SHOCKING Peptide Warning: Supplements That Can DESTROY Your Energy l Anthony Castore l Ep #406

Episode Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

Hi, I'm Natalie Nittem, your host, and we are back with a fantastic guest who has never been on the show before. I can't believe it's his first time here. Now, if you've ever wondered how to train hard and age well, which is a concept that some people say is actually not possible, this episode is for you. My guest, Anthony Castor, blends elite strength coaching with deep cellular medicine. We break down concepts like AMPK versus mTOR. Now, if you don't know what that means, don' worry. We will explain exactly what it is in the episode.

And trust me, you'll be glad that you know. Mitochondrial health, peptides, and how to structure training for long-term performance. Plus, Anthony shares a very personal story about what can happen and maybe go sideways when you stack too many good things at once. Now, Antony and his business partner have put together a couple of novel supplements. We'll talk about them in the episode. If this is something you might be interested in, we have a link and code in The Show Notes for you. And this episode is brought to you by Vitali.

Be Minerals, and Level Up, all with special offers just for you listeners. Check out the show notes below for details and enjoy the shows. It is such a pleasure to finally have you here, Anthony Castor. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks you, so, much, for having me on here. You're a podcast that I've listened to and have enjoyed for years. I'm part of your community and I was humbled to be asked to Oh, well, it's a pleasure. And actually, yeah, I noticed you meant and join my community, but you've been kind of you been silent.

So I'm kind like, does he want to be here incognito? Am I going to call him out at some point? I got a funny story behind this. You'll appreciate this for as much as I started to learn about cellular medicine and I can piece together science, you will not meet anybody stupider than me when it comes to technology. And I couldn't log in. So for the longest time I kept trying and I've got really, really short patience. If I can't get it on the third time, I'm like, and then I keep seeing things come through.

I was like I got to get this figured out. Finally logged back in, but yeah, the silence was I changed computers, lost my password and could not figure out how to log back. Well, if you need any help and let us know and we'll help you out, we can rescue you. the silent background because you know it's no fun being part of something when you you're like you read something you were like oh I want to talk oh i can't interact with these people that's exactly what happened exactly okay all right well we'll we will rescue you out of the out-of-the-backstage place alright so now let's let take you let go back to your room to the beginning a little bit just for very briefly just to give people a bit of background on you like what what moments or experience as a strength coach that's because that your roots right is is strength coaching like what what kind of pushed you into this whole human performance like basically saying you know telling people giving people writing a program for someone to build bigger biceps or quads or whatever is all cool but how did you kind to make that that next step into human Absolutely.

So they say those who do, or those can do those, who can't coach. And I love my parents, but my mom was five foot one. My dad said he was 5'10", but I think he's probably closer to 5.8". And, I loved training, putting on muscle didn't come easy for me. I was that really curious kid, ask a lot of questions, figure out how things work. And it was always, how does this work? Why does it work, How can I make it better? So with the strike training, I really made some great progress. I was blessed to have just an amazing coach and mentor, Chad Coy.

He still competes in strongman and trains a lot of people. And we put, that was a buck 17 dripping wet, and he brought me up to 185 completely naturally in six months and I lost 2% body fat. It was six. That sounds impossible, but now how old were you? So that's young man hormones plus. Yeah. And I attempted wrestling in high school. I wouldn't say it was good, I was significantly underweight. So it's kind of that perfect storm of training stimulus, eating. When there's something I'm interested in, and I just kind hyper-focus on it.

And what was so cool, I mean, from the beginning, it was like, why is this work? Why am I taking more protein? why am i doing carbohydrates at this time? So I was always thinking, tinkering with stuff and with Chad's guidance, the impossible is possible. And on, we fast forward a couple years, and I never stopped looking for answers and came across the work of Charles Pollackin. To this day, i think he's arguably one of the, if not the most brilliant strength coach that ever lived. And I had the privilege of being a coach for him and working directly with them.

And what was so interesting about Charles' approach, what's so novel, was how he connected those dots between Chinese medicine,

Strength Coaching Origins and Early Performance 5:36

these other modalities, strength training. I love that whole system. Like I'm very math-brained and I like to have this works because of this. So with Charles as kind of a blueprint for what training could look like, I followed that model. I read about Chinese medicine, nutrition, literally everything I could and continued on this journey. It was in 95 when I still thought I was going to be able to do something in bodybuilding and we can look at me and say, you're not going be to able do anything in Bodybuilding.

You put on 70 pounds in six months of muscle. But I'm thinking there's not a whole lot you couldn't do. I guess maybe I should have a better outlook on it, but I was really more interested in to back up a little bit. I did a bodybuilding show and I got to tell you those trunks are not a good fit and tip of the hat to the people that do it. But it just wasn't for me. And the whole, like, if I do this, then this happens. So got more into the prep side. In 95, I started reading about IGF-1, and because I could not stand the smell of Protan, that stuff you put on to make you dark on stage.

And it smells awful. It gets all over your sheets and clothes, but because... And tropicals toxic. Yeah. That too, yeah. And then I found out about Melanotin. So I was like, man, these peptides are really something. As much as I could, I kept reading about everything and all the stuff around bodybuilding. When they officially launched peptide certifications, right away I got to do this, so I want to learn everything. I did every single certification out there. I did SSRP, everything that was available, and literally every course that's popped up I've done.

And it's really, I just love learning and in particular to answer your question, getting back to the original question. You know, the training and the peptides. As I was learning things through the lens of Dr. Seeds and the SSRP and cellular pathways and mechanisms, I realized that these were terms I'm familiar with from training, you know, IGF, PI3K, all this stuff, and mTOR. And it's like, huh, if we're working through these pathways, so is this training. there's got to be this intersection. And it was fun for me.

It was like putting together a puzzle, piecing it together and saying, you know, what are the right answers? How do these pieces fit together? And then just have continued to kind of build out that model. Hey folks, I just wanted to throw a little message in here for those of you who are sending me all these incredible questions on social media or through YouTube or even on Spotify, wherever you're listening to the podcast. I wish I could get back to each one of your personally, but unfortunately I can't.

And because I cannot, I created, about a couple of years ago now, I've created a membership community where I get to hang out with people just like you. I do live weekly Q&As, almost weekly anyway. We also do have podcast guests come in to answer everybody's questions and do presentations, you get to interact live with those podcast guests. We will sometimes do challenges with some of the partners. Like in 2026, we have a mitochondrial enhancement challenge coming up where we're going to be testing mitochondria function.

we are going be to testing people's deuterium levels. If you haven't heard about deutereum, We've got podcasts coming down the pipes on that. And then people will be invited to follow a personalized protocol and then retest their mitochondria on the other side. We offer that in the membership community and we do it at incredible discounts that you just can't find anywhere else. So if you're interested in hanging out with me and other like-minded people, which actually happen to include some pretty awesome practitioners and even some previous podcast guests who've come and joined the community, then I invite you to check it out on my website natnidam.com slash the dash longevity dash community or just go to natnim.

com and look for the longevity community tab at the top of the page. Click on that and see if this is right for you. I would love to see you there. and we could make 2026 our best year ever together. So once again, that's natnidham.com. Just look for the Longevity Community tab at the top of the page. Now let's get back to the show. You have this unique title, SSRP Fellow and Elite Strength Coach, which is this beautiful marriage of cellular medicine and a strength coach, to many people would seem like they're worlds apart, right?

