Georgi Dinkov, Interesting Interview #1

Georgi Dinkov AKA Haidut on Vaccines, mRNA therapies, Genetics, Transhumanism, Metaverse, Cancer Stocks, Big Pharma/Tech, Coffee, Metabolic Diseases, Stress and Fatigue.

Visit Georgi Dinkov’s blog and supplement company website. Follow him on Twitter here.

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Today we will be interviewing Georgi Dinkov AKA Haidut, in our first ever Philoinvestor interesting interview. Georgi is a computer scientist by degree, but was employed in a biochemical outfit after the Dot Com crash forced him to seek work outside technology.

That experience gave him the opportunity to work with top class biochemists from NIH and all over the world, allowing him to acquire some of their knowledge and expertise. After having left that type of work, he continues to study biochemistry as a hobby up until today.

A big turning point was when he discovered the work of Dr. Ray Peat and diverted more of his time on the metabolic theory. In 2019 he branched out to doing his own studies and publications, expanding his research group with scientists from the Bulgarian Academy of Science (BAS).

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There is a lot of talk nowadays about the Metaverse. Do you know anything about it? And why did Facebook change its name to Meta?

Facebook and Google know well that monetizing people’s attention is a risky business. And to derisk their business, they want to monopolize human attention so that no competitor can stake a claim on it. Companies have been doing it for decades but the technology was not advanced enough to pull off a complete monopolization of human attention. Some of the earlier examples are Microsoft bundling their own IE browser with Windows and making it impossible to uninstall it, while also convincing developers to create websites that did not work with the rival browser Netscape.

“If you create the Metaverse of which Facebook sells the devices for, and I guarantee you Metaverses will not be interoperable between companies, these people using FB devices will be participating only in FB’s version of reality. And it will be very difficult to come and take from that data. FB will fully own that data because it is only available through FB devices. Fully enclosed by a digital wall that cannot really be removed unless a competitor convinces people to use another similar, competing device. But then again, most people will still use only 1-2 such devices. It becomes tiresome to deal with too much choice. Look at browsers – most people use 1, at most 2 of them. So, the top 2-3 browsers get 99% of the market share and there is no unseating them, at least in the current legal/financial framework.”

..And because this device, the way it’s designed is that you wear it all the time. It basically little by little replaces most of your interactions with reality. And you live in this digital avatar world. Facebook says that it’s too difficult to interact with the real world. Put this device in your head, and in your mind you will be turning to somebody else – this digital character. This device will replace your sensory information and your ability to interact with the world.

With the internet of things, basically everything around at some point will be another device. This metaverse device on your head will integrate with all these devices. And you will sit on your sofa and eventually with a brain implant, you will get a robot in the kitchen to go to the fridge and get a beer for you on the couch.

You won’t look at TV anymore because Facebook will be able to stream movies for you and do anything else in terms of entertainment and even sensory stimulation.

There is a group which are using very similar devices that are simulating sexual intercourse without a partner. You have this thing on your face, and a digital partner in front of you. And these devices and wires that you are wearing are stimulating physical contact.

Facebook already has a few patents on how to simulate sensory information through these devices and regenerate it into your body. For example, instead of you looking outside the video and seeing sun, Facebook says there is no need for that. You put this thing on and it has a camera and it’s also capable of seeing the sun and the ocean, but then there will be these electrodes attached to you, and this device will transfer the physical information of the world directly into your body.

Basically, what they are trying to do is steer it towards your perception of reality and pass it through a filter which is controlled by a company. The filter is capable of augmenting reality where if you don’t like the reality, you can change certain aspects or even all of it.

No company has relinquished control of individuals after it has already gained it.

There is money to be made but there is also the greed of power. And if they can get to a point where your interaction with reality reduces, and you are more immersed to the digital world… then perception is reality. “We can create our own reality, and even augment it to make it better.”

“Who cares if the world outside is sad and gloomy, as long as you have this device and pay us per month for it, then we can guarantee you a much better life. Or at least the perception of a much better life. But if perception becomes reality they are saying their digital reality is just as good (or better) than your physical reality. It the digital version is much safer too, as it is completely under the control of the user (or the company) and there can be no unforeseen circumstances, tragedies, mishaps, etc. The movie the Matrix gave a great example of how Facebook wants this to play out. Namely, Facebook wants its device to give its users the equivalent of the Blue Pill in the move, while physical world would be the equivalent of the Red Pill in the move.”

And the majority of people will say bring it, give me the Blue Pill because the Red Pill is too much for me to handle and also I don’t particularly like what I see when I take the Red Pill.

The tech is already there for creating sensory perceptions. But I think they are getting ahead themselves. They think they can implant new information into your brain, just like the Matrix. Neo is sitting on that chair, and they are sticking that electrode into his brain.

The presumption is that all knowledge is in your brain, and that the brain is nothing but a computer except implemented in cells rather than electrodes.

