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In this episode, we explore:

• Poison

• Trying hard

• Instagram relationship advice

• Staying long enough to have an impact

• Developing taste

Let’s dive in!

Health

Poison Everywhere

A topic near and dear to me. I alternate between phases of caring about environmental contaminants and phases of not caring at all!

Now, I’m in a phase where I care minimally about everything health- and optimisation-related, but this is still a good piece on the poison everywhere around us.

Is the furniture I sit in every day made with harmful substances? I don’t know. Are my plates, pots, and pans safe to eat from? No clue. And if they aren’t, there’s no way for me to assert my rights or collect a single penny from some faceless factory in Cambodia. If you think there’s any kind of quality control, there’s zero — nothing is getting inspected. Every nine months it turns out my protein powder contains heavy metals. The border can’t even stop counterfeit Rolexes from getting through, and the bar for listing a product on Amazon is the floor. I am sorry to say that for consumers, the buck stops with no-one but you. And your position is totally helpless.

Two years ago, I kept seeing these ads on the NYC subway. It’s so crazy: in one of the wealthiest cities on the planet, babies eating from lead-contaminated glassware is so pervasive a problem that a private company has to step up to do basic quality control.

NYC babies are not the only ones silently getting their IQs nuked because of careless manufacturers. Afghan children probably have the catastrophically highest levels of blood lead — even in the diaspora abroad — because virtually all the manufacturers of traditional Afghan cookpots were using lead-contaminated metals. Even when this was found out, it took Amazon over a year to take down the listings for the damn things. The level of public harm is off-the-charts. Chances are you don’t own one of these, but when’s the last time you might have eaten in a restaurant that does?

My main issue is that the line between caring about this topic and using it as a new pet obsession that prevents you from doing so many things in life and robs you of peace of mind is actually very thin.

The problem is so overwhelming that you almost can’t engage it. There’s just too much stuff to check on your own. This is catnip for neurotic Type-As. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you try to fix it. And, in fairness, none of these hazards are big and likely enough on their own to warrant your deep-dive attention. It’s in aggregate that they’re impactful: in your life, most risk factors aren’t an issue at all, but there’s probably something that needs to be found out and fixed. The only solution is to delegate it to a third party that you can trust to do a really thorough job. Only a business with this as its core competency is capable of the breadth and depth required for this Herculean task.

This is becoming a big business with players like Yuka, Oasis, Tap Score and more.

If you want to go down this rabbit hole, you’ll like these: A Chemical Hunger and How Trustworthy Are Supplements?

Lastly, on the main target of this decade, seed oils:

Genetic evidence and trials suggest seed oils are not harmful: they don’t make people fat, they don’t cause inflammation, they don’t cause cardiovascular disease, and so on.

Given all of that, why are people worried about seed oils? Not for any good reasons. Most of the anti-seed oil hype has to do with feelings that they’re unnatural, that they’re prepared in bad or disgusting ways, and so on—not on the basis of any meaningful, clinically acceptable evidence. The best arguments are based on mechanistic reasoning, but mechanistic reasoning sets up a game of ‘he said, she said’ because proponents of replacing saturated fat with mono- and polyunsaturated fats, seed oils, whatever, also have their own technical, mechanistic arguments and the bulk of the causal evidence.

Wellness

On Trying, and Doing More

Good news. It seems like “trying hard” is becoming sexy again. It was one of the main themes of Marty Supreme. This piece encapsulates well the cultural shift at play here.

“The truth is, I’m in pursuit of greatness,” he said, during an acceptance speech last year.

In this way, pursuing your dreams is inherently vulnerable. Publicly trying is like being naked in front of a crowded room (at one point in the movie, Marty literally drops his pants at a party so a millionaire can smack his ass with a ping pong paddle, because the price of his humiliation is a ticket to Japan).

Whether you’re getting naked in front of someone else or putting yourself out there in pursuit of your dreams, this kind of confidence is inspiring and magnetic. It’s why I love Addison Rae.

Rae, who grew up in Louisiana, blew up filming short dance routines on TikTok in high school. When she started posting (up to eight videos a day), her peers rolled their eyes with a who does she think she is lilt. After she moved to LA and rebranded as a bubbly, rainbow-coloured baby Britney, she received further backlash for her hyper-curated new image.

“Everyone’s always like oh she’s trying too hard this, she’s trying too hard that—how about you try at all?” she cheerily quipped on a YouTube podcast. “We can tell you’re not!”

Let’s make nonchalance uncool, and caring too much great again.

The social faux-pas of caring too much is defined in the novel Martyr!:

“He felt a flash of familiar shame—his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much. He realized he was perhaps doing . . . The Thing, the overlooking thing, obsessing over something in a way that others felt to be smothering.”

Remember how Gwyneth Paltrow cried when she won her first Oscar at 26 and we all hated her for it? She was too good, she cared too much. She was a nepo baby and a gifted actress? We didn’t know what to do with that, so we made her a meme.

Yet, when Josh Safdie explained why he wanted Gwyneth to sign on to star in Marty Supreme, he said:

“Gwyneth, she’s got that dog in her, as the kids say.”

In this sense, the path to success is shaped like a horseshoe, in which what’s perceived as “too much” at the time can be seen as cool down the line. Obviously, this can’t be a motivation for going after your dreams (otherwise it’s not about your dreams, but something else, like popularity etc), but it’s an interesting potential byproduct that proves that, even when it doesn’t seem like it, trying IS sexy!

Pair with:

The only way to have more energy is to do more

— Simon Sarris

Better Thinking

Instagram is training you to leave people who love you

This is a fascinating one.

Right now, love is something that is mediated by a third presence, i.e. your social media feed. The “relationship discourse” people talk about is pure governance. The algorithm calibrates and observes affective fluctuations like longing and feeds back content that stabilizes you in that state until it hardens into identity. You are entrained into the conclusions.

How does the lack of Cognitive Security affect relationships? ent, attachment, and reverence can exist together. A mind subjected to constant short-form penetration loses attention and coherence, and becomes porous.

A porous mind cannot sustain love, because love demands the capacity to hold ambiguity without converting it into accusation, to endure friction without outsourcing interpretation to strangers. The feed dissolves that capacity, and it trains you to experience discomfort as evidence (that it is not working) and patience as self-betrayal.

The mechanism is banal and devastating. Stress weakens the prefrontal restraint that mediates impulse. The subject reaches for reels out of anesthesia. And anesthesia is precisely the state in which beliefs can be implanted without resistance. Repetition completes the work, while familiarity starts to replace truth. The second exposure does most of the damage; after that, the narrative no longer feels imposed, and it starts to feel self-generated. You stop saying “this is what I saw” and begin saying “this is how I see.”

This is why the algorithm becomes lethal to intimacy. When a relationship enters turbulence, the feed does not show you how to repair the relationship with loved ones. You won’t be seeing it on trending. Rather, it shows you how you need to break up. A single pause on content about “toxic men,” “bare minimum,” “emotional labor”, “over giving,” “choosing yourself,” etc is enough to initiate escalation. The system infers vulnerability and clusters content accordingly. Your partner is reclassified from person to problem.

Another essential piece of the equation is to understand where the LLMs you’re using every day were trained. It turns out they were trained on relationship advice subreddits that overwhelmingly promote ending the relationship.

Pair with: instagram is unchic

Instagram is addictive. If not because of its social feedback loop, because of the way it plays with the mechanical demands of our brains.

AI Updates

The Implementation Gap

I read this post this morning, and found it really correlated with what I see on the ground with our clients and in our pilots at Mirage Metrics.

Silicon Valley thinks AI agents are a $20/mo self-serve subscription.

Main Street is paying local agencies $10,000 just to turn them on.

Everyone assumes AI will be bought primarily online like Slack or Zoom. I think they are wrong.

Some of the biggest winners in the AI boom won't be the software vendors. It will be the humans installing it.

Here is the reality of SMBs right now:

• 54% lack internal AI expertise.
• 41% have data quality too poor for AI to even work.
• 41% already prefer buying AI through a local IT provider.

You cannot "1-click install" a genius AI into a messy CRM or a 15-year-old server. It will just execute the wrong tasks at the speed of light.

The AI software will be cheap and a lot will absolutely be bought online. Making it actually work for a messy, real-world business will be expensive.

Very bullish on the "Do It For Me" economy being back.

Real businesses are messy. Fragmented systems. Bad data. Exceptions everywhere. The gap between buying AI and deploying it is massive. The value won’t be only with who sells the model. It will sit with who makes it work.

• connect to the stack

• understand the workflow

• structure the data

• define what the system can actually do

You don’t drop AI into chaos and get leverage. A lot of the value will be captured by the companies that deploy, integrate, and operationalize. That gap is currently where most of the value is.

Pair with: Services: The New Software

The next $1T company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm.

Every founder building an AI tool is asking the same question: what happens when the next version of Claude makes my product a feature? They’re right to worry. If you sell the tool, you’re in a race against the model. But if you sell the work, every improvement in the model makes your service faster, cheaper, and harder to compete with. A company might spend $10K a year for QuickBooks and $120K on an accountant to close the books. The next legendary company will just close the books.

Intelligence vs Judgement

Writing code is mostly intelligence. Knowing what to build next is judgement.

Translating a spec into code, testing, debugging: the rules are complex but they are rules. Judgement is different. It requires experience and taste, instinct built on years of practice. Deciding which feature to build next, whether to take on tech debt, when to ship before it’s ready.

Startup Stuff

Staying Long Enough to Have an Impact

This is important and not said enough:

Career advice: Stay long enough to have an impact

I’m seeing many folks who exhibit the following pattern:

- Do a role for 12-18 months
- Change roles
- Repeat

They are “job optimizers”, constantly on the lookout for something better, almost from the moment they land in a new role. The purpose of their current role is to help them find their next role.

If this is you, stop. Take a breath. Embrace your current role. In fact, fall in love with it. Throw yourself into learning, building and having impact. You need at least 3-4 years at a company to have real impact. Have impact with measurable outcomes, and the next role will take care of itself. If you do great work at a good company, word will get out and you will never need to look for a job again. Plus, the joy and satisfaction of having meaningful impact is reward in and of itself.

Frank Slootman offers a few other reasons why employers see too many short-tenured jobs as a red flag.

In the words of Frank Slootman:

Avoid having a series of short-tenured jobs on your resume, especially if you can’t name specific accomplishments at each one. It is hard to lay real tracks at any workplace in just 12-to-18-month stints. You may be unhappy and frustrated in your current role, but try to stick around long enough to make something of it.

Several short tenures in a row also imply that you had poor judgement in choosing those roles or perhaps that you’re the kind of person who gets into chronic conflicts with management. One brief tenure will be seen as a fluke by future employers, but a series of them will be seen as a red flag. The shortest tenure I ever had was three years; all of my others were in the five-to-seven-year range.

No matter how fast a business tries to move, things take time. I see it every day at Mirage Metrics: deals take time, implementation takes time. You can’t have a serious impact in 12 months.

Pair with: Hire people who give a shit.

What I Read

White Collar Goes Blue

A working theory on the rights and reshaping of the professional laptop class.

AUTONOMY. CREATIVE OWNERSHIP. A SEAT AT THE TABLE. The right to say no, not like that, or not right now. Flexible schedules. Remote work. A title that keeps getting better. The expectation that your opinion shapes direction. The expectation that your resources scale with seniority.

These are among what I call luxury workers’ rights. They sit on top of human rights, civil rights, and workers’ rights. They’re the terms of a job meant to make work feel more meaningful and make you feel more valued. We typically associate them with white collar work and view them as moral principles, but they’ve always been a form of compensation for the scarcity of cognitive labor.

White collar work as we’ve known it is cognitive labor with a personhood premium—autonomy over the work itself and value attached to the person doing it. Cheap capital and high margins made it easy for companies who needed human intelligence to pay these premiums. Software’s surplus has been subsidizing our ego-scaffolding. But we’re facing the big shift now.

The early narrative was that AI would kill blue collar jobs first, but it turns out the real world is full of friction, and in the meantime, AI got a lot better at thinking. So it’s white collar work that’s exposed. AI is making intelligence abundant, and when the scarcity of anything drops, the premiums drop with it.

If you strip white collar jobs of their luxury rights, the line between blue and white collar gets a lot thinner. The professional laptop class is staring down its biggest reshaping and identity crisis since industrialization.

The lies I used to tell myself

A good piece.

Intuition is fake and rationality solves everything.

I used to be horribly judgmental of people who made decisions based on intuition, as in, “I just do what feels right.” And then I noticed that whenever I overrode my intuitions, I made terrible decisions. I hired the wrong people, started projects with the wrong people, dated the wrong people, ate food that made me feel bad, did forms of exercise I found unfun and injurious. I don’t have a satisfying theory for why this is, but I know what happens: When I shift from emotional intuition to a logical story about a decision, it’s much easier for my reasoning to get hijacked by plausible-sounding directives that turn out to be nonsense.

It took me a long time to learn this, and that might have something to do with my training in law and poker. Overriding intuition in favor of explicit reasoning makes sense in contexts that reward systematic rationality, where you will get separated from your money if you count on gut feelings. But most of life isn’t a closed system with enumerated rules and clear outcomes. If you try to explicitly name all the factors that make someone a good friend or co-founder, you might come up with some good indicators, but your crude map will also mislead you about the territory.

This is why “wisdom is knowledge that can’t be transmitted.” Wise people have navigational skill, not a long list of rules.

Pair with: The MindBody Prescription, Dr John E. Sarno

On Parenting

A few interesting stuff I saved recently:

• Scott Alexander’s parenting piece and his apparent lack of control at home

• On being authoritarian sometimes

• Millennials spend way more time with their children than past generations, men do way more tasks at home, and although it was believed that men's involvement would increase fertility, it actually seems to lead to the opposite effect (correlation is not causation, though!)

• The Blueprint for Raising Elite Kids: It Starts with You

Brain Food

Are You Developing Taste or Performing It?

Everyone is talking about taste these days.

This meme is a good description of what many call “taste”, maybe a bit outdated, but you get the idea.

This is a great piece on the topic.

Taste has become the most talked about quality in fashion right now.

The tastemaker is having a moment, and everyone wants to be one. Someone with niche expertise and point-of-view that can’t be bought. Podcasts are debating it, creators are defining it, entrepreneurs are paying a premium for it. And the entire internet is attempting to reconstruct Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s wardrobe in pursuit of it.

But it didn’t come from nowhere. Last year, a particular kind of fashion exhaustion set in. We saw it in our feeds, in our wardrobes, maybe even in ourselves. Everyone was looking the same, sounding the same, shopping the same. The algorithm served it and the market was ready to sell it. And somewhere along the way getting dressed stopped feeling like self-expression and started feeling like a performance.

Taste became the antidote, but the solution is starting to look a lot like the thing it was trying to solve. So how did we get here?

I find tools like Pinterest, Instagram and TikTok are making the taste question particularly interesting and complicated because you see many groups of people with the exact same “packaged taste”. Go to any popular coffee shop on a weekend, and if you watch people, you can almost certainly envision their For You page.

The same goes for reading lists, references, etc.

The resolution isn’t a reading list, or a set of references, or a more sophisticated version of consumerism. It’s the willingness to sit with the question before reaching for someone else’s answer. To make the wrong purchase and pay attention to why it was wrong. To admire Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s wardrobe without trying to replicate it - because admiration is where taste begins, and copying is where it ends.

The capsule wardrobe didn’t fail because the idea was wrong. It failed because it got separated from the most important word in the original premise: your wardrobe. The individual was removed from the equation before the equation was solved.

The taste movement is making the same move. The search for an original eye is being outsourced, and that’s the problem.

Tastemaker content doesn’t help you find your taste. It helps you perform someone else’s version of it. Yours is still waiting. It just needs space to surface.

Pair with: Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley.

Products make you feel something when you use them, and they make other people feel something about you.

Products are no longer just functional tools; they are emotional touchpoints. Increasingly, products are designed as vehicles of self-expression and social signaling, reflecting your values, lifestyle, and identity. Products with technology at their core are closer than ever to art.

If true, this also means that other players become critical to the ecosystem: artists, designers, creators, creative directors, media companies. And more questions inevitably arise:

Who are the kingmakers and gatekeepers of taste? What culture war will the greater focus on taste ignite? Does the city or culture a company is created in matter a lot more? Nobody owns “taste,” but enough people will certainly try.

What I’m Watching

Clavicular is What Nietzsche Warned Us About

Pair with: Similar things are happening on the women's side of the internet.

this is what happens when people remain unmarried in cities for too long and the same pattern reveals itself in men through looksmaxxing. as a species, our biological drive is to pair-bond and reproduce. when that drive is blocked or indefinitely delayed, it doesn’t disappear; it gets redirected.

we start seeing strange substitute behaviors: excessive grooming, hyper-fixation on self-improvement, and constant optimization. the brain has mating energy and anxiety that need somewhere to go, so instead of being expressed through bonding and reproduction, it gets funneled into endless “improvement” and the belief that this will be the final thing that fills the void and secures the love you're looking for but it ends up magnifying the core feelings of rejection and now it's also within yourself, the ultimate self betrayal.

Dirt Newfoundland

One of the best series on YouTube, by far.

The Tool of the Week

Some good perfumes

I’ve been geeking a bit over perfumes lately. Some good options here, here, here, here and here.

Quote I’m Pondering

Everyone wants to win until they realize how many losses it takes. Lock in.

— Scottie Pippen

EndNote

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Leave a comment

Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi

This is The Long Game, a newsletter about technology, operations, AI, building a company, health, wellness and the decisions that compound over years. More than 5,000 people read it.

If you want it in your inbox, you can subscribe here:

Subscribe now

In this episode, we explore:

• Fatigue

• Your unfaire advantage

• Vertical vs. General AI

• Sales learnings

Let’s dive in!

Health

Why fatigue is the optimal state of man.

If you’re a long-time reader you know what I think of “recovery” and “overtraining”. In short, you are probably very far from overtraining.

Over the last 4 weeks I could not train like I usually do, so I was way less “fatigued” than usual. I felt way worse.

This piece explains what is happening:

Look around. The modern man is fucking broken.

Hunched over keyboards like Quasimodo, drowning in Slack notifications, paralyzed by analysis.

Scared to approach the girl who makes his heart race.

Terrified his business will fail before he even starts.

Living in constant anxiety because his energy is spent in his own mind.

No force, no action, no making moves in the real world.

We’ve been chained to desks for 8 hours a day for the past 150 years, but the problem has reached critical mass in the last 40.

Since computers invaded every office in the 1980s, we’ve created a generation of men who’ve never known what it feels like to be properly worn down.

This is the problem: Your mind is holding you hostage, and exerting yourself physically is the key to unleash those shackles.

The solution is to keep yourself in a state of physical fatigue.

You’re hardwired for physical labor, not cubicle imprisonment.

When you systematically exhaust your body, something magical happens:

Your mind stops overthinking and starts executing.

• No more analysis paralysis about your business idea

• No more fear of rejection

• No more doom-scrolling and mental masturbation

• No more caring about politics, gossip, or Kim Kardashian’s latest surgery

You enter a state of pure action. Flow state on demand.

And I am going to give you the exact actions you can take to finally get the fuck out of your own head.

Of course, you can overdo it, and it will backfire, but roughly speaking I think for most us, more will be better :)

Pair with: Exercise as medicine for depressive symptoms?

Wellness

Use your undair advantage

For some reason, this post really hit a nerve and I kept thinking about it. It’s so obvious, but I think that many people are trying to make things harder than they should be for some weird reasons.

So here it is, maybe it will help you as well:

abuse your unfair advantage everywhere

everyone has it

> if you live in your mom's basement w no responsibilities, work 18 hr days
> if your know a guy who knows a guy, use that guy
> if your parents paid for ur college, invest your time in up-skilling urself

life isnt an even playing field

all the "winners" are not playing fair

to catch up you have to identify your unfair advantage

and abuse it

Think hard about any things you have that could help you achieve whatever you’re trying to achieve, and relentlessly use those resources.

No matter what it is, relationships, family, natural abilities, looks, money… Anything. Use the set of cards you were delt with.

Better Thinking

You will be OK

Should you be scared or optimistic related to the fast progress of AI?

Here’s a pessimistic outlook believing we’re headed toward an apocalypse:

A journalist asked me this year why I do what I do if I see unemployment on the horizon. I answered something about how it would be a shame to waste the opportunity on anything less important. Maybe I should have said that extraordinary times call for extraordinary effort.

If there are a few years left, I want to spend them fully, and this is what carries me through most days. I spend hours with my friends, I treat myself often, I work until I can’t string together a sentence. I try to bring others joy, I try to bring myself joy. I feel incredibly lonely still, and the days are often filled with wasted time and self-destructive rotting. I forgive myself, because there is no time to do otherwise.

There were many months where I would look at a leaf, or a building, or a light, and cry because I did not want the world with these things to end, and it seems like it may end. I don’t cry as much anymore, although I do still mourn.

This strikes me as really misguided, and typical of people in the AI bubble in San Francisco. Once you leave this bubble, you start to think that change—as fast as it may be—will actually take way more time than you think.

This is a good response to the doom perspective:

What I mean by "you will be OK" is:

1. A prediction: I believe the most likely outcome is that AI will lead to a vast improvement in the quality of lives for the vast majority of people, similar in scale to the improvement in our lives compared to pre industrial times. Moreover, I believe that, assuming they take care of their physical and mental health, and do not panic, many, probably most, young LessWrong people are well positioned to do very well, and both take advantage of AI as well as help shape it. But this is only one outcome of many.

2. A working hypothesis: I propose that even though there are multiple possible outcomes, including ones where you, I, and everyone, will very much not be OK, people should live their day to day under the hypothesis they will be OK. Not just because I think that is the most likely outcome, but also because, as I said, it is best not to dwell on the parts of the probability space that are outside your control. This was true for most people during the cold war regarding the possibility of a total nuclear war, and is true now.

I do not mean that you should be complacent! And as I said, this does not mean you should let governments, and companies, including my own, off the hook! There is a similar dynamic in climate change, where people get the sense that if they are not "maximally doomerish" about climate change and claim that it will destroy the world then they are being complacent and doing nothing. This is wrong, and seeing climate change as fatal is not just bad for one's mental health, and can have negative impact on your life decisions, but also can lead to wrong tradeoffs.

Pair with: An End to Doomerism

Pessimism sounds smart. Optimism sounds dumb. It’s no wonder, then, that pessimistic messages hit the headlines, and optimistic ones hardly get a middle-page snippet. It’s why doomsday thinkers get respect and accolades.

AI Updates

Vertical vs. General

Back on the general AI vs vertical solutions. A topic important to me because of our work at Mirage.

In the wake of Claude Cowork, this post is interesting:

Amjad is onto something most AI labs haven’t fully internalized yet.

I’ve spent the last year watching verticalized agent startups raise hundreds of millions only to get steamrolled by generic coding agents.

The pattern keeps repeating.

Legal AI agent? Claude Code can read statutes and draft contracts. Medical documentation? Coding agent with the right prompts handles it. Financial modeling? Same story.

The verticalized approach assumes domain expertise is the moat. But Sutton’s bitter lesson says the opposite. General methods that scale with compute always win.

What makes coding agents different is they have somthing no verticalized agent has. A universal interface to the world.

Code can call any API. Code can parse any document. Code can automate any workflow.

Every vertical agent is basically a worse version of a coding agent with guardrails.

The VC math here is BRUTAL.

Enterprise AI startups raised something like $8B in 2024 building bespoke solutions for healthcare claims processing, insurance underwriting, legal discovery.

Meanwhile Cursor hit $1B ARR in 36 months just letting developers write code faster.

And here’s where Amjad’s insight gets really interesting.

He’s right that program synthesis maps exactly to the bitter lesson. Search and learning. Those are Sutton’s two scalable methods.

What is a coding agent doing?

Searching the solution space of all possible programs. Learning from feedback loops. Executing and iterating.

Every handcrafted vertical agent is the equivalent of 1990s chess programs encoding grandmaster knowledge. They work until they don’t.

AlphaZero didn’t need chess theory. Claude Code doesn’t need to be trained on legal precedent.

Microsoft is catching up to this realization late. They built an empire of verticalized Copilots for Sales, Service, Finance.

Replit figured it out early. Give developers a general coding environment and let them build whatever they need.

The winners in AI infrastructure will be the ones who understood program synthesis was the endgame all along.

And here’s the other side:

The counter dynamic to the AI model doing everything is that, at least in enterprise, bridging the AI models’ capabilities to the customer’s environment still requires a tremendous amount of long tail work.

The gap between an AI agent working for 90% or 95% of the solution and 100% is usually about 10X more work than most realize.

Getting access to the enterprise data, connecting to the enterprise workflows, delivering the change management that employees need to adopt the technology, handling the regulatory and compliance requirements of that industry, and so on all require some degree of highly dedicated focus in a domain.

There’s a strong analogy to vertical SaaS here actually. One would have thought that horizontal technologies could solve all problems in SaaS. But in fact there are endless very large companies that just hyper focus on a single domain, because that level of specialization is valued by the enterprise.

We will likely see the same play out with AI Agents in the enterprise as well. And in fact these domains will be far larger than traditional software categories because the TAM isn’t software, it’s work to be done.

Startup Stuff

Sales Learnings

I read a post on X a few days ago, and it intrigued me:

If you’re like me, and you haven’t heard of many of these, I’ll share a brief overview of these. I think they can be very helpful if you’re doing b2b sales.

1) Dixon & Adamson, CEB study

Core finding: Relationship building is negatively correlated with winning complex deals.

What to understand:
The CEB research behind The Challenger Sale showed that buyers do not reward friendliness, responsiveness, or long relationships in complex B2B sales. They reward sellers who change how they think.

Top performers did three things:

• Taught the customer something non-obvious about their business

• Reframed the problem before proposing a solution

• Took control of the buying process

Sales implication:
If your pitch sounds like “Tell me about your challenges” you are already losing.
You win by saying “Here is the problem you are underestimating, and here is why it is costing you more than you think.”

Relationship follows insight, not the other way around.

2) Neil Rackham, 35,000 sales calls

Core finding: Features do not close deals. Implications do.

What to understand:
Rackham found that top performers almost never push product features. Instead, they:

• Ask implication questions that expand the cost of the problem

• Delay solution talk until the pain is fully quantified

Example:

• Bad: “Our AI automates document processing”

• Good: “What happens when one missing document delays a shipment by 48 hours?”

Sales implication:
If the buyer does not verbalize the consequences themselves, they will not act.
Your job is to make the cost of inaction feel operationally dangerous.

3) Kahneman & Tversky, 1979 Prospect Theory

Core finding: Losses are felt about twice as strongly as gains.

What to understand:
People do not buy to win. They buy to avoid loss.
A guaranteed small loss feels worse than a probabilistic larger gain feels good.

Sales implication:
Do not sell upside first. Sell downside.

• Not: “This will increase efficiency by 20%”

• But: “Every month this stays manual, you are leaking X in delays, errors, and rework”

The deal closes when doing nothing feels irresponsible.

4) Tversky & Kahneman, 1974 Anchoring

Core finding: The first number or frame anchors all future judgment.

What to understand:
Even arbitrary anchors distort perception. Once an anchor is set, all negotiation happens around it.

Sales implication:
Whoever frames the problem first controls the deal.
If procurement anchors on price before you anchor on cost, you lose.

Always anchor on:

• Total cost of the problem

• Scale of operational risk

• Strategic downside of delay

Only then discuss pricing.

5) Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993 Peak-End Rule

Core finding: People remember peaks and endings, not averages.

What to understand:
The buyer will not remember most meetings. They will remember:

• The most emotionally salient moment

• The final interaction before the decision

Sales implication:
Design the process.

• Create a sharp insight moment where the buyer says “I hadn’t thought of it that way”

• End with clarity, not discussion. Clear next step, clear framing, no ambiguity

A messy ending kills deals even if everything before was good.

6) Von Restorff, 1933 Isolation Effect

Core finding: The thing that is different is remembered.

What to understand:
When everything looks the same, nothing stands out. Novelty creates memory.

Sales implication:
If your pitch sounds like every vendor, you are invisible.
You must isolate one distinctive idea:

• A nonstandard metric

• A contrarian insight

• A unique deployment model

One sharp difference beats ten generic benefits.

7) Zajonc, 1968 Mere Exposure Effect

Core finding: Familiarity increases preference.

What to understand:
Repeated exposure creates comfort, even without persuasion.

Sales implication:
Deals die when you disappear.
Short, lightweight touchpoints matter more than long, heavy ones.
Slides, short notes, one-page memos, quick Looms. These build cognitive ease.

By the time they decide, you should feel familiar, not risky.

Pair with: How to Sell

6) Follow-up

Always follow up same-day. No excuses. Do not leave your follow-ups till tomorrow. Just get it done then and there, it shows you’re on top of things and the signalling value is super important, plus lags are the death of sales so you always want to take care of your end of things as quickly as is humanly possible.

Your follow-up should be short, gracious, and include a clear call to action for the agreed next step. For example, if you decided a follow-up call made sense, you want something along the lines of “You mentioned a call next Monday afternoon would be good; I’ll send an invite for 3.30 and just let me know if you’d prefer a different time.” etc.

Finally —follow up relentlessly. People drop off the radar even when the sales call went incredibly well, and it’s usually just because they’re busy, not because they hate you. I can’t tell you how many big deals I closed where I had to follow up >15 times to get the deal done. Be shameless here — you want to get a clear “no” or a clear “yes” or a clear “I’m doing XYZ and it will take me 5 days, follow up next week”. I usually followed up every 3 days or so, but people differ and the specifics matter here.

What I Read

Capital in the 22nd Century

A thought-provoking piece:

If AI is used to lock in a more stable world, or at least one in which ancestors can more fully control the wealth they leave to their descendants (let alone one in which they never die), the clock-resetting shocks could disappear. Assuming the rich do not become unprecedentedly philanthropic, a global and highly progressive tax on capital (or at least capital income) will then indeed be essentially the only way to prevent inequality from growing extreme. Without one, once AI renders capital a true substitute for labor, approximately everything will eventually belong to those who are wealthiest when the transition occurs, or their heirs. Or more precisely, it will belong to the subset of this group who save most and most invest with a view to maximizing long-run returns.

Pair with: This response

I’ve seen a lot of people misunderstand what we’re saying. Our claim is that in a world of full automation, inequality will skyrocket (in favor of capital holders).

People aren't thinking about the galaxies. The relative wealth differences in a thousand years—or a million—will be downstream of who owns the first dyson swarms and space ships. And space colonization isn't bottlenecked by people’s preference for human nannies and waiters.

So even if you can make 10 million dollars a year as a nanny in the post-abundance future, or get a 10 million dollar charity handout, Larry Page’s million cyborg heirs can own a galaxy each.

You might think this is fine! Why is inequality intrinsically bad, especially if absolute prosperity for everyone goes up? Fair enough, but to me quadrillion fold differences in wealth between humans seem hard to justify in a world where AIs are doing all the work anyways - these disparities in wealth are not incentivizing hard work or entrepreneurship or creativity, which is what we use to justify inequality today.

What I’ve Learned from Watching People Wait to Have Children

Sad but important topic:

Despite amazing innovations in fertility medicine, women who reach a certain age are forced to face an inconvenient truth: There is a biological window of fertility, and for safely bearing healthy children. (And men have one, too.)

But saying this out loud has somehow become taboo. Instead, young women and men are being comforted by the false premise that childbearing may be delayed without consequences. The science says differently. And while developments like egg-freezing and IVF have contributed mightily to extending fertility, they are also not the guarantees the public perceives them to be.

Pair with: How Did Having Babies Become Right-Wing?

You Cannot Destroy the Elite

Interesting take:

What do Madeleine Albright, the controversial US Secretary of State, and Václav Havel, the playwright and first president of the Czech Republic, have in common?

Both were born into elite Czech families in the 1930s. Albright, born Marie Jana Körbelová, was the daughter of a prominent diplomat who served as the Czech ambassador to Yugoslavia. Havel was the son of a wealthy real estate developer who owned the Lucerna Palace shopping complex. Following the communist coup in 1948, both families had their property confiscated by the state. Owing to his bourgeois background, Havel was branded a “class enemy” and could not pursue the education he wanted. He later spent time in prison as a political dissident. Albright would have likely faced the same fate had her family not fled to the US when the communists took over. (They had already fled the country once in 1939, before returning at the war’s end.)

Despite all this, Albright and Havel went on to achieve great success in their respective fields. Which illustrates an important point: you cannot destroy the elite. You can seize people’s property. You can round them up and put them in camps. You can even kill their family members. But sooner or later, they will regain their former status.

Pair with: The Disadvantage of an Elite Education

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated.

My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file

I’m more and more attracted by simplicity in work and life setups. Maybe it’s the side effect of entering in my 30s.

The biggest transition for me when I started college was learning to get organized. There was a point when I couldn’t just remember everything in my head. And having to constantly keep track of things was distracting me from whatever task I was doing at the moment.

So I tried various forms of todo lists, task trackers, and productivity apps. They were all discouraging because the things to do kept getting longer, and there were too many interrelated things like past meeting notes, calendar appointments, idea lists, and lab notebooks, which were all on different systems.

I gave up and started just tracking in a single text file and have been using it as my main productivity system for 14 years now. It is so essential to my work now, and has surprisingly scaled with a growing set of responsibilities, that I wanted to share this system. It’s been my secret weapon.

The IQ bell curve meme all over again!

Seed to Nowhere: Inside Morocco’s Scale-Up Trap

Great read for my Moroccan friends, or if you’re interested in the startup landscape in Morocco.

TL;DR

• Morocco’s funding “boom” is misleading. A record year on paper, but most of the capital went to three startups. Everyone else is still stuck at seed, and the capital ladder snaps the moment founders need a real Series A.

• Morocco can start startups, but it still can’t scale them. Growth money dries up fast, top teams leave to raise abroad, and the exit market is basically nonexistent. No exits → no liquidity → no recycled capital → no ecosystem.

• The talent base is thin where it matters. Too few builders, too many talkers, and an education pipeline that produces degrees, not product execution.

• High-friction operations, slow regulation, and a dormant diaspora drain momentum. Until Morocco fixes these fundamentals, it will remain “promising but not delivering.”

Pair with: Totally unrelated, but as Morocco becomes a touristic powerhouse, I find it useful to study the case of Vietnam and to understand that tourism will not lead to the GDP growth that we’re looking for. Vietnam’s GDP could top Thailand’s this year as growth accelerates

Vietnam is on course to surpass Thailand in nominal GDP as early as this year, with large-scale public works projects propelling rapid economic growth.

Vietnam’s real gross domestic product grew an estimated 8% or so in 2025, and Hanoi targets growth of over 10% in 2026 and beyond. Though some see this goal as overly ambitious, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh stressed that “double-digit growth is achievable” at an economic event in December.

If growth accelerates as planned, nominal GDP for Vietnam could reach the mid-$500 billion level in 2026 or 2027, surpassing Thailand and potentially becoming the third-largest economy in Southeast Asia after Indonesia and Singapore. Per capita GDP would exceed $5,000, approaching that of Indonesia.

Brain Food

Screentime for kids

When toddlers get iPads, does it change brain development?

A longitudinal study from Singapore says yes and shows links: accelerating visual and cognitive control networks early predicts later effects on decision making, and later increases in anxiety:

Background

Infant screen time is linked to many negative outcomes, including anxiety, but the underlying neural correlates and pathways remains understudied. We aimed to assess the directional association between infant screen time, development of brain network topology, decision-making behaviour and anxiety symptoms in adolescence.

Findings

Higher infant screen time was associated with a steeper decline in visual-cognitive control network integration from ages 4.5–7.5 years (β = −1.03 (−1.61, −0.46)), which mediated increased CGT deliberation time at age 8.5. Deliberation time, in turn, was associated with greater anxiety symptoms at age 13. A full serial mediation pathway was significant, linking infant screen time to later anxiety via accelerated brain network maturation and decision-making behaviour (β = 0.033 (0.002, 0.160)).

Interpretation

Higher infant screen time is linked to accelerated topological maturation of the visual and cognitive control networks, leading to prolonged decision latency and increased adolescent anxiety. Sensory processing impairment may underlie this novel neurodevelopmental pathway, highlighting a potential target for early intervention.

What I’m Watching

Break Into Frontier AI Research

Very interesting video for those looking to get into frontier AI research.

• Start with ML and deep learning courses. University or online both work. Learn undergrad-level math and revisit it as needed.

• Move quickly to reading papers. This builds a mental map of the field.

• Read papers efficiently. Abstract first, then jump to the core sections.

• To find related work, use citations. Go backwards via references and forward via papers that cite it.

• To start doing research, pick a paper with public code. Run it, tweak parameters, test new ideas.

• Research is about building on existing work, not reimplementing everything from scratch.

• Math matters, but scope depends on your role. Theoretical work needs deep math. Empirical work needs enough to understand what’s going on.

• Reach out to PhD students, professors, or paper authors for guidance or collaboration.

Terry Tao: “LLMs Are Simpler Than You Think – The Real Mystery Is Why They Work!”

Terence Tao says the math behind today’s LLMs is actually simple. Training and running them mostly uses linear algebra, matrix multiplication, and a bit of calculus, material an undergraduate can handle. We understand how to build and operate these models.

The real mystery is why they work so well on some tasks and fail on others, and why we cannot predict that in advance. We lack good rules for forecasting performance across tasks, so progress is largely empirical.

A key reason is the nature of real-world data. Pure noise is well understood, perfectly structured data is well understood, but natural text sits in between, partly structured and partly random. Mathematics for that middle regime is thin, similar to how physics struggles at meso-scales between atoms and continua.

The Tool of the Week

Creatine

Back full circle here. I’ve had a few weeks without training due to travelling and work. Completely lost the momentum and confirmed that the less you do, the more tired you are.

Retrying a few months of 10g of creatine monohydrate per day to see if I can witness any material impact on performance.

Additionally, the only supplements I can’t live without are electrolytes before training and magnesium before sleep.

Quote I’m Pondering

If we’re aiming to create works that are exceptional, most rules don’t apply. Average is nothing to aspire to.

The goal is not to fit in.

If anything, it’s to amplify the differences, the special characteristics unique to how you see the world.

Instead of sounding like others, value your own voice.

Develop it.

Cherish it.

As soon as a convention is established, the most interesting work would likely be the one that doesn’t follow it."

— Rick Rubin

Barcelona 🫶 - hit me up for a coffee if you’re in Barcelona ☕

EndNote

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Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi

This is The Long Game, a weekly newsletter about technology, operations, AI, building a company, health, wellness and the decisions that compound over years. More than 5,000 people read it every week.

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In this episode, we explore:

• Nucleus Genomics debacle

• Expectations

• Taking yourself seriously

• AI is Rewiring the Economy

• The hunger to be everything

Let’s dive in!

Health

What’s going on with Nucleus Genomics

A long investigative post came out about Nucleus Genomics, a startup that sells genetic testing and embryo selection services. The idea behind these services is simple: during IVF, you can choose the embryo with the lowest predicted risk of certain diseases, based on polygenic scores.

It’s a serious topic because it deals directly with future children.

The problem is that almost every part of Nucleus’s story shows signs of being unreliable.

First, the company’s marketing looks fabricated. Their website shows customer testimonials with timelines that are impossible based on when their product launched, and the photos appear to be stock images or AI-generated.

Some reviews even used faces of a different ancestry than the supposed reviewer, which matters because polygenic scores are highly sensitive to ancestry.

Then there’s the lawsuit. Nucleus is being sued by Genomic Prediction, a competitor, for allegedly stealing their trade secrets. According to the complaint, two employees left GP, deleted data, disabled security cameras, and transferred confidential documents to Nucleus. Whether all claims are true or not, it’s a major red flag.

But the biggest issue is scientific. Nucleus released a whitepaper claiming a new “AI breakthrough” for embryo selection. It turns out this whitepaper is almost a copy of a competitor’s earlier paper. Same methods, same logic, even some identical wording. And even that would be forgivable if the work were solid. Instead, the paper is full of obvious mistakes: incorrect medical codes, strange definitions of diseases, unexplained data processing steps, and what looks like training and testing on overlapping datasets, which invalidates the results.

Worse, earlier analyses by third parties had already shown that many of Nucleus’s polygenic scores didn’t work as advertised. In some cases, the performance implied by their reports was mathematically impossible based on the underlying data. They were often using polygenic scores built from only a handful of genetic variants, which cannot meaningfully predict risk for common diseases.

On top of that, their terms of service say their tests are “physician-ordered,” but then say no physician reviews the results. They also forbid New York residents from using the service, even though the company is based in New York and advertises there. This likely reflects regulatory constraints, but it also shows sloppy execution.

Why does this matter?

Because embryo selection is one of the highest-stakes products in the entire consumer health space. People are making decisions that will affect their children for life. If a company can’t produce honest marketing, reliable science, or clear legal compliance, you have to question everything else: how they handle genetic samples, how they validate their models, and how they communicate risk to parents who don’t have the tools to evaluate any of this themselves.

This is a very complicated space, and when a company promises cutting-edge genetics, the work has to stand up to scrutiny, which it clearly does not here. If you scratch the surface and find copied research, fake reviews, and basic scientific errors, the trust collapses. And without trust, nothing in this field works.

I personally think it will not end well for Nucleus Genomics and its founder, and I have had this impression for years already.

Pair with: Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection

Wellness

Expectations

Your weekly punchline:

a lot of suffering is rooted in the idea that your life should be something different than it is

It reminded me of this great piece:

The only way to counter that truth is going through life with purposely low expectations.

Don’t expect a lot of economic growth.

Don’t expect great investment returns.

Don’t expect a ton of innovation.

Don’t expect politics to improve.

Expect occasional catastrophes.

Be OK with things staying roughly the way they are right now, or worse. Because for most people the way things are right now is indistinguishable from magic relative to how things used to be.

Then any little improvements that happen to come along feel incredible. You appreciate them more. Low expectations don’t make you depressed – they do the opposite, making little gains feel amazing while bad news feels normal.

It’s not easy, because the knee-jerk way to set expectations is to anchor to what everyone else has right now. But imagine the tragedy of unbelievable progress throughout your life and enjoying none of it because you expected all of it.

Pair with: Expectations and reality

Two, understand how the expectation game is played. It’s a mental game, and it’s often a crazy and agonizing game, but it’s a game that everyone is forced to play, so you should be aware of the rules and strategies. It goes like this: You think you want progress, both for yourself and for the world. But most of the time that’s not actually what you want. You want to feel a gap between what you expected and what actually happened. And the expectation side of that equation is not only important, but often it’s more in your control than managing your circumstances.

Better Thinking

On Taking Yourself Seriously

Two lines stuck with me this week:

“In my experience of life across personal, professional, and open source, I’m amazed at how many people kind of wait for things to happen to them instead of going out and making things happen for them.” (source)

“The single greatest thing you can do for your sanity is to take life seriously. We live in a profoundly irony-poisoned society and you cut off 1/100th of what life can offer you by being a goofball. The jester may be near the king but he does not sit at the hand of the father.” (source)

Both describe the same thing in different ways.

A lot of people wait. They wait for direction, luck, or someone else’s decision. They don’t decide much on their own, and they don’t push.

They just hope something shifts. Nothing meaningful comes out of that.

The irony part is similar. If everything is a joke, you never have to risk anything. You don’t fail, but you also don’t build. You stay on the edge of your own life. You’re present, but not involved.

By pretending nothing is serious, a lot of people are actually preparing a soft landing in case it fails.

The people who move forward aren’t like this. They take their life seriously enough to choose a direction, and they take enough responsibility to actually act.

Most progress is just getting out of neutral and dropping the protective layer. That’s it.

Pair with: How to go great work

AI Updates

AI is Rewiring the Economy

This is a very good piece on how AI is reshaping the economy.

You either believe AI will displace jobs or you think its hype. I think that’s the wrong question. The right question is how does AI reshape the economy.

AI will force us to reconsider commerce, consumerism and the norms of our economy. We will enter a world where consumers buy less stuff, but with much higher conversion. Middle-income consumer populations will have less disposable income as their jobs come under pressure from AI. Meaning consumerism ceases to be the driver of economic growth.

This won’t happen overnight. We’re only just seeing the earliest signs.

This economic shift happens in three phases:

• First, AI commoditizes knowledge work, destroying consumer purchasing power.

• Second, human behavior shifts from consumption to goal-seeking as AI handles routine tasks.

• Third, new business models emerge that profit from human flourishing rather than human spending.

The “is it really taking jobs” is a bit of a lightening rod. But if you take at a minimum that junior level jobs are not appearing. This is worth your attention.

One line in the piece jumped out at me:

AI will reduce the cost of services like containers did to goods.

That’s the real story. Containerization made shipping almost free and rewired the entire global economy around consumerism. AI will do the same thing to knowledge work.

The author describes it clearly:

We’re about to remake the global supply chain of knowledge work.

The question then is what happens when the people who are the consumer class lose a big chunk of their income. He writes: “We created the perfect shopping platform as buying power begins to disappear.” That paradox is the interesting part. Perfect conversion, declining consumers.

Another line worth quoting: “Revenue comes from delivering outcomes, not selling stuff.” If services become cheap and abundant, the value isn’t in pushing more consumption. It’s in helping people achieve goals: health, education, money, and skills. This is where his idea of “Gross Domestic Flourishing” comes in. It isn’t idealistic. It’s an economic necessity.