But it sounds to me like what you're saying is when you put those two together, you all of a sudden, one plus one equals five. And you want to talk about maybe some of those pathways that you've found that will, physical training and will yield five times the reward than just doing the physical maybe talk a little bit about a couple of those pathways like let help people to understand like, what does that mean? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's a great place to start. And probably two of the easiest ones to talk about, because these are ones I we can kind of unpack them and have just a real basic understanding.

The two you probably hear the most are going to be AMPK and mTOR. And when we think about those, and I always have to dumb stuff down for myself so that I can understand it and digest it.

AMPK vs mTOR and Cellular Training Basics 11:54

I'm all in. Bring it! When I started learning about these, I pictured AMPK almost like a fuel gauge. And when you think about what happens if we're driving our car and our fuel gets low, we are going to sense that it's going start blinking and car is going slow down. We want that on there. we want to know we running out of fuel. And of course, as long as we're not trying to be like Kramer on that Seinfeld episode, we just kept driving. What we are going to do is we will pull over, refuel, and that's a great opportunity to check the tires, make sure everything is good on the car, get back on road and drive.

And building on that analogy, when we think about mTOR, that's our gas pedal, you know, go, and it's fun to drive that car. And especially, if there's no cops around, I'm not saying this out loud on air, actually. Well, we would never do it. It's just theoretical. Speaking for a friend, he can really push that pedal to the metal. He goes super fast and hard, but We want to think about the balance between those, and that's really where I think a lot of people, this for me was big pivot in my thinking, you know, wanting to put on muscle, all I'm thinking about is mTOR.

And when you have people that are interested in slowing the aging process, AMPK, AMP. And maybe I should explain those both a little bit more. So what happens with AMP? When it senses low fuel, logical thing to do is create fuel. That's going to drive lipolysis, breaking down fat for energy, and glycolyses, is breaking sugar for the energy. The other really cool thing it does is all of the car parts that might have got beat up because we were driving fast, it gives us a chance to clear those out.

And that's important because, you know, we want to replace those rusty brakes with some brakes that actually work. And in our body, it's the same thing. We want a build, build build. But we don't want build on top of bad infrastructure. Right. When we balance those, and there's a circadian component, there is a training component. There's food component there. A peptide component when we balances to it. It's beautiful. Using myself for an example, when we think about that transformation I had, those things are possible because we're balancing the building with the cleanup and we are circadianly aligned.

We're getting the right nutrition to support recovery. Everything's working. Now, if we were to just try to build, build build to use another analogy, you'll notice I speak in a lot of analogies. If I was going to the beautiful kitchen for my fiance, hey, we're going redo the kitchen. And I go out and I hired the best workers at all. I mean, these guys are builders. And it has costed me a pretty penny thousand dollars an hour. And I come back a week later and I'm like, guys, where's my kitchen? And they're like we didn't give us any building materials.

I mean, okay, that's on me. If I were to go out by brand new wood, marble, nicest sinks, I can't think of the word for the sinks. All the things. Yeah. The things, yeah. Appliances, all the thing. And I'm a guy that can change a light bulb. So they're just sitting in the kitchen. Again, they come back a week later and I was like, where's my kitchen? I got the best materials available. Julie, my fiance, is not home. I'm looking at this pile of expensive rubbish and I was like, well, shoot, I am just going to go store it, so I will push it off to the side so at least it's out of the way.

That's what our body does when we break down substrate. We're not using it. It gets stored. So that's my overly simplistic and long-winded explanation of cellular pathways, AMPK, mTOR, and why when we're thinking about things like peptides and small molecules and training stimulus, we want to make sure we are pushing or pulling the right lever at the people will say you can't build and burn at the same time. Like you got to, and there's all these different philosophies in, in strength training, right?

That you'll have people that do like a month of tear down where AMPK is the lead, takes the leads, right? We're stimulating autophagy and mitophage, we're getting rid of excess adipose tissue, were tearing down, and then we'll follow it up with a cycle of build where now we are changing, just like what you're saying, where just changing gears. In your mind, do you need big chunks of time to do the teardown and big chance for cleaning? Or do think it's the kind of thing that people can weave in and out of in shorter period, like over the course of a week?

Does it depend on the person? How do decide how you're going to play, how are you going toggle between the AMPK and the mTOR dominant states? Yeah, so that's a really good question and the short answer is it does depend on the person, but I'll explain that a little bit better. And the other short answers you can absolutely and you should toggle between those states. So what we want to think about with these training stimulus, I will give you three different examples for the sake of discussion. we'll say metabolic training is one type of training.

And when my definition of metabolic, uh, based on like the stuff that N1 group does, that's going to be where our primary goal is to, if you think about reaching failure, we're reaching because we are running out of breath. We're not picking up a weight we can't pick up. we've exhausted our metabolic capabilities. And for me, that comes pretty fast. Nobody hates cardio more than me. So an example of what would that workout look like? That might be 25 reps, rest for 30 seconds, 25 wraps, rests for thirty seconds.

That would be isolation exercises because we don't want to create nervous system stress or big systemic stress, we just localize metabolic stress. Another type of training we could think about would be tension-based hypertrophy. And that's going to be something where we're doing a little bit more volume. We're not picking a load that we are going fail with at low reps because we want to create maximum tension for the maximum time. And then the third type of training stress, and this might be closer to powerlifting, neural hypertrophy, that's going to be where adaptations in the nervous system are expressed through training, so are being able to coordinate nervous-system efforts and put all that into a single rep and lift a super heavy weight for just a couple reps, more demanding on the nervous system.

So then when we think about these, what are some signs that we're going to know like this is the right training stimulus for me or I should pivot? So with metabolic training, since basically we're trying to create local stress and we don't want to overdo it, what we want think about is if we've got two days later delayed onset muscle soreness, that's a good indication that we are maybe not capable of adapting to that type of stress effectively. And it doesn't mean we can't do it, it means that let's think about what's on the opposite end of that spectrum.

So if this is really light and short weight, neural, really heavy, and a few reps is going to be the opposites. It might be an opportunity to spend anywhere from a couple of workouts to a cup of weeks doing that. And with neural to kind of give you the guardrails for that, Um, anything having to do with the nervous system is going to affect our digestion and it's going affect your sleep. So if we were trying to lift those heavy weights and all of a sudden we're not sleeping so well or our digestions off, um, nervous systems, not adapting properly.

And then with hypertrophy, when you think about because we're really not maxing out the nervous system, but it's involved and we are not mixing out our metabolic system. But it is involved. The rate limiting factor is going to be our ability to clear metabolic waste. So, for example, if you're fighting off a cold and people do it all the time, I'm going go in and work out through it. I don't want to miss a workout. You get sicker faster. Yeah, exactly. You're competing with the stimulus. So to get back to the question, do we toggle?

