Mark Bell's Power Project - MBPP EP. 665 - PED’s (NOT Roids) to learn faster and GET FITTER ft. Go Super Brain Andy Triana

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

Andy Triana aka, Go Super Brain, is a Strongman competitor, consultant to professional athletes and a straight up genius. Today he melts our minds discussing legal PED's, how to learn better, how to retain info, flow states and various supplements for aiding performance and reducing anxiety. Go follow Andy asap on IG: https://www.instagram.com/gosuperbrain/ Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Bubs Naturals: https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢Vertical Diet Meals: https://verticaldiet.com/ Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% off your first order! ➢Vuori Performance Apparel: Visit https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order! ➢8 Sleep: Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro! ➢Marek Health: https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS! 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 Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Subscribe to the Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ 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 ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ 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 #GoSuperBrain #Biohacking #PowerProject

Power Project family, we talk about sleep all the time on this podcast, as you know. That's why we partner with Eight Sleep Mattresses. And the amazing thing about Eight Sleep Mattresses, and one of the reasons why they are nicknamed the Tesla of beds, is because of the technology behind the Pod Pro cover. Not only does it literally change its temperature through the night. First off, it can go from 55 degrees all the way to 110. But the temperature changes through the night based off your own body temperature. It also tracks your heart rate, your heart rate variability, your tossing and turning,

your partner's tossing and turning. And based off of that, in consecutive nights, it will literally change the temperature settings so that you get better quality sleep on different nights. It blows my mind at how great these mattresses are. So Andrew, tell them how to get it. Yeah, absolutely. So the other cool thing too is like the app will actually, you know, you track everything through the app, but then it'll send you messages like, hey, do you feel more rested today? Well, that's no surprise because, you know, it gives you all the information. And yeah, it's just really cool to be able to track that sort of thing. So that way, you know, like, you know, you can't get better at something you're not tracking and it does it for you. So head over to 8sleep.com slash PowerProject.

That's 8 spelled out. So E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash PowerProject. And you will automatically receive $150 off of the Pod Pro cover or the Pod Pro cover and mattress combo. Again, no code for that. You guys will get that automatically. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Power Project family, how's it going? Today we have on the podcast Andy Triana, aka Go Superbrain. And we actually came across him through Joe Sullivan and Jake Benson, who we had on the podcast. They told us of this guy who could help

people unlock different things in their brain and just improve their cognition. So we reached out to him and let me tell you the amount of things that we got into on this podcast from the use of psilocybin for performance to injectable L-carnitine, just the amount of things that we learned today, you guys are not ready for it. There's a lot of power here. It's going to be a crazy one. So either way, I just want you guys to enjoy this episode with Andy Triana, aka Go Superbrain. It's a long one, so make sure that you have your pens and your notepads

out because you're going to learn a lot of crazy things. Let's get into it. Let's roll. We're rolling. Rolling, rolling. Make sure, make sure. Yep. Little tickers going. So we are definitely rolling. We got some superbraining going on here at Super Training today. Yeah. Awesome to have you here, Andrew. Likewise, guys.

Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to come out. You said you've been a fan since you were a little kid, but you're still a little kid. You're only 27. It's been the reoccurring trend in my life. My first Strongman Nationals, they ID'd me. Because they're like, holy, what are you doing here? friend in my life, my first Strongman Nationals, they ID'd me.

They're like, what are you doing here? I remember the video you put up doing carb night, the very, very first time. You were still round-faced, Mark, at the time. That was a beautiful look. They want that back. Everybody does. For Strongman, a lot of these guys are

giants. Are you competing in a weight class or something like that? and are are you competing in like a weight class or something like that or you just competing with the big boys i've competed in all the weight classes i've gone as low as 80 kilo and made like a pretty scary cut to that had the ambulance called on me recently and i've gone all the way up to heavyweight um i wasn't a heavyweight and bodyweight but i put myself in that realm as a competitor but most of my time is spent between 90 to 105 kilos are you a professional strongman? There is no quote unquote technical professional for the smaller weight classes. There's only for

that in 105 and up. But my first worlds, I took fifth. I've been at the world level in multiple categories before. And I consider myself someone who is professional skills, but there's just no actual like delineation between that and amateurs for what I participate in. And you were doing some of this stuff uh some strongman training while you had two jobs and you were doing it like 3 30 in the morning or something yeah i remember one time it was in the winter um it was actually so cold and you're on the east coast shut yeah so i was there at 3 30 in the morning it was dark out and the door was frozen shut and i just had to like eat that and turn around and go to work early jesus that takes a a lot of dedication. You know, I, I, I like to wake up early and kind of get my day started. Um, but I'm usually like walking or I might like run.

There's been time periods where I lifted and stuff, but that was like more bodybuilding stuff. I can't imagine like first thing in the morning, waking up and doing Atlas stones. So I'm definitely a little bit of a morning person. Like for example, I responded to your text in California time at three 45. And it's just that I'm that person. My eyes pop open and I'm just up. So it wasn't super difficult, but I think something you guys can relate to is that motivation when it's

authentic, always trumps how tired you are acutely. And you know, our brain is set up for that. We have instant response systems that in less than a quarterely. And, you know, our brain is set up for that. We have instant response systems that in less than a quarter of a second, you could be excited. And I think people forgetting that lets them believe that they're more tired than they are. Like, sure, maybe you're tired waking up, walking the dog, but you don't need to be ecstatic either.

You only need to be not tired when you're doing what you need to do. And with your vast understanding of the brain, how can some of the people listening to the show start to get themselves into maybe like a routine where they're developing really good habits over a period of time? It actually starts with assessment. So I have a subscription-based email for Go Superbrain. And we just finished this thing where I had everyone denote what the energetic demands of a task were and if it's different than the importance of a task so for example food shopping is one of

those things it's always kind of energetically taxing like has anyone ever come back from the supermarket like wow i feel amazing it's like it's always more tiring than it should too many choices right but the importance is relatively low And then maybe something like this where the energy demand is pretty low. We're just sitting here and talking, but it's important to a lot of us. I think making that first assessment is the best way to kind of get out of a bad rut of being always tired and stuff because you realize, yeah, sure you're tired, but you're going to the supermarket. Who cares if you're tired? And if you only need to be cognitively awake to do something like a talk like this, I don't need 1,000 calories beforehand to be prepared.

I just need 30 seconds to get my talking systems going properly. Can you trick yourself into being more fired up to go to the grocery store or anything like that? Yeah, we have tons of little games and stuff that we do at Go Superbrain. But it could be as simple as pulling out your arm hairs. If you're exhausted and too tired to go into the supermarket, just start ripping arm hairs off your arm. You're going to get a sympathetic response and these adrenaline-like stuffs are going to spin around.

So you could be smart or kind of dumb about it. Hurt yourself a bit. What other weird games do you guys play that we just – because that makes sense, but it's not something that I would just do without being told. So what else do you got? So when it comes to weird games, I kind of separate it in what you want to get better at. So there's a speech protocol I have on Instagram that's really cool. So if you realize you're one of those people that – or actually let's take a step back and we'll put both of you guys in the example here.

What's your Instagram by the way? It's GoSuperBrain. OK. Both of you guys follow me already. Oh, good. I follow you both back. But I'm going to give you this prompt. Let's imagine a purple alligator with cheeseburgers for eyes and a cowboy hat. If you had to describe that to the next person walking in the room, would it be your inability to see this abstract purple alligator in your head?

Or do you see it in your head and you can't tell somebody else about it? That's how we decide what brain game you need to play. And that also applies to sports. You know, like if it's a balance type too. After the energy assessment, what do you move on to there for forming habits? So the next thing after that energy assessment is figuring out what you suck at recovering from. You know, so I'm someone who recovers very well from a lot of work. I love to work. It's not mentally draining for me to do a lot of work and relax. But I do struggle with

nihilism when I find myself not working a lot. So what I need to recover from when it comes to, oh, I'm not good at this, it more has to do with introspection. So once you have this energy assessment, start looking at what do I not do well when it comes to the things I already do and it will fill itself out. A habit isn't something like I want to do this every day and you start doing it every day. It only becomes a habit after you've done it for a bunch of days. Before that, it's just a kind of random arbitrary thing you did. Exactly. So what I view habit formation as is a subtraction equation, not an addition-based one. It's not that I'm going to do X and then Y and then Z.

It's that X and Y and Z have to be done. What is most likely to happen over X, Y, and Z? And then we modulate it. So you find it easy to do a lot of work at once. You find it non-energy, like not taxing. Most people don't. Most people find it, especially nowadays, they find it very hard to focus on a single task for a prolonged period of time, whether it be reading, whether it be working on something that they don't want to do. For those types of individuals, what are the things that they need to start paying attention to to be able to increase that skill and turn it into something that is a

skill. Totally. And you're right. It's the most widespread thing ever right now. I think part of it is that we promote multitasking as something that's beneficial when in reality it's not. But the simplest thing is close all the tabs in your head. You know, if you had 15 tabs open on your computer and I was like, find your bank statement, you'd make a mistake. I think people go into tasks thinking about what do I have to do after? What am I going to do later? What have I done before this? Instead of saying what are the demands of this task?

Where am I at right now and how do I get there? What is a way to close all those tabs? Because I don't know if you were seeing me earlier. I had two computers going and I was, I didn't mean to do this. It just kept happening where I'm like, oh, I got to finish this one thing. Oh, damn it.

I'm in the middle of this. So like I can't focus on one thing because I'm always thinking about the next thing or something else that I have to think about. So what's a good way to make sure like you can close those damn tabs because they keep popping up like old pop-ups back in the day. Literally for you, I bet.

Yeah, they do. Mindfulness is the simple answer. What I do is I play the world's smallest violin. When I find I have too many tabs open, I rub my index finger and thumb next to each other and force myself to actually feel that. Not just because I'm doing it and I know it's happening, but do I actually feel them going over each other? Can I feel the small ridges in between my nail and the soft part of my finger?

And that inherently closes the tabs. That many tab open phenomenon is anxiety being manifested. And it's not the type of anxiety where it's like, oh, I'm not sure. It's neurochemical anxiety, meaning we have five different brain areas that are competing for function. And to be focused, we need one to two brain areas that are open for function. And to be focused, we need one to two brain areas that are open for business, if you will. So in essence, you just need to do something to get yourself to be present immediately. Like some type of funneling type of activity. How would you do that in sport? I love this question, Mark. It's always relative to your

success rate on the sport itself. So let's say we're talking about someone who's a great squatter and they're squatting. That is going to be totally different than the deadlift, which may be their worst lift. So if you find that you're going to be for sure successful at something and struggling with many tabs, I would recommend just a quick meditation because that's the only thing that's going to disinhibit that anxiety to allow you to do the thing that you're already successful at. Whereas if it's that same squatter who's now trying to deadlift and they suck at it and they have that anxiety, it's a different mechanism promoting it. This is actually a little bit of fear and we alleviate fear with confidence and that's when warm-up sets come into play or anything like that. I've heard Jason Kalipa talk about this before.

He struggled with running, and he won the CrossFit Games years ago. And it wasn't until he fixed his running that he became a better CrossFit athlete. But one of the things that his coach suggested while he was running, Jason would think, like, I'm getting tired. Like, I can't breathe. Like, this is getting challenging. Like Like all I want to do is stop. And all these things would kind of go off in his head or my calf is getting really tight or this is getting really strenuous or look how far ahead everybody is than where I'm at. And his coach just said, let's just hone in on one thing.

And so for him in this scenario, Jason's form wasn't great because he's pretty thick and the way he would kind of run pretty stiff. So his coach has said, let's just concentrate on your foot strike. I want your foot to strike like this. You're going to land on your kind of the ball, your foot this way, and you're going to push off this way. So foot strike, foot strike, foot strike. Whenever you're in trouble, you think about how your feet are striking the ground. Are those the kind of suggestions that like somebody might utilize for a particular sport to kind of get them away from this panic mode that they might be in? Absolutely. I love that example because you followed it up with originally with he wasn't good at it.

And furthermore, he wasn't necessarily built for it. When you're in that scenario and fear is what's driving your inability to do something, you need a buoy of objectivity is what I call it. And that's what that was. It wasn't that his foot strike was so poor. That's why he was bad at running. But that focus on the foot strike is that objectivity that he can latch onto. And it might be your brain is telling you you're tired, but it's lying to you.

It's really just stressed and scared and doesn't think it's good at it. But you can close those tabs and find that buoy of objectivity when you're lost at sea and let yourself be aware of the fact that, wait, I'm actually maybe not as tired as I thought. He started running, but it was his response or rather his lack of proper response to that tiredness when he ran and not having a strategy to combat it. Real quick, you mentioned a short meditation for the lifter that is like really bad at the deadlift, right? What does that kind of look like? Because when people think about meditation, they think about maybe shutting their eyes and focusing on one thing. But what does that look like? Does it look like focusing on the lift, how the lift looks? What do you mean when you say that? So great question. Meditation is such a large bandwidth, right? Even physiologically what it does, we can talk about so many microcosms within the same meditation that are changing

metabolically. What it looks like in this specific scenario for like that squatter who's about to do the deadlift that they struggle with, it's getting feedback from their body because we're doing a body-based activity, right? So they're too much in their head and not getting enough sensory feedback from the neurons in their feet and their hands, you know? So in that scenario, their meditation, it's going to be a lifting-like meditation. It'll be take off your shoes and feel the platform and the floor and the warmup area with your feet. Feel how cold the bar is relative to the warmth of your body. Feel the knurling digging into your hands when you grip the deadlift bar.

That's like a powerlifting meditation, if you will. And you do that and you're not like literally doing that. You're imagining that. It can go either way, actually. If you're good in your head at doing it and you can feel that anticipatorily, do it. If you struggle and you need the knurling in your hands of rub and scrape, do that too. That's what I mean by powerlifting meditation. If I'm dealing with like a football player or an executive, their meditation for sport or performance in their world is different than the powerlifters.

Okay. performance in their world is different than the power lifters. Okay. And now real quick, generally, as far as meditation is concerned, if somebody is trying to build that habit, do you think that's, because everyone's like, oh, I want to build a habit of meditation. Do you think that that's the way people should go about it? Do you think it's that beneficial that they should just try to build that habit in the morning or in their daily life? Or is there a specific way they should try to build the habit of meditation?

Like you just mentioned, sports-specific meditation. I think synergy is the secret to life, right? You know, for – not to answer your question with a different answer, but everyone talks about health, right? What is this health? And it's health relative to you. So if you're a marathon runner, having a high blood pressure is probably not great, especially because marathon running is supposed to do the opposite. Having a high blood pressure is probably not great, especially because marathon running is supposed to do the opposite. But if you're, let's say, a shot put thrower and you're the best in the world, high blood pressure is not that bad for you because that constriction response is how you're throwing the shot put and increases in blood pressure actually an adaptation of that sport. So it's health relative to what?

So let's say you want to learn to meditate and your current goal is fat loss. We're going to talk about a meditation that's focusing on oxygen, carbon dioxide flowing. So it does that. In short, I think meditation of some sort has too high of an ROI for any human to ignore, especially in the modern day world. But I think the secret is finding the meditation for you. Like a moving meditation, not like most people. Whatever it may be. Got it. On your website, you teach learning, which is an interesting thing because I've always

– I struggled in school and an interesting thing about school and an interesting thing about education in general is that I don't recall there ever being a day where they taught you how to learn. And so it's like, it seemed like that's a pretty big topic that just gets brushed over. We're just going to learn history. And no one really is, no one's really examining like, let's start off with some basic stuff and let's see what ability you guys have to learn and not only the ability that you have to learn. Let's teach you how you can learn better. Why did you decide to go this route and why did you decide to make Go Superbrain the website? So it was partly in frustration from coaching was what made me think about this. It was like, how come this introductory protocol

or block got such great results in teaching this person how to squat, but not this person, or especially in the world of strong man, it's easier to see that skill acquisition process. And then even furthermore, it's like, how come this person kind of learned something in chunks? Like they got really good at the squat, then they stopped and it took them three meets to make that next jump in technique. And how come some people just get it all at once? And there's all these disparities between the end outcome and the path someone took to get there in learning. That's what caught my eye originally. And then it became how do I service people better? And I realized that half the time it's verbiage based when it comes to learning. The gateway into learning is being aware that you just gained a new piece of information you weren't aware of before.

And that can only happen through words being placed appropriately, right? Because if you don't know something, how do you know it? You only know if someone teaches it to you. So when we set up scenarios for learning that are individually specific, success goes through the roof. And I started seeing that in small ways. So I took a step back and was like, all right, well, I'm not even doing the same job as a coach anymore. I'm not a strength coach doing this stuff. So I had to redefine some things. And, you know, I told Mark briefly off air, I started asking people a bunch of questions. I was like, what do you know about your brain? You know, I would just ask people at the gym or I'm a social person, just kept asking the same people, the same questions. And I really

accumulated nothing more than coffee makes me go faster. If I want to work harder, I try to avoid concussions when I can. And if you were to cut my skull open, it's pink and mushy. That's like the extent of what people know about their brain. So those two worlds just came together for me. I was like, oh my god. It's not that people can't learn. It's that people aren't allowed to learn because of the scenario they're put into. Real quick question too because there's going to be some asshole who's like, where do you get his education?

Even though when you show what you've been able to do for countless people and we're not going to talk about who those people are. But when you show what you've done, it's like obvious what the fuck you're talking about. So how did you come about learning all this stuff specifically about the brain? And we're going to get into compounds for that too. But how did you learn about that? Cool story, especially relative to learning, right? So I got my initial degree in applied exercise physiology, and that was great. By the time I finished my bachelor's, I realized I have a gift for this.

Like I work really hard and all that stuff, but I'm definitely meant to be doing this. It's just easy for me in a lot of ways to absorb the information. Like if you guys have seen Stranger Things, like the stuff's like underneath the earth. I joke that that's what it's like when I read research. I'm like, oh. I know what's going on. It just happens. So I went into grad school with nothing more than wanting to prove something I was deeply passionate about in research. I told you guys off the air, but for everyone listening, I wanted to prove that a natural people, if you take resistance training and push them too far, they will convert more

growth hormone on their own versus testosterone because growth is a specific analog to heal resistance training-based damage. Long story short, there was politics involved stemming from if I was to prove this right, what would it mean for the rest of the world, which to me, I was like, oh my god, did you just ask me that question? What's the point of being a researcher? And there was like – there's a lot of money problems involved with research and bias. And I got to the point where I was like, why am I going to school and paying out of pocket if I can't even be in school for why I want to be in school? So I actually left.

I dropped out of graduate school. I went through like this existential crisis of like I'm supposed to be the smart guy and I love what I do and I couldn't even finish my graduate degree. And then I got this like spark where I was like, you know what? It doesn't matter. All this information is out there for us. I can buy this book and read this book and do what I want. And then I wanted to create a platform for other people to get high level education without having to be subscribed to an $80,000 debt. One of the things you mentioned about what do people know about their brain, what is something that you know about the brain that you feel is pretty basic and that everybody should know? Oh, good one.

I actually think about this all the time is that there's no such thing as nothing. no such thing as nothing. Everything you've exposed yourself to or going to expose yourself to, et cetera, et cetera, has made at least a 0.001% conformational change. The first time you took any compound that attaches to the androgen receptor, every single time after that, your receptor changes a little bit. The shelf life for receptors are relatively short, a couple hours to a couple days. And the way they genetically get remade is based on what attached to them, not your genetics anymore. The first receptor was based on your genetics, but not the second, third, fourth, or fifth. We make conformational changes and you get better and better at attaching and binding and all this

stuff. So it's that nothing is nothing or there is no nothing. We learn and grow and change from everything we're exposed to. And if you think about people will say you are what you eat, but you can take that a little further and just say consume. You're the byproduct of everything you ever consumed, maybe even everything you ever thought. But the things that you think about are probably pretty direct correlation to all the things you've experienced and seen and consumed, right? Totally. And that starts out early on in life. And then you get to a point where it's easy to believe you can't change because actually change is happening so fast that you think that change isn't in control of you

and you become normalized and numb to the fact that you're changing always and you think it's just static when that's not true. Just because change being chronic doesn't mean it's normal. It just means it's always happening. Same thing as like your life. From the time you were born, we're moving unidirectionally towards death. There's just no other way to put it. It sounds crazy, but it's true.

We're a chemical reaction that only has one direction we can go. And it's just – you just got to accept that. Rewinding real quick. You said that what you were trying to prove in grad school was that an individual that's natural, if pushed hard enough, will produce more growth hormone to continue to grow? Yes. OK. Where have you come to in terms of that currently? Like what do you – what is your beliefs on that or what have you been able to show?

