[00:00:01] Luke: All right. Kyal, what's the main difference you notice between American culture and Australian culture?

[00:00:08] Kyal: Oh goodness. It's probably the availability of health here comparative to Australia. And Australia, we're on an island. We're very easily controlled, as we may have seen in years past that have come. There's been certain things pushed on the population that have been very hard to resist.

[00:00:25] But here, in Austin and Texas especially, it's a health hub of course. But the availability of good quality supplements. Anytime you are in a pinch and you can't cook a meal, there's amazing restaurants. They be them organic, like The Well, for example. You can always get fantastic food. And as a result, the opposite thing happens.

[00:00:43] When my family and I come to America, we lose weight. We lose inflammation, which is the opposite of what you hear. You hear Americans go to Europe or somewhere like that and they lose a heap of weight and lose inflammation. But here, with our mindset now, education around what nourishing and nutritious food is, we're able to find them. Like Whole Foods and other supermarkets like that. The availability of health here is-- it's great. Love it here. We always feel better having been to America than when we're back in Australia or New Zealand.

[00:01:17] Luke: Do you live in New Zealand now?

[00:01:19] Kyal: Live in New Zealand now, yeah. We moved from Australia about six months ago because essentially, they banned one of the primary peptides that my company produces, BPC-157.

[00:01:28] Luke: Are you serious? Why? Because it works so well?

[00:01:31] Kyal: Pretty much. The quote was, "Due to its increase in popularity and its lack of human clinical studies, we are going to ban this peptide and make it prescription only." So it's not banned. You can find a doctor who'll prescribe it if you have yourself a cowboy of a doctor in Australia who's not afraid of regulatory agencies coming down on them, which is pretty rare.

[00:01:52] But yeah, as far as from my business perspective, it would not be viable for me to sell that to Australians, which is a real shame because that's where I started the business. A huge percentage of our audience and our customers are from Australia, and I've had to, over the last year, since they banned it in, I believe it was June last year-- we were actually in Texas when they banned it-- we've had to just pull the primary product that our business produces, which is a real shame because so many people were not dependent on it, but utilizing it as their accelerant for gut health issues or for injury recovery.

[00:02:24] So yeah, that's part of the reason why we moved from Australia. The other part was we were living in tropical Queensland, and mold was a huge issue. We lived in three houses, and every single one of them was riddled with mold, even brand-new ones. The environment, the humidity, and the new house materials that they use combined with high levels of EMF, we just couldn't mitigate the damages or we couldn't stop the mold growth.

[00:02:49] They had a lot of rain or a lot of chem trails and stuff over that areas too. We, conspiracy theorist hat on, believed that they were deliberately targeting these areas because every day you'd see planes going over with chem trails. And our roof had high levels of barium and all these heavy metals that are supposedly in these trails in our drinking water because we tested it. Because we noticed a sediment in it that we hadn't had anywhere else we lived. We were under the flight path.

[00:03:18] Luke: Interesting.

[00:03:19] Kyal: In Sunshine Coast.

[00:03:20] Luke: So much of it that you could see the sediment in the water?

[00:03:23] Kyal: Yeah.

[00:03:24] Luke: Holy crap.

[00:03:24] Kyal: Our water was dark because it was on the way down and also one of the looping routes for when they go to one of the major airports in Queensland, Brisbane. So there was a heck of a lot of issues without drinking water, which that shouldn't be the case. It one of my--

[00:03:41] Luke: It's such a travesty, that whole thing. That's one of my gripes with the MAHA movement and all this stuff, which is great. Get the food dyes out of food. Okay. Make tallow fries. Great. Dude, you can make a decision on what you eat or drink. Not everyone can afford organic food necessarily or buying an expensive water filtration system or something. But you can go to the farmer's market and get some grass-fed beef. You can make choices, but one thing that we can't choose is when we walk outside and take a breath. So that particular issue is extremely problematic to me.

[00:04:26] Kyal: Anything where we lose our autonomy, our choice, be it the drinking water-- yes, you can filter that. But for most people, we're in a hotel now. We're showering and we're not going to drink the water, but it still absorbs through our skin. Our skin absorbs a heap of chemicals, a heap of things that are in the water.

[00:04:41] So maybe worry about the food diets, yes, but let's clean up the drinking water. Removing fluoride's a fantastic first step, but there's so many other things in it that really need to be addressed, including things like birth control and microplastics and all manner of crap that's in the water. We need it cleared out.

[00:04:59] Luke: Yeah. Anti-depressants, all kinds of shit. Radiation, chemo. I interviewed a guy way back in the early days who was a water filtration expert, and he was explaining-- I didn't know this prior to this, but in many municipalities, they recycle the water. LA being one of them since there isn't water native to the area.

[00:05:20] So he's explaining how basically you flush the toilet, it ends up at the processing plant and then there's various mechanisms of filtration that get the bulk matter out, toilet paper, tampons, poop, etc. And then it goes through a purification process, obviously, to sanitize it.

[00:05:41] But what doesn't get removed is every single drug, like you mentioned, birth control, that everyone's ever pooped out. And also all the drugs that people flush down the toilet. And I was like, "Okay, on a biochemical level, that's disgusting because then you're drinking and showering in that." But also just energetically, I don't want the combination of millions of people's internal physical energy in my body. That is so weird.

[00:06:13] Kyal: If you believe in homeopathy, then you have to believe that the vibration of other people's, I don't know-- what do you call them? Metabolites, essentially, are going to impact your own. And then they go through municipalities where they lose all the structure and it just ruins the water. I know water's a big topic near and dear to your heart.

[00:06:31] Luke: It's like mass urine and feces therapy. Anyway, how's New Zealand? You like it there? I've never been to Australia or New Zealand. I've always wanted to go to New Zealand because I hear they have a lot of hot springs there.

[00:06:45] Kyal: There's a lot of hot springs. Rotorua in New Zealand is fantastic. We've gone there. And all the geothermal pools, they're fantastic. We always come back really refreshed when we've been there, which has been twice. Auckland itself as a city. It's just a city. It's nothing special, to be honest. It a means to an end for our family. We had to get out of mold.

[00:07:02] The house we're in has no mold whatsoever, so we're in our little hermit shell at the moment. We're doing our ozone saunas to remove as much mold as possible. We have a 2-year-old, so we have to, whether we like it or not, be in a bubble and look after them, get their kids in a good school, which was hard in Queensland to find one.

[00:07:22] And yeah, just focus on the businesses. We've got LVLUP Health, my business that's exploded in the last two years. And my partner and I are working on a skincare business on the side that we're yet to launch, but that's proving to be a very challenging endeavor, getting skincare right versus put some herbs and some nutritionals in a capsule, is pretty easy compared to the nuance of pH balance and how oily or how drying a product is.

[00:07:46] And do ingredients cross-react with each other? Like copper peptide might react with something like vitamin C and then nullify the effect of both. So that's been a very challenging journey. Two years in the process, and we're still not super close to launching that one. But I can't wait to do that with my partner. She's the right side of the brain, creative, artistic, spiritual. And I'm Mr. Science, Mr. Left Brain, Mr. Mechanism.

[00:08:11] Luke: I can tell. I've listened to a couple of your podcasts, and I was like, "Okay, this is going to be an easy one because I could just wind you up and let you go." I love interviewing brainiacs because I'm probably more like your partner. I get the big picture of things, but if you ask me to rattle off the scientific studies of this and that, I'm not that guy. So that's why I like talking to people like you.

[00:08:34] So what I want to focus our chat on today, I try to always cover things that I've not really covered at depth, and I've touched on peptides on a couple of shows, but I've not really done a deep dive, I think because prior to very recently when I found you guys, you have to get them through a doctor and inject them.

[00:08:55] And I just know that's so unattainable for most people. And even for those that have access to peptides and a doctor that will prescribe them, just many people aren't interested in putting a needle in their body. Myself included. I do it pretty regularly, but it's not fun. Even if you don't mind the needle, it's just a hassle. It's like reconstituting it. There's math involved. It's just like the whole thing's confusing.

[00:09:22] Kyal: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:23] Luke: So I want to educate the listeners on the incredible healing potential of peptides, and you seem like a guy really well-suited to do that.

[00:09:32] Kyal: Love my peptides.

[00:09:33] Luke: Yeah. And that said, I just want to say kudos to you for doing something interesting. People send me all kinds of different supplements, and I'm always out buying different things and trying different things, and it's like, I don't know, at some point I just want to go in my cabinet and just throw everything away.

[00:09:53] I'm supplemented out. And there's a lot of noise and there's a lot of people, I think, that jump on trends and bandwagons just throw out products that, even if they're not harmful or toxic, they just don't really deliver on the promises.

[00:10:11] So full disclosure, when I think, I don't know, someone on your team sent me this massive box of your stuff, I was just like, "Oh, great. More pills." Dude, the world has enough supplements, honestly. It's like there's enough shit. You don't need that many, depending on what you're trying to heal or optimize.

[00:10:27] But then I started opening them up and looking at the ingredients. I'm like, "Wait, these dude's managed to make peptides orally available, and you're doing liposomals and all of these super badass formulations that I was like, okay, Goddammit." Just when I think I'm not going to take any more supplements or have anyone else on the show, I'm over it, then someone like you comes along and I'm like, "Holy shit. They actually did something unique and novel."

[00:10:51] So kudos to you doing so. So I'm excited. But let's start just pretending like everyone listening has never even heard the word peptide. Let's start there and then we'll get deeper as we go.

[00:11:05] Kyal: Sure. So thank you for the praise for the products too.

[00:11:08] Luke: Oh, it's for real, dude. They're badass.

[00:11:11] Kyal: They're a fantastic catalyst to naturopathic. My training and my background is in nutrition, human nutrition and naturopathy. So I have a really strong bias towards using herbal extracts like botanicals and nutraceuticals, like NAC, glycine, all these things that have fantastic benefits in and of themselves. But then catalyzing the results by using a peptide, which orchestrates the nutraceuticals and the botanicals to work even faster and even better.

[00:11:27] So all the way back, what are peptides? Our body produces hundreds of thousands of peptides endogenously, made by our own cells. So when you take a peptide exogenously, like through a capsule or through a injection, the body recognizes what it is. It's not a drug. Some are drugs, but most of the ones, all of the ones that LVLUp sells and that you can get therapeutically, not through pharmaceutical companies, are naturally found in the body.

[00:12:01] Insulin is a perfect example of probably the most commonly known peptide. Our body makes insulin. It lowers blood sugar, petitions energy into your fat cells, and it's a peptide hormone of storage. There's plenty of other ones like glucagon, and this is where GLP-1s like Ozempic, Mounjaro, Tirzepatide, Retatrutide, all of these are coming into popularity because of celebrities.

[00:12:27] But those ones are non-natural ones. They're just based off of the natural GLP, glucagon-like peptide that our body produce naturally. They modify it to last longer in the system, so then you can inject it once a week and it'll hang around and have an effect for a whole four to seven days, depending.

[00:12:45] But even further back, peptides are just chains of amino acids, the smallest building block of protein. They're a chain, i.e., they're strung together with a bond. The smallest ones are bio regulator peptides. They're often two peptides, two or three chained together. And then there's larger ones like BPC 157, is a 15 amino acid chain peptide.

[00:13:07] And all of these have really profound effects on our body. They leverage our body's own healing processes. BPC is known as the Wolverine Peptide because it promotes angiogenesis to a natural level, not a super physiological level or a level that's beyond what our body would want.

[00:13:25] But it leverages these pathways to induce healing basically. That's connective tissue, like your hair, your nail, your skin, and your gut lining. All of it's made of connective tissue and ligaments, tendons, all these collagen networks are all dependent on the processes that BPC upregulates. It'll help with fibroblast growth. It'll help with collagen network synthesis.

[00:13:50] And then for things like injury recovery, it works on growth hormone. There's so many different mechanisms and pathways that even I don't remember all of the 12 of them. And I'm not going to bore your audience by trying to rattle off all of them. But essentially, it just accentuates and accelerates the healing processes in which your body already has.

[00:14:09] The metaphor I use is if your body is a construction site and you bring on all the building blocks, you bring in the bone broths. You bring in nutritious foods. You remove all of the waste that might be at this building site, i.e., you clean up your diet, our glutamine, glycine, these are all the building blocks like the timber and the bricks.

[00:14:28] The peptides are like having a really skilled foreman on the site. You bring them in, tells all the builders, all the pathways how it's going to utilize these resources to induce the healing. Or if it's not BPC, for example, another peptide, it will modulate gene pathways to accelerate processes within the body.

[00:14:54] And a GLP-1 is the perfect example that everyone knows. If you take this peptide, satiety goes down, insulin increases, and glucagon decreases, and all those three together enables you to be satiated, to not feel full, lowers your blood sugar. And for a diabetic, this is a fantastic new drug.

[00:15:11] When that first came out, I was a bit on the fence about it. These peptides that the Kardashians are injecting and everyone's jumping on as their new almost addiction level drug to these things. But having seen-- when used in smaller doses than the drug companies present, having seen how beneficial and life changing they are to people's lives, I've come around full circle.

[00:15:33] I'm like, all right, if you're going to use these things, if you are 100 pounds overweight and this is the catalyst or the tool that gets you to a healthier level that enables all of the other lifestyle factors to begin or to stick, then what a fantastic accelerant, what a fantastic tool that we can use to onboard people into the process of natural health and get them to a state where they're more open to exercising.

[00:15:54] Some people are so overweight, if they try to walk, they come back and be out of action for a few days. And how slow and how difficult is the process of weight loss and improving your metabolism and your health going to be if a simple walk or a run just is insurmountable for some people.

[00:16:11] Whereas if you use these things, get over that hurdle, get past that threshold of challenge, then the ripple effect and the downstream, you might not even need the peptides anymore. Because all of the other dietary and lifestyle things can then come in that the peptide has allowed you to get to that state where you're motivated to do the exercise, the work, to clean up your diet and to, I don't know, fast track and get you to where you need to be faster.

[00:16:38] So peptides are fantastic for that. There's ones like GHK-Cu. It's used ubiquitously in the skincare industry because it's a small three amino acid peptide. Being that small, it can cross the skin barrier and have effects on your collagen networks in your skin.

[00:16:53] That's why a lot of no tox alternative skincare products and the ones I elucidated to that we're bringing out work via leveraging GHK and similar peptides like that. But there's other ones that do require injection. LVLUP's benefit is you don't need to inject these things.

[00:17:11] There's a small set of naturally occurring peptides that will work orally because they're small enough, but there's larger ones like insulin. If insulin was small enough to work via a capsule or orally, no diabetics would have to be injecting themselves every day.

[00:17:24] It's just too large of a peptide, unfortunately. And then a lot of the other ones that people take, like growth hormones, [Inaudible], they're too large, and you can't really-- unless you modify it in the future, which may come, but as it stands now, they need to be injected too, which as you said, is a cumbersome, tedious, and annoying process of the reconstituting with bacteria, static water, and doing all the maths using your peptide calculator.

[00:17:47] And then even if it doesn't hurt, even if the pain of injecting deters you from it, it's just annoying. So by putting in the ones that work orally into a capsule, barrier to entry for people trying these peptides has been reduced significantly.

[00:18:02] BPC, full disclosure, it works better if you inject it. But do you want to inject it five days a week, or could you get 80% of the benefit, 70% of the benefit from an oral capsule? Well, yeah, you can because it does absorb orally. It works orally.

[00:18:18] And if you have gut issues, which is the primary reason why our customer base would take like GI Repair or BPC, then it's working locally on the area that you want it to affect. So that's my rationale behind why I use oral peptides. I probably didn't get into enough detail about just generally what peptides are, but they are everywhere in the body.

[00:18:38] Luke: Well, we're going to go deeper too.

[00:18:41] Kyal: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:41] Luke: But I think that's a good overview. Another thing about injectable peptides versus oral is they're freaking expensive if you have to work with a doctor who's courageous enough to work with peptides, considering the regulatory hurdles that have been presented.

[00:19:00] But I remember when I was on, a few years ago, I interviewed a guy in California, Dr. Matt Cook. Great guy. And he works a lot with stem cells and peptides and all this stuff. And he got me on a program for a while. He was probably hooking it up, and it was still super expensive. It was a few hundred dollars per month.

[00:19:20] And then, as we said, constituting them, and I ended up taking a huge portion of our refrigerator to keep them there. Did it for a while. I was like, "A, this is too expensive. B, it's difficult to make it a sustainable practice because of the hassle.

[00:19:40] But I want to back up a little bit. Speaking about the GLP-1 peptides, which now pharmaceutical companies are turning into drugs, or have you classify that, a couple years ago, a former podcast guest who has a company that does a few peptides told me about semaglutide, a peptide. He's like, "Oh, it's great for weight loss."

