Barbell Shrugged - Neurohacking Your Body and Activating Your Highest Genetic Potential with Daniel Schmachtenberger

Episode Date: March 8, 2017

This week on Barbell Shrugged we are going to show you how to take your performance to the next level. It is 2017. We are using technology, more than ever, to understand the body-mind connection and make them both stronger. This is the next level for performance and creating an optimal experience for you as an athlete. Helping us dive deep down this rabbit hole, Daniel Schmachtenberger tells us how to neurohack your athletics. Daniel is the Co-Founder and Director of R&D at Neurohacker Collective. With a background in many bio science fields with a unique focus on complex systems optimization, Daniel and his team are leading the pack in designing whole systems approaches to performance and athletic enhancement without side effects.  We dive into better solutions for PRE-WORKOUT, recovery, nootropics, anti-aging practices, the cutting edge protocols for hormone optimization, and all the things you can be doing beyond the basics. We are going deeper than we ever have when it comes to performance enhancement, and make your plateau a baseline again.  Learn more about Neurohacker Collective at barbellshrugged.com/neurohacker. Use code "barbell15" to save 15% on Neurohacker products and supplements Enjoy the show, Mike  

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we interview Daniel Schmachtenberger. He's the co-founder and director of R&D at Neurohacker Collective. He developed the Qualia product that we at Barbell Shrugged all enjoy. He has a background in many bioscience fields with a unique focus on complex systems optimization through holistic approaches without side effects. On this episode, we're going to get into biochemistry, the basics of that, hormones, inflammation, tissue repair, anti-aging, cell energy, and nootropics. Enjoy. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson. And we have a special guest today. We have Daniel Schmachtenberger.

He is the co-founder of Neurohacker Collective, director of R&D there. You developed the Qualia product, which I've been taking for over a year now. And hands down down favorite supplement. You have a background in many bio science fields with a unique focus on complex systems optimization through holistic approaches without side effects. It's a mouthful. More than the usual guest mouthful. Yeah usually you don't have to write the whole thing down and then actually read it off. Usually you kind of just wing it but you're like I gotta type this one out. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot going on. And Daniel is doing a lot.

And over at Neurohacker Collective, you guys are working on a lot of really cool stuff that I'm, you know, from what I understand about what's happening, quality is just the beginning. And all the stuff that you guys are talking about doing in the future is really, really exciting. So I'm glad that we're here at the beginning and having this conversation. Today we want to talk about how to get all the anabolic effects of, you know, hormonally. I know everyone gets really excited about that. How can I improve my testosterone and things like that?

We've had Kirk Parsley on in the past who taught us how to make some lifestyle tweaks so we could have more testosterone in our lives so we get bigger and stronger faster. And we're going to get much, much deeper today with Daniel. Could you tell us what some of the basics are that people might, just a quick overview of the basics in case somebody missed something in regard to lifestyle that we may glaze over here before so we can dive deeper. Sure. Let's take testosterone and hormone optimization as a subset of kind of biohacking, neurohacking, athletic performance as a whole, which will include cell energy and tissue repair and adequate focus and pre-workout and all those things. So we'll kind of do a high level of as many of those as we can cover today.

And I'll just reference briefly what we'll call the basics. I'm going to assume that most of your listeners understand the right ratio of macros for the phase they're in and the focus, whether they're in a bulking phase or a cutting phase, etc. They understand ketosis. They understand intermittent fasting and carbohydrate cycles and protein fasting. And they understand blood sugar optimization, the need to get enough sleep and how to optimize quality of sleep, at least basics there. All of those kinds of things, right? And there's obviously also a bunch of basic supplementation, so how people use protein, how they do their pre-workout, their post-workout,

what electrolytes, branch chains, et cetera, they're using while they're working out, basic amino acid supplementation. I'm going to assume that that's all a given, and if not, that you've got that covered pretty well on a bunch of podcasts and then we'll talk about kind of more interesting things that would sit on top of those basics being well covered so we're going to dive into things that that you want to start looking at after you've got the basics down cool yep what are what are some of the deeper things we can get into when it comes to hormones that goes beyond getting sleep and eating the right foods?

Well, so you mentioned you've had people come for and talk about testosterone optimization. Testosterone is obviously the first hormone that most people, especially men, think about when it comes to athletics. And the primary lifestyle things are going to make sure that they have the right nutrients to make testosterone do they have enough zinc do they have enough magnesium do they have enough of the right fatty acids are they sleeping enough are they not in adrenal fatigue you know etc are they avoiding xenoestrogens from plastics and like that and other kind of estrogenic foods factory farmed meat or dairy that is estrogenic, all those kinds of things. The importance of getting body fat percentage down for how that influences testosterone aromatizing.

So we'll call that all the lifestyle stuff, the foundational stuff. Beyond that, let's talk about different categories of hormones. And to begin with, we're not going to talk about how to have hormones outside of their normal range, but how to make sure that they are in their normal optimum range, which is very commonly not the case. So that if people are having difficulty losing weight or gaining muscle or repairing, or they're not doing it as well as they were when they were younger, very likely they're actually in suboptimal ranges, subphysiologic optimum range. This is a place where I'm going to recommend

actually finding a really good integrative doctor who you can work with to run some labs and kind of optimize based off of labs. You can do it based off of symptomology, but it's much harder to differentially tell is this a thyroid thing or an adrenal thing or an androgen thing or an etc so let's go through some categories the first thing with regard to hormones that i would have anyone address is adrenals you know before

testosterone or anything else i actually focused on some i was taking some supplements for adrenal support um before i started taking qualia and i noticed uh there were a lot of things that were fixed i guess you could say um i was waking up with um let's just say on the show yeah with a raging boner yeah um day after day and i was like oh this is you know oh man i remember that was happening in my early twenties. And you forget because it slowly subsides over time. And I always associated that with more testosterone. And of course it's all tied together, all your hormones, you know, one drops, it's pulling some other ones down and things like that. But I remember focusing on adrenals and not really thinking much about it when I was younger. And then all of a sudden, it felt like my entire system was improving.

Yeah, so let's talk about adrenals for a minute. Adrenals do lots of things, produce give or take 300 different hormones that all have key purposes. Let's kind of primarily focus on two major hormones and the ratio of them that is the first thing that people would want to dial in, which is cortisol and DHEA. Cortisol is produced by the adrenal cortex. It's related to sympathetic nervous system functioning. And DHEA is produced by the adrenal medulla related to parasympathetic functioning. The ratio of cortisol to DHEA has a lot to do with sympathetic overtone and the overarching relationship between sympathetic and parasympathetic as it's translated into the endocrine system. So that ratio of cortisol to DHEA affects everything from

lean muscle mass and fat burning to bone density to genetic transcription, right? It affects a tremendous amount of things. And it happens to me that cortisol and DHEA are both made from the same precursor hormone, pregnenolone, which is kind of the rate limiting factor in the equation. So when there's increased stress that needs increased cortisol production, the body ends up shunting the pregnenolone to cortisol and that ends up leading to not enough pregnenolone for DHEA. So the cortisol to DHEA ratio goes up and that leads to a whole host of imbalances across everything regulated by the ratio of those two the ratio of those two is a very key thing to look at as is the circadian rhythm of cortisol which is so the basic test here is a four-point adrenal lab where you're

looking at early morning late morning afternoon night cortisol, and then an averaged DHEA, usually DHEAS, and looking at both, is your cortisol doing the right thing at the right times of day? So is your circadian rhythm well balanced? And then cortisol DHEA ratio. So if that ratio being off is a very big problem, why is that happening? Yeah. So anything that causes increased stress, and I mean stress from an adrenal glands point of view, meaning increased need to produce cortisol, which pretty much means increased ACTH levels, adrenocorticotropic hormone, which is the brain hormone that will be stimulating cortisol production, is going to cause that issue. Now, that's emotional stress. And this is anything from stressing over finances to relationship stuff to work to anything, right? Well, that's ubiquitous.

