Find out today on the Passive Cash Flow Podcast with this prestigious interview with Dr. Gordon Chiu! Part I of this incredible interview with Dr. Gordon will focus on primary how to protect yourself from the Coronavirus.
Aaron’s guest today is an extraordinary individual, scientist, teacher, tutor, inventor, author, and real estate owner Dr. Gordon Chiu. Dr. Chiu has done extensive work on the subject of viruses over the last decade and his knowledge and guidance can help to save lives.
Dr. Chiu actively tutors in Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Math and ACT/SAT. Gordon was born in New York and grew up in northern New Jersey. He graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute summa cum laude in Chemistry. For his Master’s in Chemistry, while working full-time at Merck, he traded the opportunity for a multi-year program at Columbia University for a three semester program at Seton Hall University. He didn’t have to pay the bridge tolls or get stuck in traffic! None of this mattered much after he got a full scholarship from the National Institutes of Health for an MD/PhD program. He focused on dermatology research.
Four years later, Gordon got another two scholarships and formally completed a doctoral degree in Natural medicine and a doctorate in business. Right after school, Gordon was chosen as “doctor” for numerous skincare brands including representing Demi Moore’s skincare event in Asia. Today, Gordon has a young family, a wife and two daughters under the age of 5.
Gordon is a prolific inventor with over 31 filed patents during his tenure in the corporate world. Ultimately, though, he decided to ditch the trappings of corporate America in order to spend more time teaching and motivating youth to discover their passions and pursue them with the same kinds of successes he has had– an experience he finds more rewarding, dynamic, and even, at times, more challenging than figuring out the material science, chemical, and medical applications of graphene. He has over fifteen years of combined, in-depth, university school relationships (ranging from Berkeley, Cornell, MIT, and Northwestern to National University of Singapore, NYU, Rutgers, and Waterloo). He has also taught at the EF Academy and Horace Mann. He has been featured on Princeton TV as a super-tutor!
The Passive Cash Flow Podcast is for beginner or experienced investors. Learn how you can diversify out of the stock market, own a part of an apartment building & start earning Passive Cash Flow! Peoples Capital Group has been helping passive investors build wealth in NJ real estate for 10 years. Visit www.PeoplesCapitalGroup.com to find out if you qualify to start earning passive income and pay less taxes via investing in real estate. IRA’s and 401K’s are accepted.
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Watch Other Interviews With Dr. Gordon Chiu
Part 2 – Will There be Another Pandemic?
Part 2 of this incredible interview with Dr. Gordon will focus on Predictions for the next pandemic, the best real estate to buy to be prepared for the next pandemic, and how to level up!
Part 3 – What Is the 10,000 Rule? How Do You Retire Early?
Part 3 of this incredible interview with Dr. Gordon will focus on:
- What is the 10,000 hour rule
- How to retire early
- Insights into how patents work
Aaron Fragnito: Ladies and gentlemen, we have an amazing Passive Cash Flow Podcast, Episode number 27. Today, we have a special guest Dr. Gordon Chiu. Our guest today is an extraordinary individual, was scientist, a teacher, a tutor, an inventor, an author and real estate owner, Dr. Gordon Chiu. Dr. Chiu has done extensive work on the subject of viruses over the last decade. His knowledge and guidance can help save lives. Dr. Chiu actively tutors in biology, chemistry, physics, math, ACT and SAT. Gordon was born in New York and grew up in Northern New Jersey.
He graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Summa Cum Laude in chemistry. For his masters in chemistry while working full-time at Merck, he traded opportunity for a multi-year program at Columbia University for three years semester program at Seton Hall University. He didn’t have to pay the bridge tolls or get stuck in traffic. None of this mattered after he got a full-time scholarship from the National Institute of Health for MD/PhD program. He focused on dermatology research.
Four years later, Gordon got another two scholarships and formally completed a doctoral degree in natural medicine and doctorate in business. Right after school Gordon was chosen as doctor for numerous skincare brands including representing Demi Moore’s skincare event in Asia. Today, Gordon has a young family, a wife and two daughters under the age of five. Gordon is a prolific inventor with over 31 patents filed during his tenure in the corporate world.
