#143: The World's Most Famous Performance-Enhancement Chemist

At the behest of my astute legal counsel, here is a legal disclaimer for this episode: First, I am not recommending, endorsing, or supporting any of the substances or compounds (especially illegal) discussed or described in the interview. I am interviewing Patrick Arnold as a journalist seeking additional information regarding matters of public interest and concern. Second, I have removed some of the names of athletes who are alleged to have used performance enhancing drugs. I recognize that this seems excessive, but even if athletes have been publicly banned for drug usage, unless the ban relates to the specific substance and time period referenced in the podcast, I can be sued for defamation for repeating or publicizing these stories. With all that said, here we go... If you liked my episode with Dom D'Agostino http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/11/03/dominic-dagostino/, you might love this one. Patrick Arnold http://ketosports.com/, widely considered "the father of prohormones," is an organic chemist known for introducing androstenedione (remember Mark McGwire?), 1-Androstenediol (marketed as "1-AD"), and methylhexanamine into the dietary supplement market. He also created the designer steroid tetrahydrogestrinone, best known as THG and "the clear." THG, along with two other anabolic steroids that Patrick manufactured (best known: norbolethone), were not banned at the time of their creation. They were hard-to-detect drugs at the heart of the BALCO professional sports doping scandal, which thrust Barry Bonds and others into the spotlight. BALCO distributed these worldwide to world-class athletes in a wide variety of sports, ranging from track and field to professional baseball and football. Recently, Patrick has been innovating in the legal world of ketone supplementation, including breakthroughs in performance and taste with products like KetoForce http://ketosports.com/project/ketoforce/ and KetoCaNa http://ketosports.com/, which were highlighted during my podcast with Dominic D'Agostino, PhD http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/11/03/dominic-dagostino/. If you'd like to meet the (in)famous Patrick Arnold in person, you can find him at The Arnold Classic http://arnoldsportsfestival.com/?full_website in Colombus, Ohio from March 3-6, 2016 at Booth 328. Otherwise, you can check out his current concoctions for athletes here http://ketosports.com/ and here http://prototypenutrition.com/. In this science-dense conversation, we cover a ton, mostly related to better performance through chemistry. We also discuss Patrick's biggest successes and mistakes, his path to science, ursolic acid and other clever creations, exogenous ketone supplementation for sports, as well as nonsense in the media about anabolics (e.g. current Delta-2 scandal). Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Greetings, my little Maguire. This is Tim Ferriss, and I'm going to read you a legal disclaimer for this episode. I don't do many of these, but at the behest of my ever-so-competent legal counsel, allow me to read the following. "I am not recommending, endorsing, or supporting any of the substances or compounds discussed or described in this interview, particularly when this applies to illegal, illicit, or dangerous compounds or substances. I'm interviewing Patrick, furthermore, as a journalist seeking additional information regarding matters of public interest and concern." And you shall also notice that we have removed a number of names of different folks to protect the innocent, guilty, or otherwise. And with all of that said, since I've covered my little white ass, please enjoy.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:50Tim Ferriss?

  No, it would seem inappropriate to ask.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:57Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, all you freaks out there, and aren't we all freaks at the end of the day? This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. If you liked my episode with Dom D'Agostino, the incredible scientist who fasted six, seven days, whatever it was, deadlifted 500 pounds for 10 reps, and continues to do amazing work for the Department of Defense with exogenous ketones, et cetera, et cetera, you might love this one. So, here we go. Patrick Arnold is widely considered the father of prohormones. He's also an organic chemist known for introducing androstenedione, remember Mark McGwire, one

• 1:38Tim Ferriss?

  androstenediol, marketed as 1AD, and methylhexanamine, if I'm getting that correct, into the dietary supplement market, and I'm going to mangle quite a few of these types of words. Now, you may recognize the name and say, "Why do I know that name, Patrick Arnold?" He also created the designer steroid tetrahydrogestrenone, best known as THG or "The Clear." THG, along with two other anabolic steroids that Patrick manufactured, perhaps the best known of the two being norbolathon, not banned at the time of their creation, this is very important, were hard-to-detect drugs at the heart of the Balco professional sports doping scandal, which thrust Barry Bonds and others into the spotlight. I was in the Bay Area when this happened.

• 2:20Tim Ferriss?

  Balco distributed these worldwide to world-class athletes in a whole slew of sports, ranging from track and field to professional baseball and football. More recently, Patrick has been innovating in the legal world of keto and supplementation. And that's actually how he connected with Dom, including breakthroughs in performance and taste with products like Keto Force, like Keto Kenna. And both of those ended up coming up, I believe, in my conversation with Dom because they have some very, very, very interesting applications. If you'd like to meet Patrick in person, the infamous Patrick Arnold in person, you can find him at the Arnold Classic in Columbus, Ohio from March 3rd to 6th, 2016. So that's coming up very soon, for those of you who are listening to this, when it first comes out, at booth 328.

• 3:02Tim Ferriss?

  So I believe that will be the Keto Sports booth at 328. Otherwise, you can check out his current concoctions for athletes at ketosports.com, as well as prototypenutrition.com. In this science-dense conversation, we cover a ton, most of it's related to better performance through chemistry. We also discuss Patrick's biggest successes and mistakes, his path to science, exogenous keto and supplementation for sports, of course, as well as nonsense in the media about anabolic and performance-enhancing drugs. For example, the Delta 2 scandal that came out not too long ago, and lots of misinformation related to that. So, I will, with one more caveat, let us get into it. This is a dense conversation.

• 3:47Tim Ferriss?

  And as always, with my podcast, with my blog posts, I don't try to put out an episode that everyone will love. There's no such thing. I try to put out episodes that a fraction of my listenership, in this case, will love and really get into because there's tons of detail in the weeds. If this episode isn't for you, that's okay. You can try something else, like Jamie Foxx, or Josh Weitzkin, the chest prodigy. My goal is, with every, say, five episodes or so, to hit everybody in my audience. But this is a very cool episode. It's highly specific, and I do hope you enjoy it. So here is Patrick Arnold.

• 4:27Tim Ferriss?

  Patrick, welcome to the show.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 4:30Tim Ferriss?

  I have been looking forward to this and hoping that we might cross paths for such a long time. I've had many requests and when I look back at the supplements, for instance, that have had an impact on me, and I look at the common thread, kind of in retrospect, you've had a hand in pretty much all of them.

• 4:54Tim Ferriss?

  And it's, it's an area where I have a very high degree of insecurity. I've never studied, say, organic chemistry to any extent, and it's, it's kind of like Latin in so much as I've read a lot of these words, but I'm sure I will mispronounce a lot, so feel free to correct me. But I wanted to begin at the beginning, I guess, and just to ask you if you could talk about how you developed a passion for chemistry, because it's not, it's not a hot subject in the same way that, say, computer science is very in, right?

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 5:30Tim Ferriss?

  How did that start?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Well, I would say that to tell my story, I'd have to talk about how I gained a passion for weightlifting, bodybuilding, at the same time that I grew a passion for chemistry. And I'll start with the weightlifting part, because that was, happened earlier, and that happened when my grandfather had a old set of York weights in his, in his basement, and we brought them all down to our basement, and we ended up buying benches and whatnot from this guy in Wallerford, Connecticut, that had his forgery there, and he made this really cool hardcore stuff and everything. We'd set up our own little gym, so I was around 12, 13 years old.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  So we were one of the first people in our neighborhood to start lifting weights and, you know, really got into it and all that. So later on, um, I've always was very science oriented. My father always had encyclopedias, uh, science books and I used to read about the universe and, and astronomy and be fascinated by that. And, and later I got fascinated by nutrition, you know, and that part of that had to do with the fitness stuff. I was getting into all the weightlifting and all that. I got into, you know, what do I eat to gain muscle, to be healthy, you know, so I could run farther and, and all that. And, and later on, and I remember the first time I

• 6:57Speaker 02

  ever heard about anabolic steroids was a book that I bought, um, just one of those standard, whatever, uh, I don't know who, what publisher it was, but one of those standard books about weightlifting and everything. And there was this one little page or paragraph said anabolic steroids. I say, what is this? They say, do not take these. They don't work. They are bad and some athletes resort to this, but you, you know, I'm like, okay, this means that there's something good. So I'm, since then I got kind of curious, you know, and I'm thinking, well, maybe there's a drug aspect to, uh, to fitness too, as, uh, not only, um, you know, nutrition and whatnot.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  And, and, uh, and I was also was a, you know, I wasn't the most perfect youngster either, you know, and I would go out with some friends and we would smoke pot or whatever and occasionally, you know, experiment with other things. And, and I just became very interested in pharmacology, uh, pharmacology of the building muscle, pharmacology of mood enhancement, um, whether it be, uh, nootropics or psychoactives or, or, you know, recreational or whatever. The whole thing fascinated me. So I, um, originally wanted to be a pharmacy major. Uh, I couldn't

• 8:23Speaker 02

  get into the pharmacy school, so I got into the chemistry department, which I'm very happy that I did, cause I think I'm much happier learning how to make stuff than, though you could be a pharma, pharmacologist, pharmacologist or whatever, work in research, but.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Studying chemistry and specifically organic chemistry, organic synthesis, you you learn how to make stuff. And if I never learned how to do that, I never would have done all the crazy stuff I've done and we wouldn't be talking right now. So.

• 8:53Tim Ferriss?

  And the the the performance enhancement side of things, a mutual friend of ours, we have quite a few mutual friends, was is telling me that you used to go down and maybe you could place us here in terms of where you were at the time, but go down to the library stacks and try to find molecules or patented molecules that you could tweak or look at variations of. Is that is that true? Or is there a is that an aspect of this same timeframe?

• 9:25Speaker 02

  You're confusing two timeframes, but I'll clarify.

• 9:29Tim Ferriss?

  I do that a lot.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  It it started when I got my first job out of undergrad and I went to work for a chemical company in New Jersey called ISP, formerly GAF. I don't know what it's called now. But I had a boring job. I did organic synthesis. I mostly did polymers. I did some other stuff. My boss was absent most of the time. My job by day consisted of setting up a reaction and then every half hour or so injecting a catalyst in there and checking the temperature and whatnot. So there was a chemistry library, quite significant, well

• 10:10Speaker 02

  well kept or well stacked, a chemistry library on that floor. And I started thinking, you know, I got a chemistry lab here and I would like to fool around, make some stuff, you know, I would like to make, you know, some stuff, bodybuilding stuff, you know, and I also was thinking about making making other stuff, which are recreational stuff, which which was turned out to be a learning experience. But um.

• 10:39Tim Ferriss?

  We'll definitely come back to that.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, we um. So what I would do is, I started out very naive. I wanted first thing I wanted to do was make testosterone and.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  I started off really stupid thinking that I should make it the way it's made from scratch, which is actually from a plant.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Um, uh, or an extract of a, it's, it's a yam, a diascoria yam. And I was able to get the extract or chopped up. And I just made a completely huge mess.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  It was the stupidest thing to do because it, later on I realized, if you're a chemist, if you're a synthetic chemist, you find the raw material that's available, commercially available, that's closest to the molecule you're trying to make. It's like if you want to build a car, you don't make your own rubber, make your own steel. You know what I mean?

• 11:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  You buy, you buy whatever things that are as pre-made as possible and then,

• 11:46Speaker 02

  you know, put it together, you save yourself a lot of, you assemble it, yeah. So I, I found out that, um, DHEA was easily available and cheap at the time. So it was actually,

• 11:59Speaker 02

  uh, sold to a lot of, uh, AIDS buying, buying clubs and anti-aging people. So I was able to get, uh, you know, good supply of that. And from DHEA you can make, um, testosterone, Diana Ball, uh, Bolder, you can make a lot of things from it. So I was able to, to make several steroids from that. Um, there were other classes of steroids I could make too. And, and it, it took a long time for me to, to really, uh, get my feet wet. But, um, I learned a lot of techniques and I learned how to purify things more, I, more so than if I ever just done my job that I was supposed to do there.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Cause I was learning nothing, pretty much.

• 12:46Tim Ferriss?

  So you're tinkering when left unsupervised?

• 12:50Speaker 02

  When left unsupervised, I would come, and I would come back at night many times and stay late and guy, people must have been wanting, thinking, boy, that guy's working hard.

• 13:01Tim Ferriss?

  It was, just not on the things you were assigned, right?

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I always wondered, you know, if they're talking to my boss saying, you're, you're kind of sitting here all the time. Yeah, after a while, my boss caught on.

• 13:13Tim Ferriss?

  How did you choose the molecules to create? So you mentioned, you know, boldenone,

• 13:21Tim Ferriss?

  which, I mean, the only reason, I associate that with sprint cyclists for some reason. I'm not sure if that was in the news in the last few years, but how did you choose which molecules to go after?

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Well, first and foremost, it has to do with the availability of the, of the raw material. There was a, there was a, um, a precursor that was commercially available, uh, and it wasn't controlled that I could buy. And in one step I could make boldenone from.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  I was able to buy androstein dion. It wasn't controlled. And I was able to make testosterone from that.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  That was able to buy something called epiendrosterone, which I was able to make some DHT derivatives from and, I also fooled around with some 19 nor stuff as well. Uh, several things. So.

• 14:21Tim Ferriss?

  And, and the, uh, so I, I've always called it, and this is again, getting back to this, I've only read it, never had to say it.

• 14:29Tim Ferriss?

  The androstein dion, but the, uh, and, and how do you pronounce that properly?

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Well, I like to think I'm the one that pronounces it properly, but I've never, and just seen the eye on, I would say.

• 14:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Okay. So that, that, correct me if I'm wrong, so it came to the, the media limelight with, and is that, is that correct? Am I thinking of the same thing?

