Paused at 1:00:39.
Hey everyone, we just got wrapped up with our last live stream, number 51 with Ray Peat, and we had tons of issues with bandwidth and the sound is kind of popping every so often. And so it's extremely imperfect, and so it's not up to the quality of the other streams, unfortunately. I don't even know what happened. I'm still going to try to figure it out. But I still obviously wanted to release the episode. I've stitched together some of the long silences, unfortunately, that happened during the show.
And at about 1 hour and 22 minutes and also an hour and 34 minutes, I had to stitch those together because there were long periods of silence. So here it is. It's again, the quality is not amazing. And again, it's like popping throughout the whole episode, but I thought it was really excellent otherwise. And I thought we covered a lot of new ground. So I hope you guys like it. And yeah, we'll try to do better next time. Okay. Talk to you guys soon. And here's the episode.
Okay. Georgi has a small window here. So guys, we're having a little bit of bandwidth problems, but we do have Mr. Raymond Peat, Mr. Georgi Dinkov. Ray, how are you? Very good. Georgi, how are you in your small, low bandwidth box? Still hanging in there, like surrounded by the National Guard. Okay. So we have something to anchor this show in. And so Ray just wrote a fantastic newsletter, riffing on ideas that I hear few people talking about.
So Ray, your newest newsletter just came out a few days ago, if I'm not wrong, but it's cumulative damage, degeneration and aging possibilities of reversal. And it had a lot to do with the heat shock protein. So that was the part I was vaguely familiar with. But maybe, I don't know, do you want to talk about just giving your motivation for writing it?
Oh, it's part of the general picture, how to understand biology usefully. And the reductionist, breaking it up into parts, you can have an infinite amount of that kind of knowledge and never be able to do anything with it. But if you are actually under the principle of how the organism works, bacteria don't have any of our ordinary analytic abilities, but they have the intelligence and computational ability that lets them redesign themselves radically to meet a challenging environment.
And Barbara McClintock showed that that same sort of redesigning your genome happens in plants. And it should be obvious that if bacteria and plants can radically pick themselves up and change themselves to do better in the world, there's no reason why people should feel that they're weighted down by the horrible ballast of genes inherited from reptiles or whatever. And the factors of this simplifying picture are the physics of phase change, essentially what Gilbert Ling was talking about,
but what was a major movement early in the 20th century for understanding the origin of life and what life is in its basis. And that view that life is a substance rather than an accumulation of 20,000 independent pieces of DNA, that idea of life as a substance, it can change the phase in one direction of losing energy or it can, with good luck, come back to a high energy state because all of the parts are subordinate to the flow of energy managed by the whole organism itself.
And you talked about, I'm going to butcher his name, Le Châtelier's principle. And so the first, I don't know if this is related, I think it's related to Barbara McClintock, but a long time ago, maybe you had said that you read a paper or there was a situation where a cave of fish, fresh river fish were diverted into a cave and then over a period of time, they lost their eyes, became clear, and they basically adapted very quickly to their environment. But that's along the lines of Barbara McClintock's research, right?
Like inborn capacity to change given a new novel or even an inhospitable environment. - [DH] Oh yeah, the encyclopedias that I read as a kid reported those experiments. The regular mainline encyclopedias included the Lamarckist experiments. And when I was in graduate school, there were still people doing experiments of that sort. Previously, they had done them with various sea organisms and plants, hybridizing plants by grafting branches to them, causing a change in the whole organism.
These experiments with fruit flies, since fruit flies were the main organism, the genetics dogma based itself on bacteria, single-celled organisms, and then finally fruit flies. Two different kinds of experiments. One fed fruit flies a very high salt diet, and they adaptively changed their cuticle so that it wasn't irritated by the flow of salt in and out. Their anal scales were toughened up, and putting others under a very hot artificial light caused the wing structure to thicken up and get thick veins.
So these were strictly first-generation adaptation to a stressful environment. Then they turned off the light and gave them a normal salt diet and cross-bred them. From then on, they could have a Mendelian-like inheritance of these traits that they had never seen before in fruit flies. They sorted out generation after generation with the thickened scales and the thickened veins in their wings. I asked several of my professors about that, and the standard action was those were hidden genes. They were there all along, and once they expressed them, then they were able to continue expressing them.
But that is the scientific method genetics is based on. If it happens, then it must have already been there in these immortal genes because nothing new happens. So it's better than a deus ex machina. It's saying that, "Well, we knew that already. You didn't do anything except we hadn't previously expressed that gene, but it's immortal and it's always been there."
So to get into the bulk of your newsletter about the heat shock proteins, you start off by talking about Gilbert Ling. I flipped through his book again, and he's talking about ATP, what did he call it? The par excellence or the queen of cardinal adsorbents. So that's something that's helping or critical for the electron flow or pulling electrons through the cell and doting to oxygen. ATP has to be, what's the right phrasing? Lost in the cell for this phase transition to happen?
Yeah. I mentioned that it functions as a protein solvent, and so if you lower your energy and don't have the ATP binding it and keeping the cell together, some proteins come out of solution and go into a different phase. So these become stress-induced organelles, but they always depend on the situation, the type of stress. So the way the protein comes out of solution when the cell is de-energized is shaped by the other factors acting on the organism.
The practical use of that idea is something that has been noticed ever since experiments by Szent-Györgyi that ATP has a softening, relaxing effect on isolated protein material from cells. Exactly the idea of keeping everything together and in solution in the cytoplasm or the coacervate or the whole protoplasm. In a fatigued muscle, for example, the muscle gets harder and harder and when it's fully energized, the cytoplasm is flexible and soft but can in a moment contract and do a maximum of work.
Like a fatigued heart gets harder and harder, but on stimulation it's already tight and hardened and so it can't do much more to become tighter. So the ATP functionally represents the flow of energy, carbon dioxide produced from oxidizing glucose, for example. The energized well-nourished cell is in a relaxed state and that has to do with insomnia, muscle cramps, all the biological functions all the way down to cancer, for example.
Cancers can be adequately diagnosed just by their hardness. Doctors have noticed that if a lymph node is hard to the touch, it's going to look cancerous on the inside if they cut it open. But the hardness involves first the inability to relax and then the stabilization of a fibrous form of actin, one of the mobility producing proteins of any sort of cell.
And then the depleted energy turns on collagen synthesis and the actin, which is hardening the cell from the inside, attaches to this growing collagen produced surround and you get a system that is harder and harder the more energy depleted it is. Was Szent-Györgyi the person who did the experiments with injecting ATP into dead animals and he showed that it reverses the rigor mortis?
Yeah, rigor mortis is the phase change and when you get smaller degrees of that phase change, then you get chronic things like intracellular bodies that produce anything from arthritis like inflammation to dementia, formation of prions. Proteins that are no longer soluble becoming the mad cow or Alzheimer's agent. So this is happening, this precedes cellular division, correct? Like when a cell is extremely stressed out?
Oh, yeah, promoting cell division is one of the alternatives and you want to lose the complex energy consuming cell functions, thought and organization and secretion, all of the fancy specialized things cost energy. And to escape from whatever is causing the stress and the damage, turning off the differentiated functions and resorting to simple cell division, making new cells hoping that they will survive and overcome the environment. So the hardening process is broken free of by activating the de-differentiating cancer producing property.
Are you familiar with some studies published I think in the 80s showing that niacinamide is actually also a great substance for increasing solubility of pretty much anything it gets called dissolved with? I saw some studies showing that if you mix niacinamide and let's say something very lipophilic like progesterone, it increases its solubility in water by a few thousand percent. And then they tried a few different substances and niacinamide increased the solubility of many different proteins that weren't very soluble in water.
So I'm wondering if considering the similarity or the importance of niacinamide as an NAD precursor and the relationship with ATP, whether niacinamide can fill in for some of those roles that ATP has as a solubility increase. Yeah, it does and it's able to stop the energy loss. It turns off some of the deranged DNA repair mechanisms and can just let the cell die peacefully rather than draining tremendous amounts of energy. So it plugs the leak and that solubility thing has all degrees of visibility.
