Lost Conversations with Ray Peat #3: Israel, Iron, Formative Ether, HAARP, Jeffrey Epstein, Topical Vitamins, Temperature, and Joseph Stalin
"It just takes a little change towards irritation going down your intestine to have really big effects on your mood and philosophy." — Ray Peat (2019)
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 #3: Israel, Iron, Formative Ether, HAARP, Jeffrey Epstein, Topical Vitamins, Temperature, and Joseph Stalin
Introduction
Transcript
Recorded August 26th, 2019
[Omitted personal chatter]
Danny Roddy: I actually wanted to talk to you about the random cultural stuff that's going on. First I wanted to ask you, did you know that conspiracy theorists are now a domestic terrorism threat?
Ray Peat: Yeah, I've been hearing that.
Danny Roddy: Is this part of just turning up things to 11? You have better perspective than I do but all this stuff that's coming out just seems so crazy.
Ray Peat: The craziness was so pervasive in 1950 to, oh, about 1960 that apparently no one remembers it except the people who were suffering from it at the time. The mood in the 1950s was more like Kafka than the crazy flapping around the ruling class is doing now.
Danny Roddy: It was more under the surface craziness?
Ray Peat: Pervasive from surface to bottom and now the ruling class is coming out into the open. 10 or 20% of the population is starting to see that they're crazy, but back then it was like half a dozen people in the whole country.
Danny Roddy: Speaking of crazy, I've been reading a book about The Tavistock Institute. One of the things that caught my eye is that it said approximately 30 years ago, Kurt Lewin and Brigadier General Dr. John Rawlings Rees proposed developing methods of political control based on driving the majority of the human population towards psychosis. That makes a lot of sense to me.
Danny Roddy: Then they talked about turning people against each other and having a myriad of ways to do that, from age and sexual orientation to diet, etc. They were essentially creating perverse pseudo-families and making people go crazy, especially under conditions of austerity.
Ray Peat: Yeah. They have been learning how to do it more and more but they were trying already in the 30s and 40s but didn't really institutionalize it in the CIA and FBI until about 1950.
Danny Roddy: Do you think what we're experiencing now is the transition, or is it what Douglas Valentine wrote about — the Phoenix Program? He mentioned that what we are experiencing now is akin to a matured Phoenix Program, something that has been more carefully planned out.
Ray Peat: Yeah. The assassination network is just one part of their program of finance and of public media and such, they have all different levels and all the way from sub murder to sophisticated murder and starvation and alienation by convincing people that they're crazy. All different levels are in operation.
Danny Roddy: I’ve been reading an article by Whitney Webb where she connects Jefferey Epstein to Robert Maxwell, Danny Casolaro, Promis Software, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the Clintons, Mena, Arkansas, Iran Contra, Barry Seal, United Arab Emirates, sex trafficking, Mossad, Adnan Khashoggi, Southern Air Transport, Leslie Wexner, Bill Casey, the Mega Group and Lynn Forester de Rothschild. It’s a tour de force.
Ray Peat: The size of it is the worst thing. In the 50s, the public had swallowed it so totally that they didn't have to push them around individually, but the technique for pushing them around is improving at the same time that more people are getting skeptical. I think the media has been spreading a little bit of enlightenment since the 1950s.
Danny Roddy: Can you dig into that more? Do you think it's accidentally coming out? It seems like the media is the biggest part of the problem.
Ray Peat: Oh yeah, but I mean it used to be garage printing presses. In the 40s, I remember we were already circulating pamphlets. When someone would try to start a movement and would start publishing a little newsletter, their press would get blown up and now they just have to unplug them from YouTube and such things.
Danny Roddy: YouTube is almost unusable now.
Ray Peat: A couple days ago I heard that Google had banned anyone who was criticizing the riots in Hong Kong, pointing out that they're managed by the National Endowment for Democracy and other US agencies, that they can't get on YouTube.
Danny Roddy: It seems ominous that YouTube is becoming an authoritative source of information.
Ray Peat: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Danny Roddy: "That Danny Casolaro 'suicide'—I know it's just one in a string of many — but when I saw the photos, it just seems preposterous.
Ray Peat: What photos? I haven't seen any?
Danny Roddy: His family said he was very squeamish of blood.
Ray Peat: I've heard that but his arms were all slashed up apparently.
Danny Roddy: It was disturbing how deep the cuts were… A while ago, I asked you about Epstein, and you linked Robert Maxwell and his connection to Israel. If you remember, a few months ago I asked you about the Pilgrim Society, and my motivation for asking you that was to establish more of the Anglo-Saxon elite. At the moment, it’s popular to blame everything on 'the Jews.' Apparently, after World War II, being anti-Semitic became unpopular, and so that's when that Pilgrim Society group started letting in more Jewish members.
Ray Peat: Israel has been sort of adopted as a tool by the US since Truman put them through, recognizing them, and since then anti Semitism has been a controlled political term by the US power establishment to use Israel as their tool. They get used back as Congress sends them billions of dollars and they send a few hundred million back to buy Congress elections and to run people like Maxwell and Epstein.
Danny Roddy: I might have missed it, but do you think it's more of an America-owns-Israel relationship, or is it bidirectional? Also, is America mostly interested in Israel just as a launching point for destroying the Middle East, and eventually Russia?
