Mark Bell's Power Project - Dr. Adam Hotchkiss - Hormone Optimization Do’s and Dont’s! MBPP Ep. 753

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

Today we are joined by Marek Health partnered health care provider, Dr. Adam Hotchkiss! We covered all things in human optimization from TRT, diet and even the benefits of Cialis. Follow Dr. Hotchkiss on IG: https://www.instagram.com/dr.aehotchkiss/ Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really does work): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast

Hey guys, I want to tell you about Merrick Health, the premium telehealth clinic owned by Derek from More Plates, More Dates. Now, when some people think about Merrick Health, they think it's just another one of those testosterone companies or another one of those blood work companies. But Merrick Health is really cool because, yeah, you can get your blood work done, you can get hormone optimization, but you can also get nootropics. You can also get Viagra. You can get literally whatever you need from that clinic and they make it very, very easy for you. That's why we love Merrick. So Andrew, how can people learn about it? Yes, Merrick Health is not just a one trick pony. But if you did want to get your labs done, we highly recommend the Power Project panel. That's 28 different labs. That's also going to come with a client care coordinator that's going to give you a lab analysis, and they're going to work with you and help you optimize your body.

Again, that's at merrickhealthalth.com slash PowerProject. At checkout, enter promo code PowerProject to save $101 off that entire panel. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. And we are now. So what is this majestic cereal? Malted milk. What? Okay, look up malted milk and just bring it up.

It sounds like something like my grandparents would have made. If you want to make any cereal. I've had it before. You've had it? Yeah, would have made. If you want to make any cereal. I've had it before. You've had it? Yeah, it's amazing. So you know what I'm talking about. You just pour the powder in whatever bland-ass cereal and the cereal becomes good. I don't know what the macros were on it, but I just knew that.

I put it in every fucking cereal I could. You ever have a malted shake? I've heard of that. Yeah. They probably use malted milk and malted shakes. Yeah. I love malt. They're really good.

One of the cereals I eat the most is grape nut flakes. Have you ever had grape nuts? No. Really? Yeah, it's like an old man cereal. It sounds way too healthy. Do they actually have grapes in it? No. How about nuts? Neither. Okay. But they've turned it into a flake and it has that malt flavor.

It's delicious. That's got to blow your butthole out pretty good. It does, yeah. It's like pure fiber. Wait, grape nut cereal cereal okay you before chewing on a tree yeah before this gets started you said you're eating kashi and now you bring up grape nut cereal have you been eating this from a kid from since you were a kid or is this more of an adult i'm a man so i gotta eat old no no i i eat old cereal bran flakes but i do have a significant amount of like sugary cereal as well not so much anymore but certainly there was a point in my life where I ate a ton of sugary cereals. Whenever my mom bought that shit, I would just take spoonfuls of sugar and just dump it right on top.

I was like, this is perfect now. I was raised, I knew that Corn Flake thing because I was raised in that church. Okay. A Corn Flake church? Yeah. Yeah, the Adventist and so i'm no longer my team was like having second thoughts yeah you gotta eat these cornflakes so we ate like i had like weedabix and like these brands like i was raised relatively like with food food centered

pretty healthy ish okay kind of different yeah and we'd go through weird like all of a sudden my parents be like we're vegan now and i'd have to be vegan for a few months and and then we'd get back to getting some like i could have chicken or fish again your parents were fairly health conscious yeah for the most part like that church the adventist church is very like health focused um and so there was always like we were centered around food a lot is it more christian catholic or yeah no they're they're christian yeah i've since way grown out of that right uh the rest of the family pretty health conscious or mainly just you uh turn into a meathead over the years uh yeah just me for sure yeah there's more like a spiritual thing you know and then mine was uh my mom was very health conscious i think growing up um yeah

like when she was pregnant with me, before being pregnant, she had signed up for like a marathon or I think it was a triathlon or something. It was like eight months into pregnancy with me and was like, fuck it, I'm doing it. Like I signed up for it, so I got that stubbornness and like that. Yeah. Shit.

Probably wasn't the best for me. I came out late and almost died and stuff. Well, how'd she do? I don't know. Yeah, that's what matters most, right? I just heard these things through the years.

Like, yeah, your mom's crazy. Yeah, Quinn was like stuck in there. I don't know what she was doing. She came very late. So it's just, sometimes I guess

there's circumstances. Maybe not. Maybe it wasn't the running or maybe it was. Hard to say. I don't know. It's pretty comfortable in there though. I bet. You know, there are. Maybe not. Maybe it wasn't the running or maybe it was. Hard to say. I don't know. It's pretty comfortable in there, though. I bet.

You know, there are people that apparently remember what it was like to be in the boom. When people say that shit, I'm just like. Dude, I don't believe it. I don't believe it either. But they claim to. It was probably really dark. Exactly, right? Like, you sure you're not just remembering last night when you slept?

Yeah, right. Your eyes aren't open. You're just sleeping. Yeah. Jesus. Did you do a lot of sports as a kid, too? I actually didn't. Yeah, I did almost zero.'t open. You're just sleeping. Yeah. Jesus. Did you do a lot of sports as a kid too? I actually didn't. Yeah, I did almost zero.

I skateboarded most of my life, like, well, when I was younger. Just didn't have much exposure to it or didn't want to do it? Little. So kind of played into that whole, like, crazy Christianity that we were grown up into. We had to go to church on, like, Saturdays, and it was very regimented, and so we weren't really allowed to do that many competitive sports because a lot of them happened on the weekend. Then I kind of just started rebelling pretty hard and grew my hair out,

dyed it black, and was wearing skinny jeans and skateboarding. Were you an emo kid? I wasn't emo. I was more like punk. I hated emo kids. I looked like an emo kid, and from the outside, you'd be like emo kid. But I was like, fuck emo. I'm hardcore.

I'm punk. That makes a lot of sense. But I was an emo kid. If you were going to class them, categorize them, I fit into that. How did you get into some lifting weights? Yeah, so lifting weights and everything basically changed the entire trajectory of my life because, yeah, for a while there, like, I was skating, kind of messed around, partying a lot, doing drugs, doing stupid shit. Like, I had to enroll in college. My parents basically at, like, 18 or whatever when I graduated in high school, they were like, you got to either enroll in college or get out.

Like, if you're going to stay here, you got to be doing something. Good for them. So I signed up a lot. I just never went. And then, you know, like my first semester went by and I just failed everything because they don't kick you out of college. You know, in high school, you know, I figured like, well, they're just going to drop me, whatever. And then I get that, like, I don't know, report card. Is that what it is still in college?

I can't remember. But all zeros like apps, you know, and I'm like, oh, fuck, this isn't good. Like I just wasted their money. I'm like, this isn't good. And then I just kind of got in trouble with doing something else stupid. And I'm like, I need to change my life. I'm not doing shit. So one day, I just literally one day cut off all my hair.

I got this tattoo. It says basically with it or on it. It was what the Spartans used to say, like when they go to war, like give it this year all or die trying. Because they would go out with their shield. And then it was like, go out with their shield and then it was like come back with your shield or dead on your shield you know because and i was just like getting really into the spartans i'm like these are men like what i'm doing is just dicking around like these are these were badass dudes they were defending like their their

countrymen and everything you know fuck each other though too i think they did a deep you get into being a spark i think now we're going's go. They would just penetrate the thighs. No, thigh wars. Dude, you're absolutely right, though. I think they did because they were like, if you love the dude next to you, you're going to fight so much harder. This isn't the month for this type of conversation.

We've already gotten enough backlash, and now you're wearing a pink shirt. I know. It's an appropriate time for me to bring it up. Smokey and I went down this road. Being part of Team Super super training it was important yeah so i i changed everything i uh i got a gym membership and then getting like working out was something i was getting super into and i've kind of always been the i'm gonna give everything 110

or nothing like i go like that's why i was way submerged in that skateboarding culture and everything and yeah it's all i did so then i started working out and that's why I was way submerged in that skateboarding culture and everything. And that's all I did. So then I started working out, and that's all I did. I'd get home. I'd be on the, at first, like, the bodybuilding.com forum and stuff, you know, learning everything. And then venturing out, like, bought a physiology book, and I'm starting to learn. So I re-enrolled in college. So, like, I really like the science stuff. Started taking science courses, became a personal trainer.

I think I need a little bit more. You know, this isn't, it's not fulfilling enough, but I really have a passion for this stuff. So then I just continued in college. I transferred out of community college, went to a university. At that point, I was kind of thinking like I want to do something in medicine. I never thought that I could go on to be a doc just because I felt like I didn't come from that pedigree, basically, you know. I thought those were kids that were on like yachts and going to Harvard and stuff. And I'm like I didn't come from that pedigree, basically. I thought those were kids that were on yachts and going to Harvard and stuff. And I'm like, I started a community college. I'm never going to be a doctor.

So maybe I could be a nurse or a PA or something, maybe. I started shadowing this doctor, super successful dermatologist, and he kind of told me his story. It was very similar, except for he was a surfer. He didn't even get into med school until he was 30. I'm like, oh, cool. So there's alternate paths,, not all doctors fall into this one category, all sorts of walks of life, you know? So then I kind of went down that road,

but yeah, fitness was the catalyst there. Like working out changed everything because as soon as I dove into that, I started loving science and you know, one thing, if I do another, I just kept progressing down the road. And what type of doctor did you pursue? Yeah, so when I was working for that dermatologist, I loved it. Like dermatology was super cool. I liked the mixture of clinic, and they did a lot of little minor surgeries. I was also shadowing orthopedic surgeon at the time. My dad's good friends, orthopedic surgeon, so I was loving the bone surgery stuff too. I knew I wanted to do either one of those. When you go the traditional MD or DO route, you have to pick at the end before you go to residency, the training.

Not only do you have to pick, but you have to match into these programs, which can be extremely difficult to do. Both of those are like top pain specialties, extremely hard to get into. Quick question. Difference between MD and DO? Not much. I agree. Okay. Yeah.

So MD is a medical doctor. DO is a doctor of osteopathic medicine. In the past, they used to do a lot more body manipulations. It kind of was like a MD with a little bit of chiropractic in there. Now, most of the graduating DOs don't do much of that from what I know. Yeah, at the end of the day, they're the same exact thing in my opinion. So, yeah, I'm like, dang, I'm going to have to choose between those one day. That sucks.

And then we had a nail condition come in, and the doctor brought his friend in who was a podiatrist, a foot and ankle specialist, because they do a lot of nail procedures. And so I get to talking to him, and he's like, yeah, before this, I just fixed an ankle specialist. Um, cause they do a lot of, um, you know, nail procedures. And so I get to talking to him and he's like, yeah, before this, I just fixed an ankle fracture. I'm like, that's that orthopedic surgery stuff I like. And now you're here doing skin stuff on the nails with us. Like you get to do both these things. And so at that point I was like, he's, that's what I, that's my dream, you know, skin and nails and some bones. And like, that's awesome. Like this is melting. So yeah yeah i decided to pick podiatry which is a different school too and it's a different degree so there's md do and dpm

i'm a dpm so we focus like from day one on the foot and ankle some people are really disgusted by feet i'm pretty disgusted by feet a lot of weird stuff can happen to your feet right yeah i mean this guy had to get like a bone a bone sawed down, I think, right? Yeah, yeah. Bunionette surgery. Yeah, Taylor's bunion or bunionette. Exactly. So they shaved it and put something in there.

Yeah. Yeah. A little screw. Exactly. A little screw. I think it's still there. That's crazy. Probably.

Yeah, feet are disgusting. I don't like feet either. Whenever people ask me, like, you have a foot fetish? I'm like, absolutely not. This would be the worst thing to get into if I had a foot fetish. Like, they would be ruined, you know yeah feet are disgusting i have a cool question because we've been getting into like a lot of foot development stuff as of recent um and i i know like i guess you're not focused on feet anymore but when you would see different patients was there

any stark difference you noticed between a foot of a really good athlete, if you ever got your hands on those types of feet versus GenPOP? Yeah. So, well, first I really hardly got my feet on my hands on good athletes, you know, most of what comes through podiatry clinics, like 80 to 90% are patients with diabetes who have just terrible feet. Occasionally we do get some sports med in, there are podiatrists that really specialize like out here in the Bay area. There's, um, Dr. Saxena, he's a big one world renowned, like flies up to Nike a lot. And so there are like specialists who do sports med, but we don't see it too much. Um, but no, that's actually, that's something interesting too. I, uh, I think you actually turned me on to Dr. Um, Andrew Bryan is that he's an Australian, like minimalist shoe, you know? Yeah. I saw you post this thing one day. So I started. Andrew Bryan. He's an Australian minimalist shoe.

Yeah, I saw you post this thing one day, so I started following him. Recently, he posted this post of Usain Bolt and LeBron James' feet. Did you see that one? I did, yeah. And they're just destroyed. They are wrecked. And he's like, does this mean that they're not good athletes? Would they be better athletes if their feet weren't this way? Probably not.

So it's kind of interesting. Athletes might have really destroyed terrible feet too but everybody's different and so that's one thing that i'm always saying like we can't really throw everybody into these classifications of like your foot needs to be this way you know everybody's a little bit different maybe their feet were just chucked into shoes that weren't working great for them and their feet got kind of mangled over the years but didn't have any any uh negative side effects yeah could be or maybe their feet are just mangled because that's how their genetics are something you know it's super interesting it's interesting when people talk about problems or issues how uh a lot of times there's not an actual symptom attached to it i mean sometimes it's a good idea to investigate certain things

just to make sure that you're healthy and that you're heading in the right direction. With myself, my sleep has been a challenge for a few years. And then more recently, I think I have most of it solved. I'm sleeping longer and stuff like that. But it's making me really groggy. And previously, I didn't really feel like I had any symptoms. However, I'm just like, well, not sleeping doesn't seem like a great idea. But I don't know, for whatever reason, maybe I was able to condition

myself to that or I'm not really sure. But in a lot of what you're doing with Merrick Health now, does it seem like a lot of people are coming to you just to want to make advancements and they don't really have a lot of symptoms and you have to try to, I mean, you're trying to service the client in some way and give them what they want or what they think they want, but you probably have to steer them a little bit towards, well, hey, you should be really grateful and thankful that you don't have any symptoms right now. You actually are heading in a pretty good direction and here's what I suggest kind of thing. Yeah, I'm huge on that. Like symptoms are big and what we do at Merrick is a lot of

the subjective of how you feel. Um, we definitely correlate it with lab work and we do crazy extensive lab work, which is awesome. And a lot of people just come just to get a peek at that, which is cool. But symptoms are really the huge driver. Uh, even like with feet, you know, like if you have a Taylor's bunion or an actual bunion or you have a flat foot, but you're not in pain, there's no need to throw an orthotic in there or do a surgery or something like that, you know, and the same goes with, you know, the hormone replacement and stuff. Like if you come to us and your testosterone is 300, but you're like, I'm making great gains. I'm, my libido is amazing. You know, my recovery is good. My motivation's there. Like, why do you need 800 testosterone? You know, is there, is there really a difference? Like maybe you are somebody who

works really well at 300. Okay. So this, um, we're, we're just hitting it right off the bat. Um, Andrew, can you look up coach Eugene Teo? The Eugene Teo? Yeah, yeah, yeah. His Instagram. And the reason why I want to mention this guy is because he's super jacked. Uh, he's going to be on the podcast at some point, but his testosterone is not necessarily high, right? And there are many athletes who you were mentioning. You mentioned a few people. But athletes think that or people think that when they get their test checked or whatever, if it's not at a certain level, they need to start doing things to get it at a higher level. Because if their test is high, now I'm going to be able to make all these magical gains.

What do you think people are getting potentially messed up with that idea, or are they correct? Yeah, I think it varies for each individual. So, yeah, when I came to Merrick, I was kind of thinking like – because we get a lot of – we got like you guys with us. We get these high-end athletes that come to us, and I'm like, I'm going to finally be able to – oh, yeah. That's him, by the way.

He's definitely jacked. His test isn't high. He's natural, and he makes great gains. Yeah. Yeah, so I was thinking, like, I'm going to finally get to see, like, all these fake natties, you know. Like, even with you, I've got to be honest. I have a list over here.

We're going to go over that later, and I'm just kidding. Like, I'm now your doc at Merrick Health. I'm going to see you later. I was looking over your labs. He did not tell me to do this. This is the first time we've talked. I looked and you have natural numbers, at least right now. I can't say what you've done for the rest of your life.

He's natty right now. I was actually surprised at how many athletes come through who legitimately don't have amazing numbers. And so I think that sometimes people are misguided just by the number of testosterone. Like you don't need to have a 1500 testosterone to have amazing gains. Everybody's physiology is a little bit different.

So there's a lot going on. There's the, uh, the androgen receptor could be an argument. Like how, how much, how many androgen receptors you have, what's the density, what's the quality of them? Um, like, you know, it's the density, what's the quality of them. It's been theorized that some of these super responders, like the bodybuilders, the ones that step on the Olympia stage, it's been theorized potentially they have more density of these androgen receptors.

Potentially their transcription of the DNA occurs differently than ours do. Maybe they have different mechanogrowth factor that's like an IGF of the muscle. So there's so many other factors, not just the testosterone. Because I've seen like a guy with 300, you know, look like something like that. And then I've seen a guy with 2,000 running all kinds of shit. How does a person have like 2,000 just normal? No, no, no. Even like that. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. But I have seen some pretty elevated ones too where it's like 1,500 natural and they're definitely, they're working out, not making that great of gains. Everybody's a little bit different. And to base everything off the number is just silly I think. Is there some other number? Is there like free testosterone or is there some sort of ratio that if you get people in that ratio, does it seem like they tend to make a lot of progress?

Sometimes, yeah. Yeah. So like the free is definitely something that we're going to look at. So the free testosterone is basically the testosterone that can be utilized. Theoretically, I think there's some research recently where free maybe isn't as important as we used to think. But either way, free means that it's not bound to a protein. So either albumin or sex hormone binding globulin. When it's not bound, it can potentially be more readily used. And so, yeah, getting that free up is really what we're trying to do. That's another thing, though, too. We do see sometimes, and that's why it's nice to kind of go to a place like Merrick rather than just to your doc,

because there is some where a guy has like an 800 testosterone, but their free testosterone is in the gutter. It's like five or something, so very low. And they're having all the symptoms of low testosterone, but their doc's been telling them for years, you have fine testosterone, you have fine. Well, maybe not. Maybe we need to look at the free, and then we need to look at why is their sex hormone binding globulin so high, you know, these kind of things, and address that as the individual, because it all, again, comes down to the individual.