About 1971 or 2, I was experimenting with things like bread dough. I was making bread at the time and the relation of water retention to the bread dough is a big factor in the texture of the bread. I was thinking of the bread dough as an analog for the cytoplasm and what happens when the cytoplasm is energized and relaxed or stressed and tensed up. I tried different stimulants and sedatives and found that the free water content of barbiturate was one thing I tried.
It made the dough slippery and wet because it was unable to hold the water in solution and stimulants like caffeine, which also has a solubilizing effect on other substances. It made the dough bind water and retain more water. So it could be very humid containing a lot of water and still not be wet and slippery. Would gelatin have some of those effects as well, increase the solubility of intracellular proteins? Would which? Gelatin.
It would probably depend on the starches present. One of the classical examples for studying coacervation was to make gelatin and gum arabic, a starchy molecule. They handle water in different ways according to their proportion. Gelatin is bound to run into things like RNA and polymer carbohydrates that will affect the water holding properties. If I'm reading this correctly, an excess of unpaired electrons, which is what happens when metabolism is impaired, would greatly inhibit the solubility of proteins inside the cell, right? Mm-hmm.
So things that accept those electrons like quinones or other oxidizing agents, they should improve the solubility of proteins and retain the gelatin-like structure of the cell. Yeah, and that should involve a constant flow. When the excess electrons are being drained away quickly enough, that is the living state. It should be constantly active with electrons flowing into the electron vacuum of oxygen. So some of those effects of estrogen on activating the heat shock proteins and decreasing the solubility of proteins in the cell, does that have to do with the activity of estrogen as a reductant?
Yep. That's its molecular structure. The phenolic structure shifts the electrons away from oxidation and changes the whole water protein system so that while stopping oxygen energy production, it activates the enzymes that govern glycolysis and lactic acid metabolism. And the role of progesterone as an inhibitor of HSP formation, is that a direct effect or does it have more to do with the opposition of progesterone to estrogen's effects? Its direct action is probably on proteins in general, not just a protein of progesterone receptor, but it is currently effective on a great variety of proteins,
including the cell division apparatus and motility and conductivity and so on. And it is one of the things that helps the cell retain water under control, but not having the wetting property where estrogen releases water from proteins, it makes them swell up with bulk inactive or glycolysis-supporting water. Progesterone causes the water to be bound into a solution with the proteins and excludes the pre-bulk water.
Maybe we'll back up just a second here. People in the health world, they say you should activate these heat shock proteins to sit in a sauna for hours or something, and these help a person resist stress. How do you see that? That's true that they will help a cell survive partial cooking and so on. That's where the whole idea of them being strictly beneficial, that they do help survival of terrible conditions,
like being poisoned by germs or cooked by excess heat or starved by energy depletion. But the drug companies are among the first to become aware that that process, de-energizing cells, turning them towards the lactic acid, cancer-like or stress-like metabolism, that the whole energy of the cell goes down. As the life of the cell is saved by the heat shock proteins, its energy tends to revert to that simple cancer metabolism that loses the basic function of what the organism was trying to do.
So the drug companies are producing chemicals that they hope will be non-toxic that will reverse the process, knock out the heat shock proteins and restore cells, bringing them back from the cancer or stress metabolism. I might have not clipped it out of your newsletter, but didn't you say that the activation of the system, it was kind of like you'll never – I know there's a sticky statement, but you'll never be the same again?
Like you'll have stepped backward and the heat shock proteins will basically leave some kind of scar that the ability to generate energy won't ever be like it was before that activation? Does that make any sense? That's the general line of aging. It's like a ratchet that keeps you alive for the moment, but each time it is called on for that short-term survival, it reduces your flexibility just like a scar. It plugs a hole, but it limits function.
If you get your attention on the whole coacervate-like quality of the organism, getting rid of that high quantity of heat shock proteins at the same time that you're energizing the whole cell, and it happens that progesterone has many layers of functions blocking and reverting away from the heat shock state and activating the right kind of energy production, suppressing lactic acid metabolism, antagonizing estrogen, blocking collagen production, all of the levels happen to be touched on by progesterone.
I wanted to make a point that you mentioned the heat shock protein 70 and the involvement of estrogen and nitric oxide in activating it, but there are a lot of studies showing that the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis is actually just as potent in cortisol specifically. Not only it increases the production of this protein, but actually that protein is required for cortisol to bind to its receptor and cause all the downstream effects that exist. It seems that any type of stress, not just heat, is capable of activating or increasing the synthesis of these heat shock proteins.
De-energizing the cell. Exactly. So I guess it's a bit of a misnomer to call them heat shock proteins. They're more like stress shock proteins or just shock proteins in general. Yeah. They block the disorganizing factors that come from everything that de-energizes the cell. So if I understand correctly, any event that the organism is exposed to that demands production of energy to deal with, which is really any event in life, if the energy production is not sufficient to meet the demand, then the heat shock proteins will get activated.
So in other words, aging occurs every time there is a demand on us placed by the environment that we cannot meet up energetically. Yep. And if you pay attention during stress, you can learn to see the taste in your mouth and the odor of expired air through your nose, for example. You can tell when the energy supply is under stress and basically aging is happening when you see these signs.
For example, if you stay in a hot bath too long, you start getting weak and feeling stress. And at an extreme, you can get a metallic taste in your mouth and a dry, odd odor in your exhaled breath. And you realize that if you have a pint of orange juice or so, you can stop those processes and get things working again. What's that metallic taste in the mouth due to? Is it truly because there's some metal that's getting unbound from cells?
No, it's just lipid peroxidation. When the free fatty acids reach a certain point, anything available as a catalyst will start lipid peroxidation. And since metals cause it, we associate that taste with metals. But you don't need the metal because it's the lipid peroxides you're tasting. So if your breath starts smelling like ketones or ammonia, all of these are also signs that you've overstressed yourself. We already talked about estrogen increasing the heat shock proteins. Just going back to an old email that you and I had, Ray, you said, "Estrogen, hyperventilation, lactate, etc. increases serotonin."
I think it's serotonin that directly increases parathyroid hormone, and then parathyroid hormone increases nitric oxide. So the heat shock proteins are just happening under all of that. Is that right? Or is it more of a secondary messenger type of situation? Yeah. There are so many of these pathways towards death. Each pathway gives you mental confirmation, but the fact is they're all happening at the same time because it isn't being run by a cascade of signals acting on receptors. It's the phase change that's happening. Like a phase change of the entire organism mediated by each cell?
Mm-hmm. And that coacervate, that's like a mini cancer? The cell is no longer a whole and it's kind of dividing up into subgroups? Is that the way you see it? It's part of normal adaptation for the cytoplasm to differentiate according to challenge. But when the de-energizing is extreme, you get things like the prions forms that can start real degeneration, cancer, and dementia, and so on. But ordinarily, any little pressure can cause the quality of the coacervate to change accordingly and usefully.
And that's what's happening when bacteria do the reorganization of their genes. It isn't that they have a messenger service that has the address of the genes that they send in after having computed which gene they need to meet the environmental stress. But it's that the whole system is such that the genetic resources are always in touch with the problem situation. And so the phase change occurs according to a schedule of real-world probability. And those small perturbations are really like the organism's holistic way of doing calculations.
And during that process, the cell would be especially susceptible to vaccine or viral RNA, polyethylene glycol, carrageenan, etc.? Yeah, the fatigued state is a degree of the inflamed state. And one of the deranged things related to the genetic causation doctrine is the idea of the cell surface membrane as being a barrier. But if you think of it being nothing but the end of the coacervate of the cell and the beginning of the extracellular world, the state of energy of the coacervate or the degree of water protein solubility of the cell as a whole,
the barrier function on the microscopic level that Gilbert Ling talks about, it's a phase governed selectivity, not a pore governed. The idea that you can let in a small, moderately water-free potassium ions to the energized cell and exclude the hydrated, bigger sodium ions, that's the idea that there is a barrier. But the drug companies have taken advantage of that and convinced researchers to get certain drugs or big molecules in the cells.
