Lost Conversations with Ray Peat #1: The Purpose of Hair, Luciferianism, and Obama as a CIA Creation

"The crazy right-wing conspiracy theorists are right about almost everything." Ray Peat (2017)

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Lost Conversations with Ray Peat:

• Lost Conversations with Ray Peat #1: The Purpose of Hair, Luciferianism, and Obama as a CIA Creation

• Lost Conversations with Ray Peat #2: Theology, Lenin's Matter, Wagging the Moondoggie, MK-NAOMI, and AIDS

• Lost Conversations with Ray Peat #3: Israel, Iron, Formative Ether, HAARP, Jeffrey Epstein, Topical Vitamins, Temperature, and Joseph Stalin

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Introduction

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Transcript

Recorded May 12th, 2017

Ray Peat: Hello?

Danny Roddy: Ray!

Ray Peat: Hi.

Danny Roddy: Hey, how are you?

Ray Peat: Good.

Danny Roddy: Good. Good to hear.

Ray Peat: Are you still in Mexico?

Danny Roddy: Yeah, I'm in San Miguel. I feel like I took such a gamble leaving San Francisco because I really had no idea what it was going to be like. I can honestly say I've never been anywhere like it. I don't know what it is, but it's like a magical place. I just love every second of it. It's amazing.

Ray Peat: Yeah, I think it's both the climate and the culture.

Danny Roddy: That actually leads me into my first question for you. The non-pretentiousness and the easygoing of the Mexican people here is such a dramatic change from at least San Francisco, where I'm used to. You feel like you're walking down the street in San Francisco, and everybody is judging you. Here it's everybody keeps to their own business. Everybody says hi to each other. I'm thankful for your work because I see that, and I'm like, "Oh, my God. This place is so much more conducive to just general health, whereas I visited San Francisco about a month ago. I felt like a flood of negativity almost, just going back to San Francisco. To compare and contrast how I felt in two different places was pretty eye-opening.

Ray Peat: Several years ago, I guess about 20 years ago, I was staying with a friend in Beverly Hills at a very luxurious place and no stress but anything I ate while in California, I would get intestinal bleeding. My friend was putting on a party occasionally. During the time that she was doing her parties, I would drive down to Ensenada and spend a few days there. Just crossing the border, my intestine would stop bleeding, and I could eat anything. I did that, went back and forth several times like that, and every time it was just like turning a switch.

Danny Roddy: I wouldn't have picked up on any of that stuff had I not read your cultural ideas. Also, going back to San Francisco, I have the people I consider some of my best friends. They're intelligent people. They all graduated Berkeley. I don't know if that's an intelligent university, per se. They all were really engrossed in US politics, too. Not like that's a bad thing, but they all were at each other's throats, too. It was almost impossible for them to entertain an idea without accepting it, because they were so dogmatic towards whatever position. They lean mostly left, obviously, but it was also like this environment is breeding this hostile thinking of my friends that just want to dominate each other. Yeah, and I would have never picked up on a lot of that stuff had I not just done the risky thing and moved. Yeah, it's amazing.

Anyways, thank you so much for talking with me. Your comment or I remember I asked you a while ago about mast cells, and you sent me back a paragraph saying that you thought they were potential sites for renewal. That has helped me so much because when I'm reading through things, sometimes it's hard for me to interpret exactly what's going on and try to read through the lines of things. Obviously, my weak point is understanding how some of the experiments are done because I've never done them.

That's my intention for asking you this battery of questions, hopefully to have the same kind of thing happen to where you give me a general context of how you think it works. I think something like that really helps me navigate through all these different papers, which are all saying the same thing of the Hamilton and androgen experiments, and they're all parroting each other.

I feel kind of embarrassed to ask you this but my first question is, what do you think the general function of hair is? Is it like a heat sink, or does it arise from metabolically active sites? I know those are some of the general things that people will say. I read Montagna's General Function of Skin, or whatever, but I couldn't figure out exactly what the function of hair was.

Ray Peat: I think the reason we have the most abundant hair on our head is that it's keeping the heat, just insulating the heat so you don't lose so much body heat from our most metabolic organ.

Danny Roddy: That would explain ... I found a 1947 paper by a guy named Pinkus, and he said something to the effect of everybody knows summer hair is better than winter hair. That would be in line with what you're talking about, dispersing heat during summertime?

Ray Peat: Yeah. Years ago, I thought about that, and I had the unflattering idea for bald people that maybe their general metabolism was so low, their body just gave up trying to protect their brain temperature.

Danny Roddy: Okay, so in a follow-up to that, when somebody gets a scar, and a new long hair grows out of that scar tissue, is that extreme mitosis or something occurring in that specific area? Then a hair follicle develops because of the intense metabolic activity?

Ray Peat: I think it's a loss of responsiveness to signals that should tell it what its place in the body is. The thick hair growth on the scalp around the brain, I think has that function of being an insulator, but on the rest of the body, the armpits and the pubic area, the hair I think is acting as a distributor of pheromones. Other places like the cheeks and the arms that are fairly well supplied with pheromone glands, they don't have a lot of hair. I think the reason for the longer hair in the armpits and the crotch is communication by pheromones.

