Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

This week I am covering a few different topics.

In the wisdom section, I briefly discuss growth and why it is always uncomfortable.

In the health section of the week, I talk about caloric density, and why this factors into weight loss.

And lastly, in the wealthy section, I discuss what has been happening with Ethereum, and why its price keeps going up.

Enjoy the read and let's get into it.

You can find all past issues (including this one) here.

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🧠 Wisdom Focus Tip(s) of The Week: Growth is always uncomfortable

Do you remember growing pains when you were a kid? I certainly do. I remember laying in bed at night unable to fall asleep because my legs were in a constant state of mild pain/discomfort.

My body was in the process of growing, and that process was not a comfortable one for me.

Growth in general, especially growth in a philosophical way is also uncomfortable. The worst part about this discomfort is we often don't realize we are experiencing growth. We just feel the discomfort.

"Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger than we were before." - Alice Walker

A few things that I can remember being extremely painful, yet in hindsight was me growing.

• A messy breakup in my mid 20's
• Learning to only focus on what I can control, especially in late 2017, early 2018 when my fiance was in the first stages of recovering from a catastrophic stroke
• Losing hundreds of dollars when I first got back into Poker last year (I sucked but had no idea)

We mature with damage, not age, and often don't realize that the pain we are experiencing is teaching and molding us into stronger, more capable humans.

So, if you're struggling right now, just know that there is a very strong chance that you are growing, and that there is light at the end of that growth tunnel.

🥑 Health Thoughts of The Week: Caloric Density in food

I am going to speak for myself here but despite my general knowledge of health, nutrition, etc. I am still blown away by a certain kind of imagery that makes me completely step back and rethink food.

Yesterday I found a really cool comparison image around the concept of caloric density of foods that I want to share with you. It's from the Instagram account called MeowMeix and I recommend you check her page out for inspiration.

It covers the concept of caloric density or the number of calories contained within certain kinds of foods. A donut is an example of something that is calorically dense because it has a ton of calories for a small amount of food. Celery is an example of something that is not calorically dense at all since you get a lot of food relative to the number of calories.

As someone who struggles sometimes with the convenience of fast food and services like DoorDash, this image is really helpful for me.

The left image is an entire day's worth of calories in one meal. The nutrients involved are abysmal compared to the image on the right. On the right, we have three full meals, snacks, etc of nutrient-dense food that is not dense in calories.

A goal of mine this year is to create systems that make eating healthy much easier for me. The MeowMeix Instagram account has already inspired/motivated me to get better about this, and I have a new shopping list.

Shopping list:

• glass mason jars for "overnight oats" and "salads in a jar"
• Glass Tupperware

Ethan Suplee discusses losing over 200 pounds and creating a sustainable and healthy lifestyle on the Joe Rogan Experience

Ethan Suplee is an actor and is most famous for being the massively overweight football player in "Remember The Titans."

Over the last twenty years he has struggled with his weight, but in the last five years has found a system that is sustainable for him and has allowed him to keep the weight off.

It's an amazing story, and I recommend you give it a listen if you're curious.

You can find a link to the episode here.

💲 Wealth/Crypto Thoughts of The Week: Ethereum price goes up...a lot

Ethereum broke $3,500 a coin this past week. Wow. To be honest, I did not expect the price to increase this quickly, but in many ways it makes sense.

I'll be explaining why this is happening later in this section, but first, some Ethereum news!

Visa CEO says payments giant is moving into crypto in a 'very big way.'

I used to get asked all the time "Can you even buy stuff with Crypto?"

The answer is obviously yes, but that wasn't always so obvious. These days many of you know that you can spend your crypto directly even if you don't really know how.

I'm also asked quite often "how long will you hold onto your crypto before you sell?" My answer is "until I don't have to anymore." Meaning, I will hold my crypto until I can easily spend my crypto on anything and everything.

Visa is working their mega-corporate asses off to be the payments network that bridges the mundane world with the crypto world.

Think of Visa as the network of payment channels connected to most merchants on the planet. In a few years, you will be able to swipe a Visa card connected to your ETH or BTC wallets and have it auto-magically spend your crypto to purchase whatever you were shopping for.