[00:20:00] And I don't know what happened, but at some point, I just like ballooned up. I think I was drinking way too much raw milk, and I didn't really realize it, but I was getting quite pregnant looking. So when I gain weight, unfortunately, it doesn't go everywhere. I just get a gut, but I stay skinny. So one day I jump on the scale and I was 200 pounds, which for a 6'2 guy is good, but only if you have muscle.

[00:20:24] And I don't really have a lot of muscle because I hate working out. So I was like, "Oh shit." It dawned me one day I was fat. And I remember he told me about that. So, I don't know, it was maybe two months. I was doing a little shot a week of this peptide. I was like, "Holy shit." I shredded 20 pounds of not doing anything.

[00:20:41] And then I mentioned it to someone. They're like, "Dude, you're on Ozempic." And I was like, "Wait, what?" I'm like, "No, I'm not." And they're like, "It's the same thing." And I had no idea that that drug, the Kardashians they're talking about and the peptide, my natural doctor friend turned me onto are in the same family.

[00:20:58] So I got totally freaked out and stopped because I felt like it could be dangerous or something. And I already lost the weight and it stayed off. So I was fine. But tell us the difference, if there is one, between the pharmaceutical versions of the Ozempic and what I thought was a more natural alternative in the semaglutide. Is it in the dose, the formulation? What's the difference?

[00:21:20] Kyal: It's a bit of a spectrum. So you will get peptides from desiccated organs. If you were to take a thymus gland, you are going to get bioactive thymus peptides in there. Or you can go the other end of the scale and be on an Ozempic, for example, which is a naturally occurring one that's been modified by drug companies to have that longer effect.

[00:21:38] It's not found naturally as you inject it, but they take what you naturally make, combine it with something to make it hang around longer, then it becomes a drug because they've modified it away from nature. Therefore they can patent it and it can be their own thing that they can sell as their own intellectual property.

[00:21:53] And it's the same with all of them, tirzepatide, retatrutide, and semaglutide. They're all the generic names, and now there's brand names behind it all that the companies own. So that's the difference between the natural ones. It's a very blurry line between the natural and the pharmaceutical. And they overlap a lot.

[00:22:10] Online vendors will often sell the semaglutide and the melanotan, alongside the natural occurring ones like the BPC. So it's challenging, yes, to understand the difference between them all. And even with resources that we put out, I often include the drug-like ones in there too, because people who come to peptides just want to know about all of them.

[00:22:27] They're not really dogmatic with if it's naturally occurring or if it's pharmaceutical. It's because of their base being natural, the side effect risk is so much lower than other drugs, which don't even resemble anything that our body naturally makes. So they are safer, even though when they become a drug or they are modified away from nature, then you increase the risk.

[00:22:51] That's why there are some side effects with GLP-1s, especially, the talk about the muscle mass loss and the bone mineral density loss. And that wouldn't occur with natural GLP-1 that our body should be making in sufficient quantities, but almost in the way that people get on TRT because their natural levels of testosterone plummet.

[00:23:10] I believe GLP-1s have a place, but you use them as like TRT but with GLP. So the amount of glucagon-like peptide that your body produces might get burnt out because of dietary overstimulation you might have indulged your whole life. And then just a downregulation of how much your body will make of that.

[00:23:27] So if you bring in a microdose, and I'll give a nod to Dr. Tyna Moore. She's mainstreamed GLP-1 microdosing and has a whole course on how to do that correctly. I'm not your doctor. She's not your doctor, but if you want to learn about these pharmaceutical ones and how to do them at a microdose, she has some great resources.

[00:23:46] GLP-1s are, I call them the gateway peptide to all the other ones. You can see everyone. I think most people in America would, a, see the commercials, but B knows someone who's lost 20 to 100 pounds even on these things that you're like, "Okay, wow, peptides are powerful, aren't they?" This is some really beneficial medicine that is helping a lot of Americans for better, most of the time, for worse sometimes.

[00:24:09] There's a bit of a drug dependence without any mechanism of addiction that clinicians are seeing where people have lost the weight. They're so happy that they've lost the weight that they're scared to put it back on. And when they've passed the point of needing it anymore, they just refuse to get off of it.

[00:24:24] So that's one downside to that. But yeah, to go all the way back to your initial point, there's the spectrum of drug-like and then naturally occurring. And you still can take desiccated organs, like heart and soul have their desiccated range. You take brain, you're going to get some of the brain peptides that I put in Neuro Regenerate.

[00:24:44] The difference is when you take it from an organ or a natural source, like brain for example, the peptides aren't going to survive stomach acid degradation. As soon as it hits your stomach acid, the acid combined with the proteolytic or the protein degrading enzymes are going to nullify the effects of that peptide to almost zero, probably zero for most of the time.

[00:25:03] Luke: Oh. Is that why you put sodium bicarbonate in your formula?

[00:25:07] Kyal: 100%.

[00:25:07] Luke: Oh, that's funny. I saw that in a bunch of these and I was like, "What? Why put baking soda and everything?" That's funny. Okay, that makes sense.

[00:25:15] Kyal: Yeah, a lot of the peptides, like GHK for example, we liposome that to prevent the fatty phospholipid membrane that encapsulates the peptide, protects it from the stomach acid and from the enzymes.

[00:25:28] But prior to doing that, in ones like KPV, we do still add sodium bicarbonate. And even with the liposome, we add that to buffer that stomach acid and to prevent pepsinogen, the inactive form of the protein degrading enzyme pepsin, to stop it converting to that enzyme and then attacking the peptide, therefore increasing the oral bioavailability of a peptide that might've had as low as like 10% bioavailability or oral absorption.

[00:25:54] Luke: Oh wow.

[00:25:55] Kyal: So we don't have statistics specifically, but the results are night and day difference when you take it in that form versus if you were to just take your injectable GHK, put it in some water and drink it, you're not going to get any benefit really from that. So unless you took it with a heap of sodium bicarbonate in the water too, then you can increase the bioavailability of these peptides.

[00:26:14] But the other thing we do is delayed release capsules, which are enterically coated to prevent-- the capsule doesn't break until it gets to your small intestine, which is the site of absorption for most peptides. So intelligent delivery mechanisms are how you get oral peptides to work.

[00:26:14] But the biggest thing we can never overcome is the gut lining. It only absorbs things up to about around 500 Daltons. So there's peptides that are too large. Even if we got them through to the stomach acid, they're just not going to absorb. So that's why there's only a small set of like 20 to 30 oral ones that work.

[00:26:49] Luke: I've got my NAD patch on today. Is that the case with a molecule like NAD or glutathione, why Ion Layer-- shout out to the company who makes these-- they're freaking amazing. Is that why they're doing that transdermal delivery system? It has to do with the size?

[00:27:07] Kyal: Yeah. So their delivery system plus the reason why people take the precursors is they are smaller than the actual NAD molecule and will absorb versus if you do just take NAD+. It needs to be liposomal to have much of a benefit, like the peptides too. NAD is a peptide itself too. A lot of these sites sell NAD alongside of the--

[00:27:29] Luke: Oh yeah. That's right. That's right. Actually, that's funny. When I first started injecting peptides, I was doing the NAD, and it's like, that one does suck to inject. If you do it subcutaneous, it burns the shit out of you. It's very uncomfortable.

[00:27:43] Kyal: There's peptides and there's small molecules too. They often get clumped in with the drugs naturally occurring peptides, bioregulators and small molecules. A small molecule example would be something like 5-amino-1-MQ. A lot of people call it a peptide, but it's not. This is one that interacts with NAD.

[00:28:00] It increases NAD salvage. So that's one way you can increase NAD levels. You can take the precursors, which is on this end, you can stop the NAD getting eliminated through your body and shuttle it back to recycle. So these small molecules like that five amino increase your NAD pools equivalent to taking the precursors.

[00:28:20] And then a product like our Longevity combines the enzyme inhibiting 5 amino with another one that inhibits it and then gives you the precursors that work orally. So, again, injectable is always going to supersede oral, but if you don't want to do, then a patch.

[00:28:37] Luke: When you say that word, I keep thinking you're saying 5-MeO.

[00:28:41] Kyal: 5-MeO.

[00:28:42] Luke: I was like, "Wait, what? I didn't see that bottle. I would be taking a lot more of it."

[00:28:46] Kyal: Neuro Regenerate 2.0.

[00:28:47] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You take some 5-MeO-DMT, it'll regenerate your whole soul forever. Talk to me about the regulation. I try to be a positive person, but I'm increasingly frustrated with the pharmaceutical industrial complex and the whole medical system.

[00:29:08] I'll caveat that by saying I know some amazing doctors. I'm sure the vast majority of people that work within that system are well-meaning and great people and are trying to help and heal and all the things. So having said that, I think the system in and of itself is just corrupt and fraudulent.

[00:29:26] And there's really great, well-meaning people, that get caught up in that system, and many of them never realize it. And if they do, how do they get out? You've already spent all this money and time on medical school and so on, so you're just like, "Ah, this is the way it is. It's not perfect, but it's a living."

[00:29:42] However, it does really irk me that the government as a whole and the legislative bodies of these health departments and such make it so difficult to get substances that are relatively harmless and really helpful and push literally genocidal bioweapons on us at the same time.

[00:30:16] So either one of those premises is evil in and of itself. Don't stop me from having the right to put whatever I want in my body, a. It's a violation of first principles. It's just, don't impose your will on me. I'm going to do what I want, and I'm willing to accept the consequences, should there be any.

[00:30:34] That's one part. And the other part is you're encouraging me to do things that are not only harmful, but potentially very deadly. So I have such a problem with that in and of itself. But when it comes to peptides, it's been a really strange landscape to observe because I've been using them for six, seven years or something.

[00:30:58] And I'll find a website that sells peptides, the injectables, and we can talk about the purity and testing too. Bookmark that for me. But I'm looking at their lab results and this and that. I'm trying to vet a company and make sure it's not going to be tainted or anything like that.

[00:31:17] And I'll order from them a few times then they disappear. The site's down. I'm like, "What is happening?" The peptides hold such a strange space in the regulatory scene. And I've never understood why the FDA or whoever it is that controls these things, it's so weird how they're legal. They're illegal. You can do this one, not that one. I'm just like, "What is going on?" Why are your peptides such an issue with the man, with the government?

[00:31:48] Kyal: Completely agree. They are the black sheep of medicine. They don't belong to regular MDs and doctors, and they don't really belong to the naturopaths and the chiropractors. They are this bridge between the two worlds because you could argue they are drugs. The effects they have are drug-like. We could see that with the results they get, which is fantastic.

[00:32:08] And that's why pharmaceutical companies are sinking millions and probably billions of dollars into peptides to then make them products. And part of my conspiracy theorist hat says, oh, well, they're just banning them to then modify them and make them their own. And there's a really strong case for that.

[00:32:25] Luke: Ah.

[00:32:25] Kyal: If they modify it far enough away from nature that it's not no longer naturally occurring, then they can own that patent and it be a drug. So that's one leg of looking at it. The other way is they don't particularly like competition. And when you look at the pleiotropic or the multi-mechanistic effects that peptides have, it competes with so many different drugs on the market.

[00:32:46] If you have osteoarthritis and you use gut healing peptides, the inflammatory burden that it reduces on you might actually be enough to help remedy or bring down your need for paid medications or anti-inflammatories. Or even if it's bad enough, you might be on an immunosuppressant.

[00:33:01] Well, if you can take a naturally occurring peptide, and even in botanicals and naturopathy circles too, if an ingredient is too powerful, if it's a pseudo pharmaceutical, which is what the word that you use, they describe that as anything that elicits a drug-like effect, and they have control over those substances in Australia. I believe America is the same.

[00:33:22] So as soon as it has the ability to work just beyond this token, oh, it helps with inflammation a little bit. You look at turmeric, for example, that'll do a little bit. If you take a Meriva curcumin, which is like a phospholipid based one, then it works a little bit better.

[00:33:38] But then if you take it too far, then the head just gets chopped off of that ingredient. And we've seen it so many times in naturopathy. It's disgusting the amount of ingredients that get banned because they might have an effect for cancer or they might have an effect for Alzheimer's. Lithium, for example, low dose lithium orate is completely banned in Australia. You can't use it.

[00:33:59] Luke: Really?

[00:33:59] Kyal: Yeah. I tried to put it in that one, but having started the-- I was operating the company in Australia at the time. It was not allowed. Why? Because evidence showing it's like very beneficial for Alzheimer's prevention and even interventional. So couldn't use that. Yeah.

[00:34:16] Luke: And compression too. I think people think of lithium in the pharmaceutical version like a super hardcore drug. But I remember the effects of lithium. We were talking about hot springs. There's a hot spring in Colorado called the Orvis Hot Springs near Grand Junction-ish Durango in the San Juan Mountains.

[00:34:36] Amazing hot spring. And the water's super high in lithium. And you soak in there and it's like you forget all your problems. It's like you're almost high. And then I was like, "That's cool." And then I interviewed a guy, Dr. John Gray, who's a relationship expert.

[00:34:49] But he told me, he's like, "Oh, dude, you got to get on lithium orate." And I was like, "Lithium? I'm not psychotic." And he goes, "Oh no, it's different. It's not the pharmaceutical." And I love that stuff. I don't remember to take it all the time, but when I do, I definitely have a lighter mood. I think it's super legit.

[00:35:06] Kyal: It's one of those low excitement factor ingredients that's like molybdenum or selenium or something that's just essential, but not really--

[00:35:14] Luke: But it would make sense if that's effective for neurogenerative diseases, Alzheimer's, and even mood disorders, depression and stuff. Of course, pharmaceutical companies can be like, "Hey, that lithium's dangerous, we got to get it off the market."

[00:35:26] Kyal: Dr. Aseem Malhotra pointed out some statistics about who funds the CDC or the FDA. 80% of it is pharmaceutical companies. In Australia, he came and lectured there and he's like, "I was absolutely shocked and appalled when I found out how much money the FDA get from pharmaceutical companies." That was until I found out that Australia gets 97% of their funding from pharmaceutical companies. So it's the most regulated and the strict country in the world to try and operate a business and to--

[00:35:56] Luke: Wow. And you've done it. I guess you had to move to New Zealand, but still-- if you create a company with these, I don't want to call them fringe because it makes them sound like they don't work or they're dangerous, but these gray zone peptides and some of these things like lithium orate and so on, what is the risk profile there of getting, not your business shutting down, but if you just start having to nick products from your product line, especially if they're your flagship-- I love your Gut Repair one and the other BPC-157.

[00:36:33] I'm like, "This is freaking amazing. It's orally available, affordable." It's like, I don't know. I'd be super bummed if I went to your website and that was gone. And I would be a lost customer if I wasn't obsessed with all the other ones. How do you reconcile that and someone who's, I'm assuming, trying to have a scalable, successful, profitable business that grows and reaches more people?

[00:36:53] Kyal: It is a risk. Having orals versus injectables is one way to mitigate the risk. When you're in doing the injectables, and we'll touch on purity, they need to be saline. They need to be completely pure. Otherwise, people are going to have reactions versus not saying, I do this. We test everything. But making sure that there's no lipopolysaccharide or no heavy metals.

[00:37:13] Heavy metal detox is so important for health. Yet if you are injecting cheap ones that you find on the Internet, there could be metals in there. You just spent maybe a year doing metal detoxes for silica and binders, and then you just put it all back with the intention of healing and making yourself better with contaminated product.

[00:37:29] But I guess from a regulatory risk, I've left Australia and I have no intention on returning to it because of how difficult it is. Pete Evans, mutual friend of ours, he's seen exactly how hard it is. He spoke about a BioCharger and got fined just five figures for saying it might help with a certain cough.

[00:37:45] That's how strict and how controlled that country is. He spoke about a recipe and they said he's making medical claims and he is not a doctor. So it's a very tricky place to be. But a lot of the other companies that--

[00:37:57] Luke: I wish you guys had the Second Amendment. I think the only thing that makes America more free than a country like Australia is the fact that we're heavily armed, honestly. Otherwise, what's the difference? It's like same people basically pulling the strings at the highest level. It's just we have that one safeguard.

[00:38:16] Kyal: They call Australia the experimental grounds for all the rest of the world stuff. They see if they can pull it off in Australia before moving onto the bigger population areas. We saw that with COVID, how far they were willing to push the Australians. I was living in Melbourne.

[00:38:30] Luke: Melbourne.

[00:38:31] Kyal: Melbourne, Australia.

[00:38:31] Luke: Yeah. I told you I used to date someone from Melbourne, and I would say that, and she's like, "Oh, gosh." She'd get so annoyed. She's like, It's Melbourne." Yeah.

[00:38:40] Kyal: I was living and working at a health food store at the time. I had just started LVLUP while I was working at the whole food store. It was a really good job for me to learn about what worked. You'd see like 30 people, 40 people a day coming in, telling you all their ailments, and then a five-minute mini consultation, you'd be like, "All right, this is what you need to take."

