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The Stephen McCain Podcast
Insightful interviews, strategies, and advice from people making world-class decisions in human optimization, performance, & longevity with Olympian Stephen McCain.
The Stephen McCain Podcast
The Cutting Edge of Human Optimization: Peptides, Exosomes, Hormones, Brain Chemistry, and Sexual Health with the Prep Coach Alex Kikel. EP 020
In this episode of the Stephen McCain Podcast, I interview a true unicorn in the biohacking world named Alex Kikel; also known as "The Prep Coach." Alex shares his extensive knowledge about optimizing human performance through biohacking techniques that affect everything from cellular function to hormonal balance. Working with professional athletes and performers, he demonstrates how understanding the science behind our body's responses can lead to significant improvements in health, recovery, performance, and longevity.
• The placebo effect works through anticipatory responses between mitochondria, body water, and the fascial system
• TB500 peptide activates neonatal genes, essentially returning tissue to its undamaged, youthful state
• Copper peptide GHKCU can modulate brain chemistry to normalize neurotransmitter levels naturally
• Exosomes potentiate peptide actions and can dramatically accelerate healing when used together
• Sexual performance can be enhanced through proper protocols combining red light therapy, peptides, and hormonal support
• Hormones should be optimized based on individual response rather than standard reference ranges
• Most peptides can be used long-term when dosed appropriately for your specific biochemistry
• Growth hormone supplementation works best at lower doses than commonly prescribed
• Mental outlook significantly impacts physical results—viewing everything as an opportunity creates better outcomes
• Combining biological interventions with appropriate actions always works better than supplementation alone
For links to all the resources in this episode, go to: https://stephenmccain.com/prepcoach
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Website: https://theprepcoach.com
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexkikelTPC
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Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Stephen McCain podcast, where I bring you people making world-class decisions in the field of human optimization, performance and longevity. You are in for a Serious treat with this podcast. I have Alex Kekal on today. He calls himself the prep coach. He works with a lot of professional athletes and performers and he is a wizard with all things biohacking. I mean, his mantra is that he believes you can biohack anything and he has the goods to back it up. He really really knows so much more than most people that talk about a lot of these things that we all do in this space. So you know, we cover a lot of ground on this, from peptides to hormones to exosomes, mindset, sexual wellness a lot of topics and he really offers insights that very few people really have that degree of knowledge, and so I think you're going to love this one. I love doing this. I wish this podcast could have been three hours and I think you're going to like it, so let's do this. Alex, welcome to the Stephen McCain podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me man. I really do appreciate that. It was an honor to meet you in person at FOH Live. We had some good conversations.
Speaker 1:Cool to kind of follow up from that, oh man, I'm so excited about this. You're one of those people that I might come across once every five years Maybe. I attend a lot of conferences and I was like, oh man, here we go, this guy, because you know, this is what I've said about you you are incredibly versed in biochemistry and yet you are incredibly versed in having and they all up, they operate in that, that that sort of space. And then you get these people that are just like, well, I've just tried everything, I know the way the body works and it just here's how you do this, but you're just, you're like the perfect combination of that and I'm I just can't wait to pick your brain on this podcast. Well, thank you.
Speaker 2:I appreciate that. I think a lot of what I see. The world is not black and white. It's always gray goes for everything like nothing's really good or bad.
Speaker 1:People aren't good or bad, it's many shades of gray. Just kind of apply that to everything. Yeah, and you gave a speech that was uh, the premise was you can biohack anything, and I've always had that philosophy that, like you can't, your body is an adaptive thing and you can cause it to adapt to in any direction that you want. You just got to give it the right material and stimulus. Right, that's exactly right, it's so.
Speaker 2:The word's plastic right, so that plasticity, anything can change. Like what? 20 years ago they thought the brain, like could never grow or improve. It was like, oh, you have Alzheimer's or dementia or you have a TBI. It's like you're done, sorry, your life's over. And for all those people the doctor said that to, it's like could you imagine being that person who's told you're done living your life? Because you just got punched in the face and then they didn't listen, they went out and did their own thing and they realized, oh, I can change my brain. It applies to everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in fact they were actually. By even saying that the brain can't do that, they were informing their own brain and building neural pathways to strengthen that belief system.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, so I'm going to kick off this podcast really cool with that. Okay, okay, you're going to love this, okay. So this goes back to how your thoughts become things, how your thoughts become reality and really the whole placebo effect. So I don't think anyone's really ever elucidated the placebo effect, at least in this manner. We saw how through my lens and how I see things working.
Speaker 2:First of all, it's a conversation between mitochondria our body's water and fascia, meaning mitochondria are not reactive, they're proactive. They are anticipatory, meaning before you do anything, they're already reacting. They know what's going to happen. In the same way that water is very reactive and it's a communication system. So water look out in the ocean. It gets hit by lightning. What happens? It tenses up. How can it do that before the lightning hits it, unless if it knew it was going to come? Or you jump off a tall building into pool and if you're high enough up, guess what You're not dropping into water. It's like you're hitting cement. It tightens up. You're not just going to go into the water. So how would that happen if it wasn't reactive in the same manner?
Speaker 2:Then we look at the fascial system in our body. So okay, we have something's about to happen. Our fascia and our water are communicating with each other before we even do that action or take that supplement or eat that food. But how does it move throughout the body? Our fascial system that actually moves faster communicates with water and mitochondria faster than our neurons fire in our brain. So those things are firing at peak of seconds. Like you really can't even measure that these anticipatory actions are happening faster.
Speaker 2:So the whole placebo effect, the whole your thoughts, become things. It's because you're doing that. If you think you're going to take a supplement, for example, like you're about to pop a pill, ss31 or whatever and then you hear something crash down upstairs and you run up to it and you forgot to take that pill, your body would still respond as if you took that pill, even though you didn't take it because in that environment you were about to it's. You took that pill even though you didn't take it because in that environment you were about to. It's not like. You can't fool yourself. Keep like oh, I'm going to take it, not do it. No, you're not going to take it. It's that anticipatory programming response.
Speaker 1:Yeah, anybody that's taken enough stuff or paid attention with enough awareness to their physiology for a long enough period of time, they know that that is real. You, you like there, you could have a headache even I know everyone has probably done it. You have a headache and you take like an ibuprofen or something and just as you're even entering it into your mouth, your headache starts to subside a little bit right, exactly. Yeah, I'm more fascinated by not just how that works with these placebo effects, but I'm more fascinated with how every thought that you have can make your life better or worse. Really, at the end of the day like when I was a training to be a world-class athlete and try to make an olympic team you literally had to control everything that your brain was thinking because you couldn't let anybody rock you off your mountaintop, you know, and it was an art to do that right and that's to me.
Speaker 2:It's a learned skill, like I always use myself for the example just because it's the easiest, like I was not always naturally positive person, I was not naturally healthy, I was not naturally intelligent, had poor memory, like the opposite of who I am today, and I made the decision to become this person. It literally is an active process every second, every single day, and that sounds laborious in nature, but it's really not. It's a learned skill over time. So if you could start slowly, like you said, getting to the top of that and staying there, not letting anyone or anything really derail you from that. Anything comes into your life. My biggest mantra that I tell myself and everyone I work with is everything in life is an opportunity. So the moment something negative happens in your brain, find the positive and say it out loud, confirm it to the world and do not even go down that other path. If you can get good at that alone, your quality of life, how good you are at your job, how good of a partner you are, it just goes up crazy, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I mean to think that nothing bad is ever going to happen or that we're just impervious to negative situations. It's all about how you react in your relationship to it, and within all difficulty lies an opportunity. That's one of my I think that's my favorite quote. It's Einstein quote and I always do that. Try to do that exact same thing, just to say what can I learn from this or how can this better me and how can I just move forward with knowing something that I didn't know, that can make me more equipped in the future, you know, and fantastic. Well, I'm glad we kind of got a little bit of a mindset start to this. I did want to ask what is your formal background in terms of this education, because you showed me a couple of books where we got started. I mean, obviously you are a self educator, but what is your formal background in, like this, chemistry and biochemistry and biology?
Speaker 2:So actually, nothing in that world. I got my master's in performance enhancement, injury prevention, whatever 10 years ago, decade plus, whatever. And then I was going to go for my PhD because originally I wanted to work in a human performance research lab and teach, because I just liked education at that point. And at that point my business blew up just doing online stuff on the bodybuildingcom forums when it was big and I was like I'm not going to spend more money in school for a doctorate, I'm just going to see if this thing works. And again, that was like 13 or whatever years ago. So it was just a master's, a couple of scattered certificates and stuff like that. But I think what college taught me the best was how to learn, so how to find information and how to interpret that information. Everything I know today I learned after college. But I love traditional academia because you learn how to learn. It sets you up for the right way to continue the rest of your life. So I think that was very invaluable for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when I went to UCLA I was pre-med and I wasn't really ready because I didn't know how to. Really I just wanted to be an Olympian. And then, when I subsequently went back and I moved to the Olympic Training Center, then I went to college at University of Colorado and I switched everything to finance degree in business and at that point it was when I really learned how to learn and I graduated at summa cum laude and then from there I've always felt like an academic at heart and how I've picked up a lot of this health stuff. And what's fascinating is you never can really stop. And I feel that's why I always feel kind of bad for doctors in this realm, because they go to school for so long and by the time they finish it seems like their education is just beginning, because it's everything.