Because that's – that's a very big deal right there. I think it's true. I'm not just saying that biasly because it came up with it. So think about it this way. Let's say you're doing a volume block, right, in training. And let's say you are an enhanced individual. Try it out and most guys inherently will figure this out on their own. try it out and most guys inherently will figure this out on their own taking 15 to 2000 milligrams of testosterone will not increase your recovery during a volume block better than growth hormone

and conversely if you're in a peaking phase and you add growth hormone then it's definitely not gonna make you stronger that's what the androgens are for so we've kind of all accepted this when you're doing volume is that the right time to start eating less food and all of these things? We need to synergize the stress and the activity with what we take. And that has definitely reigned true as my career has gone on. Now, also, you were mentioning something as far as like, you know, certain people believe that they can't change over time or something along those lines. But we talk about and we've been trying to delve into the idea of belief on this podcast a lot or people believing that they can do certain things or not. And within a certain side of fitness right now, especially when it comes to bodybuilding, a lot of individuals have certain beliefs that like, oh, I can't gain a certain amount of size after this many years of lifting.

It's like there's a, people are trying to make themselves think that they need to hop onto something to get to a certain level. Now, where does, or how do you think that belief does affect an individual's ability to gain strength, gain muscle, gain size over a period of time, decades even? Huge question. Have you guys been exposed to the transgender studies from like 30 to 50 years ago by chance? I'm aware of it. But if you could make our audience aware of it, that would be great. Awesome. So what they found was that regardless of what the person identified as socially, their brain makes conformational change based on the distinct authenticity of their belief. So what they found out was some people who identified as transgender did have the

same, in fact, brain and sexual orientation of their skin suit. It doesn't mean that they're not trans, but what it meant was that they didn't have a long enough time of belief or authentic enough belief. And then what we saw in other trans people is that from what they were born with, and these are people that didn't undergo surgery, their brain did change to the sex that they believed they were supposed to be. And the cool part is you can't tell on the outside, and they're both still transgender. You can identify as whatever you want. But what happens up here is very different. I got these headphones on up here, right? So these transgender studies started to show us that the brain is listening to your belief in a sense.

So if you want to make a conformational change and you pair it with even a smidgen of activity that complements it, it will happen. And conversely, this is the sucky part about it. If you don't believe enough in something, but you're doing all the right things to make it happen, yeah, your look says it all. It's definitely not going to happen now. And it just makes me think of all these black-pilled individuals on the YouTube fitness side of things because there's so many of these guys who are just like, I can't get this big if I don't take this. I can't get this, this, like this amount of whatever, or what this person's done cannot be achieved if I don't take drugs. So in, in essence, what these individuals are doing, are they changing like their responses, their physiology to like kind of mirror that in a way?

Do you think that, or am I, am I going way too off on this right now? You're definitely right. It's funny. So let's say the scenario, which I can't lose body fat unless I take 40 micrograms of clenbuterol. If you truly believe that enough, we could change that out with a placebo and you would have very similar effects to taking the clenbuterol. And that's because of the anticipation. Where's the camera,

Andrew? Please keep going. I just want to. No, no, no. So what happens is it's our hypothalamus, right? Our hypothalamus is the part of the brain that's like the hub, if you will, for the

metabolic stuff. It's listening to the other areas of our brain that get turned on. When your amygdala turns on, our hub for like excitement related to fear and defenses and stuff, it impacts the hypothalamus. That impact is actually somewhat similar to taking clenbuterol. So if you are manifesting this, I changed all my stuff for fat loss. Here's my fake clen I'm about to take. You can have them take that fake clen and see the same exact responses happen actually a couple seconds even before they take it. Endogenous insulin does this. If you eat at the same time every day and suddenly eat 30 minutes later, you actually had an endogenous insulin response

before the time you were supposed to eat, not the time you actually eat. That's fucking crazy. The brain's just like running everything. It really is. And it's funny. I've come full circle in the sense of when you hear as a kid, we only use 10% of our brains. I'm actually coming full circle in the sense of maybe it's funny. I've come full circle in the sense of when you hear as a kid, we only use 10 percent of our brains.

I'm actually coming full circle in the sense of maybe it's true, but it's that the other 90 percent has a more important job than what you can tell it to do. And it's arbitrary, but maybe that last 10 percent is just my decision to like knock over Mark's coffee or not. You know? And the 90 percent is maybe just kind of like – it's just like it's running. It's doing something probably. It's too big for you to even fathom and think about how important it is. So it's funny. The worst disease in humanity is called Odin's curse and it's because the part of your brain that breathes automatically for you doesn't mature in the womb.

So you have to actually breathe consciously so you either die of psychosis from not sleeping or you asphyxiate when you happen to fall asleep so let's talk about that for a second because like there's a lot of stuff in our life time that we just kind of like i guess it's learned but it's learned in a different way we just just like pick it up. Talking, walking, breathing. There's all kinds of things that kind of fall into that category. But they are like the most important things that we'll ever have. Why do you think that, like why does that happen? Like what's going on in the brain?

Like Andrew has a 10-month-old, I think, right? Man, he's about to be one year old oh yeah a couple days let's go so like in observing like a little creature like that you know seeing them like just kind of learn on their own and explore um what is like set up in our brain to allow us to learn uh just by experience and just by almost copying and stuff like that? It's because we have preset cortical areas. So we have a speech area, a motor area, et cetera, et cetera, right? And if we have the area for it, it needs to be filled with something.

There's like kind of going back to what I said, nothing is like never listened to in the brain. If you have the area for it, it's got to get filled with something. So if you're a feral child, you're going to learn to speak the way like homeless and feral children speak. And if we take that American feral child and put them in like India, they will learn to speak Indian. It's because that brain needs something to be filled with. Now, it's interesting. We don't have a center of our brain for the future. And that's actually why anxiety exists. There's no part of your brain that can tell anything beyond a couple of minutes in the future. The most futuristic thing we have is thyroid.

At 2 a.m., you actually stop doing growth hormone functions. You start doing thyroid functions anticipatorily and that's what determines the hormones that get released when you wake up and that's like what? Four to seven hours that tops. So four to seven hours that tops so four to seven hours is the most futuristic thing we can do anxiety is this manifestation of electricity and stuff in your brain that doesn't have a brain center to handle it wow i just think it's fascinating like just like blinking breathing like these just certain things that your body just um and we just i guess we kind of take it for granted, right?

Our body is like pretty amazing at doing these things, but it's something we don't really give much thought to. Even just talking. Like how the fuck – how am I talking? Like if there's no center in the brain for the future, how am I talking right now? How am I spitting this out right now? What's even cooler is – and this is part of the speech protocol. We have certain areas that are aligned chemically and electrically to be aware at the same time. So a good speech – or rather I'll start with a question.

Do you remember any of the last podcasts you did, like what you said? I remember some stuff, yeah. But probably close to nothing on it, right? Right, because, yeah, we do a lot. You're right. It's because your hearing and your speech and your interpretation of them can be active at the same time. And the reason you don't remember it is because all three are doing their jobs. If you were to sit here and be like –

We're always like, what the fuck was that guy's name? Yeah, exactly. If you were to sit here and be like, oh, what am I going to say next? Oh, my god. What did Mark say? Oh, you know, that's trying to do too much. If you let things kind of happen, especially when they're going to be successful, hopefully you've gone through life and you can learn to talk and be successful and not have to worry about it. So that's why they can happen.

But imagine now someone came in. I'm fluent in Spanish and maybe I wasn't fluent in English. I started speaking Spanish at a certain point to you guys. Now you would be like, oh, what did he say? And you would start triggering the thought process related to language and not using the inherent stuff you've learned what about stuff that's like kind of like i'm gonna butcher terminology but like stuff that's like kind of encoded in our in our dna um i'll get to it eventually but this was just the example that it sparked in my head or the uh what i remembered so

as silly as it sounds my son i don't think has ever watched me rub my eyes, but my wife is like, he rubs his eyes the exact same way you do. And I'm like, I don't know where the fuck you picked that up, but somehow he did. Maybe it's just the way our bodies are, whatever. But I've heard that like depression can also be somewhat like hereditary and also encoded in your DNA. What are your thoughts on that? Or have you learned anything about stuff that's like, this kid was never taught that, but because his parents do it or have done it in the past, he now does it even though he's never learned it? Totally. So to a degree, all that is super true. So for example, when you said like the rubbing your eyes, it's not that there's a gene for rubbing eyes, but there's a gene for blood flow to the

ocular area. It's monitored by thyroid and your son right now is developing his eyes greater and greater. So maybe it's not the gene that makes him rub, but maybe at a certain point with these dopamine levels, you don't get as much blood to your eyes as you wanted. And then you start rubbing them to draw blood to the area. And now we see that as a true genetic thing that can happen. Similar with depression, the depression that comes genetically has to do with your neurochemistry secretion, meaning it's that you're either hyper secreting things that make you stick to depressive behaviors, i.e. serotonin, or you're just not secreting enough of the things that light up your mind like dopamine and

norepinephrine there's tons of subcategories of depression which is why the american ways and also the french and uk ways of treating it are very very poor because like oh you're depressed we're going to give you a stimulant it's like that might not be good for a lot of people so let's i guess we can talk about this a bit because you mentioned anxiety and you just mentioned depression. So what are things that people should be trying to do to nullify first off their anxiety or anticipatory anxiety for things happening in the future? What should they try to think about and do? And then for individuals who actually have literal like maybe clinical depression, what should they do rather than potentially going for medications that are given to them? Totally.

That's a big question. So when it stems with let's say someone who doesn't have this clinical issue, be objective. Ask yourself to what degree am I facilitating this? It's unbelievable how many people you meet with anxiety that also have a caffeine addiction and sleep in every day, wake up at different times and do all this stuff. I'm not saying you need to quit coffee and wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning. But you have to identify, wow, I am facilitating this. I'm not giving my brain an idea of how much stuff to secrete when I wake up or even when I'm actually waking up. So we kind of talked about the thyroid.

That whole anticipation system is now screwed. And then I'm literally putting a drug in my system that increases my heart rate and does it through a brain mechanism. So of course you feel anxiety. That first question is the hardest for people to look at and answer. Because let's say you've been struggling with this anxiety for 10 years. And for 10 years, you've also been going to Dunkin two or three times a day. You then have to take the step to realize like, wow, I caused my pain for 10 years. And that's oftentimes the most difficult thing. When it comes to the clinical portion, you have to realize that your PC has been preset with a bug and you need to create lifestyle habits to facilitate that bug working better.

And that's all it is. So let's say your depression is because maybe you don't secrete enough norepinephrine in the mornings. You should probably find a morning routine that helps with norepinephrine. And then all of a sudden, as the sun is up at its peak, you can now continue these cascades. There's a bunch of stuff that you can do on your own and you can probably gain a good advantage of doing things on your own. But do you believe that people should try to get help? I think so, absolutely. For example, the fitness industry is exploding because of the amount of coaches and information out there. And no one has any pain or embarrassment when they say, I don't know how to do this thing.

I want to lean out or whatever. But all of a sudden when it comes to between your ears, we're all supposed to be experts or we're all supposed to be people like, don't tell your friends you're feeling this. I think we absolutely should all reach out to some type of help. It doesn't mean a psychiatrist needs to prescribe you drugs, but it does mean that you probably should find someone besides your best friend to talk to or you should find skills from a professional that will enhance your ability to deal with stuff up here. If your shoulder hurts, you find a mobility expert and they will tell you how to do some stuff and breathe to open up your collarbones and shoulders. There's no issues there.

But if you don't have a skill upstairs, you got to find it. Real quick, I do want to rewind when we were talking about one's belief in terms of what they can do. You mentioned on the fat loss side, how does that potentially affect the growth side of things or gaining muscle side of things? Actually, if I had to pick, I would say it impacts the growth in gaining muscle more than the fat loss because of the mechanisms of it. the growth and gaining muscle more than the fat loss because of the mechanisms of it. Your ability to gain muscle is obviously predicated on using nutrients and nourishment optimally. And what I mean by optimal means that they go to your muscle. They don't get used up for immediate energy.

You find other ways to create energy endogenously. The food you eat is going to interact with muscles you trained, right? That would be optimal in this scenario. If your heart rate's above 85 at rest and you're mouth breathing, you are changing enough stuff with your hypothalamus and your metabolism that there's no way that food is going to your muscle. So it's the best way to envision it is like that guy who's always been like barely 200 pounds soaking wet, but says he eats eats 10 000 calories and can't gain weight everyone calls him a liar but he might not be lying he might just have a resting heart rate of 95 and that every iota of food he eats is being used up for immediate energy and none of it's reaching his muscle tissue jesus christ we talked a little bit about belief and how important that is how

important do you think that interest level is? Because I have always felt that if things are actually fairly easy, if you're interested in them, you will just – you will tend to follow through. You tend to have like a lot of habit, a lot of great habit-forming things around things that you're interested in. The two prerequisites for learning are insulin sensitivity of a marginal degree and your ability to be interested in what you're learning. So we all took algebra one growing up, right? How many of you guys can do two-step algebra equations now? I don't know about that. Is it because it's been so long? No, that's crap because you remember that one book you read in English or that one time in gym class?

Oh, that was amazing. The difference is no one is going to learn something if they're not interested and that interest is what pre-sparks the brain area. And when the brain area is like excited, pre-sparked, if you will, we secrete peptides that allow the change to happen when you learn. So I describe it as like a swordsmith making a sword. You start with this block of metal that's certainly not a sword. Then you get it – I don't know the term, but you get it like super red hot, right? Then you hammer it. You make some small changes, not too much because then it will get brittle and the sword will break.

You make some small changes. You let it cool. Then you get it red hot again and do that same thing. The ignition of the hot process is your interest. of the hot process is your interest. If I sat here and gave you all the most sophisticated information on the planet, but there was no emotional context and interest involved, it just wouldn't stick. And we know that. So this makes me wonder, for example, if someone were like, okay, I'm about to say I'm going

to start taking some Trent, right? But someone then gave them sugar pills as Trent, like you mentioned, the sugar pills for Clint. I don't know. This has probably never been done. But do you think that that individual, because they believe now they're taking Tren and they're more interested in lifting because of the gains they're going to get from this potential Tren, that they will start to grow faster? Is that a possibility? In that case, no. OK.

Is that a possibility? In that case, no. But if someone had taken Tren long enough that they altered their receptor dynamics like we briefly talked about and they have a receptor that's highly sensitive to Tren and therefore it has the epigenetic factors after things bind to it that might be similar to Tren, then we would see it. But you would have to – you'd have to have the Tren be a of you already. You know, you gotta be at one with the trend. So let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. Maybe that was too. Okay.

Okay. So what if it was just any drug that helps with growth? Maybe not trend specifically, but something you think that will help with growth. Yeah. Like what if it was SARMs or something that you really believe that it would actually work? But let's say that it wasn't, it was a sugar pill, but you thought it was something like that.

No SIBO. I'm curious. Would that work or that it wasn't. It was a sugar pill, but you thought it was something like that. Is that nocebo? I'm curious. Would that work or no? Still no. Only would that work is if you previously had that exposure. That's the cool part about the placebo is you can use it to your benefit if that person's made the adaptation, but if they

haven't changed for that adaptation, there's nothing to anticipate. Earlier I said, how do you learn something you've never learned? And we decided it was based on verbiage and talking. It's that same thing here. How do I invoke a biological response I've never created? What about – I know we're kind of bouncing around a little bit, but like retaining information. I feel like I have only like a little bit of storage space in my head.

And this is along with the lines with like – I call it noise. I'm getting better at reading. Reading has been very difficult for me in the past, but I'm getting better at it. And I'm able to kind of like retain some information. Uh, most of the times I'm looking at the words and they're just kind of like going in and out of my brain. But even like for audio books these days, it's kind of hard for me to focus and actually retain the information. Do you have any techniques or any information as far as reading something, listening to something, and then actually being able to like, oh, I remember what that was all about. Yeah. So for that, it just has to become multi-sensory.

Meaning you're sitting there listening to the audio book and doing nothing else. Got it. That better be like Jesus Christ telling you you're about to make $250,000 or it's not going to be important enough for you to truly remember it. So as you're doing it, maybe it's the audio book. You either have to be listening in your head and seeing the picture or maybe writing something. And the beauty is it doesn't even have to be – realistically, it doesn't even have to be real. You could be writing complete horse crap on the paper. But if you feel an emotional connection to what you're listening as you're writing, you will be able to remember it.

That makes sense. Yeah, I usually try to listen to something as I'm like driving home or something, but that makes a lot of sense. And then also when you're saying earlier about like being on this podcast, I'm going to go home tonight and like tell my wife, like, dude, we had an amazing podcast with Andy and she's going to ask me, what did you guys talk about? And I'm like, that's a good question. I don't know. You have to wait for the episode. So yeah, it makes a lot of sense. What about retrieval? You know, we're just like remembering someone's name, things like that. So you learn the most about memory recall when we see cognitive decline in degradation in old people. So the pecking order is first, we have a decrease in the secretion of dopamine.

Over time, that dopaminergic decrease is going to make your hippocampus, the home for memory, less active. And over time from there, we see a degradation in your frontal cortex, your ability to make decisions. So that information and knowing it happens in that way gives us the opportunity to improve our recall when we're not old because your ability to improve recall is nothing more than having dopamine secreted that's relative to the memory you're trying to recall. So let's say you're trying to recall the best coffee you've ever had. It's not a coincidence that drinking any type of coffee at the moment while you think about it helps you do that. Same thing if you're trying to remember what you were saying to your kid earlier but you're lifting weights, it won't happen maybe until you calm down and start

talking to your kids again or driving home and knowing they're on their way. So a way to instantly improve recall is obviously start by whiting out all the noise in your head. But two, start thinking and bringing yourself to a scenario that's similar to what you were trying to think or talk about. Now, real quick, as you were mentioning like attributing some emotion to trying to remember something as Andrew was talking about, how can individuals change their breathing to have a better effect? Cause you were giving the example of if an individual has a resting heart rate at 85 or more, right?

Growth is going to be a non-fat, like it's not going to happen well. And we know that like Wim Hof breathing, right? It does certain things to allow you to feel a certain way that amps you up and gets you ready to focus on something. So what should people be paying attention to in terms of their breathing just to be a better human being? Because that can affect a lot of different things. View it as breathing is your pre-assessment for stuff. If you're doing something exciting, you don't need to start doing the Wim Hof breathing right now.

But that's the strategy that will be beneficial. If you're doing something relaxing, maybe lean on nasal breathing with a slower cycling rate because that's going to match what you're going to do. And that's, ironically enough, half the framework to answer Mark's memory recall question. So if you wanted to do something exciting or remember something exciting, the Wim Hof breathing in that scenario would be the perfect way to improve memory recall. But if you were trying to remember something relaxing or in that part of your brain, the Wim Hof breathing would impair your ability to remember in that scenario. And in general, as far as breathing is concerned, people should try to nasal breathe

most of the day. Nasal breathing when you're relaxing or not doing anything that's actively heavy breathing. And when you're doing something that's heavy breathing, do it as hard as you can. Like when I have people who, I don't create diet plans for people, I create fences. So I give specific constraints and say color within the lines. When I do that with people, it's like, I want you to heavy breathe for two minutes today and I want you to nasal breathe the rest of the day. And that's kind of that dichotomy I set up. You know a lot about like chemistry and things like that. And you mentioned that you have some supplements of your own and things like that. Are there some supplements out there that can, in your opinion, can assist with someone that has anxiety or someone that's depressed?

I know there's like pharmaceuticals and there's all kinds of things. And you mentioned earlier stimulant might not be the best idea for that particular thing. What are your thoughts on maybe just like stuff that's a little bit more over the counter for stuff like that? So I'll give like two scenarios. Let's say you went through all this pre-assessment stuff we talked about and it sounds kind of like hippie-ish to say it in like that assessment sense, but how do you ever expect to find the right answer if you don't know what you're looking for? So let's say you've already done the assessment process and you realize that maybe my anxiety is predominantly driven through my cardiac stuff.

It's like I came back. My blood lipids sucked. My resting heart rate never gets that low. My HRV is kind of low. And in that specific scenario, it's like, wow, it's my cardiac system and epinephrine that's driving this anxiety. It's like, wow, it's my cardiac system and epinephrine that's driving this anxiety. So maybe losing a little bit of body fat and going for some walks and taking some ashwagandha when the sun goes down to decrease that resting heart rate does everything you need to do for that anxiety.

