The Peptide That “Changes Everything” with Andrew Huberman

Here we are. Cheers, guys. Cast in a can. Can you hear me?

Yeah, zero sugar cold brew yerba mate. I'm half Argentine, so I've been drinking mate since I was a kid. It's got caffeine, and it's a super smooth arc of caffeine. That's why I love it. Yeah.

It's organic. BPA, BPS, phthalate-free cans because a lot of people worry about that stuff.

It's free of all that, and it's awesome. I have very high caffeine tolerance, so I drink, no joke, like four to six of them a day. But most people do just fine with one or two.

So you have one in the car before the gym.

Caffeine before the gym is such a hack, and I don't do it, and I need to get back into it. I don't know. Sometimes it's tough.

Well, look, if you have anxiety issues, you should be careful with caffeine. But if you don't, caffeine's great. It's definitely a performance enhancer. So much so that the people that regulate this stuff in sport set an upper limit on the milligrams of caffeine that you can ingest.

But I cut off the caffeine intake at about 2 p.m. But listen, I also drink caffeine first thing in the morning if I'm going to work out in the first two hours of the day. And that's about three, four days a week I do that. Other times I wait a little while. So it's really an option, but I love yerba. I also drink coffee. I'll have a couple double espresso, and I love it. But like you guys, I get up, hydrate, electrolytes, caffeine, family, work, work, work, work out, work, work, work. And then by 8:00 or 9:00, if you cut the caffeine out earlier, you're going to crash on a steep cliff. And it feels great because you fall asleep easily.

I mean, in South America you'll see people drinking yerba after meals because it helps with digestion. It's a mild appetite suppressant. So, if you like, I like to work out fasted. It's not going to kill your appetite, which is good because, you know, we still need to eat. Everyone's like trying to eat less these days, it seems, but still need to get the nutrients. And then it's high in antioxidants. It's got a lot of positive benefits. And it's not necessarily an alternative to coffee. You could do both. But it's not an energy drink, quote unquote, in the sense it doesn't have alpha-GPC, taurine, all those things that a lot of energy drinks have. Not to knock on those things, but, you know, I think yerba, coffee, those...

No, go ahead.

Yeah, it's going great. I mean, we partnered with Mateina, so I'm a partial owner with SYCOM. You guys know Rob and the rest of the guys at SYCOM, Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny. And we are available online through Mateina, through Amazon. We launched in Whole Foods, in Costco Canada, and in Sprouts Markets just recently, and pretty soon it will likely be everywhere you look. And people love it. You know, I'm very happy when people say they love it. It's delicious. You know, 90% of the world's adults drink caffeine every single day. It's the most popular drug in the world.

And most people need it to function pretty well. But a recent study showed they looked at coffee, but a couple of cups of caffeinated coffee per day seems like it can offset some of the dementia risk. Now, with a study like that, there are a bunch of issues. It's not necessarily causal, right? People drinking caffeine are probably working more, focusing more, more cognitively engaged, etc. But as long as it doesn't send you into a spiral of anxiety, caffeine is quite good for you. That's very clear.

Yeah. So I mean, this also showed up in the NFL a little while ago, but people are taking vasodilators. You know, Viagra and tadalafil, commonly goes by Cialis, is a vasodilator that lowers blood pressure. And, you know, people know of it as Cialis for erectile dysfunction, right? But it was originally developed as a drug to improve prostate health because when you vasodilate, when you dilate the vasculature, you get more perfusion of the prostate, and you need perfusion of the prostate to avoid infections, but other things as well. So the basic takeaway is that most every male 40 and older should probably be taking somewhere between 2.5 and 5 milligrams of tadalafil. Not necessarily for erectile function, although it will augment that as well, but to lower blood pressure and to improve vasodilation for the brain, for the prostate. And I'm not saying this as a biohacker or a podcaster. We had our head of male sexual health from Stanford. His name is Mike Eisenberg. He's an MD/PhD. He is best-in-class in terms of male sexual health, endocrinology, etc. And that's his recommendation, and it's one that most every male, maybe 35, but at least 40 and older, should take just as a preventative for strokes.

