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(soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music)
(soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) - Okay, hello everybody. Welcome to the show. I just interrupted Ray and he was talking about the CIA and art. Ray, go ahead and reiterate or say whatever you were gonna say before I interrupted you. - Oh, just that the traditions in painting
had accumulated lots of knowledge from the time of Michelangelo and the older, older so-called classical paintings. They had been learning actual physical principles about light and geometry and teaching their art students sort of an aspect of physics to use in representing the world. And then the first world war, the Dada surrealist reaction and Freudianism rejected the whole so-called rational system that created such terrible things as the world war. And that went with a lot of experimentation in both the arts and sciences and humanities trying out different things
and Hitler closed all of the experimental art schools and descending science programs and such. But right during and after the second world war, the CIA created the thing they called Congress for Cultural Freedom in which they imposed that revolutionary attitude towards painting, destroying the old because of its connection to the corrupt system. But they put it out as the glory of Western culture, of freedom and Siqueiros, the Mexican painter called it ghost art imposed by the Rockefellers to destroy consciousness, abstract expressionism, for example, all of the abstract approaches to art
and the activities of the CIA through the Cultural Freedom Foundation shamed and expelled from the universities the traditional people who preserved the great tradition in painting so that a whole generation of painters in the universities didn't learn how to paint at all. We're just now beginning to come out of that phase where the whole culture was deliberately being destroyed and rerouted down the Rockefeller ghost art route to destroy actual understanding. I see Noam Chomsky's linguistics so-called as being one of the most powerful examples of that. Real linguistics had developed with Franz Boas and his students
and they had created descriptions understanding of a great variety of language and culture that sort of a peak idea was the Horafian hypothesis showing the absolute interaction between conceptual understanding of the world and how the language is structured. And that was a way of understanding the role of language behind science and art and culture, the way that language can propagandistically destroy understanding of reality. That was part of the real tradition of linguistics. At MIT with Pentagon funding, the trend under Noam Chomsky was to throw out everything that was real in the linguistics tradition
and substitute mysticism based views of consciousness in which words are essentially determined by genes. It's a long story that many historians of language have looked back on it and pointed out that his so-called generative linguistics, generative grammar couldn't generate anything and wasn't a grammar. It was a total fraud, but school textbooks, high school books incorporated his ideas and supposedly since it described language production in terms of a language apparatus which is genetically determined, supposedly learning his so-called linguistics would make it easier to understand the English language or whatever language you're studying.
And they actually sold those books to school boards across the country. Absolutely destructive, not only useless, but destroying a consciousness of how language really works. So when he got famous for his anti-imperialism, the world just sort of politely forgot how fraudulent his linguistics work had been. Do you think that he-- Fraudulent in the direction of opening the philosophical world to accept whatever the Pentagon and CIA wanted to substitute for consciousness. Do you suspect he was working under the direction of anybody specific? No, I think he was one of the originators having grown up studying mysticism,
it blended right into, I think he believed in that mystical idea that there is no consciousness other than words, which in a fairly recent video he was explaining that dogs can't think, animals can't think because they don't have words. But he said, I forget, canine or dog, he spelled out, he said if they heard me say dogs, they would get excited and think we were going somewhere. So he was saying dogs don't have consciousness because they don't have words, but then he had to spell out
the word because he didn't want to get the dogs excited. Are you going to say something, Georgie? Oh, Georgie, your audio. I think you're muted, Georgie. Sorry, can you hear me now? Yeah, now you're good. Yeah, so weren't the experiments in North Carolina with deaf and mute people that the state thought they were, I guess using Chomsky's theory, they thought that these were complete cretins that had like no consciousness, no feelings, no mind, and they actually forcibly sterilized them. And then later on, somebody did IQ tests on those people
and turned out that they're perfectly intelligent. So doesn't that invalidate Chomsky's theory directly? How is history connected because of their speech? Yeah, exactly. So these people had no language, right? They were born deaf and mute and all they could do basically is like, I mean, they had sign language, which eventually they learned, but initially they had no language and all they had is perception and visual perception and tactile perception. And when a psychiatrist did IQ tests on them, turned out that some of them were like slightly behind, but most of them had normal intelligence.
So it's difficult to argue that Chomsky was right because this directly proves even in humans, people with no language are perfectly capable of conscious experience. Yeah, everything in reality falsifies Chomsky. Why is this guy still a tenured professor at MIT then? Is it just inertia? Well, at the same time, he was creating his anti-linguistics, anti-science doctrine of generative grammar. One of his students said that even though the press all through the US was saying Chomsky has explained how the brain creates language, he in person said when he says generate,
he means it in a mathematical sense of account for. He was knowing that people were being misled, that he was aware that it wouldn't actually generate anything that was useless for that purpose. But at the same time he was doing that, Norbert Wiener with his more holistic approach to cybernetics, non-digital, analog approach, he was present at MIT, but because he criticized war, wouldn't take money from the Pentagon, he was ostracized. Chomsky was glad to receive funding from the Pentagon. He was a supporter of a Pentagon rocket man
to be the chancellor of MIT, very close to the Pentagon, powered and taking their money, and being in a way the Pentagon's pet anti-imperialist. Chomsky used to be a close associate, if not even a friend of Marvin Minsky, one of the creators of the AI movement. And I think where Minsky greatly disagreed with Chomsky's theory that language is genetically determined because Minsky said, listen, if that's the case, we should have been able by now to create an algorithm that would allow a computer to generate and learn a language de novo.