Ray Peat: Oh yeah. It's definitely a tool and the bankers who were Anglo Saxon used to be an exclusive ruling class using American Jews like Henry Kissinger just as technicians. In roughly the last 50 years, the ruling class has shifted its center heavily away from the northeastern English ruling class to a more Jewish loaded ruling class.
Danny Roddy: Is that because of the death of David Rockefeller or something different?
Ray Peat: Partly that but just the shifting money relationships that the Anglo Saxon bank and German bank and Italian banks, the Jews have been powerful in those for I guess 200 years or more. Those European Jewish banks have just shifted the center of gravity in the US ruling class away from the WASP personality types.
Danny Roddy: Is the Rothschild family the top tier, do you feel?
Ray Peat: Pretty much, yeah.
Danny Roddy: Someone did a breakdown of the Forbes top 10 richest people and mentioned that if the Rothschilds were included, with a net worth of hundreds of trillions of dollars, the whole list would be dominated by the Rothschilds.
Ray Peat: Really?
Danny Roddy: Then I think I had read in 2012 that the Rockefellers and Rothschilds had come to some deal and merged their fortunes to some extent.
Ray Peat: I hadn't heard that but they're in the same business, running the same banks. On several levels, the ruling classes have stopped being WASP and become pretty heavily Jewish influenced.
Danny Roddy: A few more things from this Campaigner magazine. Let me read you this passage: ‘Out of an area of approximately 800,000,000 population marked for mass genocide, the so-called fourth world by McNamara's World Bank Program, in India alone, it is estimated that approximately 22 to 30,000,000 deaths occurred during 1974 as a direct result of the Rockefeller starvation plague program, aimed at reducing the world population to between two and 2.5 billion by 1990. Public figures on the hideous genocide in the Sub-Sahara region are withheld so far. Central America, also set aside for mass genocide, is another case, and Bangladesh may lose half its population through the Rockefeller program of food production cutbacks over 1974 and 1975. By the fall of 1975, the Rockefeller agency's programs will have deliberately exterminated more human beings than the Nazi regime, and that is merely the beginning.’ This was written a while ago, but it puts depopulation into a new light. It's disturbing to think that this has already happened.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and Bolsonaro in Brazil has a policy of basically turning the Amazon forests into cattle and soybean farms and so now he's burning the forests to get rid of the nuisance populations.
Danny Roddy: Are a lot of people dying?
Ray Peat: They have no place to live when the forests are burned down.
Danny Roddy: Ah. I heard that that was happening but I almost don't pay attention to any news now because I feel like it's all propaganda.
Ray Peat: You have to read into it what's really happening.
Danny Roddy: The long game of the oligarchy and depopulation — what's the point if they don't live long enough to see the results? Is it for legacy and tradition? It doesn't make much sense to me.
Ray Peat: They still have an old fashioned view of what the world is and think if they have their small countries or areas in a country, that the rest of the world can turn into just giant slave plantations. They don't think about it as an ecological ongoing process.
Danny Roddy: I think I read somewhere that UNESCO is preserving specific areas for future oligarchical generations to prevent us from causing damage. Does that have any merit?
Ray Peat: You mean UNESCO is serving the ruling class?
Danny Roddy: Yeah, like they're creating more and more heritage sites so people can't enter them and that is land for future elite people.
Ray Peat: It is functionally so, but a lot of the people in it see it in an context just where they're doing good rather than doing good for the ruling class.
Danny Roddy: We mentioned Russia a little bit earlier. Somebody had mentioned you were reading a book called Khrushchev Lied. Is that speech that he gave a reason that Americans think he's a horrible person?
Ray Peat: Khrushchev or Stalin?
Danny Roddy: Stalin.
Ray Peat: Oh yes, he was serving his own interests which coincided with Germany and the US, that ever since the Dulles, Germany has seen the US as their support and so the Gehlen Organization became the Dulles Gehlen Organization. They were already creating the myths which included demonizing Stalin. That was an institutional policy of creating a story about what Stalin was doing because Germany wanted the resources that Stalin was occupying and keeping away from them.
Danny Roddy: Frances Stonor Saunders said that America propaganda was saying that Stalin was being celebrated for helping us win World War II and then immediately after, the propaganda had to switch to demonizing him. Go ahead.
Ray Peat: It had been going ever since he came to power. The richness of the myth was largely created by German propaganda as they were teaching their people that they needed Lebensraum and that Stalin was in their way. That was just adopted by the US after the war. Roosevelt and even Nelson Rockefeller had seen a different version of capitalism all through the Roosevelt administration in which they would cooperate with the Soviets after the war and that's why people are generally convinced that Dulles had Roosevelt assassinated, because the policy had changed over the Germans' plan, the Dulles Nazi program for dealing with Russian resources.
Ray Peat: The same goes for Latin America. There's a good book, I think it's called something like 'The Containment of Latin America' by David Green. The Roosevelt program was sort of a Marshall Plan for Latin America to turn them into consumers, not just for Europe but also for Russia. Latin America would serve as sources of resources and a market for American industry. This wasn't the same as the German Dulles plan, which aimed to essentially enslave everyone.
Danny Roddy: To be in power, you probably have to do some bad things, right?
