The Pomp Podcast - #1193 Daniel Kelly On 10 Ways To Increase Your Testosterone

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

Daniel Kelly is a peak performance coach. In this conversation, we talk about why there is such a pandemic of low testosterone in males, what the right range to target is, and how you can naturally increase your testosterone to have a clearer mind, more energy, and perform better in your job. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 235,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Daniel Kelly is a peak performance coach.

In this conversation, we talk about why there is such a pandemic of low testosterone in males, what the right range to target is, and how you can naturally increase your testosterone if you want to actually have a clearer mind, more energy, and perform better in your job as a founder, investor, or an operator. I always wonder what I can be doing better to perform better in my job, and Daniel's here to help me unpack how testosterone levels, specifically increasing them in a natural way, can help me do that. I really enjoyed this conversation with Daniel, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Here's my conversation with Daniel Kelly. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments.

All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Daniel here with me.

And what I wanted to do was create a masterclass on how to increase your testosterone. But what I thought would be important is Daniel first explained to us how many people, especially men have low testosterone and what is happening to their body in that low testosterone type state? Yeah, thanks for having me, Anthony. Excited to be here. So it's a great question. So according to research, you could say that anywhere from let's say 15, maybe to 20% of the population has low testosterone. But in reality, that depends on the definition of what low testosterone is for most people. And these days, what is happening is that there's a very wide range for what constitutes normal testosterone. And it keeps every year keeps going lower and

lower so what i consider optimal levels of testosterone and what someone considers maybe like normal levels of testosterone are quite different so i would say that i would probably say even if you just look at most men around like most guys in the population i would say it's high as high as 50 even based on the blood test that i've seen guys do the average person in the population has a very low level of testosterone walk us through what is like a low level number wise and what is a high level so that if people go and get their blood tested that they can kind of understand what that range that they're trying to hit is. Yeah, absolutely. So low level of testosterone. I mean, when I had, uh, I'm 36 now, but when I was

28, I got a blood test and I had like the testosterone levels of an 80 year old man. So I had like 250, 300, it was like bottom of the basement, but doctors will tell many guys that that's normal testosterone because in the reference range, and we can talk about the reference range and why it's BS, but that's in the reference range. So I would say anywhere from like 300 to 400 450 is pretty low testosterone even 500 you could argue it isn't really great so optimal levels of testosterone and it depends on the individual and how they feel right so because how you feel is more important than a number as men we tend to get fixated a little bit on numbers like how much i can bench press and what my testosterone level is but i would say anywhere

from like let's say seven to nine hundred typically and even up to a thousand for a lot of guys but for most guys that's the sweet spot typically can you have too much testosterone if you were to go up over 1000? I think if it's natural, I don't see why it's why it should be a problem. There shouldn't be any downsides, really, if it's natural, and it's coming from your body. Okay. And so for people who have that, let's call it 250 to 500 range, what are they experiencing? Right? Are there things that if somebody is watching this, or listening to this right now, if they say to themselves, Oh, I can check, you know, A, B, and C boxes, I may have low testosterone, let me go get myself checked. What exactly would those feelings be? Or how would

they be able to identify this? Sure. So I can speak from my own experience, then I'll say what the typical symptoms are. So over a couple of years, I started to experience symptoms like anxiety, depression. I always felt like there was a black cloud following me around. My libido was like hit and miss. Most of the time it was miss. Frankly, I didn't feel like I was making any progress in the gym. I had like stubborn belly fat that I couldn't get rid of. My sleep was quite broken. I didn't feel confident. I felt anxious like all the time. So I would say those are the main things. So anxiety, low libido, body fat that you can't lose, lack of focus as well low energy there's another one so those like these kind of malaise symptoms

that a lot of men go through low testosterone is often the culprit behind it and it just makes you feel like a shadow of the man that you know you're supposed to be okay so you have seven ideas or things that people can do to naturally increase their testosterone the first one is around vitamin d explain what's going on with low vitamin d and what people can do to reverse that yeah so so low vitamin d is like vitamin d is actually it's interesting because vitamin d is linked to many chronic diseases actually the vitamin d deficiency and frankly most people don't get enough there's a lot of research about vitamin d and how it helps the human body but there's links between vitamin d and the hormonal production and most people that i've seen

of the hundreds of blood tests i've looked at over the years most people are vitamin d deficient and this is especially so if you live in like a cold weather climate maybe like the east coast new york places like that even people that live in places like miami los angeles uh as the because the lifestyles that we live tend not to get enough vitamin d from sunlight so i think that getting enough vitamin d is is important if you want proper hormonal function and therefore optimal testosterone levels is it as simple as just go outside and do it for 30 minutes a day or should people be supplementing uh in terms of taking extra vitamin d like what do you see people doing to actually get those vitamin d levels back up yeah so a combination of both i think i think