Ultimately, though, he decided to ditch the trappings of corporate America in order to spend more time teaching and motivating youth to discover passions and pursue them with the same kinds of successes he had, an experience he finds more rewarding, dynamic and even, at times, more challenging than figuring out the material science chemical and medical applications of graphene.
He has over 15 years of combined in-depth university school relationships ranging from Berkeley, Cornell, MIT and Northwestern to National University of Singapore, NYU Rutgers and Waterloo. He’s also taught at the EF Academy and Horace Mann. He’s been featured in on Princeton TV as a super tutor. Without further ado, this episode is going to be- this entire podcast is broken into three episodes, and this is the first part.
We’re going to focus on three of the best books Dr. Gordon Chiu suggested us to read. We’re going to talk about the H1N1 versus the coronavirus, and tips to your safety and to help flatten that curve. Let’s listen in this amazing podcast episode here number 27 of the Passive Cash Flow Podcast. This is part one of our interview with Dr. Gordon Chiu. Dr. Gordon Chiu, thanks for coming on.
Dr. Gordon Chiu: Aaron, I’m glad to be on the show, glad to be of help. I worked on the H1N1 virus in 2009. That was the last pandemic that we had of global proportions. I was on the front lines working on foam-like surfaces or foamities, if it’s plural. That’s why and what kind of surfaces transfer viruses. That takes a very different type of a doctor. It takes a doctor of science as opposed to seeing patients and things like that, because you have to study the materials. I had given a talk on TEDx on new materials. One of those areas was graphene, because it could be electrically conductive to wipe out bacteria. With COVID-19, that’s the disease, coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that is actually a virus.
What you need is you need to look at materials and really understand how they transfer. I’ve been invited on the number of talks to really address why some materials carry the virus longer and others don’t. In the future, imagine a future where no materials will carry things. You don’t even have to clean them. They’re self-cleaning, self-cleaning materials of the future. That’s the type of stuff that I worked on for years as far as investments and things like that, and as a scientist. That’s why when you look at this particular virus, I don’t think it’s a big bad one because it has some spikes around it. That’s why it’s called “the corona,” the crown. Those spikes can be broken, actually, so that the DNA- everyone knows what DNA is, so I use DNA, but it’s actually a single-stranded RNA virus.
It transfers through the spikes right into your lungs. That’s what makes you sick. What you want to do is, if you’re going to clean your hands, clean the surfaces, you want to clean it with pH 10 soap, because the soap, when it’s high pH alkaline, it actually can break the spikes and prevents the transfer. Now, if you just use soap and you do two happy birthday songs, which is 20 seconds, what that will do, is it will emulsify the coronavirus. That’s nice, but it doesn’t break the spikes.
Emulsification takes 20 seconds because you want to make sure that everything is covered on your hands and you’re removing it. Then, it’s clean 20 seconds and it’s all in. It’s like a film of oil on top of the water, and you want it to go in, like milk.
If you use pH 10 soap though, which is not only cheaper but it also breaks the spikes, pH 10 stuff could be like- and I’ll name a couple of brands, but brands have to be careful because you don’t know if they change anything in the manufacturing, still called the same brand. Typically, it’s going to be bar soaps that are pH 10. Now, another thing that you can do to be careful about how to prevent things is, of course, wearing the mask and making sure that you’re not going to get anything on you.
Then, after you wear the mask, you tend to forget what’s an invisible enemy anyway. This little enemy is something you can’t see. I’m wearing gloves right now. I’m putting them on so that I can talk to you guys about this. It takes a little bit of time to put on the gloves properly. The invisible enemy needs to be labeled like if you were being chased by an invisible enemy, you want to throw some dust everywhere. Glitter, so you can know where they’re shining, and you can prevent yourself from running into them.
Aaron: I’ve seen movies. Yes, sure.
