Peptides: The Science, Uses & Safety | Dr. Abud Bakri

Dr. Abud Bakri, MD, is a board-certified internal medicine physician and expert in the science and clinical use of peptides. We discuss the history, uses, sourcing and safety of BPC-157, GHK-Cu, pinealon, epithalon, GLP-1s, retatrutide, melanotan and growth hormone-promoting peptides. We discuss the gap that exists between animal and human data and meaningful differences in the sources for different peptides. For those interested in peptides, Dr. Bakri provides a grounded look at the science, risks and uncertainties shaping the field today. Read the show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Lingo: https://hellolingo.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Abud Bakri (00:03:33) What are Peptides?, Receptors (00:06:26) BPC-157, Discovery, Animal Proteins (00:11:19) BPC-157, Animal Data, Regeneration (00:12:27) Sponsors: Eight Sleep & Lingo (00:14:51) BPC-157, Regeneration & Healing, Neurological Effects (00:19:27) Adverse Events, Clinical Trials & Legality of BPC-157 (00:29:41) GLPs & Compounding Pharmacy; Peptides & Gray Market (00:35:25) Manufacturing, Compounding Pharmacies, Gray Market, Black Market (00:41:32) Peptides & Tumor Growth?; Angiogenesis (00:45:17) Sponsor: AG1 (00:47:01) Pharmaceutical Patents, Clinical Trials for BPC-157, Potential Outcomes (00:54:19) BPC-157 Healing, Patient Experiences (01:01:22) Physician Counsel, FDA Legality, Malpractice (01:07:25) Pinealon, Epithalon, Discovery; Sleep & Cognitive Performance, Risks (01:18:17) Sponsor: Function (01:19:55) Pineal Age Deterioration, Epithalon, Eye Health (01:29:38) Thymus, Age Shrinkage; Thymosin Alpha-1, Immune Function (01:38:13) TB-500; Pet Health; Thymic Peptide Doses, Thymulin, Zinc (01:49:13) Sponsor: LMNT (01:50:33) GHK-Cu (Copper GHK), Collagen (01:55:32) Illness Recovery, Thymic Score, Tool: Blood Test & Immune Cell Counts (02:04:01) Growth Hormone Secretagogues, Age Decline, Cancer Risk, Insulin (02:15:36) GHK-Cu, Topical Cream, Red Light Therapy (02:20:25) GLPs, Discovery, Physical & Cognitive Long-Term Effects, Fertility (02:33:53) Retatrutide; Drug Patents & Nomenclature (02:39:03) Peptides: Women Reproductive Disorders; TBI, Neurologic Effect; Safe Sources (02:45:34) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  People are now stacking their GLP-1 as their insulin sensitivity tool, their growth hormone, or their GHRH, and their androgen modulation therapies as this Trinity stack.

• 0:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Trinity stack.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  To get very fit, very healthy, quickly. So a lot of these transformations you see in CEOs and celebrities and stuff is using a combination of those three things. You know, your TRT plus terzepotide, retinotriptide, whatever it may be, and then using a growth hormone modulation, if you can afford growth hormone, or tesamorelin, epimorelin. And you're seeing people lose a lot of fat, gain a lot of muscle in short amounts of time. Is that healthy? We'll find out. But that is like the celebrity protocol.

• 0:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

• 0:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Abud Bakri, an internal medicine physician who is also extremely knowledgeable on the science and use of peptides. When I say peptides, I mean both FDA-approved peptides, such as the GLP agonists. You probably know these as things like Ozempic, Monjaro, and Retinotriptide, as well as peptides such as Body Protection Compound 157, or BPC 157, which, as you'll learn today, has a very long history of being used in humans for gut health and tissue repair, and many interesting studies in animals supporting its potential use in humans,

• 1:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  but a minimum of formal studies in humans, meaning one. We discuss BPC 157, what it does and how, as well as things like growth hormone secretagogues, like tesamorelin, MK677, and others. And we talk about things like GHK copper, which nowadays many people are using to promote collagen synthesis and repair for aesthetic reasons, like improving skin, hair, and so on. We also talk about peptides that have been studied for the purpose of DNA repair and longevity, like epithalin and pinealine, which also have been touted to improve REM sleep and for improving cognitive function. You'll also learn what is known and what is not known about these peptides, both in terms of function and safety. During today's episode,

• 2:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  you will come to appreciate that Dr. Bakri has truly encyclopedic knowledge about these peptides. He is also formally trained as a physician, and as a consequence, you will learn how to think about peptides based on whether or not they have known receptors or not, that turns out to be very important, and what their real safety profiles are, as well as what particular concerns you ought to have if you are considering using peptides of any kind. As a formerly trained, board-certified physician, he comes at this topic through the lens of a physician, but also somebody who is very interested in the current status and future of peptide medicine. Today's discussion, thanks to Dr. Bakri, is a true masterclass on peptides. By the end of today's discussion, I promise

• 2:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  you, again, thanks to him, that you will be among the most informed, doctor or otherwise, about peptides, from the GLPs to BPC157 and all the others that I mentioned, including some that I didn't mention here in the introduction. So it is a real gift and honor to have this knowledge presented to all of us. So buckle up, you're about to learn a lot about peptides. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Abud Bakri. Dr. Abud Bakri, welcome. Good to be here.

• 3:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Peptides, huge topic and huge category of biology and medicine. So we should start off by breaking this into categories so that people can wrap their minds around it, because that word peptides has come to mean stuff people buy and take and maybe should or shouldn't buy and take, but there's a lot of important and quite simple biology to understand.

• 4:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Before anyone should even be thinking about any of that. So if I just push the word peptides towards you, how do you carve that up in terms of thinking about it as an MD, as a clinician? And maybe also put yourself into the mind of interested, let's call it a peptide curious person out there?

• 4:21Speaker 00

  So scientifically, I would say it's one of the languages of the human body. Right? So the body likes these different languages to communicate between cells, going from DNA to RNA to proteins, which are can be broken down into polypeptides and peptides. And peptides are one of these languages. Steroid hormones are another language. And then peptides can be broken down further into subcategories, whether or not they have receptors or they have no receptor. And that kind of changes the clinical effects we'll see, like the GLP-1s, which have a very strong clinical effect, compared to these obscure peptides like BPC157, TB500, TB4, that don't have a clear target.

• 4:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  They have receptors, but they just have many of them? Or they don't even have receptors?

• 4:59Speaker 00

  We don't have a receptor identified for BPC157 or TB4.

• 5:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  Just stopping right there, there's a very interesting distinction. I don't think anyone else has described peptides this way. Let's take BPC157 for the moment. We're going to talk a lot about it today. If it doesn't have a receptor, what are some ways that it could impact cells and organs?

• 5:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 5:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  And so forth? Or is it that there are receptors? We just don't know what they are?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  It could be that, the latter, that maybe the receptor is still elusive. Or it could be that it's modifying certain proteins that already exist or linking different peptides, proteins together in a more favorable fashion for gene transcription. The Russian peptides are all epigenetic modifiers, that they bind to the groove of the DNA in certain spots that either open up or close the chromatin to certain areas of genetic expression. And they've modeled this out.

• 5:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like a steroid hormone?

• 5:46Speaker 00

  So steroid hormones bind, like they bind to a, like the end receptor binds DHT or testosterone, goes into the nucleus, turns on all the androgenic genes.

• 5:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, like puberty is a good example of that.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly, exactly. So like Penelion that we've talked about, shuttles heat shock proteins with androgen receptors.

• 6:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it. So if I just pause us for a second, we should think about this word peptides in two major categories, at least.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 6:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  One is has known receptors, plural, like the GLPs.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 6:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  The other category would be does not have known receptors, might have receptors, but can Definitely impact biology in interesting ways, or so say the animal data.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 6:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  A lot of animal data.

• 6:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  All right. I know a lot of people are interested in GLPs and I want to go there. But because I know most people are probably listening to this foremost because they want to hear about the other stuff. Let's start with BPC157. What is it? What do we know about it? We'll explore safety. And what is your stance on it from the perspective of a consumer and a clinician? So first of all, what is BPC157?

• 6:51Speaker 00

  The best way to look at it is, you know, as humans, we've been looking for medicines in plants for thousands of years. And in the last, let's say 150 years, we've been looking for medicines in cells. So animal derived versus plant derived medicines is the way to think about it. You think about aspirin, you think about metformin, the statins, those are all discovered in, you know, plant tissues. Statin's more so fungi, but you get the point. Now we've been looking into animal tissues to find cures, medicines, treatments. So a group in Croatia in the 90s looks out for this peptide called BPC that they eventually named BPC. It's a 40,000 Dalton giant peptide called BPC. BPC157 is 15 amino acids from that giant peptide.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  We don't naturally make BPC157. That's what you'll commonly hear online. We make BPC the big protein.

• 7:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Did this group go looking for body protection compound? For those that aren't familiar, in the laboratory, you can take a tissue, grind it up. You can do what's called fractionation. You can start separating basically cells and tissues and liquids according to the size of different proteins, like different filters will bring, like just like certain filters will let sand through or pebbles through or boulders through. That's kind of what you do. And then you figure out what the sequences are. And then you throw them on cells or put them into animals and you try and figure out what they do. Why were they motivated to look for? What eventually became BPC?

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Pavlov, the famous scientist that would do the experience on the dogs with the bell and making the dogs salivate. The other work he did was on gastric juices of dogs. What he'd do is he'd put a hole in the dogs' stomachs. He would feed them food and then get the gastric juices and sell that as a medicine.

• 8:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's how he made his money?

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was part of his business.

• 8:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  So he got a Nobel Prize. He was also kind of like, what, did he have like a call code? It was like, like, "Enter Pavlov for discount at checkout"?

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Amazing.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  So this is BPC, or BPC 157 exists. There's probably other peptides and compounds in there, but they found that gastric juices had positive effects on healing, on people that had GERD and these kind of...

• 8:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wait, so people were taking BPC in the time of Pavlov?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  They didn't know what BPC was. They were taking gastric juices from dogs.

• 8:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  For what?

• 8:58Speaker 00

  GI distress, GI discomfort. Some people would try it for wound healing. There was a big push in this era for like finding animal tissues and putting them into humans. That science fizzled out. At the same time, there's a scientist, Hans Sealy, that's coming up with the stress adaptation theory. And he notices that animals are stressed out, three things happens to them. Their adrenals get really big, so they make more cortisol. Their gastric lining gets destroyed, and then their thymus gland and their lymphatics shrink down. And he has this published paper where you have clear adrenal from a stressed animal versus a non-stressed animal, a thymus from an animal that's stressed versus not. So this group is looking and thinking, hey, Pavlov had this gastric juice. Hans Sealy said that there was damage during stress.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  There must be some kind of cytoprotective or organoprotective compound in the gut. The stomach is a very rich endocrine tissue. It makes ghrelin, all these other hormones. So they're like, there must be something else in the gut juice that protects the gut lining from further damage.

• 9:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Were people drinking the gastric juices of dogs? Were they injecting them?

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Drinking was mostly what they did.

• 9:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it was supposed to be a medical elixir? Presumably it had many, many things in it, many peptides, not...

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Dyspepsia and like upset stomach and this kind of stuff is what people were thinking

• 10:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do the reports point to the fact that it might have worked, independent of what was sold on Dr. Pavlov's non-existent website? This was in like the early 1900s, right?

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 10:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then, Solia was what, 1930s?

• 10:22Speaker 00

  I think so, yeah, it was about 100 years ago.

• 10:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Someone will correct us if we're wrong. And this other group in Croatia...

• 10:26Speaker 00

  It was 91.

• 10:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  91, okay.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Their first paper talks about this, like, hey, there must be some kind of... Compound, they identified the big 40 dalton protein BPC. And then they were like, what's causing the actual biological effects? They identified BPC 157, the 15 amino acid peptide that's causing all these effects. There's actually more peptides in gastric juices that some other scientists may or may not have already identified. This field of peptides is going to be very interesting because almost every organ has a signature of peptides. Like if you think back, Dr. Vladimir Vulevich in 1850s, 1880s finds carnecine and carnitine in muscle of cattle. So you can think about the first peptides that are found are carnecine. And then carnitine is the amino acid that have positive effects on strength training and performance and different effects there.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  But that was the whole idea is like, hey, there's muscle peptides that may have muscle effects. Right? Peptides might have gut effects.

• 11:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  So this Croatian group isolates this 15 amino acid kind of mini segment of BPC. They and others start injecting into mice inducing injuries to nerve, to tendon. Maybe describe a few of those effects. I'm familiar with that literature, but I can tell that you are far more familiar with it. So what are some of the impressive effects that they observed that led to where we are today?

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Yep. So they did all kinds of horrible things to these mice. They would sever tendons and then give them BPC through oral or injectable intra-peritoneal administrations. And they'd have faster healing times. They would sever ACLs of the mice. They would do burn wounds. So when a patient has a burn wound in like the ICU, they end up having crazy gastric ulcers. But if they were able to put BPC on topically for the mouse, they would have no gastric ulcers. They name it as this anti-stress compound is how they look at it. Now, when they do that Achilles paper on the mice, that's what explodes the bodybuilder interest. And leads us to today where we are like, oh, MSK injuries must be BPC, tendons and muscle injuries. But the original idea of BPC was to use it as a gastric treatment, not to use it as a musculoskeletal.

• 12:27Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 13:12Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 13:57Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 14:42Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 14:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let me pause you here. People are probably saying, should I take it or should I?

• 14:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Just hang in there, folks, because this is really, really important. What is so striking to me about BPC, and by the way, that's not an endorsement for BPC, just what's so striking to me, because my lab worked for a long time on optic nerve repair and neural regeneration. Nerves don't like to regenerate in the central nervous system. Peripheral nervous system, they do it. They do it slowly, but they do it.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Not in the central nervous system. Ask anyone who's had a stroke or an optic nerve injury. It's a tough road at best. There are data that I've seen with my own eyes that show that, you know, you can accelerate healing of tendon, of ligament, of nerve pathways.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  In animals, yes.

• 15:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  In animals, yes, thank you. And that it just generally promotes, quote unquote, "repair."

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's kind of weird.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  It is weird.

• 15:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right? Because I could spend the next 10 hours or more telling you about all the ways that people have tried to get nerves to regenerate and couldn't. And as you pointed out, this thing doesn't really have one specific, at least, known receptor. So the data on the gut make a lot of sense. This is, after all, a gut peptide. It makes sense that that gut peptide could get lots of places in the body.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  But what is it doing mechanistically, if we know, to support regeneration or replenishment of all these different tissue types? Because a neuron is a very different cell type

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 16:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  than, you know, a fibroblast or one of the bits of collagen that make up different connective tissues.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  Yep. It's modulating a lot of these growth and healing pathways. Like, in the models of damaging the endothelial layer or the epithelial layer of different tissues, you'll get more VEGF signaling. So that's the vascular endothelial growth factor. So you get more blood vessels angiogenesis being formed, which creates a lot of the controversy around BPC's safety. You'll get cell migration, especially when coupled with TB500 and TB4. You'll get, you know, more access of the healing factors to the area through angiogenic pathways. On top of that, you'll get an anti-stress effect. So the other big thing that they did was they'd give corticosteroids with BPC157 to these mice. And usually, when you have a wound and you give corticosteroids, the corticosteroids

• 16:58Speaker 00

  will slow or even stop the wound healing from happening. When BPC was administered, the healing was either the same or even better.

• 17:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is BPC considered anti-inflammatory? Because based on what you just said, it almost seems like... It helps maintain some of the pro-inflammatory response.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 17:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Some people might be thinking, why would you want inflammation? What Dr. Bakri just said is if you block inflammation with corticosteroids, you aren't going to call in the signals to repair tissues.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  So lowering inflammation is a dicey thing that maybe we set aside for later in the conversation, if we have time, but is it thought that BPC is lowering inflammation? Or is just somehow hitting the gas pedal on all these regenerative, restorative biological processes?

• 17:38Speaker 00

  It's more putting the gas pedal on these processes to bring in the immune system, the healing factors. For example, in one tendon model, they noticed that it increased the amount of growth hormone receptors on the tendon. So theoretically, this would allow more growth hormone to dock in and cause the outgrowth of the tendon and the regrowth of it. So there's that theory there. Downstream, it'll modulate nitric oxide synthesis. So that's a big thing when it comes to wound healing because you need to dilate the blood vessels. You need to call in different cells. So it's really changing the way cells behave at that level. But that's only for like the tendon side of it. They also did weird things on the neurological side, like they would make these mice drunk. Okay. And they would then give them BPC and they'd get less drunk when they go through mazes.

• 18:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, boy.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 18:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  We did not just recommend you take BPC with alcohol.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  No.

• 18:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Just want to be very clear. But people are good, you know, will do their own interpretation. So I'm being semi facetious, but very interesting.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  And then also they would give them, get the mice drunk and then have them withdraw from alcohol. And that withdrawal is deadly. If we have a patient in the hospital that withdraws, they could die during that withdrawal if they're not given benzodiazepines. They got BPC and they didn't have the withdrawal symptoms. I'm like, what's going on here? This is a very interesting compound. I think it gets, it gets all the hype for the MSK stuff, but I think the neurological, neuropsychiatric, I would say, and then gastric effects are way more interesting when it comes to that because it's modulating the gut-brain access in an interesting way. A lot of people come to us and they're like, my Adderall's not working since I've been taking oral BPC.

• 19:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Are they happy with that effect?

• 19:03Speaker 00

  No, they're not happy. They're very mad because like it seems like it's a blunting their Adderall. So it's doing something from dopaminergic signaling both on both sides, both withdrawal, when it comes to like the gabaminergic side, but also the peak of signaling. So if you like peruse Reddit, which you should never do, you'll find all these anhedonia discussions about BPC. People feel like depressed and low energy.

• 19:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Incredible.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  So it seems to be

• 19:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  In terms of effects in animals and anecdotal reports in humans, because I think both your and my excitement about this might be occupying a substantial amount of the force field here, let's do something that normally I would do in a few minutes. I'm gonna ask you some very direct questions about this and I don't hold you responsible as being like BPC spokesperson, but here you are. That's Pavlov's job and he's dead. Are there any known adverse events from people taking BPC, known and documented, okay, adverse events where it's unrelated to contamination or something of that sort?

• 20:10Speaker 00

  In the literature, when it comes to the animal data, they've injected animals with, you know, a thousand times the dose of BPC with no real adverse effects. So there's, we don't even know the LD50 of BPC, which makes it hard for it to become an FDA approved.

• 20:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe defined as LD50.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  LD50 is the dose of which would kill 50% of the animals if it was administered to them. So we don't even know what that is.

• 20:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that's actually an important number, as, you know, barbaric as it sounds, to determine for any drug. What's the LD50 for caffeine? What's the LD50 for aspirin? What's the LD... This is, every drug you take, folks, on or off the counter, you know, at prescription or non-prescription, has gone through LD50 testing in animals.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  To be a clinician, to prescribe this, we need to know what that is, which limits us. Now, there was two very small Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials on rectal BPC, enemas, in the early 2000s from that same Croatian group. So that's the big concern of BPC. All the data comes from one group, so people can be skeptical. There's a couple of Chinese groups that have also replicated some of their work, but those groups wanted to try to treat ulcerative colitis. It's a very miserable condition of where the immune system attacks the lining of the gut in multiple spots. And they use enemas of BPC up to like 80mg, which is much more than people would take.

• 21:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Most people are injecting microgram.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  100 or 200 micrograms per day or something, maybe more, but

• 21:22Speaker 00

  Up to a milligram, yeah.

• 21:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're talking about... 80 milligrams.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, rectal enemas, they did a phase one and phase two trial.

• 21:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're doing this daily or they do it once?

• 21:29Speaker 00

  They did it for a few weeks and then they remeasured, it was placebo controlled. The data is not available, the abstracts are only available. So that's what also gives us some pause when we're gonna, you know, push that forward, especially when the legal discussions are happening here in the next few months on BPC. The first, the phase one trial showed no adverse effects. And they didn't even have BPC in the systemic system too. That's a key point to know that orally administered or rectally administered BPC doesn't seem to go systemic.

• 21:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe define that a little bit more specifically?

• 21:57Speaker 00

  If you take aspirin and then you measure blood aspirin levels, you'll notice the levels go up. When they measured BPC levels, BPC 157 levels in these individuals, they didn't find it in the blood. So either it was broken down very quickly or it stayed locally to the lining of the gastric tissues.

• 22:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  That raises a question for me. Let's say somebody doesn't quote unquote, "take any BPC 157 by NMR or otherwise." If I were to just draw your blood right now, there's BPC 157 in there in the bigger protein.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  The bigger, the bigger BPC protein, I don't think you wouldn't find it.

• 22:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is it circulating or is it, or is it restricted to the gut?

