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Marcus's Friends and Family Update #6

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Allillanchu, Amigos,

A lot has happened since I last updated you all. Let's dive right in.

🫂Relational Wealth

I've been thinking a lot recently about relationships. Travelling has made me notice how much of my quality of life is directly tied to how strongly I feel connected to those around me. No man is an island, and nothing like travel makes this more apparent. At the same time, it also has shown me that humans are naturally wired to create connection.

There is a story I love which I'd like to share. In 1973 a Mexican professor set out to prove humans are innately drawn to violence and betrayal instead of cooperation. He put 10 complete strangers — different ethnicities, different politics — on a small raft and let them drift across the ocean. He expected that pandemonium would ensue. What he proved was the inverse. Put a small group of humans together with a shared goal and they will tap into innate tribal mentality and bond. (The neural mechanisms behind vasopressin are a whole other rabbit hole that's worth exploring.)

The Acali

Reflecting on what the best months of my adult life have been, they all share a similar shape:

UQ Ventures: San Francisco. 20 of the most cracked UQ students all living together and sharing the same adventures on the opposite side of the globe.
Co-living Madeira: 12 strangers living together on a remote island, co-working and hiking together.
Atlassian APM program: new city, new friends, Sydney Summer, and a shared vision to achieve a return offer.
Network School in Malaysia: Connor and I, living and eating together with an eclectic group of international friends.

The worst months of my life have also followed a similar shape but inverse: the more separate and disconnected I've felt from friends and loved ones, the worse my quality of life.

Loosely I think about relational wealth as:

RW(p) = Σ (depth of connection × time invested), over every friend in location p

A key goal of my life is to maximise my relational wealth. If all one did was try to maximise their relational wealth, that would be an extremely expedient and meaningful life.

There is an anti-vision I hold in my mind as well:

So devoid of meaning, surrounded by people who are paid to be there, paid to care

I'm reminded of this quote:

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

— Mark 8:36

Or as George Orwell states:

"The most terrible loneliness is not the kind that comes from being alone, but the kind that comes from being misunderstood. It is the loneliness of standing in a crowded room, surrounded by people who do not see you, who do not hear you, who do not know the true essence of who you are. And in that loneliness, you feel as though you are fading, disappearing into the background, until you are nothing more than a ghost, a shadow of your former self."

— George Orwell

Put more succinctly:

There is no loneliness more lonely than to be alone in a crowd. No awkwardness more unsettling than the inside joke you do not comprehend.

— Claire North

While staying in Network School I became acutely aware of how my quality of life, my wellbeing, is tied to how well I am taking care of my health as well as how much relational wealth I have accumulated.

🏝️Network School

NS is an experiment by Balaji (the ex-CTO of Coinbase) to see what would happen if you built a city explicitly designed for digital nomads. It's based in Forest City, Malaysia — a failed Chinese artificial island next to Singapore that is now a ghost town. It's built around 4 principles: learn, earn, burn and fun. Although I joked with Darcy and Connor that the principles should really be: learn, earn, burn and churn due to their high turnover rate. I went in with two goals: secure revenue for our business and gain a few kilos at the gym.

On the business front we built a functioning platform and secured a few thousand dollars of revenue. Unfortunately we couldn't acquire customers profitably and decided to pivot. Health-wise, the two months I spent at Network School were genuinely the healthiest I have ever been in my life. Just the pure convenience of having every meal be catered and also unlimited in terms of how much I could consume led to some very big meals.

The view we ate dinner to every night

While Connor and I ate a lot, we also played basketball almost every single day. We also realised we need to age into golf.

We played 1v1 basketball so hard one time Connor passed out

A human wouldn't drink and drive, but a tiger would

In short, my time in Malaysia was amazing. For 2 months Connor and I lived in the same room and largely followed the same routine every day: wake up, eat breakfast, work, workout at 4pm, eat dinner & socialise, play basketball, relax. Despite us living together and spending a disproportionate amount of time together, it was great fun.

We also met some amazing friends at NS who, despite us only being there for 2 months, I feel will be long-term friends. Sadly Network School has had to relocate to Kazakhstan after an incident involving dual passport Israeli citizens allegedly staying there. For more info about the Ghost City Network School was located in, I'd recommend checking out this video which Connor is featured in (15:53).

ns: Forest City scale model — the Ghost City

Bottom left: Aussie dinner at NS. Bottom right: scale model of the hotel we stayed at in Forest City.

