Dave Lee: Things You’re Taking That Are Reducing Your Masculinity

People say that people are taking too much melatonin.

They're not taking enough melatonin.

Some people are still very sensitive to it and they do best with like one milligram or three milligrams.

That's cool.

But all the really good research that we've got on melatonin as like a health promoting agent is in the doses of 20 milligrams.

Jeez.

The ultimate expert to disaster on TRT and sexual health from issue resolution to optimization, Dave Lee.

The main thing that I see dysregulate pregnenolone and DHEA in younger men is nandrolone and trend.

Those hormones or analogs seem to dysregulate the pituitary's connection with the thyroid and the adrenals far more than any of the other steroids do i see a lot of guys thinking they have erectile dysfunction because they can't get it up for some trash they met on tinder three hours ago that's not erectile dysfunction

the supplement ingredient that causes the most variability across the board is botanicals hey i want to improve their sleep if i give a hundred guys magnesium I'm gonna get probably 90 guys get at least some degree of moving in the right direction.

If you give 100 guys ashwagunda, valerium, or chamomile, you're gonna get a massively varying response.

What are the actual percentage of side effects rates?

And if we're gonna lump finasteride and titasteride together, some studies are as low as like 1%, but some are as high as like 11 or 12%.

The other problem though is that if you get the side effects from finasteride, it's really f ⁇ ing bad and it's really f ⁇ ing serious.

Cialis is not clinically effective in any studies for performance anxiety erectile dysfunction.

But in practice it is.

Because the interesting thing is a lot of people will say one of the biggest reasons you shouldn't do porn is dopamine, but you made a different argument.

Sir

Before starting this podcast, I just wanted to say that ideating steroids for a full show is not widely accepted because it discounts the real work which is the backbone of this sport and unfortunately spreads that an unsafe chemical solution is all you need for results.

Both of these are an antithetical society's understanding of the sport.

And while there will always be some that claim that PEDs are all you need, I would like to deliver an an honest message of what is required for achieving top performance as well as the dangers associated with this route.

I received this comment from a user named Night Scarens.

But just as a rock climber, the athletes undergoing this path in the sport are willing to put their life on the line for their passion.

Just the danger between the two sports is different.

Luckily, we do have safety nets in the sport, such as organ imaging and regular blood work.

But that doesn't change the high risk one must accept in taking on this competitive lifestyle.

Headphones headphones are nice.

I like it cuz it makes me feel like Joe Rubin.

Yep, I like that.

I feel like my My voice sounds a lot better through the headphones than in real life.

I think when you can hear your voice you pay more attention to how you speak

I agree.

Yeah,

and it also makes me

makes me a little bit more conscious of making sure that I'm not ASMRing my my audience with my yep um

with my uh awake apnea

back when i was back when i was a drummer we would sometimes for a show you'd get all your drums running through your inn ears so you can hear like all the toms and all the cymbals sounding really cool that was the most fun time you could have on stage especially if you have like you get a little bit stoned right beforehand and you just hear all the instruments perfectly and sing

wonderful it's awesome Speaking of the stuff we were just discussing, but yeah, my buddy, my best friend Dion has been doing,

has recently just started ketamine infusions.

And so he'd go there in the morning and they would just give him like a whopping dose hydraveneously of ketamine.

And first it started at, I think, like maybe 50 milligrams or something.

Yeah.

Then finally he went up to like 100 milligrams.

Jesus.

All at once.

And

yeah, I think it was like, yeah, dude, I think I think I saw some aliens and some god and everything.

And yeah, then I saw our best friend Ryan that passed away.

Yeah.

I started crying.

Yep.

And,

you know, I don't really know what else he's learned from that process, but it seems like every time he comes out of it, he's a lot more appreciative.

Yeah, I think that those experiences, like...

There's this analogy I've used kind of to death in a lot of my talks, which is that, like, if you go get hit by a bus, you're going to learn a lot from surviving that, assuming you survive, right?

You're going to learn like not to cross the street without checking for buses because that would have really hurt.

But you're going to learn like the fragility of human life.

You're going to have learned the importance of telling people that you love, you love them.

You're going to learn the importance of spending time in the sunshine because you might not know when you're going to get your last one.

I think when you have experiences like that, that's the kind of shit you learn.

And it takes a while for it to like integrate in over like the course of like weeks and months and even years.

But I think when you have like mystical experiences that are like really profound and really strong,

you you learn just experiential things from them that just change the trajectory of how you view and see the world and i think that if you can do enough of them in a controlled and safe way i think that can set you up really really well for the rest of your life i believe at least no i am i'm in full agreement with you um

I've discussed my pod a few times before, but

I had a very like cynical view when when I was younger just because my parents are pretty like

your typical conservative Asian type of culture

so

it was it's very controlling

do well at mouths don't take drugs what's up do well at mouths don't take drugs yep yep yeah

and I lived in Texas at the time so at the time it was a lot more racist back then

I'm sure there's definitely still some places but I mean it's just a completely different universe nowadays.

But just being a complete like alien, ostracized, looking completely different, being overweight to add on top of that and everything just caused a lot of cynicism.

And then

went to San Diego and I had a lot of experiences, I think similar to like you did, where

I was introduced to psychedelics.

I was introduced to people who didn't really give a fuck about what you looked like or what you did.

They were just there to try to love and appreciate.

Because I don't know if you've ever been to places like San Diego or haven't been to San Diego, but I have been to places that have that same kind of thought.

Yeah, everyone's there just to have fun.

It's a little bit sleepy, like people aren't like work in like LA where they're stressed all the time and like in a rush.

But everyone there is just like there to be happy.

It's like family kind of feeling.

So

I was introduced to a whole new perspective there.

And I think maybe

part of the reason for feeling like there was a new openness in my mind or maybe

like an opening or of neuroplasticity might be due to my like new found psychedelic intake

but

honestly all I can say is that I think it was really just being around these people and these mindsets that really made the biggest change for me and then my best friend who

Ryan who

went through the craziest things in life like when he was seven he basically saw his mom die downstairs in the kitchen.

She got shot by

having a fight with her boyfriend at the time.

So he like runs down to see her, you know, dead and just

and then

basically has to raise his two siblings.

Their house catches on fire.

Gets flooded because he's in Louisiana.

So that that kind of stuff happens there pretty often.

Then as he went off to the military, his dad who was never really in the picture hung himself.

So by the time he was like, he was still a teenager,

didn't have any parents anymore and just his two siblings that he was trying to take care of.

And then just a host of other things such as like going to prison on a mistake and then having to do a lot of crazy things there.

And because he was such a good Samaritan while he was in prison, the fire department asked him to work for them.

So he saved a bunch of lives working as a firefighter.

And then finally came across this kid who shot himself but misses brain and he saved the kid's life but the kid ended up being the son of the head of the police department so Ryan gets a call in prison

and they're like Ryan even though he had years years left they were like yeah Ryan you'll be out in six months and he just falls to the floor and cries and

this guy Since I lived with him for like a while, like he, me and Dion were just best friends for a long time.

And I lived with him and he would always do selfless things for other people

without seeming like he had any

concern of how much time that took out of his day, out of the things that he had to do.

And I find that that's always the biggest surprise to me.

Because it's not like we don't want to do nice things for people.

It's that.

We feel spread thin because sometimes a lot of us have a lot on our plates.

And there's only so much energy and time.

And sometimes it's hard.

I agree.

I think that that guy sounds like a really cool guy.

When you go, I don't have a story that's anywhere near as

intense as that.

But when I was in my mid-20s, I had quite a severe brain injury, which caused something called vestibular neuritis, which was like a,

I would say it's kind of like spinning around on this chair like 50 times and you stand up and everything's like spinning.

permanently.

And over a couple of years, that started to get really old really quick.

And

the process of getting through that and coming out of that and, you know, giving up on it multiple times and clawing back at it, you know, being told that it was incurable and then going to university to find out what the cure was and, you know, going through all that and coming through it.

When you come out the other side, the world is a different place than it was before you went into that.

And I think that one thing that there's this archetype called the wounded healer, which I think a lot of people in healthcare are.

And this would probably be something that your friend Ryan Ryan would fall into.

And I think the reason why people who've been through something like that, which is a very difficult, life-defining experience, is that you

realize that when you help other people selflessly, it puts you into flow state.

But you also get just as much out of that interaction because you made the world a better place because you were in it.

And I think that,

like, I know that I used to have a lot of trouble falling asleep.

That voice in my mind would keep me awake all the time.

And I tried every supplement.

I tried every, you know, I taught mindfulness meditation for years.

Everything.

The way that you shut that voice up at the end of the day is you go to bed proud of yourself.

And I find that I'm the most proud of myself at the end of the day if I go,

how many people have I positively impacted?

Or if I was to drop off tomorrow, was the world a better place because I was in it?

And if I can do that productively, like I do that for me.

And so like

when we're doing selfless things for other people, like there's that episode of Friends where I think Chanlas trying to prove there's no such thing as a selfish good deed.

And it's like this whole back and forth thing.

I think that

there is a reward, an intrinsic reward in being selfless for other people.

And I think that when you tap into that and you realize that that gives you more positive experiences than like hedonistic pleasurable shit, if you can set that up in a way that then becomes scalable and it it becomes productive and it becomes something that propels you forward I think that's a really good life hack it's kind of a Alex Ramosey Chris Williamson-esque kind of quote of mine but instead of tailored to confidence it's a little bit more tailored to like fulfillment but I do feel like

us tapping into the person that we want to be is kind of the way where we can go to sleep at peace at night yeah And I think that the wasted potential of not being the person you could be is why a lot of people are anxious and depressed, because that comes with guilt and shame.

And the inner monologue is like a

really advanced neurological, psychological program that runs inside our brain.

And that thing doesn't give out participation medals.

Like that thing, like that thing's watching when no one else is around, like that thing is with you 24 hours a day.

It knows who you are.

Not the facade you put on, not the fucking social media presence you have.

Like it knows how you treat weight stuff when no one's around.

It knows, you know, if you're littering, it knows, if, it knows exactly who you are, how you are, and who you could be.

And I think that if you have a known discrepancy between how you're showing up and how you could be showing up, that's supposed to make you feel anxious.

Like that's supposed to be an uncomfortable negative feeling.

And I think when a lot of people experience that, they go, oh, there's something wrong with me.

And it's like, well, there is, but it's, you don't need a pill.

Like, you just need to change what you're doing.

And

that internal accountability, I feel like if that's causing you problems and you can correct that and, you know, know take it as a weakness and turn it into a strength and go okay, now I'm actually you know living true and you know Christian people would call it living true to the inner voice of God.

You know, there's all these different teachings about what this is, but at the end of the day, like I think if you go through the day knowing that you tried your best, that you're a good person, that you at least feel like you did the right thing based on what your values and virtues are, then that sounds like a pretty good way to have a good day, I think.

And I think that's what we're all trying to do.

Yeah,

I think so.

Now,

I'm interested in how this all ties with

hormones and sexual health, but um

just so people aren't confused because we kind of just went on a tangent from the beginning of the podcast, but guys, this is Dave Lee is the ultimate expert to testosterone TRT and sexual health from issue resolution to optimization.

I really love your work, dude.

Um, I've seen some of your podcasts and some of your lectures and everything, and I like how deep you really go into

um not just issue or problem resolution, but kind of like the whys of why we're feeling what we're feeling.

And

how I think in today's society, it is easy for us to

simplify things and kind of just put a patch on problem

rather than really going deep into what could be the initial cause of that in the first place.

And I find

in a lot of different places, whenever I have taken things apart and then started from the bottom and then put it back together slowly i saw which pieces worked the best for me and that has led i think life to be easier for me to navigate through um and one example for that that's a very simple to just put is like an elimination diet for example you're causing a lot you're feeling a lot of issues throughout the day um not sure why it seems like it could be like to your digestion you eliminate all foods that could be a possibility and then you introduce them back in very slowly and then you figure out which ones work for you you, and then you can still eat a lot of the things you want, but then you feel a lot better throughout the day.

And hopefully, whatever disorders or diseases or anything else that might be actually serious linked to that is now not really a problem.

So,

yeah,

what'd you do, bro?

I'll just jump in.

So, yeah, thank you for all that.

Thank you for having me.

It's very exciting to be here.

I think you think like that because you have an engineering brain, right?

Yeah,

probably.

Yeah.

And I think the way that I've looked at this, so my original background from a postgraduate perspective was business and marketing.

I actually stopped doing science quite early into high school.

I didn't have an interest in it until I needed it, which was learning how to heal the brain issue.

