[00:00:00]
Greg: Dave. Great to have you on the show. Appreciate you being here.
Dave: Thank you for having me.
Greg: I’ve been wanting to have you for quite a while actually, Dave, I’ve been on a bit of a health journey myself recently researching lots of stuff and researching a little bit around testosterone personally and what I was fascinated to see, and the reason I wanted to get you on is because I really noticed a bit of a link between testosterone and performance in business potentially, and how you might show up in your business and your moods and things like that.
Greg: And I thought, actually, this could be a subject. I’ve never spoken about anything like this on the podcast. Never had any guests over who are experts in this. So I thought it’d be really interesting ’cause our podcast is all about how to grow a really successful construction business and then how that impacts your life.
Greg: Great to have you on. And maybe we could just start, first of all, just by finding out how you got into this space. So what’s made you such a prolific educator in testosterone and educating men about this? Because you are, you’re absolutely everywhere about it.
Dave: Yeah. It’s great that we’re having this conversation because my undergrad degree was in [00:01:00] business particularly in digital marketing.
Dave: So I used to run a very small kind of digital agency. After I left university, I did a couple of agency jobs, and so it’s good to be able to use my first degree because it doesn’t really have that much, I don’t get to talk about it very much. But I had a brain injury when I was in my mid twenties, which kind of rendered me semi, I guess what you’d call disabled.
Dave: I had severe vertigo for a number of years to the point that I couldn’t really walk properly. And when the medical system failed me and told me it was incurable, I took that as a kind of up your signal. And I went back to university and studied science and learned how to heal it because you’re told that nerve issues can’t regenerate.
Dave: Turns out that’s not a hundred percent true. So in the process of that, I was looking at neuropsychiatry because I was very interested in how the brain worked. But when I started doing my master’s in neuropsychiatry, after doing like a bridging postgraduate diploma in biomedical science. I realized that it was mainly just a course about how to drug people rather than how the brain worked or even how the drugs worked.
[00:02:00]
Dave: So I was a bit jaded and put off it. I asked too many questions. I didn’t continue with the course, but it led me into endocrinology because when you understand the body is a series of interconnected systems, you realize that the endocrine systems sits upstream of basically all of your biological functions.
Dave: So when that system is not working properly due to a condition that is impacting it, then it’s very difficult for the body to heal and recover or even feel good generally. So I use testosterone replacement therapy as part of a big rehabilitation process to get back on track. And after I did that, everything else kind of felt superfluous in my life because this was so important and it was so meaningful and powerful and no one was talking about it.
Dave: And I was very interested in complex problem solving and systems. So I approached the endocrine system and the body as human engineering. I think the fact that the human is sentient makes it much more complicated than servicing a car. I like to relate humans. If you’ve watched my Silverback speech to the movie cars where you’re a car, but you’re sentient and alive, that’s a really good framework for the human.
[00:03:00]
Dave: So I ended up just doing some lectures on YouTube because when I was at university I was like, look, there’s no lectures on these hormones. Here’s 40 something studies I’ve looked at. I’m just gonna make a university style lecture and put on YouTube. Didn’t really plan to make a business out of it. I was teaching mindfulness meditation at the time for schools and businesses.
Dave: It was part of a not-for-profit and ended up getting tens of thousands of views on it back in 20 17, 20 18, on this boring ass university lecture. And I was like, huh. Like I didn’t think this would, people would care. So I ended up helping out some people with some stuff related to the hormones in the video, just in terms of answering educational questions and not giving medical advice, but just helping them with their understanding on other people who had brain injuries.
Dave: And then when COVID came around and the previous job I was working at was no longer viable, I basically made a Calendly that took the average charge of what people were donating me for my time at the time.
[00:04:00]
And I thought, okay I’m gonna do this full time because this means everything to me and I really wanna help as many people as possible.
Dave: And then from a business standpoint, I’ve just built a personal brand that’s based on trust and authenticity and doing the right thing at scale. I said yes to every opportunity that comes in my inbox and I’ve given as much value away for free to as many people as I possibly can, which has grown a business which has basically grown and scaled off word of mouth.
Dave: And then I’ve become a speaker and author and everything kind of from them.
Greg: Yeah. That’s fantastic. And just talking about your businesses, ’cause you am I right in saying you own a few clinics? Do you or partner with clinics around the world?
Dave: Yeah, so I own a clinic over here in in, it’s actually in Lavia, which is for people who aren’t familiar with the Baltics.
Dave: It’s the Baltic state above Lithuania, so north of Poland west of Russia. So we’re called TRT Baltic and we are the only hormone replacement therapy clinic servicing all of Eastern Europe. And we’ve just built our own pharmacy so that we can legally serve as Scandinavia. Scandinavia at the moment can’t get treatment.
[00:05:00]
Dave: So I’ve spent the best part of a year training one of the smartest doctors I met in Latvia on my approaches. And so I own that clinic. I’m also a equity owner in a clinical primal zone in Australia which is built around my clinical frameworks and health coaching integration. And that’s been incredible to be able to scale what I was previously doing in one-on-one consults for 45 minutes to an hour.
Dave: Where I’m able to work with four to five times the volume of the patients because I can collaborate with the doctor. So that’s been incredible in terms of seeing the clinical outcomes at scale because it’s all well and good if you make a YouTube video and you have a theory. But, you know, I was working with thousands of clients one-on-one for five or six years, but then with Primal Zone, that’s kind of multiplied to multiple fold that.
Dave: So to be able to see not only so many lives positively affected, but the clinical model working that’s also led me to authoring three books. And now I’m working on courses as well as YouTube master classes to be able to teach as much of what I can to other practitioners.
[00:06:00]
And I also have a clinic that I partner with in the US called Victory Men’s Health.
Dave: I actually flew over to them for a podcast. I wasn’t planning to partner with them, but after I walked away, I basically sat ’em down and said, you have to partner with me because I need to be a part of what you’re doing. They have an incredible business model, amazing aesthetics for their clinics. It’s a real in, it’s if you went to A-A-T-R-T doctor, but it was like a luxury biohacking masculine barbershop.
Dave: That’s the, but everyone there is exceptional clinically at what they do. So I really like their model and what they’re doing. So I also partner with them and we’ve just released a signature supplement line through them as well. So my goal was to be able to have somewhere I could send people to all over the world to say, if you want to get your TRT fixed and you’ve watched my content, you can go and work with someone here.
Dave: And I’m either directly involved or I have trained the people who are prescribing.
Greg: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And yeah, well done on your success there, Dave. What’s I find is really interesting, just from what you said there, is that it actually started with you really focusing on your personal brand, and that was a big aim of yours, of, you know, giving away free content, focusing on the brand, and then I guess these other opportunities arose from there.
[00:07:00]
Greg: So maybe just focusing on that for a second, before we really go into testosterone how, what lessons do you think our listeners could take away from that? Now we’ve got, this podcast is for construction business owners. How important do you think a personal brand is in business generally and in that space?
Dave: It’s everything. I was very blessed when I was at university. I interned for a digital marketer named Paul Raimondo, who was a very good friend of mine at the time. And so I was able to apply what I learned at university, but then also see him in terms of, he was very into, at the time, like Facebook funnels and like retargeting was really taking off.
