#876: Dr. Andrew Huberman — Peptides, Performance, and Protocols

0:00Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where I dig into the fringes, the edges, to find out what people have discovered, what they're using, and what you can use. My guest today is the one and only Andrew Huberman, PhD. A lot of you will know who he is. We cover things like lessons from Dorian Yates, his current training regimen, psychedelics, peptides. He's used a lot of them, so this is pretty broad-ranging coverage of peptides, AI in health, and much more. For those of you who do not know Andrew, he is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the

0:33departments of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he runs the Huberman Lab. His research spans brain development, visual perception, and repair from blinding diseases, the neuroscience of stress and resilience, and neuroplasticity. He has published more than 75 peer-reviewed articles in journals, including some very well-known journals like Nature, Cell, Science, and Neuron, and his honors include the Kogan Award, the McKnight Neuroscience Scholar Award, and the Pew Biomedical Scholar Award. In 2021, he launched

1:04the Huberman Lab podcast, which became and remains the most popular health and science podcast in the world. Dr. Huberman is the co-founder of SciComm Media, the company behind the podcast Huberman Lab, performed with Dr. Andy Galpin and David Senra. He's the author of the forthcoming book, and we cover this in some length, Protocols, Subtitle, and Operating Manual for the Human Body. You can find all things Andrew Huberman at HubermanLab.com. And without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging and very tactical conversation with, yes, you guessed it, Dr. Andrew

1:38Huberman. Thank you, Dr. Huberman. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. Me, Tim Ferriss, so. Well, you know what? Why don't we just do a quick callback? The Dark Wizard. This sounds

2:08like an Ozzy Osbourne album, but it's not. It's a documentary. And we were chatting about it before we started recording. Since it's top of mind, why don't you just describe what that's about? Because this involves a character that I tracked for a super long time. Dean Potter. Dean Potter. So what is The Dark Wizard? Why has it struck you so? Okay. So I learned about this movie from Andy Stumpf, who's a retired Navy SEAL tier one operator who then set two world records with the Red Bull high performance team doing wingsuiting, base jumping, wingsuiting, whatever you want to call it. The squirrel suit.

2:42Squirrel suit. And he told me about this movie, The Dark Wizard, which is about Dean Potter, who started off as a climber and then became, people can watch the documentary, and then got into parachuting and then what he called freebasing, which was, you know, climbing and then jumping off a rock and parachuting and then eventually wingsuiting. And I won't give away anymore, but it's a really interesting four-part series that gets into his mental health challenges, how he was able to funnel, let's just call them the high dopamine, more manic states into incredible feats

3:15performance, and then how he balanced out the lows. But the most interesting part about it to me is at the level of something I think about a lot these days, which is energy. Like we're born into this world with a certain amount of energy and we think about it as time and longevity. But there are people that seem to, I don't want to give anything away here about the movie, but there are people that seem to have more of this thing that we call energy. And when they're able to focus it, they take performance to outrageously high levels. And

3:48you see how the energy folds back on him and almost destroys him at times. And also times when he's somehow able to harness it and put it to these incredible feats. But the most important thing about the film is he talks about, and he demonstrates through the activities I talked about before, wingsuiting, et cetera, he demonstrates how when you are in competition with other people, it's a misuse of the energy that can harm you. But when you are seeking

4:22what he calls just seeking beauty, like really trying to chase the feeling, the pure experience of taking that energy and putting it into something that you love, that's when the really impressive feats land and that move you forward. So there does seem to be something almost spiritual about whether or not we're funneling energy into things that really reflect us at our best, what he calls funneling into beauty versus competition. And competition is, it turns out,

4:53is what destroys people. And everyone will say, no, no, no, it's actually what allows you to reach a higher and higher bar. But if you watch all four episodes, you realize, no, that's an illusion. And when you get caught in that, you're limiting your output, you're limiting your performance. It also has multiple cameos by the great Alex Honnold and their competition is extremely interesting. So I'll leave it at that. It's a long teaser, but it's a real insight into human psychology and energy, which is something, again, I'm just obsessed with because ultimately it's where we place our efforts. That's all we've got.

5:28That's all we've got. And Dean Potter also fascinating character. I'm going to watch this. And if people have enjoyed slack lining, he helped to popularize slack lining, certainly as cross training for climbing, but overall, and I can't help but mention the incredible Laird Hamilton also, because we're sitting here in Malibu. So if anybody's ever done standup paddleboarding, e-foiling, fewer people have done toe-in surfing, certainly, but people should watch, I think it's riding giants about the early chapters of Laird. And standup paddleboarding

6:00goes way back, probably thousands of years, but he certainly helped to repopularize it. We are going to talk about all sorts of frontier topics. We're going to talk about perhaps some revisions, updates, maybe a better way to put it. And I'm just going to hop into this very long list that we will almost certainly not complete, but let's hop into one that is of personal interest to me. And I want to hear how this experience informed your training. Dorian Yates. So I have interviewed Dorian, but I've never met him. You had the chance to train with Dorian.

6:33He is multiple time, Mr. Olympia, six, six times. He was legendary, not only for his accomplishments in bodybuilding, but also for in the eyes of many, the bizarreness of his training methods, which in contrast to many were pretty minimalist in certain respects. So could you just speak to the experience of training with Dorian and what you took away from that in terms of application to your own training? I've had the honor and pleasure and pain of training with Dorian Yates once here in Los Angeles. We did

7:09a back workout, back and rear delts workout. And then I just came back from Marbella, Spain, where we train legs together. It's a sorist I've ever been. And I should say the science caught up to Dorian. What Dorian did to train for Mr. Olympia and what Mike Menser, who I'll explain in a moment, were proponents of is now very well supported by the peer-reviewed data. And a bunch of physio folks are probably jumping out of their seats going, no, no, you don't have to go to failure beyond failure and you actually need more sets. But if you look at their training, which was essentially

7:43a couple of warmups, a light set to just familiarize yourself with a movement, a medium set, maybe 50% of what you would use on your work set, work set somewhere between five and 12 repetitions typically. And then maybe a third warmup for just a couple of reps and practice sets. And then Menser, Mike Menser was a big proponent of one all out set to failure. Okay. Turns out that's probably not enough for most people to stimulate hypertrophy and strength increases

8:14because it demands so much focus, intensity, and effort. There's a kind of a systemic neural fatigue to it. And a lot of people just can't contract the muscles with enough focus and intensity for one set to absolute failure to work. Dorian basically more proponent of two sets per exercise, maybe two or three exercises per major body part, major body part being quads, not legs, right? So training with Dorian essentially consists of what I just described, a couple of warmups, two all outsets to failure or one set. And then some assisted reps or a drop set

8:49or a rest pause where you rest after failure and then do a couple more reps. What's unique about that training is you feel very tired at the end of a workout, but a couple hours later, you're fine. And indeed, if you do it right, you get stronger every single workout with the caveat. And Dorian made this clear to me that about every six or eight weeks or so, you need to come off the gas pedal a bit and just stay out of the gym for a week, or you can't do a kind of more moderate week.

9:21Now, what Menser, and let's just stick with what Dorian said, because let's call it low-ish volume, high intensity. What he's a proponent of was heresy back in the day. Certainly the opposite extreme would be like the Schwarzenegger, two hours, twice a day type workouts. And then people will say, well, Dorian was using loads of steroids and growth hormone, et cetera. The scientist in me will, in no attempt to defend him, will just accurately say, what's the one thing that he was doing differently? Yeah. That was par for the horse. That's the key. Everyone was and is taking some testosterone

9:53and other anabolics and androgenics, and some were taking growth hormone. But the point is, and at the top level, all of those guys have incredible genetics, long muscle bellies. What makes Dorian, even now at 65, he carries a ton of muscle mass. He's doing a lot of biking. He's doing functional training. He's doing a lot of other things, but just the sheer density of muscle that he carries speaks to his genetics and the amount of training. What I've been doing for years is the same split three days a week, one day legs, including calves, rest a day or two, train chest and back, rest a day, shoulders and arms, and also some neck training

10:28because I didn't wrestle. And, you know, neck is important to train, especially for guys. Otherwise it looks like the wrong head is on a, on the body. And also as the upper spine, it's important for shoulder stability, et cetera. That split, most people say, well, that's, that doesn't square with the science. What does the science say? The science says, and this is Brad Schoenfield's work and other people's work, which is fantastic, which is when you stimulate a muscle to grow, you have about 48 to 72 hours in which there's protein synthesis after the training. So the logic says, well, logically speaking, you would say, okay, well then

11:02train every muscle group three times a week or twice a week. The problem is that when you do that, you're not taking into account the other things that you might be doing. Like I run three times a week, one long, slow run for about 60 minutes, one high intensity interval type training, you know, like sprint for 30 seconds on the assault bike rest for 30 seconds and just repeat that six to eight times, right? Kind of a max heart rate training. And then maybe one moderate session of like 20 or 30 minutes of running or biking. If you're doing those other things, you have to take that into account.