Whatever. What I do is somebody comes to me day one, I say, what have you been doing? What works for you? It hasn't. And that gives us one of those three types of training stimulus that we're going to start with. And then based on those guardrails, it's a little more extensive than that. But for the sake of discussion, I think this will give people something to kind of get their head around when those Guardrailes start to manifest. three, four days, somebody's like, you know, I really haven't slept well and we're in a neural phase.

I'm like alright, pivot opposite end of the spectrum, metabolic, so a little deload. And so then what we think about is Cliff notes version when those are in place, how do we support the nutrition? How do you support? The Lifestyle step and lifestyle is really the most important We had a discussion you and I beautiful discussion and i think we're on the same page with this when we think about I like to use the analogy of a pyramid and the broader the base the better the support and Yeah. And the bottom of that pyramid has always got to be lifestyle.

The beauty of it is you can build a solid, solid base and all you got do is wake up in the morning, get some sunlight, all the boring stuff, breathe. Work it into your schedule and the better you do that, essentially the more you ascend to that next level. Next level we think about, that's the training stimulus. Cool thing about training, when we're thinking about stress in our life, there's a lot of different types of stress. emotional, job, training, different time zone, whatever. But the only one we have 100% control over and we can really use it to signal for the right adaptations that we want is going to be training.

So picking that training dress. And then when we think about logically the next layer of that pyramid, is going to be the nutrition.

Training Styles, Recovery Signals, and Longevity 23:00

Nutrition is gonna be raw materials for the scaffolding, for recovery, substrate availability, all that stuff. And then when we think about the top layer of that pyramid, that's gonna all the cool stuff we love to talk about, the peptides, repurposed pharmaceuticals and All that cool stuff. But I tell people, you know, so many people want to build that pyramid upside down. They want take all the cool peptides and use that to take care of maybe a shortcoming with nutrition, maybe shortcomings with training, may be short coming with lifestyle.

If you've ever tried to balance a pyramid up side down, I'm not very good at it. It doesn't work. So you want make sure you have a foundation. And with the foundation, it's going to dictate what's gonna make sense to sprinkle on top. Because you're into the cellular medicine piece, right? And that is a very unique perspective that not a lot of trainers are looking at. at all. So do you assess your client's capacity to handle load based on their response or are you doing some kind of testing that gives you an idea of what's their capacity at a cellular level to manage this type of training or to even say, you know, this because like, for example, I know that genetic like even from a genetic perspective, which I always found really interesting when I got told this, because I see it play out in the gym.

I need more time to recover between workouts. Like my pathways for recovery are not they're just not fast. So if I tried, when I was doing CrossFit and I trying to do it five days in a row, I as a bag of broken toys until I smartened up and cut down on my frequency of training, which made me sad because I kept wanting to go. But, you know, probably someone would be able at a cellular level to say like, this, this system is not primed to manage the damage, to, manage to the inflammatory response fast.

It will, but, and is there, is, there a way for me to cheat? Like are there peptide strategies I could be using to overcome these shortcomings in my system at a cellular level? Sure. Yeah, no, it's a, um, I found the same thing too. We look at these programs in muscle magazines and it's like, train seven days a week and for somebody that's worked well, but for a lot of us, you know, there's other factors. There's going to be life, There is going be all these things and all those things affect our recovery.

So to answer your question, when somebody comes to me, um, If they have blood work available, we can look at that and that can give us some valuable feedback. I use a InBody 970 that gives us phase angle, which is going to show health of the cell membrane and how well signals are traveling. It's going give us how they're holding their water, where they are holding water. Fat, muscle, bone mass, all those important things. So that's a real good starting point. And sometimes people have data like continuous glucose monitor or even something as simple as a lumen.

These are all good things. If I don't have any of those to work with, there's some questions you can ask these people or you could even ask yourself if you're trying to think about where to start. And generally the questions I'll ask is, what have you been doing? So if somebody says, you know, I've been training four days a week and I haven't made any progress. So the first thing I'm thinking is like, four days a week, well, let's dial that back to three really good days. And it's all about just starting.

So if you start with three days, and they're making progress, great. If they are not, then as they were working out, you can observe things like, are they having trouble recovering between sets? So, if they have trouble with recovering sets, that means their aerobic system is not very efficient at recovering that ATP. Because when we're resting and we use that oxidative phosphorylation, that's what banks that 32 to 36 ATP compared to if we were still running in glycolysis and were just spitting out 6 to 8 ATP.

And if you're looking at somebody that doesn't have good throughput. They can't generate power. And they tell me their sleep and their work is stressful. Their sleep is bad. That tells me the nervous system. We got to build that up slowly. And if we think about somebody that really does a ton of walking, all the right stuff, but they're still not really getting the performance within those sets that we want, that could be something like the folds in the cristae where the super complexes are at. And when we think about what's going to improve that, that's gonna be like intervals.

So basically kind of looking at giving somebody like, this is what you're starting with, and then conversation with them. How are you sleeping? How you feeling? Are they making increments in weight or decreasing rest time or variables? And if not observing why that is not happening are kind the tools to point in the right direction and then even to build on that when, and this goes back to your original question about building and burning at the same time. I look at it a little bit differently than a lot of people and what I'm looking at is specifically through the lens of the mitochondria.

And to explain that a little bit better, when we exercise, while we're working out, we are driving fission. Fission is when mitochondria are splitting apart. Basically, they've been worked and there's a lot that happens in between, but I won't bore everybody with that. You're getting bad parts over here, good parts here. We want to have mTOR afterwards. That's why we do our meal after the workout. And I actually have people push it back 30 to 60 minutes to allow for time for mitophagy. Mitophage is cleanup of damaged mitochondrial parts that were exposed to oxidative stress during the work out.

Then that mtor, that big meal with the carbs, all the good stuff we like to eat and the protein coming in, stimulates pathways that are going to be conducive to growth. And fusion and then the next day it's kind of like going back to our building analogy we got all the workers on the site we get all materials on site but we don't just keep bringing more workers and more. More equipment. What we want to do is give them time to build what they have and clean up. So the day after the workout, that's actually a really low calorie day.

And the purpose of that is to improve fusion. Infusion is where we have those leftover parts from fission. I know fusion, fission sounds a little confusing, but just think about fissure is splitting, fusion is joining, we're fusing together. When we fuse together, it's so cool what happens. I say so, I kind of nerd out on this stuff. It's cool it happens, when mitochondria fuse, what they're doing is they are essentially looking around They see their buddy over there, Mr. Broken Mitochondria, and they're like, man, you know, three quarters of this mitochondria is so perfect.

This is better than anything we had before. And that mitochondrion sees them and it's like oh, we really could have used that half of mitochondrious before we were exercising and then they fused together and now we've got this better mitochondrial that's more efficient at using energy, more Handling oxidative stress so when we balance that whole vision fusion my topogy it's absolutely possible to build muscle and lose fat my own data last five and a half weeks and did this experiment attracted. And five and a half weeks on in body same time of day, same hydration, everything, seven pounds of muscle and only went up three tenths of a percent of body fat.

