March 2024 Life Recap

I’ve been going to the University of Texas to get a DXA scan (also called a DEXA scan) for the last 2 years. I try to go every 4 months. And now I had my best scan ever! I gained a lot of muscle.

The DXA scan is the most accurate way to measure body composition, including muscle and fat. I’m happy to report that I had my best ever body scan.

I gained the most amount of muscle and the least amount of fat. My visceral body fat was also the lowest that I think it has ever been. This is a huge win for me because I have been struggling to gain muscle mass.

What has been working for me has been to use the Fitbod app for weight lifting. But most importantly to eat more food and especially protein.

I did a macro tracking experiment one weekend where I measured and weighed and counted every single calorie that I ate. It was shocking to see that if I even missed 1 meal, which I do regularly, that I would be at a caloric deficit. Thus, it was basically impossible to gain weight, no matter how well I was doing at the gym with my workouts.

So I added 1 or 2 smoothies to my diet each day. That was the main reason I believe that I had this successful change in my body composition.

Smoothie Ingredients

I have 1 or 2 of these each day. It is a bunch of calories and perhaps 30-40 grams of protein.

½ cup soy milk
1 cup water
2-3 tbsp PBfit, a peanut butter powder
½ banana
handful of blueberries
½ tbsp chia seeds
½ tbsp ground flax seeds
1 tbsp olive oil
1 scroop collagen peptides
2 raw eggs

Events

Josh Weissman Party

I helped my celebrity chef friend Joshua Weissman host an event at his home! For his friends. It was great. We’re going to do it again sometime when his schedule calms down.

It was totally plug and play for him. I worked with his assistant so that all he and his wife had to do was show up. We made the RSVP, shared invitations, got snacks and drinks, and tidied up afterwards.

During the event, I did name tags and ran a round or two of introductions. Then helped to wind it down at the end. Everyone was super happy with how it turned out.

Private Mega-Authors NYC Event

I flew to New York City to host a private event for a group of extremely famous and successful authors. I’ll respect everyone’s privacy and not name anyone, except to say thanks to Nir Eyal for inviting me and flying me out and Adam Enbar for allowing me to crash at his place.

My major take-aways from this:

People like people who are passionate about things.
New York City is unmatched for its density of cool, talented people.
I found myself frustrated at times to travel cross-town. Sitting in traffic or even on the subway. Having a nice car and living in Austin, where everything is basically a maximum of 20 minutes away, has spoiled me!
Visiting NYC for 48 hours was so great. I should do it more. The flight wasn’t so bad thanks to watching movies on my Apple Vision Pro.

South by Southwest

Another busy week of SXSW. I had three big events.

My First Million Fan Meetup, with special guests Sam Parr and Neville Medhora. See my video about that. The host used my book so she had name tags and did a round of introductions. I was just a guest here, but I’m listing this because I’m proud of the video we made about it.

Internet Pipes Meetup with Steph Smith. My friend Steph Smith asked me to help and I think I was the MVP. I called in a favor to Chereen at Lodgewell to let us use her amazing downtown mansion. Then I did name tags, some small group introductions, and generally helped Steph with hosting duties. I even got to teach Steph in real-time how to use the party harmonica for crowd control at large events. Plus I managed a small team of paid helpers to support check-in and other logistics. And invited Max Reisinger to host his own meetup-within-a-meetup. He invited a bunch of interesting creators, which was cool.

AppSumo Panel Discussion. Nick Christensen invited me to be the panel moderator for an AppSumo event. I got the most compliments from this! I think it was so successful because I knew almost all the panelists. So I could joke with them or push them a little. And I did a lot of crowd work. I’m doing more and more crowd work at events to help make them more interesting, and less boring. Most panels are boring. This one was not.

Testimonials I received from the AppSumo event.

Conference Work in Houston

I was hired by Collin and the Digital Wildcatters team to help be the Master of Ceremonies for their EMPOWER 2024 conference in Houston. It was great and I learned so much! More notes coming soon, or just see my Tweet with take-aways.

Other Event Notes

I attended a Shopify Founders event that Ben and Ari, readers of my book, hosted in Austin. They’ve built a really cool events business using the framework from The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. Pretty neat to see.
At that event, I met an Austin woman in her mid-20s who has created a multi-million dollar skin care business entirely on TikTok shop. Hoping to get some cool tips from her to try selling my book on TikTok. My team is working through fulfillment and setup now using ShipBob, which is taking a while, but I hope it might be a neat experiment.
Nick Gillespie from Reason Foundation invited me to a private dinner. He did his best to manage a single-track conversation for 15+ people which is nearly impossible. What I thought was really cool was that after 20 minutes of this, the conversation naturally broke up into smaller groups and the energy levels were so high. I think because we’d all been waiting to talk to our neighbors. This was much better than having no structure at all. It was great to see Nick’s wife, Sara Rose Siskind. She’s so smart and funny.

Friends & Family

Sara and Sam Parr’s Austin going away party

Had nice hangs with Sameer & Kelly, Sam Parr & Sara’s going away party, gym hang with Zach Ware, YouTube brainstorms with Caroline Konstnar, Twitter ads with Fritz, late lunch and conference brainstorm with Monica Lim, and lots more.

JWeg’s Bachelor Party

I flew down to Mexico City to celebrate my friend Jonathan Wegener’s bachelor party. I loved meeting his friends and dropping in for a few days with a whole new social group. We did one or two things each day, plus had plenty of lovely meals.

I love Mexico City and enjoyed going back with friends. See my Mexico City tips and tricks here. One day I got to lead everyone on a super-fast museum tour. I also got Jonathan set up on the EcoBici bike share, like CitiBike in NYC, and I believe it was one of his favorite things. To ride bikes together with friends around a major metropolis is quite special.

On this trip I found a few new spots that I can recommend to others:

Visitor from Ukraine

I have an Instagram friend from Ukraine who visited America and Texas for the first time. I brought her to Austin and showed her around for an afternoon. Seeing the city and Texas through her eyes was so cool!

At one point I told her, “This isn’t really a nice part of town actually…” and she said, “What do you mean! We’re in America, all of this looks so nice to me.” That was neat. I also took her to Waffle House and Barton Springs Pool.

Conclusion

I can’t believe how many events I did in March! Wow. It’s especially wild because I was so burnt out after all my events in early December… I think I only hosted 1 or 2 things in all of mid-Dec to late Feb.

This is the second time I’ve posted my monthly recap on my blog. Last month’s writeup is right here.

Does anyone read these?? Leave me a comment below, or send me an email.

March 2024 Life Recap