2672: Demystifying Bioregulators & Peptides With Nick Andrews

19:24So I know most of your audience knows this, but to understand the difference between amino acid, a peptide, and a protein, you think of Legos. And the difference is how many are clicked together. If you have three to five, three to seven Legos clicked together, that's functionally a bioregulator. One Lego brick by itself is an amino acid. And once you get over about 50 Lego bricks clicked together, now you're a peptide. And they act differently because biology, size and shape also impacts how they behave in the body and what they can do.

19:59Adam Schafer:Okay. When you're saying like these extracts, are they just taking like a thymus and making it so you could just take that and inject it? Or are they actually looking at, like you said, what they're looking for is what's doing the thing. What is it that they're finding? They're finding these short peptides that seem to do what exactly? It's called a regulator. What does that mean? So I'll give you the crude overview of essentially how they were originally made. You take an organ, you throw it in a blender, you blend it up really well, and then you put it through a series of filters so that everything above a certain molecular size is filtered out.

20:39So now you're left with, to be frank, because I've done this in a lab, a weird colored liquid that smells really bad. And it's all those bioactive molecules. Organs don't usually smell good, like if you've ever been around a butcher or anything like that. So now to the next question, what are they doing? This is actually a really important question and actually really fascinating. So to keep this from being confusing, I'll just clarify. When I say peptide, I'm referring to the common peptides most people know that you would inject, BPC, TB500, so on and so forth. Bioregulator is going to be these molecules, which are generally seven amino acids or less.

21:25so with peptides you get into another area of confusion here because you hear the constant debate you can't use peptides orally because they'll get broken down by your stomach and they're mostly useless no it's just amino acids right so and that's a true statement bioregulators can be taken orally and when you tell people that they're like no you can't because you just told me if I take it my stomach's going to break it down

21:48Adam Schafer:I got to pause right there that we had Dr. Seeds on the show and that was his that was his critique of a bioregulator orally, is that you're just going to destroy it in the gut, so it's a waste of time. So there's published papers on this, and there's a very clear answer, mechanistic answer that explains it. So the main enzyme that chops proteins up, whether it's a steak or TB500, if you were to take it orally, is pepsin. It's running around like a pair of scissors in your stomach, just chopping all the proteins and peptides up. generally speaking pepsin does not attach well to molecules to bioregulators to peptides that are less than about seven amino acids because it this is a loose explanation but you essentially need a large enough molecular area for it to attach to and start chopping stuff up so once you're under about seven amino acids it's going to be chopped up a little bit without question but it isn't going to get completely destroyed.

22:51BPC-157 is, I believe, about 50 amino acids. So BPC-157, I'll use a better example.

22:59Adam Schafer:Yeah, because that one's orally bioavailable. A little bit. So TB-500, so actual thymus and beta-4 is a very large molecule. TB-500 is a fragment of it. But even that fragment is still a very large molecule. Somebody will probably correct me here. I believe it's about 40 amino acids. 40 amino acids is getting sliced and diced up, down, left, and right by pepsin. So you can't really go any smaller than that fragment of the full thymus and beta-4 molecule and have it be active. So once that 40 amino acid block starts getting chopped up, you're done. Game over. So the second piece to this is you have a transporter in the lining of your gut called PEPT1.

23:49PEPT1 directly essentially latches on to amino acid chains, peptides, but only ones that are about seven amino acids or less. So you have direct transport pathways, active pathways, out of your gut into your bloodstream for bioregulators. You don't have that for peptides. Peptides have to go all the way through digestion and then try to pass through the gut lining.

24:17Adam Schafer:And there's no passing through the liver? How does it get to the bloodstream? So they're still going to go through the liver. Okay. And you will get additional degradation there. It's not a huge number of studies. There are a handful of degradation studies out there on peptides. And these are, I'll say, educated estimates. It's not like there's 500 papers, so you can say a hard number. but realistically when you take a bioregular orally, you're probably getting somewhere 10 to 30 % into systemic circulation. Okay. And you can also, you can get to that number a few different ways. There are some degradation studies.

25:00There are also actually a number of radioisotope labeling studies. So they take one of these molecules and they, they make part of it radioactive essentially. They tag it. Yep. Yeah. You put it in a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, and you look at where it goes. They've done that with multiple of them. And based on where it's going, you can now make legitimate calculations that to see this much radiation around the body, you had to have at least this much of the stuff get all the way through digestion and into the body.

25:29Adam Schafer:Okay. So correct me if I'm wrong. When your body breaks down amino acids, each amino acid does something on its own. You have a complete protein that does something differently. when you're taking these chains that are seven amino acids long, let's say, or less, that has a particular signaling process in the body. It knows where to go, essentially. Essentially. And to me, this is actually the coolest thing about bioregulators that I actually don't think I've ever heard anybody talk about, at least any of the podcasts I've listened to. So let's take a step back. How do peptides work? When you take a peptide, it's essentially looking for a receptor.

26:09So let me go hit that receptor. And a peptide is essentially ramping something up, generally speaking, above baseline function. So if a certain function in your body repair and regenerate, you know, microvascular growth, even if you're, you know, the pinnacle of health and you're operating at 100%, if you take BPC, it's going to improve your microvasculature. Right, it's going above 100%. bioregulators don't work like that. Bioregulators don't work through the receptors. So bioregulators are freaking fascinating because what they do is they, you know, they have to go through digestion as we just spoke about.