Ray Peat: Noam Chomsky went down the list, I forget which one he started with, either Roosevelt or Truman, but he showed in detail that the offenses committed by each of our presidents since Truman, at least, align with the Nuremberg standard of offenses. According to that standard, every U.S. president should have been hanged.
Danny Roddy: Except Obama, because he had no scandals during his presidency. That was a joke. I wanted to ask you about this a while ago, but you visited Russia in 1968. Is that correct?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Danny Roddy: People were asking how did you do that?
Ray Peat: I asked for a visa, I bought a boat ticket and went to Europe. Since I wasn't going on a group tour, it took I think five weeks from the time I asked before they gave me a visa basically to go wherever I wanted. We got robbed in England, so we were on an extremely tight budget and so we didn't do a lot of traveling once we got there. It was cheap to get around on subways and trains.
Danny Roddy: That wasn’t a sketchy time to go to Russia as an American?
Ray Peat: No, it was legal. You would have expected that we'd have trouble getting back in the country but they were so well organized they I think just figured that we were harmless and hopeless and not to bother with. Coming back in from Mexico, I've always had much, much harder problems with immigration than coming back from the Soviet Union.
Danny Roddy: Speaking of it, things are getting rough here. There is a power vacuum or something, and there are two cartels — one from Sinaloa and another one from, I forget where. There have been three burglaries on my street, and then there was a shooting a few weeks ago in which an American got killed in the crossfire.
Ray Peat: I hadn't heard what the new drug policy is. I had assumed that it would sort of legalize drugs up to the US border.
Danny Roddy: Oh really? I hadn't heard that.
Ray Peat: That had been talked about before he got elected but I haven't heard what has come of it. He's probably forced to keep enforcing some of the anti mob rule.
Danny Roddy: The sickness of the cartel stuff is really weird to me after living here and interacting with Mexicans.
Ray Peat: Yeah, the CIA in Afghanistan and Vietnam was definitely running the drug business, and they definitely haven't made an effort to stop the flow or the production. They want the drugs coming in. It gives them power to put people in prison and to have the army active with the false front of looking for drugs. That was becoming policy when Blake College was there. We saw people being union organizers, for example, were being arrested by Mexicans and using the technique that had developed in the United States of saying they weren't arresting unionists, they were arresting drug people.
Danny Roddy: If you just delete the CIA, do you think humanity would have a chance? Do you think that is the biggest threat to everyone?
Ray Peat: It would put a dent in the evil empire organization but it's a multi centered network really. The Italian elites and French elites and the German, largely those three countries are tied very tightly to the CIA and Mexico is fairly well forced to conform to the CIA. If you took the CIA out, the network would hardly be compromised.
Danny Roddy: It's just too big now.
Ray Peat: Yeah, it has so many centers, the struggle to reorganize it under probably direct German or English rule, most likely German.
Danny Roddy: Was there a palpable difference in people before the CIA existed?
Ray Peat: Oh yeah, yeah. The Roosevelt years, people believed, they gave up the socialist idea and said, "Well, social democracy in the Roosevelt sense is all we can get," and so they were enthusiastic. Hitler canceled the socialist revolution by saying he was doing it and gave working people jobs and that was enough to kill the socialist, anti capitalist movement. That was what Roosevelt was trying to do the same, a more civilized kind of fascism in which he explicitly said that he was saving his ruling class by making it more humane and democratic. The extreme Dulles faction just couldn't wait to get rid of him.
Danny Roddy: That's funny. It sounds like that is the origin of socialism becoming this dirty word.
Ray Peat: Yeah, the first World War was officially, the propaganda organization put it into full force, militarized propaganda to go from condemning anarchists to calling them socialists and communists.
Danny Roddy: Correct me if I'm wrong but the oligarchy transcends partisan politics and capitalism and socialism, right?
Ray Peat: That's Hitler's concept of it and Mussolini's. I think they got their idea from Napoleon. Napoleon stopped the real revolution but was progressive, spread progressive legal reforms, so Hitler and Mussolini had some good things for the working people but only to increase the power of the ruling class.
Danny Roddy: Say magically there was some socialist program that did support people — do you think that would move the needle in a good direction?
Ray Peat: Oh, no. Like Roosevelt, that would make it very pleasant to move onto total fascism, total one world for the corporations, but that is always necessarily a brainless and ultimately suicidal way to run things. That kind of fascist socialization under the control of what's good for, it'll probably be Amazon, the one corporation that owns the world as whoever owns Amazon will be able to make stupid mistakes to end the world.
Danny Roddy: I'm a little confused…
Ray Peat: Bernie is enough like Roosevelt but it would be good for people in general for maybe 20 or 30 years but then the Amazon principle would have reached its peak.
Danny Roddy: You're saying if there was a switch now, with oligarchy in place, that it really wouldn't do anything. In fact, it might make it worse?
Ray Peat: If you could put all of the oligarchs, say, in the Connecticut or some confined place and deal with them with some kind of balancing power where you had actual elections and could criticize their policies and make policies regulating their money, like the Chinese did. They put them in Shanghai and gave them gigantic fortunes to keep them quiet and dealt with the capitalists by giving them everything they asked for but in an isolated way so they couldn't interfere with threatening the government. If you could do that, then the people could keep the top elite scum under control until they just died away.