Dr. Gordon: They use that in the movie, so it’s nothing new. I’ve just worn a pair of gloves. My gloves, I’ve done this in China. I’ve done this in Hong Kong. I’ve done this in many Asian countries. That’s why you see the word “virus” on these things. This is virus, so it’s, basically, like that. You also see that there’s a V-I-R-U-S, virus. If I turn my hands around facing me, I see this side, I “also” see the word virus.
Guess what? When I look at my pair of gloves, what’s going to happen? If I want to touch my face or I want to touch somebody, it says virus on it. You are going to avoid and be reminded constantly that there’s a virus on here possible. Then, you’re not going to touch someone with this. That’s the mean, nasty thing to do. You won’t touch your face with this, so you’re going to be careful.
When you’re going to take off these pairs your gloves, what you’re going to do is you’re going to first take this pair that might have the virus and you’re not going to go reach in from the bottom here, that would touch your hands and you contaminant, but what you do is you’re going to grab the fingers. Your fingers, you’re going to loosen this like this. Then, you’re going to pull this off like that in one shot and you haven’t touched the outside. You’re going to take the clean pair of hands and you’re going to rub your face because you might have an itch or something. Human beings touch our faces 3,000 times a day.
Aaron: Sure.
Dr. Gordon: Now, we have the pair of gloves. We’re still holding it. You can see that what I’m going to do is on the underneath side I’m going to go and grab this end here. I’m going to pull up like this. See that? I’ve now wrapped the pair of gloves inside the pair of gloves so the outside is actually inside the gloves. See that? I can throw that away. I’m finished. That’s how you would take care of a pair of gloves properly.
Aaron: I got to say, Dr. Gordon Chiu, I don’t know how many people are really going to follow those directions. That’s great for a scientist or a doctor, someone in the healthcare industry. As you were doing that, I was thinking to myself, I am just the worst with these gloves and these masks. I try my best to wear the mask when I go out and wear the gloves, but I literally went to the supermarket the other day, and I had my gloves on, and I found myself reaching in and eating Pringles with the gloves on in the Pringles jar.
I was eating with my wife. She was like, “Why are you reaching and eating Pringles with gloves on?” It gets to a point where, if you don’t follow the rules properly with the gloves, you’re not my mindful about it, then there’s almost no point of wearing them.
What you explained there it was great. I do want to make those changes. The truth is, I don’t know a lot of people who are that smart and careful about this virus. That really goes into– Just the solution is ultimately some type of a cure or at least something to help keep all the reactions and all the terrible things that are caused by this virus to at least slow them down and at least stop them in some way.
How close do you think we are to some type of cure? I know there’s different medicines that people are talking about that work and help with the symptoms. What do you think about that? Do you see us coming up with some type of cure perhaps by the end of summer that helps us a lot of the symptoms that people are facing.
Dr. Gordon: For people like you that don’t label your gloves and for people like you who want to wait for therapies, we have to. Otherwise, people like you are going to die or get sick, so we have to save you. That’s why we have to come up with techniques and therapies. As you know, the societal cost of people getting the infection is going to be higher than the ones who can either stay at home, keep social distancing. You’re not actually coming in contact with someone who’s sick.
See, you’re fine because you’re not sick right now. The moment you turn, and I’ll use the word “turn” because it’s been used in vampire movies, the moment you turn, you’re now one of the infected. When you’re one of the infected, you can infect. Now, the unique thing about the COVID-19, the symptoms, is that it could be symptom-less while you infect others, and the societal costs– I’m going to ask you how do you like the societal cost that so far?
Aaron: Well, it’s terrible. There’s a societal cost, there’s an economic cost. I’m worried that as the economy slows down, there’s also a cost of life to that. People that lose their home and lose their healthcare, depression, suicide. We have to recognize there’s cost to life for both solutions here. I also think it’s not realistic to expect the majority of our society to do that careful touch you just did with the gloves. We’re following social distancing that’s working. I think–
Dr. Gordon: Is it working?
Aaron: The curve has been flattened for the most part.