• 22:28Speaker 00

  We don't have that data.

• 22:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's incredible, right? Because we're talking about these effects all over the body. We don't even know if it leaves the gut.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  No, but well, the injectable is going to go systemic.

• 22:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  And most people are going to take, if they're decide to do this, are going to take an oral or an injectable. They're either going to inject local to the injury if they can.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Or intraperitoneal. So they found fragments of the 15, like there's a paper in 2024 that looked at this. And they could figure out if somebody had BPC administered for doping reasons, because it's on the water list now. So they could figure out if someone had taken BPC.

• 22:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  But we don't know, like we don't, we need to know the dynamics. We don't know where it goes, how it goes.

• 23:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  And we don't know the results in terms of what those 80 milligram enemas of BPC did for the colitis.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  In the phase one trial, it was just a safety. There was no adverse effects. In the phase two trial, it was very small, like 40 patients. There was at least a positive signal on the ulcerative colitis.

• 23:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  And this was done in the United States or this was in Croatia? Okay, so to be quite direct, on the one hand, you have groups who I think are mostly well intentioned, saying, hey, 80 milligrams of BPC by way of enema. Did not cause any adverse events. And that's the phase one that you described.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  If we believe their data.

• 23:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, right. On the opposite side, many people, especially in the United States and, you know, and Northern Europe, where the regulations tend to be similar-ish, right? As compared to elsewhere in the world, would say, well, yeah, but that study was in Croatia. Now, I have many Croatian friends. That's not a knock on Croatia. Why would it be that the clinical trials in Croatia would hold less weight? This is, this is a dicey area, but I think it's important because you'll hear this. Oh, those are Chinese peptides. Those are Russian studies. Like, yeah, and, you know, I mean, to me, you know, the question is, was it good science? Was it done carefully? Would it pass muster for a phase one in the United States?

• 24:22Speaker 00

  That's a good question. The groups seem to be very robust and they do really good randomized control, double-blind placebo-controlled trials. I think we're very United States centric. We view ourselves as the premier science and we are the premier science. So people kind of trust that more. And there may be perverse incentives when it comes to different government bodies and like, you know, Soviet era research that might be pro fabrication when it comes to certain compounds that makes people hesitant. Cause there's a lot of like these Soviet era compounds that are not peptides, or some of them are peptides, that are fantastic. They sound, they sound amazing, but when they get tested, maybe they're not as potent as Soviet data would suggest.

• 24:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  I always thought that the Russian stuff was like the really potent stuff that they didn't want anyone else to know about.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  That is also.

• 25:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Kind of way it goes the other way, right?

• 25:02Speaker 00

  It could go both ways. I mean, but they were, they were more interested in performance. They wanted better astronauts, better Olympians, better soldiers. We care more about, you know, a profit drug model that gets people on a subscription for the monthly drug, unfortunately. Sometimes it heals people, but.

• 25:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  So nowadays, is BPC 157 legal in the United States? Like if I wanted to go online and buy BPC 157, I can do it, right? Legally.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  For research purposes only.

• 25:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  I thought now, under the new regulations recently passed, that you can get it from a compounding pharmacy or?

• 25:33Speaker 00

  Technically not just yet.

• 25:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  And it depends on, on medical boards. To, to break it down, BPC 157 never got FDA approved, right? So it gets into these compounding pharmacy lists. There's a category one, two, and three. Category one means the FDA thinks like, hey, this is not an approved drug, but we're okay with you compounding this and you're okay to push that forward. Category two is like, do not compound. In late 2024, BPC 157 and like 20 other peptides got moved to this category two list. Since about 2017 to 2024, people have been prescribing BPC in these alternative medicine, anti-aging practices. It gets removed from that list. Of course, you know, compounded pharmacies re-label it as PDA, pentadecapetide arginate.

• 26:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  But it's the same thing.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  It's the same, exactly.

• 26:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Really?

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Yes. One of them will be an acetate, one of them will be an arginate, but the PDA is BPC157.

• 26:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because there are many, many people selling compounded pentadecapetide.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  Pentadecapetide arginate, PDA.

• 26:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Did I mispronounce it?

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, pentadecapetide arginate.

• 26:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Arginate, okay.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  I think the acetate one is the one that's on the category two list. Now, just in April of this year, it got removed from the category two list, and it's not yet on the category one list, which would allow physicians to prescribe it through compounding pharmacies.

• 26:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Now, but they can prescribe the PDA version.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  People are prescribing PDA.

• 26:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yes.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Now, state medical boards view that very differently. Like, I got a letter from one of the licensed medics states. One of these states reached out to me, it's like, "You could not prescribe," not me directly, but to the general public of people in that state, it said, "You cannot prescribe non-FDA approved peptides, no matter what." So there's controversy there. Even if the FDA says, "Okay, we're okay with you prescribing it," is your medical board in that state going to be okay with it?

• 27:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's state by state?

• 27:09Speaker 00

  State by state laws.

• 27:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  What about with telehealth? So if somebody's on the East Coast in a state that allows them to write a script for, let's just call it BPC because it's effectively what it is, or this other thing where they kind of wriggle through the regulation, can they send that to California or to Wisconsin or someplace else if the patient is there?

• 27:27Speaker 00

  The telehealth laws go into effect where the patient is. So if, let's say, in California, it's not allowed to have BPC according to the state board of pharmacy, or whoever bans that, even if you're a New York doctor that's licensed in California, that would be against the California Medical Board, and they would ask you, if they found out, to stand in front of them. Now, are boards cracking down on this? Not really. There's a couple of states that are cracking down on people, and people know to avoid those states, but it's going to be very dicey over the next few years.

• 27:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. Couple of questions. Anecdota. We don't want to place too much on it, but the big kind of rumor out there that pricked up my ears a few years ago was when I heard that some athlete before the Summer Olympics, this was two Summer Olympics ago, from Eastern Europe, had a complete Achilles transaction, not just a tear or a pull, but when we think about nerves and tendons, we think like, complete cut the whole way through. And the rumor was they took BPC157, locally injected.

• 28:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  For a few months and they podiumed in the Olympics. They still got a medal.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Familiar with that story?

• 28:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  That was the, that was the story that kind of got out there that I feel kind of catalyzed this movement of BPC out of these niche communities and in, started it toward the, the public awareness that leads to you sitting here today, among other things. We also, you have met a lot of other knowledge, but we're restricting to BPC now. So do we have verification of that story?

• 28:49Speaker 00

  No, no, I, I think that story was hearsay. I don't think they wanted to reveal what they actually did. I don't think they only did BPC 157. They'd be stupid if they did. They should have, you know, all the best and latest, greatest treatments, whether exome, stem cells, other peptides.

• 29:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  Anything that wasn't banned. And by the way, I should say, BPC 157 was not on the banned substances list at that time. It was so unknown, just like there are compounds right now that athletes are using and not just in the enhanced games in preparation for the Olympics. I'm not saying they're all doping, but there, it's, it's a common practice that athletes will forage into things that can help them that are not yet on the banned substances.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  And I mean, good luck proving that BPC was injected, you know, a week ago. Cause by the time the peptide's already gone out of your system, so, or at least we think based on the pharmacodynamics that we understand now. That story was run with, from the research community. They used it as a marketing tool to sell more BPC 157. Cause what, what happened in the, in the field is the GLP-1s come online, you know, late 2021, 2022, with Ozempic and Wegovy, they get the FDA approval for weight loss. There's not enough of a supply from the traditional pharmaceutical versions of the GLP-1s. So people start looking elsewhere to get their weight loss drugs. I know people that would drive down to Mexico to pick up pens because a pharmacy in the United States would cost, you know, $1,500 for an Ozempic pen, pharmacy in Mexico, one hour drive.

• 30:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Same drug.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Same exact drug.

• 30:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  How much relative cost?

• 30:08Speaker 00

  150 versus 1500. So 10x.

• 30:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  And this is the thing that Trump has been, you know, very vocal about, like that we, that we're getting overcharged for drugs here.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  We, we definitely are. And the Trump RX has lowered a lot of these prices, by the way, for a lot of these drugs. Now, that time, there was a shortage of semaglutide and then eventually terzepatide. So the compound pharmacy game shifted into making these drugs. Compounded versions, so they're not the FDA-approved versions. But when there's a shortage of a medication, the compounders are allowed to make these drugs to meet the shortage. And in fact, the FDA was reaching out to these people, telling them to do it. Like Brigham, talking to him last week at the ENHANCE Games. He was like, "Yeah, the FDA told us to make this stuff, and then they're getting us in trouble."

• 30:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is Brigham Buehler, who runs Ways Too Well.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  He ran a pharmacy for a long time, right? Compounding pharmacy. Yeah, we've never actually met in person.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  One of the best ones, yeah.

• 30:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's not an ad for pharmacies. We have no, I have no business relationship to Brigham. So if there's a shortage, compounding pharmacies can jump in the game.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  Yes, and they did, and they jumped in very hard.

• 31:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  On the GLPs.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Yes, and they made a lot of money off the GLP ones. This was, you know, billions of dollars being made.

• 31:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Were they selling them for less than standard pharma was selling them?

• 31:09Speaker 00

  They were less than the Ozempic pens. Unfortunately, what would happen is the provider had the discretion on the price. So all these providers also were making a lot of money.

• 31:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Who's the quote-unquote provider? The physician?

• 31:19Speaker 00

  The physician, or the NP, or the PA.

• 31:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Who takes the difference?

• 31:22Speaker 00

  The clinician, which is, I don't think is legal in most states.

• 31:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wait a second.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Or maybe not even federally.

• 31:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wait a second. So let's say I wanted to take a Wegovy.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  And there's a shortage. I can't get it from, who's the big manufacturer?

• 31:33Speaker 00

  Novo Nordisk.

• 31:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Novo Nordisk doesn't have enough.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 31:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  My doctor says, "Listen, you need this."

• 31:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I say, "How much is it?" And they say, "Well, fifteen hundred, um, fifteen hundred dollars." But it turns out the compounding pharmacy, through a different doctor, a more benevolent doctor.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 31:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Could have prescribed it to me for, I could get for maybe three hundred dollars. In the case where I'm paying fifteen hundred, it's going to my physician unbeknownst to me. I don't, I'm cloaked from the process.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  If you're getting the Novo Nordisk pen, the physician's not involved in that at all.

• 32:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, I'm talking about if I'm drifted towards a compounding pharmacy.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  So the, the, most of the times when it comes to compounding pharmacies, which I don't think is a good practice. The clinician gets a price from the pharmacy. So the pharmacy will tell you, "Hey, a vial of semaglutide costs one hundred and fifty bucks."

• 32:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Hmm.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  This clinician can now sell that vial to the patient. Sell, it's really, they're charging an administrative fee, right? It's not a sale, because technically you get some medications like that. They will sell it to you for two hundred or eight hundred dollars.

• 32:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, if I want to ask my physician...

• 32:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  How much are you getting the drug for from? Because I know which pharmacy it's going to come from because it's going to come in about says like Upstate or TaylorMade or what's Brigham's Pharmacy?

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Revive.

• 32:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Revive, it's coming from Revive. What are you paying for this from Revive?

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 32:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then what are you going to charge me?

• 32:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I can assume the difference is going to my clinician.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  It's going to the clinician.

• 32:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  All right, sorry clinicians.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  The game is up. Patients are now going to ask and you have every right to ask as far as I'm concerned.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, because what's going to happen with the BPC and all these other peptides moving is there's going to be telehealth platforms on every web, on every corner now. They're going to be like, hey, BPC 199, BPC 299. And they're going to like check out and there's going to be a doctor somewhere in a room that's going to stamp the prescription, but it's just that, you know, e-commerce. It's supplemented with the, with the stamp of the doctor, which is not good medical care at all.

• 33:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, to balance this a bit, the route that many people have gone for about a decade now, but primarily in the last three to five years was to go to these for research purposes only, what we would call gray market.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 33:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's just name names because they're out of business now anyway. They shuttered themselves. Peptide Sciences, till a few years ago, you could go on there, could buy pretty much any peptide. It would say for research purposes only, not for animal or human use.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  Yes, and you'd sign that many times.

• 33:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  And when you paid them, you would have to Venmo them.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or you could do it through Zelle.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 33:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  But they would ask that you not send it to a peptide sciences account. It was like some random name and the names kept changing. So everyone knew they were in on something like this. By the way, I, I, I want to be very clear. I ended up getting these things, right? I was too frightened to take them. Later, I have taken BPC. I've tried it. I don't take it currently, but I've, I've tried it through a compounding pharmacy. So I just want to be very clear what that experience was about.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Yep, so eventually they actually got payment processors, like the, this, this market evolved with the desire.

• 34:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  There's maybe, I'd say five to 10 billion dollars on gray market peptides being spent in the United States in 2025, and that's going to grow this year.

• 34:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  So here's my question. Standard Pharma, we know goes through, of all the things we're talking about, the most stringent process. You may hate Pharma folks or whatever, that's, you're right. But the, the stuff that you get that's non-genetic from Novo Nordisk, from Eli Lilly, you can be certain, based on the product packaging, that it's as clean as it gets.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 34:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  As pure as it gets.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 34:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Compounding pharmacies are a mix. It depends on the compounding pharmacy. Do we know that gray market peptides had problems? Because there are people out there right now who are certainly not physicians. People like Robert Breedlove, who's best known for like his work in crypto, who's also now like very open about the fact that he's taken all these peptides and anabolic and things. And I heard him online the other day saying literally that he's tested the gray market for research purposes only peptides and compared them to the compounding pharmacy versions and they're identical. Now, he's not a physician and I don't think he's lying, but many people are taking that sort of evidence and saying, oh, I'll just get it from gray market sources. As a physician, what is your stance on this?

• 35:29Speaker 00

  So the API for all these active pharmaceutical ingredients comes from China. There are no such things as American-made peptides. It gets finished here. So the API-

• 35:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're all from China.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  Everything's from China.

• 35:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  The raw materials?

• 35:41Speaker 00

  The raw materials, like the semaglutide you're getting from a compounding pharmacy or a research peptide website, retinocidine included, comes from China. And then gets either the raw material gets packaged here.

• 35:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wait, raw materials or synthesized compound? Because there's a big difference between getting like the raw materials for something and getting the thing.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  The synthesized semaglutide gets made in China. It'd be very expensive to make it here. There are people starting to look at that because that's the next thing in the arms race to make American peptides.

• 36:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  So they're all Chinese peptides?

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Everything's Chinese peptides.

• 36:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  There's no Guatemalan peptides? There's no-

• 36:15Speaker 00

  China's the best at doing it. Now, the compounding pharmacies vary in grading. Some of them are really good. They do all the testing, sterility. They have very good quality control. So you get a good product, but they usually have to compound it with something else to get by the regulations, like they'll add in a B12 or a B6 to say like, the patient had nausea from the traditional semaglutide. We can compound them with B12 or B6 to get around the nausea. And that meets the patient rule because there's two ways to get compounded medications. There's a shortage or there's a unique need that the patient has.

• 36:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do we know that compounding with something else actually deals with the nausea or is that just a-

• 36:51Speaker 00

  A slight event. It might help some people.

• 36:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Anecdotally, people will say that they respond better to the pens, like the actual pharma pens than to the compared to the compounded stuff. The research stuff is all over the place. Like, some of it could be better than compounded stuff. It could be the wrong substance. Like, there's a, there's a guy went viral on Twitter a few weeks ago. He got Retitutide, started getting darker. He's like, I don't think I'm injecting Retitutide. Yes.

• 37:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  He was in Milan.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  He was injecting Milan ten, too.

• 37:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  And folks, I realize that we're, we're going places that not even I predicted we would go. But this is super informative. So all of the raw materials are coming from the same source.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Then they're getting filtered into these different, let's just call them stringency bins.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Standard pharma, quote unquote, big pharma.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Being the most stringent.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, some of the raw materials are overseas, like I think Lilly's opening some China factories, some of it's here.

• 37:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, some are going into compounding pharmacies. And compounding pharmacies, I think it's fair to say, have varying levels of stringency.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 37:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Some are going to be excellent, some are good, some are going to be lousy.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 37:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Fair? Okay. The quote unquote gray market peptides, the ones where it's quote unquote for research purposes only, but I made the joke on X a few weeks ago, like, how many of you are running experiments in your not on animals? What are you doing cell culture at home? Like, come on. I know it's involved in doing cell culture. You're not, no one's doing this at home. So those presumably also come in anywhere from excellent to dreadful.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  But we don't know which are which.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 38:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  We don't know that.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  And batch to batch, that's the big problem.

• 38:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Gotcha. Okay, so it is risky to get research for research purposes.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  I mean, like, that's the majority of the way people are consuming peptides, unfortunately. We should just, because of the, the move in 2024 to get these from the category one to the category two list and make them banned, quote unquote, that opened up this gray market zone. Like, the gray market existed for the last 15, 20 years. Bodybuilders would, you know, have anecdotes about BPC 157, they'd inject it post, you know, post squats for different injuries. Nobody really cared about it. It was with the GLP-1s and then the banning of the peptides, plus this, you know, anti-medicine kick that's been happening over the last five years.

• 38:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Since the pandemic.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Yes, since the pandemic, that people are like, you know what? I want to inject this because it gives them a sense of autonomy, or they feel like their bro recommended it, like. Said the best job in 2025 was to be a peptide affiliate. People made my yearly salary in a month selling peptides illegally on TikTok.

• 39:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I will say, because for people that think it's just bro science, it's also gal science. I will tell you, I don't even know if that's a term. Someone needs to come up with a better term. My understanding, and not from Reddit, is that more than half of the peptide market is female.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 39:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, there's this perception that it's like, you know, only guys who like to lift weights and want to be jacked and, you know, jacked and tan or whatever they say, you know. No.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  No.

• 39:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Especially when we start getting into things like GHK, you copper. We start talking about things for collagen and skin rejuvenation. There's a big peptide market in towards women. I actually think in the long run, it's going to exceed, at least financially, the peptide market in men.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  I think it already has, because soccer moms have become like affiliates, like, you know, Amway and Herbalife was the big thing 20 years ago. Now soccer moms just do peptide affiliate.

• 39:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Where are they getting their peptides?

• 39:57Speaker 00

  Research, research grade websites.

• 39:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Gray market.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, all gray market.

• 40:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  We already know that they're not recommended, but what about black market? What would be considered black market?

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Black market is like you bought it directly from China. Like, it's very cheap. Like, a vial of BPC costs five bucks to make. Like, now someone will sell it to you for 1.99 plus, depending on where. But a black market is either like, you know, your friend in China on WhatsApp sends you a vial of BPC. Do not do this. Or someone synthesizes, claims they synthesize it in their bathtub, like, just like the underground gear. Like, all those steroids that were in the 90s and the 2000s. It's like, who knows what that is?

• 40:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  What's so interesting to me is with steroids, it went from bodybuilding community to eventually hormone replacement. It was like TRT or what I call TRT plus, because a lot of guys are taking a lot more than that.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Some are taking less, some are, most are taking more, some are taking what they're prescribed. And then HRT has become very popular in women. So now HRT is kind of like a thing that it's not like, oh, my goodness, like someone's taking estrogen replacement or testosterone. It's not a big deal. Peptides is different because it came, you know, the big explosion in this came through the GLPs. And I would argue, I'd love your opinion on this, why so many people are now peptide curious is because people, because of the GLPs, are now also very comfortable. Injecting themselves.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 41:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like, like five years ago, if you're like, you're gonna inject yourself, people like, oh my God, then they realize it's like this little tiny pin, it hurts less than a, you know, Texan mosquito bite. People are doing it on their skin and like, you know, and somebody's, you know, your girlfriend or wife is doing it as if it's nothing and, you know.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Like heroin addicts or diabetics.

• 41:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. You're not going intravenous, so that changed everything.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  That de-stigmatized it. Now, to be fair, I, I wanna touch on the, the question about adverse events again.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 41:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  We're gonna spend a couple of minutes talking about some incredible things that we've seen and heard about BPC 157 in terms of its positive effects.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 41:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  The concern I've always had was the angiogenesis, the growth of vasculature. If somebody happens to have a little tumor, or what will eventually become a tumor, sitting on their liver, or in their gut, or in their pancreas, in theory, it could vascularize that tumor and cause it to grow more quickly. Is there any evidence that that's actually happened? I wanna be very clear, I'm not loading this question, because it sounds like I'm kinda like leading the witness when I say that. I want to know.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 42:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm not currently taking BPC 157. Unfortunately, I don't have an injury at the moment, so that would be the only condition which I'd take it, unless you tell me there are other reasons. But I don't wanna give myself

• 42:18Speaker 00

  That risk.

