reason, psychologically, the need to commit to an hour of time was a huge psychological barrier, but I could make the commitment to 30 minutes of time, especially 30 minutes of reading. So what did I do? I went out and I bought an elliptical for my house so that I didn't have to drive to the gym. I made this thing that I wanted to do even easier for myself. Now I realize that's sort of an extreme example, but that's why you have to look at yourself in the mirror and decide, is this really something I wanna commit to?  So did it work? Yeah, pretty well. So I bought my elliptical on February the sixth, and that started a 73-day-long streak of me getting 30 minutes of cardio a day. And as you can imagine, I lost a ton of weight in those 73 days. Turns out that Apple did something really smart when they implemented this calendar. This is just a glorified Seinfeld calendar. If you're not familiar with the idea of a Seinfeld calendar, it's that if you wanna reach a goal, what you should do is put a calendar on the wall and put an X on that calendar for every day that you do the thing you wanna do. And eventually you have a chain that you don't wanna break. When you decide to work out every day to get 30 minutes of cardio every day, this becomes a Seinfeld calendar.  April the 19th, I got a stomach bug. And then work got stressful after that. And I fell off the wagon for a little bit. But I got back on pretty quick. Building this success enabled me to tackle one of my biggest fears, running.  I mean, really hated. I looked at people who enjoyed running. And in my mind, these people were aliens. I couldn't understand why anybody would wanna do that. Why would you wanna run when nothing was chasing you, when you weren't in danger of being eaten? But my wife's a runner. She likes to run, I mean, not a regular runner, but she ran track in high school and she's always enjoyed running. So this was a way for me to invest in spending time with my wife to learn how to be a runner. In elementary school, I would beg my mom for a note on the day that we had to do the mile-run walk for the president's physical fitness challenge. I would beg her to write me a note, excusing me from PE that day, so that I didn't have to do it. So it's September 2016, I started Couch to 5K. I kept my daily cardio routine, but I just subbed in the Couch to 5K runs three days a week. In October, I hit the infamous week five day three, which if you've done Couch to 5K, you probably know what I'm talking about. It's where your workout ramps up from two eight-minute periods of running with a five-minute walk break in between to a straight-up 20-minute run. It's a pretty big jump. It's pretty intimidating. And I had a plan for failure. If I couldn't do it, then I was just gonna repeat week five, no big deal. But I did it. I surprised myself. I didn't think that I could do it. And so, when I did week five, day three of Couch to 5K, I ran the first mile of my entire life. I'd literally never run a continuous mile until that point. As a 35-year-old, I ran the first mile of my life. I stuck with Couch to 5K until I could run a continuous but slow 5K. And then I signed up for a race and I underestimated how motivating that was gonna be for me. So I trained pretty hard for it. I followed an actual training plan. My goal was to get under 30 minutes. And I did. I finished in 28 minutes and 40 seconds, way faster than I expected to. I beat my previous best by about three minutes. This last Sunday, I ran the Cap 10K in Austin. It's one of the most famous races in Austin. 21,300 runners in this race. My previous fastest 10K was about an hour and two minutes, so I set an hour as my goal seemed reasonable. Seemed like it was gonna be tough on a course this hilly with 21,000 other runners. I ended up finishing in 57 minutes and two seconds. I got the text message on my phone with my official time and I teared up a little bit. It was one of the biggest achievements of my life to be able to run a 10K that fast and to look at the work that had taken me to that point. My runs are now in my favorite parts of the week and race days are some of my favorite days of the year because I get to go be around this amazing tribe of people who are all oriented around fitness and running. It's very reinforcing. So to tie it all up, let's talk about how to hit your big goals. First, take a long-term view. So I mentioned when I set into this whole journey, when I decided I was gonna get fit, I set a goal of losing 50 pounds. But I didn't tie a date to that. Instead, it was just this nebulous thing out in the future that I wanted to get to. What I did tie dates and things to were things like getting to the gym three days a week, getting on elliptical seven days a week, working on my fitness that way. When you take a long-term view, it smooths out the bumps in the road. It lets you find the joy in the process versus being fixated on sprinting to this goal all the time. Second, set goals along a way that let you snowball success. This is how I became a runner. I did the elliptical thing every day for 73 days and then I did it again. Running was really scary for me. But being on the elliptical, it taught my body to seek out endorphins. And so when I took away the extrinsic reward, that 30 minutes of reading, I found that the endorphins were enough for me. I was so hooked on the small endorphin boost from being on the elliptical that the big endorphin boost from the runner's high, oh man, that was immediately reinforcing for me. I no longer needed that extrinsic reward. The exercise itself was enough for me. Third, build habits and then optimize them with the system's mindset. This takes the blame off of yourself. It lets you focus on building the habits and optimizing them and not focusing on things that you might perceive as personal failures. It takes the responsibility off of you and lets you do what you know, already know how to do from your job. You already know how to approach and debug a system successfully.  You've worked too hard at building it. You wanna get better at writing code? Build habits around reading and deliberate practice. You wanna get better at concentrating? Build habits around periods of concentration and slowly build on them. Cal Newport's book, Deep Work, is about exactly that. It's exactly what he talks about in that book, is systematizing and building out patterns of deep thought in your life. So today, I weigh 180 pounds, 50 pounds off my peak weight. I'm at my lowest weight of my adult life and by far the best fitness. I drink one to two green smoothies a day. I get 30 minutes of cardio six to seven days a week. I've gone from hating running to running an average of 20 miles a week. And all this stuff is driven by systems and habits requiring very little willpower on them. And if you take nothing else away today, that's what I want you to hear. Anybody can do this. You just have to understand that willpower won't get you there and learn how to hack your way around willpower. Learn how to build systems and habits that will get you to your goals. You can do stuff like this too. I don't have a lot of willpower. I've failed at this so many times in my life, in my life before I finally figured it out. And I know you can do it too. Thanks a lot.