If consumer spending collapses, companies either tie revenue to human outcomes or they die.

There’s a key point here: the next wave of AI companies will win by improving people’s lives in measurable ways. That’s the direction of travel, whether we like it or not. And if even part of this thesis is right, we’re heading into a world where the most valuable businesses are the ones that scale high-quality services and human capability, not consumption.

Pair with: AI will not make you rich

Let’s grant that generative AI is revolutionary (but also that, as is becoming increasingly clear, this particular tech is now already in an evolutionary stage). It will create a lot of value for the economy, and investors hope to capture some of it. When, who, and how depends on whether AI is the end of the ICT wave, or the beginning of a new one.

If AI had started a new wave, there would have been an extended period of uncertainty and experimentation. There would have been a population of early adopters experimenting with their own models. When thousands or millions of tinkerers use the tech to solve problems in entirely new ways, its uses proliferate. But because they are using models owned by the big AI companies, their ability to fully experiment is limited to what’s allowed by the incumbents, who have no desire to permit an extended challenge to the status quo.

This doesn’t mean AI can’t start the next technological revolution. It might, if experimentation becomes cheap, distributed and permissionless—like Wozniak cobbling together computers in his garage, Ford building his first internal combustion engine in his kitchen, or Trevithick building his high-pressure steam engine as soon as James Watt’s patents expired. When any would-be innovator can build and train an LLM on their laptop and put it to use in any way their imagination dictates, it might be the seed of the next big set of changes—something revolutionary rather than evolutionary. But until and unless that happens, there can be no irruption.

Also related: Companies that have adopted AI aren’t hiring fewer senior employees, but they have cut back on hiring junior ones.

Startup Stuff

Do too much

I liked re-reading this piece.

As a new founder, I’d often look at the CEOs of successful companies and wonder, “How do they do it?”

As Scale grows and as I learn on the job, I’ve come to realize that leaders of great organizations never just do it. They overdo it.

As a leader, you are the upper bound for how much anyone in your company will care. You need to do more, care more, attempt more than would seem reasonable. It will seem like overkill. But too much is the right amount.

This is true in big and small ways.

• What people say is overoptimism is just optimism.

• What people say is overcommunicating is just communicating.

• What people say is overdelivering is just delivering.

• What people say is micromanagement is just management.

• What people say is ruthless prioritization is just prioritization.

It reminded me of what Duolingo’s founder said on a podcast a few years ago:

Luis von Ahn: Yeah. I mean we’ve gone through a bunch of different org charts. I mean when we were from zero to call it 30 employees, org chart was very flat, as in I was managing everybody. And that was that. And maybe I took it a little too far, but I actually think for the first zero to N where N is around maybe 20 to 30 people, the best thing you can do as a CEO is be a micromanager. I actually believe that. When you are such a small company, usually you don’t quite yet have product market fit, you haven’t really figured everything out. You have one goal, get to product market fit. And I don’t think you should be in the business of coaching people for this or that. No, no. Just I think you should micromanage people to get to product market fit. I actually believe that. At some point, it really shifts even if you love micromanaging, which I love micromanaging, but I’ve learned not to do that anymore. Even if you love it, at some point you just can’t do it as well.

Pair with: What a CEO does

“A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.”

I asked, “Is that it?”

He replied that the CEO should delegate all other tasks to his or her team.

I’ve thought about that advice so often over the years. I evaluate CEOs on these three metrics all the time. I’ve learned that great CEOs can and often will do a lot more than these three things. And that is OK.

But I have also learned that if you cannot do these three things well, you will not be a great CEO.

It is almost 25 years since I got this advice. And now I am passing it on. It has served me very well over the years.

What I Read

the slow burn of becoming yourself

this is a great read. Highly recommend it.

the exhaustion of trying to belong.

Looking back, I think I understand why I felt so lost. I wanted to be like everybody else. I wanted to listen to whatever music my friends listened to. I wanted to wear whatever the pretty girls were wearing. I wanted to do cool things that can impress people. My questions weren’t “What do I truly enjoy?” but rather, “What would they want me to say?”

There’s something bone-deep exhausting about constantly shape-shifting for the sake of belonging. You become fluent in other people’s preferences, like an actor who’s learned every script but forgotten her own voice. You get good at the performance, but the performance never ends.

We mould ourselves for others because deep down, we crave love. We want to be seen, adored, chosen. It’s a deeply human instinct. But somewhere along the way, in the act of asking for love from the world, we begin carving off pieces of who we are. We offer up fragments of ourselves, hoping someone will say, “This is enough.”

And then one day, you realise: you’ve become a mosaic of other people’s expectations — but none of it feels right.

Pair with: Authenticity is a sham

the hunger to be everything.

Another great read, in a similar vein.

They told us we are lucky, to live in an era of endless doors; of infinite selves waiting to be summoned with a scroll, a post, or a step-by-step transformation.

But no one warned us of the disease it carries. Of how too much possibility can fray the edges of a person.

Our skin aches for mornings that begin with the light of dawn and not that of a screen. Before our feet touch the earth, our eyes have already wandered into someone else’s world. We didn’t notice when we stopped living and began watching others. We’ve become spectators of everyone and participants in nothing of our own.

We compare the raw underbellies of our own existence to another’s highlight reel. Our hopes now bloom from envy. Our bodies grow estranged.

And I have become a graveyard of personas. Restless in the presence of simple pleasures. Always terrified of settling. I used to think I was failing because I hadn’t arrived anywhere, but I’ve simply been lost in the contradiction of different maps, wandering too many paths.

I carry cities I’ll never walk and careers that died before a resume held their name. I mourn strangers I nearly loved; left behind in unread messages. Because what if, there’s someone else; gentler, funnier, easier, more aligned with me just one scroll further?

Pair with: Instagram is unchic and The Trouble with Optionality

For new graduates, working at a consulting firm creates optionality because of the broad exposures (to industries and companies) and skills these firms purportedly develop. Going to graduate school creates optionality by enabling more opportunities than a narrow professional trajectory can provide. Working at prestigious firms and developing social networks are similarly viewed as enabling more choices and more optionality. And of course, the more optionality, the better.

In contrast, the closing of doors and possibilities signals the loss of optionality. This language doesn’t only apply to career planning: Don’t be surprised to hear someone in finance talk about marriage as the death of optionality.

This emphasis on creating optionality can backfire in surprising ways. Instead of enabling young people to take on risks and make choices, acquiring options becomes habitual. You can never create enough option value—and the longer you spend acquiring options, the harder it is to stop.

Why the West was downzoned

Western cities used to allow dense building everywhere. Between 1890 and 1950, they mostly banned it. This “Great Downzoning” caused today’s housing shortages.

It didn’t happen because planners hated density. It happened because downzoning raised property values for suburban homeowners. Where it raised values, it passed. Where it lowered them, it failed.

Today, in big cities, strict zoning reduces property values. When owners can vote to add density, many choose to upzone.

Zoning wasn’t driven by ideals. It was driven by incentives. It will change for the same reason.

In 1890, most continental European cities allowed between five and ten storeys to be built anywhere. In the British Empire and the United States, the authorities generally imposed no height limits at all. Detailed fire safety rules had existed for centuries, but development control systems were otherwise highly permissive.

Pair with: Cities and Ambition

date someone who is interested in you

A good dating piece from the perspective of a woman. I think the dating space is completely messed up. I was lucky enough to get out of it just in time, but I’ve been studying it and reading a lot about it. I don’t think we can blame men or women as a whole; it makes no sense. However, I do believe some patterns of behavior are very unlikely to lead to something good.

This piece captures one of those patterns perfectly. She talks about giving people access to her inner world and mistaking their attention for actual understanding.

date someone who is genuinely interested in you. not just the surface-level fascination, not the curated version of you that smiles for pictures and keeps conversations light. i mean someone who slows down enough to notice what kind of silence you fall into when you’re tired, what song you hum without realizing, what time of day you seem to disappear into your thoughts. someone who pays attention not because they have to, but because knowing you feels like a privilege.

Pair with: How Dating Apps Contribute to the Demographic Crisis

Against the Odds, by James Dyson

I like to keep this book open on my laptop and read a few chapters here and there. Truly an exceptional tool to keep at hand for any founder.

On perseverance:

Life is a mountain of solvable problems, and I found that the more problems I solved, the more people told me I was wrong to try. Everyone said it couldn’t be done. Everyone said the big companies would crush us, that we didn’t understand manufacturing, that no one needed another vacuum cleaner. But the truth is simple: if you believe in an idea, you must be prepared to back it to the hilt. You must be willing to look foolish, to be wrong, to start again, and again, and again. The real failure would have been to stop.

On why being an outsider is an advantage:

What I had going for me was precisely what everyone assumed was my weakness: I knew nothing. I had no preconceptions about how a vacuum cleaner ‘ought’ to work. I wasn’t trained in the industry’s traditions, which made it easier to question them. Expertise blinds. Inexperience, combined with curiosity, lets you ask the questions experts no longer ask. Most breakthroughs begin with someone naïve enough to wonder why everyone else accepts the status quo.

On how long it really takes;

People see the finished product and call it an overnight success. They don’t see the 5,127 prototypes, the nights I thought the whole thing was collapsing, the months where I couldn’t pay myself a salary, the years when absolutely no one believed what I was building was possible. Innovation looks glamorous only in retrospect. At the time, it is a long stretch of disappointment punctuated by the rare and precious moment when something finally works.

Brain Food

Mediterranean people vs Northern People

This is a topic that keeps coming back: why some cultures seem more laid back than others. I found this answer original and probably correct (spoiler alert: it’s not the weather.)

Mediterranean people, generally speaking, just want to have fun.

It’s a Northern European phenomenon… directly attributed to Protestantism.. that prioritized work, structure, and committee governance over leisure. That mentality then transferred itself to the North American colonies and became deeply embedded in the American psyche.

This cultural package ultimately led to differences in institutions, education systems, trust in impersonal cooperation, and the timing and depth of industrialization. This is one of the important reasons the US became the global economic hegemon and why Northern European countries, in aggregate, are more productive than the southern ones. It has little to do with intelligence or sophistication and much more to do with cultural orientation toward work versus living.

You see this clearly in parenting.

In places like Greece, Spain, and southern Italy, you’ll often see adults out at 10 or 11pm on the plaza or at a restaurant, genuinely enjoying themselves while their kids run around playing in the background… and toddlers literally passed out on a bench, a chair, or in a stroller nearby.

Meanwhile, Americans and many Northern and Western Europeans put their children to bed promptly within a defined bedtime window, because the next day is structured, scheduled, and built around order, routine, and getting up on time.

One culture allows the present moment to stretch. The other organizes the present around the needs of tomorrow.

It’s all about “what’s next?” versus “experience now.”

That distinction explains a significant part… more than many people care to acknowledge… of the differences in productivity, power, and modern life in the West.

Pair with: Mediterráneo moral.

What I’m Watching

Barcelona’s Map, Explained

Pair with: 5 Big Things That Cities Could Learn from Barcelona

Pay the Price

Pair with: Discomfort is the price you pay for a fulfilling life

The Tool of the Week

Some brands I like

This, this, this, this and this. If you need ideas for the end-of-year season!

Quote I’m Pondering

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now

— Alan Watts

EndNote

Thanks for reading,

If you like The Long Game, please share it or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it!

You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Also, let me know what you think by leaving a comment!

Leave a comment

Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi

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This is The Long Game, a weekly newsletter about technology, operations, AI, building a company, health, wellness and the decisions that compound over years. More than 5,000 people read it every week.

If you want it in your inbox, you can subscribe here:

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In this episode, we explore:

• Petter Attia: grifter or longevity visionary?

• Be the guy

• Smart people believing stupid things

• AI investment thesis

• Earth AI

Let’s dive in!

Health

Peter Attia: Grifter or Longevity Visionary?

A lot of people are asking whether Peter Attia is a grifter or whether he’s actually pushing useful ideas about longevity. The truth is more boring and more human. Attia is rigorous, smart, and serious about the science. He’s mainly pushing exercise, muscle, strength, and metabolic health. These are solid fundamentals. He is also selling the products he believes in, which can lead to some questionable situations, especially when you don’t agree with his underlying belief.

Because Attia has become so invested in increasing his personal protein intake he has invested in a protein bar company (David) and a venison jerky company (Maui Nui).

Does this make him a grifter or a charlatan?

I would still say no because he clearly believes strongly in what he is pushing, to the point where is constantly munching on venison jerky sticks, consuming up to 10 per day. Will he make money off the sales of David protein bars? Yes, but I’m convinced this was not his motivation for becoming involved with this company. I’m sure he got tired of venison jerky and was seeking more varied (and healthy?) sources of easy-to-access protein.

But I think an important point is that the pressure to constantly create content makes anyone drift into talking about things that may not matter as much. I’ve been in the longevity world for years. I’ve tried most of the practices. I’ve measured everything. I pushed hard on nutrition, zones, sleep, biomarkers, rapamycin debates, extreme protein targets, everything. And over time, something became obvious to me: the more obsessed I became with optimizing my health, the worse I felt.

There’s a point where vigilance turns into self-surveillance. When your attention is always pointed inward, small sensations turn into symptoms. Innocent aches become problems. You start triggering mind-body loops that didn’t exist before. The longevity crowd almost never talks about this psychological component. It’s the blind spot of the entire “optimize everything” movement.

That’s why I’ve shifted my own philosophy. I still think Attia has valuable lessons. I might disagree with him on a few things (like protein intake), but overall, he’s rigorous. He explains complexity well. He updates his views. He’s not a scammer.

But I’ve learned to take what’s useful and ignore the rest. Today, I focus on the basics. I strength train because I love it. I try to get better at something I enjoy instead of chasing every new protocol. I take a few supplements that I know actually help. And I avoid turning my entire life into an experiment.

The paradox is simple: the more you think about your health, the more fragile you can become. The less you obsess, the healthier you often feel (granted you have a good base of understanding your health).

The real “longevity hack” is not to become a full-time manager of your own biology, but to build a life where your health is supported almost automatically: moving often, training hard at something you enjoy, eating well enough, sleeping enough, and not drowning yourself in worry.

Attia’s core message on exercise, muscle, and cardiorespiratory fitness is correct. It’s worth paying attention to. But there’s a deeper layer that doesn’t get enough airtime. Longevity is also psychological. It’s about not turning yourself into a lifelong patient of your own thoughts.

That’s the part the biohacking world keeps missing, and the part I think we need to bring back into the conversation.

Pair with: I think more of the longevity space should focus on radical science and innovations like what my friend Kai Micah Mills is building, rather than on the healthspan narrative. We won’t live 150, 200 years without radical new science. Supplements and blueprint protocols will certainly not lead us there.

Wellness

Be the Guy

I loved this post.

Be the guy.

If you want to live an extraordinary life, you have to be the guy.

Be the guy to make everything happen. Plan the nights out, book the trips. Get the first round of drinks. Send shots to the girls table. Crack jokes. Put everyone in a good mood. Lead by example. Lift all tides.

Life is what you make it & it goes best for the people who play the leading role in making it special.

Pair with this (monthly reminder):

“The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.”

Better Thinking

Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

This is an excellent piece on why so many smart people can believe stupid things.

Smart people can fall into strong biases. They use their intelligence to defend beliefs that fit their identity or group, and this makes their errors more elaborate and harder to see. Studies show that the highest-scoring individuals on reasoning tests are often the most biased on political questions.

Human thinking is shaped by social goals like belonging and status. This leads people to build complex justifications for beliefs that feel right to them. Elite institutions strengthen this pattern by training people to argue persuasively rather than seek truth.

Learning about logic or biases often isn’t enough, because people apply those tools selectively. The traits that help most are curiosity and humility.

Curiosity pushes you to explore gaps in your understanding. Humility makes it possible to revise your views. Rational thinking depends more on these qualities than on raw intelligence.

The correlation between intelligence and ideological bias is robust, having been found in many other studies, such as Taber & Lodge (2006), Stanovich et al. (2012), and Joslyn & Haider-Markel (2014). These studies found stronger biases in clever people on both sides of the aisle, and since such biases are mutually contradictory, they can’t be a result of greater understanding. So what is it about intelligent people that makes them so prone to bias? To understand, we must consider what intelligence actually is.

In AI research there’s a concept called the “orthogonality thesis.” This is the idea that an intelligent agent can’t just be intelligent; it must be intelligent at something, because intelligence is nothing more than the effectiveness with which an agent pursues a goal. Rationality is intelligence in pursuit of objective truth, but intelligence can be used to pursue any number of other goals. And since the means by which the goal is selected is distinct from the means by which the goal is pursued, the intelligence with which the agent pursues its goal is no guarantee that the goal itself is intelligent.

Another interesting part is the claim that elite institutions create people who are excellent at arguing but not at finding truth. In those environments, complex but flimsy ideas can spread because they signal status. Once they reach politics and media, they shape culture more through influence than accuracy.

For centuries, elite academic institutions like Oxford and Harvard have been training their students to win arguments but not to discern truth, and in so doing, they’ve created a class of people highly skilled at motivated reasoning. The master-debaters that emerge from these institutions go on to become tomorrow’s elites—politicians, entertainers, and intellectuals.

Master-debaters are naturally drawn to areas where arguing well is more important than being correct—law, politics, media, and academia—and in these industries of pure theory, sheltered from reality, they use their powerful rhetorical skills to convince each other of FIBs; the more counterintuitive, the better. Naturally, their most virulent arguments soon escape the lab, spreading from individuals to departments to institutions to societies.

Pair with: Luxury Beliefs are Like Possessions

People adopt certain beliefs because it gives them a feeling of belonging, and does not impose any serious costs. You can scream “defund the police” all day with the knowledge that you will not be personally responsible for whatever happens with policing policies. But by displaying that belief, you can elevate your social status among the people whose opinions you care about at no instrumental cost to yourself.

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AI Updates

AI Investment Thesis

This post on Yishan’s AI investment thesis went viral, and I found it covers very important topics for anyone in the AI space.

My AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers.

App functionality will be added to the foundational models’ offerings, because the big players aren’t slow incumbents (it is wrong to apply the analogy of “fast startup, slow incumbent” here), they are just big. Far more so than with any other prior new technology, there is a massive and fast-moving wave that obsoletes every new app almost as fast as it can be invented. There is almost no time to build a company and scale it.

There are two ways AI application startup founders can make money:
- Make a flash-in-the-pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash (my estimate is that you have about 12-18 months cashflow generation)
- Make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity

The situation is highly unstable - we don’t know if it’s going to crash or go to the moon but both scenarios make it very unlikely that any AI application startup will independently become a generational supercompany (baseline odds are low to begin with).

The best odds are finding an application niche in a highly specialized field with extremely unique and specific data barriers, ideally ones relating to real atoms (hardware or world-related) data and not software/finance.

Great, this is blowing up so I will offer some additional follow-up:

This is NOT your typical prediction of “the incumbents are agile” or the old “what if Google clones your startup” midwit investor question.

The entire novelty of this thesis is that unlike in the past, specific elements of the AI industry are likely to make it so that application companies cannot outrun the wave of obsolescence, which will rush along far, far more quickly than prior technology waves.

The foundational technology has not stabilized in any way whatsoever, and applications require a sufficiently stable foundation for some extended period of time in order to create value and then a system for monetizing that value (i.e. “a business”). The wholesale rate of change in the nature of the foundation is the reason why I think almost all application startups will not survive to achieve any significant scale, not because the current large players are special.

Most companies don’t survive sea changes in the business-technological environment. But these sea changes happen slowly enough that one can build businesses in between. PC, desktop internet, mobile internet, etc, all took many years to play out, and were spaced out enough for application companies to grow, mature, and become incumbents themselves. As a baseline, most startups don’t survive during a rapid period of change either. The small minority of incumbents who survive need extreme agility and enough of a stable footing in the last epoch (i.e. a revenue base that doesn’t dissolve too quickly) to fund their evolution.

Moreover, it’s usually new startups that drive the disruption that challenges incumbents. This is not the case with AI. In this case, the largest players are the ones continually causing the sea change. The environment is so continuously roiled that there is no stable foundation for application startups to become established before the next wave overtakes them. I’m not talking about incumbents outcompeting them, I’m talking about the landscape changing to make them obsolete.

From a practical investment lens, the way to apply this thesis to an AI application startup is to ask: are the fundamental assumptions underpinning this startup’s existence going to be the same in five years? Or will they be unpredictably different? The key here is predictability - if the future will be radically different but you can predict it with confidence, you can pre-position your business. But that’s not the case right now in AI. You can’t skate to where the puck is going if all you know for sure is that 20 people are going to slap the puck in some crazy direction at extremely high velocity.

Sea changes are now happening on a 9-12 month cycle. Very few startups can turn into a mature business in that timeframe - and by mature, I mean having all the boring stuff like sales relationships and brand recognition. Yes, your engineers can make the change, but human hiring cycles and team solidification and market relations are incompressible (e.g. if you hire 100 people in a month, your organization will implode).

Thus, application companies never quite make it to a full business threshold before the sea change happens out from under them. When I say the incumbents will take the application space, I mean that they’re the only ones who can provide enough internal stability and resources to survive the sea changes they themselves will be driving, NOT that they’re going to provide a superior product. They’re just the ones who won’t starve.

And here’s the other side:

The counter dynamic to the AI model doing everything is that, at least in enterprise, bridging the AI models’ capabilities to the customer’s environment still requires a tremendous amount of long tail work.

The gap between an AI agent working for 90% or 95% of the solution and 100% is usually about 10X more work than most realize.

Getting access to the enterprise data, connecting to the enterprise workflows, delivering the change management that employees need to adopt the technology, handling the regulatory and compliance requirements of that industry, and so on all require some degree of highly dedicated focus in a domain.

There’s a strong analogy to vertical SaaS here actually. One would have thought that horizontal technologies could solve all problems in SaaS. But in fact there are endless very large companies that just hyper focus on a single domain, because that level of specialization is valued by the enterprise.

We will likely see the same play out with AI Agents in the enterprise as well. And in fact these domains will be far larger than traditional software categories because the TAM isn’t software, it’s work to be done.

Very fun debate, but I’m taking the other side.

From what I see on the ground, I think both are true in some ways. I see that actually setting AI agents in company operations requires a lot of unsexy work on the ground, often needing forward-deployed engineers to make things work.

I also see the foundational models being able to do more and more tasks without specific knowledge about a company or industry being added.

What do you think?

Leave a comment

Pair with: OpenAI product strategy and AI investment thesis

Startup Stuff

Building What’s Fundable

An interesting read showing how YC shifted from inspiring founders to solve real problems to chasing whatever ideas the VC crowd finds fashionable.

As tech became easier to navigate, YC stopped being an on-ramp and became a factory optimized for “what gets funded.” This shows a broader problem in venture: consensus thinking dominates, and contrarian, mission-driven ideas get crowded out.

Founders now follow a hyper-legible, prewritten path instead of thinking independently. Stanford/MIT grads, who spend 1-2 years at Google, Meta, Microsoft…

The fix is to build from belief, not from trends. Mission-driven founders who choose meaningful quests are the only real counterforce to a system that rewards sameness.

The most important takeaway here is that I don’t believe this is YC’s fault. Instead of laying the sins of an entire industry at the feet of one participant, I would argue, instead, that they’re adhering to the logical economic incentives that are being shaped by a much bigger force: The Consensus Capital Machine.

Pair with these quotes about Oracle’s early days:

When Oracle was formed in 1977, venture capitalists wouldn’t spend a dime investing in software… When they heard the investment was about software, they wouldn’t even see me… Oracle started without a dime of venture capital. I put in $1,200 and the other two guys put in $400 each, and with that $2,000 we started Oracle.

Ellison, along with Bob Miner and Ed Oates, started Oracle with just $2,000 in 1977… They never raised money from venture capital and Ellison was largely allergic to raise equity.

What I Read

Galaxy Brain Resistance

This is a very interesting one by Vitalik. A bit related to the piece I shared above about smart people believing stupid things.

Galaxy brain resistance is about whether a way of thinking can be twisted to defend anything you already wanted to believe. If a reasoning style can justify everything, it explains nothing.

A lot of the arguments people use today fall into this trap. Folks decide the conclusion first, then build a story around it: inevitabilism, overly grand long-term claims, moral panic dressed up as principle, or financial hype pretending to be social progress. These aren’t real arguments. They’re excuses.

You see the same pattern in crypto, politics, tech, and AI safety. “I’m doing more from the inside”, or “give me power so I can help later”, can be used to defend anything at all.

The way to avoid this is to have solid principles you don’t bend and to avoid incentives that push you into convenient justifications. These are the only things that keep smart people from talking themselves into anything.

“If your arguments can justify anything, then your arguments imply nothing.”

Pair with: Too Smart

The Ideal Level of Wealth

Interesting read:

As you can see, the amount of wealth needed to live a “good life” is much lower when we continue working (versus never having to work again). Of course, Coast FIRE is riskier than financial independence since you still need to earn an income to support your lifestyle indefinitely. However, Coast FIRE also provides more flexibility and is more realistic for the typical person. Most people don’t want to sit around doing nothing all day. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun and relaxing for a week or two, but I’ve written about the problems it can lead to.

Whether your goal is Coast FIRE or full financial independence, the ideal level of wealth in the U.S. is in the low-to-mid range of Level 4 ($1M-$10M), or $2M-$5M. I know this is a lot of money and many people will never reach it, but that’s why it’s an ideal. It’s something to strive for. It’s enough where you don’t have to worry about money anymore, but not so much that it becomes a burden or warps your identity.

And, yes, it can warp your identity. Great wealth can influence who you trust, what motivates you, your stress levels, and even how you raise your children. As Felix Dennis wrote in How to Get Rich:

Still, let me repeat it one more time. Becoming rich does not guarantee happiness. In fact, it is almost certain to impose the opposite condition—if not from the stresses and strains of protecting wealth, then from the guilt that inevitably accompanies its arrival.

Pair with: The ladders of wealth creation and How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis.

How to be creative (without taking drugs)

An important read in the era of productivity maximization at all costs.

The mistake people make is treating creativity like productivity. They try to work harder and expect creativity to appear. Instead, sprinkle in new inputs and watch new outputs appear.

Two good techniques:

2. Scroll for anti-social proof - Go to YouTube or Substack, scroll through the explore page, and click only on content that has under 5,000 views. You’ll find niche ideas that haven’t yet mimetically spread. 90% will be a waste of time. Like a successful venture capitalist’s portfolio, the 10% of hits cover the 90% of misses multiple times over.

3. Avoid content made after 2016 - Something happened in 2016. The internet became less weird, less creative. Whatever the cause, pre-2016 content has a distinct flavour of strangeness that has vanished. My favourite hack for this: Find a book or essay you love. Open up ChatGPT deep research. Ask for 50 similar books or essays, all created before 2016.

Pair with: “Jootsing”: The Key to Creativity

In Defence of Men

The essay is thought-provoking. It argues that modern culture often attacks masculinity while ignoring one of its core strengths: the deep male need for competence. For many men, feeling skilled and useful is central to identity. This comes from long evolutionary patterns in which men gained status through ability and achievement.

Being a “success object” helps men, but it also makes them vulnerable. When their competence slips because of age, job loss, or failure, their sense of self can collapse. This is a major reason middle-aged men face high rates of depression and suicide.

The author’s point is that masculinity has problems, but it also has real value. Men need space to acknowledge the good in their nature and not feel ashamed of wanting to be good at something and needed by others.

A fundamental difference between masculinity and femininity is the convention that manhood is not a birthright, but a status that must be earned. The anthropological record writhes with accounts of premodern groups in which boys have to pass gruesome and frightening tests to be considered a man… The researchers concluded, ‘whereas womanhood is viewed as a developmental certainty that is permanent once achieved, manhood is seen as more of a social accomplishment that can be lost and therefore must be defended.

Pair with: Why men don’t age like wine

The Mind of Napoleon: A Selection from His Written and Spoken Words

A real insight into the mind and thoughts of Napoleon.

“The love of glory is like the bridge that Satan built across Chaos to pass from Hell to Paradise: glory links the past with the future across a bottomless abyss. Nothing to my son, except my name!”

Share The Long Game by Mehdi Yacoubi

Brain Food

Earth AI

As we’re working hard on Mirage Exploration (our mining exploration project in Morocco), I’ve been studying a lot Earth AI. It’s impressive how good their hit rate is and all the discoveries they made over the last few years.

You might not find this very relevant, but I’ve been geeking out about it lately.

Here’s how they’re different from the rest:

1. They ingest far more data than normal explorers.

   • Full Australian open-file archives since the 1970s: drill logs, assays, maps, geophysics, company reports.

   • National geophysics: magnetics, gravity, radiometrics.

   • Remote sensing and elevation data.

   • Historical geochemistry at large scale.

   • Their own drilling and field data.

2. They clean and unify all of it.

   • OCR, digitization, georeferencing, fixing coordinate systems, normalizing lithology and assay formats.

   • They end up with ~200–400 million usable geological training examples.

3. They train continent-scale ML models.

   • Multi-modal: geophysics + geochem + geology + satellite.

   • The model learns mineral system “context” instead of simple anomalies.

   • Can detect extremely weak signals (example: 0.002 percent Mo soil anomaly).

4. They rank targets at the scale of all of Australia.

   • They generate a probability map of mineral systems across the entire continent.

   • They consistently pick areas that previous explorers ignored.

5. They control the full loop: target → hypothesis → drill.

   • Geologists convert AI targets into specific geological theories.

   • Each drillhole is a hypothesis test.

   • Results feed back into the model and into human interpretation.

6. They built their own low-cost drilling hardware.

   • Modular rigs with minimal site prep and onboard waste handling.

   • ~86 dollars per meter vs ~300 dollars for standard drilling.

   • Faster mobilization, more holes tested per dollar.

   • I found this mix of hardware + software part fascinating.

7. Their hit rate is orders of magnitude higher.

   • They report ~75 percent of drill sites returning economic-grade intercepts vs ~0.5 percent industry norm.

   • Faster cycle: roughly 4x faster exploration timelines.

8. Their business model forces technology to work.

   • They stake ground or enter alliances, drill with their own rigs, and earn royalties only when they hit real ore.

   • No consulting incentives, no selling “AI tools” without proof.

Earth AI wins because they combine:

• the largest unified geological dataset in Australia

• a true multi-modal ML model trained at continental scale

• very cheap, fast in-house drilling

• a tight scientific loop between AI, geology, and drilling

• a business model tied directly to discovery quality

This lets them find new deposits in places where multiple exploration companies have already failed.

We are learning from the best in the world to apply the best practices in Morocco.

Pair with: It’s Time to Mine

What I’m Watching

Is Maine the Culinary Capitol of New England Food? | DIRT Maine

The Fake Side of Science-Based Fitness

I hope this era of ‘science-based’ obsession will soon die. They have transformed lifting for the worse.

The Tool of the Week

Leather Jacket

I have not bought any yet, but I’ve been really into leather jackets lately. I find this one very nice and not overly expensive like many others are.

Quote I’m Pondering

“You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.”

— Philip Roth

EndNote

Thanks for reading,

If you like The Long Game, please share it or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it!

You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Also, let me know what you think by leaving a comment!

Leave a comment

Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi

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Subscribe now

🏗 Note:

We’ve been working on OrderFlow, our AI agent that automates the most tedious part of manufacturing and distribution: turning emailed purchase orders into clean ERP entries.

OrderFlow

It reads purchase orders, validates data, flags issues, understands complex internal business logics and sends confirmations, all within the systems teams already use.

No new tools, no process change, just less manual work and fewer errors. It’s already live with several clients handling hundreds of orders a week. If you’re in manufacturing or distribution and dealing with similar bottlenecks, let’s talk.

In this episode, we explore:

• Dad’s workouts and children’s metabolic health

• Smart people and dating

• Student of the game

• AI scientist

• Hiring and talent

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

💪 Dad’s workouts may shape his child’s endurance capacity and metabolic health.

I found this paper very interesting and motivating. If you’re struggling to find motivation to exercise, this could help you!

The core idea is that fathers who exercise can pass down better endurance and metabolic health to their children, not through DNA mutations, but through microRNAs in their sperm that reprogram how embryos develop.

Key findings

1. Exercising fathers → fitter offspring

   • Male mice that exercised before mating had offspring with:

     • Better endurance.

     • More muscle mitochondria.

     • Improved glucose metabolism.

   • These benefits appeared even though the offspring themselves didn’t exercise.

2. Mechanism: sperm microRNAs

   • Exercise changed the small RNA (especially microRNAs) content in sperm.

   • These microRNAs influence early embryo development by turning specific genes on or off.

3. Central molecular pathway

   • Exercise increases PGC-1α (a key regulator of mitochondria) in the father’s muscles.

   • This alters sperm microRNAs that suppress NCoR1, a gene that normally inhibits PGC-1α activity.

   • When the sperm fertilizes the egg, these microRNAs reduce NCoR1 in the embryo.

   • That shift triggers more mitochondrial biogenesis and oxidative metabolism in the offspring’s muscles.

4. Proof of causality

   • Injecting sperm RNA from exercised males into normal embryos was enough to reproduce the same “fit” offspring.

   • Isolating just the small RNAs (and not long RNAs) produced the same result.

   • Injecting one specific microRNA — miR-148a-3p — into embryos replicated the endurance and metabolic improvements.

   • Reversing the effect (by re-adding NCoR1 into embryos) canceled the benefit, confirming causality.

5. Duration

   • The effect lasted one generation (F1), but not two (not passed to grand-offspring).

6. Human link

   • Men who trained for endurance had higher levels of the same conserved sperm microRNAs as the mice, suggesting possible human relevance.

Pair with: Association of Preconception Paternal Alcohol Consumption With Increased Fetal Birth Defect Risk

Our finding suggests that future fathers should be encouraged to modify their alcohol intake before conceiving to reduce fetal risk, considering a paternal drinking rate of 31.0% substantially elevated the risk of birth defects. Strengths of this study include the use of data from the Chinese National Free Preconception Health Examination Project, a 3.3% maternal alcohol consumption rate, adjusted potential baseline and clinical parameters, and matched known possible interfering factors, especially exact matching of maternal province of origin.

🌱 Wellness

❓ Why So Many Smart People Are Alone

There were a few good conversations this week about why so many smart people are single.

Simon Sarris started it by saying it’s strange. There are so many capable people who all seem to want the same thing, yet they can’t find each other.

On paper, it should be easy. Smart people have the tools, the networks, the awareness. Maybe it’s not effort that’s missing, but desire. Maybe being alone just feels easier.

It’s actually mysterious how many smart single people there are that cannot find a partner. So many people want a well-defined thing, and that thing exists in droves, and they cannot find it. Also it’s each-other.

On paper it seems like smart people should have the easiest time of all with (social) assortative mating.

The numbers are low, but you have the most signals and avenues to find each-other, the most resources, ostensibly the best coordination mechanisms etc etc etc

and yet

of course I’m making it sound more easy than it is, I’m not trying to be glib “just go to the husband/wife store”.

But I feel like something is *off*, given the stakes. Some dating dark matter that’s just way off. Hence mysterious.

From the outside, for most smart people, I think the effort invested isn’t really commensurate with the desired goal. And if they’re smart I don’t know why that would be unless its really a crisis of desire. Or maybe for most people being alone is more rewarding than I think

People answered in different ways.

Some said being smart can make it harder. You think too much. You treat love like a puzzle instead of a leap.

Others said the culture had changed. There’s less trust, less community, fewer shared values. People are busy building good lives that leave no space for anyone else.

Others blamed the tools. Apps make people flat. They sort by school or income, not by warmth.

This was another interesting perspective. Maybe the whole setup changed. The ground that made family and marriage feel natural isn’t there anymore. Work, money, housing, stability, none of it feels solid.

this advice is solid, but it ignores the bigger context. a lot of people aren’t skipping marriage or kids out of disinterest… they’re living through a total reconfiguration of the social & cultural marketplace. the conditions that made these milestones accessible or natural may have eroded or at least the ground beneath is no longer as stable.

you have to account for that cultural gravity. because unlike work or travel or running a marathon, this part of life isn’t single player.

it feels like this aspect of twitter is so extremely ignorant to the macro environment, esp rich billionaires. i remember when sheryl sandberg told everyone to lean in & what a fascinating time that was.

this stuff is simply not as it easy as it was.

Someone commented that we’re trying to build families without the world that used to hold them. Another wrote that we learned to optimize everything except closeness. I think these are very important parts of the puzzle.

Put together, it feels like a picture of our time. People still want the same things, but the world that made them possible has gone missing.

Pair with: How Dating Apps Contribute to the Demographic Crisis

🧠 Better Thinking

🎒 Student of the Game

I liked this short text. This is part of the reason I want to keep writing The Long Game. To force myself to remain a student of the game.

Most founders see incumbents as slow, bloated targets. They never ask the real questions. Why did Ramp win corporate cards when dozens failed? How could OpenAI emerge despite Google’s head start?

These aren’t accidents.

Five minutes into an old Invest Like the Best episode, Patrick O’Shaughnessy asks John Collison about conglomerates. John doesn’t pause.

TransDigm. Danaher. Vail Resorts. Dominos. He rattles off how each one compounds value: aerospace rollups, operating systems, acquisition playbooks.

Patrick redirects him. John could go for hours.

This is the difference.

Most founders won’t even study their own market. John studies everything.

Your competition thinks history is academic. They’re wrong.

Can you explain why your market’s dominant player won? Not what they did, but why it worked? Which conditions still exist? If you can’t, you’re guessing.

The game you’re playing has been played before. Someone won and left clues everywhere. Every market leaves patterns, incentives, blind spots.

Study the tape.

Pair with: The Surprising Power of The Long Game 😉

It’s easy to overestimate the importance of luck in success and underestimate the importance of investing in success every single day. Too often, we convince ourselves that success is just luck.

🤖 AI Updates

👩‍🔬 Kosmos: An AI Scientist for Autonomous Discovery

I read the Kosmos: AI Scientist paper this week. Here’s what they built and a few thoughts on it.

The idea is simple. Science has steps, and most of those steps can be automated:

• read papers

• form hypotheses

• analyze data

• write results

• repeat

Kosmos tries to automate that loop. It runs two kinds of agents, one that reads literature, another that analyzes data, and both share what they learn through a single world model. In one run, it can read around 1,500 papers, run 166 analysis agents, and write about 42,000 lines of code. Each run takes about 12 hours.

FutureHouse gave Kosmos to researchers in different fields, neuroscience, materials, energy, etc., and asked them to test it. The preprint reports seven “discoveries.” Three were rediscoveries of unpublished or preprinted findings, and four were said to be new.

A few examples:

1. With brain metabolomics data, Kosmos suggested that lowering brain temperature activates certain repair pathways that protect neurons, a result later confirmed by humans.

2. In solar cell data, it spotted a link between humidity and current output, not shocking, but a fair re-discovery.

3. It also found that higher levels of an enzyme (SOD2) may reduce heart fibrosis. Humans later proved it was causal.

Some thoughts:

1. This isn’t the only “AI scientist” in the works. Others (including Google and a few stealth groups) are building similar systems. We really need better benchmarks to tell which of these are truly useful.

2. The long-run format feels impractical for most scientists. Twelve-hour jobs with big costs make sense for big labs, not day-to-day research. I suspect what people really want is a smart copilot that can reason alongside them in real time.

3. The paper tries to measure time saved versus human work, but the math feels fuzzy. Reading 1,500 papers sounds impressive, but good scientists don’t brute-force knowledge — they find the right papers and leap from there. That kind of intuition is hard to model.

Still, it’s an interesting step. If systems like Kosmos can move from “black box discovery” toward real collaboration, where scientists and models think together, that could change how research happens.

Curious to see what others are building in this space.

Pair with: AI and the Limits of Language and When is it better to think without words?

⚡️ Startup Stuff

🤝 Hiring & Talent

I enjoyed reading this piece about Cursor, and particularly the part about hiring and talent. I’ve started thinking more about hiring for my company, Mirage, lately, and how to find a competitive edge to attract the best people (with the added difference of not having raised any money, which of course complicates things—for now.)

Cursor’s recruiting machine is on another level

Cursor’s secret to recruiting is to treat the atomic unit of the hiring process as a person, not a job spec. Let me explain.

At most companies, the recruiting process looks something like this: identify a hole in the company’s ability to execute on some function, open up a job, source a list of people, interview some of those people, hire one, start them a couple months out.

At Cursor, the recruiting process looks like this: post the name of someone really, really good in the #hiring-ideas channel in Slack, swarm that person with attention, conduct team interviews (wide range of “process” here), and if the desire is mutual, they start on Monday.

The team is growing fast. This time last year, the company was under 20 people; today it’s pushing 250. I probably spend about a quarter of my time recruiting, and that’s celebrated. There’s a constant stream of names flowing through the #hiring-ideas channel. Sourcing doesn’t consist of searching for relevant job titles or companies on LinkedIn and adding names to a spreadsheet for a recruiter to reach out to; it looks more like genuine curiosity about who the best people are.

The team found Eric Zakariasson because he was leading Cursor workshops in Stockholm. Ian Huang was an outlier in customer telemetry because he was coding so much with Cursor into the wee hours of the night. Whenever a potential pool of talent might be opening up, like New Computer shutting down or Meta layoffs, the Cursor team collectively searches for their most talented. Any time someone at Cursor comes across an impressive product release, tweet, or blog post, they drop the creator’s name in the channel accompanied by a “should we hire?”

If there’s consensus that a prospect is good, another Slack channel gets spun up where people strategize on approaching them. Common questions the group will pose include: “What does this person most love working on?”, “What are they best at?”, and “What would be the optimal setup with Cursor?” They then strategize about which exciting challenges Cursor is facing that they can dangle, on the assumption that the best people love a good challenge. Ideas for who to backchannel with are floated with no awareness or permission from the prospect (on this, I have mixed feelings).

Pair with: Spotting Talent

📚 What I Read

👁 Seeing Creativity Like a Language Model

AI doesn’t have to make slop—it can help you do the best work of your life

The allocation economy

The way I think about how AI will affect the economy at large is to move us from a knowledge economy to an allocation economy. In a knowledge economy, you are compensated based on what you know. In an allocation economy, you are based on how well you can portion out the resources of intelligence.

You need vision, a taste for ideas and for language, and an ability to effectively communicate what you want in words. You need to know how to plan and how to estimate timelines, how to break up projects and distribute them among different people who are skilled at different tasks. You need to know when to step in and what to micromanage to ensure the details are right.

All of these skills already exist in the knowledge economy: They are the skills of human managers. Not just managers in business, but anyone who manages humans: Showrunners, directors, and conductors, all do the same kinds of things.

But human managers make up only about 10 percent of the workforce. And in order for everyone to effectively work with AIs on a day-to-day basis, these are the exact skills that we all need to develop.

In broad strokes, this is how AI might affect creative work. For many creative tasks, we’ll move up one level of abstraction from doing everything ourselves to directing what work needs to be done and how.

🫀 Viscerality

The great Simon Sarris on pleasure.

One problem in living too abstractly, or too conveniently, is that you begin to think things like fine silver might only exist for special occasions. Or that luxury is a thing to be found at luxury destinations, in luxury hotels, or with specific luxury brands, and implicitly you might no longer search for ways to make your every-day life more exquisite.

I think there is a lot of luxury that we forget we can have. Probably you have encountered a version of this: I know of quite affluent people who drink mediocre coffee — not because they like it! When pressed it is because they are too busy to seek out what’s better. They cannot be bothered, somehow, to search for luxury. They do not wish to study. May this kind of idleness never find you.

People think luxury is event based or louis-vuitton or mercedes based when it is really fork based. There is more to the pleasures of the earth than what can be marketed to you. Every day is all there is based. Not only is the coffee a special miracle but the cup you drink out of can be special, what’s more it should be. It is part of the ritual of every day and you should properly respect that. It carries something to your senses, it should have your adoration. If it is not special throw it away. Beg your friend or your mother for a good cup. Buy one for your lover.

I hope you understand this goes well beyond coffee or silverware. There must be a fine silver of your own life, many of them. I cannot know what they are. But you can ask: The things you touch every single day, do they mean anything to you?

Pair with: Is Our Addiction to Pleasure Destroying Us?

🐐 People who demand nothing of you (or, notes on charismatic people)

Notes on charisma.

I’ve been thinking about what makes some people more enjoyable to be around than others. It might be impolite to talk about this, but at least from personal observation, there are differences in how people make me feel after I spend time with them. To a degree I respect polite fictions and what they do to maintain social ties, so I wouldn’t support telling anyone outright if I found them boring—definitely not in front of others, and only very carefully in private if the situation called for it (it almost never does).

Disclaimer aside, the best answer I’ve come up with is that the most likable, charismatic, enjoyable people to be around are people who demand nothing of you. That’s the best phrasing I can come up with after trying for two years. At first, I had “ask nothing of you” but it didn’t quite feel right. It felt too detached, like they wanted nothing from others, like they never invited you to things or asked for commitment, and this isn’t true of the people I’m thinking of. The most charismatic people I know, who seem to have this radiant, magnetic quality to their presence, are actually those who actively invite you to things with your best interests in mind but are totally okay with you declining, and they really mean it.