11:32And so what ends up happening, if you do this split of training your legs, taking a day off, then the next day doing some sort of chest back workout, the next day running for 30 minutes, now your legs, if you train them properly, are still probably a little bit sore, you know, okay, well, it's not going to stimulate hypertrophy, but if then you do a airdyne bike, high intensity workout, you're getting some stimulus to your legs. It's enough to carry you to the next week. So in reality, this arrangement of three times per week of resistance training, three times a week of

12:06cardio, you're training everything directly once a week and indirectly a second time. And you're getting a lot of cardio because all these studies of hypertrophy and strength training, it's on a background typically of not doing any cardio. And so when I look at like kind of what the science says, of course, it's people are saying, oh, anywhere from 10 to 20 work sets per week that to maximize hypertrophy. Okay. 10 sets of quads per week distributed into two or three different sessions. Plus I'm supposed to sprint outside or on the, on the airdyne bike. Plus I'm supposed to do a

12:38long run. All of a sudden you run into, you have a collisions all over the place. So it turns out that for years I was doing this split. And then when I talked to Dorian, he's like, he split things up into a four day split. Wasn't doing quite as much cardio. He's like, yeah, it makes perfect sense. Once directly high intensity, lowish volume once indirectly. Like when you train your chest and back, you're hitting your arms and then you train your arms directly. So it's twice a week. When you do the airdyne bike, there's some stimulus of like your lats and pushing and pulling again, it's not for hypertrophy, but it gets you to the next week. And what I've found from training with Dorian is

13:11you think you're training to failure. You're not training to failure. And this is the other piece. People will say, oh, the data say two or three sets taken to one or two reps in reserve. That's true. Like you can get a lot of hypertrophy and strength increases doing that. Maybe it's less taxing on the nervous system, but what is failure? Like if somebody really put a gun to your head and said, curl that bar one more time, or I'm going to kill your family, you'd curl the bar. Now it's not pleasant, nor is it appropriate to think that way in the gym. And there are probably some guys thinking that way in the gym. It's just impossible to generate that kind of mental intensity.

13:45You go, all right. If you just step back the way Dorian is training now, the way he basically trained for the Olympia, six Olympia wins is you train each body part directly once per week. It gets hit indirectly a second time per week. You give it plenty of rest. You're doing four to eight sets per body part, two to three exercises per body part. So you're splitting up those work sets. You know, yeah, it all kind of works out. And so this is the big revision for me is if you just look

14:16at the science, you'd say, okay, 10 to 20 sets, more volume of these sets, almost a failure or even two failure is maximizing hypertrophy. Yeah. If you're doing curls and leg extensions for a study, but what about all the other stuff? Okay. So that's the gist of it.

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15:37Now, I guess what I did just before breakfast, I did what I do every morning. I took some creatine. Today, I took five grams. If I'm sleep-deprived, I might take 10 or 15. And I have used Momentus creatine for a long time, as it's been one of the highest quality creatine options available on the market. That's exactly what I used this morning. Now, Momentus has taken that quality that they're already known for even further with Signature Spec creatine, their most advanced version yet. Signature Spec is manufactured in a pharmaceutical facility using reverse osmosis water purification.

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16:41but it's great for the gym too. So if you take creatine every day, like I do, make sure it's the best. Do not cut corners. Head to livemomentus.com slash Tim and use code Tim for 14% off. That's an interesting percentage. For 14% off of your first one-time order or a total of 35% off your first subscription order. That's livemomentus.com slash Tim. That's livemomentus.com slash Tim. If you want to look back at this approach to training, I mean,

17:19there are a lot of examples, but you can go back to Arthur Jones, then Mike Menzner, and then of course you have Dorian, Blood and Guts. I remember having that black and white book that describes some of the training. And for those who may doubt the efficacy of this type of, let's just call it short duration, because you can do it Dorian recommended. The workouts can be quite a bit shorter. And in some cases- Yeah, with a warmup, it's like, it ends up being, you do a couple minutes on the bike, you do your warmup sets. By the time you get to the second or third exercise for a given body part, you're only doing one warmup. Yeah. Yeah. And what I would say

17:53is you can look at, now this is somewhat of a complicated case study, but like Casey Beater with Arthur Jones, crazy example. There's some sort of muscle memory, which we won't get into right now that enabled a lot of those gains. But suffice to say, this type of minimalist training can be applied in a lot of places. And I think, according to many competitive powerlifters, the best powerlifter of all time, Ed Cohn, also pretty similar recovery schedule, right? And very interestingly similar

18:27in terms of overlap with Dorian Yates. So what does your split look like now? So the split I follow now is essentially the same one I've always followed. And it is, and I want to be clear why I'm saying Monday or Tuesday, because there needs to be flexibility in one schedule too. This is important. So Monday or Tuesday, I train my legs, calves, hamstrings, quads, maybe some direct like glute training, but probably not a couple of warmups, two to three, maybe, but usually just two hard sets to failure. I have a training partner. There

19:00may be some assisted reps. So quads would be two working sets of leg extensions. I'll leave out the warmups two to three, because I'm, you know, need a bit more there lying hamstring curls to failure. Then belt squat, my favorite movement. I actually bought a belt squat machine because you don't have to load the shoulders. Which machine do you like? I use the pitch shark and rogues got now one. That's kind of more of a fan-based one. And there are a bunch of, it's a lot of fun to go on Instagram and some of the gym equipment assessment accounts as a whole world. Soren X has one that there are all sorts of great ones out

19:31there. I bought the pitch shark. I'll reinforce the belt squat. Yeah. Love the belt squat. It takes a little bit getting used to, because some people feel as if, you know, it's like jamming into their hips or something. You can put a towel there if you need to. I mean, all the West side barbell guys would talk about belt squat. They would load it up. You can actually march with it to build all sorts of stabilizing muscles. I mean, that's an incredible cardio workout. You just put a couple of plates on each side and you, and you just march lifting your knees. And like, after like a minute, you're like, this is no way I can continue. It's a great workout, but I end up doing leg extensions,

20:01leg curls, then belt squat. And then I may throw in a hack, a couple work sets of hack squat. And that's it. And that's Monday or Tuesday. The day after legs is always a rest day. Like if you train legs properly, the next day should be a rest day. You should need it. Ideally I would do sauna and cold that day. These days I haven't had time a day later. I pick, I think systemically you have to ask yourself, am I systemically exhausted? Did my nervous system take enough of an ass beating on that Monday or Tuesday that I need two days off after legs. And if it was very, very intense,

20:36then I'll do some sort of 20 or 30 minute cardio. Typically it's a run, not an all out run, not a jog, just somewhere in between, probably in the zone. Let's just call it zone three ish zone three, four. Okay. So, um, you're not sucking for air, but it's not a sprint workout. It's not zone two. And then I'll do a push pull. I'll do a chest and back workout and neck. What do you use for neck? I have a four a neck machine. You do. I do. Which brand do you use? Uh, hammer strength, hammer strength. Yeah. And again, the reason I'm asking this guys is not to plug particular

21:08manufacturers because the physics and the geometry and so on really matters. It really matters. Especially in my experience with something that has injury potential. I have a four way neck machine also. Oh, cool. I do it very, very slowly myself. Like don't overdo it. If you've never trained neck, do not rush into like high velocity stuff, but that's why I was asking. Yeah. Neck is very important. I'll talk about specifically what I'll do if I don't have access to that. Some people will be like just in back same day and rear delts. And yeah, I think of it as like a torso workout because I'm not a bodybuilder. I'm interested in posture. I'm

21:40interested in strength. I essentially do some sort of pushing movement, like a low incline press and then some sort of fly type movement. Although sometimes I'll just do low incline bench press or so couple of warmups, two or three warmups, two or three work sets in the failing somewhere between five and 12 repetitions. And then dips, weighted dips, big believer in these. Like, I think it's like an upper body squat, whatever that means. Weighted dips, typically with a weight vest and it looks ridiculous, but the chains are great. If you can throw those on, cause you can

22:10like toss one off and then keep going. If you want to keep going. Whereas if you got a weight hanging between your legs, which always just feels weird to me anyway, you're like waddling around the gym, it's clanking into your ankles. I'll do some sort of dip. And then I'll do some sort of row for the back. Typically like a low row or a dumbbell row, one arm dumbbell row, and then some sort of chinning movement. Although I put the chins first, cause we've all got this thing of how many can I do? And, and I recently bought a Nautilus pullover machine based on the training with Dorian. And it's from 1976. And it's one of only two that still exist. And it's kind of like some guys like

22:43muscle cars. I like old school strength training equipment. Dorian loves his pullovers just like Arthur Jones. And by the way, if you're rowing heavy and you're doing these things, you're getting some forearm training, but then I'll do the neck training and I'll either use the four-way neck machine or I'll do a Jeff Cavalier has a great from athlete next has a great video on how to train with a plate. You wrap it in a train neck with a plate and a bench. So you could do that anywhere. You wrap it in a towel, you lie on your side and you're just, you have to be careful about closing the chain. So you, you know, you've got one leg down and you've got a hand down on the ground. The video

23:15describes it. Maybe we could put a link to it. One thing that's very important. I learned about training neck is you need to nasal breathe the whole time, have your tongue on the roof of your mouth and make sure that you're not sticking your chin out at any point while you're bending it to the side, because then you start getting clicking in your jaw. And my spinal surgeon friends tell me that it's a great way to slip a disc in your neck, the neck aesthetically. Like it's always weird when like dudes are talking about aesthetics, but these days because of the looks maxing thing and all that, like it's, it seems to be like more, but there's something actually very important.