[00:38:58] And they'd come back and give you good feedback. But about maybe nine months into that job is when the call came around and everyone started to lose their mind. And it was wild to see the bustling streets of Melbourne go to a complete ghost town. And I was an essential worker because of being in a health food store.

[00:39:16] 1,000 people in the city of 5 million. It was insane to be a part of that. And then when protests and stuff kicked off, I, of course, didn't agree with any of it, so I went to it and saw people get shot with rubber bullets and tear gas thrown on just because we were walking. No one was inciting violence. It was not good for the nervous system, I'll tell you that much.

[00:39:37] Luke: Wow.

[00:39:38] Kyal: Being a part of it. And a lot of anger, a lot of government control of it, and media control. You'd go to a protest and there'd be almost a million people at this. And then they'd report on the news a minority of 10,000 people marched on the streets of Melbourne. And I'd be like, "10,000? What are you talking about? That one street out of the 30 that we're on?

[00:39:57] Luke: Oh my God.

[00:39:58] Kyal: It was really interesting and really one of the awakening experiences to have lived through and been a part of.

[00:40:03] Luke: Yeah. Congratulations on getting out. Yeah. We, here in America, were, of course, keeping track of all things on social media. And the one that got me in Australia was-- and again, sometimes you can't trust the mainstream media, but there's also click bait in the alternative media that could be exaggerating things.

[00:40:24] But there was something I saw at that time during that weird period of these essentially quarantine camps, concentration camps being built in Australia. Was that real? Was that a pilot project, or was that something that actually took root, and were people getting sent to them?

[00:40:40] Kyal: To call them a concentration camp is a bit hyperbolous. They were areas where you had to quarantine yourself if you'd come from overseas. You were required. It wasn't even optional. You had to stay in a hotel. They did that to Novak Djokovic for weeks and then deported him because he wouldn't comply.

[00:40:56] But Australians returning home, if there was no vaccine at the time, they had to quarantine for three weeks, make sure you weren't bringing the disease in. That wasn't optional if you wanted to come back. That was really not nice to see that happening. And they had plans of opening up really large ones.

[00:41:11] It was only like, I believe, 10 kilometers, or six miles away from where I was living at the time. They had this plan to open up this massive big one that did look like a concentration camp. But obviously, I think information started to get out fast enough and everyone just got sick of it.

[00:41:26] And when they saw that the vaccines didn't really do anything to prevent it anyway, there was a big enough level of awakening that they just had to drop it. It wasn't holding up anymore. But for about a solid two years, I think maybe a year and a half, it was really pretty gnarly to the point where everyone had to put their check in at the supermarket and wear masks and sanitize, and it was just madness.

[00:41:52] But again, every event like that is really informative. That was a great psychological thing for me to go through, but also to see where the world is, where this country is. And that honestly made it really easy for me to leave when the time came to allow the business to survive. Because if I'd stayed there, I would've been one of those companies that you mentioned. You stay in the country and you put your head out, they'll cut it off in a country where 97% of their funding comes from Big Pharma. And all the natural health companies in Australia are owned by Big Pharma themselves because of the regulations. If you want to have an approved product, the amount of money you have to spend, it's ridiculous. It's almost impossible to start up a compliant business within Australia.

[00:42:34] Obviously, my stuff isn't compliant. So moving out of Australia to New Zealand and then moving all of our operations to America, where all the awakened like-minded people who are open to this stuff are in a higher concentration, it's been phenomenal. And then just not taking unnecessary risks.

[00:42:52] There's things like SARMs, which are selective androgen receptor modulators. Things like RAD140, MK-677. These are very clearly drug-like and have negative side effects. And in regulations, almost every country, they are definitively banned and these companies still sell them, or they might sell things like in Clomophene or testosterone alongside peptides.

[00:43:13] And then it's the testosterone and the drugs stuff that gets them in trouble. And then all the other rest of it has to go alongside too because the fines are pretty big. So yeah, just risk mitigation is part of why I moved. But also I did assume a lot of risk in selling these products that in Australia when I was doing it, I'm like, okay, this could end at any point.

[00:43:34] I'm going to make hay while the sun shines. And my why behind these products was never financial. I was my mother's primary carer for eight years. She had breast cancer. When she found out about it, I was only 17. Sorry, no, I was 19. My sister was 17. And I was studying graphic design.

[00:43:56] I was going to be a designer, a web designer logo. I design all my labels because that balances my left and right side of my brain. But I was doing that and then she got this diagnosis and I said, "You got two years to live. Get your affairs in order and make the most of your life."

[00:44:10] And I just didn't like that, obviously. My mother was my best friend at the time, and I wanted to do something for her. So I started studying nutrition. That's when I did my first degree in health and went and studied human nutrition because I had the belief that food is medicine. I still believe that.

[00:44:28] And if you learn enough about it, then you can use dietary interventions. I learned all about Dom D'Agostino. I learned all about Thomas Reed's theories on what causes cancer, the metabolic approach to it. Learned that with the human nutrition course. I was saying before I found your show way back, years back, and I went everything into Dr. Jack Kruse and blue light and EMF and implemented that too.

[00:44:50] And actually, it wasn't until we bet her primary breast cancer took about six years of fighting that and she actually managed to overcome that and was given the all clear for that. It wasn't long enough that they say you're all clear for the five years, but there were no signs of disease progression and remission.

[00:45:08] But then we celebrated our win by moving house. And this is when my EMF journey began, because the house we moved to was about, I don't know, 40 meters, 20 something yards away from a-- maybe not that close, but really close to a huge cell phone consignment. The EMF we had on our meter was constantly maxed out.

[00:45:30] I was passing out. I was getting hypercoagulation in my blood and passing out. It happened three times living in this lovely home on a lake, and this was my mom's dream home. And then we all started to feel bad, and she ultimately went on to develop a brain cancer from living there.

[00:45:48] Having been so depleted from all the therapies, that standard of care therapies, combined with the natural stuff is taxing in and of itself. A hyperbaric oxygen treatment is inflammatory on purpose. If you do it around chemotherapies, if you do high dose vitamin C, these are challenging therapies that she was doing alongside of the chemotherapies that got us that result that she was after.

[00:46:11] All the deuterium depleted waters and red light panels and all that stuff really did help and made a huge difference. But as soon as we moved and changed our environment to that one, there wasn't much we could do, and she got wrangled back into the radiation therapy route and that basically just cut her life within four months of doing that, unfortunately.

[00:46:29] But having these products is my homage in her legacy, basically. All of the products that we've developed are either ones that I wish I had for her, or a combination of things that I used because my mom was an athlete. She was a triathlete. She was really fit.

[00:46:45] She always ate healthy. But she got cancer. I'm like, "How did this happen?" She's supposedly this picture of health. She was a 45-year-old woman with a six pack who could ride for six hours a day, and she embodied health in that respect. But there was a lot of things from her childhood. She lived in agricultural land and would ride her horses and get doused with glyphosate.

[00:47:08] So there's one layer to it. She had a very physically and sexually abusive father. So there's that deep-seated layer of trauma that never got resolved. And then even my father had his own crap that he brought to her and kept her in a chronic fight or flight response. So that was part of the reason too.

[00:47:26] But it's this cumulative effect of stresses that once you figure out what they are, if it's heavy metals from even deodorants, if it's perfumes and chemicals, all of it adds up. And then when you try to reverse engineer cancer, you just can't leave any stone unturned because it's life or death, literally.

[00:47:44] So things like TUDCA we use because we'd lived in mold in the past as well, which is just this thing that kept coming back in my life to teach me lessons. But for her it was, yeah, mold and chemicals, hormonal imbalances, all of which breast cancer is a hormonally driven thing, but exogenous estrogens through pesticides, through perfumes. And mold is estrogenic two specific types.

[00:48:09] Luke: Really?

[00:48:10] Kyal: Yeah. Yes. I've forgotten the exact one, but there is one specific type of mold that I'd imagine was in our house based on me as a child having lived in the same house that was highly estrogenic. So that cumulative effect of all of those things that really, most of them, as we said at the very start, you should not have had to deal with that.

[00:48:29] They should not have been these pesticides being doused on someone out enjoying their childhood on a horse. They should not be all of the things in the water that we drank that wasn't filtered that come from the public municipal. And then the layer of stress.

[00:48:42] There's so many different layers to healing and health, and I truly believe the most upstream is in here, how we adapt and response. And none of these will work for you if you're living in an abusive relationship. If you are constantly surrounded by people who make you stressed, they might do a little bit, but realistically, as a naturopath, my training is to always address the root cause. And if you peel it back and back and back, a lot of it just comes from here. And there's so much free shit, free stuff we can do that can really--

[00:49:11] Luke: You can say shit all day long. This is America, baby. This is Texas, son. You could fire a gun in here. I wouldn't mind. Just don't point it to me. No, I personally try to swear less, but sometimes there's no substitute word. There's just moments that I'm like, "Don't say fuck." And then I'm like, "There was no other way. I'm sorry."

[00:49:29] Kyal: As an Australian, it's--

[00:49:30] Luke: I mostly feel bad because people have written in and said, "I really love your show, but I try to listen in the car with my kids and stuff." I'm like, "Ah, that's valid. I understand that."

[00:49:43] Kyal: I'm Australian. Swearing is like our pause filler.

[00:49:46] Luke: Totally, totally.

[00:49:48] Kyal: But yeah, so the products were made to basically be the products that I wish I had when I was caring for my mother, and products that if she was alive, I would use for her to help her heal. And for me personally, having gone through three years of living in toxic mold, had levels about 60 times the upper limit of certain mycotoxins.

[00:50:06] It was catastrophic to mine and my family's health. So mold was one of those great teachers. Cancer was the first, and mold was the second. These are the two things that form majority of the range that LVLUP has. I have a testosterone boosting product purely because my levels dropped so low from mold absolutely decimating your endocrine system. It lowers men's testosterone. It feminizes them and causes depression. And even in my--

[00:50:30] Luke: Like soy boy.

[00:50:31] Kyal: Pretty much. Exactly. It's way more estrogenic than soy even. So yeah, molds can absolutely ruin you.

[00:50:38] Luke: Oh my God. I got to come up with-- what's the equivalent of soy boy? Because I just think that is the funniest put down-- we got to--

[00:50:44] Kyal: I'd say mold man, but that sounds a little masculine, doesn't it?

[00:50:47] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Wow. What an origin story. Sorry, man. When people lost their parents throughout my life, I've always just-- I know it was a while ago, but still, I'd say, "Man, I'm really sorry. I don't know what that's like. It must be tough." And now I know what it's like. So I have a different level of empathy for that. But man, what a beautiful catalyst to do something meaningful that you seem to be enjoying and have a real passion for.

[00:51:22] I always feel bad just talking about someone's product, but I'm personally curious about a lot of the shit you've put in here, so I want to get into that. But let's back up on the peptide piece a little bit and talk about some of the risks with the gray area there in terms of purity. And I'm assuming that's mostly having to do with the injectables, but as I said, these websites pop up and go away and it's super sketchy.

[00:51:49] So if somebody is trying to go online and order peptides, if they don't mind injecting them, etc., what are we looking for in terms of safety and efficacy? Because anyone can throw up a freaking website on Squarespace and be like, "These are peptides." And it's just some white powder in a vial.

[00:52:07] You really don't know. There's no way you can test these things by yourself to ensure that they are what they say they are, that they don't have heavy metals, or the freaking supplement or the peptide could have mold. And you're trying to recover from mold.

[00:52:21] Kyal: Exactly right. It's a pretty contentious topic that a lot of companies don't want to spend the money. It costs about one to $2,000 per peptide to test it. That's not a lot for a company that makes millions. But for the smaller ones that start up, they're not going to do that. The ones that come in and sell the product for half the price of the competition, there's no chance that they have sourced that properly for it to cost that amount. There's no getting around the fact that peptides are expensive.

[00:52:44] That was one of the points you mentioned at the start, how expensive those protocols are. This is because of the way they're made. Majority of them are custom synthesized and they use amino acid sequencer, which is a very slow process. So there's no getting around the fact that they're expensive.

[00:52:59] So your first red flag is if they're cheap, you're not getting what you paid for. Mine are expensive because we genuinely test every single peptide we put into it for lipopolysaccharide, which is bacterial cell walls, gram-negative bacterial cell walls. Very inflammatory. If you inject that, bad news. In studies, that's what they inject to induce a state of inflammation to study inflammation.

[00:53:24] Luke: Oh, wow.

[00:53:24] Kyal: Very bad to have that in your peptides. It's not as common as people would think. People like Andrew Huberman have done podcasts and said, "You can't inject LPS." He's right. You shouldn't do that. But it's not as ubiquitous as he makes it seem like every company would have it in there. But it's still a risk. If bacterial contamination happens, you will end up probably with some level of LPS.

[00:53:43] The other one is heavy metals, and this is probably, in my opinion, more of an issue than the LPS because we don't like the things they give in a schedule for heavy metals. So why would we continue to take that risk with intention to give health injectables like peptides? Well, we wouldn't want to do that.

[00:54:02] So that's why a HPLC testing, a metals and bacterial contaminants testing report is essential for every company, especially the injectables. Orals, it's still important. You don't want to eat tuna or salmon that's full of metals. Because a small, like 0.1% of them will absorb by bioaccumulation. The more you eat that contaminated food, the more likely it is going to be that it'll cross your gut barrier, especially if you have a leaky gut or hyperpermeable membranes.

[00:54:32] Then those metals will get into circulation and accumulate wherever, usually in fatty tissue if they're at adiposity, which is one theory for why people gain weight, is because toxin dilution. If you have heaps of toxins, your body will put on fat to store them there. And this is one of the risks, I guess, with GLP-1s. It's fast weight loss often results in people looking like skeletons because they've just liberated so much toxin that their liver is all of a sudden overburdened with.

[00:54:56] Luke: Holy shit. Because your body's protecting you from absorbing the toxin by encapsulating it in fat, essentially. And so you'd almost, in a way, be healthier having a gut full of toxins than liberating it too fast. And especially if you're really unhealthy and all your detox pathways are dysfunctional and you're not eliminating, and your liver's clogged and so on. That's what's giving people the black eyes and stuff.

[00:55:25] Kyal: Partly, yeah.

[00:55:26] Luke: Oh man.

[00:55:26] Kyal: It's a controversial take, but yeah, I definitely think when you lose weight, you shouldn't do it fast. You need to do it slow. And especially if you've got all the genetic mutations, you might methylate properly. So your liver's not going to clear the things. You can very quickly and easily overburden your liver if you lose weight too quickly.

[00:55:42] And then you've liberated all these things. And if you don't have fat, then toxin storage is in fatty tissue. Where else is fatty in your body? In women, in my mum specifically, I said she could ride for six hours. That meant she didn't have any adiposity on her stomach or on her butt or anywhere like that. So it stored in her breasts. Fatty tissue in your breast.

[00:56:03] In men, your prostate's fatty, your brain is fatty. Majority of the organs that do end up with cancer, not all of them, there are exceptions, but majority of the organs that do end up with cancers are fatty tissues. And then the toxins, be the metals, be the glyphosate, disrupt mitochondrial function.

[00:56:20] Your efficiency drops down, and then your cells have to resort to that primitive glucose-loving sugar metabolism that then ultimately doesn't create enough energy for the repair genes to be activated. And then it's basically like this little cell alone in the body. It doesn't know where it is. And then it kicks in all the survival programming of bacteria basically embedded within us. So it's really beautiful, yet scary.

[00:56:45] Luke: That's interesting. I've never heard that perspective. And I also didn't know the prostate was fatty. I think, just because I'm an aging man, I've done a couple of shows talking a lot about the prostate, so I always felt funny talking about it because it's like young guys will not give a shit. Women will not give a shit.

[00:57:04] And I'm like, "It's the thing." When you realize like you got to pee urgently more of the time, it's usually that. So it's something I've worked on myself a little bit and not wanting to end up in prostate cancer. It's so prevalent. It's like, that's doesn't sound fun. I have one friend that had it. I think he's managed to clear it, but yeah, I'm not interested in that. If you get your prostate operated on, you're going to have no more boners the rest of your life, which is really not optimal.

[00:57:32] Kyal: Doesn't sound like a great rest of your life.

[00:57:34] Luke: Yeah. Okay. Again, I'm just a geek that is interested in how things work, and so, like I said, when you guys sent me your stuff, I was just like, "What is this stuff? Why did they do it this way?" So if you wouldn't mind humoring me, I just want to go down the geek hole with you on some of the formulations.

[00:57:55] Now, you've talked about the BPC and a couple of the other ones, but if you would just allow me to pick a few things apart and you tell me what it is and what it does. And I also want to give you props for not using really shitty excipients in your capsules.

[00:58:12] I find it really annoying when someone has a product that would otherwise be pretty effective and then they are trying to cut corners and put a bunch of weird shit in their capsules. You have a very clean product line. So I wanted to give you props for that.