26:47They end up in primary circulation and then they go directly into the cell. There's a few ways they can do it. They can do it through diffusion. They can do it through being actively pulled into the cell through a few different mechanisms. And so they, they can go into pretty much any cell for the most part. But yeah, when you say seven amino acids that I think a lot of people will be like, well, you're not going to have many combinations that you can have to actually, it's actually a massive number because if I won't go down this road to calculate, it's an exponential function. Yeah. It's like five times, five times, five times, so it's a huge number.

27:25Adam Schafer:Yeah. You can organize seven in a lot of different ways. Right. So what happens is, especially in smaller molecular structures, charge structure becomes very, very important. Yeah. If, if you get into like all the lipid nanoparticle technology, which is like all the rage lately, it's, it's the same thing. It's entirely dependent on charge structure to be able to deliver it to something. Bio. So bioregulators in a sense are working at the same level of like what we just now have is like cutting edge technology as to how they home in. So they get to a cell, does it have the right charge? Certain cells have different charges on the outside, so they're going to be more likely to be accepted by certain cells depending on their charge structure and their amino acid structure.

28:12When they go into the cell, they're actually small enough to pass into the nucleus. So now once they're in the nucleus, they actually directly interact with either or both DNA directly or histones, molecules related to the DNA. So bioregulators are directly signaling the DNA.

28:34Adam Schafer:Okay. Okay. And now what are they doing? Because a peptide signals specific things. Bioregulators, I'm assuming the regulator part of it means it's just optimizing its function up, down, depending on what the cell needs. Right. So that's why I brought up what peptides do before. To put it into one sound bite here, peptides focus on receptors, which are generally in the outside of tissues, outside of cells, and ramp it up over 100%. Bioregulators go to the nucleus and interact with DNA or histones to tell them to go to their baseline homeostasis state. Okay. Wow. So you have a liver, let's say, that's operating suboptimal or sub-baseline.

29:25Adam Schafer:It's dysfunctional. Let's say you've got some elevated liver enzymes, maybe a little fatty liver disease, whatever. A bioregulator would go in there and tell the cells, hey, let's get back to operating optimally. And you see improvements, essentially. Right. So interestingly, there is a slight overlap in function in GHKCU and bioregulators. because GHKCU absolutely works through a wide array of receptors. But GHKCU also can signal to the DNA to shift back to homeostasis. Okay. There may be others. It's actually the only peptide I'm personally aware of that actually does that. So it's very unique in that sense.

30:03But that's exactly how bioregulators work, and that brings up another difference, which causes more confusion on bioregulators. You take peptides, like, hey, I messed up my knee or my shoulder or whatever. I'm going to go use BPC and TB500. You know, hey, some people are like, I feel a difference in a day. Some people are a week. But if you're using it right, you're going to feel it. No question within a week, usually within a few days. Bioregulators are slow and steady because they're never ramping it over 100%. So they're just saying, let's go back to our baseline health state, homeostasis. So that is a slow and steady operation.

30:42And the majority, I'll say probably in the majority of cases, you're usually not going to have an overt subjective effect of, oh, wow, I feel that. There are two easy examples that are exceptions to that. One is in men's health. As men age, due to hormonal balance, even if you're optimized, TRT and all this and all that. Sure, you're just older. Right. Morning erection in men is a very easy, very obvious sign of hormonal health. And that also gets into vascular factors and all that. And as we age, whether it's women know this because they're husbands, men know this because they live it. As you age, you're not waking up every morning having to be careful to roll over, even if you're absolutely optimized.

31:32So if you take testes and prostate bioregulator, the perfect stack for basically men's sexual health would be testes, blood vessel, and prostate. If you take those three, most guys within a week, some guys two weeks, you will absolutely notice a difference of morning erectile function when you're waking up.

31:56Adam Schafer:Okay. Over how long? So how long that lasts. Or no, how long do people notice? How quickly? Three days to a week, you say. Is that same? Some people in a couple days, I usually tell people one to two weeks. most within a week if you're struggling with health and there can be any number of health issues your health isn't really dialed in it may take two weeks because you're you're all the tissues involved have further to go to get back to homeostasis okay one thing that i see is when i when i when you look up and research on just peptides many of them are still used or prescribed medically in Russia.

32:35Adam Schafer:Like they'll prescribe CMAX for anxiety, CMAX for cognitive function, or CELANC for anxiety, for example. Like you go there, this may be a prescription that you get if you have cognitive decline, anxiety, whatever. They do this with other peptides. Are they prescribing bioregulators? Is that part of their medical system as well? You know, that's kind of interesting because I have a few contacts, you know, in my personal circle in Russia. And, you know, they're looked at, at least as has been explained to me. First off, to answer your question, they're entirely over the counter. The cytomines are largely ignored from what I'm told.

33:21Like, oh, that's old, like, 1970s stuff. Who cares? If they're used, it's more of the health optimization equivalent of the circles in the West. and those would more often be the cytogens. Okay. So that's one piece I didn't touch on before. I explained cytomines and cytomaxes. So cytomines are just essentially the bulk stuff. It's loaded with the direct bioregulators, but also larger molecules. The cytomaxes are purified down to, for the most part, just the pure bioregulators. And then Cavinson and other people took the research a step further and said that, okay, we have these larger amino acid chains, you know, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, whatever it is, that produce this effect.

