Editor’s Notes: Join Steven Bartlett on The Diary Of A CEO as he sits down with peptide expert Dr. Alex Tatem to demystify the science behind one of the most explosive trends in health and longevity. Dr. Tatem explores the revolutionary potential of peptides for torching belly fat, accelerating injury recovery, and reversing signs of aging, while addressing the controversial role of Big Pharma in their regulation. Beyond the technical benefits, this episode offers a heartfelt look into Dr. Tatem’s personal journey from surgical burnout to becoming a leading advocate for accessible, personalized medicine. It is an essential watch for anyone interested in the future of metabolic health and human optimization. (April 20, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction to Peptides
STEVEN BARTLETT: Dr. Alex Tatem. There’s this word that has exploded in society in recent times. In fact, when I look at the data, people searching this word has increased by 400% just recently. And that word is peptides. I have no idea what peptides are. I’m someone that wants to be healthy, that wants to optimise my health, wants to live long, doesn’t love ageing.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And I’m told that this word peptides is somewhat linked to it. So I’ve brought you here because you’re an expert on the subject matter. I’ve watched your videos on YouTube. To start at the very beginning, Dr. Alex. What the hell is a peptide?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Peptides are a structural class of medications. The best way to think about peptides is that just like we have small molecules, which are drugs that are very small, taken in a pill, and have a wide-ranging effect throughout the body, peptides are derived from little pieces of amino acids, which — think of them as the Legos that make up the human body, the Legos that make up proteins.
These are fragments of proteins that are designed to specifically target certain receptors and affect cells in a very targeted fashion. Or a best way to think about it is a very specific targeted key to unlock a very specific lock. So instead of a small molecule that may have a wide-ranging effect throughout the body, peptides are much, much more focused.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’ve got different types of Lego cubes here. Would they be different types of peptides, or are they different types of amino acids that come together to make a peptide?
DR. ALEX TATEM: The best way to think about it is — my son loves Legos, which is why I’m glad that we have these here. But he can take the same set of Legos and he can build a rocket ship. And then just a few minutes later, he can build a pirate ship. And then he builds a race car. And he’s using the same Legos, but he’s creating very, very different things that all do very, very different things.
And so peptides have become incredibly popular because yes, we have some really fascinating peptides that can help with anti-aging, with healing, and with tissue repair. We’re going to talk about some of those hopefully. But they can do so much more. More than that. The first peptide that was actually isolated and used in medicine was insulin back in 1921. And then all the way in 1985, in the world of urology, which is where I was trained, we had Luprolide, which is a different peptide that again also had peptide-like insulin, but instead of having wide-ranging metabolic effects, it had an endocrine effect. It was designed to shut down the production of testosterone for prostate cancer patients that needed to have their testosterone taken away.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting. Okay, so insulin’s a peptide.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Insulin’s a peptide.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because it’s a series of amino acids.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Amino acids that are put together.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so you said that the combination of amino acids forms a key. So what is the lock?
DR. ALEX TATEM: The lock could be a cellular receptor. It could actually be regulating a certain pathway within the cell.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so let me repeat this back to you to make sure I understand it. So peptides are like a key, which you can make by configuring amino acids in a certain way. And there’s different locks in our body that these keys can go into. So if I take — we’ve got some peptides on the table in front of us here.
BPC-157: The Healing Peptide
DR. ALEX TATEM: So a good way to think about it is this: if you’ve got a hammer, right, which is what a lot of small molecules are — like you can do a lot with that, right? Like you could hammer in a nail. But if you try to use that hammer when you’re trying to put in a screw or you’re trying to put together a table that you got from IKEA, it may not always end the way that you want to.
And that’s the problem that we have with a lot of small molecules. It’s not that they don’t do what we want them to, they do a lot of other things while they’re at that job that can have significant negative side effects, which is why a lot of these small molecules actually don’t make it all the way through the FDA approval process, because we find something, it does what we want to do, but it has significant safety concerns down the line.
Now what we see with peptides — for example, I’ve got in my hand right now a little vial labeled BPC-157. This is probably one of the most popular peptides that we’re talking about right now because BPC-157 is a synthetic version of a naturally found peptide in the gut. But what this actually does is it enhances blood vessel growth in areas of injury.
And it kind of makes sense because if you think about it, our gut, our stomach, is really just this bag of acid that sits inside of our abdomen.
