The Long Game 48: DNA Testing, Wellness as a Status Symbol, Peer Review, Climbing the Wrong Hill
đ Man's Search for Meaning, Rocket Men, USâChina, The Case Against Reality, Spot, and Much More!
Hi there, itâs Mehdi Yacoubi, co-founder at lifetizr, and this is The Long Game Newsletter.
Greetings from Montenegro đČđȘ
In this episode, we explore:
The future of DNA testing
How wellness became a status symbol
Is Peer Review a Good Idea?
Climbing the wrong hill
Manâs Search for Meaning
The case against reality
Letâs dive in!
đ„ Health
đ§Ź Whatâs the Future of DNA testing?
This week, Orchid was announced. Itâs a company that aims at providing couples with DNA information to reduce the risk of getting a baby with some health conditions.
Immediately, dozens of people got furious and saw us enter the Gattaca era. The company goes beyond what other services currently do and helps parents choose the embryo with the lowest risk of developing heart diseases, Alzheimerâs, diabetes (T1 & T2), breast cancer, and more. Itâs a significant step forward.
The genetic testing space is very particular because society is well aware of some of the dystopian futures associated with it. I think whatâs essential for now is to open the discussion because our technology gets better rapidly, and we will be able to do a lot in altering human DNA. We need to be proactive and fix the good limits to get the most out of this technology.
Even though itâs understandable from the parents' perspective, imagine a world where everyone looks like The Rock. What makes our strength as a species is the diversity of looks and talents distributed in the population. Give us the possibility to choose the kid we want, and we will lose a lot of diversity in very few generations. Iâm not sure I want a world like this.
Like other breakthrough technologies (bio-weapons, nuclear, etc.), the only approach that can work is a global one, where every country is held to the same standards.
For more on this, I recommend this episode with Jamie Metzl, author of Hacking Darwin, where he explains how the (scary?) future of genome editing might look like.
Iâll be honest, I have no idea how we should use DNA testing and genome editing for the better. Iâll be learning and exploring this topic to find good ways to think about it. Let me know what you think!


đ± Wellness
đ How Wellness Became a Status Symbol
I love wellness and psychology, so I naturally enjoyed this piece showing wellness has become the new status symbol. I donât really like that wellness is now a status symbol as it distracts from its initial goal.
âItâs like the only acceptable lifestyle brag,â says Ana, 26, a Manhattan spinning enthusiast. âYou are a douche if you brag about your car or how much money you make, but bragging about how much you spin is normal, though still very annoying.â
Iâm very interested in all the ways we can and will close the gap between the part of the population thatâs getting healthier & fitter year after year and the other part thatâs getting less and less healthy.
Itâs depressing that the new CĂ©line bag is a green juice.
When the recession hit in 2008, luxury shoppers became more reluctant to purchase goods that actively flaunted their wealth. The phenomenon, dubbed âstealth wealth,â ushered in an era of discreetly luxurious brands like The Row and CĂ©line, and a label-less, unadorned aesthetic that made it harder (to the uninitiated) to gauge how much a garment or handbag actually cost. Now, a few years after the recession, it seems there has been another shift, as luxury consumers pour their money into boutique fitness classes and expensive sportswear. If five years ago it was a CĂ©line bag, todayâs ultimate status symbol might just be a SoulCycle hoodie and a green juice.
I donât think we can fight against status games as they might be embedded in our nature and societies, but I think we can and should make health and wellness accessible for everyone. If people want to spend đ° in clubs, I have no problem with that; they do what they want with their money, but basic goods helping people be healthy and feel good should not become what the elite gains status from.

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đ§ Better Thinking
đ„ Is Peer Review a Good Idea?
There have been many discussions lately about the problems of academia and the gatekeeping of people with power. One of the main topics of discussion has been whether we should keep the peer review system. It helps surface quality science, but it also prevents out-of-the-box thinking from going a long way. I found this paper interesting and worth sharing. Hereâs the abstract:
Prepublication peer review should be abolished. We consider the effects that such a change will have on the social structure of science, paying particular attention to the changed incentive structure and the likely effects on the behaviour of individual scientists. We evaluate these changes from the perspective of epistemic consequentialism. We find that where the effects of abolishing prepublication peer review can be evaluated with a reasonable level of confidence based on presently available evidence, they are either positive or neutral. We conclude that on present evidence abolishing peer review weakly dominates the status quo.
Alex Danco also had two excellent articles on this topic, exploring whether Twitter can save science and arguing we should get rid of peer review.
As you may know already, ten years ago (before I got into the tech world) I lived in the academia world, as a grad student doing neuroscience research. Scientific research, to put it bluntly, needs to be fixed. There are so many smart and well-intentioned people working really hard in university labs and research institutions, but whose best years are getting wasted through no fault of their own. Itâs not an easy problem to fix, but weâre going to have to.Â
Related to this, Agnes Callard explains why academic writing is a problem for philosophy.
"Writing for the sake of publicationâinstead of for the sake of being readâis academiaâs version of âteaching to the test.â The result is papers few actually want to read. First, the writing is hypercomplex."