Speaker 1:Is it's so hard to keep up with everything? I mean I there's every time I feel like, well, that's pretty. Is it's so hard to keep up with everything? I mean I there's every time I feel like, well, that's pretty much it. I think I'm just gonna. There's not a whole lot else new going on, and then all of a sudden just a wave of all this new stuff comes down and I'm like I gotta wrap my head around this stuff dude.
Speaker 2:So okay, so good example in the peptide space, we're learning of about 100 to 200 new peptides every single day. So if you keep up with all the journals, talk to all the researchers because I'm good friends, or at least I know them in acquaintances with a lot of different people all the time they'll be hey, did you ever hear about this? Hey, this is new. There's always learning. So I spend more than half of my week feeling dumb, which is kind of the perfect place to be at, because you're always learning. You're always receptive information, so interceptive information. So as long as you can encode those memories, you're good to go. That's been like for me. That's the hardest place where I'm at right now. Like my food intake has gotten ridiculous just because of how much I'm learning. Every day. I'm at like 4 500 calories. It's like 400 grams of protein, 600 grams of carbs, 100 grams of fat ish and uh and I'm.
Speaker 2:I'm going hypo by 4 pm every day after I take my pdo walk outside because it's like after the work day and training and learning so much I'm just going hypo from that walk because it just sets me over the edge. So fueling the memory encoding side of things has been hard for me.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah, well, let's dig in a little bit, because you mentioned peptides and I have been using peptides for 11 years. It was pretty underground when I started and I host the World Peptide Congress, now a Dr Seed's event, for the last two, three years and I've been able to speak there. I used to attend it as just one of the only non-doctors. Oh, that's cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would just sit in the back and just listen. And then I got to know him and introduced myself, said thank you so much for allowing non-doctors to be here. He's like, yeah, yeah, of course you know, and and, uh, I I'm a huge, huge. I've had a love affair of peptides for a very long time and I haven't really covered them that much on this podcast. It's so weird, I don't know why.
Speaker 1:I sort of have, um, you know, I never really like I never thought people were gonna inject themselves with needles, and now it's like no big deal and because I had people that would come over to my house and they're like, dude, what, what are you doing? You know, like this, what is all this stuff? You know, and? But but I mean, look, we have, like the, I think, the basic core peptides. You have your PPC and your TB 500, which everyone talks about. But let's run through these a little bit, because I think you might have a different perspective on it and maybe I do too, at least on those, those two that are like the considered the Wolverine healing stack. But I've always said that the TB 500 also is like a thymus peptide, so there's an immune system aspect to that peptide that is very beneficial as well in anti-inflammatory. And so you have any inside tidbits on some of these core ones that no one knows about or that that may be a different way of looking at them lots.
Speaker 2:So okay, if you ever want to learn about any supplement peptide whatever, go to it. Look at the cascades on the biochemical processes and then just start googling. Oh, if there's a pi3k akt cascade, probably drive m tor in anabolism in some degree. If it has, you just go through that for absolutely every single aspect. Tb500, again, because there's 20 to 50 things that these peptides do. So I try and make it as easy as possible. We break it down to the top four things. So there's a primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary aspects. So one, two, three and four, right With TB500, the reason why I love it. So the first primary reason for everyone is it's pretty much the only peptide out there that'll activate neonatal genes. So those are the things right now in your system that will turn on and it'll be essentially if you are at this point in life with zero trauma, oxidative stress, inflammation or damage. It's the only peptide out there that does that and this is research that's been out for over a decade. At this point, only compound that does that. So, activation of neonatal genes, tb500. Wow, is that cool. Second one, if you start looking at some of the research with strokes, okay, this is some really cool research out there. Its ability to actually heal and recover from a stroke in the moment, an hour or two later will show up as if you did not have a stroke, meaning the TBI and the traumatic brain damage effect you get while you're having a stroke. If you can make it to your fridge and pop five to ten milligrams of tb500, go to the hospital. Obviously make sure you're doing your due diligence. They will basically ask you to leave four hours later because the secondary scans will show up as there's no damage. We've had that happen multiple times over these.
Speaker 2:I think carl, who used to have a big podcast back in the day, superhuman radio, love that dude. I think he's like. I always want to give him credit for that because he's the biggest proponent of that and he actually did himself. So anyone in that kind of age range I'm like, hey, just have tb reconstitute ready to go in your fridge. So if it does happen, just go there. You're kind of good to go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's two, right, uh, if we go down, because there's tons of different interactions, let's look at one interaction that most people don't know about. If you look at the ability to potentiate antibiotics, so let's say you have to take a course of any of the penicillins or any of the cephalosporins, whatever antibiotic or over-the-counter herbal antibiotic, so anything that will manage bacteria. It could be a methylene blue, could be an allicin, could be an oregano oil, whatever you're trying to clip a bacterial problem, tb500 potentiates their action. So if you do have to go on a traditional pharmaceutical from your doctor and you're worried about your gut biome, you could do half the course, half the dose, and take tb500 to make up the difference.
Speaker 1:So, like people with sebo can, maybe. Well, because sebo you actually are trying to annihilate a lot of that, the overgrowth of bacteria. But I wonder, could you get away with, I guess, the thing with antibiotics? You don't want to become immune to using the antibiotic again, right, resistance. So I think the herbals are a one way to avoid the resistance. Right, you know that way, but uh, that's there. I did not know that. About tb500, I did not know that at all. But keep going. This is fantastic. I don't want to slow you down. Yeah, no, you're good.
Speaker 2:Everyone likes to discern between BPC and TB in terms of which will heal soft tissue, which will heal muscular tissue, and over the years of doing torn pecs, bicep tendon ruptures, I mean every kind of injury you can imagine. I've seen so much crossover and spillover it's pretty dramatic between the two. So TB500, we've seen an application be able to heal muscular tissue, tendinous fibrous-based collagen tissue. We've seen if you locally inject it into your erectile tissue, males and females can start to re-hypertrophy that erectile tissue if there was some kind of trauma from a bad sexual incident or if you were hit with a baseball bat in the groin, something like that. So even that fibrous, connective, tunica-based architecture of like the penis, for example, or even the clitoral network, you can locally apply TB500. It's a little bit harder to do those kind of clitoral-based injections but if there was a clitoral-based damage event you can kind of bring that tissue back.
Speaker 1:So I see TB500 and BPC as both being more global tissue healing players because of how many cascades they work through. Wow, that's great. I mean you bring up the penile health and all that, and that is a rabbit hole. I think we're probably going to go down here, although I don't want to derail the peptide stuff just yet. So I'm going to put a pin in that one, but it's something that I think you know a great deal about and you've worked with some. Go ahead.
Speaker 2:I was going to say I don't want to interrupt you. I want to do one more just because you're wearing glasses. Have we talked about TB500 eye drops?
Speaker 1:You told me at FOH, at the party, or like the little dinner afterwards. I told you. I said I want to do my eyes and you said 50 micrograms. You make 50 microgram drops just TB500, right so?
Speaker 2:you can do both TB500 and BPC157, and you can also add in it's a product called KeyNC and that's a C-leaded carnosine that was originally for macrogeneration in the canine world but works on humans extremely well. But to focus on TB500, if you get normal 5 milligram vial, add one milliliter of bacteriostatic water. It'll be basically one drop or one iu. So you would transfer that to any kind of eye drop, or one drop is roughly 50 micrograms per eye. It'll start to actually rehydrate the eye, it'll heal that corneal lens, it'll penetrate through that ocular tissue and start healing every different fibrous. There's three different tunics, there's multiple different tunics, multiple different cascades. Obviously it's healing every aspect of eye health. So it's really like right done.
Speaker 1:Okay, I, I actually, um, I, I always have tb500, bpc157, ghkcu, growth hormone, peptide, uh, thymus and alpha one, always like I, always, always, always. So I re-upped my bpc157 and tb500 specifically to do this protocol, the i1 nice because it's the only thing I've noticed, like I. Nice Because it's the only thing I've noticed, like I'm 51 now and it's the one thing that and it's not farsight, farsight is perfect. I'm like a hawk, but up close I just I'm really sensitive to blue light and I think it's all these damn screens, but I'm gonna.
