For me, it was the dopamine effect and the effect on the dopamine receptors. For me, that made the big difference. If you meditate consistently daily for 8 to 12 weeks, which 90% of people will not do because it's uncomfortably boring, the prefrontal cortex will physically get bigger and the amygdala will physically get smaller. So, we're actually able to change the architecture of the brain.

From this [Music] [Applause] training, just time, sit down, keep it real, and cut the [ __ ]. Welcome to Table Talk. All right guys, we're back with another episode of Table Talk. Today, our guest is Dave Lee. I have here, author, speaker, health coach, focusing on neuroendocrinology. Right, basically just TRT. And Tom again to be able to help with the assist because when we start talking about topics like this, I can kind of go to where the grass is. We can't get down into the weeds on a lot of these things. Where, where I want to jump off would be, how did you end up doing this in this field?

Yeah, that's a good question. So, I actually stopped studying science in about year nine in high school. So, we were able to choose what subjects that we picked after year 10. I went to a religious school, and I remember the final science exam in year nine, I just answered all the questions because God made it that way. And I was like, you can't fail me because we just came straight from chapel. And, uh, the, the teacher said, I'll give you a 51, but don't continue with science. And I said, that's a, that's a good trade. So, I had no interest in science. Um, it was something that I didn't ever think I would be in this field. Um, I did my undergrad in digital marketing. I was a touring musician for a while, and I had a brain injury when I was about 25. And it left me with, uh, debilitating vertigo. It was quite a severe case of vestibular neuritis. It wasn't diagnosed for well over a year. And, uh, for those who aren't aware, basically, it felt like we'd spun on these office chairs 50 times for years straight. And, uh, long story short, um, you know, condensing three years of suffering into a three-minute story. I went back to university to learn how to heal the brain. Um, I was interested in how to heal a nerve because every doctor told me, you're never going to walk properly again, your life's essentially over. And, uh, that's a difficult pill to swallow. So, I went back to university. I was always quite contrarian and wanted to prove people wrong and learned how to heal the nerve, uh, in, in the, in ear. And I was very interested in mental health. I was very interested in why so many people were living a life that from the outside looked objectively pretty good, but so many people just didn't really want to get up in the morning. And I wanted to know why people had this kind of low-grade depression going on. So, I started to do a postgraduate diploma in science, transitioning into a master's in, uh, neuro-psychiatry. And I very quickly dropped out because I wasn't interested in learning how to drug people with psychiatric drugs. Turns out that's what most of the course was. And through that study, both in terms of learning how to heal the nerve, but also learning the root cause of how the brain works, led me to testosterone. Um, I was always interested in lifting weights to just like stay in shape and, you know, not look terrible, but I was never really coming from like a bodybuilding background. So, I was purely coming into testosterone from a mental health and, and I guess what people would refer to as like a longevity kind of background. And that process, and that journey of rehabilitating the brain and learning to heal it, you know, in addition to using things like peptides and so forth, that struggle and that process was so meaningful for me that all I really cared about doing after that was helping other people go through a similar experience to what I'd gone through, going through the, you know, the dark struggle of their life and getting their life back together. And that got me into health coaching. You know, when I started doing this, health coaching wasn't a thing. I just felt like I kind of made it up. I was like, I'm going to be the guy in between you and your team of doctors to kind of help you understand what's going on and to kind of coach you and help you understand how to move forward and make sense of things, I guess. And over the years, had evolved into writing a few books, you know, doing a few podcasts, you know, opening now a couple of clinics, uh, with TRT, and ultimately helping guys not just get their testosterone replacement therapy sorted, but also all the other hormones around testosterone, uh, very, very important for the brain. But also just helping guys get from A to B. And I think so many guys feel like once they start taking testosterone, they're just going to feel fantastic and everything's going to be solved. And a lot of the time, that's not the case.

Well, I think something that you touched on, and I think it can be the first topic that we jump in on, is we've had a lot of guests speak about Peds, and we're all over the spectrum with this. Where, say, with Ally, we're talking more just the testosterone replacement. Some of the other guys were talking more performance enhancement, so forth. And something that you said there gets lost in a lot of these conversations, that some people, like yourself and Tom included, you know, this was a pathway to get out of a really bad place. You know, where other people use SSRIs and talk therapy, not discounting that in any way whatsoever, but that one aspect right there is very, it's not discussed. So, let's kind of just jump off there because you kind of stated your background and history with that. There, can you reiterate yours real quick, just so?

Yeah, sure. So, um, I, I had eating disorders and kind of suicidal depression from like, kind of 14 onwards. Um, I got put on, once I finally saw a doctor, I got put on probably every SSRI that was available at the time. Um, the last one I went on gave me what's called a serotonin storm, which is basically what would happen if you kind of took the whole box, say, and tried to OD on it. So, I was found at like 2 AM, sat in the freezer because I thought I was like melting. I was so hot, hallucinations, all that type of thing. So, after that, as you can imagine, it's kind of like, I feel like I'm done with these. Um, but my problem was that all of my depression, personally, was the fact that I had way too much serotonin. And depression kind of gets put into the same umbrella as anxiety, and a lot of the same drugs are used. As far as I'm aware, at least anyway, when the root cause can be so different. So, I was taking an SSRI to increase my serotonin on top of a level that was already extraordinarily high, and it was just obviously making things spiral and get worse and worse. So, I decided that at this point, I had already had, um, two blood panels done when I was in really bad shape and I was in hospital. Um, I had checks for testicular cancer and things like that to see if there was anything that was causing hormonal abnormalities there, which it wasn't. But my testosterone was always coming out on the absolute bottom end of normal. Like, you know, if it's 400 to 1100, it'd be like 402, 383, but not low enough for them to do anything. And I was told that in the UK, at least, until you're 30 plus, no doctor is going to touch you with testosterone at all under any circumstances. So, at that point, I'd just begrudgingly survived suicide attempt number six. So, I decided, well, [ __ ] it, I knew someone who sold it. So, I was like, I'm going to do it myself. 'Cause at this point, what do I really have to lose? Um, so I started taking what, you know, I did the research and looked at what like a TRT dose would be. Um, and probably within two weeks, I felt about 20, 30% better. You know, it's not, it wasn't a magic bullet by any stretch of the imagination. But now, all of a sudden, it's like, oh, I can actually get through the day without feeling it takes every ounce of willpower in my body just to do that.

And for me, it was the dopamine effect and the effect on the dopamine receptors. For me, that made the big difference. So, I basically have loads of serotonin and basically no dopamine. And it sensitizing those receptors, for one of a more complicated or scientifically accurate term, was the difference for me. And that, you know, I, I would never want to not have that now because I know what it feels like if I come off that. So, and I'm sure there are so many people in that boat that are probably being just handed SSRIs like as a blanket statement, like if you feel bad, this must be it. When there's a whole, there's a whole other host of neurotransmitters that could be going on that those medications don't act on that could be the root cause of it. You know, so for me, that, that literally saved my life. And, you know, they, people will be like, oh, but now you're on it for life. And it's like, well, I wouldn't have a life probably if I wasn't on it. So, what is the net negative here? I don't see one. So, that was, and, you know, knowing what that did for me, and everything else has ever come close to even scratching the surface compared to the effect testosterone has. And as you say, I just don't think that gets mentioned in terms of the mental health benefits testosterone can have. And the fact that I was still coming out normal by the skin of my teeth as like an 18 or 19-year-old, you know, they don't know where that I should be to feel good, you know, in that scenario. Like, sure, okay, you're coming out at 400, and that technically puts you in normal range. But if the symptoms are all there, that this is too low for your body, then does it really matter at that point? You know, so I think in that scenario, there's a lot of people out there who are doing a disservice, maybe where there's a chicken and egg scenario. Where does the depression, the anxiety, or whatever cause the low testosterone? But there's going to be another population where the low testosterone causes the depression and anxiety. And if you're treating the anxiety, using the root cause, then you're never going to get anywhere.

Well, that's what I was going to ask, because I wonder if you'll have environmental factors and then the chemical factors. You know, and I, I don't know. So, I'm just going to throw this out because I really don't know how many Amish people really are suffering from say, anxiety or depression, or if it's a tribe somewhere else in the world, you know, how many of them really suffer from that? I don't know the answer to that, so I can't really definitively say. But I'm going to speculate and just say, probably not a lot. Right? So, if it is environmental, will the environmental create the chemical problems? Or do you get where I'm going there? Or are the chemical problems create the chicken and egg, right? Type of thing. But more importantly, will the environmental problems like when create those deficiencies in the hormones?

Yeah, this is a, this is a fascinating subject, and I'm glad we jump straight into this because this is my main area of interest. So, exactly, exactly what you said before, the serotonin. So, there's something called the monoamine hypothesis of depression, which is that depression is caused by low levels of one neurotransmitter in particular, serotonin. This was like, very thoroughly debunked a very long time ago. It's just that there was, there has been so much research and so much, uh, R&D from pharmaceutical companies, uh, that there is just so much money and so much narrative invested in this hypothesis that it will continue to be perpetuated. And just like all, just like most things, there is a time and a place for an SSRI. Um, it's just that I would argue that 90 to 95% of the time, they are prescribed it's incorrectly prescribed. And this idea that more serotonin is helpful for depression is not only incorrect, but I would argue, just like what you said before, it's actually counterproductive for a lot of guys. And this, if we are going to be looking at one neurotransmitter that's really important for men's mental health, is dopamine. Um, we can't really just isolate and go, oh, it's just this one neurotransmitter that fixes things. But if we were going to apply a reductionist lens to it, it would be that one. And the reason for that, and this is what I found in my life, and also, you know, in theory and in working with other guys, the real way that we can treat, and I would argue cure, you know, depression, anxiety, listlessness, um, and anhedonia, which is when people don't feel pleasure from things, is for men, I don't know a thing about women in any regard, but I know about men. And what I know about men is what helps men is momentum and feeling like we're moving forward and we're on a mission and we're accomplishing something. And maybe we're aiming towards something that's just outside of our comfort zone. And ideally, where we want to be at is we want to be kind of like halfway down that path already, like being on the path to something that we're working towards. I think that's very therapeutic for the majority of men. And when testosterone is low, and we lack that biological internal resilience to stress, not only is that very difficult to do, but it's also very unappealing. You know, we, one thing that gets thrown around a lot is that testosterone makes effort feel good. And the question is, like, how? How does it do that? It acts as an internal buffer towards cortisol and adrenaline. So, if you're doing something that's, let's say, outside of your comfort zone, it's challenging, it's meant to drive stress, it's meant to be difficult, it's meant to be something that makes you feel uncomfortable. But there's also meant to be this other path where this is this dopaminergic transmission which is going, yeah, this is hard, but the reward feels good, and I want to work towards this. I'm okay taking a risk. Yes, it's challenging, but it's something that I want to achieve because it's meaningful. If you lack that, things just feel really difficult, and things feel scary. And people go towards the path of least resistance. They go towards the, um, the avoidant kind of behaviors. And then what happens over time is if you are that guy at 18, by the time you get to 30, if this is what you've done over that developmental formative period of your life, where, you know, between 18 and 30, you're meant to be forming your identity as a man, you're meant to be going out and, you know, taking on risks and leaving a mark in the world. And, you know, this is where guys are typically more risk-taking and reckless and, you know, wanting to just have a crack at things. I think if you don't do that, and you get to 30 and you're the guy who didn't do that and spent the last 12 years watching porn and playing video games and not having much to show for yourself, I think not only does the life that you end up building become a depressive and anxious life to live, but you also feel a degree of this guilt and shame for it. And what a lot of us are dealing with, particularly my generation, so I'm 32, I was born in, I started TRT when I was 25, is I have the saying that we were brought up in swimming in this proverbial pool of estrogen. And when I say estrogen, I don't mean internal, you know, aromatized estrogen, I mean xenoestrogens, phytoestrogens, you know, environmental, uh, endocrine disruptors. And when my generation is, you know, brought up on a diet that is very, very low in micronutrients, we're wrapped in plastic, we're staying inside all the time, we're sedentary, we're not going through these rites of passage or these challenges that we're meant to have growing up as men, it makes a lot of sense to me why so many guys are coming into their early 20s feeling low, feeling scared, having this learned fear, being avoidant of the challenges that they once, or their, their, you know, fathers or grandfathers would have taken a swing at. They're going, oh no, no, I don't want to do that, that sounds scary. I just want to, you know, do the lazy, easy thing. I think a lot of guys are then having this lived experience of going, hey, I'm embodying this human machine. I am consciously experiencing this body that is being, they know that there's something wrong. And they're going to the doctor being like, I don't feel right. I don't feel the way I know I'm supposed to feel. I feel like there's something off because they're experiencing this, we're embodying this consciousness that's experiencing the external world and the internal world. And when that feels scary, and this feels anxious, and something wrong inside, and we go to the doctor, and the doctor goes, ah, yeah, you've got a serotonin deficiency. Here's your antidepressant. All your blood work looks good. You're within range. You know, your testosterone levels within the healthy range of an 80 or 90-year-old man with prostate cancer. You know, this is totally healthy. There's nothing to worry about. Fortunately, over the last four or five years, there's been such a push with this TRT narrative. There are so many more guys looking into testosterone. Like when I did it, it felt like a big shot in the dark. But now there are so many younger men who are learning this, they're investigating this, they're seeking out practitioners who know how to work with this. And I think that's really exciting because they're now able to fight back against this environmental chicken and egg cycle, which I think it's exactly that. It's like, is it the chicken or the egg? It's like, it's this perpetuating vicious cycle that's continuing. And I think that TRT, as well as choosing positive diet, lifestyle interventions, and looking at things holistically, and looking at things as a synergistic approach of what do I need to take, what do I need to do, what do I need to not do, I think they're also equally important. I think this is where guys can actually start to reclaim the masculine birthright and the equality of life that they should have had all along.

From a societal level, kind of looking at it more broad, because when you're speaking about, you know, thriving for things, driving for things, purpose, however you want to say that, that can also be defined as ideology, right? To where if there's a, a mental health, how do I want to politically correct this, if there's a mental health crisis or a mental health culture, then people can fall into that and make that their ideology. For instance, a lot of people say, you know, if you don't worship a God, then some other ideology is going to take its place. Well, that could, could that take its place to where, you know, I'm basically suffering from mental health, you know, depression, anxiety, or whatever it is, and so are all these other people, and I'm going to follow all these other people because we're kind of all in the same camp of, I don't want to say victimhood, 'cause I don't want to tie those two together, 'cause that would be false, but how do you get that, how do you get them to break from that? Right? Because everybody who I've spoken to is going to say they suffer from some mental health condition. We, we all do, right? But some are going to be able to lean into that more, you know, for their coping or lack of being able to do things, X, Y, and Z, that kind of pull into that, and then that becomes a tribe, or could become a tribe. I don't want to speak in absolutes, but would you agree that that can, that is somewhat of a tribe with a large demographic?

Definitely, without a doubt. All right. So, now you're trying to break people out of a tribe, right? Which is like trying to take the serious competitive powerlifter who's in the prime and be able to say, no, we don't want you to do that anymore. We want you to go do this over here. Then they're going to fight against that. You know, it's almost like a cult-like mentality at the extreme sides of that. So, how do we go about addressing that? Or how do you go about addressing that?

Yeah, I guess where I'm going with this, because if you have a patient, if you have somebody that you're working with, right, and they're part of that ideology, you're not only just trying to treat that person, but you're trying to treat the ideology, the people they surround themselves with are also so part of that culture, you know, so you become the people that you surround yourself with. So, you're trying to pull them kind of out of that culture as well. But what I don't know is how is that, is that culture pulling them back in?

I think there's a couple of things there. I think firstly, just like you absolutely correctly identified, it's much more difficult to unlearn things than it is to learn things. And I think the most important part of this whole, I guess, educational role that I try to put out there online, I try to make a lot of content for people who are looking for it, is that people need to first identify and realize that their system of beliefs, their ideologies, the tribe that they're surrounding themselves in, it's not working for them. Otherwise, they wouldn't be seeking an alternative. Because if everything was working out great, going, yep, I identify with my mental illness, I'm a victim, I'm suffering, everything's terrible. Well, if that's working out great for you, then good for you. But I don't think it is. And I think that's what people are coming to realize is that, you know, the pendulum always swings just too far in the wrong direction. It went from no one can talk about mental health to, and no one has a mental health problem, to now everyone has a mental health problem. And I think the point that it swung past is that it's great that people are now actually able to put the hand up and go, hey, I'm not doing well. But that should be the point where you go, okay, I need to find a fix and solution, not to be like, I now have an excuse to be a complete and utter failure at all the things that I should have tried out that I just completely avoided because it was all too difficult for me. And I think that that whole process, and the thing that I talk to my clients about a lot, and all the content I put out, is recognizing and going, this is hard. Like, this is supposed to be uncomfortable. This is supposed to be confronting. This is supposed to be something that is a challenge. And for a lot of guys, it is their rite of passage. You know, if you're in your 20s and your 30s and you're kind of waking up to realizing and going, identifying with these limitations that I have, identified and put on myself, is not working for me. And then realizing that you have to go out and be your own advocate and find a solution and advocate for yourself. And then actually, sometimes, you know, guys have to basically take their treatment into their own hands, like what you did with yours. And recognizing and going, hey, this system isn't what I thought it was going to be. And now I actually have to apply a problem-solving lens to this. This takes a lot of bravery. This takes a lot of courage. This takes a lot of resilience. This takes a lot of perseverance. And these are often traits which these guys not only don't have, but they've conditioned to go, oh, these are actually bad things. You don't want to be, you don't want to be someone who's, you know, challenging the status quo or pushing against the grain. You, you know, you're just better off, you know, having your, your mental health disorder and just, you know, being healthy enough to pay your taxes, but not healthy enough to actually thrive and enjoy your quality of life.

Well, I think, I think as well, I mean, hopefully this statement will trigger you to go down a rabbit hole in a second, but, you know, you are not your mind, which I think is something I've heard you say at some point. And what I mean by that is, we are kind of at the, you know, we kind of are controlled by our neurotransmitters at the end of the day, in our thought process and our interpretation of the world. And you mentioned the two key players being dopamine and cortisol and adrenaline that are linked together. You know, if there is this dysfunctional testosterone relationship there where you're not getting the dopamine hit, or you're not receiving dopamine, or you're not sensitive to it, therefore, delayed gratification doesn't become a thing because why would you strive for something that you have to wait for if you don't get the dopamine hit that is supposed to come with some kind of hard work, effort, etcetera? And then on the other side, as you mentioned, you've got the buffer from cortisol and adrenaline, where think you are more susceptible to stress. So, now you've got someone who finds working hard more stressful than they should, and an individual who then also gets a diminished or no reward for the hard work that they do. So, where do you go from there? Well, then you end up, uh, porn, video games, social media, anything that gives you this some kind of artificial dopamine stimulus without the input. And if they, enough, and you know, you fall into that pattern because that's what ticks the boxes for the neurotransmitters that you're seeking for, or whatever. And if everyone around you is doing that, well, then we're all social animals at the end of the day, you know, if you're in high school and your friendship group is all doing those things, then you're going to do them, aren't you? You don't know what 15, 16, 17, all the drivers that are going on behind that. You don't start to wonder about the world and go, is this really what a human being should be getting stimulus from or whatever? So, then of course, you're going to end up getting pulled towards that, even if it's subconsciously. And even if you didn't have that issue in the first place, you can get pulled into that. And then you end up stimulating that dopamine system constantly, all the time, with no input. And then you fall into the same trap, even if you didn't have the root cause. And what motivation is there to get out of that if you're still getting that quick dopamine hit all the time, and you think you're okay? So, it, you know, you can get pulled into that from those that are around you or just societal norms. But we all need to realize that again, hopefully this will trigger you a little bit, that how you perceive what creates you, H, what creates happiness for you, or what you perceive is what's good for you, is not always accurate. Like, your perception is not absolute truth.

Before he goes down the rabbit hole, the interesting thing to me is, if you play video games all day long, right, and that's kind of what you do, that still takes discipline, you know, to be able to sit there. And they are kind of anti-establishment because there's a lot of people that are going to say, oh, you lazy ass, all you do is sit around and play video games. So, in a way, I would say that all the tools that they need, they actually already have. They just don't know how to apply them outside of whatever those realms are. You get what I'm saying? So, because they are being stereotyped, you know, so their, their fears are being stereotyped because they're not going to go do something different than what they're doing. It's kind of a moot point because they're being stereotyped for what they do do, right? It's just what they do do may not be the best for their overall health. But the discipline is there because if they know how to get to, I don't play video games, right? If they get to like this billion level and they're just like waxing people left and right, that's not easy to do, you know? Hell, it's not easy to sit in front of a screen for all that period of time to be able to do that as well. So, there is underlying all that, there's a work ethic, there's discipline, there's all these other things. It's just kind of misplaced. And they're content with what it is, you know, the same way anybody else with any other hobby or habit would be content with what that is. The difference, I think, is the overall impact on their health and the future, right? To where you mentioned earlier, there's just, there's kind of different phases of our life. When you're mid-teen to like 25, you're going to be more apt to taking risks. You're going to do stupid [ __ ]. You know, the, I would even kind of argue that the delayed gratification probably doesn't matter as much then because how are you going to explain that to somebody? It's like a teenager that wants to max out all the time. You know, hey, can they do it and get away with it? Yeah, probably. You know, are they going to really understand this is going to impact you 10 years from now? Probably not. Not during that phase. Um, a good example would be saving money during that time period. Yes, there's compound interest and all the other stuff, but at the same time, they, as they get older, their income should grow, so they don't want to save everything because they're doing it at the expense of other experiences they could have, you know, going on a trip or whatever it's going to be. And at the end of the, at the end of our times, it's the experiences that we're going to remember. Not the, I'm not telling people to go blow [ __ ] money. I'm not a financial advisor in any way whatsoever. But sometimes some of those actions come in contrast to what it really should be. You know, then as they get older, you know, then it's going to become a little bit different to be able to put into there. So, the point I'm trying to make is, I think a lot of the traits that they're being told they don't have, they do. You know, and I've used the example of with the delayed gratification and long-term goals. Most got through high school, right? I mean, to be able to do that was 12 years. You know, if they went to university or they went to college, that was four years. They know how to implement and take action on a long-term plan. But once it's not being governed, you know, by either a university, a guidance counselor, parents, or whatever, military, if they're in there, then they're out on their own. That's where things begin to fall apart. And that's where, you know, health coaches and coaches and like can kind of come in there because they become a little bit more of a governor to be able to help with how to kind of lay that whole thing out. So, with that being said, now you can reiterate your question, so you can get on the rabbit hole.

