2837: The Methylene Blue Masterclass: Cutting-Edge Mitochondrial Support with Dr. Scott Sherr

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, mind pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded Fitness Health and Entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. This is one of the best interviews I've ever done on supplements and cutting edge supplement technology. It was so informative. We had Dr. Scott share on the podcast. He's a board certified internal medicine physician. He's also certified to practice health optimization medicine and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, but he knows his stuff. And we break down some of the best cutting edge supplements that you can get your hands on to improve things like cognitive function, athletic performance, overall health, longevity. This episode is brought to you by Troes Scriptions. So they make some of these incredible supplements. In fact, Dr. Scott share. He's one of the founders of this company. So you can hear him talk about a lot of stuff and you can get this stuff here. Troes Scriptions.com forward slash mind pump. That's T-R-O-S-C-R-I-P-T-I-O-N-S.com forward slash mind pump. The code, Mind Pump for 10% off. This episode is also brought to you by Ced. This is the world's best probiotics. Look, studies show that taking probiotics definitely help with gut health, but they also help with things like mental clarity. They help with athletic performance. They help with skin health. They help with lots of different anxiety. Probiotics are a staple and the data is showing this. So some of the most studied supplements you can take are probiotics, but don't settle with any. Go with Ced. They're the best. They have the best science, the best people on their board who do this cutting edge technology and science on probiotics. And they have a patented delivery system. Go check them out, get 20% off. Go to Ced.com forward slash mind pump. Use the code 20, Mind Pump, to get that 20% off. You ask for it, you got it. By the way, there's two versions of this program. One for men and then one for women. The programming's different. Women have a more higher emphasis on lower body volume, glute training, shoulder volume. Men, it's more traditional. Now, because it's a brand new program, we're launching it right now and it's 40% off. If you go to mapsppl.com, use the code PPL. You get the price slashed by 40%. Also, if you sign up, within the first few days of the launch, you can attend live coaching by one of the Mind Pump coaches. They're gonna do three days of coaching, breaking down things like nutrition, exercise, lifestyle, really to help you become more consistent and maximize your progress through the program. We also include a supplement schedule guide, which will be free with this program. Again, you can get all of that included 40% off, mapsppl.com, the code is PPL. All right, real quick, if you love us like we love you, why not show it by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpumpstore.com? I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to mindpumpstore.com. That's it, enjoy the rest of the show. God, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, guys. This has been, this is great already. We're already having a good time. Yeah, we are. So just for the listeners, tell them a little bit about your background and what you do and then a little bit from there. So I'm a board-certified internal medicine physician. I practice something called health optimization medicine, which is a, it's based on a nonprofit actually that we help run. It's called health optimization medicine practice. It's a framework that optimizes health rather than focuses on disease. It's a, if you're a clinician, you want to look for more training and a different perspective. It's really cool. And it's a seven module certification for people. And so I use that as kind of the foundation of my practice. I'm also specialized in something called hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which I've known and used in practice for many years when I was living in the Bay Area actually as well. And then I help run a couple of companies, one called True Inscriptions. It's a company that helps people right now on the longer path of optimizing their health. And I'm the chief of education, outreach. I don't know, my title just changed. It was something and now it's something else. But I do a lot of education, outreach, media, and a lot of teaching. I still have my own clinical practice. I do it most through my house in Colorado at this point. And I really try to kind of give people a navigation on some of the more difficult things that we're focusing on these days, energy, stress, anxiety, sleep, immune system function, and how we can really help people now while we're on the longer path of helping people long term. In my experience, when I met physicians who have moved into a space that seems more preventative, there's typically a story behind it. I was just gonna ask, you didn't land there, did you? Oh no. So there's two ways this typically happens, right? The first way is not my way. The first way is you're a doctor and the system fails you, right? The system fails you or your family, and then they can't get help and they look for alternative things and they get into the functional integrative world and that's how it goes. My story is a little bit different. I grew up the son of a crazy motherfucking chiropractor. So, no. And my dad. So his name's Alan Scher and he's a practicing chiropractor for over 45 years in Long Island in New York. And so I grew up in his practice. I grew up, obviously I was adjusted when I was born and then I even when I was a kid in high school, I worked at his front desk, I was really good at collecting money because I knew that was the money I was getting for spending money and also for college, right? So I grew up very alternatively and I didn't really know a lot about conventional medicine until I decided actually with his guidance to go to medical school. The idea being, well, I grew up pretty crazy. I kind of have understanding of that alternative world, at least in philosophy, then I would learn the medical stuff and then figure out what to do with my life. And so as a result of that, I kind of took the fastest path out of medical school you could, which is four years of medical school, three years of residency, which is still a lot, but that's the shortest. And then from there, gravitated towards creating my own integrative practice where I see people from all over the world using that health optimization medicine framework along with using other tools and technologies and practices and in a supplementation and things like that. So that's the story. Do you still remember, can you remember or recall when you realized you were growing up in unconventional medicine? Oh man, I mean, it was always weird in my house. I mean, because there's always, because in that time there was no functional medicine, there was no really integrative medicine. It was just like OG alternative health chiropractors really that were doing it. And so it was always something weird happening in my house or close to it, right? I was even talking to my dad, it was, you actually liked the story is that we have like a very small podcast called the health optimization medicine podcast and I interviewed my father for it. And he was telling me all these stories about my childhood and about growing up and like he was in communes before he started the practice and like all this crazy stuff. And I was like, oh, this makes so much more sense. So, but some cool stuff. Like I remember being a kid and him taking off people from dairy and from, you know, from like sugar and things like that. Before it was popular. Before it was popular. Like in the 1980s, he'd take people off a dairy. Their allergies would go away, their asthma go away. Like they could function better. And so I saw him doing all these crazy things back then. And it's kind of come full circle for me now because now I have my own practice where that philosophy is a big part of what I do. But now it's a little bit more data-driven. So I do laboratory testing and use a field called metabolomics, which is this cool study of like small molecules of how the cells work. Yeah. So, but I'm always, he's still one of my biggest mentors and I talk to him all the time. And he's always been a big fan of the things that I do. Now, because you came from that and you saw things like that as early as in the 80s, were you the pain in the ass student going through Western medicine? Yeah. Questioning everybody. It was so weird because people go to pizza parties all the time and like, why the fuck were you eating pizza? Like this is medical school, right? And like it was, I was definitely a pain in the ass. Yeah. But also, you know, part of it is when you're training, you just kind of put your head down and you train, right? So like it's school, right? So there were times, oftentimes, because the thing about medical school is that like you spend like a hot semester on anatomy and physiology. You do your dissections and all that thing, which I was not very good at. That was not my thing. I was never gonna be a surgeon. I had this reputation of being the oops guy, like I'd absolutely break. They were already dead though, okay? So that was okay. But there were times when I was like, what am I doing? Why am I here? Because sometimes, very, very quickly after alerting anatomy and physiology, you go directly to pathophysiology and disease and treatment, right? There's no like, how do you keep the body healthy? You know? And kind of how I grew up with that philosophy is like if you give the body what it needs, it's going to work the way it's supposed to. And my dad actually had this really interesting saying back in the early 90s, he's like, Scott, the most powerful drug you can ever take is the food that you eat. This is like 1992, right? Nobody was talking about this at the time, right? So he's very, very prescient or very whatever it is. And so for me, it's always, it's been like a mission to go back there. And then this health optimization medicine framework that I use in my clinical practice, that's based on another mentor of mine and a guy that I work with now, he's actually the founder of the nonprofit and also a transcriptionist, his name is Dr. Ted Ochikoso. Dr. Ted is this like polymath, brilliant dude, and he created this framework. And he's like, what if we can optimize health rather than focusing on disease and keep people healthy? Not just looking at early onset of disease or like, we have standards of care for like diabetes and high blood pressure, but there's no standard of care for health, right? And that's what he was trying to develop. And so I signed on almost immediately when I met Ted in 2017, because it was like, this is it. Like this is what I've been waiting for, is like, so I'm going to bring everything together. This is interesting. It's so crazy because it's so true. Chiropractors were the original alternative medicine practitioners before that even became a thing. What were the strengths and weaknesses of traditional Western medicine? And then what are the strengths and weaknesses of alternative and how are you trying to bring those together? Well, I think the strengths of the acute care system is that we're really good at acute care. Like I worked in Baltimore at a place called the Shock Trauma Center. And if you can imagine, have you guys watched The Wire before? One of my favorite shows. Yeah, it's a great show, right? So I actually lived in a building that's like a cracked out building in the show that they redid afterwards. It's called Silo Point and kind of funny story there. But in Baltimore, lots of shock, lots of trauma, lots of gunshot wounds. So you go to shock trauma and like most of the time, like even you come in like with ridiculous, ridiculous things that you mostly live, right? I mean, I can tell just a quick crazy story. Like there was a lady that came in