Mark Bell's Power Project - The Legal Drug That Boosts Energy, Focus & Longevity – Methylene Blue - Dr. Scott Sherr || MBPP Ep. 1127

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

In episode 1127 of Mark Bell’s Power Project Podcast, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, Andrew Zaragoza, and Dr. Scott Sherr explore the benefits of methylene blue for energy, endurance, and recovery. They also discuss gut health, breathing, nutrition, and nootropics to help boost your fitness and overall health. POWER10 for 10% off Methylene Blue: https://troscriptions.com? utm_source=affiliate&ut- m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcast Follow Dr. Sherr on IG: https://www.instagram.com/drscottsherr/   Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   🥜 Protect Your Nuts With Organic Underwear 🥜 ➢https://nadsunder.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 15% off your order!   🍆  Natural Sexual Performance Booster 🍆 ➢https://usejoymode.com/discount/POWERPROJECT Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎 ➢https://emr-tek.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶 ➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Ropes and equipment : https://thestrongerhuman.store ➢ Community & Courses: https://www.skool.com/thestrongerhuman ➢ YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Podcast Courses and Free Guides: https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz/ ➢ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamandrewz   Chapters: 0:00 Health Optimization: A New Approach   5:16 Nutrition is Key to Healing   7:01 How Mitochondria Fuel Energy   10:27 Insulin Resistance and Energy Loss   12:10 Signs of Mitochondrial Dysfunction   15:45 Gamify Your Fitness Goals   17:26 Thin Doesn’t Mean Healthy   20:35 Gut Health vs. Hormone Therapy   22:01 Understanding Hormone Balance   25:24 Methylene Blue: Energy Boost   27:02 Nicotine's Surprising Benefits   30:24 Hyperbaric Therapy for Recovery   31:52 Healing Through Oxygen Therapy   35:14 Oxygen Saturation Explained   36:50 CO2 Boosts Performance   39:57 Breath Holding for Recovery   41:26 Holistic Health Hacks   44:29 Benefits of Meat Variety   46:12 Exercise Motivation Tips   49:18 Why Solitude is Uncomfortable   50:51 Understanding Your Thoughts   54:08 Struggling with Food Choices   55:37 Breathing for Better Recovery   58:49 Athletes and Gut Health   1:00:14 GABA and Your Gut-Brain   1:03:31 Psychedelics and GABA Boost   1:05:13 Alcohol and Sleep Problems   1:08:19 Relaxation Without Alcohol   1:09:50 Mental Health Practices   1:13:04 SSRIs and Their Risks   1:14:36 Personalized Health Optimization   1:17:43 Nootropics for Brain Health   1:19:16 Methylene Blue Benefits   1:22:06 Methylene Blue for Endurance   1:23:43 Adjusting Methylene Blue Dosage   1:27:00 Keto and Brain Health   1:28:41 Avoid Losing Muscle on Diets   1:31:33 Keto for Health Conditions   1:33:01 Lifestyle Changes for Metabolism   1:36:04 Methylene Blue Contamination Risks   1:37:34 Methylene Blue for Fish Health   1:40:41 Antioxidants Done Right   1:42:10 Cold Exposure and Mitochondria   1:45:20 Focus Boosters: Nicotine & Caffeine   1:46:49 Red Light and Energy Synergy   1:50:01 Healthier Home Lighting   1:51:36 Sunlight for Jaundice   1:54:45 Burnout in Medicine   1:56:13 Supplements as Temporary Tools   1:59:12 Immune-Boosting Supplements #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Higher doses of Methylene Blue will increase the hydrogen peroxide production in your cells and kill bugs and kill viruses. Do you have dosage recommendations on your website? Depending how they feel, once they feel great it could be at 4 milligrams, it could be at 8 milligrams, it could be at 16. When you see the major benefit, that's the dose you stay at. How does it affect a performance athlete? So Methylene Blue can increase endurance is the short story,

and it does that because it can act just like oxygen. We have our other one called Blue Canotine, which is a combination with the nicotine and caffeine, and that's giving you more of the anaerobic. So if you're doing more lifting heavy, the anaerobic side of things, you tend to do much better with that. For those who have mental health issues, what should they consider from some of the things

that we talked about in this conversation? Some of the first antipsychotics were derived from Methylene Blue, and it has this capacity to increase dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. So it's going to be a mood booster on its own. You wanna make sure you're working with a practitioner to slowly wean yourself off while you're taking Methylene Blue at the same time.

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is really gonna be something that helps the podcast move forward. So if you can, leave us a review there, and enjoy the rest of the show. Dr. Sher, welcome to the show. Thanks guys, I'm really good. It's really nice to be here with you. Sher, welcome to the show. Thanks guys. I'm really good. It's really nice to be here with you.

Yeah. You have some really interesting products and really interesting information. I think one of the first things to kind of maybe go over is kind of what came first here. You having interest in a lot of products like this or you having a company, which came first? Were you kind of playing around with a lot of products like this, or you have an accompany, what, which came, which came first? Were you kind of playing around with a lot

of different things years ago and then decided, Hey, maybe everybody else would really dig this too. Well, yeah, it's, it's a good question as to where everything starts, right? I mean, I grew up the, the son of a crazy motherfucking chiropractor. So he's a phenomenal guy. Hi dad.

He's, he's been a chiropractor for 45 years and he's always been on the edge, right? So I always kind of grew up like with new things in the house, new diets, new machines at the office. And so I was always interested and curious when it came to that. I went to medical school and after medical school I got involved in these hyperbaric oxygen chambers

and I got really interested in how this technology worked and trying to figure out how you can kind of integrate a whole bunch of things together. So I played around with it myself. And in 2017, I met this really interesting and brilliant dude named Dr. Ted, who's got an IQ of 180 to 215 or something like that. Evidently-

By the way, you don't take an IQ test unless you're smart. Yeah, I mean- So no one's ever got like a 50 on an IQ test. Oh, they have, believe me. Mark, you want to take an IQ test? No, thank you. You've met some of these people. You've met them, I promise.

The average IQ, just for everybody. Kind of like a 40 yard dash though. No one's ever run a 6.0 40 yard dash. Well, the average IQ is 100, right? That's the idea. And so if you think you're above average, you're probably not. That's the idea because the average is a hundred.

And no one's ever asked you, then it probably means you're not that smart. And if your parents said you didn't take an IQ test, it's probably because you didn't do well. Right. Because that's what my parents told me. They never gave me an IQ test. But anyways, if your IQ is that high,

evidently you don't get an actual number. You just get a range, which is what he gets. I feel like you messed up our scale. Yeah, exactly. Wow. So he actually started a nonprofit organization called Health Optimization Medicine in Practice, which is this framework that he developed

in clinical practice when he was starting as an anti-aging physician. And the idea was to try to optimize health rather than treat disease. It was like, you know, most things are working on either illness like conventional medicine, of course, or you're working on like root causes of illness, right? So the idea was to try to change the framework

and make it so that you could actually work on people's health, like optimizing their vitamins, minerals, nutrients, and cofactors and things like that. And then focus on creating a comprehensive health-focused care for your patients. And so we did that, we started in 2017 and we started a nonprofit. But the challenge with like optimizing somebody's health

is that people wanna feel better tomorrow, right? But they don't feel better tomorrow. It takes like six months or a year or longer. So what are you gonna do right now to help people while they're on that longer path? Yeah, food and sleep and all these things and these habits, they take a very long time to really implement.

Right, and if you're looking on somebody's cells, right? And you're trying to optimize their vitamins, minerals, their mitochondria, it's not like tomorrow you're gonna be able to do that most of the time. If you're doing it the real, the hardware, but the more sustainable way, which is the thing that you mentioned. But like, how can you help people right now

while you're on that path is like, and that's where our company kind of came around where we started experimenting with various molecules and compounds. I mean, I've always had an interest in this, like I said, but I know we've been doing these things on my own, but it really wasn't till we started the company where we were like, well, let's,

what can we help people with right now while they're on that longer path of optimizing their health? And that's when we came around things like methylene blue and you know, magic psychedelic mushrooms and everything else in between that we could use kind of as that bridge for people while they were on that longer path of helping themselves. Are there things that you think about right now

where you're kind of like, holy shit, my dad was right. Are there things that- Oh yeah, all the time. I mean, cause I'm imagining you're working on a new thing or you hear a new thing, like my dad said that a bunch of times and I thought he was crazy. I have the perfect example of this.

I must've been like 1989 or 1990. And he said to me, Scott, you know what the most powerful drug you can ever take is? Food. And I was like, well, everybody eats food all the time. And I would say that to people in the 1990s or even 2000s, they would just look at me like I was fucking crazy.

But it is the most powerful thing you can do. Absolutely, is the food that you eat is the most powerful drugs. Everything is a molecule when it comes down to it. That's the most powerful thing. That's probably the one thing that I remember the most. I think the other thing that he'd always remind me is that if you give the body what it needs,

you can heal yourself. You can really see a massive benefits if you give the body what it needs, you can heal yourself. You can really see a massive benefits if you're willing to do the work, if you're willing to just take the time, change lifestyle, change behavior, change diet. Like I saw him taking people off of dairy back in the early eighties and their allergies would go away and their asthma would go away.

Their autoimmune problems would go away. Those kinds of things just didn't exist back then. So like little things like that, but a lot of it was related to diet and food because chiropractors have a different philosophy. They understand that the body really requires foundational things. They really believe in the adjustment, right?

The subluxation of the spine and improving like sort of the energy flow as a result of that. But really what it comes down to is you still gotta do the other things too, right? You have to work on your diet, your lifestyle, et cetera. So those are some of the things that I can remember. I know we're gonna get into like way more fun stuff, but you did mention the food.

Conceptually, if you're gonna explain kind of quickly how you look at nutrition from just a big overview, how's that you look at it before we get into more fun stuff? Well, I think of it as, most of us should think about it as fuel, right? What is it, what part of our body is the food that we're going to fuel us?

And you have your macronutrients, you have your proteins, fats and carbohydrates, obviously. And so I think of food either as things that are gonna build muscle or build tissue or things that are gonna help your cells work better typically. And you obviously have your macros, you have your micros, but for me, I mean, what I think about a lot

is your mitochondria, your energy powerhouse in your cells, right? And so you have, you know, basically your fat and your carbohydrates that are basically electrons for you to make energy. So we eat those macronutrients because we need electrons. We need those to power our mitochondria. And so we have to make sure

that we're getting good sources of those. And not only that, you have to have the micronutrients, the other aspects, your vitamins, minerals, and nutrients that are a part of those macronutrients to help fuel all the machinery that's required for yourselves to work. So I think about it from like high level down, so your macronutrients, your micronutrients, and then cellular metabolism.

That's kind of how I think about it. And then I think on the other end of it is, you know, connective tissue, muscle, and that aspect, which is mostly on the protein side. Okay. What is, I guess, maybe messed up, or what is the reason why there's so much focus on mitochondria?

Well, I mean, if your mitochondria don't work, you don't work, right? Do you know where you have the most mitochondria per cell by chance? I have a- In your penis. You're so close. Yeah, you knew that was probably the answer, right? It's actually your testicles, your sperm, the close.

There we go. So you're sperm, sperm and ovals. That's what I think with all the time. 150 IQ. Let's go. Look at that. Put some points down for that. Do you know when you ejaculate

how energetically tired you feel like? So guys, after they ejaculate, they feel tired, they wanna go to bed. Blew off all your mitochondria. Exactly, all that energy. But women feel fantastic because they just took all of your mitochondria. Oh, they do take away, don't they?

But they need it, right? They need to be that vortex so that they can take all of your mitochondria. Vortex, good way of putting it. I don't mean that in a bad way. It's just that's how they're- You are a vortex. I'm gonna go home and tell my wife that today to see what happens.

But I love you. Just to make sure you finish it with that, right? But so eggs and sperm are the highest concentration of mitochondria per cell, because it's so energetically taxing to make a new human, right? So after that though, the most mitochondria per cell in your brain,

then in your heart, your liver, and then of course your musculoskeletal tissue, right? Because your musculoskeletal tissue has to have a ton of mitochondria and capacity so that when you're doing your crazy ass whatever, like you can still do it for a long period of time. And that's because you have tons of mitochondria per cell. If your mitochondria aren't working very well, you're not gonna have,

that's one of the major reasons why fertility rates are going down so much is that people's mitochondria are just fucked. And there's a lot of reasons why. Like the major reason is actually insulin resistance. So if you're insulin resistant, if you're diabetic, if you're obese, you don't do a really great job making energy, right?

The two things about making energy are really important is that you have to make it, you have to make it in that mitochondria and then you have to detox from it. Because when you make energy, not only do you make like ATP, which is your energy currency, but you also make people know like carbon dioxide and water.

I love calling carbon dioxide a waste product for our friend Brian McKenzie, because he loves when I say that, kind of just tickles him right in the wrong way. Because you know CO2 is not really a waste product. But in addition to that, you also make what are called reactive oxygen species, or oxidative stress, or inflammation. Your body has to be able to neutralize that,

so that you don't get too much inflammation in the system. But if you already depleted in antioxidants and everything, you're not going to be able to do that very well. You need some of those because they're really important for singling and things like that. But if you can't do it, you're gonna feel like shit. After you exercise, a common thing is like, I exercise and I can't move for three days.

Like you'll hear people say that, right? Because they have so much stress in the system that they can't neutralize that oxidative load you just created with making more energy. So the first reason why mitochondria don't work is insulin resistant. Second is toxins in the environment, anything from, you know, shitty water to shitty food to process things.

Infections can do it as well. Infections are very common. Medications can do it. The most common medication that's taken in like, at least in the longevity community, I don't think so much in the performance world is metformin. Metformin actually destroys complex one in the mitochondria. So as a result of that,

the idea is that you're supposed to make new mitochondria that work better, but that doesn't always happen if you already have shitty machinery that can't already do that. So the macro is the micro is the things that we were talking about. So it's like, it's kind of crazy, the statistic, it's like 94% of the US population has mitochondria

that don't work very well, 94%. So that's really, really high. And so if you don't have mitochondria working well, again, you can't get pregnant. Maybe that's a good thing, depending on what you're looking for in your life. But if you've already had four kids like me, maybe that's not so bad, but there's better ways.

