Dr. Scott Sherr: New Performance Enhancers & Biohacks To One Up Your Competition (Methelyne Blue etc)

Dr.

Scott Scher, board certified internal medicine physician certified to practice health optimization medicine, who speaks across the globe about GABA, methylene blue, hyperbaric chambers, and assortment of various other topics related to the optimization of human health.

Thanks for having me.

It's nice to.

How did you hear about my work?

Did you find me through different what channels?

Yeah, so basically

a lot of the things that I study myself and a lot of the things that I like to focus on is just overall health optimization.

And one of the, one of the spaces, well, the main space that I actually do this podcast in and create most of my content, which I think is kind of an interesting,

contrasting type of space is the bodybuilding space.

Yeah.

So like, I mean, I know you, I'm sure you're familiar with bodybuilding, especially when it comes to IFVB, bodybuilding,

I guess,

being associated with a ton of like performance enhancing drug use.

So right.

I think very recently in the last two, three years, it's been it's become a lot more of a transparent space where people are starting to openly discuss what is going on in the community.

And I think one of the coolest things is there's there's figures now that are arising where we're discussing some of the ways for us to really optimize our health at the best we can.

Because, you know, every time you're using like a performance-enhancing drug, such as an anabolic steroid, it's only creating more inflammation in your body, it's only degrading your health longer or more and more in the long term.

Long term, sure.

And we have to figure out all of these other methods where we can mitigate

overcompensate.

Yeah.

Mitigation strategy.

So

yeah, I love what you do.

Saw your work on

a bunch of different podcasts.

Thomas DeLauer,

one of the buddies, Mark Bell's podcast.

Yeah.

He was on my podcast as well.

Mark Bell's great.

He's fantastic.

I love him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was a funny one, by the way.

Yeah, I mean, he told me like when we were doing some pre-work, he's like, can you talk about erections on this podcast?

He said, you can talk about erections.

You can come on the podcast.

I was like, I can talk about erections.

We're cool with that.

Yeah, that was fun.

Yeah.

But yeah, man, I mean, I guess overall, I just really love all the topics you cover because

one of one first, like, I've been having, I've actually had like random people, such as like my own partner's father has texted me and been like, hey, what do you know about this methylene blue stuff?

And it's just kind of like

in different places in my life and different people,

they're just,

methylene blue is just starting to like pop up as like something that's like, very relevant and something that people are really interested in.

And I know you are a big contributor to that.

Yeah.

I mean, like, we were the first company to have a product that was based on methylene back in 2020.

So we have a lot of information, a lot of experience.

And so, yeah, things have gone bananas over the last six months or so with methylene blue, but we've been, we've been doing it for longer than that, for sure.

Yeah.

But tying that all into like, I guess, overall human optimization with your focus on the GABA system and sleep overall too.

I think sleep is extremely important for this space where

like the space that I discuss things in.

And then also

trying to remember, but you kind of just, you have like this very, oh, oh,

brain health as well.

Sure.

Which I think is very,

it's like an undervalued topic, especially in bodybuilding, considering there's so many like neurotoxic things that we, I guess, indulge ourselves in.

So it's pretty pretty cool that I don't know if you've ever heard of

even like YouTubers, just like Vigorous Steve or anything.

Vigorous Steve?

No, I haven't.

No, you can.

I mean, if you, I guess if you ever have some free time, just like check out Vigorous Steve.

I'm sure you probably heard of like more plates, more dates.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's kind of the same.

They're, they're kind of similar in a way, but, but Steve kind of delves more deeply into he does more deep dives into specific compounds and everything.

So,

um, but you know, they focus on a lot of these ways that we can, uh, I guess,

mitigate neurotoxicity and try to just support our brain health.

And, like, I didn't even know over the longest for the longest amount of time that alpha GPC was something I could take regularly for brain health.

I was just like, oh, I just see this in all my pre-workouts and stuff, but I didn't realize it was something that I could actually support my health long term with.

Yeah, cell membranes are kind of a big deal.

So, yeah, it's a good deal.

Yeah.

So, I guess, um, that's awesome.

I love it.

Yeah.

Uh, I guess, first off, um,

man, there's so many topics I can go on.

Just randomly out of curiosity, though, I did see you go to this.

How was the 2025 Peptide World Congress?

What was that like?

Yeah, so I went to the Peptide World Congress run by Dr.

William Seeds.

It's a cool organization.

They've been around for a while.

They're kind of the pioneers in peptide science, understanding peptides from a clinical perspective.

And as the FDA has gotten more crazy about various peptides and trying to take things off the market, they've been kind of the one place where people have tried to go for information.

And Bill is a really smart guy.

I spoke there last year, so not this 2025 year, but 2024, on hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

I did a full 30 minutes on that.

This year, I came back and I did

a collaboration talk with Thomas DeLauer.

And Thomas has been a friend for a long time.

And he and I have been talking about performance from

a parasympathetic perspective, which is a little bit different than most people think about it, right?

So we called it the parasympathetic edge, how you can optimize your performance by working smarter and not harder, basically.

And the idea really was, how can you bring in parasympathetic tone pre, during, and post-workout?

And when you do this,

actually finding out that you make more gains, you have to do less work to make those gains and you don't stress out your system and

just burn out too fast because you're overtraining, which is what most people are doing and so you know thomas is kind of the a really great example of of how to do this and he and i have been working through various understanding the physiology of why it's important to deregulate your nervous system not just upregulate it all the time and try to like listen to metallic or death metal before you do your workout all the time but actually maybe listen to mozart or beethoven and like actually drop in i don't know if i don't know if you've tried any of this before now but like that was the idea and like it's a really cool concept because like most people that are in the workout community are just trying to like go hard go hard and then go harder and then get the least amount of sleep possible and then go hard again but they're actually doing themselves a disservice over the long term and we we kind of we actually just we broke that down into various sections which was fun okay um actually can we deep dive into that a little bit so i think first off um i think there's a a little bit of um

There's a little bit of like a maybe a cringe when people hear the word overtraining in this space, which is kind of silly because I know there's different like perspectives on the definition of overtraining.

Sure.

Right.

Like, are you training too much volume or like i think i think a lot of people in the i guess in the exercise science space kind of like associate overtrading with fatigue like how much are you fatiguing yourself and there's this like there's this like perception from like the harder core bodybuilding community that like there's all these new science-based kids and influencers that that are like talking about oh god you're gonna like over fatigue yourself you're gonna like do too much and you're gonna get to fatigue yourself but then a lot of these kids are not working or training hard enough to even like progressive overload properly to optimize their gains in the long run.

But then on the other side of it, I know exactly what you're talking about, where a lot of these people, these kids, these side space lifters, even like guys that are hardcore in the community or bodybuilding pros, they don't always,

it's almost hard to perfect your recovery, you know?

Sometimes like it's, it's, it's already hard for us to like get perfect sleep, some of us.

So, I mean, and then add everything else on top of that.

I understand that, um, especially if you're someone that's like, you own a business, you're in content creation, you have a podcast, and you're doing bodybuilding, dude, that's like sympathetic drive the entire day.

Exactly.

When do you ever have a time for you to actually rest and recover?

Yeah.

And that's, that's a really great way to kind of introduce this idea is because most of us aren't having any downtime.

Most of us don't know how to turn on our off switch, right?

The off switch in our brain is actually regulated by something called GABA.

You know, the GABA is a neurotransmitter that helps calm down the firing of our brain.

It's the breaks of our brain.

Most people know about like the superstar neurotransmitters, like norepinephrine and dopamine and serotonin.

Those are the ones that people get all the give all the attention to, but it's your GABA that regulates all of that and tries to calm things down.

And when GABA is more activated, that's when we actually can build muscle.

When it's not activated, you can't, at least not as well.

And like this is very well described.

Like you don't make your gains during your workout.

You make your gains after your workout.

And then you have people that do their big workouts and then you just, just like you said, now they go now the meetings all day.

They have the kids all day.

They have, and they're just powering it through and then they have no time to get that downtime to get that parasympathetic activation so the key of this is that it doesn't have to be like 24 hours of downtime it doesn't even have to be like 10 or 15 minutes can go a long way after workout and you know thomas and i talked about how one thing you can do after workout for example is you can actually um

lie down like on the ground put your feet up against the wall and just doing that for 10 or 15 minutes is going to downregulate your nervous system enough that you've now started your whole body on the whole process of anabolic side of it.

Like, you know, working out is catabolic, right?

It's actually breaking things down.

And the anabolic side is the parasympathetic.

And, you know, it's interesting you mentioned the points about people not doing enough load to actually see the gains.

And I can see that too, right?

Because you actually have to get to a certain point to be able to, you know, get a catabolic load enough so that you can make enough anabolic stimulus on the other side of things.

But most people are actually on the other side of it, which is that they're doing too much catabolic work work and not enough time to work on that anabolic side.

And then they're taking exogenous things like, you know, steroids, for example, which can be very helpful at building up on that anabolic side, but it's a balance there.

And the challenge is that most people aren't focused enough on that

parasympathetic activation, that GABA side, that they're not seeing the gains that they could feel and have with much less work overall compared to what they think that they need to do.

Okay, gotcha.

What would be your top recommendations for us to focus and improve on that parasympathetic side?

So the major things to think about, the easiest thing, the easiest bucket of things to think about is what you're going to do after exercise, because that's when most people have maybe a little bit of time.

But there are really cool things you can do before and during exercise as well to help.

But from the on the after exercise thing, the major things to think about here are how can you bring down your heart rate very quickly and also work on

doing it in a way that you're also working on, like, for example, like I said, like lying down, for example, after workout or putting your feet up against a wall to help with lymphatic return to getting, you know, things back to your heart and for detoxification and to work a little bit faster.

So, major things that I think about after workout is how are you going to downregulate your nervous system as fast as possible.

So, you know, doing certain types of breath work can help here.

Doing, you know, positional stuff can help as well.

And then, you know, working on

not going into into something immediately, right?

Having a way, giving yourself a little bit of time.

But the major thing overall here is that how can you work on various strategies that can help improve your parasympathetic tone?

Like one of the things that I talked, what we talked about a lot during our talk was actually CO2 tolerance testing and training.

Are you familiar with CO2 training?

No, not very.

So the idea of CO2 training is that The main stimulus that we have to breathe is actually not how much oxygen we have, but amount of CO2 is in our system.

And so people know oxygen is why we need oxygen to make energy.

We make CO2 as a quote-unquote waste product, but CO2 is also really important because if you're hyperventilating, if you're breathing too fast, you breathe off too much CO2.

And what happens is that your red blood cells carry oxygen, right?

And your red blood cells try to release oxygen into your tissues so that you can do more work.

But if you're hyperventilating, if you're breathing off off too much CO2, and overall, most people are hyperventilating more than they're underventilating,

you're actually, because

there's less CO2 around, there's less capacity for those red blood cells to dump oxygen into tissue.

And so you get basically less capacity to do work if you're hyperventilating.

And so you can actually train your body.

to actually retain more CO2 at any given level.

And by doing that, you're actually going to dump more oxygen into your tissue.

And so this this is a fantastic performance enhancer.

And it's free.

It's, it's something you can train very, very quickly.

And there's a number of different strategies to do it.

But if you can do this, the thing about doing CO2 tolerance training, though, Niall, it's interesting that

what happens when the CO2 starts elevating is that when you're not used to it getting to a certain level, it actually triggers your fear response.

So if anybody.

Everybody knows this, like if you hold your breath, at some point you're going to want to breathe, right?

And then at some point, you're going to like be get this like, holy shit, I need to breathe kind of thing.

And that's like the fear response.