But

I view the human experience, which is a very complex, interconnected machine that we don't really fully understand, whether it was created or evolved or a bit of both.

But we've got this extremely complicated machine that's also interplayed with our mental experience, our sentient experience.

So this machine is now experiencing itself being alive.

And the consciousness that we're experiencing is impacted by our free will.

I mean, I could take this microphone and throw it out the window if I wanted to.

I can do whatever I want.

But I'm also impacted by all the inputs of everything around me, everything I've eaten, everything I've taken, everything I've done for my life leading up to this point.

It creates this very complex experience that we're all having in real time and we're all trying to work out what to do with it.

And then we're all interacting with each other, working out

how to make it a better experience and how to get what we want.

And I think that that

has always been something that I've thought about a lot.

And when I got into hormones, it was learning how to heal the brain.

So I originally

transitioned from business into marketing.

And the way that, so if you do your undergrad in Australia in, let's say, business, if you want to do a master's in science, you can't just go and do a master's in science.

You have to to do like a, it's called like a postgraduate diploma.

It's kind of like a bridging course where they give you everything from the undergrad into a short condensed period, then you go do the master's.

So, I got like a month into a master's of neuropsychiatry, and I was just like, fuck this.

Like, this is not what I thought it would be.

I thought I was going to learn how the brain worked, how to heal the brain.

It was just how to prescribe drugs.

And so, when I started looking at it from a critical standpoint, I was understanding

what are the mechanisms in the brain that sit the highest.

So, what are kind of like the puppet strings, like the marionettes that impact everything in the body how we feel how we heal how we live you know what separates people and you know we're all biochemically unique but the things that sit really high up in that cascade are hormones not just things like testosterone but thyroid growth hormone melatonin bregnolone dhga and we know how strongly hormones affect humans just take a look at I don't know, any given woman, for example.

I mean, they go up and down with their hormones very strongly.

So I think we all know how

strongly hormones affect us, especially guys who've used testosterone, have used anabolics, you feel completely different when you use them.

So

I originally got into learning how the hormones work to heal the brain, to create an environment in which the brain could actually heal itself.

And then what was more powerful for me in that experience was the actual

conscious lived experience of going through rehabilitation and

taking something that seems like an impossible, insurmountable task and swinging at it every single day relentlessly when you make no progress for months

and getting a sense of satisfaction and joy from that that I had never felt before I'd taken testosterone before.

And I was like, this is a, this experience of feeling like I'm fighting something that's bigger than me and it's giving me purpose and pleasure and passion and I'm overcoming it.

That kind of warrior mentality had been something that I had never awoken in me before because I must have had low testosterone growing up.

And once I'd gone through that and come out the other side, all I really cared about was helping other guys going through similar stuff because it was just such a powerful, meaningful process.

Yeah, that's the weird thing about today's society is like, how much can we really fight the declining rates of testosterone?

So I think TRT is honestly an awesome thing, but I know there's always going to be like that small, tiny percentage that thinks, oh, like I shouldn't have to need an exogenous substance.

Yeah, but fuck them right.

Like, yeah,

there are always going to be people who are always going to think and say all kinds of shit.

And

I guess, you know, in terms of to each their own, like, we're all just trying to work out how to go through this as best as possible.

Some people are choosing to be vegan.

Some people are choosing to, I don't know, there's all these different paths people are going down because they're looking for the answer.

And

it would be great if we could all make optimal testosterone levels naturally.

Like if we could all just eat the right diet, live well, you know, try to avoid the xenoestrogens and things we can here and there.

But if we could just live well and all be making optimal hormones we wouldn't be talking about this like this kind of stuff wouldn't be making a big movement and i think you know one of the very early questions i had when i was younger was was trying to work this out be like how is it that there's so many of us in our you know in our 20s at the time we're living relatively well but people are just waking up with low-grade depression low-grade anxiety you know they don't want to self-delete but they don't want to go outside

And I'm like, why do we all feel so average and crappy where multiple generations ago, people were going out and taking on the world?

And i think this

having the having the hormone levels of a seven-year-old when you're in your 20s is not good it's not good physically it's not good mentally but most importantly and this is the part that i'm the most passionate about if you don't have that surge of like optimal androgenic function and good biological physiological health when you're in your peak like late teens to early 30s The trajectory of where you end up at 40 and 50 is going to be drastically different.

And I think what we're getting now is we're getting a whole bunch of guys in their 30s who haven't had that androgenic rite of passage that they were meant to have in their 20s.

And they're getting to 30.

They have very low stress resilience.

They don't have a lot to show for it.

And they're in a situation knowing that they should have done better.

And they feel guilty.

They feel avoidant.

They feel shameful.

They're not proud of themselves.

They know that they're not where they're supposed to be.

And I think they think that it just should be that hard, but other people can do it maybe.

They don't realize

it's a lot more internal than that.

Yeah.

And like some people are just being a little bitch about things.

Like some people, like I say this all the time,

they're doing maintenance work and expecting transformational results.

But there's a whole bunch of other people

who should feel far better than what they feel because they've grown up in an environment which they were just bombarded with hormone-disrupting chemicals from when they were born, or even when they were in utero.

You know, their parents were bombarded even before they were born.

And we're now this multi-generational thing, which is like, what happens when you saturate humans with xenoestrogens and they reproduce and they reproduce and they reproduce?

And then we're walking around being like, we've got like a fifth of the testosterone on average that we should have.

And, you know, yeah, people aren't living as well as they should, especially over here in the States.

But like, I think a lot of people know that their inputs don't match their outputs.

They're like, I should feel better than I do.

And that's why I think this, yeah.

TRT, it sucks to need something like TRT, but what sucks more than needing TRT is needing TRT and not using TRT.

And I think when you optimize your testosterone levels, if you go through this experience of life with optimal hormone levels, I mean, we only get one lap around this.

Like, I want to go through with optimal testosterone levels.

And if I can't get that naturally, I'm going to be a big advocate for people getting it exogenously.

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So what are your thoughts about HCG and Enclomophene, or at least using some other protocols instead of TRT?

Because I know there's a small percentage of people that will like fight TRT.

Yep.

For whatever reason.

Yeah.

And I think that, you know, in their defense, TRT is a big commitment.

It's like getting surgery.

It's like you don't want to get surgery if you don't need surgery.

It's invasive.

It's more so that if there was a better alternative to TRT, we'd all be using it.

So the problem with all of these trends which come in, whether it's HCG monotherapy and clomiphene, for a little while it was like gonadarellin, kispeptin.

All of these things come and go.

I think personally, and I've written a book on this, I think HCG is going to be a chapter that we look back on and go, fuck, what were we thinking then?

Personally, that's what I think.

So

if these things worked and they were what they say they are, they'd be great.

The problem is they're not.

So when we look at HCG, HCG is a female pregnancy hormone.

It doubles roughly every 24 hours when a woman first falls pregnant.

And it's really important.

If a woman gets pregnant, she's now taking her daily caloric expenditure of

doing woman stuff.

And then now she's also growing a fetus inside her.

That's going to be a lot of energy being used.

But also her life is now really valuable because that's going to be the life that's going to continue on the human race.

So HCG does a...

amazing amount of things for female health in terms of otherwise if they didn't get that increase in HCG which stimulates something called cyclic AMP as well as the thyroid they'd just be in bed all day when they were pregnant they'd just be snoozing because their body would just be using so much energy to make this kid.

So it upregulates a bunch of really important metabolic processes and I also think it makes them hypervigilant because it keeps them alive.

So

there's a reason why when the human female is pregnant, she makes HCG instead of luteinizing hormone because it does different things.

Otherwise, she'd just make more LH.

So now we have the question of going, okay, well, let's take this female pregnancy hormone and inject it into a man.

What's going to happen?

And it's like, I know that all this like gender confused stuff is all the rage at the moment um

i i live in a country that's not politically correct so i can say that but this this is a really interesting thing because what we what we do when we take hcg and put it into a male body we know what it does in the testicles it stimulates the lating cells in the testicles to make them produce hormones just like gluteinizing hormone does What does it do in the brain?

What does it do in the spine?

What does it do in all the other peripheral tissues in the body?

We don't have a fucking clue.

Never been studied, never been looked at.

No one knows.

And anyone who says they know is just making things up.

Will it ever be studied?

I don't think anyone's ever going to pay for it.

I don't think we're ever going to know.

So it's very interesting that guys are going out and doing this and just throwing all caution to the wind.

And I hope it works out for them really well.

But

the important thing to note with HCG is it's still shutting your natural production down.

So if you take testosterone or you take HCG, your natural production of these signals from your brain to the testicles are still going to be zeroed zeroed out regardless.

So would you rather take the thing that's been studied for decades, which is bio-identical, or take the thing that has to be kept in the fridge, that has a 36-hour half-life, that we have no idea what it does to men, that we know it causes feminizing symptoms in men as well, and go, well, which one do I want to use to increase my testosterone?

So when you're saying feminizing symptoms, what are you referring to?

You're not referring to estrogen.

So this is from your increase in testosterone.

So this is the tricky thing.

So

the cool thing about this space is a whole bunch of people have done a bunch of like self-experimenting and reported back.

So we've got a bunch of really interesting insights.

That's why bodybuilding is fascinating.

You guys are just like fucking guinea pigs.

Yeah, exactly.

It's wonderful.

So we can learn so much.

So the thing that's interesting with HCG is that when guys take it,

a good proportion of men, I argue about 30 to 50%,

get really strong feminizing side effects.

And they're side effects that come across as very estrogenic in nature.

And then the problem is if they take an aromatase inhibitor and bring the estrogen down to, let's say, where it was previously and, you know, hold other things constant, those symptoms don't go away.

And previously, the theory behind this was that anastrazole or exomostane can't touch the aromatase inside the testicles.

It's intratesticular aromatization, which can't be modulated by these drugs.

One, why not?

Yes, they can.

But two, this was just a hypothesis that people came up with, and I don't think it really rings true.

When you look at HCG under a microscope, it looks a lot like estrogen.

Like it, I think the molecule itself is estrogenic.

And when we add into all the xenoestrogens and phytoestrogens plus the endogenous aromatized estrogen from testosterone, I think that this is just something that for a lot of men will cause more harm than good just from a subjective experience.

You know, things like bloating, feeling more emotional, anxiety, just feeling like a chick,

you you know, crying in movies, things like this.

But stuff that ultimately, like if you're injecting something, and again, kind of going back to what we were talking about before, if you're looking for a protocol to improve your lived experience of life, if you're going to be getting a whole bunch of feminizing estrogenic symptoms from HCG and you're wanting to boost your androgen levels, your male life force, it's kind of like you're taking a right when you're supposed to take a left.

Yeah, I see what you're saying.

Okay.

That's really interesting.

Do you happen to have, I know this is all anecdotal, but what would you say is like the percentage of people that you've seen experience these feminine symptoms?

So when I've spoken to colleagues about this, Dr.

Adam Hotchkiss, we've spoken to about, I've spoken to Dr.

Jordan Grant about this.

We tend to arrive on about a third, a third, a third, which is that a third of guys will take it and they'll feel fantastic.

A third of guys will take it and they'll feel like they've just injected liquid girl.

And then a third of guys will just go, I feel no different, but my testicles have enlarged.

So we find that it's about it.

And the thing that pisses me off about it is I haven't been able to find what's the trend.

Okay, what's like the variable that each of those guys have.

I haven't been able to find that.

This is purely anecdotal, obviously.

It all is, but

I was that third category where I don't feel anything.

I just feel fine.

My testicles get bigger, my loads get bigger.

Yeah,

fertility definitely increases significantly.

My favorite part.

But

recently, I think

I had increased my dose, but only a small amount.

And I was feeling

almost estrogen, like almost estrogen-like symptoms when I felt like I shouldn't be because I'm pretty confident my estrogen was in range.

I get my blood done pretty regularly.

I am on a higher level of test, but I'm also on a level of primo that's keeping my estrogen within a normal reference range.

So the symptoms that I was feeling were not very distinct.

It was very mild, but they were kind of surprising to me and they were of something that obviously still caused me a little bit of concern.

So it's the only thing I've noticed.

And

the HCG was a curiosity to me.

And then now that you've said that, it kind of makes me feel and wonder more if that is the case because I have dropped the HCG just a little bit in the last week.

And I feel a little bit less of those symptoms.

I mean, obviously, I would expect my estrogen to just decrease a little bit as well with that.

But,

you know, I'll keep you updated with that because I just got a blood work test for prolactin, estrogen, and IDF-1 yesterday.

So that should come next week and then I'll get to know where my estrogen is.