Four kids, congratulations. Yeah, thanks. I mean, I used to start, at the end, it was like I would look at my wife and she'd get pregnant. So if you're health-optim know, that's how it goes. Yeah, there you go, right? So, but if your brain doesn't work, right? You have brain fog, you have concentration problems,

you have mental fatigue. We talked about if you have musculoskeletal issues, you have exercise-induced fatigue, cardiac issues, liver issues, et cetera. So your mitochondria are kind of a big deal is what it comes down to. And so when I'm thinking about helping somebody, if I'm thinking about mitochondrial stress,

I'm thinking about everything else as well, but that's kind of the lowest or the, not the lowest common denominator, that's not really the correct, but it's sort of where everything, everything kind of culminates in mitochondrial function. Just creating a lot of like gridlock, I guess, like you're consuming too much energy,

your body's not efficient at dispersing the energy properly. Right. And then we kind of wonder why we have so much angst or anxiety or don't feel good about things. It's maybe because we're not moving enough, we're not getting enough sun. And our body has a way of signaling us and telling us,

maybe what are some signs that someone's mitochondria might be inefficient? Yeah, so there's lots of different signs there. I mean, it really depends on where you're having the most issue oftentimes. So we talked about infertility, we talked about brain fog, concentration issues, fatigue, a cardiac issues, detoxification issues.

Those are really, really common overall. If you have overall just inflammation that won't go away, it's oftentimes because the mitochondria are pretty mucked up and aren't working very well. So my thought is always thinking about, as we were kind of alluding to earlier, what's the macronutrient status, what's the micronutrient status,

and then looking at behaviors and lifestyles, of course, sunlight, exercise, all these things are very, very important. We know that exercise makes new mitochondria, for example. New ones are gonna be better than old ones typically. And that's kind of the idea. So if you can regenerate, rebuild, that can also be really helpful.

I wanna echo something that you said earlier, but because I've been seeing this type of comment on health podcasts when a lot of information is being put forward. You mentioned that people kind of want to start something and they want it to make this immediate difference, but it's going to be something where there's so many different inputs and you need to give it time to work.

And we're talking about all these different things, how your nutrition, your sleep, all these different things are going to be having an effect, and you just need to kind of start getting started and give it time. Like, because a lot of people get frustrated because they're like, I'm hearing so much conflicting information, I'm hearing I got to do this here and do it time. Cause a lot of people get frustrated cause they're like, I'm hearing so much conflicting information. I'm hearing, I gotta do this here and do this here.

It's like, yeah, there's a lot of shit you gotta do if you wanna get your health in order, if it hasn't. So just kind of be prepared. That's all. And definitely don't worry about being perfect. Don't worry about it. No, definitely. Just get started, get moving and get it.

You might be consistent for two days and you might fall off for two days, but that's okay, try to just get back to it. Yeah. Yeah, I always tell my patients to celebrate their wins, you know, celebrate the days that they do well and just get back right on the horse if they fall off, right? But there are a couple of things that I use

and Methylene Blue being one of them, like your tongue over there, right? Yeah. Because that there is this fantastic mitochondrial optimizer. And so I often start with people using that because it will give them a bump almost right away. And then they start getting that little bit of energy that they need to start actually doing things

that they wanna do. Because once you can start giving people a little bit more energy, then that's when things start rolling. That's when you can see that sort of waterfall of effect. I think that's a great place to start for a lot of people is how do I get you feeling at least pretty good each day so that you can follow through

with some of the things I'm mentioning. Cause otherwise you don't wanna go out for the walk in the rain and you don't wanna go and see the sunlight in the morning and do all these various things. You're just not motivated to. And you might be able to force it for a few days, but if you don't really love it or care that much about it

or see the impact or effects of it, you're probably not gonna do it. But if you just have a little extra pep in your step from some different things you're taking or from particular interventions, the problem is the natural interventions, it's not really a problem, it's actually a good thing. It takes a long time.

It takes weeks, months, years, and it takes a long time to get better at those things. And it takes a long time to start to learn what you need and to make the kind of proper tweaks for it. But what I try to share with people too is I think you can gamify some of this to a certain extent. And it gets to be fun in a way. You're like, I don't know,

you maybe don't feel like you have great energy for a walk and normally you don't have caffeine, but maybe that day you have a regular, we were talking earlier, like a lot of us cut back on caffeine, but maybe for that day you have a regular cup of coffee, just something a little different, just to kind of get you, not through the day,

but get you excited to do some of the stuff that you were trying to do in the first place. Yeah, it can be totally demoralizing. If you try to do something and you just can't, or that you try, you go for your walk, and then next day you just can't move. And then, so it can be hard. It can be really hard when you get started,

but even if it's just a little bit, I remember reading a story about a guy that was maybe 350 pounds, and most of that was being overweight. And he would try to go to the gym. And what he would do would be that he would just get his shoes on the first week. The second day, he would get his shoes on

and drive to the gym, but not actually go inside. He would just drive there and then come back. Then he just forced himself to do this slowly. And then he would go to the gym for five not actually go inside. He would just drive there and then come back. Then he just forced himself to do this slowly. And then he would go to the gym for five minutes and come home. Then he did for 10 minutes and then come home. And then 30 minutes, then an hour.

And then he was, then he lost all his weight over about two years, but he, it's a slowly just building up that habit train, right? That habit slowly over time can be really, really helpful. But again, you don't have to do this on your own. There's lots of different resources out there. There's lots of ways to sort of incrementally increase your capacity, especially if you know,

you're not gonna have a lot when you first start. I wanna also mention too, I think, while being overweight can be problematic and in many different ways, I think that people that aren't overweight think they're getting away with something. And I'm here to tell you that you're not. You're not getting away with anything

because you're still gonna probably end up sick. If you don't have good habits, they will catch up to you at some point. You've had on the inside, you've had on the outside. That's the question. There's a lot of, and we were talking about sort of this mitochondrial dysfunction. Can't just read that by seeing somebody and saying,

oh, that guy's 30 pounds overweight. Of course he's got bad mitochondria. That might not be the case at all. So people that are thinner and people that are, that maybe don't look like they have an issue with food, if you're still eating shitty food and having shitty practices, you're gonna have shitty health. It's hands down.

I mean, people just have what we call the skinny fat. They look like they're not overweight, but they're all just, they're just blubber, right? Especially visceral fat, which is the fat that's around your organs. That's actually the more dangerous type of fat, even than the external plump that you see in people. So it's a big deal.

I mean, most of us are either overweight on the outside or on the inside. So using various ways to improve our lean body mass is extremely important. And then understanding that mitochondrial function will go down as we get older no matter what. And I have a really big emphasis on what I do is actually testing what's going on.

So seeing what's going on under the hood, looking at your levels of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients, looking at your mitochondrial function, because that's really the only, I mean, if you feel good most of the days, that's usually a good sign. If you don't have a lot of energy dips, if you don't have a lot of brain fog,

if you don't have any issues with sleeping, obviously sleep is really, really important for recovery. And if that's the case, you're probably doing okay. But in general, I work with all my patients and I say, look, we wanna get you from where you think you are, which you're feeling good to feeling amazing. I was mentioning Dr. Ted earlier. He likes to say like, just because you're not sick,

doesn't mean that you're well, it just means you're not sick. So that does it just kind of bullshit that you actually, you think you're perfect. No, you just don't feel sick at the moment, right? But if something happened, how easily would you get over that threshold and start feeling terrible?

It's common, right? So we have a lot of people now with long COVID, for example. A lot of these people didn't have any symptoms at all before they had COVID, but afterwards they can't get better. And this is almost hands down because they had some issues with their mitochondrial function, with inflammation,

with gut issues before they had COVID infection. And then after that, things just went fucking haywire and they haven't been able to recover. I've seen that across the board. When it comes to, apologies to everybody for my voice. I just heard myself. With something like HRT, like hormonal interventions and stuff, it's recommended that people get a lot

of habits in line before they explore that stuff. For sure. With something like Methylene Blue, is that the same recommendation or do you use that to get those habits in line? So Methylene Blue is something you can use kind of very early when you're starting to optimize. I 100% agree with you when it comes to HRT

because oftentimes people need a lot less on the hormone replacement side. Once they optimize their gut, their sleep, their vitamins, minerals and nutrients, then the need for hormones may still be there depending on what's going on, but it's probably gonna be a lot less. But when it comes to methylene blue,

the really cool thing about it is it optimizes mitochondrial function. It helps with energy production. It helps with detoxification. So both those things are really important for your mitochondria to work, the energy production part, the detox part. There's very few compounds that do both of those things are really important for your mitochondria to work. The energy production part, the detox part. There's very few compounds that do both of those things.

We were talking about caffeine earlier. Caffeine just stimulates you to make more energy. But as you do that, it can also increase the amount of oxidative stress or inflammation in the system. So if you don't have enough antioxidants to kind of counteract that, people may not feel very good over time. Same thing goes with other stimulants

like nicotine, for example. It helps you with more energy, but it doesn't give you any of that detox as well. So, methylene blue is kind of cool because it kind of does both at the same time, especially at very low doses. So, it's one of the things that I use very commonly. So, I work with people,

I put them on hormones all the time, but I don't start with hormones almost ever, unless it's a very significant, special reason or whatever. But for the most part, I'm giving them optimized vitamins, minerals and nutrients. We're giving them some methylene blue, some other things, maybe some GABA-Urgic stuff,

which is helping with relaxation, stress reduction. And most of us can't calm the fuck down as we know. And so we need ways to be able to do that. We all like to be on all the time, but how do we turn off it? And that's the GABA system. That's a neurotransmitter that calms our brain down. So I work on that with a lot of my patients.

We have products like that too, at the company that turn the brain off as well as turning it on. So my perspective always here is try to help people right now, but not help them too much in the sense of like, if I gave somebody hormones tomorrow, they'd feel fantastic, but that's not really not gonna serve them

over the longterm. That's how I see it. And when you kind of mess with a hormone, then there's other hormones to consider. So we give you some testosterone. That could be a great thing. It could be exactly what's needed for a person, but then we know their estroidal, their estrogen,

and like a lot of other things can go up. And then we got to think about that. And if you're only like 28 years old and we may have jumped the gun on something that we didn't need in the first place. And give them tiny balls that they can never get back. So yeah, that's a problem. And I think that that's my issue with TRT in general

is that most are not thinking about hormones in a network. And if you don't do that, you're gonna get into trouble over time. So what we do at Health Optimization Medicine is we think about everything as a network. And if you don't do that, you're gonna get into trouble over time. So what we do at Health Optimization Medicine is we think about everything as a network. If you move one node in the network, everything else has to be looked at at the same time. So I'm not interested in doing TRT.

I'm interested in hormone optimization. So looking at all of your pituitary hormones, all of your adrenal hormones, all your gonadal hormones, so your testicular hormones, et cetera, and then optimizing those all together. Because if you think about testosterone, you had to think about melatonin, you have to think about your thyroid,

you have to think about growth hormone, these all kind of go together in various ways. And so it's really important, if you're thinking about going on hormones, is that you're looking at all these hormone networks together or you're gonna get into trouble over time, is what happens. What's all the hype on methylene blue?

It's been around forever, man. It's been around since 1897. It was the first drug that was registered with the FDA back then. It was actually a treatment from malaria. It got this cool magic bullet term because you could give really high doses of it and it would not have any detrimental effect on human cells,

but it would kill bugs, it would kill pathogens and kill cancer cells, interestingly enough. And so it was really well used before 1950 because that's when nothing else existed except for methylene blue from an antimicrobial perspective, used for malaria, other infections. Back during World War II,

the pilots that were in the Pacific had to take methylene blue prophylactically. And they all have these stories because one of the fancy and fun yet benign side effects of taking methylene blue prophylactically. And they all have these stories because one of the fancy and fun yet benign side effects of taking methylene blue is it concentrates in your urine. So you piss blue. So they had all these stories and songs about pissing blue.

And from there, the first antipsychotics were actually derived from methylene blue because it's got some neurotransmitter effect. It increases serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. So it actually is a mood booster on its own, it's been studied for depression, it's been studied in bipolar, and from there, it got a really new life because we found

that it concentrates in the mitochondria itself. And there's a really nice and really cool researcher down at University of Texas, Austin, his name is Francisco Gonzalez Lima, and he's done a lot of work on Alzheimer's models using methylene blue as a reversal agent, basically in animal models. And so we know that it's got this fantastic capacity

to improve mitochondrial function at low doses, no matter what's wrong with the mitochondria, which is pretty amazing. So we have these four complexes on the mitochondria, they're called proteins, there's complex one, two, which is pretty amazing. So we have these four complexes on the mitochondria. They're called proteins. There's complex one, two, three, and four. And many people have dysfunction of the first two especially. And what it can do is it can actually bypass and regenerate

parts of the electron transport complex to help make it work better so you can make more energy. And it can also, at the other end of it, it can help with the detoxification side. So as we were talking about earlier, when you make energy, you also make free radicals. And so you have to be able to neutralize those. So what Methylene Blue can do is actually can neutralize those free radicals at the same time as making energy as well. So it's kind of like this, it's called the redox cycler is the fancy term for it. And there's very

few other compounds that do that. So it's gotten a huge boost since the pandemic. And that's because it improves mitochondrial function. And at higher doses, it's also an antiviral. And it does this in a very interesting way. But it basically builds up the production of something called hydrogen peroxide. Everybody's heard of hydrogen peroxide before. But our cells actually make this.

They make it to kill organisms, viruses, bacteria, fungus, and it can do this in a very controlled way in your cells to help kill bugs. And so higher doses of methylene blue will increase the hydrogen peroxide production in your cells and kill bugs and kill viruses. So that's a pretty fancy way it can be used as well. So it's got a lot of press over the last four or five years.

We were the first company to make a commercial product actually right before the pandemic started, a combination of methylene blue with nicotine, caffeine and CBD. It was kind of more of a focus, fantastically focused product. Yeah, why'd you choose some of those things to mesh together? Do you like nicotine?

I do. Yeah. Do you get scared of nicotine? No. Yeah, I don't think you would. I used it a little bit, but then I stopped using it because I was like, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, nicotine's got a bad rap for good reasons because high doses of it are addicting

and they are in cigarettes and vaping products and all those products have lots of other carcinogens in them. Nicotine itself though, is a fantastic nootropic. It's especially at low doses. It's a cognitive enhancer. It's an anti-inflammatory. I've seen fantastic things in long COVID.