But that's also your sympathetic nervous system, your fight or flight nervous system taking over.

So when you're training and you're working really hard and you're getting that fight-or-flight nervous system coming online, your reserve depends on when that sympathetic nervous system really starts getting locked up and really, really, really tight, right?

Which, what I mean by that is that at some point, you're going to have to stop lifting because your system is overstressed.

But if you can tolerate more CO2, you can actually go longer.

So your sympathetic reserve is higher.

And so your output reserve is going to be higher too.

So this is one of, it's a really simple strategy.

You can do very easy breath work training to actually increase your CO2 tolerance.

And by doing that, you'll see that your stress response is going to go down.

overall.

So you can do more work per amount of load.

And that as a result of having CO2 tolerance, your nervous system is going to be able to

actually downregulate faster as well once you're done with exercise.

Do you happen to have an example of one of these breath works?

Yeah, so the most common one actually is.

I have the book over here.

It's called The Oxygen Advantage.

It's a guy named

Patrick McCune.

And

it's based on this method called the Buteko method, which was made in Russia.

Shockingly, everything comes out of Russia, especially from bodybuilding.

You guys know that world well.

But he created this idea of how to train breath holds over time, both static breath holds, which means that you're doing them at rest, and then doing more breath holds when you're doing walking, like walking breath holds.

And then there's another guy named Brian McKenzie, who's a friend of mine, really good guy.

He does what's called gear system breathing.

So learning how to breathe nasally, so nasal breathing for longer during various sort of

strengths or intensities of exercise.

And nasal breathing itself is also better for the most part, unless you're under max load, because nasal breathing is also increasing the nitric oxide in the body.

And nitric oxide is important for vasodilation of your blood vessels.

And also another important thing is like when you're less sympathetically dominant and you have more capacity on the parasympathetic side, you can actually, your blood vessels will stay dilated for longer.

And so you get more oxygen, more substrate to your muscles and to your tissue so that you can maintain and build them for longer.

So it's really cool, right?

Because, like, we wouldn't think that, you know, if you could just activate your parasympathetic nervous system more, you're going to be able to get more oxygen to your tissues, more substrate to your tissues.

You're going to have higher sympathetic reserves.

So you're going to actually be able to do more work

compared to if you were already come into

the workout, like at high stress mode, right?

If you're already in the workout coming into high stress mode, you don't have as much reserve.

You don't have as much capacity to get any higher than that.

I see.

I have a good example of this.

I have a friend, his name is Jeremy Bloom.

He's a former Olympic skier and NFL running back for the Eagles.

And when he first started doing his skiing competitions, he used to listen to Metallica, right?

Rock down the hill as fast as he could.

But I was alluding to this earlier.

By the end of his Olympic career, he was listening to Mozart and Beethoven because by having, he already had the skill set.

You guys already have the skill, right?

Now it's about like dropping into flow, like dropping into sort of like a coherent energy, right?

This is the Navy SEAL thing.

Everybody's working in concert together, everybody's moving and flowing together.

But if they were too sympathetically dominant, it wouldn't work because the blood flow to their brain goes down and they can't concentrate and lateralize their thinking.

But like dropping into flow, that energetic coherence is going to make your workout so much better and so much more fruitful from like a gains perspective afterwards, too.

Yeah, wow.

I guess

the one thought that I have, because I understand that most of us have a good understanding on just

we have a good amount of like credible studies out there supporting the use of like caffeine and various stuff in pre-workouts for,

I guess,

performance during exercise.

I guess what would you have to say regarding these substances?

Because I mean, you know, sometimes some of us are like freaking slamming like dry scoops, like, you know, like 30 minutes before the workout.

And then, I mean, you know, what happens to the parasympathetic state when that happens?

Yeah, so it's a really good question, right?

So we know caffeine and nicotine as well, actually, are very well described as performance-enhancing drugs for, you know, for workouts.

And it's a balance, right?

Because some people can do very well with some caffeine, but you'll often find that combining it with some parasympathetic activity is going to be better than doing it on its own.

Even if it's just doing some, if it's not CO2 training, even doing some like prolonged exhaled breath work like while you're doing your workout right so just downregulating your nervous system just a little bit more between sets can go a long way because again again you have more reserve for that next set that you're doing so it's a balance right because we know caffeine well described performance enhancing but the problem with too much caffeine is that it actually has the opposite effect it's going to be a detriment and so i think what's what's here what's interesting here niel is that

you can find that certain people at certain point certain times of their life are going to be able to tolerate tolerate certain stimuli versus others.

When you're younger, you have more resilience.

You have more capacity.

Your mitochondria overall, which is the part of your cell that makes more energy, they're just more resilient to

the kind of stress you're going to put under.

As we get older,

the enzymes don't work as well.

The energy capacity doesn't work as well.

Our ability to use and stimulate is going to be less effective.

My opinion on this is like, it very much depends on the goal, right?

If the goal is you have a huge, you have a competition in a year and you're looking to get as much muscle, as big as you can, as fast as you can, that's very different than like longevity, right?

Where you want to have like really good muscle tone.

You don't want to make sure you don't get, you know, sarcopenic or lose muscle mass as you're older.

Like

it really depends on what your goals are.

And that's really what it comes down to.

Like if your goal is to, you know, be huge and have as much, you know, mass as possible, then maybe not getting parasympathetic makes sense for a little while, right?

Maybe you can tolerate that for a period of time, especially if you're younger, or maybe not as much.

But as you get older,

your system is not going to be able to tolerate that.

You're going to start breaking down.

And I think where I'm typically trying to dance with people is sort of like, where are they in that spectrum?

And then, yeah, more caffeine or nicotine in the beginning or less caffeine and nicotine.

Like Thomas Stella, you and I were talking about, Thomas uses

a lot of down-regulation before he actually does his workout.

He uses something called Trocom that we have at our company, which is a product product that helps with the GABA system as well and downregulates the nervous system using the GABA system.

And so he finds that he works out in combination with caffeine, nicotine, Trochom together, and he does so much better than just caffeine and nicotine on their own.

It's the calm focus, the focused capacity, but without having like the oversympathetic drive is, I think that's the sweet spot, honestly.

It's like, but everybody's going to be a little bit different how they're going to dance in there, you know?

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's one of the things I love discussing is a sweet spot for just because there's so many individual individual, sorry, I can never say it right, individualistic responses out there.

And I think that's very understated.

And

I mean, you just like go to the comment section anywhere.

And I think most people don't really fully grasp that there's so much variance in responses per people per person.

Yeah, I mean, I work with people all the time, man.

Like I'm, I'm a clinician, so I know very much that what happens or works well for one person, you know, may have a very different response than somebody else.

And it's difficult to be in a position like yours, for example, and other people.

Thomas is a good example of this too, where like he's showing what works for him, right?

But you have to also predicate what you're saying on like, this is what worked for me, but I don't know what's going to work for you.

You have to figure it out yourself or work with somebody.

But in essence, what I'm usually looking to do is find a way to create dynamic capacity in people, which is their capacity to get sympathetic when they need to and rock on that workout or their day or whatever it might be and then be able to downregulate their nervous system as quickly as they can as well because the we know something called if you've heard of heart rate variability before hrv and so hrv is the measure of the the beat to beat variability of our heart rate most of us have what are called you know regular heart rates but there's a little bit of variation and the variation is correlated to your the balance of your autonomic nervous system your sympathetic and parasympathetic sympathetic fight or flight your parasympathetic, rest, digest, detox, recover.

And so the key for all of us,

all of us, I would say, and I would argue, is that we need to find a balance, but it's a dynamic balance, right?

So you want to get sympathetically dominant, then you have to learn how to bring yourself down, right?

If you're parasympathetically dominant, you learn how to bring yourself up and you go back and forth, back and forth.

And so, you know, there's so many different tools and techniques here, but In essence, most of us are living most of our life too sympathetically dominant, like on that fight or flight and not not really knowing how to turn off.

So that's when focusing on some of these strategies can be super helpful from an anabolic perspective, making gains, but also just from like not suffering perspective in your life, you know, where you don't actually feel like you're just burning the candle on both ends and like your relationships are suck and your sleep sucks and you get sick all the time.

And,

you know, Thomas and I spoke about that.

Actually, he used to get sick all the time.

But as soon as he started working on really optimizing his parasympathetic nervous system during his workouts, before he went to bed, his sleep got better, relationships get better, like life isn't, you know, some difficult, you know, which can be so hard for so many of us, unfortunately.

Yeah.

Real quick, guys.

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Also, this channel is not sponsored, which means only the companies that I work with, which are Young LA and Huge Supplements, are the companies that can help fund this channel by you guys using the code Niall.

So Code Nile gives you a discount of 50% off of YoungLA, and Code Nile also gives you a discount of 10% off of Huge Supplements.

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The only thing that I really fully understand about the GABA system is obviously we increase GABA before we go to bed, helps us go to bed.

And then I guess people who have anxiety throughout the day can potentially supplement with GABA or at least try to use various methods to increase their GABA in order to like

calm that anxiety and get more into that parasympathetic system.

I really don't know very much else about it,

but I guess I would love to do another like little deep dive into GABA and then I have a few other questions after that.

Yeah, let's do it.

I mean, look, so GABA, as mentioned, is the neurotransmitter of relaxation, of turning the brain off.

And most of us are GABA deficient, meaning that we don't have enough GABA around because we're on, on, on all the time.

Our sympathetic nervous system, our cortisol level, our steroid in our body down-regulates and depletes GABA if it's up and running at all times.

And so when your GABA levels are low, you have more anxiety, you have difficulty sleeping, you have more of an overactive mind that can actually make you feel depressed as well, and you can't build muscle as well if you're GABA depleted.

And GABA is made by

a process in the body with the precursor amino acid, glutamine.

And so you probably know glutamine.

There's, I know there's controversy in the, in the bodybuilding world about glutamine and about supplementation, but there is no controversy here, which is that if you over-train Nile, you're depleting glutamine.

And I can tell you that for sure because most people that are doing too much work at the gym, they have what's called a leaky gut, a gut lining that's leaking.

And so our small intestine, the main fuel of the small intestine is glutamine, actually.

And if you're over-training, you're going to have a leaky gut.

So you're going to have bloating, diarrhea, constipation, but

those are not the only symptoms.

You actually might have brain fog, depression, anxiety.

And these are actually related to the whole system

because of the leaky gut causing inflammation, but also because you don't have enough precursor amino acid to make the GABA in the brain.

Okay.

And so glutamine turns into glutamate, and then glutamate is a neurotransmitter in the brain too.

Glutamate is actually our primary excitatory neurotransmitter.

So the one that keeps us on, focused, going.

And then it actually gets converted into the brain into GABA.

So

there's a conversion there that requires vitamin B6 and magnesium.

So one of the main things that I always look at when people are coming in with like overactive mind, anxiety, stress, insomnia, is looking at the micronutrients like your B6, your magnesium, your glutamine, your amino acid um, as sort of my primary drivers of, you know, some of the levers that I can help them pull to make them feel better.

Um, because the thing about being overactive on the um in on the gluten, the glutamate side.

So, if you have too much glutamate compared to GABA, glutamate is that excitatory neurotransmitter, your brain's overactive, as I mentioned.

Um, you know, on average now, we actually have about 70,000 thoughts per day.

Yeah, or just on average, and

that stuck out for me.

Yeah, and then overactive minds, if you have anxiety and depression, up to 120,000 thoughts per day.

And so I always say, don't believe everything you think.

That's a crazy amount of thoughts every day, these thought generators that we make.

And so when GABA is depleted, that's what happens.

You have overactive glutamate signaling or glutamate toxicity, even.