For example, they have completely transected the Achilles tendon in rats — transected, so they’ve cut across the Achilles tendon. So not just a small injury that you or I might experience in the gym where we pull it or strain it, but actually surgically cut the Achilles tendon. And then they administer it to rats and they are healing spontaneously with administration of BPC-157. If you have an Achilles tendon injury and you’re a rat, BPC-157 is one of the best things that you can ever have.
Now, that is not a one-to-one translation to what we might see in humans. But as we talked about earlier with our point on safety, when they were studying BPC-157, we try to look for something called the LD1 or the LD50. How much can I give this to someone until 50% of the population that receives that dose doesn’t do well or dies. That’s called the LD50 dose. We have yet to figure out what the LD1 dose is for this, which is the amount that it would take to hurt even 1% of the population, because it is so incredibly well tolerated.
So just giving you an example — this is a compound that can have profound healing effects, at least in our animal models that we’ve seen so far. But so far we haven’t seen any precipitous negative effects in human patients when taking this. But we need more data.
Why Peptides Have Exploded in Popularity
STEVEN BARTLETT: I am mind-blown and I’m very, very excited. We’ve got all the several peptides here in front of us. I want to go through all of that and understand which ones do which things. But there’s a bigger question here.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Which is why now? Why have the subject of peptides suddenly exploded into society’s consciousness? What’s going on? What’s the big picture?
DR. ALEX TATEM: So this is really interesting. In 2013, there was actually a court case in the United States. It was called the Myriad Genetics case. This was the company that actually patented the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. They discovered the genes that cause breast cancer. This was mind-blowing. They identified the specific genes that would predispose patients to developing both breast, ovarian, and since we’ve learned, also prostate cancer.
It was a fantastic discovery, but they patented it, and they said, “We now own this intellectual property.” And then everyone else said, “No, no, no, that’s the human body. You can’t patent that.” And the Supreme Court actually sided with that argument, saying that if something is natural, it’s found within us, I can’t patent your muscle cells, right? Which is a wonderful thing.
But the unintentional byproduct of that is all of a sudden pharma had no incentive whatsoever to pursue really promising compounds that they could not monetize. So that happens in 2013. At the same time, around 2012, 2013, there was a terrible event that happened in New England where there was a compounding pharmacy that was not doing the right thing, and they ended up having a bunch of contaminated specimens that caused a fungal meningitis. A bunch of patients got really sick. It was a huge scandal.
And all of a sudden, the FDA stepped in and said, “Hey, historically, states have been allowed to regulate compounding pharmacies themselves, but we need some federal oversight here because this is not acceptable.” And they introduced a new set of regulations on top of compounding pharmacies, basically saying what you can and cannot make. And what they eventually said is, you can only make three things. You can make things that are in the USP, United States Pharmacopeia — things that have been well described, already published, things that are already in drugs that are already on the market — or three, things that are on a very specific list that we’re going to give you. And in that list, they actually included a lot of these very promising compounds that were stuck in drug development limbo.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And you say compounding pharmacies. You said that a few times. What is a compounding pharmacy, just so I’m clear on the definition?
What Is a Compounding Pharmacy?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Back in the 1800s or early 1900s, if you ever needed a medication, you’d go see the pharmacist who had a shop down the road, and he would actually make your medication in front of you, and he would do that custom for every single patient that came by. And it was only since the advent of modern factories that we had the modern pharmaceutical industry come about.
But the truth is, that’s kind of paint-by-numbers. You’re creating this one pill and it always seemed kind of crazy that the adult dose is one standardized dose for all adults. If you look at what your body composition is versus some of my patients, why is the dose in your blood pressure medicine the exact same? That doesn’t seem to be quite right, but it is what it is.
So when patients fall outside of that and they need custom medication, we still have those people who make custom formulations of medications. But instead of it being just your local pharmacist who’s using a mortar and pestle and is creating something in his back office, these are now large, sophisticated industrial operations that can make custom formulations for patients.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think the important context for people that don’t understand how drug development occurs is that to get chemicals like the ones we have in front of us on the table through FDA approval, you’ve got to spend millions and millions and millions of dollars.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah, an incredible amount of money.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And if you know you can’t protect it once you spend $100 million, you have no incentive to just do charity work.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Absolutely not. Because you have shareholders and you have to make payroll. And so because drug development is so expensive, there is no incentive for commercial pharmaceutical companies to pursue the development of these compounds. And then on the other side of that, we have compounding pharmacies that, for them it makes sense. What if we could just make these compounds and then sell them directly to patients? We make a small margin when we sell it. This makes sense for us. Well, they could do that starting in about 2014, whenever that legislation finished.