It's much more ubiquitous than it was in evolutionary environments. Then also physiologic sources of stress. So blood sugar imbalance causes cortisol spikes. Any source of ongoing pain, so physical, structural pain from injuries, from poor biomechanics, et cetera, inflammation, not enough sleep, infections, toxicity, all of these can cause those dynamics. So we're talking about physiological and psychological stress causes. And so the real key there is to actually identify and address the causes of stress and support the adrenal glands

and what they're doing. So you can support the adrenal glands a bunch of ways. You can just give DHEA, which is a generally valuable thing for lots of people to do. There are a few contraindications regarding particular kinds of endocrine cancers, which is why I say I like to have, and there's controversy around that. Some people think DHEA is fine in all cases, but DHEA is the precursor hormone to testosterone, but which also then means to estrogen. And so one does want to pay attention to that whole process, that whole chain. But when you look at standard hormone optimization programs, you look at somebody like Senagenics or any of those,

it's testosterone, HGH, DHA is always the foundation of it, and then other stuff on top of there. And DHA does have effects on testosterone to the degree that it's low. Going beyond low is not really going to have that effect, but it does have anti-aging effects because it decreases with age, largely because of accumulated stress over time. So the things that you can do for adrenals is identify the causes of physiologic and psychologic stress and work to release them have better stress support processes that means sleep more meditation

psychotherapy whatever it is it's going to help with uh not being bothered by the things that were bothersome and then physiologic support for with not being bothered by the things that were bothersome. And then physiologic support for the adrenal glands. This is the minerals that they need and the vitamins that they need. So B5 is a big deal, panthenic acid, magnesium, sulfur, both very important. The right pregnenolone is made from cholesterol, so the right healthy fats are going to be key here. I want to talk about the vitamins and minerals real quick. We were looking at some products one day, and you were talking about some ingredients. It's like, yeah, they've got this vitamin listed.

However, that vitamin in the form it is in that supplement is not really that bioavailable. Sure. So what should people be looking for in that? It's not a simple topic because it depends on the nutrient and the intent of the nutrient, right? So if we're talking about magnesium, there's a lot of different useful forms of magnesium for different purposes. Magnesium 3 and 8 is very useful for crossing the blood-brain barrier and affecting central nervous system magnesium levels.

Topical magnesium is great for not having to absorb through the GI tract and for a number of purposes that it has, especially with local application, magnesium citrate, etc. So you've got maybe 13 interesting forms of magnesium, and then you have plenty of just not that interesting forms of magnesium and then you have plenty of just not that interesting forms so the topic of right form of nutrients is beyond the scope of what we could do here because we'd have to kind of go through all of them go down a rabbit hole uh we could do that sometime but there are yeah there are good resources online where people can study this so i guess yeah one thing we should just point out is when you're taking any supplements, you can research to make sure that you're taking the right types of B vitamins or magnesium for what it is you're trying to get out of it. B's are particularly a big deal because should this B vitamin be methylated, should it be phosphorylated,

that ends up being a big deal and it ends up being not the same for everyone based on genetics. So someone can have issues with methylation and actually do better with different forms of B vitamins. Folic acid is famous for that, but also B12, also B6, also B1. Got it. What else should we be looking at? Are we still in adrenals? Yeah, we didn't talk about adaptogens yet. Okay.

So adaptogens are generally herbs. We could also think of some mushrooms as being adaptogenic that are not specifically going to raise a level or lower level of something, but have some kind of support to increase the adaptive capacity of that organ or system. Adaptogens are usually HPA focused and adrenals as the core of that, but they can be focused on a number of systems. And so... So, sorry, what does adaptive capacity of an organ really mean? So say we're talking about the adrenal glands. Do we want to lower cortisol or do we want to raise cortisol? Well, it depends, right? We can have issues of cortisol being too high,

and that's usually going to be in response to causes of stress, cause of inflammation, where we need to actually deal with the underlying cause. But we may choose to want to keep the levels lower while we're dealing with the underlying cause, so that we're just not dealing with a cortisol DHEA imbalance and all the things that come down line from there. So you can use things that will actually lower cortisol levels. And you can use anything from holy basil to phosphatidylserine to, you know, there's a number of things that can do that. But you can also have cortisol that's too low. The most common reason is it's been too high for a long enough time, you actually just fatigued the adrenal glands capacity

to produce it. And you'll know that because cortisol is low and DHA is low, but ACTH is still high, meaning there's still a impetus for cortisol to be produced, but the capacity has just worn out. And then you can do things that will extend the half-life of cortisol like licorice and more precursor like pregnenolone that will help start bringing it up. An adaptogen would be something that could help the adrenal gland just do a better job identifying what it needs to do and being able to respond to it either way. So rather than inherently lowering it or inherently raising it, it's simply adaptive. So rhodiola, cordyceps, ginseng, mosteng most sumac kudzu most of these fit into that category with

various degrees of research backing up how well they work it seems most of those things uh if you ask the average person like they wouldn't know much about them and then a lot of people may have tried those things and and it didn't work and so they think it doesn't work um how would someone know they would need you know cordyceps mushrooms or any of these other you know licorice you mentioned or like how would how would you know which one of those things were going to help you with your performance to get bigger and stronger and perform better and be a better athlete or just have more energy like how would you identify any of those things so there's let's say three different ways uh ideal as i'm suggesting here work with an integrative doctor run labs and optimize based on labs um because that's just

getting your blood work done look at your numbers yeah yeah because getting say you have a pretty big range for total test for free test for dht for the cortisol DHA ratio, really being in the optimum part of that range makes a huge difference from still being quote unquote in range, but in a suboptimal part of that range. But then you can have downsides from being, of course, outside of the range, even on what you'd consider the positive side. So there's really nothing better than lab-based optimization at this point. So if someone is interested, can afford it, I recommend that you can go find docs who specialize in that from the Institute of Functional Medicine or places like that. And particularly people who do

bioidentical hormones and other therapies like that for athletes is going to be very useful. A lot of them will also know anabolics if someone happens to be using those or is interested in, you know, SARMs or other kinds of beyond just normal bioidentical hormone support and will know how to interface with that topic. So you can do it based on labs. You can also do some labs on your own. So you can, there's a few companies that will sell lab tests uh that you can either so wellness fx is a classic example i'm sure your listeners know lab tests direct you know it's another one

where you can go to lab core get your blood ran get the results back yourself or do salivary urine stool labs that you don't even need blood draw for and you just learn a lot and a lot you know a lot of people become kind of serious biohackers and do that that's another fine way you can also just understand the symptoms of various biochemical imbalances and work on it there that's sketchier but to the degree that the intervention you're using using is generally safe then it's okay and then you can just use interventions that are generally safe enough that it's not even really symptom-based it's just i'm willing to throw some money at it and try and it seems like a safe good idea anyways and so a lot of nutrients and a lot of adaptogens would fit into that category. Some things definitely wouldn't. I'm not going to eat too many reishi mushrooms.

You'd have to eat a lot of reishi mushrooms to have a problem. Yeah. It seems like method three was more your style, like I'm just going to try this out and see what happens. Yeah. I'm really big on trying something and comparing how I felt, you know, this hour versus last hour or today versus yesterday and things like that. So we want to talk about delayed causation here.

So this hour versus last hour, if you're doing something that's going to affect a neurotransmitter or a hormone or something that you'll really subjectively notice in short term, you'll notice it. If you're doing something that's going to have an effect that's cumulative over a longer time, or it's going to prevent some aspect of aging or help some slow aspect of tissue regeneration, you don't go to the gym and get buff quickly either, right? So how do you know if it's working? Well, you've actually got to be measuring because if you didn't, if you weren't measuring that you could lift more, you wouldn't fucking know if you were increasing or not. And if you're only looking for gains, you can see in the course of an hour you're probably doing the wrong thing yeah um so you have to pay attention to delayed causation as well which is important right yeah i remember i added a lot of adaptogens to my diet uh specifically with a lot of different types of mushrooms last summer and uh i about a month later I noticed that my joints felt way better and I was just leaner.

Now, of course, another way to look at this is you can look at what lots of people have already figured out, meaning look at all of the peer-reviewed research on it and also look at the kind of field of the body of practice. So Examine is not a perfect website, but it is a pretty good website for looking at nutrients, supplements, etc., and looking at the collection of clinical data. So it's a good place to start. And then kind of Google deep dive from there. PubMed has a lot of stuff that you can at least get the abstracts on.