The interesting thing about like this industry, fitness or bodybuilding specifically, especially when guys are trying to get bigger, is that we take a really small view at this one thing, test. Because guys end up taking tests. They're like, what's the test? The test needs to be higher. But we don't, like you were mentioning, all these different factors that allow people to do what they do. It's going to be interesting finding out and learning from you what other things people should be paying attention to. Because like, for example, you know who Giannis Antetokounmpo is in the NBA?

Plays for the Bucks. He's like, oh, yeah, yeah, Giannis, right? So people look at him. He's called the Greek freak. His brothers are also very fucking large. But he has a 13 inch Achilles tendon. I thought you were going to say 13 inch something. I mean,

who fucking knows with that tendon, right? But he has a 13 inch Achilles tendon and that is like double the human, like double the size of everybody else's normal Achilles, which is why you wonder why does he have this jumping strength and power, et cetera. Like he's literally, he has certain aspects that you cannot replicate.

Right. Um, so his calves don't look as good as mark's they don't his calves are like that's a terrible that's a terrible black man calves i think uh michael michael phelps has like a size 15 or 16 foot you know so he's like these things that people are born with or like got giant hands crazy wingspan his wingspan represents someone i think that's like seven foot". And his torso versus his legs. There's something weird there, too. Yeah, right.

His torso is really long, and he has really short legs for his height. Yeah, like the femur. And it's not just the testosterone winning him those medals. It's so many other factors. But people will say he's on shit because he's an Olympic athlete, and, well, they make money. So why don't you take drugs? And I mean, maybe. He probably is on shit maybe he probably is i would i would say so too but i don't think that's the thing that's winning

him the medals you know now there's some weird stories surrounding him like where he just uh had time off for a little while and he just gained a bunch of muscle and his coach was like hey what's going on here yeah i mean there's people that are just there are people that are outliers for some reason we have a really hard time accepting it yeah um well i mean look at like uh like phil heath uh you know like when he was in his basketball years like you can probably find that if you google what phil heath looked like when he played college ball like the dude looks like you he started when he was 12 yeah he like he started getting on shit when he was 12 he didn't though right no i'm kidding i just that's what people say yeah people will say and then uh ronnie i think uh ronnie was like competed his first olympia natural i don't think he has any

reason to lie about that because he was open about it the rest of the time you know and he was like yeah my first olympia i was natty and you can tell you relatively small yeah like look at that jesus so he wasn't training for bodybuilding he was just training as an athlete like he was it would be it would be counterproductive to train as a bodybuilder, as a basketball player, you know? Dude, I've seen a picture of Phil Heath, but nothing like this. But dog, he delts his biceps and he's playing basketball all the time. Right. So then you give somebody like that, you put them into the super physiologic levels on top of the work ethic and everything that they're doing.

Yeah, you're going to grow a monster. But I never looked like that when I was in college you know and i will never it'd be good to just know his story like when he was done playing basketball when he just played basketball less and just lifted you know what i mean like he probably instantly gained a bunch of weight oh yeah yeah but i mean most guys would love to look like him in his natty, untrained state. That's like the goal. And I don't think he was running testosterone then. So actually this is interesting because a lot of people will call into these clinics and they'll get their blood work done. And the main number they want to pay attention to is their testosterone.

But if people are getting their blood work done, what other things as far as their performance do you think they should keep their mind on and actually look at other than your test? Take a look at these other things to see what you should change. Man, there's so many things. And that's like if you come to Merrick too, what we're doing, like you guys know the lab panel that we're getting is insane. We're testing like 20, 30, 40 sometimes different lab markers. Here are things like 12, 15 pages because there's so much that goes into human optimization from health standpoints but also to performance. So things like performance like we were talking about before, prolactin is like one that I never thought about really. And I was telling you guys, you know, I basically – I was kind of uninterested in sex for a while.

And, you know, I'm here sitting thinking that I'm just aging. I'm getting older. I'm getting more mature. Like, you know, I care more about work than, you know, my beautiful fiance is next to me, but yeah, it's cool. Then I get my labs tested, my prolactin is out the roof and, you know, that's something and the prolactin can be causing that low libido that people are coming to us saying, but downstream could be affecting your performance as well. Estrogen too. And estrogen, I think people think about in the wrong way a lot because estrogen is hypertrophic in its own regard too. So you want to screw up your gains, like lower your estrogen too much. And there's people walking around with like no estrogen. They're just taking these aromatase inhibitors thinking that that's

what they're supposed to do. Probably not. So yeah, we got prolactin, estrogen. We got the free testosterone we talked about. We got the IGF numbers, which that's debatable, but something to look at too. Even just your normal – your minerals and things like that. So many different things to look at. Yeah, there's a lot that goes into it. And recently I was on Tom Segura's podcast and we were going back and forth about stuff. And he was asking about performance enhancing drugs he's asking about steroids and i said you know what man i said unfortunately like it's a big story like there's

a lot to know he's like all i need to know is where to get them so there's a lot of people that probably come to you guys that are probably kind of hunting for it and what is your advice to you know a 25 year old guy who's just like's just trying to get a little bit bigger. Yeah, that's hard. So there's a part of me that's very libertarian, and I'm like, whatever you want to put in your body, you shouldn't really be allowed to. But at the same time, I am a doctor, and we're treating people medically, and our license says for whatever stupid reason that we cannot give steroids in order for performance enhancing,

which is kind of crazy. It's like you can't make people have more muscle and less body fat. But that's another story for another time. But it's kind of crazy. You take hormones to be a different sex, and that would be okay. Yeah, or like something that recently I thought about, like as a podiatrist, I prescribed a lot of times like toenail fungus type stuff. Toenail fungus is not going to hurt anything.

So getting rid of it is basically aesthetic, right? Like it's only for aesthetics. The medication that we give, the terbenafins, antifungal, terrible for your liver, terrible for your markers. So I'm like I'm allowed to just give that for beauty purposes. But if a guy wants to have bigger biceps, they can't take testosterone. Like they – literally the laws are the same as like heroin. It's crazy to me. But yeah, anyway, so that's like one part of it is there's that part of my mind.

It's like, man, I'm sorry. I can't just help you to do this safely because I do feel like you should be able to have a little bit of control. But unfortunately, we are governed by the laws. That's what it is. So, you know, and I would probably try to talk these guys into anyways, like maybe you should just dial in every other aspect of your life first. You know, these guys will come and sometimes their complaints are basically like, you know, I can't put on weight. I'm like, okay, what are you eating? They can't even really tell me.

And then it's like, you know, well, you know, I have like a six-inch sub at like lunch and then like at dinner, like maybe some spaghetti or something. Like, dude, see, start there. lunch and then uh like at meat dinner like maybe some spaghetti or something like dude see start there like even you know dial in your food like like just do that first and then come back to me after you're eating like 4 000 calories consistently of like you know the muscle building foods um you know and then and then what's your sleep like oh like most nights i stay up till like one playing video games or something you know and then i got to get up for like class at seven okay dial that in too like let's dial all this stuff in before we take that plunge. Cause you're potentially looking at getting on like at 20 or, you know, maybe you're in,

you're going to need to run it till you're like 80. So 60 years of pinning, you're ready to do that. You know, like a few times a week. That's crazy. Wait. So quick question about the 20 to 80 thing. Why do you, why is it that when people get on, the typical trend is that they must be on or they will be on for part of the rest of their life? Why is that? So unfortunately, I don't think it's – I mean more recently it's been the trend where more people are kind of wising up and kind of realize that you need to get on and stay on before. And like coming up, Mark, you probably know people with blast and post-cycle therapy and i think that's probably really unhealthy yeah people do like 12 or 16 week cycles yeah things like that and then they run like clomid and hcg and stuff to come off and crash but so what happens is your body's really smart about things and it's in a sense that it's getting

testosterone from an outside source and so it shuts down the system um and so you quit producing testosterone and if that goes on for long enough, you can just be stuck where you're not making testosterone anymore. Also, having high levels of androgens and things have been shown to be toxic to the testes, actually. So the leydig cells that produce testosterone, if you're on too high of androgens for too long, you may damage them and make it so they're no longer producing testosterone. So when you get off, you're, you know, you're down to the levels of a female. And so that's why we say, if you get on, you're probably going to need to stay on. Have you assisted people in coming off?

We have. So yeah, it's a lot easier, I'd say, to come off of TRT than like performs enhancing doses. You know, when we're talking like a dose of 100 to 120, maybe 150 milligrams a week versus a bodybuilding cycle where they're doing maybe a gram, which is 1,000 milligrams of these things, like that's different. So, yeah, we certainly do assist people to get off, usually for fertility reasons. It's a big one that people come off. They get off because they can kind of – that same system where the testosterone production is very closely related to fertility. And so when they come off, they can easier, they have an easier time, you know, conceiving. So that's one of the things. And has that been successful?

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we use that. It's good to know because sometimes people are like, you know, it might wipe you out forever. Yeah. it might wipe you out forever. But there is that possibility that maybe before you ever went on, you didn't know whether you were compatible with your mate previously. That's what I tell pretty much every guy when they're coming to us and they're curious and they're a candidate for TRT and they want to.

I tell them if fertility is at all a concern, get it tested before getting on. And if you have good viable sperm, get them frozen. Just have a backup plan. It kind of sucks because we see bodybuilders who wildly abuse this stuff for years. They have tons of children. And then occasionally there's a guy on TRT with a really low dose and all of a sudden they're infertile. And as far as I know, I don't think we have the data that show the exact number. 25% of every guy will be coming – we don't have that.

It's like really just a crapshoot. Like each person is very individual that way. Do you have a hypothesis of that? Like do you have a – like from what you've seen and everything you've heard, is there something in your head like it might actually end up being this even though there's no hard research and numbers to show? I would say more likely than not the fertility is not really an issue. No? Yeah, just based on like, you know, all the bodybuilders and things. Like you guys probably know so many bodybuilders that have full families.

Like it wasn't an issue for them. They likely didn't come off either. That would have hurt their career. They probably stayed on Tren and Anadrol and everything else and pumped out babies, you know. I would say, since I'm not a doctor, I could say this um i would say it's all reversible and it appears to be reversible however you could do so much damage right and there's individual people that might have pre-existing conditions that uh lead them to causing more permanent damage certainly yeah i would agree with that our guy um what's the gorilla chemist name gorilla chemist oh yeah

brian gorilla chemist gorilla chemist is his name yeah gorilla chemist uh yeah he came on because he was moscow brian moscow yeah yeah he was talking about fertility stuff that was going on with him and he knew people that were fine but he himself had to dial things back and figure out ways to get it back so yeah it's interesting how yeah what seemed to be cool too, and I haven't really looked into it, but have you seen that it seems like most guys running high engines have females? So they have daughters. I've seen that a lot. I've seen that in a lot of MMA fighters and just badass dudes.

Yeah. So you think that's more than a statistic? I don't know. It's something that's like anecdote, I think, within our community now. I don't know if anyone's ever looked into it but it seems to be like it seems to be true like all these these pros and stuff are pumping out daughters yeah and like uh navy seals and like dudes at that like crazy top level like they're having a lot of females it's pretty interesting but what about um birth defects like when being on gear like i've heard a lot of dudes say like

they want to come off because they want to make sure that they have a healthy baby. Me being one of those dudes. But like, yeah, is there anything, any statistics or anything that shows that like if you're on a bunch of shit, this could happen if you have a, you know, offspring? Yeah. What's hard with that too is we don't really have a lot of good research on this because just like TRT in and of itself is relatively new.

We also can't do good studies of people running, like actually we can't ethically load people up with, you know, tons of steroids and things to see. One could kind of hypothesize that you're probably going to run into some, potentially some issues at least change. Like, you know, I think like Dr. Huberman, Andrew Huberman, you guys have had on, I think he did some research himself on like testosterone and it's uh it's differentiations and things that it has on um the embryo and the the fetus and everything in the womb it's pretty interesting so hormones play a big role in development while they're in

the womb you know so i would suspect there's probably something and then when you're using like underground labs and things you're exposing them to like the heavy metals that they're getting the the terrible uh all the things that they're making the drug with, you know, so that can probably be an issue too. Walk our audience through a little bit of what it would be like to be somebody that purchases a service of AmeriHealth. I'm in my 40s, maybe getting closer to 50. Work is stressful.

Just life is kind of stressful. It's kicking my ass. I'm 30, 40 pounds overweight. Used to play sports. Don't do much anymore. Not as physical. I go to you guys because I'm like, man, there's just something wrong. I don't feel like I have anything inside anymore.

I'm not sleeping well. I feel a little bit like a mess and I need to figure this shit out. So I come to you and where do we start like how much blood work or do we need to do and like what does this process look like over the next couple weeks or months take some trend yeah so and then you just hang up the phone what the fuck was that i just log on do some trend this place is awesome I do think sometimes people think that's what they're getting is I think some of the other TRT clinics have set that precedent unfortunately so I wouldn't I don't even like to call us a TRT clinic we are a human optimization not even a clinic we're just a human optimization like program or platform or service you know

so yeah to kind of answer that what would happen is basically you get first and foremost, if you wanted, you could just take control of your health and order your own labs if you knew what to look for, which is pretty cool. I think that's something that even today I was just kind of, I was watching Peter Attia. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. Super interesting guy. He did a video on lipoprotein little a, which is a cholesterol marker. Somebody commented and they're like, I can't get my doctor to order this.

And then I commented like, go to Merrick health, dude. Like you can order whatever you want, you know? Cause, but, uh,

that's, that could be the first step. You could just order labs and take a peek. I've had friends. I've had trouble getting certain things ordered. Yeah. Yeah. In the past.

Yeah. It sucks. Um, so we give you that power if you want, if you have a distrust in healthcare professionals or something, which is common these days, and I understand why, then maybe if you want, just take it into your own hands and look at it. But the kind of more traditional route is we would set you up with what's called a patient care coordinator.

They're basically, I like to consider them like your concierge, where they are your go-to for all things, your optimization. So they're your go-to for all things your optimization. So they're going to help you to order the appropriate labs. That may be like you have a lab panel with us that kind of has things that you think will be geared to your listeners. So they can set you up with a lab panel that they think are going to help to look into your symptoms and things. After that, they'll get them back, and the patient care coordinator will do a really thorough kind of review of the labs with you. If there's things on there that they can recommend like, hey, it looks like you're a little B vitamin deficient. Let's get you settled on some B vitamin.

They can give you those recommendations. They can give you like – they'll help a lot with lifestyle stuff. Sometimes it's just supplements even. Yeah. Like all the counter supplements, right? Yeah. A lot of times it can be. It can even just be lifestyle things like you said said you on your intake, you're only sleeping

four hours a night, you know, let's try to, let's try to fix that. We get that going or, you know, you, you haven't been eating quite right. Let's set you up with the right kind of a diet. So that's the thing that the patient care coordinator is doing with you. The last step would be if there's anything on there that actually requires medical attention, they'll set you up with a physician that's targeted to kind of your goals. So we have people like myself who, you know, I've done like bodybuilding, CrossFit, powerlifting, dabbled in the performance enhancing myself. And so maybe you're somebody who's running steroids already and you want a doctor who understands that to help you with like harm reduction.

Maybe you get teamed up with somebody like me. There's other docs who are specialists. That's a good thing to point out. A lot of times if you go to a regular doctor, they're not going to maybe understand that you, you know, you enjoy taking performance enhancing drugs to be a little bit bigger than the average person. It's my hobby. They might not understand your, your levels and stuff like that. My hobby to be jacked. I understand your levels and stuff like that. My hobby to be jacked. That's a huge thing too.

Like I feel like a lot of times people are afraid to bring that stuff up. They feel like they're going to get judged. Like come to us, please. Like I might not be able to give you Tren, but I know what Tren is. Does your primary care? Probably not. It's not approved for human use. They probably have never even heard the word Tren, you know. So like I can help you to set up these risk mitigation strategies and stuff that can help. Like I can't

condone it. I'll tell you, you shouldn't be doing this, but if you are, let's do all these other things too. Let me give you the like accelerators to help your health, you know? So, uh, that's one thing that we can get, but with your guys still going back to him, you know, if then he progresses to, to the doc, then we take a look at different things. And it may not always be testosterone with you, with your guy, maybe that you're, you're theoretical there. Maybe he has a pretty decent testosterone, but we noticed that his A1C is in diabetic territory. His fasting insulin is super high. He's insulin resistant. That's where all the symptoms are coming from. Then we can address that. So we address that with various lifestyle intervention first and foremost.

We recommend different training protocols and diets and things. And then if we need to progress to pharmaceuticals, we will. But I would say on the list of what we do, the pharmaceuticals is very small. It's all of that other stuff that patient care coordinators talk to you about, all that lifestyle stuff. We even recommend readings to patients, like actual books to read and things. We are very holistic in it. The medication, like I kind of alluded to earlier,

if you want to just come for the drugs, we're probably not the clinic for you. We're definitely all about optimization. A lot of guys come through here and don't even get things. Sometimes that'll piss the kid off. They're like, I paid all this money and I only got recommended to take supplements. Sorry, man.

We care about your health. There's other places. There's underground labs that will hook you right up. Unfortunately, now there's TRT clinics where you can get that stuff, but that's not us. I'm happy you clarified a lot of that because when a lot of people think about Merrick Health, they think it's a TRT clinic. They think I'm going to come to Merrick and I'm going to get some tests and some drugs. health, they think it's a TRT clinic. They think I'm going to come to America and I'm going to get some tests and some drugs.

And you guys, first off, in terms of medications, you guys have a ton of different medications for different things. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I always say like we are not a TRT clinic. Like we look at hormones. That's one. That's, you know, we look at testosterone, free testosterone.

That's one test out of like the 35 I mentioned earlier. That's a very small amount of what we do. Like we take a look at your entire body. So yeah, we're going to talk to you about your insulin sensitivity, your lipids, your cardiac health, your metabolic health. We're going to talk about all of that. So don't expect to come and only focus on your testosterone because we're definitely going to be focused on your entire health. Just in my own experience, this makes conversations in the household a lot easier. You know, when you're like,

hey, you know, I got to go meet up with Greg in the fucking parking lot to score a bunch of tests and trends. That's some shady shit going on that the wife's not going to be too happy about or the rest of the family. I have had a very similar experience. Who knows what situation you can get yourself into with that. This is, this is

something where you can go to your significant other, say, you know, how into this shit I am. Like I, you know, I love training, you know, and I want to try to take it to the next level. And it's, it's more, um, you have a, you have healthcare professionals by your side, uh, watching your cholesterol your blood pressure all these other markers of health right yeah did you say meet greg in a parking lot for test and trend yeah was that the same guy you went to i mean how long ago was his last name did you do that yeah was this coach greg i mean i wouldn't the timeline matches up might have been a while ago.