Yeah. So feeding the day of the workout and then stripping like kind of pushing that AMPK cycle. the next day. Yeah, and I joke with people, you know, the bros had it right a long time ago, cheat day, but this is just kind of an expansion of that. And when we think about, we're so conditioned to think how many calories do we burn in a day? But our body is really thinking bigger than that, it's thinking a week or whatever. So what I do, if I'm trying to lose fat, I would for that week, start with an average of a 10% deficit.

and my training days would be really high with most of the calories focused right after the workout. My recovery days will be very low, but that's going to average out to a 10% deficit over the course of a week. And if I'm not losing fat, I'll take that down to 20% and then for muscle building, it's gonna be the exact opposite. But what you'll find if you do it that way, Is you'll absolutely put on muscle even if you're losing fat and you absolutely lose fat even If you gaining muscle, it's just which one do you want to do more of?

So we're talking about performance now, you know from like building muscle adding muscle to the frame What if we start what if now overlay this whole framework of longevity over this because we don't typically think of bodybuilders as the most longest lived people, like they're not, you know what I mean? Like, is because the nature of the body builder is the, to me, they are the original biohackers, right? These are people who will stop at nothing to achieve the outcome that they re after. And their outcome is very specific.

It's a physical aesthetic outcome. it has very little to do with, how metabolically flexible they Those don't rank because if I get the cuts or the lines or whatever it is that I'm looking for that they need in my abs or my shoulders or glutes, then I've achieved my goal. Am I insulin resistant? Don't care. I'll deal with that on another day. As a result, bodybuilders often don t live the longest or most vital life. you know the audience that's listening here is is sitting there going okay great you're telling me i can build muscle and i Can clean up and that sounds like a good idea but what if we're training for longevity like what do we where do We change things up a little bit because i'm a big believer obviously and having lean muscle as we age we need it to remain functional But I also don't think that carrying a ton of muscle in older age is necessarily the best strategy.

Like you want enough and you wanted to be functional, but you don t need loads. Yeah, I completely agree. And, you know, got all the love and respect in the world for the bodybuilders. I was never any good at it, but I did it myself. And now, you know, 53, and you can tell by the gray in my beard, the focus is on longevity and love having muscle. But there comes that point where it's like, I'm happy with what I have and it is practical, But I don't need to walk around with the biggest muscles. I want to add years to my life.

If I wanna have a sharp mind during the day, all these things.

Assessing Readiness and Mitochondrial Support 35:00

So what's really cool is with the same pieces I would give a bodybuilder, we can give your person that's looking at longevity and going back to those three different categories of training stimulus or somebody is we always hear about the benefits of raising VO2 max. So they might spend a little bit more time doing uh, metabolic type of training. And then when they, um, and less time and kind of that neural type training or tension training, I could simplify for the audience just because people might be a little mixed up.

So on the metabolic training it's kind high reps. It's high wraps, moderate weight. And short rest period in between the neural training is when you're doing high weight, low reps and you are training to failure. And then in-between there's that other space. The tension. which is still reps, but not going to failure. You might be working to, I don't know, 70, 80% of your max, maybe 85, that kind of thing. Perfect. Yeah, exactly. And if we think about how those kind line up with our longevity goals, so metabolic is going be a lever we could pull on to improve VO2 max.

Tension based hypertrophy is going to be a lever we could pull on to improve organ function and immune system. And then the neural training is gonna be lever, we can pull for everything from like brain function to vision, when we think about taking peptides to increase BDNF, nothing does it better than exercise, especially if you had to pick up something heavy. So there's a place in everybody's program for all these. And it's just realizing that, you know, every time doesn't have to be a PR, but these are all awesome levers we get to pull on.

When we pull them, that's kind of how we choose our peptide. What are the signals that my body is capable of creating with this stimulus? And what are the ones that, you know, just like an old speaker, we need to turn that volume up a little bit. We need make it clearer. So what is the specific peptides we can add in to amplify those signals? Okay. Well, so let's talk about that a little bit. So that's interesting. What you're saying is, and probably I guess it's how much weight you put to each one is going to be what stage you are at in your life and what your ultimate goal is.

Right? So from a longevity perspective, you want to toggle between the three, probably do less of the neural maybe than the metabolic and the tension, I'm guessing? really good way to think about it is and you're right on track with that in terms of like specifics for how much remember when we were talking about like for example metabolic you can have that delayed onset muscle soreness and neuro digestion sleep the tension you know some some immune dysregulation and So what we want to do is all three of those are going to move us towards longevity.

And the amount of time we spend in one, we probably want spend more time in metabolic, but we just do it until we kind of get to that point where we're not adapting and then we pivot. We do that until don't adapt and pivot because all of three are moving us in the right direction. As our system adapts, and that's what the peptides and lifestyle and nutrition, all that stuff is going to help us do even faster. That lets us be a little bit more specific with which of these trainings are we going be able to tolerate for longer and which one is moving us closer to our specific goal.

Example, if I wanted to build a BO2 max, but I have really poor metabolic tolerance, I might have to work these other two levers just to gradually move that up. But once it gets up, then I can spend a bit longer there. At what point do you bring the peptides in? Do you use them all along kind of thing as a support? And what peptide and small molecules are we talking about here? Are we're talking things like BPC157 to help recovery, to support recovery? Or are talking mitochondrial peptids to supporting mitochondria?

I know that you're a big fan of urolithin A and I am as well. I think that anything we can do to keep the mitochondrion keep that kind cleanup, constant cleanup going, the better off we'll be. But you want to maybe talk a little bit about the peptides you use in those different phases to support. And do you ever use the Peptide as a gap stop or are you really using it just to Yeah, absolutely. So when we think about all these awesome tools that we have out here, and I'm guilty of this, happy to share my story a little bit later, but you know, it's like this does this.

I am going to take it for this and this as this And it is like, where do we stop putting stuff in? And when we put too many things in, we create signal noise. It's just like having a hundred of your favorite people in a small room. You get the chance to interview them, but if everybody's talking at the same time, there's no signals getting through. So to answer your question, where do we start? I'd say probably 90 percent of the people I start with, the first thing I'm going to reach for is actually a ketone monoester.

The reason for that is we always want to think about how many things do we have to check off to adapt to this training stimulus to get a training effect. Some of those things are improving the ratio of NAD to NAH, managing our antioxidant system, decreasing histone deacetylase so we don't replicate inflammatory genes, managing inflammatory cytokines, interleukin, 1 beta, tumor necrosis factor, alpha, NFKB, things like that. So what if I were to tell you, if you throw back a terrible tasting shot of ketones or if he used the Kinetic Pro, it actually tastes good.

I have some downstairs. Yeah, I just got some. Yes, great stuff. So with that, that gives people something to start with. And you're already making huge steps towards getting a training adaptation. Then we have budget considerations and everything too. a lot of good things out there, but if that's usually my first go-to, then we want to think about next most important thing. And we'll absolutely get to the peptides, But I just really like to lay the foundations. Yeah. So just go back to get the ketones.