And then the forums are great places, right? And whether you're talking about forums like Longecity or Subreddits or Steroids.com or there's a bunch of shit in bad bro science. And then there's some gems of great stuff. And so if you have time and you're interested, you can find stuff there. Yeah, nice. Actually, I'm going to do a show with examine.com founder, right? The guy who's running it right now, yeah yeah yeah cool um so i got a quick question so a lot of people they get their

blood work done they see their testosterone is low free testosterone is low and they just go well i need testosterone i'm gonna go get my trt inject testosterone get my number back either into an optimal range or in some people's cases way beyond an optimal range you know what are the downsides of just fixing you know a single hormone when when that's the only thing that you really know know to fix okay so let's talk about so we we were talking about hormones we just did adrenal so far right so now let's talk about sex hormones uh so when we're all interested in. Yes. So if you're running a panel to look at sex hormones, and you just look at total and free testosterone, that's a close to worthless panel. Because if total is in a good range and free isn't,

you don't know why yet. Is it because too much of it is converting to DHT? Is it because too much is aromatizing into estrogen? Is it because it's bound up in sex hormone binding globulin? You don't know because you haven't run the things yet. So at minimum, you want to run total test, free test, and DHT and see the ratio of those. Now a deeper test where you look at all of the androgens is great, right? 24-hour urine collection to do a traditional kind of male endocrinology, super valuable. And you can see androstenedione, androstenedione,

look at all the ratios, super valuable, but at least those three, because the relative ratios of total test, free test, DHT, very important, right? DHT too high or too low are big problems. And so you don't just automatically want to use DHT blockers. Everybody who's used Propecia has then noticed that their sex life sucks or that some aspects of life suck. People who've used DHT boosters notice other things suck, right? Whether it's increased cancer risks or hair loss or so. Dialing those ratios in is important. Also, the ratio of testosterone to estrogen.

And so you can just do estradiol or you can do a deeper estrogen panel and look at all three primary estrogen types to see how much aromatase transition is happening and then you can use natural blockers if too much of your testosterone is aromatizing into estrogen you can use dim is the primary thing people will use and uh you know calcium glucrate there's a handful of things have some indication, or people will go up to anastrozole and use a pharmaceutical aromatase inhibitor. Sometimes a little bit of anastrozole up front to bring it back into range and then be supported ongoingly by DIM.

And typically, especially if people are going to take testosterone, or even if they're going to take DHEA, if they're going to take anything that boosts testosterone and they can see that they have a propensity to aromatase, that'll be one of the things they'll pay attention to. Getting body fat down will also be a big part of that. Paying attention to other estrogenic things will be a part of that. Progesterone as part of this panel is also quite important for the ratio of progesterone to testosterone and to estrogen and sex hormone binding globulin, SHBG, which is if your total test is pretty good, your free test is low,

your SHBG is high, a lot of it's bound up in sex hormone binding globulin, there's oftentimes underlying health issues that are causing that. Infectious, toxicology, or, and I'll just preface again, and I hope this is on the show everywhere. I'm not a doctor. This is not medical advice. I'm not treating, prescribing, diagnosing. None of us are, etc. This is just general educational info. Go talk to a doctor and find out more. But oftentimes, if you see something like sex hormone binding globulin being high, and then you explore and you find a mucosal infection or dysbiosis in the gut

or some other condition like that, and you address it, then that will autocorrect. Which means if you are going straight to test injections, one, you might not be looking at why it's low to begin with that is affecting other systems. It could actually be affecting future disease states. It could be affecting a lot of other hormones and important pathways in the body and creating external dependence and all the side effects associated that are not fun side effects. And so I'm not saying TRT is bad, especially as people are aging and you just do have natural drop-off.

It's a reasonable thing to think about. Young people should really exhaust all other options before going there yeah but once you start injecting if you ever stop injecting now you have to go through this whole other protocol to get back to normal and now you're dealing with the same problem in the beginning you probably have some people who are in bodybuilding or came from bodybuilding and they have they know a lot about cycling and so they would come off a test cycle and they would do an hcg cycle hcg and then astrozole and some other stuff and you don't if you've been on tests for a long time getting your base levels back up fully is really hard to do a lot of people can address underlying causes like we're talking

about like getting their adrenals in good shape, getting their causes of stress in good shape, getting their mineral levels up, getting their estrogenic processes down, and then doing things like, that's a good time to do an HCG round, right, to induce light Excel upregulation. There are interesting things to do there. And I would say any doctor who's worth working with would understand these topics well. So that's a little bit on test. Now, this is just what you'd call kind of natural hormone optimization. And so everyone knows that if they're healthy and they're 20, building muscle, losing fat, repairing is very different than when they're 40 or 50. And that's just because of, you know, they weren't on steroids at 20, right? They were just on endogenous steroids that were

actually well-balanced. So being well-balanced is a great thing. There are things someone can do beyond just basic endogenous optimization now that have many of, not all of, but many of the upsides that previous anabolics had with a lot less of the downsides. The science is advancing, right? And so if someone's really interested, it's definitely an area of study. And probably SARMs are the most interesting topic to start with here. There's a number of peptides that are interesting for tissue regeneration and other purposes. And we haven't got into neurohormones and HGH IGF-1 ratios, and we'll get there. But Austrain is a very interesting SARM that has... What was the SARM again? Sorry. It's a selective androgen modulator, so androgen receptor modulator.

And so it's going to increase the effectiveness of androgens for anabolic purposes with a lot less of the downsides of taking exogenous tests and the effect that's going to have on adrenals, on down-regulated endogenous tests, testicle shrinkage, et cetera, et cetera. Is it making you more sensitive? It is making the androgen receptors more sensitive. Okay. Most of them are sensitivity up regulators of androgen receptors, various androgen receptors, and they are getting to have

multiple times the positive benefit to kind of downside that original anabolics had. Some of them is significant multiple times. So you get the performance aspects, you get more muscle mass, easier to lose body fat, more energy, et cetera, kind of in the performance world. And then, but you're less likely to lose your hair and to to get man boobs and those types of things shrink and right have increased cancer risk count testicle shrinkage is the worst yeah so this is no one wants to roll nuts well if you are not needing to produce testosterone, then your lytic cells shrink, right? And which is why you hit the HCG round afterwards. But the longer you're on exogenous test, the higher amount you're on and the more cycles you do, the more that's going to be a real issue.

Gotcha. So the lytic cells are the cells in your testicles that produce testosterone. Correct. Okay. And so there's some good websites like serotropic.com is a good website. Peptides.com, right? There's a number of good ones where you can go learn about a number of interesting molecules that are research molecules that if someone wanted to engage with, they could. And we don't have any business relationship with them. We just think they, from what we've seen, share good information and or produce good chemistry. So like I said, probably the best starting one for most people

that's currently available is Austrane. SR-9009 is a very interesting one that's very hard to find right now. It has to be injected. It is touted as exercise in a bottle. That's a little bit too much to say but in terms of its uh it's uh and its anabolic capacity to very little downside looks profound from the early trials that are happening right now so we'll just say this is a very interesting area of chemistry and i would always start with the basic lifestyle optimization and making sure you're working out your workout

routine is actually good right then i would look at um all of the making sure your workout routine is actually good, right? Then I would look at all of the making sure your endogenous levels are good first. And then if you're still looking for performance on top of that, then this would be the next category to look at. Nice. Just hitting on hormones real quick, addressing the other couple things that you might want to discuss. Thyroid hormones are important. And so people can have obvious thyroid issues.

They're obvious, right? If someone's free T3 is just too low, if their TSH is too high, so all the basic thyroid things are straightforward. Then there's also subtler things. If the ratio of reverse T3 to free T3 is high, then you're possible to have symptoms like low thyroid symptoms, even though your normal T3, T4 numbers look pretty good. So I would say, again, if you're going to run a thyroid panel, run a comprehensive one. Run the thyroid antibodies, run reverse T3, see the whole thing, work with someone who knows what they're doing. It's a relatively easy thing to dial back in place.

