Derek Fitness and Joe Rogan dissect Gorilla Mind’s nootropic red gummy formula—tyrosine, 200mg caffeine, uridine, L-theanine, and saffron—debunking past supplement scams like ephedrine-laced products (e.g., Rip Fuel) and early bodybuilding marketing deception. They critique Hollywood’s aesthetic extremes, AI-generated media risks, and the psychological toll of public betrayals, while warning about reckless biohacking (stem cells, HRT misinformation) and genetic engineering vanity. Rogan’s minimal social media use contrasts with today’s curated attention-seeking culture, and they highlight functional fitness over dangerous drug-driven physiques, like Gable Stevenson’s speed or Topuria’s striking power. Ultimately, the episode underscores the dangers of chasing extremes—whether in supplements, appearance, or public perception—while advocating for evidence-based health and career stability. [Automatically generated summary]
So I think it was the first time I was on you asked me about Gorilla Mind and the nootropic formula that I used before podcasts and to get cognitively dialed.
And at the time, it was a capsule-based formula.
And it still is.
It still exists.
But taking what we could to suspend in a liquid format and getting it into something that's more like publicly and widely accepted and that they would want to drink on a regular basis and is something you could use daily.
It's kind of what we did in this.
So we included essentially like a daily use version of the Gorilla Mind formula, which includes the tyrosine precursor for dopamine as well as other neurotransmitters, catecholamines like adrenaline or adrenaline.
Also, Alpha GPC, most bioavailable form of choline.
It crosses the blood-brain barrier and is pretty efficacious and also just a good choline source in general, which most people are deficient in as a nutrient and I think completely unaware that it's actually important to be supplementing with potentially.
And in general, it's just like the highly nutrition dense foods that you would get it from.
A lot of people aren't focusing on specifically either because of caloric density or it's like an animal-based like nose to tail thing or fill in the blank.
It's not impossible to do it.
A lot of people who focus on it could probably relatively easily, but it's still one of the things you have to focus on actually kind of like maneuvering into your diet typically.
So in general, most people are at least maybe like 50% of the way that are at best.
And that's even among people who I would say are relatively balanced diet individuals.
So it's like the fine line balance of not too much, something that is still tolerable, sustainable, going to be widely accepted and widely impactful on a beneficial level, but not overdoing it and 200 is kind of what we landed on.
And then uridine monophosphate, pretty unique ingredient.
I haven't seen anybody ever include it in a drink, let alone even in supplements typically.
So it's also something that operates via the cholinergic system, but in a different way.
Mainly it's utility is kind of enhancing your sensitivity to stimulants.
So somebody who is otherwise desensitized from like heightened exposure to things that either desensitize them to caffeine or nicotine or things of this nature, even something like the ADHD medications.
This can actually, at least the literature suggests strongly that it enhances dopamine neurotransmission potential.
So like almost restoring function and damaged dopamine producing neurons in the brain.
So you can kind of get a heightened impact out of the same level of stimulant.
So a caffeine dose that might otherwise be, you're used to it now, you start to feel it again more than you used to without having to increase your caffeine intake.
Yeah.
So it's a pretty cool ingredient and it seems to have some neuroprotective properties potentially as well.
And some interesting literature on like Alzheimer's and whatnot, but it's more like fringe and to be determined how impactful it is.
And then on top of that, we have L-thenine.
You're probably familiar with its effects, stacked with caffeine, increases alpha waves, good for verbal fluency, as well as just general attention, concentration, but keeping you a little bit more balanced and mellow while you have the heightened stimulatory activity from the caffeine and the other kind of like dopaminergic compounds.
And then also saffron extract, which is a totally unique inclusion in my opinion.
Still don't really see it in nootropic formulas, let alone in drinks.
And it's something that in literature has shown to be as efficacious as pharmaceutical SSRIs without inducing the same erectile dysfunction inducing effects of it and without causing the same anhedonia inducing effects, which is kind of like the muting of like pleasure in the brain.
So saffron.
Yeah, super interesting ingredient.
It seems to be pretty impactful for depression, for anti-anxiety, and it also operates through a seemingly different mechanism, even though it's often stacked up against SSRIs for its comparisons and outperforms them or matches it with a relative lack of side effects.
It is something that operates through seemingly antioxidant activity, some dopaminergic, some serotonergic, and just a little bit more of a benign way to achieve what is a similar outcome, but with a seemingly lower, if not negligible to non-existent side effect profile.
I'm not saying that's what our drink does.
I'm just saying that's what the literature on saffron does.
And anyone can go look that up and reference it.
And then who pairs the name?
Probably the most impactful acetylcholinesterase inhibitor that you can include alongside like choline precursors.
So it inhibits the breakdown of acetylcholine as opposed to being the fuel, like the precursor, like choline, acetyl, alpha-GPC, CDP choline.
These are things that provide the substrate to actually produce the acetylcholine, preventing the breakdown of it too.
Could otherwise get like a one-two punch where you get the heightened fuel substrate, but then also an inhibition of its breakdown.
So you have just like a heightened level of cognitive capacity through both like the one-two punch.
So a lot of it derived from the original capsule-based formula.
So back in, I don't know, 2021, I had already been using this thing for daily use, essentially.
And it was something that was determined based upon years of experience, personal anecdotes, but digging through hordes of clinical literature ultimately.
There's a lot of these compounds that have clinical studies on them for different applications.
You can kind of sift through what are the efficacious dosages, where are they impactful, whereas a sustainable level, you could actually take this long term without it being negatively impactful on, because sometimes if you overdo it in one area over time, it might be problematic.
So trying to find the fine balance of where's a dose that moves the needle, but isn't going to kind of like push you in too far of a negative direction that it's unsustainable.
Because sometimes that this stuff, it's like a hammer solution.
You might see an energy drink that's like 300, 350 caffeine.
And it's like, okay, you know, you've essentially like singled out a lot of the customers who might otherwise benefit from it.
Even if there was other good stuff in the drink, it's like only stim junkies can use it now, you know?
So this is kind of like the fine balance of what I thought to be the most sustainable version of balancing, you know, dopamine input, serotonergic activity, getting some of that, you know, anti-anxiety support, and also getting a reasonable hit of caffeine.
And did you, so in pill form, so did you start out by using each individual supplement and then trying to use them in combination to see if there's a synergistic effect?
I guess maybe that's a bit more interesting than digging through literature, but when I was a university student, just like being a nerd mixing stuff in my kitchen like a chemist, essentially, and just measuring raw powders back, you know, in the day, what we would do, or at least, you know, like biohackers and what have you, we'd buy just like off of different websites, raw bulk ingredients, and then you'd measure out with little micro spoons in these laboratory increments to try and get, okay, the microgram equivalent of this.
And you'd make some disgusting shake with a concoction of different unflavored powders and create what is your ultimate kind of combination.
Many variables at the time, obviously a bit more rudimentary and crude when you're like 21 years old and you're just trying to like get cognitively locked in to study for finals.