34:10But even when you do that, you're going to end up with a soup of these. So if you go through like lab level super ultra purification, you may find when you're doing like mass spec and all this stuff that, hey, there are 5, 6, 7, 8 of these bioregulators that are coming out of a heart for a heart bioregulator. When you do the lab work, what they find with these, and this is, to find this stuff, you have to go to Russian literature and translate it. It's another issue. It's not easy to go dig this up. But what they usually find is that one or two of them is producing something like 80 % of the effect.

34:46Okay. So instead of having to go, it's a complicated process and functionally labor-intensive. to be like, I got to go collect, you know, 5 ,000 hearts and extract all this to get enough to go sell on the market. Well, if I can just identify that one bioregulator, that one five amino acid chain that produces 80 % of the effect, it is far easier and far more efficient for me to now just go to the lab and produce that bioregulator, that one specific one out of the three, four, or five that produces the effect the same way I would produce a peptide. You can do it on a machine automated. So that's a cytogen is that we identify.

35:27This is the one that produces 80 % of the effect. So we're going to make it entirely synthetically. That's what I was just going to ask you.

35:33Adam Schafer:So they're not taking a bunch of cow hearts. They're actually making it synthetically. Correct. Wow. That's interesting. So here's how I see, cause I love going on, on the internet and bodybuilders are the best at experimentation. They're typically the ones that try things first. And I've been reading about bodybuilders using the heart bioregulators because of years of use of growth hormone and anabolic steroids, the fear being the enlargement of the heart, issues like that. And they're saying, I'm using this to help offset some of that. Is that an appropriate – does that make sense? It does make sense.

36:09the catch 22 from the western perspective you guys see this all the time you talk about it on your podcast constantly just because this is a western view show me the paper show me this exact mechanism that exact mechanism they work there's lots of Russian literature guys can verify pretty easily themselves via biological effect so they do work but they're slow and steady and in the case of bodybuilders is it going to completely counter that? The answer is no. Because when you get into why are you getting an enlarged heart and other secondary cardiac effects from excessive androgen cycles and things like that, you have a number of effects causing it.

36:54It's not just, we'll say, cellular disruption of homeostasis. So they're helping that effect. People at that level using those compounds at those doses, you have other effects going. So it, it's a bandaid. It's not a bandaid. It, it's, yeah, it's helping one piece of the puzzle. Okay. But there's a lot of things happening.

37:17Sal Di Stefano:Yeah. I liked where you were going earlier, uh, about being able to kind of check and see like, especially with men's sexual health, like an actual effect and a feeling associated with this. I know as a consumer, it's kind of difficult to describe like a bioregulators and their benefit to them. Is there any other, like, so would you be paying attention to blood markers and how often would you kind of check to see how things are working and benefiting you? Like, are there other types of indicators that you could pay attention to in different stacks that you might be able to feel something and peer into that a little bit more?

37:56Yeah. So, for instance, there are human studies on bioregulators. They are on PubMed. Most of them are coming out of Russian institutions, which some people don't like, and that's their choice. But for instance, retinal bioregulator. There are human studies that showed improvement of a few different retinal conditions in a medical setting, medically measured. another example is another confusion point of bioregulators sort of like peptides so for instance BPC and TB500 they function through two core different pathways but if you dig into the pathways they hit they do overlap they hit some of the same pathways just to different degrees bioregulators can be the same So certain amino acid chains can cause functions and be taken in by multiple tissue types.

38:59One example is bone bioregulator. So bone bioregulator is extracted from the bone marrow. So bone bioregulators will improve marrow function, which improves bone, but it also improves T cell function.

39:14Adam Schafer:Because of the bone marrow. Right. Right. And it does also have other secondary minor effects and other immune-related tissues. Would there be endurance boost because of that, red blood cell production, anything like that? There can be, but once again, the way to understand bioregulators, and I thought about this a lot, actually, before coming here, what's an easy way to communicate this? And this is what I came up with, is think of it as three tiers. You have standard oral supplements, whether it's magnesium or anything else, right? Then you have bioregulators, and then you have peptides. So each level is essentially a different level of intensity.

40:01Adam Schafer:Okay. Okay. So would a bioregular be more like a light dimmer switch, turning it up or down depending on what your body needs? Right. So to really go down this rabbit hole, I would actually redefine the common term optimization to a point in that I would almost refer to bioregulators as optimizing compounds because they're shifting the tissues they target back to your baseline homeostatic state. And then peptides would be above and beyond. Above and beyond. So are they good to use together? Absolutely. Okay. What are your favorite bioregulars? What are some of the reviews you're getting that people are like, oh, this one?

40:41Adam Schafer:I mean, you mentioned the male health one because that's a very obvious sign. Are there any favorites among your performance-driven individuals or people who are looking for cognitive enhancement or anything like that? Yeah. So I'll shift the sphere for that a little bit there. So Promethean works with clinics to get them bioregulators. And one place that there are clear results by clinicians using this in the real world is actually with people undergoing chemotherapy. Because chemotherapy is rough on your body. It has a huge impact besides just the cancer on your immune system, your cardiovascular system, and other areas.

41:26So there's a number of clinicians which are more open to these routes that have been using thymus, bone marrow, and blood vessel bioregulators.

41:35Adam Schafer:Is it more as a protective route? Either protective or as post-chemo. It depends on when the person comes to them. Especially in the functional medicine world, people are usually coming after they've kind of given up on the mainstream. But they do have some clients who are like, yeah, unfortunately, the big C showed up. Like, we've got to take care of this. So you can start it beforehand, and that's not going to prevent all the side effects of chemotherapy, but it's going to reduce the magnitude of them. Okay. Because now you have a mechanism, just think of a push and pull, right, from a training sense.