Yeah, I think there's there's a lot to unpack there and, um, I think it's also always important that we, you know, recognize our n equals one and our own experience and perspective on these things. The, the, the interesting thing about when we're looking at neurotransmission and how the brain works and how we're experiencing, you know, consciousness and how we're just feeling day-to-day is that a lot of what we're feeling and receiving as inputs are neurotransmitters. And, and what I learned, you know, when I went back to university and then pursued hormones, is going, well, what governs the neurotransmission? Not just like the release of dopamine, but how the enzymes work, how the receptor sensitivity works, how reuptake works, how this whole system is governed. And it's its hormones, it's the endocrine system. And, and I think that we are all creatures of habit. We are all reward-based creatures. And we are also all, uh, evolutionarily conditioned to seek the path of least resistance, just as a default. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And I think a lot of this stuff as well is touching on this bigger concept of we're all just kind of learning how to be alive. Like, we didn't get an instruction manual on how to do this when we were when we were born. And we're all kind of fumbling through life, kind of working out what to do and how to do it. And I think when you're kind of coming up as, you know, a 15, 25-year-old, that's when it can feel like you're meant to know a whole bunch more about life, and you don't know [ __ ] because you're doing everything for the first time. So, I think that this whole period is supposed to be challenging, and it's supposed to be scary, and it's supposed to be daunting. I think it's interesting with video games that when we look at, you know, the most, um, potentially detrimental things that can be done behind a screen for habituation, it's violent video games and pornography. And I think that it's interesting that those are the two most popular things because they are simulating violence and they're simulating sex. And these are two things that are high risk, high reward. You know, it's it's much, uh, it's not going to give you the same, um, pleasure and the same experience, you know, watching porn versus being with a real woman. But there's a 0% chance you'll be rejected by the porn. There's no vulnerability, there's no risk-taking, there's no bravery and courage that, you know, is involved in typing in a few letters into your browser and hitting enter. But, you know, approaching and interacting with a woman, especially in 2024, you know, you'll probably be hit with a rape charge if you tell a woman that looks pretty. Um, this can be a completely different kettle of fish for guys. And I think that the same with video games as well. I don't think video, I don't think everyone has a toxic relationship with video games who plays video games. I, I like to play a strategy game called Age of Empires, uh, once or twice a week to keep myself sharp. Um, but I, I don't think I could be addicted to it because I, after a game or two, I'm like, I don't want to do that again. I get bored. And I think that, you know, there are some people who are playing, you know, competitive Call of Duty at the highest level, and they're esports. And I'm like, that's remarkable reflexes, remarkable brain training, you know, phenomenal dedication. Arguably not the phys most physically healthy thing, but powerlifting and bodybuilding is not that physically healthy either. So, you know, there can be arguments made for that. But I think a lot of guys who are playing these video games, and again, I am drawing on my own experience here, but I have spoken to a lot of guys who felt the same. You know, when I was growing up as a teenager and adolescent, I played a lot of video games. But looking back on it, it wasn't because I really enjoyed the games and was passionate about it. It was just an easier way and a less risky way to get the thrills than going outside and engaging in things like sports and engaging in things like, um, other competitive activities in the real world. Because in the video game, if you die, you just turn the console off and you go and you know, eat your chicken nuggets and you're all good to go. But, you know, in the real world, you know, if you go skateboarding or surfing or, you know, things like this, you know, there can be real physical consequences to screwing up. And I think that a lot of these younger guys are, they're just habituated to go, oh, this is the path of least resistance to get my thrills. And then you become habituated to that and go, this is the, this is the dopamine machine. This is the, this is the program that I'm just going to plug into daily to pacify that drive and strength for life. And I think that when testosterone is low, it doesn't necessarily force someone down that pathway, but I think it predisposes you more towards going down that pathway because you biologically lack the resilience. And then these pathways become more appealing.

True. So, could, you know, in reality, then it's not necessarily the dopamine hit, it's the relationship between the dopamine hit and the effort that is required. So, then you create a false perception of X amount of effort should lead to Y amount of dopamine. So, then when you go out and you like, take up skateboarding, you're like, well, this is, this is 10 times the effort for the same thing. Yeah. Why would I do that? Tony Hawk's way easier.

Yeah, exactly. So, there's nothing inherently wrong. It's just that it can skew your perceptions of what you should have to do. I think that, and then the thing that I've been the most interested in over the last few years in terms of just working with a lot of guys under the age of 30 is going, okay, how does this impact the trajectory of the man that you're going to become when you're 30 or 40? And I think that's where it starts to get scary. Because as, as you get older as a man, again, I don't know anything about women, but as you get older as a man, you are expected to have more mastery over self and mastery over whatever it is that you can offer or contribute to society. You're expected to be able to be more of a leader and to be more disciplined and to have more of a skill set at 40 than you are at 20. At 20, you can kind of be a bit of a degenerate and it's kind of just like, yeah, that's 20, it's okay. But by the time you get to, you know, your late 30s and your 40s, you're meant to be able to lead a household, you're meant to be able to be cool, calm, and collected under stress, you're meant to be able to, the thing that you started doing in your early 20s, you should be good at that by the time that you're in your 30s and 40s. And I think that when we miss out on these experiential learning opportunities, which are the challenge of going out and being like, hey, skateboarding is hard, but I'm going to keep pushing through with this because this would be cool and I want to learn the skill, and you fall off and you get back on the board a hundred times. That experience applies to a lot of stuff downstream from that. And I think that what we're getting now, because I see it all the time, is we're getting a whole bunch of guys in their 30s who are going, I didn't do all that stuff when I was younger, and now I'm expected to be this archetype of a man, and I'm not, and I feel like a failure, and I feel like there's something wrong with me, and I don't know how to fix it. And I really empathize for those guys. Because a lot of the stuff that we talk about is going, you know, how does this impact my day-to-day right here, right now? But I think what's really important is looking down the line to be like, how is this going to impact not just where I end up in the future, but who I am in the future?

Mhm. Why do you think in the Western world, compared to like Eastern philosophies, do you think then that we're so happy to try and look at the mind and the body as almost separate entities, whereas in a lot of Eastern philosophies, you know, it's kind of almost a given that a healthy mind can't exist in an unhealthy body and vice versa? Over here, it seems to be only just now that we're kind of putting the two together. You know, why, why do you think that disconnect has kind of happened? And what do you think needs to happen to help close that gap?

I think it's just different paradigms that underpin how we view health and biology. You know, in the Western medical model, you know, you go to a, you know, gastro specialist, or you go to a liver specialist, or you go to a kidney specialist, you know, you go to all these different specialists who don't treat and view the body as a holistic, you know, series of interconnected systems. I like to view the body like a car that's alive, like the Pixar movie Cars, where like all those little cartoon cars are alive. That's the human experience, where a very complex series of interconnected systems experiencing itself being alive. And, you know, I've spoken to clients who've been to, I can never pronounce it properly, gastroenterologists, gut specialist doctors, who go, oh, yeah, diet has nothing to do with autoimmune gut conditions like, you know, ulcerative colitis and celiac disease and so on and so forth. And I'm sitting here being like, that, that's just, that's just straight up done. And so, what does, yeah, surely the stuff that's literally passing through that, that is the only thing interacting with that system, surely that might be involved? No, it's just genetic. You know, it's just you, you've got a predisposition, there's nothing you can do, take your pills. Um, this, and I think the reason why people are seeking this more, and again, the term holistic kind of gets a bad rap because, you know, it sometimes gets thrown around, but it really, that really is what it is. And I think people are more going towards this paradigm again because the previous paradigm wasn't working. They were going, this, and not only was it not working, but it just, it doesn't make sense. And I think, you know, one thing to me that I think is really cool is that there are so many people who are spending their spare time learning more about the human system. Like, science-based podcasts are really popular because people are starting to go, hey, I want to learn more about me. I want to learn more about what's going on with how I'm feeling and how all this stuff works. And I think that that's really exciting because people are becoming empowered. But yeah, I, I think it's just, it's just stemmed in this idea that this is how it is because this is the model that sells the most drugs. And this is just what underpins how we view the health system is the medical system. And the medical system is underpinned by the pharmaceutical industry. And when you look at other, you know, health-oriented paradigms, you know, particularly Eastern paradigms, they very strongly understand the interconnected relationship with the whole body. And I think that that is kind of coming back to this uncommon common sense approach, which is that everything's interconnected, everything affects everything. And that's why we have to, a lot of the time, when there's something wrong here, it's just like in a car, if, you know, if the noise coming from over there, there might be something wrong over here. Mechanics get that, but doctors don't.

So, let's, let's say we take these individuals who, you know, have that kind of skewed perception of reward versus risk. If, say, you're coaching someone like that, and they're in that scenario, how does one go about building what would probably be viewed from the outside as willpower, or resiliency, or grit, you know, whatever you call it, the ability to be more willing to make the investment to get the reward? What are things that people should be doing or can start doing to help create a healthier relationship in that way?

Cool. I love this question. So, there's a couple of things to look at. I think firstly, we have to have a purpose. We have to have a why. And I just want to feel better is not a purpose. That's not a strong enough purpose to get up when the alarm goes off at 5:00 in the morning. It's a strong enough purpose to set the alarm. It's not a strong enough purpose to not hit snooze. So, there has to be a why. There has to be a purpose. And a lot of the

Time that purpose has to to be external. It has to be, "I'm doing this so that I can be a better father," or so that I can be a better husband, or so that I can achieve XYZ, which is something that's bigger than me. So there has to be a why.

I think there also has to be a recognition that you're current, that the way that you've been going about things thus far isn't working, and so something has to change. And I think there has to be a degree of humility and willingness to accept that maybe you don't know as much as you thought you did, and that's okay.

Um, from there, I like to look at it as a, a yin and yang approach, you know. And in terms of this, you know, Yin being the calming and and Yang being like the fire. And I think two of the most valuable things, I think when we're working with men, we need to logically understand why things are going to do something. If I tell you, "Hey, go do this," you're going to be like, "Yeah, [ __ ] off." But if I go, "Go and do this because of this," you'll go, "Oh, I want to do this now. I've learned why this is important to me. This is my choice why I'm doing it." I think that's important.

So I like to recommend that on a regular scheduled basis, we look at practicing some form of mindfulness meditation, as well as some form of challenging physical endeavor. And I think for a lot of guys, the most bang for the buck, particularly guys who are anxious and maybe a bit more physically and mentally meek, is some form of striking-based martial art. And I don't mean going out and doing a professional fight and getting a head caved in. I treat brain injuries, it's not a good idea. But something that simulates that physical combative challenge, like padwork, for example.

And if we can take someone who's not feeling in control of their mind, because a lot of the time what leads men down a bad path is just bad emotional reactive decisions. "I feel [ __ ] so I'm going to get back on the booze." Um, it's these these uh, split-second decisions which are based on self-soothing anxiety, which are coming from a place of not being able to regulate emotion, not being able to do what you need, not what you want. And being able to regulate that's really important.

And I think that the advantage of doing some form of martial art, which is something that I am the world's worst Muay Thai uh train like athlete. Uh, my my coach in in Lithuania will attest to that. I have been doing it for years and I suck because I can't balance. But I do it anyway. And I do it because I suck at it. And the reason why I do it and that it's so valuable is that for that hour every week, I am pushed so far outside my comfort zone. It's high stress. Yes, I'm not going to get hit, but your brain doesn't really know that. It's just pad work, it still feels scary. And when you're in a situation when you're physically and mentally stressed and you're able to keep cool, calm, and collected and execute, that's a really handy skill for when you get overwhelmed outside of the gym.

And I think that that's a really important thing to just practice again. Is this experiential learning? Is being like, "Hey, things can get really hectic and, you know, really full-on, and I can keep my cool and regulate my mind and regulate my prefrontal cortex," which is the part of the brain that tells us to basically think before we act and be in control rather than just react.

And then the mindfulness part, I think is really important because one thing that a lot of guys struggle is they have a really bad relationship with the voice inside their head, with with the narrator that's, you know, narrating their thoughts. And I think the reason they have that poor relationship is because one, that narrator inside your head, he doesn't give you a participation trophy. He knows exactly what you do 24 hours a day. He knows how you act and who you are when no one's around. He knows that your facade is [ __ ].

And I think that when you're laying awake at night with that voice torturing you because you're not living up to your capacity and your potential, and you know that you could be more, I think that that can be very difficult for a lot of guys to deal with. And I think that rather than, you know, knocking that narrator out with drugs and alcohol and sedatives, I think what's much more beneficial is to actually forge and train the relationship with your mind so that you can actually focus on what you want to focus on and exert the willpower that you want to do. And the mental skill of attention is an integral precursor for willpower.

And I think if you can train your mind to create stillness and focus, and then train your mind to be able to regulate stress in a physically stressful environment, and you do those things regularly for a prolonged period of time, it it's kind of like creating a system where it would be unreasonable for that not to give you some degree of progress.

I want to ask you about mindfulness in a minute. That would be the next. But quick kind of philosophical question. So you mentioned willpower there. I mentioned it. Does willpower really exist? Or is it that, for me, let's say I have an unhealthy relationship with risk-reward. So it's harder for me to justify doing something that takes more risk to get less reward. You over here have a healthy relationship with risk-reward. So it is easier for you to do a hard thing to get a delayed gratification of bigger reward. I would look at that from the outside as, "That guy's got great willpower." He follows his meal plan every day, whatever, despite cake and donuts being around him. Is that willpower, or is it just the fact that for you personally, the reward is big enough, you know, at the end of it, that the difficulty is worth it? And that's a totally like abstract question, I realize. But people will often, people often in these scenarios will say, "Well, I can't do it. I don't have the willpower," or, "He has great willpower. I can't do that."

Yeah, I think, and I've spoken to a lot of people about this. Does willpower exist? Because I've, I've done a lot of work with psychedelics and and all these kind of different communities where people have these different viewpoints. And every single person who I've met who believes that there's no such thing as free will hasn't been doing very well. And that's something that I've gone, "Well, that viewpoint doesn't really seem to be, uh, serving these people well." So I choose not to believe it. Just like when I went through my brain injury, I brainwashed myself to believe that "God gives his, uh, his harshest tests to his strongest warriors." Is that true? I don't give a [ __ ]. It helped me. Um, I just believed it was true.

So when it comes to willpower, like, I, I could take this bottle right now and throw it at Dave. I could. I don't want to, but I could. That's willpower. I think that when it comes to this whole idea that we don't have willpower, I think some people don't. I think everyone can have it. You know, I think willpower for the mind is like strength for the body. It's something that it has to be trained. It's something that some people naturally have a bit more than other people. Like some people are just naturally stronger than other people, you know, genetics, upbringing, so forth. But I think you can, you can exert free will if you want to. And you can break this thing that we call the default mode network.

So the default mode network is this, um, concept that we've come up with in in neuroscience, which is this idea that, "How I am, who I am, how I think, how my memories work, all this kind of stuff, my identity." This is just how I am and how I do things. I, if I get up every morning on the left side of the bed, I could get up on the right side of the bed if I want to. I just don't. Now, is not doing that lack of willpower? Is it a conditioning? I think people like to get into these philosophical debates, and I think that they're interesting. And I think that it's amazing that we can even think about this and be aware of this and go down these rabbit holes. But I think willpower is something that can be trained. I think willpower is something that absolutely can be trained. Because when that alarm goes off at 5:00 AM, outside of a few, you know, maybe masochistic people, I don't think anyone wants to get up when that 5 AM alarm goes off.

Well, I think to go deeper onto what you said is, you know, your balance with risk and reward would be be inverse to what mine is. Like, I would, I would risk way, way more than what I would need to for the potentially, sometimes, in my brain, the reward may not even be there. There's just a slight chance that it's going to be there. But I think when people are balancing this out, first, they have a lack of self-awareness to be able to think that through, you know, where do I sit on this risk-reward spectrum? You know? And, and if they think that through, and then basically run a SWOT analysis, right? Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Then they'll obviously, they have the cognitive ability to be able to do that. And then once they understand that they're more adverse to risk, or they're not really that adverse to risk, but they want a greater guarantee of what that reward is going to be in relationship to that risk. I don't think most people even process that. You know what I'm saying? Because they might have some kind of why that's very intangible, very floating, you know? Because they don't want to plant a stick in the ground because then that creates more commitment. So if we keep it floating, there's less stress or demand, you know, for that. But then to not look into those things, or just to assume that there is going to be no red risk is just reward, or what the risk, or even if they go through the exercise and they do that, they don't, they don't define the undefinable characteristics. Like, out of these risks associated with whatever this is, maybe we're able to define half. MH. Right. There's a whole other half of the risk that we don't know until you go through the whole process. You're like, "Oh, [ __ ], I didn't think about that one." You know, that was in there. But to your point that you made earlier, through time, you're able to fill out more what those risks are because you've gone through the same journey with different things to be able to do that. Unless you avoid it all together, then you're 35 years old and you're trying to figure this out. And it's like, "Well, the risk of this is A and B." Mhm. Where had you taken more risk throughout younger ages, you know, this is A to Z plus a whole bunch of unknowns that we don't really know. And kind of lay that all out. So I think it's with that willpower, we're dealing with a lack of self-awareness. Y. You know, that has to come before a conversation of willpower. Absolutely. And that would make it hard to define, right? Yeah, for sure. Because I remember, um, I think it was a, a study, or it might have even just been like a bit of a documentary, but the company Red Bull, you know, they, they sponsor like a load of really crazy, wild events, sports. So they, they put, um, like electrodes, and you might be able to explain this better than I do, on a lot of their guys who do like wingsuit flying and skydiving. And the guys who are, you know, doing BMX tricks on a ramp that they hung from a helicopter and stuff like that. And they found that their dopamine system was almost non-responsive to anything that you would experience day-to-day. Y. Y. So like, you know, what's your favorite food? Pizza, whatever. They eat that. Nothing. You know, what's your favorite TV show? Whatever. Um, I'm sure sex probably would have been the same if they had tested that. So they had to do something like that to even activate that system almost at all. And like, you know, maybe they are hardwired that way, and that's totally fine. But, you know, I think to your point there, if you don't do the introspection to know, "Okay, this is how I'm wired. I can probably put the needle either way. But I can also probably now understand what bad behaviors I could be drawn to because of this. What behaviors can I be drawn to that aren't so self-destructive that would achieve a similar outcome?" You know? 'Cause there's always going to be a way, probably, that isn't, you know, wingsuit diving. They probably could do, right? You're, um, a question fused. So with regards to willpower, there's been some study recently on parts of the brain and the whole anterior cingulate cortex, which they're kind of calling the willpower, um, center of the brain. And that it seems that people who have done lots of hard things through their lives, it's been hypertrophied. And then you see the opposite in terms of it being atrophied in people who make the easier choices. Do you think it could be that simple? Potentially. In that we have a center of the brain that is kind of assessing constantly whether something is hard enough and then whether it requires willpower? And do you think that analogy, even if it's not the truth, could be a useful way of putting across to someone, like, "Hey, if you exercise this part of your brain, it will hypertrophy like a muscle." You know, even if it's not the whole truth, maybe it helps people start to understand what they're looking for.

Yeah, these are such great points. And I, I'll tie them all together. So, uh, regarding the the Red Bull and the electrode, uh, point, I can't remember the name of the movie, but there's a movie, I think it's on Netflix, but a guy like free climbs El Capitan. Um, I think it's called Free Solo. I'm not sure, I'm probably butchering that. But they looked at his brain and they were like, "How the [ __ ] are you doing this?" Turns out he had just like, no cortisol activation in his brain. Um, so some people are, are born in, you know, we, we have different neurotransmitter polymorphisms. And and I have something. You know, I've looked at my brain genetics because I was always trying to understand like, why was I always drawn to doing things that other people found scary and and risky? And I found that they would bring me peace. So, you know, getting on stage as a musician, you know, being a vocalist, being a drummer, you know, doing stuff like this. Like, I feel more calm and present, you know, speaking with no preparation than I do sitting around with nothing to do, chilling, watching a movie. And there's something called the Warrior Gene, um, which is where you have a very fast, uh, metabolism of dopamine, as well as other neurotransmitters, that's metabolized by an enzyme called COMT. So what happens is, your brain, it's not that you're making too little dopamine, it's that you break it down really quickly. Does COMT also metabolize cortisol or adrenaline? That correct? I believe it metabolizes adrenaline, but I could be, it definitely metabolizes noradrenaline. I'm not sure about actual adrenaline. But then we've also got MAOA, MAOB, which, uh, MAOB is more impacted in metabolizing dopamine as well, which I also have very fast genes for. So I find that to feel not bored, I have to do hard, challenging stuff. But another way that I can feel not bored is sit around and do a bunch of drugs. So there's what I had to do, you know, when I was younger, is go, "Okay, I, um, I have a brain that has capacity to be, and this gene is very highly expressed in things like surgeons and military and paramedics, you know, people who are doing high-risk stuff because it prevents boredom. But it's also very highly expressed in drug addicts and degenerates, you know, gamblers, sex addicts, things like this." So I had to basically sit down with myself and go, "Okay, I need to live in a way where I get pleasure and reward from doing things that keep me on track and keep me healthy. I need to become addicted to things that are good for me." And things like intermittent fasting helps. Things like, you know, caffeine helps. Things like eating a high-protein diet helps. But I had to, you know, consciously kind of come back to this choice of of this willpower.

