Best Peptides, Stem Cells, Testosterone & Exercise Hacks - Biohacking Roundtable - #1148

people of the uk and ireland if you are coming to see me on tour i want to hear from you i want to know what problems you're dealing with your worst first date and any questions you've got for me and i will be bringing some of you up on stage to talk about it so if you're coming to see me on tour this october go to chriswilliamson.live stories submit them and i might see you with a mic in front of your face very soon chriswilliamson.live stories everyone tell me what peptides you're on that's all i care about let's go which day of the week uh which time of the day um i i view peptides as a little bit more of like a condiment that's in your refrigerator that you might use for a specific reason and don't follow a an exact protocol every day um for example when i travel i use thymus and alpha-1 which i'm on right now as you can tell uh for any for the immune system yeah you uh i keep around bpc 157 and tb 500 for injuries i run a couple of times a year a tessamorelin ipamorelin uh with cjc 1295 cycle for growth hormone and um those are the biggies uh oh c-max and c-link intranasal yeah uh c-max is a little bit more of like a cognition uh brain-derived neurotrophic factor booster and then c-link is more of like a uh like an anxiolytic so kind of an uh it's like my version of valium caffeine yeah what he said yeah uh and pretty much that protocol i agree with and i tell everyone the answer is not at the bottom of a peptide bottle like diet lifestyle nutrition uh living by the principles first these are like additives that can help optimize your health especially with our food sources and how stripped they are of the nutrients um the only compounds that i think i take that you didn't discuss is igf lr3 i don't know if you've ever messed with that uh insulin growth factor lr3 so a lot of people take growth hormone historically but the reason they were taking growth hormone was in an effort to get all the therapeutic benefits that growth hormone gives you when it converts to igf and so if you were to use the peptide igf you get all the benefits of growth hormone but with a much better safety profile that will not impact your natural growth hormone levels um and so that's why i'm a huge fan of does it does it have like a similar uh like pure hgf or something like that like pure hgh you get a little bit of of almost like a glucocorticoid response where there's a surge in cortisol your resting glucose tends to be higher a lot of people don't sleep as well at night because it it goes on a downstream pathway do you skip out a lot of that yeah you you do skip out a lot but bigger than that is you're not impacting your natural growth levels so you know you're still in your four i'm in my 40s 46 so i want to be cognizant of that but anytime i come off like so i'll go on for four to six weeks and then i when i come off i'll cycle on to cjc and some of the other things you discussed just to boost my natural growth hormone levels so i have the simplest protocol here sounds like um i will microdose glp1 once in a while for inflammation i think there's going to be new emerging research i was actually at the protein working group summit 3.0 and that is like the oscars for nerds and protein scientists i just invitation only a hundred of the finest scientists that are doing this and they're doing this and they're doing protein research and there were topics of discussion like what are the challenges that we face but more importantly i sat with arnie astrup who discovered glp1's impact on appetite so he was essentially responsible for what we now have is this obesity now not called obesity sarcopenic epidemic glp1 use which again i am totally for glp1s but that is cool you said you're microdosing inflammation yes and there is going to be new emerging research that it is going to have an impact on cancer they believe that low dose we we don't totally know he believes it's through inflammation and this was the guy who discovered glp1's effect on appetite how do you know that it's not just a reduction in the turnover of food right we don't all of this eating less cancer causing food yeah it could be but that remains well in the the second leading cause of cancer well age is the lead leading cause of cancer and it's the second leading cause of cancer the leading cause second to that is obesity and then so if you were able to address aging and obesity then you're naturally going to reduce the risk of cancer so i i think uh i mean there's even there's definitely going to be a correlation to the weight loss obesity is one of the biggest risk factors for cancer inflammation yeah inflammation independent of obesity as well just eating you know how many bros you know that are relatively lean but they're turning over tons of sugar they're just training it out of them or they're still young their metabolism's still that's one of the possible benefits of intermittent fasting is autophagy and giving giving that like reactive oxygen species production a break yes uh i i have microdosed with glps before on flight days like there's something about just like quiet food noise you don't really have access to great food anyways i don't want to be distracted by food or think about it i'm sedentary anyways for most of the days so even if i could eat it's probably not the best scenario for me to be eating and so uh that when i say microdose like i don't know how much you mean but i'm talking like 0.25 and to contextualize that like a normal dose would be 8 10 12 milligrams depending on it's crazy that you so it is good because what you're saying is what we've seen anecdotally like because we're at over 70 000 patients now in in the patient population as a whole at ways to well and a lot of the patients are now doing microdose glp ones and they say that they see a big difference in their inflammation and i think that that is what we're going to find more and i think the bigger point that we have to make is that they're here to stay whereas other medications there's never been anything nearly as revolutionary and you know in the 90s when they had the food guide pyramid and then all of a sudden obesity hit yeah yeah we are at the precipice of trading obesity for sarcopenia right now what's yeah right we're going we're going for people who are too big to people who are too frail decrease in muscle mass and strength and we've seen it right your parents all of a sudden get frail your grandparents get frail and if we're not careful we're going to miss the early warning which i think that we're seeing uh with people out in hollywood we're just seeing a transformation i read your book and you talked about where it's not necessarily that people read it we're under-muscled right we're also under-muscled it's not just that we're obese we are under-muscled that's right and if we can maintain lean muscle mass and bone mineral density as we age it is one of the leading indicators on health span and longevity what are some biohacks or some interventions that you use or believe in but you don't have any data to support what are some of the things that you're like i fucking love this and i know that it works for me the doctor in the corner is shaking her head we'll give it to the fucking bro scientists let's go bro science uh biocharger have you ever seen this oh my god i have one borrowed one for tony roberts yes i have one doctor backs me up wait no i don't i don't i don't so i wrote me into your facebook marketplace no i okay so i don't know if this works and she said pick any piece of equipment that you want and she keeps talking about this biocharger she's like my sex drive is up it's like the best thing ever i'm like okay well i already have a sauna i already have a cold plunge what about the biocharger yeah but so i got a but i have a biocharger how did you find it great my husband he's like i feel this i mean who knows but it does it does red but does it work it's like i don't know if this is based on a tesla coil surrounded by 12 noble gases in two and there's zero clinical data but you can hold a cool fucking lightsaber what did you think of it when you used it i think a parasite recipe like you think it works okay the raisin brand what is that works for what constipation if if you're constipated been traveling whatever you sit in front of a raisin brand recipe which lasts 12 minutes and you literally have like a turtle head experience with chris what i got research on i was like what is i went i went to tony robbins house he said he's got one in every room in his house apparently i don't know why and uh we i got lent one for a month or so i noticed no difference for the people did you use it wait did you use it consistently rude semi-consistent he didn't use it you didn't but you can't like you put your phone near it and your phone starts fucking glitching out like yeah how often did you use i don't know if i'm supposed to use okay wait i have two other i have two things okay and then and then i've got one more you might know more about this this machine so i so there's something and you probably know way more about this than i do but i got um lent a wind back machine have you ever seen that it's like some tech card therapy do you know what that is i don't know okay someone okay exciting i don't know and it's so you don't know what it is i don't know what it is either but what is it well it seems like it has some um it's like not quite ems but it has some um high radio frequency it is but it's not exactly it's called tech card therapy and what do you do it's patches so there's patches but i've been using it for my hamstring and it seems like a controller that's producing it does it has this yes and i was hoping that you would tell me what exactly how it works but it seems to do tissue healing i haven't seen good us data on it i think that i i feeling better has to work somehow and it's not a stim device yeah uh i do not know if if someone could google it and see exactly what it looks like exactly what frequency also i'll send again what's it called ems no it's called a wind back wind back win yeah pull it up and see what they're what they're actually saying that it does. I might have seen something like it before. And it localizes to where the pain is, which is really weird. Yeah. The Roxyva lamp. Have you seen this one? No. Okay. So it's a sound lounge that vibrates for like a vibroacoustic bed that you lay on. That sounds cool. And then it's a lamp and the lamp has headphones. So it's like an AV cable. One side is going into the vibroacoustic bed. The other side is going to the headphones. And then there's like a hundred different sessions ranging from five minutes to 60 minutes that are like blast off to the moon psychedelic, like full on mushroom LSD like trip, depending on what you choose with zero biological payback. As far as you actually needing to swallow a substance or put anything under your tongue, you lay there, you put on the headphones, you flip it on, you close your eyes and it whisks you off to another planet. And it works. What is it called? Wait, what is it called? So it's like, if we were to talk about the proposed neural bed. What would be the benefit? It would be based on what's called light sound entrainment, meaning shifting you into different brain waves based on the light and the sound. It's called a rock SIVA. There is a session on there. It is like a shift wave, but imagine if the shift wade didn't just have sound, because the shift wade is super cool for people listening or watching. It vibrates pretty powerfully. It doesn't just vibrate, it fucking shakes the room. It's lined with nodes. I've got one at the house. And the cool part is it will guide you through breathwork sessions. And specifically, like the breath holds, you can go like 25% longer just based on the distraction of the vibrating chair. And you're wearing a fingertip monitor for HRV, and your HRV climbs through the roof while you're doing this thing. Imagine that plus flickering light. That's also designed to just like whisk you off into a completely different state. There's a session called Rebirth, and they actually recorded like whoosh, whooshing sounds in mom's womb and the fetal heart beats. And you put on the headphones, you close your eyes, you lay under this thing, and it feels like you're just like primarily being whisked back into this like fetal state. And you lay there for 45 minutes. And sometimes you'll fall asleep, you're in and out of consciousness. And then the last five minutes, you get burst, and the music crescendos. And all of a sudden, like everything starts beating and the lights get brighter and your heart rate speeds up and you get this dump of adrenaline. And then you're just like out, and then everything goes dark. And you sit up for a minute and you just feel like you go conquer the world. 2:00 PM in the afternoon. Wow, I was so into that story. It's pretty cool. That's fucking cool. Does it work? I've used the shift wave. The shift wave's not as comprehensive as that. There was an interesting thing around the sounds from mother's womb. I had Steven Porges on, the polyvagal theory guy. He came up with the safe and sound protocol, SSP. You familiar with that? This is a mode of nervous system re-entrainment. And it's a combination of meditation with, you actually have a facilitator who is halfway between mantra, meditation, psychotherapy, and sound wave work, I guess, and breath work. And one of the things that he taught me, which is fucking fascinating, the soft, gentle, reassuring sounds that mothers give to their kids is the frequency in which the safe and sound protocol works as well. One of the weird things is that's this- You mean the same like sound frequency? Yes. Like the tone? Yes. So interesting. It's the same for dogs and it's the same for horses. And that's the reason that equine therapy and that humans and horses are able to connect as well, and that humans and dogs are able to connect as well. Because the sound frequency that mothers and kids have in all of those species are within the same band. Isn't that fucking cool? That's wild. What if your mom has a really low voice? She's probably jacked, so it's fine. It doesn't matter at all. What else have I been using that's been interesting? Hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I mean, I know that this is not super experimental and it's probably pretty well- Not sexy at all. Old news. It's that hard shell at what, like 2.2 Atta is so good. I don't know what is happening to make me feel the way that I do after I come out of a hyperbaric therapy, but it is 20 minutes on, five minutes off. 100% oxygen on the mask, normal oxygen outside of that, 90-minute session down at depth, 2.2, is better than any coffee, better than any cold plunge, better than anything. There's a little bit of parasympathetic activation too, just from the whole sensory depth nature of it. I did one at Brigham's yesterday and my tongue lagging out of the corner of my mouth. But it's just a standard hyperbaric chamber that they've been using in operators forever. Yeah. Michael Jackson was using one in the '90s. Have you guys used the hydrogen bath stuff? I've used that, yeah. I have a hydrogen bath in my garage. Okay. I don't, and I think there is some, I haven't looked it up. I just fucking have one. It's just transdermal absorption of hydrogen. But I know you add a lot of studies behind it. I just use it and I like it. You're just getting hundreds of times more hydrogen than a pill. It's so relaxing to me because it's a hot tub. You're seeing a hot tub that has hydrogen in it, and you can probably talk- You need a placebo-controlled trial where you're actually in the hot tub and nobody tells you whether or not they put hydrogen in it. But the idea is that there is some transdermal absorption of hydrogen in a hydrogen-rich environment, either in the air or in the water, that's greater than what you would get from a pill dropped in water. And hydrogen being a selective antioxidant means that for inflammation, for soreness, et cetera, you do feel pretty good afterwards. Yeah. But it's hard because a hot tub you feel good, too. I read books for my podcast. Literally, my bookshelf on my books to read is in the garage, that's where my wife, Hemini, put the bathtub, in a hydrogen bath with a red light. And how long? And I lay out there- The red light is great. I lay out there and read books. How long do you stay in? About 40 minutes. Every day? How long do you stay in, Chris? Almost every day now. Oh, the hydrogen bath I was using really intermittently, that was when I was in Lumati. That's the only place I've ever used- That's where I got my hydrogen concentrator, was from them in San Diego. Have you seen Alex Tarnava's thing? He's the inhalation- Yeah. Yeah, Brigham has one. It's the only hydrogen inhalation machine that can go up to that high of a percentage that doesn't use a nasal cannula, so you get a pretty high concentration- That also doesn't risk fucking blowing up. Without risk of explosion. Yeah, without risk of explosion. Yeah, that's terrible. You do not want to be fucking about with hydrogen, dude. But I mean, you put me in touch with Alex and his machine is fucking out of this world. I don't even know if they're publicly, if they're widely available. I don't know if they're for sale or not, but it's called- You've been working on it for a decade. What's pushed me over the edge is there's a very trustworthy guy in the hydrogen research sector, named Tyler LeBaron, who I think he founded the Hydrogen Research Foundation. I think that's what it's called. He put his name behind this because he was so impressed with it compared to all these different machines, a lot of them coming out of Asia that have low concentration or you can't adjust the percentage or they use a nasal cannula instead of a mask. When I asked him about it, he was like, "Thumbs up. This is the best one in the market." What do you make of, because we've got hydrogen tablets. Right. Hydrogen- Flasks, water infusion flasks, inhalation, and now baths as well. What do you make of hydrogen, the research around it generally, and then what do you make of those different- I've used a test kit to test the bottle and the tablet, and the bottle produces a higher concentration of hydrogen. It's like 8 to 10 ppm, but the bottles poop out after 300 uses. You're going to buy a bottle frequently. The pill is slightly lower. The transdermal absorption, there's not a lot of research on that. The inhalation is the highest concentration that you can infuse into your body as far as what they've actually looked at for hydrogen concentration. What's the proposed mechanism, benefits of breathing hydrogen, of putting more of it in your body? It's an antioxidant. Basically, it would quell inflammation. It would essentially, because it's a selective antioxidant, it can accept or donate electrons. Unlike, say, like, a high-dose synthetic vitamin C or vitamin E or a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, it can actually accept or donate an electron. It would be something that would not, say, quell the hormetic response to exercise. After you do a hard exercise session, you're actually not supposed to take high-dose antioxidants. You're not supposed to spend- Same reason you shouldn't do a cold plunge. Well, the cold plunge, you have to drop the muscle temperature by about one degree Celsius, which takes at least 10 minutes at a pretty cold temperature. Jumping in a quick cold plunge or taking a cold shower after a workout, that's not as big a problem as doing, like, it's been overblown because I don't know a lot of people who even have the time after a workout to get in a cold plunge for 10 to 20 minutes, which is where the desire, and that's where the research that you blunt the anabolic response actually happens. So if you're going to do a long cold plunge, wait for a few hours until after the workout. Who the fuck's doing a 10-minute cold plunge? Me. No one. No wonder we're doing this on Friday. Fucking nuts. I do three minutes and I'm done. So basically, hydrogen and methylene blue are two examples of selective antioxidants that can accept or donate an electron that would be acceptable for post-exercise inflammation without blunting the anabolic response. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. 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That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. What about talking about the temperature of your muscles being a mediating factor? I saw that Brian had swallowed a thermometer, a pill thermometer, and he was looking at the temperature that you need to get to for the sauna in order to get to heat shock protein. And he'd been doing maybe 20 minutes or 25 minutes at 2. But he actually needed to get to 30 minutes at 200 in order to get to that. What was your read on that data? He did. He's also very lean, right? So that's going to be a factor in that he's probably going to need higher temperatures, right? Quite efficient with heat. Yeah, exactly. Efficient with heat, less insulation. I think it also depends on your activity level in the sauna. Like I move a lot in the sauna. Like I'm doing pushups and squats and, you know, hot yoga and uranium tanning and, you know, all the things that one does in a sauna. So I think if you're moving around a lot, you can get pretty hot. But he does make a good point in that if you want the actual heat shock protein benefit of a sauna, which is the main mechanism that kicks in at the higher temperatures. So not just like the detox from sweating or whatever, but the actual cellular resilience effect that you need a hotter temperature than most likely a lot of people are actually using with the caveat. Being it's kind of a paradox that sauna decreases risk of dementia and Alzheimer's. But when your cranium gets hot and you're getting above about 200 degrees and you don't have your sexy Elvin sauna hat, then you actually increase risk of dementia and Alzheimer's. So he makes a pretty good point that you probably need to go hotter than you're actually going or move more in your sauna or both. But you need to invest in a wool cap to do so. That's the protection. Interesting. Yeah. And ice balls. I was going to ask. Got to ice your balls. Yeah, ice the balls. I bought my sons the, I forget the brand, but they're the ice. Do you get nutsicles? I have 18 year old sons and I want grandkids and we do so a lot. That is the thing they say that if you're trying to reproduce that the hot temperatures can decrease fertility. Well, the crazy thing is I was, when I went to go and freeze my sperm, I was talking about, oh, okay, what do I need to avoid? One of the things that the guy came back to me and said is there's so many guys that go away in a bachelor party and they just hang in a jacuzzi. You know, like just chilling with their boys for ages. He was like, that will do so much more damage to your sperm count than a ton of saunas because you've got direct contact from the heat of the water, just like absolutely infusing your testosterone and your testicles. And chlorine and parabens and phthalates and everything else. Probably not great. How important are the heat shock proteins? Like, do we really need those or can you get a lot of the benefits without getting into that upper echelon? You can get, and as a matter of fact, this was a couple, a couple of months ago, they looked at sauna versus weight training and the weight training protocol produced heat shock protein elevation, similar to what people were getting from a sauna session. I don't remember the time or the temperature being used, but weights would be one just exercising in the heat in general. Paradoxically, cold plunging can increase heat shock proteins because it's a thermal regulatory mechanism. So there are other ways that you can stress the body, kind of like fasting and autophagy to, you know, get a similar pathway activated. So it doesn't just have to be sauna. That's interesting. I've been loving a resonance breathing lamps. There's this lamp called OM, OM.health, and it's got FDA registered heart rate sensor on the top of it. So you can imagine like a big glass lamp and on the top there's a stone and that's got a hundred Hertz sensor. You just hold the stone and the lamp is connected to your wifi, has the algorithm and it detects your HRV. You breathe, the stone vibrates. So you're just breathing up and down with the stone. It maximizes your blood pressure. It maximizes your resonance. It gets you into resonance. It's maximizing that arrhythmia between it. And it just makes like an ocean sound two weeks ago. I got targeted on Instagram. So rules. So funny, funny story. So, so, uh, uh, Jay Wiles, the HRV expert who developed that lamp, I used to have this thing where I didn't want to do a podcast without a sidekick, without a podcast host. Jay was my podcast sidekick for like four years. No way. Yeah. He was, he was like the witty banter guy and he's super smart. Like, like when, whenever anybody would ask a question about HRV, like Jay would jump in and then he developed this lamp and it actually is cool. It's fucking, it's absolutely awesome. The best thing about it is you can grab it and use it while you're watching TV. So let's say that you're lying in bed or you're on the couch or whatever. If you've got a lamp nearby, you can just be watching the movie and you can crank out 45 minute resonance breath work sessions without even thinking about it. All you do is you don't need the light cue, just the vibratory, just vibrating. It doesn't interrupt anything. If you've got it next to your bed and you can't sleep on a nighttime, you can roll over and grab it. It doesn't interrupt whoever you're in bed with. So what is that? Is it the vibration that changes it or is it the breath? The idea behind resonance breathing, and it's actually kind of fascinating that nearly every human being on the planet with a breath rate of around five and a half seconds in, five and a half seconds out, achieves peak HRV. So that's about where you see really good vagal tone is at that breath rate. And this lamp is essentially in a training tool to either via visual cues or via vibratory cues, if you're using the stone to cause you to breathe at that rate. There's a book called Coherence. And in the latter pages of that book, it was one of the first books I ever read on resonance breathing. There's like a link or a QR code to a downloadable MP3 file called the Clock and Bell. And that was when I first discovered the power of resonance breathing because it's literally like tick-tock, tick-tock, and you play it while you're working, while you're checking emails, while you're doing whatever would normally be stressful. It keeps you from email apnea because you know that you're doing resonance breathing, but it trains you how to subconsciously resonance breathe. Obviously, a way more stripped down solution than what Jay developed, but the home lamp is super cool. It's because it's like it's art. It's trait rather than state. And I think that's what everybody's trying to get themselves over to. It's like, I want to do this practice, but I don't need to just end at the end of my session. It's like, I want to do this practice, but I don't need to just end at the end of my session, One of the interesting things that I talked to Jay about was if you get below 10 minutes, it's just state. If you get between 10 and 20, you start to move it across into trait changes too. I think you only need to do maybe three or four sessions a week, so an hour a week, something like that. And it's so easy. So that's on my list. It doesn't do fetal heartbeat and womb whooshing sounds though. Which is a shame. Which is a shame. They got to build that up. Any other cool shit like interventions or supplements or whatever you've been playing? The other big one that I've seen, and I know Ben's experienced it too, is, the Muse stem cells. So a scientist, Mari Dezawa out of Japan, discovered a subset phenotype of stem cell called Muse. And it's fascinating because everything they've been doing outside of the United States with tinkering with stem cells and trying to put them under stress and trying to get them to adapt and change has been in an effort to create a cell that would have a certain phenotype that would be optimal for healing, recovery, and treating an array of different chronic diseases. But that would not become tumergenic, right? So one of the challenges of a cell that can differentiate, meaning it can become anything, is that cell could, in theory, hypothetically become a cancer cell. Or what if it came into contact with a cancer cell and took on a cancer phenotype and then exasperated that? And now we put trillions of these cells in your body. Yeah. And so fascinating. 2014, this is another woman, one of the leading scientists in stem cell research. 2014, she discovered this cell. It is a Muse stands for multi-lineage stress enduring, which basically means traditional stem cells, you have to cryo-freeze negative 80 degrees or more. And the second you thaw them out, they begin to die. And so you've got to get them into the body quickly. These Muse cells can stay alive for days at room temperature. Less than 2% of stem cells are Muse, but they're the super soldiers. So in all this research is now coming together, like this scientist, Dominic Doyle, Deutsche out of Germany, was a professor at Stanford, and he couldn't understand why diabetic patients didn't seem to be responding in certain ways like other patients. Now that he realized in his study, even though they had stem cells, they were missing this other tagged cell that was some sort of subset. And what it was, was a Muse. And so here's why that's important. A Muse cell, in layman's terms, can become anything. So like when you're a kindergartner, you could grow up and be a scientist, a doctor, an attorney. Ben Greenfield, some of us. Ben Greenfield, whatever it is, because you haven't set your identity yet. So in America, most people who say stem cells don't work, they're getting bone marrow aspirate, or they're taking cells from fat tissue. And the problem with that is that cell's already developed a phenotype. And the fraction is very large. Yes. And if they're diabetic or elderly, they don't have Muse. There are no Muse. It's literally just traditional MSCs. And so what is so special about these cells is they will take on any phenotype. Here's the blood-brain barrier. Other traditional cells get caught in the lungs. Traditional MSCs mostly get caught up in the lungs. They don't pierce the blood-brain barrier. Traditional MSCs have a 3% engraftment rate. Muse cells have a 30% engraftment rate. Traditional stem cells take multiple days to engraft. Muse cells are engrafted within 48 hours. And high histocompatibility, too. There's almost no immune system response. So they're immunomodulatory. Is this the shit that Matt Cook had me breathe? Did he have me atomize Muse cells? Yes, you can nebulize them. Yeah, nebulize. He probably had you do that with Muse-derived exosomes. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. And so you can literally place it on the fulcrum plate internasally, and it will pierce the blood-brain barrier. And they have this because they did it on stroke victims in Japan. And their brain is lit up like a Christmas tree with these tagged cells. And what's crazy is through phagocytosis, they'll consume the damaged cell and take on the personality of that cell. So if you have a damaged neuron, they become a baby neuron that's young and healthy and vibrant. This is proven quantifiably in babies born with encephalitis. They did a study in Japan. If they don't treat those children, almost all of them will be brain damaged in the subset population that was treated in a randomized control trial, which people love. Those children, 90% of them had totally normal brain function out to two years from one intravenous treatment, from one intravenous treatment. And we actually had a patient who was on a heart transplant list. We were talking about this with Ben yesterday. Crazy. A patient on a heart transplant list. We treat them intravenous because they couldn't get the heart. By the time they got the heart and they re-ran this patient's information or all their data, the doctor took them off the transplant list. And there is crazy data on heart, brain. You guys are using Dazawa Muse, right? Correct. Because the actual fraction percentage of Muse cells widely varies. And that's who Matt's using. Dazawa, I think. Dazawa is the woman. In Japan, who discovered these cells. Who discovered, yeah. And so this is the most game changer thing that I have seen. And I've like, I don't own into the company. It's not mine. I wish I did, but it's like the most game changer thing. And we've been using it because again, Texas has the right to try. And so this is what Brett has seen the most impact with, with his Parkinson's. And I'm not saying it's going to, if with Parkinson's, it's like, can we slow? Can we slow things? Can we give your body the best chance? And there are so many things that we can do. And I'm not saying it's going to, there are so many different benefits to this, whether it's tendons or joints or orthopedic related injuries, the data's really compelling. When you go back and look at all of the data that this woman has accrued over the last decade. And now it's a culmination of even the scientist in Germany, Dominic Deutscher, who is trying to understand what are these little subset phenotypes. And now it's all come together where he's like, holy shit, I've wasted 20 years of research. They're actually harvested from a rare breed of cattle in the Middle East. So super cool. You're kidding. Difficult to get. You're kidding. He is kidding. It's a callback. This is healthy birth, healthy mother, pre-plan C-section. They take the discarded afterbirth. And from that, they can extrapolate out these super cells, these super soldier cells, basically. That's so fucking cool. Afterbirth super soldiers. Yeah. That's what I need. So those are things that I think will be game changer as they become more readily accepted. Florida's passed a law that allows accessibility. Tennessee just passed a law that I lobbied for. And then also I lobbied in Arizona. We got it through the house and the Senate, but the government- The governor of Arizona shot it down. I think Texas is going to pass more accessible laws around this. And then Utah. And then Utah. Yeah, Utah. So you can get it in certain states. Yeah. And then certain states are regulated. And then obviously it's not an FDA approved modality for anything. So any use of these cells would be off label. Super extraordinary. There is no label. You know what you were talking about, putting stuff here. I was thinking about Clear Spray, X-L-E-A-R. That shit, just available over the counter for mark-ons. Yeah. It's freaking crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I can't believe that that thing is just like, oh yeah, just buy it. And for the people that don't know what I'm talking about, can you explain what it is? It's a nasal spray. You know about the xylitol infuse nasal spray? Yeah. Yeah. I've only ever really used it after swimming in fresh water. Like I discovered it way back in the triathlon days where you'd get out of a river or lake or any fresh body and just typically like about 3 or 4 a.m. that night after you'd lay down and stuff connects in the nasal passages and you get the histaminergic response, you start sneezing. And you start sniffling and you spray this stuff and you get vasodilation and it seems to just like knock down the histamine reaction, but it's just an OTC. Yeah. Yeah. Over the counter Clear Spray. But if you do a course typically for about 2 or 3 months, that's enough to knock out mark-ons. That is a. Right. Which normally you'd get a pretty expensive and difficult to get vasoactive intestinal polypeptide like nasal spray for, the VIP peptide. Yeah. But you can do that and then maybe some stuff. You can do like a silver spray and you can get rid of something that's literally living in your fucking nasal cavity. Like you got shit that's living inside of your nose. These like, they're like microbe organisms. And yeah, there's Clear Spray, which is just X-L-E-A-R. Somebody knows how to pronounce it. Yeah. Whatever. I mean, apparently it's Clear Spray. Clear Spray. Somewhere along the way, low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older. Turns out there's a reason for that. As we age, our mitochondria, the parts of our cells that power us become weaker and make less energy, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Timeline. 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That's timeline.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. So why are GLPs, a concern for sarcopenia, and are you more worried about sarcopenia than osteoporosis? I'm worried about both, and that is a great question. We've never had the ability to lose this much weight this fast outside of bariatric surgery. We are at the intersection of something that we've never seen before, which is very unusual in medicine, to be at a place that we've never been. We now have the capacity to reduce weight, magnitudes, than of weight that we've never had before, which means if in fact these drugs are utilized, which I think the number is, they're expecting somewhere along between 40 to 60 million people on these medications. It's like 20% of Americans. Yeah, plus all the people who are just like using gray market stuff and not even telling anybody. Hopefully things are going to evolve there. But what is going to happen is if obesity has been our focus, which it has been for the last 50 years, we haven't gotten very far. All of a sudden, we're going to have a lot of people who are are now available. Obesity will become less of a problem, but the fact that people are sedentary, sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass and strength is going to become a primary problem, which then we know how bone is formed. And by the way, osteoporosis is a pediatric disease with geriatric outcomes. Osteoporosis is a pediatric disease with geriatric outcomes. You explained for the idiot in the room. Yeah, yeah. Meaning what you do when you are younger to protect bone and muscle plays a role in the outcome. So she was saying it's like predictive of your osteoporotic status late in life, what you are at early in life. So women, athletes that lose their menstrual cycle are very underweight. People that have struggled with anorexia end up having very low bone mineral density and then are at risk for osteoporosis. It's kind of strange to hear three people in a quite experimental open to new evidence being skeptical about GLPs. I understand obesity was a problem for a long time. We've got this intervention, which appears to fix the obesity thing. And now there's all of these potential side effects that we don't understand. In fact, they're not even side effects. They're more like second order consequences. That's probably a better way to look at them, right? Rather than side effects. How do you guys feel about the potential for millions, tens of millions of people to be taking GLPs over the next decade or so? Well, I think what we've touched on is in traditional medicine, it's an insurance model. And this is my forte. And the challenge with that traditional model is you are based off an indication and that indication is based off a specific dosage. And so these trials were based off chronically sick, morbidly obese people, right? This was originally going to be a diabetes medication. And so all of the initial data. Which is where the lion's share of human clinical data comes from, is disease population. And so then the problem is you take that and you roll it out to the general population and every. The one with the 33 BMI. Yeah. And now every housewife in Malibu is using it to lose 10 pounds for like vacation. Guess what else it does? And this is not really talked about. It has different sexual side effects if you are a man or a woman. Is that like the anhedonia thing where it reduces