Free issue today, or rather, sponsored by the startup I’ve been working on (more below). If you’re reading this hungover, try Last Call next time (FD20 for 20% off).
⏳ I came across this 16th-century Korean letter written by a pregnant widow to her deceased husband and found it incredibly moving.
You always said to me, "We'll be together until our hair turns gray, then die together", so how could you go and leave without me? Whom should I and our child turn to; how should we live? How could you leave us all behind and go on your own?
How did you feel about me, and how did I feel about you? Each time we lay together, I asked you "Dear, do other people love and cherish each other as we do? Are they like us?" How could you forget my words and abandon me?
History can feel so flat and cold, until you read something like this and realize that people’s lives centuries ago were just as vivid and emotionally rich as ours. This is why I value good historical fiction and period movies. It’s speculative but you get that full sense of what they might have been like as people.
Highlights in this issue:
Alcohol health
declining intelligence
controlled nuclear proliferation
50 thoughts on DOGE
Good reading,
—TK
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Any change in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans later this year—currently up to two drinks a day for men and one drink a day for women—could upend people’s perception of their nightly tipple with far-reaching consequences for the alcohol industry and the public.
The scientists don’t agree on moderate drinking. Conventional wisdom used to say that a little bit of alcohol had some health benefits. Now, more researchers and governments are saying that less alcohol is best for your health.
In January, the outgoing surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, called for cancer warning labels, although it’s hard to imagine that happening under the new administration. But who knows, both President Trump and HHS Secretary RFK Jr. are known abstainers.
Drinking can damage your body in a few different ways. When you metabolize alcohol, your body breaks it down to acetaldehyde, a toxic chemical that can damage DNA and proteins. Alcohol also generates chemically reactive molecules containing oxygen, which can damage proteins, fats and DNA...
The dangers of drinking too much loom especially large for women, who have lower levels of an enzyme that breaks down alcohol. Their bodies also contain less water and more fat, and they weigh less than men on average.
There seems to be a general movement towards increased health consciousness about alcohol consumption, even in the NBA. Despite that trend, alcohol consumption has stayed pretty stable over time.
So this is actually what I’ve been working on for the past year and a half, and why I took a few months’ hiatus on the newsletter. I first got into this during college when I read this WIRED magazine article about the science behind hangovers. It turns out that electrolytes and drinking water don’t really do much for you.
After taking a trip to South Korea a few years ago, I was reminded how much the alcohol wellness category is established there. When I got back, my friend Sampson and I started an alcohol wellness brand, Last Call, inspired by some of the products in Korea and Japan. Our key differentiator is DHM, a plant extract used in most of the popular products over there. It targets the way alcohol affects your body and helps the body metabolize alcohol more efficiently.
Drinking is one of the oldest human social traditions around how we celebrate and enjoy our lives. Most people don’t necessarily want to stop drinking, they just want to be healthier about it. The idea is that whenever you drink, even if it's light, you should be taking something like an alcohol vitamin that helps counteract the effects and helps you feel optimal the next day. If you’re curious to try it out, you can use FD20 for 20% off. And feel free to shoot me any questions at teddy@trylastcall.com.
🧠 Data suggest human reasoning and intelligence has continued to decline since the early 2010s.
In many cases, they fell further between 2012 and 2018 than they did during the pandemic-affected years. And broader in that this decline in measures of reasoning and problem-solving is not confined to teenagers. Adults show a similar pattern, with declines visible across all age groups in last year’s update of the OECD’s flagship assessment of trends in adult skills.
Much of this may have to do not with our raw intelligence but how our environments (i.e. smartphones) have eroded our attention and capacity to concentrate.
Part of what we’re looking at here is likely to be a result of the ongoing transition away from text and towards visual media — the shift towards a “post-literate” society spent obsessively on our screens…
Particularly striking however is that we see this [decline in reading] alongside decreasing performance in the application of numeracy and other forms of problem-solving in most countries.
☢️ It’s hard to escape the feeling that the lesson of the last few decades has been: it’s good to have nuclear weapons. Ukraine, which gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994, is the obvious recent example. Libya and Syria both failed to develop them and suffered foreign invasion, domestic civil war, and regime change. Iran has been attacked by the US and Israel. Meanwhile, North Korea has never been threatened and Israel, though having been attacked, is safer for having them. All of these examples raise the question of how present and future leaders of unsecure states, both free and authoritarian, will think about the need for WMDs. What kind of incentives have we created?
The moral of these stories and others is painfully, uncomfortably clear. The modern world is a place where nuclear-armed great powers, led by authoritarian leaders, often feel the impulse to bully smaller nations. If those smaller nations lack nuclear weapons, they lie prostrate and vulnerable at the feet of the bullies. But if they have nukes, they are much harder to push around.
