The Tim Ferriss Show - #143: The World's Most Famous Performance-Enhancement Chemist

Episode Date: March 2, 2016

At the behest of my astute legal counsel, here is a legal disclaimer for this episode: First, I am not recommending, endorsing, or supporting any of the substances or compounds (especially illegal) discussed or described in the interview. I am interviewing Patrick Arnold as a journalist seeking additional information regarding matters of public interest and concern. Second, I have removed some of the names of athletes who are alleged to have used performance enhancing drugs. I recognize that this seems excessive, but even if athletes have been publicly banned for drug usage, unless the ban relates to the specific substance and time period referenced in the podcast, I can be sued for defamation for repeating or publicizing these stories. With all that said, here we go... If you liked my episode with Dom D'Agostino, you might love this one. Patrick Arnold, widely considered “the father of prohormones," is an organic chemist known for introducing androstenedione (remember Mark McGwire?), 1-Androstenediol (marketed as “1-AD”), and methylhexanamine into the dietary supplement market. He also created the designer steroid tetrahydrogestrinone, best known as THG and "the clear." THG, along with two other anabolic steroids that Patrick manufactured (best known: norbolethone), were not banned at the time of their creation. They were hard-to-detect drugs at the heart of the BALCO professional sports doping scandal, which thrust Barry Bonds and others into the spotlight. BALCO distributed these worldwide to world-class athletes in a wide variety of sports, ranging from track and field to professional baseball and football. Recently, Patrick has been innovating in the legal world of ketone supplementation, including breakthroughs in performance and taste with products like KetoForce and KetoCaNa, which were highlighted during my podcast with Dominic D'Agostino, PhD. If you'd like to meet the (in)famous Patrick Arnold in person, you can find him at The Arnold Classic in Colombus, Ohio from March 3-6, 2016 at Booth 328. Otherwise, you can check out his current concoctions for athletes here and here. In this science-dense conversation, we cover a ton, mostly related to better performance through chemistry. We also discuss Patrick's biggest successes and mistakes, his path to science, ursolic acid and other clever creations, exogenous ketone supplementation for sports, as well as nonsense in the media about anabolics (e.g. current Delta-2 scandal). Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Greetings, my little magwai. This is Tim Ferriss, and I'm going to read you a legal disclaimer for this episode. I don't do many of these, but at the behest of my ever-so-competent legal counsel, allow me to read the following. I'm not recommending, endorsing, or supporting any of the substances or compounds discussed or described in this interview, particularly when this applies to illegal, illicit, or dangerous compounds or substances. I'm interviewing Patrick, furthermore, as a journalist seeking additional information regarding matters of public interest and concern. And you shall also notice that we have removed a number of names of different folks to protect the innocent, guilty, or otherwise.

And with all of that said, since I've covered my little white ass, please enjoy. Optimal minimum. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports

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pounds for 10 reps and continues to do amazing work for the Department of Defense with exogenous ketones, et cetera, et cetera, you might love this one. So here we go. Patrick Arnold is widely considered the father of pro-hormones. He's also an organic chemist known for introducing androstenedione, remember Mark McGuire, 1-androstenediol, marketed as 1AD, and methylhexanamine, if I'm getting that correct, into the dietary supplement market. And I'm going to mangle quite a few of these types of words. Now, you may recognize the name and say, why do I know that name, Patrick Arnold? He also created the designer steroid tetrahydrogestrinone, best known as THG or The Clear. THG, along with two other anabolic steroids

that Patrick manufactured, perhaps the best known of the two being Narbolethone, not banned at the time of their creation, this is very important, were hard to detect drugs at the heart of the Balco professional sports doping scandal, which thrust Barry Bonds and others into the spotlight. I was in the Bay Area when this happened. Balco distributed these worldwide world-class athletes in a whole slew of sports, ranging from track and field to professional baseball and football. More recently, Patrick has been innovating in the legal world of keto and supplementation, and that's actually how he connected with Dom, including breakthroughs in performance and taste with products like KetoForce, like KetoKana. And both of those ended up coming up, I believe, in my conversation with Dom because they have some very, very, very interesting applications. If you'd like to meet Patrick in person, the infamous Patrick Arnold in person,

you can find him at the Arnold Classic in Columbus, Ohio from March 3rd to 6th, 2016. So that's coming up very soon for those of you who are listening to this when it first comes out at booth 328. So I believe that will be the Keto Sports booth at 328. Otherwise, you can check out his current concoctions for athletes at ketosports.com as well as prototypenutrition.com. In this science-dense conversation, we cover a ton. Most of it's related to better performance through chemistry. We also discuss Patrick's biggest successes and mistakes, his path to science, exogenous ketone supplementation

for sports, of course, as well as nonsense in the media about anabolics and performance-enhancing drugs. For example, the Delta 2 scandal that came out not too long ago and lots of misinformation related to that. So I will, with one more caveat, let us get into it. This is a dense conversation. And as always, with my podcast, with my blog posts, I don't try to put out an episode that everyone will love. There's no such thing. I try to put out episodes that a fraction of my listenership, in this case, will love and really get into because there's tons of detail in the weeds. If this episode isn't for you, that's okay. You can try something else like Jamie Foxx or Josh Waitzkin, the chess prodigy. My goal is with every say five episodes or so to hit everybody in my audience. But this is a very cool episode. It's highly specific and I do hope you enjoy it. So here is Patrick Arnold. Patrick, welcome to the show. Thank you very much.

I have been looking forward to this and hoping that we might cross paths for such a long time. I've had many requests. And when I look back at the supplements, for instance, that have had an impact on me. And I look at the common thread kind of in retrospect, you've had a hand in pretty much all of them. And it's an area where I have a very high degree of insecurity. I've never studied, say, organic chemistry to any extent. And it's kind of like Latin in so much as I've read a lot of these words, but I'm sure I will mispronounce a lot. So feel free to correct me. But I wanted to begin at the beginning, I guess. And just to ask you if you could talk about how you developed a passion for chemistry, because it's not a hot subject in the same way that,

say, computer science is very in, right? Sure. How did that start? Well, I would say that to tell my story, I'd have to talk about how I gained a passion for weightlifting, bodybuilding, at the same time that I grew a passion for chemistry. And I'll start with the weightlifting part because that happened earlier. And that happened when my grandfather had an old set of York weights in his basement. And we brought them all down to our basement.

And we ended up buying benches and whatnot from this guy in Wallingford, Connecticut that had this forgery there. And he made this really cool hardcore stuff and everything. We just set up our own little gym. So I was around 12, 13 years old. So we were one of the first people in our neighborhood to start lifting weights and really got into it and all that. So later on, I've always was very science-oriented. My father always had encyclopedias, science books, and I used to read about the universe and astronomy and be fascinated by that. And later I got fascinated by nutrition.

And that part of that had to do with the fitness stuff I was getting into, all the weightlifting and all that. I got into what do I eat to gain muscle, to be healthy so I can run farther and all that. And later on, I remember the first time I ever heard about anabolic steroids was a book that I bought just one of those standard whatever – I don't know what publisher it was, but one of those standard books about weightlifting and everything. And there was this one little page or paragraph. It said, anabolic steroids. I said, what is this? They say, do not take these. They do not work. They are bad.

Some athletes resort to this, but I'm like, okay, this means that there's something good about it. So then I got kind of curious and I'm thinking, well, maybe there's a drug aspect to fitness too, not only nutrition and whatnot. And I also wasn't the most perfect youngster either. And I would go out with some friends and we wouldropics or psychoactives or recreational or whatever. The whole thing fascinated me. So I originally wanted to be a pharmacy major. I couldn't get into the pharmacy school, so I got into the chemistry department, which I'm very happy that I did because I think I'm much happier learning how to make stuff

than – though you could be a pharmacologist or whatever, work in research, but studying chemistry and specifically organic chemistry, organic synthesis, you learn how to make stuff. And if I never learned how to do that, I never would have done all the crazy stuff I've done and we wouldn't be talking right now. So. And the performance enhancement side of things, a mutual friend of ours, we have quite a few mutual friends, was telling me that you used to go down, and maybe you could place us here in terms of where you were at the time, but go down to the library stacks and try to find molecules

or patented molecules that you could tweak or look at variations of. Is that true, or is that an aspect of this same time frame? You're confusing two time frames, but I'll clarify. I do that a lot. It started when I got my first job out of undergrad and I went to work for a chemical company in New Jersey called ISP, formerly GAF. I don't know what it's called now. But I had a boring job. I did organic synthesis.

I mostly did polymers. I did some other stuff. My boss was absent most of the time. My job, my day consisted of setting up a reaction and then every half hour or so, injecting a catalyst in there and checking the temperature and whatnot. So there was a chemistry library, quite significant, well-kept or well-stacked chemistry library

on that floor. And I started thinking, you know, I got a chemistry lab here and I would like to fool around and make some stuff, you know. I would like to make, you know make some stuff, bodybuilding stuff. And I also was thinking about making other stuff, recreational stuff, which turned out to be a learning experience. We'll definitely come back to that. Yeah. So what I would do is – I started off very naive.

First thing I wanted to do was make testosterone. And I started off really stupid thinking that I should make it the way it's made from scratch, which is actually from a plant. What plant is that? It's a yam, a diascoria yam. And I was able to get an extract or chopped up. And I just made a completely huge mess. It was the stupid're trying to make. It's like if you want to build a car, you don't make your own rubber.

You make your own steel. You know what I mean? You buy whatever things that are as pre-made as possible and then put it together. You assemble it. You assemble it, yeah. So I found out that DHEA was easily available and cheap at the time. So it was actually sold to a lot of AIDS-buying clubs and anti-aging people. So I was able to get a good supply of that.

And from DHEA, you can make testosterone, Dianabol, Bolden. You can make a lot of things from it. So I was able to make several steroids from that. There were other classes of steroids I could make too. And it took a long time for me to really get my feet wet. But I learned a lot of techniques and I learned how to purify things. More so than if I ever just done my job that I was supposed to do there because I was learning nothing pretty much. So you're tinkering when left unsupervised.

When left unsupervised. And I would come back at night many times and stay late. And people must have been thinking, probably that guy's working hard. It was just not on the things you were assigned, right? Yeah, yeah. And I always wondered if they're talking to my boss saying, you're kind of sitting here all the time. After a while, my boss caught on. How did you choose the molecules to create?

So you mentioned Boldenone, which I associate that with sprint cyclists for some reason. I'm not sure if that was in the news in the last few years. But how did you choose which molecules to go after? Well, first and foremost, it has to do with the availability of the raw material. There was a precursor that was commercially available and it wasn't controlled that I could buy and in one step I could make bold known from. I was able to buy androstenedione. It wasn't controlled. And I was able to make testosterone from that.

I was able to buy something called epiandrosterone, which I was able to make some DHT derivatives from. And I also fooled around with some 19-nor stuff as well, several things. So I've always called it, and this is, again, getting back to this, I've only read it, never had to say it, the Andrastein Dione. But the, how do you pronounce that properly? Well, I like to think I'm the one that pronounces it properly, but Andrastein Dione, I would say. Okay, so that, correct me if I'm wrong, sort of came to the media limelight with – Is that correct? Am I thinking of the same thing? Yeah.