And we miserably failed every time we tried. - Yeah, that's what Chomsky led the public to believe he had. But a couple of times when I was teaching linguistics, nationally known linguists would go around basically propagandizing. And when they would come to my class to talk, I would have a chance to explain what was wrong with Chomsky's thing. I pointed out that you can create a sentence if you pick out the right system, right series of his rules, you can create a sentence in any language in the world.
But only if you know what the sentence is you want to produce to know what series to choose your rules in. You can't make a sentence that you don't know already applying his rules. The choice of the rules has to be guided by the finished sentence. And a couple of them actually understood the concept. You can see that they only took them a couple of minutes to forget it. - In one of your articles you said that the real structure of language is images based on images.
So if I understand this correctly, language comes after perception, just like anything else in this world. So if language is based on images, is the fundamental structure of language based in physical brain structure, which always changes with time and experience? - Yeah, the brain structure as formed by interaction with the world. - So in other words, metabolic rate, which greatly influences changes in brain structure, it may be the ultimate determinant in the evolution of language. - Yeah, you can analyze language. Someone looked at letters that nuns had written in their 20s,
and then they knew the outcome. And those who developed Alzheimer's at a relatively young age, they could see that their language structure in their 20s was simplified. And at a young age with a lot of mental energy, the language structure is extremely complex and unique. Every situation demands a fundamental rethinking of the whole thing. And so there is real uniqueness in everything a healthy person says. And when the mental energy is lower, what you get is strings of cliches. - So basically the ability to turn experiences into language depends on the metabolic rate vitally.
- Yeah. - And the summation of that is Chomsky was too addicted to the MIT Epstein money to change his ways. - To change his what? - Change his ways, change his theories. He was too committed to them. I'm just joking. Didn't Epstein work at MIT? - Oh, not that I've heard of. Oh, yeah, just a little while before he was notorious, he was funding one of their programs, and the guy who accepted his funding was embarrassed and quit. - I think him and Minsky collaborated on a few things,
or at least Epstein sponsored some of Minsky's research. At least that's what I saw recently on the global research site and some of the other more peripheral ones which seem to be speaking more truth than mainstream media has cumulatively done over the century. - Well, speaking of that, so obviously we'll talk about all those things, but first I wanted to chat about Ray's newsletter, and then we could kind of go off the deep end on all the coronavirus stuff. And so, Ray, you just sent out your Ray Peat's newsletter, Estrogen, Iron, Degenerative Aging, and Progesterone.
And again, it's insane to me that you're-- Go ahead. I was going to say, I thought you were putting together new parts of the puzzle, and I thought it was just amazing that you're still synthesizing these new ideas every two months, you know, so I thought it was a fantastic newsletter. What was your motivation behind writing it? - Just noticing that people weren't putting two and two together over the years. Stuff that people could have been actually doing serious work on 50 years ago. No one really has the motivation or energy to draw the conclusions.
- And I thought-- - Incidentally, some people probably still don't have their copy of it because Gmail is limiting it to a certain number every 24 hours. And so I think about half of them still haven't gone through. - Bummer. If you need any help with that, let us know, obviously. But what were some of the major points? You're obviously conversing with the public all the time. What are the huge misconceptions that you feel like this newsletter covered that are just repeated over and over that you think are incorrect?
- That working on one part of it, like taking an aromatase inhibitor, isn't going to solve very much. At the same time, improving one thing is likely to be making something else worse. And so to look at the whole process as far as you can and think of how you can remedy things with the least risk of doing more damage. - I have a question on one of the main themes that you have there, which says that osteoporosis and dementia are associated with iron overload, but they're also associated with an increased likelihood of anemia.
So what would be your understanding of anemia? Just low ferritin and low iron saturation? - No anemia, low blood, low hematopoietin, low hemoglobin. And about 50 years ago, someone was studying the health of California migrant workers and found that the kids running around somewhat hungry and dirty were healthier than the local middle class Anglo kids. And one of their features, the immigrant, very poor kids, had I think a hemoglobin of 10 or 10.5, something like that. And it isn't just malaria in Africa that flares up and kills people when they give them an iron supplement,
but right in the U.S. they can see that so-called anemic kids are healthier than the ones with the so-called normal levels of hematocrit and hemoglobin. - So by iron overload, you mean the accumulation of unusable iron in the forms of lipofuscin and other iron complexes? - Yeah, and estrogen is one of the things that causes you to retain iron, but protectively lowers your hemoglobin and hematocrit. And for 100 years, doctors have looked at the women sometimes with very low hematocrit or hemoglobin and prescribed iron pills and kept prescribing it even if their hemoglobin got lower,
not understanding that the same thing that makes them overload on iron is blocking their bone marrow formation of red blood cells. - So the well-known effects of increasing hematocrit and hemoglobin under the effect of androgens, is that due to the opposition of androgens to estrogen or a direct effect of androgens? - Both direct on the bone marrow in particular, androgen stabilizes it and helps it get warmer, more productive, estrogen tends to lower the temperature, and that goes, among other things, with a tendency to inflammation and iron toxicity.
- Have you seen those studies that claim that the purpose, apparently, of fever is to deplete serum iron and tryptophan, which helps greatly in fighting off an infection? - Yeah, and it reduces all sorts of cytokines, chilling creates inflammation, secreting inflammatory cytokines, and causes cells to take up water, and the falling temperature is not only a sign of, but it's one of the mechanisms by which estrogen changes the body physiology. - Can you run through the calcium metabolism and how that leads to the accumulation of iron?
