What's on Your Mind: Gratitude & Thanksgiving

[00:00:00] Hey Justin, how are you? Hey Ram, I'm doing well. I'm doing well. Happy Friday. Happy Friday. Happy pre Thanksgiving. I don't think we're going to do a what's on your mind next week. So a good time to talk about Thanksgiving and gratitude. Indeed. Yeah. I'm excited. I love Thanksgiving. It's actually my favorite holiday.

Same. My favorite holiday as well, by the way, it's like by a long shot. What makes it your favorite holiday? I think a few things like number one our family gets together. I have siblings we're distributed. All over the place now, so it's hard for us to come together.

Thanksgiving is one of those holidays where most of us come together, sometimes all. My brother and I my younger brother and I play video games. We used to play Madden NFL. It's like the only time of the year I play a video game. We go non stop. We go at it. We're highly competitive. He kicks my ass, by the way, because he maintains his skills, he's much better [00:01:00] than me, but towards the end, I start to get competitive, that's one we might play chess, or poker, as a family, or, uh, my mom, she loves to cook, she loves to make pies, I love to eat them.

That's always good. My dad has a nice scotch collection. He likes to enjoy that too. So it's fun, we just have a great time, sharing, reminiscing stories. And I like the message of gratitude I think is key as well. We have a tradition where, During Thanksgiving go around the table and we share what we're grateful for.

I think that's part of it. But how about yourself? Why do you like Thanksgiving so much?

Today we are live and my son is home sick. So we're getting a real view. My son just threw up. So I'm grateful that I'm not sick yet, but I do need to attend to him for a second. So maybe you'll you'll, you got me covered for a sec. Life comes at [00:02:00] you fast sometimes, it's funny when I'm sick, one of the moments where I feel gratitude is when.

I'm coming back into health. There's this J curve when you're feeling all crummy, you're in bed, feel miserable. But when I feel my strength come back, I try to savor that period of gratitude for as long as I can. And then when I'm healthy, like I am now, I think back to those times to remind myself how lucky we are to have health, for those of us to have good health.

So just something I wanted to share. Gift giving ideas, because I know Black Friday is coming and Cyber Monday, and it's hard to shop for people that have everything in our lives. I like to think I'm a good gift giver, but I'm a slow, [00:03:00] deliberate gift giver. I think hard about it, then I find it and it clicks.

I'm going to give you all a few ideas for giving gifts for the mind, body, and soul. Alright one is this book by Will and Ariel Durant, like a power couple, that's called The Lessons of History. It's a very thin book, too, so you'll get good adherence on it, alright? First off, Will and Ariel Durant, also another book called The History of Philosophy.

It's a good primer survey of philosophy out there. And so they wrote an encyclopedic volume about history. It would take up, one of those shelves. And they summarized history into this thin little book called The Lessons of History. Now think about how audacious of a task that is. And it's one of my favorites because the chapters cover [00:04:00] Everything that matters and everything that's important and every sentence is dripping with insight and substance, like the density, the rate of learning per unit of time is very high and there are a lot of classic truths that they cover here.

 Table of contents you can see there. We've got history and the earth, biology and history, race and history, character and history, morals and history, religion and history, economics and history. They're covering, quite a bit of content. I'll read one or two sentences. So this is from biology and history.

A few sentences I underlined. One is, the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. And it goes on to elaborate that. There's a paragraph on them. The second is, the second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. They start to introduce, evolution. [00:05:00] Uh, anyway, it's a great, it's a great book.

History of Philosophy, it's also, Story of Philosophy by Will Durant is also great. Phenomenal as well. Other books on the investing side, I mentioned David Draymond. He wrote a book about contrarian non consensus investing. It's a really good book too. What Works on Wall Street is fantastic if you're interested in investing.

I put these two books more like in the, in the advanced bucket. They're not like introductory material, I would say, and they're accessible books, but you wouldn't want to start there is how I would look at it. This is. This is Dramon's Contrarian Investment Strategies. I spoke with a hedge fund manager actually about this book, a former hedge fund manager, last week.

And he had been to Columbia Business School, he'd read quite a few investment books, and they weren't quite, their strategies were not performing. And then he read that book, and they started performing. And a lot of it has to do with what's a consensus and what's expect, what [00:06:00] expectations are. And that's something I spend a lot of time, Trying to understand.

So that's a good book. Here's another one. This is Peter Atiyah's Outlive. It's a great book about longevity and wellness. Both Justin and I have read this book. We've incorporated quite a lot of the practices here. I interviewed Justin about his dexascan experience. I'm getting one myself. I'm doing advanced lipid testing.

I did a CAC score, so that's a great book and it introduces the idea of medicine 2. 0, and I think you should take control of your healthcare, you should take control of your medicine, you should go to your doctor informed and say, look, I want to look at these things. Options or procedures or I don't want to look at certain options and procedures.