with a knife in her chest. Okay. And I'm a third year medical student. I'm on call every three nights for 30 hours. Like that's called Q3. This is actually where I learned about hyperbaric therapy, interestingly enough. But so on call every three nights for 30 hours for three weeks, like one day off. So the way that works is that you're, just to kind of people give a sense, you work for 30 hours, you go home, you sleep for four hours, you wake up, you have dinner, you go back to bed and you go back and you have two regular days. And your third day is like that again, 30 hours. So it's crazy. But in the shock trauma center, this lady came in, she had a knife in her chest. She was completely talking to us, right? No problem. But all of a sudden lost all her vital signs, right? And so if that happens in a trauma bay, what you do is you complete, you crack their chest open right there without taking them to the OR. So they cracked their chest open and I watched her heart just spurting out blood every beat. And they actually were able to sew something onto her heart to stop it from doing that. And she lived. It was the craziest thing I've ever seen, right? So we can do amazing things in acute care, but we suck at almost everything else when it comes to the conventional system. Primary care, prevention care is okay in some ways, but they're not looking for keeping you healthy, right? They're just keeping you trying to find early signs of disease to keep you from dying, right? And there is a, I think everybody needs to get a colonoscopy. Like I think if you're male or female, you're over 40, 45 years of age, like get screening tests can be very important because they can find early signs because most of us are just really unhealthy in general. And that's the other issue, right? Like 94% of US adults are metabolically unhealthy, right? So it's only 6% are metabolically healthy. This is why mitochondria become a big deal, you know, which I'm sure we'll talk about later, but in essence, I think what conventional care is really good for is acute and interventional care. Now, aside from that, not very good as much else. We have to manage disease. They can manage disease okay, but they're not looking at trying to reverse disease, not trying to, you know, try to get to the root cause of anything, right? So we're non-conventional medicine, so integrative, functional, health optimization medicine, the things really come in as like, how can we look at the root causes first of all, for sure? But even in addition to that, how can we keep people healthy? How can we optimize them at a foundational level? And that's really where I think things are going, right? I think that's what you guys are all about too, right? Which is like, let's take things out of that system, because once you get in the acute care system, it's really difficult to get out. And I worked in the hospital for many years. I worked as a hospitalist. Have you guys heard of a hospitalist before? No. So a hospitalist is like your primary care doctor in the hospital. Okay. So you have a primary care doctor that will see you and that will send you to a specialist and like, you know, what a primary care doctor equivalent in the hospital, a hospitalist does is be your primary person. And then if you need a cardiologist, you get a cardiologist. If you need a gastroenterologist and things like that. So I did that for many years and like, it's okay. You know, it works, but it's like grinding people out most of the time where you find that you send somebody home, they're gonna come back four or six months later with something else, right? The system is not good at reversing anything. It's just good at managing. And then we have a pharmaceutical system that's very, very good at keeping people on medications for the rest of their life because that's how they make all their money, right? If you have a blockbuster drug, I mean Viagra not excluded, although now we can take Viagra all the time, right? You know, no problem. It's good for vascular health. It's good for prevent dementia and things like that. Or I was just at 18,700 feet at Everest Base Camp. You can take it up there. It helps too. When you walk around with half of an erection at the same time. No, that's not why. That's not why. That's not why. That's not why. That's because it gave him up over the brain. Yeah, there you go. So anyway, I think the conventional system is good at acute and preventional care, but it's mostly a grinding system. I mean, I have friends of mine in the system like it's a meat grinder. That's what you call it. You grind people in, you grind people out. You only have 15 minutes with somebody and you're done. Yeah, part of the challenge, I think too, Scott, just to give some, because I've over the years of being a personal trainer, I've trained so many doctors. At one point, I had a studio. I was down the street from a large hospital. I started, I trained one, the next thing you know, they're referring each other and I'm training all these doctors and surgeons. And they're good people. They really want to help people. And we would talk about this all the time. I'm obviously in fitness and health. They're treating people either through surgery or through medications. Part of the challenge too is preventative care is requires more from the patient. It's not just take this pill, which by the way, the data on even people forgetting to take their medication is pretty silly. But it also just requires more. Like getting someone to take a pill versus change your diet, the adherence is a lot higher with the medication. So how do you work with that? Is it, do you get more, probably get more of a self-selection bias that people are willing to? So maybe, I don't know, talk about that a little bit. I mean, I think what it's coming down to is that there's a lot of democratizing information now, right? And so that's a really good thing because now it's not like the doctor's telling you everything and that's it because 20 years ago, you just had the doctor to listen to. And then there was Dr. Google, which was good, but also a pain in the ass because if you look and you see you have like a hangnail, you think you're dying of cancer. And so you have patients coming out, I'm dying of cancer doc because of this hangnail or whatever, right? And now you have Dr. Chat, GPT or whatever, right? And so there is definitely negatives to that because it becomes like- Information overload. Information overload, exactly. But at the same time, it's more democratized so that you can really get people more interested in helping themselves, I think. And you're right. So for me, it's a lot of the self-selection bias, but what I found over the years is that you have to give people some glimmer that there's a different way to do things, right? And for everybody, that's gonna be a little bit different. But the key, and this is what's really important is that when you're working to optimize somebody's health, it's not likely to happen. It's not gonna happen overnight, okay? It's gonna happen six months or a year later if they can stay on a path, right? So you need to give them things along the way to help them so that those bottlenecks are addressed. Is the bottleneck energy? Is the bottleneck focus? Is the bottleneck sleep or stress? You can, if you work on those bottlenecks along the way, then it becomes a lot easier. And I found the biggest two bottlenecks in the world for me as a clinician are energy and anxiety. I know about it because people want more energy and people don't wanna be less anxious, right? And if you can optimize energy, you can make them feel better right now so that they have more capacity, more long-term, to do the things that you wanna do, like change their diet, walk around the block even, or just do something slightly different about their stress. But if they don't have enough energy, they can't do it. That's right. And having energy is the biggest currency that we have, right? And we're supposed to make, so we make ATP, our energy currency in the body, right? We make about 150 pounds of that every single day to maintain our energy demands. But it's very difficult for us to do that because most of us, as I mentioned earlier, are not able to do it anymore. 94% of US adults don't have enough capacity. The biggest example that I've been thinking about recently is black and white thinking. Our brains are the number two place that we have the most energy needs. You guys know the number one place? Is it liver, muscle, gut? Reproductive organs. Oh, oh, yeah. So eggs and sperm have the most mitochondria per cell. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And right after that is the brain, right? So if you're trying to think in like a nuanced sort of way, that takes a lot of energy. That's why we're also polarized. We love to be like, it's either black or white. There's nothing in between because energy demands for a nuanced kind of thinking are very, very challenging. Take us then to metabolic health or mitochondrial health. I mean, you hear this a lot now in social media. What are we talking about? And why is this even a big deal? I think that's the way of what we're seeing, right? Is because metabolic health is mitochondrial health. So people hear the word metabolic health or that term. What that really means is that can you make energy effectively? And can you manage the stress of making energy? So you guys know that we eat, especially fat and carbohydrates, because we need the electrons on those particular macronutrients to be processed by ourselves in this part of the cell called the mitochondria to help us make energy, okay? So we need to be able to make energy, right? And so that's not an easy thing for many of us to do anymore because along that process of taking our food and bringing it down and bringing it into the mitochondria, there's a lot of steps along the way, right? There's the citric acid cycle, which is how it breaks down the food and then has things like NADH and FADH, which are these electron carriers that bring electrons into the mitochondria and they go into something called the electron transport chain, which has four complexes, aptly name one, two, three and four, where the electrons have to flow through that. And then as they're doing it, you make this gradient of protons, hydrogen ions, and then you have to have oxygen come in and become the final electron acceptor. This is all happening, millions of times a second for all of us right now. We have quadrillions of mitochondria in our body. It's like a huge amount that we have. And not only do we make energy, we make this ATP. We do it by allowing this gradient of protons coming back down. It's a 6,000 RPM motor that's in our cells, the ATPase engine. It's a making energy. And then we make energy ATP, but we also make carbon dioxide, which goes back to the plants and then give us oxygen, right, that's the goal. And we make water and we also make what are called reactive oxygen species or free radicals. That's great. If we have too many free radicals though, the system starts breaking down. And so metabolic health is, do you have the capacity to make energy effectively throughout that whole process that I just went by very briefly? And then do you have also the capacity to manage the stress of making energy? And 94% of us don't have that capacity anymore. Yes, so compare the 94 to the top 6%, like and compare it from the perspective of somebody, the average person who's like, I wanna lose a bunch of body fat, I wanna be in shape, what compare those two groups, like what is happening on like a cellular level as far as like their ability to have success. It's their resilience, right? Because everybody's going to have stress. Everybody, even the people that are in top 6%, of course they're gonna have stress, but what they have is enough capacity to manage both the energy production and the detoxification side of things. And what happens over time is that the detox side of things, especially gets really, really clogged up. And if that