It means memories, experiences etc. can be manipulated and whatever memories are, their storage into your brain can be changed.

Georgi explaining their perspective: Do you want a PhD? For 1,000 euros you can get this data and you put it into your device and it has the information to become knowledgeable, for example, in chemistry or physics or any other field. In a few seconds you can become a master.

Georgi’s take: I don’t think that this works.

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The worm experiments

They did experiments with these worms who are capable of regenerating everything including their head. Even if you chop off its head, it can regenerate another one.

So, they chopped its head but before they taught the worm tricks to like or dislike certain foods or travel through rough terrain. And when its head regrew, it still had those characteristics that it was taught before its head was cut off!

This whole idea that electrode implants are going to be able change your knowledge and feed you information and change your memories, to me that is fantasy. That is just not how the human body works.

Reference: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-decapitated-worms-regrow-old-memories-along-with-new-heads-9497048/

Crypto has been rallying since the bottom of the March 2020 covid-induced market crash. Do you think this is a bubble or not really? 

I’ve always wondered what is a bubble. Even in non-bubbly markets you have a boom/bust cycles. Economists have Kondratieff waves.

Bubbles could just be compressed waves. What defines a bubble? If there is a net benefit, it’s not really a bubble.

I don’t think we have seen a crypto bust yet, so it’s early to say if it’s a classic bubble.

A classic bubble means a ponzi scheme so the early adopters get rich and they jump the ship, and the whole thing collapses. And everyone is worse off than when they started.

But one of the reasons we had such a boom in crypto, was due to Quantitative Easing.

If we see more adoption by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan adopting Bitcoin as another currency, then it becomes less likely to end up as true bubble even if there is a bust.

And of course, there is the issue with the US dollar as a reserve currency; there are countries out there that are not happy about it. And they are doing everything possible to unseat the USD, and some of the interest in BTC is spurred by these state players to pour money into BTC and take it to a level where it can take a chunk of the action.

If that happens, BTC stops being a bubble and starts becoming an asset. As of right now, it’s too early to tell.

Right now 95% of transactions are fake, basically people selling BTC on one exchange and buying that same BTC back to create fake volume and convince more people to jump into the game. After all, high transaction volume and high capitalizations are seen as signs of a healthy market. Resulting in a bit of a game of “fake it till you make it”.

Until that clears, I don’t have a definitive statement on what BTC is. The technology is good, it resolves a lot of problems with state actors if they are not friendly with their own population (e.g. censorship etc.)

But it’s too much of a wild wild west to play with it too much, personally I follow the rule of putting 10% of my liquid assets in Bitcoin. On the new kid on the block, so to speak.

Some people look at Crypto as the ultimate hedge against inflation. What do you think about that?

Crypto unlike gold has a tremendous amount of volatility. Despite a massive increase of inflation, precious metals have not gone up to compensate for that. I think BTC got some of the action that metals would have received.

Maybe the younger crowd is more crypto-friendly, I don’t know.

Whether it’s a good inflation hedge depends on its adoption and whether it ends being a bubble or an asset. If you see the transactions, little by little, all whales are disappearing. And the more institutional it becomes and entrenched as a legitimate form of finance, the more it can serve as a hedge against inflation.

Once the wild wild west situation ends and BTC isn’t banned, there is a great potential for a decentralized currency to serve as a hedge against inflation or a hedge against currency devaluation by governments.

Artificially high inflation due to miscalculations by central banks, whether it's deliberate or not, still results in currency debasement.

China seems to been trying to ban it, as is Russia. But I don’t think the U.S will.

Do you think the Big Tech companies still have room for growth or are they in the final stages of their growth cycle?

Depends how much China opens its markets. All of them are operating there but China is very suspicious of foreign companies operating on their territory.

China will be very careful how much it allows these western companies to propagate locally. Once they establish a solid footing, it is very difficult to reverse that. Also, China saw very well what happened with the so-called Color Revolutions in the Middle East in 2010-2011 period. They saw that Western tech companies are a perfect vector for carrying politically subversive information inside a given country and can be used to greatly manipulate the population of a given country. Most of Big tech has very close ties with the intel agencies (e.g. CIA, NSA, etc) and China will do what it can to prevent a Big tech company from acquiring enough influence/market in China that would allow it to cause social upheaval.

But even from a purely economic point of view, China does not want to depend on foreign software, especially if the Great reset (4th Industrial Revolution) will depend entirely on digital technologies and their software. If Chinese are allowed to become dependent on e.g. Windows software, then it becomes very difficult to convince them to use something else. It’s possible, but very difficult, and China wants to stimulate the consumption of domestic technologies in order to reduce economic dependence on both imports and exports.

How can Facebook and Google achieve further growth?

The only options that Facebook has is to come up with better ways to extract more money from the existing user base or expand in other areas, and this is why we have the Metaverse.