But

it's always curious to see when the HCG is causing estrogenic symptoms without changing serum levels.

Yeah.

Because that's the thing that I find really interesting.

And just like with

When we're using HCG for fertility, typically the protocol I recommend, which I give out for free in my my books, it's 250 a day of HCG with 150 three times a week of FSH on top of TRT.

And the interesting thing is that on that amount of HCG a day, 250 a day, some guys' testosterone levels will fucking double.

Like they'll just go through the roof.

Other guys, they won't move at all.

So for a long time we thought, oh, the people who feel good on HCG, it's just because their test levels are going up.

Or the people who feel the estrogenic symptoms on HCG, it's just because their estradiol is going up.

And what we just found after just years of just heaps of anecdotes and getting data back was just going, those variables are not strongly enough correlated with the outcomes that we're looking at.

So, but you take a female pregnancy hormone and you put it into a dude, it's going to have unpredictable results.

I think that's just the way it is.

Yeah, yeah, I think so too.

Though I do believe, though, you put anything into any adult and it could always have unpredictable reactions.

So that's the weird thing of how our chemistry is, right?

We're all extremely different, but it's easy to play down and say that we all should experience something similar.

similar.

The biochemical individuality of people is staggering, and it's what we're learning more about with things like genetics.

Yeah.

I think most people fall into buckets.

Like, that's why I like to say there's no cookie cutter, but there's templates.

Yeah, there's templates, but there's also just wild combinations of templates because

like I got my genetics done, so I literally got the longest list, bro, like the longest list of like a hundred different combinations of genes that would, you know, cause me certain predispositions.

Yeah, um, certain uh genetic predispositions to diseases, certain predispositions to my personality and how I might act, yeah, um, whether or not I'm chill or I'm stressed out, uh, or even um, how I react to how many reps I do, which was honestly my favorite one that I talk about in like every podcast.

People are annoyed by that, probably, but um, it just fucking it's it shocked me because, for example, you'll hear from most fitness experts and bodybuilders, like eight to ten reps, ten to twelve reps every set, for example.

But there are those some people that you'll ask about how many reps they do, and they'll say that I find that 18 reps works better for me.

And that's always weird, right?

Because you look at science papers, critical science papers, they'll say it doesn't matter.

You can do any range of reps, but it's just the totally vol the total volume that matters.

And all you're doing is you're increasing work by doing more volume when you could just be increasing load at the time.

But

then I got my genetics on and it said that I have impaired muscle performance.

So essentially I have more type 1 fibers and I will probably perform better and probably

show more results of hypertrophy by doing more time under tension type work or endurance work,

which could be

probably more reps.

Yep.

Could maybe be more sets too, but it, at least from what I've felt anecdotally, more reps seems to work for me.

Yep.

I mean, I'm sure there's a whole lot of other combinations.

Like I was discussing psychoplasmic training and metabolite training with Dr.

Todd Lee versus like everyone's typical Meyerford-Billard training where they just do eight to ten reps in the set and then whatever.

But like if you like put that into consideration,

we're all doing the same kind of workout programs and we're not tailoring it to ourselves.

And obviously, most people don't really want to spend enough money to get their genetics done and see what they're testing.

It's and a lot of people also don't want to spend the money to even know what they could be prone to because

ignorance is bliss sometimes.

Definitely.

And

the more you can understand about yourself, and maybe this will segue the conversation naturally into psychedelics.

But I think that there's probably two kinds of people.

There's people who self-experiment, and then when you run this kind of genetic test you go oh that's why i've always done better when i do abc

or you've got people who are very much into following the rules and then when they get these genetic tests they find out and go hang on maybe i'm the exception to the rules and then they give themselves their permission to break the rule and the thing that i love about science and like

I think it's really cool that so many people are now interested in science.

I think, because 10 years ago, no one cared.

Whereas now it's like, it seems like it's all people want to talk about is saying, oh, this study said this, this study said that.

And

when you study science at a tertiary level, which is for anyone who's wanting to do this, I totally recommend you just do a basic science course and learn this.

It's how you read a study.

So what you do for like a whole semester is they'll give you studies and they'll just take a section out and they'll go, we removed the graph or we removed the discussion or we removed the abstract.

And you have to go in and fill it in with all the other information that you have.

And when you do that, you learn a bunch of really cool shit about how studies work, but you also, sometimes when you analyze the study, you go, I don't really agree with what the authors said that this means.

This is just a bunch of academics who are saying, oh, we did this and we did that.

And then because of that, that means this.

It's like, well, does it?

And that's where I think that...

training is fascinating, but also people taking their, you know, genetic polymorphisms is fascinating, is because you understand that when they put these graphs together and when they make these studies, they eliminate the outliers and they distill and condense the data down into only this means this.

And it's a useful mechanism to understand the majority.

It's really useful to understand all humans, but it's a useless tool to understand individuals.

And so basically it means that every part of you that's unique and individual, if it's outside the status quo, is that a weakness or a strength?

And I think everyone predisposes themselves to go, this is a weakness or something wrong with me.

Whereas in reality, if you put it in the right context, it's a strength.

So like for your example, I imagine that it's not something I'm familiar with, but I imagine it's something that would make you terrible at powerlifting genetically.

I'm sure you could overcome it, but you'd be a better bodybuilder than a, or an endurance athlete than a powerlifter.

Yeah.

And it said specifically endurance athlete.

Yeah.

But I hate it.

Yeah.

I'd hate it too.

Powerlifting is way cooler.

But it's,

there's things like this that come up all the time in life where people are like, I can't do this, so I'm shit at this, I'm shit at this, and I'm shit at this.

And what you learn from genetics is that for all the things that you have that you suck at, because your bloodline was a dominant bloodline, which is why we're having a conversation today,

it also has a whole bunch of counterbalancing really good stuff.

So for all the weaknesses you have, you probably also have strengths.

And I think so many people are caught up in being like, these are all my weaknesses, I'm fucked, rather than being like, what are all the opportunities that I potentially have for strengths that I just haven't put myself in the right lane for?

It's kind of like if you were a four-wheel drive, and I talk about cars all the time.

If you were a four-wheel drive and the whole time, you've just been Formula One racing your whole life, and then one day you're like, hey, we're all going to go off-roading.

And you're like, I'm good at this.

Maybe this is my thing the whole time.

And all the other Formula One cars are sucking at being off-roaders and you're just absolutely slaying it.

I think that's the exciting thing that genetics can unlock for people is being like, what are my strengths and what am I good at?

And I think that the ultimate way to optimize your mental health is to get the foundation of your physical health correct first.

Because if your physical health is off, like, you know, for example, if, you know, let's just say hypothetically someone's bulking and they're really full and bloated,

as like a hypothetical example,

you're going to be subjectively experiencing that because and your brain's going to be telling you a signal from that.

That's going to be impacting your mental health.

So when we extrapolate that out over a lifetime, when people have got these chronic, like if you're eating stuff daily that's not good for you, if you're living in a way every day that's not good for you, and that's adding up over time, then no wonder so many people are going to the doctors asking for antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, because they've got all of their internal alignment.

Like the vehicle is broken, and they're wondering why it doesn't feel good when they drive.

Going off of that, so what are the tests and side effects or TRT side effects that you see most often, and how can we resolve those?

From

really kind of basic standpoint,

the most common side effect that we'd see from testosterone would be symptoms that would be estrogenic symptoms, what people would typically call.

And what's happening is that we are taking an amount of testosterone and we're either putting in too much too quickly, which up until I went to the Olympia the other day, I spoke the year before and then I spoke this year.

I'm just in a really good echo chamber of like TRT practitioners practitioners and clinics, but

I was speaking to people about how like doing like two to three injections a week with like little insulin syringes, like microdursing it that way.

And the looks I was getting from people was like I was like delivering the prophecy.

And I was like, how, this was like

common practice like five years ago.

So

if your protocol is off, you're going to have a bad time.

But if your internal health is off, you're going to have a bad time as well.

So what we talk about a lot in TRT and also in anabolic steroids, which is not really a space I'm in, but I've kind of in it by association, is this concept of supra-physiological.

And the problem is, if you take a guy who's, let's say, you know, 250 pounds, drinking alcohol, he's got fatty liver disease, he's insulin resistant, he's living like shit, if you take him to the top of the reference range, that's fucking supraphysiological for him.

Because there is no way someone in that state of health would be making that much testosterone.

So the problem is, kind of going to this conversation we're having before, is that we've decided that there's this physiological range for everyone.

And we're going, oh, well, as long as you're in that, then you won't be having any issues.

I can say, sure as shit, that the physiological range for a 21-year-old athlete who's living like a saint and the physiological range for a 60-year-old who's living like a dickhead is completely different.

And what happens is if we go super physiological and especially if we're giving doses in levels that create these waves of fluctuations which men don't do well with, we create this scenario where the body has again in this kind of system that we've got like the human body we've got too much of this precursor to metabolize properly so the body is going to shuttle it down the aromatase pathway and the reason why it's doing that at an upregulated rate rather than putting it down the correct ratio of estrogen to dhd is because that process is driven by inflammation So what's happening is your body's going, nah, you're sick.

This is not good.

Slow down your testosterone production.

We need to focus on survival.

And then the individual's coming in going, oh, you're pumping the brakes and I don't like how that feels.

So I'm going to come in and pump the accelerator and we're just going to move ahead and have a grand old time.

It doesn't work.

It's stuttery.

You get bumps.

You get side effects because you're now, you're not working with the body.

You're working against it.

So a lot of the problems that we're seeing with TRT is one, the protocol's off, which...

It's a simple fix.

But two, when the protocol's good, but the individual's still having a bad response, it's because their body is too systemically inflamed to tolerate the amount of testosterone that they're taking.

And that's when it can be a matter of going, okay, what's the underlying root problem?

Because a lot of people have issues they don't realize.

They don't realize that they're 10% body fat too heavy.

They don't realize that they have fatty liver disease, that they have hypothyroidism, that you can't drink, you know, three, four standard drinks a few times a week and be healthy.

They're not realizing that.

So when you've got these problems and then you're putting in the optimal healthy amount of testosterone, you're putting healthy testosterone into an unhealthy body body and you're getting side effects.

And that's what happens.

Gotcha.

What about sexual health?

I think sexual health is tricky because sexual health is something that carries a lot of vulnerability.

It's hugely dependent on another party, which is the partner.

And when you take into account psychological vulnerability and the variable of the relationship and the partner, you create a situation that the practitioner only has a very limited scope over what they can control.

So I see a lot of guys thinking they have erectile dysfunction because they can't get it up for some trash they met on Tinder three hours ago.

That's not erectile dysfunction.

Like

that's not a medical condition.

If you don't know the girl and you can't get an erection, you don't need a pill.

You need to go out for coffee.

I think that that's something which I'm seeing a lot of is guys are expecting to have porn star stage performance because they've got X amount of testosterone.

It doesn't work like that.

You can still be self-conscious, and that will still create a stress response.

The more stressed you are, the blood goes away from your extremities, the penis is an extremity, you lose your erection.

But we could also say that the stress can also come from things that aren't necessarily self-conscious, right?

Like biological stresses.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a huge amount of stuff that will cause these stresses.

And I think that this is where sexual function is something that's really difficult to troubleshoot because we can biologically fix the foundation.

Like

younger guys, unless you're really overweight, you shouldn't have a blood flow problem.

But if you've got a low androgen problem, the situation is not

only are you low in sex drive, but you're low in that internal buffer against the stress response.

A lot of the time, guys with low testosterone still jerk off all the fucking time.

The problem is that when your testosterone is low, you're not making the thing internally that blocks the effects of cortisol and adrenaline.

So, for example, if you're, you know, let's say you bring home

a lady that you're particularly attracted to,

that's supposed to create a bunch of sensations, excitement, lust, arousal, but also a degree of I'm self-conscious, you know, what's my performance going to be like, these kind of things.

But this is meant to drastically outweigh this.

You know, this kind of excitement, arousal, sexual, you know, sexually turned on, confidence, bravery, all this stuff, that's meant to outshadow that kind of lingering, you know, second guessing in the back of your head.

You know, once you get going, it all goes away.

The problem is that when you take out the high testosterone, all of a sudden, that buffer towards the internal effects of that cortisol and stress is gone.

So those cortisol and adrenaline molecules are going to be much more active at the receptor sites.

So you're going to have a much stronger stress response in any given situation.

So not only can this lead to performance anxiety, but it will also lead to guys going, oh, I don't want to take that risk.

I don't want to go for that business opportunity.