This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Jim Hart, Logan Larson and Mike Akin's coming up on DTS Tech to get plastic out of water, has actual captured Gen Z and Tim Stephens is here to tell us about driving the world's fastest electric vehicle and why he now has a light bruise on his chest. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 21st, 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Albany, New York, I'm Tim Stephens. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chin. We're gonna talk to you quite a bit about the car later on, Tim, but two million dollar car, how is, how, how are you not like just a melting pool of anxiety after driving that? Yeah, you really got to kind of put that aside and, you know, you got to drive it like a normal car because you got to report on what it's like to drive. And if you're just tiptoeing around, you don't get to feel. Yeah. All right, let's start with the quick hits. Microsoft's head gaming head Phil Spencer and Sony PlayStation head Jim Ryan are taking part in a closed door hearing in Brussels Tuesday to make their case why Microsoft should or should not be allowed to acquire Activision Blizzard. Representatives from Google, Nvidia, Valve, Electronic Arts and the European Games Developer Federation are also there. Earlier in the day, Microsoft President Brad Smith announced a binding 10 year contract with Nintendo to provide games specifically Call of Duty to Nintendo the same day that they launch on Xbox with full feature and content parody. Microsoft offered Sony a similar deal, but Sony has not accepted it as of yet. Dot dot dot yet. I don't know. I don't know. It's not looking good for this deal, but Microsoft's about to make its good play. So we'll see. The latest release of the Linux kernel version 6.2 adds upstream support for Apple's M one pro Max and ultra chips. That's right. You can run Linux on Apple Silicon. Thanks in part to the work of a Sahi Linux developer, Alyssa Rosensweig and team, which made the graphics support possible. Ubuntu will make Linux kernel 6.2 the default kernel in its 23.04 release, and it will also be included in Fedora 38, both of those expected in April. Tiktok continue to try everything it can think of to avoid getting shut down in the US the way it's been shut down in India. Tiktok announced it will let researchers at US based nonprofit universities access public anonymized data through its API. This will include comments, likes and favorites on video as well as search results. Researchers can apply to Tiktok's US data security team to get that API access. The company is also introducing something called the creativity program in the US, which will expand monetization from the current creator fund. Details pretty scarce right now, but participants with enough followers and view counts who post high quality original content can potentially make some money. It was just about eight days ago on February 13th when we talked about the upcoming US Supreme Court cases testing the Safe Harbor Law known as section 230. We'll have a link to that show in the show notes if you want to hear the detailed breakdown about those cases. But here's the reminder, they're happening Tuesday, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in Gonzalez versus Google. That's the one that tests whether algorithmic recommendations on YouTube are either a kind of moderation and thus protected by section 230 or not and not protected by section 230. On Wednesday, the court will hear Twitter versus Tomna. That one rests mostly on whether Twitter violated anti terrorism laws somehow when they failed to take down specific tweets in a timely manner. There are exceptions to section 230's protection regarding criminal speech. So that case is going to rest a little bit on where that line is drawn. We are getting the hearing. We are not going to get a decision until later this year. As people in large numbers use Bing's chatbot, don't call it Sydney. They have uncovered some of this. Let's call them less desirable quirks. You can debate whether beta testing in public is a good idea or not, but it might be the only way to get the kind of massive usage that can uncover these types of things and make them better going forward. In response to the fact that Bing tends to get a little bit more unusual the longer you talk to it, Microsoft is now limiting users to five chat turns per session and 50 chat turns per day. That seems to be enough for most users to get the answers that they're looking for. Also context will be cleared at the end of sessions to prevent the model from getting confused. Search Engine Journal reports that 71% of Bing's chatbot users have been giving it a thumbs up. They don't think it's that crazy. They actually think it's pretty helpful or cool or at least different. Microsoft will also start testing another option that lets users choose the tone of chat with options for precise that would be shorter, more focused answers, creative, which are longer and more chatty answers or balanced for a bit of both. Too bad they didn't give unbalanced as one of the yeah, unhinged. Alright, that is a look at the quick hits. Let's talk about Gen Z. The Financial Times reports that according to ad tech platform attain folks born after 1996 aka Generation Z make up 34% of all US iPhone users. By comparison, Samsung has 10% of Gen Z's age group. Research from counterpoint shows that iPhone grew its overall US market share of actual phone usage from 35% in 2019 to 50% in 2022, which has a lot to do with the Gen Z crowd pouring into the iPhone market. Older users in the US on the other hand tend to be more evenly split between iOS and Android. Yeah, so that's US but outside of the US iPhone usage among young adults, a little bit less pronounced, but research from Cantalus that looked at Western Europe found 83% of iPhone users that are under the age of 25 did not plan to switch to another platform. Now, if you compare that to Android users, less than half of those users in the same age group plan to stay on Android. Cantalus research also shows that globally for every 100 iPhone shipped, Apple will sell 26 iPads, 17 Apple watches and 35 pairs of AirPods. If you compare that to Samsung, 100 smartphone shipments leads to fewer than 11 tablets, six smartwatches and six wireless earbuds. Aha. So Apple's way to keep you in the garden. The ecosystem is working seems to work. Yeah. I've noticed my nieces who are in their 20s and in the Gen Z cohort tend to use iPhones as well. Financial Times story is titled how Apple captured Gen Z in the US and changed their social circles. But Mac rumors put it more confrontationally. They titled their story. Apple's popularity with Gen Z poses challenges for Android. Tim Stevens, is this a passing fad? Or do you think Apple may have captured the youth and assured its own future? I do think they've done a remarkable job of capturing the youth. But I think what this really comes down to is I message. I mean, I think if there was any doubt about why Apple has been so reluctant to open up iMessage to get rid of, you know, green bubbles. Now we know why this is this is proving to be a remarkable effective marketing tool for them. It shows that peer pressure is still alive and well in Gen Z. People don't want to have people in their groups who are not on the iOS platform. And you know, if you look at other markets, like in Europe or in Asia, where other options are more popular, things we chat that kind of thing. The numbers are different. So it really shows that people just don't want to have Android people in their circle of friends. And people want to be the circle of friends. So they're buying iPhones. And that's a little bit sad, but it's proving to be very effective for Apple as we can see. I mean, as far as the younger set goes, not just say that older people like myself aren't impressionable. But I was more impressionable when I was in my early 20s. I actually had this iMessage thing happen recently. This is a bunch of people who are my age. So nobody is in the Gen Z category, but we were all at a wedding. It was a destination wedding. Everybody's trying to coordinate. Where are you? Let's go to dinner, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. There may be 12 of us on this iMessage group. I say iMessage, because one person out of the group had an Android phone. And I mean, they didn't do anything wrong. But the whole chat was everything was wonky. Attachments weren't loading correctly. You'd get somebody liking someone's post without saying something, but it would render strange.  