“If our business is to monetize our users, then we need to have absolute control of this. And we are doing it by immersing these users into a mixture of digital and analogue reality.”

Google’s search results quality is currently abysmal. Not only are they censoring, but the quality is abysmal.

These days I realized that when I search in Google, the words I searched are not even in the query. They are actually trying to guess what I like, and that has been supplanted by Google showing you what other people already liked.

Google is trying to increase the clickthrough to their ads by sacrificing the relevance/quality of their search in favour of showing results that are “click-bait”. They know random things that I like and what I am prone to be distracted from, and they try to throw these random click baits at me so they can monetize me more and more via ads. So, in a sense Google does not really care any more if I will be satisfied by their results. They care mostly of whether I will click on a link/ad or not.

They think their search monopoly is impossible to crack and this is why they are willing to turn their search product into yellow-page tabloid. But I don’t think it is wise for Google to do that. There are other players in the search market that are rapidly gaining market share – DuckDuckGo, Brave, Yandex, Qwant, etc, and the more users

This is why they spun off Alphabet, because it is supposed to come up with other profitable ventures. But there is nothing even close to Google at the moment.

Growth routes are limited for Big Tech, and the only places are in China, Africa and Latin America. But, LATAM is very hard to penetrate. It is not very developed infrastructure-wise and the population is more oriented towards the analogue version of life.

Africa is too underdeveloped for big tech companies but they may change if there is a massive development of infrastructure there which Musk is hoping to achieve with his constellation of all these Satellites.

Reference: https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/starlink-satellite-internet-explained/

The only market that is ready for the taking is China, but the China regulatory layer is putting the brakes on western Big Tech because it doesn’t trust them.

China will never allow a foreign company to come in and swoop a specific market.

Talking of technology, to what extent has the proliferation of technology and social media affected our health? Kids are burning themselves playing video games nowadays. People live more in social media than in the real world.

I think it has a tremendously negative effect on health mostly because digital is a very weak substitute version of reality. It does not contain the novelty that the analogue world possesses.

Of course, things are also changing in the digital world but in a very predictable manner. I think that gears children feeling that they are fully in control. And when they have a clash in the real world they feel powerless because the things they expect to happen normally don’t happen. And they feel they don’t have the knowledge to cope with these, it’s almost that they are developing learned helplessness.

They have two choices, they have to dump the devices and re-learn to live in the real life or they get so overwhelmed by the real life that they now say, “The real world is too tough, I need somebody to curate it for me.”

And Facebook says, I am your man. Wear this device all the time and I will give you a nicer version of reality that you fully control. That is a very very dangerous proposition.

It’s an illusion, nobody has full control of reality. And you are surrendering control to an entity that is after profit, which is not bad, but as far as your health is concerned Facebook doesn’t care at all.

“If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.”

Facebook is working with experts to make their products more addictive, to trigger a higher emotional response.

And people are coming back more and more for that shot of dopamine, because it’s quick, enjoyable and you feel like a million bucks.

Children are very susceptive to internalizing these beliefs and behaviours. And when they grow up and have to interact with the real world, that could be very traumatizing for a kid that feels that anything you want is just a click away.

It makes life almost impossible or at least very stressful, because the skills to deal with the real world have been lost.

Pain avoidance hinders creativity

The element of the unexpected forces you to adapt. This attempt to adapt engages certain areas in the brain that are connected to creativity. It’s not a coincidence that people who are really good in arts and sports are never people who come from an environment of routine. Some of them have had very stressful lives but their lives were never routine, predictable, boring etc.

If you want to maintain creativity which is the best weapon to dealing with uncertainty; digital technology is not the answer to that. It destroys natural creativity and destroys the ability to intuitively come up with the solution.

In the digital world there is no testing. They are not interested in proving you are wrong. They only focus on giving you positive feedback so they can increase engagement with their devices and products.

We have seen an explosion in ADD (attention deficit disorder) even before the pandemic. It was known that watching too much TV can directly cause it. Radio can’t do that because audio is not sufficient to create a zombified behaviour. But if you combine it with video, that can cause severe psychological disturbances.

Depression and psychotic disorders are through the roof. People who are prone to excessive daydreaming are prone to psychotic disorders.

People who spend an exorbitant amount of time playing video games and on TV or social media tend to daydream excessively and ultimately that leads to psychotic disorders. You start believing that version of reality that is presented to you by those devices. In other words, you start believing in things that are not real, or are at least very heavily modified versions of reality. That is the definition of psychosis/schizophrenia.

“What we want from our life is to chase the hormetic response to succeed while modernity is the opposite.”

Modernity minimizes that response and is trying to completely remove it.

Modernity states: “We can create a world with no pain. We can also maximizes pleasure too. If pain is zero, then end value is infinite.” But the real world is not that.

Heraclitus: “Everything changes and nothing stands still.”