• 42:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  That risk. And I think most people don't wanna give themselves that risk. So what is the, the realistic risk based on observations in humans or animals? Have we ever seen tumors grow more quickly?

• 42:27Speaker 00

  No. Like, for example, most compounds, if they're, you know, carcinogenic, we will see that signature in the animals. Like, you know, with Cardarine GW, was a drug that was very, was very promising, because it had, you know, diabetic implications for metabolism, and now it's a bodybuilder drug that they use for more cardio.

• 42:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  What is this? Cardarine?

• 42:44Speaker 00

  GW. You might have seen it on, on the reddits and those forums, but people use it for

• 42:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  I stay out of reddits.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, good.

• 42:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Increases your cardio capacity.

• 42:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Gotcha.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  And so it's banned on, on the water list, of course. But it was, it had promise for treating diabetics, because it changed metabolism in the liver. It had a signal of cancer in animal data, so that whole thing was scrapped. There is no signal from the animal literature on BPC 157 for, for, you know, cancers. Now, that, all that literature comes from one group. So we have to be very careful. It's that one Croatian group that tells you that it's the safest thing in the world.

• 43:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  All the animal data come from one group?

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Almost all of it.

• 43:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Almost all of it. Very few, like there's a couple of Chinese studies on BBC 157. Now they're starting to become more interest here. Like I think there's a phase two trial on hamstrings happening here in the United States.

• 43:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Really?

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Humans?

• 43:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Phase two?

• 43:30Speaker 00

  Yes. We talked to a group, an orthopedic group somewhere on the East Coast. They wanted to do a BBC trial, so we consulted with them to kind of-

• 43:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Great.

• 43:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's gonna happen, especially if it moves to this category one list and people can be prescribed it. At least we can get like a phase four trial where it's being prescribed and we can see what's happening to the people as they're getting it. And we can aggregate all this anecdotal data into one place, ideally, and report on it. So that's something we're working on in the background.

• 43:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is that something you personally are involved in?

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Yes. So we're working on aggregating all this data together-

• 43:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Great.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  Into a NE1, N-E1, that study, to put it all together. Because all the anecdotal data exists, but like put it together somewhere. At least we can see what the signals are. For example, on Reddit, you'll find signals of hematomas getting worse, which makes sense with the VEGF pathway.

• 44:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  I've heard this. So a friend and physician who is, I would say peptide curious slash positive, told me that when he takes BPC 157 for, you know, shoulder or knee or whatever, that angiomas on his face, that sort of spider web angiomas, not the formal term, forgive me derms, but get worse.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's his personal observation. I think a lot of people don't want that. It makes sense, though, if it's promoting angiogenesis.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  Based on the mechanism, it does make sense. Now, BPC 157 is not a uniform and it's an up regulator. In some models, it decreases VEGF. In a melanoma model, a cell line.

• 44:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it might be potentially anti-cancer, but we need to test it?

• 44:49Speaker 00

  We don't know. And what's really unfortunate about this compound, it's very promising. It has all this cool literature in animals, and we just don't know when it comes to humans.

• 44:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Just the one animal?

• 44:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Study?

• 44:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And we'd love to know, because like if it does work, I could see a million use cases in ICU that we could use, you know, BBC 157 to really help people out, especially during the critical illness, because like in ICU, people get gastric ulcers. Like if we knew that it would work, I would love to give them an infusion of BPC 157, and that's the future I could see happening, but we need data.

• 45:17Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 46:00Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 46:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  It has a collection of different things in it that has dramatically improved my sleep, both my slow-wave deep sleep and my rapid eye movement sleep, and I absolutely love it. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman to get a week's supply of AGZ and a bottle of D3K2 with your subscription.

• 47:01Speaker 00

  When is there going to be a formal randomized controlled trial on BPC and who holds the patent? There's multiple patents on BPC157, depending on which salt they're in. The patent has been passed around a couple of times to different places. Unfortunately, the company that had the patent under the, the Pleva, got acquired by Teva. Teva is this generic pharmaceutical company, and they don't, they make, you know, Adderall. So they have, they're making tons of money making Adderall, they don't really care about BPC157. So they have one of the patents. The other patent expires in like 10 years. I think Sikrak still has it. Dr. Sikrak is the guy behind BPC157. He's in Croatia. He's in Croatia, yeah. Would Teva sell the patent? I'm sure they would, if someone made an offer. The problem is, I don't see the purpose of even having the patent, because you can add on one chain to the amino acid. This is the problem with peptides.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  This is what Eli Lilly is coming into when it comes to making reta, is that patent laws for peptides kind of suck, because you can add on one amino acid, you can modify one thing on it, and suddenly it's a different compound.

• 47:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is true for other pharmaceuticals. I'm familiar with some of the ketamine and ibogaine trials. And there's a company that took ibogaine and basically added a magnesium component to it, and you can make that a completely new drug.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 48:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm not saying that doesn't work. I think they have a good rationale for doing that. But so this game of sort of protecting patents.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  It's rough. And plus, millions of people have already used BPC157 through research use-only websites. So I think millions is fair. But now, how do you reel that back? Like, it's already the cat's out of the bag. So like, there's no financial incentive to run the giant study. Unless, like, we crowdfund it as peptide-curious people.

• 48:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Within the category of interesting anecdotal data.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 48:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  And in your role as a physician, I realize you're not suggesting these things, but you have a different picture of this stuff at the level of mechanism, and you're a clinician that works with, you know, truly FDA-approved drugs. And I want you to share with folks, I said it in the introduction, but internal medicine means that you spend your days what?

• 48:56Speaker 00

  I'm on the wards of the hospital, admitting patients from the ER to the floor to the ICU, managing very complex disease ranging from, you know, a simple pneumonia to a coronary artery bypass patient. So that whole spectrum.

• 49:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. So that lens applied to this, as much as one can, would you say that, like, of the reports that you've heard directly from people you trust, and from people that, who are not incentivized to say these things? Like, "Oh, you know, it made me happier." You know, their skin looked better. All the things that one can find with an affiliate code attached to it. Of those, what do you think are the most interesting, potentially valid claims?

• 49:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I ask that because if we were going to fund a clinical trial,

• 49:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 49:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  we'd need to pick an endpoint or a couple of endpoints.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 49:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is it going to be recovery from injury?

• 49:44Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 49:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  If so, what kinds of injuries? Is it going to be the gastric stuff? Is it mood, interaction with dopamine receptors? I mean, I've heard so many different things. If we had a chunk of money and we're going to, we're going to design a study and have someone else do it. So it's truly independent. Like, what are the top three to five outcomes that you've heard? That you have a good feeling there's quote unquote, something there?

• 50:02Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 50:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then we'd narrow it down to maybe one or two for sake of the study. What are those five?

• 50:06Speaker 00

  I would say to complete the phase one, phase two on the ulcer of colitis, do that phase three trial on proving that it has benefits for ulcer of colitis. And I don't think we'd need to use the enema. We could probably have an encapsulated version that releases deeper into the intestines.

• 50:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  So fix the gut. Fix the ulcer gut.

• 50:21Speaker 00

  Yes. In conjunction with that, you could do a trial on like, you know, GERD. That's a simple condition. A lot of people have it randomized to BPC 157 oral capsules versus Pantoprazole.

• 50:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. And you're basing this on the fact that you've seen and heard that people who have GERD

• 50:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 50:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  get better, feel better when they take it. Okay. And it could be placebo.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  Yes. I mean, anecdotally, when I travel, I have a bottle of BPC orally.

• 50:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Why is that?

• 50:43Speaker 00

  I don't get, you know, traveler's diarrhea or, you know, when I, you know, eat exotic foods in random places, my friends all get sick and I tap not to. Anecdote, right? But that's interesting. There seems to be some kind of gut protective effect. And that's what they noticed in the mice literature. They would have an offending agent into the gut. And they'd noticed that there'd be protection deeper down in the gastric tract from that offending agent. Because if you think about it, the gut is the most vulnerable part of the body. It's open to the outside world. It's a tube that runs through you. You can eat something and it could completely destroy you. So you have to have some kind of mechanisms, the prostaglandins, you know, all these different hormones that are made, potentially BPC 157 is part of this robust armory that the gut has to protect itself from further injuries.

• 51:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  What are some things outside the gut or indirect from the gut that are also compelling?

• 51:28Speaker 00

  So I would love to see some neuropsychiatric BPC studies when it comes to addictions. There's enough anecdotal about people talking about addictions and then like, hey, I don't need to crave insert drug here. Not recommending that anyone tries that out, but for alcohol or whatever it may be.

• 51:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do you think that is likely due to the, or spec? But likely due to a interference with the reinforcing properties. Just like earlier, you said people are getting less drunk.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  So people are getting less high.

• 51:54Speaker 00

  It could be that.

• 51:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or is it somehow touching the craving mechanisms themselves?

• 51:59Speaker 00

  It's probably touching the craving mechanism through the gut-brain access. Because I don't think it's going to stomach either. I think it's locally in the gut, shutting down the neurons from. If you think about it, if BPC is what they claim it is, right? And that's a big if. That if you have a noxious agent going into your gut, your body has to have a mechanism to lock down, protect your vital organs. Right? So is BPC part of this giant transduction pathway to protect your vital organs, your brain, your heart, your kidneys from further damage?

• 52:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  We had Dr. Diego Borquez, I can never pronounce his last name, forgive me, Diego, who's out at Duke, who's really the world expert on these neuropod cells in the gut that signal through the nodos ganglion, up the vagus nodos ganglion, to either promote or suppress release of dopamine to make you either approach or avoid certain foods.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Very, very interesting.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 52:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  I would be more than happy to encourage his lab, even if get funds for his lab to do something on this. What are some other categories of interesting effects that deserve careful study?

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Yep. So we need to see what BPC does on the musculoskeletal system. Like, that's what the hype is. That's where everybody is going. So as I look through, like, what model I would look for, you just want something that's not very vascularized, but could be improved if the blood flow was good, like a tendon injury. So perhaps, you know, a bicep, tricep tendon type of post-surgical outcome. So if you get your bicep tendon torn, you get a repair, you get BPC either intraoperatively or post-operatively, and you see if that person heals faster. Because the idea is not to use BPC. It's not going to magically reattach an ACL that's torn, right? But can it further accelerate the healing from an ACL surgery so you come back in six months rather than 12 months? That's the big question. And that's why, like, a lot of athletes are using BPC 157 for that use.

• 53:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Has anyone ever done the one limb versus opposite limb control experiment? I mean, I know that people take it orally or inject it systemically, like, under the scanner into the muscle, goes systemically in the bloodstream if you apply it that way. If you can get to the injury site, sometimes people will inject locally. But. It seems that the challenge is that, let's say you have, you know, a tendonitis in one elbow and tendonitis in the other elbow, you could inject into your left elbow and not your right, but there's going to be systemic transfer. So it's hard to do that internal control experiment.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've had, I've used BPC for one injury and I've had results on a different injury.

• 54:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Positive results.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  Positive results. I'm like, oh, interesting. That my shoulder feels better even though I was doing it for my elbow or whatever it may be.

• 54:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  This would be a good time for us to, you know, bracket what we're about to say by saying this is purely anecdotal, but filtered through, I consider myself a skeptic on many, many things, especially things I would put into my body. I'll tell a story. What's your favorite personal BPC story involving you and your body?

• 54:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I tore my tricep a few months ago.

• 54:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Tore?

• 54:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, tore tricep lifting with people I should have been lifting with. They're much stronger than I was. Purple from here to here. Like the pictures, I posted them on X. It's brutal. I'm like, oh, I'm gonna have to have surgery. This sucks. I don't have time to have surgery. Cause you're in a brace for like three months and I put BPC in locally, I'll try this at home, not medical advice, but locally in the tissue spot with a couple of other peptides. And within three weeks, my PT is like, what the hell are you doing? This is healing so fast. Would I have healed that fast anyways? I don't know. But that's typically a grade two tricep tear with purple arm from top to bottom. It wasn't grade three because I could still extend my elbow. That's usually a three month recovery and to be back in three to four weeks was fantastic for me, which is why I'm so excited.

• 55:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  What dosage were you injected?

• 55:23Speaker 00

  A larger dose than people would typically.

• 55:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Not micrograms?

• 55:26Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 55:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  You were up in the grams.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot higher. I think personally and in some of our people, we've used bigger dosages. I think that's the problem. The low dosage is, even though that translates well from the mice data, for humans, I think the dose is way higher. But people just go based on the dosages that would fit in the pilot through a peptide science website rather than what actually, we don't know what the human dose is for BPC 157. So there's a lot of work to do just to figure that out. Like when we spoke to the orthopedic group, they're like, yeah, we're gonna start with, you know, 250 micrograms. I'm like, I don't know if you're gonna see an effect at that low of a dose. You might need to raise it up. Like that's what people do online. I'm like, yeah, but that's just because someone's peptide website says to do that. There's no data there. But, you know, tricep was back to normal.

• 56:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Amazing.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  That was an interesting BPC case. I've seen other injuries where BPC didn't really help. Much.

• 56:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  I can't match your story. That's, that's a bigger result. I can just say that I had a bad trap neck pull where I couldn't turn my head. And I was like, oh, one of those. And you had some BPC. So it was only, I think only 200 micrograms and just pinned it right into the, that's street talk for injected, right into the, kind of like, upper trap-ish area. Two days later, completely gone, of course. I don't know what would have happened had I just waited. But it seemed eerily fast.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 56:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then I stopped taking it.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 56:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  So there's a guy that, you know, and, and by the way, that was not gray market. It was obtained through a doctor's prescription from a compounding pharmacy.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 56:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Labeled BPC 157, not.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  PDA.

• 56:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  PDA. Okay, those are anecdotes. I've also read, just to be fair, we should balance this out. Certainly on X, you know, people can say anything they want. People saying, oh, you know, I didn't feel well. I stopped taking it. Okay, could be due to what it was dissolved in, could be due to their own unique, you know, response, could be due to bad sourcing, you know, contamination. So we don't know. But not everyone has a great result.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  No.

• 57:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  And some have no result.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  But many, many people report what can only be described as pretty astonishing positive results.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  That cannot be directly ascribed to the BPC because of the placebo effect, et cetera. And I'm not saying that to protect myself, but saying that so that people can couch this in that, like, how we got here.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 57:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is because of stories like this.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  There's two possibilities. Either BPC is as amazing as we think it is, and it's unfortunate that millions of people don't have access to it. Or BPC is actually either ineffective or harmful to people, and millions of people are injecting it right now by buying it through online sources. Both cases are very bad endpoints. One is worse than the other. You can argue which one. But that's why we need this data. We need people to push this forward, to figure this out, because we don't want these endpoints. Because if, if in 20 years, we find out BPC is as good as, you know, Sichrix Labs says it is, then man, people are pissed off. All the, you know, joint replacements and injuries that didn't heal, and all the athletes that maybe could have had a longer career, that would be very unfortunate. But if it's the opposite, and like, you know, every 18-year-old kid in the, in the gym will come up to me and say, I'm gonna inject BPC. Like, where do you get it from?

• 58:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  What for?

• 58:18Speaker 00

  I'm like, dude, you're 18. You have all the peptides you need in you. Like, the parabiosis studies, these are young animals. Like, I should take your blood and.

• 58:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  We had Tony Weiss Cory on the podcast. There was, you know, young blood is rich with these things. And no, we're not talking about harvesting blood from babies.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  No, no, no.

• 58:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Check out the Tony Weiss Cory episode. We'll, we'll provide a link. I mean, what you just said about young guys coming up to you in the gym and saying, should I be taking or I'm already taking BPC is, you know, we could have a whole other conversation, maybe another time. We will talk about testosterone and synthetics and things like that. I see a lot of young guys taking. Everyone. I don't know if it's everyone. I don't know if it's everyone. I see a lot of many, many people are taking testosterone exogenously who truly don't need it and potentially permanently shutting down their fertility or causing other issues. Yeah, with the looks maxing trend too. With the looks maxing trend, you know, they're walking around with hammers, sludge in themselves, this kind of thing. You know, I'm sure when I was in my twenties, you know, people in their fifties were probably like, what are these kids doing? You know, and it wasn't anything like this, but who knows? It was like baggy pants and like, you know,

• 59:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  and like, there was weird stuff going on, like hacky sacks and stuff. So, not me, not me. But I'm confident that thanks to you, we've framed the history of this, which by the way, is fascinating, and kind of where we are now, very, very well. So, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have two questions. Well, one comment and one question. The comment is, I think there's a third category of problematic outcome. One you said is, this thing works spectacularly well for a number of important problems, to solve important problems, and we don't find out about it because it wasn't looked at carefully. The other is, it's detrimental. There's the other one, which is, we start hearing about adverse events, and it goes kind of the way of the dodo, or it kind of drifts back into who

• 1:00:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  you know, and is it the good stuff or not the good stuff, because we don't actually know whether or not the, the adverse outcome was due to BPC itself, to misuse of BPC, or to, like, you know, like, the factors that it's, it's dissolved in, or something like that. And I think that's the most likely outcome, unless we get our arms around this. And that's where you could say, like, the hormone replacement therapy field has actually enjoyed the fact that if a woman decides she's going to take progesterone or estrogen replacement therapy, perimenopausal, or menopausal, or something for PCOS, or whatever, that wouldn't be what to take for PCOS, but you get the idea where a guy decides in his, you know, forties or fifties, or whatever it is, okay, he's going to go on TRT, he can do it carefully, she can do it carefully. And knows what adverse outcomes to look for.

• 1:00:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  No one's thinking, oh, my God, the sesame oil that's dissolved in is possibly causing these problems.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  Well, some people will be very particular on which oil their testosterone comes in.

• 1:00:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, that's in the gym community. Yeah, yeah, totally with you and where to inject and so forth. That aside, my concern is that it is kind of Wild West-ish.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:01:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I'm not so concerned, I'll get in trouble for this, but whatever. I'm not so concerned that these actual compounds are necessarily harming people. I worry that the way they're arriving to people is harming them. And we're going to miss out on that first possibility that these are very useful. And of course, I don't want anyone getting hurt. So here comes the question. As a physician, I realize that you are more than peptide curious. You're very peptide friendly in your own life, you know? If you have a patient who has, you know, just their gut is a mess or they're dealing with, you know, post-surgical issues and you know that BPC from the right source is either going to be benign or could potentially help them, what kind of position does that put you in?

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:01:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  As an American board certified physician?

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  Very uncomfortable position because if I'm rounding on a patient in the wards of a hospital and like, hey, you should take BPC instead of your Pentoprolol, I'll probably get my license revoked. So not a good idea. Don't do that.

• 1:02:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  What about in addition to?

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  In addition to, so like if they come see me in clinic, that might be a place where we can have that discussion. We're going to see very shortly here what the FDA is going to tell us about BPC and all these other peptides and the legality of them. If they get moved to the category one list and then the state say like, hey, the FDA said so, we're not going to look, we're not going to care about this. You can do what you want to do as a physician. And you counsel the patient, like you have an honest discussion with the patient. I think that's what it should be. It should be between the physician and the patient. Like, hey, there's this promising compound. It's not FDA approved. We have minimal to no human data, but we have anecdotal. Are you willing to? Try this on yourself and we'll monitor you, we'll have clear endpoints for that. That should be what this looks like, a frame discussion between a physician and a patient. Now, if that patient has an adverse effect, they can go to a medical board and say like,

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  "Hey, Dr. So-and-so gave me BPC157 and I had a bad effect." And I would be like, "Okay, you gave them a non-FDA-approved compound, A for injectable. B, the problem is, there's orals that are being sold as supplements now. Like, BPC157 as an oral available supplement, because it's not a medication. It's never been approved as a medication in the United States." So, what is BPC's legal status? Is it dietary available, therefore? Because if you, you know, cut up an animal and ate its stomach, you'd probably get some BPC in there.

• 1:03:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I can buy desiccated liver tablets. I'm eating livers.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  There's tons of-

• 1:03:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  You can go buy liver at the, like, one Michelin star restaurant, not down this road, but a different road.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, like, Dr. Cavinson identified many peptides in livers, like Livogen and Ovagen, that you'd find in your desiccated liver supplement that you're eating. It's like, the biggest distributors of peptides have been these organ meat companies, because each organ has a signature peptide that comes out of it.

• 1:03:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do they get absorbed?

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:03:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Are they bioavailable active?

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  Dr. Cavinson's work suggests that it is. Dr. Vladimir Cavinson is this Russian, Soviet scientist that gives us Epitalon and Thymalin and Penilion and all these Russian peptides. Dye and tripeptides can be orally available if they're the right shape and size. They're not very well available, but they can be available.

• 1:03:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, you won't necessarily get it from the organ isolate or from the, or eating the organ? Like, if you eat heart, probably very rich in L-carnitine. Can my body make good use of that?