Well, yeah. And then the connection there, which is interesting, is that when I was looking up angiostein dione, looking up the best way to make testosterone from androstenedione, I came across a German patent from the former GDR, East Germany. And it had to do with the use of androstenedione as an acute performance enhancer, using mostly nasally but also orally. It said that it elevated testosterone for 90 minutes or so and that people would have an acute central nervous system effect and whatnot. God knows why East Germany would publish a patent telling the world how they cheat. It's beyond me. But I don't really understand. But I took note of that and I said, well, I find that interesting.

And then I just sort of forgot about it. And later on, you know, I left that job and I ended up out here in Illinois. And this guy that I was partners with at the time, his name was Stan Antosh. And he had a company called Osmo out in San Francisco. And he and I were, with Locke and my current partner, were trying to make some stuff, trying to make CLA. I came up with a process for that. But anyway, he said to me one day, I want to put together a kitchen sink creatine product that has every best thing in the world.

Can you think of any ingredients? And I'm like, well, there's something called angostine down. If DHEA is illegal, I mean, if DHEA is legal, this stuff should be legal. I mean, it's not controlled and it's one step away. It's two hydrogens away. And he said, what is it? And I told him what it was. He says, how do you

know that that's not illegal? I say, it shouldn't be. I say, it should be very widely available in China too because it is an intermediate in the manufacture of contraceptives and all sorts of steroid drugs. Since China at the time had a one-child policy, I'm sure contraceptives were a huge market there. So lo and behold, there was a ton of vanadacidone at a very cheap price. So he started to bottle it and that took off. And that, just for people who are listening who might not be familiar with this world, that would be referred to as a pro-hormone, correct? And I mean, I've heard you referred to as the father of pro-hormones. But these compounds that are one step away, like you said, or two steps away, like two hydrogens away from testosterone. testosterone and so it's not it's not controlled when you consume it but it's converted into something that if you like testosterone that if you consumed directly or injected directly would

have sort of legal uh restrictions associated with it well the whole concept of prohormones was sort of something i i came up. I mean, it was a term. But to me, actually, DHEA was the first pro-hormone, but nobody really marketed as that. They just said DHEA does all this stuff, blah, blah, blah. And I knew that it turned into testosterone, but negligibly. But when I came up with the angostine dione, the whole marketing scheme of that is that it converts to testosterone. It is a pro-hormone or pro-steroid. And that became a genre, a whole genre of supplements.

And there were subsequent products. Then I came up with 4-AD, which was ingesting diol. And eventually, I came up with something called 1-AD, which was the first one that actually really worked like a real steroid. And that's when things went crazy. That's when the money really started pouring in. But as far as your analysis of the technology saying that if it is an active hormone, it's illegal, that's not necessarily true because it's at least as far as illegal as controlled substance goes because there's a lot of active steroids that are not controlled substances. Now, in 2003 or 2004, I think, or maybe 2002, people started selling the active versions of these.

They started selling, instead of 1AD, which was converted to 1 testosterone, people started selling 1 testosterone itself. And I got very upset because I was working with Rick Collins, the attorney. I don't – you're probably familiar with Rick. Yeah. And we actually had a lobby. He specializes in this type of case or these types of – Steroid law. Exactly.

Steroid law, supplement law and all that. So our whole defense of these products was predicated on the fact that these are not active hormones and that your body has to convert them and your body has a finite capacity to convert them. So they have a sort of a built-in abuse or proof potential to them. Now, when people started selling the – and we were actually – Rick and I were actually going to see lobbyists in Congress and whatnot because there was rumblings that there were going to be bills and they want to get rid of these Andros and all that stuff. And people started selling these things and they wanted in on all this, you know, let's keep all this stuff legal. And I said, guys, we can't. You're going to ruin our whole argument.

And then they got angry and said, oh, you just want the market for yourself. And, well, it ended up being a – it was a fail. But I tell you, our efforts did keep the prohormones and those other active ones on the market for maybe two, three, four years longer than they may not have been if we'd done nothing. So actually going out there and making some noise helps. And in the case of, say, 1AD, so 1AD is one of those supplements that I used after seeing a friend of mine. I mean, seemingly, of course,

this isn't literally true, but sort of double in size. He was a jiu-jitsu competitor, and I was just like, and everybody just was like, what are you using? Because we don't believe it's broccoli and end up being 1AD. Can you describe

for folks the advantages of 1AD, or I guess before that it was 4AD, if I'm mixing things up, correct me, compared to androstenedione? Because I want people who are, say, unfamiliar with some of the basic chemistry here to gain just the basic vocab. Because is there an aromatase component? Or I'd look for you just to describe what the advantages are compared to plain Jane. Okay. Well, I can make a progression from androstenedione, which is like the Model T. Right. And to 4AD, which was better, and then 1AD, which was quite different. Anyway, androstenedione is – it circulates in your blood with testosterone. It's constantly interconverting.

It's pretty widely – its concentration in your blood is significant. It does aromatize easily, which means that it will turn into estrone, which can then turn into estradiol. And at the dosages people were taking, they would get a disproportionate increase in estrogen compared to testosterone, and that would lead to estrogenic problems such as gynecomastia or whatnot. So just for people who don't know, so gynecomastia, I mean, it's a terrible nickname, but nickname is bitch tits, right, because you develop fatty deposits in sort of your breast tissue or pectoralis tissue, which is why a lot of bodybuilders have that type of surgery.

I just want to provide a little bit of context for people. Please continue. Okay. So then I came up with 4-angestine dial, which I knew about because back when I would make the testosterone in New Jersey, I always had these 4-AD contaminants. And they're like basically over-reduced. You don't need to know that's a synthetic term, over-reduced angestine dial. And I thought to myself, let me look at this stuff.

And I went to the library and I saw that, yeah, it's natural metabolite and everything. And then I found some articles to say that it actually converts the testosterone a lot better than androstenedione. And not only that, but it can't directly aromatize. So, and it was easy for us to make. I mean, it was a very simple reaction. Just get the androstenedione and just use this reagent called sodium borohydride methanol

and dilute, wash, and it's the simplest kind of reaction. So that had a great advantage, and that superseded the interesting dial but still people

would not get like what happened to your jujitsu friend, you said it was jujitsu yeah it was jujitsu and so when I came up with the 1AD and that was kind of a feat at the time. I probably would be able to figure it out a lot quicker now.

It's been 15 years or so. But I took a long time trying to figure out how to make this stuff because I looked it up. I went to the library and I was looking up, okay, what other natural metabolites of androgens are there in the body that could be very anabolic? And I found this one German book on steroids and I saw this one metabolite that had the double bond. I don't know if you know enough about organic chemistry that there's single bonds, there's double bonds. I mean, that's about as simple as you can get. That's about as far as I go.

All right. A steroid molecule has four rings. And the first ring in testosterone, industry down, and 4-ED, it's in the lower part, which is a four, carbon four to carbon five, which this one stuff was carbon one to carbon two. So it was in a weird position. But that had a tremendous amount – tremendous ramifications as far as bioavailability or more so conversion and receptor affinity.

And it also was – would not aromatize. So I looked it up and I'm like, man, this stuff looks like it's going to be strong. So I made some of the Dione and for some reason that the compound intrinsically burns like, like putting wasabi on your tongue. And was this – you were ingesting it orally or how are you taking it? Orally. Orally, yeah. Yeah.

But the thing is it would also burn as it went to your system and everything. And I was – as pure as you could get it, it wouldn't matter. It was not an impurity. It was a property of the compound itself. So I said, man, I can't be selling this stuff. The few people that tried it just blew up. But they're like, man, I don't know. I'm like, all right, I'm'm not gonna put this on the market so so i um quickly came up

with a die all version which was a little more complicated than i thought but i found some catalyst that allowed it to to uh to do what i had to do and and and then that didn't have that problem and then we came out with that. It quickly became extremely popular. I remember going to one Arnold, you know the Arnold Classic, right? Yeah, the Arnold Classic. It's like the Coachella of muscle heads. I mean, it's gigantic.

I mean, what is it? It must be like 100,000 plus people easily in Columbus, right? I mean, it's just gigantic. It's an entire city of people. It's like the Burning Man for people in tight pants with big muscles. What is that? A motorcycle thing up in North Dakota? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's that type of sort of draw. But it's more than that now. Now it has like 30, 35 different sports.

Oh, it's gigantic. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just not even just bodybuilding. But back then it was mostly bodybuilding. And I don't know if you've heard of the distribution company called Europa. I have. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Back then all the Europa guys were 350 pounds and, you know, monsters. And I remember them coming around and saying, Patrick, what's up with that 180?

I love it. I take it 20 a day. And I'm like, 20 a day? Are you insane? You're only supposed to take like three to six a day. But these guys, you know, they do what they want to. They weigh 400 pounds. So just to touch on that for a second.

I mean, there's so many different questions I want to ask here. But I guess where I'd love to steer this for a second isohimbine hydrochloride and took it too close to ephedrine. And now I really feel like I'm going to have, you know, die of heat stroke. I mean, really, in retrospect for me, I think I was really haphazard and just felt like I was immortal, which is not the case. Let's rewind back to the – you mentioned the recreational drugs, and I don't know if this was in terms of placing it in time when you were in college or otherwise, but, I mean, did you have – you said there was a learning experience there. Do you want to elaborate on that?

Yeah, that would be back in New Jersey. So at the time, well, I guess just to kind of preface it, I, actually the whole thing kind of started in high school in that I was on the wrestling team and wrestling practice

was really hard. And I looked in my mother's medicine cabinet and I saw there was an old prescription for Percodan. It said for pain. I didn't even know what it was. And I say, I got a lot of pain during my wrestling practice, so I'm going to take one of these before my wrestling practice. And I did, and I had the best wrestling practice ever.

People were bending my arm behind my neck in all kinds of positions, and I'm just staring ahead. I don't care. And I kind of grew to an affinity for that sort of drug or whatnot. But I never did anything about it or whatnot. But then when I moved to New Jersey and I had all that free time, I thought to myself, well, wouldn't it be nice if I could synthesize something like a Percodan or something along those lines? So I looked into all the different derivatives that were – that exist and I looked into Damerol, you know, the morphine derivatives are kind of out of the question because they all start with a morphine type substructure, which is all controlled. And I found out that methadone was something that all the raw materials were not controlled, were cheap and available. It was a three-step synthesis. It wasn't that easy, but I was able to figure out how to do it.

Now, I didn't know what I was getting into. Right. And I made my first tiny amount, and I took 40 milligrams. And because I looked up, it said 10 milligrams is a regular dose. And I said, well, a regular dose is nothing. I'll take four times that. And I took it. And then at work, I weighed it out on an analytical scale. And then I walked to the lunchroom and I was feeling kind of giddy and I ate my lunch. And the way back from the lunchroom, I started spinning really bad. And I just made it to the nurse's office. I just started throwing up and my face was itching. My nose was itching. And

I just lay there. And every time I would move, I would throw up. And I lay there for like an hour or two. I made it up to my lab and continued throwing up the whole afternoon, throwing up. Everyone left. I made it to my car, throwing up all the way to my car, drove home 10 miles, pulling over every mile or so, throwing up, throwing up, throwing up. And I didn't get back to work for like three days. I was just throwing up. And I said, I'm never going to touch that stuff again. This stuff is horrible. And then I had a skiing injury a couple of months later and I was prescribed painkillers or whatnot. And I thought to myself, well, I got that methadone and, you know, maybe I'll try it again. I'll be more careful with the dose and, you know, maybe I'll take it intramuscularly, you know, that way I can – don't have to wait and see. I'll start with a little amount.