I don't want to go for that thing that's outside my comfort zone.

I'm too scared.

Because they don't have that internal buffer that's supposed to make you go, yeah, I am scared.

Yeah, this stuff is real, but the reward is greater than the risk.

And when you get rid of that body's ability to be able to have that internal buffer against stress, the behavioral outcomes of that and the subjective outcomes change.

And I think that that could also lead to a lot of performance anxiety because you don't have that lust and that passion and that drive.

So unless guys are very, very comfortable with their partner, then yeah, they're going to get a big stress response.

Sexual performance goes to shit.

Okay.

And, you know, there could be.

I would actually be interested in just discussing like a variety of reasons why this stress could happen or why these things could happen because I don't think any guy really feels comfortable saying or considering himself as self-conscious.

Or sometimes it might be hard for someone to admit something like that.

There's some interesting correlations between how self-conscious someone is and their IQ.

People who are smarter tend to be more self-aware and people who are lower IQ tend to be more confident.

It's like ignorance is bliss.

Right, right.

So,

and a lot of this stuff I think people get caught up in their heads about.

So, and it's kind of like when people go to start TRT.

It's supposed to be a big deal.

You're supposed to be nervous about it.

So, when it comes to intimacy and things like this, I think it's important to recognize that this is a very intimate personal act between two people and people should take it seriously.

And I think that that's important.

But, you know, when it comes to what the stresses can be, I think particularly if you've been on a losing streak like if you've been in a situation where you've lost your erection in intimacy and it's led to a negative experience let's say she gets offended you get embarrassed you know

whatever can happen in that scenario depending on the emotional maturity of both parties i think if that's your basal point of reference for intimacy that can set you up for a losing streak and the example that i use for this and it's it's from a if anyone's a boxer and you're like well that doesn't make any sense i know it doesn't make any sense it's not a literal analogy but if you take two boxers one who's never won a fight and one who's won every fight and let's say for some reason they're going to have a match when that walkout music is playing and you know when you've got the you know the crowds cheering and everything's going on the guy who's won every fight he's going to associate that experience with victory conquest um you know knocking the other guy out you know winning so that association he's going to go okay these butterflies in my stomach this tightness in my chest this is associated with like excitement and, you know, going and doing something really fantastic and big and riveting.

Whereas the guy who's lost every fight, he's associating that experience with, I'm going to get knocked out, I'm going to lose, I'm going to be embarrassed, it's going to hurt.

But it's the same physiological sensation of the tightness in the stomach, the butterflies, the sweating, the heart rate.

So the problem is if a guy's had a losing streak where he's lost his erections, when he gets into that intimacy setting again, all those biological triggers are now going to be associated with a negative psychological outcome.

And that's going to just flood that stress cascade.

Gotcha.

Because once you have a big stress response, cortisol's got a half-life of like 40 minutes.

So if you've dumped a whole bunch of stress in that scenario, unless she gives you a really good massage and plays some really calm, like it can be difficult to come back from that.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

That reminds me of the stress and success mindset that Huberman has discussed.

Yep.

You're familiar with that?

Yep.

Do you happen to have any ways that you would recommend that somebody or a man like get to that point?

Because it's easier said than done to just be like, oh, think positively.

Yeah.

I think the healthiest way and the correct answer to the question is to have a discussion with a partner that you love and trust and tell them what's going on and work through it.

That's the correct answer.

It's not always an answer that works, but that's the optimal outcome is just talking about it and, you know, healing with it experientially.

That's not always an option for people, though, and I understand why that is.

So this is is something that I think people can biohack.

And obviously having a good, healthy testosterone level is a good foundation for this.

But

when we look at something like sialis, Tadelefil, or, you know, short acting version, Viagra, which I don't recommend.

But if we look at sialis, what sialis is, it's basically like a cock ring that's internal.

It's not giving you an erection.

It's not making you aroused.

It's trapping the blood in the erection once that process has begun.

So it's not going to create an erection.

It's going to maintain the erection.

So cialis is not clinically effective in any studies for performance, anxiety, erectile dysfunction.

But in practice, it is.

Because

what's happening is if you, as a guy, you're in a scenario when you're worried about losing your erection, but it feels like really strong and dense and engorged because you've taken something like Cialis.

That's kind of going to be like someone, again, going back to the boxing analogy who's like rooting in your corner, being like, no, you've got this.

You can do this.

This is going to be easy.

So sometimes having that confidence and just feeling like a stronger, better erection can get rid of that negative voice inside of the head to allow that situation to work out properly.

So sometimes it's just a matter of using Cialis until you get yourself on a winning streak.

And then once that winning streak becomes your default, then you're not going to worry about it anymore.

And I think in scenarios like that, five milligrams of Cialis,

that's going to be like having a light beer trying to get drunk.

Like it's just not enough.

So I think in those situations, like 20 is good.

40 has been studied safely, but 10 to 20 is what I'd be looking at for something like that.

And another thing that works very well from a supplemental standpoint, because a lot of the sedative supplements will either impact erection performance negatively, or they can be like phytoestrogens or whatever.

But the one supplement that works really well, all my listeners are sick of me talking about this.

I've done so many lectures on it.

I use it for everything.

Phosphodetyl serine inhibits the response of the adrenaline production to the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that signals the adrenal glands.

And this is actually tested in athletes.

They put them on a stress test, they make them run, and the group of athletes who don't take the supplement produce a stress response.

The ones who take the phosphidyl serine don't produce a stress response.

So, if you take like a clinical dose, which is like 600 milligrams, I recommend the Thorn one.

If you've got an affiliate company that makes them, I recommend that one.

The Thorn one works well.

The Jarrow one works well, but like 600 milligrams of that with like 20 milligrams of Tadalafil prior to intimacy and using that until it's no longer needed so you get on a winning streak

That's how you can get out of that.

There was something that I heard you discussing that I'm very interested in talking about so

things that guys may be taking or may be on that might be affecting their sexual health or sexual performance.

And I also remember that I believe you were discussing things

that

block the five alpha reductase conversion to DHT.

Yep.

Also.

And this is something that I like discussing a lot as well because I know that there's a wide variety of different responses from men.

Yep.

Yep.

Okay.

So preface is I've got a really great,

we called it a debate, but it's more just two friends presenting different ideas.

But I've got a video with Dr.

Carl Gillette on the TRT and Hormone Optimization Channel channel where we're talking about the the different sides of of the five alpha reductase inhibitor argument and i'm quite against them but he presented a really good argument maybe not for them but for the people who are wanting to use them um

my general philosophy when it comes to troubleshooting sexual performance with supplements is when in doubt, take it out.

So the first thing you want to do is just go through what is every supplement and medication that I'm taking that is not necessary and stop taking that.

And 90% of the time that will fix it.

Because

someone could be that one in 100 where you hyper-respond to some flavonoid or whatever that's in.

Curcumin, ashwagandha, fucking ginseng, whatever.

So if you're taking a bunch of different supplements and a bunch of different pre-workouts and intra-workouts and post-workouts that have got all these different ingredients, just stop taking all of them for like a couple of weeks and see if it gets better.

And then you can create a process of elimination, like what you were talking about with elimination before.

What type of ingredients, though, are particular?

Typically botanicals.

Botanicals are

the supplement ingredient that causes the most variability across the board is botanicals.

So for example, if I take 100 guys and I'm like, hey, I want to improve their sleep, if I give 100 guys magnesium, I'm going to get probably 90 guys, get at least some degree of moving in the right direction because it's a fucking electrolyte.

If you give 100 guys ashwagunda or 100 guys valerium or chamomile, you're going to get a massively varying response.

Some really, really good, some really, really bad, but a whole bunch of side effects, a whole bunch of non-responders, some guys being like, it kept me up.

This is because botanicals have so many different bioavailable and bioactive compounds in them that interact with a laundry list of symptoms in the body.

Sorry, systems.

So if you go on like examine.com and look at like any of these, like chamomile, valerian, ginseng, anything, you can see that there are compounds and constituents in there that interact with virtually every different system in the body.

So if you're taking like a cocktail of just a whole bunch of stuff,

it's basically just like a lottery as to whether it's going to do you favors or not.

So I think cutting out everything that's non-essential, but especially botanicals.

So when I say botanicals, I mean anything plant-based, herbal, any of those extracts, things like that, drop them all out.

And then if they're working for you, you can put them back in.

But that's a good thing to look at.

The other ones that will impact sexual performance, so yeah, anything that will inhibit the conversion to DHT, for guys who don't react well to them, HCG,

DHEA pregnenoloin can cause problems for some guys as well but can be a miracle for others

anything that in that in isolation increases serotonin so SSRIs tryptophan 5-HTP those can all cause issues for guys as well a lot of supplements will do more harm than good from a sexual performance standpoint unless we're talking about a very small list of things things like creatine protein powder collagen powder you know liver capsules, things like that that are relatively benign across the board.

I'd say that most supplements can be a curveball for sexual performance.

Gotcha.

Interesting.

I'm one of the guys that ECG works well with in terms of sexual

arousal,

which is nice, instead of the opposite.

And then, what is the other thing I was thinking before I was brain farting?

I also can seemingly take finaceride without any issues.

I'm on finasteride and minoxidil, and I seem to not be having any issues related to that.

At least when I jumped on, I didn't notice any difference, and I haven't noticed any differences since, which is awesome because the side effects are obviously very, very, very, very scary for a lot of guys.

But I've heard that the percentage is extremely small, yet

anecdotally, whenever we listen to any of these lectures or podcasts with hormone or HRT professionals or experts seems like anecdotally it's a lot more common.

Yeah.

And I think there's a couple of factors for that.

So when we look at the studies, and this is something I summarized in the debate because I really wanted to be like, well, what are the actual percentage of side effects rates?

And if we're going to lump finasteride and titasteride together, some studies are as low as like 1%,

but some are as high as like 11 or 12%.

The other problem, though, is that how many men in these studies get side effects, but just stop taking the drug and just drop out?

They don't actually come back and report the side effect.

I think the real reason why we hear so much about it, though, is that if you get the side effects from finasteride, it's really fucking bad and it's really fucking serious.

And I think that's why it comes up more.

I do too.

And I think when it comes to taking these medications, I think people can...

I think people should be able to take what they want to take as long as there's informed consent.

And the part that I come back to as a big advocate for not using them unless people really want to use them is that, and people can read about this because I put the link up in that debate.

There was a class action against Merck, which is the company that makes finasteride, for permanent side effects after discontinuation.

And they lost.

They had to pay out like 8 million.

But the most important part, and you can read the transcript, it's right there.

I don't know how to pronounce the website, Rooters, R-E-U-T-E-R-S.

I don't know what the correct pronunciation is, but on stand, the manufacturers of the drug revealed that they were aware of the permanent side effects after discontinuation, but chose not to mention that because they knew it would impact the sale of the drug negatively.

So when people go, oh, the side effects don't exist, I'm like, the company that makes it literally admitted on stand that they suppressed it.

It's like, that's a, that argument is now like a moot point.

But I guess the question that we have to look at, and this was my kind of side of the debate with it, is that if it's not causing you any acute side effects at the moment is it going to potentially cause chronic side effects like you know is going is blocking that receptor long-term going to lead to detriment and then kyle who i had the debate with he was kind of of the perspective that it could actually lead to benefits um in terms of improving his argument was cardiovascular and prostate health which we kind of disagreed with but that's why I think it's such an interesting debate and topic at the moment.

And a lot of these fields, a lot of these areas in this field are, is that

everything kind of is still evolving.

This is a space that we're still learning about.

And I guess my approach, again, as someone who suffered a brain injury and as someone who's advocating for the best interest of their clients, I go, well,

I just come back to that when in doubt, leave it out.

And go, if it's an unknown, maybe just avoid the risk because you'll be kicking yourself if something happens.

But I think people can make that choice with their own prerogative as long as they understand that it's playing with fire.

Gotcha.

And you normally advise people just never to touch it.

Yes.

If people ask my opinion on it, I just go, don't touch it.

I wouldn't.

If people say,

like, I had a guy the other day, and he's a younger guy, and he's a model.

And he was like, I can't go bald.

And I'm like,

I'm like, I get that.

I understand that.

I used to be, I put a photo, I'll have to show you a photo afterwards.

I was in like an emo band for like when I started losing my hair.

Yeah.

I used to straighten it and fucking dye it and like frizz it all up at the back and shit and wear eyeliner

i wouldn't be able to be in that sick

i know right was the best i mean i still dress like that now but without the hair um

i wouldn't have been able to be bald and do that if that band had taken off it wouldn't have worked um luckily when i went bald i could just grow a beard and put on like 20 kilos of muscle and i could pull it off but yeah

I feel like that's kind of what happens to all the guys that are like that anyways.