getting more sunlight in general as a human being is just a good thing because you're going to feel good and it's also good to help set manage or maintain your circadian rhythm because your circadian rhythm is dictated to a degree by your sunlight exposure so if you spend all day under fluorescent lights and in an office you're not going to get that so a lot of people's circadian rhythms are out of whack right so getting sunlight exposure is good just for that anyway and supplementing with vitamin d i think is a good thing but you have to be careful that with a lot of supplements that you take and we can this applies to vitamin d or anything if you don't take a good quality supplement, it's not going to do jack, to be honest. So taking a good quality

supplement and also vitamin D is fat soluble. So you need to take it with fat. I found personally that when I took a vitamin D supplement combined with fish oil, it actually quantifiably notably went up on my blood test. So I would say if you take it with food, then it will help a lot as well. Zinc is the second idea here. What exactly is zinc doing and how can people go ahead and supplement that yeah sure so zinc production is closely linked to sorry zinc is closely linked to testosterone production also sperm production in men i think it constitutes like over 100 different uh biological actions or activities in the human body so the body thinks a lot of it is quite important and a lot of people are with anything like anything that we're going to

discuss in this list are zinc deficient simply because we don't get enough of it through our environment through food these days because food is so depleted as you know anthony's food is so depleted from the vital nutrients and stuff like that. So I would say that supplementing with zinc as a man, super, super important, both for sperm quality and testosterone production as well. The next idea is sleep. And this one I think is a little bit counterintuitive because a lot of folks who let's say that they have stubborn body fat or they, you know, have that fogginess in their brain or whatever, they're like, oh, I'm not working hard enough. I'm not doing things while I'm awake that could help to clear this out or to lose the body fat, whatever. But actually,

if you ever sleep you know nine hours in a night because you're just exhausted you wake up and you feel refreshed and so what's going on when you're sleeping to actually help boost those testosterone levels yeah great question so it's interesting that you mentioned that because the default setting for most people is like especially in our society that's in love with how much you can do and how hard you can work is like what more can i do when in reality like there's no amount of exercise can outrun a bad diet and lack of sleep as well so i always say to people like i would rather you exercise less and sleep more and you'll find it's a lot more effortless to lose weight and have the kind of body and the health that you desire so from a scientific standpoint what sleep

does is that well lack of sleep rather it elevates cortisol and also a lack of sleep is associated with lack of discipline lack of willpower and also more cravings for carbohydrate rich foods which are going to lead to low testosterone right so you'll find that after you've had a bad night's sleep you won't be able to control your cravings and your impulses and stuff like that and lack of sleep is also associated with low testosterone and obesity. So it's kind of like go hand in hand. And I find that a lot of people that I work with who are overweight, their sleep is typically very, very bad. And hence their testosterone is low as well. When you're working with these people, are there a specific number of hours that you try to get people to hit? Or is there some sort

of measurement in terms of like deep sleep that you really want them to try to optimize around? Yeah, so I try not to obsess specifically over too many things. But I mean, seven or eight hours a generally for most people is good but i think the most important thing for people is like getting to sleep before midnight i think because that's more in line with your body's natural circadian rhythm because all sleep is not created equal right so if you go to bed it's let's say 1 a.m or 2 a.m and you sleep for seven hours that quality of sleep is not going to be the same as when you go to bed before midnight you just won't feel the same you probably experienced that yourself i know if i go to bed at 3 a.m and i wake up at 10 i just won't feel as good as if i could otherwise

Yeah, completely agree with that. Low magnesium is another thing that has been linked to low testosterone. What's going on with magnesium? Yeah, so magnesium, so very simply, calcium contracts muscle, magnesium relaxes it. And so there is lots of research to indicate that it's not very super, super clear, but that magnesium has a direct role in testosterone production. But because it's so important in the body, and for so many different reactions in the body, I think it's important to take it. And I think a lot of people get a lot. And the biggest reason I like magnesium is because it helps with relaxation. And frankly, most people aren't relaxed enough these days. And so if you can get more relaxation, that's going to help you to drift