Dave: This would’ve been back, yeah, 2012 kind of time. So he was very big on starting YouTube and Instagram and he would basically do this thing on Snapchat stories at the time where he’d just basically answer questions for people on improving their digital marketing on his lunch break.
[00:08:00]
And he, I, after I finished university, I shared an office with him and kind of shadowed him and he mentored me and helped me with a lot.
Dave: But what he helped me with the most was understanding building brand. And particularly for a person, he was like, you know, this was 10 or 15 years ago, but he basically predicted that YouTube and social media were going to be the primary source of media influencer. So he was like, you need to build a personal brand.
Dave: So I was a singer back then in a band, and that’s a personal brand, so I was very familiar with it. So then when I started doing this work, because I had shadowed, that’s what I had learn in terms of marketing and then also having a degree in it. So understanding the theory. I just unconsciously or subconsciously built a personal brand in my spare time.
Dave: So if I did a bunch of consults you know, let’s say I did three hours of consults in a day, I’d spend the rest of the day in Facebook groups or forums just helping people, never promoting my service, never posting my booking link, just helping people and building brand equity. So I think in my space in particular, because a lot of people do the wrong thing, there’s a lot of people who don’t know what they’re doing.
[00:09:00]
Dave: There’s a lot of unethical stuff. Building trust is really important. So that’s been something that I’ve been very big on. Trust and transparency and people being able to genuinely see that the goal is to help people not make money. And then finances come from that when you do the right thing at scale and you’re good at it.
Dave: But the other thing in terms of personal brand is that it’s everything in terms of your it’s like a, it’s like your 2025 version of your resume. That you can invest in. So investing in your personal brand is not an expense. It’s an investment as long as you plan to carry that brand through your career.
Dave: So I look at it from multiple angles in terms of I get indirect ROI, from building a personal brand, from speaking at higher profile events and going on higher profile podcasts and things like this. But without a personal brand, even if people are relevant now, you will fade into I relevancy if you don’t build a personal brand.
[00:10:00]
Dave: ’cause other people in your niche will build a brand bigger than yours and they’ll get the attention. So I also think it’s important, it’s kind of like one of those things where you have to be in it now because otherwise you’ll fade into, I re.
Greg: Yeah, completely agree. I think it’s becoming even more relevant now with ai.
Greg: People I think are not gonna realize what’s real, what’s not. But more importantly than ever, we’ve gotta stand out as someone different and build that personal brand. ’cause people are just gonna resonate with that more than all the AI nonsense. That’s all the AI slop as they call out there.
Greg: Yeah, a hundred percent agree with you there. Let’s move over and start talking about testosterone then. Maybe first of all, just a background, you know, what is actually testosterone doing in our body, in our brain? What’s, what how important is testosterone for us?
Dave: So all humans have all sex hormones.
Dave: So men have female sex hormones and females have men sex hormones. We just have them in different ratios. Testosterone, progesterone, estrogen. We think of these as the three primary sex hormones, progesterone and estrogen for women, and testosterone for men. Women need a little bit of testosterone. Men need progesterone and estrogen just in different amounts, and they do different things primarily in the biology.
[00:11:00]
Dave: So you can think of one as like a Mac Os and one as like A Windows Os, for example. Similar components, but set up kind of differently. So when it comes to testosterone in men, this is your primary sex hormone. And it’s not just related to sexual function without sounding too esoteric. It’s basically your life force and it’s your life force via multiple psychological in terms of how you feel and how you think, and how you subjectively experience being alive, but also biological in terms of basically not breaking down and dying, but also being able to perform.
Dave: So when we look at all the systems that testosterone interacts with. It makes a lot of sense why it leads to a therapeutic outcome for someone who’s not doing well in various ways, shapes, or forms, because it kind of upgrades a lot of processes that break down in disease states, or it’s protective. So the way that we often look at testosterone from a objective standpoint in terms of improving health is that in the right doses, in healthy men and it’s, and in delivered in the right way.
[00:12:00]
Dave: And there’s nuance to that. That’s the science of it. Testosterone is protective against the four primary diseases of aging, which is cancer dementia or cognitive decline. There’s diabetes and heart disease. Now, all four of these things will be that those umbrella things will be the thing that kill you unless something tragic happens.
Dave: When we look at aging, it’s basically these systems wearing out and breaking down over time. And part of what facilitates that, other than chron chronological time and wear and tear, is the decline of hormones that we get as we get older because we’re very familiar with menopause and women, the ovaries kind of car it at a certain point and stop producing all these sex hormones.
Dave: And their risk of those four diseases of aging immediately goes through the roof. And that’s very well known. And they also feel terrible, and that’s also very well known.
[00:13:00]
Men have a similar thing. It’s just, it doesn’t drop off a cliff as such. It’s more of very linear decline over adulthood. So it reaches this critical point at some time, but when it’s death by a thousand cuts, it’s difficult to pull that trigger.
Dave: But what we see is these levels get lower, or if younger men are having lower levels, which is becoming more of a problem now, is that they are a lot less biologically and psychologically resilient to stress. That shows up both day to day, but also where you end up in terms of your career, your family life, your hobbies, your general lived experience, but also the circumstances that come from that as well.
Dave: Because stress resiliency, as you’d know from business, is extremely important for everything. Not just business, but biological systems as well.
Greg: Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. You mentioned that just sometimes younger men can have a bit of a problem with low testosterone as well. And this seems to be something that’s a bit more frequent now than ever before, but why do you think we’re seeing that today, that this decline in testosterone and also seeing it shown up in younger men younger?
[00:14:00]
Dave: Yeah, it’s a very good question and it’s something that I’ve been, when I first started my career, my big goal was to advocate for the awareness of TRT. ’cause back then it wasn’t really a thing. Now it’s more, it’s become a thing, which is fantastic. But now it’s about advocating for doing it right. And doing it right in younger men when it comes to hormone replacement therapy is very different than in age related hormone decline because the root cause is different and the human is a different human.
Dave: And most of the traditional approaches to hormone replacement therapy are for andropause, which is this age related hormone decline. So when you are treating a man for older level, sorry, an older aged male for hypogonadism, meaning Lloyd testosterone, you’re basically taking him back to where he was before.
Dave: So his biology has been here before. He’s going back to how he felt when he was 2021. That’s an easier adjustment for the body because all those systems have already been in place.
[00:15:00]
The body has acclimatized to this before. If you’ve never drank caffeine in your entire life and you have a cup of coffee at 30 versus if you drank caffeine for most of your life and then took a break from it, it’s going to have a different response and it’s gonna have a different adaptation period.
Dave: So when it comes to these younger men. Not only is it a different way that they have to be treated because you have to take into consideration that they’re basically going through a second puberty because they’ve never had high levels in the first place. There’s also gonna be a psychological adaptation as well, maladaptive behavioral coping mechanisms.
Dave: But the cause of this is often dismissed as, oh, it’s because you’re overweight or you’re not exercising enough, or you’re not getting enough sunlight. And that is often true. Absolutely. But it’s not always the case. And you can absolutely see in blood work when someone’s levels are suppressed, you can see the signal from the brain to the testicles goes down because the body focuses on survival.
[00:16:00]
Dave: And if someone says, look, I’m drinking 20 started drinks a week. I smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. I eat junk food and I don’t exercise and I’m 130 kilos, you can say, that’s kind of what happens. And you know, you need a personal trainer and an exercise regime and better discipline and all these different things.
