Effects of Low Testosterone No One Talks About & How To Optimize Your Hormones

Everyone knows what TRT is, everyone wants to ask about, and one of the downsides of that is that a lot of the time people who come in wanting TRT treatment, metabolic dumpster fires. And this is a real problem because these guys have often destroyed the endocrine system from years or decades of poor health practices.

When we're looking at low testosterone symptoms, things like anxiety, depression, poor sleep quality, lack of energy, anxedonia, which is where people don't feel pleasure from things that should be pleasurable and enjoyable, lack of focus, lack of motivation, lack of drive. And the factor that connects these things as well is that poor diet and lifestyle will also suppress the testosterone levels.

In all aspects of improving health, whether it's mental health or physical health, you have to meet the medicine halfway. And we are live, Dave. How are you, Sir? My brother, thank you for having me. Hey man, I'm excited to be chatting with you. I've had like multiple guests on talking about all things hormones, TRTHRT. It's like a super hot topic right now, but I kind of want to just. Wipe.

The slate clean. Assume I don't know anything and just start with a clean slate with you, man, because I've heard nothing but good things about you. You're super knowledgeable on the subject, so let's just dive in man. First of all, what gets you into this realm of information to begin with? Yes. So it's, it's a little bit of a, a long back story that I won't bog you down too much with, but I had no interest in science at all when I was younger.

I was a musician. I did my undergrad degree in digital marketing and I had a brain injury when I was in my mid 20s. And every Doctor Who I spoke to said that there was no way of recovering and I was going to have this permanent Vertigo state for the rest of my life.

And if it wasn't for initiating TRT during those very dark, challenging spaces of my life, which was coming up on 10 years ago now, I don't think I would have had the mental resolve to go back to university, get a postgraduate degree in science and, and learn about how to heal the brain. And also to learn that endocrinology is a very key part of human health, which I think it's been neglected for a very long time, both in mental health and physical health.

And that transitions me into becoming a researcher, becoming an author, becoming a health coach, and now being a part owner as well as partner of clinics all over the world. And my key mission has been to educate. Originally it was to actually raise awareness around TRT existing, but I think that that's kind of being done now. Five years ago, no one knew what it was.

Now everyone knows what TRT is, which I think is great, but it's created this new problem where you can get TRT everywhere, but no one knows what the hell they're doing with it. And I think that it has the capacity, of course, more harm

than good. So my mission has been to educate as many people as possible, both practitioners and patients, on how to do TRT properly, number one, but #2 how to do all the other important lifestyle factors that you ultimately have to do in order to get the results that people are hoping to get on TRT. Totally agree.

So when you had the injury, how old were you when you got on the TRT? 25. 25 and I'm assuming, I mean I've had, I've got one employee actually that had like this crazy injury and it messed up his endocrine system and he got on TRT for that reason. But I would assume the majority of the people that are getting on TRT now are kind of by way of just lower testosterone in general, low libido, things like that being the primary draw. Yeah, I would say so.

I think that if we look at the traditional literature and approach for hypogonadism, that would tend to be like the male version of menopause. Like a guy gets older, hormones decline, and then we were still youthful levels, but we've got this whole cohort of younger guys. There's a there's a subset of men who messed themselves up with anabolic steroids and damaged their endocrine system

from that. But we've got this new wave of younger guys who were coming up who either were unhealthy during development or for unknown reasons, which I think are related to environmental factors, that we've got this whole cohort of younger men who were doing everything right, who still have the testosterone level of a 90 year old. And unfortunately, they're going to the doctors or they're going to healthcare providers. They're being told their levels

are normal. They're getting put on antidepressants and all kinds of other psychiatric medications. And the issue is that they just have 1/4 to 1/3 of the testosterone levels and they should have to thrive. And they're wondering why they feel like crap, sleep like crap, have a terrible sex drive, terrible results in the gym, and ultimately it's because the biologist is completely out of

whack. You. You probably understand it's way better than me, but isn't it something like over the last 50 years test average testosterone has dropped by like 50% or something like that? It's difficult to measure because we haven't actually been able to measure or we haven't wanted to slash being able to in science and measure testosterone levels for that long. So we've only got a handful of decades of data to look at.

Like we don't know what a healthy 20 year old in the 1930s or 1940s had because we weren't able to measure levels in serum not far back. But there's been some interesting research that's come out in this field showing massive declines in testosterone and sperm levels. The most interesting study that I saw, it wasn't actually intending to measure this. It was actually an interventional trial using estrogen blocking medication.

And when they noted the participants, they had participants under the age of 30 and participants over the age of 65. And the authors, authors noted that before starting the trial that there was no statistical significantly different level of the younger man versus the older men's testosterone levels. So the way that I describe it to people is the average 20 to 30 year old these days has the same amount of testosterone as the average 7 year old these days,

and that's the problem. That is pretty well man. What what do you think the it's, it's a myriad of things I'm assuming, but what do you think like the primary drivers for that average is decreasing over time as a result of? I think that there's a huge amount of factors that we don't

know which one is causing the lion's share of the issue. So we know that there's the environmental disruption. So I call it the three PS, the plastics pollutions and the pesticides. These are the environmental, what are called xenoestrogenic estrogenic chemicals, meaning that we're taking unnatural synthetic molecules and they're getting into the human body and trace amounts through just

living and exposure. And when they bind to the internal estrogen receptor, they have a much stronger effect than natural biological estrogen does. And this can cause some negative feedback in terms of the way that the brain produces hormones. The other factor though, which I think is often overlooked, is the obesity epidemic and also the lifestyle factors that come with that, the processed food, the lack of exercise, the lack

of sunlight, etcetera. And I think one factor that people massively overlook, but it becomes abundantly clear when you start to look for it in clinical practice, is obesity during puberty. I mean, this is a new thing. I mean, in the 60s and 70s, kids weren't obese during puberty. It just wasn't a thing. This has been a modern

phenomenon. And I think when the endocrine system is developing, if someone is metabolically significantly diseased during that period, I also think antidepressant medications might be a factor as well. But I think particularly obesity and inactivity, while that system is developing, stunts its capacity to reach its full potential. That's just what I've seen, and I hope that the literature catches up and looks into this, because it's pretty damn obvious when you look.

Yeah. Do you think there's much of an impact from like a genetic and epigenetics standpoint? Because like, I look at my life, you know, personally and I'm healthy, I'm eating all the right foods. I've like removed all the negative chemicals, the soaps, like I purify my water. Like I I do all the right things, check all the boxes, so to speak. But I've never had particularly high testosterone.

So I'm in my mind, it's like, well, maybe I'm coming from some genetic standpoint that just doesn't have that high testosterone to begin with. So do you think there's that much of an impact? Epigenetics are really big, and epigenetics is a much more exciting field for people to be looking into than genetics because epigenetics are how

things express. So you've got genetic things, for example, like the color of your eyes, like nothing is going to change that in terms of how you're living. That's passed down in hereditary. So when we're looking at epigenetics, there's a lot more research now showing that. I mean, it's what we all know just from common sense. Healthy parents have healthy kids, unhealthy parents have unhealthy kids.

And we're learning more about how the health of the parents, both the mother when she's pregnant, but also both parents in the years prior to conception, will impact the health of the child in the way that child's genetics will express. So I think it is a huge, huge, huge factor. And I think that there are some things that people can do in terms of their diet and lifestyle factors to change the way these epigenetics express. But I also think that some of us are just dealt a certain hand.

And I don't think it's ideal that younger people need hormone replacement therapy. I think that's a big shame. I mean, hormone replacement therapy is a big serious medical intervention, but so is being hypogonadal for your entire

adult life. So if we're in a situation where we're saying, OK, this is something that people are being born with now and it's an issue of the modern diet and lifestyle, If it's not something that we're able to correct, it is something that we're able to intervene with.

And the outcomes that we see from intervening with that are absolutely life changing, which is why I dedicated my whole life in Korea to advancing this field and also, you know, champion and advocating for men to really be educated on the topic and also be able to have informed conversations with seeking out therapy to improve their life. Totally.

And if people go to like get their blood drawn, I mean all these tests have like a window of what they say the ideal range is. But like when you look at total testosterone, that window is like from 200 to 1200 or something crazy. So you could be in range at, you know, 20250IN. You working with people over the years, Like what would you say is the optimal range that people should strive for? You know, more narrowed down than what that broad range exhibits.

Yeah, it's, it's really challenging when people are looking at the ranges, especially when people are interpreting their own blood work. And I think access to information is great, but I also think that access to information that you don't understand can lead to bad decisions. So one of the challenges is that when you're looking at your blood tests and it says that you should be between X&Y, the question is what does that

actually mean? And people think that if it's below that or above that, you've got a problem. And if you're within that range, then you're fine. You know, if it comes up bold and in red, then there's an issue. And for some blood markers, that's absolutely true. The ranges absolutely do represent what is healthy and what is unhealthy. But the problem with a lot of these blood markers is that they're just adjusted based on averages.

So when we look at science, the terms that we use would be the mean, which is like the average, and then standard deviation, which is basically how far away from the average these things are. And this is how they calculate the range. So when you're looking at your total testosterone blood work and it's got a range of let's

say like, you know, 200 used to be like 200 to 1200. Now it's often like 200 to 700 because it's falling in absolute freefall. Like I've witnessed it fall dramatically, like significantly just in the five years without in doing this. But if you're looking at that number, all you're looking at is the average and then the standard deviation of the last 100 or 200 guys that got their testosterone level checked. It's not a benchmark or a standard of what it is to be healthy.