Taxi Drivers in London

The exam to become a London taxi driver up until 10 years ago included learning by heart all the roads and their names in Greater London. That was a very brutal exam. They discovered by doing MRI exams of the old and new drivers that there is a significant difference of the amount of brain grey matter on the people who learned the roads and apply them -Vs- the people who relied on the GPS. The latter actually became dumb.

Now imagine what will happen when we immerse into digital technology for much more than just driving. If we are checking Google for all types of information, if we are relying on Youtube to give us images of the world. Little by little every aspect of our life will come from this, being fully curated by them, and you will degenerate fast.

People crave connection with reality. With a GPS most of this is automated. The analogue world loses its meaning the more you interact with digital technology.

Reference: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/the-bigger-brains-of-london-taxi-drivers

For someone that feels tired fatigued and unwell, is it the proper course of action to stuff himself with multivitamins and supplements or is there a better way? It seems people are taking too many pills nowadays. Is that how modern medicine keeps us alive and well, or is that just how they make more money?!

Intuitively I think we all know the answer. This is a for profit industry and there is nothing wrong with that but problems arise.

It is way too easy, in our time deprived environment, to reach for the easy solution (a pill) – but it turns out it’s not easy at all as it makes the situation worse. Just popping an unknown number of pills prescribed by doctors or sold at a grocery store is not going to work. First you have to identify what the issue is.

Chronic fatigue is driven by declining metabolism. Unless you can produce energy, fatigue is actually the body’s adaptive mechanism to prevent you from expending more energy that you don’t actually have.

And one of the worst things you can do when fatigued is to force yourself to do more work like doing exhaustive exercise or pushing yourself even more; the whole “no pain no gain” thing.

I agree to a degree to that but also keep in mind that “more pain does not necessarily mean more gain”

This second part seems to be lost on most people; they think that if no pain means no gain then if I do more pain means I will have more gain. There is always an optimal amount of pain for the maximum amount of gain! After that it’s diminishing returns.

More pain does not always mean more gain.

I think in investing it works the same way, you can never time the market perfectly. I don’t know a single investor who has managed to do that over a sufficiently long period of time.

Short-term it could work, but overtime if they focused entirely on that strategy – it seems that it backfires.

It’s the same with popping pills. The core issue is suboptimal metabolism. Start working on that.

Go to your Doctor and do some basic blood work for thyroid, stress hormones, cortisol, estrogen, check androgens, check CO2 as it is a very good indicator of metabolism. Also check cholesterol levels; if cholesterol is high, metabolism is low.

If these biomarkers are out of whack, it is better to do focused things that address this imbalance rather than popping pills or multivitamins. Remember, those pills can also cause allergic reactions so they could be even more counterproductive.

What about path dependency? Is vitamin from food the same as vitamin from pills?

No, it’s not the same. Taking it from food is a much more complex reaction as we have evolved to take it from food. Now taking it from an isolated form we could be making it worse.

Silica, Talc, Titanium Dioxide, Parabens, Bisphenol A, Mineral Oil etc. are all excipients present in many/most pills/vitamins and the industry selling them is telling us those excipients are perfectly safe, but it turns out to be lie. A good example is the recent class action lawsuit against J&J. They knew the talc in their products causes ovarian cancer yet kept promoting it as safe. The same applies to most other excipients.

All of these things are irritating and toxic and most people don’t care about them but it’s enough to cause a reaction.  A small exposure to a toxin over a long period of time is worse than a brief exposure to a higher amount of toxin.

In fact, our stress system is designed to tolerate relatively elevated toxicity of these stress hormones but for a short period of time. Chronic elevation is much worse than brief bouts of exposure.

There is a certain amount of baseline stress that an animal can tolerate but if you elevate that beyond normal levels, invariably the animal either dies or develops a disease because stress suppress the immune system. We are not evolved to live under constant stress. Anything in your environment could trigger the stress inside you if your metabolism is low and you cannot produce the required energy to deal with the stress.

Even a tiny amount of titanium dioxide, present in all pharma drugs and many supplements is sufficient to cause diabetes. Considering that people take more than one pill, they maybe exposing themselves to high amounts of these excipients.

Iatrogenic reasons are the third highest cause of death. But you will never read that in the press or medical journals. Link

Many of these excipients are capable of causing CVD (cardiovascular disease) because they are pro-inflammatory. CVD is nothing but a chronic inflammatory disorder over a period of several years or decades.

Taking these things, more often than not, leads to a worse situation. The right thing to do is to adopt a more holistic approach like changing your diet, changing your lifestyle to reduce stress and surrounding yourself with people that you have a connection to.

Your journey in biochemistry led you to founding your own supplement company, Idea Labs DC. What was the idea behind that and what do you want to achieve by producing these supplements?