Dave: And then if the levels don’t improve, then you should look at having it treated. But it’s very clear that this is being suppressed for a reason. The other problem we’re having though is we’re seeing younger men coming up who are doing everything right and they have levels of an 80-year-old. And I believe personally, and a lot of my colleagues are in agreement that this is from what’s called like the lifestyle factors are an issue.
Dave: You know, obesity during puberty is a new problem and I think that causes developmental issues, but the plastics, pollutions and pesticides that we’re chronically exposed to over a lifetime, especially in utero. And then as babies, I would argue that my generation, I mean I’m 32, like my generation and the younger generations are kind of like the test subjects of what happens when you give that to people when they reproduce.
Dave: And we see this in animal studies.
[00:17:00]
We see generational issues with you know, the endocrine system when they’re exposed to these chemicals. And it’s very clear that these endocrine disrupting molecules called xenoestrogens, which are like artificial estrogens that bind in the body with the receptor, are having many fold higher effects in terms of estrogenic effects in the body.
Dave: This can lead to a shutdown or reduction of hormone production, as well as issues with the receptors, issues with hormone positive cancers. And I think that is something that is a big factor in why the younger generation of men are very clearly more feminized.
Greg: Yeah that’s fascinating. So if someone’s listening to this now and they’re thinking, yeah, like I haven’t had a blood test for a while, not specifically tested this, but I wonder, I just wonder if maybe my testosterone levels are lower than they should be.
Greg: Like how would that be showing up for them? How would they, you know, what sort of things would they be experiencing?
Dave: Yeah. So for a longer response to this I’ve got a video on YouTube called the TRT Masterclass, where I kind of go through this for everyone as well as a ebook called TRT 1 0 1, which also goes through this.
[00:18:00]
Dave: So if people want to have a more in-depth answer, that’s what it would be in terms of how does it show up in the blood work, where looking at a reference range, which is already lowered. So you’ll often be within the reference range on paper, but you’ll be symptomatic and typically symptom symptomatic presentation can begin in Australia.
Dave: If you’re looking at the lab tests, which are printed in Pomo per liter, anywhere below a 300, sometimes below a 400, absolutely below a 200, this is where we see symptoms in terms of what those symptoms can be. The problem with looking at it from a face value is that. You basically have what I call feel like shit itis, which is just general malaise.
Dave: So fatigue, but also trouble sleeping. Low energy, low motivation, low mood, depression, anxiety lack of stress, resilience lack of enjoyment of exercise, erectile dysfunction, low libido.
[00:19:00]
The problem is that there’s a whole bunch of lifestyle stuff that can cause these symptoms. And there’s a whole bunch of psychological stuff.
Dave: There’s also a whole bunch of nutritional stuff, cardiometabolic, health, alcohol, consumption. All of these things can cause these symptoms. So it’s very important if someone wants to look into this, and this is the mistake that I see people making and I’m not trying to make money from my clinic. My clinic was built because this is what’s needed.
Dave: So it’s, you know, people can go to anyone who’s an expert in this, but you want to go to someone who talking about, but basically. Someone needs to kind of do the human equivalent of a mechanic popping the bonnet of the car. So if you go to a mechanic and say, oh, my car’s making this noise. He’s not gonna go, oh, that’s this.
Dave: Here’s a replacement for this. I’ll replace it. See you later. But that’s how people are looking at hormones. And I understand that because they’re not scientists and they’re not doctors, but it’s very important that you outsource this. And if we’re coming back to business, you don’t take on projects in your business that have extremely high risk, high reward that you don’t know how to do.
[00:20:00]
Dave: You outsource it. That’s common sense. So when it comes to health, it’s the same. So it’s very important the doctor does the equivalent of mechanic popping the bonnet, assessing everything because that noise over here might be coming from this being screwed up over here, which is screwed up from that thing over there.
Dave: And it’s flowing through. Human body’s the same. So comprehensive blood work of all the different markers in the body that makes sense to test in relation to how you feel. And then a full assessment of how you’re living, what you’re doing, how you’re feeling, your habits, your routines, your vices, your goals, your history.
Dave: All of these things kind of have to be taken into consideration to say, is this a primary problem that is causing other issues, or are there other issues in how you’re living or your health that are causing this, that we need to fix so that the testosterone improves? Because if your body’s pumping the brakes on something and you don’t fix why it’s pumping the brakes, you come in and pump the accelerator instead.
[00:21:00]
Dave: That’s like having something suppressing your production, and then you’re coming in and replacing it and optimizing it. That is going to lead to side effects, and that’s what happens. People feel a bit better, but then they have these problems and then they blame things like, you know, oh, I’m overproducing estrogen, or I’m overproducing prolactin.
Dave: It’s yeah, you are for a reason. And taking a pill to try to cure those symptoms rather than adjusting the root cause. Is what leads to a never ending cycle of not feeling good and being unhealthy. So it’s it’s a bit of a, it’s a bit of a process, but it’s something that you identify a need for.
Dave: You outsource it to a professional. They have your best interest at heart. They’re not just trying to put you on a program and sell you shit, and that’s how you investigate it and take care of it.
Greg: Yeah, it is fascinating ’cause just diving into some of those symptoms you mentioned there, if, you know, if I was a business owner, and I’ve been through really tough times in my business writing my book about a period where we actually went, grew a business to a, you know, really quite large and then went bust.
[00:22:00]
Greg: It was like one of the worst experiences I’ve ever faced in my life. And some of the symptoms you were talking about there not sleeping, putting on weight, maybe you know, not feeling motivated all the different things that you’ve said. I think, actually I was feeling that back then.
Greg: Was that low testosterone or is that actually just a symptom of life and business? So I guess it’s quite difficult, isn’t it, for business owners if they’re having all these symptoms, you know, they’ve gotta actually identify what is causing it. Is it business? Is it lifestyle or is it low testosterone?
Greg: So I guess the blood tests are what’s crucial there to try and actually get to the bottom of what’s going on.
Dave: Yeah. If we’re gonna use a business analogy, it would be like, let’s say you, you opened a restaurant and your waiters suck. Your chefs suck, your marketing sucks. Everything about what you’re doing sucks.
Dave: And then your business is going terribly, and you go, oh, the restaurant industry is just screwed. It’s no it’s you. But the industry also could be messed up, and that’s where you’d probably have someone come in and audit things to say, no, look, the industry doesn’t work. You suck at what you’re doing, but the industry doesn’t work.
[00:23:00]
Dave: Or, no, there’s actually nothing wrong with the industry. These other businesses are doing great. You are just inefficient and ineffective in what you’re doing with your business. And it’s very difficult to see the forest from the trees. It’s if you’re in a toxic relationship and all your friends can see it, but you can’t, you can see it once you get out of it, but not when you’re emotionally attached in there.
Dave: And it’s the same with your health. It requires someone who is compassionate and caring and sees you as a human, not just a number, but isn’t emotionally attached to you or your outcomes because. It’s science is objective. There’s an art and a science to hormone replacement therapy, but it’s something that you actually have to have someone else do purely, not just for the expertise factor.
Dave: That’s the primary thing, but also the fact that they’re not you, and that’s very important.
Greg: Thinking about symptoms and if someone wants to resolve these, they realize they’ve got.