I really feel like all of us who like metal bands and rock and all that stuff, we end up getting kind of bald and grow big beards later anyways.

I really feel for the dudes who go bald and can't grow a beard.

I really feel for that.

But yeah, look, it's something where, and like when he came to me and he was like, I need to do something to prevent the hair loss.

I'm like, well, this is where I'd send him to someone like Kyle who's like, well, this is the minimal effective amount that we could possibly put in that's not side effect free.

And he'll admit that, but it's going, well,

if we're going to be working something with something that's playing with fire, as long as one, you understand that there are risks, and two, we go, how can we find the truly minimal effective dose with this?

And then as long as we understand that that doesn't absolve the risk of side effects, but it drastically reduces them, that allows someone to go, I'm going to make this decision, I'm going to give myself the best possible chances, and I'm going to hope for the best.

And as long as they understand what they're doing and why they're doing it, I think that's their prerogative.

But if they were to ask me, I'd be going, well, if something does happen, it's one of the few things in this world that people like myself don't know 100% that we can fix it in every case.

You wouldn't want to give yourself like an incurable dysfunction of your androgenic system.

Like that's a really bad long-term prognosis.

So I'm like, it just depends if it's worth the risk.

And I think for most people, it's not.

But if someone's like, it is worth the risk, then go for it.

Gotcha.

Okay.

And the risk we could be saying is anywhere from like 1 to 11, 12% or something.

I think the risk of finasteride syndrome is a lot lower than like the 11 to 12 percent kind of risk was going we stop the drug and and the side effects resolved I think that I think even the I'm probably as as far down the post finasteride doom rabbit hole as you could possibly go and I will still admit that we're looking at like you know one or two percent so it's not a lot of people but you know in a room of a thousand that's 10 or 20 people like that's that's not that negligible but from a statistical standpoint, it's low.

But again, if I said Russian roulette, there's 100 barrels and there's one bullet in there,

it's like, if you get hit by the bullet, it's going to suck, but you've got a good chance to get hit by the bullet.

It's like, do you want to play that?

And I think that's what a lot of guys are doing, right?

That's how they're looking at this and they're going, well, I don't want to get hit by the bullet, but my odds are so low.

And I guess the argument that I'm making is that if you don't get hit by the bullet now, it could cause issues over time.

But again, we don't know.

So I just go, look, don't touch it.

But if you really want to take it, there's some nuance and go see someone like my friend Carl Gillette and he could help you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

Honestly, I might go bold later in life anyway.

So you'd be able to

rock it.

I've thought about it a few times.

I think my goals have made jokes about shaving my head before like competitions.

Yeah.

That way I look like a

Japanese yakuza.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can pull that off.

Look like I belong to California a little bit more.

I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Yeah, I don't know either.

Melatonin, something that you were discussing before.

Love it.

I love melatonin.

Tell me about it.

So melatonin is

probably the most commonly used hormone, I would argue.

It's over the counter here.

It's not in some countries.

And up until there was a really good study just after 2010, I think it was 2011 or 2012, where they very thoroughly disproved that it dysregulates your natural production.

Up until that point, we were like, look, you should only use it if you're like changing time zones or

shift work and you want to use like the minimal effective dose.

Once that research came out and that whole thing went out the window, then melatonin became a lot more interesting.

Unfortunately, there are still some very big names in the space who perpetuate that it does shut down your natural production.

I don't know if this is

controlled opposition or if it's people that just can't read or a combination of both.

But if people just go examine melatonin on Google, it comes up.

You don't don't have to understand science it's very clear it's very easy it doesn't shut down your natural production so melatonin is your body's um

they call it your primary sleep hormone and i guess it is it's basically the part of your circadian rhythm that goes up when cortisol goes down so in the morning that thing that kicks in that gets you out of bed at like 4 a.m to 9 a.m depending on the individual that's your cortisol spiking and then that spikes and drops off over the day and then when it gets gets dark at nighttime, that's when your melatonin comes up.

So they kind of have this sun-moon kind of inverse relationship.

And it turns out that melatonin does a bunch of really cool shit.

And what it's working on in the body is it's kind of working like glutathione.

It's working as your body's second chief endogenous antioxidant.

And this is one of the reasons why disrupted melatonin production, you know, from artificial light, particularly screens.

I mean, I would argue that endogenous melatonin disruption must have just gotten worse, like this in the recent years.

And we know that melatonin plays a really important role for putting the body back together while we're resting, because that's when the body recovers.

So melatonin also does a bunch of really other, really cool, important stuff for the hormonal system.

It's an estrogen receptor modulator.

So it's kind of like a CIRM.

And then people go, oh, wow, that's cool.

I definitely want to take that now.

But it's also extremely neuroprotective.

It's really important for liver detoxification.

And it also can give you really good quality sleep if you get the dose right.

The problem is people say that people are taking too much melatonin.

They're not taking enough melatonin.

Really?

Yeah.

People need to take way more.

Way more.

That's a hard take, huh?

Yeah, I have.

At least current days.

The video that I have on YouTube that has the most views is

on melatonin.

I think it's at like

200 or so thousand, which for me is massive.

Because I just make boring lectures.

No one watches my videos.

And the statement that I make is you should take as much as you can tolerate.

It's just that for some people, that's zero.

Some people don't tolerate it at all.

The important thing about melatonin, though, is that the first time you take it or the first time you increase your dose, it's going to make you groggy in the morning.

That's fine.

There's a solution for that.

It's called coffee and it'll be fine.

So

whether you start taking 0.3 or 1 milligrams or 3 milligrams or 5 milligrams, you wake up in the morning and you go to the kitchen and you prepare the coffee and you drink that and it will cure the problem.

Your body just needs a few days to adjust.

And that's it.

It's

now some people are still very sensitive to it and they do best with like one milligram, three milligrams.

That's cool.

But all the really good research that we've got on melatonin as like a health promoting agent is in the doses of 20 milligrams an arm.

Jeez.

Yeah.

So the two leading researchers on melatonin,

Russell and Doris Lowe.

I can't remember Russell's surname.

It escapes me.

But he takes, I think, 180.

Doris is taking

Doris and the Grams.

What?

So,

yeah.

Melatonin, so they've done studies on rats where they tried to do them harm with melatonin.

They went like, how do we kill a rat with melatonin?

Because if you give a rat enough of anything, you'll kill it.

They had to cancel the study.

They were like, we can't, this isn't working.

Like, this is a waste of time.

They were giving the rats like the equivalent of you taking like hundreds of grams of it a day, and they just couldn't do any harm to them.

They're like,

you can't overdose on this.

It's impossible.

So the only problem is if you take too much, which, you know, if you're really sick, it would still be beneficial.

But for the average guy wanting to optimize your health, you basically just want to make sure that it's cleared your body by the time that your cortisol peaks in the morning.

So that's what I'm saying.

You want to take the most you can tolerate without it impacting your morning cortisol production.

Gotcha.

And for most people, in my experience, it's between

5 and 20 milligrams.

And if someone's got, the thing that I found melatonin shines the most for is if you've got an issue with like herniated discs, if you've got like severe problem in like your skeletal system, which makes it difficult to fall asleep, if you've got like neck pain, back pain, like something from a surgery that hasn't recovered, if you've got a pain in your body that means you physically toss and turn and can't get comfortable at night.

That's skeletal in that that muscle yeah yeah skeletal

push the melatonin dose up because that is impact it's actually reducing your body's natural melatonin production and it's reducing the receptor availability and in those guys 20 to 50 milligrams of melatonin can be a game changer for sleep even up to 100.

i see um always want to titrate up gradually but if you've got a physical particularly issues like bulging discs in your back If you've got issues sleeping and you can't get comfortable, pushing the melatonin dose up can be a game changer.

It will just make you groggy for a a few days.

But, like, I've been taking, I've got two bulging discs in my back, which I'm working on.

I've been taking 50 milligrams of melatonin for a night.

I got up at five this morning.

No, no, no groggy, just nothing.

I've taken up the 300 before.

The only reason I went back down was just that it was just too expensive.

How the fuck do you take three?

You got a compound.

Okay, okay.

Gotcha.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow, that is insane.

Cool.

Sounds like the conversation that a lot of bodybuilders have about GH.

You just got to take as much as you can tolerate.

Yeah,

until it adapts.

Or just drink the coffee in the morning until then.

Yeah.

But

I guess,

so what about the arguments regarding melatonin long term and also like cycling melatonin?

Yeah, I think that that all went out the window when we found out it didn't mess with your natural production.

There's, and again, going back to our discussion before about science, there's a lot of really bad science out there.

So there's some studies showing that like melatonin is bad for dopamine production Right rats are fucking nocturnal So they gave a bunch of rats melatonin at night and went oh, it's suppressed their dopamine production It's like yeah, they're fucking nocturnal They didn't control for the fact that the rats are nocturnal.

There's so much shit like that in science, which you just look at it and go This is dumb but the the conclusions they form form part of the academic literature.

But

actually they didn't just give them melatonin when they believed they would go go to sleep.

No, they would not.

It's ridiculous.

So there's a really good book.

Dr.

John Lawrence, I think I'm pronouncing his name wrong, but The Miracle Molecule is his book that he wrote on melatonin, which goes through all of this and really good research.

But when you look at the studies on melatonin that give either humans the appropriate dose at the right time or rats an appropriate dose at the right time, it is protective, it is supportive, it is beneficial for every system that we want to protect and support.

Wow.

All the fears and the concerns are based on giving rats too much at night when they're nocturnal.

I don't think you like, if you benefit from melatonin,

I can't see any advantage to cycling it.

The only, I think when it comes to things that you can get side effects from or build a tolerance to, then that's when you want to cycle them.

I think when we're looking at pharmaceuticals, we want to use the minimal effective dose.

When we're looking at bio-identical hormones, we want to use the maximal tolerated dose because those things are healthy and and good for you.

And I think that, and my friend Dr.

Keith Nichols has talked about this a lot.

He's a big advocate for pushing all the hormones up as high as possible.

Is that eventually your receptors are just going to saturate?

And then if there's leftover melatonin floating around, is that going to be doing any detriment?

That's

because it's melatonin and it seems not to be very many side effects and there isn't, right?

Exactly.

On the other side, like if you're a bodybuilder and you're taking gear and you're saturating your levels out, at one point you are going to have some pretty serious side effects from something like, you know because testosterone with saturated receptors will cause like a variety of crazy side effects.

Oh, yeah, melatonin on the other hand sounds a lot lighter than that.

And it seems to be very protective against a lot of the things that we don't want to die from.

And that's what a lot of people are looking at for melatonin as a longevity molecule is being like, well,

and this is the thing that one of the things that I'm the most interested in in this space is being like, what are the interventions that you and I can do now that are sustainable that are going to have a big dividend when we're 50, 60, 70 years old.

And the things that I wonder about is like, you know, would taking a healthy amount of melatonin every night for life, would that be something that would have a positive outcome on protecting for things like, you know, the big four diseases of aging, which is diabetes, cancer, dementia, and heart disease?

So if we can look at like low maintenance,

things that are net positive and good for you, that we can do sustainably long term, I think they're the things we want to focus on.

And I think personally, melatonin falls into that category.

Wow.

Okay.

What are your thoughts on?

Well,

I mean, you've kind of already answered this, but I guess I'm still interested to know what your thoughts are on the difference between just trying to optimize your endogenous versus taking exogenous melatonin.

I think when it comes to all hormone optimization,

you want to focus on the endogenous optimization regardless of if you're you're taking it exogenously or not.

And it's because,

for example, if you took, if we, if you and I sat here and took 50 milligrams of melatonin now versus if we took it at, let's say, midnight,

the receptor availability is not going to be the same because we're going to have other hormones floating around.

It's light outside.

It's not going to have the same effect as if we take it at nighttime in a dark room when you lay down to go to bed.

It's going to work differently because the internal environment is different.

Hormones don't do anything until they activate a receptor.

It's like pinball.

the balls will float around on the table you can have all the balls floating around and you can hit them with the paddles but you don't get any points until they hit the bumpers

so

the way that you optimize receptor availability is that you optimize endogenous production whether you are or aren't making

so a good example is testosterone like if you take someone who's you know obese unhealthy and you put them on a 500 milligram a week steroid cycle versus someone who would be making optimal levels naturally if and they are and then you put them on 500 milligrams milligrams a week of test, that test is going to do a lot more for this guy than this guy because the receptors are working properly, because the body is primed to be making it already.