Danny Roddy: Okay, that's super interesting. I wouldn't have picked up on that. The difference between those terminal head hairs and the armpit hair, what is it, the medulla? Is that the difference between the structure of those hairs or no?

Ray Peat: I don't know why we aren't hairy all over. Europeans, Nordics are pretty furry, furry legs on both men and women, but I think that is probably related to climate and wearing clothes and sexual preferences. The fact that women don't have bristly chests and faces, I think that's part of a sexual selection that isn't biological in the deeper sense but more of an aesthetic thing.

Danny Roddy: A few papers by Paus ... I don't know if I'm saying his name right ... and a few other people that seem to be along a smarter line of researching hair, they all reference back to a paper in 1954 by a guy named Chase. He thought that hair growth was basically this disinhibition cycle. The papers from Paus, everybody thought he was wrong at the time, but Paus was saying that they thought he might have been on to something. Does that resonate with you at all, with the dizzying amount of modulators that are telling the hair to enter into anagen or catagen or telogen?

Ray Peat: I think estrogen is recognized as an ender of the cycle. I think it's why women have very fine body and facial hair. Dogs that are given too much estrogen generally lose most of their body hair.

Danny Roddy: Hey. Sorry about that. My Internet just decided to turn off. You got cut off right when you started talking about estrogen, the fine hair of women and dogs.

Ray Peat: Oh, yeah. There is an article, 2006, the hair follicle is an estrogen target and source. Have you run across that?

Danny Roddy: Okay, yeah. I definitely have that.

Ray Peat: I think inflammation is the main problem. Part of a general defensive system, the skin has the protective barrier function inside, and estrogen, the effect on the barrier function in the vagina and uterus and the skin. What the estrogen effect is is to accelerate the differentiation towards forming a flakiness, keratin, the stuff that hair is made of, estrogen, keratinisis, the surface cells of the vagina and skin accelerating the breakdown of the living cell causing it to become just a flake of keratin, basically. That's in a way a defensive function, thickening the surface leather effect. Vitamin A has one of the essentials for making steroids, pregnenolone, DHEA and progesterone. Vitamin A antagonizes that premature terminal effect of estrogen.

Any stress tends to produce that defensive early maturation, and things that protect the energy system against stress increase the growth production of mast and differentiated functioning, so that the energy when it's abundant and Vitamin A and cholesterol are generously available, you will have a thicker more elastic skin. The opposite of aging, it's like a baby or teenage skin is many layers of juicy flexible cells. Old skin is showing the effects of estrogen or stress or lack of energy. The progesterone, high energy effect that goes with teenage skin or baby skin also goes with the proper rapid elongation of the hair shaft.

Danny Roddy: Speaking of the skin and the hair follicle, I know you've said that the brain is like the first line of defense against stress. Because the skin and hair follicle are producing hormones, do they have some kind of role in stress, or are they producing hormones just for their local activities, or do they have a larger ... Go ahead.

Ray Peat: The guy who invented the concept of neurosteroids, Baulieu in France, he removed the adrenal glands from animals. Previously, they had the normal very high circulating DHEA. For about a week after he removed the adrenal glands, their DHEA decreased, but it came right back to normal. He said that shows that the brain is a major source of DHEA, but he neglected to skin the animals because I think the skin is probably a bigger source of at least DHEA than the brain.

Danny Roddy: Was that B-U-L-L-O-U-G-H? Bullough?

Ray Peat: Yeah, B-A-U-L-I-E-U.

Danny Roddy: Okay. I have some notes in front of me, and there's another guy that has a similar name. That ties in perfectly to a couple other questions because ... Oh, shoot. I'm forgetting the name of the guy. Oh, Pitts? He did a study on some younger guys who were experiencing premature baldness, and then another guy named Schmidt did similar experiments. Some of them found lower thyroid function but higher pituitary and adrenal function, and the DHEA was really high. This is protective, correct, because of the stress they're experiencing?

Ray Peat: Yeah. It goes up with stress. If it doesn't have enough thyroid and defensive things like progesterone, then it also increases the local production of estrogen.

Danny Roddy: The DHEA is maybe being converted into the androstenedione? Then that's being converted into the estrogen and cortisol?

Ray Peat: Yeah. That happens particularly in stressed tissues. In old women, for example, the breast aromatase concentration is very high. I think in any stressed or aging tissue, the aromatase goes up two or three hundred percent. Then when you're under stress and making DHEA, that's feeding into tissue estrogen.

Danny Roddy: In regards to men, because the thyroid and the testes aren't working well, I have a newer reference on older men. It says that the 5-AR in the skin ... This is going back to our previous conversation, but the 5-AR in the skin increases possibly to compensate for the failing thyroid function in testes to produce the protective androgens?

Ray Peat: What in the skin increases?

Danny Roddy: The 5-alpha reductase.

Ray Peat: Oh.

Danny Roddy: Some of the balding things, they'll say, "Oh, the balding areas have higher 5-AR. Therefore, androgens are clearly the problem here." If the thyroid is low, and the testes aren't working well, I was thinking that maybe the skin was picking up, compensating in some way, or is that no?