I won't have to wait an hour to see, you know, what – you know, whether it's going to hit me or not. So I took it and I was like, you know, this is pretty good. It's pretty good. Then I started to – and it would last sometimes 36 hours at first. That's a long time. Yeah, it is a very long half-life. But time went by and I guess it was about a year that I was taking it. It took months before I realized I had an addiction.

And I realized, because one time I just sort of stopped and I was just like, oh my God, I feel terrible. What is wrong with me? Oh, geez, I feel terrible. And I wasn't even thinking. And I went to work and I'm like, I'm just going to take my methadone. And all of a sudden, wow, I feel good. And I'm like, I'm just going to take my methanol. And all of a sudden, wow, I feel good. And I'm like, oh, no.

Oh, no, I'm an idiot. Why did I not realize that this was – and then from there, I was like, well, you're going to have to deal with this, man. How did you get yourself off of it? Well, I was sort of thinking and it was really stupid thinking. There was a book back then. I think that guy Andrew Weil and someone else wrote it.

It was called From Chocolate to Morphine. I don't know if you remember it. It was a very candid book about drugs, an honest book saying, you know, which ones are harmful, how they're harmful, how they're not harmful. And in there, they said opiates are very addictive. You know, they can kill you with the overdose very easily. easily, but people can take them controlled for decades and not suffer serious health consequences other than maybe being fatigued or whatnot. And I said, well, no, Patrick, you know, you could just hang on until maybe medical science

will find some way for you to magically get off this stuff without, you know, discomfort or whatnot. But what ended up happening is they ended up finding out, because I had a big mouth and I was very reckless, they ended up finding out what I was doing at work and they drug tested me and they laid me off. And so I was stuck with nothing. And by that time, my tolerance had grown considerably and I was taking a lot.

And it was a horrible, horrible experience. I didn't know what to do. I went to methadone clinics, you know, where the heroin addicts go and they just looked at me and said, get the hell out of here. You don't belong here. I'm like, but tried to explain my story, but it didn't fit their paradigm. So eventually I went to my doctor. He took one look at me and he said, you need to go. They made some calls. They said, you need to drive 75 miles south to Summit, New Jersey. They got a place for you down there and they'll take care of you. And I drove and I got there and they didn't believe me either. Because who comes in saying, well, I'm a chemist.

I made my own methadone and now I ran out. You don't hear that story. That's not the usual story. It sounds like someone that's coming in for free drugs or something. But I was just like, please, you've got to help me. So they did their best to detox me. I spent the first three or four days on the couch shivering with a blanket over my head. It was even hard for me to remember, but it's just the worst thing in the world.

And it went on and on and on. I didn't feel normal again for two or three months, but that taught me to respect drugs, especially drugs that are of addiction. And don't think that you're immune or somehow you're unique and that it won't bite you, especially something serious, like serious one like that. Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, opiates scare the hell out of me. Uh, I've, it's part of the reason that I've always tried to, well, I shouldn't say always. I mean, back when I was in my younger, even dumber years, um, not always the case, but I try to stay away from anything really fast acting, uh, no intravenous, et cetera. And I was very fortunate and I was really happy in a way when I had my first reconstructive surgery, they gave me Vicodin

and all sorts of different opiates and they made me viciously sick. Yeah. I couldn't take them. They made me extremely nauseous and I was really grateful. You know, it's funny, Tim, because I've had some situations where I've had to be prescribed opiates recently and also had to have them in a hospital itself, intravenously and whatnot. And they don't make me feel good like they did back then. in a hospital itself, intravenously and whatnot, and they don't make me feel good like they did back then. I mean, if I'm in a lot of pain, yes, they will numb the pain, but they just make me feel kind of yucky and moody and nauseous. I lost the affinity for them. There's no recreational value with them anymore. Thank God.

Yeah, I remember. And so the question, the follow-up question I wanted to ask was, what other drugs that athletes take you think have a high abuse potential or are dangerous? And the example that comes to mind. So when I was in, in, uh, I must've been in college cause otherwise I wouldn't have been able to afford it. Had to have been working was a newsletter. I can't remember the name of it, but by Dan Duchesne. Oh, dirty, dirty dining. That was probably it. And I remember when he started talking about DNP.

Am I getting that right? Yeah. And the stories, I mean, they were told to be entertaining. And I was like, Jesus Christ. I mean, it just seems like rolling the dice and waiting for the Reaper on like snake eyes to come and take you out because it seemed so, so dangerous. But are there any particular drugs or classes of drugs that come to mind that you think are dangerous or have a high abuse potential that athletes use? Well, DNP is probably the most dangerous one. I do not think it has a high abuse potential because it doesn't make you feel good.

No, no. There's no reinforcing effect of it. But you mentioned Dan Duchesne. He's actually the guy that sort of propelled me into this industry and he was my mentor sort of. And I knew him quite well and discussed DNP with him. And I knew his fiancee also. And she used to call me all the time.

It was a very strange situation. But she had told me how, well, Dan's gone and everything. But Dan was reckless and didn't always have his, I have a lot of good things to say about Dan, but I ought to be honest. Dan was reckless, and he used a lot of clients. His clients were almost all women as skinny pigs and did some things that could kill them. And he had this girl taking DNP and insulin at the same time. And she said that she almost died. Now, coincidentally, later on, Dan convinced her to go get calf implants in Mexico. That ended up becoming infected, and she ended up getting her legs amputated.

Jesus. And she was a very depressed, almost suicidal woman to begin with. And I remember when that happened, I was just like, this is just, well, we're going off that tangent. No, but it's dark. I mean, Dan was. It's dark. Dan was, yeah, Dan.

You could tell, I mean, just in the writing, you could tell he was very conflicted. He's very smart, but very conflicted. He could be a very nice person, but he could be a very selfish person, and he could just not care about people sometimes. I think the way he was towards women sometimes, you know, he was

I wouldn't call him not physically sedictive, but psychologically sedictive. Sadistic. Aside from the, say, methadone, right? And this is related to the other question in terms of what is dangerous or potentially dangerous. Let me put it that way. Is there anything that you avoid testing yourself for any particular reason? Or using for extended periods of time?

Bodybuilding type stuff. Well, insulin, I'm not sure about because I have no evidence that taking insulin in a fashion where your blood sugar does not – stays under control is particularly dangerous. A lot of people saying that taking exogenous insulin will lead to insulin insensitivity. But I don't think that insulin itself leads to that. I'm not so sure. So I'm not convinced of that argument. Certainly insulin, if taken without the right amount of food or at the wrong dosage, could lead to hypoglycemia. And if not addressed appropriately, could lead to coma, possibly death. But insulin is one of these things that I don't think is –

if used judiciously, it's not necessarily going to hurt you. Now, it could lead to – probably would lead to adipose or visceral fat deposition. Yeah, specifically visceral fat, which is the fat between your organs, which is the fat that's associated with metabolic syndrome, hypertension, type 2 diabetes. All things you generally don't want. Atherosclerosis, yeah, exactly. But in the context of bodybuilding and a diet that's of a certain type, I don't know if that's necessarily going to happen. But I'm sure if you just eat like crap and take a lot of insulin, that will happen. Yeah. Well, if we took a slightly different tack on it, what are some of the biggest wastes of money if you look at just the world of competitive athletes and trainers and so on?

I think the biggest waste of money is this IGF-LR3. Can you explain what that is? It's something like growth factor. LR3, I've actually never heard of. I've never heard those three letters. Well, I'll make it brief. IGF-1 is the most – it's a big anabolic hormone in your body. When you take growth hormone, pretty much all the anabolic activity that growth hormone manifests itself through is IGF-1 that's made in the liver.

You take growth hormone, there's growth hormone receptors in the liver. They get turned on. Your liver pumps out IGF-1. IGF-1 goes out. That's what makes your bones grow, your ligaments grow and whatnot. And if you're young enough, maybe your muscles too. Now, back in the 90s, there was no IGF-1, regular IGF-1 available, but what was available was this derivative or this analog of IGF-1 that had an amino acid taken off to allow it to not bind to what are known as IGF-1 binding proteins.

And the reason why they did that is because it was meant for petri dish, in vitro studies. And they wanted the IGF-1 to be free to do exactly what it had to do or not worry about these binding to stuff. And then it would throw the experiment off or whatever, right? So this stuff was never meant for humans. But it was available. So people were like, oh, it's the best IGF-1 because it doesn't bind to binding proteins. And people were taking it. But the whole thing is the fact that it doesn't bind to these binding proteins means that when you shoot it in your body,

your body breaks it down almost immediately because the way your body uses IGF-1 is actually, it has to bind to something called IGF-1 binding protein 3, which titrates it, extends its half-life, delivers it to the tissues at the right time and whatnot. So people are still stuck under this illusion that this in vitro version of IGF-1, which is cheap, still works. And,

you know, and, and by now people are not really talking about it because enough people have tried it and seeing like it doesn't do anything, but it's still in people's arsenal for some reason. The IGF LR three IGF. Yeah. LR three.

Yep. Uh, what, if you look at the various compounds that you've either createdving standpoint, what fills you with the most pride? I think something I made called Six Oxo. You know, I was going to bring up 6-oxo? Because that was another one on my list that I've encountered over the years. So please, yeah, explain 6-oxo to folks. Well, there's no other compound that my company spent as much money on to show efficacy, to show safety, and also to show that it was not – it had no anabolic activity.

It was purely an aromatase inhibitor, an aromatase inhibitor being a compound which prevents testosterone or certain endogenous androgens from converting to estrogens. And that's all it did. It took a, it was, trying to learn how to make it was quite an experience because it's a very violent reaction. And you kind of keep it really cold and you got to learn to add one thing to the other.

Violent meaning it could explode in your face or how violent? Well, not actually fire violent, but actually go out of control and boil and just spray solvent and reagent all over the place. I mean, it could – it to scale up to production level. And we got it down to where we were able to make reproducible batches, great purity. I remember, you know, that was the first aromatase inhibitor product on the market that actually worked. I mean, there was Chrysin before. Actually, Chrysin was something that I originally came up with and offered to Bill Phillips.

I actually worked at EAS for two weeks. Didn't work out very well. Your employment record kind of sounds like mine. You know, I went from place to place until I found my little home in Illinois, and I've been here since 96. I have a great business partner. We are very synergistic. I'm the guy in the lab, and he's the guy that knows business,

and he's the guy that puts together the huge reactors and all the manufacturing stuff. But I digress. Six Soxo put it on the market and everything and we paid Thomas Inklidon

who, I forgot where he was. Arizona, maybe? Yeah, yeah, Arizona, yeah. He did a study, and I remember I went to a show in New Orleans, and I was sent the results, and I was like, wow,

this stuff works. I was showing everyone, look, it works, it works. It was really great results, and that made me very happy. And we had results presented at a poster presentation and whatnot. I was able to tell people about it and do an ad on it. And it became a very good product. And it wasn't – the thing about it is that I knew that the,

the pro hormones, the one AD for AD and all that, that they were going to be gone. You know, they were tick. It was just a matter of time. Yeah. The whole,

the whole industry had become polluted. People were selling methyl one testosterone. People were selling, you know, synthetic liver toxic versions. and, um, and 2005, they went all, testosterone. People were selling synthetic liver toxic versions and in 2005 they all went off the market.

But this was a product which was not an anogenic anabolic steroid. It basically reduced your estrogen which then prompted your pituitary to make LH which then caused your testicles. Yeah, which then prompted your pituitary to make LH, which then caused your testicles. Glutinous hormone, yeah.