And I think that if we look at, I like to look at the brain kind of like we'd look at the body for training the body. So there's different parts of the brain that if you use it more, will get bigger. Just kind of like, you know, if you do a whole bunch of bicep curls, your biceps will get bigger, hopefully. And if you don't do any bicep work, then they'll, you know, start to maybe not shrivel away and atrophy, but, you know, deflate and over over time get smaller. Brains are the same. So when we look at mindfulness, for example, there's two parts of the brain that I like to refer to. One's the prefrontal cortex, which is what humans have that separates us from animals. And then we've also got the amygdala, which is like the alarm bell. And this is what signals the adrenals to produce cortisol and adrenaline under stress. So if you're an anxious personality type and you're anxious all the time, or you go, let's say, to war, or go through some horrific, you know, stressful prolonged event, your amygdala will get bigger because your body is now adapting towards threat. If if we go back in time and we are living in a, I don't know why we'd be living here, but let's say that our tribe gets attacked by saber-tooth tigers every Saturday morning, that amygdala is going to get big for a reason because it's going to go, "Threats are here. This is important." The problem is that physical threats and perceived threats, the brain's pretty blind. We don't really understand the difference between the two internally. So what happens is the prefrontal cortex gets bigger and the, sorry, the amygdala gets bigger and the prefrontal cortex gets smaller. So now we're more anxious, we're more fear-prone, we're less able to control our minds because we're more focusing on survival. So it's kind of like if you had like a, a weaker, smaller muscle that wasn't firing properly, and then that was causing you problems with your other lifts. What would you do? You'd go, "Okay, I'm going to do isolation work in a way that I can bring this up so that it supports the rest of my body." And that's what meditation can can be. And we know from brain imaging studies, and I was involved in one of these studies in Australia, is that if you meditate consistently daily for 8 to 12 weeks, which 90% of people will not do because it's uncomfortably boring, the prefrontal cortex will physically get bigger and the amygdala will physically get smaller. So we're actually able to change the architecture of the brain from this training, just like you're able to change the architecture of your your body from from physically training.

So I think that when when we can understand and go, "Okay, this isn't just some kind of esoteric, woo-woo, spiritual hippie-dippy nonsense. This is actually changing the way that my brain works." I think when we're in a situation going, "Hey, I don't take care of myself well because sometimes I make bad decisions because I feel emotionally overwhelmed or I'm stressed and I don't know what to do, and I need to get better at that." Then this is a way that we can go, "Okay, well, if I do this consistently for X period, then I will actually be able to physically set myself up to be in a better state." And I think that this, it's, it's called reverse engineering. And it would be like if I came to you and said, "Hey, I want to deadlift 500." You're okay. "Well, the way that we would do that is that we'd come up with a training program over a period that would progressively overload and, you know, cycle different strength-based stuff and so forth." Not my area, but we'd create a process to go, "We're going to work backwards from the goal and we're going to break it down into step by step." And I think that we have to apply this lens to other things. And I think the reason why sometimes we don't see this process through is that the why isn't big enough. If I said, "Hey, I want to deadlift 500," and you said, "Why do you want to do that?" I was like, "Uh, Instagram, look cool." That's probably not going to be enough of a motive to get me to do that for, you know, six months or however long it took. But if I was like, "I'm going to compete at a powerlifting event, and my wife and my parents and all my friends are going to come and watch me do it," then now I might stick to that program. And I think that we haven't, a lot of the time, there isn't enough purpose. There isn't enough why behind why we want to make these changes. And I think that's why people can have a bit of a downfall with this. But I think if we can understand and go, "Okay, if I do this, and do that, and do this, and stop doing this, and this, and this, then this will logically and methodically get me towards being less of how I am that I don't like, and more of the kind of person that I want to be." I think that's where we can start to make some real change.

Are you looking to boost recovery, enhance your sex drive, and improve performance in the gym? Do you think your hormones are out of whack and you're tired of getting the runaround from your doctor? You know, things like, "Your hormones are just fine. Stop lifting heavy weights," etc., etc., etc. I know what that feels like, as I've been down that road most of my life. This is why we've partnered with Marek Health. Marek Health is a premium telehealth platform that specializes in hormone optimization and preventative medicine, ensuring a better quality of life. Marek Health offers a Table Talk panel tailored for our listeners, featuring comprehensive tests like total and free testosterone, sensitive estradiol, and advanced markers like lipoprotein A and IGF-1. These comprehensive panels of up to 84 carefully selected biomarkers allow you to identify areas of enhancement and maximize your physical, cognitive, and sexual performance. It's much different than the panels you may get from your doctor. Choose between self-service options where you can select lab panels based upon decades of experience, or opt for guided optimization with your own health coach. Start with a detailed breakdown of your labs and receive personalized treatment options, both over-the-counter and prescription. Visit MarekHealth.com/TableTalk and use the code TABLETALK to get 10% off your first order. Marek Health isn't just about better health, it's about empowering you to take control of your well-being. When you talk meditation, so there's a couple questions here. Is where do you have your clients start? Right? Because if they've never done anything, it's going to be hard, right? So what's the starting place for that? Then, if meditation is being used basically just as a way to distract from the normal day-to-day and the stresses from the day-to-day, how would that be any different than just binge-watching some show on Netflix that is achieving that same goal? Mhm. Specific to just only that goal, you know, being distracted away from what the normal thoughts are.

Yeah, I think that when it comes to to meditation, it's difficult to do. Meditation is a distraction because when you sit alone and you know, with your eyes closed and you remove all stimulus, your brain is going to start throwing at you all of the stuff that you're trying to distract yourself from, and you're going to have to sit with it. And I think that's why people don't like it. And just like cardio and just like mobility, the more you need to do it, the more uncomfortable it feels, and the more you suck at it. You know, if you get onto the elliptical and you can't do two minutes, that doesn't mean that cardio is not for you. That means you need to do a [ __ ] ton of it, and you probably should have done it a while ago. So when people sit down and they go, "I can't meditate. My mind's too busy." It would be like me being like, "I can't deadlift. It's too heavy." It's like, "Well, yeah, that's, that's welcome, welcome to training."

So when it comes to starting meditation, um, there's lots of different types of meditation that people can do. And if if people are doing a certain one that they like and it works for them, do that. Just like training, you, there's lots of ways to get in shape. Um, the form of meditation that has the most research is called mindfulness meditation, which is where we focus our attention on the present moment. And the way that we do that is we use a series of anchors. So if we were to meditate now, the things that we would focus on would be the, the typical one is the breath. It's like the rise and the fall of the breath and feeling that sensation in the body, as well as things like the physical body against the chair, the feeling of the the air coming into the body, maybe music if it was playing. But all of these are just tools so that we can focus less on what's going on up here and more just purely in the present. Because the mind is thinking about the past or the future, typically. So we're bringing our attention into that present moment. And then what happens is you, you do that for like maybe half a second, and then you go, "Oh, [ __ ], yeah, I did it." And then your mind wanders off again. And if we perceive that as a failure, it would be like coming in and doing a bicep curl and being like, "I nailed it." And then when you lower the weight, you go, "I [ __ ] it up." It's like, "Why do you lower the weight when you train?" So that you can lift it back up again. And that's what mindfulness is. Know, training is not coming in and just, depending on the type of training you're doing, training is not coming in and going, "Oh, I'm just going to hold the contraction of the lift for 60 minutes, and that's my workout." That's not how you train. You pick it up and put it back down. And mindfulness is the same. You bring your attention to the present moment, you get distracted, and then you bring it back. That's a rep. That's not a failure. That's a rep. Up and down, up and down.

So in terms of starting with it, it's, you know, when we're teaching it to children, we talk about starting with one minute per year of age. And with adults, I think starting with anything more than 10 minutes is counterproductive. It would just be like if you've never trained and you're like, "I'm going to go hit CrossFit." That sounds like a good idea. You're going to hate it. You're never going to go back. So five to 10 minutes is a great place to start. I have been since the first iPhone came out, I've been using Headspace and I've been recommending Headspace. I think Andy, who narrates it, is great. I don't have any financial affiliation with them. I should. Um, Headspace is great. They have a basics program. Um, and what I recommend people do is do you do it every day? To get the change in the brain, you have to do it every day. If you miss one day because life happens, that's cool. Just don't miss more than one day in a row. If you miss more than one day in a row, you go back to the start. You start again. It took me about a year to get through the whole program. Once you learn the skill of attention, to being able to focus your attention in the present moment, that's where I think you can start to meditate a bit more infrequently and maintain the skill. Another really good one, if people want somewhere to start, if you go on YouTube and you search "Alan Watts 15-minute meditation," there's a phenomenal one where he explains what it is while you're doing it. It's got some music and an animation. It's a really nice one to do. But that's that's the kind of prescription that I give for that. And if I take a hundred guys who say they're going to do it, 90% of them will not complete that basic program. And then they will come back and winge to me about the [ __ ] that they would have solved if they had completed it. And the problem with mindfulness is that it's uncomfortably boring. And we have to sit with our thoughts. It's kind of like spring cleaning. Spring cleaning is okay if you do it every spring. But if you've never done spring cleaning, that going into your garage is going to suck. And if you've never meditated before, you've got a whole lifetime worth of [ __ ] that you haven't sifted through and looked at. And you have to be prepared to sit down and do that. I think mindfulness is very brave because you're sitting down and you're looking in the eye all the stuff that people usually numb and run away from. And that can be difficult, and that can be uncomfortable. But I think the risk of not doing that and then suffering the consequences of not being present and making good decisions, I think that has more negative detrimental outcomes than just sitting down and looking at it and getting it done.

Sure. In terms of obviously the word mindfulness keeps coming up repeatedly. The way it was explained to me, which made you maybe you can put your own definition on it, was like, if your brain was a camera. Mhm. Someone who is not particularly mindful might take a photo every 15, 20 minutes throughout their day. So then when maybe they're looking back on their life and they're trying to find all these positive experiences and things like that, or they're trying to introspect and learn from their own habits, they have less data points to go off than someone who is mindful, who maybe takes a photo every 30 seconds or one minute. You know, someone who is mindful is more attentive to the things they're doing, which means A, we notice more of the things that we do wrong, in inverted commas, so that we can learn from them. But we also remember and hold onto more of the things that were pleasurable or positive in that day. Does that make sense to you? Or how would you maybe go about explaining, because it's a word that does get thrown about, but it's, it's so hard to quantify what it actually means. Right.

Yeah, yeah. So I just refer to like mindfulness is like strength, and then meditation is like going to the gym. Meditation is a workout, and then mindfulness is what you get from doing the workout. Um, when I look at what mindfulness is, it's the mental skill of attention. It's being able to choose what I want to focus on. If I'm out to dinner with my wife, I'm not thinking about something that my client said that day. I'm choosing not to think about that because I want to be present doing this. It's a being able to choose what we think about and focus on is really important because a lot of people's mental health problems come from them not being in control of their mind. And the human mind is an extremely, extremely advanced, powerful tool. Whether whether it was created or evolved or a combination of the two, it's, it's basically like a Lamborghini engine, and you've got to learn how to drive that thing, or it will drive you. It's like this, you have to rule your mind, or your mind will rule you. It's, there's no in between.

So I think that, exactly what you said with the camera and the snapshots, I think that's important because it's very easy, and I, I think we kind of default to it based on societal conditioning and media and marketing, to always focus on what we don't have. You know, "I want this, I want this." We're always walking towards the next thing. And that can be cool if we're goal-oriented. But I think sometimes we miss out on a whole bunch of quality of life because we don't take the time or consciously choose to be grateful and appreciative for what we have. You know, I, I'm very, um, adamant on, and it was because, you know, I went through a very difficult period, like yourself. I almost lost my life a few times. I lost the ability to walk properly for a few years. When you have something taken away from you, or almost be taken away from you, you appreciate it a hell of a lot more. And I always make sure that, you know, when I'm having, you know, a really nice peaceful dinner with my with my wife and my puppy, or, you know, having a really nice day with my family, or just having a nice walk in nature, I choose to come back and go, "There was a point where I couldn't go for a walk. There was a point where I was miserable and I thought my life was over. This is really [ __ ] cool, and I'm really happy that I have this." And I would do that walk every day regardless. But the sensation and the pleasure and the experience I have from choosing to focus on what I do have completely enriches my quality of life and completely changes my brain architecture. And this this coming back to gratitude and choosing to be grateful is, you know, people think it's hippie-dippy and people think, "Oh, it's woo-woo and this and that." But it is the thing that ultimately impacts your quality of life because if you always choose to focus on what you don't have and what you're missing out on, you can never stop to smell the flowers. And I think that that's, it's not something that people are going to want to regret at the end, being like, "Oh, I wish I'd just been present for more of that and, you know, being more aware of all the good times I was having when I had them." I mean, you can start, you can start doing that now.

Sure. In terms of, obviously, the word mindfulness keeps coming up repeatedly. The way it was explained to me, which made you, maybe you can put your own definition on it, was like, if your brain was a camera. Mhm. Someone who is not particularly mindful might take a photo every 15, 20 minutes throughout their day. So then when maybe they're looking back on their life and they're trying to find all these positive experiences and things like that, or they're trying to introspect and learn from their own habits, they have less data points to go off than someone who is mindful, who maybe takes a photo every 30 seconds or one minute. You know, someone who is mindful is more attentive to the things they're doing, which means A, we notice more of the things that we do wrong, in inverted commas, so that we can learn from them. But we also remember and hold onto more of the things that were pleasurable or positive in that day. Does that make sense to you? Or how would you maybe go about explaining, because it's a word that does get thrown about, but it's, it's so hard to quantify what it actually means. Right.

Get in the way of what I need to do. I think that if people can logically choose what they want to do and still experience and be aware of their emotions, but not let them supersede their responsibilities, I think that's a really important path forward.

Then I think when people go, "How do I do that?" it's again coming back to this. I think practicing martial arts and practicing meditation gives you the neurological architecture to be able to regulate the emotions.

So, would you say the emotion is kind of like the mental manifestation, say like a knee-jerk reaction? Yeah, it's kind of like how your brain very quickly interprets how you could react. But that's only going to be one viewpoint. So, like I know, say we put a sculpture here in the middle of the three of us, I'm looking at a different point to what you are. The sculpture looks different to you, though it does to me. Like the emotion is maybe one view, but then the logic is the other view. And you know, perhaps there's a third view or something there.

So, would it be fair to say that, you know, we shouldn't discount them, but we should look at them as like a slice of the whole reality there? And it's not a case of "ignore," but think, "Oh, well, I could react this way, but actually, in context, this isn't as meaningful as that viewpoint maybe makes out to be."

Humans are fascinating, and I think that the fact that we have all these things and we can be aware of these things and then we can talk about these things is, is, is fascinating. Babies are a good example of absolutely zero emotional regulation, slightly happy, laughing, slightly sad, crying and screaming.

Um, so I think if we look at that as the extreme, and then if we look at the other extreme of like being a complete robot and feeling absolutely nothing, you know, that would kind of be a sociopath. We, we kind of want to have this point in the middle where we can recognize emotions because emotions are very important for empathy and sympathy. It's very important that we can put ourselves in someone else's shoes and go, "How would I feel if I spoke, if someone spoke to me the way that I'm speaking to them?" I think that's very important for mature relationships. Otherwise, you're not going to get very far and no one's going to like you very much if you can't empathize.

But I think when it comes to, and I've spoken about this in terms of trauma as well, it's like we have to be able to see emotions, feel emotions, embody emotions, experience emotions, but also be able to put them to the side and go, "I'm going to make room for this. I'm not going to suppress this. I'm not going to, um, you know, bottle this up and then, you know, take it all out on someone who doesn't deserve it in the future." But I, I have the conscious maturity as an adult to be able to put this aside and then choose how I'm going to show up. And that process is not easy, and it's probably not something that even people who think they've mastered it get right 100% of the time. But it's something where that the strength of your character is, is demonstrated and challenged under highly stressful situations. And it's in, in those situations where the going's tough and it's pouring rain, how you show up in those situations when your emotions could get the best of you, I think that's the best test of your character.

Sure. So why do you think then, you mentioned about society becoming more emotionally driven? What do you think is kind of pushing that?

Oh, all the workism nonsense. Um, I, I think that it, it comes back to the kind of the mental health stuff that we were talking about before. Is that if we allow our emotions to be an excuse for things, and if we allow emotionalism to be an excuse for things, we absolve responsibility. If we go, "Oh, well, I was meant to stick to my meal plan and I was meant to go to the gym five days a week, but I felt sad, so I didn't do it. Instead, I went and had a pizza and, um, you know, just went to bed and just chilled out and did nothing." That's not okay. That's not acceptable. And I think that the idea that it is for people who maybe aren't doing well and who lack the resilience and lack the perseverance, it's a pretty sweet get out of jail free card. If we can go, "Hey, emotions are so important that they're now an excuse for being able to do whatever I want, say whatever I want, whatever I think." For someone who's not doing well, that sounds pretty sweet. And I think that's why this narrative is becoming more popular. Is more and more people aren't doing well and we're going, "Oh, this is the solution." And it's going, "Well, this sounds pretty appealing." Because I think the other solution, which is the stuff that, you know, we've been talking about so far, everything from, you know, hormone optimization, diet optimization, lifestyle optimization, you know, habits, all of this stuff, and and objectively improving self through rigorous ongoing self-development, that's a whole bunch of work. And I think that this pathway is just, this is the path of least resistance. This is appealing to that mammalian hind brain, which is going, "This sounds like a sweet get out of jail free card." I think that's why we're going down that path. And I think that, without going too rabbit hole, I think that this population is an easier to control, more subservient population than this population.

So should the focus instead be not on the emotion itself, but your reaction and action that takes place in this, in the midst of them?

Absolutely. Everything is about how you respond. Um, you know, how we show up and how we survive is, is ultimately who we are as people. And I think it's, it's, it's always in the response. It's, "I felt like this, but I did this anyway." That's commendable and respectable.

Cool. Isn't that most of life though? I mean, it's, I guess I got a different view kind of on that because most of what I, what most of what I've ever done or will do involves kind of me not wanting to do it. M-hm. But it doesn't, it's still has to be done anyhow, because the ultimate accountability is going to fall back, you know, and did I do it or did I not do it? And it doesn't really make any difference how I feel about it. Exactly. It still has to get done. Yeah. You know, that's, if it's business, family, training, or whatever, it's going to be the, I think where the, the wiser, probably better anchored, you know, where, when looking at younger generations, say my kids as an example, trying to anchor that tough, right? Because they're in their 20s. Like, how the [ __ ] do you know what you want to do, right? So we have all these conversations about purpose, why, or all the other different words that we kind of want to put out there to kind of explain that they don't [ __ ] know. You know, they're still just figuring [ __ ] out. Where that's kind of where the ideology falls into that, you know? So if my one son's in the military, really doesn't have to really worry about that because his service circumcedes everything after that, right? So he's got to be willing to die for the country, and that's more important than his [ __ ] emotions. Yeah. You know, that's kind of implanted because of the environment that he's in. I think it's kind of going back to what I said before, where people are in certain ideologies that will kind of cover that. If you're in school, if you're in college, or whatever, it's going to be. But then when they're out on their own, they're thrown into this real world and they're like, "What the [ __ ] am I here for, right?" And if religion's not part of that whole thing, and the military or whatever ideology is not there, they got to create their own ideology, you know? Or I, they're not going to do that, right? They're, they're going to fall into some other type of ideology with that. But all of them that I feel are productive are going to be ones that create the greatest amount of self-accountability. Exactly. Because then you have control, right? Fail or not fail, and you're going to fail more than you're going to succeed. And I think that's kind of a lost thing that's in there where we see that in the weight room, right, all the time. You know, most of what we do in the weight room, if not all of it, is kind of like not doing what you wanted to do, you know? I don't want to say failing because people will take that as taking every set to failure, which, you know, that's, that's not really what I mean. Yeah. But you're all in there for some purpose, yeah, which isn't going to be realized until, you know, later time, which means that one session in the gym, you failed because you didn't achieve that said purpose, because that's going to come later than that. It needs to be applied to all these other things. But when it comes to trying to figure out, you know, and I've always been conflicted on this since the very first book came out of "Determine Your Why" or whatever it was, I forget the author, but that's when it became a huge talking point and it just kind of, you know, trends up and down now, is how do people discover that? You know, especially if you're working with somebody that is in their 20s, yeah. You know, it's, and even if you're older, I mean, there's a lot of times like, "Why in the [ __ ] am I still doing what I'm doing?" Y-you know? So it's, it's never, I think part of it is, it's never absolute, yeah, where I think people think it needs to be this absolute thing where it's always there and it's always a drive and you always want to get up super early to be able to get this thing done. And it's all that. Where to me, it's more of a, it's an overreaching objective. Y-yeah. That may not have the same vision at certain periods of time. You know, sometimes it's going to be very clear, other times it's going to be very cloudy. Y-yeah. But it's still kind of always there. Where that's where I see the issue with the younger generation is they're trying, they know what they're supposed to do, like they're trying to figure it out, but they're lost.

Do you think a lot of that comes down to though, being in, you know, encouraging people to be introspective and just being like, "Well, what actually gives you fulfillment or or happiness as opposed to pleasure?" You know, like for example, they're going to say Doritos and video games. But at least if you're aware of the concept, then as you're going through those developmental stages, you kind of can start to tune into like, what gives you immediate pleasure versus what makes you feel fulfilled? If you, well, what I wonder is, I mean, if we go through, you know, our our backgrounds kind of like [ __ ] up and found out, you know, is that necessary? You know, so, so we, we can try to explain all this, but, you know, without the circumstances that we've all been through, we may not have that same clarity. And a lot of them circumstances were not good, you know, be able to do that. Where at the same time, we don't want to tell people, "Go do really bad [ __ ]," you know, because it's going to provide more clarity on your life. But I think the thing we probably all share in common is at some point, or at various points, we took a step that maybe we didn't feel ready for, or we thought that maybe was beyond us, or that this is going to test me. I think probably everyone who ends up in the right place, you know, or or is in line with their goals or their purpose, whatever, probably at some point just had to go, "Oh, well, that means I need to give up the career I've just been to college for," or, "You know, take on a job role that I don't really think I've got the skill set for," or, or something like that. You know, like if it scares you a little, a little bit, then maybe that tells you all you need to know. Perhaps. And that's what do you think about that?

