Graduate devising sustainable future

Zach Weiss holds a snake plant. Photos submitted

By Tom Victoria

Zach Weiss is working toward a sustainable future for society. The recent college graduate is using his intellect and drive to find a way for people to use land that improves their lives.

“I want to build communities where they're based in permaculture,” he said. “There's food every year. You can interface with people that have farms or have your own farm and build a society where you are free to do more than just work because a lot of people in America are free to work, but then they go into jobs that may treat them well, but the power structure isn't democratic. Everyone loves democracy, but everyone doesn't like politics. So nobody gets into politics, but everyone has to work. And when work isn't democratic, then your life isn't democratic. You become more authoritarian in your own nature.”

Zach, 22, graduated with a degree in computer science with a minor in philosophy from Virginia Tech’s college of engineering. 

“I'm going to go into Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA),” he said. “Basically it's just agriculture, but it's using computers and it's using design. It's doing science with specific rooms, like a greenhouse is controlled environment agriculture. Using LEDs (light-emitting diodes) to grow plants is controlled environment agriculture. I want to push the manifold even more, use sensors, specifically built environments within and outside buildings. And I want to employ passive power generation to maintain these systems. So on a whole mountain watershed, you have bay systems down a river or a creek or whatever, down this watershed that generate electricity. And then through that they communicate with sensors throughout that watershed.”

Zach graduated from Virginia Tech this spring.

Zach also wants to utilize Wi-Fi signals.

“I have some ideas about wireless power charging,” he said. “So having a small device somewhere with a specific Wi-Fi signal for instance. You have a base station that generates electricity, has its own battery and it has an antenna where it can send signals. So we build a specific type of antenna that can charge through the Wi-Fi protocol, something that has low battery, that has really low power usage. So say for instance, you have a microcontroller that's sitting in a tree, that all it does is measure the color of the trees in some area. And then all you have to do to get a reading from that is you send it a Wi-Fi signal that has enough power to get a reading and then it sends it back.  Systems like that are able to be just thrown around into an environment to better understand what's happening.”

Zach cited examples of benefits from such systems.

“That way, we can grow specific types of plants within that watershed and build communities,” he said. “We can have, for instance, on that watershed, there's a chance that mudslides or landslides will happen during certain times of the year, but there's already people that have been living there for decades. You have these systems that are able to detect landslides within a minute of it.” 

Zach was inspired by a video about dealing with a similar problem in Europe.

“I have some ideas about how I want to go about it because there's this town in Norway where they have avalanches,” he said. “They started putting up fences. They had a snow sensor. There's some pretty cool stuff that I want to invent, that I've had some ideas for. So I'm really excited to use my computer science skills, which is essentially just critical thinking with computers. Using reason with computers and doing that with agriculture, because the way that we do agriculture, it's great for production. However, it's detrimental to the environment. So I want to at least do something there because I can't, with my power right now, advocate in the military to stop doing authoritarian things. That's not something I can do. So I'm just going to go into CEA and invent some stuff.”

Zach flexes while exploring the Nohoch Che’en Caves Branch Archeological Reserve.

Zach isn’t averse to starting his own business someday, but under the right conditions.

“It will probably be like a worker co-op,” he said. “I don't really like the idea of profiting. I just want to be able to have enough food to eat and accumulate stores of food. It wouldn't just be for me. It takes a lot more than just one person to run a farm. So this is something that I just think if everyone has food, if everyone has water, if everyone has enough clothes, if everyone has someplace to sleep, and if we had electricity, then that's all you really need. I feel like we can totally get this system built.”

Zach wants to explore other countries someday.

“I'm waiting to get out of America,” he said. “If I'm in Europe, then I can easily travel and then talk to all these different people in controlled environment, agriculture, learn a bunch from them, and then invent some stuff from what I learn. But that's just not happening yet. I'll probably do that in a few years.”

For now, he’s exploring America.

“This summer so far, I have gone on a road trip to the Rocky Mountains and Yellowstone Park,” he said. “I plan to be working at VT (Virginia Tech) for most of the summer while leaving for a few trips throughout the season. I am also looking to find land to begin a permaculture setup. I'll be starting a permaculture design course this summer at the same time that I'm doing work for the Plant Breeding Program at VT.”