42:09You have chemo pushing those functions down so they're not working as well. Bioregulators are helping balance by continually signaling the DNA to say, nope, stay in the homeostasis state and build and repair.

42:21Adam Schafer:Yeah, and I did see some studies, again, Russian studies, that show that there are anti-cancer cell proliferation in some of these studies with these bioregulators. Yeah, so multiple bioregulators. All the studies I'm familiar with, they're basically like petri dish studies in individual cells. But it makes absolute sense because what is cancer? Cancer is essentially derangement of a cell. It stops doing what it's supposed to be doing normally and goes off doing bad stuff that makes you sick and kills you, right? So if you look at Western technology, there are multiple Western therapeutic approaches trying to figure out how to tell the cell to go back to the healthy state.

43:03Bioregulators do that. Now, bioregulators are not like dropping an atom bomb on something. So you're not going to say, and I don't think anybody would ever claim, bioregulators are going to cure cancer. Right. Highly unlikely. but the mechanism is there and it's been proven in labs that it does shift cancer. It can shift some portion of cancer cells back to a normal healthy state.

43:30Adam Schafer:Okay. One of the bioregulars I'm interested in is the pineal gland one. And it's not necessarily because I know a lot about the pineal gland aside from the, you know, you hear people say things like the pineal gland is what gets you to like when you, when people take psychedelics, that's what opens up. or it gets calcified from water having too much fluoride in it or whatever. What do you get from using a pineal gland by a regulator? So your pineal gland goes back to baseline. What do you experience from that?

44:01Sal Di Stefano:Is it affected by 5G? You know, that's a little bit of a conversation. If you look at studies, I mean, most brain tissue is going to be impacted by it. Good job, that was kind of a joke. Yeah, I don't want to sidetrack you. Yeah. Yeah. So the way to understand pineal gland and some of the other ones is you have your endocrine system. Pineal gland, it's kind of like the parathyroid. Pineal gland and parathyroid, like most people are like, what is that? Oh, I have that. I didn't know I have those in my body. But they're both critical to endocrine function.

44:35Adam Schafer:Oh, okay. So for pineal gland, yeah, yeah. And I'm not shooting it down. I'm just using the term. I mean, you can get into the more woo-woo aspects. How open are you to the metaphysical space and all that? But without even having to get there, the pineal gland, and I'm throwing parathyroid in here because we're like, what the hell is that? Both of those are organs that play critical roles in multiple fashions in your endocrine system. So endocrine system ties back to everything. It ties to hormone levels, stress response, just including how you age because all this stuff is actually – if you look at all the major signaling systems in the human body, the vast majority of them are all tied together through the endocrine system, through various signaling cascades.

45:25So another example is – this is an uncommon one. You have a middle-aged woman, busy life, whether it's kids, work, both, everything, whatever else. And they can struggle with stress and that cascades into hormone dysfunction and it can cascade into endocrine dysfunction as well. So bioregulators, once again, are not going to fix those issues 100 % on themselves. But I mean, I do private health coaching on the side. I use these with some people. I've absolutely seen an effect with a number of women I've worked with by having bioregulators on board

46:04Adam Schafer:I've got to give you credit because and I want to talk about your push patch because NAD the biohacking space loves talking about NAD I've used NAD sub-Q intramuscular I did an IV, never liked any of it, the intramuscular sub-Q didn't notice anything, we did an IV We actually had somebody come in here. They were trying to convince us to partner with them. And they gave us a free, like massive dose of NAD. So we all sat here hooked up to these things. For three hours. And we were here for like an hour and a half. I don't remember what it was. And I did not like it. My legs felt heavy. I didn't sleep well.

46:42Adam Schafer:Didn't feel good. And then later on, I just didn't notice much of an effect. But there was an acute crappy feeling is what happened. I've used supplements that raise NAD. Notice nothing. I get nothing from them. Now, some people love it. Some people notice a difference. Zero. bro, you have a something called a push patch with NAD. That works for sure. I give that to my wife, myself, these guys in here. It's one of the few things these guys fight me over. Oftentimes I take all the supplements home or whatever products. Those patches come in and we're like, you know, perfectly dividing them because all of us know the difference.

47:13Sal Di Stefano:All of us have personally reported back that we feel the difference in it, including our wives too. I mean, that's what she's always asking me to grab more because of that. Anytime I've been sick, it's become like part of the protocol to take that right away. and I swear it cuts it in half.

47:25Adam Schafer:Oh, and energy-wise, I just feel, I'm not like stimulated like caffeine. I just feel good all day long. Like flying. You're getting on a six-hour flight until I became part of Pushpatch, helped develop the product. I'd get on a flight even for two hours. I would get off. I was in a brain fog for like a day. Yeah. I mean, I can fly to Europe now and get off the plane and be ready to rock. So, okay, so why do I notice a difference? Because you send us stuff all the time. And I've used it, I don't know, at least 20 times. My wife has used it just as many times. Why do I notice such a big difference with that versus even the IV?

48:02Adam Schafer:We got a massive dose. All of us were sitting here doing it, and I didn't like that. And yours, with the pushback, I noticed. I felt great. What's the difference? So to use a training analogy to keep it simple, and then we can dive in more technical if you want, is I think you're going to do an extended training session. I'm going to go train for four hours, biking, running, lifting, crossfit whatever it is right let's say you know you're going to drink a gallon of water over that four hour training period well if i tell you to drink that whole gallon right now like yeah any of us sitting here could do it and it's not going to be fun you're going to have a stomach ache you might puke or are you just going to be dude i feel bloated like i'm not going to go lift now right and okay technically you're hydrated but two hours into that workout hydrated the water's dehydrated right the water's gone you're dehydrated and now you probably have a stomach ache and all the other cascading issues of pounding that, uh, you know, gallon of water up front.

