College can be a very large expense, and reasonable questions to ask are “Is college worth it? What’s the return on investment?” The short answer is that it depends. It depends on where you attend college, how expensive it is, what subject your degree is going to be in, and whether that degree can provide a return on the college investment. There are ways to determine all of these factors with a degree of reasonable expectation. The costs of college tuition varies considerably. On average state schools are largely less expensive than private schools. But there are exceptions. The “investment” factor of the equation can differ greatly. There are some colleges that offer fast online degrees that can be completed in about half the time (in two years) as compared to the traditional time of earning a bachelor degree (which is four years). This strategy can reduce the cost of college in general for getting a bachelor’s degree. Also attending college online means that you won’t have the housing and living expenses of on-campus residential school. So fast online degrees can be a large savings as compared to a four year on-campus experience. Some colleges accept transfer credits from Sophia Learning, and this can both save money and time in getting a bachelor’s degree. Sophia Learning is a third party education provider that offers basic classes that can be transferred into your degree program at a participating university or college. What’s great about Sophia Learning is that you can complete as many classes as possible within certain time frames, and for inexpensive flat rate costs. For $99 a student gets one month to take as many classes as possible.

The first thing to do is let the meat sit in the open air for about 10 minutes, to bring it closer to room temperature. Then salt the meat. As I wrote in a previous post I’m on the Carnivore diet so all I use as a spice is salt. Rub the salt in. Sometimes I’ll use Kosher salt which is more flakes than it is granulated, and rubs-in well. Get the grill up to 400° degrees. It doesn’t matter if you’re using a gas grill or a charcoal grill. The temperature for normal cooking on a grill (that isn’t slow cooking or smoking) is 350°. Once the temperature reaches 400°, put the steak on for four minutes on one side, and four minutes on the other side, and that’s it. You’ll want to let the steak sit for a few minutes on the plate given that it’s still cooking even though it’s been taken off the fire. Cut, and enjoy.

Kids who grow up with and communicate through devices in their hands are sometimes referred to as the “silent generation”. Social awareness and intelligence that’s in-person, requires social interactions to be done in-person. There are social cues that cannot be learned through a device. I’m not saying that I don’t communicate through my phone, because I do. The irony is that you’re reading this on a device. But I grew up before these cell phones existed, when the best way to communicate at a distance was to actually talk on the phone, which is a higher form of communication than texting and messaging. I’m not naive enough to think that the tide will be stemmed, but you should know that balance is key, and that the predominance of digital communication is stunting the social growth of the silent generation. Depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts are all up in young people, whereas dating and relationships are down, and has now started to decline America’s birth rate with the younger adults having significantly less children. The dad advice is to spend less time on communication through any social media and more time in-person. It will produce rewards for the rest of your life.

I’ve been on the Carnivore diet, which for me consists of meat (mostly beef), salt and water and black coffee for over 5 years now, with the rare occasional exception of eating some broccoli or white rice here and there. I started this diet out of desperation at the end of 2018 because of my autoimmune condition, and lost 72 lbs and my autoimmune symptoms went away and I’m not on any medications. The Carnivore diet will help with autoimmune issues because meat, salt and water aren’t inflammatory. The eventual goal is to be on this diet temporarily, and steadily introduce other kind of foods into my diet individually (hence why I sometimes eat broccoli or white rice, and other foods, to see how my body responds). As it is now, I still have to be on the Carnivore diet, maybe indefinitely, as other foods do still produce an inflammatory response. For people who are on the Carnivore diet to reduce and hopefully resolve underlying health issues, such as autoimmune disorders, this diet isn’t reached and practiced as a result of philosophical considerations, like how veganism can be a philosophical response to how the food industry treats animals. It’s strictly to abate the health problems with things like joint deterioration for people who have rheumatoid arthritis. For anyone on this diet, it’s also important to eat some organ meats periodically, as not all of the nutrients that we need are in the muscle meat (which is primarily what I eat with hamburger meat and steaks and roasts and so on). You can find organ meats, like liver, in supplement form, so that you don’t actually need to cook liver if you don’t want to.

There is a crisis of fatherless households in the United States. "According to data from 2022, there are approximately 18.3 million children across America who live without a father in the home, comprising about 1 in 4 children (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022)." - Source: America First Policy Institute. One reason why Jordan Peterson reached such levels of popularity in 2017 was due to a phenomenon of being a kind of "internet dad", who told young people to clean up their act, clean their room, not to apologize if they don't mean it, not to feel bad for their own ambitions, that they have something singular and unique to contribute to the world, to slay the dragon as a meaningful path in life on a hero's journey, to adopt responsibility as an antidote to the suffering that is always part of life (and thereby making the inevitable suffering of life tolerable and meaningful), and not to interrupt children who are skateboarding, among other pieces of advice. So why not formalize the collective advice of dads who have been there and done most of what's generally required in life, which is too broad to make into a list. Suffice it to say, this group is an attempt to discuss the important aspects, and the fun aspects of how to make life easier, more profitable, and generally the way it should go.