“I keep a healthy diet. I don't eat as many processed foods.”

Zach also focuses on fitness as evidenced by an impressive physique.

”What I'll usually do is some form of chest and push or something like that one day,” he said. “And then I'll try to get legs in. If I'm going to be in the gym, I need to be hitting legs at least once a week. I'm trying to get a stronger deadlift, trying to get to the 1,000-pound club. I'm also trying to increase my bench as well. For one of those days, I'll either add on arms or for two of the days I'll add on arms. I do a core three days a week. And then depending on my week, I'll either go to four or five depending on what the schedule is.”

Zach said balance is the key to fitness.

“I try to keep three a week because it's good,” he said. “I need to rest. I've been thinking about what it means to rest compared to the gym, and that's where actually growing the muscles happens. Because if you go to the gym all the time, you're just going to break down your muscles and you're never going to rebuild them. So having a good balance is very important. But I've been working more on core, just like doing planks or something like that before my workouts. I always do warm-up for my workouts. It's just something to get my heart rate up.”

Zach also watches what he eats.

“I keep a healthy diet,” he said. “I don't eat as many processed foods. I'm very much on the stay away from stuff that has internationally recognized harmful materials in it. So I use this app called Yuka, where you scan the barcodes and it gives you the whole list of anything, of all the ingredients, and it says if any of them are hazardous. I don't have chips. I don't have any kind of crackers or anything like that because they have too much phosphate. I only have uncured meat. I don't have any pork or anything that has the artificial preservatives in it.”

Zach prefers organic food.

“I've really been working on trying to not consume as much processed food,” he said. “There are studies on this kind of stuff where if you have too much phosphate, you're going to have an autoimmune disease or you're more susceptible to get that. People die early because they eat processed foods or, especially, fast food. I don't eat fast food. I haven't eaten any kind of fast food from any of the big brands or chain restaurants for years because not only it makes me feel bad physically, but it's not good for you. So I just make my own food. I get the ingredients and then I make it.”

Zach pointed out the tie between unhealthy eating and weight gain.

“You can guarantee some basic outcomes from eating fast food,” he said. “You're going to feel full after you finish it. Obesity is a huge issue in American society. If you're overweight, your heart's going to fail. You're going to need to get someone else's heart. You're going to have to change your diet. You're going to have to change your lifestyle or you do surgery and maybe there's some sort of new heart technology out there. It's cybernetic. But there's a lot of evidence to show that if you're overweight, you're going to die early, which is unfortunate. That's why I'm trying to really, for myself, stay fit, stay healthy. I'm not trying to push myself too far. That's unreasonable because I like keeping a good physical fitness, but not going overboard with any unrealistic expectations for myself, especially strength-wise.”

Zach doesn’t just incorporate the gym into his fitness routine.

“On a typical day, I'll usually wake up and have coffee in the morning,” he said. “I'll hang out, just rest. I've been trying just walk as much as I can. I don't need to get in the car. I know it's only going to take five minutes to get there if I drive, but it takes me like 15, 10 minutes. I walked to school a lot. I'll try to get to the gym. If I get to the gym during the day, I'm usually there for an hour, hour-and-a-half. Then, I use a sauna. It's really good for you. Just don't overdo it. After that, I'll either go to the supermarket, get some food, come back home, clean myself, eat, relax, and then that's like on a day off, basically.”

Zach poses by a statue originally from the Pantheon in Rome while visiting London.

Physical fitness always was important to Zach.

“I did martial arts when I was younger, so self-defense, and then I did two years BJJ (Brazilian jiu-jitsu), which was fun,” he said. “I didn't join any sports teams in high school, but I was on the robotics team and I wanted to keep up my physical fitness. I had been wanting to go to the gym for a few years before I actually went. My parents wouldn't let me lift weights because if you lift weights when you're young, you kind of stay where you are. So I wasn't allowed to go to the gym until I was 14 or 15. I started going to the gym mainly because I wanted to basically just be strong. I wanted to have a good physically fit body by the time I was a senior in high school, and then I ended up doing that.”

Fitness runs in Zach’s family.