It's just a representation of the average cohort. The problem that we have is that the average healthy athletic young man is not the standard population that's getting that testosterone checked on average, because the indication for measuring testosterone levels in the blood from a medical perspective is for prostate symptoms. So what we're typically looking out on paper is actually the average of elderly men with prostate symptoms, and it's not

age adjusted. You know, when you look at a woman's progesterone level, they've got different reference ranges for if she's postmenopausal or where she is during a menstrual cycle. But if you're looking at a testosterone level for a man, it's the same reference range if he's 18 or 80. So this can create a lot of problems for people. So because the reference range has fallen so dramatically in Australia, we use the units and animal per liter for total testosterone.

So the numbers look a little bit different. But when I started, the reference range was 10 to 35. The reference range is now 6 to 24. That's massively different if you're looking at where you sit relative to like the middle of the court bottom quartile or the top quartile of the range. So what is now mid range used to

be bottom quarter. So unless you're in the top quartile of the reference range when you're getting your testosterone levels checked, it doesn't necessarily mean and go, OK, well, I'm below the top quartile so I need TRT, I've got a problem. But what it does mean that if you are having some negative symptoms and you're not feeling

100%, it's really important to not just look at testosterone, but you look at the entire blood panel. And when I say you look at it, I mean that you solicit someone who knows what they're doing. You can see the whole picture together. And also who is advocating for your best interest? Unfortunately, there's a lot of people out there who just sell you testosterone and peptides and injectable beers and whatever pills because that's

how they make their money. But if you work with someone who actually knows what they're doing, they can look at your symptoms and how you're feeling and say, look, this is actually something that you could and maybe should intervene with to have a better quality of life. Or if they know what they're doing, they can say, well, actually your levels are pretty average, but the way you're looking after yourself is pretty

damn average as well. And if you're not sleeping properly, you're not eating properly, you're drinking a bunch of alcohol, you're not exercising, you're able weight, then you're not going to have optimal testosterone levels. And that's what you should expect. So it's important that people understand that sometimes this condition can be intractable, meaning it can't be solved and

it requires intervention. But other times people's testosterone levels suck because they're looking off themselves like shit. And that's just how the body works. Yeah, no, I think lifestyle

factor is huge for sure. When you when you're looking at, you know, you mentioned kind of like you look at women, they're going through menopause, their different menstrual cycles are going to expect different ranges in in the realm of males, what would be, you know, textbook expectation throughout their livelihood, like a different ages, puberty as they get older. Like what? What can someone expect if they are healthy? If they are doing the things right? Like what?

What would be an ideal trend line, so to speak? If we're going to talk about total testosterone, which is a measure of what the body produces, so there's two lab markers we typically look at for testosterone 1's total, which is either how much you're making or how much you're taking. And then freeze testosterone, which is more of an indication of what's working at a receptor level. But that's going to be impacted by other binding proteins and

their production in the body. So if we're talking about total testosterone, I think a good healthy level for a young man is 1000. If it's got 4 digits and that's really healthy, you definitely want to be closer to 1000 than 500. I think that's a good rule of thumb. The problem is that guys are walking around with A200300400 testosterone level. This is what we would expect for a guy in your 60s and seven.

So if you're in your 30s or if you're in your early 40s and you're thriving and doing well, 708 hundred testosterone is good. If you're younger and you're kicking ass and you're looking after yourself really well, 1000 plus is fantastic. Anything on the 500 or mid 5 hundreds I would be looking at as suboptimal and anything below that you're looking at maybe needing an intervention in terms

of therapy. Now there are differentiating factors in terms of something called receptor availability. So hormones don't do anything in the body unless they activate a receptor. Kind of like if you're playing pinball, you don't get any points until it hits the bumpers. So we can't measure things like receptor availability. So some guys might feel great at 500 because they have this genetic expression where they're more sensitive to the antigens. So it's not a hard rule or

anything like that. But you want to be shooting for 4 digits or close to that to have good testosterone levels. And then when we optimize testosterone levels exogenously, we can sometimes look to push it a little bit higher, because what we find in practice is that external testosterone isn't quite as efficient as naturally made testosterone.

So sometimes levels have to be a little bit on the higher end to achieve a result. But we're also in a situation where we're saying, well, we've already shut the endocrine system down. It takes just as much work to inject this much as it does to inject a fraction more. So now we can actually achieve what the optimal level of testosterone could have been all along. And that's where the magic can happen. You can turn a bad situation into a good situation.

Got you. If someone has more sensitive receptors, for instance, if we can't test for that, do we do things based more so off of symptoms and how they're feeling? And I'm, and if so, what is it you're looking for? Like who's a good candidate for TRT in that regard? Because I again, use myself an example. I've never had super high levels, but I don't really feel any of the things that people that reportedly have low levels are expressing.

So I would assume that maybe my receptors are more sensitive. Absolutely. So it's very important to look at the cross section of symptoms in lab work. The problem with low testosterone symptoms isn't that very broad and very ambiguous. So one thing is that low testosterone symptoms and low thyroid symptoms are virtually identical. So it's always important that we also screen the thyroid dysfunction as well because that

can also be a factor. But when we're looking at low testosterone symptoms, things like anxiety, depression, poor sleep quality, lack of energy, anxedonia, which is where people don't feel pleasure from things that should be pleasurable and enjoyable, lack of focus, lack of motivation, lack of drive, sexual dysfunction, not waking up with erections, things like this. The problem is that those symptoms can all be caused by poor dying lifestyle, and the

factor that connects these things as well is that poor diet and lifestyle will also suppress the testosterone levels. So the body is a very complex series of interconnected systems and one of the failures of many aspects of healthcare, everything from fitness and nutrition all the way to Western medicine, is that we view everything in isolation. It's like going to five different types of mechanics and having them all service one individual component of your

car. It doesn't make any sense and it doesn't deliver the best outcome. So the challenge for a practitioner who actually cares about their patients or clients and knows what they're doing is that we have to look at how the individual's feeling, look at their blood work, and say, are these symptoms actually coming from the levels being suboptimal? And if so, are the levels suboptimal in a way that we

can't resolve? And there are markers in the blood work that we can look at to see if testosterone production is being suppressed. If the testicles are failing, we can also look at other blood markers to suggest, hey, is this person pre diabetic? Do they have something like fatty liver disease? Are they eating a garbage diet that's jacking their triglycerides up? We can get a lot of indicators that really give us some good insight on how someone's looking after themselves, but it's also

incredibly important. This is why 15 minute doctor's appointments don't work, is that people need to be upfront and disclose all aspects of how they're looking after themselves. Because some people have those symptoms because, you know, they've got a newborn baby and they're an entrepreneur and they're not sleeping properly like that. There can be so many factors that will lead to these symptoms in a transient way.

And if you come in and supercharge the engine by cranking up the testosterone levels, if the body is naturally suppressing that system, you're not going to end up with a smooth ride forward. If the body's pumping the brakes and you're pumping the accelerator, you're not working with the body now, you're working against it.

So when you go and see someone with these symptoms and comprehensive blood work, it really has to be a skillful practitioner or an expert looking at this to actually make the diagnosis to say, yeah, look, TRT would be in your best interest. Or maybe you just need to fix these other factors and see how you go and then come back over time to see if you're feeling. Yeah, I definitely want to talk about the the landscape of TRT as you see it.

Real quick before I forget though, Andrew kept messaging me about this graph that he's seen you illustrate that basically just talks about, you know, lifestyle factors in current day society, like as as people get busier, they have kids, they're young professionals. It's kind of like corresponding with what's happening naturally in the body with testosterone. I don't know if you know what graph he's talking about, but if you do, can you elaborate on that?

Yeah, interesting story with that one. So I was, I was emailing the team at the Mark Bell Powell Project to ask if I could be a guest for like a year. And, you know, never heard that. Totally fine. I'm sure they got a whole bunch of emails. And then when I did my speech at the Silverback Summit, I did this graph the night before in Canva with like squiggly lines that I just, you know, I don't have any graphic design skills.

And after the speech, Andrew saw my speech and he was like, hey, you need to come on the power project and you need to bring that graph. And I was like, well, I need to do the graph a little bit better because the one that I did looks like absolute garbage. So the power project came out a couple of days ago, the graph presentations at the end, but I'll explain it to you now. So the, the way that I look at it. So I'm, I'm very interested in behavioral psychology and I'm very interested in

neuropsychiatry. So the difference between psychology and psychiatry. Psychology is more about behavior, mood, emotions, and psychiatry is more about the architecture of the brain and neurotransmission and how this facilitates the psychology of the individual. So I'm very interested in both of these things. And when I did my post grad, it's called a postgraduate diploma, so you can do a master's in a field that you didn't do your original undergrad in.

I did that in biomedical science so that I could do neuropsychiatry to learn how to heal the brain. Turns out psychiatry is just about drugging people, so I dropped out of it pretty quickly. But the reason I got into looking at testosterone was that when you look at it from a psychiatric perspective, testosterone is basically the perfect pharmacological antidepressant for men in terms of how it impacts

neurotransmission. So when we look at how testosterone levels work in in, well, both men and women, but particularly in men, basically you flatline the testosterone up until you get puberty. And then you get that big spike that everyone's aware of when you're 18 to 21, depending on your development. And then assuming that you look after yourself in a relatively consistent way over the course of your life, you get a relatively linear decline.

You know, women more so get a crash when they get menopause. Men get more of a really gradual insidious decline over their lifetime, but it peaks when you're 18 to 21, and then it gradually declines after that. And when we look at how life tends to work, again, assuming that people don't have a

traumatic childhood and assuming that things go relatively OK to people, life's pretty crazy when you're a toddler and when your testosterone's low, you don't have any responsibilities. You're going to school, you're playing video games, hang out with your friends. And then as you get older, there's this increased burden of performance that men have. You know, I think that we really become adults at 30, not at 18, you know, 18 year old boys and not adults.