Glutinous hormone, yeah. And then would cause an upregulation of your testosterone production and natural testosterone production. So your testicles would not shrink. They'd actually probably grow a little and whatnot. And the product became quite popular. And I remember we, at the time, my brother, who had been an investor in our business, an unhappy investor, he, after a while, because things didn't move fast enough for him, he

got out and then he met some people and he actually started the company. The supplement company. Yeah. So he was the CEO of and one of their biggest products had 6-Oxo in it.

And I remember actually I hope I'm not breaking any HIPAA laws here, but I saw Bud work on the 6-Oxo, and he got a very good effect from it. So he was a big believer in it. His company didn't last too long. There was a lot of, I don't know, infighting and whatnot. But it was a lot of, I don't know, infighting and whatnot. But it was a great product.

But in 2009, a pitcher named... ...had a positive for androstenedione. And it was blamed on the 6-oxone. And I was... You know, I had read it and people were calling me and I was just pissed off. I'm like, don't blame it on that. That's stupid. I mean, and then there were all kinds of theories I had that it's possible that the 6-oxone itself could be used as a, you know, because the androstenedione can metabolize the 6-oxone or whatnot, or he could have been taking something else or whatnot.

But I say I know my product. I know it's not contaminated with androstenedione and we certainly didn't spike it. I remember talking to my attorneys and they're like, Patrick, you know, they're taking this stuff very seriously. You're not supposed to tell anyone this, but they are hearing about this. And they had some big expert saying that he believes that Anderson Diamond was deliberately putting the product. And I'm like, what? And yeah, he's talking to two important people. I'm like, so you guys should be ready for anything.

I'm like, so you guys should be ready for anything. I'm like, this is BS. I'm just like... And then a couple days later, I'm getting ready for the gym. I get a call on my phone. It's like 5.15 a.m. So it's Patrick. Yo, mom, such and such from the Drug Enforcement Agency. We're need to be let into your plant.

And I thought it was one of my friends screwing with me. I said, fuck you. I can't swear. You can swear on the show. All right, all right. So I hung up. And then I was like, uh.

And then it rang again. I'm like, uh, hello? It is a raging snowstorm out. And at the time, I didn't have my license and everything. And I'm just like, oh, no. And I'm thinking, what could it be? And I thought to myself, it's not the 6-Oxo because there's nothing wrong with the 6-Oxo. So I went to the thing.

What do they think I'm doing? I was just so confused. So my partner had to bring me up, go through the raging snowstorm. We get there. And lo and behold, they're there for the 6-oxo, and they have a search warrant, and they believe that we are spiking it or something. And I just remember getting kind of very angry and frustrated, and that whole situation turned into a huge nightmare because they were determined to not let it go. They did not understand the technology at all. They did find a trace of the stuff in there.

Which is interesting then. Yes. It was below the detectability of the instrumentation that we used for quality control. So they were never able to prove that we knew it was in there. But, I mean, it's in the parts per million range, and it's physiologically insignificant. Yet they were determined to somehow make me pay. My attorneys, Rick and, at the time time Mike, the manager and whatnot, they went up there and gave a presentation that I helped them with that totally – there were like 15 people there from the DEA, FDA, whatnot.

And they completely knocked them down. I remember that the investigator slammed his – he said the investigator slammed his fist on the table and ran out of the room. He was so pissed off. But not only that, but they came to town and they visited all my workers. And then they dragged them to New Hampshire for grand jury hearings. They read my secretary of the herborander rights on the stand because he thought she was lying. It was insane. But after five years, no charges, but the damage was done.

It took away our biggest moneymaker, and it was a big blow. Sounds like an exhausting five years. You know, it's the thing about the government is that they can accuse you of something and ruin your life. And you could be completely innocent and you do not get compensated. Now, I'm not saying my life was completely ruined, but I'm saying that it was significantly downgraded. I don't want to go into detail, but a lot of, yeah, it was not good. What was your first contact with Victor Conte? How did that, how did you come in contact with Victor? Well, I used to argue with him all the time. And for people who don't recognize the name,

could you provide some, some color or, uh, the, uh, or not color, but like who is Victor Conti or who was he at the time? Well,

he has this little slimy used car sale. It's also in mustang. I don't know. Oh, you don't mean to describe him physically. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, but this is, Oh, you don't mean to describe him physically. No, no, no. But this is – you know what?

We can back into that though. So you used to argue with him. What did you guys argue about and what – roughly what time, what year was this? Well, this would have been around 99 to 2000, there was something called Usenet. What do they call them? Usenet, the bulletin boards. Yeah. They were very cumbersome, but that's how people would chat back then in groups.

And there was one called Miscellaneous Fitness Weights. And Victor was on there, a guy named Lyle McDonald, Bruce Neller. Lyle McDonald of the ketogenic diet? Yep, yep. Many other people, Will Brink,

you name it, anyone back in the time. And Dan, of course, was there too. Victor came on and would push his ZMA all the time. Yeah, that's zinc, magnesium, aspartate. Yes. Yep, yep.

Which I still take. I think it's a decent product only because I think that a lot of people are deficient in zinc and magnesium. And I think it's as good as any. So he would talk about his product and the studies he did, which was sort of structured to give the results that he wanted, I guess. And it was sort of hard to believe and whatnot. And people like Lyle, who tends to be pretty negative. And if he sees anything that he thinks is BS, he's going to lay into you.

So he really laid into Victor. And I kind of laid into Victor a little bit too, but not so much because I would read it and think, well, you know, at least he did a study, you know, let's, let's see if there could be something here. I don't just, don't just assume that, oh, it was fake or whatnot. Um, give the guy, you know, the benefit of the doubt or whatnot. And so he saw me as someone that was not necessarily an ally, but at least had a degree of objectivity. Semi-neutral party. Yeah. And he also used to make fun of my pro-hormones. Oh, your pro-hormones don't do anything.

Oh, they suck. They suck. And then one day I get a private message from him. He said, hey, tell me about your pro hormones. Do they beat drug tests? And I'm like, well, no, but I know something that does. Now, if you want to go down that path, I'll tell you how – what I sold him at the time was this stuff called Norbolafone. All right?

That's an anabolic steroid that was never marketed or if it was, it was marketed very briefly. But it's mentioned in a lot of the original literature. For instance, there's certain famous books, one by a guy named Charles Kochankian, another by Julius Vita, who wrote sort of research compilation books on an antibiotic steroids. And they talk about all the ones that are made and what their properties are, toxicity wise, you know, antibiotic and endogenic ratio, potency. And nivolithone always was a standout. And it's a very odd chemical. But I always knew that it was closely related to a very popular or very widely available progestin used in birth control pills. And that progestin is known as levonorgestrel.

And it's found in something called Norplant. It's also found in a wide variety of well-known birth control pills. So I knew that I could make this Norbolithone from level nogestral by a simple selective hydrogenation, which is simply adding hydrogen molecules to one part of the molecule, which is done with catalysts and hydrogen gas and whatnot. So I always wanted to do that. And at one time, our company had a partnership with Metrex and partly because Connelly was – Scott Connelly and his deceased, God bless his soul, partner or he was like his Smithers. I don't know if you remember.

The Simpsons? Yeah. Billy was like Connelly Smithers. I love Billy. Billy was a great guy. He put up a lot of crap. But they really liked me and they wanted to pick my brain. I think that was one of the reasons why they partnered up with me.

So we would have our meetings and then they'd say, hey, Patrick, you meet Billy. Let's go into the office. And then it's like, all right, what can you make? What can you do? It's funny. But I was like, you know something? There's this stuff called Nebolathon I've always wanted to make. And I just needed some raw material.

And I know it could be gotten from China. And I'm like, hey, we got to – we work with TCI, one of the biggest distributors of chemicals out of China. We get you whatever you want. I said, well, you can get me some of this level of gestural. And I gave them the CAS number, which is a number that is associated with chemicals just to make sure that you don't screw up. Yeah, important to get that right. Yeah, it is.

You get the wrong thing and you die. So he said, yeah, I'll get some level of testosterone. I'm thinking, oh, maybe like a gram or something. So I get 200 grams shipped to my lab. And I'm like, oh, my God. So I'm like, look, I could, just thinking to myself, wow, I could probably do a lot of things for this. And I thought to myself, I could probably get into a lot of trouble. If you had to buy that yourself.

Oh, my God. If you were to buy a gram or so through a research chemical company, it would be like $300. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. You just don't – That's a serious payload right there.

That's for free. Just said, yeah, here you go. Make some. So I made some. I gave it to Scott and Billy, and they loved it. I gave – I had a friend over in Greece. He's interested in things like this. Gave some to him, several other people.

And then, you know, I had already – and then a sprint cyclist – actually several, many grade B athletes used to contact me back then and I shook them up. I have too many stories to tell you, really screwed up stories like that. We would just go on forever. But eventually – no, there was a – who came into the picture later who was a sprint cyclist girl, and she took a lot of it and everything. She was not very careful with what she did. But this was all before I even met Victor, all right? So I met Victor. He emailed me saying, hey, do your pro hormones beat the drug test? And I say, no, they don't, but I have the stuff, the stuff from the Bolethon.

So I said, can you send me something? I sent it to him. You know, I didn't really know who – I knew who Victor was, you know, Mr. ZMA guy, Mr., you know, blah, blah, blah. But I didn't know he was connected with a lot of the high-profile athletes like he was. So he comes back and he says that he loves the stuff.

And so he was one of the guinea pigs and he said, he loves it too and whatnot. And they passed it through their inside guy at the UCA lab who I found out his name was Victor Uralitz. that people don't know is how many people worked both sides and just got away with, you know, never died it or chastised in the media or whatnot that facilitated this whole thing. Now, Victor had this guy, Victor Uralitz, that worked in Don Catlin's lab. And he would send urine to him and he would put it through the rigmarole and, hey, come out clear. So that's how the name Clear came about because Victor Urolitz would say your urine is clear.

So the Clear is the Norbolothone? The first Clear. The first Clear. The clear is the norbolithone? The first clear. The first clear. The first clear was norbolithone. Then back to – like a man. It was a wonderful woman. She looks like a woman now, by the way. She's not competing anymore. And it's amazing sometimes how women can become virilized and then stop and for the most part revert, though the voice sometimes retains some of the – because the larynx doesn't totally shrink. Yeah, and I think this is – just to pause for a second. So for those people who are wondering what androgenic versus anabolic means,

do you want to just quickly define the difference? Because people think of steroids, but then you also hear, you know, I guess like AAS, right? So when you're looking at the profile of these things, just since we brought up the voice and the vocal cords and stuff,

can you, can you distinguish between anabolic and androgenic? Well, anabolic precisely means growth of muscle tissue. That is the goal when people were developing anabolic steroids was to develop a compound which only grew lean muscle mass, muscle primarily. Now, testosterone also brings with it secondary sexual characteristics, such as growth of pubic hair, growth of the prostate, seminal vesicles, and beyond that, you have androgenic alopecia, which is male-patterned baldness. You have growth of the larynx, acne, body hair.