I, I think it's exactly what you, what you said is that, you know, the, to get to where you've gotten to is an outcome of doing a whole bunch of [ __ ] that you didn't want to do and you did it anyway. And that mentality is absolutely what is lacking in a whole bunch of people who aren't doing well because they don't have that skill set and this ability to be able to do it anyway, even though you don't want to do it. The way that I instill that into myself, so when I was going through rehab, my brain injury, once I realized that there was a path forward with rehabilitation and testosterone and peptides altogether, it was about 8 to 10 hours a day of just horrible physical rehabilitation for the best part of a year. I had never done anything hard in my life up until that point, and I was looking basically down, it was either that or suicide. And I, I tried this, and this is much more difficult than people realize, and I realized I couldn't do that either. So I had my back against the wall and I had to go down this path forward. And I realized I didn't have a strong male role model who had, you know, showed me this path forward. I didn't have the actual skill set to go through this. I was basically looking down this rite of passage being like, "This is make or break," but there's literally no other option than to just plow forward and do it. And through that process, I learned exactly what you talked about there, which is this ability to be able to just do what you need to do, even though you don't want to do it, because that's just life and that's just what you have to do. And that process taught me so much that has allowed my life ever since then to feel infinitely easier because I went through something that was so objectively difficult. But this, this whole idea of needing to do the things that you don't want to do because you want to be the guy who did that, I, I try to teach my clients to go, you know, if, let's say you, you're going to go out to a restaurant with all your buddies and you know, it's like a burger place or whatever, and there's a bunch of stuff on the menu. The pleasure of breaking your diet and having the double cheeseburger and the fries and the [ __ ] milkshake or whatever, that's going to feel good for the mouth pleasure, and then you're going to feel like [ __ ] afterwards. You're going to feel ashamed, you're going to feel embarrassed to yourself because you didn't keep your word to yourself. But going out and going, "No, I'm going to stick to the menu. I'm going to get some maybe grilled chicken and a salad or or whatever it is." You're going to get that might not feel good at the time in terms of mouth pleasure, but if you can derive pride and if you can derive, "I am the guy who does what he needs to do, not what he wants to do, because I am that guy and I am able to stick to my guns to be able to be the person who I want to be." That mental conditioning, I think, can derive even more pleasure and more, more happiness than having the cheat meal can. And in terms of like, how to actually teach these guys who were younger, I think the most important thing is that they find a strong masculine role model who has maybe the outcomes that they want, and they go, "I want to be more like this. I want to be more like that." And go, "Okay, how did they get to that point?" "Oh, it was a whole bunch of doing stuff that you don't want to do in order to get the result." "Crap, okay, I need to be more like that. I need to develop that skill set." And I think that what a lot of guys want is they want to have the results from the work that they haven't done, which is literally entitlement mentality. And I think what's really helpful, like for me when I was doing rehabilitation, the first David Goggins podcast that came out with Rogan before he released the book, where he like summarized his story, I reckon without any exaggeration, I think I listened to that more than 200 days in a row on repeat while I was doing rehab to go, because he was telling the story of being like, "I'm someone who never thought I could do something like this." And I'm there being like, "I'm someone who never thought I could do this." And I was like, "This is the only path forward. I've got this guy in my ear telling exactly about how he did something like this. I'm going to do the same." And then it was basically realizing that all it was was just showing up, doing things that were difficult, but they weren't that difficult. Getting up and going to the gym when you don't want to do it, it's hard. It's not that hard. Like, it's, it's not. And realizing and going, "Okay, I just need to consistently stick to this and do this for a prolonged period of time and not give up." That's challenging, but I can do that. And that for me, going through that experience and process, that's allowed me to see how when that was lacking, why I wasn't the person who I was proud to be.

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So is there just an overemphasis in people's minds on harm avoidance as opposed to winning in general, or later on? So like, you know, say the mentality between going into a game trying not to lose as opposed to trying to win?

I think you summarized it very well before. You said, you know, like, "Why the [ __ ] am I still doing all this stuff?" It's like, "What else would you do?" Um, I, I was trying, for a long time. So my, my father is in his, he'd be 68, um, and he's a, he's a principal and he's just opened a new school in Lithuania. And I remember having, I had so many conversations with him like, "Just [ __ ] retire. Like, why do you keep doing this to yourself?" And he's like, "What else am I going to do? He's like, "I, I need to be doing something that feels meaningful and purposeful." And the analogy I use is that I think we get more pleasure, or sorry, pleasure is probably not the right word. I think we get more meaning from building the castle than we do sitting on top of it when it's done. And I think that's, I, I think a lot of people are very conditioned towards wanting the outcome. It's all about outcome, outcome, outcome, outcome. And going, "Okay, how do I get the outcome with the least amount of effort possible? How can I biohack this to be able to get 10x my results with half the work?" And I think for a lot of the time, it's one of the reasons I love Muay Thai. It's like, "How do you train abs at Muay Thai? 500 crunches." Is that the best way to train abs? No, but it builds character and it sucks, and that's the point. And I think we need, again, the pendulum can't swing too far in either direction, but I think we need a bit of that. I think we need a bit of that, "The process sucks, and that's the point."

Well, understanding that, because it's to tie back into that, the outcome may never happen, even with all the right processes, right? I think everybody kind of gets that to a certain degree, right? But the, that process, you know, learning to enjoy the process, which it's overstated, you know, it's been killed to death, that I don't know what that means anymore. But it is, I don't want to say it is what it is because I said I wasn't never going to say that again, but it kind of is. With that, I think most people have a grasp of that. But getting back to trying to establish, you know, their why, I think you kind of touched on it a little bit. Is you got to stack the wins where you can stack the wins. And then the more you're able to stack that, the better it will be. So if it's just as simple as waking up and walking down to the stop sign and back, but you do that every single day, you try to do that every day. I mean, that's pretty [ __ ] easy, right? It's, well, depending on where the stop sign is, but, you know, 500 steps. Who cares? Just anything to be able to hear something that you're going to try to do on a daily basis, which is really simple to actually do. Going to the gym, I could understand for some people, they never trained. You got to, you know, get in the car, pack your [ __ ], you know, there, there's too many stackable things that can go wrong. But just waking up in the morning and walking out, walking 500 steps and back in, and that's a win for a lot of people. That's one thing. And then from that, they can stack, stack, stack, stack. And I think the more stackable wins they can get like that, the more clarity they're going to be able to have, assuming hormones are not all [ __ ] up, which we're going to get into that. Then they'll see what their purpose or why it will, it will show itself. M-hm. Right. The more things you do, the, the more exposures that you have, something will come up and say, "That's kind of cool. I kind of like that." You know? But without any exposures, you're not going to have that, you know? Without any stackable wins, you're not going to have that, you know? And that again, it would be assuming hormones are not all [ __ ] up, which will go back to what we were talking about in the first place, where with, I mean, there's more things going on than just testosterone. So we have this plummeting testosterone rate globally, right? So I think that's getting being pegged as being the problem for probably more things than what it really is the problem for. And we're not going to start pinning all these ten teenagers with testosterone, even though probably a lot of people would like to see that happen. Yeah. Um, what are some of the things with that? Just assuming that their testosterone is low, because I think that's probably a fair assumption for most people to make at this point, than to assume that it's optimized. M-hm. What are some of the things that they can do to be able to bring that in line with all the other hormones that won't involve, you know, taking testosterone?

Sure. So I think there's two categories here that's worth talking about today. One being younger men who are growing up who have, you know, endocrine disruption. But I think the other category, which would be cool to talk about for your listeners, is maybe people who've abused PEDS in the past and then are now on TRT as a result.

So when we're talking about the former, um, it seems very clear to me that the same thing that's [ __ ] up men's testosterone in women is messing with their progesterone. But in both genders, um, is messing with thyroid. And it seems like the same endocrine disrupting factors from the environment that are messing with these primary sex hormones are also messing with not only thyroid production, but also conversion of T4 to T3, and then thyroid receptor availability. I see subclinical hypothyroidism in close to half of my clients on hormone replacement therapy, um, to to varying degrees. And sometimes that can be autoimmune related, sometimes it can just be a sluggish thyroid. And a lot of the time, it's from poor diet, lifestyle. But a lot of the time, people are throwing more testosterone at a thyroid problem. And a friend of mine over here in the states, Dr. Charles Barnes, he says, "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." And I think that for TRT practitioners, it's like, "Ah, more testosterone will solve that." And it, it might help. I mean, boosting test will help thyroid to a degree, but thyroid is a factor. And then when we look at the guys who've previously abused, um, anabolics, particularly the 19-nors, so Deca and Tren, um, those, or I would argue any of them, in in massively superphysiological doses. But for some reason, those ones in particular, that tends to also dysregulate the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis, which can then mess with your production of pregnenolone and DHEA. So it's very common when guys have come off, you know, big cycles and now they're on, you know, testosterone replacement because they've, you know, destroyed their natural production, that they're going, "Oh, I feel better than if I'm not on it, but I feel like there's still something missing." And then sometimes they'll try to push the test up and they'll go, "Oh, I need, you know, 300, 400, 500 milligrams a week of test to feel okay," or they'll feel like there's still some stuff missing. And this can be when there's a deficiency in, again, thyroid, pregnenolone, DHEA. And then when you get older, there can also be deficiencies in melatonin and growth hormone as well in those populations where the thyroid is perhaps the root cause, or at least a huge part of it.

What are the typical signs and symptoms that point you toward suspecting the thyroid is a big player as opposed to your average guy who comes to you just being like, "I don't feel great"?

Typically, when they're talking about hypothyroidism, they're talking about it in women because it, it's more recognized in women. And the classic hypothyroid symptom is cold, cold fingers and cold toes, you know, cold extremities. Um, women objectively run colder than men, body temperature. It's why women are always cold and men are always hot. Um, in men, cold extremities comes in when it's pretty severe. But the primary symptoms that we're looking at, if I give you a list of, uh, low testosterone symptoms and low thyroid symptoms in men, we're looking at the same list. They are the same. And I think this can be where marketing, uh, can be detrimental. I think that this is where people's decisions can sometimes be misguided because testosterone is sexy. Like, guys want more test. Selling testosterone to a guy, if it didn't shut down your natural production, that's like selling a thirsty guy in the desert a glass of water. It's like, "Give me more test." Thyroid doesn't sound like, "I don't really want that." But a lot of the time, what people are looking for from the TRT is actually the thyroid. And the problem is, people aren't checking thyroid properly. A whole bunch of these testosterone clinics over here, they aren't even running TSH, which TSH alone is like nothing. But they're not even looking at that. And especially if there's an autoimmune aspect to the thyroid, which is called Hashimoto, I assume it was named after a guy named Hashimoto. Um, this is something where if you don't fix the thyroid and you put them on test, not only will you get an incomplete response, but this is one of the primary things that causes the estrogenic side effects because T3 is very important for regulating the androgen and estrogen receptor sensitivity, as well as metabolizing estrogen from the body as well.

True. So speaking as someone whose wife has Hashimoto, so I've been, I've been forced to educate to a reasonable degree on this topic. If we're looking at a full thyroid panel, so TSH, T3, T4, reverse T3, I think would be a good one to talk about, and, um, thyroid antibodies. When you're looking at those, what are we seeing in someone who's got, say, regular hyperthyroidism versus autoimmune hypothyroidism?

Sure. So there can be different presentations of this based on how far along they are in their, um, disease state. Um, and I'm going to talk about the reference range here because the units that we look at for thyroid can sometimes be very confusing. So in Australia and Europe, the reference range for T3 goes up to about a 6.5. Over here, it goes up to about a 4, 4.5. They're different units, but they look similar. If I say I've got a T3 of 5, that could be either. Whereas when you've got the units of testosterone in like the tens versus thousands, it's very obvious that we're looking at different units. So I'm going to reference the range rather than talking about numbers. Um, so when we're looking at typical hypothyroidism, we're looking at an elevated TSH and we're looking at a low free T3. And then T4 can fall anywhere in in in in that range. And what that is essentially saying is that there's not enough thyroid going around and the, the body is essentially screaming at the thyroid to go make more thyroid hormone. You know, TSH is thyroid stimulating hormone. So the body is going, "There's not enough T3 activating the receptor." Pituitary is going, "Hey, thyroid, make more of this. You're not doing a good enough job." Why is that happening? And it's because the autoimmune system has attacked and degraded the thyroid via the antibodies, ATPO and ATG. And this is basically, basically damage the thyroid's ability to produce the thyroid that the body needs to, uh, function. So that's the typical, uh, thyroid case that we would see. The one that we're seeing more commonly now, which is what I see with these guys who are coming up who don't have Hashimoto's, but they do have subclinical hypothyroidism, is the T3 is high or it's healthy, and the TSH is high. So this is when we're going, "Well," and typically it's top of the range, you know, maybe top quartile of the reference range for T3, and we're looking at a TSH of like 2.5 to 4. And this is when the body is going, "Well, I'm making a whole bunch of this [ __ ], but there's not enough activating the receptor." So there's heaps floating around. So when we look at hormones, hormones don't do anything until they activate a receptor. It's like pinball. You can have all the balls flying around on the table, you don't get points until it hits the bumpers. So hormones are the same. And if we're looking at thyroid, we're not netting any thyroid activity until T3 activates the thyroid receptor. So we're seeing elevated levels of T3 and we're seeing elevated levels of TSH, which is basically the body going, "I'm making this on, I'm I'm maxed out my production here, but it's still not enough at the receptor level." And it's because the receptors are blocked from these endocrine disrupting chemicals. And people are having to push their T3 levels well above the reference range to bring the TSH into a satisfying level, which is signaling that the body is going, "Hey, I've got enough thyroid hormone here to actually fuel the metabolism," which is what thyroids doing. They're the two kind of presentations I see the most.

Sure. And in that circumstance, what are those endocrine disruptors typically? You know, broad categories?

I, I like things in threes. And I like alliteration. So I look at the three Ps, which is the pollutions, plastics, and pesticides. And we don't really know which one of those is the, is doing the lion's share of it. And which one is, you know, people say, "Oh, it's mainly the, the atrazine and the glyphosate." And people will say, "Well, I'm like, I'm over in Eastern Europe where glyphosate's pretty regulated. I mean, you can't go down to the hardware store and buy that [ __ ]. You need a government permit for it." And we still see this. So it's a factor. I think the plastics are, are really big. I mean, my generation's been wrapped in plastic since we were a kid. You know, all the synthetic fibers and the clothing. I think it all comes together to create this perfect storm. Um, and then you combine that with the lifestyle factors, the, the low micronutrient density diet, I think, and the lack of sunlight. The one thing that I see, and I've spoken to a few practitioners in the UK about this who agree with me, is I see so much autoimmune hypothyroidism in the UK, and it's because they don't get any sunlight. And I can attest to this. Yeah. And the, like, it's not the only thing that causes it, but I see a pretty damn good correlation between hypothyroidism and not just vitamin D levels, but just sun exposure in general.

Sure. And where would, so reverse T3 is one that can play a part there, but often won't get included in panels. So what role can that play? Let's say someone's got a hypothyroidism problem that doesn't seem to be responding, or whatever, where does that come into play? What does that disrupt in this relationship?

Sure. Um, so T3 blood test will put a hole in your wallet. Um, typically, the cost of a T3 panel is the cost of the whole other blood panel combined, same for T3. So in Australia, a T3 blood test is about $300. That's why we don't typically run it. Um, I also think people don't run it because they don't know how to interpret it. But that's a factor why a lot of the time it's not included in preliminary labs, is is that it's just cost prohibitive for a lot of people. A good practitioner, T3 is something that I think you should run when you can, but you can run other stress hormone markers like cortisol and prolactin as a proxy for it. But I do prefer to have, I always prefer test, not guess. But that's why it's often not included. So reverse T3 is very well named. It looks exactly like T3 molecularly with some very slight differences. And the T, reverse T3 comes into the thyroid receptor and blocks the thyroid from activating the receptor properly. This is a very important biological function for scarcity survival. So when we see people who, when we say, you know, stress lowers your metabolism, or when you diet for too long and you have to reverse diet, this is what the body is doing to slow your metabolism down. It's going, "Shit's not good. We need to conserve resources. Slow the metabolism down to survival." So when people need to reverse diet, this is when reverse T3 goes too high and the metabolism is getting slowed down. So it's an important biological process, appropriately. Kind of like the sabertooth tiger thing we were talking about before. Now, the problem is that when people are chronically stressed from, let's say, injuries, you know, chronic pain is a big one that will drive this up, chronic psychological stress, just poor sleep in general, huge amount of factors that can impact that. Reverse T3 will elevate, and this will create a situation where the thyroid will see it kind of like T3 because T4 converts into reverse T3 and T3 as well. And it will reduce TSH output. So this is when we can sometimes see TSH be low and free T3 be low as well, is because the body's going, "Well, I'm making a bunch of T4. There's a whole bunch of stuff in here that looks like T3. Everything's sweet." And it's because the body is going, "I'm slowing your metabolism down because you're stressed." And one of the worst things that people do, I've got a whole lecture on YouTube on this, which is called TRT Troubleshooting, because this is a very common thing as well, as our Beyond TRT, where I, I break this down and, and, you know, give recommendations, all on YouTube for free. Is that if you throw more thyroid hormone at this situation and you go, "It's basically the body being a car is going, 'I'm pumping the brakes. You know, this is a dangerous road we're driving on.'" And you're coming in going, "I'm smarter than you, buddy. I'm going to pump the accelerator." What's going to happen? You're going to have a stuttery ride forward. This is what we see. We see, "Oh, some symptoms get better, but then you get side effects." And it's because you're not supporting the body, you're now working against it. So when someone's got elevated reverse T3 and hypothyroid symptoms, what we need to do is actually lower the stress. And this is when people take supplements. Like, ideally, you want to address the root cause of it. Supplements are not a cure. But when we look at supporting something with supplementation, you know, supplementing a protocol, things like collagen protein, which is rich in glycine, good quality magnesium, things like phosphoserine, ashwagandha. When you give people these calming supplements, they go, "Oh, I have more energy." They go, "This is perked me up." And it's because that's taken the stress off the body and now the metabolism starts working well. So in, in those situations, we have to address the root cause of the stress. Sometimes the root cause will be intractable. If someone's got horrific pain that, you know, isn't going to be able to resolve, then sometimes we have to maybe take the stress out and then give a little bit of thyroid to, you know, find a happy medium. But it's very important to look at stress markers as a whole. And if people aren't going to run reverse T3, then cortisol and prolactin being elevated is a good proxy for that, um, to work out exactly how you're going to treat this situation. Because sometimes people, particularly new practitioners, will get into the field and go, "Just want to throw hormones at every problem." And sometimes that can make things worse, not better.

Sure. So in this scenario, we've got T4 can go on to either T3 or reverse T3. And the level of cortisol, I guess, is the main driver that determines the ratio of that?

So cortisol gets a bad rap. And we think of cortisol as a stress hormone. Cortisol is your body responding to stress. It would be like blaming the fire engines for the fire. Cortisol is anti-inflammatory. But the body upregulates cortisol and adrenaline in response to stress. So it's not necessarily the cortisol that is driving the conversion of, uh, it may play a role actually. But the main role is whatever's driving the cortisol to be going up is what's driving the T4 to go down the reverse T3 pathway.

Sure. And that's why that could, in many scenarios, be the case. Maybe if people have been like yo-yo dieting, or like, you know, say a bodybuilder does three shows in a year or something like that, they could be stuck with this problem where it doesn't matter how much T4 or whatever they take, they've just got a conversion problem. Yeah. Overdoing the T4. Like, I, there's, there's always, everyone's biochemically unique. So there's not a one-size-fits-all, but there are templates. There's not, there's not a cookie cutter, but people fall into buckets. And there are exceptions, but most people fall into buckets when it comes to the T3, T4 ratio. And supplementing T4, I think that ideally, we want to use something like desiccated thyroid, which fortunately here is like the, the frontline treatment for hypothyroidism. In countries like Australia and Europe and the UK, it's a real pain to get. It exists in a 4:1 ratio, T4 to T3. And for most people, I mean, unless they're dealing with a real stress problem, that ratio tends to work well. Some guys, though, once you get past like 50 to 100 micrograms of T4, their T4 will just elevate to the point that it will shuttle down the reverse T3 pathway anyway. And then you're better off just pushing up the T3. Some guys need T3 monotherapy, but this is generally a short-term band-aid for when they're overconverting to reverse T3. Because if you give T3 monotherapy for too long, you will become deficient in T4. You don't need a huge amount of T4. It is primarily a precursor, but it does get the thyroid hormone into every tissue in the body. So working in the natural ratio, which is like a 3 to 4:1 of T4 to T3, is best for most people, but there will be exceptions to that.

So you mentioned at the beginning there about lifestyle factors and diet playing a role there. So like, to that, jump to my head would be something like selenium or iodine, which, you know, play a role in a lot of thyroid reactions, should we say. And what are you seeing in terms of people being able to improve these conditions through lifestyle and diet? Like, what are the main players that are coming in to help get them out of that situation?