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah. And then the connection there, which is interesting, is that. When I was looking up and just in dial, looking up, you know, the best way to make testosterone from and just in dial, I came across a in a German patent from the former G D R East Germany. And it had to do with the use of uh and and just to dial as a uh acute performance enhancer using mostly nasally, but also orally. Uh, it said that it elevated testosterone for ninety minutes or so, and that people would have it, you know, acute central nervous system effect and whatnot.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  God knows why, why East Germany would publish a patent telling them the world how they cheat is beyond me, but I I don't really understand. But um, but I took note of that and I said, well, I found that interesting and then I just sort of forgot about it and and later on, you know, I left that job and I ended up out here in Illinois and this guy that I was partners with at the time, his name was Stan Antash and he uh had a company called Osmo out in San Francisco and he uh he was, he and I were with this lock and my current partner, we're trying to make some stuff,

• 16:15Speaker 02

  we're trying to make C L A, I came up with a pa- uh process for that, but but anyway, he said to me one day, I want to put together a kitchen sink creatine product and it's every every best thing in the world, you think of any ingredients. And I'm like, well, I I something called and just in dial and you know, if the H A is illegal, I mean, if the H A is legal, this stuff should be legal. I mean, it's not controlled and it's what, you know, it's a one step away, it's it's two hydrogens away and he said, what is it? And I told him what it was, he says, how do you know that that's not illegal? And I say, it shouldn't be and and I say, it should be very widely available in China too, because it is a uh it is a um intermediate in the manufacture of contraceptives and

• 16:59Speaker 02

  all all sorts of um steroid drugs and and since China at the time had a one child policy, I'm sure contraceptives were were uh a huge market there. So lo and behold, there was a ton of and just to dial at a very cheap price. So he started to uh bottle it and it took off.

• 17:20Tim Ferriss?

  And that uh just for people who are listening who might not be familiar with this world. That would be referred to as a prohormone, correct? And I mean, I've heard you referred to as the father of prohormones. But these, these compounds that are one step away, like you said, or two steps away, like two hydrogens away from testosterone. And so it's not, it's not controlled when you consume it, but it's converted into something that if you, like testosterone, that if you consumed directly or injected directly would have sort of legal restrictions associated with it.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Well, the whole concept of prohormones was sort of something I, I came up with. I mean, it, it was a term, but to me, actually, DHEA was the first prohormone, but it, nobody really marketed as that. They just said, DHEA does all this stuff, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, I knew that it turned into testosterone, but negligibly. But when I came up with the ingesting diol, the whole marketing scheme with that is, is that it converts to testosterone. It is a prohormone or pro steroid. And that, that became a genre, a whole genre of supplements.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  And there were, there were subsequent products. I also kept, then I came up with a 4AD, which was ingesting dial. And eventually I came up with something called 1AD, which was the first one that actually really worked like a real steroid. And that's when things went crazy. That's when the money really started pouring in. But as far as your, your analysis of, of the technology saying that if it is an active hormone, it's illegal, that's not necessarily true because it's at least as far as illegal as controlled substance goes, because there's a lot of active steroids that are not controlled substances.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Now, in two thousand and three or two thousand and four, I think the, um, or maybe two thousand and two, people started selling the active versions of these. They started selling, instead of one A D, which was a converted to one testosterone, people started selling one testosterone itself. And I, I got very upset because I was working with Rick Collins, the attorney. I don't, you're probably familiar with Rick.

• 19:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we actually had a lobby.

• 19:58Tim Ferriss?

  specializes in this, this, this type of case or this.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Steroid law, steroid law, supplement law and all that. So our whole, our whole defense of these products was predicated on the fact that these are not active hormones and that your body has to convert them and your body has a finite capacity to convert them. So they have a, is sort of a built in abuse or, um, proof potential to them. Now, when people started selling the, and we were actually, Rick and I were actually going to see lobbyists in Congress and whatnot because there was rumblings that, you know, there can be bills or they want to get rid of these andros and all that, all that stuff. And people started

• 20:43Speaker 02

  selling these things and they wanted, um, in on all this, you know, let's keep all this stuff legal. And I said, guys, we can't, you're going to ruin our, our whole argument. And then they got angry and said, oh, you just want the market for yourself. And well, it, it ended up being a, it was a fail. But I tell you, our, our efforts did keep the pro hormones and, and those other active ones on the market for maybe two, three, four years, longer than they may not have been if we'd done nothing. So, so actually going out there and making some noise and. Helps.

• 21:22Tim Ferriss?

  And in the case of say 1AD, so 1AD is one of those supplements that I used after seeing a friend of mine, I mean seemingly, of course, this isn't literally true, but sort of double in size, he was a jujitsu competitor and I was just like, and everybody just was like, what are you using? Because we don't believe it's broccoli. And ended up being 1AD. Can you describe for folks the advantages of 1AD, or I guess before that it was 4AD, if I'm mixing things up, correct me, compared to Androstine Dion? Because I want people who

• 22:03Tim Ferriss?

  are say unfamiliar with some of the basic chemistry here to gain just the basic vocab? Because is there an aromatase component? Or I'd love for you just to describe like what the advantages are compared to plain Jane.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Okay, well, I can make a progression from Androstine Dion, which is like the Model T.

• 22:27Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  And to 4AD, which was better, and then 1AD, which was quite different. Anyway, Androstine Dion is, it circulates in your blood with testosterone, it's constantly interconverting, it's pretty widely, it's concentration in your blood is significant. It does aromatize easily, which means it'll turn into estrogen, which can then turn into estradiol. And at the dosages people were taking, they would get a disproportionate increase in estrogen compared to testosterone, and that would lead to

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Estrogenic problems such as gynecomastia or whatnot.

• 23:17Tim Ferriss?

  So just for people who don't know, so gynecomastia, I mean, it's a terrible nickname, but nickname is bitch tits, right? Because you develop fatty deposits in sort of your, your, your breast tissue or pectoralis tissue, which is why a lot of bodybuilders have that type of surgery. I just want to provide a little bit of context for people.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:34Tim Ferriss?

  Please continue.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Uh, okay. So then I came up with four and justine dial, which I knew about because when I, back when I would make the testosterone in New Jersey, I always had these, this four AD contaminants and they're like basically over reduced. You don't need to know that's a synthetic term, over reduced, um, and justine down. And, and I thought to myself, let me look at this stuff. And I, and I went to the library and I saw that, yeah, it's, it's natural metabolite and everything. And then I found some articles to say that it actually converts the testosterone a lot better than and justine dieon. And not only that, but

• 24:18Speaker 02

  it can't directly aromatize. Um, so, and it was easy for us to make. I mean, it was a very simple reaction. Just get the and justine dieon and, and, and just use this reagent called sodium borohydride and methanol and dilute, wash and it's simplest kind of reaction. Um, so that had a great advantage and that, that superseded the and justine dial. But still, uh, people, you know, would not get like the, like what you happen to your jujitsu friend. You said it was jujitsu or?

• 24:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it was jujitsu.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Jujitsu, okay. And so when I came up with a one AD and that was kind of a feat at the time, um, I probably would be able to figure it out a lot quicker now. It's been 10, 15, it's been 15 years or so, but, uh,

• 25:17Speaker 02

  I took a long time trying to figure out how to make this stuff because I looked it up. I went to the library and I was looking up, okay, what other natural metabolites of antigens are there in the body? That could be very anabolic. And I found this one German book on steroids and I saw this, this one metabolite that had the double bond.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  If, I don't know if you know enough about organic chemistry that there's single bonds as double bonds. I mean, that's about the

• 25:47Tim Ferriss?

  That's about as far as I go.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  All right, a steroid, steroid molecule has four rings and then the first ring in testosterone, N S D D, it's in the lower part, which is a four, carbon four to carbon five, which this, this one stuff was carbon one to carbon two. So it was in a weird position. Uh, but that had a tremendous amount, tremendous ramifications as far as, um, uh, bioavailability or more so conversion and receptor affinity. And it also was, uh, would not aromatize. So I looked it up and I'm like, man, this stuff looks like it's going to be strong.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  So I made some of the diol. And for some reason that the compound intrinsically burns like, like you're putting wasabi on your tongue.

• 26:47Tim Ferriss?

  And was this, you were ingesting it orally or how are you taking it?

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Or orally.

• 26:52Tim Ferriss?

  Orly, yeah.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, but the thing is it would also burn as it went through your system and everything and, and I was, and as pure as you could get it, it, it wouldn't matter, which was not an impurity. It was a, it was a property of the compound itself. So I said, man, I, I can't be selling this stuff, you know, I'm, the few people that tried it, you know, just blew up, but they're like, man, I don't know, man, my gut. I'm like, all right, I'm not going to put this on the market. So, so I, um, quickly came up with a diol version, which was a little more complicated than I thought, but I found some catalyst that allowed it to, to, uh,

• 27:36Speaker 02

  To do what it had to do and and and then that didn't have that problem. And then we came out with that it quickly gained uh became extremely popular. And I remember going to one Arnold, you know, the Arnold Classic.

• 27:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the Arnold Classic, it's it's like the uh. The Coachella of muscleheads. I mean, it's it's gigantic. I mean, what is it must be like a hundred thousand plus people easily in Columbus, right? I mean, it's it's just gigantic. It's it's it's it's an entire city of people. It's like the burnt Burning Man for people in tight pants with. Big muscles.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  What is that motorcycle thing up in uh North Dakota?

• 28:15Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, I mean, it's it's that type of sort of.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:18Tim Ferriss?

  Draw uh.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  But it's more than that now now it has like thirty thirty five different sports.

• 28:23Tim Ferriss?

  It's gigantic, yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's just um it's just not even just bodybuilding, but uh. But back then it was mostly bodybuilding and I don't know if you've heard of the distribution company called Europa.

• 28:34Tim Ferriss?

  I have, yeah, definitely.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, back then all the Europa guys were three hundred fifty pounds and, you know, monsters. And I remember them coming around and say, Patrick.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  What's up with that one A D? I I love it. I take it twenty a day. And I'm like, twenty a day? Are you insane? You're only supposed to take like three to six a day, but these guys, they're, you know, they they do what they want to. They they weigh four hundred pounds, so.

• 29:03Tim Ferriss?

  So so just to to touch on that for a second, I mean, there's so many different questions I want to ask here, but. Uh, I guess where I'd love to to steer this for a second is. When you're on the cutting edge, like sometimes you get cut, right? So if we if we rewind, and I can think of a lot of examples as a consumer, not a creator of these things, but as a consumer where I'm like, oops. Took too much yohimbean hydrochloride and took it too close to ephedrine and now I really feel like I'm gonna have, you know, die of heat stroke. And really, i- i- in in uh. Retrospect for me, I think I was really haphazard and uh just felt like I was immortal, which is is not the case.

• 29:44Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, let's let's rewind back to the you mentioned the recreational drugs and I don't know if this was uh in in terms of placing it in time when you were. Uh, in college or otherwise, but I mean, it did you have you said there was a learning experience there. Uh, do you want to elaborate on that?

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that would be back in in New Jersey. So at the time, well, I guess just to kind of preface it, I actually, the whole thing kind of started in high school in that I was on the wrestling team and wrestling practice was really hard. And I looked at my mother's medicine cabinet and I saw there was an old prescription for for Percodan. It said for pain. I didn't even know what it was, you know, and I say, I got a lot of pain during my wrestling practice. So I'm going to take one of these before my wrestling practice. And I did. And I had the best wrestling practice ever. People were bending my arm behind my neck and, you know, in all kinds of positions. And I'm just staring ahead.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  I don't care. And I kind of grew grew to an affinity for that sort of drug or whatnot.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  But I never, you know, did anything about it or whatnot. But but then when I moved to New Jersey and I had all that free time, I thought to myself, well, wouldn't it be nice if I could synthesize something like a like a Percodan or something along those lines? So I looked into all the different derivatives that were, you know, that exist. And I looked into Damarol, you know, the morphine derivatives are kind of out of the question because they they all start with a morphine type type of substructure, which is all controlled. And I found out that methadone was something that all the raw materials were not controlled,

• 31:42Speaker 02

  were cheap and available. It was a three-step synthesis. It wasn't that easy, but I was able to figure out how to do it.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  Now, I didn't know what I was getting into.

• 31:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Uh, and I made my first tiny amount and I took forty milligrams. And, cause I looked up, it said ten milligrams is a regular dose. And I said, well, a regular dose is nothing. I'll take four times that. And I took it and then at work, I weighed it out on an analytical scale. And then I walked to the lunchroom and I was feeling kinda giddy and I ate my lunch. And the way back from the lunchroom, I started spinning really bad. And I just made it to the nurse's office. I just started throwing up and my face was itching, my nose was itching.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  And I just lay there and every time I would move, I would throw up. And I lay there for like an hour or two. I made it up to my lab and continued throwing up the whole afternoon, throwing up. Everyone laughed. I made it to my car, throwing up all the way to my car, drove home ten miles, pulling over every mile or so, throwing up, throwing up, throwing up. And I didn't get back to work for like three days. I was just throwing up and I said, I'm never gonna touch that stuff again. I said, this is, this stuff is horrible. And then I had a skiing injury, um, a couple of months later. And I was prescribed painkillers or whatnot.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  And I thought to myself, well, I got that methadone and you know, I'm, maybe I'll try it again. I'll be more careful with the dose and you know, maybe I'll, I'll, I'll take it intramuscularly. You know, that way I can, uh, don't have to wait and see. And I'll start with a little amount and won't have to wait an hour to see, you know, what, you know,

• 33:42Speaker 02

  what it's, what it's gonna, whether it's gonna hit me or not. So I took it and I was like, you know, this is pretty good. It's pretty good. Then I started to, um, and it would last sometimes, you know, thirty-six hours at first.

• 33:53Tim Ferriss?

  That's a long time.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  It, yeah, it is a very long half-life. Uh, but time went by and I guess it was about a year that I was taking it. And it was, it took months before I realized I had an addiction. And I realized, cause one time I just sort of stopped and I was just like, oh my God, I feel terrible. What is wrong with me? Oh geez, I feel terrible. You know, what's even thinking? And I went to work and I'm like, ah, I'm just gonna take my own methadone. And all of a sudden, wow, I feel good. And I'm like, oh no. Oh no, I was an idiot. I should, why did I not realize that this was, uh, and then from there, I was like, well,

• 34:39Speaker 02

  you're gonna have to deal with this, man, you know?

