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The Observe and Rapport Newsletter
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A weekly guide of my favorite books, articles, products, and lifestyle habits.
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March 28th, 2024 | by Kyle Brennan
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Thought of the Week
The opposite of depression is expression.
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What comes out of you doesn't make you sick; what stays in there does.
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We're most drained when we're not expressing our real feelings and thoughts.
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Suppression takes up a ton of emotional energy, yet we continue to exert so much energy every day suppressing what we're truly feeling. We flood our system through work, vices, and exercise, or drown it out with constant media consumption.
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One of the greatest assets one can attain is the ability to pause and notice what you're feeling in the moment; when you're angry, hungry, tired, or lonely. If you can recognize your impulses and not immediately react, but pause and take note.
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I struggle with this myself. My tendency is to bottle up my feelings and distract myself. Lately, I've been trying to journal about my actions and inner sentiments. By applying a label to them, it's much easier to sort through the forest.
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Express what you feel/think and allow others to respond in their own way, knowing that it's ok even if they disagree.
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What I'm Reading
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I’ve long been fascinated by the science of longevity. If you know me well, you know I am always experimenting with the latest nutritional fads, life hacks, supplements, and exercise routines - searching for the magic bullet that is going to make me feel like the world’s most elite athletes.
Dr. Peter Attia has also long been on this quest himself. In his first book, Outlive, Dr. Attia outlines how our traditional approaches to treatment medicine have failed us. For too long, we have focused on treating diseases & illnesses when they occur which, by then, is often too late. In what he coins “Medicine 3.0” we must shift this model into early prevention and detection to help people live longer and better, reducing risk from all the “4 horsemen” as he calls them (cancer, metabolic syndrome, Alzheimers and brain degenerative diseases, and cardiovascular disease).
Medicine 3.0 consists of 5 broad domains.
1. Exercise
2. Nutrition
3. Sleep
4. Emotional health
5. Exogenous Modules (Drugs, hormones, or supplements)
The biggest takeaway from the book is exercise is the biggest lever on healthspan by far. One of my favorite parts of the book is what he calls the Centenarian Decathlon. Basically, what are the ten activities you want to be physically healthy enough to do when you are in your later years? Things like:
* Picking up a 30-pound child from a squatted position or a crib
* Getting up off the floor with one point of support
* Placing a 30-pound suitcase overhead
If we optimize our exercise, nutrition, sleep, and overall health early in our forties and fifties, we should have no problem doing these things well into our nineties.
The book was quite dense with science, but thankfully, Attia did a great job of making it easy to understand if you don’t have a PhD. I was already applying a lot of the advice from the book, but I learned a ton of new thins as well.
Overall, the book makes THE case for living life as healthy as you possibly can now. If we are healthy now, we can find all kinds of things in the future to look forward to doing.
Rating: 5 / 5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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I’ve had a number of people tell me to check out the Red Rising series. I found the first book at the library last week and took it as a sign to start it up.
I will say that fantasy/sci-fi is generally not my cup of tea. For some reason, my brain has an aversion to anything where the characters say “My Lord.”
I’d say Red Rising is a combination of The Hunger Games, The Martian, and Game of Thrones. It is a 2014 science fiction novel by American author Pierce Brown @piercebrownofficial , and the first book and eponym of a series.
The novel, set on a future planet Mars, follows lowborn miner Darrow as he infiltrates the ranks of the elite Golds. It has been seven hundred years since mankind colonized other planets.
The powerful ruling class of humans has installed a rigid and color-based social hierarchy, where the physically superior Golds at the top rule with an iron fist. Sixteen-year-old Darrow is a Red, a class of workers who toil beneath the surface of Mars mining helium-3 to terraform the planet and make it habitable. When he learns of their fate amongst the other races, he must form a rebellion to fight against those who trampled his family.
Although it’s not a book marketed as Young Adult, it brought me back to some of the books I enjoyed as a thirteen-year-old. I don’t know if I’ll finish the series, but that’s not meant to say I didn’t enjoy the book. I would like to read them, but unfortunately, I just don’t have the interest in this genre necessarily. Although that could change!
Rating: 4.0 / 5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Product I'm Using
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After reading Outlive by Peter Attia, I now know how important grip strength is as an indicator of longevity. Also, doing jiu-jitsu has made me realize that my forearm and hand strength needs some work. I bought this device from Amazon for $10 and have been using it periodically throughout the day whether I'm on a Zoom call or watching TV. It goes up to 132 lbs of resistance, so I got plenty of work to do until I'm crushing handshakes.
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Site I'm Checking Out
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BookPecker.com summarizes popular books into 5 key points. Five bullet points may not be enough information to learn and absorb new concepts, but just enough to pique your interest and help you decide if you want to read a particular book or not.
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Currently, there are 14,509 books summarized in 5 bullet points.
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What I'm Watching
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If you like Reacher, you'll love the new rendition of Road House, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Connor McGregor. The plot is literally straight out of a Jack Reacher novel. A former brute is called upon to clean up the riff-raff at a roadhouse bar in the Florida Keys. Chaos ensues.
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It's not winning any awards, but it was a great 90-minute movie for unadulterated entertainment.
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Quote I'm Pondering
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“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
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Keith and Kyle sit down to discuss social psychological concepts such as Collective Fallacy and Preference Falsification, Different approaches to building meaningful relationships with others, how to be financially responsible while also maximizing joy and fulfillment in life experiences, and the importance of spending quality time with loved ones.
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Books mentioned in this episode:
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Check Out My Amazon Favorites Bookstore
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Browse my favorite book selections hand-curated by me. I also earn commissions so if you buy anything, those earnings get reinvested right back into this fancy newsletter ;)
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Kyle's Published Work
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33 Life Lessons on My 33rd Birthday
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Thirty-three was a big one. Mostly because I became a dad. Our daughter was born on New Year’s Eve — a fitting arrival for a kid destined to reset everything. It’s been a beautiful, if slightly sleep-deprived blur ever since. I’ve only been “Dad” for less than ten months, but if I’m being honest, I’ve been preparing for the role for over …
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Depth Over Downloads: Why Spending Time with Books Still Matters
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Everyone wants faster information. But no one asks if faster information leads to better understanding — or a better life. In the age of AI and tweet-sized wisdom, we’ve confused information with transformation. But there’s a massive difference between knowing what a book says and being changed by it. The Delusion of Instant Learning In a recent interview, political journalist Ezra Klein admitted he once believed …
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The Jack Reacher Approach to Never Being Caught Off Guard
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There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, ‘Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything,’ and an optimist who says, ‘Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway.’ Either way, nothing happens.” —Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia I don’t read much fiction, but I’ve always been hooked on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. He’s not your typical …
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