But back then it was just what is the most impactful things that I've heard work.
And then also digging further into literature, looking on the limited forums that existed back then online because it's a lot more of a like a niche community back then.
When you're promoting, like I was doing Cobb's Comedy Club, when you were doing a comedy club, you'd show, this is back in the day when radio meant something.
You'd show up in the morning and you'd do the morning drive.
And they would go, oh, Joe Rogan's appearing at the comedy club this weekend.
Come see him.
And you'd be funny on the radio and have a good time with the people.
And he gave it to me.
And I was like, hey, man, this stuff feels like something's going on.
Like, this is legit.
And that's what really got me in.
That's how we developed Alpha Brain.
We developed Alpha Brain after me trying out Neuro One saying, can we optimize this?
Is there another way to do this?
Is there, you know, other forms that we're missing?
But your formulation seems like very comprehensive and also fucking delicious.
Yeah, that's one of the difficult things too is making it taste good while still being able to suspend the active ingredients because they could just fall out of suspension or a myriad of different issues, carbonation problems, even exploding cans in transit that you're not predicting are going to react a certain way.
Even the black lids, dude, like it's stuff you don't even think of, but absorbing heat.
It's like, oh, it's going to be more prone to blowing up now because of that.
I think some people think it depends on the person and like the kind of content they make typically.
Typically, they have a bit of a bias.
Yeah, but in general, it's going to irritate your gut or it could cause GI distress.
And for some people with extremely sensitive gastrointestinal issues, it can for sure.
But in general, at the dosages used and just having it even conservatively, which most people are going to be, it's like pretty benign, at least from the literature I've seen.
One of the things that we had noticed when we first came out with AlphaBrain was for some people, it's a small amount, but for some people, they would get headaches and they felt terrible after taking it.
I don't know what their dose is.
I don't know if they were taking the recommended dose or if they were saying, well, two's good.
But yeah, some of these, if you're not careful, it could be, you know, pushing you into like we vetted this out beforehand, but one of the first formulations or prototypes of Gorilla Mind in the capsule form, we had something called Velvet Bean Extract, which standardizes to L-Dopa.
So like Levo Dopa is used for like Parkinson's patients because it's a direct precursor to dopamine without a rate limiting step that kind of like in hit regulates the conversion.
So rather than using tyrosine, we were like, we thought, and we didn't end up releasing it because of this, we could just go, okay, let's get a straight precursor and see how impactful this thing is because we really want it to hit.
And oh my God, I had like dopamine overdose myself.
Had my girlfriend at the time also fuck herself up and my parents fuck themselves up.
And somehow it didn't, it didn't occur until like three incidents later.
I'm like, okay, this thing is unsustainable.
And I guess my business partners didn't really even think worth mentioning, which was kind of crazy at the time because they just trusted me to do the formulations and whatnot.
But they had the same experience and didn't bring it up.
And I'm like, guys, like, we can't release this shit.
You're going to have more motivation, more drive, more, you know, it's the more the better is what a lot of people think.
But similar to probably even worse than stimulants, because at least stimulants, you have kind of like a direct biofeedback through your heart rates going through the roof and you're getting the anxiety with dopamine.
If you overdo it with something that you can't like rate limit either, you just like get sick and you just end up having to lie down for hours.
In general, 400 milligrams is even like the FDA stated, you know, everyone's going to be okay probably dose.
But in reality, it's kind of crazy.
A lot of people don't realize the studies done for caffeine-induced performance enhancement are all looking at like three to six milligrams a kilogram, which is like, unless you're a tiny woman, 400, 500, 600 milligrams are the doses that actually really move the needle when it comes to acute performance enhancement.
Yeah, they have a they had threshold concentrations that they would deem inappropriately high, perhaps for safety, perhaps because they thought it was an unfair advantage.
So you can get performance enhancement as low as, I think some people was like a milligram per kilogram.
It depends on the person and tolerance, of course.
But in general, the most tried and true studies when it comes to repeatable, high impact with a proportional relative lack of side effect, but not none, was like three to six milligrams a kilogram.
Like acute strength enhancement, offsetting like any sleep-induced deprivation and performance outcomes mentally.
You can pretty much offset like a shitty night of sleep and all the kind of detriments to your performance via a pretty solid dose of caffeine.
Yeah, most of the stuff is kind of energy, acutely offsetting performance decrement related, but also in a context of strength, high intensity activity, you can absolutely get a benefit from it.
And there's a reason why, you know, sprinters will take, you know, modafinil or high-dose caffeine or powerlifters will take, you know, massive doses of, you know, pre-workup before a lift or whatnot.
Like it's all impactful for your psychological state to get really like locked in in a hyper-vigilant state to really max out on what you're trying to do, whatever it may be.
And, you know, and they're trying to figure out what is the correct dose.
And a lot of people are going 20, 30.
They're getting pretty high, you know, because the recommended was like five milligrams, I think.
And now everyone's saying, actually, the real benefits are at 20 and at least 10.
But you're getting a lot of what happens when people have sleep deprivation.
And I'll butcher the science, so I won't try to repeat it.
And I recommend anybody listen to the episode.
But what he was essentially saying was it bypasses all the problems that occur and you could at least have a bridge to your performance would not be impeded by a lack of sleep, at least for a temporary day or whatever.
But one thing to mention on the caffeine, too, is I think a lot of people, when they hear the stuff like, you know, I heard you can go up to 20 grams of creatine or, you know, the highest impact dose in caffeine literature is, you know, three to six milligrams a kilogram.
It's not like I or I imagine Chris is like blindly recommending anybody start there.
And it could easily get misconstrued that way in like a clippable format if people just like hear the headline and then run with it.
Like in, you should start as low as you can with caffeine and you could get a ergogenic effect as low as, I think the lowest dose was like 50 to 100 milligrams probably if you equated to body weight, but it's all like tolerance dependent.
It's just when you look at the studies, like these are the repeatable high impact outcomes are typically in, and especially in like trained athletes where you're trying to see how hard you can push them.
It's kind of like, you know, for max stress resilience, max, you know, acute force production, these are the kind of dosages that are just used in the studies.
So anyway, with that caveat, and same with the creatine, you know, you might shit yourself if you go to 20 right away.
It's like the best gateway drug, if you can even call it, it's not like a drug, but to get people who otherwise would never try it to actually see the benefits of it.
So like, I know so many women who literally refuse to take the powder because it's like, even though it's kind of tasteless, it's still a nuisance.
Can be a little bit messy depending on the scooper shape of it and everything and how you're going to try to convince a chick, like, trust me, it's really good for your health if you like, you know, fucking swig this thing dry and then chase it with water every day.
It's not the easiest sell every time.
They're like, fuck you.
I don't care.
So the gummies are good for that, in my opinion.
And yeah, I mean, going back to the 20 grams and the offsetting of, you know, performance deteriorations, I do think it's basically offsetting kind of the deficiencies in like ATP production, especially locally in the brain.