Speaker 1:I have the can see eye drops. I've used the methylene blue eye drops. I have the bison mitten eye drops that come from Russia. I've actually purchased those in Russia. I mean, if you can get them in I got them in Moscow Uh, if you can get them cold there without them being shipped here, they work amazing. I don't feel like they work as well here after they come through customs or whatever. And then I do have exosomes that I thought about doing a round of drops of exosomes. I mean, I think exosomes and peptides play very, very well together. I've been tinkering with those protocols for two years now, but I'll take it one step at a time, but I'm going to do your eye drops for sure.
Speaker 2:So you're a thousand percent right on the exosomes they will potentiate the action of any peptide you introduce it to. So the whole new wave should be hopefully it catches on sooner rather than later should be reconstituting your peptides in exosome-based water. It's slowly starting to go in that direction, but that potentiation effect is pretty high. Usually it's just more the sourcing of the exosomes that makes it harder.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, I've been in the exome business. I mean, look, I'm wearing club exosome, you know, for most people. Yeah, Sandra Kaufman and I've been doing this. She introduced me to them and I haven't stopped since. Every quarter I do them, sometimes more, but I've been trying them with various peptides and GHKCU. I don't know what it's kind of like that thing we alluded to when we first started talking, like your brain kind of like knows something. You know, I don't know exactly. I know it could be the stem cell recruitment or something, but I love taking GHKCU when I do exosomes. Do you have anything with that peptide in particular? That might be why this is happening, oh God.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I've used, I've been able to wean off people off of antidepressants and SSRIs and SNRIs by using GHKCU. So it'll modulate cortical centers in the brain to basically normalize neurochemistry. So we're literally using it to modulate things like dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin. But again, it's not not I say modulate specifically, meaning it's not going to increase or decrease by default. It's going to bring the levels to what you need them. So if you are too high dopaminergic and you're starting to get the little shakes, or you're too low dopaminergic you don't have the motivation at all, it's going to bring it up or pull it down based on what your neurochemistry needs interesting because I, you know, this is a this is a whole nother topic.
Speaker 1:I would say the. The one thing I always feel like I'm trying to work on, like everyone has their like legacy things that they pretty much work on for their whole life, right, or they spend a good amount of years trying to figure out. And one of them, for me, is I feel like I have a unique brain chemistry. I mean, I I probably didn't help it by being so one-dimensional for so long, like when you're trying to, when you're an Olympic athlete. It's like you're just like everything is this, everything, everything is. I sacrifice everything in life for this, for this, for this. So I tend to be a rabbit holer where if I'm into something, I'm into it like 24-7, and then I'll just burn out and I'll be like I need to take three days and just not even think about anything. But my brain chemistry is, you know, maybe GHKCU, the copper peptide, is actually balancing my brain chemistry a little bit. Maybe that's what it is.
Speaker 2:That's usually how it comes in and how it acts. So question follow-up for you is what doses are you normally getting that at? Because it could be a big dose range depending on the person.
Speaker 1:I do one to two milligrams injectable.
Speaker 2:You could probably have that one milligram in daily in the morning fairly long term, as long as you're not getting too high copper levels which you have to take a lot of GHK. If that even happened, you take it as that morning AM circadian ligand. Get outside, Let your eyes see first sun. It'll potentially affect you even more so.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, yeah, I go through where I'll go maybe two weeks and then I'll take a little break, and then I'll go two weeks and take a little break. I'm always kind of often on it, but lately I've been off of it for a while and and which is rare for me Like I love it. I love the skin you know, like, oh my God, it's just.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that peptide. I just have a really good connection with it and I did not even consider the brain aspect of it, so that that could be, um, that could be something. What about, uh, thymus alpha-1? Because I think that for the immune system and autoimmune conditions and rebalancing the innate and the adaptive immune systems, have you got any tertiary and primary effects of that?
Speaker 2:A lot. So real quick back to GHK. I've had people do it daily for upwards of a year to replace their medications and zero negative side effects. Again, we monitored copper levels, obviously, but as long as there was no copper toxicity then it was perfectly well tolerated. I'd rather have them have that in play than SSRI or SNRI that's causing other kinds of neural atrophies. So the traditional cycle length it could be dramatically high. You can also do it Monday, wednesday, friday or in frequently throughout the week. It doesn't have to be a daily thing because it operates on a very genomic principle, meaning long-term, chronic. You're changing your genes with that. So I wanted to say that just so you know.
Speaker 2:Like the window is huge for frequency and application.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we had mentioned before I got on this that I had used Kratom to spend a lot of hours sitting in front of a computer because anyone that may not know if you go to my website, I built that thing. If you go to clubexescom, I built that thing. I tend to like to learn things but can't sit still for long periods of time because I'm so active. But Kratom, which is an opioid, I would do the one that was blended with kava, and so I typically I know I have a low GABA, but that allowed me to work, but it was doing something to my brain that I was like I don't really I feel like this is killing my motivation. So maybe this copper peptide kind of helped re-architect and modulate a little bit of those levels so that they're more normal. I mean, I feel pretty good, but I do feel like sometimes I sit down at a desk and I'm like I don't even know where to begin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you want to be just like everything else we talked about, like before we recorded. You want to be 110% every single day, in every aspect of life. I feel like with our technology, our tech, just the information we have, the education, all the tools we have, I don't see why that's like a fallacy. I don't see why everyone shouldn't be living their best life every single day. So I think shooting for that is just what everyone should be doing Exactly.
Speaker 1:I totally agree with you. All right, let's move on to you know how much time we got here. Do we want to spend all this time on peptides? Well, how about this? Are there any peptides out there that you really are just so surprised at what you're getting out of it? Or anything new with peptides, like I recently just started doing SS 31 and I was like, wow, this, this peptide feels like someone put new batteries in me. It was phenomenal.
Speaker 1:You helped me figure out the dosing for that and, uh, I, I kind of I never, I kind of wrote off, not wrote off, but I sort of put on the side the mitochondrial peptides for a long time because they the mot C I hated injecting. Like, how do I get enough water in there to inject all of this without it being this massive five injections everywhere? But SS 31 is a little bit more of a, a tolerable amount. That's simple and easy to do and, man, I, I love that peptide. I really like it. How are you dosing mot C? Well, you know, there's so many, there's so many ways to do it like. There's the one time a week, there's a multiple times a week, there's five or ten milligrams once a week, uh, for 10 weeks. There's dr c's protocol. There was a protocol that various people had put out. That kind of rose to the top. How do you recommend dosing mot c?
Speaker 2:that's why I asked too because I think this would be a cool sidestep in the conversation as well the whole application application, because I think it's very misunderstood, right? So I'm someone who used to learn about half-lives, peak concentration and that really meant a lot, right, that has a place in pharmacokinetics dynamics to understand how drugs supplements, how everything works. Right. The problem with that is especially in the peptide world. They're operating more on non-genomic and genomic chemical signaling principles. Meaning non-genomic happens right now, peak of seconds. So if you're injecting SS31, actions are happening. Okay, that's signal transduction, that happens as you're injecting it. It doesn't have to be all the way in, there could just be a little bit and it's starting to work. Then the genomic side of things that's the chronic long-term changes that happen over days, weeks, months and years. So anytime you take one injection of one peptide, you're technically changing your genome forever, which, if you're doing it in the right fashion, it could be very good. If you're doing it in the wrong fashion, it could be bad. So that sounds scary, but in reality, think about it as something's happening right now, it's something happening long-term. So in that kind of vein, if we can have a compound that we can get action right now and long-term, wouldn't it make most sense to apply it in a daily fashion for the vast variety of reasons? Because we're getting a chemical signal here and another chemical signal there, versus just one long-term chemical signal. So yeah, and again, generally, for like mot c could be used in that daily fashion doses, usually 200 to 500 microns, you know what I mean. Upon waking, pre-workout, something like that, depending on the goal. But the doses can be worked up very high based on the individual. So it's always that individual based response. It could be worked up to multiple milligrams depending on the reason.
Speaker 2:Mozzi specific because it's working on the, the mitochondrial. So it's that short open reading frame. So you zoom in on the dna, look the mitochondrial dna, it spits out short open reading frames. Spits out mozzi, so it's mitochondria open reading frame of the 12th srnac. Just tells you where it's acting. What it does basically what that does a really good job of is it'll actually up regulate the entire sirtuin family. So if you're taking mozzi to up regulate the sirtuins and all the cool things everyone has nad for, then that's a different protocol than if you're taking the drive ampk, which is different, trying to drive my mTOR with it so many things, and that's to me where the frequency and dosage has really changed.
Speaker 1:Interesting If you're trying to get some DNA repair. I imagine that MOTC was probably pretty good right.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah. So whenever you have your IV girl or guy show up with your NAD.
Speaker 1:Maybe you throw a little MOTC in the bag just going to potentiate it, yeah like just going to potentiate it, you know, yeah, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned this because other peptides like I know the epitalon protocol that the soviets were doing for a long time that people use it for telomeres or that's a good one to talk about.