48:56If you go the other extreme end, you have NAD sub Q and you have oral supplements. So that's kind of like handing somebody, you know, like the little, uh, paper cup, you know, you see in bathrooms of water, like the dentist. Yep. Like, okay. Like I'm not thirsty right now. Cause all right. That was a little drink of water. Um, but you know, it's a quick hit like in, five minutes, I'm going to be thirsty and that's all the water there was. So, you know, coming back to supplements, some people love it. You know, my 78 year old mother, they're awesome for her because once again, it's situational.

49:31Somebody older, you know, or somebody who's in a fairly poor state of health, that's enough to make a difference for them. For somebody who's younger or somebody who's very fit or optimized, your body already operates at a high enough level that that's unlikely to make a dent in your natural production. So in the middle, the sweet spot is let's take that gallon of water and put it in like a hydration backpack with your little straw, and now you can sip on it pretty much consistently for the whole four hours. Now you're not thirsty, now you don't have a stomach ache, and now you stay hydrated the whole time.

50:09So if we translate that back to how does this matter to NAD, is as soon as NAD goes into your body, it can be degraded via a number of routes, a number of enzymes. So that's going on. And secondly, everybody thinks of NAD as mitochondria in the cell energy. I know you guys know this, but what some people may not know is you actually have two pools of NAD. You have an intracellular and an extracellular. So you have NAD in the cell and you have NAD outside of the cell. Now, that does a few things. That gives your body basically a reservoir and a way to balance so it can pull stuff into the cell when it needs to.

50:53But NAD is also a signaling molecule for your immune system and for other functions. Essentially, think it's a little more complex than this, but think free NAD floating around in blood or bodily fluids. So we have a signaling molecule here. If I flood your body with that molecule, that also happens to be a signaling molecule, Well, now you know why your gut's feeling like they're on fire, why you feel like an elephant sitting on your chest, and why you might puke. Yeah. Because we just disrupted the signaling molecules. Now, is it dangerous? Unless you were to do something really, really stupid in terms of an IV fusion, not dangerous.

51:32It's just not going to be fun. It felt terrible.

51:34Adam Schafer:My legs felt heavy. It really felt weird. I didn't really feel bad for him.

51:38Sal Di Stefano:I just didn't feel the effect of it. I didn't feel good at all. I remember you complaining about it. I was just like, I didn't feel anything compared to the push patch I feel. It's wild, the difference. So the other aspect of that is, and especially when you go to conferences and we get into the deeper ends of these circles, a common debate is, hey, cells cannot take NAD up directly. So this is a common debate around the precursors, NNM and NR. Right. Is cells can't directly take NAD up, so it's useless to just put NAD into your body. well first off that seems actually wrong there are I know of two really cool studies they did with humans IV infusion measured urine blood all that to account for all the NAD possibly coming out of you and then looking at tissue behavior long story short what they found was that this was IV infusion is that they didn't measure a rise in the blood levels of NAD until I want to say almost two hours into an IV infusion When they do all the math and all the nerd stuff on that, accounting for urine or NAD breakdown products, they can't account for it.

52:48So that study shows that there are numerous pathways for direct uptake of NAD into cells that we just don't know about. We can't tell you what tissue. We can't tell you how we're doing it. But if you just do the math, cells can take it up. How much? It's a big gray area. But that just says that to say cells can't directly take up NAD is wrong. We can't say more than that, but we can say that some tissues, somehow, they can. The second piece is, yes, NAD gets broken down. It gets broken down into a few different fragments. And this is also where it gets interesting because you can do an NAD test, right, the finger prick test.

53:29and most of them are for intracellular NAD, how much NAD is in your cell. You have, I think, one or two that I'm aware of that are extracellular, how much NAD is just kind of floating around in your bloodstream and in the interstitial fluids. And they're related, but they also tell you different things. So when NAD gets broken down into these different fragments, most cells have transport pathways specifically for some of these fragments. So NAD gets broken up into Lego block example again. I get 10 Lego blocks. You break it up into three different pieces. Your cells have a way to bring each of those pieces in, and then it has another set of machinery to reassemble those pieces.

54:12Now, inside the cell, it may convert it to NNM. It may convert it back to NAD. It depends on the cell, what's going on, and other factors. But regardless of which path, you've still increased the bioenergetics of that cell. Okay.

54:29Adam Schafer:And when I'm doing the push patch, it's doing a slow trickle for, I think, was it eight hours, 12 hours? 12 hours. And so it's releasing a consistent stream of NAD throughout that entire period of time. Yep. Steady state. So essentially think of it as a square wave, right? If you were to look at a dose curve picture, if you're doing an IV infusion, it's like a sharp pyramid, like straight up and then straight down, right? Right. With push patch, you know, think almost like a picture of a table. Like ramp up is probably around two hours. The exact number is going to depend because it depends on skin quality, how you're wearing it, hydration, your electrolyte levels.