They need to buy a certain delivery or targeting molecule like the vaccine, the current RNA vaccine has lipids that are actually functioning as inflammation promoting adjuvants. But they're being advertised as delivery agents for the nucleic acid as supposedly the strip of RNA is so big it can't get across the barrier membrane unless it's enclosed in these targeting specific lipids. But when one group of researchers was genetically modifying cells, they would buy the targeting agent and put their stretch of a big DNA molecule into this targeting lipid.
And as a control for how successful the genetic change was taking up the targeted DNA, they introduced bare naked stretches of the same DNA. And they found they went into cells even easier than the targeted piece of DNA. The cells, ordinary cells can take up or dissolve DNA from the environment. So what you eat, a certain amount of the DNA is getting into your lymphatic and blood circulation and cells have the option of taking up whole genetic stretches of information.
If the cell judges it, it can be helpful. So the idea of the cell state, the inflammatory state, it's really the cell that is already stressed, de-energized, and inflamed is an obvious target for a virus. The virus doesn't have to necessarily have clever attaching machinery and enzymes. It can just fall into a weakened cell just because the cell is relatively water soluble. You've described that before as just a general leakiness, correct? Yeah. And in your newsletter you say the drug companies are creating a variety of heat shock protein inhibitors and you said that also before.
But I imagine minocycline or the tetracyclines in general and progesterone, those are drugs that already exist that probably do that, right? Yeah. Methylene blue is also another extremely potent one specifically for heat shock protein 70.
Thanks for that, Georgi. Ray, I don't know how related this question is, but the idea of incorporating things like milk and cheese and vitamin D and vitamin K to lower parathyroid hormone, do you see that as a newer part of the system and thus suppressing it can help turn off a lot of these older aspects of the system like the prolactin, the serotonin, etc.? Well, there are different layers and probably most important to an organism with a big skeleton, but I think analogs of parathyroid hormone go way back in the different evolutionary levels.
I don't remember where it starts, but I think it's something analogous is a very early part of the systems. But the parathyroid glands being, I mean, you correct me, but in such close proximity to the thyroid, did that mean they evolved at the same time? Not necessarily, but probably. They have very contrary functions and so maybe it's like being close so they know what each other is doing. And then a similar question, but the renin-angiotensin system, is that even more ancient than our hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis?
I think it is. Those are things you can look up. The phylogeny of hormones. A lot of people have seen how far back you can find the molecule. Great stuff. I was going to do an advertisement. Georgi, unless you have some questions? No, keep going. Okay, so we jumped right into it, but I just wanted to say that we are reading from Ray Peat's newsletter. And so Ray, can you just let everybody know how they can obtain your newsletter? Oh, [email protected]. They can give you information. It's $28 for 12 issues over two years.
And then the same situation for your books. So you can email that same address. When you looked at these prices, were those right for the digital copies? No, I think it's much lower for the digital. I don't remember how much it is. That's what I thought. So you can get Ray's books in a digital format. And then I wanted to talk about Progest-E from Kenogen. And so this is the Progestrone I've been using for a long, long time. I email Catherine at [email protected].
And Ray, you had mentioned to other people that you thought you were confident in this product. Is there anything you want to say about it? Oh, I've used it for 45 years or so myself after researching it in animals. But I finally got interested in how people could use it. And so I experimented with what the safe and effective solvents were. And that was how I came up with the Progest-E complex formula in the 1970s.
And I tried it out on all my friends and pets and such. Like roommates, a pet rabbit had a brain tumor and had reached the point that it couldn't hop, couldn't stay standing up if it tried to hop. And when I was blind, the vet had said it was beyond help, couldn't even do its basic functions. And so my friend said, "Okay, try your Progesterone." And I rubbed the oily solution on the relatively bare skin inside both of its ears.
So it was really a huge dose because of the size of the ears. And I had tried setting it up and previously it had just fallen over. This time it fell over and went into a deep sleep. I came back two or three hours later and my friend thought I had killed the rabbit. It was so stretched out and relaxed. But when I approached it, it leaped to its feet like a new rabbit. And the first thing it did was to hop straight ahead and came to a wall and stopped and copiously urinated.
And apparently it was unloading some large amount of water that had been causing swelling and pressure and so on. And after that it could hop and do everything rabbits normally do, turn corners quickly and so on. I have a picture, I think it's from Hans Selye's 1947 Textbook of Endocrinology. Was that the name of it? Anyways, it's the one that you talked about where the guy has the rat and he's picked it up and he thinks it's dead. But it's just really, really, really relaxed. And so exactly what you said about the rabbit.
Yeah, it looks like a wet dish right now. Yeah, exactly. I have a question. Why would progesterone be able to fill in for the function of the adrenal glands that were removed but pregnenolone wouldn't? I think Selye's experiment showed that maybe about 20% of the rats would survive if you give them pregnenolone compared to like 100% if you inject them with cortisone and maybe 80% if you inject them with progesterone. But pregnenolone didn't have that adrenocortical effect. Yeah, Hans Selye showed that each of the steroids has a range of properties.
And aldosterone has its estrogen resembling and anti-androgenic properties. Each one has a range. And it just turns out that progesterone will fill in for a deficiency of aldosterone or cortisol or androgen. But it will also protect against an excess toxic dose of those same things because it has a weak mineralocorticoid effect that makes up for the absence of aldosterone as well as toxic excess. And the same thing, testosterone has progesterone sustaining pregnancy sustaining effects if you give it to a pregnant animal.
But it's not nearly as effective at that purpose as progesterone is. And the estrogen is the thing that it's strictly antagonistic to. It will have some of the anti-inflammatory properties of cortisol as well as being a major protector against excess cortisol poisoning. And it does a lot of those things on the enzyme level as well as the so-called receptor level. When you look at the list of its actions, coordinated effects on both receptors of all sorts and enzyme activation changes, you would think it was a magical invention. It's so extremely complex but organized.
And I mean judging from the studies, the few studies that have been done on pregnenolone in comparison to progesterone, the pregnenolone seems to have more of a structure stabilizing effect, not so much hormonal effect. Is that right? Yeah, I think that's true of both pregnenolone and progesterone. I don't think of either of them as a hormone. And the FDA, at least for 50 years, classified pregnenolone as a non-hormonal steroid. I include progesterone in that category, non-hormonal, because when you look at everything it's doing, it's stabilizing the energy and structural systems.
Stabilization is so different from hormonal excitation and activation. It just doesn't fit the word. So maybe we should classify the steroids into pro- and anti-metabolic lipids, right? Because they are lipids after all. Yeah. I want to talk about androgens actually, but one last question about progesterone. If somebody has a very sensitive stomach but they want to take it orally, have there been any ways that you've found that can get a person around that and maybe not irritate them?
Yeah, a large amount of vitamin E taken orally. If you have a sensitive gallbladder or something, that sticky oil creates nausea, gagging, all kinds of digestive reactions. But if you mix it with butter, for example, and take it with a baked potato or some food, you don't even notice it. Good stuff. Okay, so Georgi and I, the last two weeks, have been talking about DHT.
And then somebody emailed me and left a few comments saying we were taking you out of context. And so I had to go back and listen to some of our previous conversations. And there was one that I never really listened to again because the audio quality was so bad. But you were explicitly clear, Ray, in your thoughts about DHT.
And I won't read the whole quote, but it's like, in general, things like that are not to be messed with unless you have a very specific knowledge of a deficiency because if you take a little too much, any of those defining feature-creating hormones can change the whole system in an unpredictable way. Yeah, everything you do practically changes a million things about the organism. And the known effects, if someone is dying of cancer, obviously you don't worry about what it's going to do to their sex life in five years.
So again, just your general thoughts and your experience. I talked to a lot of guys, obviously, that have taken finasteride and feel like they're really never going to be the same again. And then also I talked to a lot of people with gynecomastia. And so again, given that they're exploring thyroid, vitamin D, good nutrition, bowel disinfectants and things, where do you think either testosterone or DHT can play a helpful role?