Dr. Gordon: For those of us who are still alive, it’s working. The ones who died, it wasn’t working, because they got it. With anything, watch me touch my face. We saw you in the video you touch your nose, so feel free to touch your face. I’ll just keep mentioning that, because we tend to touch our faces 3000 times in an entire 24 hour period. You imagine like how often– Some people have said, “Let’s just train everyone not to touch our faces.” That’s also impossible. For many, for most.
We have to do within the entire period. Now, can we all stay at home for prolonged periods of time? Most people aren’t set up to even do that unless you have an online business. If you have another online business, but your online customers are financially not able to buy online because they can’t financially pay things, then you have another issue.
What you’re identifying is that some people, it’s almost like a bell curve, some people will get A’s, because they do all their homework and they study on their own, and some people will get B’s. If we can help the B kids with the C kids with private tutoring or the things that we can get to A’s, but there’s a cost to that because perhaps they weren’t able to get to that, or if we advanced people to certain levels.
Everything has a cost. There’s a risk and reward in business, in real estate and when we talked about, as well as in life. In anything, there’s a risk-reward. Are you in the risk pool or not risk pool. Let’s say we didn’t have social distancing. Let’s go the full range of what some countries had planned to do initially was to let everybody get infected. Then, the ones who survived would be fine.
Aaron: Herd immunity, right?
Dr. Gordon: Yes. Herd immunity. That’s what we did in 1918, that was such a great idea in 1980. It was so great that we actually did it. If we did that in 2020, It’d would wipe out a huge amount of population. It would cost suicidal ills, because everybody gets sick becomes a vector that can spread it to other people. That’s what I meant by getting big turning. Imagine if someone turned within the nursing home. What’s going to happen to the other people?
Aaron: That happened in Washington. That was one of the initial outbreaks. Sure.
Dr. Gordon: Yes. What would happen if somebody turned inside of the prison?
Aaron: That’s happening. You hear those stories.
Dr. Gordon: Who brought it to the inmates? I thought the inmates are inside. Maybe the prison guards. Maybe somebody else. Who brought this into them? They’re already in social distancing, they’re inside, as long as nobody goes in that was infected. Clearly this thing is elusive. It’s evasive because we can’t just base on symptoms. If we add symptoms and we detect fevers, that would be one thing. Now, we have to go and wait for the detectors to ramp up and, hopefully, those detectors are 99.99999, and you still have 0.00001, so there’s always that bar of error. If it’s 99, that means it’s 1%.
It depends on the error and what that cost is. 99% sounds so great. 1% it’s fine, but if it’s 1% of a million, that’s still a million people. A hundred thousand is 10%, that’s still 10,000 infected that we’re generating.
Aaron: Sure.
Dr. Gordon: It depends on what that number is and how big the mass sizes. 1% of a billion. That’s still 10 million. That’s a lot of numbers.
Aaron: I mean, there’s a lot of things we can discuss about the virus. Are people going to follow the directions, how long are they going to stay at home, how long they are going to wash their hands for 20 seconds and wear the masks and gloves? I think it’s going to get to a point. There is some beautiful spring day is going on and I just can not seat inside and twiddle my thumbs.
I’m super busy running my business. I love the outdoors. I’m an individual who just- if the government tells me to not go outside, I have really just don’t know if I want to live my life that way. I’m not sure where society is going to draw that line, and say, “Well, are we going to live these depressing lives inside and washing our hands with all of these protocols and government controls, which is really scary as well. The cops they can arrest you for walking in the park now.” I guess, where’s that middle point? The herd immunity–
Dr. Gordon: I’ll share with you where I stand, because where I stand, one of the things is I was part of helping Hong Kong get to zero virus. We actually did. Hong Kong is not China. There’s freedom of speech. Freedoms are there. It was under British colonial role. Independently, under no force, there wasn’t any arresting or things like that, they brought it down to zero through hygiene and through social distancing.
If that were your lowest cost, I’m giving you the numbers, it’s the lowest cost versus- the highest cost would be the wait for the vaccine and having people infected. That’s the highest cost. Of course, perhaps getting the vaccine and finding out that the virus perhaps mutated and the vaccine doesn’t work as well, some people die and other people have it, it’s different. Now, the other thing you should know, your viewers, is that the virus infects the pneumocyte type 2 cell inside of the alveolar lungs.