To lower anxiety pregame, because it lowers your blood pressure a little bit. They think it might be a performance enhancer by delivering more blood to the muscles. You know, you have to look at what's on the banned list, and there's obviously lots of things on the banned list, and then there are going to be the things that people are going to use because they're not on the banned list, and they'll be banned the next Olympics. That's often how it goes. So I pay a lot of attention to this over the years. If you looked in the '90s, you saw things like bromocriptine, apomorphine, things that people who know those names will augment acetylcholine, dopamine in order to improve fast transmission of neurons and alertness and focus for getting quickest out the blocks and sprinting, for instance. Those drugs are now banned. Okay, you'll see in sports where staying calm is an advantage, any shooting sport, for instance.

Most of the banned drugs are things that lower heart rate. Imagine skiing up to a target, picking up your gun and shooting, the less you're shaking, the better. So there's a bunch of banned drugs, and then there are all the things that people will take to lower their blood pressure. And some of those are not banned. And this is kind of how the cycle goes. We heard about the skiers injecting their penises in order to expand their bulge size, I guess it were, in order to get a little more air resistance, in order to perhaps capture a little more air time. That hit the press mostly because it's kind of humorous when we think about it. That was really sport. You're going to see this. You're going to see this. You're going to see peptides like BPC-157, I believe, is banned. But that's a naturally occurring gut peptide. Very hard to test for because you have tons of it circulating, and the synthetic versions may or may not differ from that version so much that you can detect it.

Okay, I'll hit the key bullet points here for the novices and for the aficionados. So a peptide is a short chain of amino acids. You know, insulin is a peptide. So when people say peptides, they're generally referring to things that people take by injection or orally in order to augment some effect, healing, growth hormone release, etc. Just as when we hear the word steroids, I mean, estrogen is a steroid hormone. But when we hear about steroids, we're typically thinking about androgenic steroids, right? Testosterone, etc. Okay? So when it comes to peptides, some are FDA approved, right? Some are made by drug companies, have passed through their patent. Many of the so-called growth hormone secretagogues, tesamorelin, ipamorelin. These are things that cause the pituitary to release more growth hormone. These have been tested, FDA approved. Most people are not getting them from drug companies. They're getting them from either compounding pharmacies, which are a lower-cost alternative that there isn't as much stringency in terms of purity, so that varies by compounding pharmacy, or from what we call gray or black market sources. So when you say Chinese peptides, what you're talking about is you can go online and buy peptides that are listed or labeled as for research purposes only. And that's what a lot of people are injecting. And that is a concern. And I'm not saying this because of my relationship to Stanford or anything like that, but I'll just say I do not think anyone should inject peptides that are labeled as for research purposes only, because even if it says 99% purity, the 1% is likely to be something called LPS, lipopolysaccharide, which can cause inflammation. It's not a good thing to be injecting. Maybe one injection doesn't do anything, but when you're injecting every day for five days a week and for a month, you can start running into some issues, autoimmune effects and so on. That said, let's just acknowledge what people are doing. And there's some peptides that have very impressive results for which there's essentially no good human data, lots of animal data, and lots of anecdotal...

which is a synthetic version of a gut peptide, can accelerate their wound healing. What's the problem? We don't have a control experiment. It acts systemically. So I can't inject it in one elbow, not the other. If I have two elbow injuries and say, 'Okay, it worked better for this one, not the other.' People claim it could be placebo, but people claim that it helps them.

Well, but the issue is that it goes through your whole body. You know, and it increases vascular growth, it increases nerve growth, it increases cartilage regrowth. From the animal studies, we know that. So the logical backbone is there. People are using it like crazy. The lethal dose is very, very high. I don't even know if anyone's achieved a lethal dose. The one study that was done in humans looked at, believe it or not, BPC enemas at very, very high doses for a gut, like a colitis issue, I believe it was. Listen, I think you have to just decide what your margin for risk is. The other one that's very interesting that not a lot of people are talking about is pinealon, which I've tried. I don't take it any longer. I tried it for a little while and it doubled my REM sleep. I was getting close to three hours of REM sleep per night. It's thought to increase regeneration or the health of pinealocytes, the pineal cells which make melatonin and so on and so forth. But the big one, the peptide that's going to change everything...

