The Long Game 69: Altos Labs, Chemical Hunger, Obsessive Walking & Great Thinking, Próspera
The Long Game 69: Altos Labs, Chemical Hunger, Obsessive Walking & Great Thinking, Próspera📱 Social 3.0, Web3 Resources, Chinese Debt Crisis, Epistemic Wellbeing, the Metaverse, and Much More!Hi there, it’s Mehdi Yacoubi, co-founder at Vital, and this is The Long Game Newsletter. To receive it in your inbox each week, subscribe here: 📣 We are hiring at Vital, help us build the “Strava for Health.” We are currently looking for:
We are offering $1,000 in Bitcoin if you refer to us a candidate we end up hiring. In this episode, we explore:
Let’s dive in! 🥑 Health🧬♾ Meet Altos Labs, Silicon Valley’s Latest Wild Bet on Living ForeverMore great news for longevity! A new company with a lot of funding was recently announced:
This is very important news because government agencies that usually grant research funding aren’t really interested in funding longevity research yet. So before they start doing so, we need billionaires close to the longevity cause and who aren’t pursuing short-term returns but rather care about advancing the science.
It’s great to see researchers finally paid for what they’re worth. SCOOP: An insanely well-funded company called Altos Labs is going after "rejuvenation" technology.
Yamanaka factors. Epigenetic clocks. CRISPR.
Offering academics $1 million salaries and more.
Investor rumor mill: Milner, Bezos, ARCH. Musk?
🌱 Wellness❓ A Chemical HungerThis series of articles must be one of the most baffling articles I have linked in the newsletter since its beginning. It explores a new possible explanation for the obesity epidemic in the US.
The series then explores a possible cause: chemical contamination.
This idea is worth exploring more. The field of nutrition is ridden with wrong science and industry-sponsored theories. Finding the root causes of the obesity epidemic is essential. This recent paper published in Nature is another step in the same direction: The pesticide chlorpyrifos promotes obesity by inhibiting diet-induced thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue🧠 Better Thinking🚶♀️ The Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive WalkingI found this article linking great thinking and obsessive walking fascinating (and also a good dose of confirmation bias, I admit!)
Darwin was not alone:
The questions that come to mind are: is it a correlation or causation, and if it’s causation, why is it the case? These questions remain unanswered, but on a personal level, walking a lot is a deterministic way to feel and think better. ⚡️ Startup Stuff📱 Social 3.0I have been thinking a lot about the new age of social products lately. The main reason is that we are building a social product at Vital, specifically, building the first ‘social x health’ product. We decided to focus on this vs. build a data-only product that already exists on the market. You will have all of your health optimization metrics, data, insights, + a whole social app in one! More details will be released soon. I mentioned a few interesting resources and people related to this topic in the thread below, but I’m looking for more reading, insights, and opinions. 💌 Reply to this and let me know your favorite social products and what you would love to see in our ‘social x health’ product! 📚 What I Read🌇 Próspera FAQLearn more about the new charter city Próspera in Honduras:
✋ The antidote to fake news is to nourish our epistemic wellbeingOn epistemic wellbeing:
📈 Our Visions of the Future Determine Our Society TodayYour weekly dose of optimism, and why it’s essential:
Follow-up reading: Definite optimism as human capital 🎙 Podcast Episodes of the WeekThis week in podcasts:
🍭 Brain Food🌴 Solarpunk Art ContestI recently came across a cool initiative to sponsor artists who come up with beautiful and inspiring Solarpunk art pieces.
nasjaq came up with an interesting criticism of the Solar Punk aesthetics that’s worth mentioning:
seeing a lot of solarpunk content lately and honestly: i'm not a huge fan of the aesthetic. It feels anti-capitalistic and implies humans aren't capable of staving off climate change unless we dramatically reduce our capacities, & the only thing we can do about it is plant trees 🎥 What I’m Watching🇨🇳 Chinese Debt CrisisI’m learning as much as I can about China. I enjoyed this video about the Chinese Debt Crisis. To pair with the latest episode of The All In Podcast, where they discuss China’s recent ban on video games. The video game ban seems extreme but early lockdowns in Wuhan seemed extreme at the time too.
What is it we aren’t seeing this time? Because we were missing something last time too. 🌐 You Can Beat GoogleI highly recommend Garry’s Youtube channel. This video covers an article by Waze former CEO Noam Bardin that I already shared in the newsletter but is worth resisting: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
🔧 The Tool of the Week🤓 Web3 Reading ListIf you’re on Twitter, you know that everyone is obsessed with NFTs and Web3 lately. It might remain an obscure topic for most, but this reading list should help you get up to date. One of the main reasons why web3 may be a paradigm shift is that you can see the previous generation get visibly triggered by not understanding it
You saw the same thing with previous trends: remote work, digital nomads, startups, internet
They were fringe, until they were not Justin Jackson @mijustin I really don't get the hype around web3. (I was around for the advent of the web and and "web 2.0" and was excited about both) If you're a web3 believer, what's compelling about it for you?
🪐 Quote I'm Pondering
— Michael Jordan in The Last Dance If you enjoyed this newsletter, make sure to subscribe if you haven’t 👇 👋 EndNoteThanks for reading! If you like The Long Game, please share it on social media or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. Podcast reviews are also gratefully received. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the heart just below this, which helps me get visibility on Substack. Feel free to email me or find me on Twitter if you have any feedback or questions. Until next week, Mehdi Yacoubi PS: Lots of newsletters get stuck in Gmail’s Promotions tab. If you find it in there, please help train the algorithm by dragging it to Primary. It makes a big difference. If you liked this post from The Long Game by Mehdi Yacoubi, why not share it? |
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The Long Game 68: Zone 2 Training, the Efficiency Trap, Mimetic Desire, Optimism, Tote Bags
Monday, August 30, 2021
🥛 Whole Milk, Maybe, the Streetlight Effect, How Afghanistan Became a Failed State, Anti-Doping, and Much More!
The Long Game 67: Vital, Smartphones & Wellbeing, Seeing the Future, Remote Work
Monday, August 23, 2021
🌐 The Metaverse, Climate Change, Time Dilation, Afghanistan, Parasocial Relationships, Reveri, and Much More!
The Long Game 66: Feeling Great, Sacrifice, Cold Emails, How Asia Works
Monday, August 16, 2021
⏳ Every Hour Matters, Afghanistan, Geothermal Energy, Quantum Gravity, Russia, Khodorkovsky, Saturn, and Much More!
The Long Game 65: Polygenic Embryo Screening, Cognitive Improvement, The Measure & Improve Paradox
Monday, August 9, 2021
🌒 Seeing on the Far Side of the Moon, The Dissident, North Korea, Earth's Most Wanted Hacker, and Much More!
The Long Game 64: Longevity Moonshot, Positive People, Awkwardness Principle, Product Thinking
Monday, August 2, 2021
🥶 Cryonics, Thiel Fellowship, Productivity, Plastic, Strava, Cancer Screening, and Much More!
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