Sure. I'm sure I'm going to piss some people off who prescribe these things, but I don't care. Um, I have never in my entire career, and with all my colleagues combined, coming together and talking about this, because one of the best things that I have done for for my career is just coming together with other people who do this and being like, "What do you see? What works for you? Let's share." No one has ever seen these thyroid-boosting supplements like, it's typically tyrosine, selenium, and iodine do anything for hypothyroid symptoms. Because those nutrients in a decent diet are not deficient to the point that they will cause hypothyroidism. And adding a bit more in is not going to upregulate thyroid function. They're not linear regulators of thyroid output. They don't do [ __ ]. Um, the stuff that does make a difference from a diet and lifestyle perspective, again, is the sunlight stuff. Getting plenty of sun, getting outside, doing physical activity. I'm, I'm going to bring up the, the I word, the inflammation word, which, you know, kind of gets a bad rap these days online. But chronic inflammation, whatever that's coming from, and typically that's coming from pain, lack of mobility in the body, it can be digestive distress, alcohol consumption. I mean, there are so many things that drive inflammatory processes. They will downregulate thyroid hormone output and downregulate thyroid hormone receptor availability too. So living a lifestyle which is conducive to low inflammation, which is basically just being healthy, you know, recovering properly from training. Overtraining will destroy your thyroid because you're not recovering properly. Not sleeping properly. Untreated sleep apnea, huge factor. And having too much body fat. And it's a very vicious cycle because if you get too much body fat, your thyroid hormone downregulates because you become inflamed, your metabolism slows down, then you get fatter, then your thyroid gets worse, and then it just becomes this vicious perpetuating cycle. The human body is very good at these vicious cycles. You know, we technically they're called positive feedback loops, but that sounds like a good thing. So I call it a vicious cycle. Um, human body's very good at this. The human body tends to kind of self-delete in by locally when things don't go well. And I think it's that's where it's up to us to intervene as practitioners to be like, "We need to come in and break this cycle and augment it with positive diet and lifestyle habits to be able to reverse the root cause of the situation." And in that process, sometimes people do need supplementary thyroid hormone support. The cool thing about the thyroid, and this has been very well studied, if I, or if, if your doctor was to prescribe you, you know, one grain or two grains of of natural desiccated thyroid and you took it for two or three years and you stop taking it, you're going to go right back to where you were before. There's no shutdown unless you take a metric [ __ ] ton of thyroid to the point that you're hyperthyroid. You're not going to suppress your thyroid hormone output. So if you're here and you need to be here, your thyroid treatment will just fill in that gap. I wish TRT worked like that, then it would be much easier. So thyroid is something that it's so important that everyone looks at. And over the last five years, I've now added it to both of my clinics onboarding blood work panel for the antibodies because a lot of the time people will have some antibody activity present, they'll have some subclinical hypothyroidism early on. And if you want optimal testosterone levels, you have to have optimal thyroid. If you want to put a Lamborghini engine in your car, you have to...

To have all the rest, I don't know anything about cars. I just talk about cars. Time, but you have to have all the other parts of the car be able to support that engine, otherwise it's not going to work properly. And it's the same with the with the body. So if you want optimal testosterone, you have to have optimal thyroid to support that. Some people have that at baseline. I see some guys with great thyroids naturally. I see some guys with great testosterone levels naturally. It just seems to be getting rarer.

So in your in your populations that you work with, who are candidates for TRT, obviously the goal is always like, well, you know, at X age or whatever, or when symptoms kick in, get blood work. You know, it's always like the best protocol. But do you see any symptoms perhaps earlier in life that would lead you to suggest that this person ultimately is going to be someone who is going to need TRT, you know, earlyish in their life? So like something that maybe presents as a teenager or they early 20s that means by the time they're 30, 35 makes it more likely that they're going to be a TRT patient, perhaps outside of body composition? Yeah, they use TikTok. Um, I often say the the number one side effect of going on TRT is is starting your own business.

So look, when there's, and this is a really good point, because I think that juvenile and adolescent obesity is one of the biggest factors towards why younger men are having low hormone levels. Even when they do get healthy, there's this idea that, you know, if you're a young guy, you know, under, you know, let's say under 30, like what you said before, as long as you're, you know, eating well and exercising and you know, you will have optimal testosterone levels. That is just not the case. Like just in practice, I meet guys who are doing everything right to the point that it's weird, like that excessively, everything is perfectly dialed in to oblivion, and their testosterone levels are lower than like a 7-year-old alcoholic.

So in terms of symptoms coming up, I think a lot of the time it can be mental health symptoms. I I wouldn't be surprised if there was underdeveloped genitalia as part of that, but that's not something that I I have seen or or want to see. Um, I'm sure that would be part of it as well. I'm sure that there would be physical structure issues, and I'm sure there would be behavioral issues. But the problem is that those behavioral issues can also be coming from other factors as well. Um, but I think the the risk factor that I would see is being obese during puberty. I think if you're obese during puberty, your endocrine system is not going to develop properly. Um, I wouldn't be surprised if things like SSRI use, uh, heavy cannabis use during teenage years as well would be a contributing factor too, because they're both endocrine disrupting. Um, those are probably things that would be worth looking out for.

And it's it's it's a real tricky scenario working with these younger guys. I mean, how old were you when you started? 19. 19. So when I started at 25, I mean, I was very similar to you. I mean, I had I had no other back was against the wall, and it was the best thing I ever did, which is why I advocate for it so strongly now. But it's a big commitment to make when you're younger. You know, that definitely impacts your fertility. Um, you're becoming physiologically dependent on something the government doesn't like you to have, like that's a bad combo. Um, but I think the opportunity cost of not doing it is greater. But yeah, that that would be the main thing I would be looking at is not so much the the symptoms of the hypogonadism growing up, because you know, there's all kinds of stuff that would cause a teenager to be anxious, even with optimal testosterone levels, and you maybe be a bit meek of stature. But I think the the poor diet, particularly the lack of like animal protein in the diet growing up, combined with obesity, that's going to be a risk factor.

Sure. So even things like gyno during puberty, in your opinion, probably isn't any kind of indicator, or might that give a kind of a peak under the hood for individuals? I I didn't think about that one at all. That would I wouldn't say that would be 100% correlated, but cuz I I believe you can like people say that gynecomastia is genetic, and that you can just genetically get it during puberty. Why the [ __ ] are men genetically growing tits like that? That's that doesn't make any sense to me. I've never seen the gyno gene. Um, I think it's more likely an outcome of of of low androgen levels during development. Yeah.

Sure. When you when you're about to start, say you've got a a new patient, whatever, um, who's about to start their TRT, sure. Obviously, that that initial phase, you're probably taking a system that has been devoid or very low on testosterone. So you've got a lot of receptors that are kind of like screaming out for this stuff. So those four to maybe say first 12 weeks are probably a bit of a whirlwind. Oh, yeah. Right. When you actually finally give the thing all these. So you know, testosterone is going to have acute effects and genetic effects, which I think would be good for you to talk about the difference and how long you should be waiting for the latter. How do you go about setting their expectations during that initial phase where all these acute effects are going to hit? There's going to be a lot of up and down regulation. You know, there's probably going to be water weight and conversion issues, perhaps at first. How do you go about kind of explaining that and setting the roadmap out for them?

I say, welcome to turbocharged puberty part two, um, because that's what it is. I mean, there's again, we're kind of looking at two different populations. We've got the guys who are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, and we're going, hey, we're going to take your endocrine environment back to replicate more of what it was when you were in your 20s. It's like returning home. Like it's just like, oh, this is how I used to feel great. If you take a guy who's 30, who's never had an optimal androgenic surge in his body before, this is new territory. This is essentially puberty, but now you're an adult with responsibilities who can drive and and so on and so forth, and it's happening hard, and it's happening fast.

Um, it's one of the reasons I started a support group, um, for my clients, because this first, I would say all the way to six months, but yeah, particularly the first maybe two to three months, it is a rocky road. There is a lot changing. The first thing I try to do with them is go, frame the the the sensations that you're experiencing as positive. What where you were at before wasn't working, and now you're feeling change take place. So just try to frame everything that you feel as a positive. Um, I mean, unless of course you get [ __ ] gyno. Um, but, you know, if you're like, I can't sleep, like I'm feeling overstimulated, like, you know, guys will sometimes say, and they'll go, I I can't control my temper anymore. And I'm like, you didn't have a temper. Like you weren't controlling a temper, you were pled. This is now you have a temper. Now you need to learn to regulate it. Which is why I think martial arts is important, because you learn that you don't know [ __ ] about fighting. That's a very important thing to lean when you first get a temper.

Um, so that that first period is very tricky. Typically, what will happen, because testosterone, it's not a stimulant, but it does activate the central nervous system. So a lot of the the time, guys will feel overstimulated. And if you've got an anxious mind, that overstimulation can be perceived and felt as anxiety. Um, this can be challenging. And I I often tell guys, you know, during this period, particularly the first couple of weeks, which there can be a bit of a honeymoon, I go, look, use it. Go for a walk. Do more physical activity. You know, if you're feeling more activated and you can't sleep, go for a walk, do some push-ups, get some exercise, get into the physical body. The best way to get out of your mind is into the physical body.

And then when we're looking at it from a standpoint, when I've got guys who've never had optimal androgens before, I think the more frequent the administration can be, the better. Twice a week for Cypionate and Enanthate works really well for a lot of guys. But if you've never had this surge before, I think sometimes it's better to start a bit more conservatively and increase the dose through titration over time, rather than just shooting straight for the moon. And then also maybe going for three injections a week. If guys want to do it daily, great, but a lot of guys don't want to do that. But I think three days a week rather than two days, starting a bit more conservatively and then working up in small increments every three to four months, that's going to allow the subjective adjustment phase, which again, six to 12 months, but particularly the first few months to be a lot more comfortable. Um, and also less prone to side effects.

And then the other thing that these guys have to learn, and and this is something that I speak about a lot, is that when you are hypogonadal, you will often maladapt. The stress from that with coping mechanisms, things like, you know, drinking alcohol or eating too much junk food or having a poor diet and lifestyle. If you optimize your testosterone levels to, you know, the upper end of where they should be, you have to come in and start living in a way that you would be making those levels naturally if you could. Otherwise, you've now created a disconnect. You've created a body that would never have optimal testosterone levels, and now you're pumping them in. So this is what causes side effects. So the thing that I try to teach them over this period is, go, you have to now meet the medicine halfway. You have to show up in a way that you would be optimizing your natural levels if you were making them naturally. And that's why the natural testosterone optimization stuff is the same as the treatments for getting rid of side effects on TRT. It's dropping body fat, dropping visceral fat, eating well, moving more, good cardiovascular fitness. You can't have optimal testosterone levels and get out of breath climbing upstairs, because you would never be having those optimal testosterone levels if you had poor cardiovascular fitness. And that discrepancy between where what you would be making and what you're taking will show up as side effects.

That's a that's a very good point. So in those in that scenario, there we've got that say three to six month period where these these acute effects are are setting in. What do people, what should people be expecting to see in terms of positives there versus the longer, more genetic based effects that are going to take place 6, 12, 18, 24 months and so on? Yeah, absolutely. So when we when we look at the clinical outcomes that we're trying to achieve with TRT, we're looking at the effects from prolonged exposure to androgens over time. This is what we're looking to improve. Things like basically restoring you and turning you into the man that you should have been all along. And that's a process that takes time. Puberty took years. TRT, the effects of TRT take years. However, the acute subjective benefits that you can receive at the start are a welcome change when you've had low testosterone for a while. And I'm sure you can attest to that as I can as well.

The benefits that we're looking, so I like to kind of put things out and if we're looking at a graph to go, okay, let's say that we break the benefits down into like, you know, feeling better mentally, feeling better, I don't want to use the word spiritually, but feeling more like masculine, feeling that kind of androgenic, you know, well-being sense, you know, improved immune system, improved, uh, you know, muscle hypertrophy, reduced body fat, as long as you're training and eating properly, of course, and then libido and sexual function. That's the big one that a lot of guys talk about. The problem is, well, not the problem, the reality and the limitation of TRT is that libido is impacted by everything else in your psychology, physiology. It's the downstream effect of everything. Libido is a signal for you to reproduce. So if you're in a survival state, your body is not going to signal you to reproduce.

So what I like to say to guys, and this turns out to be very true, is that over the six months, all of these graphs will start to move up at different points. Typically, people start to feel energized first. They feel more activated, maybe they feel a bit more confident, maybe they go, oh, now that diet and training program, I'm actually getting the results I should have been getting the whole time, which I wasn't. The last one that moves is libido. So sometimes you can get like a a surge of, um, libido for the first couple of weeks because you get this dopaminergic response from your body being like, holy crap, there's a whole bunch of testosterone here that I've never had before. But the sexual benefits of testosterone, they start to move for some guys after three to six months and then can really take multiple years to truly take effect. And one of the big mistakes guys make is they get, you know, let's say six months in and they go, I had a massive libido surge at the start, and now I'm kind of closer to where I was before. And I'll turn around and go, do you feel 20% better than you felt before you started? Oh, yeah, I feel at least 20% better. Cool. That's a win. That's not a bad thing.

Some guys think that once you reach the optimal serum testosterone level, that you will feel the optimal benefits of TRT. This is not stupid. This makes sense because with any other drug or medication you take, when it reaches peak serum levels, that's when you feel it the most. You know, your pre-workout, you feel the most when it peaks in your system. Testosterone, what you're hoping to achieve and feel is the prolonged exposure to that level for months and years. So that can be the thing that guys can sometimes be a little bit disappointed with, but also just need a reality check, which is that the libido is the last thing that's going to come to fruition. But in the in the interim, all the other benefits should just be gradually going up over time. Sure.

So considering that, when do you start looking at potentially adjusting a dosage? Because if we have that initial phase where things just is like wildfire, and you know, they're reacting like crazy, and then we get this patience that's required then for this equilibrium and for everything to creep up, what would really be a sensible time period then for you to actually assess the effect that that specific dose is having? Yeah, cool. This is a great question. So people have different ways of doing this. Um, the the late Dr. John Crisler used to say there's an art and a science to TRT. Very, very, very true. Um, I say there's multiple ways to skin a cat because I think that saying is funnier, but different ways to do things.

Um, the way that I recommend that we do it, so again, I'm going to talk about reference ranges because the the units that people will be looking at are very different, and I always get them wrong when I'm in a podcast. So the optimal testosterone level for TRT is somewhere between the top quartile of the range and double the top of the range. With the range where it is now, maybe it's even triple the top of the range, it's getting that low. So that's a big range, but we're also looking at a big patient population. You've got everyone from 18-year-olds to 80-year-olds with every level of health. So there should be a big range. I think, and again, this is coming from years of coaching experience, having a couple of clinics, doing a lot of this, I think the best course of action, and people may disagree, but that's cool, is that we should shoot, assuming the guy is in relatively good health, shoot for about the top of the range to start with. Because that is generally going to be three to four Xing their testosterone levels. That's a lot. Like it. That may not be the end destination, and for a lot of younger guys, it absolutely isn't. But the way that I like to do it is to shoot for about the top of the reference range to begin with. I can already feel people freaking out because I'm talking about staying within the reference range, but shooting for the top of the reference range, which for most guys, assuming you respond averagely, is about 120 to about 160 milligrams per week of testosterone divided into two to three shots. And then once you get to that point, I like to let it settle there for a good three to four months and go, okay, we've given it eight to 12 weeks to build up, your levels are about in that point, let's let it settle. And then when they come back after that point, their body's taking time to adjust, we'll see how they're feeling. And if they're going, hey, everything feels fantastic, everything feels awesome, cool. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. That's fantastic. Because more is not better past a certain point for each guy. And what will happen is guys will come in and go, oh, I want to, I want to up my dose. And then they'll come back and they'll be like, oh, now I have all these side effects. And it's like, well, this is why you don't pick your own dose, bro.

Um, so at that point, if they come back, so let's say they've been on, you know, they've been in this kind of top of the range, give or take by a quartile, and they're going, yeah, I feel like there's some room for improvement here, that's when I think titration should begin up. I like to titrate by five to 10 milligrams per injection, so that would typically look like, you know, 10 to 30 milligrams per week. I think titrating by any more than that causes kind of like a whiplash effect. So it's not that that could take you too high, it's that you get too high too quick. So I like to titrate by, again, averages, by about, you know, 15 to 25 milligrams a week every three to four months until we reach that sweet spot where they feel good. Um, the thing with the TRT dosing is that you can always bring it up and bring it down. Like you don't have to go, oh, you know, I I once I get there, then I can't come back down. It's like, you can come back down. You know, we can adjust this to a point that it feels good. And the most important thing that we're looking at is not so much what is that testosterone number on paper, it's how does the rest of the blood work look, particularly things like the, uh, the holistic relationship between like lipids, liver panel, uh, red blood cell count, blood pressure, sleep, all of these factors as well. And also seeing how they're feeling day to day. If you take too much testosterone, yet you'll feel like a beast in the gym, but but you'll also sweat like a [ __ ] after you eat, your sleep will go to [ __ ]. There's a whole bunch of side effects that come if you go past that sweet spot. So titrating up in increments of, you know, yeah, as I said, 10 to 30 milligrams every three to four months after they've taken about, yeah, three to six months to settle into the starting dose to begin with, I think is the best way to play it.

And how much variation do you see first in terms of what number ends up being optimal for that person, but also how that person responds to X dosage? So like you put all three of us on 200 milligrams per week, what and the response you see in terms of testosterone level in in, you know, response to that, how much variation is there at a population level? Sure. So I wrote a book about this a couple of years ago called TRT 101, and I'm happy to say that it's aged like wine. It's aged. I stand by everything in that book. Um, so I have found that there is about eight out of 10 guys will respond about the same, you know, within a striking distance of of the same kind of, uh, levels. One out of 10 guys will shoot through the roof taking next to nothing. I have guys who are taking like 70 milligrams a week and their levels are as high as the average guy taking 250. Those guys are lucky. Like that's awesome. Um, I also have guys who are taking 300 milligrams a week and they're barely hitting the top of the reference range. Um, so I find that eight out of 10 about the same, one in 10 high responder, one in 10 low responder. Meaning low. Um, but eight out of 10 fall into the same category. And that's why like I like, so in Australia and and and Europe, we compound testosterone at 250 milligrams per mil. I think 150 per week is a good starting dose for most guys. You know, SHBG is a factor, there's other factors that will impact that because it divides into, you know, 0.2 mils three times a week or 0.3 mils twice a week. It makes it easy to do. And that will typically give someone a total testosterone of about 25 to 35 nanomoles per liter. I'm not sure what the conversion is into, um, into the numbers that you guys use over here, but that's about the top of the range, give or take. That works really well.

Now, in terms of response to, uh, the numbers on paper, you know, the other side of it that varies more, and that's where it's kind of more of a mix. And when we're looking at, you know, the the again, talking about the free testosterone relative to the reference range, I do find that again, it's not a perfectly correlated variable, but age is a factor. It seems the younger the guy, the higher they need their free testosterone to be to resolve their symptoms. That makes sense. Plus, if a guy is symptomatic at a relatively higher level, then it makes sense that he needs his free testosterone to be higher to achieve symptom resolution. Um, I have some guys where if you take them above the top of the reference range, they get those crank. I call it cranked, which is like you have too much energy in a bad way. It's like you're overstimulated, but it's uncomfortable. It's like too much caffeine side effects. Anywhere above the reference range, they feel like that. I have other guys where until they get to double the top of the reference range, they feel like it's not doing anything. And that's when they've got all their other lifestyle factors in check as well. So I find that the younger they are, the healthier they are, the more they benefit from the higher end testosterone levels. And when you get the older guys, make that's a little bit more correlated with doing better lower, but there are so many exceptions to the rule that it's like a loose correlation.

All variant. Does that change if because you you touched on this a little bit earlier, if you're working with somebody that basically was blasting [ __ ] for a decade? Yeah, right. And now they want to kind of move into the TRT. Where to them, you're going to say 70 milligrams a week and they're going to laugh and spit your face and [ __ ] like that. But you noted before that they decrease in the thyroid and DHEA and D. You know, what are some of the other things that will result if their dose has been over a thousand milligrams per week for a decade? And then they start to basically, I don't want to say they do they build immunity, you know, to that higher dose to where they're going to need higher doses or will they be able to come down to lower doses?

So the literature says that androgen receptors upregulate when they're agonized. So if we use an example like amphetamine, amphetamine, you build a tolerance to because your dopamine receptors downregulate, so you need more to achieve the effect. The literature says that androgen receptors upregulate when you agonize them with with something like testosterone. So in theory, guys who've been blasting gear should be more sensitive or should be no less sensitive than other guys. That's not the case in practice, but that's what the literature says. In practice, when guys have been, you know, cruising on like 500 milligrams a week plus for years, maybe even decades, they definitely need more than a guy who's never had optimal testosterone levels before because their, and this is just my theory, their body has been conditioned around a much higher androgenic environment. So if you take a guy who's been on, you know, 500 milligrams a week and you bring him down to like, you know, 120 a week, that's probably going to feel pretty terrible for him. Now, would he level out there over time? Maybe, but I haven't seen that be the case. I think that when a guy's been on higher doses for a prolonged period, that's when we want to work him down into still a physiological range, which I think the physiological range is still two to three times the top of the reference range. But I think those guys are more looking at, again, if they're an average responder, we're looking at doses of like 200, 250, sometimes 300 milligrams a week. So the higher end of TRT. Because and and some people, like there seems to be this, um, there's not really like a hard line in the sand where it's like below here is TRT and above here is steroids. Um, and people like to go, the line's here or the line's there. There's no no line, there's just a a blurry mess in the middle. But when we look at testosterone optimization, testosterone is healthy for you up until the point that it's not. And in science, we call this an inverse U-shaped response, which is too little [ __ ], too much of [ __ ], different kind of [ __ ], but there's a sweet spot in the middle. But once you pass that sweet spot, you get problems, just like if there's too little, you get problems as well. And if you've been taking a large amount for a while, if you're also trying to maintain a super physiological amount of muscle mass as well, you're not going to do that on a low-end TRT dose. So it is important that if these guys are like, hey, and this is where it's so important to have a provider who knows what they're doing and to be transparent, it's like, I want to be able to take the higher end TRT dose that's going to not jeopardize my health, but that's going to allow me to get the best performance out of my training and maintain the best muscle mass and the best feeling of well-being. I advocate that for everyone because that's what's been the most therapeutic for me, and that's been what's been the most therapeutic for a lot of my clients as well. And that's where it's really important to go, okay, let's say a guy's going to take, you know, 250 a week for example, that's when it's really important that we're monitoring all those other blood markers to go, are you actually tolerating this? Which is what's your blood pressure? What's your red blood cell count? Are your lipids out of whack? Are your liver enzymes out of whack? Where's your eGFR? And if those things are all optimal and within, you know, healthy range, you.