Appetite, right? It also decreases appetite too, yeah. We've actually been using a lot of like alternative integrative practitioners are using nicotine and nicotine either orally or nicotine patches for long COVID symptoms and seeing fantastic benefit overall. It's interesting actually actually during the pandemic, we thought that smokers would do worse

because they have bad lung function overall compared to the average human. They actually did much better than we anticipated because there was something about the nicotine going into the lungs that was preventing the COVID itself actually from binding to receptors there. The ACE receptors interestingly enough. So I still don't think you should smoke anything actually,

but just an interesting tidbit there. So we use very- Smoke cigarettes and don't use ventilators and then you should be okay. In general, staying off of ventilators is a good idea. Yeah, it seemed like the extra oxygen, I think, harmed people worse than they suspected. Well, it wasn't actually the extra oxygen,

it was actually just being on the ventilator itself. Yeah. So just as a side note, like if you could supersaturate somebody with oxygen during the pandemic without being on a ventilator, you would be actually in a very good place. So we were using just nasal cannula. We're using these things called BiPAP machines,

which kind of force oxygen in, putting somebody into an hyperbaric chamber, which supersaturates the body with oxygen was actually preventing people from going on ventilators. The problem we had is that we thought everybody needed to go on a ventilator very quickly. And then their lungs and everything had this massive inflammatory reaction as a result of COVID, as a result of actually being on a ventilator itself. And that just killed people. And that was unfortunately what China was telling everybody to do initially when everybody

started getting COVID here. But in any respect, I think what nicotine can do is, at low doses, especially like one milligram, two milligrams, even a half a milligram, it's been studied in Alzheimer's, it's been studied in mild cognitive impairment, it decreases brain inflammation, and it makes your cognition faster, your working memory better, your recall better as well.

So you find that by doing a little bit of nicotine, it's not addicting either. If you use less than about four milligrams a day, there's really no addictive potential. And what makes it more addicting nicotine is when you use all the vaping products, the cigarettes that have all the other ingredients that are in the cigarettes and vaping products as well.

But nicotine's fantastic. To rewind real quick, you mentioned the hyperbaric oxygen chaver multiple times now. And that's something that you see a lot of professional athletes using. I personally haven't used one just yet. I'm curious as to why that could be something you think people should maybe give a shot to, try to find one in their area. Yeah, I mean, it's a fantastic technology. I've used it for the last decade.

I've worked with anybody from fighters to NFL players, lots of professional sports, lots of elite athletes. There's kind of two ways to think about it. One is that it can give you a performance boost. That's not usually how I use it, except in like elite athletes and performance specific related events. Usually I use it more for recovery

because it can decrease inflammation, it can improve detoxification overall. But in general, when you get more oxygen circulation, you're causing more energy to be produced and you're causing all these, what's called these epigenetic changes, these changes on your DNA, how things are expressed, like some of the genes and things like that.

So you make new blood vessels, you decrease inflammation, you increase stem cell release, you can fight infection, you improve lymphatic flow. So, and a lot of the athletes that I work with are using that as a kind of a recovery tool. I work with a ultra marathoner and he would have to sleep like 10 hours a day to try to recover, but using hyperbaric therapy

before he went to bed, he needed eight hours because his recovery stories were so good, for example. And are there certain good ones for at home or, cause I know usually people go to facilities for this, but are there decent at home products for that yet or no? Yeah, there are. Yeah, they're called soft chambers. You actually get a hard chamber for the house now too,

that can go to deeper pressures. Like there's different pressures depending on what you need. Are these similar to H-Bot or different? Yeah, I'll type barricade. It's the same thing. Okay. I'll type barricade chambers, H-BBOT, HBOT, yeah, same thing.

There's milder pressures and then there is deeper pressures. Milder pressure is like, they're usually around 10 to 15 feet of sea water equivalent. So you can imagine you're simulating the pressure you would feel under a certain amount of sea water. So you look up your 15 feet below like a pool or for example, something like that, all that water is exerting a pressure on you.

And that pressure we simulate in the chamber and that pressure drives more oxygen in circulation. So typically you have 21% oxygen in the air you breathe. You can increase that to a hundred percent with a mask or anything. But if you drive it down with oxygen and pressure, the pressure can drive in up to about 1200% more oxygen depending on the situation.

And so that can reverse low oxygen states, number one. So if you have like an acute stress, acute trauma, heart attack, stroke, traumatic brain injury, you can really see some fantastic benefit very quickly using that extra oxygen circulation. Is it mimicking altitude? It's actually the opposite, right? So when you're at altitude,

you're at less oxygen and less pressure. So less oxygen, less pressure is gonna give you less oxygen into the system overall. But that also can be a hormetic stress as well, as you know, going to altitude can stimulate something called hypoxic inducible factor or HIF. And HIF, what that does is increases your body's stimulus to make more mitochondria

because it's not as much oxygen around. So that's one of the reasons why people like to train at altitude. Also- And there's altitude masks and stuff too, right? Yeah, yeah. And that's one of the reasons it increases stem cell release. It increases mitochondrial density.

You actually can do something similar in a hyperbaric chamber by giving somebody something called an air break. So if you're at a hyperbaric pressure, you're in a hyperbaric chamber and you're at, let's say 15 feet of sea water, you're breathing 100% oxygen. What you can do is you can take away the 100% oxygen

and give them 21%, which is usually at sea level. That change from 100% to 21% actually acts, simulates altitude. So your body thinks of that as a delta shift or a change to a low altitude state. And then you get that same release of that same hormone. So we do that in the hyperbaric chambers as well. But I live in Colorado, so a lot of people come train,

as you know, where I am, because you can train up there, you increase your hormone called epigen, which increases your red blood cell number and that your oxygen carrying capacity is dependent, typically, on how many red blood cells you have in circulation. The only difference or the only acceptance of that rule is if you go into a hyperbaric chamber,

you can automatically super saturate your bloodstream with 1200% oxygen, because you're actually saturating into the liquid of the bloodstream instead of just on the red blood cells. I found it fascinating watching, it was called the Armstrong lie. It was on Lance Armstrong and they showed him,

it was actually really cool. The reporter was outside of their vehicle. They're in like a van type thing and they're talking about doping and they're talking about the other countries doping. But meanwhile, the United States athletes literally right behind them at that moment were doping. And what they were doing with Lance Armstrong is they took, so it's really interesting because he went to these crazy altitudes and he trained like a maniac and his training

performance was on a completely different level than anybody's ever seen or heard of before. They took that blood from that day and then put that back into his body. It's like, that is super fascinating. It's almost like, I understand why there's like rules and stuff, but it almost like, why is that even illegal? Like he still did the training.

I'm sure he took other performance enhancers as well. But that's just super fascinating. Yeah. So what you can do is you can auto-transfuse yourself is what you're talking about. You can take your own blood to give yourself, phlebotomize yourself, take your blood out, and then re-give your blood back to you right before a race.

I thought a couple of my guys do hyperbaric therapy right before their races. They can bring a portable chamber to the race, and then they can train right afterwards. And because they're gonna, that's one thing you can do from a boosting, like if you have one at your house, you can, or like a local facility,

you can actually go into the chamber, super saturate yourself, you're gonna increase your oxygen carrying capacity for about 30 minutes to an hour after you get out. So you're gonna be able to- If they'll make that illegal. It can't be, you can't ever test that. Okay. Yeah. I guess you could only test it

if you did somebody's like arterial blood gas. If you did an ABG, which is sticking an artery in your wrist, you could get a sense of their O2 concentration that way, which would be unusual if you hadn't just gotten super saturated. But I also use a lot of Methylene Blue as well, pre workout because it increases your aerobic capacity as well,

because it can act just like oxygen. What have you guys seen with Methylene Blue? Like obviously you get your clients and they say, I feel good or I feel better. Those are all things, but what else, is there any blood work or lab testing or is there anything that's like really clear? It sounds like it's working great. It sounds like it's making a huge impact on a lot of folks,

but is there any tangible thing that we can link it back to? So from a technology perspective, we've been looking at hypoxic training with Methylene Blue and using various things like VO2 max testing. And that's something that we have seen a significant benefit. So if you do hypoxic training and then you do aerobic training after that,

your VO2 max will go up by a significant percentage. So that's one thing, the least objective. Just a couple of weeks of usage or a couple of days of even just like one. Even just a couple of sessions. Yeah, you'll see it immediately. Most of the time, when you get the right dose, usually that dose is gonna be at least 16 milligrams

of methylene blue. So I keep it in the cheek by the way or? Upper cheek and gum. Okay. Upper cheek and gum. It's just popping more of it. Keep it going, keep it going. Oh yeah, we have this guy.

Let's talk about this guy for a second. What's this guy? I'm not allowed to talk about that one. Oh, all right, we're gonna do it anyway and then we'll see. We didn't get it from you. I don't know where that came from. I don't even know what it is.

Yeah. It will be something that you'll enjoy in a dissociative type of enlightenment way. Let's say. Yeah. If my mom sees this episode, she's like, she's always told me from a young kid, don't eat other people's food, don't drink the drinks that people give you. And I just did something. Let's talk a little bit about, let't drink the drinks that people give you. And I just did both. Double down.

Let's talk a little bit about- Don't worry, I'm a doctor. Let's talk a little bit about CO2. I think that we're gonna see, there's some people building like these CO2 masks. And I think that if it works well, I think that you'll see more of it in 2025. So what are some of your thoughts on that

and how could it be utilized? So CO2 is carbon dioxide. And so carbon dioxide is our, what we breathe out when we take a breath out. It is the quote unquote waste product of energy metabolism. Sorry, Brian, I said it again. But so what CO2 does,

when you have increased CO2 in the body, what that does is dilate blood vessels in general. So if you can dilate blood vessels, you phase out dilate, you're gonna get more oxygen to that tissue as well. So what people are trying to do is see if they can combine CO2 training with performance training because you're hypothetically

going to be able to get more oxygen to the area as a result of that. It's a little bit dicey. You have to be a little bit careful. You don't want to do too much CO2 because it can also cause massive vasodilation, cause really bad headaches. It can also cause you to do too much CO2 because it also cause like massive vasodilation, cause really bad headaches. It can also cause you'd have too much CO2 in the system. You can get more acidotic in the blood

and that can be very dangerous. So you have to be very careful on how you do this. I go very slowly with using any CO2. I mean, for example, you have people that cannot balance their O2 and CO2 in their body. This is people with really bad, for example, sleep apnea. They can't balance it in general. Yeah. They can't balance it in general.

Yeah, they can't balance it in general. This is usually morbidly obese patients or people that have lung disease like really bad asthma, really bad pulmonary fibrosis, COPD for example, they have a hard time balancing because if you give them too much CO2, they stop breathing. Not cool, right?

So you have to be really careful. People think that it's actually oxygen that stimulates us to breathe, but it's actually our CO2 levels that do that. So if you start making it so that you become CO2 tolerant, you may change that balance and it could be dangerous for you over time. So you have to be really careful.

So I'm a little bit hesitant with CO2 training. There are some guys in the hyperbaric field that are using CO2 with hyperbaric therapy, but I get a little scared about that just because of that CO2 O2 balance and our CO2 stimulus to help us make us breathe. Something interesting I've heard about CO2 is that you can do it without doing anything.

You could do it just sitting there and you can get like a little bit of a response. So that'll be interesting to kind of see if people can just basically sit there, put a mask on, breathe for X amount of minutes, get a little response from it, maybe do it a couple of times a day or something for whatever weird outcome they're looking for

in performance enhancement. I think the first step with that is probably breath holds. I mean, that's kind of what Brian's all about. As you know, it's more about CO2 tolerance. And then from there, maybe doing it. But I don't think that if I was gonna do it, I haven't really tried it very much with any CO2 exogenously.

I think breath holding would be the first thing because when you're doing breath holding, that's gonna increase your CO2 tolerance. And that's a more natural way to do it as opposed to doing the mass to start off. It feels horrible. Like the CO2 tolerance stuff at first is very difficult. I know that Seema does a lot of roles and stuff

where he's predominantly breathing through the nose. I do a lot of running that way. And at first you're just like, this isn't even possible. I don't even think, you know, and you can definitely feel times where it doesn't feel safe but usually I just tell people just, you know, breathe the way that you need to breathe when you kind of get to that point.

And then as you get used to it, you're like, oh, you start to learn where you can push on it. Yeah, I'm physician. I try to take things methodically with my patients and myself. And I got involved in the biohacking world many years ago and I was just like, you guys are doing 30 things at the same time.

How is that even, that's just not even possible. You don't even know what's helping you. So try to be methodical about it. Try one thing at a time and go slowly with things. That's what I try to do with most people and myself. It's hard to get too excited. Yeah. And you get too fired up. Yeah, everybody's like, oh, look at the squirrel and go slowly with things. That's what I try to do with most people and myself. It's hard to get too excited. Yeah. And you get too fired up.

Yeah, everybody's like, oh, look at the squirrel. Look at the squirrel. I really, there's only things I can try. Yeah, you can, but what's your foundation here? That's really what I always come down to with people is that you can always chase the new shiny object or the new little trochee that you just, you know, that you're just trying.

And that's great. But if you don't have a good foundation, they're all just gonna be little shiny objects over time. So that's what we call, what we do. Have you heard of a concept called the holobiont before? I've not. So holobiont. Holobiont, H-O-L-O-B-I-O-N-T.

So the holobiont is that we are this holoorganism. We're not just made up of human cells. We're made up of bacteria, fungus, virus. We're subject to all the things that are going on, our lights, our water. This is the holo-organism that is us. This is what we're trying to optimize. And so what we like to do at,

what we call it as holo-biote hacking, instead of biohacking, which is just chasing every little object, you wanna try to optimize your biology, but if you don't have a foundation to that. So what is that foundation? It's looking at obviously your diet, your lifestyle, but it's also your vitamins, your minerals,

your nutrients, your co-factors, all of your relationships. Do you have shitty relationships? Do you need to get divorced? Do you need to sleep in a new bed because your wife or your husband is snoring and keeping you up all night? Like these are really important things.

So I always go back to first principles, to foundational principles first. So when people are like, I want to do CO2 training or I want to take methylene blue or I want to take that new trochee that you can't sell or whatever it is, I'm like, no, well, what are you doing? What are you doing on a daily basis first? Because that's the foundation.

Once you build on that foundation, at least start addressing that foundation. You don't have to have it perfect. Nobody has anything perfect except for maybe you, Mark. I don't know. Not yet. No, but nobody does, right? So the idea is I always go back to that foundation

and we call it holo-biot hacking for that reason. The problem with medicine in general is that they're looking at you as an individual in a population of individuals. They're not looking at you as an individual and that holo individual that you are. So if you change that perspective, then everything shifts. Everything's like, well, I'm not you, you're not me.