• 34:42Tim Ferriss?

  How did you, how did you get yourself off of it?

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Um, well, I, you know, I was sort of thinking, and it was really stupid thinking. There was a book back then, um, I think that guy Andrew Weil, or some, and someone else wrote it. It was called From Chocolate to Morphine. I don't know if you remember it, but it was a very candid book about drugs. An honest book saying, you know, which ones are harmful, how they're harmful, how they're not harmful. And in there, they said opiates are very addictive, you know, they can kill you with overdose very easily. But people can take them controlled for decades and not suffer

• 35:28Speaker 02

  serious health consequences, other than maybe being fatigued or whatnot. And I said, well, Mo Patrick, you know, you could just hang on until maybe medical medical science will find some way for you to magically get off this stuff without, you know, discomfort or whatnot. But, but what ended up happening is they ended up finding out, because I had a big mouth and I was very reckless. They ended up finding out what I was doing at work and they drug tested me. And they laid me off. And so I was stuck with nothing. And by that time, I was, my tolerance had grown considerably and I was taking a lot. And it was a horrible, horrible experience. I didn't know what to do. I went to, I went to methadone clinics,

• 36:11Speaker 02

  you know, where the heroin addicts go and they just looked at me and said, get the hell out of here. You don't belong here. I'm like, tried to explain my story, but it didn't fit their paradigm, so.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  Eventually, I I went to my doctor, you know, he took one look at me and he said, you need to go, they made some calls, they said, you need to drive seventy five miles south to Summit, New Jersey, they got a place for you down there and they'll take care of you and I and I drove and I got there and they didn't believe me either. Because who, you know, who comes in saying, well, I'm a chemist, I made my own methadone and now I ran out, you know, you don't hear that story.

• 36:49Tim Ferriss?

  It's not the usual story.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  We, uh, sounds like someone that's coming in for free drugs or something. But I was just like, please, God, help me. So, um, they did their best to detox me, I spent the first three or four days on the couch shivering with a blanket over my head, it was, it's even hard for for me to remember, but um, it's just the worst, worst thing in the world and it and it went on and on and on, I I didn't feel normal again for two or three months. But uh, that that taught me to respect, uh, respect drugs, especially drugs that are

• 37:29Speaker 02

  of addiction and and don't think that um, you're immune or somehow you're you're uh, unique and then it and it won't bite you, especially something serious like, serious one like that.

• 37:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, it's opiates scare the hell out of me, uh, I've, it's part of the reason that I've always tried to, well, I shouldn't say always, I mean, back when I was in my younger, even dumber years, um, not always the case, but I try to stay away from anything really fast acting, uh, that in in terms of, you know, no intravenous, et cetera. Uh, and the, uh, I was very fortunate and I I was really happy in a way when I had my first reconstructive surgery, they gave me Vicodin and all sorts of different, uh, opiates and they made me viciously sick.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:23Tim Ferriss?

  I couldn't take them, they made me extremely nauseous and I was really grateful.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  You know, it's it's funny, Tim, because um, that I've had some situations where I've had to be prescribed. opiates recently and also have had to have them, you know, in, in, in a hospital itself intravenously and whatnot. And, and they didn't make, they don't make me feel good like they did back then. They, I mean, if I'm in a lot of pain, yes, they, they will numb the pain, but um, they just make me feel kind of yucky and moody and, and, and nauseous. Um, there's, I, I don't, I lost the affinity for them. There's no recreational value with them anymore. Thank God.

• 39:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I remember. And so the, the question, the follow up question I wanted to ask was, what other uh, drugs that athletes take, uh, you think have a high abuse potential or are dangerous? And the, and the, the example that comes to mind, so when I was in, in, uh, I must've been in college because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to afford it, had to have been working, was a newsletter. I can't remember the name of it, but by Dan Duchene.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Oh, Dirty, Dirty Dieting?

• 39:40Tim Ferriss?

  That was probably it. And I remember when he started talking about, uh, DNP, am I getting that right?

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:48Tim Ferriss?

  And the stories, I mean, they were told to be entertaining. And I was like, Jesus Christ. I mean, it just seems like rolling the dice and waiting for the reaper on like Snake Eyes to come and, and, and to take you out because it seemed so, so dangerous. Uh, but what are there, are there any particular drugs or classes of drugs that come to mind that you think are, are dangerous or have a high abuse potential that athletes use?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Well, DNP is probably the most dangerous one. I do not think it has a high abuse potential because it doesn't make you feel good.

• 40:26Tim Ferriss?

  No, no.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  There's no reinforcing effect of it. But, but you mentioned Dan Duchene. He's a, um, he's actually the guy that

• 40:34Speaker 02

  That sort of propelled me into this industry and he was um my mentor sort of uh and I knew him quite well and discussed DNP with him and um and I knew his fiancee. Also I and she used to call me all the time. It was a very strange situation, but she had told me how would and well, Dan's gone and everything, but Dan. Dan was reckless and and didn't always have his uh I have a lot of good things to say about Dan, but you know, I ought to be honest, Dan was reckless and he used a lot of clients.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  His clients were almost all women as skinny picks and did some things that could kill him and he had this girl. Taking DNP and insulin at the same time and she said that she almost died. Now, coincidentally, later on, Dan convinced her to go get calf implants in Mexico. Um that ended up becoming infected and she ended up getting her legs amputated.

• 41:42Tim Ferriss?

  Jesus.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  And she was a very depressed, almost suicidal woman to begin with, and I remember when that happened, I was just like. This is just, well, we're going off on a tangent.

• 41:55Tim Ferriss?

  No, but it's dark. I mean, Dan was.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  It's dark. Dan was, yeah, Dan.

• 41:59Tim Ferriss?

  You could tell, I mean, just in the writing, I mean, you could tell he was very conflicted, very smart, but very conflicted.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  He could be a very, very nice person, but he could be a very selfish person and he could just not care about people sometimes. And I think he. The way he was towards women sometimes, you know, he was. I wouldn't call him not physically seductive, but psychologically seductive, sadistic.

• 42:26Tim Ferriss?

  Aside from the, say, uh, methadone, right? Are there, and this is related to the other question in terms of what what is dangerous uh or or potentially dangerous? Let me put it that way. Is there anything that you? Avoid testing yourself for any particular reason?

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Um.

• 42:48Tim Ferriss?

  Or using for extended periods of time?

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Bodybuilding type stuff, uh.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Well, insulin, I'm not sure about because I have no evidence that taking insulin in a fashion where your blood sugar does not, it stays under control is particularly dangerous. A lot of people saying that taking exogenous insulin will lead to insulin insensitivity.

• 43:20Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  But I don't think that insulin itself leads to that. I'm not so sure, so I'm not convinced of that argument. Certainly insulin, if taken without, you know, the right amount of food or the wrong dosage could lead to hypoglycemia and if not addressed appropriately could lead to coma, possibly death. But insulin's one of these things that I don't think is, if used judiciously, it's not necessarily going to hurt you. Now, it could lead to, probably would lead to adipose or visceral fat deposition.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, specifically visceral fat, which is, you know, the fat between your organs, which is the fat that's associated with metabolic syndrome, you know, hypertension, you know, type 2 diabetes and all.

• 44:21Tim Ferriss?

  All things you generally don't want.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Atherosclerosis, yeah, exactly. But, you know, in the, in the, in the context of bodybuilding and a diet that's of a certain fact type, I don't know if that's necessarily going to happen, but I'm sure if you just eat like crap and take a lot of insulin, that will happen.

• 44:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, if we took a slightly different tack on it, what, what are some of the biggest wastes of money that if you look at just the world of competitive athletes and trainers and so on?

• 45:00Speaker 02

  I think the biggest waste of money is this IGF LR3.

• 45:07Tim Ferriss?

  Can you explain what that is?

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Well.

• 45:10Tim Ferriss?

  Something like growth factor with LR3. I've actually never heard of. I've never heard that, that, uh, those, those three.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Okay, well, I'll make it brief. The IGF-1 is the most, it's a big anabolic hormone in your body. When you take growth hormone, pretty much all the anabolic activity that's growth hormone manifests itself through is IGF-1. That's made in the liver. You take growth hormone, there's growth hormone receptors in the liver. They get turned on, your liver pumps out IGF-1, IGF-1 goes out. That's what makes your bones grow, your ligaments grow and whatnot. And, and if you're young enough, you know, maybe your muscles too.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Now,

• 45:58Speaker 02

  back in the 90s, there was no IGF-1, regular IGF-1 available, but what was available was this,

• 46:07Speaker 02

  this derivative or this analog of IGF-1 that had an amino acid taken off to allow it to not bind to what are known as IGF-1 binding proteins. And the reason why they did that, because it was meant for petri dish in vitro studies. And they, they wanted the IGF-1 to be free to do exactly what it had to do or not worry about these, you know, binding to stuff. And then it would throw the experiment off or whatever. Right? So this stuff was never meant for humans. And, but it was available. So people were like, oh, it's the best IGF-1 because it doesn't bind to binding proteins, you know, and people were taking it. But the whole thing is the fact that it doesn't bind to these binding proteins means that when you

• 46:52Speaker 02

  shoot it in your body, your body breaks it down almost immediately because the way your body,

• 46:59Speaker 02

  the way your body uses IGF-1 is actually, it has to bind to something called IGF-1 binding protein 3, which titrates it, extends its half-life, delivers it to the tissues at the right time and whatnot. So people are still stuck under this illusion that this, um,

• 47:21Speaker 02

  This in vitro version of IGF-1, which is cheap, still works and, you know, and by now, people are not really talking about it because enough people have tried it and seen like, it doesn't do anything, but it's still in people's arsenal for some reason.

• 47:39Tim Ferriss?

  The IGF LR3.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  IGF, yeah, LR3, yep.

• 47:44Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, what, if you look at

• 47:49Tim Ferriss?

  the, the various compounds that you've either created or resurrected, which, which are you proudest of? Uh, just, just from a sort of creativity, problem solving standpoint,

• 48:07Tim Ferriss?

  what, what, what is your,

• 48:11Tim Ferriss?

  what, what fills you with, uh, the most pride?

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Um,

• 48:20Speaker 02

  I think I, something I made called Six Oxo.

• 48:24Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I was gonna bring up Six Oxo because that was another one on my list that I've encountered over the years. So, uh, please, yeah, explain Six Oxo to folks.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Well, there's no other compound that my company spent as much money on to show efficacy, to show safety, and also to show that it was not, it had no anabolic activity. It was purely an aromatase inhibitor, an aromatase inhibitor being um, a compound which prevents uh, testosterone or certain endogenous androgens from converting to estrogens. And that's all it did. Uh, it took, it was.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  Trying to learn how to make it was quite an experience because it's a very violent reaction and I and you gotta keep it really cold and you gotta learn to to add one thing to the other.

• 49:23Tim Ferriss?

  Violent meaning it could explode in your face or how violent?

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Well, not actually fire violent, but actually go out of control and and boil and just spray solvent and reagent all over the place. I mean, it could, it's called an exotherm.

• 49:39Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  So I had to do this in my lab and then we had to scale up to production level and we got it down to where we were able to make reproducible batches, great purity. I remember, you know, we were the first, that was the first aromatase inhibitor product on the market that actually worked. I mean, there was Cryson before. Actually, Cryson was something that I originally came up with and offered to the, to Bill Phillips. I actually worked at EAS for two weeks.

• 50:20Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing)

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Didn't work out very well.

• 50:23Tim Ferriss?

  Your employment record kinda sounds like mine.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  (laughing) You know, I went from place to place until I found my little home in Illinois and I've been here since 96. So I have a great business partner. We, we are, we are very synergistic. I'm the guy in the lab and he's the guy that, you know, knows business and he's the guy that puts together the huge reactors and, you know, and all the, all the manufacturing stuff. So, but, but I digress. Six OXO, put it on the market and everything and I, and I, we paid Thomas Inkledon, who, I forgot where he was. I don't...

• 51:05Tim Ferriss?

  Arizona, maybe?

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, Arizona, yeah. And he did a study and I remember I went to a show in New Orleans and I was sent the results and I was like, wow, this stuff works. I was showing everyone, look, it works, it works. It was really great results. And that made me very happy and we, we had to, you know, results presented at a poster presentation and whatnot. I was able to tell people about it and do an ad on it and it... It became a very good product and it wasn't. The thing about it is that I knew that the pro hormones, the 1AD, 4AD and all that, that they were going to be gone. You know, they were.

• 51:51Tim Ferriss?

  It was just a matter of time.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it the whole.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  The whole industry had become polluted. People were selling methyl, one testosterone. People were selling, you know, synthetic. Liver toxic versions and and um. In 2005, they went all, they all went off the market.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  But this was a product which. Which was not an anabolic steroid. It basically.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Reduced your estrogen, which then prompted your pituitary to make LH, which then caused your.

• 52:27Tim Ferriss?

  Puttynizing hormone, yeah.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Puttynizing hormone, yeah, and then. Would would cause an upregulation of of um. Your testosterone production and that, you know, and natural testosterone production. So your testicles were not shrink. They'd actually probably grow a little. Whatnot and um. Yeah, the product became quite popular and I remember we at the time. My brother, who had been a investor in our business. An unhappy investor, he he uh, after a while, because things didn't move fast enough for him, he got he got out. And then he met some people and he actually started the. Company.

• 53:10Tim Ferriss?

