Some hugely important conversations on Plant Yourself recently:
If you're fortunate enough to have savings, you've probably thought about how to invest them responsibly.
The standard answer is to stick your money into no-load mutual funds that track the market and leave it there for as long as possible. Low risk because of the diversification. Low fee because there's no genius managing your money, just an algorithm. And high return because over the long term, it's almost impossible to beat the market.
What could possibly be wrong with that?
Today's guest, Marco Vangelisti of Essential Knowledge for Transition, points out that all the bad things that are happening on the planet right now – habitat destruction, pollution, climate instability, oceanic dead zones, massive poverty and income inequality, social and political unrest, rising fascism – all funded in part or wholly by those very mutual funds.
If you're an ethical vegan, you might think that a portfolio that excludes Perdue, Dannon, and Tyson Farms would be in concert with your values. But if you're invested in mutual funds, with hundreds or thousands of companies' equities represented, you're what Vangelisti calls an “unaware and extractive” investor. Your capital returns are essentially theft, either from the earth's natural resources that have been commandeered by a private institution at the expense of the commons, or from exploited people (whether laborers or inhabitants of areas that are being exploited).
In our conversation, Marco shares the problems with mainstream investing, and offers several tiers of investment approaches that range from “aware” to “no harm” to “positive impact” to “regenerative.”
He also offers his perspective on risk, given the stock market's current untethering from reality and the historical crashes that have followed periods like the one we're living through now. As in, perhaps a strategy that maintains capital is actually less risky than all those mutual funds if the market is likely to crash within the next ten years.
And he gives specific suggestions for places to invest to reverse climate change, empower Black and minority entrepreneurs, and defund the war industry.
Listen or watch here: https://plantyourself.com/marco-vangelisti-pyp-421
Non-affiliate offer: I'm signed up for Marco's course on Aware and No-Harm Investing, and he's offered a 20% discount to Plant Yourself listeners, good through August 16, 2020. Go to EK4T.com/register and choose the TANHI course option, and enter the discount code PLANT in the bottom field.
Ryan Robinson, DDS, is a unicorn in the medical world: a dentist who helps people open up their airways and learn how to breathe properly.
Breathe properly? What are you talking about?, I hear you say. If I'm alive, then I must be breathing properly, right?
Not exactly. It turns out that one of the casualties of modern life is the shape of our skull and the corresponding size of our airways. For the past 300 years, since the advent of the industrial revolution, we've been eating softer food, robbing our tongues, jaws, and lips of sufficient exercise.
And those deficiencies have, in turn, affected the growth and structure of our upper and lower jaws. Basically, our jaws are smaller, and our mouths are smaller, and our nasal airways are pinched.
How might you know you have a breathing problem? If you snore when you sleep, check. If you clench or grind your teeth during sleep, check. If you breathe through your mouth, check.
And breathing affects how well we digest our food. It affects how well we sleep. It affects our body's perceived and actual levels of stress. It can give us clear or infected sinuses. Poor breathing can actually cause depression and anxiety that we'll never fix by therapizing since the conditions are rooting in physiology rather than psychology.
Ryan Robinson was an “ordinary” dentist, or “tooth mechanic” as he put it, until he discovered the field of airway health and completely changed his practice to focus on healthy airways.
In our conversation, we talk about the reasons for our modern breathing problems, the wide variety of health costs, and several approaches to treatment. Since I traveled to Delaware for a consultation, we talked about my mouth, nose, and airways in particular. You can see the video of my visit on the Plant Yourself blog.
Bad breathing is an epidemic in the modern world, one that is profound in its harms and almost completely unrecognized by the medical profession.
As a big fan of lifestyle medicine, I hope my platform can get the attention of some of the bigwigs at the American College of Lifestyle Medicine to make Breathing the 6th lifestyle pillar, after Nutrition, Exercise, Sleep, Stress management, and Social support. I hope you'll help in this mission, so that we can all begin to breathe just a little bit easier.
Listen or watch here: https://plantyourself.com/breathing-ryan-robinson-pyp-422/
If you want to tackle the stress in your life, this is the resource that will give you the tools to do it right. Glenn is a multi-repeat Plant Yourself guest, and a brilliant and caring instructor. He's a science guy (26 books written and counting), a martial arts instructor, and a sought-after stressproofing speaker and trainer in the high-pressure halls of corporate America.
And now he's sharing his body-based stressproofing program with the rest of us. If you have a body, and you live in 2020, this course is worth your time and consideration!
Read more and sign up here. (Not an affiliate link.)
To your health, happiness, and prosperity,
Howard
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