Arvind's Newsletter

1.US short seller Hindenburg Research is targeting Asia’s richest man with accusations of market manipulation and fraud. The bold move comes after a run of often-successful bets against companies ranging from electric-vehicle maker Nikola to Twitter. The firm published an almost 100-
page report on Gautam Adani’s Adani Group, sending shares of the Indian group’s companies tumbling Wednesday. And the pain may not be over. Hindenburg has targeted about 30 companies since 2020. On average, their stocks lost about 15% the next day, and were down 26% six months later.

Over the past few years, Nathan Anderson has made a name with analysis that sends stocks sinking. Now the activist short seller behind Hindenburg Research is going after his biggest game yet, but soon, Adani may bring the fight to Hindenburg.

2.We have historically thought about weight as the mere outcome of our deliberate choices about diet and exercise. We have not typically thought about weight like a disease. But in the past 18 months, there’s been an extraordinary revolution in weight-loss medication that’s putting in our hands a therapy that can help people easily shed weight without major side effects. You may have heard these drugs go by the names Wegovy or Ozempic. But activists fear that fat people may feel pressured to take these medications in order to access the same rights as their non-fat counterparts, rather than out of any desire to improve their health.

This article which is a transcript of Derek Thompson’s interview with Susan Yanovski who is co-director of the Office of Obesity Research and the Program director of the division of Digestive Diseases and Nutrition of NIH on the impact of anti-obesity medication (weight-loss drugs) on society in general and what are the key risks. Read the transcript below or listen on Spotify to the Podcast (Plain English)

3. How to Be 18 Years Old Again for Only $2 Million a Year by Ashlee Vance of Bloomberg
This article is under a paywall so I enclose some excerpts below:

Novak Djokovic, age 35, sometimes hangs out in a pressurized egg to enrich his blood with oxygen and gives pep talks to glasses of water, hoping to purify them with positive thinking before he drinks them. Tom Brady, 45, evangelizes supposedly age-defying supplements, hydration powders and pliability spheres. LeBron James, 38, is said to spend $1.5 million a year on his body to keep Father Time at bay. While most of their contemporaries have retired, all three of these elite athletes remain marvels of fitness. But in the field of modern health science, they’re amateurs compared to Bryan Johnson.

Bryan Johnson, the founder of payments platform Braintree, spends 30% more than that — $2 million dollars per year. Johnson has taken the idea of the quantified-self to the extreme and is on a quest to reverse aging. Supposedly it’s working: the 45 year old has a “biological age” of 30, according to some doctors.

Johnson, 45, is an ultrawealthy software entrepreneur who has more than 30 doctors and health experts monitoring his every bodily function. The team, led by 29-year-old regenerative medicine physician Oliver Zolman, has committed to help reverse the aging process;in every one of Johnson’s organs. Zolman and Johnson obsessively read the scientific literature on aging and longevity and use Johnson as a guinea pig for the most promising treatments, tracking the results every way they know how. Getting the program up and running required an investment of several million dollars, including the costs of a medical suite at Johnson’s home in Venice, California. This year, he’s on track to spend at least $2 million on his body. He wants to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis and rectum of an 18-year-old.

Johnson, Zolman and the team are more than a year into their experiments, which they collectively call Project Blueprint. This includes strict guidelines for Johnson’s diet (1,977 vegan calories a day), exercise (an hour a day, high-intensity three times a week) and sleep (at the same time every night, after two hours wearing glasses that block blue light). In the interest of fine-tuning this program, Johnson constantly monitors his vital signs. Each month, he also endures dozens of medical procedures, some quite extreme and painful, then measures their results with additional blood tests, MRIs, ultrasounds and colonoscopies. “I treat athletes and Hollywood celebrities, and no one is pushing the envelope as much as Bryan,” says Jeff Toll, an internist on the team. All the work, the doctors say, has started to pay off: Johnson’s body is, as they measure it, getting medically younger.

4. It’s easy to lose the spark for work you once loved. Five strategies can help re-ignite your fire.

5 A Turkish company supplying power plants installed on ships announced it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Ukraine's state-owned energy trader company to cooperate on jointly developing and implementing a project to supply the war-torn country with up to 500 megawatts of electricity.

Missile and drone strikes by Russia have damaged critical infrastructure in Ukraine, including about 40% of the country's energy system. As a result, Kyiv is looking to "powerships" that can generate electricity using low-sulfur fuel oil or biodiesel.