  The supplement supplement company.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so he was the CEO of and one of their biggest products had six oxo in it. And and I remember see actually. Um, I hope I'm not breaking any HIPAA laws here, but I saw. Bud work and on the six oxo and he he got a very good effect from it. So he was a big believer in it. Um, his company. Didn't last too long. There was a lot of. I don't know, infighting and whatnot, but um. It was a great product, but uh, after in 2009, a pitcher named.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Had a positive for antrazine diol. And it was blamed on the six oxo.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  And I was, you know, I, I had read it and people were calling me and I was just pissed off. I'm like, don't blame it on that. That's stupid. I mean, um, and then I had a, there were all kinds of theories I had that it's possible that the six oxo itself could be used as a, you know, cause anderson down can metabolize the six ox or whatnot, or he could have been taking something else or whatnot. But, you know, I say, I know my product. I, I know it's not contaminated with anderson down. Um, and we certainly didn't spike it. And I talked, I remember talking to my attorney. So they're like, Patrick, you know, they're taking this stuff very seriously. Uh, they, they had a, you're

• 54:47Speaker 02

  not supposed to tell anyone this, but they had a hearing about this and they had some big experts saying that he believes that that's, that anderson down was deliberately putting the product. And I'm like, what? But yeah, he's talking to two important people. I'm like, so you guys should be ready for anything. I'm like, this is BS. And I just like, and then a couple of days later, I'm getting ready for the gym. I get a call on my phone. It's like 5:15 a.m. So it's Patrick, your mom such and such from, uh, the drug enforcement agency. We're need to be let into your plant. And I thought it was one of my friends screwing with me. I, I said, fuck you. I think I can't swear, but I

• 55:30Tim Ferriss?

  You can swear on this show.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  All right. All right. So I hung up and then I was like, uh, and then it rang again. I'm like, uh, hello? It is a raging snowstorm out. And at the time I, I didn't have my license and everything. And I'm just like, oh no. And I'm thinking, what could it be? And I, and I thought to myself, it's not the six oxo because there's nothing wrong with the six oxo. So I went to think, what, what do they think I'm doing? You know, I was just so confused. So my partner had to bring me up, go through the raging snowstorm. We get there and lo and behold, they're there for the six oxo and they have a search warrant and they believe that we are spiking it or something. And, um, I just remember getting

• 56:17Speaker 02

  kind of very angry and frustrated and, and that whole situation turned into a huge nightmare because, um, they were determined to not let it go. They did not understand.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  The technology at all. They did find a trace of the stuff in there.

• 56:37Tim Ferriss?

  The end, Anderson Dan.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Yes, it was below the detectability of the instrumentation that we used for quality control. So they were never able to prove that we knew what was in there. But I mean, it's in the parts per million range and it's physiologically insignificant. Yet they were determined to somehow make me pay.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  Uh, my attorneys, Rick and at the time Mike the manager and whatnot, they um, they went up there and gave a presentation that I helped them with that totally.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  There were like 15 people there from the DEA, FDA, whatnot, and they completely knocked them down. I remember that the investigator like slammed his, he said the investigator slammed his fist on the table and ran out of the room. You're so pissed off. But they all, but not only that, but they, they came to town and, and they visited all my workers. And then they dragged them to New Hampshire for grand jury hearings. They read my secretary of the Herbert Rander rights on the, on the stand because he thought she was lying. It was insane, but after five years, no charges. But the damage, the damage was done. It, it took away our, um, our biggest moneymaker and, um,

• 57:59Speaker 02

  you know, that's, uh, it was, it was a big blow.

• 58:03Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like an exhausting five years.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  You know, it's, it's the thing about the government is that they can accuse you of something and ruin your life and you could be completely innocent and you do not get compensated. Now, I'm not saying my life was completely ruined, but I'm saying that it was significantly downgraded. But I don't want to go into detail, but a lot of, yeah, it was not good.

• 58:31Tim Ferriss?

  What, what, um, was your first contact with Victor Conti? How did that, how did you come in contact with Victor?

• 58:41Speaker 02

  Well, I used to argue with him all the time.

• 58:44Tim Ferriss?

  And for people who don't recognize the name, could you provide some, some color or, uh, the, uh, or not color, but like who is Victor Conti or who was he at the time?

• 58:56Speaker 02

  Well, he has this little slimy used car sales and must I don't know. Oh, you don't mean to describe him physically?

• 59:04Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no. But, but this is, uh, so you know, we can back into that though. So you used to argue with him. Uh, what did you guys argue about? And, uh, what, you know, roughly what time, what year was this?

• 59:18Speaker 02

  Well, this would have been around 99 to 2000. There was a, uh, there was something called Usenet. Use, what do they call them?

• 59:30Tim Ferriss?

  Usenet, the, the Bolton boards and.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. They were, they were very cumbersome, but that's how people, you know, would chat back then in, in, in groups. And there was one called miscellaneous fitness weights. And Victor was on there, a guy named Lyle McDonald, uh, Bruce Neller.

• 59:51Tim Ferriss?

  Lyle McDonald of the, the ketogenic diet?

• 59:55Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. Uh, uh, many other people, uh, Will Brink, um, you name it, anyone back in the time. And Dan, of course, was there too. Uh, Victor came on and would push his ZMA all the time.

• 1:00:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's zinc, magnesium, aspartate.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  Yes. Yep, yep. Which I still take. I think it's a decent product, only because I think that, you know, a lot of people are deficient in zinc and magnesium. And I, you know, and I think it's as good as any. So, but, um, so he would talk about his product and the studies he did, which were, which were sort of, um,

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  uh, structured to, to give the results that he wanted, I guess, you know, and it was sort of hard to believe and whatnot. And people like Lyle, you know, who's gonna, who tends to be pretty negative. And if he sees anything that he thinks is BS, he, he's gonna lay into you. So he really went laid into Victor and, and I kind of laid into Victor a little bit too, but not so much. Because I would read it and think, well, you know, at least he did a study, you know, let's, let's see if there could be something here. I don't just, don't just assume that, oh, it was fake or whatnot. Um, give the guy, you know, the benefit of the doubt or whatnot. And so he saw me as someone.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  That was not necessarily an ally, but at least had a degree of objectivity.

• 1:01:32Tim Ferriss?

  Semi-neutral party.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he also used to make fun of my prohormones. Oh, your prohormones don't do anything. Oh, they suck. They suck. And then one day I get a private message from him. He say, hey, tell me about your prohormones. Do they beat drug tests? And I'm like, well, no, but I know something that does.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Now, if you want, if you want to go down that path, I'll tell you how, what I sold, what I sold him at the time was this stuff called Norbolathon. All right. I, that's an anabolic steroid that was never marketed, or if it was, it was marketed very briefly. But it's mentioned in a lot of the original literature. For instance, there's certain famous books, one by a guy named Charles Kochakian, another by Julius Vita, who wrote like sort of research compilation books on anabolic steroids.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  And they talk about all the ones that are made and what their properties are toxicity wise, you know, anabolic endogenic ratio, potency, and Norbolathon always was a standout. And it's a very odd chemical, but I always knew that it was closely related to a very popular or very widely available progestin used in birth control pills. And that progestin is known as levonogestrel. And it's also, it's found in something called Norplant. It's also found in.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  A wide variety of well-known birth control pills. So I knew that I could make this norbolithone from levonagestrel by a simple selective hydrogenation, which is simply adding hydrogen molecules to one part of the molecule, which is done with catalyst and hydrogen gas, whatnot. So I always wanted to do that. And at one time, our company had a partnership with Metrix.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  And partly because Connolly was Scott Connolly and his deceased, God bless his soul, partner. Or he was like his Smithers. I don't know if you remember. The Simpsons? Yeah, Billy was like Connolly Smithers. I loved Billy. Billy was a great guy. He put up a lot, a lot of crap. But they, they, they really liked me and they, and they wanted to pick my brain. I think that was one of the reasons why they partnered up with me. So we, you know, we would have our meetings and then they'd say, hey, Patrick, you meet Billy, let's go into the office. And then it's like, all right, what can you make?

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  Oh, you know, what can you do? It's funny. But I was like, you know something, there's this stuff called norbolithone I've always wanted to make. And, and I just needed a, some raw material. And I know it could be gotten from China. And then like, hey, we got to, you know, we work with TCI, one of the biggest distributors of chemicals out of China. We get you whatever you want, you know? I say, well, you can get me some of this levonagestrel. And I gave him the CAS number, which is a number that is associated with chemicals, just to make sure that you don't screw up, you know? Yeah, important to get that right. Yeah, it's, yeah, it is. You get the wrong thing and you die. So he said, yeah, I'll get some levonagestrel.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  And I'm thinking, well, maybe they'll get me like a gram or something. So I get 200 grams shipped to my lab. And I'm like, oh my God. So I'm like.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  Look, I could, just thinking to myself, wow, you know, I could probably do a lot of things for this. And I thought to myself, I could probably get into a lot of trouble.

• 1:05:57Tim Ferriss?

  If you had to buy that yourself?

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, you know, um, if you were to buy a gram or so through a research chemical company, it would be like $300.

• 1:06:09Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, okay, yeah.

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, you just don't.

• 1:06:13Tim Ferriss?

  That's a, that's a serious payload right there.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  And that's for free. Just said, yeah, here you go. Make some. So I made some, you know, I gave it to Scott and Billy and and they loved it. Um, I gave, I had a friend over in Greece. Um, he's interested in things like this. Gave some to him, uh, several other people. Um, and then, you know, I had already, and then a sprint cyclist. Actually, several, many, uh, grade B athletes used to contact me back then and I shook them up. I have too many stories to tell you. Really screwed up stories like that. We would just go on forever. But, um,

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  but

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  eventually, no, there was this, uh, who came into the picture later, who was a sprint cyclist girl and she, she took a lot of it and everything. Um, she was not very careful with what she did, but, but this was all before I even met Victor. All right? So I met Victor. He emailed me saying, hey, did your pro hormones beat the drug test? And I say, no, they don't. But I have this stuff, the stuff from the Bolothon. So I said, can you send me some? I sent it to him. You know, I didn't really know who, I knew Victor was, you know, Mr. ZMA guy, Mr., you know, blah, blah, blah. And, um, but I didn't know he was connected with a lot of the

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  high-profile athletes like he was. Um, so he comes back and he says that, uh, loves the stuff.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  And so he was one of the guinea pigs and he said, Victor says he loves it too and whatnot. And they passed it through their inside guy at the UCA lab. Who I found out his name was Victor Urolitz. Um, it's very funny that the whole Balco story that people don't know is how many people worked both sides. And just got away with, you know, it would never dieted or chastised in the media or whatnot.

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  That facilitated this whole thing. Now Victor had this guy, Victor Urolitz that worked in um, Don Catlin's lab.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  And he sent us, you know, he would send urine to him and he would put it through the rigamarole and hey, come out clear. So that's how he, the name Claire came about because Victor Urolitz would say, your urine is clear.

• 1:09:01Tim Ferriss?

  So that was, so the clear is the norbolethone?

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  The first clear, they're actually, the first clear was norbolethone.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  Then back to, uh, like a man, it was a wonderful woman. She looks like a woman now, by the way. She's, she's not competing anymore. And it's amazing sometimes how women can, can become virilized and then stop. And for the most part, revert, though the voice sometimes retains some of the, because the larynx doesn't, you know, totally shrink.

• 1:09:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And I think this is just to pause for a second. So if for those people who are wondering what androgenic versus anabolic means. Do you want to just quickly define the, the difference? Because people think of steroids, but then you also hear, you know, I guess like AAAS, right? So when you're looking at the profile of these things, just since we brought up the voice and the vocal cords and stuff. Can you, can you distinguish between anabolic and androgenic?

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  Well, anabolic precisely means growth of muscle tissue.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  That is the goal when people were developing anabolic steroids was to develop a a compound which only grew lean muscle mass, muscle primarily.

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  Now, testosterone also brings with it secondary sexual characteristics such as growth of pubic hair, growth of the prostate, seminal vesicles, and beyond that, you have androgenic alopecia, which is male pattern baldness, you have growth of the larynx, acne, body hair.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  These would be anything that's outside of the realm of muscle building and that's something that obviously a woman would not want to have happen to them, that's androgenic.

• 1:11:16Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. So that's why it's important for people, well, people look at the relative sort of anabolic strength versus androgenic effects when looking at which of these drugs to use potentially.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  Yes, they do, but people also make a vital mistake, a fatal mistake in thinking that just because a drug has a good anabolic androgenic ratio means that they could take that drug at any dose and it won't be androgenic. The thing is, is that these, these drugs that are low androgenic, they are low androgenic at a minimally anabolic dose, basically. So there's, so there's a selectivity there that's dose dependent. So if you take five or 10 times that dose, you're going to get the full androgenic.

• 1:12:07Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, got it. So yeah, so if you're popping Oxandrol and like Pez or whatever, you're, you're still going to end up with a good amount of androgenicity or whatever.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  So when that girl comes up to you, I don't understand, they told me it was Anavar.

• 1:12:21Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:12:23Tim Ferriss?

  That's because you're taking mega doses.

• 1:12:28Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. I took you off track a little bit, though. You were talking about Norbolatone.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  Um, she was so obviously on something and she just became a target. Uh, Don Catlin's lab was out to find out what the hell she was on. So they were examining-

• 1:12:47Tim Ferriss?

  Just for context for folks, who's Don Catlin?

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  Don Catlin is retired right now, but he was the head of the largest drug testing laboratory for the Olympics, um, you know, and Olympic drug testing in the United States back in late nineties, early two thousands and whatnot. So he had his UCLA laboratory and they made a project out of finding out what was taken. So they determined by looking at her urine that she was taking norbolifone. Um, I forgot how they, uh, they may have actually looked

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  at metabolites and then made some and matched it up. But the funny thing is that that guy, Victor Urolitz, who I mentioned before, had told Victor that way back when they, when they started, when they conceived the antibiotic testing protocol, he wanted to include norbolifone in the list of drugs to be tested. But Don Catlin and these other people said, no, no, let's not bother with that. That stuff's not, no one can get that. It's not commercially available, you know? So Don kinda was, um, was proved wrong on that. But anyway, so

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  they found out that she was taking it. And the thing is, is that, um, I was told, actually I got my timeline a little wrong, but before, even before that, Victor, uh, that Victor Urolitz had told Victor Conti that they're on to norbolifone and everyone has to stop taking it now. And I told, don't take norbolifone anymore. Do not, do not take it anymore. I got some new stuff. It's called TH, well, I called it trend stuff, but it became known as THG or the, the clear, the, the clear or whatnot. But, but she, oh, I liked norbolifone.