What does parathyroid hormone have to do with iron overload? - The way parathyroid works, for example, under stimulation of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, that system activates the parathyroid hormone. Serotonin, pro-inflammatory, activates the parathyroid to provide more calcium to the bloodstream by taking it out of the bone. And the way it takes it out of the bone is to suppress the formation of carbon dioxide because carbon dioxide helps the present calcium to crystallize into the bone as calcium carbonate. And when the CO2 production is lowered, it's replaced by glycolytic production of lactic acid,
and the lactic acid in itself helps to dissolve the bone. pH isn't the thing because you can have low pH with CO2 forming bone and the same pH with lactic acid disassembling the bone. And in all the rest of your tissues, including the cells in your bone, making the lactic acid, all of the intracellular processes, blood vessels in particular, suffer. When they shift from producing carbon dioxide to producing lactate, the intracellular pH rises, increasing the negative ionization of the cell proteins, increasing their affinity for metals with a positive charge.
Ionized calcium with two positive charges, iron, aluminum, lead, any other metal that is present will be stuck inside your soft tissue cells along with the calcium, especially if the calcium is deficient in your diet. You will be taking up more iron, aluminum, lead, whatever is present in your intestine. So the more calcium deficient you are, the more parathyroid hormone you make, and the more other metals will be present under the influence of parathyroid hormone to crystallize, poisoning your blood vessels and brain cells and kidney cells in particular.
In Gilbert Ling's theory, potassium, which is another alkali mineral, has the highest affinity for the intracellular proteins. How are these other metals, such as sodium, calcium, and iron, able to displace potassium and disrupt the structure that potassium forms in the proteins? The carbon dioxide causes its affinity for electrons as an acidic Lewis acid molecule, and as it associates with the proteins, the electrons are retracted, making the electron cloud holding the potassium proton, holding the potassium alternatively with protons, making it experience a lower attractive concentration of electrons.
And since the water polarization of the big potassium atom doesn't interfere with that lower electronic attractive field, the potassium is strongly attracted even to an electron retracted protein. But as the carbon dioxide is decreased and the pH rises under the influence of forming lactic acid, then the electron cloud on the protein is no longer retracted towards the CO2, but it forms a more intense concentration of negative charge, which will overcome the highly polarized water layers around sodium, for example, but also around other highly concentrated positive charges. So once the sodium starts displacing the potassium,
then the calcium and lead, mercury and iron will have a chance to get in at the same time as the calcium. So you're saying that during the elevation of lactic acid production, intracellular pH rises, but that's because the cell quickly expels the lactic acid it produces, right? That's what's raising the pH, because if the lactic acid stays inside, the pH will drop and the cell will probably die. Yeah, but the lactic acid quickly moves out of the cell and acidifies the environment, creating other problems, activating inflammatory signals and so on.
But what happens inside when the lactic acid leaves is an increased pH because of the way the NADH handles its protons. Does lactic acid increase the reactivity of iron? I don't recall how they interact directly. Okay, so iron basically, by being in the body, if there are a lot of reactive oxygen species, they're the ones that turn iron into the reactive form, which is the ferrous iron, and that's what attacks the polyunsaturated fats? Mm-hmm. The CO2 is known to have an inactivating effect on iron,
helping to keep it in a relatively oxidized state because of that acid property of CO2. And just by displacing CO2, then lactic acid is, in effect, likely to make iron more reactive. When you reduce the triply ionized ferric iron, you get the highly reactive ferrous iron. So the reducing property of lactic acid is for sure going to create iron damage. And in that case, the reactive oxygen species are also a problem because they also have this reductive effect, right? I mean, so keeping the metabolic rate high and preventing the leakage of these reactive oxygen species
through the membrane, keeping their numbers low, is another thing that will limit the activation of iron and turning it into the reactive form. Yeah, it's a whole flowing system that changes the nature of the cytoplasmic substance. It's a process that isn't just an adding of a lot of little events, but the whole—the way Gilbert Ling saw it was that the nature of the substance of the cell has these different ways of existing. What is the direct conductor of this whole process? I mean, in some articles you mentioned thyroid and other CO2,
but I guess the main effector of these beneficial changes, which keep the intracellular pH low, keep the iron from getting into the reactive state, keep the electron flow going, it seems that all of this, the direct agent is carbon dioxide, but the thyroid is just the cause of the creation of carbon dioxide. Yeah, this CO2 is the most pervasive and powerful and immediate causer. And it simultaneously goes with your consciousness, your level of motivation and sensitivity and all of those things, all of the life properties correspond to basically the level of CO2 in your tissue.
In your estimation, is parathyroid hormone one of the strongest stimulators of lactic acid production? Yeah, as I presently understand it. So all things being equal, if you were to be injected with estrogen or serotonin or PTH, PTH would be the worst out of all of those? Yeah, except that estrogen ends up increasing your PTH. Well, I was talking to Kate Deering, we were trading emails back and forth, and we were trying to figure something out, and I realized I had like a estrogen increases parathyroid hormone, prolactin increases parathyroid hormone,
aldosterone, like every single thing, serotonin increases parathyroid, so it seemed like that was, I don't know, the final common path of stress. Is that how you look at it? Yeah, the angiotensin system is very close to it, but I think that's the right way of seeing it. But the reverse is also true, isn't it? Parathyroid hormone stimulates the production of all of these other mitigators as well. Yeah, because it creates the degenerative alarm condition, and the short-term recuperative stress hormones all exacerbate the long-range degenerative processes.