pleasure? But it's more pronounced in one sex? Yes. Which one? So in women. Oh, really? And the data is still emerging because we haven't been using it. Are you ready? God damn it. So for me. You're so lean. You're so lean, but no, I can't have that. sex with you. So for men, it can increase testosterone, it can decrease body fat, decrease estrogen, and it can increase sex drive. But what we're starting to see for women is that it can, again, decrease body fat, but it also seems to decrease sex drive. So just give them some PT-141 nasal spray and we're back off to the races, right? Or we study women more. Yeah. Or we study women more and perhaps we get, to your point, specialized dosing. Because the problem is in that model, I literally, right before we walked in here, got a text from somebody who said, my wife's trisepatide is no longer covered by insurance and they're trying to move her to a dosage that would be covered. Okay. You're going to move her up to a higher dosage to get insurance to cover. Oh, it's a higher dose that's covered. Yes. Even though she was getting the efficacy out of the lower dose. Right. Which is a problem. Insurance companies, I've broke this down on your podcast too before, it's a big challenge because 30% of the revenue of an insurance company comes from monetizing drugs. So they are changing dosages based off rebates and what rebate pays them the most. And so you may be on an efficacious dosage that's working great for you, but they may go, yeah, we're not covering that one anymore. You've got to bump up. Yeah. Which is super interesting because it's an efficacious dose. I mean, we were just talking about 0.25, which is a micro dose that suppresses food noise that for a lot of people is enough, nowhere near enough to get covered by insurance. But then. These larger doses is where you see the issue back to sarcopenia, where you're told you're supposed to go to the gym and lift weights. And the only way for you to do that without feeling flat is to eat a good meal, but you sit in front of your favorite smoothie or pre-workout or whatever, and you get nauseous trying it. So then you're flat in the gym. And so this is like the whole gray man hypothesis where the road that we're going down is getting really smart, getting, getting big, like AI, uh, potentially like, you know, we're infused brains while our body wastes away into little stick figures. And the gray men are us from the future on GLP-1s and AI. Thank goodness we have testosterone. Is the, is the, um, the dosage, is it a pre-click pen? Is that why people can't? Because when I think, oh, this is the dosage, I just think about a vial and an insulin syringe and you go, well, I'll just draw more or less. So the companies are launching those other dosages to give more mobility to patients and options. So the commercially available, uh, companies, the manufacturers, our compounders have been doing that for, for the last five years. Um, but that still goes back to, it's going to be based off what was in the clinical trials and what dosage were showed to be efficacious in those trials, which is again, on obese patient population. And if you want insurance to cover it, insurance is going to do it following the literature. Oh, that's so interesting. We're in a space where we don't really understand a no micro dosing. We do know that GLP-1s affect muscle positively, despite what you're seeing in the literature, which is it, reduces muscle mass. The majority of the fat, the majority of the mass lost is fat. But why I think, I actually think the GLP-1s are really good is it, it has the potential to improve muscle quality. Imagine. By reducing intramuscular triglycerides. Yes. Imagine you have a Wagyu steak. You go on a GLP-1, you, you know, inject it, your Wagyu steak becomes like a filet. So the texture and the composition can improve with GLP-1. So we need it. I believe that we need it because we have not been effective before. And again, I don't think body fat is the major problem. I think it's intramuscular fat. That is true that a lot of the studies on, I think it was primarily red or true tide that showed muscle loss were done via DEXA evaluations, which couldn't differentiate between lean mass loss coming from muscle or lean mass loss coming from something like intrahepatic tissue, intramuscular triglycerides or other things that would actually be a positive when it comes to loss. But if you're not eating enough food, the muscle loss thing is still a pretty, pretty big risk. To try and recap while we're out here, cause that was, that's fucking mind blowing. The studies that have been done are mostly on morbidly obese people because they're morbidly obese. They're given quite high dosages when it comes to the prescribed prescriber approved dosages that people can take because they need to follow the science. That means that, even people who are looking to lose a little bit of weight and might be able to get efficacious effects from micro dosing, they need to be given the big boy dosages because they're the only ones that currently have been studied in the literature. Is that right? It's attempt to try and land the ship and thread the needle and get insurance coverage. And then the initial insulin, the initial prescriptions for the first few years were preloaded syringes. Yes. Right. And so you couldn't have the autonomy to shift. And so when we were seeing muscle wasting, it's like, yeah, because a lot of people don't have the autonomy to shift. And so these people are taking way higher dosages than they should have been taking. And their doctor's just trying to give them a solution. And then no surviving their weight. And when they don't need to, they could get away with 0.25 or 0.5. And what Gabriel was saying is like, the muscle loss is not necessarily a direct mechanistic cause of the GLP itself. And some of the actual loss from that might be favorable. It's the loss that occurs from simply not being able to get into the gym and or eat adequate protein. Because you've got such low energy because you're not eating enough. And low food volume. What's the mechanism for the sex drive in women? Dopamine. Dopamine brain reward pathways. Because the pathways are very similar. And they're looking at GLP-1 for alcohol addiction and drug addiction. Anything that's hedonic. It's not solely just related to body fat and appetite. It has brain effects. It's not only found in the gut and making you feel full and slowing gastric emptying. It's also you have GLP-1 in the brain. And so it impacts your dopamine response. Desire. I brought this up. Zombie mode. I brought this up with Rogan. What happens when our entire economy is driven on consumerism and you pharmacologically suppress desire? Most people are buying shit, not things that they need, just things that they want. And it's repeat habituation. I'm just going to satisfy, satiate myself. And yeah, maybe it's sex. Maybe it's video games. Maybe it's porn. Maybe it's social media. Maybe it's weed. You're going down the GLP to GDP. Right. But here's what we're talking about. Very nice. I totally missed that, but I'm like the mom in the room. But what's happening is that, so I see patients in my clinic, right? Strong medical. People are getting a little depressed. They don't get the same enjoyment from sex, from eating, or from spending. People on GLPs. Yes. And now I want to be really clear. I'm not anti-GLP-1s. I mean, we prescribe them. But it's the idea that kind of what Brigham is saying is that we understand the utilization, in trials with sick people with type 2 diabetes, we don't really know all of the other secondary outcomes that this can cause. And again, part of them are positive, but decreased sex drive, fun, mood, all of those things, those are a problem. I remember looking at- Yeah, it's a great aid for stoicism. I looked at some research around bariatric surgery outcomes, and there's an increase in suicides risk after bariatric surgery, but it's not a problem. It's not just because it's highly traumatic, and sometimes there's infections, and sometimes like idiot surgeons close you up with galls still inside of you, and things can go wrong. It's that typically people who are sufficiently overweight that they use bariatric surgery are eating to deal with something that's happening in their life. They've now had that pathway of reward and sedation taken away from them, but the problem still exists. Yeah. So now what you're talking about here is, hey, you're using GLPs to help yourself lose weight, the weight loss has been curtailed, but the reason that you overate still exists. And the same thing goes for porn and video games. If you were to go to Dr. Lyons' practice, I guarantee you, you're doing a full workup, you're assessing the blood work, and you're looking at the patient holistically. Of course. If you go into a primary care practice in an insurance model, they have six minutes with a patient on average. They want to put a win on the board for that patient. That patient's asking for a GLP-1. That patient probably is pre-diabetic or diabetic. That patient probably does have weight to lose. But what is the root cause of- Of this illness. And these are the symptoms, not the root cause. And then they prescribe the GLP-1 without ever saying, do they have a hormonal inadequacy? Do they have a family history of mental health issues, depression, anxiety? You're doing all that. Yes. But you have the ability in a cash model. And you bring up another really good point that, say someone needs to lose weight, again, we have to recognize we have been very unsuccessful. Now we have a tool that makes us successful. However, let me pose it to you. If you, Brigham, had low thyroid and you were hypothyroid, well, you might try to get to the root cause, but let's just say you have low thyroid and I give you thyroid replacement to normalize your levels, you wouldn't think twice, right? I'm going somewhere with this. Yes. If you had trouble seeing, let's say your eyes got older, if I gave you glasses, that wouldn't be an issue. No. It would affect my sex appeal a little bit. I would push back. I would ask for contacts. Fine. But wait, I'm going somewhere with this. But if someone comes in to your point with, say, low testosterone as a woman or a man, they are now juicing. They are now on steroids. So this is a problem. Not that your testosterone is low. I'm going to give you testosterone to bring you up to a normal level. We're not talking about optimization. We're not talking about enhancement. We are talking about someone who's using a GLP-1 now has low testosterone, man or woman. And the thing, the balance, let's say they have low sex hormones, Because of the industry stigma in general, everyone at this table is very interested in health. But for the average person, if you go, hey, I'm on testosterone, they're like, oh my gosh, you're juicing, you're on steroids. Right. Because what you're saying is spot on because there is a stigma in primary care too with testosterone. So real world example, and he covered this on Joe, is Jelly Roll. We've helped him lose 250 pounds. Everyone immediately assumes we put him on a GLP-1. No, we ran his blood work. He had low testosterone. He was chronically inflamed. He had all sorts of other biometric issues unrelated to discipline. And all we did was fix those root causes. He never took a GLP-1. And to this day, everyone's like, and I sell GLP-1s. I would tell you if he took it. It'd be great. I'd vote for GLPs if he needed it. The guy did it with blood, sweat, and tears, diet, lifestyle, nutrition, and optimized hormones. Yes. But in general medicine, they view it as testosterone is the boogie. Yeah, it's a misunderstanding between hypogonadism and super physiological dosing of testosterone and not understanding the sweet spot in between. And I still, you know, like I was watching Pete Hezga's recent video about putting warfighters on testosterone. He wasn't putting warfighters on testosterone, he was screening. Or yeah, screening for that. I still like to see that conversation couched in the discussion of like lift weights with your legs where there's a high concentration of androgen receptors and cover the bases like creatine and zinc and boron. And I think that's a good thing. Yeah. I think that's a good thing. I don't think that testosterone replacement therapy is the first solution, but sometimes it is the most effective solution, especially in a scenario where you're unable like in a warfighter to live the optimal lifestyle. This is very important. Very important conversation. What you are saying is absolutely correct. We are seeing a decrease in testosterone year after year. Obesity goes up, behaviors go down, people are eating, not sleeping, all sorts of things. There is a medical risk when someone has low testosterone for heart disease, for osteoporosis, cognition, depression. So if I had one dream in this room of strong men and powerful men, we would clear up the idea of a testosterone revolution and we would clear up this idea that testosterone is steroids and somehow I can give medication to make someone have less fat, but if I give medication to someone to have them build muscle, it's a problem. If you and your partner sleep best at different temperatures, it is time that you joined us in the modern world and got an eight sleep. I've always wanted to try eight sleep. Which side of the bed do you prefer? I usually take left, but I am flexible. You're not sleeping in my bed, mate. When you said partner, I just assumed. I meant a romantic partner, you know? Of course. Eight sleeps pod five is a smart mattress cover that actively cools or heats each side of the bed by up to 20 degrees. So if you run hot, I'm going to sleep in it. I'm going to sleep in it. back to women. I don't know how much the cultural conversation and the pushback around testosterone is to do with people understanding a study of three people from 1930. I think it's much more cultural than that. I think it's much more of a, what does testosterone represent generally? I think that, and also the same type of treatment that GLP-1 is given in terms of perception of taking a shortcut, right? Testosterone is often perceived the same way, right? You're not going to go lift weights and you're not going to pay attention to lifestyle factors and you're just going to throw a bandaid on it. But no one cares if someone's taking GLP-1. No one's accusing somebody that lost a ton of weight on GLPs of being non-natty, right? But if you ever do a six-week course of fucking enanthate, that means for the rest of your time, your natty status is gone. So what is it? Why that? What's the difference? And I think this is a good split test, right? You have two drugs, delivery mechanisms, not too dissimilar. One's IM, one's sub-Q. Both can be sub-Q. So you can use them in similar ways. They achieve similar things, like a leaner, more built physique. Why is it that testosterone's got this? Is it the sort of masculinized side of this? Is it aggression? Is it, what do you think? I think it's the performance enhancing benefits in sports and that's created a dogma around it. Everybody, evidently. But like take sports out. I think it goes beyond sports though. I mean, there is simply a perception, I think, that if someone is on testosterone, they are. They're taking a little bit of a shortcut when it comes to muscle mass recovery. But if they're low, are they taking a shortcut? If they're hypogonadal, they're not taking a shortcut. They're addressing a deficiency, but there's still the perception that you're not doing the work. And I think that feeds into, I think some of it is the unfairness potentially of the sports performance angle as well. What happened to the Enhanced Games? Do you not think that the indication is wrong today? Like the clinically low, I have to be very careful about this. You are way too well read. So basically what he's saying is our indication of 300 nanograms per deciliter, it's in different countries, depending on where you live. In Italy, it might be 350. That will determine what your definition of hypogonadal is. So the lower range of normal from a normal adult male in the US at the moment is 300 nanograms per deciliter. And that's too low. In my opinion. What's the upper bound? You think that the lower range should be raised? I think that. But again, I want to couch this very carefully as a practicing physician who does. This is not medical advice. This is a fucking biohacking table. Wait, but listen, but so I'm going to give you the answer. Just pass it to me and note under the table and I can say it. I'm not a doctor. So what I'm saying is that it's not just the number. So there is other things that go into effect, for example. And I figured this out. I had a guy who was from Homeland Security and his testosterone was 600. And he had all the signs and symptoms of low T. And I'm like, brother, I'm not putting you on tests. Just get more sleep. You're going to be great. And it turns out he had a CAG repeat, a CAG repeat. So the testosterone that he had wasn't effective because he had issues with the receptors. We all have different receptors. A testosterone of 900 for you might equal a testosterone of 300 for Brigham. Right. And then the CAD repeat is not a SHBG free available testosterone. It's an actual receptor issue, whether or not it's going to be converted into free. It's free. It's still not interacting with the receptor. And we don't test those routinely. It's primarily done in research where we're still gathering the data as what the impact is. But the idea that number one, that testosterone is going to cause harm in physiologic ranges. So if someone is 300 or 500, but feel like crap and it looks like they need testosterone, but they don't measure low, you know, in the medical world, we are, according to guidelines, not supposed to essentially treat that. That's where I was going. And a lot of that is insurance based too. And we go back to this whole conundrum of like, you can practice a sick care model and it's a challenge because every personalized medicine is exactly that. It should be personalized. Each individual is different in their physiological response. But insurance will cover $299, but not $301. Well, does TRT create the same problem that Ozempic does? Like people are pharmacologically solving a problem that lifestyle should have partially fixed. Is it an artificial solution to an artificial problem? Some people are. Absolutely. I mean, that goes back to what I was saying earlier about lifting weights and micronutrient replenishment and relationships and sunlight and de-stressing and recovery and sleep. If you have all of those parameters in place, which a lot of people nowadays do, I think there can still be anything from environmental factors that influence testosterone availability. This is the endocrine disruptor discussion, you know, the plastic discussion, personal care products and foods wrapped in plastic, which I think, you know, can affect that. There is the industrial pollution, air pollution, even like light pollution having an effect on the stress and sleep component. Like I think we have a bigger uphill battle, including the fact that not a lot of guys are like chopping wood and building fences and hauling rocks outdoors. And so I think it's a cluster of factors that influence a modern lifestyle, putting you at a higher risk for hypogonad. We definitely have higher levels of low T than we ever have. As a society, but then you also look like my good friend Callie Means breaks down the whole food system and ultra processed foods. And when did we see that spike? The big changes started happening in the 80s. And we can go back to like the infancy of how that occurred. As soon as the government began to regulate big tobacco, big tobacco, JP, JP Philip Morris or whatever, went out and started acquiring most of the major food production companies. And most of those major food production companies pivoted from healthy foods, more hearty, beef meals to ultra processed foods. Ultra processed foods have a 30 plus percent profit margin. A banana has