Speaker 1:What's that that's a good one to talk about yeah, and so people would do five or ten milligrams, you know, for 10 days. It was like either you do 50 milligrams or 100 milligrams, so but it was these big doses. Then there was sort of like well, what about one milligram a day? And and so I kind of moved away from the five to 10 milligrams a day towards just doing the one milligram and and I liked it and I don't. I've been using that protocol for a long time and I've had my. I don't know if these telomeres tests are like even from true not true diagnostic. I don't know if that stuff is legit, but my telomeres were 15 years younger than me and so maybe they're working. I do find that my sleep reset, like my circadian rhythm reset with epitalon, is very real for me. Like my circadian rhythm reset with epitalon is very real for me.
Speaker 2:No, it is too. And so okay, if we go down the epitalon conversation and remember all the dosage protocols, things like that, it's through my lens, my experience of people for the past 13 years. I don't think anyone's wrong. It's always your own lens and your experiences, because there's thousands of different ways to do things In my world. Looking at epitalon, you can dose it multiple different ways. But again, if we look at it from a telomerase aspect, so trying to actually lengthen telomeres, you're looking at that three prime overhang. So DNA works. You have that parent strand, so you have a three prime to a five prime. Then below that it goes the opposite three to five prime underneath. That's the new strand and then that little overhang, that three prime, that's the thing that slowly shortens over time. So then the dna gets shorter and shorter. Everyone knows that right.
Speaker 2:The problem is what if that strand, what that three prime overhang, goes too far? It'll spill over and it can start fueling senescent cell and cancer cell growth. So in the epitalin based world you gotta take a lot of epitalin. But it's also one of the biggest peptides I think everyone should respect more. So I don't like doing a 50 milligram bolus or something like that if you do a 10 milligram bolus once or twice a month, every three months, four months, that's more than fine. Or the the milligram for like 10 days, 20 days, 30 days, whatever, then you're doing that a couple times a year. I think that's more than fine, I think it's more of the total dose and total duration.
Speaker 2:People run into problems because if you are again going and overshooting that three prime overhang, it's spilling over into the wrong cascade. You can't really get a lot of negative side effects if you overdose on tb or bpc. Maybe the, the dopamine receptor transmission, changes with bpc. But that's more dependent on the person, not the dose.
Speaker 2:But epitalin is the one where I would like to stay away from fueling anything senescent, you know, because they're already not. That's still very bad. They're doing their own life cycle. They're supposed to proliferate, die off, move on to the next thing that's supposed to happen. But fueling them further I'm not a big fan of, for obvious reasons. So I would rather be more cautious with the epitalin dosage and then, like you said, that that's, that's just for longevity health. If you're using it to reset your circadian pattern, that's absolutely amazing, right, you could do a little bit in the morning or before bed, because it will stimulate some people so like, if I would take it afternoon, I will be up for two days straight. But if I take it in the morning, get some first light sun exposure, I'm good that night and I get better sleep. So it'll be stimulatory in different environments based on the individual going back to their own neurochemistry, so you want to trial it different times a day for you yeah, and, and there is some skin health benefits.
Speaker 1:Have you seen? Have have you noticed that at all?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, and that's actually going back to a lot of the insulin sensitivity changes. So it's acting kind of as like a faux nutrient partitioner, where it's improving how you're handling glucose, lipids and nitrogen, so you're storing things in the right compartments less inflammation, less dermal downregulation, so the skin starts to heal itself.
Speaker 1:This is great. You're like a wealth of knowledge. I absolutely. This is great. I you're like a wealth of knowledge. I absolutely, I love this. What about you mentioned all these different, like hundreds of peptides that we're realizing or that are now we're finding, and are people sequencing and trying these things and using them? What's going on with any of this?
Speaker 2:so two camps right now. There are ones out there that no one knows about but we have the cast number for. So the cast number you can actually get it synthesized and made and then sent out More expensive, you have to know how to do all that fun stuff, but that's one where we can trial it in person. The other way is they're in the research and there's no cast number. So over in the no cast number world we have no application for it because we literally can't have it synthesized. That's a very interesting world because I can't talk about a couple of them because I want to eventually bring them to the market with BioLongevity Labs, but a couple of the ones over there. There's one specifically that stands out in the mitochondrial that's probably going to reverse type 1 diabetes, which is super crazy, but again there's no cast number. So that's all in the literature. Maybes we still got to try that out Over here in this world, the ones that no one knows about. But we have the cast number, we're synthesizing, we're getting all the data.
Speaker 2:I try to never talk about a compound list.
Speaker 2:If I had at least 100 people, use it myself, because if it's 100 easy number, 99 of people responded amazingly well and one percent that one person didn't, and then it builds from there. So I try to not talk unless I have at least 100, but I prefer like 500 ish people, um, just to kind of make sure I have all my bases covered. But over in that world, the mitochondria space is exploding like crazy. There's a whole uh no, I shouldn't say that uh, yeah, there's a there's a lot of mitochondrial things that are kind of taking the forefront. There's a lot of things coming out in the skin care based world. A couple new things come out in the myostatin based world that are going to be pretty interesting. So there's a little bit of peptides coming in for literally fixing everything. That's why I I made that seminar. We have something to fix everything, because the peptide space is now blowing up to say, oh, there's a skin problem, there's a cancer problem, there's a brain health problem. They're fixing everything with these peptides, which is super cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're so powerful. Anyone that's ever had some sort of issue or something they wanted to change and then used peptides. And I have always said that people overestimate what peptides can do. And underestimate what peptides can do because some people are just very unrealistic. A lot of times there's a lot of magic bullet syndrome or thing where like I want this one thing and it's just going to fix it. I'm always under the impression that you, you can signal the body to do, but you also got to do other things and behavioral things and other things to nurture that adaptation and facilitate it. But I think this is fascinating. It's a lot easier when you only have a few choices. You know because I sit there.
Speaker 1:I remember when I got into like brain health and all these nootropics and I was into racetams and all this stuff and you find this stuff that really works for you. But now there's like so many and you can try a lot of stuff. You'd be like that thing is perfect for me and perfect for me. But over the course of 15 years of doing all this stuff I'll circle around to something that was like an old school, like a racetam, like phenylparacetam. I'm like, oh my God, I forgot how amazing this thing is, you know.
Speaker 1:So it's almost like there's almost too many choices that are going to be coming up. And then, really, how do you architect? Cause everyone wants a framework and they want a blueprint or they want something, and every day I do this, and then I and just give me my system, and really it's a lot more fluid in a way. And just give me my system, and really it's a lot more fluid in a way. Right, a lot of these things, and I think you just have to be open-minded and always be learning. But, man, I'm excited to hear about some of this stuff you guys are creating with BioLongevity Labs, because this is an exciting time.
Speaker 2:It is man. And going back to what you were saying, I think sometimes people see how I do things for myself, for my clients, and they kind of misinterpret that. Because for myself, for example, I take so many things every single day but I've slowly implemented one thing, week after week, month after month, for literally over a decade, to figure out what works, what doesn't work for me personally. And now I'm at the point where I have my baseline and if I'm going to bring in a new nootropic then I'm going to pull something else out and then give it a good amount of time to really know what's working with it. So I'll only make one change at a time and I'll make sure I have my baseline. So I know that any kind of deviation. But most people, like you said, you see there's 20 things and you have 20 things to fix.
Speaker 1:You could go that route of putting 20 things in at one time, but if you don't know the science to look out, for and I totally agree with you and I always try to tell people try to roll things in one at a time so that you build a relationship with that particular compound or supplement or whatever it is. But you start adding, you know, just throwing too many things into the pile, Like you have too many variables, and you know, well, yeah, it worked, but I don't know what worked. And now you're kind of stuck with that. You know, I got to take these 20 things every single day when it could have just been some very simple thing, right, that's a big one too.
Speaker 2:So again, these things do not have to be taken every single day. They could be used infrequently or even on an as-needed basis. Good example Do you remember the movies my Big Fat Greek Wedding, what is it called? My big fat creek wedding? Oh yeah, remember that. So remember, I had the windex.
Speaker 2:He'd spray it on everything sure yeah, bpc 157, topically applied, works like that in the movie, meaning it literally fixes almost anything topically. So, like my puppies, they scraped their little paws the other day because we got a new puppy a couple weeks ago and I put her little paw in like a bath of BPC-157 water, healed it overnight. A little scrape on like my daughter's knee you spray with BPC-157, heals it overnight. Like that's a compound that everyone should have on hand Reconstitute, put it in a little spray bottle, keep it in your fridge. Something happens. You just spray BPC-157 on it. It heals it, usually overnight. If it's extreme, like a gas, you don't want to do that. But if it's topical, nothing crazy then you can definitely do that. That's something where everyone can have easy access to keep in there just in case. But you don't need it every day. It could just be an infrequent as needed player yeah, dr elizabeth ureth.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you know who she is. She's probably one of my favorite doctors in the whole world. She said bpc 157 should just be in the drinking water, like literally, you should just be in the drinking water.