Greg: Low testosterone levels, they’re gonna potentially do TRT, is that the magic bullet? Are they then gonna all of a sudden be this peak performer in business and in life?
[00:24:00]
You know, how does it work from that standpoint?
Dave: I wish if that was the case, my job would be so much easier. I mean, I wouldn’t even need to do this.
Dave: The coaching side wouldn’t be needed. So yeah I wish that happened and I think everyone, including myself at some point, is guilty of having that rhetoric because it’s appealing. It sounds nice. It’s not though. So when you look at hormone replacement therapy, what you are essentially doing is you are, this is great, ’cause I always use business analogies.
Dave: So it’s, if let’s say you have an assembly, let’s say like a box factory or something like that, putting boxes together, you e everyone would know in business that your output is going to be bottlenecked at your weakest link. So if you have a weak link in the bottle factory. And let’s say it’s an employee on the construction line.
Dave: Your options are to either fire them and do that job yourself. In this instance, you can’t hire someone else. You have to do it yourself, or you train them up so that they stop being a bottleneck and then everyone else has improved output as a result.
[00:25:00]
This is kind of like how hormone replacement therapy works.
Dave: So in the situation that you have to fire that person and do it yourself, you’re now in a situation where you have to be responsible for consistent, long-term administration of testosterone for the rest of your life because it shuts down your natural production and creates a biological dependence. So you are now doing that employee’s job.
Dave: Now it’s using the needles, the tiny little baby needles or a topical cream if it’s done right, but tiny little baby needle in insulin syringe that diabetic little girls do every day, just not to die. So it’s not a big deal, but it does require discipline because you do have to maintain that administration.
Dave: But now you’re in a situation where. You can actually have not just the levels that don’t make you feel terrible, but levels that are optimal. The problem with that though, and I’m gonna change the analogy now to a sports car, if you put a supercharged engine in your car and you don’t know how to drive, it’s not going to make you a better driver.
[00:26:00]
Dave: It’s going to make you a worse driver because now you can’t handle that thing going around the corner. Now, if you blame testosterone for those problems, that’s like saying, oh, a supercharged car is bad. No, it’s not bad. You just can’t drive it. It’s too powerful. So some people think that if you’re replacing your testosterone externally, that it means that you no longer have to do the health promoting factors that would optimize your levels naturally.
Dave: This sounds nice, but this is the opposite. Basically, once you start TRT, you are injecting the testosterone levels of a healthy, optimal male into your body. This means that you have to live like a healthy optimal mail one to get the results you want. And two, to be able to tolerate it because if you are unhealthy and your levels are healthy, the gap between these two things is what causes side effects via increased internal systemic inflammation.
[00:27:00]
Dave: Upregulating the expression of tase, it upregulates the expression of estrogen receptors, and well as downregulates androgen receptor expression, it upregulates a hormone called prolactin, which suppresses five alpha reductase, which reduces DHT. So ultimately what this means in layman’s terms is that the hormone doesn’t metabolize properly and it doesn’t make you feel the way that you’re hoping it will make you feel.
Dave: So when you look at how testosterone differs neurochemically from things like amphetamine or cocaine or other stimulants, it’s not an agonist or releasing agent for dopamine. It modulates the receptors and the production, the transmission. So what this means is it’s not going to make you euphoric by staring at a wall and doing nothing, but it is going to allow the things that should feel good to feel good.
Dave: And it also creates a secondary buffer against stress, via opposition of a hormone called cortisol, as well as upregulation of the gabaa receptor, which is the receptor that things like Valium and alcohol work on to create more of a resilient to stress mindset where your brain goes less into the monkey mind and you may be a bit more predisposed to being stoic in some ways.
[00:28:00]
Dave: But it’s very important that people understand that it’s not just going to turn you into a alpha disciplined, stoic, masculine man by default. It’s simply going to allow the habits that would form those values and attitudes to solidify if you actually do the work. So basically it builds the foundation of the house, but you have to build the house on top of that.
Dave: And the benefit of TRT is that if you tried to build the house before, it would crumble down ’cause the foundation was weak. But replacing the foundation doesn’t mean you don’t have to rebuild that house. It just means it’s gonna work this time so that sometimes people are sold a bit of a lie because it’s very marketable to sell someone masculinity in a shot.
Dave: But it’s very much a matter of you have to meet the medicine halfway and that’s what gets you the result that people are ultimately hoping to achieve.
[00:29:00]
So when I coach them, it’s about cool, your expectations are great, but they’re going to require work and the work will be amplified by the testosterone, but zero multiplied by any number is still zero.
Dave: And that’s the truth of it.
Greg: Hey, can I just ask a quick favor? We are constantly trying to bring on the best guests on this podcast so we can deliver as much value as possible, but the only way we can do that is if we get more subscribers, more likes, more comments, and more reviews. So subscribe to this channel and click notifications so you know, every time we’ve got a new video coming up, give us a review if you’re getting any value from it, and give us a thumbs up.
Greg: We’d really appreciate that.
Greg: Yeah, that’s interesting. I like that, that it will amplify, you know, the work you’re putting in. So if someone’s not dialed in, let’s imagine, you know, they know they’ve got some work to do with nutrition, drinking, maybe drugs, whatever it potentially is. Does that mean, does.
Greg: Wait, you know, don’t do testosterone at all until you’ve actually got life dialed in.
[00:30:00]
Or, you know, will testosterone help you get life dialed in? Is that the catalyst to get you started? What’s, because I heard a podcast before where someone said, don’t start testosterone until you’re at least below 15% body fat because of potentially negative side effects.
Greg: And when I listened to it, I thought, that’s interesting because if someone’s maybe not got the motivation to go down the gym and, you know, how are they gonna get to 15% body fat before they start? So what’s your thoughts on that? How dialed in have we gotta a be before potentially considering it?
Dave: Yeah. In general, a lot of people on YouTube have a lot of opinions about things that they’ve read, but not that they’re practiced. And this is a big problem with social media, is that reach is determined by how good your content is, not via whether it’s actually correct. Practice is very important because clinical out we’re working with humans.
Dave: This isn’t, we’re not studying theory or religion. We’re studying the practical application of science. So practical application is king.
[00:31:00]
Yeah, in a perfect world, everyone would be as close to 10% body fat, no alcohol, all clean, healthy, high protein diet, resistance training, cardiovascular exercise, sleeping eight or nine hours a night, minimal caffeine consumption.
Dave: And then I would have the easiest job in the world. It would just be taking a whole bunch of optimal cars with no engine and just plunking an engine in them and plunking an engine. Those people to work with are great. They make life super easy, and the reason why they’re also very good to work with is that they’ve built incredible resilience and discipline habits because they did all that health promoting stuff while feeling like shit.
Dave: And when you take someone who’s built discipline in adversity, it’s kinda like in Dragon Ball Z for people who’ve seen it when Goku trains with a weighted vest and then he does the fight and takes the weighted vest off and just kicks their ass, it’s like that. So those people are wonderful to work with because the main side effect they get is they start a business.
Dave: Like I often joke that starting a business is the main side effect of DRT because people have better stress, resilience. So if the discipline’s already there, great.
[00:32:00]
The real part of it though is that most humans who have had low testosterone for a long time won’t be healthy, and that’s the reality of it, because people are sentient beings who make decisions based on either impulses or willpower, depending on whether they’re at.