Danny Roddy: I think that the last time we talked, you were discussing the altruistic properties of matter. Does that change when there's psychosis for many generations?
Ray Peat: The principles, both Vernadsky talking about physical chemistry and Marx talking about history, they both recognized that things are tending towards perfection but that since they are changing and adapting, the possibility of an error could catastrophically end the whole system forever.
Danny Roddy: You think that's where we're headed?
Ray Peat: Yeah, there are no really visible ways to stop it.
Danny Roddy: In an interview, you mentioned that you thought the ruling class were klutzes. Can you expand on that?
Ray Peat: Well, they are so stuck in their groove that they have no noticeable mentality that they are mechanical ideologues. Like the top Nobel chemists and physiologists and such are pretty mindless as a rule. They're running down the rut of their ideology and the ruling class is doing the same. They have their ruts well under control but they don't look around and see where the ruts where are leading them.
Danny Roddy: Their ruts can be exploited, right?
Ray Peat: Oh, yeah, it's a matter of getting a lot of people to see that the ruling class is in an obscenely sadistic rut or ideology. If you just get a few million people able to communicate with each other, that's all it would take to change the whole course and use the state powers that exist creatively.
Ray Peat: Like if you had 10 or 15 Stalins, that could change the course of history.
Danny Roddy: Was Stalin against his ruling class?
Ray Peat: Oh, yeah. He knew that things had to be managed, and he did his best to manage the Politburo, but he realized that they had their mental limitations. So, he was constantly compromising to find the best path that his colleagues could agree to.
Danny Roddy: What is the major criticism of him?
Ray Peat: That he defeated the Germans. That's why they hate him, because he industrialized the country, got everyone literate, and was able to defeat the Nazis so that England and United States couldn't get at their resources. Keeping all of those resources away from the West is a good justification for saying what a beast he was.
Danny Roddy: Antony Sutton's information in his book "Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler," a majority of it is accurate, right? The Morgan Rockefeller Wall Street, go ahead.
Ray Peat: Who's book?
Danny Roddy: Antony Sutton, C. Sutton.
Ray Peat: I don't think I know that book.
Danny Roddy: No, I asked you about him and you weren't a fan of his.
Ray Peat: Oh, that guy, yeah.
Danny Roddy: Go ahead.
Ray Peat: Crazy people can get the facts organized very well and make them useful.
Danny Roddy: The first tip-off was he was using socialism as a slur, and then you said he was associated with some magazine that I wasn't familiar with.
Ray Peat: Yeah, I forget.
Danny Roddy: Birch Society?
Ray Peat: Oh yeah, John Birch Society.
Danny Roddy: They're like a libertarian Koch Brothers-type thing?
Ray Peat: Oh, more like the founder of it was a candy company magnate and basically of the Koch ideology. His way of doing propaganda used the crazy old lady fears of Joe McCarthy, was in tune with him. Not necessarily directly supporting him, but the extreme paranoid idea that makes Americans fearful at all costs, and then they'll believe anything. The John Birch Society was hysterical about any bit of ideology because it would keep people acting crazy.
Danny Roddy: I was talking with a close friend, who I consider intelligent and who has a lot of money. They were talking about how they felt bad for lower socioeconomic people because they had such a terrible quality of life. I was thinking to myself, "I don't think you understand how bad your quality of life is."
Ray Peat: Yeah. When I talk about the deprived Bush family and such cultural deprivation, no wonder George was an idiot. People don't understand what I mean by deprivation. That they're so deep in their ruts that they are morons. They can't say anything clever.
Danny Roddy: I know people are a product of the sick culture, but how do you interact regularly with sometimes aggressive, angry people through email?
Ray Peat: If you have the patience to act like Carl Rogers's thing, I hear you say so and so and I'm listening and so on, sometimes you can get them to hear what they're saying. I've had the patience with two or three people who just by listening to what they were saying, that they changed their minds 180 degrees just because they had been deprived of, I didn't present my views at all as an opponent, I just listened carefully to their stupid views and they started realizing that they were stupid.
Danny Roddy: Your patience level is admirable, something I aspire to. But when you are consulting with people via email, was there anybody that you were like, "I can't work with this person because they're too stressful?"
Ray Peat: Looking at my emails this morning, I had that thought two or three times. I go through mental responses. The Australian use of the word mental, "He's gone mental."
Danny Roddy: Haha.
Ray Peat: That sort of thing occurs to me. I gather myself together and try and direct them on a useful course.
Danny Roddy: Aggressive stupidity is the hardest thing to deal with?
Ray Peat: I've used the concept aggressively ignorant at times. Everyone is ignorant and once you accept that, if you just listen to someone and realize that you're ignorant and say basically, "How can you believe that, explain it to me," that they start explaining it and come out of their rut.
Danny Roddy: Even when doing interviews with you, I feel like I'm taking in 10%, and then when I re-listen to us talk, I take in the other 90%. Similarly, somebody has emailed me a year or two years later, and it'll say, "Oh, those things we were talking about? They finally make sense to me."
Ray Peat: Yeah, but that's really what language is. Language doesn't directly send meaning across but it jiggles you so that you have to invent the meaning.