Ray Peat: Yeah. I think that always happens, that the brain and skin are major stabilizing backup organs for all the hormones but especially the steroids.

Danny Roddy: Perfect. Thank you. Getting into the actual structure of the hair follicle, the things that kept sticking out to me was that the outer root sheath was allegedly a place of dense mitochondria. They were saying that that was also where the hair follicle was storing all of its glycogen. Then I read a few times that you could eliminate the dermal papilla, and that the outer root sheath would basically regenerate the entire hair follicle. Do you think that's especially important, or am I going down a wrong road?

Ray Peat: No. I haven't thought about that but the stem cells, it's an interaction between the underlying layer and the follicle itself. The stem cells get messages. Stress can renew the hair follicle, as well as tell it to turn off.

Danny Roddy: You see estrogen as the-

Ray Peat: Yeah, I think the stress, that all of the protein type sentinels going back and forth, but I think the main context is the ability to produce energy and use it. Things like histamine, nitric oxide, carbon monoxide, estrogen, and serotonin, I think those are the main context that the stem cells are listening to.

Danny Roddy: Okay, that makes sense. I read a few times, Kealey. I might be saying his name wrong. Adachi and a few of the other hair loss guys talk about how the hair follicle is extremely glucose-dependent and that it needs a source of glucose. Then a few other people say it's relatively independent of the circulation of glucose in the blood. They were thinking that the glycogen was part of that independence, but if the circulation is reduced from the low thyroid function and the oxygen supply is reduced, the hair follicle obviously suffers. That's where the oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation come in, really harming ... Go ahead.

Ray Peat: Yeah. All of the stresses tend to interfere with glucose oxidation. When you're stressed, you liberate free fatty acids as an energy source, but those poison the ability to oxidize oxygen, so it creates a local diabetes. Have you heard anything about whether diabetics have more baldness or less baldness?

Danny Roddy: I read that the insulin resistance, so-called, is related to baldness. Then somebody on one of my YouTube videos said that he had worked extensively with type 1 diabetics who were all using insulin, and he was like, "I've never noticed any of them being bald before." I don't know if that was accurate or not.

Ray Peat: I've been thinking that with a concentrated glucose solution, you could probably activate hair growth just by keeping your scalp moistened with glucose.

Danny Roddy: That's funny because people have emailed me that, asking if that was a viable therapy. I was like, "I have no idea. I don't know how that would work." It made me think of when you would say things like people use honey for scars and things like that. Go ahead.

Ray Peat: People are actually suggesting applying insulin topically to the skin, but that's a relatively much bigger molecule than glucose. I think there's a chance that either of those can get in, in a quantity that could help.

Danny Roddy: The insulin is helping by what? Stupid question but just supplying the hair follicle with glucose?

Ray Peat: With energy, yeah.

Danny Roddy: Okay. I've been thinking about this for a long time. I think I know the answer, but do you see IGF insulin-like growth factor 1 as like thyroid, like progesterone, as protective?

Ray Peat: Yeah. They come up, when you're not getting enough energy to keep things going, so stress is one of the things that will increase them. Yeah, I think that they are part of helping to renew cells.

Danny Roddy: I was reading almost everything bad lowers IGF-1. Estrogen therapy lowers it. Fasting lowers it.

Ray Peat: Lowers which, IGF?

Danny Roddy: Yeah, IGF-1. It sounds like maybe it could be bad, too?

Ray Peat: No. I think in general, it's on the reparative, constructive side.

Danny Roddy: I was reading the old Kealey 1990s papers. They were saying insulin was powerful at stimulating the growth of the hair follicle and then IGF-1 was like a hundred times more powerful. These were isolated culture experiments, I think.

Ray Peat: Yeah, that's the problem. In the culture, you don't know what the cell in its proper location would be interpreting those same things.

Danny Roddy: This leads to just another quick question. These experiments where they're exposing hair follicles to DHT or testosterone in culture are just generally meaningless?

Ray Peat: Well, not meaningless but you have to think of what they mean to the cell. The cell is constantly getting, when it's in its right place, it's getting all kinds of messages and support moment by moment. You have almost a different species or different substance when it's in vitro. You can get little bits of information that way.

Danny Roddy: Thinking of a specific one that you actually sent me a long time ago, it was by Wolf. I think they were exposing the hair follicle to DHT, and it increased nitric oxide. That was just to say that hey, nitric oxide is part of the cascade of baldness problem, right?

Ray Peat: Yeah.

Danny Roddy: That's increased from the oxidative stress and the lipid peroxidation?

Ray Peat: Yeah.

Danny Roddy: Even more so, that increase in intracellular calcium is the main thing that's turning on the nitric oxide?

Ray Peat: Yeah, over-excitation.

Danny Roddy: There's a paper by a guy named Goldman, and he thought that hypoxia in the scalp was an underappreciated realm of baldness research. Go ahead.