They can just legally drink and drive. They're not adults. I think men become adults when they hit 30. And then as you get towards your 40s, you're more expected to have some degree of mastery either over a skill over yourself, over leading a family, over leading other people. It's expected that a 40 or a 45 year old man is going to have his shit together, whereas it's kind of acceptable for a 20 to 25 year old guy to still be like finding himself and goofing around a bit from like a

societal standpoint. So as the burden of performance goes up in life, the testosterone levels are there to buffer that, and that all works out pretty well. And then as the testosterone levels go down over time, the burden of performance also goes down because as you get older, you've built your family, you've built your legacy, you can kind of sit back, put your feet up, retire, and chill out.

The problem that we're having though, is that that burden of performance in society hasn't gone away. Absolutely not. But if the testosterone levels are peaking at half of where they were before, all of a sudden now the burden of performance for men is still up here, but the testosterone levels are at that 7 year old level when you're 20 or 21 and it's all downhill.

So the problem that I think, and what I see is that we have these younger guys who don't have the biological foundation to buffer them against the stresses of life. Because when we look at what testosterone does internally in terms of your biology but also in terms of your psychology, it buffers against the effects of stress. So things are still difficult in life when you've got higher testosterone levels, but that challenge of pushing outside

your comfort zone feels better. You know, I think it's Andrew Huberman who says that testosterone makes effort feel good. And that's a very good way to summarize how it works because it facilitates dopamine transmission, which is like our pleasure neurotransmitter, but it buffers and offsets for a lot of the activity of cortisol and

adrenaline in the body. And when we look at what leadership is, which I think if people say, well, what is masculinity, Masculinity is leadership is testosterone creates the capacity to develop leadership because leadership is being cool, calm and collected and rational in stressful situations that would overwhelm other people.

That's what leadership is. So if men are lacking that leadership and that that drive and that ability to push outside their comfort zone and make something of themselves in the early phases of their life, I think it can be quite challenging, demoralizing, guilt inducing, anxiety inducing to get into your 30s and 40s and feel like you're behind the 8

ball. Feeling like you don't have something to show for it, feeling like you're still a shadow of who you should be even when you're trying your hardest and doing everything right. You're feeling fatigued and tired and drained like a 50 year old when you're 30. And I think how that impacts the trajectory of where you end up and the life you can ultimately live is very sad.

And I think that that can lead people to developing and living a depressive life, which ultimately resolves in a depressive mental health disorder. So it's it's more so looking at this idea that if testosterone is not there to create the foundation for someone to deal with the challenges of development and life, that as a result, they can get very easily overwhelmed. They can become avoided, they can become passive and complacent, and they can become almost a victim of their

circumstances. And I see that play out and I think it can be devastating. Yeah, it's, it's it's unsettling how much more rampant the use of antidepressants SSR is. And things of that nature have come. I mean, like, I don't know, so many people that are on it now. It's like, I don't recall any of that ten years ago.

You also make a good argument with that for like kids, adolescents, teenagers having more hardship and responsibility bestowed upon them at an earlier age to kind of just build that foundation up while their natural levels are significantly higher, which is also totally counter to all our system as it sits currently. I mean, kids go to high school, which is super chill, and they go to college, which is also

typically pretty chill. They may be broke, but like there's not that much responsibility and they graduate college and they go, you know, maybe corporate America, who knows, But there's not generally a ton of responsibility until 30s and beyond from what I've seen in general day-to-day society. It's, it was interesting when I

was at university. I mean, at every point that you're at in life, you know, you're probably dealing with the hardest challenges that you've developed in terms of like, you know, where you're at. You know, I remember year 12 exams seemed like the end of the world. You know, looking back on that, that was just a piece of cake.

Universities seem to be challenging when you've got all these assessments and deadlines and you're working a part time job. But at the end of the day, the burden of performance and the responsibility is so low.

And one of the things I see a lot of guys really struggling with, especially when they start to have a family before they've learned to look after themselves properly, which I think a lot of the time can be a real challenge and sometimes a mistake as well if they're not ready for it. But when you become an adult, and especially if you're running a business or you're providing for a household, there's only 24 hours in a day. You need to sleep for about 7 to 9 of those hours.

And if you're not effectively managing your time for the rest of it, you don't have the resources to work a fulfilling career, look after your health and fitness, and also have healthy relationships and healthy spiritual development as well. So a lot of the time people get very overwhelmed with realizing just how much execution and planning goes into proper self-care.

Because if you're managing your nutrition, managing your training, and you're working 40 hours a week, you don't really have time to get wasted on a Saturday night and be hungover all day Sunday. And for the guys who continue to do that as they get older into their 30s and 40s, they're really behind the 8 ball and that's when things can start

catching up with them. So when you don't have that internal drive and energetic resources of having a good energy metabolism, which is also supported by the endocrine system, it can be very difficult to live a life that is not overwhelmingly stressful and still have something to show for it at the end of the day. Yeah, completely agree. When it comes to like we're also in this like weird state where infertility rates are significantly high.

Is that how tightly linked is that to total testosterone, free testosterone? Is that more so the health of the sperm, sperm motility, things like that? Like how closely linked is all that? There's not a lot of data linking the two, which doesn't make any sense because obviously the sperm and the testicles are, you know, kind of interconnected in virtually every way. So there's absolutely a connection. It's not really deniable with this stage.

One thing that's interesting for me, So if I look around at women who I've met over the course of my life, who've been about my age, give or take, more than half of them have had issues with their menstrual cycle. Whether it's like brutally painful periods, endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, losing their period when they're stressed, all that kind of stuff is rampant in women under 35. When my parents were that age, they didn't know anyone with those problems.

This wasn't the thing. And when it comes to men, those issues are still prevalent and present. The symptoms of them just don't really show up until it comes time to fire the children. So it's very concerning how many young and relatively healthy people are having problems with fertility. And it can be very scary and very devastating when guys in their mid 30s are having trouble

conceiving. And one of the challenges that I see when guys do their sperm analysis is a lot of the time the issue is in the lack of sperm production. It's a high percentage of sperm that are not healthy. So either they're lazy and the sperm aren't moving properly, or they have a higher rate of deformity. So there's always going to be some deformed sperm in an ejaculate load when they do a test on it.

But we're seeing guys who are having all kinds of deformities in their sperm and I think that this is a downstream effect of long term metabolic dysfunction. So people being a little bit overweight for way too long is basically causing them to be pre diabetic or sometimes they're even in type 2 diabetes realm and they don't realize it. This has huge negative effects on sperm parameters and fertility.

But the other factor which unfortunately I mean the SSRI hypothesis of depression, which was called the monomine hypothesis of depression, which was this theory to monomine meaning 1 neurotransmitter, in which this case was serotonin. There was this theory in the 80s that people were depressed because their brain was broken and it didn't produce enough serotonin to make them happy. And this theory was thoroughly

debunked in the 90s. Both in terms of looking at the mechanisms of how depression works, but then also looking at all the massive amounts of data on interventional trials with SSRIs where they found that the placebo beat the SSRI. So the SSRI didn't work, or the SSRI was outperformed by other interventions like diet and lifestyle.

But unfortunately, even though that research was so, so abundantly clear, we're like 3 decades down the line from this and this is still the modern paradigm that's being practiced in psychiatry. When someone goes to the doctor and they're saying I don't feel good in my life, the doctor isn't looking at anything in terms of their diet, lifestyle,

blood work, anything like that. They've just got a little handbook that says if someone's sad, give them this many milligrams of Zoloft and send them on their way. And the problem is that not only does this not actually help the issue, but it's leading to downstream ramifications. And I'm seeing this show up a lot of the time in fertility as well. So psychiatric medications for men as well as hormonal birth control for women.

You know, it's, it's crazy to me that women are getting pushed onto the pill by their doctor for acne when they're like 14 years old and they're not looking at other factors for that. And then, yeah, we're getting into our 30s, wanting to have kids, and we've got a decade of psychiatric or hormonal birth control medication use. And all of a sudden the fertility complications are there. And we're not really sure how this is going to affect the next generation of kids.

And I think that's a little bit scary. Yeah, from an epigenetic standpoint, man, this is super scary because like you look at your lifestyle decisions having a profound impact on like the next three generations. And if we've got the infertility issues or if you've been, if you've been fathered by lazy sperm, quote UN quote, like that's not a positive thing either. And people on all these medications as they're getting pregnant, that having an impact on the fetus.

Like I don't know what the solution is to all this, but it seems like it's going to be by way of like some implosion at some point, not too distant future. It will definitely reach a critical point. And, you know, we have the declining birth rates at the moment, which I think it's scary. But when we reach the point, I think in the next decade, there are some projections that the majority of adults will be

infertile in a decade. I think that's when people are going to get a wake up call because a lot of people are having a wake up call on an individual level. But from a societal standpoint, I think it's swept under the rug because when people have problems paying their bills or paying their rent or affording food at the grocery store, this kind of stuff isn't a priority. And that makes perfect sense.

You know, we have this Maslow's hierarchy of needs and, you know, basic food, food, water, shelter is the foundation. So when that's under stress, everything else falls by the wayside. And that's just human nature. There's nothing wrong with that. But the chronic disease epidemic, including mental health, obesity, autoimmune disease, all of these things that we're seeing a huge percentage of young people who have chronic disease.

Now, when we eventually realize that it's all to do with diet and lifestyle. I mean, I live in Eastern Europe. I traveled to America, in the UK and Australia multiple times a year. And the difference is stock. You know, when you're just looking around in the street at the average people in the average supermarket, the West is significantly sicker than places like Eastern Europe, even though we're much poorer over here. There's a lot more economical challenges here.

