Fishy update, July 2023

This is just a short update on my health progress and current supplement usage.

I’ve used Arctic Med’s fish oil since 2006 (under a different name in the beginning). Before taking 10 ml a day (two teaspoons or a small tablespoon) I regularly got a cold 3-4 times per year, as well as several short bouts of a sore throat. Since then I’ve only had one real spell of falling ill in 17 years (!). That was when I caught Covid-19 in early March 2020.

Before 2006 I was slowly getting weaker (lower bench press maximum), and took longer to recover from exercise, so I had to gradually cut back from 5 to 2 sessions of strength training per week. After 2006 and the beginning of my daily ArcticMed regime (I was 34 at the time), I slowly increased my number of workouts back to 4-5 per week, and my bench press maximum skyrocketed from around 110kg to 150kg (about when I turned 40). Being old turned out to be just a number, the number of spoons of fish oil consumed!

ArcticMed referral link (10% discount on your first purchase of fish oil and the super special antioxidant rich olive oil used to protect the fish oil), or use this coupon code: PDJHBOA15V.

Today I’m 51 and the last four years I’ve exercised at least 6 days per week (actually closer to 345 days per year, so practically every day). My routine is to wake up without an alarm, meditate for a few minutes, then head to the outdoor gym for my daily 300 bodyweight strength training repetitions. Yes, I train outdoors no matter if it’s +30 degrees or -15 degrees. I do chin-ups, inverted muscle-ups, bar dips, ring-dips hanging leg raises, air squats, walking lounges etc.

I simply make sure I get a full body workout of a total of 300 BW repetitions every morning. Followed by a cold shower,as cold as possible, for about a minute. Back in the old (young) days I would most certainly have fallen ill, overtrained, got hurt, become weaker and so on. But now age doesn’t seem to matter.

I’m sure I’ll start losing ground sooner or later, but as of now, I keep progressing instead, hoping to soon add muscle-ups to my repertoire for the first time in my life. New strength and agility records thus awaits in life’s second half. I ascribe that to my daily fish oil intake.

Please note however that I’m not a medical doctor, nutritionist, PT or any such thing. I can only refer you to ArcticMed’s own research, and I take no responsibility for any medical claims myself. My only credentials are my six-pack and athleticism (as an office worker at close to 52 years of age) as sometimes seen on my Instagram account.

Apart from my daily fish oil, I eat a lot of chili, cacao, turmeric, garlic, kale, spinach, beans and black pepper, not to mention salmon, tofu, vegetarian soy products and quite limited amounts of land living animals and birds. I also take Vitamin-D capsules during winter since I live in Sweden, plus occasionally creatine (especially after learning on Huberman Lab that it’s really effective for headaches and head trauma). I also fast 16 hours a day since around 2013-2014 (temporarily 18h/day for a while this summer; between 20:30-14:30 every day).

I don’t hesitate recommending to everyone I can to drink a bit of fresh fish oil from ArcticMed everyday, and replace one’s old olive oil with AM’s super oil (check out the specifics on the AM website). I might be a case of one, an outlier. And I do sleep well and generally take care of myself, but I did that before 2006 too. Actually the way the fish oil effect was originally discovered was through Norwegians becoming much healthier in years when they had to eat a lot of salmon rather than meat. In later years Norwegian athletes (soccer players) increased their exercise frequency and reduced their recovery time after starting with AM’s fish oil.

Again, I’m not an MD, so form your own opinion, perhaps by taking the AM fatty acid blood test, and then trying the fish oil for 3 months before updating the fatty acid test!

The Investing Course is launching soon

It’s finally time!

Since making the Swedish finance course several years ago together with Ludvig Sunström, we’ve had a ton of people asking:

“When is the English version coming?”

-Soon!

Thanks to a request from business students at London Business School early last year, I finally got started adapting the course for an English audience. The request triggered a 14 hour lecture series over three weekends for a group of finance students at LBS. The video and other material from that course subsequently inspired the structure and basis for The Investing Course.