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  I mean, there's Cardiogen, which is one of the heart peptides that was scantily studied in the late 2000s, that may be orally bioavailable. The problem is, no one's doing the work to figure that out.

• 1:04:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  You painted this picture where, not you, perhaps, but let's just say, another physician has the awareness that BPC157 might be useful to a patient of theirs that's dealing with a, they had like an ACL tear. They're not recovering very quickly. Doctor says, "Listen, you're doing everything correctly. There's this new category of stuff. We don't have a lot of data on it. I'm not aware that there are any severe risks, but they could be there. So, if you're willing to embrace those unknowns, you could take X number of micrograms or milligrams per day for two weeks and see how you feel." Patient says, "Okay, I'm willing to do that." The physician says, okay, you want to make sure that it's real and you want to make sure that it's clean.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:04:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  There's no contaminants.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:05:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  If that physician says, you know, I can write you a script for it and this compounding pharmacy will send it to you, and they're making money on it. A lot of people, well, the moment they hear that, they think, oh, well, they're totally incentivized to do this because they're going to get a cut. But if we go back to the original pharma model, it is a little bit of a different situation, right? Because let's say Lilly charges $1,500 for a pen of some sort of GLP. The physician who prescribes that, are they getting a cut of that $1,500?

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  They don't.

• 1:05:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  They don't.

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  But there are kickbacks and pharmaceutical incentives and pharma dinners.

• 1:05:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Those are real.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  It's flights to Hawaii for a conference.

• 1:05:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Really? So there are real incentives, even though they're not getting paid directly?

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's always incentives in any kind of business, especially a business as big as pharmaceuticals.

• 1:05:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, physicians are already getting paid, so I'm not saying that, but these are peripheral incentives.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  Well, the pharma is also lobby a lot of the medical schools and they, you know, funding.

• 1:05:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Gotcha. So there's a relationship there, but it's not cold, hard cash?

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  It's not as direct as the compounding pharmacies.

• 1:05:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. But in a compounding pharmacy, now, this physician, hypothetical physician, could say, hey, you know what? You can get it from this compounding pharmacy and it's going to be 500 bucks. The patient, we've now established, because they've heard this podcast, has a right to say, what are you paying for it versus what you're charging me?

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:06:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  They might lie, they might tell you the truth. Or the physician could say, you know what? I'm not making a dime on this. It's just, I think it might be useful to you. That physician is protected or not protected if something negative happens to the patient.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  I don't think.

• 1:06:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Something happens to them, is somebody suing a compounding pharmacy or they're suing their physician?

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  They're suing all three. They're suing the physician, the compounding pharmacy, and anyone who recommended it, so.

• 1:06:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's pretty scary.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  No malpractice provider is going to give you coverage for peptides, especially non-FDA approved peptides, unless there's, you know, high-risk malpractice providers that they'll cover you for that.

• 1:06:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's say somebody gets hurt taking one of the prescribed pharma GLPs and they're pissed and they sue. They sue their doctor or they sue the pharma company?

• 1:06:47Speaker 00

  Depending on who had the liability. So if the doctor didn't warn you that, you know, injecting 10 times a dose might cause pancreatitis and you had pancreatitis, they can claim the doctor is at fault. If someone has deep pockets, they can go at Lilly and say like, hey, Lilly, you didn't disclose this risk.

• 1:07:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think now people, thanks to you, are armed with enough information to be able to make really good decisions about whether or not to say, eh, waiting for those clinical trial results, or I'll stick my toe in the pond, or I'm going to continue to learn more. But I'm going to now learn more, thanks to you, genuinely, with a lot more understanding about how this stuff. Flows from website or from doctor to patient. Let's talk about pinealine.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Pinealine is one that most people probably haven't heard of. I'll just go on record saying I've tried it a few times or more. I don't take it regularly, but I tried it before sleep.

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:07:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  If I take it at the beginning of the night, it reduces my deep slow wave sleep and gives me far more REM across the night. Not a great situation. Great situation is if I go to sleep, get my usual ration of deep sleep. If I happen to wake up in the middle of the night to use the restroom once or so, not uncommon. If I do a very small injection of pinealine at that point, the one and a half hours of REM that I would get in the final hours of my sleep, now I'm getting three hours in the same amount of sleep. It's just a higher fraction of REM.

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:08:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sometimes you wake up feeling a little groggy, but it is a whole other life to get that much REM. I don't do it regularly. It's not, you know, I would say maybe three times a month. But here's the interesting thing. It improves my percentage of REM on all the other nights in between those three injections. So I'm coming clean here.

• 1:08:27Speaker 00

  Linger in effects.

• 1:08:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Very cool. You're interested in pinealine for a whole other set of reasons. But first of all, what is pinealine and where does it act? Does it have a known receptor?

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  No known receptors. So pinealine is a tripeptide, EDR, discovered by the mention of Dr. Vladimir Cavinson. He's a Soviet researcher that comes out of this Soviet era research to make soldiers, astronauts and pilots better. There's concern that the US might be using lasers to shoot at soldiers. So the Soviet Union tasks him with identifying peptides to defend soldiers, their eyes, and then they're aging. Because what would happen is they'd be in a submarine for a few months. There'd be a nuclear sub and they'd, they'd come back to shore and they'd be like, you know, these submariners, let's call them, would look 10, 20 years older.

• 1:09:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  Also happens to astronauts.

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  Yes. So then the same, the same thing, as astronauts are coming back, they're, they're aged. So Vladimir Cavinson is looking at this and he's like, hey, there's, there's gotta be a solution for this. There's been literature about using extracts of other tissues, notably the pineal gland and the thymus from, you know, late 1800s till this, this 1970s point that we're, they were, you know, starting our story. And he starts grounding up these extracts and injecting it into these people and then undoing a lot of this aging effects through pineal extracts and thymus extracts. Because these, what do these soldiers have? They had very bad circadian rhythmicity. So they can't, couldn't sleep properly. They had terrible immunity. They'd get sick often. They'd be, have autoimmune problems, all these conditions that come with it.

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  And then they were able to undo this using these organ extracts. So Vladimir McCavinson takes it a step further. He looks like, hey, what's causing this effect? In these, in these tissues, like people have been injecting pineal glands in different research models, or taking out pineal glands from rats from the 1800s onwards. He finds peptides in these extracts. He's like, huh, I wonder if these effects are from the peptides, not from the gland itself. So then he sequences from the pineal gland epithelone, and from the thymus gland, a couple of different peptides, vialon, thymogen, cristogen, that you'll be hearing about in the next few years, that on their own do a lot of the effects that the whole extract would, would do.

• 1:10:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  Now, you're talking about epithelone, but pinealone-

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  It's not from the pineal gland.

• 1:10:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's not from the pineal gland.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  Even though everyone-

• 1:10:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, I think it's called that because there's, there's, as far as I understand, please correct me if I'm wrong, there are animal data suggesting that pinealone can help either regenerate or enhance the general functioning of pinealocytes. So it's having an effect on the pineal when, like you take cultured pineal glands, like a little pea-sized gland you put in a dish and you dissociate the cells or keep it, you know, as a little pea-sized thing, and then you give it pinealone. It seems to improve the timing and perhaps even the amount of melatonin output from the pineal, these kinds of things.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  Epithelone does that. So that's a big confusion. I don't know why he named them the way he named them. If anyone knows, please let us know. But epithelone is from the pineal gland. Pinealone comes from a ground up brain extract called cortexin.

• 1:11:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  And brain has pineal in it.

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it was the cortexin specifically, not, not the subcortical regions. So he, specifically not the subcortical regions.

• 1:11:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's reassuring.

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  So Vladimir McCavinson identifies, he makes a drug in Russia, it's called epithalamine, which is the pineal gland extract, and had great effect on circadian rhythmicity and-

• 1:11:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  That makes sense because it's rich with melatonin.

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 1:11:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Basically giving people melatonin.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  But also you apply it with the enzyme that creates melatonin from serotonin to acetyl serotonin to melatonin. So like, when he gave it to young monkeys, the monkeys had no effect. But he gave it to aged monkeys that have decreased melatonin and- From puberty onwards, your melatonin levels dramatically decrease. He was able to restore melatonin production in these aged animals and eventually replicated it on humans.

• 1:11:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  I want to talk about Phimus because it's fascinating and you're truly versed in this. But before we do that, so pinealine comes from the cortex, not the pineal.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:12:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's annoying.

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  Yes, very annoying.

• 1:12:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe we just rename it today. I'll let you do the renaming.

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  We'll call it EDR.

• 1:12:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  EDR.

• 1:12:14Speaker 00

  That's the three amino acid sequence.

• 1:12:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Great. We'll call it EDR so people don't get confused. What are some of the known effects? Or am I just imagining this REM increase? Because I can't change what's happening to me during sleep.

• 1:12:26Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:12:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  That would be an amazing placebo effect. And the reason I say amazing is there are many things that one can do to improve the amount of slow wave deep sleep. Not eating too close to bedtime, doing some exercise early in the day, et cetera, et cetera. Very hard to increase REM except by heating your sleep environment in the last third of your night. And maybe some alpha GPC in the late day can bump it up a bit. Or you can REM deprive yourself.

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:12:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or you can smoke cannabis for 10 years, then quit. And then you'll get a lot of REM because you got no REM for 10 years. Do not recommend that protocol. But for me, it was just striking. So why would EDR?

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  Tripeptide with no receptor.

• 1:13:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. Previously called pinealine, but from here, here forward, EDR. Why would that have this effect on, on REM sleep?

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  Yep. And I actually searched through all of the literature from Cavinson. He never mentions REM sleep once in his studies. He's studied pinealine quite extensively on different neuronal tissue extracts, animal studies, even in athletes, and never mentions the REM sleep. They weren't having, they didn't have whoops in the 1970s in the Soviet Union.

• 1:13:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  What? They didn't have an eight sleep? You're kidding me?

• 1:13:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. They didn't have, you know, sleep trackers in the 1970s.

• 1:13:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  Uh, when it came to, to these, so there was no reports on, on that. But what seems to be happening, let's, let's see, what is this pinealine, this EDR? It's a tripeptide that meets the groove of the DNA of different key regions and helps the promoter region be exposed so then that DNA transcription can happen, translation, transcription. So you get.

• 1:13:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Turning on genetic programs.

• 1:13:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's acting a little bit like a transcription factor.

• 1:13:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, almost like that, or maybe assisting transcription factors in accessing the DNA in the right places. So pinealine in one sentence, it's. Leading to better brain metabolism through modulating all of these different pathways. For example, G D F eleven, SOD one, SOD two, uh, iris and P P R alpha, P P R gamma. So what seems to be happening? So he made pineal on as a anti-stress cognitive performance compound. Uh, and it was available orally in like Kazakhstan to.

• 1:14:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  So I'm an idiot. I'm taking it before sleep. I should be taking it in the morning.

• 1:14:24Speaker 00

  Yes. So if you take a high enough dose, there is sedation from it.

• 1:14:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  If you take it in the morning or pre-hit workout, you get quite an interesting effect. So he studied this um, compound on athletes. And he would uh, do have them do their training session, go to exhaustion and then do a test afterwards. And then there's two groups, pineal and the placebo. The pineal group could keep their performance up despite uh, being maximally exhausted from their training.

• 1:14:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  I feel like such a dummy. Here I am having like these elaborate dreams. I don't really remember or care about. And when I could be actually thinking better during the day.

• 1:14:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. So a lot of people will report less brain fog, you know, better thinking. Uh, there's a friend that has a, you know, nine-figure company. He has all of his employees on pineal on.

• 1:15:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're taking it in the morning.

• 1:15:03Speaker 00

  In the morning, uh, or at night, depending.

• 1:15:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do you know the dosages? Uh, we're recommending it.

• 1:15:07Speaker 00

  Orally, people will take anywhere between, you know, half a milligram up to three milligrams. Is what people um, settle in. Um, the cabins in ones that that come from Russia are like two hundred micrograms.

• 1:15:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Some people are injecting it.

• 1:15:19Speaker 00

  Some people are injecting it.

• 1:15:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Ego systemic.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  Ego systemic. It's orally available through these uh, Latin pep transporters.

• 1:15:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Crosses the blood brain barrier.

• 1:15:26Speaker 00

  Most likely, yes.

• 1:15:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. Cause it's coming from cortex, but.

• 1:15:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:15:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Otherwise, we're, the way you're describing it, we're putting, no one's infusing into the brain.

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  No one's, so we're assuming it's small enough. It's a tri-peptide to cross the the blood brain barrier.

• 1:15:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Have you tried it?

• 1:15:37Speaker 00

  I took some last night, but.

• 1:15:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, at night?

• 1:15:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I, I will take larger dosages. Uh, if I want to get good sleep, I'll describe as eight K R M. Some people, it will cause them to have a little bit of awakening. Um, at first that may be why your deep sleep is going away.

• 1:15:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'll say this. If I take half of what was recommended, I'm great.

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:15:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  But I'm very sensitive to everything.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:15:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Just sensitive.

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  If I take what was recommended, I fall very deeply asleep. I have elaborate dreams and I wake up.

• 1:16:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I couldn't tell if that was a disruption in sleep architecture. I just found, and granted, I'm only doing this three times per month, maximum. And I often forget and then I go months and months and I was like, oh, maybe I'll take a little pinealine. And I go, whoa, this is wild. And then I'd stop taking it because I don't know enough about it. Now, I know it's cleanly sourced because I trust the compounding pharmacy it's coming from. But I should ask, are there any known risks of EDR?

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  So far, nothing in the Russian literature. So the caveat, it's Russian literature. It's not gold standard American research that we love here. So there's nothing that's come up as a, you know, clear sign. Because what it seems, the big theory of Cavinson is that as you're, when you're younger, you make a lot of these peptides naturally, these tri, di tri and tetra peptides. And as you age, they go down in function and quantity. And by replenishing these peptides, you're restoring some aspect of youthfulness. Something similar happens in America with GHK copper, which is another tri peptide. That's technically like the collagen regulator. So pinealine is the brain regulator. And GHK copper is the collagen regulator. But so far, the side effects we've noticed, and we have probably the biggest anecdotal compilation of N equals one.

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  Every day I wake up, someone texts me like, hey, pinealine did this to me. Some people will have a little drop in blood sugar. Because it's PPR alpha, PPR gamma, so it'll have positive metabolic effects. So that's something to keep an eye on. Some people even had their A1Cs drop. So.

• 1:17:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Hypoglycemic and other people, blood sugar issues, take extra caution.

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  And then very vivid dreams. For some people, that could be disheartening if they have like, you know, nightmares or something like that. But very, very vivid dreams as a result of pinealine, especially like the color and the the quality of the dreams is very different than you'd normally expect. What seems to be happening is like, just like, you know, psychedelics change the redox state of the brain. Pinealine is doing something similar where you're getting more alertness during the day. Like you don't wake up with as much brain fog, at least anecdotally. You get better performance during like high intensity interval training. And then you get more REM sleep at night because the neurons are in a better oxidative state thanks to the PPR alpha, PPR gamma, iris and all these different pathways that it's modulating.

• 1:18:14Speaker 00

  With no clear one, you know, receptor that's doing it through.

• 1:18:18Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 1:19:03Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 1:19:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  To learn more, visit functionhealth.com/huberman and use the code HUBERMAN for a $50 credit towards your membership. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman. What about epitalin, which turns out comes from the pineal? Yeah. I'd love your thoughts on this. I've heard, and I thought it was complete nonsense when I first heard it, that the pineal becomes calcified as people age. The reason I thought it was nonsense is I used to co-teach neuroanatomy when I was at UCSD before moving my lab to Stanford with a guy named Harvey Carton. You guys can look him up. Unfortunately, he passed away. He was in his late 80s, and he had this incredible career as a, I think, one of the greatest neuroanatomists of the last 100 years. And that's a good category to be in, because we have like Kahal, who's like discovered

• 1:20:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  everything, basically, and then the rest of neuroscientists are just kind of tinkering around with what he predicted. And then a few other neuroanatomists like Ted Jones is there, but he's like the neuroanatomist of my generation. And I asked him about this calcification thing, because he had looked at the brains of so many different species, including humans. He was also an MD, by the way. And he goes, yeah, I don't know whether or not this calcification thing is real. And he kind of brushed it aside and I thought, well, Harvey doesn't take it seriously. So I'm not going to take it seriously. But even though he was absolutely right about many, many things, I think he might've missed that one. Because when I go to the literature now, it's a little bit tough because the cadavers that you looked at in medical school, and not all of them are processed on the same timeline, right? It's not, thankfully, it's not a controlled science, right?

• 1:21:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  These are people that generously donate their bodies to science, right? Does our pineal calcify? Even if it does, does that somehow inhibit its ability to communicate with our other tissues?

• 1:21:23Speaker 00

  It's a big kind of debatable thing in, in the pineal research. If you look at the pineal gland Wikipedia, it's very underdeveloped, let's say. Cause it's kind of woo woo, like when you think of pineal gland, you think of someone who's gonna sell you-

• 1:21:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  No neuroscientist chooses to work on the pineal.

• 1:21:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:21:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  They should, but it's not a very sexy-

• 1:21:38Speaker 00

  It sounds like someone's gonna sell you crystals or something about you.

• 1:21:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's not very sexy, yeah.

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  But I think it's a key aspect of aging and longevity. So that's what gives us, you know, our interest in it. The pineal gland, it seems from Cavinson's work that the decrease in pineal gland function with aging is more of a physiologic than a anatomic problem. I will see some calcification on MRIs when we have a patient come in for like a stroke or a TBI. We'll look at their MRI and like, hey, there's, that looks like a little bit of calcification there. Maybe my neurology colleagues will disagree, but that seems to happen. But the question is, what is actually leading to the deterioration of melatonin synthesis? Cause it decreases quite dramatically and some people even think that might start puberty. Like if you have a pineal cyst, you can have precocious puberty like eight or nine years old.

• 1:22:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  The rhythmicity in melatonin. Cause a young baby, very young baby, their melatonin secretion is not very rhythmic. But they're in REM like a lot.

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  A lot of their sleep is REM. It's a beautiful thing, right? With time, it becomes more rhythmic.

• 1:22:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:22:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  And of course, in today's day and age, with all the artificial lighting and the lack of sunlight exposure, things that you and I care a lot about, people are making themselves somewhat arrhythmic or phase shifted. But epithalin is somehow restoring pinealocytes, is somehow enhancing function of the pineal and other tissues?

• 1:22:55Speaker 00

  Yep. So in Cavinson's- Work he's found that will increase the expression of the different clock genes. So in like, you know, lymphocytes that he'll measure in peripheral tissues, he'll notice that the clock genes actually change. So in a more rhythmic pattern, he'll notice that morning cortisol is higher.

• 1:23:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Great. Which by the way, folks, I've said this in the cortisol episode. You want your morning cortisol super, super high. You want your evening and nighttime cortisol low. If you're a resident in medical school, just listen to what your superiors say. They don't give a shit about your cortisol levels. You gotta do the hard work and then later you get to. Later you get to go to bed. It's a little weird that the medical profession tortures their own. By disrupting one of the, one of the primary anchors of health.

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:23:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  And cognitive.

• 1:23:38Speaker 00

  I mean, I've had 28 hour shifts and that's what got me interested in.

• 1:23:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're young, you're good.

• 1:23:43Speaker 00

  But yeah, the idea was it was restoring a more circadian appropriate hormonal profile. Through HTH cortisol.

• 1:23:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Taken when?

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  Anytime. Because the idea with these bioregulators, unlike, you know, a GLP one drug that you take today and have the effect for the next week. The idea from the Cavinson model is that you take these and then you accrue benefits when you're off of them. Like you notice with penicillin, you took penicillin for a day or two or three days a month and you had effects until you took the next dose. So the idea is can you accrue benefits from these compounds as they upregulate or down regulate certain genetic pathways? And in more favorable state and then keep those effects later on. So in the Cavinson seminal work was his 15 year longevity study. He got people in nursing homes, two groups, one them got epitalon in the form of epithelamine, which is the whole pineal gland extract.

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  And then a peptide called thi-malin, not thi-mulin, there's two different peptides. A lot of people confuse them. Every peptide website confuses them. But they inject them for 15 years, like a 10 or 20 day course per year. Just, just beginning of the year, middle of the year and that's it. And they had a significant lower mortality when it came to cardiovascular disease, infectious risk and for cancers.

• 1:24:56Speaker 00

  So Russian study caveat, but that would be the most interesting longevity study I've seen done if accurate, if true, because he was able to take nursing home patients, give them peptides for, you know, very small amount of the year, and yet they accrued benefits the rest of the year.

• 1:25:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  Impressive. One of the things that really got me excited about epitalin, is it thalin or talin?

• 1:25:16Speaker 00

  The Russians say epitalin, is that the way they say it, but it's spelled with a T H.