It's a lot darker in winter here. There's a lot more alcohol and smoking here. There's all of these factors which people think would be worse, but the modern diet and lifestyle in Western countries is death by 1000 cuts. And it's exciting that so many people are waking up before they get sick in terms of saying, hey, I'm in my 20s and in my 30s and I want to focus on longevity

now. I want to start looking after myself now so that I have a better chance to be around my grandkids and live a long, happy, healthy, you know, high quality life. But then the challenge is, well, how do you do that? Because depending on which website you go on or which YouTube rabbit hole your algorithm puts you down, you could come out with a completely different strategy with the same goal.

Yeah, it is. It is interesting, man, because I feel like there's definitely an abundance of information, Internet, technology, social media has made that apparent. There's no shortage of that. And it's like the people that are invested in their health that want to get better, Like there's definitely a demographic of population that's growing in that. But it seems like at the same time, there's this growing demographic that's just getting

worse and worse and worse. And I think that latter demographic is growing at a bigger, more expedient rate than the, you know, the the other. So I feel like that implosion point is bound to happen and it's just going to be a a widening of the haves and have not gap in health. Typically people think of that in finances or wealth, But like in health, at the end of the day man, if you don't get your health like everything else is for naughty.

You know, I have to say my, there's two points there. So my mentor Paul Check has this saying, which is that sooner or later everyone's health becomes their number one priority, which is absolutely true. But the point that you raised

there is very true. And I hadn't made that connection before, which is that, you know, we looked at like during the COVID era and the destruction of the middle class, which was basically, if you took 10 people who were middle class, nine of them got pushed down and then one of them went up via entrepreneurship and became wealthier based on the

situation. And I think exactly what you just alluded to, the same thing is happening with health is that one or two people out of 10 are reclaiming their health and getting better. But eight or nine people out of those 10 getting worse and worse because there's more hyper palatable food, there's more things like Uber Eats, there's more stimulation you can get from the screen in your pocket

than ever before. And it's never been easier to live a terribly unhealthy lifestyle than it is right now.

Like it absolutely is effortless to treat your the body like a dumpster fire. And also with the working from home movement, you know, that creates opportunity for people to live a much healthier life, but it also creates A tendency and an impulse for people to be way lazier because you can just stay at home and do whatever you like all the time, but no supervision. So people are like, oh, I'm not

trapped in an office all day. So the people who were actually proactive with the health can go, OK, instead of commuting, I can, you know, get some workouts in. I can go for a walk during the day. Like, you know, I can maybe get some workout equipment at home and stretch out and do some yoga or some body weight work, you know, between my calls or whatever. And I can have healthy home cooked food at home in the fridge. There's so many benefits to it.

But then I'm also seeing by and large, the majority of people that step count goes down to like 3000 steps a day that then on your dedicated exercise movement just completely falls by the wayside. They roll out of bed, they roll straight onto Microsoft Teams. They're not going for a walk, they're not getting any sunshine because they're just following the impulses and they're saying, well, it's just never being easier to be lazier. And then when they're.

Looking on Instagram and they're making this upward comparison to all these other people who are projecting a version of their life which looks so much more attractive and sexy and desirable and successful. I think that it's just leading people to absolutely destroying their physical and mental health because they're not taking agency and it's easy to be like everyone else. It is easy to be complacent. It is easy to be compliant. It is easy to follow the path of

least resistance. I mean, that's baked into human nature is to conserve resources. But people have to wake up to realize that the modern diet and lifestyle and environment, if you don't proactively work against it and take initiatives, it'll destroy you. Yeah, It's interesting. I had Mark Bell on the podcast earlier this week, and we were talking about this very thing. And it's like, you know, humans are very vain creatures. Like, we're creature habits.

We want things to be convenient. We want things to be easy. It's never been easier to be unhealthy, but it's also never been easier to like be healthy too. Like you got so many tools, so many wearables, so many tracking devices and technology, so many good quality food options that are out there. And like he's got standards for himself. I've got tension for myself. You do as well. Like we would not tolerate, you know, putting on an additional 30 lbs of pure fat.

Like we would fight against that out of our own self-interest and preservation. And you would think like people that you know are feeling unhealthy or obese, they would want to feel better and have a higher quality of life. But it's almost like society's standards, what's what's deemed acceptable by society has decreased so drastically over the year, over the years due to body positivity or just

whatever. And it's like people's individual standards have rather than held stable and true, have just like followed suit with what society is accepting. And it's a sad reality to to witness, but man, it's definitely happening. It's it definitely is. And you raise a really good point on food there. And this is something I bring up all the time. So one thing that blew my mind when I was in the States, I mean, there was two things. One is the junk food over there

is incredibly delicious. Like I see why so many people are fat. Like the burgers and the stuff you guys have over there. Incredible. But the other thing that you guys have there is you have the most incredible meal prep services that just blow my mind. The two that I tried obviously don't have any affiliation with anything in the US, but like I tried the Nutrition Solutions meals and the Icon meals when I was at my friend Ellie Gilberts

house. Meh. Like in Australia, the best meal, like the fitness meal prep stuff that you can get all tastes like garbage. Like some of it tastes OK, but you'd never look forward to it. It's like a 5 out of 10 at best. I was eating those nutrition solution and Icon meals and I was like, this is unreal. This stuff is awesome. And because you've got so many companies, it's in the best interest of the consumer because they're all competing, so they have to compete on prep.

So it's affordable. But when I was doing rehab for my brain injury, like I started exploring back when Dominic d'agostino was first on Joe Rogan talking about the ketogenic diet. So that's when I kind of first looked into food to be like, okay, maybe there's more to food than just macros and how this tastes. I mean, this was many, many, many years ago. So I had to learn how to cook. I had to learn how to, you know,

buy the right ingredients. But because I was also doing rehab for a brain injury and I couldn't work, I was on a budget. So, you know, I learned how to cook things like Stan Efforting's Monster mash. I learned how to meal prep properly. And then through experience, I learned to go and hang on. This isn't just about how I look in terms of, you know, calories and macros. This is the food that is building every cell in my body that's driving me to feel the

way that I feel every day. And the stuff that I teach my clients is going, look, you can every now and then you can eat out in a way that fits your macros. You can go to the restaurant and you can order your thing. And you know, you could be out and about travelling and find the place on Uber Eats that does the healthy thing and get it delivered. And that's fine to do every now

and then. But you can't live on take out food, even if it's macro friendly, you can't do it because there's just so much crap that goes into all those processed foods that people are buying that over time it causes a problem. So either you have to learn how to cook, you have to hire someone to cook for you like a meal prep company, or if you're doing really well financially, you can hire a chef, or you can do what I did and marry a woman who cooks. But you've got to do one of

those four things. And for most people, it's going to be learning to cook or doing the meal prep delivery thing. And if people don't look at that as a foundation of going, like I see people obsessing over their supplement stacks and they obsess over milligrams of this and milligrams of that, but they completely neglect the kilograms of food they're putting into their body. So when we're looking at taking agency over our life, the first thing that we have to look at is

the fuel. Like when I like my dog just turned 1 year old, beautiful black Labrador. And when he meets up with the other puppies from his Lissa, which I think is awesome, we do it every few months, He looks significantly better than the other puppies in his litter because we're very meticulous with the diet that we feed it. And when you start to look at that in people as well, you can tell the quality of someone's diet by their skin, by their mood, by their energy levels, by how they act.

And that's why, you know, I, I, I love Mark's content. I've been following Mark for a long time before I did his podcast. You know, he's had a very interesting kind of journey over the, the foods that he's kind of advocated in the way that he's eaten through self

experimentation. But the thing that I think he's done very, very well for people who disagree with the to and froing over certain macros is that there's a huge onus and emphasis on being attentive and being aware of the quality of the stuff that you're ingesting. Because once you swallow that food, all of that stuff is being absorbed into your bloodstreams through the mucous membrane in your body.

It's literally becoming part of you, and you're having a biochemical reaction to the last meal you ate for about up to three days to completely eliminate that from the body. So that's the first thing in America that people need to be focusing on is saying you guys have the so many options and so many temptations to eat so much extremely hyper palatable garbage that is so tempting and it's everywhere and it's super

available. But you also have such incredible food that you can get prepped for you or that you can buy from the supermarket or that you can buy from places like Whole Foods and you can work out a strategy that fits your budget. If you don't have any time, spend your money on meal prep. If you don't have any money and you have an abundance of time, learn how to cook. Everyone sucks at cooking. When people say, oh, I can't cook, that's like saying, oh, I can't roll the blade.

It's like we just haven't learned how to do it. It's a skill that you don't have. You're not. So like some people are born master chefs. Like it's a skill. So when I first started cooking, my meal sucked. By the time I got good at cooking monster mash because it's all I could afford for like a year, I would be like drooling when I was microwaving that next meal because I was so excited.

Like I think one of the ultimate bio hacks because I'm so sick of all these bio hackers just selling affiliate code nonsense. The ultimate bio hack is learning how to cook a meal that you look forward to more than anything that you can order off at Uber Eats. That's the buyer. 100 percent, 100% man, 100% It's it's funny because like, I wouldn't think that someone that's £400 and obese would argue that, you know, fast food take out from McDonald's is healthy.

I don't think anybody is delusional to thinking that. But I feel like people are ignorant to how much that truly impacts things, especially when compounded over a lifetime. And I was on a podcast the other day and they were like, look, if you had a Lamborghini car that you'd saved up years for and bought, you're not going to put the cheapest, you know, fuel in. You're going to put the premium quality fuel in it. It's like, it's the same thing with your body.

