All right, Andrew, I want to ask you

about peptides.

All the rage. You look at Google Trends.

Everybody and their brother has a

peptide startup, but there seems to

maybe be something there. I don't know

if there's a there there. For people who

have heard the word, don't know exactly

what folks are talking about. I get

texted every week multiple times from

people asking about various peptides.

And I'd say half the time, depending on

what they're trying to do, I'm like,

"Can't you just be a grown-up and inject

testosterone or HGH [laughter]

instead?" If you're trying to get there

directly. But I would be very interested

here. I know there's a broad spectrum of

stuff that people are experimenting

with.

What are these things? And And what's

what's your current thinking?

>> I also don't completely disagree with

you about like just be a grown-up and

take cypionate and HGH. If you want to

maintain fertility, take some HCG as

well.

>> Yeah.

>> And I'm being facetious, of course. I I

think there are risks to all of those,

but

it is the appropriate opening joke

/reality, because if you're expecting

cypionate HGH type results from

peptides,

you ain't going to get them. At least

not with respect to like anabolic

growth, feelings of well-being.

Peptides are short chains of amino

acids. Insulin's a peptide, etc. I

cannot take credit for what I'm about to

say next, but it's a very, very

important principle. Like this is kind

of the theme today, I suppose.

Abubakr who's an MD came on the podcast,

talked about peptides, and he said,

"Look, for many, many

hundreds, if not thousands, of years,

but certainly hundreds of years in the

context of pharma,

people have been searching for medicines

in plants.

Isolating medicines from plants. Pharma

companies still do this.

Now, people are starting to look for

medicines within the body. And peptides

are a great example of that. GLP, for

instance. The drugs that increase GLP do

so to thousandfold levels over the

levels of circulating GLP that you would

have.

And they result in, as we all know,

robust weight loss.

So, that's one category. I think we need

to think about categories of peptides,

but understand that peptides are all

over They're made in your brain and

body. Some of them may have benefits

when

made synthetically and delivered at

very, very high doses,

such as with these GLP agonists,

Ozempic, Mounjaro. Retatrutide is one

that we should talk about, made by

Lilly. It's coming out soon.

It impacts the GLP system, but also the

GIP and the glucagon system.

>> Careful with that one, kid us.

>> A lot of people are going to be

microdosing it.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah, a lot of people are finding that

microdoses can have similar effects, and

that's an important kind of cost-risk

analysis. Okay, so stepping back,

peptides are made in your body. They at

high concentrations made synthetically,

they may provide

benefits that are make them medicines.

So, we can think of the weight loss

peptides,

the GLPs being the most prominent

example. The GLP drugs that increased

levels of GLP hundredfold were used to

treat diabetes for a while.

Still are.

But they didn't induce much weight loss.

The ones that

raise GLP levels thousandfold

or more, those lead to robust weight

loss, including muscle loss, and so

that's part of the controversy. Also,

there's discussion about maybe

increasing some apathy. They reduced

craving for alcohol and perhaps cravings

more generally. At the recommended

dosages, in some people they can create

nausea, which is why some people are

taking less of them and still getting

the weight loss benefits, but less

nausea. There's a lot of stuff going on

there, but to stay on the GLPs and

weight loss peptides specifically, Lilly

developed retatrutide, which hits the

GLP, GIP, and glucagon system, leads to

the most robust weight loss, seems to

spare some muscle, perhaps. People

should always resistance train anyway to

offset that, but

it's the most effective of those weight

loss

let's just call it GLPs even though it

hits these other systems. The gray

market is

the quote unquote for research purposes

only stuff that you can buy online. It's

perfectly legal to sell

for research purposes only not for

animal or human use. And I joked on X a

while ago like wow, all these home labs,

everyone's buying this. Of course people

are injecting them. The concern is about

contamination with things like

lipopolysaccharide or you're not getting

what you think you're getting. So, many

people are already taking retatrutide

even though it hasn't been formally

released

because it's pretty easy to synthesize.

And so it's being sold on the gray

market. People are taking it. There's a

second category and then I'll return to

the kind of gray market issue. The

second category would be things to

increase growth hormone. So called

growth hormone secretagogues, things

like sermorelin, ipamorelin,

tesamorelin.

These are all variants on the theme of

get the brain neurons that project down

to the pituitary to stimulate release of

growth hormone at night. Typically you

don't need a couple hours before sleep

is the idea. Probably good for sleep

anyway. It is good for sleep anyway.

Then you inject this stuff. Typically it

leads to maybe a

three to eightfold increase in

growth hormone IGF-1.

Some stimulate appetite quite a bit like

MK-677, some don't.

I've tried sermorelin very briefly.

Dramatically increased my slow wave deep

sleep, nuked my REM sleep. This is a

common theme. Spiked my prostate

specific antigen. I've never had any

problems with PSA. I came off it, PSA

went back to normal. No one's been able

to give me a mechanistic explanation for

that. I'm not about to run the

experiment again. I didn't find that I

got much fat loss from it, but I didn't

use it very long. I didn't find I got

stronger.

You know, just didn't seem worth it to

me

given the PSA thing. A lot of people

take these thinking they're going to get

these really dramatic increases in

growth hormone.

They sound dramatic, three to eightfold,

but whether or not they're meaningful in

terms of fat loss, it doesn't really

seem they're that robust, especially

given that you have all the GLPs now.