Whatever works for you may not work for me. So I have to understand what's happening with my biology and how I'm going to be affected by the things that I do. This is what I tell my patients all the time. Like, yes, your husband or your whatever, somebody that you know is doing great on like 20,000 grams of creatine a day. Like maybe that's not for you.

Maybe you should start off with five or whatever, right? And then let's increase it over time. It just as an example. So that's what I hate. I don't use that word lightly. Hate about social media now is that you have all these people out there that don't have any clinical experience that are telling people what to do.

And like, I see this all the time. They used to follow my protocol for this or my protocol for that. And I'm like, dude, you have no idea how this works with people. I see many, many patients. I know how different everybody is because of that whole organisms that's different.

And you're telling everybody to take these nine things for sleep every night because you do. I'm sorry, but that's not a good way to go because I have to deal with the outcomes of those people taking all those nine things and saying, why do I feel like shit? So it's a big thing I find. And I know that most of the time

the advice is coming from a good place. People are trying to help. I totally understand that. But if you don't have any clinical experience, if you're not working with people, you don't understand the variation and the heterogeneity that's out there when you work with them.

You're trying to get healthier and you're probably eating chicken for every meal or the same beef cuts for every meal. And trust me, I know how good some cuts can be. You can make anything taste good, but Good Life Protein is the place that you wanna go if you wanna start adding some different types of meats into your rotation.

They got pecania, they got chorizo sausage, which is still great on the macros because they're using Piedmontese beef. They have lobster, they have all different types of fish. They have actually a bunch of different types of chicken too. They have lamb. I'm telling you, if you give it Good Life a shot and try some of their different meats,

which are still great on the macros, you'll start to appreciate the things that you can get from different meat. Don't think too hard about that one. But check out Good Life, because we're sure that you're going to love the taste and the quality. And it's good for your health. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at GoodLifeProteins.com and at checkout enter promo code POWER to save 20% off your entire order.

Or if you want to save even more, use promo code Power Project to save an additional five percent off your build-a-box. Again, GoodLifeProteins.com. Link is in the description as well as the podcast show notes. What you're saying there is also like the most important thing is it goes back to kind of what we were talking about at the beginning. If you have a stable foundation for all these practices, then all of these other things that some people may look at as fringe may actually have a stronger effect. Like for example, red light therapy, right? That if you haven't started dealing

with your sleep and nutrition and you're like, I wanna get a red light panel. Like it's great that you wanna do that, but these things are gonna move the needle faster for you before that panel's gonna, you're gonna feel much from there, you know what I mean? Totally, yeah, I'm 100% with you. I mean, if you're sleeping three hours a night

and getting a red light panel, why, right? There's all these other examples of that. So, however, I will say there are certain benign, more benign types of things that you can start. We talked about with Methylene Blue or even just a little bit of exercise, something that's just going to give you enough motivation to start doing those other things.

You don't know what that is for most people, but you can kind of like, for example, if one of my patients is like, I really wanna get a red light panel and their sleep is really, really shitty. I'm like, okay, get the red light panel. At least it's doing something that they can do consistently on a day-to-day basis to say, okay,

now I can, I feel a little bit better. Now I can sleep. They believe in it and you're giving them a little pat on the back. That's great. You look that up, that's cool. You should go do that. Exactly. So I don't denigrate those things

as long as they're not going to be harmful. If they're like, hey, Dr. Scott, I want to do modafinil because I really heard it's awesome. It's going to make me feel great. I'm like, well, why don't you just do these other 50 things or just start with one of those 50 things. That's going to be much more transformational than taking modafinil.

However, if you're going for a trip tomorrow and you're going to Germany and you need to feel awake, then take it fine. But again, it's about that holo-biont hacking thing, right? It's that foundational first principles that I always go back to. But you have to throw people a bone. And I totally understand that.

And I use methylene blue a lot that way. I also turn people's nervous systems down significantly as well, because as we were talking about before, is the parasympathetic, excuse me, the parasympathetic nervous system gets short shrift for most of us. Most of us are on all the time, wanna hustle. I mean, I grew up in New York for God's sakes, I know it.

The hustle is real, but people don't know how to turn off their brain. So one of the things I almost work on primarily and almost everybody is working on shutting off. You know, the parasympathetic system is arrest, de-digest, digest, recover, detoxify system. So if you can get people more parasympathetic, they actually gain more muscle

when they're trying to exercise. That's usually a good thing for people that are on the exercise train. And at the same time, they're also gonna sleep better. They're gonna have better relationships. They're actually going to show up better too. I have a friend that issued a challenge to some of his clients and he said,

and one of the challenges, there's multiple challenges. And he wanted each person to do it like within the course of a month to do a couple of these challenges. And one of them was to just go on a walk without your phone. And one of them was to just go on a walk without your phone. And one of the guys came back a few weeks later and he's like, oh, he's like,

I went on a walk without my phone. He's like, now I'm doing it all the time. He's like, it's amazing. And we're just like so baffled by how impactful that one little thing can be. And so while sometimes these things might be difficult or they might be new or different, you wanna have your phone with you

because you wanna listen to a podcast, just try it. You know, just give it a shot. There was a time we didn't have phones. And maybe as humans, maybe we need a lot of time to interact and we need a lot of communication. We need friends and family and we need to gather. And there's all these things that we're well aware

that we sort of need need even around the holidays. Maybe not everybody always likes them, but you get around your family and it's just something that you do, but it's beneficial whether we like it or not, but also being alone is really important and being just being with your own thoughts for a while. Yeah, that was a great research trial that they did

where they had, people had the opportunity to, they had to stay in a room, I think for 20 or 30 minutes without any, anything else going on. There was no stimulation. So they had a choice of whether it's- So how? Yes. So this is the deal, right?

So they had the capacity, they had two choices. They could just be there. I love this study by the way. I've heard of this before. They could be there on their own and just be there for the 20 or 30 by the way. I've heard of this before. They could be there on their own and just be there for the 20, 30 minutes or they have the opportunity to electrocute themselves. Not a big electrocution, but a small one.

And most people were so uncomfortable with their own thoughts that they electrocuted themselves multiple times. Instead of just being with their thoughts. Yeah, it's crazy. Because people don't know how to deal with their mind because people are just distracting themselves all the time. And their thoughts, everybody,

do you know how many average thoughts you have per day? Oh, shit. It's probably like- I gotta have the world record for sure. It's probably like a hundred thousand or something. That's close, that's close. But there's some range of 10,000, a hundred thousand, right? It's actually around 70,000 thoughts a day.

70,000. Yeah, so don't believe everything you think, right? However, if you're anxious or you're depressed, your thoughts go up to about 120,000 thoughts per day. So it's interesting, people wouldn't think that if you're depressed, you'd have as many thoughts as being anxious, but you're just depressed and thinking

about the same thing over and over again. It's called perseverating. It's the same thing as being anxious and thinking of something over and over again. So this is why people can't sleep. They're super anxious and their brains are going a hundred miles an hour, 120,000 thoughts a day. So if you can just decrease the amount of thoughts

to about 70,000, you can typically go to bed and that's enhancing the GABA system overall. But it's interesting just to have this conversation with people and people think, oh, maybe I have a thousand thoughts a day or 2000 thoughts a day, but you already knew, you're on the right track. It's about 70,000 thoughts.

Be careful and yelling out the programmer as well. Yelling at anybody. Well, you're your own programmer. Exactly, yeah. Your subconscious is spinning out those ideas and they feel like they're random ideas, but they're probably not. Our brains. They seem weird and awkward and you're like, how did I think of that? I don't know.

Or why did I think of that? But all of our brains will think of the craziest shit. That's just what they do. I mean, most of the things that our brain is doing are doing two things, trying to protect us or trying to get us to procreate. That's it. And if you think about it, think about your thoughts, right? It's a, that's it. And if you think about it, think about your thoughts, right? That's it. I mean, testosterone, come on guys, I mean, you guys take it, right? So, I mean. Don't add me into that.

Don't add me into that. Yeah. But testosterone even naturally, I mean, this is, it's hard for women to understand how many times guys think about sex on a daily basis. A lot. It's at least double or triple what women do because I mean, there's a lot of different reasons,

but testosterone- I tried to explain this to my wife. I'm like, think of the day where you are the absolute horniest and just multiply that by like a hundred. That's what we deal with every day, every day. And women don't even realize that. It's the masculine struggle. It is, it's a struggle,

but that's what our brain is always doing. What we're on this, technically what we're on this planet to do is to survive long enough to procreate so that we pass on our genes. That is it. That's really what evolution is all about and all other species except for humans. You and I can die now.

Indeed. Pumped out some kids. After 40 years of age, our epigenetics, our epigenetics actually make actually take a massive shift. Not needed anymore. Yeah, we don't need it. We're not needed. We're only supposed to have a few people that live to 60, 80, 100.

So they can be the wise people of the village. Everybody else is supposed to die. So there's enough nutrition. There's enough resources for people to survive. This is back in tribal days. So living as long as we do now, our bodies start to significantly change after the age of about 40, there's a big shift

and after the age about 60. This is not even for women in, that go through menopause and things, that's not even, there's even another, this is not even related to that for women. There's still a 40 and a 60 for them as well. So we take a massive shift there and our brains are still paleolithic brains.

We are thinking about staying part of a social group. So we didn't get outcasted. So we wanted to be a part of, that's why we have such big whites in our eyes is so that we can see how people are looking at us so that we're not, you know, we're not gonna be ostracized from the group or something like that.

So it's really interesting evolutionarily. So we have to, now that we don't have to worry about many of the things that we had to worry about now, our brains are still thinking about all those things. So that's why observing your thoughts and understanding that you don't have to believe everything you think can be very, very powerful. It's like talking to my children, how about,

yes, I love sugar, but I don't eat it. They don't understand that. Like, well, if you like it, dad, why wouldn't you eat it? I'm like, well, because it's not good for me. And I know what it's doing to my body. They're like, well, you like it though. So you understand, because that's the relationship we have to things

when we're younger, because we don't think there's any separation with our thoughts at all. I could picture them just staring at you, chewing on a cookie and still like not registering why you're not enjoying a cookie with them. Or that I love pizza, right? I fucking love pizza, but I never eat it.

I know my time I'll eat is at two o'clock in the morning at Little Vincent's in Huntington, which is a town that I grew up in New York, which I never ever ended up doing anymore, but it's fantastic pizza. But it's the same kinds of things, right? We end up not doing things because we know that they're not good for us. It's the same thing as not believing end up not doing things because we know that they're not good for us.

It's the same thing as not believing certain things that we think because we know that they're not optimal or healthy for us too. It's just, it's a perspective shift that's hard shift for perspective shit, evidently. Perspective shift that's hard for people to kind of grab onto. I wanna quickly rewind to becoming parasympathetic

and cause I don't think we talked about specifically what you use for that. But you know, one thing that I think is extremely powerful, we've alluded to it multiple times, learning how to nasal breathe, because that helps people breathe into their diaphragm, which can help calm them down, because most people are breathing here perpetually, which makes them more stressed. But one thing I want to say first off is, you mentioned that one can gain more muscle if they're more parasympathetic during forms of exercise. And I can attest to that because now exercise, Jiu-Jitsu,

what I do in the gym, I'll have days where I do more intense things, but it doesn't stress my system out nearly as much. So I'm able to do it more frequently, which gives me more volume over time. That's how that can work. That's just through learning how to control your breath. But I wanted to ask you about more

in terms of potentially the breath and in terms of supplements for that. Yeah, so that's a perfect example of even intro workout. If you can decrease your sympathetic response between sets, you will see massive benefit there. So we have a friend, Thomas, that will actually go flat on his back between sets and do his breathing exercises between.

And so that's actually a huge shift for people. And you will see significant benefit. You'll see faster recoveries. You'll be able to actually train more if you actually drop your nervous system down faster. We've had Andy Triana on the show, his name is Super Brain. We've had him talk about people doing that

when they come home from work. Just having this practice, just, hey, take about three minutes and you're gonna digest your food completely differently. Your glucose response is gonna be way different if you just calm down, lay down, put your feet up on the couch and breathe. Yeah, so the real key with breathing for people

is just to increase your exhale time. So you can breathe in fast, but breathe out really slowly. Excuse me. And that'll help with your calming down in the nervous system. So the easiest way for people is usually three seconds in and five seconds out. That's the quickest and easiest way for most people.

Ideally through the nose, as you said, you can do it through the mouth. You can use, I have a friend that has one of these kind of cool resistant whistles. So you can breathe in through a whistle and then slowly out through the mouth. You can use, I have a friend that has one of these kind of cool resistant whistles. So you can breathe in through a whistle and then slowly out through the whistle, you don't actually make a whistle sound. It just looks like a whistle. That's another way to do it.

If you're having a hard time doing yourself, they're cheap. They're like a couple bucks. It's not a lot of money, but meditation is really helpful. Obviously yoga practices, really, really helpful. Stretching, even light stretching can do it as well. I'll often have my patients and my friends and colleagues use some stretching before bed and really nice.

But I do use a lot of supplementation for people as well. I find that working on the GABA system that I was mentioning earlier. So GABA is, it's called gamma-aminobutyric acid. It's our most prominent neurotransmitter in the brain that calms down. It's like the breaks of your brain. And most people in this world now are GABA deficient.

GABA is in balance with this other neurotransmitter called glutamate. Glutamate is our most excitatory neurotransmitter and GABA is our inhibitory neurotransmitter, relaxing. And there's always a balance between these two. But most of us are GABA deficient because we're overstressed overall, and then we're undernourished.

We don't have enough like cofactors to make that transition, things like magnesium and B6. So I give a lot of my patients magnesium and B6. The precursor amino acid to GABA is actually glutamine. So glutamine has a kind of a storied history in muscle building. We don't think it helps a whole lot there, but it's really important for the integrity of your gut.

Excuse me. Your small intestine actually, its main fuel is glutamine. So the problem with over training actually, and a lot of people I've seen this on a lot of athletes is that they give themselves leaky guts. They're using all their glutamine for their muscle and their gut doesn't get enough and their guts get really leaky

and then gets a huge amount of inflammation. I'll sneak in with a comment on that. People aren't sure what comes first sometimes with long distance runners and endurance athletes. They're not sure if they have had sort of messed up digestive system and their smaller frame than they got in endurance because of that. Or if the endurance training from the time they were young

sort of messed up their stomach because of so much over training, makes it very difficult for them to eat. My feeling it's the latter there is that over-training is messing up their gut. And I've seen this just time and time again, if I can, what I typically do is just give them masses

amounts of glutamine and they do better. I work with a guy recently. 20, 30 grams. Yeah, something like that. Especially if it's really messed up. And then you can decrease it over time. I had a guy that I just worked on with an ultra marathon a hundred miles at Leadville,

the highest ultra marathon in the world. I think the elevations are like 12 to 14,000 feet. Yeah, I hear that. It's crazy, yeah. That's wild. And he was complaining of severe diarrhea the year before and we gave him four grams of glutamine every four hours and he didn't have any diarrhea the whole time.