This is unusable. It really actually it wasn't really anybody trying to shame the Android user. It was it was, you can't really follow the chat, at least in the context we were using it for. So that is a real thing. And that is something that Apple is well aware of. And, you know, I don't think blue and green text message bubbles are the entire reason that younger folks don't want iPhone or do want iPhones rather rather than Android.  Now that could still be true. But I mean, that's not what Android means anymore.  So it's not about like financial status so much as just, I guess, going with the flow. Yeah, that's interesting, because iPhones definitely are still at the higher end of the market. And when I was in my 20s, I don't think I would have been able to afford an equivalent iPhone, granted it was in the 90s before that was even a thing. But, but, but you're right. It's not like having an Android phone immediately is cheap. So maybe that that I don't know, I think there's a lot more going on here, because as your story pointed out, Sarah, if Apple's not careful, they're going to force people onto other platforms because their people get tired of the I message thing. I really think Apple should support RCS for that reason. And then the red bubble, blue bubble thing still going to work to its advantage. But breaking chat is going to push people off. And I agree with you that it's not the only reason that that I think there's just the Apple has done a good job of marking itself as a hip young brand. And Samsung does a fairly good job. But you know, the evidence points that maybe they're not doing as good of a job. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of talk right now about plastics, not this isn't like from the graduate. We're talking about people being concerned about plastic showing up in your food or your drink.  But there are real statistics out there. The World Health Organization notes that nine studies have found micro plastics in drinking water, not just fresh water, but actual drinking water in a range anywhere between zero and 10,000 particles per liter. There hasn't been enough work done to say just how much of a danger this is. But if you just rather not drink plastic in your water, there are people working on filters. Yeah. So current carbon based filtering systems, they work slowly and require a decent amount of energy. So one promising take comes from scientist at Daegu Gwang Book Institute of Science and Technology or DGIST led by Professor Park Chi Young. Yeah, they created a porous polymer called a covalent triazine framework, but you could just call it CTF for short, created from an inexpensive precursor material. So not expensive to make. That's a big advantage right there. And they exposed it to some mild oxidation so that it attracts water and has some microscopic pits and holes that can capture pollutants as the water goes through. Reportedly more than 99.9% of the pollutants can be removed within 10 seconds. This thing's cheap to make. It works fast and you don't need to power it. The CTF filter can be reused multiple times as well. It's not one and done. So it's cheap, works well and it can be reused. Yeah, they also built a solar powered version that uses heat to remove volatile organic compounds. Those are found in things like paints, solvents, other indoor materials that you don't want to drink. They have a prototype that combines this one with the microplastics one to remove 99.9% of both types of pollutants. Their findings were published as the cover paper for the 50th edition of Advanced Materials in September. They obviously know people are interested in learning more. I am as well. I'm not totally sure how much microplastic drinking I'm doing and if I am doing it, how much that is potentially harming me, but not knowing is enough for me to be really interested in knowing how to get them out just in case they do end up being harmful in the future. Yeah, Tim. How are you feeling about drinking plastic these days? Yeah, I mean it is truly to tell but obviously you know these things are so microscopic that it is easy to see how they can become embedded in your organs and that's not a good thing. I'm lucky to be out in the woods. My water comes out of the ground and goes back into the ground so I'm relatively comfortable that my water is on the lower end of the scale. But certainly this is definitely a major concern I think for a lot of people and it's good to see some manufacturers or some brands starting to become more aware of this as well, especially on the clothing side because a lot of these particles come from synthetic fabrics that are washed and then these microfibers come off of there. So Patagonia for example, I think you can get a filter that you can put in your washing machine that will help to reduce the amount of plastics that you're putting out into the environment which is great. It'd be great to see more brands kind of getting ahead of this as well rather than waiting for the scientific research and waiting for these solutions which are proving to be a little bit slow to come I think. Yeah, I'm going to guess this is getting a second because this paper came out in September. I'm guessing this is getting a second wind partly because of the buzz around plastics that I was talking about earlier but they're probably looking for funding for some kind of spin-off startup that happens at MIT all the time. I can't imagine it wouldn't happen at DGIST as well. The thing that makes me positive about this is I'm not willing to go to great expense to filter my water for plastics yet until I know more but if it's cheap if I can spend 10 bucks and put a filter on my water and this thing just works and I have to replace the filter once a month or something I would absolutely go for that just to keep the water clean so this does sound promising. I know there's a lot of other water filter technologies out there in fact if you know them or you're working on them in the audience please email us feedback at dailytechnews.com we'd love to hear about it but this one does sound pretty promising to me. You know a lot of this too is this reminds me of thankfully knock on wood everybody there hasn't been a huge fire issue in my neck of the woods in northern California but we've had some pretty crazy seasons and that has affected all of California and many other places in the world as well and so many of my friends especially who have young kids and didn't always you know have invested in all sorts of air purifying filters and you know figuring out how to say stay as safe as possible now obviously smoke inhalation is different than drinking microplastics but this feels like hey if we can if we can prove that you can you can be healthier even if you're not necessarily going to be sick right but if you can just avoid the potential of becoming sick going down the