Pair with: It’s Charisma, Stupid

🔑 Those hot-girl self-help videos are making you worse

I really enjoyed this one. You might think it’s weird for me to share this, but if you’re a long-time reader, you know I have extensive interests. I always felt that something was completely off with these types of girls giving advice.

The content itself is secondary to the delivery. Their advice could be swapped out with a dozen other videos and no one would notice. Their authority is less from true insight or experience, and more from the image they’re selling you. Every message is interpreted through the implicit idea that you could look just like me if you follow this simple advice.

Of course, this isn’t a new thing. Society has long equated beauty with moral or intellectual authority. In classical philosophy, beauty was often seen as a physical embodiment of inner intellect or moral excellence. The concept of kalos k’agathos literally combined “beautiful” (kalos) and “good/virtuous” (agathos) to describe the ideal human character—“the beautiful and the good.” During the Renaissance, beauty, especially female beauty, was depicted as a symbol of moral and spiritual purity. Consider Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus—a woman as the embodiment of ideal beauty, but also of divine truth. Female figures have always been simultaneously moralized and idealized, seen as vessels of purity and wisdom only insofar as they fit aesthetic ideals designed by men. These modern “hot-girl gurus” are just the digital-age continuation of these same beliefs.

The danger isn’t just in its vapidity, but also in the disillusionment that follows. Eventually, the ego inflation meets reality, and the “high-value” fantasy collapses. You realize that not every man will treat you like a princess just because you manifested it, that cutting people off doesn’t automatically heal you, and that acting “unbothered” just gives you communication issues.

Pair with: is self-help bad?

🧠 The Divided Mind, by John Sarno

This is a great addition to Healing Back Pain, by the same author, the hero Dr Sarno. It’s great because here he doesn’t focus only on back pain, and explains that mindbody syndromes can manifest themselves in so many different forms.

“First, a sad paradox. Medical research has become more laboratory oriented in the last fifty years. To be sure, this shift has produced some impressive results. But at the same time, human biology is not exclusively mechanical, and there are limits to what the laboratory can accurately study. The laboratory study of infectious diseases has been magnificent—it is very straightforward. But its very success has deflected attention from the influence of emotions. As a result, medical research has failed abysmally in many areas.”

Pair with: Sarno’s 12 Daily Reminders

If you’re currently suffering from chronic pain, let me know! I’ll send you materials and links that will likely help you.

🍭 Brain Food

🚜 Factory Farming is a Blight

This is a great read on factory farming and what should come next to replace it. The author argues that factory farming is one of the worst moral failures of our time, not only for animals, but for people and the planet.

I had a quintessential British country-girl upbringing: my family rode horses, kept gundogs, and donned tweed to stalk gamebirds with shotguns. The entire local economy revolved around animals in some way, and every single person I knew, from ruddy-faced farmers to hardened huntsmen, cared about their well-being. There was even a local saying: animals eat first, humans second. Every creature under one’s domain deserved respect, even the ones you ate.

Of course, it’s not just the British who care for their animals; many nations have made great leaps in animal welfare over the years, especially for popular pet species. It wasn’t long ago that cat-burning was considered a fine form of public entertainment across Europe. Today the European Union has some of the best animal welfare laws on Earth. Even the rugged frontier of the United States has become so pet-friendly it’s hard to drive more than a block without seeing a dog groom-and-pamper service.

Despite this, I can confidently say there has never been a worse time in history to be a domesticated animal under the care of humans. The reason for this is modern factory farming. As of 2022, 98% of pigs, 99.9% of chickens and 75% of cows in the United States are kept, for a significant portion of their lives, in tightly confined and deeply unnatural conditions known as factory farms. These ratios are similar across other developed nations.

Solutions

Ending factory farming will take work on several fronts.

Governments need to lead by banning cruel practices, redirecting subsidies toward humane farms, and resisting industry capture. Germany and Slovenia have already outlawed caged farming, showing it can be done. Laws like the EATS Act, which protect big producers, move in the opposite direction.

Food companies must also take responsibility. Many are already pledging to go cage-free or label welfare standards. They should be encouraged and held to those commitments rather than rewarded for efficiency alone.

Technology offers a way out, too. Cultivated meat, precision fermentation, and in-ovo sexing could sharply cut suffering if they get fair regulation and investment instead of industry-backed bans.

And finally, change depends on people. Buying from better farms, reducing demand for factory-farmed meat, and keeping pressure on companies and politicians can help turn shared outrage into real progress.

Pair with: Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.

🎥 What I’m Watching

📈 it sucks, but it’ll skyrocket your energy levels…

Pair with: Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time

🥊 2-3 days in Dagestan with Islam Makhachev

I love Islam; he is so humble and so funny.

🔧 The Tool of the Week

💊 Omega 3

I did some blood testing recently, as it had been too long since the last time. I was happy with the results overall. My glucose used to be high, but not anymore.

However, it seems I could benefit from supplementing with Omega-3s to lower my ApoB, lower my LDL even further and lower my triglycerides to be in a more “optimal”—Peter Attia range!

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.

— V. E Franklart

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading,

If you like The Long Game, please share it or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Also, let me know what you think by leaving a comment!

Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi

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In this episode, we explore:

• Aerobic training

• Feelings

• Life with kids

• Agency > Intelligence

• Paranoia and not dying

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

🫀 Aerobic Training

I stopped doing cardio a few years ago. I know I should still be doing some; this was a great reminder that lifting is not aerobic training.

Lifting Isn’t Aerobic Training — Why You Need Aerobic Training to Balance Out the Potentially Deleterious Cardiac Effects of Lifting.

Doc… my heart rate increases when I work out… Isn’t that aerobic training, too?

No… it’s not let me explain

Resistance training is essential. It protects muscle, bone, and metabolic health.

But it’s not aerobic training — even if your heart rate spikes during a set.

During lifting, the heart generates high force to push blood against high pressure (high pre-load). Intrathoracic pressure rises, venous return to the heart drops, and stroke volume — the blood pumped per beat — falls.

To keep blood pressure stable, heart rate and vascular tone increase sharply. That’s cardiac work against resistance, not the sustained lower pressure flow that builds aerobic fitness.

In contrast, when you run, cycle, or row, the heart works hard to move larger volumes of blood through lower resistance.

That high volume continuous output drives oxygen delivery to muscle and creates rhythmic shear stress along the vessel walls.

These are positive effects which improve blood vessel function, create more capillaries, and an “eccentric” cardiac adaptation — a stronger, more elastic heart that fills and empties efficiently.

Resistance training alone can lead to pressure-dominant remodeling — thicker heart walls built for brief, high pressure. Thicker walls and thicker vessels, but not a larger aerobically capable heart.

This is considered maladaptive. It’s not awful… but we can balance out these effects

Why we need to run/ride or swim, too

Aerobic training promotes volume-dominant remodeling — expanded chambers built for endurance and flow.

During aerobic training your heart is pushing out large volumes against low resistance.

The chambers in your heart increase in size to be able to match the volume of blood- and oxygen- your muscles are asking for.

This increases your stroke volume. It builds much healthier cardiac adaptations and balances out the ill effects of weight training .

You need both resistance and aerobic training

Lifting builds pressure tolerance.

Aerobic training builds flow efficiency.

Together, they create a heart that’s strong and supple — capable of both power and longevity.

The most realistic cardio for me is rucking, to be honest. I did a few hikes this summer, carrying my 15kg daughter plus some other stuff in the bag and greatly enjoyed it. It also allows you to be with people who are not really doing cardio while you are, which is a nice perk.

Pair with: Waffle House Ready

ME

You had me ruck two days a week for endurance. Did you select that for me just because you know I like rucking, or is rucking something you program often?

JB

I try to encourage more people to ruck. I like it because people don’t have to adapt to new movement patterns.

Walking is already ingrained—everyone knows how to walk. Whereas, for example, running is a technical movement with high force on your Achilles. There’s some adaptation to run.

With rucking, there isn’t a significant adaptation that’s going to cost you energy or cause injuries. If someone has good running technique, fine. But how many 45-year-olds have great running technique? So why would I have someone run when we could get a pretty similar training effect with rucking?

With rucking, I also feel like you get less interference with strength gains, and it’s easier to scale. When I was focused on rucking last year, it never really felt harder. I just knew how hard I was working—RPE seven to eight—and I got faster and went further without it ever feeling like torture.

🌱 Wellness

🧘‍♂️ Feelings are Supposed to be in the Body

This post went viral on X:

More than 12k replies later, I think this one nails it:

You’re looking for external solutions to an internal problem,

You were trained by society to believe that by owning the right things, achieving the right goals, having the right status, you’d find happiness and inner peace.

Now that you have those things your anxiety will increase because you’ll realize you’ve been doing it wrong your whole life.

The next step is to go inward and heal yourself. It will be much harder than anything else you’ve done, but if you do it you’ll come out free on the other side.

Pair with: Feelings

The resistance: My own numbness was locally optimal, helping mitigate pain, distraction, manipulation, social disharmony, and other risks. Put another way, given the state of my life and nervous system at the time, feeling my feelings locally made my life worse.

Now, was numbness globally optimal? No. Life was in 360p when it could’ve been in 4k.

• I’d brush my teeth too hard and only notice from the blood on the sink, not the pain.

• Other people made decisions in seconds by checking their gut. I made a decision by agonizing my way to a heady answer that still felt bad. Decision-making spiraled because every option felt equally gray.

• I thought I didn’t like animals! I missed the beauty around me—even though I found it incredibly cute when crushes would suddenly stop on a snowy street overwhelmed by what they were soaking in.

• Everything I did had to be “useful”. All of my desires needed reasons.

• I couldn’t tell the difference between “I’m feeling really jealous right now” and “Did I eat something bad?”

• I couldn’t experience deep pleasure.

• I had great trouble working on my self-rejection and trigger bottlenecks.

Unfortunately, my numbness numbed itself. I went like this for many years until others pointed it out.

🧠 Better Thinking

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Life & Kids

I liked Mitchell Hashimoto’s perspective on life with kids, and I fully agree with it:

I was someone who through my 20s wasn’t even sure if I wanted kids. Work was my passion and I enjoyed it deeply. I filled up two passports. I did well financially. And yet, it’s incomparable to the joy and purpose having children has given me. Like, not even close. Its crazy.

I have a single friend in his late 30s right now. Mega-millionaire. Doing whatever he wants. He’s happy! He always asks me “where are you going next” and I always respond “nowhere, I just want to be home with my kid.” And he looks at me like I’m CRAZY. He tries to empathize, but can’t.

I used to be him. There’s nothing wrong with being him. I’m happy for him. But kids rebalance your life to realizing that nothing matters more than them. Like nothing even comes close to mattering. Everything else becomes noise.

And I didn’t get it either. So I don’t expect other people without kids to get it either. And that’s fine. I’m not judging you. Even when I decided to have kids, I didn’t (couldn’t!) know what to expect. I wasn’t particularly excited, honestly.

But holy shit does that change once they come. I look at my life in bewilderment almost every week thinking how my 20s self would’ve hated this, and yet this is the best my life has ever been.

My kid is sleeping right now and I’m just counting down the minutes for her to wake up so we can hang out. That’s all I want.

Not sure if this, coming from a billionaire, helps the idea or actually hurts the message. I can argue both sides 😅

Share

Pair with: Tales from Toddlerhood

I can relate so much to the content of this piece 😂

Toddlers are geniuses who are also very dumb.

If I took my daughter to China for a year, and we just lived there with no language instruction, I’d come back knowing approximately six Mandarin words and she’d be fluent. It makes no sense to me that toddlers just learn a language by hearing the language, but somehow they do. They’re weird freak geniuses. But then she says stuff like “would you like a strawberry?” when she wants a strawberry, because when we say “you,” it refers to her, so she now thinks “you” is a synonym for her name, which is very unimpressive.

Likewise, the other day I read her a new book for the first time, and then the second time I read it to her, she stopped me in the middle to correct something I said. It turns out I had accidentally skipped a word, which she knew because she somehow memorized the whole book on the first read. But then we’ll pick up another book and she’ll stare at the page for a million years looking for where Curious George is “hiding” even though he’s obviously right the fuck there.

🤖 AI Updates

🔨 Agency > Intelligence

Now more than ever, this is an extremely important idea to understand, especially for people doing a cognitively demanding job: agency > intelligence.

It’s tempting to think that more IQ/ being a genius is everything. That might be the case for very specific fields (and even then, I think agency can compensate for a lot of IQ points), but in general, as long as there is a base level of intelligence, almost every achievement will be due to having high agency.

Agency > Intelligence

I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?

Grok explanation is ~close:

“Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual’s capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path.

People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next.

It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

Pair with: On agency

At the heart of agency lies a willingness to question defaults. To be agentic, you have to treat “how things are supposed to be done” as just one option among many.

Or, no, that formulation isn’t deep enough. When I think about friends of mine who struggle to be agentic, the problem isn’t precisely that they do the default thing; it’s that they fail to understand their problems and the solution space. They act in incoherent or ineffective ways because their mental model of the situation is too limited to show them a way out. They are not attuned enough to figure out what they want and how the world works. To be agentic, you have to really look at the problem and at the solution space and accept the responsibility of learning what is necessary to make the problem go away.

⚡️ Startup Stuff

🕵 Paranoia & Not Dying

Staying Alive

Lately, I’ve been studying a lot of B2B companies, especially in logistics, manufacturing, mining, construction and industry.

What surprised me is how many of them aren’t doing anything particularly groundbreaking. They don’t have revolutionary technology, they’re not raising huge rounds, and they don’t talk about “changing the world.”

And yet, they’re alive.

Some of them have been around for 10, 20, even 30+ years. They started small, often local, and kept doing their thing, slowly improving, keeping customers, reinvesting profits, and staying paranoid.

Now they’re doing $50M, $100M, $200M, sometimes $500+M in annual revenue.

They’re not famous, they’re not “hot,” but they’re solid. And over time, that solidity compounds. Most of you would have never heard of any of them.

Meanwhile, in the startup world, most people are playing a different game.

It’s all about speed. Everyone wants to be a unicorn by year three or die trying.

You now have to reach $2M ARR in ten days 😂

The problem is, most actually do die trying.

When you zoom out, the outcomes look very different:

• One group ends up with stable, growing companies that employ hundreds or thousands of people.

• The other group ends up back at zero, sometimes after years of stress and hype.

It made me realize how underrated survival is.

It might not be important for VCs who have chips in 10-20 companies and only need one winner. But for you, as a builder, it matters a lot.

Not saying that the long-term path is easy, though.

Every year you stay alive as a business, you gain relationships, data, knowledge of your market, and trust. These are moats that no investor can hand you and no competitor can easily copy.

The founders who survive the longest tend to share one thing: paranoia.

They’re constantly asking, What could kill us?

They don’t assume next year will look like this year. That mindset keeps them sharp.

And when new opportunities appear—AI, regulation changes, new markets—they’re alive to seize them. The wave only matters if you’re still around to ride it.

I think about this a lot now that we’ve shifted from B2C to B2B. In B2C, you’re chasing momentum; in B2B, you’re building endurance. It’s not as glamorous, but it’s far more forgiving if you can stay alive and keep improving.

So, what’s the better outcome?

To have a “boring” business doing $20-200M in revenue after 10-20 years (owning 100% of it), or to have chased the unicorn dream and ended up with nothing?

Yes, I know, it’s not that simple, nothing is. Still, it’s worth thinking about.

Stay alive. Stay paranoid. The rest compounds.

Pair with: How to Keep Winning

1. Don’t Die

Almost everything else you can come back from except death. I’m using “death” both literally and figuratively to mean the point of no return. First, know the death boundaries, and obsess over the extreme downside scenarios and prioritize survival. Visualize all the ways you could die—all the time. In that way I’m very careful, almost paranoid. I ran Replit for eight years with little commercial success, but at no point did we ever get to the red zone when it came to runway—we always had plenty of cash on hand. You’d be surprised by the number of brilliant founders that reach out to me for advice when they’re three months from death.

Once you’re deeply familiar with the death conditions, you can take extreme risks because you know you’ll always come back when things go sideways. Especially in America, and especially in Silicon Valley, people are forgiving of failure. You can come back from almost anything.

At Replit, there were many times when the business sort of worked and any rational founder would have decided to scale it. For example, we had a decently growing business in education and recruiting, but both markets felt unexciting to me—we couldn’t build a big company or achieve our mission that way. So we pivoted. The most recent pivot was from being primarily a coding editor to becoming a natural-language creation interface (vibe coding). Some employees and customers were upset and left (some have since returned), but I knew I had to align with the biggest revolution the world has seen since the internet. When you eventually make it, people won’t just forgive you, they’ll join you.

Also pair with: The GOAT Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive

“At some point, what’s worked before will not work any longer”

📚 What I Read

📝 Profile: Herbert A. Allen; Cashing In on Old Friends in High Places

Interesting profile.

INDEED, watching Mr. Allen, and who is in his office on Fifth Avenue at 55th Street, can provide clues to deals yet to come. “Herbert clearly is the player,” Mr. Biondi said. “He can make the introductions, he has the credibility and he’s got the track record.”

For all his influence, Mr. Allen has no desire to show it off. An intensely private man, he strives to keep the details of his life -- and business -- a secret. He would not cooperate for this article, saying, “I don’t need this.” Nor would anyone at his firm provide any information. Many of his friends hid behind movie-blurb quotations -- “unique,” said Mr. Kaufman of Savoy; “an extraordinary man,” said David Geffen of Geffen Records; “a force, honest, direct,” said Mr. Diller of QVC.

Share The Long Game by Mehdi Yacoubi

📉 The Economy That’s Great for Parents, Lousy for Their Grown-Up Kids

This is an issue I see happening in many developed countries: one generation doing very well at the expense of the next generation.

The divided fortunes of parents and their adult children are part of a split-screen economy that is delivering robust returns for high earners and many older Americans while conditions for many others worsen. There have always been divisions between high-earning Americans and others, such as younger or low-income workers. But those divisions are now widening within the same families, flipping traditional expectations about younger generations economically surpassing their elders.

In some cases, financially secure parents are subsidizing their children’s rents, helping them travel for job interviews and paying for job coaches. Other families are turning to multigenerational living arrangements.

Recent college graduates are taking a particular hit. They typically face higher unemployment than older workers, but the gap is widening. While the overall unemployment rate rose to 4.3% in August, it is much higher for recent college graduates—6.5% over the 12 months ending in August. That is about the highest level in a decade, excluding the pandemic unemployment spike.

Some economists blame AI for replacing entry-level roles. Others say companies have slowed hiring because they are uncertain how tariffs and other regulatory changes will affect their costs. Recent grads report submitting hundreds of applications through LinkedIn and other portals and barely ever getting a response.

Pair with: Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year

🏃 Why I Run

This is a powerful piece. I think it can apply to any intense physical activity. More than anything, those activities are a way to stay sane and not go insane.

Ten years ago, when I turned 40, my father posted a birthday message on my Facebook page that was visible to all of my friends and followers. I had a great life, he said: a loving wife, three beautiful children, a successful career. But all men’s lives fall apart at this age, he warned. He was 73 then, and was thinking of his own life and of his father’s. There is too much pressure and there are too many temptations, he said. He had entered a spiral at 40 from which he never recovered. He hoped the same would not happen to me.

Pair with: Exercise as medicine for depressive symptoms?

🥇 The Primacy of Winning

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar doesn’t build high-performing engineering teams, he wins. Here’s how.

When people ask me, “How do you build a high-performing engineering team?,” the answer is: I don’t. High performance engineering teams are downstream of culture, and a culture reigns supreme if it has internalized the primacy of winning. Because winning is what matters. I’m not talking about stock price or OKRs. I’m talking about fulfilling your mission, delivering outcomes, and going faster, higher, and further than anyone thinks possible.

What is a high-performing engineering team? A sufficient number of software updates per hour? Crazy impressive DORA metrics? Elegant code that puts the best Haskell poetry to shame? It’s none of these things. A high-performing engineering team wins.

Pair with: The Best Story Wins

🍭 Brain Food

🇮🇪 John Collison of Stripe: Ireland is going backwards. Here’s how to get it moving

Overall, these are great lessons for Europe as a whole.

Why can’t Ireland just do things?

The answer is, as you might have guessed:

The answer is that our processes to decide on what gets built and where have broken down. Those decisions are now made by bodies that do not, and cannot, think holistically about the tasks we have set them.

It’s easy to see how we got here. The generation of leaders in the 1980s and 1990s have a lot to answer for. The legacy of the likes of Charlie Haughey, Bertie Ahern and Ray Burke was to permanently damage the public’s trust in politicians.

In Haughey’s heyday, Irish politicians had a lot of power. Ministers could wave through big projects, micromanage their departments, directly appoint allies to big jobs, set budgets as they saw fit, chat freely with lobbyists, procure what they wanted and from whom they wanted it, control local councils, and even appoint judges.

This was a system that was capable of doing new things quickly. Haughey brought about the IFSC and Temple Bar in one term. In 2006, we built 93,419 homes. Between 2000 and 2015, we built 895km of motorway, Dublin Airport’s Terminal Two, the Jack Lynch tunnel and the Port Tunnel.

But it was also, as we know all too well, a system open to abuse.

A few solutions John proposes:

1. Give power back to politicians instead of agencies.

2. Judge agencies by outcomes, not paperwork.

3. Simplify planning rules to speed up approvals.

4. Let the government fast-track major projects, like Canada and others do.

5. Expect stronger leadership from ministers who already have the authority to act.

Leave a comment

🎥 What I’m Watching

🤮 How Did the World Get So Ugly

One of the blessings of travelling and/or living in such a beautiful city as Barcelona is to witness immense architectural and city planning beauty. On any given walk, you can see details on random buildings that must have involved dozens of highly skilled people for months on end.

Sadly, everything is now focused on efficiency and ‘minimalism’ at the expense of beauty.

🇧🇷 Brazilian Architecture

I love Brazil so much, and Brazilian architecture.

Pair with: This villa in Brazil.

🔧 The Tool of the Week

💪 Grip Training

I injured my left bicep a month ago, so I had to modify my training a bit. I became a bit obsessed with forearms and grip training. I did not purchase all the plethora of grip training tools, but I’ve been enjoying my fat gripz.

I’m doing a shorter version of Smaev’s insane forearm pump workout 😂

Additionally, these grippers are also cool.

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading,

If you like The Long Game, please share it or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Also, let me know what you think by leaving a comment!

Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi

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In this episode, we explore:

• Parenting time

• Protein powders and lead

• Discomfort is the price you pay

• LLMs are a different kind of intelligence

• Your consciousness can jump through time

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

🧪 Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead

Roughly 6-10 years ago, we began to see a growing number of doctors recommending increased protein intake for health and longevity, which led to pushing the 1g/lb bodyweight recommendation (the classic bodybuilding recommendation) to the wider population.

Everyone who has tried or is eating 1g/lb of bodyweight of protein every day knows it’s not easy to hit this number.

For example, at 220-240 (depending on the period), I should be eating 220+g of protein per day, which is obviously a lot of protein.

This led many people to drink a good share of these proteins in a liquid format, with protein powders exploding in popularity.

Last week, this report showed that many popular brands of protein powders contain high levels of lead.

Much has changed since Consumer Reports first tested protein powders and shakes. Over the past 15 years, Americans’ obsession with protein has transformed what had been a niche product into the centerpiece of a multibillion-dollar wellness craze, driving booming supplement sales and spawning a new crop of protein-fortified foods that now saturate supermarket shelves and social media feeds.

Yet for all the industry’s growth and rebranding, one thing hasn’t changed: Protein powders still carry troubling levels of toxic heavy metals, according to a new Consumer Reports investigation. Our latest tests of 23 protein powders and ready-to-drink shakes from popular brands found that heavy metal contamination has become even more common among protein products, raising concerns that the risks are growing right alongside the industry itself.

For more than two-thirds of the products we analyzed, a single serving contained more lead than CR’s food safety experts say is safe to consume in a day—some by more than 10 times.

“It’s concerning that these results are even worse than the last time we tested,” said Tunde Akinleye, the CR food safety researcher who led the testing project. This time, in addition to the average level of lead being higher than what we found 15 years ago, there were also fewer products with undetectable amounts of it. The outliers also packed a heavier punch. Naked Nutrition’s Vegan Mass Gainer powder, the product with the highest lead levels, had nearly twice as much lead per serving as the worst product we analyzed in 2010.

Even in the lifting and bodybuilding niche that I follow a lot, you can start to feel the tide is shifting. Many people realize that eating more protein than they need takes away from useful carbs that really make the difference when you train.

I think .7 to .8 g/lb of bodyweight is likely to be a better recommendation, at least this is my current target.

Pair with: Why You Don’t Need High Protein and Top-rated protein powder (if you insist on drinking protein shakes), and Arrêtez de vous prendre la tête avec les protéines ! by my friend NFKB.

🌱 Wellness

⏳ Parenting Time

I remember watching a news show right when my daughter was a few months old, and the host said something along the lines of “if you complain about all the infinite requests of your baby battling for your attention, if this is annoying to you, then you will almost certainly not enjoy the presence of your children once they become adults.”

This graph was a brutal reminder of how quickly it passes.

More than 40% of your parenting time has elapsed by the time your kid enters kindergarten.

Once they get into middle school it is 2/3rds gone.

Pair with: Your life in weeks and Vitalism, to hopefully make this graph much, much longer.

🧠 Better Thinking

😅 Discomfort is the price you pay for a fulfilling life

I could not agree more with the core idea of this piece. It complements perfectly the ideas on the shortcomings of the over-optimization lifestyle I’ve been sharing here for some time.

I find myself asking this more and more: since when did boundaries and routine become more important than growth, adventure, and being there for others? Why do some people dread going to the plans they made, and would rather go to bed early so they can wake up for their morning routine? I won’t lie, I’ve been a victim of this. I think after the pandemic, I may have started ‘protecting my peace’ a bit too much. Thankfully, I snapped out of it. Grabbing coffee to catch up with a friend and not missing someone’s celebration is more important than being able to wake up at 6 a.m. to get 10,000 steps in before 9 a.m.

Good ideas for all of us:

Get familiar with the unknown. The feeling of exploring a coffee shop you’ve never been to, the initial awkwardness of talking to a stranger, the unease of eating alone at a restaurant, the effort of dragging yourself off the couch to go dancing with your friends, the indulgence of letting yourself sleep until 11. There’s more to life than constant stability. When your days start blending together, make it a point to do at least one thing to break up the monotony: walk a different way to work, put on that dress that’s been hanging in your closet for a “special occasion,” or book the trip.

To ponder:

It’s all connected: the relationships you nurture, the hobbies you pursue, your travels, your daily life. You’ll stumble, feel exhausted, and be hard on yourself. But your patience and persistence will ultimately pay off. Leaning into that discomfort and pushing yourself, whether it’s setting aside an hour to write, reworking a painting again and again, spending hours perfecting an outfit, or saying yes to last-minute plans, will ultimately feel more rewarding because you didn’t give in to those limiting beliefs.

Pair with: My generation isn’t suffering enough

There are ways to practice the best of both worlds. One is the ancient stoical practice of voluntary discomfort: the art of suffering on purpose. This involves integrating simple yet unpleasant tasks into your life, say taking a cold shower for 30 seconds each morning, adopting a strict exercise regime, or giving up alcohol. Extreme athlete Wim Hof has even designed a simple breathing technique to foster resilience, involving voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system, a method which has been linked to health benefits such as reducing stress, boosting the immune system, and easing the symptoms of autoimmune disorders. Others encourage intermittent fasting, a method which has also been linked to reduced anxiety and depression. Voluntary discomfort doesn’t have to be physical, either. It may involve intellectual unease: reading things you disagree with, engaging in arduous debates, trying to dismantle and re-sculpt your worldview.

🤖 AI Updates

💬 LLMs are a different kind of intelligence

Karpathy’s latest interview was very good. I highly recommend it.

This post complements it well:

The most interesting part for me is where @karpathy describes why LLMs aren’t able to learn like humans.

As you would expect, he comes up with a wonderfully evocative phrase to describe RL: “sucking supervision bits through a straw.”

A single end reward gets broadcast across every token in a successful trajectory, upweighting even wrong or irrelevant turns that lead to the right answer.

> “Humans don’t use reinforcement learning, as I’ve said before. I think they do something different. Reinforcement learning is a lot worse than the average person thinks. Reinforcement learning is terrible. It just so happens that everything that we had before is much worse.”

So what do humans do instead?

> “The book I’m reading is a set of prompts for me to do synthetic data generation. It’s by manipulating that information that you actually gain that knowledge. We have no equivalent of that with LLMs; they don’t really do that.”

> “I’d love to see during pretraining some kind of a stage where the model thinks through the material and tries to reconcile it with what it already knows. There’s no equivalent of any of this. This is all research.”

Why can’t we just add this training to LLMs today?

> “There are very subtle, hard to understand reasons why it’s not trivial. If I just give synthetic generation of the model thinking about a book, you look at it and you’re like, ‘This looks great. Why can’t I train on it?’ You could try, but the model will actually get much worse if you continue trying.”

> “Say we have a chapter of a book and I ask an LLM to think about it. It will give you something that looks very reasonable. But if I ask it 10 times, you’ll notice that all of them are the same.”

> “You’re not getting the richness and the diversity and the entropy from these models as you would get from humans. How do you get synthetic data generation to work despite the collapse and while maintaining the entropy? It is a research problem.”

How do humans get around model collapse?

> “These analogies are surprisingly good. Humans collapse during the course of their lives. Children haven’t overfit yet. They will say stuff that will shock you. Because they’re not yet collapsed. But we [adults] are collapsed. We end up revisiting the same thoughts, we end up saying more and more of the same stuff, the learning rates go down, the collapse continues to get worse, and then everything deteriorates.”

In fact, there’s an interesting paper arguing that dreaming evolved to assist generalization, and resist overfitting to daily learning - look up The Overfitted Brain by @erikphoel.

I asked Karpathy: Isn’t it interesting that humans learn best at a part of their lives (childhood) whose actual details they completely forget, adults still learn really well but have terrible memory about the particulars of the things they read or watch, and LLMs can memorize arbitrary details about text that no human could but are currently pretty bad at generalization?

> “[Fallible human memory] is a feature, not a bug, because it forces you to only learn the generalizable components. LLMs are distracted by all the memory that they have of the pre-trained documents. That’s why when I talk about the cognitive core, I actually want to remove the memory. I’d love to have them have less memory so that they have to look things up and they only maintain the algorithms for thought, and the idea of an experiment, and all this cognitive glue for acting.”

These quotes are also a good overview of the episode:

1. LLMs don’t work yet
They don’t have enough intelligence, they’re not multimodal enough, they can’t use computers, and they don’t remember what you tell them. They’re cognitively lacking. It’ll take about a decade to work through all of that.

2. When you boot them up, they always start from zero
They have no distillation phase, no process like sleep where what happened gets analyzed and written back into the weights.

3. What’s stored in their weights is only a hazy recollection of the internet
It’s just a compressed blur of 15 trillion tokens squeezed into a few billion parameters. Their context window is just short-term working memory.

4. They’re good at imitation, terrible at going off the data manifold
Too much memory, not enough reasoning. We need to strip away the memorized knowledge and keep the cognitive core: the algorithms, the magic of intelligence, problem-solving, strategy.

5. We’ve probably recreated a cortical tissue, pattern-learning and general, but we’re still missing the rest of the brain
No hippocampus for memory. No amygdala for instincts. No emotions or motivations.

6. They memorize perfectly but generalize poorly
If you give them random numbers, they can recite them back. No human can do that. That’s the problem: humans forget just enough to be forced to find patterns.

7. Anything truly new, code that’s never been written before, ideas that have no template; they stumble
They’re still autocomplete engines with perfect recall and no understanding. Until we find that cognitive core, intelligence stripped of memory but full of reasoning, they’ll stay brilliant mimics, not minds.

It also confirms what I’m seeing on the ground every day: AI is great and has a lot of potential, but the impact and speed of change coming from it is overblown.

Pair with: LLMs can get brain rot

This is crazy, but just like us, LLMs can get brain rot:

We propose and test the LLM Brain Rot Hypothesis: continual exposure to junk web text induces lasting cognitive decline in large language models (LLMs). To causally isolate data quality, we run controlled experiments on real Twitter/X corpora, constructing junk and reversely controlled datasets via two orthogonal operationalizations: M1 (engagement degree) and M2 (semantic quality), with matched token scale and training operations across conditions.

Contrary to the control group, continual pre-training of 4 LLMs on the junk dataset causes non-trivial declines (Hedges’ g>0.3) on reasoning, long-context understanding, safety, and inflating “dark traits” (e.g., psychopathy, narcissism). The gradual mixtures of junk and control datasets also yield dose-response cognition decay: for example, under M1, ARC-Challenge with Chain Of Thoughts drops 74.9 → 57.2 and RULER-CWE 84.4 → 52.3 as junk ratio rises from 0% to 100%.

Error forensics reveal several key insights:

• Thought-skipping as the primary lesion: models increasingly truncate or skip reasoning chains, explaining most of the error growth.

• Partial but incomplete healing: scaling instruction tuning and clean data pre-training improve the declined cognition yet cannot restore baseline capability, suggesting persistent representational drift rather than format mismatch.

• Popularity as a better indicator: the popularity, a non-semantic metric, of a tweet is a better indicator of the Brain Rot effect than the length in M1.

Together, the results provide significant, multi-perspective evidence that data quality is a causal driver of LLM capability decay, reframing curation for continual pretraining as a training-time safety problem and motivating routine “cognitive health checks” for deployed LLMs.

⚡️ Startup Stuff

🧗‍♂️ AI Didn’t Kill Tech Jobs, it Killed the Ladder

This piece shares very good ideas for young people looking for AI & tech jobs.

First, the problem:

AI didn’t destroy the tech job market; it just massively changed it. This is not just an opinion; it’s facts. Let’s talk numbers.

AI didn’t kill tech jobs, it stumped on entry-level roles. A Stanford study shows a 13% decline in early career roles that were exposed to AI. On the other hand, the demand for more experienced senior roles saw a 6% increase. You can read this blog post by Sundeep Teki on the 6 major ways AI changed the software developer job market for more details.

Then the solution:

Start practicing today, so you’re not stressed tomorrow.

Build your portfolio (vibe-coding your app, contributing to open-source, anything you can think of), share what you learn on X, get high-quality connections, and enjoy the process.

The time for unpaid internships is gone, when you can have 100% control over what to work on. Entry-level roles are also on a decline. You’re on your own to get yourself going, and nobody is coming for help.

There has literally never been a better time to work independently on yourself. AI gives you such leverage that people didn’t have 5 years ago. A lot of smart guys out there are using AI to enhance what they can do, rather than compete with it. And in 5 years, those will make it out successfully, that have teamed up with AI to make cool stuff and ship it.

I see it from personal experience: I’m much more likely to want to talk with a young engineer/ builder if they just send me a cool side project they did.

Pair with: Build your personal moat

My favorite career advice is to develop a “personal moat.”

A personal moat is a set of unique and accumulating competitive advantages in the context of your career.

Like company moats, your personal moat should be a competitive advantage specific to you that’s not only durable, but compounds over time.

This should be something that’s:

• Hard to learn and hard to do (but perhaps easier for you)

• Impossible without rare and/or valuable skills

• Unique to your own talents & interests

• Legible, in the sense that your expertise should be easy to describe, easy to share, and makes people want to do both for you

📚 What I Read

💄 The Great Feminization

Thought-provoking piece.

Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten. Naturally employers err on the side of making the office softer. So if women are thriving more in the modern workplace, is that really because they are outcompeting men? Or is it because the rules have been changed to favor them?

Pair with: Rise of the Beta

🤑 Populism Fast and Slow

A very good piece on the issues with the elites.

Unfortunately, there are many cases in which the people are right to distrust elites. Analytical reasoning is sometimes a poor substitute for intuitive cognition. There is a vast literature detailing the hubris of modern rationalism. Elites are perfectly capable of succumbing to faddish theories (and as we have seen in recent years, they are susceptible to moral panics). But in such cases, it is not all that difficult to find other elites willing to take up the cause and oppose those intellectual fads. In specific domains, however, a very durable elite consensus has developed. This is strongest in areas where common sense is simply wrong, and so anyone who studies the evidence, or is willing to engage in analytical reasoning, winds up sharing the elite view. In these areas, the people find it practically impossible to find allies among the cognitive elite. This generates anger and resentment, which grows over time.

Pair with: A Psychological Theory of the Culture War

This article presents a psychological theory of the culture war, and posits a dynamic social system in which the actions, rhetoric, and behaviors of each side influence the other. People are not seeking their own economic interests nor even working towards a moral vision, but responding to a built-in drive towards trying to achieve status, which involves tearing others down. It’s something of a LARP because those who are most unaware of their own motivations can act with the most certitude, and therefore have the largest effects on our political culture.

💰 The Making of a Market Maker

How Thomas Peterffy built the machines that killed the trading floor and made Interactive Brokers into a $100 billion business.

So many things to learn here. Some of the learnings are that he never read a business book (I actually think this is great advice) and that he still owns 75% of his business, showing how important keeping control over your business is (same as we see with Larry Ellison, Dyson, etc.) It might seem unimportant in today’s world where people raise round after round, diluting themself to very low ownership with the idea of becoming a decacorn. But having a huge business with low control over it is not necessarily the position you want to be in.

I brought up Costco, a comparison investors like to make. Both companies are built on the radical notion that you can make more by charging less. One of Peterffy’s neatly groomed eyebrows lifted.

“I’ve never been to Costco,” he said.

I asked if he had studied other businesses, or learned from mentors. The question seemed to exhaust him. His eyes closed briefly.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Can you repeat that?”

When I did, he replied: “I’ve never read a business book.”

In 2019, on his 75th birthday, he stepped down as CEO, handing the reins to Milan Galik, a Slovakian software engineer who joined the company in 1990. Peterffy gave up horse riding at 70 and skiing after a fall, but retirement is out of the question. He’s 80, chairman of Interactive Brokers, still owns nearly 70% of the business, and says he’s “sort of running the sales and marketing department because nobody wants to do it.”

Pair with: John Collison in conversation with Stanley Druckenmiller, and how many great firms are maniacal about the information they consume.

👂 The key to love is understanding

On relationships, conversations, listening and understanding:

endless conversation as a love story

If life goes well for me, I hope my dream relationship will just feel like one long, continuous conversation. I don’t mean that metaphorically, but literally — a never-ending dialogue of becoming. I want to walk and talk, lie in bed and talk, sit across from each other at dinner and talk. I want to reflect on our days together, ask strange questions, spiral into metaphysics, laugh about dumb things, and learn the specific, rippled texture of each other’s minds, studying their soul’s cartography, one contour at a time.

Voice and language so precise and personal that when one of us dies, as is the nature of life, the conversation doesn’t end. It continues in the empty space, in the wondering: What would they have said? The dialogue stretches into the beyond, because conversation lives on and on. This is romance, to me.

To me, this is intimacy: mutual prompting, mutual witnessing, an endless back-and-forth of seeing and being seen, a daily work of co-created shared language. The people we love participate in our becoming, as much as they observe us. They reflect parts of us we didn’t know were there. Their curiosity rearranges us and their listening sharpens us.

Pair with: Masters of Love

🍭 Brain Food

🤯 Your Consciousness Can Jump Through Time

This one is crazy:

On an early October night in 1989, a four-year-old girl was shocked awake by a phone call and a scream. She tiptoed barefoot on the clammy vinyl tile of the hallway. “He died in a car accident!” her mother’s voice cracked before it shattered. The girl’s shining dark eyes could only stare. From the moment she threw her arms around her father before he boarded his flight for that fateful business trip, she knew she would never see him alive again.

This is just one of the myriad and often eerie accounts of precognition that have been shared with cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, Ph.D. But it was her own experience with these strange, psychic “gut feelings” that led her to study them in the first place.

As far back as the age of seven, Mossbridge has had precognitive dreams, she says. She and her parents were skeptical of them until she began recording the details in a dream journal. While she admits she’s misremembered some of her dream visions, she’s also been able to foretell events from the future that she would have had no other way of knowing.

She says these memories from the future could mean the notion of time might not be as linear as we imagine.

And a possible explanation:

Precognition could be explained as a form of quantum entanglement, Radin says. Particles that are entangled are supposed to share the same information and behave the same way, even from far away, which is what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Radin thinks this theory might explain why we can remember things that have not happened yet.

“Some people hypothesize that precognition is your brain entangled with itself in the future, because entanglement is not only things separated in space, but also separated in time,” he explains. “If it can be entangled with itself in the future, in the present you’d be feeling something like a memory that is going to happen in the future.”

If time is not so linear and consciousness can enter an invisible portal to the future, it might explain the feeling of déja vû. Regardless, the phenomenon of precognition is backed by statistics—it’s just a matter of proving what the mechanism could be, Mossbridge says.

I am convinced that there is much more to reality than we currently understand, so I do not like to dismiss seemingly ‘crazy-sounding’ ideas.

Pair with: CIA archives on precognition and Reality is an illusion

🎥 What I’m Watching

🇲🇦 Exploring the Souk in Tangier

I love Tangier, I was there a few weeks ago, and enjoyed this OG Bourdain episode.

Pair with: The movie Only Lovers Left Alive

🧠 How To Force Your Brain to Crave Doing Hard Things

This guy will literally rewire your brain to stop procrastinating.

🔧 The Tool of the Week

🔋 Reign Energy Drink

I’m struggling to find good energy drinks in Europe. It seems they can’t legally have the same caffeine content as the US ones. I was in France a few days ago, found a Celsius, bought it, only to discover later it has only 115 mg of caffeine 😂

My favorite option is Reign, with 200mg, but it’s rare to find.

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”

― Søren Kierkegaard

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading!

If you like The Long Game, please share it or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi

Subscribe now

In this episode, we explore:

• The pathologization pandemic

• A wandering mind is unhappy

• Why advice doesn’t work

• Rare earth metals

• Instagram is unchic

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

💊 The Pathologization Pandemic

I saw Chris Williamson’s video about his ‘toxin-induced mental health challenges’ and a few interesting tweets about it. Naturally, I found this to be the perfect topic for this week’s TLG.

First, I want to say I like Chris. I used to watch his content a few years ago, he’s a smart guy and his content high quality.

In the video, Chris talks very openly about how his health completely crashed. He was someone who took his health seriously, IVs, peptides, strict routines, he wasn’t careless. But he started feeling worse and couldn’t figure out why. Later, he found out he had Lyme disease, gut infections, parasites, and then discovered the house he was living in was full of toxic mold. That combination ruined him.

His energy disappeared, his brain stopped working properly, he had tinnitus, brain fog, memory slips, and trouble sleeping. He kept doing the podcast, but behind the scenes, he was barely functioning.

He tried everything, treatments, detoxes, endless tests, and even going to Mexico to filter his blood. But this was the first time in his life when trying harder didn’t help.

That hit him hard because his whole mindset was built on effort and discipline.

Now this is what happened and Chris’s perspective on it, but as someone who also had episodes like these (1 year of chronic fatigue syndrome after a virus infection, and 3 years of chronic back pain), I think there is another explanation for what is happening to Chris.

Watching Chris talk about his health, I couldn’t help thinking about something beyond Lyme or mold. Yes, he’s dealing with real infections and toxins. But there’s another layer many people are facing today: a nervous system that has been pushed too hard, for too long.

Chris lived at full speed. Podcast, business, travel, constant output. Always switched on. Even with perfect (are they really perfect?) routines, IVs, peptides, biohacks, the body can only handle so much pressure. Eventually, the system burns out. Your brain stops working properly. You lose energy. You can’t sleep. Everything feels overwhelming. Then something like mold or Lyme shows up and finishes the job.

It’s easy to blame the illness. But a lot of this starts earlier, in the mind and nervous system. Dr Sarno called it the mindbody syndrome. Not an imaginary illness, but the body breaking down under stored stress and emotions that never had space to be felt. The body says what the mind refuses to say.

Most people try to heal by adding more: more supplements, more treatments, more hacks. But maybe the real question for Chris isn’t what else he can take, but what he needs to let go of.

Why the constant pressure? What happens if he stops pushing? What emotion is he working so hard to outrun?

You can detox mold. You can kill infections. But if the nervous system stays in fight-or-flight, healing never truly lands. The body still thinks it’s under attack.

If I could speak to him, I wouldn’t ask about protocols. I’d ask why he feels he must always do more. And what part of himself he won’t allow to rest.

Until that is faced, no treatment will feel like enough.

No amount of biohacking will resolve a mindbody syndrome.

Pair with: The Pathologization Pandemic

But why would so many people confuse sadness for sickness? For a start, it’s human nature to look for single causes to complex problems. The physician’s habit of ascribing all of a patient’s symptoms to just one diagnosis led to the formulation of Hickam’s dictum, which states: “A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases.” Likewise, it’s tempting to look for a neat and simple reason for people blaming their troubles on a single disorder, but to do so would be to make the same mistake as them. Pathologization can have as many causes as it damn well pleases.

Also pair with: Chronic insomnia, mindbody, and doctors might not understand it

I had chronic insomnia for 5 years. During that time, I saw every type of doctor imaginable — general practitioners, sleep specialists, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, psychologists. Not one helped. The pills made my sleep worse, the endocrinologist invented and diagnosed me with a bipolar-adjacent disorder, and the CBT therapist literally told me to “try to feel tired.” In the end, the insomnia was spiritual in origin (manifesting physically) and no medical treatment could have touched it. Yet every one of these “experts” was certain they had the solution.