like an eight to 10% profit margin. So it's our food systems. It's our glyphosate rules and regulations around our crops. All of those things are controlled in much bigger dynamics. All I hear right now is that cigarette companies have made us less yoked. That's the story. But here's the problem. Let's say you take the warfighter. Everything that we named here is a perineum and that you can go to bed early and you can sleep in and you can reduce light pollution. These are all luxuries that a warfighter, a new mom are not going to have. And so if we restrict the ability to treat based on allowing them to solve for lifestyle factors first, there is enough evidence to support that low testosterone contributes to disease risk that I wouldn't wait. Why would I wait? You don't have the degrees of freedom within your lifestyle for certain people that have got constraints on their sleep, constraints on their ability to eat, et cetera. Yeah. I guess, Ben, you've experimented a lot, obviously, every performance intervention under the sun. Where does testosterone rank for you? Like compared with sleep or resistance training or light or diet, stress, stuff like that. How important is. In my defense, I actually have not sunned my perineum. So. Recently? Yeah. Since I've been in Austin, I haven't had the opportunity. I think it depends primarily on age, right? So I've been on testosterone for four years. I began when I was 40. The main thing I noticed was being able to recover a lot faster, being able to hit the gym for, you know, what I do in the morning that keeps me sane, keeps me active and keeps me productive and keeps my head clear. I can continue to do that day after day. Whereas I was noting a, like, a significant increase in the amount of time that I needed for recovery between workouts, just based on HRV, based on soreness. So I would rank it higher and higher in order of priority, the older a man gets. I know we're talking about men, but obviously women are part of this discussion as well. Which they haven't really been studied nearly as much. Yeah. And I would say somewhere in the range of 35 to 40 years old in most men. Gabriel probably has the actual demographic data somewhere tucked away in a giant book. Uh, it, it's becomes pretty important. So I would say for me as I age, increasingly important. Mm. Can I just, sorry. One other thing that we should mention, of course, is the fertility discussion, right? The, the younger you are, and this is the problem with the old looks maxing community of dudes totally screwing themselves over from like a legacy and childhood standpoint when they're 16 years old. Um, you know, we, we do need to bear in mind that a 30 year old who may be hypogonadal and may still face some of this uphill battle in terms of a post-industrial lifestyle or a modern lifestyle, keeping them that way and not being able to do things besides testosterone replacement therapy needs to know there's an impact on fertility and their practitioner needs to be aware of like methods to, to maintain, uh, Did I froze sperm quality? I froze my sperm last year, just in case I ever wanted to get on TRT at some point I'm not on it. And I was like, ah, I just feel like it's probably a good insurance policy. And it is so cheap. You want to talk about some fucking patriarchy. One of the places that it definitely exists is how cheap it is for guys to freeze their sperm compared Yeah, well, it's probably less expensive to use you're using Mike's butcher shop down the street for this great solution. Yeah. And also we just because someone goes on testosterone, there are like you had mentioned, there are interventions like HCG, you have to work with a provider that knows doesn't mean you're going to be infertile. 10% of men just at baseline have low fertility, 2% of men have like no sperm. So if a guy is hypogonadal and he's younger, he should still be treated. You should bank his sperm. You should give him the appropriate discussion, give him him some hcg but you wouldn't want to withhold a medical treatment i just think it's a it's a mistake and if we don't de-stigmatize the idea that somehow testosterone is gonna ruin the world and make them it's wrapped up in a moral panic i'm kind of fascinated by the i've never thought about it before but the equivalency of glps on one side yes and testosterone on the other like morally there shouldn't really be much difference between the two one is helping you eat less and one is helping you build more muscle and your hormonal profile to improve i get the sense that a good bit of it is that one side is quite male coded and one is to do with aggression and sort of dominance and pursuit and forward motion and another is a somewhat more female coded which is that it's helping you to lose weight maybe a little be a little bit more slender and this looks like health and the other one looks more like luxury perhaps or or unnecessary enhancement yeah everybody knows a fat person that loses weight it's like you didn't need that so you can see it visually you can't see someone's low testosterone in the same way so i wonder that's a really fucking interesting but what happens when a woman goes on a glp1 and her testosterone is low she tells her sister i i have low testosterone i'm gonna start testosterone she's like oh my god you're gonna start steroids and then she's shamed but so we know that a person will go on uh typically a glp1 for two years and come off now um essentially there's a weight cycling so it becomes a skinny fat situation and they've lost now lean tissue and they put on fat and let's say in a profile of a decreasing milieu her estrogen goes down her testosterone goes down all her hormones go down but then because of this stigma she's ridiculed or shamed because now she's on steroids and so in a moment where we have the ability to shift her life and her trajectory she doesn't take it because of all the noise that she's now producing and that's a that's a problem i didn't even realize the stigma was that significant for women it is and testosterone for a man is the number one biomarker there is no other biomarker that reflects the risk of type 2 diabetes that reflects the risk of potential depression and when you say biomarkers i like the whole hormone out of all of them total t free t everything yeah well i mean so i would say total testosterone because again it's really free t which is a really good point but if i had to pick one biomarker it would be testosterone so let's say if we take that back to soldiers if we and we don't routinely screen them that one biomarker will give us more information into their future than any other biomarker i want to know what's happening with peptide access right now because you were part of this big hearing that recently happened if you're going to spend an hour in the gym you might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it 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gym.sh slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 10 a checkout that's gym.sh slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10 a checkout what what happened inside of the fda so what's going on no thank you that's a good question so um i've been trying to ring the bell on this since it started uh during the biden administration the fda it kind of in a vacuum blindsided the public by putting peptides on the naughty list and said these 17 peptides are now considered dangerous to compound um meaning overnight the regulatory landscape shifted and so compounding pharmacies like mine legally could not make a safe product that had been in the market oftentimes for more than five six years um and with no heads up like we weren't seeing adverse safety data nothing uh one of the ways that i've tried to prove this is i submitted multiple FOIA requests um to the fda over the last three years and they had not responded to a single FOIA request um so when secretary kennedy was put into this position and was given the opportunity to try and drive change this was one of the first things i discussed with him was hey we've submitted these FOIA requests we haven't gotten answers industry's just asking for guidance we're not making this but you created a gray and black market overnight and so just two weeks ago they federally indicted a gray market peptide manufacturer out of florida who was buying all of his api from china that was tainted with testosterone and so women were injecting an api is the pharmaceutical ingredients so it's the base product that you use to compound the medication um so that being said after a lot of lobbying begging pleading and flights to dc and uh thank god for guys like joe i'll say thank you for your time and i'll see you next time and i'll see you next time in itself we could write a book on it literally they had the the group built out um we submitted over 800 studies 800 pay 5 000 pages of documents um we did a retrospective analysis of 16 million patients that were on bpc 157 out of that we found three adversaries that were on bpc 157 and we found three adverse events three adverse events yeah somebody said that by the hundreds of thousands of of uses of multiple peptides including bpc and like the the number of adverse events was close to zero correct i'm almost and versus let's look at what seven this is one of the largest retrospective analysis ever done of a medication and so i want to be clear because another famous influencer clinician just took to the internet and tried to debunk this hearing uh the hearing wasn't about efficacy we this is what this is a confusion for people it's all about safety because what people fail to realize again going back to the process and the legal structure if you file for a new drug indication what i am asking you for is to give me medicare medicaid tricare dollars i'm asking you to force employers to cover a treatment for an employee because 90 of americans get their coverage through employers and so that's the reason insurance plans go up every year because they're monetizing all this stuff and so this is not that world this is a cash pay product for a patient using their hard-earned money to decide under the supervision of a clinician to fulfill this prescription through a board certified pharmacy that is inspected by both the state and federal government and we had a safe pathway and that pathway was removed in a vacuum with no evidence and then we went and argued with evidence submitted over 5 000 pages of studies and the fda in in this environment gave these clinicians literally like a week to review and they were like oh my god this is a bad thing and they're like oh my god this is a bad thing and they're like oh my god this is a bad thing and they're like oh my god this is a bad thing review everything so these doctors these poor doctors are trying to cram for the test before they come in here and we had submitted it a month in advance and then the fda releases a statement to the public with a black market peptide api data set saying we are going to stand against this most likely even if these clinicians vote yes and by the way here's a certificate of analysis from a it wasn't a compounding pharmacy it was a fucking black market manufacturer that had already been shut down why so it was very misleading that's a difficult question to ask i don't again we when we sat in there the clinicians began to get so frustrated that at one point one of the fda individuals said hey look i just want to be clear we're not intentionally hiding or misrepresenting data and the clinician was basically saying well yeah it really feels like that like it doesn't feel like you were giving us a shot at this they ended up overturning six out of the seven peptides but here what was disappointing though is the fda all voted straight line one way the clinicians that use these products and are actually clinicians end users in the medical space all voted straight line yes and it was like but here clear which pathways they were on this is a really good point because maybe you can clear this up is that physicians practicing physicians will say well why are there no randomized control trials yeah why is this data mechanistic data why rodent models animal models if you can prove it mechanistically then we should be able to see it in some type of randomized control trial and i think that and so yeah that's that's great a great so actually on bpc we submitted i think four or six human studies i can't remember i don't want to let's say four to be safe at least four human studies now the issue with a peptide is you cannot patent something that is readily available in nature that's patent law in the united states so look at what's going on with the glp-1s 503a patient-specific pharmacy can compound a glp-1 weight loss drug it is infuriating the big pharmaceutical cartels because they're like wait a second we spent billions of dollars to make these drugs and so a lot of the pressure on peptides as a class has come because big pharma is monetizing these at a new level and so in one breath you've got these big pharmaceutical companies telling the fda these are dangerous these are this these are that in the next breath eli lily goes and spends seven billion dollars to acquire a peptide manufacturer out of china murk is attempting to patent over 200 potential future cutting peptides but a lot of the physicians who are or were prescribing peptides they they have a pathogen pathway via an IRB to be able to start to gather data, right? To actually show what's actually working in applications and saving patients. But again, an IND, and this is the general gist of the FDA stance from what I can gather being at this, I testified and gave my two cents on what I think and where we are and how we got here. But the general rebuttal of the FDA as a stance is, well, we have an IND process, so go get a new drug indication. And my rebuttal is, Apothecary precedes Big Pharma. The founder of Pfizer was a compounder. Compounding has been in existence for over a hundred years. In 1997, Congress passed a bill to protect compounders that said, we are going to allow the patients and clinicians to prescribe unique medications to a patient and provide accessibility. And the problem is if we hand the keys to the castle over to industry, and I said this in my speech to the Senate, if Eisenhower, everyone talks about Eisenhower's speech in the military industrial complex. The second half of Eisenhower's speech, she talked about the scientific industrial complex and what would happen if we hand science over to industry. And if we allow industry to control our scientific processes and protocols, and that is where we are headed. And that is terrifying because what you will have is everyone getting the same dose GLP-1. You're going to have everyone getting the same, because this is what we have a double-blind placebo-controlled trial on. And this is where academia drives me mad. Because when Rogan posted his pictures of plasma, phoresis, some dipshit doctor talks about how it wrecks the immune system. No, this is a 24-hour decrease in your immune response. And he talked about how this is pseudoscience. Plasma phoresis does have a double-blind placebo-controlled randomized trial. And that double-blind placebo-randomized trial showed that it actually took 18 months off of your biological age on people over the age of 50. But people want to split hairs and decide when they want to use double-blind placebo. And that is why we have to have a double-blind placebo-controlled randomized trials and when they don't. Well, here's what I've seen in medicine. But this is what is so relevant here is that there's a need for improved care. And because there's a need, that's why people are reaching for peptides. That's why people are looking for plasma phoresis. Typically, the consumer, the patient will drive forward, say, plasma phoresis for something that is different than, say, myasthenia gravis or something that is an indigestion. And that's why people are looking for a new medication. But this is how we start to grow. I mean, before, no one thought mold was a thing. I moved to New York. I got really sick. No one was talking about mold, whatever, 15 years ago. And all my blood work was great. And I was living in, you know, stocky botrys. And now, environmental testing is more of a thing. But there is the patient and then there's the need that we have to fulfill. And hopefully, the science catches up. The idea of randomized control is not a good idea. It's not a good idea. I mean, they're valuable. We still need that for peptides. Maybe not within your sphere, but the general medical community, they need randomized. My argument is this is about medical accessibility and medical freedom. Yes. And if a patient under the supervision of a clinician, under the guidance of a subject matter expert, wants to utilize a compound that is safe, who is the federal government to obstruct a safe pathway and force them to a dangerous pathway? And if people love randomized control, trials, I would say, let's look at the products that have hit the market. What happened with Oxycontin? What happened with all of the anti-inflammatories? What happened with antidepressants? In the second largest retrospective study analysis of a drug that went through randomized control trials, what did we see? 25 years later, what we saw is antidepressants don't fucking work. They work for a small subset of the population. They barely differentiate from placebo, yet they increase suicidal ideation, suicidal tendencies, violent thoughts. Most of the school shooters were on antidepressants. We have created a colossal disaster for a product that in its own scale that was developed from a Pfizer consultant does not differentiate barely by one point from placebo. But yet we've spent trillions of dollars on these medications. Public service announcement brought to you by Saffron. Yeah. Who gets to decide how much risk people should be able to take with their bodies? Like, should the FDA protect people from making bad medical decisions or, like, at what point, basically, how much evidence should be required before adults can access experimental treatment? That's a difficult one. I think it's risk-reward. I say this with everything. Again, peptides are not a silver bullet, right? They're a tool in the tool belt. But for somebody who's, a real-world example is Brett Favre. He's diagnosed with Parkinson's. This Parkinson's is terminal. It is progressive. The doctors basically say, we've got nothing. But there are things that can help. That have a shot at helping. And a lot of those trials are in other countries and not accepted here. But there are modalities that he's getting benefits from. And those modalities are being obstructed. And so I believe in a patient's right to choose. And one of the things we're working on here in Texas, Congresswoman Lacey Hull is going to submit a bill in Texas that's going to be the Right to Try Act. And the Right to Try Act is going to try and provide patients in Texas with medical freedom. And we're trying to do the same. at the federal level. The belief is, through citizens' petitions, if you're a chronically ill patient, or you have a terminal disease, or you have some sort of catastrophic debilitating issue, why is the government stopping you from using a stem cell product? Why is the government stopping you? This is the end of your runway. Beyond a threshold of severity in terms of your health, you're allowed to throw anything that you want at the wall within reason? I think you should. That's my personal opinion. But so a lot of that would still be out of pocket though, right? All of it's out of pocket. Yeah, none of this would be covered by insurance, which goes back to the main crux of the issue. If somebody wants to spend their cash to sun their. Who are you to tell? If I want to fly to Thailand for double Bs, I can do it. Yeah. I just got to pay for it myself. And so where people are leaving the country to go get treatments, and it's like, these treatments should be available here. We don't need Big Brother impacting every decision. And I get