Like your body is your vehicle for life. It's your vessel. You've only got one of them. And I feel like if people just simply made that association, they would at least hopefully think twice before putting something in their mouth. And like, for me, I've been following the same diet for over a decade now because I've tried multiple diets and know it works for me. I know it feels optimally. And if I go out and eat something that's even slightly off my plan, I feel it the next

day. And that's not a worthwhile trade off for me. And if people, just people just don't know how to be in tune with their body and know what feeling good feels like, I think is also often times the issue as well. When it comes to food and you having such an emphasis on optimizing hormone levels, is there a specific dietary protocol or macro split or certain foods that you try to incorporate on a regular basis? So I've I've done and tried everything nutritionally.

I'm a very big advocate for both learning in terms of science, but also learning by experience as well. So when it comes to supplements or medications or nutrition strategies, I don't even work with or recommend anything that I haven't worked with myself personally and also understood in terms of science as well. So I did a ketogenic thing when

I had the brain injury. And if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have been able to function enough to go back to working three days a week at a minimum wage job. There was something about the ketogenic diet, and I assume it's the way that it reduces neural inflammation, increases GABA signaling that allowed me to function when I was in a brain injury state. And I also did the carnival

thing for a little bit. I didn't find that that worked particularly well for me. This was back when it was, you know, first kind of popularized. I never did a full vegan thing because that just didn't make any sense to me to even try. But I have done like a very heavily kind of plant focused diet with just a small amount of meat.

And then I've also kind of done the inverse with like a very heavily meat focused diet and small amounts of fruits and you know, bittersweet potato and stuff like that and everything in between. If people are looking for a framework to follow, I think Stan Efforting's vertical diet is a really good model that obviously you adjust areas of it because unless you're a high level athlete strongman, you don't need to be eating, you know, 600 grams of carbohydrates

from white rice. But from a model standpoint, in terms of looking at what are the easiest foods to digest, which are the highest in micronutrients that match the requirements of of the human body, I think the vertical diet is a foundation. And then tweaking and changing that based on what you digest. Well, what you do and don't like is a good model. I also think Mike Dolce has a

fantastic approach in nutrition. If people want someone to follow and look up to and just have a framework or someone to just look at and go, I don't want to learn every aspect of this. I don't want to spend hours on YouTube learning about nutrition. You know, who can I just listen to? I think Mike Dolce gets it right in terms of the foods for supporting hormone levels.

There's a lot of debates and arguments around whether people should or shouldn't eat meat, whether people should or shouldn't eat plants, that the way that it works is that you can absolutely survive on a carnivore diet. That's true. But to thrive, we do benefit from phytonutrients. So phytonutrients are not necessary for human supply, but they are necessary for a lot of helpful biological factors for the human Organism.

So I think the best diet is something that includes nutrients that are fat soluble in bioavailable form. So for example, if you look at something like a carrot or a sweet potato, they're orange. So they contain beta carotene, which is the precursor of the vitamin A vitamin A is one of the five fat soluble nutrients being AEDK and cholesterol and

vitamin A is very important. But a lot of people, particularly Caucasian people, in terms of genetics, don't metabolize beta carotene into retinol very well. So getting the fat soluble nutrients in the most

bioavailable form is objectively important for hormone production. And people will say, well, yes, the body can make cholesterol on its own, That's true. That's a survival mechanism because all your hormones are made from cholesterol, and if your cortisol goes to 0, you will drop dead and die. That's the way the human body works. So you have to be able to make cholesterol endogenously. Otherwise if you didn't get a kill during evolution, you would have just carved out and dropped

dead. But the idea that we can generate enough cholesterol endogenously by a survival mechanism to optimize hormones is also objectively incorrect. So we need some degree of animal based food in the diet. And for me and a lot of people I've worked with looking at their blood work, I've never seen someone's health get worse from eating more meat. I've only seen people get healthier from eating more meat. So meat's great for you.

Red meat is higher per gram in micronutrients than white meat. But chicken, fish, pork, pork in Eastern Europe is much better because it's more like boar than like domesticated pig. It tastes way better too. But beef is a super food. And then organs are higher in nutrients as well. But you know, that's not for everyone's palate. And I also think that fruits and vegetables should also be

included in abundance. I think that raw leafy green vegetables are not great for a lot of people's guts, just based on what I've seen. I have a lot of guys come to me who are eating like meticulously, and they're bloating is just through the roof. Their digestion's horrible, and they're eating a big bowl of raw leafy green salad with pumpkin seeds and all this stuff. And that just doesn't go well for some people. But I think cooked vegetables are fantastic.

Potatoes and sweet potatoes are super high in minerals, very high in potassium. I think fruit is wonderful. Some people will equate like a glass of orange juice to a glass of Coca-Cola and say, well, it's all sugar. That's a silly reductionist model. When we look at things in nature, they contain things that buffer. So fruit is full of sugar, but it's also full of vitamin C, which buffers the oxidative processes when it comes to metabolizing sugar.

Same with coffee. You know, coffee is full of caffeine, which is a stimulant, but then it's full of phytonutrients and all the minerals that caffeine depletes in the body. It's almost like they were put together for a reason. So I think fruit is fantastic. I mean, obviously you can overdo it if you try, but it's very difficult to eat too many bananas. Like you just get a satiety mechanism kick in. So me, eggs, fruit, vegetables. And then if people digest them

well, I think grains are fine. I mean, I wouldn't be eating a huge amount of calories from grains because they're not as micronutrient dense. But some high quality bread with some with some, you know, good quality butter on it, you know, if that fits your diet plan or if that makes the meal more enjoyable when it's home prepared, fantastic. But meat, whole eggs should be the cornerstone of the diet. I don't have any problem with dairy.

If the if the estrogen and dairy is bioavailable, then so is the testosterone and the growth hormone. None of it is. But dairy is fantastic as well. Full fat dairy. I mean, obviously you can overdo it from a caloric standpoint and it's not very satiating, but I don't think there's any problem with dairy either. So I think that the diet can be a very rich and diverse diet, but some people will do better with higher carbohydrates. Some people do better with lower carbohydrates.

I think that that comes down to how the individual performs from a metabolic level. And I think that some people can do great on a low carb diet and some people can do great on a high carb diet. If they're going to do a high carb diet that's low fat, they need to make sure they're eating nutrient dense fat sauces. Jiffy peanut butter is not healthy fats. I see bodybuilders saying this all the time. That's just so dumb.

But you can also get a full day's worth of micronutrients from 4 egg yolks, which is like 20 grams of fat. So you don't have to have a huge kind of fat to get micronutrients. You know, seed oils are not helping people's hormone production even though they're fats. But you can also have a relatively low amount of carbohydrates in the diet and be just fine, as long as those carbohydrates sources are healthy and ideally have antioxidants and other nutrients

in them as well. So there's a lot of ways people can do nutrition, but starting out with the vertical diet or Mike Dolce's approach to nutrition, I think is a fantastic way to begin. Totally agree. Do you go out of your way to eat much like fish and seafood? Cause like a lot of people are, you know, deficient in iodine,

things of that nature. I'm very big on the high dose of Amiga 3 supplement, so I use 4 grams of EPADHA per day, which is equivalent to eating about half a pound of salmon a day. From a palatability standpoint, I don't like fatty fish very much. I just don't have a taste for salmon. In Australia, I love barramundi. Barramundi is wonderful. We got some really good mackerel in Australia. I have this rule that if you can't see the ocean, you should question the seafood.

So growing up in Perth, WA, we're on the coast, amazing

seafood. I mean, oysters are a superfood as well. Things like this are wonderful for you over here in Lithuania getting good quality fish. I'd be more concerned about the food poisoning. So I don't eat very much fish, but I am a massive, massive proponent and I push it very hard. Is if you're not someone who eats a large amount of fatty fish in the diet, you should definitely be getting a high quality omega-3 supplement to bring the omega-3 index over a

tent. The, the, if we look, if you go on pub Med and you search omega-3, there are 10s of thousands of studies showing a positive impact of omega-3 supplementation on every single health condition known to Matt. So, and the other thing that I see is that when I get guys come to me with their blood work, because I review about 20 or 30 client blood panels a day for my clinics.

When I see guys who have these incredible lipid profiles, like the lipid profiles that a cardiologist would print out and put on his fridge, every single one of them is taking a high dose omega-3 supplement. Every single one. So I very strongly recommend that people support their omega-3 intake, whether it's through diet or supplementation. I just did a experiment, got blood work on both ends.

It was like a two week experiment, kind of like in response to a lot of Mark Bell sugar diet stuff, doing the opposite of it with high fat. But I doubled my testosterone in like a two week, three-week span. And I started, you know, maybe because of the macronutrient manipulation I was making super high fat, minimal protein, very low carbs, but I also added in a can of cod liver more often than

not throughout that span. Super high in vitamin D Vitamin AI. Would imagine that had a pretty profound impact on hormone levels as well. Cod liver is also a superfood. I mean, it's not for everyone's palate as well. I mean, it's got a taste for sure. But so you do a ketogenic diet. Yeah, I've been doing keto for almost 11 years now. Yeah. So the ketogenic diet, like it has, I mean, you can do a garbage keto.

I mean, you can eat KFC and just call it a ketogenic diet if you want to. I mean, it would technically still be one, but you can also do a ketogenic diet with incredibly nutrient dense sources of fat. And that's where I see people thriving. I mean, I get guys come to me who are doing ketogenic diets all the time and their blood work is absolutely garbage. But when you ask them what they eat, they go, I eat keto. I'm like, no, like, what do you actually, what foods do you

actually eat? And it's just crap. But when you when you have guys come in who are doing a healthy ketogenic diet and they're eating good quality fatty meats, sometimes they're eating some organ meats. They've got things like avocado in there. They've got really healthy nutrients and sources of fat. And I have a bunch of guys who still follow something like Dave Asprey's Bulletproof diet, which I guess is kind of like a keto derivative spin off kind of thing.