I found it very interesting for myself. I I got started like years ago before I knew what I was doing on well, originally got started on 250 a fortnight. But once I kind of got a decently competent practitioner, I was on 175 a week split into two shots. And when I pushed it up to 250, which for me brings me right up to about top of the range, or sorry, double the top of the reference range, all my other health markers improved. So my blood pressure went down, my eGFR went up, my liver enzymes went down, my triglycerides went down, my HDL went down, my red blood cell count went down. All of these things that people would associate with taking too much testosterone, it went the inverse direction. So I think that it's important that we find the healthy dose for everyone. And for someone who's been taking a lot for a while, I think that's still going to be a higher end TRT dose. Yeah.

What are some of the other biomarkers that can be disrupted because of that long-term higher dose? I think when if someone's been on a long-term high dose for a while, I think we're going to learn more about the detriments of that by scanning the organs and running blood work. Um, blood work for me, and this is how I think blood work should be viewed by everyone, but a lot of people have a degree in Reddit ly who think that they are blood work is the be all and end all of health. I see so many people obsessing about, oh, this lipid means this, and this. Just go get your [ __ ] just go get it scanned and see what's actually going on in there because that's what you're using it as a proxy for. Blood work is really just a tool for us to go, do we need to scan this? Um, and then we can actually know what's going on there. So I think if someone's been running too much test for too long, or and anabolics for too long, we're going to be looking at heart enlargement, potentially. We're going to be looking at sluggish kidneys and we're going to be potentially looking at some liver swelling as well. Um, and hypertension. Those are the probably the big ones that we're going to be looking at. Um, as well as prolonged disrupted sleep cycles. And that can elevate things like hemoglobin and hematocrit too. Those are the main things that I see when I see blood work of someone who's like, let's say their sweet spot for TRT is like 200 to 250, but they're taking like 300 to 350. Like they're just, they're overdoing it, but not, you know, shooting through the moon. We tend to see, uh, hematocrit spike, we see, uh, LDL spike, sometimes triglycerides can spike, uh, AST and ALT will spike without training the day before, sometimes GGT will go up, and eGFR will go down. That's what I typically see.

Sure. In in those populations, you said about them needing a higher dose, and it's not the androgen receptor. Do you have any theories about what is causing that desensitization or that increased need? Is there some kind of aromatization or SHBG input or something that's meaning that they need more in that regard? I think I think there's two factors going on for that. I think, and uh, my friend Dr. Keith Nichols has spoken about this before me. Um, he taught me this as well, is that, and a lot of people have observed the same thing, it seems that exogenous testosterone is not as effective as endogenous testosterone. Meaning, if I, let's say, for some somehow, you had two identical twins, and one had a free testosterone, the top of the range naturally, and the other one had a free testosterone at the top of the range on TRT, I think the natural guy is going to be getting a better androgenic response to that. Why that is, no idea. But we observe that. I assume that when you make testosterone internally, maybe it metabolizes better, maybe there are so many factors as to why that could be. But it seems that exogenous testosterone is less efficient when we're looking at blood markers than internal testosterone, just from observation. So I think that's a factor. The other factor, though, I think it is, and again, Keith taught me about this too, this has been researched, so you can look it up, it's called Androgen Resistance. And this is the idea that some people, and I would argue younger people, have worse androgen receptor expression, and potentially they could also have upregulation of estrogen receptors as well. Maybe we don't really know. But there seems to be that the plausible theory that I have for why, you know, Bob needs double the amount of testosterone as John to feel the same benefits is that Bob's androgen receptors are not as sensitive, or there's not as many of them. It would be one of those two, netting less androgen receptor activity from X dose of testosterone. And I think that that is an outcome of the environmental factors, probably the same thing that caused the levels to potentially be low in the first place, is potentially the same thing that's leading to that. So it seems to be a, it it seems that there's both at play, but there seems to be a receptor issue going on there. And then when we look at factors going, well, how can we upregulate these receptors? That's when diet is really important. Things like carnitine, creatine, choline, surprise, surprise, all the things that you get from eating meat, which is good for you. Um, fat soluble vitamins, so vitamins A, E, D, K. These nutrients are very important in androgen receptor expression, as well as thyroid hormone as well.

Do you think with the the PED using population chronically, some kind of cortisol? There's a a cortisol player in there? Because as far as my awareness is that when you're putting a lot of exogenous androgens into a system, the body will usually upregulate cortisol. But it doesn't matter so much because all the receptor sites which they both bind to are being taken up by the exogenous. And again, that could be wrong. What I'm saying is, if that is right, and someone's ingesting injecting a gram of test for five years, you've got the body pumping out cortisol for forever with no real effect because they're masking it. And now as we're coming down, there could be some kind of prolonged, you know, almost PCT style, you know, coming off. Do you think maybe that could just last really long in people that have been on for a long time? Yeah, and this stuff's really interesting because we have no [ __ ] idea. Like, and this is, this is it's such a bodybuilders who are taking these drugs are just the ultimate guinea pigs that we're learning from and observing from. And that's why I love working with them because it's, it's fascinating when you, when they come to you with these situations. Um, this is where I will often see the downregulation of pregnenolone and DHEA. And I think that this is when it comes to the symptoms of when they come off, you know, grams of, you know, let's say, you know, they're using like nandrolone, tren, maybe they're using some oral like anavar or winstrol or whatever, and they're running these big cycles. And they come back down to like, you know, let's say 250 milligrams of testosterone. And they're going, why do I feel like crap on something that should make me feel at least pretty damn good? Maybe not as good as King Kong levels, but, you know, you've got the testosterone levels of the 0.01 percentile of the population, you should feel damn good. And it would seem that from observation, again, this isn't based on research because we don't have the studies on this, but it seems that the pregnenolone and DHEA downregulation, which, you know, we think of DHEA as an adrenal hormone, sorry, as a testicular or steroid hormone, but it is an adrenal hormone primarily. It seems that the downregulation of these hormones could be at play with why these people are not feeling well. I think the one thing that people often don't consider is that when we're looking at these anabolic steroids, which are analogues of mainly DHT, um, as well as nandrolone, but mainly DHT is that just like with female birth control, which is a progestin, which is an analogue of progesterone, is that these things bind to the receptor and they look like the androgen, like DHT, and they do a lot of the stuff that it does, but they don't have the same downstream metabolites. And it's the downstream metabolites of these hormones that have this really important balancing concert effect with the rest of your biology. And I think that some of the side effects that guys get from running cycles for prolonged periods, particularly with things like mood and sleep and like brain fog and sometimes digestion as well, is because they've now got these, uh, lack of these endogenous metabolites of things like DHT and estrogen, which they're not, they're basically throwing their body out of balance, and then they're experiencing the body being out of balance. And I think that contributes.

You noted with the long-term use, the the impact on organs. What would be the long-term impact on brain? Yeah, this is a really good question. My, as we spoke about before, my main area of interest is is the brain. Um, I I do, I don't believe that anabolic steroids are carcinogenic. I think they could be, though. Um, and what when we're looking at studies on anabolic steroids, the problem is that they're run in isolation. So if you're natural, and then you just start taking, I don't know, like 200, 300 milligrams a week of tren with nothing else, which I hope no one would ever do, but that's what they do in these studies, is you shut down your natural production. So you now have zero endogenous testosterone, DHT, estrogen floating around. That's neurotoxic in and of itself. So if they note things like neurotoxicity from these anabolic steroids in isolation, a big contributing factor is the fact that there is no endogenous testosterone underneath. So I, I also am not that optimistic or naive that I think that if you run a test base that now all of a sudden you can take all this gear and it not be neurotoxic. Um, it's it's not really clear what the impacts are long term. Um, there's definitely concerns that it could lead to things like early onset dementia, because it would be cardiotoxic or not cardiotoxic, uh, neurologically toxic to the brain tissue. I don't think we have data based on how guys are using these compounds at the moment to, um, ascertain what the reality of that is. Um, and I also think that some guys are throwing caution to the wind with going, oh, well, as long as I'm taking my, you know, six or seven over-the-counter supplements from iHerb or Amazon that I can now offset grams of gear's worth of use. I think that that's, you know, that's like wearing a blazer as a bulletproof vest. Um, you know, it's really optimistic. Um, I'm sure some stuff absolutely helps, but I think that there is a, there is a, there's a risk to reward, and I think some guys aren't factoring in risk. And that's why when I get guys come to me who are wanting to take steroids or take, you know, large doses of these compounds, and I, I really speak to them and go, when you're 40 or 50 or 60, if there are consequences to this that we don't fully understand at this stage, are you going to be okay with with that? And or do you maybe just want to optimize your testosterone level? And this is the other thing is, if you're running your TRT too low, you're always going to want to take more. But if you can get your testosterone up to the optimal level, like testosterone optimization therapy, I would argue that that is when you are going to feel your best 24/7 round the clock. And I think if you, you know, if you have, if you want to step on the stage at the Olympia, like I was just at the Olympia, you can't do that with TRT. Um, or, you know, if you're wanting to set, you know, records in, in, you know, non-drug tested competitions, then you're going to have to have that tradeoff. But I think for a lot of guys who are wanting to take all these things, what they're actually subjectively wanting to achieve and experience, unless it's those goals, they can achieve by just optimizing their testosterone replacement therapy. One thing that I see a lot is guys on TRT aren't taking enough. And I know that that's a really unpopular angle in this space, but heaps of guys are underdoing their TRT, you know, to stay within the reference range. And that's what's leading them to want to go and take more and more and more. Whereas if you can optimize your testosterone replacement therapy protocol, any, like, if I go and take a bit of, you know, primobolan or like even oral primobolan, like the compounds that typically feel the best, they all make me feel worse because my testosterone, there's no room in my body for more testosterone. I'm maxed out. Back when I was first starting my treatment, I used 25 milligrams of proviron a day for over a year straight because I didn't realize that I wasn't taking enough testosterone. I thought, oh, I need a bit more DHEA, I need a bit more this, bit more this. So if you can optimize your testosterone treatment, you want to get to the point that more androgens past the level that you're at create negatives. And I think that that optimal testosterone level is where we should be aiming to optimize TRT too.

What if we look at the brain consequences of the reverse? What are the risks for brain health for people who have low testosterone in the long term? It it seems that, so when we look at, if we even go beyond that and look at the diseases of aging, which there are four primary diseases of aging, which is diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and dementia, which are all, they all have one thing in common, which is they all involve to some degree insulin resistance. Um, dementia is sometimes referred to as type 3 diabetes or diabetes of the brain. So sex hormones, you know, in men, primarily testosterone, and in women, way more complicated, but particularly progesterone, is implicated in this. Is that these hormones are very neuroprotective, and they're very important for energy metabolism in the brain. When the brain is not receiving proper energy, it literally physiologically becomes depressed. So not only do you feel subjectively worse, your brain doesn't fire properly, but this can also lead to increased degradation of brain tissue, you know, shifting of gray matter and white matter. And it seems that this will age the brain at an accelerated rate. And that's why I'm such a big advocate for testosterone replacement therapy done properly is that if it's done correctly, and again, the way that you do it correctly is meeting the medicine halfway and living healthfully as if you would be making those levels naturally if you could, it should be protective against all of these situations. So when we look at the effect of low testosterone in the brain, not only are we looking at reduced energy metabolism, insulin resistance, neurologically, but again, coming back to that cortisol, adrenaline thing, we're also looking at more stress hormone activation. So subjectively, the brain is going to feel more anxious, more like monkey mind. Um, the GABA and glutamate ratio is also very important for how you're subjectively thinking and feeling. That's going to get all shut to [ __ ] but the brain is going to age faster and it's not going to function as well as it should. And that's why going on TRT when someone's hypogonadal, people often note that their brain fog is gone, and they feel more mentally at peace, like their mind is less like, and it's just more still and stoic. That I think is very therapeutic, both subjectively, but also long-term for brain health too.

You mentioned the GABA glutamate axis there, which is something I find interesting. So I just want to ask you about that. How much of that axis being off-kilter in most scenarios, glutamate being way too high, do you think is at least partial explanation for a lot of the behavioral issues for want of a better term that we maybe see in the population now? As in like, for one of, you know, being triggered too easily, being more emotionally driven, you know, however you want to sum it up, you know, what I'm kind of referring to there? Yeah, the GABA and glutamate ratio is really interesting. So GABA and glutamate are both metabolites of glutamine, um, which, as people know, it's like an amino acid. You get it from protein, helps with recovery stuff like that. So GABA is your brain's main inhibitory neurotransmitter. So it's what drugs like alcohol, benzodiazepines, that's what they work on. It sedates things, brings things down. Uh, glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmission. So it's not like, you know, dopamine or something like this, which feels good. It's just overactivity in the brain. And both are important in balance. You know.

Sometimes, when it comes to, you know, neurology, we go, "Oh, this one's good, this one's bad." You know, dopamine good, cords are bad. They're all really important. We sometimes get a bit myopic with things, but the ratio of these is very important.

And when this ratio is out of balance, typically it's, it's what's called excitotoxicity, which means that the brain is basically firing haphazardly, and then you're consciously embodying that. Being alive and this, for a lot of people, will feel like an overly anxious, uh, like a hair-trigger stress response and a monkey mind, the inability to calm and keep the mind still.

And one of the main, uh, hormones that's very important, that's two main hormones that's very important for GABA signaling, one is allopregnanolone, which is the five-alpha reduced form of progesterone, and the other one is, I can't pronounce it, but it's the, uh, one of the metabolites of DHT. So both of these hormones are contingent on five-alpha reductase. And when guys take drugs like dutasteride and finasteride, which block five-alpha reductase expression, my concern is that some guys who don't experience short-term side effects of this may be experiencing either unconsciously behavioral and neurological side effects of things because it is changing the brain architecture. But it could also be causing excitotoxicity over years and decades, which I think is something that we're going to discover down the track, is that these drugs may also accelerate early onset dementia. That's just a theory, though.

How much of an effect do you think lifestyle and also diet, especially additives, are having on that axis? Because obviously, we all know about like monosodium glutamate, which now is kind of the devil. So they sneak it in in the form of glutamic acid and other things. Are those things, in your opinion, having a meaningful effect?

I think they're, I think they're all contributing as well. Like, I read the ingredient labels of, like, the food in the supermarket here, and it's terrifying. Like, this, you know, in the Baltics, this doesn't exist. Um, and it's everywhere over here. It's, it's, it's mental. So I'm, I, I think that all of these things, you know, the artificial colors, the artificial sweeteners, the artificial flavors, things like MSG, which is what you mentioned before, um, all of these things as well, which can contribute to gut inflammation. So potentially, like, genetically modified gluten that you have a lot of over here, um, the, the solvents that they even use for natural flavors. I mean, I think all of this stuff is, you know, going back to, like, the pollutions, the plastics, the pesticides. I think all of this stuff is just adding and adding and adding and adding and adding to this toxic burden.

I wouldn't be surprised if, like, when people adopt, you know, things like carnivore diets or even, like, you know, like a whole food plant-based vegan diet, which I'm not an advocate for, but, you know, when people adopt this, by default, they tend to cut out a whole bunch of this artificial crap that's in the processed food. And I think that that is also a contributing factor as to why people feel better, you know, either under of the extreme that they go with these diets is because they're getting rid of all that processed junk. And, you know, over here, like, I never do, like, meal prep and stuff like that when I'm at home, but here, like, I travel with meals. Like, I'm conscious of what I'm eating. Like, I'm reading the ingredient labels because when you don't have this stuff ever, because it just doesn't exist in the country that I live in, and you come here and you have it, you feel it. Like, it's whereas for people over here, I assume it's very normal. But those food additives, we, we don't know if a tiny little bit of them is a difference because we can go, well, mechanistically, it's toxic, but then the amount that you're consuming is so small that it probably doesn't do anything. And that's a lot of people's argument. Over a lifetime, we don't know. And I'm a big believer when it comes to synthetic artificial [ __ ] that we're looking at guilty until proven innocent, not innocent until proven guilty.

True. So we've spoken a lot about testosterone, obviously, because we all love testosterone, we all want more. What about the role of estrogen in TRT? How big of a role does that play? What do you see in terms of good and bad practice in terms of AIs or like demonization of estrogen and so on?

Yeah, um, it's, it's an interesting field. Uh, when I got into TRT many years ago, it was everyone took, you know, either a quarter of a milligram or half a milligram of anastrozole twice a week to keep your estrogen within a sweet spot. Um, over time, that has changed. And now there, there seems to be kind of like a tribal divide between people who are pro-AI use, anti-AI use. There are people who think that some people are genetic over-aromatizers. Spoiler: there's no such thing as a genetic over-aromatizer. You're just fat, um, or you're drinking too much alcohol. Um, this is, this is just, this is just the way it is. Um, and when it comes to aromatase, when we look at what aromatase is, so firstly, if someone is doing a physiological hormone replacement therapy with testosterone, we are mimicking the correct amount of testosterone that should be in the body. This should not require, or necessitate, aromatase inhibition. Otherwise, the healthy 20, 21-year-old athletes would also have to take aromatase inhibitors. So a big part of why people are needing these to fix the side effects they're having is because they're taking big doses and they're giving themselves big roller coasters, which men are not meant to have, or they're taking too much of it. You know, I think that if you're, if you're taking, like, you know, 500 milligrams a week, a gram a week of testosterone, like, you know, people say, "Oh, you know, you want to take a whole bunch of primobol or something like that to offset the effects of estrogen." I don't know how people think that's healthier. It's still agonizing the [ __ ] inside the body anyway.

So I think when we're talking about PED cycles, I don't, you know, if people are going to do that stuff, I think it's all unhealthy. And, you know, aromatase inhibitors probably have a role in that. It's not something I do. But when it comes to hormone optimization therapy, I think that we should be looking at the side effects that men are having because the, the important thing that often gets overlooked is that guys are going, "I'm having these side effects," and the practitioner is going, "It's not estrogen. You never need to block aromatase." You know, aromatase inhibitors have no place. Cool. They've still got side effects, they've still got problems, and we need to work out how to fix these issues. In my experience, all of those issues come down to, and Jay Campbell has been a big advocate for this, um, is insulin resistance is driving increased aromatase expression. That's a big one. Too much alcohol consumption and hypothyroidism. Those ones account for, and you, excess body fat kind of comes with all of those as well. All of those, in my experience, account for all the side effects that we see from excess estrogen on TRT.

The way around it is, firstly, you increase frequency. So I used to sell mobile phones and I was at university, um, and when someone came in with a phone problem, we'd say, "Have you turned it off and turned it back on?" Increasing injection frequency is to turn it off and turn it back on on TRT. It doesn't solve every problem, but it's a really easy place to start. Um, and it solves a lot of problems. So if someone is, you know, 40, 50, 60 pounds overweight, you may need to do daily injections until you lose the weight. That's not going to be forever. Daily injections get old after a while, especially when you're putting it into the deltoid. But it's hard, but it's not that hard. You can do it. But that's a big factor. But for a lot of guys, it's going from two to three injections a week can make a difference.

Now, if I've got someone who is obese, alcoholic, insulin resistant, firstly, something like metformin is a better thing to reach for than an aromatase inhibitor, in my opinion. Because, you know, you can Google metformin, aromatase, and lo and behold, in people who are insulin resistant, it will reduce aromatase expression because you're correcting the insulin resistance, which is what's driving the increased aromatase expression. But if someone is in a situation where they're like, "Hey, I'm doing daily injections or, you know, whatever, and it's not working," the way that we can get around this and we can restore an optimal androgen to estrogen to DHT balance is transscrotal testosterone cream. Which is a compounded 20% cream. The typical cream you get from the pharmacy, like Andro-Forte and stuff, or test gel, or like 2 to 5%. This is a 20% cream with enhanced absorption. You apply it to a shaved scrotum twice a day. You put it on the ballsack because it's not going to, uh, transfer to other people unless you're rubbing your balls on them, which people generally don't like when you do that. Um, maybe some people do. But you put, but it also has the skin on the scrotum is very thin, so you have more absorbency into the body. And the reason why we theorize that leads to the elimination of these side effects with still optimal testosterone levels is that because the testosterone is not having to be metabolized in the liver, they're not having to clear the ester, the cypionate or enanthate. That system seems to be compromised and not working as well in men who are inflamed and overweight and drinking too much alcohol. So if, if we can put a transscrotal cream in the mix, the testosterone is basically going straight into the bloodstream. But it's also having more exposure to the 5-alpha reductase enzyme, which we know is an antagonist internally to estrogen. So when an individual is sick and inflamed, sometimes we look at it and go, "Oh, they're making too much estrogen." A big factor is they're not making enough DHT. Because excess body fat, excess alcohol consumption, hypothyroidism, all of these factors, insulin resistance, all downregulate, uh, 5-alpha reductase expression as well. So when we go through the, when we go through the scrotum, we can now get a scenario where we can actually mimic the hormonal balance of a healthier man without needing to use medications that may cause further side effects.

The problem with the aromatase inhibitors is that even if you dose them to the point that you get your levels about right, and I've spoken to guys who are advocates of them, and they will admit that this is still a drawback. They still kind of make you feel a bit funky sometimes. They can still cause joint pain, even if you don't tank your levels. They can still cause some brain fog. They can make you feel like a bit of a dumb dumb. They can make you feel a bit slow. So I think that a good practitioner should be able to avoid the need for them. But it's very important that guys who are having these side effects, which are estrogenic in nature, still get them resolved.

True. And how often do you have to, how often do you run into needing to manipulate SHBG with your clients? Because that seems to be one that again, is either demonized and it's the devil and you everyone has to do something about it, or other people think it's really not that important. So how often is that having a meaningful effect on people and how do you know that it is?