I didn't even, yeah, I've had that same thing, though. It gets so much easier now. You know, I'll tell my fiance, like, I've got to go do a shot. It's so nice to be like, I'm going to. Before, when we first moved in together, so she was just like, something smells. And so I had this testosterone suspension, which is like, that's, as as you know, like it doesn't have an ester. It's just raw testosterone. But in order to make that, you have to –

Rough shot. Yeah. The things that they cut it with, there's something called guaiacol. I think it's literally like paint thinner. And so the entire house is just smelling like paint thinner. When you inject it, your pores are reeking of it and she's like, something smells like awful. What is this? I don't know.

I have no idea. That's so so weird it's my hormones yeah so then one day like i like i'm at work and she's like smelling around like i'm getting to get to the bottom of this you know and finds the bag and like sends me a picture like the fuck is this you know like oh yeah so like i forgot to talk about that yeah oh yeah i forgot about that well and who knows what weird bunk you know yeah you get and the shots you take. To use something like that, to put that into your body, I'm not happy about the fact that it didn't. But I mean that is kind of the cool part about Merrick is I'm being open about this shit. This is the things that when you come to us, you are – I'm not going to look down at you if you tell me like, hey, I'm getting ready for a show right now and I'm running 500 megs a trend a week.

And that's – I don't agree with it. I don't think you should. But I've been there and I can help you and I can guide you down the right path to do some harm mitigation. So that's kind of cool in my opinion. effects, if there are any, of taking like TRT dosages and maybe even a little higher to the performance enhancing side that you've seen? Does it automatically cause elevations in like our blood lipids and blood pressure and things like that? So actually just a few days ago, a pretty landmark study came out. It was a really big meta-analysis that showed that taking testosterone wasn't linked,

at least in the short and midterm time ranges, linked to an increase in cardiovascular disease, which is huge for like TRT because before it's always kind of been a lot of people have just kind of been talking out their ass and said like, you know, even being on TRT is going to negatively impact your cardiovascular health. Was this kind of specific to like just testosterone? Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, just actual TRT. It's important to note because sometimes people are taking a bunch of other things.

It makes it hard. In my opinion, that's not true like TRT or HRT. When I think testosterone replacement therapy, you know, I'm replacing testosterone. That's not throwing in oxandrolone and androlone and everything else. Like we don't make those, you know. So, yeah, the kind of things with TRT that we see is we can potentially see that there is an increase in LDL cholesterol, a decrease in HDL cholesterol. And the LDL is the quote-unquote bad, but I don't want to say that because that's – I don't think that people should say it. It's cholesterol.

It just – it can do things. And then the HDL is the quote-unquote good, which is highly debatable too. We've – in the past, we've increased HDL and it hasn't changed any markers for like overall mortality. So that's interesting is how good really is HDL. Anyways, that will lower. And then we do usually see some increase in your blood thickness. So like the amount of red blood cells or the hematocrit and hemoglobin, which to an extent can be a good thing because that's where it's going to help with performance.

It's when it gets too thick that we're basically setting you up to have elevated risk for things like clot and stuff like that. So we try to prevent. But when you're running the TRT dose, like that replacement dose, usually don't see things get too crazy. When we see it as when we push too far into that super physiologic. And then I would argue too, that I think that we can definitely push it a little bit, you know, like, so on the, the lab, like thing that you get from lab corp request or something, it's probably has like a 900 total, but we definitely see natural athletes and teenagers and things that run up to like,

you know, 1,200, 1,300, 1,500 sometimes. So I don't think there's probably that many deleterious effects to having something like a 1,300 testosterone. That's a lot different than a 2,000, of course. I think we're probably going to run into some negative effects then. But just being able to push it a little bit to give somebody a little bit of extra edge and whether it be career or their fitness or whatever else probably isn't that bad. But I think that you should definitely be under the watchful eye of a trained physician or something or a PA and P a trained medical professional and kind of be

checking those markers. Otherwise you're just, you're, you're, you know, you're blind like me, like I didn't know about the prolactin. I would have never known if I didn't get my labs drawn. There was actually something going on there. I have a question about that, and this is from my uneducated view of hormones. You mentioned how there are teenagers that have 1,200, 1,500, whatever, natural test. And it makes me wonder if a person wants to come in and they go up to those levels, It makes me wonder if a person wants to come in and they go up to those levels with all the different factors that are involved in testosterone and gaining muscle and all of this stuff. Would it not be far fetched if somebody is not set up to have that much test coursing through their body?

Like maybe this teenager, because that's what they're able to produce, they work well producing that. Maybe what I'm saying is stupid, but should some people maybe not have it that high? Are there problems with certain people not having it that high? I think that's a fair argument to make, especially like kind of like I said before, sometimes I've seen really awesome athletes come in with like a 400 testosterone, which most guys would probably consider low i'm like this guy looks he's jacked he looks amazing like maybe he has other and there's other things going on you know the angina receptors the the transcription like i talked about so many other things going on maybe they don't need that much and then maybe there's an argument to be made that they will be have uh they can ramp up the negative side effects too you know if they run those numbers too high. Maybe they don't require that. And so it just becomes more of like deleterious than actual beneficial.

So to add on to that, and this is another question, because I know athletes that have low testosterone, but they're elite athletes. And the way they go about life, they're not like, oh, 400 tests, I'm tired all the time. They're vibrant individuals. So for them, and this is, again, hypothetical, I don't know if there's even an answer to this, is getting them to 800 and 900, will that be – people think that if I'm at 400 and them at 900, I'm automatically going to be a higher-performing athlete. Is that something that's like just true? Like if you have higher tests, you will perform better and life will be better. So I think that if it's natural testosterone, like a natural 400 versus a natural 800, probably not much difference. I would argue, though, probably that you get some benefit if you are an enhanced like 800. Because the difference there is that we are keeping a steady level of 800 at all times. And so a natural person may go down to like 400

and they'll peak up to 800 and they'll have these peaks and valleys. And so I do think that the person on TRT is going to have a bit more edge. Like a TRT 800 has a bit more edge on a natural 800 just due to that. But at the same time, like how much? Probably pretty negligible.

And I think like you talked about the athlete, all the other stuff they're doing in their life is a huge driving factor. You know, like I worked out here last night. I forget the kid's name, Smokey. The young kid in here, like 19 or 20. Yeah. The dude's jacked, right? Yeah. Looks incredible, yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, Smokey's like, yeah, he's not doing anything. And I believe it. He's freaking putting in hard work. And then because I saw him working out, his shirt is drenched. He's training amazingly. And then after, first thing he does, he goes and gets his meal-prepped food, and he's eating it. I'm like, yeah, he's getting the results because he's doing all the other work.

You can't expect to just pin something and everything is going to happen. Because there's people that massively use the shit out of this stuff and they don't look that great. You know, like when you look at the pros and the elite level power lifters, elite bodybuilders, like everything else is dialed in. You know, like I've, I went through a stint where I tried some bodybuilding for like a year. I've never been so miserable. It was so hard to get down that food, just the food alone. You know, like I was getting to the point where I was eating whatever sugary cereal I could get my hands on just to get those calories. And it tasted disgusting to me. Like I was eating boxes of Mac and cheese and a pound of meat, like doing everything that I could to get the calories in. And it wasn't fun. Like

it's awful. And they're doing that, but they're eating fish and like chicken and rice, fish and rice, beef and rice every day, day in and day out, know like it's hard and i mean you know you're at that level like it was all that like i don't think the drugs got you to where you were it was everything else that you did that was the cherry on top you know that was a supplement but like it didn't replace all the hard work you put in it may have i took a lot of shit yeah i want to go back to you talking about the health side of things and taking a TRT dose and maybe even slightly a little bit higher. I think that maybe there's some people out there that are under the impression that steroids are going to add like 20 to 30 pounds to their frame. And sometimes it can, if somebody is really getting after it, if somebody is really training really hard, they got all their meals intact. Uh, it might yield that much weight gain depending on how much the person weighs, because it's probably

going to represent an overall percentage of your body weight that you're going to be able to gain. Um, in my own experience, you know, I recall gaining probably about 15 pounds fairly quickly. I mean in comparison to like the years it takes to put on 15 pounds of muscle. When you first start training, maybe you could say it might only took you a year or two years to gain 15. But once that year of hard work is already put in. Those newbie gains. Yeah, you don't get a second or third burst of that unless you take something. But I like to point this out because it's not going to turn you into being so much bigger to the point where you're going to have a lot of health concerns.

Now, again, if you go off the rails and you take your own dosages and you start taking a lot of stuff and you start to bring in other factors, then your blood pressure is going to go through the roof. Then your red blood cell count is going to be high. Now you have high blood pressure. Your resting heart rate's probably not good. It's probably jacked. So your heart rate's going pretty fast all the time. You have thick blood that's trying to be pushed around in a body that has high blood pressure. And I believe that that's where a lot of these recent deaths have happened with bodybuilders. It's not necessarily just the stuff that they're taking,

but it's the fact that they, the combination of all the things that they took made them so large. And then also they're taking clenbuterol and things like that, that kind of speed up your heart rate, pre-workout type stuff, caffeine and all these other things. Meanwhile, their blood pressure is really high because they're 60 or 70 pounds heavier than normal, than what their normal body weight would be. They're literally like an obese person, just muscle, which is actually more metabolically active, has more vascularity, so puts more strain on the heart than even fat would. Right. And you – anything is possible.

So I don't like to say that something is impossible, but it would be near impossible for you to gain that amount of size with like a TRT dosage or – I mean you're pointing out like testosterone replacement. Yes. Like you might only notice a five or six pound, which is huge. You might gain five pounds of muscle. You might lose two or three pounds of fat because your metabolism might be increased because you now have a little bit more muscle mass. That'll look really awesome on a lot of people.

Just that small, that small little manipulation. But in my opinion, you wouldn't be putting yourself at any risk in terms of health concerns. It's only when you go into the astronomical amounts and you're really pushing and you're trying to gain a tremendous amount of body weight. Yeah, I would agree. For some reason, it's interesting because it does seem that when we dose with exogenous testosterone, we do ramp up that blood cell production a little bit more than just natural testosterone would. I don't know if that's really ever been studied as to why. I know that it does promote the erythropiosis. It's a hard word to say.

The creation of red blood cells. The EPO. Yeah. So it ramps that up a bit. But why it does more than like endogenous or natural testosterone is interesting. I don't know why the difference is. But it does seem to. So you can run into that. But like that study showed, it likely isn't going to increase cardiovascular disease.

You're right. It's everything else. It's the massive like they're pushing down on that hammer as far as how many androgens they're running and all the other compounds. So their body's under this massive amount of oxidative stress. The workouts too, like training the way that a lot of these guys do isn't really the healthiest. You know, either like getting under like what you did probably really wasn't that healthy for you. Might not have been a good idea. Yeah.

When you're looking at longevity, did you have fun and stuff? Yeah, that's a different story. But yeah, that's probably not great. And then, then just walking around with all that mass and everything too. Yeah. And then a lot of times, unfortunately, like big in the nineties and things, you know, guys got really hooked onto other drugs and things, you know, they were doing all the opiates and stuff just to be able to get through the training. So there were so many other confounding factors, but yeah, the TRT, it literally is a replacement. I explain it as like vitamin D is a hormone too. When you have low vitamin D, we replace that and get that back to normal. That's

basically what we're doing with testosterone. We're not trying to tip the scales into the growth phase really. We're just trying to replace it so that you get some of the benefits from it. And some of that is cardiovascular protection actually because it's great for the heart and stuff. is cardiovascular protection, actually, because it's great for the heart and stuff. Having too low of testosterone is just as bad as having too high of testosterone. So they kind of have that nice little window where things are optimized, and that's what we're aiming for. We don't want you too low.

We don't want you too high. Yeah. You know, Mark's been doing a lot of running, like miles and miles a week. Crazy. And when it comes to some of these athletes who do take tests or who do take extra stuff to get bigger, do you think that it would probably be, most people think it's bad for the gains, but it would probably be a good idea to do something that would allow them to increase their cardiovascular capacity? I mean, you see Kai Green still fucking doing the step mill all the time. And I wonder if like a lot of these individuals who choose to do bodybuilding, whether it's someone young who's just trying to gain as much muscle as possible

or an IFBB person, if they really spent time each week doing cardio, but challenging cardio that actually increases their aerobic capacity, do you think that that could be something that tips the scales back to being healthy, even though it might take away from a little bit of muscle gain? Yeah, I don't, I would even argue that it might probably though it might take away from a little bit of muscle gain? Yeah, I would even argue that it probably wouldn't even take away from gains. And I think a lot of the pros these days kind of realize that. In fact, a lot of them keep cardio in the off-season, first, probably because they're seeing all their friends drop dead, unfortunately. And second, though, a lot of them will say it increases their hunger and helps them get

more food in. And so there's benefits to it. And I think most of the top bodybuilding pros are doing some bit of cardio in the off season right now, which is good. Maybe some nutrient partitioning, like the nutrients going to the right places rather than like just being stored as body fat. Exactly. Yeah. And then, but there, there's so many other things that have just recently started to be talked about. Like before it was people didn't even think about blood pressure medications or diabetes medications and things other than the insulin like post-workout. But like these things are probably –

like I think that if you're going to venture into like the performance-enhancing drugs, some of the first things you should get online is like an antihypertensive drug like an ARB, an angiotensin II receptor blocker, and probably something to help you with your glucose disposal like a metformin or maybe a basal insulin like Atlantis or something. If you're going to be pushing into those, like we used to just focus on the drugs, the bodybuilding, like the anabolic things. We left out all the other benefits that we could get out of pharmaceuticals.

And so we probably could have saved some lives if these guys would have just been on like a blood pressure medication and they would have saved their kidneys and everything else. What you got over there, Andrew? You're brewing up some questions I can see. Yeah. No, I was curious because you had mentioned that like at Merrick, like the pharmaceutical stuff, that's like going to be towards the end. Like you're not going to walk, you're not going to go up to Merrick and that's the first thing you're going to get. But in like what case would somebody get prescribed testosterone? Because you had just mentioned a bunch of different testosterone levels. And I'm thinking in my head like, well, shit, I think mine was at a 400. So like does that mean that I wouldn't get testosterone if I went even though I had X, Y, and Z symptoms?

Yeah, we've literally prescribed to guys with like a double-digit testosterone. And then we've prescribed to guys that even have like a 600 testosterone. So that's one nice thing is we really focused on that subjective on the individual, how they feel. Um, because we do have guys that sometimes they, they have that 600 testosterone, which any normal, most people would be like, that's a great testosterone, but they have all of the other symptoms. Their libido is terrible. They don't have good motivation. They're not making gains. They're putting on fat. Everything else in their life is dialed in. Then we, we take a kind of, um, outside the box approach and we're like, let's try this, you know, and we, and a lot of times that can help. And what's to say like, you know, this guy's 50 and it's the first time he's

ever had his testosterone tested. What if he was one of those guys that operated his whole life at a 1200? And so now he's taking a, you know, a 50 percent less than you know so yeah um so we we kind of give it to basically everyone it's very individual we don't have an algorithm that says like you don't get it until this number or you do get it you know because we do give it sometimes people come in 300 they feel great cool it's not even talked about testosterone other times everything else is dialed in i have a 900 okay let's start seeing what we can do on the test. Nice. And then, so prolactin, how do we fix that?

How do we get that back in range? Yeah, and what is it? What's it do? There you go. Yeah, so prolactin basically was responsible for milk letdown, which is making milk from the breast tissue, which happens in women. That's why that's happening to me. Okay. Does it taste good?

We were talking about malted milk. Yeah, Tony Hughes squeezed some milk out of him. Some milk out of him. He does it just by thinking too, right? Like focuses on it. Yeah, I think he did it without even touching it. Oh my God. Just flexing it. Yeah, he probably didn't even touching oh my god oh my god just flex it out

i don't yeah he probably didn't have to flex just like zend it out so yeah that's that's one of the things and more though and like so in men it's actually kind of the uh the thing that stops us um from like after an orgasm we have this massive rush of dopamine and things something needs to calm that down because we can't just be in a perpetual state of orgasm we might not we have some drugs for that we would get nothing done and so prolactin is kind of

your body's natural shut off it stops that and that's why if your prolactin is too high the refractory period or the time between ejaculation can be very large, very increased. So lowering that, you could get some benefit, more than one round. So that's kind of what it does. And then ways to lower it.

So the way that we like to usually start is with vitamin B6, the active form of that, something called P5P. The active form of that is something called P5P. Taking it like 50 to 100 milligrams before bed because it can help with sleep too has been shown to reduce that prolactin pretty significantly, which is nice. There are some people that require more heavy-duty pharmacologic drugs like cabrogoline or bromocryptine. These can be like they have a host of bad side effects. So that's one thing I don't recommend guys just jumping on, which is pretty common in the bodybuilding world. You get on trend or something, you get a little sore nipples, people are just popping caber, which is crazy.

Because that has like a – I think it's like a 300 milligrams lifetime exposure before you run into like cardiotoxicity, which is a very small amount. So when we're prescribing it, it's like 0.25 like once to twice a week. I shouldn't even be talking doses here because somebody's going to be – That's true. Allegedly, that's the dose. Well, I mean, at least it's much safer. But then I remember reading on the bodybuilding.com forums, like, you know, Papa Graham every other day or something.

It's like, oh, my God. Dudes just love saying Papa Graham. That's just like baseline now. Yeah. But there are some agents that we may need to deploy if you have – some people have what's basically like a small tumor on the pituitary that's causing excess secretion of this. Wow. It's actually pretty common. We diagnose it pretty often, which is interesting because we'll see guys coming in with all the signs of having low T, like their libido is down and they're feeling like crap and all this,

and their doctors tested their testosterone. It's fine. They come to us. We look at prolactin for the first time, massively elevated. We tell them to go get an MRI, and they have this small tumor on the pituitary, and that's cool because somebody finally diagnosed it. A lot of times the doctors out in your primary care and things aren't thinking about stuff like this, unfortunately. On the prolactin side, I was wondering what are the lifestyle things that people do that could be causing elevated prolactin?