[00:58:27] Kyal: Before we get into the detail of an overarching thing, excipients are just wasted potential. If you are in a capsule, like a pit bag--

[00:58:35] Luke: Tell people what excipients are.

[00:58:36] Kyal: Excipients are basically--

[00:58:37] Luke: Because it's a fancy word that maybe some people don't--

[00:58:38] Kyal: They're non-functional ingredients. For example, rice flour is the most common excipient that people will use because it's super cheap. Or cellulose. They'll just fill the capsule with cellulose. And if you were to give someone a BPC capsule, it's usually half of a milligram, one capsule dose.

[00:58:55] And then that remaining, say, it's a 500 milligram capsule, 499.5 milligrams is just going to be rice flour, which I've always thought, why wouldn't you just put something functional that's going to work alongside of it that's going to synergize and make it work better?

[00:59:08] And that's why I use the bicarbonate to make the peptide absorb better. I use things like PEA, which is an anti-inflammatory analgesic thing that's made in mother's breast milk that helps soothe the baby when it's in pain. Or when it needs the boob, it's getting a high dose of PEA from mother's breast milk.

[00:59:26] So this is an amazing ingredient that I'm like, "Let's just put that in there. That'll work so well." And every formula I've ever made has had that rationale of, all right, this is working by that way, let's combine it with this and this. And I sometimes go a little bit crazy and combine it with 16 other things, but that's as an overarching theme why I formulate that way.

[00:59:45] Luke: Thank you for doing that. I don't think any of us needed to eat any more rice powder. So the first one, I think, that got my attention was Urolithin A, which I've actually done a show on that, which, I think, if I remember right, comes from pomegranate, right?

[01:00:02] Kyal: Correct. Yes.

[01:00:03] Luke: And it helps with-- see if I get this right, if my memory serves me. Because I take it. There's a company called Timeline Nutrition. Makes Mitopure. Interview the guy. I was like, "I'm sold." Makes sense. So the-- what do you call it when you mitochondria turnover? Is it mitogenesis?

[01:00:20] Kyal: You got it. Mitochondrial biogenesis.

[01:00:22] Luke: Biogenesis, yeah. So like your cells. When your cells die off, you want to get rid of the old ones and encourage new ones. So I get urolithin A. My basic understanding is really good for mitochondrial function. And so I saw that and I was like, "Oh, sick." But then you have this Akkermansia, which I think is a bacteria. We'd be here forever if I went through every little thing, but where does the Akkermansia-- is that how you say it?

[01:00:54] Kyal: Yes. You got it.

[01:00:55] Luke: How does that play into the urolithin A?

[01:00:58] Kyal: So this is a metabolic support product that's not directly providing things like your B vitamins. So the urolithin A does increase the mitochondrial biogenesis. It helps with mitochondrial efficiency. It's fantastic.

[01:01:08] Luke: Is it mitophagy? Is that another word for it?

[01:01:11] Kyal: That's for the things that clear damaged mitochondria.

[01:01:14] Luke: Okay, okay, okay. That's what I was thinking of. Does urolithin A do that too?

[01:01:17] Kyal: I believe it does. I think it just increases the number and the density and the genesis of new ones rather than the clearing of the old ones. When you clear old ones, it's more, you're looking at senolytics. Ones that induce autophagy are clearing out the ones that are inefficient.

[01:01:34] And that's a really great way to prevent things disease processes by clearing out the old and bringing in functional new ones. So that supports mitochondrial biogenesis. And when you do that and you increase cellular energy, the ripple effects are just so broad. You can't even just say it does this or this or this, by improving mitochondrial health and energy. Mitochondriacs, right?

[01:01:54] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[01:01:55] Kyal: The ripple effects, the downstream stuff is so ubiquitous that I don't think you're going to bother. And you've already done a whole show on urolithin. So the other one's akkermansia, which is being inaccurately, but I can see why they're doing it, being promoted as a natural GLP-1.

[01:02:11] It's a keystone bacteria that our body is meant to have from birth, but a lot of people lose the microbiome diversity, therefore they lose their species of Akkermansia. And this is a--

[01:02:23] Luke: Do you think of someone's C-section born that they're never even going to get it?

[01:02:27] Kyal: There's as a good chance. I can't definitively say. It might still happen. I hate being so nuanced all the time, but it's just the truth. There's no universal rule for things, but yeah, there's a good chance if you've been on antibiotics and C-section, you probably don't have a very high level, if any at all.

[01:02:43] A lot of people who do fecal microbiome testing will show up either low in it or conversely, some people are really high in it, therefore this isn't the right product for them. But yeah, it's usually, for the most part, something that a lot of people don't have. And when you do take Akkermansia, then it will have a beneficial effect on your blood sugar levels.

[01:03:02] It will help with natural GLP-1 secretion. And it's not going to be comparable to an Ozempic or semaglutide or anything like that. Don't buy any hype behind it. I sell it. And please don't buy the hype if I start saying that.

[01:03:14] Luke: Someone listening who's like me is like, "Sweet. No more working out."

[01:03:17] Kyal: But yeah, basically the combination of those plus the prebiotic fibers that-- it's got a postbiotic, which is a metabolite of bacteria that your body actually has. Tributyrin's another one, like butyrate. Bacteria in your microbiome produce these things. urolithin A, urolithin B, they're postbiotics.

[01:03:35] A prebiotic is called the fibers and stuff that you might take that then get used by the bacteria or the probiotics to create the postbiotics. So in this one you've got the pre, the pro, and the postbiotics all working together to support metabolic health.

[01:03:51] Luke: Something about all probiotics that is always of concern to me is the survivability. One of our sponsors at least a lot of the time is just Thrive Health. In fact, they're coming tomorrow to do an interview, and they make this spore-based probiotic, which has been incredible for me with my gut health journey over the years, which has been the one thing that's been the most difficult to fully solve.

[01:04:18] But after talking to them and doing a little research, I just like, oh, anything that's not spore-based sucks because it'll never survive the gut and just wrote them all off, which is probably not correct. So with the Akkermansia-- is that how you say it?

[01:04:33] Luke: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:33] Kyal: How are we ensuring that that's actually getting to where it's supposed to go and doing its thing without just getting nuked by your stomach acid?

[01:04:39] Kyal: Well, flat out already. It's dead from when you take it. It's not the point. We're not trying to reseed. By providing pasteurized Akkermansia, which I'll bar the one company that claimed theirs isn't dead, we've tested it. It is. Anyway, won't get down that rabbit hole. All Akkermansia is basically destroyed in the presence of oxygen, and there's no capsule that's oxygen tight 100%.

[01:05:03] So basically, when you take this pasteurized Akkermansia, the breakdown of it in your gut actually induces your natural levels that they need to be present. We can't reseed Akkermansia if there's zero detectable, but most people would have a very low level that you bring this in and basically the Akkermansia within your gut utilize the prebiotics and the building blocks of the pasteurized Akkermansia to then grow in your stomach and in your microbiome.

[01:05:32] So there's plenty of bacterial species that people supplement, even the ones that don't survive. The actual building blocks to them can be of use for people for helping their gut bacteria.

[01:05:45] Luke: Interesting. Like if you make key fear and you have the grains, it's like you're feeding the milk and whatever beneficial bacteria is still present in that whole mix. I thought of that because I'm making some right now.

[01:06:01] Kyal: Another one's Clostridium butyricum. That one doesn't survive either. That's C. butyricum. It makes butyrate in your gut. You can pasteurize that and it can still get through.

[01:06:10] I do prefer ones that are spore-based, but there's certain populations that just flat out, no. There's no way that that's really going to work as a capsule. The only way in studies that they have proven that it can work is if you take it live and then you inject it straight into your gut to ensure that it survives.

[01:06:25] But by taking it as a capsule, as soon as that capsule breaks, there's a very low chance it'll survive. So why even bother trying to pretend that you're delivering a live probiotic? The spore-based ones, yeah. There are certain ones. There's Bacillus subtilis that's a spore-based one. We use that in one of our products, and that will survive the stomach acid and seed properly.

[01:06:45] Probiotics is such a complicated topic that I don't claim to be an expert on them, but there's certain ones that I know how they work and I'm like, "Great, this has utility." Especially if formulated alongside something that the bacteria make. Postbiotics are probably my most favorite of the pre, the pro, and the post of those three categories.

[01:07:04] And the reason I like them, like the urolithin A, is you don't have to have the microbiome population to begin with to get the benefit when you give someone a postbiotics. The urolithin A, if you don't have any bacteria that make it, then taking pomegranate, it could be the keystone of your diet and you're not going to get any urolithin A.

[01:07:23] But by taking that, by taking the butyrate, either sodium butyrate or tributyrin, you are getting the metabolite that has all of these benefits that have been studied without the need for getting your bacterial species in a state in which they produce it.

[01:07:38] Don't get me wrong, that's important. That would be better for a long-term thing. And that's why I think it's great to include them together. Even tributyrin modulates favorably, the gut bacteria in a state that it's more likely to make the bacteria that will then produce the butyrate. So it's like a feed forward mechanism with that one. So that one's really cool.

[01:07:57] Luke: Wow. That's very interesting. I love learning about this stuff. Even I've been doing this almost nine years and sometimes I'm like, "I think I probably know all I need to know." And then I meet someone like you. I'm like, "No, it's so interesting. There's so much more stuff."

[01:08:13] All right. What about the Neuro Regenerate, which I took two of before we recorded. I feel like it's working pretty well. I should be tired and brain foggy around this time in the afternoon and I'm not. Tell me about some of the stuff in here. There's things I recognize like brain blood flow, ginkgo, gotu kola, etc. Oh, and there's some liposomal peptides in here. What's the basic mechanism of action here?

[01:08:43] And this one is interesting too, I think I was telling you before. When I buy supplements, I'm always intuitively guided to smell the bottle. Unless it's something that doesn't have any plant material in it, then it's probably not going to smell. But this freaking thing, that smells like it's something. So when I opened this one, I was like, "That's got to be good." It's like there's potency there. There's some vitality.

[01:09:07] Kyal: Yeah. All the herbal extracts we're using at a really high potency, like 10:1, 20:1 extracts, which means for every milligram you take, it's equivalent of taking 20 times the dry herb equivalent. So you'd have to take 20 grams of lion's mane as a whole herb to get the equivalent of one gram.

[01:09:22] That's how the ratio works. So it's super concentrated doses of those things. But the rationale and the reason behind that product is, again, my journey with mold. Dave Asprey started Bulletproof because he lived in a moldy house. He had hippocampal atrophy.

[01:09:37] They said he had the brain of an 80-year-old. I don't think my mold was as bad as his. I didn't get brain scans to confirm it, but definitely, my brain did not work properly after being in mold for three years. I had to take all the racetams and caffeine and everything just to make it function at a baseline level, not a higher level.

[01:09:53] So my conclusion was, I'm certainly going to have suffered some level of atrophy in the brain, which can occur with long-term mold exposure. So that was my selfish reason for making this product, is to bring my brain back from that state. The other one is my dad, my opa being Dutch, died of Alzheimer's.

[01:10:13] And my dad started repeating himself a lot over a short period of time. And I'm like, "Okay, let's get in it with some preventative stuff." So increasing blood flow to the brain with the gotu kola and ginkgo and Bacopa. They're all traditionally used naturopathics that have pretty decent effect, especially with long-term use.

[01:10:33] But then bringing in my expertise of peptides. There's some fantastic brain peptides used clinically. I don't work with people, but I've heard stories of things like cerebral lysine, which is a brain peptide, Dihexa, P21. These are all naturally occurring peptides that are found in the brain. Cerebral lysine is like an extract of porcine brain matter, and it's not isolated down, but P21 comes from that.

[01:10:58] That is the specific peptide that's one of the primary actives of that. So by making it liposomal, combining it with things like Dihexa, which does cross the blood brain barrier, these are found to be seven magnitudes more powerful than BDNF. And BDNF is naturally produced by our brains.

[01:11:18] It's called brain derived neurotropic factor. Other people describe it by calling it miracle growth for your brain. If you have had a brain injury or if you have neurodegenerative concerns, like I was worried about, increasing BDNF, you sure fire away to increase neuroplasticity, synaptogenesis, and neurogenesis.

[01:11:36] The formation of new brain cells basically. Recovery for your brain. That's why I call it Neuro Regenerate, is because using lion's mane, which is pretty commonly known to boost BDNF alongside of ones that are less commonly known. Like there's 7, 8 DHF dihydroxyflavone, which works similarly to BDNF combined with these peptides that boost it so significantly, like Semax, P21, and Dihexa. That's my attempt to remedy my own brain issues alongside of--

[01:12:07] Luke: It seemed to have worked. The fact that you can remember the names of all these things. I love listening to you talk. I just like, "How's he doing it?" Man, I can't even pronounce the one fucking-- I forgot it already. I need more of your product. With the Neuro Regenerate, as you're talking. I'm like, "Wow, it would be great to stack that with some psilocybin or LSD microdose." What do you think about that, off the record?

[01:12:33] Kyal: I'd put it in the formula if I could legally do it.

[01:12:35] Luke: Do you think if the regulations ease up on psilocybin that you would add it?

[01:12:39] Kyal: Absolutely, yeah.

[01:12:40] Luke: That sounds like a perfect marriage.

[01:12:42] Kyal: Absolutely. It would be, yeah. Different ways of getting to that end goal of we need to increase neuroplasticity, it's one of the most beneficial things for brain development. Even if you're not fighting a neurodegenerative condition, if you want to acquire skills faster, if you really want to consolidate learned information, boosting BDNF is one of the best ways you can do it.

[01:13:05] Children under the age of seven have significantly higher BDNF levels. That's why they just sponge everything they learn and can learn new languages or learn their schooling and learn their first language so fast, is because of how much higher levels of BDNF and other brain growth factors are, of which these peptides don't just trigger the one.

[01:13:23] It's like four or five that it really hammers not beyond-- again, peptides don't work beyond what our physiology is capable of doing, but they just amplify and get us to that 10 out of 10 level that's safe for how much it's going to boost these pathways.

[01:13:40] And in a sense, when people say, "Oh, well, how long do I take it for?" That's a really poignant question that people ask. And you do need to actually cycle these things because if you constantly hit a receptor, like caffeine for example, if you take caffeine every day, then you develop a sensitivity to it.

[01:13:58] And with peptides, I always suggest five days on, two days off. Because if you're hammering these receptors all the time, they have the potential to down regulate and the density of the receptors can lower. Therefore, you need more of the peptide to have the same effect. And if you keep pushing it far enough, then maybe the effect will drop off to insignificant amounts.

[01:14:16] So all the peptides, all of the small molecules, I definitely recommend cycling. But yeah, the brain ones, I would recommend maybe three to five times a week if you're really looking to maintain optimal function of the brain.

[01:14:28] Luke: I was already cycling your stuff just because I didn't want to run out. That's good. I'd be surprised if I still have. This one, I think I thought I was out of this, but it was the other one, the histamine one I was thinking of.

[01:14:40] Kyal: The other ingredients I combine in to target the-- what is it they call it? Type 3 diabetes. I've heard people throw that term out, which is what they are calling Alzheimer's. Blood sugar feeds into the degradation of the brain. So using things like dihydroberberine, it's an ingredient patented as GlucoVantage.

[01:15:02] It works significantly better than regular berberine as an alternative to metformin, which is a diabetic drug that is recommended in both cancer protocols and for people with diabetes. So dihydroberberine is what I consider a next generation nutraceutical, and there's plenty of ones.

[01:15:19] Urolithin A is another example of that. NACET, which is a form of NAC, which if I think most of your audience would know what NAC is, NACET is called N-acety-L-cysteine ethyl ester. It's a modified form of the NAC that, because of that ethyl ester group is capable of crossing into the brain, increasing glutathione levels in the brain significantly more than NAC would.

[01:15:38] It's one of these ingredients that I just absolutely love and just love to bring to the market, if not the first, one of the first to try and bring them to the mainstream and hopefully push the supplement industry forward. Even if I die off in the future, I don't--

[01:15:52] Luke: Please, we need more of you. It's getting I so redundant, as I alluded to earlier. Every once in a while, I usually just order delivery from Whole Foods, but I go in there a couple of times a year, and I'll walk down the supplement. I'll just be like, "Oh, what's the mainstream look like?" And I'm just like, "Oh my God, this is so boring." I'm like, "You guys, I could have walked in here 10 years ago and it would've been basically the same shit."

[01:16:17] Kyal: We got to create the demand for these ingredients, because the problem with them is because they're so novel and not used everywhere, they're really expensive. My biggest regret is the cost to entry of these products. I wish I could make them cheaper, but I cannot make my margins thinner without it not being a viable business anymore.