So the key is to try to bring that system back in balance.

This is what we're talking about here.

And then you bring that back in balance by repleting GABA.

in a number of different directions.

The first thing I want to mention here, though,

you mentioned GABA supplementation.

And so you don't want to supplement with GABA directly because GABA itself is too big of a molecule to get into the brain.

If you take GABA on its own and it makes you feel more relaxed, it means that you have a blood-brain barrier that's leaky, that's not doing its job about keeping things out.

And so as a result of that, you want to be getting that checked out.

That usually means you have a leaky gut at the same time.

And so GABA supplementation typically is not the way to go.

Typically, the way to go is to supplement the GABA receptor in a comprehensive way so that you don't deplete GABA at the same time.

Now, the best example of this, people love to relax by drinking alcohol, right?

And alcohol binds to that GABA receptor very, very tightly and it depletes GABA very quickly.

And so, this is why alcohol is like the shittiest thing ever for sleep.

You

go to bed very quickly with it with the alcohol on board, but you wake up like two or four hours later with massive headaches or you don't get good sleep because you deplete GABA very quickly.

And that other neurotransmitter that I mentioned, glutamate, which is supposed to be in balance, has got too much of it.

And then you have headaches, you have tremors, nausea, you have vomiting, like that's all glutamate toxicity, right?

And so benzos, benzodiazepines, like Adivan, Xanax,

lorazepam, others, which is another name for Adivan, they all deplete GABA as well.

And then you have like your ambiens, Lunestas, your sleep drugs, they also deplete GABA.

And this is why they deplete them so quickly that you get tolerance.

So you need to take more of it to get the same effect.

You get withdrawal if you stop it.

You can even die and you get dependence, right?

And so you want to avoid all those things on the GABA system as much as you absolutely can.

And so

the way we think about repleting the GABA system is by comprehensively affecting it by using something that binds to where GABA would bind and then something that binds on a separate site.

And they work together in synergy in a pair to enhance the amount of GABA that binds, but not deplete it at the same time.

And so there's things like KAVA.

You've heard of KAVA before, right?

Kava is Kava bars.

KABA binds the receptor in a cool location, increasing GABA to bind.

And then you have something like...

something called B3 GABA or vitamin or a nicotinyl GABA, which is

a vitamin B3 attached to the GABA.

That gets across the brain no problem because B3 has a transporter transporter and you get the GABA in the brain and you get the B3 and the B3 is mildly activating.

So you get this sort of calm focused relaxation, which is super cool.

Yeah.

So if someone was a supplement,

I guess if someone was having trouble, I guess, increasing their GABA,

and obviously maybe, you know, say that they have like, they don't have a leaky gut.

So, you know, when they supplement GABA, then it just doesn't cross that barrier.

You would recommend them find this as a supplement instead?

yeah

yeah b3 gaba which is called nicotinil gaba we have a product at my company transcriptions called trocom that i was mentioning briefly that has this in there um the nice thing about it is as i was mentioning it doesn't make you feel tired it just makes you feel more relaxed and combining

a multiple multiple what i would say niles like a combination approach my major approach with the patients that i work with is optimizing their gut if they need it and optimizing their micronutrients their magnesium and vitamin B6, specifically related to the conversion of glutamate to GABA in the brain.

And then I'd be thinking about supplementation that enhances GABA holistically, like Kava does it, CBD, CBG, CBN, the non-psychoactive cannabinoids, they also do it.

I also use a lot of the B3 GABA.

In our comm product, we also have something called agarin, which is in another product of ours called Trozi for Sleep.

Agarin's from the fly agaric mushroom, which is a psychedelic mushroom.

And this particular mushroom has been around a long time.

And at low doses, this agarin is not psychedelic.

It just works on that GABA receptor.

So I think the real key for those that are listening is that you want to avoid benzos, you want to avoid alcohol, you want to avoid the sleep drugs because they're all going to deplete your GABA system even more.

And my guess is that most And I see this in clinical practice, most people are GABA deficient.

And, you know, it's kind of a crazy thing, right?

Because we give a lot of antidepressants to people because they feel depressed, but oftentimes it's actually a GABA issue and not a serotonin issue.

And we know that most of the, so most of the antidepressants work on the serotonin system, but we know that depression is not a serotonin problem.

This is something that came out over the last couple of years is that we used to think that people with depression had serotonin deficiency.

but they don't.

They don't actually have low serotonin levels.

But giving them an SSRI can be helpful in some cases, but it's not the underlying reason why they're depressed.

Why do you think things like exercise help depression?

It's actually regulating the nervous system, the parasympathetic, sympathetic nervous system, because actually exercise, you know, in good amounts, not overtraining, actually increases something called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which actually increases GABA at the same time.

And so exercise itself can help regulate that nervous system.

And I'm sure you've had this experience.

I know I do.

I know my wife needs to, right?

If my wife doesn't exercise, it's like, please exercise, right?

Please,

can you go exercise, please?

Like, and I'm, and this is, this is me personally, too.

Like, if I don't get exercise, like, my nervous system is just not as well regulated, right?

So it doesn't mean you like, I just want to make this point, I guess, is that like, it doesn't mean you have to sit on the couch and like relax all the time.

They're like, no, exercise is important, part of regulating that, your nervous system, but it's, it's the key just to understanding that you do most of your building when you're not in sympathetic mode.

Gotcha.

Okay.

I recall you stating some of these things on some previous podcast, and I really love it because, you know, in the bodybuilding community, especially, if you have a really good coach,

they normally

direct you to have glutamine in a fasted state.

And sometimes in different points of the day, most often it's normally fasted in the mornings to help that layer because bodybuilders deal with a lot of digestive issues, especially since during the off-season phase, they're slamming so, it's just so much of a food, an insane food volume.

And hopefully, if you're doing it right, you're still including some

variety of different sources of fiber in there and micronutrients.

But I mean, there's a lot that don't because they're trying to get in as many calories as possible, and the fiber just fills up space that they, you know, for the calories that they could be consuming instead.

Yeah.

And I, I think it's a really cool thing to discuss because with a lot of these digestive issues, it's only become more prevalent in the next or no, in the last like several years that focusing on this gut health is

going to be

a positive for your brain and really just like your overall well-being as well.

So,

as far as the GABA system, though, I do

want to ask, what are your thoughts on these two compounds?

I know they're pretty different, and I guess one is actually detrimental for your GABA system in the long term.

The other one, I'm not so sure, but Fenibut and GHB.

I know there's still a lot of people out there that resort to these as substances to help them go to sleep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Fenibut and GHB are working on the GABA system as well.

You have

phenyl GABA and you have GHB, which is gamma hydroxybutyrate.

And so

GHB works on a little bit of a different system than Fenibut does.

GHB works on the GABA-B side.

There's different receptors, basically.

There's two major types of GABA receptors.

One's the GABA-A and one's the GABA-B.

Fenibut works on GABA-A and GHB works on GABA-B.

And so these actually can be helpful, but the problem with both of them is that they are addicting.

And the reason for that is that they do bind to the GABA receptor in a way that is basically very similar to a benzodiazepine, right?

But they don't, but what's interesting about them is that they don't bind to separate sites they bind directly where gaba would bind and so

this is actually slightly more dangerous over time if you're taking too much of it because um when you're binding to a separate site there is sort of a couple governors on the wheel there that you still have to have gabba to bind on its own to the receptor for actually for it to work this in these cases you're compensating for low gaba levels which can be helpful because you're binding to where gaba would bind directly.

But because of that, you're also potentially making the system more dependent on what you're taking because it's used to having that amount around.

And so as a result of that,

you have their higher addictive potential.

But they could be used in a pinch.

And I think that they could potentially be used in combination with some of these other compounds that are in or these other sort of strategies that are enhancing the GABA system.

But like, you know, GHB has gotten a bad rap over the the years for, you know, the date rape drug and things.

But, you know, it's a fantastic drug.

It's actually the drug that's approved for narcolepsy.

It's for people that have difficulty with their sleep patterns and

they fall asleep during the day and they go directly into REM sleep.

So it'd be very helpful for them.

So I think GHB can be used actually responsibly in people that do have sleep disorders

and actually see significant benefit there.

And Fenabut, the same thing, but the problem with them both is that you don't want to be using using them all the time, right?

Because if you are, you can get dependence on them.

And then what happens is that it works just like Atavan or these other drugs, like the benzos, especially or alcohol, where what happens is if you take too much of it, your GABA system

has this feedback loop like, oh, I don't need as many receptors around.

And it decreases the number of receptors.

And then what happens is you need more to get the same effect.

And then

after you try to stop it, you get this sort of massive rebound.

And then you get, you know, terrible headaches.

You get

it's called glutamate toxicity.

And so

the way we formulate at our company is trying to be more comprehensive here and more supportive so that you can enhance the amount of GABA

by giving something that works just like GABA.

So in the case of Trocom,

it's nicotinil GABA.

In the case of RTRZ, it's the agarin.

And so that you're not depleting any of the GABA at all, and that you're enhancing it in a more holistic way by optimizing the receptor.

So, um, but in a pinch, you know, GHB used responsibly, Fenibut used responsibly can enhance the GABA system.

And, you know, like in a performance perspective, I could see it being used in somebody that's having a hard time, you know, for a short period of time.

But with the guys that you have to use it responsibly and under medical supervision is what I would highly recommend.

But I appreciate you asking the question because I think more people are using these than I think about all the time.

And

And I know that people were really upset when Fenobo came off the market as well

because they were having such good success with it.

And that's the reason why it gets across the blood-brain barrier.

It binds directly to where GABA would bind.

So it does work very well in that capacity.

But again, there's a higher addictive potential.

Gotcha.

Okay, cool.

And just really going to back a little bit because I get a little bit air-headed sometimes.

You didn't say that,

but if you supplement GABA itself, the main issue is just that if you do not have something like a leaky gut, for example, that has trouble crossing the blood-brain barrier, but there's no like depletion of GABA.

No, no, you won't have a depletion of GABA if you take GABA supplementation.

One thing I've heard,

that's another

good point, is that, well, I've heard, well, if I take something that enhances my GABA system, is it going to decrease my body's own ability to produce it?

And the answer is no, that there's no evidence that that feedback loop exists unless you're doing something very significant that's binding to the receptor, as we described before.

But in general, taking GABA supplementation

directly, like GABA supplements aren't going to work for the reasons that we mentioned.

But so, most time, when you get like a sleep supplement, it's going to have multiple different things in there.

It's going to have GABA, it's going to have maybe some CAVAR, maybe some L-theanine, some valerian root, you know, L-theanine, valerian, these work on the GABA system and they enhance it.

But the most

the safest way to support the GABA system is to find things that help bind to the receptor, increasing GABA to bind,

and not directly giving something that's going to increase GABA on its own.

And that would be your fenibuts, your GHPs, or even your nicotinyl GABA or your agarin on its own is probably not a good idea, right?

You want to have something that's going to be combining on the receptor so that you don't potentially...

have the effect that you would if you drank a lot of alcohol or benzos and and downregulate the the the gatha receptor over time So

if you're taking GABA supplements on their own and they work for you, it likely means that you need to get your gut addressed.

And it likely means you need to optimize that to see a benefit overall.

And you actually reminded me when you were talking about glutamine earlier, Nile, that I worked with a guy recently that he did the

100-mile ultra marathon here in Colorado where I live.

It's called the Leadville Race.

And the problem is a lot of these guys, and maybe some bodybuilding community too, I didn't realize, but have a lot of GI issues, especially when they do these longer runs.

They have diarrhea, they have abdominal bloating.

And all we did for him was we supplemented four milligrams, sorry, four grams of glutamine, glutamine, every four hours while he was running.