• 1:14:56Speaker 02

  So she kept taking it. So that she got caught. She's connected them and then, um,

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  That really screwed things up and and then the Balco thing came down as a result of an investigation that an IRS agent was doing, but that's that's that's another story.

• 1:15:17Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I just for for just some personal context, the reason that when Balco just exploded in the media, I followed it so closely is I moved to the Bay Area in 99 and I lived in lived in Mountain View originally, but also San Jose and traveled to San Francisco. And I guess Balco was what in Burlingame and it's like Bay Area Lab Cooperative. Is that what it stood for?

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42Tim Ferriss?

  But I remember seeing the sign and so it kind of got incepted, right? And it's like, oh, like the red doorknob in this in the in, what the hell was it? The not Sixth Sense, the one where the like the the main character ends up being dead the entire time. I'm completely blanking on the movie, but the point being I followed it really closely and also at the time was involved with sports nutrition and met athletes who had some ties to Balco, but it didn't mean anything to me at the time.

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:16:15Tim Ferriss?

  And when we talk about, say, Catlin and the cat and mouse game of drug testing, you mentioned THG. I'd love for you to just describe how that came to be. And that's what tetrahydrogestrenone? Is that am I getting that right?

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  Tetrahydrogestrenone.

• 1:16:33Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, yeah, close. So this is this is a rare chance to actually correct it on this on this stuff. So how did how did THG come about?

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  Well, I told you before that Bolathone was made from a progestin.

• 1:16:49Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  That's, you know, a drug that's found in.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  Birth control pills. Well, there's other progestins out there too, lots of weird ones. And there's one called gestronone, which is actually not used for birth control pills, but used for a disease called endometriosis, which is a female disease of the inflammation of the uterus.

• 1:17:14Tim Ferriss?

  Uterine lining, right?

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, uterine lining. So, uh, you know, I was just looking through the Merck index. I look at structures, you know, I, I can-

• 1:17:22Tim Ferriss?

  What is the Merck index? I mean, that's M E R C K, right?

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  M E R C K. Yeah, the Merck index is a, um, it's a compilation of compounds. It's not every compound in the world, but compounds that are natural ones or, or drugs or, uh, ones that are, have significant use in, in the industry. And it's, there's maybe about 10,000 in there and they add ones, they take ones away. Um, so I, I go in there and I look up, you know, they have a index for progestins. And so I find this one called gestronone. I look at it and it has, it is a hybrid of trenbolone, which you've heard of.

• 1:18:08Tim Ferriss?

  I have, yeah. It's a, it's a favorite among powerlifters, among other people.

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  Yes, and among cattle too.

• 1:18:14Tim Ferriss?

  Among cattle, yes. Another thing that I do not advise kids to try at home is to take these pellets and turn it into something you can inject in yourself, necessarily. But, uh, yeah, trenbolone.

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  Trenbolone. Uh, so it was a hybrid between trenbolone and nebolithone. It had the three, the triene, the three double bond, uh, structure of trenbolone and it also had this weird extra carbon coming off the, the ring structure that nebolithone had. And I say, this has got, if I-

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  Turn this, add the four hydrogens, turn it into an acetylene, into an ethyl, which basically makes it more, less progestational and way more anabolic androgenic. Um, I could do, I could do the same reaction that I did with nebolithone and come up with something that no one's ever seen before and probably is a lot stronger. And that's exactly what happened. So the really cool thing about it is that I made a molecule that no one's ever made before. Yeah, yeah. And, but the thing that I didn't know, which I found out later, which I'm reluctant

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  to admit, because if I, if I just don't admit it, it'd make me look so much more brilliant than I am. But I have, but I'm an honest person. But I, but, but there was a, I did an interview with, uh, Bob Costas. And, and part of that interview, he, he, um, interviewed Don Catlin. And Don Catlin said, you know, this molecule, it just disappeared in our instrumentation and we were amazed. We were like, whoever's doing this must be brilliant. And I thought to myself, well, I didn't know it would disappear. Though it kind of makes sense because of the way they test it. They have to add these, they have to derivatize it for gas chromatography and it's very, it would be very unstable. So it makes sense.

• 1:20:19Speaker 02

  But I didn't think that at the time. So they actually had to change their whole means of testing steroids. You had to use different instruments because of that. But, um, but all I know is that, uh, it worked and it worked at a very low dose. Um, Victor was using it at extremely low dosages and getting very good results from people. Um, but I tell you, that stuff was weird. I mean, I had tried it. What made it weird? It made you feel angry. It made you feel... It dried you out and made you feel really hard and strong.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  It had a anti-mineral corticoid effect, which is the anti aldosterone, basically sort of like a spironolactone. Um, how do I put that? I think you know what I'm talking about, but just put it simpler. Basically, your kidneys make a, um,

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  or your adrenal makes a hormone called aldosterone, which causes you to, uh, retain sodium and water and excrete potassium. And this blocked that. So basically you would excrete water and sodium and you would have a diuretic effect and you would look shredded.

• 1:21:47Tim Ferriss?

  But you would, so would you, was the anger a result of just feeling like you were cutting weight for wrestling? So you're just in that, that type of dehydrated, sort of high heart rate rage state? Or was it something else?

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  No, it wasn't anger. It just made you feel irritable.

• 1:22:09Tim Ferriss?

  Irritable, yeah.

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, certain steroids do that. I mean, one, another one that does it is, is halotestin or fluaximestron. And, um,

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  there's no, no one really knows why certain steroids have effects on the brains, uh, on, on, on the brain. Um, and there's ones like Diana Ball, which supposedly make you feel good and whatnot. But, you know, no one has a valid explanation for that, but.

• 1:22:40Tim Ferriss?

  The, uh, the, uh, I've heard, maybe you can speak to this and, you know, I know, I know Chris Bell and Mark Bell, and they did the documentary. I always get the order wrong. I think it's bigger, faster, stronger.

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:22:52Tim Ferriss?

  Um, the, what are contra, what types of other drugs are contraindicated to take with anabolic? Because it seems, and I might be pulling this from. Hearsay, but that many of the cases of say, people committing suicide or committing homicide, say, when they're on anabolic is often while they're simultaneously taking, say, SSRIs or anti-anxiety medication. And it's hard to say if it's correlation or causation, but are there any particular drugs that you think are contraindicated for athletes? Let's just use that example, who are taking anabolic.

• 1:23:36Speaker 02

  I don't, as far as psych drugs go, I don't know of any, but certainly with orals, you do not want to be on a blood thinner, like Coumadin or anything like that. In fact, I had a friend who was taking SuperDrol. SuperDrol was one of those over the counter designer steroids. That was quite potent. And they actually thin your blood themselves. They're anti-thrombolytic. So if you combine them with these blood thinners, let's say, if, you know, your doctor thinks you have blood clots in your legs or whatnot, and you're

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  also taking steroids, especially an oral steroid, you can easily have excessive bleeding. And my friend ended up having, you know, bleeding ulcers in his stomach and had to go to the hospital. He's like, why does this happen? And I was like, what are you taking? I'm like, I'm taking SuperDrol in my blood thinners. He's like, well, you shouldn't do that. Well, you didn't tell me. Well, he didn't ask me. So, yeah, don't, don't, never, never take a blood thinner. And that's a lot, if you, I don't know if you know this, but with a lot of anabolic steroids, people get bloody noses. And that's exactly why.

• 1:24:56Tim Ferriss?

  I did not know that.

• 1:24:59Tim Ferriss?

  That makes perfect sense. I mean, that would, well, I mean, there's a lot more to it, but uh, I was just, the image that came to mind was people doing, you know, powerlifters competing in meets and getting bloody noses. But then again, they also have like 1,200 pounds on their backs. So it could be

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:16Tim Ferriss?

  Combination of factors.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  They are, they're, the blood pressure, the transient blood pressure that they experience during a lift is phenomenal.

• 1:25:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  You know, yeah, if you could measure it, it would, I don't know, my blood vessel system would split and explode.

• 1:25:33Tim Ferriss?

  Now, the, you've, uh, you've been involved with a number of different companies. I have to ask, because a friend wanted me to ask you.

• 1:25:41Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm gonna get the, is it Yersolic or Ursolic acid? I have no idea. But he wanted to know, when is he going to be able to get more Yersolic acid? And maybe you could explain for people what it is.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. So we, uh,

• 1:25:57Tim Ferriss?

  And this is, this was, this is prototype nutrition that we're talking about.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  Okay. So this is, this is the spray. Okay.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  So I first heard about Ursolic acid when a, uh, study came out in a journal called Cell Metabolism. And, and it was, um, it was written by a guy from University of Iowa. He was a researcher. They used some technique that, um, to identify genes that were turned on or off in, in muscles.

• 1:26:29Speaker 02

  Uh, genes that had to do with metabolism or anabolism. And they were basically looking for catabolic genes that were turned off and anabolic genes that were turned on. And they used something called a, uh, some sort of a, a, a library, a database of, of genes, mRNA, expression signatures or something. And, um, they used 1,300 chemicals, just natural chemicals, drugs, whatnot, or whatever. And they put them, you know, through this algorithm or whatever. And it came out that, uh,

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  Your sollic acid just seemed to, you know, do everything. The next, the second one, which was a far second was metformin.

• 1:27:19Tim Ferriss?

  Very interesting. Okay.

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  Which does is a very interesting molecule in itself. However, it didn't really have the anabolic effects. So they ended up giving the urtic acid to mice and rats and they and they found that the muscle fibers grew bigger, they got a stronger grip. And they didn't gain any weight. But they had a proportional decrease in fat mass and

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  and they also looked at, you know, what's going on with um

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  hormones or, you know, the mechanisms uh in the muscle and they've and the and gene expression. And one of the big things they found was a large increase in the in muscle derived IGF one. Uh, we talked about that earlier or earlier. We were talking about IGF one producing the liver, but there's also localized IGF one producing the muscle, which is more uh relevant to to muscle growth. So their urtic acid had an effect on that. And then there was a a second study done by the same group. Um, which found that it's

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  increased the amount of brown fat.

• 1:28:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  Quite significantly, um, which caused the the mice to have a higher levels of energy expenditure because they, you know, they would uh they would eat a lot and not gain any weight and run around and, you know, the brown fat would just burn off all the calories. So

• 1:28:58Speaker 02

  so I originally came out with a um a product which was just urtic acid extract from rosemary and I I realized quickly that

• 1:29:09Speaker 02

  That the stuff had no solubility in water or oil. It basically put it in water and it it it it won't even wet. It just you mix it up and it floats and it's completely dry.

• 1:29:20Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds sounds fun to drink.

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't. You can't. Well, you put it. That's why you put it in castle. But still, it's in your stomach and it's just gonna sit there. And unless it somehow solubilizes, it's you're not gonna absorb it.

• 1:29:32Tim Ferriss?

  I tried to. I tried to do some stuff with, I think it was lucian recently. And I got this, you know, industrial packet of lucian and the same the same thing happened. It was just like I could shake it until my arm fell off and it would just sit there on top of the water. It's horrible.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  Now, the thing with lucian is that it will eventually wet and go into solution. You gotta be very patient.

• 1:29:53Tim Ferriss?

  Just have to keep going.

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  You have to keep going. And they have ways to instantize it. But your sollic acid just will never. You can a hundred years, you can stir it and it'll come to the top. So I went about trying to find derivatives and and I first made an acetate out of it, which is basically taking a hydroxyl group and make an ester out of it, an acetate ester. And then I there was a another functional group, which is a set of atoms that are attached to the molecule, that was a carboxylate group, which I could then make a salt out of. So

• 1:30:33Speaker 02

  I ended up making an arginine salt acetate. And I found out that the solubility properties of that, it wouldn't be soluble in water. It would wet in water. However, it would be soluble in solvents like like methanol and whatnot, which which are good indicators of something that could absorb through your intestines or through your skin. And I decided to make a spray because I thought that, well, first of all,

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  So it was a lot of these, the manufacturing method required a solvent to begin with. So I figured I would use a transdermal type solvent and sell it that way. And, and it ended up becoming a very popular product and it worked quite well. I mean, people could really feel something from it. They would, they would get a, within a week or so, um, greater vascularity, you know, greater, greater muscle volume. Uh, so that's one of, that has been one of our best selling products.

• 1:31:49Tim Ferriss?

  One of my, so my friends gets ridiculed by his significant other because it's just like, like 40 times at night.

• 1:31:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:58Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, when, when, when will people be able to get that again? So I think it seems like it's been sold out for a while.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  Well, I just made two kilos of the stuff, so next week.

• 1:32:12Tim Ferriss?

  Soon, all right, well.

• 1:32:14Speaker 02

  And by, well, by the time this airs, it will have been two weeks in the past.

• 1:32:20Tim Ferriss?

  So yeah, people who are listening, if you're, if you're listening to this first, I would, I would, uh, not daddle if you're, uh, interested in getting this stuff because it will sell out. Uh, the, now if it's increasing hypothetically, and this is just a question that I get a lot. So I'd like to bounce it to you. If it's increasing IGF-1 production or IGF production in, in any number of ways, does that, at what point does that increase the risk of cancer or cancerous growth?

• 1:32:50Speaker 02

  It's muscle specific. So I don't think it, I think it's kind of does its activity in the muscle and sort of, you know, decomposes and doesn't really affect systemic circulation. So if you have, unless you have some kind of a tumor in a muscle or something, I, I can't see it really having an effect because it's not, it's not going to reach systemic circulation and then say go to your prostate and stimulate a tumor there or anything.

• 1:33:20Tim Ferriss?

  Right. What, here's, this, this is a totally selfish question, but I'd imagine there are some people listening who would be asking themselves the same thing. If you were, if you were, and you're probably so sick again in this question, but I'll have to ask it. If, I would like to get better at chemistry and understanding organic chemistry, clearly out of school.

• 1:33:43Tim Ferriss?

  What would you recommend I do? I mean, like, I have the cognitive apparatus, I think, to learn it. I just have never approached it in any type of systematic or interesting way. I mean, are there any, any resources, any approaches that you would suggest if I want to become basically just very rudimentary, in a rudimentary way fluent in more of the language of chemistry so that I can just, just be more informed?