And also kind of offsetting the pulling of resources away from like methylation support and whatnot in order to produce the endogenous creatine as well.
These things can all be impactful to kind of like get you back to almost baseline.
So if you're in a deteriorated state, being able to offset the performance decrements from an otherwise, you know, sleep deprived state or, you know, you're traveling or what have you, like it can absolutely be super impactful.
And the literature has shown that time and time again.
I mean, that's like fucking M1Ts over the counter from, you know, like some 19-year-old kid who's just like manning the counter and doesn't care and will like fuck your endocrine system up to sell it to you.
The amount of people that have inadvertently gotten gynecomastia from those days when they were sold some irresponsible pro hormone over the counter without like any knowledge of what they were taking and then had to just recover naturally with no support, it's a shame.
But in Canada, for relatively recently, even it was still available over the counter, even though Canada is like super tight on regulation when it comes to the most weird stuff.
Like when it comes to caffeine, you can't even have a can with 200 milligrams.
It has to be like 180 or lower.
Why exactly?
I don't know.
But that is a thing, as well as limitations on basic amino acids.
It's like tyrosine if it's more than like 10 milligrams or something.
But anyway, so ephedrin, for whatever reason, was still over-the-counter available in GNCs up until like a handful of years ago.
And it was, you know, the bestseller in GNCs in a lot of supplement stores, not just because it worked as a bronchodilator, but also because people were buying it in bulk to make meth.
And what's crazy too is back then it was proprietary blends on a lot of the products and it was still the norm with no education available, no YouTube to really tell you what to look for.
It's funny, too, because some of these companies, it's like now we're in the mix competing with them on shelves or whatever.
But I remember being like convinced back when I was a teenager by them, oh, you need, you know, Gakik, Lukik, and Creek Kick in this combo that costs 250 bucks.
It's crazy because now it's almost full circle because, you know, I was back then, you know, at least at the time when I didn't know any better.
Oh, you know, I guess this guy must be natural because he told me so or whatever.
And it's like, I'm skeptical, but like, and, you know, in hindsight, it's absolutely ridiculous.
But now a lot of bodybuilders are pretty forthcoming because it's more normal to be transparent and also not mislead people and you know, unethically sell things and just reality check people on the what it's going to take to be at that level.
And is it the risk you want to, you know, subject yourself to?
Because back in the day, too, it was like you didn't know if you had good genetics or not when it came to certain dosage responses.
So you would like always think the next guy's just taking more than you.
And it would result in guys unspokenly thinking this guy must just be taking 5x the amount of shit I'm on.
So I need to go to like five to 10 grams of total gear per week now.
And you would just like, that's what led to so many early deaths in bodybuilding too.
Yeah, and he talked about his TRT protocol and kind of like the realities of how impactful it actually is and improving his performance and how it makes him feel.
And he was just like pretty non-sugar-coated about it.
And there's a lot of speculation about if it's like a health thing or what, but that's tough to know because he just had the role where he gained the most size he ever has, too.
Yeah, I just mean, I think he probably had more preventative screening before that role to know he could even subject himself to it without dying because it's like a pretty risky endeavor to go become the biggest you've ever been at that age.
So to then downsize after the theory is that he was literally about to die essentially.
So that's why he lost so much weight now.
And I'm thinking, I think maybe he's just like trying to take like a health phase and kind of like come down and wait for a bit and he'll probably like crank it back up.
I think based on what he tried to do with the smashing machine, I think he's trying to win an Oscar and trying to be a real actor because he was really good in that movie.
Yeah, but I guess I mean like typically when actors are trying to get taken more seriously for more impactful like artistic creative roles, it's almost like the jack meathead guy downsizes to do something more, you know, like, I don't know, artsy.
I think I can't imagine talking about peptides and putting the feelers out there would not eventually transition to like, you know, it was recommended to me by my doctor to be on, you know, hormone support or whatever.
It's just proportionally to relative to what he was.
You know, it's kind of like anybody who used to be a bodybuilder or had significant amounts of size, even me, like people in my videos are like, where you're, you know, you've lost everything.
And it's like, okay, I'm not like non-existent anymore.
And I don't want to give away too much, but it has something to do with aliens and aliens send a transmission to Earth and there's like this insane impact on society.
But it's like fucking total left field movie.
You don't see it coming.
It's crazy.
Or not movie, television show.
And again, I, like Jamie, I've only seen the first episode, but it's great.
It's like oddly overlapping with the Stranger Things.
I feel like I'm kind of watching the same show all the time.
of like obviously totally different overall stories but like you know you have kids and these kind of like and evil things And I don't want to wreck an episode, but they mention it, not specifically it, but a story about an extraterrestrial evil being called it in a Stranger Things episode.
I'm like, this is a weird fucking reference for these being at the same time right now.
You know, it's getting to the point where, you know, there's no excuse for waiting three years because you could have AI generated scripts and do it in an hour.
For, I think, right now, it's the first time in the last 15 years they've had three drivers coming down to the final race to win the championship between them.
That might have been the race that just happened, but it was nuts, dude.
It's because right now you had McLaren, who was like a shoe-in to have their main driver, or at least the guy who was in the lead, take it, but they're refusing to favor one over the other, which is a typical strategy for whoever's in the lead.
You'll have the other one kind of like block people for them to make sure they win the driver's championship.
Yeah, they're like making sure they can have equal opportunities to win, but the net result might now be none of them win, and a guy from Red Bull takes the thing.
And that will be coming down to one person, even if it's a guy from a team that won the thing.
They're still competing against each other.
And sometimes they can get pretty reckless where they're, you know, one is not willing to compromise and he'll like blow the whole thing up to make sure that he has the best opportunity, understandably, but it's also like you guys are getting paid tens of millions of dollars.
Maybe you should listen to your fucking guy who's telling you what to do.
The holidays come with a lot of traditions: gathering with family, cooking those once-a-year recipes, and leaning into the little rituals that bring everyone together.
That's something I always look forward to.
But there's another tradition I think we should all start doing during the holidays, and that's taking some time for ourselves.
This season, you do so many things for the other people in your life.
You plan get-togethers around everyone's schedule, you spend hours picking out the right gifts and cooking the right food, but you also deserve just as much attention.
Otherwise, you'll burn yourself out.
So, do yourself a favor and take some me time.
Go on a hunting trip.
Have a quiet night with a book.
Maybe even schedule a session with a therapist.
Therapy is an extremely effective way to make sure you're focusing on what you need.
And BetterHelp can easily set you up.
They have access to a wide network of fully qualified therapists and they do a lot of the work for you.
Even if that first match isn't a good fit, you can easily switch to another therapist.
This December, start a new tradition by taking care of you.
Our listeners get 10% off at betterhelp.com/slash J-R-E.
That's better, H-E-L-P dot com/slash J-R-E.
Yeah, I get it.