We're using the key tones because they're a source of energy. They also anti-inflammatory, right? So they help with those that manage inflammation really nicely. It's kind of like this low level It's a, I find that like, it's almost like a very easy, low risk intervention. They're just amazing. I mean, that could go on for hours about them. Um, they, when we think about, you know, people going and getting an NAD IV, um, to get that NED into the cell, It depends on, N. A. D. N A D H ratio. So when you take a ketone ester, or you've optimized that, so you're getting energy in the sale.

And then when oxidative stress that that's going to activate NADPH, which will activate an NLRP3 and NRF2, to which you'll decrease oxidate of stress. And then, so we've got a buffer for oxidated stress, we got energy for the mitochondria, and we're basically forcing that cell that might be metabolically inflexible to make that big stockpile ATP with oxidative phosphorylation. So stock piling 32 to 36 ATP. The other things we want to think about is the actual structure of the mitochondria. Before we add in mitochondrial peptides, it's like, I always joke with people, and I took this from Charles, you can't shoot a cannon off of a canoe.

Not unless you want go for a swim. No, that absolutely won't work out unless do you wanna go And if we're taking all these things like SLU or MOTC that can improve throughput, and that's a good thing from the mitochondria. But, you know, if you've got oxidized cardiolipin in there, cardiolypin is the foretail phospholippid that makes up the inner membrane of the my mitochondrion. Or, we don't have enough folds in the cristae, so we do not have these super complexes. Then it's just like trying to drive a car super fast with a cracked motor block.

You put nitrous boosters on there, but that poor thing can't even go to 65 in the first place. It's absolutely going to crash, and so will we. So scaffolding is going be the next thing we want to address, phospholipids, plasmalogens, and making sure you're getting your phospho-lipid fish oils, even just taking half of a baby aspirin with that to help convert it to the pro-resolving mediators, the resolvents, lipoxins, moracins and protectins. And those are actually what modulate the whole inflammatory process in our body.

So yeah, cheap, simple fix. People are taking these mega doses of fish oil, take a good phospholipid bound fish and add a half a baby aspirin and boom, box checked. Or even eat a can of sardines if you don't mind them and take half of baby asprin. So you're producing these pro-resolving mediators. So after we have the scaffolding in place, I do think the best place to start, in my opinion, is usually going to be mitochondria. And when we think about mitochondrial peptides, people are going be familiar with.

We have MOTC, we SS31, and we humanin. There are others, but if we focus on those, it can kind of give a Cliff Notes version of what and when. So when we think about MOXIE, what it's really good at doing is helping us switch fuel sources. And what I mean by that is switching from running on glycogen, like when were lifting weights, to running an oxidative phosphorylation when you're recovering in between so we get that ATP back. When we think about SS31, what that does, you know, I tell people duct tape fixes everything.

SS-31 is like duct-tape. It stabilizes that cardiolipin. So remember, since that's the inner mitochondrial membrane for the electron transport chain, if that has got those oxidative patches where it's cracked and rusty, not going to work. But if we can stabilize that while we're replacing things for the scaffolding from those possible lipids we were just talking about, then, you know, we could get some performance out of it. And then when we think about human and human is kind of like the It prevents apoptosis and it also crosses the blood-brain barrier.

So I tell people when you get to that point that you've got good mitochondrial structure. The scaffolding's been replaced with nice fresh phospholipids and plasmalogens, and you worked out that mitochondria. Maybe exercise mometic. MOTC or SLU and then you know you got the perfect blueprint for mitochondria that would be in my opinion a smart place to freeze frame replicate those

Peptides, Ketones, and Mitochondrial Optimization 47:00

by using humanin for a couple weeks so that's a blueprint we're going off of and Then we can even talk about so what's next That would be an opportunity that you could do like a Fox04 for three days, clear out your senescent burden. And then when people go and do something like an NAD, you're not going to have the problem of it getting sucked up by these senescents cells with an upregulated CD38 because you cleared a lot of those out with the FoxO4. You can actually get a boost from it and don't keep doing it instead.

get that boost and then use a five amino one MQ, which will keep NNMT down. So you're not, because if you put more NAD and you make more and NMTA, so there's no net gain, but if manage the amount of N and empty, then this bolus of an AD have can kind of burn off through a longer amount time. And then keep your epigenet in there for down regulating the CD38 so those senescent cells that might be starting to pop up again are taking your NAD and make sure you're using like a 1MNA. 1 MNA is going to help with the recycling of the NED.

Perfect. Yeah, absolutely. And really what I do, what do I tell people to do? Days that I'm training, I use the 5-amino-1-MQ. There's some cool studies about how it actually improves performance. I saw one on vertical jump. And the decreasing NNMT will shrink fat cells. Then on your days that you're recovering, remember, our goal is to get those macrophages from M1 to M2, so anti-inflammatory, reduce inflammation, recover from workout. And we raised prostacyclines and improve endothelial function with the 1MNA.

So recycle that NAD on those days. Use the one MNA on an off-training day. And so that's my example of yes about how I put things together. with the mitochondrial peptides, you were talking about the SS 31, the Matzi, how often do you feel, and again, it's going to depend. I mean, some people just need it more than others, but is that the kind of thing you might do like an eight week cycle a couple of times a year, or is this an ongoing thing? You dip in and out of like, what are your thoughts on that?

Cause you know, we're let's agree that our mitochondria I mean, we have so many important parts in our body, but if the mitochondria go down, nothing else is going to happen. They're the captains of the ship. Yeah, I completely agree. When we think about how do we rotate these, to your point, it is person specific, but in terms of how we choose when to rotate them, things we'd think, have I been beating up my mitochondria for a while? If I have, I probably need some SS31 and I'd probably those to go hard on those phospholipids to make sure those are repaired.

And things that you're going to notice when you repair those membranes, decreased oxidative stress, there's going be less inflammation. You're gonna have clearer thoughts, you gonna recover faster between workouts, You gonna see improvements in blood glucose. So then, after we know, and this is all without blood work, just bloodwork would be a whole different discussion, but with Subjectively, we'll assume we've got good mitochondria structure now. So now it's just like recovering from a workout.

Now that we recovered from the workout, what we're going to want to do is work out again. That would be like a Matzi or a SLU or an ATX 304. Then after we train for a while, you know, when you need to recover, so that could be a little bit of SS 31. Or if, you know, we didn't push too hard, just enough to get mitochondrial biogenesis, but still been keeping up with our plasmalogens and phospholipids, that's where we do just that really short, I keep it short two-week humanin for the freeze frame, and then kind of rinse and repeat, start again with Well, I guess at this point you would start with, if we're not doing the FOXO4, a different exercise for a medic, then stabilize the cardiolipin and repair, and then freeze frame humanin.

That makes total sense. that's really interesting. So the five-amino-1-MQ, there's a lot of interest in that. And I'm seeing, seeing combinations of five amino-one-mq with NADH on the market. What are your thoughts on that? I would say don't, and the reason. That's okay. I could be completely wrong on this one. Here's the thing. You're sitting there and you're thinking it through at a cellular pathway level. So I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss your don. Explain to me why you are feeling like this is just Is it too much?