And last question about this, I'm pretty, I don't know if I caught this ever, the parathyroid hormone is stimulating the production of lactic acid from the bone specifically, is that right? Well, that's its functional, most known action, but it can't help doing it everywhere in the body. And then to do that to other tissues, it just has to be in the blood, is that right? Yeah. Awesome. What increases cellular uptake of parathyroid hormone, and what, conversely, what inhibits it? Is there a mechanism that can do one or the other? One or the other, what?
Cellular uptake of parathyroid hormone. In other words, is there a way to make the cell more resistant to parathyroid hormone? Like, I mean, I know the medicine talks about receptors, but as you said, the cell is the entire receptor, the entire cell is the receptor. What makes the cell resistant to parathyroid hormone? Nothing that I know of. Wow. So really the only way to protect is limit its synthesis. Yeah, and vitamin D and calcium and magnesium are the things that are best known to do that.
But at the same time, reducing androtensin and serotonin and aldosterone, for example. Is there a specific parathyroid hormone receptor that medicine claims is the main mechanism through which that hormone works? I'm not familiar with it. Okay. Maybe that's why, like, there may be steroids that compete with it, but I guess the receptor hasn't been found yet, or at least medicine is not interested in looking at it because they think parathyroid hormone is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's given to osteoporotic people to increase their bone growth. Yeah.
Ray, I forgot what article you had posted this in, but apparently parathyroid hormone is harder to suppress as you get older or sicker, and it was a DAMI paper, A-D-A-M-I, relationship between serum parathyroid hormone, vitamin D sufficiency, age, and calcium intake. I think it does increase with age. One of the interesting things that they don't like to talk about either is that the bone with aging and osteoporosis forms lots of aromatase. It becomes a powerful source of estrogen at the same time that it's degenerating.
And that would be ameliorated by what? Just decreasing the activity of the parathyroid? Or no, this is a functional aspect of the bone that's not going to change? Or how do you reverse that? Yeah. Getting your calcium and vitamin D and magnesium high enough that you turn off your parathyroid hormone, that's necessarily going to reduce the local stress and all of the signals that increase aromatase. Amazing. Might take a five-minute break here. We have Ray Peat on the phone. Georgie Dinkov, my partner in crime.
We're talking about Ray Peat's newsletter right now. The newsletter is available by email now. It's $28 US, which can be paid through PayPal. Ray Peat's newsletter, [email protected]. Ray is sending those out right now. You can also email Ray Peat's newsletter to purchase Ray's books. I frequently come in contact with people that have no idea that you've written any books. I would strongly recommend people get a hold of these. They're basically collector's items. Ray, why don't we talk about Progest-E from Ketogen and how does progesterone relate to parathyroid hormone?
It strengthens your bones and turns off aromatase. Once you recognize that stressed bones produce estrogen by their local aromatase, then you see one of the reasons that progesterone is going to strengthen the bones because it knocks out, it inhibits aromatase and knocks out the estrogen receptors. In addition to good nutrition and calcium and vitamin D, progesterone, thyroid, vitamin K would be good things for osteoporosis? Yeah, everything good helps your bones. I have a question. In one of your newsletters, you said that serotonin antagonists are highly anabolic for the bone.
I've seen a number of different studies come out with the various drugs, one of them ondansetron, which is prescribed for nausea but it's really a serotonin antagonist. It seems that these agents somehow directly work on the osteoclasts and osteoblasts without necessarily affecting parathyroid hormones. It seems like serotonin has a direct effect on bone health that is, while overlapping with parathyroid hormone, there's an independent component of it too. Would you agree? Yeah, I think everything really is overlapping. The receptor idea is just a way of trying to introduce order kind of artificially.
Amazing. Thanks for that. Email Catherine to purchase Progest-E. Each bottle contains 3,400 milligrams of progesterone. It lasts a very long time, unless you use it topically, which I'm going through bottles every month. Another question on progesterone. In one of your articles, you mentioned that high enough concentrations of progesterone can actually make the so-called estrogen receptor protein completely disintegrate. I've seen many studies confirming that and other substances, such as caffeine, apparently have the same effect. Does progesterone have the same sort of disintegrating effect on aromatase too, or is it simply inhibiting its effects?
I think it's just blocking the promotion. For example, one of the powerful promoters of aromatase is prostaglandin, E. The enzyme cyclooxygenase that makes prostaglandin is activated under almost exactly the same circumstances that activate aromatase. So there's almost always prostaglandin, E, present, pushing for the formation of estrogen. Progesterone is known to, in multiple overlapping ways, to block the formation of prostaglandin, E, by creating destructive metabolites of it, blocking its formation and probably several parallel mechanisms that prevent the activation, opposing cortisol's activating effect on aromatase.
What do you think is the main mechanism behind the synthesis of the actual aromatase protein? Is it simply under the body detects the metabolic rate is low or there are tissue and organ needs, you know, massive amounts of repair, and that's what triggers genomically the synthesis of more aromatase? Or is there another mechanism behind it, like radiation, heavy metals, things like that? Yeah, all of those things overlap for more than 50 years. Radiation, hypoxia, vitamin E deficiency, progesterone deficiency, all of these have been known to activate the formation of more aromatase.
You have to then look at what each one of these things is doing. Each one of those factors, radiation, hypoxia, and so on, is also activating many other parts of the cell, which lead to activation of aromatase. So it's like a holistic switch mechanism in which everything gathers up a summation of forces to either turn aromatase on or off. Does the entry of steroids into the cell depend on the steroid structure and the status, the lipophilic or hydrophilic status of the cell?