road you know we're having something that can that can be traced back to the water that you're drinking not being as clean and filtered as possible they're just going to sell lots of this stuff because yeah you know even if it's preventative it's like why not I hope it really works as well as the paper makes it sound because the paper makes it makes it sound like it works works really well I can't wait to hear from the person who has therapeutic uses for eating plastic though you know there's always another side to every argument folks are you that person what would you like to hear us talk about on this show one way to let us know is our subreddit submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com when people talk about EVs the names that invariably come up are Tesla of course maybe Rivian BYD Kia Ford Volkswagen but the industry is filled with specialty makers as well who target specific niches like performance one of these is Croatia's Remach Automobili in 2013 Remach and introduced the concept one EV supercar you may have heard of that it claimed to be the fastest accelerating EV in the world well Tim Stevens wrote an article for The Verge called bending physics inside Remach's plan to make the fastest EV on the planet I highly recommend you read that full article to get the full flavor of his experience but for now Tim tell us about your trip to Croatia to drive the Navara a $2 million $1,914 horsepower all electric car yeah the numbers are pretty astonishing this is the world's fastest EV they just said that record a couple of months ago 258 miles an hour on a close track which makes it yeah the fastest EV in the world and acceleration acceleration from 0 to 16 in 1.8 seconds which is honestly uncomfortable that is not a pleasant experience to be going to accelerate from 0 to 60 that quickly I opened in my piece we were going through the different drive modes and I was in the passenger seat to kind of get a feel for the car before I got to drive and the test driver was in cruise mode which is the second slowest mode and he said okay I'm going to put my foot on the floor to see him get a sense for acceleration and I was taking notes of my phone and the phone flew out of my hand and smacked me in the chest so hard it left to bruise because it was just that brutal and we weren't even in the faster modes of the car yet so remarkably quick and you know these cars are large they're wide they're hard to drive but this thing was just honestly quite pleasant to drive suspension was reasonably comfortable and even you know with that much horsepower it was pretty easy to dawdle around through some neural roads and the outskirts of Zagreb and Croatia there but yeah when you got into the throttle a little bit deeper it was pretty remarkable to say the least yeah EVs have are known for having pretty good acceleration because of continuous variable transmission and stuff like that how much do we know about how they are super charging that acceleration with this one yeah most EVs they have really good torque off the line but they kind of peter out when you get a high speed because they run out of torque pretty quickly this thing though yeah obviously has a lot of torque all the way through and one interesting thing that that makes this EV pretty different compared to your average Tesla that kind of thing is that there are four electric motors one for each wheel and that not only gives obviously a lot of power but it also gives a lot of control one of the things that I drove over was I was accelerating hard over an overpass which had these kind of diagonal metal separators on the road and I could feel each motor scaling back as I went over these metal dividers because the grip was lower than on the asphalt and as soon as that tire got over the metal back on the asphalt that motor then powered up again to give me full thrust and that's really remarkable it's checking I think every 100 times a second each grip at each corner of the car and it can scale back power at each wheel individually which is which is pretty remarkable what to be clear if you had done that speed in a car that wasn't checking 100 times a second and it had just powered through you would have skidded out right yeah the test driver who's in passenger seat at that point said that if the car hadn't been actively looking and throttling back power the car would have speared into the wall more quickly than any really any human could react realistically because that much power going down it would have spun up the wheels on the metal part immediately and it would have just ended in tears basically and this has autonomous systems as well because now that you say that I kind of want an autonomous system to help that error correct for me it does not it does have certainly you know driver assistance systems where it's going to be you know cruise control and that kind of thing but also stability and traction control as well to make sure that you don't go spinning into the wall as it helped me in that situation but Remak is working on autonomous shuttles as well that's another part of their business that they're working to develop fully driverless vehicles for use in Croatia and elsewhere in the world but this car no this is one that you get to drive for yourself yeah so what's the point of this I mean obviously they might sell a few two million dollar cars to a couple of billionaires around the world but is this calling attention to the rest of the business what about the rest of us who say great car if it was more like you know 50 grand yeah this is basically a halo car for the brand so they're basically showing this is what we can do when the sky is the limit but they are making a lot of money through engineering partnerships with other manufacturers and those manufacturers do tend to be prestige manufacturers like Aston Martin but they're doing hybrid systems for other brands and basically working to bring that technology to more attainable cars cars that are still in the hundreds of thousands of dollars unfortunately but certainly it's beginning to create and show the level of advancement of simple technology that can trickle down which is great and they want to be partnering with other manufacturers Porsche is a major investor of theirs so I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that at some point we might see some rematch technology instead of a Porsche and we're still talking about expensive cars but you know not two million dollars expensive at least yeah I think it is was interesting and you go into detail in the article about the fact that this company shouldn't really be in Croatia it's only in Croatia because Remak himself just really wanted it to stay in Croatia yeah the company grew out of a rematch basically blowing up the motor on his BMW and deciding to make it into an EV and then getting funding despite all odds you know no investors no startups wanted to work with him in Croatia but he was very stubborn about that and he was quite quite honest about the struggles of that when I spoke with him he said that he had some regrets but ultimately he was very proud they've got over 2,000 employees there now and it is considered to be among the best if not the best employer in the entirety of Croatia yeah and making parts you know chassis big technology I probably parts is the wrong word but but making things for a lot of other car manufacturers like you said so it's not it's not putting all its eggs in one basket right and and now Remak Group which is kind of the parent company there it now is in control of Bugatti which is one of the most historic sports car manufacturers and one of the most prestigious sports car manufacturers in the world and now Remak is in control of