But then again, if you're on another team, you're like, well, this is kind of bullshit because this guy didn't really win the race.
He won the race because his friends blocked everybody.
I guess it's just problematic because it's so bandwidth intensive too to manage the two drivers that if they're equally trying to win and only one is more likely to, what may very well happen on this weekend is they both don't win.
So I got a tour of the McLaren pit last year and they showed me like all the different technology that's involved and they gave me a like a rundown of how much engineering is involved in these things and explained everything.
It's crazy.
They're all just trying to shave tenths of seconds out of turns and then it all accumulates over the course of the race.
This is all like very straight-edge, like really tried and true neutropics that work through kind of like endogenous pathways or things that otherwise backfill neurotransmitters similar to like the creatine deficiency that we talked about.
If you backfill it and you can otherwise, you know, have a readily available source of phosphocreatine to offset ATP deficits, L-tyrosine, stuff like that, similar just in regards to dopamine, for example.
Like a sugar, but it also has a hyperhydrating effect that you can hold upwards of an extra pound of body water if you have it as a supplement.
So, some endurance athletes will use it before events in order to retain more water in a way that is not, it enhances like thermoregulation, your ability to tolerate stress.
You don't lose as much, you don't dehydrate as fast.
There's a lot of upsides for its kind of like unique application.
Maybe even avoiding pissing at nighttime could be really potentially, yeah.
Um, I haven't cold plunged in the last three weeks because I got some stem cells and I'm still sauna-ing, so it seems like there's a lot of controversy about this in terms of like what you should and shouldn't do post-stem cell injection.
I have a very minor Achilles tear when I was elk hunting in September.
I twisted my ankle pretty bad, and I didn't think anything of it.
I stopped limping after like 15 or 20 minutes, and I was like, I think I'm okay.
And I have, and I was wearing at the time, I was wearing very light boots.
They're like, you know, just a real light boot that you wouldn't do for heavy mountain trekking.
And we did some steep elevation, and then the real problem is going down.
And you're, you know, when you're going down like several thousand feet over the course of like an hour, it's fucking brutal.
And I twisted one of my ankles, and then the next day, I put on a much higher, more rigid boot with great ankle support, and I was fine for the rest of the trip.
But then it's the fucking worst when you just got to like stare at the ground the entire time you're walking because the littlest off step, you just roll your ankle or not only that, you go down, you know, you could die.
I'm just like, I'm looking at a year before I could do everything again.
Then you lose all your gains, all your cardio gains, everything.
You can't move right.
You're fucked.
So I got a stem cell shot in there.
And there's a lot of debate about when you should be able to cold plunge after stem cells.
And a lot of the literature seems to say three months.
It doesn't seem to think sauna, there's more indication that sauna is probably therapeutically beneficial for the stem cells because the idea is that the stem cells are still in the area trying to heal the tissue.
When you cold plunge, you kill them.
But when you're doing sauna, you're increasing blood flow and it might help them.
So what they said is like, I wouldn't do anything for a couple weeks, nothing.
Like you might see however many studies that say fill in the blank exotic compound is like totally ineffective.
And it's like, who was it tested on for how long?
What was the dosage?
You know, and like it might be a completely useless interpretation for your specific nuanced scenario.
And if you hear hordes of anecdotes from everyone in your circle you trust who actually knows what they're talking about, has been in the trenches, knows their body well, you can't really ignore that.
So it was like literally the most synthetic, you know, animal-derived, shitty estrogen that is not bioidentical at all.
And also a synthetic progestin that is not bioidentical to progesterone.
It's just like a progestin analog essentially that fulfills activity at the receptor, but is otherwise like, you know, the equivalent of putting you on like a micro dose of nandrolone or a micro dose of, you know, fill-in-the-blank progestin-derived compound or 19-nord-derived compound that facilitates progestogenic activity, but just is not progesterone.
So it's like to try and say, you know, this horse piss-derived estrogen formula and the synthetic progestin we apply to these women is the equivalent of you having been on what you would otherwise produce as a young, healthy, vibrant woman from a bioidentical estradiol and progesterone perspective.
Simply not accurate, but that's like essentially the comparison that they made and, you know, presented it as such.
And the result was a relative risk increase of breast cancer incidence, I believe, to the tune of like one of a thousand women.
And the absolute number was like three of a thousand in the placebo arm had breast cancer incidence.
And then I think four out of a thousand had breast cancer.
So then the media ran with a 26% increase in risk.
And like I might be misinterpreting one or two variables, but like high level, that's essentially what it was.
And it caused mass hysteria and panic and basically dictated the facilitation of black box warnings being put on hormone therapy.
So the most aggressive FDA warning that shows basically any clinician that's looking at it or anybody who's going to like take the risk of using it, this is the most dangerous drug you could use with the highest risk of like lethal side effect potential.
And then on top of that, it just like wasn't representative of what is actual replacement therapy with what is the hormone you would be producing naturally.
So for years, you know, we went thinking, oh, it's going to cause clotting issues.
It's going to cause cancer.
It's going to do this.
It's going to do that.
And only in the most nuanced edge case scenarios is it justified because, you know, that person just absolutely has a quality of life deterioration that is so significant that it's worth it to take the risk to use hormone replacement therapy.
And it's like now, similar to some of the like common sense interpretation of things, like this doesn't make sense.
Like, look at all this literature showing the cardioprotective effects, showing the neuroprotective effects, showing the bone support and integrity.
Look at what you lose if you don't take these hormones.
Like you were essentially giving yourself a worse quality of life, inevitably, and deteriorating your health unquestionably.
Like with men, there is some semblance of residual activity you can maintain.
And some men maintain vibrant, you know, reasonable testosterone production until old age.
But with women, it's kind of like right when the lights shut off.
And it's like, even the mechanism by which they argue it would cause it doesn't even make mechanistic sense because it's like the only way you're going to increase the prostate growth is via bringing.
And it's like, of course, when you use hormones that are androgens, like you're going to grow tissues that they're exposed to, but it doesn't mean it's a bad thing necessarily.
And if you're a hypogonadal male who has low T and it goes up to just the threshold of barely acceptable, that's where the growth essentially stops.
And if you go beyond that into like medium normal, high normal, even super physiologic territory, your prostate doesn't linearly grow in exposure.
Otherwise, bodybuilders would have massive prostates like busting out of their bodies.
Because the physiology is essentially interchangeable in that you could have gone in any direction dependent on your exposure to these hormones.
So it's not.
Yeah.
So if a man exposes himself to significant amounts of estrogen and has no, has hormone deprivation, there are some irreversible anatomical changes because they've already like matured that will not go away.
But like with women, it's like the inverse and you could otherwise get closer to that like extreme scenario where you're once your voice box gets to a certain like anatomical development, you can't necessarily go back to your high-pitched, you know, problem with D-transitioners.
Yeah, that's one of the one of the tough things with HRT, too, is like, as much as I think it's so amazing that it's being educated about and there's widespread attention being brought to the importance of it.