For example, cortisol and estrogen are much more hydrophilic than things like pregnenolone or progesterone. So if the cell is composed of fully saturated fats and is highly lipophilic, would that decrease the amount of hydrophilic steroids such as glucocorticoids and estrogen and aldosterone from entering inside the cell? Yeah, because at the same time it's keeping the energy state of the cell up, which maintains the hydrophobic condition.
The stabilizing of the hydrophobicity is also the stabilizing of the energy level, and that suppresses all of the things that would call for raising the amount of estrogen or cortisol in the blood. So a very well energized, highly lipophilic cell would be resistant to estrogen even though it may be expressing the estrogen receptor at a normal level. So it may look like an estrogen sensitive cell, but estrogen can't really do much because it cannot get inside. Yeah, and it's probably keeping the estrogen receptors on the verge of disintegration to keep the hydrophobicity high.
Do you think that may account for some studies that show that if you drastically increase the intake of saturated fat in the diet, it shows an increase of the amount of estradiol in the urine and sometimes in the blood as well? Would that be simply because the body is excreting all of this estradiol that cannot be used because the cells simply are impervious to it? I think so. A group, I think, generally led by Pasqualini has identified the processes of increasing estrogen in the cell or decreasing it.
And in about 10 different ways, progesterone's effect is to get estrogen out of the cell and inactivated, made water soluble so that it travels through the blood quickly and is excreted. So the deficiency of progesterone will leave your cells highly activated by estrogen. For example, in the uterus or breast tissue that is deficient in progesterone, it's internally, it begins making its own estrogen but doesn't depend on the ovaries or adrenals to, you know, they used to cut those out to prevent or cure breast cancer.
But if you take out the ovaries and adrenals, you're also taking out progesterone and that activates the process of forming estrogen locally, starting with the uterus and breast, but eventually going to every tissue that has been studied. Since the main method of deactivating estrogen is the glucuronidation process and glucuronic acid production depends on glucose availability, would you say that... Sulfation. Sulfation, yes. Would you say that the presence of sufficient amount of glucose in the diet, of carbohydrates in the diet, is vital for the proper excretion and deactivation of estrogen? Yeah, I think so.
The glucuronic acid is related to the vitamin C producing system and that requires the normal flow of carbohydrate through the system. Great stuff. Before we move on, Ray, was there any other part of your newsletter that we should touch on before we move on? Nothing occurs to me. Okay, great. I have a question about lipofuscin. What is the mechanism through which lipofuscin inhibits the electron transport chain? Does it bind to one of the complexes directly, such as cytochrome C oxidase,
or does it simply impede the flow of electrons by its accumulation and, I guess, electric repellent forces? My basic idea is that it's consuming the oxygen and the electrons that should be available to the mitochondria and it's directly turning them into hydrogen peroxide and superoxide and water. But in order for that process to happen, basically the accumulation of reactive oxygen species needs to occur, which suggests that a block of oxidative phosphorylation is already happening, right? Yeah, but it's like an amplifier. Once the process starts, you're making more heme oxygenase, releasing more iron,
getting a more reduced environment that makes the iron more toxic, and consuming oxygen, lowering oxygen tension, accelerating the process. Once a person in old age reaches a point where they're visibly developing massive accumulation of dark pigment, it is extremely quick that they will go on to die. I was going to move on, Georgie. Stop me though if you have another question. No, I don't. Ray, we were talking before this and I joked, and I said, "How are things in the apocalypse in Oregon?" And you said things are halfway through.
Instead of just going through the news and talking about all the bad things that are happening, of course we can't do that, but can you summarize what's going on? Is this the capitalist class winning and then winning over the working class? How can people think about what's going on in a reasonable way? Because it's extremely confusing what's happening, I feel like. The ruling class knows very well how to herd people, scare them with something, get a lemming conformist trend going, and keep them scared and inform them that everyone is going to do it
and you'll be a freak if you don't go along with them. And so I think they're even inflating the number of people who are really getting the vaccines. The propaganda has reached a point, I think, that it is triggering the irritation, self-defense reflex in more and more people who are – as they start communicating, finding ways around the censorship, that frightens the ruling class more and so they panic and get more absurd in the lies they're putting out through the media. Well, people with two vaccines becoming suddenly un-vaxxed because they don't have a third one,
I mean, should shake anybody to their core that this is insane. And of course, I mean, that's – if I were to hypothesize, given the things I've seen, that's just to normalize constant vaccination and that's part of the agenda for whatever reason. Yes, three vaccines in a year and that's not counting the influenza and shingles and chickenpox and all of the other vaccines. They haven't revised anything so it says now adults are going to need multiple, many annual vaccinations. Even though the information has been coming out for several years that the influenza vaccine,
for example, makes you much more likely, several times more likely than the unvaccinated to develop a respiratory pneumonia-like problem. So there was a huge campaign the previous year, 2018 into 2019, to get Italians vaccinated with the influenza. And according to everything that's known, that would multiply several-fold their risk of developing some other respiratory disease. So that very likely was a factor in the high mortality in Italy, that they had been so obedient in getting their influenza vaccine. I don't know if you checked out that Notion document I sent you, but there were two tweets.
One was from Marx in 1842 and another one from Illich in 1976. And it seems like people were sounding the alarm on the possibility of a medical dictatorship. And so I'm sure given the amount of things you've read, probably a lot of people have talked about this, that it would come to some kind of technocratic medical nightmare situation. There's a movie called V for Vendetta, which was fairly recent, which was exactly about that. I haven't seen it for years.
