👋 ASB Partners Nuggets 10.24.25
This is a short weekly email that covers a few things I’ve found interesting during the week.
Interesting Links/Reads
Many links are sourced from Marginal Revolution (bold and italics are my own to highlight what I found particularly interesting)
Example of how I used AI to fix my dryer and save myself from brining in a repair man
From Patrick Collison on Twitter:
Maybe a very prosaic observation, but I’ve been reflecting on just how much the pandemic changed the world in ways that are completely unrelated to the pandemic itself. I think I’ve underestimated it ’till now.
In a recent interview, I was struck by the comment that so many of the shops that we associate with the best of France—the poissonneries and the fromageries—closed during the pandemic, to be replaced by take-out pizza shops and the like.
College professors almost uniformly describe big changes in student behavior: lecture attendance and willingness of students to complete reading assignments are both way down.
A UK government official recently told me that British economic statistics have become much less reliable since the pandemic: data on trade, employment, and population is suspect. (The true GDP per capita figures are probably worse than what is indicated by the published data, since the 2021 census is believed to be an undercount.)
In the West, there are far fewer bustling workplaces than there used to be. In recent conversation with a well-traveled friend, he bemoaned how so many cities—places like Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Bali—have lost so much of their erstwhile vibrant nightlife.
Immigration accelerated enormously across many countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia.
In China, I hear descriptions of how fear, caution, and conservatism have persisted since the COVID lockdowns. (And Western travel to China remains massively depressed.)
Lots of the changes are neutral, or even good. Retail participation in the US stock market almost doubled overnight, say, and has persisted at that elevated rate. Firm creation in the US increased by around 50%, which is probably a very good thing.
Overall, the number of time series (either literal or figurative) that jumped discontinuously during COVID and then didn’t return to baseline is just very striking.
Which are the best historical analogs? Are there any apart from major wars?
I want to read this book!
Thanks to a 2012 law that qualified beekeeping for an agricultural exemption on property taxes, [Jason] Smith found his honeybees also saved him close to $5,000 a year.
Soon, friends were asking him to help them do the same. And before long, JC’s Honey Bees was born.
“You pay me, say, $2,000 a year to save yourself $6,000 or $8,000 a year, and my footprint on your property is small. You just have to be OK with some red neck showing up on your property once a month, tending to the bees and leaving,” he said. ...
According to the most recent Census of Agriculture in 2022, there were about 9,000 bee farms in Texas. That’s more than any other state. It’s more than the 21 lowest states combined.
It’s also a number that’s more than quadrupled since the 2012 law took effect.
Podcast/Videos
Liberal democracy is on its heels. There is some retreat, but we’re still better off than we were in the ’90s, the ’80s, the ’70s, the ’60s, the ’50s in terms of liberal democracy. I don’t think it’s gone forever.
COWEN: I think my view would be science will do fine, but even the Enlightenment proper did not have universalism to begin with. The future for universalism, to me, looks quite grim. I think we will have a steady stream of low-level conflict across major powers. China does all these cyberattacks on us. They would have been acts of war way back when, and we just put up with it. Russia sabotages EU infrastructure. That might have been an act of war way back when. We just put up with it. We’ll just be creeping up, up, up that threshold, not to nuclear war, but we’ll get as close as we can get without deterrence really having to kick in. The world will just be more violent and have more conflict. Why is that wrong?
PINKER: I think that’s interesting because, as you say, it doesn’t result in war, and war would be much worse. The invasion of Ukraine, rewinding the clock 100 years, that could have been like the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo. It could have been that NATO decided to go all in, and something like World War I or even worse could have happened. As awful as Ukraine is, and that is awful, it’s not as bad as World War I.
If these cyberattacks, these insults, because of a norm threatened by Putin, no doubt, and by Xi, that you don’t invade your neighbors, you don’t try to rearrange borders by force, we haven’t had another world war. If what you said is correct, things could suck, but still, they could suck much worse if we had a world war. I think it is less likely than it was 100 years ago.
Adam Buckstein’s TL;DR: You should try to consume 2grams of protein per kilogram of body weight (~1gram/per pound of body weight) which is more than double the current recommended daily amount
⇒ That’s important because we don’t store amino acids like we store fatty acids as triglycerides or we store glucose as glycogen
The major source of our amino acid storage tank (so to speak) is our muscle skeletal muscle tissue
And you don’t want to be pulling from that skeletal muscle tissue to get amino acids every day
Why do we need amino acids every day?
