The Long Game 96: Endocrine Disruptors, Low Expectations, Obsession, Deep Work
đ± The Truth About Online Dating, 14 Peaks, Jakarta, Substack Reader, Knowledge Networks, and Much More!
Hi there, itâs Mehdi Yacoubi, co-founder at Vital, and this is The Long Game Newsletter. To receive it in your inbox each week, subscribe here:
In this episode, we explore:
Endocrine disruptors
Doing the deep work
Low expectations
Obsession
Community-curated knowledge networks
The truth about online dating
Letâs dive in!
đ„ Health
đ± Endocrine Disruptors
We talked a few times about infertility, birthrates, and endocrine disruptors in The Long Game, and I came across this great article this week about some ways to reduce your exposure to endocrine disruptors.
Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are found in almost everything these days from our water and food to the air we breathe. Other common places youâll find EDCs:
Chemical sunscreenÂ
Microwaveable popcorn
Tupperware
Non-stick pansÂ
Baby bottles and toys
It can get tricky to understand what are the best measures to reduce your exposure, so here are some ways to mitigate exposure and harms of EDCs:
Donât use plastic Tupperware. Opt for glass
Eat organic food
Buy products from non-toxic brands, your local health food store, or make your own
Replace your non-stick and aluminum pots and pans
Avoid packaged, processed food and drinks
Filter your water (water filter & shower filter)
Use a sauna (to eliminate your bodyâs EDCs)
Eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables
đ± Wellness
đ§ââïž Doing the Deep Work
Ava knows how to put words on important feelings & emotions.
On doing the deep work within yourself:
It was a deeply useful insight, but it didnât change me overnight. I still had these entrenched patterns of behavior that Iâd been recreating since I was a little kid. Iâll give you some examples: Iâve always been scared of abandonment and rejection, I never felt safe, and I wanted very deeply to be loved. These were traits that were present in me as a 4-year-old. Theyâve always been part of how Iâve approached school, work, and relationships. They thrummed around me like white noise when I was trying to sit in silence. I was intellectually aware of them on some level, but they were so painful and primordial that I struggled to really touch them. For example, I would notice that I often felt fidgety or anxious when I was alone. That was because I always relied on other people to reflect âokaynessâ back to meâI looked to the external world for reassurance. I didnât really know whether I was okay or not when I had no input from others. But I didnât know how to change thatâI didnât know how to stop feeling the way I was feeling. My discomfort was a living being crushing me under its weight.
Now I realize that I needed distance. I needed the ability to look at myself without judgment, to watch myself the way I would watch someone else. Distance is the only way we can have real perspective. And thatâs what psychedelics and mindfulness gave me: the ability to maintain distance. For the past two years Iâve been watching myself the way you might watch a movie. I notice which things upset me, and the coping mechanisms I turn to when Iâm upset. I notice that when Iâm stressed it feels like a ball of tension is expanding in my chest. I notice that for my whole life Iâve been driven by anxiety, driven by competitiveness, driven by the need to feel chosen. I notice the unrealistic expectations I have for love: the way I use it as a pacifier, the way I believe that it can solve any problem. But it could never solve my most important problem.
đ§ Better Thinking
âȘïž Low Expectations
Whatâs the best way to always be happy? Low expectations.
Munger was recently asked an unrelated question that adds a layer to Muskâs point.
Asked, âYou seem extremely happy and content. Whatâs your secret to living a happy life?â 98-year-old Munger replied:
The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations youâre going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take lifeâs results good and bad as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism.
It doesnât mean people shouldnât try to achieve crazy things, but simply expecting that things wonât go out as expected is a better long-term strategy.
Elon is the best example of this:
He tweeted two years ago:
To be frank, in the early days, I thought there was >90% chance that both SpaceX & Tesla would be worth $0. The press & aerospace / automotive industry at the time (correctly) agreed with me.
I donât think any of that is casual irreverence or cocky risk-taking. Purposely low expectations is the only way to survive in a world thatâs not kind enough to reward every ambitious person with success.