These would be anything that's outside of the realm of muscle building and that's something that obviously a woman would not want to have happen to them. That's androgenic. Got it. So that's why it's important for people – well, people look at the relative sort of anabolic strength versus androgenic effects when looking at which of these drugs to use potentially. Yes, they do. But people also make a vital mistake, a fatal mistake in thinking that just because a drug has a good anabolic androgenic ratio means that they could take that drug at any dose and it won't be androgenic the thing is is that these these drugs that are low androgenic they are low androgenic at a minimum minimally anabolic dose basically so there's so there's a selectivity there that's

dose dependent so if you take five or ten times that dose you're going to get the full androgenic oh got it so yes if you're popping oxandrolone like pez or whatever you're still going to end up with a good amount of yeah androgenicity or whatever so when that girl comes out to you i don't understand they told me it was anovar. Right. Boo. That's because you're taking mega doses. Got it. I took you off track a little bit, though. You were talking about Norbolithone. Well, she was so obviously on something, and she just became a target.

Don Catlin's lab was out to find out what the hell she was on. So they were examining... Just for context for folks, who's Don Catlin? Don Catlin is retired right now, but he was the head of the largest drug testing laboratory for the Olympics and

Olympic drug testing in the United States back in late 90s, early 2000s and whatnot. So he had his UCLA laboratory, and they made a project out of finding out what urine was taken. So they determined by looking at her urine that she was taking Norbolafone. I forgot how they – they may have actually looked at metabolites and then made some and matched it up. But the funny thing is that that guy, Victor Uralich, who I mentioned before, had told Victor that way back when they conceived the anabolic testing protocol, he wanted to include Norbolithone in the list of drugs to be tested.

But Don Catlin and these other people said, no, no, let's not bother with that. That stuff's not – no one can get that. It's not commercially available. So Don kind of was proved wrong on that. But anyway, so they found everyone has to stop taking it now. And I told him, don't take Nabolathon anymore. Do not. Do not take it anymore.

I got some new stuff. It's called – well, I called it new stuff. It's called TH – well, I called it trend stuff. But it became known as THG or the clear or whatnot. But she – oh, I liked the Nebulatone. So she kept taking it so that she got caught. She's connected to – and then that really screwed things up. And then the Balco thing came down as a result of an investigation that an IRS agent was doing. But that's another story. Well, I just – for just some personal context, the reason that when Balco just exploded in the media, I followed it so closely is I moved to the Bay Area in 99 and I lived in Mountain View originally, but also San Jose and traveled to San Francisco. And I guess Balco was what in Burlingame and it's like Bay Area Lab Cooperative. Is that what it stood for? Yeah.

But I remember seeing the sign. And so it kind of got incepted. Right. And it's like, Oh, like the red doorknob in this, in, in, in,

in, uh, what the hell was it? The, uh, uh, not six cents. The one where the,

the, uh, the main character ends up being dead the entire time. I'm completely blanking on the movie, but the point being, um, I followed it really closely. And also at the time

was involved with sports nutrition and met athletes who had some ties to Balco, but it didn't mean anything to me at the time. And when we talk about, say, Catlin and the cat and mouse game of drug testing, you mentioned THG. I'd love for you to just describe how that came to be. And that's what, tetrahydrogestrinone? Am I getting that right? Tetrahydrogestrinone. Ah, yeah. Close. So this is a rare chance to actually get corrected on this stuff. So how did THG come about? Well, I told you before that Nabolithone was made from a progestin. That's right. That's a drug that's found in birth control pills.

Well, there's other progestins out there too, lots of weird ones. And there's one called Gestrinone, which is actually not used for birth control pills but used for a disease called endometriosis, which is a female disease of the inflammation of the uterus. Uterine lining, right? Yeah, uterine lining. So I was just looking through the Merck Index. I look at structures. What is the Merck Index? I mean that's M-E-R-C-K, that's M-E-R-C-K, right?

M-E-R-C-K. Yeah, the Merck index is a compilation of compounds. It's not every compound in the world, but compounds that are natural ones or drugs or ones that have significant use in the industry. And there's maybe about 10,000 in there. And they add ones. They take ones away. So I go in there and I look up, you know, they have an index for progestin. And so I find this one called gestinone. I look at it.

And it is a hybrid of Trenbolone, which you've heard of i have yeah it's a okay it's a favorite among power lifters among other people yes and among cattle among cattle yes another thing that i do not advise kids to try at home is to take these pellets and turn it into something you can inject in yourself uh necessarily But yeah, Trembleon. Trembleon. So it was a hybrid between Trembleon and Nebolafone. It had the triane, the three double bond structure of Trembleon. And it also had this weird extra carbon coming off the ring structure that Nebolethon had. And I say, if I add the four hydrogens, turn it into an acetylene into an ethyl,

which basically makes it less progestational and way more anabolic androgenic. I can do the same reaction that I did with Nebolathone and come up with something that no one's ever seen before and probably is a lot stronger. And that's exactly what happened. So the really cool thing about it is that I made a molecule that no one's ever made before. Yeah, yeah. But the thing that I didn't know, which I found out later, which I'm reluctant to admit because if I just don't admit it, it would make me look so much more brilliant than I am.

But I'm an honest person. But there was a – I did an interview with Bob Costas. And part of that interview, he interviewed Don Catlin. And Don Catlin said, you know, this molecule, it just disappeared in our instrumentation. And we were amazed. We were like, whoever is doing this must be brilliant. And I thought to myself, well, I didn't know it would disappear. Though it kind of makes sense because of the way they test it,

they have to add these, they have to derivatize it for gas chromatography and it would be very unstable, so it makes sense, but I didn't think that at the time. So they actually had to change their whole means of testing steroids. You had to use different instruments because of that. But all I know is that it worked, and it worked at a very low dose. Victor was using it at extremely low dosages and getting very good results from people. But I tell you, that stuff was weird.

I mean, I had tried it. What made it weird? It made you feel angry. It made you feel – it dried you out and made you feel really hard and strong. It had an anti-mineral corticoid effect, which is anti-aldosterone, basically sort of like a spironolactone. How do I put that? I think you know what I'm talking about. Yes. Put it simpler. or your adrenal makes a hormone called

aldosterone which causes you to retain sodium and water and excrete potassium and this blocked that so basically you would excrete water and sodium and you would

have a diuretic effect and you would look shredded but you would effect and you would look shredded. So was the anger a result of just feeling like you were cutting weight for wrestling? So you're just in that type of dehydrated, sort of high heart rate rage state? Or was it something else that caused that? No, it wasn't anger. It just made you feel irritable. Irritable, yeah.

Yeah, certain steroids do that. I mean, another one that does it is halotestin or fluoxymesterone. And there's no – no one really knows why certain steroids have effects on the brains, on the brain. And there's ones like Diana ball, which supposedly make you feel good and whatnot. But you know, no one has a valid explanation for that.

But the, the I've heard, maybe you can speak to this and you know, I know, I know Chris Bell and Mark Bell and they did the documentary. I always get the order wrong. I think it's bigger, faster, stronger. with anabolics because it seems, and I might be pulling this from hearsay, but that many of the cases of say people committing suicide or committing a homicide, say when they're on anabolics is often while they're simultaneously tape taking say SSRIs or anti-anxiety medication. And it's hard to say if it's correlation or causation, but are there any particular drugs that you think are contraindicated for athletes? Let's just use that example, who are taking anabolics. I don't, as far as psych drugs go, I don't know of any, but certainly with orals, you do not want to be on a blood thinner like Coumadin or anything like that.

In fact, I had a friend who was taking Superdraw. Superdraw was one of those over-the-counter designer steroids that was quite potent. And they actually thin your blood themselves. They're anti-thrombolytic. So if you combine them with these blood thinners, let's say if, you know, your doctor thinks you have blood clots in your legs or whatnot, and you're also taking steroids, especially an oral steroid,

you can easily have excessive bleeding. And my friend ended up having bleeding ulcers in his stomach and had to go to the hospital. He's like, why does this happen? And I was like, what are you taking? I'm like, I'm taking Superdraw in my blood thinners. He's like, well, you shouldn't do that. Well, you didn't tell me. Well, you didn't ask me.

So yeah, don't – never take a blood thinner. And that's a lot, I don't know if you know this, but with a lot of anabolic steroids, people get bloody noses, and that's exactly why. Huh, I did not know that. That makes perfect sense. I mean, there's a lot more to it, but the image that came to mind was people doing power lifters competing in meets and getting bloody noses. But then again, they also have like 1,200 pounds on their backs, so it could be a combination of factors. The blood pressure, the transient blood pressure that they experience during a lift is phenomenal. Yeah. You know, if you could measure it, I don't know why the blood vessels just don't split and explode.

Now, you've been involved with a number of different companies. I have to ask because a friend wanted me to ask you, and I'm going to get the, is it ursolic or ursolic acid? I have no idea. But he wanted to know when is he going to be able to get more ursolic acid and maybe you could explain for people what it is. Oh, okay. So we –

And this is prototype nutrition that we're talking about. Okay. So this is the spray. Okay. So I first heard about ursolic acid when a study came out in a journal called Cell Metabolism. And it was written by a guy from University of Iowa. He was a researcher. to identify genes that were turned on or off in muscles, genes that had to do with catabolism or anabolism. And they were basically looking for catabolic genes that were turned off and anabolic genes that were turned on. something called a – some sort of a library, a database of genes, mRNA expression signatures or something.

And they used 1,300 chemicals, just natural chemicals, drugs, whatnot or whatever. And they put them through this algorithm or whatever and it came out that ursolic acid just seemed to do everything. The next – the second one, which was a far second, was metformin. Very interesting. Okay. Which does – is a very interesting molecule in itself. However, it didn't really have the anabolic effects. So they ended up giving the acetylcholine to mice and rats.

And they found that the muscle fibers grew bigger. They got a stronger grip. And they didn't gain any weight, but they had a proportional decrease in fat mass. And they also looked at what's going on with hormones or the mechanisms in the muscle and gene expression. And one of the big things they found was a large increase in muscle-derived IGF-1. We talked about that earlier. Earlier, we were talking about IGF-1 producing the liver, but there's also localized IGF-1 producing the muscle, which is more relevant to muscle growth. So, the ursolic acid had an effect on that.

And then there was a second study done by the same group, which found that it increased the amount of brown fat quite significantly, which caused the mice to have higher levels of energy expenditure because they would eat a lot and not gain any weight and run around. And the brown fat would just burn off all the calories. So I originally came out with a product which was just a salic acid extract from rosemary. And I realized quickly that the stuff had no solubility in water or oil. It basically put it in water. It won't even wet.

You mix it up and it floats and it's completely dry. Sounds fun to drink. Yeah, you can't. That's why you put it in a castle. But still, it's in your stomach and it's just going to sit there. And unless it somehow solubilizes, you're not going to absorb it. I tried to do some stuff with, I think it was leucine recently. And I got this industrial packet of leucine.

And the same thing happened. It was just like I could shake it until my arm fell off and it would just sit there on top of the water. It was just like I could shake it until my arm fell off and it would just sit there on top of the water. It's horrible. Now, the thing with leucine is that it will eventually wet and go into solution. You got to be very patient. You just have to keep going. You have to keep going and they have ways to instantize it, but ursolic acid just will never. A hundred years, you can stir it. It'll come to the top. So I went about trying to find derivatives, and I first made an acetate out of it, which is basically taking a hydroxyl group and make an ester out of it, an acetate ester. And then there was another functional group, which is a set of atoms that are attached to the molecule, that was a carboxylate group, which I could then make a salt out of.

So I ended up making an arginine, salt, acetate, and I found out that the solubility properties of that, it wouldn't be soluble in water. It would wet in water. However, it would be soluble in solvents like methanol and whatnot, which are good indicators of something that could absorb through your intestines or through your skin. And I decided to make a spray because I thought that, well, first of all, the manufacturing method required a solvent to begin with, so I figured I would use a transdermal-type solvent and sell it that way. And it ended up becoming a very popular product, and it worked quite well. I mean, people could really feel something from it. They would get, within a week or so, greater vascularity, greater muscle volume.