off to sleeping. Therefore, your sleep quality is better. I think the impact of that is going to be quite important. So a lot of people do find that if they take magnesium before bed, it helps them relax more and get better quality of sleep. There's been a rise of things like CBD. I know plenty of people who smoke marijuana. I know plenty of people who, uh, take some sort of, uh, tea, or they may even have other types of sleeping pills or whatever that they're using all in an effort to get to sleep, sleep longer, et cetera. Does that stuff actually help when it comes to testosterone levels or can some of that stuff hurt? Uh, and if somebody is trying to raise their testosterone level. Well, speaking of like, for example, something like marijuana,

marijuana, I think I always like to go to the root cause of why someone is not sleeping. and so marijuana for example is more of a sedative so it knocks you out so it just makes you fall asleep straight away right so is that really going to help you get restorative deep REM sleep compared to getting normal sleep probably not and I think that most reasons and the research on it is like it's kind of like in some research it shows that improves and some research that shows it doesn't necessarily help but I think all in all as a lifestyle like uh and getting good quality sleep and having optimal testosterone levels something like marijuana isn't going to be optimal cbd oil potentially but again i always want to look at like instead of like relying on

supplement as crutches i think there should be the icing on the cake as opposed to relying on it to help you get asleep if you're relying on something like that to help you fall asleep i would like to look at your mindset and what you're thinking about before you go to sleep and why you're so stressed instead of relying on something to help you like knock you out yeah that makes sense uh omega-3 fish oils uh i never took fish oil ever in my life and then i started taking it like maybe a year ago and uh i think it's working i don't know but like now i'm like i better take this every day what's going on and am i an idiot and just buying you know fake uh pills or is there actually some sort of benefit from this well omega-3 official is like one of the most anti-inflammatory

things that you can get and so if you think about inflammation it's the underpinning of pretty much all diseases high levels of inflammation in the body whether it's heart disease cancer diabetes it's all the underpinning of everything is inflammation so anything that you can do to lower inflammation in your body is going to be a net benefit obviously it always comes back to the quality of it again so with regards to fish oil ideally what you want to do is get the fish oil that's actual like this tough stuff on the spoon even though it tastes like crap you want it you want to take it on a spoon because it's flushed with nitrogen so it's much more pure and whereas the stuff that you get on the uh on the shelves the capsule is usually by the time that you buy it

like the it's kind of uh how would i say it's kind of like the quality is lowered significantly so if you get if you do take omega-3 fish oil i take like the uh the liquid form and like it's super super beneficial because also when we want to think about hormones and hormonal balance hormone your hormonal state is just a downstream effect of what's happening elsewhere in your body so what do i mean by that so if your body is tired and beat down and stressed like your testosterone levels are going to be low right so if we want to think of the root cause which is like having all our bases covered then more nine times out of ten our testosterone levels or our hormones are going to be more balanced and optimized when you think about gut health that's another idea that you have

in terms of if you improve your gut health, that should help to increase your testosterone levels naturally. What's going on there? Yeah, so think of it again, this comes down to inflammation. So I've done some research on this and it's interesting.

I went on TRT like at 28 years old and if I knew what I knew now about testosterone production and how gut health is linked to it, I probably wouldn't have gone on it. I don't regret it. And that's another thing that we can talk about perhaps.

But what I discovered was that there's certain bacteria in foods, if you eat a high sugar diet for example you eat the kind of foods that you're not supposed to eat what these bacteria do is they release things called endotoxins and endotoxins are released from these bacteria and they can actually inhibit your testosterone production and prevent it from happening and kind of like lower your t production i i think personally with the rate of obesity the amount of obesity that we have in the population today i think a major major part mechanism behind that is the poor gut health of people which therefore lowers their testosterone levels as well

The last one that you have, which I think is incredibly underrated is stress. And most people, if you ask them, like, do you live a stressful life? They'll tell you no. And then they will go sit in, you know, an hour of traffic. They'll argue with their spouse. They will go to the office and send passive aggressive emails, like, you know, the whole thing. Right. And so one, are we just way more stressed out than maybe we'd like to think of ourselves? And two, how can you go ahead and use stress or the lack of it to actually increase testosterone levels? great question so i think from a male perspective a lot of men are guilty of this as in they they don't check in with themselves and as men we like to think that we can we're supermen and that we can do anything i'm not stressed yeah bro but i look at your blood work and like how your health is and everything about it tells me that you're stressed right so if you're not feeling good you're low energy you struggle to get out of bed in the morning psychologically you may not be stressed but physiologically you're stressed right and so from a just from a scientific biological standpoint chronic stress elevates cortisol and high cortisol levels like a wrench a monkey wrench