Bugatti as well so that shows you know the amount of respect that he's been able to earn in a short about a time largely again based on that engineering skill that he has and that all of his employees there is a greb have as well very cool thank you well indeed cool also cool let's know this one a team of scientists at Columbia University Medical Center led by a dermatology and tissue engineering doctor Albert Papallardo successfully nurtured a cluster of skin cells designed to adhere to a mouse's hind leg and be accepted as its own tissue in under 10 minutes the procedure was over and Papallardo says it was a perfect fit now this is significant not just because it worked on a mouse but because it could help people with burns or really any animal that has a large wound to cover irregular shapes with real and functional skin the lab-grown material is known as a skin construct a sheet of human cells that could be implanted on a wound that's otherwise too big for a graft from another body part Papallardo's team published their success in Science Advances on January 27th describing a three-dimensional or edgeless graft shape to fit a body part without having to create seams which in the past have led to strange shapes and you know not great mobility and you know things that just don't really look like what they're supposed to look like a 3D printer made the scaffold that let skin cells grow into the desired shape then Papallardo seeded those human cells in layers around the scaffold letting the cells build themselves a network of structural molecules Now if you haven't watched the video of this already trigger warning for those who get freaked out by small disembodied hands because they show a very compelling demo of growing skin for a hand on the small hand scaffold that's incredibly impressive but also just unusual looking Yeah Just a tiny glove Tom just tell yourself that It's a tiny skin glove Yeah Yeah and an incredible technology for treating so many things like burns and that sort of stuff Yeah This is amazing Yeah I mean there's obviously clinical trials if you say I know somebody who could benefit from this where do I sign or who do I call we're certainly a ways out from there yet but it sounds like the researchers were beyond impressed with not only the fact that this worked but it worked in a really short amount of time you know this was not like a nine hour surgery or something that took months to kind of grow in a lab type thing it worked as advertised You know Skin graft surgery can be really long right from what I understand so Yes long and with not necessarily the greatest of results maybe better than what you were working with before but Yeah but yeah this is it's very promising All right let's check out the mail bag Yeah so we had a conversation last week about the mill which is a device that helps you separate compostable materials from inorganic materials and just kind of make a composting a more finest sand in the house basically just makes the whole process a little bit easier but for a price Thor wrote in Thor lives in Sweden and said the mill composter sounds awesome I'd love to have a bin that reduces smell and results in something we could use for our plants hopefully they'll also sell it as a standalone product at some point because as Thor is pointing out there is a subscription service Thor said although my food waste doesn't go entirely to waste now either when I live in Tonsburg the buses ran on biodiesel that was created from municipal food waste now Thor and Anthony and Chris I don't think you all know each other but Anthony and Chris have some promising products besides the mill Anthony said we found a great product called Lomi that's L-O-M-I it's a bit pricey it's $499 but we love it it takes all our food waste paper towels napkins plastic wear anything compostable and converts it to loam it drastically reduces the volume of the compost and eliminates the odor no need to send back to the company you just dump it in your normal compost bucket there are consumables involved but it costs us $42 per quarter which is much more reasonable than $33 per month Chris also wrote in and said I've been using the Food Cycler by Vitamex for a couple of years does the same thing as the mill it grinds and dehydrates food waste our family accumulates the food waste into a large planter pot over the winter and in the spring it gets mixed into our planter bets well first of all thank you to Chris and Anthony for sending in the links to those we'll have those in our show notes because I know a bunch of you out there were wondering like hey could I just buy the mill well not from mill but you can buy something just like it from other places so thanks for that one of the keys about the mill was that you didn't keep the sand you didn't keep the powder that it made you mailed it to them and they disposed of it and I think Anthony and Chris were like well why would I do that I can just compost it myself but that left me thinking well I guess the one thing mills still would appeal to is somebody who doesn't have anywhere to compost or doesn't want to deal with the compost maybe doesn't live in a city that collects the compost and so this would be a solution for an apartment dweller in that situation we're like I don't want to have a bunch of powder and have to deal with it great for those of you who garden but I don't garden the mill might still be useful for them but still pricey at $33 a month to do that so I think building it into a municipal collection is probably the way to go for that but yeah very much for non gardeners or people without any kind of land in their living situation flower haters unite we've got the product for you but it's not free yeah the flower lovers though Anthony and Chris have got you hooked up with some standalone solutions you got some options something for everybody yeah if you if you if you if you ever talk about something on the show and you say I've got feedback I've got a product I've got something to say feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send us that email thank you in advance also thanks to you Tim Stevens for being with us today besides driving and pretty cool fancy cars let folks know where they can keep up with your work thanks Sarah yeah you can find me at Timstevens.substack.com if you want to get a couple emails from me every now and again or I'm Tim underscore Stevens on the Twitter if you're still hanging on over there many people are and thanks for being with us today also thanks to our brand new bosses we've got Craig we've got Aaron we've got Malcolm and we've got Sam who all just started backing us on Patreon since we saw you last thanks to all of you Craig Aaron Malcolm Sam big round of applause from here nice long three-day weekend but four new bosses all right all of that Craig Aaron Malcolm Sam the fantastic four welcome them other patrons and all of you Craig Aaron Malcolm Sam and all of you patrons stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet we're going to talk about Twitter deciding to charge people extra to secure their accounts with SMS while leaving unpaid users the more secure options I think I have a way to make some sense of that so patrons stick around you can also catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern at 2100 UTC you can join us live we'd love to have you you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we're back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com prime and club hopes you have enjoyed this program


I talked to my mom and grandmother about menopause, hey, what age were you when you went into menopause? Oh, I don't remember, and my doctor told me to take tums. Tums, and I'm like, I was gonna help.