[01:16:33] Because all the peptides in that Neuro one, it's a very expensive product, but every one of them is custom synthesized for us. We don't buy it from a bulk manufacturer of these ingredients. No one buys them in bulk. We have to order them. And then to liposome properly is very hard.

[01:16:48] There's a lot of companies who claim to liposome and you could put it in a denture cleaner, basically, with phospholipids in an ingredient, and then claim you've liposome'd it because that will work. And then basically break away an hour later and no longer be in it.

[01:17:00] Luke: Really?

[01:17:01] Kyal: Yeah.

[01:17:02] Luke: Oh my God, I love whistle blowing, shady shit in the industry. That's one thing I was going to ask you, actually. Normally, with a liposomal, like a Quicksilver Scientific for example, has been doing that for a long time. They're liquids that you just hold under your tongue. And then I've seen yours and a couple of others in the past couple of years that are a capsule and liposomal. How does that work?

[01:17:27] Kyal: The reason you don't see it everywhere is it takes about a month of the [Inaudible] ingredient freeze drying slowly.

[01:17:34] Luke: Really?

[01:17:34] Kyal: And you have to test it along the way to check the viability of the liposomes to make sure you're doing it at the right rate. It's a very complicated time and energy expensive process. And that's why it's not done commonly. Or if it is being done, probably not being done particularly well. But yeah, I've been given video from my manufacturers showing them all in the freeze dryer and it's like, all right, they're cooking for the next month.

[01:17:57] I'm like, "A month? I got to wait another month for this ingredient? He's like, yeah. You're not doing it as a liquid, so this is the process in which we get them into powder form, and there's no way to shortcut it. And if you do, you'll break the liposomes and you'll just have the active ingredient and broken-down phospholipids rather than this phospholipid surrounding the peptide.

[01:18:16] And it's still being within that phospholipid after the freeze frying process. It'll get better. As I said, the higher the demand-- the consumer demand drives manufacturing. So the more people want this thing, the cheaper it'll become, and the more companies will do it. But at the moment, doing that was insanely expensive and time consuming.

[01:18:37] Luke: So if you're pioneering something, you're profit margins are just going to be a lot lower for a while.

[01:18:42] Kyal: Yeah, pretty much.

[01:18:44] Luke: I'm sure many people understand liposomal, but for people that don't and why that's relevant, as I understand it, lipo, fat, lipid. So you're putting said molecule that you want to get into the bloodstream wrapped in a tiny piece of fat so that your cell lets it in. Is that the idea?

[01:19:06] Kyal: Yeah, yeah. Like Trojan horses, the ingredient through a fat that your body absorbs fats readily from the diet. If you encapsulate it in a ball, think of a basketball, but inside the basketball is the peptide or is the glutathione or is the vitamin C. It's a way of getting it in beyond what our digestion would normally allow that molecule to come through.

[01:19:25] Peptides, for example, if they're too large or if they have terrible bioavailability or oral absorption, you put them in a liposome. You could increase it significantly. It's the same with vitamin C. If you don't liposome vitamin C, 1,000 milligrams, that might give you the squirts. Versus if it's liposomal, it's going to absorb and have that therapeutic effect systemically.

[01:19:42] So liposomes, again, this next generation of supplements and especially when done right. You'll know if it's not done right because your "liposome" or vitamin C will give you the runs rather than working orally. Not working systemically.

[01:19:57] Luke: Okay, cool. I also want to remind people, you can go to lukestorey.com/peptidepod and find the show notes here. And then also at lukestory.com/lvup, which is L-V-U-P, if you want to try this stuff. The code is LUKE15 and you get 15% off.

[01:20:17] But more importantly, what I really like, because I just was looking at your site again this morning, and the amount of education there for people especially that are like, "Whoa, I can't keep up. There's too much information here." Which I'm barely keeping up, so I get it.

[01:20:36] But what I noticed on your site was the level of education there was insane, but more importantly, all of the research and all the studies related to everything you're talking about are archived there in an insanely thorough way. It's like if we talk about urolithin A, it's just like, boom, boom, boom. Here's 50 links to every study proving that it does what it's supposed to do.

[01:21:00] So I wanted to give you props for like, I don't know-- most brands don't do that. They're just like, "Here's the ingredients, and this is what we say it does." But you seem to be very obsessive in a good way about actually backing up the data. So I just want to let people know, whether you buy something or not, your site is a really great wealth of information in that regard.

[01:21:24] Kyal: Thank you. There's two layers to that. One, I went to a private school and had friends who were really hard on me if I said something, especially during my days with my mom and her cancer. I had a housemate who said, "Yeah, but where's the study?" So we were looking at apricot seeds, for example.

[01:21:38] Oh, these show potentials like that. Where's your citations? Where's your evidence? And I'm like, "Oh, crap." All right. So he ingrained that in me, really traumatized me at this point because I had no legs to stand on. He was further in his medical degree. And I'm like, "Oh, but, but, but." So there's that layer.

[01:21:54] But then there's also the layer of, even if people don't buy anything from the site, it's part of this movement of empowering people to make their own health decisions. If you have evidence there and you can go and read studies or, goodness, for better or worse ChatGPT, use them to summarize it for you, how good is that for empowering people to understand how the body works and not just claiming it.

[01:22:16] But I guess the third layer is risk mitigation. If you put it up on your product and then you're making a claim around your product, the government agencies, if you're in a controlled place like Australia, can say that you're making claims, make medical claims around your product, and then you're liable for fines and stuff like that.

[01:22:35] So I'm definitely a cowboy in this space and willing to take risks to try and give people the results. But other companies probably it's safer for them not to say anything than it is to put out information out there and then have the accountability of it being accurate.

[01:22:50] Luke: Okay. Got it. I personally like that. Not that I have the patience to sit there and read all 40 studies on a particular ingredient, but the fact that it's there, to me, is comforting. Because it's like, I don't know, you hear all kinds of different claims and things in this space. Everyone's trying to make a buck.

[01:23:05] So I'm of that dude who will dig into a website quite a bit before I decide to take it and God forbid, promote it. Especially if it's something I'm like, "Hey, I'm doing this. You should try it too." I like having that backup.

[01:23:20] Let's talk about a couple of more things here that I'm just curious about. Botanabolic, I'm assuming this has something to do with putting on muscle, which obviously, I haven't been using this one.

[01:23:33] I was looking in the mirror a couple days ago. I'm like, "Dude, you really need to work out." I'm like, "It's getting embarrassing that I'm getting so scrawny." So I should probably get on this one. But I haven't used much of this one yet. So talk to me about that for the gym rats, or not even gym rats, but people that having some muscle in your body's healthy.

[01:23:51] Kyal: Well, testosterone itself is incredibly healthy for both men and women.

[01:23:55] Luke: Is this your testosterone product too?

[01:23:57] Kyal: Essentially, yeah.

[01:23:58] Luke: God damn, I need to get on that one then. I haven't checked mine, but it's, I don't know, maybe not great.

[01:24:02] Kyal: So this product had developed after living in mold. My testosterone dropped well below where it should have been. I think it was just below 300. And as a man, a well-functioning man, 800-plus, closer to a 1,000 you can get at, the better you're going to feel, the easier muscle gain's going to be.

[01:24:19] And the more vibrant, the more drive you'll have, the higher your dopamine levels will be. It's just a miracle molecule. And that's why so many men end up on TRT. For better or worse, they just swear by it. And even though they might get bald or they might have side effects, they just stick with it, because it's gives them their vibrance and their zest for life back.

[01:24:38] But being only 30-- 32 now-- 30 when I first developed it, I didn't want to get on TRT when it was that low. And there are really powerful botanicals like Tongkat Ali and Fadogia Agrestis, Cistanche, they're all been shown in studies to be able to increase LH luteinizing hormone, which then goes on to make testosterone. There's also botanicals and nutraceuticals like boron, for example, that decrease what's called SHBG or sex hormone binding globulin.

[01:25:07] This is a little Pac-Man essentially that floats around in our circulation and grabs onto hormones and basically lowers the activity that they're going to have. If they're free, they can act on androgen receptors. Testosterone, for example, will have its effect, but if it's bound to that, it needs to be liberated before it can have that effect.

[01:25:26] So you could have really, really high total T, but terrible free T, and then you're not going to get the benefits of having that high testosterone level. So that's often a target. And when people exogenously either injectable or creams or something, push testosterone, then SHBG will reactionary, increase to sort of bind it and bring it back down. Because you don't want to go too high, otherwise you get suppression.

[01:25:49] It's one of these contingencies our body has for keeping our checks and balances. But anyway, this one is a comprehensive multi-mechanistic formula for both increasing your total and free testosterone levels with those herbals, increasing muscle mass with things that inhibit myostatin as an ingredient found in dark chocolate and green tea called Epicatechin.

[01:26:12] Myostatin is this gene that basically blocks muscle growth. I think there's a peptide therapy that people like Bryan Johnson, Dave Asprey, Ben Greenfield, have had. It's called follistatin gene therapy. And this is real cowboy stuff for the peptide stuff, but they basically get this gene injected into them to make their body produce the peptide follistatin. And that inhibits myostatin, and there's Belgian blue cows that have a knockout for the gene of follistatin, and they are just this hunch.

[01:26:37] Luke: Really?

[01:26:37] Kyal: Yeah. They're the huge-- even Whippet. They've done it on Whippets and Greyhounds and knocked out that gene. And they just look like big Ronnie Coleman looking bulls or Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime looking Greyhounds.

[01:26:56] So it's insane what you can do with that one gene. And Dave's physique has significantly improved since having that therapy. Bryan Johnson did it for longevity reasons, to preserve muscle mass. And when I was talking to Ben last year, he'd just done it and was like, "Man, I put on 11 pounds of muscle and not even really worked out."

[01:27:14] So as a longevity thing, it's really cool. The only negative, I guess, I have to that is it's like a gene therapy, and that's a bit of one of these gray area things that ethically I'm like, "Hmm, do I support gene therapy when I was so anti the agenda? Or do I look at the technology and see how it's being positively applied versus negatively." And I guess cancer vaccines fall into that thing.

[01:27:36] And initially, my gut reaction is hell to the nah, but then maybe, it might be able to bring in some gene therapy that reactivates one of the genes that's deactivated from cancer, and that might be very beneficial. So my approach to naturopathy, to natural medicine, to functional medicine is let's bring all the things together that work.

[01:27:58] Let's use our discernment to make sure they're safe, make sure there's not going to be any risks or any complications with using it. And that can be from everywhere. It can be from medicine. It can be things like low dose naltrexone. It can be lithium orate. It can be colestyramine or ivermectin.

[01:28:13] All these things, if they work and are safe, then let's use them. And peptides, I believe, fit in perfectly with that. I could just make naturopathic products and have no risk of compliance or government cutting the legs out from underneath me. But the peptides will make the naturopathics work so much faster.

[01:28:32] With the GI Repair full peptides combined with the tributyrin, combined with quercetin and zinc L-carnosine, all those three, if you didn't have the peptides, would work, but probably would take you months to get to the goal at which taking that product would probably give you within two to three weeks.

[01:28:46] So they are accelerants. There's no peptides in the Botanabolic, but the ingredients in it are these really highly concentrated extracts. And there's also things that you'd find in horny goat weeds, this fantastic herb that's been used for-- I think I was a kid when I was walking through the supermarkets with my family and noticed it and had a laugh at what it was called.

[01:29:05] It's been in the supplement space for 30 years. But now you've got these new era ingredients like icariin, which is the extract. 0.2% of the whole herb is icariin, but that particular molecule is the exact same PDE5 mechanism of Viagra and Cialis. So if you cut out the 99% of the horny goat, it doesn't have that effect.

[01:29:27] Super concentrate, the icariin, expand the dose of it, then you're going to have similar effects to a pharmaceutical from something naturally found. And that's where I see the future of medicine going, these next generation nutraceuticals on extracts from botanicals and peptides. So yeah, this one, I guess it's got maybe four or five mechanisms for boosting your vitality as a man.

[01:29:51] Luke: I dig that philosophy though because I always feel a little bit weird about taking synthetics. I have my NAD patch that's not from an herb, you know what I mean? So I do them, but I always just, I think, intuitively gravitate toward compounds that are derived from nature, even if they're extracted a million times. You're getting just more of something in a smaller package, but it's not something that's totally foreign to the body. So I dig that approach.

[01:30:24] Okay, couple of things I want to ask you. What's your opinion on liver cleansing, these gallbladder flushes? Have you done that? Do you believe in the efficacy of that as a semi-regular practice? And I'm asking because I've done a couple in the past few months, and I used your Liver Complex and your TUDCA in conjunction with those, and I feel like I got really great results. So what's your take on that practice? And then talk to me about how you deliver support and why it's important.

[01:30:56] Kyal: The liver cleanses using things like, I think it's castor oil and--

[01:31:01] Luke: Epsom salt. You're taking malic acid, apple juice or tart cherry juice for a week and starting to eat mostly plants and things like that, limiting fats. And then, yeah, on the final day or night you drink a huge glass of Epsom salt. And I think it's tasty. My wife hates it. No, not the Epsom salt. I'm sorry. You do the Epsom salts, and you open the bile ducts.

[01:31:28] And then the drink you make is a shit ton of olive oil with grapefruit juice and whatnot. Personally, I like the drink, the lemon and olive oil, but a normal person would not. So that's what I'm referring to.

[01:31:42] Kyal: Yeah. Having never personally done that, I won't speak to the efficacy of that. Mechanistically, I can see how that would work. As you said, opening up the bile ducts, honestly reducing the burden on the liver by just having minimal amount of other things coming in, overburdening it.

[01:31:56] The Epsom salt has fantastic minerals, and it's going to have a very interesting effect with your osmotic gradients and your electrolyte balance, which might cause the things you're talking about. But from my training as a naturopath, we look at how we support the liver and support detox and clearance.

[01:32:12] And this gets back to Mr. Left Brain Science over here, is I want to support phase one, phase two, and phase three detoxification. Phase three is the lesser known one that's also known as elimination or drainage and supporting bile. That's supporting bowel movements. That's supporting sweating.

[01:32:29] That's all part of your elimination and making sure that your drainage pathways are open with things like rebounding, sauna, making sure your bile duct is flowing. You don't have thick bile. That's really important. And I believe majority of the benefit you'll get from a liver cleanse is actually just getting the bile to flow and really-- almost if you had blocked pipes in your house and you've got a high-pressure hose and you're just flushing it out to allow everything to remove out quickly, that's what TUDCA does and bile salts do.

[01:32:58] And I believe with what you've done with the cleanse, it would have a very similar effect to that. I don't know if anything came out of it that's like you've had an exorcism sort of thing.

[01:33:07] Luke: When I first started doing them back in early 2000s, I would eliminate a lot of the gallstones. You'd have just a bunch of these green pebbles floating in the toilet when you're done. And there's something satisfying about that because you're like, "Ah, that doesn't look like I want it in the body." And so when I took a 20-year break or something, I was like, "Ah, it's probably time to do that again."

[01:33:28] And I haven't had any of those stones, so either, I don't know, I have too many that they're blocked or else I got rid of them and they never came back or something. But I think that's one of the rewards of doing the liver flushes, is it's kind of good to see like, yeah, I don't want that in. And I got them out.

[01:33:46] Kyal: Yeah. I wish I had firsthand experience to speak on that one, but I haven't.

[01:33:50] Luke: Fair enough, fair enough.

[01:33:51] Kyal: The only intense one I've done are the mucoid plague cleanses. I think it's called a ZenCleanz or something like that.

[01:33:57] Luke: Oh wow.

[01:33:57] Kyal: But there's always this part of me, it's like, all right, you're taking a whole heap of fiber, indigestible fiber, a whole heap of enzymes. Is it what you're taking that's caused that? It's the same with the oils and the castor oil and the sea salts. Is it what you've put in that's coming out, or has that had the effect of pushing things out of you? I'm not so sure at the moment. So wish I had a better answer for you than that.

[01:34:18] But what I can speak to and speak about is supporting how you support liver clearance. And the reason I can speak to that is I did have a blocked bile-- well, not blocked. It was still flowing, but sludgy bile. Mold absolutely thickens up and makes your bile really viscous and doesn't flow very well.

[01:34:37] TUDCA is actually one of the earliest products I ever made with LVLUP because I was living in a house with a little bit of mold. It wasn't too bad. But at the time, it was something I took, and then I had this just absolutely biblical bowel movement from the first time I took it. And that just cleared out all this bile that was in me, and I'm like, "Whoa, okay. No wonder my liver enzymes were slightly elevated."

[01:35:00] No wonder like, even though I was eating clean, I was still not feeling great, because the mold clogged it up and the TUDCA just flushed out the pipes of the bile and the bile duct. And you can feel pretty bad when you do that the first time because gut bacteria, like our own cells, don't particularly like toxins, especially when you dump them all out in one mighty movement.