So that has been one of our best-selling products. One of my friends gets ridiculed by his significant other because it's just like 40 times at night. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When will people be able to get that again? Because I think it seems like it's been sold out for a while. Well, I just made two kilos of the stuff. So next week.

Soon. All right. Well, by the time this airs, it will have been two weeks in the past. So yeah, people who are listening, if you're listening to this first, I would not daddle if you're interested in getting this stuff because it will sell out. If it's increasing hypothetically, and this is just a question that I get a lot, so I'd like to bounce it to you. If it's increasing IGF-1 production or IGF production in any number of that, at what point does that increase the risk of cancer or cancerous growth? It's muscle specific. So I don't think it,

I think it's kind of does this activity in the muscle and sort of decomposes and doesn't really affect systemic circulation. So if you have, unless you have some kind of a tumor in a muscle or something, I can't see it really having an effect because it's not going to reach systemic circulation and then say go to your prostate and stimulate a tumor there or anything. Right. This is a totally selfish question, but I'd imagine there are some people listening who would be asking themselves the same thing. If you were, and you're probably so sick of getting this question, but I have to ask it. If I would like to get better at chemistry and understanding organic chemistry, clearly out of school, what would you recommend I do? I mean, like I have the cognitive apparatus, I think, to learn it. I just have never approached it in any type of systematic or interesting way. I mean, are there any resources, any approaches that you would suggest if I want to become basically just

very rudimentary, in a rudimentary way, fluent in more of the language of chemistry so that I can just be more informed. Well, you're absolutely correct. I do get that question a lot. learned organic chemistry and all this was a very laborious process of taking courses and being frustrated and not knowing what the hell anything meant and working and studying and taking exams until it clicked. So to say that you're going to pick up some book and, you know, read it for an hour a night or something and then suddenly start to understand all this, you know, that you're going to pick up some book and, you know, read it for an hour a night or something and then suddenly start to understand all this, you know, unless you're some,

some sort of genius, you know, like amazing person. Yeah. Like you learned Chinese in two days type of person. I don't know. That's a good question. Here's maybe a slightly different question because I think what I might do honestly is just reach out to one of these extension schools in the Bay Area like UC Berkeley or whatnot and see if they have some type of introduction to organic chemistry that isn't going to want to make me slam my head in a car door that has some type of decent teacher instruction to it. You've taken general chemistry? I have not. I don't know. That's embarrassing to say, but I don't recall if I have or not, partially because in a very undirected myopic way, I mean, most of what I've learned, I feel like most of what I've learned from chemistry, I have taken basic, I'm almost 100% sure I've taken basic chemistry and then also some neurochemistry in the first few years of college.

But most of what I've ended up learning is through self-experimentation and then wondering what could go right, could go wrong, did go right, did go wrong. I mean, from an athletic standpoint as a consumer, I think it just came down to similar to yourself. It's like, oh, well, that's very curious, but I'm not sure the journalist is getting it right. Let me go to the library. Let me go to PubMed. Let me try to figure out, like, is there even a plausible mechanism, right?

And I remember reading a story about you early on with, I think it was Yohimbe and like the testosterone and that whole experience where you're like, wait a second. Yeah, that was actually before the ostinine. Yohimby contained testosterone. So I bought a bunch of Yohimby capsules, broke them open, and extracted them with a solvent and got this green yuck. I'm like, testosterone is not supposed to be green. And then did an NMR, which is a nuclear magnetic resonance test on it. And I'm like, this, once I started looking through the chem abstracts, which was in the library that was on the floor I worked on, and cross-referencing Yohimbe with testosterone, there was zero connection there. So I realized that the whole thing was a lie. Right. Yeah.

No, no. I was just going to say, like, that's so – looking at it from a slightly different perspective, what happened with me is, uh, it was, uh, you know, you him be, you him, be, and you him being were popular at a point for, or they kind of made the rounds, right? I mean, they're, they're fads and supplements for fat loss. And it was thought like, well, because of these particular receptors that might be effective for reducing body fat in, say, the legs or wherever it might be, and took this yohimbine. And my body does not agree with that stuff. I just get extremely overstimulated, and I feel like I'm on the verge of vomiting the

entire time that it's, I guess, peaking. And that made me interested in looking at, you know, so you read beta agonist and then you realize there are different types of beta agonists. Like what the hell is an agonist? And okay, well then by learning what an agonist is, you start hearing about antagonist and then down the rabbit hole we go, right? So that's a long answer to a short question, but I don't, I really, if I have taken chemistry courses, I need a significant brush up. But the, where do you think, what were the biggest wastes of time for you in the classes that you took? The things that you were like, this actually had no application

to the practical side of what I'm interested in. Is there anything that comes to mind? Well, one graduate course really pissed me off because it had to do with analytical chemistry, advanced analytical chemistry, instrumentation and whatnot. And it was very interesting. And we didn't really deal with the instruments directly very much at all but um i studied my ass off and i and i wrote one of the the best reports the guy in the best papers and the guy complimented me on it um and i i learned a theory and all that and the exam ended up being what is the inner diameter of a of a column that we put into a gs390 and i'm like what the hell he looked this stuff up in a manual and everything is like stuff you know if you're a tech or something you know it was it was almost no theory, and I was just like, what is wrong with this teacher? I just was so frustrated, and I ended up not passing the course.

So, I mean, the course was useful, but the exam and the way the guy approached what the students should come away with was completely out of whack. But I also hated physical chemistry, thermodynamics. It's good stuff if you want to be an engineer or whatnot, but I wanted to be a synthetic organic chemist. So that stuff, and I involved a lot of math. I hate calculus and all that. So I'd love to ask a couple of, a couple of fan questions, uh, that, that have come in and, um, then we can segue to some of the stuff that you're working on right now. Uh, the first is, and, uh, I would love to know the answer to this too. Uh, this is from Michael Taphouse.

When will we be able to measure our own BHB levels without blood? BHB for those people who don't know is beta hydroxybutyrate. So currently if you're experimenting, as I have been often with ketogenic diets, exogenous ketones, which you're going to get into, I'm using the precision extra device from Abbott labs to measure my ketone concentration in millimolars. So when, when will we be able to measure our own BHP levels without blood? And I'll just modify that and say, or in some easier way. You know, that's a dominant question, right? That's a dominant question. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. No, but, and I'm sorry, and I didn't listen to the entire Dominic interview, but I listened to most of it. But I imagine you probably brought that up. And what his answer would have been would be the acetone breathalyzer. And I don't know how accurate that is. Tom seems to think it's relatively accurate. The catonics or something like it.

Yeah, so the catonics. So the Dominic we're talking about, for people who haven't heard, I did an interview with Dominic D'Agostino. He's a fascinating researcher and scientist who also deadlifts like a freaking monster, but is really, really savvy with this stuff. The ketonics, so I have a ketonics device. Side note, because I was doing this, the whole series of strange experiments where I was getting 100 grams of vitamin C intravenously and doing all of this stuff. And I wanted to monitor my ketone levels while getting this infusion because the, the, you can't use a glucometer. I realized cause I scared the living hell out of myself while I was getting one of these IVs. Cause I started to feel a little

funny and I was wondering if I was hypoglycemic because I'd been scared by some horror stories that had been told by folks. And so I used a glucometer and it came out 385. And I was like, uh-oh, that's not good. It came out 385 and my millimolar concentration was probably about six at the time. It was high. And I was like, well, that sounds like ketoacidosis if the device is accurate. And the doctor who was supervising me said, there's no way that's accurate. It has to be broken. He tested it himself, 80. And just to place this for people, this was around 5 p.m., right over the Golden Gate Bridge, gridlock outside, not immediately close to a hospital. I mean, I had a doctor supervising me, but if I required some type of sophisticated operation, I was not in a good place.

And it turned out because then I tested it again, 389. And I was just like, wow, it is as usual for me. And which is why people should always do their own homework and get a tattoo. This is don't try this at home. Don't do that folks. Actually, the people that like one in a thousand will probably go and get it. But the, is that, um, when I feel like I might've actually done it, meaning like, Oh, I think this might be it. Like I finally statistically just gotten to the point where one of my self experiments backfires to the extent that I'm like going to die. I looked at it and I

was like, just kind of laughed and looked at the doctor and I was like, well, that's not very good. And, and it turned out like, it turned out that the vitamin C, uh, causes the, the strips that are used for reading the blood drop in the, in these glucometers to malfunction. It just, it messes with the, the electrical, uh, conductivity or something like that. So I wanted to track my ketones, but I knew that I would get an error with the BHB through the finger pricks, which always happened after these IV infusions. And so I was playing with the ketonics, the downside of the ketonics, and maybe there are more advanced versions now, but it's basically like keto sticks with AP on. And it says if you're light, moderate, or heavy, but it's basically like keto sticks and it will for with a p on and it says if you're light moderate or heavy but it's it's no more specific than that so i was like ah i know i know i know i'm high i want to see how it varies over time ah but sorry for uh sorry for no i i understand it and i'm working on improved versions of uh of ketones. I'm actually ready to file a patent.

I can't give away what I'm doing or whatnot, but we have a whole bunch of strips here and we've been doing our own blood tests and they're vital. You need an exact number to make a graph. Let's talk about the exogenous ketones. So – because it's come up in a few other interviews, including in Dominic's interview. So ketokana or ketokana – no, tropicana, tropicana. Yeah, that's it.

I'm remembering it. Ketokana. Yep. Keto Kana and keto sports. So when I'm flashing back to this conversation that I had with Peter Atiyah, and he was talking about drinking jet fuel in his kitchen at one point, just like dry heaving for an hour and trying not to wake his family up. And that was the Model T version of ketone salts that I think Dom had shipped him in some nondescript container. But you've made a lot of advancements. So I guess the questions are, how did you get introduced to the exogenous ketone world? And this is because I've heard it from so many people,

sorry, this is long, but it's not androgynous ketones. I don't know what it is on the internet, but like so many people refer to them as androgynous ketones. Like, no, they're not androgynous, exogenous, like exoskeleton from outside the body. That's it. Exo. Yeah, exogenous. So how did you get introduced to all of that? Well, I'm so glad that I did because at the time, I was kind of stuck love the sport and a lot of great people in it but it's just dead. It's all – how am I going to get a pump or what is the best stimulant I could take to make me insane before I work out or what's going to be anabolic and you can't sell anything that works anymore. So, Dominic D'Agostino called me or sent me an email saying, you know, I'm looking for contract, some contract synthesis work.

And, you know, I know, Patrick, you Patrick, I saw you on the boards. I know you're a chemist. People have mentioned you. And I haven't had any success with anyone. And what I'm looking for is to make what's known as a ketone diester. It is a pro-drug to acetoacetate, which is a ketone. And I said, yeah, I know what ketones are. I know all about that.

And I thought to myself, this sounds like some really cool stuff because I had known about the ketogenic diet and everything, and I knew about ketones and that they are a fuel that your body uses. And I started doing some searches and said, okay, there's a big opportunity here. So let me make the ketone ester for him. He could do his studies. And it took a few months and whatnot.