Ray, did – I mean, you've read a lot of Illich's stuff. Was that something he was chronically talking about? Oh, yeah. He saw education and medicine as the two basic evils of our society that were destroying humanity. What about technology? The Unabomber thought technology is at the core, is the actual direct agent. Do you agree with that, of the destruction? Well, yeah, the way technology is used in indoctrination, the existence of the technical knowledge itself needn't be harmful, but they create this ideology of the digital view of consciousness, for example, that's separate from technical understanding.
If Norbert Wiener had been followed, there wouldn't have been this digitized reality quantization of everything as part of the philosophical reductionism. That reality is discrete instead of continuous. Yeah. Ray, by the second vaccine, third vaccine, and impending fourth vaccine, would there be something a person could measure on a lab test? Would their aldosterone be through the roof or something with inducing that spike protein? Would there be something they could identify? Inducing the spike protein? I'm not sure what you mean.
Like if somebody was skeptical that these vaccines were harmful, could they get a blood test for something that would demonstrate that their physiology was completely out of whack? Oh, yeah. I think the antidepressant would be pretty high. That's an accurate blood test? Yeah. Interesting. I've never had a measure. I don't know if you've seen the news, but China is embarking on a massive vaccination campaign to vaccinate 1.1 billion people by October 1st. What do you think is behind that? Is China also under control of the powers that be?
Or do they have another motive, afraid maybe that if this virus narrative falls apart, maybe CIA or who knows who else will release another virus and that one won't be as benign? Yeah, I think China keeps in mind the history of germ warfare of the United States, and that's probably part of their thinking. But they also collaborated with the United States in that Wuhan Institute of Virology on this gain-of-function research.
So is that a case of keep your friends close, your enemies closer? Does China just want to get an idea of what the Americans are thinking of unleashing? Or do you think China is on board with this whole globalization plan? I think it's a faction in China. I think the president, he intervened and sort of cut down the Fauci faction. Oh, I see. So that may be behind his announcement that he's going to redistribute the wealth, make China more equitable? I guess, yeah.
I was going to move on to questions. Georgie, stop me if you have any other. So before this, Ray, I gathered a bunch of questions from people that watch this show. And so I thought we would run through them and then let you go. Guys, give this episode a like. Sincerely appreciate it. We have an amazing listenership that hangs out every Friday. So, guys, thank you so much, Georgie. Thank you, Ray. Thank you.
So my number my first question here was hopefully like a clarification of Georgie and I were talking about collecting the urine and each liter being about a thousand calories. But I think I might have Georgie might have said it correctly and I might have goofed it. But can you just explain that that test, that at home test for collecting urine and how to quantify how many calories you're burning real fast? No, I don't know how it would be used for counting calories.
Well, didn't you mention that if you discard the morning urine, then you collect the urine the rest of the day? Couldn't you do some kind of math and then figure out how many calories you're burning? If you measure your water, total water intake and urine, then you know how much water you're evaporating. And that goes up as you burn calories. So you have to know the water balance. So you basically perspire about a liter of water for every thousand calories burned, right? Yeah. Yeah.
My apologies to Georgie, because I butchered that and I said you were wrong. So my apologies, Georgie. Thanks for clarifying that. Speaking of something else you can clarify, I have a quote from you in 2012 and it says, I have known, this is the relevant part, when it's taken to small doses, 50 micrograms of T3 will usually normalize any hypothyroid metabolism.
And I actually send that quote to a lot of people and I just wanted to like bring it back up since it's nine years old and see if you still felt similarly about that kind of upper cap of 50 micrograms of T3. That's just the equivalent of the old standard two grains of armor. It's partly just an arbitrary number because it varies so much with individuals. But roughly 25 micrograms of T3 sums up about the same as as one grain of armor.
And since the average replacement dose used to be two grains of armor, that's where that 50 micrograms came from. And if somebody was taking 50 micrograms, like the people that you know who have done that, do they take 10 micrograms five times per day with food or do you split up even smaller? Yeah, either way, but for sure split up so it comes in gradually. Good. Stop me at any time, Georgie.
Another question from a listener here, and they said, I'd like to hear from him about some of the reasons that he is so upbeat about Mexico. The ones that you mentioned he talked about on the call that you were on with him. In fact, I'd like a whole show about Mexico, he says. So I mentioned on a live stream saying that we were on a call that I didn't set up by some other people and you were very positive about Mexico.
And so I think that's on a lot of people's minds right now of, hey, I got to get out of the US or I got to get out of somewhere else. And I mentioned that you had a very positive view of Mexico. If you want to reiterate any of that, I think people would enjoy it. The objective evidence is that I guess it was about 20 years ago, Cuauhtémoc Cardenas really won the popular vote, but lost the election by fraud. And the fact that in actual votes, as well as electoral success, AMLO had national support.
The fact that the great bulk of the population supports those two individuals shows a lot about the quality of the country. Very, very different from European-American consciousness. Do you think there's any truth to the claims that there was election fraud in the last election, in the presidential election in the US? I mean, if this can happen in Mexico, why couldn't it happen here, considering the sophistication of the three-letter agencies? Yeah, the use of digital voting machines operated through computers. It's the perfect way to hide the fraud to some extent.
Black Box voting, when it was pointing out fraud by the Republicans, was a very popular website. But I think they're still in operation, but no one wants to investigate fraud by the Democrats comparatively. Do you think the court system has been completely compromised, or at least compromised to the point where even if evidence is unearthed, it will simply go nowhere? Yeah, I think the courts are well-packed with state supporting, no matter which party. It doesn't really matter that much which fascist party you're keeping in power.