🌱 Wellness

😓 A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind

I think we likely all experienced this at one point or another. It’s interesting to read the framing of this paper.

You’re not depressed, you just lost your quest.

Unlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them, contemplating events that happened in the past, that might happen in the future, or will never happen at all. Indeed, “stimulus-independent thought” or “mind wandering” appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation (1–3). Although this ability is a remarkable evolutionary achievement that allows people to learn, reason, and plan, it may have an emotional cost. Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering “to be here now.” These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Are they right?

Laboratory experiments have revealed a great deal about the cognitive and neural bases of mind wandering (3, 7), but little about its emotional consequences in everyday life. The most reliable method for investigating real-world emotion is experience sampling, which involves contacting people as they go about their lives and asking them to report their thoughts, feelings, and actions at that moment. Unfortunately, collecting real-time reports from large numbers of people as they go about their daily lives is so cumbersome and expensive that experience sampling has rarely been used to investigate the relationship between mind wandering and happiness and has always been limited to very small samples.

In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.

Pair with: Why Aren’t Smart People Happier

… but also with: If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy? I absolutely believe that is true. The beauty of being mentally high functioning in our society is that you can trade it for almost anything. If you’re smart, you can figure out how to be healthy within your genetic constraints and how to be wealthy within your environmental constraints.

If you’re smart, you can figure out how to be happy within your biological constraints. But your biological constraints are a lot larger than you might think.

The dynamic range of happiness is quite large

If you’ve ever gotten drunk or achieved an altered state of mind on psychedelic drugs or through meditation, breathing or other hypnotic techniques, you have experienced brief moments of happiness beyond what you feel on a typical day.

Of course, some of this is a fake, pleasure-driven happiness. But there’s truth to it; otherwise, you wouldn’t desire that state.

Achieving these brief states of happiness can show you how dynamic your range is—and that range can be quite large.

How do you nudge yourself in that direction on a perpetual basis, as opposed to visiting it by stunning your mind into submission and silence?

🧠 Better Thinking

📖 Why Advice Doesn’t Work

If you’re in the business of giving advice, you might find this interesting.

It lists many reasons why your pieces of advice might not lead to the result you’d expect:

1. The advice might simply be bad or mismatched

• It could be wrong, naive, or based on incomplete understanding of the person’s real situation.

• Even good-sounding advice can clash with hidden constraints the receiver has.

2. Advice is too shallow compared to the lived experience it represents

• Short phrases like “move your feet up” in climbing hide dozens of subtle steps learned only through practice.

• Good advice can be true, but useless without the deep skills behind it.

3. People don’t actually understand the advice

• We often hear advice without truly grasping what it implies.

• The mind filters out what it doesn’t want to hear or doesn’t find immediately obvious.

4. People actively misunderstand advice because they don’t want to follow it

• When following the advice would be painful (ending a relationship, making a change), the mind invents reasons to treat the situation as “different” or “exceptional.”

5. They don’t believe it will work (lack of inner conviction)

• Even if someone nods along, deep down they may not believe success is possible for them, so they never act.

6. What works for one person may not work for another

• People are different in temperament, values, emotional wiring.

• Advice carries an implicit “this worked for me,” but humans vary more than we realize.

7. Some advice requires too much willpower or effort

• Easy advice (buy headphones, air purifier) gets followed.

• Hard advice (start running, change habits) is ignored because energy cost is high.

8. People don’t actually want advice, they want validation, conversation, or guardrails

• They ask for “advice” to get reassurance, to talk, or to check if disaster is certain, not to change their plan.

9. We’re trapped inside our own heads

• Overthinking, emotional overload, or closeness to the problem blinds us.

• Even obvious solutions can’t be seen from the inside.

10. When advice does work, we stop calling it advice

• “Don’t drink pond water” isn’t seen as advice, it’s obvious.

• Once something becomes internalized, it stops being treated as external wisdom.

11. The same problem that makes advice necessary blocks its use

• The traits that cause someone’s struggle (procrastination, avoidance, confusion) are the same traits that stop them from applying the advice that would fix it.

Pair with: Advice that actually worked for me, and Advice for 10-20 year olds, and (importantly) also Advice expires faster than milk now.

🤖 AI Updates

🦾 Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models

This is a very interesting new paper:

Large language model applications, such as agents and domain-specific reasoning systems, are increasingly relying on context adaptation. Instead of updating model weights, they modify inputs through instructions, strategies, or evidence. Prior approaches have improved usability, but they suffer from two recurring issues: brevity bias, which strips away domain insights in favor of overly short summaries, and context collapse, where repeated rewriting gradually erodes important details over time.

Building on the concept of adaptive memory introduced by Dynamic Cheatsheet, we propose ACE (Agentic Context Engineering), a framework that treats context as an evolving playbook. Rather than overwriting or compressing context, ACE accumulates, refines, and organizes strategies through a modular process of generation, reflection, and curation. This structured and incremental approach preserves detailed knowledge and scales effectively with long-context models, avoiding the collapse seen in earlier methods.

Across both agent-oriented and domain-specific benchmarks, ACE optimizes context usage in offline settings, such as system prompts, and in online settings, such as agent memory. It consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving gains of 10.6 percent in agent tasks and 8.6 percent in financial tasks, while also reducing adaptation latency and rollout cost. Remarkably, ACE achieves these improvements without requiring labeled supervision, instead relying on natural execution feedback.

On the AppWorld leaderboard, ACE matches the performance of top-ranked production-level agents on overall averages and surpasses them on the more challenging test split, despite using a smaller open-source model. These results suggest that comprehensive, evolving contexts enable scalable, efficient, and self-improving LLM systems with minimal overhead.

This paper shows a new way to make AI better without retraining it. Instead of changing the model’s weights, it changes the context the model uses. The model keeps a growing notebook of what works and what fails, updating it over time. It learns through use, not through training.

The results are impressive. It beats stronger models like GPT-4 in tasks using only context, with lower cost and no labelled data. It also challenges the idea that prompts should be short. These models improve when they have rich, detailed context they can build on.

If this approach scales, AI may not need fine-tuning. It will improve by updating its own memory, becoming self-tuned rather than retrained.

Pair with: Agents 2.0: From Shallow Loops to Deep Agents

⚡️ Startup Stuff

💼 Job Applications in the Era of AI Slop

As new AI tools are popping up every week “helping” applicants batch apply to hundreds of jobs, I think your best bet a getting the role you want is to do the opposite.

Show a few teams you’re interested in working with that you really care.

I liked how DHH put it: be the David Goggins of candidates when you apply for a role. Send a real message, do deep research into the company and the founders, send some code/ small app related to what they do, send a Loom of yourself…

Go the extra mile when all the other candidates send their CV and a small, non-customized note.

If you do this, your competition won’t be able to keep up with the quality of your application. Of course, this will take more time, but applying to 100 job offers and hoping for the best is not a better strategy.

In other words: give a shit about your work and about the company.

The second (giving a shit about work in general) is equally important. It’s possible to fake fervor in the course of an interview and say the right things to convince us of enthusiasm for Scale, but the proof is in the pudding. If someone is applying to Scale and has never been deeply obsessed about something before, then it’s a bad bet to think Scale will be the first. I have a particular line of questioning around this:

• What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?

• How many hours were you working a week?

• Why did you work so hard? Why did you care?

• When were you the most unmotivated in your life?

• What’s the thing you’re the most proud of?

• Do you think it was worth it?

For an obsessed person, it’s always worth it.

While we’re talking hiring, we’re currently hiring forward-deployed engineers and software/AI engineers in Paris, Barcelona and Casablanca. Drop me a note if you or someone you know could be interested.

Pair with: How to hire

Focus on the right ways to source candidates.

Basically, this boils down to “use your personal networks more”. By at least a 10x margin, the best candidate sources I’ve ever seen are friends and friends of friends. Even if you don’t think you can get these people, go after the best ones relentlessly. If it works out 5% of the time, it’s still well worth it.

All the best startups I know manage to hire like this for much longer than one would think possible. Most bad startups make excuses for not doing this.

When you hire someone, as soon as you’re sure she’s a star you should sit her down and wring out of her the names of everyone that you should try to hire. You may have to work pretty hard at this.

📚 What I Read

🤖 Superintelligence Isn’t Enough

This piece perfectly puts an idea I’ve been having in my mind for years, especially when I hear people talking about how AGI will kill all jobs and that it will be able to do literally everything.

The reason for this skepticism is that the binding constraint on economic growth today is simply not insufficient intelligence or cognitive ability. Even absent smart machines, human beings today collectively have more cognitive ability than at any prior point in human history. The binding constraint has to do with how that intelligence interacts with the material world in a myriad of ways. Economic growth depends ultimately on the ability to build real objects in the real world. A smart machine may be able to come up with a plan for a better mousetrap, but to actually fabricate that mousetrap requires capabilities beyond any machine’s control.

At a macro level, we are already running into the constraint of too many dollars chasing too little stuff. As environmental doomsayers have been arguing for years, there are ultimately material limits to growth. The one most obviously in front of us is global warming, but there are many others. The planet does not have the resources to sustain 8 billion people with an American standard of living; indeed, at 10 percent annual growth, China, America, and Europe would soon run out of everything, including agricultural land, water, energy, and almost everything else.

At a micro level, there is a problem translating the work of smart machines into material goods. Product innovation has always depended on a prolonged iterative process whereby a designer tries out ideas, fails, and modifies the design in response. No amount of superintelligence will ever be sufficient to simulate the behavior of material objects under the conditions of the existing material world, as generations of builders and tinkerers know.

Finally, there is the political and social level. I attended a presentation by an engineer at a leading AI firm who suggested that in the near future, AGI would be able to, for example, provide clean drinking water to struggling cities in the developing world.

The problem is that the failure to provide such basic services in poor countries is not lack of knowledge of what a good municipal water system looks like. The problem is political and social. People do not want to pay the higher costs engendered by a new water system; unionized workers in the municipal water authority do not want to lose their jobs to automation; business owners do not want the disruption that will occur as the streets are torn up for new pipes; the finance minister believes there are other priorities and can’t raise taxes to pay for a new system. In many poor countries, there are water mafias that buy water where it is cheap, and resell it at extortionate prices. They are armed and ready to use violence if you get in their way.

Having worked with real companies in real operations in the real world, I 100% agree with this perspective.

Pair with: AI isn’t replacing radiologists

Radiology is a field optimized for human replacement, where digital inputs, pattern recognition tasks, and clear benchmarks predominate. In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton – computer scientist and Turing Award winner – declared that ‘people should stop training radiologists now’. If the most extreme predictions about the effect of AI on employment and wages were true, then radiology should be the canary in the coal mine.

But demand for human labor is higher than ever. In 2025, American diagnostic radiology residency programs offered a record 1,208 positions across all radiology specialties, a four percent increase from 2024, and the field’s vacancy rates are at all-time highs. In 2025, radiology was the second-highest-paid medical specialty in the country, with an average income of $520,000, over 48 percent higher than the average salary in 2015.

🇮🇹 City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas

I was in Venice last week. I absolutely loved it and it greatly surpassed my expectations. I thought it was going to be so overly touristic that it would render it impossible to enjoy, but I was wrong, at least in October, outside of the centre, it was very calm and enjoyable.

A bit about the book:

From Muddy Lagoon to Maritime Power

Venice starts as a community of refugees living on marshy islands. With no land or army, they turn to the sea. Trade becomes their weapon. They master shipbuilding, commerce, and diplomacy, turning their location into an advantage between East and West.

Crusades & Constantinople (The Turning Point)

The Fourth Crusade (1204) is a key moment. Venice agrees to transport crusaders, but when things fall apart, they redirect the crusade to Constantinople. The city is sacked, and Venice takes enormous wealth, trade privileges, and territories. This marks the beginning of Venice as a real empire of ports, trading posts, and naval bases.

War with Genoa — Battle for the Mediterranean

Venice’s main rival is Genoa. For decades, they have fought brutal sea wars to control trade routes. These wars are epic—piracy, naval battles, blockades. Venice eventually wins, securing dominance over the Mediterranean trade and becoming the richest city in Europe.

Wealth, Trade & Ruthless Pragmatism

Venice is not a chivalric kingdom—it’s run by merchants. Profit comes first. They trade with both Christians and Muslims. They are highly organized, disciplined, and secretive. The Venetian ducat becomes the most trusted currency in the world.

The Ottoman Threat & Decline

Eventually, the rise of the Ottoman Empire shifts power. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 weakened Venice’s position. Then, the final blow: the Portuguese discover the sea route around Africa to India. Venice can no longer control the spice trade. The age of Atlantic empires begins, and Venice’s golden age ends.

🇨🇳 Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future

China acts like an “engineering state” that solves problems with big physical projects. The U.S. is a “lawyerly society” that relies on rules, lawsuits, and process, which often block action. This is not a total theory, just a lens to make sense of recent events.

The idea of the lawyerly society became obvious when I returned to the U.S. in 2023. The Paul Tsai China Center (as I say in my acknowledgments) was the best possible place to write this book, not only because it’s so supportive, but also because it set me inside the Yale Law School. Elite law schools, now and in the past, fashion the easiest path for the ambitions to step into the top ranks of the American government. The dominance of lawyers in the American elite has helped transmute the United States into a litigious vetocracy. I believe that America cannot remain a great power if it is so committed to a system that works well mostly for the wealthy and well-connected.

Pair with: The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis

📱 instagram is unchic

As I’ve already said many times, deleting instagram is one of the best things I did a few years ago. I think people don’t fully realize how it changes their prism on reality. It conditions how so many people live. They have to do things for their stories, they’re constantly bombarded with what friends and old acquaintances are doing. Why on earth do you need to see the Thailand trip of someone you have not seen for 10 years?!

After deactivating my account for good, and especially because I study abroad, I was concerned that I would lose track of my friends and be essentially stuck in an isolation bubble: turns out deactivating was what made the bubble burst. I stopped being up to date with the lives of people I hadn’t interacted with since middle school. My knowledge of what my classmates did during summer break relied on personal retellings instead of curated photo dumps. Because the algorithm used to constantly show me their updates, I believed some people were much more present in my life than they actually were: after deleting Instagram, I realised I barely saw them at all. Finally, and maybe most importantly, I stopped experiencing FOMO: since I am unaware of everything else that is going on at any given time, I enjoy what I choose to do. I now see the way I am spending my time not as one of multiple alternatives, but as a unique moment I can experience as I most want to.

Pair with: The Class Politics of the Instagram Face and It’s More Than Just “Instagram Face”

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the rise of that same, social media-inspired look among young women known as “Instagram Face”. It’s that face made up of sculpted cheekbones, big lips, fox eyes and a deep tan; a chimera of sexy, supermodel features. It’s not a natural face. It’s cartoonish, assembled artificially through cosmetics, filters, editing apps and even surgeries, as if girls are endlessly chasing the beauty ideal of their childhoods: an IMVU avatar, or a Bratz doll. Something perfect, inanimate, soulless.

But it’s more than just Instagram Face. I’ve also noticed the rise of a distinct Instagram Personality: girls with the same mannerisms, opinions, sense of humour. They wear the same clothes, use the same hair accessories, have the same home decor. They love the same films, the same music, the same celebrities. Even the language they use is alike: they all use the same therapy talk, like they had the same trauma, saw the same psychiatrist, are on the same healing journey. They even have the same tone, those same affectations, a cadence in their voice so characteristic of influencers that whenever I hear it I’m conditioned to think I’m about to be asked to subscribe and hit the notification bell!

🍭 Brain Food

⛏ Rare Earths

As China tightens its exports of rare earth metals, I thought it was a good time to share a few resources on the topic.

“Rare” or Just Hard to Get? The Chemistry Behind the Myth

Few catchphrases in science are as misleading as “rare earths.” The label itself evokes visions of obscure, vanishing metals, but the real twist in the story is that most of them aren’t rare at all. Back in the age of early chemistry, elements like cerium and lanthanum earned their “rare” reputation not because they hid deep within the planet, but because they never appeared alone and defied easy isolation. Today, we know that cerium is more abundant than copper, and that many other rare earths—like lanthanum and neodymium—are sprinkled generously throughout Earth’s minerals, often more so than metals we mine every day for industry and technology.

Behind the Hype: Mining’s True Challenge

For all their “scarcity,” what sets rare earths apart isn’t their geologic riddle, but a chemical one. Unlike gold or platinum, which appear in concentrated, mineable veins, rare earth elements are enmeshed together and tangled with lookalike neighbors. This resemblance, rooted in almost indistinguishable chemical properties, transforms extraction into a daunting puzzle. Mining rare earths is not a thrilling treasure hunt but a demanding chemical marathon—separations require sequences of reactions, caustic acids, and generate toxic waste, all to tease out differences so small they might be called trivial in any other context. The real bottleneck is not supply, but the process.

This was also a good one:

What can we learn from the latest Rare Earths crisis?

Though they are rarely visible on the surface, the chances are you’ve already interacted with a rare earth element today. If you have a pair of earbuds, the little ones that fit in your ears (and, for that matter, most over-ear headphones too), their speakers are powered by neodymium iron boron magnets. That satisfying snap as you close the case of Airbuds or a modern tablet or laptop? Neodymium magnets. The motors that help robots move their limbs, or raise or lower the windows in a car? Again, motors with neodymium magnets.

Remove these rare earths from the equation and while civilisation wouldn’t grind to a halt, everything would certainly become slower and less efficient. Jet engines would be less efficient. Electric cars ditto.

The funny thing about rare earths, however, is for all that everyone vaguely appreciates that they’re incredibly important, the market is actually surprisingly small. According to Rob West, who regular readers will know is one of the smartest analysts out there on the energy transition, the total size of the Rare Earth oxide market in 2024 was “about the same as the North American avocado market”(!)

This is a function of two things. First, the fact that you actually don’t need all that much neodymium or scandium or yttrium in your special alloys. A sprinkling will sometimes do. Second, prices have been getting lower and lower in recent years. And that, in large part, a function of something else: massive Chinese dominance of the market.

This is something you’ll already be familiar with but it’s worth trotting the numbers out al the same. China is responsible for roughly 70 per cent of all rare earth mining and roughly 91 per cent of all finished rare earth metal production. Those neodymium magnets inside your earphones? There is a good chance they came from the soil of Inner Mongolia, the site of China’s biggest rare earth mine.

Despite their name, rare earths are not very rare. They are to be found in most corners of the world. There are enormous reserves under the ground in Brazil, in India, in Australia and America - as well, of course, as China. But refining rare earths is hard. Very hard - far harder than nearly every other metal refining. By some accounts it takes as many as 100 processes to extract the metals from their ores. It takes enormous amounts of energy along the way. The waste products produced along the way are nasty - nastier than the kind of thing you tend to find at most copper or iron mines (and that stuff isn’t exactly very palatable).

Pair with: What’s Happening at Spruce Pine...?

Note:

Expect more mining content in TLG as I’m focusing on a good amount of my time on this lately, both with Mirage Metrics and with Mirage Exploration.

Also, thanks to all the readers who responded last week on this theme of what we’re doing at Mirage Exploration. If you have friends I should talk to, or if you’re in the space, I’d love to chat! Just reply to this email.

🎥 What I’m Watching

🧗‍♂️ How to make doing hard things easier than scrolling youtube

This might help you : )

📈 The Sales Playbook for Founders

This is a great playbook that I used successfully initially at Mirage.

🔧 The Tool of the Week

💊 Electrolites

The only supplement I can’t live with right now is these electrolytes. Not necessarily this brand specifically, but because I’m cutting, my overall food intake is significantly lower, this the amount of electrolytes I get from eating is less. Without electrolytes, I get insane cramps.

I also take a lot of this magnesium, and it helps me get better sleep and better recovery in the gym.

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

No one talks about how peaceful life gets when you’re obsessed. 12 hour days feel effortless. Week days and weekends blend together.

You wake up, log on, and by the time you check the clock it’s time to sleep again. Runners call it the high. Athletes call it the zone.

Writers call it flow. Whatever it is, it’s beautiful.

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading,

If you like The Long Game, forward this email to someone who might enjoy it!

Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi

Subscribe now

In this episode, we explore:

• Fake natural controversies

• Avoidance

• The Dragon Hatchling

• 996

• How Europe crushes innovation

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

🏋️‍♀️ FFMI / Natural Lifting / Natural Potential / Fake Natty

There’s been a lot of discussion lately in the fitness world after Jeff Nippard’s video on natty or not physiques. There were many interesting responses video (here, here, here and here) to it. I’ll try to recap the whole saga here with the interesting elements of this conversation.

1. The basic conflict

• The “natty or not” debate is not just about steroids; it’s about truth, fairness, and identity.

• Viewers want to know if what they see is possible for them.

• The gym used to be private; now every physique is public property for analysis.

2. The fake natty pattern

• Usually young, flashy, loud about being “natural.”

• Show fast transformations (1–2 years), often with no detailed training logs.

• Disappear for months, then return smaller, claiming injury, burnout, or “TRT.”

• Reuse the same photos and videos for years.

• Sell programs or supplements based on their look.

The issue is pretending that effort alone achieved something that wasn’t natural. Usually, people are ok when the creator is honest about their gear use.

3. The witch-hunt side

• Some creators build audiences by calling others out.

• They slow down clips, zoom in on acne, and analyze lighting.

• Their logic: “If I can’t look like that, it’s not natural.”

• Often right, but the mindset becomes toxic, and everything turns into suspicion. And every single advanced lifter is not natty according to them (and to most people on forums like NattyorNot on Reddit). Peak loser mentality.

4. Jeff Nippard’s video and the backlash

• Jeff’s intent: explore whether some impressive physiques could be natural.

• His mistake: using “genetics” as an unproven explanation for everything.

• Some critics argued he blurred science and storytelling.

• The point: you can’t defend someone’s genetics without data; it quickly becomes pseudoscience. Like, do you have good shoulders because of “genetics” or just because you love training shoulders, and that love for shoulders, is it genetic… there’s no end.

5. The “genetics” problem

• People say “good delt genetics” or “bad trap genetics,” but no one’s ever measured that.

• Shape and bone structure are genetic, but growth rate and potential are mostly unknown.

• Without data on the real variance of muscle gain, “genetics” is a placeholder for ignorance.

• It’s an easy way to dismiss suspicion without proving anything.

6. The production illusion

What makes someone look enhanced online is rarely chemistry:

• Lighting and angles (a hard light can add 20 lbs visually).

• Leanness (lower body fat exaggerates size).

• Pumps and posing.

• Selection (posting the best shot out of hundreds).

• Editing and filters.

• This is striking if you train in a gym with influencers; their photos look nothing like how they are training normally or outside in the street. The art of deception.

Most “unbelievable” physiques are believable under normal light.

7. Time as the only real test

• You can fake photos, but not time.

• Enhanced lifters usually peak fast (20s) and regress early.

• Naturals grow slowly, plateau later, and maintain longer.

• Consistency over 10 years tells you more than bloodwork or claims ever could.

8. What makes someone look natural

• Softer fullness when not pumped.

• Steady improvement year to year, not month to month.

• Real naturals talk about fatigue, sleep, food, and training details, not just “grind” and mindset.

9. Why the debate never ends

• Social media rewards drama, speed, and strong opinions.

• Lifting rewards patience, boredom, and uncertainty.

• Both systems clash: the slow world of biology vs. the fast world of content.

• That’s why we keep looping through the same outrage cycle, fake natty exposed, audience shocked, repeat.

10. The only perspective that holds up

• You’ll never know with full certainty who’s natural.

• The question matters less the longer you train.

• Real progress comes from time, recovery, and honesty, not from trying to police other people’s biology.

Personally, I think there are more fake natty than ever, but I also think the natural limit is higher than previously thought. It’s often said that a 25 FFMI is the natural limit, but as I’m getting close to it, I’m now open to thinking that the natural limit is more around 26, even 27. For example, I do believe Trell is natural; he’s certainly a freak and not representative of what most will be able to achieve.

🌱 Wellness

🤚 Avoidance

Carl Jung on avoidance:

People do not realize just how much they are putting at risk when they don’t accept what life presents them with, the questions and tasks that life sets them. When they resolve to spare themselves the pain and suffering, they owe to their nature. In so doing, they refuse to pay life’s dues and for this very reason, life then often leads them astray. If we don’t accept our own destiny, a different kind of suffering takes its place: a neurosis develops, and I believe that that life which we have to live is not as bad as a neurosis. If I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality. A neurosis is a much greater curse! In general, a neurosis is a replacement for an evasion, an unconscious desire to cheat life, to avoid something. One cannot do more than live what one really is. And we are all made up of opposites and conflicting tendencies. After much reflection, I have come to the conclusion that it is better to live what one really is and accept the difficulties that arise as a result—because avoidance is much worse.

Pair with: As always, The MindBody Prescription

🧠 Better Thinking

⚖️ Dichotomie

This is a great and beautifully written essay on the “effort guy” vs. the “clever guy.”

It’s worth thinking about which side you belong to, and meditating on whether tampering with your natural tendency with the opposite approach could lead to breakthroughs in your life.

Dichotomies are a good way of evaluating people. They serve as highly signal cleavage points based on a snap judgment. In the realm of worldly achievement, my favourite of these dichotomies is whether someone values cleverness or whether they value reps. Fundamentally, the clever person sees immense beauty in maximizing elegance. The reps guy, rather, is interested in the nobility of effort. The reps guy approaches their work like a mountain with a pot of gold at the summit. It is up for grabs to whoever applies with the most herculean effort. There is no uncertainty or unsolved puzzle; it is simply a matter of effort and competence. The clever one wonders if there isn’t some larger pot of gold hidden somewhere that can be stumbled upon with no more effort than a pleasant stroll, so long as they know where to look.

Neither is better than the other. Both camps have many successful ambassadors, though the world-historical level outliers tend to embody their fair share of both. Rather, they are two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world. One values effort and one wit. To one success is glorious because of the hard work and to the other, it is glorious despite it. I believe whether one values reps or wit is largely innate, there is just something so obvious to them that one is better than the obvious. There are correlates, those who are high energy tend to value reps and those who don’t largely value wit. One guy thinks that he is more deserving because he worked harder than everyone else, the other guy thinks everyone else is stupid because he got the pot of gold by barely lifting a finger.

The best rep worker I know is obsessed with finding opportunities where he can outwork everyone else. Where the inputs and outputs are known and the reward is certain but rare because of the effort required. To him everything is a question of brute force and a question of taking his set amount of it and choosing the best linear path to apply it towards.

The most clever worker I know is obsessed with something he calls finding “mate in one”. This term comes from chess and describes when, no matter what move an opponent can make, you will be able to checkmate them on the next turn. It is the one move, the single leverage point, that negates all other effort. He would present me with a problem he was trying to solve and I would lob all kinds of ideas or strategies at him that would make marginal progress and he would dismiss them out of hand. With enough thought, enough wit, there was a “mate in one” move to be made that would render any further effort completely useless.

The latter strategy, of course, is much more uncertain. While the repetitious man can immediately get to work, the clever one must wait around and pontificate for a solution that may or may not exist. In exchange for taking this risk the clever man gets the opportunity to run laps around the repetitious man. Instead of being the guy, he can be the guy who finds the guy, or the guy who finds the guy who finds the guy.

Consider the case of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. There is a video of Ted Cruz painstakingly plotting out the next 35 years of his career in undergrad, culminating in his run for president. Harvard Law, the Senate, this committee and that committee, decades and decades of labour all to end up subservient to a guy who called his wife a dog on national television. Trump found “mate in one” in a game that had been thought to been completed and reduced down to a game of attrition.

The repetitious worker’s asset is his tremendous effort ergo the opportunities he looks for are ones where consistency is the most difficult. These tend to be very contained systems with clear outcomes (e.g. Mr. Olympia, Highest paid actor, the Governor’s office). The clever worker’s greatest asset is finding novel solutions ergo the opportunities he looks for are ones that have been least explored (e.g. investments, warfare, espionage, scientific discovery).

One question I like to use to discern someone’s tendency towards cleverness over repetition is the nightclub line scenario. This is a hypothetical situation in which you land in a new Tier 1 city and have to meet someone in the hottest club with the tightest door in the entire city. There are many good answers but they all give you a clue as to where one’s particular proclivity towards the beauty of work lay. The grinder will tend to say something like they’ll get in line and chat up some girls or go up and down the line and ask if they can cut in front or join their group. Then you start to get things like pay the bouncer off or sneak in the side door or figure out what the stamp or wristband looks like and make a duplicate. Finally, you will sometimes hear something like finding out who the big investor is in the club and send them an email the morning you land and using that as a way onto the list. Each answer gets the person into the club of course, but the tradeoffs between effort and cleverness are evident and will hint a lot at where someone stands in the great dichotomy.

🤖 AI Updates

🐲 The Dragon Hatchling: The Missing Link Between the Transformer and Models of the Brain

This is a fascinating paper. It presents a new kind of AI model called Dragon Hatchling, or BDH. The idea is to build a system that works more like the human brain than current language models, such as Transformers.

If you’re using AI a lot, you might find yourself in situations where you just don’t understand how the model gets to certain outputs or conclusions, even after good prompting. In many ways, it doesn’t think like you’d want the model to think, which makes the communication with the AI models tricky at times.

Today’s models rely on huge blocks of matrix math, which are powerful but not very similar to how neurons in the brain actually communicate. BDH replaces that setup with a network of many small “neurons” that interact with each other directly, forming a large web of connections that adapts as it processes information.

In BDH, the connections between neurons strengthen or weaken as the model reasons. That’s inspired by a biological principle known as Hebbian learning, where “neurons that fire together wire together.”

The result is a system that doesn’t just apply what it learned during training, but continues to adjust and refine its internal structure as it thinks. This gives it a kind of built-in adaptability that current models lack.

The authors also created a version that can run efficiently on GPUs, called BDH-GPU. It performs about as well as Transformer models of a similar size on language tasks, but it behaves in a more interpretable way. Its activations are sparse and easy to analyze, and individual neurons tend to represent clear ideas rather than mixtures of many things.

The goal is to make AI systems that reason and generalize more like people, while still being efficient and transparent in how they work.

Pair with: Claude is trying to brand itself as enabling us to ‘think’ more.

⚡️ Startup Stuff

🔨 996 Is Not Your Competition

There’s a lot of chatter around working hours in tech right now. 90% of it is posturing imo. Young kids thinking they’re amazing because they’re coding in a bar at 11 pm instead of enjoying a social moment 🤦‍♂️

This is a good article on the topic.

This is what the 996 crowd doesn’t understand. They post their suffering like medals. Screenshot their commits. Count their hours. They’re performing intensity to avoid asking if they even care.

Mercenaries do performance theater about 996. Missionaries don’t even look at the clock.

You can’t beat someone who thinks they’re playing.

When you genuinely love the problem, the hours disappear. You’re not counting. You’re playing.

Type 2 fun. Miserable now, magical later. Except when you’re having fun, it’s not even miserable now.

Your 0.1% equity is probably worthless. The expected value is less than staying at Google. Everyone knows this.

So why do it?

Because the math was never the point. The joy is.

I think this makes the perfect point: by focusing on hours, people try to appear obsessed about their work, but they’re more obsessed about the appearance of being obsessed. This is not true obsession.

A lot of things are like that with our culture, which is increasingly focused on appearances and the image of things vs. the thing itself. If you ever have the chance (or misfortune) to watch an IG influencer take pictures and then see the result online, you’ll watch two completely unrelated realities.

The same goes for the founder tweeting about 996. They are the IG model version of tech Twitter.

Pair with: The 996 Local Maxima Trap

the 9-9-6 local maxima trap

you can optimize for looking busy, hitting metrics, being “productive” – but you might be climbing the wrong hill entirely.

real breakthroughs happen in the spaces between. when you’re walking and your mind wanders. when you sit with a problem long enough that the obvious solutions dissolve and something deeper emerges. when you have the luxury of thinking “what if we’re approaching this completely wrong?”

my process is simple: i’ll open a Notion doc on my phone and just walk. sometimes for hours. the walking rhythm unlocks something – maybe it’s the bilateral movement, maybe it’s getting away from screens, but ideas start connecting in ways they never do at a desk. i’ll quickly jot stuff down as interesting thoughts pass.

then i come back and just sit with the problem. draw some pictures, build it out a bit. no rushing to conclusions. no pressure to ship something by end of day. just... what is this, really? what can it connect to or evolve into? what would this look like if it were in its most beautiful configuration?

once i see it clearly, execution becomes effortless. the focused bursts where you’re completely in flow – that’s when the real work happens. but you can’t force your way there. you have to earn it with the slow, patient thinking first.

the irony is that this “inefficient” approach ships better stuff faster than grinding 12-hour days. but it requires believing that thinking time isn’t wasted time. that walking isn’t procrastination. that sometimes the most productive thing you can do is to not do.

many teams don’t get this. they need to see keyboards clicking and meetings happening. but the best work – the stuff that actually moves the needle – happens in the flow moments when no one’s watching.

📚 What I Read

🇪🇺 How Europe Crushes Innovation

A sobering read on a lot of things wrong with employment in Europe and how it hinders innovation. This might be an unpopular opinion in Europe, but it’s an essential read:

For decades Europe did fine with its incremental-but-likely-to-pay-off innovation model. Century-old firms show there is still money to be made in developing a slightly better tyre or a faster train. But in recent years the rewards flowing to companies making bold bets have ballooned. Tech firms that pursued disruptive innovation have turned into trillion-dollar behemoths. None of them is in Europe. Nvidia, an American chipmaker, is worth more than the European Union’s 20 biggest listed firms combined. Some of that may be a bubble whose popping may splatter American business. But lacking companies in such superstar sectors is one reason why output per hour worked by Europeans has slumped in comparison with America in recent decades.

Don’t hire and don’t fire

European businesses face a multitude of problems. Smothering regulations, expensive energy, high taxes and a fragmented single market are all known hindrances. Yet few think labour-market legislation is much of an issue. For why would successful companies, if they could be fostered in Europe, ever need to downsize? And yet they do. Microsoft, Google and Meta have all sacked over 10,000 staff in one fell swoop in recent years, despite doing roaring business. Satya Nadella, the boss of Microsoft, said firing people even as his company was thriving was the “enigma of success”. Try telling European politicians that. When Bosch and Volkswagen, two German industrial titans, recently announced their own lay-offs, the timelines stretched to 2030.

Pair with: Another topic entirely, but also related to Europe’s struggles. No Country Ever Got Rich From Tourism

In the United States, newscasters read out employment numbers and GDP growth figures. In Southern Europe, they read out tourist arrival numbers. In many countries, tourism has become synonymous with future economic prosperity.

When put into numbers, the dependence of some countries on foreign tourist spending is staggering. In 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic threw global tourism into chaos, international tourist receipts were equivalent to 53% of Montenegro’s exports; the figures are similarly high for Albania (51%), Croatia (38%), Greece (28%), Portugal (23%), and even large countries like Spain (19%) and Turkey (16%).

For comparison, automobiles are 17% of Germany’s exports and oil is 49% of the United Arab Emirates’ exports. Some European countries are more dependent on tourism than Dubai is on oil, and most of Southern Europe is more dependent on tourism than Germany is on exporting Volkswagens and BMWs.

🏗 On agency

A great (and funny) question to ponder is:

if i had 10x the agency i have what would i do?

Some helpful elements related to agency:

Looking at the problem

At the heart of agency lies a willingness to question defaults. To be agentic, you have to treat “how things are supposed to be done” as just one option among many.

Or, no, that formulation isn’t deep enough. When I think about friends of mine who struggle to be agentic, the problem isn’t precisely that they do the default thing; it’s that they fail to understand their problems and the solution space. They act in incoherent or ineffective ways because their mental model of the situation is too limited to show them a way out. They are not attuned enough to figure out what they want and how the world works. To be agentic, you have to really look at the problem and at the solution space and accept the responsibility of learning what is necessary to make the problem go away.

If you forget about how your problems are “supposed to be solved” and just look at the goal—what is the shortest path from here to there? What is the fastest way to get the information you need to find that path?

If you have a clear understanding of the goal, there are often paths that lead there that are much shorter than the default path. A good question to ask is: what is the simplest solution that could possibly work?

If you read interviews and biographies of people with high agency, you can get plenty of examples of them asking the equivalent of this question and finding simple, creative solutions to complicated problems. Since it is hard to say anything general about what it means to find a simple solution, I recommend looking at plenty of examples to get a feel for what it means to act in this way.

Pair with: 9 fun ways to increase your agency with zero grinding required

7. Work less. Focus more - A good rule of thumb I want tattooed on my brain: working hard is overpriced, focusing hard is underpriced. Most of our lives are spent inside the Grove Trap: “There are so many people working so hard, and achieving so little” - Andy Grove. One door out of the Grove Trap is deep mode: Focus 90% of your work hours for 2-4 weeks on your number one bottleneck. Most people context-switch between C-tier tasks all day—emails, meetings, small fixes. They never identify the A-tier task, much less focus on it. One month of clear-minded focus beats a year of distracted hustle grindset.

8. Low agency is downstream from taking yourself too seriously - One thing that helps with taking life less seriously is exploring the absurdity of astrophysics. It’s hard to take my life too seriously when there’s a black hole at the centre of the Milky Way 4 million times the mass of our sun, or staring into the night sky and seeing light from stars that existed over 10,000 years ago in the present moment. My fear of cringe looks tiny when placed in the grand scheme of the universe, let alone the multiverse. If you stare into the stars long enough, the stars begin to stare back into you.

🎳 An Existential Guide to: Making Friends

An important topic, and a great way to approach it. And of course, as you would expect (recurring topic in the last editions of TLG):

Enemies of Friendship

Self-optimization. Professional networking. Status anxiety disguised as taste. The algorithm’s sweet narcotic drip that replaces “we” with “for you.” The contemporary delusion that intimacy must be hygienic, that it should smell faintly of eucalyptus and good lighting. Friendship is not spa water. It is the puddle you step in together and then name.

Most dangerous of all: Narrative. The minute you decide what this friendship is, you have given it a plot arc, which is simply a schedule for death. Let it resist articulation. Let it be the thing that only explains itself while it is happening, and even then only in a dialect the air forgets at once.

Pair with: How Friendships Change in Adulthood and How to Make and Keep Friends as an Adult

🔮 Private Truths, Public Lies, by Timur Kuran

I recently revisited this book on the social consequences of preference falsification. Thought-provoking.

Preference Falsification as a Specific Form of Lying

Why introduce a complicated term like preference falsification? Wouldn’t “lying” do? While always a form of lying, preference falsification is a more specific concept. Consider a person who, as a soldier, followed orders to massacre unarmed civilians. Years later, he denies taking part in the crime. If he was personally opposed to the atrocity, and participated solely to avoid being court-martialed for disobedience, his lie about his involvement does not misrepresent his sentiment toward his victims. Given that he felt no antagonism toward them, he would not be falsifying a preference. Preference falsification aims specifically at manipulating the perceptions others hold about one’s motivations or dispositions, as when you complimented your host to make him think that you shared his taste.

Nor is preference falsification synonymous with “self-censorship,” the suppression of one’s potentially objectionable thoughts. In this instance, preference falsification is the broader concept. Had you merely kept quiet during the discussion about the decor, that would have been self-censorship. In pretending to like it, you went beyond self-censorship. You deliberately projected a contrived opinion.

Two other common terms with which preference falsification has close affinity are “insincerity” and “hypocrisy.” I will sometimes use them where the context leaves no room for ambiguity, just as I will refer occasionally to lying. But no such term is sufficiently precise for the topic at hand. What gets falsified may be a preference, one’s knowledge, or a value. For analytical clarity, it will often be essential to distinguish among various forms of falsification.

🍭 Brain Food

⛏ It’s Time to Mine

I’ve become fascinated and obsessed with the mining industry over the last year. This article explains well what is at stake and why mining as an industry will explode in the decades to come.

Milton Friedman once famously used a pencil to illustrate the power of capitalism. Something so mundane, bought for less than a dollar at any corner store, depended on a vast and invisible web of global cooperation. The wood came from one place, and the metal, rubber, paint, and machinery from another — each requiring its own supply chains, tools, and labor. No single person could make a pencil on their own, yet the world produces billions of them.

Now, imagine what Friedman would say about a smartphone. Or an electric vehicle. Or an F-35 fighter jet.

At the foundation of it all, however, is something even humbler than a pencil: rocks. Blasted, shoveled, crushed, and burned — earth transmuted into metal, machines, and power. Our world is built from the ground up.

The importance of critical minerals and mining is not a novel concept, but we want to share our updated perspective — shaped by the accelerating convergence of technology, capital, and policy — and help explain the complex process that transforms rocks into global supremacy.

We do have active mining projects at Mirage Metrics, working with mining companies on data & IA developments in Africa.

On top of that, we also started Mirage Exploration, which is an exploration company focused on ai-native mineral exploration targeting energy transition metals in Morocco (cobalt, copper, manganese, rare earth metals).

If you’re in the space or know people we should talk to, let me know!

🎥 What I’m Watching

🧠 Genius and Easily Raising Your IQ

This guy literally won ‘genius of the year’ in 2016 and has a video explaining how anyone can increase their IQ:

Pair with: Nobody is a Prisoner of their IQ

🏗 Jeff Bezos Shares His Management Style and Philosophy

Jeff Bezos is talking about leadership, but really, it’s one of the most succinct blueprints for how to achieve greatness I have ever found.

Pair with: What is Amazon

🔧 The Tool of the Week

👟 Sneak in Peace

This is such a well-done and great product to discover and buy sneakers. Aesthetically designed, great selection, everything you need in one place.

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.

— Dostoevsky

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading,

If you like The Long Game, forward this email to someone who might enjoy it!

Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi

Subscribe now

In this episode, we explore:

• Mold, microplastics and polyester

• Retardmaxxing

• A Missing Paradigm for LLM learning

• Craft vs slop

• The Forward Deployed model

🏗 Note:

It’s been a long time :)

I started a new company a few months ago, and did not have the time and mental bandwidth to keep writing this newsletter. However, I never wanted to stop it for two reasons: it helps me learn a lot, and it helps me meet great people and has led to countless positive things in my life, friends, hires, etc.

As for the new company, we’re building the AI-native Palantir focused on logistics, manufacturing, and mining. In short, we take industries that still run on manual processes and scattered systems, and give them an operating layer powered by AI agents and real-time data.

At the core is a unified data platform that pulls everything together, from sensors, ERPs, and documents to operations in the field, so decisions are made on a single, consistent source of truth. The result is fewer inefficiencies, faster decisions, and companies that can finally operate at full potential.

For the AI agents, think agents that fully automate freight forwarding paperwork and trucking operations, track and coordinate activity across industrial plants, handle order intake in large-scale manufacturing, optimize truck shifts in mining operations, or manage customs paperwork end-to-end.

We also build custom LLMs designed specifically for logistics and manufacturing teams, so operators can query and act on their data as naturally as having a conversation.

Lots of cool stuff.

If you have a company in those spaces or adjacent to them (or work at one) and suffer from similar challenges in your day-to-day, drop me a note 💌

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

🦠 Mold / Environmental Toxins / Plastics

Being honest, I’ve been less focused on health, tracking, etc., over the last 12+ months. I stopped wearing my Apple Watch, I stopped wearing my Oura, I stopped tracking everything. Even as I’m cutting right now, I don’t count calories. I’m going full vibes, leaning into auto-regulation and learning to understand the messages of the body.

I started paying attention to the messages coming from my body after my life-changing discovery of Dr Sarno (🐐) and the mindbody syndrome, which led me to understanding that overoptimisation, tracking and the metrics-oriented approach to health were fundamentally not adapted to how my brain and mind are wired.

I still think wearables and tracking have their place, especially for a few months, to learn what there is to learn, but after that, it can quickly become more noise than anything else. For now, auto-regulation and listening to the body work well for me.

Some interesting health topics that have been on my mind:

Mold:

This father shares his mold experience. Quite frightening because it can wreak your health, and if you’re not aware of the idea that it could come from mold, you could be running in circles for months/ years, not understanding what’s happening to you and your family.

So, the mold thing happened to us. And it’s been pretty bad. Been quite a process, and it’s amazing how commercial mold testing companies are totally useless. Take a moment to read this post for your family’s health. In Q4 2024 and Q1 this year, my youngest little boy was getting sick frequently. 105 fevers, respiratory infections. 7 times in about 4 months.

Polyester and fertility:

75% of female dogs wearing polyester couldn’t get pregnant because it tanked their progesterone. Polyester creates an electrostatic field that disrupts hormone production. Maybe time to switch the leggings for some cotton pants!

Microplastics in the brain:

Another alarming study on the detrimental effects of plastics on human health.

Finally, even greater accumulation of MNPs was observed in a cohort of decedent brains with documented dementia diagnosis, with notable deposition in cerebrovascular walls and immune cells. These results highlight a critical need to better understand the routes of exposure, uptake and clearance pathways and potential health consequences of plastics in human tissues, particularly in the brain.

Microplastics removal strikes me as one of the greatest opportunities in biotech over the next decade. Who’s working on this?

Pair with: Oasis App

It helps you analyze the water quality where you live and the top bottled water options.