Speaker 2:Like literally, you should just be in the drinking water. Yeah, I've never talked with her personally, but she always seemed like an awesome person.
Speaker 1:Oh, she is awesome. I mean, I'm happy to make an introduction at some point, because I nobody is going to be upset with me introducing you to them. That's my opinion.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:That's right. Yeah Well, that's why when you asked for Sandy's number, I was like here you go. Yeah well, that's why when you asked for Sandy's number, I was like here you go. No one's going to be upset. You speak the language across the board. But you did mention some sexual health with the TV 500. And I know you've worked with adult film stars. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, male and female.
Speaker 1:Male and female. Okay, it's a very interesting topic and it tends to be something that can be the what you frame this whole podcast, because you know people are sexual oh well, how do I increase my penis size and all this stuff but you've actually laid out some things in order to do this stuff, in terms of pumping and using a C-ring and jelking and topical DHT red light.
Speaker 2:I mean honestly, I'm very open about that. Those are the basics. You do those and then just like everything, everything else. We don't want to just take something. We're going to do something and take something. It's just like, like let's I usually always use the example of creatine. You can take it by itself and not do anything, but ideally you're going to take creatine and train if you're taking it for, like, the muscular benefits because there's so many other neurological changes, so maybe that's a bad. I'm bad with analogies and examples, so maybe that was a bad one. But we always want to do something. We do an action and take something. I don't like just the supplement and then no action.
Speaker 2:So that's my, that's my philosophy yeah, right, I mean, it should be like that. So in this world, you do the manual work, you're breaking up the, the fibrous connective tissue of the penis uh, clitoral difference will save that, uh, for a second when the erectile tissue for male world, you're breaking that up, you're changing the mitochondria being more blood flow, oxygen nutrients, that's hemodynamics. Then you do things to potentiate that. So, like you said, with the dht gels you could do localized applications of injectable dht. You could do localized applications of igf, des to spark growth in the area. Specifically, you could do all okay.
Speaker 1:So hold so you can do, uh, injecting some sort of igf, so like a growth hormone secretagogue or a growth hormone, or what are you suggesting on?
Speaker 2:that one. So actually IGF, we can use either an Increlix or an IGF-DES. The LR3 version of IGF is more of a circulatory insulin regulatory player, which is cool. That handles a lot of nutrient partitioning. But if we want localized growth, because you can do this for your biceps, your shoulders, your glutes, your penis doesn't really matter you would locally apply IGF-DES or Incralex. Incralex is straight IGF that tends to spill over in the global system and cause some organ-based strains. So we usually say I'll say I'll hold off on the actual IGF, straight like an Incralex.
Speaker 1:go with the IGF-DES which off on the actual IGF straight like an Incralex go with the IGF-DES, which is staying a little more locally Interesting. So I've been into this for a long time because I try to biohack everything and I've used the Joel Kaplan pump for years, which I think his is the best one. I'll include a link in the show notes. I'm on my third one and those things are pretty pretty. You know they last a long time. But I've always considered getting blood flow and oxygen and then, like you said, like the jelking, the massage, I mean you can definitely increase size with doing that stuff and the health of it. And then I use this red light. I have it sitting right here. Let me grab this One second.
Speaker 2:Yeah, while you're grabbing that too, just for those listening, there's also the red light that you'll put directly on your rectal tissue, so it just literally looks like a, like a normal, like a pump, but there's red light built into it.
Speaker 1:You can, oh yeah, I'm always like somebody needs to just hit a home run with that, but I use this. This is a flex beam, so you can nice, you can literally like wrap around, and these things are pretty, pretty powerful. You can do red or a combination of red.
Speaker 1:So no, no one else should touch that one right no, no one should touch that that's yours, that's mine yeah, so uh, but I keep everything safe, but I've, I've never done any of the igf or you know, or the, uh, even the. Can you even get dht cream, like you, I imagine? Okay, so you know where to get it right a mess that's not easy to come by, I imagine so certain compounding pharmacies will do it, because females can use it also to drive that clitoral growth change.
Speaker 2:so if they want to get more sensitive clitoral uh interactions, uh, better orgasmic strength, certain compound pharmacies will do that. That's usually hard to find, it's usually you know other routes to go get it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I tell you another thing that I've done, which I think are great and I'm very happy with I've injected exosomes, oh yeah, and man, it's like you're an 18-year-old again. The response is it's almost annoying, an 18 year old, again you. The response is it's almost annoying, like it literally is almost like oh, my god, this is like an 18 year old penis, right, you know, because you know you think at a 50 year old man you're like, yeah, well, I want that. And then, but then when you actually start having that and you these spontaneous erections anywhere or anything, and it starts having this response it's it's, it's good, it, you can bring it back is what I'm trying to say, you know oh, that, so that's the perfect way to word it.
Speaker 2:So, uh, using exome therapy directly into the penis or into clitoral tissue. If it's working that well, it's usually because there's some kind of damage occurring in that tissue. If you have a perfectly healthy, if, if you took that 18-year-old with no erectile tissue problems, you won't get any effect. Exosomes are amazing at repair, so there has to be damage there to bring the oxygen nutrients and drive those cellular repairs. So to me that's a good sign. If you respond that well, don't you go? Oh, okay, I have to change something in the meantime.
Speaker 1:You're not going every single day but doing that every quarter, like you said. Absolutely awesome, have you? Have you played with, uh, like oxytocin or dopamine? So I have oxytocin, lozenges, trokes or whatever, um, and I I kind of just did it to do it, and this was years ago. I now feel like I would like to do it with a more conscious approach to doing something. And then with dopamine, I've played around with. I mean, there's all the precursors you know like it just the, the Acuna, prurines and the various nootropics that do dopamine precursors, also the cellelgeline, which is a pharmaceutical to MAO inhibitor. It basically slows down the breakdown of dopamine. Um, because dopamine I know for sure there's a connection with that and your sexual drive, right. It's sort of like the testosterone of the brain, right?
Speaker 2:okay, cool. So let's get into that real quick then. So let's give the female some love for this part of this conversation. Um, so, first of all, in the brain male or female doesn't matter it's this oxytocin, dopamine, nergic base metabolism that's occurring. Then send signals through the spinal cord, all the prorectal centers. For females it'll bleed off into the actual breast and nipple architecture, then go down through the spine and then go into the clitoral network, which will literally space out and branch out. It's super crazy cool if you ever look at a picture whereas guys it'll go through the actual testicles and then into the actual penis.
Speaker 2:For females, that process to stimulate blood flow and hemodynamic changes to breast, nipple and clitoral tissue architecture most of the time is 5 to 15 minutes, usually closer to 10 to 15. Guys, depending on how healthy they are, 60 seconds, a couple minutes, right? Exactly. I mean the old adage of the foreplay needed for females and not for males as much. It's true biologically, because they just don't push blood that fast, they're not pushing and moving dopamine oxytocin around. So in the female-based world keep in mind, by the way males basically orgasm one way, two. I mean there's like a couple for guys, depending on where you're stimulating what tissue females have like dozens of different types of orgasms. So if you understand that, then you go back, say okay, if it's starting in the brain, we can modulate that oxytocin and dopaminergic metabolism to then push orgasmic strength potential and then you modulate hemodynamic flow and then you take that 10 to 15 minutes down to two minutes and I think I use this example at the seminar because I give it all the time it's that the red light or the stoplight effect to where, once you start improving that clitoral tissue sensitivity and improving how blood flow will get down to that vaginal bowl. So vaginal bowl being clitoral tissue, the vaginal hood, which is the lips and all that fun stuff, every woman.
Speaker 2:Once you fix these problems, they will have a small shearing effect. So literally, pants will just rub on the clitoral tissue the wrong way effect. So literally, pants will just rub on the clitoral tissue the wrong way. Whenever you stop at a stop sign you got to slam on your brakes, it'll rub and there'll be a spontaneous orgasm. We've had that happen. I've gotten that dozens and dozens of times over the years after we fixed the sexual problem Going back upstream, if you have the hormones fixed, because usually it's testosterone driving libido in females and estrogen for males.
Speaker 2:So it's kind of the opposite of what people would think. You fix the dopamine oxytocin, you're good to go. So intranasal oxytocin is a really good player because you're getting straight in through that nasal cavity and it's also remember through the nose. It's driving up hippocampal and amygdala-based changes, so emotion and memory. So now all of a sudden you can really train yourself to be easier aroused.
Speaker 2:So protocols I put together for certain couples is they'll literally sit together in red light therapy together. So I have two models set back to back. They're on the ground, legs spread, both naked. Uh, red light therapy near infrared on both genital tissues. Beforehand. We'll have them do their protocols, whether it be self-stimulation, the jelking uh, there's also clitoral pumps for females as well. That works extremely well.
