Health researcher by background. 80,000 men through my programs since 2011. I’ll see you at 120!!
USA
Joined January 2009
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my trading theory:
beginners are lucky and have some good trades
then they become "smarter" and begin getting fantastic at buying at the top and selling at the bottom. If you could fade yourself, you'd make a fortune.
I just finished Warren's Mistakes, by Porter Stansberry. The best book on investing I've ever read. The power of compounding, mistakes to avoid, and what works. Packed with evidence and yet incredibly entertaining as well as data focused.
Should you really be cutting salt?
Maybe it's a horrible idea to cut salt. Maybe it will make people's lives shorter and miserable.
mattcook.substack.com/p/shou…
This is why I never want to retire. I love doing what I'm doing and plan to do it until I'm 120 years old when I will drop dead.
The FIRE (financial independence retire early) movement has done an immense amount of harm to society
This is coming from someone who used to be a believer in FIRE, but I have realized just how much of a fallacy it is, as I have grown older
Taking a bunch of high potential income earners and convincing them that their life goal should be to pursue a net worth that allows them to check out of society is immensely damaging to the social fabric
Many of these people sit on the upper echelon of office jobs, have built great businesses, or are at the top of their field in their career field
They should be inspired to continue doing what they are best at, and ultimately, mentor and give back to the next generation who want to pursue those same goals
Instead, many of these FIRE folks become wandering retirees with a meaningless life who are trying to grasp on to money as their north star
It is a false sense of security and accomplishment. Becoming wealthy should never be a goal in the first place.
It should have always been to pursue something that adds meaning to your own life and to society
It is a completely fallacy to believe that retiring will be your source of happiness. More often than not, it has the complete opposite effect
Why does carnivore dieting “work”? All meat is a bad bad idea. But it’s much less toxic than the garbage people have been eating.
That’s the long and short of it.
I think this is spot on. and unfortunately there's a reward for intelligence. People who are not intelligent are going to do whatever the doctor says to do, and they're going to get messed up.
The reason many doctors on here are criticizing technologies such as whole-body MRI is that they are working inside a healthcare system that was never designed to handle large amounts of information generated directly by individuals.
The system was built around information flowing through physicians, clinical trials, regulatory agencies, professional societies, insurance companies, reimbursement systems, and specialist referrals. It was not built around people acquiring large amounts of information about their own bodies and seeking their own understanding of what it might mean.
As a result, many of the criticisms of whole-body MRI are really criticisms of a healthcare system that has no place for information that is interesting and potentially useful but whose significance may not yet be fully understood.
I do not think the future of healthcare is a system where people must wait for every question to be answered by an RCT, approved by regulators, incorporated into clinical guidelines by a professional society, and reimbursed by insurance before they can learn something about their own health.
The future is giving people access to far more information about their bodies and using AI to help determine what is likely to matter clinically. The answer to uncertainty is more information, not less. It is also better interpretation, better tools, and greater individual empowerment.
Here's why I prefer Claude Opus 4.8 or ChatGPT 5.5 to the open source models such as DeepSeek and GLM 5.2.
The closed source big models are much better at figuring out what I really want and doing it. The open source models are inferior in detecting intention.
The open source models can work but I have to be much, much better about specifying what I want them to do for me.
It's worth paying extra for the frontier models than getting mired in these open source models that aren't as good.
I do use the open source models but I do my primary, most important work on Claude Opus 4.8.
There's been a claim that shingles vaccine Shingrix lowers dementia risk by twenty percent. This is completely fake.
The actual assertion this is based on is a previous live virus vaccine that's no longer offered.
And the effect is actually one with any vaccine, so obviously it can't be specific to the shingles vaccine.
The absolute reduction was tiny, and it's really due to the fact that people who go for vaccines are in better health or more motivated and health conscious than people who don't.
This is called the healthy vaccinee effect.
That's the whole effect here.