There's also the cowboy docs who almost go to the hyper extreme of optimization and are putting women on aggressive dosages of testosterone, saying, you've been lying to, you know, this is actually what you need to feel good.
And for a woman who's been, you know, asexual for years and feels, you know, has no energy and they are told this guy is, you know, the cutting-edge doc who everyone sees, they will probably trust his guidance.
And as early as before I started Merrick Health, which is my company, my mom was getting hormone therapy guidance from a doc who was relatively well respected.
And the dose he put her on of testosterone was so aggressive that her voice was changing within weeks.
And I had to like cut the cord on it.
I was like, what the hell is this?
And her testosterone levels were like in the like 300s plus.
So like you're essentially low, low normal, healthy male territory, not like actually, but like on a clinical reference range, and absolutely potential for masculinization.
And testosterone can be helpful in women for sure.
And it's an overlooked hormone that is absolutely important in women, just the same as it is in men.
It's just like you got to kind of know what you're getting yourself into too When it comes to what is reasonable for a doctor to tell you you need and at what concentrations you should expect, you know, blood level targets to be.
Because if you just go in blind, you might end up with the most exotic, you know, like Beverly Hills doc who thinks you should be on like the craziest cocktail ever because he knows you're going to feel it and respond really, really well immediately, but then also might just like fuck you up permanently.
Well, this is also the problem with transitioners.
When you're becoming a trans man, right?
The initial impact is alleviation of anxiety and euphoria.
You start feeling great because that's what testosterone does for you.
It doesn't mean you're supposed to have that.
Your body's going, what the fuck is this?
And now you're, you know, essentially you're changing the whole cocktail of your body.
And you're, you know, and you're going to give permanent changes that if you make a decision when you're 14, 15 years old, they put you in this stuff.
Those detransitioners are some of the saddest stories, man.
Because they've become sterile.
They'll never have children.
And, you know, lose their tits because they go to a doctor that thinks you should have your memory glands chopped off when you're 15.
We're in the weirdest of times with all this stuff because it's like what gets accepted and not accepted.
And what, you know, what becomes, again, like we were talking about in the zeitgeist, when a thought gets out there and then it's very difficult to move away from that.
It's like, oh, you're affirming your true self.
Like, really?
With synthetic hormones that didn't exist in your body before, that's your true self?
Are you fucking sure?
It sounds like this might be a social contagion that is like sweeping through the land.
And one of the things that's really interesting is the drop-off of kids identifying as trans is it coincides directly with Elon buying Twitter.
Like immediately when you could, because he used to not be able to talk about it.
He used to like literally, if you dead name someone from Twitter, meaning like if you changed your name to Dominique and I called you Derek, I could get banned from Twitter for life forever.
Yeah, I think as much as I think access to drugs is super, like you should have the full liberty to do whatever you want.
That's where the importance of educating yourself is so critical because you really don't know what you're subjecting yourself to.
If you have an immature brain too, you have not even had full frontal lobe development to try and think you're going to make a sound decision with how you're going to impact your lifelong physiology.
It's not even legal to get a tattoo and you get your penis removed.
It's fucking crazy.
It's fucking crazy.
Oh, they know.
Some people know as early as three.
I've had conversations with people on this podcast.
I have friends that have trans kids and they knew right away.
Like, are you sure they didn't have a fucking insane mother and a gay child?
Because that might be what was going on.
And now this gay child will never have an orgasm again because you've convinced them that they're not a gay child, that they're a woman, which is in fact completely homophobic.
Interesting extreme of the scenario, but maybe on the opposite is guys who are in their in adolescence who are so hyper-educated that they use the knowledge to biohack their development into becoming as maximally tall and like infrastructurally sound as adults as possible.
And that's a really interesting predicament because it's like any like a reasonably ethical doctor will be like, there's no fucking way I'm touching that like case of any overseeing anybody's care who's doing that kind of thing.
I was watching a podcast about this where this guy was talking about his son and he's short and his son is short and his son's friends were also short and their parents got the kid on growth when they were and they grew like a lot bigger than the parents.
That guy was 300 fucking pounds and moved like a cat.
Like unbelievably mobile and flexible and had like an insane record.
I think it was like 280 and one or 280 and two.
Like fucking insane.
Like one of the most dominant wrestlers of all time.
But there's, they call him in Russia, they would call him the experiment.
Yeah.
And you see his parents, his parents like 5'5, 5'7, like small people.
And he's this fucking behemoth of a person.
And of course, the Soviet doping program is legendary.
The movie Icarus highlights that, you know, but everybody knew about that.
The Eastern Bloc weightlifters, the females, they set records that were never broken again.
These women completely became men.
There's a lot of evidence that they were doing that to their athletes.
The fact that they wouldn't do it to their most dominant wrestler in the history of the fucking sport and the guy who was the absolute biggest freak in the history of wrestling.
So he grew to what is otherwise an acceptable adult height, but he otherwise was destined to be literally a dwarf, whatever the socially acceptable term is.
So they either paid for his pharmaceutical growth hormone and admitted, like got it for him, paid for it, made sure he was taking it, or he didn't become the greatest, some argue, you know, the football player of all time.
It was like you either take this at the dose that is going to like push you to maximal IGF-1 output territory and we get you to as high of maturation as possible or you're not going to be a professional player.
But what Bo Nick, Bo Nichols, an elite wrestler, like a top shelf blue chip wrestler.
And one of the things that wrestlers have is this ability to close distance because they're, you know, they're on the outside and they can just shoot doubles.
So that explosion naturally lends itself to closing the distance and striking because, you know, it's the same kind of thing.
If you develop good striking, and Hadolfo Vieira, who's like fucking super jacked, but he's a Gi Jiu-Jitsu guy.
Gi Jiu-Jitsu is all about strength and control technique as well, but it's a tight game.
It's not a game of like jumping, moving across distance quick.
It's a game of they're gripping each other.
And then, you know, it's a lot about strength and it's a lot about technique, but it's not about closing distance.
So Hadolfo Vieira is like a plodding, like really super jacked guy.
And Bo Nichols just light on his feet, moving on the outside and just closing distance, cracking them, getting out.
And he hits him with this fucking bomb head kick and puts him to sleep.
But it's that ability to close the distance.
Nobody did that better than Yoel.
Yoel was the best at that because he's just a fucking unbelievable athlete.
And with Izzy, he fought Ezrael Adesania and Izzy said, dude, I had to stay on the outside with that guy.
I could not just go after him because the counters would come so fast.
Yoel caught him with a big left hand early in the fight.
And he was like, oh, well, fuck this.
He's like, we're going to make this a boring fight.
I'm just going to win a decision on this motherfucker.
Because it's just the consequences of being too close to him where he can do that.
It's just, you have to fight a technical fight with that guy.
Stay on the outside, pick at him, move a lot.
Don't set your feet ever.