Like what, like, you know, I've heard that Kratom does that and that's what I saw in my last test with Merrick. But do things like weed or other things like habits that people have? Kratom and marijuana. Kratom and marijuana. Kratom and marijuana. Yeah. Okay. So maybe watching too much porn, you know, constantly, or I guess it doesn't even need to be porn, but constantly, you know, doing things to yourself.

Not all day long. Actually, that's like something I've thought about too. Like sometimes I'm like with somebody has a high one and I'm'm like you use kratom no marijuana no like hmm did you rub one out before you got his lab i don't ever say it but i'm like maybe that's what it was we'll we'll check next time and see if it's still elevated but it's possible and theoretically right yes power project family how's it going now we've partnered with bubs naturals and they're an amazing brand they have this just wonderful mct oil powder that i put in my coffee in the morning and they have this collagen protein most people don't get the amount of collagen that they need in all mix well in anything coffee water whatever it's also whole 30 approved but the thing i want

to talk to you guys about real quick these apple cider vinegar gummies now if you go on google and you type in apple cider vinegar there's tons of benefits immune support uh metabolism digestive digestion can uh but one thing you'll also come across is apple cider vinegar tastes like it's bad it's really bad uh that's why they came out with these crack gummies um the reason why i call them crack gummies and it's an empty uh empty little package of them because uh we can't not eat a lot of them at once they're really good for you don't get me wrong but they also taste really good and it's hard to only eat two at once and the serving size is two so you guys should get this you should should only have two. Good luck. Good luck. But the benefits of apple cider vinegar actually from these gummies, I noticed that my, honestly,

it's helped my digestion a lot. A ton. Yeah. Yeah. It definitely has helped me, you know, hit the bathroom a lot more consistently. Mark always talks about, you know, may your shits be tapered. And I guarantee you with those, they will be. They will be.

But just, yeah, please don't eat the entire bottle the way we do, but they're, they're that good. And you know, I have tried apple cider vinegar and all that stuff. And I just, it made me, it made me sick. I just, I felt real bloated and I couldn't be consistent with it with this. It's very easy to stay consistent. We're too consistent. A little bit too consistent. Yeah. But head over to bubsnaturals.com and make sure you guys enter promo code power project to save 20% off your entire order. Again, bubsnaturals.com, um, promo code power project to save 20% off links to them down in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. What about, um, what, what hormones should we be, should we be paying attention to

if we're, um, if our goal is fat loss, like what should we keep in check? Yeah. So I mean, testosterone would be a big one there. Um, that's something that you, especially if we want to maintain some muscle mass is probably going to benefit you in this anti-catabolic properties. Um, definitely we should be looking at things like your insulin sensitivity. Um, so we check your fasting insulin, which is something that a lot of doctors don't do too, which is interesting to see. And we take really aggressive approaches in all these. I think the marker goes up to like 25 or something on insulin. We like to see that number below five.

So we want you to be very insulin sensitive. So that's something to look at. Your hemoglobin A1C, which is a measure of basically how much blood glucose has been in your system for the past three months, basically how much blood glucose has been in your system for the past three months, basically kind of makes a stain on the red blood cells so we can get a view of how elevated your sugars have been. So that's one of them. Those are the big ones, and just see if you're metabolically healthy. Got it. And then before we got on air, you guys were talking about like a fat loss drug.

What was that called? I think we were talking about semaglutide a bit. Which helps with hunger, right? Yeah. So it's interesting. Semaglutide was originally made for diabetes, type 2 diabetes. It works on the pancreas at the level of the beta cells, which secrete the insulin. So we're trying to basically ramp up insulin secretion because of what happens a lot of times in these type 2 diabetics is if they've been secreting too much insulin, they become insulin resistant.

So the insulin isn't working at the cells. The pancreas works so hard to pump it out that these beta cells basically like die out. They just get overworked. And so the target of the drug was to kind of heal those and promote insulin secretion. But interestingly, they found that a lot of these test subjects, which were obese people with diabetes, were losing a significant amount of weight. And then it was then approved for weight loss as well in that regard. So it basically knocks out your hunger and makes it a lot easier to get into that caloric deficit. I like it a lot.

I prefer that for patients because in the past, most of our weight loss medications have been like stimulants. Now they're basically like amphetamines. medications have been like stimulants and other basically like amphetamines. And then you're just ramping up their, like, you know, their nervous system, putting them in a crazy sympathetic overdrive and they're switching and everything. And that sucks. I would much rather somebody just be able to get into a caloric deficit and do it a lot healthier. And then there's some people too, that kind of obsess about that caloric deficit. What's nice about this is it's kind of just in the background. I tell them, don't even think about it. Quit tracking, you know, just live your life. Eat when you're hungry. When you get that urge, stop when you're full. And that can be really beneficial for people.

And that's semaglutide does that? Yeah. Semaglutide. There's other ones too. We like semaglutide. That's been shown to be kind of the most superior in those, the GLP-1 agonists, what they are. Yeah, the semaglutide is the one that we tend to see the best results with. Is there particular side effects that make you nauseous or something like that? Yeah, very nauseous. That's the thing. It's a once-weekly injection. That's a great way to not eat, just feel sick.

Yeah, there's other medications too, like melanotan. That one makes you pretty nauseous, and it's been linked to weight loss. Is it just because I don't feel good? But yeah, it can make you nauseous. So sometimes we'll give it alongside like Zofran, which is an anti-nausea medication. But that's one of the side effects. And then two, if you've had a history of like a thyroid cancer or it's in your family or something, that's something to look into. I don't think it's actually ever been shown in humans, but in animal models, it has been shown to potentially be linked to a thyroid cancer.

And so that's something we need to look into in your history and things and start. So, yeah, that would those are the two. Yeah. You know, I wonder, because on the podcast we talk a lot about just habits needed to be healthy, whether you're trying to lose fat, gain muscle, or just live a healthy lifestyle. Now with, you know, the amount of people that you've seen come to try to get human optimization in any way, you guys do the long questionnaire where you figure out what their lifestyle is like. Do you notice, do a majority of people have like bad lifestyle habits and they're trying to replace those lifestyle habits with something

pharmaceutical? Because I wonder like, you know, we use caffeine and there've been times in the past years ago when like, I just drank a lot of coffee cause I wasn't getting enough sleep. And if I just got enough sleep, I wouldn't need to drink as much coffee and everything else would be better. So how often do you see that? Do you think it's a majority or do you think it's a minority of people? I think in general, it's probably the majority do that. Our client base, though, I actually really like, I mean, we're teamed up with people like you and other very like-minded. So the people coming to us are pretty like, you know, fitness forward and health forward. So we have a pretty cool population we work with and I love the patients we work with. Um, but more

often than not, like outside of Merrick that I've seen, yeah, people just want like, you know, the pill and the pharmaceutical to help with everything. Um, you know, that's something that I talk about too, like, cause you know, by training, I am like a foot and ankle doc and I do a lot with that and athletes, but I always tell people like, I can't just prescribe, like, you know, go barefoot and do all these foot exercises because people aren't going to do it. That's why we use the crutch of the orthotic and stuff. You know, these are people that I can't even talk into doing a 10 minute walk a day. How am I going to tell them like, get out the toe spacers and the ball and like do like two hours of warming up your feet every day

and exercising and, uh, you exercising and strengthening all these intrinsic muscles. It just doesn't work because these people don't want to make those lifestyle changes. So yeah, but at Merrick, we do see more of the people who are really dialed in and they want an extra. I always say it's where that last 5%. They got 95% of it dialed in. We can help. Sometimes we investigate and we find that sleep.

Other times it's medication. But we help with everything in between. Are there any drugs or hormones that can help with people getting better sleep and there's not like a negative side effect to it? That's hard, man. Sleep is the hardest thing for me. I'm like, as you know, it's tough. There's so many variables to it.

Recently there's been something called Delta delta sleep inducing peptide the research that I've seen isn't too promising on it and so I don't even usually recommend it for some people who maybe want to try it we will uh you know facilitate that with them I personally like melatonin a lot everybody knows about melatonin but I kind of i megadose melatonin in myself for its antioxidant i don't know if you saw dante tridell talking about that yeah talking about taking like 200 milligrams so i take 40 so yeah it's served in a four milligram thing and he's like people have had it all wrong and you need to take like this crazy yeah well i think for like crazy amount sleep the dose is small, like only up to like three grams.

But if you want it for all the antioxidant properties, and I think he was talking about fat loss potentially too. It's interesting. It has these anti-cancer properties as well. The cool part about melatonin is a potent antioxidant in that like each of its metabolites that it's metabolized into is an antioxidant as well. So normally you have like an antioxidant and then it's metabolized into other things, but each one of these metabolites is another antioxidant that can be beneficial. So there's these layers of properties that can help with our, you know, reducing oxidative burden. It seems to work with, in collaboration with vitamin D or something like that too, right? Yeah.

Or is it a hormone, melatonin? Well, yep, it is. Yeah. The thing with melatonin though is it, I don't think it really helps people stay asleep. It's more of, it kind of sets thing with melatonin, though, is that I don't think it really helps people stay asleep. It's more of it kind of sets the stage to fall asleep. We're naturally producing it when the lights go down. We would have. So it's not something that's keeping you asleep. So that can be an issue.

And a lot of people's problem isn't falling asleep. It's staying asleep. The biggest thing for sleep for me is lifestyle. The sleep hygiene we all talk about. We'll be coaching people on get some sunlight first thing in the morning. Turn off the – don't be exposed to blue lights and things before going to bed. The lifestyle surrounding sleep is the biggest. Unfortunately, the infrastructure we all live in is very deleterious to sleep hygiene. Do you use mouth tape?

I don't, but I don't think I, I personally am pretty good on sleep now. I've kind of got it dialed in. Oh, good. Yeah, luckily. I mean, I go to bed at like eight and wake up at three. I'm kind of crazy. I got to work out super early. But yeah, I don't, but I think it could be, could be beneficial.

When it comes to melatonin, you're mentioning like the infrastructure when it comes to getting ready for sleep is messed up. Like we do live in the houses that have all these light supermarkets. Do you think, and I'm curious, when you take melatonin, you said it helps you fall asleep. Do you take it because of the infrastructure? Like what would happen if now you stopped taking melatonin? Because I've heard, and I could be totally fucking wrong, but when people use melatonin too much, it becomes something that they then become dependent on, like caffeine now need coffee i need fucking coffee every morning is melatonin

similar yeah it's a i mean we are replacing the hormone and so we just like we talked about with testosterone you start taking testosterone from an outside source the body is very efficient and it's like we're getting it from somewhere we don't need to make it so very similar thing happens in melatonin i do like i know huberman stuff recommends against melatonin for that reason i'm not taking it for the sleep though i am taking it for all the antioxidant properties and so at this point i'm basically doing melatonin replacement therapy you know i do often think about though like if shit hits the fan and i have to live off the land like i'm screwed man no testosterone no melatonin, no caffeine. But in your opinion, the antioxidant benefits and melatonin outweigh you not producing your own melatonin? Because I'm ramping it up to such an extreme.

So the small amount that my body would produce, it does have antioxidant properties too. But I'm like pushing that. I'm really hitting hard on that melatonin antioxidant thing more so than my body would produce. Last thing I want to ask on this, do you think there are any long-term ramifications to doing that? I don't know. I don't think we know. We don't know that?

Well, maybe Huberman would be able to school me on that a bit, but, cause I have heard him talk against melatonin a lot and he's a much better source for all that neurochemistry than I am. Okay. But I'd be interested to have that conversation. It's weird where our beliefs are though because he doesn't agree with that. But then he was talking about stuff that boosts your testosterone. I know it boosts your natural testosterone.

So maybe there's some different things. But I think he's on TRT himself too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's interesting kind of where our beliefs lie and the different information that we have. I think sometimes the current information that we have is just we're just doing the best we can with it. And it's hard to – it's kind of hard to sift through and I guess find like what's the – Man, there's so many things out there. What's the most optimal thing?

Like all the – there's – I'm kind of in the – I don't like any of the extremes. Even like I'm not crazy all barefoot. I'm not crazy all shoe. I'm not crazy, even like, I'm not crazy, all barefoot. I'm not crazy, all shoe. I'm not crazy, like all meat. I'm not crazy, all vegetable. Like, I really think most people could benefit from just kind of being in the middle, you know, and getting benefits from a little bit of everything. I kind of see like the fitness industry is so polarized now and all, you know, it reminds me a lot of politics, you know, like on one side, you got the crazy, like grab them by the pussy, no abortions ever. And then on the other side, it's like everybody should just be whatever gender they want and everybody gets aborted.

Fuck babies. Where most of us are probably right in the middle somewhere. And we'd all be a lot better off if we were somewhere in the middle. That's probably how it would be with all the fitness stuff too. Should people eat vegetables? Probably. Do they need to eat nothing but vegetables? No.

And then could people eat organ meat? Yeah. Is that all they need to eat vegetables? Probably. Do they need to eat nothing but vegetables? No. Like and then should people – could people eat organ meat? Yeah. Is that all they need to eat? Probably not. You know, like let's get out of this crazy polarized view. It's wild that there's studies done to like disprove that stretching, you know, works or doesn't work. Yeah. Or that there's – with cardio.

Like there's like people that are like cardio, it pulls muscle off the body. It's like why are we discouraging people from moving more? Like let's just encourage them to move. A lot of times too is those – we're seeing more of the headlines in the media. We're not seeing the actual study and people don't even realize how to – or know how to interpret the study. They didn't set out trying to show that we shouldn't stretch or something. Yeah, and so I think that we just see this headline like eating organ know, eating organ meat, it's going to, you know, eating testicles will enhance your testicles. Like, no, that's until you try. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. I mean, I think that again, like it's just the, we have these crazy extremes that I think most people would benefit from just getting a little bit. I do appreciate you guys podcast for that as you get kind of everybody on, you know, you get, you get all of these extremes and then you guys kind of synthesize it.

And you're like, like, you know, I, I heard you talking to the, uh, that barefoot guy and you're like, well, yeah. And you're like kind of hitting him like, well, you know, like, you know, shoes do help. You do run faster with shoes on. And it's true. You kept swerving around it, but I was like, no, you run faster when you wear shoes. Yeah. I was like, I've never really heard Mark take this big of a stance on stuff.

This has got to come up. Well, it's just like if you're going to punch a wall or punch a bag or something, like if you had some sort of brace or something on your hand, it'd be easier to punch it harder. Like it just would be. You would be just like less inhibition. Like, oh, this isn't going to hurt. Or doing a deadlift with a belt on. Maybe your body like it's this is going to hurt less so you can put more into it yeah yeah what about uh testosterone for women like do people do women come through

merrick and they get prescribed testosterone as well yeah sometimes um usually we try to stay away from hormone replacement therapy and uh like a woman that's's premenopausal. Their hormones are so, they fluctuate so much and things can be very hard, and it's probably not a wise idea to start messing with them too much until they're in that postmenopause time. Women are very tricky. We have specialists. Aren't they? In many ways.

We have some docs at Merrick that specialize in hormone optimization for females, which is great. But yeah, sometimes we do. Oftentimes the testosterone is more for like the libido for them that we're seeing. We'll optimize their progesterone and their estrogen, which is pretty standard. And they'll still have some issues with like libido. And that's when we'll employ a little bit of testosterone to increase the libido um that's kind of a debated subject in the endocrinology world as to whether or not it's beneficial but that is when it's used even in standard endocrinology is more for libido than anything else and then like the side effect not side effects but like benefits could also be the same like muscle growth fat loss and that sort of thing in women yeah but again we're doing a

replacement and so we're replacing that their dosage too, you know, so in a man, maybe that, that replacement is only like a hundred milligrams and a female, maybe it's like five or 10 milligrams. And so they're likely just going to be back to where they normally would be physiologically. We're not going to put them into that virilization or the masculinization realm, you know? So it's not like they're going to be, you know, growing a beard and then large clit and all that stuff that you see with like the abuse. Easier to find. Yeah.

I mean, the thing is, is we, we send it to these people and how much you use is up to you, you know? Yeah. So, and what's the detriment of taking it pre-metaposel? So, yeah, I mean, you could just mess up your normal hormonal production, you know, very similar to like men. And when, like I said, the body is very great at regulating these things. And so we can have some deleterious effects if we start messing around too much and it's not needed to. A fun. Oh, go ahead.

I was going to say, I wonder how that would impact their end menopause, having like a little bit of testosterone. Yeah, sometimes it can help to – the end menopause is what we actually – some most people are thinking like end menopause, that's actually what we can kind of consider like post-menopause. Like they're in that once it's started when they're having – we're basically giving it more for symptom relief. So if they're having hot flashes, they can't sleep, they're getting migraines, things like that. That's when it can be very beneficial to be giving them a little bit of hormones. I know some women that have claimed that they've been in it for like 10 years. And I just look at their husband. I'm like, what the fuck? Give them a merit card. Like Jesus Christ,

she's taking you for a ride over here. She's just using it to, you know, act like a bee. How did you go from podiatry to hormone optimization? Yeah, that's interesting because I'm probably the only podiatrist really doing this kind of stuff. Yeah, so like I explained earlier before, like in podiatry, we're working with mainly patients with diabetes, type 2 diabetes, very heavily influenced by their lifestyle and poor choices and things, you know, or the infrastructure that they're in, a lot of different factors. But anyways, it was with a very unhealthy population.

I often like tell the story of when I was in residency, because I got in this, remember, because I was into fitness and everything. I was into helping and I wanted to promote health and fitness. I saw this patient come in. He was diagnosed with prediabetes and came to our clinic for a foot check. And I was talking to him, like, this is so cool. Like, I get this guy before he has diabetes. I get to talk to him, and I get to maybe make a change in this guy's life.

And so I give him all the recommendations. Like, you get this type of exercise and, you know, do some heavy lifting, some resistance training, some cardiovascular, eat these type of things, keep the calories within here. You can reverse this. I often tell people, I don't like when they say, I'm diabetic. No, you're somebody who has diabetes. And you can be somebody who doesn't too because this is a preventable and a reversible disease, which I don't think a lot of people realize it's reversible.

So I was hoping that I'm going to make this change in this guy. Then I think I see him six months or a year later and he he has full-blown diabetes, and he has a wound on his foot. And so wounds on the feet are what we're often dealing with with diabetes, and we're taking off toes and feet and legs. We're amputating because these wounds get so bad. And so, yeah, he ended up losing a toe or something. I'm like, man, this just sucks. This is not what I signed up to do.