protecting the consumer, but where was that protection with the antidepressants, with the OxyContin, with the level of corruption we've seen from our regulatory bodies that are supposed to be here to protect us, right? And those people are swapping spit oftentimes with industry at a level that's nauseating. But it's challenging because you might be doing something in a way that is ethical. But if you've got another compounding pharmacy, like in Florida, where they're putting all this crap in, how do we protect the people? I do believe in medical agency. I do believe that people should have the freedom to do whatever they want. If they want to use a medication because they have five pounds to lose, they should be able to get to choose. We should not, as physicians, ever dictate what an individual wants to do. There has to be agency. But then the question is, how do we protect the people that don't know and think they're getting one thing? I think we have to assess it as a different model. That's where I keep going with this. There's the insurance model, and then there's the cash pay model. And in the cash pay model, we don't need a new drug indication that costs $300 to a billion because it's going to stifle and limit innovation. And that entire model was built around a framework that was built by industry that has a reason to build a moat around accessibility of care because they are monetizing chronic disease at an astronomical level. That's why the average American in the 80s was on one prescription drug, and now the average American's on four or more prescription drugs. But we're the sickest country developed nation in the world. So in a perfect world for you, like in a cash pay, model, there would be right to try in every state. I think right to try and under the supervision of a clinician. That's an important caveat. Like I believe in putting a doctor holding me back. I believe in the sacred relationship of a patient and clinician. I believe that most clinicians, when given the opportunity, want to do what is right for their patient. And oftentimes their hands are tied. And they will go, like even you, you were very weary to say, I have a patient who's sick, but I don't want to prescribe off-label because it puts your license at risk. But that's a travesty because that patient needs help. And we shouldn't have to look over our shoulder. I remember this was during COVID. I had written a prescription for an indication for ivermectin for something. This was before it was all crazy. And I got a letter saying that if I ever did this again, that it would affect my license. Addressing the horse pace doc. But also this person, we test for parasites. There was an indication that whatever, they didn't care whether I put that indication. They shut us down as a pharmacy. They sent us a letter saying they would revoke our pharmacy license in the state of Texas. If we ship one more prescription of ivermectin, that they would shut down our pharmacy. I can ship ketamine. I'm not allowed to ship ivermectin. But can you imagine as a provider being restricted, being told that I can't write a script for a. They don't know what I'm treating. We treat parasites all the time. And it was just, it's terrifying because providers, clinicians, we spent our lives dedicated to being able to care for people. Talking about experimental forward thinking stuff, getting into some fun things. What are the most exciting interventions that you've come across recently? Some of the most experimental things that you've been playing around with? Oh man. I mean, we were just talking about plasmapheresis. That's an interesting one just because there's all sorts of different blood and plasma filtration. I don't know if you've heard of it. I don't protocols that people are turning to for microplastics for lipid management, for mold. Can you explain the plasmapheresis? I did, by the way. Plasmapheresis, like, yeah, like, literally, like, pulling your blood out, filtering the plasma, replacing typically with either albumin or, in some cases, like, actual human plasma or, like, Brigham has this soup of, like, stem cells and exosomes and all sorts of cool stuff that you can get put in. And so, the idea is it's like an oil change for the body. And, you know, there's even places, like, in Mexico and Europe that will do blood filtration, not just plasma, different filtration mediums that are designed for different purposes. Like, there's a heparin-based filter that is designed for spike protein, right? Like, a sticky fly trap for spike protein for something like long COVID. There's another one called the marker filter that is for microplastics. That's a specific filtration medium for that. So, that's one that a lot of people are, like, electively doing out of pocket. A lot of times, internationally, like, TPE, like, you can literally do that at Brigham's Clinic. Like, you can do a basic plasmapheresis very easily, you know, depending on how many times you're squeezing a little rubber ball that you get to hold two, you know, four or five hours, but you're just basically sitting in a chair. And then the problem with that, though, is, like, when that was what I was alluding to earlier, when a guy like Joe posts that, immediately. Immediately, it's like, this is my moment for these clinicians, and they just tag his video and throw it up, and they're trying to just riff and, like, coast off of the momentum that he created for it, debunking it, right? And this is where I get, it's like, you're an academic. You're now trying to debunk a placebo-controlled randomized trial. Like, at what point do we, like, pick a side? Do you believe in randomized controlled trials, or do you not? You know, like. Well, presumably, they're saying that they have contrary data. To the first randomized controlled trial? His main thing is, there's only one major study that demonstrated this, and the rest is anecdotal. But they've used plasmapheresis in hospital systems for decades. And it's still used. So, plasmapheresis. So, plasma is where they believe that the antibodies. So, for example, if someone has a reaction to something within their body, depending on what the disease is, it exists within the plasma. It's concentrated somehow. Again, I'm not an immunologist, but to the best of my knowledge, within this plasma, it's also. So, where toxins and all this other stuff live that, say, wouldn't be able to be excreted by the body through urine or feces or sweat naturally. So, plasmapheresis is used in hospitals to this day, where they use it for things that are, you know, extreme. Burned victims. Anyone who's been exposed to a level of mold and toxins. A real-world example, too, would be, again, Jelly Roll. Like, I hate to keep saying it, but he, because he lost so much weight, he was chronically inflamed. Even though we were doing a ton of this stuff. A ton of things to bring down his inflammation. All of that weight loss, you can only sweat it out so much. You can only excrete it so many ways. It ends up putting a major load on the kidneys. And a lot of it back to, like, the last piece. But it's transfer. And then it started impacting his sleep. And then as soon as we run him through plasmapheresis, he calls me. He's like, Bubba, whatever the hell y'all just did, I have not slept this great in years. Yeah, people talk about, like, a sauna for, you know, do the natural version, just sweat it out. But, I mean, if you look at the size of a microplastic, they range, like, the unit. Of measurement is a Dalton. And so the size of a microplastic ranges anywhere from, like, slightly under 100 to up to 1,000 Daltons. And what a sweat gland can actually pass through is, like, 100 Daltons. So arguably, maybe one-tenth of the microplastic exposure that you have, you can actually sweat out in a sauna. And considering that most of the microplastics, for example, in the food supply, like in plastic packaging or drinking out of a cup in Starbucks, are way larger than 100 Daltons. You just can't get rid of that in the sauna. Like, it's an inconvenience. In truth. But if it's getting into your body, at this point, it's pretty difficult to remove it. There are some gut binders. There's probably, like, 10 different supplement companies. Like Avmacol and stuff like that. Yeah, just over the past few months, people have been, like, mailing me whatever, like a sulforaphane-based compound for microplastic removal or some other, like, binding stack that supposedly removes it from the gut and possibly via some sort of osmotic gradient from the tissue as well. But none of those are that proven. And so that's an example of, like, well, at some point, you just got to filter it out. The problem with that is it's, you know, it's a long and expensive protocol that not everybody's going to do. But eventually, maybe there will be a way to democratize it. We've seen that with a lot of medical treatments. That's the goal with all of this is to make it affordable for the masses. And I think the biggest thing I've seen is- I think we should on Shark Tank, like, to suck it and just- Wait, what is that? I've never seen that. We're going to come out with it. How long does it take your body to replace the plasma? Because I think this is one of the concerns. You've got this period. You've got this period of time. You've gotten rid of all of this plasma. So you're immediately- What you'll do is we'll add back in albumin. And so you immediately- At the same time. Yeah, you immediately have that replenishment. The big critique is, or what people have tried to critique, is there is a drop in your immune system. But the truth is that drop is for 24 hours. So we were just talking to one of your buddies, and he just did it, but then he got on a flight. I was like, ooh, man, I would not have done that. And what happened? Did he get sick? He felt run down and not great. Yeah, it's that. There's also the risk of- The catheter, depending on where that is placed, having a rupture or an issue. But you have a compromised immune system for 24 hours. So that is a legitimate risk. And this is, again, anything in medicine, you have that discussion. You make sure you tell that patient for the next 24 hours, you will have a compromised immune system. And then after that, your immune response is boosted. And all of that inflammation that was in your plasma is removed. And all of those shock proteins and all these different things that are causing so many issues, we're basically taking out the trash. Years and years of inflammation and gunk with albumin, young, clean albumin. What's albumin? It's literally a, yeah, it's just a protein that instead of- It's just a placeholder. And some people will replace it. Same thing about egg white. Egg white has a ton of albumin in it. It's just basically- Egg white. You're putting egg white. Yeah, just get it. Yeah, I mean, very, very similar. Yeah. Okay. What are the strongest longevity interventions that are cost-free? Because much of this stuff sounds maybe difficult to access. People are outside of the country. So, yeah, epidemiologically, yes. Lifting, grip strength is often identified as a metric, but it's not because people have like big, meaty hands, live longer. It's because people who lift heavy objects and do some type of manual labor or artificial manual labor inside of a gym tend to have high grip strength as a byproduct of that. So, you're not going to live longer by having like a hand grip dynamometer in your car that you're squeezing all the time. It'll make a little bit of a difference, but physical activity that exhausts the grip would be one. VO2max is another one. And I think the misperception is that you need to do like these like fancy Norwegian 4x4 protocols to significantly increase VO2max, meaning like four minutes maximum sustainable pace, balls to the wall, four-minute recovery, four times through as a sample prescribed protocol for VO2max. I mean, just yesterday, there was a study that came out that showed that small bursts anywhere from three to five times a week of 10 to 20 seconds had an impact on VO2max. So, these are all things that you can do. So, like tiny bursts, like on an airdyne, just quick sprints. Do you think VO2max or muscle mass is more important when it comes to training for longevity? If you could pick one? I would choose. How are you defining longevity? If I had to pick one, I would choose muscle mass because I think low muscle mass, I'm not just saying this because Gabriel's sitting next to me, puts you at a higher risk for frailty. And I think frailty is one of the, like not being able to outrun a lion is less likely to kill you than like stepping off a curb and being frail. Like with the VO2max equation, like joking aside, yes, VO2max can have a significant impact on cardiovascular health, but you can get pretty good cardiovascular health, including blood pressure management with strength training. So, if I had to choose one, it's an unrealistic scenario anyways, based on how easy it is to do VO2max. You do both. And then the last one that I would name is like a free intervention. If we're not going to talk about like Harvard's longest running study on longevity and happiness, relationships, love, all of that. Have a friend. Boring, esoteric stuff aside, I would be walking speed. Yes, 7,000 to 8,000 steps a day is advisable, but the actual speed of walking, the pace, like the actual cadence of the walking is important. So, VO2max, grip strength, and walking speed would be the three that I would choose. I don't remember the actual like pace based on whatever you would measure. Quicker than you might think. Like six seconds. The way I think about it is like walk slightly faster than what your brain wants to do. There was, I don't know if it's still available, a device called a counter pace, like a heart rate strap that you could wear that tied to ear pods that tracks your heart rate and then helps you maintain a cadence that matches that heart rate so that your foot strike is occurring during the diastolic phase of heart pumping. So, you're essentially like teaching your heart how to pump with each step. So, that's like. Very similar like counter pulsation therapy they would do at a hospital for like, you know, post heart attack, but the idea is just like when you're walking, try to walk. It's like resonance breathing, but resonance walking. Kind of like that, yeah. Yeah, you're up and down with the breath, but this, you're step and step with the heartbeat. Yeah. That's fine. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Those would be three. I think if you were to look at the VO2max versus muscle mass thing, if you were to say somebody is a five out of 10 on both, where would you start? Because it seems to me that the muscle mass thing is largely talking about being protective in later life, frailty, falls. hip replacements, stuff like that. - Metabolic health. I don't know, I just, coming from the background of being such a bro, VO2 max was never anything that anybody really considered. And it seems like that's really had the ascendancy recently. And it gets chased a lot as a number. It's largely reflective of cardiovascular health. I mean, it's definitely like if you're competing as like, I don't know, Ironman marathon or swim or whatever, like VO2 max is important as a performance metric. But the reason that it tracks with longevity is not necessarily because maximum oxygen utilization is going to help you live longer. At least I don't think that. I think it's because it's reflective of overall cardiovascular health in the same way that grip strength, having strong hands, I can hold onto something for a long period of time, isn't going to make you live longer. But what you got you those strong hands is- Everything Ben's saying is like, that's, when I, again, go back to what you do, what we do, comparing it to traditional medicine, somebody comes in, the first thing we do is comprehensive blood work. That's one thing. That's one thing. One tool and one assessment, but we also run them through a DEXA. And then we do a VO2 max, a walking VO2 max to assess their cardiovascular condition. You give me those three things. I put it into the AI algorithm. I cross-reference all of that. And we begin to model out all cause mortality. And I can begin to project if you're headed towards a chronic disease. So like in traditional medicine, somebody shows up sick, you write them a pill. Somebody gets it, you mask the symptom. And it's like, but why aren't we just practicing proactive predictive medicine? Like what you're doing in your practice, you can prevent 1.7 million Americans are dying every year of chronic disease. That's more than every war we've ever fought in the history of America in a year. And it's all preventable. But it's not longevity. And I wish there was another name for it because the reality is, and I think it's health span. I think it's muscle span, but yeah, health span. But I think, you know, as a geriatrician, which means I've taken care of a lot of dying people, that there is a one harsh reality. And that is, you know, nobody gets out alive, no one. And so is this, you know, increase in longevity, just a distraction from the end result, which is that we will all die. And at some point, we have to recognize that that it's going to happen. It is how we live within that timeframe. And, you know, maybe there's a genetic push past 85. We don't know. I mean, there's genetic genetics play a role. We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. So, yes, being strong, being capable, not restricting protein. I know that you had a guest that was talking about protein restriction. That's, that's not where I would say that. Not a lot of people need to hear that right now. But my argument is always, if we can buy you time, I would say we can buy your health span time to keep you healthy longer. There are folks like David Sinclair, my buddy, Dr. Ian White, Ian's 22 years stem cell research at Harvard at the bench. Yeah, that's, those are interesting. And what he'll break down is pretty crazy. And this is why I have dinosaurs and jellyfish at our clinic. Because he literally breaks down that we share a common ancestor with every species on earth. We share DNA with the eternal jellyfish. Within us is a black box code. And there are companies in Texas right now that are doing gene activation. And we can literally inject you with a virus that will go turn on a gene that has been turned off, right? We can tell your body to put on more muscle. We can turn on a gene that has been turned off. We can turn on a gene that can increase bone mineral density eightfold. These things exist today. And so my only thing, getting more into the biohacking woo-woo like futuristic, is can we buy you time? Can we through common practice, not the woo-woos, through just good old bread and butter, smart medicine, buy you health span until one of these brilliant people crack the code of how do we turn on that gene? How do we turn on the jellyfish gene? And aging is not abnormal. The idea that we're not going to, I mean, aging is normal, but the chronic disease, that's not normal. That's not a normal part of aging. And we've come to normalize all of that. And that's a problem. So if we stop stigmatizing testosterone and allow us to replace the things that we need, then. Yeah. Well, perhaps there's a through line here because if you downregulate fertility enough and don't have children, that might be a viable life extension setting a message to your lizard brain that you better stick around as long as possible because you have no progeny. So once you're gone, the game's over. Oh, hold on. You got to hold on. So yeah, basically, yeah, I would say the most significantly, potentially significantly impactful life extension strategy would be- Not having kids. Don't have kids. Don't jerk off, don't have kids. Okay. What do you make about the criticism? So Dr. Daniel Lieberman, who came on the show and I asked him about what's he think the current recommendations coming out of, I guess, our side of the world around one gram per pound, one gram kilo to one gram per pound of