Two days I totally thought I missed mother’s day! Then I was like “Well… at least I can say something during this post!” I looked up when mother’s day and realized I’ll be early instead of late!

I wanted to give a quick shoutout to my mom. My mom has been the longest reader of my posts and watcher of my videos. Knowing mom was reading my early blog served as motivation to keep going. It is actually mom I think about when I write. My long explanation about Joe Rogan at the bottom? That’s for everyone BUT I always ask myself “Will mom understand the context of what I’m talking about?” If I’m unsure I try to elaborate. Mom might not even know who Joe Rogan is! Can you believe that?! Joe Rogan has been one of my favorite people for a long time. 🙂 OK… goodnight for real this time!

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I have this plan to do an update every 9 days summarizing the previous 9 days. What I have in my mind is creating a collage of all of my daily photos, like this one:

And creating a collage of my daily mental health status updates:

and reflecting on those two 9 day snapshots. If you look back at the picture up top, that’s my “update project board”. What I was going to do was attach the images that I wanted to turn into collages so, when today came, they would be easy to create. I obviously didn’t get that done! Even though that didn’t get done I can still do a basic update.

The Last 9 Days

• Tuesday, May 1st – I started doing BJJ at Taiwan BJJ again! It’s been over 10 years since I last regularly trained BJJ. I have been waiting over a decade for that day to arrive! It’s actually taken me over 10 years to get in a mentally and financially stable enough place to dedicate time to training regularly. My goal was to start up again before I was 40 so I’m ahead of schedule!
• Wednesday, May 2nd – Looking at the Instagram photo doesn’t helpfully remind me of anything… I’m at the Xindian apartment though… I probably got some work done there.
• Thursday, May 3rd – It looks like this was the day that I decided to start writing every day! Writing every day has been on my list of goals… also for over a decade! Not only am I touch typing every day I’m also maintaining a pen and paper journal.
• Friday, May 4th – My energy was on the rise so I went for a long run to even things out. I think I ended up having a really productive day after that as well.
• Saturday, May 5th – I spent a long day hanging out with Magda. We had a lot of fun. Went to see the new Avengers movie, had dinner, talked… a real nice day. Oh! I also picked up a Bullet Journal that day.
• Sunday, May 6th – This is the first day I have notes from my bullet journal. It’s really cool. I just drop a few words about the day and it is enough to spark my memories. Sunday I played some board games with Magda, bought some new domains and wrote the “108 Days of Flow” protips blog post. The bullet journal really helped me focus that day (and it has every day since).
• Monday, May 7th – I met a new Canadian friend who is traveling throughout South East Asia and training at BJJ gyms along the way. He stopped by the makeshift gym in the Xindian apartment. Another old Taiwan BJJ friend was also able to stop by. We had a really nice class that day.
• Tuesday, May 8th – I spent, probably too long, submitting an application for Founder Gym to see if I get accepted to be in their startup founder program.
• Today! – The last few days my energy has been on the rise so sleep has been spotty. I’ve actually done a pretty good job implementing my new evening routine, but I keep running into snags. My evening routine is what I’ll be focusing on over the next 9 days. My morning routine is SOLID. It’s been like bam-bam-bam-bam. This morning was bam-bam-obsess over Sam Harriss and Ezra Klien’s debate about racism and thought-policing… lol

I was looking for a link to introduce you to that whole debate but then I thought to myself “How did I even find myself there?” Here’s what happened…

I fried up a pile of bacon and I made a video where I ended up briefly talking about the ethics of factory farming. That reminded me of a photo Joe Rogan posted to Instagram:

Since I was about to eat I figured I’d watch a Joe Rogan podcast. I scrolled through recent ones and saw an episode featuring Sam Harris. I was like… “I like Sam Harris, I’ll watch that.”

It was during that podcast that I was exposed to the debacle between him and Ezra Klien.

The reason I’m presenting all of that is that I wasn’t sure what article I should share with you to get you up-to-date about the situation (if you wanted to be). They all heavily slant towards either Ezra Klien or Sam Harris. So, instead, I’ve laid out the breadcrumbs that led me to the debate and you can watch that video or hit Google and go to a source (or multiple sources) to get up-to-speed.

The Payne’s Notes version is:

1. Sam Harris has a controversial figure on his podcast
2. This results in an article being produced that upsets Sam (rightly so as it landed him on Southern Poverty Law Center website as a purveyor of hate speech)
3. Sam and Ezra digitally tussle over the article
4. Sam and Ezra have a podcast about the matter
5. Sam thinks Ezra’s news site Vox engaged in disingenuous journalism and Ezra thinks Sam didn’t properly interview his controversial guest about matters of race or felt that he shared bad conclusions.

Alright… enough of this! I best get to sleepin’. 🙂

I’m predicting that I’ll be better prepared for the next report.