Ray Peat: Periodic hypoxia, momentary, that's one of the things that can start the cell cycle new. I think that's estrogen's good function for renewing tissue is activated by momentary hypoxia, by knocking out the oxidative system, but that's a renewal thing that should last maybe a few hours at most. Then chronic hypoxia, you get the defensive reactions of nitric oxide and heme oxygenase, carbon monoxide, and progressive deterioration. Some of these people are just suggesting surgery to increase circulation of the scalp and such. I don't think there's any possibility in that.

Danny Roddy: To tag on to what you just said, the Larson et al. finding that the prostaglandin D-synthase, this is interfering with that normal hypoxia leading to renewal and with the accumulation of the PUFA in the prostaglandins. It basically just creates that typical baldness shape, basically?

Ray Peat: Yeah, and I think the accumulating PUFA is one of the reasons why people get bald and heart attacks and prostate cancer. You know, prostate cancer is well associated with baldness?

Danny Roddy: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ray Peat: It's the same with heart attacks, many times more heart attacks in extremely bald men.

Danny Roddy: Something that's funny is if you go to their hair loss forums, they're all under the impression that there are good and bad prostaglandins. They say prostaglandin D2 is bad and PGE2 is good, but then if you go to the prostate cancer research ... You've obviously pointed me in this direction, but almost all of the PGE2 is intimately associated with the development of prostate cancer.

Ray Peat: Yeah, because they believe in the essentiality of PUFA, they have to think there must be some good prostaglandin. It turns out, I think, that when you metabolize sugar, you make it into fat. Then you make the fat into the mead acid, down that chain, you get the Omega-9 PUFA. Those are made into things like prostaglandins but we seldom get the chance to make them because we're drowned in the omega minus-6.

Danny Roddy: Ray, I don't think I ever talked to you about this, but your reply to Mary Enig when you were like, "Where did she get my resume and disinformation?" I cried when I read that. I thought it was so funny.

Ray Peat: Oh, what was that?

Danny Roddy: Your reply to Mary Enig. You had three things for her. It was like what filler material was she thinking of for something. Then, two, where did she acquire my degree and misinformation? I never tell anybody about that or something. It was just like this comedic throw in to your reply to her. It was just so funny because I didn't expect it when reading, and you could tell that Mary, rest in peace, was just like really upset. You were just flippant of her. I don't know. It was just funny to read.

Ray Peat: Where did you see that?

Danny Roddy: I think it was posted a long time ago in the Westin A Price thing. I'll write it down, and I'll send you it. It must have been like 20 years ago almost. It was probably in the early 2000s.

Ray Peat: Yeah, I didn't remember that I had even replied to her.

Danny Roddy: Maybe it was not you. I don't even know. Go ahead.

Ray Peat: I was embarrassed for her saying such dumb things because she had done so much good research. I just didn't know what to say about the dumb things she started saying.

Danny Roddy: Like something that is totally obvious when you start diving into the nutrition stuff is people have camps, and you can't step outside of the camp, partly because people have made products and they are now aligned with products and aligned with the ideas behind the products. It's just painful to see. Like that bulletproof coffee guy, he has a hundred different products that he's selling. Therefore, if he's selling a product with something in it, he can't say that product is ever going to be harmful. It clouds everybody's thinking, and it's real bizarre. I don't even understand it.

I always think about that oxidative shielding paper you've linked. I think it was by Guppy et al. They were saying the reactive oxygen species was a response not the cause. You look at the excess oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation as basically the failure of T3. T3 is typically not viewed as an antioxidant but by supporting the endogenous production of antioxidants, it's really important for maintaining those redox systems, I guess?

Ray Peat: Yeah, and even the things that they call the antioxidants, they go up when you're being injured, so it's better not to have great antioxidant defenses. Cancer cells are the ultimate in antioxidant defenses. The healthy cells don't have to defend themselves. They're using the oxygen and making the oxygen availability very limited. It can't do any harm because it's being used so fast.

Danny Roddy: Just for clarity, I got this wrong in one of my articles, but you think GSSG should be higher than GSH?

Ray Peat: Relatively. 

When you're in trouble, you're not oxidizing things fast enough, and some of your reducing capacity gets away and loosens up, breaks up the bonds between proteins. The proteins stick together by the disulfide bonds, so part of preparing for cell division, you surge powerfully in the direction of GSH being high and GSSG being very low. Then when you get back to functioning, it goes the other way, heavily towards GSSG. The actual numbers, I don't know that anyone really knows because the way you go about measuring it changes it so it's a very delicate system.

Danny Roddy: I think I understand this. Just a general fact, but I don't know if it especially applies to the hair follicle, but during that early anagen growth phase, it's extremely glycolytic. Then approaching the late anagen, when the hair fiber is being formed, is that when the differentiation happens, and that's more of a thyroid-driven state?

Ray Peat: Yeah.

Danny Roddy: That's an okay way of looking at it?

Ray Peat: I think that's how it works. The starting out of stem cell activation is the reduced state. Then the energetic working is an oxidating state.

Danny Roddy: Okay. There was a paper by a guy named Vidali, and he said that thyroid was mitochondrial hair medicine. I thought that supported everything you were saying.

Ray Peat: Yeah, people are trying various solutions of T3. Did I mention to you that I thought a little vinegar in vodka or something might be a good way to keep a fair amount of T3 in solution for topical use?