“I started a fitness account sophomore year and three years, I go from more scrawny to athletic build, getting strong, staying strong,” he said. “And I did it through physical fitness. My mom is a physical education teacher, so she taught me everything. And my dad, he has a long history. He's worked out a lot. He was in the military. He boxed. He had a weight set that I would use. He basically got me through the point where I couldn't really lift the bar. And then I was putting 45s on. He brought me all the way through. It's mainly just because I know that my family has instilled a good, healthy lifestyle in me. So I'm very grateful for that.”

Zach is committed to lifelong fitness.

“If we go to how our biology works, we evolved to walk, we evolved to move,” he said. “We didn't evolve to sit in at a desk every day of our lives and to drive a car to get there. If anything, we walked to the place where we produce value. So that was the basis for it. And then now, it's just we sit around all day and we just accumulate this fat. We eat too much food and we don't actually work that off or make any use of the energy. So that way it goes to the fat, because our bodies don't understand that we're living in a completely different environment than 300 years ago. I will probably, at the very least, be going on walks every day or something like that throughout the rest of my life. I'm going to keep on eating good food. I've already been growing my own food, but it's slow. I'm going to be trying my best to live a healthy, fit life.”

Zach stressed it’s vital to not become sedentary.

“If you have overweight people that go to the gym and they eat poorly, they're going to stay overweight, but at least their heart is working out,” he explained. “At least they're doing physical fitness, because there are big overweight people that are super strong. The world's strongest man is overweight. The difference between someone saying they're fat versus they're overweight or their BMI (body mass index) is too high, it really just depends on lifestyle. If the fat person is eating too much food and they're still going to the gym and they're strong, or they have crazy long endurance, then that's something that is at least acceptable.”

However, Zach said the opposite isn’t acceptable.

“If you're staying at home, you're living a sedentary life, you're emulating the value of gluttony,” he said. “That's obviously something that we should think of as unreasonable. Despite the rationality of what they used logically to get there reasonably, they're going to die early. So when I ever see body positive stuff, typically it's mainly about encouragement towards whatever goal you want to be. But obviously that comes with the idea that you have to be a certain level of physically fit in order to have a longer lifetime. If you eat too much and it starts affecting other things in your life, you can't go to your daughter's school play because you couldn't get out of the car fast enough or you couldn't stop eating at the dinner table, and then you missed the bus. If you're trying to have a better life, then I don't think there should be any shame. It's just a matter of time before each person can get to a level of fitness that they want. If someone's being gluttonous and they don't want to do any of this stuff, they don't want to get fit, people are going to be lazy, people are going to be fat, people are going to eat too much.”

Zach linked a negative mentality to poor health.

“When someone is really hateful, they're going to die early because hate induces stress,” he said. “You're going to have all these things that affect you because of the amount of stress that you have accumulated. If you're a hateful person, you're going to die early. If you're overweight for too long and you have bad lifestyle habits, you reap what you sow. You're going to die early because your heart's going to fail.”

The road to fitness isn’t easy.

“Two summers ago, I started dealing with pelvic floor pain,” Zach said about the muscles by the tailbone. “I had sharp pain in my ass for 13 weeks. I didn't really know what it was. I thought it was prostatitis, so I was taking back antibacterial or antibiotics for a while. I was bouncing around doctors as well. I ended up figuring out that I just needed physical therapy. So I've been dealing with that. I stopped going to therapy a few months ago just because I'm doing well on my own. I dealt a lot with chronic pain. It was really bad. It was a dark time, but that was two years ago, and I'm better now and still dealing with the residuals. But that's the thing, I'm still doing the power training or powerlifting to some extent. I'm still working out, still working some muscles that are a little tight and nerve endings that have been really clenched up. So I'm dealing with that.”

Along with good health, fitness brings other advantages such as increased strength for daily life and other types of workouts.

“I move my mattress and bed frame up on my own,” Zach said. “I'm holding stuff for my grandma or with people that need help. I don't need physical help from other people unless it's a bigger, more unmanageable task. I have a barbell in my house. I don't put weights on it. But what I will do is train it like a metal bo staff. So I have these metal stakes in the yard that I'll have set up and I have the metal bo staff or the metal barbell. I'm holding it like a wooden barbell or a wooden bo staff. And I'm training bo staff attacks. So using a weapon that's supposed to usually be wood, but it's metal. It's 45 pounds. And I'm like doing this, swinging it, moving it around really fast. If I have a wooden weapon, it's going to break some teeth. I can do some damage.”