So it's not very well known in the endurance community actually. He's actually telling me, like nobody had told me this before. It just made so much sense to me. And I talked to a couple of my colleagues that use like a number of different products, but glutamine is a big one there. So if you're using- RIP to Charles Poliquin. He always talked about glutamine being good for the gut.

That's awesome. Yeah. And so you need more of it if you're, if you're doing a lot more training, if you have a leaky gut, what's going to happen is most of that glutamine is actually going to go to your intestines. It's not going to go to your muscle as well. So, so glutamine is your precursor to something called glutamate which then gets converted, as I mentioned, to GABA, right? So if you don't have enough precursor, you're not gonna make enough GABA either. So that's another reason why people are GABA deficient

is because they have leaky guts and they can't make enough. So big on glutamine, especially for leaky gut, especially people that have a lot of GI inflammation, et cetera. So you wanna replete GABA, which is really important. So you wanna think of precursors, you wanna think of cofactors, and then you wanna supplement itself with something that's gonna increase GABA.

And I do this interestingly because GABA supplements don't work. If you take GABA as a supplement, it doesn't get across the blood brain barrier. So the barrier of the brain is really trying to resist most things getting through because it's trying to prevent you from getting infections in your brain

and inflammation in your brain, which is not cool. So, but if you have a leaky brain, which happens if you have a leaky gut actually, you will get GABA through and it's almost diagnostic actually. So if you give somebody a GABA supplement, if you take a GABA supplement, you'll find, if you find that you feel calm and relaxed,

it's because you have a leaky brain. Excuse me. Ooh. So you gotta be careful, but that's okay. You can fix your gut by optimizing as we've been talking about. But the best thing to do to support the GABA system with supplements is actually to work on the receptor itself

in a couple of different ways. So you've heard of things like kava, for example, as you know, kava works in the GABA receptor. Also valerian root, which is something that people use for sleep that works on the receptor, something called hanokyal or hanokyal, which is from magnolia bark that also works on the GABA receptor.

But it binds to it, which is kind of interesting. It binds to another site on the GABA receptor, but it increases the affinity for GABA to bind. The problem is if you don't have a lot of GABA already, you're gonna deplete any GABA that you already have. And it may be detrimental over the long-term if you take this. So what you wanna do is take something

that's gonna bind directly where GABA would bind on the receptor. And it's a very cool compound that comes from a magic mushroom called agarin that I like to use in one of our products called Troz. And agarin is from the Amanita muscaria mushroom. We were talking about this really, this is a mushroom that is well known in Christmas.

So Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, depending on when this comes out, but it is been well known as a psychedelic mushroom for thousands of years in Siberia. If you go up to Scandinavia now, or even Germany, Northern Europe, you'll see this mushroom everywhere. And because it gives a psychedelic experience

because of the other ingredients in there called the Ibotenic acid, which is neurotoxic. So it becomes neurotoxic and gives you this experience, but don't try to eat the mushroom directly, especially if it's not dried, because you will get this nasty experience. If you're a shaman, you would have drank the reindeer of reindeer urine because reindeer would eat these,

reindeer would eat these mushrooms and trip. And people in Siberia were like, oh, why are these reindeers having such a great time? And they tried to eat the mushroom, they couldn't, they'd vomit. So they'd actually drink the urine of the reindeer itself. There you go. And as a result of that, they would have the experience

and then the people having the shamanistic experience with the shaman would drink the urine of the shaman, so double distilled urine for you. That's right up our alley. Guys, okay, no, no, Andrew, okay, sir, please. He was a little embarrassed. Remember his thought. Andrew made a preview on an episode recently.

Preview that you saw before we went live? People really thought we drank each other's pee. We do not, all right? I want to make that clear. We don't drink each other's urine. We can now continue. Ensema got a little embarrassed. Back stepping, yeah.

Stop it, guys. Do you ferment it first? Is that why? Ensema's a really good actor, guys. It's OK. Just believe what you want to believe. Yeah, so guys, whatever you end up doing behind the other door is OK.

It's OK. But if you were going to drink any kind of urine, it would probably be best to drink some reindeer urine, I would say, or maybe the shaman's urine. Because at least you get a psychedelic experience out of it, right? So the ibotenic acid is the psychedelic component. The agrin is the other component in it.

Those are some good pictures. The agrin is a long-acting GABA agonist. It works on the GABA receptor. It binds to where GABA would bind and it sticks on there for about six and a half hours. So if you're giving that, you can take it and it'll give you a long-acting response and's not going to deplete your GABA over time. There's another one that's not as fun as that one called

nicotinol GABA or vitamin B3 attached to the GABA. And that is nice because B3 has a transporter gets across the brain barrier. And once it gets into the brain, B3 kind of takes GABA with it and it hydrolyzes into B3 and to, so it breaks up into B3 and GABA. So what's nice about that is you get the GABA response but you don't get tired because B3 is mildly activating.

So it's kind of uncommon for people to feel less anxious but not tired, but this is what it can do if you take that particular compound. So what we do is we combine something that enhances the affinity for GABA to bind like CAVA, Hanukkah, Hanukkah for example, and then we combine something that enhances the affinity for GABA to bind like CAVA, Hanukkah, Hanukkah, for example, and then we combine that with agarin or with nicotinol GABA together.

And that gives you a fantastic combination to relax and enhance the GABA system without depleting GABA in the process. The major thing that people take that deplete GABA, anybody know? Anybody know it's alcohol, right? Alcohol binds to the GABA receptor and binds very, very fast and very, very strongly.

So it increases your, obviously that's why people get tolerance, withdrawal. They get dependence on it. And then you take it in two hours later, you wake up in the middle of the night with a massive headache. That's because you have all that, the GABA is unbound and deficient now

and you have all this glutamate. You guys have been to a Chinese restaurant and had MSG, right? MSG is mon have all this glutamate, you guys have been to a Chinese restaurant and had MSG, right? MSG is monosodium glutamate. And then if you have a lot of that, all of a sudden it's gonna give you all this glutamate and this imbalance with GABA being too low as a result. And you have more glutamate and you get that headache,

you get that irritability, you feel like shit. That's what the glutamate is all about. So that's why alcohol is really bad is it gives you this really tight binding, depletes GABA. And then, and this is why I stopped drinking a long time ago is I'd go to bed and I wake up two hours later with a massive headache

and I'd have a headache the whole day later. So even though it depletes GABA, but a lot of people like to take it to help put them to sleep though. Well, the problem with that is it gives you a really shitty sleep overall. If you do sleep with it, typically you're like me and you wake up a couple hours or four hours later

feeling like just terrible. If you have some Irish heritage, maybe. I had a friend in college, hopefully he's not listening. If he is, it's funny, I wouldn't say his name. Hi, Brendan. Anyway, so he was from, his family was from Scotland and we would drink in college. He could drink himself like vomiting, pissing, passing out an elevator.

And the next day he could run 15 miles. It was amazing. Those kinds of people, it's a feat of amazingness. However, they have a much higher risk of alcoholism, as you can imagine, because they don't get the same effects as I did where I would be sitting on my couch because they don't get the same effects as I did where I would be sitting on my couch and I couldn't move for the next day or so.

And once you have kids, as you know, you can't tolerate that kind of thing. So once I had little kids and I wasn't getting more sleep, then I couldn't like rest in bed the next day. That was never gonna happen. I was like, fuck this, I'm done. Could be possible, maybe drinking a little bit, maybe, could help someone relax and get to sleep maybe.

So it works on the GABA system. So I think there are better alternatives than drinking. I do think that there's been a lot of studies that have come out recently as far as how much can you drink and still not cause any health issues. There's some controversy there. In general, what I tell my patients is there's much better ways to relax than drinking alcohol.

But if you're going to drink this, try to drink at least three to four if you're going to drink this, try to drink at least three to four hours before you go to bed. So that all of that alcohol is at least out of your system before you sleep. It's not going to help you sleep. It's going to mess up your sleep architecture.

So we have all these different parts of our sleep. We have our deep sleep, we have our REM sleep, we have four stages of our deep sleep especially. So it completely screws up your deep sleep if you drink alcohol. And if you wear a ring or something like that, or some other device, then you'll see how your sleep gets all screwed up.

I'm gonna make a device that shows that alcohol helps your sleep. And we'll see how that sells. Cause I think people want, they want encouragement to drink alcohol. Of course, they want positive feedback. Everybody wants positive. The red is good.

This is great for you actually. Oh, five minutes of deep sleep. Amazing. I mean, in general, I have people, I always say, we always say at my company at Tres Sculptures is there's better drugs for that. Yeah, I remember hanging out with Kyle Kingsbury one time. I asked him if he drank alcohol.

He's like, oh, we just have a lot of other options. My wife and I look at other options. I was like, that's a cool way of looking at it. And I've never had that perspective. I didn't know there, what are these other options? What are we talking about here? And a lot of that has to do with working on the GABAergic system in other ways, the GABA system.

So enhancing GABA by using something like our Trocom, for example, or Trescriptions, which kind of helps you with relaxation. So it's common if you have kids, your day is crazy. You went to work and you saw you, you worked with your kids and you went, you took them to practices or whatever, they're young. It's more stuff around the house.

You're just tired and you want something that's gonna help you kind of calm down your nervous system. So I totally understand why people wanna have a glass of wine, but having something that relaxes otherwise, that's why other technologies and other practices like sauna is great. I have an infrared sauna at my house. When I found out that I was going to have a fourth kid and I had a house that had three bedrooms and one bathroom in California, I was like, I need my own fucking room. I need something. And I bought my infrared sauna. It was the best purchase that I've ever made. So almost every night I'm in there before I go to bed.

It's a great way to calm down the nervous system and just relax before going to bed. So as obviously you don't have to use compounds, you can use practices, you can use breath work and use yoga, you can use meditation, sauna, but sauna is my favorite. Yeah, for me, I think one of the best purchases was a hot tub years ago

when I finally made like a little bit of money. It wasn't that expensive. I bought a used hot tub. It was an outdoor piece and I just went in there and it was just amazing because yeah, being a dad and like just having other responsibilities, it was cool to have my own little spot to kind of calm down. It was nice.

It's my own room where nobody can bother me. That's what I would say. So I love it. I want to quickly ask this. For those who have mental health issues, let's say they are using medication, SSRIs, et cetera. We were talking a little bit about the gym and that. You never want somebody to just stop taking medication.

Of course. That's the worst thing to do. Don't do that. But what should they consider from some of the things that we've talked about in this conversation? Yeah, 100% don't stop when you're taking cold turkey most of the time. That's not a good idea. When it comes to methylene blue, so methylene blue is interesting.

As I was mentioning, I think that some of the first antipsychotics were derived from methylene blue and it has this capacity to increase dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. So it's going to be a mood booster on its own, which is pretty cool. It's actually been studied in depression and in bipolar. Some psychiatrists that I'm working with

are weaning their patients off of their SSRIs and SNRIs, which is kind of a newer class of SSRIs. They also have norepinephrine that they prevent from reuptake as well. Weaning them off using methylene blue. But there's a bit of a trick here because they do work on a similar pathway in the sense that SSRIs are increasing serotonin as is

methylene blue. So if you're taking an SSRI or if you're taking an SNRI, for example, you want to make sure you're working with a practitioner to slowly wean yourself off while you're taking methylene blue at the same time. The risk is low, especially if you're keeping your dose of methylene blue very, very low. But in essence, what you can do over time is wean yourself off the antidepressants and use something like Methylene Blue instead with practitioner supervision. And I've been able to do this with patients. I have a lot of my colleagues

that have been able to do this as well. And the major thing I would just wanna also emphasize here is that there was a recent study that was published that depression is not a serotonin deficiency. There's no indication that people with depression have low serotonin levels at all. Now, if you give somebody a serotonin booster, they will feel better.

That is true, but it's not gonna be immediate, right? It takes four weeks, six weeks, or eight weeks to be able to see that difference. The interesting thing about methylene blue is that it increases those neurotransmitters immediately. And also there's newer drugs that are coming out on the GABA side as well that are actually now being indicated for depression at the same time

because they work right away. They work on that GABA receptor to calm down that anxiety, that perseveration, that constant thought loop, those 120,000 thoughts. So it was just a recent drug that was approved for postpartum depression. So after a woman has a baby, it happens to many, many women, unfortunately,

they get these hormonal shifts and they get very depressed. And so this new drug has actually been approved that works on the GABA receptor and works immediately, which is fantastic. That's what we want in somebody that has postpartum depression because you don't wanna wait six weeks, you wanna help them now.

So my sense always is, I understand why we use SSRIs. In fact, unfortunately, I know the lady whose sister committed suicide back in the 1990s after starting an SSRI, before they had a black box warning on the drugs that said these may increase your risk of suicidality, especially in younger people. I think she was like 20 when she went on the drugs.

She hung herself two weeks later or something crazy like that. So these drugs are not benign. They have black box warnings for a reason. So, but I understand why we use them, but I think that there's lots of great alternatives now. We know, I'm sure you both know, that exercise has been shown to be just as powerful as taking antidepressants if we can get people to do it.

So for me, with our products, I think Methylene Blue is fantastic because it increases your energy, increases your detox capacity, increases neurotransmitters that are gonna help with your mood. So I think all those things are great, but you have to also just be mindful

if you're taking medications that are also working on those same receptors because there could be an interaction, it could be a mild one, but it should be done with a practitioner just to be able to slowly make sure you're okay with those. If you're someone that's taking supplements or vitamins

or anything to help move the needle in terms of your health, how do you know you really need them? And the reason why I'm asking you how do you know is because many people don't know their levels of their testosterone, their vitamin D, all these other labs like their thyroid, and they're taking these supplements to help them function at peak performance.