23:47You're not hammering your cheekbones. No, I'm definitely hammering my cheekbones. Come on, Andrew. Nope. Not hammering my cheekbones. Not taking, you know, that is such a wild thing. Yeah. No, no, no, no. But there is something interesting. So from a strength and stability standpoint, training one's neck is really important because it's the upper spine. I do think it's one of the reasons I've never had any shoulder issues and I've got long arms and everything points to the fact that I should have rotator cuff issues. I don't do any direct rotator cuff work. I think it's because I started training my neck a long time ago and aesthetically like you have this, this is a

24:22great opportunity to point out just how perfectly constructed you are, Tim Ferriss. You train your neck. Really? If you look ahead on at a male face, if the neck sort of arrives, right at the sort of like more or less plus or minus a few, whatever millimeters and more or less at the outer jaw, the outermost point of the jaw, like below the ears, you'll notice like it looks kind of right when somebody is really wide and their neck is not at that point. It looks like the wrong head was placed on. Then you see Laird Hamilton and you realize like this dude just has a really big neck,

24:55but it's appropriate for his body structure. And then after the neck, I'll do, I don't know, three sets or two work sets per side. Although you don't train neck the same way, like to like four straps and all that. And then I'll do some core work and the core work that I'm a big fan of because you also get some forearm work in is I'll hang from a bar and I'll do some L sits. And if I've been doing them a lot lately, I'll do some pikes, you know, five sets of five ankles up to my hands and then slow on the descent and then into an L sit if I can. And I'll do maybe three or five sets depending, and then lower back work. And I have a 45 degree angle hyperextension,

25:30and I'm not taking that to failure. The low back thing is really important. And there are a lot of data out there that if you can strengthen the spinal erectors, your posture is better, you're more injury resistant, but that whole workout takes an hour tops. The next day is the high intensity cardio day, just max heart rate. These days I get on an Airdyne bike. And I would say for this, for people, it's whatever you can do without getting hurt. So question for you on the Airdyne, or I guess assault bike, this is a digression,

26:01so I won't indulge this too far, but to figure out why the assault bike worked and caught on where the Airdyne did not, right? You can look at footage from Dan Gable, legendary wrestler, working out on an Airdyne, but it never really spread until the assault bike reformatted it, improved it in some ways. My question for you on that real quick, for people that don't know, you're using your arms on these sort of isolateral movable handles that power this fan. So you can pedal and use your arms one or the other or both. And I find that my upper body

26:37fatigues a lot faster than my lower body. If I'm trying to do, let's say like a Norwegian four by four or something like that, like four minutes on three minutes off or four minutes on four minutes off. Do you find that not to be the case for yourself or how do you approach it? Because I've wanted to use the assault bike. It's now easier to find an assault bike and say a hotel gym for me than a stationary bike that fits well. Otherwise, how do you approach that? Well, the naming piece is interesting and maybe we get into this at some point deeper in the discussion, but naming is very important and it's not just important in health and fitness and this

27:09kind of thing. It's, it's actually very important in science. And I'm a student of science as a field, not just the field of neuroscience in terms of the facts, but also you look at the culture of a scientific field. Oftentimes the naming is what carries a field forward very quickly. And you go, how can that be? Aren't these scientists? Shouldn't they just be focused on the data? Nomenclature is important because if more people are doing something because they can talk about it to more people using the same language, it tends to accelerate a field. Also assault bike sounds cool. Stationary bike feels like you're just pedaling. The assault bike

27:44is interesting because I also, I get like a lot of lat work from it. Keep in mind the day before I trained my chest and back. No, exactly. That's why I'm asking. So it ends up being a second kind of stimulus, not a hypertrophy workout, but you sort of end up feeling like almost like a pump type thing if you do it right. I can't do more than 30 seconds on 30 seconds off without experiencing what you experienced, which is that my legs just have all this gas in my, my arms. They can just keep going. It all transfers to the upper body. So Norwegian four by four on the assault bike just

28:15sounds like torture to me. This workout, if I can, I'll get outside and sprint and you could do it on a rower. You could sprint. You know, I think it's just important because it's a near all out or all out workout 30 seconds on 30 seconds off, or maybe you jog a couple laps and then, you know, you do a 400 on the track and then walk a lap and then do a 400. It, whatever you do for this workout, you know, you can come up with any number of different variations. It's gotta be something where you can apply max effort and not get hurt. And then the next day is a shoulders arms. You do some sort

28:47of pressing. I'm not big on lateral raises, some sort of press for the shoulders, a couple work sets of bicep curls, a couple of incline curls, some hammer curls, some overhead tricep extension for the long head, a couple of work sets, some bench dips. And there you go, like bench dips again. So now you're getting a little bit of other stuff working, even though it's not an all out chest and back workout. And then the next day, which is typically on a Sunday, I'll do some long, slow movement, ideally outside. Maybe it's a walk and a hike with my girlfriend. Maybe it's I'm rucking and

29:18listening to a podcast. If I'm alone, maybe I'm jogging in the sand. Like it could be a long bike ride. Just something like there's something so nice to starting the week. Jogging in the sand sounds miserable. Yeah. Slow. It's a slow pod. It's a, you know, you're a mule. I like to think of like you're kind of a mule or I'm a mule. That's going to be my clip for the teaser. I'm a mule. No, I'm kidding. That works. That works for me. And you know, the real hard part about that workout is not going faster. It's pretty easy to jog and then walk, jog and then walk. It's probably beneficial. That workout is as much for the mental stimulation, but it's also,

29:50there's something so nice about going into the work week. Maybe it lands on a Monday. I don't know. But typically for me, it lands on a Sunday because there's something so nice about going to the work week, having spent as much time as possible moving outdoors the day before. But I do this and ends up being six workouts a week, but some are very, very short. None of the resistance training stuff is terribly long. You're done in an hour or so, unless you're waiting for equipment and you know, at 50, I'm continuing to get stronger. I'm not, you know, outrageously. So, and it just works.

30:21It just works. And it's worked for everyone that I know. Now one key thing, and a lot of people will, what I call the kind of geek this, and they won't do compound movements. And I do some rear delt flies on the whatever, either chest and back day or the shoulders and arms day. You need that for shoulder posturally, aesthetically, et cetera. But people will think, oh, I can do leg extensions, leg curls to failure once a week. No, you're also hack squatting and belt squatting or hack squatting and front squatting to failure for a couple sets. That's intense. You know, you need to do the

30:54compound movements. There's no world where you can just, you know, do isolation movements this way. And that's the thing that sometimes gets forgotten in the Yates style training. He was doing a lot of compound movements and he's still a proponent of that. Let's hop around. Then we may come back to training. We spoke some time ago about psychedelics with a focus on MDMA. And it seems like you may have some revised views, maybe a few caveats. I would be interested to hear your current thinking.

31:27So this is an area you've spoken about and thought about pretty extensively. And whereas I'm more of a newbie, as we talked about last time, in case people didn't hear that conversation, you know, growing up, I made the mistake. It was a truly a mistake of taking some psychedelics at a very young age, quote unquote, recreationally LSD, psilocybin, not giving any thought to like what the long-term consequences might be. Fortunately, I didn't feel any long-term consequences, but I had enough bad trips, meaning one, Robin Carter Harris would say, you can't have a bad trip. There's no, you can have

31:57a bad trip, Robin. I've had one. It sucks. You're in the pit for hours and hours. There's no guide there. If you're doing it recreationally as a teen, the brain is hyperplastic. It made me very, very cautious, almost paranoid about psychedelics for many, many years. Then also the last time we spoke, I talked about how in an effort to resolve what I felt were some longstanding psychological traumas, I did clinically supported MDMA, standard kind of maps protocol, right? Take a, forget the milligram dosage, maybe take like- Probably 125, something like that. Yeah. And then, and sometimes there's

32:30a booster about 90 minutes in, you have someone there, you're doing talk therapy before, during, and after. Tremendously helpful to be able to feel my feelings, to be able to recognize what a whole body feeling was about. I mean, there was never the experience for me of wanting to dance or have sex while I was on. It was like, no, there was some shaking. There was some, a little bit of that, but it was a very, you know, it's an empathogen. I think, yeah, as you know, it's not a psychedelic, it's technically an empathogen and raises both dopamine and serotonin simultaneously, which is very

33:03unusual for any compound to do and raises oxytocin quite dramatically. The data actually say the empathogenic effect of MDMA is not due to oxytocin through a kind of sort of good control where you just give oxytocin and you don't get the same clinical effects, but you could argue the cocktail effect, the synergy might be important. So I did that a few times. I think it was a total of four times separated by a number of months or a year clinically supported in any event, after a

33:34period of doing that, I took a break and on the suggestion of the same clinical group decided to partake in a psilocybin experiment. And it was high dose psilocybin. Now psilocybin, as you know, leads to, I think in the words of my, our friend, Paul Conte, it almost like recedes the waterline on the, on the unconscious mind. So what I found in psilocybin was because my brain often thinks in analogies, like this is how I structure my thinking. It's reflexive for me off psilocybin.