I'm just dealing with this when it's too late, when these patients are coming in, when their bones are exposed, when there's maggots in the wound. This is what I'm seeing. I'm not getting to do any of the other stuff. And in podiatry, I could have focused more on sports med and things, but my passion is more the optimization. And so, yeah, I kind of met up with Merrick and loved what they were doing we're kind of operating outside of the outside of the the normal we're ordering these tests that you can't from your

doctor a lot of times because we're dictated by insurance we're dictated by the infrastructure and so I loved that idea like I can help these people more as more as like a coach more than even a doctor and I actually so I was doing a little bit of hormone replacement therapy in my own clinics too as a podiatrist because I actually had this the first time I had this wound a recalcitrant wound basically meaning the wound that's not healing no matter what we've done taking this patient to surgery we've put on grafts we've done offloading we've done all these things this wound isn't healing so I kind of start looking into things and I find this paper published, I think, in 2009 out of Russia.

The author's name was Kelchenko. And it was the employment of testosterone replacement therapy in hypogonadal men with diabetic foot ulcers. And they healed their – I think it was an N of 3 or so, a sample size of 3, not very big. But they healed all of these ulcers with the use of testosterone. Like this is super cool, and I'm into this stuff myself, you know? And so I called up the patient's endocrinologist who should be managing their hormones. And I ran the paper by them and my thought like, Oh, cause I'd ordered this guy's testosterone too. He had like a hundred like female level testosterone. So I'm like, yeah, he could probably benefit just like this paper showed.

I asked the endocrinologist and he just dismissed me like, no, that we're not going to do that. That's crazy. Why would you even think about that? You know, like, no, we don't do it because a lot of endocrinologists don't even really do TRT. And so I'm like, shit. So I called the primary care and I asked him and primary care is like, well, I don't do hormone replacement therapy. I don't know much about it. You seem like you know what you're talking about, though. Do you want to try? And I will help you medically manage this patient. And part of my license does say that I can do anything systemically if it's going to aid in foot injuries or foot health, so the treatment and prevention of any foot problems. And so it falls within my scope to be able to do that. But I wanted his help, too, because he's the one medically managing the patient.

And so as a team, we employed this testosterone replacement and within four months later, that wound was healed. So probably improved things like blood flow down there, reduced inflammation. There was a lot of good benefits and it healed the wound. So I was started to routinely get testosterone labs on my patients as well. And finding that a lot of these patients with diabetes had hypogonadism or low testosterone. And I was employing this with the help of their medical doctor overseeing it. And so then I just kind of transitioned that into Merrick where I'm working alongside MDs and DOs too. I kind of have the personal experience where I've done a lot of this stuff myself. I'm very into performance enhancing hormones and things. And so I'm working with these other docs,

and we're just trying to optimize before it goes down that road. And we've caught a lot of patients coming in with pre-diabetes or sometimes full-blown diabetes that they didn't know. And a lot of times their low testosterone is due to that. And what's awesome at Merrick is we can take the steps, and these people are coming to us a lot. They have a lot more will and desire to change these things in their lifestyle. So this patient population is awesome.

I can explain to them, your low testosterone is due to your diabetes that you didn't know you had. Let's fix this diabetes first and foremost. A lot of times you'll see that testosterone creep back up and it changes their life just getting the diet and lifestyle in. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean it's been awesome. So long, long story, but that's fine. Yeah, that's great. their life just getting the diet and lifestyle in yeah so yeah i mean it's been awesome so long long story but that's not yeah that's great i gotta say that's pretty fucking awesome because again you you hear about a lot of clinics who it's like somebody comes in with an issue and

they're just like just take this yeah and they give the same thing just take this take this take this to everybody without actually trying to find out the underlying issues into why they are the way they are because somebody could be coming to merrick or any clinic being like, I just want some tests. But you guys will go through the blood work, go through and see you actually have this problem and you don't really need tests. Like you'll really figure out what's wrong with people rather than just dumping a template on them. Yeah. I would love to optimize all their other health markers first too. And we talked about there is some side effects. So somebody comes to us and their lipids are already terrible. Like, I want to fix that first because you're not really set up to

be a good candidate for TRT yet. So let's optimize, though. It would be so irresponsible just to throw testosterone at some of these people. And then why not just like fix all these lifestyle things that we can do and help them metabolically improve their insulin sensitivity, improve their lipid numbers. And then maybe if needed, which a lot of times it's not even needed at this point, but if needed, then we can employ some hormone replacement too. How can somebody mitigate acne? I know sometimes that's an issue for some people when they get on testosterone, even replacement dosages. It is. So acne is another hard one.

It's kind of like sleep to me. It's kind of perplexing. Obviously, there's some type of hormone component, and that's why we're getting it through our teenage years and puberty and everything. So one of the first things that we'll try to do, or at least that I like to implement and some of the docs I like to work with, we'll do things like just reducing the dose a bit. Sometimes maybe you're ramping things up too high, so we cut reducing the dose a bit. Sometimes maybe you're ramping things up too high,

so we cut down the dose a bit. Maybe employ more frequent injections so you're not getting massive spikes. When you bolus a hormone, you get a large spike, and then estrogen spikes and things as well because of the aromatization. And so we try those things, reducing the dose, increasing the frequency. And then my personal kind of thought on it is let's reduce as much oxidative stress and burden as we can. So getting a really good antioxidant protocol in hand. So first and foremost, getting your fruits and vegetables or just fruits if you want or whatever, getting some good antioxidants in and then supplementing with those as well and doing more for your overall oxidative stress.

Because sometimes I think that's where a lot of it's coming from, especially in the guys blasting the gear and things. I think more of it is just an oxidative response to all the stress they're putting themselves in. Any ideas on why a carnivore diet seems to help a lot of people? I mean, so much of the testimonial from Dr. Baker and Paul Saladino, so much of it seems to be surrounding like skin. Somebody just does a carnivore diet for a week or two. It seems to be helpful in a lot of cases. Yeah, I don't know. I wish we had better like research on it. Obviously, we do need to take into account anecdote.

You know, people aren't lying. I think that's a huge thing. And it may be that maybe they had some allergies or something that they weren't aware of. And maybe even just with my fiancée is a dietician and she's very big into fruits and vegetables, balanced diet. She was probably overdoing the vegetables a bit too much and getting some like GI distress and some skin issues and things. And so she, we actually took an approach with her, like let's cut back the vegetables a little bit. We didn't eliminate them, but we added in more fruit and replacement of the vegetables, added in a little bit more meat for her, and she did see some improvement.

So everybody's a little bit different. And that's one thing I don't like, though, too, is like with the carnivore diet, everybody needs to be eating only meat. No, probably not everybody. Yeah, only meat all the time. Yeah. Sounds a little bit too much of a stretch. Yeah, I think it's a little bit too, but maybe some individuals benefit really well from that. I do great with all kinds of carbohydrates and that's how I function well, you know,

but I don't really like having a high fat diet. It makes me feel kind of sluggish and slow and I don't get any improvements cognitively. I don't do that well with fasting either. I kind of actually get brain fog when I don't eat. But some people, fasting is amazing for them. Some people, keto is amazing for them. Everybody has something that works good for them. We shouldn't dismiss it, but we also shouldn't push it on everybody. Unfortunately, I think it sells to take your shirt off and to give a crazy

claim and say that you only have to eat organs. And then that's what sells, unfortunately. It doesn't really sell to be like, it depends. You know, you're an individual. Try this. See how you feel for a while. Yeah. I wish it was more like they could say like, oh, I have seen some benefits in some people and it might work for you. And, you know, if it fits your macros might work for you or keto might work.

And I think an interesting thing about an interesting thing about meat, though, and what is undeniable is it's not something that people are allergic to. It's not people like people don't usually have like a bad reaction to it. However, I do agree with you. Sometimes the fat in certain types of meat, people are like, man, that's just they don't like it doesn't sit well with them. They don't digest it well. that I've helped over the last few years when I try to position them to eat more towards meat, it seems to help a ton just because other influences seem to have some sort of impact that I can't tell exactly what they are, but when they kind of primarily go to meat,

and I'm not saying that you should only eat meat, and I'm not saying that you should do that for like long periods of time, but I think it's a good thing to investigate. And I think if you have a problem, something like acne, I've never had acne issues, but I actually think that a lot of acne stuff is related mostly to the gut. Yeah. We don't know enough about the gut to. It's kind of what I think happens a lot of times is so much related to the food. Obviously when you take testosterone, there's a hormone issue where the fluctuation is happening. And when I have noticed issues with acne, it's been the combination of the two, hormones and food.

Because when I did come off steroids a long time ago, I did notice getting some acne. That one time? That one time. The other thing I would say just in regards to steroids and like coming off steroids we talked about it a little bit earlier um and i don't know if you guys assist people with this or if this is something that you uh have come across but my main place of concern would be somebody's uh from from a mental perspective where they would be mentally uh because especially if you're on like performance enhancing dosages for a long time,

you're going to feel a particular type of way about your workouts. And it's hard not to feel a particular way about your workouts and then feel a particular way about yourself. That's true. And then when you're on that downswing, you don't have that energy. You don't have that strength from a mental side of things. And even your sexual performance and even your libido, like all those things are going to be coming down at the same time. Your motivation and career and everything.

Motivation, all that stuff is going to be zapped. So from a mental side of things, I think people should be really cautious. Yeah, me too. The mental side of things is something that we as a community and the fitness and performance enhancing community haven't even really ever talked about. And I think that it's been huge interest to me seeing the deleterious effects of a lot of these compounds that have like long-term on our brain. So the oxidative stress alone that these compounds are putting on our brain leading to not only behavioral changes like we all kind of know about, but probably some long-term issues

too, like dementia, Alzheimer's and things like that. Really? Yeah. Then for some, we don't talk about it enough. For the longest time, you know, we talked about hair loss and acne where it was like, well, steroids, I mean, like your brother's documentary, I think the quote was from that, you know, show me the bodies. Who was that? Romano? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that was everybody, that was all over the forum. Show me the body, show me the body. Well, unfortunately now we're stepping over bodies left and right. So there's obviously an issue. Um, something's going on. Um, and so we used to only talk about, well, there's acne, their hair loss, your blood pressure might get a little

bit elevated, but when you get off, it'll go down. So no problem there. Like I don't even consider hair loss and acne to be a bad side effect. Like let's not even focus about that. Let's talk about the effect that it has on your brain, the effects that have on your heart, on your kidneys, liver, liver, something we used to talk about a bit to take some, some Tudka and knack and you're fine. Like liver is probably not even that big of a problem either. Like we were so focused on the wrong shit back in the day, like when we should have been focused on the heart health, the brain health and the kidney health and all that, because that's what's taken a hit in the brain specifically. There's been a good amount of studies showing that long-term use of these androgens and things can have some pretty deleterious effects on our brain and our cognition and our long-term mental acuity.

What ages have they noticed this type of – because I've heard Derek once talk about how some young people started taking tests or whatever and it affected their emotions and then he kind of mentioned the brain a little bit but as far as alzheimer's dementia what what ages do people see some of this yeah well we can we probably don't see that until later like you know 50 60 70 and things and it's hard again it goes back to what we were talking about earlier we can't do these controlled studies where we're going to be employing these things and we don't really have the the data to show what it is causing it. But we know that some compounds produce a lot more oxidative stress and cause a lot more issues than others. We see that acutely when mood changes and things

and some people get certain ways or even some of the positive effects that we see, they are changing brain chemistry, that drive and the motivation and wanting to rip the bar off the ground. That's altering brain chemistry. Doing that long enough has got to tweak some things, you know. And there's been at least anecdotal reports of things like the nandrolones and the trend and stuff, like altering people's, like, sexuality, you know.

They find that when they're on cycle, their search history is getting a little strange, you know. Like, we know this is happening. Unfortunately, we can't study it in a controlled setting where we can employ these things. But it's a big enough risk for me to I think that we should look into it and try to deploy some tactics to reduce that harm. Yeah. On the other side of things, if you're an unmotivated person, it seems like testosterone can help a lot. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

But again, that's within that replacement dosage. Yeah. Like we're not talking about having a 3000 total here. I mean, that's, yeah, it's probably going to push things a bit too far. And then some of the motivation and things can get a little bit too out of hand and you know, yeah. I'm seeing a lot of occurrence of like 18s through 21, 22 year old guys hopping on some TRT. And it's interesting because it's again, 22 year old guys hopping on some TRT.

And it's interesting because it's again, replacement therapy and you're young. So what are you noticing? Cause I mean, you mentioned when you started training bodybuilding.com forums, I don't think in my age group too, when I started training, this type of shit didn't seem to be like occurring with people my age. But now it's like,

it seems like, you know, there's memes of uh guys on trt on like tiktok and shit where they're like lifting and they're like yeah stay natural and then they're doing their shit but what are you noticing and what do you think young guys need to be careful with yeah it's it's such it's so different than when when we were coming up and we were doing things because before it was like we thought probably people i remember even wondering if like the olympia people were on i'm, I wonder if they're doing stairwells. Nobody even talked about it. Now everybody talks about it. Everybody tells their cycle. And I think

that's helpful and harmful. It's helpful in that people aren't wasting money on things like muscle tech and stuff, thinking that, well, you know, Jay Cutler worked, you know, I should spend all my money because that's what he's taking. So it's helpful in that regard to where people are at least educated about what's actually happening. It's harmful in the way that every kid thinks that like, now I got to get on. It was probably a little bit better when they thought cell tech was the thing that was, you know, and they were just taking, spending way too much on creatine. So yeah, that part is like, it's hard. I like that people are well-informed. Sometimes they're too informed though and they think that it's going to be something special. And so, yeah, we do see kids come in sometimes.

Actually worse though than hormones because hormones are these – like especially testosterone. This is a bioidentical hormone. It does have deleterious effects but probably not as much as some of like the SARMs and things that people come in doing where these things they can order just online, you know, from research chemical places. But I swear, I'll look at some kids come in with their SARMs labs and like, you are like, you look like you're about to die. Your labs look so bad, you know, like the cholesterol is like, I mean, not, I'm being a little bit, but it looks awful. Their liver enzymes are terrible. Their cholesterol is crazy. The HDL is crushed. Their testosterone is in the tank.

Estrogen is nonexistent. I'm just like, man, this is awful. Where if somebody comes in running high testosterone, we know what to expect and it's all manageable. So, yeah, it's probably worse that kids are jumping on not TRT but more of the SARMs and things. The SARMs I don't even think have a place for men to be using in general. I think if they're ever going to be used successfully, it'd probably be more in females. These are literally things that were made to reduce the androgenic side effects of things that, you know, there's something that like a woman potentially or an elderly could benefit

from without having to get all the side effects of masculinization and things. So the fact that like young boys even do this, I'm like, you obviously don't understand physiology and biochemistry. You have no purpose ordering a research chemical and trying this on your own. It's kind of crazy. Yeah, SARMs are an interesting thing. You guys go down the rabbit hole of peptides as well, right?

We do. Yeah. What kind of peptides are out there? I know there's some for injuries. I've taken BPC-157 and TB-500. I know it sounds like I'm speaking another language, but that's what these fucking things are called. Have you guys had some success in prescribing some of that stuff? more like clinical and human data on them. But from what we see, they seem to be relatively safe and they seem to be pretty darn effective. They're both compounds that are naturally made as well. So I feel a little bit safer there.

What they do, like the BPC-157 will actually kind of upregulate growth hormone receptors in the area. So we're usually suggesting the injection in or around the injury. So you have some tennis elbow or something, you know, we're suggesting that you inject it in that area so that you get that localized growth hormone receptor upregulation. So we tell them to take it before bed to growth hormone secreted, you get some of that healing benefit from it. And then the TB500 promotes something called angiogenesis or the creation of new blood vessels, which can definitely help to improve wound healing thing or tissue healing, wound healing, healing one. Other peptides that we utilize are some of the growth hormone secretagogues

like tesamorelin, ipamrelin, these type of things. That's one that I'm like iffy on. I don't really believe that much in exogenous growth hormone as being too beneficial. Potentially really beneficial as far as injury repair, beneficial as far as muscle growth and performance, probably not in my opinion. What about regular growth hormone? Yeah. So no, I don't think so. So there's a, I don't think people understand there's a kind of a difference between what's like the IGF that is created at the level of the muscle, which is called mechanogrowth factor versus the IGF that's secreted by the liver and that goes systemic, which is more responsible for tissue healing or injury repair. So there is a difference there.

And then IGF is actually the thing that we're kind of more trying to increase. The growth hormone is secreted, tells the liver to produce more of this IGF. But when we work out and things, that's when we produce that mechano growth factor. And that's what's probably responsible for the hypertrophy and the hyperplasia and all of that within the muscle cell. And that's also a peptide, but just taking that directly doesn't really seem to be. Yeah. I don't think it's something, I don't think it's legit. I mean, it's one of those, I have seen it's like MGF and then a number or something. Right, right.

Yeah, but obviously people aren't walking around looking – I mean there's not many Olympians out there. Right, right. So it's probably not working. So you don't think growth hormone is that effective in general? I guess if someone had low growth hormone, they took – Yeah, that's obviously – A good replacement dose maybe would be helpful. Yeah.

It's hard. It's kind of like an anti-aging longevity thing. People make a huge deal about it. Yeah, but I think that is definitely misplaced or misguided in my opinion. So as far as longevity goes, I think it's probably one of the worst things you could do. All the longevity medications that we – that are implementing, you know, the – like the metformin, rapamycin, these things are actually trying to reduce growth and slow down the growth and lower the igf because it makes sense that if we're speeding up growth we're shortening lifespan you know we're ramping that growth so it's kind of uh it's kind of weird because acutely yeah that makes a lot of sense because like from the time you're like eight to

like 20 that's a huge difference yeah you're you change so much right and a lot of it has to your growth hormone your hormones in your body are going crazy. So you progress and you don't look eight years old anymore. And then you look at professional bodybuilders. They're like in their late 20s, 30s. The dudes look like 40 and 50. They look bad. I even saw that in myself.