He’s also better at other exercises.

“In a push-up contest between me and a bunch of people, I usually win,” Zach said.

Being an impressive physical specimen also brings a level of protection from would-be bullies who are intolerant of others’ differences.

“Being strong helps with intimidation,” Zach said. “Everyone looks at me when I'm in public. I swear everyone sees me because it's the red hair. Everyone has to make eye contact or something like that. But no one's ever going to be antagonistic to me. I did martial arts when I was younger, so I know self-defense. I'm not going to let anyone f**k with my friends like that or be horrible, even to a stranger. I don't really have many altercations because I don't drink, I don't go downtown, so I don't deal with drunk people.

He posts fitness content to inspire self-improvement in others.   

“I like posting good photos of myself and a lot of my followers end up getting inspired,” Zach said. “I think that is a great side effect, and I have also spent time doling out advice to anyone who asks. I can only lead by example, and I believe that a healthy life is a long life. If others truly are inspired by my posts then that is awesome.”

He wants his social media followers to interact with him and help build a better tomorrow.

“I've changed a lot of my content because I just want to make it more accessible,” Zach said. “I wish that my followers listen to me and they engage with me. I have a Ko-fi. You can send me money, buy me a coffee or buy me food, but if people want to pay me money, they should pay me so that I can make more YouTube videos. I can talk about things that are going to get us past where we are now, because what I want to do is build a society that doesn't need to have profit to live. I hope that my followers will engage with me, even if they disagree with me on topics that I talk about, because I think that they're very important that we discuss. And we don't stop having these conversations because it's either we have the conversations and we criticize our beliefs or we just let other people tell us our beliefs.”

He uses the platform to create food for thought.

“I'm going to record another video sometime soon,” Zach said. “It's my second episode of constructive criticism called logic and reason. Basically, the difference between logic and reason is logic is rationality, and reason is critical thinking, essentially. So you have logic, which is the framework of all of the ways that we develop language, the ways that we have arguments. And reason is looking at that logic and seeing if it holds up empirically, essentially. Is it reasonable that someone has this idea? Is it reasonable that someone's doing this? Is it reasonable that this argument is allowed to be not valid? Is it reasonable to allow this argument to be valid? Because if you're critical about someone's argument and then you realize that there's things they're doing to justify that argument that don't make sense in the real world, that it's unreasonable and it's not valid despite the logic being valid, because there's another layer.”

He explained how rationality is problematic.

“Rationality is dangerous because you can rationalize anything,” Zach said. “You can rationalize a horrible belief set or you can rationalize a good belief set, but neither of them could be founded in any kind of truth. So in order for things to actually be good, they have to be reasonable at the very least. So I'm going to talk about that to some extent. I'm kind of just going to brief on a bunch of topics and then give a thought experiment at the end. So I'm excited to do that. And I want to talk about more stuff in that series, but I'm kind of just going to focus on that, work on my YouTube channel, just make like a video a month or something like that.”

He also is considering delving into cultural propaganda.

“You're not immune to propaganda,” Zach said. “I always like seeing memes that are just absolute gibberish but are used as insane cultural commentary. I'm really thinking about doing a deep dive into this show. I see South Park as an anthology of American mythology. South Park is a depiction of American culture and American mythology from the eyes of the worst people in America. If you look at South Park at face value, these are all just shitty people doing stupid shit. But if you watch South Park as many times as I've seen it, you start to see, obviously, it's satire, but it's not just reaffirming satire. It's a very much let's look at every single argument that American hegemony is used to maintain it. Also, let's throw in mythology real quick because that's the whole framework. It all holds together because we have Christmas and we have Jesus and we have all of these different ways to view everything. It's so interesting. And I'm really looking forward to more YouTube videos.”

His hobby aligns with his career path.