body weight for protein. And he just sort of looked and was like, I think it's overblown. I don't think that people need that much. It doesn't really seem to make that much sense to me from a longevity standpoint. It doesn't seem to be that much evidence. I've looked at every big diet on the planet. That's interesting. He wasn't invited to the protein working group, which was all the hundred finest scientists, protein scientists. And they disagreed on some things and they disagreed on others. I don't know this gentleman, so it's not a knock to him. But in this room, these were the finest protein researchers from all over. Would that not mean that they're kind of biased? No, they don't all get along. So some of them are low protein researchers. Well, yes, they are all the protein experts. Some agree on 1.1. I mean, they're all over the place. So what they do is they present the evidence to the best of their ability, all the evidence that have been done. And what they came up with is that they're there is no evidence that going below the minimum requirement has benefit at all. So going below like 0.55 grams per pound. They argued is it, could you go from, is 1.1 better than 1.4? Potentially is anything better than 1.6 grams? No, no one agreed that. So that's not one gram per pound. What about protein cycling though? Like the idea from like an autophagy standpoint of like a fasting mimicking diet on a quarterly basis or a period of protein cycling? Protein restriction to simulate or stimulate autophagy. And then most of the time you're actually eating whatever the 0.8 to 1.2 grams per pound. So to be clear, I was not invited there as a guest researcher, but I was there interviewing these guys. And one of the things that was interesting is that in terms of human trials, it seems as though the sweet spot for aging and optimal health to find that as you will is closer to 1.2 to 1.6. grams per kg. So it's not one gram per pound, which is what I recommend. It's slightly below that. And what you're talking about is this idea of protein cycling. So the body turns over 250 to 300 grams of protein a day. As we age, we become less efficient at that liver turnover, all of this stuff. As we age, if we then begin to restrict protein, this is not moving in a positive direction. And all the aging, there's no aging data in humans that would suggest that we're over consuming protein. Is his argument that we're over consuming protein? The data doesn't support that. I was going to say, because most people, I feel like everyone I know doesn't. I think he was making an epidemiological case. Or observational, or association. If I know the Lieberman you're talking about, that you don't come across a lot of long-lived cultures who are feeding at the levels that are currently recommended by a kook like this. Here's what's relevant. Do you not see, because I'd like to keep it simple, stupid, because my brain's not smart enough to figure all this out. I did give you my book, which has pictures. Yes, and I've read it, but what I learned- Reagan tried to color them in. That's why it wasn't- Yeah, I thought it was a coloring book. To be fair, the Forever Strong playbook, I will give it a plug. It took me two years to write, and it has pictures to make it simple and stupid. And it's digestible. I love it. And my main thought was- He actually ate it. Is we, yeah, if we prioritize, I've learned in my life, if I prioritize protein, it is a caloric, dense, nutrient-rich aspect. Of my diet. And I will eat less of the ultra-processed, less of all the bad things. Just anecdotally, I'm not saying, there's no science behind what I'm saying. I'm just looking at it going, if I prioritize protein, it fills me, it fills my appetite. Yeah, it's hard to calorically overeat on protein. I can't, it's hard to overeat. Yeah, if I eat a steak, I'm done. Yeah, yeah. And so, do you not see a value in, or would he not see a value in prioritizing protein first as part of your diet? You're arguing for the benefits of protein. You're arguing for the benefits of protein intake as a calorie restriction mechanism. Yes. Yeah. And do you know- I imagine he would, I imagine he would do too. I think my question is something like, what do you think about one gram per pound of body weight? It's on the higher end, yeah. That seems to be more than is necessary. I would agree with that statement. That is more than is necessary. I mean, it depends too. Like, I have 18-year-old sons and they're probably hitting 1.4 to 1.5 grams per pound right now based on my grocery bills. But they're also highly anabolic. They're growing like- Yeah. They're lifting every day. So, it's pretty population specific. What about- That is exactly what they came to in the summit. What about fiber? There you go. Because I've been pretty good at sort of licking my finger, putting it in the air and working out what way the wind's blowing. I think the protein thing everyone could see a little while ago. Creatine, I was early on creatine. I was early on water quality. I think air quality, stuff like jasper and mold, I think that's going to be a huge thing. Love jasper, yeah. Next after that, I think it's going to be light, light quality and light pollution. I think, and it's slowly sort of trickling through the echelons of how- health fiber to me seems to be just about sort of taking that it's at the hockey stick moment here and i get the sense that protein and fiber are going to be a little antagonistic to each other when it comes to designing a diet so i'm interested in what you guys think when it comes to fiber optimizing gut health everyone gives a fuck about bloating and digestion and leaky gut that's exactly it is i i don't think that that uh high protein intake necessarily rules out fiber but what you were just saying is the one thing that flies under the radar yes uh fiber um is is beneficial for everything from glycemic variability to bowel movements to uh the the microbiome and the fact that it's it's often a food for uh probiotics leading to postbiotic production the issue is the large number of the population that has issues like small intestine bacterial overgrowth or diverticulitis or some form of of of ibs you I'm like what the gut biome looks like and what someone's especially like like the gas production by specific bacteria in the gut looks like before you decide what kind of fiber someone should be on or the fermentable nature of that fiber like inulin and chicory root and shit like that completely screws some people over as far as gas and bloating it feels and then for other people it's great gut food it feels like fiber is much more uh individually variable that you could probably look at most people and say yeah if you had like one gram per kilo of body weight of protein like you'd probably be all right whereas yeah if you threw a bunch of oxalates at one person from spinach that's not being cooked they're gonna have a very different response to somebody else who doesn't have that kind of gut microflora yeah i think that's i think that is a frontier that we don't know about and i think that's a frontier that we don't know about and i think that's a frontier that we don't know enough about my prediction is the food matrix conversation is next the bro bodybuilding sphere we're great there's uh i guess i would include myself in there boiled chicken egg whites we know what the protein is we know the macros rice chicken but what we don't know is how for example there was a study that came out on high fat dairy we don't actually understand how the fat in dairy the compounds then work with the protein and the protein and the macros so it's not repeatable it's not supplementation it is within the dynamic of say for example a steak yes has protein yes has b vitamins but it has and serine taurine it has these other what you imagine as a phytonutrient in plant it has its own carny nutrient and it's how those all fit together we don't really know how the foods all work together is it possible for you guys to give general advice when it comes to phytonutrients and how they work together and eating for gut health through a diet because it seems again this fingerprint each person's flora is slightly different what are the we can say hey one gram per kilo of body weight protein that's probably a good baseline can you give me equivalent baselines when it comes to fiber intake for humans who just want to have good well i can cheat here because i'm a doctor so we test we don't guess we do stool tests we do breath tests we do tests so if you have small intestinal bacteria overgrowth we would treat that we would treat that and we would treat that and we would put you on a diet that was essentially low fodmap so there's there's ways that you can experiment but also test so you're guessing less and low fodmap isn't necessarily synonymous with low fiber but you're literally limiting that's true fructans oligosaccharides disaccharides uh what else uh monosaccharides and oils and so these are specific compounds that if you were to google high fodmap diet you would want to avoid because those are sources of fiber that would cause gas and bloating but that doesn't mean you're going to get fat you're going to get fat you're going to get fat mean that you can't eat fiber at all you can do like like on a low fat mod diet you could do like chia seed slurry right like put a bunch of chia seeds in water soak them have that as like a pudding um uh a lot of times like seeds and nuts you know the fiber and the skin and those that would also be acceptable but then like apples pears garlic onions all that stuff would be out and in some cases like mixed greens romaine lettuce like a lot of things you'd find in salad those are fine you know kale it kind of depends because then there's the whole thing you brought up which is like is all the way down the middle and then you have the whole thing you brought up is all the way down the middle and then you have the whole thing you brought up oxalate sensitivity an issue so gabriel makes a great point it's like we now live in an era where you could get like a jenova diagnostic stool test you could get a trio smart you know sebo breath test and see if you're reactive to certain fiber-based foods those tests are not that expensive we can't just give this what you could say is like have 40 grams of fiber a day or more and if you have gas or bloating when you start doing that go get tested to figure out what's causing the gas yeah we always say yes and but anyways well we'll say yes but like yes this is a good rule of thumb but there's always outliers everybody's different personalized medicine should take a personalized touch to do that it requires the analytics and the data to have the knowledge of you specifically and you're a unique individual so let's look at you as a unique individual and tailor a unique program and it sounds like almost that's what you are both saying this is why people feel overwhelmed by health but it's hard in the modern world because they're like oh well i've got to go and get this fucking special fingerprint test and i'm like no i'm not going to do that i'm not going to do that i'm not going to get anything done and i don't know where to go and maybe i'm in a country that can't provide it or maybe i'm going to have to pay out of pocket and i can't afford it and i'm going to do it and then i'm going to adjust yeah i mean there there are workarounds and there are levels like for example with what we're talking about with the with the the fodmap and the sebo issue there's like an at home breath testing device called a food marble and it gets a pretty decent corollary it's not as good as like a more expensive lab-based test but it can help you to keep track of primarily the fiber-based foods that would cause something like bloating the other thing is just simple food this is the old school tactic for well let's cut everything out let's start from scratch you're going to have steak and chicken and fish and maybe some sweet potato mash kind of like a white rice like a paleo-esque type of approach and then you could start to add in some grain some dairy some different forms of fiber and you're going to get to the point where you can identify within like four weeks an app right to track what was it you could use an app i mean you can easily use like a clod or gpt model now to literally say okay here's everything i ate here's my gas and bloating symptoms and within four weeks you're gonna get a pretty good map of the culprits doesn't have to be complicated to be effective and we live in the information overload and that's the disease the disease is distraction we can fully simplify people know what works well for them if they don't they can track it but you eliminate you keep it simple and you add things in slowly i think we overcomplicate yeah that's what we were saying that's kind of where i was going with the protein is as i say don't let you know don't let perfection get in the way of progress and it's based on what you're doing and it's based on what you're doing you don't have to be perfect just be better make slightly better choices test things out like you're not going to die if you try a fiber and it doesn't work out for you and you're bloated and have stomach upset there was a pear bezoar someone ate it was something like 300 pears and they actually got a you know the hair hair ball of a um it's actually called a pear bezoar and it created a small bowel obstruction who the fuck eats 300 there's one case i think 300 anything is going to cause a small bowel obstruction and it's based on what you're doing and it's based on what you're doing it was a it was a case study i could easily get 300 blueberries i will take on the small bowel obstruction challenge i could make it happen do you guys follow a specific diet yeah it's called the forever strong playbook what is it no no um so it's a higher protein diet i don't eat a ton of processed food at all um prioritized protein we make it very simple i have two crazy kids what about like grains dairy like a lot of people and i think we're starting to see that it has a we do high fat dairy fermented foods um the one thing that we don't eat is a ton of packaged processed foods yeah aside from like beef sticks right but it's sweet sweet potato will eat rice i'm not a low carb person yeah it sounds very like weston a price ish where that's right grains aren't eliminated but they need to be like fermented or soaked or sprouted dairy is like the full fat varietal good meats fermented vegetables where have you come into land now ben obviously you've experimented um i'm i'm pretty close to a paleo diet with a lot of fermented vegetables that like i like most of my carbohydrates are like underground storage uh organs like sweet potato yam purple potato berries and honey uh most of my vegetables are kimchi sauerkraut um and then a lot of hunted wild game meat uh super clean fish that is farmed not wild i know the exact sourcing and that it's clean what has been fed um steak chicken poultry or um um pastured pork and then i do like my dessert is typically uh coconut yogurt like i go through that uh what was it called coco june so good oh my gosh that's the brand oh it's so good coco june blueberries dark chocolate is not only my dessert but i've eaten twice today and that was my meal was just coco june blueberries dark chocolate uh and then and then a little bit of nuts i got macadamia nuts brazil nuts and uh that's pretty much it where are you guys all the peptides where are you getting your fish from a company called sea topia they've got like 30 plus different farms around the world and they very tightly control what the fish is fed they are tested for things like microplastics uh parasites and then they flash freeze and ship to your house and they've got a pretty good varietal just like or a king halibut, uh, some shellfish scallops, uh, and it It's the cleanest stuff I could find. What was that steak company that you gifted me the steaks? And I hope they've got a check in the mail now to me. Because that was insane. Okay, so there's this crazy breed of cattle that originates from the Middle East. Piedmontese fucking rules. No more Piedmontese. Not Piedmontese, kind of. So this breed of cattle originated from the Middle East. And A, they have the myostatin knockout gene, meaning they've got this unparalleled muscle growth. They're jacked. Big Arnold Schwarzenegger-esque cows. The result of that is that the muscle fiber thickness is like one-sixteenth the diameter of a normal Angus cow. So it's super digestible. Like a medium rare is like 95 degrees. That's how fast it cooks. But then these cattle have also developed, based on their origination, sweat glands, which is also something that is less common, but one of the key contributors to off-flavored or cow-flavored meat. And that is tough meat in general, whether it's hunted meat or farmed meat or anything else. Sweaty cows. I have no idea. It's cortisol. So cortisol upregulation causes calcium influx, basically the effect of like product rigor mortis. But a cow that can manage thermal stress eliminates one of the most common sources of cortisol in cattle, which is like being subjected to extremes of heat or cold and being unable to deal with it. So these cows wound up in Canada. There was like a Canadian farmer. Up north on the west side who had like one bull and three cows. A guy, a horse farmer in Washington State connected with these folks in Canada like 30 years ago. This better be the best. Shipped some across the border. This is like the Adam and Eve of the cow world. A year and a half ago, I get an Instagram message from this farm by Spokane. And they're like, we have the only 100% pure Piedmontese beef in all of North America. Usually it tops out at around $6,000. 