Maybe it's actually an inability to use your brain correctly that's giving you anxiety. You're living in this brain fog all day long and it kind of irks you and pisses you off and you make mistakes and that's where the anxiety is coming from, I would aim for something like a nootropic, a noopept or an amoxypine that is going to give you this balancing of cortical areas with zero impact on the heart and it has a short enough half-life that it also won't impact you later. So having this idea of why I feel a certain way is the answer to get the over-the-counter stuff. I truly think that in 95% of anxiety and depression cases, you don't need the pharmaceuticals because the pharmaceuticals that get prescribed are the wrong

ones. It's not that the pharmaceuticals are ineffective, but you can't take a blanket statement response to a non-blanket statement question. So if Mark came up here and he was like, this is the one program you need to squat a thousand pounds. Every other program will not get you to squat a thousand pounds. We would all know Mark is a liar. You know what I mean? So it's the same thing here. You continue to prescribe SSRIs and not know why it's working. It's because the question's incorrect in the first place. Can you talk a little bit more about Nupept? I've taken it in the past, not very much, but it was like a nasal one and it was like, I kind of burned it. It sucked. Maybe that's why I

stopped taking it. But it was almost like a wired version of like Kratom where like I was like up feeling pretty good, but like almost to a detriment like at the time i was living i was living in the ghetto and some dude had like pulled over because his car broke down and i like jumped out of the car and i went and helped him push the car off the side of the street which was fantastic it was really nice he's an old dude but at the same time i was like where the fuck did that come from because like i'm i try to be as nice as possible but like i was on my way somewhere and i never would have like pulled over, especially in the hood, but it was weird. So I don't know is what the hell's the deal with new pep. So I'm going to take a step back before I

answer that question. Nootropic effects are not the same as nootropics. Nootropic effect would be like, I took this caffeine and it puts a bunch of dopamine and norepinephrine and serotonin in my brain and that's why I was able to learn something. It's like, that's not a nootropic. It's a nootropic effect, meaning you had stuff secreted that made you think faster and do better learning stuff, but it's because you took drugs. Like all drugs can have a nootropic-like effect if you take enough. A true nootropic has to be an antioxidant first. Nupept, amoxipine,

the racetams, there's a decent amount of nootropics. They're all antioxidants. If it's not an antioxidant, it is not a nootropic. That's the very first and foremost thing. Next, all nootropics impact selected areas of your brain. They're not nationwide, we'll call it, or system-wide. NUPEP is going to affect the motor cortex, the speech cortex, and your auditory cortex. And therefore, it'll also impact vision. So NUPEP is an antioxidant that can increase your kinesthetic awareness, that can increase your ability to have proper articulation of speech and listening skills and that stuff, all done without impacting

the heart rate. NuPep was originally created for post-stroke symptoms for people to regain their fine motor skill in speaking. And that concept makes you realize, actually, wow, this is pretty potent, huh? So you definitely took too much. And the funny part is that's the supplement industry's fault. So for example, when it comes to whatever thing you research and you see people, they're like, oh, this is what they took in the research. I got to take this much or more for it to work.

And that's not how that works. That person had a stroke. That's why they need to take more Nupep. You did not have a stroke. I don't know if you guys are into Tudka, but Tudka was that same thing. What? T-U-D-C-A. It's like a liver support thing.

But long story short, in the research, they were taking 25 to 300 milligrams to 3,000 milligrams. But these people had liver dialysis. If you don't have liver dialysis, you only need between 50 to 200 mg of Tudka. But if you look at things with that perspective, you'll also make the mistake. So taking 5 to 15 milligrams of Nupept is actually pretty good for most people. And you just mentioned the racetam family. Well, I've experimented with a shit ton of nootropics.

I spent a lot of time with racetams and stuff. I don't know if I wasn't dosing them correctly or if I just maybe wasn't taking them because they were like fat-soluble or something like that. them correctly or if I just maybe wasn't taking them because they were fat-soluble or something like that. But have you found any research that racetams actually help or are beneficial as far as the nootropic effect or actually being nootropics? They're solid, but they're not great supplements, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense.

They don't absorb well. It's very difficult to get it to bind with other stuff. So if you mix certain racetams, like phenylppyrrha specifically doesn't mix well with calcium carbonate and calcium carbonate is a binding agent we use in a lot of pills. So something as simple as putting your race at hand with the wrong binding agent, now it doesn't work as well. A new pep is a huge step up in the fact that it binds and absorbs very well. And another popular one is called amoxipine. Amoxipine is going to impact the eyes and the vagus nerve specifically, which is awesome for people with anxiety actually. Whereas Nupept is more like sports, feeling, talking, listening, vision, that's all sports.

Whereas amoxipine is kind of more lifestyle. So finding the right nootropic for your desires is the key. Yeah. All of this started because I was chasing the, what's it called? The limitless pill, right? So I was just taking as much shit as possible. So outside of something like Adderall, like do we have anything that's anywhere close? The concept is wrong, right? The limitless pill isn't getting so hyped up that you can do whatever you want. It's being so disinhibited from mistakes cognitively that you can do whatever you want. So let's talk about quickly the definition of success. And people mess this up. People think success is like crushing it, you know, but the ceiling for excellence on a single

task is low. It's there. Like you can only pull this deadlift so fast. If you pull it faster, you won't get stronger. And if you pull it slightly less fast, you also won't get stronger. But chronically inhibiting failure is what makes you successful. It's the same thing with that limitless pill. It's not activating the areas of the brain that should be left alone is what's going to make you successful on a task. But you bump up against failure a little bit or get close to it. Have to. Right.

But it's the attenuating it as long as you can. How long can I keep staying on this chronic path of success on X without purposely running into it? You know, I've – each one of my businesses, I've had to reform at least once. But they weren't failures. That was part of my journey and that's how I needed to view things in order to stay successful. So in my mind, reforming any of my three businesses was not a failure. That's what I needed to do. And if I viewed it as a failure, that's going to

be the issue in and of itself. What are your thoughts on Kratom? I know we had some mind bullet earlier. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I'm a big fan of Kratom. I think there's a lot of potential for it to be used in a lot of people. My only concern is people don't know how to use anything properly. And I think that's one thing you're doing very well with MindBullet, but people think it's, oh, Kratom, I'm going to take this every single morning and just see what happens. Or, you know, I've heard of people, their first dose being over 2000 milligrams and they're like, Andy, I don't know why I got so angry and felt terrible about myself. Kratom is really cool because altering that GABA-A receptor is kind of like switching from PC to Mac. It's an alternate perspective that you can use with your hormones.

And that's amazing. But there's a lot of responsibility there too. So that's really my only thing on Kratom for the world. I think if you are above average in intellect to even a small degree or just responsible enough to ask the right questions, Kratom can be really great. I have a question about that because like I use Kratom quite a bit but I've never felt a level of dependency on it. I don't use it every day and I don't feel like I need to use it every day and something as potentially strong as a potion.

I've heard some individuals talk about on like YouTube. Oh, I started taking Kratom. I got addicted to it and I had to stop and, you know, that type of stuff. So like you mentioned, you need to use it responsibly. How can people use this responsibly? Because when I take it, I feel I can focus better on certain things. You know what I mean? So what are your thoughts on that? So you kind of answered the question for me. If you take it and you feel focused,

you should take it before focus-based things. First off, I don't think you can get addicted to Kratom. You'd have to take a lot, like 10,000 milligrams or more, in my opinion, and chronically, and also use it for things that aren't attributed with a task. So for example, you could take 25 grams of Kratom, but if you only did it for focus-based activities and that's what happened, you would never develop this addiction. And addiction gets broken down into two words, right? We have physiological addiction and habitual addiction. Physiological addiction is – remember we said about these receptors that get coded for and they change as you change and based on what you take? You can create a receptor that has to have something bound to it.

That's what addiction to opiates, whatever it may be. It's the receptor doesn't function without this thing bound to it. Habitual addiction is more of what it sounds like. You're addicted to the habit of thinking, oh, man, I can't go to the gym unless I took a scoop of this pre. It's like, no, you can, but you think you cannot. And it's the habit makes the change. People are always looking for change, right? It's instant change.

You know, our boy over here took nasal Nupep because he probably heard it hits faster than the pill. So he's like, I can just take the spray here and immediately it works. That's awesome, right? Instant change is gratifying and cool, but that's also the potential for danger if you use it for everything you do. And we're starting to live in a world where that's more common. It's like, if you feel good, why not do it every day? It's like, that's not a good mindset to have. Can you explain the difference? Because I didn't know there was a difference between dependency and addiction. Yeah. Also dependency and addiction are a little different.

I don't like to use those words. I know what you mean. Dependency is more of the habitual world. It's meaning that you've formed a relationship with X and that relationship with X is predicated on your success to do something else. Physiological addiction is this true function where your metabolism is waiting on the catalyst of kratom, opiates, whatever you're addicted to. You can get addicted to. It's depending on that catalyst for the rest of your life to start metabolically. Yeah, I just think that's really important because a lot of people are, oh, I'm addicted to caffeine.

I'm addicted to coffee. I can't be me without that. And it's like, no, you're just dependent on it. Yeah, you've just never seen that the grass is greener and you think that this is what's making my grass green rather than like, why don't I just take something else? What – in studying all this stuff, what problems of your own have you been able to solve over the years? I have a really fast brain and that caused a lot of anxiety and poor decision-making because of it. and that caused a lot of anxiety and poor decision-making because of it. And it was nothing more than the fact that I was trying to – and this is where I talked with some of my executives. I was forcing myself to live in a culture that I didn't fit.

That doesn't mean it's like, oh, you're so different. You do your own thing. It's like, no. The standards of what success, failure are related to academics, let's say, in culture made me feel anxious because they didn't fit me. My parameters for maybe academics in this world are just different. And so for me to feel success and do all those things in this world, I have to abide by these rules and being able to learn like from the

transgender studies in this, you start to realize that the rules you impose on yourself are what you end up abiding by. And if you let the rules you impose on yourself are what you end up abiding by. And if you let society tell you what those rules are, then you might run into an issue. Maybe you might not. But just knowing that those rules internally, that internal narrative, the adjectives you use on yourself can be changed and they can also change how you feel, think, function after is just paramount in my mind.

Some of your research, has it led you to be an entrepreneur? Absolutely. Especially because I realized after schooling mostly that if you choose to be on a long-term path and you're not happy with it, it's going to get worse. So I realized for me that long-term path was helping people in different domains as I got smarter. So I don't do anything that's like too residual in the sense of every person I meet with, we meet and start fresh every single day. I do micro-progressions, assessments constantly. I don't do anything that's like system-based where it's like, oh, we just have to do this. And that's kind of made me the entrepreneur because you think that way, Mark. There are no rules to my road.

I'm going to create stuff and allowing myself to feel – I guess the right word is comfortable with that being me has been the biggest thing. Yeah, because you mentioned I think maybe – was it after school that you were working at Subway and Max Muscle? Yeah, GNC. GNC. Same concept. But yeah, so I didn't grow up with money. I had a really, really traumatic and difficult upbringing. And it even led to guilt related to success when I started becoming an entrepreneur, especially because it happened for me kind of young.

And it's funny enough, like these brain studies and everything I've realized has made me find out that like your mind and who you are is totally separate from your brain. You can be the person you want to be completely independent of the brain you were given. If you feel like you're not smart naturally, thank god we got new pep and you could study and now you could be smart. You don't have to be subjected to the biology or the genetics you were given. Real quick, what you said right there. If you feel that you're not smart naturally, right? Obviously, there are people who can do things faster than others. But for example, when I was brought up, my mom made sure to not ever say I was smart.

She never said anything like that. It was always – she would always reward work that was put into something. Like she would tell me, you worked hard at this. You see, that's why you got this result. Do you think it's like, you know, your, your brain works really fast, right? So, and if we're talking about how like people would probably judge and select, you are very extremely intelligent, right? Do you think that there is a danger in an individual believing that they're really smart or believing that they're not smart? Or is there a way people should be thinking about that? Totally. I think having an accurate difference, because you'll never be fully aligned between

who you are and your self-image and culture is very important. So I work with an athlete in particular who is very renowned in sports culture. And he's constantly told by everyone he's the best. This person was even injured and was neglected proper care by the team because of who he was because they're like, oh, you're you. He'll be fine. Who cares, right? And the best thing this person could have done for themselves is not believe that stuff. And it has nothing to do with me.

They did it on their own. But their lack of listening to those things has been the greatest thing that they can do for success in their career because they're not inhibited by these standards. Now, I realize I'm very smart, right? If I was listening to everybody else, say, oh, you're a genius. Like, what are you doing? I would have stopped. But because I have this internal narrative and these morals of this metaphysical person I am and I believe in that more than the world around me, that's why I can keep getting smart and keep making more money and keep being happy. So if we subject ourselves too much just to what other people say, there will be a ceiling on what you want to do. So ideally – I may be getting this wrong but ideally you want to create an avatar of what and who you'd like to be even if you're not there and that's what you should be trying to gauge and head towards and think like.

And society will find you and accept you properly when you become that person. So for example, you become someone who's like, oh, these friends don't like me anymore. You'll find new friends. If you become someone who this job doesn't fit me anymore, you will someone who's like, oh, these friends don't like me anymore. You'll find new friends. If you become someone who this job doesn't fit me anymore, you will find a new job. And whether society likes you or not, they already decided whether they didn't like you or not before. So there's just such minimal impact on the morals and person you want to become than the world around you than we're just led to believe. But there's also a – oh, sorry. Go ahead. There's also seems to be like there is a danger in trying to become somebody that other people – like for example, if you had a friend group and you're like,

I want to be more liked by these people and this is what I need. This is the person I need to become, to become more liked by these individuals. Then inherently it could be somewhat dangerous because you will become that person but it might actually not really be a beneficial thing for you. Kind of like the dopamine dependency stuff we were just talking about. What's happening is you're getting your dopamine response, your feelings of success and enjoyment and motivation from something that's not giving back to you. You know, they're not taking drugs and becoming a drug addict,

but the adaptation you're making towards being closer to this friend group is not paying you back. So even when you get there and let's say you do get there, now you're going to have a decrease in dopamine and satisfaction because you attained the end outcome goal. I'm like all these crappy people who I'm friends with and there's nothing that got me better along the way. And now you have less success and motivation and you've become someone you didn't like. The dopamine will be secreted no matter what. And that's the beauty of what kind of what I said. So if you want to become this person that you believe in, you'll get a dopamine response

by getting 1% closer to that person. Even if people do or don't like you, you're giving it to yourself. What is something like, um, like telling yourself you're going to do something and then following through with it? What does that do for somebody? That's one of my favorite things in the world, actually, because the reason that's so satisfying and cool for us to do as individuals is because we were able to make the future happen the way we wanted to without having that part of our brain even exist.

And you feel like you're in control, like you did something really cool even if it's kind of small, right? And that's what's connecting up here properly. Like maybe it happens through verbiage or money. You got these cortical areas lined up to do the thing and then you did the thing and got the payoff you wanted. So you kind of set up your own success in a way and that's why it's so enjoyable. Yeah. I heard David Blaine talking about this on Joe Rogan and it was a technique that I utilized and didn't even really recognize what it was doing for me, but it was simple stuff. Like when I first started running, I was like, I'm just going to run from

here to that stop sign. Then the stop sign would be 50 feet away. But I would kind of lie to myself and say, I'm going to run to the stop sign, and I would run further. So in my head, this trick that I was playing on myself, kind of like your trick with pulling the hair, I was tricking myself into kind of, I guess, energizing myself in the fact that I did a little bit more than I actually previously agreed to do.

And it just was, it's something that has helped a lot. And now I'm able to run, you know, several miles. Yeah, it totally makes sense because you start to realize that there's nothing scarier actually than not completing the task. You know, what you're feeling during that run, for example, like that fear of a high heart rate, everything that's fear-based in my opinion has a physiological thing we can chase. That's called RPP, rate pressure product. That's when you multiply your heart rate times your sympathetic – or sympathetic times your systolic blood pressure and it's a marker of your sympathetic nervous system's activity. And what that means is how hard are we squeezing the heart and how hard are the veins squeezed? And that just means like if it gets real high, it'll pop.

But that induces fear in people, everyone, even if you're trained for it to not happen because your hypothalamus needs to secrete something when that happens, which means your amygdala needs to be turned on. you did was and the reason why it felt so good was you decreased your fear response to that physiologically and then showed yourself that it's actually not even scary to continue passing it and this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where i can do it again i can do it again i can do it again the reason even furthermore that's so enthralling to the human is because most success is actually random you don't realize it but if you're a really good power lifting coach you can tell someone when they're going to pr which doesn't sound like a huge deal, but that's like, dude, I can predict that. That's amazing. Most success is random. So when you can give a skill or anything to yourself that induces it, it's incredibly enjoyable.

What are some modern day habits that maybe actually you don't, you might not even partake in or – but just things that people do every day from waking to when they go to sleep that they don't even realize is so dangerous for themselves and their progress and their success in general? I know that's a big, large question, but there's just a lot of things that people probably are doing common often that are probably just like really fucking them in the long run. that are probably just like really fucking them in the long run. I think the biggest thing is that no, not no one, but very few people genuinely do things for themselves. Half the reason you hear people going on a weight loss journey is because they just got out of a relationship or someone told them they were fat once, you know, and that saps you of a lot of dopamine and a lot of enjoyment in life

because you're doing it for someone else. So that means the adaptations you're making in this fat loss journey aren't even for you. So you've gone through all this stress, made all this change, and it wasn't something you were even emotionally attached to in the first place. You wanted to prove someone wrong or do X. So I think if you did the same exact stuff all day,'t change a single thing but genuinely did some of it for you that alone will make a change one of the reasons why i love uh like exercise and examining diet is because of the way that it's made me feel over the years i think same is true with you same is true with andrew and the same is probably true with you um it uh there's obviously like a lot of brain chemistry and there's a lot of hormones involved and things like that.

But I heard recently a friend of mine who started to do some TRT. I really was interested in asking him a lot of questions about like what he felt and what it was doing for him. But not so much from a physical standpoint. I mean, those things were pretty obvious. He gained some muscle mass, got a little stronger, all the things that you would normally associate with taking some testosterone. But he mentioned that he felt like a badass. And I thought that – I'm like, that is amazing. And it sounds silly for me to say this out loud, but I always feel like a badass.

I've felt like a badass since the time I was young. Because I participated in sports, I feel like I've done pretty well in them. And just the different things I participate in, even with running, I know that I'm not good at running in comparison to some other people. But I am, this also sounds weird saying out loud, I'm impressed with myself. I'm impressed with what I'm able to do, especially coming from the background that I previously had without any running. So there's so many things that we can do for ourselves to allow ourselves to feel like a badass. And there is even at times some pharmaceutical intervention that we can utilize to assist us to get to that same spot. Especially when the change comes later in life.

So that feeling like a badass is in part being control of your own secretions of dopamine. I keep bringing that up and I want to highlight what I mean by that for a second. Our dopamine is anticipatory, meaning it gets secreted actually before you do stuff. So, you know, Mark, you were an incredible lifter at one point in your life. And obviously, I'm sure you still are, but the numbers, you know, you set earlier in your life are just bigger to the world. I'm sure you can look back and kind of tell if this lift was going to go super, super well or not before it even happened. And that's kind of what we're alluding to here. However, the scenario with the TRT guy,

and one of the reasons he's feeling more badass is because testosterone's primary goal is to actually increase the recycling of synapses in our spine, which is what hormones have to cross, like the battlefield, if you will, for them to get to the other side and make change. So testosterone re-energizes how quickly we can do that in our spine. And so often people don't feel as good as they could because their brain systems are just really slow at recovering. So, for example, if he didn't change anything about his lifestyle, but he added TRT and felt that, it means he was deficient in choline.

Well, since we're kind of talking about this now, right, when does someone – or like as far as potential hormone replacement therapy, right, getting on tests and all that type of stuff. What should someone assess if they actually really need to do it? Because that's something that is super popular nowadays. And you got guys that are fucking 20, 21, just like young ass dudes. I'm on TRT. Hopping on TRT. Or TRT dose. Yeah, exactly.

Like doing some testosterone. Like do you really need that right now? So how do you gauge if someone needs it and if they actually don't and they just need to change their habits? It's funny. I always start with what are you replacing? And the first thing is, oh, I'm replacing testosterone obviously. My testosterone levels are low. But it's like, no, that's not true.

Same thing with money. Money solves problems, right? It's not like this high score you get and then you get like points and you get something in the mail to like put you in a certain club. You just use it to solve problems. So let's say you want to go on TRT. What are you replacing? What problems and issues, fires are you putting out?

And furthermore, to what degree does the replacement need to matter? So let's say your big thing is climbing mountains, right? And you're someone who wants to go on TRT. And I ask you, well, what are you replacing? You're like, oh, you know, I think I could climb another mountain but my recovery is slow and maybe I just took on another job and I can't handle it. That's a scenario where it's like, OK, lacking of consistency in testosterone is a life impediment for this person and we need to replace that and solve that problem. But let's – going back to the example of someone who's 21 going on TRT and

it's like, I don't get a boner every morning or whatever. It's like, well, that's a personal issue and I don't mean it in the boner sense. I mean it's your minerals, your metabolism, your biology are so off that you can't get it. So you're not even solving the problem by adding testosterone. You're solving a side effect of your own issues. effect of your own issues so i kind of go back to is the problem going to be solved with this currency of testosterone where you're just taking it because you want to be like i'm on trt and like it's what all the other guys do here you know my strong sleeves i bought all the brands at once you know there's a big difference there okay how do people find happiness This is a tough one.

It's because no one has the answer for what happiness is to them until they've already found it or lost it. I got the answer. Have some Ben and Jerry's. You're happy when you're having that shit for sure. Well, the funny part is you probably only found out it made you as happy as you did when you stopped eating Ben and Jerry's. I know. Sad.