What that means is that inside the alveolar sac, it’s like a sack of grapes inside your lungs, inside there’s two types of cells, type 1 and type 2. Type 1 is what you use for your carbon dioxide-oxygen exchange. That is 95% of your alveolar sac. The other 5% is pneumocyte type 2, which produces a surfactant. What the surfactant does is it keeps the alveolar sac inflated when you blow out.
When you expire, your lungs don’t collapse on you because the alveolar sacs are fine. The virus infects those cells that make the surfactant. What happens from there is now those cells, those 5% of those cells now in each sac, 5% in each sac now do the bidding of the virus. Now, they make more viruses. They don’t make surfactant. Now, the alveolar sac does not stay inflated. It actually gets filled with mucus and other things because there’s something called the macrophage that comes in to destroy things.
You let your immune system take over. What the immune system then does is it sends over the macrophage through a reaction, a nonspecific immune reaction. It goes and wipes out the good cells and some of the bad cells that are infected. That’s why you start hacking up some yellow stuff, green stuff sometimes. You’ve gotten, we’ve all gotten sick and we see that mucus. We have some internal bleeding now. What that then causes is a fever. That’s why you’ve got some individuals presenting with fevers.
Also, because there’s internal bleeding, you may have individuals also with lower blood pressure. It doesn’t sound good. Now, what about the people who don’t die from this but got their lung pneumocyte 2 infected, they might lose up to 30% of their lung function. How is that for a change? You don’t die. You recover, you walk out of the hospital, but now you can’t run up the hill like you used to. You can’t sing a song like you used to. How is that for- try that on for science.
Aaron: How often is that happening?
Dr. Gordon: Well, look, we don’t have enough data. We’re still looking at the data. We have to look at all of the people got sick once you get better, and then we didn’t die, and then we have to then do studies on what they are now. I don’t do that anymore. I’m retired, as you know. I retired seven times in my life. I have knowledge. I do these projects and I do this charity because I want people who want to be saved, who don’t want to get sick, have the option to absorb this knowledge and say, “What if we didn’t burden society, what would happen?” We would have a better society. It would be everybody’s benefit. Don’t forget, there’s people who love you out there.
Your family members, they don’t want you to get sick. Also, if you get sick and you don’t die, dying is one option, but if you don’t die and you lose 30% of your lung function, life is probably going to suck pretty bad. If you were smoking a cigarette before, a pack a day, and you lose 30% lung function, you can’t even enjoy those packs of cigarettes anymore.
Aaron: [laughs] Now, you got to quit. I completely understand. Now, you’re talking about enjoying life. That’s what I’m talking about. I’m a small business owner. I was telling my wife earlier, “If you take away my business,” which, by the way, Peoples Capital Group is over 90% collections on a lot of this, buildings were strong as ever, but as a small business owner, our flip department is at a standstill right now.
We can’t get permits. We can’t sell houses. Buyers or mortgages are falling apart. Right now, our residential business is slow. That’s the challenges we face as small business owners as time slow down right now. I’m sure things will come back to life. Right now, as a small business owner, if you take away my economy, and you take away my freedom and my ability to run my business the way I need to run in the building for consumers to do what they need to do to keep our economy moving, maybe you could do that for one month or two months, but that is– My business is me.
You can’t hold me down. If I get up every morning, I get up to run my business and make it successful. Whoever or whatever is in my way, I’m going to get through.
Dr. Gordon: Let me ask you a very simple question, Aaron. What if your tenants got sick and now they can’t pay you because they’re sick or they died, or what might also happen is that what if you got sick and then you either got sick or died, and now you can’t help your investors? Because as a simple fact as wearing gloves or putting a mask and gloves together, should go together, it’s the simple knowledge that it wouldn’t cost very much. Imagine if everybody did their part.
Aaron: How long would we have to wear masks and gloves?