So, the growth hormone secretagogues

also include things like CJC,

and there's some variants on these,

which can lead to some insulin

resistance, but maybe spikes GH a bit

more.

I don't [clears throat] know. None of

those, to me, really seem worth it,

personally. Just given the effects

aren't that great.

You know, if someone can afford it and

they can get a script for it, probably

better to just take pharma-grade

somatropin or omnitrope growth hormone.

And, you know, the bodybuilders would

take like eight IUs a day or something

crazy like that. But, the in the trials

that have been done with metformin and

GH, typically, it's people are taking

one to two IUs five nights per week.

That will dramatically increase deep

sleep and probably sleep overall, and

the effects on fat loss and just tissue

repair, healing, and feelings of

well-being, and just cognitive function,

anecdotally, people and subjectively,

people say like, "Wow, I just feel so

great." This is the getting up in the

morning and be like, "Wow, my joints

feel good." and just being ready to like

go, go, go. It's not anabolic as much as

something like testosterone, etc. But,

I'm not telling people to run out and do

GH, but if you could get a good script a

script for real GH and take a low dose

versus taking a bunch of like unknown

secretagogue peptides, that seems like

an obvious one for me.

Then, there's a category of things like

BPC 157, body protection compound 157,

which is

a amino acid chain that is in gastric

juice, but it's this isolated amino acid

chain that

seems to be the one that's most popular.

And, at the same time, it's the one for

which most people

probably taking it for all the wrong

reasons. I've tried it. I definitely

feel like after a pain or strain, the

recovery is faster.

But, I can't do the control experiment

cuz it goes systemic. So, it's not like

you could have Let's say you hurt both

biceps. You could You can't inject into

one bicep and not the other and assume

that it's just acting locally. It's

going to go systemically. There are

capsule forms of BPC that people claim

are just as good. I don't know.

Do you have to inject locally close to

the injury? It seems that might be

helpful. The animal data on BPC are

really impressive.

Cartilage regrowth, fibroblast

migration, angiogenesis, nerve regrowth.

It's a literature I've spent a lot of

time with. There's not a single

published human trial.

Where I think the most interesting use

of it perhaps is

is I know someone recently, she wrote to

me and she said that her dog had a

spinal injury. And she said, "Does BPC

work in animals?" I go, "Actually,

pretty much all the data are in animals.

So, if my dog, God forbid, had an

injury,

I'd be

willing to give him or her [snorts] BPC.

You have to work out the appropriate

dosage.

>> How would you source that?

Hypothetically.

>> So, you can get it from compounding

pharmacies now. So, you need a doctor to

write that script.

Depending on your risk tolerance, you

could go to the gray market for research

purposes only. I wouldn't do that.

Peptide Sciences shuttered

their doors, windows, whatever. They

closed a few months back. They they

sensed the heat coming on and they're

like, "We're out." They took their money

and they're out. Smart move, Peptide

Sciences.

So, nowadays you can find doctors that

will prescribe it. And there's also

pentadecapeptide, which is just a

different

form of BPC. Seems to have

same function.

It's easier to find. And getting it from

a compounding pharmacy, of course,

compounding pharmacy is very in

stringency, but is going to be cleaner

than the gray market sourcing, of

course. But, I've no relationship to

these pharmacies, but for instance,

Tailor Made, Upstate, Revive Pharmacy,

these are kind of the better known and

trusted compounding pharmacies.

Compounding pharmacies were allowed to

compound drugs that are still under

patent during shortages.

And

can compound generic drugs. They'll also

truly compound peptides. You could can

get BPC with another one, the TB500.

So-called Wolverine stack. I don't know.

I've never tried TB500. I keep some BPC

157 in the fridge. If I have a a strain

on a joint

>> in for a second? Like the challenge with

so much of this stuff is you can't do

the control.

>> Can't do the control.

>> took the Wolverine stack after I had

elbow surgery and I'm like

Did it help?

>> I have no idea. Frankly, I have no idea.

>> You know what? I will say this, I've

used it a few times, very short runs of

it. I'm not interested in using it as a

general recovery tool or every day or

any I don't have any gut issues. Like so

people have used high doses of BPC to

resolve gut issues. That was the

original use. You know, in this clinical

trial they did BPC enemas at very high

dosages.

>> Sounds like an Austin party.

>> You know, and supposedly, I learned this

from Abood, Pavlov actually had a side

gig. He was a health influencer. He'd

give people gastric juices to try and

resolve ulcers and things like that. And

we know gastric juices contain a number

of beneficial peptides.

But I don't recommend

>> they down those? How did they get them

in there?

>> How they down them and how they get them

in there?

>> Shots glass of gastric juices?

>> maybe he had a cabinet of people with a

you know, they're tapping them. Yeah, so

they're rough. So, you know, people say

should I take BPC 157? No, you shouldn't

unless you have an injury or maybe in

that case you get clean compounded

pharmacy BPC and you inject it locally

or you take it systemically. You try it,

see if it helps. But why would you take

it ongoing? That just doesn't make any

sense to me. It doesn't make any sense

to me, frankly. And again, you go back

to your sort of half joke at the

beginning, you really want to recover

quickly from exercise? Take an IU or two

IUs of

GH every night before sleep and you will

recover magnificently well.