“I have a hobby when it comes to growing cool plants, vines or stuff like that, and just growing cool plants in an environment,” Zach said. “But the job is growing any kind of crop. So I grew jalapenos and basil over last summer, and I had a lot of jalapenos that ended up growing. That was just to see if I could do it. I'm starting hydroponic strawberries. I've got some carrots. If I'm growing a crop, it needs a purpose for the most part. I'm going to be growing crops for the rest of my life. It's good because I'm hopefully going to be working at a farm this summer, so I'll be learning a lot about that. I'm going to get an apprenticeship, and then I can have some sort of knowledge about how farming happens on a large scale. And then I can use computers to build something similar.”

Zach spends quality time with his late buddy Ash Ketchum Weiss.

Another interest coincides with his fitness lifestyle.

“I started cooking for myself,” Zach said. “I eat so much. We're having dinner and I eat everything at dinner and then I'm still hungry later, so I will definitely start cooking my own stuff. I've gotten into baking, baking my own bread. My dad cooked. My mom baked. I make my own breakfast every day. I cook my own food because I like being creative with it. It's better than going to a restaurant, sitting down for 40 minutes and then paying money when I could pay three-fourths of that cost or two-thirds of that cost and then have three or four times as much food.”

He also recognizes problems inherent with the food service industry, making it unappealing to patronize. 

“I feel bad for service workers because their livelihood is only based on how well they can be affectionate towards people that believe that if they pay them, they can do whatever they want,” Zach said. “For the most part, service work is just assuming that people are going to be shitty because they have so much experience of people just being horrible, despite probably most times, a nonconfrontational approach. You're not really going to have a philosophical conversation with your server. You're going to want them to go put your food in to order and then stop talking to you because you want to talk to the people at the table. I obviously respect and I'm grateful for service workers. I just feel service workers are exploited, too, because the way that we started changing our economy after factory jobs started getting outsourced, the service industry was huge.”

He said the problem with the service industry is intrinsic.

“Who's the service industry serving?” Zach asked rhetorically. “Who are the people that the service industry is supposed to make money off of? What are all the stakeholders? Who are the stakeholders that McDonald's serves or who are the stakeholders that fancy high-end breakfast restaurant serves? There, it's obviously richer people. Poor people don't go out every day unless you go to McDonald's every day. I just feel bad because it's going to be rich people that go to service jobs and they feel like they can do whatever they want because the culture is like you pay money to a servant and then within bounds you treat them however you want. So that's not good.”

He stressed the importance of knowing where your food comes from.

“If you just joined a group that grows a lot of food, you don't have to do service work,” Zach said. “If you want to, you can work at a restaurant in your off time with the food that you grow. It's like when you have McDonald's. You're so disconnected from the source of the food. It's bad because if you're not connected to the source of the food, then you could just be getting fed slop. It's very important to be connected to the animal that you're going to kill or the animals that we factory farm.”

He said there would be two possible reactions to being exposed to what happens at factory farms.

“I feel like this would go two ways,” Zach said. “So if we were to basically just make images or videos of factory farms more available to people, they would end up either being completely desensitized to it and just be like, okay, this is how it is, whatever, or they wouldn't want it to happen. They wouldn't want to see it at the very least. I don't know if any respect would be built for the animals being factory farmed, but I think that it would either be I don't want to see it or I don't want to hear it, or, yeah, that's fine. I'm just going to scroll past it. Factory farming food is fine as long as the animals aren't given much knowledge, because knowledge is suffering. So you keep them blissful and hopefully they have quick deaths. We should totally reduce the amount of food that we eat, just as a whole, because people are fat, so we don't need to eat as much as we are.”

He said technology needs to be applied the correct way to agriculture.

“We need to look back to a lot of indigenous roots, how people in the past grew,” Zach said. “Technology is great. It's like a good springboard to get an idea to work, because technology essentially is magic to some extent, depends on how it's used. It's important that we use technology the right ways and not just use technology as a whole as a solution, because that's not how it works.”

He said the best way to improve how things are done is broad cultural change.

“We know that media is a good instiller of beliefs and minds,” Zach said. “What else can do that? Social media has a way to interact with people and change their beliefs. Religion has a way to interact with people and change their beliefs. Schools have a way to interact with people and change their beliefs. Family has a way to do that as well. So I think, honestly, a religion would probably be the best way to go about it, because you need people to go from rationalism to reason. I'm trying to figure out a good word to go from rationalism to reasonability, but that doesn't sound good. Like reasonalism, that doesn't sound good.”