But that's why we've partnered with Merrick Health for such a long time now, because you can get yourself different lab panels like the Power Project Panel, which is a comprehensive set of labs to help you figure out what your different levels are. And when you do figure out what your levels are, you'll be able to work with a patient care coordinator

that will give you suggestions as far as nutrition optimization, supplementation, or if you're someone who's a candidate and it's necessary, hormonal optimization to help move you in the right direction so you're not playing guesswork with your body. Also, if you've already gotten your lab work done but you just want to get a checkup, we also have a checkup panel that's made so that you can check up and make sure that everything is moving in the right direction. If you've already gotten comprehensive lab work done. This is something super important that I've done for myself. I've had my mom work with Merrick. We've all worked with Merrick just to make sure that we're all moving in the right direction and we're not playing guesswork with our body.

Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at MerrickHealth.com slash Power Project. And at checkout enter promo code Power Project to save 10% off any one of these panels or any lab on the entire website. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. So would it work for like the loss of a family member as well? Kind of like thinking about like postpartum,

about post death of a family member, helping with that. So it can, yeah. I mean, adjusting, it's called an adjustment disorder typically where you have this massive shift in your life with the death of a family member. Like anything like exercise could be helpful there too. Anything that's going to improve some of that neurotransmitter ecosystem in your brain is going to be helpful. But I always like to say that it's always good to talk to somebody.

It's always, it's always, it's important. I think when you have something severe happen to you to say that it's always good to talk to somebody. It's always important, I think, when you have something severe happen to you, that you have somebody that you can talk to. Psychiatrists, psychotherapists, social worker, a health coach, somebody can be really helpful in that capacity, but it can be very difficult for us to get out of those thought loops if they're really, really severe.

And that's why I think even SSRIs can be helpful for some people. So I don't like to say that anything's not going to be helpful. I mean, even cocaine can be helpful sometimes for your eyes. You use cocaine in eyes. That's actually a drug for your eyes, didn't it? Anyway, so. I didn't know that.

Yeah, not heroin, but cocaine. But anyways, almost everything has its place, just depending on the situation. But if you're going through a really hard time, I almost always recommend you have somebody there to help you talk to you and be with you in that capacity because that's gonna be much more helpful than any drug or any compound on its own.

Cocaine I'm imagining does something to dilate your pupils quite a bit, right? It does, yeah, that's why it's used for glaucoma. For it's called narrow angle glaucoma, yeah. What about like just kind of some old school nootropics, like alpha GPC and things of that nature? So I use them all the time. I think what it comes down to for me

is I think of Neutropics in a couple of different categories. When we were first creating the company transcriptions back in 2020, we were looking at Neutropics as a entire category. And it's really difficult because there's so many different types of Neutropics. And they run huge amounts of range. There's a shitload of them now.

Yeah. And what I think the first way to think about them from like a first principle perspective, is it in tropic that's health optimizing you, that's sort of supportive for your system, that it can help you overall in your health, or is it something that's going to kind of clock your system in a way just to overdrive it and it not necessarily very healthy for you. We know a lot of the ones in the latter category. Adderall, the racetams for example, nicotine, caffeine, these are all performance enhancing nootropics.

We call them ponds, P-O-N-S in our language. We created a paper on this really early in our company. So performance optimization nootropics are the ones we typically think of. These ones are going to clock the system, but then are not necessarily healthy for the brain. And you have the other ones on the other side, which are performance enhancing that, excuse me, that are health optimizing. We call them HANs or health optimization nootropics. These are the ones that are healthy for the brain and that can support the brain as well as make it work better. So a good example,

like you just mentioned, alpha GPC is one like there. Another one that's really good is L-tyrosine. L-tyrosine is an amino acid that increases your dopamine and norepinephrine levels. So it's doing that in a natural way because it's enhancing your whole system's capacity. Even things like CBD are actually pretty good because they can naturally enhance your mood

and support by decreasing inflammation, improving neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. So what I typically like for people to do is focus on the health optimization, nootropic side of things, because that's where they're gonna be most support their brain. So if you're taking it on a regular basis, right?

So you're taking your health optimization nootropic, your L-tyrosine, your CBD, your alpha GPC, that's where I like to keep people for the most part. Now on the other side, which is your Adderalls, your racetams, your nicotine, your CBD, your alpha GPC. That's where I like to keep people for the most part. Now on the other side, which is your Adderalls, your Rassetams, your nicotine, your caffeine, these are more, you take them for a particular reason and you take them for a targeted timeframe, but you shouldn't be taking them all the time.

This is even with caffeine too. I think people should cycle on and off caffeine for the same reason, because it is going to rev up the system over a long period of time. And that's not usually very good for people. Now, there are ways to mitigate these. The nice thing about coffee, for example,

is not only does it have caffeine, it also has polyphenols, which are also helping on the antioxidant side. So coffee is more of kind of a balance between the two. The cool thing about methylene blue, it actually falls into a separate category, because not only is it a health optimization nootropic, it's also a performance optimization nootropic

at the same time because it can support the system, it can enhance energy production, which is more on the performance side, but it also helps the detoxification as well. So as a result of that, we call it a blue tropic. It's blue, obviously. And so as a result of being a blue tropic, you can take it on both sides.

And that's why I can give the people that are really fucking sick and they can do really well with it at very low doses and titrating their dose over a very, you know, about over a period of time, every three to five days, I'll increase their dose and they do really well with that. If I give them a huge dose right away,

they may not do very well because it might be too stressful for the system, but low doses over a long period of time. So my chronic fatigue patients, long COVID patients, people with chronic infections, mitochondrial stress, autoimmune problems, they do very, very well if I do slowly over a long period of time. If I gave them a huge amount of caffeine right now,

they'd feel like shit. If I gave them nicotine right away, they'd feel terrible. If I gave them Adderall, man, they wouldn't feel good for like days. And so that's how I think about nootropics. When you think about it that way, then it's more understanding for like, what do I really need?

Is it something that's gonna be healthy for my brain or is it something that I just need for a performance benefit now? Ideally, you're not taking any of the performance stuff unless you've done the health optimization stuff first, because that's when you know you're gonna be able to clock your brain, but you're not gonna pay the price over long periods of time. What are some, like, do you have dosage recommendations

on your website? Yeah, so when it- People can check out. Yeah, so we have two different strengths of Methylene Blue. We have something called Just Blue, which is 16 milligrams, and we have something called Tro Plus Blue, which is 50. The Tro Plus is only available to practitioners because it's a little bit more nuanced

in how you wanna dose the higher amounts. But when it comes down to it, what I usually recommend is you start off with, we make these things called trokies. They're these dissolvable lozenges that you guys dose the higher amounts. But when it comes down to it, what I usually recommend is you start off with, we make these things called trochees. They're these dissolvable lozenges that you guys were just using before. And they're scoured, so you can kind of break them up into like a quarter, a half, or a full,

depending on what you need. And for Methylene Boost specifically, I usually have people start off with a quarter of one of the trochees, and I increase their dose every three to five days. And then depending how they feel, once they feel great, it could be at four milligrams, it could be at eight milligrams, it could be at 16.

Then you can, that's when you see, when you see the major benefit, that's the dose you stay at. If you're using it for performance though, and you're relatively well optimized, then you can usually start off at a higher dose, usually eight or 16. And then that's usually gonna be your dose overall.

Quick question about the performance aspect of the Methylene Blue and just the methylene blue. How does it affect a performance athlete? Someone like a grappler, someone like, you know, anyone who's doing cardiovascular work, how does it affect them? So methylene blue can increase endurance is the short story.

And it does that because it can act just like oxygen. So if you're doing aerobic work, you can do more aerobic work for longer as a result of taking methylene blue. Because what happens when do you go into more aerobic work for longer as a result of taking methylene blue. Because what happens when do you go into anaerobic is when you stop having enough oxygen around to make energy. So what can happen is if you have enough of something like oxygen that can give you that boost

without having as much oxygen around, you're gonna get that endurance boost. So for endurance athletes, they do really well on using Methylene Blue for that reason. We have our other one called Blue Canotine, which is a combination with the nicotine and caffeine, and that's giving you more of the anaerobic. So if you're doing more lifting heavy,

the anaerobic side of things, you tend to do much better with that. Most people, a lot of people use caffeine pre-workout, right? So it's the same kind of idea, but this is kind of, this is caffeine times 10. Yeah, no, this is, this definitely gets me excited. Definitely gets me excited. Try this before training, try this before competition.

Yeah, so- I'm at a blue tongue on the mat. Yeah, yeah, so the guy that I was working with that did the Leadville race didn't have diarrhea because he was taking glutamine, and he took 32 milligrams of methylene blue, straight, and then a blue canine every four hours as well. And he trained with it first.

I don't recommend you do it just for your race, obviously. You do it beforehand in training and see how you feel. But once he did that, he cut out three hours of his time from the year before and he didn't have any diarrhea so he wasn't on himself. So that's always nice. And again, no sides really, no side effects. So the major thing you wanna think about

with methylene blue side effect wise is it can cause headaches in some people when you first start it. So that's why you typically, if you're not well optimized, you wanna start over. It's a good way to know that you took too high of dosage probably too. It can be.

The other thing you also have to be aware of is if you are on hypertensive medications, if you have high blood pressure, methylene blue can increase blood pressure a little bit. It doesn't typically do it a whole lot,, if you have high blood pressure, Methylene Blue can increase blood pressure a little bit. It doesn't typically do it a whole lot, but if you have high blood pressure already and you're on like three or four medications, then you probably don't wanna take it very quickly.

You wanna start off at very low doses, watch your blood pressure and make sure it's not going up. The major other thing you'll find is that when people have a lot of muck shit in their system, inflammation, toxic load, et cetera, once you're starting to optimize that and start taking some Methylene Blue, you'll find that you might get

what are called detox symptoms as you do it. So a little bit of abdominal pain, muscle achy, joints, things like that that can happen. But I've seen it on the other side where people have severe joint pain, aching, et cetera, they take Methylene Blue and all that stuff goes away. And that's very common too, actually. When some people hear severe joint pain, aching, et cetera, they take Methylenol and all that stuff goes away. And that's very common too, actually. When some people hear the word detox,

they automatically have like alarm bells go off, like you can't detox your body. So when you say detox, well, like what are you referring to and are they wrong? So detox means a lot of things to different people. You're right. So I think about it in a couple of different capacities. The major way I think about it,

so I'm always on like the mitochondrial focus, is that I think about when we're making energy, we have waste products of energy. The major waste product that we have to worry about is what's called oxidative stress reactive oxygen species. So oxygen will make these more reactive molecules and those can cause stress on the system. So we have to make sure that we can neutralize that.

And that's what I call the major aspect of detox. That's what we're doing. We make something like 50 kilograms of ATP a day. It's ridiculous how much we make. Yeah, a ton of it. And so we're making all that ATP, that energy currency. We're also making a ton of that reactive oxygen. So we have to make sure we have enough detoxification power

to be able to neutralize that. So it doesn't cause a huge amount of stress. And a lot of us just can't do that very well over time because we're deficient in antioxidants. So our antioxidants are vitamin C, our vitamin A, E, K, our glutathione, vitamin D, these are all really important antioxidants. And so if you don't have enough of those,

you're going to build up with these reactive oxygen in the system causing inflammation. So the major part of detox is to be able to neutralize the oxidative stress that happens with purely from just making energy. Now there's other aspects of detox too. There's detox pathways. There's ways that we eliminate things like toxins in our environment, which obviously is a very big deal too.

And there's, that's usually done through like our liver and our kidneys that are doing most of the detoxification. But we have different aspects of our antioxidant pathways that are involved in taking out toxins from ourselves or from our tissue and things like that. So you have to be able to bind toxins in that capacity and you have to make sure you can excrete toxins. You have to shit them out or piss them out

or sweat them out in that order really. So basically, yeah. It seems like there's some pretty cool fats and stuff like that out there. I don't know how much you played around with any of that, but you know, it's been around forever, like MCT oil or these different derivatives of coconut. There's C16 from a company called Wizard Sciences.

Have you ever any experience with any of that or ketones or anything? Cause I'm just thinking like you're mentioning, you know, how some of these things, what some of these things can do to the brain. We had a doctor that came on the show and he talked about a ketogenic style diet and what it could potentially do

for all kinds of different diseases. Yeah, I use the ketogenic diet a lot overall. I've been, I knew, I met Dominic DiAgostino, one of the major researchers back in 2013, when I first started in the hyperbaric field. And he was using a combination of hyperbaric therapy, the ketogenic diet for a model of metastatic or glioblastoma with brain cancer, severe stuff.

And so back then there were very few resources of keto at all. And we know what the ketogenic diet does is decreases inflammation in the body. It's a much cleaner fuel to burn than sugar is when it comes to the mitochondria itself that we were talking about. So it causes a lot of less of those oxidative molecules

to be produced as a result of making energy that way. So it's a fantastic fuel as a way to prevent or protect the brain or the body from oxidative stress. So I use it a lot in clinical practice. I use it a lot. I don't use it as much for performance as I used to. There are certain athletes do very well, fully keto, but many don't, many still need some sorts of carbohydrates

really to fuel and to gain muscle. Dominic's a beast, but he's a very unusual beast when it comes down to fully keto overall. But there's like anything else, there's been all these sort of, there's all these flows and patterns, right? Four or five years ago, there was keto pizza, there's keto pancakes, like everything gets crazy.

Like I remember I went to his conference, it's called the Metabolic Health Summit, and I saw all these vendors, keto bagels, like guys, come on, can't we, you know, really? Do we have to do this? That's a paleo at the same way. I know, it all does, it all gets commoditized. Vegan, even like, you know, they're making vegan brownies.

Like, I don't think that's the point of this diet. Fathead pizza's really good though. It is, true. It's very good. You got a good point. Yeah, there's some very good, they taste very good. And the same thing with like everything else, like even fasting, people have just gone over,

like there was like the fasting everybody couldn't eat unless only one meal a day. And then people were losing muscle and getting sarcopenic or losing muscle mass. And so there's some sort of balance here. And the key really I find is that you just have to monitor people over time and check their levels of shit. Like look at their, well, not actually look at their shit

too, but check their levels of their mitochondrial function. Check their shit. Do they have leaky guts? How is their brain functioning? You can do all these things and kind of, I like to have objective measures as much as possible. I found that people were fasting too much. They were going keto too much and losing too much muscle

mass because they weren't eating enough. And so then now, no, I don't, most of my patients are on keto anymore. They're low carb, but I don't typically have them on keto. And then if they are exercising a lot, then they need more carbohydrates in general, just making sure they're getting good sources of those things.