Ray, before I read off more questions, is there anything you want to say about Afghanistan, and is there anything you want to say about the so-called FDA approval of the vaccines? Oh, I think there was a possible positive interpretation for Biden wanting to do what Trump wanted to do, get the army out of some of the wars. And I think today's bombing probably was the factions that can't afford to have any decrease in war expenditure.
The trillions that have gone through the military industry in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, they don't want to see the tap turned off to their endless money supply. Do you think Biden's decision to withdraw, was there anything good behind it, according to you? Or do you think it was more along the lines of a political move because midterm elections are coming, he wants to please the war-weary public, money can be spent on other things, the public really doesn't want any more wars right now?
Yeah, I think their interpretation of natural positive action by Biden is reasonable. But the faction that doesn't want to stop the war will kill lots of people to try to get the reoccupation going. Great stuff, thanks for that. Okay, here's another one. Ray has previously mentioned that his favorite animals are ants. Are there any animals that Ray considers to be evil or malevolent, such as mosquitoes or hyenas?
I don't think so. It's just what they interpret as food that isn't compatible with our well-being. I noticed someone who asked the question, I think, had the name sandwich. It's a matter of perspective. Mosquito and hyena see lunch when they smell a person. It's just in conflict with human preferences. You have a good memory for remembering that. On that note, do you think that hunting for food is not an immoral activity for a human?
Yeah, if there's actually a reason to hunt for food, if they really need food. It's like a hyena. You can't say that they're having evil thoughts just because they have a different idea of what lunch is. That's exactly the context I was asking about. If a person is hungry, and if food supply becomes a problem, or becomes too compromised, and all you have is a gun in the wilderness, then it's a matter of perspective. Yes, it's a living creature you're destroying, but you're not doing it for fun. You're doing it because you saw food.
Semi-related, but do you have any favorite examples of mutual aid in the animal kingdom? Oh, there are so many of them. People are impervious to that idea that nature isn't anything but terrible and harsh and cruel. That's why I feel like just getting your thoughts on it is useful. You can see a lot of videos on the internet of animals expressing grief and gratitude and mutual support and so on.
I watched one, and it must have been a tiger or something, and a bird had fallen into a tar pit, and the tiger went over to it, grabbed onto its wing, and swung it out of the tar pit. It was pretty good. I have several other examples. There are several videos on YouTube where you can see how a herd of buffaloes saves an antelope that a lion has basically latched on.
The buffaloes will go in and kick the lion. Usually the lion leaves when he sees a herd of buffaloes, but if he doesn't, then he'll get kicked out. This is a very common example of how people are playing with it, not really treating it as food, and just letting it be. I've seen videos of people releasing a grizzly bear from a trap, a very large Canadian gray wolf from a trap, a bobcat, and I think even a mountain lion. Typically, if you get that close to these animals under normal circumstances, you will probably get attacked.
It's amazing that these animals were basically just sitting there quietly, allowing the human to free them up, and in some cases, after that, they refused to leave. They just kept following the human around as if they somehow became friends. Yeah, actually, animals show gratitude and friendship. Have you seen this in birds? In one of your books, you mentioned that birds are apparently really good at trying to get people's attention and form cooperative relationships. Yeah, and you probably remember the story I told about the ant.
I put out an ant that was drowning in honey, and its head was exposed. An ant came along and found a drop of honey, but it ran around to see how big it was, and it saw the head sticking out and jumped back in shock, and then discussed the situation for a while. Very agitated communications, and then it went around to the side and sat down and started eating.
Another ant came along, did exactly the same thing, jumped back in shock, except this time the communication was very short, and it went around and started eating honey. I didn't stay there to see if more ants came along and did the same, but when I came back an hour later, the drop of honey and the ants were all gone. Oh, wow. Do you think ants communicate strictly to chemical messengers, or do you think they can do electromagnetic things, too? They were obviously doing some kind of sign and touch language.
The first one, they would discuss it a while, and the arrived ant would run around, and they would talk about it some more, and it ran around two or three times, describing how big the drop was before it started eating. So these stories about a horse whisperer or a wolf whisperer or whatnot, they actually have basis in reality. Apparently, people can learn the language of animals and communicate with them. Yeah, I'm convinced that ants, for example, have lived around people enough that they've learned English or whatever language they're around.
A couple of times when ants were bothering a roommate who was going to get some ant poison, I just firmly and clearly said, "If you don't leave, that person is going to poison you," and they just disappeared. You're saying we could experience a Coco the Ant-like situation with sign language. One day we could figure out the ants' language with their arms and things like that? I think so. It's obviously a very efficient language that can take a new, totally novel situation like that and size up the nature of the problem.
So the second ant arriving got the idea in just a brief conversation. I interrupted you. Did the ants that were bothering your friend, did they just quickly go away, or what happened? Yep, it just disappeared. Great stuff. You know, I have one more question. You called mushrooms an inspiration based on their structure and what they're able to do. What are so special about ants? Why are they so amazing to you?
At a relatively low body temperature, they can be so quick-witted. As they get very cold, then they slow down. But they think and calculate just with amazing efficiency. Basically as smart as anyone. Do you think them living in those burrows, basically just like the naked mole rat, they're exposed to high concentrations of carbon dioxide? I think so, yeah. Have you seen the studies showing that ants don't age? Basically they die either from a predator or a trauma, basically. Something squashes them. But they don't really age.
That would be the outcome of living in a high CO2 environment, I think. Okay, we'll jump to another question after talking about ants for 20 minutes. Macaroni Delta says, what advice can Dr. Peat give regarding the best way to treat romantic grief, i.e. a broken heart? What a physiological or philosophical approach to it be most effective? I think he had more there, but I cut it off. Find a substitute or replacement. That's excellent. That's funny because that's what the dating community would say, is quickly find somebody new. Why do you say that? It works.