for like losing fat anything that you want which is healthy chronic stress is doesn't help with it and i think that uh these days in reality a lot of people aren't really getting into a form of real relaxation what i mean by real relaxation is you getting into kind of that mode where your body's just kind of like chilled and you're breathing properly like we think that we tend to think in our society these days that relaxation is like watching netflix or like watching a movie or something like that right whereas in reality that's a that's a form of passive relaxation that's not active relaxation when i think of active relaxation really relaxing it's like doing deep breathing exercises because from a scientific standpoint if you're breathing from let's say

you're breathing from your chest which most people are probably doing most of the day that what ends up happening is that you activate a part of the nervous system which is the fight or flight mode right it's getting your body in like ready to react ready to run away from the saber-toothed tiger or to have an argument with your boss at work whatever it is but if you're breathing from your diaphragm and you teach yourself to breathe from your diaphragm you're activating a part of the nervous system which is called the rest and digest where you're actively relaxing and getting into those states right and that has a noticeable effect on things like your heart rate your blood pressure and stuff like that so i think that most people don't check in with themselves and aren't

aware of the state and these little things that happen during the day whether it's like you get cut off in traffic this person said that or you look on social media and someone makes you angry or whatever these things kind of accumulate over the day and we don't realize how much of an effect this has on our physiological state and that if you add that to all the other things that are going on not eating well sleeping like crap and all these things it's just another burden that's placed on the body right so i think that people would do much better if they had some a bit more quiet time and time to reflect and time to check in with themselves on a daily basis doesn't have to be an hour even if it's just a few minutes a day where you can just check in with yourself

how am i breathing how am i feeling and i think that you'll feel a bit more at peace and more relaxed as opposed to like feeling like you know stressed out all the time you mentioned earlier that you took trt what were the pros and what were the cons of doing that and then how much of that experience has helped inform these seven ideas that we've been talking about yeah great question so trt i took it when i was 28 so i had a about 25 years old i started doing blood tests on a regular basis I actually listened to a podcast and on the podcast my friend Jay Campbell and Mike Cernovich was on there and they were talking about the importance of getting regular blood work and it really resonated with me because I thought well I don't want to have

I want to be like as fit and as healthy as possible until like the day that I die and I want to be preemptive with my health and I want to I don't want to be reactive and only take action when something bad going on and in my mind I figured like well if I take regular blood tests and I'll be able to see the trend and where things are going and then I can figure out okay what kind of steps I need to make to do it so long story short I was doing this on a regular basis for a few years and then I took a blood test and one day I had the testosterone levels of an 80 year old man and I was like well I was like it was like a gut punch to be honest I didn't realize I thought at 28 years old I thought I wasn't drinking wasn't smoking wasn't taking drugs

looking after my body so it was kind of a big a big shock for me but it made me I kind of had a eureka moment because it made me realize all of these symptoms that I'd been experiencing over the past year I'd kind of normalized because they crept up on me one by one so I was like struggling with anxiety almost day in day out I was like I was a I felt like I was a negative person but in hindsight what I realized it was the hormones were below testosterone was affecting me and affecting my mind and the way that I thought um I didn't have much confidence in myself I wasn't I was training really really hard in the gym I wasn't seeing any gains and I was like have I tapped out my genetic potential and then uh like and I didn't have libido and like even sex felt like for me at

the time it felt like a chore to be honest with you and so after doing that I felt I felt like well my lifestyle is pretty good what else could I really do I didn't feel like there was anything else that I could do so I did a lot of research on it and I figured well even though it was a big step and it was a big leap for me at that age I felt like taking testosterone was the best option for me in order to kind of recapture this health and vitality that I so desperately wanted because I felt like a shadow of my form myself and so I took I took TRT I was kind of I was kind of bricking it as I was like super scared about taking it because I was like it was like putting this needle in my body I'd never injected myself with anything before right and I got the prescription

from the doctor and i actually put off doing it for two weeks because i was really scared about taking it and i thought what am i doing with my life i'm injecting myself with this substance i've never done it before and i actually had to get my roommate at the time to inject me the first time because i was that scared of doing it right and so i injected myself and like within a few weeks of taking it i felt like my vitality my confidence and everything had come back again and i felt like a bit more like my my real self because the real self who i was the like the the driven confident ambitious person has kind of like disappeared along with my testosterone my vitality as well and so testosterone in many ways gave me back like the life that i knew i

was capable of having and so as a result i quit my job at investment banking start my own business um wrote a book but and so it gave me the things that i knew i was capable of doing but i just didn't have the possibility because my hormones were just in the gutter right and so the pros i would say is that taking testosterone and optimizing my testosterone levels with it it gave me back more energy my libido came back um i had a lot more strength and power in the gym but the downside is that like i was on a on on this for the rest of my life right and i had to have regular had it monitored on a regular basis have a prescription that could be taken away at any time um i had to get it regularly monitored by a doctor if i knew what i knew now about human