And I was trying to push in the food and pushing the weights, pushing the growth hormone, the tests. I'm like, I'm aging. I'm starting to get wrinkles. I started getting way more focused on longevity after that. But yeah, I realized like this is really counterintuitive. We're taking all this stuff for longevity, but it's probably not. It's probably doing the opposite. Acutely, yeah, it might help with hair, skin and nails and things like that. And you may feel a glow, but you're probably ramping up that they're shortening the lifespan a bit which

not so great do you know anything about uh oral bpc uh 157 if that's the right one we had a guest on uh previously and we were talking about lucas uh lucas owen oh well we yeah he's yeah that guy no it was uh taylor drawl i forgot his name. I just know that's his Instagram. But no, he was. Yeah, but because we were talking about BPC. And for my back, I was just curious, like, oh, does it have to be like a site injection? And that sounds horrible. But he said the oral one could actually work even better than a site injection. So I don't know if, do you know anything about that?

So when we deploy the oral more than not, it's more for gut health. So when we deploy the oral more than not, it's more for gut health because it's actually take like a compound that's produced in our gut naturally in order to heal some gut issues. So normally we're giving it more for working within the GI tract. But, I mean, that's interesting. I don't really know. Again, I don't think we have those awesome trials to say. I often wonder that too. Like is even injecting near the site really helping at the site? Part of me says probably not because we know that things don't really work that way.

When you inject, it does get into circulation. It is probably going everywhere. So there might be some validity to the fact of taking orally. I don't know. I wish we had more trials. Part of me thinks that the site injection is a little bit of bro lore. That makes sense. I like that. That's's good i like that i i do think can we make a shirt that says that especially when you're going like subcutaneous so like the interesting like the bpc 157 was

utilizing achilles tears which is interesting to me as a as a foot and ankle surgeon um they like lanced the or cut the uh the achilles of uh mice and then they injected into the achilles they do some fucked up shit they do monkeys yeah right yeah i try not to think about it it's terrible but yeah but they were actually injecting like into the tendon not just around the area. I mean, otherwise, when we inject a growth hormone and things, we're not trying to only get it here. We want it to go systemic, and it does. And so, yeah, I think there's a little bit of broil over there, even though I'll recommend to do it because that just seems to be the standard as of right now.

We don't have the trials. Hopefully, one day we do. And you get a little acupuncture effect, right? I mean, you stick the needle in the spot that hurts. That might be, yeah. I know like at Westside, they would just inject saline pretty often. Interesting. Why? In between sets? In between sets.

Just to like, just to cause like disruption in the area. So if you think about like, you're trying to cause like blood flow to a certain area. So if I, you know, aggressively rub on your shoulder, like blood flow is going to want to go there. So it didn't have any harm. It didn't hurt at all.

It was just like salt water basically. I would have put some carnitine or something and get some benefit out of it. Yeah, yeah, throw something in there. Throw a little bit of testosterone in there while we're at it. Yeah, exactly. Carnitine is a cool one that I like for a lot of those guys that, yeah. Throw something in there. Yeah. Throw a little bit of testosterone in there while we're at it, right? Yeah, exactly. Carnitine's a cool one that I like for a lot of those guys that are coming in, those younger kids. That's something we employ a lot. Injectable L-carnitine?

The injectable L-carnitine, yeah. That's pretty interesting. It's something I really like. And I especially like with those, you know, the kids have like a 600 and they're like, I want a little bit extra edge. What are we talking about kids? I guess, yeah. Teenagers? Well, I consider like a 20-year-old.

Yeah, I should say. Little 8-year-olds. These 8-year-olds that come, soon enough, they all have TikTok and stuff. They probably will be calling up Merrick. Just have their parents' credit card. I want to be on some of that testosterone. Oh my God.

But like when these younger adults come in and they have decent testosterone, but they do want that little extra edge and they're not quite ready to jump over to the testosterone. Something like L-carnitine can be pretty cool. That's been shown to upregulate the engine receptors. So you're basically are giving testosterone more places to bind to. So you're working on that other side of the equation because you have the number of testosterone and then just floating around testosterone is not doing a thing until it binds. So the idea is basically you give these more places to bind. You get more out of it.

And we've seen increases in strength and endurance with that. And then it has a ton of other benefits too, like reduction in LDL cholesterol, reduction in inflammation. It has some neuroprotective benefits. So it can be a pretty cool one to utilize. I know it was utilized in the Olympics with Mo Ferrara. Is that that runner? Mo something. And it's not, but the thing about injectable L-carnitine too,

because we had Andy Triana come on the podcast. And after that, I was like, maybe I should do injectable L-carnitine because there's all these benefits and it's not illegal at all in any type of federation. Well, that was the issue with that Mo guy. benefits and it's not illegal at all in any type of federation well the uh that was the issue with that mo guy i think it's mo farah he was taking too much i think because it's like i think you can inject up to like 50 milliliters i want to say and he was probably like 52 or something no he's pushing a little bit but yeah the nike oregon project was actually iving it so to their athletes i mean they were increasing

their mile they're decreasing their mile time and having awesome benefit with it. That sounds so good. It's like a fat oxidator or something. It is, yeah. So maybe it helps you. It ramps up that mitochondrial function to get into that beta fatty acid oxidation. So kind of switching over that fuel pathway into fat burning, which is beneficial for runners for sure.

Yeah. So it does have some benefits. And then we utilize kind of some outside thethe-box things in those naturals too. They're looking to get something like a Tadalafil, Cialis. Cialis has actually been shown to increase free testosterone, to increase antigen receptors as well, reduce aromatization, so the testosterone converting to estrogen, kind of leaving some of that testosterone there.

It also is going to promote overall blood flow. So you use that around training? Yeah. You ever done it? It's a great pump product. Have you? Some people have said to take like five milligrams before training. I've never tried it training-wise.

It's pretty good. I did it yesterday when we came in here. I took a little because I had to work out with smoking. I'm like, I better show up. I better look pumped. I know he's going to take pictures. Wear some gray sweatpants and take some Cialis and get a workout in. Quick question, actually, too.

Actually, go ahead. What were you about to say? Oh, I was just going to say the thing with that, too, is I tell people you still have to go down that arousal pathway. So you got to just watch some porn, take some Cialis, and then go train? No, no, no, no, no. To get an erection, you have to go down the arousal. No, don't do that. Because sometimes I'm telling these kids when I'm like, you know, I'm telling

these kids when I'm like, all right, let's try to optimize what you've got. Let's try something like L-carnitine to Dalafil or something. And they're like, well, aren't I just going to have an erection at the gym? Like, well, hopefully not. I mean, maybe if you see somebody you're super attracted to, but you know, you do have to go down that. It's not, I think like 40 year old virgin, he just like popped one and then held up. Like that's probably not going to happen. Okay. I want to know about this because, because you know some people do use viagra cs i've tried um i've tried blue chew before yeah just because i was just like i wonder what this will do and that's just wild yeah but i i wonder if somebody is like i want to do this all the time

is there well they're like just like we were talking about melatonin and caffeine is will it mess with the ability of the individual to get hard on their own if they depend too much on Cialis and all this shit to get super hard? No, probably not because the pathway that it works is kind of interesting. What happens is the blood flows to the erection, the penis, and then there's an enzyme that basically kicks on to reduce the erection. This is blocking that. So it's a phosphodiesterase inhibitor. And so it's knocking out that enzyme so that it can stay hard. And so it doesn't change anything about the getting hard.

It changes things about how well it stays. Does that make sense? I know what I'm getting from Eric next. Some Tadalafil. Oh, yeah. If there's going to be no really long term. From everything we see, it seems to have a lot of health benefits too.

So it's going to help with prostate health because it's a medication that's actually prescribed for that. It's on label uses for that benign prostatic hyperplasia. So it can help to reduce the growth of your prostate, which is great for guys on TRT if they're afraid of that.

It's also promoting blood flow throughout the entire body. So that's improving that endothelial function, the lining of the arteries that we get afraid of. So it's promoting that nitric oxide, which helps to reduce plaque buildup and things. There's been some research on it showing to have some cognitive protective benefits too. Whoa.

Is this something that we can take as a like a daily vitamin like in the low dose no yeah i'm serious because i know you're serious that's actually how we recommend it okay cool because the one time i tried to take a pre-workout i just had the most insane headache so that's yeah i'm the exact same way um i i'll tell these guys a lot. Like I, like we suggest that you take it daily, low dose, like 2.5 to five milligrams. But some people are super sensitive to it. And I'm one of them. It gives me like a headache.

It makes me feel terrible stuff. Sinuses. The first experience I ever had with one was in undergrad. I had a hundred milligram Viagra that I ordered from India, which I didn't, I thought, I didn't know. I'm like,

Oh, Viagra. And you know, I go out on this date and then I pop that and I had to go home alone too because it just didn't work out in my favor. But I went home alone with a raging migraine. Like I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I had meningitis because it's the worst headache I've ever had. And then I found that I'm pretty sensitive. So I'll take like two milligrams, 2.5. That's good., yeah, I think I took 10 or 20 milligrams, and I was just like, oh, I'm not having a good day. It was not fun.

Some patients tell me that they push through that, and eventually it goes away. I'm like, that's crazy. I don't really like the pain. Anything for love, right? Yeah. I do say that, like taking as needed, and that's what I'll tell them. I'm like, well, then just get it as needed.

And, you know, like, I'll take a headache if it's – Hey, you know, I've worked through hamstring cramps. Exactly. I've done that before, right? You still got a job to do. Exactly, yeah. I'm like, it'll benefit me more in the – like, if I want to go work out with somebody like Smokey,

he's a beast in the gym. He's going to show me up. I'm like, all right, it's worth the headache to have a little bit – Good pump so I can be next to him. I can fill out that Excel, all right? And then, or it's worth it if you want to please the lady, you know? You guys are going away and you're like,

I really want to show up tonight. Like, I can, I'll take a little proflate ibuprofen. Yeah. Okay. Let's go down this a little bit more. You know, will somebody, if they, if they keep taking it, will they sometimes like, will they build a tolerance? Like, for example, you they, if they keep taking it, will they sometimes like,

will they build a tolerance? Like, for example, you take too much pre-workout, you need more to get the same effect. Is that because I'm going to get some, I'm going to start super low, but will there be a time where like, oh, I need to start taking more because it's not hitting the same. Would that happen with it? Do you see cases of that? I haven't seen it personally. It's a good question.

I don't know. I'm sure there's probably some literature on it too i would suspect not but yeah we'll have to look and i have to say i don't really know i'll make sure i'll look it up and get you the the data before you jump into it we don't want to i'm gonna jump in but i just want to know how deep do i need to go because i'm this sounds like a lot of fun well i just like it as the as needed and i think i mean i do think that all the health benefits probably come from daily dosing in a small amount, but I'm just not somebody who tolerates it that well. So the as-needed can be fun, for sure.

I actually didn't get a headache yesterday either. Maybe I'm building up a tolerance to the side effects because it was fine. And Tadafanil, that's Cialis? Cialis, yeah. And then there's Viagra, which is like Sildenafil. What's the difference? The half-life is a big thing. And that's why I like it too, especially if you're taking it for the bedroom.

The half-life of the Cialis is something like 17 hours, so it's probably in your system for like 30 or so. The half-life of the Viagra is only a few, like two to four. So it can definitely get a bit awkward if you're like, a lot of times you don't want to tell the partner that you're about to pop one, you know? And then you got to like plan it really well as far as time goes. If you have a fucking hour, get down here.

Exactly. And then the Viagra seems to interact pretty significantly with food too. And so if you went out on a date and got some food, like you're probably going to be messing up the absorption of it. Where the Cialis, it's nice. You can take it at 8 a.m. in the morning as your morning routine, still working at night

when you meet up with her, you know, it's cool. And she never asked, no. You're actually enhanced. You're no longer natty. It does lower your blood pressure, right? Yeah, that could be a positive benefit too. In my opinion, I think people need to take a much more aggressive approach to their blood pressure. We actually prefer like a 115 over 75 and we found anything above that. It's actually been well known for, well documented for a long

time, anything above that increases risk of cardiovascular disease. So even the normal US recommendations or the American Heart Association or whoever puts out the recommendations for hypertension at like the 120 over 80 is probably still a bit high too. So I'm big on blood pressure, especially like I said with performance enhancers. I think they definitely need to have some blood pressure medication in. Absolutely. What about the like viscosity? Because like my hematocrit has like always been really high.

Probably due to, well, definitely due to disarms, but also from snoring. Oh, yeah. So it's always been really high. Does it help with like thinning of the blood at all? No, I don't think so. So, but the blood pressure medication, one that I really like is called Telmasartan. One of the side effects to the ARBs or the angiotensin 2 receptor blockers is anemia. So in somebody like you or a performance enhancer, that's an amazing side effect to have that we're reducing the blood cell account. So it's actually in reducing the thickness of the blood. So it's, it's a great addition. The Telma Sartin is one, like a lot of people come to us too, just for kind of getting these, uh, these outside the box, esoteric things like metformin

or something, even though they're not diabetic, which is when I take daily, I take metformin and I take Telma Sartin daily and I don't have diabetes or high blood pressure, but they have these longevity benefits and they agonize these, uh, these different receptors and have all these awesome benefits. And so we get people coming to us that are like that, you know, they're fans of David Sinclair and things, and they're really into the longevity and, and then, you know, I'm interested in metformin, but I told my doc and he looked at me like I was crazy because I have a 5.2 A1C and I'm healthy and we can work with that too. So it's not all about hormone replacement is we definitely push on that optimization as far as longevity.

Sometimes maybe just for cosmetics, like we do have access to some pretty cool topical peptides and things for reducing fine lines or hair loss is a big one. You know, all anything goes into human optimization. We're trying to uncover. Power Project family, I hope you guys are enjoying this episode. Now, Mark, Andrew, and myself have been cold plunging for a while now. We actually use the Cold Plunge XL. But the reason why this has become part of our daily routine every single day is because of, honestly, how good it makes us feel coming out of that water. Now, if you want to take a cold shower, that is beneficial, and you need to be doing that if you don't have a cold plunge. But if you do get a cold plunge that goes

all the way down to 39 degrees, it's crazy because Andrew Hurman actually talked about the benefits of dopamine post-cold plunging. Now, cocaine gives you a 2.5 rise in your dopamine release. Cold plunging gives you that also, but it also gives you a sustained higher level of dopamine throughout your day. That's just one of the benefits, as there are many. So if you guys want to get on it, Andrew, how can they? Oh, yes. You guys got to head over to thecoldplunge.com and check out Andrew Promo Code Power Project to save $150 off. And before we drop off here, I do have to say that this has been the absolute best thing I have ever done for my mental health.

Every single day I get in this cold plunge and I come out a happier, more positive, and more vibrant human. I can't recommend this enough. Again, thecoldplunge.com promo code POWERPROJECT to save $150 off. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. You know, on the longevity thing, I was really wondering about this because, you know, you see some older guys getting on test or maybe they're just doing a lot of stuff, right? And people think of the quality of life versus the length. Span. Lifespan.

The health span versus lifespan. The health span versus lifespan. So I wonder about testosterone when it comes to longevity and your actual lifespan because you'll feel more – like let's say you're 50 years old, 55. You'll feel more like, let's say you're 50 years old, 55, you'll feel more vibrant. But is there a, is there a sweet spot for feeling more vibrant and having a lifespan benefit? Because people can go really hard with that shit. They feel great, but then high blood pressure, thick blood, blah, blah, you will die soon. Right? So what is that middle ground? Yeah. It's probably again, cause I do think having too low of testosterone is going to reduce lifespan and healthspan for sure. Because we know that having

too low of testosterone, terrible for your brain, terrible for your heart, terrible for all kinds of things. Having too high, same exact stuff. It's kind of like everything in life, like even water, you know, too little of it, you're dehydrated. Too much of it, you die of volume overload. Yeah. And so testosterone fits within that category too, hitting that sweet spot. So you probably are getting an increase in not only lifespan but also healthspan. If by whatever chance – I mean this study recently or this meta-analysis recently showed no increased risk of cardiovascular disease in short and midterm. If one day we find out that 50 years on causes increased mortality, I think that we've improved their life significantly. You know, it doesn't really make sense. I would so much rather die at 80 being fit and playing with my

grandkids and like, you know, having fun and being able to work out and take walks and do my own stuff rather than living to 90 or a hundred in a wheelchair, having somebody do everything for me. And so that's sometimes I think the longevity people get a little bit too into like oh we'll take all these things like like inhibit all this mTOR and take you know all that and I'm like why man like you're gonna be so frail and fast all day and they're like you know 110 pounds they already look like if they fall they're gonna break every bone in their body yeah I'm like you're gonna try to get to 100 like this? But the overall, the umbrella that we see, I think, that people don't look into enough is, like, the people who live the longest and the healthiest have increased strength and muscle mass, you know? And so if we can help them to improve their fitness and their strength, specifically more strength than even muscle, that's a big thing.

Because you need to be able to stop yourself from falling. Or if you do fall, get yourself up, things up things like that you know that become an issue and i mean if you're not strong when you're older that's going to be a big issue living long it's kind of dumb people that live really long are usually really small they're usually very very small it's like not a whole lot you can do about that same with animals right small animals live longer than big ones being short and just not weighing a lot i'm not able lot, I'm not able to figure that one out. I think we're going to start to see a lot of people like your size living longer because we know how to keep our health in check. Like back, what, 70, 50, 60 years ago, when people were living a long time, they also didn't know exactly what to do.

Like they weren't eating enough protein to maintain muscle on their frame they weren't doing a lot of things i think we're going to see a lot of jacked old people that live till 90 95 but they also have a high level of like you know life's like they have a good quality of life too yeah yeah definitely possible i do think that we should put way more emphasis on the actual training and the strength and things than we do. Not just thinking about all these small little minutiae like taking metformin or fasting and everything. That's probably, I mean, it might be beneficial. That might be like a few percent.

But the massive majority is probably going to be trained. A lot of it would be. Some resistance training and some cardiovascular. A lot of it would also be stress mitigation, right? That's big. So what do you do for that? Live in a cave? Right.

Just not live your life? Like if you just, if you don't have an aim and you don't do anything, then maybe you're less stressed. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that we could put somebody in a lab and make all the perfect everything, get them, you know, fast them for a certain amount of time, expose them to a certain amount of cold, expose them to a certain amount of heat. But like how miserable would that be? Right, right. You know? That's why it does like, that's how I am even with diet. Like, you know, maybe there's some benefit in some of these things, a small benefit,

but like, that sucks. It's not the world we live in anymore. Like we aren't cavemen anymore. That's not the world we live in. We don't have to always be saying, what did our ancestors do? Even that I think is kind of a dumb argument because our ancestors probably didn't live very long. You know, they, I don't, I'm not all about like, oh, our ancestors did this.