Hi everyone, Joe for jasmizcasebreaks.com coming at you with 2018 Panini Prestige Football Fat Pack Break number 29 This is the last one last filler to fill up that NT football break Which is coming up in next in a separate video big. Thanks everyone here for getting in on it All 30 teams 32 teams are in so we're gonna do the break first And then we'll do a different dice roll at the end to see who wins those final spots five into five ten times for names and teams one two three four five six seven eight nine and 10th and final time Try to copy everybody's names here five and a five ten times four the teams two three four six and 10th and final time All right, so here's the first half of the list right here No trade windows in these little filler breaks. Let's just get on with it. Now. Let's just print this out see who I Guess we'll see what we get out of the pack could be a surprise or two in the pack But we'll just we just want to see who's gonna win These NT spots. So there's just vet commons. These won't ship these will ship The fun rookies here That Josh Allen No, but we do have a 2018 NFL passport Josh Allen for the bills. I'll be for PJ. It's pretty good. Josh Allen. I've heard of him All right Now we'll re-randomize these names and then we're gonna see who is gonna get into that NT break All right, there's the new dice. Here's the list. Let's roll it and randomize it four and a two six times Six spots being given away after six top six after six one two three four five and Sixth and final time after six so from seven on down no dice But People in this break have a lot of spots surely they must be in the top six, right? They can't be too sad Matthew Shira PJ Matthew Shira Matthew Matthew and Sean M There you go. So most of you I think Got in thanks for getting into the action. I appreciate it. I'm Joe. I'll see you next time for the next break. Bye. Bye


From Soldiers Radio and Television, this is the Army Today, a daily feature from around the globe. Today's Army, whether it's 8,000 feet above sea level, or gathered to bear witness to a comrade's reenlistment, today's force, according to Brigadier General Gary Valesky, is the best it's ever been. You look at the Army you have today, it's unbelievable. Valesky is Deputy Commanding General Maneuver at the 1st Cavalry Division, currently deployed to Afghanistan, where the infantry officer spends most of his time on battlefield circulations, following up on tactical operations within Regional Command East. RC East is large, 14 provinces, 43,000 square miles. It's about 28,000 soldiers that really are the rubber that meets the road. It is, he says, a road paved with measurable improvement, primarily with their Afghan partners. For example, there are 200 independent operations probably every night in RC East that the Afghans are doing themselves. He says like many of his troops, his prior deployments to Iraq make him keenly aware of the similarities and the significant differences. To be able to pull embedded partnership here, to be able to pull a targeting process here that we used has really, in my mind, been extremely rewarding. He acknowledges there are challenges to overcome, but here in the provinces, Afghans are stepping forward with confidence and capability, tenants of conviction they've gained with the help of soldiers from the world's best Army. Getting better every day. This is the Army Today from Soldiers Radio and Television.


Almost time for the bell, how many options will you sell? Fire up your platform, get ready to enter But first let's get the mindset centered Ay, ay, let's go We're not here to gamble, we're here to trade We follow the plan, that's how we get paid Test and trade it, have success Find what works for you and forget the rest Stats and probabilities is what we're about Time to dismiss greed and doubt Focus on the process, not the money And the profits will flow like honey Power our lives, let's start the show Come on trade hackers, get ready to go Zero-day options, time to make bank Get locked and loaded, then be ready to plank Ay That is a monster green bar Did not see that one coming after the jobs report this morning I thought we were in for a little bit of a A little bit more bloodiness to the downside But holy moly But worked out okay I did a, my AM ratio ended up getting stopped out Was pretty close to 50%, didn't hit Got stopped out I also did another discretionary just one to one Cause I wanted a little bit more size on with the width That we had, that one got stopped out Pretty small size and then The JSP's this afternoon have been rocking so that Got it all back plus some So For power hour, I think we would call this I think this would be considered a short squeeze right 2% From the open So I'll be doing my 2 to 1 version 2 to 1 version, so 8 by 16 Look at me, I still got some calls From one of my iron condors They were worth about $1.60, now they're worth $0.90 I'm gonna just hold on to those See if we push up a little bit more Try to sell those for a little bit more No, I completely forgot about DKS Dick, I apologize I forgot about you today I was Yeah, I was like I saw some of you guys post and I was like Oh, I forgot about DKS Such a problem child I didn't have my phone alarm set, that was the problem Alright, so I guess I'll just I guess I'll just sell these Calls Get them out of my way Bought them for $0.05, selling them for a buck A buck even Alright, so Longs in place for Tronch 1 Chris, I don't know if I'm stating the obvious but 3 to 2 is 3 puts versus 2 calls And 2 to 1 is 2 puts versus 1 call So it looks like we're gonna be maybe 5, maybe 10 wide Looks like we're gonna go 10 wide Where is my template? 