So,

I don't think that things like HRT give people a context or a permission or an environment where they can just go, oh, my natural production is taken care of.

Like, I don't need to do any of that stuff.

I can just biohack my way through life and it's all fine.

No, I think, I think you have to meet the medicine halfway.

And I think that's the most important thing with all of this stuff, but especially melatonin as well.

I mean, you can take all the melatonin that you want, but if you scroll on your phone until two in the morning, you're going to have a shit sleep regardless.

So one of the best things you can do on your phone is taking the red light out.

I have an app, Flux, on my computer.

I don't know if you've got Flux on your laptop, but gradually pulls

the blue light out of the screen as the sun goes down.

That stuff's really good.

I have this thing that a lot of friends have made fun of me for because they don't know what it is until I tell them, but I got these like red and these orange glasses from amazon yeah you know what i'm talking about bro and i love them yeah because i'll put them on and literally an hour and a half-ish or something roughly after i put them on i'm tired yeah like i'm ready to go yeah uh but um

and it's super easy because then it you know you don't have to worry about each individual screen or what color your lights are yeah it's for everything yeah and i think i think that stuff the way that i like to do it is because the problem with all of this like health optimization biohacking stuff is if you take it too far, you can become neurotic and weird.

And no one ever wants to hang out with you because you're just fucking annoying.

And all the anxiety you create over your routines just offset all the benefits of all the stuff you're doing.

So I like to have like,

I've got the blue light block of glasses in the house.

I like to change like a few of the bulbs of the house to like a red bulb if possible.

Have some candles around.

Have like the Himalayan salt lamps.

I've got those as well around the house.

And that way when it does come to evening, it's like, oh, I'd just rather put the salt lamp on or put a candle on.

So that way, you've kind of just rigged your environment to kind of have that as part of your lifestyle.

And I think if you, it's kind of like the, you know, how do you drink more water?

You put a big pint glass next to your water tap.

Like, that's the best way to drink more water.

And I think if you can just rig your environment that way, like, you know, one of the best things people can do is like get like a clock alarm and like charge your phone outside your room.

Like, there's a whole bunch of just little like life hacks that you could do that set it up to make all this stuff effortless, or you could become a real routine, obsessed type A dude about it if that works for you as well.

Gotcha.

Okay.

So do you happen to remember any of the studies or any of the references that you normally refer to when we're discussing

how melatonin does not affect your endogenous production, how taking exogenous doesn't affect your endogenous production?

Yeah, so the best citation is just that examined study.

I wouldn't be able to quote the exact name of it, but what they have shown is that when you do put it into your body, so let's say if you swallow like a five milligram capsule now, that will suppress the production of melatonin while that five milligrams you've taken is circulating because the body will go, well, the melatonin's here, we don't need to make anymore.

What the studies have conclusively shown is that the following night, when you don't take the melatonin, it hasn't impacted your production at all.

That's the most important distinction.

I see.

So, when people go, oh, well, if I stop taking melatonin, I sleep like shit.

It's like, that's why you started taking the fucking melatonin because you weren't sleeping well.

So, they think it's a withdrawal, but it's going, no, now you just got used to actually having assistance here.

Okay, gotcha.

So, if you take like two milligrams of melatonin and you have, like, say, five milligrams of melatonin in your system or something, I'm sure this isn't how it works, but you know, do you know what happens there?

Yeah, it would suppress your production.

So, the

physiological amount of melatonin that we produce is very strongly disagreed upon.

So some people say that we only make 0.1 to 0.3 milligrams of melatonin, which is probably true, but that would be assuming that oral has a 100% bioavailability, which it doesn't.

So Thorne did a study.

Either they did it or they funded it, but it's the study they publish where they showed that depending on the individual, it was three to 10 milligrams of melatonin that allowed people to come up to an optimal therapeutic amount and that's what we find in practice as well is that three to five up to ten milligrams of melatonin is the amount that most people will use wow so although and then the question is if we're going well the physiological amount is 0.3 milligrams is that the amount of the average person who's going on their phone all day and watching a movie before bedtime at what hour did they pull that melatonin from because that's going to be different every hour of the night so i think it's more beneficial to go at what point when we keep pushing the melatonin up do people stop sleeping better.

That's what we all want to know because why we're fucking taking melatonin is to sleep better.

And they found that in most of the studies people do better with more melatonin up to about five milligrams.

But then people who had trouble sleeping did better with 10 to even 20 milligrams of melatonin.

So Thorn, the way that I recommend, if people want to fuck around with melatonin, I recommend that you go on iHerb or Amazon or whatever and you buy some one, three, and five milligram melatonin capsules.

Thorn make threes and fives.

I think Life Extension makes some ones.

They'll cost you like 10 bucks a bottle, and start with one milligram for a few nights, have the coffee in the morning, and titrate it up by one to two milligrams of melatonin every three to four days.

Because that way you'll have, you know, the ones, threes, and fives, and you'll get up to like 20 milligrams if you need to.

And you keep titrating it up.

And I'm, I'm totally borrowing this.

I'm going to say I inherited this from the late Dr.

John Chrysler.

This was his recommendation.

i didn't come up with this um

is so you take that every night and then once you get to the point where your sleep gets worse so if you go my sleep's now broken i'm waking up more during the night maybe i'm having some distressing dreams or something like that that means you've taken too much if your sleep quality suffers then you have to back it back down and yeah what what we've found is five to twenty milligrams of melatonin works best for most people if someone comes to me and they're having issues with sleep which is a real common thing, I tend to go, my base recommendation, which is just in a book that I just put out, is going, we're just going magnesium and collagen protein to start with, because that's going whole foods, nutrients that help with calming the system.

If that doesn't work, the thing I like to go in beyond that is the melatonin.

And if we're needing to modulate things like stress and cortisol, things like phosphodyl serine and theanine work really well.

And if all of those fail, if we sorry?

What are your thoughts about 5-HCP?

I think 5-HTP is crap

because

it's just a serotonin precursor that you're taking to increase melatonin.

So it became redundant once we realized that melatonin was something that you could just supplement with.

But the one that works, if all of those don't work,

and you've got your 50 milligrams of melatonin in or 20 milligrams, you've got all the supplements not working, that's when a micro dose of THC can do wonders.

Absolute wonders.

Well, okay.

Cool.

Micro dose of THC.

Yeah.

Something I do every night.

Yeah.

In the macro dose.

Macro doses are significantly more fun.

But if you can, if you, and I am also a big fan of the macro dosing THC for recreational effects, but for people who don't want to have it, they don't want any of that, but they just want to sleep better, one to two milligrams of THC with the melatonin, that can be the thing that prevents someone from having to go for something like ambient.

So if someone's like, melatonin's not cutting it, and I need a pharmaceutical sleep aid, one to two milligrams of THC is not going to cause the stone over in the morning.

It's not going to give you the munchies.

It's not going to,

you're not going to have too much fun with it.

That tiny, little, tiny, tiny, tiny bit of THC is just enough to give that melatonin a little bit of legs.

And that can be the thing that allows people to resolve the insomnia without having to go for the things like the ambien or the Xanax and the Valium and things like that.

Okay, cool, awesome.

And then, what was that last thing you said about the five milligrams versus so 10 to 20 milligrams, you know, is for people who actually really have the issues still going to sleep, but the five milligrams was for what?

Three to five milligrams for most people with melatonin is the dose that works well.

And then, yeah, if you're having trouble with sleeping, 10 to 20, up to 50.

Gotcha.

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I guess that means the two milligrams I've been consuming whenever I felt like I needed it because Huberman said so is probably not completely correct.

I mean,

if it was enough that it worked for you and it produced a notable difference, then that's great.

I think the argument is more that there is more potential benefits left on the table to going higher if you can tolerate more.

Unfortunately, I cannot say if it's noticed, it's if it's made a noticeable difference because one,

the distinction was way too small, and then whenever I do really feel like I need it, I also have other supplements that I go to first, like GABA and Ashwagandha

before bed.

I always take the magnesium glycinate, but I go to do those two also before bed.

So, um, oh, uh, what is your thoughts on like

KSM66 and Ashwagandha and like what time to take it?

I always see that in pre-workouts and like intra-workouts too, and I'm just like,

like, okay is that really a good idea so ash ashwagandha is a very interesting supplement it's very well researched

there are some people on the internet who misunderstand it and are afraid of it

and there's some very poor literature again this is kind of like it deliberately segued into this on how ashwagandha impacts the serotonergic system um

so

are you familiar with the psychedelic 5-MeO DMT?

Yeah.

Okay.

Are you familiar with the dosages of 5-MeO DMT in terms of like what roughly, let's say 50 milligrams of 5 MeO DMT would be

so

for dosing reference, 50 milligrams is about breakthrough threshold.

That's the point that would put most people on their ass.

Gotcha.

So they did a study where they took a group of two groups of rats and they made them do something called a shiver test, which is where they basically make them swim in water that they would usually drown in.

And then they wait until they're right about to drown and then they take them out of the water and see what happens.

Animal cruelty and science research is not really a thing.

So anyway, they gave the group, I'm going to get the dose wrong off the top of my head, but they gave them the equivalent of giving a human like eight to ten breakthrough doses of five MeO DMT before the swim test.

And then they gave them ashwagandha.

And then they took them both out and they went

both of those groups of rats shivered in a similar way and that means that the ashwagandha works on the same serotonin system as the 5MeO DMT.

Like that's fucking retarded.

Like that makes like literally no sense

because no scientist in the study had actually ever done 5 MeO DMT or knew what it was.

So This is formed like when people quote all the time that ashwagandha and you can read on examine when people quote that ashwagandha impacts a serotonergic system, when you click through to the study, this is the study, and it's just the most ridiculous study ever.

So some people think that it messes with the serotonin system.

It might, but that's not the issue.

Ashwagandha is a GABA A receptor positive allosteric modulator, which is a fancy lingo term for the receptor that alcohol and benzodiazepines work on that calms you down.

It makes that receptor more sensitive.

It has the same mechanism of action as value.

Just much, much, much more.

So combining that with taking a GABA supplement,

that would be like a potentiator because

you're taking the,

it's interesting that we can supplement GABA, but we can't supplement things like serotonin or dopamine.

But you're taking the neurotransmitter and then you're making your neurotransmitter more receptive to it.

So it's like a one-two punch.

That's how you can produce an effect.

Makes sense why it feels so good when I do both.

Yeah.

Same with like theanine.

Like theanine gives your body the precursor to make GABA and then you make the receptor more sensitive.

Magnesium allows your body to make it, works on the receptor as well, semi-glycine.

Now, the problem with ashwagonda, the drawback is that because it works like Valium, it's very strong.

So if people don't have baseline high levels of cortisol or they don't have issues with like insomnia and being kept awake from stress, it can cause people to become like apathetic.

Like it's kind of like if you were just like heading out for a day and took some Valium, it could make you feel just like kind of zonked and like demotivated and a bit depressed.

Like the next day, for example.

Or if you take it the day off.

Acutely, yeah.

Yeah.

The day off.

Because if you take something like Valium, because the dose is high, it also gives you a bit of a dopaminergic buzz.

That's where like you kind of take it and feel a bit spacey and feel a bit kind of fun.

With ashwagonda, because it's mild, it can just, it's literally a depressant.

It's like a tranquilizer.

So if you're someone who's like super high stress, you've got chronic pain, you've got a bunch of shit going on, your cortisol levels are always jacked up, and you take some ashwagandha, you can go, oh, this is it like this has put me in the zone like this is a really nice sedative effect but if you're someone who's not highly stressed you take ashwagondo it could turn you into a fucking potato because it's going to move your chemistry in the wrong direction so

for people who are highly stressed or in chronic pain it's probably the most effective herbal extract for that sedative pathway The problem though with all these botanicals is they're all at least a little bit estrogenic.

And the amount that they they are estrogenic in the scheme of things for someone who's on cycle,

drop of the ocean, not a big deal.

But

there are these kind of drawbacks to them, which they are like ashwagandha is an Ayurvedic tonic medicine, which wasn't meant to be used on consecutive days in Ayurveda.

It's meant to be used as a one-off.

So, you know, is us coming in and taking a concentrated version every night for sleep, is that going to be something that's going to lead to problems long term or health benefits long term?

We don't really know.

But out of all the herbal supplements, it definitely has the most practical application for practitioners because it's so effective for reducing sleep, calming anxiety, taking the edge off stress.

And I would argue that if people are putting them in with pre-workouts, it's probably kind of like the

Jaeger bomb.