No diarrhea at the end and cut three hours off of his time from the year before.

Now, I was also giving him methylene blue, which we can talk about too, to help with performance.

And so I think that also was helpful.

But I think a lot of the GI-related issues that bodybuilders and people that are doing like the ultra-marathon endurance work is they're using so much glutamine for muscle building that they're actually depleting in a triage type of way their gut of glutamine.

And if their gut system is not getting enough, their small intestine is not getting enough glutamine,

it's going to get leaky.

And then that causes inflammation.

And the body is going to get more inflamed and more sympathetically dominant and deplete GABA.

And it's like a vicious, vicious, vicious cycle.

Awesome.

Okay.

So before we move on to methylene blue, which I'm pretty excited about, I just feel like this is one of the, there's just so many new, like,

I don't know if you,

I know methylene blue has been around since like, what, like before the 1900s or something?

Yeah, 1897.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, crazy.

But uh, you know, there's a lot of this, like the resurgence of a lot of substances, like even like GLPs have been around for so long, but for some reason, there's just like, I don't know, it's just so.

so prevalent now um i feel like methylene blue is probably definitely one of the most overall beneficial substances out there out of all of these, which is exciting for me.

But before moving on to that, I guess now if we were to

switch our focus on to,

say,

being able to

switch between the parasympathetic and sympathetic state

in a very productive manner,

I guess what would be the best use for us to use things like nicotine, caffeine, any of these substances in order for for us to, I guess, focus and also maybe in the long term, support our brain health

for when we do need to be in the sympathetic state, I guess.

That's a really great question.

I love the way you framed it because

caffeine is typically not taken on its own.

Caffeine is usually in coffee, for example.

That's the most common way.

So caffeine is the most widely used nootropic on the planet, the most widely used brain-enhancing compound on the planet.

The thing about caffeine is that it increases wakefulness.

It does this by blocking the receptors in our brain called the adenosine receptors.

And adenosine is also really important, right?

Adenosine is what's making our energy, adenosine triphosphate.

And average human of regular lean body mass makes about 165 pounds of ATP every single day.

And I would imagine if you're...

In your position, I know in Thomas's position, I got to think that at least it's like 20 to 30% higher than that if you're building a a lot of muscle or you're doing a lot of endurance work.

And so caffeine blocks those adenosine receptors, and so it makes you feel more wakeful.

It also increases some of your, it also increases your cortisol level as well, which is your stress hormone.

And so this is what makes you feel more wakeful.

But coffee also has...

what are called antioxidants and polyphenols in there too.

So there is some protective nature of drinking coffee while you're stimulating the brain.

And I think that's an important piece of it.

And then when it comes to,

so there's a protection protection piece, not only to stimulation piece.

And then there's also nicotine.

So nicotine gets a bad rap, and it should because it's usually in tobacco-containing products like cigarettes and vaping products.

And the dosing is usually quite high.

But very low doses, like micro doses of it, one to four milligrams a day,

are doing some amazing things to increase some neurotransmitters in the brain, like dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, which are all great for working out.

But at the same time, it's a fantastic anti-inflammatory.

Nicotine at low doses has been shown to improve cognitive capacity, to improve your thinking, your memory, your learning.

And so nicotine can be great for this, as well as decreasing inflammation.

I mean, I'm not sure if you've heard about some of the research.

This is kind of my world, but in the world of like long COVID and autoimmunity and chronic inflammation, chronic fatigue, we're using a ton of nicotine at low doses in these people and seeing amazing results.

I mean, I have one lady that I met that had lost her smell from COVID and took like a half a milligram of nicotine in a trochy form that we have and with some combination of other things and like she got her smell back the next day.

And so I've seen a number of people like that.

So nicotine and caffeine are so interesting because they're not just stimulating the system, but they're also causing

an additional aspect of anti-inflammatory antioxidant as well.

So I think that the reason why they're so effective in working out is because they do both at the same time.

But of course, too much of either is going to be too much on the sympathetic drive aspect of things.

But if you can get the dosing just right where you're getting enough stimulation,

the big thing also about working out, Nile, is that your form matters, right?

Your ability to focus, your ability to maintain

tension on various aspects of what you're doing is so, so important.

And if your mind is thinking about what you did yesterday, what your mom is going to do for her birthday in three days, like that's also a recipe for disaster from a workout perspective.

And so, yeah, Thomas and I talked about this in the lecture, but like a big part of this is that you need to be able to focus during your workouts.

You need to be able to keep present.

And so learning how to meditate can be great for this, like a focused awareness kind of practice where you focus on,

as something that Thomas mentioned, this is happening now.

What am I doing right now?

And keeping yourself in the moment.

But what can be really helpful is something like nicotine and caffeine to help you do that.

And so that balance that we were describing, that autonomic balance of focused, sympathetically there, but also with parasympathetic undertones to everything so that you have more sympathetic reserve, so you can do more work.

You can actually work out higher levels and higher intensity, more oxygen to your tissues.

But at the same time, being able to focus enough so that you maintain your form, you maintain your tension, you do not hurt yourself when you're working out.

That's kind of a big deal too, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I think that's why we're seeing like a resurgence of this whole science-based community trying to push a slower.

Well, I mean, first off, slower eccentrics is a different story.

That's that just, that's where, you know, most of your hypertrophy really comes from is the eccentric.

But also just being.

in touch with the form and going slow obviously has been helping prevent a lot of injuries, especially for a lot of these bigger guys, you know, that are carrying crazy amounts of weight.

But I mean, I, I, I do, I mean, I think most of the audience can attest to this, but they feel that if you are really on point, you're really focused during your workout, it's just a lot easier for you to push without getting injured.

Yep.

That just, everything just clicks.

So it's the flow state, man.

Like you're, you're kind of getting in that flow, but at the same time, you're not thinking about what you're doing in five days from now or not checking your phone between sets or between or during the sets or whatever people are doing now.

Like that's the worst thing you can do is finish a set and go check your phone for your email, for your text, for your social media feed.

It's like, because you're not letting your nervous system down-regulate, right?

But you're also getting distracted, and the distraction is almost as bad because you need to focus and keep that flow, keep that tension.

You are going to see much bigger gains that way.

It's just hands down.

Okay.

Awesome.

One thing that I really like that you

said before was the differentiation between,

I believe it was

acronyms.

Was it Pons and Hans?

Oh, yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nice.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a cool term.

So my company was founded by like one of the smartest dudes on the planet.

His name is Dr.

Ted.

And Dr.

Ted is a, he's a...

man of many trades for sure.

But as we were looking at developing a nootropic, it was our first nootropic for our company.

It was called, it is called blue canitine.

It's a combination of methylene blue with nicotine, caffeine, and CBD.

It's a great pre-workout, actually.

And we were looking at

definition.

CBD is not a problem taken pre-workout.

Like, it doesn't reduce the inflammatory response of working out that you need small amounts.

It's only a small amount of CBD.

It's only five milligrams.

And it's again, the idea here is to kind of give you

some

neuroprotection and also some antioxidant capacity while you're doing your workout.

So typically the dose is about a half of the troche.

So it's about 2.5 milligrams.

That's not a lot.

And it does have that capacity to increase your focus, increase your drive,

but not give you the hyperstimulation as well because it has a little bit of CBD in there to kind of balance it out.

So that's like that parasympathetic balance to that sympathetic oomph that you get with a pre-workout stack.

But so as we were developing blue canetine,

we were looking at the definition of nootropic, and it's a very wide range of things that fall into these brain-enhancing supplements.

And so what we did, or what Dr.

Ted did at the time, was delineate between two different types, basically three different types of nootropics, actually.

The first being health optimization nootropics.

Second, performance optimization nootropics.

And the third, blutropics.

And the blutropics, the exemplar of the example in that class is methylene blue, blue, which we'll get to.

But health optimization nootropic, what this really means is it's something that's enhancing your brain, but not unhealthy for the brain.

So CBD is actually a good example.

It's enhancing the brain in many ways, but

it's not a detriment to the brain.

Another good example of this would be something like L-tyrosine.

L-tyrosine is an amino acid that gets converted into norepinephrine and dopamine in the brain.

So you need norepinephrine and dopamine.

These are your neurotransmitters.

L-tyrosine, giving that as a supportive, enhances the system, but it's not going to clock or over-clock or over stress the system in any way by giving it.

Okay.

An example of a performance optimization nootropic is one that is enhancing the brain to perform a function better, but it's not necessarily healthy for the brain.

And so we've talked about a couple of these already, actually.

Caffeine and nicotine fall into this category.

They may help you perform a task better, but they may not be healthy depending depending on how well or how optimized your brain is to start off with.

And some other examples, of course, your stimulants, like your Adderalls, Vivanses, other worlds.

These are stimulants that enhance your brain to perform a task better, but they may not necessarily be healthy for the brain.

So the key for the way we think about formulating is that we're looking at, there's really, you really can't have true performance optimization without brain health optimization at its foundation.

So we work with people using a framework called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, or Home Hope for short, that focuses on a data-driven way at optimizing cellular health, looking at mitochondrial function, looking at cells and the gut and the hormones and neurotransmitters, and optimizing all that so that when you do use something like caffeine or nicotine, you're not clocking the system in a way that's going to cause a detrimental effect in the long run.

And so

young, healthy don't typically have an issue with these, but as you get older, you may not tolerate caffeine as well.

You may not tolerate nicotine as well and some of these other things like stimulants.

And so the third category is called blotropics.

And blutropics are a combination of a health optimization nootropic plus a performance optimization nootropic together.

And the exemplar of this is methylene blue.

Methylene blue has the capacity to enhance the system energy detox, but it also has the capacity to increase your performance side by increasing that energy and also increasing some of those neurotransmitters as well, responsible for helping you make energy and get your drive and focus and your sympathetic nervous system on board too.

So it has this capacity to do both.

And so

those are the categories overall.

Awesome.

Supplementation.

So

as far as

the health optimization nootropics, what are the best, I guess, supplements that we can implement

aside from, because I would love to discuss methylene blue to kind of conclude all of this and how it just kind of really does help all of the things that we discussed.

But like for me, for example, I am, I take alpha GPC regularly.

I take

choline, sometimes in choline and astol or sometimes in CDP choline just to support my cholinergic system.

I also take sleep aid sometimes, like

docamine sussinate or something.

I don't know if I said that right, but apparently it kind of it's anticholinergic over time.

It's not something you want to regularly take, something that you kind of only want to take kind of like, I guess, GHB or Fediba, like in a very, you know, only when you need it.

So I feel like it's important for me to supplement my, my choline or at least support my choline system.

And then you're on the right track, yeah.

Phosphatetylserine is probably the last thing that I add.

So I guess

those are all fall into the category of health optimization nootropics because they're supporting your brain health.

And then your brain health is really important.

And so the best way to do this, if you can, is to look at a laboratory analysis.

And this is not just like your regular, go see a PCP, get your regular blood work done.

That's not going to help you here.

What I'm really talking about is a comprehensive look at vitamins, minerals.

nutrients, cofactors, how well

your cells are making energy, your mitochondria, the part of your cell that make energy.

Can you take the macros that you're eating and effectively bring in the energy from your food and make them into ATP in your cells.

Can you detox from the energy you make?

Do you have heavy metals on board?

Do you have optimized levels of fatty acids?

Like you can look at all these things now using multiple different types of testing.

But what I typically use is something called organic acid testing, which is in a comprehensive look at metabolic function.

And the issue here, Niall, is that 94% of U.S.

adults have metabolic dysfunction, meaning that they can't make energy effectively, either on the input,

on the actual energy production cycle itself, or on the output side of making energy.