34:07Almost everything that came to me in those sessions was symbolic representation analogies for somebody else who represents their world. Not that way, maybe musically or through somatic experience. It's likely that from my understanding that they will experience insights through those same kind of representations. What I found from psilocybin work was it was exquisite at revealing to me the structure of my thinking and the ways that some of the patterns in my life that were not serving me

34:43well, how they were structured. It was sort of like, oh, coming out of it, there's this form of self-seduction that I do, which takes actually eight forms, which look the following way in my life. I can be seduced by the enchantment of some sort of promise of a future outcome. That's not realistic. And you can see that I'm just kind of giving one example. And once you see that you can't unsee it. And that for me was an incredible experience. I do think it was important to keep a journal afterwards to take notes

35:13while off the drug. And for me, that was very, very helpful, allowing me to understand the structure of my thinking, both for things that serve me and don't serve me. I will say, and this is getting a little, as long as people are doing like live streams of taking psychedelics, I feel I'm very solid ground, but who knows? Well, just wait until the second half of this conversation. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't want anyone to run out and take these things without clinical support. There are a number of people who shouldn't be taking them and all the usual caveats apply, young people, et cetera. But the real, like, whoa, one session type rewiring, which was the

35:52hardest work I've ever done, having done lots and lots of therapy, but the hardest work I've ever done was to take MDMA and then a couple hours later, take a high dose of psilocybin. And I've only done that twice. Now, the reason it was such, by the way, if I ever try and run for public office, any mistakes I make, they'll attribute to this, by the way, I've seen that publicly, but I'm going to make it very clear right now. Not only am I not going to run for office, I'm running from office. So, you know, there's been some speculation, but the interesting thing was no two days later drop, which you do experience with MDMA. I just did not experience that if I took

36:29psilocybin with it. Remarkable. Had some of my best workouts, work weeks, et cetera. It's like, wow, that can be avoided through this thing. But what was remarkable is on MDMA as an pathogen, you feel very good about most anything you focus on. You can find the peace in it. You can find the love in it. Could be this yerba mate, which I happen to love, but you like would really love. That's the danger, right? You can get pulled into these force fields of thinking something's really important that might not be that important when the session is over. That's why I think it's very important to have a trained guide with you,

37:02but there's the drop.

37:07One name that has come up on this podcast more than once is Dr. Walter Longo, USC professor with decades of peer-reviewed research on fasting, nutrition, and aging. And as some of you long-term listeners know or readers, I regularly fast. I've done a lot of experimentations with fasting over more than a decade, including intermittent fasting, extended water-only fasts up to 10 days. And I've looked at the before and after. Frankly, the fasting has been one of the most incredible unlocks that I have found. The before and after, looking at glucose control, oral glucose tolerance

37:41tests, hemoglobin A1c, et cetera, all these things that really do matter for the long-term, for mental health, for physical health, have had dramatic, dramatic shifts. And I've talked about that before. But the sad truth, the truth about fasting is that it can be really hard. And that is why Walter is interesting. He's best known for something called the fasting mimicking diet, FMD, which is essentially a way of eating that produces many of the benefits of fasting while still allowing you to eat food. So if we look at that a little more closely,

38:13he took what he learned in these randomized control trials and so on and packaged it into a five-day program called Prolon, P-R-O-L-O-N. It's five days. So for five days, you restrict your food a bit. And what Prolon does is makes it idiot-proof. It comes in one box. Everything is laid out. There's no guesswork. You just follow the packages. And in scientific studies, five-day cycles of the fasting mimicking diet, improved markers tied to metabolic health and aging, help people drop fat while holding onto lean muscle, and even associated with measurable drops in biological age. And to put some

38:47numbers to it, with glycemic management, blood sugar management, we're able to see in one RCT improvements in 53% of FMD participants versus 8% of controls. So it does make a difference. You get the benefits of fasting, including autophagy, your body's cellular self-cleanup process, while still eating real structured plant-based meals. So you don't have to negotiate with yourself. You don't have to struggle. It all comes in one box. And it's right there, laid out, simple to follow. And there are other people who recognize friends of mine like Rich

39:21Roll who also have used Prolon. For a limited time, Prolon is offering my listeners 15% off site-wide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their five-day program. Just visit prolonlife.com slash Tim. That's P-R-O-L-O-N-L-I-F-E dot com slash Tim to claim your 15% discount and your bonus gift. You guys know I love wearables. I'm sure you do as well. And they're great, but they give you data. Typically, they do not give you solutions. That's why I absolutely love The Pod by this episode's

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41:03Psilocybin for me was a very dark and harrowing experience. A lot of purging, a lot of vomiting about halfway through. These weren't enormous doses. They weren't small either. It was four to five grams, but just to be clear for folks. Yeah. Of dried, like psilocybin mushrooms. So for me, it was terrifying to be on psilocybin alone. It was extremely difficult. And the combination of the two, it was sort of like having like my really good friend, Rob Moore in there with me

41:34going, you can do this. Now, Rob wasn't in there. So I'm just sort of half joking because he's here in the room with us now, but it was like, I can do this. I can lean into the hardest work. I'm going to give an example so it's not too vague. I'd spent a fair amount of time thinking about some of the harder things that had happened in my childhood, in my life, some of which were self-inflicted, some of which were not self-inflicted. And I'd come to peace about those through the work I described. Standard psychotherapy, a lot of journaling, Time, MDMA, psilocybin, those separately. Taking them

42:09together, I had this voice in my head that was like, it's time to do the real work. And I was like, oh goodness. And I said out loud, like, I thought we're just going to like, listen to the Grateful Dead today. And you know, the person helping me was like, no, that's not how this works. You know that I'm thinking, I don't want to do this. And I don't even know what this is. I just know there's something there that's something foreboding. And I'm like, oh shit. And I think it is important for people to understand this because it can be very, very scary. And you feel it sort of coming at you like a storm and you can push it away.

42:40I could have spent the entire time listening to the Grateful Dead, not a huge Grateful Dead fan, but you know, people have encouraged me to listen to it. So I've been doing it and I like it, but I could have done that, but I didn't. Instead, I was like, okay, with those two compounds in me, I was like, I can do this. I've got myself held. Like I'm like, I'm my own friend. That's the pathogen. I can do this. It wasn't this like, all right, let's go. Like, let's fight. And that session took me through a brutally hard voyage of thinking about all the things that didn't

43:14happen, all the things that I would wish had happened, that I was in no position to make happen for myself. Heavy, gnarly. And coming through it, it was the perfect thing because I was like, those are the things I know I can create now. There is no way. And this is why I feel it's important to talk about these compounds. There is no way whatsoever that a therapist was going to sit down and go, Hey, what's ever on your mind today? Let's talk about what didn't happen.

43:48No one's ever done that for me. And if they had, there's no way that I would have been in the full emotional experience of the lack or necessarily had access to it or had access to it. Right. So I give that as an example, it's certainly not what everyone would experience, but I'd never thought about the problem of what hadn't happened as a viable option to explore. It's so obvious now, but then the outcome of this brutally hard session was beautiful. No additional drug, nothing. And it stayed with me. This was well over a year ago. And I thought, this is awesome. I can create these

44:21things. I know exactly what to aim for. And it started to make steps in my life, steering the ship in those directions. And not surprisingly, it's like, yeah, I can do this. I can do these things. I need some practice. And so I think that the medicines as we think of them are immensely powerful, immensely precarious. You need the support. I've been told in these sessions, Hey, maybe we don't go there. You don't go there. That feels like a repeat. You know, you need someone to help guide you. These are not to be used recreationally in my opinion, at least not for folks like me. You know,

44:53I'm just not interested in that. The lessons I learned is the following. Neuroplasticity is the goal directed toward something that oftentimes we can't identify through standard therapy. Like you would say, Oh, I'm trying to resolve my traumas. That's a sentence. If you can't know exactly what the thing was, or even if you can, or the things that happened, what about the things that didn't happen? It just never would have occurred to me. So it revealed both the thing that needed work and allowed me to do a lot of the work in real time and spit me out the other end,

45:25which is how it felt. You know, I wasn't cratered coming out. I was like, Ooh, that was an ass kicking of a whole other level. And with a clear mission in mind of what to do in my daily life that has served me very, very well. It also reminded me that we seem to have this one compound type view and I'm not suggesting that polypharmacology is the way, but it turned out in this case was the appropriate tool for me. And it's also a reminder that combined pharmacology with brain

45:56machine interface and stimulation, combining ketamine therapy with TMS. I've not done ketamine nor TMS, but I think we are entering a really exciting new time where we're going to be able to amplify the effects of machines and drugs. Let's call them what they are. It's pharmacology, but drugs that they can synergize in ways that are more directed. But ultimately the directives in life are what matter. Like, do I feel better? What am I doing on a daily basis that's serving me? If the inter mid cingulate cortex or the posterior insula gets 10% thicker, great. But if you're not