25s and 15s I got filled at 9.65 On the 25s and 15s for Tronch 1 2 to 1 So, Chris, my 3 to 2 That's just gonna be my normal new Tronch 1 The 2 to 1s for short squeeze only I got filled on my Humpty PMMers Post that real quick I had to 1-up you Meach Anytime I can get a 1-up on Meach, it's a good day 5 cents 1 cent, it doesn't matter Alright, so Tronch 1 is in A couple other things that I did today I had to add a calendar to my Timefly With this monster move It's already almost pushing up to the calendar strike But we get a little pullback We'll be back in business All my short premiums coming in nicely VXX trades coming in That one that was way out there Back to even the very first VXX trades contracted all the way back VXX actually hasn't contracted As much as VIX Sometimes we'll see that contract even more But not today, VIX down 6% Yep, Dark Vendor I sold Puts all afternoon I didn't do the exact Times of the back test I was just kind of Buying every dip basically I saw your question on VXX Dark Vendor I'm expecting more ball contraction Premium just getting sucked out of this market Ducks bouncing back Had to adjust our I thought I might get out for a 15-20% profit on our Put calendar in SPX But after the rip had to add to that one We got a double there Not sure what you mean, Chris I didn't perceive you as being rude in any way I was just being a smart ass About the 3-2-2-1 Alright, so today for my calendars I'm going to go with the 4-7-3-6-3-5 Taking a look at the event calendar for next week We've got PPI on Wednesday CPI on Thursday So I decided to not do a 6-7 Because the shorts would be on CPI day And those could continue to expand Going into that date So I'm going to pass on the 6-7 Or the 5-7 So I'm going to do a 3-5 So I'll have my 5-day options on PPI day The longs I'm going to do a 3-6 So I'll have the longs on CPI day as well And then a 4-7 So that would be Tuesday's shorts Nothing really going on there And 7-day would be that Friday So that's the plan I'll do a 4-7 Here right around the same time as Trunch 2 It's always in the positions and updates, Kelvin That's where you'll find that on a daily basis Every morning for your reading enjoyment So let's see, do I have any JSP's left? Yeah, I do have a little 2-lot left I'm looking for a buck 20 on It's currently trading at $2 4-7 is in the calendar October plan There's the back test So that'll be the first one I put on at 2.15 Here about a little over 10 minutes I'll put that on before I do Trunch too And actually, I just updated that back test I'm going to use 25 delta, not 20 I meant to do that before I saved it Getting a little pullback in SPX So Maro, I just saw your post In the ZeroDTE channel Do you have a link to what you're talking about for that back test? On mine Yeah, I start with a 6 on a 2 to 1 ratio I start with a $6 stop loss You're saying you just changed that to 4? Oh, trail, got it Okay, I'll check that out Thank you I'm getting another little bounce I assume my remaining JSP's should be Fairly close, trading at $1.70 I'm trying to get $1.20 I'm going to change that I'm going to try to get more out of those Nice little decay coming in on Trunch 1 With this bounce Chris, you go to India for 2 weeks You come back and you don't know your way around The tradehacker community What's going on here? How is India, by the way? You need to get it together, son Learn some golf, okay Good, good Chris is going to be the next VJ Singh Alright, so before Trunch 2 I'm going to go ahead and get in my 4.7 Fill it at 24 even I just posted that in the calendar channel Then hearing about 15 minutes I'll do a 3.6 Alright, so for Trunch 2 I'm going to buy some wongs Looks like maybe we may be 5 wide For Trunch 2 Yep, I'm still sticking with 1 to 1 On my Trunch 2, correct Give it a couple minutes too Kelvin, did you look at the back test? It literally shows you what I do on the back test Literally Exactly What I do Alright, it looks like the 2015's Maybe the 2010's Probably coming down a tad Looks like the 2010's It holds here 2010's going in At 5 bucks No takers 4.95 No takers 4.90 Oh, 4.95 Fill it at 4.95 On the 43.20 Calls 43.10 Alright See how she blows today Chris, you want me to go Bring up the back test So that I can tell you I think the Kelvin and Chris are you guys brothers Did your guys' mom feed you Hand feed you into your teenage years What's going on here I mean Holy moly You literally have the back test You can open it I think you guys are brothers The Kelvin and Chris twins You guys are something else Alright, 230 I'm doing the 3.6 250 I'm doing the 3.5 I'm an enabler So the SPX bar is big But check out the NASDAQ NASDAQ is up almost 2% on the day More of a dip after the open Russell down 1% Excuse me, up 1% Dow up a little over 1 Silver up 3% Notes and bonds It bounced back a little bit Still red I did, I've got some long Well, I got hammered I was short to begin with And I got Punished for that And then I Once we got into Short squeeze territory I flipped it I had gotten stopped out long before But once we got into short squeeze territory I bought some NASDAQ I'm still holding those So that helped I haven't gotten back what I lost this morning On my little discretionary futures trades But it's helping It's coming I'm glad it's entertaining for you, Andrew K I'm here to entertain Alright, so let's see Let me get my notes down Tronch 1 I got in at 9.65 I'm looking for 5.80 For Tronch 1 Tronch 2, I got in at 4.95 3 bucks To reduce Tronch 2 I didn't do a new TGIF I just added that one To my other single calendar Decided to stick with that Because I'm doing my 4, 7, 3, 6, 3, 5 here So I figured that was enough Enough calendar Entries for the day Tronch 3 in about 5 minutes Vegas Michelle hitting 50% On P2H, nice Buy some more longs for Tronch 3 A few minutes here Looks like it might be the 43.20s, 43.10s By the way Any Trader Sync Trader Sync Trader Sync? Yeah, Trader Sync So you may have noticed If you're trying to Look at the performance Of multiple setups That it only is allowing you To look at one at a time The devs Are aware of it and they are Working on fixing it Per my boy Nixon Trader Sync Doesn't need to escalate it He takes care of stuff He's