Basically, it was done as a source of side income. Now I work with a research group in Bulgaria and with this group we want to test the metabolic ideas on several diseases like Cancer, Alzheimer’s and even Covid to see to what degree changing the diet or eliminating PUFA can help these conditions.

We want to show that all disease stems from dysregulated metabolism. I don’t want to sell a remedy for everything, but if the company can finance the research activity and share the knowledge with the world then that is good for now. I don’t want to become a big supplement vendor.

There is a plethora of “Cancer Stocks” popping up promising to cure cancer and other serious diseases via DNA-therapies and cracking the genetic code. Should Philoinvestors be looking deeper into these stocks or not?

As far as investment opportunities are concerned, unfortunately there is little correlation between how viable a therapy is and what the drug will do financially.

There are examples of drugs that got withdrawn from the market but made big money. FDA Q&A on Vioxx

For example Vioxx, it was the most prescribed NSAID (non-steroid anti-inflammatory drug) in the market ever but after some high profile deaths, the FDA pressured Merck to pull the drug. Merck did so but the point is that Merck made big money from this. The rise and fall of Vioxx

So, there is money to be made from these stocks if there is government backing or a potential acquisition from a big pharma company. The genetic mechanism behind cancer has been an idea that has been pursued at this point for almost 100 years. It has produced absolutely nothing.

Pharma claims that any disorders you develop is because of genetics.

First, they thought it was a gene responsible for cancer, they couldn’t find it. Then they thought it was a group of genes. Then they thought an entire genome could be causing cancer, that also turned out to nothing.

So far, genetics and genes in terms of disease cause is a dead end, unless the disease is present at birth (“congenital disease”). Even if it is genetic, it can be handled by things that methylate or demethylate those genes. There is no need to edit genes, to turn into a mutant!

To me that is a very extreme version way of looking at disease. Considering the fact that up to now it has not paid off, throwing even more money into the approach is not warranted. But as far as trying to make money from such misguided but highly supported approaches, I think it is very possible.

General Electric

General Electric is the leading producer of CT scanners. The problem is that a single such scan delivers the radiation of 500 X-rays; and the risk of developing cancer from ionizing radiation is cumulative. It depends on the total number of exposures in your life.

They used to think and still propagate incorrectly that it was a linear threshold. As long as you are not getting an intense exposure, you can get 1000 exposures of low level and not be in risk of cancer. That is false.

General Electric got caught selling its machines over-calibrated to deliver even more radiation than was necessary because the higher the amount of radiation the more fine and higher quality images it produces. But this at the expense of higher risk of cancer for the patient. GE got caught that they deliberately did this and several people proved in court that this caused their cancer.

“Just because something is detrimental overall to society doesn’t mean it will not make a lot of money.”

So my response is two pronged, if it’s about money there is a chance that some of these companies will make a lot of money. If it’s about health I think they are bad; every single one of them.

How long do you think the research and development will take for these new therapies to be approved for use and go to market?

I think now with the mRNA vaccines, and this is why we are seeing the major push behind vaccines and mandates, is because it also changes the paradigm. Back in the day, you would spend 10 years just trying to develop and test a drug or a medical intervention.

Now due to the pandemic, the public has been conditioned to accept an intervention whether it’s a vaccine or something else that has had only a fraction of the testing and the investment that goes into developing these therapies

Before it took 10 years and 2-3 billion but now with these new vaccines it has been shown it can be done in 3 months. But in the expense of safety.

Now the whole industry and regulatory framework is moving towards shifting the acceptance of that risk on the end-consumer.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Crispr therapies already being done and maybe the way they will get this to the market quickly is by saying that they can actually improve your chance of recovering from Covid if they edit one or more genes.

A lot of medical development is likely to happen over the next year or two and we will probably see therapies applied to human use without the usual long-term decade or more timeframe and the associated investment.

There is a tremendous opportunity to make money in this environment but in the expense of the user.

Have you looked at the Marijuana industry at all?

Making money in marijuana stocks is the same story as in genetics stocks.  As regards health benefits, the evidence is pretty conclusive that long term usage of marijuana is detrimental to health, especially if done on a regular basis.

Occasional use is like alcohol because it does have anti-stress effects. But long-term use leads to psychosis and infertility in both sexes. It may lead to several cancers and it is an endocrine disruptor. Many of the chemicals in marijuana are estrogenic, serotonergic and anti-androgenic. From the metabolic point of view, I would not use marijuana.

However, there is a lot of money to be made there. I think governments will start regulating it more as some clinical trials are concluding now and will inform on how marijuana affects general health.

I see that humanity has mostly accepted the notion that our genes command most everything in our lives. If you are balding, it’s in your genes. If you are weak or strong, it’s in your genes. What’s the story with genetic determinism?

I have not seen evidence to back this notion up. Height is considered highly genetically predetermined but I have 3 friends that are towering above their parents. 7 feet vs 5 feet.