46:30making better decisions, like frankly, who gives a shit, right? You know? So ultimately that everyday outcomes, the clinical outcomes and everyday outcomes are what really matter. Brain imaging is important too, of course. So the experience with these compounds, I will also say left me in a place where I'm like, I'm feeling pretty good right now. I feel really good. In fact, I don't feel quote unquote called to it again right now. Maybe I will at some point. I have not, you know, for instance, I've never done ayahuasca. There seems to be this resurgence of the one shot theory in Silicon Valley

47:02that there are these like CEOs who, you know, or company founders rather, who will take ayahuasca and then like quit the company or something. And I made the argument to Mark Andreessen like, well, maybe they're happier. And he made the argument quite astutely as pretty much everything Mark says is yeah, but as an investor, that's not what I'm looking for. And I go, well, sure. But from a life satisfaction point, maybe yes. I think it depends on what your incentive structure is. And so I am very excited about plasticity tools, whether or not it's talk therapy combined with a brain stimulation

47:33device that's invasive or non-invasive or a vagal stimulation device, those are getting better and better all the time, whether or not it's an empathogen and psilocybin high dose with therapeutic support, or it's daily microdosing for seven days with an undetectable like subjective effect where you're just like, I feel fine. I feel normal, but you're doing a bunch of hard things and suddenly your brain is shifting more quickly. I mean, I think this is where the field needs to go enough with it quote unquote opens plasticity. That's a general statement, not about psychedelics,

48:05but include psychedelics. Yeah. Let me chime in here. This is good terrain. So I would say a couple of things that might be helpful for folks were interesting just to bat around. So the first I would say is that when you induce plasticity, let's just explore that with in the context of psychedelics. And I'm going to use some pretty primitive analogies here, but if you're heating up the clay, that doesn't immediately mean that in that window of plasticity or after that, you're going to turn out better than you were before. You have to be very cautious about how you reshape the clay once

48:40you induce that plasticity. And I'd suggest people check out Gould Dolan. She's at UC Berkeley. She's looked at critical periods and the reopening of critical periods after psychedelics. She's focused a lot on MDMA, but also is exploring Ibogaine among other things. And that's part of the reason why historically, if you talk to facilitators who have literally supervised thousands of sessions, more common in like the neo-shamanic kind of Northern California context for simplicity than

49:10the indigenous, but the two to three weeks following has always been viewed as this golden window for reformatting your behavior and your patterns. And it turns out that modern science, Gould's research being one good example of it, reinforces this. So it's not just taking the medicine in the form of a pill, a potion, whatever it might be. It's actually that that is a catalyst that opens a period of time during which the work needs to be done, right? So that's part number one. I would say that

49:43your experience also with the hippie flipping, so the MDMA plus psilocybin, or in this case, psilocybin mushrooms, I would say blunting or eliminating the, let's just call it energetic hangover MDMA, super typical. I don't generally, well, not that I'm doing this at all, obviously for legal purposes, but let's just say hypothetically, that's part of the reason why some people will format, say a weekend where you have breath work, let's just say as a lead-in, then in pathogen, and then the next day something that is more, and this term is controversial,

50:19but classical psychedelic, again, for simplicity, let's just call it psilocybin, LSD, whatever it might be, also tends to reduce that potential for like the energetic hangover. That's pretty common. People can check out also Transcend Therapeutics that just got acquired, or at least the majority was purchased, who have been commercializing methylone, which is a very, very interesting compound. It's like the shorter acting, softer cousin of MDMA, much less body load, very, very interesting compound. And what they did, which was very smart, and I'm not saying MAPS slash Lycos,

50:54whatever the current name is, wasn't smart, but one of the problems that MDMA ran into is that it was coupled with psychotherapy. And the FDA does not know how to regulate psychotherapy that they don't know how to standardize or think of as standardized. And so what transcended is they just completely separated the two and actually removed the psychotherapy completely and said, how do people do with methylone, period? That's it. And they've done incredibly well, which is reflected in the acquisition. Really interesting compound, methylone.

51:25Methylone. Interesting. I wasn't aware of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think these are very interesting compounds. And I used to have this view, like, you're increasing neuromodulators. SSRIs will do that too differently and clearly a different experience. Actually, I've not taken SSRIs. I'm trying to think, have I ever taken an SSRI? Have you ever taken trazodone? It's not technically an SSRI? No, I haven't. So I think there's so much important work to be done here. And I will say, you know, a huge hat tip to you. You've been ushering this forward. It's amazing. We

51:59can even have this conversation about things that have happened. Things have changed. My conclusion after all of that and lots of personal flight time with lots of things is that to state the obvious, it's not a panacea. It's for most people not going to be one and done where the potion pill plant medicine does all the heavy lifting for you. The way I think about it now is it's like very complicated knee reconstructive surgery. It's like you're going to want to pick the doctor very carefully. You're going to want to know how to do your

52:32due diligence. You have the surgery and then guess what? The next, let's even, could be like both shoulders, both knees. Boy, do you have a lot of rehab to do. And that's the way that I myself think about it. And also it's contraindicated for a lot of people, at least as of right now, there are exclusionary criteria for these clinical trials. And I don't think all of them will hold water long-term, but if you have bipolar, if you have a family history of schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, it is generally not a good idea. And coming back to the polypharma,

53:05do not underestimate the risk of cannabis when taken with or in proximity to these drugs. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble. And then I would say to deliver on the brain stimulation side, that one of the most interesting things to me right now is the one day protocol. It's been refined by Dr. Jonathan Downer at University of Toronto and others, but using an agent, in this case, an antibiotic to induce neuroplasticity called decyclycerine.

53:39So you take, in this case, it's just a coincidence, but I think the most common dose that's been used is 125 milligrams. I got oral, like trochey, and you dissolve it an hour before your stimulation. And again, I'm pulling this from memory so people can read up on the literature, but you take that five-day protocol that had been compressed by Nolan and team down from three to six months. They had compressed it down to five days, but people are still having to take five days off of work because you're getting stimulated 10 times a day, every hour on the hour. There are variable protocols, but that's roughly it. Very few people can take a week off

54:13of work and pay out of pocket, incredibly expensive. So this one day is preloading with the decyclycerine and you take those five days and you compress it into one day. And I've had experiences with this one-day protocol and full disclosure, I'm involved with this company, Ampa Health, which is co-founded by Jonathan Downer. So there's that, but I experienced all this before any of these conversations. And from that, I've been able to get a 90% reduction in my generalized anxiety

54:45disorder and OCD for three to four months at a time. Some people get much longer durability. That's impressive. I've met people who've had 18 months of durability with major depressive disorder one day. And the side effect profile, and there are other hardware providers and so on that you can look into, but having this accelerated TMS protocol enhanced by the neuroplasticity of this decyclycerine, DCS for short, it's been a real focus is trying to look at neuromodulation writ large, as opposed to

55:21just psychedelics, right? Because if the only tool you have is a hammer, and this is not my expression, right? A lot of things start to look like nails and psychedelics are not useful for everything. They just are not. And if you look at any historical use of these compounds, having thousands and millions of people taking psychedelics is a brand new experiment. If you look at most indigenous cultures who consume, whether it's celosibi mushrooms or ayahuasca or something else, it is a very, very, very, very small percentage of the population, typically reserved

55:53for who you might consider the ethnobotanist slash pharmacist slash medicine man or woman. And pre-Columbian contact, for instance, with like in the case of ayahuasca, two things. Number one, the patients seldom drank, the patients in quotation marks, because two of the principal uses of ayahuasca or for warfare and hunting. So this idea of like, we just put LSD or whatever the psychedelic du jour is in the water and we have world peace, it ain't a real thing, guys. It could be the opposite.