• 1:25:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 1:25:21Speaker 00

  So I'll say epitalin, whoever wants, you know, we're making the rules today, so.

• 1:25:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 1:25:24Speaker 00

  Epitalin is also A D G.

• 1:25:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 1:25:27Speaker 00

  That's the immunoglobulin sequence for immunoglobulin.

• 1:25:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'll say epitalin because it's easiest for me, and forgive me if anyone takes offense. I took interest because in my former life, running a lab focused on, among other things, visual pathway repair.

• 1:25:41Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:25:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  To reverse blindness or impending blindness, and there's some interesting papers, and there I can really gauge the data, even though they're in mice, I can say this is a real effect, or like a meh effect, or like a whoa effect. Using epitalin to combat some of the neurodegeneration and things like retinitis pigmentosa, downstream neurodegeneration, N R P, which is a very common, unfortunately, blinding disease, or even in glaucoma.

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:26:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  I should mention that B P C one five seven, to my knowledge, hasn't been looked at extensively in terms of optic nerve repair, but it absolutely should be. If someone knows those papers, please put them in the comments. So I was intrigued.

• 1:26:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:26:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like, here's this molecule that's somehow involved in DNA repair, and it's either maintaining or restoring some of the machinery that would otherwise definitely be lost in one of these optic nerve damage conditions that models things like glaucoma, retinitis pigmentosa, stroke, traumatic head injury. It's a big deal.

• 1:26:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:26:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Vision and movement are kind of the biggies. I mean, there are other things too, but like, you know, you don't want to lose those. And if you do, you can get by, but you need additional support, obviously. So the reason it's so interesting to me is that it's getting to DNA repair, as opposed to these downstream, you know, working on any number of vague receptor-ish, maybe no receptor, things like, and this is what gene therapy is about.

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:26:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  So do you think of epitalin as kind of a gene therapy of sorts? Or do you think about it more as support for genetic machinery that has lots of downstream targets?

• 1:27:07Speaker 00

  Yes, I think it supports this genetic machinery.

• 1:27:11Speaker 00

  When it comes to the eyes, it seems to be repairing some of the photoreceptors that might get damaged in a retinitis pigmentosa. Melanopsin wasn't discovered when Cavinson was kicking it around. But I would, my, my theory is that epithelone is working on melanopsin.

• 1:27:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting.

• 1:27:27Speaker 00

  And that it may be upregulating melanopsin levels and then making that morning sunlight that everyone likes to be more effective. Because the big problem is, a lot of people will tell me, doc, I did morning sunlight, I didn't feel effects. I'm like, have you had enough darkness to regenerate melanopsin levels? Because we know that in animal studies, five days of pure darkness dramatically increases the amount of melanopsin in the retinas.

• 1:27:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is interesting, and I certainly have a lot of close, close friends that are in a position to do these studies.

• 1:27:52Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:27:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you know, the podcast is obviously available free to everyone, but we have a premium channel that funds research.

• 1:27:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  We don't talk a lot about it, but we, we've given a lot of money away to excellent laboratories where they're free to explore these things. I'd love to see some of the studies that we're talking about today supported. And by the way, that's done in collaboration with donors that do a match. So we could get the right people to do the right studies with no bias toward what the preferred outcome is.

• 1:28:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:28:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  In fact, the scientists that we both know, the right ones, would try and disprove the hypothesis that any of this stuff was real.

• 1:28:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:28:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  And if something makes it through that filter, then they would conclude it's real. Otherwise, they're trying to essentially knock down the, the quote unquote positive outcome.

• 1:28:33Speaker 00

  Yep. And I think as a clinician, one of the key things for people to remember is that we've screwed up a lot of times as clinicians through different grotesque abuses of our, you know, trust. We've done, you know, interventions or drugs that weren't the most efficacious. For example, like in the 1910s, 1940s, we irradiated thymuses of young kids to prevent SIDS. This was considered gold standard medicine.

• 1:28:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Does it have anything to do with SIDS?

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  No, they thought that-

• 1:29:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sudden infant death.

• 1:29:01Speaker 00

  They thought that the thymus was too big and was sitting on the heart and that might be the cause. So tons of these kids, and I think at least 10,000 died from cancers. No, I think the only person that's talked about it is Sapolsky. He has a video talking about this. So we've had a lot of issues as a, as a, as a field, may be very cognizant of that and know the history of where we've been. Like, like Verkal of the famous Verkal's triad, he was like- Pro this therapy and we all know learn about it in medical school, but no one talks about this aspect. So there's a lot of grotesque abuses of medical power, let's say, if you have to be very careful on which interventions we give people and the first things like do no harm. So while we are, you know, excited about these therapies, we got to be kind of careful in where we're taking people.

• 1:29:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Appreciate it. Wasn't aware of that study. Perfect tee up for, no pun, for the thymus. Tell me about the thymus. Super interesting organ.

• 1:29:48Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:29:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  We gland.

• 1:29:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:29:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  We all have one when we're born.

• 1:29:52Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:29:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  By time we're, what age is it mostly gone?

• 1:29:55Speaker 00

  So the thymus is grown under the influence of a lot of these youthful hormones, melatonin, growth hormone, DHEA, and then it's shrunk at the moment you hit puberty. So until from your, the day of birth until puberty, you grow this massive thymus.

• 1:30:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  Where is it?

• 1:30:11Speaker 00

  It's right above your heart, right behind us, the collarbone.

• 1:30:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  How big is it?

• 1:30:14Speaker 00

  It's a, in, in a baby, it could be quite large on the chest.

• 1:30:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Big as a baseball?

• 1:30:18Speaker 00

  Like maybe the size of half the heart, let's say, maybe bigger, depends on, on, on the size. Right now, in our bodies, it's going to be a bunch of fat with a couple of different globules of thymic residue.

• 1:30:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Tiny, tiny.

• 1:30:31Speaker 00

  Very tiny. In fact, most surgeons will just remove it when they do surgery nowadays for like open heart. But there's, you know, good data from New England Journal of Medicine that removing the thymus tissue, residue tissue, leads to a mortality signal within the first five years after those surgeries.

• 1:30:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  So people have died because of thymus removed?

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  They'll have like either higher rates of cancers or, you know, higher rates of autoimmune diseases if they have their, their thymus is removed. Now there are thymomas where people have to have their thymus removed, but we're talking about people that, you know, the surgeon's going in to do a coronary artery bypass surgery.

• 1:31:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is the thymus neurally innervated?

• 1:31:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:31:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's getting signals from, from brain?

• 1:31:07Speaker 00

  Vagus nerve, yep.

• 1:31:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's getting, sorry to get technical here, but I, since I did the episode in the vagus, some people might remember, there's a lot of ascending sensory information from the vagus going up to the brain. There's also motor control from the brain going down through the vagus, those two, two-way street, mostly up. Some down is the thymus controlled by the descending is it like in other words

• 1:31:28Speaker 00

  That's a good question.

• 1:31:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is something going on in our brain like stress level or

• 1:31:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:31:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or sleep controlling our thymic output?

• 1:31:33Speaker 00

  There's sympathetic and parasympathetic innervation to thymus.

• 1:31:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Uh huh.

• 1:31:36Speaker 00

  Um, that dictates its hormonal output because the thymus, what is the thymus?

• 1:31:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, what's it secreting?

• 1:31:41Speaker 00

  It's a gland that both secretes hormones and develops the T cells. So your lymphatic cells are found in your bone marrow. That's where they're made. The T cells will travel up to the thymus and get trained so they don't kill you. And they don't attack your own tissue, but attack a foreign invader or a cancer or whatever it may be. That process is very good in youth and as you age, you get more autoimmunity, more cancers, et cetera, et cetera, because the immune system is not as robust. Both because the thymus makes less of the hormones that train the immune cells and makes less of these immune cells themselves. So when you're, you know, 15, you're making 10 to the eighth magnitude of these cells every single day. They're called naive T cells. They will eventually become your CD4 and CD8 T cells.

• 1:32:23Speaker 00

  Uh, as you age, this number dramatically decreases and those cells will live somewhere between 10 and 15 years. And that can kind of gauge when the mortality window kicks in for a lot of these different disorders, when your thymus reaches a, you know, minimum level of output, you get a lot of these disorders like cancers, uh, heart disease, uh, autoimmunity. If you put almost any disease and look at the thymus, um, risk associated with it, it increases as the thymus, um, function, uh, decreases. There's a nature paper, uh, 2026 just came out that looked at cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality and all these different metrics that they did MRIs of people and and the people that had the higher thymic scores had less mortality across every single one of these conditions.

• 1:33:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  But you said, not challenging this, but what's surprising about that very interesting result is that you said that by time you reach your, you're in your thirties, I'm in my 50s, those ages, our ages, you, there, you've got just a bit of residual tissue there. It's just a few cells and yet it's somehow maintaining function.

• 1:33:23Speaker 00

  The rate of decrease varies dramatically from person to person. So we call this thymic evolution. So from the moment puberty starts till, um, you die, your Thyrmus is slowly shrinking. That really happens in your twenties and thirties, the majority of that, under the the pressure of androgens, estrogens, progestins, and corticosteroids. Those are driving a lot of the shrinkage.

• 1:33:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  So the hormones that everyone seems to want to increase the rest of their life and that become, you know, active a lot during puberty actually cause thymic involution.

• 1:33:53Speaker 00

  Yes. So like castration will undo some of the thymic involution. Pregnancy is a great time to involute your thymus, which makes sense because you don't want to be having an autoimmune attack against the baby, or an immune attack against the baby.

• 1:34:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do women's thymus disappear after pregnancy?

• 1:34:09Speaker 00

  They they involute and then will regrow during the breastfeeding period under the influences of growth hormone and prolactin. So hibernating animals will have a dramatic shrinkage of the thymus during hibernation and then a regrowth during the feeding window.

• 1:34:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is there any benefit to doing or taking something to either maintain or regenerate thymic size?

• 1:34:29Speaker 00

  So there was.

• 1:34:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  As in, as let's just say, as somebody 25 or older.

• 1:34:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a interesting study, TRIM trial from Dr. Greg Fahy. He's doing a study where he's giving a cocktail of growth hormone, metformin, and DHEA. Gave that for 12 months and had the thymic size increase on imaging. The amount of CD4 or CD8 T cells increased and the ratio of which improved. And then some of the markers that would show like immune cell exhaustion, like PD1 and all these different aspects of T cell dynamics also improved. So they're trying to use growth hormone to regrow the thymus.

• 1:35:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Getting us directly to peptides, many people who are peptide curious start asking about thymusin alpha.

• 1:35:08Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:35:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is thymusin alpha a peptide that comes from the thymus?

• 1:35:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:35:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  So thankfully, they named it appropriately this time. Great for that. What does thymusin alpha do endogenously when you're not injecting it or taking it? What's its normal function?

• 1:35:21Speaker 00

  So thymusin alpha 1 is part of this thymic family of hormones that gets secreted. It's like these 21 amino acids. It increases T cell development in the thymus, increases T cell proliferation outside the thymus, and makes the T cells more likely to properly attack a pathogen. Like it's like a, you know, jet fuel for the for the T cells.

• 1:35:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's like pro-immune?

• 1:35:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:35:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  I've heard of people taking it when they feel rundown, if they're traveling, they're sleeping less than usual, they're a new parent. So obviously, that's kind of, you know. Peptide Wild West kind of indications.

• 1:35:54Speaker 00

  It was FDA approved as Zedaxin for kids that were born without a thymus or a malfunction thymus like Di-George syndrome, these different kind of genetic abnormalities to be used for these kids to help develop the T cells that they had that weren't in the thymus because they'd have like bone marrow T cells that weren't properly developed. So there was good support from Thymus Alpha 1 for these kids. I don't think that FDA approval still exists. So the people are trying to, you know, grandfather Thymus Alpha 1 into this peptide conversation. In other countries, it's approved for a adjuvant therapy for like hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and then different cancers. So far, the sepsis literature and infectious literature is not that promising. It might be like, if you take antibiotics with Thymus Alpha 1, you might have a quicker bounce around. What I would be interested to see is like

• 1:36:39Speaker 00

  if you, you know, went to nursing homes, injected everybody with Thymus Alpha 1 in November, in December, would you have less flu in January and February? That'd be the interesting thought experiment. Both Thymus Alpha 1 and Thymus Beta 4 come out of the Goldstein Lab. That's the very famous lab that studied thymus in 70s, 80s, and 90s. But thymic research kind of fell out of favor the last few decades.

• 1:36:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's almost as sexy as the pineal gland. I say that sort of tongue in cheek because, I mean, I think these are fascinating glands. And the reason I ask if they're neurally innervated is that, you know, nowadays, there's a, there are a lot of reasons why people choose to study one thing or the other. But these understudied glands, if neurally innervated, then open up a lot of interesting questions about brain control, behavioral stress control. And the experiments kind of write themselves. Doing them still takes a lot of work. Interpreting them is no easy task either. But I think there should certainly be more work on, on the pineal and on the thymus. So I want to make that clear. That, have you taken Thymus Alpha?

• 1:37:36Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I've used Thymus Alpha 1 when I travel to avoid the cesspool of planes and hotels and all these places, which, like, I would say, traveling and then this year on the wards, the first time I don't get flu, cold, whatever kind of infection, I dosing Thymus Alpha 1 throughout, and I didn't get sick a single time.

• 1:37:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  What time of day or night are you injecting?

• 1:37:56Speaker 00

  Twice a week, time agnostic. We're talking about, you know, 2.5 milligrams.

• 1:38:02Speaker 00

  As a prophylactic, that's not FDA approved or.

• 1:38:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, this is just you doing your thing.

• 1:38:06Speaker 00

  I'm curious and see if it would work.

• 1:38:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you're trying to stay healthy so you can take care of patients.

• 1:38:11Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:38:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  So you're willing to be your own experiment. When we hear about thymus and alpha, we usually hear about TB 500 also. What's TB 500 and how are the two related, if at all?

• 1:38:20Speaker 00

  So while Cavinson is finding Thymulin and injecting that into people, the Goldstein lab finds thymus in fraction five, which is this giant protein that has many different peptides in it, thymus and alpha one being one of them. And then thymus and beta four being the other one. Thymus alpha one, thymus and beta four were discovered in the thymus, but they're not exclusive to the thymus gland. They're also made in other tissues. Thymus and beta four seems to be this 43 amino acid peptide that helps in the actin cytoskeleton of cells. So if you think about it, immune cells have to move a lot. So they have to reorganize their actin cytoskeleton quite quickly. So it seems to upregulate that movement, which, you know, the horse community for doping and other athletes have found a niche for thymus and beta four to use it as a doping.

• 1:38:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  You say the horse community?

• 1:39:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, the horse races. Thymus beta four is a very common doping agent.

• 1:39:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  For the riders or for the?

• 1:39:05Speaker 00

  For the horses.

• 1:39:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  For the horses?

• 1:39:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:39:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do they test the horses?

• 1:39:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, there's like a big doping scandal when it comes to horses. And I don't know if they test them or they're like.

• 1:39:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know what's funny? This is a very relevant tangent. Occasionally someone will say, hey, does all this morning sunlight stuff, does that work on like dogs? And I go, listen, I hate to tell you this, but like a lot of the literature came from animals, not necessarily dogs. And they have melanopsin ganglion cells. They have supercosmetics, like yes, yes, and yes.

• 1:39:31Speaker 00

  Same physiology.

• 1:39:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then recently, won't say who, it wasn't me. Truly, I have a friend whose dog was injured. And the question becomes like, would BPC work? And you can actually say, well, there's a lot more animal data than human data. Talked to a couple of vets and vets will, they're a lot more adventurous than you might think. And I thought, well, listen, you know, now of course, these are pets. They're, I love my dog, you know, it's not the same as a human. I am a bit of a specious, but love them tremendously. And I think the pet peptide industry is going to be enormous.

• 1:40:03Speaker 00

  It's blowing up already.

• 1:40:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  So here's the question, and then we'll go right back to what we were saying before. There's been so much interest in NAD, NMN and NR to upregulate NAD. NAD is a pro longevity, NAD for, you know, one of these things that drops over, uh, over the lifespan. Although the paper last week says that it doesn't drop in blood, the landmark paper. I will say, the news stories on that claim that I called it a longevity drug. I've always said that NAD, I, I do augment NAD using NMN. It gives me more, uh, morning energy. I will say it does make my nails really thick and my hair grow fast. Two effects I was not looking for, but I like the energy effect. I've never said it increases lifespan, ever. So, um, this was mentioned in the New York Times and elsewhere, and it's absolutely false that my name's included in that statement.

• 1:40:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  So their fact checkers need fact checking. NAD has been kind of the thing for a lot of people who want to go beyond supplements, right? They got beyond creatine, beyond magnesium, beyond what they can get, you know, just on Amazon or whatever. But they don't want to go all the way to, you know, like blood cleansing and all this other stuff, which I, I certainly don't do myself, and I think that's too extreme, at least for me. To each their own. When I hear about thymus and alpha, TB 500, BPC, it occupies this kind of middle ground, right? And so I think this is why a lot of people are saying, hey, listen, I love my dog. I love my cat. I don't know if NAD is going to do anything for their longevity. It doesn't look like it may or may not, I don't know. But I think a lot of people are starting to think, oh, you know, like, and here we go, Pavlov and his dogs.

• 1:41:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  So I do think this is another category of interest. And of course, we're the curators, they don't get a vote, they can't consent. Right. Right? So we have to be very thoughtful there too. Yep. If I ask you, let's say I had an aged dog and I come to you and I go, listen, I know you're a human physician, but he's getting sick a lot, I don't know, maybe getting some thymus and alpha, he's kind of creaky joints, some BPC. He's probably got a couple of years to go and that's it. Would you say like, well, I know you're not a vet. The veterinary board is going to sue me now, but. No, they're not going to, actually, I have relatives who are vets, they are very open. Interesting. Very open, the veterinary community's been very open. I injected my previous dog with testosterone later in life, and I expected the vets to come after me with pitchforks. And I got calls that said, we would love to prescribe this. In fact, we wish we could just do vasectomies on male dogs.

• 1:42:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let them keep their testosterone and then you don't have to worry about this breeding problem and you let people train them not to hump.

• 1:42:22Speaker 00

  Yep. No, my sister was at a companion pharmacy here locally that would give dogs their testosterone.

• 1:42:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  It made him so much healthier and happier. I have zero regrets.

• 1:42:32Speaker 00

  I'm pro peptide for pets. Let's say, let's say, I think there would be beneficial effects. We know dogs, when they vomit, they end up licking some of the vomit. You've seen this before?

• 1:42:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yes.

• 1:42:40Speaker 00

  As I saw that, I'm like, is he trying to get peptides back from the gastric tract? Like that's the first.

• 1:42:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe.

• 1:42:46Speaker 00

  From a Pavlovian box.

• 1:42:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Being kind to dogs.

• 1:42:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I'm like, I mean, intuitively, instinctively, there might be something there. Like they're, they might be trying to get BPC out of that. Who knows? But I think there would be less hesitation for people to use these on animals. They come from animal literature, like you said, we don't want to be harming these pets. Right? But a lot of, I think a lot of the, the positive signals are going to come out of people giving them to their pets. Unfortunately, there's so many brands now that are popping up every day, giving their pets peptides.

• 1:43:16Speaker 00

  Cause BPC, is it going to be treated as a supplement when it comes to oral capsules? Or is it going to be treated as med? Like we haven't got that answer from the FDA. RFK himself has kind of said like, oh, these are supplements. They're not, they're not medications. So FDA.

• 1:43:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  He said that?

• 1:43:28Speaker 00

  He said that. We're not going to regulate them as meds because they're not meds. Which I don't know if the agency themselves is going to be too happy with that.

• 1:43:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  And there's a big, well, McCary, just McCary, I don't ever know how to pronounce his last name. Recently left. So that there was a, from what I understand, a kind of a split. I don't think he left because of peptide or anything. I think it was related to other things that I'm not aware of. But I do think the question that you're raising is one of the most important questions. Is BPC going to be taken seriously as a drug?

• 1:43:54Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:43:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or is it more creatine-ish?

• 1:43:56Speaker 00

  Yep. I mean, for example, I could give you a B12 supplement. You could buy that on Amazon or I could prescribe that to you. But if I was to give you an injectable B12 shot, you would need a prescription for that. So is that distinction going to apply to peptides also is the big question that no one's answered. And is a, you know, Penylon is a supplement you can find in Kazakhstan and Russia and Ukraine, wherever, all these different countries. Over the counter in different pharmacies.

• 1:44:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is pinealine available as a capsule?

• 1:44:20Speaker 00

  It's available as a capsule.

• 1:44:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Does it work as well as a capsule? In a capsule?