The only difference between these 2 generations is that the parents were living mostly with grains as part of the food but then they moved to the city and the kids were raised on a diet of milk, eggs, meats, fish etc., away from some of the pesticides used in agro-regions.

During communism many pesticides were imposed on the farmers to be used but those pesticides were extremely toxic. DDT is a famous example.

To this day the pesticides being used in both Greece and Bulgaria are very toxic but very effective. And since many of them have been banned in Western countries, the big vendors like Monsanto are dumping those banned chemicals on countries with less ability to resist. As shown in the Wikileaks documents Monsanto tried to bribe even the French minister of agriculture to allow use of toxic pesticides. When he refused, Monsanto turned its eye on Eastern Europe where bribes are much less likely to be investigated.

It is the quality of dietary protein that is responsible for the difference in height. It is well known from other studies that height varies with the socioeconomic development of a country.

This whole idea that a disease is due to a gene or a group of genes or an interaction of genes has already been largely been invalidated.  As far as genes are concerned, there is heritability but that is not the same as genetic determinism.

For example, descendants of Holocaust survivors have been found to suffer much higher rates of chronic disease than the general population even though their ancestors who were in the concentration camps did not mutate to favour disease and did not carry disease genes as they themselves did not develop the disease their descendants developed.

So, the stress the Holocaust survivors endured in the camps was transferred to their children and grandchildren, etc but no genes were involved. The heritability of that disease susceptibility was epigenetic. The same thing applies to health.

When somebody sees a good-looking, tall person they will say “wow, what good genes you have”, when in reality that person simply inherited the benefits of the good/healthy life his/her ancestors had. And finally, genetic causes of disease do not make sense evolutionary. If disease is bad and evolution is an optimization mechanisms, it there were any genes causing disease they would have been de-selected by the evolutionary process billions of years ago. Why would evolution propagate features/genes/disease that are costly and reduce the likelihood of an organism surviving and reproducing?

There is no solid evidence for genetic determinism except congenital diseases. But even in that case, some of those diseases can be reversed by improving the ratio of NAD/NADH which are the most fundamental ways to improving the energetic capacity of the cell.

What have DNA therapies actually achieved since they started?

Nothing. The human genome project is an absolute abject failure. Trillions of dollars have been poured into it with no results. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/revolution-postponed/

The Philippines has just emergency approved the Novavax vaccine. Since COVID, the stock has done ~50X, do you see that kind of potential in anything else going forward?

I think there is a potential for Novavax to increase even more if it gets approved by the US or the EU (Novavax wasn’t approved by the EU at the time of the interview, it is now). If that’s the case then you can expect more upside from here simply because of the large percentage of unvaccinated people.

The US and EU populations together are ~800 million people. The unvaccinated population is 40% and that’s ~300 million people. A huge untapped market that can be owned by Novavax because in my knowledge there is no other company close to developing a traditional vaccine for Covid.

If Novavax gets approved and starts taking over that market, there is a huge potential for a several fold increase from here.

The Pfizer Covid Pill

If the Pfizer pill gets approved the Vaccine mandate may disappear. We were told by govt officials that the whole point of the vaccine mandate is because we don’t have a way to treat covid.

The argument for vaccine mandates crumbles because if the pill treats covid there is no reason for them to exist. But again, just because something is not needed any more does not mean the company selling it will stop selling it. If there is established market, the company will keep selling its product, even if it is obsolete. Pfizer Game Changing Pill

Any breakthroughs that you are expecting in the field of medicine and therapy?

Not from traditional medicine because it is too invested with the genetic paradigm as it matches so well with the IT (information technology) paradigm.

At this point most pharma companies are IT companies because most of the genetic therapies and genetic analyses of disease is actually computer modelling.

Genes and computers go well together. But computer are not good at modelling continuous flow of energy and information. And that’s what the body is, it is a constant and largely unpredictable flow (i.e. Panta Rei) of electrons.

The way big pharma and medicine are trying to steer the conversation is similar to the Facebook conversation on reality.

🤖 TRANSHUMANISM 🤖

And that is where transhumanism is coming from. Big Pharma says, “We tried to cure these terrible human diseases and we couldn’t. So the way we solve that is to turn people into mechanical robots that can’t get sick. They can break down, but we know to easily repair mechanical failure.”

But the flow of electrons in computers does not change physical structure the way it does in the body. Consciousness is a process where electrons can flow and modify the structure.

In the computers there is a structure and electrons flow through it but they don’t physically modify the structure. A computer is the same from a day to day, but the human body fully turns over in 6 months. It fully replaces itself in 6 months, yet it somehow stays the same person.

Every cell that you are made of will be completely replaced in about 6 months, but somehow that would still be you. While the computer in 6 months will be the same exact computer, except for the abstract representation of information inside of it.

And the industry is trying to equate that with consciousness, humanity and reality.