ETH Staking on Coinbase now works for me:

If you use Coinbase then you are likely on the ETH staking waitlist. I was too, until yesterday.

I tested staking ETH on Coinbase with about half an ETH and it works just fine.

For the large majority of you, if you choose to stake, I expect you will be using Coinbase to do so.

While you won't get the maximum % return if you stake with a centralized exchange like Coinbase, it is far, far easier to stake on Coinbase or Kraken than it is to set up your own staking validator.

In the future, I will cover other ways of staking, but I don't think my readers are quite "crypto-mature" enough of that right now.

Why the ETH price is going up so dramatically

There are quite a few factors all at play here, but the main reason the price has gone up so much comes down to two factors:

1. Speculation and anticipation of a July software upgrade
2. Increasing demand and decreasing supply of ETH

1) Speculation and anticipation of a July software upgrade

I'm talking about EIP-1559. This is the software upgrade that will start to remove a ton of ETH from the supply by burning a portion of the transaction fee of every single ETH transaction going forward.

I've been telling all of you about this for over a year now, and the rest of the world is starting to play catch up and realize this. Thus, many people are buying ETH like crazy.

2) Increasing demand and decreasing supply

I just mentioned that the demand for ETH is skyrocketing. The supply of ETH is not skyrocketing for several reasons.

When you stake ETH you are effectively removing that ETH from the pool of available ETH that can be bought. There are currently over 4 million ETH staked on ETH2 and none of that staked ETH can be sold for at least a year.

Over 10.5 million ETH is locked in DeFi (decentralized finance) and is not available for purchase.

This means that in the last year or so, about 10% of Ethereum's total supply is no longer available for purchase.

The demand for Ethereum has skyrocketed.

When a lot of people want something, and the supply is lowering, the only thing that can move is the price point.

So, ETH price goes up. ⬆

This will only become more dramatic once EIP-1559 goes into effect and starts removing ETH from the supply with every transaction.

In fact, some folks believe ETH is already well on its way to $10k.

Quote/Meme of the week:

More specifically, ETH will do to banks what digital music did to record stores.

In time, you will be able to be your own bank, and will not need to rely on others to manage or control your money.

Have a great week!

This concludes our issue this week, I hope it gave you some perspective or injected a little motivation into your life!

If it helped, let me know! I read every newsletter response I receive, and I absolutely love hearing from all of you. This newsletter is for you, so I need your help to make it as great as possible.

If you'd like to show me some love for writing all this free stuff, you can always buy me a coffee.

More Resources

I will be adding to this section over time as we find resources that will help you all.

• Check out the Wise Owl Store
• All Wise Healthy Wealthy Articles on Medium
• Start your own Sendfox Newsletter
• Free products to help you level up

Crypto Resources

The Bankless Podcast: This is a link to the bankless podcast on Spotify. Start from the very beginning and learn why I am so positive about the power of Crypto and Ethereum in particular. You can find the podcast easily on the internet, but I am linking to episode 1 on Spotify for your convenience.

Buy your first ETH or BTC:

• On Coinbase - this is the easiest starting place for the newest beginners
• On Gemini - Another great option founded by the Winklevoss brothers. They are based out of New York.
• On Kraken - Kraken has a bit of a harder user interface, but they already have ETH staking enabled with the push of a single button.

Earn interest on your crypto

• BlockFi - Currently, you can earn 6% interest on BTC, 5.25% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.6% on stable coins like USDC. Use the referral code b09f24fd to support the newsletter.

Other tools:

• Argent Wallet - This is the best mobile wallet for Ethereum, Defi, and all things on the Ethereum network, including staking. They even have plans to implement Layer 2 to remove network fees.
• Ethhub - this is a weekly newsletter that lists out all the interesting news, articles, and tweets that have happened in Crypto that week. It's free and awesome.
• Ethdashboard - A simple dashboard to look at various metrics in the ethereum space. I mainly use this as a quick tool to check ETH gas fees.
• Cointracker - this is one of the better tools for tracking all of your various crypto across all of the various wallets, exchanges, etc. You can also use them to do your crypto taxes each year.
• Metamask - this is a crypto wallet that you can access from your browser and allows you to easily interact with blockchain apps online.