If there aren't deep underlying causes going on, it can make a tremendous difference, especially to energy, fat loss, and fine motor coordination, all the things that thyroid is part of. Pancreas hormones. This is huge, and this is mostly going to be addressed by diet and exercise and sleep right someone can go ketogenic and make a huge difference to getting their fasting insulin levels down and their glucagon in good place but sometimes they'll do all that and still have this like syndrome x kind of thing happening and then it's like all right what's going on and sometimes it's low levels of vanadium low levels ofium, some of the minerals that are required to actually have insulin receptor sites work well. Or, you know, there are some other lying Krebs cycle intermediaries that are way too low issue

going on. And that's when you actually have to kind of dive in deeper to the integrative medicine of it. But if your fasting insulin levels are high, fix that first. Really kind of almost before anything, because that's going to affect adrenal. You won't get adrenals in good shape if your blood sugar is out of balance, and you'll have suboptimal everything else. And so you can just start with, you get a glucose test kit for $30 at any drugstore. Check your glucose levels first thing in the morning and after food. If they spike too high after food or if their fasting levels are high, then go and actually run some labs, look at your insulin, look at your glycomarker,

a whole bunch of, depending upon who you're working with, different markers and get that dialed in. And last would be neurohormones. And there's a lot of things to look at here that can make a huge difference. If you're having a hard time sleeping at night because you wake up to pee, even though you're not drinking that much before bed, check your ADH levels, your antidiuretic hormone.

If that's low, that can be enough to just fuck everything up. You have to look at why it's low, but there are things you can do if your doctor wants you to get on desmopressin that can just instantly get you sleeping right it can make a huge difference while you work on regulating it and it it's involved in so many other things it usually makes a huge difference so lots of neural hormones to address but hgh is the big one that everybody's going to want to look at. And again, as people age, exogenous HGH, not a bad idea. Again, do your own research and work with someone who really knows what they're doing there

because there are, of course, side effects that are possible if you're going too high with HGH or if it's inappropriate and there are endogenous things that you can do if you're young to upregulate HGH, the right amino acids. I mean, basically, get good sleep, deal with your adrenals, take some arginine, ornithine, basic things like that. And then if there's still an issue, worth working with. So we could go more into these, but we'll call all of this Hormones 101. Gotcha. We talked about stress early on, and when we talk about disease in the body, I hear two things brought up.

And I used to hear inflammation all the time. Everyone was saying inflammation, inflammation, inflammation. And then now I'm hearing stress. We talked about stress. What about inflammation? You should still be hearing inflammation all the time. Inflammation is never an original cause of illness because something caused inflammation, right? There's something that is irritating some tissue that inflammation is a response to. So just doing anti-inflammatories is not going to address the original cause. So you have to say, is it a structural issue, right? So you can have inflammation from a structural issue, meaning your biomechanics off, or you actually have damage in a joint, or your biomechanics when exercising are off. So you can continue to cause a tier one inflammatory process

because of structure being off. This is where the right ch chiropractic the right body work the right surgery if you have to or addressing joints through uh prp or stem cells or things like that can make a huge difference but also um people getting their biomechanics down makes a huge difference right so working with someone who is really good at biomechanics really good a huge difference right so working with someone who uh is really good at biomechanics really good with kind of the applied neurology um so if you're if you're moving poorly it's been pointed out to you that you're moving poorly you're just like ah fuck it i'm just gonna keep doing i'm gonna keep pushing my squats because i'm gonna because i want i my ego is just too inflated and i don't want to step back.

Your squats are really going to suck when you have a knee surgery. Yeah. Or life is going to suck later when you have a hip surgery or back issues. Or you just are always stressed out or can't sleep that well because of chronic inflammation. Or you increase the predisposition for diseases that have more likelihood when inflammatory molecules are high. So poor movement is leading to inflammation, which is then causing a lot of this disease. This is interesting because especially in our market,

especially CrossFit weightlifting, a lot of it is just dosed with more fish oil. Inflammation's high. Here's some fish oil. Right. And so this is probably the first time I've had this discussion where what's the origin of the inflammation? Because inflammation's not a natural state to be in. Well, I mean, it's a natural process,

but it is a sign of something that is irritated that is signaling some immune, some repair process in that tissue, which means there's some tissue damage. Now, obviously, you're going to have inflammation when you work out an intentionally damaged tissue. But if you can have excessive inflammation, because you're not just doing micro tears on muscle, you're actually damaging connective tissue, you know, etc. And then if you have chronically elevated inflammatory markers, then inflammation is less effective, and you don't heal as quickly. And if you have chronically elevated inflammatory markers then inflammation is less effective and you don't heal as quickly um and then you have the whole host of other things that

can start to be problems so um biomechanics being off is a huge one especially for people who are working out and are more interested in the short-term metrics of how fast how heavy how hard and less in the long-term metrics of am i going to be able to do cool stuff at old age like Jack LaLanne? And so that's one. You can have a similar, a biomechanics one that's just from posture. If you're sitting at your computer in a position where you're getting a sore neck or a sore back, you can just, even if you're not moving on it, just the chronic loading of weight and gravity over long periods of time can be an issue.

So ergonomics matters. So those are the kind of structural biomechanical cause of inflammation. And then let's talk about biochemical causes. So if someone's eating foods that they have some subclinical allergy to, you can get inflammation in the gut. Very common. that they have some subclinical allergy to, you can get inflammation in the gut. Very common. If someone has got subclinical infection, so they've got dysbiosis in their gut or other forms of subclinical infection,

and not just in the gut, but any of the mucosa, the sinuses, the lungs, your genital tract, eyes, right? The mucosa is where the outside world is actually interfacing with the body to selectively allow some things in and not other things. Certain things getting in that shouldn't can cause major problems, or the body having to work very hard to deal with certain things it shouldn't be exposed to can cause problems. So again, this is where you start looking into infection. And other forms of toxins. So we can talk about mycotoxins from mold, heavy metals, organophosphates. There's a lot of things that can cause inflammation. Also oxidative stress.

Oxidation is a major cause of inflammation. So the right antioxidants are major anti-inflammatories. And you can start looking at, well, what's going on? Because, you know, we want oxygen to oxidize some things, right? We want it to be able to oxidize glucose in the mitochondria appropriately to produce ATP, but not oxidize cell surfaces and other things. So how do we make sure the body has the right cell energy intermediaries, which is a topic we can get to in a minute. It's another

huge area of bio-optimization is ATP, NAD, et cetera, optimization, while simultaneously making sure that it has the right antioxidants. So there's a lot in terms of causes of inflammation that are worth addressing. And then there are just anti-inflammatory things that people can use. If someone needs for pain, I would recommend ibuprofen above acetaminophen many, many, many times in terms of side effects. And I would recommend neither of them very often. And so, like you said, fish oil,

your omega-3 in particular, your longer chain omega-3 and curcumin are obviously the two most famous and well-researched anti-inflammatories. It's a good starting place. Then you've got black cumin seed oil and actually the anti-inflammatory effects of green tea, of quercetin, of some antioxidants that are affecting that cause of mucosal support there's lots of things someone can get into that's interesting i know uh quite a few athletes that pop ibuprofen frequently and i've always kind of been like not such a good idea and i think i think people know that you know it's a you know unless you're just completely shunning off your

intuition but you know it's like oh maybe I shouldn't be taking this. But I think most people who are are focused on the short-term benefit of that. Because there's even been research to show that it can improve tissue repair, like muscle growth with the use of ibuprofen. But it's not, that's a study focused specifically on the muscle belly repairing not necessarily what's happening in the rest of the body which is what you're concerned with well as your muscles get bigger your liver and your kidney and your intestines don't get proportionally bigger they just have more to process more metabolic waste to process more and so damaging those organs that are going to be dealing with allowing the muscles to work is just not that smart. So if you think about five or 10

years ago, it's almost hard to care about what you were doing. You're like, whatever, it's about now. And yet back then, you're making choices that we're all focused on optimizing now. And that's partly why today, some stuff might suck for you, right? You're in debt, or you have bad relationships with certain people, or you have physiologic issues, where like, man, I wish I'd have paid more attention back then. But then it's so easy to just keep perpetuating that. And to think about how many decades of older age are real and unavoidable and that when you're there, what you're doing right now will be almost hard to remember as having mattered. So say, let's pay attention to what we're doing now. Let's optimize it, but let's optimize it in a way that optimizes next year and next decade and 90.