55:11but ramp up in most cases is going to take about two hours. So you're going to have your ramp up and now you're just going to stay here for, you're actually going to stay there for longer than 12 hours. The reason it's over at 12 hours is it has a built-in battery because you're using a small electric current to push it. The battery runs out of power at 12 hours and by default it's turned off, but you've built up skin loading because during that first two hours, the area of skin and the tissue immediately under the skin, were essentially getting super saturated. So now when the patch stops, you actually, that continues to diffuse into the blood, you know, for how long?

55:49Maybe one to three hours.

55:51Adam Schafer:So push patch, explain how it works. You just said there's a battery in there. So here's what, for people who aren't familiar with this, there is a battery in there. You put it on, you pull out a little tag, which I'm assuming creates contact with the battery. What's it doing? How's it pulling through the skin? So the easiest way to explain this is think of a magnet, right? So if I have a North Pole, two magnets, and I take the North Pole and the South Pole, and I even bring them slightly together, they pull each other together. Right. If I take two North Poles, they push each other away. So you can do the same thing with an electric current.

56:28So when you start that electric current, and when we say electricity, you're not sticking your finger in a wall. No, you don't feel anything. You're talking a watch battery. So what happens is you start that electric current. One side of the pad is negative. One side of the pad is positive.

56:43Adam Schafer:So it's going like this. Now, not all molecules. The vast majority of molecules have a net charge, right? So I'll give you an example. So people see NAD and they say, oh, it's positively charged. Because it's NAD+. Right. The answer is it depends. It depends on pH. It depends on some other factors. NAD can, in certain conditions, actually have a net negative charge. So, you know, this is some of the magic behind push patches, actually our formulation, getting into all the crazy formulation chemistry and electrochemistry behind that. But understanding how to control the charge state of the molecule you want and where to put it so that, like the magnets, if you have a molecule that's negatively charged and you put it on the negative side, it's going to be pushed to the positive.

57:34And the reason it doesn't go straight down is think about a picture of a sunspot on the sun. You see the big arc of the sunspot. That's actually the same thing happening. The plasma from the sun is following the arc of the electric current. So what happens with any molecule used with iontophoresis is it wants to follow that arc. Now what happens is once it kind of gets halfway down that arc, think of a stream just flowing by. It's just going to kind of get swept off and your body's going to go do with it what it needs to do with it.

58:06Adam Schafer:And our push patches, this is like a medical technology, right? Because this is also used. This has been researched and used for other delivery, for other medicines as well, correct? Yeah, that's actually the cool thing about it is. This isn't like you invented this technology. This is technology. This technology of transdermal, I don't know if that's the right term, of application of medicines or molecules. This is a medical technology. Yeah, a transplant is correct, and everything you said is correct. The cool thing about it is it's old technology. It's been around since actually earlier in the 70s.

58:43It goes, I think, all the way back to the – in the 50s, it was ugly, but it goes that far back. Basically, as soon as people were playing with electricity, like what happens if we put electricity on your skin? Oh, interesting things happen. Now, once again, electrochemistry is complex and the skin is complex. So the challenge with ionophoresis, one of the reasons it really hasn't moved beyond a handful of niche applications in the medical industry or anywhere else is because when you start getting into how do I formulate the molecule, it has to be stable in that electric field. It has to have the right charges.

59:24It has to be able to move with it, and it has to do all that while still being useful and stable once it gets into the body.

59:30Adam Schafer:Got it. So, you know, we can do point A, electro-iontrophoresis. A fifth grader could do it as a grade school project. But you can use a needle and just put something in the body, right? But there's a lot going on in between those two steps, and it's not simple, and it's not easy. Okay. So, in other words, this doesn't necessarily work with every molecule. It has to be the right one to be able to do this. Correct. So Push Patch is working on developing a number of other products, including bioregulators. And a lot of times it isn't fast because you have to dial in all those factors to make sure it's doing what it's supposed to be doing.

1:00:12Adam Schafer:So in other words, the reason why a lot of people don't notice NAD is because they're not – your body doesn't utilize it in one bolus or even a small dose. It kind of needs this consistent stream. Because like I said, it's the only NAD I've ever felt. So that's actually a critical point we kind of skipped over before is with an IV infusion, you suddenly have a massive dose of NAD. Yep, cells are going to take it up. Yep, it's going to help things. I'll give you an example. For addiction treatment, IV infusions are – I don't know if you're familiar with this. There's a number of clinics that specialize in this.

1:00:49they're so messed up from drug addiction. NAD, IV infusions are like a miracle tool if used appropriately just because they're in that much of a degraded state. But generally speaking, you dump this massive load of NAD into your bloodstream. Kind of like you and me drinking water. Maybe you or I could drink a gallon of water in one sitting. We're going to puke if we try to drink two. Body's kind of the same way. It can only use NAD so fast. And then on top of that, But as NAD increases, cells have more energy to do more stuff. Now they'd like to have some more of it. But that one bolus is gone.

1:01:25It was here and gone. Now I'm ramped up. Now I'm ready to do more repair. I'm ready to do more neuron firing and thinking or training, whatever it is. Well, yeah, it's almost like a tease, right? Like, oh, that was like, you know, you stopped by and loaned me your Ferrari, right? Like, here, Nick, you can drive my Ferrari for an hour. Like, oh, my God, that was awesome. Dude, I want to go drive the Ferrari again. Sorry, I took it home.