Dave: And people tend to do things in the short term to make them feel better that in the long term, make them feel worse. Like drugs and alcohol and junk food. So people often self-medicate these symptoms with maladaptive coping mechanisms, and that’s okay because they’re a human. But they also have to recognize that they have to put the work in to going from A to B, but you don’t instantly become a disciplined monk mode person overnight, sustainably.
Dave: So there’s a process there. So when it comes to the answering the question, it depends on the individual, and this is where everything has to be done on an individualized basis because, and this is why conversations take time, because it depends on what someone wants to do.
[00:33:00]
So if someone’s I want to go on TRT to optimize my hormone levels and my levels are low, and yes, my health isn’t perfect, but even if I get it all, perfect.
Dave: I know from experience that those levels might come up, but they’re not gonna go to optimal unless someone’s really off track. So if someone wants to do it, and I guess this is where maybe I have a controversial opinion, but I don’t care. There are so many surgeries or, I mean, you can take people who microdose ozempic now when they’re not even obese just to lose fat.
Dave: So if there’s options for that are elective surgeries, for example, let’s say like breast enlargement or those butt implants people get or whatever, like a lot of that stuff they’re putting in there is toxic and they’re doing it just because they want to feel and look good. I think that people should be able to optimize their bioidentical hormones if it will actually lead to a better quality of life.
[00:34:00]
Dave: As long as they’re making informed consent and they understand the dependency, they understand everything that comes with it, because I don’t think there is another intervention that you can do that has anywhere near the level of safety side benefits and ROI. But it does have that degree of responsibility.
Dave: So in terms of coming back to that point, the question is if someone doesn’t want to do it, and let’s say they’re like I just wanna feel better. I’ll do TRT if I need to, but my preferred outcome would to be to not need it, but have the benefits from it. That I think is, that should be at the heart of every practitioner who’s approaching a patient.
Dave: That should be the assumption, unless stated otherwise. So in those situations, it would be about making an assessment to say, firstly, is the signal luteinizing hormone suppressed? Because if it’s suppressed, that means that your body is basically taking resources and caloric energy and focusing on survival over reproduction, because reproduction comes last in the biological priority system.
[00:35:00]
Dave: For most people it’s number one, but biologically it’s last. Survival first, reproduction last, everything else in between. So if you’re unhealthy, body’s not gonna be optimizing your biology to reproduce, which is sex, which is hormone production. So in those circumstances, it’s about saying, can we actually fix the thing?
Dave: So if someone is, let’s say morbidly obese and they’ve got bad knees and they’ve got slip discs in their back, and that’s a case where someone’s going, look, this is, a lot of this is intractable and it needs to be worked with, meaning it can’t be resolved. But like I said before, if someone’s smoking 20 cigarettes a day, drinking 20 standard drinks a week, sleeping four hours a night and not exercising, and their hormone levels of crap.
Dave: Then that’s when the decision needs to be made. Look, you need to, you know, pull your finger out, see if this recovers and retest, because if someone’s that far off track, they’re gonna have side effects too. But when it’s in the middle of that, when someone’s a little bit suboptimal and they’re a little bit off, I think age is a factor.
[00:36:00]
Dave: If someone’s over 40, I mean, even if you do everything perfectly, you’re still gonna have a degree of age-related decline, even if it’s not severe. But if someone’s like 24, 25, then I think there should be more of an emphasis to at least try to recover the production. And that way you are putting the work in first to show that you’re actually serious about feeling better.
Dave: But it has to be a case by case. And that’s why it’s so important that whoever someone’s talking to isn’t just trying to sell them a product. And the problem with these clinics, and I can say this to someone who, like I said, has a lot of business background. We know that McDonald’s makes their profit on the fries and the coke.
Dave: The burgers are just a just under break even, basically. So for a clinic, it’s much more efficient to have a hundred people on three medications than 300 people on one medication. Much higher profit margin, much less overheads, much less headache.
[00:37:00]
So clinics, a lot of the time, if they’re not ethically minded and actually want to help people, they’ll just basically give everyone who has a qualifying level of testosterone, the burger fries, and the coke, which is typically the testosterone, the HCG and the estrogen blocker.
Dave: And even if you have side effects, even if it’s not in your best interest, even if those levels could be recovered, they’ll go, yep, we can legally do this. Let’s gonna make a sale. We’re gonna get, you know, three times the profit reoccurring income because they’re now dependent. And that is unfortunately a lot of the treatment that people get.
Dave: So if you’re in a situation like that, you need to sit down with someone who can actually go through your staff and advocate for your best interest. And sometimes people need to push towards TRT. Sometimes people need to push away.
Greg: Yeah, no that’s really balanced advise there, Dave. Thanks for that.
Greg: So I just wanted to come back to something you said there, one of the side effects of potentially someone having their hormones optimized as they go out and they wanna start a business. I just wanted to dive into the psychology of that, because why do you think, why do you think that is? What, what’s you mentioned a bit more stress resilient.
[00:38:00]
Greg: But I’m thinking about when I was sort of 20 and, you know, my testosterone is probably through the roof. I was, you know, definitely a risk taker. I felt invincible. And, you know, is it that you’re getting those feelings again? You know, as a maybe as a 40-year-old man that’s doing it?
Greg: Is that how you’re gonna feel? That you can take on the world and, you know, you’re a risk taker and what is actually happening in, in the brain?
Dave: There’s a lot of biochemical stuff happening at a neurotransmitter level. What to me is still unclear because it hasn’t been studied properly, is whether androgen receptors themselves.
Dave: Psychoactive effects. And I believe that they do. And I also believe things like HCG have a psychoactive effect in terms of being feminizing. So I think there’s a, it’s a combination of a lot of things. It’s kinda like a pie graph, and I couldn’t tell you which one is the dominant slice of the pie, but it’s, everything is involved in some way, shape, or form.
Dave: And I think more so for some than others. But for me personally, I was always very strongly minded regarding critical thinking.
[00:39:00]
And I was very blessed that the last, the, sorry, the first year I did at Curtin University, which was in 2010, 2010, was the last year that they made all the first years to a critical thinking unit where they’d come in and bring someone in who was an expert on.
Dave: Nine 11 euthanasia, abortion, you know, just controversial topics. And they would just present both sides of it and just make you think about it. And then you basically had to identify a belief that you had, and then you had to write a counter argument to it. And that was like the essay. And it was a fluff unit, but it was, I loved that unit because it, I was, I grew up in, in punk rock and I went to a very military boys school.
Dave: And I didn’t like any of the rules. I’d say, look why should I go to a 10 week class at school when we’re just covering two chapters from a textbook that I can read an ACE exam the day before? I’m like, this is just, this is not smart. So I always kind of had that mindset at first. And I very strongly remember when I was working for myself, agency side, and then I had the brain injury.
[00:40:00]
Dave: One of the downsides was that you don’t get sick leave. You know, there’s no, like, when you’re working for yourself, you know, I had to close my business down. End all my contracts and moved back in with my mom. And I was lucky I could do that. But at that point, when I still had low testosterone and wasn’t doing well, my knee jerk response was, I want to go back to working for someone else so that I have security.