If you see the problem as energy depletion and inflammation, that sort of change, then you will take into account thyroid, carbon dioxide, glucose, the balance of amino acids in your proteins, cutting proteins that contain methionine, cysteine and tryptophan, supplementing instead some gelatin, all of the anti-inflammatory things and aspirin, coffee or caffeine and progesterone are very effective stabilizing, energy restoring, anti-inflammatory things that help all of those. But I think it's important to think of those as a deviation from the proper functions of the organism and look to restoring the energized,
uninflamed but purposeful processes of the organism. And a lot of that is getting your attention away from the medicalization. People can get so interested in that particular problem, the finasteride syndrome or post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, that they forget what it is they're doing in their life. And if they can get the sense of excitement and play as a governing principle of their activities and start imagining the constructive anti-inflammatory energy restoring things, rather than trying to work out the thousands of details of what particular substance would be most effective.
So you're saying that since the ceiling on even something like coffee or aspirin or other anti-inflammatory therapies in a person's life, like a person could find, it could take a long time to find the right dose of aspirin, you know, and that should be explored before trying something testosterone or DHT? Oh, yeah, but in conjunction with adequate sugar and the right protein and mixed nutrition and feeling out the effects of what the aspirin is doing,
because those hormonal effects are leaving the estrogen excitatory process in your brain, for example, to dominate and that tends to create an obsessive process in the brain where the others, when you lose interest in your particular health problem, you're probably on the right track. I guess one question for me, if a male were to use any of the endpoint androgens, let's say they have a severe deficiency of androgens and they tried to correct it, they couldn't.
And if they're at the point of using, let's say, testosterone, my question is, wouldn't it be less risky to use the DHT given its non-ability to turn into estrogen? Yeah, definitely. You know, there are clinics going up around the country selling testosterone treatments and the doses they give are ridiculous. Fifty or a hundred milligrams at a time, for example, where a healthy young male makes maybe four or five milligrams a day and maybe 10 or 15 milligrams of DHEA per day.
If you take, for example, one milligram of DHT and back it up with a few milligrams of DHEA and progesterone, aspirin, coffee, steady supply of sugar and related nutrients, then the DHT is more likely to have a constructive repairing role. Well, I will let the cat out of the bag a little bit. So I've been experimenting a little bit with DHT and I would say, and I'm not above the idea that it could be harmful in the long run, but it definitely seems to have a neutralizing effect on the nervous system. And so would…
Yeah, anti-inflammatory is what it's doing beneficially. In my experience, nothing terminates a severe stress reaction for me like a few milligrams of DHT. But my experience is that it's not something that can be used on an ongoing basis without interruption. It's more like the emergency fix when you're really in trouble and you don't feel like taking three grams of aspirin or you don't have them with you. The DHT works in minutes like a charm. But, Ray, I definitely don't want to mischaracterize. You're saying there's a hundred other things to check before doing that, right?
Yeah, just because it makes you feel so good that you're going to get stuck on that if you don't fix the whole energy system that started the whole process. Yeah, that's definitely in the back of my brain that there's something else that needs correction. So speaking of aspirin, something I was interested in, what do you consider a max dose of aspirin at a single time? For example, I know when I've tried a gram or two grams, it seems to have a hypoglycemic effect after a while.
So is there an amount that you feel comfortable with taking at one time? I have taken as much as a gram, but you have to be familiar with it. I think usually 300 to 500 milligrams at a time with food is safe and comfortable. And you can repeat that amount usually very safely. Good stuff, Georgi. Interrupt me at any time. I was just going to go through these questions. And then, you know, we have a bunch of reader questions, too, so we can go into them.
I just wanted to expand on the hypoglycemic effect. In higher doses, aspirin depletes the amino acid L-carnitine and starts to work very similarly to the drug Meldonium. So if you take more than, I don't know, I guess it depends for each person, but I think over a gram or two grams, it basically inhibits significantly the oxidation of fat to cause a drop in blood sugar. So I would certainly take it with something sweet if you're taking higher doses. Yeah, that sounds good. Great stuff.
OK, so a few days ago I posted on my Instagram about mushrooms and then I was instantly I got a lot of questions about agaritine and I couldn't answer them. So I thought I might ask you. But anyways, what exactly is happening to the agaritine? Because maybe in an older email from a few years ago, you sent somebody something that said it was like changed from not being harmful to maybe being helpful. But it's entirely possible that I misinterpreted what you said to him. No, I don't remember what I said.
But OK, so when you're cooking the mushrooms for three hours, are you getting rid of the agaritine like it's escaping in the cooking process? Yeah, either it's turned into something very different or just vaporizes. And then a lot of people, and again, I know you've talked about this already, but the water doesn't contain the agaritine after a few hours. No. OK. Looking at the structure, it looks like it will be highly estrogenic, that agaritine thing. Have you seen something on that, Ray, if it has any estrogenic effects aside from being labeled as a carcinogen?
No, no, I haven't. And speaking of fungus, Ray, is there any way to distinguish between a fungal and bacterial infection? Because from what I've read, they seem extremely similar. Fungus is a nucleated cell that works so much like a human cell that the poisons they have for treating them happen to knock out our own mitochondria, because they're generally intended to knock out the fungus mitochondrion energy system. And so the people who are convinced they have systemic fungal infection will take those toxic drugs for a long time and get worse and worse
and think it's the fungus that's responsible and it's really the drug knocking out their mitochondria. And bacterial infections, if they reach your bloodstream, they can quickly become deadly, and a good strong dose of antibiotics gets into your bloodstream and will take care of systemic bacterial infection. But once a fungus actually gets in your bloodstream, I think a person might have something like a week to live because there are no really effective safe drugs once you have an actual systemic fungal infection.
It can linger in your lungs but not getting in your bloodstream, so it can damage the lungs over a period of years. But if it was actually a systemic infection, like many people are told that Candida does, but that's all just selling treatment that goes on forever. What would be some signs/symptoms of having a, starting to develop a systemic fungal infection? Oh, extreme sickness. It grows so fast because it has everything it needs in the blood and there's no good immune defense once it gets in the bloodstream.
People with a very weak immune system can live for years with it thriving in their small intestine and even stomach so that yeast can grow high enough up that you can make alcohol when you eat carbohydrate because the yeast will ferment it right in your stomach and small intestine, but that isn't reaching the bloodstream. So for people with this intestinally bound fungal infection, what is it that they can do? I mean, should they be taking the drug or are there nutritive options?
One thing is not to starve the yeast because if you know what happens if you've baked bread, when the yeast runs out of sugar from breaking down starch, it starts attacking the proteins and you get a very stinky batch of dough. And that same thing happens that the yeast that starved for sugar changes radically and becomes very invasive and toxic and destructive. So not taking the very popular no sugar diet approach, fiber to accelerate your intestine, accelerate to improve the acid production and enzyme production and peristalsis stimulated by fiber in the diet
will increase the resistance to the growth of the fungus and should eventually over a period of several days clean out and disinfect your small intestine. What about things like coconut oil? Yeah, the oils, coconut or olive oil are both bacteria killing and fungicide. And some people have used olive oil doses for H. pylori in their stomach, for example, but it also helps to suppress it in the small intestine. That's the idea of having a little bit of it with shredded carrot.
The carrot itself has some antifungal ingredients and combined with a touch of vinegar and olive oil, it's disinfecting your intestine while stimulating it. Is there any specific fatty acid in olive oil that's responsible for this or some of the other components that are present in the actual olive fruit? All of the saturated fatty acids are fairly germicidal. I just forgot what I was going to say. I was going to ask you about the olive oil, but you think, would you like prefer that over coconut oil for kind of a disinfectant effect, right?
I think I would. And so even with the daily keeping the PUFA as low as possible, it would be worth it to find a very pure olive oil to use every day, maybe on the mushrooms or the carrot? Yeah, and it tastes the best too. The FDA or Department of Agriculture years ago did a survey and found, I think it was 70% of the olive oil sold in the US was fraudulent, contaminated with canola or some other oil. How much olive oil are we talking here? Like a fourth of a teaspoon or something?
