Hi there, it’s Mehdi Yacoubi, co-founder at Vital, and this is The Long Game Newsletter. To receive it in your inbox each week, subscribe here:
In this episode, we explore:
The case against optimization
AI anxiety
Mental liquidity
The real competition is water
Whose jobs are most at risk
🥑 Health
🚫 The Case Against Optimizing
In the last few months, I gradually developed a sort of allergy to many of the gimmicks/ optimizations of the health space. I don’t know what caused this, but Brady’s piece encapsulated well a few of the ideas I started to feel.
The blessing of having a wealth of biometric data is also a curse.
We’re living in a time when people are aware of and taking control over their health. It’s beautiful to see.
Some call this biohacking — “do-it-yourself” biology. Because everyone has access to a large amount of information through sources like YouTube, podcasts, and even popular books, they’re exposed to the latest science of living well, and the tactics by which to do so.
But has biohacking gone too far?
Social media is full of “rules” that one should abide by in order to optimize their health, sleep, and performance.
Some of these rules make up a productive “morning routine” and include delaying your morning caffeine intake by at least 90 minutes (something about cortisol), exposing yourself to early morning sunlight (something about melatonin), and, if available, hopping into the coldest body of water possible (something about adrenaline and “resilience”).
More rules extend to the nighttime “wind down” routine.
Make sure to eat your last meal at least 3 hours before bed (for the digestion and the extended intermittent fast), avoid screens and television in the bedroom (for the melatonin, sex is okay though), and by any means necessary, drop your body temperature. A hot shower can work for this, but even better if you’ve got the $1,000+ mattress cover that can be set to your (and your partner’s) ideal sleep temperature, adjust that temperature overnight based on your individual physiology, and track your sleep along the way. Pay no mind to the EMF radiating from the bed all night — something else biohackers will tell you to avoid at all costs.
Another idea that Brady’s piece doesn’t fully touch on is that life has different phases. This is not often discussed, but I think it’s an essential idea. It’s very different to obsess over optimization once you have already achieved a lot professionally and you’re in the second part of your life with all the resources you need vs doing that in your early years. The reason it’s different is that the optimization obsession is self-limiting. Some things require losing sleep over, not having 20 must-do daily habits, eating perfectly etc. They require a willingness to be all in.
Lastly, a part that’s even less discussed is that when you get a kid, the vast majority of the focus on yourself disappears automatically. My unpopular guess is that the rise of extreme optimization is a consequence of people delaying/not having kids.
🌱 Wellness
🤖 AI Anxiety
As the advances of AI are getting faster and faster, there is a palpable sense of anxiety related to it, a sort of generalized AI anxiety.
When we introduce new machines, we also disrupt social structures, games, and the rules of those games. With paradigm shifts come lots of progress, yes. But agents of progress are agents of chaos too. They create agitation and anxiety.
I see many shades of this, but I’ll narrow it down to three major types:
Anxiety of incompetence: my skills are devalued and i have to learn new ones
Anxiety of irrelevance: people might not relate to, value, or think about me
Anxiety of uncertainty: I don’t know what the future holds and it feels fickle
Encircling these is a overall feeling of lack of control and agency. Among the groups of talented, ambitious people we engage in, there’s seem to be a palpable (perhaps rarely-felt) fear of falling or already being behind and wondering what next. It’s expected with any paradigm shift, sure, but this one looms large.
With the potential democratization of powerful AI tools, there’s also talk of moats (especially the software kind) being destroyed. This applies to individuals too, spurring more of the anxieties described above. Without personal moats, we may find ourselves in a perpetually evolving, seemingly more meritocratic game.
It sounds good in theory, but with fewer ways to play every game and more people able to play all of them, another kind of anxiety unquestionably pops up.
So what are the solutions? I liked Anu’s suggestions to combat this growing sense of inadequacy:
Become the expert at the new thing. If you’re truly passionate about AI, it might be a no-brainer. Build the tech, sell the ‘shovels,’ be a meta commentator, curator, regulator, etc. It’s still early, so it makes sense to me that you could reach expert status faster than in legacy industries.