happens, the whole system starts breaking down. And the biggest reason for this is actually insulin resistance. So people have high blood sugars. Sugar is one of our substrates that goes into our mitochondria helps us make energy. But it also, if there's a shit ton of it, you're also gonna make more waste products, right? Make more reactive oxygen species. And then what happens is that the mitochondria get overloaded with these waste products because you don't have enough, what do you need to balance this? You need antioxidants to do this. Things like glutathione and vitamin C and alphalopoic acid and things like that, which over time get depleted. And then you get into a place where you can't actually manage the amount of energy that's coming in. And so the mitochondria start actually doing the opposite, actually making less over time. And so you know this, like it's not something that happens overnight for most people, but they're insulin resistant. They're fatigued all the time. They feel like they're inflamed all the time. Like they can't lose weight. They're brain's foggy. They have mental health issues. These are all mitochondrial issues at their base. And the question is just why, right? You have definitely insulin resistance being like one of the major reasons. The other one is a big one, which is sympathetic activation, always being in fight or flight, always feeling like your brain is on instead of having that parasympathetic side of things. Because if you're always on, you're always releasing neurotransmitters and hormones like cortisol that are stressing the system too. So talk about now, this is 90, which is 94% of the people. And you get news from the doctor, you're not healthy or what like that, or you're recently motivated because you, whatever reason, it feel like I need to make a change in my life. And so I cut calories, I start hitting the gym five days a week, I'm pushing sweat my ass off. That person ends up struggling. So explain why that is, and I feel like this aligns so much with the conversations that we have on this podcast all the time. And we get a lot of shit for like telling people to do less. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I've been calling it the sympathetic spiral of doom, for this particular reason, because people think they need to do more to get better as opposed to doing less. And oftentimes it's those people that go to the gym and then they crash for like three or four days after they went, or they go into a sauna and they can't move for five days afterwards because their body's already under such sympathetic dominance. You know, that fight or flight, that running from the saber tooth tiger thing we always say in medical school for a reason. I know why we always use the saber tooth tiger. I mean, who thinks about a saber tooth tiger? But we do. Anyway, but you know, that's what culture rewards, right? We all reward that hustle. I grew up in New York and, you know, the hustle that never stops kind of deal. And in medical school, we had shirts that said sleep is for quitters, right? Because it was in medical school. I mean, I told you about my rotation that shocked trauma, right? 30 hours every three days. It was intense, right? And so we reward this stuff. But then what's so interesting is that as a clinician, you think people would realize when they're in this state that they have no idea, right? They have no clue. They think that, oh, I just need more stimulants. Or like, oh, I just need to do the gym more. Like I need more coffee, right? Or whatever. But then they realize like they do more and more but they're not seeing any benefit, right? And so a big part of this actually is like, you know what? You actually have to calm down your nervous system without telling them to calm down. We talked about this. You don't tell somebody to calm down because that doesn't work, right? But if you say, look, if we just down-regulate your nervous system a little bit, throw you back into parasympathetic, everything else is gonna get easier. But that's, it's a conversation. And then it's giving them the experience. But the key here, and this is really important, is that when you're trying to down-regulate somebody's nervous system and calm them down, if they don't have enough cellular capacity, they're going to crash, right? Because you decrease their nervous system capacity. So you're trying to get them to relax. Which was keeping them just moving. Just getting them, keeping them alive, basically. And being able to function the way they were. I had a lady just a couple of weeks ago, she's like, I was dealing with moles and Lyme. My doctor gave me some stuff to calm me down and I just went, bam, right? She crashed, right? Because that was keeping her. And so many of us out here, this is the same thing. This is what's happening now, right? Is that we're just able to stay on this sort of train. And then if you start taking the brakes off without giving enough mitochondrial support, this is where the methylene blue actually comes in. Is where, because that's what had been one of my biggest levers recently, is like, if you can give them the support while you're taking the brake, we're starting to put the brakes on, then that's the key. We have a term that we call them cortisol junkies. And this is really hard to communicate to a person that's in this state, because they get this immediate reward from the high stress. Try telling somebody who's here, where you're describing, who just did their circuit training class, and they get that rush afterwards of completing it and that adrenaline, and they go like, and then try being the person who's trying to tell them, that's not good for you. Like you piss off, I know how I felt right afterwards. It's really difficult to communicate that. I'd love for you to get into methylene blue, like the history of it. We talked about this, you know, tongue in cheek, like where, who was the first person to realize that dye had these types of benefits to it, you know, for the mitochondria? Like how'd you get, how'd you find your way towards it? So it's a crazy compound, it's very blue, it's been around a long time, but it's absolutely a huge bridge in the work that I do, because it helps right now with the mitochondrial funk that we've been talking about. It helps with energy and detoxification at the same time. So I like to say that our cells are like gasoline powered cars. We make ATP, but we also make that carbon dioxide, not a waste product, I promise, but people will think about it that way. I have friends that get very angry if I call it a waste product. And then water, and then of course, there was reactive oxygen species, right? That's what our cells are making on a regular basis. But methylene blue comes in, it helps with the energy production side, and it helps as detoxifying at the same time. So it works with energy and detox at the same time. It's called a redox cycler in that way. So the history of it, in the 1870s, 1870, so a long time ago, it was developed as a textile dye. So if you wore like Levi Strauss jeans, your jeans were dyed with methylene blue. But at that time, you guys, if you had like a cellulite, it's like an infection on your leg, you would die, right? Because there was no antibiotics, there was no antimicrobals available, right? So they were looking for compounds out there that could treat these kinds of infections because nothing existed. And so they realized that methylene blue, it actually got the name of a magic bullet at the time, could treat pathogens, could kill pathogens at high doses, but it would not harm the normal, the human host, right? And that was like the best thing ever that they could find because either they could find compounds that would kill you and kill the, you know, kill the pathogen too, which that's not very helpful. Or they wouldn't kill, they wouldn't be strong enough to be an antimicrobial, right? So methylene blue was the first drug registered with the FDA in 1897. Oh, no, sure. Yeah. So it was a very nascent FDA and it was the first fully synthetic drug too. So it's not something that comes from nature directly. And that also gives it a little bit of like, you know, some controversy in the world of medicine and alternative medicine, right? Even with my dad and he uses it in clinical practice, but I like to remind people that synthetic things are not necessarily bad for you, just like natural things are not necessarily good for you. Like you can forage for the wrong mushrooms and die. Well, I think the value of natural things is, we have a long history of being used. This is a synthetic that's been used for- Long time. Over a hundred years. It didn't like leech into somebody's wound. Like how did this like- So they were doing cellular testing on malaria, actually. And they found that malaria specifically, you know, us white people going down to Africa and getting malaria, you know, we would die, right? And so this particular compound, methylene blue, could give it very high doses of methylene blue and it would kill malaria. And they saw it in cellular culture. Oh, wow. And so then they realized, well, what else can it do? So between 1897 and 1950 or so, it was like the premier antimicrobial. And by the way, it's still fucking works, but it wasn't as sexy because you had penicillin and other drugs that came out in the 1950s, which is very important. Which by the way, if you go to the hospital now, there's a condition now that they'll give you intravenous. What is it? It's called met hemoglobinemia. And this is a particular condition where your red blood cells can't carry oxygen. It's typically because you've been had an overdose or poisoning. Like you guys know like the Huffer people, like Huffing Glow or Huffing Paint, that has something called sodium nitrite in it. And that is colorless and tasteless, but it actually prevents you from carrying oxygen on your red blood cells. So methylene blue is the antidote for that, for met hemoglobinemia. And it's also the antidote for cyanide poisoning. So if you're going to Russia anytime soon, you know, make sure you're bringing it with you. Because what it does, cyanide actually destroys part of those electron protein complexes that I was talking about. It destroys complex four. And so if you get methylene blue on board though, nothing but there's all these kinds of ninja moves on your electron transport chain to bypass blockages or bypass areas that aren't working. That's what makes it so powerful is that because so many people are walking around with mitochondria that don't work well, especially complex one and complex two, which are the main complexes that take electrons from your food. So if you've had a chronic infection, if you know you're diabetic, if chronic stress, pesticide exposure, so many different things can affect those first couple of complexes and affect the capacity for your energy production to happen. So short story with methylene blue is that between 1897, 1950, fantastic antimicrobial. It only had one major side effect, which you guys have all experienced. Blue. Yeah. Yes, blue urine. And so there was actually even stories, songs in World War II. If you were World War II and you were shipped off to the Pacific, you were taking methylene blue prophylactically to prevent fungal infections while you were in the jungles of some of the tropical islands in the South Pacific. And it was calling, they said going blue in the loo, right? With all the English people, going blue in the loo. So, but in the 1950s, when antimicrobials came around that were prescribed, it became less used in that way, although it works fantastically well as an antimicrobial. And still does, and I use it that way now, especially for urinary tract infections actually, because methylene blue makes your urine blue, concentrates in the bladder. It breaks up biofilms, it's an antimicrobial at high doses. But at lower doses, around like four to about 25 milligrams, it's a fantastic mitochondrial support. And we know that from the last several decades of research. There's