The Long Game 164: Fake Natty, Natural Potential, Avoidance, The Dragon Hatchling, 996, Thinking

🇪🇺 How Europe Crushes Innovation, Private Truths, IQ, Bezos, Sneakers, Friends, Dichotomies, and Much More!

Hi there, it’s Mehdi Yacoubi, co-founder at Mirage Metrics & Mirage Exploration, and this is The Long Game Newsletter. To receive it in your inbox, subscribe here:

In this episode, we explore:

• Fake natural controversies

• Avoidance

• The Dragon Hatchling

• 996

• How Europe crushes innovation

Let’s dive in!

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🥑 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.

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🌱 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

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🧠 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.

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🤖 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.

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⚡️ 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.

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📚 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.

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🍭 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!

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🎥 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

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🔧 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.

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🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.

— Dostoevsky

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👋 EndNote

Thanks for reading,

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

Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi