Ray Peat and the Mexican Mayor

In 2013, I started a blog named Vision and Acceptance. In my about section, I wrote that creativity is the antidote to the authoritarian mindset. The intention was to have a place to write and to offer others the same opportunity. Helping others put themselves out there creatively was just as important to me as having a space for myself. It’s where I posted the Organizing the Panic interview with Dr. Ray Peat and wrote about various other topics. Ultimately, the demands of daily life pulled me away from keeping up with it.

Years later, the world is crazier than ever, except now Ray Peat isn’t in the physical realm to shoot an email to. Dr. Peat is probably one of the top 3 influences of my life. His work helped me regain a significant portion of my health through trying different things he wrote about and discussed. Equally important to my health improvements was that he validated my thoughts and positions on things in a manner that no one else had ever done. He made me feel smart where others thought I was crazy. His work restored in me the joy of learning that we are all born with but gets gradually annihilated by the authoritarian school system. He also helped nurture a big-picture focus in me. That’s a lot to do for only one person but he did it for many people.

I was lucky to discover his work toward the end of 2011. I found a good group of people with whom I could discuss it, and that helped me understand him better. I’m far from the only person to have exchanged a lot of emails with Dr. Peat but I was fortunate enough to conduct some written interviews with him as well.

It's important to remember that communication of even a single idea between two people takes time. The advancement of technology has led us to rush communication or expect each other to express everything perfectly in one attempt, causing us to lose a lot in the process. It's really the back-and-forth part of dialogue that fosters clearer communication and deeper understanding. The idea that you can’t step in the same river twice feels especially true when it comes to what we say. In many ways, each conversational exchange with another person is its own unique creation.

Looking back, I put countless hours into not only the interview questions with Dr. Peat but also the questions I asked him in emails. As a result of interacting with him and knowing what a hardworking mind he had, I felt he deserved a conscious effort on my part to provide plenty of context for the questions I asked, and I sometimes followed up on his answers to gain further clarity. You have probably heard that context is a very important concept for understanding Ray Peat’s work. There are times when, from the way people talk about him and his work, I think I can make definite conclusions about what he thinks on a topic—but then I ask myself, is this his set position on this? Or is he answering a specific question from someone? What is the other person’s question exactly? If someone is referring to his newsletter, what was written before and after the sentence being quoted?

It can be difficult to know exactly what Ray Peat thought on something without the context of the conversation he was involved in. This is why, when I share one of his replies, I believe it's important to also share my question, as he often specifically interacted with the vocabulary I used in it.

I really want to continue writing about topics I discussed with Dr. Peat, along with other subjects related to health and the culture. I also want to include dialogue with him where appropriate, especially where I believe it would be of interest to others. So, today marks the beginning of that.

Vitamin F is the first topic I want to write about. F stands for fun, friends, and family. These things are essential for health, which is why I’m making a vitamin reference. We live in a very anti-social era right now, so it’s crucial for a person’s health and mental well-being to give Vitamin F as much attention as nutrition. This means that we may need to shift some of our focus from thinking about nutrition to being more social.

Since this is an anti-social time we are living in, we may have to be the bigger person, and by “bigger person,” I mean a big-picture thinking person. We may have to be the ones willing to reach out to people on their birthday, check in on someone with a phone call, or set up a coffee date to catch up. It pays off in huge dividends, and understanding those dividends is where the big picture thinking comes in. Carl Rogers wrote about these dividends in A Way of Being:

"Now I am more willing to be close in other relationships and to risk giving more of myself. I feel as though a whole new depth of capacity for intimacy has been discovered in me. The capacity has brought me much hurt, but an even greater share of joy. How have these changes affected my behavior? I have developed deeper and more intimate relationships with men; I have been able to share without holding back, trusting the security of the friendship. Only during my college days – never before or after – did I have a group of really trusted, intimate men friends. So this is a new, tentative, adventurous development which seems very rewarding. I also have much more intimate communication with women. There are now a number of women with who I have platonic but psychological intimate relationships which have tremendous meaning for me.

With these close friends, men and women, I can share share any aspect of my self - the painful, joyful, frightening, crazy, insecure, egotistical, self-deprecating feelings I have. I can share fantasies and dreams. Similarly, my friends share deeply with me. These experiences I find very enriching."

This is exactly how I would picture someone with a high metabolism and good body temperature speaking about their social life—the body warmth reaching their heart space, necessitating an outpouring to others. This is health. This is Ray Peat. And it’s ten times more important to our lives and humanity as a whole than just what age we live up to.

This social warmth isn’t something you can fake if you don’t yet have it in you, but you can start cultivating it, just like people cultivate an increase in metabolism. And this must be extremely threatening to the ruling class because they do everything in their power to deter meaningful social connections. After thinking about it for many years, I truly believe that building strong and trustworthy social bonds is the answer to the how to “organize the panic” riddle. It’s how we can organize ourselves in a way that will be out of their reach—but only if we are capable of sturdy dialogue built on sincerity, along with bonds cemented through shared experiences.

The ruling class (elites, or whatever you want to call them) wants us obsessed with individualism, but how many individual names are known to the entire world? A tiny sliver. Communities are much more powerful.

This obsession with individualism is killing social bonds. Yes, you need to be able to be you, but being you in a vacuum of loneliness doesn’t count for much. To enjoy time with others, a little compromise is required.

This brings me to my next point: unfortunately, our pursuit of good nutrition can sometimes get in the way of having a high social metabolism and vitamin F. Some people have significant food sensitivities at their current point. They don’t yet have the resilience to withstand eating a meal they haven’t prepared themselves, and that cautious approach is exactly where they need to be. But many others do have that resilience, yet they allow nutrition to become a wedge in their social interactions. I asked Dr. Peat about this subject in 2014, and I’ll conclude this post by sharing our exchange. His words are always food for thought—and often comforting.

Me: You know how sometimes we ask questions to get info for our lives, and other times we ask questions just because it gives us more insight into who we are asking the question of? For me this is a question I am asking to try to get more insight into you. I hope that's ok.

This question stems from how I see people discussing your work vs. how I perceive your work. And I could be wrong, it's really important to me to try to see people for who they are rather than putting my projections onto them. I see you as someone who experimented a lot and someone with self-knowledge. To me that is what life is, like our lives are a series of personal science experiments that create a giant picture for us, and it doesn't unfold linearly. I think an inspiring person points us back to ourselves rather than to imitation of them. I feel there is a giant picture behind your food suggestions like even when I asked you about your food suggestions in the interview, you mentioned "Bucky Fuller’s idea of doing more with less has always appealed to me." You also said this, "and even ‘poor students’ quickly realized that learning could be central to their lives; their internal resources were more fruitful than being guided by authoritative professors in billion dollar universities.”

I have seen people force-feed themselves certain types of foods and in certain quantities that make them worse on discussion groups about your work. I feel with myself I studied some of your work and tried stuff and sort of stayed with what worked or revisited stuff. Or discarded other stuff that didn't work for me in that moment, etc. I was talking to someone about you and I was saying there's more to food than nutrients. Like food is a way of having shared experience or other things. So basically, if you were in Mexico and the local town mayor invited you to their house, but there was PUFA in every part of the meal, and that meal would be the backdrop to great conversation and exchange, would you partake in the shared experience or would you not eat the food? I figured you would because of the vast complexity of food and its other purposes besides building or tearing down the body. I just view you as someone who steeps himself in the complexities of life but maybe with food, I am wrong and you pursue a more simple way. So I think yes you would eat the food as a gesture of shared experience. But the person I spoke with said no, you wouldn't. In the name of seeing you for who you are without my own projections, do you mind answering this hypothetical question?

Dr. Peat: I have always eaten what they served, even tequila or rum, though I normally don't drink alcohol. I learned that way that alcohol is an antidote for some allergens, that would normally make me intensely sick. Its antioxidant effect is as good as vitamin E's in certain situations. I've stopped telling people about that effect, because I can imagine how it could go around on the internet.

When cultures used to eat their traditional foods, eating with people meant participating, joining them in their experience. The industrialization of food and food imperialism have been culturally genocidal.

(When Dr. Peat sent me this picture of himself in Mexico, I replied that it seemed to say, “Good luck trying to put me into a box.”)