🩺Health

As I mentioned above, the two months I spent at NS were the healthiest I have ever been:

I dialled in my nutrition with the help of a coach (link)
Slept amazingly in our air-conditioned hotel rooms.
Worked out in the NS state-of-the-art gym and played basketball almost every day.
Lost natty status experimenting with some peptides.

💉 Peptides

I experimented with a blend of BPC-157, TB500 and GHK-Cu. I definitely think BPC and TB500 work for recovery and increased my endurance. GHK-Cu is primarily for skin and I didn't really notice any differences. I would say overall it was a successful experiment and I'm bullish on peptides as a wellness category since GLP-1s broke the cultural fear of injectable wellness. The next ones I would like to experiment with in future are Epithalon and Pinealon for sleep improvements.

GHK-Cu makes the liquid blue and also causes some skin irritation

For the first week before injecting myself I would use this Napoleon edit to hype myself up every night. It worked.

Watch this TBPN episode between Martin Shkreli and Max Marchione if interested in the different perspectives on peptides. You can view the conversation as an abstract battle between the entrenched pharmaceutical industrial complex and the newer wave of health 3.0 preventive focused medicine.

📊 Health Dashboard

I also started a project at NS to compile all my blood test data and health records into one centralised location on my own server. It started off with just blood tests and, like a good little PM, I have iterated on it over time. Now it includes:

Blood tests (Aggregated from my health record in Australia, Longevity Network and Superpower.com)
My workouts (aggregated through Hevy's API)
DNA data (what little was connected from Ancestry.com)
Sleep Data → Accumulated from Sleep Cycle, Oura, 8Sleep & Fitbit Air.
Body Composition from Dexa Scans done in Australia.
Mindfulness Data synced to a custom app I vibe coded specifically to track my meditations.
Heart Rate Data from Google Fitbit Air.

This all culminated in health.rehbock.xyz/app which is a frontend dashboard you could think of as a customised version of superpower.com or illumelabs.ai. I might eventually clean it up and open source it as a competitor. Everyone reading this has access — just log in with your email (the one this newsletter landed in).

health.rehbock.xyz dashboard — biomarkers view

The dashboard: current priorities, latest panel, and every biomarker trended over time.

Future Tests

Gut Microbiome Test — something I've wanted to do for a long time after reading 10% Human.
Sequence my genome offline.
Get another Dexa Scan Done at my new baseline weight.

Graphing my tests, I found two things of note:

My Lp(a) — the genetic risk marker for heart disease — is top 1%. As in: basically no inherited risk.
I have high circulating testosterone but a huge chunk is bound up by my elevated SHBG, meaning my free testosterone — the one that actually matters — is quite low (bottom quartile).

How testosterone is produced: hypothalamus releases GnRH, pituitary releases LH, Leydig cells in the testes produce testosterone into the blood

How testosterone gets made

Inside a blood vessel: free testosterone (1-2%, active), albumin-bound (20-40%, mildly active), SHBG-bound (60-80%, inactive)

Where it ends up (credit: RxHomeTest)

LH & FSH · THE SIGNAL ↓ LOW-NORMAL

3.7 mIU/mL · LH · ref 1.5 – 9.3

2.8 mIU/mL · FSH · ref 1.4 – 12.8

↓

TESTOSTERONE (TOTAL) ✓ HIGH

828 ng/dL · ref 250 – 1100

↓

SHBG · BINDS & INACTIVATES T ✗ ABOVE RANGE

57 nmol/L · ref 10 – 50

↓

TESTOSTERONE (FREE) ↓ BOTTOM QUARTILE

73.1 pg/mL · ref 46 – 224

Why is my SHBG high?

I've skipped breakfast almost every day for the last 5 years, which means I've been chronically under-eating compared to what my body could utilise.
Being underfed means the liver makes extra SHBG and more testosterone becomes bound.

Overall, my testosterone production is fine — I just need to lower my SHBG. To do this I started supplementing:

🏋️ Gym progress

I remember when I first started doing strength training at a gym, looking down at the scale and seeing 63kg and thinking, damn, I've actually gained weight. In my first year of working out I gained roughly 10kg. Since then, and for the last 5 years, I had roughly maintained the same weight around 70kg, mostly due to undereating and inconsistency. It was only last year, when I was working full-time at Updoc and had a semi-consistent training routine and diet, that I started to make progress again. In fact, I only really realised I was chronically undereating when I calculated my macros for the first time (thanks, Stefi).