Now sadness ensues. Now we got you stopped eating Ben and Jerry's. I know. Sad. Now sadness ensues. Now we got to eat more Ben and Jerry's. Someone call Ben and Jerry's while we're here. Let's get some stuff going. Get this going, yeah. But finding out what happiness is to you only occurs after you've had some type of failure or loss in life. And I guess in a way I view happiness as your ability to continue slaying the big dragon and not dying. So you have a problem in life, right? What makes you unhappy

is that you can't solve the problem and it's not letting you do what you normally do. So it's funny. Happiness in my mind is closer in the dictionary to solving problems than it is to a euphoric feeling. If you're euphoric all the time, you're high. You're not happy. There's a difference. Euphoria is a fleeting state. Happiness is a decision. And I think that issue in verbiage is why most people never find it.

I think you mentioned something really interesting there, like solving a problem. I'm kind of thinking about it in my head as we're going along here. I think people not defining like what it is they want out of life or what their aim is, is one of the things that makes it very difficult to feel happy or to feel successful or to feel good about something is the fact that every single time that you start to do a little bit better, you keep moving the fucking target. You know, every time you make a 50-yard field goal,

now you're trying a 55-yard field goal. Now you're trying a 60. Now you're trying the longest field goal that's ever been kicked, you know, and you start to set these things out that are just unattainable or maybe not unattainable, but they're very difficult for you at that particular time. And I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to scale up. But you'll hear someone say something like they want to make like $80,000 and now they're making 95 or 100. And now they're thinking about, one 50. Oh, this would be sick. If, if this job

had this with benefits and with a company car and like, it just never fucking stopped. So I think trying to just hone in what it is that your aim is and what your ideal circumstances would look like, what your ideal day would look like, I think would be really helpful. Totally agree. And like you kind of elaborated on the point without me having to. It's that the second you attained the thing you wanted, you changed what you wanted. You know, even though you said, oh, it's only five yards extra on this field goal, but you changed it, you know, and this happens a lot in sport. There need to be natural cycles to things, right?

So when you succeed at something, you need to celebrate it and then start over. The same thing when you fail at something, you need to dissect why it happened and then start over. So if you did something successful, the worst thing you could possibly do is get into another developmental block and try to one up it. The best thing to do would be to start over and realize how far you came. So let's say it's powerlifting, right? You just hit an 1800 pound total. That was your best thing. The worst thing you could do is talk to your coach about how to hit a 1900 pound total next week and then get into another prep. You need to go back to be like, wow, this, you know, maybe it was these sets of 10 with short rest. We did nine months ago before starting prep. It's like, I'm doing these 30 pounds heavier and I'm not as sore.

And that adds to the happiness you just gained. It's the cyclic ability to discover a problem, figure out why you can't solve the problem, start to solve the problem, finish the problem, solve it, start back over. And it's that end chunk that creates things as cyclic that makes you chronically happy instead of being, this was a happy period of time in my life because of something I did. It's a cycle and that you continue to follow that cycle rather than event, event, event, and not having a baton in between them. I learned a lot of what you just said from using the conjugate system. I know you said you worked for Dave Tate for almost a year and a half or so.

You said you worked for Dave Tate for almost a year and a half or so. Utilizing the conjugate system and having Louis Simmons as a mentor of mine, he taught me to get different PRs, different bests, with a lot of different scenarios. So you could walk in for the day and you could start bench pressing. You could just not feel it. And rather than doing a regular bench press, like what's one way to get a PR every single time you walk in the gym, it's to do something maybe you've never done before. So now I'm going to bench press with a clothes strip off of one board. And now I just turned a nightmarish day where I was really fixated on this day. I was really excited about it. I came in and maybe I

was sick or fatigued from previous workouts, didn't get sleep, whatever it is, and just everything felt heavy. I now turn this into a successful day because I now have an aim and a marker to shoot for the next time that I roll through this particular exercise. So we had this giant exercise index to choose from to have different records at. giant exercise index to choose from to have different records at. It's kind of like, it's almost like, I guess, setting yourself up to win like participation trophies almost, you know, like you really are, I call it an underhand pitch. You are delivering yourself a nice underhand pitch. The way that you would teach a child to like swing a bat, like you're

not throwing the ball like with your best stuff, you know, to your son, you know, right away when he's trying to learn how to hit, you're not throwing curves and sliders and shit like that. You want them to see the ball and maybe the bat that they're using is large. You hold the ball up so they can see it. And then you kind of just toss it as lightly as you can. So it's in the air for as long as possible. And maybe they can swing at it twice and halfway get some sort of measure of success off of it. But I think that's what a lot of us need to probably do more of is like give ourselves stuff that's really easy and then be pumped when we made it. Totally. Interning with Dave was great. And I learned that exactly from

him as well in the conjugate system. And when I go out into the real world and talk to people and work with people, I realize that conceptually applies so well. So going back to let's say you're on a program and you're like, I'm never going to hit the total or hit the lift I wanted because I messed up this workout and now I won't make the adaptation. And that's just all so wrong. Performance is a noun. It's something that you do. And if you're doing something, not only is it individual to you, but more importantly, you have to realize it's not predicated on math. It's not predicated on anything besides getting it done and allowing yourself to continue to do it. So it's funny.

People love to harp on conjugate being like not scientifically correct, but the reason it gets success is because it's behaviorally correct. Behavior and science are not mutually exclusive. You can have terrible coaching from a science perspective, but have someone who's an excellent life coach, excellent at teaching things and excellent at continuing that happiness cycle we talked about and the person still achieves the sport outcome goals they wanted. Sports is not just biology. If it was, then it would be a game of who can pin the most and not get sick.

But we know that's totally not true. We also know that there's no such thing as the program, right? Like why would strength training even be a thing if there was just one program that worked or one style? It's getting the person to have a little bit of biology, a little bit of confidence, and a little bit of the opportunity to participate that makes them successful as an athlete. It's not that this person did the 5x5 and then a 4x4 and then you went up 20 pounds on the 4x4 when it should have been 15 and now you're stronger. It's like, no, you performed on that 4x4. You did not get five pounds stronger. Why is conjugate behaviorally correct?

Because it's allowing you to go through fluxes. So we cannot, it's very, very difficult for the brain to keep doing the same behaviors over and over and over again. It's not that the program or the fact that you can't squat every day, you can't squat every day aggressively. You want to squat every day. Maybe we do one day. It's like very aerobic and hippie like one day. It's very aggressive.

One day it's like bodybuilding squats. Then you could squat every day, but you can't go in every day in low bar. And that's kind of what conjugate does very well is that we're teaching your squat pattern to get better by doing 10 different squats and you just plot them correctly you can get better at doing the same exact squat every day but like i said maybe you emotionally do it differently it's just that your program is getting someone to elicit the right behaviors which up here lets this stuff change the other thing too is the the records that you're beating are, they're records for the day. This was

discovered by the Bulgarians and I believe the Soviets as well, the Soviet Union. So let's say a lifter had a, I don't know, a 300 pound clean and jerk or something like that. And they went in for the day and they were supposed to work out with like 270 pounds. And for whatever particular reason, they were just gassed that day. Things weren't working out. If they got 260 pounds on a particular lift, they would celebrate that. They would say, this is for today. This is in regards to, and that was with high level athletes. That was with Olympians. So now if we're talking about

That was with high-level athletes. That was with Olympians. So now if we're talking about in SEMA helping out somebody that lives in Michigan that's a police officer, you know, it's like that guy is not a professional fitness person. He's not a professional lifter. And I think that a lot of us don't – we're not always accounting for that part of it. I don't, every day is gonna be so different for you, especially given the circumstances, if you have like a regular job, if you have a lot of other responsibilities, you going in and playing power lifter for a few hours

is gonna look a lot different than somebody that can set up their whole lifestyle around it. Totally, we actually talked about that outside and even what's that program gonna look like? You guys both wanna run conjugate? They're gonna look super different as well because this person's daily ability to participate is different.

This person's daily ability to recover is different and all that stuff. So to a degree, the stress on your body is to a degree general, no matter what, you know, I work a lot of hours and I've had to adjust my training recently because of that. So I was like, man, I just don't have that. I'm always an excited person. I didn't have that pop in the gym. And then I could have sat there and been like, Oh, I'm not gonna be able to get stronger. I'm not gonna be able to get bigger and do this. But all I realized was I'm in a different scenario going into the gym. So I need different things to invoke the behaviors I want. And that's really all it comes down to.

But I think far too many people are not assessment-driven. And I actually at one point want to ask you guys a question. I ask all my close friends who I consider smart, but we'll get like that into a second. But if you're doing stuff that's not assessment-driven, you're saying this is the best way to lose weight or this is the best way to power lift and you do this to that person. You're forcing them to assimilate to your program. That's not the point of being a coach. A coach is to assimilate to the person. If you make someone assimilate to you, you're just giving them a glorified template. I'm curious about this real quick because I know we've touched on how to learn things better.

But when it comes to maybe physical skills, let's say someone wants to pick up things in jujitsu faster, pick up things in lifting faster, movements. What are some things that they can do like just without any type of supplementation? And then what are then some potential supplementation or nootropics or whatever they can add to that experience to allow themselves to be able to assimilate what they're trying to get faster. This is probably the area of sports performance I like the most, actually, skill acquisition. When it comes to a physical skill getting better, the first thing you have to do is realize how good are you at it in the first place. The way I answer that question is, can you still do it if you're breathing really, really heavy?

And if the answer is yes, that means you're relatively masterful and we can talk about how to do it in a way. If you can't do it when you're breathing really heavy, then you're actually a novice. And that has nothing to do with how strong. I'm sorry. Someone's definitely going to get offended by that, but it is what it is. It makes a lot of sense. You can have a full conversation with somebody while they're deadlifting 405. They're probably a pretty damn good deadlifter. My point exactly, right? But whatever. So if you're viewing it through the eyes of a master, the way to get better is to have a novel and successful experience and that's tough the longer you get, right?

If we're dealing with a novice, the way to do it is in many different scenarios. So can you do it with a good athlete, a bad athlete, you know, in the BJJ scenario? Can I still hit this, you know, arm bar with someone who has long arms, short arms? If I'm tired, if they're tired, most importantly, it's the difference in energy systems. So briefly, we have creatine, glucose, and fatty acids we can use for energy. If a novice can somehow do the skill with all three of those substrates being used, the fat being the long-term, glucose being that middle, everyone's aware of that stuff. If you can do the skill the same in all three,

that's how you move up to mastery. When it comes to the supplemental stuff, the only way we can supplement to enhance skill is to increase our sensation of the skill. And that sounds kind of weird for a second, but I'll explain that more. So if you take testosterone, you get stronger. It's because you have more acetylcholine. Your technique didn't get better. Your ability to recruit the technique may have gotten better. That's something that Masteron does very well, but you did not get the skill better. You see what I'm saying? So if you want to get a master better through supplementation, you allow them to have that novel success with enhanced sensation and the brain does the rest while you go to sleep.

So let's say – you do BJJ, right? That's what I thought when you asked. So let's say there's a specific defense or something you want to get better at. Maybe you take some Nupept and meditate before and you guys – have you done like the shark tank drill? That's an awesome way with one movement and Nupept to enhance the skill of someone who's elite. Nupept isn't like legal in any sense, is it? Illegal? It isn't like in terms of –

No, you can use it in every single sport. Like even professional wada, it's legal. So you're good to go. Now with Nupept also, is there something that people need to be careful because with some of this stuff, I'm just like,

if you take too much of it or if you do it too often, can it fuck you up in any way? No, but Nupept's not idiot proof in the sense of you can take it and nothing will happen. So if you took Nupept, let's say I use it

to replace morning coffee, BJJ, and working with my clients, it's not doing what you want it to do. Okay. So you'll get used to it pretty much like- Not used to it. It's that learning is novel. So what I mean by that is you're not done learning the skill when you go to sleep tonight. It happens for the next two to three days actually. So what's happening, let's say you take Nupept for just BJJ, but then you use maybe amoxipine or phenylpyracetam elsewhere, you'd be fine. But that Nupept supplement is now acutely paired, if you will, with that BJJ skill. So I bring it again in to the diet within 48 to 72 hours and you're doing it with something else, it'll actually

impede the previous skill. So are you saying that if an individual wants to take Nupept, they should use it for one specific thing rather than using it for a bunch of different things concurrently? Assuming you want to use it to learn something, you can totally just take it because it feels good, you know, and that's different. If you're just using it for the feel, that's fine. But if you're, I want to get better at this because of new pep it's more of like your thursday routine that has new pep in it rather than this is what i take got it and any difference in like taking it orally or like how

i did i shot it at my nose is that just for speed yeah in that scenario it's just speed okay and what about acetylcholine? You keep mentioning this. Can somebody just take acetylcholine and get a strength response or – Yeah. Actually, there's a really good supplement out. It's called Alpha-GPC. A lot of people are starting to become aware of it. It's a little more complicated than it meets the eye and I'll explain that in a second. But acetylcholine is Alpha-GPC in a very specific manner.

So alpha-glycerophosphorylcholine left-handed is already in our brains. And it's part of the spinal cord that actually makes your muscles contract. So you could legitimately take alpha-GPC and get stronger acutely. But downsize, it's not at all permanent. You could take a coffee cup size of acetylcholine and it won't be permanent. You could take a coffee cup size of acetylcholine and it won't be permanent. So if someone does take acetylcholine, they want to take that before a lifting session in essence? The beauty is it's so non-general.

You can do whatever you want with it really. That's the beauty of it. So it's going to be – so L-lypholized choline is what makes you poop. The choline itself can be diverted to different areas based on what's needed. So you can just take acetylcholine or alpha-GPC or CDP choline and it will do its own thing on its own. What would you maybe pair that with? Is there something else you can take along with it that's also like an over-the-counter type of thing? Totally. So going back to your BJJ example, let's say you're like, you know, I'm already kind of good at this move.

So the way to get even better would be to enhance your capacity for it with the new PEPT. So taking alpha GPC with the new PEPT, the GPC is going to enhance your duration and time to fatigue for whatever you're doing. And pairing that with new PEPpped means i just got an extra 30 minutes of novel learning i could take care of what's the go ahead i was just gonna ask i could be wrong but isn't like alpha gpc and acetylcholine aren't aren't those just precursors to choline that's already in your head uh kind of it's a weird way to dissect that sentence we do legitimately have alpha glycerophosphoryl choline in us. That is going to be the analog you can take to directly get yourself acutely stronger.

If you take CDP choline, it can be derived into more things. Alpha-GPC is just specific. Furthermore, choline is not infinite in our bodies. That testosterone reuptakes it, makes it a little faster so we can work better. But it's used up every single minute that goes by. So it's something you can replete very easily. Same way as food. You can't not eat all day.

You have to replete it. It's that same thing. So then would taking testosterone make the alpha-GPC more potent? No. It would only mean you recycle it faster. So instead of the garbage men come in your house on tuesdays now they come tuesday thursday saturday what is uh the difference between some people that can recruit a lot of like motor units to be really strong or really

explosive uh we know some individuals that when they come in here and lift they could just lift like monsters and uh and actually a few of them that I know will actually even get hurt a lot because they can like blow their body apart basically. And they need to kind of be taught to almost slow down. What is that and how can somebody maybe tap into their nervous system a little bit better? So that is the type of athlete you are. I'm one of those. I have two proximal biceps, two proximal pecs. I tore this rotator cuff and the super spinatus on it. I broke the fifth metacarpal on this hand. I dropped a 380 pound stone on my knee and I've broken my foot from it. So some people are just like, and that's how they are. So I'm someone that work capacity actually makes me safe.

I get hurt the heavier I lift because that's my natural tendency. And you become a balanced athlete and that's the best athlete. So I spend roughly 70% of my year just doing super shitty feeling sets of 10 with 90 seconds rest. And I get stronger from it because my weakest portion of my biology so much has to do with the maintenance of my acetylcholine factors. So in that person, what gets them stronger and safer from periodization is actually building more muscle so that they can handle their own nervous system, whereas some athletes are the opposite. And if you're the opposite, that's someone who needs speed work, plyometric jumps, creatine supplementation and that stuff so that their nervous system can get ramped up to the point that their muscles are unsafe then.

How can somebody toe the line safely between – let's say NuPept is the example, right? Start using NuPept before workouts and then they start using it before every workout because they want to learn better. But now NuPept becomes the thing that they need to take before they work out or their workout is shit. How does somebody toe the line from using that effectively to being effective for them to be able to learn more and then it not becoming something that they absolutely need to be able to learn well? So I think we said it outside. I don't think we said it live. Everything that you take is capitalizing on what's already in your head. Norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, all this stuff in your head is facilitated by taking Molly the same way it is by going to the gym.

Obviously very different amounts, but that stuff is already there. So let's say you take Nupep and you said, I want to learn. I'm going to be the best at learning. So let's say you take new pep and you're like – you said, I want to learn. I'm going to be the best at learning. Are you trying to take it for stuff you're already really good at and therefore not actually learning anything new because your program isn't designed to do that and you're just taking the new pep because? I don't want to sound like a broken record, but assessment is how the world works. Successful people aren't always smarter than you.

They're better decision makers than you and that's the difference. So you need to literally assess what you're doing things for and pay attention to how you're actually feeling before you decide to go ahead and take that again. And even having an idea of what the goal of this training week is, this training block, this training day. Am I just doing today to induce muscle damage in my pecs and set up next week's session? Because if you are, then who cares about the new pep? Just set up next week's session. But if the entire block is a peaking phase, that's different than if it's the very first block of a new year's program. If you're doing the first block of a new year, it's probably pretty boring, monotonous

and basic stuff. You don't need to learn much there. Let's just take a small break because I think there's still a good amount more to get to. I have to pee, but I'm assuming that it would be a good idea just so we're not, I don't know,

just blistering with questions forever. Maybe just take a little breather and we'll come on. We'll take a quick commercial break. How about that? Yeah, sounds good. Bad Project Family, how's it going? Now on this podcast, we talk a lot about getting your lab work done. That's why we've partnered with Merrick Health.

They're a telehealth network and they're owned by Derek for more plates, more dates. But the amazing thing about Merrick is that when they get your labs done, they have a client care coordinator go over those labs with you. Now, a lot of you, when you guys are looking at labs and looking at your testosterone, cholesterol, et cetera, what Merrick Health does is they don't immediately throw a needle at you. They can help you figure out what type of things you need to do in terms of your nutrition, potentially what you need to do through your supplementation. someone who potentially has hormonal issues, whether you're advanced in age or you do have very low testosterone, Merrick will put you on a protocol that is specific to you and that helps you out with your current levels. The problem with a lot of these other telehealth networks is that when they do HRT for individuals, they give everybody the same exact thing,

and that can actually damage you and not be beneficial. That's why Merrick Health is the way to go. And Andrew, how do they go about it? Yes, that's over at merrickhealth.com. That's M-A-R-R-E-K health.com. And let's say you just want to get your testosterone checked, or maybe you want to get your testosterone, your estrogen, and a couple of other things. Load all those labs into your cart and at checkout enter promo code POWERPROJECT10 to save 10% off all those labs. But let's say you're not sure where to start, head over to MerrickHealth.com slash PowerProject and get the PowerProject panel. That's going to cover everything you need to know, including a consultation with a client care coordinator

that comes free with that and use promo code PowerProject to save $101 off of that entire bundle. Again, MerrickHealth.com. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. We're drinking these keto beers over here. Is there caffeine in them? No, I don't think so. I'll try one if there's no caffeine. I'll grab it.

Thanks, man. It tastes oddly good, man. Yeah. Oddly good? I didn't think it tasted so good. Maybe you can tell us more about it.'s r13 and then like maybe you can tell like cuz you probably understand the fucking chemistry of this thing Taney D all it just means that they added a specific group where there's a double bond on the first and fourth or first and third carbon on the ethanol and it's on the right-handed side and the guy that um the guy that sells this product he um and i don't know if this is true so i don't want to be spitting out

information it's not true but uh the claim is is that this is not um uh addicting the way that ethanol which is a normal beer is right, right? So I don't know. Would you think that would be true? I don't know enough about it specifically to say that, but probably. The cool thing about drugs is all the bad side effects of something tend to be coupled together chemically. So, for example, the anxiety and the increased heart rate

from caffeine, trimethylxanthine, go down in dynamine, which is dimethylxanthine. So it's just like sometimes you can solve a lot with one little chemistry thing. Thank you. So there's the new thing you guys heard of, e-clomid? No. They came out with a new clomid.