When people say, âhigher risk equals higher returnâ they should actually be saying, âhigher risk means Iâll probably earn lower returns most of the time but thereâs a small chance Iâll earn very good returns that make up for it.â
Thatâs the distinguishing feature of higher risk: The greater prevalence of failure, not the smaller chance of success that has the potential to offset it.
The key part is that low expectations and accepting frequent losses increase the odds of sticking around long enough to eventually be right enough to make up for it, and then some.
âĄïž Startup Stuff
đ Obsession
Last week, I listened to MrBeast on JRE, and his obsession with his craft struck me. For the better part of a decade, he did nothing else than obsess over creating the best Youtube videos, and he still does.
I think this level of obsession and dedication to your craft is necessary to reach the highest level in the activity youâre pursuing.
When youâre building something, the biggest trap is to be in it just for the results and expect things to be quick. MrBeast manages to stay obsessed with these videos because he loves them and wouldnât want to be doing anything else. Thatâs the second part of the equation.
If you apply this level of obsession to something you deeply love (and that matters), thatâs when the magic happens (see here, and here.)
I feel like hard work has gotten a bit out of style lately, but it doesnât mean the recipe to achieve great things has changed.
Pair with this excellent interview of Flexport CEO:
"On some timeframe, you'll succeed, but the timeframe is super uncertain, so how do you set up your life up in a way that you can't fail."
"Success was certain because we didn't have this time horizon that it had to happen in 18 months or else we were all going to go bankrupt."
đ What I Read
đž The Rise of Community-Curated Knowledge Networks
I find the space of knowledge curation fascinating. We are seeing new tools emerging with both the curation and the community in the same place. It has a lot of similarities with what weâre building at Vital: bringing the tools and the social network in the same place.
The intersection of curation and knowledge management is inhabited by utility tools like CB Insights â destinations for both reading content and organizing information. Their biggest miss is that they still function as hierarchies and have not tapped into the power of networked information and crowdsourced knowledge.
On the community side, weâre witnessing a shift towards a post-social media era defined by niche, gated communities of interest and purpose.Â
Some content creators, such as 2pm and Lennyâs Newsletter, are blending curation and community to inhabit a space I call: new media. Â
Hunter Walk writes:Â
Iâm of the belief that âCome for the Content, Stay for the Communityâ will be one of the dominating themes for media this decade. As more creators break away from companies to go subscription indie, theyâll find it to be an effective and rewarding strategy to think of ways to build âwhole is greater than the sum of its partsâ experiences.
Most of these communities exist inside Slack, Discord, Telegram, or some other tool. But given the chat-based nature of these platforms, itâs easy to miss the best content. Without bespoke tooling to preserve knowledge, these communities will struggle with the same challenges of their early social media predecessors.Â
The intersection of community and knowledge management is inhabited by spaces like Genius, Stack Overflow, and other collectively maintained libraries. Wikipedia is the pinnacle example here, and remains one of the greatest wonders of the Internet age, proving the value of bespoke tooling and the feasibility of collaboration at scale
đźđ© Jakartaâs Transit Miracle
How one of the most-congested/polluted cities in the world is turning things around.
So just to recap: In this booming SE Asian city we have some of the worldâs worst congestion and pollution, no subway, MRT, or light rail to speak of, poor cycling/walking conditions, and insufficient or unsatisfactory bus service. Itâs no surprise, then, that road traffic accidents were a leading cause of death in Jakarta in the 2010s.
If you looked at Jakarta 10 years ago you probably wouldnât have predicted it would ever grow into the transit-heavy, cycling-friendly city it is today.
But⊠it did!Â
So how did Jakarta shake itself free of this automobile-induced stupor? What really caused this mobility revolution? For my money the main reasons are simple:
The government is all in on supporting a mobility transformation that reduces traffic
Civic leaders have made significant efforts to integrate the cityâs various travel modes, making sure they all complement each other
đ On Ambition
A great follow-up piece on last weekâs hard work article:
Last week we talked about how the term âhustle pornâ is often used to stigmatize working hard altogether, and how thereâs been a culture shift from celebrating Michael Jordanâs perseverance despite the flu to celebrating Simon Bilesâ courage to drop out of the Olympics despite potential blowback.