• 1:34:11Speaker 02

  Well, you're absolutely correct. I do get that question a lot. And to be honest with you, I don't have an answer because the way I learned

• 1:34:22Speaker 02

  organic chemistry and all this was a very laborious process of taking courses and being frustrated and not knowing what the hell anything meant and working and studying and taking exams until it clicked. So to say that you're gonna pick up some book and, you know, read it for an hour a night or something and then suddenly start to understand all this, you know, unless you're some, some sort of genius, you know, like amazing person, yeah, like you learn Chinese in two days type of person. I don't know.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  That's a good question.

• 1:35:06Tim Ferriss?

  Here's, here's maybe a slightly different question because I think what I might do honestly is just reach out to one of these extension schools in the Bay Area like UC Berkeley or whatnot and see if they have some type of introduction to organic chemistry that isn't gonna wanna make me slam my head in a car door, that has, you know, some, some type of decent teacher and structure to it.

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  You've taken general chemistry?

• 1:35:29Tim Ferriss?

  I have not. I, I don't, I don't know. That's embarrassing to say, but I don't recall if I have or not, partially because in a very...

• 1:35:38Tim Ferriss?

  Undirected myopic way. I mean, most of what I've learned, I feel like most of what I've learned from chemistry, I have taken basic, I'm almost 100% sure I've taken basic chemistry and then also some neurochemistry in the first few years of college, but most of what I've ended up learning is through self experimentation and then wondering what could go right, could go wrong, did go right, did go wrong. I mean, very, from an athletic standpoint as a consumer, I think it just came down to, similar to yourself, it's like, oh, well, that's very curious, but I'm not sure the journalist is getting it right. Let me go to the library. Let me go to PubMed. Let me try to figure out, like, is there even a plausible mechanism?

• 1:36:19Tim Ferriss?

  Right? And I remember reading a story about you early on with, I think it was Yohimbie and like the testosterone and that, that whole experience where you're like, wait a second.

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that was actually before the, the oxygen and I, they said that, um, the advertisements used to say that Yohimbie contained testosterone. So I bought a bunch of Yohimbie capsules, broke them open and extracted them with a solvent and got this green yuck. I'm like, testosterone is not supposed to be green. And then put, and I did an NMR, which is a nuclear magnetic resonance test on it. And I'm like, this is a bunch of crap. And I realized, you know, once I started looking through the chem abstracts, which was in the library that was on the floor I worked on, and cross referencing Yohimbie with testosterone,

• 1:37:10Speaker 02

  there was zero connection there. So I realized that the whole thing was a lie.

• 1:37:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Yeah. No, no, I was just gonna say like, that's so, looking at it from a slightly different perspective, what happened with me is I was, Yohimbie, Yohimbie and Yohimbien were popular at a point for, or they, they kind of made the rounds, right? I mean, they're, they're fads and, and supplements for fat loss. And it was thought like, well, because of these particular receptors that might be effective for reducing body fat in, say, the legs or wherever it might be. And took this Yohimbien and I, my body does not agree with that stuff. I just get extremely.

• 1:37:55Tim Ferriss?

  Overstimulated and I feel like I'm on the verge of vomiting the entire time that it's, I guess, peaking. And that made me interested in looking at, you know, so you read beta agonist and then you realize there are different types of, you know, beta agonists, like what the hell is an agonist? And okay, well, then by learning what an agonist is, you start hearing about antagonist and then down the rabbit hole we go, right? So that's a long answer to a short question, but I don't, I really, if I have taken chemistry courses, I need a significant brush up. But the, where do you think, what were the biggest wastes of time for you in the classes that you took? The things that you're like, this actually had no application to the practical side of what I'm

• 1:38:39Tim Ferriss?

  interested in? Is there anything that that comes to mind?

• 1:38:42Speaker 02

  Well, one graduate course really pissed me off because it was, it was had to do with analytical chemistry, you know, advanced analytical chemistry instrumentation and whatnot. And it was very interesting. And we didn't really deal with the instruments directly very much at all. But I stuttered my ass off and I, and I wrote one of the best reports, the guy, the best papers and the guy complimented me on it. And I learned a theory and all that. And the exam ended up being,

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  what is the inner diameter of a, of a column that we put into a GS390? And I'm like, what the hell? He looked this stuff up in a manual and everything is like, stuff, you know, if you're a tech or something, you know, it was, it was almost no theory. And I was just like, what is wrong with this teacher? I just was so frustrated and I ended up not passing the course. So, I mean, the course was useful, but the, the exam and the way the guy approached, you know, what the student should come away with was completely out of whack.

• 1:40:06Speaker 02

  But I also hated physical chemistry, thermodynamics. It's good stuff if you want to be an engineer or whatnot, but you know, I wanted to be a synthetic organic chemist. So that stuff, and it involved a lot of math. I hate calculus and all that, so.

• 1:40:22Tim Ferriss?

  So I'd love to ask a couple of, a couple of fan questions that, that have come in and then we can segue to some of the, the stuff that you're working on right now. The, the first is, and I would love to know the answer to this too. This is from Michael Tap House. When will we be able to measure our own BHB levels without blood? BHB, for those people who don't know, is beta hydroxybutyrate. So currently, if you're experimenting, as I have been often with ketogenic diets, exogenous ketones, which you're going to get into, I'm using the Precision Extra device from Abbott Labs to measure my ketone concentration in mill molars. So when, when will we be able to measure our own BHB levels without blood?

• 1:41:07Tim Ferriss?

  And I'll just modify that and say, or in some easier way.

• 1:41:14Speaker 02

  You know, that's a Dominic question, right?

• 1:41:16Tim Ferriss?

  That's a Dom question. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:18Speaker 02

  No, but, and I'm sorry, and I, and I didn't listen to the entire Dominic interview, but I listened to most of it. But I imagine you probably brought that up and what his answer would have been would be the, the acetone breathalyzer. And, and I don't know how accurate that is. Dom seems to, to think it's relatively accurate.

• 1:41:38Tim Ferriss?

  The Ketonics or something like it. Yeah, they, this is the Ketonics, so, so the Dominic we're talking about, for people who haven't heard, I did an interview with Dominic D'Agostino, who's a fascinating researcher and scientist who also deadlifts like a fricking monster, but is really, really savvy with this stuff. The Ketonics, so I have a Ketonics device. Side note, because I was doing this, the whole series of strange experiments where I was getting, you know, 100 grams of vitamin C intravenously and doing all of this stuff. And I wanted to monitor my ketone levels while getting this infusion because the, the, you can't use a glucometer, I realized, because I scared the living hell out of myself while I was getting one of these IVs, because I started to feel a little funny and I was

• 1:42:21Tim Ferriss?

  wondering if I was hypoglycemic, because I'd been scared by some horror stories that had been told. By folks. And so I, I used a glucometer and it came out 385. And I was like, uh oh, that's not good.

• 1:42:35Tim Ferriss?

  It came out 385 and my millimolar concentration was probably about six at the time it was high. And I was like, well, that sounds like ketoacidosis if the device is accurate. And the doctor who was supervising me said, there's no way that's accurate. It has to be broken. He tested it himself, 80. And just to place this for people, this was around 5pm, right over the Golden Gate Bridge, gridlock outside, not immediately close to a hospital. So if there, I mean, I had a doctor supervising me, but if I required some type of sophisticated operation, I was not in a good place. And it turned out, because then I tested it again, 389. And I was just like, wow, as is usual for me, and which is why people should always do their own homework and get a, you know, tattoo that says, don't try this at home.

• 1:43:21Tim Ferriss?

  Don't do that, folks, actually. The people that like one in a thousand will probably go and get it. But the, is that when I feel like I might have actually done it, meaning like, oh, I think this might be it. Like I've finally statistically just gotten to the point where one of my self experiments backfires to the extent that I'm like, going to die. I looked at it and I was like, just kind of laughed and looked at the doctor and I was like, well, that's not very good. And, and it turned out like, it turned out that the vitamin C causes the, the strips that are used for reading the blood drop in the, in these glucometers to malfunction. It just, it messes with the, the electrical conductivity

• 1:44:03Tim Ferriss?

  or something like that. But I, so I wanted to track my ketones, but I knew that I would get an error with the BHB through the finger pricks, which, which always happened after these, these IV infusions. And so I was playing with the Katonics, the downside of the Katonics, and maybe there are more advanced versions now, but it's basically like a keto, it's basically like keto sticks and it will, for, with a P on, and it says if you're light, moderate, or heavy, but it's, it's no more specific than that. So I was like, ah, I know, I know, I know I'm high. I want to see how it varies over time. But sorry for,

• 1:44:37Speaker 02

  No, I, I understand it. And I'm. Working on improved versions of of exogenous ketones. I'm actually ready to file a patent. I can't give away what I'm I'm doing or whatnot, but we have a whole bunch of strips here and we've been, we've been doing our own our own blood tests and they're vital. I mean, you, you need an exact number to make a graph.

• 1:45:04Tim Ferriss?

  And so let's talk about the the exogenous ketones. So, so because it's come up in a few other interviews, including in Dominic's interview. So keto cana or keto kana, no, tropicana, tropicana. Yeah, that's the time remembering it. Keto cana.

• 1:45:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:45:23Tim Ferriss?

  Keto sports. So when I'm flashing back to this conversation that I had with with Peter Tia and he was talking about drinking jet fuel in his kitchen at one point, just like dry heaving for an hour and trying not to wake his family up. And that was like Model T version of

• 1:45:44Tim Ferriss?

  ketone salts that I think, you know, Dom had shipped him in some nondescript container. But, but you've made a lot of advancements. So I guess my, the questions are, how did you, how did you get introduced to the sort of the exogenous ketone world? And just like, this is because I've heard it from so many people. So this is long, but it's not androgynous ketones. I don't know what it is on the internet, but like so many people refer to them as androgynous ketones. Like, no, they're not androgynous. Exogenous, like exoskeleton from outside the body. That's it.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  Exo.

• 1:46:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exogenous. So how did you get introduced to all of that?

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

  Well, I'm so glad that I did because at the time, I was kind of stuck in the, in the whole bodybuilding supplement world, which is very limiting, not very rewarding. And, and for someone like, like me, it's, it's, I mean, it's, now I love the sport and, you know, and a lot of great people in it, but it's, it's just dead. It's all, you know, how am I going to get a pump? Or what is the best stimulant I could take to make me insane before I work out? Or, or, you know, what's going to be anabolic? And you can't sell anything that's worse anymore. So.

• 1:47:09Speaker 02

  So Dominic D'Agostino called me or sent me an email saying, you know, I'm looking for contract, uh, some contract synthesis work. Um, and you know, I know Patrick, you know, I saw you on the boards. I know you're a chemist, you know, people mention you and, and I haven't had any success with anyone. And what I'm looking for is to make a, uh, what's known as a ketone diester. It is a, uh, a pro-drug to, um, to acetyl acetate, which is a, a ketone. And yeah, I said, yeah, I know what ketones are, you know, I know all about that. And, and I thought to myself, this is, sounds like some really cool stuff

• 1:47:53Speaker 02

  because I, you know, I'd known about the ketogenic diet and everything, and I knew about ketones and, and that they are a fuel that your body uses. And, and I started, you know, doing some searches and said, okay, there's a, there's a big opportunity here. So let me, uh, let me make the, uh, ketone ester for him. He could do his studies. And it took a, you know, a few months and whatnot. I was able to make some good stuff. Um, and he ended up, this first study, which was the CNS toxicity study on the rats.

• 1:48:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Which was supposed to be, um, had applications for the Navy SEALs and their rebreathers and whatnot. And, uh, he had tremendous success with that. Uh, and then it went on to, that he got a grant or approval to do cancer stuff and he got tremendous results with that. And as, as you know, uh, um, he's continued to have, to do research and show phenomenal things with these, these, um, exhaustness ketones. Well, um, you know, we started off with the diester and, and I thought to myself, well,

• 1:49:10Speaker 02

  you know, um, I would like to get in on this, on this gig. So I want, I, I wonder if I can come up with some kind of a supplement version. So I said, well, I, I know that you can make salts out of these, you know, I know that the sodium. Been a hydroxybutyrate out there because I've seen it before, but I know it's like a million dollars. And I said, I gotta find out a way to make this cheaper. And, you know, I did a lot of research and, and stuff. And, and I did find a way to make it at a price that your people could actually, you know, afford to take it in effective dosages. And I made potassium sodium,

• 1:49:52Speaker 02

  which was the original stuff. I don't know if that's what Peter took, or if Peter took the stuff from Oxford, or it may have been the, it may have been my, my stuff, the original keto forest, which by the way, is not meant to be drinking straight. You have to mix it with an acidic beverage.

• 1:50:10Tim Ferriss?

  I think what he, I think what he took at the time was just some equivalent, but I think it was, I mean, I remember at some point, I got these ketone salts from, from Dom. And I was like, they just sat in my refrigerator for months. I was like, I cannot build up the courage to take this stuff down.

• 1:50:34Speaker 02

  Wasn't given, you know, he wasn't given appropriate directions. If I drank that stuff straight, it'd be like drinking salt water out of the ocean.

• 1:50:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:50:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, you throw up. So, um, yeah, I mean, and then Dom did some research and found, yeah, racist blood ketones and whatnot. And, and we did a patent together. You know, I had an idea, you know, how we patent this, how we patent this, he can't just patent the salts and whatnot. And so let's combine it with MCT, see what, see what happens. And, you know, we found some results that, you know, that looked like there were some significant changes there. And then there was a patent, um, applied for with that.

• 1:51:18Speaker 02

  And that's a, that's a whole nother rabbit hole. I just, that's a mess. I don't want to go down.

• 1:51:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, no worries. The, what are the most interesting applications of exogenous ketones? Because I've used it while fasting. I've used it while just making the transition to ketosis to make it a little easier. As you're going through that very grumpy gray zone.

• 1:51:45Tim Ferriss?