It's e-clomid. And it just absorbs better. It's not that it's not clomid anymore, but it's just like they fucked with a little chemical bond and now it just absorbs better. We're on now, right? Yeah. Well, I have a question about something uh we've we've talked about flow states and stuff on the podcast before who's the author of steven it starts with a k well our ketones we're drinking

well we're drinking hard ketones now but his the fuck is his name? I bought his book, too. Okay, just type in the book on becoming Superman or superhuman, one of the two. But, for example, sometimes if I take Kratom before going to jiu-jitsu or sometimes if I do shrooms a little bit before I go to jiu-jitsu, there's certain times when I do jiu-jitsu and I'm thinking a little bit more than I'd like. Then certain times when I'm doing jiu-jitsu and just everything is boom. All the movements that just need to happen, happen. It's like, I'm even surprised at some of the shit that happens. And using this a bit before I noticed that happens more often than sometimes when I don't and I'm able to get into that zone, right? What is that zone or what is that state and how can people bring it upon, bring, bring

it on more often? Encourage it maybe almost from a natural perspective. That too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you make mistakes in BJJ, you're going too fast and anticipating too much and then you make the mistake? Well, not even mistakes. More so it's when I'm rolling and I'm just like doing things that I've never practiced before or doing things that I've maybe thought about and then they just happen. And it's not even that I was trying to do it. My body just,

boom, does certain things. And I'm just like, I don't know how the hell this is happening now. I know I've seen it. I know I've maybe done it a few times, but the fact that it's just happening so quickly and so fast and I'm not thinking about it, that is a state that I can get into sometimes. And sometimes it state that I can get into sometimes. And sometimes it happens. I can get into that state faster when I take creative beforehand or maybe when I do psilocybin beforehand. That's what I'm wondering.

How can I trigger that more often? So the reason I asked is because the answer is identifying what the flow state is for the activity. Okay. I've participated in BJJ. I was a freestyle wrestler in high school, so I get what that's like. And you see the dichotomous difference

between wrestling and BJJ, right? The density of that neck. Oh, yeah. It's that strong, man. Jesus. But BJJ is more like chess, where you could say wrestling is more like checkers. Right?

And if you're someone that's going too fast and you notice that your suboptimal, we'll call it, or not flow state in BJJ has to do with thinking too much, you're actually similar to Andrew talking about Nupept where you were over-facilitated. Now you're taking in too much information. The reason why things that are typically not stimulants but put you in flow state is because for BJJ, you're going a little bit over your flow state curve.

What does that mean? So flow state is like a threshold for everything. And it's because when we pair these cortical areas, like for right now, flow state for me in speaking is utilizing my auditory, lingual, and thought interpretation-based courtesies. So they need to be firing at the same exact rate for me to do this. If I start doing it too fast, that's when you have like that nervous talking and it's like, ah, you start putting in stuff

that doesn't matter. And if I'm going too slow, I'm going to be like, ah, right? So there's this like optimal threshold for everything. And you are the one to make the mistake, not the BJJ or the drugs or anything else. So flow state is predicated on where do I need to be for this activity? What areas are involved? And am I going to go under it or am I going to overshoot it?

So in anything, flow state means the areas of your brain that are involved are firing at the same rates. And the rate is relative to the rhythm of what you're participating in. So BJJ being a little bit slower is going to mean that the threshold is probably definitely lower than powerlifting for sure. So you're obviously an excited person. You think a lot. lower than powerlifting for sure. So you're obviously an excited person. You think a lot. BJJ gets your heart rate up. It's not a surprise to me that having too much norepinephrine dumped from your liver glycogen being depleted and your heart rate being up doesn't make you better at BJJ. We need to maybe alter some GABA-A responses and increase kinesthetic awareness for you to hit that perfect BJJ curve. I have a question about that because everyone is somewhat different when it comes to certain

activities. Like, and we talked about this so much on the podcast, but for me, when it has come to hitting big lifting PRs or performing well in the gym or even doing well in BJJ, I'm the type of person who I don't like to get hype. I don't like the loud music playing. I don't like people yelling of person who I don't like to get hype. I don't like the loud music playing. I don't like people yelling at me and I don't like even screaming myself. I more so like to calm myself down and not think about anything. And that's when I personally perform the best. So knowing that, what do you think, and some people need to get super hype

apparently so that they can do certain things. So with that difference in how people are and how I am, what would you say is going on there? It's your response to neurochemistry. So I'm someone where norepinephrine, as it gets up, I get aggressive. So when I take injectable carnitine, I can't take that much because it gets a behavior, a neurochemical response I don't want. So within that, we also know that everyone responds differently to like a cup of coffee, even though the coffee is secreting the same hormones. So what it turns out and why it's difficult to talk about is that norepinephrine between the three of us is different. Norepinephrine between ourselves is also different.

So my response to norepinephrine might be the same as Mark's response to dopamine. And that's the weird and trippy part about flow states. Dopamine makes me social, makes some people smart, like gives them that ability to focus. So you need to identify what's going to be beneficial to you from a hormonal perspective? And what do I naturally already do? So if you're someone who, you know, maybe you find that it's easy for you to get hyped up and fast, you probably have a relatively above average or sensitive response to norepinephrine in the right hemisphere of your brain. So we need to take things that don't facilitate that, but we facilitate other stuff. So you maybe can get away with taking like some glycerol and oral steroid and creatine in crazy high doses as long as your heart rate doesn't pass this threshold.

And then it's like, wow, I just took like – not that anyone would ever do this, but I just took 400 mg of anadrol and I actually don't feel worse because you identified it properly where in the wrong instance, 25 mg of anadrol could be too much. It was Stephen Kotler. Stephen Kotler, okay. Jesus Christ, man, you're just smashing so many of these things. So much to dive into here. I've heard you mention a couple times on this show, and I've heard you mention previously on a few other podcasts that you were on, and even just on your Instagram, talking about like the metaphysical things that are, things that just seem to like just happen, you know, and we're not 100% sure why, but

I kind of think that it's connected to some of our beliefs and these things that look like they fall into our lap or these things that, you know, some people have a friend that like everything they do, like they don't seem to care or they don't seem to like really try extra hard on a lot of stuff. But for some reason, like it just seems to work out. What you're mentioning about flow state or even like when Michael Jordan was in the zone and every shot that he shot, like everything just went in every single time regardless of whether he was off balance or had three people hanging on him or whatever. I think one of the key factors of those things is like I think it is a good idea to prep yourself and to prepare yourself so you have the best opportunity to do as well as you possibly can.

But I also think it might be a little bit of a mistake in trying too hard to get into those states. What are your thoughts on that? All the athletes that I've talked to and communicated to recently know that my favorite cue when we sprint is stop trying so damn hard. People make the mistake. Yeah, you try. It's like, what kind of run was that?

Yeah. And it goes back to like that success level thing. If, you know, Michael Jordan didn't have to try to hit these jumpers because it's what he does and expresses naturally. And going back to that flow state question, his ability to try, which will spike his heart rate, change carbon dioxide and oxygen, more norepinephrine is actually probably going to be too much in that scenario. And the way I came to this actually is kind of interesting. I think we've all misdefined the term free will. So if you want to say you have true free will, that would mean that I can pick a date on the calendar in 10 years, or at least this was my original interpretation of it and say I'm going to make this happen.

But that's not true. And the reason we know it's not true is because we have no section in our brain that can actually do those things. The best things that happen in life don't happen until they've happened. Think about the first time you released the slingshot, Mark. You probably had no idea it would get as big as it did until it started happening. You had no idea that all these places would carry it until they responded to your email. So free will is more about your mindfulness and decisions you make in the moment and how they continuously create momentum into what's next. And having faith in that what's next is the free will because we have no idea what's

coming. So if you just have the faith and mindfulness acutely, you then are moldable enough to even just not lie but just say that anything that happened was supposed to. How the fuck did we get on that topic? We got into a warp zone. Well, while we're in this crazy zone, I told you guys I had a question for you guys. I respect you guys very much. I think you're both super intelligent. I ask all my smart friends this question. It starts with the commonality in smart people is that when they deal with a problem, they start philosophical, right?

And then they get conceptual and slowly funnel. Do you guys think that as yourselves who also think that way, you adapted that strategy because you're already smart? Or do you think it's that initial adoption of that strategy that allows you to be smart? No, I think it's because of adopting that. I don't think I'm smart, dude. Just straight up. I don't like to hold that belief. I mean I don't think I'm dumb either, um i think it's that adoption of that belief that's my personal opinion i just

like to know i don't there's no right answer yeah it's just one of those things where it's like huh did you get here because you got yourself here or did you just pick this because of who you were i think also i mean all of us here are people who continually seek information and we're not like, we like to learn more things. I know that I'm never comfortable with the things that I know and I'm always, I get proven wrong all the time and it's great. I love it. So because of that, that's how I found certain answers, not because I'm smart, but just because I seek. That's how I found certain answers, not because I'm smart, but just because I seek. Yeah.

You know, people that seek are going to find, right? So that's the way I've always been. I've always been into trying to find out more. And also, I'm not afraid to just say, like, I don't know. You know, and I know some people that are pretty smart, but the people that are pretty smart, they'll try to give you an answer. And the people that are really smart will say, I don't actually know. That's what I've kind of noticed out of all the high-level people that we've had on this show. They're like, man, I've gone in circles on this a million times.

I've been studying this for 30 years, and now I just kind of found out that I don't really know much about it. And you're like, damn, that's kind of depressing, but I understand what they're talking about. Absolutely. I feel that all the time, especially when you start thinking about all these neurochemical phenomenons and they're spinning and I know all this stuff happening, but I still can't figure out certain things in life. You know, like we all deal with certain issues day to day. Why don't we have perfect relationships? Why do friends come and go? Why do these things happen? And you start to realize that our worlds are also different in between the ears, that it's actually more of a miracle that it ever works out in the first place than that it's a problem that it doesn't. How can you interact with someone where every word I say is actually different in a way than it is to you? And we become friends over similarities that are small, not the opposite. You keep mentioning something too that I find fascinating.

And I think it could help people become superhuman if they're listening and kind of honing in and paying attention. You multiple times have referenced just mitigating and the mitigation of failure. and it's like not that you ever want to totally avoid uh being in any sort of position where you might fail because that's probably being too scared to just go through life it's normal to to be kind of fearful of things but the mitigation of failure um when you think about the gym and you don't fail you are allowing yourself to learn what your body needs to learn for the day. And you put it in your gym bag and you stuff it in your gym bag and you take it home, these good results, right? And you get to kind of hold onto those things. And over time, they accumulate and they add up to something. And you're able to recover and your body is

very accepting of this methodology that you have taken on. Whereas if you are failing and you set yourself up to fail, you kind of continually teach your body to fail. You teach your body. And also from a mental perspective of like, man, I don't think I can do that. Or last time I did this, I had a bad experience. You end up with what they call in boxing, they call it sparring partner syndrome, where I'm just never going to win because I'm a journeyman boxer and I'm just here. All I'm good at is taking a lot of good punches to the head. I'm like Rocky was that way, right?

trying to figure out ways of mitigating failure, being prepared, those kinds of things to me, I think for a lot of folks, it would help to drive down the amount of anxiety and drive down the amount of like worry that you have if you are going into situations a little bit more prepared and previously you had some pretty good experiences with them. I'm glad you're kind of forcing us to go back to that because I think people view failure incorrectly first. Powerlifting is a sport because you can't go nine for nine every time. If you could, it wouldn't be a sport, right? And I think the problem is people view natural occurrences as failure when certain natural occurrences aren't failure you went for a big lift on your third attempt and you missed that's not a failure you simply found out where

your limit was failure to me is something that was supposed to go correct and when i mean suppose i don't mean oh i should have hit that lift that doesn't count you know that's a shoulda what is supposed to happen is like i'm not supposed to knock this over. You're not supposed to show up late when you go places and you purposely allow a pitfall to happen when it wasn't supposed to. That's a failure. I said, I've reformed my businesses three times. I'm sure you've done similar things, Mark. And those were never failures, especially in hindsight. You're like, wow, that had to happen. It actually would have been a failure if I didn't change anything. So kind of taking the connotation away from the word failure, thinking it's like a red negative sign and more viewing it as a mistake is the proper way to take that advice.

What if you don't have a win yet? The funny part about that is the best part is actually to not have a win because it means you stand to gain the most and failures and mistakes still give you information. So you're actually set up for an incredibly novel opportunity to create momentum. How important is an individual's verbiage to their success, like the way that they speak and the way that they talk about things about themselves? Vaguely conflicted in the research. You'll find research that says it's everything and you'll actually find research that say it doesn't matter at all to a degree. I personally think that the adjectives and narrative you use to describe what's going

to happen are incredibly important because we kind of really briefly talked about like how certain parts of the brain can turn on in response to certain things and certain ones can turn off. That verbiage is this raw platform for brain areas to turn on because you're saying it to yourself and you actually respond to yourself. And if you didn't respond to yourself, then you wouldn't say anything in your head in the first place, right? They're monologues. You're talking to yourself. So if you're inciting a narrative, a monologue using adjectives that kind of stimulate amygdala stuff, which again is that fear defense.

Like what, by the way? Oh, let's say curse words, for example. If every single time, right? This F in this, this F in that, even if you're talking about something positive, like, oh, I just hit this F in lift. It was, you know what I mean? Sound like you're from Boston. Yeah.

Well, I was at one point. Oh, okay. Yeah. There we go. And the harbor. And the harbor. You know? New Jersey, right?

Yeah. New Jersey currently. Similar accent in a lot of ways. Coffee. You know? But if you're using that, you're actually not inciting parts of your brain that are associated with success. You're inciting parts of your brain that are associated with defense and failure and fear.

And sure, they release norepinephrine too. But that's that norepinephrine that makes you kind of angry and fidgety and vigilant of that guy over there. Why is he looking at me? And that's what I meant earlier about norepinephrine is different within us as well. That's what I meant earlier about norepinephrine is different within us as well. Having it secreted due to liver glycogen depletion is different than having it secreted due to anger or fear or curse words or the inciting of something scary. Doesn't that depend though upon how you view those curse – like if you're saying, oh, that fucking lift was awesome. Like if you don't necessarily think of it in an aggressive way, would that change the way you – A little bit.

I think if we had to look at it at that micro of a perspective, it would be how you said it, not your perception of it. Okay. So, for example, you're never going to go to your mom and be like, oh, mom, you're so fucking cute. You know what I mean? Like it just doesn't work that way, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's my point, you're so fucking cute. You know what I mean? It just doesn't work that way, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's my point. So the words kind of matter.

The words kind of don't. You played that out way too good. So in being Mr. Superbrain over here, what was the decision making? You know so much about the body. You know so much about Like, you know, so much about the body, you know, so much about the brain, you know, so much about like the chemistry. Why would you ever go and like mess with the chemistry? You just couldn't help yourself. Why wouldn't you go and met?

Why would you go and meddle with the chemistry via like performance enhancing drugs and things like that? The ceiling on performance for humans is nowhere near where we are yet. We are not even close. You see – so anyone you think might be the best athlete on the planet, go look at their camp. I guarantee you it's not perfect and not perfect in the sense of, oh, they don't wake up late, whatever. They're just leaving stuff on the table. I have never met an athlete, period, that has maximized every opportunity that they have truly.

And that's why I'm into it. I want to see it. I want to see freaks. I want to see people be their best. And I just haven't seen or been in a scenario where I think someone's done that yet. And you've explored everything, right? SARMs, PEDs, peptides. So I have talked to people in China who shouldn't be taking drugs about taking drugs.

I've worked with dyslexic and autistic children. I've spoken to someone on every single continent on the planet except Antarctica about this stuff. So I just think I have enough data to say that. Like just everyone can get better and furthermore – and this is more opinionated. I think the fact that we can respond to all things put in our mouth from a drug and anything perspective as an opportunity, I don't think it's random. Birds, for example, can auto-regulate their temperature at night based on how much they eat. And if they eat too much, they have to vomit. So it's like, well, so there's a finite limit to the birds, right?

You could eat as much as you want. All that happens is you get fat. But like there's really – if you breathe and eat slow, slow you're not gonna vomit no matter how much you eat same thing with sports we only know that your recovery impeded your ability to do the volume we don't know the maximum amount of volume a human can tolerate you know it was like all your recovery or something you did thwarted the biology. We don't know where biology ends yet. So, for example, there's compounds out there that have nothing to do with AAS that are more potent when used properly than AAS because of their specific synergies. Are there compounds and things someone could take for dyslexia or autism or things like that that really have been shown to help pretty well with some

of these conditions? Lactobacillus ruderi is the bacteria that is deficient in all children born in the ASD spectrum. Every single child with ASD is born with multiple bacterial deficiencies. In the gut? Yep. But ruderi is the only one common amongst all of them. What's even more interesting is we see alleviation of these symptoms in children amongst all of those categories by supplementing with lactobacillus ruteri.

Furthermore, we see an ability to increase learning in these kids. From taking that supplement? And you can get that from drinking kefir. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. That's that's amazing so you just gotta specifically target that bacteria but that kind of even alludes to my previous point about us not being done with humans yet it's like wait you're telling me we've spent all these years giving these children adderall and screaming at them in a classroom but all we need to do is make them have a yogurt drink and they get smarter. It's like we don't know what's going on yet.

So it's like, you know, you just gave me some credit about being smart and knowing all this stuff. And I'm sitting over here thinking we don't know shit, you know, like there's still a lot of questions I have to research and look at and decisions I have to make where I'm not fully sure of what's going on biologically. And it's not that it doesn't exist or I'm not smart enough. It's that that pioneer has – that area has never been crossed over to. No one has pioneered there yet. Well, you just mentioned about lactobacillus rewrit. Is that something that's commonly known currently or commonly being used to help with those children? Or is that something that is still kind of like only individuals who are – I don't know, who pay attention to that, understand that mechanism? I totally live under a rock.

I think it's common knowledge. I think it's common knowledge. I don't know if it is. So the groups for this stuff are very small. The way they found out about lactobacillus reuteri working was actually really unethical. It was a group of parents that started giving their autistic children their own fecal matter in a bottle. Oh, wow.

Why? And it worked. But why? Why was that even an option? So they knew. No, thanks. Yeah. Prior to that, they knew there were bacterial deficiencies and they got lucky.

Truthfully, the thought process was it's, they also knew important piece of fact that the bacteria that's in us is also reproduced in our poop. Same bacterias. So they're like, if anyone needs more bacteria, we might as well make it our poop and not someone else's poop and they did it and it worked. point ultimately is is that what's going on internally is monitored truly by things smaller than we can still comprehend so an interesting question i had with someone recently was he asked me like well what happens after testosterone binds to the testosterone molecule and like he was aware that like it binds causes genetic changes and stuff. He goes, well, how do you know when you're done, like all this stuff? And the answer is actually photons. The photons of light coming from the sun and moon are what tell your testosterone receptor to let go of what's inside or hold on.

So it's like something that small is telling your testosterone receptor what to do with the drugs they're attached to. So there's just like so much left that we just don't have the answers for yet so with the um with the kefir um would that help in adults as well because like this episode is going to be uh 664 i will write down 646 or i will do something silly like that from time to time and simo will like send me a text and be like dude you actually put the wrong number again because i i don't i don't know if it's just, again, I get fatigued and I'm just not paying attention. But it happens quite a bit where I will move numbers around. So now I'm interested because this is the first I've ever heard of anything like this. So you have to be deficient in the bacteria for it to work, unfortunately.

So for you, you probably wouldn't. I was actually told I was autistic growing up. I was in special classes. Now I just realized I'm kind of more of a savant than autistic in the first place. But what's funny is they – like these gut bacteria tests, they didn't do it on me as a kid. They're just like – I was nonverbal until I was like four or five. So this kid acts weird and like he doesn't do good on SAT, like state testing. So he's obviously dumb and like put me in a special class.

And then later on in life when I was already intelligent, I got a bacteria test and actually turns out I am deficient in lactobacillus reuteri but not massively deficient in other bacteria. So I even have an impediment in my ability to use my brain, but I never knew about it. So it never happened and manifested the same way. If I did it earlier in life, maybe things would have been different. But now as an adult and I supplement with this

bacteria, even when I remove it from my diet, I don't really notice a difference besides mood. Oh, well, what do you notice in terms of your mood? It just makes me a little less like social and happy. Gotcha. Okay. Like if I miss out on like sauerkraut or kefir, I have to eat fermented foods every day or at least I've told

myself I have to. I do notice a little something okay um and studying the brain and then probably stumbling upon some information that the gut is considered the second brain and by some people it's even considered the first brain are you kind of like shit man now i gotta now i gotta learn all this stuff about the gut as well uh to a degree yeah yeah. I think I'm very biased in my knowledge. I know everything I need to be absolutely awesome with sports performance athletes. So I do know a lot about the gut as well. But what's funny is the serotonin in your gut is not the serotonin in your brain. So to a degree, it's more like imagine having an awesome executive assistant and that's more of the brain-gut relationship than it being the same job if that makes sense.

It's like I have an assistant and he saves my life. And the other day, he had a family emergency and actually went to India and didn't tell me. And I was like, oh my god. I have all these emails. I don't know how to use a calendly. I was like I don't know what I'm going to do without this guy. Calendly. It's like our – I think that's how you say it.

Do you know what that is, Mark? Oh, calendly. Yeah, calend. Whatever was like, I don't know what I'm going to do without this guy. Calendly. It's like our – I think that's how you say it. Do you know what that is, Mark? Oh, Calendly. Yeah, Calendly. Oh. Whatever it is, yeah. I was like, what the – I like Calendly though. That sounds cool.