You know, the Jaeger bomb is kind of like the Jaeger master, which has got the alcohol and then the caffeine and the sugar.

It's meant to kind of take the edge off the caffeine or give the alcohol a bit of a kick.

I'd argue that that's what these pre-workouts are doing.

It's going, well, let's put a whole bunch of stimulants in, but then let's put a whole bunch of stuff like theanine and ashwagandha in to take the edge off so that you're not getting too cranked out at the gym to try to give you that happy medium.

That's probably why they're putting them in there.

I, yeah, I always found it weird to have ashwagandha like in your mornings or like in your intra workouts or pre-workouts.

I always found that just such a weird thing to put in a supplement.

And then, I mean, like, it's not like you're going to have any disclaimer in that supplement, like, oh, hey, if you have like super high cortisol levels, then this is actually probably going to work better for you or something.

Or say, like, if you have low cortisol levels, then don't take this product or whatever.

You know, they just want to sell it.

I just found that a weird thing to just put in a giant.

cocktail of supplements.

The supplement industry

is a wild industry, man.

And I think that, you know, they've taken like ancient Chinese medicine, Ayurveda,

even like ancient Scandinavian medicine, and they've just put them in 500 milligram capsules and they just sell them at the vitamin store.

And, you know, these are powerful medicines that have been used for a long time that people would study and practice for for years before they use them on people.

And

it's something that, you know, we don't really know in terms of what it's going to do long term and if it's that big of a deal.

But it's one of the reasons I say to my guys, like when we're troubleshooting shit, I'm like, just everything that's not food, just take it out.

Just go back to basics.

And the reason why I recommend that is that so many many times when they do this, it was one of the dozen ingredients in the five different products that they were taking, which they didn't need, that was just interacting with them in a bad way.

And

sexual dysfunction, issues sleeping, issues focusing, brain fog, that kind of stuff.

I mean, these are all these like mild, low-grade things that come up when something's out of alignment.

Interesting.

Cool.

Have you ever noticed any

effects of like

nootropic mushrooms or lion's mane or any of these things long term in a detrimental way?

No.

The lion's mane one is interesting because it's technically a five-alpha reductase inhibitor.

I don't eat vegan food, but like I've seen vegan restaurants where like they'll cook that thing up like a steak and put it on pizza.

Yeah.

Like you could eat it.

I ate a lion's mane steak just because I was curious what it tasted like.

Was it good?

Well, I was wondering if I was going to see like the universe afterwards, but I didn't.

I don't think, and again, like maybe if you took a very concentrated capsule with a very highly targeted version of the active ingredient, could you cause some damage?

Maybe.

I wouldn't be the guinea pig who found out, but I think these medicinal mushroom products are great.

If the dose is right, if they're in a low dose, they're all blended together.

I think they can work really well as nootropic for people.

If you combine that with good nutrition, good workflow, it's not going to work like Adderall or Badafinil.

But

a good blend of those mushrooms in the right dose and the right setting, that could give you an extra 10, 20, 30% boost in creativity.

I think people look for nootropics to work like Adderall, to be the thing that's going to get you off the couch, to get you stoked to go and do the thing you don't want to do.

You're going to need amphetamine for that.

The thing that's going to take you from being in, like if you're already in the state you need to be in, that's going to enhance and perpetuate that further you know whether it's like creative work or flow state work or you've just got good discipline and work ethic and you want to take it to the next level i think medicinal mushroom complexes where they're all balanced together can be a great mechanism for that to happen okay that's cool to hear i i agree with that too so whenever i do podcasts for example like because like what we were just discussing off the podcast whenever i'm digesting food and i have to digest large amounts of food for bodybuilding yeah my brain state's like no man Like, I can't.

It's so hard to work.

It's so slow.

But during a podcast, for example, I'll make sure I'm not digesting too much food.

And then I'll take something like Lions Main Cordyceps in a compound.

So like 500 to 800 milligrams of each.

And then I'll take something like, for example,

you know, Aubrey Marcus and Joe Rogan's Onit

alpha brain product, which has alpha GPC in it.

This combo for me almost makes me feel like my brain is is working in 1.5 to 2 times speed, which is amazing.

I feel phenomenal on it.

I do notice, though, some people make the argument that with some of these things, you can take it every day, but for me, I've noticed it works best if I only take it on the day that I need to do the thing.

So if I have one podcast or two podcasts a week, I'll take it on those days and then off on the off days.

If I take those days off, I find that I feel better and I work better taking this supplement on the day that I'm on.

And it's always been like that for some reason.

Now, for the mushrooms particularly, I'm not sure if that's the case,

but at least for the supplements that have things like Alpha GPC and like whatever on it, whatever else that that product has, I notice it's best when I do cycle it.

Yeah, I think if you're trying to get a subjective effect from anything,

any supplement experience, then cycling it is going to be the thing that's going to make the difference.

I quite like the Onit Alpha Brain product.

I think it's overpriced, but I think they've built a phenomenal brand, so I think they can charge good money for it.

I think the formula is great, especially at a double dose.

I have a similar thing.

I use the product Qualia Mind.

This is like a seven capsule dose.

I don't know if you've seen that, but it's similar to the Onnit one, but it's a bit stronger.

And

the reason why that gives me such a good effect is because I use it like once a week, maybe twice a week.

But if you were to use it every day, like, is it good for you?

I mean, yeah, probably, but it's not going to give you that kick you're looking for because it's about that subjective effect you're getting is the deviation from your baseline.

But if this becomes a new baseline, it's not your brain is too good at keeping things in balance.

It's otherwise coffee would have the same effect every day.

Like the brain is very good at maintaining homeostasis as a defense mechanism.

Even when the things you're putting in, like, you know, lion's mane and cordyceps and alpha GPC, these things are good for you, the brain will still work to maintain balance.

And I think that that's one of the mistakes a lot of guys are making is they're looking for products like this to use daily to get them just to feel okay, which is because their diet and lifestyle and, you know, all this other stuff is off.

What we want to do is get to the point where day to day, you don't feel like you need anything like that.

But when it comes to doing something like a podcast or writing a book or, you know, getting through like a mountain of work that you don't want to do one to two times a week, using something like that could be great and i think pre-workouts are the same like you don't want to have to take a pre-workout with like 300 milligrams of caffeine just to go and hit hobs five days a week you know you don't want to need something like that every day ideally ideally you just want to be able to you know have a coffee and go to the gym but you know once to twice a week if you really want to fuck shit up and you've got like a really good pre-workout formula and you want to do that go for it But I think that's how these things should be used.

Awesome.

We're about running out of time, which sucks because we have a Q ⁇ A that I wanted to do as well.

But I wanted to ask you beforehand, too, because this is something that I was thinking about in the beginning of the podcast when my brain was fried.

But I really enjoyed your talk about

you were discussing porn and how porn affects a lot of guys.

And

the interesting thing is a lot of people will say

one of the biggest reasons you shouldn't do porn is dopamine.

But you made a different argument, and I really liked where you went with that.

Do you think you could kind of expound on that?

Sure.

I think when you talk about something like porn,

it's going to create a lot of strong responses.

Either people will people always like to defend their vice

but people also like to virtue signal.

So I take a very middle stance on porn

and I think it's good to look at it realistically.

The idea that watching porn and masturbating to porn can produce an amphetamine-like dopamine surge in your brain is ludicrous.

I'm just trying to think of an analogy that's similar.

It's just, it's not possible.

The amount of dopamine that your brain creates from something like using Adderall

or dexamphetamine or methamphetamine, we're talking like hundred to thousand-fold increase in dopamine.

Something like methylphenidate, ritalin, is like a ten-fold increase.

Modafinil is like a two to three-fold increase in the right dose.

Porn and masturbation is not anywhere near that level of dopamine toxicity.

Behaviors, and porn is a, you know, watching porn and masturbating to porn is an interesting discussion because

it's kind of like gambling on a slot machine.

You're doing something, like it's a physical activity, but it's a simulated thing.

But it's not a drug.

So because it's not a drug, because it's not taking your dopamine through the roof, you can't be addicted to porn in the way that you can be addicted to amphetamine.

And if someone is making it out like a porn addiction withdrawal is as bad as amphetamine, they need to eat a mouthful of cement and harden the fuck up.

Like, that's ridiculous.

Like,

and I don't want to be insensitive to people who are suffering, but at the same time, if you can solve all your problems by just like putting your dick away and going outside, you don't have any problems.

Like, porn addiction is not a real problem.

It's a symptom of people who don't have any any real problems.

And it's just a lack of willpower.

So yeah, if you're jerking off to porn all the time, you're conditioning your brain to get your dopamine from doing that instead of maybe going to the gym or going for a walk in the sun.

I think you made the example of like someone who literally just stays in for the entire day or like for a lot of the day and he's not doing the things that he should be doing or that he knows that he wants to do because

he's just...

He's wired to that dopamine machine.

But I think the thing with that dopamine machine is that, and what people need to understand, it's not as strong as like drugs.

You've just condition your brain into getting dopamine from the wrong thing.

And going for a walk in the sunlight or going to the gym or eating a good meal or like working on a hobby, they're within the same league of dopamine producing activity.

You just have to kind of swap one for the other.

And

the way that I look at it is that, because the important thing to look at with porn, is that what we know from research and men is that if we see just in person a woman that we're attracted to, even if there's no interaction there, we're just in the presence of a woman we're attracted to, it increases endorphins, it increases dopamine, it increases testosterone just from being in the same room as an attractive woman.

So my argument is that a lot of these guys are self-medicating their low testosterone, low dopamine with the porn.

It's the chicken or the egg thing.

Gotcha.

And I think that a lot of the time guys get a boost when they watch porn.

Maybe, you know, that boost goes away when they have an orgasm and they get the prolactin spike.

But I think being around attractive women is something that gets guys going.

It has for a long time.

You know, Aaron Clary says that attractive women are the fuel that drives capitalism,

which is fucking true.

I can see why it's all falling apart over here compared to Eastern Europe.

So

when we're looking at something like

habitual behavior, which is what porn addiction is it's that men have just become habituated to the wrong thing and it's a very easy thing to become habituated towards if you've got that lower testosterone that we're talking about before because now if you're if you're more sensitive to stress and you've got less dopaminergic activity then getting your satisfaction from you know looking at porn and getting a woman through the screen Yeah, it's not as good as the real thing, but there's a lot less vulnerability.

There's a lot less of a threat here.

There's a lot less of something that could go wrong.

And I think that when you've got that lower testosterone state, that's a lot more appealing because there's a lot less risk.

So you're going, okay, well, the reward's not as good, but the risk is non-existent.

If you're in a high stress, low energy, low testosterone state, that's a good deal.

So the problem is if you keep making that deal and you never have that process of pushing outside your comfort zone and going and forming the real relationships, that's when you can get into your 30s and 40s and go, oh.

I don't have anything to show for this.

And now the point that I've gotten to is depressing.

And I think that's one of the issues that comes with that.

Awesome.

Thanks.

That was great.

Let's just do some of the questions for the Q ⁇ A real quick and then we'll close up.

Yeah, sure.

Mick the Great asks, how to deal with acne from test?

So, Mick the Great,

firstly, ideally get it from a pharmacy.

That's probably going to be the number one thing because it's all the other crap that you're injecting that's not testosterone that is more likely, like the worst acne I have ever seen in my entire career has never been from a pharmaceutically prescribed testosterone product.

So getting a cleaner source, ideally from a pharmacy, injecting it two to three times a week,

more frequent injections, lowering the dose if needed, they're the big ones, but it's going to be the purity of the product.

And one of the important ones, if you're getting it prescribed, is checking the carrier oil, because some guys will have an immunogenic reaction to a carrier oil.

that you inject just like you would from diet.

So if you can get like an MCT based testosterone that's from a pharmacy and you're injecting that two to three times a week, that's not going to cause acne.

Okay, awesome.

Do you see any difference between three times a week, four times a week, and every day injections?

Yeah, I think

typically when we look at injections, we look at two to three times, well, two times a week, three times a week, and then daily.

I don't do every other day because it's just an annoying way of doing three times a week with your half injection per week.

It's just annoying.

Going from two injections a week to three injections a week can be a game changer.

I've seen labs where on 150 milligrams of testosterone split twice a week, the levels literally halved between Monday and Thursday.

So people think, oh, if you're doing it twice a week, it's keeping it super stable.

Not for a lot of guys.

It can just be reducing that wave.

So twice a week to three times a week, I have seen that be a game changer to the point that if someone comes to me and they go, I want to start on an optimal TRT protocol, I'm just going in three times a week from the get-go.