Because everything in our body requires proteins
Proteins are doing all the work in our body
Proteins are made up of amino acids, and so we have to be giving ourselves a daily intake of amino acids to make sure we’re able to do all those functions
Peter wants to state that again because there’s a very important and fundamental point here that is glossed over when we talk about it because we take it for granted
We can store fat in unlimited quantities ‒ so if you deprive a person of fat calories for a period of time, they have a long reservoir that they can dig into
We can store carbohydrates
Now we can’t store them quite as much because we only have so much glycogen we can store in the muscle and in the liver
But when we break down fat, we keep making the substrate to actually make glucose [gluconeogenesis]
So we get into a nice little rhythm
The only place that an amino acid sits in residence in our body is in the muscle
⇒ Therefore, if we even get near the edge where we are not getting sufficient intake of amino acids, we don’t have a buffer, we don’t have a rainy day fund that we can dip into, we immediately start to catabolize or break down muscle
The case for raising the protein RDA by at least 50% [A: 9:45, V: 7:12]
There have been multiple isotope tracer studies showing that 1-2 g of protein per kg of body weight is needed to prevent negative protein balance in adults
This is quite a bit more than the RDA of 0.8 g/kg (50% more)
Most of the isotope tracer studies show 30-50% more protein intake is required
That’s really important because if we look at the actual protein intakes of adults, these are nutritional surveys that are done: they’re all flawed
We all know the flaws of questionnaires
We know the rates at which muscle mass/skeletal mass are declining by decade in an aging population. Is there any way we can estimate what percent of that decay is simply being driven by insufficient amino acid consumption versus other factors?
Other factors would be
1 – Anabolic resistance associated with aging
2 – Anabolic resistance associated with sedentary behavior
3 – Lack of sufficient resistance training
There are many factors that explain clearly the fact that as a person goes from 50 to 60 to 70 on average they’re losing muscle mass
⇒ But when older adults take in 1.2 g/kg of protein, it nearly eliminates some of the age-related muscle loss that happens
Rhonda thinks that is some evidence to support what Peter was saying in that if older adults increase their protein intake by 50% to this minimum, they’re actually preventing a lot of the age-related loss in muscle that occurs
Most experts agree that the RDA should be 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight per day ‒ it’s time to change the RDA to that number
Anabolic resistance compounds with the fact that we’re already not getting enough protein to be in a positive state of protein balance
Anabolic resistance is when your muscle tissue becomes less sensitive to amino acids, and so muscle protein synthesis isn’t occurring as much as it does when you’re younger
⇒ The consensus now is that a lot of anabolic resistance is not necessarily due to the aging process per se, so much as inactivity
Peter points out the impact that physical training has on insulin resistance as well
Completely different mechanism of action, probably ties in more to fatty acid accumulation within muscles and all sorts of other things that lead to it
But again, the most effective remedy is physical activity
Peter’s advice: you must steel yourself for what is coming, and you must build up as much muscle mass and strength and cardiovascular fitness as you can muster, because the longer you can ride it out, the better you’re going to be
Rhonda agrees, “It’s like our retirement fund. You have to put money in because one day you will retire, and if you don’t put any money in that fund, you’re going to be screwed. And so with the muscle mass, you’re right. You have to bank as much as you can while you’re young.”
The unmatched longevity benefits of exercise, its synergy with higher protein intake, and Peter’s recommended protein intake [A: 1:06:15, V: 1:11:33]
In Peter’s view, all roads still point back to this idea that exercise is the most important drug
He’s just not aware of a “drug” that is better than exercise
And there’s this enormous effort to figure out a way to put exercise into a pill
He just can’t imagine it’ll ever happen
Optimal creatine use: dosing for adults and teens, safe product selection, debunking kidney myths, and more [A: 1:25:45, V: 1:34:27]
GI side effects
Peter remembers, as a kid, he never had GI side effects even when taking 30 g a day, but for some people it’s 10-20 g
In one dose, that would affect a lot of people’s GI
Rhonda does 5 g doses: she’ll put 5 g into water or tea, and takes it before noon
Rhonda thinks the most important thing is that it’s creatine monohydrate
The reason people like Creapure® is because it’s pure
But what Rhonda likes even more than that is NSF certification because there’s rigorous testing to make sure there’s no lead contamination and these heavy metals and things that sort of hitchhike on a lot of these supplements.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Adam
Are you familiar with Reuven Kigel's eating plan, based on Shulchan Arukh and Misha Berurah?