Danny Roddy: No. I haven't heard the vinegar. I knew you thought vodka would be okay.

Ray Peat: Yeah, I think maybe a drop of vinegar in a batch might make it more available.

Danny Roddy: That's good to know. I've never tried the topical. I think I tried the DHEA progesterone. I still have a lot of hair, so it's too sticky, but I know a lot of people who are really bald have been messaging me. I always tell them that you've mentioned that in the old KMUD interview. I knew that you thought T3 might be good, but I had never tried it so I rarely mentioned it to people. Going to the 3-beta–hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase, Sawaya et al. showed that that enzyme was three times higher in the balding scalp. Is that just a consequence of generalized stress, basically? Is 3-beta–hydroxysteroid concentrated in the adrenal glands? I guess I'm confused at where that fits into everything.

Ray Peat: I think it's linked with aromatase in some situations. Isn't it a precursor to aromatase action?

Danny Roddy: I don't know. It produces the androstenedione. From one of your references, I picked up that androstenedione was largely converted into estrogen and cortisol. You sent me those references saying that trilostane, which was used for Cushing's and animals with hair loss was effective at restoring hair growth, just I guess emphasizing the role of cortisol?

Ray Peat: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Danny Roddy: I read in some paper that the hair follicles didn't have a Randle fatty-acid cycle but they do have a glutamate glucose cycle. One, I don't know if that's true. Then two, I was curious if that was accurate, the glutamate glucose cycle, that one of the reasons for cortisol being bad for hair was because it liberated a bunch of glutamine from the muscles.

Ray Peat: Why would that be bad if the glutamine-

Danny Roddy: I think it was Kealey, but they were saying that ... I might have been interpreting wrong, but if the glutamine were favored over the glucose, this highly dependent structure couldn't use the glucose. Therefore, it would be forced to use this amino acid.

Ray Peat: Who was it that said there's no Randle cycle in the skin?

Danny Roddy: I think Kealey. K-E-A-L-E-Y. Let me get the ... They have a couple papers saying glucose is the major fuel. I think they say that it will take fatty acid but that the yield of ATP was way lower. This is a paper from 1994, and this is a quote from it. They say, "No glucose fatty-acid cycle operates in the hair follicle therefore, but a glucose glutamine cycle does since the presence of glutamine will inhibit glucose utilization."

Ray Peat: I'm stuck on the no Randle cycle because I have to read more and think more about that because I cannot think of how that would ... It works even in the brain. It isn't just a muscle thing, but I would have to convince myself that that article is right.

Danny Roddy: Okay, I'm going to send it to you. I think my confusion was I was reading all of your stuff. I was like, "Okay. I understand this." Then when I was digging more into hair follicle stuff, it was like, "Okay, what I understand about generalized tissues doesn't apply to the hair follicle," so I think I was confusing myself a lot of the times, trying to get this, gaining new understanding.

Ray Peat: I think one difference between the skin and the brain, there is that hypothetical blood brain barrier, and I think the skin is much less barricaded against sugar and other things. I think it might be much more susceptible to interferences, that you might take a lot more fat to poison the skin against glucose than you do with a muscle.

Danny Roddy: Okay. That's good to know. Just a few more questions. Sorry for this battery of things. Some old papers talk about the loss of subcutaneous scalp fat, that the anagen is embedded in. Do you think this is important?

Ray Peat: I don't think so.

Danny Roddy: No? Okay. I've already asked you that. Go ahead.

Ray Peat: Have you read anything about aminoguanidine or agmatine? Our body's natural defense against nitric oxide is agmatine, mostly.

Danny Roddy: Okay. No, I haven't read it.

Ray Peat: It's a fairly small molecule. It's arginine minus the acid group. It's very safe to take internally. A couple of Israelis for several years, each of them took 2.4 grams a day to test its safety. They've done the most research on it, Gilad and his wife. Since it inhibits nitric oxide, I've wondered if it might not be good to use topically for hair.

Danny Roddy: Okay. I think it was one of your references, but the nitric oxide theory of aging. It's still hard for me to see where it fits in with everything, but it sounds like it's really central in basically everything, right?

Ray Peat: Yeah, more or less as central as endotoxin from the intestine. Endotoxin starts off a flood of nitric oxide and serotonin and to some extent, histamine, but the nitric oxide aging promotion is really an extension of endotoxin.

Danny Roddy: This leads me to another question but I was reading that people with liver disease have super high levels of nitric oxide.

Ray Peat: Yeah, that seems reasonable. I think the nitric oxide is causing their liver disease, and then the liver is letting it expand.

Danny Roddy: Since it increases with aging, what's the primary way of degrading nitric oxide? Is it progesterone?

Ray Peat: Thyroid and progesterone, I think, and glucose, keeping your glucose flowing through the system, and carbon dioxide.

Danny Roddy: Speaking of liver stuff, somebody posted something you had sent somebody about hair loss. You said that the liver was central. I took and ran with that. Since I knew that prolactin was involved, I was curious if the hypoglycemia caused by thyroid deficiency, sodium deficiency, not being able to absorb the glucose and then calcium. All those things are promoting the hypoglycemia, and this is increasing the prolactin. Then the prolactin is activating the adrenal glands. Is this a right cascade of what's happening?

