Dr Jon K

I love the FDA warning letters because there's no other way I would've found out about Pink Pony Peptides

The New Yorker just lab-tested research peptides from a popular online vendor. BPC-157: contained lead. TB-500: contained endotoxins. CJC-1295: less than 42% of the labeled dose. This is what people are injecting into their bodies. The peptides aren't the problem. The supply chain is. This is exactly why the FDA reclassification matters moving these compounds into regulated compounding pharmacies with cGMP standards and real quality control.

THIS IS WILD! Peter Thiel’s company the “Enhanced Games” got valued at $1.2B before a single event. the first one is next month. here’s what the headlines aren’t telling you (share this): every athlete is monitored. every compound is clinically approved. every dose is tracked. two independent medical commissions oversee the whole thing. and if your bloodwork doesn’t pass, you don’t compete. the same investors behind the biggest peptide and longevity companies put $1.2B behind this. these aren’t sports guys… they’re taking a public bet that performance medicine becomes a real market. whether you’re into it or not, pay attention.

If longevity escape velocity arrives by 2033 (Ray K’s prediction), a 50-year-old today has a shot at seeing 2100. The prize: 50 extra healthy years of compounding knowledge, relationships, and impact. Worth optimizing for? Focus on a longevity mindset.

🚨 Your brain shuts down in time intervals. New research tracked cerebral blood flow in desk workers using transcranial Doppler imaging. What they discovered changes how we should think about cognitive performance during work. Sitting for 30 minutes measurably reduces blood velocity to your middle cerebral artery. Your prefrontal cortex begins operating on restricted fuel. The decline happens predictably, like clockwork, every half hour. But walking for just 2 minutes every 30 minutes completely reversed the effect. Not walking for 8 minutes every 2 hours. Short, frequent interruptions. The timing reveals something crucial about how your cardiovascular system operates under sedentary stress. Blood doesn’t pool gradually. It pools in waves. Your circulation hits specific failure points at regular intervals when movement stops. The 30 minute mark appears to be a biological threshold where your calf muscle pumps lose their ability to maintain adequate venous return. Think about every important decision you’ve made sitting at a desk after 30 minutes of stillness. Every creative problem you’ve tried to solve. Every complex analysis you’ve attempted. You were operating with diminished blood flow to the exact brain regions responsible for higher order thinking. The implications extend beyond productivity. Prolonged periods of reduced cerebral blood flow accelerate cognitive decline. The same vascular mechanisms that impair thinking in real time contribute to neurodegeneration over decades. Office workers aren’t just experiencing temporary mental fatigue. They’re participating in a daily pattern that systematically starves neural tissue. What makes this particularly disturbing is how perfectly our work culture aligns with the worst possible timing. Meetings scheduled for an hour. Focus blocks planned for 90 minutes. Deep work sessions extending for multiple hours. We’ve organized professional life around intervals that guarantee cognitive impairment. The solution sounds absurd until you understand the physiology. Stand up and walk for 2 minutes every 30 minutes. Not stretch. Not shift in your chair. Walk. Activate the muscle pumps in your calves. Force blood back toward your brain. Every knowledge worker should treat this like a medical prescription. Your cognitive capacity depends on maintaining cerebral blood flow. Your long term brain health depends on preventing chronic vascular stress. Movement every 30 minutes isn’t a productivity hack. It’s basic cardiovascular maintenance for an organ system that requires constant circulation to function. Your brain runs on blood flow, not willpower. Starve it for 30 minutes and watch your intelligence evaporate in real time.

LLM Knowledge Bases Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So: Data ingest: I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them. IDE: I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides). Q&A: Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale. Output: Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base. Linting: I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into. Extra tools: I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries. Further explorations: As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation + finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows. TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.

Every cherry blossom in this photo is genetically identical to every other one. They’re all copies of a single tree. Japan’s most popular cherry, the Somei-Yoshino, was created by gardeners in Tokyo around the 1720s. Every one planted since has been grown by snipping a branch off an existing tree and fusing it onto new roots. In 2019, Japanese scientists tested the DNA of 46 Yoshino trees across the country, including one in Washington DC that Japan gifted in 1912. All 46 traced back to the same parent. That’s why they bloom at the exact same time. Same DNA, same internal clock. Each summer, the tree builds tiny pre-made flowers inside its buds, then the whole system shuts off for winter. To restart, two things have to happen in order. The tree needs about 61 days of cold (below 10 degrees Celsius) to unlock its dormancy, a biological off-switch that only winter can flip. Then it needs enough warm days in spring to push the flowers open. If either step gets skipped, the tree just sits there. No bloom. This process has been tracked in Kyoto since 812 AD. Emperors, monks, and aristocrats wrote the bloom dates in their diaries for over 1,200 years, making it the longest continuous biological record anywhere on Earth. For the first thousand years, the dates barely moved, hovering around April 17. Then starting in the 1800s, they begin sliding earlier. By the 2020s the average had landed on April 5, almost two weeks ahead of where it sat for a millennium. In 2021, Kyoto hit March 26, the earliest bloom in the entire 1,200-year record. The old record was March 27, in 1409. This is the Meguro River in Tokyo. 800 of these cloned trees line both sides of the water for about 4 kilometers. Last year’s cherry blossom season brought in $9 billion to Japan’s economy, up 22% from the year before, with over a quarter of viewers coming from overseas for the first time ever. That’s ten times the economic impact of Shohei Ohtani’s entire 2024 baseball season. Warming springs pull the bloom date earlier, but warming winters might eventually stop the bloom completely. Without enough cold days, the off-switch never resets. A Kyushu University study from 2024 found the trees are already waking up 2.3 days later per decade since 1990 because winters aren’t cold enough to properly reset them. In the warm winter of 2023-24, cherry trees at Japan’s southern tip bloomed on the same date as trees 860 kilometers to the north because the southern trees barely got enough cold to function. Japan’s weather agency now predicts the Somei-Yoshino could stop blooming entirely in three southern regions by 2100. One tree, cloned before the American Revolution, now powers a $9 billion economy and holds the longest biological climate record on Earth in its petals.

The peptide revolution will require a small (reservoir enabled) auto syringe that doses at intervals with multiple peptides throughout the day. Basically a parallel exo-somatic signaling system.

1/ Insane: A single injection into the inner ear reversed deafness in all ten patients. Some started hearing again within weeks. Gene therapy just crossed a threshold we thought was still years away. Lets dig into this breakthrough and how it works 🧵