Is too little? The wrong stimulus at the wrong time? What's happening here? Because we're putting two things together. Mm-hmm, exactly. And when we think about NADH and NAAD, the balance of those essentially is our redox potential. When we talk about redux potential, easy way I like to remember it, all you got to think of is oil rig. Oil rig, it's an acronym, oil, oxidation is loss, loss of an electron. reduction is gain, RIG, and as silly as it sounds that balance of redox is everything. That is what modulates our antioxidant system, that's what gives the mitochondria energy, um that is the spark that creates all these signals in our body and it's a really difficult thing to measure even with blood work So when we dump in NADH, we're making the assumption that we are low in that.

And if we throw off that redox potential, then what happens is we create oxidative stress with antioxidants basically. things go haywire, that creates oxidation in membranes. And when membrans get oxidized, you've seen a car rust, just imagine your cells rusting. So for that reason, I don't think it's a good idea. I think if we use something like a ketone nester that can almost intelligently optimize that redox potential, And then we use a 5-amino-1-MQ because the specific purpose for 5 amino-one-mq is to hold down that NNMT.

And we don't need to manage NADH to do that. They're independent. So why did they put them together? I don' know. Yeah. To me, like introducing an ADH just seems for exactly the reason you said, it seems like you're loading up one side of the scale in a system that the body is constantly working to balance. You're exactly right. Unless you knew somehow that you were deficient in an ADHD, I don't even know how that would happen because essentially it would be an imbalance in the process, not an imbalance in molecule.

Yeah, every cell. Yeah. And I think, I mean, the best explanation I have, and I don't know the people that are coming out with this, so I what we see a lot of times in the industry is random example, no actual example. But you know, like, well, okay, here's a real world one. So SLU is good. BAM is Good. Let's just put them together. Now people have all their fat burners in one, And you'll recall the conversation I had around that and why that's not a good idea because independently they can both work in the right context, but together they're basically blocking each other from doing their job, creating excessive oxidative stress and the exact opposite of what you'd want to do if you're trying to improve mitochondrial performance.

Great, so what we're talking about here is BAM15, which is a small molecule, and SLUPP336. 332? 322, sorry. So those are the two small molecules we were talking. And the reason why we are talking, people are listening to this, either they know and they were part of that whole craziness for a while, or they have no clue what were we talking? And what you're saying is they're essentially redundant. you actually want to toggle, maybe you want a toggle between them or use them at different times because they're both, and there was maybe what we should do because we're going to run out of time and just get into the meat of it.

And I want you to talk about your story because you have a really powerful story to tell. In this space, I think those stories don't get told enough. We hear about people going, oh, I'm going to use this. This works for me, and this was great. Right now, we just finished saying the five amino NMQ with the NADH, probably not a great idea. You're taking a risk, right? When we come to the BAM15 and the SLUPP, the SLEW, as you call it, let's talk a little bit about what does each one of them do, like maybe quickly, don't go too deep.

And then why do people think and people are thinking, putting them together is amazing, we're just going to do more of the same, only better. How would you use them instead? So the short version is when we think about SLUPP332, it's helping with fat burning potentially. It increases use of fat for a substrate by up to 30% and it does this by increasing activity at complex one and complex three in the electron transport chain. So it's turning up that volume and it creates this futile cycle. Even though there's more throughput, there is not more energy yield.

And that's almost where the exercise memetic kind of thing comes from. We're really working that mitochondria, but we're not making more ATP. when, so that can create oxidative stress. When we think about how BAM works, BAME can also create, would be something you would do for fat loss. Some people might remember from way back, DNP, they're both uncouplers. And an uncOUPLer, what it does is essentially, it causes energy to leak. So it makes the cell less efficient at making the energy it needs. There's a time and place for both.

But if we, think this through logically, when you're, uncoupling, you're decreasing membrane potential, and you need to have membrane and potential to increase throughput at complex 1 and 3. So when that complex one and three has to work even harder to do what it's supposed to, do you creating oxidative stress? Oxidative Stress is going to oxidize the cardiolipin. And what all these big jumbled up words mean is you are going have brain fog, You're going collapse, And you going ruin your redox potential.

So that's really what we want to think about when we're taking these things. It's not this works for this. This works in this context. What's the whole picture? What are the onsite, offsite targets? upstream, downstream signaling. Is this the right tool for the job? It's not about how much we can put in. It is about choosing the tools and really how little you can do. Because remember, exercise will send all these signals. Exercise will signal PGC-1 alpha for mitochondrial biogenesis. stimulate IL-6 for healthy inflammatory response.

Exercise can improve NAD to NAH ratio. So it's like, as much as I hate to tell people, like come on, just go exercise and then have these cool things.

When Supplement Stacking Goes Wrong 1:00:00

Then when would you use the SLU and when were you used the BAM-15? You're not going to use them together, right? Not together. No. Based on what we're talking about. When would use use separately? Like what are your use case scenarios? Sure. So the first thing we want to think about is, again, the structure. Structure dictates function. If we've got a healthy cardiolipin and we have well-performing mitochondria or managing our oxidative stress, this might be a really cool opportunity to use small amount of the SLUPP332 because it's going to increase beta oxidation, so fat loss, and it is going increase throughput in the electron transport chain, but the mitochondria can handle it because we've got the scaffolding in place.

And then what we would think about is after we've done that for a while, you know, we need our time out, our recovery. So have a couple of weeks in there to recover, just, take care of those mitochondria. Then if we're not doing hypertrophy type of training where you're creating more oxidative stress or metabolic, you know, maybe it's more neural type training, where we have a little bit longer rest in between. And you doing like more walking to make up for calories you are not burning in the gym for maybe 10 days, maybe two weeks, that might be a good opportunity to use BAM and really pull on that fat loss lever.

Especially if your goal isn't PR on strength, on your off training days where you're getting that walking in, that can amplify the effects on AMPK. So if I was going to do them, that's how I do it. But it's a perfect example. The BAM is during more restorative periods where you're just not putting the system under stress. so the BEM is going come in there because otherwise it is just more of a stressor to a system that is being stressed. Yeah, you want to think about the times that you don't really have a big energy demand because what it's doing is making you less efficient at making energy.

That would be a good time to, if you wanna try it out, try out. But if doing it at a time where you need peak energy output and you're making it so that your, your slipping energy in that process and the electron transport chain, stress that maybe you can't adapt to, and at the very least, you're decreasing your performance. Let's talk a little bit about when things can go sideways. And you've had that experience yourself. I think it's important to share this experience because as a seasoned coach, as someone who knows what he's doing, a guy who studies this stuff, we all fall prey to the same things, right?

We get overly excited about something and we go, yay, okay, fine. We just go ahead and jump into something, low and behold, Every once in a while we get this cosmic, this karmic communication that's like, you're not paying attention and we're going to make you pay attention. Exactly. You know, there's a saying a smart man learns from the mistakes of others, a wise man. I'm sorry, a smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learn from the mistakes of others. I used to be a Smart Man. And to kind of give people the history of what happened to me.