I'm like, that's probably suboptimal. We can literally, like, your ancestors didn't do testosterone, but you seem like you want to. You know, like, there's a lot. They would have used a cell phone if they had one. Exactly. They didn't have private jets and cell phones and things. Speaking of ancestral stuff, you seem to have referenced the liver king a couple times and uh my brother um recently has linked up with you guys and instead of getting uh a um

instead of getting thyroid medication he was uh uh recommended to take thiamus which is thyroid from a cow so what are some of your your thoughts on replacing or fixing something in the body with something from an animal? Sure. Yeah. So I actually didn't even realize that his liver King's supplement brand is ancestral something. Yeah.

I didn't know that until I have just haven't really followed the guys. He falls into that category that I don't like of like too extreme and they're just trying to sell something, which is fine. Everybody needs to to sell something but i do think it comes at the risk of people sometimes which i don't like um but i didn't know of that until i had three patients actually come in saying that they were they have hypothyroidism so they have an issue with their thyroid they got off of their prescribed medication and started taking this ancestral beef natural desiccated thyroid. And each of them had terrible thyroid markers because they thought that it was thyroid

medication too. I don't know much about, I haven't looked into his stuff much, but it doesn't seem to be like the natural desiccated thyroid or the armor thyroid that we prescribe. So that's how it can, that kind of stuff can be harmful. Like we do prescribe very often natural desiccated thyroid from pig thyroid that is produced in a laboratory, not sold over the counter, and it actually helps. So how we can tell is we're looking for thyroid-stimulating hormone, TSH. When you're taking exogenous thyroid, that TSH should basically be down because your pituitary shouldn't be secreting it. It shouldn't be telling your thyroid to produce any thyroid hormone, very similar to testosterone with like luteinizing hormone, follicle-stimulating hormone. So they came in and their TSH is off the roof. So obviously there's no active thyroid in his medication.

It's not a medication but supplement. But that's where that kind of stuff can be harmful is if you're telling people that you can eat an organ and it's going to heal the organ or, you know, you can take this supplement and it's going to be better than your prescribed supplement. That's not necessarily always the case. And so that's how I think that that kind of like some of his claims and things can definitely be detrimental. But in some cases, if it has the active ingredient, it can help your thyroid.

Is that what you're saying? Yeah. But I think there must be, I don't see, I haven't looked into it enough, but there must be some regulation that says you can't sell thyroid hormone over the counter, right? Because it is prescription only. And so I don't think you can just walk into Walgreens and buy some active thyroid hormone. It has to be from across the counter from your doctor's prescription. But he's putting natural desiccated thyroid on the label and people think they're getting it. What they are probably getting, which is probably beneficial, is the cofactors and things that are found alongside of the thyroid.

There's probably a lot of benefit to taking some aspects of natural desiccated thyroid but not a replacement. Is that his fault? Probably not so much as the consumer's fault. They probably should look into it a bit more and do their research before jumping off. So I get that argument for sure. Just unfortunately people usually aren't that intelligent and we can kind of exploit them. And I think that's- Yeah, he takes kind of a hard stance on like your liver can potentially help your liver. And it would seem to actually make more sense that all organs can help all

organs and that if you're eating natural foods that it can just help your body in general, especially if you're staying away from processed foods. But it's not like a one-to-one, like I have a liver issue, I'm going to take a liver supplement. No, and yeah, I really don't know much about the guy. I'm not trying to make jabs at him. It's just the hot topic right now, right? Like that's what everybody's, he's kind of on and good for him. He's obviously marketing himself well. It's just he is one of many.

He's just right now, he's the hot flavor right now, but there's been conversely, I mean, even like Lane Norton for a while, I like the guy a lot, but for a while he did kind of promote the eat parts and M&Ms and shit all day and you can get lean. And that was a bit too extreme. And I think he admits it to this day too. Like, yeah, I probably pushed a little bit too hard on that. That doesn't work for everybody. It's just, I always kind of, uh, I don't like when anybody is trying to push these crazy claims too hard on people and it could be deleterious to people. Like Lane's recommendations at one point probably caused some people to gain some excess body fat and stuff. Cause they were thinking, well, Lane Norton's got a PhD and he says I can eat pop tarts and stuff.

And he'll be the first one to be like, no, that's not what I said, but people interpreted it wrong. Eventually, he realized like, oh, I'm putting this out the wrong way. Like people aren't – it's not hitting them the way that I wanted it to. He talks with people that have maybe previous bad habits. You tell them they can eat Pop-Tarts and they're going to overeat. Yeah. So he was trying to direct them towards like, hey, if you stay in a caloric deficit you'll still be okay you'll still be able to get ripped right and it's hard for people to hear that because for some people once they

triggered something it's game on and that's what i do i do mainly like if it fits your macro there's nothing that i that's off limits for me i fit everything in but that works for me and it doesn't work for everybody you know some people really like to have a regimen. They like to have restriction. They like to be told you can't have these foods. For me, I'm the exact opposite. You tell me I can't eat cookies, I can't think of anything else but cookie, you know? Are you also getting all of your carbohydrates through kashi cereal? No. Probably not. I usually don't. I hardly even eat that much cereal. But that's the thing. I take a much more. I usually don't. I hardly even eat that much cereal. But that's the thing. I take a much more.

I think most people could probably just benefit from eating whole foods. Yeah. You know, like eat some meat, eat some vegetables, eat some fruit. I believe in grains and carbohydrates too. I don't think there's anything wrong with them. Going back to the ancestral thing, we've seen grains in the – I guess he's kind of a caveman. He was that frozen dude that they found in – where was it? Ireland.

The oldest man they found, they found grains in his gut. So he was eating grains. All of the instruments that we found from the cavemen, they had grains on them. So they were actually producing wheat and things like that and grinding it up. So cavemen probably had some grains too. It makes sense. It's right there. It has calories and it can fuel them.

Why wouldn't they eat it? Yeah. So like, you know, they probably ate what was available to them, be it fruit, vegetables, animals, you know, animals were the big one because they had the most calories in them. You take down a bison, you're eating for a month probably, you know, but I'm sure that they weren't, they weren't turning away a vegetable when they saw it or a berry or something, you know, or grains after they learned how to mill it and everything. So, yeah, I kind of take the approach of if you can eat the least processed stuff that you can. And then sometimes we do live in this world where there's processed stuff around.

I don't think you're going to – it comes back to the quality of life. If you're at a party and there's cake going around and it's your grandma's birthday. You know, are you going to say no to that cake because your ancestor didn't eat it? Probably not. Let's have the cake, you know, enjoy your time. And then maybe eat a little bit less potatoes later on. That's how I look at it. Some people do, they have that piece of cake and it puts them down a spiral, you know,

and that's where it can be bad. I'm not allowed to eat the cake. But that probably comes from years of an unhealthy relationship with food already. You know, most kids and stuff, if we didn't subject them to our unhealthy relationships with food, most kids will just eat until they're full and then get back to playing or something, you know. And then we've had sometimes by the fault of our parent, even by saying finish that plate and you're not moving this table until you finish that plate. And then you can't have dessert until you eat more calories by finishing your plate.

You know, it's kind of wrong. We've probably put a lot of wrong habits into kids from day one. We probably should have just put the food in front of them, let them eat to their desire and then go about their day. Or if they want to move on to dessert, fine. Make sure maybe they hit their protein. Maybe instead of saying finish your plate, just finish your protein serving, and then you can have a little bit extra carbohydrates from the sweets. My opinion.

I'm not pushing it on everybody. That actually makes a lot of sense. I always finished my plate as a kid, and I always finish my plate as an adult. I will never. You won't see anything on that plate, no matter how much you put on it, I'm not going to throw that food away. It's ingrained in me. Was that because of your parents? Yeah, my mom.

My mom. I finish my mom's food. Yeah, same way here. So I ain't going to, I ain't going to turn you. I fill my plate. I eat my plate. That's how it works. Yeah.

Sometimes it's probably not great. It's not great. To be like, before you eat more food, you got to finish all this food. And that's like the requirement is eating more food to get to more food, you got to finish all this food. That's like the requirement is eating more food to get to more food. And then they just keep doing that. And they're like, I don't really want to finish this meal, but I really want that ice cream.

Let me finish this meal and then I'll have that. Finish your French fries. Yeah, finish French fries before you move on to your McFlurry. It's like, what? Does that make any sense? We were talking earlier about kids and kids like being, you know, talking about kids, teenagers and so forth, like pursuing performance enhancing drugs. And my take on this is I think that maybe kids are just kind of changing their drugs. Like kids and drugs have always, you know, teenagers and drugs have always kind of gone hand in hand. That's true. I didn't think about that.

When the news hits and they're like, teenagers having sex and teenagers doing it, it's like, you don't say, it's like, Jesus Christ, this has been going on, you know, for forever. You know, it's been going on forever. So I think that kids are just maybe making different decisions with the style of drugs and the lifestyle that they might want to live. Whereas years ago, maybe they were messing around more so with other types of drugs. You're hearing more and more people talking about psychedelic type of drugs. You're hearing more people talking about performance enhancing drugs. Joe Rogan talks about it quite often. And I would just say this, you know, having kids myself and, you know, with my son,

if I walked in his room and he's shooting some steroids. You're going to say, give me some? Yeah. Yeah. It would be a much different conversation than if I walked into his room and a handful of times I saw that he was passed out on the floor and he pissed himself, you pissed himself from drinking too much. Makes sense. So I'm not saying I want kids to do any type of thing.

But if they're going to be influenced by these like different types of drugs at this time, I think the cat's already out of the bag. The information is already out. So it's kind of just hard to hopefully uh people will try to figure out a way to do it in a safe way but even come to america even even given that scenario um a lot of people have messed around with steroids and i again i'm i'm a pretty big believer that a lot of the side effects can be reversed um there it depends. You know, like somebody can take a crazy amount of shit and they can have effects that are less than desirable. But it's kind of just the way I've been looking at it.

Would I rather have somebody, you know, messing with some really hardcore drugs or would I rather have them looking at, yeah, maybe I want to take a little bit of Anivar or something like that. To me, again, what do I know? But it seems to be less harmful and it seems to be kind of a positive. It's like heading towards a goal, I guess you'd say, whereas like, what's the goal of snorting cocaine? Yeah. That's a way to look at it. Yeah. I haven't even thought of that, but it makes sense.

I would say the issue probably comes with those other drugs are probably still there too. And now they're at it, you know, some kids though might just get on that straight and narrow of like fitness is my life. And that's awesome. Cause it usually comes, you usually aren't dabbling in other drugs when you get really down the rabbit hole of fitness and stuff, you know, usually not, I would say, would you guys agree? Like even drinking becomes something that you're not really that interested in because you're like, that's probably going to hinder my gains. Yeah.

I've seen oftentimes. Yeah. Yeah. So you're probably right on something that's interesting to think about. And then as far as like the I would say, though, that I do think there are a lot of side effects that are irreversible. But we do have more knowledge now and we have places like we have educators. We have people like Derek. You know, obviously he puts out decent, great videos for that stuff um there's a guy named victor black i really like a lot of the uh the

stuff i've gotten from is him as far as his risk risk mitigation he's great um yeah he's a good awesome guy um john jewett the 212 uh olympian guy he has a really him and victor work very closely together so there's all these good sources of this the more safer use model um and then you can probably facilitate that through somebody like merrick which you used to not be able to you know if you were 18 before and you you couldn't go to your primary care and be like hey i'm looking i want to do this trend cycle and get on stage and like i would like to have some metformin i'd like to have some telmosartan and you know some l-carnitine they're not going to give it to you. But now we do have a pretty

good amount of educators that you can start getting a good, uh, knowledge based on not just bodybuilding.com forums or Reddit forums. And then you can go and get actual help from clinics like Merrick or other, uh, well-educated docs who can kind of help with that. So yeah, I would say you're right. Something I haven't even thought about. I should take a less harsh opinion of these younger guys trying to jump on stuff. The other side of it, which I think is always something of concern, again, is the mental side. Yeah. If you're young, you just haven't had a lot of life experiences yet.

Your brain's not fully developed. And any influence of anything, like who the fuck knows what happens. Yeah. And I do think you should probably try to just push the hell out of those natural things first. First learn how to train. Like I've been lifting out for like 15 years. I probably still don't fully understand proper training, you know. Like people like you and your friends, the top level guys have really perfected that.

And that's why you made crazy gains. And then also perfect the eating perfect everything else first you have a lot of years where you can run off that natural production like if you start at 14 15 like go until you're 22 or so and optimize the hell out of it dial everything else in so that when you do start to sprinkle in that stuff that is just the thing that takes you from great to amazing you know an interesting thing that i i just i i think it's just so unique is if a guy chooses to hop on and they get bigger for a while if they do lower or go down um or stop they end up in a different body like i looked at uh you know i thought about pete rubish no pete rubish um years ago i was dead lifting seven to eight. He was huge, yacked, right?

And I don't know why he chose to stop, but he did. And Pete is a different human, looks like a different human being. And I just wonder, what does that do to somebody mentally? If you literally, you took yourself to a point of becoming Superman, and now you're normal again, how do you rectify that? How do you rectify that? How, how are you like, how do you feel about yourself? Even in myself, like, uh,

last year, this time I was 225 pounds. Now I'm 205. Cause I'm just been focusing much more on longevity, but there's the times I'm in the gym and I'm just like, fuck, I'm not the biggest guy in here anymore, you know?

And it's kind of hard mentally. And then I got to talk to myself. Like, you know, there's, you have bigger goals. There's other things. You're not just this. And, uh, recently, recently like i don't know if you guys listen to uh the

foo ads podcast the real bodybuilding podcast uh it's fun to listen to it's bros talking but uh foo ads interesting because he's one who retired recently and so now he's running a lot more he's losing a significant amount of weight but they're talking about that a lot where you know he was a 300 pound giant on the olympia stage and now he down to like two 50 or so and trying to cut more in the mental aspect of that. And then the other bodybuilder, um, Ben Chow had to quit because of kidney reasons, same thing. He's losing weight and they're, they kind of get on there. It's like cathartic for them to talk about this. They don't even like to go in the gym half the time anymore because it just feels like, you know, it sucks. Workout quality is terrible. They're not the biggest guy in there anymore yeah they've uh they've both talked about which is

probably something that you kind of get too out of it mark like their uh ben's i think cycling fuad's running um probably very similar to why like you're running you know like you know you can't lift the weights that you used to so it's kind of sucks to even try but you do need an outlet for sure and so you just change your path, you know. So I think there's ways to get around it, but I don't think it's easy. But the whole body thing can't be real because, I mean, look at the size of you. Like you must have used to have been on and now you still look like. I'm just kidding.

Because we already determined you're natural. That is an interesting thing. I think people think that they can do them and then they can stop them and then they can hold on to their gains. And I guess it would depend on like how many years you've been training for and stuff like that. Like there's so many other factors. I think you can hold on to a decent amount. But probably – I mean you're obviously not going to look that same way. Everything is going to be different.

Just even the way that you hold on to glucose and everything, the glycogen retention and all that, it's all going to be different. I personally don't think you can hold on to any of it. No? Again, it would depend on when. If you took it while you're a teenager, of course. Oh, I thought you meant glycogen. I thought you were going to give me a carnivore.

No, I just meant testosterone. Or I meant performance enhancing drugs. I don't think you can really keep any of it. Maybe there's small amounts, but I was like, huh. You just meant testosterone. Yes, yeah. Or I meant performance enhancing drugs. Yeah. I don't think you can really keep any of it. Yeah. And maybe there's small amounts, but like if you got yourself to like 270 and you're fucking big. No.

You're not going to. You'll probably down to like 220 or so, you know? I mean. I mean, I just, for my own experience, like I weigh about five pounds lighter than I did when I was 16. And then even if I take myself in my best shape without being on anything, I was around 215, 220. I would weigh that same amount. I would go back to that same. And I think over time, I don't think it would happen right away.

But two years, five years, I think it would. Do you think you downsized to where your genetic potential could have potentially led you naturally so say you could have gotten to this size naturally but you ramped up to 280 or whatever and then when you get off you just go back to wherever your natural set point is that's like that's kind of what i think yeah that can make sense that's kind of i don't think we have any like data on or anything. But again, much of what we do doesn't have data on it. I mean look at like Jay Cutler or someone like that. I mean he's holding on to tremendous size but he's also – I don't think he came off of everything.

Yeah, I think he's on TRT. And he probably looked amazing before he got on anything because he's fucking Jay Cutler, right? Yeah, and that's the thing too. I think if – I think I'm kind of thinking of it differently. I'm thinking of coming off blasting and going on to a cruise or a TRT. And I think that's going to help you to maintain it. Because like I talked about, you're going to keep those steady levels. If you blasted for years and came off to nothing, yeah, you're going to shrink.

You're going to shrivel up. Yeah. And probably in front of people's eyes. Well, I think it's important for people to know. They should, yeah. Like that it's – if you can hold on to something, it would be very minimal. Yeah. And so I think people are like, oh, I'm going to do a couple cycles when I'm in my 20s and I'm going to get big and I'm going to hold that.

It's like it doesn't not work that way. Yeah. And when you're younger too and you just – you don't think about the future. I didn't even start thinking about the future until probably like, I don't know, about to turn 34. Probably just like three years ago it started kind of dawning on me. Really in the last like year, more than anything, where I'm like, I care a lot more about career and my family and setting up a future.

Before it was just kind of like, you know, no, like live fast, die young. And I just, I didn't think, I wasn't actively thinking that way, but it was kind of the things I was doing, you know, I wasn't really thinking about the future. And when you're a kid, that's why you are snorting Coke and shooting things up we're nowadays popping pills because you're not thinking about

the future and the same kind of happens with that yeah but if we could just be like dude this is gonna mess you up like you're gonna be smaller you're gonna you know you're gonna have all these issues you may have libido issues for life like you may have all this thing but it's hard to get across them but i get your point like i might rather than mess around with some anabolics rather than some uh some cocaine or the opiates and things now or fentanyl and all that terrible stuff. I think that is something that more people kind of need to explore because it does kind of seem like, you know, okay, maybe if somebody just goes on some tests, okay, you'll get bigger. You'll gain some muscle. It might not be anything crazy.

anything crazy but if you choose to open pandora's box and take some heavier things that's going to put 30 40 pounds of muscle on you that that it's it's still something i'm just like god that that must be fucking crazy it's like you're now way 40 pounds less because you're choosing not to do it anymore you're not the same human you literally you you don't even perceive yourself as the same individual because that becomes your identity that That becomes your identity. It happens really fast too, right? Whereas if you were doing it the natural route, it would take a couple years, which you would have to kind of like work for and you would notice every day and like – or maybe you wouldn't notice as much because it's slower. Yeah. But when you gain that muscle mass and that strength that quickly, you do feel like a fucking superhero. Yeah, true.