âĄïž Startup Stuff
đ Climbing the Wrong Hill
Donât climb the wrong hill. Thatâs an essential concept Iâve been thinking about lately. Chris Dixon describes the problem in a good way:
Over the years, Iâve run into many prospective employees in similar situations. When I ask them a very obvious question: âWhat do you want to be doing in 10 years?â The answer is invariably âworking at or founding a tech startupâ â yet most of them decide to remain on their present path and not join a startup.
Why smart and ambitious people stay working at companies they donât believe in or in areas where they have no long-term ambitions?
I think there are basically two reasons:
Not having a practice of self-reflection and not developing the habit of examining your life.
Thinking that you have a lot of time in front of you.
I think this is a big mistake. Iâm not saying everyone should start a company or leave their current job, but I think having some plan to get to job and life youâll be fulfilled by is a good idea.
People early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, donât waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear.
This idea doesnât apply only to professional life. The same goes for relationships, social status, and so on. Being aware of the game and whatâs a stake is the first step, then understanding how you want to play the game is the second one.
We already talked about the problem with optionality a few months ago, but this piece is so good that itâs worth revisiting frequently.
The shortest distance between two points is reliably a straight line. If your dreams are apparent to you, pursue them. Creating optionality and buying lottery tickets are not way stations on the road to pursuing your dreamy outcomes. They are dangerous diversions that will change you.
đ What I Read
đ Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon
I greatly enjoyed the story of Apollo 8 by Robert Kurson, and I find it fascinating how these people managedâagainst all oddsâto put a man on the Moon in a time that was deemed impossible by all the âexperts.â Itâs fantastic to see what human beings are capable of.
I'm very optimistic about our long-term futureâif we do the work. I am also realistic about the risks we face. If we collectively address those, I have no doubt we'll become multi-planetary and live for millennia. If we stay oblivious to the risks, we might not make it to 2100.
This book tells the story of one of the most amazing things humans did, and we should be inspired from this to address (among others) these challenges:
Fight climate change
Defeat aging
Explore the universe and become multi-planetary
Reduce existential risks
What are going to be the Manhattan Project & Apollo Program of the 21st century?
đ Manâs Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl
I finally read the masterpiece. I understand why so many people recommend it, talk about it, and are even emotional when mentioning the work of Frankl.
I believe everyone would benefit from reading this book. Itâs profound, poignant, and will help you in your journey to find meaning. Here are a few notes:
Donât aim at successâitâs a side effect of aiming at a cause bigger than oneself.
Success will follow you because you had forgotten to think about it.
A man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.
When youâre in such a state of strain (concentration camps), youâre forced to go back to a primitive level of existence (dream and think about food, sleeping, and basic human needs.)
Humor is a weapon for self-preservation.
Hope is both very powerful and very dangerous. Giving up hope leads to death.
Even in horrible situations, men choose how they want to act and who they want to be. The prisoner you become is a result of an inner decision.
If there is a meaning in life, there is a meaning in suffering because suffering is part of life.
Life means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to the problems youâre facing. You need to fulfill the tasks that are coming your way. These tasks differ from man to man and from moment to moment. There is no one meaning of life for everyone.
When a man finds that the task he needs to do is suffering, he needs to find the meaning in his suffering.
âEverything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedomsâto choose oneâs attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose oneâs own way.â
â Viktor E. Frankl
đ Podcast Episode of the Week
There are so many great episodes I listened to recently. Now that I fixed my chronic back pain (more details coming soon), I can run again, and I greatly enjoy going for a long run at a slow pace while listening to a good episode.
I recommend:
đ Brain Food
đ€Ż The Case Against Reality
I learned about Donald Hoffmanâs work on consciousness this week, and the least I can say is that I couldnât stop thinking about it. I found these ideas through this long conversation that I highly recommend. This article is a good introduction to Hoffmanâs work:
As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptionsâsights, sounds, textures, tastesâare an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about itâor when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusionâwe realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brainâs best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasnât, wouldnât evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what itâs really like.
Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. Whatâs more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.
In a few words, Hoffman argues that all we have been studying in science so far is the equivalent of being in a VR game and studying whatâs happening in the game. He calls for exploring whatâs outside of the VR headset, and he argues that space-time is within the VR game and can be bent if we leave the headset. He uses quantum mechanics to justify his ideas, and heâs calling for experimental protocols to validate or invalidate his conjecture.
đ Red pill or blue pill?
đ„ What Iâm Watching
đșđžđšđł Peter Thiel on US-China Relations
China again this week! Iâm no geopolitics expert. I try to make sense of the world we live in on multiple different verticals. Geopolitics is one of the verticals Iâve been paying more attention to recently. Peter Thiel made the news a few days ago because he raised awareness about how China might use bitcoin against the USD as a global reserve currency. A lot of it was taken out of context, and hereâs the video where he details how he thinks about the USâChina relations. I donât agree with everything Thiel says and stands for, but one thing I like about him is that heâs not afraid of saying things that might not be popular in the dominant world view of the moment.
For more:
âI Never Thought China Could Ever Be This Darkâ: the story of the Uyghur diaspora.
đ§ The Tool of the Week
đ¶ Walking Meetings with Spot
Iâm a huge proponent of walking for health, mental health, and more. Itâs a perfect low-intensity activity, it helps you move more, and you can do other things while walking. I always loved to call friends and family while going for long walks, and recently I also started doing some work-related calls while walking. Lately, Iâve been getting 15â20k steps per day, and I feel much better than when I get 8â10k steps.
I came across Spot this week, and I found the concept so good that I wanted to share what theyâre doing even before trying the product. Hereâs what they do in a few words:
Starting a Spot is simple. Send a calendar invite directly from your existing calendar tool and let everyone know itâs an audio-only call. No second-guessing if you have to turn your camera on or not during the meeting.

đȘ Quote I'm Pondering
âThose who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.â
â Viktor E. Frankl
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đ EndNote
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Until next week,
Mehdi Yacoubi
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