1:01:47Adam Schafer:Okay. Is this only available through, because it's a medical technology, it's only available through prescription? It is. You know, we're working with some people. Hopefully we'll be able to have another conversation with more news about that before too long with you guys. But the device itself, so the actual patch itself is a registered medical device and requires a prescription. Oh, okay. Okay. Interesting. Um, all right. I want to talk about, uh, GHKCU again. Um, cause now I'm seeing it being used in other skincare products. Uh, what's the amount that you guys are using within Tara? Because it seems to be much higher than some of the, some of the other ones out there.

1:02:31Yeah. So, yeah, I call it the Amazon effect, right? Um, because is now everybody's um yeah obviously being the owner of the company the founder and the guy who makes all the products um have gotten comments emails of like hey your product looks great and hey maybe i used your product and i love it but it i can buy something that looks like it's almost the exact same thing says makes all the same statements about it um for 15 so why am i going to pay for yours? Well, the answer is peptides in general are freaking expensive. And I'll give you an example. I'm not attacking any brands here. You can go to the top brands and I've gone to all the big beauty stores with women multiple times, essentially legit market research, walk me through all the hot products.

1:03:24I want to know what to look at, which everybody love so I can look at the label. I look at the label and what I do is since I make this stuff, I know how much all this stuff costs. So either I'll buy it or I'll take a picture of the label, go back to my laptop and say, if you dig into the research with most of the skincare peptides, you can look up a general range of what an effective concentration would need to be. Sometimes it can be a big range. Sometimes it's a narrow range. But you can look up the range. And if you know what it would cost to buy the raw material, you can do a rough calculation.

1:04:02Well, if I say the minimum effective level based on the research is X, right? And I know that the peptide costs Y. Well, now I can just calculate the cost of the peptides if I assume that each one is at the minimum effective level. and what you find in most brands, even the big ones, is that they would have to charge two to three times what they are for their product. Now, this can vary widely, but in a lot of the cosmetic space, a lot of products have a 5X to 10X margin, meaning that if it costs them$1 to make it, they're going to sell it for$5 to$10 for you to get it. So a lot of times I do the math and some brands, you'll see that their price is maybe twice what the cost of goods are.

1:04:51You can't run a business on that. So what that tells me right there, because their formulation is proprietary, nobody's going to tell me, but just by doing the numbers on the cost of the peptides and saying I know minimum effective levels are this, well, I know most of these products, they have it in there. It's a legitimate claim, and I'm not saying it can't not help you, right? It can still do something, but to really hit that minimum effective level for a clear, obvious effect from that peptide and whatever its mechanism is, I'm not going to name potential competitors. I've only found three that even begin to get into that space.

1:05:31Sal Di Stefano:Yeah. This is what we speculated on. Because it's such an effective peptide that even little bits of it, some people might notice some sort of positive change. And so then they'll assume, oh, this must work.

1:05:42Adam Schafer:It's better than their petroleum-based lotion. Right. But it's not going to be like you're – because when you guys have one or two applications, you notice. Literally one or two, and you can tell the difference. Well, yeah, through some of my personal health coaching stuff, I mean, just to be blunt about it, I had a high net worth client I was doing a health coaching for, and she knew about Interra, and she's like, hey, I don't like Botox. I'm having these issues. If I told you there was no price, Could you make me something that would actually fix this? I was like, let me think about it and let me get back to you.

1:06:15Went, did a little bit of homework and get back. And I said, yes, but you know, like the, the one ounce 30 ml tubes that Interra sells our serum in, I said, that's going to cost you$1 ,500 per tube. And she was like, okay, done. I'm like, okay, done. Made it for her. And she was like, it was actually wild. I would love to get pictures. Unfortunately, that's never going to happen. But it just proved real world. And no, that's not economically viable for 99.9 % of the population. But depending on where your limits are, to a point, the sky's the limit.

1:06:55Sal Di Stefano:Wow, that's cool.

1:06:56Adam Schafer:So looking forward, what are you most excited about with this space? Is there anything cutting edge that you're excited about?

1:07:02Sal Di Stefano:Or I would love just your business side because you've got Pushpatch and Terra and Promethea and which of the three are you most excited about or which has the most potential in your opinion? You know, I am really excited about all three. So I'll answer this in three ways. Of course, you wouldn't be doing them if you weren't excited about all three. You know, fortunately, I've gotten to a point in life kind of like you guys where I get to do what I actually love doing. So, you know, from a growth perspective, push patch is wild because NAD is legit as you guys know, but the challenge is in the delivery of it so that it produces the greatest effect.

1:07:42And, you know, realistically over, since the beginning of this year, it seemed like the general public consciousness kind of hit that space of like, Oh, NAD isn't some weird optimization thing just for gym bros. It's like, Oh, and interestingly where NAD is really seeming to blow up right now is in aesthetics why? you know for a couple reasons number one for just market reasons you can charge a lot for NAD whether it's an infusion injection whatever but you know so Pushpatch goes to a number of the big aesthetics conferences and we actually have a massive client base there because what you'll find if you use it appropriately is that when you get into the more invasive aesthetics processes, not just Botox, but whether it's micro-threading or even like the more hardcore RF microsurfacing they do, which takes like the top three layers of skin off, your recovery, there are cases where it's cut in half.

1:08:48It's cut to one-third by putting on a patch the morning before the procedure. Because that mass, so a lot of the aesthetics procedures, for example, like RF, radio frequency resurfacing, and you guys absolutely know about this, it's essentially a good injury. You intentionally cause a certain type of damage to a tissue to stimulate it to repair and regrow. That takes a lot of energy to do that. So hey, if I preload your system with elevated levels of NAD, guess what? Now you're doing that way faster. And just think about it from both the customer side and the business side. So if a woman has done this before and it's like, oh, dude, I'm going to have to go hide for a week after having this done, but then I'm going to look like a million bucks to, I look great in two days.