What troubles me is that so many doctors are here on X peddling this myth that the current shingles vaccine lowers dementia risk "by 20%.
That means they don't know how to read a study.
Maybe that's the whole purpose of medical school to keep doctors from understanding studies. Why is it that anyone like me can actually see through this but doctors don't bother?
A lot of nonsense that shingles vaccines lower dementia risk. I’ve read the studies.
Suppose you take 500,000 Medicare folks. Out of those, you pick 9000 of the most healthy. You give those 9000 a big red capsule every day. It’s a big red sugar pill but they think it’s medicine.
Years later, the dementia onset for those 9000 is 18%. The dementia onset with the other 491,000 is 25%.
So it’s a 7% absolute improvement. A great thing.
But. You took the healthiest bunch. Of course they have less dementia than the average.
This is what these observational studies do. This is why none of the drug-company sponsored observational studies showing vaccines lower dementia are useful in the least.
They do a similar trick in the GLP-1 “studies.” Look for this trick.
The primary way you know is it’s an “observational” study. Just don’t pay any attention when you see that. It’s not that an observational study MUST be rigged. But the big ones sponsored by Big Pharma are ALWAYS rigged.
I’m no longer shocked how many doctors fall for this.
Local ai models are the future, and here's why.
Most people don't develop code. They just ask questions. They just want recipes and simple information. When did Joe DiMaggio die? And how do I make ravioli?
And a local model, even running on your phone, can give most people exactly what they want out of AI.
A cardiologist there named Mercedes Carnethon pulled five long-running cohort studies and looked at people who developed diabetes during follow-up.
She wanted to know: once you have diabetes, does your weight predict how long you live?
She got data on 2,625 people who developed diabetes during the studies. Then she sorted them by what they weighed AT diagnosis. Normal-weight diabetics. Overweight or obese diabetics. Then she counted deaths.
Normal-weight diabetics died at a rate of 285 per 10,000 person-years.
Overweight and obese diabetics died at a rate of 152 per 10,000 person-years.
The thin diabetics died at twice the rate of the fat diabetics.
my landmark post on how fat people are often healthier than thin people has landed.
mattcook.substack.com/p/fat-…
Losing weight is not going to make you healthier.
In fact, people who are fatter are generally healthier than thin people, and this is known as the obesity paradox.
And it's been proven time after time after time.
Why not focus on improving your health, and then your body will give up fat without it being a big problem?
People are remarkably stupid because they think that they'll be healthier if they lose weight. Reality is, losing weight does not make you healthier. Everybody believes that it does, but it does not. anything with a BMI under 36 and there's no reason why you cannot be perfectly healthy
Losing weight makes it much more likely that you will die. It lowers overall survival except in cases of BMI over 36
If you can't afford health insurance, you should look into these health ministries in the U.S. because you can get the same as health insurance for a fraction of the normal costs.
And they do pay your bills and they do take care of the things that need to be taken care of. Most people don't know about them. Look at medi-share and Christian Health Ministries, but there are many others.
Let me explain yet again. Fat people who are fit are healthier than most thin people.
There are many studies that show this.
The reason possibly is that fat people who are fit have a lot more muscle than thin people do.
And the fat people do much better if they get type 2 diabetes or cancer. They outlive thin people.
This idea of just losing fat as THE key to health is so bogus and wrong.
GLP-1 drugs cause fat people to become less healthy. They lose muscle mass they may not get back. Especially if they are older.
here's how I got rid of bad daily migraine headaches. My cortisol went through the roof.
My testosterone collapsed.
My erections stopped working.
And my headaches turned into daily migraines.
I tried at least twenty different things over the years.
This is what worked.
open.substack.com/pub/mattco…
fat loss doesn't mean you are healthier. You can be healthy and obese. This is so common they have a name for it, the "obesity paradox."
Losing weight with a dangerous drug makes you less healthy, not more healthy. GLP-1 receptor agonists mess up your gut and pancreas and increase gut endotoxin.