The reason I share this is not so everybody can tell me how much of an idiot I am when they see me, but I'm just kidding. Yeah, I want you guys to be wise. I do all my research. It's easy to make a mistake on this stuff. I was going to be speaking at Peptide World Congress and super excited about this. I knew. And I said, all right, we're going all out. We've got to look good on stage. You know, I'm going be my healthiest ever. So it's like, you know. MOTC is going help with AMPK, so is SLU. It'll do BAM on my off days.

Don't worry, i'm stabilizing my cardiolipin with SS31. i got my GHRH in here, tessameral, and that improves complex 1 and three, as well as helps with lipid management. And I've got my GHRP6, which has GHRS on the afferent and efferant neurons from the vagus nerve. So I even addressed my parasympathetic balance. I thought I had all the bases covered. Anybody who's listening right now is probably like, whoa, you lost me at the second peptide. You're going hard. I was going in the paint. What ended up happening is I got a virus or something.

on, it was a Monday, I woke up really dizzy. And knowing that I had Peptide World Congress coming up, and my fiance had the day off, we loved to work out together. I was like, Oh, just go to the gym. We'll be on machines. They don't have to balance. No big deal. Could I have been stupider? So I went in there, worked out. It felt terrible. and we're on our way to Whole Foods. we are coming back and I'm having trouble taking air in. I get home, I lay down, and I call the chiropractor. It was on a holiday.

And I was like, you know, a little bit dizzy today. I probably just need an adjustment. Can you get me in tomorrow? So I go over. Tuesday I woke up.I felt really tired, but not dizzy. Went over, got my adjustment, I felt worse than I did. About three hours later I fell even worse. So I was like, I'm just going to lay down. I laid down, woke up on Wednesday, spoiled my dog so much that he expects a ride to the park every morning. And I went to walk him that morning, the world was spinning. Come on, Jeter, you got to poop today.

No poop. Loaded him in the car, drove over to And I mean, I thought I was gonna have to pull the car over so I get over there I'm walking them and all of a sudden I could not take care and I had to call 911 my fiance came to get the dog. They had an intubate me and landed in the ICU for five days. Whoa. And at the time, nobody knew what happened. I And, you know, God bless him. Dr. Seeds came all the way in to see me in the hospital. And running Jokey and I have, I stood up to go sit in a chair and poor guy had to my ass through my robe.

So I'm never going to live that one down, but I get out of the Hospital. Like I said earlier, You know I love putting puzzles together. I want to figure this stuff out. And what I realized, there were so many things that led to this. You had a viral insult. There was too much demand. I was putting on my system and I wasn't supporting the scaffolding. So when you think about, let's back up, what happened with breathing? So you have chemoreceptors on your carotid that sense ATP. If you can't make energy because your mitochondria are broken, for lack of a more eloquent way to put it, Every time that ATP dips, it senses low oxygen, even though when they had an O2 sensor on my finger, I was reading 8992. I shouldn't be collapsing.

So it was essentially this not enough ATP and how it affects the oxygen signaling, and then that causes you to hyperventilate, throws off minerals, electrolytes, adds organ stress. My kidneys plummeted. The EGFR went down to 27 and cystatin C. up to 2.54. So, you know, really lessons stuck with me. Made it to Peptide World Congress, had a blast, talk went well, and I attended grand rounds and of course I had to present my case. I'd done like all this background research and i figured out every mechanism and pathway and I thought I knew it all, or at least figured it out.

So I present this case, all the details and everything. And Dr. Seeds, I love it. I absolutely love him. He's such a great mentor. you're such a smart guy. You're just trying to do too much." He's like, you've got to support the structure. That you are right, this peptide works for this, and this works, for that, but you ask these things to all do what they do on a structure that's completely rubble. So the way I fixed myself was I started from the ground up. It was just the SS31 ketones. Getting out, I was walking.

I didn't even get in the gym but one time a week for the first couple of weeks. The rebuilding of the membrane with the plasmalogens and the phospholipids. And just a lot of walks. You know, getting out there because we're always thinking we've got to build muscle. the crazy thing is like when this happened I lost 31 pounds and was I put on 15 pounds back from just walking and working out once a week. And that kind of shows people that it's not about how much we can do. It's about what can we recover from.

Fast forward, now I'm healthier than I've ever been. I feel terrific. That's a weird thing to say, but that was a blessing. wisdom to share with other people. So with sharing that story, what I want people to take away is we have limits. And I know we want to lose fat, we wanna put on muscle, and we can absolutely do those things. We have so many amazing tools for that. But at the most foundational level, lifestyle, then think about the training we're doing. Be intelligent with it. Make sure we are doing what we need to send the right signals.

Have the nutrition in there. Then add your peptide or peptides, you know, start with one, see how it works, add another. You don't have to add them all in at once. And most importantly, support the scaffolding. healthy cardiolipin, get those possible lipids in, all the things you need to do. And that's how you go from broken to best ever for yourself. But if you keep trying to push against that system 100%, you know, I hate to say it, but you're probably going to land up exactly where I did. as cool as it sounds, it really sucks having a tube down your throat.

Yeah. Well, and you know, I think it happens more than we know because it happened to people and they don't necessarily talk about it. And, um, thank you for being open enough to share your personal experience because, you, know what, at some point you're sitting there going, well, this shouldn't happen to me. I know better, but it's for that reason that it I, think so important so that people, there's a, a bit of, You know, there's such a mad rush to peptides right now. And I think that people sometimes run the risk of being a bit cavalier about it and just saying, well, you know I'm just going to try this and oh, I heard this was great.

I am just gonna try that. Not respecting the fact that, when you can introduce micrograms of something into your body and have it actually have an effect, That's a powerful, powerful signal.

Recovery, Longevity, and Practical Foundations 1:12:00

That is not to be messed with. And what you're describing here is that there is a very distinct order of operations where if you don't, if it goes back to the pyramid, If you are not building on that wide pyramid base, you really run the risk of tipping the scales one way or the other the wrong way. So as we're closing up here, And I have a feeling I know what you're going to answer to this, but I want to hear from you. You know, like you've spent decades pushing the limits of performance and recovery.

Like that's what, you know especially before you got into this wholesaling of medicine thing, You were a coach and you were pushing people and building. When you imagine the next decade of human optimization, what do you think we'll look back on and say, we totally underestimated the value of this one thing? That is a beautiful question. I love it. And, you know, it's funny. Uh, I really feel like we're kind of coming full circle with all the technology we have, everything we available, um, people realizing I can do more work.

Can be faster, more and more, and I think there's going to be this tipping point where almost would collapse and everybody realizes like, Hey, I'm 53. My parents had an eight-hour workday. It's enough. Have your work time, have your recovery time. So work-life balance. Don't forget to appreciate the beauty around you. Go take a walk, spend some time with your dog, your loved ones, all those basic things. And then with all these amazing tools we have coming out, that's where they're really going to shine because we're going when we're doing the things right and we've got that optimal work-life balance and hit a hiccup or we want to have that little extra boost, that's where these things work and it's going to be such an amazing time, so I'm excited for it.