• 1:44:23Speaker 00

  Higher doses as needed, but it still works.

• 1:44:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  What are the doses, dosages, excuse me, that people are injecting versus taking orally?

• 1:44:30Speaker 00

  So when it comes to the bioregulators, the epitalon, pinealine, the Cavinson literature looks at like microgram dosages from 10 to 100 micrograms of, of the actual raw peptides. Of the peptide mixes, we're talking about 10 milligrams. So 10 milligrams of, you know, desiccated cow brain that might give you a few hundred micrograms of pinealine.

• 1:44:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, man, desiccated cow brain makes me think of Crutchfield-Yakov, AKA Mad Cow.

• 1:44:54Speaker 00

  That was the first patient I had on wards in third year of medical school.

• 1:44:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Had degenerative brain from Crutchfield-Yakov.

• 1:45:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a bad, bad case on neurology wards.

• 1:45:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, please, folks, do not be consuming brains. I know there's some people like, oh, he's got all this stuff that can help you. Like, please, please, please, like, these, these, uh, these prion things are really serious.

• 1:45:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:45:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:16Speaker 00

  Scary.

• 1:45:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's really scary. It's really, really scary. And not just from Wild Game, but it's really scary.

• 1:45:22Speaker 00

  By the way, I think this set back all that research in the, when the, you know, the prion stuff happened in the early 2000s, that set back a lot of these animal derived peptide research dramatically because people are like, oh, we don't want to touch these extracts anymore.

• 1:45:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Makes sense.

• 1:45:34Speaker 00

  Because there was thymus extracts, there were, like, there was about, you know, 10 different groups in Eastern Europe that came up with their own thymus peptide drug, which was a poly peptide fragment with, you know, thymus alpha 1, thymus beta 4, vylon, thymogen, crystal, like, all these different peptides that you'd get together. The Eastern Europeans went down like this mix of just mixing up young thymuses because you don't want an old thymus from a cow. You want a six month old cow that has the giant juicy big thymus with all the healthy hormones in there. They'd grind that up and inject that into, into humans with positive effects, like, you know, hundreds of papers on that. The American side, the Goldstein group came up with thymus in fraction 5, which has thymus alpha 1 and thymus in beta 4 in it, also thymus in beta 10, thymus in beta 9, a bunch of different thymusins. That studied these two dramatically, thymus alpha 1 and thymus in beta 4.

• 1:46:17Speaker 00

  The French came up with the actual main thymus hormone, which is thymulin, not thymulin. Thymulin's the Russian poly peptide mix. Thymulin is a nine amino acid peptide that is the marker of thymus function. It also has very interesting neurological effects, which I think you'll, you'll find interesting because it modulates. The, what we're calling the thymus pituitary adrenal axis, thymus pituitary gonadal axis. Thymulin is this peptide that's secreted by thymus dramatically decreases with age. Zinc dependent, so biology likes to use metals with different amino acid structures. Hemoglobin with iron, GHK copper with copper. Thymulin is zinc dependent, so it's a nine amino acid peptide with zinc inside of it to do its effects.

• 1:47:01Speaker 00

  That will develop NK cells and T cells, stimulate the immune response. But also in the animal models, not replicated in humans yet, when they take out the pituitary and then inject, you know, ACTH or ACG, the amount of thymulin sensitizes the end organ to production of the targeted hormone. For example, if you were to give ACG alone to the animal.

• 1:47:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  HCG.

• 1:47:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, ACG.

• 1:47:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Synthetic gluteinizing hormone.

• 1:47:25Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. ACG is binding to the, it's called the ACG LH receptor. So they would get more testosterone produced when they got ACG with thymulin versus HCG alone.

• 1:47:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  So what you're saying is that thymus and alpha potentially, or TB500, or other thymic hormones?

• 1:47:44Speaker 00

  Thymulin specifically.

• 1:47:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, thymulin specifically.

• 1:47:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, the other ones do different effects on the pituitary axis.

• 1:47:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  So thymulin specifically can augment?

• 1:47:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:47:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  The effects of endogenous and perhaps also exogenous hormones?

• 1:47:57Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:47:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting.

• 1:47:58Speaker 00

  And it makes sense because if you're not robust when it comes to immune status, because you can think of your thymulin as high in youth, low in age. You have no business investing in reproduction. You have no business in creating a lot of corticosteroids because that gives you that, you know, youthful energy in the morning. But if you're making a lot of corticosteroids, you're shrinking your thymus. So it creates kind of a feedback loop, negative feedback loop to prevent you from overrunning your system. A lot of young guys will be like, oh, my immune system sucks and my testosterone's low. Like, is there a thymus link there is the question?

• 1:48:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting, and I'm sure that you're the first person in the last. 20 years to be talking about this publicly. And I really appreciate that you are because of course you knew what the thymus was. Don't know a lot about the biology, but you've really opened people's eyes to what it is that it goes away over time. People taking thymus and alpha TB 500 and thymulin.

• 1:48:48Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:48:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is this something that people would cocktail? Or is taking thymulin something that generally could be a good idea under certain circumstances?

• 1:48:56Speaker 00

  Thymulin itself has a very short half-life. The goal would be to increase endogenous production of the thymulin itself.

• 1:49:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  How would you do that?

• 1:49:03Speaker 00

  So sufficient zinc status is necessary to make thymulin. The first sign of zinc depletion before RBC zinc or serum zinc decrease is your thymulin levels tank.

• 1:49:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking Element makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. My days tend to start really fast, meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise.

• 1:49:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  So to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes, when I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an Element packet dissolved in it. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. GHKU Copper.

• 1:50:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:50:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Most of the questions I get about it are from women.

• 1:50:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:50:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  I sent out a little informal poll to the, uh, be careful how I say this, the women in my life, um, including siblings and things like that. And, and almost all the women said, what about GHQ copper? I hear it can be good for my skin. Should I use it topically? Take it orally or inject it? If I inject it, should I inject it locally? I'm like, please don't inject it in your face. Cause I don't, as much as I'm comfortable with people giving themselves like a little, you know, sterile injection in, you know, belly or something like, I get worried about non-experts injecting themselves in the face and other, other tissues. So a lot of interest in this. What is it? Why has it made it into this kind of, um, aesthetic category? Because I'm guessing it has a lot of other effects too. But it's kind of funny how things kind of land in one region. Like creatine was like

• 1:51:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  the muscle thing for a long time. Then it got some kind of like, maybe it's good for cognition, maybe for people with Alzheimer's, maybe women should take it too, for all those reasons and more. And it kind of reverted back to like the muscle thing.

• 1:51:33Speaker 00

  GHKCU is a tripeptide, um, with a copper ion in the, in the middle. It's glycine histidine and glycine. Um, it's actually found in type one collagen fibers. So.

• 1:51:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Tell me where type one collagen fibers are.

• 1:51:46Speaker 00

  All over your skin, hair and connective tissue. So, uh, just like Vladimir Cavendish discovers these 40 different peptides and liver peptides, brain peptides, pineal peptides, whatever it may be. There's a American researcher, Lauren Pickhart, Dr. Lauren Pickhart, uh, was passed now. He discovered GHKCU, uh, in the collagen tissue. And it's like, hey, this might be the, the factor that controls collagen synthesis and also collagen breakdown. So he does a bunch of studies. His work is all about this. So almost all the, the literature comes from this one lab, a common theme in peptides, unfortunately. Um, he discovers it in maybe the mid seventies. It's, um, found to be very high in youth in serum levels. So you'll, you'll find this in the blood of, of anyone that we test, um, up to like

• 1:52:28Speaker 00

  200, I think nanograms, whatever the, the unit was, and then it gets down to like in the levels of the sixties by the age of 65. So dramatically decreases with age. It's thought to be maybe what leads to the youthful appearance of young skin. And with age, you lose that effect. So he did a whole bunch of trials, both topically for skin, for hair. Um, there's now injectable work being done. So similar to the BPC, they would, you know, cut rats open, inject GHK copper in a different site and they'd get faster wound repair of the the skin tissue from injecting this. So that's, you know, it's become synonymous with BPC 157, TB 500, Wolverine stack, which someone online has made up.

• 1:53:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's that's the Wolverine stack?

• 1:53:10Speaker 00

  It's those two.

• 1:53:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  TB 500 and and

• 1:53:12Speaker 00

  And no, TB 500 and BPC 157.

• 1:53:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  And BPC 157.

• 1:53:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:53:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 1:53:16Speaker 00

  Now people will add on GHK copper and call it the Glow Stack.

• 1:53:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  The Glow Stack?

• 1:53:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:53:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:53:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. Someone has made it up and a research chemical.

• 1:53:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, I like it. Glow Wolverine.

• 1:53:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. There's a big debate about whether or not mixing those together causes, you know, denaturing of different peptides. That's beyond this discussion. Point is GHK copper, it both upregulates the synthesis side of collagen and the breakdown side of collagen. So because when you're you're remodeling tissue, if you're just rebuilding it, you're you're going to get like very pathogenic structures. And if you're just breaking down, you're getting bad structures. So you're doing both. So the idea is, does it number one have a skin effect, which it seems to be the, you know, compared it to to retinol and vitamin C creams and all these things with positive effects. And people will anecdotally talk about like, no, the crow's feet going away and topically it does good for them. There was a study on hair that didn't seem too promising. So it's not going to, the peptide sites try to tell you like, this is better than minoxidil. Not really.

• 1:54:08Speaker 00

  Maybe it could be an adjunct and a lot of patients will have that success using that with some of their other topical hair loss agents. And now there's a Chinese group studying it for lung regeneration because there's a lot of connective tissue in the lungs between the different alveoli. And there's some hype there of using GHK copper as a regenerative from that side.

• 1:54:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  How many people are trying to regenerate their lungs? This is for like COPD?

• 1:54:32Speaker 00

  COPD and smokers, it's a big, big industry.

• 1:54:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe long COVID, from what I hear, is a real thing, lung damage from COVID.

• 1:54:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:54:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  I know some people will debate it, but it seems like there are enough people walking around. Who were vaccinated and non vaccinated who claimed that they have

• 1:54:45Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:54:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Symptoms post covid that have lasted a long time, AKA long covid. So that might be an interesting place for them to remain peptide curious.

• 1:54:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and thymic atrophies is a big part of the, I suspect.

• 1:54:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Post covid?

• 1:54:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, because any infection actually leads to, we talk about the thymic evolution that happens with age. There's thymic atrophy that happens after every infection. The thymus kind of shrinks down and then the idea is that you, you know, recover, you convalesce. We have to have convalescent homes for sick patients and then you regenerate your thymus in the state of health. And the problem in modern day, people are stressed out, they're at work, they get sick and they keep getting sick. So they never get this chance for that thymus rejuvenation. So then they're constantly getting hit down and they're ending up with these diseases of aging that could have maybe been augmented, ameliorated, maybe pushed down had their thymus function been better in youth.

• 1:55:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Raise my hand, Professor Bakri. I'm only half guy, I really feel like I'm in school, this is so cool for me, I'm truly in heaven right now. If you look back at the literature on convalescing, how long were people recommended to take some time off after a cold or a flu or some other?

• 1:55:48Speaker 00

  That's a good question.

• 1:55:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because I think this would tell us like, are we, just like with sort of how long maternity leave

• 1:55:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Type things like, you know, the idea now is people are being forced to go back too quickly in countries like in Scandinavia, perhaps where they get more time. Positive outcomes for baby and mom, like

• 1:56:04Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:56:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think it's an interesting and important question because our biology hasn't changed that much.

• 1:56:08Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:56:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  In the last, you know, couple thousand years, years at least. Like after one has a cold, typically people go back as soon as they deem themselves non infectious, which really worries me. But do you think people are getting back to work too quickly?

• 1:56:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:56:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, I understand the reasons why, but do you think that adding a stage of really getting back to full functioning without getting into the, you know, back to the gym, back to work, back to everything could be beneficial for these longevity effects?

• 1:56:35Speaker 00

  Right, right. Well, I mean, if you think about it. Nothing that they do, once they come back, is, you know, additive to healing. Their circadian rhythms are thrown off, they're under maluminate lights all day, they're not getting sunlight, their vitamin D levels are atrocious, their blue light exposure at night is high, their stress levels are very high, their guts are inflamed from eating processed, hyper-processed, hyper-palatable foods. They have obesity, or they're prediabetic, so all these things now lead to this inflammatory state, and they just got sick, and their thymus didn't bounce back. So then they get sick the next time in two, three weeks. Like, post-pandemic, a lot of my colleagues were like, dude, I get sick three, four times a winter now, before I'd get sick, you know, once a winter. So, this is where the interest in thymic peptides is very elusive.

• 1:57:18Speaker 00

  We have to figure out if the STPs or the PTEs are the more interesting ones. There's synthetic thymic peptides, thymus alpha 1, thymus beta 4, thymulin, and there's purified thymic extracts. There's the two different research committees that exist when it comes to thymus. Which one will be more advantageous? Vladimir Cavinson came up with the thymulin injectable and oral versions of that, and he had positive immune markers, and he showed like, CD4 cells come up, and CD8 cells improve, and all his immune markers become a more youthful state, let's say. But unfortunately, what's happening here is, we don't have thymologists. Like, we don't have a branch of medicine that's dedicated to this aspect of immunity. Like, there's, you know, allergy, allergy immunologists,

• 1:58:02Speaker 00

  but they focus more on, you know, allergies to different agents, or very severe immune diseases. They're not really addressing the immunity of the general public, and how you can boost that. And I think post-pandemic, a lot of people started asking, hey, how can I have better immunity for myself? And now, finally, people are starting to talk about the thymus. Unfortunately, it's been too little, too late. That would've been great during the pandemic, because we could've used these thymic, you know, focused interventions, whether it be zinc, or, you know, thymic peptides, or your purified thymic extracts, to augment immunity of the population as a whole. Especially because Dr. Cavinson was doing this in the 70s in Russia. Even in Russia, they don't really look kindly to this research.

• 1:58:45Speaker 00

  The Soviet era research has been kind of pushed aside, and it's like more Big Pharma style. Because it's more profitable, because how many thymuses are you going to inject into people? And how many thymuses exist on the planet to make these different peptides from?

• 1:58:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  But you could inject a lot of synthetic thymus in alpha TB 500.

• 1:59:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:59:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  And maybe BPC, so. Wolverine stack plus, you know.

• 1:59:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it'd be very interesting if we can get that because now that everyone's getting like these panulo scans and different full better MRIs, we can see the thymus size.

• 1:59:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  I was gonna ask you, can I get some sense of my thymic size and output from a blood draw? Or do I have to do whole body imaging? I've done whole body imaging. It is somewhat costly and that's a barrier for people. But if people can afford it, I actually think it can be useful. I have a number of friends, including a neurosurgeon friend who said that he's, some people are still alive now because they got that scan. A lot of people get scared about what they see. Wouldn't you rather be scared about what you see and be told that it's okay? Then not know it's there and then have a catastrophic event?

• 1:59:42Speaker 00

  We always have a patient that comes in, you know, car accident, young 45 year old, car accident comes in, has a pancreatic mass. They would have never known about had they not had that accident. They get a CT scan just to check for any kind of internal bleeding. They find the pancreatic mass that gets removed. It ends up being a malignant mass that had they waited six months, they would have, you know, had stage four pancreatic cancer and passed away. So that's, that's the theory. There's the concern about false positives and false negatives when it comes to these screening modalities, like any screening modality is not perfect. So there's a big debate on whether or not to do these that will leave to people and their physicians. But I've been trying to lobby them to give the thymic score to everybody who gets one of these scans. Cause they could see like, hey, can you, can you see where the thymus is at? Cause you know, someone might come in, you know, for five different scans over five years. They did a TRT protocol or a GH protocol, or whatever it may be.

• 2:00:27Speaker 00

  And we could see did that improve thymic status or make it worse, different infections, different interventions. That'd be very interesting to kind of tease out. On blood tests, we've been trying to work with a couple of different labs to figure out a thymic score. The most commercially available is going to be a lymphocyte count, which look at CD4 to CD8. There's an ideal CD4 to CD8 ratio that's more youthful. You don't want to have more CD8 cells than CD4 cells. You don't want to have too few of either of them. That goes more into like the HIV literature. But the, the most simple thing that almost every single person has gotten done, but no one's looked at is their lymphocyte to monocyte ratio on their CBC. So almost everybody's on a CBC with diff. It's a $3 lab test.

• 2:01:07Speaker 00

  If you type in any disorder, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, and put lymphocytes to monocyte ratio, there's a study that will talk about how like low lymphocytes to monocyte ratio is associated with poor outcomes when it comes to that disease state. So it gives you kind of a general gestalt of what's going on with immunity because you want a high absolute lymphocyte count, not too high because it's associated with like lymphomas, but somewhere the hazard, when you look at the charts, around 1,000 total lymphocytes is where the hazard of different cancers starts to increase. A young, healthy person will be between 1,500 and 33,000 total lymphocytes. And you want the ratio to the monocytes. The monocytes are different types of immune cells that are more inflammatory.

• 2:01:51Speaker 00

  So if you have a robust amount of lymphocytes with a low amount of monocytes, that suggests you have a more, let's say, ready and robust immune state. So $3 lab test that everybody gets, almost every lab testing company now checks it, and no one really reports on it. But you can kind of stratify people into a disease risk based on that score.

• 2:02:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  Out of 100 randomly polled physicians who received their license in the United States, how many of them probably know what you just described?

• 2:02:17Speaker 00

  Zero.

• 2:02:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Why not?

• 2:02:19Speaker 00

  It's like rabbit holes that you kind of go down and find out. Like, I've been lobbying everyone in the hospital to look at this.

• 2:02:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  But it's very easy, right? The data are there.

• 2:02:26Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:02:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's not like you're saying, oh, you gotta do all this additional work, you gotta bill insurance.

• 2:02:29Speaker 00

  No, no, it's all there.

• 2:02:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's there.

• 2:02:31Speaker 00

  Like, I started to care about the thymus post-pandemic because I noticed people's lymphocyte counts were lower. And I could notice that, you know, anecdotally or looking at, you know, small data sets, like, hey, people that had lower lymphocyte counts had worse disease or like earlier, like, people that had cancers in their late 30s, early 40s, and like, huh, they all had, like, lower lymphocyte counts. So I started to, like, dig into the literature. And I'm lobbying a lot of the hematologists and infectious disease doctors in my hospital to start to look at this. Unfortunately, they kind of are textbook. It's not part of the guidelines. It's in a space that's not pathology, so it's not clear, like, hey, if I check your lymphocyte to monocyte count right now, is it gonna change my management of you in the hospital today? Not really. It's more of a long-term look. So that's where all these direct-to-health, direct-to-consumer companies have an opportunity

• 2:03:13Speaker 00

  to kind of modulate the way medicine's practiced in the United States. But if we have this metric that we can study, why not use it? And then, like, try different interventions and see what actually helps people. Like, we've gotten sometimes peptides, and we've had people go from like a 4 to 1 lymphocyte to monocyte ratio to an 8 to 1 ratio. Now, is that significant? That seems to be significant. But no one's really kind of discussing it, unfortunately.

• 2:03:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  I know who I'm putting my vote in for surgeon general. If ever there's a turnover, I haven't explored the most recent person. So that's not a comment on her. It's, I know they elected to not vote Casey in. But so that's not, truly not a mention I haven't done. But I think your voice should be heard far and wide on these things. I mean, like, more data is good. The scientist in me just says, you got the data. Data could be informative. Take a look. There's a category of peptides such as growth hormone secretagogues. Testomerelin, epimerelin, MK677, that we could, we could do the deep dive on all those. But I'll just batch those and maybe we parse them a little bit. And things like melanetin.

• 2:04:14Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 2:04:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  These are, to my understanding, FDA approved for certain indications. So they've gone through the randomized control trials for like growth hormone secretagogues for small stature in kids. They might use it for that or for post-surgical burn recovery. I think some are HIV.

• 2:04:35Speaker 00

  HIV.

• 2:04:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  HIV. So the idea here, the sort of framework that I'm teeing up is that these molecules are, have been explored.

• 2:04:45Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:04:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  For their known biological function in animals. It's established. These molecules lead to an increase in growth hormone above what would normally be secreted. They do it indirectly by, so they're sort of the gas pedal on that system. Growth hormone secretagogue, cause more growth hormone to be secreted, not actual growth hormone. They vary in terms of how much they stimulate hunger or don't stimulate hunger.

• 2:05:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:05:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  And on and on. You should take them if you're gonna take them before sleep, but not having eaten in the last two or three hours, all that stuff. We can save ourselves some time here.

• 2:05:15Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:05:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Most people who are taking these things, whether they get it from pharma or compounding pharmacy or gray market, research purposes only.