Danny Roddy: That's why experience is so important. I can’t remember where, but I heard an analogy that information was like a cloud and that experiences is the lightning bolt connecting the two between each other.
Ray Peat: Yeah. Just the idea of what is information, I've been thinking about people talking about what they're studying and such. People say that the brain is not a computer but then in explaining what they mean, they get lost in their ideology and start explaining how it's like a computer. The idea of information is an ideology. They can't define what they mean by information. There are ideas and forms and things and what you want to transmit is a picture of where you are looking at the world and you can't, there's no way you can give a literal representation of it but you have to make something impossible to see wrong. If the person is jiggled enough, they will invent that perspective and see things more or less from your perspective.
Ray Peat: The whole thing is individual perspective. Each animal and even each molecule probably has its own perspective. When you're studying nature, you have to try to let nature jiggle your perspective in the right way so you can invent what it is like to be that part of nature. People are the same way. When you're studying an oyster, for example, you try to let the oyster tell you what it's like to be an oyster. Person to person talking, it's basically the same thing.
Danny Roddy: That's the Heraclitus Aristotelian approach to science?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Danny Roddy: That's important because things are never static and always changing, correct?
Ray Peat: Yeah. The meaning of information is what makes information important but it isn't in the information, it's in the living organism sending or receiving messages. The people with the strong ruling class ideology want to say that there is objective information, a Platonic truth that can be put into words, put into binomial digits and back into words and that you can compute reality. There's no such thing. There is no abstract information. It's only patterns and metaphor.
Danny Roddy: Last time I talked to you, we talked a little bit about field biology and also the inherent properties of matter. Is ether essential for understanding these things?
Ray Peat: Yeah. Each bit of matter consists of overlapping fields and communication is letting your organism's overlapping fields disturb and interact with the other person so that they get objective knowledge of what kind of animal you are.
Danny Roddy: And those relate to ether, right?
Ray Peat: I think the ether consists of extensions of organisms. Every bit of matter has its various physical fields and at an early stage, the convention, Einstein for example said that these fields can totally neutralize each other and so everything is local. You can have atoms which are like logical binomial digit, interpretable clean meanings, but in fact no field cancels out perfectly. All the fields are interacting and extending as far as anyone knows to an infinite distance, so everyone is always definable in terms of exactly where they are at this moment and what fields they're interacting with.
Danny Roddy: Things in nature and in humans, they all have a field, and then the totality or the accumulation of all those fields is the ether?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Danny Roddy: Then what is being transmitted through those fields?
Ray Peat: Forms. Every bit of matter is or has form. This matter is never shaped exactly like that matter. As it works being itself, its fields are a cloud of what that momentary self is like and so the interactions are always through fields and of forms.
Danny Roddy: Is there another way of putting that?
Ray Peat: Yeah, like if you have a metaphor, you want to talk about the quality of some situation and so you use a metaphor of talking about a computer, for example. The language has the units approximate enough that you can talk about all or none or wired connections, hardwired, and you create a pattern out of these recognizable units that words can transmit. The pattern of your words creates a pattern of what a computer is. Then if you want to communicate that by wire, for example, you can break down your message into a series that is organized forms organized temporally, but what you have is a spatial form in your image or metaphor and your word is building on a combination of other words and those words are learned by, you grow up with an environment of actual forms around you.
Ray Peat: Things and forms and so the word is a form of vibration that is a metaphor for some form in the word in the world and you can break that language down. The language has somewhat of a spatial quality. When you're talking, you tend to direct your message in a single direction and wave your hands and have tone of voice and so on. You can break it down very abstractly and send it as bits that have, each one is exactly the same so there's no form to any of the parts of the message but where the form comes in is the temporal sequence. Then at the other end those are put together into another spatial sequence that the encoder comes in with the same code for decoding it and puts it back into a spatial form, spatial temporal, which is language. The language is decoded again by the person who knows how to speak the language and decode it back in the real world perspective. Perspective is the biggest sort of form, which is an experience of substance itself as form.
Danny Roddy: Somebody from two different cultures, they would have a basic level of communication, and then you have language on top of that?
Ray Peat: Yeah. The animals know how to do it sometimes better than people. Animals of different species that never saw each other before, they can recognize friendliness or threat or fear. You can't define how they do it but you can see it. I've interacted with parrots and porpoises and blue jays and all kinds of personalities. They manage to get me to understand, probably partly because I am suspicious of language as a tool of communication. Animals, if you're open, will communicate very complex things.
Danny Roddy: A few years ago, I asked you about Ian Stevenson, who legitimately studied reincarnation. You had said something about a person leaving a residue behind when they pass. Does the field never go away, or your mark on the ether and your forms, they don't disappear when you die?
Ray Peat: It's like memory. The things that you remember aren't there but you can reconstruct them because they left a trace in your matter and all matter is leaving a trace everywhere. That's why Michael Persinger, who analyzed interaction electronically, is interesting because he showed that things resonate and the resonance can persist for a long time. He didn't explain how long but the pattern is really, at any moment it's very expansive if not universal. The deformations that each part is making are integrated. There is progress so that everything that happened has to be incorporated when you make a new moment or a new future, but those things are always present. You don't go anywhere when you go back to a memory but you can construct the memory. You're always present to your memories or they are present to you, so nothing goes away but it's a matter of finding or identifying the impression.
Danny Roddy: One of my favorite quotes from you is talking about all the versions of yourself are in the same room, and I guess depending on your resonance, is the version of yourself you most identify with.
Ray Peat: Our ideology tells us that memory is some kind of a computer process or it's a substance that takes on these different forms and you can reconstitute an earlier form more or less perfectly when the situation calls for it.
Danny Roddy: Stanley Krippner, he wrote one of the forewords to Mind and Tissue. Did he ever work with Persinger?
Ray Peat: Not that I know of. Persinger's old enough that I'm sure he was acquainted with everything he did. I don't know if he was personally acquainted.
Danny Roddy: How did you meet him?
Ray Peat: I don't remember. A friend of mine was a psychology student who introduced me to some of these people, the Reichians in particular. I corresponded with some of them, Abraham Maslow for example.
Danny Roddy: You corresponded with him?
Ray Peat: Yeah. One of his graduate students, John Stevens, who changed his name for some reason, he came to visit Blake College. Through him I got acquainted with his mother, Barry Stevens, who was part of a Gestalt psychology network and somehow I met probably half of the people like Carl Rogers and, what's the California Reichian's name?
Danny Roddy: Just a minute, so you had interactions with Rogers and Maslow? Just trading letters or did you meet them?
Ray Peat: I met him once.
Danny Roddy: Rogers or Maslow?
Ray Peat: Rogers. Who was the other name?
Danny Roddy: Abraham Maslow.
Ray Peat: Oh, Maslow. No, I didn't meet him but I corresponded.
Danny Roddy: Man, that is, go ahead.
Ray Peat: Barry Stevens was always talking about the people she knew, the Gestalt people and Rogers in particular and Maslow.
Danny Roddy: Did Stanley have an affinity for your work?
Ray Peat: I guess. I think that was through a friend of mine who knew him. Probably gave him a copy of my book.
Danny Roddy: Ray, let me know when you have to go. I just have a few other things I wanted to bounce off you. There are declassified military documents with project names like Traversable Wormholes, Star Gates and Negative Energy; High-Frequency Gravitational Wave Communication; Concepts for Extracting Energy From a Quantum Vacuum; and Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions. Go ahead.
Ray Peat: I think most of those are either deliberate misleading government tricks or they're people thinking up phony programs to get financing.
Ray Peat: I think some of the things are simply insane people who studied math and physics to the point that they lost touch totally with reality. I've known some of them, but I think the government ideology really favors that out of touchness and uses it to keep people under control by making them think about things that have no meaning at all.
Danny Roddy: What about HAARP technology? I think we talked about this a while ago, but owning the weather for military use? That's something that's been extensively studied and exists, right?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Danny Roddy: People are saying that some of the hurricanes are taking impossible right angles. Do you think that is part of the HAARP program?
Ray Peat: I don't know.
Danny Roddy: It's just impossible to say, right?
Ray Peat: I think so. Some of the things are probably actual experiments but I doubt that it's effective enough to control the direction of a hurricane.
Danny Roddy: Okay, so based on your understanding of science, this seems far fetched.
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Danny Roddy: Okay. Can I ask you some logistical questions?
Ray Peat: Sure.
Danny Roddy: If somebody smells like ammonia, is that a surefire sign that they are not taking enough thyroid?
Ray Peat: Usually. It could just be that they have a kidney problem and they're dripping. In rest homes, a lot of the people smell of ammonia and sometimes people who sweat a lot, their skin bacteria will produce ammonia, so there are different causes. Sometimes it can actually be in the breath, that's when they're very sick, but a very healthy, sweaty person can have enough bacteria growing that their skin will develop an ammonia smell.
Danny Roddy: If it was a kidney problem, would there be some direct course of action that would be fruitful?
Ray Peat: If it's coming out of your breath, yeah. Getting enough sugar and thyroid and of the essential vitamins and minerals.
Danny Roddy: If a person does significantly better on a combination of T3 and T4 than T3 alone, does that mean they have a very high-functioning pituitary?
Ray Peat: Oh, yeah, it can have the function of suppressing TSH and that can be a very productive effect, to get your TSH down if it's like a 10, getting it down to one can make a total difference in general health.
Danny Roddy: The T3 half-life is much shorter, right? Causing a person to wake up hypothyroid?
Ray Peat: It has a half life of 12 hours so yeah, you can become dangerously hypothyroid in just 12 hours.
Danny Roddy: Got it. The value of T4 is suppressing the TSH for longer.
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Danny Roddy: Broda Barnes said something like, "Some people need one grain, most people need two, occasionally people need three, and very rarely do people need four." In your interview with Patrick Tempone, you said that if somebody has symptoms, they should not resist going to that upper echelon of thyroid dose, right?
Ray Peat: Yeah, like a woman I knew who for years had had terrible symptoms, 20 years or so, and was limping along on two grains. Somehow she decided to take five grains and got a doctor to prescribe it and felt immensely better, so she found another doctor to prescribe another five grains and she felt really good at 10 grains, found a third doctor and at 15 grains she felt perfect and her body changed. She had had hips that were as wide as a laundry tub and couldn't walk from arthritis. Everything cleared up. She got a job and gradually tapered back down to five grains.