So again, it's not about the extremes most of the time. It's about finding some sort of middle way. Even just a switch of middle way, even just a switch of carbs is huge because if you are just like, well, I'm gonna primarily eat and you're actually following like clean natural sources of carbohydrates, it just pigeonholes you. You're like, okay, potatoes and rice.

And those are both amazing. Those are both great. And you could certainly overeat potatoes and rice, but like how often you're, I mean, I guess you can hammer rice pretty good, right? It's pretty easy to do, yeah. But potatoes and fruit and stuff like that, they're all delicious,

but it does kind of put an automatic governor on the situation, but it's real easy to start to add in other things. You start to dump honey on there and you got yogurt and you got a big fruit bowl and now you have this like 1400 calorie thing that was trying to be more on the healthy side. I'm a big fan of honey.

I have all my patients have some of it at some point. It's a fantastic antioxidant. I have some of my patients actually, I'm one of these people that can sometimes have a dip of their glucose at night, their blood sugar, and I can wake you up in the middle of night. And so some people do really well with just like a tablespoon or even a teaspoon of honey before they go to bed.

They're finding out more and more information about honey all the time, it seems like. Yeah, yeah, so I'm a big fan of it. So again, I'm not a zero sum kind of person. I always find that there's a balance for people. We always get commoditized in America because we wanna do, this is the cool thing. So everybody's keto everything and there's paleo everything

and then fasting everywhere. And that's just kind of the, we take everything to the extreme, but that's okay. As a clinician, I always try to find the balance. I mean, I've even been subject to some of these extremes like full keto for a while, let's do it, like full intermittent fasting, and then I'm already skinny as it is, I can't do it.

So. Yeah, and for some people that have been off balance for a long time, they might have to over correct for a little while. They might have to follow really strict rules. They might need to try their best to adhere to a ketogenic protocol, or they might need to utilize a lot of intermittent fasting.

And then once they kind of get their bearings and they start to make progress, they're a little healthier. And now they can kind of open up the playbook and enjoy some other foods and stuff. That's a great way to think about it. And also if you have a very severe condition, if you have cancer, for example, I have a lot of my colleagues that use ketogenic diets

very therapeutically in combination with all different types of things, including hyperbaric therapy or methylene blue or whatever. Like there's lots of different things you can use, but the keto diet is a very significant mainstay in that world for a lot of different types of conditions in the cancer world. Earlier, you mentioned insulin resistance

and we're talking kind of like low carb and stuff like that. Obviously those things could help. Lifting can help, walking can help. Any of your particular supplements help? Are there any supplements you run into that you think can kind of help people in this area? Cause I think that is a big pillar for a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, I think Methylene Blue

is a very interesting one here because it does improve metabolic rate. And if you're increasing metabolic rate, you're going to improve your insulin sensitivity in general. So I do use that a lot. The nicotine that's in our blue canadine is also something that's going to decrease appetite. So that tends to help with insulin resistance as well.

At least anecdotally, we don't have any studies on that for either of them, but I find some interesting feedback from my patients and from people that are taking them. We've actually had a number of people with thyroid conditions that take methylene blue and they feel like they're actually feeling better overall. Their metabolic rate goes up, their weight goes down, their insulin resistance improves.

So in combination with obviously other things as well, they're not just taking methylene blue, they're also optimizing their diet, their lifestyle, the inflammatory kinds of things that are involved, like maybe a toxic relationship. I feel like that's a big one for a lot of people. Or a sleep divorce. You guys know about sleep divorces?

No. Oh yeah, sleeping in separate beds or something. Yeah, yeah. It's actually more common than you realize about, I think I was just looking at a statistic recently, almost 50% of couples sleep in separate beds. Wow. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty interesting.

This can save a lot of marriages if you have a snoring partner. They've actually done studies here that even if you don't think you wake up and you have a snoring partner, every time they snore, your cortisol level goes up. So your stress hormones go up every single time. So it, it fucks up your sleep. So that's going to, if you have your cortisol level elevated all the time, you are not going to have fantastic

insulin sensitivity because cortisol decreases your insulin sensitivity. Cortisol rises, you know, when you're stressed, right? It also rises when you exercise and that's a good thing. But if you have too much for too long a period of time, it's gonna decrease your insulin sensitivity. The GLP-1s are interesting when it comes to insulin sensitivity because they're decreasing appetite overall. So this is your semi-glutides of the world,

your ozempics, monjaro's and things like that. They're getting, there's a lot of controversy with those drugs for a lot of good reasons overall, but I do think they likely have a place for, especially for people that have a huge amount of weight to lose and there's no other way to get them to start. But those are increasing insulin sensitivity as well. So I find those to be interesting.

Trying to think of other supplements that I use for it overall. I mean, usually it's a dietary shift for most people. It's just trying to decrease the amount of carbohydrates in their diet or trying to have more complex carb and less processed foods in general. I also use a lot of berberine as well for my patients. Berberine, it's a natural hypoglycemic,

so it decreases blood sugar. It's also an antimicrobial. So if you have like gut issues, if you have overgrowth, if you have pathogenic bacteria, you can decrease that using berberine. That's a common one. What else do I use? I use chromium.

Chromium is another one that also decreases blood sugar as well. Those are the ones I use. Is there any drugs that are around the corner that are gonna be the next like methylene blue? It's a good question. When it comes down to the way methylene blue works, it is so unique overall.

A lot of drug companies, I think I hear, are starting to look at derivatives of it that they can patent for billions of dollars. Methylene Blue's been around for over a hundred years, so it's off patent, it's not that expensive. It goes in your fish tank in your toilet, right? But this is the challenge. This is, I appreciate you mentioning it

because purity is a big deal with it. Methylene Blue is not a natural ingredient, it's a synthetic ingredient. So yes, not everything that's natural is good for you everybody. You can go forage for mushrooms and die. So be careful. So, but not everything, obviously synthetic is good for you,

but the challenge with methylene blue is that it could be contaminated with heavy metals. So it can be contaminated with mercury, cadmium, arsenic, and lead as part of the manufacturing process. You have to be really careful of the source you get. And this is a big deal with my company. I'm one of four docs on my team. And so we've had to throw out thousands of dollars

worth of methylene blue over the years because it didn't meet our spec. And the challenge is that a lot of it's contaminated. The other issue is that a lot of it doesn't meet its label claims. So if it says it's one milligram per whatever, usually it's about 60, 80% of what it says. And the challenge if you get like the liquid drops

is that that's the issue, the liquid and the drops, it deteriorates very fast. They're also really, really fucking messy. If you get methylene blue on anything, it's going to stain. So if you're gonna cut methylene blue like in one of our trochees, do it on a paper towel, on a dark plate. In my house, we have buffered vitamin C cut methylene blue like in one of our trochees, do it on a paper towel on a dark plate.

In my house, we have buffered vitamin C that I use every day, but it also is an antidote for methylene blue on stains. It doesn't work in your mouth, but it works on countertops. It works in the laundry. Yes, I've done that. My wife was really fucking angry at me, but I'm like scrubbing my washing machine with buffered vitamin C.

It's like a pen exploded everywhere, right? Yeah, no, it's worse than that. So it can be, before it was used for malaria, it was actually used to dye blue jeans blue back in the 1870s as a textile dye. That's how it actually got its start. And somehow they realized, it was kind of funny, they realized the people that were in the factory

dyeing these blue jeans blue were healthier than anybody else. They were trying to figure out why they were so healthy, why they were feeling so good. And they realized it was because of all these other things that we now know. But it's very, very blue and it can be contaminated. So you don't wanna go to your fish tank store

and buy methylene blue, which you can do. It's gonna be contaminated with heavy metals if you do that. And interestingly, people think that it cleans the fish tank, but actually cleans the fish. It actually is an antifungal. It's an antiseptic. So you take out the fish, you put in methylene blue, you kill all the bugs on the fish and

in the fish tank as well. But just like ivermectin and horse dewormer, don't get it from horses. Go get it from a reputable source. It's a good drug. Ivermectin is a great drug. Methylene blue is a great one too. Just make sure you're getting it from good places. So, yeah.

This makes me have two questions. First question is, if you don't wanna have the blue tongue, is there anything you can do about that? Yeah, you can just swallow methylene blue, which is nice. So our products are made as trochees because the cool thing about that, except for methylene blue, is that ingredients are typically more bioavailable

because if you swallow your supplements, you typically degrade them going through your small intestine, your liver, something called first pass metabolism. Common example I give is something called NAC or N-Acetyl-Cysteine. NAC is about 10% bioavailable, which is pretty common. So if you take 100 milligrams of it, only 10% of it is actually getting into your body.

Now, Methylene Blue is actually an exception to this rule. It's 100% bio available, whether you dissolve it in your mouth or you swallow it. So you can swallow it, no problem. I usually recommend swallowing it on an empty stomach because it's gonna work faster that way. And because the nice thing about a buckle delivery here is that it works very fast.

Within about 15 to 30 minutes, you're gonna start feeling the effect. So if you have a lot of brain fog, a lot of cognitive issues, fatigue, that kind of thing, it's sometimes better to have it in your mouth and have the blue tongue because you're gonna feel it faster. But if you have more of a systemic reason

to use methylene blue, then orally just swallowing it is okay. With our combinations with our nicotine, caffeine, and CBD plus methylene blue, that will make you snap your fingers, feel your brain turn on within about 10 minutes if you put it here. Okay.

But if you swallow it, it's gonna take longer. Gotcha. And my second question is, you mentioned buffered vitamin C. And it made me wonder, you've been talking about antioxin a lot during this episode. I'm assuming that you don't only have your clients do this nutritionally, you also have them supplement it. And if you do, how so?

Do you just look at their blood and tell them what they should supplement? That's ideal. Ideal is I have a good sense of what's happening and what they need. The challenge is that if you oversupplement with antioxidants, you can actually cause the opposite to happen.

You can actually cause it to cause oxidative stress in the system, especially with some of them. And if you oversupp supplement with vitamin C, you just give people diarrhea. I mean, that's what it comes down to. But I found that the best way to do it is to look at a blood panel, blood and urine and kind of see what's going on.

And then you can optimize. I mean, vitamin D levels are usually in the tank, especially with people with darker skin like you, because they don't get enough sun. You need more sun than the average person. And so if your vitamin D levels less than 50, you're going to have problems over time. You're gonna have joint issues,

you're gonna have inflammatory issues, hormonal issues. The normal level supposedly is above 30, but I try to have all my patients between 50 and 70. Ideally between 70 and 90 is better, nanograms per deciliter, because that's really what we call evolutionarily derived levels. So if you look at like tribes that are still

in the environment as best they can and other in like jungles and things like that, their vitamin D levels are around 50, between 50 and a hundred typically. So, and that's where we wanna be. So in general, I like to optimize antioxidant status by knowing what somebody's antioxidant status is, because there's been a lot of studies

that have been published that this antioxidant doesn't help with this cancer, actually makes cancer worse or something like that. And that's always because they're not measuring shit. They're just giving you something, not giving you a whole network of antioxidants, just giving you one, that's never gonna go well, because you're gonna overcompensate

and the system's not gonna like that, right? That's why I always say that things are a network. You can't just give one node in the network without understanding what else, what's gonna happen downstream or upstream from that. What do you think about the cold potentially helping to produce vitamin D? So I think that what it comes down to is what cold does,

which is it does many things, but one of the things it does, so vitamin D is the main area where vitamin D is actually made is in your mitochondria. And I think what's happening with cold is that what cold does, so your mitochondria, think about it has these four little four complexes and they have a little bit of space in between them. The more space you have in between them,

the less efficient they are. And the less efficient they are is required if you need to release more heat. So for example, if you live like an equatorial climate, you have to have mitochondria that are further apart with these little complexes so that you can release more heat because it's so hot. But if you live in a colder climate,

in general, they have to be closer together so that you can keep that heat in and keep them more efficient. So what cold can do is shrink down the space between those mitochondria, making them more efficient. So I think that the efficiency of production of vitamin D goes up because of the cold as a result of that.

And it makes sense evolutionarily, right? If you are like us, you came from a Northern European ancestry, we had to be able to hold on to more vitamin D for longer because we weren't seeing it for a good part of the year. So I think those are some evolutionary reasons. When I was, I think about things and a lot of like from an evolutionary mindset,

almost all of the things that are happening now are because we are a species that grew up during the Paleolithic times. And everything since then is like, what the fuck, right? So that's our bodies are really kind of at that level still. So that's why I think cold for us is great. But if you go into cold, it may not have the same effect

as us going into the cold, for example. That's like I have my colleague, Dr. Ted is from the Philippines. He's like, fuck you, I'm never going into cold, it may not have the same effect as us going into the cold, for example. That's like I have my colleague, Dr. Ted is from the Philippines. He's like, fuck you, I'm never going into cold. I'm a tropical motherfucker. I'm a tropical boy is what he always says. I don't need cold. Same here.

Yeah. Yeah, same. I wanted to ask you real quick about the trocom and then the blue, mainly, honestly, just for myself. Just keeping my focus because I'm definitely one of those types that's gonna overthink a lot of things. Trachom and then the blue, mainly honestly just for myself, just keeping my focus because I'm definitely one of those types that's gonna overthink a lot of things. And so being able to try to calm and quiet down that noise

so I can focus on the task at hand, which one would you suggest for me? Yeah, that's a good question. So if you're, when it comes to Trachom, for example, so Trachom is a combination of nicotinol gabots, I have vitamin B3 with the gabot that I was talking about before, along with Kava, CBD and CBG. What's nice about this,

I call it from the boardroom to the bedroom to optimize performance because, yes, the bedroom, we can get there. We can go low voices and talk about the bedroom. Let's go. 1900. Currently stuck there. Yeah.

Yeah. So the nice thing about working on the GABA system when you're anxious and stressed is that it can just take the edge off a little bit. So, you know, when you're really, really stressed your mind goes blank. You don't know what you're, the words you're going to say. You don't know what you're, what you were gonna say

your lines or whatever it might be. And if you can just take down the edge a little bit or take off the edge a little bit all of a sudden you start performing much better because you're calmer than you were before. And this happens in the bedroom as well. Like if you get super anxious, you ejaculate very quickly actually because parasympathetic, your relaxation is what gives you an erection and sympathetic, your fight or flight system

is what actually allows you to ejaculate. So if you can become more parasympathetic and relax, you can stay longer in that parasympathetic phase, and then you'll ejaculate in a longer timeframe. This is good for maybe pre-maternity ejaculation, for example. So the same thing happens during the day. Hopefully not pre-maternity ejaculation. What I'm saying is like-

Oh, again. I didn't mean to mean, but I made that joke anyway. But anyway, so if, or we can continue that conversation if you like, but during the day, if you're really stressed and you take down the edge a little bit, you're gonna perform better. Now on the other end of it, if you have more like ADHD kinds of symptoms where you have a hard time concentrating,

tasks switching all the time, and it's really hard for you to focus, then something like blue canadine can be really helpful because that's actually more of a dopaminergic need. Like you need more dopamine to help you focus and keep your drive on one task. And that's what a little bit of nicotine, a little bit of caffeine and methylene blue can do.