One thing that did help psychologically was starting to train Jiu Jitsu and realising I was borderline victim weight. It gave me sufficient motivation to actually push to carry more weight on my frame. When I got to NS, I think it was the first time in my adult life that I've had unlimited food, easy access to a gym and strong motivation to gain weight. Thankfully, I was happy with the progress I made. I put on roughly 3kg in 2 months. I know a lot of it was probably fat, but it still felt great in the moment.

Add me on Hevy if you use it.

~63kg in 2019

78kg in May 2026, end of NS. No leg days harmed writing this newsletter.

The goal physique → Daniel Craig in Casino Royale

Fashion Upgrades

Before leaving Sydney, I decided I needed to invest some effort in upgrading my fashion sense. With the help of Stefi, I think I'm on track. I particularly like this dark green colour and think it will be my accent colour of choice.

green Percival chore jacket — centrepiece candidate

Style upgrades thanks to Stefi

🗿Singapore stay lit

June 2023

May 2026

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man — Heraclitus

A funny anecdote:

I missed my flight to LA on my way out of Singapore.
However I do pride myself on being able to adapt and find the silver lining in all uncomfortable situations.
So I messaged a girl I had been seeing in Singapore and went on an impromptu last-minute date: pictured below

Cute polaroid, green line theory though anyone?

🏔️Peru

After finishing up at Network School, I took a flight to Peru to meet my family, go explore the Amazon and hike the Machu Picchu Trail. I had a lot of fun.

It was cold

These are not my grandparents

Big tree

Tarantula

🥾 The Inca Trail

Despite it being the first multi-day hike I've ever done, I can definitively assure you that the Inca Trail is one of the most beautiful thru-hikes in the world. It was the highlight of my trip. Day 3 alone makes the whole hike worth it. On Day 2, you summit the highest point of the trail (Dead Woman's Pass) and descend into this gorgeous valley, gaining a breathtaking view while simultaneously regaining the ability to breathe. On Day 3 you walk the same stones that the Kings of the Incan empire used to walk through this beautiful shifting scenery that encompasses both ancient ruins and stunning rainforest-type vegetation.

Our porters were also amazing — they would carry 25kg of gear and essentially run the trail. Our guide Joseph entertained us at night with stories from his friend who carried coca leaves for the cartels in the Amazon.

Credit to Sophia for having an actual camera and learning the rule of thirds.

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour."

— William Blake

🤝 Trail companions

Apart from our guide, our hiking companions were all Americans. Despite my previous inclinations, I now believe Americans — when they are not fat or stupid — are incredible people. The patriarch of the family we hiked with is a urologist who said he found the whole preventive medicine trend "totally boring." His favourite disease to treat is kidney cancer because:

The surgery generally works.
The stakes are real and people can die if he messes up.

I've found that, paradoxically, the people who work closest to death are the happiest people you'll meet. I think it's because they are constantly reminded of their own mortality and the fact that they have (for now) more health and freedom than the people they treat.

This urologist was a very passionate hunter. He has hunted everywhere from the Tian Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan to the Kruger of South Africa. He made a convincing case that hunters are the true animal lovers. I've now put hunting in NZ — apparently the best hunting in the world — on my post-capitalist bucket list.

"The greater the god complex of your surgeon, the safer you are."

peru: two men in traditional Taquile dress

🍽️ Lima and the last supper

On our last night in Peru we ate at the 26th best restaurant in the world. Food: 8/10. Company: 10/10.

Forbidden matcha

🎲Random Tidbits

🤿 Cave Diving

Before I left Brisbane, Loic showed us this awesome cave in Brisbane. Apparently it's the largest cave complex in South East Queensland and is not on any official maps. Pretty lit. The Instagram reel Connor made about the experience.

💭A few quotes to chew on

"The body adjusts itself to the condition of the soul."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

"Aut inveniam viam aut faciam" — "I shall either find a way or make one"

— Hannibal

"Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

"The genius consists in one thing only: a greater capacity for patience."

— Gustave Flaubert

"Man's maturity - to regain the child at play attitude."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

"What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

🙏A few asks

In the spirit of maximising relational wealth, one small favour:

Fill in your details at hello.rehbock.xyz — your mobile number, birthday and current city. Takes 30 seconds, goes straight into my personal CRM.

That's all for now — my next update about living in SF will appear shortly.

— Marcus