After fine tuning the Swedish 12-week version over 7 installments and 600 participants, we are finally ready to release the condensed and improved 6-week English version. We are currently planning for a launch in September 2023, in a classic back to school approach.

The Investing Course is a 6-week long online course that teaches you how to find, analyze, value and invest in stocks
 
(To be clear: This is not a course about short-term trading, crypto, FX, options, or whatever is currently popular on social media)

The core emphasis is on fundamental analysis, understanding business models, and finding out whether a stock is cheap by using valuation methods.
 
In the Investing Course you will learn:

  1. How to find worthwhile stocks (Search & Screen)
  2. How to analyze different types of stocks (Research & Forecast)
  3. How to see if a stock is cheap by triangulating 7 methods of valuation
  4. How to interpret company reports and understand financial ratios
  5. How to build a Watchlist for monitoring stocks over the long-term
  6. How to rank your investment ideas by risk and reward, and manage a portfolio
  7. How to time your trades better with technical and macroeconomic assessments
  8. How to write a compelling investment case to share with others

And much more….

You will simply learn the fundamental skills used by professional stock analysts like myself
 
After completing the course you will:

  1. Have analyzed and made a valuation for your first stock
  2. Receive a list of ~100 quality stocks from different categories worth analyzing (and perhaps adding to your portfolio)
  3. Have started a Watchlist system for monitoring stocks with target prices and various other metrics, which will help you greatly over the long-term

You will also have free access forever to all the (continuously updated and expanded) course materials and the alumni community.

We are excited for the Investing Course and think it’ll be great.

So – if you want to learn the important skill of company valuation and how to analyze stocks, join the waiting list and you’ll be first to know when we launch.
 

 

What happened before the Big Bang?

Why is there space and matter, and why do we feel things (and have free will)?

We know about the Big Bang. It happened. No arguing there. What that means is that we can pretty reliably use mathematical models to extrapolate current states and trends backwards in time to a point to the sudden expansion of the Universe.

That point, however, is for all practical purposes still infinitely far removed from what actually set off the Big Bang, inflationary expansion and the creation of all matter and space as we know it. Sure there are some pea-brain ideas about p-branes, circular time and whatnot, but there is still no generally accepted explanatory theory for the actual start of everything from nothing. 

We also know there is consciousness. You know it and I know it. That more or less is what consciousness is: sensing, knowing, being aware. That what it is to be conscious is what consciousness is, and we all have it. If you don’t, you’re a zombie, a placeholder, a non-player character. In short, if you’re not conscious, you’re not; and then you don’t know what consciousness is. Otherwise you do.  

Some like to claim that “not even science knows what consciousness is“.

Exactly, scientists don’t know what it is, because they are mostly reductionists and emergentists. They are reductionists in that they believe all things 1) are things, and 2) all things can be broken down into their fundamental components (little ‘billiard balls’ like quarks and electrons, or strings, or “fields”). Scientists are looking for that ultimate one field, string or particle, as well as the one ruling set of equations that govern the ultimate underlying field. That ‘field’ and that ‘equation’ are what I am talking about when I talk of consciousness, that which started it all. The One concept at the ultimate beginning. How it started is an unanswerable question. That there ‘suddenly’ was something rather than nothing is impossible for a physical something in physical reality to grasp.

Scientists are emergentists in that, in the reigning paradigm, they for the most part believe non-conscious fields, and their temporarily measured manifestations as particles through their interrelations, create self-awareness – i.e., consciousness, through a magical process called emergence.

Again, they start with a dead building block, claim these building blocks perform a kind of ‘dance’ with other such building blocks, since the particles can somehow sense each other through a field. They then go on to say that ‘consciousness’ arises from the dance, somewhere in the in-between of particles and fields.

That “emergence” is nothing more than saying “Hey, and then there is magic!“.

