The Long Game 167: Not Dying, Paranoia, Agency & Intelligence, Feelings, Aerobic Training, Kids

🏆 Winning, Running, Grip Training, Ireland, Brazil, Beauty, and Much More!

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

In this episode, we explore:

• Aerobic training

• Feelings

• Life with kids

• Agency > Intelligence

• Paranoia and not dying

Let’s dive in!

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🥑 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.

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🌱 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.

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🧠 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 😅

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.

😅😅😅

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🤖 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.

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⚡️ 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”

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📚 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.

📉 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

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🍭 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.

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🎥 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.

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🔧 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.

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🪐 Quote I’m Pondering

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

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👋 EndNote

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Until next time,

Mehdi Yacoubi