Speaker 2:Could be oxytocin intranasally, could be like a 9 mebc to drive up dopamine receptor function.
Speaker 2:So it actually improves the repair process of dopamine receptors, if that's an issue. And they literally sit there and they'll self-stimulate and they'll usually have a conversation about that first time they were together or some kind of fantasy that they personally enjoy. What we're doing in this environment is training the brain to remember all of the emotions that happened in that moment, like when you're with your wife for the first time. Thinking back, you're like I wish I could relive that, just to remember that If you go into this environment and maybe add some new pep beforehand or some nootropics, you're ingraining that memory, you're encoding those memories to come back to life. So then all of a sudden, the marriage of 30, 40 years or maybe your love life, your intimacy life, was petering out a little bit. You can bring that back by just changing how you're remembering those memories. Then even the smell of your wife or of your husband, depending on who you are in the situation that'll automatically drive arousal because it's still through that nasal cavity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it really does point to that the arousal process really begins in the brain Does, yeah for sure, and that how powerful that it is to circle back up to that and really use that as the driver. And if you're with somebody and you married them and there's a reason, you probably went through a very intense sexual experiences together and those things are ingrained and you might not try to bring those up to the surface again. You know, that's a cool protocol, like that's so cool that you're doing that kind of stuff. What about this? What is it called Cabergoline? Because that basically what inhibits prolactin and it does some stuff with dopamine right, yeah, so you look at like dopamine inhibitory hormones.
Speaker 2:If you look at prolactin being high, dopamine is going to be low, dopamine is high, prolactin is low. So that's just, it's how it works in biology. It's a checks and balance system. So if someone has that hyperprolactinemia, where prolactin is way too high, dopamine is going to be low. That could be a problem for the poor erections or the no motivation at all, poor strength in the gym, like low cabergoline, um primipexil, drugs like that are very big over in a lot of the neurological dysfunctional diseases like parkinson's. They're very chemically powerful. So in this world for the sexual dysfunction we might bring it in if there's like a post finasteride syndrome case, but that's kind of far and extreme amounts of dopamine that tend to cause a lot of problems. Because in biology again we don't want crazy low or crazy high one right in the middle and it's pretty hard to dose cable properly. So if you are going to try it it's a one-time-per-week application, 0.125 milligrams, a very, very, very low dose and see how you respond.
Speaker 2:You can cause problems and it will drive a lot of neural atrophy over time if you keep it in consistently no-transcript, like some of my girls on the browser circuit right now. The way they do a lot of their scenes is they'll do all their scenes in the course of 8, 12 or 16 weeks and they're done for the year. A couple of girls will do it like scattered throughout the year, but a lot of them like to clump it all together. So if you are doing that much sexual action over a couple of months, you get worn out neurochemically, just like. Imagine training for the Olympics. Imagine if you had to train for the final six weeks but you did that for three, four months, like I'm sure you actually did. Because Because at that level you have to, but it destroys your body, it destroys your brain, so you do have to supplement for that accordingly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, when you start getting into the performance world Real quick. I want to follow up on the oxytocin. I've always been a little bit kind of shy of doing it because I'm already a nice guy in my opinion. I mean, maybe some people think I'm a jerk, but I mean I've always felt that, oh, I don't, I'm afraid I don't want to be so gullible because oxytocin can kind of make you trust everybody, Right. But is that maybe the wrong way of thinking about it? Because it's like, no, you want to just use it discreetly in this window for your life and not when you're like out and about working or having a negotiation or something like that. Yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 2:If you're that person that has that social anxiety, you can use it before then, because you need that extra push and bolus of oxytocin. But if you're using it in this kind of sexual improvement world and you can always also take the injectable oxytocin so it's the only compound out there that will drive biotransformation of adipocyte to myocyte. So you're taking energy from fat cells and fueling enables and building new muscle tissue with it. So, depending on how you use it, will also change its end fate. That's how trend blown and like the bodybuilding world and all back on the cow. The cattle research that's how it got so big was because of its modulation on oxytocin levels. So intranasal, a lot of good neurochemical players for the sexual performance based world, and some other things as well social anxiety, injectable, still going to spill over a little bit into everything else, but also driving the anabolic effect.
Speaker 2:Um, the one thing with oxytocin, though, is if you because you have to slowly work the dose up for all of these if you take too much, your ears get beat ready to get a ton of head pressure in your heart. You don't get tachycardic, but your stroke volume, so it'll feel like thump, thump. It feels like you're having a heart attack, you're not having a heart attack. If you're not having a heart attack, that generally means hey, you took a little too much, take a little bit less. So we try to slowly work up. That's a normal effect. But if people don't know that's going to come, you'll freak out like crazy.
Speaker 1:Interesting. That's just somebody who has been around the block and knows that here's the ranges and here's what happens. That's why you're such a great person to learn all this stuff from, because you say, well, here's the science of it and here's how to do it, but also, at the same time, here's how you know you did too much. That's pretty powerful to have that as a resource. I did want to talk briefly about I can't believe how fast time is going. I feel like I could pick your brain all day. But I did want to mention male hormones, maybe even female hormones, because I am under the impression now that at some point in every person's life, their life would be improved by optimizing their hormones. At some point, every single person on this earth at some you know, are you, do you agree with?
Speaker 2:that Completely agree with the caveat that if the world suddenly changed in terms of the poor water, the malnourishment from our food sources, all of the blue light exposure we would have to completely change our society around, which will probably never happen. If that happened no, we probably wouldn't need it. The problem is this has changed over the last hundred years. It's gotten worse and worse. Probably won't get better, except for the crowd like us that are actively doing things like wearing our blue light blocking glasses or getting our sun exposure, or structuring our water or doing whatever we're doing.
Speaker 2:So I agree, I think everyone should be, unless if the world completely changed, which it won't. But I think it's a good way to preface that because people need to understand it's only because the environment that we've created for ourselves and I also don't want to give up technology, like we wouldn't be able to have this podcast if this technology wasn't there. So we just have to do the right things in the background to bridge that gap, to adapt to the new society we're in, because we can't really do what our ancestors did because the ancestors didn't have 5g you know, yeah, yeah, exactly, and the ancestors didn't really live beyond 120, 125 or whatever.
Speaker 1:And that's our goal is to expand the life span of a human being and the health span and, for me, the fit span. You know, I always I'm like I don't want to just be here and be even remotely healthy, I want to be an ass kicker, I want to feel great, you know so, dude I I loved your seminar at foh live because you're up there like doing push-ups, jumping jacks you fell off the stage at one point.
Speaker 2:You're like doing flips, like I was getting jacked up, like I wanted to go up there and join you doing all the stretches. It was cool.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, cool, yeah, cause one of the first. I gave this speech a couple of years ago at Radfest and at the end of it I just I gave it on exercise and I was so fired up and everyone got really lit up and I didn't even think I just I just kicked to a hand stand and I started doing handstand push-ups like this and everyone went nuts and so a lot of times I can't help, but I get so excited and everything and I, I just feel like I think exercise is man. I, I thank god for exercise like I don't I am. I literally left the gym yesterday and I said that to myself thank God for exercise, it is, I just love it, but I don't want to get off the. The hormone thing Like God. Okay, let's say this guy calls you up, he's around 35. Something's going on. I don't feel I'm not responding and classic signs brain fog, like low libido. Not responding to workout Just doesn't. I just don't feel like I used to. What do you recommend to these guys, besides getting a blood test? Obviously?
Speaker 2:So, like we've talked about before, recording too, the nanograms per deciliter have changed over the years. As society has gotten sicker and sicker, those blood levels get lower and lower. So it used to be up to 1,500. Nanograms per deciliter was the top end of normal. Now it's like 800, 900. I've seen some where it's at 700, which I can't even believe. That's out there as top end of the reference range.
Speaker 2:No-transcript, because although I'm a big fan of hrt, certain people don't want to go down that route or don't want to inject anything yet. So it could be the over-the-counter supplements, first of like tanga, dalish, stance, fidoja, like some of the basic things, maybe graduate to like a testalute and bioregulator things like that, and then things still aren't working. Then you go into the HRT TRT space, so that could be a slow introduction of the creams. The creams, again, the kinetics are pretty tough, same with the lozenges. They work amazingly well for certain individuals, but it's all about the timing and then how many times you would take it during the day and is there a risk of contact exposure from, like, the cream-based world and the application process. So a lot of different ways to do it before you even have to take an injection. Ultimately I love the kinetics of the injections. They're the most reliable and they're a lot easier to time.