Yeah, definitely. Going into tissue repair, what are some things we can do to optimize that outside of hormones and keeping the inflammation down? Those would be two of the big ones, right? Having your anabolic hormones in place not having catabolic hormones uh too high and having inflammation in place is huge making sure you have the right amino acids you know enough protein the right amino acids and the right minerals um trace minerals especially this is another thing as an athlete you're sweating more as you're sweating more the benefit is you detox uh things that are you know know, water-soluble

chemicals that can come out through sweat, and they don't all have to come out through the kidneys, which a lot of them can be damaging to the nephron kidneys, but you're also releasing more minerals. This means electrolytes, but also means trace minerals. You probably replace your electrolytes, you might not replace your trace minerals as much, and so when you see young healthy prime athletes who have a heart attack uh or you know have other diseases come up one hypothesis is the you know selenium is a trace mineral and you look at its effect on the heart or vanadium or chromium's effect on diabetes or you know so many trace mineral effects on key enzyme or other processes so if you're eating a diet that has lots of organic vegetation in it, you should be in pretty good shape. And trace minerals are deficient in almost all topsoil.

And if you're sweating more, then supplementation is a valuable thing in that place. Pay attention to making sure you're getting trace minerals from sources that don't have heavy metals and toxic load and etc so it's worth learning a little bit i'll just kind of do a high level flag on that in the moment sleeping enough is key for tissue repair it's you it pretty much only happens when you're sleeping it pretty much only happens in delta sleep so if you're not getting enough delta sleep you are not doing tissue repair well. You're also not doing cognitive repair well. You're not going to be doing repair in general, so you can't prioritize that highly enough. Let's talk about tissue repair on joints.

If you have a ligament or a tendon that is fully separated, you need surgery. If it's not fully separated, there is good evidence of the effectiveness of both PRP and stem cell therapy in joints. Some people will say, and PRP more than prolotherapy otherwise, but limited effectiveness there. People say, hey, there's not much in the way of good double-blind placebo-controlled trials. Well, it's not really fun to do double-blind trials on putting needles right into, you know, big difficult needles into difficult areas and, you know, drawing blood with big needles for PRP. And because part of the effect is mediated through inducing very localized inflammation, even just putting a placebo thing in there has some of that effect.

So I would say, as you're doing the research on it, factor anecdotal research that doesn't make sense that it would be placebo-mediated, right? So if you see pre- and post-ultrasounds where there's a tear in a ligament and there's no tear afterwards, placebo shouldn't do that. If PRP or stem cells are making that happen,

even if it's not a large double-blind randomized crossover trial, pay attention to that. And then find doctors who are good at that. So that can make a huge difference for people. We already mentioned hormones, but again, having your test and your HGH in place is huge. There are some peptides that make a huge difference to um tissue regeneration and again i'll just reference the

the sources earlier that we mentioned for looking into research chemicals and peptides there's more but that's a good intro for tissue healing oh a couple other things. Medical laser works. So cold laser and hot laser, different frequencies. But laser does have clinical trials that are meaningful for upregulating local ATP production and helping with scar tissue, helping with repair. PEMF works. There's, again, limited trials, but there are good trials. Pulse electromagnetic field therapy, particularly very high amplitude. And so this can help increase healing time from both surgeries and injuries and just training.

The right frequencies of light work. So near-infrared therapy and the kind of LED beds, et cetera, these things do increase effectiveness. Cryotherapy helps. You can do cryotherapy in an ice bath. You can do cryotherapy in liquid nitrogen cryo, which is much, much easier. It is easier. Probably more effective.

I've done ice baths and cryo. Cryo is three minutes, three, four, five minutes. That's not so bad. Ice bath is terrible. Well, the first 30 seconds. Exactly. And then we acclimate. Can we take a break?

Let's take a break. And then we're going to talk about how we can live forever. Sounds good. Hey, guys. Mike Bledsoe here. And i want to tell you a little bit about qualia daniel schmackenberger came to me over a year ago and was telling me about uh the product that he had created i actually didn't believe that it was as good as he said it was and he handed me a month supply anyway and i started trying it and one of the things i noticed is when I looked at the bottle is that it had a ton of ingredients that I was already taking with a lot of other supplements already. So one of the initial benefits of taking Qualia was I was able to take less of other things. So some of the things I was taking was I was taking an adrenal support supplement.

I was taking a nootropic as well. And by implementing the Qualia product, I was able to ditch those other two supplements and just do the one. Additionally, after taking it for a little while, I'm not real big on the pre-workout stuff normally. And I do take it on occasion. One of the things I noticed is this performed or outperformed any pre-workouts I was taking. So if I was taking a pre-workout in addition to the

quality of product, it was just too much. So if you follow the show, if you've been following the show, you know, in the last five years, we really haven't done sponsors. We haven't really promoted a lot of products super heavy. And so this actually says something special about what's going on with this, because it is something that I really believe in. Doug really believes in. A lot of the team in Barbell Shrugged takes this supplement, and we really like it because it's not just about performing better today. It's about increasing your longevity. It's about becoming better over time. It's not a quick fix. You will notice the effects immediately.

But you are going to, it is about the long game. And as you can tell, you're listening and watching this show with Daniel Schmachtenberger now, he has really thought about the entire system on how to improve the human experience as a whole. So if you want to try this product out, go over to neurohacker.com and use the promo code BARBELL15 for 15% off. Again, neurohacker.com and use the promo code BARBELL15. If you go over there right now, there's some really cool videos and blogs. If you read a little bit, I think you're really going to fall in love

with what they have going on over there. So check it out. And we're back with Daniel. And we were talking about tissue repair. We're talking about hormones. And I think that if you're not quite 35 yet, this might not be on your radar, but I know that for me as I've gotten older, the anti-aging thing starts looking a little more attractive. Can you speak about that? Sure. First thing I would say for anti-aging is all things general health optimization because aging is really a lot of what we call aging is accumulated damage right we're looking at

senescent cells but that's micro damage from inflammation from toxins from nutrient deficiency, from pathogens, from stress, from unstable glucose levels, from etc. So simply having more stable and robust health from all the basic things is the foundations of it. Then again, you can build on top of foundations. It's an area that is being researched very actively right now. You can look at organizations like SENS and RAD and Calico and HLI that are all focused on kind of radical life extension, biologic methods of radical life extension and other kind of technological methods. This is where we upload our brains to a computer. So that's transhumanist beyond biologic life extension. Let's just talk about biology here.

And let's talk about two things with regard to life extension. First is just living to your genetic maximum. And then the next thing is how to live beyond genetic maximum. So far, nobody has verified consistent good answers for number two, but we're getting close. But almost no one lives to their genetic maximum. We'll say the oldest people are always in the 100, 110, a little bit older than that range, but not much. And let's assume that most people's genetic maximum is over 100. So avoiding dying of illness is the first part of life extension,

right? So that's going to be cardiovascular disease first, then it's going to be cancer, then it's going to be diabetes, and it's going to be Alzheimer's. So you look at how you decrease the likelihood of all those things. And know and that basically means support the health of those systems we could do a whole show on that but i'll just say that and then in terms of just like short little hacks that can help so there's a few drugs pharmaceutical drugs that have some good research showing an effect in various aspects of life extension the most famous one is metformin which is a diabetes drug again this is because blood sugar and then cell energy processes make a huge difference this is this is largely going to be working through you know blood sugar stability but also through the sirtuin genes which are some of the primary genes that get activated in

caloric restriction caloric restriction is the biggest thing that we know of so far for life extension nobody wants to do it because it's miserable um well it also i mean for me i remember i remember reading researchers that was saying you know caloric restriction is a great way to to live longer and here i am trying to get as big and strong as possible right so. So we're at odds. So the way you put those two together for most people is intermittent fasting, which is you try and get as big and strong. You're taking in more calories,

but you at least drop your calories acutely for periods of time. Now and again, and in doing so, you can get elevation of AMPK levels. You can get elevation and activation of sirtuin genes, some of the key mechanisms that mediate life extension through caloric restriction without having to live on 30% reduced calorie all the time. And where does protein fasting come in with this at all, or is that a completely different topic? Different topic, but heavily related to inflammation.