Oh, yeah, half a teaspoon is okay. It just gives you a trace of PUFA. The question I forgot was, from what I gather from what you're saying, is that a fungal infection is going to be a lot more rare than just a bacterial infection. Is that right? Yeah. Once it gets into your tissues like the lungs or the skin or toenails, it's very hard to get rid of because it's so closely structurally and functionally similar to human cells. And then one last question, then we can move on to reader or viewer questions.
I have one related as well. Go ahead. You mentioned H. pylori. That's pretty common in low thyroid people. And so in addition to the vitamin D and getting in the carrot salad or the mushrooms, I think maybe you specifically identified tetracycline and a, maybe you said a macrolide and a penicillin. You thought that was kind of a useful therapy for that? All of those have been tried and proven effective. For like two or three weeks, not just taking it for a few days? Yeah, just to be sure.
And then a question, I'm sorry, the question I get all the time is like in, I had gathered a bunch of your responses of how you used antibiotics yourself. And so you had mentioned, oh, in the past, I'd use it for a day or two until the symptom was gone. But if somebody has like an outright infection, that might not be long enough to get rid of the infection. If you are watching the symptoms of the infection, the first dose you take, like 250 milligrams of penicillin,
you might not feel anything. Take another dose four hours later. And at some point, a second or third dose, you usually feel a sudden subsiding of the symptoms. And with the third or fourth dose, the symptoms of the infection are often gone. But I think it's a good idea to taper off, take them maybe at eight hours interval for the next day or so. Sorry to interrupt, go ahead. Just making sure that the symptoms are noticeably subsiding and then disappearing and that they don't come back.
Like chronic gas or diarrhea or things like that, that would be more of a serious type of that. A person could guess they probably had something worse than just a mild endotoxin problem or something like that. Yeah. If it's a fungus producing gas, the penicillin isn't going to do much. And flowers of sulfur and fibers and thyroid are the way to get your digestive system active. The flowers of sulfur are turned by fungus. They have exoenzymes that act to reduce the sulfane form of the sulfur producing hydrogen sulfide, which is toxic to them.
So they produce their own toxic form of sulfur, but it's local. And you might for a few hours, you might smell like hydrogen sulfide if you have a lot of fungus. But that's what's killing the fungus. And so it's a very safe way to get rid of intestinal fungus. A couple of questions in regards to antibiotics. As you know, Ray, most doctors, if they put you on antibiotics, they'll say you have to take it for two weeks or ten days or two weeks. Usually it's about two weeks.
Is there any good evidence behind the recommendation or is it purely ideological? A few studies found that the infection could linger and that there would be spores that if you stopped it after four or five days, whenever the symptoms were gone, the spores could germinate after ten days or so. And so what they're doing is killing the second infection with the first prescription. They're just taking account of the possibilities of the spore being a return of the infection. Okay, and related to that, antibiotic resistance, which has been blown out of proportion in my opinion.
It's a huge topic right now. Everybody's working on the latest and greatest, newest antibiotic. How much truth do you think there is to that, that if you use an antibiotic repeatedly, the bacteria will become resistant to it and it will no longer be effective? On a population basis, that happens. That's where the resistant bacteria come from. Hospitals do it so consistently they breed their own toxic resistant strain. But one person, it just doesn't happen.
And then what about the claims that if you use antibiotics, even sporadically but continuously, you will eventually give yourself a fungal overgrowth because the fungus is opportunistic and when you kill off the bacteria, the fungus will take over. Is there any truth to that? Yeah, that famously happens with the heavy two-week program that's so commonly prescribed. They can really sterilize your intestine, but without paying attention to your hormones that govern the digestive enzymes, a sterile intestine, which isn't digesting properly, is a good place for fungus to take root.
So you want to make sure if you really sterilize your intestine that you're taking into account the things that will restore secretion of stomach acid, pancreatic enzymes, and mucous production, everything that takes energy to produce. So would it be a good idea then if somebody's using antibiotics just to throw in a bit of flowers of sulfur just in case, just not to give the fungus the opportunity to immediately overgrow? If they're going to take such a gigantic dose as doctors usually prescribe.
Okay. And then specifically to the tetracycline family of antibiotics, all of these molecules are quinones and all quinones have antifungal effect as well. Would those be – do you think that may be true of the tetracyclines? I'm just going by – Yeah, I think it's even used in trees and such for fungal infections. And at the same time, it's anti-inflammatory and inflammation predisposes to all kinds of infection. And so the tetracyclines, I think their major effect might be the anti-inflammation.
The medical world reacted to the suggestion that azithromycin was part of the proper treatment for the COVID virus because they saw it as a bacteria killer, not a virus killer. But its anti-inflammatory effect is very powerful at knocking out the symptoms of the virus infection. And by knocking out the symptoms of inflammation, that in itself creates a resistance to the virus getting into your cells. Okay. And again, another question specific to the tetracyclines. Is there anything inherently irritating in those molecules that can irritate the intestinal tract for some people?
Because I know some people react really badly to specifically those type of antibiotics. Yeah, any reaction that you have, you should stop taking that one. Okay. And specifically for minocycline, I think you mentioned to Danny once that it may inhibit the thyroid via what mechanism? I'm not sure, but lots of people get very uncomfortable on just a moderate dose of minocycline, even though it's theoretically very good and is being used to treat dementia and so on because of its anti-inflammatory effects.
But some people just have to be very watchful that it doesn't do something they don't like. Can you go into that a little bit more because I feel like I've definitely experienced that. I don't know what causes it exactly, but I've had bad reactions to different antibiotics that it could have just been a batch effect or it could be a peculiarity of my system. I don't know of any studies that explain why people have those bad reactions.
This is kind of related, but sometimes when I would take like 50 milligrams of minocycline or something, I'd feel profoundly – I think Georgi just said this – but I feel like I was hypothyroid. It made me hypothyroid, but it would also mitigate a stomach problem. And so I would hypothesize like, "Oh, maybe it lowered nitric oxide or it lowered some stress hormone or something that was keeping my structure together and lowering it made me kind of look ugly while also actually lowering the inflammation in my intestine." Does that make any sense at all?
Yeah. By reducing inflammation, sometimes your stress hormones will come back to normal. And if you're experiencing good functioning from abnormally high adrenaline and cortisol, when those are lowered by getting rid of the inflammation, then you feel a letdown and realize you're compensating for something like hypothyroidism by running high on adrenaline. Not that you guys necessarily care. I think our stream is down, but I'm still recording the audio. And so we just have to keep rolling. I don't know what is going on because the stream health is good.
It's just like the whole thing is glitchy, and people are saying we're cutting in and out, but honestly, it doesn't matter because I'm still recording it. So Georgi, did you have anything else on this topic? No, I got those all. Okay. Thank you, Ray. Thank you, Georgi. Let's try playing a question because I'm just going to assume this is still going. Solomon had one about testosterone. We kind of covered that. This one from John is about... I'll leave it as a surprise. Okay. So let me hide this. Ray, you can hear everything okay still? Yeah.
Okay. Let me hide this. Okay. This one's from John. Hey, Danny. Oh, this is not going to work. Okay. That was real glitchy. Choppy. Yeah. Okay. Error. YouTube is not receiving enough video. This makes no sense. Okay. Let's try one more and see what happens. This one's from our brother Ozan. Ozan.
Hello, Danny. Hello, Georgi. Hello, Dr. Peat. This is Ozan. My question is about viruses. After investigating them over the past year a little deeper, like most people, I can't really see a reason why a virus would even want to invade a human cell, especially because wanting seems like something a living organism would do.
So if a virus isn't alive, it seems as though we're attributing ideas to an inanimate object. I'm kind of having a hard time seeing the advantages of a virus to inhabit a cell and duplicate itself, because then we're implicating that it has the processes that are involved in making those type of decisions, like a metabolism or energy production or digestion or reproduction.
And it doesn't seem to have any of those things. It more so seems like an RFID chip that a higher intelligence made and is then enabled by another higher organism than itself, akin to exosomes being produced by our cells. Viruses, to me, at least, seem that way, as opposed to what they're being propagated as, which is something that can have malicious intent, even though they're in quantities that are incomprehensible. There's so many viruses.