a researcher at the University of Texas, Austin, his name is Francisco Gonzalez Lima. And he's done a lot of work on Alzheimer's models, traumatic brain injury, stroke, and others looking at how methylene blue concentrates in the mitochondria and optimizes mitochondrial function. And it does this very effectively and very, very quickly. It's not like you take methylene blue and you wait a month for it to start working. It starts working. Yeah, it should be within three to five days of taking it. If it doesn't work at that dose, you go up on the dose, right? And so the higher dose is like a milligram per kilogram, which is like 50 to 70 milligrams, or a little bit higher, maybe up to two milligrams per kilogram for an acute infection. Like that is a fantastic way to use it. But for the most part, I'm using it at lower doses, four to 25 milligrams on a regular basis for the whole spectrum. For people that are super sick and need that bridge, that support, but also on the endurance side, because it increases aerobic capacity. It can work just like oxygen in your cells too, so you can maintain aerobic capacity for longer. And the first time I realized this, I was working with a patient, the Southern lady, I can't do her axin, but she was living in Alabama. And she's like, Dr. Scott, I can't stop working out with this stuff, because it's so great. I'm like, well, what's so great about it? She's like, well, I can maintain my heart rate up for longer without having to stop. And I work with a guy that did the Leadville race, the ultramarathon where I live in Colorado, and he cut three hours off his time using methylene blue, 32 milligrams every four hours. So how are you measuring the success of the dose? Like, so like you decide, how do you figure that out? And then we know, like, oh, this is working well. We don't need to go up or like, how do you figure that out? So a lot of it's gonna be how you feel, right? But you can also look at metrics like heart rate capacity. Like if you maintain maintenance of heart rate for longer, if you're doing aerobic work, there's some studies that we did on dogs, specifically looking at lactate threshold. And so that you reach your lactate threshold later if you have methylene blue on board, because it's able to maintain aerobic capacity for longer. So a lot of it's gonna be subjective, which means that how do you feel when you're doing certain things and then looking at various markers. But like what's weird about it is that you can give somebody methylene blue in the morning and they sleep better at night. Well, why? Is because they're getting better mitochondrial support during the day. And then you see their HRV go up at night as well when they're sleeping. It's the same deal because you can see how when you give more mitochondrial support, the system starts being able to calm itself down. Because it's now like, okay, now I'm having enough support here. It's not trying to fuel with stress hormones and stress all the time. Right, exactly. And so the mitochondria able to relax. Like there's this thing called the cell danger response which you guys have probably heard of where the whole system goes into this sort of shut down hibernation mode, especially the mitochondria. If there's too much stress in the system, your court is all people, right? What happens instead of the mitochondria making more energy that actually make less. But if you can flip it out of the cell danger response, then it starts being able to make more. And that's why I was, I've been shocked over the years. Like I had a guy, a colleague of mine, he's like, I've had anxiety on my life. I took methylene blue and it went away. And I was like, huh, well, what's up with that? Well, really because what his anxiety really was a representation of was mitochondrial stress. Right. And when we are giving him more support, then his mitochondria able to like flip back over into a more healthy way of optimizing energy production. There's a lot of things that are marketed to us today about mitochondrial health. An example, red light therapy. Is there added benefits of pairing it with this? Like, I mean, and so like, what would, if I, you were giving me all the things to do that, what would a stack or all the, you know, what you would prescribe to me? All the things. There's lots of things that can't be there. What I would say is there is a significant synergy between methylene blue and red light. That's been well described because methylene blue can donate electrons, basically help with energy production at all the complexes, but especially complex four, which is called cytochromoxidase. And red light therapy, about 680 nanometers, well established as donating photonic electronic energy to complex four as well. And so that combination is very powerful. So you, you can take your methylene blue 45 minutes or an hour later, for a minute, for a minute to an hour later, you go outside in the sun, you know, red lights in the sun, everybody don't, you don't have to have a panel, or you can go in front of your panel. If you have one too, that's a great synergy. Now at higher doses, like you can use that as a compounding for infection as well, for especially for viral infections. So you give your methylene blue higher doses, you go out in the sun. This is what I was doing four or five years ago without telling anybody that I was doing it and seeing significant benefit. And a lot of my collision, you know, colleagues were too. So antimicrobial also for viral infections. Yeah, antiviral too. Wow. Now, methylene blue is also an MAO inhibitor. It's actually a quite strong one. So let's talk about that for a second. Yeah. So MAO is monominoxidics inhibition. Yes. So that what that means is that nothing blue prevents the breakdown of norepinephrine and serotonin and at higher doses dopamine. And so that means there's more of that around, but it's dose dependent. So lower doses of methylene blue can do a little bit, higher doses are gonna do it more, but it's something you have to be aware of. But you have people that are on things like SSRIs and, you know, serotonin to reuptake inhibitors. These are antidepressants. You don't want to combine them. So you don't typically want to do that. The risk is very low to actually do it, but I recommend doing it with a practitioner. Okay. The risk that they talk about all the time, something called serotonin syndrome, which is not something that any doctor has really ever seen in their clinical primes. Happening to me. No. You're getting yourself. Yeah, I was stupid. I did methylene blue with tessofencin, which is a peptide, well, you could buy it as a peptide, which is a norepinephrine serotonin dopamine reuptake inhibitor. And so, and I just started sweating like a maniac. Okay, you started sweating. Like real bad. You were to hospital. Like drenching. And so I went to the hospital. So I'm like, oh, is this serotonin syndrome? It might be. So I went there, had the shivers the whole field. And then it was a few hours later, I was okay. How much methylene blue do you take? I've probably 16 milligrams a lot. The tessofencin was, I don't remember what that happened. Must have been a pretty strong SNP. You did a high dose of tessofencin, but you were upset at how high of a dose you were. That must have been it. Because usually the only studies that they've shown causing serotonin syndrome with methylene blue have been IV methylene blue. Oh wow. Which is a high dose. Yeah, which, you know, it doesn't have to be high, gets the body really, really quickly, right? And then when people start taking methylene blue, even at low doses, one of the things that most people say that they feel like slightly funny, like a little bit off, a little bit different, that's usually because of the norepinephrine and serotonin. But the norepine, the dopamine doesn't happen until much higher doses of methylene blue. But yeah, that was, again, that combined two things that put, so this is just the where, because it works, it actually does work. And so you want to always be careful with things that work and combining it with other things. Yeah, but I have integrative psychiatrists that are weaning their patients off of SSRIs and using methylene blue instead. Now, we're just gonna say so, because here's one of the other things, and I don't even know if we can necessarily talk about this, but I know a lot of people who use methylene blue as an antidepressant because it lifts their mood. And what is mental health issues like depression really at their core? It's a mitochondrial issue, right? I mean, we know this, it's a gut issue, it's a mitochondrial issue. You have all these books that like fix your gut and your depression goes away, optimize your diet or start exercising and depression goes away, right? So there is a, we know 100%, like when I went to medical school, I learned that if you were depressed, it was a serotonin deficiency. And that's complete bullshit. There's no evidence at all. But you know, actually there's more evidence that there's a GABA-ergic aspect to here. So GABA is our primary breaks of the brain and GABA deficiency is associated with depression, but low serotonin levels are not, right? And so we know that the mitochondria are the big part here, right? So understanding how you can optimize mitochondrial function is key. Understanding why the mitochondria under stress is also key, like it's a toxic exposure, is it synthetic dominance, is it medications people are taking, is it infections, like there's all these other things that it can be, right? So you have to think about the roots, we talked about the root causes, but then if you just focus on optimizing mitochondrial function first and the additional benefit with methylene, because you do have some mild increase in serotonin and norepinephrine as well, right? But it is dose dependent. How does it compare if you, and I know like it sounds like you use this to get the client going, jumpstarted, and then of course nutrition exercise is key, right? For sure. Now how does it compare though head to head with that? Just a better diet and strength training, because we know that's obviously incredible for mitochondrial health. So how does it compare? My goal always with people is like, let's get you on some methylene blue if you need it now. And then over time, as you optimize your diet, as you optimize your lifestyle and your exercise, you need it less. I was talking to our mutual friend, Thomas DeLauer, just a couple days ago, and I was like, he takes it two or three times a week, right? When he has like a bigger day, more stress, you're traveling, if you're well optimized, you don't need to take it every day. But if you're traveling, like let's talk about an airplane, right? Airplane, your pressurized on a plane to 8,000 feet above sea level. So as soon as that cabin door closes, you get tired, you want to take a nap, right? Because you just became hypoxic all of a sudden. And for me, when I live in Colorado, it's glorious getting on an airplane and coming to the other places that I go is just mostly sea level. My ring loves me, right? Because I'm always at sea level and I have 21% oxygen in the air. But where I live, it's about 17% oxygen in the air. When you're on an airplane, you're about that too, about 17, 18%. And so that's a hypoxic stress almost right away. So taking methylene blue before you're on an airplane is like transformative for people, right? Because even if you're mitochondrally healthy, right? That's still significant stress. So you use it as like a pre-travel stack that you can use, it is transformative. So all of my patients- It's a great hack. That's so great. I'm gonna use that because I travel- We all fly a lot. Quite a bit for the company. And I always don't feel good if I'm on a plane. And so, I've never thought to use methylene blue beforehand. Yeah, before. And depending on how long the flight's gonna be. So I have people dose every, it's the half-life, it's about four hours. So if you have a flight that's 10 hours, you're dosing