My savant was showing. But it's kind of more of this balancing axis rather than two jobs, if you will. We were talking a little bit earlier about athletes in pro sports, and it got me curious because whenever people think about athletes in baseball, basketball, football, whatever, whenever athletes have way above average muscle strength, power, people are like, well, it's because all athletes, all pro athletes are taking drugs, right? Well, with your experience and what you've seen in that sector, these individuals are obviously insanely above average as far as their abilities to perform certain things. But how prevalent is drug use in pro sports? The word drug is huge, right? Illegal drug use. So what we'll say is a decent amount of athletes cheat. Not as many as you think.

All athletes are doing something to get better though. So not all athletes are breaking the rules. But I have yet to meet a single professional athlete who doesn't have something. And what's funny is a lot of them do useless stuff. One of my best friends works in hockey, professional hockey. One thing that's popular in hockey is taking Sudafed. It doesn't work, obviously. For what?

Oh, before the game, obviously. What does – I'm being sarcastic. It doesn't do anything. Yeah. But it's very popular in that sport. So my point is you might think that it's like, oh, this person is taking the most scientifically accurate stuff to improve it. A lot of them are just capitalizing on the placebo effect.

So it's like what – I mean would you ever take a suicide before you went to the gym unless you were sick? No, it wouldn't do anything. We know that. But to them, they believe it so much that it's actually doing something. A lot of these guys do – not that it's stupid, but they'll drink like a matcha tea and they're like, but someone told me this matcha tea works and I had a good game on it and now I just drink this matcha tea before every game. Every athlete is doing something. Far less of them than what you think are breaking the rules though. That's an interesting thing because, I mean, when I played college soccer, a lot of guys,

not only on double days would they take ibuprofen and even I took ibuprofen during double days just because of the pain. But a lot of guys would then start taking ibuprofen before a game because they're like, I feel less pain, joint pain, et cetera, right? Huge one. It's probably something you shouldn't be doing but that's what they did. And it just makes you so comfortable that we said earlier about the creative and habitual person excuse me habitual addiction is

like it just becomes the thing you do and it helps me get into the mindset and then it's like real but not real until you do that in the first place you mentioned uh injectable carnitine a little bit ago um i forget exactly what what the purpose was for that. But my understanding is that can actually help people burn body fat. Like what are some of your takes on like injectable carnitine and how would somebody utilize it? I'm a huge fan of it. So all the research you heard about carnitine is true. It's not a great supplement though because it only works if you inject it or do it

intravenously. I believe the amount was like 100 milligrams per kilogram was what you needed of oral carnitine which means that someone my size I'm not as big as you guys is taking like 10 grams of it and carnitine smells

like fish. It also makes your poop smell like fish so taking 10 grams of it is not carnitine smells like fish. It also makes your poop smell like fish. So taking 10 grams of it is not useful. The injectable version is how you get the results you want. It can do anything you want. And that's why it's kind of difficult to use it properly because it's environmentally sensitive. Wait, what do you mean it can do anything you want? We'll get there. Okay. Maybe not anything, but you'll see in a second. Okay. But basically it's environmentally sensitive. So we use carnitine to poop. We use carnitine to burn fat.

We use carnitine to get our mitochondria. It's got a bajillion different jobs, kind of like choline Andrew mentioned earlier. But when you take the supplement, it's only doing what the acute environment is making it do because it doesn't stay in your system super long. environment is making it do because it doesn't stay in your system super long. So taking the carnitine injection before a run is a totally different supplement than taking it before bed with growth hormone, then taking it in the morning to lose fat, then taking it before the gym or after the gym. So it's – I love it because one supplement that's totally legal, cheap, doesn't give pip, all that great stuff.

What's pip? Like post-injection pain. OK. OK. It can give you many, many different opportunities. totally legal cheap doesn't give pip all that great stuff it's like post injection pain okay okay can give you many many different opportunities okay real quick okay so what okay it's it's totally legal uh how do you find out about injectable quarantine and then also like what what do you mean like you can take it before a workout and it can increase like the amount of muscle you can potentially, or not the amount of muscle, but like the amount of volume you can do during that training session.

You could take it before, let's say grappling. Like what do you mean? Energy uncoupler or something. Yeah. Uncoupler or something like that. So we can use carbs and fats for energy, right?

Okay. If you're in a sports performance setting, you can use both. Your goal is to use fats for general energy, meaning just the maintenance and sustenance of being alive, while carbohydrates do the specific energy work. So let's say you're doing high rep, high bar squats. Glucose, glycogen, all that stuff is mainly active in your quads and legs, while fats are keeping your heart rate in check, letting you recover between sets and all that. There's this dichotomous role between them.

Imagine your carbs as like machine guns and your fats as like business liaisons. They professionally allow things to kind of happen where carbs are just real dumb. It's dealing with a lack of oxygen. dealing with a lack of oxygen. The ability to have more carnitine means you spare more glucose. So you could do more muscular work without having to pay as much energetic money to stay alive. So your ability to do more volume, let's say during a workout or in BJJ while taking carnitine is a product of better metabolism. And better metabolism is obviously what gets you lean.

You go on a diet to improve metabolism. You know, we can all lose fat, but you just also restore it. The carnitine diet effects stop storage of fat, which is why it works. And then the dangers or like long-term use

of injectable carnitine, using too much injectable carnitine. Is there anything that if someone wants to go down this road, because when somebody hears this and sees this, they will, is there anything that they need to take into account? Only take as much as your work capacity can handle. And luckily there's no real dangers, but there's some shitty quality of life aspects. So I had someone reach out to me, they're like, Andy, I was taking a gram and a half of carnitine and they can barely squat 315

and like have a high resting heart rate. And he's like, all I do is poop all day long. And that's really, that really is what happens. Um, you just like keep poop. Cause I, I told you like the lifelized version of choline is going to make you poop carnitine and choline have a relationship. You take too much and you're just pooping all day long. Um, so there's no real health effects, but the annoying part of carnitine is the more elite of an athlete you are, the better it is. And if you're not an elite athlete,

it's pretty much useless. You got to make me go get a needle, brother. Like, I didn't want to do this, but I mean, fuck. Like, it just sounds too good. Andy said I'm elite. But not only that, it's like you just read, like,

my email from, like, two years from now. Like, dude, I still can't squat 315 and all i do is shit all day long when we talk about dosages i'm sorry i'm just so curious we talk about dosages here um and it's not illegal like it's not like drugs like it's not water legal you could literally go to a police officer and be like what's up dude and like they can't do anything you know it's it's not legal at all. It's literally L-carnitine, you know? So it's funny. People, there's stigmas on everything, right? Like, there's a stigma on Kratom because

we're like, oh, doesn't it do the same stuff opiates do? You know, there's a stigma on using a needle. But just because you use a needle to draw out amino acids, there's nothing illegal about the needle. You know, you can go to a hydration clinic and get an IV of electrolyte fluids. Does that make you like a heroin addict it's like no just because you did something iv doesn't mean there's something like you know connotatively attached to that that being said

200 milligrams is an exceptional dose of carnitine as far as like getting the most out of your rois daily daily or not daily so the nice thing is if you want to use carnitine for like a health based purpose you could go like 50 to 100 milligrams daily if you want to use it for a specific sports purpose 200 is really the number where sports performance starts to be enhanced okay and is it readily available like i've never seen where you get on the internet you can get it everywhere actually oh i'm not looking in the right spot yeah if you all just most people aren't searching i want to inject carnitine so that stops you from finding it but um durell strength is a good friend of mine his name is david herrera and he's the best at making it carnitine's not easily uh synthesized and stuff

um you can take a shitty made carnitine and it'll hurt a bunch and still work but uh this guy does it through like a lactate ringer and all these special things that make it special. But you can really get it anywhere. You can even make it yourself as simple as mixing a pharmaceutical-grade cleanliness carnitine in water with like a filter. You can do it yourself. It's going to suck, but that's the beauty of it. Like you can get it anywhere and it's not hard to make is this something you just wake up and be okay take my card and team before the day or is it something you place before a workout or a session of whatever you're trying to do so let's revisit your bjj scenario from earlier

right with new pep just so everyone who's listening is on the same page already yeah let's say you're like all right i want to lose fat but i don't want to do any more stuff. I'm just like at my limit for stress. My food's already kind of low. People don't realize that drug intervention is a modulator of energy. So if you want to lose weight, you can exercise more, you can eat less or take more energy modulating drugs. It's all the same effect, right? So you can not change anything, intervene with carnitine, then change something else. And that's actually how I recommend people do fat loss. You play different cards, never play the same card twice. So if you just decreased your food, you're not allowed to decrease your food

again until you've increased exercise and done something with a supplement. Then you can come back to it. And it's because all these goals are just balanced on each other. So if you keep taking away food, taking away food, taking away food and not changing anything else, you're never adapting to the loss of food. Your body just thinks, oh, this person is poor and can't afford food and now we're starving. I heard somebody mention that taking injectable carnitine is a little bit like just deducting a little bit from your caloric intake. Is that kind of a decent way to look at it? Or maybe it's adding to your energy expenditure? The latter would make more sense.

It's adding to your expenditure. It's moving fats better. The only reason- But in like a pretty good manner. Like it's sizable. Like it's not nothing. It's going to be something that can impact your fat loss. You can see the difference in one to two days, honestly. It works immediately when it comes to performance. But the thing is,

specifically, one, you can only use as much as you're capable of using from a fat movement scenario. Before you poop yourself. Yep. And that's the problem is most people are absolutely atrocious at beta-oxidation, which is the movement of fatty acids. That's why people see results on the ketogenic diet quickly, but then it drops off before it picks back up. It's because you had that initial rush in beta-ox. So if you could handle fats well, you can take a lot of carnitine and see a lot of results. And if you can't handle fats well, then a little bit of carnitine will do almost nothing and make it seem like you're losing weight because you're eating less.

When in reality, you're only losing weight from a little bit of carnitine being bad at beta oxidation because it's fixing the thing you fuck up the most. Personal question. So now I handle fats well. This is making me very very very curious like so would I be able to because you mentioned 200 milligrams but do you have to should you start there like would you try a lower amount and see how effective it is or would you say 200

milligrams for performances where anybody would like to start because I handle fats well yeah so it is you do need a super physiological amount of carnitine to change performance okay we can call physiologically normal being like 50 So it is – you do need a super physiological amount of carnitine to change performance. We can call physiologically normal being like 50 to 100 and it still will do something, but it won't drive performance. The ability to drive performance to have more carnitine in your body than normal is the effect that drives performance.

It's like, wow, all these carbs I have are just free to use for my muscles now because we've already handled survival. Now, this is just an amino acid, right? It's literally, it's not an essential amino acid. It's conditionally essential. And you could even argue it's not an amino acid because it's made by two other things. But yes, it's an amino acid. And it's in steak, right? It's pretty good abundance in steak.

You would eat it in steak, right? Yeah. Pretty good abundance in steak. You would eat it in steak. You would eat it in actually all foods that contain a full gram of protein will have some amount of carnitine. And then choline, which we talked about earlier, I believe is in like egg yolks, right? That's the most plentiful food source right off the top of my head. It's actually one of the only nutritional portions of soy is choline. But there's not a lot of foods where you can get it from in abundance. Carnitine, you can actually get your natural levels up decently through proper exercise and food, but choline, not the same. What do you know about IV type stuff?

Because I've heard people have got a mixed reviews. got a mix reviews. I have a friend that actually, it's a friend of a family friend that has a company that does these like IV drips. And sometimes people use them for, because they, you know, had a bender in Vegas or something like that. And they're trying to rehydrate or whatever. But there's like these glutathione IVs and some things that I'm not really too familiar with. But I hear remarkable things, NAD and stuff like that. But I just don't know. Like it's outside of my normal scope of what I'd learn. So what have you seen from some of these things?

They seem to be really effective or is it just overhyped? Glutathione's superb because it's the opportunity for your immune system to have more points to spend. So it's funny enough. Everyone loves the term like antioxidants, free radicals, this and that. Those terms come from a mathematical basis of reduced to oxidized glutathione. So if we had to have like employees, if you will, in the big business that is the immune system, every single employee is glutathione and they're contributing data to the immune system as a whole. So the injection either intramuscularly or intravenously of glutathione is the opportunity

for your immune system to be far more moldable. So I've used that with some people who had COVID to recovering from multi-day competitions to after a giant weight cut, how to get back. Glutathione is great. NAD plus is interesting because if it makes you feel a lot better, that means your beta oxidative capacity sucks. Essentially, NAD plus is how we resynthesize ATP through a training environment. But if the usage of it makes you feel amazing, that means your energy recycling is slow. And sometimes people will feel like shit after they get these IVs. And sometimes these IVs, I think they'll kind of hurt. They'll mess with people's like body temperature. Like it's not

the most pleasant experience, my understanding. Yep. You're totally right. And that has again to do with your movement of fat and just total blood stuff through your veins. If we had to say like, Andy, I know you said health is about synergy and it's my book, not your book. There's no health between us, but if you had to pick what's unhealthy, it's the inability to move fats just because it's so general. That's one of the big things I think people could stand to gain from like the carnivore diet stuff is that it's just by following this incredibly simple plan, you can increase beta oxidation very easily. The problem with that is when you're poor at it,

nothing works right. So you can't stand to lose body fat until you can move fats around your body properly. And that's why carnitine is so awesome for people because it can teach that to happen. Proper exercise habits do that for you. But as you know, Mark, not everyone is trying to do those things. There's something I want to ask because I think cognitively when I think about a lot of these things,

there's – for example, testosterone. I've never thought about taking it because it looks like I produce enough. I've gotten good results enough without it and I don't think think that it's also legal for like the sports I do. But also, I wouldn't want to affect what my body could actually do as I get older. That's one of the reasons why I don't even want to even go to that unless I get really old and I really do need it. So when I hear about something like injectable card and seeing it's not illegal on any type of water or whatever, any of the sports that I do.

And then also it doesn't literally affect my body's production of anything if I were to stop. Right. It seems like a no brainer. Right. What other potential, I don't know, supplements are not even like injectable card and seem because it has a specific use, but things like that, that are definitely beneficial and performance enhancing, but have minimal side effects. Like, uh, like what's the next wave of like human performance type thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's a couple of cool ones that come to mind. I think insulin is incredibly misunderstood. My eyes got one. Yeah. Insulin is probably the best one out there. And that's been utilized for a long time in the Olympics and in professional sports.

It's not even illegal. You can buy it at Walmart. Right. Oh, shit. You want to hear some shit? The only states where it's not legal to buy in Walmart happen to be the states where a major pharmaceutical company is hubbed from Indiana. One of the few states you can't buy it. Oh,

that's a surprise. How many, uh, you know, insurance and pharmaceutical industries are based out of Indiana. You know, it's only seems to be the states where these people are that you can't buy the insulin,

but you can literally buy insulin for $25 at Walmart. Okay. So let's, let's talk about insulin because, um, we had Jake Benson and Joe Sullivan on, which is why you're here now because they told us about you. You're fucking awesome. But insulin, right?

Number one, why is it misunderstood? Number two, if people choose to go down that route, what should they be careful with? Because in the past, like there was this trainer I used to work with, and a man died in his house from doing some stuff with insulin. It's like, yeah, you start foaming at the mouth. I don't know what you need to do when you take insulin, but they didn't have it. There we go. Dude just died right there. Why is it beneficial, but what are the downsides? What are the things people need to pay attention to? Why should they consider it? What would be reasons why they should not even go down the road of taking insulin?

Funny. You probably wouldn't expect this from me, but the downside to insulin is reading research and then trying to do what the research told you. Because who do you think the research is done on? It's done on diabetics. So it's not a one-to-one ratio that you can measure from. And people like to do these things like, oh, I'm badass. I'm hard. I'm going to do the pharmaceutical stuff and then read a research paper and think they can just pin what the research paper says.

There's no reason why a healthy non-diabetic athlete ever needs to do more than 10 to 15 IUs of insulin at a time. And that dose alone couldn't even kill you. The dangers from insulin come purely from lack of knowledge and using it like – I always say people abuse the vials. They see how small a vial of something is and they're like, this is it? This can't be that cool. Look how small it is. Then they draw out how much it is. Look how little this is.

I can definitely take more. Look what this looks like and don't understand sig figs and weights of things and stuff. But it's – insulin is actually very safe. If you were to do something as simple as never take more than 10 IUs, you could do whatever you want with it and you'd probably have no issues. The problem is when you treat it like a testosterone, you treat it like a carnitine and you treat it like another drug that has a different set of rules. People tend to think it's like, oh, if it's testosterone, orals, this, this, this, they

just all follow the same rules and that's not true. Another compound that's really cool in that sense is called DADA. It's disopropylamine dichloroacetate and what it does is it takes off the brake system that deals with force production while breathing heavy. You know? Wait, say that again? We're good? No, no. I mean I need – I just hit the Wait, say that again? We're good? No, no, I need it. I just hit the wire.

Oh, yeah, we're good. We can hear you. But say that again. What does it do? It takes off the brakes for producing force while breathing heavy. Whoa. Who's your dada? Like, this is what my son's been telling me this whole time. I gotta take dada. I thought he was talking to me. Fuck. Alright.

Makes sense. ATP is something you can actually take so is amp like the pure energy source that we use for currency in biology um i think there's a there's honestly an entire world i would feel comfortable saying i could take an athlete who was not taking true performance enhancing drugs and get them to the results of someone who did just by being smarter with this stuff. And I don't think – I'm not saying that as like to be cocky or arrogant. I'm not saying that it's me either. I think anyone can do it.

But it's like using the kitchen sink approach versus asking questions with a therapist and doing that type of stuff. I don't think that per milligram of kilo testosterone is as potent as any of the stuff I just mentioned. But because you can take as much of it as you want, it will look different. What things can these types of drugs and peptides and stuff – what are some other things they can help with? You mentioned in the beginning of the podcast that you believe that we're a lot of times using some of the wrong drugs for depression. And I've heard from a good friend of mine that he has a doctor friend that prescribes for people that have depression. He routinely, and it works really well for him, is he routinely prescribes testosterone and he's got great results.

So like some of these things I've even heard, I think glutathione I've heard can assist with Parkinson's disease, like all kinds of weird stuff where it's like, how come this isn't being like talked about more? How come we're not seeing this more? Because there's a lot of people suffering out there from a lot of different diseases and we can probably nip a lot of these in the bud with some of the stuff you're mentioning here today. Totally. So let's say you're in a relationship with a significant other and you're depressed because you guys are butting heads and stuff, right? You could potentially alleviate that with new pep and meditation because half the times you have a miscommunication issue with someone is

because you can't appropriately identify what's in your own head and regurgitate it in a communicative style way to the person next to you. And when you're having that issue with the person you love the most in life, hell, stuff's going to seem depressed. Let's say you're depressed because your job has high demands. And like Andrew spoke about earlier, you find yourself distracted energetically. That can cause depression because you're not meeting the criteria expected of you in that scenario. So maybe we can take something like an alpha GPC and cure this acute depression in Andrew by focusing and giving him horse blinders just for work and stuff. So the testosterone even more

ironically works in men and women that have depression. So it's like, whoa, what does that mean? And it means that inability of your spinal cord to be too slow at recovering from pain signals, whatever hormone it may be, substance P is the signal that gets sent from your spine for pain. spine for pain, the lack of those being ready for life could also cause depression. So it's funny. You can – if you can answer the question of what is making me feel this way, you can then find the perfect drug to fix it. Like let me ask you this. When – because a lot of people come to you for this stuff, for a lot of things. But when someone has kind of figured out some of the reasons why they're depressed, is – I guess no. But is the first answer – not the first answer, but like do they always need to find a substance?

Or do you tend to – I mean you obviously look at lifestyle factors. And you look at things that they could change within that, right? Like someone isn't getting good sleep each night. There's probably things that they could take to get better sleep. But I'm guessing you look at a lot of these things before heading down that road or do you think that the chemistry is just as important as lifestyle habits? There is an ambiguous line. There are scenarios where supplementation is absolutely necessary and there's zero chance you can get out of this without it, even acutely. And it's because you've

now learned to be depressed. You've learned to be anxious and you've done it for long enough that it's part of your natural behaviors, responses and stuff, right? It makes sense. The same way we all know you can train yourself to be consistently positive by as simple as responding with, I'm great every time. Even if you're not great, just keep responding with, I'm great. It's going to work. And it just works in the other spectrum and bandwidth of things. So if you're in deep enough, you basically need a supplement just to teach you and show you the other side. So my favorite way to teach someone with poor hamstring activation how to feel their hamstrings

is to make them lay on their back and put their feet flat. And I say, don't move your heels. And I try as hard as I can to pull their heels. And the only way you're going to follow that correctly is by flexing your hamstrings. It's like you just felt them for the first time in your whole life.

Next time we do this, we're going to do an RDL immediately after. So you could do an RDL with what you just discovered are your hamstrings. Then we're going to do an RDL immediately after. So you could do an RDL with what you just discovered are your hamstrings. Then we're going to do it 10 minutes before you squat, then 20 minutes before you squat. And eventually you can use your hamstrings when you squat, right? Same thing here. If you're constantly depressed and you don't even realize what it's like or remember what it's like, exactly, to feel a certain way, even if you are feeling it, you won't know you're

feeling it. Cause now let's flip the scenario and it's going to make a lot of sense. How many times have you seen an athlete, Mark? I know you've coached a lot of people where it's like, Mark, I only want to complete this one goal and they complete it. And you as the coach are like, wow, I got them to do it. They're going to be so happy. And they're like, meh, that wasn't as hard as I thought. I want to do this instead. It's the same exact thing. You never even knew what it was like to feel success. And when you did, you ignored it. So therefore, you can't expect to feel it when you squat 500 because you didn't feel it when you squatted 400.