So maybe Dr. Peat could expand upon this idea that viruses want to get into your cells as if they're a parasite and you're the host, because I'm just not really seeing that relationship. If anything, it seems akin to horizontal gene transfer, where there's a transfer of information happening between organisms. And I remember Dr. Peat being able to take up DNA, even if it's foreign.
The exosomes are produced by our own cells under stress, and sometimes they can create a stress or defect in other cells. But normally their function is to repair and patch up and quit the processes that are causing the problem. So the exosomes normally are part of our maintenance system, and when our system is sick, then the exosomes can extend and spread that sickness. But the environment is full of cells that have decomposed for various reasons, or pollen that's deliberately spread by plants.
We inhale pollen or eat it, and that DNA gets into our system, and our cells have access to that and now and then can absorb it. People who've eaten certain kinds of algae, for example, it turns out that the algae DNA can be found in their own cells, in the human brain cells, for example. And a few labs that have looked for those effects find that it isn't that uncommon. I think it's the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, part of MIT-Harvard, a group there, did a study on the RNA virus used in the vaccine.
And on human cells in vitro, they showed that cells not only can take it up and use it in the cytoplasm, but their reverse transcriptases can integrate it into the DNA genome. And if you question how these complex systems, large stretches of DNA or RNA surrounded by proteins and lipids, how the virus came into existence, naturally a higher intelligence was responsible. Animals and plants, with their repair systems, are always packaging some of their DNA, RNA, and proteins into exosomes for their own maintenance.
And if these get into the environment, probably as food of other organisms as well as things drifting in the air like pollen, but this horizontal transfer of genetic information, bacteria do it as a routine thing. They mutate in the right direction and make a little exosome to transmit that DNA to not only their same species, but even different species. So they're usefully and protectively doing a DNA transfer, which is like passing a good virus or a good exosome onto its neighbors.
And I don't see any possible origin for viruses other than as escaped genetic material from complex organisms, animals and plants. And plant organisms, plant viruses, can be taken up like the algae DNA that was found in people who had eaten it. Two plant genetics professors at Oregon State who were working with a plant virus to infect the plant, they would put some pumice powder on their finger and the dab of the virus culture, and then they would rub the plant leaves. The pumice was to break the cuticle and let the virus get into the plant.
These two professors working with the same plant virus just a few months apart both died of a very rare brain disease, which I think very likely was similar to the algae gene that can affect the brain. I think these were an example of grinding plant virus DNA into their fingers and having the brain cells take it up with harmful effect. I have a question here related to that. So I guess in that case it doesn't make sense to speak of like an avian specific virus or a marine specific virus or a human specific virus.
They're all viruses of specific origin, but as far as their target, it's really any organism that can make use of them. Is that correct? I think so. Or that it is in especially weakened condition so that any random junk falls into their cells. Okay. So potentially, would you guess like what portion of these viruses that are out there would be harmful to us or would it be anything would be harmful, even beneficial ones, if we're in an energetically depleted state?
Yeah, it would be the fairly rare virus that would be really useful without a lot of work. But I think our cells can store some of these as potentially useful, even though they might have to undergo further stress to mutate it enough to make use of it. But generally, I think being in the depleted, inflamed state makes us susceptible to probably 99% of the DNA we incorporate in that condition is going to be harmful to some extent.
Well, that raises a very interesting question about the origin of viral pandemics. Why would they suddenly start for a specific virus and then let's say like spread around the entire world? Either there's no such thing or maybe, or I don't know, like why would a specific virus suddenly take hold into humans considering they've been exposed to those viruses probably for generations, but suddenly we have this pandemic and now it's taking over the world? Well, probably not.
Not the specific one, but pandemics in general, to me, sound either not possible and they're being overblown or there's something else going on. Yeah, the coronavirus has been around as long as anyone knows, causing colds and several lawyers are suing state and federal departments of health, asking them for the information of the harmfulness that they based their lockdown and vaccine campaign on. They have not released any actual data to support the whole pandemic response system. It's a big vacuum as far as actual science is concerned.
Right, but aside from this pandemic, I mean I'm looking at the 1918 flu pandemic, a study recently came out, even the Black Death, the plague, the study recently came out that said both of these events, the mass deaths were actually due to possibly endotoxin overload, stress and like general inflammation, not the actual virus itself. So the whole talk about pandemics sounds very political to me, even if the virus is pathological. Yeah, but that's the thing about the azithromycin, for example, or hydroxychloroquine, any of the things that have obvious helpful effects.
Aspirin, progesterone, everything that is helpful is anti-inflammatory. As if the, what am I looking for, the carbonic anhydrase inhibitor. Oh, azithromycin, yes. It has a profoundly anti-inflammatory effect. Those things are actually not only preventing and curing the symptoms, but they're putting the cell into the uninflamed condition that makes young healthy people resistant to even catching the virus or having any reaction to it. The system doesn't want to relieve the suffering and death whatever is causing it, whether it's influenza or COVID virus.
They want to sell their vaccine primarily and possibly a new patented antiviral, but they're turning away from the very clear evidence of extreme success in treating and curing and preventing the symptoms just by concentrating on the inflammation. It's only the inflammation that is killing people and causing symptoms. Inflammation leads to the uptake and replication of the virus. So, if I'm hearing this correctly, blaming solely a virus for a worldwide pandemic, whatever that virus may be, is insane. Yeah, because this inflammation always causes damage to the intestine. These are enteroviruses.
They infect the intestine preferentially. When the intestine is inflamed, it leaks at least endotoxin and increases serotonin release. Those both increase clotting and inflammation of the blood vessels, which are currently being emphasized as a major killing effect. All of these clotting, inflammatory blood vessels, brain, lung, multi-system problems have existed before and are not specific for this disease. If they, tomorrow, on every newscast around America, if they announced that the rotavirus was out and that it was terribly dangerous and gave a bunch of ambiguous symptoms, wouldn't that create a similar type of situation?
A bunch of people going to the hospital and getting iatrogenic treatment? That's something that isn't seeded into the culture of understanding. Just using something like fear could create a mass amount of illness. Yeah, and then putting a tube in someone's windpipe and pumping air into them. That destroys the lungs very quickly. The hospitals were ordered to do that with no rational basis whatsoever. They killed just by intubating that many people. Whatever they had as a problem, you're going to kill a very high percentage of them.
Like the German hospitals, a doctor who insisted on the rational, traditional, mild way of giving oxygen with just a cannula at your nostril. His hospital had zero COVID deaths and an adjoining hospital just as technically qualified, but following the unfounded recommendations, they had 60% mortality. Absolute murder by intubation. In general, when you order people to diagnose and treat in certain ways, you're going to create the appearance of a very deadly disease, which is really the side effects of medicalization.
You mentioned there's a factor in the environment that's leading to this general frailty of the population, especially the young people. It's probably more than one, right? Or do you have one that specifically you have in mind? Oh, yeah. All sorts of things. The last 40 years have tremendously increased in the environment. The use of polyunsaturated fats is one anti-energy exposure. The use of nanoparticles in foods and clothing, for example, and skin preparations are another major change tending to promote inflammation.
And then vaccinations are intended. The aluminum or lipid adjuvant is put in there to create systemic inflammation. And experimentally, you can create allergies in an animal by exposing them in that way. And injecting antigens into the muscle is completely irrational as far as our immune functioning works. But it reaches the nerves transport the inflammation producing substance to the brain and the brain activates a system wide inflammatory state, which, among other things, increases production of antibodies.
But at the same time, it's depleting your general resistance. And the vaccine increase corresponds very closely to the rise of allergies and inflammatory diseases like autoimmune. But I think it also is behind this accumulation, Kawasaki disease being very rare and things being added to a systemic inflammatory syndrome, which is reaching its peak now. So presumably all these factors also activate the heat shock proteins, right? Yeah.