every four hours while you're on the plane. You just want to modulate your dose depending on sleep, right? And then you also want to try to meet the time zone that you're going to go to. Then you can also use GABAergic things. We have other things that we use to help people. What you're saying about in mitochondria, I think that now lots of data is supporting this. People might not even be aware, but there's all these studies now that are coming out like Crateen, they're showing it's got antidepressant effects. Why? Because it helps with ATP production. We know a ketogenic diet sometimes has this effect, not because there's magic in the diet, but because producing ketones is just a cleaner, I guess, for lack of a better term, way of producing energy. So if you've got kind of dysfunctional mitochondria, suddenly you feel like, oh, wow, it feels so much better. Well, it's because you just switched energy sources and you have something different. So yeah, mitochondria, this is like, it looks like medicine is kind of moving in this direction where they're all looking, okay, what's going on with the mitochondria? It's called cellular medicine sometime. It's called mitochondrial medicine, but it's absolutely happening because we used to think these mitochondria, when I was just, my daughter was 15, she just took science and she learned about the cell and then you have a nucleus and you have the mitochondria, you have the Golgi bodies. There's just one mitochondria in that cell that you learn about. Then you learn that there's some cells, like we were talking about eggs and sperm that have thousands, neurons, thousands of mitochondria per cell. And they're not just making energy. They are, there's a whole new world of talking about like mitocentric medicine you're gonna be hearing. And it's gonna be all about the mitochondria are these gating and sensing organs in your cells. Your nucleus, yeah, they're kind of important, but they're not as important as mitochondria is what we're actually, I mean, obviously, it's where all your DNA and everything. But then also as Dr. Ted likes to always remind me, like where is the brain of your cell? It's not your nucleus, it's actually the cell membrane itself. The cell membrane itself is sensing everything. It has to decide what to let in, what not to let in. Exactly, so the cell membrane, so that's why we're talking about phospholipids, we're talking about oxidative stress, because you can see all the signs of this in the lipid membranes as well. Then of course the trans fat arguments and all those thankfully those are gone for the most part. What's the role of a mitochondria's function in cancer? It's a big one, right? Because if you think about cancer, cancer is an end stage process that's happened because of poor terrain or poor foundational health, right? If your immune system optimized, like we're making cancer cells right now, all of us, every second of every day, but our immune system knows most of the time, amazingly, to get rid of those cells, right? But cancer cells are just trying to protect themselves. This is a crazy thing. There's all these ideas of you guys are like the mean gene, like Richard Dawkins stuff, but the idea is that all of our cells are really just trying to protect themselves and do what they're supposed to do. And if they need to protect themselves because there's toxic exposure, because there's sympathetic activation, they're gonna do what they need to do to try to survive, and that's what cancer cells are doing. And a big part of that is the mitochondrial aspect of this, because mitochondrial function, if that starts going down, the whole cell starts going down too. Because if you can't sense how much energy needs to be made, you can't sense what you need from a resources perspective, you can overcompensate or you can undercompensate, right? And this is the thing about what mitochondria do is that you make new ones all the time, but you're not making them like de novo, they're actually being mitochondrial fission, so you're actually making new ones out of the ones that you already have. And so, yeah. So mitochondrial biogenesis. So they're making a photocopy of a photocopy. Exactly. And they start to get worse over time. Yes, exactly. Wow, wow. Did you work with hyperbaric chambers start your kind of fascination with mitochondrial health? It did actually, yeah, 100%, because I realized what you're doing in a hyperbaric environment is you're flooding body with a huge amount more oxygen, right? And that sounds great in principle, right? But what that does is revs up your capacity to make energy if you can, and also revs up your capacity to need to detox because the way methyl, the way, excuse me, the way hyperbaric therapy works is by creating a huge amount of oxidative load, huge amount of reactive oxygen species in the system. But what if you can't tolerate all that, right? The idea with all that ROS is that you're creating an impetus for stem cells to get released, the immune system to get activated, to kill bugs, to do all these good things, to decrease inflammation. But if your system can't tolerate that, then you're gonna be in a world of hurt, or you might get some benefit, but you're gonna go back to the same way you felt before. This is what I kept seeing in hyperbaric in medicine. Like, I actually got disinvited from a conference back in the day because the title of my talk was gonna be, please don't put them in the chamber. Oh, wow. And I love hyperbaric medicine. I think it's fantastic. Yeah, because sometimes it does, but it sounds like it's far more beneficial for somebody who's metabolic healthy than it is for somebody who's not. Or to at least try to optimize for like three or six months to get the foundation on board. And that's where that health optimization medicine became a huge piece for me because I was, I would see people and they weren't getting better. Like, you should get better. Like you have an infection, I'm treating it with hyperbaric therapy. Like this should get better, but it wasn't. Like, or they were getting a little bit better, but then they just get worse again, relapse. And I was like, well, this came down to understanding cellular metabolism, understanding energy production, detoxification. And then how could I help them? Well, I could use this foundational framework called health optimization medicine that takes three or six months to get them better. Work on that, then get them on some methylene blue, which would be really great as a support. And then also working on optimizing their nervous systems or down regulating their stress response. Because this is the other thing, right? I like to just learning about this a couple of days ago where there's some of the anti-depressants actually are mitochondrally dysfunction, they make the mitochondrion dysfunction more. As I found out like early on in my career and using hyperbaric therapy, that some people on certain antidepressants just would not get better. Just would not. Why is it on Simbalta, you won't get better on using hyperbaric therapy? It was because it was destroying mitochondrial function, right? And so I found it over the years that if you can really focus on helping people now, and then giving them a ground game, that I often say get 60 or 70% better first, and then let's get you into the chamber to get you that next 30% more. There's other reasons. If you're doing performance or recovery, there's other reasons too. You can just go into the chamber tomorrow. Or if you have an acute issue. But in essence, my practice has kind of developed like, okay, hyperbaric therapy is great, but if you really want to see long-term benefit, you need to get 60 or 70% of the way there anyway, right? And then if we do that, do you nearly need to be in the chamber? Then we can have that conversation, right? I use hyperbaric therapy all the time still. But what I'm using on my ground game for people is like, okay, let's optimize. Much more complete picture. Yeah, yeah. Were you guys one of the first ones at TrueScriptions to use Methylene Blue or to work with Methylene Blue? We were the first company to make a commercial product with Methylene Blue. Back in February of 2020, so just about six years ago. Wow, and it exploded. Yeah, and exploded. What's so interesting about it is that before us, you had to go to a chemistry company or somewhere to get it, and it was very difficult to find good quality stuff. So we were the first, and it took us about a year longer to launch the company in 2020 than we anticipated, but it took us that long to find a good source of it. Really? The problem with Methylene Blue is that when you make it, it's often, it's made in a lab, and it can be contaminated with heavy metals, like lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenate. Is that often the case? Unfortunately, yes. Even, so if you look online now, you can find it everywhere. We were the first company, the only one in 2020. There was like six companies in 2024. Now there's over a hundred companies that are making it now. But the problem is that the quality is all over the map, and it's not very good. So there's something called USP grade. So if you go online now, you go online to Amazon, I don't recommend you buy any supplements on Amazon, but especially Methylene Blue. There's a lot of counterfeits. So much counterfeits. Which is crazy. Yeah, it's creating millions of dollars worth. So I always tell my patients, do not buy your supplements on Amazon. But in any way, so Methylene Blue specifically, this USP grading it's called. Like that's supposed to be pharmaceutical grade. But the problem with that is that people don't eat, they just put that on the label, and then we've tested a lot of this stuff as well. It doesn't meet USP grading. And that means it's more contaminated with heavy metals. And the liquids out there are probably the worst offenders because their potency is nowhere near what it says on the label. Like one of my biggest pet peeves is that, if I say Dr. Scott, I've been taking Methylene Blue 10 drops a day for a week or whatever. And I feel like shit. I'm like, well, how much you've been taking? I'm 10 drops a day. I'm like, well, how much is that? Like, I don't know, 10 drops. I'm like, what are you telling me it doesn't work? What are you telling me it's making you? And then what are you taking? Right, and then so liquids are really difficult because it's like a milligram per like dropper. You don't know exactly how much it is. And then it gets on your countertop and you almost have your wife try to divorce you. And, you know, so the key, this is a good trick. If you get Methylene Blue on a countertop, it does stain, buffered vitamin C. Oh, wow. This has saved my marriage at least three times. Thank you. In my laundry, in my sink. So it does work, but the challenge is like finding good stuff is really difficult. Sal and I found, we've tested a bunch of stuff across Amazon stuff, pharmaceutical stuff that you can prescribe. And Scott, I'm not just saying this because we work with you guys. Actually, this is one of the reasons why we work with you guys. I've tried three different separate from TROscription. So three other Methylene Blue providers. And yours was the best, has been the most consistent best experience. So it's got to be that. It's got to be that I wasn't getting either the right dose or there was some other stuff in there. Yeah. One of my favorite stories is a guy a couple of weeks ago, actually a couple of months ago now. He's like, yeah, doc, I bought this Methylene Blue from a source that says it was made in the United States and it took three weeks to get through customs, you know? Yeah. Three times. And this is the thing, if you're buying it on Amazon, it's so funny how things come back like full circle, right? Because early in the pandemic, about six months in, there was this article from the New York Post. It said biohackers drinking fish tank cleaner to reverse their age. That's because fish tank cleaner. Well, because Methylene Blue were