  And, you know, effectively alleviates any of what people might call keto flu for me.

• 1:51:53Tim Ferriss?

  I know a lot of endurance athletes use it or take it prior to aerobic workouts. Like, what are the most interesting applications? In your mind of, of these exogenous ketones?

• 1:52:06Speaker 02

  First and foremost, endurance athletes. And the many teams at the Tour de France, Tour de France, sorry, France, were utilizing these ketones, whether they be salts or the stuff, the, the mono ester, the Clark,

• 1:52:35Speaker 02

  Karen and Clark, Richard Veets, I don't know if you know their BHB ester?

• 1:52:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:44Speaker 02

  I, I know that the one, the team that won was, they had actually an exclusive contract. They denied taking it, but there were, you know, I, the writing's on the wall. I have all these messages everywhere, but, but, um, but there are also people that were, had, uh, that were on ketogenic diets and also taking exogenous ketones. I mean, keeping their levels up in the range of five millimolaliter, that's up there.

• 1:53:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's up there.

• 1:53:09Speaker 02

  And they had, you know, they, obviously, that's not an easy thing to do. So they wouldn't be putting themselves through all that suffering if they weren't getting the results. And they were getting the results. And I, I've also had Ironman people, MMA people that, that love it, that use it.

• 1:53:31Speaker 02

  Um, certainly if.

• 1:53:33Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 1:53:35Speaker 02

  Certainly, if you are avoiding carbs, if you are on a ketogenic diet, and you want to go to the gym, and you know, normally people that are that are on regular diets, you know, they'll drink some carbs before or during their workout, you know, because your body's gonna burn up carbs and you need to replenish to keep your blood sugar up or whatnot. But if you're on a ketogenic diet, y- your body's not using carbs really. It's using ketones. So you're gonna go in that gym and you're just gonna start working out and your ketones gonna be used up really quickly and and you're gonna tank. So.

• 1:54:18Speaker 02

  So if you are in ketosis and you need something during your workout, you drink a exogenous ketones and it'll be like drinking carbs. I mean, you will feel your brain will be energized, your body be energized, you won't tank.

• 1:54:41Speaker 02

  It's it's pretty amazing. I mean, people that, I mean, I've given it to people that, you know, are like, guy, I'm on the ketogenic diet and I work out, I feel like Kratz, I try this. And they're like, wow, you know, I didn't get tired and, you know, my body, you know, had all the fuel it needed.

• 1:55:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and for for me also, just on day one or two of converting from carbohydrate dependent to fat adapted, trying to get to at least, say, before I hit about 1.5 millimolars, if I'm, if I have to do an interview or something like that, then I'll just take a serving of the KetoKana 15, 20 minutes before I'm set to start the interview. And I've been really impressed. The other other particular types of people who should not take it?

• 1:55:34Tim Ferriss?

  Or who should get some type of supervision or permission from their, you know, GP or whatever to to consume it? Is it contraindicated with anything?

• 1:55:46Speaker 02

  Um, the BHB part, I, I don't, I don't think so. Um.

• 1:55:57Speaker 02

  I mean, they're.

• 1:56:00Speaker 02

  People that are diabetics can go into diabetic ketoacidosis, but that's a special condition and I don't think this little bit of ketones is gonna like exacerbate that or anything. Uh, but if you are, uh, some of these products, the, the sodium load is, it's not really, really high. I mean, you can have a pizza and have, you know, five or 10 times amount of sodium, but, but if you're on a sodium restricted diet, you have to take that into consideration.

• 1:56:31Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:56:32Speaker 02

  But other than, but other than that, I, I don't think there's any problem.

• 1:56:35Tim Ferriss?

  What, uh, what makes you different in the world that you've inhabited up to this point? I mean, in the creation of these different things, in the, the creative problem solving, uh, coming up with THG, et cetera. If you, if you kind of look back, why, what are the things that make you as good at it as you are? Cause there are a lot of, I mean, a lot of folks trying to do these things, but you've had an incredible amount of, of creative success.

• 1:57:07Speaker 02

  Well, when I got started in this whole thing would be the early nineties. There was no internet back then. There was, like I said, there was chem abstracts, which are this endless volume of, of large books with extremely small writing that you'd have to cross-reference and they were very, very hard to understand. And I learned to understand these things and then look up articles and I had the patience to drive to a library here to there, find these things. And I learned how to research in a very primitive way. And I learned the patience of researching and I got a head start.

• 1:57:55Speaker 02

  Before anyone else started to be, you know, to kind of start to do what I was already doing. And there's a lot of researchers out there that, yeah, sure, they can research and they can find, "Oh, a study that this does that, that does this." But can, do they actually have a lab? Can they actually make this stuff? Can they actually test the product to see if it really is what it is? I've also developed a certain intuition

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  that tells me if something is worth exploring more or not. And that that depends upon a lot of things. It depends upon the journal. Well, it's not really intuition, it's actually logical. You know, it depends upon the impact factor of the journal it's published in. You know, are there other publications by, you know, unrelated authors or whatnot? Is there a plausible mechanism?

• 1:58:58Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, I think it's just a lot of experience and just an affinity for this kind of thing.

• 1:59:05Tim Ferriss?

  When do your best ideas tend to come to you? Is there any pattern to it?

• 1:59:11Speaker 02

  That's interesting because a lot of times, I'm sort of a, I'm not a consistent producer. My mind tends to go through periods of where I just am not creative, I'm frustrated.

• 1:59:30Speaker 02

  I don't feel as though anything's gonna happen or whatnot. And then I'll come across something and then I'll get a spurt of energy and creativity. And all these things will come out. Sometimes, you know, I'm laying in bed trying to go to sleep. And I'm like, I think of four or five different things and I'm like, wow, wow, wow, you know? And then I try to remember what they were. And I should write them down. But, and then I work on them. You know, it's, I guess that's not unheard of.

• 2:00:06Tim Ferriss?

  Do you?

• 2:00:11Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any particular morning routines that you find helpful? I mean, aside from the usual, I mean, do you wake up? It sounds like you wake up on the early side. What is it? When do you? What time do you wake up? And what does the first, say, hour and a half of your day look like?

• 2:00:27Speaker 02

  Well, if I go to the gym, I'll wake up at five.

• 2:00:33Speaker 02

  First thing I do is I make my coffee.

• 2:00:35Tim Ferriss?

  How do you make your coffee?

• 2:00:38Speaker 02

  I just make it with a coffee maker.

• 2:00:43Tim Ferriss?

  You just drink black coffee?

• 2:00:45Speaker 02

  No, I put cream in it and some Splenda. I don't put any butter in it or anything like that because I do it before I work out. And then, and then nothing against Bulletproof Coffee and everything, but I find it to be a little heavy on my stomach if I go into a gym.

• 2:01:00Tim Ferriss?

  You might also have higher disaster pants potential.

• 2:01:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I don't. No MCTs before the gym, for sure.

• 2:01:08Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. And then what is your, what does your workout routine look like?

• 2:01:14Speaker 02

  Well.

• 2:01:14Tim Ferriss?

  On a weekly basis or whatever you happen to be doing now?

• 2:01:17Speaker 02

  Well, as far as, well, let me start with, I prepare my workout drink, which is, um, I have this stuff. My friend is a trainer. His name is Ian Danny. He has a product called Amino Matrix. His company's called Optimum EFX. It's very expensive, but since we, I've worked with him, we make some of his products. I get it for free, but it's basically a full spectrum essential amino acids that's enriched in branched chain amino acids with some other things thrown in there, Lipoic acid, citrulline malate, and a few other things. And I mix that with about 45 mils of Ketiforce, which is the stuff you're not supposed to

• 2:02:02Speaker 02

  drink straight, like Peter did. So if you mix it with amino matrix, which is very tart, it it um it buffers the alkalinity of the keto force and it ends up tasting quite, quite good. So I drink a little bit of that. I take it to the gym. Um lately I work out maybe three to four times a week. Uh sometimes, you know, if I feel I'm I'm motivated to really get into, you know, extra good shape, I'll work out more. Um however, I usually combine, uh I do legs and arms in the same

• 2:02:44Speaker 02

  day a lot and um chest and back and then shoulders, abs, uh and I mix it up sometimes. Uh and I and I do cardio. I I don't, I haven't gotten into a lot of the um the kettlebell or or some of the the athletic type of, you know, different kind of things.

• 2:03:09Tim Ferriss?

  Metabolic conditioning stuff?

• 2:03:13Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, well, some of those, um, yeah, yeah, exactly. Which I would like to do, but you know, I just, oh, um, I just don't have the time to learn it all. I just, I I just don't, I'm, I'm an old dog. It can't teach me.

• 2:03:32Tim Ferriss?

  Was it, so, speaking of old dogs, uh, do you have any, uh, how are you thinking about longevity or or extending lifespan? Is that a, is that a high priority or do you not spend a lot of your brain cycles on it? And if you do think about it, what do you think are promising?

• 2:03:54Speaker 02

  Well, I worry about.

• 2:03:57Speaker 02

  My health over the next year or five or 10 years. You know, I go to the doctor and sometimes I have abnormal blood values or whatnot. And I don't know what's going on there. And I worry about that. Because I don't want to come down with any sort of condition that's going to knock me out or anything like that. I worry about, you know, cancer and all that stuff. I'm not worried about whether I live to be 85 or 105. That's not... Why worry about that at this point? I'm worried about quality of life in the immediate future. I've been thinking about taking...

• 2:04:42Speaker 02

  I was taking Metformin for a while. I stopped. You know, sometimes it upsets my stomach. But I've read a lot of research on it and it seems to be maybe the most promising of the anti-aging drugs out there. And...

• 2:04:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It is... It does seem to have a fair amount of interesting data behind it. Yeah. Rapidly since is interesting too. I mean, that entire kind of class. But I haven't taken either at this point. I don't know. For whatever reason, I don't know why it makes me so... I have so much trepidation about it. I guess it's because I feel like, once you're on it, you probably... If you're taking it with the explicit purpose of extending longevity, it seems like, once you're signed up, you're signed up. Unless some type of contradictory data comes out against it, against the efficacy or indicating side effects.

• 2:05:41Tim Ferriss?

  I'm going to switch things up just a little bit because I know that you are in a different time zone and I want to be respectful of your time, but I have a couple of what I would call rapid-fire questions. Answers don't have to be short. They can be short or long. But when you think of the word "successful," who's the first person who comes to mind and why?

• 2:06:05Speaker 02

  Hmm, successful.

• 2:06:09Speaker 02

  I guess Bill Gates, um, not so much, I mean, he's financially successful. But he's also become a, you know, uh, quite a philanthropist, uh, uh, you know, he's, he's done a lot of good things. He, he's not just made a lot of money, but he's also, um, put a lot of effort into making the world a better place. And I, I think he seems to be, uh, psychologically in it, you know, feels good about himself.

• 2:06:50Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, is there any particular book or books that you've given a lot as a gift?

• 2:07:00Speaker 02

  As a gift? I've, I've received books as gifts. Um, I don't know if I've, I've given, I gave my mother, uh, the book, Kennedy book by, uh, I think it was Chris Matthews, the guy from MSNBC. Cause I know she loved Kennedy. She met Kennedy at his inauguration. There's a weird story. But, uh, so, uh, but one of my favorite books is, um, is by an author named Jared Diamond. And it's called Guns, Germs and Steel.

• 2:07:32Tim Ferriss?

  Guns, Germs and Steel. Yep.

• 2:07:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I read that. That really gave a, a, a big eye opening on, on, um, why certain people of the world are more advanced than others and why, you know, people behave a certain way. And, and it, it, it's opposed to just genetics and, oh, this person's smarter because they're this or that. It, it, this is so many aspects to it. It, um, it was quite, it got to be quite a scholarly feat though, near the end. That book was, uh, you know, he was quite detailed.

• 2:08:12Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, what are the most common misconceptions about you? Or is there anything that you would like to clear up in any, in any way?

• 2:08:25Speaker 02

  Well, I used to have a persona on the internet as being short-tempered and arrogant. And, and I have a sarcasm that doesn't always come across in the written word so well. And I've kind of toned that down, but there's still a lot of people that, uh, maybe they just want to believe that I'm a jerk. Um, I'm not, I'm not sure. I don't get, I don't get out and travel and go to shows, go to conferences nearly as much as I, I should.

• 2:09:09Speaker 02

  And, and I know I really should because I'm kind of a recluse when it comes to that. Cause I know, you know, a lot of my colleagues are, they're here and there and everywhere and everyone's meeting each other and, and I feel as though everything's happening and I'm being left behind. Um, so I'm gonna, this year, I'm gonna try to change all that. But, but, but I'm gonna, you know, I run a business here, or, or one of the people that run a business here that we, we do production, we have to be testing every batch and, and whatnot. And, and, um, I, I have to be here. So it makes it kind of hard.

• 2:09:40Tim Ferriss?

  I think you and I have a lot of shared DNA in that department where I can pretend for very brief periods of time to be an extrovert, but I find it very exhausting. So I, that's part of the reason that I'm cutting back significantly on all of the shows and conferences and whatnot that I attend this year because I just find it extremely draining.

• 2:10:01Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:10:02Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, but you also end up being reactive, right? In the sense that when you're in the, in the, in the cave, working on production, I mean, you can, I, I would imagine it's easier to set your priorities and get less distracted by shiny objects than if you're out and about being bombarded by all these inputs at a conference. I mean, I, I, it's been a long time since I've been in that world, but that's what I would imagine to be the case. Uh, what, uh, what advice would you give your 30-year-old self? And maybe you could place where you were, what you were doing at the time.

• 2:10:41Speaker 02

  Thirty years old is when I moved out here. I would say, don't listen to that Stan Antos guy.

• 2:10:49Speaker 02

  Stay the hell away from him. Cause, cause he really, you know, there was like two or three years where I could have jumped ahead a lot quicker if it wouldn't been for him.

• 2:11:06Speaker 02

  It's hard to say. I, I would, uh,

• 2:11:16Speaker 02

  I mean, if I knew all the stuff I knew right now, I would just say, hey, I know how to make this. I'd make it. You can't say that, you know?