Stay the course, but level up with the new thing. If you’re a software engineer, learn how to leverage AI tools to 10x your understanding, output, quality. Same goes for creatives of many kinds. And really for anyone creating software or using software to create.
Find weaknesses in the new thing, and exploit them. Believe there are things humans can do that AI can’t replace, and focus on doing those things. We might even willfully foster, create, and protect new skills and sectors that are AI-light or resistant (e.g. human made art).
Go where the new thing isn’t welcome. Cue the ‘man in the arena’ replies, but I see this as a legitimate, even virtuous option. AI won’t permeate every job, industry, or region at the same speed or to the same extent (read: probably not pure tech or software-first).
I just heard this concept, and I love it: Mental Liquidity. It’s the ability to quickly abandon previous beliefs when the world changes or when you come across new information. To ensure you stay (or become) mentally liquid, there are a few things to keep in mind.
Two critical things to keep in mind here:
Be careful what beliefs you let become part of your identity. Religion and politics are contentious because almost by definition your beliefs are part of your identity – you’re not just dealing with ideas and philosophies, but tribes and belonging. Another Dee Hock quote applies here: “We are built with an almost infinite capacity to believe things because the beliefs are advantageous for us to hold, rather than because they are even remotely related to the truth.” Things get dangerous when people let their investing and economic beliefs fall into the same category.
Most fields have lots of rules, theories, ideas, and hunches. But laws – things that are unimpeachable and cannot ever change – are extremely rare. Some fields only have a handful. A big problem arises when you try to force rules and theories to become laws. The few laws tend to be the most important things in any field. But everything else, like Einstein said, is just a theory of maybes.
⚡️ Startup Stuff
🌊 The Real Competition is Water
I loved this article by Ravi Gupta and read it multiple times this week. So important when building anything. It’s about remembering the possibility of death, daily.
Recently, Bill Gurley tweeted a proverb that was shared with him.
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”
I think there are two important concepts for entrepreneurs that come from this:
Speed: How soon do you have to face reality?
Severity: What is the cost of ignoring it?
The lion and the gazelle have to face reality every day, and the cost of ignoring it is death. That’s a powerful combination. For many startups that have a lot of runway, it can feel like they have the opposite combination. With 3-4 years of cash, they don’t have to face the reality of the markets (private or public) for many years. Plus, the cost of ignoring market realities now seems low. Employees are not leaving in droves. Financial plans have been revised downwards, so business performance seems fine when compared to the revised budgets. Importantly, every other startup seems to be doing the same thing.
This seems reasonable on the surface. But it’s not. It’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because it allows you to have standards that prioritize feelings over performance. This is a path to mediocrity. If you don’t think this applies to your company, look at your financial plan for 2023. Does it represent excellent performance? Does it require you to make significant progress on the things that keep you up at night about your business? Does it increase your chances of long-term market leadership? Does it put you on a path to consistently beating Rule of 40 at scale? Or is it just a set of numbers that will allow you to tell yourself, your team, and your board that you are “beating plan”?
James Astill wrote a piece that I think about all the time. In the article, he wonders why American children are so good at swimming and so bad at math. He comes to the conclusion that schools are too busy teaching kids to feel good about their math performance rather than actually teaching them how to do math. At the same time, he notices that his children’s swim instructors are similarly supportive to the math teachers, but with completely different results. He observes that the swim instructors have an advantage over the math teachers. They have been blessed with an unforgiving standard: the water. Here’s the closing sentence from his piece: “If their instructors had focused on making them feel good about swimming, instead of on making them swim, they could have drowned.”
If you’re a startup founder or leader, embrace reality. Outperforming a middling financial plan doesn’t matter. Neither does having slightly better performance than a bunch of other startups that aren’t ever going to be great.
What matters is moving your company towards excellence. What does that mean? Look at your 2023 plan and be honest with yourself about whether your revenue growth justifies your cost base. If it doesn’t, either make the hard decision on costs now or find the big bet on product that will give you a chance to fundamentally alter your growth trajectory in 2024 and beyond. Most companies are treating 2023 as a mulligan year with hopes that the market improves in 2024 and brings growth back. None of us know whether it’s going to be easier or harder to grow in 2024. All we know is that hoping that it’s easier is not a great strategy.