Only if you want to be really lazy and you can get away with it, I think you should go twice a week.

Going beyond that, like going from two to three injections a week, one extra injection a week, game changer, going from three injections a week to seven injections a week, so now four extra shots on top, given the half-life so long, I think diminishing return sets in them.

But if someone's troubleshooting, if someone's overweight, if someone's got liver issues, if someone's getting their health together or they're taking a larger dose, that's the other thing as well.

Like, I mean, I'm not really in the cycling space, but the more you're taking, the more often you should be pitting.

Like, because if the total anerogenic load is higher, stability is going to be your best friend.

The more you're taking, the more stable you want it to be.

I feel like I can agree with that as well.

I know it's annoying, but I have injected every single day, and it's always really helped

with just an assortment of side effects.

If I was going to do...

higher doses myself, I would only do it daily.

And I'd just be like, yeah, it's inconvenient, but then stop taking a steroid cycle when you get over it.

Yeah.

Simple.

Just saying to the other bodybuilders out there, though, I'm sure that injecting three times a week will still be a really good option as well.

That's what most top coaches will

tell you to do.

Yeah.

And

I used to sell mobile phones when I was at university.

And when someone came in with a problem, the first thing we'd say is, have you turned it off and turned it back on again?

Because that, back when you used to be able to take the batteries out of a phone, that used to fix most issues.

Injection frequency is the same if your phone's working fine you don't have to restart it all the time but if your phone's not working the first thing you do is turn it off turn it back on if you're getting side effects on your protocol increase injection frequency then start to troubleshoot other issues because that's the easiest thing you can do it's going to be beneficial across the board and it solves the majority of problems it's just an injection frequency thing if you increase the injection frequency and then you've still got issues then now we start to unpack stuff but i think that should be the if it ain't broke, don't fix it for sure.

But if you're troubleshooting, that's where you start.

Cool, cool.

Ben S47 asks, is Dave still using testosterone cream instead of injections?

I guess he's talking about it.

Yeah.

So I started cream in January because it's just easier to get it in Lithuania.

That's purely why.

I had previously done six months of cream.

I did injections for eight years.

I'd previously done six months of cream, but it just didn't work for me in the past.

So I've been on cream.

Previously, I was on 250 a week of tests, split into three shots.

Now I'm on 200 milligrams a day of cream.

So two clicks in the morning, two clicks at night.

Levels are exactly the same.

I feel exactly the same, except I don't have to stab myself, but I have to rub cream on my balls twice a day.

Literally.

No difference whatsoever subjectively in how I feel.

If I went back to Australia, I'd go back to injections.

If someone said tomorrow, you have to swap back to injections, cool, no problem.

Totally equal for me.

The game changer recently though has been we organized for the pharmacy in Greece, who if people are watching, they service all of Europe.

You don't just have to go through my clinic.

You can go through any

clinic or doctor in Europe that will prescribe through Greece, but we're doing it through TRT Baltic, is the HRT-based cream.

And my friend Keith Nichols put me onto this because there's multiple different bases you can get for the cream, and they're all a little bit different.

One will leave like a powdery residue on your nuts like talcum powder.

One will smell really chemically like you have to wash it off.

That's the

Atrivis and Versa base.

Liposomal goes on great, absorbs quickly, but the levels aren't as good.

That's what I was using previously.

The HRT based cream, it's cream made specifically just for hormone replacement therapy.

It's made from olive oil and macadamia oil, so it's all natural.

There's no solvents or anything in there.

And you put on the tiniest bit, it sounds like I'm selling this, you put on the tiniest little bit of cream and it feels like a good quality sunscreen and you you literally rub it in and it's completely gone no residue in like literally 10 seconds so to be able to just put on about half the amount of toothpaste you'd use on a toothbrush of cream put that onto your balls you get out of the shower pull your pants up and to feel

just as good as you feel on 250 a week of injectable but being able to throw it in your backpack when you're traveling not have to take injections with you

it's a nice change that's cool but you have you do it in the morning and at night.

Yeah.

So every, okay.

Yeah,

you can do it once a day if you're lazy, but it's got a 24-hour half-life.

So you are much better off doing it twice a day, but you can do it once a day.

And a lot of guys who've been on injections for like 20 years are like, give me the once-a-day cream.

Like, I'm just sick of doing this.

Okay, I see.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know a lot of people who have definitely gotten tired of injections for sure.

Yeah.

Cream used to be shit, but now that cream can be compounded in a way that's so well that you could get like levels that are even higher than 250 or 300 milligrams a week just by putting cream on twice a day,

it's a pretty attractive option.

Okay.

I have a feeling like whenever I'm like 50 or something, I'm probably going to want to do this.

Oh, yeah.

Ultra Joe Comic asks, how can I manage enlarged prostate while in TRT without using finasteride?

That's a tricky one.

Prostate health is

difficult.

I'm not an expert on the prostate.

I refer all these questions to my friend Dr.

Jordan Grant, who's a fantastic urologist.

But I have asked him these questions.

And one of the things that I think is important for men is understanding that if you live long enough, your prostate is going to get big.

Whether you have low testosterone, high testosterone, if you're an old guy, your prostate is going to swell up.

That's just part of living long as a man.

The thing for the prostate, though, is that antigen receptors saturate at hyperconatal levels of the prostate.

So whether you take 50 milligrams of testosterone or 5 grams of testosterone, the activity of the antigen in the prostate is going to be the same.

The difference is if you're using other compounds, they come in and bind with the androgen receptor of the prostate and that produces different effects.

So my number one recommendation is to only use bioidentical testosterone.

So not be using any of the other anabolics if your prostate is of concern.

And the second thing is you want to actually go and find out that your prostate is what you think is problematic.

I've met so many guys who are like, I've got prostate issues, got prostate issues, got prostate issues.

They had pelvic floor issues.

They had issues with their psoas muscles.

They had issues with anxiety causing issues with their bladder.

So you really want to make sure that your prostate is actually enlarged.

You can get it scanned.

You don't have to get a finger up your ass to work that out.

You can get it scanned.

And find out that that's what the problem is.

But I found that the best thing to support prostate health from everyone who I've spoken to is just good diet lifestyle and keep stress low.

So if you're on TRT and it's already enlarged, keep your injection frequency as often as you'll possibly be willing to do.

Use supplements like melatonin, sleep well, don't take on too much stress, keep your body fat nice and lean, don't drink alcohol, don't smoke cigarettes, live a healthy, clean lifestyle.

That's the best thing you can do for it.

Awesome, cool.

And last last question: Little Joe Cartwright asks, Have you seen any link between pregnanolone deficiency and sodium sensitivity?

I've seen a link between pregnanolone deficiency and everything sensitivity.

Yeah, so when pregnanoload is low,

and I've got this in my Beyond TRT e-book, when pregnanolone is low, you become hypersensitive to everything.

So if a supplement causes a side effect, if a medication causes a side effect, you're going to get that side effect.

Because pregnantolone is basically your body's thermostat in every tissue.

It maintains balance.

So it's why it increases every time you take something that intoxicates you, so that your brain can defend itself.

So your electrolytes will go massively out of whack if pregnenolone is deficient, absolutely.

But there's a whole bunch of other things that could cause sensitivity to electrolyte imbalances as well.

So pregnant alone being deficient is something that you have to fix because if you don't fix it, nothing will ever feel okay.

It's at such a core foundational aspect of your mitochondrial health that you have to have sufficient pregnant alone levels.

You guys here in the States are blessed that you can check it.

We can't check it in heaps of countries.

What?

Yeah, in Australia, you can't check it.

In Europe, you can't check it.

You can check it in the UK and in the US.

That's it.

You can't check it anywhere else.

You know why that is?

Because no one wants it.

There's no demand.

We used to be able to check it in Australia and they were like, oh, we got rid of it.

I was like, why?

They were like, you were the only person referring it.

It's just no interest in it.

So that's why it's expensive.

Is it because maybe there's just most people don't, you don't really see it as a deficiency as often as, say, you know, testosterone?

Yeah.

So the late Dr.

Ray Peet was very big on pregnancy.

And they used to use pregnatolone, as far as I'm aware, for a lot of things that they now use corticosteroids for.

So the reason why pregnetolone fell out of favor over corticosteroids is that in a clinical environment for inflammation, the corticosteroid will, like, you know, something like prednisone, will outperform pregnetolone.

It will just cause way more side effects.

But

you can only patent the drug for like eight years.

So once pregnetolone was not patentable anymore, it fell out of favor.

So pregnanolone is the less, the least tested for and the least prescribed hormone because it's the oldest.

There's no money to be made off it.

So back in the 20s and 30s, it was popular.

Okay, gotcha.

So are there any other cases when someone should be supplemented with pregnant alone and DHEA aside from

when they're feeling associated symptoms and on their blood work they have low levels?

I have made the case that pregnantolone and DHEA should only be supplemented for in the context of deficiency.

I wrote a book on it.

I've done a couple of lectures on it.

I stand by that statement because

in practice if you don't have a deficiency and you take them you don't tolerate them and you get side effects and you feel better off them than on them so i think we can sit around and hypothesize mechanistically all the amazing benefits they have but if if you it seems like if your body's natural set point is optimal then if you throw that out of balance you get problems where i would reframe my stance on this and at one point I'm going to do a podcast with Vigorous Steve.

We've spoken about this.

Love love Steve.

Yeah.

Take a shot at Steve.

No, I agree with him.

And

this is where I'd say that he actually has nuance that went beyond what I said.

The

main thing that I see dysregulate pregnantolone and DHEA in younger men is nandrolone and TREM.

I don't know why that is.

I assume it's because of its impact on the progesterone receptor, or maybe it's because of the doses, or I'm not sure.

But those hormones or analogs seem to dysregulate the pituitary's connection with the thyroid and the adrenals far more than any of the other steroids do so I guess the argument is

would

would it be smart to use them prophylactically on a big cycle on the assumption that a supraphysiological cycle of antigens is going to downregulate those levels so kind of like you could see in ahead and you were taking it to prevent that get shut down

that would make sense to me and that would be where i'd refer to someone like steve and go do you see this being a thing and if he would go yeah then i'd i'd take it off that because the 99 of my clients are guys who've never used anabolics especially trt guys so I only see deficiencies of guys who've previously abused steroids or they've gotten older and they've got age-related hormone decline or they've had a brain injury.

They tend to be the things that cause pregnant loan deficiencies.

But

if someone was going on a big fat cycle,

if someone like Steve was to come in and go, Yep, every time we run bloods on a big fat cycle, pregnantalone and DHEA come in low, I guess you could argue that you could use them prophylactically for something like that in a replacement dose.

It's just not a field that I work in.

But you said, particularly with trend and nandrolone, is where you see these deficiencies.

Yeah.

Okay, gotcha.

Hmm.

Cool.

Yeah.

Nandrolone and Trend have always been of interest, especially because of their just fucking weird-ass side effects.

So

the discussions around them are always really entertaining, to be honest.

Because they make people gay.

Probably that, too.

Look, they're fascinating compounds because of their impact on the progestin receptor.

It's because they're both an alligator and a progester.

And progesterone in men is a really interesting, misunderstood hormone.

A lot of the time we think testosterone, masculine, estrogen, feminizing.

but really like progesterone is the feminine life force of a woman.

So,

yeah, when you take a guy who's pumped full of superphysiological amounts of androgens, and then you put in a bit of a progesterone on top that's not even bio-identical progesterone, it's an analog, and you put that in an environment with all the other drugs and everything else going on, plus, you know, being physically in shape, having a lot of muscle.

I can imagine that would lead to some interesting outcomes for sure.

All right.

I think that's about time.

So where can everybody find you?

Yeah, I'm on Instagram.

I'm Dave Lee or advancedfundamentalhealth.com.

I've got a few e-books on there.

Coaching's available on there as well.

But the best place to find me is just put on, just jump on YouTube, search Dave Lee TRT.

There's over 100 videos on there.

I've got one-hour lectures on every topic people could be interested in, some live lectures too, on philosophy and behavior.

So all kinds of free content there.

And then, yeah, if people want to pick up an e-book, advancedfundamentalhealth.com.

Awesome, thank you, bro.

That was really awesome.

Thank you.

Tons of information.

I think everybody will love it.

I did.

Thank you.

Thank you, guys.

If you guys would like to split the podcast, you can by rating us a five-star on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or anywhere you find a podcast, or subscribing to the YouTube channel and clicking the bell button because it lets us get super sick, knowledgeable guests like Dave today.

So, love you guys.

Thank you.

Peace.

Fire.