• 2:11:22Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right.

• 2:11:22Speaker 02

  You know?

• 2:11:23Tim Ferriss?

  Buying Apple. Yeah, right. It's like, well, if I knew then what I knew now, right?

• 2:11:27Speaker 02

  It's just an unfair question. It's just, you mean like philosophically as far as demeanor and all that goes?

• 2:11:35Tim Ferriss?

  Anything, anything. It's just, it's a wide open question, but, uh, but we can, we can also table that one for now.

• 2:11:43Speaker 02

  I would, I would be, I would, um,

• 2:11:48Speaker 02

  be more patient with people and, and not, um, you know, on, on the internet and whatnot. In person, I, you know, I was always good and everything, but, but, um, you know, I kind of grew my reputation on, on the internet and I would become impatient and belittle people and, and sort of if they, and whatnot. And, and some people thought it was really funny, but, but it caught, it did turn a lot of people off and, and I don't, you know, I, I'm ashamed of that. It's, it's not who I am. So.

• 2:12:25Tim Ferriss?

  There's a, and this is just because it's, it's a topical. I thought, I want to at least bring it up and we don't have to discuss it, but there's a current scandal that's been discussed pretty widely about, um, Delta two. Do you want, do you have any interest in commenting on that or, or would you prefer to just leave that be for the moment?

• 2:12:45Speaker 02

  No, that's, that's interesting. They, um, that all came about with, um,

• 2:12:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And if you could catch people up who are not, just give people some context for those who don't, aren't familiar.

• 2:12:54Speaker 02

  I wish I had that guy's name. Um.

• 2:12:59Speaker 02

  Well, the whole thing came about with the doctor in Indianapolis that was prescribing growth hormone to his wife. And I guess a couple of years after, someone went to work for that organization and he heard that about that. And I don't know, I can't really remember. But Al Jazeera did a undercover thing and they found about this guy. But part of what this guy was also doing was selling this stuff called Delta 2, which was a anabolic steroid that was never marketed.

• 2:13:41Speaker 02

  And I heard a lot of people talking about it. For instance, they asked Victor Conti about it and Victor doesn't know what it is. Obviously, you know, he said it was no good, it was weak or whatnot. And it's actually something that I made back in the early 2000s and tried it out. It's very difficult. It's weird stuff to make because it turns into like fiberglass and expands. You can't filter it. You have to make it into an acetate, but whatever, that's all chemistry stuff.

• 2:14:20Speaker 02

  But I made it into a spray and I was thinking about selling this as a supplement. I never gave this to athletes as, you know, undetectable typing or anything like that. It's actually a pheromone that elephants, female Asian elephants, tend to excrete in their pee in very large amounts at certain times of the month. It's strange. And it's also found in human sweat, believe it or not. I think the bacteria in your human sweat take some of your endogenous hormones like endrosterone, which are metabolites, and they convert it into this Delta 2. But

• 2:15:04Speaker 02

  I ended up making it into just for a couple of people to try and not athletes or anything like that, but into a oil-based injectable, the 100 milligrams per milliliter. And that was based upon some studies that were done that showed that the stuff actually was quite potent. It was pretty much equal potent to testosterone, milligram per milligram, but not as androgenic. And the people that tried it, they liked it, you know, very much and whatnot. And that kind of came and went and never bothered with that.

• 2:15:49Speaker 02

  But my guess is that, you know, some of the people that tried it, it already got around, and someone else got it made and did the same thing. And then started, this guy was one of them, started giving it to athletes years after. And in retrospect, I think I heard about this stuff being given to athletes a few years back, but didn't believe it because I didn't think that the drug testing organizations would not be able to find it. I thought it would be way too easy, but maybe not. But it was just interesting because I read about it and I said, oh, man, that's that

• 2:16:34Speaker 02

  stuff I fooled around with.

• 2:16:36Tim Ferriss?

  It's old news from 2001.

• 2:16:37Speaker 02

  And then I see Victor saying it's no good. And like, and Victor's saying it's a prohormone, it's oral, he doesn't even know what he's talking about. It's by injection, acetate, it's very effective. It is.

• 2:16:51Tim Ferriss?

  What are other drugs that or molecules that you think we will be hearing more about in the next few years in the media? Right? So maybe they've been around for a long time, maybe they're new. What types of, maybe I'll rephrase it, just like performance-enhancing drugs or therapies do you think we'll be hearing more about in the next few years?

• 2:17:18Speaker 02

  Well, a lot of the most promising ones are have to do with gene therapy. And that's those have been around for a long time, and they don't seem to go anywhere. There's a lot of safety concerns. I can't think of any actual small molecule or peptide drugs that are you just inject that that um that do a heck of a lot.

• 2:17:49Speaker 02

  That's a good question, but but one I did talk to someone from ESPN not too long ago, and he asked me a question about what do you what do you what do I think is going on? You know, what is the most advanced thing that's going on that you think? And I say, well, I always had a suspicion that the Chinese may be using gene therapy. And what what they could do is that they could actually probably engineer embryos,

• 2:18:23Speaker 02

  probably in certain certain genes to that express certain growth factors or repress certain other genes or whatnot. And these kids can grow up to be superhumans. And that and that could have happened as far back as, you know,

• 2:18:47Speaker 02

  mid to late 90s. And those super kids could be coming of age right now and competing.

• 2:18:57Speaker 02

  And I've seen some some of these these Chinese athletes that that are that just kind of,

• 2:19:06Speaker 02

  you know, they don't make any sense.

• 2:19:08Tim Ferriss?

  They look like the the bully whippets that have the myostatin inhibition.

• 2:19:12Speaker 02

  Right, right. And at the same time, they have completely smooth skin and, you know, they just don't have androgens going on, you know what I mean? It's sort of.

• 2:19:20Tim Ferriss?

  Puzzling, puzzling combination of characteristics. Do you have any opinion, and I don't, I'm getting pretty deep in the, my ignorance pool here, but SARMs, you know, like this selective androgen receptor modulators. Is there, is there any there there? Or is this, is that, that's just a, I mean, it's an acronym that I've heard kind of thrown around a bit recently. Is, do you have any familiarity with those or thoughts on those?

• 2:19:50Speaker 02

  I have a funny anecdote about those and then I'll, I'll tell you my, my thoughts. But the guy that shares my lab right now, he used to work, be a salesman for another chemical company in town that we had done some work with. And they would make, they would make drugs, um, small amounts for research, for, uh, research for other drug companies. They were basically a, a contract synthesis place. And they made thousands of SARMs, SARM candidates. And there was one that was, looked amazing on paper and they gave it to the rats and within a day, all the rats were dead.

• 2:20:30Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God.

• 2:20:32Speaker 02

  So that just shows you that something that works in vitro, you don't know what's gonna happen. But, but as far as SARMs go, um, they're, they're basically a, uh, they're basically trying to do the same thing that androgenic anabolic steroids do. Uh, they know a lot more about the mechanisms from the receptor to the nucleus and everything that happens in between. And there's a lot of, uh, a lot of events, um, chemical molecular events that, that happen there that, that can determine whether a compound is, is potent or whether it's selective in a, in a certain cell or not.

• 2:21:16Speaker 02

  And so they know a lot more. And they have molecular modeling where they're able to, you know, come up with theoretical compounds to say, well, this attaches to that well, that, that, and then they find a, uh, like, it's a custom synthesis place to make the molecule and then, you know, they try it on the rats and whatnot. So it is, um, they're basically trying to, and plus they're not confined to the steroid structure, because these structures are, are so divergent.

• 2:21:49Speaker 02

  They're completely different looking. Yet they all will combine some way to the androgen receptor. So they're not confined by any one structure. And so there's thousands and thousands of possibilities out there. However, they still have yet to to eliminate the androgenic anabolic separation. They're have yet to eliminate the hepatotoxicity, basically the the cholesterol.

• 2:22:23Tim Ferriss?

  The liver issues, yeah.

• 2:22:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, the AST ALT enzymes.

• 2:22:26Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by the the anabolic androgenic separation? Oh, just just reducing the androgenic effect?

• 2:22:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, they'll never you'll never get zero androgenic, 100% anabolic at any dose. They are they've gotten very good separation. I don't know how much better. I mean, if it's that much better than, say, a primobolin or whatnot. But they do find that at higher dosages, like I said before, the androgenic effects do start creeping up. However, but they I think they are doing better and whatnot. But then they and they certainly haven't done anything about the HPTA shutdown, which basically means shutting down your body's own testosterone production.

• 2:23:17Speaker 02

  They that these compounds still still will do that. So there's no there's no great improvement there. It's it's sort of like, you know, and you know, better anabolic steroids, but they're not they're still in the same thing, pretty much.

• 2:23:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they're not not the breakthrough that, at least at this point, that a lot of people would would hope them to be. Do you have are there any molecules? And I'll ask just a few more questions. Are there any particular molecules to you that you think are exceptionally beautiful or elegant? Are there any that just really stick out to you?

• 2:23:58Speaker 02

  As far as how they look on paper?

• 2:24:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, whatever. I mean, just like there are, and the reason I ask, it seems like a weird question, and it might not, might be a bad question, but there are, I know mathematicians, for instance, who find certain equations just to be very elegant to them. They're like, wow, alright, like, that does so much with so little. I would call that beautiful, right? So I don't know if that exists in your world of chemistry, but if it's not something you think about, then it's not, there doesn't have to be an answer to that question. I was just curious.

• 2:24:31Speaker 02

  Well, I wouldn't say a specific chemical structure, but there are certain, certain compounds which crystallize beautifully.

• 2:24:44Speaker 02

  I don't remember what it was. I was working with something. And by crystallize, I mean, a lot of times you purify things by heating them up in a solvent or solvent mixture, until you reach the point where it goes clear. I mean, it's cloudy and it gets hot enough, you know, things are more soluble when they get hot. It goes clear, and then you let it sit, and it cools down, and then the pure chemical tends to sometimes crystallize. And some things crystallize into these big, long needles, and the needles get bigger and bigger, then you have to, and that's what I find beautiful, because that means that I have a pure compound, and that makes me very happy.

• 2:25:29Speaker 02

  Now, when things don't crystallize, and sometimes they'll, they'll sit there, and they'll turn into this nasty oil, that pisses me off. I don't like that.

• 2:25:39Speaker 02

  So I love nice crystals. Nothing makes me happier than, than nice crystals.

• 2:25:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, on that note, Patrick, this has been, this has been a blast. I enjoy getting into the weeds, and you're constantly selling out of everything. So the, the best place for people to find the keto canna, if they want to experiment with that, is ketosports.com? Or is there a different place you would suggest they, they check out?

• 2:26:08Speaker 02

  Well, KetoSports.com has the information. We yet to have a, uh, um, uh, the ability to sell off that page. So go to Prototype Nutrition, one word, PrototypeNutrition.com. That's where you can get the Keto Cana or the, um,

• 2:26:24Tim Ferriss?

  Or salic acid.

• 2:26:25Speaker 02

  Or, or the, or, or UR spray. Um, and, uh, we all, we also have other products under the Keto Sports brand. They're all sold under the Prototype site. We, um, we have a C8, uh, caprylic acid product, which is a, an MCT. That's an, um, only the C8, which is the best MCT. Um, we have a, uh, combination coconut and ghee product. That's good for cooking. That's keto-friendly. Um, we're about to introduce a product that, um, that

• 2:27:05Speaker 02

  help, that reduces blood glucose by inhibiting, um, absorption from intestine and, uh, speeding up elimination of glucose through the urine, which will, which will cause, uh, your blood sugar to drop and will help you reach ketosis a lot quicker.

• 2:27:26Tim Ferriss?

  That's, that's very interesting. Well, I would like to, I will go check that out right now. That's very, very interesting.

• 2:27:32Speaker 02

  Well, there's, there's been studies on it. It's, there's, there's enough safety data on it. I don't want to give away exactly what it is.

• 2:27:38Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:27:39Speaker 02

  We, we have the material here. We just, um, having trouble tabling it. We have to be, do some granulation work, but it, that should, but by the time this interview comes out, the product, um, but this product will probably be available. So.

• 2:27:52Tim Ferriss?

  Fantastic. Well, then people can check it out, PrototypeNutrition.com. And of course, as always, everybody, uh, you will be able to check out plenty in the show notes, all the links, everything else at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. Uh, is there any, are there any other sites? Uh, and of course I'll put these in the show notes as well, but any, any place that you would encourage people to see what you're up to, uh, or find you online?

• 2:28:18Speaker 02

  Well, I have PatrickArnoldBlog.com. I don't, uh, keep it updated much lately, but I probably have about thirty, forty articles from the past. A lot of them pretty unique stuff, you know, that you wouldn't find anywhere else.

• 2:28:35Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect.

• 2:28:35Speaker 02

  Uh, I have a Facebook page, but that's mostly for just being a wise ass, so.

• 2:28:41Tim Ferriss?

  Which, alright, so people can, can, uh, can find you on, on the Facebook, and I'll get, I'll get that from you as well. Is there, is it, is it a fan page, or is it just a personal page?

• 2:28:52Speaker 02

  It's, it's just a personal page, but we also have, um, we also have, well, we also have a company called E-Farm Nutrition, uh, which I, which, it's not been a big priority lately, but they have a, uh, Facebook page, and Prototype Nutrition has a Facebook page.

• 2:29:15Speaker 02

  I think that's about it.

• 2:29:17Tim Ferriss?

  That's great. Well, I'll list everything out, and, uh, Patrick, there are lots of, of, of rabbit holes we could go down, of course.

• 2:29:25Speaker 02

  I know.

• 2:29:26Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe we'll do a round two with, with some additional rabbit holes, but thank you so much for taking the time. This was a lot of fun.

• 2:29:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree, Tim. Thanks.

• 2:29:35Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, everybody listening, as always, thank you, and until next time, uh, work smart, play often, and experiment well.

• 2:29:51Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the, uh, the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles. That I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 2:30:34Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. And until next time, thank you for listening.