You said about 90%?

94%.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

Yeah, it's high.

And so the problem is that most of us have some mitochondrial dysfunction related to toxins on our environment, toxic people, too much stress.

So this is the sympathetic nervous system on board for long periods of time.

This is going to really make our mitochondria less effective and efficient over time.

Also infections, medications.

So there's tons of reasons why mitochondria don't work very well.

And so, what we're really trying to do with the laboratory testing is find the deficiencies and toxicities that you have so that you supplement effectively to compensate for those.

And so, taking B vitamins, for example, can be health optimization nootropics in some people.

Taking magnesium can be that way because all of a sudden, you have enough magnesium for all the enzymes that you need to make to make energy, or the enzymes you need to make to make more GABA, or et cetera.

So, magnesium is so deficient and

I think magnesium is deficient about 80 or 90% of the U.S.

population.

So it's a huge amount of magnesium deficiency.

So

the key with health optimization and nootropics is that it's really just health optimization is what it comes down to.

Because if you're really optimizing the health of your cells, the health of your neurons is also going to be more optimized too.

And then on top of looking at labs, then you can think about various types of supplementation that can be used in conduction.

So like your alpha GPC, your cholines of the world, your phosphatidyl serines, your

what other things can I think of?

Like even CBD and some of the cannabinoids can also work in this capacity.

You're not testing for them directly, but you know that they're going to work on brain health, cellular health in various ways.

Awesome.

Yeah, I think a combination of all of these things over the years have really helped me and my performance.

I remember when I was younger and I had a bad digestion.

I was eating, I don't know if I was lactose intolerant yet at the time, but man, like I was like farting all the time when I was a kid.

And I was diagnosed for ADHD because I was just having so much trouble focusing in class, couldn't do any tests or anything.

So obviously I just ended up jumping on Adderall and that was just kind of like a cover-up.

Nowadays, I focus on my diet and I kind of just implemented an assortment of all of these supplements, both for brain health and then, you know, I'll cycle on and off of certain, I guess, pons or stimulants.

Yeah.

And I just, I don't know, I feel like it's a lot easier for me to, like, I had a, I had problems speaking and talking and conversating properly.

And now I host a podcast and it feels easier to me.

I still have problems all the time, but I just feel like doing

all of these things together has allowed me to just come off of Adderall completely without

having really any issues with focus.

So

or my entire body performing.

So I just, it's really cool to, I guess, just discuss.

I love that.

I love that you've had your own journey, man, because it's really common, what you've just described.

And I think what I've found over the years, you know, working with people, you know, working with a lot of patients is that if the brain's working better, it's not just the cells in the brain that are improving.

It's all your cells.

Because you have to remember, the cell, the basic cell is the same, whether it's in the brain, your heart, your liver, your kidneys.

And so it all runs on the same

processes, the same machinery, the same mitochondria.

It's just in a different location.

So if you're working on...

building up the basic cell, the architecture, the capacity, everything else gets easier.

And you'll also also see the manifestations in everything in your life.

And so that you can take those stimulants and you won't feel as bad because you have the cellular capacity to handle it because you've been working on your diet, you've been working on your stress, you've been working on your sleep, you've been working on your relationships and all, and your stress levels from other things in your life, right?

And so all that together makes you more of a resilient, a dynamically equanimous human, which what I mean by that is like you have the capacity to go back and forth from high stress to low stress to, and you bounce back because your cells are able to bounce back better.

And, you know, some of these compounds that we described can be like the ones that are supporting you from a lab-based system are really mainstays.

And so there are some things that I don't like people to actually cycle off of compared to other things that you do cycle off of.

And the cycling, the things that I don't cycle off on, the things that your body actually requires compared to the stimulants and other things you're using for performance, you know, for short periods of time are fine, but it's good to cycle those things off.

Gotcha.

I feel like you might have mentioned,

I'm not sure if this is correct, but I feel like you might have mentioned berberine and chromium in one of your podcasts.

So I know that

there's a lot of implementation of blood sugar control in the bodybuilding community, especially because there's just so many high carb intakes.

And then obviously, with high,

I guess, growth hormone use, over time it can start to create a buildup of insulin resistance.

So um there's uses of berberine there's uses of a metformin um chromium r-ala

um i guess

do you feel like there's there's much benefit to to using these and then also i guess my thought was always the concern for berberine chromium some of these things

what issues they cause with gut issue with gut with the gut in some people because i know they can

Yeah, I mean, I think that you make all good points there.

I mean, insulin resistance is a challenge, especially in people that are high stress all the time, too.

So even if you're not, if you're always sympathetically dominant, your cortisol level is going to be more elevated, your blood sugar is going to be more elevated.

You're going to get more insulin resistance that way, too.

And so I use berberine, but I think you have to also understand that berberine.

does have an effect on the mitochondria it does have a bit of a detrimental effect on complex one so you probably want to cycle on and off of it as a hypoglycemic when it comes to its effect on the gut it is also an antimicrobial.

And so taking high doses of berberine over time also will deplete your gut microbiota.

So the types of gut bacteria, I mean, I use it in this capacity.

I've used it as a way to help decrease bacterial overgrowth and for parasites, and it really works fantastically well.

But long term, you got to be careful there as about that kind of dosing that you're taking.

With

chromium, I'm a little bit less concerned overall.

I do think it could be helpful with blood sugar regulation.

And I think, did you mention another compound as well?

I can't remember.

It was metformin and R-A-LA.

Yeah, that's right.

So metformin, I'm not a big fan of metformin in general.

I think that, especially if you're very, very,

very active, metformin does have a destruction capacity of complex one in the mitochondria as well.

So I do not like to use it as a blood sugar control for most people.

I think ALA is great, though.

I think ALA is underutilized overall for this purpose because it does work as a hypoglycemic, and most of us are deficient in alphalopoic acid.

And this is one of our major antioxidant pathways.

It's a major detox capacity, pathway upregulator.

So ALA, if you have it, a few people have taken it, you take it and you urinate later.

You kind of have this sulfur smell of your urine.

That's because ALA is a detoxifier.

And so I like ALA.

I think that's one of the ones that I think is more vastly underused in this capacity because it really does have this antioxidant and inflammatory downregulation and capacity to it, along with the hypoglycemic.

So it decreases decreases your blood sugar.

And then, of course, I'm using a lot of methylene blue here, too.

I'm using a lot from a blood sugar regulation perspective because it's enhancing energy and also enhancing detox capacity so that you have less inflammation in the system.

And then that's also going to help with blood sugar regulation.

At least that hasn't been looked at from a study perspective yet, but clinically, we do see this.

And we do see this in blood sugar control and also people doing endurance and multiple other aspects of why methylene blue can be helpful in the performance space.

Okay.

With a disclaimer in mind that everyone responds a little bit differently,

I guess, what do you personally, how do you personally cycle berberine for yourself?

So me personally, I'm thinking about if I'm going to use it usually once a day

for three to four, probably three weeks at a time and then come off it for a week.

But then that's only for a short period of time.

Then I'm then going to take a longer break from it like later on.

And my guys

that have elevated blood sugars

that

require more, I might even go twice a day with a berberine for a period of time, like either two to three weeks at a time, but then have them come off for that timeframe, about two to three weeks at a time.

So usually two weeks on, two weeks off, maybe four weeks on, four weeks off, depending on the person.

It just depends on the situation.

But I think

there's an argument that like a low dose of berberine on a regular basis is not harmful, and that might be okay from a hypoglycemic perspective, but I tend to focus more on

the other aspects that I mentioned, focusing on the sympathetic overdrive, focusing on that parasympathetic activation that'll help with blood sugar regulation.

I'll also increase their alphalipoic acid, and those are kind of my focuses.

I don't do as much berberine as I used to.

Okay.

Low-dose berperen is in like

I guess a general range.

What do you think?

Like maybe like 250 to

250 to 500 is like the lower range yeah typically okay cool um now the fun stuff uh methylene blue yeah can you um tell us all about it

where is it from

why uh why was it created methylene blue was created actually as a textile dye back in the 1870s for like blue jeans and stuff right and dye blue jeans blue yeah and it was used for multiple other things it was but it actually became the first fully synthetic drug that was registered with the very early FDA at the time back in 1897 because higher doses of methylene blue are antimicrobial.

They kill bugs like fungus, virus, bacteria.

And it was the first real antimicrobial that we had available.

And so between 1897, 1950, it was used for lots of different things, urinary tract infections, fungal infections.

If you were a...

a soldier in World War II and going to the Pacific, you had to take methylene blue prophylactic to prevent fungal infections.

And they had songs about taking methylene blue blue because methylene blue would turn your blue, your pea blue at the time.

And it still does if you take methylene blue.

And so you'd have all these songs about being blue at the loo kind of thing, you know, loo being the toilet at that time.

Still in other countries, not the U.S.

so much.

But these higher doses of methylene blue were very interesting because you could give a very high dose of methylene blue.

And you would kill pathogens, but you would not harm normal cells.

And this is why it got the name of being a magic bullet.

And so oftentimes when I talk about methylene methylene blue, that's the title of my talk.

It's the magic bullet that is methylene blue.

These higher doses, though, became out of favor because antimicrobials like penicillins and things like that came around in the 1950s.

And methylene blue had a number of different lives after that, I guess, for different chapters or epochs.

The first antipsychotics were derived from it.

It was used in laboratory staining.

still is because it concentrates in a part of the cell called the mitochondria, as we were talking about earlier.

And then we found out over the last couple of decades that lower doses of methylene blue, like 4 milligrams, 8, 16 milligrams, up to maybe a milligram per kilogram or lower, so 70 milligrams on average human and below, are fantastically effective at improving mitochondrial efficiency, mitochondrial energy production, detoxification, and also increasing your aerobic capacity.

Because methylene blue can act just like oxygen in your cells and help you make energy for longer without going into anaerobic mode.

So, like a lot of the guys I was talking to earlier, the long distance and anaerobic guys, or excuse me, the long distance endurance guys

noticed that they can increase their aerobic capacity by using methylene blue and keeping it on board.

And on the anaerobic side, we're seeing it as something potentially that actually helps mitigate your lactate rise.

And so, by mitigating your lactate rise into a workout, you're going to be able to do more work without going to failure.

And this is because it helps you make energy effectively for longer.

And so that's a potential major improvement for a given workout.

In addition, there's also the potential that we see a higher recovery,

higher heart rate recovery, which means that you can recover at a higher heart rate when methylene blue is on board compared to when it's not.

And that's another reason why we think that's the case is that you're also increasing the efficiency of the mitochondria with energy production so that you don't have as you don't have to get down to as high a low a heart rate to see that in see that improvement in your overall recovery so yeah that's a kind of a very very quick rundown on all things methylene blue but there's a lot of nuances to that but in essence it's compensating for mitochondrial dysfunction and then improving mitochondrial efficiency at high output states is what it comes down to that's awesome i feel like that could really help with bro's leg days definitely gets really painful i know dude and it's like that that lactate threshold, it's so cool.

They actually did a study in dogs, and they saw that their cardiac output was able to stay up higher, like their heart rate rates were higher because their lactate

rise was less significant so that they could go longer without hitting it.

And so I think, you know, it's something that we've been playing around with now with some cyclists overall, which is like looking at it from an endurance perspective, but also looking at a lactate threshold perspective as well.

And then also with hypoxic training.

So low oxygen training using CO2 tolerance training we mentioned earlier actually and doing all these things together.

It's like, of course, it's like a stacking bonanza of amazingness.

And so seeing really cool things by adding hypoxic training to

and then adding methylene blue to hypoxic training and then seeing VO2 max go up by 10 points in people.