[01:35:21] It's called a Herxheimer reaction. Often when you do things like antimicrobials, you experience that too, but bile has an antimicrobial action in and of itself, plus the toxins really annoy your healthy bacteria. So you can definitely get a Herxheimer reaction to it. And since then I've made a half strength for people who are really chemically sensitive and have a high toxic burden.

[01:35:39] But that's how the TUDCA works. There's also, they're called choleretics and cholagogues, naturopathy things that increase the production of bile and also the increased bile flow. Things like globe artichoke, any of the digestive bitters really help with that too. And anything that helps with bile flow is really going to take a lot of the burden off of the liver.

[01:36:01] You might still need to support phase two, which is upstream of the elimination by having things like glycine, by having things like NAC and glutathione. They're all going to support phase two. There's six ways in which the body-- this is the beautiful thing about the human design, is there's six contingencies for how your body clears out toxins.

[01:36:20] It's not like all of them are dependent on glutathione or all of them are dependent on glucoronidation. There's six of them. And it's only really when you overburden your body so much that you might end up overburdened on all of those pathways.

[01:36:33] So the way I formulated the Liver Complex is to support every one of our six, they're called conjugation pathways, which is the way that the body binds to toxins and then eliminates them for removal. So yeah, supporting that phase one is not often something I feel like people have to support.

[01:36:52] Doing something like taking milk thistle for example, it's one of the most common liver support. It supports phase two, but it also pushes phase one as well. And for people who have drainage problems or have insufficiencies or need support in phase two, you're pushing all of this phase one toxins into a wall basically.

[01:37:09] And then you can end up with elevated liver enzymes and higher levels of liver inflammation if you have nowhere for it to go. So honestly, when it comes to supporting liver, you got to work back from three to two to one.

[01:37:22] Luke: Yeah, that makes sense. I think a lot of people discount the importance of colon cleansing. Ages ago, in the beginning of my journey, that's the first thing I started with because I was so toxic and I was following a naturopath at the time that had me, doing binders and taking herbs that make you go and doing all that stuff.

[01:37:44] And the way it was explained to me is in a much more simplistic than you just said it, but it's that thing. Okay, cool. So you're encouraging, say, your liver to dump all these toxins, but your bowels backed up. Where do you think it's going?

[01:37:56] Kyal: Back into circulation.

[01:37:57] Luke: Yeah, just going back into your bloodstream, just like if you ate it. Maybe even worse because it just goes right through the intestinal walls there. So I think it's a really important thing for people to understand. You can't just start detoxing willy-nilly, especially if you're new to it and you have a really heavy toxic burden.

[01:38:15] Kyal: If your bowels aren't working properly, if your liver's not working properly, then, again, we have contingencies for this. They're called the kidneys. Then you might develop kidney issues. And people who have bad acne or bad skin, our skin, our kidneys, and our liver are our primary ways we detox. Sweating.

[01:38:30] When I lived in mold, I had this really distinctive smells, like acetate, like nail polish, and that's because my liver was backed up. As I said, the first time I used TUDCA, I actually removed that burden and started not to stink. But because of the mold backing up my liver, I was sweating all of the time, even when it was cold.

[01:38:48] And that's because of that contingency, this third organ of elimination being my skin was doing majority of the detoxification and the clearance of these metabolites of the mold. So if you do have really struggle with skin issues, I often implore people to not focus on the skin. Don't keep lathering topicals on it, especially in the skincare industry where there's the cause and the solution of the--

[01:39:11] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[01:39:12] Kyal: The problem is in the same product. But yeah, by just going after the liver health and gut health beyond that too, is one of the best ways that you can resolve skin issues. If your gut lining is leaky, then all the things that overburden your liver, for example, like these LPS that we mentioned are really inflammatory, they're going to get through your gut lining and then hit your liver and cause liver inflammation.

[01:39:34] So order of sequence for how I like to treat people is brain, adrenals, all encompassed in how your mindset and your philosophies and how you live your life. Then it's gut health followed by liver health and then all the other stuff, whatever is needed based on the individual.

[01:39:51] If you want to optimize brain function, it's not going to work as well if your liver and your gut and your stress access are overburdened. So things like the Neuro Regenerate, they're not a first line intervention for someone if you've got brain fog. And that does a little bit, but it's like a naturopathic Band-Aid or no better than taking a pharmaceutical to mask the symptoms.

[01:40:11] Then you've not really understood what naturopathy and natural medicine's about. And it's like, let's peel the layers back and figure out what's causing it. And a lot of people, it's their life circumstances. When I was living in Victoria, no matter how much I did, being stressed in Melbourne, didn't do very good for my body, no matter how many supplements. And living in mold too. I have an infinite amount of GI Repair and Liver Complex.

[01:40:35] But while still having that toxic burden come in while still being put in a fight or flight response because, even if my conscious mind doesn't recognize it, my body knew that I was being poisoned by something. So it's constantly putting me in autonomic dysregulation. So it wasn't until recently, honestly, when I've got out of the mold that my HRV's finally gone up.

[01:40:59] I've had this Oura Ring for six years and never had a HRV above 30 until recently in the last six months living in New Zealand, finally getting the mold out. I was egoically embarrassed to compare my heart rate variability to my biohacker friends and be like, "Oh, I got 30." And they're in the 100s or the 90.

[01:41:18] And I'm like, "I don't know why. I'm doing everything." But yeah, it's only now that my nervous system's starting to calm down and the cell danger response, it's called, that your body can get into limbic system retraining. This thing called the Gupta program, which is really good for just allowing your body to realize it's not in stress anymore.

[01:41:38] It's not in danger anymore. Affirmations go almost as far, if not further, for that part of your body than any supplement could. So mold is a great teacher that I think is educating a lot of people nowadays.

[01:41:50] Luke: Yeah, it's huge here too. I'd say the majority of people I know have had mold issues.

[01:41:59] Kyal: Anyone on the East Coast, anyone near coastal actually, the humidity from the ocean, the ocean breeze brings in 80% humidity. Combine that with all the drywall cellulose-based materials, don't have proper ventilation. It's really a recipe for disaster. And then bring in the high amount of EMF we have that just potentiates the growth of mold.

[01:42:19] EMF, like for human cells, mold doesn't like it either. It stresses out molds too. And when molds are stressed, that's when they grow the fastest. It's a survival mechanism. The way they grow super fast when they're stressed is like cancers in our body do. We are stressed out with all these mitochondrial burdens, all these endocrine disruptors, these carcinogen that it's just like, all right, let's just grow. That's our contingency for survival.

[01:42:41] And I can't remember who it was who said that, so please don't hold me to this hypothesis, but if we didn't develop the cancer, then I believe that was saying that we'd probably die off sooner because of the necrosis or whatever tissue that it affected. There'd just be nothing left because of the burden of it. So it's one of these things like we really need to focus on detoxification.

[01:43:05] This is why this product and TUDCA are super critical to people's health. We can throw as much urolithin A and NAD and all the precursors to help the mitochondria, but if you've got things gunking up the machinery, making you really inefficient in your energy production, they will work provided you're taking them. If you stop taking them, then you just back to your baseline. So detoxification, heavy metal removal-- microplastics are another huge one at the moment too.

[01:43:31] Luke: Talk to me about microplastics because the show I recorded before you arrived today, one of the listener questions was how to detox microplastics. And I just went through the things that I know about general detox, assuming that those would be caught taking zeolite and taking saunas and doing all the things. What's your protocol on getting the metals and plastics out of the body?

[01:43:56] Kyal: The metals, I believe, are easier than the microplastics at the moment because we've been doing it for a long time. We've known about mercury and aluminum toxicity. People like Chris Shade really move the needle, move the industry to get rid of them. And even you can test pre and post pretty easily.

[01:44:11] Microplastics are new. I believe there's testing for it now. Bryan Johnson has put a lot of effort and energy into testing for that, which I have mixed feelings about how he approaches health. But looking at that, there's no argument here. That's very important to see where you're at with these things because, as I said, they completely gunk up your mitochondria.

[01:44:29] You can do an organic acids test, and this will give you the metabolites of your mitochondria and see how efficient you are. And if you have an accumulation of one that might be in the Krebs cycle, or might be from the electron transport chain or somewhere in the energy producing machinery of your body, then you know that there's a problem in one of those enzymes in that process.

[01:44:49] And then you can figure out what it might be. There's a list of things that it can be, but usually, it's a metal or a hormone-disrupting chemical or something like that that you need to remove. And then when you do, works again. Mold toxins are a big one of those. A lot of people end up with chronic fatigue syndrome when they're in mold because it basically ruins their mitochondrial efficiency.

[01:45:09] But microplastics, why they're a problem, they embed within our cell membranes and basically create-- people don't like seed oils because the oxidized oils from these seed oils basically embed in your membranes too and make your membranes more susceptible to inflammation.

[01:45:25] If you've got double bonds or rather than saturated bonds, those double bonds are susceptible to the inflammation and then break basically breaking the-- either in a little bit, creating a leaky gut, but a cellular leaky gut because of the incorrect type of fat or too much of the wrong type of fat embedding in the membrane.

[01:45:44] Plastics embed in the membrane the same as an oxidized or a trans-fat would. And the way we get it out is removal of inflammatory fats, but also phospholipids, so things like phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylserine. Bio Balance, I think-- I've forgotten the name--they make a really good--

[01:46:02] Luke: Oh yeah, I've been taking their--

[01:46:03] Kyal: BodyBio.

[01:46:04] Luke: BodyBio. Yeah. Their founder was on the show. I just ordered a huge bottle of their phospholipid blend. It's one of those things just-- her case for it was convincing. I didn't even think about the microplastics part, but I just gravitate toward it. My body and brain seemed to really like it, so I'm mega dosing it currently.

[01:46:24] Kyal: It's fantastic for mold detox too.

[01:46:26] Luke: I've heard that. She mentioned that. Yeah, yeah.

[01:46:28] Kyal: So mold, microplastics, and the oxidized fats. It's one of the staple things, I believe, with all of the-- most people will have one or more of those things is something they're trying to work on or need to work on. So the phospholipids are awesome and just a healthy diet with no oxidized oils, all the carnivals, and people who talk about only having ghee and only having coconut oil, the more saturated versus the poofers. There's a lot of merit to that for this exact reason.

[01:46:54] Luke: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Cool, cool. Oh, you touched a bit on gut. This is, thankfully, a trending topic over the past few years of leaky gut and gut permeability and all these things, the glyphosate issue. So almost, I feel like it's tired, but you have come up with something super novel with the BPC-157 and specifically your GI Repair. And as I mentioned earlier, selfishly, I always want to talk about the things that are going to serve me.

[01:47:24] Kyal: Mm-hmm.

[01:47:25] Luke: I'm just kidding, but hopefully the audience. But it's been a pesky issue for me for a long time. I just feel like I've overcome so many issues in the past that are just gone, and digestion and gut health is just one that's never been perfect, steady improvement. But I did notice a massive, massive difference from whatever the freak you did in your gut formula. And I was like, "Okay."

[01:47:49] And how I can tell that it's working is I'll go off the rails and eat something that I know is going to agitate my gut, and then it will, and then I can fix it super fast. So it's been my cheat code when I'm going out to a restaurant, eating some crappy food or something, just because I don't want to be neurotic and too controlling. So I let myself live a little and I'm like, "All right, here it comes." And then my digestion will be off. And whatever you're doing seems to really help.

[01:48:17] Kyal: Yeah. The reason why gut issues are often so difficult to combat is we have a tennis court in size worth of our gut lining. It's so much of it, and it's only one cell thick. Our intestinal layer is a semi-permeable membrane. It needs to be permeable to let proteins in and minerals, and there's transporters embedded within it too.

[01:48:38] But it's huge. And if you have gut inflammation, 80% of our immune system is harbored around what's called the GALT that hangs around that single cell lining of our gut to basically clean up any inflammatory things, any bacteria that cross any undigested proteins or proteins that have got through our leaky gut.

[01:48:56] It's like these shouldn't be in here. Let's clean them up. So a lot of people who have subclinical or clinical permeability of their gut end up with an immune response. And if it's really, really, really bad, I believe that's one of the major origins of autoimmune disease is these things are crossing our barriers so readily that our body's like, "Whoa, what's going on here? We need to figure out what it is. Let's mount an immune response to something."

[01:49:19] And it finds an undigested protein, be it egg, be it chicken, whatever your food sensitivity is, develops an immune reaction to it, a memory to this protein, but via this process known as molecular mimicry, it looks like something else in your body, be it a [Inaudible].

[01:49:36] Gluten and thyroid are pretty lengthy. If someone's got a gluten issues or thyroid autoimmunity, it's often triggered by gluten. Other ones might be connective tissue like osteoarthritis. A lot of the time when people work on their gut issues, the inflammation reduction from working on their gut results in significantly less, if not complete resolution of arthritic pain in their distal joints that have nothing really directly to do with the gut.

[01:50:01] It's just that modulation and that suppression of the lingering fire that is this low level of inflammation that can occur when we have hyperpermeability of the gut. It's pretty easy to tell if you have some gut issues. There's some really clear-cut things. Bloating's a pretty good one if you feel terrible. If I accidentally eat gluten, then I get the gluten sads where you feel really--

[01:50:21] Luke: Really?

[01:50:22] Kyal: Yeah, yeah.

[01:50:22] Luke: It'll affect your mood?

[01:50:24] Kyal: It affects your brain significantly. A lot of people who are celiac know because obviously there's a lot of pain in the gut.

[01:50:29] Luke: I never thought about that because, like last night, I had a little glutten ice cream. My freaking wife buys this, yeah, it's super healthy ice cream. She buys it because she can control herself. Unfortunately, I can't. I ate some last night that had cookie in it.

[01:50:44] I was like, "Ah man." And I feel fine, but I think I'm probably more sensitive of gluten than I would like to admit to myself. But I never thought about mood. I just thought, oh, my joints will feel a little sore if I go nuts on some gluten or my digestion will get funky. But I never thought about the mood part of it. Bringing on depression, anxiety, things like that.

[01:51:07] Kyal: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:51:08] Luke: Goddamnit.

[01:51:09] Kyal: I mean it depends on your sensitivity to it.

[01:51:10] Luke: It's so tasty.

[01:51:11] Kyal: It is. It is. And it's like gluten never used to really be a problem. It's usually because gluten and glyphosate tend to piggyback on each other. They use it as a dessicant on wheat, which is one of the primary sources of it. It's not the only one, but majority of the wheats have gluten in it.

[01:51:24] They use it to kill off the crops basically to make them all harvested at the same time rather than, oh, this what's ready. We'll just naturally do it. It's a lazy bit effective way of farming. And as a desiccant, it's used right before it's harvested. And they don't often wash it off.

[01:51:40] Organic wheat is a better way of doing it. A sourdough, you might nullify some of the gluten. A lot of people don't actually have gluten issues. If they use like an heirloom wheat or a long-fermented sourdough. It's going to cause some level of inflammation. It's just how much? And how much is your underlying level of gut permeability to begin with?

[01:51:58] It might be you have a complete solid gut that gluten's just like, oh yeah, transient at best. It'll cause a little bit of an issue, but it won't actually cause this systemic inflammation that is celiac disease or gluten sensitivity.

[01:52:11] My whole family, myself included, in Australia, we use the highest percentage of pesticides on our crops. We also have GMO crops. There's been nine genetic modifications to the gluten and to the wheat crop in Australia. The amount of gluten --

[01:52:24] Luke: I don't think there was anywhere worse than America for food production. That's shocking.

[01:52:29] Kyal: Our little--

[01:52:30] Luke: They do it worse than we do? Congratulations.

[01:52:33] Kyal: Yeah. When glyphosate went off patent, we bought it in by the millions of tons and just went crazy with it. There's a wheat belt in Victoria, where my mother grew up, and that's where they have the highest percentage of glyphosate use in all of Australia I believe.

[01:52:50] If I could blame one thing above all other things, it'd probably be that. And I think that's why Monsanto are losing court cases very quickly or maybe quicker now that Bobby's in there and he's the guy who brought it all up and fought for that case where they ended up with a big payout.

[01:53:05] So I'd really like to see some more of that happen. And put that number 400 on his list of things he has to do to try and make America healthy again. So one of the big reasons why mood can get affected by gluten is it increases the amount of this protein called zonulin.

[01:53:22] Zonulin is something I first learned about from Zach Bush. His product ION Biome helps reduce zonulin, but there's also a peptide called larazotide, which is an antagonist to it. So basically, an antagonist is something that's going to bind to a receptor in the body, in place of something else.

[01:53:38] So if you have zonulin coming in and basically causing permeability, by taking this larazotide, which has been studied for celiac disease, it will prevent the zonulin from binding to the cell of your gut and causing the permeability. It increases permeability of your gut.