Speaker 2:But then once you have a long ester testosterone let's say a traditional cipionate, right? Everyone's going to dismantle and cleave that ester differently. So it should be an application one time per week, right? Does not happen that way. Certain people have to microdose it daily. Subcutaneous get less estrogen spillover. Other people do intramuscular. Monday, wednesday, friday. Some people like myself. I clean these things terribly. I can take a shot once a week, probably once every two weeks, and be fine, because I just don't break these things down that fast. That's for my metabolism. Certain people could be doing twice a week, three times a week. It just depends on the individual. So there's no right or wrong way to do it.
Speaker 1:Interesting. How do you know that? Are you using like a Dutch panel or something to see the metabolites? Or like what do you Feedback? You just what's feedback, Biofeedback.
Speaker 2:So the biggest thing you'll know is you'll take your shot of testosterone as a male or female. You'll see energetic, You'll start recycling acetyl going through the spinal cord of the brain. You'll feel like you were 25 again, like you're 30 again, right. And then by day three or four you're like oh my God, I'm not getting my nocturnal erection. Sleep isn't as good. I'm feeling more stressed out. Oh, I'm cle. One shot per week. Never needed to change it because I felt amazing from that. I've never come down from that, Whereas other people might.
Speaker 2:Once you see that downward curve with biofeedback, that's when you have to put another dose in Because at the end of the day, again, reference ranges only matter for you. So I tell everyone recreate your own reference ranges, you may feel amazing. So, like my reference range. So everyone knows my testosterone right now is probably 200 nanograms per deciliter, super low. But I'm taking nangelone as my HRT, not testosterone, because I respond very poorly to testosterone. I get all the negative side effects, I get no positives, I get acne, my hair falls out. I just don't respond well, Whereas nangelone I've only ever gotten better sleep, more fat loss, everything improved, my mental clarity, memory recall, everything improved.
Speaker 2:So on paper testosterone is crazy low, but I'm fixing the angiotensin load with Neanderthal, so there's also that to take into consideration. But reference ranges only matter for you 800, 1200, 1500 nanograms per deciliter. How do you feel? And then get your blood work and say, okay, I respond best in this range Might be a little bit higher might be a little bit higher, might be a little bit lower, but it only matters for you interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, you know, and even with myself, because when I turned 40, 39 and 40 I, I started using hcg as a monotherapy and it worked incredible.
Speaker 1:I was able to get my levels up to, I mean, 13, I like really really well, you know, and my testicles were definitely able to get that luteinizing hormone mimetic signal and really manufactured testosterone. And then over the course of time, over the course of a decade, I started implementing some clomiphene or on clomiphene, and that helped because the you know, the monotherapy was wasn't as effective. But it's a bit of a pain in the ass because you had to inject you this stuff all. I don't mind it, but that's the thing is. You know, a lot of guys are like well, and you have to tell them like, once you start, you're kind of on this, I mean, maybe if you're doing like tongkat ali or some of the things you're just seeing, if they work or cause I imagine that stuff is in a long term solution, cause you're gonna have to cycle it. I mean, tonka Ali, is it probably not going to just work indefinitely? Nothing is, I mean well, until you get to the big boys, you know but, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then now for me, I'm doing the oral testosterone we talked about, which gives me a pulse throughout the day, and then six hours later you take another pulse and I love it, um, just because I feel like I got my. You know, get my, my. My workouts are fantastic. Um, I don't feel like I'm stepping on the gas too hard. It's a oral, I mean. It's so easy to take, it's so nice. So for me, I'm always like let me do the absolute, like all the sort of precursor stuff, until I finally get onto the full blown replacement. And a lot of that was built on this philosophy that I wanted to maintain my fertility. But then you were like well, that's not a problem, you just take some HMG and some injectable carnitine. And then what else did you?
Speaker 2:mention Usually HCG. So you want to drive intratesticular reactionsadogenesis and then you should want to fix motility if there's dna fragmentation problems. You do like a little bit of tb 500.
Speaker 1:There's a couple things you bring in there, but that's like the basic three or four and so you're just like if you do this cocktail, you're pretty much gonna light it up so I am very proud of this fact.
Speaker 2:Um, I haven't checked the numbers lately, but I last time I checked it was over 2 000, I think, pregnancies. I've been able to be a part of an actual conceptions, which is crazy to be like I helped bring like over 2 000 babies into this world and like I'm just so proud. I have tons more to post, um, because I always wait you always want to wait the danger zone the first 12 weeks, then after that you know. First you know trimester, then it's okay. Now you can post about it. But I've helped a ton of people with fertility and I'm so proud of that because I love my kids.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, you know, good for you that I, that is so admirable. You know, like, yeah, good for you. And uh, you know you made me make me not worry as much about like, if I do decide to go on, let's say, injectable testosterone, that I'll still have the capacity because, yeah, we'll see. Right for now, I think the, the orals, are working. What about the? What about the growth hormone side? Because I've tried all the growth hormone secretagogues from the CJC 1295, no DAC with ipamorelin, the combination of those two, dosing it multiple times a day, the Ibutamaran, which is oral, the Grelin's memetic, the tesamorelin's, there's a lot and I like all of them and they all have their sort of nuances, but they're not a. They all have to be cycled, in my opinion. Is that? Do you feel the same way?
Speaker 2:No, not necessarily that. Do you feel the same way? No, not necessarily. Um, so if you look at that somatropic system, look at a lot of the old research that was done in a lot of just when they were trying to figure out the kinetics and dynamics of the actual growth hormone molecule, and so they were giving. So if you get a vial of exogenous growth hormone, it's the 22 kildalton variety, so our body produces a 22, a 20, 17, 15 all these oligomers, heterodimers. Our body produces a 22, a 20, 17, 15, all these oligomers, heterodimers. Our body produces a ton of different growth hormones. It's not just like one thing, right? So that vial is a 22 kilodon. You take that.
Speaker 2:What everyone thinks is that it will shut down and cause complete suppression, and then there's no 20. There's nothing else. That's how they actually get you on the ice form ratio test. It's water and the Olympics and stuff like that. It's just a ratio. So the problem with that, though, is that literally couldn't happen, or biologically you wouldn't survive. You need different things, like for your eyes to work properly, you need different fragments of those growth hormones that our body's already producing. So what we see is not complete suppression, but blunting. So you have a short blunting process from the exogenous hormone itself. The things kick back online three, four hours later and then there's another spill of the different oligomers, heterodimers, the 17s and things like that to recirculate and do all that fun stuff. They did the research on people using exogenous growth hormone for years and years on end, every single day, and the worst case scenario, they came off and within I think it was 24, 48 hours, complete restoration of normal growth hormone cycles actually restored. So if we understand that, as the exogenous one, the peptides, all they're doing.
Speaker 2:So MK is different. Mk works on the enzymatic somatropic system. So it's driving growth hormone secretion through a different aspect, the traditional IPMs and things like that. That's stimulating the glandular production. So you're technically just stimulating your own natural production. In that way, mk definitely steps over the line because it's extremely strong. Of all of them, I'd say NK is probably the only one you shouldn't be on the longest term. I've had people you'd be on it for a year, two years, something like that kind of what we're trying to fix. Bring the dosage up and down, depending. But that's not a long-term solution for a lot of individuals because it'll drop a lot of edema which will bring a lot of inflammation, insensitivity and causes problems, long-term or higher dose. But the IPAM, the traditional growth hormone-releasing hormones, or the peptides, or exogenous growth hormone, those can be long-term therapies, depending on what you're trying to drive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've heard the MK-677, I beat him around. You shouldn't do more than 90 days in a row, according to Dr Seeds, because he says you can involute the receptor like you can mess up the receptors, but I like to use that one if I'm going on like I'm going to put on some wheat, like, because it makes you hungry, right.
Speaker 1:It activates that hunger. And I've heard the CJC-1295, ipamorelin, like that one you can it's kind of mild right. You can dose it multiple times a day, like right now I have a pen and I'm just hitting that, like in the morning and the evening, and then after workout I'm hitting it quite a bit because I'm trying to put on some muscle and I love Tessamorelin. But to me nothing is as great as growth hormone. Like I've done growth hormone three times, and and and, but I never can stay on it indefinitely. I start to feel hyperplasic. I just feel like, uh, I need to come off of this. You know, like nine months into it I'm like, uh, or a year, I'm like something's like, it's just, it's like a switch is just turned on. Yeah, you know, maybe it's a dosing issue, but that's that's usually.
Speaker 2:It's off to talk to dr seeds at some point about that because usually the receptor base changes from an mk enzymatic standpoint pretty dose dependent like. If you look at the literature they've seen igf changes prolonged and continually increasing and plateauing off after about a year. No receptor architecture based changes. But you're looking at 25 milligrams, 10 milligrams, 5 milligrams, like mk does not have to be dosed crazy high. So that's probably what he's talking about with the, the receptor-based change. I'd have to hear his opinion. Um, but people will go 50 milligrams, 75 like.