What are some things that like blood work can tell us and what are some things that blood work can't tell us? Because I've been somebody that's gotten a lot of blood work done. I'm a fan of it. We have a sponsor of the show, Merrick Health, and I still get my blood work done. But I've noticed that there's some great data that can come from the blood work and there's some things that we can adjust and fix. But there's also a lot of stuff I think that's still unknown because it's just blood from a certain area that's taken on a certain day. We're not pulling blood from like the spine and we're not checking the chemistry of the brain. So it can't really tell us everything, right?

Yep. So blood work is like when you take a picture of a car that's going fast and the rims are kind of like blocked out or whatever it is. That's what blood work is. You're trying to take a snapshot of something that's in constant and chronic motion. So inherently, there's some bias. It's like, this isn't just what's happening. I only looked at one microsecond of this stuff. So you use blood work to determine what over the counter supplements should I take? Am I deficient in what minerals? Am I a liver guy? Am I a cardiac guy? Am I a kidneys guy? And then that's how you

determine that stuff. You also use it to gauge your, you know, not to steal Mike Izzertel's term, but max recoverable volume. No offense to anybody, you cannot determine max recoverable volume with training data alone. You are just looking through the wrong lens because you're subjective. Are your quads sore? Maybe, sure, they're sore. But how much bun and creatinine is left over? How much nitrogen was not absorbed due to the exercise? I can't tell you that. The only way to determine max recoverable volume and what supplements you should be taking for health is through blood work. So let's say you have a cognitive issue, a skill issue. Blood work doesn't matter at all, almost completely at all. So blood work matters for the athlete who's trying to increase longevity, decrease mortality risk, and be truly optimal. But it's actually somewhat limited in the totality of things. But what it can tell us, it can do it well.

in the totality of things, but what it can tell us, it can do it well. So for example, if an athlete were to try to get their blood work to figure out their MRV, would they have to do a hard lifting session the day before blood work the morning after? Very cool. So this is how you use blood work to create a story. So and also remember, MRV is not movement specific. It's energy system specific. So your MRV for squat doesn't exist.

Your MRV for creatine, glycolysis and aerobic squats exist. That makes sense so far. So we take you during a volume block, let's say mostly glycolytic work, right? Glucose, high reps, shorter rest, that stuff. Take it at the beginning and we know that the biggest variable in seeing your health and therefore ultimate size increases from a glycolytic performance block is your liver's ability to overturn protein. All right? So let's take it at the beginning. Let's see what your liver markers are like.

Let's take it again at the point where you're most fatigued and see what your markers were like and then take it at the end once you've gotten results and see the difference between the first and third and how they're different from the second. And then you take that total tonnage you did and be like, okay, now is this appropriate or not? So the first thing is you need to be an athlete that tracks your training volume because a lot of athletes don't even do that. Most people only track their PRs and they do that via instagram okay is there anything um kind of maybe somewhat under the radar as far as things we can take to help um i guess i'll say mitigate or help suppress pain um i've dealt with back pain for way too damn long um and kind of like what you were saying with like taking supplements to get out of like a certain state, like you just need a little something to kind of kickstart you a little bit. Um, with my back pain, I have good days, I have really bad days. Um, and it would be

nice to like have something to be able to take to just be like, okay, I'm going to start working on this, you know, and then I'm going to take this so that way I can get like maybe more range, more mobility, or just be able to put myself in a position that I would collapse without. So unfortunately, the only supplements you can take for pain are to dull and mask it. But there's no adaptive things you can take for pain. The beauty about pain, though, is that it does have a lot to do with what's going on upstairs. So before I go deeper, I'll give you two brief stories. I had an athlete who recently had some severe lower body injuries, one of the best athletes in his sport.

And his knee pain was alleviated by us doing squats until the knee pain went away. And every time the squat had pain in the knee we would sit down and do a manual technique that acutely took the pain away and it's funny this i'm someone who doesn't count very much so it's like hey how many reps are we doing this set six to eight anything past four and your heart rate goes up it's all i'm looking for how many sets are we doing and once the last one sucks we're done so we legitimately squatted for over an hour and every other set, every set, I had to release the kneecap and do it again. And eventually it was like, oh my God, Andy, my knee doesn't hurt.

And it's funny, this athlete hasn't had knee pain since. But that's only because the athlete could tolerate that. I have an athlete I just finished working with. She's an incredible sprinter, truly, truly special gifted sprinter. She was in pain and we couldn't do anything that made her feel like she was less good of a sprinter because that's how she set up exceptional confidence wise still but that's how she is so we couldn't take that approach to alleviate her pain we actually did 14 straight regen sessions we didn't train for 14 days. We did 14 recovery-based sessions and her confidence was

able to get high enough that she counteracted the spinal cord's pain response. The ultimate point of those stories are pain is nothing more than your spine secreting substance P from a portion of it. And the substance P is going to attack a neuromuscular junction-based receptor. And the substance P is going to attack a neuromuscular junction-based receptor. Pain is anticipatory. It's a safety-based anticipation. So what we're really talking about is you've learned to be in pain relative to the activity your brain is anticipating. And it doesn't have to be an actual activity to anticipate it.

It could just be walking down the street. It could be anything. But you can train your brain to no longer have a pain response to X. And that's how you get it to go away if that makes sense. So, whoa. So like that's not necessarily mask. Like for example, you had this individual squat their way out of pain and you did something whenever they felt it and their pain went away. So that means that pain wasn't structural.

It wasn't like something that was actually going on, but like what was going on with the knee specifically? That's what's making me wonder. So it was that, and obviously now think of squats. When your knee drives forward in a squat, that can happen because your hips went back and there's no other option to hit depth. Or it can happen because you have a hamstring shorten and the shortening of the hamstring pulls the knee forward, right? Two ways to get the same end outcome.

Now we talk about pain being anticipatory. Maybe we had an experience where, wow, if we squat into knee flexion without a shortened hamstring, I have pain. So even if he was doing it technically correct every set, but the pain was being pronounced, it was showing itself, it's that there was anticipatory response to the movement, not the structural area. So we had to create a safety pattern associated with the movement to get him to stop secreting substance P. Taking kratom or a real opiate does the same thing, but it's only that the supplement is inducing the sense of safety. In the sprinter, she had a legitimate structural issue. She has

stress fractures, but we got the pain to go away in 14 days. The stress fractures didn't go away in 14 days. Obviously, it takes more than two weeks to go away, but we eliminated the pain response of anticipating running, and that was why she was getting pain. So even if you have structural damage, you don't have to have pain and you don't need to have structural damage to have pain. I think it's like 70 to 80 percent of bulging discs in your back are asymptomatic. We've all done crazy enough shit. Guarantee you we all have bulging discs here. Yeah.

But the majority of us don't have back pain. That makes me wonder though, like for example, the athlete with stress fractures, does the pain in response to the stress fractures, isn't that going to be something that in the long run helps them not continue to get worse fractures? Like, isn't that important to show a signal and is potentially having that pain go away, could that be damaging? So potentially, I love that thought process, but rather think about it this way. If you have good technique in whatever you're doing and you've developed an injury and pain comes along, won't pain then change your technique to facilitate further injury? So it's one of those things you have to realize that the question you asked comes from the concept that pain has a connotation and is bad.

Pain is not bad. Nothing in the body is bad. Cortisol is not bad. Your amygdala is not bad. Nothing is bad. If you view everything from the question as why is the brain seeing this as advantageous, you will always find the proper answer so i wanted to kind of like not rebuttal but like when you're saying like at the end that anticipating something that's going to hurt it's going to hurt and i i totally agree if i have to i don't know wash my hands i know for a

fact that's going to hurt if i have to flush the toilet i know that's going to hurt but there's been times where like i'm just like here walking around and then all of a sudden literally nothing changes, but my back just completely, it completely just goes out and I'm in pain for like the next like two, three weeks. I didn't anticipate that. I didn't expect anything to be happening. Like I was just doing my normal day to day thing, like walking or whatever. So what happens when, when that, when that happens? Cause I wasn't anticipating anything and it still really fucked me up. So that's what's anticipating. So it was like, holy shit, Andrew hasn't flattened his diaphragm in three weeks.

Better secrete substance P. You thought you were just walking, but what are you doing the whole time you're alive? You're respirating and your respiration was poor enough that it set off that substance P response in response to your diaphragm not being able to shorten and flatten properly. And that caused anatomical differences at the ribs, which secreted pain. That makes sense. Got it. Would a BPC-157, would that help with some of these injuries and stuff you're mentioning? Yeah, but what's beautiful about BPC-157 in a good way, even though it doesn't sound like

it's about to be good, is it doesn't interact with pain. The problem is you don't have to have pain to be injured. All of my injuries have come with zero pain until after the muscle tear happens. So like, for example, everything, obviously you'll just tear shit. There's something that led up to it, but it's more often that the lack of pain associated with certain things done often that can cause injury is scarier for your career long-term. So BPC-157 is going to respond to acute musculotendino damage, which is something that happens all the time. That's why it's awesome. The extra important thing is that when you start

recovering from something, it's actually a perfect time to start pain signaling. How many times has this elbow never hurt? And ever since this elbow hurt the first time, it hurts forever now. It's that the same way when you learn a new skill, this pattern opens up. That hormonal response to the elbow with pain was enough to open up this new pattern, so you never undid it. I always joke that you can only learn when you're young. When you get older, you're just relearning or unlearning. And that's what pain in sport truly is. It's a re-slash-unlearned thing, not a true novel learning scenario. Going along with this pain thing you're talking about, chronic elbow pain is something that a

majority of lifters, not even a is something that a majority of lifters, not even a majority, but a lot of lifters who do powerlifting, bodybuilding, et cetera, over time, they say they feel like, oh, try some pushdowns, any type of push, elbow pain. So is that something that there's a process to undo that feeling if quite literally there's really nothing structurally going on here

other than the fact that you've been feeling that for years? So it's the collarbone and ribs that are the anticipatory hub of pain for shoulders and elbows. So if you have chronic elbow pain, yeah, my triceps fine, my biceps fine, even this like ulnar nerve is fine. You then have to realize that it's the rib position you're in in this area is inhibiting shoulder flexion. And then you get pain because what goes along with shoulder flexion elbow flexion right so we're inhibiting this trap this shoulder this elbow coming up because the ribs are tight enough here that if those do that we might rip something you know actually tear your ribs but that's how like this brain's thought process goes and you know

it works because i release almost everyone's rib or elbow pain by releasing the rib where your nipple is i'm very curious what that's like later on there's really cool manipulations i do of the rib and trunk uh via manual work to alleviate pain specifically because what is surrounding our spinal cord this rib cage and it's like it's actually a cage, right? That's holding all this stuff together. And what's attached to the spinal cord? Organs, ribs and neurons.

And they all live here and they're not that muscular. So anything messed up, I call it the show. And like the show here is going to lead to pain everywhere else for sure. What was RPR? What's the – Yeah, yeah. What's it stand for? Yeah, yeah. I forget. But is it kind of like that, like the – to pain everywhere else for sure what was rpr what's the what's yeah yeah that's what to stand for yeah yeah like yeah but is that is it kind of like that like the uh similar concept like the

trunk is just by like if i had to only massage and intervene manually with one area for the rest of my life it would be from your sternum up to your neck so more up here but even just the ribs in general are probably the only area that you actually need to manually manipulate most of the time with bb bpc 157 do you have to inject that right at the location like this have to be on site so it's localized you can go like an inch north of it because of gravity because then when you stand up it'll be pulled down but it does have to be localized taking it nas nasally, orally, all that stuff, even sub-Q is unfortunately complete crap. Oh, you got to try to inject it into the muscle.

Have to. Have to. I don't think I knew that. Dan, well, we went through a lot with you. I'm sure we can just keep hammering questions, but we have to shift into sexual performance since a lot of people have been asking a lot of questions about that. So if you have another

question, you have a question kind of related to it. It was more down the psychedelics rabbit hole. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Well, before we took our break, right? Cock tease. Literally. You mentioned that before one of your Strongman events where you did a pr

um you took some dmt now what yeah yeah first off okay dmt why the hell did you do that how can that be effective people i've never gone down but i do want to try dmt one day but then also things like maybe psilocybin you know how can people use these things in a performance standpoint? So I think psilocybin is the only one that can truly be used for performance. I won regionals on DMT because I was going through a terrible time in my life. That's when I was doing the GNC and Subway. I had a really bad relationship and it was still bleeding into it. I was about to move to Raleigh but not sure.

My life was honestly just like kind of in shambles so i needed that uh sensation that comes after dmt just to align myself to do it um because honestly i did i wasn't even considering not showing up to the contest um it was that bad at that point in my life i was piss broke and all that stuff so that's not that's more of like a scenario where it was useful and most people don't know what the sensation you're talking about is yeah there's a rush that comes after DMT that's very, very positive. It has to do with what dimethyltryptamine does in the brain in a natural setting. With sensation, your motor cortex, the activation of acetylcholine through the spinal cord mechanisms and all that stuff are upregulated a lot as well as the ability to learn something new acutely. The reason I say psilocybin is even better than the others for sports is because it doesn't inhibit your amygdala.

As much as everyone would like to believe it, you need that amygdala to do sports. That feeling when you're like, yo, I'm the man. I'm rising to this occasion. That's totally your amygdala. It's a good thing though. So with, if we inhibit that, we do potentially inhibit sports. LSD, for example, inhibits the amygdala for sure. So that's why psilocybin is really nice because it gives you these nootropic like learning effects and this humanics based change to your mind that you can couple with something that's, sports are metaphysical.

People would like to believe otherwise, but sports are all metaphysical. We really debunked that they're biological. So when you combine these two worlds for an elite athlete, there's an incredible amount of potential. Like for example, are you talking about something like a 50-milligram microdose? Because like for example, I have these microdoses that I got from Brenda. 50 milligrams of psilocybin, some lion's mane, et cetera. Is that the kind of dosage we're talking about for sports or something bigger? Totally no. You do not want a – I guess the opposite of a microdose is like a macrodose.

You do not and cannot be taking that for sport. And it has nothing to do with the fact that you'll be tripping balls. It's more the fact that now the drug has become the activity we need psilocybin to kind of accentuate what you're doing so there's a difference between being high as balls and lifting and lifting while under the influence of something if that makes sense it's got to be the role player exactly that's the best way to put it like because otherwise then you're just high as balls interacting with weights or bjj you want to be it. Because otherwise, then you're just high as balls interacting with weights or BJJ. You want to be unlocked mentally and then do what you normally do.

If you can't do what you normally do, then it's not a microdose. And are there – because we've had someone that came on the podcast and talked about psilocybin. Are there long-term of changes that it has on the brain and learning by microdosing? That's what they claimed. But do you know more about that? Is there anything to that? So that concept actually occurs in all supplements. There's side effects of chronic supplement usage.

There are supplements of chronic activity participation. And lastly, there are the chronic effects of what you did. And these three worlds are different. So chronic effects of supplementation mean that having nothing to do with what you did. And these three worlds are different. So chronic effects of supplementation mean that having nothing to do with what you did, it's having this chemical compound in you all the time that's bad. So if we talk about ethanol, there are some days where today's not a bad idea for a drink, but there's no scenario where every day is the good idea for a drink, right? And that would be, like I said, it's the supplement being in you chronically that's causing something. Now, like I said, there is the chronic change of the novel activity and

that's what you aim to do. It's like this one time doing BJJ while on psilocybin, I practiced my favorite move or a move I was bad at and that made a chronic change to the memory the neuron was stored with and all that stuff. And then lastly, there's chronic change that has to do with you doing something all the time, an actual activity. They're all different types of learning. And the ones you don't want to identify with are anything that have to do with the over usage of a supplement or activity. You should always be in control of the activity and the supplement you're taking together and know what you want to get out of it for the long term. So the long-term effects of psilocybin use every day as a supplement are actually very similar to Adderall. It's called glutamate

toxicity. Glutamate is our natural excitatory neurotransmitter. And by having too much responsiveness to the world around you, it causes issues, obviously. So the side effects of too much Adderall are actually pretty much the same as too much psilocybin has to do with taking in too much all the time. That's costing way too much money. Okay. Makes you scared as fuck. You're taking in too much like that. You're like, well, it also makes you realize the power of responsibility. So think about it. Without saying it, I just said that you can take a bunch of illicit drugs and get healthier. You could also take no drugs and basically die soon.

Last question on the psilocybin aspect of things. So let's say 50 milligrams. aspect of things. So let's say 50 milligrams. I know it depends on the individual, but if someone's taking this stuff weekly or before something, how often would they want to take it? How do they toe that line between I'm doing this too much before this activity or this is the right amount I can take for it to have its effect long-. So if you think about it logically and slowly with like this philosophical concept we've been using, the question answers itself. Better question, how many times a week can you do the best thing you've ever done in BJJ?

Once, maybe twice, maybe like three, four times a month. That's how often you would use the new peptin psilocybin. Okay. So like if you could genuinely tell me every time you step into the gym, you're making an opportunity for amazing change. You'd be lying. Half the days are just to pass the baton so that we still have enzymes and adaptation happening.

So you only want to take these new peps, these psilocybin, this like super brain protocol on the day that you're actually capable of doing that. If not, then you're a stahedonist. Okay. You were heavy when you were younger, right? Yeah, I was fat. How fat?

I was 220, 411 in my freshman year of college or high school rather. Whoa. And how did you get through that? How did you – is that kind of what sparked you into fitness or – To a degree. I've always just been been a hardworking and passionate bastard. One of my best friends was in wrestling. He's like, hey, if you don't want to

be fat for the rest of your life, you should wrestle. I was like, really? I was like, alright. My first day of wrestling practice, I just never stopped. I got all the way down to 135. I've just been always one of those people. I just buy in easily. What was that movie with The Rock? Yeah.

I forgot what it's called, but him and Kevin Hart, where he just works out and never stopped. How'd you get so big? I just lifted every day for every year and I never stopped. That's kind of what it was. I didn't get into the science of stuff until I got to the

age where I was like, wait, why is this guy so much better than me? We've been practicing together for years. That's when I got into the science because I saw the difference of like if we do the same thing, shouldn't we end up the same? And I was also the subscriber to the thing. It's like we get 1% better every day and you work hard and you'll get to everything. And like it sounds awesome and I would love – I would tell little kids that, right? But any realistic person is like, hey, do you get better every day? Nope. I only get better in chunks. everything and like it sounds awesome and i would love i would tell little kids that right but any realistic person's like hey do you get better every day nope i only get better in chunks that's

how the world works you like nothing nothing nothing here's a little something nothing nothing nothing and that's how real life is um and at that time was that was that really difficult for you or did it just start to kind of happen naturally because you were just so much more movement? Like was it difficult to like – I mean wrestling is really hard. There's a lot of running. Like coaches are pretty up your ass in that sport. So this is the personality thing. I like that stuff.

If it's not a challenge, I'm not interested. I struggled in school really bad because I had this – I was a little bit smarter than the average kid when I got old enough and I don't do super well with being forced to do things a certain way. So it just didn't work out. And if I'm not challenged, it's just not cool to me. Like to this day, like, uh, I kind of hate to admit it, but I don't wash or fold my own clothes. I absolutely refuse. It's so frivolous to me that I won't do it. If my cleaning ladies don't come to do it for me, they will stay on the floor and I will just pick up clean clothes from the floor and walk out perfectly happy. Won't give a shit just because I don't see it as important at all. It's so frivolous. Like I'm going to spend five ATP to do this. And then like my neck will be tight and I

just have put clothes from floor into cabinet. Like why is that useful at all? So there are certain things that I struggle with seeing the importance of. I haven't touched a dish or my clothes. I'm not doing this. Are you kidding me? They'll stay on the floor. Thank you, Andy Mill. All right. Sexual performance.

What are some things that people can do to increase performance in the bedroom? What's funny is I think a lot of times, we joked about it earlier with Tren is that people think that their ability to get a boner five times a day or more than that is directly correlative with sexual health and performance. So most men and the women aspects opposite – I'll describe that in a second. Most men have an expectation of their libido to be far higher than it is. And they think that being manly is like, dude, I saw a chick at the mall today.

I immediately got a bone. That's actually – that's abnormal. It's very wrong in fact. So having an accurate idea of what you think is normal for sexual performance is the first way to get it up because everyone's realized you can take to dalafil and have the hottest girl in the world in front of you or guy like whatever you're into and still not get it up and it could be as a product of how my heart rate spiked and i got nervous real quick so and this is where i'll start to talk about the dichotomies between men and women. For a man to get excited, he has to be increased in blood flow and a little bit excited.