Injectable only, and on an empty stomach, meaning not having eaten in the previous two hours, 30 minutes before bed.

I doubt it was pinealon, and sometimes they'll throw some melatonin in there so you feel, quote unquote, an effect for some people. You got to get it from a compounding pharmacy or a reliable source. I'm not suggesting people do it. I actually stopped taking it because, and this is not a promotional, but I take AG1, which is their sleep formula. I helped design it. My sleep on AG1 is amazing. Amazing. I'm getting two and a half hours of REM sleep per night. I get tons of deep sleep. I feel great. So I don't need pinealon.

But the peptide that's going to change everything, and this is more up your guys' alley because this gets right into the business sphere, is Lilly has a patent. Eli Lilly has a patent on a peptide called retatrutide. Retatrutide is sometimes referred to as GLP-3. It's a triple agonist of the GLP-1, which we're all familiar with, glucagon, and something called GIP, I believe. If I'm wrong, someone will correct me, of course. The interesting thing here is that in a phase three clinical trial in humans, it caused up to one-third loss of body weight. So a loss of one-third of body weight in about six months' time. And it seems like there's some degree of muscle sparing. It works phenomenally well for weight loss. The bodybuilding community has been onto this for a long time, right? Bodybuilders always get there first. Then what happens is in Florida and the United States, doctors who know, who work out in gyms with people who know how to gain muscle and lose fat quickly, start experimenting. Then it goes into their high-leverage clients. Then it shows up in Hollywood. Everyone lies or avoids answering the question of how they got so jacked. They talk about eating chicken breasts and they're actually taking growth hormone and cypionate and winstrol and retatrutide, excuse me. And then everyone hears about it and they start, you know, whatever, looks-maxing it, and then it's a big giant mess out there. Here's the deal.

We are looking at a potential change in the laws around peptides such that buying peptides would become illegal. I actually think this is a terrible idea, but the motivation behind this is largely because Lilly owns the patent. People are already injecting retatrutide. They can buy it out there. They're taking it at maybe a third of the dose that's recommended in the trial. And they are seeing phenomenal results at fat loss. Not a week goes by where I don't get a hundred questions about retatrutide to my phone, my personal phone, let alone an email and etc. So the reason why peptides might soon become illegal to purchase through even compounding pharmacies, let alone gray market, is because Lilly would like to protect the domain over that patent. This is going to be a trillion-dollar drug. Trillion-dollar, but people are already taking it. I've never tried it, but people I know who have taken it said it works phenomenally well at a fraction of the dose.

Reduced alcohol appetite, reduced impulsivity perhaps? Remember that the receptors for these things are all over the brain and body, and the other GLP agonists have been looked at for alcohol use disorder, for binge eating disorder, and for a lot of behavioral and impulse control disorders because a lot of the receptors are rooted in the hypothalamus, which controls a lot of impulsivity-type behaviors and anxiety-related behaviors. So my stance on things is, do as you wish, but know what you're doing, but with the important caveat that if you are an adult and your body is fully formed, you are in a completely different landscape than if you're 14, 18, 20. I worry very much. We're hearing more and more about young people, especially women in the past, but now also young guys who are thinking, oh, you know, they've got to take TRT. That's crazy. I've talked about the fact that at 45, I'm 50 now, 45 years old, I started taking a microdose of cypionate, microdose, but micro so I maintain fertility. I've checked that. I take hCG, etc. Never in a million years would I suggest anyone else do that in their 20s or 30s unless they have a serious issue. With peptides, there's the risk of where you're getting it from, purity, right? But there's also the risk that if you're augmenting growth hormone in your teens, your 20s, you can really mess up your hypothalamic-pituitary-body axis, all the organs of your body in major ways. You shut down fertility. If you come off these things, you may revert to a state, you know, a depression, etc. I just think the whole looks-maxing phenomenon is really, really dangerous and foolish, especially in people younger than 40.