Yeah, SHBG is something where everyone seems to want it to be higher or lower. It seems like no one's ever happy with their SHBG and they just blame it for all their problems. Um, outside of extremes, I, I can test the idea that SHBG is a determining factor for injection frequency. Because what determines injection frequency is the half-life and metabolism of the ester, which is impacted by liver enzymes. SHBG impacts how much of the testosterone is bound and free. That impacts how much testosterone dose you need to increase the free level. I think we should all be injecting as often as we sustainably can, which for most people is three times a week or twice a week if you're lazy. And SHBG just determines how much total testosterone you need to bring those levels up to optimize the free testosterone. Um, SHBG can be dysregulated by things like prolonged massive caloric deficits or prolonged states of deep ketosis will drive it up. Liver disease will drive it up or down depending on the case. And hypothyroidism will drive it right down. Um, insulin resistance will also drive it down as well. So the, I look at SHBG kind of like your thumbprint. It's as long as you're healthy, some people, it's, your SHBG is your SHBG. For some guys, it's going to be 20, for some time, it's going to be 40, 60, 70, and you just got to work with it. It does go up with age. But eliminating, sorry, trying to modulate or manipulate SHBG levels is trying to push water in a different direction. It's not going to work. You know, you can take 10 milligrams of boron and you knock your SHBG down by 20 points, and then it will come back by 20 points because your body will just hyper-excrete the boron. Um, there's not a healthful way to lower or manipulate SHBG. You just got to work with it.

So if someone is coming back high total but low free, perhaps because of SHBG, as long as they're not having side effects, would that just be a sign to that they need more to get their free in the correct place?

Yeah. So when someone comes to me with like, you know, stellar total, you know, SHBG of like, I had a guy yesterday who had like 95 SHBG, which is pretty high. Um, my general kind of joking statement with it is, if it's got one digit or three digits, you got a problem. Um, but with that said, you know, 80, 90 is pretty high. Um, in those situations, I'll always look to be like, is there a root cause that has dysregulated this? So if a high SHBG, I'm looking at, you know, is this guy crash dieting? Is this guy like, you know, in a horrible ketogenic diet where he's not, you know, eating sufficient protein regularly to keep out of that deep ketogenic state? Um, and in those scenarios, as long as there's not something that we can actually resolve and fix, it's something that we have to work around. In which case, yeah, we have to bring the androgens up to be able to support the free testosterone. Um, when we do, if someone naturally, you know, let's say has good total, low free, high SHBG, and then you come in with TRT, people need to be aware that the SHBG will drop. And for some people, you know, let's say this guy's at 95, for some people, it'll gradually over six months drop to 80, 70, 60. Like, sometimes it will come right down to like 30 or 40. So if you're going to keep your testosterone dose the same, then that could potentially lead the free to go up and up and up and up and cause problems. So some people ask, like, why do we monitor free test? Why do we monitor bloods on TRT? When someone's got their blood work dialed in and have had their dose dialed in for months and years, one, because we legally have to. The government makes us do it. But it's also important that we look at that every six months because if your SHBG changes dramatically, which it can in the first year, that is going to impact your free significantly, which may impact your symptoms and your dose.

In, um, then the opposite problem to what most people focus on, really low SHBG. Do you find that to be common in people who would call themselves like non-responders or hyporesponders?

No, I just find that they're a pain in the ass. Um, no, it's, uh, the low SHBG thing is interesting. Some of the healthiest people I know have an SHBG of like 8 or 9. Low SHBG, going back to the question you had before, which I forgot to address, can be another marker that you're taking too much testosterone. Is your SHBG can plummet. Um, it's just, it doesn't mean that you're taking too much. It just can mean. So if you have an SHBG of 20 and then it comes back at like six, like that's one of the ways that like when guys come and see me and they're like, "Oh yeah, I'm not taking anything extra," and I'm like, "Really?" I'm like, "Why is your SHBG at four?" And they're like, "Oh yeah." Um, so SHBG being super low can indicate that your, your dose is too high. But it can indicate hypothyroidism or insulin resistance. So that's when I'll always run a full thyroid panel, like what you spoke about before, antibodies, TSH, T3, T4, um, reverse T3, everything, as well as looking at the HBA1C, um, to see if those things are a contributing factor. So when SHBG is low, you just got to go, "This may mean there's something going on," but it doesn't mean that there is. And I think that's where guys can freak out and go, "Oh, my SHBG is low, it must be because I've got XYZ." No, it just means that we need to look at it. But you might just genetically have low SHBG, and that's fine. So it's a, it's a bit of a tricky one to work with. But when SHBG is very low, that's when I think it's always important to inject as much as possible. But if someone's got like a single digit SHBG, you really should be injecting as much as you possibly can. But I think everyone should be doing that anyway. But I would argue the lower the SHBG, the more that that is necessitated. Is that just because they're going to get that bigger spike? Because less of that testosterone is going to get temporarily bound up? So like, if a person injects 50 milligrams with super low SHBG, they'd get a bigger spike than if they didn't have low SHBG?

It's more so that less of it's going to be bound, so more of it's going to be metabolized out really quick. SHBG-bound testosterone has a half-life of about a day. Bound has a half-life of like somewhere around an hour, if not a bit less. So the lower your SHBG, the more of that bolus you're going to eliminate quickly, which would lead to this kind of fluctuation of symptoms or or negative, you know, symptom response. These are guys who do really well with like daily, three times a week, every other day injections, or looking at cream as well. Um, yeah, and it, it, it seems to play a big role in, in symptoms for them. But the argument is that if you've got high SHBG, it means you don't have to inject as often. That's just not true. You just need to inject more.

So where do you see, um, the role of things like the GH secretagogues, Gogs, and CJC, and things like that? Because again, a lot of people seem to just get put on those because it's like, "Oh, well, surely it just makes everything better."

Yeah, fries and the cook. Yeah, sure. So like, where, what do you see their role? When are they actually warranted? And when is it just a scenario because people are throwing it in because they think it just can't hurt? Again, I'm going to piss people off, but I have not found anyone, and I'm sure they, they are out there, but I haven't come across them. Everyone I know who's promoting them is selling them, um, whether they have an affiliate code for some peptide underground site, or whether they're running a clinic. Um, I'm, I'm very conservative because I had a brain injury. I'm personally looking at things going, if something isn't unknown, unless we really need to use it, I think you're better off not. So when it comes to increasing growth hormone, there's a really good way to do it. It's called growth hormone. Um, I think that if we want to increase growth hormone, we should use growth hormone. The problem is that growth hormone is really [ __ ] expensive, and it makes it cost-prohibitive. I guess the question that people need to ask themselves is, going, "Do I want to take something that hasn't been studied long-term, that we don't fully understand, so that I can save some money?" Is that a trade-off that I want to make? I don't. And I, when people come to me and ask what should they do, I go, "I don't think that's a good idea." Because I'm going to be advocating for your long-term best interest. With that said, I think if people do want to use them, I think if moreland and CJC is probably the most benign out of all of them, um, because they are, it's the cleanest. All the other ones seem to impact other pathways, like, like mainly ghrelin, as well as cortisol. So when we're looking at Ipamorelin and CJC, like Ipamorelin is basically telling your body to make more growth hormone, and then CJC is upregulating the receptor availability for that. I think it's a good way to net more growth hormone activity from an outcome standpoint. But from a long-term health longevity risk reward ratio standpoint, I'd be going, "I just prefer people to use growth hormone." MH.

True. And what about, um, the use of enclomiphene? Whether it's as a monotherapy, do you see a place for that, or used in conjunction with? Again, that's another one that quite often people who are taking it don't actually know why they're taking it, quite often. So how do you see that being used?

Yeah, there's a good place for it. Is there a bin? Um, yeah, over there. Um, I, yeah, I'm, I'm not a fan of the whole enclomiphene thing. Um, I'm not a fan of Clomid either. But when we're looking at enclomiphene, what, what enclomiphene is doing, and enclomiphene just being the half of clomiphene that does mechanistically what we're looking at Clomid to do, which is to block the estrogen receptor in the hypothalamus. When we block the estrogen receptor in the hypothalamus, it tells the body that the, uh, sex hormone cascade is deficient. So your body will then upregulate luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone, and this will then create more testosterone. The idea is that you can either do this in place of TRT, you can upregulate your testosterone production, which sounds sick, or you can take it with your TRT, which will prevent your natural system from shutting down. It all sounds awesome. The problem is that it also blocks estrogen receptors in a whole bunch of other tissues in the body. And blocking estrogen receptors in the brain, it's not just going to upregulate androgen production, it's going to do a bunch of other stuff, and we don't know what it's going to do. And clomiphene is not approved in Europe. It, it will never be approved in Europe. It has been banned in Europe. It's not approved in Australia. We have no long-term studies at all of what this is going to be doing to people. Um, but the most important thing is that when people take it, their levels go up, but they don't feel better. They don't feel as if they had achieved those levels either naturally or with TRT. So they don't get symptom resolution. And I feel like because it's interesting here, like in Australia, there's like five clinics, and of them, like maybe two of them are reputable. The one that I just opened in the Baltics, there's none. There's no TRT clinics in Eastern Europe. In the UK, there's like four or five. Here, there's like four or five within 10 minutes of where I'm staying. In Florida, like they're everywhere. So I think it's a really attractive marketing proposition. I did my undergrad in digital marketing. I very much understand this. It's basically selling you a, "Here's your cake and you can eat it too. Here's all the benefits of TRT without the side effects. You don't have to inject." It sounds awesome. It's just that it doesn't make people feel better. It tends to cause side effects. And I have concerns long-term as to whether it's actually going to be detrimental for other systems in the body. So I don't like it.

Someone did mention the other day when we had a conversation about it, who's, who's someone who I, I respect very highly, um, who said that the theoretical place for it, again, just to give the devil's advocate here, is if someone, let's say, is overweight, they're wanting to increase their testosterone levels, and they believe that if they, you know, we have, you know, let's say historical labs to show that when they were leaner, their testosterone levels were good, you could temporarily use enclomiphene to then support the testosterone environment, take it out, you didn't suppress your natural production, and then you could not need TRT for life. That theoretically makes sense to me. Whether the risk to reward ratio is in favor, whether it would actually be effective for achieving that outcome, I don't know. But that's the only plausible argument that I've heard in favor of it.

Sure. Um, I want to move on to just lifestyle factors a little bit now, if that's okay, unless you have anything more about TRT. You've put out a decent amount of material, reels, whatever, about the importance of circadian rhythm. MH. So we all understand it's important, we all kind of get it, right? But at a physiological level, let's say we take two people. You know, the difference is, this guy gets up when the sun rises and goes to bed when it sets. This guy is like a night shift worker. So does the polar opposite. You know, at a physiological level, what does going in line with the circadian rhythm do for us that creates all these benefits?

Sure. So where I'm from in Perth, Western Australia, a lot of people work on the mines. So they, we call it FIFO, fly-in, fly-out. And you fly up to the mines, and you, a lot of these guys work underground, or they work like massive shifts for a couple of weeks, and they come home and they make like very, very, very good money without, you know, qualifications. So it's a very attractive thing for guys to do, particularly when they're younger. And the other guys that we've seen shift work typically, like paramedics, nurses, and police are the main ones who I would work with who do shift work. Sometimes those shift work swings can actually be pretty forgiving. Like they give you long enough that you can, they do like a morning shift, and they do like a day shift, and they do a night shift, and it's kind of long enough that you can get into a rhythm and you can be okay with it. But some of them are very, uh, sporadic shifts, or some of them are just like always night shift, and it can be pretty rough. Um, everyone who I've met who's been doing night shift long-term hasn't been doing very well. Typically, you know, inflammatory markers will go up, stress hormones will be dysregulated, and a lot of the time, particularly once they've been doing it for years, they just feel really [ __ ]. I think that shift work ages you prematurely. And I think that, again, exception to the rule, of course, but I think shift work is very unhealthy for you. And what is unhealthy is that you are completely out of alignment with the rhythms of the sun and the moon based on where you are in the world. And this isn't like a super esoteric thing. Like the body is on a clock. Um, and the sun, particularly at different points in the day, will deliver different spectrums of light, which send different epigenetic signals to your body to do different things. So, and Chinese medicine is very big on this, is that your, your organs work at different times of the day and so forth. But what is the most important, when I look at it very simply, because I think there's a lot of esoteric stuff there, but when I look at it very simply, your, we kind of have these two hormonal rhythms. We have a day hormonal rhythm, where in the morning, you get a spike in, uh, you get a spike in cortisol, you get a spike in DHEA, which then trickles off over the day. And then at night, you get a spike in melatonin. And these cortisol and melatonin rhythms kind of work in, in balance with each other. Melatonin is a very important antioxidant for every single tissue in the body, especially the brain. So when we dysregulate cortisol and melatonin rhythms, we now don't have energy when we should have energy, and we're not tired when we should be tired. And when we look at the prolonged effect of this, will we counter not having energy by using stimulants? Easy solution, not good in the long term, but can be solved in the short term. But when we look at the long-term effects of not getting proper sleep cycles, proper REM and deep sleep cycles, and proper melatonin production, we not only reduce a huge amount of really important endogenous antioxidant activity, um, but we, we also now have eliminated proper REM and deep sleep, which is very important for things like memory formation, but also physical recovery and neurological recovery as well. So it's when you dysregulate your 24-hour hormonal rhythm, you then run into the negative side effects of that. Cortisol is very important as an anti-inflammatory as well in the morning. So the prolonged kind of like what we're talking about with testosterone, the chronic effects of it, the chronic effects of your cortisol and melatonin being dysregulated can be very aging to the body and very inflammatory as well.

Okay. So for those of us that, you know, are inside all day, which is the vast majority of us, what are we looking at in terms of sun exposure habits to try and keep us on track? Because, you know, it's not realistic for everyone to be outside all day, right? So there's got to be some kind of, to put it worse, probably, uh, like minimal effective dose of sunlight to keep you where you should be. What, what would you view that as?

Yeah. So for people who have the luck, I think the best way to look at it is get as much sun as you can without burning. And it's like, well, how do you do that? Is you get more short bursts of sun until you build up a tan so that you can tolerate longer sessions. And morning and evening sun is going to be more gentle than midday sun, particularly in countries like Australia. Um, now I live in a part of the world which, you know, during the, during the summer, we have a 24-hour sunlight day. And then during the winter, we have about two hours of sunlight. When it gets really dark, like it goes like full, like north of the wall, Game of Thrones [ __ ]. Um, so in, in situations like that, if you live somewhere where it gets really dark and cold for winter, vitamin D has a half-life of nine months, so you can bank it. So you bank, you bank sun in the summer. People do this in the parts of the world that I live. They spend a lot of time outside in the summer. I see more vitamin D deficiencies in Australia than I do in the Baltics because people take it for granted and then [ __ ] go outside. So it's very important, like, if, if we're going to look at going, "How do we get sun exposure in an efficient way?" Getting little bursts of it at different points in the day, particularly dawn and dusk, because that's what's going to line up your circadian rhythm. So getting small, just going outside as much as you possibly can for short periods at different times of the day is going to be the most bang for your buck way to improve sun exposure. You know, when I used to work in an office in Perth, um, I used to, you know, for, for lunch, I would just, you know, have a small lunch and a protein shake, and then I'd just go for a walk around the block for my whole lunch break, just to be outside. You know, when people would go outside for like a morning or an afternoon cigarette, I'd just go and, you know, drink a coffee outside. And you just stand outside, even if it was overcast. Just standing outside. And I think that that's, if we can all make a conscious effort just to be outside more, that is something that's going to be a net positive over time for sure.

I mean, I, I can attest that we were, we were in Finland one year for like European championships or something. I think it was June or July, and we stayed at this this Airbnb, and they didn't have a single curtain or blind. Yeah, in their house. And this was when it went dark for like two hours between three and five AM. That was it. And they were like, "Trust me, if you lived here, you would understand." Because if there's sun, you do not say no to it. Because then the reverse. So we were all there just lay in bed at 3 AM, like quite awake, this whole time. But it was weird because we probably were all getting like two or three hours of sleep at night for about a week, felt totally fine. Yeah, like did not feel tired at all. And you'd get, you'd get 12 hours of sleep in winter. So it's, they're, they're very in alignment with the, the seasons over there because the seasons are so strong. But yeah, my house is the same. Like I had to install blinds in my, in my study to be able to film content because in the, in the summer, it would just come in. But yeah, you, you really appreciate life when you take the sun away for like six to seven months, and then you give it back. Like, it's, it's like adults on school holidays over there. Like, like when the sun comes out, it's like, "Hey, I want to train." "No, I'm gone fishing." [ __ ] off. Like, it's people are just outside enjoying themselves. And then in the winter, like people, like, you know, buckle down and work or become alcoholics. Um, it, it can go either way. But it's, yeah, it's very much like that in my house as well. There we don't have blinds because if the sun's up, cool, enjoy. We have, you know, obviously most of us are getting familiar with the effects of blue light and what that can do. So it might be worth just touching on good practice there. But what do you see of the role of perhaps using red light strategically to maybe keep us in that circadian rhythm and help people unwind who are perhaps stuck in front of computers, you know, eight, nine hours a day, and so on?

Yeah, this was something that I, I, I used to think was like majoring in the minors. I used to be like, "This is just not really worth it." I, I haven't delved into, like, the red light panels myself because I just haven't gotten around to it. And I also, I think that the, when we're looking at ROI, I think that maybe these are a bit lower down the list, um, especially if you live in an area where you can get sun. Like, if you have good sun exposure for most of the year, I think red light therapy is just a gadget and gizmo that most people would get a low ROI from. If you live in the darker areas of the world, then yeah, maybe. Um, look, I, I think that when it comes to eye strain, I think that's where the blue light blocking glasses can come in, particularly since the monitors have all gone 4K. Like, I love my red glasses things because I get eye strain at the end of the day, just from looking at this [ __ ] screen, especially post-COVID, now that so many of us are doing through a screen what we used to do face-to-face. I think that that can be something that is worth, you know, paying, you know, 40, 50 bucks for a pair of those and wearing them at the end of the day, kind of like safety goggles for using a screen long-term. Um, I also think that, however, it's something that it's impossible to avoid. You know, fluorescent lights everywhere, you know, everyone's got a phone. It is going to be there to a degree. And that's why I'm big on one, melatonin supplementation. I think that everyone should take melatonin if you tolerate it and if you want to. I think that it's beneficial for everyone, kind of like a multivitamin. But I also think that when it comes to the blue light stuff, you know, people talk about, you know, I have like a program on my computer which will take the blue light out of the screen at the end of the day. Um, if I'm going to use my phone in bed, I have it so if you triple tap the button, it takes all the blue out and it's just red. I think that stuff's helpful. I don't think it makes a huge difference. Um, I prefer to look at practices that you can do. So I like to have like the, the red light salt lamps in the house to replace the blue globes at the end of the day. But I think one of the best things people can do is rather than try to biohack it, just like charge your phone in a different room. Get like a bedside table and read a book before you go to bed. Like, I think that's a better biohack than getting the gadgets and gizmos, personally.

So you've mentioned melatonin a few times now, you're very much in the pro camp. Yeah. There seems to be this huge spectrum from nobody should take it, it's awful, it causes memory loss in later life, and probably a lot of other myths that are out there, to it can cure cancer and you don't need anything in your life if you superdose melatonin. So you said it's something that's probably beneficial for just about everyone. What are the benefits we're going to get from it? And you said there's probably a minority that don't respond well to it. How does that present itself?

Yeah, so I don't sell melatonin. Maybe I should. So when it comes to melatonin, firstly, there is this myth that up until about, it was about 2010, 2012, I'm not sure when the study came out, but there was a period where we believed that melatonin dysregulated your natural production, kind of like TRT dysregulates your testosterone production. This was very definitively debunked. And if people want to read the very layperson summary of the research, if you just go on to Google and search Examine Melatonin, examine.com have a really good summary of this literature. Unfortunately, I'm not going to name names, but there are very big people in the YouTube science space who perpetuate this myth. I don't know if they're incompetent, or if there's some kind of special interest funding, or if they just can't read. But this is, this has been very heavily debunked. So it does suppress melatonin while it's circulating, but it doesn't suppress melatonin the following night. And people go, "Oh, well, I took melatonin for a week and then I stopped taking it and I slept worse." It's like, "Yeah, that's why you started taking melatonin in the first place, dummy, because you weren't sleeping properly in the first place." Um, so that, that's just objectively not true. Um, when we look at, when people take melatonin, one of the complaints that people have is that when they wake up in the morning, they feel groggy. Like they're like, "I feel zapped. I can't get out of bed. I have to drink like six cups of coffee to get going." For the majority of people, that will go away after three to five days. And that will come back anytime you put the dose up. So if you go from like one to three milligrams or three to five milligrams, that will come back every single time you put the dose up. Uh, so melatonin and glutathione are your body's two chief antioxidants. The only studies which show detriment, there's a great book called "The Miracle Molecule." Uh, I can't pronounce the guy's surname, I feel awful because I keep mispronouncing it. John L. L. I believe. He's an advocate for high-dose melatonin as well. Um, but the only studies that have shown detriment, and he cites this in his book, and there's so much of this stuff in science, like it, some people don't believe how bad a lot of research, uh, design studies are. And this is something you learn when you study science at a tertiary level, just how bad the, uh, experiment designs are which we draw conclusions from. Rats are nocturnal, but they give them melatonin at night and they go, "Oh, it causes all these problems." It's like, "Yeah, [ __ ] nocturnal." It's like if you, if I gave you melatonin every day at 9 AM, you probably wouldn't have a good time. Um, so dumb. But and yeah, again, people can look this up. They give the rats melatonin at nighttime. So melatonin has been shown to be beneficial to virtually every different system and different cell in the body. Um, it modulates the estrogen receptor, which people are often very interested in in in in this field. And the negative side effects regarding, you know, sexual function, penis development, testicle size, prolactin are only found when they give it to the rats at nighttime because it messes with the circadian rhythm. Um, melatonin is something that there's also a lot of disagreement about dosing. Some people say you should only take like 0.1 or 0.3 of a milligram. Some people say you should take a lot. It's individual. I think that, well, firstly, when we look at the research, it shows the anti-cancer benefits of melatonin seem to set in above 20 milligrams. But, you know, arguably, if you took a low dose for your whole life, you know, we don't have research on that. Um, I personally take 50. I've gone as high as 300. Um, I didn't maintain that because there was a linear cost increase. It started to be more expensive and growth hormone and the benefits, the diminishing returns for me, set in about 50. So I reverted back to about 50. Um, and I find that the people who benefit the most from high-dose melatonin are people with physical pain that prevents them from sleeping properly. So I've got two issues with bulging discs in my back. I find it very difficult to get comfortable in bed. So in these situations, the research has shown that when someone's in chronic pain at night, their melatonin output is reduced, and their synthesis is reduced, so they need more. And it wasn't until I put the melatonin dose up consistently that I could actually sleep through the night. Um, and this is after many years of pain. Um, melatonin also reduces nocturnal urination. So not wetting the bed, um, but getting up to pee during the night. So if you're someone who's always having to get up to pee during the night, I mean, assuming that you're not just drinking a bunch of water before you go to bed, it's also something that can be looked at as well for that. Um, Dr. John Crisler, the late Dr. John Crisler, had a very good protocol for titrating melatonin. And he said, you go on to iHerb or Amazon or whatever, and you buy one, three, and five milligram capsules from a reputable brand, Life Extension, Thorne, and you basically titrate up by one milligram every two to three days. And you do this until you reach a point where your sleep gets worse. And when your sleep gets worse, typically you'll just kind of have like waking dreams or you won't be able to actually get into proper sleep states. That means you've overshot the mark that works for you. And in my experience, for most people, the most beneficial dose of melatonin, again, they say the physiological amount of melatonin is 0.1 to 3 milligrams. That's the physiological amount for someone who's bombarded with blue light all day, not someone who was, you know, living ancestrally. So I think that, well, from what I've seen, three to 10 milligrams is the most beneficial for the average guy. And then for people who are dealing with like chronic pain and difficulty sleeping, 20 to 50 milligrams can work well. The world's leading researcher on melatonin, I think, takes 180. Um, and then there's another one who takes, I think, like a gram or something like that, which is very high. But that's the kind of dose ranges that we're typically looking at is about three to five milligrams up to 50 in extreme cases. But for most people, about, yeah, about 10 milligrams.