But they're focusing on getting a large intake of fibrous vegetables as well. Their blood work is like incredible, like absolutely amazing.

And it's similar you. When I was talking to Mark Bell when I was out there for his podcast, he kind of just started the sugar diet thing and he was explaining it to me and I was like, oh, that just sounds like what Ori Hoffmechler was talking about in his book The warrior Diet, which basically spelled out what they're now doing is the sugar diet, but exclusively with fruit during the day, which is obviously a healthier way to do it than eating gummy bears because there's more nutrients

in the fruit. But just like you could be doing a high carb diet, you know, drinking nothing but Coca-Cola or eating salvage kids or you do a high carbohydrate diet, eating multiple servings of fresh organic fruit per day. The macros are going to be the same, but the micros in the inflammatory response to the food is going to be completely

different. So I can imagine that if you've been doing a ketogenic diet long term and you're thriving very well, you would have also tuned into saying, hey, the quality of the fats that I'm eating. Like I used to teach, I used to teach mindfulness meditation. That was my job before I did this. I used to teach like science

based meditation. And one of the things that we did, the organization I was at is we'd run like a community based, like one hour guided leaded meditation that I do, you know, at a Community Center. And this was when I was doing the ketogenic diet for a period. And I remember one time before I went, I had a 12 egg omelette before I went, just the 12 egg omelette. And I went and sat down and meditated. And my mind had never been more

calm and steady and cool. And I was just sitting there being like, this nutritional intake of cholesterol and all the vitamins I've had, my brain is just completely thriving on this. So I think, you know, just like yourself, if you've been following a diet approach for 11 years, it's because you've been like, hey, this works for me. I'm doing really well on this. And I think one of the problems is that people have just been eating for taste their whole

life. They haven't eaten well for long enough to then veer off it and realize how crappy that food

makes them feel. Yeah, 100% agree, man. Pivoting back to TRT specifically. So like I I compete in natural bodybuilding. So like it's pretty much totally banned, outlawed, all that jazz. However, you know, we've learned so much, especially in the last decade around, you know, hormonal impacts, endocrine system, longevity, health, well-being, all that all that good stuff. Is there, like, is there ever an instance where you know someone just not a good fit for TRT?

Like if you're looking at it from a performance standpoint? Like This is why professional bodybuilders competing on the IFBB stage take steroids. Like it's obvious they got a performance benefit. But I guess the question is, what would be a use case in which they would not be optimal? It could be detrimental. What would be the point of diminishing returns for someone that's trying to optimize? Look like I just kind of flesh that out a little bit if you

would. Yeah. So this is a, and this is something that I actually teach a lot of. So when I come to the States and I'm running seminars for either at the Super Back Summit or the Olympia or for clinics that I'm parted with, one of the things that I teach in terms of how to work with these patients is that one of the problems is that now that TRT and I don't want to say

it's a problem. One of the caveats to TRT becoming more mainstream is that a hot like back when I started doing this five or six years ago, the only people who were coming to me for consults on TRT were like health and fitness enthusiasts, because it wasn't a mainstream thing. There was no YouTube channels about it. There was no Joe Rogan talking about it. I mean, people would ask me like, what the hell is TRT?

Like, they had no idea. Whereas now when I tell people what I do, everyone knows what TRT is. Everyone wants to ask about it, and one of the downsides of that is that a lot of the time people who come in wanting TRT treatment, what my friend Jay Campbell affectionately refers to as metabolic dumpster fires. And this is a real problem because these guys have often destroyed the endocrine system from years or decades of poor health practices, and they want

to get back on track. But their body is just so screwed up that if they take TRT in the way it's traditionally prescribed, their blood pressure will go through the roof and they'll be riddled with side effects that people typically call estrogenic side effects. So they can get things like gyno water retention. Their face swells up. They start crying when they watch a Marvel movie.

All the stuff that you don't really want when you're taking, you know, exogenous testosterone, you're having a whole bunch of the side effects and all the good stuff. The problem is, though, that these men need the treatment. And there's two ways that we have to work with this. So 1 is that there's this saying I was taught by a mentor of mine, which is that in all aspects of improving health, whether it's mental health or physical health, you have to

meet the medicine halfway. So if you want to become a better driver, if you buy yourself a better car, that's not going to fix the problem in and of itself. You also have to get the driving lessons. You have to meet the medicine halfway. So a lot of the time when people take an antidepressant or they take a stimulant or they take a sleeping pill, they just expect

the drug to solve the problem. They're not actually trying to work with the drug to allow the drug to give them the foundation to help them change their circumstance. This is how medical interventions are supposed to work. So the first thing that we have to look at if someone comes in who TRT would be a contraindication for, which people who are generally insulin resistant, have liver disease or have basically metabolic syndrome, meaning they're overweight.

These guys need TRT, but they're also going to get side effects from TRT. So it's a real catch 22. So typically a practitioner will either prescribe them an estrogen blocker, which will solve one problem and create two more, or they'll tell them that the side effects are all in their head and there's nothing that can be done to fix it. Both of these problems are wrong.

So not only do we have to start working with guys in terms of fixing their habits, which is often a bit of a progress, we have to go, OK, what do we start with? And the way that I like people to look at that, which again, this doesn't apply for everyone, but it applies for most people, is you can make a list of all the things you're doing that you know you shouldn't be doing. And then you can make a list of all the things that you're not doing that you know that you're

supposed to be doing. Fix that shit and fix it gradually. Find the easiest things to fix, but fix that equation. But the other thing is that we can look at the delivery mechanism of testosterone. So typically when we look at TRT, we're looking at injectables. So testosterone cypionate, testosterone ananthate, These are basically Coke and Pepsi. They're basically the same thing, slightly different, but

they're interchangeable. Now, when this stuff is prescribed, the little handbook that the doctors get in medical school says 1 injection of one mil, which is 200 or 250 milligrams every two to three weeks. This is a train wreck because even if you're healthy, it'll Jack your levels through the sky for a few days and then they'll crash out and they'll be terrible by the time you do your next injection. Men do not do well with a hormonal rhythm over the course of weeks.

We're meant to have flatline stable hormone levels every day. So what this does is it basically gives men a similar hormone rhythm to women on their periods.

This is not good for anyone. So when it comes to using injectables, the problem that we have is that if someone is insulin resistant or they're overweight or they have issues with their liver or they have all three of these problems, they will typically produce less 5A reductase, which is what makes DHT and they'll produce more aromatase, which is what creates estrogen. Now this is not necessarily a problem because the body is trying to protect itself.

Estrogen's anti-inflammatory. But then when you come in and Jack the levels up, the body is not in an environment in which it would ever be making these hormone levels. So you've just taken a Ferrari engine and you put it into a beat up Suzuki Swift and you're wondering why it's not working properly and you're saying, well, if I take the Ferrari engine, it's going to turn my Suzuki Swift into a Ferrari? No, it's not. Doesn't work like that.

But what we can do for people who are metabolically unhealthy is give them testosterone in the form of a cream. Now, the typical creams and gels that people are usually familiar with, which have a bad rap are garbage. Test the gel androforte. These are the brands that people get from the pharmacy. These creams are so weak and have no bioavailability. You'd basically have to take a

bath in it for it to work. But when you work with a provider who's skilled in this kind of application, you can

have a 20% cream made-up in what's called a HRT base, which is made of olive oil and macadamia oil. So it's a really natural healthy cream. It's like a moisturizer. And you get about the amount of cream that you'd put toothpaste on a toothbrush. So it's a relatively small amount of like a moisturizer.

And you apply it to the underside of the ball sack because the skin on the scrotum is very thin and it has a large presence of the enzyme 5A reductants, which is reduced when the individual is chronically inflamed.

So when they take testosterone by rubbing it on their shaved bowl SAC twice a day instead of injecting it, what we're able to do is more so mimic the way that the testosterone would be metabolized by a healthy mat, which allows them to feel that motivation, that uplift, that energy effect, that kind of androgenic masculinizing effect. And they don't get any of the side effects that we typically see from injections.

So it allows them to tolerate the testosterone without the side effects that would be caused by the contraindication of being overweight, obese, insulin resistant, or having fatty liver. So it's not so much that these individuals can't or shouldn't do TRT, it's that it needs to be done in a way that's catered towards them being metabolically

unhealthy. And then augmenting that treatment with something like metformin to improve insulin sensitivity or, you know, improving the diet would be better. But you know, compliance is the science. So things like metformin can be very helpful, Melatonin to help with sleep as well. Things like glutathione as well to help with antioxidant

production. All of these things can be very helpful to augment it to allow people to benefit from the treatment without having the potential side effects. But if you take someone who's unhealthy and overweight and give them a big dose of injectable testosterone, you could be creating more problems than you're solving. And I haven't heard many people with that application modality.

I'm out. I hear like the horror stories of people walking to a clinic, getting prescribed testosterone, not getting follow up lab panels for like 6 months or ever and then having that, you know, injectable dose and then doing that every two weeks or something. I've heard a lot more people having a reduced dose, but scattered throughout the week, like a, you know, Tuesday, Friday split or something like that.