Ray Peat: Yeah. I don't know about the adrenals being in that place in the cycle, but the rest of it sounded okay.

Danny Roddy: If estrogen is terminating the growth phase and then prolactin is being increased by estrogen, what specifically about prolactin is anti-hair growth? Is it increasing the oxidative stress, or is it lipid peroxidation?

Ray Peat: Yeah. I think it activates the immune system inflammation process.

Danny Roddy: That is just the cytokines are causing this inhibition of hair growth, and that's primarily being promoted by prolactin?

Ray Peat: I don't really have any idea of the details. What started me thinking about that was seeing women who had had a bad reaction to the old high potency estrogen birth control pills whose hair, even their eyelashes and eyebrows completely fell out. That started me reading about the effect of prolactin. In birds, it's a molting hormone. It makes the feathers fall out. All of the glands in the skin are very responsive to prolactin. It affects the balance between sodium and potassium, for example, in the sweat glands.

Danny Roddy: Since just being a person on the Internet with an opinion, hundreds of people have emailed me over the last few years. I would put money on anybody having a hair problem having a prolactin of over 10. Low Vitamin D, high over 1 TSH, tend to be higher cholesterol, and over 10 prolactin seem to be just really normal. I was trying to find out.

Ray Peat: That's for men?

Danny Roddy: Yeah, yeah.

Ray Peat: Yeah, that's high for men.

Danny Roddy: I was reading like for a child the second year of life, they had around 5 for both girls and boys.

Ray Peat: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Danny Roddy: Okay, almost done. I promise.

Ray Peat: The women who lost all their hair had prolactin about 10 times normal, I think.

Danny Roddy: What was the reason that you thought the liver was central in the hair loss, or do you not think that? Was it the estrogen?

Ray Peat: Regulating the sugar into estrogen is the main thing and keeping the endotoxin out of the system. The endotoxin, once it poisons the liver enough, it flows through the system. Then you get the local interference with too much nitric oxide, dysregulation of calcium and the Vitamin D deficiency, both parallel to that. The Vitamin D and glucose regulation, the oxidizing function is partly regulated by Vitamin D and keeps down the toxic effects of the other nitric oxide, endotoxin-related things.

Danny Roddy: Hypothetically, would two people with say prostate cancer, and one had hair and one didn't, would you assume they were expressing ... I don't know if expressing is the right word, but one was experiencing more oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation in the scalp in some way where the other person that kept their hair was not. Would that be the primary difference between the two situations?

Ray Peat: Yeah. I think the extremely bald people who are very susceptible to heart disease and prostate cancer, it's high estrogen, low thyroid function, lots of prostaglandins, everything inflammatory and interfering with energy production.

Danny Roddy: I have read about cyclic AMP a lot.

Ray Peat: About what?

Danny Roddy: Cyclic AMP or cAMP.

Ray Peat: Oh, yeah.

Danny Roddy: Is there an easy way of understanding it? I feel like every paper I read, something says that some substance is regulating it. Then another paper I'll read will say another substance is regulating it. I guess I just can't grasp where it fits in.

Ray Peat: It's everything that activates normal differentiated cell functioning involves increasing cyclic AMP. The opposing direction towards cell division and deterioration at the end is from too much cyclic GMP. The nitric oxide acts through cyclic GMP, which is knocking down their differentiation and energy production. In general, cyclic AMP goes up with everything good, but you don't want too much of everything good, either.

Danny Roddy: You said in one of those KMUD interviews that a guy had fallen in a fire and burned his scalp. I found that paper, and they actually had photos of it. Does that tie in to the long-term inflammatory process of so-called perifollicular fibrosis? Some of these papers are saying that transforming growth factor beta-1 is the so-called key player in this process?

Ray Peat: Yeah. I think that transforming growth factor can end up producing cancers and dedifferentiated to an excess, but I think it's one of the stem cell activators.

Danny Roddy: Okay, so it's involved in regeneration? It's not so much a specific target for hair loss?

Ray Peat: No. It's a general thing. You don't want to push it too hard, or you'll get cancer.

Danny Roddy: Along the same lines, trying to make sense of all these mediators, they're talking about the bone morphogenetic proteins.

Ray Peat: That sentence cut out.

Danny Roddy: Oh, sorry. Can you hear me now?

Ray Peat: Yeah.

Danny Roddy: Along the same lines, they're talking about the bone morphogenetic proteins, BMP-2 and 4. Are those similar?

Ray Peat: Yeah. When the cell is de-energized and under stress, they can pop up in the wrong tissue, and you can grow a bone inside your eyeball or in your heart. I think that's from energy deprivation and nitric oxide, probably.

Danny Roddy: Is the reason you focus on these macro events, like the nitric oxide, because these lesser players are ... Do you see that as like minutia and getting too into the weeds with the different health problems?

Ray Peat: Yeah, but there are about a thousand of these regulatory proteins. It's impossible to interpret when you take two or three or five or ten of them, depending on the ones you're not looking at, you can get very different impressions of how they're interacting.