Danny Roddy: I've experimented with a lot of things, including higher doses of thyroid, and one of the things I noticed was breathlessness. However, sometimes eating more oysters would solve it.
Ray Peat: That's very interesting about the oysters. Magnesium is sometimes a problem, increasing your thyroid can make you have a magnesium deficiency. In your case it was probably some other trace mineral.
Danny Roddy: Taking too much thyroid and experiencing breathlessness, that's fairly common, right?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Danny Roddy: Speaking of oysters, if you're drinking a cup of coffee along with them, when do you think it starts becoming problematic, either in terms of toxic heavy metals or iron?
Ray Peat: I think it will limit your absorption of useful minerals too. It probably blocks some of the copper.
Danny Roddy: Would it ever be valuable to consume oysters more regularly?
Ray Peat: Yeah, if you have anemia or have had a traumatic thing that needs healing, then having a can a day for a while can really accelerate healing.
Danny Roddy: You don't see that as extremely risky?
Ray Peat: No.
Danny Roddy: Something I’ve seen a few times is that a person’s vitamin D level doesn't seem to increase despite taking a supplement. In an email response, you mentioned that it's important to regularly consume liver to help raise the vitamin D level.
Ray Peat: Yeah. Other nutrients are involved. Usually it's fat people who can't get their blood vitamin D to rise but I think trace minerals and vitamins are somewhere involved. One theory is that the vitamin D is simply going into their fat and disappearing but I think some of it is the inefficient metabolism of it.
Danny Roddy: What about liver problems?
Ray Peat: Yeah, when your liver doesn't have all the trace nutrients, you can't metabolize anything properly.
Danny Roddy: Speaking of iron, I understand that blood donation can be risky and there are various things to consider, such as needle aversion and past traumatic experiences. However, where do you see blood donation fitting into the grand scheme of everything?
Ray Peat: With most people eating an average diet, I think it is likely to be life extending. Not just getting rid of iron overload but getting rid of some of your old microvesicles. Messengers sent out under stress can circulate and keep amplifying the stress and reducing those occasionally has an anti stress effect, effectively making new blood when you take out some of the old.
Danny Roddy: Do you give blood?
Ray Peat: No.
Danny Roddy: I mean do you have things so dialed in that you don't think iron would accumulate?
Ray Peat: Yeah, I've been so heavily into milk and cheese for so long, I'm probably on the edge of iron deficient.
Danny Roddy: Was there a time that you did give lots of blood?
Ray Peat: No.
Danny Roddy: When you're talking to somebody are you ever thinking, "Oh, iron overload," or is this just an ancillary thing that is downstream from all the more important things?
Ray Peat: In actually being present with a person, I don't think that has ever occurred to me unless they said something about their history that implied it, like particular types of anemia that will inflame you towards having stored iron excess. I don't think I've ever had it occur to me just from the way a person looks or functions.
Danny Roddy: If a person had a high iron saturation, say 60%, would that be something safe to do?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Danny Roddy: You said before that should be around 25% to protect from cancer?
Ray Peat: Yeah. 25 or 30% is okay.
Danny Roddy: Do you have any idea, the average percent, that number decreases from blood donation?
Ray Peat: I've seen a few people edge it down a little bit but it takes a long time to, if they're at 50 over four or five donations, they can get it down to 30.
Danny Roddy: If the blood comes out slightly maroon, what does that mean?
Ray Peat: I think it's possibly a slightly deficient person but I think having a high thyroid function makes it darken. You suck all the oxygen up and make it dark. Using those oxygen hemoglobin saturation things on your finger, I've experimented and found that if you dip your hand in ice water so there's no metabolism going on, your oxygen goes up to 100% saturation. If you're slightly hyperthyroid, you can get it down to 88 or 89.
Danny Roddy: Is it shocking to you that the health world doesn’t care about a person’s temperature?
Ray Peat: Doctor types will say, "How could the temperature make a difference, your brain is like a computer, a computer runs perfectly well when it's cold." It's an ideology that things process information all through your body and what does temperature has to do with that?
Danny Roddy: If you just expose a tissue to cold, what is the first thing that happens?
Ray Peat: The oxidation decreases, all the chemistry runs more slowly.
Danny Roddy: Is it like pyruvate dehydrogenase is sensitive to temperature?
Ray Peat: It is but everything goes down along with it. Your blood can go through the tissue without losing very much oxygen, like being in shock. The blood can circulate through a shocked person just like through a dead body without giving up any oxygen to the tissue. When it's very cold, it's like being semi dead.
Danny Roddy: The organism becoming leaky, right?
Ray Peat: Yeah, the cold even slows down the leakage but it does lower once the energy level from low oxidation, once your energy goes down ATP leaks out and everything starts deteriorating.
Danny Roddy: Thanks for that. Another logistical question about the topical vitamins — do you think 100 milligrams of the Progest-E is too much to put on your leg from your knee to your ankle?
Ray Peat: No, if you're rubbing it in you can absorb a pretty fair amount of it if you leave it on and rub it thoroughly.
Danny Roddy: Could you even apply 3/8ths of a teaspoon, which is the equivalent of 150 milligrams, to one leg?
Ray Peat: Yeah, if you go from your thigh to ankle.
Danny Roddy: Okay, so you put it on your thigh.