🌱 Wellness

🕶 Retardmaxxing

I was coming to a similar understanding of life on my own (that you might have noticed if you’re a long-time reader of TLG), but it’s always better to put a name on it, and Elisha Long did it better than anyone else. Retardmaxxing.

A short description of what it is, and why it’s so important for you overthinkers, overoptimizers and wannabe overachievers:

High IQ often means overcomplicating everything. Always analyzing, always strategizing. I catch myself doing this all the time.

But the truth is, most high IQ people are miserable. When your brain is wired to constantly dissect, predict, and overanalyze, you see every flaw, every risk, every hidden angle.

It’s like carrying X-ray vision for reality. You can’t just enjoy the moment because you’re busy seeing how fragile everything really is. You know the odds, the statistics, the history. You can’t unsee it.

The more you know, the harder it is to laugh freely, to be lighthearted, to feel joy without caveats. That’s why so many brilliant people end up restless, cynical, even depressed.

Meanwhile, the simple ones look happier, lighter, free.

Moral of the story: You need to be retardmaxxing more often.

Pair with: Why We Prefer Complicated to Simple

🧠 Better Thinking

🪓 Craft Is the Antidote to Slop

I really loved this article by Will Manidis. A perfect response to Meta’s latest announcement of a dedicated AI video brainrot app.

From Genesis, man enters not a paradise without labor but a world of intentional creation. The LORD God places man in the Garden of Eden “to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15) establishing labor not as punishment but as sacred vocation. This original calling invites us to co-create the Kingdom, tending and developing the world with intention and care. Our fundamental purpose is not consumption but participation in the ongoing work of creation.

The serpent’s temptation represents the first shortcut in human history. “Ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5) was not an invitation to deeper engagement with creation, but a way to get out of the work required to tend to it. The consequence wasn’t the introduction of work itself, but its corruption into burdensome toil: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” (Genesis 3:19). Humanity’s first sin was, in part, choosing the easy shortcut over the meaningful process - preferring effortless gain to the demanding but fulfilling work of tending the garden.

This first temptation remains alive today. Our post-enlightenment view that our world is purely material-that our lives are the outcome of physical processes devoid of feeling, craft, or meaning-is to discount the unique, historical, and stubbornly detailed nature of reality. This view misses what is evident: that the world we inhabit bears the marks of exacting, purposeful craftsmanship on both human and cosmic scales. Viewing the world as raw material is a cheap shortcut around the demanding, hermeneutic work of understanding the past and engaging deeply with the present.

The outputs of these shortcuts are “slop”— the dominant cultural output of the twenty-first century Slop emerges when we eliminate not just toil (the burdensome aspects of work) but labor itself (the meaningful human engagement with creation). Slop is production without history. Slop is detached from genuine human contribution. Slop born of effortless, replicable processes.

We see it in the overwhelming flood of Al-generated content on timelines. But slop is not just digital; it manifests physically in the uniform, history-denying aesthetic of new build transplant cities built from replicable templates, lacking any imprint of history or specific human interaction with place. It is also present in industrially farmed food that has seemingly never seen soil. This might explain why truly inspired creation, the antithesis of slop, often seems rooted in something beyond mere human effort or secular concern. Consider how no purely secular building has ever approached the grandeur of Chartres or any of the old cathedrals, and no secular music has reached the spiritual depth of Bach.

Slop, in all its forms, is the result of attempting to conjure life and meaning without labor or place in history.

Language models provide the means for industrialization of Slop. In their highest calling, these tools can eliminate genuine toil: tending to burdensome emails, litigating with your co-op board, or drafting a parking ticket appeal. But when we ask a model to write a poem, design a church, or compose a eulogy, we get something fundamentally different from human creation. The model has never lost a loved one, never stood in a holy space, never lived. We can and should automate toil, but we must preserve craft. The difference is simple: when I use a model as leverage to remove toil, I remain source; when I ask a model to remove my agency by replacing my labor, something ancient and unseen becomes source.

Demons thrive in these automated realms. Not metaphorical demons, but the actual spiritual forces that have always sought to separate humanity from meaningful engagement with creation as we see in Genesis 3. The demonic recognizes in our shortcuts the perfect opportunity: tempt humans away from the difficult labor of making, growing, and building with our own hands and minds. Instead, offer an endless stream of effortless consumption-images without artists, music without musicians, stories without storytellers. The devil’s oldest strategy is, of course, promising godlike creation without godlike effort.

Yet, the biblical narrative does not end in the Garden lost to a shortcut. It culminates in Revelation with the vision of a city, the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21-22). This city is not a return to effortless paradise but a place whose jasper walls and river-lit avenues are inconceivable without millennia of labor and discovery - the accumulated craft and effort of humanity redeemed. The nations bring their

“glory and honour into it” (Revelation 21:24), a glory that is the fruit of human labor and culture offered back to God. The perfected creation still involves ongoing fruitfulness and tending (”the tree of life... which bare twelve manner of fruits, “ Revelation 22:2). The Kingdom of God is not merely a distant future state but is, in a sense, present alongside us, requiring our active participation in building and tending it through meaningful labor. It is no coincidence that Christ was a carpenter and Moses a shepherd.

In this vision of redemptive labor, we can glimpse a more hopeful future where technology serves its highest purpose by eliminating true toil while preserving the sacred space for human hands and minds to engage in genuine craft. When automation frees us we gain capacity to redirect our energies toward the kinds of deeply human creative acts that build the Kingdom: tending gardens, raising cathedrals, composing hymns, and nurturing communities. It is a participation in the ongoing work of building the Kingdom.

Pair with: We Are the Slop

They say my generation is wasting our lives watching mindless entertainment. But I think things are worse than that. We are now turning our lives into mindless entertainment. Not just consuming slop, but becoming it.

🤖 AI Updates

🔍 A Missing Paradigm for LLM learning

If you use LLMs a lot in your work, like I do, you might have encountered many situations where you feel the LLM does not respond the way you would like.

Part of the issue is explained here:

We’re missing (at least one) major paradigm for LLM learning. Not sure what to call it, possibly it has a name - system prompt learning?

Pretraining is for knowledge.

Finetuning (SL/RL) is for habitual behavior.

Both of these involve a change in parameters but a lot of human learning feels more like a change in system prompt. You encounter a problem, figure something out, then “remember” something in fairly explicit terms for the next time. E.g. “It seems when I encounter this and that kind of a problem, I should try this and that kind of an approach/solution”. It feels more like taking notes for yourself, i.e. something like the “Memory” feature but not to store per-user random facts, but general/global problem solving knowledge and strategies. LLMs are quite literally like the guy in Memento, except we haven’t given them their scratchpad yet. Note that this paradigm is also significantly more powerful and data efficient because a knowledge-guided “review” stage is a significantly higher dimensional feedback channel than a reward scaler.

Pair with: Matthew McConaughey talking about wanting a private LLM and (maybe?) the solution.

⚡️ Startup Stuff

💭 Reflections on Palantir

Over the last few months, I’ve been reading and re-reading this piece dozens of times. I’m learning everything I can about the early days of Palantir.

As we started taking on AI projects with companies, the reasons behind the FDE model (forward-deployed engineer) became obvious.

Forward deployed

When I joined, Palantir was divided up into two types of engineers:

1. Engineers who work with customers, sometimes known as FDEs, forward deployed engineers.

2. Engineers who work on the core product team (product development - PD), and rarely go visit customers.

FDEs were typically expected to ‘go onsite’ to the customer’s offices and work from there 3-4 days per week, which meant a ton of travel. This is, and was, highly unusual for a Silicon Valley company.

There’s a lot to unpack about this model, but the key idea is that you gain intricate knowledge of business processes in difficult industries (manufacturing, healthcare, intel, aerospace, etc.) and then use that knowledge to design software that actually solves the problem. The PD engineers then ‘productize’ what the FDEs build, and – more generally – build software that provides leverage for the FDEs to do their work better and faster.

This is how much of the Foundry product took initial shape: FDEs went to customer sites, had to do a bunch of cruft work manually, and PD engineers built tools that automated the cruft work. Need to bring in data from SAP or AWS? Here’s Magritte (a data ingestion tool). Need to visualize data? Here’s Contour (a point and click visualization tool). Need to spin up a quick web app? Here’s Workshop (a Retool-like UI for making webapps). Eventually, you had a damn good set of tools clustered around the loose theme of ‘integrate data and make it useful somehow’.

At the time, it was seen as a radical step to give customers access to these tools — they weren’t in a state for that — but now this drives 50%+ of the company’s revenue, and it’s called Foundry. Viewed this way, Palantir pulled off a rare services company → product company pivot: in 2016, descriptions of it as a Silicon Valley services company were not totally off the mark, but in 2024 they are deeply off the mark, because the company successfully built an enterprise data platform using the lessons from those early years, and it shows in the gross margins - 80% gross margins in 2023. These are software margins. Compare to Accenture: 32%.

Tyler Cowen has a wonderful saying, ‘context is that which is scarce’, and you could say it’s the foundational insight of this model. Going onsite to your customers – the startup guru Steve Blank calls this “getting out of the building” – means you capture the tacit knowledge of how they work, not just the flattened ‘list of requirements’ model that enterprise software typically relies on. The company believed this to a hilarious degree: it was routine to get a call from someone and have to book a first-thing-next-morning flight to somewhere extremely random; “get on a plane first, ask questions later” was the cultural bias. This resulted in out of control travel spend for a long time — many of us ended up getting United 1K or similar — but it also meant an intense decade-long learning cycle which eventually paid off.

My first real customer engagement was with Airbus, the airplane manufacturer based in France, and I moved out to Toulouse for a year and worked in the factory alongside the manufacturing people four days a week to help build the version of our software there.

My first month in Toulouse, I couldn’t fly out of the city because the air traffic controllers were on strike every weekend. Welcome to France. (I jest - France is great. Also, Airbus planes are magnificent. It’s a truly engineering-centric company. The CEO is always a trained aeronautical engineer, not some MBA. Unlike… anyway.)

The CEO told us his biggest problem was scaling up A350 manufacturing. So we ended up building software to directly tackle that problem. I sometimes describe it as “Asana, but for building planes”. You took disparate sources of data — work orders, missing parts, quality issues (“non-conformities”) — and put them in a nice interface, with the ability to check off work and see what other teams are doing, where the parts are, what the schedule is, and so on. Allow them the ability to search (including fuzzy/semantic search) previous quality issues and see how they were addressed. These are all sort of basic software things, but you’ve seen how crappy enterprise software can be - just deploying these ‘best practice’ UIs to the real world is insanely powerful. This ended up helping to drive the A350 manufacturing surge and successfully 4x’ing the pace of manufacturing while keeping Airbus’s high standards of quality.

This made the software hard to describe concisely - it wasn’t just a database or a spreadsheet, it was an end-to-end solution to that specific problem, and to hell with generalizability. Your job was to solve the problem, and not worry about overfitting; PD’s job was to take whatever you’d built and generalize it, with the goal of selling it elsewhere.

Pair with: How Palantir Built the Ultimate Founder Factory and The FDE Playbook for AI Startups, and for my Spanish-speaking friends, El auge del Forward Deployed Engineer.

📚 What I Read

🧹 Digital hygiene

Almost everything you need to fix your digital hygiene (which is getting more and more important with the new type of AI-powered scams).

Every now and then I get reminded about the vast fraud apparatus of the internet, re-invigorating my pursuit of basic digital hygiene around privacy/security of day to day computing.

The sketchiness starts with major tech companies who are incentivized to build comprehensive profiles of you, to monetize it directly for advertising, or sell it off to professional data broker companies who further enrich, de-anonymize, cross-reference and resell it further.

Inevitable and regular data breaches eventually runoff and collect your information into dark web archives, feeding into a whole underground spammer / scammer industry of hacks, phishing, ransomware, credit card fraud, identity theft, etc. This guide is a collection of the most basic digital hygiene tips, starting with the most basic to a bit more niche.

📉 The Great Cousin Decline

A sad development of people having fewer kids.

Perhaps you’ve heard: Americans are having fewer children, on average, than they used to, and that has some people concerned. In the future, the elderly could outnumber the young, leaving not enough workers to pay taxes and fill jobs. Kids already have fewer siblings to grow up with, and parents have fewer kids to care for them as they age.

Oh, and people also have fewer cousins. But who’s talking about that?

Within many families—and I’m sorry to have to say this—cousins occupy a weird place. Some people are deeply close to theirs, but others see them as strangers. Some cousins live on the same block; some live on opposite sides of the world. That can all be true about any family relationship, but when it comes to this one, the spectrum stretches especially far. Despite being related by blood and commonly in the same generation, cousins can end up with completely different upbringings, class backgrounds, values, and interests. And yet, they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family.

Pair with: The parental dead end of consent morality

Humans are deeply mimetic creatures. It’s imperative that we celebrate what’s good, true, and beautiful, such that these ideals become collective markers for morality. Such that they guide behavior.

I don’t think we’ve done a good job at doing that with parenthood in the last thirty-plus years. In fact, I’d argue we’ve done just about everything to undermine the cultural appeal of the simple yet divine satisfaction of child rearing (and by extension maligned the square family unit with mom, dad, and a few kids).

Partly out of a coordinated campaign against the family unit as some sort of trad (possibly fascist!) identity marker in a long-waged culture war, but perhaps just as much out of the banal denigration of how boring and limiting it must be to carry such simple burdens as being a father or a mother in modern society.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 The ultimate status symbol? A big family

I generally disagree with explaining failing birthrates with the rising cost of living (just watch countries like the Nordics have similar failing rates with immense financial help from the state), but this is an interesting angle around large families as a status symbol.

What is the ultimate luxury status symbol? Once upon a time it may have been flaunting a rare handbag, sports car or flashy watch.

But with soaring costs of living and shrinking household sizes, an uncertain global future and a noisy pronatalist rhetoric, perhaps the most serious flex of wealth in developed economies in 2025 is something once considered a natural part of human life. Having kids — specifically, lots and lots of them.

“For most working parents, and particularly those living in cities, even to have one child comfortably is a major economic calculation that requires considerable financial stability,” says Eliza Filby, author of Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad. While that was also true historically — when having an enormous brood was bolstered by a need for labour, religious imperatives and preserving family legacies in the face of high infant mortality — children today aren’t a source of positive household cash flow. They are a drain on it.

Pair with: The Birthgap

🚧 The #1 Bottleneck to AI Progress is Humans

I often think about this exchange; it sums up very well some of what is wrong with Europe.

Dwarkesh Patel 00:51:51

That makes you wonder, when you go around the world—because I know you go outside the Bay Area and the East Coast as well—and you talk about progress studies related ideas, what’s the biggest difference in how they’re received versus the audience here?

Tyler Cowen 00:52:02

Well, the audience here is so different. You’re the outlier place of America. And then where I normally am, outside of Washington, D.C., that’s the other outlier place. And in a way, we’re opposite outliers.

I think that’s healthy for me, both where I live and that I come here a lot and that I travel a lot. But you all are so out there in what you believe. I’m not sure where to start.

You come pretty close to thinking in terms of infinities, on the creative side and the destructive side. And no one in Washington thinks in terms of infinities; they think at the margin. Overall, I think they’re much wiser than the people here.

But I also know if everyone, or even more people, thought like the D.C. people, our world would end. We wouldn’t have growth. They’re terrible.

People in the EU are super wise. You have a meal with some sort of French person who works in Brussels—it’s very impressive. They’re cultured, they have wonderful taste, they understand all these different countries, they know something about Chinese porcelain. And if you lived in a world ruled by them, the growth rate would be negative 1%.

So there’s some way in which all these things have to balance. I think the US has done a marvelous job at that, and we need to preserve that.

What I see happening—the UK used to do a great job at it. UK, somehow the balance is out of whack, and you have too many non-growth-oriented people in the cultural mix.

🇪🇺 I try to remain a European optimist because I love to live here, but so many things have to change, fast.

🏆 The Score Takes Care of Itself, by Bill Walsh

This is one of the books I frequently come back to. I like to always have it in mind all the time because of how important the lessons I took from it are.

A short part I like:

The Gladiator Mentality: Get Your Mind Right

The gladiator mentality is common in sports, especially football at all levels. Although it’s played out differently in business, I think there is a similar phenomenon—that is, the effort to get your mind right, totally focused—before a significant event, whether it’s a major sales presentation or something else. Among other things, it involves the preparation, the “ceremony” before the main event. Top performers utilize this opportunity to get ready for battle.

There is a ritual, sort of a crescendo, that takes you to the very peak of preparation and readiness. The gladiator is thinking, mentally narrowing his focus, as he goes through the ritual before the game. It draws him upward smoothly into the increasing intensity and pressure of the event like a high-performance car going from zero to sixty, the gears shifting seamlessly and without notice.

In addition to our pregame discussions, I had my own ritual as a coach before each kickoff and did it almost unconsciously. I always went to my locker first and then walked through the locker room, taking exactly the same route each time. I would sit in my office and watch another NFL game on television for five minutes or so—not really paying much attention to it, just distracting myself. Then I would leave my office, and just before going out to the field I would shake hands with every single player on our team. If I got done and had missed one of them, I somehow knew it and would search him out and shake hands.

It was that ritual that helped me to create the mindset I wanted before each game. It helped me to focus on what I was about to do, allowed me to methodically narrow my concentration to the point where I could block out everything but the game plan and its execution. The routine was part of the grounding process in which I sought to eradicate worry, excitement, stress, distractions, hopes, fears, and all personal issues. It was like walking into a completely different room mentally, like being on a different planet. And it didn’t end when I left the locker room.

Pair with: The Upside of Stress

🍭 Brain Food

🧠 Your brain’s next 5 seconds, predicted by AI

This crazy paper shows that your brain states can be predicted using transformers.

The bottom line of the paper: Transformer predicts brain activity patterns 5 seconds into the future using just 21 seconds of fMRI data, and it achieves 0.997 correlation using a modified time-series Transformer architecture. Crazy!

Abstract: The human brain is a complex and highly dynamic system, and our current knowledge of its functional mechanism is still very limited.

Fortunately, with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we can observe blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) changes, reflecting neural activity, to infer brain states and dynamics.

In this paper, we ask the question of whether the brain states represented by the regional brain fMRI can be predicted. Due to the success of self-attention and the transformer architecture in sequential auto-regression problems (e.g., language modelling or music generation), we explore the possibility of the use of transformers to predict human brain resting states based on the largescale high-quality fMRI data from the human connectome project (HCP). Current results have shown that our model can accurately predict the brain states up to 5.04s with the previous 21.6s.

Furthermore, even though the prediction error accumulates for the prediction of a longer time period, the generated fMRI brain states reflect the architecture of functional connectome.

These promising initial results demonstrate the possibility of developing generative models for fMRI data using self-attention that learns the functional organization of the human brain.

Pair with: A streaming brain-to-voice neuroprosthesis to restore naturalistic communication.

A woman who cannot speak now speaks through her brain, in real time, with her own voice. No typing, no delay, or sounds made. Just neural intent to streaming speech this isn’t prediction. It’s embodiment

🎥 What I’m Watching

DIRT Series

I love this YouTube series. The guy makes me think a little bit of Anthony Bourdain.

🎙 Herbert Allen Interview

A great interview. A few ideas from it:

Do the work you actually enjoy, not the work that looks lucrative. In the U.S., if you are competent, your needs get covered and often more. Treat losses as tuition because they teach faster than wins. Build and back things where people share real risk, take personal responsibility, and keep the business simple enough to understand on one page.

Pair with: The Consigliere

🔧 The Tool of the Week

📜 NotebookLM

I find a lot of people still don’t know about NoteBookLM. I find it to be the most underrated AI tool. Particularly useful if you want to quickly master a topic and have a few PDF documents on the topic.

This is also a great way to read a book or find answers to some of your challenges, using the learnings of your favorite books.

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

I think of each hour spent on fitness as one day less that I’Il spend in a hospital.

— Ed Thorp

Barcelona 🫶 - hit me up for a coffee if you’re in Barcelona ☕

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading,

If you like The Long Game, forward this email to someone who might enjoy it!

Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi

Subscribe now

In this episode, we explore:

• Policy ideas for a healthier country

• Creating your own misery

• Chesterton’s Fence

• AI agents

• High-intensity parenting

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

🏛 Policy Ideas for a Healthier Country

I’ve listened to Calley and Casey Means over the summer and was fascinated by how clearly and eloquently they were able to articulate the problems with health as a whole in the US. Here’s a short summary of the episode:

They discuss how the healthcare system often treats symptoms instead of root causes, largely because doctors aren't trained enough in nutrition and prevention.

Calley explains how food and pharmaceutical industries influence policies, leading to an abundance of unhealthy, processed foods that contribute to rising chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes.

They show that the system profits more from illness than health, which results in over-prescription of medications, even in children. Their solution is to return to whole, unprocessed foods, cook at home, and make mindful dietary choices.

They advocate for systemic changes to support healthy food options and greater transparency in medical research funding. Their push for people to take control of their health through informed choices and for a healthcare system that truly promotes well-being.

As a follow-up, I found these suggestions made by Justin Mares very good:

1. Remove corporate interests from FDA and USDA guidelines. Today, Big Pharma funds 75% of the FDA’s drug division budget, and 95% of the USDA panel charged with updating nutrition guidelines had conflicts with food or pharma. This is how you get “research” finding Lucky Charms are healthier than ground beef (really).

   • There was also a hilarious moment last week where the FDA formally responded to RFK’s claim that 50% of the total FDA budget comes from pharma, noting that it was “only 47%”.

2. Eliminate the ability of Big Pharma to buy off the mainstream news. As of today, the US and New Zealand are the only countries that allow pharma to directly advertise to the public (and the US has only allowed this since 1997). When pharma accounts for 55% of the mainstream media’s budget, they effectively own the media. It’s how you get crazy things like a pharma-funded doctor saying obesity is genetic and kids should be on lifetime Ozempic injections, and no mainstream mentions of the many downsides (inflammation, gut issues, etc) that come with Ozempic. 

3. Remove conflicts of Interest at the NIH. Currently, there are no conflict-of-interest bans at the NIH, and 8,000 researchers have "major" conflicts. Until 2005, NIH researchers were allowed to accept direct stock options and consulting fees (which 40% of them) did. This is why 40x more money is spent on ways to "manage" cancer than to prevent it: prevention is far less profitable than treatment. 

   • We should also explicitly ban conflicts of interest in nutrition studies. 82% percent of independently funded studies show harm from sugar-sweetened beverages, but 93% of industry-sponsored studies said no harm. 

4. Prevent pharma from price-gouging the American people. Today, buying Ozempic in Germany costs 17x less than it costs for Medicare to buy the same drug. Medicare is the largest buyer of healthcare services in the world, yet under a 2003 law, it’s prohibited from negotiating prices with pharma companies. This leads to absurd schemes like pharma “charging” consumers $1000/mo for Ozempic, then giving them rebates to get the total cost closer to $200/mo. At the same time, Medicare (and thus the US taxpayer) pays the full $1000/mo. 

5. Remove toxins from our food supply. The American food system is uniquely poisonous. We allow 150 pesticides that Europe bans, and high levels of these toxic pesticides are found in 93% of American’s blood/urine samples.
   A simple approach would be to adopt the same chemical regulatory approach as the EU. Today, the EU bans 80,000+ chemicals the US allows in our food, water, skincare, and other products. We should follow the EU’s model and do safety testing on new chemicals before they’re introduced to the food system, rather than ban chemicals decades after we have proof of harm (more here).

6. Increase patient choice with HSAs. Today’s healthcare robs Americans of choice. Patients are shuttled into a 1-size-fits-all program where insurers cover only certain treatments, with certain doctors, and under certain conditions. We should introduce consumer choice (both by exposing prices to consumers via companies like Superscript) and by making HSAs and FSAs key pillars of all healthcare policy. A good step would be to unlock universal HSAs for consumers. 

7. No soda on SNAP. Coca-Cola and other soda manufacturers make billions each year from SNAP recipients. 75% of all $115B in SNAP funds go towards processed foods, and 10% of all SNAP funding goes to soda. This is insane: we are incentivizing the poorest among us to eat processed foods and drink soda. This policy is a key reason why the poorest men die 15 years earlier than their wealthier counterparts: almost entirely due to food-based chronic illness.

   • Additionally, I’d suggest giving bonus dollars or allowing SNAP funds to be used at farmer’s markets and within local food systems, to support healthy local food economies.

8. School lunch reform - Today, eating school lunches is a risk factor for childhood obesity. School lunches are toxic, largely due to captured interests that push for Lunchables to be sold in school lunches and who say pizza is a vegetable (due to the tomato sauce. Yes, a tomato is a fruit). We need to reform these corrupt guidelines to focus on nutrient density from whole foods, and ban ultra-processed foods from school cafeterias. 

   • Additionally, school lunch programs should likely have a health feedback loop. If the kids in a given district fall below certain health metrics (obesity, BMI, whatever), then the school lunch program should be changed! With such a feedback loop, almost every school lunch program in the country would be forced to change today.
     

9. Support a transition to regenerative agriculture - Some studies estimate that if 25% of our agricultural lands transitioned to carbon-sequestering regenerative agriculture, the US would solve its carbon emissions issue.
   Beyond the climate impact, regenerative agriculture improves soil health, leading to more nutrient-dense plants and healthier animals (and hence, to healthier humans). Incentivizing farmers to transition from chemically-intensive forms of monocropping to regenerative agriculture would do wonders for the climate and the health of our food system.
   

10. Reform crop subsidies - Under today’s system of crop subsidies, planting corn/soy/wheat is heavily subsidized, with most subsidies going to large agricultural corporations and landowners. These subsidies make corn/soy/wheat artificially cheap, which is why they end up in everything in their most processed forms (soybean oil - which today accounts for nearly 20% of the average American’s caloric intake - and high fructose corn syrup to name a few). Our subsidies program is so corrupt that the government subsidizes tobacco 4x more than vegetables.
    I wrote more about this topic here, but if there’s one thing I could change in today’s US system, it’s probably this. 

    • To the extent that anything is subsidized, subsidies should go towards maximally nutrient-dense foods grown in local food systems by smaller farmers.
      

11. Fix our water supply - Our water supply is in dire straits. Not only are there issues with water in places like Flint, MI, but at the national level our drinking water is riddled with PFAS, glyphosate, and many other toxins. A recent study found 95% of all tap water exceeded the limit for at least 1 carcinogen, and half of all water is contaminated with PFAS.
    Current EPA and drinking standards should be improved, as current federal limits are often 10-100x higher than scientifically established safe limits. For example, the acceptable level of glyphosate in tap water is 7000x higher than the current EU standard.

12. Break up the foreign-owned meatpacking monopolies - 85% of the meatpacking industry is owned by 4 companies, 3 of which (National Beef, JBS, WH Group) are located in Brazil or China and have a long history of abuses and outright fraud. JBS in particular has paid over $3B in fines in the last 20 years for (at various times) bribing inspectors to let them sell tainted meats to school cafeterias, creating unsafe working environments, price fixing, and lying about the amount of rainforest they clear-cut for their cattle herds. JBS in particular is the company that is most responsible for clear-cutting the Amazon for cattle. American companies should control the American meat supply!

    • Additionally, a national law similar to TX SB 691 should be passed that allows for the processing and slaughter of animals at small farms. For a healthier and more resilient food system, we need to decentralize the system and make sure that 85% of beef processing does not go through just 4 centralized companies.

13. Require nutrition classes and functional medicine in MD programs - Today, 80% of medical schools require zero nutrition classes. Practically zero MD programs take a holistic, functional approach to medicine that aims to treat root cause issues (ie lifestyle).

14. New presidential fitness standards - JFK wrote a letter in 1960, The Soft American, which called for a reworking of the Presidential Fitness Test to create new physical standards and expectations for our children to develop healthy bodies. It is time to issue a new standard and framework and encourage a new baseline for physical fitness for our children.

Pair with: A great highlight from the hearing.

🌱 Wellness

💭 Creating Your Own Misery

I find it good to remind myself of this idea frequently.

You create your own misery by caring too much about your feelings. As long as you're alive, you're meant to cycle across the entire spectrum of the human experience

Don't let the occasional funk trigger internal alarm. By reacting, you condition your brain to perceive negative emotions as a threat you need to run away from

Let your moods naturally fluctuate. Don't rashly interpret that something is wrong. Happiness isn't a conscious goal to seek, rather an unconscious byproduct of lessening its importance.

Pair with: Assured Misery, and this:

I think if you’re so smart why aren’t you happy is actually kind of a good criticism. I know so many brilliant generally successful people who want to be happy and if you ask them okay how do you think happiness works, what have you tried, who have you hired to help etc nothing

🧠 Better Thinking

🚩 Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Thinking

I’ve come back a lot to this idea over the last few years:

“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”

The lesson of Chesterton’s Fence is what already exists likely serves purposes that are not immediately obvious.

Fences don’t appear by accident. They are built by people who planned them and had a reason to believe they would benefit someone. Before we take an ax to a fence, we must first understand the reason behind its existence.

The original reason might not have been a good one, and even if it was, things might have changed, but we need to be aware of it. Otherwise, we risk unleashing unintended consequences that spread like ripples on a pond, causing damage for years.

You can see that everywhere in society today, where so many things start to be perceived as useless, only to find ourselves worse off after having them removed.

Intellect is therefore a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and destructive power. Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

— Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

⚡️ Startup Stuff

🤖 AI Agents

AI agents are a fascinating topic that’s worth getting into.

An AI agent is a type of model architecture that enables a new kind of workflow.

The AI we started with formulates an answer and returns it to the user. Ask it something simple, like “Does an umbrella block the rain?” and OpenAI’s GPT-4 returns the answer, “Of course it does, you dumbass.” The large language model is able to answer the question without relying on external data because it uses internal data and executes on the prompt without making a plan. It's a straightforward line connecting input and output. And every time you want a new output, you have to provide a fresh prompt.

Agentic workflows are loops—they can run many times in a row without needing a human involved for each step in the task. Under this regime, a language model will make a plan based on your prompt, utilize tools like a web browser to execute on that plan, ask itself if that answer is right, and close the loop by getting back to you with that answer. If you ask, “What is the weather in Boston for the next seven days, and will I need to pack an umbrella?” the agentic workflow would form a plan, use a web browsing tool to check the weather, and use its existing corpus of knowledge to know that, if it is raining, you need an umbrella. Then, it would check if its answers are right and, finally, say, “It’ll be raining (like it always does in Boston, you dumbass) so, yes, pack an umbrella.”

What makes an agentic workflow so powerful is that because there are multiple steps to accomplish the task, you can optimize each step to be more performative. Perhaps it is faster and/or cheaper to have one model do the planning, while smaller, more specialized models do each sub-task contained within the plan—or maybe you can build specialized tools to incorporate into the workflow. You get the idea. 

Right now some companies are going horizontal, while others go for specific verticals:

We can put these companies on a spectrum: On the left-hand side is “vertical task automation,” and on the right is “horizontal selling of AI agents.” A vertical work application automates a variety of tasks within one industry—think AI agents for legal, like Harvey ($80 million-plus raised). In the middle are AI agents geared toward one specific task, such as software engineering. Cognition Labs ($20 million-plus raised) focuses on performing one large task—writing code—that cuts across many industries. On the far right are companies that sell AI agents as a service. You pay to access AI agents that can do a variety of horizontal tasks, like calendering, note-taking, or PDF summary. Lindy ($50 million raised), which offers a tool that has dozens of AI agents, is an example of this kind of company. There are many of these players, and arguably, every software company could be an AI agent company. 

Pair with: this video.

📚 What I Read

🏆 Sex and Status

Fascinating topic—the logic of female and male intra-sexual competition:

To me, the most interesting finding in this line of work is that how tough a guy looks to men appears to be a much stronger predictor of mating success than how attractive he is to women.

Researchers recorded short videos of 157 different men. Next, another group of men watched these videos. Researchers asked them a question about each of the men in the videos: “How likely is it that this man would win a physical fight with another man?” They used a scale ranging from “extremely likely” to “extremely unlikely.”

A group of women also viewed the videos. They responded to a question about each of the men: “How sexually attractive is this man?” They used a scale ranging from “extremely unattractive” to “extremely attractive.”

Eighteen months later, the men in the videos completed a questionnaire asking about their sexual history over the 18 months. How tough a guy looked to men predicted his reported mating success better than how attractive he looked to women. The researchers concluded, “Men with higher physical dominance, but not sexual attractiveness, reported higher quantitative mating success.”

Pair with: How men compete for status

🧠 No, intelligence is not like height

... and the reason is one of the most interesting findings from modern behavioral genetics

I mentioned that the difference between IQ and height is one of the most interesting findings in modern behavioral genetics and I do think that is true. Though we’ve known theoretically that the causal arrow between genes and culture could go both ways, these new molecular findings are a clear demonstration of cultural forces shaping and mimicking genetic processes — and the lack of similar forces on height serves as an important negative control. In the context of population differences — a focus of the piece in The Atlantic — direct/within-family heritability provides an upper bound on how much a trait can drift between populations under neutrality (see [Edge and Rosenberg (2015)] and summary). For educational attainment, for example, we can already calculate that the expected variance between continental populations under neutrality is minuscule: heritability*Fst = 0.04*0.15 = 0.006. But if we do ever disentangle the direct and indirect components, they could be leveraged to estimate cross-generational influences that are otherwise very difficult to observe. Scientists enjoy a challenge and the study of a complex, stratified, environmentally sensitive process without construct validity is a veritable feast of challenges.

🏗 High Intensity Parenting is a Real Barrier to Healthy Birthrates

I found this post to be very thought-provoking. I definitely think the author is onto something true.

Why we should worry less and have more kids Even as birthrates are crashing, parenting has gotten a lot more demanding over time. Parents spend around twice as much time with their kids as they did 40 years ago, according to one study. Travel teams, a rare thing a generation ago, are the norm today. Growing up most of us would walk to the bus stop by ourselves. These days at school bus stops, the number of waiting parents is almost equal to the number of kids. How do they find the time for that? It seems like it would be hard to have a lot of kids when parenting is like this. And the data bears this out. Time intensive parenting is linked to lower fertility Data analyst and journalist John Burn-Murdoch looked at a number of policy and cultural factors impacting fertility rates. The two most negative correlations? For OECD countries, the amount of time mothers spent on ‘hands-on parenting’ and the amount time kids spent on homework both were linked to much lower birthrates. Both of these are proxies for high-intensity parenting.

This makes sense. If raising kids is seen as an onerous task, fewer people will want to be parents at all. Those that do become parents will want a lot less children. The best family model? Whatever works The Boom Campaign, a pronatalist group in the UK, presented this chart finding that the belief that “a child is likely to suffer if their mother works” was linked to lower fertility rates in Europe. (TFR values are from 2015-2019; fertility is lower everywhere now.)

For traditionalists, this is tough to swallow. Surely it is beneficial for kids to have their mother stay at home with them when they are little, right? Stay-at-home moms are a cornerstone of many successful families. But so are working moms. In parenting more than almost anything else, we make the perfect the enemy of the good. It turns out that if women think they must choose either work or having children, then a lot of them will choose only work and birthrates end up being lower. This seems robust. Policy writer Aria Babu looked at the same question for a number of additional countries and found the relationship still holds. It is more pro-natal to welcome either option, having a full-time parent or having two working parents, with equal enthusiasm. A majority of women want to work, and many have incredible talent. If society denigrates either careerist mothers or stay-at-home moms, a lot of women will reject motherhood completely. Mainly we need more parents. For that it helps to be very flexible about how people get there.

Tiger mothers: How is it going?

There is one group so known for intensive parenting that there is a word for it. Yale Professor Amy Chua wrote a bestselling book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that valorized the intensive parenting-style of Asian parents worldwide. Her book drew a lot of strong reactions. Some were inspired to try harder, while many parents were upset that their children would be left behind. No doubt, the book and the mindset that inspired it meant ratcheting parenting up more than ever. How is all that tiger parenting going? Not very well, if the goal is to keep the lights on in the long run.

Is this just a quirk within East Asian countries? No. The East Asian pattern of high investment in very few children holds around the world. In the United States, East Asian women have the lowest fertility rate of any group, even though they have the highest marriage rates of all. A lot of pronatalist thinkers are saying the same thing: We should go easier on parenting while having more kids Bryan Caplan Economist Bryan Caplan notes in his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids that parenting should be easier than ever because of modern conveniences and our better quality of life compared to our ancestors. In theory, people should have more kids as society grows richer. Instead, we have fewer, and parenting feels harder. Why? We have placed many new requirements and expectations on ourselves that earlier parents never had. A lot of that effort isn't necessary, he says. Caplan gives another reason not to try too hard with parenting: biology. Nature has a huge influence on how kids turn out regardless of what parents do. Adoption studies show that for all the effort that adoptive parents put into raising kids, they tend to be quite similar to their biological parents. This is liberating in a way. If our parenting matters less, we might as well have fun and not stress so much about whether someone got a little more TV than they were supposed to.

Pair with: Understanding the impact of the drop

A fertility rate below 1.6 means 50% less new people after three generations, say 100 years. Below 1.2 means an 80% drop. The U.S. is at 1.64. China, Japan, Poland, Spain all below 1.2. South Korea is at 0.7—96% drop. Mass extinction numbers.

📺 Confessions of an Advertising Man, by David Ogilvy

I’ve been learning a lot from Ogilvy over the last few months. Truly an exceptional thinker.

The creative process requires more than reason. Most original thinking isn't even verbal. It requires 'a groping experimentation with ideas, governed by intuitive hunches and inspired by the unconscious.' The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked.

Pair with: On Advertising

🍭 Brain Food

📱 How Dating Apps Contribute to the Demographic Crisis

This is a good article linking dating apps to the collapse of birthrates in recent years. Whether it’s through the paradox of choice, the ease of finding casual connections delaying the moment people commit to serious relationships, the impact of dating apps on social skills or the culture shifts normalising casual dating combined with the natural window for having kids that remains the same the article covers it all.

Many people aren’t finding love - and seem to be giving up. The number of monthly active dating app users worldwide has dropped from 287 million people in 2020 to 237 million people in 2023, according to the Economist.

Part of the reason that people are ‘giving up’ is that people aren’t that interested in dating anymore, as shown in this graph from Pew Research. 50% of singles are tapped out of the dating market. According to Morning Consult, 79% of women are uninterested in using the apps in the future. This is unsurprising. The US is already an individualistic society, and being single is more affordable than ever (however, married people do better economically).

To be clear, the apps work for some people. According to Pew Research, 1 in 5 partnered adults under 30 met on a dating app. It’s a brilliant way to get outside of a social bubble, to meet people you might have never crossed paths with, and to get practice dating (and find love!) There is a reason that 10% of adults met their significant other on the apps (rising to 20% for under-30s) - and it’s because they can work.

Pair with this tweet:

I was on dating apps for a few months and studied the market carefully. The reason most dating apps don't work is kind of toxic.

It boils down to adverse selection + female hypergamy leading to most women chasing a small fraction of high status dudes, most of whom are uninterested in relationships.

The average male and the average female have vastly different experiences on apps. Average men get basically nothing and struggle to get responses. Average women are overwhelmed with choice and struggle connecting with flaky, emotionally unavailable guys while being bombarded by a bajillion messages.

This occurs because women overwhelmingly match with a minority of the most attractive guys. Men are willing to sleep with a very wide range of women, so women match with men who are out of their league relationship-wise. The result is a small fraction of men end up sleeping with lots of women and the creation of Facebook groups like "Are we dating the same guy?"

A reasonably attractive woman on a dating app gets an inflated sense of her appropriate match and she becomes very picky. e.g., about half of women on Bumble screen out guys who are shorter than 6'.

For the top guys, there is little incentive to settle down. They stay on the apps and run through many women. This leads to an adversely selected pool of men who are a) very attractive, b) very good at dating, and c) not interested in relationships.

🎥 What I’m Watching

🎙 John' Sarno’s Lecture on the Mindbody Syndrome

If you’re a long-time subscriber you know how much Dr. Sarno means to me. His work saved me from chronic back pain.

Since I fixed my pain 3 years ago, I sometimes have small bouts of pain that resurface during stressful periods. Over the last few weeks, I happened to have back/ leg pain resurfacing so I re-watched/ re-read many things related to mind-body syndromes which helped me get pain-free.

💭 The Best Ways to Heal Chronic Pain

Pair with: The Book that Healed 70% of My Back Pain

🔧 The Tool of the Week

🎨 Create.xyz

This is the best website creator I’ve used. Instead of a clunky product, you can just prompt your website in plain words, and iterate on it with a chat. Very well done product. You can also build tools with it.

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

That is how I like to work: I go in with a blind belief that something will happen, and until it’s proven impossible, I will continue banging my head against the wall.

— Rick Rubin

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading!

If you like The Long Game, please share it or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below.

Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi

Subscribe now

Friends, long time no see! Thanks to Substack’s recommendation feature, we’re welcoming hundreds of new readers since the last episode. I was busy with other areas of my life (more on that at some point) and not in the right type of content diet to keep shipping The Long Game as I wanted to, so I took a long pause to come back with more inspiration.

In this episode, we explore:

• Executive physicals

• The self-help paradox

• Strategic cope

• Going big or going small

• Water quality

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

💼 The Executive Physical

I’ve been fascinated by this topic of executive physicals. This is a great write-up on how it goes in the US.

My first visit began with an hour-long meet-and-greet in a room that felt more Amangiri than medical facility, and my doctor had all the time in the world for even my smallest worry, pausing every now and then to engage in small talk unheard of in normal medicine. The more embarrassing parts of a medical visit — the head turning, the coughing — were orchestrated behind a series of sheets. When they needed a urine sample, the request came delicately, in veiled euphemism. Could I “rest” in a private waiting area featuring piped in ocean sounds, until “nature called”? I could deliver my urine discreetly to a dropbox, so no one would know about my bodily functions.

The three days were a blur. I went through comprehensive blood work, full chest imaging, a treadmill test that included a DIY chest waxing experience I’ve yet to recover from, a full ultrasound exam of my vascular system, a hearing test (my hearing, perfect, except for my girlfriend's voice range, a result they offered to print and send home with me), a sports medicine consult that promised to fix my tight hamstrings, an eye exam, a secondary cardiac exam, and countless other check-ups. These appointments were offered alongside a battery of not-so-medical services: massages, nutritionists, haircuts, personal training, and even cosmetic surgery. My requests for certain “lifestyle” drugs, including semaglutide, were firmly denied.

Each appointment was unrushed, but began precisely on time. Any concern I had was addressed same-day, not months later as is common with specialist appointments. The lounge and its constant flow of snacks, refreshments, and strange company made it all too easy to lose track of time. One day, in conversation with the general contracting king of eastern Oklahoma over some non-alcoholic beers, I missed multiple appointments. They were promptly rescheduled.

Despite the rumors I’d heard, the operation wasn’t a backdoor pharmacy for off-label medications or off-shore bloodboys. It was just diligent and exhaustive care. It was everything we should want out of the medical industry. But in the favela of American medicine, it also felt like everything we can’t have.

Pair with: Vitalism

If you’re interested in longevity and extending human lifespan, you’re going to love what my friends at Vitalism are building.

🌱 Wellness

🍂 The Self-Help Paradox

This piece correctly describes what’s increasingly wrong with the culture of self-help and personal optimization.

Many of the goals and processes which are top-of-mind in society have only flourished because they were allowed to grow in a soil which was rich already in self-doubt, feelings of inadequacy, and low self-esteem.

Along comes somebody successful who tells us we need to work one hundred hours a week, setting up our own business, in order to become rich and successful, and who are we to say otherwise? Even better, we now have a pathway to follow, something which gives hope and a sense of trajectory.

Similarly, this exists in our personal lives, where we are sold the idea that working out 7 days a week, getting big muscles or stretchy hamstrings will give us the body which our would-be dream partner craves. Therefore, we must be productive in order to live up to this deal.

These goals, although sounding realistic and positive, can come with insidious baggage when given free-reign, especially in the developing mind.

As I started to pay attention, I noticed that most people I admire around me are not obsessed with self-help and optimization and manage to have more flexibility in their lives.

Here, Amjad suggests there is something called the total stress load. From personal experience, I’m inclined to think this is real.

Pair with: The case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings

🧠 Better Thinking

🗯 Strategic Cope

I read this banger from Du in January and kept thinking about it since then.

One of the most powerful skills is the strategic cope. Being able to believe whatever you want, whenever you want, with conscious intention

In times of struggle, you tell yourself that this is what it's all about. Obsessing over doing the hard things. Embracing discomfort. Value leisure and you're never making it out

Then you inevitably hypnotize yourself out of the trenches and the switch turns off. You're happy now so struggle is cringe. Yeah the cold plunge thing was cool while it lasted but I'm over it. Life is too short to not enjoy

Identity is seasonal. Can literally just lean into any perspective and it suddenly becomes real. The less seriously you take yourself, the more fun you can have with it all

A general theme of personal study I’m interested in these days is all the mindset manipulations necessary to weather the ups and downs of building a business. That’s one of the main reasons I think biographies are really the best thing to read.

It’s way more important to understand how someone you admire managed to get themselves out of a rut rather than understanding the latest trendy business concept.

Talking of biographies, I’ve stopped listening to nearly all podcasts except for Founders. Here are my favorites:

• Dyson

• Brunello Cucinelli

• Sam Walton

• Larry Ellison

• Estée Lauder

• Ed Thorp

I pay particular attention to those who managed to build great things while also building a great family (this is a small percentage of the episodes list, but there are a few notable exceptions that could inspire you!)