But only I think if you employ the right eating and work too I do really think that the work and all the lifestyle shit is so much more important than people put into it and I really I used to kind of fall into that class of oh they're just doing steroids I was competitive in CrossFit

and stuff for a while not like on the games level but locally competitions and I would look at the games level like, well, they're doing growth hormone. They've got a good hookup. That's why I'm not. Now I'm much more of a believer in, no, those dudes work their asses off. They put in the work, like first and foremost. I know you joked around about it, Mark,

but I'm sure your work was way more than any drugs ever did. Like it was the grind. It was the getting up and getting your ass to the gym when you didn't feel like it. It was the shoveling the meal when you didn't feel like it. The going to bed, the skipping the parties, you know, like that. And that's the stuff that people don't get dialed in first and they should. I'm all for a 20-year-old wanting to start things, but like get all that other stuff in. Because if you just throw that in and don't do any of that, you're not going to get the results.

Now you've wasted money and you've hurt your health. If you're going to hurt your health, at least get something out of it in my opinion. Like I think the Olympians, they understand that they're putting themselves at risk. But look where they're getting out of it. That's their career. They're making their money off it. They're setting up their future that way. And so there's a lot of things that we do that you can say that police officers and stuff in harm for their, you know, same type of thing. They're putting themselves in harm in a

different way. But if you're going to employ it, make sure that you get all of it that you can. Don't just stick the needle in your butt and expect to turn into Mark or you, you know, it's not going to happen. It's not. And I mean, yeah, they might make a small bit more gains than other people, but they're not going to turn out to be the elite lifter that they think they are. Yeah. And long-term, like you mentioned, some of those guys end up stopping working out. I'm not going to say that they didn't love exercise because I mean, if, if he got up to 300 pounds, even if he was on stuff, he must've loved the gym. But, you know, I don't see myself stopping working out for any reason because number one, I've enjoyed it for such a long time. And number two, it's not just for how I look in the mirror. It's for all the other

benefits it gives me mentally outside of the gym and what it's doing for me. So if you don't love it and you only enjoy it because of the amount of size you see yourself gaining week by week, year by year, and then you aren't gaining that anymore, shit, that's not good. You really have to like that shit. I agree. I should clarify, too. I don't think, like, Fu, he still trains. But they were just talking, like, he's just focused more on running now

because it's like I can do this a lot better naturally and I can almost kind of be competitive in it. I can set up a race for myself. But lifting is still there and they love it, obviously. So, yeah, I don't want to misspeak on his behalf. But yeah, for sure. That's huge.

Like it should just be to help you with your sport. You know, you shouldn't be, it would be dumb to do steroids and work out because you're on steroids. You know, I think that's what you're saying. But I know some people who have done that. Like they,

they, they hopped on, they did a cycle or whatever. They barely train. And yep. Once they came off, they don't train because it's, they don't feel the same way as they feel when training when they're on some shit easy to do too because yeah you go

from feeling great move the weight is moving better you got the aggression and all that goes away and that's when you got to dig into that willpower and that you probably don't have because you didn't set it up before getting into there you know yeah so i think we cannot like yesterday i worked out with uh like you know i'm just on plain TRT right now. Worked out with Smokey and my buddy yesterday, and they're both bigger than me. I didn't take any pre-workout. It was, I'm three hours back.

It was late at night. But I had an amazing workout because I knew how to tap into that motivation that I have, you know? Yeah. And that's what some people don't learn how to do when they're looking for the pill or the injection to get that. And, you know, that's everything in life, business, school, all that. There's no quick fix.

You've got to suck it up and do the work, you know. I do wish people would put way more emphasis on that. And that's something I am trying to talk to. A lot of the patients come in. Like I said, a lot of them are pretty dialed in and they're kind of looking for that extra few percent, which is cool. But when we do get the occasional younger guy in, it is kind of nice too that they're coming. They're obviously proactive about this stuff.

They chose us over the one that's just going to write them a script. And so I can sit down and talk to them about like, let's figure out your nutrition, man. Let's figure out your diet. Like, let's figure out how you're training, how you're sleeping, who you're hanging out with, what supplements you're taking, how much water, like that stuff means so much too. I do like to be able to make that impact on people's lives. I would like everybody just to try something.

Just go into the gym and do like three sets of something. Lap pull downs, dumbbell presses, have about a minute rest in between sets, do about 10 reps, pick a weight that's appropriate for you. Go in for that day without a pre-workout yeah when you're done with just those couple sets you're usually all set to work out throw on some good music and fucking have a party like i i love i love pre-workout i love caffeine i like all the stuff it's good to get hyped up it's good to do some of this stuff all the time uh here and there but you don't necessarily

need it like if you go in the gym and just start moving around uh you're that's where the motivation a lot of times kicks in yeah i know for me anyway some like elite lifters and um athletes and stuff they will purposely train alone like with no music no pre-workout and so that when they get to meet day when they can employ all that stuff deploy all that stuff rather that they do yeah and like uh crossfitter uh josh bridges you know like navy seal dude he always talks about doing like no music by himself in the garage just like suffering you know putting yourself in that pain cave it's a lot easier to do when you got the whole gym firing you up and the music's cranking and you pounded some dry scoop some jacked 3d you know like it's easy to get going but it's really hard to tap into

that, to be like, this sucks and I'm going to hang out in there. And that's where like the cold plunge and stuff that you guys are doing. That's like the scientifical term would be basically like stress resilience, like increasing that epinephrine and hanging out in it and being like, I want to run out of this, but I'm not going to, I'm going to sit here and endure the pain. And that helps. And it trickles down, I think. And you've probably seen it too, like in, in business and things like things get shitty sometimes life sucks sometimes. And the people who make it through the other end are the ones that just, you know, stick it out. They work hard and they deal with the suck. And then they rep, they, they get all the benefit too many people these days. I think as soon as things hurt, they turn away, you know,

and they, they think that they, they just need something to push. They need a little bit of a buffer, be it a drug or, or something to push them through the painful. But I think we should embrace the suck a little bit more personally. What's the price point at, at, for, uh, the thing that we offer for Maricel? Project panel? Yeah. About how much is that and what are they getting?

So let's look it up right now because I don't know right off the top of my head. And I don't either. Well, you guys offer a lot of different things. Yeah. This is just a specific special thing. I actually don't know how much anything costs. I don't know if they set it up that way purposely, but I do like it because I'm not dictated by a number sign. You know, it's not like the insurance companies where, because people are like, well, how much is that going to cost?

I'm like, dude, I'm sorry. I don't know. Like PCC will handle that. But I do like that. But I sometimes I wish I knew. Yeah. Sorry. I know.

I just had to pull it up. But so for the, the power project panel, now this covers literally everything that you're going to need to know, like what's going on under the hood. And the really, really awesome thing about this panel is that it comes with a lab analysis with somebody, with a client care coordinator. So that's the really big thing because we could all go get our labs done, but to interpret those, it's like, oh, no, my test is only 200 or whatever. Then I need testosterone. It's like, well no my test is only like 200 or whatever you like then like i need testosterone it's like well what about your free test right like what are some of these other underlying issues that you might have so that's the important thing about our panel and so for that it's 500 bucks but with promo code power project you save 101 off of that so you're getting a shit ton of work done plus somebody that's going to interpret everything all for

under 500 bucks or 400 26 different labs 26 different labs so that's a shit ton of work done plus somebody that's going to interpret everything all for under $500 or $400. 26 different labs. 26 different labs. So that's a shit ton of stuff. So testosterone, estrogen, your cholesterol, all of that stuff that you're going to need to know. I've been ordering labs for myself since 2015, I think, every six months. And before coming to Merrick, I wasn't really a follower of Derek or anything. I didn't really know what Merrick was before Derek reached out to me.

But I would hear rumor because I'm kind of in the space that Merrick was the place to go to for cheaper labs. So I do think that's a relatively good deal. And I'm not just saying that because I'm obviously biased. So take that with a grain of salt. Though, I've utilized all of them and I do know that Merrick consistently is kind of the cheaper ones, at least for the labs. I don't know what it comes to when you're paying for medication stuff. I don't know. But, uh, but as far as labs go, if you just want to get a look under the hood, like you said, that's a great deal. Cause I've spent a lot going through those other companies too. Always searching for promo codes

and things. Yeah. Yeah. And trying to get it through just like, uh, whether it be your insurance, it's a pain in the dick because the doctor's not going to order damn near anything. So if you have to go out of pocket, I mean, at least in California, it's kind of, it's a pain in the dick because the doctor is not going to order damn near anything so if you have to go out of pocket i mean at least in california it's kind of it's very expensive yeah and there are other places but like the thing that we like about america is it's like the premium telehealth clinic yeah you can go to some of these like they're not underground because they have a website but they kind of treat you like an underground lab where they're just gonna throw some needles at you like it's a lot different here. Yeah, and I like what you said about the interpretation. In 2015, I was in my education.

I kind of knew what I was looking for. A lot of people don't, and so they might be massively interpreting or like uninterpreting or misinterpreting. I mean, misinterpreting is a word. They might be massively misinterpreting the lab results. And so it is nice to get teamed up with a patient care coordinator who can potentially put you towards a physician too, which is awesome.

Because even then, even when I was in school, some of the things that I know now, I'm like, man, I should have caught that earlier. You know, my kidneys weren't doing so good when I thought they were fine, you know, or maybe it was actually probably vice versa. But that's what's cool about working with Merrick too, is we do work with athletes and things. And we understand where your doc might see your kidney values and be like, you're in kidney failure. And then, you know, we are like, no, you're not. You're just a muscular dude who worked out yesterday. And that's why we're getting these kidney readings.

And then, like, just to put you at peace of mind, let's order something like a Cystatin C. I guarantee, like, 9 out of 10 primary carers won't know what that is, that it's a better marker. And on top of that, I was just working out with my buddy came and joined us yesterday, and he was like, my doctor will not order a Cystatin C for me. He won't do it. I've been begging him. This guy's a dentist.

He knows too. He knows what to look for, but he's been begging Kaiser, which you guys have here in California, to order it, and they won't do it. Crazy. Just like they won't order the lipoprotein little a and things. Like, I do like the fact that we give people, we kind of give them the power over their own health. That's that like kind of like libertarian that I talked about. Like, I do understand that can be dangerous. Some people will misinterpret them and take the wrong measures, but still, that's their choice. We can't tell people, like if we're going to say my body, my choice, it should be for everything, including things like,

you know, what you get put into your body and, you know, what you decide to put into your body yourself, things like that. You know, I do, I do feel that way personally, but that's not the views of Merrick, but necessarily, but my own, I don't want to misspeak. I know I'm representing them, but I think they would align with that. But that's a controversial subject. What's the deal with creatine or creatinine levels? It seems like every time anybody that lifts and goes and gets a test done, everyone's like this – or not everyone, the person that reads the labs are like, this is really fucked up.

That's happened to me. What's the deal with that? Are we going to die? No. Yeah, that's what I was saying. And a better reading would be to get that Cystatin C, that kidney measure, and look to see what's happening with the nephrons in the actual kidney. So it's going to be elevated if you have – even if you just have excess muscle mass, it will probably be negatively elevated. If you worked out, it will definitely be elevated because there's going to be protein filtering through.

It's going to put some strain on the kidneys. And then if you're taking creatine, which most of us are in our pre-workout and things, even if we're not deliberately taking it, it's usually in a pre-workout or intra-workout. You're probably going to have some elevations on that level. And so for the athletic population, we need to take that kind of thing into consideration. Same thing happens on liver markers. So the liver marker enzymes will be elevated due to a workout. So I, one thing too, I tell like a lot of people is if you are going to get labs, like to get the most out of your money, you probably don't work out for like three to four days before things like light walking or light cardio and things should be fine, but don't work out for like three to four days before things like light walking or

light cardio and things should be fine but don't get under heavy weights don't be doing those uh sets to failure and things that is going to just it's going to skew the results a bit yeah my shit's been really jacked exactly because you probably never take some yeah just no i'm not gonna ever stop right i've never been a lab where i've not worked out three days before so yeah you're probably not getting a – Shit. I think – Like your C-reactive protein is 15. This is impossible.

You should have died three weeks ago. Exactly. But is it maybe more accurate? Because if they were to stop working out, that's very abnormal as opposed to continuing to work out every day. Yeah, but I just – those aberrations in the lab work aren't negative ones per se, but they're looking that way. So I would say that if you took like a week off and you got labs and your kidneys are still left, like there might be – we need to do some further investigation. Got it. So we get a better look into things.

And blood work is about comparison. So like if they were just like, hey, go ahead and work out and do whatever, all three of us are going to work out quite differently. And then – and each time we're going to work out differently so they're trying to compare your blood because that's the whole thing with getting the blood work done it's good to have a first reading but it's really important to have you have follow-up blood work and you're trying to improve some of those markers i'm huge on that yeah i think it's that's the most beneficial thing is to have as much data as you can. I like to be able to look back. I wish I started before 2015, but mine is 2015 and now.

And I have – I can – if I wanted to get real nerdy with it, you know, I could put it in spreadsheets and make trends. I don't know how to do that stuff, so I don't. But it would be cool. Hopefully one day like Merrick gets an app or something that does that because I think that would be awesome. That would be. If you could just continually get blood and it's thrown into – and you can see trends, it would be awesome for diets and things too. People make these crazy claims like show me the lab work that shows that six-month period where all you ate with meat had positive effects. Maybe it didn't.

Or sleep or work. I do tell people like some people come to us and everything is perfect. And I'm like don't look at this as like obviously you shouldn't look at it as a bad thing. But sometimes I feel a little guilty. Like, I'm sorry you came to us and you're good. But the really cool thing is that you got all this awesome labs, you know. And like, let's have that as a set point. And now you know.

And then say in six months when you get it again, if you, maybe you've been busting your ass at work and you're only getting four hours of sleep a night and things have changed, you can point at that. Because that was a variable that changed, you know. And you have this data point. People want to be messed up. They do. Testosterone was low. Yes, I know. I do think sometimes they're like, yeah, I hope my testosterone is low.

Yeah. Yeah. There was an ease of mind for me because like when I got my first set of labs from Merrick done, I don't know if it was three years ago now, maybe two and a half or three years ago, I never really had consistent lab work done. And I was like, I wonder if anything is just off. You know, my grandfather died of diabetes. I was just wondering, is there anything weird going on?

And everything was cool. And I was like, okay, I'm good. I got really nothing to worry about. It's nice to know that everything you're doing day in and day out is paying off too, right? Because you probably put a lot of work into this, you know? Yeah. That got cool. It makes sense. Like, oh, cool.

It makes sense. Like, yeah, the mirror is one thing, but we do know that the mirror isn't everything. Like, that's why bodybuilders, they look great in the mirror, but they're dying because the insides aren't good, you know? So it is nice to get that look under the hood. As you said, I like that term because it's true. And I like all kinds of data points. Like, I was even just the other day, I took off my continuous glucose monitor. Have you guys messed around with those at all?

I haven't used it. I don't like pricking shit. No, it's not bad. I thought so too. I was all afraid. It took me like five minutes to get the courage. It's weird because I inject other shit. I think just the process of it,

it makes a noise and it's kind of scary. I didn't even feel it. Have you done it? No, I was going to, but I'm just afraid I'm going to get it caught on something and it's going to like just jack. I don't know. It just just it weirds me out i didn't but uh i taught uh jason kalipa said he wore one and he does brazilian jiu-jitsu you know and so he said he put it on his abdomen and then put some rock tape over it and then it was fine well i guess the gi or

whatever was there i didn't catch mine on anything it wasn't bad. But it's fun to try. It's cool. I recently saw a doctor, though, like talking bad about it. Like, you know, people who don't have diabetes have no right wearing this. It's just stupid. I'm like, why? Why would that be stupid to let somebody get a look at their health? You know, like we've had patients come in just one night. I talked to him, and he was like, my wife for years has made this soup that we think is really healthy. But that was the one thing that shoots my blood sugar like out of the range.

It's crazy. And he was actually trending towards, I think he was in the pre-diabetic category too. That's why we gave him one. Like everything else seems dialed in with you. What's going on that's causing you to be this way? And so it can be interesting. Like why wouldn't we give? And the craziest thing is those things are prescription only.

Wow. Yeah. To get a look at how foods impact your blood sugar, you have to go to a doctor and pay like a prescription. That's so dumb. I feel like you should just, I don't know, I don't get it. Especially when you can do a finger prick. That's not, that's over the counter.

Yeah, right. Again, getting into the political BS of medicine and anabolics and things is crazy. Andrew, take us out of here, buddy. All righty. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. If you guys are ready to get optimized with Merrick, make sure you guys head over to MerrickHealth.com. That's M-A-R-R-E-K-Health.com.

And when you guys are checking out, if you guys do, like, order your own labs, make sure you use code POWERPROJECT10 to save 10% off all of those labs. Links to everything down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Please drop some comments down below, maybe some more questions about testosterone that we can address in a future episode. Hopefully we can get to all of them. And subscribe if you guys are not subscribed already.

Please follow the podcast at MBPowerProject on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. My Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter is at IamAndersZ. And Seema, where are you at? Go down to the description. Check out Discord because I'm pretty sure at this point there's over 1,400 people in there. It's popping.

So at and Seema ending on Instagram and YouTube. At and Seema ending on TikTok and Twitter. Adam, where can they find you? Where can they find me? At Dr. A.E. Hotchkiss. H-O-T-C-H-K-I-S-S. Or just Merrick Health. Yeah, we'll link it down in the description as well.

I'm really not that cool. I have a new puppy, and that's mainly what you're going to see. Nice. A lot of my puppy right now. Yeah. But, yeah, I would love to see you guys at Merrick, though. It would be awesome. Follow me if you want to.

It could make me feel cooler than I am, hopefully. Yeah, we'll make it happen. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, man. I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never weakness.

Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye. Where's the puppy? Oh, you don't see him? No, you're looking for the puppy. I don't see him yet. I just see you and your hair.