That’s why I think transhumanism will fail. What it may achieve is replace everything except our brains, but I am not sure how well this will work out.

I think the brain communicates with every part of body and if you are a cyborg with a human brain, things can go very wrong.

But there is plenty of money to be made due to the greed of certain people and the stupidity of the populace.

🦾

Prosthetic limbs can save an immediate anatomical problem but we don’t know the long-term problems of that. We don’t know over time what happens to that metallic arm literally embedded in your organism. For sure it will leech metals, and further to that we don’t know what happens to those electrodes that are implanted into your brain.

Any foreign body that your organism is incapable of excreting, eventually triggers cancer. First the body will encapsulate that foreign body in this gelatinous shell, then calcium and then more tissue and eventually it will form this lump. But the cells around that lump will be very metabolically deranged and those cells are fully capable of eventually forming independent cancers and metastasizing.

Breast Implants = Transhumanism

Initially the doctors were popular, everybody thought that these doctors are Gods as they solved the confidence issues of so many women. And little by little it turned out that all the breast implants over time lead to development of cancers.

https://raypeatforum.com/community/threads/breast-implants-can-cause-lymphoma.20423/

Now we know that this is not a viable healthy therapy, I suspect the same model will play out in regards to these semi-cyborgs. Your limbs are robotic but your brain is still human, and no matter how much Big Tech wants to replace your brain with a computer chip the evidence points to that it CANNOT be done. So, your brain will probably remain human and the data that we have on the long-term effects of anything implanted in the body or brain is not good.

Explant Documentary

Over the past six decades, thousands of women across the globe have become sick with an amalgam of mysterious and severe autoimmune disease symptoms. The common denominator in many of their cases? Breast implants.

A lot of people are suffering from intestinal issues. What’s up with what? Do you have any tips on inflammatory bowel and constipation/diarrhea?

Most likely chronic stress which slows down gut motility and gives more chance for the bacteria to digest the undigested food turning it into endotoxin which inflames the bowel and increases synthesis of serotonin.

Activated charcoal helps, eating easily digestible foods, avoiding PUFA (poly-unsaturated fats) as much as possible, taking vitamin E once or twice a week to protect from the detrimental effects of PUFA.

Anti-serotonin drugs are known to cure IBS but ultimately that’s just a patch unless you really sort out the core issues which are invariably stress and/or eating improper food that is feeding the bacteria.

Some activated charcoal, a daily carrot salad, anti-serotonin drugs and anti-estrogenics alleviate but often do not cure bowel disorders.

All of these supplements will be patch-work unless you actually address the underlying issues.

I have always believed that health is of primary importance in success. There is no success without health. And that goes the same for investing. How good will your investing really be if you are stressed out, anxious and tired all the time?

On that note, could you offer Philoinvestors any lifestyle guidelines to follow for lowering stress and living a better life? The low-hanging fruit so to speak🍎

Well, there is a famous proverb in eastern Europe. “Never make big decisions on an empty stomach.”

That’s probably a good rule of thumb. Investing is stressful by definition as you invest money, sometimes your own sometimes other people’s.

The implication is that if you lose, many people will suffer. Therefore, having the energetic reserves is extremely important not only to handle the losses which will inevitably come at some point, but also to see them as a lesson and take them into perspective – to learn from them and become better in the future.

It has been shown that when you are under stress (brain and scalp temperature largely determines your cognitive abilities) you shouldn’t make financial decisions.

And the way to guard yourself from that is to not work in an office which is poorly ventilated, is cold or has blue light. And to my experience that happens to be most offices.

If you have to work in such an office, bring a red light amd make sure you’ve had a good breakfast in the morning which includes sufficient amount of protein.

If coffee makes you stressed it’s better not to take it. Some people believe coffee gives them an edge because they are ready to go, shaky and agitated, but I don’t think that is the way to go ☕️

But in investing you want to be calm and collected, and find information that contradicts your theses and not the opposite. Humans famously have confirmation biases and cognitive dissonance, and neither is pleasant.

Confirmation bias makes you pay attention to confirmatory evidence and ignore the latter. But also the pain of not liking to find evidence that is conflicting with your beliefs. The way the brain deals with this is to exclude it. We don’t like negative information.

The best way to mitigate that is making sure you can give your brain a sufficient amount of energy to be able to hold an opinion that is contrary to your internal one.

“One of the highest markets of intelligence is the ability to put yourself in the position to endorse an opponent’s idea and argue in favour of it.” Aristotle

Energy is success

Aristotle often did this with his students, he put two students who held opposing views. And after they had finished talking, he commanded them to switch their views and argue in favour of the other guy.

He found out that when people were tired and hungry, they couldn’t do it – it was just too stressful for them. But the ones who were well fed and basically the ones who were the most capable of arguing for the opposing views turned out to be the most intelligent and succeeded in life back in Ancient Greece.