health i probably wouldn't have done it but i don't regret it for all the lessons that it taught me in terms of like how to read and i went to work at trt clinic and i read i learned a lot about blood work and men's health and men's hormones so for me personally it was a good experience but now the reason why i came up with that list is because most men quite frankly they don't want to go on a lifelong medication they don't want to inject themselves they don't want to go to a doctor and in the united states what they're going to do now is going to make it even worse we have to go to a doctor's visit once a month maybe to get trt which is kind of crazy so i think most men they try to my experience of working at the trt clinic was i saw so many men

they tried to shortcut the process they're overweight because they had a bad diet slept like crap, didn't exercise, and then they think TRT was going to help them. The reason that TRT helped me so much is because I already had a lot of these good habits in place and I already took care of myself. So it was kind of just helped me take off. But a lot of the men that I saw, they thought that they could shortcut the process by taking TRT. So a lot of men would do well by mastering a lot of the fundamentals of human health before they go on TRT. And if they really, really need it, I think it's a very good adjunct to an otherwise healthy life, but it shouldn't be the only thing that you do to fix your health. Were you worried that once you got on it,

that you wouldn't be able to get off of it. Well, I'm still on it now. So yeah, kind of. Yeah. To be honest with you, it's like, yeah, I'm reliant on a medication the rest of my life. Could I come off it? Potentially an experiment. That's not something that I've done up until now or even considered. I'm happy with where I'm at, but someday I would like to come off it, I think. Yeah. And I always wonder, is it one of these irreversible decisions where the downside to coming off is so great that you're incentivized to stay on it? And so actually one of the most important decisions is like the onboarding, right? Of like, I think there's a large and growing number of males that say, hey, I want to do this, or I need to do this. It's the only way that I

feel good. But the longer they can hold out and do kind of the natural augmentation or the natural raising of the testosterone, the better, because once you get on, it's kind of hard to come off of it. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's kind of like coming off caffeine, right? It's just a nightmare but being on trt i agree it's like a lot of men think that they go about in a very like kind of um cavalier way and they think oh well just try it for a few months it's not something that you try you go on it and you stay on it right so i think that a lot of men they kind of they do bind to this like kind of gumdrop fantasy about trt they will fix all their problems but like we say in england you can't put lipstick on a pig right so if your lifestyle habits are

terrible trt isn't going to do a lot for you but i agree with you that being said in most i would say that most men would do well to fix their lifestyle but like if you're a man who's getting older you've otherwise got your stuff together your life together i think tlt is not a bad adjunct to an otherwise healthy lifestyle to be honest yeah that uh that makes sense where can we send people to find you on the internet whether it's on twitter or elsewhere where if people would like to learn more about what you're doing kind of naturally raising their testosterone levels uh or just getting better educated absolutely so my website is daniel kelly my full name dot health And then if you want to find me on Twitter, my handle is at Daniel Kelly 150. And if you guys

want to follow me on Instagram is Daniel optimized for one word. Awesome. Daniel, listen, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. I think that the testosterone level of males is now becoming more of a talking point. And what we're starting to realize is what you started the conversation with, which is most males are being told that their testosterone levels are actually in that reference range, but it's much lower than it should be or could be. And many people may ask, why are you having someone talk about testosterone levels? You talk about business and investing and Bitcoin and all this stuff. But one of the things that I think I've realized is in order to have mental clarity, in order to have the energy to be

successful in business or investing or whatever kind of your chosen profession is, you have to have an optimized body. And so things like sleep, like the supplementation that we've been talking about about you know doing many of the kind of taking care of yourself type actions uh the more you can do that the higher testosterone levels the better that you actually will perform in those job functions and so i appreciate you taking the time uh to kind of share that knowledge with folks and if anyone has not yet uh i suggest they go to follow you on the internet or check out your website um and then we'll definitely do this again in the future thank you so much for having me anthony yeah i couldn't agree more so many entrepreneurs business owners they they look

at like the how they can generate more revenue how they can improve their business in many many ways, but they fail to realize that the number one ROI they can have in their businesses on themselves and on their own health, right? Like you said, mental clarity, more energy, and therefore that's going to drive business. So I think that when you, if you realize that early on, it's going to have a massive, massive impact on your life and your quality of life. I could definitely agree on that front for sure. All right. Well, thank you so much. We'll do it again in the future. Thanks, man. Appreciate you.