Speaker 2:There's always a problem with either the duration or the dosage. In this case it's usually the dosage. So like growth hormone for example, exogenous 22 cold on growth hormone, a quarter of an iu is amazing. A half an iu is amazing if we're trying to differentiate between, like the athletic world over here and the longevity space over here. You're about sub two IUs over here. Over here is about four plus IUs. For the athletic world right, right in the middle is about three IUs. We are kind of in both worlds. But it's also coming down to personal response. Certain people will take half an IU. They'll gain five pounds of fluid overnight. Blood pressure will shoot up to 170 over 120. They get intracranial pressure. That's someone who's just a poor responder, because every drug, that's why no drug is good or bad. That's usually how it's used. Or are you a good or a poor responder? This right? So if you're a good responder to it, maybe it's just the dose that might be the problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very interesting. I think I naturally have a little bit low IGF levels. Like I'm around I now I don't know, I don't know what the proper the reference is for like a 50 year old, but I mean, I think I'm around like 135 if I, if I do nothing, and that's just not good enough. You know, I, I, I think I like to be at least 180. I feel good once you know. Uh, any, when I go over 200, I start to feel a little bit too much. Like around 215, I'm like that's because you have some people like no, you should move it up to 300, 300, optimal. It's like not for me, yeah, for me, that's just too much. I feel like I'm, I'm exploding like a cellularly what you know well it's.
Speaker 2:It's funny you say that too because, like remember, like igf1. So there's only really two ways that I think people should be checking if their growth hormone products are working or valid. First of all, set it up for third-party HPLC testing, actually get it mass specced to see if it's the right purity, right dimer content. There's no kind of misfolded proteins, so you know the product's good. And then from there IGF-1 is the best that we can do. But that IGF test is beyond poor. So the liver production process that occurs from taking any of these peptides or exogenous growth hormone.
Speaker 2:Igf-1 is one growth factor. You know how many growth factors we have? I used to have I took it down I used to have a growth hormone ebook. I cut it to Somatropic Bible. I thought it was super cool, good, catchy title. I listed in there just to be pedantic about it hundreds, all of the growth factors that we know about. There's hundreds of them. So you may be getting all of the other numbers elevated. So your IGF-1 may be lower in mid-range and your friends saying, oh, go up higher. But if you're feeling those effects it's probably because everything else is working that well. So even the IGF score. It's tough and that's why I like going back to biofeedback and also just remembering, in biology, extremes. We always want to stay out of the extremes, unless if you're going to be a professional athlete. That's extreme by nature, so that's a different conversation I totally agree with you.
Speaker 1:I I do feel that you know. Performance is basically saying I'm willing to give up some of my health so that I can win right now right. I mean it's, it's just the way it is. And I I've been a performer, I've been in that performance world and you literally beat yourself to shit. It's just not language. But I mean you, you literally redline yourself and I wasn't in a sport where I was doing any sort of redlining with compounds and chemicals and things like that, like I was just over-trained. Oh, dude?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's exactly it. I think everyone hears that and thinks, oh, they're going to drug themselves to become a champion. I'm not talking about that. It's literally the training, the eating. Like you destroy your relationships, People destroy their joints, Like everything is only about winning that gold and so your life is just it's the most unbalanced world you could ever be in. So you just you tank yourself and there's a time and a place for that. It's not for everyone. I could never do that for multiple reasons. I don't have the skill I don't have. There are many reasons why I could never do that, but another big one is that I could not give up my family time, my work time. I just couldn't do that because that in and of itself is hard to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it really. I mean, I was at the highest level for 12 years, which is quite a long time for a gymnast, and I still have fragments of things that I have to sort of wrangle with in my life, sort of wrangle with in my life. I mean, I, I just went to an ayahuasca experience in in january, just because there's still fragments of this, you know, and I never, you don't you just you don't know, you just know, you just think I'm just this person and this is just who I am. But you know, I saw um I've mentioned this before, but, like you know, the weight of gold, that, that, that documentary with um, michael Phelps, and they talked to a lot of Olympians about how they're mentally, the, the, the, the, uh. You know the, the effects of being this person and man.
Speaker 1:Like you know, I, I feel like I've done a really good job. I mean physically I don't have any pain or anything anywhere and I, I mean I was supposed to be massively arthritic and I feel all this stuff that we're doing and we're talking about like completely saved my life in terms of I can work out and feel incredible and love it and not be in any pain, and it's just my eyesight. I'm going to try those eye drops, you know, but it's just a testament to all the stuff that we're talking about and I do believe, if you are a person who you know doesn't step on the gas too hard, and you can find and people like you and maybe listen to my podcast at times, because I always try to find people like you're exactly the type of person that I love. I mean, as soon as I heard you speak, I was like I love, I love this guy and I haven't even met him yet. I love him.
Speaker 1:But I mean, look, I want to be respectable, uh, respect your time. I literally could talk to you all day because you get me so excited about this stuff and you're such a wealth of knowledge. How can people find you?
Speaker 2:Theprepcoachcom. And then on Instagram I'm Alex underscore Kickel, so it's A-L-E-X underscore K-K-E-L. And then I have a YouTube. I think it's at Alex Kickel TPC. I'm bad with those. I'll send you the links to put in the show notes or whatever, but really just those three places. I post up a ton of free stuff because if there's people I can't help out, I'm trying to put out as much free content as I can, literally just to try and give back to the world. It's given me everything. For anyone who doesn't know me, I'm literally living my dream life. I have a wife, I have four dogs, three kids, a fourth kid on the way. Like I wake up every day excited to train, excited to play with my kids, excited to learn work. Like I only can do this because of everyone else out there. So I'm trying I'm making a big goal in 2025 to give back to the world as much as I can.
Speaker 1:That's awesome man You're. You're a real inspiration because you're somebody who alone would just be worth listening to because your knowledge. But you're a super nice guy and you're like a good human being. I can see it Like you really you're a family man, but you don't curse, like you talk openly about how much your wife and your kids and your animals like give to you, and so I'm. I just think that, um, I'm really happy that I got to meet you. Uh, I definitely look forward to continuing to. I'd like to work with you.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to reach out to you and sort of be like okay, like how you know, tell me how I can work with you and and just because I think you're a real, you're a real diamond in this industry and I think it's it's refreshing to not only find someone like you but to find someone to you with such a good personal constitution of self and man. Thanks for being so open to coming on this podcast and just getting to know you, and one of the first things you said to me when I really kind of went up to you it was like what are you working on now? And you were just so eager to offer help.
Speaker 2:And so I really appreciate you, brother, I really do Again, I appreciate that anyone wants to hear me babble for an hour, 10 minutes, two hours. Like it blows my mind when people are this nice to me. So like I'm trying to get better at receiving compliments, cause I'm kind of like I'm just Alex, like just have these conversations, like we're just like having fun and uh, especially at FOH, I get I think that was one of the key defining moments honestly in my life where I realized like holy crap, like I could do a lot of cool things in this world and I I really take that with a lot of responsibility and I appreciate you having me on. It really does mean the world to me.
Speaker 1:So thank you, yeah, yeah, it's my pleasure. Are you? Are you coming to world peptide congress? I know jay is talking about coming uh, when is that? It's uh, it's in june, like like mid, like june, maybe 10th, 11th, something like that, but it's here in vegas, um, but it's, it's really, that's dr seeds event and it's all uh, cellular, it's all, basically, with a heavy emphasis in peptides and things like that. But I love it, I'll be emceeing it and if you do want to come, let me know. I'll see what I can do.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Thank you, I think that'd be so. We're going to have baby four on May 28th, so that should. I'm trying to stay home for at least four to six weeks because I want to make sure I enjoy that time with the family, make sure my wife isn't getting crushed. So, depending on how things go with that, I'm trying to not make plans for that second half yet, but if everything works out good, then I'd love to be there just to see you in person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it'd be great. We can chat offline about it, and so, for everyone that's listening, I'll put all the links to everything we talked about. You can go to stephenmccaincom, backslash prep coach. So that's Stephen, with a PH McCain, backslash prep coach. Alex, man, kick ass, I love it. I feel like I didn't even scratch the surface. I mean, I you know, but I just get so giddy talking to you. But I think clearly there's some good value here for people and I personally am going to enjoy editing this podcast because some of the things you said I'm going to have to go. I was going to write notes while you're talking. I was like I don't want to edit, I'll just go back and do this. So, um, yeah, I really appreciate it and thank you so much for coming on. Did we miss anything?
Speaker 2:I mean, there's always stuff to talk about, so we'll talk off air, I'll come back on whenever, like we'll just kind of keep talking.
Speaker 1:Fantastic brother. Well, thank you so much, alex, and thank you everybody else for listening to the Stephen McCain Podcast and stay healthy, everyone and we appreciate you listening and we will see you on the next episode. Take care, and I'll see if I can find the button here to end this podcast. Here we go, okay, boom, see you guys.