• 2:05:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or black market, God forbid. They're doing this because they want to lose fat, gain muscle, recover from exercise more quickly, and look more youthful.

• 2:05:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:05:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Can we assume that those effects are real, given that they were FDA-approved for other things?

• 2:05:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so when it comes to, let's parse out the effects and the different types of compounds that exist in this category. So there's the ghrelin side, the ghrelin agonist, like MK677, not FDA-approved, orally-available pill that makes you bleed out growth hormone. Like, you make so much growth hormone in response to that. And in non-pulsatile fashion, growth hormone is a very circadian hormone that gets released in the first, you know, 90 minutes of a slow wave sleep. And if you miss that big pulse, you're gonna get small pulses throughout the day. The question is, is that big pulse better than small little, you know, mini pulses throughout the day? These secretagogues will address the broader category of something called somatopause. So you've heard of menopause, you've heard of maybe andropause. Somatopause is this event that happens somewhere in the 30s where growth hormone production dramatically decreases.

• 2:06:24Speaker 00

  So if we kind of paint a picture, your pineal gland's aging before puberty, your thymus right after puberty, you know, in your 20s, and in your 30s, you're having somatopause. That's where your growth hormone production is decreasing. You're having, they call it adrenopause, where your adrenals stop making as much DHEA in the different ratio of cortisol. And then you're having menopause, andropause, and all the other chronic conditions. So it's like your first 50 years of your life, that's what you have to expect. The question has been, and it's a big debate in the medical community, is replacing growth hormone and addressing somatopause useful? Because you can measure, if we had your IGF-1 when you're 18, and your IGF-1 when you're 30 and 50, that's gonna be a dramatic decrease in that. Should we now replenish this IGF-1? The proponents will say IGF-1's important for skin, and good quality sleep, and for

• 2:07:09Speaker 00

  muscle recovery, and joints, and all these things. And those are true. We know growth hormone has all these beneficial effects on that. We also know growth hormone is thymoregenerative, because it stimulates the regrowth of an aged, involuted thymus gland, based on Dr. Fahy's work. The question is, is there an oncogenic signal when it comes to growth hormone?

• 2:07:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Does it cause cancer?

• 2:07:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:07:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Can it, sorry, can it promote more rapid growth of other, of existing cancer?

• 2:07:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:07:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't think anyone thinks it causes cancer.

• 2:07:36Speaker 00

  It's not mutagenic, and this is the big debate when people are like, BPC causes cancer. There's no mutagenic effect from BPC like smoking a cigarette. Smoking a cigarette, you get carcinogenic damage to the lung tissue that causes a cancer later on. There's no direct mechanism that would link any of these peptides to a carcinogenic effect. But is it, you know, a growth factor that could grow cancer potentially? There isn't good data showing that. The debate may be like, hey, by boosting thymic function from growth hormone, are you increasing immunity and then immune surveillance of different tumors?

• 2:08:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right.

• 2:08:06Speaker 00

  And therefore decreasing and then causing the scale. There's a big debate of whether growth hormone is even beneficial when it comes to aging, because growth hormone does grow certain tissues. There's models where people are growth hormone deficient and live a lot longer. And growth hormone is not positive when it comes to a cardiometabolic perspective.

• 2:08:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  And in species like dogs where there's tremendous variation in the amount of IGF-1 that's made between, say, a Chihuahua and a Great Dane. The breed that makes more IGF-1 downstream of growth hormone, of course, lives a lot shorter lives than smaller versions of the same species.

• 2:08:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:08:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  So you want a dog around for a long time, get a Chihuahua. You want a real dog, get a, excuse me, you want a dog that lives a long time, get a Great Dane or a Bulldog.

• 2:08:44Speaker 00

  There's that whole discussion of what's better. And then you get into antagonistic pleiotropy. Is this something that's good in youth but detrimental for longevity? Or is it pro-longevity? And that's the big debate in the longevity field, whatever that field is, of whether or not to use growth hormone. So now growth hormone has become very difficult to acquire through clinical prescriptions after the whole metabolic steroids act and Barry Bonds and all that stuff. So people have now shifted to using secretagogues in lieu of growth hormone.

• 2:09:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Also, growth hormone is very expensive.

• 2:09:11Speaker 00

  Very expensive. Yeah, like Pfizer's pens are in the thousands of dollars. So like if you want, if you're rich, you can afford to, you know, have a growth hormone habit. But otherwise, a secretagogue costs less than a hundred bucks.

• 2:09:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm told that growth hormone doesn't shut down one's own production.

• 2:09:25Speaker 00

  It's not, it's not a strong shutdown like the testicular axis.

• 2:09:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm also told that when people take it, they feel awesome, which is scary to say on a podcast because you're like, oh, no, I don't want everyone running out. You know, young people are already making tons of it. But I mean, that combination of looking younger, feeling great, cognitively feeling great. I mean, I have some friends who've taken like an IU a night or even two IUs a night, you know, five nights a week for years. And you go, hey, like, are you worried about some of the tumor effects? And they're like, You just function at a whole other level and you go, oh God, that's really enticing. But, you know, even with great imaging, you don't know if you've got tumors that you're accelerating in that case. So it's kind of scary.

• 2:10:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. And we don't have a data set that would show that. Like where's the body count from, from growth hormone? Uh, like the bodybuilder body counts are from other compounds.

• 2:10:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're doing everything.

• 2:10:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, when you go into a gym, you can tell who's, who's doing growth hormone versus not based on their skin shining.

• 2:10:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  I see.

• 2:10:22Speaker 00

  Is he a 45 year old dude that's through somatoplasma, has perfect young skin and there's botox and other things involved, but you can tell there's that growth hormone look, the hair looks a little bit healthier. Cause growth hormone favors the conversion of T4 to T3. So it changes the thyroid dynamics. Uh, it can have progestiglicer effects as well, uh, from the IGF-1 perspective. So there's a lot of, you know, useful effects to it. The question is, is that been a good idea to replace it? Traditionally, like medical field's kind of anti, um, using these sercatoggs to augment somatoplasma. But I think there's going to be a role for it, perhaps cyclically. Cause I don't think anything in nature is, is year round. So what if you did a cyclical cycle of, and this is not medical advice, but theoretical cyclical cycle of tesamorelin for, uh, a certain amount of time, got your

• 2:11:06Speaker 00

  IGF-1 to a certain level under clinician guidance, measured your, your thymus on an MRI before and after, and then you saw that the thymus grew and you had, you know, higher CD4, CD8 count. That would be pretty interesting.

• 2:11:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Be interesting. A few years back, and I've told this story publicly before, I tried, um, sermorelin.

• 2:11:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:11:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  It was different than obviously than tesamorelin, but similar in the sense sure the endpoint is, you're seeking is more, uh, growth hormone IGF-1. And it dramatically increased my deep sleep.

• 2:11:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:11:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  And like nuked my REM sleep. It was like the opposite of pineal on.

• 2:11:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:11:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  And yeah, so well, didn't try that. The other thing that it did, and the reason I halted it almost right away, cause I was really just running it as an experiment on myself, was that it spiked my PSA, my prostate specific antigen. It had always been in range and, and relatively low. Boom spiked it. And I was like, whoa, that's wild. And I don't want that. Get him off it.

• 2:11:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:11:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  It reverted to a low level. So that was pretty striking. So obviously, you know, hyper responsive prostate to sermorelin, maybe it wouldn't have been to tesamorelin, et cetera. But, but those are the kinds of things.

• 2:12:09Speaker 00

  It might just be the growth hormone itself. They, they use growth hormone secretion.

• 2:12:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's a good point.

• 2:12:12Speaker 00

  As you age, your prostate gets bigger. The bane of every man is going to be BPH. Like that's going to be the reason that you hate your life in your sixties and seventies. Cause you have to wake up at night to, to pee. And then when you're at a, you know, an amusement park, you're going to have to find the nearest bathroom very frequently because your bladder size is. There's some prostate peptides we're looking at. Thanks. There's like young guy, old guy, like taunting, like, you know, you got 10 more years before you're miserable. Thanks. There's prostate peptides that Cavinson looked at that were trying to translate some of that literature. You'll save me. No, there's, there's people, this guy named Brendan Henry, who's translated like thousands of these papers from Russian to English. So shout out to him, no affiliation, but he's translated a lot of this Russian literature and helped us from that. So that's great. But the prostate is growing with age under the control of DHT and estrogen, and then probably growth hormone.

• 2:12:54Speaker 00

  So the question is, do you want to be messing with that and increasing the size of that? There's, there's concerns about, you know, cardiac growth, liver growth. So there's all these things, but also growth hormone and, and the secretagogues have a negative effect on, on insulin sensitivity. Right. So people's A1Cs will usually jump, like the, the joke in the bottom middle of the community is you have to get lean enough and healthy enough to be able to take growth hormone. Well, it's happening. Growth hormone or the secretagogues? The growth hormone more so. It can make you insulin insensitive. Yes, especially with more like tesamorlin, especially when combined with ipamorlin. Tesamorlin is kind of a weaker GHRH. Tesamorlin, especially when combined with ipamorlin, tesamorlin is FDA approved. Ipamorlin is not. The GHRH versus GHRP kind of in the weeds there, but

• 2:13:35Speaker 00

  those two together can create a giant growth hormone response where your IGF-1 is in the 380s, 390s. So that's, that's, that's quite high, like puberty levels of IGF-1. And you're hungry all the time. Yeah, yeah. With MK for sure, with, with tesamorlin. So tesamorlin has more fidelity, less ghrelin effects, especially, um, because you can have ghrelin effects, prolactin effects and cortisol effects from whenever you're mucking around with the pituitary, because they're all in that, in that same area. I think MK bleeds out the worst when it comes to having the other effects. MK is not a peptide. It's a non-peptide GHRP. What's happened now is people are now stacking their GLP-1 as their insulin sensitivity tool,

• 2:14:17Speaker 00

  their growth hormone or their GHRH and their androgen modulation therapies as this trinity stack. Trinity stack. To get very fit, very healthy quickly. So a lot of these transformations you see in CEOs and celebrities and stuff is using a combination of those three things, you know, your TRT plus maybe Anavar with terzepotide or retretutide, whatever it may be. And then. Using a growth hormone modulation, if you can afford growth hormone or testosterone, epimorin, and you're seeing people lose a lot of fat, gain a lot of muscle in short amounts of time. Is that healthy? We'll find out. But that is like the celebrity protocol.

• 2:14:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Very interesting. And I'm guessing that for women, the, it's the combination of growth hormone secretagogue plus something like, and we'll talk about these now, retitru tide or one of the other GLPs. I'm going to acknowledge, because people are going to start like dart, throwing darts at me about this. Yes, retitru tide is hitting things other than GLP pathway. It's also GIP and glucagon pathway. But most people put it under the category of GLP. So you are encyclopedic, my friend. I really, really appreciate the clarity and the thoughtfulness of your answers on these. And as people are probably becoming aware, we could spend 50 hours talking about psyllian, about cerebral lice. And I think we will have to have you back to explore those other ones. There are a few other things I'd like to talk about if you're willing to give us the time. We should close the

• 2:15:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  hatch on GHKCU. I just spoke. And I saw it in your eyes. You're like, he said it wrong. Do I correct him? Yes, correct me. Everyone else does. GHKCU for the collagen effects, it's available in a lot of creams, assuming it's real, assuming people are doing this medically supervised. Is there any benefit to putting it directly on crow's feet or other wrinkles or face versus injecting it for it to go systemically?

• 2:16:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think if you have a well formulated topical that's actually not broken down, because a lot of these, you know, from these research chem sites, they sell topicals now because everyone's in skincare. They're, you know, poor quality. They're not even blue. Like the GHK should be blue, but that is

• 2:16:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  It should be blue.

• 2:16:14Speaker 00

  From the copper, yeah.

• 2:16:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, that makes sense. My copper pills are blue.

• 2:16:17Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 2:16:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  That makes sense.

• 2:16:18Speaker 00

  But that doesn't mean that it's real. It could be copper just falling out of the complex of the GHK. So yeah, you want a well formulated, like a good skincare brand that knows how to formulate these and deliver them into the skin. Because that's, that's another thing. So like, you know, every skincare brand has their now GHK formulation because people are demanding it. But it's been around for 30, 40 years on topical. The injectable is not FDA approved, of course. I think it's going to be on the second round of discussions when it comes to the peptides coming back to category one. The first round is going to have these seven peptides, BPC, TB, et cetera. And the second round is going to look at GHK. I don't imagine that that makes it. There's no good human data on that. But topically, there's great human data on like different aesthetic outcomes, especially when coupled with red light therapy. Because it seems that the the blue pigment and and the red light seem to be synergistic in that effect.

• 2:17:03Speaker 00

  There's also some some literature when it comes to GHK CU for post UV damage. So people that are, you know, sun friendly can use GHK CU topically to alleviate some of the the photo damage. Of course dermatologists are gonna get mad at us and say like you just use sunscreen and don't get damage in the first place. But for people that, you know, aren't as responsible, you can use GHK CU as a man of post sunscreen.

• 2:17:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Listen to the derms who are slightly more sun positive.

• 2:17:30Speaker 00

  Yep, yep.

• 2:17:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Especially low, low UV index.

• 2:17:32Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:17:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sun when the sun is low in the sky.

• 2:17:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:17:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Doctor Abu Bakr is is perhaps the only other person on the planet besides my friend Samir Hattar, who's been on this podcast, who's as excited about circadian biology as an organizing feature as I am. There are a couple others out there, but in terms of people who are like really grounded in what's real that he's I put him in that category, whether he likes it or not. So people are taking GHK CU cream, putting it on and then doing red light therapy. And there are human data that that perhaps can augment some of the collagen reparative.

• 2:18:04Speaker 00

  Yes, some of the photo aging effects, some of the the effects of aging when compared to like different retinols and and stuff like that. I think the the consensus in the field now is to use it with the rest of your skincare routine, not in place of it. But a lot of people, especially bros that have never been into skincare, are now into skincare because of GHK. Yeah, so there's that, but it's promising.

• 2:18:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  The bros are into skincare.

• 2:18:25Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:18:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  There'll be a documentary before long. Like, what do you call that? The manosphere? It's like the skinosphere?

• 2:18:30Speaker 00

  Well, with looks maxing, that's it's the looks maxing peptide now, GHK, because all these guys that are into looks maxing will use GHK.

• 2:18:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're dipping their hammer in GHK CU and and tapping themselves. By the way, if you want great, long wavelength, red, near infrared and infrared light to augment your GHK CU peptide, by the way, I'm not suggesting that, there's this thing called sunlight that provides that. You just have to be careful not to get too much UV in the process. So before, before People start thinking they absolutely need a red light device. Full spectrum too, free. Full spectrum, balanced, great article in Nature we can link to recently that describes the different spectrums coming out of different devices. And that thing that we call the sun, which is the best source of all of that. And better blue light, too. And better. Because we're deprived of 480 nanometers in this setup. I mean, unless you have full spectrum lighting that we don't know about. I don't get paid to say what I'm about to say, but I'm really excited about something.

• 2:19:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  For a long time, I've used Bond charges bulbs because they have these bulbs that switch from full spectrum in the day. Then you flip the same switch and it goes to yellow and then flip the switch again and it goes to red. I find the red to be kind of difficult to navigate at night. Raw Optics. Yep, they made the new one. Made one that goes from like a morning, really bright light, full spectrum with a lot of blue in there on purpose to wake you up. And the right blue, the 480 cyan blue. Switch the same switch, don't have to change the bulb, it goes to kind of a late morning mode, to afternoon mode, and then goes to candlelight mode in the evening. And here's the cool thing, not only did it get the spectrum and the balance right, but it doesn't flicker. They got rid of the flicker that you get from LEDs and yet it's an LED, so it's energy efficient.

• 2:20:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yep, it allows infrared and. Yeah, and I have no affiliation to them whatsoever. I pay full price for these things and I have to say I really, really like them. Even my bulldog puppy has a little one, this little monkey holding a lamp. And I say, when the monkey goes to candlelight, you're going to sleep. And he knows, he's learning when it goes to candlelight. Now, he's a dichromat, not a trichromat, but that's a different podcast. All right, GLPs. Yep. Now, we can comfortably exhale into your colleagues can, you can feel completely comfortable about anything that they might think or say because the GLPs are the reason why people are comfortable injecting themselves. It's why this whole thing of peptides has really taken off. BPC kind of rode in on the GLPs, in my opinion, even though it's been around for a long time.

• 2:20:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  And so have all the other peptides we've been talking about. So, what are your thoughts? I've never taken one of these. First things first, we're hearing that. Some people, I think Sam Altman actually talked about this publicly.

• 2:21:04Speaker 00

  Overdose.

• 2:21:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  With Kara Swisher about what he thought, yeah, where he overdosed, actually a compound pharmacy issue he thought was what did it. I trust him to do the right calculation. So it does sound like that was a compounding pharmacy issue.

• 2:21:14Speaker 00

  Could afford it. Does the buy the farmer great options?

• 2:21:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think back then people were just getting them where they could.

• 2:21:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  I didn't ask him why, why that happened. But nonetheless, get the dosage right. Make sure you're getting the right stuff clean. But he talked about the kind of lack of motivation, which many people have described anecdotally, like, okay, lowered their food drive, but lowered their drive period.

• 2:21:38Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:21:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Makes sense, you know, depending on which pathways are being affected. But do you think that's a real effect? Is that something that people need to be concerned about? Do you think people can microdose this stuff? Because a lot of people are microdosing it, regardless of what their source is, they're taking a lot less than the kind of standard clinical trials will be. And we're leaving out ritotru tide for now.

• 2:21:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:21:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because it's so new. We're going to talk about it. But I'm talking about the standard.

• 2:21:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, semaglutide, tazepatide.

• 2:22:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:01Speaker 00

  So you have your, you know, semaglutide, which is Ozempic and Wegovy. The Wegovy is the FDA approved version for the weight loss. For tazepatide, you have Zepbound and Mongerol, Zepbound being the FDA approved version for weight loss that allows them to keep their patents for longer. These medications are transforming medicine, especially where I practice, right? If we kind of zoom out, our medical system, if we didn't have these interventions, was going to collapse on itself, thanks to the obesity, prediabetes, diabetes epidemics. Because we don't have enough clinicians or finances to get everybody who was prediabetic in the last, you know, 20 years, had they all transitioned to diabetes and ended up with, you know, diabetic medications and dialysis and eventually cardiovascular disease and all these things. We don't have the resources to take care of all these people. Like, our

• 2:22:46Speaker 00

  medical system was going to collapse. And there wasn't enough finances to take care of it. Now, these GLP-1s are coming in and kind of transforming that phase of medicine because now we have a chance to dramatically change the rate of obesity, diabetes, prediabetes, and all these cardiomy metabolic disorders. So where do we stand? We needed something to happen. I mean, ideally, everybody, you know, would get morning sunlight and eat only healthy foods, unprocessed foods, and have low stress and sleep great at night. And maybe no one would develop to become obese. But the reality is, people become overweight obese. They get stuck in that hole. And if you just try to step out of the hole the way you came in, sometimes that doesn't work. You need a different path out of that problem. And that's been, you know, the diet and exercise literature for the last 40 years.

• 2:23:29Speaker 00

  Millions of books have been sold on how to get people leaner. We now have interventions medically that can dramatically change people's weights for the first time. We've had drugs in the past that, you know, five, 10% of body weight. Now with the GLP-1s, we're getting 10, 20, even 30% of body weight being shaved off of people, especially with the new retinocyan data. Is there a free lunch? That's the big question. Like we kind of talked about earlier, there's always been these medical mishaps that have happened. So far, the data is very promising when it comes to GLP-1s and that we are now reversing this rate of chronic disease. Is it going to stay that way? That's a good question. I'm cautiously optimistic when it comes to these medications. I've been prescribing them since I was a resident in my VA clinic.

• 2:24:12Speaker 00

  I was putting all these vets that are, you know, 300 pounds on GLP-1s, they were losing 50, 100 pounds. Before it was an FDA approved for weight loss, we knew that if you put diabetics on this drug, they would lose weight, thanks to a lot of the bodybuilders. That kind of pioneered that. When did the bodybuilders first start using GLP's? Late 2010s. Wow. And then the Signal. I don't think Novo or Lilly wanted to make these for obesity. They were focused on making diabetes drugs. Because if we zoom out even further, this is another animal derived compound, right? It's found in the saliva of the Gila monsters. GLP-1 was discovered. It's too short acting to have worked on its own. Then pharmaceutical companies, this is where you've got to give pharma their credit,

• 2:24:55Speaker 00

  they developed these drugs into more functioning versions that had, you know, longer half lives and could stick around in the serum for longer to have the clinical effect. So then we started noticing that diabetics, like my grandma got Byetta, which was one of these first GLP-1 drugs like 25 years ago. It was the one, out of all the drugs she was on, the reason I went into medicine, that was the drug that changed her whole trajectory. Because she had less insulin needs and she was losing weight and more energetic. So we had seen the effects on diabetics and then you get liraglutide, dulaglutide, and then eventually semaglutide was the blockbuster. But you get all these positive effects coming from these drugs on diabetics. It gets translated into obese people and overweight patients. The question is, what is the long-term effect of this? Do you have to stay on this drug forever? Can you titrate off?