I was able to make some good stuff. And he ended up, his first study, which was a CNS toxicity study on the rats. Yeah, which was supposed to be – had applications for the Navy SEALs and their rebreathers and whatnot. And he had tremendous success with that. And then it went on that he got a grant or approval to do cancer stuff. And he got tremendous results with that. And as you know, he's continued to do research and show phenomenal things with these exogenous ketones. Well, we started off with the diester and I thought to myself, well, you know, I would

like to get in on this gig. So I wonder if I can come up with some kind of a supplement version. So I said, well, I know that you can make salts out of these. I know that this sodium beta-hydroxybutyrate out there because I've seen it before, but I know it's like a million dollars. And I said, I got to find out a way to make this cheaper. And I did a lot of research and stuff, and I did find a way to make it at a price that people could actually afford to take it in effective dosages. And I made potassium sodium, which was the original stuff. I don't know if that's what Peter took or if Peter took the stuff from Oxford.

It may have been my stuff, the original Ketoph, which by the way is not meant to be drinking straight. You have to mix it with an acidic beverage. I think what he took at the time was just some equivalent, but I think it was – I mean I remember at some point I got these ketone salts from Dom and I was like – they just sat in my refrigerator for months. I was like I cannot build up the courage to take this stuff down. He wasn't given appropriate directions. If I drank that stuff straight, it would be like drinking salt water out of the ocean. Yeah, right. Yeah, you throw up. So, yeah, I mean, and then Dom did some research and found, yeah,

races to play ketones and whatnot. And we did a patent together. You know, I had an idea. You know, how do we patent this? How do we patent this? You can't just patent assaults and whatnot. And I said, let's combine it with MCTs, see what happens. And, you know, we found some results that, you know,

that looked like there were some significant changes there. And then there was a patent applied for with that. And that's a whole other rabbit hole. I just, that's a mess. I don't want to go down there. Yeah, yeah. No worries. What are the most interesting applications of exogenous ketones?

Because I've used it while fasting. I've used it while just making the transition to ketosis to make it a little easier as you're going through that very grumpy gray zone. Uh, and, uh, you know, it effectively alleviates any of what people might call keto flu for me. Uh, I know a lot of endurance athletes use it, uh, or take it prior to aerobic workouts. Like what are the most interesting applications in your mind of these exogenous ketones? First and foremost, endurance athletes. And the many teams at the Tour de France, Tour de France, sorry, France, were utilizing these ketones, whether they be salts or the stuff, the monoester, the Clark, Karen and Clark, Richard Veach.

I don't know if you know their BHB ester. Yeah. I know that the team that won, they had actually an exclusive contract. They denied taking it, but the writing's on a wall. I have all these messages everywhere. But there are also people that were on ketogenic diets and also taking exogenous ketones. I mean, keeping their levels up in the range of five,

a little multiple liter, that's up there. Yeah, it's up there. And they had, you know, they obviously, that's not an easy thing to do. So they wouldn't be putting themselves through all that suffering if they weren't getting the results. And they were getting the results. And I've also had Ironman people, MMA people that love it, that use it.

Certainly if you are avoiding carbs, if you are on a ketogenic diet and you want to go to the gym and, you know, normally people that are, that are on regular diets, you know, they'll drink some carbs before or during their workout, you know, because your body's going to burn up carbs and you need to replenish to keep your blood sugar up and whatnot. But if you're on a ketogenic diet, your body's not using carbs really. It's using ketones. So you're going to go in that gym and you're just going to start working out and your ketones are going to be used up really quickly and you need something during your workout,

you drink exogenous ketones and it'll be like drinking carbs. I mean, you'll feel your brain will be energized, your body will be energized, you won't tank. It's pretty amazing. I mean, people that, I've given it to people that, you know, are like, I'm on the ketogenic diet

and I work out, I feel like crap to try this. And they're like, wow, you know, I didn't get tired. You know, my body,

you know, had all the fuel it needed. Yeah. And for me also, just on day one or two of converting from carbohydrate dependent to fat adapted, trying to get to at least say before I hit about 1.5 millimolars, if I have to do an interview or something like that, then I'll just take a serving of the

KetoKana 15, 20 minutes before I'm set to start the interview. And I've been really impressed. Are there particular types of people who should not take it or who should get some type of supervision or permission from their GP or whatever to consume it? Is it contraindicated with anything? Um, the BHB part, I, I don't,

I don't think so. Um, I mean, there are people that are diabetics can go into diabetic ketoacidosis, but that's a special condition. And, and I don't think this little bit of ketones is going to exacerbate that or anything. But if you are – some of these products, the sodium load is – it's not really, really high.

I mean you can have a pizza and have five or ten times the amount of sodium. But if you're on a sodium-restricted diet, you have to take that into consideration. But other than that, I don't think there's any problem. What makes you different in the world that you've inhabited up to this point? I mean, in the creation of these different things in the, the creative problem solving, uh, coming up with THG, et cetera.

If you, if you kind of look back, why are, what are the things that make you as good at it as you are? Because there are a lot of, I mean, a lot of folks trying to do these things, but you've had an incredible amount of,

of, uh, creative success. Well, when I got started in this whole thing would be the early 90s. There was no internet back then. There was, like I said, there was chem abstracts, which are this endless volume of large books with extremely small writing that you'd have to cross-reference and they were very, very hard to understand. And I learned to understand these things and then look up articles. And I had the patience to drive to a library, here to there, find these things. And I learned how to research in a very primitive way.

And I learned the patience of researching. And I got a head start before anyone else started to kind of start to do what I was already doing. And there's a lot of researchers out there that, yeah, sure, they can research and they can find, oh, a study that this does that, that does this. But do they actually have a lab? Can they actually make this stuff? Can they actually test the product to see if it really is what it is. I've also developed a certain intuition that tells me if something is worth exploring more or not.

And that depends upon a lot of things. It depends upon the journal. Well, it's not really intuition. It's actually logical. You know, it depends upon the impact factor of the journal it's published in. Are there other publications by unrelated authors or whatnot? Is there a plausible mechanism? I don't know.

I mean I think it's just a lot of experience and just an affinity for this kind of thing. When do your best ideas tend to come to you? Is there any pattern to it? That's interesting because a lot of times I'm sort of a – I'm not a consistent producer. My mind tends to go through periods of where I just am not creative. I'm frustrated. I don't feel as though anything is going to happen or whatnot. And then I'll come across something and then I'll get a spurt of energy and creativity and all these things will come out. Sometimes, you know, I'm laying in bed trying to go to sleep and I'm like, I think of four

or five different things. I'm like, wow, wow, wow, you know? And then I try to remember what they were and I should write them down. But, and then I work on them, you know? I guess that's not unheard of. Do you have any particular morning routines that you find helpful? I mean, aside from the usual, I mean, do you wake up, it sounds like you wake up on the early side. What time do you wake up and what does the first say hour and a half of your day look like well if I go to the gym

I'll wake up at 5 first thing I do is I make my coffee how do you make your coffee I just make it with a coffee maker you just drink black coffee no I put cream in it and some Splenda. I don't put any butter in it

or anything like that because I do it before I work out and then nothing against bulletproof coffee and everything, but I find it to be a little heavy on my stomach if I go into a gym. You might also have higher disaster pants potential. Yeah. Yeah, I don't. No MCTs before the gym, for sure.

Okay. And then what does your workout routine look like on a week of this or whatever you happen to be doing now? Well, as far as – let me start with I prepare my workout drink, which is I have this stuff. My friend is a trainer. His name is Ian Danny. He has a product called Amino Matrix. This company is called Optimum EFX. It's very expensive, but since I've worked with him, we make some of his products.

I get it for free, but it's basically a full-spectrum essential amino acids that's enriched in branched-chain amino acids with some other things thrown in there, phallopoic acid, citrulline malate, and a few other things. And I mix that with about 45 mils of Ketoforce, which is the stuff you're not supposed to drink straight like Peter did. So if you mix it with Amino Matrix, which is very tart, it buffers the alkalinity of the keto force, and it ends up tasting quite good. So I drink a little bit of that. I take it to the gym.

Lately, I work out maybe three to four times a week sometimes you know if I feel I'm motivated to really get into you know extra good shape I'll work out more however I usually combine I do legs and arms

in the same day a lot and chest and back and then shoulders, abs. And I mix it up sometimes. And I do cardio. I don't – I haven't gotten into a lot of the kettlebell or some of the athletic type of different kind of things. Metabolic conditioning stuff. Well, yeah. Well, some of those – yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Which I would like to do, but I just don't have the time to learn it all. I'm an old dog. It can't teach me. Speaking of old dogs, how are you thinking about longevity or extending lifespan? Is that a high priority or do you not spend a lot of your brain cycles on it? And if you do think about it, what do you think are promising?

Well, I worry about my health over the next year or five or ten years. You know, I go to the doctor and sometimes I have abnormal blood values or whatnot, and I don't know what's going on there. And I worry about that. Um, because I don't want to come down with any sort of condition that's, that's going to knock me out or anything like that. I worry about, you know, cancer and all that stuff. I'm not worrying about whether I live to be 85 or 105. That's not – why worry about that at this point? I'm worried about quality of life in the immediate future. I've been thinking about taking – I was taking metformin for a while.

I stopped. Sometimes itin for a while. I stopped. Sometimes it upsets my stomach, but I've read a lot of research on it, and it seems to be maybe the most promising of the anti-aging drugs out there. It does seem to have a fair amount of of interesting data behind it um yeah rapamycin is interesting too i i had or i mean that entire kind of class but um i haven't i haven't taken either at this point i don't know for whatever reason i don't know why it makes me so i have so much trepidation about it i guess it's because i feel like once you're on it you probably if you taking it with the explicit purpose of extending longevity,

it seems like once you're signed up, you're signed up unless some type of contradictory data comes out against it, against the efficacy or indicating side effects. I'm going to switch things up just a little bit because I know that you are in a different time zone. I want to be respectful of your time, but I have a couple of what I would call rapid fire questions. Answers don't have to be short. They can be short or long, but when you think of the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind and why? Successful. I guess Bill Gates.

Not so much. I mean, he's financially successful, but he's also become quite a philanthropist. He's done a lot of good things. He's not just made a lot of money, but he's also put a lot of effort into making the world a better place. And I think he seems to be psychologically in it, you know, feels good about himself. Is there any particular book or books that you've given a lot as a gift? As a gift?

I've received books as gifts. I don't know if I've given – I gave my mother the book, the Kennedy book by – I think it was Chris Matthews, the guy from MSNBC. Because I know she loved Kennedy. She met Kennedy at his inauguration. It was a weird story. But one of my favorite books is by an author named Jared Diamond. It's called Guns, Germs, and Steel. Guns, Germs, and Steel. Yep. Yeah, I read that.

That really gave a big eye opening on why certain people of the world are more advanced than others and why people behave a certain way as opposed to just genetics and, oh, this person's smarter because they're this or that. There's so many aspects to it. It got to be quite a scholarly feat though near the end. The book was quite detailed. What are the most common misconceptions about you? Or is there anything that you would like to clear up in any way?

Well, I used to have a persona on the Internet as being short-tempered and arrogant. And I have a sarcasm that doesn't always come across in the written word so well. And I've kind of toned that down, but there's still a lot of people that maybe they just want to believe that I'm a jerk. I'm not sure. I don't get out and travel and go to shows, go to conferences nearly as much as I should.

And I know I really should because I'm kind of a recluse when it comes to that. Because I know a lot of my colleagues, they're here and there and everywhere and everyone's meeting each other. And I feel as though everything's happening. I'm being left behind. So this year I'm going to try to change all that. But I run a business here, or one of the people that run a business here, that we do production. We have to be testing every batch and whatnot, and I have to be here. So it makes it kind of hard.