He theorizes religion being the effective tool to get the message across.

“A new type of religion needs to be set up in order to get to a point where people start realizing their quality of life,” he said. “Why do we have a quality of life that is much higher in America or Western countries than in other parts of the world? What brought us there? Why are Third World countries slums? And they feel like they're only a few decades away from a previous war or something like that? There are a lot of spots, a lot of places in the world that have literally had coups and wars injected into them by outside powers, outside Western influence, especially the CIA, will start coups. The colonization of Africa and Southeast Asia, that's a whole thing. There's a reason why quality of life is way different, because all of the value left those countries and came to the Western world.”

He explained how a new religion would differ from existing ones.

“This religion wouldn't be, oh, boo-hoo, we feel really bad, you Third World countries,” Zach said. “It's no, how about we just develop a society that is actually ready to go to space, to actually build colonies in space. But we can't go to Mars without learning how and accepting the realities of climate change and how we can change that and better engineer our planet to it. The logical conclusion of CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture) is planet geoengineering. It's like taking an atmosphere system and then engineering it in a different way that works with an environmental system.”

“You have to see it through or you're never going to finish anything in your life.”

He explained how a new religion could pull from excisting faiths.

“If we adapt Christianity, we take the Abrahamic religions, we take all the good stuff from there,” he said. “And then we're just like, hey, we're going to write down all of these proofs for why these good things from the Abrahamic religions are good, and then set up basically like a manual to how to critically think, and then establish some sort of ration, some reasonability God or something that allows people to look to as a set of ideals. And it's very open about that. So we're not just saying that there is this God that exists, but we have this idea of a God that exists, that we can manifest in ourselves to allow us to look at how people say they have, if they're Christian, they have a personal relationship with Jesus, something like that. And that's kind of the idea that I'm talking, but ideas are tools. We use ideas in a way to manipulate people, we can use ideas in a way to help people.”

He said the key is opposite to what some religions teach.

“I think humans, because we have the ability to change our environment and because we have the ability to perceive reality, we're kind of gods,” Zach said. “We'll never be a perfect God, but perfection doesn't exist. That's going to be one of the main things. You can never be perfect. You will never attain an unattainable thing. And to try to be unattainable, that's a contradiction, and that allows you to believe anything. So when we have a religion that's based on reason, then it's constantly going to change. It's not going to be objective. It's not going to be objectively true that certain facts exist. It's going to be objectively true that what exists has to be critically attacked. If you believe contradictions, then you're going to carry out actions that may not be reasonable. So in order to help each other out, you should criticize each other, but while also knowing that you're just trying to be as reasonable as possible. And reasonability also entails the idea of you're building each other up. Reason has a way to make things true.”

He stressed reason over rationalization.

“What's true is that human society has only existed for this long because we've built societies, because we've had civilization, because we've grown agriculture, and we stopped basically running each other out of territory because we were hunter-gatherers,” Zach said. “Once we started settling down and building things and producing plants, crops, animals and just different types of culture, that made us happier. That is what brought us further. That is what helped us survive and grow more. What doesn't help us survive and grow more is war. Because war inherently destroys and kills people for any reason. It doesn't matter. All you have to do is rationalize, which is why rationalization is arbitrary without reason. So this religion would instill an ideal of reason, because you're never going to get to the point where you have perfect reason. You can be critical of one thing and critical of another thing, and then someone can be critical of your criticism, so it's going to be a lot of conversations. But honestly, it's better than a preacher going up and feeding everyone's fears and then telling them that all they need is God, and God's going to get them to their salvation.”

He said the concept of morality should be viewed differently.

“I don't like the idea that human morality has never changed and this is the best way to live because different societies live different ways,” Zach said. “If you're going to build up a society, there has to be some things that are going to help build a society. There have always been things that have been detrimental to one person, but better for everyone else. But is that really good? Say, for instance, human sacrifice. It's one of the things that people bring up a lot. I'm not saying that human sacrifice is okay. I'm just saying that human sacrifice ends up allowing people to dispel paranoia. There's a scapegoat for a reason. It's very historical. There's always going to be someone within a group that gets blamed for the bad things that happen. That's unreasonable.”