Pretty amazing.

Wow.

That's cool.

I might have this wrong, but did you mention before that there was a there was a specific way or like something that you guys could add to methylene blue to help tailor it towards anaerobic processes?

Well, no, not exactly, but I think that, but I would say what we have is something called our blue canitine, which, you know, combining, it's a combination of methylene blue with nicotine and caffeine along with the CBD.

And so that's a nice way.

to give you the stimulation piece along with the aerobic capacity.

But when it comes to the anaerobic side of things, we're still trying to work this out, but we know that from a lactate threshold perspective, you will reach it at a later time time so that you'll be able to do more work before you hit it.

And so you can do a number of different things, you know, inter-workout to help there too, which another one, of course, is just downregulating your nervous system.

That's what we were talking about earlier.

So if you can parasympathetically drive yourself out of the sympathetic dominance, you're also

going to have more capacity in general.

And then if you can do it like pre- workout, like pre-leg day, for example, or pre-leg set, if you have more reserve there because you're you're not as sympathetically driven, you're going to be able to do more work without reaching failure, too.

So it's a kind of a cool combination

effect, is what it comes down to.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Yeah.

Methylene glue for travel.

I remember you recall mentioning how beneficial it was, especially if it was just like going on flights.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And this is because when you're on an airplane, most people don't realize this, but that as soon as they close the cabin door, you're pressurized to 8,000 feet above sea level.

They do this is because if you're at sea level, it's much heavier.

And if you put yourself, if you're doing 8,000 feet above sea level, the air is lighter.

There's not as much molecular stuff in there, like oxygen, nitrogen, things like that.

And so it's lighter.

But the problem with that is that most of us live at sea level and that living at sea level and going from zero to 8,000 feet is a huge hypoxic stress for the body.

You go from breathing about 21% oxygen, which is at sea level, to about 15% oxygen on an airplane.

And so, the good news for me is I live in Colorado, so I'm at 5,500 feet.

And so, my O2 sat, my O2 percentage in the air is about 16 and a half, almost 17 percent already.

And so, that change is not as big for me.

And the jet lag I actually experienced living in Colorado now since moving here four years ago, compared to living in Northern California or the East Coast before that, is like dramatically better.

But what methylene blue can do is it can compensate for that hypoxic stress.

It compensates by decreasing inflammation, by allowing you to make more energy effectively, by working just like oxygen in your cells and actually compensating for that low oxygen state, protecting you from the radiation of being closer to the sun and the atmosphere.

So it's got all these potential benefits.

And so we have protocols on our website where you can learn how to use methylene blue in correlation to your timing on your plane

as far as with jet lag and like what's the time at your destination and what's the time and best to use methylene blue in your airplane in correspondence to that.

And it's been a game changer for me, man.

Like the combination of living in Colorado and methylene blue, but I have a lot of patients that swear by it and they will use methylene blue when they travel all the time to help them with that jet lag and with that hypoxic stress.

There's a few guys that I know that have airplanes that are actually pressurized to sea level pressure.

So they have the normal amount of oxygen on their on their plane and they don't get jet lag is nearly as bad, but that's very expensive and only for you like the billionaires out there that can afford burning that much gas.

I don't know, you know, that's another thing entirely, but

in essence, anybody that's flying to Colorado to come visit me, they get methylene blue when they get off the plane.

Hopefully I've got it to them before they've even got on the plane.

And then all my guys and friends that...

my colleagues that are going mountaineering, they all get methylene blue before they go now.

And we're actually testing some of this

this September.

I'm going to be going to Tibet.

We'll be testing it 11,000 feet.

But I have friends that have used it at higher elevations and definitely see the benefit.

Acutely can really be a great mitigator of that hypoxic stress.

Oh, wow, that's dope.

I feel like

this could be really valuable for physique athletes and bodybuilders since,

I mean, for one, I mean, already, it's such a stressor traveling alone.

Not, I mean, first off, like the most basic thing, you know, circadian rhythm, depending on where you're going.

But just like the rise of water retention and inflammation, especially if you're traveling pre-show, a lot of athletes will try to travel maybe three, four days in advance to the show just so their body has a time to adjust.

Normally, I mean, some guys,

some guys'

increase in body weight is just insane after a flight.

There's some guys that'll increase seven plus ten pounds, and then they have to drop all of that to make weight by the time the show and the competition comes around.

So

I'm very curious to see how much this actually helps with that.

I'm sure it'll help a great amount for the inflammation.

And

I think there's a lot of, I feel like a lot of it is also a resultant of the stress from, as you say,

being in that like,

what is it, like that low oxygen state?

Yeah, it is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I guess I don't really know too much about it, but it just sounds like it would be a great benefit.

Yeah, if you can mitigate the hypoxic stress, if you can mitigate, mitigate the stress itself of travel as well, meaning you know downregulating the nervous system getting more parasympathetic so you use a lot of trocom our product trocom pre pre-flights for people as well as the methylene blue because again you get that parasympathetic activation along with the energy enhancement and detoxification in the in the mitochondria it's a great combination i had one lady a friend of mine she's actually She does a lot of movement training.

She's not an elite athlete, but she does a lot of traveling for work.

And she just was telling me one day she was on the airplane.

Her heart rate's typically 60, but it was just a very, very stressful day.

She had gotten on the airplane, her heart rate was like 85.

She took her Trocom and then 20 minutes later,

her was bound to 60 and she was able to take a nap.

And so I think a lot of travel is stressful.

A lot of guys, especially physique-wise, are dehydrated as well.

And they have to be like hydration is really important, but I know it's a balance, you know, when you're looking at physique and things like that.

So, um, but you can get a better benefit by getting some of these compounds on board, even if if you're not as well hydrated overall, but it's better to be hydrated if you can.

But I found that, and I'd be interested to talk actually more about this, you know, and if you have any experience or anybody that's interested, you know, that would give me feedback on that weight differential by adding a little bit of methylene blue to their travel, by adding a little bit of TroCom.

I would be very interested to see if there's a difference there.

My guess is it would be pretty dramatic for many people, probably not across the board, but I would be very interested and intrigued on those kinds of results.

Yeah, that'd be awesome.

Yeah.

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So, from my understanding, there's a couple of reasons to use methylene blue and both with their own respective dose ranges.

So, I guess, should methylene blue ever really be cycled off for any reason?

Or I'm assuming like at the lower doses,

you can run it year-round.

Yeah, lower doses are very safe to use year-round.

The more optimized you are, the less frequently you tend to need it.

So, in somebody that's well-optimized and young, and has pretty good mitochondria, like I'm not using it more than maybe two to three days a week for their high output kinds of days, unless they're traveling or under more stress, then we'll use it more often.

Doses there typically range anywhere between like four milligrams to 25 milligrams-ish.

You really don't want to go too much higher than that on a regular basis.

Above 30 milligrams a day, I do recommend cycling it at least one day off per week.

If you're taking up to 70 or 100 milligrams a day, which is more for anti-infective capacity or severe mitochondrial stress or chronic infective issues.

So then you definitely want to be cycling it on more and off, more

on and off because those are higher doses that can cause stress on the system.

In essence, lower doses are going to be better for most people.

And then lower doses are very safe to use regularly.

And like my patients with autoimmune issues, chronic fatigue, I use them on a daily basis for months if I need to, if not years in some people very safely.

And I try to have people avoid the liquids, liquid methylene blue.

I just liquid methylene blue is really hard to dose.

You don't know exactly how much you're getting.

And you got to be really careful with methylene blue because

the quality is kind of across the board.

It could be contaminated with heavy metals like lead, mercury, arsenic, and cadmium.

So you just don't want to do that.

You really want to make sure that the methylene blue you're getting is from a reliable manufacturer, that they will give you their certificate of analysis to ensure it's safe.

And, you know, our company, Transcriptions, does all that.

And we make them like a, in a lozenge, trophy form that makes it super easy to use and travel with.

And we tested a lot of the other products out there now.

We tested all the liquids, a lot of liquids.

There's more and more popping up every day.

But the liquids, the potency is never what it says on the label.

So even if it says it's like 10 milligrams

in a dropper, it's typically six or seven milligrams.

It's much less potent than you you realize.

And so you just got to be careful what's out there.

And that's why we're just so careful at our company about what we source.

And we've had to throw out thousands of dollars worth of compound ingredient over the years.

And the other issue is that most of these companies are trusting certificates of analysis from another company that they've never heard of before, from another country, maybe.

And so we have our own third party.

It's not our company.

It's a third party that tests everything that comes in from an ingredient perspective for all our products.

And so we know exactly how much we're getting, that it's pure, that it's potent.

There's nothing else in there that's not supposed to be there.

So you just got to be so careful.

I know in your world, especially, there's a lot of unregulated, there's not a lot of regulation, a lot of supplements out there.

And like we get it, like no supplement company has to regulate themselves.

But I'm a clinician, I'm an internal medicine doc, and there's four other docs on my team or three of the docs on the team, including me.

We really care about quality.

We really care about every time we make something, it's precision dosed so that you're getting the same thing every time the same way way with the same so you know exactly what you're getting without any trash or you know garbage on there too or in there yeah that's awesome um i've heard good things about your company so i'm really excited to try it i've i myself um yeah as you said there's there's a lot of uh i guess i don't know if you'd call them companies or whatever but like even like peptide sites and stuff too just recently that just got shut down by the fda and um i have experimented with a couple um sources with methylene blue and um from the liquids that i've experimented with i have not been the biggest fan and they normally taste like absolute dog shit yeah so yeah, and they're so they're so messy, man.

Like, one thing I would say is that if you're using methylene blue, it's really good to have some the antidote of blue, which is buffered vitamin C.

If you get some buffered vitamin C for the house and you get methylene blue on anything, you can scrub it with buffered vitamin C and it will come out.

This has saved my marriage at least three times so far.

My kitchen counters and my washing machine.

Yes, all those things.

And so the question sometimes that I get, though, in a corollary, was like, can I use that in my mouth?

Or can I use that

so that my mouth doesn't get blue or something?

The answer is that we don't think it's the greatest idea to pair them together in the body because

it may take

the capacity of the methane blues action, its effectiveness down a little bit.

Now, it may have a benefit in some ways too, but we're not sure.

So just to be...

cautious, recommend not combining them together.

But if you get it on a surface, scrub it with some vitamin C and you'll see that you'll see a benefit in getting it out and not, you know, losing, you know, your, your, your wife might not lose their shit like mine almost did a number of times.

So that is, that is quite interesting.

Um, I've actually tried a pill of methylene blue from another company

that uh

uh they included buffered vitamin C in the actual pill along with the methylene blue itself.

And I will notice that like you know, if I open the capsule and I decided to have it dissolve in my tongue instead, the blue isn't really nearly as prevalent, especially as like the crazy liquids and stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

But I'm just not, I'm not convinced it's the right way to do it right now.

I think there might be some nuances in certain people that it might be better or at least okay to do it that way versus people that should take it on the blue side.

Right now, we have good data on the blue side.

So that's what we do.

You know, at Trescriptions at my company, we make these things called buckle trochies, these dissolvable lozenges that are easy.

They're square, they're squared, so you can break them up into quarters, halves, or full.

They can be dissolved in the mouth.

And if you do that, it's going to be faster acting, but your mouth is going to be blue, but you can also swallow them, no problem.

And the nice thing thing about methylene blue is that it's about, it's called the bioavailability, the amount of the actual active ingredient that gets in when you swallow it.

Whether you do it in buckle form or you actually swallow it, it's about 100%.

So almost all of it's getting in the system already.