Dave: And then once I’d done rehabilitation and I was working, you know, three days a week for a non-for-profit, and then four days a week and kind of, you know, built my way back up just from, you know, very basic digital marketing stuff, I immediately had that drive again to say I’m comfortable with a degree of risk when there is a greater chance of reward.
Dave: And I can’t say that was purely just a neurochemical thing because I’d gone through a lot of stress adaptation as well. But when we look at it from a neurological standpoint, there’s this interaction between what testosterone does and what dihydro testosterone does.
[00:41:00]
And dihydro testosterone is you can think of it like Superman, testosterone, it’s.
Dave: The androgenic component. So when testosterone activates a receptor, it’s primarily anabolic, which is to build and protect. When it comes to androgenic, these are things like masculinizing features. So when you look at what DHT does in terms of its metabolites, it basically has a similar biological effect to the pathway mediated by Valium or benzodiazepines, which is it upregulates the gabaa receptor.
Dave: So when you combine that with something that itself, and also testosterone is increasing the transmission of dopamine. This is basically the hormone equivalent of a Yager bomb, which is how I describe it, because people know what a Yager bomb is. So the idea of a Yager bomb, if you’re going out and maybe chatting some girls, is it’s gonna pick you up, but also have a bit of that social lubrication so that you are kind of more upbeat, more vibrant.
[00:42:00]
Dave: You’ve got the sugar, the alcohol, and that. I don’t recommend people do this, but as a recreational drug, it’s horrible for you. But sugar, caffeine, alcohol creates that balanced effect from a neutropic standpoint for biohackers. It’s why they combine caffeine and theanine, which is what you get from green tea.
Dave: You get that more balanced, cool, calm and collected effect from the stimulant. So I think entrepreneurship, and I listen to a lot of people talk about entrepreneurship as a concept, ’cause I’ve been doing it for a long time and I think it’s interesting. But the core foundation, I think of entrepreneurship is leadership.
Dave: And I think a core foundation to masculinity is leadership. If you say, what is leadership? Leadership is the capacity to handle stress. And when you’re looking at how these hormones work via multiple pathways, not only do they increase your stress resilience and reduce this chaotic overthinking monkey mind tendency, but you’re also at the same time getting a greater reward from things that are challenging.
[00:43:00]
Dave: So if you if to, to oversimplify it, if someone’s low testosterone and they wanna push outside their comfort zone incrementally, they’re going to have a higher perceived stress and a lower perceived reward because they’re lacking the thing that buffers against the stress. And then they’re lacking the thing that makes the thing that makes the motivation feel good.
Dave: But when testosterone and DHT are optimal, now you’re in a situation where the stress response is still there, but it’s buffered the way that I would argue it always should have been. And then the ability for the brain to produce the chemicals that make you feel a reward are upregulated. So this is going to condition behavior towards pushing outside the comfort zone, especially if there’s a reward for doing so.
Dave: Whereas this balance is more going to trigger avoidant behavior because, you know, it’s just too much effort, it’s too much risk, it’s too much work. I’m just gonna stay inside and do the things that replicate going out in the world, which would be seen as traditionally masculine, which is warrior mentality, and sex, which is video games and porn.
[00:44:00]
Dave: So people choose those options because they’re replicating the thing that they have this drive for, but it’s a much safer, less vulnerable environment to express that urge. So I think one of the reasons why people end up starting a business is, and the other thing that’s the third one as well, sorry, is that testosterone is the only molecule that’s been studied that reduces operant conditioning.
Dave: Meaning reduces the ability for someone to be conditioned or trained by either a reward or punishment to do a certain outcome. Whereas other psychiatric medication, virtually all of them increase upper end conditioning. So I don’t think it’s a coincidence why testosterone is so difficult to get and so stigmatized.
Dave: But I think if you take a molecule that makes people more inclined to think critically and less inclined to follow the rules and increases their stress resilience, and then you combine that with the current state of the economy where it’s basically impossible for most people to actually live a happy, healthy, thriving life unless they are upper level management of a company or an entrepreneur.
[00:45:00]
Dave: I think that if you combine those factors, you take that biochemical principle, you take the behavioral principle, and then you take an environment and you mix that all together, you’re going to see a lot of guys starting their own business.
Greg: That’s, yeah, that’s really fascinating. I mean, I’ve coached a lot of people in business and just thinking about that stress resilience is probably one of the key factors of being able to predict how successful someone’s gonna be.
Greg: Actually, you know, it’s amazing how you can get some people to get stressed out over the smallest things and you realize how are you gonna scale a multimillion pound or dollar business if you have no stress resilience? And I think when you look at some of the most successful people out there in business you know, all the Elon Musks and whatever else you think the stress they must have to deal with day by day, but they seem to be able to cope with that.
Greg: So yeah, I think stress resilience is quite interesting. They’ve really thought about that term as being, you know, a key link to success in business.
[00:46:00]
I can definitely see that link. Yeah, high, really interesting
Dave: that that to me is a very key point. Just, sorry, go carry on. Yeah. That to me is a very.
Dave: Critical point in my coaching as well, because I see a lot of people tending towards basically like neurosis and neuroticism where they’ll become, I guess what in Australia would call Snowflake syndrome. But people can become so hyper stressed and completely sympathetically activated, so physically stressed from small, tiny variables that aren’t perfect in their life.
Dave: And what I try to condition them away from is saying, if you can’t handle this, you are not going to be able to handle what the future holds because this is nothing. And I have found that the most anxious and stressed people have objectively the least stuff to be anxious and stressed about.
[00:47:00]
And it can be very challenging for them to overcome that and see that they’re getting in the way of a huge trajectory opportunity in their life, which is why I often encourage people to practice martial arts and.
Dave: If I look at all the things I’ve done for my mental health and resilience in my business, going into, you know, Vilnius and doing a Moay HAI session, you know, once a week, not even sparring, just on the pads, just to simulate violence and stress and being in control of being on the object, oh, sorry, on the offensive, and doing it in an intense way.
Dave: I mean, if people are getting stressed out by little things, go and have someone simulate, you know, fighting you and being on the receiving end of violence in a safe way, and then you’ll come home and all of those other things that were stressing you out just seem like nothing in comparison to that. So I think if you push outside your comfort zone in other things, and you do it strategically with the saying of, I’m going to do this so that I am the person who is conditioned by this, and my life is going to be better as a result, that makes such a huge difference.
[00:48:00]
Dave: So I think stress resiliency can be trained. And I think people who struggle with anxiety aren’t actually any more anxious than people who don’t struggle with anxiety. I think a lot of people have similar levels of anxiety. It’s just how well some people handle and manage it.
Greg: And talking about stress being trained, I, I know you, you mentioned you did mindfulness, didn’t you, early on in your career, and I’ve heard you speak about that before on podcasts.
Greg: So how important do you think that is as a business owner to potentially, you know, just take some time out and learn how to control your brain a little bit?
Dave: I think it’s something that is extremely high, ROI, it’s just that the consequences of not doing it often get overlooked because you only know what you know.
Dave: It’s kinda if you drank a beer every night and then never stopped drinking a beer every night till you died, you wouldn’t have known how much better you’d felt if you never drank a beer. So I think the benefits of mindfulness are often overlooked because people don’t do it for long enough to actually see what kind of benefit it would have.