Danny Roddy: Okay. That helps a lot.

Ray Peat: If you look at the very basic general things like redox, the GSH/GSSG balance, the NAD/NADH balance, that's more easy to measure, so it's one that more often is accurately reported. The PH going up tends to go with redox going in the NADH DSH direction, and that goes with not enough oxygen. If you think of oxygen making carbon dioxide, sucking electrons out of the system, that's the opposite of the high PH, high glutathione, high NADH direction. It's extremely generalized, works everywhere, and the peptide regulators are working within that context. It lets you interpret what those infinitely complicated proteins are doing.

Danny Roddy: Do you see any of them as more important than other? A few you mentioned, like NF-kappa b and TNF-a and Interleukin-6, are those more so important than the other ones?

Ray Peat: Yeah. They're just a little more generalized. They're a gate between the disturbed cytoplasm turning on the DNA, but still, you have to think of them in terms of redox. Too much reductive energy and not enough oxidation turns on aromatase, NF-kappa beta, nitric oxide, heme oxygenase, and everything that is needed in an emergency tends to get over produced when you don't have enough oxygen.

Danny Roddy: Awesome. I have a few non hair-related questions. Tell me if you have to go, and we can jump off. I've been doing the plastic wrap and vitamins on my skin. I don't know if you use plastic wrap or not, but do you have any estimation on the length of time needed to absorb a certain amount?

Ray Peat: From CO2?

Danny Roddy: No. If you put fat soluble vitamins on your lower leg, and you wrap it with a thin layer of plastic wrap. Is that something you do, and B, do you keep it on for a certain amount of time?

Ray Peat: I just rub the oil in and then sit around reading for a half an hour or so.

Danny Roddy: Go ahead.

Ray Peat: It runs off, so you keep absorbing some, but if you put on your pants or go to bed, you lose about half of it. The first hour, I think, you get a big part of it soaked in.

Danny Roddy: Okay. I was keeping it on for like a day. Would that be good, or would that be just excessive?

Ray Peat: No. It doesn't do any harm.

Danny Roddy: In previous emails you had written, because you're my main source for the fat-soluble vitamins on the skin, but previously you had written three to five times the amount. Then when we talked last time, you said 10 times the amount. Is it just totally dependent on the skin thickness?

Ray Peat: Yeah.

Danny Roddy: You just have to estimate, right?

Ray Peat: Yeah. If a person is visibly deficient in something, you can get a really quick response. In less than an hour, you can see them going from dying to perfectly healthy and happy with something like progesterone. If you're just measuring the amount in your blood, you don't see all of it that goes into your body in the blood, so you might calculate it only five percent or ten percent is getting into the body. If you're looking at the effect produced, it can seem like a very large part of it is getting in pretty quickly.

Danny Roddy: If you were to eat like four ounces of liver to inhibit the absorption of iron, is there a certain amount of coffee you would tend to drink?

Ray Peat: Oh, just a cup of strong coffee.

Danny Roddy: Okay, good to know. Not even nutritionally-related questions, I think I could infer this, but do you see the government as an extension of the marketplace? They're two sides of the same coin, right?

Ray Peat: I see it as sort of the enforcer. The big companies want to make us buy something, and the government is their enforcer for backing up what they want to do.

Danny Roddy: That's why libertarianism is like a kooky thing because they think if you just get rid of the government, the marketplace will take care of everything, but I don't-

Ray Peat: They'll have to hire their own mafia instead of making the taxpayers support it.

Danny Roddy: Since we had our conversation and we talked about that a little bit, or since you had the interview with Gavin, I've been reading a guy named Paul Joseph. He's the guy that made those Zeitgeist movies. I don't know if you've ever seen them, but he basically has some similar talking points that you said about libertarianism and things like that. He was strongly influenced by Bucky Fuller, so I felt comfortable listening to him. Obviously, I don't know what he's thinking fully, and I don't know what you're thinking either, but is it possible to have a non-authoritarian centralized government? Non-authoritarianism and government, can they coexist, or is that impossible?

Ray Peat: I think it's all the money system, the possibility of using money to extract more money, that the government in itself is innocuous. Like in Mexico, disorganization is the best thing the government has. The US has been teaching them how to get organized, how to stop fighting, one cartel against the other. The US learned hundreds of years ago that one big cartel is their ideal, and they're teaching Mexicans how to not fight among the cartels. Traditionally, Mexico by its disorganization has left lots of libertarian reality.

Danny Roddy: Do you think basic income is like a step in the right direction, or do you see problems with the government controlling that?

Ray Peat: Oh, that's fine. Nixon and Johnson both thought about doing it. They were thinking of it as just a way to reduce the cost of welfare and policing and so on. It's just an extension of the policing system if you pay people not to have to mug people in the street.

Danny Roddy: That was like the major realization because I was really trapped in the libertarian mindset because I thought it was the most non-authoritarian. It was realizing that it's kind of selfish, and you're only thinking about yourself. If a lot of the societal problems are based on this really, really rich people and really, really poor, and that wealth gap is creating or associated with violence and all the things nobody likes about the culture, it really makes sense to try to close that gap.