16 hours but you think there is some special source in a 24-hour fast there is occasionally you just have to balance like the anabolic yeah there's other ways to do it yeah through training there's yeah there's different mechanisms thermal stress yeah there's there's other ways and so if you are somebody who is um who is at risk of frailty or you're just trying to get yoked or no one who's at risk of frailty listens to this podcast that's not true my mom does she's not at risk of frailty this is true hi gabriel's mom what talking about longevity tests you know we're looking at the things that people should be paying attention to where do you think people are wasting money or effort or time the most either on diagnostic or so intervention side things for health more generally like is there a particular type of test that's widely regarded that people think is bullshit and what do you reckon i mean there's there's ones that like we even do but it just gives you more knowledge like the mtfhr but you can do that through process of analysis of elimination like you had said like cutting adapting which supplements you take and using methylated supplements there's is it a necessity no if you you could just do that through process of elimination and save money i think um and this might be a little bit of a contrarian stance but i think there is a great deal of emphasis placed right now on cardiovascular risk potential based on either a cardiovascular risk potential or a cardiovascular risk potential based on either a score right do you have high blood pressure smoking history family history of cardiovascular disease etc and what does your lipid panel look like right not not just like the basic stuff like ldl hgl triglycerides lp little a apple b the issue is that that can be a clue but definitely not a telltale sign of actual plaque deposition in the heart and i am increasingly convinced after seeing so many people who have had a heart attack and they've had a heart attack and they've had a people come back from their cctas like an angiography of the heart like a ct scan clearly usually with ai based diagnostic imaging clearly hard and actually show yes where hard more stable hard plaque which you would typically see in more of like an athletic population who scarred up their heart a little bit or unstable more likely to break loose plaque resulting in a stroke or heart attack lies right so the ai based diagnostic imaging can tell you that and the reason that's important is because in many cases people including myself have a pretty good lipid panel right ldl hcl triglycerides yada yada yada but then you do the ct angiography and you actually see plaque deposition that if not monitored and addressed either you know allopathically with like a like lotostatin or a pcs k9 inhibitor or something similar exactly or um more non-traditionally right with enzymes like lumbrokinase natokinase um there's a new cyclodextrin that's that's that's being in trial right now um to actually break down the plaque you actually could be at risk and not even know it or you could alternatively like be on a statin or a path or whatever else due to high cholesterol and not even need it because you don't have any plaque deposition so the idea of like imaging for the heart you know indirect answer to your question is like i think myopically focusing on a lipid panel is either a causing people to be prescriptive or a lipid panel is either a causing people to be prescriptive or a prescribing medication that they might not need or be telling them they're okay when in fact there can be significant plaque so you're saying rather than obsessing over lipid panel you would just go and get a clear i think anybody who has a history of heart exercise anybody who has a family history of cardiovascular disease i'm not a doctor by the way don't take this as medical advice uh i think even like perimenopause uh you know that the risk goes up significantly we always get what you're saying you'd get it i agree with ct angiography so traditionally which is really interesting after men leave the pediatrician there's no need for them to go to the doctor for example women go to ob-gyn you know they get a gynecological exam but men they leave the why would you have to go to the doctor they don't really have a reason which is a mistake so getting a baseline testosterone baseline cardiovascular testing is great like your boy's age now but then not necessarily treating with medication having a baseline exam by 40 pi we recommend that you have a baseline heart scan both hard and soft plaque what would be the gold standard for that clearly clearly yeah did that fucking clearly thing cubic millimeters but now if you do that for muscle so right now with a dexa i think this is where the future is going right now we look at a dexa dexa compartmentalizes bone uh body fat percentage and then extrapolates lean body fat percentage and then extrapolates lean body fat percentage and then extrapolates lean body mass but we don't look at muscle quality you and i've talked about this a lot yeah we're not imaging routinely muscle quality i believe they do it in japan whether through ultrasound or mri where you see you can occasionally see it if you get if you get a treatment done like a stem cell injection of the doctor using ultrasound you can see the quality of the muscle somewhat uh but it's not done but that's a greater that's a greater driver of say insulin resistance than body fat percentage it's the fat that's in the muscle we don't image so you'd be looking at a whole body mri rather than a dexa yes yes i mean you're gonna sit still for an hour there's not that many there's got to be other ways there's a new there's a new one do you see the water when you sit in a basically in a hot tub that mind uh who's developing the ai-based company is about yeah right yeah i forget what it's called uh i don't even know is it them i don't know quantifiably how well it died yeah i just saw it literally stepped into water and it uses frequency-based mechanisms to do some type of a digital signal that's similar to a full-body mri but that's the future yeah i'm telling you that that's the future of medicine you still need a dexa you still need to look at uh bone density but looking at the quality of this tissue i think is you're going to be able to correlate it with insulin resistance and disease outcomes surprising to me that clearly scans for the people that c l e e r l y um that they're not more widely used when heart disease is like the number one killer they are more expensive they subject you depending on the speed of the radiation um once again it's fine and there's there's still holes in the process like if you got a ctn geography in 2024 the software algorithm has changed like six times since then so if you're running the same data through a 2026 uh software that's been updated like the data set is not necessarily going to be similar and most of the time request they're not running it back through yeah you have to request your raw data and run it back through an old data set so there's issues but in general um even if it's not going to be similar it's going to be similar it's going to be similar into like the concierge based medicine category i think more people should be considering a scan like that i don't know how much is it you got any idea how much out of pocket it clearly would be grand maybe yeah i think it's around that i mean that's not cheap but fuck you only you don't need to get it done that much get it done 40 years old as a guy at a baseline it's controversial a lot of people will correlate i've seen up to 97 accuracy claims a carotid intima media thickness score with ultrasound to look at carotid plaque plaque deposition and based on data sets correlate that to what you'd get from a ct angiography and that's like a five minute scan on both sides of your neck um it's just it's it's difficult to put a lot of um it is difficult to estimate how powerful that that prediction is um but there there are a lot of companies uh unfortunately in the cimt space who claim that is really close to ct angiography full body mri which is very controversial we recommend them we recommend them full body mri these are early detection screening tools um you'll hear physicians say why would you screen for something what are you going to do about it well that's like saying i don't want to look under the covers i'm just gonna you know hide put my head in the sand yeah if you know there's an issue you want to find it early freak you out though like there are there are certain things like i have full arthritis like literally like from my cervical then have someone else read it for you and i'm and i have someone else read it for you but like there's a lot of stuff that you you can see and it doesn't necessarily mean that you that is true surgery no or you know that i need to go get my spine operated on no like in my case i do i do stu mcgill's big three hang for the fucking boss shout out stu mcgill dude do a lot of plank training take care of my spine i always have a giant water bottle behind me on an airplane which helps a ton and so i go relatively pain-free but full body mri shows like i'm super effed up like so it can be scary for a lot i think a lot of it though too comes down to good clinicians having good conversations yeah same thing with the cancer screening like we can screen for 200 types of cancer at stage zero yeah we can tell you seven years in advance so we use those all that you use the grail test yes and then it's important to have the nuanced conversation and have the time so traditional medicine will go well you don't need that like we we will you know yeah that is a mistake but it's like it's a yeah and we've seen so uh i helped implement this with soldiers with special operators and we've seen a lot of people that have been in the military and they've been in the military and they've been in the military for a long time because they are exposed to so much stuff they have threefold the risk yes burn pit you name it what's that from being exposed to random particulates yes also shooting guns yeah all that gunpowder is getting absorbed people don't think about it you're absorbing all that through your uh skin and we yes and we've saved guys lives because we were early enough in detection and then even not to go back to microplastics but like this is a crazy one i didn't realize this until we had this meeting and it was the first time we had this meeting and it was the first time we had this meeting and lip gloss moms and dads are buying it yeah but it's it is loaded with microplastics and so they're absorbing plastics and the reason your lips are pink is you have more blood vessels in your lips and so it's a higher absorption rate and so little girls are absorbing crazy levels of microplastics through lip gloss and your first avoid lip gloss and don't eat after loading your mag wow so surely someone's going to come along and make a kid friendly microplastic free what they're arguing today is like at minimal they need to change the labeling of what they call all natural and like mandate that you disclose uh a risk profile and so the texas is looking at potentially forcing companies but what we've learned with food is if you can get two or three big states to do it it's so painful on the big corporations that they'll just change the label everywhere because they don't have to split all of the correct do you think in future we might see kind of the same as in the uk i don't know whether it's the same over here smoking packets have got almost 90 of it is taken up with some horrible artery like it's a warning label can you see the same thing happening maybe around other around maybe microplastics or other contributing elements you mean like a photo of just like teeny tiny testicles on a lip gloss bottle it does decline to infertility yeah yeah but that's one of the reasons why they think that that fertility infertility is increasing that's shana yeah what was it 97 or 99 a minute microplastics in our testicles oh did you see where most of that came from though that it was in the fucking gloves oh if i get to teach all three of you wait you mean the gloves being used in the study yes so the big microplastics the big micro jared pull it up it's hilarious that's crazy microplastics study just such microplastics because they were wearing fucking nitrile gloves that and how how is it that these gloves bend why do they bend because tiny little bits of plastic are breaking off so literally what happened was we're sorry the plastic gloves we were wearing got on the plastic detector of the microplastic study we were doing and contaminated the results so the um yeah it's wild sure there it is gloves may be skewed this is march 29th university of michigan scientists may be unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves university of michigan study found common nitrile and latex gloves released tiny particles called sterates which closely resemble microplastics and can contaminate samples during testing in some cases it's led to wildly exaggerated results forcing researchers to track down the unexpected culprit don't fucking test me dude yeah oh my god there's a lot there's a lot of confusion and misperceptions in the microplastic industry like like the sweat thing is one the chewing gum is full of microplastics issue the the size of the microplastics and chewing gum actually is too large to be absorbed in the gut in most cases in significant amounts of chewing gum is less of an issue and then the um there's another one what do you think of clothing because everyone there's a whole like thing against lululemon and stuff now too well well there was another big study a few weeks ago that that actually compared like how much microplastic exposure do you actually decrease with certain lifestyle-based modifications like your clothing the type of packaging that you store your food in your personal care products which involve shampoo and conditioner whatever which is stored in plastic bottles the number one contributor bar none was oral exposure via plastics in your food so what you store your food in uh or the food that you buy in plastic is the number one contributor so if you can do anything like which by the way is impossible to get rid of your garbage bag like there's a lot of stuff yeah but think about it when you go to the grocery almost everything is in everything and that's the problem we live in a society that right now is pretty much engineered for you to get your food in plastic even if it's healthy even if it's not healthy but even if it's a little level of awareness because you talked about my fit foods i used to use them 10 years ago and i would i was so dumb i would heat up the in the plastic so listen i didn't know like 10 years ago i didn't know i'd heat up my little pre-prep meal in the plastic in a microwave free microplastic now i put it on a plate so i pulled out i asked them to pull me the data from it was their bps in the containers or the cover and there wasn't they used some very expensive company to not have microplastics so when was the first time you used microplastics in your food? we're working at the moment i love their stuff inside every can there's a plastic line that's how you don't get stuff contaminated with the metal however you can use a biodegradable natural plant compound liner so we're looking at how much it's going to cost for us to line this please do that because i drink two of these a day i know i know they're fucking awesome however leave it with me until you find out 10 years from now it's some edamame based phytoestrogen is killing you yeah yeah exactly yeah you're slowly taking over your brain everyone with new tonic a bunch of smart people who can't have kids god damn it yeah yeah i um i think the this sort of current future that we've got moving toward with all of the different diagnostics all of the different interventions like it's what do you think if you were to make some of your predictions for where you think the attention is going to be in future i think air quality is going to be huge that's just about coming online i think light pollution internally flicker led stuff like that is there anything else? social media anabolics bigger and bigger anabolics okay what do you mean social the use of social media like it's we have awareness but i don't think we yet really understand how detrimental it is to children and development like being on technology and the level of technology that kids are exposed to is going to have some sort of major impact that we'll look back and go wow was that like the tobacco of our time the smoking of teenagers in 2026 yeah yeah um no one thought the idea that anabolics what do you mean like the anabolic agents that they use in hiv and wasting that were used like nandrolone yeah things beyond testosterone they're used in hiv and wasting fda approved yeah anabolic agents i think it's going to be you you mean that anabolic agents will become an increasingly popular uh treatment strategy for sarcopenia or yeah there's amazing study on nandrolone and bone mineral density that's right um you guys earlier were talking about free testosterone one of the like little tricks that i think i learned from larry there are there are carcinogen receptors for growth hormone and it might be able to be used for actual cartilage repair as well and then there's things like men who have an issue with free versus total right so you've got their total testosterone at an optimal level but they're free is suffering a lot of times that's um sex binding goblin hormone yeah and so then if you add in a microdose of anabar it will literally like a pac-man gobble up the sex binding goblin i think the elephant in the room with shbg though is that sex hormone binding globulin is also something that increases in a state in which you are in which the body senses something like famine starvation stress or any type of scenario in which it would be unwise to bring more humans into the room to the world right and so so people who are on like a strict ketogenic diet have high shbg people who are under a lot of cortisol load high stress they have high shbg so in many cases like it can be something as simple as just like do like eat more carbs with dinner sleep a little more lower stress seems to yeah it goes up what do you think about nandrolone in older male populations as like obviously you still keep them on a test sip or an anthate but then microdose or low dose i think that that's going to be the way the future and we have to address it and if we if we d in this so we have a mutual friend dr larry lipschultz the godfather of male fertility yeah he's the i've known him for i don't 30 he was the guy who developed the entire like wings and an arrow he's been he's been using peptides for literally like 20 years used to write for gq magazine uh he's got but he's a heavily heavily accredited academic um at baylor college of medicine in houston texas he's literally wrote the book on urology and he's just such a subject matter expert he's the one who originally taught me and like helped me i mean i was i was literally 25 body fat doing crossfit every day trying to eat right couldn't figure things out felt like i was just run ragged and he optimized me to where all of a sudden i went from 25 to seven percent without testosterone he literally used hcg and clomiphene and was one of the first nandrol yeah no he's in his eight but that's the future we have to address it whatever happened to ghrp2 and ghrp6 and mod grf because i was fucking about with that 15 years ago and that i would i'm surprised when we're talking about oh we're gonna have a human growth hormone rather than going exogenous trying to create some endogenous feedback right you mean like like growth hormones secretogogs yes uh i think better options came out and there was such a hunger surge too there was a lot of oh i don't want to say fucking gremlin did you ever use it oh yeah i know and i would sweat you ever try this no no um this is an early uh this is an early growth forming yeah growth hormone releasing hexapeptide and bipeptide you know who prescribed me it was larry lipschultz and this was again like 15 years so we had to do the other peptides we were talking about like tessa morellon and ipiporellon cjc 1295 they've all replaced a lot of those are what people are using now yeah right are they mimicking the same sort of yeah same pathway but without all of the like yeah the with a lower side effect profile and the same dude we used to we used to shoot it when i was in university the only way that you could use it was if you hit yourself with it as you were cooking because by the time that you would finish the meal, you were like beyond ravenous because it's just dumping ghrelin into it like just over and over and over. I mean, it was overwhelming. It was great if you're trying to put on weight. So what happens? Is it still used? No, it's transitioned out. Nobody really uses it. Everything moved to CJC and all these other secretive dogs. There we go. Yeah. Down to your tongue. I think, by the way, you mentioned light pollution. Yes. And you said air pollution, right? Yes. Yeah, I think air quality and light quality are going to be. I think water and electricity are three and four. I think water's already been done. I've already liked electricity. Okay, so water's already been done. Electricity would mean non-native EMF such as Wi-Fi routers, 5G, square waveform signals at a higher intensity and things that may cause either actual thermal heating if very close to the body such as like cell phone radio frequency or low level upregulation of channels in cells related to calcium influx. How crazy do you go in your house? Are you at the Paul Celadino level? Are you that aggressive? My house is pretty aggressive. Like everything is hardwired with metal shielded cables, ethernet. There is no Wi-Fi. Every floor is grounded. I mean, at my house, we pulled out all the stops in terms of circadian friendly lighting to address light pollution. You don't understand. Ben showed me the guy that came in to help. Who'd the buy your home dude? What was his name? Brian Hoyer. Right. So this guy comes in looking like a dude out of fucking Ghostbusters. Like meters. Like more meters than you've ever seen in your life. It's unbelievable. He was like Dr. Octopus. Magnetic and electrical. He's