[00:49:00]
Dave: The organization that I used to work at was based on secular mindfulness training, so non-religious, non-spiritual. And it was based on interventional trials where they would scan the brain and they would see the physical changes in the different parts of the brain to actually prove that eight weeks of mindfulness daily in children actually increase the size of the prefrontal cortex and reduce the size of the amygdala.
Dave: So the prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive control focus impulse control a lot of the things that are based on high level human functions. Whereas the amygdala is like the alarm bell for stress that activates the limbic system, which is emotional, as well as sending a signal to your adrenals to push out cortisol and adrenaline.
Dave: So in eight weeks of consistent daily training, the alarm bell got smaller and the focus part got bigger. Like you could see it in an image. So this stuff is not woowoo, spiritual mumbo jumbo crap. It can be. But the practice of mindfulness itself is an evidence-based free form of brain training that literally involves you sitting down and doing nothing.
[00:50:00]
Dave: But the barrier to entry is that it’s boring, and that’s the point, is that it’s meant to be uncomfortably under stimulating so that you can retrain your attention span. Because the average human has a lower attention span than a goldfish. That’s now true. And that was from the advent of the smartphone.
Dave: So I think a lot of people aren’t realizing how much they struggle to focus because their brain is used to being hyper bombarded with stimuli that’s designed to capture your attention. So mindfulness is simply a practice. Of essentially going to the gym for your brain to learn the skill of attention and focus so that you can choose what you wanna focus on, which means that you can exert willpower, which is very important because reacting emotionally doesn’t help anything, especially business making shitty businesses.
Dave: Most decisions I see people make that are hugely detrimental in their lives in any way. Emotional decisions that they haven’t thought through was just a reaction.
[00:51:00]
And learning to separate from your emotions. Learning to separate how you feel from what you do is ultimately the skill that you need to have in order to do what you need to do, not what you want to do, which is what allows you to prolong gratification and reach long-term goals, which is inevitably important.
Dave: If you wanna build anything in life that’s worth having. So the idea of mindfulness that sometimes people get discouraged by is that you sit down and you find something through an app like Headspace to hold your attention in the present moment, and then you get distracted and you go, oh I’m, I suck at meditation.
Dave: It’s if you’ve never ridden a bike and you fall off, of course you suck at riding a bike. You don’t have a skill that you’ve never practiced, so you’re supposed to suck at it. But if you’ve never done cardio and you get on a cardio machine, you get out of breath in two minutes. That means you need the cardio.
Dave: It doesn’t mean that it’s not for you. It’s if you’re stretching and you’re really tight, you’re not gonna go, oh, stretching’s not for me. You go, oh, I really need to stretch. Mindfulness is the same. So if you can’t focus, it means you need to work on it.
[00:52:00]
So the analogy I use is if you go to the gym and you’re doing bicep curls, if you pick up the weight to the top of the range of the motion, you’re not a failure by putting it down.
Dave: That’s the point, because putting it down gives you the opportunity to pick it back up again and do the contraction. That’s the exercise. Unless you’re people wanna be argumentative and talk about static holds, you don’t go into the gym and just hold the weight at the top to 20 minutes and then leave.
Dave: That’s not more successful than doing the reps. So the point of meditation is to get distracted, realize you’re being distracted, and then come back to the present moment. That’s the exercise. Over time, you get better at holding the present moment for longer and coming back quicker. But originally the skill that you’re learning, you, this is you know, you’ve gotta walk before you run.
Dave: It’s basically the repetitions of how many times can you come back to the present moment over that period, and then you can apply that skill in day-to-day life. So meditations like going to the gym, mindfulness is like carrying all the shopping bags inside.
[00:53:00]
So in one trip. So if we’re looking at the benefits of mindfulness it’s sitting down at your computer for your business, or, sorry.
Dave: Your alarm goes off in the morning and you want to hit snooze, but you get up anyway because you wanna keep your word to yourself and you wanna do the things that, that will involve. You know that if you hit snooze, you’re gonna feel behind the eight ball all day. And you can say the discomfort of getting up now is less than the discomfort of putting it off.
Dave: But that requires mindfulness to be able to hijack that thought response and not just react. Same with your business. If I sit down, I’ve got a whole bunch of tasks today that I enjoy and a whole bunch of tasks that I don’t. So the way that I apply it is I do all the ones I don’t wanna do first, rather than put them off to the end of the day and then I put them off to tomorrow and blah, blah, blah.
Dave: And it’s also about having positive interactions with someone, you know, if it, you don’t want to take out your shitty day on your wife or your kids. That’s not what emotionally mature adults do, and it’s not acceptable. And if you know someone’s coming to you from a place of being, you know, upset or hurt, you can more quickly practice the skill of empathy and put yourself in their shoes so that you can hear where they’re coming from.
[00:54:00]
Dave: There are so many higher quality interactions that you can have in life. And one of the big takeaways for me is that every time I sit down and have coffee with my wife or go for a walk with my wife and my dog outside, or you know, we sit down and have dinner, I make sure to take like a mental snapshot of those moments because those are all the moments that people miss out on when they look back at the highlight reel of their life.
Dave: They didn’t take the time to sniff the flowers and be grateful for the little things. They’re just looking forward to the next shiny thing. So I think that’s also really important for quality of life. So I think it’s. There’s a clip I did a long time ago where I said that the 10 minutes you spend meditating is the most productive ROI you’ll get from 10 minutes that you can do for anything else.
Dave: And I stand by that. And mindfulness is about frequencies. So it’s about disrupting the default mode network as often as possible. So it’s better to do lots of short sessions, ideally every day then do you know, one long session a week or something like that I recommend people check out The Headspace app, I think is the best.
[00:55:00]
Greg: That’s fascinating. Yeah. Thanks for running through that, Dave. So I appreciate all your time on the podcast today. Obviously we’ve covered a ton of stuff here, which is really interesting. I could keep you here all day asking you questions, but maybe just some passing words of advice. If you’ve, if there’s a business owner listening to this now who maybe doesn’t quite feel they’re performing at their peak maybe they feel that their business isn’t quite going the way they want it to, they feel they’re maybe destined for a little bit more from where they’re at in life.
Greg: What sort of advice would you give someone like that?
Dave: Outside of all the stuff that we’ve already spoken about, so usually it would be something around, you know, looking at all the health systems and the complex labs and stuff like that. But assuming that we’re at the end of the discussion and that’s all being covered off there’s a process that, again, it’s a business term, so I’m just gonna find an excuse to use this.
Dave: But if people aren’t familiar with reverse engineering. It would be much easier to build a car if you could take an existing car and deconstruct it than just start from nothing and go, I’m going to build a car.
[00:56:00]
You know, back when we were doing Facebook funnels for retargeting, it was much more efficient to take a campaign that worked and then tear it down and see how it worked so that we could kind of replicate that for something else.
Dave: So reverse engineering is a very effective way to solve a problem is rather than start at step one, is work back from step a hundred, because that can often be clearer than the first step. So I would encourage everyone to like, without again, sending too esoteric. But because this idea of manifestation is bullshit, but manifestation can be a good goal setting tool if it’s applied.
Dave: So applied manifestation is a good idea. So I encourage everyone to visualize who the best version of themself would be. Every aspect of that person. So what they would do, how they would look, how their bedroom would be set up, what their daily routine would look like, what their diet would look like, what their mannerisms would look like, all of these different things.