• 2:25:40Speaker 00

  The pharmaceutical companies have not given us good guidelines on that. They've shown us what happens if you stop the drug. You can max out on maximum dose of Zepatide, pull the brakes on. People tend to sometimes gain the weight. Some people don't, but some people regain back to baseline. Because if you think about it. The better way to think about weight loss, it's the calculation your brain does every single day with all the different hormones and peptides that are made from the gut, the GIP, GLP, glucagon, insulin, testosterone, estrogen, all these things kind of modulate. And there's this thing called a set point theory or settling points and they integrate, should I eat or not eat? Right? So the GLP-1 is a giant signal to the brain of don't eat. So we're modulating this pathway. What happens to all these young kids that are 18, 19 years

• 2:26:22Speaker 00

  old on 5mg of retinotrite that have lost 30, 40 pounds? Are they going to have to be on that for life now to maintain that weight?

• 2:26:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Can I ask you about that? Because when people say, perhaps you have to be on a drug for the rest of your life. I think, okay, what's the availability? What's the cost? What's the real world cost of taking six months off because you can't access it? There's a shortage and maybe better drugs will come along. Like, I don't necessarily have a problem with it, although if you talk to type 1 diabetics, in the old days, they weren't crazy about the idea that they had to constantly inject themselves with insulin. Now they're better, better delivery devices. I kind of feel like eventually there'll be some slow release polymer that will just kind of give you a microdose of it. You could dial it up if you want.

• 2:27:03Speaker 00

  There's all pills now.

• 2:27:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Personally, I don't worry so much about like, oh, for the rest of your life. I worry more about the much shorter life if people are obese. But what about these brain effects? I do worry about a brain that's developing in the context of a, you know, thousandfold or more increase in these GLPs. Because when we had Zach Knight on the podcast, he's not a clinician, he's a scientist up at UCSF, Howard Hughes investigator, which means he's like a superstar and deserves to be in that category. He described that the diabetic drugs would increase GLP by like, like double, quadruple, but the weight loss effects weren't really there. But the drugs that you rattled off a few minutes ago, Monjaro, Zempic, et cetera, and certainly retinotrite, we're talking about. Thousand-fold increases in GLP's. We don't know what the long-term effects of those are on like

• 2:27:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  neuroplasticity and could be great.

• 2:27:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:27:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Could be positive. We shouldn't always assume those effects are bad.

• 2:27:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, like the effects for like, let's say, a 60-year-old prediabetic diabetic on Alzheimer's disease seems to be potentially positive. I think that's the study last year didn't show a good signal on Alzheimer's prevention, but we know diabetes and cardiometabolic disease speeds up that transition. So controlling insulin dynamics might be beneficial there, and obesity is not great for Alzheimer's risk. The question is, what about for like these cognitive effects? Is the effect happening from the drug itself? Is it from misuse of the drug, too high of a dose? You're not getting enough electrolytes, you're not getting enough micronutrients, macronutrients, you know, your blood sugar is low. Because a lot of these patients, the way we approach it is training wheel effect when it comes to GLP-1s. Okay, you come to us, you're a patient, you want to use GLP-1s.

• 2:28:35Speaker 00

  We'll give you a lowest dose as possible that has an effect for you GLP-1 in conjunction with lifestyle modification, dietary advice, exercise programs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then hopefully peel away those training wheels, or keep them on if you need them, until we get to the endpoint that we want. Now, when people do it that way, I don't hear a lot of these effects anecdotally from Berkeley patients that we hear about online, where people are like, "Oh, I'm depressed, I hate my life from these drugs." And the question is, are they just, you know, a lot of people have low blood pressure from these drugs because they're not, you know, consuming enough electrolytes or enough food, period. Because like, some people will take a mega dose of these drugs and end up not eating, like, a day goes by, they've eaten one meal.

• 2:29:17Speaker 00

  That's not conducive to feeling good. Everyone, you know, the reason people are obese in the first place is because eating is such a pleasurable experience for humans and a social experience, et cetera, et cetera. The other thing is, if you're not eating with people on the same table, are you having less of that socialization aspect? A lot of times you meet up to eat or drink, or whatever it may be. So I'm very curious, when it comes to the cognitive effects, is it from the drug directly interacting with receptors in the brain? When we've seen that the right amount of dose decreases inflammation in the brain? Or is it because of the social aspects of the drug changing the way you behave and therefore leading to negative outcomes?

• 2:29:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  How dare you think of confounding variables. It's like, no, it's so cool because you're willing to go outside the box and say, "Hey, listen..." This might be due to some of the downstream consequences of reduced appetite.

• 2:30:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we know the literature shows that people now are having less alcohol cravings from this. It might be changing the way the dopaminergic signaling is happening in the brain, which is concerning, right? Because a lot of people will be stacking this with, you know, ADHD medications. They might be using some of these peptide stimulants, some Maxlang, whatever it may be. So the question, because what happens is people go to these websites, they buy one peptide and they got a great result. And they'll be like, you know, let me add three more peptides.

• 2:30:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sensory peptides.

• 2:30:23Speaker 00

  Yes, it's an increasing AOV problem, so the average sale value goes up from these websites. We'll see where GLP-1s go. The reality is, it's here. There is no pre-GLP-1 world for us as clinicians, as health enthusiasts. We're in a post-GLP-1 world and everything kind of dictates downstream from that.

• 2:30:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  The people I know have taken these, and I don't know exactly which, are taking much lower dosages than were prescribed to them. And they are indeed sharing them with getting the prescription, then people are sharing them, people are cost-sharing. Now people are trying to get them from other sources. Several of those people say they feel like they can think better, but I told them, well, yeah, if your insulin sensitivity is improved, if you're carrying less body fat, body fat's an endocrine organ, you need some body fat. But there could be a number of reasons for that. I don't know if these are direct effects on the brain.

• 2:31:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that'd be leptin sensitivity increases as you decrease the body fat mass. There's GLP-1 receptors on the pomegranate neurons in the brain. And no one's kind of examined what that means downstream for the leptin-melanocortin pathway. And what that means for energy status, thyroid hormone production, reproductive status. We know a lot of people are Ozempic babies and that a lady will be subfertile or infertile, start a weight loss drug and then find out by accident she's pregnant.

• 2:31:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Was she obese before?

• 2:31:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's overweight obese women that are having their fertility improve as a result of losing the weight. Because we know your leptin status is a key driver of fertility. Because if you're having low leptin levels, you're starving, you shouldn't be fertile. If you have too much leptin and you're leptin resistant, you shouldn't be having kids either. So both of those things kind of get modulated by these drugs as well.

• 2:32:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  There was a science paper some years ago that leptin hitting a certain threshold is actually what signals the onset of puberty in females. Is that still considered true?

• 2:32:09Speaker 00

  I think that's... That's part of it.

• 2:32:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Makes sense, like enough body fat to signal that there are enough resources and then animals or that was an animal study. Or the idea was that people perhaps also become females become reproductively competent at the point where there's enough energetic resources that interesting. Have you ever taken one of these?

• 2:32:25Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. Yes, I I had a family member with a GLP one pen from four years ago. That said it wasn't working. So I'm like, okay, let's see what's going on here. I got a pen. Don't do this at home. And I was like, yeah, it's not working. Like it's bunk. They got him from overseas. It was a a brand name Ozempic pen, but gotten from overseas. Got the pen. I was like, you know what? If it's bunk, let's see what it is. Don't do this at home. Biohackers in me came out and tried it. I injected a, I think it was a milligram of Ozempic.

• 2:32:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  What's a standard dose?

• 2:32:57Speaker 00

  You start at point two five and escalate to point five.

• 2:32:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  You went straight to a milligram?

• 2:33:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was like, ah, they're like, it doesn't work. I'm eating so much. I'm okay, whatever. You got bunk bunk pen from overseas. I go to do a shift. I was on night shift that day and I've never had Charizard like projectile vomiting.

• 2:33:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  And low blood sugar presumably?

• 2:33:16Speaker 00

  The blood sugar effects for for non diabetics don't get that low, but it was just miserable. Like I would I would go admit a patient, go upstairs. Vomit in the in the call room.

• 2:33:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  You just gave a really good reason why people shouldn't just do what you just described.

• 2:33:29Speaker 00

  They shouldn't do that. Then go back to back to the ER, admit a patient and it was it was the most miserable night of my life. So be very careful how you use these drugs. That's why titrate very slowly. Luckily with the newer ones, the effects are much less, like people who report trisapetide and retitratide even have less of these gastrointestinal effects. But that's a peptide gone wrong story.

• 2:33:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Peptide gone wrong. Retitratide.

• 2:33:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:33:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  I put out a post on X, I thought, and I do still think that it that retitratide is going to be a trillion dollar industry, not because so many people are necessarily going to use it for weight loss, but because many people will use it for weight loss. Many people will use it for other things because you can be sure, absolutely sure that Lily is going to find other. Ways to

• 2:34:17Speaker 00

  Market it.

• 2:34:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Market it and you can protect a patent by finding additional uses for things. I mean, a lot of the blockbuster drugs for eye diseases, the patents to prevent generic forms were continued by, here's the deal, folks, companies are really incentivized to take the hundreds of millions of dollars that they spent on clinical trials and research and development and not have to do it again. So if you can find another valid use for a drug, you don't have to run all the safety stuff, you don't have to do a lot of stuff, you just have to show efficacy and a few other things. But that's the way that drug companies continue to play the game to protect their investment, right? I mean, you can understand why they do it.

• 2:34:55Speaker 00

  They got shadow rollers?

• 2:34:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's your business. But so I'm guessing that retinotrite is, we're going to discover that it's useful for a number of things and from the clinical trials. There's a reason to believe that's going to be the case.

• 2:35:07Speaker 00

  And the big thing they're trying to do now is classify it as a biologic. So retinotrite has 39 amino acids. To be a biologic, it'd be above 40 amino acids.

• 2:35:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  And once you get to above 40 amino acids, if you are a biologic, then the patent lasts

• 2:35:18Speaker 00

  Way longer, I don't know the exact numbers.

• 2:35:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's like 15 years.

• 2:35:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, much, much longer.

• 2:35:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  If it's 40 or below amino acids, then it's something like five to seven years.

• 2:35:27Speaker 00

  That's someone patent law will have to.

• 2:35:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  So we're talking like hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars if it's a, if you, and you can tinker with this, you can add amino acids.

• 2:35:35Speaker 00

  And more importantly, no one can compound it if it's a biologic or if it's very difficult to compound, like the right certificates. Something similar happened with HCG where it was taken out of the compounders recently.

• 2:35:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  Really?

• 2:35:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so HCG.

• 2:35:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Human chorionic gonadotropin, this is commonly prescribed for trying to restore fertility to men, but it's main, mostly being given in IVF cycles to women.

• 2:35:56Speaker 00

  Yep, yep. There's a big controversy about HCG and compounders and who can compound it and who can't, that's beyond this, but this is a very important thing because if Lilly gets retinotrite as a biologic, then the compounders are out of luck because the compounders all have the formula for retinotrite, they're ready to make it. Like they can get the API from China and start compounding it as soon as it's available. It will make them all billions of dollars. But if Lilly is able to do this, they'll be able to protect themselves from what's going to happen. See, the Trump administration now is trying to get with Trump, RX, Lilly and Novo Nordisk to drop their prices to make them more available, which has happened. Like now, I think you can get a, you know, $300 monthly dose of terzepatide available through these websites.

• 2:36:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  It used to be 1500.

• 2:36:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, 1500 without insurance. Some insurance will cover it, some wouldn't. You'd have to get a savvy clinician that will advocate on your behalf to get these covered. But cash pay between, you know, even some of the pills, I think you can pay 150 bucks a month for the orfogaplan, which is not a peptide, but still GLP-1 agonist, which kind of gets into the point. Like, it doesn't matter if it's a peptide or not. What matters is where it touches, what receptor it touches. Because orfogaplan is more similar to semaglutide. Both them are GLP-1 drugs. One's a peptide, one's not. Then BPC is the semaglutide. So, like, everyone online talks about peptides are good or peptides are bad. There is no actual scientific category of peptides that gives you a functional definition that's discussable between two people. Because what do you mean by peptide? Do you mean carnecine? Or do you mean retitutide?

• 2:37:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Excellent point. Speaks to a lot of the confusion. You are a beam of clarifying information on this. Actually, I'm going to put in a vote publicly right here and now, but also I'm going to do what I can to contact folks that are relevant. I think you should, no joke, I think you should be in charge of a nomenclature committee. I think in the world of genetics, for a long time, people would just name genes Sonic Hedgehog, or, you know, Sync 1, or people name it after their cousin, and it was a mess. And so what ends up happening is you find similarity between genes across different laboratories. Eventually, you have a meeting and you come up with a, you have a nomenclature committee.

• 2:38:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then you say, this is, you know, Efrain 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, these are the sequences. The general public doesn't think about molecules in that way.

• 2:38:09Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:38:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  But the general public are diving right into this. They are the experiment. And so what I think would be very, very useful would be a clear and accessible nomenclature to divide up what we've talked about today. You know, BPC 157, you know, peptides with and without known receptors. The regenerative peptides, as you've called them, things like thymus and alpha TB 500, which are immunogenic peptides. I think The word peptides is just too general.

• 2:38:37Speaker 00

  It's too general.

• 2:38:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm putting my vote in for you, not that you don't already have enough to do to come up with some nomenclature that maybe I can help propagate in some of the other people in the podcast community. We'll even contact our close, close friends in legacy media and explain to them how this works and maybe they can help propagate it, just for sake of clarity.

• 2:38:56Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:38:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right? We're not taking the stance these are good or bad, but just for sake of clarity, given that there's so many people that are peptide curious. Okay, so before we wrap, I solicited X and Instagram for questions about peptides. I did not reveal exactly who you are, but I gave some of your credentials and got back many, many excellent questions, most of which, thanks to you, were answered during the course of our conversation up until now. But there are a couple of them that many people asked, we didn't touch on, at least not directly. One thing that's come up several times is the question about, for women who have endometriosis or fibroids or other things related to reproductive health and potential, can things like BPC157

• 2:39:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  help and/or hurt those circumstances, given their potential role in angiogenesis and the other things you described?

• 2:39:44Speaker 00

  No literature exists on either animal or human data that relates to those peptides. I'd say those are more hormonal slash metabolic issues that a good OB-GYN should take care of. They're very difficult to treat conditions and very miserable to have for people and have fertility implications, but those are more on the hormonal side. I think the hormonal lever is way stronger than peptide lever like BPC or any of those. And as far as I'm concerned, there's no case reports or studies that would suggest positive or negative.

• 2:40:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  CNS effects, central nervous system, excuse me, of BPC157 or other peptides that we've talked about that don't fall under the typical umbrella that people go to when they think about BPC157. Now, you talked about some of the stuff related to alcohol and perhaps other things like Adderall, but...

• 2:40:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  Anything known about, you know, people feeling better or worse on different peptides? Just psychologically, neurologically? TBI, I'll throw TBI in there for myself. I don't have TBI fortunately, but I know many people that do. They reach out to me. Could it be beneficial in those cases?

• 2:40:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, there were studies in Russia on TBIs when it comes to Cortexin and Serbolinein, which would probably never be available in the United States. So we'll skip those. There's no good data on BPC TBIs. They theoretically could be useful from an anti-stress perspective. That'd be interesting to explore that. BPC's neurological effects are very homeostatic in nature. They don't let you get too high, in the mice data at least. The mice can't get too drunk and they can't withdraw from alcohol. They can't get too high on the mice methamphetamines. And they can't get too high on the methamphetamines and they don't withdraw either. So there's a homeostatic mechanism that might explain some of these anhedonia side effects that people are reporting, where BPC modulates the gut-brain access in a way, which we do not understand, it's kind of woo-woo, that makes it so that your brain can't go too far in one direction.

• 2:41:29Speaker 00

  Maybe in putting, if you think of a just-so story, it's putting you into a rest and digest state to heal whatever problem you have. If that's why BPC exists as a big parent compound, that might be part of the fact that if you screen BPC, your body goes into like a convalescent mode. Because it will take away stimulants, it'll take away sedatives. Don't try this, of course, but there seems to be a homeostatic mechanism in BPC that needs to be explored further with good data.

• 2:41:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Very interesting. Thank you. The major question was, what should people do if they are actually interested in obtaining peptides? Let's just set the GLPs aside, because it's kind of a separate category. And they want to explore their use and they want to be as safe as possible. Where shouldn't they look?

• 2:42:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:42:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is how I'll phrase the question. Where should they look? Who should they talk to? At what point do they, can they be confident that what they're taking is what, you know, the bottle claims and that it's, you know, free of contaminants and so on? Many, many questions, but I think this is what kind of the question.

• 2:42:30Speaker 00

  Yep, yep, yep. It's the most difficult question to answer because the majority of people are getting their peptides from research-only websites. Unfortunately, those are not reliable. We don't know what's in them. They could be good, could be bad. Could be as good as a combined pharmacy, could be much worse, could be the wrong peptide in the vial. So we don't know what's in there. What should happen over the next six, 12, 24 months is there will be a lot of physician-led options for patients to get peptides. Number one, you should encourage your physician, if you don't have one, get one and get a good relationship with one because having a good relationship with your physician is a key aspect of driving good health. But having a physician that's educated on peptides, to my doctor friends, all of you guys now live in a peptide era. You have no choice but to get educated, so get educated, we should create resources for that. There will be a lot of telemedicine options opening up soon through various companies that will offer these peptides.

• 2:43:15Speaker 00

  And it will be good for the consumer because it will be a race down in price. And then we'll know which combined pharmacies are better, which ones are worse, so you can get better sourced peptides. But you should get them from clinicians. The question that's going to happen is there's going to be a lot of these orally available peptides and they're going to be all over supplement websites, like you'll find them with your magnesium, your creatine, and then your penicillin or your BPC157. The question is, what is that going to look like? So we'd like, you know, our FDA overlords to give us some guidance there on what can and cannot be sold and bought. But it should be physician-led, you should be doing this under the guidance of a physician that's monitoring you. You shouldn't be taking tesamorlin without checking IDF1 levels. GLP-1 even should be monitored with physicians that can counsel you on too much weight loss. Like some of these celebrities should have had better clinicians monitoring their GLP-1 journeys because they lost way too much weight.

• 2:43:59Speaker 00

  That doesn't look healthy at all. Unless someone's, first of all, if someone's not having the basics in place, there's no point in putting all these peptides in. Morning sunlight, sleep, darkness at night. Yes. Good diet, minimally processed food. Yes. The next phase of peptide curious and peptide-driven discussions is going to be like, how do you incorporate it into a giant health system? Like you do morning sunlight, blood blockers and epitalon, you do, you know, BPC and you work out in the gym or whatever it may be. There's going to be protocols that develop, but I think within six months, there'll be very good physician options for everybody. Abud.

• 2:44:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Amazing. Thank you so much for coming here today and again shedding so much light on what all of these things are. You have clearly a virtuoso level of understanding and ability to communicate about the history of these things, what they are, what they aren't, what we know, what we still don't know, the potential upsides, the potential hazards, the regulation, and on and on. There are 50 other topics that you and I must talk about at some point. Your knowledge of hormones in men and women, pregnancy and women's hormones affecting the fetus, how progesterone impacts DHT in male offspring, incredible. Absolutely want to have you back to have that discussion, but we'll let people digest this in the meantime. We'll put links to where people can find you. I just want to say thank you for doing

• 2:45:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  what you do. And if you don't mind me sharing, you're 33 years old. That's right. I love that you're a clinician and you're practicing medicine, but please, please, please keep, wherever you can, keep up your efforts as a public educator. Come back and talk to us again. You're a gift to us all, and thank you so much. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, and thank you for the kind words. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Abud Bakri. To learn more about his work and to find links to the various things we discussed, please see the show note captions. I should also mention that Dr. Bakri has just released a new app, which is focused on circadian biology, which we didn't talk about today, but he's a true expert there as well. You can also find a link to that app in the show note caption. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube

• 2:45:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  channel. That's a terrific, zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five

• 2:46:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep To exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast,

• 2:47:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as what we call protocols, in the form of one- to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available at completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Abu Bakri.

• 2:48:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

• 2:48:23Speaker 02

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