Amazing. And so you're really looking at them as, and you talk about it at the top of the pyramid as optimizers versus doing the foundational work. But there is, but there are times I think with certain ones of these where they can step in to help us through the foundation piece, right? Like, repair peptide, like an SS 31 or a BPC 157 or thymus and alpha one for immune support. Like they can, they're not always at the peak here. They can sometimes at right time can be woven through the foundations just to help us along.

Yeah, I think the way I explain it to people is if you think about listening to music through a speaker and you had a really nice stereo system, after a while the speakers wear down, wires get thin, still the same radio station coming through. So what peptides do is they repair those wires and speakers. They're not going to put a bigger speaker on there or thicker wires. But they're going to make those perfect. So they set the stage so that recovery can happen. And they are absolutely going be times when using them as an intervention or to clarify a signal.

That's what we want to do. To provide people some clarity. What you want to think about is these are here to make a signal clearer, not replace it. And if instead of thinking, I'm going to take this to increase what I am doing, you know, peptides don't really work that way. It's kind of like, if you think of a ceiling, You can touch the ceiling by standing on a table or you can jump up and touch a ceilin, but the ceiling is still there. So peptide might give you a ladder so you could hold your hand against the And if you're trying to touch the ceiling, you might be jumping and nicking the ceilings a couple of times.

So never should you look at them like, well, if I take a peptide, I'm going to put my hand through the seal because it just won't work that way. OK, got it. A couple more quickfire questions. The word longevity gets thrown around a lot. What does it actually mean for you in practice? What is longevity look like? Is it strength, mobility, energy, the ability to still feel powerful in your 70s and 80s? Like, what does that mean to you? When I think about longevity, I'm thinking about maximizing every day.

What I mean by that is if I am reading something, being able to retain it and process it quickly. If I work out, be able perform optimally and recover. And if spending time with my fiance and fur babies, really enjoy and appreciate that moment. So living life is longevity. And we don't get to pick how long we have, but we get choose the quality of how those years are going to be. So maximizing that. Love it. Beautiful answer. There's a lot of noise in our field. Very noisy. Those hundred people in the room, they are all talking at the same time.

If you could wave a wand and change one thing about how people are approaching training and longevity today, what would it be? I would challenge them to beast out on recovery. Don't think about what else can I take? Think about, what am I doing? If it's not working, why isn't it working? And what could I do to take a step back and get even more? Beautiful. Love it. You've trained to lead performers for decades. What do the ones who age best have in common, like physically, mentally, and emotionally?

That's a really good question. I think when I look at common threads, it's, and I don't know if I'll articulate this well, but across all the different sports executives, everybody, There's this real burning desire to be excellent at what they do. And it's not about how many things they did, but whatever they're doing at the time, they want to excellent. They don't want do it halfway. So these are the people that if I tell them, you know, take your ketones three times a day. They're not asking, what else should I take with it?

They are like, he told me to take ketone three time a days, so I'm gonna take key tones. And they're curious, they ask questions, I give them information, but they challenge me on things if they have questions. So kind of taking ownership of our own health and asking the questions but I guess, I don't know if I articulated it well, it's that whole focusing on the task and doing it amazing instead of kind of focusing around this and just seeing what else you compile on top. Yeah, so having that curiosity, but at the same time, the focus on the one thing.

Nice. For someone in their 30s and 40s, or their 40's, who's just starting to think about building that future-proof body, what are the simple foundations you want to tell them to look into now? Where should they start? Some really basic low-hanging fruit. This is overly simplistic, but I cannot begin to tell you how beneficial getting out and taking a couple walks a day is. That's going to help with circadian alignment, that's gonna help You're going to be setting a strong foundation just doing that.

Another one that's not sexy, but hydration. Making sure that when you're hydrated and your cell has enough volume, it's polarized. When it is polarized, you can send and receive signals. So for peptides to work, our cells have to polarized so walking in water, two W's. And then supplement wise, what else can I add in? I'm so all in on ketone monoester and specifically the mono-ester, which is the beta-hydroxybutyrate and the R1-3-butanediol. Yeah. It just checks so many boxes. That's the kinetic pro.

Right. We can do a whole episode on the different ketones out there, but I know that that one is a favored one for a lot of good reason. Absolutely. I hope that wasn't an underwhelming answer, but if you guys do those three things, I promise you will. We wanted your take on it, right? And it's interesting that ketones are in there because what you're not saying is people need to be on a ketogenic diet. What you are saying, is we want to give the body access to what ketone can bring to the equation.

Absolutely, yeah. Okay. All right. Well, this is, you know, I can keep talking to you for hours. Like I may have a million other questions I want to ask you, but I, in the interest of time, i'm guessing we could also always do a part two at some point. But you've taken that leap. You've put a couple of really good quality supplements on the market in this space that we've been talking about the SLUPP and the BAM15. In our conversation, what really strikes me is how focused you are on helping people to understand the time and the place and conditions that they would even use this in.

So my guess is you're not just pushing these out there for everybody to buy them. Do you also have a platform where you educating people on how and when and where? And do you want to share that with us and then maybe tell people where they can find you, where can learn more, if they buy this, all the things. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for the opportunity to share it. So I've got a school community. It's called Castor Built to Adapt. And I have written over 50 articles for that. A lot of stuff on mitochondria.

That's kind of where I geek out. Yeah. Then I got the company with a friend of mine. Alchem IQ Labs.com. We do have the AIQ332, which is our slew your lithium product and the BAM15 and we've got an ATX 304 coming out. And this is probably the worst business decision ever. I'm not telling you guys to rush out and buy these. Make sure, go in, my community is 100% free. Go in there, read some articles, ask some questions. If you have a question, I'll answer it. I want you guys to be educated when you make a choice if this is the right decision to take or not.

And if it is, you know, i feel like we got a good product. But at the same time, the last thing I Want is for somebody to Take it just because it's Anthony's product and He seems like a smart guy. Yeah, so. I'll just take this every day with my vitamin C. Amazing. So what we'll do is we will put all the links in the show notes. OK. Maybe give us a couple of easy links now. You've got a great Instagram page and your website and or the community link. My Instagram is just at and then A-N-T-H-O- N-Y C-A-S- T- O- R- E.

And then I do a lot of stuff with the SSRP. I'm hoping I'll get to speak again at Peptide World Congress. Then my school community, it's the SKOOL school. It's completely free. I don't have a website for like me. I'm technologically challenged. But for the company that I have, it's Alchem IQ Labs, ALCHEM. iqlabs.com. That's where we've got the products. There's a little bit of information on there, but really most of the information is in the community. And we got a coupon code for your listeners.

It's nat10. Okay. Thank you for that. You're welcome. Give me the opportunity to connect with your My pleasure. And guys, before you go shopping, get educated. Go consume some of this men's. He's taken the time to put it out there, whether it's in the school community. Also, you've got some really fabulous content on your Instagram page. Thank you. So folks, please make sure that you check this all out. Anthony, thank you so much for your time and for sharing today. It's been a pleasure chatting with you again.

I'm humbled to be on here. Thanks again for having me to a guest. The pleasure, we'll talk soon.