Even the smart ones could not perform well if they were not properly fed. Be well fed, be unstressed and deal with personal problems because they can wreak havoc.

Try to trade with a clean mind, in an environment that is conducive to optimal environment. Get sunlight and take vitamin D as it has a cognitive boosting effect ☀️

I feel the quality of sleep in modernity has dropped dramatically. All my friends have trouble sleeping well. What can someone do to get better sleep? By the way, my sleep usually drops in quality when I use too much caffeine.

Blue light is the perpetrator of sleep-disturbance. The light coming from devices is heavy on the blue spectrum, and it’s the blue spectrum that suppresses production of melatonin but also it inhibits mitochondrial function.

Staring at a red light for 3 minutes a day, twice a week is capable of reversing declining vision. Even if you point the light at the wall, and look at the wall, it still has a therapeutic effect. After two months of doing that, there was reversal in the decline of vision.

Mechanism of action: 🏮Red light improves mitochondrial function in the retina. Declining vision is correlated to declining brain function as well.

Blue light does the opposite: You harm your vision, your brain and your sleep. Your overall cognitive function. Don’t spend so much time in front of the computer. Install a filter that removes blue spectrum of the light. This promotes feelings of relaxation and the feeling to sleep.

—> Just Get Flux!

The fluorescent blue light that you often see in hospitals is very detrimental.

I know Doctors that had headache for years. I told them to change the lights in their office and their headaches disappeared. You can solve this problem by not turning on the fluorescent light or installing a red light LED.

Melatonin is a very powerful inhibitor. If your health is good, you will produce enough amounts but we don’t know the full pathways when you supplement it.

Supplementing melatonin could increase serotonin and increase stress in the system. Path-dependency matters.

Doesn’t coffee spike hormones and by doing so disrupts sleep?

Yes that’s how it works.

Also coffee antagonizes the so called adenosine system. It is a calming system and if you antagonize it, excitation results. Usually the inhibitory systems and the stress systems are the opposite.

Conversely, anything that inhibits GABA can increase stress hormones. This can lead to nervous system burn out.

If you take caffeine without enough nutrients and fuel, you trigger a stress reaction. If coffee is too much: The cells treat it as a toxin and ramp up the metabolic rate to excrete it. And they need fuel for that.

Promoting the inhibitory system of the body with glycine, more salt and sufficient calcium promotes metabolism and calms you down. Sodium has an anti-serotonin effect, and this has a sleep promotion effect because serotonin promotes cortisol. Glycine is very good for skin, hair and nails. Glycine is the major component of collagen.

People who have trouble sleeping have high cortisol. People with depression also have high cortisol 😔

The Cushing disease drug rapidly normalizes disturbed sleep, even in people with PTSD. The drug is called RU485, known as the abortion pill because Sanofi-Aventis quickly realized it will make more money as an abortion pill than as a cortisol blocker, but it was originally designed/developed as a cortisol blocker.

They repurposed the drug from a Cushing’s disease pill to an abortion pill, because it can block progesterone and that terminates pregnancy.

It is known that people with depression have high cortisol, and high cortisol comes with high serotonin. Lowering serotonin also helps promote sleep as this has a lowering effect on cortisol.

Cyproheptadine has a very fast action on depression and sleep, as it lowers serotonin.

I recently gave up coffee. I went into a deep lethargy, with short bouts of productivity. My sleep became very deep. What’s the story?

Caffeine overuse tends to block the inhibitory adenosine system which is one of the key elements of sleep.

And some people with poor liver function have trouble metabolizing coffee. In fact the speed in which you can metabolise coffee has been clinically as a measure of liver function.

And if you feel like even a single cup of coffee is giving you problem, especially if it comes with cream and sugar, then maybe you are too compromised of a metabolic state to be using it. So better if you don’t.

And then for the person that gave up coffee and his sleep improved, I’d like to know how much he was using. If he was using a small amount then maybe coffee is too stressful for you, as your health is compromised at the moment.

If you are abusing it; taking extreme amounts and I know some investment professionals that do – then make sure that everytime you drink coffee you provide sufficient energy for it. Because all coffee does is ramp up your metabolism. So if you are pressing on the gas but if don’t have enough energy within you, all the gas pressing does nothing – actually it is counterproductive by burning out the engine.

Coffee is a BOOSTER. If you don’t have any gas in the tank, the engine will break down. It cannot on itself make you move better. That depends on the energy supply.

It’s not a good idea to take coffee in an emotionally stressed state. Better calm down first and then drink the coffee. Because it is like saying, “I am stressed but if I ramp up myself more I will perform better.” This is usually not true.

Those stressful/manic periods did not lead to good investment decisions. If you are a fundamental investor then it makes even less sense to promote stress for performance, because your investing window should be fairly long. And having a calm mind is imperative.

Let’s stop the interview here and continue with more questions in the next one.

Sure.