So it's a great book. What else? So that's on the mind. Those are gifts for the mind, gifts for the [00:07:00] body. So I'll give you a low cost gift and an expensive gift. Okay. Low cost gift is the foam roller, 15. High impact. You can tuck it away in the corner and you can just do a roll on your back or on your legs and just iron out those knots.

Foam roller, gotta be one of the best. 100 purchases out there. So foam roller is a great gift for someone that has everything. Here's another one on the higher end side. Theragun. Okay. So there are different varieties of these and they're competitors to the Theragun. Theragun is considered the best brand and the best product.

And there are different variations. The most expensive is called the Theragun Elite. I think it's 600 bucks. It's going to be on sale. I'm presumed during Black Friday. So that's a really great gift. For someone that has everything as well, battery seems to last forever. I don't [00:08:00] remember charging.

I've had it for two years now. I keep using it. Battery hasn't died on me. Used it yesterday. I woke up with neck pain. I just rolled out of bed and I had a, literally a pain in my neck. I could not twist my neck to the left. I still have a little bit of that pain now. That's what happens, when you pass 40 years old.

Those are some those are some gift recommendations on the or the body. What else? A DEXA scan. I would recommend that as a gift. You can, it's going to cost somewhere between 100 to 250 or so out of pocket. It's probably in the lower end side of that. That's a great gift for, someone that has everything.

I doubt many people have had DEXA scans yet and, you can measure your bone density to test for any risk factors. You can measure visceral fat. There's some people that are skinny fat. They look like they're in great shape and in great health, but they might not be. And a DEXA scan can reveal that.

It's a low [00:09:00] radiation. And for those that are interested in the quantified self, that's a good gift. On that point, the WHOOP device. So the WHOOP device is something you put around your wrist, and like an Aura ring, which is one of their competitors, it measures heart rate variability, and it measures the quality of your sleep.

I found them both to be very accurate. I've had both. I've lost both. They're both very expensive. I'm really annoyed at that. My kids have destroyed them, as well as my Airpods, which I go through like TikToks, which is really annoying too. But those are great gifts also. I think the Whoop is, it's 400 if you buy it outright, or you can subscribe to it and you get real time monitoring and data.

You can work out with it. You can see, are you in a zone two cardio fitness zone, which is very important for longevity and the aura ring, and with this device, you can measure your sleep quality, I did a lot of experiments around sleep quality, and I measured [00:10:00] my subjective sense of sleep quality against the score, and I found that, They're very highly correlated.

So I like those two devices and it reminds the person that you're gifting them to about the importance of sleep and sleep quality, right? So sleep is the foundation for health and for learning and for mood. I like those two. All right. So I think I heard Justin coming back in here. All right. Is the poop mopped up or is that going to be a handle later?

Is it building a crust on the floor? Yeah, it's only partially cleaned. All right, good. Let me get you up to speed. I walked through gift recommendations for the mind, body, and soul. So I walked through some interesting books. Will Durant. This is awesome, Justin. You might want to get this for your kids.

Lessons of history. It's a stem. It's, this is a book written by Will and Ariel Durant. And these two, it's like a power couple, they passed away, but they actually wrote an [00:11:00] encyclopedic set on history, so they know what they're talking about. And they distilled that, they distilled history into this short little book here.

And it's organized by chapters like biology, and, Uh, economics, and government, and history, and socialism, and religion, and moral, it's really, it's highlighted in the same power couple wrote the history, the story of philosophy. The very deep, considered, thoughtful thinkers. Fascinating. Really cool.

I love book recommendations. So we went through a few of that. I shared my best, uh, recommendations for the body, Foam Roller, and then the Theragun. Theragun those are both great, and Dexascan. So those are, I think, what are you, so I didn't get, this is another great one, by the way, like a nice pair of Bose NC 700 heads are awesome.

I lose airpads like way too much. So I just use this [00:12:00] now. The audio quality is fantastic and it's got noise cancellation. Anyway, Justin, what do you like in terms of gift giving? For the person that has everything, that is tough. And that's how I feel every time the holidays roll around for my wife.

And it's really difficult. One thing that I now, I got to get on it now. You gotta, that's the challenge also when you do customize things is the lead time jumps up on you. I'm a big fan now of high quality printed photo books. So live a lot of digital. Light, right? And so you take photos all the time and then you've got like this great digital photo album and what the heck do you do with it?

Yeah, maybe every once in a while you get those moments from Google photos or Apple photos and you're like, [00:13:00] Oh, five years ago or something like that. Those are so touching and I love them. But they're ephemeral, right? It's just like here and then gone. And so I have now adopted the get a really high quality photo book.

I personally have liked, I believe the producer's called Milk. It's integrated into the, Apple photo application. And so you can create the album there, send it off for printing and it comes four to six, maybe more weeks later. And so you have a really high quality product. It takes a while though, if you want to put time into it and organize the photos and add captions and things like that.

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