Never be in a place where he can just like, because he can just launch on you and blast you.
There's something about that kind of wrestling from the Chechens and the Dagestanis and maybe even him more than any of the other ones.
It's just so aggressive.
And he chains things together so well.
And if you're not training with guys like that, like Schaub told me that he went to see Chimayev when Chemayev is in training camp for Drickus Duplicis.
And he called me up.
He goes, dude, listen to me.
Shaub was a top 10 UFC heavyweight.
He's been around forever.
He was in camp with George St. Pierre when George St. Pierre was in his prime.
Nate Marquardt.
Nate Marquardt was his prime.
He's like, dude, I've never seen nothing like this.
He goes, they were bringing in world-class wrestlers, and he's fucking ragdolling them.
He goes, he's a freak.
He goes, he's going to fuck Drickus up.
I go, really?
He goes, dude, if he gets a hold of that guy, he's fucked.
I mean, everyone is fucked because there's no, other than John, there's no one that can wrestle with that guy in that sport.
And the thing about a guy who could wrestle like that is if he could strike like that, the problem with wrestling is you're always worried about the takedown.
So that opens you up to strikes because you're always like every feint, you're thinking he's going to shoot for your legs, but then boom, he catches you with a left hook.
And the speed that guy has, it's like a lethal combination of athleticism, speed, power, size, and an insane wrestling pedigree.
I mean, Olympic gold medalist, as good as he gets with wrestling.
Yeah, I think more attention is going to come to how to actually ensure your brain stays safe in the sports for longevity purposes as people kind of realize how impactful the weight cutting especially can be, but also if you end up getting knocked out, you might not come back the same.
And some of the strategies that should be employed after those fights as well to actually restore as quickly as possible and avoid permanent degradation.
There's one school of thought that I'm in, which we need to expand the weight classes so we have more weight classes and we need to somehow or another institute some sort of hydration policy where you cannot dehydrate yourself and weigh in and pretend that you weigh 170 when really you weigh 210 because there's a lot of guys doing that.
And the other school of thought is they should be able to hydrate with IVs.
Because they used to be able to hydrate with IVs.
The blood-brain barrier and the hydration of the brain, it takes much longer to rehydrate your brain than it does to rehydrate your muscle tissue.
And so these guys are going in there, their muscles are full, but their brain is dehydrated and they're vulnerable to getting knocked out.
And I think that's what happened with Pereira, particularly with the Izzy fight.
But Izzy caught him with a picture-perfect right hand, just right on the chin, and then followed it up with a left hook.
But it was just he didn't have the durability at 185 that he has at 205.
At 205, he's been dropped.
Like Khalil dropped him.
Guys have dropped him.
And, you know, Ankhalia rocked him, but he can take it.
I don't know if it's a coincidence, but I mean, you can't.
I'm sure the internet has their speculation, but the timing is very odd with like one of these interviews he did where somebody was almost seemed to plant in his head that like if you meet a wife in Miami, that she's probably like not a, you know, good, you know.
I always say that if you want to starve to death, open up a bookstore in Miami.
It's like people are just partiers.
It's like, you should have a passport to go to Miami.
It's barely America.
It's fun.
It's a great city.
A lot of fun.
But it doesn't really lend itself to the kind of sturdy, stay-at-home mom support for a world champion because the discipline involved in being not just a world champion, but a world champion on Ilya's level, you know, like a two-division dominator goes up, knocks out Charles Olivera like it's nothing, which is crazy.
Not only that, had a celebration the night before the fire celebrating victory.
I mean, you know, that's what it is, regardless of what he's saying, you know, when he's like, I got to get my personal life in order and the timing of everything.
And I think there's actually, is it publicly media about the, there's like a divorce now or something?
What's the typical outcome of these cases where it's like super famous person, wife claims that she is 50% responsible for their success, tries to take half?
Is that like, if there's no prenup, that's kind of just what happens?
And also, it's like most people don't know what fame really is.
They think they do.
And then they get it.
And then they think they can manage it.
And then the fucking psychology behind it and the spinning that goes on in your mind when you're trying to go to bed and you're worried about all the mean things people are saying about you.
Yeah, it's part of the reason I work best late at night as much as I would love to have the perfect circadian rhythm and go to bed at the perfect time and align it with the sun going down.
It's like the only time my phone and all this stuff is not blowing up is in the middle of the night and I can just focus and not have to think about stuff blasting me.
I get sent enough things by my friends that are fucked up that I don't have to go looking.
So I go, Jesus, is that real?
And then I'll maybe, you know, do a search and find out that it is real and then read about it.
And like, oh, what?
But that I think is probably valuable because it's keeping you informed.
It's the endless, mindless scrolling that I think is the most detrimental and the one that robs you of the most time because, you know, you could be sitting down at the kitchen table and all of a sudden you have this plan for the day.
There's a lot of people that will succumb to the pressure at the max level and check the, you know, what people are saying about them, who's going to win.
And it's like back in the 90s, I don't know what it was, but it was like some of the lighting too was almost so bad that it gave this granular, sharp, kind of like pixelated but like etchy look to the physiques.
And it would look like they were more cut and defined and just better downlighting overall.
And some of these shows, they're so washed out with the high resolution and like the perfect, and when I say perfect, it's like almost overexposed lighting to show what's going on on the stage that they look watery and fat, even when they're like, and I say watery and fat, like, you know, like the fucked up perception of the fitness industry.
It's like proportional to what you're expected to look like.
But it's like they could be shredded out of their mind and like having worked so hard to show up in shape and then just get like decimated online from some fucking keyboard warrior who's like, your back is like too watery, bro.
There's no way if you saw the two of them, you would say that guy on the left that has no abs and is smooth is going to fucking destroy the guy on the right.
Nobody would believe it.
See if you can find the two of them together.
There's no way.
There's no way.
David Benavidez is one of the scariest guys alive because he's relentless.
He's so fucking skillful.
He's so fast.
It's brutal combinations.
But he's so unimpressive physically looking at him.
Like, I used to bounce downtown Vancouver and we'd have the teams come by that would play the Canucks and they would come party at the champagne lounge and the club that I was bouncing at.
And he'd be like, this guy is like, you know, a professional athlete.
It'd be the whole team and half of them looked like, you know, some dude that's like, you'd do like a fucking keg stand with at like, you know, a party.
And that's like the max of his athletic capacity is being like held up to chug some beer or something.
You know, I thought that when I went to the professional soccer team here in town, Austin FC, these guys have these fucking quarter horse legs and then like real thin upper bodies.
Like they don't use their arms.
I mean, it's literally, unless you're a goalie, you don't have to use it.
Yeah, it's crazy, too, because sometimes you might just have like nice-looking round muscle bellies, but you don't actually have like mitochondrial density to support athletic endeavors.
So you're kind of just like a show thing.
It's like a cosmetically pleasing athlete, but not actually able to translate it into anything.