So for people that have more focus issues, I usually go for blue canine. If it's more of a stress anxiety issue, then I usually do the Trocom. The nice thing about, as I mentioned, you can kind of quarter, you can use a quarter of the trocom. And as a result of that, you don't get really tired at all.

You just feel that, that focus flow in while you drive down that sympathetic nervous system to a calmer location. That makes sense. Yeah, it's definitely gonna be the nicotine combo for me. Then that task switching is fucking ridiculous for me. Yeah, I have the same issue. A lot of us do, even if we don't have classic ADHD,

just because we have our phones, we have all these inputs coming in all the time. And so that's why I feel like Blue Canine Team can be so helpful. And what's great about it, because it has a little bit of CBD in as well. You don't get any calm down, you don't get any crash from it.

You don't feel really jittery, as long as especially if you started off at a low dose and kind of slowly increase your dose. Usually it's either a quarter or a half. That really does the trick. And as I was alluding to earlier, it's kind of like snapping your fingers. When you find the right dose,

you know you found the right dose because you're like, okay, I'm good. Did you get it? Yeah. Oh, the mosquito. How long does it last? Is it person to person? How long does it take for your system to go through? Somewhere between three to five hours, typically.

If you're more hyper metabolic, it might be like around two sometimes, but usually it's about three to five. Without any come down to crash, people that have taken Adderall know, after you take it, you get a huge crash, you can't eat, you feel like you're not a great way to lost drug, but people use it for that too, but you can't eat afterwards.

You don't sleep very well that night. So it's not very long acting, which is nice for that reason. So oftentimes what I'll do for people, we call it the get shit done bundle. It's or get stuff done or whatever, is using the blue canine in the morning. When you first wake up as your coffee alternative, or with coffee, if you drink coffee,

it can be kind of your second cup of coffee, I guess. And then in the afternoon or around two or three o'clock, you can use the Just Blue, the Pure Blue by itself, as a way to enhance your energy production, increase your performance without feeling like you're stimulated as well. And so that kind of keeps you rolling throughout the day. So that's a nice combination I use on a lot of people.

Nice. What are your thoughts on Red Light? I love it. Red Light's a fantastic synergy with Methylene Blue as well. If you combine the two, so you take your methylene blue and then you do red light afterwards after about 45 minutes after it digests or gets in the system,

they synergize at the same place in the mitochondria, actually it's called complex four. So they enhance each other's effect. Photons from near infrared light, so it's 680 nanometers, which is in the red spectrum. And the methylene blue go to that same complex and power you up. So. And the methylene blue go to that same complex and power you up. So great combination is methylene blue sunlight 45

minutes later or methylene blue near infrared light. I use that combination all the time. Higher doses of methylene blue, like 50 milligrams or above, and higher strength like lasers for actually using in cancer, actually pretty interesting. And so using it in other infectious kinds of diseases as well, because it increases the amount of capacity to kill organisms at that level.

So I love it. And I use it myself almost every day. Yeah, I think, you know, I think red light is just drawing attention to just how important light is and how important our light environment is. And, you know, the blue blocking glasses and, you know, all the different measures people are trying to take

to kind of calm down just how bright their environment is. It just really makes a lot of sense. I mean, if you just think about most environments that you're in, even think of like, places where people are sick, which is the hospital, it's just, they're just getting crushed by that light only. It's terrible, yeah. And the terrible thing about it

isn't necessarily blue light. The terrible thing about it is that you're just getting that one type of light and people have a hard time. Like they don't wanna accept it. They don't wanna think that it's like, it's bad. But I think it's gonna turn out that it's harming us way worse than we can even imagine. I think it's kind of a driver of so many other things.

I think it's the driver of your day, calms down, you're getting home from work and you're trying just to kind of relax, but you got all your lights on, it's dark outside, you watch TV and then you're kind of wondering like, I didn't have these cravings during the day. This is interesting. And that's when those cravings hit you

and that whole cycle just starts back over again the next day. So I think the red light stuff is really helpful. And I think, you know, the company that supports me is called EMR Tech and they have, yeah, they have, not only they have red light, but then now they have UVA and UVB in the lights as well. And I think it's just, again, drawing attention to,

okay, yes, it'd be great if we just got outside, you know, get the sun as much as you possibly can. Everyone gets the message on that, but there's certain parts of the country and certain parts of the world where maybe, you know, it's not always a convenience. And so maybe we can figure out different ways to change our light environment

and beyond the expense of red light, you could actually just change out some of your bulbs and have different types of bulbs in your house and have some red lights mixed in there to where you're getting just a better light environment in general. Yeah, I make my kids wear glasses when they watch TV at night.

And there's been a lot more information and interest in education over the last four or five years or even more now about it. The big thing I also just like to remind people is that it's not just the spectrum, but it's also the brightness that matters, especially at night. So blue blocking glasses are good,

mostly because they're decreasing the brightness of everything. So there's been, I think, a little bit too much focus on blue light at night and less focus on the brightness. If you look at the studies overall, it's actually more on the brightness, on the lux itself, the lux capacity. That sounds like back to the future.

I know. The flux capacitor. Yeah, the flux capacity. But the lux strength is actually more important than the light spectrum itself. So just be aware of that. But I agree with you. It's a big deal. And I've worked in hospitals for many, many years.

I know how terrible it is. And when we put- When you come out of there, your eyes are like, almost like burning. Like you feel like the way that they portray it, like in a cartoon where the, like their eyes are all like loopy. I know. And then putting premature babies under these lights.

I mean, it's a big deal. So, but they, even for premature babies, if they have this thing called, they get hyperbola rubanica, it's called what was the actual lay term for it? I forget, but they get all yellow. You can put them under, you have to put them under sunlight to actually decrease.

Jaundice. Jaundice, thank you. But there's actually like another term for it that I'm thinking. But I was trying to think of the non-medical term, but all good. But when they get really yellow, you can put them in sunlight and they get better.

So they do use that at sometimes at the hospital, but in general. Yeah, they did that with my son. And I remember like, you could see all these babies, you know, from like this window. And the one guy, he pointed to my son and he goes, that baby looks like he's been in a tan in bed.

I was like, that's my son. Yeah, I had one with my husband too. Good job getting a tan early, early on. Yeah, yeah. You sure that's your son? Is he that tan? Well, he's a little too dark, maybe, not that one, other kid.

Yeah, you gotta be careful. You hear about Tyreek Hill? Oh no. Another baby? Well, he has more babies than touchdowns. Yeah. Oh. That's what I heard.

Oh, you gotta pass on those cheetah genes, bro. Shit. Pretty cool. Being fertile. Yeah. It's a commodity these days. What's it like being able to, you know, being in this position that you're in these days, being able to help people.

You are a doctor, but you're also, you have some unconventional ways now to be able to assist people along with the conventional training. I love it. I mean, as I mentioned in the beginning, I grew up the son of a chiropractor, so I never really had a box to play in. I was always four corners without any sides kind of deal. And so I went to medical school with the idea of, it was very high-minded at the time,

it was to bridge the chasm like these large gap between conventional alternative medicine. But over the years, I've been kind of been able to do that in some ways. I'm an internal medicine physician by training, so I can talk out of that side of my mouth. And then I can do as much as far alternative as you wanna go, I can go there too.

And I just love the being able to kind of bridge those worlds. For the most part, we don't need conventional medicine unless there's an acute issue. If there's an acute issue, like you have a, you get into a car accident, go to the fucking hospital. Like you need to go to the hospital. That's what really good at.

I worked in a trauma center. That's what I saw amazing, amazing things happen. That's where I actually was introduced to hyperbaric therapy actually. So I saw the amazing things that we can do, but we are so fucking terrible at keeping people healthy. So bad at it. And the only thing we can do is try to prevent

early diseases, early screening, like your colonoscopies, your mammograms maybe, your early screening for other types of cancers, et cetera. But in general, we are really, really shitty at preventing things from happening. That's because prevention does not make the system any money. Insurance companies do not reimburse for any preventative care at any level

compared to interventional care. So that's why when I went to medical school, my friends wanted to be surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons. They wanted to be cardiologists and interventional cardiologists because you make $700,000 a year coming out of school. Like that's a lot of money.

And I got very tantalized by those things too, to some degree. And then I kept going back. I always tell medical students now and people thinking about medicine, like if you had a hundred million dollars, what would you do? Because that's what you need to do in medicine.

Otherwise you're just doing it for the money and you're going to hate it over time. Is this what it comes down to? And so that's fine. If that's where you want to go, you work for 10 years, you make your money and leave because the burnout rate in conventional medicine is ridiculous. I mean, during COVID, you guys probably all heard about

the amount of people that left the medical field because they just couldn't take it anymore. And so the only way I think you can really sustain yourself as a medical practitioner is truly doing something you love. If you love doing interventional cardiology, fantastic. But for me, it was always trying to find that bridge, what I could do to kind of help people. Yes, if they needed something right now,

I had things for them right now. I could help them. I have lots of practitioners that I work with that do conventional medicine, do great work, and I can send them to those people, go to a trauma center, if you have a stroke, go to the hospital, you know, et cetera, right? But if you have time, if there's, if there's any time at all, which there almost always is,

then there's almost always something you can do that's more comprehensively going to help somebody not only treat their illness or disease, but actually make them healthy. And the nonprofit that we have, Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, is training practitioners, doctors, not only treat their illness or disease, but actually make them healthy. And the nonprofit that we have, Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, is training practitioners, doctors, healthcare providers.

You don't have the license. You don't have to have a license to do it. You can get a certification and learn how to keep your patients healthy. The focus is completely different than just keeping your patients from getting more ill, or even finding root cause of disease. And that's all important.

But once you focus on health optimizing them, everything else gets better. So if you just focus on optimizing their gut, optimizing their cellular metabolism, making sure their mitochondria work, making sure they have the right hormones, almost everything's gonna get better in the process. So for me, it's always about shifting that perspective

in the people that I'm working with personally as clients, but also the people that I'm training. And then in our company at Trescriptions, our idea is that we hope that you don't need our products for the rest of your life. Our hope is that you can use these as a bridge for the most part to improve your life, optimize your health,

and then you can get off of them for the most part or only need them, use them as needed. And for example, I don't take Methylene Blue every day. I take it when I travel. I take it when I'm under more stress. I take it when I travel. I take it when I'm under more stress. I take it when I need it, right? And it's a fantastic jet lag hack, especially because if you're on airplanes all the time,

you're pressurized 8,000 feet up there, meaning that you're at less oxygen and less pressure. So you're at more risk of getting sick. You're more risk of feeling like shit because your mitochondria are under stress. So take some Methylene Blue when you travel. It's going to help a lot. And we have a whole protocol for that on our website.

So I take it as needed. I take Artrocom as needed when I need to relax and stress. If I can't, if I don't have time to like sit on the ground and breathe for five minutes, so just pop one of those and keep going and it's gonna help me, right? So there's ways you can use these as needed, targeted. But if you need something more right away,

that's okay as you're working on optimizing your health. So that's kind of how I see it. Thank you so much for your time today. Appreciate it. Where can people find you? Where can they get some of these awesome supplements? Well, this has been fun, guys. Thank you for having me.

I hope you guys are feeling good now, by the way. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Are you feeling good? Right around the time it was dissolving. Yeah. Yeah. That was very apparent. You feeling pretty quiet? Yes. It? Right around the time it was dissolving. Yeah, that was very apparent.

You feeling pretty quiet? Yes. It's beautiful, isn't it? It is. Yeah. Yeah. When it hit me, I was just like, there's nothing else going on. All you are is here.

Yeah, for a couple minutes, I was like, is this going to be OK? And I was like, yeah, this is OK. Yeah, it's nice, right? Well, thanks for the time. This has been a lot of fun. So my company, a couple of companies, the one that has the products is called TROscriptions. It's TROscriptions, so TRO, like prescriptions,

but with a TRO in front of it. You can find us on Instagram at TROscriptions. We have TROscriptions.com. We have a number of different products. We talked about many of them here. We talked about our Methylene Blue product, pure Methylene Blue called Just Blue. We talked about our combination of Methylene Blue

with nicotine, caffeine, and CBD. That's called Blue Canotine. That's our focus product. We talked also about Trocom. Trocom is for relaxation, stress reduction. It's great. You can take it during the day to decrease your stress level,

to wind down in the evenings. It's great for decreasing the amount of thoughts from 120,000 to about 70,000 thoughts a day. Your average number. Remember, everybody don't believe what you think and it helps you calm down and it can help you sleep for that reason. We also have something called TROSY,

which we didn't chat about, but TROSY is our comprehensive sleep formula. It really does help with all aspects of sleep. It has that agrin in there with the psychedelic mushroom, the aminida muscaria mushroom. So it's non-psychedelic at low doses and you just can't buy it in Louisiana for whatever reason that mushrooms legal there.

So sorry, Louisiana people, but it's fantastic for sleep. And then we have something called, oh, it's fantastic. And I use it all the time with travel, especially. It's really great for jet lag, really great for time zone shifts, a little bit of melatonin and five HTP in there as well. And then finally, the one we didn't talk about something called true immune,

which is a one ingredient called Cordycepin from the Cordyceps mushroom. Cordycepin is about a hundred times more powerful than Cordyceps mushroom for immune system support, decreasing inflammation, increases deep sleep. I take it all the time when I travel and I have four kids and it's been one year of beautiful bliss of not getting sick since I've started taking it.

And then our nonprofit is called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice. Homehope.org is the website. If you're a practitioner, you're interested in looking to optimize health with your patients rather than treat disease, you can check us out. We have a seven module certification course as well.

If you're interested in my stuff personally, I'm at Dr. Scott Schur on Instagram, drscottschur.com. And I do a lot of consulting with individuals, with clinics and yeah, all over the world. So this has been fun guys, thank you. Strength is never weak, this week is never strength. Catch you guys later, bye.