Don’t let a long runway lower the bar for your company. High standards are a gift that you give your team.
As we all learned from the show's season premiere, if you want to look rich, you won’t.
In the polite society of Succession, less really is more – a memo that Greg’s date did not receive. Like a bull in a bloodlessly-decorated china shop, the Burberry-toting victime de la mode fell face first into scornful side-eyes from the otherwise welcome guests of Logan’s birthday party.
The offending accessory in question? A conspicuous tote currently listed on Harrods’ website as the “medium” size. Modest, it was not, but as bags go, this was no it-bag. However, the fact remained: Greg’s date had crossed a line sacred to the 0.001%. Their disgust lay not in the check’s chequered history in British class structures, but instead, its gauche association with high fashion, and therefore, flashiness. She was all too much.
I know writing is right for me because I actually enjoy doing it. That’s what matters. It’s not about what you find intellectually cool, or what seems like the best “opportunity.” Those things can be important too, but they don’t matter if you hate doing the thing. I like sitting at the dining table and tapping away at my keyboard for a few hours. I like to make up stories and write down my thoughts. Of course there are days when I’m sad and struggling and my writing is bad, but most of the time I’m having a pretty good time. There are not that many things in the world I could do for eight hours a day and have a good time.
You have to do the thing you actually enjoy doing, not the thing you find conceptually exciting. You have to date the person you actually like, not the ideal of perfection you fetishize in your mind. And you have to have enough self-knowledge to know what you enjoy.
This mirrors a recent revelation I’ve had about relationships. Here it is: the couples I admire most seem like they’re having fun. That’s literally it. Obviously, everyone will tell you that their relationship is fun because that’s what they’re contractually obliged to claim. And I’m sure they’re having fun sometimes. But honestly I don’t think most couples seem like they’re having that good of a time. They seemed bored. Or stressed? Or one person wants more but the other doesn’t want to give it. There’s not really that deep sense of joy and play that makes relationships aspirational to me. The couples I admire are probably often stressed out and fight and disappoint each other, but there really is this thoroughline of playfulness, of really having a great time with the other person, that I think a lot of relationships lack.
The well-being gap between liberals and conservatives is one of the most robust patterns in social science research. It is not a product of things that happened over the last decade or so; it goes back as far as the available data reach. The differences manifest across age, gender, race, religion, and other dimensions. They are not merely present in the United States, but in most other studied countries as well. Consequently, satisfying explanations of the gaps in reported well-being between liberals and conservatives would have to generalize beyond the present moment, beyond isolated cultural or geographic contexts, and beyond specific demographic groups. This essay has explored some of the most likely and well-explored drivers of the observed patterns:
There are likely some genetic and biological factors that simultaneously predispose people towards both mental illness/ wellness and liberalism/ conservatism, respectively.
Net of these predispositions, conservatism probably helps adherents make sense of, and respond constructively to, adverse states of affairs. These effects are independent of, but enhanced by, religiosity and patriotism (which tend to be ideological fellow-travelers with conservatism).
Some strains of liberal ideology, on the other hand, likely exacerbate (and even incentivize) anxiety, depression, and other forms of unhealthy thinking. The increased power and prevalence of these ideological frameworks post-2011 may have contributed to the dramatic and asymmetrical rise in mental distress among liberals over the past decade.
People who are unwell may be especially attracted to liberal politics over conservatism for a variety of reasons, and this may exacerbate observed ideological gaps net of other factors.
The amount of observed variance that each of these theories explain relative to one another is, at present, empirically unclear and hotly contested. However, the general pattern is clear: conservatives report significantly higher levels of happiness, meaning, and satisfaction in their lives as compared to liberals. Meanwhile, liberals are much more likely to exhibit anxiety, depression, and other forms of psychic distress.
Critically, these facts don’t tell us anything about which worldview is morally correct. Outside of Randian objectivism, it is widely acknowledged that what is maximally advantageous for oneself is not necessarily the most moral thing to do. Doing the right thing instead regularly imposes risks and costs on those who step up. Consequently, the fact that conservatism has practical advantages for adherents while liberalism may undermine well-being doesn’t necessarily tell us which ideology is more ethical to hold. Those are questions better suited for theology and philosophy than social science.
