The Long Game 168: Dad's Workouts, Dating, AI Scientists, Hiring, Talent, Charisma

🧠 The Divided Mind, Omega-3s, UFC, Viscerality, Factory Farming, Self-Help, 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:

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🏗 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.

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.

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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!

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🥑 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.

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🌱 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

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🧠 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.

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🤖 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?

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⚡️ 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

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📚 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.

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🍭 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.

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🎥 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.

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🔧 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!

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🪐 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

Source

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👋 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