On the same theme:

Nothing has ever worked more to combat emotional pain for me than simply knowing others have gone through similar

At my worst, the mere act of reading Reddit threads was able to envelope me with the calmness necessary to clear my mind enough to think of a plan

The solution was never found in a list of steps, rather just the feeling of relatability. All I needed was to be aware of someone else's misery and know that I wasn't alone. The path forward always appeared on its own thereafter

Pair with: Humans are not automatically strategic (h/t )

But there are clearly also heuristics that would be useful to goal-achievement (or that would be part of what it means to “have goals” at all) that we do not automatically carry out.  We do not automatically:

• (a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve; 

• (b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress; 

• (c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal; 

• (d) Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past); 

• (e) Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren’t habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don’t work; 

• (f) Focus most of the energy that *isn’t* going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;

• (g) Make sure that our "goal" is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won't continually sap our energies;

• (h) Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting;

.... or carry out any number of other useful techniques.  Instead, we mostly just do things.  We act from habit; we act from impulse or convenience when primed by the activities in front of us; we remember our goal and choose an action that feels associated with our goal.  We do any number of things.  But we do not systematically choose the narrow sets of actions that would effectively optimize for our claimed goals, or for any other goals.

⚡️ Startup Stuff

🛣 Go Big or Go Small

I found this piece from Mike Karnjanaprakorn very interesting. It mirrors a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about for the last few months.

Founders often ask me where they should go big or small as they navigate the idea maze. As with many things in life, the answer depends on your risk tolerance, lifestyle preference, and personal goals. 

If you choose to go big and aim for a billion-dollar company, you’re signing up for a high-risk, high-reward journey. You’re competing in the ‘business Olympics’ against the smartest, most well-funded, and most ambitious teams in the world.

Success rates are low (less than 2.5% if you’ve raised a seed round), equating to roughly a 1 in 40 chance. These are not bad odds if you can repeat this 40 times in your lifetime, but considering each startup takes about 5-10 years to build, this is unlikely, and you might end up with nothing.

On the other hand, if you choose to go small, you might enjoy a slower, more predictable, and balanced path. This path can be better for those who value stability. The success rate is higher (let’s say it’s 50% for a straightforward cash-flowing business), though the upside is limited (let’s say it’s $10M if you’re in the top 10%).

I wrestle with this question myself, and looking back, I would have opted for a smaller company in my 20s to accelerate my growth as a founder. This path would have taught me about building products, recruiting talent, marketing, finance, and all the other company-building skills.

With some luck, I might have even become a millionaire. If so, I would have banked that money and then went big. It sounds counterintuitive, but having a financial safety net can enable you to take more risks, reduce stress, and make long-term decisions. 

Don’t get me wrong; I learned a lot from working at an early-stage startup, but it didn’t teach me much about being a founder and entrepreneur. In my experience, there are aspects of being a founder that can only be learned by being in the trenches and doing it. No amount of articles or blog posts or tweets you read will ever replace this experience.

At the end of the day, the decision between going big or going small is a personal one. It should be made based on your preferences, ambitions, and desired lifestyle. There’s no wrong answer.

Regardless of the path you choose, luck plays a significant role but to increase your odds of success, I find this advice from Suhail very useful:

“Startups are a whole lot of luck but how hard you work, who you know, your taste, your ability to hire talented people, your perseverance, your area of genius, your urgency, your capability to accept painful moments reduce the luck to something more deterministic.” — @ Suhail

And who knows, the small thing you’re building can turn into something massive. Or, you completely miss your moonshot which paves the way for your next big thing. Life is funny in that way.

📚 What I Read

📈 Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook

I picked up this book to learn more about sales as an early-stage founder.

PUT ACTIVITY ABOVE ALL ELSE

Everyone’s a fan of working “smarter, not harder” in the modern knowledge-worker economy. Well, sometimes you just have to grind. Sales, like recruiting, is all about activity and leverage. Generally speaking, activity in equals value out. There are certainly ways to ensure that your activity is high quality; you can also lever it with technology to get more in less time, and higher impact out of each unit of activity. We’ll dig into that more later. But to quote Joseph Stalin (likely apocryphally), “quantity has a quality all its own,” and internalizing that is key.

More time on the phone. More demos. More proposals sent. More emails sent. More dials. More keystrokes. All of the above is activity, and activity is the goal.

This is often in direct contravention to typical notions of “quality” work. Thinking deeply about the perfect response to that email. Spending five minutes to game out a call before you make it. Reading, and rereading, that email to understand every nuance. “Studying up” on the materials to make sure that your pitch is perfect.

No more. Just as you need to shift your mindset from scarcity to plenty, the reality is that in order to move opportunities down the pipeline and close deals, activity is job one. Jump first, prepare midair. Template all communication. Drive activity, and output will follow.

📝 You Don't Need To Document Everything

“Stop selling your life off so cheaply to strangers”

Influencers are of course the most extreme examples—but this impulse is so ingrained in everyone now. This pressure to post everything. And I think it’s a massive cause of anxiety for Gen Z. There’s a sense now that something didn’t happen if you don’t share it. There are young people who wouldn’t understand going to an event, travelling somewhere, being in a relationship, if they couldn’t post about it. They would not see the point. They simply cannot conceive of a life that exists without an audience consuming it. Like, for example, the popular belief now that if your boyfriend doesn’t post photos of you he’s cheating or doesn’t really love you. Or it’s a red flag if you meet someone and they aren’t on social media (just me who thinks this is a major green flag?)

On this note, I’m strongly in favor of banning smartphone usage in schools.

🤝 Friendship and Social Fitness

“It is nearly impossible to be happy without friends”

One lesson here is preventive — don’t let your friends become strangers. The more time that passes between conversations, the more they become an unfamiliar person.

This is important for a society that is growing increasingly concerned about loneliness and friendlessness. Some even suggest that we are in a “friendship recession,” with 20 percent of single men now saying they don’t have any close friends. It’s not just men, though. A 2019 survey found that 30 percent of millennials of both sexes said they are always or often lonely, and 27 percent said they have no close friends.

Gen Z doesn’t look much different and might even be in a worse position. In her 2023 book “Generations,” the psychologist Jean Twenge points out that from the 1970s into the 2000s, teenagers spent about two hours per day with friends. By 2019, this had dropped to just one hour per day. In the 1970s, more than half of 12th graders got together with their friends almost every day. By 2019, only 28 percent did.

🛠 So you wanna de-bog yourself

“What I found in the mire”

The mediocrity trap

About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap: situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.

The mediocrity trap is a nasty way to end up in the bog. Terrible situations, once exited, often become funny stories or proud memories. Mediocre situations, long languished in, simply become Lost Years—boring to both live through and talk about, like you're sitting in a waiting room with no cell reception, no wifi, and no good magazines, waiting for someone to come in and tell you it's time to start living.

(I have previously written about this phenomenon as an underrated idea in psychology.)

🔨 What I'm building next

A friend of mine is thinking of leaving his corporate job and starting a company. I sent him this great piece by Andrew Rea.

What being “ready” looked like for me

• Financial savings – Over the previous year I had saved ~18 months of personal financial runway. (there were no trust funds involved in the making of this company or blog post)

• Health – Physically, I was coming off multiple long distance races, lifting weights regularly, and generally felt like my body and mind were in the best shape they’d ever been in.

• Skills – I had picked up enough skills in my past few roles that I felt generally capable of taking something from zero to one. (or at least not completely useless)

• Judgment – My taste in picking opportunities worth working on had significantly improved since I first started working in tech / startups. IMO, this is an underrated facet of careers and entrepreneurship.

• Confidence – I’ve long struggled with imposter’s syndrome. Feeling like I didn’t belong in the room. Like I was fooling everyone. Etc. The things that most of us have faced at one point or another. While that wasn’t gone, I had a genuine belief in myself that hadn’t existed before. 

  • Side note – Being around and working with people you think are better than you day-in-day out is the best way to fix this. It teaches you that the people you put on pedestals are human too. 

🍭 Brain Food

💅 Hot at the top: The influence of self-rated attractiveness on self-perceived status

Interestingly, good looks make people feel socially superior:

Multiple studies have documented that physically attractive individuals enjoy a wide array of favorable life outcomes. However, most prior research has focused on third-person assessments of a target's attractiveness and the target's likelihood of receiving social or economic benefits. Our research sought to examine how first-person perspectives of physical attractiveness predict self-inferred social status.

Across a pilot test, a correlational study, and a between-subjects experiment, we found consistent support for our main hypothesis that self-rated physical attractiveness positively predicts higher self-inferred social status. We also found exploratory evidence that this association is mediated by self-perceived social likeability. As such, our findings suggest that people who believe they are more (vs. less) physically attractive also believe that they are more well-received in social settings, which in turn gives them a sense of higher social status.

Notably, the effect of manipulated attractiveness on self-inferred social status extended to a more objective metric, one's estimated annual income, as demonstrated experimentally in our final study. This unexpected finding has several possible explanations, each with important implications for future research.

First, it suggests the possibility of failed randomization across the attractiveness conditions. This, however, is unlikely because further analysis suggests no effect of manipulated attractiveness on other demographic factors such as gender or age. Moreover, the execution of the data collection was set to randomly assign participants to conditions online. Nevertheless, this finding deserves further research to tease out the effects of manipulated attractiveness on subjective versus objective income. We suggest that readers interpret the results of Study 2 with caution.

Second, our attractiveness manipulation may not only have inflated participants’ subjective perceptions of their social status, but it could have also prompted dishonest, self-enhancing reporting on ostensibly objective measures.

🎥 What I’m Watching

📉 The Downfall Of Modern Podcasts

Couldn’t quite put my finger on why I fell out of love with podcasts but this video exposed it perfectly. I used to love the idea of two people sitting down and having conversations about their passions and sharing ideas but something changed within the past two years.

🤌 The Ultimate Grip Strength Guide!

I’ve been geeking over grip training lately. This is a great video if you want to get started.

Bonus: if you want to explore more underrated muscles, try neck training.

🔧 The Tool of the Week

🚰 Do you know what's in your water?

We hear about microplastics, and water contaminations all the time these days, and rightfully so. Ever wondered how the bottles of water you’re usually consuming rank against what’s on the market? This is a great website to see what you’re drinking, and potentially make the adequate swaps.

Pair with: Rapid single-particle chemical imaging of nanoplastics by SRS microscopy

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

“Hard work never killed a man. Men die of boredom, psychological conflict, and disease. They do not die of hard work.”

— David Ogilvy

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading!

If you like The Long Game, please share it or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi

Subscribe now

In this episode, we explore:

• Most supplements don't work

• Efforts and goals and joy

• A map is not a blueprint

• John D. Rockefeller’s 38 letters to his son

• How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

💊 Most Supplements Don’t Work

Let’s talk supplements a bit. I’m not anti-supplements. My general feeling is that people love to focus on the fun and flashy part that doesn’t matter much and neglect the boring stuff that works. This is the case in health, and in pretty much everything else, work, relationships, etc.

People are not satisfied to hear sleep, exercise and eat mostly clean foods, they prefer to talk about their morning routine comprised of 40 different pills 💊😅

This article is a good reminder that most supplements don’t work:

Whenever I see someone touting the merits of, say, neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman’s $370 supplement stack, I’m tempted to go full PubMed on them. You really think the herbal extract Fadogia agrestis is going to boost your “healthspan and muscle performance” based on an obscure study of male albino rats published by the Asian Journal of Andrology back in 2005? A grand total of zero human trials is what Huberman means by a “robust foundation of science”?

But this kind of gladiatorial approach is likely to miss the mark. For one thing, there’s an ocean of weak and biased supplement research out there, so many popular supplements do have at least superficial backing from what looks at first glance like science. The real problem runs deeper, though. The quest for a silver-bullet performance boost presumes that these pills, potions, and hacks will improve your life in some meaningful, measurable way. And there’s reason to doubt this is true even when the supplements do what those who peddle them claim. Here’s why.

The first issue to consider is margins. There are a small handful of elite athletes around the world for whom a half-percent improvement in speed, strength, or recovery is meaningful. For the rest of us, even something that produces a statistically reliable improvement—a threshold that, according to the International Olympic Committee’s most recent scientific review, only caffeine, creatine, baking soda, nitrate, and possibly beta alanine meet—is unlikely to have any practical impact whatsoever on our lives. If the effect were large enough to matter, we’d be able to measure it easily instead of arguing about how to extrapolate from albino rat studies. Even the best-case scenario is comparable to a marathoner shaving her head: the aerodynamic advantage is real, but it’s also meaningless.

I know that no matter how often this message is repeated, it won’t change much, looking for the magic supplement that will 10x your sleep/ muscle mass/ recovery/ productivity is too tempting!

Anyway:

You have limited time, energy, and resources, and dedicating these to performance hacks can distract you from training, recovering, eating, and sleeping well.

🌱 Wellness

🧘‍♂️ Efforts and Goals and Joy

“If you really want something, then the soul must make demands of the body.”

I first read this piece a few weeks ago, and this quote stayed with me. I suspect it will stay with me for a long time.

I find it ideal to always have more ambitions, plans, and projects than one could possibly accomplish. Aspirations — even unlikely ones, maybe especially unlikely ones — are an essential part of living well. When we are at our most ailing, we are reduced to thinking and talking only of our ailments. When we are at our most vigorous, our most alive, we think and talk of our goals and aspirations. Over long time frames, the pessimist becomes an unobservant man, and the optimist creates the world.

If you make lists of lofty goals, it can be easy to leave them to accumulate, as happens sometimes, into a mountain of to-do’s and notes and half-forgotten plans. Dreaming alone is seductive, even a little sweet, since it lacks the pain of trying. So it feels proper to prize attempts more than dreams. You should have ideals, but you cannot only love an idealized future, you must cultivate a love of effort, too. If you really want something, then the soul must make demands of the body.

Since I have suffered years of chronic back pain that went away thanks to Dr. Sarno’s work on MindBody Syndromes, I am very attentive to the physical manifestations of emotions.

I think that the modern world and modern medicine have led us away from developing intuition when it comes to our health and feelings and we are worse off from it.

Pair with: The Mindbody Prescription

🧠 Better Thinking

🗺 A Map is Not a Blueprint

This is a great essay that explores the complex interplay between human innovation and the natural world, focusing on the unintended consequences of our attempts to outsmart nature. It’s a thought-provoking read for anyone interested in the delicate balance between human ambition and the natural environment, stressing the need for a healthy skepticism towards promises of simple fixes to complex natural phenomena.

I’m sure that by this point you are understanding the general character of the problem:

First: We see a biological, natural process in the world, and we want to understand it. So we study it as intensely as possible and make our best efforts to map it to explain it to ourselves and others.

Second: We see some deficiency in the process as it exists today. Farmland is running out. Some of us have mental health struggles. Natural fats are expensive and unkosher.

Third: Using our map of the process, we create a solution to the problem. Trans fats, lobotomies, synthetic fertilizers.

Fourth: The solution will seem like a home run. It will address all the problems of the original system, with no side effects, because the location of the side effects is outside the map. The consequences of hubris will always be hiding in the parts we don’t yet understand.

Fifth: Problems will eventually emerge, and we will realize that we did not have an accurate map in the first place. Heart disease, suicides, soil depletion. So we go back to the source, study it as intensely as possible, and make a new best effort to map it and explain it to ourselves and others.

And then the cycle repeats.

The example of Ozempic is particularly timely.

⚡️ Startup Stuff

🏗 How to Do Great Work

I've shared this essay on here a few times already, but it's the type of essay that you always keep open in a tab on your laptop.

Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can't think of this time as a cost, or it will seem too high. You have to find the work sufficiently engaging as it's happening.

There may be some jobs where you have to work diligently for years at things you hate before you get to the good part, but this is not how great work happens. Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to take stock, you're surprised how far you've come.

The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.

If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth. Most people who do this do it unconsciously, but it's worth stopping to think about. Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon: the more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more. Growing an audience is another: the more fans you have, the more new fans they'll bring you.

Pair with: Love the Mission or Love the Game

The way I see it, there are two types of true entrepreneurs. There are those in it for the love of the mission that they’re obsessed with championing. And there are those in it for the love of the game of entrepreneurship itself, almost irrespective of the mission of the business. Sometimes the mission is the business and sometimes the business is the mission. Type I, and Type II.

People who are in it for the love of the mission:

They need to be deeply inspired and obsessed with a problem or idea in order to dedicate time and mindspace to working on it. Any amount of rationalizing something they “should” work on will fail in the end. Even if they try, they’re energy will be sucked away when they encounter something else that sparks that fire in them. You might call these people missionaries or visionaries or something else. They’re driven by a view of the world they want to turn into reality.

People who are in it for the love of the game:

They’re obsessed with the game itself. The game is entrepreneurship — with some mix of building a business, creating something from nothing, “winning” against a field of competitors, capturing the world’s attention, making a lot of money, rising to the top of the entrepreneurial respect ladder. To a large extent, they could get excited about any idea, so long as the game around it is compelling. Importantly, they are deeply driven by playing the game, not just by winning it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of loving the game or loving the mission lately. I think Anu describes the nuance of this question very well in her essay.

📚 What I Read

🎧 Jay Z: Decoded

An inspiring read into Jay Z’s outsized success. One of the main ideas of the book is that “belief comes before ability.”

1. "We change people through conversation, not through censorship."

2. "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man!"

3. "Hip-hop is more about attaining wealth. People respect success. They respect big. They don't even have to like your music. If you're big enough, people are drawn to you."

4. "The challenge is not just to survive. You're gonna get knocked down. But it's how you get back up. That's the challenge."

5. "I'd rather die enormous than live dormant."

⛽ The 38 Letters from J.D. Rockefeller to his son

I’ve officially entered my Rockefeller obsession phase. These letters to his son are so good. It’s the perfect way to understand his mindset and how he thinks about life. There is something special about the type of advice a person gives to their children.

Some interesting points from the book:

1. Starting points do not determine your end point

   Our destiny is determined by our actions, not by our origins.

   1. “John, opportunities will always be unequal, but the results prove otherwise. In history, whether in politics or businesses, (especially in businesses), there has been many examples of successful people who started from scratch. They have had only a few opportunities because of poverty, but they eventually achieved fame because of their past struggles. However, history has also been filled with examples of rich children who were privileged but have failed in life. According to a study that was conducted in Massachusetts on 17 wealthy people, it was revealed that none of their children left the world wealthy.”

2. Luck depends on planning

   Everyone is a designer and architect of his own destiny.

   1. “I admit, just like a person cannot have no money, a person cannot have no luck. However, if you want to make a difference, you cannot wait for luck to patronize. My credo is: I do not live by God-given luck, but I do-so by planning luck. I believe that a good plan will affect luck, and in any case, it can successfully affect luck. My plan to turn competition into cooperation in the oil industry justified this.”

3. Comparing Heaven and Hell

   The greatest reward for our hard work is not what we get, but what we will become.

   1. “John, this very humorous fable tells me that: Losing work means losing happiness. It is regrettable that some people only realize this after being unemployed, which is very unfortunate!

      I am proud to say that I have never tasted unemployment. This is not my luck, because I never treat work as hard labour without fun, instead I found infinite happiness from work.

      I think that work is a privilege, as it brings more than just sustaining life. Work is the foundation of all businesses, the source of prosperity, and the shaper of genius. Work makes young people work harder and do more than their parents no matter how rich they are. Work is expressed in the humblest forms and lays the foundation for happiness. A job helps to add flavours to life.”

4. Do it now

   Opportunity comes from opportunity.

   1. “I have always believed that an opportunity comes from another opportunity as even the best ideas have flaws. Even if it is a very ordinary plan, if it is actually implemented and developed, it will be much better than a good plan that is abandoned halfway, because the former will be carried out consistently, but the latter has already been given up. So, I said that there is no secret to success. To achieve positive results in life, it is of course good to have extraordinary wisdom and special talents. There is nothing wrong with it. As long as you are willing to take active actions, you will be closer to success.”

🛣 On going for it

A beautiful essay that I recommend reading.

Close friends know that childhood was hard. Difficult. Challenging. Pick your adjective.

Growing up was different. Different from what most of your peers experienced. That’s always made it hard to connect over the typical coming of age stuff.

You grew up in Ohio. Poor by American standards.

And religious. Very f*cking religious. Like some people would call your sect of Christianity a cult religious.

Dad was the pastor. Not the mega-church with a book and a private-plane type of pastor but the works 2 jobs on the side to make money net out every month type of pastor.

You grew up believing that God created everything and that Evolution is a lie. That the bible is the infallible word of God. That you should base your entire life on its teachings. That you should follow God’s calling for your life. Stuff like that.

👫 On the desperation of female neediness

An excellent piece about relationships and dating:

If I had an avocado toast for every time a female friend told me how much she loves dating around, I would be on the housing ladder by now! It’s a regular conversation, especially with women who are professionally successful and secure in other ways. They will tell me about their escapades with this or that man and will reassure me that all they want is fun, and they definitely don’t care if it leads to something. The other women in the group will nod in agreement and smile reassuringly. Not me. I was raised by an emotionally reactive mother, so when it comes to picking up on other people’s emotions, I am like a predator in the jungle. I can see the increased moisture in their eye socket and the exaggerated curve of their smiles. These women suffer from what I call ‘sexual revolution Stockholm syndrome’ where because they have no choice but to date casually, they have convinced themselves they are having sex without commitment by choice.

This is especially true for women with well-paid, high-flying careers because the ego-bruising of failing to achieve your personal life goals stings so much more when you have mastered control of all the other aspects of your life.

Some of the neediest women I know will repeatedly try to convince you they don’t need a man. On the other side of the coin, I would say horny men will say they want to get laid, but God forbid they move as much as a finger to do what it takes to achieve that (go on a date, get rejected and try again, get to know someone etc.).

Pair with: For Gen Z, an Age-Old Question: Who Pays for Dates?

When the date ended, we split the bill. But our discussion was emblematic of a tension in modern dating. At work and on social media, where young people spend much of their personal time, they like to emphasize equity and equality. When it comes to romance and courtship, young people — specifically women and men in heterosexual relationships — seem to be following the same dating rules their parents and older generations grew up learning.

🍭 Brain Food

🔮 How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

This one is very good, whether you have talents or not.

• Do grunt work. Most people do not like doing grunt work. More often than not people want to be doing “creative” work, such as discovering or creating new things. Fortunately for you, this is your opportunity to shine. Become someone who loves grunt work. Most times the work is not that complicated, it’s just laborious, repetitive, and not that intellectually challenging, but it is important. Learn to genuinely love it and do it for the team or project. People will appreciate you.

• Do the boring things. Similar to grunt work, there will always be boring work to do. Learn to love it & do it! This is an especially good area to work in if you aren’t so smart or talented because people will show you more grace & patience to get up to skill (purely because they don’t want to do it themselves).

• Learn undefined skills. Learn skills that have not yet been professionalized or established. A really good example of this is learning to code with AI. 

• Work hard. If you are not that smart or talented it’ll often take you more time on average to complete a task. And that’s okay. Just be aware of this and put in the extra time and effort to not only produce at a good pace but produce above standard. Again, most smart or talented people can produce above standard with much less effort than you. But sometimes they don’t do so because they don’t see a clear reward at the end. Try to counteract this and put in the extra effort. It might not always lead to a super fantastic outcome, but you significantly increase your chances of bumping into such an outcome if you do.

• Bring a sense of urgency & move fast. If you think about it, most deadlines are arbitrary, and smart & talented people know this. They will still work to the deadline but they may not feel a real sense of urgency to move faster. Try to counteract this energy. I’m not sure why but moving faster increases the likelihood that work will actually get done, and also opens you up (and therefore the team) up to a lot more opportunities along the way. Most likely because you are “prepared” when you meet luck, or something along those lines. Anyways.

🎥 What I’m Watching

🤖 How we built a 1000x Growth Product in 1 Year | Perplexity AI, Aravind Srinivas

💪 8,100 — Breaking the World Record for Most Pull-ups in 24 Hours

Impressive!

🔧 The Tool of the Week

🗨 Beeper

All of your messaging applications in one app. That’s it! It is super useful to have WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Facebook, Twitter DMs, iMessage, Slack, etc. all in one app.

On top of that, it enables scheduling messages, which I have always needed as I think sending messages at the right time helps a lot in pushing things forward.

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

Do everything, and you will win.

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading!

If you like The Long Game, please share it on social media or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi

Subscribe now

In this episode, we explore:

• Strength vs. size

• The real cause of burnout

• Moderation

• Differentiation is survival

• Insights from 2,961 First Dates

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

💪 Lifting: Strength vs. Size

There’s a constant debate in the lifting world around strength vs size. Are these the same? Does training for size necessarily lead to more strength? Does training for strength necessarily lead to more size?

With the explosion in popularity of strength sports in the last 20 years and the steady mainstreaming of bodybuilding, many people have misconceptions about the best training method for their true goal.

I found this text from Josh Bryant interesting:

GETTING BIG VS. GETTING STRONG

Are these two mutually exclusive goals or can we train for a bit of both?

Even your trainer down at the local franchise gym knows that hypertrophy is best had in the 6-12 rep range while strength gains are found in heavier sets of six reps or less. But the guy who trains with those growth-targeting ranges still ends up gaining strength, adding weight to the bar and failing at a higher rep number each week. The strength guy, meanwhile, may not be as big but can generally toss around much more weight. So what gives? Where is the overlap? Where is the divide? The answer may lie in a training variable that transcends total weight: intensity.

Simply, you’ve got to be willing to wage war when you lift. That’s why seemingly backwards routines on paper can bring success — fury trumps theory every day of the week and thrice on Sunday. Leading Russian sports scientist, Vladimir Zatsiorsky, has identified three ways to develop maximal tension (and therefore, size and strength) in a muscle—they each require your all.

The Repetition Method: Using higher reps with submaximal weights to spark muscle hypertrophy.

Ultimately, more size equates to better leverage. In other words, a guy with a chest as flat as a pancake pushes the bar much farther on the bench press than someone with a barrel chest, if the two individuals have the same arm length. While strength is primarily a function of the central nervous system, the literature unanimously agrees that a bigger muscle is a stronger one.

Training to failure in traditional bodybuilding rep ranges will get you stronger—anecdotal evidence supports this assertion as many of the top strength athletes train high reps in the off-season, both to give their central nervous systems a break and to maintain muscle size before the next competitive season.

The Dynamic Method: Maximum power is developed in core lifts using 50-80 percent of a lifter’s one repetition max.

Force = Mass x Acceleration. The key is violently exerting as much force possible into the barbell with each repetition, not pumping out rep after rep. This is not opinion. This is physics.

This is called Compensatory Acceleration Training (CAT). Lots of bodybuilders do this unknowingly when doing a set of 12 reps – the first 3-4 reps are explosive, while the next 8-9 reps have a little less steam. Whether they know it or not, they are getting beneficial adaptations from the dynamic method for strength gains in the first few reps. Your first rep is always your strongest – from that point on you are getting weaker – so exerting maximum force from the get-go can help you dynamically increase muscle tension.

The Max Effort Method: Lifting weights over 90 percent for 1-3 reps.

This is how most powerlifters train when prepping for a meet. It’s very intense but doesn’t involve very many repetitions, providing some of the same benefits as the Dynamic Method. Bodybuilders like Ronnie Coleman have used the max effort method as little as three weeks out from the Olympia.

THE TAKE HOME

Strength is primarily gained by lifting heavy weight for low reps and lots of sets, mostly as a result of adaptations in the central nervous system (CNS). This maximizes neural efficiency or, in other words, gets you more coordinated at the movement. Greater coordination leads to leads to more efficiency of a lift, allowing all participating muscles to more fully contribute to each rep.

This is the primary piece of the strength pie. It will take longer but you can get stronger by training with 65-80 percent of your max to momentary muscular failure (MMF). Furthermore, you will get stronger by lifting lighter weights faster. You can produce higher amounts of force this way when compared to heavy weights.

Everyone wants to get bigger and stronger…even big, strong guys. Training with a multitude of rep ranges and tempos will get you both in the long run but you should always concentrate on increasing your weight loads through whatever path you choose. All roads lead to Rome.

That’s a topic I’m really interested in because I changed my training style multiple times in the last ten years between pure strength, powerbuilding, and bodybuilding. My personal experience is that focusing purely on hypertrophy has been, by far, the best way to promote hypertrophy.

This can also impact exercise selection. If you’re ‘powerlifting-minded,’ you tend to focus on the big three, but I found that some other exercises work way better for me: incline presses, front squats, and RDLs. I stopped caring about the big three which was very beneficial for hypertrophy.

Additionally, if you’re interested in this topic, there’s a whole debate on YouTube around Powerbuilding (mixing powerlifting and bodybuilding):

• Powerbuilding is an Abomination

• Response Video

• Powerbuilding is Not an Abomination

• The Final Powerbuilding Debate

🌱 Wellness

🥱 The Real Cause of Burnout

A short but critical video on burnout:

Pair with: You Must Fuck Around and Find Out

You should take much more risk, and try new things much more often.

Much of your comfort with risk is hard-coded genetically, a variable carefully tuned by millions of years of evolution, balancing the upside and downside of risk.

But this is one of these cases where the modern world has become so different from our ancestral environment that our instincts are dramatically miscalibrated.

That is, the downside of experimentation nearly vanished — while you used to risk your life tasting a new mushroom, about the worst that can happen now is having to go back to Google if your startup doesn’t work out.

And just as the downside shrank, the upside grew by orders of magnitude. First, because the whole world benefits when a single one of us finds anything new, as we can then all copy the innovation. This alone buys you an increase in upside of maybe 100,000,000x, as our tribe grew from a few dozen people in a cave to 8 billion human beings.

🧠 Better Thinking

🛋 On Moderation

This thread by Jason Warner perfectly summarizes an idea I’ve been trying to put into words for a long time.

I hold a few very un-popular but likely hard truth views on the world and life

One of them is that most people will never achieve a single large goal they set out to do and it’s primarily because we as a society have taught them a very dangerous concept called ‘moderation’

I absolutely do not believe that if your goal is to do something even approaching very good let alone great, moderation is the way

Moderation is for mediocre. Perhaps more accurately , moderation is for maintaining

If your goal is to maintain your status quo, moderation

I think it does people an absolute disservice to tell them that if they have some large goal or dream anything other than the truth which is this: to do almost anything big or audacious means some extreme elements are needed

And I mean extreme

Sure, someone can be absolutely fools gold lucky, but that’s not a realistic viable path for everyone let alone most. You can’t bank on luck even if it seems most want to

What you can bank on is willpower, endurance, grit, tenacity, putting in the work, day after day improvement

Let’s just talk about something actually quite simple, but not easy. Its that time of year when many folks ‘want to get in shape’

If your goal is basically within the error bars improvement aka losing like 5-10 pounds, being able to run a 5k, or getting slightly stronger …

Moderation probably is fine…it matches the goals in that they’re with in your mostly steady state norms

But do you want to dramatically change your body comp, or run a marathon for time, or get above average strong, no….you need to adjust your expectations based on effort

I can tell you is that most people that set out to dramatically change their body comp will absolutely fail and my sincere belief is it’s bc we tell them they can do this by ‘moderation’

Or maybe another way to say it, talk about setting someone up for failure & frustration

And more, truthfully, that’s hard mode! It’s actually easier to say ‘you want some outsized goal? You’re have to put in outsized effort, determination, and willpower’ and realize that pie & ice cream won’t be a thing for a while. Or yes, you’re gonna have to be at the gym more

“But Jason, that’s restrictive eating and unhealthy!”

Yeah cool, be mediocre for the rest of your life

“But Jason, working out that much means I have to give up something else!”

Yeah cool, be an adult and honest with what you want then idk

Listen, I don’t care what you’re thinking you want. What I’m saying is if you really really really want something and you want to be great at it, you’re gonna have to change your mindset. I’m not even kidding a little

There’s a reason the best seem obsessive

There’s a reason hall of famers workout like fiends

There’s a reason people who accomplish stuff are away switched on

There’s a reason the greats never slow down

Now the real point of this is to understand your goals

I love to paint, draw, & write. But I don’t care to be the best at them so I treat them like a hobby

I can afford to let painting be something casual aka moderated

But the moment I cared…..boom, mindset switch

I can’t and won’t with moderate with work or fitness/health. Those are my areas I care about. So I understand what it takes

And my main point is a message of moderation is a path to mediocre/mostly maintaining. If I am super happy with my fitness level I can dial it back a bit

But if I’m not happy and need to change the slope and get to a new baseline, I have to ramp up the intensity and focus, concentrate the effort etc

Want to do something rather drastic from your current situation? Moderation won’t get you there I’m sorry to tell you

New Years is right around the corner. New Year’s resolutions with them. Will this year be any different?

Pair with: intensity

There’s that Charles Bukowski line from his poem Roll the Dice: If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. Most obsessive people crudely describe themselves as “all-or-nothing” types. They’ll say (read: I’ll say) that they are bad with moderation, that they need to “cut something out” if they want to cut back, which is just shorthand for “I only know how to go all the way.”

Bukowski goes on in his poem: Isolation is the gift. The rest is just a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. This feels especially topical as I have begun to feel that pull of obsession to my writing. It’s like there is this constant, unrelenting tug at my psyche: get to the keyboard, get to the keyboard, you could be at the keyboard. And though I wish I could say the voice irritates me, in truth, I am on board with it. I find myself responding internally: I know! I am TRYING TO GET TO THE KEYBOARD.

⚡️ Startup Stuff

✉️ Amazon 1997 Shareholder Letter

I found this shareholder letter from Jeff Bezos powerful and worth sharing, especially this quote: “The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.”

Differentiation is Survival and the Universe Wants You to be Typical

This is my last annual shareholder letter as the CEO of Amazon, and I have one last thing of utmost importance I feel compelled to teach. I hope all Amazonians take it to heart.

While the passage is not intended as a metaphor, it’s nevertheless a fantastic one, and very relevant to Amazon. I would argue that it’s relevant to all companies and all institutions and to each of our individual lives too. In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness? To keep alive the thing or things that make you special?

I know a happily married couple who have a running joke in their relationship. Not infrequently, the husband looks at the wife with faux distress and says to her, “Can’t you just be normal?” They both smile and laugh, and of course the deep truth is that her distinctiveness is something he loves about her. But, at the same time, it’s also true that things would often be easier – take less energy – if we were a little more normal.

This phenomenon happens at all scale levels. Democracies are not normal. Tyranny is the historical norm. If we stopped doing all of the continuous hard work that is needed to maintain our distinctiveness in that regard, we would quickly come into equilibrium with tyranny.

We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to “be yourself.” What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.

You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of “be yourself” is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.

The world will always try to make Amazon more typical – to bring us into equilibrium with our environment. It will take continuous effort, but we can and must be better than that.

Pair with: How to do What you Love

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't — for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.

And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.

The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn't, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy.

Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of them. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of kids instead of lying on a beach. You couldn't just do what you wanted.

📚 What I Read

👥 How to transform your social life

A useful article:

I’ve experienced two versions of social life in New York:

1. You know a handful of people in the city but you don’t ask them to hang out because it makes you anxious, no one invites you to things, and you spend most weekends entirely alone. On Friday nights you feel depressed that the workweek is ending and you have no plans, so you send an office-wide Slack message asking if anyone wants to get dinner, which of course no one responds to because they all have lives.

2. You are invited to multiple parties every weekend (housewarmings, housecoolings, birthdays, salons, picnics, launch parties), you frequently ask people to hang out without a second thought, you host things every month, you meet several new people each week, and you make connections with random people on the internet who are interested in getting to know you.

It would have surprised me a few years ago to discover that it’s possible to go from (1) to (2), but indeed it happened for me, in the span of about a year. Here are the things that helped me make the transition.

🏗 Why I Built Zuzalu

Vitalik Buterin on why he built Zuzalu.

We tend to think about physical places, as well as the activities and cultures that come with those places, as being immutable. As an individual, you may have a choice to move to a particular place: to San Francisco for its open and accepting culture or for its AI development scene, to Berlin for the open source hacker culture, or to Asia to be part of a new and rising world.

At the same time, we take all of those features as given, as an exogenous and fixed part of the human world—there are tradeoffs, and you have to choose. But what if this could be different? What if cultures or tribes that have formed online with their own goals and values could materialize offline, and new physical places could grow due to intention rather than random chance?

Ideas like this have floated around online philosophical circles for decades. In 1988, the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli wrote a book called The Time of the Tribes, arguing that the next era will see more agency exercised in groups defined by common interests, rather than common history or blood and soil. More recently, Balaji Srinivasan wrote The Network State, arguing that communities defined by common interests can start off as purely online discussion forums, but then “materialize” into in-person hubs over time. From the perspective of economic democracy, David de Ugarte’s Phyles advocated for cultural and economic collaboration between transnational groups that would coordinate both online and offline.

💭 Thirty Observations at Thirty

7. Find mentors that can help, and want to:

When I was 19, an older brother in my fraternity told me that he felt compelled to help me, because he always felt I was the cusp of greatness but had critical flaws like a Shakespearean character and would never get to greatness without his help. So he was motivated to help me far more than those lacking flaws.

At an earlier age I would philosophize in my own head when I hit a problem. Now, whenever I encounter a problem, my first instinct is, who can I find that will want to meet with me regularly and is an expert at guiding me to a solution.

8. The world of people who change the world is quite small:

Arriving in Silicon Valley in 2012 I was overwhelmed by how much there was to learn about who actually built large tech companies and how it was done. Now, a decade later, I realize that the set of players relevant today has a massive overlap with those a decade ago. Not a whole lot changes.

And the same is true in politics, media, science, and entertainment. Once you understand these worlds of people and how they think, it’s far easier to understand where the world is headed.

🏛 Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks

Exploring the Optimistic Utopia of Iain M. Banks' Sci-Fi Universe in 'The Culture' Series

This is what makes the Culture the ultimate memeplex, with the largest, deepest basin of attraction. It exists only to reproduce itself. It derives its entire sense of purpose, its raison d’être, from a set of activities that result in it seeking out and converting all societies to its own culture. Of course, this is not how people of the Culture themselves perceive it. As far as they’re concerned, they’re just “doing the right thing.” This self-deception is, of course, part of what makes the Culture so effective at reproducing itself.
From a certain perspective, the Culture is not all that different from Star Trek’s Borg. The difference is that Banks tricks the reader into, in effect, sympathizing with the Borg.¹⁹ Indeed, his sly suggestion is that we – those of us living in modern, liberal societies – are a part of the Borg. In Star Trek, the Borg are a vulgar caricature. “You will be assimilated, you will service the Borg” – this is probably not how the Borg see it. “We’re just here to help. Beside, how could you possibly not want to join?” – this is how the Culture sees itself. Yet from the outside, the Culture and the Borg have certain essential similarities.
Summing up: Banks’s conception of the Culture is driven by three central ideas. First, there is the thought that, in the future, basic problems of social organization will be given essentially technocratic solutions, and so the competition between cultures will be based upon their viral qualities, not their functional attributes. Second, there is postulation of Contact as essentially the reproduction mechanism of the Culture. And finally, there is the suggestion that the operations of Contact serve not just as an idle distraction, but in fact provides a solution to an existential crisis that is at the core of the Culture. This is what gives the Culture its ultraviral quality: its only reason for existence is to reproduce itself.

💰 You Can’t Be Socially Liberal and Fiscally Conservative

Why this is a luxury belief.

“Socially liberal and fiscally conservative.”

This is the position of many affluent people.

Research indicates that while most Americans lean toward populism, elites are more libertarian.

Summing up his findings, the Stanford political economist Neil Malhotra has stated:

“There is this soft populism among voters overall, which tends to be more economically liberal and socially moderate. Whereas the elite donors are more libertarian in some ways — more economically conservative and more socially liberal than the base of their parties.”

Ordinary people tend to be relatively more socially conservative and economically liberal. This position makes sense.

The position is roughly that people should adhere to norms but if they fail there should be a safety net available.

Highly educated and affluent people are more economically conservative and socially liberal. This doesn’t make sense.

The position is roughly that people shouldn’t have to adhere to norms and if/when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available.

It’s a luxury belief.

💭 Why I Ran Away from Philosophy Because of Sam Bankman-Fried

Or how flawed thinking can make $10 billion disappear

I abandoned philosophy because of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto scammer.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I abandoned my formal study of philosophy because of people like Bankman-Fried.

Unfortunately, they were my professors at the time.

Where do I even begin in telling this?

It’s not easy. That’s why I’ve never given a full account of my years as a philosophy student at Oxford—despite some readers requesting this. I don’t talk about it because the story is complicated.

But Sam Bankman-Fried gives me the excuse—or even the necessity—of digging into this gnarly matter. That’s because the crypto scammer was deeply involved in a philosophical movement that originated at Oxford. It draws on the same tenets I was taught in those distant days.

My teachers didn’t run crypto exchanges, and (to my knowledge) never embezzled anything more valuable than a bottle of port from the common room. Even so, there’s a direct connection between them and Mr. Bankman-Fried.

They were erudite and devoted teachers, but I was disillusioned by what they taught. It eventually chased me away from philosophy, specifically analytic philosophy of the Anglo-American variety.

I had no idea that their worldview would come back to life as a popular movement promoted by the biggest scam artist of the digital age. But I’m not really surprised—because it’s a dangerous worldview with potential to do damage on the largest scale.

The philosophy is nowadays called Effective Altruism. It even has a web site with recruiting videos—there’s a warning sign right there!—where it brags about its origins at Oxford.

But here’s the catch, if you actually try to put this philosophy into practice, you might sell your granny to sex traffickers.

🥁 Insights from 2,961 First Dates

• Women rate 72% of men as below average in physical attractiveness.

• 29% of men and women haven’t had sex in the past year.

• People care more about their partner’s politics than their religion, and more about their religion than their ethnicity. Women care more about their partner’s politics, religion, and ethnicity than men.

• Men like 51% of women they speak to during 8-minute-long speed dates. Women like 31% of men.

• Men are more comfortable being friends with someone that disagrees with them on important political topics.

• Women are eight times more likely to be bisexual than men.

• Attractive men tend to have more sexual partners. Attractive women don’t.

🍭 Brain Food

🔨 How have you become more hard-working?

This is an interesting question asked on the LessWrong forum:

I'd be curious to hear stories of people who have successfully become more hard-working, especially if they started out as not particularly hard-working. Types of things I can imagine playing a role or know have played a role for some people:

• Switching roles to something that is conducive to hard work, e.g. a fast-paced environment with lots of concrete tasks and fires to put out.

• Medication, e.g. ADHD medication

• Internal work, e.g. specific types of therapy, meditation, self-help reading, or other types of reflection.

• Productivity hacks, e.g. more accountability, putting specific systems in place

• Motivational events, arguments, or life periods, e.g. working a normal corporate jobs where long hours are expected

• Switching work environment to something that is conducive to hard work, e.g. always working in an office with others who hold you accountable

This curiosity was triggered by realising that I know of very few people that have become substantially harder-working over their late adolescence/adult life. I also noticed that the few people that I know successfully and seemingly permanently increased their mental health/work satisfaction always were hard-working even when they were unhappy (unless they were in the middle of burn-out or similar).

People becoming more hard-working seems really useful but I haven't seen much in terms of evidence that it's feasible or effective methods. If there are books or studies on this topic, those would also be welcome. Thank you!

Contributors shared various approaches such as changing environments, therapy, medication for ADHD, productivity hacks, and motivation from life changes. Many emphasized the importance of aligning work with personal interests and values, self-knowledge, and creating systems for accountability.

There was also a common theme of internal motivation and the impact of meaningful work in increasing productivity.

Pair with: This quote from Sam Altman

Extreme people get extreme results. Working a lot comes with huge life trade-offs, and it's perfectly rational to decide not to do it. But it has a lot of advantages. As in most cases, momentum compounds, and success begets success.

And it's often really fun. One of the great joys in life is finding your purpose, excelling at it, and discovering that your impact matters to something larger than yourself. A YC founder recently expressed great surprise about how much happier and more fulfilled he was after leaving his job at a big company and working towards his maximum possible impact. Working hard at that should be celebrated.

One more thought about working hard: do it at the beginning of your career. Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier you do it, the more time you have for the benefits to pay off. It's also easier to work hard when you have fewer other responsibilities, which is frequently but not always the case when you're young.

🎥 What I’m Watching

📉 What They’ll Never Tell You About Chasing a Six-Pack

I think a six-pack is a bad goal for most people.

🧘‍♂️ I Sold My Startup & Then Did Nothing for 365 Days

Great video by Michael Karnjanaprakorn.

🔧 The Tool of the Week

🔍 Perplexity.ai

I’ve almost entirely replaced my Google usage with either ChatGPT or Perplexity. I like the UX & UI of perplexity, and I’ve been using it daily for months. Highly recommend.

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

"These slightly older men in their thirties and forties seemed to survive in much greater numbers. Surprisingly it was the young men who died first on the railway. Perhaps the older ones were stronger emotionally. Perhaps with families they had more to live for"

— Alistair Urquhart

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading!