A sociologist explains the history of a much-contested truth...
Ever since 1944, the state education system has offered broad equality of opportunity to children from different social class backgrounds. But in any broadly meritocratic system, children born to successful parents will tend to out-compete those born to less successful parents. Not because of an unequal distribution of social advantages and disadvantages, but because of an unequal distribution of cognitive ability.
In an open competition where people are selected on the basis of intellectual ability, the brightest people will obviously end up in the highest positions, be they grammar schools, A-streams in comprehensive schools, or elite universities. If these successful men and women then mate with each other and produce children (as they tend to do), their kids will also be likely to score relatively highly on ability tests (though not necessarily as highly as their parents, for there is a ‘regression to the mean’ across generations). Like many other dimensions of human personality, cognitive ability is to a significant degree genetically determined. Some bright parents have dull children, and some dull parents have bright children, but on average, children of bright parents will score higher than children of dull ones.
Are you scared AI might take over your job? Well, read on!
GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models
We investigate the potential implications of large language models (LLMs), such as Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs), on the U.S. labor market, focusing on the increased capabilities arising from LLM-powered software compared to LLMs on their own.
Using a new rubric, we assess occupations based on their alignment with LLM capabilities, integrating both human expertise and GPT-4 classifications.
Our findings reveal that around 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of LLMs, while approximately 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted.
We do not make predictions about the development or adoption timeline of such LLMs. The projected effects span all wage levels, with higher-income jobs potentially facing greater exposure to LLM capabilities and LLM-powered software.
Significantly, these impacts are not restricted to industries with higher recent productivity growth. Our analysis suggests that, with access to an LLM, about 15% of all worker tasks in the US could be completed significantly faster at the same level of quality.
When incorporating software and tooling built on top of LLMs, this share increases to between 47 and 56% of all tasks. This finding implies that LLM-powered software will have a substantial effect on scaling the economic impacts of the underlying models.
We conclude that LLMs such as GPTs exhibit traits of general-purpose technologies, indicating that they could have considerable economic, social, and policy implications.
Most impacted jobs (from top to bottom)
And, finally, the occupations without any exposure:
Agricultural Equipment Operators
Athletes and Sports Competitors
Automotive Glass Installers and Repairers
Bus and Truck Mechanics and Diesel Engine Specialists
Cement Masons and Concrete Finishers
Cooks, Short Order
Cutters and Trimmers, Hand
Derrick Operators, Oil and Gas
Dining Room and Cafeteria Attendants and Bartender Helpers
Dishwashers
Dredge Operators
Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers
Excavating and Loading Machine and Dragline Operators, Surface Mining
Floor Layers, Except Carpet, Wood, and Hard Tiles
Foundry Mold and Coremakers
Helpers–Brickmasons, Blockmasons, Stonemasons, and Tile and Marble Setters
Helpers–Carpenters
Helpers–Painters, Paperhangers, Plasterers, and Stucco Masons
Helpers–Pipelayers, Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters
Helpers–Roofers
Meat, Poultry, and Fish Cutters and Trimmers
Motorcycle Mechanics
Paving, Surfacing, and Tamping Equipment Operators
Pile Driver Operators
Pourers and Casters, Metal
Rail-Track Laying and Maintenance Equipment Operators
We had to adapt our sleep over the last three months. I found that having a light & sound machine is helpful, and I even enjoy sleeping to the sound of birds now 😂
🪐 Quote I’m Pondering
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”
— African Proverb
👋 EndNote
Thanks for reading!
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Until next week,
Mehdi Yacoubi
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The Long Game 148: The Case Against Optimization, AI Anxiety, Mental Liquidity, The Real Competition is Water
The Long Game 148: The Case Against Optimization, AI Anxiety, Mental Liquidity, The Real Competition is Water
Una gacela no tiene que correr más que el león para salvar la vida
Solo tiene que correr más que otra gacela
Keep it up!! Love it!!