The moment before the Big Bang is exactly the same thing; the only interesting part of the story gets a hand-wawing gesture accompanied by “Oh, our models don’t work there. Our models only work after the creation of time, space, electromagnetism, gravity, matter and quantum mechanic interaction principles

Yes, that’s right. The current regime has a lot of practical ideas of how to predict and manipulate the behaviour of matter, but nothing to say of its origins or meaning. Actually, it has even less to say about the start than nothing, since scientists openly admit that their models explicitly break down at the start, as they do inside black holes, and when it comes to consciousness, i.e., more or less everywhere things start to get interesting.

You and I know there is consciousness, but scientists look away and say “Let’s disregard that and focus on something we can measure: particles“. What scientists miss is that particles are just what a consciousness interacts with, what is “sees”, what it chooses to see.

Particles are a social convention between consciousnesses, they are part of a playing field, a rule book: like a computer game or a book. What happens on the screen is not what happens in the CPU or hard drive. The rules for the interactions on the screen, the seeming characters, objects, walls, gravity explosions, bouncing etc., exist as rules in a machine very far removed in character from the graphic representation as icons on the screen.

You can think of how the rules in the CPU and computer memory relate to the actions on the screen as a bit closer to how consciousnesses relate to 3D-space, time, and the fundamental natural laws governing our physical experiences and interaction. In that context the brain is just a complicated “rock”, interacting with the underlying stream of consciousness. The resulting whirls, eddies, waves, turbulence, vortices around the ‘brain rock’ form our everyday experiences of consciousness in the physical realm.

Yes, science has come a long way in explaining cosmology, from the big bang, inflation and entropy to quantum mechanics, gravity and the potential heat death end of the universe.

But it has so far given up on creation, consciousness, truth, goodness and beauty. Not to mention (free) will. Sure, they keep inventing reductionist ideas of how beauty and love relates to “fitness” points in evolutionary processes – but that’s not an explanation or an ontological foundation, it’s just a reductionist play with words. Where does that self-awareness of “beauty” or “love” as attractors come from?

Anyway, those details can be quarrelled about for eternity. What I am proposing isn’t for scientist to stop looking. They are finding good stuff, stuff underlying my current mode of thinking. Physicists for example know that there is nothing at the bottom, no ‘billiard balls’, just emptiness, 1-dimensional points, rules of interaction. What we choose to measure is what we see and interact with, the rest remains hidden.

Physicists thus actually know that there is no matter (as we used to think about it). There are no canon balls dancing, governed by gravity or electromagnetism. Physicists now choose to see reality as consisting of a field or several fields manifesting as particles if we choose to observe the fields in a manner requiring a particle-like result. 

To conclude, starting with an explicitly un-explained creation of all from nothing, continuing with fields or matter with an added sprinkle of magical emergence to get to consciousness, is not an explanation at all. It’s just bureaucrats playing with words and symbols. They aren’t even attempting to examine consciousness, which is the only thing we really know there is. And they and us alike know there is no matter if we look closely enough, just rules for our experience of what we’re looking at.

Then why not simply start with the idea that there is a fundamental ground of being, a something that is what it is to sense, to be aware. Perhaps the idea of a circle, the concept of no beginning, no end, but a kind of primordial self-referential, i.e., a closing in on itself. That ontological prime has no explanation as we could ever understand in the meaning of trying to reduce it further.

My ideas are no more incredible or un-explained than the ideas of the Big Bang and emergence of consciousness. It’s just another way of thinking about the building blocks. It’s actually a further reductionist view of the ontological underpinnings on what we actually observe. Since we observe both consciousness and rules for interaction (i.e., fields/particles), but there is no good way to get from particles to consciousness without magically adding consciousness, then why not start with consciousness and thus avoid the whole having-to-add-something-more theatre?

The ideas I have tried to explain in the last three posts are not saying any of the practical science and knowledge about particles, biology, cosmology, the Big Bang and so on are wrong. Not in any way.

I’m just pointing out that science has little intelligible to say about 1) what set off the Big Bang and the creation of space, time and the natural laws as we know them, 2) consciousness [as well as will] (since it is the ultimate ground of being, irreducible into anything else)