#112: What It Means to Be Great, Teaching Kids How to Gamble, Sauna Protocols

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week, we will take a look at an essay addressed to those who feel like they are running out of time, the sizes of living things, a controversial class for 13-year olds, and more.

Let's dive in:

What Does it Mean to Be 'Great'?

Hyde, aka @BreatheLesss, is one of my favorite follows on Twitter. He recently shared an essay titled "Is it too late for you, anon?", aka "You're 25-35 years old? You're running out of time! Love letter to a sensitive young man".

It's a beautiful treatise on the harsh realities humans face as we shed the label of being 'young'. We think we know ourselves, our desires, and have control over what we ultimately become, but life tends to play out differently than we believe it will. Our perception of self doesn't match with the reality of who we become.

This presents pain, especially for young people who feel destined to be 'great'. The article gives great advice as far as 'what to do' if you feel yourself in this position, which is summarized as follows:

1. I give you 3 years to chase your dreams.
2. Astrology chicks tell me that your Saturn return at the age of ~27 is an important rite of passage. That barrier, albeit arbitrary, is a potent source of insight.
3. When you find your talent, you’ll notice many early wins.
4. Check in with the emotions you want to feel right now.

Each piece has additional information, but what moved me the most from the entire article was a comment made from one reader. It's a deeper reflection on what it means to be 'great', which I believe matches closely with the theme of one of my favorite and seasonally appropriate films, It's a Wonderful Life, from reader Micah Gabriel Vigeant:

Size of Life

​Neal Agarwal is a creative programmer from NYC who has built some incredibly fun sites like Spend Bills Gates' Money, The Deep Sea, and The Size of Space. His latest project is a site that compares the sizes of living things, called The Size of Life. This stems from DNA all the way to the Pando Clone.

What makes this project incredible is the art behind it. Agarwal praises the artist he teamed up with, Julius Csotonyi, who spent over 5 months painting 60 illustrations for the site, with no AI used. The background music is a cello performance by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga and composed by Aleix Ramon.

Play around and become amazed at the size of life!

Teaching Kids How to Gamble

Controversial, but Recess founder Ben Sommers is releasing a class teaching kids how to gamble. It's called The Poker Class - Level 101, where kids will learn probability, game theory, expected value and poker-specific topics (pre-flop charts, position relevance, and more).

Many people in the comments are up in arms, but I love the idea behind it. I agree with Sommers when he says this teaches students probabilistic thinking, and that it touches upon a different set of skills outside of strategy games, sports stats, or even weather forecasting.

When these alternatives were brought up, Sommers responded with the following regarding probabilistic thinking:

Pair this with the excellent article Prediction: the Successor to Postmodernism by Alex Danco, and you may understand how this is one of the most important skills a young person can learn in the modern age of AI. The main takeaway from the article is that value creation, culture, and even personal purpose are increasingly organized around making and staking better predictions with information.

Sauna Protocols & Most Recommended Models

Don't Die king Bryan Johnson recently called saunas 'one of the most effective health protocols' he's ever done. Results from his experiments:

1. Fifteen sessions of sauna dramatically reduced environmental toxins in my body.
2. Sauna eliminated 85% of microplastics from my ejaculate.
3. Sauna, without ice on the boys, devastated my fertility markers.
4. Sauna coincided with my fertility markers being at an all-time high. I have more total and motile sperm than 99.6% of men of any age, including men under 25.
5. My vascular function improved by a ten year reduction in age. Now I have the vascular age of an elite 18-early 20s.

Along with protocols:

Ramp Capital asked around and wanted to find the best indoor dry sauna. Here is a link to the full thread, but if you would like to know the top recommendations here are a few that stood out:

• ​Almost Heaven​
• ​Sisu Lifestyle​
• ​Sauna Fin​

How to Build Connection With Anyone Immediately

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Always wishing you the best,

J.B.