Dr. Gordon: The more we do this, and I guarantee you this, is the more we do this properly, collectively, as a community, as a village, the faster we will all be able to get back to normalcy. The longer we don’t do this, the more the virus is able to draw one out of 52. I want us to think about like a deck of cards. If I gave you the ace of spades and you draw the ace of spades, and that means you get to mutate. If you get 10 ace of spades all in a row, that means you get to mutate into lethality, it means you have special killing powers.
Well, we don’t want you to draw that one out of 52. If you have a million chances to do that, you’re probably going to the draw the ace of spades multiple times. The virus is in that condition, they’re like playing this deck of cards with us. The more people get infected, the more draws it gets to keep having more chances. We want to make sure, because we’re the United States of America, if anybody can pull this off, if anyone can invent a vaccine, that’s the United States of America.
If anyone can invent drugs that could help alleviate the problems, that’s the United States of America. If we think of anybody who can actually everybody working collectively, because we have freedom of speech and freedom to fully reign, that’s the United States of America. It’s easy to control people under draconian methods if it wasn’t the United States. If the USA could actually prove and pull that off, you know what that would show the world? That freedom actually reigns.
Freedom is possible. We actually are disciplined enough because we care about community enough, not because we’re being forced, but because we want life to get back to normal. Exactly for the purpose of what you’re talking about, to make sure that you can continue rent roll. You can continue to flip those homes. You can be responsible to the investors. I bet if you or Seth went down, not business that you have, all that investment might change.
The yield might not be the same without you or Seth.
Aaron: Well, we do have life insurance, so there would be a big lump-sum payout.
Dr. Gordon: Long term, right?
Aaron: We have disability insurance, so I’m not sure if that would kick in. I might depend. Yes, absolutely, you’re 100% correct. If one of us was taken out of the equation, and obviously, life is- it meant to be lived and we want to be healthy, we want to live a full life and a long life. I also respect the fact that someone who’s 33 like me, I’ve hear lots of stories of people in their 30s getting it and getting a headache for three days or having fever symptoms.
I know people also in their 50s and 60s who have gotten it and hardly noticed it. It’s crazy to hear stories like that. Then, we’re working so hard to make these changes in our lives. I agree with you. If anyone can get a cure to this or get a vaccine quickly, it’s America. I think we’re working our butts off to get there. Do you have any updates in the scientific community or ideas or technologies as well? I know you’re talking about self-cleaning clothes, that’s a cool idea also.
Dr. Gordon: Most of my wealth has been in developing patents and technologies. I read certain types of books to get me to that place of living. It’s one thing to be alive, but to really live and savor all the things about living as you look at technology and say where there’s a problem and how can we use technology to solve that problem, so that billions of people in the world won’t even know that the problem ever presented itself.
That’s where that oath to creating top really valuable technologies in the health and wellness business, that’s important. I participate in that and I shared a little bit about smart materials, because we need more scientists. Now, the unfortunate thing about scientists is they really need to be talking with people like you. Most scientists have a job. They don’t make a lot of money. They’re working all their lives. They don’t have any passive income. Unlike most scientists, I started reading books like this.
This book is The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle. Then, I also started working with this book I introduced to everyone, it’s Playing With Fire and it’s called Financial Independence Retire Early. Then, this book here, Your Money or Your Life, these are all good books. Your Money Or Your Life here. Then, this last book is by Tanja Hester, it’s called Work Optional.
I highly recommend these books because they can change your entire thinking. Your Money or Your Life is Vicki Robin. It’s nine steps to transform your relationship with money and achieving financial independence. It’s all about financial independence. Now, remember, because I know about H1N1, and that was actually the flu. You know the flu comes from the pig. Chickenpox, why is it called chickenpox? Because the chickenpox comes from the chicken. The common cold, the rhinovirus comes from the horse.
Aaron: Wait, the rhinovirus comes from the horse?
Dr. Gordon: Yes.
Aaron: That was a curve ball.
Dr. Gordon: It doesn’t come from the rhinoceros.
Aaron: I would guess.
Dr. Gordon: It’s the rhino. Here are the thing is that we domesticate animals as Europeans, and we also domesticate them as Americans. We grow our food with animals and things like that. This all happened already and the genomes jumped from one to another.