If you like The Long Game, please share it on social media or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Until next week,

Mehdi Yacoubi

Subscribe now

In this episode, we explore:

• Exercise & depression

• N=1 is the ultimate truth

• Agency

• Distribution

• Low HRV

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

🏋️‍♀️ Exercise & Depression

I think a lot of us intuitively see a link between good mental health and exercise, and this recent paper validated this intuition.

Abstract

Objective To estimate the efficacy of exercise on depressive symptoms compared with non-active control groups and to determine the moderating effects of exercise on depression and the presence of publication bias.

Design Systematic review and meta-analysis with meta-regression.

Data sources The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, PubMed, MEDLINE, Embase, SPORTDiscus, PsycINFO, Scopus and Web of Science were searched without language restrictions from inception to 13 September2022 (PROSPERO registration no CRD42020210651).

Eligibility criteria for selecting studies Randomised controlled trials including participants aged 18 years or older with a diagnosis of major depressive disorder or those with depressive symptoms determined by validated screening measures scoring above the threshold value, investigating the effects of an exercise intervention (aerobic and/or resistance exercise) compared with a non-exercising control group.

Results Forty-one studies, comprising 2264 participants post intervention were included in the meta-analysis demonstrating large effects (standardised mean difference (SMD)=−0.946, 95% CI −1.18 to −0.71) favouring exercise interventions which corresponds to the number needed to treat (NNT)=2 (95% CI 1.68 to 2.59). Large effects were found in studies with individuals with major depressive disorder (SMD=−0.998, 95% CI −1.39 to −0.61, k=20), supervised exercise interventions (SMD=−1.026, 95% CI −1.28 to −0.77, k=40) and moderate effects when analyses were restricted to low risk of bias studies (SMD=−0.666, 95% CI −0.99 to −0.34, k=12, NNT=2.8 (95% CI 1.94 to 5.22)).

Conclusion Exercise is efficacious in treating depression and depressive symptoms and should be offered as an evidence-based treatment option focusing on supervised and group exercise with moderate intensity and aerobic exercise regimes. The small sample sizes of many trials and high heterogeneity in methods should be considered when interpreting the results.

Lastly, when trying to start/restart being physically active, it's essential to work first on consistency and developing a genuine appreciation/love for a type of physical activity. Once that's done, exercising becomes effortless, and one of the best parts of the day.

🌱 Wellness

🔮 N=1 is the ultimate truth

As always, there’s a lot of chatter around what is the Optimal™️ diet, what is the Optimal™️ training protocol, what is the Optimal™️ sleeping routine, etc.

I think some of those discussions are interesting, and the research around them can serve as good guidance as to what to try. The issue is when people extrapolate these findings to create blanket Optimal™️ rules for everyone.

I liked this small text on the value of N=1:

N=1 is the ultimate truth.

Large population level studies provide a decent starting point of what 'should' work assuming you're an average representation of the population. This is useful if you have no previous data on what works *for you*

If you do have previous data on what works *for you*, you would have to be some kind of idiot to ignore that & instead go with what works the best for the average population member.

E.g. assume you get a major disease that you've never had before. Science says on a population level, treatment A is superior to treatment B so you start with treatment A, but you don't respond as the average subject in the study did. Do you stick with treatment A, & go down with the ship, because "science says" it is the superior choice? Of course not, you try option B!

Your *individual* response to an intervention should always be placed above the average population member's response to an intervention.

Too few academics understand this.

🧠 Better Thinking

🔂 The Most Precious Resource is Agency

I’m resharing this excellent article that I re-read recently.

The world until recently was overflowing with onramps of opportunity, even for children, and we seem to do poorly at producing new ones. Modern complexity may have erased some avenues for agency (no boy can meaningfully learn the telegraph), but I suspect how we have oriented the world, not technology, is the main problem. 13-year-old Steve Jobs called Bill Hewlett and received a summer job at HP, which would be unsurprising in Carnegie’s time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is obviously verboten today.

We seem to have a political (public) imagination so shallow that it cannot conceive of what to even do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them all the way through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be useless in the interim. We do not need children to work, that is abundantly clear, but by ensuring there is nothing for them to do we are also sure to destroy more onramps towards making meaningful contributions to the world.

Much of the fault for this lies in an attempt at systematizing skill and knowledge transfer so thoroughly that people begin to conceive of it as the task of school, rather than a normal consequence of work. Because of this shift, childhood contains the age where one can intuit very well how the world works while being prevented from acting upon it meaningfully. Instead of an adolescence full of rites of passage, where one attempts to master something and accept responsibility, we have made it full of waiting, and doing work—for school is work—that nearly everyone knows is fake.

⚡️ Startup Stuff

💌 Distribution should be part of product design

A small reminder for today. An idea that is hard to grasp deeply, even if you’re reminded of it many times.

It's better to think of distribution as something essential to the design of your product.

If you've invented something new but you haven't invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business no matter how good the product.

Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.

The converse is not true.

No matter how strong your product even if it easily fits into already established habits and anybody who tries it likes it immediately—you must still support it with a strong distribution plan.

— Peter Thiel

📚 What I Read

📡 BELIEF & PROGRESS || "THE NEW TECHNOLOGIST MANIFESTO"

This New Technologist Manifesto is really good.

1. First and foremost, the new technologist is not ashamed of working in technology. They view it as a joy and a privilege. It is not defeatist nor is it with any sense of irony that we approach our work intensely.

2. The new technologists spend their time with each other, seeped in references and discussion, aware of histories that form an interdisciplinary school of thought and practice.

3. It is the goal of the new technologist to increase the “capability landscape”, thus increasing the individual’s potential for greatness. There have been people that were born and died within a time period without access to / invention of the tool they are meant for. How many Mozart’s died before the invention of the Harpsichord? Our job is to continually reduce the number of people that meet that fate, by improving the built environment.

4. The new technologist sees hardware as part of the “nature” layer of pace layering. We want culture to be diverse and generative, and we work to produce new hardware platforms towards that diversity.

1. The four most important areas of next-gen / post-internet technologies are hardware, spatial, crypto, and AI. The new technologist spends their time advancing ideas, products, capital, and systems in these arenas. Why? → Because hardware and spatial represent a shift in “containers” for software, and AI and crypto represent a shift in what software is. These four areas will converge into new metas.

2. The new technologist does not subscribe to the cult of being a founder. Instead we seek to advance the four areas previously mentioned.

🏦 The Dark Forest of R&D & Capital Deployment in AI

While on the surface we mostly just see large rounds and revenue or usage leaks, in reality AI companies are perhaps some of the most complex businesses we’ve had being built in tech in some time. Doing core AI model R&D necessitates a need to play 4D Chess around research communities, capital accumulation and deployment, talent acquisition, competitive understanding, and commercialization.

AI companies today find themselves in multiple cycles of R&D and commercialization, making an implicit bet that the millions or billions of dollars spent on R&D will eventually lead to market domination and massive scale years from now. This pushes these companies into a dark forest they must navigate, while stacking up R&D costs ahead of clear staying power for far longer than the vast majority of software businesses.

But to understand whether AI companies are embarking on a rollercoaster of capital deployment that is a Super Cycle, or a Euthanasia Coaster style journey, we must also understand the impending shifts that will drive all strategy over the next decade.

📈 When I Stopped Trying to Self-Optimize, I Got Better

Who could have guessed?

In the early- to mid-1920s, the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flew planes, commercially for a stint, and also for the French Air Force. He was an adventurer, a poet of life. He also wrote one of my favorite books: “Wind, Sand and Stars.” In it, I found one of the smartest lines ever written on the human condition, even though at the time he was riffing about airplanes: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add but when there is nothing left to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”

That day, at the bottom of the climb, I finally understood what Saint-Exupéry was talking about. Adding comes naturally in life, from the simple act of living; habits form, mental patterns become fixed. Jealousies, insecurities and phobias take root with disturbing ease. We may try to fix ourselves, but often by slapping on more strips of duct tape.

But, against what feels like common sense, daily labor is required to return to nakedness.

A great performance is nothing more than a lovely moment, and lovely moments are everywhere. To arrive there, you need to prune away what is causing anticipation and frustration — impatience with those you love, jealousy toward a friend or anger at your children. As Saint-Exupery advises, we must take away until there is nothing left to remove. What is left when you do that? Only an action. You are in it, then, in sports or in love, with clarity, intensity and solidity. You adjust quickly and deftly. You are no longer bound by addition. You are free to act.

That’s winning. That’s perfection.

📚 TikTok is changing the way books are recommended and sold

This represents a profound shift for readers, authors and publishers.

First the camera pans across eight books arrayed with hundreds of sticky tabs, flaunting that they have been closely read and meticulously annotated. Next a description runs across the screen: “Books I would sell my soul to read again for the first time”. The music crescendoes, and a manicured hand reveals the books’ covers in time with the beat, featuring authors including Simone de Beauvoir, Elena Ferrante and Sally Rooney.

The user, who is called “buryme.withmybooks”, does not say why she likes them, but that does not matter. On TikTok hyperbole is the name of the social-media game. Around 9.3m people have watched the video and almost 400,000 people have saved it for future reference.

TikTok, which has more than 1bn regular users, is making a mark on the world of publishing. Much of this is done through BookTok, the app’s community of users who comment on books. It is among the largest communities on the app; videos with this tag have been viewed 179bn times, more than twice as many as BeautyTok (beauty enthusiasts splinter into various groups). Adding #reading, #books and #literature pushes views to more than 240bn. Whoever said books are dead has not spent much time on TikTok, nor in bookstores, which now have whole displays touting titles “as seen on TikTok”.

🫀 Low Heart Rate Variability (HRV)

What’s a low HRV?

At the population level, the strongest parameter associated with HRV is age. And yet, at any age, the range of HRV values is extremely large. For example, a recent study looking at almost 100 000 people, showed how rMSSD (the typical HRV feature reported by most apps and wearables) spans between 10 and 230 ms for teenagers, and still covers a range between 5 ms and 80 ms for people in their sixties. The median value for people in their 30s is about 45 ms, with a very large standard deviation (30 ms), meaning that a large percentage of people will have relatively low values at any age. Most people having concerns typically report an rMSSD of about 20 ms or a bit lower, which is quite normal if we are in our fifties, and still rather frequent even if we are younger, according to published literature in the general population.

Alright, hopefully, we have established that you are not alone and a relatively low HRV might in fact be quite normal.

Why is my HRV low?

In most cases, we simply do not know. Like most things, our HRV is partially genetically determined and partially due to our lifestyle, the environment we live in, and all sorts of other factors.

The fact that we don’t know why HRV might be lower in certain people simply highlights how there is no clear causal association between HRV and other characteristics or outcomes (in either direction).

What does a low HRV mean?

A low HRV can be normal. Research studies looking at the relationship between HRV and health outcomes show associations, not causation, between e.g. a low HRV and negative health outcomes. Even then, it might be that HRV simply reflects a condition of poor health or poor lifestyle.

Most importantly, as highlighted in the first part of this article, there is so much overlap between any two groups of people, that it is never possible to determine if a person will have a certain outcome given their HRV. When studies find that a lower HRV is related to negative outcomes, they simply find a statistical association that means very little for the individual.

For example, in the figure below, we look at a biased sample made mostly of healthy, recreational athletes. And yet, if I were to tell you that my rMSSD is 25 ms, it would be impossible to determine my age and physical activity level: there is a lot of overlap between all groups (this is data I published here).

A low HRV is associated with older age and lower physical activity levels, but it is also quite meaningless at the individual level. A lot of people that are young and active will have a low HRV, and similarly, many people will have either a low or high HRV regardless of specific health outcomes.

The absolute value of our HRV is not very informative.

🍭 Brain Food

⚡ The Paradox of Liberation

Some great & thought-provoking reflections on the sexual liberation.

The sexual revolution obviously succeeded in its aim: more freedom.

The answer to the debate description (“The sexual revolution promised liberation. Fifty years on, we ask: has it delivered?”) is obviously yes.

But the reason why a debate makes sense is because many people conflate liberation (freedom) with happiness.

The revolution has unquestionably increased freedom. But it also made people less happy. Many people, though, anticipated that greater freedom would necessarily bring greater happiness.

Sadly the world doesn’t work that way.

We can’t have everything good all at once. We can have some good things, but we can’t have all good things at the same time.

Equally desirable ends often collide. Equally valued aims regularly contradict each other.

Many smart people believe that all good things can be made to conspire towards a final harmonious resolution. Freedom is good. Happiness is good. Naturally, we think (or hope) that these and all other values naturally go together. But they don’t.

The main point here is that the improvements we got from the sexual revolution also led to a deterioration in other aspects.

Louise Perry alluded to this during the debate when she quoted the economic historian Richard Henry Tawney: “Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.”

Isaiah Berlin has likewise written that, “Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.”

If you value freedom, that’s fine. But it does have costs. Women today are freer than their grandmothers. But they are less happy.

Researchers have described this as “the paradox of declining female happiness.”

Prior to the sexual revolution, women reported higher levels of happiness than men. Broadly speaking, our grandmothers were happier than our grandfathers. Over the past several decades, though, this has reversed. Men are now happier than women. To be clear, happiness overall has declined for both men and women. Men are less happy than their grandfathers; women are less happy than their grandmothers.

But relatively speaking, men now report higher rates of happiness than women.

The sexual revolution and its accompanying effect of greater acceptance of casual sex have played a role in this.  

A recent study found that after casual sex, women, on average, report high levels of loneliness, unhappiness, rejection, and regret. Conversely, men report higher satisfaction, happiness, contentment, and mood improvement.

Another study found that women are most likely to be sexually satisfied in a long-term committed relationship.

Pair with: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution

🎥 What I’m Watching

♾ Longevity Influencers Are Killing You

🧠 Our Brains Weren't Meant to See This Many Beautiful People..

🔧 The Tool of the Week

🥛 Fairlife Protein

I loved these during my week in NYC. Very convenient and has great taste.

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

"Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."

— Winston S. Churchill

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading!

If you like The Long Game, please share it on social media or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Until next week,

Mehdi Yacoubi

Subscribe now

The Long Game is back after an extended time off — I’ll try to keep a ~weekly schedule from now on.

🇺🇸🗽 I’ll be in New York next week; let me know if you’re around and want to go for a coffee, a walk or a gym session (I’m planning to try a new gym every day, I want to see all the best gyms of nyc).

🥑 Health

🫀 How ‘Trainable’ Is VO2 Max Really?

Over the last 24 months, my VO2 Max went down significantly (if we can trust the Apple Health values). It’s not really surprising as during that time, cardio was really not my top focus.

Still, even if I’m not interested in endurance goals at the moment, it kind of annoyed me to see the downward trend for all these months.

This is a good article showing that VO2 Max is actually highly trainable:

I started working with a youngish, middle-of-the-pack athlete with some big goals. He had come from a history of rotating through a number of intensity-based programs and was frustrated at the plateau despite “working as hard as I could.” In more detail, the programs typically involved focused periods of 3-4 months before the key event, which would begin with high-intensity (threshold and “VO2”) trainer intervals and progressively extend to a few specific long rides/runs before the event. After the event, he would take a couple of months off/unstructured to mentally recover from the high-intensity training and then begin the cycle again. As a part of the initial assessment, we got the athlete into the lab for a full workup including a VO2 max test. The result? A fairly modest 53 ml/kg/min.

Again, knowing what we “know,” we might say to him (or at least be thinking), here is a guy who, as someone preparing for repeated Ironman triathlon events, is clearly not untrained. So, with a trained VO2 max of 53 ml/kg/min, his long-term goal of qualifying for the Ironman World Championship might be overly ambitious, at best. For comparative purposes, most male athletes in that age group who I have coached and who have achieved that level are closer to 65-70 ml/kg/min. Even at the low end, this would represent an improvement of 22% in VO2 max (from an already trained state)! Perhaps it was my duty to send this guy on his way? Or at the very least, let him know “not gonna happen, champ.” Well, fortunately, we didn’t take that route…

Over the course of the next three years, this athlete shifted his VO2 max from 53 to 74 ml/kg/min: An increase of 40% from a very middle-of-the-pack number to an elite level! And, in the process, he achieved his goal of qualifying for the Ironman World Championship.

I don’t know exactly what I’ll do to increase VO2 Max yet as I’m certainly not willing to put in the type of endurance training volume discussed in the article, but I know that I’ve had some success in the past with small bouts of HIIT. Another thing I’m thinking about is rucking instead of walking as this wouldn’t require a change of schedule/ training schedule.

I haven’t read it yet, but Brady consistently shares great information: VO2 Max Essentials eBook

🌱 Wellness

👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 Couple Dynamics with Kids

Men, this thread is worth a read:

Men are expected now to make way more money,but also be 50/50 raising kids & keeping up the house

Women are expected to keep a Instagram home & perfect kids (w/ no help),be 'active' at school, & make $ now

It's a crazy battle going on in the US

How we stay married w/ 4 kids:👇

Learned from a divorce lawyer recently... the largest cohort of women he's seeing file is married working moms who realize: "I'm taking care of the house, kid's schedules, etc & making money...why do I need this 'extra child' to keep track of"

It's effing sa

MEN:

This isn't the 1950's anymore.

Where you come home late from work after being at happy hour, sit in front of the TV, Mary Tyler Moore brings you dinner then she goes and puts kids to bed

The house is now 50/50. I clean the kitchen, bathe kids, sweep, do laundry at time

I do grocery shopping, bring kids to doctor appts, etc.

I'm no super Dad... it's legit what's now required

There's no community anymore where your neighbors are all watching each other's kids. Those days are over

Your wife can't watch them all day alon

Or --- if your wife works...

You can't "wait" for your wife to tell you what she needs help with. You need to figure it out yourself

Believe me, we've had dozens of arguments over this...and I never win

"Just tell me what to do" is passive aggressive wimpy stuff

If you see laundry hasn't been done in 2 weeks... it's not up to you to tell her "Hey, my laundry hasn't been done"

That's what 7-year olds do

You grab the basket, dump it in, squirt an undetermined amount of soap in & hit the dang button (it'll all be fine)

Another thing is about schedules, men.

You need to be hyper aware of the 'schedule freedoms' you have vs. her

I'm guilty of this too...

Coming home from work & going straight out to mow the lawn, then fix the car while she has to keep watching kids & then make dinner is bad

If you're able to leave the house on a whim, or go to your 'man cave' & play your video games...but she can't go to the bathroom/shower in peace w/o children... that's gonna come back at you

Tons of resentment will build up

Trust me --- I've been there. I'm helping you here

Next, the money is "EVERYONE'S" not yours. Money can cause so many problems

If you're hiding money from each other, it's going to boil over at some point, esp if one of you makes a lot more than the other

You one day blurt out "well, that's MY money. I earned it!"

oh boy...

Next, delegate crap

We hire people to do our yard work, fix cars, fix household stuff, etc.

We hire cleaners a few times per month

These keep you sane

You should not be spending 3 hours of your Saturday mowing the lawn. Spend it with the family.

Last, your spouse needs to come before kids.

You don't want to be divorcing at your kid's HS graduation

Your relationship sets your kids up for good relationships...plus, it's more fun when there's no resentment & you're a team

TLDR, men:

1. Men, the house is 50/50. The woman can't carry the mental load of anything. ESP if she works too
2. Be aware of each other's time 'freedoms'
3. Share money
4. Your wife comes before kids
5. Delegate as much as you can

"But I work 10 hours per day, I deserve my rest time in the evenings"

Dude, if she has a job & having to manage kids (and you), that's a 16 hr job. Not fair

If she's not working, she's still doing 16 hrs of work at home or working on things outside the home (volunteering e.g.)

"You're a beta simp. I'm the man of the house"

Enjoy divorce court. There's a reason women file the majority of divorces

B/c men think they hold all the cards. You don't

You also don't want to

Build up resentment is a terrible way to live.

Resentment destroys more marriages than cheating

There will always be arguments over these things... but being aware of them help

Being married should be fun. You giggle about stuff. Still have great sex 10+ years in (+ after 10 yrs, you better know your wife's body well)

None of this is to bash men or talk down to them

I still struggle w/ these

It's lessons I've learned in 12 yrs of marriage, 4 kids, while running multiple biz (some together, which is a whole other topic)

Times are different.

Men need to step up more than before

Many won't.

Pair with: This is How Your Marriage Ends & How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids.

🧠 Better Thinking

⚖️ The optimal level of optimization

This is an excellent article about a topic I’ve covered many times in the latest editions of the newsletter.

The main lesson we’ve learned is that you can almost never optimize directly for a goal—instead, you’re usually optimizing for something that looks like your goal but is slightly different. It’s a proxy.

Because you have to optimize for a proxy, when you optimize too much, you get too good at maximizing your proxy objective—which often takes you far away from your real goal. 

So the point to keep in mind is: know what you’re optimizing for. Know that the proxy for the goal is not the goal itself. Hew loosely to your optimization process, and be ready to stop it or switch strategies when it seems like you’ve run out of useful similarity between your proxy objective and your actual goal. 

As far as John Mayer, Dolly Parton, and Aristotle go on the wisdom of optimization, I think we have to hand the award to Aristotle and his golden mean. 

When you’re optimizing for a goal, the optimal level of optimization is somewhere between too much and too little. It’s just right.

Pair with this tweet:

I enjoy experimenting with health optimization stuff as much as the next techy thinkboi…

But I do think an over-fixation on optimizing your HRV or any other tiny metric in your life is a sign that you lack some big compelling problem to go after.

The periods where I’ve felt the most lit up and alive are always when I’m not fixated on those little things and have something bigger I’m going after.

I think humans are natural problem seekers… and the size of the problem we’re trying to solve defines how energized we feel by our life.

… and none other than Tim Ferriss talking about un-optimizing… if this is not a sign of changing times, I don’t know what is!

⚡️ Startup Stuff

🏚 “Move fast and break things"

I found this to be a good commentary on the famous “move fast, break things” saying.

"Move fast and break things" is outdated advice for startups. Software ate the world—and there's more competition than ever. Our startup learned the hard way to ignore this advice, and this is what happened:

When you start a startup, so many people tell you to ship fast and ship messy. They tell you: you’ll know you have product market fit when people are willing to jump through hoops to use your broken product. This was great advice in 2013. But not in 2023.

When we started Jam, we first followed that advice. We got software into users’ hands our first week of being a company. But it wasn’t reliable software. And so people couldn’t use it. We were told: “That means you don’t have PMF. People will use a buggy app if you have PMF”

10 years ago, @reidhoffman said if you aren't embarrassed by your early product, you've launched too late. And that was what people kept telling us, and what we believed. So we kept launching and re-launching, each time fast and embarrassed. And it wasn't working.

Finally, we decided to try something new We took our time to squash bugs. We didn't let in users until we had quality. Then we re-opened the product. And something different happened. It started to grow. And in the year since, we grew through word of mouth from 1 -> 30K+ users

I’ve heard a version of this story from so many founders: “we had to fix 100 bugs to get to PMF”. And it makes sense:

When you’re an early stage startup, your job is to get clarity on what you’re building. When your product has bugs, it obscures your clarity. Bugs and lack of PMF both lead to low retention. So how can you tell: should we keep going or pivot? Impossible. You need clarity.

“Move fast and break things” and “you should be embarrassed by your product” was great startup advice 10 years ago. But not today. Even Sam Altman admits it:

It’s still important to ship fast to learn. But you won’t learn anything if your product is too buggy. The key is to cut product scope so much that you actually can ship something bug-free. Cut every non-essential feature. Ship fast, with small scope, high quality.

📚 What I Read

🧘‍♀️ Rest

The case for sabbaticals.

Picture a young Albert Einstein working as a patent clerk in 1905. He has a steady job, but his mind remains restless, filled with ideas that clash with the rigid conventions of physics. During the day, he mechanically processes patent applications. But away from the office, he plumbs the mysteries of the universe. This freedom allows bursts of imagination outside his daily routine. He asks, what would happen if you rode a beam of light? That year, he publishes four revolutionary papers that reshape science.

This is either the beginning of a tragedy or an incredible boon, depending on whom you ask. If you’re running the patent office, you might wonder why someone of such intellect would not be interested in improving the office itself, instead of imagining themselves riding alongside a photon. If you’re a scientist you might wonder how close we were to actually losing Einstein, if the patent office work was just a bit more time-consuming or difficult!

Today, it's nearly impossible for most professionals to enjoy such intellectual freedom. In the always-on economy, taking months or a year for unstructured exploration has become extinct. Two weeks of hurried vacation is the norm, if you're lucky. Sabbaticals are a quaint relic, reserved for tenured academics. Yet history reveals the immense value of this "long time.”

And we’re paying the price. Creativity has stagnated across industries. The few who escape enjoy epiphanies like Einstein in 1905. The always-on economy has robbed most professionals of this gift.

📉 World’s Lowest Birthrate Sinks Further Despite Cash Payouts to Parents

A sobering read, and likely what’s awaiting most developed countries.

Among advanced economies, South Korea is proving to be an outlier. Since 2013, the country of 52 million has reported the lowest fertility rate among wealthy members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—where the average fertility rate stands at 1.58. No other OECD member has a fertility rate below 1.

South Korea’s population began declining in 2020, with the number of deaths overtaking total births. Its military conscripts are expected to shrink by nearly half over the next two decades. The military has started to deploy more unmanned combat aircraft and increase the number of women serving. The country’s total student enrollment has shrunk for 18 years straight. Struggling colleges have been called “zombie universities” by local media due to dwindling student bodies. 

The South Korean government has spent more than $210 billion since 2006 to entice young people to get married and have children. 

But the efforts haven’t proven persuasive to people like Choi Sun-yoon, a 32-year-old office worker who got married last year. She doesn’t plan on having a child yet. Even though the government plans to increase the parental-leave period to 18 months, many working moms around Choi have been excluded from promotions or struggled to continue their jobs while raising their children, she said. 

“I view the government subsidies as a positive step but still insufficient, because culturally women are still conscious of how raising a child will affect their career,” Choi said. 

Pair with: Birthgap Documentary, this and this.

👫 Take a Wife … Please!

Why married people tend to be happier.

The chart comes from a recent paper by Sam Peltzman, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Chicago. For the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, Peltzman looked at the General Social Survey, which since 1972 has asked thousands of Americans, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” If you imagine this large sample as 100 people, historically about 50 of those people say they’re “pretty happy,” and that’s still true. But in the 1970s, about 35 people would say they’re “very happy,” and 15 would say “not too happy.” That began to shift around 2000, and now about 32 people say they’re “very happy” and 18 say they’re “not too happy.”

To quote a Destiny’s Child song of that vintage, why the sudden change?

After slicing the demographic data every which way—income, education level, race, location, age, and gender—Peltzman found that this happiness dip is mainly attributable to one thing: Married people are happier, and Americans aren’t getting married as much. In 1980, 6 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married, but today, it’s 25 percent. “The recent decline in the married share of adults can explain (statistically) most of the recent decline in overall happiness,” he writes.

🗣 therapy as a way of aligning with your subconscious

An original look at therapy.

When I started seeing a therapist two and a half years ago, I wasn’t sure that therapy worked. I couldn’t imagine a therapist being smarter or more knowledgable about me than my best friends were, and I’d seen studies that suggested therapy’s impact on patients was unclear. I also knew a lot of people who’d been in talk therapy for years who seemed like they had major emotional problems that weren’t getting better.

I’ve seen four therapists over this period of time, partially because I’ve moved around a lot, and also partially because I was searching for the ideal therapy experience. It’s like pornography: I didn’t know exactly what I was searching for, but I was sure I’d recognize it when I found it. That might sound insane to you, but my strategy worked—I really like my current therapist. She’s by far my favorite, and I plan to keep seeing her until the day when she declares I have no more problems. The reason why I like her more than the others is that I emotionally connect to her—I feel safely attached, and also really trust her judgment. So if at all possible, I suggest that you find a therapist you deeply like and trust. However, I don’t think this is actually necessary for therapy to work, because the most important thing about therapy is that it helps you realize things everyone around you already sees. In short: it helps you consciously process subconscious signs.

🍭 Brain Food

📜 Cynicism Masquerades as Wisdom

A worldwide survey of 200k people finds cynical people are thought of as smarter but that, in reality, cynics test lower on cognitive & competency tests.

As Stephen Colbert said: “Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the furthest thing from it.”

The abstract:

Cynicism refers to a negative appraisal of human nature—a belief that self-interest is the ultimate motive guiding human behavior.

We explored laypersons’ beliefs about cynicism and competence and to what extent these beliefs correspond to reality.

Four studies showed that laypeople tend to believe in cynical individuals’ cognitive superiority. A further three studies based on the data of about 200,000 individuals from 30 countries debunked these lay beliefs as illusionary by revealing that cynical (vs. less cynical) individuals generally do worse on cognitive ability and academic competency tasks.

Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment.

Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that—at low levels of competence—holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others’ cunning.

Here's a TL;DR:

In studies 1–3, participants indicated they thought cynics would do better on cognitive tasks.

In studies 4–5, cynics were tested and 1 SD of cynicism was associated with 0.25 and 0.17 SDs lower cognitive ability in studies 4 and 5, respectively.

In study 6, cynics were found to be - less educated in 29/30 countries - less literate in 28/30 countries - less numerate in 29/30 countries - less computer-literate in 23/26 countries

Cynicism is simply not smart.

🎥 What I’m Watching

🏥 Apple Health: 7 Secret Tips to Maximize Your Health

A great one from Shervin. I highly recommend his channel for everything related to health, health tracking & fitness.

💪 The Bros Were Right About Muscle Growth

There’s a lot of discussion on YouTube & TikTok between “science-based” training vs. “meathead” training these days. I think both approaches bring some important things to the table. This is a good video discussing this.

Pair with: The “Natural Limit” Doesn’t Exist

🔧 The Tool of the Week

📉 Blood Pressure Monitor

I’ve had on & off periods when it comes to health tracking over the last few months, but I’ve recently explored a bit the topic of blood pressure which I never thought about previously. I think it’s especially important for my lifting friends who are not afraid of extended bulking periods 😆

As you gain weight (fat or muscle) and become “big”, blood pressure tends to go up, so it can be smart to start monitoring it early enough to make sure it’s not too high.

If it is indeed too high there are many things you can do to lower it (cardio, less salt, etc.)

Lastly, it’s good to remember that high blood pressure is called the silent killer…

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.

— Arnold Schwarzenegger

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading!

If you like The Long Game, please share it on social media or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Until next week,

Mehdi Yacoubi

Subscribe now

In this episode, we explore:

• Testosterone

• Parenting

• Own it mentality

• Pushing the urgency

• What makes a good conversationalist

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

📈 Testosterone Experiments

This is a good piece by Jeff Tang about his experimentations to increase his testosterone levels. I haven’t done a blood test in longer than I should, and look forward to implementing some of these if I find out my testosterone to be lower than it could be. I think it will not be as good as before because of the poor sleep I’m getting these days 🐣.

I increased my T 300 ng/dL with sunlight, lower stress, more micronutrients, and more skin 😛 

Between February and April, I increased my T from 790 to 1096 ng/dL. The biggest thing was changing my environment from San Francisco to Costa Rica, which led to many downstream changes. Changes included:

• More sun

• Less stress

• Change in diet — more fish, less chicken, way more tropical fruits and fresh veggies. Cleaner, less processed food overall

• No change in supplements — Magnesium and Vitamin D

• Sleep — slight improvements

• In a surf town (Santa Teresa) — being around a lot of hot people wearing less clothes, and going on some dates

The 591 ng/dL test was in Utah. A few things: there was less sunlight, I slept poorly then, and I took a self-test prick. Overall, hard to know what the real factors were.

T Boosting Supplements Don’t Work

In Medellín, Colombia, I started taking most of the “T boosting” supplements:

• Tongkat Ali

• Maca Root

• Shilajit

• Fadogia Agretis

• Cistanche

• Ashwagandha

• Boron

Supplement-Maxxing. The 80/20 and my stack is Magnesium, Vitamin D, and Zinc.

In that time, my T did not significantly increase or decrease. As a result, I do not take any of the T Boosting supplements anymore (except for Ashwagandha, for the calming effects). n=1 so it’s too early to write off all of the T boosting supplements. Perhaps T boosting supplements have a greater effect if T is already lower. Will have to try to replicate and get data from others!

That said, I did take cialis a few times. More on that in another post 😉 

• I started training legs a lot more aggressively, and my leg girth increased noticeably. Wish I had measured the circumference. I also a few boxing sessions. I still believe there were positive effects from legs and boxing, but I am disappointed my T levels did not increase from it!

35± ng/dL variance in 4 back-to-back tests

One day I took multiple tests in a row to see how much variance comes from the laboratory testing itself rather than from me or normal fluctuations. Hypothetically, the numbers should all be the same if they were done back-to-back.

For tests 1, 2, and 3, they were all done literally within 30 seconds of one another. Same needle, same arm. All at once. 974.68, 900.51, 959.03.

When I got home 20 minutes later, I realized I had a mobile phlebotomist come that I forgot I had ordered. Result was 970.7.

Taking the average of this would get you 951. Overall, that’s reasonable variance I’d say, spanning from 900 to 975.

In the future, I’m planning on ordering a bunch of self-prick tests from different providers and doing all of them back-to-back. Subscribe if interested!

Pair with: Notes on How to Raise Your Testosterone

🌱 Wellness

👨‍👩‍👧 Parenting

I found this thread about parenting very important. It perfectly describes the nuances of parenting.

It's the most beautiful thing there is.

And it's also extremely hard, and almost every part of life gets way more complicated.

It's usually unpopular to say that, but I'm glad Jay said it.

I just spent 3 days with dear friends, all of whom have kids ages 8mo to 4y.

Something I need to get off my chest about being a parent of young kids and the culture we live in:

What the culture shares and even demands you share about having kids/being a parent is that it's precious, it's a gift, it's a joy, etc.

But this is not what actual parents talk about or how actual parents feel.

Instead...

We talked about the fact that our physical + mental health had gotten problematic. Our careers had taken huge hits. Our friendships were drifting. Our relationships with our partners felt strained (one person summed it up as: they're basically just the other parent I live with)

We didn't sit around writing Hallmark cards to the joys of parenting. We sat around going HO-LEE FORKING SHIRTBALLS this is impossibly hard and every dimension of our life got worse: health, finances, career, love, etc. EXCEPT a new dimension called Loving Our Kids (10/10 great).

Now, the culture (and indeed, the voice in my head) is going.. walk it back, man. Add asides like "(even though I adore them!)"

But the way the culture talks about parenting is not how actual parents talk about parenting to each other.

To understand, think about dream logic.

In a dream, you go, "I'm driving a car on the highway. Also I'm underwater and I can breathe just fine. Also this is the bike shop my dad owns."

And your brain just goes... Yes.

This is parenting. It is multiple things, fully. Terrible and great. Crushing and uplifting. At once

Parents ought to be given more permission to say multiple things are totally true at the same time, because we feel ashamed to feel bad about our experiences otherwise.

Because yes, we all feel like dogsh*t during the early stages of parenting very tiny kids. Yes, we wish we had more time for ourselves and our work. And yes, kids are the reason why every dimension of our lives took a hit EXCEPT this one amazing new dimension. BUT ALSO...

We wouldn't trade it. We don't regret it. I routinely drop everything to console or play with them. I would, w/o thinking, take a bullet for them. I'd arm wrestle The Rock -- and I promise you, I'd win -- for my kids.

But ALSO? This highway is underwater.

This is dream logic.

And people who have yet to experience the dream or for whom the dream is just a distant memory as they age -- and certainly folks who give career advice when they don't do actual parenting at home themselves -- can't understand.

Because it makes no sense.

Thank you to @sarahkpeck & @startup_parent for nudging me to talk more about parenting publicly.

To fellow parents: I see you. I'm with you. Embrace how you feel. There's nothing broken about you but PLENTY about the culture. And most of all:

Welcome to this bakery my dad owns.

@zacgarside @skstock @sarahkpeck @startup_parent Also Zac, if you have anything you've tried to prevent your kids from feeling the way you felt (that sounds very hard, btw), I'm open to learning them.

Operating at the intersection of professional ambition, personal health, and parenting well... is NOT something I'm a pro at

(I'm very happy to see after this went semi-viral that only 1 asshat told me women shouldn't work and should stay at home with the kids. The rest of you humans have been WONDERFUL and SUPPORTIVE and GRATEFUL and you receive ALL MY GRATITUDE back to you.)

Parenting is joy on tap. Every moment, every smile brings unmatched happiness. Then, on the operational aspect of things, everything gets significantly more complicated, and life can quickly get overwhelming. I think it’s better to be honest about it rather than pretend everything is always easy.

Lastly, some people read the thread as a deterrent to having kids. I absolutely don’t see it like that, quite the opposite. It’s about communicating a nuance that’s often forgotten. Without communicating some of these ideas, new parents would think they are crazy and that something is wrong with them. How can I feel like sh*t most days while everyone is pretending it’s so easy and simple all the time?

It’s not easy and it’s not simple, and you will likely not feel great on many days, and yet it’s also something you’ll be extremely happy you did, and will make your life better overall.

🧠 Better Thinking

💪 Own It Mentality

You will make regrettable mistakes, things will go wrong, these are basic facts of life. The reaction to those things is what will shape everything that comes after a mistake.

This short piece from David Perell is worth the read:

Own It Mentality

At times, I’ve taken on too many responsibilities, only to pay the price later with poor follow-through — which is ultimately more painful than saying “no” at the outset.

My poor follow-through is downstream of my ambition and my desire to people-please; both of which seem noble but can lead to consequences. When it comes to ambition, I’m like a starving guy at a buffet. Not only am I unable to eat everything on my plate, but I get sick from trying. My desire to people-please is why I say “yes” to opportunities as they arise, but I disappoint people later when I’m late on a project or have to cancel at the last minute.

To combat this, I’ve adopted a principle called “Own It Mentality.”

My goal is simple: Be a man of my word. Do what I say I’m going to do, when I say I’m going to do it. That means showing up on schedule, communicating clearly, and getting things done on time.

Being reliable is table stakes. My friend Chris, who used to run giant concerts, tells me that the most successful bands are also the most operationally buttoned-up. They run on schedule, communicate clearly, and pay invoices on time.

I want to do the same. Practically, the best change I’ve made to my own working habits is scheduling time to respond to messages every day (inbox zero, Slack zero, Twitter DM zero, text message zero). I used to wait a long time to respond to important messages because “it’s good to think about things,” only to never reply because so much time had passed that my message now had to begin with an apology, which made things even more ominous — until the whole situation turned into a monster that I was too terrified to confront. The solution is to respond fast because the faster you respond, the less energy it takes to do so.

Good executives are information routers. Much of their job is making introductions, giving feedback, and setting the tempo for the organization — all of which demand fast response times. They need an Own It Mentality because they are ultimately responsible for following up and following through on the organization’s commitments.”

Own It Mentality doesn’t just apply to executives. It’s important for all members of a team. David Ogilvy says, “In the best companies, promises are always kept, whatever it may cost in agony and overtime.”

One core difference between low- and high-performing companies is that one wishes while the other promises. At high-performing companies, diligent follow-through is the norm. People do what they say they’re going to do, when they say they’re going to do it. Meanwhile, low-performing organizations are ruled by excuses. Tasks slip through the cracks. Timelines are outright ignored.

High-performing companies are the opposite. They do the simple things right. Commitments are kept, repeatedly. When deliverables are late, people communicate. When things go wrong, the blame is owned, not deflected.

— —

Adopting an Own It Mentality

I expect an Own It Mentality from myself and from everyone I work with.

Own It Mentality means confronting conflict as soon as it arises. By not saying what needs to be said, you trade short-term comfort for long-term pain, and the longer you wait to deal with an issue, the worse it usually becomes. Avoiding conflict means borrowing time and energy from your future-self (and the interest rates are high).

For example, people avoid conflict by saying “yes” to everything and taking on too much work. Saying “yes” feels good in the moment because the expectation of achievement comes with an instant dopamine rush. All the pain of saying “no” is postponed.

One way I reduce conflict is by setting clear expectations and outlining a person’s scope of responsibilities before I start working with them. Such clarity is a way of immediately addressing conflict.

Everybody benefits from clear expectations and a high standard of excellence. Own It Mentality means that once somebody says they’re going to do something, I don’t have to worry about their ability to get it done.

That, then, gives them freedom in their work. I give people lots of autonomy. I don’t micromanage. In return, I expect people to take initiative, be proactive, communicate well, and follow through on their commitments. So long as they have an Own It Mentality, I don’t care how much somebody works, when they work, or where they work from.

Expecting an Own It Mentality doesn’t mean that you expect perfection. Life gets in the way sometimes. People get sick. Accidents happen. Projects take longer than expected. That’s fine. But when things don’t go according to plan, you have to communicate — and if people are chasing you down for information, you’re probably not communicating enough.

Own It Mentality also means that you own the fact that you aren’t able to “Own It” right now.

Do you follow through on your commitments? Is your word a wish or a promise?

⚡️ Startup Stuff

🫸 Pushing the Urgency

A quarterly reminder (for me as much as for anyone else) of the wisdom of Franck Slootman. I like to re-read Amp it Up! very frequently. This was a great complimentary article.

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman has advice for young company leaders: Boost the intensity and get used to confrontation.

Slootman is now in his third CEO job, and each time he’s led a company to a blockbuster IPO. That includes data hardware maker Data Domain in 2007, cloud software giant ServiceNow in 2012, and most recently data warehousing company Snowflake in 2020.

One problem he’s seen with young CEOs: “They just think, ‘I hire a bunch of people, and then I sit back and wait for greatness.’ They have no idea that they have to relentlessly drive every second of the day, every interaction, and seek the confrontation,” Slootman told the No Priors podcast in an episode posted Thursday. 

Look no further than a DMV office to see a lack of urgency among workers, he suggested. “This is what naturally happens to human beings,” he said. “It’s innate. We slow down to a glacial pace unless there are people who are going to drive tempo and pace and intensity and urgency. That’s what leaders need to do.”

CEOs must constantly “push the urgency,” he said, even though “it’s really hard to have the mental energy to bring that to every single instance of today.”

📚 What I Read

🏗 How to do great work

If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.

Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard."

The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.

The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work.

In practice you don't have to worry much about the third criterion. Ambitious people are if anything already too conservative about it. So all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in.

That sounds straightforward, but it's often quite difficult. When you're young you don't know what you're good at or what different kinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not even exist yet. So while some people know what they want to do at 14, most have to figure it out.

🥇 America's Elite Problem - We Have Too Many of 'Me'

and why we have to face up to this

Defining the “Elite'“

Since the Great Recession of 2008–2009, national media outlets and think tanks have reported on the growing income inequality in the United States. Yet, the problem is more complex and troubling than just income inequality. Regulatory or tax solutions alone will not be enough to address inequality on the scale it is now occurring. Inequality is always about far more than money—especially the kind of inequality we’re seeing now in the United States.

Being “elite” is about how you spend your above-average wealth. Being elite is about a lifestyle. It is a differentiated, non-conformist social imagination reinforced daily by even the most mundane choices.

Being elite is about rejecting mainstream choices for mundane things. This consumer rejection usually, but not always, means spending a lot more money on categories the middle-class and working classes would never do, even if you doubled their income overnight.

🏡 The working-from-home illusion fades

It is not more productive than being in an office, after all

A gradual reverse migration is under way, from Zoom to the conference room. Wall Street firms have been among the most forceful in summoning workers to their offices, but in recent months even many tech titans—Apple, Google, Meta and more—have demanded staff show up to the office at least three days a week. For work-from-home believers, it looks like the revenge of corporate curmudgeons. Didn’t a spate of studies during the covid-19 pandemic demonstrate that remote work was often more productive than toiling in the office?

Unfortunately for the believers, new research mostly runs counter to this, showing that offices, for all their flaws, remain essential. A good starting point is a working paper that received much attention when it was published in 2020 by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, then both doctoral students at Harvard University. They found an 8% increase in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes. Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline.

🗽 Social Status: Differences in Desire and Attainment

Intelligence, personality, Dark Triad traits, and more

I suspect that being in an environment of high achievers, with people who are pursuing education, will boost your own desire for status. This is one reason why there is so much status anxiety on college campuses. Especially at highly selective colleges. These students are already very accomplished, yet being around other highly ambitious and accomplished students can provoke feelings of inadequacy.

Can you have too much intelligence?

If you’re interested in attaining social influence and attracting a romantic partner, the answer might be yes.

 The psychologist Dean Simonton has conducted research suggesting that a person is most likely to appeal to others and gain followers if they have an IQ of around 119 (roughly the 90^th percentile of intelligence). This is higher than the typical college graduate, who has an IQ of about 110. But 119 is also lower than the typical graduate of a highly selective university, which is around 125.

119 seems to be the sweet spot. Interestingly, this is also the case for dating. All else being equal, people report that they are the most attracted to people at about the 90^th percentile of intelligence, which is around 120 IQ. People want leaders and romantic partners who are smart. But not too smart.  

Simonton and others have suggested that a person has leadership appeal if they are able to understand ideas from very intelligent people and can also communicate with ordinary people.

Very intelligent individuals have difficulty relating to the thought patterns and concerns of most people. Relatedly, I recall a psychologist who once suggested that in U.S. general presidential elections, the less intelligent candidate tends to win. This wasn’t a formal study, just speculation. But generally, it strikes me as correct. By the time you achieve the nomination of a major political party, you have already proven that you are smarter than average. But with two smart people, the one who is better able to relate to ordinary people has the advantage.