not like the I can't remember her name now The female tech support Clueless Alright so 25s 15s 25s 15s for Tronch 3 $4 Some more longs Why is my buying power like that What did I do? It's weird Alright well maybe I'm not doing Tronch 3 I just checked my buying power There's no issues I didn't put on Any new portfolio margin stuff today But something is Off Should not be Using that much capital for Tronch 3 Well I'm skipping Tronch 3 Today my friends I'm not sure what the deal is there Thank you Wuga So Tronch 1,580 Appreciate that Tronch 2 I'm looking for 3 bucks It's currently trading at 460 Marthenis you had that same issue? That's weird Why was Trying to use Trying to use like $180,000 In buying power for Tronch 3 I even added a bunch of extra longs And still did My puts weren't even that far away I mean we're talking Tronch 3 Maybe I'll Say maybe I'll sell some more puts here Alright no Tronch 3 But I'm selling some more puts There's my Remaining 2 JSP's from earlier Just got filled at $0.50 Alright so I need to do a 3,6 I just posted my 3,6 In the calendar channel That's what mine looks like Elliot And I gotta keep an eye on Tronch 2 Here It's trading at 360 I need 3 bucks Yeah I think I confused Toss's Buying power system Or maybe I'm the one that's confused I don't know yet Figured out Alright in Tronch 1 and 2 and some extra puts And then I've got a 3,5 DTE Left to do Here in about 15 minutes And then the week is done Tronch 2 down to 3,50 I do them as separate trades Elliot Mine were based on the short squeeze But I wasn't Following the specific time So I'm just gonna I'll label them as discretionary And I will do them as separate trades Our last Baseball tournament of the year for my 14 year old Tonight Tonight, tomorrow and Sunday Tonight's game Weather is showing It's going to be With wind chill factor It's gonna feel like 43 degrees Summer is over 103 huh Yeah I'm not a fan of the 43 degrees And First part of October Well it's a baseball tournament so I don't know If anyone's gonna be wearing pads or hitting anybody But uh The game's ideal I ain't getting a little bounce up here Oh the weather Yeah It is football weather my friends It is football weather Did you ever go to the Hall of Fame I assume you did if you grew up in Ohio I've never been Nasdaq still grinding higher Nasdaq pushing Trying to reach that 2% higher And there it is 2% for the Nasdaq I'm gonna go ahead and shut down my Long futures Oh yeah Taylor's been spotted Coming out of Kelsey's house He lives about Actually from my My old office before I Before I bought this condo from my office A few months ago His Kelsey's house was Right in the basically in the same neighborhood As my office And uh yep Taylor was spotted The other day coming out Apparently the media's Posted up at his house Oh that would suck I would not want to be famous Infamous yeah that's a better word I'll take the uh lifestyle Of an incognito trader Over the fame So Trunch 2 where we at on Trunch 2 it's a 350 I need 3 bucks It comes down a little bit it'll get there It's a 320 310 305 3 bucks Changing my stop on Trunch 2 Now I'm gonna go Enter my 3-5 DTE I just posted my 3-5 In the calendar channel Here's my reminder Alright so Trunch 3 is centered Oh wait What are my strikes Trunch 2 I mean Trunch 2 is the 2010s There we go That's the power of my position Dark Avenger With my Massive position of Micro Nasdaq features So Trunch 1 is trading At about 3 bucks a little less Trunch 2 is trading at 225 My short puts Are trading at 320 Just slightly above 4320 would work Early indication for market Unclose and balance 564 million to the sell side Just over 11 minutes to go Alright SPX coming down a bit So Trunch 1 is 15s and 25s Let's see a little bounce If I'm gonna take that one to the bell Trunch 2 is the 10s and 20s Looks like I'll be taking that one in Hopefully The 10 minute mark on the Market and balance jumped up to 3.6 billion on the sell side We're seeing a little bit of a sell off here That's a little bit bigger number Let's see if we can get A little baby bounce into the close Coming down Trunch 1 is trading at 820 Stops at 880 Stopped On Those are my puts Trunch 1 still holding on Trunch 2 still okay I'm gonna need a bounce Otherwise Trunch 1 is gonna get stopped Trading at 830 My stops at 880 Looks like I'm getting stopped I don't have a bid Still a little bid I did not get stopped Looks like I should be getting stopped Alright I got stopped Dollar slippage on the 2x1 Alright Hanging on to Trunch 2 Need a little bounce here I just needed to close A little above 4310 for Trunch 2 Just need a little hold Right here I got room to the upside Not much to the downside Four minutes to go So Trunch 1 I got in at 965 Stopped out for a profit at Oh no I'm sorry Stopped out for a 20 cent loss So almost a break even with some small loss And then I lost a little on those short puts And then Trunch 2 If it closes above 4310 Will give me a pin What do I do on those puts Maybe that's a $5 loss On those 4 puts So I can still be green For power hour if we hang on here Or higher Two minutes to the bell Heart rate at 68 But I need a bounce My heart would appreciate a bounce Coming down Minute and a half One minute How about a two point bounce in one minute Just a little baby green bar To end the day Just finish what you started Green all day 30 seconds Still coming down 10 seconds Two, one Close at 840850 So that looks like it'll be End up being about 5000 minus the Call it 3000 with the Puts in the longs So Net of a couple thousand Winner for power hour Couple thousand Alright my friends End of the week Everyone have a good weekend As far as the live stream schedule for next week We've got So yeah, so the morning sessions chat Will be streaming Monday Tuesday Wednesday And Thursday And then we'll do zero DTE on Friday And then of course power hour Every day of the week Alright my friends have a good weekend Take care chat with you soon