I think there's definitely specific training for purposes that would be conducive to sport, that maybe some might be neglecting for sure, and ways to optimize for like, for example, you don't do hypertrophy work for bodybuilding because it's not conducive really, to what you're trying to get.
And I think some, some people, they want the best of both worlds and they want to like, look the part and also perform.
So they might be, you know, sapping bandwidth that could be allocated towards more optimal things that don't make them, you know, as cosmetically pleasing.
Yeah, there's definitely things you can do from a uh, support standpoint when it comes to, you know, nutrition supplementation etc.
But like you are ultimately going to be capped to some extent by genetic coding when it comes to like, density of certain receptors, and like you can upregulate it to whatever capacity you can, but like you can only push it so far before you've kind of, you know yeah, chapped out.
It's interesting because, like the really bulky guys, they just never have the same fluidity that the guys that are built like Benavitez have, where the the, the punches, flow in this effortless combination.
It's a perfect technique.
The really jack guys that look like they're, they're destroyers.
And you have to have an intentful approach to making sure you can maintain the flexibility that might otherwise just be innate to somebody who doesn't have to deal with a giant deltoid that like right, right, right.
When I was at my peak of bodybuilding size, I was in the middle of a job as a lifeguard and teaching swimming lessons to kids.
And part of the teaching swimming lessons would involve showing how to do the different strokes of, you know, back crawl, front crawl, breaststroke, all the different things.
And when you're like a 265-pound bodybuilder, it gets pretty difficult because not only do you just sink harder because you're, you know, mostly muscle, but also like just even trying to get a straight arm past your head, it's impossible.
I was like trying to be a competitive bodybuilder and I just kind of realized that I could look good for Fitness industry, I guess, for kind of looking jacked for Instagram or whatever and like doing okay at like a regional level for you know a lower tier level of physiques,
but like bodybuilding to take it to that next level, it was just like a level of stress I wouldn't be able to one be willing to sustain, and then two it just wouldn't have been worth it because it was like I had tried pushing drugs and like I just wasn't responding to a level I knew I needed to to continue and justify using that much.
Yeah, so it's like your uh androgen receptor content is a uh largely predetermined thing.
There are some things you can do similar to like mitochondrial density and things of that nature that you can do to upregulate and improve it and certain supplements you can use, but ultimately your number of muscle fibers are going to be limited.
Like there's going to be people who are just at baseline, you know, chihuahua looking humans that if you put them on gear, they just become bigger chihuahua humans essentially, but like they're never going to be checked.
Yeah, they're never going to get to you know Mr. Olympia caliber.
And there's a certain like muscle belly that's more conducive to looking bigger and also being able to support certain body weights is even like a health thing too.
It's not just how well do you respond to drugs.
It's also how long can you take them without dying.
You know, so it's like some of the most highest performing and like excelling athletes are individuals who can tolerate this stuff and not go crazy from the some people mentally cannot handle these level of androgens and they, you know, it wrecks their sleep, it wrecks their blood work, it wrecks, they get really early cardiovascular disease.
I mean, at his peak, he was one of the sauciest dudes, or at least, you know, he was like the perfect hybrid of athleticism, meets, like crazy-looking physique, I would say, at least at the time, from what I can recall.
Well, the TRT Vitor was Vitor, so Vitor on the gear when he was younger, and then no gear for a while, low period.
And then when they had TRT in the UFC, where they allowed it when it was legal, which was a crazy few years that people call it the TRT Vitor years, where Vitor was just dominating everybody.
Yeah, like stuff I've never seen UFC athletes do, but I would think would be really conducive, especially to like scrambles and weird grappling positions where you want to have strength and like odd, like odd positions of your body where you're stretched out.
Yeah, melanotan 2 is a one of the, I don't know if it's an obscure one, but I guess maybe proportional to some of the more widespread ones nowadays, but it's like a melanocortin receptor agonist.
And actually, an analog of it is used for women for a hypoactive, like low sexual drive.
So it actually enhances sexual drive too.
So there's like a component, there's a version of the drug that doesn't tan you that just like makes you hornier that women are prescribed called Vilecy.
And then men, there's no drug approved, but you could theoretically take it, but it gives you boners and also makes you tanned if you take the melanotan too.
Yeah, it's like some of the exercises don't even translate the way you think they would to.
Like you do a, you get really good at the bench press, and then you do something else that you think is like pushing related or like force production.
It's like, oh, I'm weak as shit here for some reason.
Even though you thought it would translate, but there's not like a, it's almost training neuronal patterns too, more than even just like the muscle.
And you get hypertrophy, but you're also kind of just like training yourself to get really good at specific movements in a way that has like no application to a lot of sports, typically.
There are more like functional choices, obviously, but like the ones most conducive to bodybuilding and not getting injured are oftentimes like, you know, the typical kind of like beach body style things.
But there are, there are more intelligent choices for sure.
And for what it's worth, I'm absolutely not like above this style of training.
Like this is like what I still kind of do, to be honest.
So it's like, I do, you know, I'm still a fan of bodybuilding.
I don't want to like speak poorly on it or anything.
And we oversee some of the best bodybuilders on the planet right now as well and make sure they can do it as safely as possible because it's still a dangerous sport.
And, you know, you got to take modern knowledge to not screw yourself up nowadays.
Like if I had a friend, I guess maybe similar to your like heart to heart you had with Shaw about MMA at the time when it was like not really worth continuing to expose danger-wise.
It's, you know, often a lot of these kind of situations happen in bodybuilding where it's like you have a close friend who's taking exorbitant amounts of drugs and you know it's just like killing him.
And you know that the like you're not going to make it to the Olympia.
You know, they have the secret, you know, fill in the blank thing that the guru at the Olympia level who's coaching all the top bodybuilders has.
And you just need to get to the next level and get your IFBB pro card.
And then maybe I'll get to work with that guru and then he'll give me access to that drug and then I can take it to the next level.
And then before you know it, a lot of these guys are still grinding for really like low-level shows or like to place poorly even at like the entry level of professional and their health is a wreck and they're not really going to make it to where they think maybe they're on the path to.
And so I don't know.
I think the more, you know, transparent look into it has made a lot of people more self-aware to check themselves and also to know if they're even.
Because you have to respond well from a health standpoint too.
It's not just how good do I look in the mirror.
If you have wrecked blood work or you have a abnormal anatomical structure of your heart before you start subjecting yourself to hormones, these are things that are all checkable now proactively.
And you could tell beforehand if you're a good candidate, not just from a muscular response standpoint, but also from a health tolerance standpoint.
Pharmaceutical pipelines are trying to integrate them in order to offset muscle catabolism induced via GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So it's kind of a unique time because not only do we have really aggressive fat loss agents that actually work now that are not simply stimming your brain to, you know, to high hell, which a lot of the previous drugs worked like that.
Now it's like we have these effective things, but they make you eat so little that we, now the next thing is there's all this attention on how to lose healthy weight and not, you know, a bunch of muscle weight because there's more education around the importance of losing, you know, fat and not muscle, which is metabolically active tissue, health supporting.