killed. You get Methylene Blues in fish tank cleaner. Yeah. You don't want to drink fish tank cleaner. Please don't win a Darwin Award, everybody. That's very highly contaminated with heavy metals. But it was a great clickbait headline. That same paper eight months ago, did a whole article, just espousing the beauty of Methylene Blue and had an affiliate relationship with one of the shittier ones on Amazon. Oh, God. I was like, of course, right? That's how it's gonna go, right? Is it anti-parasitic as well? Yeah, anti-parasitic. It's antimicrobial in general. So we use it for people that have parasites, that have dysbiosis in their gut, that have, you know, overgrowth of bacteria. How does it kill, now how is it anti-parasitic in antimicrobial? Do they just not survive the electron transport? Like what's going on? It's actually a little bit different. So you guys know hydrogen peroxide? Yes. So we can buy it at the store, but our cells make it as an antiseptic. It's housed in a part of our cell called the lysosome. And when we have an infection or if the cell is trying to kill itself, because it's under stress and it's better to sometimes die than to try to survive, it'll release hydrogen peroxide. So Methylene Blue releases hydrogen peroxide to help kill these kinds of things. And what's cool about it actually is that it doesn't work like a nuclear bomb as an antibiotic or an antimicrobial. Like if you take, you know, a Moxacillin or Augmentin or something else, like these are nuclear bombs to your gut. They kill off all, yeah, yeah. And what Methylene Blue is more selective than that, it doesn't do it. It really does have a more selective capacity. So you can give it in the acute setting and not worry about causing that nuclear bomb kind of picture in the gut. But, you know, for the most part, we're using it at lower doses. Like we were using it at four, eight, 16 milligrams. Eight is the, for me, the sweet spot. That's where I find, where I feel the best with it. So, I was just gonna say, like, so you use your fish cleaner and then your horsey warmer. She's like, I'm gonna change. It was that time, it was that time, guys. Yeah, but so what we do with quality is that we get our Methylene Blue from a manufacturer in Japan or Korea, South Korea for those of you who are wondering. Not North Korea. I have my RCEO boomer, he's married to somebody from South Korea, but they just say they're from Korea. And I was like, wouldn't they say South Korea? Like, no, it wouldn't be obvious that they're from South Korea. Like, I didn't really think about that. Anyway, so we get it from Korea and Japan and then when it comes in, we get it with a certificate of analysis. It has USB grading, but then we test it again. So, the problem in the supplement industry in general is that they're trusting. You talked about creatine earlier. Like you heard about that creatine scandal? No. Creatine gummy scandal? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Creatine, but they came with a... Yeah, it came with a C of A from the manufacturer. So, you have these companies, because we have to regulate ourselves in this world, as you guys know, nobody else is doing it. They just take that C of A from that other company from another country. I don't care if it's China. I mean, things getting from China is fine. If you have a C of A that is optimal and you test it again. So, with all of our products, we take it that next level and we really say, look, yes, this is a trusted manufacturer, but we trust and we verify. And we've had to even throw out thousands of dollars worth of products that we've never seen before. We've had to even throw out thousands of dollars worth of stuff from our trusted manufacturer over the years. Should you need to take a break on Methylene Blue? Or is it something you take daily or take it every other day? Like what's the best way to use it? It depends on why you're using it, right? If you're using it for a bridge because you have chronic fatigue and you're, you know, you have on immune conditions and you have severe mitochondrial dysfunction, you have long COVID or other kinds of conditions where you're in a pretty bad place or you're in a pretty significantly compromised place. Then taking it every day for a little while, or maybe even for months can be okay. Like as long as you're keeping the dose, if you're taking about 30 milligrams or less, I usually say you don't have to take a break because it's super low doses. If you're taking over 30 milligrams a day, you just take at least one day off. If you're taking over 70 milligrams a day, two days off a week. But it's pretty rare to have people on those doses. How would someone know when they're taking the dose that they took too much? Like what do they feel? Well, like, okay, I got it back off. It's so person dependent. What I find is that what I like to do is titrate people. So like with the Just Blue that we have at your description, it's in a trochee form, which is like this dissolvable lozenge, which classically could be dissolved in the mouth, but it can also just be swallowed. And methylene blue is very highly bioavailable, which means that you can take it in the mouth, you can swallow it, you can use it in the IV, and almost all of it's gonna get in the body. Of course, it's just an IV. There's very few compounds that are like that actually. But so with methylene blue, the way we developed in these trochee forms, you can take a quarter, which is four milligrams. And then you try that for a couple of days. Try it in the morning on an empty stomach, see how you feel. You don't feel much, after about three days, if you don't feel much, go up to eight, see how you feel. You're like, oh, so what's your experience? So how do you feel when you take it? Oh, sharper, I just have a little bit more energy, verbal fluency is better. I used it before big interviews typically. Yeah, right. And so in your case, I would be like, okay, you tried eight. Let's try 12, any difference? You're like, you know what, at eight, a little bit jitterier, didn't feel as, I felt like it was a little bit too much. And then usually it's like, usually it's an extension of how you felt when you felt good, maybe just a little bit less good. Yes, yes, yes. And so oftentimes it's not like a more is better kind of thing. Oftentimes I find between eight and 16 is the dose for most people. Yeah, if I go up to 16, it's a little edgy. Yeah, exactly. That's how I would describe it. And that's common, and that's what I feel. Like I'm usually around four or eight milligrams actually. When I get above that, I get on the edgier side. But sometimes what I'll do, if it's a long day, is I'll combine it with something that's gonna take off the edge at the same time. Like what theanine? I use one of our other products. I use like our GABA-ergic stuff. I use our Trocom actually, because that one gives you some anxiolytic effects of anxiety. Decreasing takes off the edge at the same time. It also doesn't make you feel tired. So I like that combination. What's in that? Can I saw you, you brought that today. What is in the common one? So GABA, what else? So Trocom has something called B3 GABA. It has Cava, CBD and CBG. Now the thing about GABA, you guys probably know this, but GABA is our primary relaxing, the breaks of our brain, right? It calms things down. It's always in balance with another neurotransmitter in the brain called glutamate. Glutamate is our excitatory neurotransmitter and glutamate actually gets converted into GABA in the brain. So that's 80% of your neurotransmission, just those two. So you heard about serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, that's like the minority of what's going on. And the classic glutamate overload situation is like when you go to a Chinese restaurant and have MSG in your food. And so you have, what do you feel? You have headaches, tremors, you're irritable. The problem is that most people are... That's the thing, then you're hungry again. Yeah, exactly, yeah, that's the worst. The problem is that most people are walking around with those things, irritable, you know, mood instability, because most people are walking around GABA deficient. GABA deficiency is associated with anxiety, associated with depression, we were talking about that earlier, associated with insomnia, mental health issues. And, but if you go to a doctor, you know, like a conventional doctor, like one of my colleagues, and you say, I feel depressed or anxious, they're gonna give you an SSRI, right? But we talked about how serotonin is not related to depression, right? But GABA is. But the thing about just, well, could you just take a GABA supplement, right? GABA itself is too big of a molecule to get into the brain. So if you take GABA on its own, and you feel great, you have a leaky brain. Wow. Yeah. So your blood-brain barrier... Isn't that great. Isn't doing what it's supposed to do. And this correlates very dramatically with a leaky gut. So I've had patients that I've worked with over the years, they're like, hey, doc, I'm taking GABA, I feel great. I'm like, okay, let's do something about that. And because it's diagnostic, basically, if you have, and so you, but you optimize their gut, they seal it up, and the GABA supplement stopped working. Now B3 GABA is a smaller. B3 GABA is different. So B3 has a vitamin B3 attached to the GABA itself. And B3 has a transporter. Got it. So B3... So it hitches a ride. Hitches a ride, right? And then in the brain, it hydrolyzes, it breaks apart. So you have mild amounts of B3, which is niacin and NAD, and you have GABA. Okay? So that combination is great because now you have the GABA, which is relaxing you, but you also have mild activation. So you don't feel tired at the same time. And so you get that, that combination is great. And then we have Kava in there too. And so the cool thing about how we developed this is Dr. Ted is our, he's the founder of the company, this brilliant pharmacologist dude. Well, what if we created a way to enhance the GABA system in the most comprehensive way possible? So when you think about the GABA receptor, small biochemistry lesson, I promise. It's a cool one though. So GABA itself is a, the receptor has places where things bind. It has where GABA binds, that's where GABA would bind, right? But it also has other places where things bind, like alcohol, for example, or benzodiazepines, like Adavan and Xanax, or sleep drugs. The problem with these separate sites where GABA binds, to where the GABA receptor to where GABA binds, is that they can bind very tightly and enhance GABA to bind very, very tightly and then deplete GABA in the process. So you drink alcohol, you wake up two hours later feeling like shit, that's because all that GABA was depleted very quickly, benzos, Xanax, all these things that do the same thing. And so you don't wanna give something that just increases the amount of GABA to bind without giving a source of GABA at the same time. So he created something called an obligate pair system or an obligate pair where you bind something to a separate site on the GABA receptor and at the same time give something that works just like GABA, or GABA itself. So in case of Trocom, you have Nicotin, vitamin B3 GABA and you have Kava. And Kava binds to a separate site on the receptor. Makes you feel drunk, or you guys have had Kava before, right? But Kava itself is also something that can cause tolerance and addiction, just like alcohol, just like benzos, just like sleep drugs, because it depletes GABA in the process. And so instead what we do is you have a combination of the B3 GABA and the Kava together. So the Kava binds and you have the B3 GABA going in, so you have the GABA there too. And so you have this nice combination where you get no tolerance, no dependence, no withdrawal and you can take it as needed and you don't feel tired at the same time. What's the dosage you look like for somebody? So the Trocom dosing is the B3 GABA, I believe is 50 milligrams, 50. And then you have Kava, which is 100 milligrams. And