But to finish, you need to relax. Girls are the exact opposite. A girl can only begin to typically get turned on when their heart rate is low, but they can only finish when their heart rate becomes high. So there's this flip-flopped paradox with men and women and sexual performance. What I think also people do that inhibits their sexual performance is try. I think the worst thing you can do is start focusing on something like, oh, I'm going to make this person think some shit about me. They're going to go home and be like, oh, this person really – they did some stuff, right?

They can't go walk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. And one, if you listen to the words you're saying, you realize no one is going to really like this anyway if I actually follow through with it. But more importantly, you're setting this expectation the same way with lifting. Mark would never tell you that you have to squat this certain way he would tell you to squat the way you squat and probably do that every time and then people

just don't apply that to the bedroom if you've been sleeping with someone for a while and randomly like i gotta change everything up guess who's not getting a boner tonight yeah uh there is some anatomical stuff actually associated with male sexual performance. If you have a crazy tight lower back or anterior neck, you have to work twice as hard to get blood flow to your wiener to get it fully erect. And if you didn't, and it's because these changes in anatomy are going to change your ability for your heart rate to flux. And then you're either not going to get hard or not going to finish.

And it's actually an anatomical thing. Wow. So, so, so a lot of guys, a lot of lifters, especially like they want like power lifters, specifically tight backs,

tight lower backs. So I'm guessing for the lifting that I've been stretching lately. So like, yeah, I guess what are some, what are some things they can do to loosen that area? I'm guessing for the lifting that might be. I've been stretching lately. I've been working on it. So like, yeah, I guess what are some things they can do to loosen that area? So some of the rib stuff we'll talk about off air, like the manual manipulations I do are the best way to do it. But look at your sternum or feel your sternum. He's going to get us really excited. Yeah, wait.

If you can get a sternum soft and flat like a gas pedal, then you're flexible enough to have sex, I guess. That's the only thing I would really look at. Your sternum being soft like a gas pedal? So it shouldn't be like soft, soft, but it should be easy for it to go down and up. Okay. As long as you can do that, you're flexible enough. But then you start to hear things in the on-cycle community of like I'm cruising. I can't get my shit hard or whatever it is.

There's nothing wrong with your shit or the drugs. It's either cognitive or anatomical that's inhibiting that. And the only reason you can get it hard when you take a lot more drugs is because you're just taking a lot more drugs. What about a penis pump? Do you know anything about penis pumps? I know a little bit about them. They're unfortunately the type of muscle tissue that your dick is made up of. The penis pump will not break the muscle fibers to make them bigger.

The only way you can, quote unquote, break muscle fibers in your dick to attempt to hypertrophy it are actually having sex. And what, what, what about just utilizing a penis pump just to assist your dick from working the right way? So, oh, you mean like inhibit it or allow it to work better? Yeah. Allow it to work better. Yeah.

So if that was something where it was an unbiased scenario for you to get hard in the first place and then go get lucky, that would be the only very useful way I could see it being. Or especially if you're in the middle of a session and lose your wood, and you're not embarrassed to do that, that would be logical as well. Time out.

Yeah, we had a couple people on the show talk about penis pumps and what was the other things? The phoenix, right? Yeah, the phoenix is like that jackhammer. A sound wave thing that's supposed to, I guess, what, blast plaque out of your dick, right, basically? Have you heard of some of this technology? I haven't, but if you think about it, they're all related to that heart autonomics blood flow thing. Yeah.

Interesting. And what about, like, I guess maybe pharmaceuticals or supplements? Any of them seem to really do much? I know obviously Cialis, Viagra, those are things that work pretty well. But like what about maybe other supplements? So those work well through the mechanism of action. It's called PDE4 inhibition. Phosphodiesterase 4 is an estrogen-ish based enzyme in your dick actually that starts or stops blood flow and allowing it

to expand with these cialis to dalafil drugs they just make that uh enzyme basically zero but you can definitely still not get hard on those so if we had to pick an atypical supplement to help with libido it would be be – I have two for you. I actually think kratom would be one of them. Really? Because this GABA-A, like I said, that altered perception could be all you need to feel relaxed enough in the first place. Because don't forget, like I said, dopamine and all this stuff are anticipatory. So you could be hard as a rock and then turn around and get too excited or not

excited enough and whatever, and lose it just like that. It has nothing to do with the enzymes. So I would say Kratom and ITPP, inositol tris-pyrophosphate, would be two atypical drugs to help you get your dick hard. The ITPP, so hemoglobin has three binding sites. ITPP blocks two of them. So only one oxygen molecule needs to be bound to so hemoglobin has three binding sites. ITPP blocks two of them. So only one oxygen molecule needs to be bound to that hemoglobin. By having extra oxygen in your blood, your vessels get softer. By your vessels getting softer, your heart rate gets lower. And by, you know, now you got a boner.

Where do you get ITPP? I've never heard of that before. It's not illegal. I don't know. I have like my own sources for stuff. Okay. I like private chemists and like people I communicate with. But you just google it you should be able to find it it comes in gel like a toothpaste like gel and injection what happens wait injection yeah the gel's nasty

but i use the gel okay but but when you say injection where are they oh no so that's not local that's not local you put that wherever you want okay yeah yeah that is not local what uh what happens so like what goes on so when i was on testosterone like the like the very first like week or whatever like my libido was through the roof like i was chasing my she was my girlfriend at the time she's my wife now but like back then like yeah i was chasing her around the whole house like dude i like need to have sex like asap and multiple times. But then as like, I stayed on it for a while, it like kind of that, that libido boost, like kind of went away. Like, why does that happen? That's actually just IGF. Um, IGF and these pro it's called proliferation, which means the making of new, these cascades tend to

promote libido because it's like, well, if I'm making a ton of new cells, I'm probably healthy enough to reproduce. And that's why when you diet really hard, it's not just your libido, but your fertility goes down too in men and women. I love seeing how jacked Andy is. He has to use his other elbow to scratch his – There's stuff in the way. It's only like a jacked guy thing. It's like, dude, that's just your clavicle. You can't well

to be fair it was the back of my yeah i know just joking um i'm in the same boat don't worry about it i'm a lot worse um but in that scenario it's that spike in igf that acutely makes you do that but igf itself doesn't make you horny it's just the change so for example if like an igf works very well acutely for libido, like let's say you had some in your fridge and you're like, I want to use this for this reason. You totally could. And that's why libido and sexual performance are weird to talk about because it's an end outcome of non-related things. If you're very healthy, libido goes up and you can reproduce. Acute changes in IGF, not having IGF high all

the time causes that. Kratom and relaxation. People a lot of times in the bodybuilding world find the best enhancer of libido is insulin and a cheat meal because this like huge flooding of nourishment relaxes the heart rate, gives you an acute IGF spike, and relaxes your vessels. So it's inherently like an accidental scenario that makes you very horny. Cheat meals. Yeah. I knew it. Going to Cheesecake Factory gets me so horny.

So basically Mark took from this that Ben and Jerry and cheat meals are essentially the best thing he could do for his brain. this that Ben and Jerry and cheat meals are essentially the best thing he could do for his brain. I do know that when I was doing a bodybuilding that when I was dieting, you know, things went, things went a little South, right? But once I had a cheat meal and once I brought the calories up, like things were good. So that makes a lot of sense. And you see it like instant, right? It's like within like 30 to 60 minutes of the cheat meal being over, it's like, you could be sitting doing nothing. You're like, Ooh oh my willy's up oh man what's the um like i guess because i've seen like commercial or i guess i've heard commercials on podcasts where like um they'll have like wipes or something that desensitize your penis so that

way you can last longer um do those work but also like what can we do to last longer in bed it's just lidocaine for the most part though. So that you're literally like numbing the neurons, which also means it's going to decrease pressure, decrease pleasure, which is probably something that I don't want to get into for. I think the point of having sex is to enjoy it. But I think if you naturally as a male, and we'll get to females in a second,

you want to increase your duration or time to finishing in bed. I love that TTF works for time to fatigue and time to finish. If you want to increase that, try to keep your mind as fucking neutral as possible. And the tough part is don't get too relaxed. The second you get too relaxed, you're about to bust. Don't get too up

because then your dick's going to get softer. It's like once you're in the middle zone, try to be in nothingness and that's it. Unfortunately. Right. That's shit out. Stop trying. Yep.

It works. All right. What were you going to mention about women? I'm curious. Girls are different because they actually need to be excited to finish properly but need to be relaxed in the first place to start getting wet and having all that stuff happen. So you take all the advice you just gave guys and you basically flip it on its back. So to get a girl to finish, to have a more enjoyable time in bed, we're actually looking at cannabis, caffeine, GPC, carnitine, funny enough, a lot of these weird little things

because we need to give them enough hormonal and blood-based substrate to get an earth-shattering finish. So the fun part is you can be unhealthy as a guy and it won't decrease your sexual performance much besides just being like so fat and inflamed that you can't get blood. But you could be a pretty unhealthy guy and still have a totally normal sex life. A girl can literally be unhealthy enough that she can't cum. know get blood but you could be a pretty unhealthy guy and still have a totally normal sex life yeah a girl can literally be unhealthy enough that she can't come that makes so much wow especially when it comes to you with like cognitive and depressive based issues yeah you could literally be depressed

enough that you could put a fucking jackhammer through your clit nothing's happening i've tried that before. And is the tightness similar, you know, like with a woman, like do they maybe have same, you know, rib tight things, tightness in their body? It would occur at the same tightness, but it would occur while they're having sex. So for example, it would be very, very difficult for a girl to come in a position where like head is down, sternum is pointed towards belly and knees are towards chest rather than doggy style. Huh? I'm just picturing that. Yeah. It's like, all right, how do we inhibit a girl's anatomy for fucking? It's like, all right, how do we inhibit a girl's anatomy for fucking? It's like, all right, this is weird.

Oh, man. Well, yeah, backseat of the car might be a little bit smaller, so I don't know. Figure it out. Yeah. Well, yeah, you start to realize, like, shit, I need to be chill, you need to be excited, and we need to switch halfway. Yeah. Don't try, dude.

Like, that's some of the best advice that you can give. Especially as a guy. So the biggest problem with guys is that they become hyper-fixated. And exactly. And that's what makes it – it's like – put it this way. When was the last time you even got a girl to talk to you by – in the first place by being over the top? Girls love that guy who's like, sup? Oh, you're not that hot. It's weird.

You know? But it's true. It's weird. You know? But it's true. It's very true. And it makes sense now when you realize from a sexual perspective that we're actually typically attracted to what we suck at in the bedroom as a personality. So I'm an excitable person. I struggle with getting relaxed enough. I've never had a successful relationship with a chick that was also a Zoom Zoom brain. Makes sense, right?

Makes sense. What about – what's it called? The – is it refractory period? Oh, yeah, the refractory period. How can you like – how can you really shorten that shit? Get back to business sooner. Yeah. So that is actually directly related to the total amount of energy in your body as a male.

For a girl, obviously, they don't have that problem. They can just do whatever they want for the rest of your life. But as a guy, it's the non-drug-based things that will get your refractory period down. So actually taking Tadalafil and Cialis make your refractory period longer sometimes. Not that you can't get harder quicker, but you won't be able to finish again and it's going to decrease pleasure because of that. So the best thing you could do to make your refractory period smaller as a guy would be to like drink an intra in between rounds of sex.

Like what kind of intra? Like fuck, do your thing. All right, I'm going to go get some HBCD and like take like 80 grams of carbs, like pop an IU of slin or take some GABA or take some kratom or ashwagandha. And within 10 minutes, you should be good to go again. What's HBCD? Highly branched cyclic dextrin. We should all thank Febreze for them. So that's not even a joke.

It's true. Dextrose molecules are straight chain alkanes. So imagine like six carbons in a straight line. Febreze and the same thing for, it's called aromatic chemistry for smelly stuff. Dextrose and normal perfume are the same in this scenario. Wow. Straight chain alkanes.

Febreze, those commercials where they put people in like piles of shit and close their eyes. That actually works. So they found this process where they make a straight chain alkane, a cyclic molecule, and it has a polar suction. And in Febreze, it actually sucks in smoke odor molecules, polar, like through polarity, but it only lasts a couple minutes. When we make it a carbohydrate,

the same thing happens with blood actually. So when you take HBCD, you need less insulin and, you know, friends, I'll call, like enzymes and all this stuff per gram for it to get into your body than a normal gram of glucose. Wow. I love it. It's like you're running a marathon and people are handing you drinks. When you're having sex, you're like down on these like endurance drinks and shit like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you could take like carbs and electrolytes and like I said, a little bit of insulin or GH, something to pair a little bit of IGF with it. And you should be good to go for another big nut in 30 minutes. They're like, damn, where'd you go? You have some of your own supplements. What do you have and what makes them different? So right now I'm sticking with one.

I have a couple of friends who were going to come on as a group and make a new company. The first one that I'm keeping is my favorite. It's called Max Uptake. And essentially it's a vehicle. And in my opinion, there's no supplement like it just because there's no goal that another supplement is targeted like this one. So the original thought process was – and this is one of those things I think is well-known. I don't know if it actually is. It takes about 25 grams of fat for an oral steroid to be fully absorbed biologically. That's pretty darn inconvenient in a sports production setting or a sports performance setting, right?

When you're trying to produce something new. You're thinking like put my Anivar in a ribeye or something like that. Yeah. But that makes it tough to pair, right? Right, right. So I was like, how else can I do this? So oral steroids and most recreational drugs are taken by the liver by CYP450, cytochrome protein family super 450.

450 is how they label the specific protein and the family of enzymes is called CYP. They're triggered by fat. They're also triggered by glycerol monoserate. So taking glycerol monoserate and an oral steroid will enhance its uptake and availability. But that doesn't mean it's going to be utilized with as little waste as possible. I started nicking away at stuff and had my first formula. But then I was like, I can't release a supplement that's just for taking drugs. So I added some cinnamon and some chromium and now I just call it a GDA. A GDA? Glucose disposal agent is the term. But basically it just makes carbs work better.

But mine is just expanded to more than just carbs. Mine works with creatine, caffeine, oral drugs, recreational drugs, anything you put in your mouth. It enhances the uptake of without having to eat anything extra with it. Okay. So let me ask this. If you're not someone who's taking oral steroids or steroids in general, what is an example of, in your daily life,

how this is going to be something that you could take and something that's going to be beneficial for you? You mentioned coffee. So caffeine and creatine, you would just take it with it. It's that simple. But I've also done some health trials with it, and it seems to test about as good or better than pharmaceutical metformin on your h1c hemoglobin a1c on your blood lipids and all that stuff on your blood sugar levels basically yep chronic and acute yeah and how much of this can you take like

what's the serving size and how much should you be taking daily if you do take it is there an upper limit or so the upper limit is just on the chromium involved, which comes out to nine pills, which is a lot. The serving size that I created for about a 50 milligram oral steroid pill is three of these pills. So it seems like it would be awesome for bulking then. It's awesome for everything. So, for example, think about it this way. Let's say you take creatine in a calorie deprived state. We obviously all know that glucose enhances the function of creatine for multiple reasons, but if you can't

have as much with it, taking this with it still allows your creatine to be maximally functional. Okay, cool. So it's not on the market right now. I just recently pulled it off so that me and my friends can make this change, but I can get some out to you guys, of course. But it's really, really cool. It works with like a couple of different things and you could even use it for just regular food. So for cheat meals, a lot of people take that who are trying to stay lean before the cheat meal. And people also use it to increase appetite. I know like people like David Sinclair, he's out there talking about like longevity and a bunch of other people that are kind of like biohackers and things of that nature.

Is there anything that you see or is there anything that you utilize that you think most people should be aware of in terms of just general health, like heart health or just like something in particular that you've seen research on or that you've been experimenting with where you're like, you know what? I wish more people just knew about this. It's funny. I have all the stuff I brought up today, it's meditation. The benefits you can get.

I like because I heard you talk about meditation on another show, and the type of meditation you were talking about was kind of unconventional. I think you just said you hop on a treadmill in the morning and you just are facing towards the sunlight because you're in New York City. So it's probably cold to get outside and stuff like that. But I find that to be really interesting because I think most people, they won't meditate because they think of meditation only looking this one way. And I think they're making a big mistake. Totally.

Yeah, I think – and thanks for saying that because it's one of those things I've just bypassed now because I've been doing it for so long. But people think meditation is like those monks in orange robes like in the Buddhist tribes just sit there for 14 hours and starve. That is a form of meditation, but it's not the only form of meditation. Meditation is an umbrella term and there's many forms of it within that. The way I see it is, is I'm using meditation to alter oxygen and carbon dioxide values and also alter the noise and tabs in my brain. When you view it that way, you start to realize the only thing that matters is how I breathe, not necessarily as much as what I'm doing. So the breathing technique I recommend to people is exhale through gently perched lips like you're blowing through a straw. Exhale all the air, but stop before your abs flex. We're only letting out passive air. You're going to pause for three to

four seconds without feeling a sense of emergency come from lack of oxygen, and then slowly inhale through your nose, feeling your chest fill in 3D. If you do that for roughly 12 to 25 minutes consecutively, it has to be longer than eight minutes. If you do that for 12 to 25 minutes consecutively while doing anything as simple as like the walk we just went on, not only will you drastically change how much fat you used for energy during that walk, it'll change a lot of the cognitive stuff too. You said on the inhale, how like, so you exhale, making sure that you don't exhale so much that your abs flex, but on the inhale, what's the inhale like once again?

It's that slow inhale through the nose where you feel your chest fill in 3D. The slower the inhale, the better. And it's funny, I didn't want to bring it back to this, but when people do cardio, right? I feel like slowly the times are changing, but it used to be burn as many calories on the treadmill as possible, stay on there for as long as possible. What's funny is most of the time when people stop doing that or slightly change it up or just decrease it, the results increase and they don't know why. It's because there's a concept in exercise science called your R-value. It measures what you're using for energy while you do X. And it's because there's a concept in exercise science called your R value. And it measures what you're using for energy while you do X. The lower, the closer it is to pure fat usage.

And people just don't realize that our body can pick and choose what we use for energy to a degree. And they do something thinking they're burning fat when they're doing nothing but burning liver glycogen and glucose, which means the second you eat any amount of food, the fat loss benefits you just capitalized on are now gone. Quick question too back on the medication – the meditation thing you mentioned. Why not exhale through the nose? What's the difference between exhaling through pursed lips and exhaling through the nose before your abs flex? I'm trying to bias the diaphragm and sternum like we talked about with Andrew. So it's more of like how many things can I couple under one rather than just doing the meditative stuff. There's nothing wrong with nasal exhales, but it's just like one more thing I could say you – like bird that gets knocked out with one stone by doing it that way.

So if you just put your hands like right here and you exhale through your mouth, the ribs go down towards each other. But if you do it with your nose, the same thing doesn't happen. Oh, okay. Okay.

So it's just like one extra thing we now don't need to think about. Very cool. Okay. Take us on out of here, Andrew. All right. Thank you everybody for checking out today's episode. Drop us a shit ton of comments

on everything we learned today because there was a lot tons and make sure you guys like and subscribe if you guys are not subscribed already uh please follow the podcast at mark but this happened two days in a row where i'm like have to cough and it just messes everything up there it is please make sure you follow the podcast at mark bells power project on instagram at mb power project on tiktok and twitter my instagram and twitter is at i am andrew z and sema where you at and sema ending on instagram and youtube and sema yin yang on tiktok and twitter andy uh i am ghost super brain on instagram and that is it you cannot find me anywhere else it's on purpose i have a really really bad website called the performance vibe.com and it only has a contact

form and a link to purchase my Go Superbrain membership. I keep stuff confidential on purpose because you guys know what I do for work outside of this. But Go Superbrain and that's the only way. Is there any like books or anything you would like to recommend before we kind of hop off of here because you're – or other people you follow. I know you're friends with like Broderick Chavez and some other people. Maybe you can plug a couple of those folks so people can find out more amazing information like what we learned from you today. Totally. I'll start out with some books. I think The Confidence Gap by Russ Harris is an exceptional book for every human being to read. He gives you time in the book where he prescribes you to stop and listen to what you just read and see how you feel about it.

Awesome, awesome book. It fits for the science nerds out there. If I had to pick like a Bible where it's like read this one book and you'll learn a lot of Andy stuff, it's Malostasis, Homeostasis, and the Cost of Physiological Adaptation by Jay Shulkin. That is spelt S-C-H-U-L-K-I-N. And if I had to pick like some short, not really easy, but like a short trippy read to kind of get your mind thinking about things

the way I think about them, it would be The Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung. And then friends who I recommend everyone checks out. I think everyone should check out Alex Kiekel when it comes to sports performance, bodybuilding, and hypertrophy. I just bought that last name. K-I-K-E-L. Alex is excellent when it comes to dealing with pharmaceuticals, creating systems, and everything that has to do with what do I do to make X happen to me.

Broderick Chavez and Team Evil GSP are the best place to start learning about PEDs and to start exposing yourself to that world in general. And then that's all that comes to mind at the moment, actually, at least for now. Great. I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never weakness.

Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.