Sure. And for someone who just isn't well-suited to it, what will any dose kind of present like for that?

Grogginess doesn't go away, or the sleep, the sleep quality is worse. So even taking 0.1 of a milligram, the sleep quality is crap. One thing I'll also add is that people will often ask.

If there's a difference between like over-the-counter and pharmaceutical melatonin, there's a massive difference. So, micronized melatonin will absorb much slower because it will bypass the first-pass metabolism in the liver and it will absorb gradually in the gut. So, it creates like a pseudo time-release, uh, system.

The problem with the actual time-release matrix, like the XR melatonins that you buy, is studies have shown that even like a 6-milligram dose will elevate serum melatonin for like 16 hours. So, this suppresses your morning cortisol. So, I don't recommend XR melatonin at all. I like the micronized melatonin because this will gradually release over about 6 hours. So, you can get that prescribed.

If people want to buy it over the counter, um, Life Extension makes a 1.5-milligram version and it's called IR XR melatonin. There's a brand called Quality of Life who make a 5-milligram melatonin and I believe the Gorilla Mind Dream product also uses a small amount of it as well. They're the three products I found that have the micronized version.

Sure. So, for those who are taking maybe a cheap over-the-counter one, would you then say you're taking 10 milligrams a day and you swap to the micronized version? I presume you'd probably bring the dose back because, you know, you're taking something that's going to have a more meaningful effect.

Yeah, typically when people say, "Oh, melatonin doesn't do anything for me," I'm like, "Try the micronized version." And they'll go, "Oh, like I had like my mom's a hardcore insomniac her whole life and, you know, tried like the regular one and 3 milligrams and 5 milligrams didn't do anything." And then I didn't tell her that I gave her a different version. I was like, "Try this one." And she's like, "Oh, this one works." So, it wasn't placebo. I was like, "Here's a different brand." And it was the 5-milligram micron version.

Sure. So, you know, most people are going to benefit from taking melatonin. And are there any other things that you would put in as almost like a blank statement that most people would probably benefit from supplement-wise?

I've seen that Omega-3 has become controversial recently, um, because like there's a study where like some guy went to like a GNC and bought like five like fish oil. It's ridiculous. He bought a bunch of fish oil from some GNC store and then found out that a bunch of them were rancid. That doesn't, that just means that that GNC was selling [ __ ] rancid fish oil. It doesn't mean that oil. It was, it was one of the dumbest things I've ever read. But it, it's become like common knowledge.

So, I think that optimizing the Omega-3 index is really important because of the importance of Omega-3 in the inflammatory balance in the body. Some people like to lump, uh, EPA, DHA, high-quality Omega-3 into like all rancid polyunsaturated fats. I think this is a bastardization of of how science and how the body works when it comes to fish oil. I think you always want to get a premium quality fish oil. I think it's something you never should skimp on. You want it in triglyceride form. You want it to be as concentrated in EPA, DHA per soft gel as possible. A lot of these fish oil soft gels is like you'd have to take like 30 or 40 of them to get like a clinically effective dose. And the clinically effective dose for Omega-3 is about 2 to 4 grams of combined EPA, DHA. So, even for the high-strength products, that can be like six to eight soft gels.

I did a spreadsheet a long time ago working on being like, what's the highest quality, uh, most affordable milligram per milligram per dollar that ticks all the boxes. And again, no affiliation, it's the Sports Research Triple Strength Omega product. I saw it at Vitamin Shop here the other day, um, so very accessible. It's on iHerb, it's on Amazon. Um, I take four of those a day. I encourage my clients to take at least two of those a day. And that is what will allow us to actually get into an optimal Omega-3 index, which is therapeutic for virtually everything. So, I think that high-quality Omega-3 is valuable for just about everyone.

Melatonin, I think that if you travel a lot, um, something like a sustained-release, uh, reduced or liposomal glutathione. Thorne makes a good one. I think that's great if you travel a lot or you have young kids and you're getting sick a bunch. Outside of that, though, I mean, I don't think, I mean, you could definitely make an argument for like, you know, things like desiccated organ capsules being beneficial for everyone. I mean, sure, getting some organ meat in the diet without having to taste organs, I think that's great. But outside of that, I think if people spent the monthly supplement budget on upgrading their groceries to getting, you know, good quality pasture-raised eggs, you know, good quality organic dairy that hasn't been like ultra-pasteurized, which I've noticed a lot of the milk here is ultra-pasteurized, and like high-quality grass-fed red meat, I think that's where you'd get more ROI.

Sure. So, like with the organ supplements you mentioned there, is there anything for those of us that don't eat organs that is almost irreplaceable? Like, you can't get from anywhere else, or would it be a case of if you're eating those things that you listed that you're probably covered?

The organ meat argument is interesting. There's, so in the part of the world that I'm from, so Lithuania became, uh, independent of the Soviet Union in 1991. And one thing that got left over from that is a whole bunch of Soviet medicine. Um, Russian medicine is fascinating. Um, Russian medicine is, it came from Austria. But like Cerebrolysin, which a lot of people talk about, that's Soviet medicine. Um, and the Soviets were very big on bioregulator peptides. And these are the unique DNA, RNA signaling molecules that are found in organ meats. This idea that if you eat liver, it will support your liver. This stuff is not that well researched. There's some good literature that shows that there might be some effect from these things. I don't take them because of that. I think there might be a nice therapeutic benefit. These, uh, over Soviet medicines, which I think people are now buying online, which I think is wild. But they basically concentrate them and put them into capsules to support the organs. I don't recommend people go out and do that on a whim, but that's the practice of medicine that they did.

But I'm mainly looking at them as a very concentrated form of just bioavailable micronutrients. So, kind of like a, when you look on the back of a multivitamin label, you're getting like 100 to a thousand to whatever percentage of all these different synthetic multivitamins. Studies show that they do work in increasing, you know, those vitamin levels. I don't think they're toxic. Some people think they're toxic. I don't think they are. But I think having all the other naturally occurring enzymes and cofactors in organ meats, although you get less of them, I think that's still going to be the thing that confers therapeutic benefit. I just found though, I took all the best multivitamins for years and never felt anything taking them. You give me like two servings of like liver capsules and that gives me an energy boost. So, because I feel that objectively, I'm more, sorry, subjectively, I'm more interested in those kind of supplements. But I don't really think that everyone needs to take them. I just go, if people want something that you don't need, but could benefit from, I think those kind of supplements are, are pretty good. But I'm very minimal on on supplements. I think that I used to be very heavy with supplements, particularly with supplements to support sleep and to reduce stress. But I have found that over the years, if you upgrade your diet and you really nail your diet and your lifestyle, they end up being just low ROI in terms of money spent.

Sure. So, earlier you mentioned, um, the importance of like aerobic fitness. So, obviously for the for the population that we're kind of talking to here, who are trying to optimize their hormone levels, perform as well as possible, let's take out body composition as a goal. We're talking optimal hormonal health, mental health, etc. What should we be doing in terms of cardiovascular work to tick that box?

I hate cardio, probably more than more than most people. And I do it despite hating it. So, when people tell me, "I don't do cardio because I don't like it," I'm like, "Dude, like, come on." I had to start doing cardio back when I was a singer. So, I used to get out of breath all the time on stage. And a friend of mine who was a personal trainer, I was like, "What's the most efficient way I can get better at cardio without doing a bunch of it because I hate it?" I was a little fat kid. I never ran. I still won't run. But back then, he was like, "Well, swimming and and sprints on the elliptical would probably be pretty efficient for improving your your breathing capacity." So, I did that. And then I felt so much better just day-to-day. I was like, "Oh, this is making a big difference." I think that if you, if your body produces a stress response from walking up the stairs because it gets you out of breath, your day-to-day existence is going to be a lot more stressful and a lot less enjoyable.

Cardio, I hate cardio, but I got to the point now where I got, it's kind of like meditation. You hate it when you suck at it. But then when you get good at it, it's kind of addictive. I think the goal for cardio. So, cardio, when when we talk about the runners, it's that that feeling that kicks in after about 15 to 20 minutes where you go, "Oh, I could do this all day. This feels good." I've heard that exists, anyway. No, I can get that on the elliptical. I can't get that from running. That is called an endocannabinoid high. So, it's working on the same receptors that THC works on. It's literally getting high on your own supply. I think one of the best biohacks that people can do, and I use that term loosely, um, is conditioning your cardiovascular system so that you can produce the runner's high. If you take someone who's never done cardio, they're not going to be able to do it for long enough that they can actually get an endorphin rush from it. The endorphins that we get from doing cardio, not only are they very important for clearing up, like cancer cells, having an anti-inflammatory effect, having a mood-boosting effect, but this is how you can trigger your body to release drug-like molecules to make you feel good. Who would have thought the human body was actually made to move athletically and vigorously? And this is something that it's, it's just baked into our DNA where if you do it, it actually feels good. It's just that people are so deconditioned. And the cardio system seems to be something that you have to train more frequently, otherwise you lose it. It's like a use it or lose it thing. Strength, you can kind of do it a bit more infrequently and maintain. Cardio, you got to do it a bunch, otherwise it's like going back to square one, and then it sucks all over again.

So, I think when it comes to cardio, like people could argue the benefits of LISS or, you know, high-intensity interval training, or do whatever version you hate the least that you're actually going to do. For me, I like long walks. And when I say walks, like walking isn't cardio, but like I'm in like a 90-minute to 2-hour walk. Like I really love that. I feel really good by the end of it. I get all my creative ideas out when I do that. I do it before things like podcasts like this, or, you know, when I want my brain to be working really well. I like sprints on like the Ergo machine or the Assault Bike. I really enjoy that too. And I like the elliptical because I can just listen to my music and zone out and not have to pay attention to where my feet are going. I hate it, but if I don't do it, my blood pressure goes through the roof. And so many people are walking around over-caffeinated, under-cardioed, and their blood pressures through the roof as a result. And they're looking for things like Telmisartan, they're looking for things like, um, over-the-counter supplements to bring it down, like ubiquinol. Which, you know, I'm, you know, CoQ10's great for you. But we shouldn't be reaching for Telmisartan when blood pressure is high. We should be going, "Hey, my cardiovascular system cannot support my body properly, which is why the pressure in in the blood is so high. I need to actually make this system stronger. I have a cardiovascular deficiency and I need to train this." Kind of like if you couldn't carry in all the groceries in one trip, which is an important masculine trait that you have to be able to do. If you can't do that, you have to do more deadlifts. And if you can't maintain optimal blood pressure day-to-day, you need to do more cardio. And that's the, the higher the testosterone level, the higher your cardiovascular fitness needs to be to be able to tolerate it without needing to take blood pressure medications.

Sure. So, do you think there's a lot of trainees out there that, you know, we can espouse to the long-term benefits and the mood benefits, and they're all there. We all know them. But if we hit them where it hurts and say that a lack of cardiovascular health is going to negatively impact their ability to get more muscular and stronger, how many people do you think in the average gym are probably falling into that category?

I think people still think the cardio will make them lose their gains. I think that like, you know, we, I probably thought that for like the first year that I trained and then joked about it for a while and kind of believed it a little bit. My friend Luke Leman has dispelled this thoroughly. Ali Gilbert as well, she's like the most jacked human I know, and she does more cardio than most people would. You'd have to do it. I mean, if you're an endurance runner, yeah, sure. But like that's taking something to an absolute extreme. I think that a lot of people are falling into the idea, at least in my client population, that cardio is only a tool for manipulating calories out. And it's, you know, if you're lean and you have abs and you don't need to do cardio. It's like, you can be lean and still have awful cardiovascular health, and that's going to lead to long-term ramifications. So, um, I think a lot of people fall into the category that you only need to do cardio to increase movement to lose weight. But cardio is such an important tool for just how you feel day-to-day. And when people don't feel well, a lot of the time, it's because their body is too stagnant. There have been, you know, Eastern medicine practices all over the world that have different terms for this, you know, when your Qi becomes too still. And all these different people throughout history have identified that being too stagnant doesn't make you feel good and have ascribed different reasons for that. But the human body requires movement. You know, there's good literature that shows that frequent movement and reducing long periods of being sedentary is really important for insulin sensitivity as well. So, it's important. And movement is important. Walking doesn't really count as cardio, but more walking is good. And then dedicated cardiovascular training is, it's something that, and and I've said this to my clients, at the time, I'm like, "Yeah, I don't want to do it." "Yeah, I don't like it either." But that's where the conversation ends. It's like, you have to do it anyway. It's just like, that's just the way it is.

True. So, like, all of this stuff, if we're wrapping it into a nutshell, from the the mindfulness, the cardiovascular work, the diet, and all of it, it just sounds eerily like your body is made to do X, Y, and Z. If you don't feel good, you should probably do X, Y, and Z a bit more. Mhm. Does it really boil down to to that? Like, we're kind of living a lifestyle or a culture that is very much removed from the machine in which we were built was designed to do?

Very much so. And like, when I first got into this field, I was super into like repurposed medications and I was really into supplements. I was really into being like, "All problems can be solved with the right protocol, the right this, the right that. We need to tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak." And I found that all of those paths just led to a dead end. And, you know, there's some things that we have to intervene with, like hormone replacement therapy. And, you know, I would love for all of this stuff to absolve the need for TRT as well. It's just, it doesn't, because of the modern world. So, I think there has to be this, you know, the truth is always in the middle. And I think there has to be this cross-section between, you know, taking advantage of the best of modern science that's actually modern science, not just pseudo drug-peddling crap, but also taking the best of what we understand about human biology in terms of how how the human vessel is structured to create the response that we're trying to create with medications that we can create with just inputs and outputs. And in my experience, and I, I say this all the time, most people, particularly people probably listening to this podcast, know exactly what they should be doing that they're not doing. And they know exactly what they shouldn't be doing that they are doing. Everyone, in my experience that I speak to, knows what those things are. They just don't understand that those factors are causing the problems. They don't understand the connection between the two. And just because you don't understand the connection between the two doesn't mean they're not connected.

So, one of the things that like I tell people when I go, "Don't book in with me first, because you don't, don't book in with me to tell you to go for a [ __ ] walk every day and go out in the sun, because it's not money well spent." I say, "Just make an audit list. Out all of those things. What's all the stuff that my grandma told me to do that I'm not doing? What's all the stuff that I know that I'm probably not doing enough of that I might not be getting away with? And what's all this [ __ ] that I know that I probably shouldn't be doing, but I think I've been getting away with?" And if you can just audit that and fix that stuff up, that solves the majority of the problems. And what you don't want to do is have to work with someone professionally to tell you what you already know. Maybe you need someone to explain why those things you're not getting away with. And that can be really important for a lot of people. We need to understand the why. But that's a really, really good place to start. And I think doing that, seeing how you feel, and then if you don't feel better, getting a comprehensive blood test with all the markers included and being audited by someone. I think that's the best path forward because that will tick all the boxes and prevent you from kind of going astray. But yeah, a lot of it just comes back to living how we're supposed to be living. And when we're out of alignment with how the human body is meant to work, we're going to get negative feedback. And if that goes on for too long, we get things like cancer, we get things like cardiovascular disease, we get things like dementia, because that's your body saying, "Hey, you didn't listen to all these wake-up calls I gave you, and now I'm going to take you out." So, I think people are getting feedback from from their mind, from their body, going, "If you're stiff and sore at the end of every day, and you're not stretching, like you're not listening to your body." Or if you're not doing the, if you know that you skipped cardio like every single day that you've been to the gym, you're like, "I'll do 10 minutes at the end," and then you never do it. And then you go to the doctor and your blood pressure is like 180 over 100. You know how that happened. And I think that can be a bit of a humbling process to take a step back and look at. But it's a really good, cheap, easy place for people to start.

True. So, in and a lot, quite a few of your, your snippets that I was seeing on Instagram, etc., a phrase that you came out with quite often, or, you know, a play on it was something like, "Becoming the best version of yourself." Mhm. So, if you had to kind of like give a couple of bullet points to the average person so that would help them on that journey, or to begin that journey, because, you know, we're all kind, most of us are stagnant. Very few of us. So, beginning is the hard part. So, for those individuals, what bits of advice would you give to just get people started on that right path?

Yeah, and I think that it's, that's something where it's going to differ a lot from from person to person. And I, I really, I really like this topic because this is where it becomes actionable. And it's like, what can I actually do? And I think when we're looking at this, because it's so different for everyone, and for people who would be able to do the exercise at home, I like to come back to this reverse engineering concept. So, when I used to do like, uh, Facebook ads, like digital marketing funnels, we used to basically go, "Okay, we're looking for this outcome. How, how do we nurture the person from cold exposure, so they've never heard of my product or brand, to converting at the checkout? And what are all the steps they're going to go through for that? And how can we work backwards?" And I think that's the best way to do it. Is if someone's not doing well, or you feel like you're not living up to your potential to the point that is bothering you, then I think the best way to do that is to to visualize and go, "What does the best version of myself look like? How does he walk? How does he speak? What does he wear? How does he act? What's his morning routine? What does he eat? What values does he have? How does he speak to waiters? How does he, you know, all that kind of stuff, like what values and attitudes, like what does that guy look like?" And then if you can go, "Okay, well, what habits and what daily processes would that version of myself have that I'm currently not doing?" And then, "What are the smallest ways I can kind of progressively overload my self-development?" So, you know, if that's very far from where you're at at the moment, going, "Okay, well, a good place to start is I can set a consistent wake-up time." And then from there, I can make sure I'm hitting 10,000 steps a day. And then start to, like you, before, stack these wins. And if you can, I, I think this progressive overload towards self-development is a really valuable way to look at things. Because if you try to go, if you measure your progress by how far away you are from the end destination, it can be very debilitating. But if you can measure your progress from how far you've come, that can be quite empowering and supportive. And it can give you some like momentum, and you can feel like you're a success, not a failure. So, I like for people to go, "What habits would the best version of myself have day-to-day that allow him to be someone who I want to be more like? And how can I adopt those gradually, progressively over time, in a way that's sustainable?" And I think that's going to be different for everyone. But I think what it really comes down to is, you know, in in the 24 hours in the day, what are you doing consistently that you can pick up from? And I think that it's those daily habits over time that compound to have the biggest effect.

Very well said. That sounds like a good place to wrap it up there. What is the best way for people to follow you and find you and so forth?

Yeah, so I'm at, uh, Advanced Fundamental Health.com. On Instagram, it's I'm Dave Lee, I'm D-A-V-E-L-E-E. And, uh, on YouTube, if you just search Dave Lee TRT, there's well over 100 videos, uh, all over YouTube. I've got a ton of free lectures. Um, I try to make as much of my content as free as possible or as affordable as possible. And, uh, on my website, I've got, uh, two ebooks. There's a third one going up soon. They're $29 Australian, which is like $2 American or something. Um, but I've, I've written these handbooks and I've written these guides that are very understandable. They're formatted in a way that everyone can buy them to understand everything they need to know about getting the TRT dialed in, working with a good practitioner, what to look for. All my IP is there. I've made it as cheap as possible for people so that everyone can have access to the information that they need. And, uh, if people want to book in with me, I do have a bit of a waitlist, but you can book in via the website as well.

All right. Well, I want to thank you for coming out. Tom, again, thank you for co-hosting. And we're done.

Thank you. You don't want to leave people stranded if we're going to do this, because somebody's going to have to always be there. You know, one of us would have to always be there because it was a different at the time. All of us started training pretty much together. No, you were one of the first, you know, just to start training some of the lifts somewhere else. And your deadlift, you know, went through the, it went what, like 100 pounds for me?

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The Mental Effect of Testosterone No One Talks About | Dave Lee #332

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