I think you and I have a lot of shared DNA in that department where I can pretend for very brief periods of time to be an extrovert, but I find it very exhausting. So I, that's part of the reason that I'm cutting back significantly on all of the shows and conferences and whatnot that I attend this year because I just find it extremely draining. Oh yeah. Uh, but you also end up being reactive, right? In the sense that when you're in the, in the, in the cave working on production, I mean, you can, I would imagine it's easier to set your priorities and get less distracted by shiny objects than if you're out and about being bombarded by all of these inputs at a conference. I mean, I, I, it's been a long time since I've been in that world, but that's what I would imagine to be the case. What, what advice would you give your 30 year old self? And maybe you could place where you were, what you were doing at the time.

30 years old is when I moved out here. I would say don't listen to that Stan Antosh guy. Stay the hell away from him. Because he really, you know, there was like two or three years where I could have jumped ahead a lot quicker if it wouldn't have been for him. It's hard to say. I would – I mean if I knew all the stuff I knew right now, I would just say, hey, I know how to make this. You can't say that.

Right, right. It's like buying Apple. Yeah, right. It's like, well, if I knew then what I knew now, right. It's just an unfair question. It's just – you mean like philosophically as far as demeanor and all that goes? Anything. It's a wide open question.

But we can also table that one for now. I would be more patient with people and not – on the internet and whatnot. In person, I was become impatient and belittle people and whatnot. And some people thought it was really funny, but it did turn a lot of people off. And I don't – I'm ashamed of that. It's not who I am. There's – and this is just because it's so topical. I want to at least bring it up and we don't have to discuss it. But there's a current scandal that's been discussed pretty widely about Delta 2. Do you have any interest in commenting on that or would you prefer to just leave that be for the moment?

No, that's interesting. That all came about with – Yeah, and if you could catch people up who are not – just give people some context for those who aren't familiar. I wish I had that guy's name. thing came about with the doctor in Indianapolis that was prescribing growth hormone to his wife. And I guess a couple of years after, someone went to work for that organization, and he heard about that. And I don't know. I can't really remember. But Al Jazeera

did an undercover thing and they found about this guy but part of what this guy was also doing was selling this stuff called Delta 2, which was a anabolic steroid that was never marketed.

And I heard a lot of people talking about it. For instance, they asked Victor Conti about it. And Victor doesn't know what it is. Obviously, he said it was no good. It was weak and whatnot. And it's actually something that I made back in the early 2000s and tried it out. It's very difficult.

It's weird stuff to make because it turns into like fiberglass and expands. You can't filter it. You have to make it into an acetate, but whatever. That's all chemistry stuff. But I made it into a spray, and I was thinking about selling this as a supplement. I never gave this to athletes as undetectable type thing or anything like that. It's actually a pheromone that elephants, female Asian elephants tend to excrete in their pee in very large amounts at certain times of the month. It's strange.

And it's also found in human sweat, believe it or not. I think the bacteria in your human sweat take some of your endogenous hormones like endosterone, which are metabolites, and they convert it into this Delta-2. But I ended up making it into just for a couple people to try and not athletes or anything like that but into a uh uh oil-based injectable 100 milligrams per milliliter and that was based upon uh um some studies that were done that showed that the stuff actually was quite potent. It was pretty much equal potent to testosterone, milligram per milligram, but not as androgenic.

And the people that tried it, they liked it, you know, very much and whatnot. And that kind of came and went and never bothered with that. But my guess is that, you know, some of the people that tried it already got around. And someone else got it made and did the same thing and then started – this guy was one of them, started giving it to athletes years after. And in retrospect, I think I heard about this stuff being given to athletes a few years back but didn't believe it because I didn't think that the drug testing organizations would not be able to find it. I thought it would be way too easy, but maybe not. But it was just interesting because I read about it, and I said,

oh, man, that's that stuff I fooled around with. It's old news from 2001. And then I see Victor saying it's no good. And Victor's saying it's a pro-hormone, it's oral. He doesn't even know what he's talking about. By injection, as the acetate, it's very effective. It is. What are other drugs or molecules that you think we'll be hearing more about in the next few years in the media?

Maybe they've been around for a long time. Maybe they're new. What types of, maybe I'll rephrase it, just like performance-enhancing drugs or therapies do you think we'll be hearing more about in the next few years? Well, a lot of the most promising ones have to do with gene therapy. And those have been around for a long time, and they don't seem to go anywhere. There's a lot of safety concerns.

I can't think of any actual small molecule or peptide drugs that you just inject that do a heck of a lot. That's a good question. But I did talk to someone from ESPN not too long ago, and he asked me a question about what do I think is going on, what is the most advanced thing that's going on that you think? And I say, well, I always had a suspicion that the Chinese may be using gene therapy. probably in certain genes that express certain growth factors or repress certain other genes or whatnot. And these kids can grow up to be superhumans. And that could have happened as far back as mid to late 90s. And those super kids could be coming of age right now and competing.

And I've seen some of these Chinese athletes that just kind of, you know, they don't make any sense. They look like the bully whippets that have the myostatin inhibition. Right, right. And at the same time, they have completely smooth skin and, you know, there's no androgens going on. You know what I mean? It's just sort of puzzling. Puzzling combination of characteristics. Do you have any opinion?

And I don't. I'm getting pretty deep in my ignorance pool here. But SARMs, you know, like this selective androgen receptor modulators, is there any there there? Or is that, that's just a, I mean, it's an acronym that I've heard kind of thrown around a bit recently. Do you have any familiarity with those or thoughts on those? I have a funny anecdote about those and then I'll tell you my thoughts. But the guy that shares my lab right now, he used to be a salesman for another chemical company in town that we had done some work with. And they would make drugs, small amounts for research for other drug companies. They were basically a contract synthesis place.

And they made thousands of SARMs, SARM candidates. And there was one that looked amazing on paper, and they gave it to the rats, and within a day, all the rats were dead. Oh, God. So that just shows you that something that works in vitro, you don't know what's going to happen. But as far as SARMs go, they're basically trying to do the same thing that androgenic antibiotic steroids do. They know a lot more about the mechanisms from the that happen there that can determine whether a compound is potent or whether it's selective in a certain cell or not.

And so they know a lot more. And they have molecular modeling where they're able to come up with theoretical compounds to say, well, this attaches to that, well, that, that, and then they find a custom synthesis place to make the molecule and then they try it on the rats and whatnot. So it is, they're basically trying to, plus they're not confined to the steroid structure because these structures are so divergent. They're completely different looking, yet they all will combine some way to the androgen receptor. So they're not confined by any one structure, and so there's thousands and thousands of possibilities out there.

However, they still have yet to eliminate the androgenic-anabolic separation. They have yet to eliminate the hepatotoxicity, basically the cholesterol. The liver issues, yeah. Yeah, the AST, ALT enzymes. What do you mean by the anabolic-androgenic separation? Oh, just reducing the androgenic effect. Yeah, you'll never get zero androgenic, 100% anabolic at any dose. They've gotten very good separation. I don't know how much better.

I mean, if it's that much better than, say, a primobolin or whatnot. But they do find that at higher dosages, like I said before, the androgenic effects do start creeping up. However, I think they are doing better and whatnot. And they certainly haven't done anything about the HPTA shutdown, which basically means shutting down your body's own testosterone production. These compounds still will do that. So there's no great improvement there. It's sort of like better anabolic steroids, but they're still the same thing pretty much.

Yeah, they're not the breakthrough that, at least at this point, that a lot of people would hope them to be. Are there any any molecules and i'll ask just a few more questions are there any particular molecules to you that you think are exceptionally beautiful or elegant are there any that just really stick out to you as far as how they look on paper yeah yeah whatever i mean just like i there are and i the reason i ask seems like a weird question and it might not might be a bad question but but there are, I know mathematicians, for instance, who find certain equations just to be very elegant to them. They're like, wow.

All right. Like that does so much with so little. I would call that beautiful. Right. So I don't know if that exists in your world of chemistry, but if it's not something you think about, then it's not – there doesn't have to be an answer to that question. I was just curious. Well, I wouldn't say a specific chemical structure, but there are certain compounds which crystallize beautifully. I don't remember what it was.

I was working with something. And by crystallize, I mean a lot of times you purify things by heating them up in a solvent or solvent mixture until you reach the point where it goes clear. I mean, it's cloudy and it gets hot enough. You know, things are more soluble when they get hot. It goes clear and then you let it sit and it cools down and then the pure chemical tends to sometimes crystallize. And some things crystallize into these big, long needles and the needles get bigger and

bigger. And that's what I find beautiful because that means that I have a pure compound. And that makes me very happy. Now, when things don't crystallize and sometimes they'll sit there and they'll turn into this nasty oil, that pisses me off. I don't like that. So I love nice crystals. Nothing makes me happier than nice crystals. Well, on that note, Patrick, this has been a blast. I enjoy getting into the weeds.

And you're constantly selling out of everything. So the best place for people to find the Keto Kana, if they want to experiment with that, is KetoSports.com? Or is there a different place you would suggest they check out? Well, ketosports.com has the information. We yet to have the ability to sell off that page. So go to prototype nutrition, one word, prototypenutrition.com. That's where you can get the Keto, Kena or the – Or salic acid. Or the UR spray. Nutrition.com. That's where you can get the Keto Can or the – Or salic acid.

Or the UR spray. And we also have other products under the Keto Sports brand. They're all sold under the prototype site. We have a C8 caprylic acid product, which is an MCT that's only the C8, which is the best MCT. We have a combination coconut and ghee product that's good for cooking. It's keto-friendly. we're about to introduce a product that reduces blood glucose by inhibiting absorption from intestine and speeding up elimination

of glucose through the urine which will cause your blood sugar to drop and will help you reach ketosis a lot quicker. That's, that's very interesting. Well,

I would like to, I will go check that out right now. That's very, very interesting. Well, there's, there's been studies on it. It's there's,

there's enough safety data on it. I don't want to give away exactly what it is, but we, we have the material here. We just, I'm having trouble tabulating it. We have to be, do some granulation work.

But by the time this interview comes out, this product will probably be available. Fantastic. Well, then people can check it out, prototypenutrition.com. And of course, as always, everybody, you will be able to check out plenty in the show notes, all the links, everything else,

at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. Is there any other, are there any other sites? And of course I'll put these in the show notes as well, but any, any place that you would encourage people to see what you're up to or find you online? Well, I have patrickarnoldblog.com. I don't keep it updated much lately, but I probably have about 30, 40 articles from the past. A lot of them pretty unique stuff

that you wouldn't find anywhere else. Perfect. I have a Facebook page, but that's mostly for just being a wise-ass. Alright, so people can find you on the Facebook, and I'll get that from you as well. Is it a fan page or is it just a personal page?

It's just a personal page. But we also have a company called eFarm Nutrition, which has not been a big priority lately, but they have a Facebook page. And Prototype Nutrition has a Facebook page. I think that's about it. That's great. Well, I'll list everything out. And Patrick, there are lots of rabbit holes we could go down, of course.

I know. Maybe we'll do a round two with lots of rabbit holes we could go down, of course. I know. Maybe we'll do a round two with some additional rabbit holes. But thank you so much for taking the time. This was a lot of fun. Yeah, I agree, Tim. Thanks. And everybody listening, as always, thank you. And until next time, work smart, play often, and experiment well.

Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird

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