Okay. So protein fasting is, Dave Asprey talks about well, the difference between and the benefit of intermittent fasting, ketosis, and protein fasting in Bulletproof diet, so I would recommend that. I think it's a good resource for people um and just fasting from all protein for a short period of time a day or two days some periodicity to kind of deplete amino acid pool and have a anti-inflammatory effect that's kind of what you're looking at there but um the intermittent fasting is total total fuel

right total calories primarily there are besides metformin there are herbs that look like they do similar things so the famous Chinese herb gynostemma up regulates AMPK levels activates sirt genes. There's some evidence that oxaloacetate also has this effect, that extract from rose hips does, that the herbal extract called berberine does. So if you want to kind of dive in, there's a whole lot of things. And the company Life Extension is a good company for taking the research that's happening at universities all around the world and kind of bringing it into the supplement market.

As far as just like general early introduction to the field goes, I think that's a good place to go. Other drugs. Deprinil. Saligiline. It's a selective MAOB inhibitor. There are herbs that will do this. Hordenine, the harmless alkaloids, barley grass extract, and then not just residuline, but seligiline, residuline. You have a handful of selective MAOV inhibitors. For the most part, monoamine enzymes go up with age.

And that ends up affecting lower neurotransmitters across the board and so being able to work with that but again this is something where i really like to work with a doctor who knows what they're doing because you can also have um your mao inhibitors be low in which case uh that taking it taking a i mean your your your monoamine enzymes being low, in which case taking inhibitor is problematic. If someone is under dopaminergic, under catecholaminergic in general, then MAOB inhibitors are usually quite helpful. Deprinil is a starting place, or other herbal processes. You need to be very careful of stacking that with monoamines.

Then there's some drugs that have been prototyped just for life extension that were not really for something else and we found off-label purposes. Epitalon is one of the most well-known, well-studied. This is injected in typically, you know, intermuscular injections on rounds every six months. There are a lot more human trials that need to go, but the trials that have been done so far, very low, what looks like very low side effect, very high incidence of upregulation of telomeres and a few different interesting mechanics. So this would be injected every six months.

At what point in somebody's life would they be interested in this? Or is it so new that it's kind of like a, eh? Not that new. Could start. Realistically, the earlier one starts focusing on life extension, the better. Because if they start once they've already had damage, reversing damage is much harder than preventing it. So if you start when you're 20 and you are just kind of preventing damage from ever happening, you're going to be much, much, much better off.

Most people won't because they don't get that it matters. They're pretty sure they're Superman and they wait until they're 30 and realize they're not. And then they start and then it's harder. That's when you usually figure out you're not Superman. Right. Around 30. You're just saying that because you're 35 now. You're going to say, oh, man, 40 was the worst.

50 was the worst. It's all downhill. But I look at a very specific moment in time where I'm like, oh, this is real. Yeah, I'd go along with that. 27 to 30 was when I was like, okay, I'm not a teenager anymore. I'm starting to sense the decline. Yeah. So I would say that exponential tech in the field of biotech is changing this.

And over the next few years, we'll change it meaningfully. This shouldn't be an excuse for people to be dumb and say, well, we'll figure out how to radically upgrade me with stem cells in the future. But there are already a lot of things that are meaningful that are hard to get funded because they are not treatments for disease and so they they kind of have to be explored right now at least partially through citizen science which is why people getting engaged doing quantified self-measurement sharing them is actually part of how the field itself is evolving because medicine the way we do medicine legally is disease model based and so when we're looking at, we just don't have the same kind of funding available for that,

which is why so much of what's been learned about steroids, about athletics, et cetera, happen not through formal clinical trial science, but through biohackers sharing information, advancing a field until it got interesting enough that then people started advancing the field with clinical research. Earlier, you mentioned PRP and prolotherapy which are relatively easy to come by but you mentioned stem cells at the same time which seems to be much I don't know if it's harder to

come by or it's just it's less it's less researched or if it's there's still legality issues there or or what have you but it seems like it's potential, but it still seems like it's not as common. Why is that the case or is that not the case? We had a very sad and silly freeze on all pleomorphic stem cell, i.e. embryonic stem cell research for quite a long time here, which means that China and Japan and India and other countries are much further ahead than we are in this topic. Many people who are getting stem cells for spinal cord injury or other things like that are flying to China or somewhere to get the work done. We are starting to do more embryonic pluripotent stem cell studies, but even your own adult stem cells from fat or from bone marrow can be used very meaningfully for tissue types that are somewhat similar.

It just means they can't change into all cell types, but only into adjacent cell types. But that ends up being enough to have really meaningful effect on things like joints and connective tissue and things that are meaningful there. You also have new drugs that are coming about and even supplements that increase endogenous stem cell production. So if you think about aging, we're mostly talking about a cellular phenomena. So cells start to get senescent, right? These kind of age cells, so their mitochondria is off, some of their organelles are off, so now they produce too much histamine,

or they produce whatever, they produce some wrong things, so you get a biochemical cascade of problems. And so what we want to do to deal with life extension is we want to prevent cells from senescing in the first place. So that means the right antioxidant protection, the right excitotoxic protection, right? Like just protecting cells from all things that would cause senescing in the first place. So that means the right antioxidant protection, the right excitotoxic protection, just protecting cells from all things that would cause senescence. That's one category.

We want to be able to purge senescent cells so they don't create a problem, right? They don't create cascade problems. Senescent mast cells, senescent all kinds of immune cells, brain cells, etc. So we want to be able to trigger autophagy, the natural process of cell death, and then not just getting rid of the cells, et cetera. So we want to be able to trigger autophagy, the natural process of cell death, and then not just getting rid of the cells, but just also cleansing out all those old structures

that otherwise cause problems. Because the shed receptor sites can themselves be inflammatory or, you know, problem causing of different kinds. And then you want to help create new cells, right? So you want to increase stem cell production and differentiation in the tissues. All of that's being explored and great work is being done. It's very interesting. You've got like the company NeuralStem is in phase two clinical trials on a product called NSI-189 right now, which they were originally doing neural stem cell research for ALS and for spinal cord injury, and they found some small molecules that could actually upregulate your own endogenous neural stem cell generation in the hippocampus. And so people started getting huge benefits in these kinds of actual neural damage dynamics from a small molecule rather than actual stem cell

injection i think their chance of getting approved as a drug they're going for major depressive disorder first is very high in which case it's cross applications to neuropathy to retinopathy to you know als parkinson's will be very high so i think they're going to start to see a lot of drugs and botanicals that are working on all of those aspects autophagy senescence protection and stem cell progeneration there's um i want to move into um maybe i don't know if stimulants is the right word but pre-workout anti-aging one more just very easy one that's more available than all the ones I mentioned. TA65, it's an astragalus extract. Has pretty decent clinical trials showing effect on telomere elongation.

There's pretty good reason to think that telomere elongation is a good thing. And a meaningful thing, and being able to do that without injection or prescription or whatever is meaningful. So that's a very basic supplement that people can start with. It has, I would say, pretty close to no side effect profile that's meaningful. So, and you can correct me on, this is how I understand telomeres right now, is as your cells replicate they're getting shorter and when they get to a certain certain length then we see cell death something like that yeah the genome has enough the genome has these things called telomeres at

the end so that as you don't get perfect replication what is being cut off what isn't replicating perfectly is not actually coding regions of the genome but when you run out of telomere then you start getting into coding regions of the genome having problems which means mutation and so having the telomeres longer means that you can have some error more times before problems occur. And you have mutations, which... No good. Cancer and all sorts of other things. Awesome.

Stimulants are big in our field. Most people would just... I think the number one one that's being used is caffeine yeah um and then was it we we used to take it at one point was it was it dimethyltryptamine no we took it every day dmt trips every day before we train oh dma that's right what now dimethylamine yeah that's right that's the one yeah it was in jack 3d and uh oxy elite pro and things like that yeah it worked it worked very well if you were wanting to lift heavy weight i've been reading that one more than i've been reading the other one yeah yeah uh you had dmt is a very interesting molecule, not particularly good for athletics,

but interesting for other purposes. So stimulants. So we can talk about, maybe we can just talk about the whole field of pre-workout supplements, of which stimulant is going to be the main category, right? I won't talk about pre-workout from the point of view of what someone's doing with carbs or protein or whatever because that's going to depend on the kind of workout they're doing and the phase they're in. The biggest thing that people do pre-workout is some kind of psychostimulant. Caffeine is by far the primary one.