And so the nice thing about the blue in the mouth is that it's going to be faster, but the detrimental thing about that is that your mouth is going to be blue for a little while.

So that's going to be an individual choice.

But from a performance perspective, you can also enhance the methylene blue by combining it with red light.

So you have a red light around, or of course, sunlight has red light in there, sunlight, or the red light in the sunlight and the red light itself synergizes and works in the mitochondria in a similar location to where methylene blue does.

So you can take your methylene blue as a troche or swallow it, and then 45 minutes later, get in your red light panel, and then you will feel the energy bump from that.

It's not, if you've gotten the right dosing, it's not subtle.

And so it's a really great combination.

So yeah, I'll definitely get you some of our stuff to try now so you can get it.

Yeah, that'd be awesome, man.

Yeah.

I would love to hear some of the craziest anecdotes that you heard of of how methylene blue has helped.

I saw this commenter in one of the podcasts that you had, too, that you said that methylene blue has helped,

has been more effective at treating their ADHD than Adderall has.

So I'm sure there's a bunch like that.

Oh, man.

I mean, so when we first started working with methylene blue in 2020, so let me say we are the OGs here.

We're the first company to come out with a product that had methylene blue in it commercially in 2020, right before the pandemic started.

And, you know, when we first started, we came out with a product called blue canitine.

And blue canitine is a combination of the one I mentioned with nicotine, caffeine, methylene blue, and CBD.

And

the response was amazing.

Like people were telling us that they were able to get off their stimulant medications with the help of their doctor, that they felt that their productivity and focus was just so locked in for three to five hours, but not in the outer all way where there was any come down down or crash or so much tunnel vision that it made it impossible to do anything else.

And so we were kind of amazed initially out of the gate with the blue canitine and its ability to make people focus, flow, you know, rock their workouts and just, you know, show up better.

And people love it still.

And then we came out with our Just Blue about six months later.

And that one has been really the sleeper because it's not a stimulant per se, methylene blue.

It enhances some neurotransmitters,

norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine.

It also

improves energy production, detoxification.

So we just started getting these stories of people that had had chronic pain for years that all of a sudden was gone.

Their long COVID symptoms or their COVID infection was getting better very fast.

Initially, it was the COVID itself.

Now it's more of the long COVID side of things.

Their chronic fatigue, their fibromyalgia, their mold toxicity.

their

chronic brain fog

all across the board.

In the beginning, especially, it was like I had tried everything else.

I tried methylene blue, and finally I'm starting to feel better.

And over the years,

we just got stories and stories.

I mean, in the beginning, we had another story of a lady that gave it to her grandmother with mild cognitive impairment.

The grandmother started telling stories that the family had never heard before from her childhood because she had forgotten them until she took the methylene blue.

And so we're using it in mild cognitive impairment, seeing amazing, amazing outcomes like that all the time.

You don't remember the dosages used for the myocognitive impairment.

It's super low.

Like we're talking about doses between four milligrams to 25 milligrams a day.

And I think

a good piece to remember here is that most of the people out there talking about methylene blue are talking about much higher doses than that: 30, 40, 50, 75, 100 milligrams a day.

And that, and most people don't need that kind of dosing.

And most people see a significant benefit between eight, especially eight to 25 milligrams, is that's really a dosing range.

But

we get stories every day of

really amazing things and we get also crazy people doing things.

And, you know, I got blue in this location after

doing various things with my boyfriend and how do we get it out?

Or I had urine that's blue and I was wondering if I could ferment my urine with the blue in there and drink it after two weeks with the

that also happens.

And so bluing yourself in weird places, that happens all the time in various

interesting positions of intimacy.

Of course, your mouth turns blue.

And so, you know, are you kissing a Smurf?

Are you blowing a Smurf?

You know, those kinds of things have all been used before.

But,

I mean, those are all great.

But I've been really impressed by the number of stories that we've had over the years of just my energy is back, my focus is back.

My brain fog is gone.

My ability to get up in the morning, my energy when I see my kids or my work or my exercise, just across the board has just been amazing.

And then I use it a lot in combination with a foundational approach.

I called it, it's called health optimization medicine and practice, which is a foundational way of working with people in my own clinical,

my own clinic, my own clinical,

my own, my own practice, my own clinical practice.

Like I've just seen amazing things as a way to start utilizing low doses of methylene blue early on when I'm working with people.

And then from there, being able to see amazing benefits short term in the short term while we're working on the the optimization strategies over the long term which you know which take longer right which just overall understanding that you know working on the system the path to optimizing your health takes a longer time but methylene blue could be one of these real big inflection points for people to start them making the change see the change and be able to start making the difference changing their diet changing their lifestyle getting their diet in in better order so that you can actually start doing the harder work of taking all that and running running with it while the methylene blue is doing the job of supporting and helping you get to that next level, getting to even that first level, which may be just off the couch for some people.

Yeah, that's awesome, bro.

Um,

I guess the last thing I would love to discuss.

So, there's some of these like higher level, I guess, or higher barrier, higher barrier for entry

things or therapies that people can use, I guess, to get better sleep at night or calm down.

And I know you're talking, you were discussing red light therapy and sauna before bed, and then also one thing I really don't know anything about hyperbaric therapy.

I guess, man, I don't even know where to start with this.

First off, what is hyperbaric therapy?

Well, I think maybe to gather your question a little bit before we get to hyperbarics, if I can be helpful, is just like when you're downregulating.

the nervous system to help you sleep.

There's a lot of devices out there that can help.

And Sauna is actually my favorite.

It's the one that I have at my house and that I use almost every night.

And it's infrared sauna.

Some people can use the Finnish high-heat saunas before bed.

I don't usually recommend that because it's more stressful on the body typically because you're getting these heat shock proteins and like more of your stressful neurotransmitters.

But infrared sauna is great.

It's a relaxation.

It's kind of a nice way to get some sweat, some detox, take a little bit of a temperate shower afterwards.

You go to bed like a baby, at least I do.

So also downregulating the nervous system by

there's also a device that you can actually put on your vagus, your nerve, your carotid, your carotid and your vagus nerve and and in the side of your neck and actually use electrical pulses to help down regulate the nervous system activation there can be really great um and then when it comes to um i use other tools as well but like the

oh i wanted to mention the red lights better in the morning for people so typically red light can be is more stimulating than it is relaxing because it's activating mitochondrial function so i don't usually recommend red light at night for most people just like i don't recommend methylene blue for most people at night because it it can activate them.

I use our supplements like Trozi and TroCom.

We have another one called TroMune that helps with immune system function and deep sleep.

I use that at night.

When it comes to hyperbaric therapy, hyperbaric therapy is a tool that

accelerates healing, decreases inflammation, and gets more oxygen to tissue.

And so as a result of that, it can be a great healing technology.

And sometimes you can use it before bed in certain instances.

And other times you can use it in the morning as a performance enhancer as well.

But in essence, it's a technology that was developed actually in the 1800s as well.

I mean, even before that, but it was actually used more medically in the late 1800s, early 1900s as a tool for the bends or decompression illness.

So if you go diving and you come up too fast, you can use the hyperbaric chamber to reverse the pathophysiology or

the injury that happens as a result of that.

But for our purposes, it's a healing technology.

It decreases inflammation.

It helps with stem cell release.

It fights infection.

it improves immune system function, it reverses low oxygen states, it creates new blood vessels.

And so it has the capacity in the short term to really flood the body with more oxygen and help it heal and optimize and decrease inflammation.

In the long term, it helps with longevity.

It helps with the system optimizing itself over the long term.

So

for sleep specifically, what people tend to find when they're using hyperbaric therapy is they tend to sleep better.

Their sleep is usually more deeper.

Their HRV tends to be better because they're getting more stimulus for that down regulation of inflammation is the most important piece to that.

Gotcha.

Okay.

What exactly is the technology?

Like, how does it work?

So it's a chamber.

It's a chamber that simulates the pressure you feel under a certain amount of seawater.

And that

seawater, water itself is very heavy.

If you pick up a bucket of water, it may not be very heavy for you now, but heavy for most people.

And like that heaviness is what we simulate in in the chamber.

So you're 33 feet below the sea, you're looking up, all that water is extremely heavy, but you don't feel it because you're weightless, because the density of water compared to you.

But we can simulate that pressure in a chamber, and that pressure combined with increased inspired oxygen drives 1200% or more oxygen.

into the system.

Mostly oxygen is carried on by blood cells typically, but under pressure, you can actually saturate the liquid or the plasma of the bloodstream with more oxygen.

And so up to, again, about 1,200% or more.

And that oxygen starts creating all these sort of catalytic changes in the body related to inflammation and low oxygen states and reversing them and

stem cell release and as an anti-infective immune system enhancer, those kinds of things.

Okay, cool.

Awesome.

Great for recovery.

I use it a lot in the exercise recovery world as a way to help

between

workouts or after workout to help with the detox side of things it can be really helpful as a kind of it also has a lymphatic flow piece to it so it helps with the pressure itself can help with the movement of lymph to helping with the detoxification side as well right would you consider these pretty pretty expensive I've literally done no diving into into hyperbaric therapy or anything but good pun though we call it call hyperbaric sessions dives so well done but yeah they are they are not they're not inexpensive you can get cheaper versions for around four or eight thousand dollars but that's not going to be a great type for most people from a performance perspective.

And then on the higher end, the soft-sided chambers go up to about $25,000.

And then you have hard shell chambers you can get for the house or for clinics that go up to $500,000, depending on the type of chamber.

The soft-sided ones have less pressure, less oxygen.

They could be good for overall day-to-day performance, wellness, cognitive optimization.

The medical ones are

more for where the research is shown the most benefit.

But if you stack things together,

lights, sauna, methylene blue,

these are all things that can work together really well for people that have conditions like concussions, strokes, or people that are looking on the performance side.

So a very common combination stack for me is methylene blue low dose, red light therapy, then going to a hyperbaric chamber, sauna afterwards.

The sauna hasn't been directly afterwards, it could be later.

But the methylene blue is compensating for mitochondrial dysfunction, which many people have, most people have.

The red light is helping activate the the mitochondria.

And then the hyperbaric therapy is getting more oxygen to the mitochondria and doing all the things that I mentioned earlier.

And then the sauna is helping with the detox afterwards, too.

So, okay.

Wouldn't be surprised if Chris Bumps said did all of these things.

Oh, yeah.

And there's many people that do now.

Cool.

I have a few questions for the QA if you're interested from the audience.

Sure.

They may have some

random questions that aren't super, super related.

I'll do my best.

Okay, cool, cool.

I like random things that are not related.

My brain tends to go that way sometimes anyway.

So these are freaking crazy.

I guess, do you know anything about SLUPP332?

I don't know a lot.

I'm not going to be very knowledgeable about talking too much about it.

Yeah, it's an interesting one.

I feel like it's it's never really, from what I've heard, though, it just doesn't seem to be quite worth the value or the price.

I know it's being combined with methylene blue.

I've seen a couple of the stories about that, but I haven't delved into the research enough to be able to be too smart about it at this point.

M.

Hoff asks, number one supplement do you think every man should take?

The number one supplement every man should take.

You know,

first thing that comes to mind is it's like not that exciting.

It's just B vitamins, like a B complex, like an activated B complex, because like your B vitamins are so important for almost every cellular process and they support energy production.

They support detoxification.

They support brain health.

I don't think if you're taking like something else, but you're not taking Bs, you probably should be taking Bs.

And so the activated part is what I mean by methylated.

So methylated B12 and activated B6, your P5P, for example.

That's what I recommend almost all of my patients take

as a mainstay.

I do not miss my B vitamins on a daily basis here.