then we have CBD and CBG in there as well. So just a small amount of CBD and CBG. And that works on the endocannabinoid system, the body's own internal cannabis system. And there's a garrion in there, what is that? It's not a sleep formula. Okay, so what is that? So agarine is from the fly agaric mushroom. Do you guys know the aminina muscaria mushroom? I know Justin did by the way. Off air Justin like maimed it right out the gate. Oh my God, I know, he does. Yeah, well, what's his name? Paul Stamets, I've listened to quite a few of his podcasts, but yeah, he talks about the association there with Santa Claus. Yeah, it is, yeah. Yeah, there's a great, if people are listening, they can look up there, there's a New York timepiece. And the idea that this particular mushroom, the aminina muscaria mushroom, is the reason why we have Santa Claus. Because as the stories go, in Siberia, this mushroom would grow wild and the reindeer would eat the mushroom because they liked it and it also made them trip balls. And then people were like, oh, what's going on here? And then they realized that eating the mushroom itself is toxic, it's neurotoxic, but if they dried it, it would become less toxic. One of the ingredients in the mushroom is called ibotenic acid, that's neurotoxic, excuse me. The other ingredient is called agarin. And agarin is a long acting on the GABA receptor, binds to where GABA would bind. And so we combine that with another modulated GABA receptor called hanokial or hanokial, which comes from Magnolia bark. And that combination of hanokial plus agarins in our formula called TroZ, along with six other ingredients that are working on sleep. But working on the GABA system is really, really important because again, most of us are deficient and if we can put the brakes on for people, they start calming down their nervous system. And we talked about mitochondrial function, the combination of supporting mitochondria was something like methylene blue short-term and then less long-term if you get more optimized. And then using something that puts the brakes on, like your calm and your Z here for me, then suddenly people can feel like, oh, that's what it felt like to not always be in stress mode, and doing it in a very intentional safe space, if you want to call it that, because when people have like, their nervous system calm down for the first time, they actually get reactive anxiety to not being stressed. You guys have probably seen this, right? Somebody's like, so like working at such a high level, stress-wise, and then you bring them down, they're like, holy shit, I'm supposed to be stressed and they get very anxious about it. So it's nice to have this more like, now here, TroCom, just take it in front of me. 15 minutes later, you're feeling better. This is what it feels like to not be in stress mode. Because it works that quickly, because that's better used in the mouth, the TroCom, because it's gonna work in about five to 15 minutes. Oh, wow. And there's a little bit of tingling, you'll know it's working, because the kava from the TroCom is a little bit numbing. Oh, yeah. And so you get a little bit of a numbing in your mouth while it's happening, and then you feel like you're, just go down. Wow. I love it. I tend to be on the stress side of things more too, and like, if you have like a lot of meetings, like a lot of shit, like, you know, you just bring it down, you know? Sounds like an awesome way. I mean, we're always trying to teach people, I think this is actually one of the missing links too, for a lot of people with tech today, and the amount of stuff, social media, all the things that we're on late at night, like getting people to have like a bedtime routine. It sounds like this would be like an awesome supplement to take, post-dinner, winding down. So much better than alcohol. You know, like, what we're talking about is a replacement for alcohol, right? Yeah. And like, and I talk about it as the parasympathetic edge, really. This is something that, I think Thomas and I were talking about on stage once, Thomas DeLauer, it's like, if you can give people, especially in the performance world, like, let's give you an edge. It's called the parasympathetic edge, right? Because if you have this edge, you're gonna perform better with your workouts, with your training, with your recovery, everything, right? And then like, well, what does that mean? Like, well, it's dropping down your nervous system. Well, how do I do that? Well, let me show you what it feels like. You can give me some calm, let me give you some Z, and then, oh, this is what it feels like. And then, oh, I don't need to train as much because I can recover better, right? I see the benefit, my sleep gets better. And I talk about this a lot with my athletes. It's like, well, and as soon as you finish your workout, what are you doing? What are you doing? You're gonna go run and go to all your meetings, gonna go bang things out, you know? Or you're gonna like, give yourself 10 or 15 minutes just to calm down, right? Because that's gonna be a huge difference on how you're gonna recover and see the gains, right? Because you guys know, you don't make your gains in the gym. No, it's all right. Well, we say the best athletes, right? Have figured that out, how to be able to get into that calm parasympathetic state the quickest and most effectively. And while they're actually doing the work, right? So I have a friend of mine, he's like the only guy that was a professional running back, he was on the Eagles, and he was also professional, he was Olympic skier, only gotta do both. And he told me like, when he first was doing skiing, he listened to like Metallica and like, you know, hardcore shit, and by the end of it, he was listening to Beethoven, right? Beethoven, Chopin, like things that were relaxing, because you don't need, like, we don't need to be more stressed. We need to be, this is not only for working out, this is for like, if you want to perform better at your job, right? Like you need to drop down. You can get too amped even for athletic performance. This happened to me competing in the past where I was so psyched that I would just gas out so much faster than I did in practice. Well, they've done cool studies. I've shared it on the podcast before that like Justin's referring to, where they compare like a Steph Curry and with some other random people. And there's a game winner, like free throw he has to hit, and they measure his heart rate, and his heart rate is like resting heart rate for the average person. Like in the middle of a game where he's been running up and down a court, it's like that ability to be able to do that is so unique. Yeah, I just call it, I call it, with my patients, I call it a superpower. Like, and I remind myself this on a regular basis, because if you can just, if you're so sympathetically dominant, what you don't have is a lot of what's called sympathetic reserve, right? So if you're already going in like this, you don't have a lot more you can do, right? But if you're coming down, if you're coming from a very low place, the amount of tension you can put on a muscle, amount of stress you can put on the system, that's where the change is going to happen. And that's where you're going to see the major, like long-term benefit, right? What are your products that have something called cordicepin, is that from Cordyceps? Yeah. Okay, so what's the benefit of that? Yeah, so you don't have the Cordyceps mushroom, right? I do, yeah. Cordyceps has been known for a long time in Chinese medicine as something that helps with energy, helps with, helping with detoxification. It has a lot of different compounds in the mushroom. There's one particular compound in there that is my favorite compound other than methylene blue at this point. And it's called Cordyceps. And Cordyceps is the most active portion of the Cordyceps mushroom, but it's only 0.03% of the mushroom by weight. So a very small amount. And what's very, very cool about it is that it's about a hundred times more potent as an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, and it increases deep sleep. And you take it at night, typically. And it has transformed my personal health, I'll say that, because I'm traveling a lot like you guys, right? And whenever you're traveling a lot, you're at a high risk of getting sick, and I just don't anymore, you know, knock on whatever wood I have here, but I don't. And my kids, I have a little bowl of it at my house, they call it the green stuff, it's green colored. And anytime anybody's feeling like they're getting sick, they take it. So you can take it prophylactically. We have something called Tru-Mune, for example. That's one of our products that I take prophylactically if I'm a place that, you know, I have a higher risk of getting sick at a lower dose. And then if you feel like you're coming down with something, higher dose, you take it immediately. Like this soon as you start feeling like you get something, like you take your rest of your stack of store, it's not the only thing you take, but you will see a shift in that whole progression. Like my wife who listens to zero of what I say. She's also a physician. She's one of those people that gets a cold, you know, she gets the usual cold, but then she gets a cough that doesn't go away for like a month. And I can't sleep in the same bed as her, like it's the, you know, it's the whole thing. But if I can get her to take the Tru-Mune right when she's starting to feel sick, she doesn't get that whole thing. Like she doesn't get that cough and like, it's better for our relationship, right? And better for my sleep scores too. And so that's such a cool thing about it. And it works like a denticing in the body. So a denticing, yeah, a denticing has a lot of different functions. It's an identity, the main people, the way people think about it, a denticing oftentimes is related to blocking the identity receptor. You guys are drinking something on a regular basis. Yeah, caffeine does it. Caffeine does it. Coffee blocks the identity receptor in the brain. It makes us feel more wakeful, right? And so what methalosylic, what Cordyceps does is it works just like a denticing. So it gives you sleep pressure. So it increases your deep sleep too. So you take it at night, it increases your deep sleep. You will see this if you measure your scores as well. And at the same time is giving you anti-viral, anti-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory. Can you take it at the same time as the Z and the column? Yeah, I want to give you, okay, so this is like a last three months. I'm on this like mission to, I'm ordering, tracking, and like trying to, I'm shooting for, I haven't seen a 90 score ever. I got one today. Okay, okay, so give me the whole stack of what I should take in a day to try and optimize this. I want to know what, Methland Blue, it's so variable, right? Because everybody's going to be different. But what I would say is that you need to have a good enough support from mitochondrial support during the day. You have to make sure that you're having times when you're parasympathetic during the day too. So you're going, so the most beautiful nervous system is one that dynamically oscillates between sympathetic and parasympathetic throughout the day. But the majority of your time is in parasympathetic, right? The majority of your time should be in chill mode. This is why you see like older, you know, tribal cultures that hang around most of the day doing nothing, right? And then we're just relaxing. And then they, you know, then they're hunting, like, then they're fishing, like, then they're having sex or whatever it is. Like, but like they're doing things periodically and sympathetic. So the best way to get the best sleep is have the most regulated nervous system and have the most mitochondrial support, but then you're thinking about, okay, three hours before bed, I'm not going to have any more food. Right? Typically you don't want to have a lot of food before you go to bed. Good