[01:53:58] And we do need some level of it, but honestly, leaky gut is just too much of it. It's a Velcro-like structure between our cells of our gut, and zonulin basically opens the Velcro normally to let food and protein in, but too much of it will just have it wide open and all manner of things can come through.

[01:54:15] And then that's when we have an immune response and we have bacterial lipopolysaccharide [Inaudible] the protein. All of the things that are in your lumen can then enter circulation and cause problems. But zonulin doesn't end there. It does get into circulation, and this is where it can cause what's called blood-brain barrier hyperpermeability or leaky brain.

[01:54:36] And that's a problem for obviously mood. You're going to have the inflammatory things crossing the blood-brain barrier, which is sacred that we have this thing. Our brain should not have metals. It shouldn't have bacterial contaminants entering it and causing neuroinflammation.

[01:54:51] And a lot of the neuroinflammatory conditions are caused by the gut. That's the gut-brain connection. What we do to our gut will then, via zonulin, increase the permeability of our blood-brain barrier. And it's meant to not let many things through for good reason. That's a very fatty tissue. It's very dense in mitochondria. It's very amazing but also fragile to those toxins. And a lot of the ASD and ADHD and Alzheimer's, autism, dementia, all of that, I believe, is because of the combination of metals and toxins that bioaccumulate in the fatty tissue that is your brain but also wouldn't get through if it wasn't for this hyperpermeability in the gut that then goes on to create this blood brain barrier hyperpermeability. And the whole vaccine argument around do they cause it.

[01:55:37] Well, if you do it after a certain age, when kids have a developed blood-brain barrier, the likelihood of them crossing it, provided they don't have permeable gut, is significantly lower than if you do it when they don't even have one developed. Where are the metals going to accumulate in a child that doesn't have much fat and doesn't have a blood-brain barrier?

[01:55:55] There's a chance that they'll accumulate in the brain, and you can test for heavy metals. Hair mineral analysis is one way you can do it. It's contentious how effective it is. But you can see if you're really high in a metal. And in some ways, it's a good thing if you're high in it on the test because it means your body's eliminating it.

[01:56:13] But if it's high, that means you have high amounts of it. It always tends to coincide with whatever they have been injected with. In prior generations, it was mercury and the newer generations is aluminum. And you can see that in the metals test.

[01:56:27] And interestingly, as I said at the start of the show, I had really high levels of barium, which was from our drinking water. And that showed up in the hair mineral analysis. And I'm like, Where's this coming from? So the next step was to test the water. And I'm like, "There it is. Thanks, planes."

[01:56:41] Luke: Yeah. Thanks conspiracy theory that is making things appear in my body that are quantifiable and testable.

[01:56:51] Kyal: All the other way sources of barium just made no sense. I'm like, this conspiracy theories said it's in the exact thing that's going over my head right now, so it probably adds up.

[01:57:02] Luke: Yeah. I'm working with a guy, Matt Kaufman, who's been on the show, and we do mineral balancing and the hair testing, and my aluminum is freaking off the charts and I was like, "Oh, man. That sucks. I'm so healthy."

[01:57:16] He goes, he's never tested someone that doesn't have aluminum off the charts because they breathe. It's just like crazy. That was a really good explanation, the best one I've ever heard of understanding how gut permeability and leaky gut leads to the leaky brain and all those issues. Well-played.

[01:57:36] You have a great knack for explaining very complex things in a way that's easily digestible. And actually, now I'm more encouraged to get on your gut product on the regular. Because as I said, I've taken it as a Band-Aid, but it's not been something that I've taken on a consistent basis to keep those junctions tight and keep it healed up. It's been more of a just an emergency kit, first aid kit kind of thing.

[01:58:04] Kyal: The zonulin is one piece. There are others, but it's one of the primary drivers, and you can do blood tests and see what your zonulin levels are at. And when I first got introduced to Ben Greenfield, he wanted to get the product because he tested his fecal microbiome and he is like, "Oh, my zonulin is through the roof. I need to get on your stuff."

[01:58:24] And taking it, it went down significantly. He's like, "Good. Thank you." So that's how LVLUP, I guess, got one of its big breaks, is through Ben. And he used that one to bring down his level of zonulin. And there's other markers of gut permeability that are less associated with brain hyperpermeability.

[01:58:40] One's called calprotectin. That one's sort of a marker of IBDs, like Crohn's and colitis. And there's natural ingredients like quercetin and tributyrin, which are better for bringing that one down. That's more of a marker of gut inflammation. But the permeability is the zonulin one. There's so many tests you can do.

[01:58:57] It's a bit overwhelming how many tests you can do, but that zonulin one, I believe is one that if you have gut issues, you should be testing for or find a doctor who can test it and interpret it and give you a protocol to remedy it.

[01:59:10] Luke: Cool. Tell me about the one that I used up and then I think we will-- no, actually, there's two. There's one around the corner I wanted to ask you about because they're so weird looking. The orange ones, we'll get to that. But the one that I burned through very quickly was the histamine one. What's it called?

[01:59:25] Kyal: Hista-Resist.

[01:59:26] Luke: Hista-Resist. Yeah. Because there's a lot of allergies here in Texas and my wife's had a really hard time with this cedar here, as many people do. And now I hate to admit it, but I think I do too because I noticed when the pollen count gets really high here, my eyes hurt, and I feel like I can't think straight. And I didn't know what it was, unfortunately. I think it has something to do with that.

[01:59:49] And people will recommend, oh, take quercetin or this and that. I never really noticed anything helps, but I noticed that that one, and my wife as well noticed that yours really helped. I burned through it so fast I didn't really look at what was in it, but it was effective.

[02:00:04] Kyal: Yes. So there's basically three ways that you can clear excessive histamine from your body. You can support your own body's enzyme that breaks down histamine. It's called diamine oxidase or DAO.

[02:00:18] Luke: Not 5-MeO-DMT?

[02:00:19] Kyal: In fact, I think if you take it when you get high histamine, you don't have a particularly good time, which is interesting. It's not 5-MeO, but when I was trying psilocybin, I was in mold and I had a very, very bad time because of the neuro inflammation of the mold, which increases histamine significantly.

[02:00:38] So mold's a huge driver of Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. MCAS, it's called. But people who don't have that full mast cell activation syndrome can still just have histamine, seasonal allergies.

[02:00:49] Luke: So if you're having a mold illness or you have crazy high histamines from allergies or something, psychedelics, maybe not a great idea during that?

[02:00:58] Kyal: Maybe not because I had high levels of neuroinflammation as I spoke about before. I mentioned gluten and glyphosate and how that causes permeability. Nothing causes permeability in the gut more than mycotoxins. If they're punching holes in it, then mycotoxins are like a knife ripping through it.

[02:01:19] They're that bad for gut health that I don't really know many things that would cause gut permeability faster than exposure to mold. Honestly, mold has been the hardest thing for me to overcome personally. And it wasn't until I removed myself that I was able to get out of it.

[02:01:37] But anyway, Hista-Resist was basically created as my life jacket to wear when I was living in mold. Because we had histamine issues. If I ate an avocado, if I had slow-cooked meats, I would just bloat and puffy everywhere and it would look like I'd walk through a forest full of flowers and been just coated in pollen. It was that bad. There's photos of me from back in the day looking like a chipmunk from the histamines, but it was just because of living in mold.

[02:02:07] Everyone has different genetic susceptibility to histamine. There are genes that code in your body that make that DAO enzyme. And that's the primary way. I think it accounts for 60 to 80% of our clearance of histamines through that one enzyme. And the reason Hista-Resist works, and there's other products that do it as well, but you can provide the active enzyme in supplement.

[02:02:31] You can provide DAO2. It comes from porcine-- what is it? Pancreas extract. So a lot of the histamine reducing products that are out there on the market would use kidney extract. And kidney is really dense in that DAO2. So by providing that from a porcine extract, if you're vegan or halal, you're taking in some pork, kidney.

[02:02:57] But it is really rich in that DAO, which is bringing in exogenous or DAO that your body hasn't had to make or hasn't had to support its creation of. The other way we support DAO is with copper, with vitamin B2. It's like a biochemical pathway that requires cofactor nutrients.

[02:03:18] And if you're low in copper, then your DAO enzyme's not going to work sufficiently. So that's another reason why I think copper is an important mineral. But everything in balance. There's other ways that our body can clear it. And then there is preventing us reaching that threshold in which our mast cells, which are the primary immune cell that releases histamine, we can lower their threshold in which they do this process called degranulation.

[02:03:41] And degranulation is when our body releases histamine, using the quercetin that you mentioned, or the quercetin, however you want to pronounce it. That's one way that you can stabilize these mast cells. There's other ingredients. It's like black seed oil. There's a form that I like to use, and I think the reason it works better than other ones is we use a form called EMIQ, which is enzymatically modified isoquercetin.

[02:04:03] It's a new era supplement ingredient that has 40 times the bioavailability of quercetin. Quercetin is really low, but if you've got gut issues, that's good. There's certain times where you don't want things to absorb well. And if your histamine is around in your gut, in your lumen, then that low bioavailability is great because it's just going to work on your gut. But when it comes to systemic issues from pollens, like you breathe it in through your nose and it gets systemic, then having an EMIQ--

[02:04:30] Luke: We're about pollens, honey. You can't be walked through at the great time. Listen out. Histamines, mast cells, all that stuff.

[02:04:38] Kyal: So copper B2, the mast cells stabilizing ingredients and providing DAO, that's basically the comprehensive. Let's hit every single one of the clearance pathways. And then also reduce the dietary histamine-to-histamine conversion. It's one of the amino acids we consume through our diet, and that's really rich in slow-cooked meats and avocado. So when you're really sensitive to these things, reduce the histamine burden. Even reheated meats are a lot higher in the histidine and dietary histamine too.

[02:05:07] Luke: Really?

[02:05:08] Kyal: Yeah. If you've got that threshold, you're noticing it from pollen and then you start to eat some brisket that's been slow-cooked and left in the fridge overnight, you'll probably react to it. And a lot of people, brisket and avocado together, try it if you don't want to have a good time.

[02:05:20] Luke: No, shit.

[02:05:21] Kyal: Yeah.

[02:05:22] Luke: How about bone broth? I've heard bone broth is really-- and sauerkraut, fermented foods. Is that a factor?

[02:05:28] Kyal: 100%. These are really nourishing ingredients if you don't have this histamine issue. Otherwise, if you do, then-- I don't want to fear monger. It's environmentally caused. It's not really anything you need to do. It's just lower the threshold for these mast cells to degranulate with these naturopathic ingredients.

[02:05:44] And the DAO2, to clear it out from your lumen so you don't end up with a systemic reaction, a lot of people-- like last year at KetoCon when we were there, we sold a whole lot of the Hista-Resist because people would go out and have their briskets. Man, I love my meat, but I'm reacting.

[02:06:00] And I'd say, "Oh, take this beforehand. It'll reduce your threshold for mast cell degranulation and histamine issues." And next day they came back and gave me a hug, like, "I didn't react like." I go, "Great. That's the histamine piece."

[02:06:13] And then the other thing that the carnival people run into is fat malabsorption because of how dense in fat the carnival diet can be. So using a bile acid like the TUDCA or Ox Bile supports the absorption of the fats and breakdown of fats too. So those two products are really good for--

[02:06:32] Luke: What's the timing on taking TUDCA or the liver-- what's it called? Liver Complex?

[02:06:38] Kyal: Oh, Liver Complex. Yeah.

[02:06:39] Luke: Would you take those before or after you eat apart from food?

[02:06:45] Kyal: Let me think. Is there anything in there that would-- you could take them before. It would probably be best to take them before especially--

[02:06:50] Luke: Because I usually take bitters and things, HCL, every once in a while, and I usually take that before.

[02:06:56] Kyal: Yeah, they're great for increasing the enzymes and increasing the acid, but when it comes to absorption of the fats, it's better to probably take them before you have the fats come in. They're already there, primed, ready to work. You can bring them in reactionarily. It would probably just take half an hour or so to get where it needs to be.

[02:07:12] Same with the liver complex. That one, interestingly, you take that around sauna and it helps with the bile flow while-- sauna's supporting one of the elimination methods through the skin and through sweating whilst you support through the bile.

[02:07:25] You're doing a two for one combo by supporting with TUDCA and knack if you want to support the liver at the same time while bile, liver, and skin are all being supported. That's like a really--

[02:07:36] Luke: I'm going to try that. You know what'd be cool is taking those before the sauna and then taking a big dose of zeolite afterward. The push catch--

[02:07:43] Kyal: Yes, absolutely.

[02:07:45] Luke: Fury. Hmm, I dig it. I love this shit, dude. We've been here for a while now, and you're using a lot of energy, so I appreciate your time. But the last thing, I think-- God, this is my famous last words, that it's the last thing-- is this Longevity 5-Amino 1-MQ.

[02:08:04] Your shit is all so scientific. But when I opened this, I was like, "Oh, that's cool. They use, for those watching, a bright orange capsule. That's interesting." And then I realized, no, it's the stuff inside.

[02:08:16] So this one caught my attention. And this one, without reading anything, just the ingredients, looks like some mitochondria situation. Why is it orange? And tell me what the ingredients do in that one. And I promise I'll let you go.

[02:08:32] Kyal: It's all good. The primary ingredient in that one's the 5-amino-1-MQ, which is a small molecule, not a peptide, but it has peptide-like effects. It inhibits the enzyme that breaks down NAD called NNMT.

[02:08:45] Luke: Oh, you were talking about this earlier.

[02:08:46] Kyal: Yeah. And it is very vibrant red in color. That's why it's orange, because the red has been dilute by the white ingredients that are in it, which the NR and the NMN. They're bright white, but it's been dilute down. That's actually the old formulation. I've also added a bio regulator to it called Epitalon, which helps with telomerase. Telomerase activity, which can extend the caps of-- the telomeres are the caps on your DNA, and they're a marker of aging.

[02:09:12] The Epitalon was studied to increase telomere length, which is very interesting because the opposite usually happens when you age. So Epitalon's really good for that. But the other thing that 5-amino-1-MQ is really good for doing, boosting NAD levels is fantastic for weight loss. And a lot of people have really found that it has helped their metabolism boot it up.

[02:09:30] So I spoke about earlier how important mitochondrial function is and how making sure you got efficiencies in the Kreb cycle and in the electron transport chain. Well, the reason why NAD is so good is it directly feeds hydrogen into the electron transport chain. It's Complex I to V.

[02:09:47] That's really complicated biochemistry. Methylene blue supports that. That's why I really like that ingredient. But B1, B2, and B3 all feed into that. But these precursor nutrients to NAD, which is ultimately what they go on to create, the B3 does anyway, can increase your energy levels significantly better than just your dietary niacin or niacinamide.

[02:10:08] So that's really good. That's been really comprehensively studied as an anti-aging nutrient, NAD. That's why people do infusions and they feel better after doing an NAD IV or a patch like yourself.

[02:10:19] Luke: Mm-hmm.

[02:10:20] Kyal: With prolonged use, because it's a slower effect. But oral use of NMN and NR has that effect as well. It's just not like smack you in the face level of energy. It's more of a buildup. And quercetin, fisetin, and apigenin are all inhibitors of an enzyme called CD38.

[02:10:39] And this enzyme burns through NAD really fast. I think that's the primary reason why those particular ingredients work, is it inhibits that from working and then can bank up your NAD levels by inhibiting the main thing that burns through your NAD levels being that particular enzyme.

[02:10:58] Luke: Dude, you got a 2-year-old. How have you found time to study all of the-- we haven't even touched on half the shit you know and it's already a lot. Honestly, do you just have that kind of brain where you sit and just read all these studies? It's one thing to know about one particular molecule and its mechanism of action.

[02:11:20] But then it's something entirely different to know about its relationship to another molecule and then introducing it into the body and the relationship between that combination and the complexities of our biochemistry. It's mind blowing the amount of data that you seem to have amassed in your brain. Is that something you just enjoy doing, reading and reading and reading and taking all this in?

[02:11:44] Kyal: Honestly, through the eight years of my mom's cancer journey, it was a necessity for me to do that. That was my survival mechanism for I want to fix her. So I'm going to do 15 years of study. I took modafinil every morning to make it happen. Not anymore. I don't need them anymore.

[02:12:00] But back in the day, I drove myself to burnout. I need to understand the mitochondria. I need to understand-- I listened to everything Jack Kruse, listened to everything Dom D'Agostino, Thomas Seyfried. And then beyond that, the things that they hadn't mentioned or touched on like jacks or mitochondria and deuterium depletion and get the mitochondria working. But there's other pieces to the cancer picture that he doesn't even touch on, like these metals. And maybe he does, but at the time I wasn't learning them from him.

[02:12:27] Luke: Yeah.

[02:12:28] Kyal: All the other systems in the body, it's basically a multi-system failure of your body to develop this. So you can't just target the mitochondria and say, "All right, if I fix the mitochondria, the cancer's going to go away." Because without doing liver detoxification and the clearance of these things, that's not going to work as well as if you get your autonomic nervous system in balance and then that will work better.