Ray Peat: Yeah.

Danny Roddy: Okay.

Ray Peat: The reason that it developed in the first place was about a thousand years ago, the barons and the very successful money lenders and so on realized that the government was the way to get their position more stable and more powerful. They made deals with the king and set up organized government for more organized exploitation of the farmers. Finally, they saw that that had its limits, so they started writing laws saying that the farmers couldn't graze their animals on lands that the barons wanted to use for something else. They wrote laws specifically to funnel money into their pockets and chase people off the land. The 18th Century Deserted Village, did you ever read that?

Danny Roddy: No, no.

Ray Peat: That was describing the process of the laws being written to chase people into the city and creating poverty, so that they can extract more money from the land. The government at all levels has never been anything but that kind of an enforcement system.

Danny Roddy: It sounds like capitalism is half of the problem, and then you have this dark, black government deep state. Do you see the capitalism supporting that? Are they the same, or what's more important?

Ray Peat: No. Capitalism was just an ideology, like democracy. The way they teach it in high school and college is that it's a viable productive process, but that has never existed. It always used the government and armies and police to make the capital stay in place. It's always been a police state rather than an ideal capitalist system. The libertarians, like the Koch brothers, are behind most of the think tanks doing libertarianism. Liberty for capital always involves state enforcement.

Danny Roddy: When you see Obama get into office and do stuff he said he'd never do, and then you see Trump get into office and do stuff he said he'd never do, is that more indicative of the monetary system, or is that more indicative of these powers that be, just having complete control over those types of things?

Ray Peat: Those mysterious powers are the real ... They're the ones that invent the story that capitalism is productive. The last 70 years or so, in the US and by extension everywhere the empire goes, they've been shaping things all the way from orchestra concerts, art exhibits, science teaching, medical school doctrine, who they are going to assassinate inside and outside the country. It's all very tightly organized and scripted, basically. The whole culture including the bit players, like Obama, they are recruited. Have you read anything about Obama's family background?

Danny Roddy: A little bit. I listened to an interview with some guy that wrote a book saying basically he had no past. They couldn't get access to his thesis, and they couldn't find out anything about him, basically.

Ray Peat: Yeah. He was like a test tube CIA project. His father was imported by the CIA to mate with his mother who worked for the CIA. His stepfather had a major CIA connection to the massacre of a million people in Indonesia. His mother was there creating lists of who to massacre.

Danny Roddy: The common targets for the people controlling things are like the Rothschilds? Are those the type of people that you think? Do they have a high degree? I'm asking for answers, but I know maybe it's not possible to answer these questions. Is it a very tightly coordinated intelligence?

Ray Peat: Yeah. They've got their club. They recruit new members constantly, like Scull and Bones at Yale. This Macron guy was the latest Obama. He just came from nowhere, even created this new party and is just a creation of the Rothschilds.

Danny Roddy: Okay, and like Bilderberg and things like this are all playing into that?

Ray Peat: Oh, yeah.

Danny Roddy: Man.

Ray Peat: The crazy right-wing conspiracy theorists are right about almost everything.

Danny Roddy: I watched ... I don't know where Alex Jones sits into this, but he did film the Bohemian Grove thing that was in San Francisco. How much of this insanity do you think is based on this devil worship? Do you see that as a big factor or the occult, rather?

Ray Peat: I don't know. I think that's just like an in joke.

Danny Roddy: Okay.

Ray Peat: They say that Hitler was a follower of that same sort of thing, but I think mostly that's just decoration. I don't think it was anything serious.

Danny Roddy: Just people that are obsessed with controlling or ruling the world, they have so much money and power?

Ray Peat: Yeah. It's that they grow up seeing the reality from the money side, so it's just natural for them to think in terms of how to get rid of an excess five billion people on the planet.

Danny Roddy: Ah, okay. Those were all my questions. My final one was is there any aspect of hair growth that I should investigate that we didn't talk about?

Ray Peat: No. I think we mentioned all of it, Vitamin D, endotoxin, agmatine.

Danny Roddy: I have a real quick question. Hair growth is similar to bone growth? Is that accurate, because it seems like everything that supports bone health supports hair growth?

Ray Peat: Oh. Yeah, I guess everything that supports good health.

Danny Roddy: Maybe that's why those balding guys had five percent or something lower bone mineral density?

Ray Peat: Yeah, stress does that.

Danny Roddy: Awesome. Ray, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. This really helps. I don't know if I mentioned it but I'm like two-thirds through the book. Knowing that I'm not going down an insane path of wrongness and sticking to the things that really matter is really helpful, so I appreciate it.

Ray Peat: Yeah. Let me see what you're adding when you get it done.

Danny Roddy: Yeah. I think I should have a draft by July, and then I'm going to send it to an editor and get it edited. Once I have that, I'll send it to you.

Ray Peat: Good.

Danny Roddy: So you don't have to read something that's horrible.

Ray Peat: Okay.

Danny Roddy: Thank you so much. Have an amazing rest of the day, and thank you. I appreciate it.

Ray Peat: Okay.

Danny Roddy: Okay, bye Ray.

Ray Peat: Bye.