The FDA’s Regulatory Shift and the Banning of Peptides
STEVEN BARTLETT: What did it do?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Essentially what it did is it gave an assignment to each one of these compounds. It was either going to be category 1, which is you can compound this, this is on our specific list of approved compoundable drug ingredients. Number 2 was, hey, we see some negative safety signals here, you cannot make this. Something goes in category 2, it’s forbidden. And then we have category 3, which is we just need more information.
And all of these original compounds, these peptides that we’re so interested in now, were originally on that first list, category 1. And so they were able to be compounded. We could prescribe them to patients. I prescribed them to patients from 2014 onward. But then in 2023, the FDA at that time switched all of those peptides — 19 of them that were popular — to category 2, and then they were banned overnight. We got notifications in our email inboxes from our compounding pharmacy partners saying, “Hey, we can’t make this anymore. We’re sorry.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’ve got two questions there. The first is — when you were prescribing these peptides to your patients, were you seeing incredible results?
The Ban on Peptides and the Fight for Access
DR. ALEX TATEM: Very much so. Very much. Again, you have to use the right key for the right lock. But I think a really good example. So there is a compound that is not technically a peptide. It is a small molecule, but it was lumped in with all of these and was the victim of the same process. Something called MK-677, also known as ibutamoren.
So this is a small molecule, but when a patient takes it, it’s orally available, it binds to this receptor called ghrelin, and it actually stimulates the release of significant growth hormone. But what was really interesting is that it would actually stimulate hunger a profound amount. And all of a sudden, patients that were struggling with cachexia — so being very, very thin, very malnourished, maybe they’re going through cancer treatment.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Ghrelin’s the thing that makes us feel hungry.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Absolutely.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah. So they were able to stimulate the hunger response and patients were actually able to eat more to meet caloric goals. And so this was a medication that was fantastically effective at that. Again, it had gone through some clinical trials but was never taken all the way to commercial, and so it was never going to be available from CVS or Walgreens, but you could get it from a compounding pharmacy. And so that was one that made a big difference for us.
We also had other peptides, so GHRP-2 and GHRP-6 were some of the ones we were using at that time. Those are growth hormone-releasing peptides that stimulate the release of your body’s natural growth hormone, which can help with tissue repair. It can also help with fat loss and with building muscle. We also had BPC-157, and we had derivatives like thymosin beta-4. These are also compounds that can help stimulate angiogenesis, so making new blood vessels, and tissue repair. So if we have a patient that’s injured themselves, maybe we could help them get back at life faster.
These were all things that were used very commonplace for many years, and truthfully, they weren’t super popular at the time. We were just using them, and then they were banned overnight.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And they were working.
DR. ALEX TATEM: And they were working, and we were not seeing adverse events, which is the most important thing.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s an adverse event?
DR. ALEX TATEM: An adverse event is a patient has a terrible side effect. They call you, they have an allergic reaction to something. They call, they’ve got shortness of breath, and it’s a direct result of the medication that you gave them. It was working, and by all accounts seemed to be incredibly safe.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And then they banned it.
DR. ALEX TATEM: And then they banned it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?
DR. ALEX TATEM: That’s a great question. So officially what happened is there was a meeting where they brought together the experts at the time and they said there is insufficient data for us to say that these are safe, because again, they had not gone through the full FDA approval process. And so as a result of lacking that data, we’re going to say that they’re too dangerous. Now there wasn’t any evidence of any of that in the population. These were widely used at the time.
Potentially we had commercial pharmaceutical companies saying, “Well, hey, this is people spending money on a compound on something that isn’t coming to us. So hey, we love medicine, but maybe only when it’s our medicine.” And so there’s concern that that was at play as well. And so there is not a great paper trail and there’s not a great explanation why. And that’s something that’s been iterated by our current administration from RFK himself. He himself has characterized that move done in 2023 as being illegal.
Big Pharma and the Suppression of Peptides
STEVEN BARTLETT: With everything you know about the medical industry, do you think it is plausible that Big Pharma—
DR. ALEX TATEM: 110%.
STEVEN BARTLETT: —didn’t want—
DR. ALEX TATEM: 110%.
STEVEN BARTLETT: —these in the hands of regular people because they can’t patent this and it’s powerful?
DR. ALEX TATEM: So ultimately, the way to think about it is this. Pharma may not have a compound that directly competes for BPC-157.
STEVEN BARTLETT: BPC-157.