Some people are just drinking coffee. Some are doing energy drinks of various kinds or pre-workout supplements that have caffeine in them. Some people are doing ECA stacks, which are very popular, you know, ephedrine, caffeine, aspirin. And then some people get into more potent things like clenbuterol, you know, DMAA, et cetera, et cetera. Plenty of good illegal ones in the the category and some illegal for dumb reasons some illegal for good reasons meaning some of them are actually really dangerous uh effortless shouldn't be illegal it should be used responsibly shouldn't be illegal that's that's a dumb regulation decision in my opinion meth is i actually don't think any drug should be illegal

i think legalization of all of them has very good evidence from Portugal and many places that their use drops and we can regulate them better. But I don't recommend meth as a pre-workout supplement, even though for very short term it works. I think during the break we were saying meth is a great way to lose weight. Well, I mean, it used to be. Calorie restriction. It used to be so commonly prescribed, right, by doctors. It was like an OTC thing for a long time for these purposes. And I will say there are OTC and prescribed things right now that are similarly dangerous that in the future we'll be like, really? We gave people benzos? Yeah.

You know, because they're're like they're bad news it is interesting how how many things are illegal that really aren't bad i guess they're not having negative impacts on the body and how many things are legal that are just being prescribed very freely or over the counter that have negative impacts i i would urge people to try to separate their mind from what they've been told is legal, illegal, or what your parents told you and kind of just see things for what they are and look at the research and try to make decisions from that perspective. All you have to do is compare pot to alcohol or pot to cigarettes to realize the regulation is stupid. The way that it's happening is stupid in terms of how many people have had auto accidents from pot versus alcohol and their general availability, right? This is, the regulation is not based on science. It's based on other stuff. So it's not hard to figure out what the other stuff is.

And so back to stimulants. Caffeine. One of the world's favorite molecules for obvious reasons. Is caffeine bad for you? It's an important question. Yes and no. If you take caffeine when you are tired, it's bad for you. If you take caffeine when you're tired, it's bad for you. If you take caffeine when you're not tired and you take it in appropriate amounts and

you cycle it, it can actually be good for you. Good for you meaning longest lived industrial nation in the world is Japan. They drink green tea all day long. It's obviously a lot of antioxidants and theophylline and other interesting things but the Hunzas drink coffee a lot of the blue zones drink some kind of good coffee so the fact that some stimulants xanthines in particular caffeine in particular can upregulate metabolic process they look pretty good the evidence seems pretty good on them the problem is if you are trying to use it as a as a replacement for sleep it doesn't work and so the time that people

are most tempted to take it is when they're tired because they haven't slept enough now you're going to cause adrenal stress um it doesn't replace sleep if someone is already in a physiologically viable place, their normal cortisol levels, their norepinephrine levels, et cetera, are in a good place, then caffeine can enhance that. If they are not, should not be used. So that's one thing. Total dose is also important. People doing several Red Bulls a day, not a good idea. People using an appropriate amount of caffeine, you know, from some form can be quite responsible. And then I recommend cycling everything. I don't think anyone should be on anything all the time, any supplement, any mineral, any anything. And caffeine is the same. How often you have to cycle it is based on how quickly you get down regulation. Caffe caffeine can have a much longer cycle than almost any psychoactive

thing so what i recommend is for people to do if they're using caffeine daily every three months every quarter get off for a week first two days if you get a headache use ibuprofen two days per quarter is not going to hurt you and it just makes it less miserable take this time to sleep extra and catch up on wherever you did not sleep enough come back on some things we were talking about on the break chemicals it shouldn't be used more than once a month caffeine is when you can use pretty often but do pay attention to if you've got a adrenal fatigue if you're taking it when you're tired if you haven't cycled then you want to pay attention all right so that's just caffeine now beyond that there are other stimulants and there are blends of stimulants and there's even forms of caffeine different caffeine salts and

caffeine bound to different things that have different peak plasma times different pharmacodynamics that start getting much more interesting than just straight caffeine. And then there's, beyond the xanthines, there's whole interesting types of stimulant molecules. Again, if somebody wants to go research bromantane, or, you know, there's lots and lots of interesting, more potent ones people can use and stack, but at your own discernment study etc um so for pre-workouts some kind of stimulant when the body's in the right place for it can be

meaningful everybody knows that people will use uh knox enhancers i'm not going to really speak about that very much because they have benefit for some things. The ratio of arginine to lysine is actually pretty relevant for things like immune system, viral immunity, humoral immunity. If someone is doing a lot of arginine for a very long time, that can get off. And if they have any underlying subclinical infections, there can be effect on it. It's complicated, so I'll just say I i'm not going to talk about that one right now adaptogens as pre-workouts can be useful and then no tropics can be quite useful and there's different kinds of no tropics if someone takes cholinergics things that are affecting acetylcholine they can get get faster muscle firing, they can get faster response time, faster sensory acuity. You can get overcholinergic,

in which case you'll have a tight neck or a tight jaw, be sore. It's not really problematic, but if you notice those symptoms, overcholinergic. And you can do that regularly or just when you want those effects. There's a bunch of different things that one can do for the choline system we could talk about. And then there's other things one can do to really increase focus so that they can kind of go into a flow state more reliably and have all the things that come with being in a flow state, right? Better emotional resilience, better drive, better focus, better follow-through, less distraction, the ability access um the best performance

that you're capable of without having head trips get in the way and so you can create interesting kinds of nootropic stacks with racetams with ampikines with psychostimulants with cholinergics etc that can have a really meaningful effect there yeah i i think i've probably no not probably i've taken stimulants on and off since i was 15 pretty much since i was training and uh after in my 30s i dialed it back considerably and i started i'm fairly sensitive myself. I take a little bit of pre-workout. I dialed it back. I was just taking just enough to feel good in the gym.

Then I started playing around with nootropics. I was able to dial the caffeine back a little bit even. And I noticed that my training changed. And specifically with Qualia, when I started taking that last year, I noticed that I didn't even want to touch other pre-workouts when I was on that. And I didn't need to take it right before I trained. I would take that in the morning, and I was just working, and then I was on that. And I didn't need to take it right before I trained. It would be, I would take that in the morning and I was just working and then I would go train. And if I, if I added a pre-workout on top of that, it was way too much. It took me out of the place I wanted

to be. And I noticed that, um, a lot of the ways my training changed is I became, um, I didn't want the music so loud. I wanted, I preferred the peace and quiet and, or, you know, just lighter music. And then I also noticed a lot of attention going into my movement versus, and a lot less, I would say I was actually able to check my ego a lot more easily in that I stopped caring so much about how much weight was on the bar and much more focused on performing the movement as well as I possibly could, which then in turn helped me build a much healthier, stronger body. But it didn't give me where I'm at now when I take nootropics and qualia specifically before I train. Everything feels much better. I don't feel amped up. I don't feel like I'm raging and going crazy.

And my overall performance specifically with my breath as well is much more tuned in. I notice if I get overstimulated, I think anyone who's lifted knows the, rah, get crazy and lift as much as you can. And then if no one's paying attention to their breath in that moment, and I've noticed that my breath has become much more synced into what I'm doing, and overall I feel like I'm gliding through my training versus having to force everything. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun hearing your experience.