I'm sure that's better. But I haven't heard many people with the the cream on the scrotum, so that makes that makes more sense. Yeah, so for me personally, so I've, I've been blessed that I've had some really amazing mentors and, and colleagues since I got into the space, which I'm, I'm very humbled by, is not being a medical doctor. So friends of mine, doctor Keith Nichols has been a big advocate

of the cream. My friend Jay Campbell, who you should definitely have on the, the podcast, He, he's super into all the dieting and he's gotten into the sugar diet stuff as well. Fantastic guy to talk to about this, but what they really have been teaching for longer than I've been teaching it is that inflammation is what's driving the side effects that guys are getting on TRT. And when we look at the cream option, the cream option metabolizes very different in the body to injections.

And when we can find a pathway that complements people who would usually be getting the side effects, this is a real game changer. Now a lot of people refer just being on the cream to injections because they find that they get more of that DHT based effect and they feel the benefit of the treatment more. So with the clinics that I work with, we actually offer both so that people can choose between

the two. But when it comes to doing injections twice a week, shots is the minimum that anyone should be doing. But the more often you split that up, the better. So if people are doing injectable testosterone and they're going, what's the best, most optimal way that I can do this? It's injected every day. If people want to find the sweet spot between how can I do the least amount of injections possible but still get like a Goldilocks zone, it's three days

a week or every other day. The minimal amount is twice a week. The problem that people have when they're looking at what's called pharmacodynamics, which is basically how drugs metabolize in the body, is they look at what's called the half life. So testosterone injections and Anthony Incipienate, depending on the study report to have a half life of seven to 10 days. So we'll say about a week. Now if we use caffeine as an example, caffeine got 1/2 flight of eight hours.

It doesn't gradually build up and peak its four and then drop off for the rest of the 8. You get a pronounced peak in 30 to 90 minutes depending on the individual and then you get a drop off. But the main effect of the caffeine that you can subjectively feel is not evenly distributed over 8 hours. Everyone knows that the side effect of keeping you awake is distributed evenly, but not the

effect that we're looking for. So when we look at a testosterone injection, even though it's got a one week half life, it peaks between 24 and 36 hours. In some people it peaks out for 12 hours. So if you're not injecting daily, you're going to be getting some degree of fluctuating levels and the amount of fluctuation that someone will tolerate seems to

be individual. But from an objective standpoint, when we're looking at dosing medications like pharmaceuticals, the idea is typically to keep a therapeutic amount of the drug in your system. So if you take something that's got like a, if you take like a blood pressure medication, for example, if you take that once a day, it will still have a peak and a through, but the level when you redose it will be above what's called the therapeutic floor. So it won't be completely out of

your system. If you apply that same logic to hormone levels, you're basically saying, well, we can have a big excursion of these hormone levels and that's still fine because it's not going to 0. That doesn't make sense from an optimizing hormone standpoint. It makes sense from a pharmaceutical standpoint, not from an optimizing hormone

standpoint. So if we want to have stability, just like, you know, if you wanted to keep your peak caffeinated dose, you'd sip on coffee all day, you'd redose it at the peak to maintain a stable level. So if we want to maintain stable androgen levels, we should redose it at the peak, not at the half line. So every day is best if people are willing to do it. A really small insulin syringe you can just inject into the

delt. And if people want to find an acceptable Goldilocks zone to still get an optimal result, three days a week or month or every other day works well. But twice a week is the minimum that anyone could do. But when people are obese and have these health problems, even doing 3 * a week injections, they're still going to get the side effects. Yeah, makes sense.

What what can one expect? Like if they decide to go the route of TRT, what can they expect to happen to their endogenous production, whether it be from the injectables or the cream? It will vanish. So the way that unfortunately, if it didn't work like that, I'd just be saying everyone should try testosterone. I mean, that'd be everyone should give it a shot, but because of the down regulation of natural production, that's why it's a commitment. Otherwise it would be a very

different industry. So when you take exogenous testosterone, whether it's a cream or a shot or a small dose or a massive steroid dose, your body will have what's called a negative feedback reaction. So when testosterone circulates and activates receptors in the hypothalamus, which is a part of the brain, and when those receptors get saturated, the body goes, OK, there's plenty of testosterone here, we don't need

to make any more. Whereas if the body is naturally producing it and the levels dip down, then you get a signal to make more and the body maintains its balance. But when you're taking externally, the body goes up, job's done, I don't need to do this anymore. So the signal from the hypothalamus to the testicles, which is called luteinizing hormone, this basically goes to 0. So as a result, the testicles

basically go offline. So they basically deflate like balloons and they kind of shrink down to the size of about olives. They revert to a similar child that they were when similar size to when you were a child. And the testicles go offline because the main function of secreting hormones is already taken care of. So this is the big catch 22 of TLT.

And when you start the treatment, the the question is, well, can you trial it for like 12 weeks or 16 weeks and then have your natural production come back? And this is a tricky question to answer because there's not a 100% guarantee to something that people are looking for a

guaranteed reassurance on. So if someone like myself stops taking testosterone after almost a decade, my natural production is going to be virtually non existent. But the reason that I did TRT was that my natural production

was inadequate in the 1st place. So basically, if I haven't a company and my company is only performing as well as the weakest link and I fire the weakest link to do their job myself, I can now do that job at a fantastic capacity, but I've taken on the responsibility to do that job for the rest of the life of the company. That is a decision that I made because I was like, I can't train this guy up to perform at the level that he needs to perform at.

And that's why when someone goes on TRT, it should only be done in a situation where you're saying my natural production is so garbage that even if I like, there's no reason why this would serve me any more. And I'm OK with getting rid of it and taking on the responsibility of replacing that production. So it's like a great power, great responsibility, spider man kind of scenario. It's not ideal. It's absolutely not ideal. It's one of the reasons why TRT is a flawed intervention.

It has way more benefits than downsides. But the big downside is that once you start the treatment, you are dependent. And if people do come off within the first few months, all the literature shows that they will recover their natural production, and in my experience they do. But there would always be a potential theoretical risk, especially if people are using anabolic steroids, that that testosterone production may come back lower than it was before they started.

So people should only do it if they're comfortable with that shit potentially sailing. OK, that makes sense. So it's pretty much a commitment all in. No, no pussyfooting around it. Like if you're gonna get on it, you can just plan on staying on it until death do you part, basically. You will have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands. Absolutely.

Yeah. What about like going the other extreme, like with the bodybuilders, for example, that are using performance Henson drugs, anabolics like they're doing like blasting and cruising. You know, 20 years ago there was talk of like them cycling off to let their natural production come back into place. You don't really hear about that anymore. People are just always on some dosage and blasting and cruising is more so just continual blasting.

That's not my of expertise at all, but what's typically happening in those scenarios? Yeah, so the the way that bodybuilders do stuff is ridiculous. People will blast so much gear for such a short space of time that they will completely burden and destroy the health of their organs. And you can't accrue that much muscle tissue in that window of time. It's just not physiologically possible.

You'll inflate with glycogen and you'll have a more drive full appearance because your muscles will be more swollen. But taking grams of gear for 16 weeks and then cycling back to low levels to think you're repairing that damage, that is not how it works. Like that is naivety. That is wishful thinking. That is playing with fire.

It it would be like me punching someone in the face Monday through Friday and then not punching them in the face Saturday and Sunday and expecting it to be healed by Monday. It's like, no, it's not going to work. So it's people shouldn't be doing that for a number of reasons, but the stopping and starting of the natural production is one of the reasons why guys end up coming to clinics like mine needing hormone replacement much younger than they typically would.

Because and especially when they do it under the age of 25, because the endocrine system hasn't finished developing, when we stop and start the system, especially using high drugs of these, sorry, high doses of these non bioidentical anabolic steroid drugs, it seems to permanently damage some degree

of the natural production. So if you do one cycle, like a big cycle and you do the post cycle therapy, you take the HCG and the tamoxifen that everyone recommends that you do, even though that stuff is terrible for your health. You will recover your natural production, but you might only recover it to here. And then if you do it again, you

might only recover it to here. And then the problem is if you're blasting it, you know, a gram or two of gear for 12 to 16 weeks, but then you're spending 12 to 16 weeks with crashed out hypogonadal testosterone levels. This is why people lose the muscle that they gain on cycle. It's not because the steroids went away. It's because the baseline level they went back down to was so low that they entered A catabolic state and they feel like garbage.

And then they just want to get back on cycle again because they feel better. So the way that people should be looking at it, if they want to do this, like my approach is, and I I interviewed a, a guy named Doctor Todd Lee the other day in a relation who's big IFBB pro guy, medical Doctor Who talks about steroid use in pharmacology.

And he has the same recommendation as me, which is that unless you are a professional bodybuilder who requires steroids to compete in your sport, you shouldn't be using anabolic steroids. But for the people who do choose to go down that route, you want to be really careful with this idea of like perma blasting gear because when you go, basically testosterone is good for you up until the point that it's not.

And when you pass that physiological ceiling into this super physiological territory and beyond, you are causing a burden and damage to your organs, more or less. So depending on the compounds you're using, how good your cardiovascular fitness is, how good your, how good your nutrition is, how good your supplemental support is, whether you're managing your blood pressure, all this kind of stuff. And people have this idea and they go, oh, I'm just going to blast steroids until I get a

problem in my blood work. And then I'm going to stop taking the steroids until the problem in the blood work goes away and then I'm going to do it again. This is a terrible idea because you're not getting things like organ imaging done. You're not really seeing the full picture and the individual bodybuilder or the bodybuilding coach is not really able to look at the right blood markers and determine if damage has actually been done.

But if people are going to be cycling and using anabolic steroids, they are much better off staying on TRT in between the steroid cycle use. And if people do want to use steroids, the first thing they should do is find what that optimized TRT dose is, because if this is an optimal level of testosterone for you, like this is an optimized TRT dose.