56:25Go to any psychedelic conference and look at the obscene infighting for any proof of that. It's the worst. It's so, so bad. What they do, coming back to your point, right? And alongside the D-cycloserine and many other compounds is they induce neuroplasticity, which affords you a window of opportunity within which you can do some pretty cool stuff. All right. Totally on board. I mean, it's interesting because as we're sort of moving through exercise and psychedelics, which is really a conversation about neuroplasticity and mental

56:59health, perhaps physical health as well. It's very clear that like all the stuff about exercise, increasing brain-derived nootrophic factor, it's all tied together. And then you think, well, why is my brain sharper after I exercise? There's an alertness thing. You're using your own chemistry to wake you up with some BDNF, but then people sort of assume you just have to do the exercise part. You actually have to go try and learn something to get the plasticity. It doesn't matter. You could quadruple the amount of circulating BDNF in your brain. Nothing's going to change. I know this for a fact because for years I studied neuroplasticity. You need precisely time

57:34neural firing pre and post synaptically. You can do this with sensory input. We're talking about reading, math, learning to vibe code. Is that what they call it now? Right? Which Rick Rubin invented. No, I'm kidding. He didn't. He's going to kill me for saying that, but the memes would make you think so. Whatever it is that you want to rewire, you have to go do that hard work. Just getting the chemicals increased doesn't do it. You need alertness. You need these chemicals circulating. It helps to have an emotional rise if it's for certain kinds of work and perhaps not for others, more analytic work

58:06requiring probably less of an emotional rise. But the directed part is that that's the next step. And I think about that a lot. I mean, having sat down as you have with so many guests now who are experts in psychiatry and psychology and self-help for lack of a better way to put it, it's reassuring to me that as with exercise, as with nutrition, as with psychedelics, some themes are starting to fall out. We're starting to almost get to principles. There's this wonderful book in the

58:37field of neuroscience called Principles of Neuroscience. Almost everyone gets it. It's a big old thing. I had that textbook. It's old, right? It used to be Kandel, Jesselyn, Schwartz. And then one of those folks got canceled and then passed away. And so it's got a different author line there, but that was the original one, Kandel, Jesselyn, Schwartz. And the idea is Principles of Neuroscience. Yes, it's filled with facts about receptors and neurotransmitters and tons of beautiful details of all these discoveries. But what you learn as a graduate student and a postdoc, and then when you eventually become a professor, you want to teach the students is what are the principles of how a nervous system

59:12builds itself? Attractants and repellents. What are the principles by which neural circuits change? Oh, you need coordinated firing. You can actually unwire things if they're mismatched firing. How do you build a memory and then move it someplace else so that you don't have to fill the memory-making area to its capacity? The principles are what eventually emerge. And that's very useful. In the fields, if you will, of health and wellness, umbrellas, all the things we've been talking about and a lot more, we're finally getting to that.

59:45This is the reason why I throw out exhale, emphasize breathing, slows you down, calms you down. And inhale, emphasize breathing, wakes you up. Resistance training to or near or past failure, that kind of scales the number of sets. We are finally at a place where because of social media, thank goodness, because of podcasts, again, huge hat tip to you. Yours was the first podcast I ever listened to, still listen to. We are finally at this place where people are starting to hear like, yeah, I get it. The sunlight thing. You go, you get it? Okay, cool. Ironically, the things that people have heard many, many times are often things they need to do every day and be reminded

1:00:18of many, many times. But it's not about getting morning sunlight for X number of minutes, et cetera. It's about understanding what is it in this morning sunlight thing? I'll tell you right now, the big eye-opener for me, no pun intended, this last year was I did an episode on cortisol, the quote-unquote stress hormone. No, cortisol is involved as stress. Yes, that's true. But cortisol mobilizes glucose from the liver and elsewhere into the body. It's an energy-deploying hormone. When you wake up in the morning, it's because of a rise in cortisol. Cortisol awakening

1:00:50response. Adenosine is very low. Melatonin is dropping. Cortisol goes up. You wake up. If your alarm goes off, it spikes even more. Viewing bright light, ideally from sunlight, first thing in the morning, increases that morning cortisol spike by about 50%. Okay, and on and on. And I could say, and also cold water and caffeine and exercise. Exercise, by the way, will triple or quadruple your baseline cortisol levels at any time of the 24-hour cycle. So you go, okay, that's a bunch more facts. Ah, but the principle is if your morning cortisol is high and you can make it higher doing any number of the things I just described,

1:01:23it ensures that your evening and nighttime cortisol is low. And that's what sets you up for an increase in melatonin. It's what helps ensure a great night's sleep. And so you go, okay, so the real principle here is you want to bookend the day with high cortisol in the morning, whenever your morning happens to be, it doesn't matter if it's 6 a.m. or 10 a.m., bright light, caffeine, hydration, exercise, a little stress too, probably will help. And you want the end of your day to be low cortisol, high melatonin, high adenosine. And the more movement you get during the day, better off you

1:01:58are. And all of a sudden, it doesn't really matter if you have access or the time to do all of the things I just described. It's not about morning sunlight per se. It just turns out that morning sunlight in your eyes is the best way to ramp up that morning peak. And that ramped up morning peak is the best way to make sure that it's low at night. And if you experience any stress in the evening at night, it's a quick blip in cortisol and that's reduced. Otherwise, it's a blip on top of a high baseline. You look at cancer treatment outcomes, you look at anxiety, you look at, and by the way, what I just described is true for kids, pregnant women, perimenopausal, menopausal,

1:02:30and men. You want high morning, low evening, and nighttime cortisol. Aim for that, that principle, whatever you have available to do that. If you're on a plane, it looks different. If you're in California, it looks different than if you're in Scandinavia, different times of year, whatever you do to try and ensure that bookending high and low cortisol, respectively, morning and night, you won. You won the day and the night. And so it doesn't really matter what the individual protocols are. And this to me is like the most important and exciting thing about where the

1:03:02quote unquote field of health and wellness and public discourse about health has taken us, which is we finally have some principles to work with. And then if people go, well, I don't like the cold shower. Okay, fine. Like, I don't, I don't like resistance training. I don't want to do okay, fine. Choose a different tool, but the principles are what count. And to me, that's super exciting. That's not boring. All right, Andrew, I want to ask you about peptides. All the rage. You look at Google Trends, everybody and their brother has a peptide startup, but there seems to

1:03:35maybe be something there. I don't know if there's a there there. For people who have heard the word, don't know exactly what folks are talking about. I get texted every week, multiple times from people asking about various peptides. And I'd say half the time, depending on what they're trying to do, I'm like, can't you just be a grownup and inject testosterone or HGH instead of you're trying to get there directly. But I would be very interested to hear, I know there's a broad spectrum of stuff that people are experimenting with. What are these things? And what's your current thinking?

1:04:07I also don't completely disagree with you about like, just be a grownup and take cypionate and HGH. If you want to maintain fertility, take some HGG as well. I'm being facetious, of course. I think there are risks to all of those, but it is the appropriate opening joke slash reality, because if you're expecting cypionate HGH type results from peptides, you ain't going to get them, at least not with respect to anabolic growth, feelings of wellbeing. Peptides are short chains of amino acids,

1:04:40insulin's a peptide, et cetera. I cannot take credit for what I'm about to say next, but it's a very, very important principle, kind of the theme today, I suppose. Abud Bakri, who's an MD, came on the podcast, talked about peptides. And he said, look, for many, many hundreds, if not thousands of years, but certainly hundreds of years in the context of pharma, people have been searching for medicines in plants, isolating medicines from plants. Pharma companies still do this. Now people are starting to look for medicines within the body.

1:05:13And peptides are a great example of that. GLP, for instance, the drugs that increase GLP do so to thousand fold levels over the levels of circulating GLP that you would have. And they result in, as we all know, robust weight loss. So that's one category. I think we need to think about categories of peptides, but understand that they're made in your brain and body. Some of them may have benefits when made synthetically and delivered at very, very high doses, such as with these GLP agonists,

1:05:46Ozempic Monjaro. Red at True Tide is one that we should talk about, made by Lilly. It's coming out soon. It impacts the GLP system, but also the GIP and the glucagon system. Careful with that one, kiddos. A lot of people are going to be microdosing it. Yeah. A lot of people are finding that microdoses can have similar effects, and that's an important kind of cost-risk analysis. Okay. So stepping back,

1:06:09peptides are made in your body. High concentrations made synthetically, they may provide benefits that make them medicines. So we can think of the weight loss peptides, the GLPs being the most prominent example. The GLP drugs that increased levels of GLP hundredfold were used to treat diabetes for a while, still are, but they didn't induce much weight loss. The ones that raise GLP levels thousandfold or more, those lead to robust weight loss,

1:06:43including muscle loss. And so that's part of the controversy. Also, there's discussion about maybe increasing some apathy. They've reduced craving for alcohol and perhaps cravings more generally. At the recommended dosages in some people, they can create nausea, which is why some people are taking less of them and still getting the weight loss benefits, but less nausea. There's a lot of stuff going on there. But to stay on the GLPs and weight loss peptides specifically, Lilly developed retitrutide, which hits the GLP, GIP, and glucagon system, leads to the most robust weight loss, seems to spare some muscle, perhaps. People should always resistance train anyway to

1:07:17offset that. But it's the most effective of those weight loss, let's just call it GLPs, even though it hits these other systems. The gray market is the quote-unquote for research purposes only stuff that you can buy online. It's perfectly legal to sell for research purposes only, not for animal or human use. And I joked on X a while ago, like, wow, all these home labs, everyone's buying this. Of course, people are injecting them. The concern is about contamination with things like lipid polysaccharide, or you're not getting what you think you're getting.