I heard three interesting responses that Iâd like to address in this piece.Â
Why is ambition good in and of itself? Why be ambitious in work, as opposed to ambitious hobbies or other things?
Why work hard if youâre an employee, not a founder?
Why not emphasize work-life balance for most people, given that they wonât become the next Elon, and the Elons will become the next Elon regardless of what the defaults are?
Letâs tackle these three in order.
đ Podcast Episodes of the Week
This week in podcasts:
Hardcore History 68 â (BLITZ) Human Resources
The best podcaster, Dan Carlin, came back with a new episode on the Atlantic slave trade.
âThe Atlantic Slave Trade mixes centuries of human bondage with violence, economics, commerce, geopolitical competition, liberty, morality, injustice, revolution, tragedy, and bloody reckonings. That sounds like a lot, yet this show merely scratches the surface of this enormous subject.â
Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness
Life and chemistry, self-replicating molecules, the origin of life, life on Mars, aliens, Fermi Paradox, UFOs, science and authority, pickle experiment, and much more!
đ Brain Food
đ The Truth about Online Dating
As most dating has now moved online, we can understand human preferences like never before. This article is fascinating and gives a great recap of everything we now know about online dating.
First, letâs set the picture:
So now that we have all of these people feeding dating apps tremendous amounts of data, here are a few learnings:
This isnât the only interesting learning. Here are how men rate women, vs. how women rate men:
Women rate 81% of men below average and only 7% above average. Brutal.
Then, when it comes to inequality, the dating market would be one of the most unequal countries in the world if measured with the same standards:
Aviv Goldgeier at Hinge found similar levels of inequality on that app. He calculated the inequality of likes using the Gini Coefficient, which is a common measure of income inequality in which 0 is perfect equality and 1 is perfect inequality. Here is what he said:
As it pertains to incoming likes, straight females on Hinge show a Gini index of 0.376, and for straight males itâs 0.542. On a list of 149 countriesâ Gini indices provided by the CIA World Factbook, this would place the female dating economy as 75th most unequal (average â think Western Europe) and the male dating economy as the 8th most unequal (kleptocracy, apartheid, perpetual civil war â think South Africa).
I think the implications of dating going fully digital are huge. People have unrealistic expectations because now, instead of looking for mates in a smaller pool, people look at the best in a massive collection of people. Thatâs why you end up with women rating only 7% of men above average!
What this did in many cases was to merge what used to be independent national or local hierarchies into a single global hierarchy. This meant major change in who was a winner and who was a loser. The top global competitors became stupendously successful. Many former national or local champions found themselves in newfound competition with better or much, much cheaper competitors and took a big hit.
Online dating acts in a similar manner. It used to be that men and women met each other within various physical spaces and social circles in the real world: school, work, church, family friendship circles, neighborhoods, etc. You could certainly meet someone outside of that, even intentionally such as by looking at old school print personal ads. But the market you were in was much more limited.
Because every school, neighborhood, church, etc. was in essence its own market, that meant they each had their own local marketplace winners. And people would sort of match up within that based on their relative value in the market.
But with online dating, all those old local relationships markets have been merged. Itâs not true globalization because most people donât want to date someone on the other side of the world or the country. But in most places itâs certainly the metropolitanization of dating. Here in Indianapolis, for example, online dating means you have access to all the singles on those sites in a region of over two million people.
So in an online dating world, you are no longer just in competition with people in your social circles. You are in competition with everyone in your city or region. It may be true that your pool of prospects is also bigger. But the dynamics of these global type markets have in practice tended to produce more extremes of winners and losers.Â
đ„ What Iâm Watching
đšđł The Chinese Student Crisis
An interesting exploration of the scam of university rankings.
đ 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible
âThe biggest strength I have is, I have no fear.â
đ§ The Tool of the Week
đ± Substack Reader App
You can now read The Long Game in the new Substack app for iPhone.
With the app, youâll have a dedicated Inbox for my Substack and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never cut-off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, itâs a big upgrade to the reading experience.
The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you donât have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.
đȘ Quote Iâm Pondering
No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
â Socrates
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đ EndNote
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Until next week,
Mehdi Yacoubi
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