He said cooperation, not laying blame is the way to move forward.

“I don't like being a scapegoat,” Zach said. “I've been a scapegoat a few times before. It's never fun. So I don't think it's a good thing. I just think that it helps people get through their lives to have a scapegoat, to be like I'm not a bad person, they're a bad person. We're all going to agree that person is a bad person. We're all good in group out group bias. There shouldn't be an in group, out group bias because we're all experiencing beings, we're all going to see each other if we all share the same kind of knowledge. All the differences are our experience and our personal perceiving of that. So I feel like we're all very similar in that regard, especially our DNA. If the only thing that really separates us is our different point of view, then we're all pretty much the same. That's just like how the religion ends up working is that you have this idea of this constructive criticism, God, this reason, God, that will imbue itself within you through enough time, and then you work with other people that also have that allegiance to build a better society.”

“Just don’t give up. You have to keep on going.”

He keeps himself motivated to prevent being idle.

“I've been trying to do one thing a day other than eating and being active and keeping up my health,” Zach said. “I try to do one thing a day, whether that's making progress or just getting something done. I set up a Minecraft server in three hours and that's all I did. And I played Minecraft. I took a dorm room fan, and I turned it into a low voltage generator because I had never done that before. So I'm excited it ended up working, but it doesn't give out much voltage at all. But I wanted to get that done so then I can move on. I want to do something because I want to learn something, and then I do it. I learn it, and then I move on to the next thing. I'm like, how can I take this and apply it to the rest of my life? It was kind of instilled in me, my determination, because my dad was like, whatever you want to do, you have to finish it. You have to see it through or you're never going to finish anything in your life.”

He stressed the importance of not giving up.

“There's motivation and there's determination,” Zach said. “Determination is something that you do despite what the odds are. I can rationalize any reason to be motivated or to be determined. If I'm playing a video game and it seems like we're about to lose, I'm still going to play it till the end, because you never know. But sometimes, it's just in the cards you're going to lose. But it's that determination to finish. It's to do it. It's to get through it and move on. Even if it's bad. Just don't give up. You have to keep on going.”

He said that mindset especially applies to those with depression.

“That even goes for life,” Zach said. “If you feel like it's not worth it, then that's either an emotion or that's a rationalized thought, because suicide is crazy. It's one of those things where it's like people get stuck in their own thought loops, or they get manipulated by social media to feel even more depressed than they are. There's a computer term where it's a service that runs autonomously on a computer. It's called a daemon — D-A-E-M-O-N — but they're demons, basically, in all sense and purposes. An autonomous computer program is a demon. And you know what? Our brains are. They're carbon-based computers. So if there's a depression demon in my head telling me to kill myself, I need to recognize that that is a demon. That is not my own ego that is telling me to kill myself. So I have to go into my dreams and slay my demon, or I need to rationalize a way to fight that demon, or I need to have certain tools in my idea box to fight this sense of dread, this sense of you can't do it. The discussion about depression and mental health, a lot of it comes from an environment that people are in, and they see the chemical imbalance as evidence of the syndrome. So when doctors prescribe chemicals as a solution, that doesn't help. I mean, it does. It's a Band-Aid, and it's like medicine, but it doesn't change this environment, because then you start thinking that your environment that caused you to get the mental illness is fine. And then you keep taking the drugs, which is why I just don't want to work at a desk job.”

He said the answer is to create a new environment.

“I want to build this stuff so it’s mine or it’s a group’s, and we all work together to build a better world for ourselves.”

“I don't want to sell my soul to a government contracting company,” Zach said. “I don't want to work at a bank or insurance company or a finance company and build software. I want to build websites for people that don't have access to it. I want to run my own servers off the environmental system so that way I don't have to pay any money to a utility company to power my servers. I want to build this stuff so it's mine or it's a group's, and we all work together to build a better world for ourselves.”

He advised those wanting to start working out to do it in steps.