Okay, we can segue into these last bit of questions and then we'll let you go, right? So one, thank you so much for joining us. The stream has totally gone belly up. We're just audio now. And some people are saying they can't hear us. But anyways, we're just going to keep going. Okay, so I actually, we got, I received lots of angry emails about our last conversation and I sent out, please give us like criticism or constructive criticism on things that we got wrong, whether it had to do with the last conversation or other conversations.
And I received approximately zero critical questions. And so I was going to- But people kept complaining, right? People were complaining, but nobody was offering to clarify our warped wrong views. And so I found that to be interesting. So, but this is a open-minded discussion here. And so if you're offended easily, you might not want to listen to this. I don't know why that would be, but whatever.
So my question to you that we were talking about a little bit before the stream started, like if a group of people has a problematic kind of death culture, holy book that overrides our innate solidarity with other humans, animals, et cetera, how can a functioning society be formed or maintain, be maintained rather? I think it would probably be best to start with everything people can do that is not guided by that death culture. Just looking at the practical outcome of what you're doing and gradually, if you can shift your attention to the practical moment,
then the ideal thing would be to shift your attention to improving not just the practice of things, but our understanding that makes practical living and problem solving possible. Overcoming death and death's variations by discovering the cause of death and its variations and developing curiosity as well as practicality. And the curiosity is I think the pro-life essence of living behavior, including animals and bacteria.
So I might not fully understand, but if somebody is healthy, this is going to be very controversial, if somebody is healthy, do you think they'd take a more liberal stance on what a holy book would say, like not take it so literally? Oh yeah, that has been a historical trend to treat those ideas as metaphors and not follow rules slavishly. And then those-- Like not cutting out people's eyes or cutting off their hands as punishment. Some of the literal things advocated in holy books are now recognized as barbarians, even though some countries still apply them.
Georgi, interrupt whenever. Okay, so and then a functioning healthy society would be resistant even if there was a faction of people that were fanatical about their specific book, is that right? Yeah, people who want to survive and improve their lives can just go on about their business. Could you build a society around kind of this moral holistic – because people often make that argument, you have to have something like the Bible or whatever to build on top of.
Do you think you could build on top of a holistic view of science and have it be, I don't know, functional? Yeah, you can find like Wilhelm Reich in his book The Murder of Christ made great use of one of the books of the New Testament to connect his thinking with what's in the Christian Bible. It was very convincing use of those old ideas in a life-affirming way.
Georgi, cut me off anytime here. What do you see as the artificial – and we've probably talked about this before – but what do you see as the artificial long-term struggle between humans? Would you classify it as authoritarian versus anti-authoritarian, or would you get more specific with it, or how would you view it? Mostly it's authoritarian versus authoritarian. Behind authoritarianism is a doctrine of atomistic individualism that sort of defines everyone else as a potential enemy. And starting with – it could come from ideas in the Christian culture.
Marx, for example, adopted largely Christian ethics in designing his new approach to reality. But you can find lots of good ideas in our tradition. You don't have to start from a vacuum. And then authoritarian versus – we talked a long time ago about kind of connecting everything to nature. Would that have any relationship to nature, like categorizing in authoritarian versus anti-authoritarian, or how you said authoritarian versus authoritarian? Or it's totally for this human construct type of thing?
Yeah, the authoritarians have placed themselves, the individual human, against nature. And so they refuse to see intelligence. It starts with denying full human qualities to women and children because it's only the male patriarch that is truly fully human. And then that extends – animals are material, not living intelligent beings. And obviously the same for plants and microbes. They are defined as a material world, and women and children are mired in the material world to some extent.
And so getting away from that idea of a material world is an essential thing. You can't objectify it and say it's life. Life is the dominant male, and all the rest is tending to be inert and unwholesome matter. If you see the consciousness that is visible in plants, animals, and bacteria all the way down to their smallest units, the coacervation approach is just one way of seeing that every atom and molecule has an actual active role.
There's no random junk operating anywhere in the system. Everything is participating and guided by intelligence, except when authoritarian beliefs intervene to become blind to the intelligence that's there. I have a question. You said in one of the previous podcasts that at least the way you experienced it, the country kind of peaked in the 1950s. You said we had everything that we needed, and after that things steadily got worse. But my question is this authoritarianism has been around for millennia, and it certainly existed back in the 1950s.
Some of the more conservative groups these days are trying to make the argument that this country peaked precisely when it was controlled and ran by a patriarchal, waspy society. How do you respond to people like that? J.D. Unwin was a professor in England who said that the repressive authoritarian society was necessary for civilization itself. He said that the nature of the world is that it needs the authoritarian dictator to keep the material degeneration process from happening where everyone would just enjoy what they're doing.
It has to be organized so it has good armies and can conquer the world and expand as an empire. That was in the 1930s. He was writing about the process of creating an ideology of repression. It began at the beginning of the century with neo-Darwinism, and then people like J.D. Unwin and Konrad Lorenz in Germany, Charles Davenport, the eugenics professor in the U.S. Those were primarily subsidized by the big corporations and banks.
It was after the Second World War that they really got organized when the CIA became the primary agent of these corporations and banks which had been doing it on a private basis, taking over governments by their own private armies. But the CIA now got things organized and made a program to take over the media, the universities, the publishing houses, and set the world on the strictly authoritarian course. So these things have been there all along, but first the corporations establishing relative monopolies, and then the CIA acting as the agent of monopolies.
It was a given a power that became sort of totalitarian. I did it from 1950 because that's when the CIA started the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which even abstract expressionism was promoted in the art world over any kind of meaningful image, painting, or sculpture. It was totalitarian in the sense that it penetrated religious publications, art museums, concerts, everything in the culture was being redesigned under the guidance of the CIA. So do you think technology has a natural proclivity to eventually degenerate and become a tool in the authoritarian hand to oppress everybody?
Norbert Wiener, who was one of the most important people in designing our artificial intelligence and control and communication system, he immediately at the end of World War II rejected any military research support. That knocked him out of the official line of intellectual development because the whole policy was to militarize our world and culture. He is a good person to investigate for the conflict between the technology that he himself greatly contributed to and the way it should be used under the guidance and control of intelligent human beings.
What about hierarchy in nature? Or somebody would say, "Well, it's human nature to rule over other people." Yeah, that's what they say. But I mean specifically digital technology because it is the product of this idea of abstraction and that only ideas and atoms exist. That technology itself seems to have an inherent seed inside of itself to eventually degenerate and be used for evil, for control. Yeah, I've often mentioned that Bertrand Russell, coming from the ruling class, saw what it was doing and worked out the logic that justified it.
But as he learned more about it, he saw that his logic was ideological built into it. He did that just before the computer thinking, the computability of mathematics and logic took over in the 1930s and 40s, specifically designed around that ideology that Russell had identified. He saw that logic became a matter of authoritarian reductionism. Atoms and logical atoms have to be precisely defined before they will work in a computer or a digital control system. It's exactly the openness to new connections that the human use of language and consciousness is the proper way of human functioning.
And when you design a computable language, you've designed out the human properties that leave it open to innovation. And Norbert Wiener was one of the people who saw that on a technical level. In the animal world, if animals on the sub-Saharan Africa or something were high up on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, do you think they would not express aggression? No, not the irrational aggression. When I was in graduate school, the archaeological anthropologists who were identifying ape-like skeletons in Africa
and claiming that humanity originated with the use of weapons to bash each other's skulls, the hunter-murderer-warrior idea of human beings, that idea of aggression is closely tied to the genetic theory of survival of the fittest. And survival of the fittest was converted to suit the idea of rule by the elite through military power. But aggression seems to be a natural response in an animal world when the animal is threatened and is not allowed to retreat.
So something similar must be happening in people too, and that would be a, I don't want to call it a good response, but it would be a natural response, right? Yeah, self-defense. When you're pushed too far, you might lose rationality in the way you defend yourself, but it's a matter of survival. People will choose survival at that point, but when their survival is assured to any extent, then cooperation becomes the rule.