[00:57:00]
Dave: And then start to work out how you could be more like that person and less like the version of yourself now that you recognize that you don’t like and needs change. So whether that’s going, okay, I’m gonna start by having a set bedtime every night and the set wake up time every night. Or I’m going to, you know, clean up my diet and cook all my own meals because that version of myself would really care about the nutrition and take care of all of those aspects, and I want to be like that.
Dave: So finding small things that you can kind of progressively overload and rather than pushing all the way outside your comfort zone is just layering small wins on top and getting some momentum. The thing that I’ve learned from, and this is not a fluff exaggerated number, working personally with more than 5,000 guys now.
Dave: On the Holistic Act aspect of getting to where they need to be in conjunction with TRT is that it’s the daily habits over time that are make or break. And if I look at someone’s habits, I can tell you what their blood work is.
[00:58:00]
If I look at someone’s blood work, I can tell you what their habits are. And these small things.
Dave: When I first started in the industry, I didn’t talk about as much because this isn’t the stuff that’s in studies. This is the stuff that you see from doing this day in, day out, but there’s nothing to sell. So people don’t talk about it. ’cause I can’t put an affiliate code on habits. But I think most people know what they should be doing that they’re not doing.
Dave: And most people know what they’re not doing that they should be doing. And if you fix that equation, you don’t have to hire anyone. You can just start by doing that. You don’t have to understand exactly how X is connected to Y, but if you understand that you don’t like Y and X is wrong, then you can just fix that and see if that resolves.
Dave: And then you can investigate comprehensively if you feel like everything’s in alignment because maybe someone needs to come along and go, Hey, five or six standard drinks a week is not acceptable. If you wanna feel good and you can go, oh, okay, I didn’t realize that was a big deal. I thought that number was okay.
[00:59:00]
Dave: So there can be things like that. But that’s the number one thing. And then also the way that your subjective consciousness works, how you feel, how you think, how you experience life is has direct feedback with your body. So if your back and muscles are tight, you are not going to mentally feel good.
Dave: That will down regulate all the motivation and pleasure pathways in the brain. It will upregulate inflammatory. Pathways and you will subjectively experience that. So the stuff to focus on is walk your 10,000 steps every day, like you have to move, you have to do some form of cardio training, some form of resistance training.
Dave: Eat food that you cook yourself. If you don’t have time to cook, get a meal prep service. Find a local one that’s good. Get your meals delivered, hire a chef. Or if you have time, cook, it has to be one of those three. So nutrition’s really important. If people want a nutrition framework to check out my friend Mike Dolce.
[01:00:00]
Dave: He’s correct about everything when it comes to nutrition. And understand that if you don’t look after yourself, you won’t feel good. And just because a fictional character gets away with it in a movie, it doesn’t mean it’s real. If you want to feel like Bruce Wayne or if you want to feel like Harvey Specter don’t live like the characters, they play live like the actors who played the role.
Dave: Then you’ll see there’s a big difference there. So you have to look after yourself very well. And if you want to be an entrepreneur and you want to be fit and healthy, that takes a shit ton of dedication because entrepreneurship is stressful. Being able to handle the stress, it’s difficult, and being able to not succumb to vice and short-term problems, to ultimately optimize yourself and your output in every aspect, it’s a lot of work.
Dave: So make sure that things that you’re doing are correct and yeah, that. But my best advice to people is invest. As soon as you work this stuff out, start investing in looking after your health. It doesn’t mean a bunch of expensive supplements and bullshit biohacker, gizmos and stuff just means sleep well, you know, if you wanna spend money on stuff, upgrade your sleeping environment, get an air conditioner, like that’s a good use of money for sleeping in Australia.
[01:01:00]
Dave: Sleep, hydration, no alcohol, good nutrition and exercise. Those things consistently scaled over time is the main thing that gives an ROI. And if anything is wrong with all of that stuff in place and you don’t feel a hundred percent, you get a comprehensive blood test to see if something’s off and something needs fixing.
Dave: But that comprehensive blood work will look crappy if those habits are out of alignment. So fix the habits, see if that makes you feel better, get comprehensive blood work done. And then from a mental standpoint, the biggest thing that comes to success that I’ve seen is keep your word to yourself. It’s very easy to keep your word to other people, but if you don’t keep your word to yourself and you don’t trust your own thoughts and you, then you are not going to have any self-esteem and confidence, and then that’s gonna translate through into everything.
[01:02:00]
Dave: So if you say you’re going to cook your own food, don’t. Go back on that. Don’t go back on your word to yourself. If you say you’re gonna get up at 6:00 AM get up. If you’re not gonna get up at 6:00 AM don’t say that you will and hit snooze. I think that keeping your word to yourself is incredibly important for pride.
Dave: And pride is very important for healthy pride, for self-confidence. And self-confidence is extremely important for having healthy relationships and healthy success in everything that you do. So all of those factors go together, but ultimately I think if you want to be successful in business, you have to have a good, healthy foundation for your body.
Dave: Otherwise, it’s not gonna work long term.
Greg: I think that’s absolutely awesome advice there, Dave. I’ve really appreciate that in a really nice way to just end that podcast. So Dave, if anyone wants to learn a little bit more about you, maybe wants to look into TRT and be a bit more educated about that subject where would they go?
Dave: Yeah, so if you just search Dave Lee, TRT on YouTube, that’s, I’ve got hundreds of videos across a whole bunch of different channels. I’ve just started doing my own YouTube channel, but I’ve been on a lot of podcasts. All over. I would really recommend if people wanna learn about this stuff, checking out my TRT speech from the Silverback Summit last year, which was the keynote that’s on my YouTube channel.
[01:03:00]
Dave: I’ve got three very affordable eBooks where I’ve put all my intellectual property in. So TRT 1 0 1 is an instruction manual. TRT 1 0 2 is a myth and troubleshooting guide, and, sorry, TRT 1 0 2 is philosophy and then beyond TRT is the troubleshooting guide. I have them very beautifully formatted and very easy for people to understand, and I basically give away hundreds of dollars worth of information for 30 Australian dollars because I want people to have it.
Dave: I also have an Instagram, I’m Dave Lee, which is where I post a lot of content, but most of my content now is posted in my school group, which is $19 a month. And it gives people what I think is the best of value possible for a group. Which is, I do two q and as a week, but you can submit your questions in advance and then I record a long video response to each question I get asked.
Dave: So that’s how I can provide the most value for people possible who don’t need to do a consult with me.
[01:04:00]
And then if anyone wants to work with me, 1 0 1, private, 1 0 1, sorry, privately, I do have a little bit of a wait list, but there are consultations available on my site where we can unpack and go through everything and work out what you need.
Dave: And then if anything needs to be prescribed in Europe or I’ve also got a partner in the UK who can also facilitate prescriptions and management the US or Australia, then we can also facilitate your treatment through that. So I have consulting, I have eBooks, and I have the TRT Academy, but I try to put as much high value content on YouTube as possible.
Dave: So TRT Masterclass is a good place to start.
Greg: That’s awesome. Dave, thanks again for all your time today. I really appreciate it. That’s gonna be certainly a useful episode for all our listeners, so thanks again.
Dave: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, and thank you for all the preparation you put in. I was very impressed with the notes you sent over.