1:09:34Like, you're super psyched instead of once a year because I don't want to go hide for a week. Maybe I'm going to do two or three times a year.

1:09:40Adam Schafer:Would it make sense then to use an NAD patch before a very strenuous competition or event? You know, you can go do a marathon, triathlon, you're going to go do something crazy. Would it make sense to preload that way? Oh, 100%. It is a legit performance enhancer without question. So my son plays soccer competitively. He was just over in Europe for a year. And, you know, it's not banned. NAD is legit as far as I know. Colleges, universities, all that. Maybe that changes one day, but you can see it in his game plays. Like watching his videos of when he hasn't wore one in a challenging game when he is, you see him starting to get tired two-thirds of the way through the game.

1:10:25His reaction, his time is slowing down. He's not as fast. He's wearing a patch. It's just nonstop all throughout.

1:10:32Sal Di Stefano:We just find it in our house, my wife and I, if someone, if one of her, me, or my son gets sick, the other ones patch up. That's exactly what, as soon as one gets sick, the other ones are patched up right away. And either one keeps me from getting sick. Or even if I do, it feels like it reduces it in half, like the time and how hard it is.

1:10:50Adam Schafer:I used it with lack of sleep, you know, so like I had a really bad sleep and then I put it on, I'm like, I feel like I didn't get bad sleep. So two points there. Yeah, I definitely say, once again, remember for most people, it can take about two hours to ramp up to that steady state. But put one on and go do a workout two hours after putting one on. You know, for me, realistically, I can go through a workout if I'm wearing one. And I kind of feel like I just did warm up. Like at the end, I'm like, maybe I should do another circuit. Like I'm like, if I'm not wearing, I'm like, yeah, I'm tired. Time to go home.

1:11:25I'm wearing one. I'm like, maybe I should get some more sets in while I'm here. The other side, and this is another common question is, hey, Nick, in Mind Pump, you guys talked about 15 different things the patch is doing. How can it do that? It sounds like the ShamWow infomercial, right? Very legitimate question. And this one molecule can't do all these 27 things. And you're right, it doesn't. But what it's doing is it's increasing the available energy for every tissue type in your body, every signaling process in your body. So now every single one of those processes can work better. When people in your house are getting sick and you slap one on and it increases your NAD levels, your immune system just became more effective.

1:12:11If you're having a hard time sleeping, sleep is rest, repair, rebuild, right? So when you increase the energy, your body is now more effective. So one more step into that, a common challenge with sleep is cortisol stress, and you get a cascade from that that disrupts bioenergetics and neurological signaling. Well, by increasing NAD, now your body can be, yeah, no, that's good, but I'm going to kind of ignore that cortisol and do my job anyway. Now I can sleep.

1:12:40Adam Schafer:Cool. This is great. It's always good talking to you because you're always so deep on this stuff, dude. Yeah, the NAD I noticed the most, and I've been using the Promethean, and it's been, I would say, three weeks. And it is subtle, but I think I can tell a difference, both stamina and recovery with those. But it's only been a few weeks, so I'll report back to you. Thank you. I mean, if I can just kind of recap that, because I know it bounced around a lot, is bioregulators, think of them as the step in between peptides and supplements. Right. They're going to help if you're already not at whatever your natural steady state baseline is, which if you're not fairly well optimized and train well, just the nature of the world we live in, you're not going to be.

1:13:26They're helping you stay there. They're going to increase resistance to the stress and degradation of life, whether it's joints getting sore, how well is your cardiovascular system working, sexual health in both men and women, so on and so forth. One thing we didn't touch on that is an important point is bioregulators like peptides should be cycled. So, you know, you brought that up. Yeah, you'll commonly see you'll actually see a number of variations. So one common variation is if you have a problem system, do it one or two months and then do that maybe once every six months. some people if you're really into bioregulators and I've done this before and after going through the series that's when I noticed a difference myself I just said you know what let's just one month at a time go through every major organ system in my body and about six months into it after being through several organ systems it was subtle but I'm like my baseline energy and how tired I get in certain circumstances I can definitely notice a difference but regardless you could reasonably go if somebody has a more significant health challenge on something you could run them for two months straight but just like receptors that peptides use the how and the why and the where they attach to histones or DNA any signal like a little kid tapping you on the leg the first five times you're like holy cow what do you need after the 50th time you don't feel them tapping your leg anymore.

1:15:07And you're like, oh, you needed something? So anything that's working with signaling in your body, even some supplements, right? Like look at ashwagandha. You could take ashwagandha, 1 ,000 milligrams every day forever. At a certain point, it can actually start to have an SSRI-like effect of mood dulling because you're just hitting those receptors in the brain too hard that it's working with it. That's biology. Every aspect of biology is a cycle. so my personal opinion and what I kind of use as a mantra is whatever I'm doing whether it's peptides, bioregulators, supplements, even and you know far better than me training, right?

1:15:46You want to cycle how you're training because otherwise the muscle will adapt to that and become less responsive.

1:15:52Adam Schafer:That's right. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you guys. It's always a pleasure and I'm honored. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Super Bundle includes MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, and MAPS Aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal, Adam, and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price.

1:16:39The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com. if you enjoy this show please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on itunes and by introducing mind pump to your friends and family we thank you for your support and until next time this is mind pump