Ray Peat: Anywhere that you can rub it in efficiently.
Danny Roddy: Isn't it too sticky, like when you put on pants?
Ray Peat: I do it in the evening when I can sit around with my pants off.
Danny Roddy: Is it better to do during the day or night?
Ray Peat: You can put that on so you don't lose it on the sheets at night.
Danny Roddy: Does it ever keep you awake?
Ray Peat: No, not that I've noticed.
Danny Roddy: Then for the vitamin K and D, if you just slather it on and it's too wet, you're just wasting money, right?
Ray Peat: Yeah, should rub in until dry so you're not wasting so much.
Danny Roddy: Then last question about this, the Progest-E, I could get more on a leg if I didn't cut it with any MCT oil. It just absorbs slower, right, when you don't cut it with anything?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Danny Roddy: That makes life a lot easier.
Ray Peat: It's cheaper if you take it orally but you might have digestive reactions.
Danny Roddy: It reliably bugs my stomach. I am really sold on the topical application because I think it changes my mood over the course of a few days when I take vitamins orally. I feel like I'm more in control of things when I'm using them topically.
Ray Peat: It just takes a little change towards irritation going down your intestine to have really big effects on your mood and philosophy.
Danny Roddy: One of the last questions, there was a paper, I think in June, about a relationship between androgenic alopecia and white matter hyper intensities in apparently healthy subjects. I'm sure you're aware of more research on this topic, but this was the first paper that I saw that really solidified the connection between hair loss and potential brain issues.
Ray Peat: Oh yeah. Hormones such as parathyroid hormone affect everything, brain and hair follicle and all of the senses.
Danny Roddy: I have a paper that suggests high PTH levels are associated with white matter hyperintensities.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and the excess of pituitary hormones. An agitated pituitary goes with stress on the brain and it creates a vicious circle.
Danny Roddy: White matter hyper intensities, that's just a complicated word for the atrophy of the white matter?
Ray Peat: Yeah. Swelling will create a spot but the swelling tends to lead to atrophy.
Danny Roddy: That, the spot or the lesions is the demyelinisation of the oligodendrocytes? Is that right?
Ray Peat: Well, they are the spinners of the myelin but yeah, they're arranged along the axons of major nerves.
Danny Roddy: This is the result of the hypertensive stress physiology. Is that right?
Ray Peat: Yeah, the hypertensive stuff is downstream from the energy process.
Danny Roddy: Okay, is there anything else? Have you been working on histamine? I believe we discussed this as something critical during our last conversation.
Ray Peat: As part of the system, I'm incorporating extracellular ATP, serotonin and histamine as sort of the focus of degenerative inflammation.
Danny Roddy: Has that been a shift in your view?
Ray Peat: Adding stuff to it, putting them more in focus so that each one has its role in the right place.
Danny Roddy: Because you've talked about extracellular ATP being a degenerative signal, I think.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and it's one of the easy things to detect. Your liver leaks enzymes and mast cells leak histamine but at the same time they're leaking ATP and lots of, basically everything they have.
Danny Roddy: Do you have a new appreciation for lidocaine, or is there a new substance that you're into?
Ray Peat: No, still that and cyproheptadine and acetazolamide, it can do some amazing things when it gets your CO2 up.
Danny Roddy: You're taking those or you're just throwing those out as helpful agents?
Ray Peat: Mostly for other people.
Danny Roddy: I didn't realize that acetazolamide makes Coke taste bad. That was a deal breaker for me.
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Danny Roddy: Okay Ray, I'll let you go. What is your next newsletter going to be on? Histamine?
Ray Peat: Most likely. I'm not exactly sure. I've been thinking it's necessary to alternate between the specific practical things and the context for interpreting them. I don't want to annoy too many people by going on about the context but some of it is needed to make the practical points meaningful.
Danny Roddy: I don't think that's a bad idea at all. You're getting very popular on Twitter. I don't know if you know but you are being popularized by a white nationalist person named Bronze Age Pervert.
Ray Peat: Someone just emailed about bumper stickers, a series of bumper stickers with my name and, "Vegetable oil isn't food and beta-carotene isn't vitamin A." No one knows where they came from but they've seen them on the cars.
Danny Roddy: I feel like you're being introduced to a much wider audience.
Ray Peat: It'll be interesting to see what happens.
Danny Roddy: Ray, thank you so much, you've been so generous with your time. Tell Katherine I said hello and have a great day. Thanks again.
Ray Peat: Okay, thank you.
Danny Roddy: Okay, bye Ray.
Ray Peat: Bye.
Absolutely phenomenal interview Danny.
I had to re-read some sections for better comprehension and I will still be slowly absorbing the concepts for years to come.
When Ray said, "No, still that and cyproheptadine and acetazolamide, it can do some amazing things when it gets your CO2 up", which one is "it"? Lidocaine, cypro or acetazolaminde?
I did have to look up white matter hypertensities. Phew! I would love to talk about these things with my brother-in-law who has a shiny bald head and is losing his vitality. His Dr has put him on statins and finasteride. Oh, he's docile now as distinct from his aggressively narcissistic high serotonin former self. But there is no way to discuss ideas with either version. Ah, there's the rub.
Thanks so much for sharing this wonderful conversion with us. Precious!
Thank you for sharing this