1:07:48And so many people are already taking retitrutide, even though it hasn't been formally released because it's pretty easy to synthesize. And so it's being sold on the gray market. People are taking it. There's a second category, and then I'll return to the kind of gray market issue. The second category would be things to increase growth hormone, so-called growth hormone secretagogues, things like sermorellin, epimorellin, tesamorellin. These are all variants on the theme of get the brain neurons that project down to the pituitary to stimulate release of growth hormone at night. Typically, you don't eat a couple hours before sleep is the idea. Probably good for sleep

1:08:22anyway. It is good for sleep anyway. Then you inject this stuff. Typically, it leads to maybe a three to eightfold increase in growth hormone IGF-1. Some stimulate appetite quite a bit, like MK677. Some don't. I've tried sermorellin very briefly, dramatically increased my slow-wave deep sleep, nuked my REM sleep. This is a common theme. Spiked my prostate-specific antigen. I've never had any problems with PSA. I came off it. PSA went back to normal. No one's

1:08:52been able to give me a mechanistic explanation for that. I'm not about to run the experiment again. I didn't find that I got much fat loss from it, but I didn't use it very long. I didn't find I got stronger. It just didn't seem worth it to me, given the PSA thing. A lot of people take these things and they're going to get these really dramatic increases in growth hormone. They sound dramatic three to eightfold, but whether or not they're meaningful in terms of fat loss, it doesn't really seem they're that robust, especially given that you have all the GLPs now. So the growth hormone secreticogs also include things like CJC. And there's some variants on

1:09:26these, which can lead to some insulin resistance, but maybe it spikes GH a bit more. I don't know. None of those to me really seem worth it personally, just given the effects aren't that great. You know, if someone can afford it and they can get a script for it, probably better to just take pharma grade somatotrope or omnitrope growth hormone. And, you know, the bodybuilders would take the eight IUs a day or something crazy like that. But in the trials that have been done with metformin and GH, typically it's people are taking one to two IUs five nights per week that will

1:10:01dramatically increase deep sleep and probably sleep overall. And the effects on fat loss and just tissue repair healings and feelings of wellbeing and just cognitive function, anecdotally people and subjectively people say like, wow, I just feel so great. This is the getting up in the morning and be like, wow, my joints feel good. And just being ready to like, go, go, go. It's not anabolic as much as something like testosterone, et cetera, but I'm not telling people to run out and do GH, but if you could get a good script, a script for real GH and take a low dose versus taking a bunch

1:10:33of like unknown secretagogue peptides, that seems like an obvious one for me. Then there's a category of things like BPC-157, body protection compound 157, which is a amino acid chain that is in gastric juice, but it's this isolated amino acid chain that seems to be the one that's most popular. And at the same time, it's the one for which most people probably taking it for all the wrong reasons. I've tried it. I definitely feel like after a pain or strain, the recovery is faster,

1:11:04but I can't do the control experiment because it goes systemic. Let's say you hurt both biceps. You can't inject into one bicep and not the other and assume that it's just acting locally. It's going to go systemically. There are capsule forms of BPC that people claim are just as good. I don't know. Do you have to inject locally close to the injury? It seems that might be helpful. The animal data on BPC are really impressive. Cartilage regrowth, fibroblasts, migration, angiogenesis, nerve regrowth. It's a literature I've spent a lot of time with. There's not a single published human trial where I think the most interesting use of it perhaps is,

1:11:38is I know someone recently, she wrote to me and she said that her dog had a spinal injury and she said, does BPC work in animals? I go, actually pretty much all the data are in animals. So if my dog, God forbid, had an injury, I'd be willing to give him or her BPC. You have to work out the appropriate dosage. How would you source that? Hypothetically. So you can get it from compounding pharmacies now. So you need a doctor to write that script. Depending on your risk tolerance, you could go to the gray market for research purposes only. I wouldn't do that. Peptide sciences shuttered their doors, windows, whatever. They closed a few

1:12:12months back. They sensed the heat coming on and they're like, we're out. They took their money and they're out. Smart move, peptide sciences. So nowadays you can find doctors that will prescribe it. There's also pentadecapeptide, which is just a different form of BPC. It seems to have same function. It's easier to find and getting it from a compounding pharmacy. Of course, compounding pharmacies vary in stringency, but is going to be cleaner than the gray market sourcing, of course. But I have no relationship to these pharmacies. But for instance, TaylorMade,

1:12:47Upstate, Revive pharmacy, these are kind of the better known and trusted compounding pharmacies. Compounding pharmacies were allowed to compound drugs that are still under patent during shortages and can compound generic drugs. They'll also truly compound peptides. You could get BPC with another one, the TB500, the so-called Wolverine stack. I don't know. I've never tried TB500. I keep some BPC-157 in the fridge. If I have a strain, I'll inject it. Can I hop in for a second? The challenge of so much this stuff is you can't do the control.

1:13:20Can't do the control. Because I took the Wolverine stack after I had elbow surgery and I'm like, did it help? I have no idea. Frankly, I have no idea. I will say this. I've used it a few times, very short runs of it. I'm not interested in using it as a general recovery tool or every day or any, I don't have any gut issues. Like, so people have used high doses of BPC to resolve gut issues. That was the original use. You know, in this clinical trial, they did BPC enemas at very high dosages. Sounds like an Austin party.

1:13:48And supposedly, I learned this from Abud Pavlov, actually had a side gig. He was a health influencer. He would give people gastric juices to try and resolve ulcers and things like that. And we know gastric juices contain a number of beneficial peptides. But I don't recommend that. How did they down those? How did they get them in there? How did they down them and how did they get them? Shot glass of gastric juices? I mean, maybe he had a cabinet of people with the, you know, they're tapping them. Yeah. So rough. So, you know, people say, should I take BPC one? I said, no, you shouldn't unless you have

1:14:18an injury or maybe in that case, you get clean compounded pharmacy BPC and you inject it locally or you take it systematically, you try it, see if it helps. But why would you take it ongoing? That just doesn't make any sense to me. It doesn't make any sense to me, frankly. And again, you go back to your sort of half joke at the beginning. You really want to recover quickly from exercise, take an IU or two IUs of GH every night before sleep, and you will recover magnificently well. For the enhanced games, the swimmer, the massive lats guy, he recently put his

1:14:49stack out and I think it was 200 milligrams of sippinate per week. So that's one CC of standard sippinate. That's a lot. Most people I know, and we can talk about this and I've talked about my sippinate use from the beginning and the experiment up much, much lower. I believe in microdosing that if at all, he's taking 200 plus, I think he's doing two IUs of growth hormone per night or five nights per week. And he's taking EPO. They can only take FDA approved drugs. So it's like, enhanced, but were they testing at all to verify if they're FDA approved versus FDA non-approved?

1:15:25I mean, that would be a complicated test to run. It's kind of interesting to ask, like, was there any rule breaking in the steroid Olympics? Yeah. Maybe it was a sink test. You've heard this, right? Like urine sample and they just poured in the sink. Fast. I mean, some of the power lifters like Thor were very open about the fact that they were not allowed to use the things they would normally use because they weren't FDA approved. That's kind of interesting. It seemed like they were kind of running the middle of the road, but. And that's a lot of juice. I think he was also, if I'm thinking of the same Australian swimmer, I'm not sure, but yeah, he was also quoted.

1:15:56This is many months before the actual competition, but he's like, I am going to juice to the gills. So yeah, those would be. It looks like he almost grew gills because his lats were like, not Yates size, but he's a very tall guy. And yeah, a few Olympics ago, I think it was, wasn't the last one was the one before that. This, a female runner got popped for DECA and she claimed it came from a burrito that she ate and the DECA burrito. And you know, I'm a track and field fan and so are some other folks around the studio. That's DECA durabalance for people that don't, I might be mispronouncing it. That's correct. Nandrolone. Yeah. Non-aromatizing doesn't

1:16:31convert to estrogen. As far as we know, people use it for joint healing and things of that sort. I've never tried it, but someone in our studio said this, and I think they're spot on. They hope she used it because if she didn't, and she got nailed for it from a burrito or some other source that sucks because there's a huge stigma that goes with that. She gets, you know, she can't compete and you never really shake that reputation. So my hope is that she actually took it and got caught as opposed to didn't take it and got caught. I mean, the burrito, the burrito alibi is pretty

1:17:02flimsy. Well, last time I checked, you can't just nibble on DECA and have it do much for you. Well, and Canelo Alvarez got popped for clenbuterol and he claimed it came from some foodie ate in Mexico, you know, the clen cow, you know, hypothesis. Um, so, you know, you remember back when I think Modafino was fair game, if it were prescribed and it was something like the majority, if not all of the finalists and some of the track and field events were all diagnosed narcoleptics, they were all, that's right. It's like, what are the chances that

1:17:36these mutants would all be narcoleptics? Totally. BPC would be very hard to detect because your body makes it naturally as with, with the GLPs again, they stimulate such a massive increase in action at those receptors that you probably detect it. So those are the kind of the healing ones, you know, the tissue repair ones, TB 500, BPC, there are others, but those are the main ones. And then there's the kind of miscellaneous category, things like epitalin, which actually comes from the pineal, which is weird because there's also a peptide called pinealon, which doesn't come from the pineal. That is confusing. Epitalin is thought to allow for, you know, preservation of like histone and DNA

1:18:14structure. It's very vague. There are some decent data on visual repair for animal models of retinitis pigmentosa, maybe more robust circadian setting when you travel. I may have tried this recently, a capsule form of epitalin combined with some sunlight in the morning for the first two days did seem to shift my clock more quickly for jet lag, for jet lag, you know, a tip I got maybe, but I'm not going to do it again. Cause I don't, I don't know. I don't know if there's a there there, but I was chatting with this friend of mine. She's frequent traveler from Japan to the U S she lives in