As the early biological work of Peter Kropotkin worked out, and some of his followers in the later 20th century showed that cooperation all across the evolutionary spectrum, cooperation within species and even across species is the basic property of life, like bacteria will give their life-saving genetic material, even the strange unrelated bacteria. What do you think of the religious idea, when you get hit on one side of the face, turn the other cheek as well? That doesn't sound like a very good adaptive response, does it?
No, I think you have to stop the slapper and then you can forgive him once he's powerless over you. William Blake said that, right? Yeah. Okay, so I'm just thinking about my schooling experience, and I hated always working with people. So what's the difference between that kind of cooperation in this messed up environment and health status of many people versus what you're talking about? You're talking about something more grandiose and bigger, right? Bigger than what, for example?
What would lead a person to, or what would be the factors that could sustain cooperation among individuals without the defect of somebody thinking, "Oh, I'm just going to do it a completely different way," or "These people don't know what they're talking about," or something like that? Or, "I'm going to exploit their gullibility for my benefit." Yeah. Well, governments have created the channels for unfair advantage. They've built in privileges for banks, for example, to rip off the general public. They've given powerful opportunity to develop the constructive interactions.
But now the governments have deeply and powerfully enforced the exploitation systems. I was going to ask you about Marx and the Rothschild connection, but have you been following that game? I don't know if you want to talk about that. What is the new story that has captured your mind at the moment? What do you think is important to talk about? Oh, I think the old story, the creative nature of the so-called material world. That's where we should be putting our energy.
How it is that life has got this far, and what are the processes that will get us out of this current dying condition? And people hate it when I ask you to speculate about things, but this dollar inflation type of thing, that's on purpose to— Yeah, they invest in stocks, for example, and then to increase the value of stocks means they're taking power from anyone who doesn't own shares in the big corporations. So inflating dollar value is ruining anyone who doesn't own one of the systems which is going to survive.
In the process, they are deliberately killing the small businesses that aren't on the stock exchanges, so that all economic activity is being funneled through the big monopolies that they're invested in. And as part of killing independent business, they are inflating the dollar so that it makes it harder for them with their worthless dollars to ever buy into the monopoly system that is going to take over everything.
Do you think it goes a step further than that? I mean, there's been a lot of talk on the news about this. You may have heard of the company Robinhood, and they're trying to get everybody to invest, basically. And a lot of people are getting burned in the process. Considering the fact that the banks have all the power and all the information, wouldn't it be a bit of a nefarious idea that they have to convince everybody to invest in the stock market and suddenly crash it when they want it and take out all the profit?
So, in other words, even investing in the stock market is not a good idea for the regular person because it's the banks that call the shots there, too. Yeah, but they don't know the rules. The giant corporations have computer systems set up so that they can always beat the individual to do timely sales and purchases.
I'm sure they hope that a giant swath of the population will die, but is there anything you've seen recently that makes it more clear of what they're actually going to do with a bunch of serfs that are now dependent on the government? Oh, just being in that dependent condition, it's already increased mortality greatly. So, just keeping them in an insecure state of relative misery, they'll just die off sooner rather than later. George, do you have any other questions?
Yeah, I mean, there's already talk, even on Main Street, as they say, of upcoming civil war. Countries are bitterly divided into two, even though they're actually part of the same party, the have-nots. But do you think that if a significant amount of people tries to revolt or take matter into their own hands and try to organize and try to topple the system, do you think they will go full-blown military-style dictatorship? They will not hesitate and they will implement that?
Oh, definitely. Like the Occupy Wall Street movement, they had corporate control, but authorized by the FBI, snipers ready to kill the leaders. So, they're ahead of us in every way. But it was slightly different. Occupy Wall Street was still a relatively small political movement. Now, half of the country, at least, seems to basically want out. They don't like that system. They know that it's killing them.
I'm not going to mention any political candidates, but basically they're saying the federal government is out of control, it's an evil organization, and we will try to go our own way. Do you think that if that actually starts manifesting, materializing, basically the powers that be will say, "You know what? We will not let you." Yeah, I'm sure that's true. It doesn't matter if they're a majority. The military has the biggest weapons. The spectacle is too big at this point, right?
I guess too much of the truth has become known. It can no longer be concealed through peaceful means. I think that's true. They wanted to polarize people to get the so-called right and the so-called left to polarize and think of each other as the enemy. But now it looks like much of the Republican Party is standing for what the traditional Democratic Party stood for, and the Democrats have appropriated the worst elitism of the old Republican Party.
So the polarization is largely imaginary, but they're still hoping to capitalize on that to make the people fight each other instead of who they should be fighting. Do you think the military will follow the orders to attack its own people? Most of these people come from fairly struggling, regular, working-class families. Why would they obey those orders? Very often, like in the Vietnam War, I think it was the fragging that finally brought the war to an end. The soldiers. Started killing their commanders. Yeah, the commanders were their worst enemies.
Absolutely. Last question, then we'll let you go, Ray. People thought you were inconsistent with the – we were talking about the Rothschilds and kind of the foothold or the position they play in all these things. And then people were saying, well, Ray has spoken highly of Marx, and apparently the Rothschilds have some specific connection with Marx or funding his work. And so they thought that was an incongruency. What do you think about that? Did you ever see his article in 1843 or '44 before he was a Marxist article on the Jewish question?
People have called him an anti-Semite because of that article, but in the article, he was calling for a petition to the state Congress to emancipate Jews. The essence of the article was to support his pro-Semitic emancipation of Jews. His enemies were the Christian state and the various people who opposed Marx were the most radical anti-Semites. And so his article on the Jewish question was to oppose the anti-Semites and to call for a general, not just emancipation of Jews, but for a general emancipation of humanity from the world of finance.
And I don't know that maybe if he, when he worked for the New York Times, if the Rothschilds were invested in the Times, you could say they were paying his salary, but I don't know of any actual support from the bankers to Marx. Great stuff. Thanks for that. You don't remember the exact, did you say the exact article, 1843? I think that was the date on the Jewish question.
So one last question for me. There's a recurring theme on various online forums saying that the Soviet, the revolution of 1917 in Russia and then what became the Soviet Union, this was entirely a project of the Zionists and it had been controlling from the very beginning.
And there was nothing free about this country and on and on and on it goes. But basically it was a pet project of Zionism to kind of create the East and the West of the world and clash it against each other while selling weapons to both sides. Do you think there's any truth to that? No. I've read for years on the issue and the Soviet government was really a mishmash that was steered very intelligently by Lenin, ignoring ideology to a great extent,
but trying to do something that would end czarism forever while keeping the European and American invaders from taking over the country. And the Politburo, for example, was made up of people with a bunch of very different ideologies and Lenin was just able to maneuver an anti-czarist, anti-imperialist policy where the provisional government that they took over was really just an opening to let czarism back in or to let the West come in the way they went in in 1991.
A phony government acting as agents of the West. So there were lots of very pro-Russian people who didn't like Marxism at all but who wanted whatever it was. Orthodox Christianity, for example, was a big motive. All of these patriotic people saw the revolution as a potential way to get out of czarism and imperialism, but some extreme ideologists were operating at different times and the fact that it did stay free of the West for 50 years or so, 70 years I guess,
except that Khrushchev was in many ways strongly conceding and influenced by the West and then Gorbachev made further moves that opened it to tie it into international commerce and banking. Yeah. Normally at this point I would read stickers but I started over the stream and I can't see anything and so we'll have to do that another time. We had a bunch of donations and I'd love to read the names of everybody but it's not showing up on my thing.
So anyways, we'll end it here. It's been almost two and a half hours so Ray has stayed over time for us. Ray, thank you so much. Sincerely appreciate it. Georgi Dinkov, thank you so much. Thanks for everybody hanging in there with these... I don't even know what happened. This is the first time that the stream has basically totally stopped but luckily we have the audio no matter what. Again, Ray, thank you so much. Georgi, thank you so much. We have an amazing viewership and listenership and so I'm very grateful.
Thank you guys so much. We'll talk to you guys soon and take care. Be safe. Okay, bye everyone. Peace. Okay, thanks. Bye. [Music] [Music] [ No Sound ]