Many people have reported similar experiences. Ben Greenfield and the guys at Ares Fit and a bunch of CrossFitters and bodybuilders and sharpshooters and whatever. We didn't actually develop qualia for athletics originally. We had that in mind and we will develop more things for that application. We're developing it for cognitive enhancement and really kind of cognitive psycho-emotional enhancement. When people want to be in creative states, creative productive flow states, there's a whole set of things that they're looking for and it has to do with cognitive metrics like short-term memory and long-term memory and degree of concentration and duration of focus and task switching and all those things, right? It also has to do with

emotional metrics like drive and presence and empathy, interpersonal awareness and emotional resilience. And so we looked at how do we address the underlying physiological mechanisms of all of those processes simultaneously where we're working to upregulate the capacity of those systems rather than just exogenously override them. You exogenously override them, and you get side effects and dependence. If you upregulate the regulatory mechanisms, the side effects are positive and you can get lasting benefits, right? So that's our design criteria. And so it's a very different nootropic than most stacks because you're not just working with one part of the

acetylcholine pathway, you're working with comprehensively the whole acetylcholine pathway. And then the whole, you know, catecholamine pathways, glutamate, many neurotransmitters, from the synthesis of raw ingredients into the neurotransmitter, the transport across the synapse, the receptor site, the cell energy dynamics, you know, the metabolic waste product afterwards, as well as things like neurogenesis, synaptogenesis, phospholipid membrane integrity. So a lot of things we're working on together but like you're mentioning as far as workout goes if if you're if you're really

stimulated your proprioception might be fairly low right your body awareness might be fairly low your presence and patience are fairly low which means risk of injury goes up likelihood to perform well uh in terms of micro movements is going to be much harder and so we were actually really not surprised but happy to see the kind of response people mentioned with weight lifting and fitness but athletics particularly the benefit they were getting where they had very clear quantifiable metrics with their athletics because of, I mean, this isn't a surprise. Everybody knows how much of any athletic is a mental game.

So if you're optimizing the biochemistry of the organ systems that mediate your mind, that's a big deal. Yeah. I feel like this would be almost more effective for any athlete that has complex decision-making as a part of their sport. If you're a distance runner or a crossfitter, you kind of know exactly what you're going to do. You're going to go squat, and then you're going to do your push-ups, and then you're going to do your pull-ups, and then you're going to do as fast as you can as many times as you can,

and then you're done. And it's not really a mystery what's going to happen as opposed to someone who's like a linebacker in football where you're having to having to read and adjust and is there's more things happening where there's just more to process during your experience compared to being like a distance runner where it's just like run from here to there as fast as you can i would even say in crossfit that that may be true with individuals but anyone who's competed on a team before you watch the teams even at the games,

and you can see people arguing with each other and going, there's a hesitation, and in that hesitation they lose whatever it is they were going for. It can get fairly complicated in a team environment in that case too. It's an interesting hypothesis that the more decision-making, the more executive functions involved, the more it would help. Could very well be. We don't have data to back that up.

What I can say that's interesting is that even insofar as just things like how many push-ups can someone do before failure or how many deadlifts at a particular weight, we've had a lot of people report back to us all-time highs on very simple activities because if you are decreasing stress and decreasing distraction

and decreasing some of the mental interference that's in the way, and for many people, the actual straight benefit on sensory and motor nerves, that can be very interesting earlier you're talking about affecting the entire pathway and not just you know kind of like siloing one thing like when we mentioned testosterone doing injections and just focusing on one hormone that that can be problematic and so um you know many many other nootropics and or just supplements in general

generally you're taking kind of one maybe if it's proprietary proprietary blend there's like two or three or four different things mixed together but but quality is unique in the sense that i don't know how many you're in there but it's got to be dozens there's got to be 20 or 30 or 40 ingredients in in this one one supplement and that's because you're trying to affect the whole pathway we're trying to affect many parts of a pathway synergistically so if you look at a if you look at any pathway that is you know there's a natural regulatory process you can see what are the rate limiting factors what are the rate limiting factors on ATP production or ATP is actually one we didn't get to yet that's a really big one I imagine actually a lot of your people do things for ATP like carnitine acetyl carnitine

right Co Q 10 PQ Q basic things like that. All great. Some of them might do more advanced things like methylene blue or mildronate, which are very interesting. If not, they're worth looking into. We do have some elements of cell energy, both ATP and NAD, NAD plus NADH ratio dynamics built into qualia and we will have more in the upcoming future and so yeah but let's take something like acetylcholine right the most common nootropics are racetams which are have many effects but are primarily affecting acetylcholine uptake on receptor sites the nmda receptors in particular upregulating acetylcholine uptake in the postsynaptic neuron so you usually stack them with some choline donors and there's a lot of different source

of choline donors some of them just suck they're're not particularly good ones, or they have meaningful side effects. Some of them are pretty meaningful, but they have different peak plasma times and pharmacodynamics and kinetics, so they'll be acting for a very short period of time or over a long period of time, or they act more in the peripheral nervous system or the central nervous system. So we worked with what choline donors, choline memetics, we want for all of those reasons, for immediate effects, for longer-term effects, for peripheral and central nerves, for many different aspects of conversions. We've got uridine converting to CDP choline, converting to phosphatidylcholine,

converting to alpha-GPC, converting to acetylcholine, and there's meaningful aspects in each of those transforms. You have what other molecules are needed for the transform. You need enough acetyl group with your choline to make acetylcholine. You need enough B5 to mediate that process, etc. Then once you have the acetylcholine, the presynaptic neuron, to get across the synapse, you might need acetylcholine esterase inhibitors, right?

You need to make sure that you're not having too much enzymatic breakdown. And then the nmda modulation that occurs and then enough cell energy to process that right so and then you need to balance that whole thing with what you do to glutamate and balance that whole thing with the relationship to histamine with dopamine with etc so we factor all those things more deeply than most people have had the opportunity to factor applying system science, complexity science, bioinformatics to how we formulate. And my physiology from grad school is fading these days. But if I'm not mistaken, acetylcholine, as the central nervous system fires towards a muscle to contract, acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter that is kind of the primary

one that facilitates that process. Is that accurate? So acetylcholine is involved in most all motor nerve function, most all sensory nerve function, major part of most synaptic communication with other neurotransmitters involved. So speed of total synaptic communication, it's why it's such a key place to start neuro-optimization. I was hanging out with my friend, AJ Roberts, who's also in the fitness field. And we were talking this weekend about one of the things that he's noticed is mindfulness and meditation is, is the largest growing niche

within the fitness market that's growing right now. It's, it's really becoming popular. Uh, and for me, when I, when I think about nootropics and mindfulness and meditation, I, I, I feel like it's all tied together. It's all, it's it it's not all directly doing the same things but where i'm trying to go it all helps me get to that place where i'm going and um can i know that you studied meditation and things like that how how is how can meditation plus no tropics and all this benefit the athlete we could get quite deeply into this topic and since i know we need to wrap up i'll just say something briefly in closing so beyond the effect of decreasing just stress and distraction and being able to increase focus

and presence and flow which is huge right the psychological effects on physiology are huge we also remember that every muscle that you're firing is controlled by your nervous system and increasing your nervous system's top-down regulatory capacity for all the other systems and not just your muscles, but your immune system, all your physiology systems. They have their own bottom-up cellular control, but then they have major top-down control so to the degree that you can help the health and the integrity and the evolving connectome structures etc of the nervous system in the neuroendocrine system you positively affect every other system meditation mindfulness processes can help specifically tuning into your body and noticing body sensations you're activating your proprioceptive nervous system this will start making meaningful differences to your own subtle

sensing as you're using your body exercise we bring more mindfulness to breath and will allow you to get into parasympathetic states better which will have effects on recovery and stress and many things. There's a lot one can do here. Really interesting studies on athletics and visualization using CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, to deal with anxiety, performance anxiety stuff. I would say one thing that everyone should explore if they haven't already in this space is eeg neural feedback because this is a way that your nervous system can get feedback about itself it doesn't even have to be mediated through your conscious awareness and very quickly upregulate its regulatory capacity which can help psychological

issues can help ptsd can help nightmares can help stress can help lots of things but can also really help physiologic performance. Many groups working on this that are doing great work. Dr. Andrew Hill, the Peak Brain Institute, has done work here for athletics in particular, as well as other topics. I'm actually connecting with him soon. Great. Yeah.

So ask him about EEG neurofeedback for athletics will do yeah yeah excellent thanks for joining us daniel anything else you want to say if uh if there's anything that's particularly interesting to your listeners here regarding either understanding nootropics in more depth and and stacking them or the hormones or life extension or whatever uh If there's a lot of requests on particular topics, I'd be happy to dive into those at greater depth in the future. Excellent. And do you make any posts to social media or anything like that? Or should we just send people to neurohacker.com?

Neurohacker.com is good for if people want to research quality, research what Neurohacker is about, get a sense of our approach. We'll have many more products and different product categories coming out over the next year, all focused on mind-brain optimization. We're on social media as well. You can check us out on Facebook. Excellent. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.