What I see people doing is they blast up here and they cruise down here and they think that if they cruise lower, they'll offset the damage that they did from running higher. This is just nonsense. So if people want to actually use steroids, they should find their optimal TRT dose and then add steroids on top of that in a minimal effective dose for whatever time frame they're going to do it.

And then when they stop using steroids, they should come back to their TRT dose and just accept that if this is the lifestyle and what they want to do with their body because people can do what they like, they should make the commitment to at least stay on hormone replacement therapy rather than doing this stop stop. See Salt garbage.

Totally agree, and just out of curiosity, say you would define the difference or you would differentiate steroids and TRT being that TRT is optimal, you know physiological compatible levels whereas steroids are just super physiological beyond what would be capable in any natural realm. Yeah. So there's two factors to it.

The way that I would describe TRT, and I would kind of borrow Jay Campbell's term in terms of testosterone optimization therapy, which is we're not just replacing the testosterone level, we're taking it to the optimal level that it should be at. So TRTTOT, whatever people want to call it, but it's using bioidentical test testosterone at the physiological level that promotes health. And the problem that people have is that the physiological healthy level is often above the reference range.

So people often conflate physiological with the reference range. This is wrong. There is a level above the reference range which is still physiological and health promoting. But when you go beyond that and you're in super physiological territory, this would be a steroid cycle. Now you can do a testosterone only steroid cycle. It will typically produce side effects because of the aromatization to estrogen when you go into a super

physiological level. But you can do a bioidentical steroid cycle if you want to. But typically when we're looking at a steroid cycle, we're looking at using non bioidentical analogs of these hormones.

So compounds like Primobolan, masteron, Anavar, nandrolone, trampolone, there's a variety of them, but we're typically looking at increasing the antigen load beyond the physical range with hormones that are not bioidentical, that have been specifically designed to have more anabolic activity in the body. Makes total sense. I can talk to you for hours, man. It's super interesting. I got one more question. We're already way past the hour mark here.

It's kind of selfish question. So I'm natural bodybuilding, never taken anything. I'm a bit of a purist in nature. Like, I'm super rich with my nutrition, my lifestyle factors, optimizing everything that's within my grasp. I recognize with the technology and science that we have that I could perform more optimally with exogenous testosterone, especially since I've got naturally lower levels.

But at the same time, like I've got this, you know, purest traditional sense to me of like, hey, look, humans have been around for a long time. We've never had this until recently. You know, we can't live forever despite all the longevity experts promoting otherwise. Like, you know, death and decay is just a part of life as much as being born is. And I want to be at peace and embrace that reality, in fact, too.

And I'm going to fight Father Time as best I can naturally for as long as I can because I'd still like to compete in the natural bodybuilding realms for as long as I can. But and we don't have a crystal ball, but out of curiosity, as I get older and older, how much knowing what you've seen in your clients, would you think I'd be leaving on the table and suffering and seeing a decline in health if I were to stay natural versus going the route of TOT?

Yeah, I have a very similar paradigm to yourself. I don't like pharmaceuticals. I don't like. I mean I will recommend them when they are advantageous, when the risk to reward ratio is in favor of reward. And the reason why I like hormone replacement therapy is

that I think it is correcting a natural imbalance. So I can't argue that TRT is more natural than not taking it, but I do make the argument that optimal testosterone levels is the correct state for the male biology to thrive in. And that's, you know, based on my experience personally and with clients. But with that said, I also don't push people down the route of TRTA lot of the time I told people out of it and I often choke with my clients.

I say, look, it's more work for me if you actually do the TRT. So I don't have a stake in the game. When people are aware of TRT, it becomes a matter of when, not if. If it's on your radar by 60 years old, you would absolutely be trading benefits for not doing absolutely. And by 70 years old, absolutely, it would be almost stupid not to do it.

And it's, it's kind of similar with women who are menopausal with when menopausal women are suffering severely from a complete lack of hormones in their body. And they're aware of the benefits of hormone replacement therapy. And they trial using a bit of progesterone or a bit of thyroid or whatever they need as part of their their requirements. Because it's part of your body's natural operating system. It doesn't feel like you've taken a drug, you just feel more like yourself.

So if we're looking at that kind of linear decline in levels, the problem with the male situation is because we don't have like a menopause event where you kind of drop off a Cliff. Basically you have this slow, insidious decline over the course of years where you kind of have to reach a point and go, at what point in this equation is it worth intervening with to

fix this? And then you basically look at going, OK, well, what's the opportunity cost of delaying this by five years or 10 years in terms of the quality of life that you can, you can get. And This is why I, I work with a lot of guys similar to yourself, younger than you, older than you, who are natural and they're wanting to basically get guidance on this decision. And my best recommendation is that you get a comprehensive blood panel done every year.

And then that way over a three or four or five year period, you can look to see not just the decline of your testosterone levels, if that's occurring, because they'll kind of fluctuate a little bit, but you can actually see all the other metabolic markers that testosterone impacts. So over time, if you're looking after yourself well, which you know, it sounds like based on, on who you are, that will be something that will remain constant if you see all those

things staying in place. But then on your blood work, you see all my insulin sensitivities getting worse every year and my, my cortisol's going up and my prolactin's going up and my triglycerides are going up and my sleep quality's going down and my sex drives going down. And, you know, even though I'm tracking, you know, my, my lifts and my nutrition, I'm plateauing in the gym and I'm not waking up properly recovered.

And you can notice things starting to move in the wrong direction, then you can make the call to make that intervention. But whether that occurs for you in five years, 10 years or 20 years, I mean, I've met some guys in their 60s who have thriving testosterone levels. There are absolutely exceptions to every rule. So it's really good to be able

to get data every year. Like I love it when clients come and see me and they've got a blood test from every year for the last 10 years and we can go, OK, this is really easy now. So start monitoring your blood work comprehensive panel every year. That way you can kind of see around the corner for stuff. And then if you you do notice these comprehensive metabolic markers going in the wrong direction, you can intervene before it becomes a problem.

It's kind of like if you're driving your car and the check engine light comes on, you're better off taking it to the mechanic van before it starts billowing smoke and making a bunch of noises. So it's much better to intervene when things start to drop off before the diseases of aging

start to accelerate. And that way you can start to, you can basically find that sweet spot of saying, I'm going to push this back to the point that it's needed, but then when it is needed, I'm not going to delay pulling the trigger and end up with consequences from that. So I think it's people, if they don't need TLT, they shouldn't do TLT. But if if it's on your radar, it will be a when decision, not an if decision. Now it makes sense in regards to women.

Like I got a lot of question around menopausal years too, like when everything does drop off the Cliff throughout those menopausal, you know, window, once they get through that, like what's happening big picture there? Like are they are they still going to benefit from getting on HRT post menopausal years or after that point? Is it pretty well leveled off and stabilized and they could just expect day-to-day things to be about same same as normal?

So I often joke that I don't know anything about women at all at all. Ask my wife. But the, the way that the way that menopause works when women are describing menopause is they talk about, they go through menopause and then they come out of menopause. The process of going through menopause is the adjustment and adaptation and subjective response to the ovaries basically cocking it. So the, the testicles really gradually die as a man gets older.

This is called primary hypogonadism with women. They completely cock it and you know, completely flatline when they hit menopause. So what they end up with is basically a zeroed out progesterone level and a lot of the time a very low testosterone level. And then the estrogen level will vary based on the woman because estrogen is produced outside the ovaries. But the progesterone being crashed down to nothing is really detrimental to a lot of aspects of their health.

So a lot of the time people think testosterone is the man hormone and estrogen is the women hormone. It's more so that progesterone is the women hormone. If we talk about what hormone peaks when they're ovulating, when we talk about what gives women the feminizing effects that we would relate with femininity, it's progesterone. And in the brain progesterone works a lot like Valium. It's very calming, it's very relaxing, it's very anti stress.

So when that hormone crashes out to 0 along with all the other hormones as well, I mean, thyroid tends to drop off too. Melatonin production drops off too. When they say they've come through menopause, it's more so they've gotten used to it, but the hormone levels are still crashed out. It's just the acute adjustment

phase is over. But once a woman goes through menopause, her risks of developing the diseases of aging, which is diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and dementia, all go through the roof because the sex hormones are protective against all of those systems being problematic. So once a woman has gone through the horrors of menopause, she would still benefit from correcting the hormone deficiencies. But if they want to be proactive with it, they don't have to go through the horrible suffering

of menopause. But I've also spoken to some women who say this is the way that my body is supposed to age, and I want to age the way that, you know, nature or God intended. And I'm like, that's cool. That's 100% your decision to do. But for women who don't want to suffer and go through that, and even when perimenopause is occurring, like early stages of menopause, hormone replacement therapy can absolutely be super beneficial.

One of the best people if you want to have them on your podcast to talk about that is Doctor Fitz. Lauren, Lauren Fitzgerald. She's fantastic for speaking about those topics. Awesome, awesome. Well, I'm going to fight by the time kick his ass as long as I can naturally, for sure, man. But if I go this route, man, you're going to be the first to one that I called because you used to walk the knowledge on this. And I appreciate everything you're saying, man.

Absolutely, absolutely I will. I will look forward to hearing from you and having that chat. And for anyone who wants to learn more about the nitty gritty of TRT in terms of like protocols and injectables and how everything works, jump on YouTube and search Dave Lee TRT Master class. I've got like a 90 minute lecture that is for beginners or for people who are first starting TRT and it goes through everything I know about how the actual execution of the process

works. And all that information is on YouTube for free. Awesome. Well I will definitely link out. Make it easy people to find you, Dave. If there's anything you need from me man, just hit me up. Happy to keep the conversation going brother. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.