three, two, one rule. Right? You got that, right? And then you want to be winding down your nervous system within those three hours, right? And so how are you getting more parasympathetic? What are you doing? Are you, No TV, no phone, yeah. Or if you're doing it, I mean, you know, most people are going to do some of that. At least you're wearing protection, right? You know, not condoms for your face. Like, you know, blue blockers. Blue blockers. We should call them condoms for your face. I don't know about that. That's good. I should tell my friends that have those companies. It's called the condoms. Anyway, so yes, you're protecting your face. You know, there's also the idea that you have photoreceptors in your skin. So in general, it's about trying to keep the lights dimmer. You know? And then trying not to be too activated before bed. You don't want to do too much heavy exercise before bed if you can. Like I'm not a big fan of people doing like cold plunges and shit before bed. If people do this, like they go back and forth from hot to cold at night. I don't think it's great for most people. I think if you're pretty well optimized, you can do it. But if you're not, it's probably going to be too stressful to release all those neurotransmitters. And then you're thinking, okay, now 30 minutes before bed, what am I doing? So I, you guys remember Pavlov and the dog and things. I talk to my patients about salivating for sleep, right? Which is like, you do the same thing every single day, no matter where you are, no matter what time zone, for at least five to 10 minutes before you go to bed every single time. And try to go to bed at the same time every single time. And then if you're stacking in the products, which I do, I'm thinking about our Trozy, a half of that and a half of our Tromune combined together. Because that's typically about a 30 minutes to an hour before you go to bed. You can use them as a trokey. You can put them up in the mouth and let them dissolve, or you can swallow them, you know? Obviously it's an empty stomach, so it's pretty well absorbed both ways. And then, you know, you go to bed and you go to bed the same way every night. The same sleeping position, the same covers, the same sound machine, the same eye mask. Like it sounds like a lot, but in the end it's like- No, no, no, and I appreciate you framing it this way because this is what we talk about on the show all the time. And this is even what I've communicated. I was just yesterday, we're talking about this. And there is nothing that had so far that I've been able to do supplement-wise or anything else than the things that you listen first. Like that is getting my good exercise in, making sure that I calm down for, shutting all this stuff down, being consistent. I can go four days in a row of that, like you just said, perfect consistency, and I'm scoring in the 80s. As soon as I stay up an extra two hours later, or something like that, it doesn't even matter if I had the supplement stack, that disrupts the most. So I'm doing those things. Now I wanna know what the- Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we also like to do, and this is helpful, maybe not for you, but for those that are listening, is that Dr. Ted is, again, the guy that I get a lot of my sayings from these days, likes to say that your day starts when you go to sleep, not when you wake up. So make it the priority, instead of it being the last thing you do every single day. Make it the first thing you do. Isn't it ironic that we talk about this too all the time on the show, is that there's so many books about morning routines and stuff like that. But yet, I would argue that your night routine is far more important, way more important than your morning. But we just don't talk about that. Don't talk about it. I mean, sleep is the afterthought, right? And then this has been a big deal for me. I mean, I was in the hospital working for years and getting called at home and like, I just wasn't getting, the thing about it is if you're relatively healthy, you can tolerate this for a while, until you can't. And then you start falling off that cliff. Like why can't I recover as well? Why is my mood all over the place? Why am I tired but wired all the time? Like, well, because your nervous system is shot and you might have conjured and need more support, and you can't just think you're gonna take a supplement and that's gonna be the end all be, right? That could help you and it could be a good start or it could be something that, in addition, you add to the other stuff. Most people are gonna go the other way around which is like, they're gonna wanna pill first, right? They're gonna wanna supplement. And that's what I tell my patients all the time, is like, look, I hope over time, you don't need as much of this, but like let's get your nervous system working well or better, like let's get your mitochondria more supported. And then over time, as you're getting your diet better, optimise, lifestyle better, optimise, getting out of a shitty relationship, like, you know, getting a sleep divorce, you guys know sleep divorce, right? Half of US couples, I think, live in different, live, sleep in different rooms now. Is it half? About half, yeah. Are you serious? Wow, I was like back in the 40s. Yeah. They have like one bed for sex or they change beds. I don't know how to look good. But there's also just another hack for people is just getting a separate set of covers. You guys are- We have sleep aid. So my wife, which blows my mind, is at 90 degrees, I'm over here at 55. That's crazy, yeah. So you have different covers, different mattresses, you're not like, you know, trying to steal the covers from your spouse or your partner, that's another way to do it. But like, they've actually done studies, like if your partner is snoring next to you, your cortisol rises every time they snore, even if you think you're sleeping all night. Wow. Yeah, so you're not getting good rest. Interesting. And so you have to start off with the basics. And so when I work with patients, it's like, what are the basics for them? It's either sleep, stress, mitochondrial function, that's all happening at the same time. The question is where you start, but almost always if sleep is the issue, you start with sleep. Because if you can get them to sleep better, everything else is going to get better. This is why I love these tools that we have now, like O-Ring, is because I think for years, as a trainer over 25 years now for us, you were playing that guessing game so much, where, and I'm sure there's a major individual variance of what each person feels like with a score of an 80 or whatever, but at least gives you a metric that you can go, and it's very clear to me. There is a clear difference between, you know, two, three days in a row of 80 scores versus a 67, and it is, you can feel, you can, and so I can see that now, and then I can see as I apply these habits and routines, like what a difference that makes. TROZI has been great because it has eight different ingredients in there, and the problem with most sleep aids out there is that they're just gonna trash your architecture. You know, so your sleep architecture is the idea that you have to go through various cycles while you're sleeping. You have four stages of deep sleep, you have REM sleep, you're supposed to do this every 90 minutes, and then in the beginning of your night, you have more deep sleep, in the end of night, you have more REM sleep, and this is typically how you guys, if you're looking at your ring, you'll see this, but if you take something like THC, if you're taking like, that trashes your deep sleep, alcohol trashes all of your sleep, right? And then, you know, Benadryl or other, even Melatonin, they're gonna give you, Benadryl's gonna do nothing good for you, but Melatonin will give you like a little bit of help. It's not gonna do the whole thing. So people tell me like, Melatonin doesn't work for me. I'm like, yeah, because you were just taking Melatonin. You know, that's one of like six different sleep signals. Like what about GABA? What about a dentistry? Like what about serotonin or melatonin together? Like you combine these things together, that's why TROZI is so powerful, because it has that comprehensive support. And I always tell my patients, like, look, I want you to, if you're not sleeping, that's the first thing we gotta figure out. Because if that doesn't get better, nothing's gonna get better. And this is something I've learned over the years, right? Like you can give people expensive therapies and like go in a hyperbaric chamber or something. But if they have sleep apnea, like doesn't fucking matter. Like, or if like, if they have terrible stress, it doesn't matter, right? And so like, don't waste your money. And like I tell, and that's why I got disinvited. Like don't waste your money on this great technology. If it's, if you're just gonna be doing the same thing that got you where you are. Well, Scott, I appreciate what you guys do. Cause I'm pretty hyper aware of how sharp I can be because of what we do. So, you know, if I didn't, you know, have conversations with people or do a show with my partners every single day, I mean, it wouldn't make that big of a difference, but I need to be sharp. And so the Methylene Blue product you guys make, that's like one of my favorite things. And it definitely improves my ability to just do this. I can't wait to mess with the sleep stack. Cause I'm like so into this right now and been tracking. So it'll be a fun thing to do. You have to tell me how it goes. Yeah, yeah, I'll tell you what, I've never scored it in 90. Well, I only get 90s when I come back down to C level. You know, I gotta be saying, like when I'm in Colorado and I come down and I sleep in a hotel room, even if I felt like shit, I still get a 90 because my HRV goes up because I have more oxygen around. So that's how it typically goes. But yeah, I mean, I love our products because they really serve a purpose, which is they help you now while you're on your path. And hopefully over the long term, you need them less because you're more optimized and doing the things, but we're all getting older too. And we all have more stress on us at times, sleep stress because you have a bad night of sleep, right? Or you're on a travel, you're going traveling or whatever it might be. And so what I love about our company is that I'm a physician. Like I do this shit for a living. Like I'm working with patients. I work with lots of my colleagues that do this all the time. I see what's working. And my colleague, Dr. Ted and I, we've seen what's working for over 20 years. And we know that one sleep stack is not gonna work for somebody else and somebody else. And then we have these trokies that you can titrate, so you can take a quarter, take a half. You're not like relegated to a capsule and have to figure out how to take out like half the stuff and figure out if it works for you. And so trokies are great. They're fast, they're bioavailable. And we have a whole nonprofit organization that trains practitioners on a different way of doing all this. So you don't have to be in, if you're a physician and you're listening in your conventional doc and you want different training, like we have that for you. Like it's, and that's why I feel comfortable talking about the products. It's like, because we have a whole ecosystem for people to educate them. And then I say this with absolute truth. Like if you don't need my supplements, our products going forward, great. That means you've been well optimized and you don't need them as much, awesome. Well said Scott. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been awesome, man. Appreciate you. Thank you guys, it's been fun. 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 Superbundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle 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 Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle 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.