got all of this bullshit attached to his arms and he's going around like spraying for poltergeists and stuff. He's like, I can see in the corner there's some 5G in the corner. We got to get rid of the 5G in the corner. There was a murder here 20 years ago. So do you feel a difference? Oh, you absolutely feel a difference. And a lot of this stuff, of course, has the big fat woo bat signal on it. Because it is an inconvenient truth that there may be an effect on everything from the neurochemical balance in cells based on low level exposure to radiation or radio frequencies or EMF to the effect that it might have on something like negative ion load in the body, which is why I'm a huge fan of the grounded floors, earthing, grounding, going outside barefoot. But I think I don't think that there is a biological free cost to having a radio frequency device in your pocket as some bone scan data suggests might be an issue and sperm data or just sitting next to a Wi-Fi. Somebody broke down. Isn't there in the phone itself, in the iPhone itself, somebody had covered this that it literally tells you you're supposed to keep it a certain distance. You are. Yeah, from your cell. That sounds like a great fucking disclaimer. I think the best metric though is if you eliminate that stuff. And of course, the single most important place to do it is your bedroom where you're not supposed to. Your nervous system has a chance to arguably repair and recover for like eight hours for a 24-hour cycle. But as many places in the home as you can downregulate exposure to that stuff, I think it's a good idea. It's right in the category with light, water, and air. Are you worried about eight sleep then? I do not use an eight sleep for those reasons. I fucking love it. I'm not going to piss them off because I know they're, are they a sponsor? Yeah. Okay. I mean, you can say whatever you want. I use a different one that still cools my bed, but that tests lower with an EMF meter. Right. But okay. So I think. Do you use an EMF meter? Yeah. At least from what I know. Although I prefer for my Ghostbusters. Talking to a bunch of, talking to a bunch of friends, they Faraday cage the cooling tower of their eight sleep. You could do that. And that's where most of the, if you do the actual test to go into them. There's much less on the pad than on the controlling device itself. So yeah. So they just Faraday cage that off. You could totally tinfoil that. Can you give, can you give a layman's explanation? Because a lot of people ionizing, non-ionizing, radiation, blue, I see that you're always with wide headphones, stuff like that. Yeah. What's the 30,000 foot view of the most defensible science behind EMFs exposure to electrical frequencies and stuff like that? Class three Bluetooth signals, which defines most of what we're using on our heads and our ears, et cetera. Very little data showing that there's any deleterious effect at all. So you're talking. That is more like a, I'm not sure, so I'm going to play it safe type of strategy for me to be using wired headphones. Cool. It's your Pascal's wager. Right, exactly. It's a Pascal, it's a technological Pascal wager. For Wi-Fi, for 5G, for 4G, the biggest response to it from a, from an electrochemical balance in the cell standpoint is proximity to the source. Right? So the farther you can be from a Wi-Fi router, for example, in your home or your office, the better. Like your neighbor's Wi-Fi signals, if you've got your home totally tricked out and all your Faraday paint and camera, and cages or whatever is not that big of an issue because they're so far away. But if you're sleeping with your head, whatever, one to two feet on the other side of the wall from the Wi-Fi router, that's where there's a bigger issue. The, there are other things people worry about, electric cars. Teslas are actually designed to be pretty low EMF. There is a signal that exceeds the safety limit if you are in the backseat right next to the battery. So if you like have a kid in the backseat of a Tesla, most of the rest of it is safe. And I have a video online where I went through and tested everything in the Tesla. But if you were going to shield anything, it'd be the actual backseat. And then the other major sources in a home would be like appliances, you know, dryer, washer, microwave only while it's running. Like if you were right next to it when it's running. So basically keeping those appliances as far away as possible from the bedroom or anywhere where you're at for an extended period of time. Basically don't put your laptop on the washer, which I know you do and work from that during the day. Okay. Major appliances. And then the phone would just basically also be A, proximity to the body and B, the bar signal, the lower the bar signal, the higher radio frequency output in order to be searching for a signal. So when the plane is about to land and a hundred people on the plane all turn their cell phones on when you're maybe still like, I don't know, like let's say at 2000 feet and you've still got one bar, that's a pretty hazardous place to be because you all of a sudden have like a hundred devices pushing out a ton of radio frequency because they're all searching for a signal at the same time. So that's where you pull on your tinfoil hat is right when the plane's about to land. That's crazy. Or your EMF blocking suit. My girlfriend literally got me the tinfoil hat. I have an actual EMF blocking suit. What's the fucking hat? I wear one for international flights. I wear a full suit. She got me the cap and she's like, put this on on the plane. When I used to travel with my sons, I have EMF blocking glasses for my sons for long haul flights. Just for the radiation for long haul flights. It's interesting. I actually got this. This is for you to wear today. Hey, I love it. Make autism great again. Hey. This is what I'm going to put on every time I land. Does it block you? I hope so. Dude, I'm fucking blown away by the Tesla thing by sitting in the back seat. I'm going to guess. Lots of the batteries. But for every product problem, there's going to be a solution. So someone is now going to make a child seat, presumably, which has. Wow, I never thought about that. So I have called four body shops and so far found none. And the Tesla dealership, for warranty reasons, won't do it. Who will actually install the shielding material in the back seat? So I have just like a giant piece of fabric from Brian at Shielded Healing that's just like sitting in the back of the Tesla right now. But I haven't actually been able to find anyone who's going to pull the seat out and install it properly like between the back seat and the battery. Did you test it? So there's a great business model out there for someone out there somewhere to do like low EMF shielding for the back seat of a Tesla. Yeah, have you tested it with a blanket? Does it make a meaningful difference? Oh, yeah. When you put the shielding material, the meter drops down. It's ugly to just have a giant piece of shielding material just like propped in the back seat. So I need to get it installed or like underneath the upholstery or. What I found fascinating, it was so funny. I was watching your documentary. Congratulations on the new documentary, by the way. Well, thanks. I was watching this last night and I was looking at you. By the way, he was disappointed that they didn't actually show the penis injection scene. I was only there for the penis. Reliably, I only arrive at events. Me and Zac Efron at the back of the cinema just like, I'm waiting for the penis. Like, show me the fucking penis. One of the things that I noticed was the most Ben Greenfield thing in the world is to design the perfect house to ensure there's no EMFs, everything's local area networked and copper wiring and all the rest of it. Living room, fucking tons of boxes of new shielding material of new shit that he just had sent to his house. Tons and tons of cardboard boxes. And I was like, that's a man who gets lots of packages. I have a soft spot in my heart for a man that receives a lot of packages. It's the worst when you try. I literally have an assistant who sits at home and opens packages and sends me photos to an Asana project when I'm traveling so that everything can be unboxed and put away when I get home because one of my greatest sources of stress when I travel is getting home to all of the boxes. So I've outsourced that. I enjoyed seeing the boxes. A lot of boxes. Lots of cool free things. On the air quality thing, I think that is CO2 is something that I think people are going to pay a lot of attention to but that'll be further down the line. Before that, it's going to be humidity and mold. Just fucking huge. Wouldn't it be amazing if we had small travel mold detectors that you could put on your backpack? Air quality detectors would be amazing. Or like a canary that you could train. For mold? Yeah, for mold. It just drops dead? Yeah, here it is. uh one of the problems that you have and i only found this out from speaking to mike from jasper is that you can't have an air purifier or he calls it a scrubber scrubber but different i know your dad was huge into this stuff right uh my dad was water filtration that was it yeah um you can't have the sensor be in the scrubber because the turnover of air is too high so you always have to have two separate because it's basically pulling air through the sensor itself yeah so you can't have that you need to have a sensor that's over one side that's looking at co2 that's looking at mole particles and then you need to have this but that means that you now have two units one thing that's detecting yeah you need the detector and the scrubber and then like like if you could have the perfect setup at home and you weren't renting it you could just put in your own HEPA filtration system you would have a filter you would have a scrubber right so the filter you see like the MERV rating which is just like the particular rating like that's the actual like that's catching stuff that you pull out and change you know every six months or whatever in your home then you have the scrubber which keeps the actual mold from building up in the ducts themselves and a lot of times that uses that's using like UV or ozone or something like that and then a recirculator that's pulling in fresh air from the outdoors so you're not just filtering stale and also so you're getting so the ideal scenario yeah you're scrubbing you're recirculating and you're filtering all three like that's the best setup so is that so it's three different units it's basically three different Technologies being used for something like central HEPA filter what should happen and I think this is where the guys from Jasper Mike's going to end up doing it is all of this can be fixed if you just put it into AC like if you just go after the AC unit you don't need to do any of the additional standalone unit thing the reason that Jasper exists at the moment is that there isn't enough cleaning going on through the AC and if you're in an apartment block or if you've got a house trying to retrofit that you're going to have to bodge it together like some Ben Greenfield Tesla car like it's not it's it's too much to do so you're having to scrub inside of a room because the air that's coming in from the AC even with a dehumidifier the best that you can get at the moment is tough I mean what did you do for your AC did you have to bodge it together or did you find something that was ready made uh we went with the local company called laser and they do scrubber they do uh filter and they do recirculation level that's needed to get rid of mold though yeah yeah they're using a Merv filter that will basically catch anything that's like PM 2.5 which is I think it's PM 2.4 to PM 10 are the main sizes they need to get concerned about but I still because of wildfire season and also in the kitchen where the rating for the height of the the hood over the stove for the actual filtration system above the stove when you're cooking is too high to actually catch everything that gets released when you're cooking so even if you have a filter in the kitchen you have to have a massive amount of PM 2.5 every time you cook so I have a standalone HEPA air filter in the kitchen and then a bunch in other rooms that I pull out when it's like wildfire season or there's a bunch of smoke there are uh eight Jasper filters back in our Airbnb right now here in Austin running in every room so we have because to me it's worth it to filter then to as much as I travel get exposed in an Airbnb or hotel room and be dealing with mold for the next two years like it's way better than just nipping but see what you said is important is when you're exposed you're exposed over a period of time it takes a long time to get rid of it yeah so you might as well yeah you you work a lot with mold obviously it's been a huge part of my life over the last couple of years how how brief of an exposure do you need in order to cause an effect like six months of detox is there any equation that's been coming for this I think well part of it so yes I do and treat mold and environmental toxins in our medical practice and I will tell you I think it comes down in part to genetics some people are affected some people are not obviously there's no it's not like okay so you have low testosterone for six months here's going to be your subsequent effects but uh an exposure of even a week can a week's better though you're at least just delayed Chris's fears about his one night stand with the moldy woman so we've been a week have you gotten sick with mold you must have it uh I I've I've gotten pretty lucky I haven't yeah yeah have you done your genomic testing to work out whether you've got the different polymorphisms that your detox pathways for lime and for mold and stuff I have a little bit of impaired glutathione detoxification pathways and use some glutathione I've never had significant mold exposure but interesting knock on wood I mean I lived in me and another guy lived in the same house me and Zach and one of us him fine me same house dude like yeah and he was ripping vapes going to bed at three in the morning playing gigs here's me like getting up sunlight in the eyes grounding listening to Ben and human and you are you and uh it wrecked me so it really is if you just have rolled the genetic dice and then you kind of hit the equivalent of the Jack the inverse jackpot living in an environment like yeah it's it's a real roommate with the freaking like Viking nephilim it's just it's just completely untouched by it but yeah I think the mold thing is going to be already is sort of picking up speed but um Ariana Thacker from the mold Co she rules shoemaker protocol all of that stuff I think is going to be massive like teaching people about binders and sauna and exposure and TGF beta mold Co is kind of like systematized everything to where they have like the testing the solutions everything on one stop shop yeah which is really cool yeah um really cool slash possibly the fox guarding the hen house but I still think it's a good idea how so well if they're testing and then supplying the solutions based on the test results oh you were incentivized to get the test potential but but I've gone through the website and seen what they're doing and I think that they're doing a good service I mean you need to be a real scumbag to be yeah falsifying people's tests so you can then I would hope I would hope not I would therapy no I I so yeah what's cool is uh all of the problems that we think are sort of in the future there's already solutions or proto solutions that already exist so for people that have got systemic issues hormones health optimizing like you guys and similar to you guys exist for the light problems we've got people thinking about LEDs for mold we've got the mold Co for blood testing and mass we've got function for you know air quality we've got jet you know there's already aqua true from reverse osmosis like there's already the beginnings of solutions it's just a case of kind of telling people about it that makes me feel more confident because I guess like 15 years ago all of these problems still existed but there wasn't even the nascent version of some company that could maybe fix it best resource I ever found and I I really wanted to interview the author on my podcast and hopefully she doesn't hear this horrible interview because she was a little boring and didn't do a great job explaining but the book was fantastic it was called prescription for a healthy home and it's like everything it's carpets appliance it's roofing it's painting like ever like I gave it to the people building my home like I bought it for the architect and the building team because I wanted them to read it it was so thorough as far as everything that it went into for building materials from the ground up or outfitting like an existing condo or apartment uh or somewhere that you're not building from scratch um excellent guide and it's like I think it was published two years ago maybe so pretty relevant unreal final thing that I love which I think will pick up speed will be uh proper genetic testing so Intel xdna is who you guys use uh that Lisa's put me through a little bit expensive you need a healthcare practitioner provider whatever to get in between you I know that function are about to release their own version at some point later this year which will democratize that I'm sure you guys have all got your own versions of this too but it's the only test you only ever need to do once that's true yeah it's so until Chris Virginia editing really takes off well you got the following standing thing when we were in rowertown together yeah how did that work did you um I gained muscle at a more rapid rate than I would have expected without changing uh protein calorie intake or my weight training protocol uh around 10 pounds in three months uh it's not permanent you would need to repeat it I think every one to one and a half years and uh unfortunately uh at the time I was under the impression it was reversible in case hit the fan and something went wrong it's not actually reversible I thought it was reversible I thought you just took the tablet yeah uh no that's the issue is that uh it is not um and the company is now readily admitting that it's not uh and doctors were supposed to reach out to their patients and tell them that oops it's not um so that's the only issue now is it's just like well if you're gonna get your genes edited it'd be nice to know that if something goes wrong you could reverse it yeah yeah well I mean we did go to a small island off the coast of Honduras which is specifically a network state that doesn't have any oversight of basically any nation yeah so that you could get this experimental gene therapy and now you're like wow they didn't tell me I understand that I was taught from that technology is it's not uh editing a gene it's turning on a pre-existing you are correct it's not a crisper gene and then it'll turn back off scissors too long it's it's it's up basically like up regulating or down regulating a gene so uh yeah like joking aside the the only reason that you'd have to do a genetic test twice in a lifetime is if you are actually using crisper gene editing yeah yeah pretty sick guys you all rule I appreciate you where should people go to check out everything we've told them so many interesting my company's ways2well.com the number two yeah yeah go to my website DrGabrielleLyon.com, all of the channels, the podcast. These two are getting PhDs to come on. Let's do it. Let's go. And yeah, Strong Medical with LifespanMD if you want to be my patient. I don't do rectal exams, though. There's not a lot of Ben Greenfields out there, so just Google. It's good. I appreciate you all. You all rule. Thank you for keeping everyone alive. Goodbye, my beauties. Yes. That fucking was fun. You want to impress them on a first date, but also play it cool. So what do you do? I'm Rufy Thorpe, and I wrote and read a real love story about a hinge couple that navigated exactly that. Listen to the free audiobook now.