The Expedition: A scientific prescription to run faster, epic soup recipe, thoughts on optimization, seed oils and cancer, etc.
14 ideas to improve your life this month.
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The post
The Expedition is a monthly journey into thoughts, opinions, ideas, observations, studies, facts, figures, etc.
Good ones, insightful ones, interesting ones, weird ones, and ones you can use to live well and long.
It’s a roundup of all the worthwhile stuff I’ve discovered in the last month. The Expedition is a bit of an island of misfit toys. But, hey, the greatest journeys are winding.
This month, we’re covering:
A book I’m rereading that makes me LOL to the point of oxygen deprivation.
Numbers on:
How more exercise reduces your risk of death.
The percentage of people who stay healthy while on vacation.
Gen Z’s thoughts on social media and smartphones.
The rise of flip phones.
The government’s ability to keep our food safe.
How many gift card dollars go unused.
Changes in 100-mile run world records.
Will social media become like dying shopping malls? I doubt it. A response to a viral Substack post.
How to run a faster race: The scientific prescription.
The greatest lentil soup recipe of all time (from Tamar Haspel).
The downsides of optimization: A case study from the NBA that applies to your life, work, and health.
Do seed oils cause cancer? An astute analysis of the research.
A parting quote.
Let’s roll …
A book I’m rereading: A Confederacy of Dunces
I started rereading this book on a flight from Las Vegas to NYC last week—and spent the flight laughing alone to myself like a complete idiot. My aisle-mates assumed I was:
Drunk.
High.
Deranged.
All of the above.
Nope. It was all John Kennedy Toole, who is one of the funniest writers ever.
Toole wrote A Confederacy of Dunces in his 20s. He submitted the book to a couple of publishers, who deemed it pointless. Toole left the manuscript in his childhood bedroom, spun into depression, and committed suicide in 1969 at age 31.
His mother, however, was determined to get the book published. By the late 1970s, she had found a publisher—and the book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.
Read it and remember two lessons:
By the numbers
21
Percent the risk of early death dropped among people who followed the minimum guidelines for exercise, which suggest 150 minutes a week of moderate activity.
31
Percent the risk of early death dropped among people who got two to four times more exercise than the minimum guidelines, or 300 to 600 weekly minutes of moderate activity.
The lesson: More exercise is better, but there’s a rate of diminishing returns.
38
Percent of people say they maintain their fitness routine and eat healthy while on vacation.
My vacation health approach: I walk everywhere, occasionally sneak in an early morning strength workout, and eat healthy two out of three daily meals.
Half
Of Gen Z wishes TikTok, Snapchat, and X weren’t invented.
Roughly a quarter of that generation wishes smartphones weren’t invented.
37.6
Percent that flip phone sales grew from 2023 to 2024.
Have you switched to a flip phone? If yes, comment and let us know how it went.
My solution: Clearspace. It’s the best solution I’ve found to combat excessive phone use. Click the link on your phone to get the phone version or desktop to get the desktop version.
57
Percent of Americans that have “at least a fair amount of confidence in the government to keep food safe.”
Meanwhile, 28 percent don’t have much confidence and 14 percent have no confidence at all in the government’s ability to keep our food safe.
Where do you stand?
$23,000,000,000
Estimated total amount of money contained on unused gift cards in the United States.
23 hours, 15 minutes
Time of the 100-mile run world record, set in 1762 by John Hague in England.
10 hours, 51 minutes
Time of the 100-mile run world record, set in 2022 by Aleksandr Sorokin in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Are social media platforms the next dying malls?
Ted Gioia wrote an interesting and viral post about social media at his Substack, The Honest Broker.
Gioia compares social media to shopping malls, arguing that social will become like shopping malls: irrelevant and dead. But I respectfully disagree with him.
In the 80s and 90s, we built giant, enclosed malls nationwide. But the industry has largely collapsed, and most malls from that era are either bulldozed, abandoned, or “dying,” meaning they have less than 40% occupancy.
Gioia makes five points, ranging from the fact that malls were never real places for community building, we built too many of them, and they became identical. Social media, he says, has all those hallmarks.
It’s an interesting piece, but here’s why I disagree:
Social media is on us 24/7, not a place we physically visit.
Any time we feel the pull of boredom, we can jump into social media and distract the discomfort of boredom. It’s a no-effort, immediate solution to a problem. Going to a mall takes travel and effort.Social media is engineered to give us what we individually respond to, malls are not.
Social media algorithms deliver a uniquely tailored stream of the exact content we’ll respond to.
Malls would only be like this if you could teleport yourself to the mall instantly and the mall offered a perfect, ever-changing range of stores engineered exactly to your preferences. If that were the case, I imagine malls would still be alive and thriving.Malls have fewer, slower random and unpredictable rewards.
Social media thrives on the Scarcity Loop. It’s the most powerful habit loop for grabbing our attention, holding it, and driving us into behaviors we often later regret. It’s three parts are opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability. Read more about it here.
Malls might have unpredictable rewards in the form of, say, finding an item to buy or running into someone you know. But these unpredictable rewards are few and slow—not quickly repeatable.
Social media, on the other hand, lives on random, unpredictable rewards in the form of surprising content, likes, retweets, follows, DMs and more. And they come at us fast. Decades of psychological research show that the faster you can do a behavior, (in this case check and recheck your phone) the more likely you are to do the behavior.
For these reasons, I think the closest physical location comparison to social media is casinos. And casinos and gambling are here to stay.
My sense is that social media might contract and change over time, but we’ll always have some form of it in our life.
How to run a fast marathon: The scientific prescription
Statisticians in the UK recently analyzed the training logs of 119,452 marathoners.
They looked at how often and how fast they ran in training. And the results can tell you exactly how to train if you want to run a faster race—whether it’s a 5k, 10k, half marathon, marathon, or ultra.