Whereas if you just end up skinny fat, you might be no better off than when you started, depending on the person.
So some of the more refined, currently being developed drugs are like these, fat loss, appetite suppressing agents with concurrent like thermogenic properties for energy expenditure, and then muscle preservation mechanisms built in that inhibit myostatin or act through other pathways to try and keep the muscle on you.
Yeah Brigham, from Waste TO WELL, was explaining that they're using some people, rather are using Glp1s in conjunction with Igf and they're they're combining a bunch of different things to offset the bone density and muscle loss and then also encouraging weightlifting while they're doing it, because a lot of people are just taking them and then just shriveling because look, if you starve yourself, you will lose weight, but you're gonna lose bone density, you're gonna lose tissue, you're gonna lose everything.
Yeah, that's like one of the I think most important components of the usage of them is especially with, you know women, who might be otherwise not even integrating it into their regular life.
They just end up eating less of what is already a nutrient poor or protein poor diet and aren't Strength training as much as, I guess, proportionally to men.
It's becoming more prevalent among women, obviously, which is great.
But like the bone loss and muscle loss is significant among anybody who is depriving themselves of nutrients like that.
Like, I mean, he's just not interested in phones, man.
He decided not to have a phone for a long time because he realized it was negative for his mental health and he wanted to lose a bunch of weight, but he did it naturally.
He really did.
He did it just through hard work and discipline and just, you know, have you seen the images of him now?
But there are some people who just, if you ultimately have a genetically higher baseline, perpetual level of appetite signaling, it's kind of hard to tell that person, like, just fucking, you know, wrench it out, bro.
Like, you got this.
And it's like, I know a lot of people in the fitness industry.
Yeah, I mean, I would imagine that to some extent there's some elasticity depending on how long you've been fat and also like, I don't know, maybe just the tissue itself.
There is some level of 382 days.
I'm sure your body's fiending for energy from anywhere it can find it if there's some way to, I don't know.
But I think the interesting thing is he didn't come around, come out of it looking like a lot of these people do where they have to get all their skin removed.
That's the interesting thing is some people psychologically, it's easier to adhere to something when they're full bore.
And then I know a lot of people who they'll do commit to a competition because they know I'm accountable to step on stage and I don't want to look like shit when I'm on stage.
And they do it.
They get a bunch of photos done.
And then after they go off the rails and they're like right back to where they started within, you know, a month or two.
So here it says, 382 days from June 14th, 1965 through June 30th of 1966.
He consumed only vitamins, electrolytes, an unspecified amount of yeast, a source of essential amino acids, and zero calorie beverages such as tea, coffee, and sparkling water.
Although he occasionally added milk and or sugar to the beverages, especially during the final weeks of the fast.
Barbieri began his treatment in the hospital, but for most of the 382 days he lived at home.
Okay, it says stool samples were not taken, but he reportedly went up To 48 days between stools.
Now, one of the things that's tough is it's like, even though maybe that case study exists and there's people who just brute force willpower their way through it, some of those people otherwise might have genetically been able to tolerate, you know, the hunger signaling better than somebody else who literally cannot focus on work or anything when they're that hungry.
And it almost sometimes doesn't even come down to the diet quality as much as somebody might tell them.
Yeah, it does.
It does to some extent, but and it's certainly getting rid of the shitty processed foods and getting on a good exercise regimen and doing all the things to set yourself up in the best position will probably take care of most people.
But there are some individuals who just like at baseline, even on the inverse side, I know a lot of people who simply aren't hungry and they have to force feed themselves to gain muscle because they're just perpetually shredded and they have like the opposite problem because their hunger signaling is so low.
So it's like people look at them as an example in the fitness industry of like, oh, this guy has the best discipline.
And he's like, I don't know, like a teenage, well, he's like in his 20s now, but teenagers look up to him as kind of like a fitness industry icon of aesthetics.
There's distribution of fat and water that some people just looks more shredded than another person who might otherwise store any excess fat on like their ass or like their love handles or like whatever.
For a guy like that, not only is he diced, and, like, obviously he's just diced, but he has, like, a dry look to the skin that enhances the kind of perceived leanness.
And it's like, I forgot what it is.
It's not dick skin lean.
I forgot what the dick skin lean.
I forget what the terminology is, but it's like it's like white guy something.
And it's just like if you're certain white physiques are known to look more like you're almost so pale and dry that it like enhances the perceived leanness, if that makes like any sense whatsoever.
It doesn't seem like that's one of the weird things when you're such an OG of the industry that you just have like weird residual fan pages and you don't even know if it's the guy or not.
And it's like now every Reddit scientist is dumping fucking broccoli juice on their head or whatever.
It's just like never really pans out ultimately.
And it's pretty shocking.
I think I even mentioned this at one point that we have all these refined AI tools and drugs and some of the most developed and refined, nearly side effect-free drugs for some things that are pretty significant roots of disease, but like hair loss, like no one has a clue how to fix it without.
Well, it definitely is, like I said, the most extreme of circumstances to impose for what was seemingly a poor quality clinic.
And then also trying to go from a height that's objectively tall to a height that's objectively, extremely tall with the most heavy guy that's probably ever done the procedure, you would think.
Yeah, there definitely is something a little bit unnatural about watching even like the strikes on the ground.
Yeah, it makes you feel like something's just going to like snap.
Yeah.
But to his credit, I mean, like, the guy literally couldn't even walk before and he's optimistic about it still and he thinks he's going to make a full recovery.
this guy as far as i know he is a bit of a unique case in that he was actually correcting an asymmetry so he had i'm almost positive I don't want to misspeak.
I'm sure he'll correct it if he sees this, but I'm pretty sure he had one leg was like unusually asymmetrically shorter than the other one.
And then he was kind of evening it out to what would otherwise be his, you know, like genetic symmetrical match.
I think there's a lot of people that don't want this to work though, too, because it's like, if it's almost too easy or like, you know, doable, it's just like some people, I say a lot of people unreasonably shit on these people.
And it's just like, you know, just take the content for what it is, you know?
But I'm saying about with the genetic engineering, there's a lot of people that are going to not want that to work either, but tough shit.
You're not going to hold back science because you don't like the fact that, especially if someone has poor genetics and they just look gross in their whole life, they've looked gross.
And then all of a sudden something comes along.
It's like, and now you're a fucking supermodel and you're six foot six.
And like, Mike, it's you?
What the fuck happened?
I went to this clinic in Turkey and look what they did.
So they like think that they can induce acute like bone remodeling in the area to kind of like enhance like, I don't know, Zygoma development or what have you and get better, you know, whatever asymmetry or deficiency they deem to have cosmetically corrected.
And some of them, they're just punching their face essentially before they go out at nighttime to get like a temporary pump in their cheeks.
So like think about back in the day when you went to the club and you're like, I want to hit push-ups first.