So do you think the concept of a soulmate is basically just a fairy tale? In other words, there could be many soulmates? Yeah. That's really funny. Okay, here's a philosopher. You may have heard the expression. I'm blanking on the name. It was a European philosopher. He said that love is the illusion that one woman is more special than another. I guess this can be extended to both sexes. In other words, you can fall in love many, many times and you'll be just as good if it's with the right person. Yeah.
Great stuff. Okay, here's another one. Can you ask Dr. Peat to expand on his views of ontology? He has talked about Meinong previously. Thanks. Yeah, the ontologists have usually been confused, getting mental processes confused with thinking about the nature of reality itself. And the idea of continuity and of interaction constantly. Everything is impressing its aspects on everything else. And so the nature of being is constantly changing as the world evolves. The substance itself is changing in the ontological sense, the same way a cell changes with experience.
And that's related to William James' radical empiricism, right? Same thing? Right. Speaking of him, did you know that he had a concept about stress called reservoirs of power? Did you ever read about that? Nope. I was reading a book and it was talking about Hans Selye and then it mentioned Canon and it talked about early concepts of stress. And then it mentioned William James and I was like, what the heck? I thought he was a philosophical person. And then I found a few mentions of something called reservoirs of power.
And he was basically talking about what I interpreted to be an extreme stress state bringing on another level of accomplishment. But it was just interesting because he's clearly talking about, okay, here's the actual quote. William James suggested that every person, there are reservoirs of power which are not ordinarily called upon, but which are nevertheless ready to bring forth streams of energy only if the occasion presents itself. I don't know, you're familiar with those earlier concepts of stress. Were there any that were interesting to you? No, not especially.
Okay, we'll jump to another question here. Thank you guys so much for hanging out with us for Friday. Ray, I won't keep you too long. I'll let you go very soon. Thank you so much for hanging out. Thank you, Georgie, for making this possible. I have a question about this reservoirs of power. There are well-documented cases where mothers are basically capable of lifting cars just to save a child that's been pinned underneath. And under normal circumstances, they're not known to come anywhere near close to that level of being able to muster up so much power.
So, I mean, do you have an idea what may be behind this mechanism? What could be causing the southern and clearly unnatural or at least not normally present amount of muscle contraction force that these women can muster up? Is it some kind of a steroid reaction? A very good coordination of the chemistry and the nervous innervation, I think, strengthens the fascia and muscles in a physical way that makes the parts stronger to meet the needs of the moment.
So what would the – I mean, clearly, since these women are not being able to muster up those powers on demand, it's only under extreme circumstances. Is there any way this can be trained in a person, in other words, to be – to sort of like improve the condition, the physiology to get closer to that clearly higher potential that we have? Yeah, I think it involves things like getting up your pregnenolone basic level and DHEA that strengthens the substance at all levels.
Great stuff. Ray, I'll only ask you two more questions and then let you go. So this one's from Christian, wondering if you could recommend a safe and prothyroid way of oil painting. Maybe what substances and habits to avoid when painting. Also, maybe if he could talk about his own personal painting practice. I try not to use my fingers too much, but I'm always tempted to smear the paint with my fingers. That's not a good idea generally. And to have a very good ventilation is the other essential thing.
Great stuff. And then we'll kind of end it here. Could Ray describe what a typical day of eating looks like for him? Very random in a sense, because I got tired of doing it one way and so innovate constantly. The common themes are milk, orange juice, eggs, cheeses, occasional cheese tacos, various soups and so on. And orange juice seems to be one of those difficult things to find. Are you using orange juice concentrate right now or do you have a good source of oranges? No, bottled pasteurized orange juice.
Oh, interesting. Do you have a brand? Because I know a lot of people, I get that question all the time. And I haven't been in the US for a long time and I'm not sure what's good or not. No, it was just trial and error. I don't remember the brand. Awesome. We'll do one more advertisement here. The newsletter, Ray Peat's newsletter that we were talking about earlier is $28. You can send that to [email protected]. You can order Ray's books by sending that email, a name of the book and they'll send a digital copy to you.
And then you can order Progest-E from Keenogen, email Catherine, who's very nice and send it out very quickly in a package that provides protection for while the progesterone is traveling. And that is it. Any final words here, Ray, that the world is going crazy and things are hard to deal with right now. Is there any piece of advice you could give to anybody to maintain? Keep learning about the virus. It's currently the most important thing about the reasons for the great dangers of the vaccines. And then, Georgie, you as well.
Last question, really, do you think that the powers that be are winning? I mean, I can see it going both ways because this whole technocratic nightmare that they're trying to impose depends on turning the entire population depending on the state. But the United States is not really – the empire is not really in a financial position right now to sort of endlessly pay people to do nothing and become dependent simply because it's in such a massive amounts of debt.
And if you look at this fiat currency thing and the printing, they cannot go on forever because it will essentially destroy the dollars, the reserve currency, and then the dream of the neural order people is going to go down the drain too. Yeah. The people getting conscious is the essential thing and it has to advance at a faster rate to prevent the death of the whole system.
Great stuff. Georgie Dinkov, thank you so much. Ray Peat, it's an honor. Thank you so much for hanging out and continuously hanging out with us and talking. It's so fun. Guys, thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening, guys. Have an amazing weekend. Guys, thank you. Have a safe weekend. I'll talk to you guys soon. Okay. Bye, everybody. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]