The nuclear do what they can and the non-nuclear suffer what they must. In that context, “controlled nuclear proliferation” sounds about as reasonable as “responsible meth distribution” but Noah Smith makes an interesting case for why American allies such as Poland, South Korea, and Japan should pursue their own nuclear weapons.
Smith’s argument is that
Nuclear proliferation is already happening
American allies stand in the path of Chinese and Russian expansionist ambitions
The American nuclear umbrella is no longer reliable
A true non-proliferation regime will require Chinese and Russian cooperation, i.e. they need to have an interest in actually enforcing real non-proliferation vs. the one-sided non-proliferation status quo we have now.
The third point is especially important and has consequences beyond nuclear policy.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recent Kissinger quote: “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”
Which leads me to the next item…
Few changes prompted by President Trump’s second term could be as consequential for Europe as Germany shedding fiscal prudence to turbocharge its military and retool its economy…
Germany’s spending plan, equivalent to around $1.08 trillion, has drawn cheers across a continent unnerved by signs that the U.S. is downgrading its security commitment to Europe and seeking a rapprochement with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which is seen as the region’s biggest threat.
The plan required a constitutional amendment to exempt defense-related spending from Germany’s strict fiscal rules. This is a huge shift in Germany’s traditional austerity mindset and aversion to debt.
The spending package is made possible by a constitutional amendment that effectively exempts defense-related spending from the provisions of Germany’s strict fiscal rules, which ban budget deficits bigger than 0.35% of gross domestic product.
Friedrich Merz, in line to be the next chancellor, was previously one of the biggest supporters for these fiscal rules.
Good post from Tanner Greer about a speech Robert Gates gave 14 years ago that foreshadowed this moment.
🐕 DOGE news has been breaking at too fast a pace for me to cover in fD but Santi Ruiz’s “50 Thoughts on DOGE” is the best thing I’ve read so far on covering the good, the bad, and the ugly. Really good thoughts here on Elon himself, DOGE’s impact so far, goals explicit and implicit, what can be labeled “DOGE” vs. Trumpism at large, and what’s next.
So far, DOGE has focused only on the firing part, and not at all on the hiring part. That’s a shame for a couple reasons. It’s a missed opportunity to fix the talent pipelines that plague federal hiring. And because DOGE is constrained by a preexisting set of rules around reductions in force, the people DOGE is firing are disproportionately the more talented and more useful people…
It’s quite plausible that cutting headcount and automating more systems will help certain federal agencies do their work better. But we tend to think that many of the problems with federal agencies come from regulatory and procedural burdens on the agencies themselves. From that perspective, the solution isn’t to punish civil servants, but to release them from crappy strictures that make them worse at their jobs.
🏳️🌈 “Nearly one in 10 adults in the United States identifies as L.G.B.T.Q… The increases have been driven by young people, and by bisexual women… More than half of these L.G.B.T.Q. young adults identify as bisexual.” For Gen Z, that figure is close to one in four.
🇷🇺 “The rouble has surged almost a third against the dollar this year on hopes of an end to the three-year conflict.”
Traders have used Kazakhstan’s tenge as a proxy for the rouble, because of the country’s economic ties with Russia, with volumes reaching $100mn to $200mn a week. The tenge has rallied about 5 per cent against the dollar this year…
Some banks and brokers are offering wagers on moves in the rouble that are settled in dollars, so investors can avoid direct exposure to the country. These so-called non-deliverable forwards (NDFs) are often used to trade currencies that are hard to source outside their home countries, such as those of Nigeria or Egypt.
🍶 Sake producers in Japan are losing ground to Japanese whisky
Between 2015 and 2020, domestic whisky sales increased 50%. Japanese drinkers spent $3.5 billion on the spirit in 2023. This has left sake producers struggling to find a way to keep the party going. By some measures consumption has fallen by more than 75% since the 1970s, and 30% in the past decade, displaced in part by invasive species—sometimes beer, but especially whisky…
Brewers have begun experimenting with new recipes of “craft” sake, adding unusual ingredients to hit hoppy, beer-inspired flavors and floral, gin-like notes. One brewery has developed an Italian-inspired “margherita” sake, blending the umami of sun-dried tomatoes with the amino acids produced during sake’s traditional brewing process.
If you’re unfamiliar with Japanese whisky, reading the Wikipedia page of Masataka Taketsuru, the godfather of the industry, is a fun place to start. Born to a sake brewing family, Taketsuru studied in Scotland and married a Scottish lady before returning to Japan to help establish its first commercial whisky distillery.
🗞 Here’s a link to my News Journal where I'm collecting the headlines that catch my interest each day so that when we look back at that at the end of the year, we'll see when things happened, what kind of patterns emerged, without the problem of hindsight bias.
You’ve made it all the way to the end! Thanks for reading fD. You can support my work by upgrading to premium or share the newsletter with a friend. —TK
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