🍭 Brain Food

🗣 What makes a good conversationalist?

This is a very interesting paper exploring conversational skills.

Saloni Dattani has a great summary of it:

Surprisingly, the pandemic provided an opportunity to study this question in detail.

Volunteers in this new study had unscripted freeform conversations with strangers over Zoom in 2020, in the United States. They were asked to ‘talk about whatever you like, just imagine you have met someone at a social event and you’re getting to know each other.’

The conversations were video recorded, and analyzed for patterns of speech and behavior. Then, this was tested against people’s feelings before and after the conversation, and how they rated their conversational partner. In total, the dataset had 1,656 conversations each lasting at least 25 minutes.

Since the dataset was large and detailed, it could answer a lot of questions. First, how long are the gaps between each person speaking? Answer: Less than a second on average, which suggests that people predict when people’s sentences are going to end and how they’ll respond. Some people spoke too soon and their speech slightly overlapped or they interrupted the other person.

What are the most common ‘backchannel words’? These are words people use to show they’re following the other person’s speech. Answer: Yeah and mhm. (This study was done in the US, and it’s likely these vary in other countries.)

Were people happier after a freeform conversation with a stranger? Yes, on average! You can see this across age groups below. Volunteers were asked to rate their happiness on a 9-point scale immediately before and after the conversation.

Although I wonder how much this came from the sample – people who like having conversations were probably more likely to join the study, and it happened during the pandemic, when many people were probably very bored at home.

Finally, what makes a good conversationalist?

Volunteers were asked: ‘Imagine you were to rank the last 100 people you had a conversation with according to how good of a conversationalist they are. ‘0’ is the least good conversationalist you’ve talked to. ‘50’ is right in the middle. ‘100’ is the best conversationalist. Where would you rank the person that you just talked to on this scale?’

People who were rated higher by their conversational partners tended to speak fairly quickly, and with more emotional intensity. Also, they tended to use more head movement (nodding for yes and shaking for no) while listening, and showed more facial signs of happiness.

I really liked this paper because it described many basic aspects of conversations, and compared the analysis across different pattern-recognition software.

🎥 What I’m Watching

🏃‍♀️ I Tried Zone 2 Training for 3 Months. This Happened

👫 Why You Date People In Your "League"

🔧 The Tool of the Week

📸 Retro

I’ve been playing a bit with Retro, a photo-sharing social media. It’s well done and it’s an interesting concept.

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

Hard times don't create heroes. It is during the hard times when the 'hero' within us is revealed.

— Tim Grover

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading!

If you like The Long Game, please share it on social media or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Until next week,

Mehdi Yacoubi

Subscribe now

I took the last four weeks off of The Long Game to think, work and focus on other projects. We’re now back to regular schedule!

In this episode, we explore:

• Mindbody syndromes

• Travel

• The mindset of Arnold

• Becoming unconventionally minded

• Modern dating

• Romantic love

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

🧠 MindBody Syndromes

I saw a few conversations about psychosomatic conditions on Twitter. This is a topic near and dear to my heart as I have been very prone to those types of problems for years, from chronic back pain, to knee pain, to neck pain and more.

First, this tweet by Jonny Miller:

Then, Nick Cammarata rightfully points to Sarno’s theory (that I’ve been sharing so many times on The Long Game):

This is a good summary of how psychosomatic illnesses arise:

My impression is that even if, anecdotally, thousands of people managed to completely cure their chronic conditions through the work of Dr. Sarno, it still appears woo to the conventionally minded. I expect more research paper exploring this in the next few years.

🌱 Wellness

🛫 The Case Against Travel

Whether you’ll like it or hate it, this is a thought-provoking piece.

That is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.

The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage:

I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.

If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.

One common argument for travel is that it lifts us into an enlightened state, educating us about the world and connecting us to its denizens. Even Samuel Johnson, a skeptic—“What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country,” he once said—conceded that travel had a certain cachet. Advising his beloved Boswell, Johnson recommended a trip to China, for the sake of Boswell’s children: “There would be a lustre reflected upon them. . . . They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China.”

Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?

Pair this with: Travel is no cure for the mind.

🧠 Better Thinking

🐐 The extreme mindset of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger

Like many of you, I watched and loved the Arnold Netflix documentary.

I thought this post by David Senra was excellent and a perfect description of Arnold’s unique mindset.

The extreme mindset of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger:

1. You are a winner, Arnold. I wrote this down and put it where I would see it. I repeated it a dozen times a day.

2. My drive was unusual, I talked differently than my friends; I was hungrier for success than anyone I knew.

3. I had this insatiable drive to get there sooner. Whereas most people were satisfied to train two or three times a week, I quickly escalated my program to six workouts a week.

4. I’d always been impressed by stories of greatness and power. Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon were names I knew and remembered. I wanted to do something special, to be recognized as the best.

5. I was literally addicted.

6. I didn’t care what I had to go through to get it.

7. My mind was totally locked into working out and I was annoyed if anything took me away from it.

8. My weight room was not heated, so naturally in cold weather it was freezing. I didn’t care. I trained without heat, even on days when the temperature went below zero.

9. I had a photographer take pictures at least once a month. I studied each shot with a magnifying glass.

10. I sacrificed a lot of things most bodybuilders didn’t want to give up. I just didn’t care, I wanted to win more than anything. And whatever it took to do it, I did.

11. Every day I hear someone say, “I’m too fat. I need to lose twenty-five pounds, but I can’t. I never seem to improve.” I’d hate myself if I had that kind of attitude, if I were that weak.

12. I listened only to my inner voice, my instincts.

13. People’s ideas were small. There was too much contentment, too much acceptance of things as they’d always been.

14. My own thinking was tuned in to only one thing: becoming Mr. Universe. In my own mind, I was Mr. Universe; I had this absolutely clear vision of myself up on the dais with the trophy. It was only a matter of time before the whole world would be able to see it too. And it made no difference to me how much I had to struggle to get there.

15. Once I was over the initial disappointment of losing, I began trying to understand exactly why I had lost. I tried to be honest, to analyze it fairly. I still had some serious weaknesses. For me, that was a real turning point.

16. I was relying on one thing. What I had more than anyone else was drive. I was hungrier than anybody. I wanted it so badly it hurt. I knew there could be no one else in the world who wanted this title as much as I did.

17. I had thought perhaps he had some special exercises, but that wasn’t true. He concentrated on the standard exercises. That was his “secret” —concentration.

18. I started training in an area where there were no distractions.

19. I had lists and charts of the things I needed to concentrate on pasted all over. I looked at them every day before I began working out. It became a twenty-four-hour-a-day job; I had to think about it all the time.

20. I continued doing precisely what I knew I needed to do. In my mind, there was only one possibility for me and that was to go to the top, to be the best.

21. I remember certain people trying to put negative thoughts into my mind, trying to persuade me to slow down. But I had found the thing to which I wanted to devote my total energies and there was no stopping me.

22. They weren’t mentally prepared for intensive championship training; they weren’t thinking about it. I knew the secret: Concentrate while you’re training. Do not allow other thoughts to enter your mind.

23. When I went to the gym I got rid of every alien thought in my mind.

24. I wanted to create an empire.

⚡️ Startup Stuff

🦹‍♀️ Becoming Unconventionally Minded

Austen Allred shared this article on the benefits of being unconventionally-minded as a founder. It’s worth the read.

“Many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger’s where it’s like you’re missing the imitation, socialization gene,” Thiel said Tuesday at George Mason University. “We need to ask what is it about our society where those of us who do not suffer from Asperger’s are at some massive disadvantage because we will be talked out of our interesting, original, creative ideas before they’re even fully formed. Oh that’s a little bit too weird, that’s a little bit too strange and maybe I’ll just go ahead and open the restaurant that I’ve been talking about that everyone else can understand and agree with, or do something extremely safe and conventional.”

An individual with Asperger’s Syndrome — a form of autism — has limited social skills, a willingness to obsess and an interest in systems. Those diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome tend to be unemployed or underemployed at rates that far exceed the general population. Fitting into the world is difficult.

While full-blown Asperger’s Syndrome or autism hold back careers, a smaller dose of associated traits appears critical to hatching innovations that change the world.

“A typical child might just accept, ‘Okay this is just the way it’s done, this is how we do things in our culture or family,” said Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Center in Cambridge. “Someone with autism or Asperger’s, they kind of ask those why questions. They want more logical answers. Just saying ‘Well we do this just because everybody else does,’ that doesn’t meet their test of logic.”

Obsessiveness, another trait of those with Asperger’s, also pays off when building a tech company.

Microsoft’s co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen were comfortable coding software for hours on end as young programmers.

“Some of the more prudish people would say ‘Go home and take a shower.’ We were just hard-core, writing code,” as Gates told author Walter Isaacson in The Innovators.

James Dyson insists on some similar points throughout his books, although without mentioning Aspergers:

A strong will and raw doggedness, as stubborn as a mule, is the key ingredient to success. It's about not giving up, even when faced with setbacks or failures. You have to be willing to push through obstacles and keep going, no matter how challenging it may seem. That kind of persistence is what separates those who succeed from those who don't.

📚 What I Read

🐣 Cribsheet

I started this book, it’s a data-driven guide to better, more relaxed parenting.

With Expecting Better, award-winning economist Emily Oster spotted a need in the pregnancy market for advice that gave women the information they needed to make the best decision for their own pregnancies. By digging into the data, Oster found that much of the conventional pregnancy wisdom was wrong. In Cribsheet, she now tackles an even greater challenge: decision-making in the early years of parenting. 

As any new parent knows, there is an abundance of often-conflicting advice hurled at you from doctors, family, friends, and strangers on the internet. From the earliest days, parents get the message that they must make certain choices around feeding, sleep, and schedule or all will be lost. There's a rule—or three—for everything. But the benefits of these choices can be overstated, and the trade-offs can be profound. How do you make your own best decision? 

Armed with the data, Oster finds that the conventional wisdom doesn't always hold up. She debunks myths around breastfeeding (not a panacea), sleep training (not so bad!), potty training (wait until they're ready or possibly bribe with M&Ms), language acquisition (early talkers aren't necessarily geniuses), and many other topics. She also shows parents how to think through freighted questions like if and how to go back to work, how to think about toddler discipline, and how to have a relationship and parent at the same time. 

Ps: send me your best parenting recommendations 💌

🎓 School Is Not Enough

When I read biographies, early lives leap out the most. Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14 years old. Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, by 11. When Vladimir Nabokov was 16, he published his first poetry collection while still in school. Andrew Carnegie finished schooling at 12 and was 13 when he began his second job as a telegraph office boy, where he convinced his superiors to teach him the telegraph machine itself. By 16, he was the family’s mainstay of income.

Biographers and readers tend to fixate on the celebrity itself, the time when people become famous or remarkable. But before their success, even their early lives contain something revealing. Before you grasp, you have to reach. How did they learn to reach?

In my examples, the individuals were all doing from a young age as opposed to merely attending school. And while they may not have wanted to work, the work was nonetheless something that they, their families, and society felt was useful, purposeful, and appreciated. In a sense, they had useful childhoods.

Do children today have useful childhoods?

💡 The diversity myth

So the question we should ask is this: in worshiping diversity, in making it the highest value, what is it that we are missing? Is this an exercise in attention redirection, a kind of magic show in which you’re watching the magician and don’t notice the gorilla jumping up and down in back of the stage?

There’s a latent premise in this line of questioning. When you observe, as we did, that what’s going on is both very evil and very silly, it sounds almost self-contradictory. How can something be both very silly and very evil at the same time? The answer is that what’s going on is very silly, but the silliness is distracting us from very important things. That’s the nature of the evil. Diversity becomes a kind of divertissement, distracting our attention from the things that really matter.

What I’d like to do is delineate a few areas in which diversity is making us ignore the real issues that we should be paying attention to. I want to suggest that, at least on a public-policy level, all these debates about diversity, identity politics, multiculturalism, the woke religion, etc., should be treated like debates about homelessness. Homelessness is a mess. It’s a problem. And at the same time that it is a very real problem, it is a giant machine to redirect attention from all the other problems across America toward a narrow aspect of big-city dysfunction. When homelessness is forced into every policy conversation, it leads to circuitous, dead-end reasoning—We’re never going to fix homelessness until we fix the schools, but we’re never going to fix the schools, the police, or even the roads until we fix homelessness. It becomes an all-purpose excuse for ignoring what’s really going on. So let me, in quick succession, list a few of the deeper issues obscured by our diversity obsession today.

Pair with: Ideological Signaling Has No Role in Research

📱 Bride inflation, Tinder and the derangements of modern dating

Fascinating piece on modern dating.

Elite men

Diana Fleischman writes:

Courtship is expensive and complicated by design, and it’s the limiting factor of the sexual fulfillment of men

When these transaction costs fall via fewer social sanctions, the market becomes more liquid and elite men have ~infinite choice. And because men have evolved to maximise partners at minimal cost (commitment), happy days.

There’s also an important temporal dynamic to this. It gets better for elite men and worse for women over time.

Men’s prospects generally rise over time. This is for two reasons. First, men’s age preference for women is for younger women, and optimally forever fixed at ~22.

So there are more women in their target market as they age (ie. younger women relative to them). This is reversed for women. They prefer men older than them:

So women’s target market shrinks over time. And they face rising competition over time, as they compete with younger and younger women. (There are some very nice dynamic charts for someone who can bothered making them.)

Leonardo di Caprio is the Platonic example of this. He behaves exactly as you would expect a man who could have any woman in the world to behave under this model.

This model predicts that elite men would get married and have children later as they can’t believe their luck to live into a society with the cultural sanction and technology to provide infinite liquidity and availability of women for sex. And here we are. Tinder brought these men the Uber Eats model for sex.

Of course, this itself may be a delusion. I have written before that social norms function as a way to bridge decades of blind spots:

Culture also guides you with strange long-ago-forged nudges to get you over blind spots. You don’t know you want grandkids when you’re 20. The challenge is you’ll want them in 30 — 40 years. Tell that to a 20 year old and he may have trouble hearing you over the cacophonic need to fight and f*ck. So how do you set the right behavioral cadence for that? What can bridge decades long blind spots? Cultural norms to marry and bear children. The payoff will come.

So ironically, this dynamic may not even be good for elite men over the longer run. I do not envy any of my friends without kids who “feast” in the mating market. But these are the near-term preferences that govern elite male behaviour.

Pair with: Hook Up Culture Is Bad For The Boys Too

🍭 Brain Food

❤️ Neural correlates of long-term intense romantic love

This is an important and beautiful study.

The TL;DR:

Researchers examined MRI scans of happy couples who have been together for ~21 years and found that their reward pathways + dopamine-rich areas mirrored those of ppl who just fell in love. Meaning, you can be just as madly in love with someone decades from now.

The abstract:

The present study examined the neural correlates of long-term intense romantic love using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Ten women and 7 men married an average of 21.4 years underwent fMRI while viewing facial images of their partner. Control images included a highly familiar acquaintance; a close, long-term friend; and a low-familiar person.

Effects specific to the intensely loved, long-term partner were found in:

(i) areas of the dopamine-rich reward and basal ganglia system, such as the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and dorsal striatum, consistent with results from early-stage romantic love studies; and

(ii) several regions implicated in maternal attachment, such as the globus pallidus (GP), substantia nigra, Raphe nucleus, thalamus, insular cortex, anterior cingulate and posterior cingulate. Correlations of neural activity in regions of interest with widely used questionnaires showed: (i) VTA and caudate responses correlated with romantic love scores and inclusion of other in the self; (ii) GP responses correlated with friendship-based love scores;

(iii) hypothalamus and posterior hippocampus responses correlated with sexual frequency; and (iv) caudate, septum/fornix, posterior cingulate and posterior hippocampus responses correlated with obsession.

Overall, results suggest that for some individuals the reward-value associated with a long-term partner may be sustained, similar to new love, but also involves brain systems implicated in attachment and pair-bonding.

🎥 What I’m Watching

🥈 The Intermediate Lifter Trap

Very good video for my lifting friends, to avoid staying intermediate forever.

Pair with: Why Natural Lifters Need To BULK

📉 Why Do So Many People Not Want To Have Children?

A very interesting conversation and a new & original framing as to what it means for a culture to stop valuing having many children: auto-destruction.

🔧 The Tool of the Week

🆓 Free Tools: Push-ups & pull-ups

Time management with a kid is something else—so I had to remind myself many times that 20 minutes of push-ups or pull-ups can be a solid workout. Maybe not as satisfying as a full gym session, but gets the job done, which is way better than nothing.

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

I have always believed that the hardest parts of my professional life were the moments when I faced failure, criticism, and doubt. These challenges pushed me to the limits of my creativity, determination, and resilience. They tested my belief in my ideas and forced me to constantly adapt and improve. But it was precisely in those difficult times that I discovered my true strength and the power of perseverance. Each setback became an opportunity to learn, grow, and come back stronger than before. So, embrace the hardships, for they are the stepping stones to success.

— James Dyson

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading!

If you like The Long Game, please share it on social media or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Until next week,

Mehdi Yacoubi

Subscribe now

In this episode, we explore:

• Holistic fitness

• State of men report

• Liabilities of success

• The willingness to be low status

• Hypergamy

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

✨ The New Fitness Is Holistic, Inclusive, and Highly Personal

I found this piece from General Catalyst was a good summary of where fitness as a whole is heading.

Imagining the future of fitness

We are looking to partner with the next generation of ambitious founders that want to help empower the digitally native generation on their holistic fitness journey. We are tired of lackluster solutions that help track fitness activities. Instead, we are excited about digital tools that will inspire and guide users to become holistically healthy on their own terms. 

From immersive experiences to social fitness, these are some of the attributes and distribution channels that we think will make the best future for fitness for Gen Z and beyond.

Holistic

For Gen Z, the definition of physical health contains multitudes of factors—stress, mindset, nutrition, and sleep are as important to our bodies as movement. Studies have shown that getting proper rest is just as important to our overall health as getting exercise—an area our portfolio company, EightSleep, has explored. The rise of companies like Noom and Sweetgreen is a testament to consumers’ increasing spend in the nutrition category.

We also believe that stress management and mental health are crucial to a holistic view of fitness, if not equally as important as physical health. Mental health conversation is fully normalized for Gen Z—dialogue about mental health among top athletes reinforces this point of view.

We see a need for fitness apps that appropriately include mental health, nutrition, and sleep to become an all-in-one solution. While Calm and Headspace only focus on mental health, and traditional fitness apps only focus on physical fitness, our generation views fitness holistically and should have digital tools to help us manage these considerations together in one place. Our portfolio company, Imagine Golf, recognizes that mental health is important for physical output and has developed a holistic app to reflect this. We think more companies that link mental health and physical output are set up to capture a large mindshare of Gen Z. 

Digital

Though #FitTok has its problems, it points to Gen Z being inherently digitally native. Instead of asking a trainer at their local gym, Gen Z is seeking advice from people online. Unsurprisingly, fitness micro-influencers see the most success in engagement metrics on Instagram compared to any other influencer sizes (by follower count). With the rise of Peloton through the pandemic, Peloton instructors built massive fan bases online to capitalize on the opportunity to grab the digitally native populations’ attention.

Basic exercise tracking like running and nutritional tracking has already become digital. However, for more complicated movements during strength training, martial arts, or CrossFit (a GC portfolio company), automatic rep count and exercise recognition are still difficult. As the industry continues to evolve, we hope to see some of this mental tracking move to a more digital interface.

Social

We believe Gen Z yearns for fitness to be a social experience more than any previous generation. Fitness is a journey where users might have to overcome mental and physical challenges. Once we embark on the journey, the path to “success” is rarely linear. Why struggle through this alone? As a generation used to sharing successes and failures with our digital network, in our opinion, the future of fitness will optimize for individuals to pursue their separate goals together. Virtual communities can give our digital generation extra support during times of need but also provide a sense of community to celebrate accomplishments as well. We’re seeing a great start in this vein from GC portfolio company Fitmint, which encourages users to walk and run with their friends online.

Building community in a digital space is important, and we believe there is room for “old-fashioned” in-person gatherings too! Fitness companies like Barry’s have gained a devoted following where consumers attend classes and have become part of their “weekly ritual” to congregate with others. Community tools or digital sports clubs can bring together those in a local area to participate in health and wellness activities like running, yoga, and recreational sports, and help them form relationships with people who share their goals and interests. 

Data-driven & personalized

With Gen Z leading all other generations in purchasing wearable fitness products (like WHOOP, Apple Watch, Oura Ring, etc.), the amount of health data collected on each individual will only continue to grow over time. Luckily, Gen Z and Millennials actually want companies to leverage their personal data to customize their experience with products, services, and apps. Our portfolio companies, Breakaway and Terra, do this for individuals and businesses. Overall, our wearables are collecting troves of data that can be used to tailor workout plans, nutrition goals, and sleep patterns.

Generative AI (Gen AI) can help scale this type of personalization. Users could potentially input their goals and upload past data to use Gen AI and produce personalized recommendations instantaneously. This could also democratize access to personalization even further.

Quite a lot of similarities with how we see the future of health & fitness at Vital, as we’re building the “Strava for Health.”

Social health & fitness

🌱 Wellness

📉 State of American Men Report

A recent report came out about the state of American men in 2023. I found it very interesting and concerning.

Some elements of it:

• 40% of all men show depressive symptoms.

• 44% of all men had thoughts of suicide in the prior two weeks; younger men show the highest levels of depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation.

• 40% of all men say they trust one or more “men’s rights,” anti-feminist, or pro-violence voices from the manosphere; nearly half of younger men say they trust such voices.

• Men aged 18 to 23 have the least optimism for their futures and the lowest levels of social support.

• 65% of men aged 18 to 23 say that “no one really knows me well.”

And here’s the new geography of men’s social lives:

I recommend reading the whole thing if you’re interested in this topic.

As we’re on the topic of mental health, I thought a good counterbalance to this report is this article: What if we’re talking about teens’ mental health too much?

This goes against articles from Jonathan Haidt that we shared here over the last few weeks, but it’s nevertheless a hypothesis worthy of more research.

Some of these people are seriously unwell and badly need help. But there’s another, rather more subtle problem happening at the moment: I think the current conversation about mental health might be encouraging people to interpret their difficulties as mental health problems when they’re not, in a way that’s actively unhelpful for the individual.

Take the example of anxiety – both the physical symptoms (also known as panic) and the cognitive symptoms (worry). The tendency to experience anxiety lies on a continuum throughout the population. Some people experience it very occasionally or not at all. As you move up the spectrum, you find people who experience it more frequently and more severely. Gradually, anxiety causes more distress and becomes more difficult to control. Up at the extreme end, anxiety becomes so destructive that it affects someone’s ability to function in their life at all. At that point, we would say the person has an anxiety disorder.

🧠 Better Thinking

💭 The Liabilities of Success

This a great article on an underrated topic.

Bryan Johnson is spending millions of dollars each year towards a singular ambition—to slow his aging. His meticulous morning routine begins with light therapy during meditation. He follows this up by consuming The Green Giant, a pre-workout drink concocted from a blend of six diverse supplements, and strict regimen of over 50 different pills. All of this before his 1-hour workout, his skincare protocol, and, finally, breakfast.

Johnson lays out his entire system, which he calls Blueprint, online for all to see. Not only does he share what supplements he consumes and in which amounts, but he also discloses his biomarker data as proof of his success. According to his website, Johnson is aging (biologically) at a rate of around 9 months every year. And though he is technically 45, his biomarker data suggest that his biological age is around 42.5.

I am a bit torn on Johnson’s pursuit to slow his aging. On one hand, I am impressed by his dedication to learn more about his body and share his findings with the world. On the other hand, I am skeptical as to whether it will be worth it in the end. After all, what’s the point of living longer if you have to spend all that extra time following an elaborate longevity routine? Even if you succeed, you have very little freedom around how you get to live your life.

Johnson’s experiment demonstrates an important point about the hidden costs of achievement, or what I call the liabilities of success—for every public accomplishment, there is a private sacrifice that is often overlooked. If we view accomplishments as assets, then the sacrifices made to achieve them can be seen as liabilities. More importantly, these sacrifices aren’t just made once, but over and over again.

In Johnson’s case, he sacrifices his time, money, and biological impulses (i.e. eating a less restrictive diet) to pursue his longevity goals. And he will need to keep making these sacrifices if he wants this to continue. But, Johnson’s case isn’t unique. Many ultra-successful people make similarly extreme sacrifices when chasing their goals as well:

• Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has to work out 3-4 hours per day, six days a week to maintain his physique.

• Danielle Steel, the world’s best-selling living author, regularly works 20 hour days to continue her publishing cadence of around seven books per year.

• Tim Bergling, better known by his stage name Avicii, performed 813 shows in 8 years to become one of the most popular DJs on the planet. Sadly, the accumulated stress from constant touring eventually led him to take his own life.

It’s easy to idolize the accomplishments of those who are more successful than you, but it’s hard to understand the price they paid for that success.

This is why you have to think deeply about what liabilities you are willing to take on prior to embarking on a new project. For example, before starting a business, you should ask yourself, “Do I want to own the successful version of this business?” Because envisioning what the successful version looks like will make it easier for you to determine whether you should start at all.

This idea comes from my friend and fellow content creator Khe Hy and can be applied in many domains. For example:

If you want to be a partner at prominent law firm, are you willing to be online “24/7” and regularly work 70+ hour weeks?

If you want to have ultra-low body fat, are you willing to say goodbye to alcohol and most high calorie foods for the foreseeable future?

If you want to have the best financial newsletter, are you willing to publish five articles per week with an average length of 4,100 words?

Success comes with liabilities, choose yours wisely.

⚡️ Startup Stuff

💪 The Willingness to be Low Status

I think about this great tweet by Will Robbins very often.

📚 What I Read

👫 Hypergamy: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

““Female hypergamy” (from now on, just “hypergamy”) is a supposed tendency for women to seek husbands who are higher-status than themselves. Arguing about educational hypergamy (women seeking husbands who are more educated than themselves) is especially popular, because women are now (on average) more educated than men - if every woman wants a more-educated husband, most won’t get them, and there will be some kind of crisis.”

Educational hypergamy has gone into reverse. Now that women dominate education, they’re actively seeking less educated men, and vice versa. This seems to be because educational imbalances in favor of women have become normative; education is now a “proper” “feminine” trait.

In contrast, income hypergamy is still widespread, important, and causing problems for non-compliers. Is the norm weakening over time? It’s hard to tell.

Despite this, men and women display an equal and stunning degree of class homogamy. Men may use their class-based market value to purchase a little more education in a mate, and women to purchase a little more income, but both genders consider class first and foremost.

Looks don’t seem to figure into this at all. There’s not much trade of better looks for higher income. Instead, each quadrant in the (rich, poor) x (pretty, ugly) matrix pairs off with itself.

👛 Behind the Business of Fashion Substacks

“Shopping-centric newsletters have won loyal followings, but are now looking to scale while maintaining the intimate feel that drew readers in initially.”

This latest generation of shopping newsletters began in response to the sheer amount of product on the internet, as well as people on social media branding themselves as experts on what to buy.

“The internet was becoming this massive supermarket and there was no clarification about where you could get what,” said Leandra Medine Cohen, who launched her newsletter The Cereal Aisle on Substack in January 2021 a few months after shutting down her site Man Repeller.

These shopping newsletters offer ultra-curated product recommendations, with suggestions ranging from a vintage opera coat on The RealReal to a deal on a Lemaire croissant bag on Ssense, which are then contextualised with more in-depth writing. Reilly, for example, interviews downtown cool girls on their wish lists and compiled a Black Friday Google spreadsheet that she updated daily with new deals.

“It reminds me a lot of the audience that early Man Repeller was, where it genuinely feels like a bunch of people who just want to talk about clothes and our feelings,” said Medine Cohen.

However, the newsletter offers a simpler business model. Michael Williams of the menswear blog A Continuous Lean pivoted his blog to Substack in July 2020 and gained a following without the headaches of handling a website and trying to manage advertisers. Similar to Cohen, he notes the feeling of community is more present than in the later years of his blog, where he saw a dropoff in advertising opportunities as viewers spent more time on social media. It’s also in part because of the added paywall — 1,458 of his total 13,714 subscribers pay $8 monthly to access additional posts as well as a podcast.

“It really is just like a blog,” said Williams. “There’s just a lot of things that make it feel like 2010.”

🤖 India’s religious AI chatbots are speaking in the voice of god — and condoning violence

“Claiming wisdom based on the Bhagavad Gita, the bots frequently go way off script.”

In January 2023, when ChatGPT was setting new growth records, Bengaluru-based software engineer Sukuru Sai Vineet launched GitaGPT. The chatbot, powered by GPT-3 technology, provides answers based on the Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse Hindu scripture. GitaGPT mimics the Hindu god Krishna’s tone — the search box reads, “What troubles you, my child?”

In the Bhagavad Gita, according to Vineet, Krishna plays a therapist of sorts for the character Arjuna. A religious AI bot works in a similar manner, Vineet told Rest of World, “except you’re not actually talking to Krishna. You’re talking to a bot that’s pretending to be him.”

At least five GitaGPTs have sprung up between January and March this year, with more on the way. Experts have warned that chatbots being allowed to play god might have unintended, and dangerous, consequences. Rest of World found that some of the answers generated by the Gita bots lack filters for casteism, misogyny, and even law. Three of these bots, for instance, say it is acceptable to kill another if it is one’s dharma or duty.

🎧 How Spotify's podcast bet went wrong

By 2021, Spotify had paid to sign some of the biggest names in podcasting, and it was ready to start squeezing its competitors.

The Swedish audio streaming giant had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase podcast production companies and big name creators in the hopes of luring new subscribers to the platform. Now, Spotify chief content officer Dawn Ostroff — a TV veteran most famous for bringing Gossip Girl to the CW — was ready to stop many of these creators and companies from sharing podcasts on Apple and Amazon, and keep the content exclusively on Spotify.

Then Bill Simmons sent an email to her boss.

Simmons had sold the sports and pop culture audio empire The Ringer to Spotify a year earlier for $200 million. Now he wrote Spotify CEO Daniel Ek to argue for keeping the Ringer’s mass audience on Apple and its advertising revenue, driven by the explosion of sports betting.

🍭 Brain Food

🚔 The Criminal Psychopath: History, Neuroscience, Treatment, and Economics

This is an interesting paper about psychopathy.

The manuscript surveys the history of psychopathic personality, from its origins in psychiatric folklore to its modern assessment in the forensic arena. Individuals with psychopathic personality, or psychopaths, have a disproportionate impact on the criminal justice system. Psychopaths are twenty to twenty-five times more likely than non-psychopaths to be in prison, four to eight times more likely to violently recidivate compared to non-psychopaths, and are resistant to most forms of treatment. This article presents the most current clinical efforts and neuroscience research in the field of psychopathy. Given psychopathy’s enormous impact on society in general and on the criminal justice system in particular, there are significant benefits to increasing awareness of the condition. This review also highlights a recent, compelling and cost-effective treatment program that has shown a significant reduction in violent recidivism in youth on a putative trajectory to psychopathic personality.

Most psychopaths are actually behind bars in the US:

Psychopathy is a constellation of psychological symptoms that typically emerges early in childhood and affects all aspects of a sufferer’s life including relationships with family, friends, work, and school. The symptoms of psychopathy include shallow affect, lack of empathy, guilt and remorse, irresponsibility, and impulsivity.

The best current estimate is that just less than 1% of all noninstitutionalized males age 18 and over are psychopaths. This translates to approximately 1,150,000 adult males who would meet the criteria for psychopathy in the United States today. And of the approximately 6,720,000 adult males that are in prison, jail, parole, or probation, 16%, or 1,075,000, are psychopaths. Thus, approximately 93% of adult male psychopaths in the United States are in prison, jail, parole, or probation.

🎥 What I’m Watching

💅 LOOKISM...and how "LOOKSMAXXING" is destroying everyone

💊 The Dark Side Of Semaglutide...

This an important video to understand how to avoid losing muscle instead of fat.

🔧 The Tool of the Week

🏗 Neck Harness

Lifting friends, you don’t want to be neglecting your neck training. Even more, if you’re into martial arts.

There are many ways to train it:

• with plates: neck curls (what I used in the past, gets pretty uncomfortable/ impractical as you get stronger)

• with bands (what I primarily use right now)

• and with a neck harness

There are many neck harness models, the best (expensive), and some cheaper versions.

Try adding, 1, 2 or more inches to your neck, and report the results to me ; )

Anything above 18 inches is 🔥, and it grows pretty fast, went from 17.3 to 19in about a year. High frequency, low volume is best (like 3x/week, 3—4 sets per session).

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

For those who think you can't get to the top unless you beat the crap out of everybody-you're wrong.

When you're a repeat player, when your world is your business and your business is your world, it's all about long-term relationships.

In any negotiation I believe in leaving a little bit on the table. And in any relationship I believe in sharing the stakes.

I've been doing deals with many of the same people for decades because the goal is for us to all come out ahead.

— Sam Zell

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading!

If you like The Long Game, please share it on social media or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Until next week,

Mehdi Yacoubi

Subscribe now

TLG is back after a few weeks. I’m currently exploring other ways of creating content, especially in the video format. More on that soon!

In this episode, we explore:

• Health isn’t just biomarkers

• You can be successful without being insufferable

• Trying to organize everything

• Lean startup or not?

• Silicon Valley’s civil war

Let’s dive in!

🥑 Health

🧬 Health Isn’t Just Biomarkers

Noah Ryan managed to put into words perfectly a topic we touched on quite a bit over the last few weeks on here.

Health isn’t just biomarkers. It’s relationships, experiences, fulfillment, alignment. Those require living outside the lines.

As the trend of over-optimization is growing in the health space, this paragraph is useful and blends well the ideas of improving your health, learning things and not becoming neurotic about it.

Let me clarify: I’m not neurotic about health.

I’m just informed.

People confuse cognizance for neuroticism. Just because something is “unhealthy” doesn’t mean it’s off limits.

I know some of the stuff I do is bad for my health. Most people are willfully ignorant and decide to remain uninformed. Not my style

I know the risk profile of any vice i partake (alcohol, sleep deprivation, junk food)

I also know how to mitigate damage while still living the life I want to live (some parts being inherently unhealthy)

My goal is not to be perfect. It’s to be resilient.

Dismissing health education because you don’t want to be an “optimizor” usually signals you’re too lazy/unable to research health topics

The reason extreme routines are so popular is because they seemingly remove the need to think for yourself and understand what “optimal” truly means in your individual context.

🌱 Wellness

🤡 You Can Be Successful Without Being Insufferable

You might feel this whole edition of TLG follows a similar theme, and after editing it, I would agree.

This piece is a good reminder, especially these days.

Is it really an all-or-nothing pursuit?

I’ve written God-knows how many blog posts around the general idea of opportunity costs and why it’s important to invest in experiences early and often, but today, I want to take this idea a step further.

Yes, you should invest in experiences, but as Perkins showed above, investing in experiences doesn’t have to come at the expense of your career. Look at the boss’s reply as well as Bill’s observation when Jason returned:

“You came here to make millions. Your earning power is going to happen! Do you think you’ll only make 18 thousand a year for the rest of your life?”

“When he (Jason) came back a few months later, there was no discernible difference between his income and mine—but the pictures and stories of his experiences showed that he was infinitely richer for having gone…”

So what are the takeaways here?

1. If you are confident that your earning power will grow exponentially over time, saving every single penny in your early years is a fool’s errand.

2. If you are a competent, hard-working individual, taking a brief hiatus to explore a side quest or two won’t derail your career.

The truth is, if you’re actually a high performer, and if you’re confident that you will excel in your career, you don’t have to neglect other areas of your life to reach your goals. You’ll reach the same destination, but one journey will be a hell of a lot more fun. It quite literally makes sense to spend some of your early-career earnings on non-work pursuits. Plus, you’ll be a hell of a lot more interesting. Seriously, no one likes the boner at a cocktail party who can’t maintain a conversation without referencing their job or entrepreneurial aspirations at least four times.

So why is this “Grind over everything” mindset so popular? Maybe this is a controversial take, but I think it’s a heavy dose of copium self-administered and propagated by folks who couldn’t achieve success unless they neglected other areas of their lives.

It’s easier to tell yourself that you are better than others because you made sacrifices that they didn’t, rather than admitting that it’s actually quite possible for plenty of people to have it both ways.

Let’s be real, getting rich after spending 10 years doing nothing except “grinding” isn’t impressive. If you fully committed to anything for 10 years and the end result was anything short of a home run, that would be an abject failure. “Success,” financially speaking, should be the default outcome.

You know what’s actually impressive? Learning a musical instrument, fostering deep relationships, traveling somewhere new, picking up a new language, mastering a martial art, and/or developing a decent sense of humor, all while leading a lucrative career.

Don’t pay attention to the hustle gurus who have made their “riches” their entire identities. They fall on the left tail of the success bell curve. Instead, look at the folks whose net worths are just one of their many successes. Believe it or not, you can win the money game without giving up everything else along the way.

🧠 Better Thinking

🤯 Getting Overwhelmed and Trying to Organize Everything

It’s very tempting to feel you want to do more, achieve more get more stuff done. That usually leads to an effort to over-engineer things, create complex systems, and use many tools in the process. All that ironically leads mostly to more stress, and more time thinking about the meta-system than the actual tasks at hand.

It’s possible that the only way to find a simplicity that works is to go through the over-engineered phase, though. But I am not sure! What do you think?

Bottom line: Do the thing.

⚡️ Startup Stuff

🏗 Quick MVP or Not?

Flo Crivello tweeted this great meme:

If you’ve been a long-time reader of TLG, you know I touched on this topic a lot. This piece is a good summary:

Of course, startup teaching will always lag behind companies that succeed using a new strategy. We'll see companies break the mold and win before the startup playbook changes. And I think we're already seeing some of those companies emerge today.

Some products have such a devoted user base that they have become memes on Startup Twitter. Among these are Notion, Figma, Airtable, Superhuman, and Discord. All of them are defined by an extremely high quality user experience.

If these products were shipped as MVP's built by stringing together commodity libraries, the founders might have concluded they were just in a bad market, then gone on to build more MVP's forever.

But taking Notion as an example, their story couldn't be further from the norm. If I understand correctly, Notion moved their team away from Silicon Valley to Japan and spent a year obsessing over their product before launching their v1. This led them to a highly differentiated product that people are obsessed with. They can reduce a lot of spending on advertising and sales, since they naturally grow via word of mouth.

Notion isn't totally throwing out the rules. They started by getting a small group of people to love them. They shipped an MVP and iterated. But they chose a much higher quality bar for their MVP than most founders do today.

Pair with: First 1,000 users of Notion

📚 What I Read

🥊 Silicon Valley’s Civil War

Tech’s leadership is splitting into two elites—and the battle between them will shape America’s future.

With an estimated net worth of over $1 billion, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the Netscape browser and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is far from an everyman. And yet Andreessen’s biting criticisms of the “entrenched oligarchic structure of the present regime” have made him one of the surprising figureheads of a growing anti-elite movement that could—depending on which side wins out—reshape America’s political and social future.

Andreessen is one of the more prominent names in a new class of tech wealth that includes figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel whose political vision and methods conflict both with dot-com tech titans like Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar, as well as with those of old world industry and media, like Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner. While it might seem strange, given his own position of power, for someone like Andreessen to criticize elites, the truth is that elites have cliques, just like the rest of us. And in the cafeteria of America’s billionaires, Andreessen and his peers are hurling food and spoiling for a fight, while the incumbents are calling in favors at the State Department and New York Times.

📚 The Case Against (Most) Books

Taking opportunity costs seriously in the quest for knowledge.

Many effective altruists and rationalists oppose reading books. This position is easily mocked, but as someone who is familiar with the way academia and publishing work, I think it has a lot to recommend to it. According to the great moral leader Sam Bankman-Fried,

I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that…If you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.

Ideally, one would like to think that if someone has written a 300-page book, it means that they have 300 pages worth of things to say. My experience is that is rarely the case. People generally have an idea that can be expressed in terms much shorter than that, but extending your idea into a book looks impressive on a CV and gets you invited on TV shows and podcasts.

To take one example, the last book I finished was David Sinclair’s Lifespan. It has three parts, and the last of them is nothing but two chapters about his political and social views, where he addresses issues that are ancillary to conquering aging like what’s going to happen to social security and the impact of a growing population on global warming. He also comes out for universal healthcare, legalized euthanasia, and more income equality.

🚔 I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a cop

The conundrum in every classroom.

One student cornered me after class to tell me he’s been absent so much because he’s both getting divorced and starting a business. (“Please don’t worry about it,” I said.) Another time, a student apologized for missing class; she had just found out about a mass shooting near her home. (“Please don’t worry about it.”) Once, I listened, aghast, to a student explain that she’d unfortunately have to miss class to be at her child’s life-saving surgery.  (“PLEASE don’t worry about it!!”)

Until recently, this all seemed unfortunate but sensible. Students want points, I have the points, and so they’ll divulge whatever details they think will get me to cough those points up. Some students are probably lying, and part of my job is to tell the fake diarrheas and divorces from the real ones.

But as I enter my final grades and finish up my teaching job at Columbia, I’m struck by a strange thought: what am I doing? Why am I the guy that people tell when they have digestive distress? Why do we have an education system where it’s reasonable for students to debase themselves in exchange for made-up points?

🦉 How Much Can Duolingo Teach Us?

The company’s founder, Luis von Ahn, believes that artificial intelligence is going to make computers better teachers than humans.

Attracting people and getting them to stay is, in some ways, Duolingo’s core business. When you begin a course on the app, you are greeted by Duo and some basic vocabulary. Then a collection of cartoon characters—Lily, a sarcastic, purple-haired teen; Eddy, whom the company’s principal product manager, Edwin Bodge, described to me as a “kind of goofy, weird gym bro”—speak sentences to you, and prompt you to translate them. The app dings when you get something right, awards you points, badges, and trophies, and moves you along a winding path through a series of increasingly challenging levels. You are reminded, repeatedly, to finish at least one lesson each day, in order to keep your streak going.

Von Ahn’s original concept for Duolingo—that people studying foreign languages could practice by translating existing texts from the Web—relied on other users to rate the results and suggest improvements. The hope was that this process would produce translations worth paying for. BuzzFeed became Duolingo’s first client, in October, 2013, announcing that, as part of its expansion into Portuguese, Spanish, and French, it would “have Duolingo’s students translate the best of BuzzFeed into new languages while localizing BuzzFeed’s iconic tone.”

Pair with: How Duolingo reignited user growth

🍭 Brain Food

❓ Ne quid nimis

“Call it sex negativity or common sense, there's backlash around the corner.” Some food for thought on an important topic.

A counter-wave is inevitable. Generational cycles, you know how it goes. But I argue this pushback against sex positivity, if conducted with calibration, could restore meaning and health to our currently maladaptive society. Since the 1960s, there has been an aggressive effort to divorce sex from consequence. The general idea among this type of free love movement is that sex can be rule-free. A bulk of feminist polemic and similar progressive activism has attempted to socially engineer this dangerous fiction. It’s a fiction that pretends that one can divorce sex from responsibility, risk assessment, power, children, love, tyranny, that sort of thing.

Instead of consequence being factored into these dynamics, the gold standard is then consent. So you can have adults engaging in objectively dysgenic behavior but as long as they both agree to it, the conversation simply ends there. One could argue this is the natural product of postmodernist sex philosophy.

Postmodernists believe that there is no canonical way to explain or understand phenomena. They don’t believe in an objective world because everything, to a postmodernist, is a function of language and everything, to them, is language-mediated. You will notice the most egregious forms of this style of intellectual dishonesty among the gender studies departments of our world, for example. It’s extraordinarily cynical. Naturally, postmodernism shuns necessary categories of right and wrong, good and bad, light and dark, healthy and sick. This extends to our culture of dating, partner selection, and self-actualization today.

After the 1960s, sex was forced out of the realm of the sacred to the domain of the marketplace. And the idea was that the fluidity of the market would sort out the problems, like high status males hoarding most females to low status males becoming risk tolerant and prone to isolation or violence or both. But it didn’t. Now young people are gradually expressing their contempt for these conditions. They may not articulate their unease in harsh fashion as, say, I do. But they know what’s going on.

Pair with: Let's Have An Honest Conversation About Only Fans & This is what hook up culture is doing to you.. the truth.

🎥 What I’m Watching

🇸🇻 How the World’s Most Dangerous Country Solved Murder

⚠️ 5 Worst Novice Training Mistakes

Some important lessons for my lifting friends.

🔧 The Tool of the Week

🎒 Rucking

As we got a daughter 4 months ago, time management took a whole different meaning. I managed to stick to the gym and even progress quite a bit, but I completely stopped most of the cardio I was doing except for the walks. And walking is great, I love it, but I was looking for something a bit more intense, and most importantly without adding time on top of the gym nor the walks (why not less gym, you might ask: because I love it and I have specific goals I want to reach on that front.)

So I think the best option is to add a heavy bag to some of the walks to get the heart rate up!

🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

The road to building a successful business is paved with countless obstacles and setbacks. It's not for the faint-hearted, but those who persevere and believe in their vision are the ones who ultimately succeed.

— James Dyson

👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading!

If you like The Long Game, please share it on social media or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack.

Until next week,

Mehdi Yacoubi