“If you're trying to get into fitness, you need to go on walks, you need to do push-ups, you need to do pull-ups,” Zach said. “You need to focus on what you want, what your fitness goals are. Initially, I was like I want to be functionally fit. It's very important to, if you want to get into physical fitness or if you want to get into making your life better, focus on functionally fit. Think of the things that you do already and think of how weak, how strong you are, and then move to do muscle weight, body weight movements and stuff like that. So starting small and then going up incrementally.”

He said fitness requires focusing on nutrition.

“Keeping a good protein majority in your diet, making sure that you're eating whole grains, or you're making your own food,” Zach said. “And if it's fried, make sure it's fried at home, or if it's fried, don't have too much of it. Avoid trans fats because that just clogs your arteries. It's also good to eat nuts, eat things that are going to be packed with nutrients, and then try to make things last. So if you're going to cook a soup or if you're going to have stew, or if you have, say you only have a few vegetables to get you through a week or something like that, don't just eat the vegetables, cook them into a broth and then use that broth to extend the life of those vitamins because you can have rice and stuff with that broth, and the rice has the nutrients and the carbs that you need. So starting out, small body weight movements.”

For those wanting to effect positive change, he espoused starting with developing interpersonal skills.

“Just be friendly, smile, talk to people,” Zach said. “You want to be someone that people want to talk to you about, or you want to talk to people about what they do. Because it's really important to make these material connections with people so that way you don't have these surface level interactions with others. If you want to make change, then you have to have conversations with people that don't just have this barrier in between. It's a barrier of communication because everyone's afraid to talk to each other to some extent. It's very important that you make connections with people who seem like they want to talk to you. But also it's scary to break the ice. It's scary to talk to people. But I think that it's very important to at least try to because I've had so many times when I'm talking to someone, it's just like a bad interaction. And you always can't let other people make you feel bad for just trying to talk to them.”

He recalled how communicating directly to people reaped rewards.

“I've been able to get two different internships just from talking to people in person,” Zach said. “I don't use LinkedIn. I did not use LinkedIn to get my jobs. I used the power of walking around on campus, petting this guy's dog. I was at Kroger, and I talked to some guy getting cat food, and I got another internship. So you do not need to go to these online shops to basically sell yourself for a job. So if you want to build things in your community, who builds the community? Who is there that actually makes the material changes? Who actually makes those decisions for the material changes? So if I live in a town and the town has certain zoning regulations, and I disagree with some of the zoning regulations, I should totally go to the town hall and talk to them and do that every week or every month or however often they do it. Because at some point, people are going to recognize you and then they're going to want to hear what you want to say because you're persistent. Persistence is very important. Determination is very important. Making sure that you are committed to a set of goals that you actually are able to achieve. Then you'll be able to make small, incremental gains towards your goals.”

He said each step needs to lead to eventual change.

“So if you're trying to make changes in your environment, you have to figure out what you actually want to change and then break down the steps to lead there,” Zach said. “It starts small and you have to have these aspirations to get there, you also have to envision yourself doing it, because if you can never envision yourself standing up there giving a speech, making arguments for a certain cause that you believe in, then you're never going to do it. If you don't think or imagine yourself as creating these connections with people who get you to that point where you have the support to push for legislation, then you're never going to do it.”

“Everyone should be critical of their beliefs.”

He said people should challenge themselves intellectually and physically.

“Everyone should be critical of their beliefs,” Zach said. “If an arbitrary person is attacked by gluttony or sloth, then they need help. I think that people need to prepare themselves for demons of their own machinations and of other's creation. The seven deadly sins are real within each of our minds. Each person needs to strengthen their will to combat these beasts, for the beasts are their own self. Only after combating the sins may one assimilate a deal with those demons. Hating yourself because you don't work out as much as you should or because you fall into traps over and over again will never get you out of that hole. Loving your ego and life will draw out your strength and willpower to supersede challenges. Never forget your comrades and community. Never forget that individuals with unimaginable power pit us against each other.”

He stressed people should question what they believe and why.

“Think before hating another because that hate may have been supplanted by an idea or argument that you don't actually agree with. Your beliefs are not always your own. Challenge your beliefs, understand their origin and logical conclusion.”

Zach’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zachweighsin/

Zach’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOneSnack