Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food

Author: Chris Van Tulleken

I was expecting a scientific explanation about Ultra-Processed Food (UPF) and some guidance on what foods to avoid. After reading the book, I am more confused than before. 

Let’s start with the definition. Apparently, UPF has a long scientific definition that the author feels is not worth writing down in the book. Instead he says this: “If it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t usually find in a standard home kitchen, it’s UPF”.  I have no idea what a “standard home kitchen” is.  In our kitchen, we have all kinds of ingredients that we use to cook our meals with and it is quite conceivable that some of these ingredients are ultra-processed. So I guess my kitchen deviates from the “standard” that the author is referring to. Needless to say, this doesn’t help me get any closer to the definition of UPF.

I don’t let this minor technicality bother me too much and continue reading the book only to find that the author expands the definition to be extremely broad. In general, anything that is marketed and sold by profit making companies, could be classified as UPF. A case in point being the extension of the UPF label to bottled water, as it is now aggressively marketed and is messing with your mind. Notwithstanding this extreme case, there are tons of examples in the book of the deleterious effects that many innocent sounding food additives like coloring, xantham gum, lecithin, inulin, emulsifiers, modified starches. It turns out that many of these have the potential of messing with your natural regulatory mechanisms of food consumption and consequently can cause you to eat more and put on weight.

The book is not particularly well organized and makes for a difficult read.

The Good Virus

Author: Tom Ireland

This book goes into the wonderful world of bacteriophages. Phages are little viruses that attack and destroy bacteria in the process of replicating themselves. In a world, where our antibiotics are soon going to be ineffective bacteriophages may turn out to be one of our most important life saving medicines.

It turns out that while people discovered the existence of phages more than a hundred years ago, this field has not got its due from the scientific and medical community. This book goes into the the history of the early Pioneers, who put phages on the map, and then the trio of scientists, Delbrook, Luria, and Hershey, who really did phenomenal work in this area. They essentially invented an entirely new field of biology that was heavily dependent on mathematics to tease out the workings of phages.

Note that they started out on this endeavor before the discovery of electron microscopes before Watson, and Crick had their famous double-helix DNA model. In fact, Delbrook was driven with a mission to uncover the secret of life and phages were just a side product in his view. Unfortunately before he was able to discover the genetic code, Watson who was a student of Luria actually discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and the rest is history. However, the work that this trio has done has gone off to inspire at least six Nobel prizes and help make many other breakthroughs in the life sciences . 

Here’s some very interesting observations from the book

• There are more phages in a typical liter of sea water then there are humans on the planet. And there are 10^21 litres of water on the planet.
• CRISPR —> Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Discovered by Mojica while studying viruses in the hypersaline waters off the coast of Alicante, Spain.  It turns out that many bacteria have this Cas-9  (CRISPR associated) protein that can hunt for phage DNA sequences that match and cut them in half.
• The yoghurt industry pioneered the discovery and study of phages and CRISPR as they were lookin to protect the integrity of the bacterial strains that were used in the yoghurt culture.
• There’s an open source phage library called the “[Citizen Phage Library](https://www.citizenphage.com/)” project. To become a Phage Hunter, all you need to do is use their sample kit to mail a sample of water from your environment. You register the location and photos through their web-site and they’ll process it to identify new phages
• The OG of Phages is a French-Canadian scientist named Felix d’Herelle and there is a startup in the Bay Area named Felix that is developing a Digital Phage Platform.

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

Author: Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis has a rare gift for taking something complex in the world and writing a great book about it. In this particular case, he also happened to be in the right place at the right time, capturing the rise of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and friends, just before they got all consumed up in managing their downfall. 

The story starts with SBF attending an exclusive high school — Crystal Springs — in the San Francisco Bay area and being a gifted awkward student that by itself, would have been commonplace in Silicon Valley. He then went to MIT and graduated with a degree in Physics and a minor in Mathematics. His formative years in the workplace were at Jane Street Capital, one of the top global trading firms credited with trading trillions of dollars of security annually. The first few chapters in the book describe the quirky hiring practices and workplace culture at Jane Street that attracted the brightest young graduates from the top schools in the US. They paid them handsomely as well.  One of their main tenets was evaluating the Expected Value (EV) of trades and decision making was often reduced to maximizing the EV around trades, positions, etc. 

From Michael’s description it is clear that SBF and friends (Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh, Gary Wang, Ramnik Arora, …) tried to use EV as a general framework for all sorts of decisions that they were faced with.  It’s amusing to read how random probabilities were thrown around and used to compute rough Expected Values to conveniently arrive at decisions.

The whole story can be broken down into a few key points

1. Sam was heavily influenced by the Effective Altruism Movement and had William MacAskill retained as an unpaid advisor. 

2. He got tired of working at Jane Street Capital and figured out that he could make a lot of money in the arbitrage of  of cryptocurrency prices in different countries. He started a company in Berkeley California, where he recruited more than a dozen young effective altruitsts, and named it Alameda Research. 

3. They were making money hand over fist and SBF started getting noticed at crypto conferences in Macau and then Hong Kong. 

4. Being one of the largest traders in the crypto sphere, he realized that the existing crypto exchanges were really crappy in terms of their user interface, glitchy and had little to no customer support. Along with Gary Wang, he decided to build a much better crypto derivative exchange and FTX was born in 2019. 

5. Some of the key innovations with FTX was a system where margin accounts were liquidated within 30 seconds of their going negative. This greatly limited FTX from holding the bag in case one side of a trade went insolvent and protected the other customers from being hurt in the process. 

6. Alameda Research was now a sister company that also had a trading account of FTX. It typically was the market maker on the exchange and was the last resort for liquidity, buying up the contents of insolvent margin accounts whenever needed. 

7. To ensure that Alameda was always around, FTX had a special “do_not_liquidate” flag for the Alameda Research account that allowed it to go negative in terms of its balance on FTX. This little loop-hole, turned into a $65B line of credit that ended up sucking out customer money from FTX.

8. Alameda Research siphoned out ~$10B worth of customer funds and that is what ulitmately triggered the run on FTX and its ensuing bankruptcy.

9. One of the big mysteries that is left open in the book is where did this money go? Other than fraud, there doesn’t seem to be any glaring trading loss from Alameda Research, etc. that can explain this vast hole in the bank account.

In addition to telling the above story there’s a lot of detail of the many characters at the top of FTX and Alameda Research. The strange romance between SBF and Caroline Ellison is also explained with little fanfare by Michael. It is made clear to the reader that Sam’s quirky behavior is consistently plastered over all aspects of his life. 

While Sam was clearly a poor manager — he abhorred one-on-ones and simply didn’t like talking to people, unless he was playing a video game on the side — it turns out that he wrote a bunch of memos to his team that demonstrated that he not only thought through managerial things, but also was able to articulate it well. Typically he did this by writing a memo with a few succinct bullet points. Here’s an example of a memo he wrote on elevated titles in the workplace:

1. Having a title makes people feel less willing to take advice from those without titles.

2. Having a title makes people less likely to put in the effort to learn how to do well at the base-level jobs of people they're managing. They end up trying to manage people whose jobs they couldn't do, and that always goes poorly.

3. Having titles can create significant conflicts between your ego and the company.

4. Having titles can piss off colleagues.

The book also has some pithy observation credited to Sam like “People like you more if you agree with them”. He apparently embraced this aphorism personally and used to respond with a “Yup”  as a standard response to most attempts at conversation.

It’s too bad that Michael  published his book before the US court proceedings. I am sure, he would have got a lot more insight into FTX/Alameda and would have a more detailed explanation of the many acounting mis-deeds that brought the company down. 

One glaring absence from the book is Gary Wang. He is the clear architect and developer of the FTX software, but Michael could not get even a couple of words out of Gary.  If you want the technical details of how Alameda Research was able to draw down billions of dollars from FTX, check out this Verge article  which describes Gary Wang’s testimony in court. For a more in-depth review of the fradulent code, Molly White includes the damning evidence from the code.

All quibbles aside, this is a great piece of writing that is quite entertaining and sheds light on the characters that made and broke FTX and Alameda Research. It makes for a quick and fascinating read.