There's a lot of other ones that we could talk about, but if you're not taking your Bs, I don't know if anything else really matters, to be honest, if you're P5B vitamin deficient.

That's awesome to hear.

P5P is something that I've enjoyed just

like in the bollypical

community, there tends to be a lot of things that people are taking that are increasing their prolactin levels as well.

So I just always find like introducing P5P as like maybe like a first supplement to introduce to help regulate those prolactin levels, you know, and increase the dopamine in your brain.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that's totally something that, I mean, P5P specifically, but that's, I think that's the idea right here is like all these B vitamins are working together on these various pathways to make you perform better.

And if you're trying to make all these pathways to perform better with like the SLUP, blah, blah, blah, or like the, you know, your, whatever peptides, like it's not going to be as effective if your B vitamins are in the tank is what it comes down to.

Awesome.

Love that.

I guess for sleep too, I was discussing this with Dr.

Dean because we're discussing B vitamins a lot and how, you know, vitamin B5 and six, for example, are probably best used before bed to, I guess, one, convert L-tryptophan to

serotonin and then melatonin.

And then I guess you were mentioning that those vitamins are also important for the GABA system as well, right?

Yep.

For sure.

So you need to, to convert from the glutamate to the GABA, you need vitamin B6 and magnesium.

Okay.

vitamin by, yeah, vitamin B6 and magnesium.

Cool.

Awesome.

Henry G.

Trains asks the go-to sleep stack, which I think we kind of already discussed, but I guess if you're just going to be able to do that.

Yeah, my go-tos, I mean, are magnesium for sure.

And then I like something that down-regulates the nervous system.

I work on the GABA system.

I use a lot of TroCom for me personally.

That's from Troscriptions are our company because it's like great for people that want to wind down after your day without feeling too tired.

Instead of drinking alcohol, you can have that because it downregulates your nervous system.

And so I use a lot of the Trocom to just downregulate the nervous system, quiet the mind.

Then I also like some 5-HTP, a little bit of melatonin for some people.

Like our Trozi has those.

It has a little bit of CBD, CBN.

So sometimes I use those separately.

Sometimes I use it all in the same.

I use, but I used on the GABA side, I'm using Kava.

I'm using our

the nicotinal GABA, the vitamin B3 GABA for the TroCom.

The Trozi, I'm using the Agron and the Hanokai and the Hanokaile Hanokial, which is from Magno Yo Bark that works on the GABA system.

But so my regular sleep stack for me,

when I'm home, is very minimal.

If you're working on your sleep routine and you're optimizing your parasympathetic nervous system, you should be able to fall asleep no problem, really.

But if you're having a hard time, then you add things on.

But for me, on a relatively regular basis, it's the Trocom to down-regulate the nervous system.

And then before bed, I do, I have a sauna typically, so I'm hydrating a little bit.

I don't have an issue with getting to the bathroom.

Some people do, I know, but for me, that's not an issue.

And then it's magnesium.

And then I'll sometimes use something called our Tro-Mune, which is a high-strength cordyceps extract called cortycepin, which increases deep sleep.

And it's an immune system activator.

So something just to improve your little immune system function.

Just a little bit of that.

When I'm traveling, it's a much bigger stack.

It's going to be sometimes the Trocom, sometimes the Trozi, more of the Tro-Mune, definitely the magnesium.

Sometimes, if it's super stressful, I'll even do a tablespoon of honey before I go to bed.

I don't know if you've tried this trick, but in people that are very sympathetically activated, honey

is going to actually

have you become more parasympathetic very quickly because it increases.

So insulin, when it rises, increases your GABA levels.

People don't realize this.

So when you're parasympathetic, your insulin is able to rise.

And this is why intra-workout and post-workout carbs can be helpful.

because your carbohydrate will spike your insulin and your insulin level will actually make make you more relaxed and calm you down.

This is when like this is the this is the Thanksgiving turkey syndrome, right?

Where you've had your big turkey and you're full and you fall asleep.

That's because your insulin is going up.

Isn't that also because it has like L-tryptophan in it?

Yeah, but not as much.

It's actually, you know,

that's true, but the conversion is fast.

It's not fast.

It doesn't take, it's not like right after your meal.

Like the conversion from tryptophan to 5-HTP to serotonin takes time.

Probably at least four to six, if not 12 hours to do that.

So the main effect of the turkey is just actually the insulin load that you're putting your body under after a huge meal.

So if your insulin spikes, you get tired.

And that's because your GABA system gets turned on.

So you can use that to your advantage.

And so if I'm super stressed, I'm traveling, a tablespoon of honey will increase my deep sleep by 50%.

So it's not small.

And so you'll find people that are super stressed.

And it doesn't have a huge effect on your blood sugar, by the way, either, typically.

But everybody's a little bit different there.

But in essence, it's more going to help with regulating your parasympathetic nervous system.

And so it's actually going to, that's why your blood sugar spike isn't as significant because you're not sympathetically dominant as much when you have more, a little bit of sugar before bed.

So people can try it.

It's a great hack.

And so I'll use that when I'm traveling if things are pretty stressful.

How long before bed would you recommend this?

Exactly?

Typically within about 15 to 30 minutes before you're going to bed.

Wow, okay.

Yeah.

Wow.

That's so interesting because, you know, you hear so many people talk about like, you know, avoid your carbohydrates before you go to bed because you don't want your blood sugar to be too high.

Yeah, but it's different if you're stressed.

If you're stressed and you're not sleeping well, you need to work on your sympathetic dominance and down-regulate that nervous system.

And honey can help.

So honey's got a lot of other great, great attributes to it.

And people use it pre-workout or during workout as well for other reasons.

But the insulin spike increases your GABA, actually.

And that's another way why.

And that insulin, when insulin goes up, your anabolic capacity goes up too.

This is why you make most of your gains, not during exercise, but afterwards.

And that's why it's so important to realize.

This may be very,

this may be very debatable or whatever, but I feel like this is a good reason for, there's a lot of competitors that like towards the end of prep, you know, you're so depleted, you're on certain compounds that are a little bit aggravating.

Your sleep is getting, becoming dog shit and everything.

And some of these people just have so much trouble going to sleep because one, their cortisol is so high, their body is so stressed, they're overworking.

And then by the time they're trying to go to bed, it's like, dude, they're also starving.

So there's just like this level of just like, I don't know if it's catecholamines in their brain are just too high, but I just feel like this little dose of honey, even though it's not technically in the plan, but like, you know, I don't know, five grams of carbs or something.

It's going to go a long way, man.

I mean, or just take something like TroCalm or Trozi and just enhance the GABA system without the sugar.

You know, you can also take the vagal nerve stimulator, throw that on your neck.

You could go and take a warm bath or take a sauna, something, but honey is really a great way to do it.

It tastes good, obviously, too.

So, yeah, Yeah, cool.

Awesome.

This is an interesting one.

I'm not really sure why.

But Bison Atois asks, why is no one talking about osteoarthritis?

Why is what?

I'm sorry?

Why is no one talking about osteoarthritis?

I'm not sure if you have any.

Well, I mean, I can see this in a couple of different directions.

When it comes down to ostearthritis, it's localized inflammation in a joint.

And so I I have seen some benefit using methylene blue in these patients.

There are

some potential newer stacks where using methylene blue in combination with other regenerative therapies and seeing some benefit here from an anti-inflammatory perspective.

And I've had a couple people.

that have had inflammatory joints or joints in inflamed take methylene blue and their inflammation goes away.

This is not typically osteoarthritis.

This is more

joint inflammation related to infection or chronic inflammation.

But I do think there is a role.

There's always going to be a role for methylene blue at low doses, especially from a mitochondrial support perspective.

And I've seen a lot of great benefits combining methylene blue with something called pentosin sulfate,

which is a pharmaceutical that's used off-label for osteoarthritis.

I have a colleague of mine that uses that in combination a lot with good effect.

So

it's potentially something you can use in that capacity, I guess.

Okay, awesome.

Cool.

Yeah, that was very constructive, too.

I think all the other questions kind of refer to things that we've already discussed.

Nice.

Nice.

I mean, thanks for coming on, man.

This was really awesome.

I think this is a, there's so much valuable information that people are probably going to have to listen to this podcast like three times over before we are able to absorb everything.

We packed a lot in here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We did.

Yeah.

You do a really good job of just discussing everything in a very comprehensive way, too.

So we didn't talk about penises, though.

We can finish off with penises.

Oh, yeah, dude.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

did you, didn't you, weren't you saying something about like if we can, um, every time time you ejaculate into a girl, you're like giving them all your mitochondria?

I'm going to use that line, but I haven't said it exactly, but we have the most mitochondria per cell in our in sperm and in eggs to make to make babies.

It's not surprising, right?

So

one of the postulated reasons why you feel less energy after ejaculating is because you're losing all that cellular energy that's coming from all your sperm cells.

Women may disagree, but you know, I mean, it's this is this is, but where I was actually driving driving at is that, well, you want to optimize mitochondrial function, right?

And, and one of the indicators of mitochondrial dysfunction is actually fertility.

So you see more and more, more and more couples that need to go through IVF and things.

Why?

Because it's mitochondrial in general, either from the men or the women or both, most commonly.

So, but the other end of things is that

this is the kind of fun part with erection and ejaculation is that erections are parasympathetic, meaning that you have to be relaxed to get an erection.

You cannot be sympathetically dominant dominant or stressed and get a very good erection.

But ejaculation is sympathetic.

So the idea with something like TroCalm or relaxing your nervous system is that you can get the erection, but keep it longer without going and getting too sympathetically dominant during your intimate moments so that you don't have a premature ejaculation problem.

And so having something on board that's going to enhance your GABA system is going to help you get a better erection.

And it's also going to help you maintain that erection for longer so like we say for things like trochom for example from the boardroom to the bedroom in the boardroom you're going to perform better because you're not as stressed you take a low dose of trochom for example you're going to feel better you're going to perform better your mind's going to be more flow more energy energetically coherent and all that kind of thing in the bedroom you're going to last longer with a better erection over a longer period of time and also if you don't ejaculate or you do that's up to you when you're trying to go to bed your mind will be quieter because you have more gabba around if Trocom's up there too.

So quieter mind, easier to get to bed.

So there it is.

We talked about penises, sperm, and erections and ejaculation to finish your podcast.

So that's good.

You're changing my life forever, bro.

Crazy.

I hope so.

I hope so.

Where can everybody find you?

Well, thanks again for having me.

So my personal stuff, so you can go to drscottschir.com, D-R-S-C-O-T-T-S-H-E-R-R.com to find out more about me and all the projects that I have.

The main one we spoke about today was the the company Troscriptions, a company that makes buccal trochies, these dissolvable lozenges at the mouth, for focus, energy, relaxation, stress, sleep, combining a lot of the products and compounds that we spoke about today.

And really great ways to down-regulate your nervous system with Trocom, Trozi, and Methylene Blue and Blue Canitene and Just Blue for performance, as we spoke about, or inflammatory support.

You can check it out at Troscriptions.com.

On Instagram at Troscriptions, I'm also on Instagram at Dr.

Scott Scher,

D-R-S-C-O-T-T-S-H-E-R-R.

We also have a nonprofit called Home Hope.

You go to homehope.org if you're a clinician interested in training, learning how to optimize your patients or clinicians.

You don't have to be a licensed provider.

You can just be working with people and want to learn how to optimize mitochondrial health, check it out at homehope.org.

And yeah, I think that's it, man.

I appreciate the time.

That's awesome.

Thank you, bro.

Thank you for coming on again.

My pleasure.

We're going to love it.

All right.

See you, dude.

Whoa, what was that?

Oh, Siri heard me.

That was weird.