1:18:47Japan. She's constantly going back and forth and she'll come for just a few days and then head back. So just get the possibility for getting brutalized is high, just hopping so many time zones. And she gave me a tip and I tried it and could be a placebo. Who knows? She was just like, just fast. She's like, I, on the long flights, I just fast. And I tried that going to Asia is always a little bit easier than coming back. I was totally fine. I couldn't believe it. Cause I had to do a short trip for reasons I won't bore people with. Don't know what the mechanism would be, but I was like,

1:19:18Oh, maybe there's something there. We have our central circadian clock SCN. Most people have heard of that and how the eyes connect to it directly, which is why sunlight and other forms of light are so efficient at shifting our clock. But we have a lot of peripheral clocks, liver clocks, gut clocks. And those are usually the last to shift, which is why a lot of people have kind of feeling like their stomach is off. Digestion is off when they travel, maybe not traveler's diarrhea, but they just sort of feel like waking up in the middle of the night, they're hungry. They're on the previous locations, meal schedule. Fasting may allow for shifting in those clocks. Mealtimes are

1:19:53very robust thing in terms of raising our levels of arousal. You know, there's kind of like you eat every day at noon, like a couple of minutes before you get that arousal, these are the well-timed systems. So that's not totally surprising. Pinealon is one I've experimented with and is very interesting. And I have to say, there are very few things that increase REM sleep. Most things deplete REM sleep. In fact, I always joke, if somebody needs a PhD quick and nothing's working, have them do a study of sleep and give any drug and it disrupts REM sleep. You know, I don't study sleep, but that's

1:20:24a kind of a well-known joke. How do you spell pinealon? P-I-N-E-A-L-O-N. Oh, they really need it to be as confusing as possible. And it does not come from the pineal. So it's very, the nomenclature sucks in this area. And we don't even have names for these different bins. Half-baked postdoc is like, you know, it'd be really funny to call the stuff from the pineal epitalin. It's spelled two different ways, by the way, out there, epithalin and epitalin and pinealon and then swap them, right? Pinealin comes from the cortex. It's made in the cortex, neocortex. And I will say there are a couple of things that will increase REM. With no pharmacology,

1:20:59you can heat up your sleeping environment in the final two hours of your sleep. You'll get much more REM. Thank you, Matt Walker, for that trick. It's awesome. So cool at the beginning of the night, cold in the middle of the night and warm toward morning or throw on a heated blanket or whatever, a weighted blanket or some socks and a wool cap. If you wake up about two thirds of the way through your sleep, use the bathroom. You'll be surprised how much better your REM is. The other thing is, and this is a nice one. If you want to work out late in the day, you don't want to take caffeine because you still want to sleep that night. If you take alpha GPC, you know, 900 megs of alpha GPC,

1:21:34alpha GPC, which as you know, increases, it's like choline donor, acetylcholine, that system, you can still sleep that night and it will increase your REM sleep. And it is true. Remember we said high cortisol morning, low cortisol at night. That's the optimal setup that we should aim for. If you exercise after work and you do a, let's say a high intensity session of any kind, the resistance training we were talking about earlier, for instance, you will triple or quadruple your cortisol levels. I should also earmark that as all this stuff online, which seems mainly

1:22:04directed towards women, like, Oh, cold showers and baths, you know, ice baths are going to spike your cortisol. That's terrible. The increase in cortisol from deliberate cold exposure is trivial compared to what working out with weights will do. So late day cortisol spikes are no problem if it comes up and down, but you also wouldn't want to take caffeine on top of that and disrupt your sleep. So if you have a late day workout and you need a bit of a stimulant, alpha GPC is a good tool and you'll likely get more REM sleep. So it's a nice one. And then pineal on, I will use every once in a while. For what reason? You get three hours of REM. If you're me

1:22:41three hours and it doesn't disrupt your slow wave, deep sleep. It is wild. And here's the cool part. It works that night and it seems to work all the nights after there's carryover. And it seems the hypothesis based on the animal data is that it can help quote unquote, regenerate the pineal, which is a dangerous term because you don't want cells proliferating either. So who knows what it's doing, but I'll use it every once in a while. Always a good place to start. Now, Abud likes it in the daytime. He'll take it in the daytime. People use it for cognitive enhancement.

1:23:13He claims there's a founder of a major company that has all his employees on it for daytime work. I know someone that takes it during the daytime because there is a songwriter, very talented songwriter, and he likes the kind of hypnotic state it puts him in. I'm interested in sleeping at night and being alert during the day. Great tool for occasional use. Is that subcutaneous injection or what is that? They also have oral forms. I've only tried the subcutaneous injection and you do need to find a doctor that can prescribe it and get it from a compounding pharmacy. I think pineal is a very interesting compound and I've been monitoring my blood work the whole time doing this. So

1:23:47tried sermorellin, stopped using it. I've never used a GLP. I'm kind of curious because a lot of people are talking about low-dose terzepatide or redditrutide, like a tenth of the prescribed dose for not just weight loss, but for just cognitive well-being. Yeah, neuroprotective effects. Neuroprotective effects, maybe. Yeah, I'm interested in that stuff. I mean, I'm so curious and maybe there's literature out there, I haven't read it, but if the mechanism of action is separate from the metabolic effects,

1:24:19right? Because if you take someone who has insulin resistance or is on the path to insulin resistance and you correct for that, then that in and of itself on some levels should be neuroprotective, right? Especially if you're looking at vascular dementia or any number of things. Glaucoma, there's some interesting data that may, terzepatide may reduce eye pressure. So that's interesting. BPC-157 has this asterisk next to it. It will cause angiogenesis. So people are saying you don't want to vascularize a tumor, obviously. Accelerate cancer is that kind of thing.

1:24:51You don't want to supply more blood nutrients to a tumor. Gobble them up and grow. But it is not mutagenic. So it's not carcinogenic mutagenic per se. And that's important. Here's something interesting too. There's really kind of sociology behind all of these. There are a couple more we can touch on, but the GLPs, the prescription GLPs and the massive growth of that area is guilty of making the general public comfortable with injections. So, you know, it's kind of interesting

1:25:22to battles online or between, here we go. Yeah. You know, it's like you created this problem. You know, most people don't talk about this, but the traditional media and medicine like to couch the peptide thing is a bunch of gym bros. Massive market in women. Sure. Most people taking these peptides are not gym going guys. It's women who want to take a low dose RETA, but RETA is not out yet. Or they want to take low dose trizepatide cocktailed with NAD with some GHK copper, which is

1:25:56for, there's some studies that show that in combination with red light therapy or some sun exposure, just enough might remove wrinkles. The biggest market is women. I'm not like trying to defend the bro science guy, but it's kind of funny that the target has been like these guys on X who are selling peptides. That's not where to place. It's an easier target. Yeah. There's also this very interesting sociology around kind of natty or not stuff. And, you know, for what the hell does that mean? Yeah, exactly. I mean, if someone takes GLPs, are they now not natural? Yeah. But for men,

1:26:28that's kind of the thing, like, does someone get called out or not? My recommendation, this is what I've always done, is always just talk about everything you've taken or are taking or not taking. Yeah. Also, can I pause for a second just to say, I think I'm getting the name of the doc right, Bigger, Faster, Stronger. Oh yeah. Just Mark Bell and Chris Bell, I think it was, who directed and made the film. Great film to watch. It's older. But at some point, they're talking about this. Yeah. And they put up, I want to say it's a four point quadrant. I mean, by definition,

1:27:00and they're like, okay, so you can inject EPO, right? To increase red blood cell count and like oxygen carry capacity. Okay. And they're like, or you can live at altitude or you can have a altitude simulation tent or, and they're like, are any of these natural? Right. Right. You can get an infusion of your own blood. Yeah. Yeah. Testosterone cypionate will increase red blood cell count. Oh, for sure. And people don't talk about that was, it's not EPO like, but you certainly, cardio gets better. So even without the addition of muscle, recovery gets better. Well, I'll tell you, I mean, personally, and I've written about this,

1:27:33which is funny just to air a grievance, right? I remember like I talked at length in the four hour body about post-surgical anabolic use. And then like online, it's like Tim Ferriss admits. And I'm like, admit I fucking wrote about it at length. Totally. Just the wording is such a weasel word. I admitted. Oh yeah. Well, I've, you know, somehow, even though five years ago, I said, oh yeah, like I decided to run an experiment where I'm tried cypionate with HCG, you know, keep sperm production online and just low dose and just see what's the minimal effective dose. Yeah. I'm not

1:28:05competing in any sports. Like I, I don't think it makes that big of a difference except in terms of recovery. I didn't change my training before, after I went off and on again, like, okay. So that's within the male community in the women and peptides, there's this other piece, which is like, who's getting plastic surgery and who's not nowadays, the dermatologists certainly in Los Angeles, but in Northern California to recommend some amount of laser resurfacing to reduce cancer risk, but it also reduces wrinkles. So, you know, like what are people doing? None of it is particularly natural. I think for competitive sports is where it becomes an important issue,

1:28:39but I think that the pharma grade GLP world made sticking little tiny needles, 31 gauge or 30 gauge