[02:12:50] Everything feeds into this one thing. It's just this all-encompassing multi-systematic disease that in order for me to feel okay in the hopeless situation of you're going to die, I had to just learn as fast as I possibly could.

[02:13:05] I couldn't lose my mom at the time. I spent eight years, my early 20s through to 30 being a primary carer. I didn't really socialize. So you can tell now that I've put more time than your average 32-year-old into study. So it's just been out of survival, to be honest, if I'm completely honest with myself too.

[02:13:23] Luke: Yeah, yeah. That makes sense.

[02:13:24] Kyal: Ultimately, losing her sucked. But the silver lining to it all is I have all this knowledge now to put into these products and to help people beyond the products with lifestyle and life advice and honestly just minimizing the burden that our bodies have to take, be that from not putting toxic skincare on, be that from educating about water filters, be that educating for the right sauna to use and all the binders-- things beyond the scope of level up. My purpose now is to prevent anyone getting to the stage that my mom was at where it's like you really have to work so hard to claw it back.

[02:14:00] It's almost impossible to claw it back from when you're in that state. And when you put in this nervous system state of, I'm going to die, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy if you believe it. And unfortunately, my mom just believed it. She'd seen it happen. And for better or worse, she couldn't overcome that mental block that the doctor put in her.

[02:14:19] So by using peptides as a preventative medicine-based thing, I'm not saying any of them can cure cancer. I don't truly believe that. But as a preventative medicine thing, like the Neuro Regenerate, I gave it to my dad. He hasn't repeated himself as far as I'm aware since taking it because it's got in at that step one.

[02:14:39] If you knock something back at its first step rather than letting it walk a mile down the road, it's so much easier to get back to that state of health than when you have to claw it back from this really complex multi systematic challenge that is a chronic disease.

[02:14:52] So that's what I hope to do with these products. And none of them-- disclosure-- treat, cure, or prevent disease, but they just nourish the body and support our own innate healing mechanisms. So that's why I do this business. That's why I won't sell this business. And that's why I take risks for this business.

[02:15:11] Because people need to know, a, how they work. People need the right tools to get the results that they're after. Because with my mom's diagnosis, we spent probably 100,000 on supplements alone, let alone all the hyperbarics and stuff.

[02:15:23] And now looking back, seeing where I source them and noticing no effect from some of them, and adverse effects from others, I'm like, "Man, look, I know that brand now." And I'm like, "There's no chance I got the right thing." Or, oh, I was pushing methylation whilst using the wrong forms of B9 or B6 and causing more of a problem than a solution. And then all the green juicing, none of it was organic. I didn't know at the time. It's like, man.

[02:15:47] Luke: Right.

[02:15:48] Kyal: So you can kick yourself about what you did wrong. But ultimately, even doing the wrong things, it still bought her so much extra time. And it was all a journey to get to this stage now. And I'm still on the path. My partner's going through her own complex health challenges.

[02:16:05] She's chronic fatigue syndrome from living in the mold, way worse than mine. So she's been a fantastic teacher. But beyond the physical health, the mental health stuff, she's a psychologist and a counselor. Sorry, not a psychologist, but she's trained deeply in psychology and emotional healing and all that stuff too.

[02:16:20] So getting out of mold and then dealing with your own internal shit has been so beneficial for me. And my son, for example, I've said to you, he triggers all these things that I didn't know were there too. And that's deeply healing to me too, and making me a better person that's a healthier person who can show up in the world better as well. So these products, this brand is just my small way of contributing to the world in a way that I hope does my mom proud.

[02:16:48] Luke: Yeah. Wow. Beautiful, dude. Well, I appreciate you. Thanks for having the tenacity that you do and also the care and effort that goes into doing stuff. I was going to ask you one last thing before we close. There's all of these Chinese companies and whatnot that just make the NMN or whatever, some of the ingredients you've been talking about. There's a gradient of super shitty or maybe from like toxic and bad for you to shitty is neutral in its effect to the ultimate best extract, most concentrated, safe, yada yada.

[02:17:31] When you're formulating, how do you find the best of the best? What's that process look like? If you want to put these five ingredients that you know are synergistic in one particular product, how do you source and vet each one of those to make sure that it's the most efficacious and safe?

[02:17:48] Kyal: It's very hard to do.

[02:17:49] Luke: It sounds like it's a pain in the ass. That's why I'm asking.

[02:17:51] Kyal: It is. It absolutely is. It's very hard to--

[02:17:53] Luke: If you just took one of these and you're like, I got to get the best of each one of these, it would be hard, but you're very ingredient heavy. So I'm really curious what that process is like.

[02:18:03] Kyal: I'll keep it as simple as possible. With TUDCA, for example, you can get different purities of it and you present it from your manufacturer or maybe your manufacturer doesn't give you those opportunities as a company, but usually presented with, "Hey, we have this purity for this much. Or we have an 80% purity for a 30% less." And you can still market it as TUDCA. And the exact same as this, but it'd only be at 80% purity and the rest has no TUDCA. It's called UDCA.

[02:18:29] It might be just deoxycholic acid, which is taurine and the Urso group not attached to it. So you are presented with these moral conundrums and choices basically at every step along the way. The icarin and Botanabolic is 98%. You can get it at 50% and still claim that it's in it. And it's like eighth the cost.

[02:18:49] So even the BPC. BPC is available in three forms. Acetate, you can inject. It's a lot cheaper than arginate, which survives the stomach acid and is significantly better for oral, but it's eight times the price as well. There's all these financially driven decisions that if I had a board of directors and other people contributing to the final say, they'd be like, "I don't want be ridiculous. We're not paying an extra $4 a bottle for you to use this particular extract."

[02:19:17] But I'm the first person to use these products, and I'll be the last to use them. So I want them to work as well as possible. And then obviously, I don't just take people's word for it. Every ingredient comes with a manufacturer's certificate of analysis and purity reports, but then we third party verified all. They could doctor that essentially.

[02:19:35] Luke: I've wondered that too when I'm scouring websites and trying to vet something there, like, "Hey, here's our lab results." I'm like, "You guys literally could have photoshopped that." You know what I mean? Nowadays it's pretty easy to take to mock up any document. So I'm like, "I hope it's their real test."

[02:19:52] Kyal: When you're in the industry, you understand what's faked a lot, and usually it's the expensive stuff.

[02:19:56] Luke: You get an eye for it. Have you ever had a situation where you're getting a raw ingredient from a manufacturer and they showed you their testing and it looks good, and then you take it to your third party and then it ends up it was bunk?

[02:20:11] Kyal: No, I have had to pull a product called Turkesterone, which is a plant steroid, or it has very potent anabolic effects. But we've had to pull that from market for nearly nine months because we just couldn't source it in the purity required. It gained so much popularity because of this guy named Derek.

[02:20:29] More Plates, More Dates is his YouTube channel. It's quite a funny one, but he popularized it. We were producing it prior to that, but we ran out and then we went to reorder it, and it just wasn't available. It was cut with other steroids that don't work as well, or it was not in the form we wanted it.

[02:20:45] So we're just like, "Hey, I'm not going to push out a product that isn't what it claims to be on the label, yet on Amazon, 80% of products aren't exactly as they say they are on the label and they even 20% just don't have the active at all."

[02:20:57] It was Shawn Wells who put a video up explaining that, how bang all the supplement industry is, especially on Amazon. So there's good companies that do it, and I always aim-- I've probably been deceived of one ingredient at some point in time. I'm not sure there's too many now to keep tabs on everything, but I just have really ethical manufacturers who have the same goal as me and they understand what I'm doing with the products. They're not just a workout enhancement product that makes you feel like you're on meth, but you're not.

[02:21:28] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Amazon boner pill industry. There's a lot of the muscle building supplements and stuff. They seem very prone to that. I've never bought any of them, but you just look at their marketing. It's kind like, "No."

[02:21:45] Kyal: The end user is--

[02:21:46] Luke: But it's a little sussed.

[02:21:47] Kyal: The end user of these products, I always have in mind, like, if you're taking Liver Complex, that could be another version of me going through a mold detox and they want to support that. I don't want to be a cheapskate and use a inferior quality product and stall out the healing journey for three, four weeks by just lying to them for the purpose of financial gain.

[02:22:05] The other thing I do is make sure I'm transparent with my labeling. A lot of companies do what I call a cowardly proprietary blend. It's like, we're going to put four of these ingredients in, but not tell you how much of every one of them we're using, because we don't want people to do the same thing.

[02:22:17] Because if you're a competition, that's been a blessing and a curse because there's been plenty of pop-up copycats, take my exact formulation, and run with it. But at the same time, I'd rather just be honest. Hey, when you get this product, you're getting exactly this, this, and this. And test it. Call me out on it, please. If I'm doing it wrong, I want to be the first to know and the first rectify it.

[02:22:37] But as from all the contingencies I have in place with testing of every peptide, I don't test every raw. There's raws like PEA that's pretty safe. Rarely ever been any reports tainted or cut or dilute raw for that. But the TUDCA, for example, is one. The Turkesterone is one.

[02:22:54] And things like the butyrate, they might swap the butyrate format for a lesser effective but cheaper one. So just having manufacturers who are on the same page. And when I'm given the product spec and the cost of it not making a financial decision to save money is how I basically ensure that I get what I'm paying for.

[02:23:12] Luke: Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And for anyone that has a supplement company or is going to start one, I want to point out that in the long game, if money is really what you're after, and I sense that this has much more meaning to you than just making a buck, the people that are doing it with a short-term goal of just cash grab and doing not being transparent with their ingredients, yada, yada, they're actually going to make less money in the long run because their shit doesn't work.

[02:23:43] So people aren't going to be lifetime value customers. It's like, I'm not going to go buy something again if it did nothing for me if I fell for some marketing and their shady ingredient labeling. If I come across your brand and I take it and it actually works and does something, even if it costs more someone else's copying it or whatever, you got me for life because it works.

[02:24:05] I'm always going to want to use that or as long as I need it. So I think it's so stupid that some human beings are wired that way, where they're going to take a quick 10 bucks right now when they could have 1,000 bucks in the long term if they just had the bare minimum of integrity.

[02:24:21] Kyal: 100% agree.

[02:24:22] Luke: So congratulations on figuring that out. It's like, if you want to make money, man, you want customers that enjoy your product forever, not just for the next week, and they order it once on Amazon and you made your quick buck and they're gone. It's just dumb.

[02:24:38] Kyal: In my nutrition degree, we weren't even taught the differences in B vitamin forms. There's three different forms of B3. There's three different forms of B12, and all of them have different efficacies and different uses. Like cyanocabalamin, cyanide and cobalt, not particularly useful. Methylfolate versus folic acid. Completely different in their benefits and their effects. Genetics come into it big time. You can cause harm with folic acid versus folate.

[02:25:03] Methylfolate is the type that your body uses. But then business advice to a budding entrepreneur trying to start a business, if your manufacturer's not giving you the options of, "Hey, look, I see you want to use vitamin B9. You've just listed B9. What specific form do you want to use? What food grade, medical grade, or pharmaceutical grade?"

[02:25:24] If you're not given those options when you're formulating, you're probably just being given the cheaper variety and they're making more money off you. Because manufacturing's a whole circus of an industry as well. There's plenty of people in it to make a buck themselves without the risk of owning the business.

[02:25:38] And for those who don't know better, it's like, great, I've managed to make this product for $3, and I can sell it for 100. Amazing. But it shouldn't cost $3 if it's done right. It should cost 30 or $40. That's the difference between-- these products do cost a lot of money to make. So they are going to cost a fair bit on the other end.

[02:25:58] But hopefully, the results you get mean that you don't need to keep taking them more than once or twice a year at most. GI Repair is an interventional thing. Bring it in, fix your gut, and take it out. Please don't stay on it forever, unless you have IBD or something that means you need to be on it longer.

[02:26:13] Botanabolic should bring your testosterone levels back up. And if you choose to stay on it because you like how it feels, great. That's your choice. It's not like a drug or a pharmaceutical that you get put on it and this is the rest of your life. Now these are just, let's bring back homeostasis. Let's bring back balance and then remove it and see how you feel. Every product I have in the range is the same thing.

[02:26:32] Luke: Wow. I love it. You're dope, man. Thank you so much for coming by. My last question is this: who have been three teachers or teachings that have influenced your life and made you who you are today?

[02:26:44] Kyal: The first who I'll tip my hat to your friend Jack Kruse. I've never met him yet, but he taught me so much about mitochondria. That a lot of these, if not the products, but the mechanisms for how they work and how the mitochondria works is through his very complex and deep scientific understanding. So a lot of my nerd comes from his blogs and how detailed, almost to the point of, I can't keep up with this, but how detailed he is with the mechanisms and the science. So that's one teacher.

[02:27:11] The second would be my first boss after I finished my nutrition degree. He was a hyperbaric oxygen facility director. His name's Malcolm. I don't think I've publicly given a hat tip to him, but he was very formative. He humbled me. He made me realize that I'm not this hot shot who knows everything.

[02:27:33] These people in here with cancers, Lyme disease, you need to go so much further and beyond what you've been taught for your university degree. Look into all these things. He had this website. I think the government in Australia made him pull it down, but it was, honestly, an encyclopedia of ingredients.

[02:27:48] He taught me about peptides. He bought peptides into the clinic that I was working at, and that's how I got my start in the business, is basically through him. So he's been a fantastic teacher, and despite all the hardships of running a business in Australia with the regulations and being sued himself and targeted and run through the mud like Pete Evans had in Australia, he's continued to be on that mission to help people with hyperbaric.

[02:28:11] And that's just one tool. That's his tool, the main thing he does. But even that's being questioned. Whereas here, people can buy them at home and a lot of people are doing that. That's the risk. And I really have a lot of admiration for him continuing despite the adversity.

[02:28:26] And the third would probably-- maybe I'll just say Ben, his book, his work through all the years. He was the first podcast I found, which ultimately led me to yours. And they led meet to ones like Dave Asprey's, but he was the first. I don't know how I got under Ben's stuff, but he would've been one teacher for sure, who's been-- he's now a good friend as well. So I'm happy to say that.

[02:28:45] Luke: I've learned a lot from Ben too. I've found out about so many things that I've applied in my life from listening to Ben's podcast. Sometimes he's really into the fitness stuff, so I usually skip those. So I'm not off doing a Spartan race or anything anytime soon.

[02:29:01] But he's got a really good sniffer for the latest and greatest. And Dave too, especially in the beginning when I got into some of this stuff, man. I was like, "Oh my God. There's just so many cool things out there." And guys like that do a really great job of bringing fringe ideas and inventions to the mainstream, which is super important.

[02:29:22] As you were saying earlier, the supply and demand thing, it's like so many of these devices and things like that are so freaking expensive. Are different compounds, supplements, etc. The only reason is not enough people know about them. If there was enough demand, the manufacturing cost would go down and then it wouldn't be like a rich person's game, which it shouldn't be. Health should be something that everyone has access to.

[02:29:46] Kyal: Perfect example would be like Siete chips or some of these non-seed oil chips. There was no availability 10 years ago for these things, and now one got bought out for over a billion dollars. Look at that demand. Every supermarket or grocery store, as you call it in America, has them now. So that's evidence of the change that we want to see with consumerism driving demand. Can I sneak in a fourth teacher?

[02:30:14] Luke: Yeah, dude. Go nuts.

[02:30:14] Kyal: Dr. Evan Brand. If he ever watches--

[02:30:14] Luke: Oh, Evan Brand. Yeah. He's been on the show.

[02:30:15] Kyal: Thank you for the educational mold. Without that, without his work, when I am in a problem, in a situation, it's just my desire to get out of it as fast as possible. I mainline. Just hook me up to all the information I possibly could. And I reckon I digested probably a year's worth of his content in three or four months. And he gave me all the information and all the tools to, a, develop products that help with histamine and with mold issues, but b, to figure out how to test for it and how to remediate for it.

[02:30:46] And yeah, he's continuing to do good work, and I often feel like in the health space he flies under the radar a bit compared to other people. But the information he provides and his persistence with providing that information is very admirable. And I have a lot of respect for him.

[02:30:59] Luke: Likewise. Great guy. Real sweet guy. Yeah, he came on the show when I was a nobody, and he was big in the scene. He was a big get, as we say, at that time. He had a podcast that I-- does he still have a podcast?

[02:31:15] Kyal: Yeah.

[02:31:16] Luke: I haven't listened to him, but I used to listen to his podcast a lot and got a lot out of that. And he's a very, very smart guy and also heart center dude. So that's a great shout out. Thanks for that. All right, dude. Well, we did it. We nailed it. Another episode of The Life Stylist podcast in the can, as we say. Thank you so much.

[02:31:32] Kyal: Thanks, Luke. Thanks, everyone.