DR. ALEX TATEM: So this is the medication or the peptide that can aid with healing after an injury. So it’s not necessarily that there’s direct competition, but at the end of the day, your average patient going throughout their daily life only has so much money that they can spend on medicine. And $10, $15, however much money that goes to this doesn’t go to a prescription drug from a commercial pharmaceutical company. And so there is real concern that potentially that was at play during that decision.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And I said 110%. Yeah, I—
DR. ALEX TATEM: Well, it’s interesting because I try to walk a very fine line between what I can prove versus what I suspect after being in this space for a long time. And ultimately, I don’t think it’s accurate to characterize pharmaceutical companies, or really any other entity, as being evil or bad. The truth is maybe a little bit more ominous. The truth is that they are these large machines that are designed to prioritize profit over everything. And that’s everything.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think this is one of the really interesting observations I’ve had the higher I’ve gone in my career is that oftentimes we heard about the Illuminati. When I was growing up, I was like, oh, there’s this Illuminati. And you think of it as these shadow hooded people that get together and decide evil things. But the further I’ve gone in business, the more I’ve realized that the Illuminati or these evil forces are actually just machines that were designed to optimize for profit. Correct. So corporations are the Illuminati.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah, and so I don’t actually think that there’s necessarily a group of maniacal individuals — the Legion of Doom — plotting to take away your health. But at the same time, I think that there are these large organizations that really couldn’t care less about your health. They are prioritizing what’s important for them and regular people just get caught up in the mix.
And what’s challenging is that as a physician, I took a Hippocratic oath. I care about my patients. And so those are the people that are in front of me every single day that are seeking to improve their lives, to recover from injury. I have fertility patients that are just dying to start their family, and I have patients that are suffering from hormonal imbalances that haven’t felt right in years. I treat erectile dysfunction in men that have been struggling for years after prostate cancer treatment. I mean, these are people that are broken and hurting. You want to be able to help them.
And so I feel that as a very strong personal calling that I have to be the advocate for that patient, both in the room whenever I’m treating them and taking care of them, but also when I’m talking to others and speaking out about these issues. I want access to these medications because I care about the patients who benefit from them.
The Peptide Renaissance: Why Everyone Is Talking About Them Again
STEVEN BARTLETT: So they banned these peptides that we have here. Correct. And we’re sat here 2 years after the ban, I believe roughly 2 years after that ban. Yeah. And suddenly everybody’s talking about peptides again. Yes. Why? What’s going on?
DR. ALEX TATEM: So I think what we’re seeing is the forbidden fruit effect, because this was banned and all of a sudden, oh, well, why’d they ban it? Well, they wouldn’t have banned it if it weren’t working, right? We’re also seeing the effect of TikTok and short-form content being spread very rapidly, very virally. And that’s been going on for 2 years now, combined with new emphasis from administration leadership and HHS and RFK.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the most incredible impact that you’ve seen peptides create in a patient?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Oh my gosh, I have the best story for you. So one of the most frustrating things about my practice is treating infertility in young men that have significant metabolic dysfunction. These are young men that have a low sperm count, right? So they can’t get pregnant because they just don’t have the numbers to make it happen. And you’re looking at them and they’re morbidly obese. They have high insulin resistance, and their endocrine system has been damaged by that obesity. So they have low testosterone levels, and their brain is not making enough of the signals to stimulate their testicles.
Now, we have medications that we can use to help stimulate that, to make more of that signal stimulate the testicles. But really, what is eating at them, what is causing this, is not that chemical imbalance. That’s the symptom. That’s not the problem. And treating symptoms doesn’t really get you very far.
And so I would have patients that I would take care of, and we would never see a significant improvement in their numbers because losing weight is really, really hard, regardless of all the education and resources I try to give them. But now we have peptides in the form of GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide and tirzepatide. And I just saw a patient last week who increased his sperm count 10 times over and is now in a normal range because he’s lost 100 pounds due to using tirzepatide, exercising, and improving his diet. And he has totally changed his life.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And that started with a peptide. It started with a peptide. So we’ve got lots of peptides on the table in front of you. Yes. We will go into them individually, but just can you give me a high-level view of the types of areas in our health and life that these peptides can help with. So we’ve talked there about infertility, correct, as a downstream consequence of the weight loss and fixing the metabolic health. What other parts of the body do peptides touch?
What Peptides Can Do: A High-Level Overview
DR. ALEX TATEM: The best way to think about it is like this. So peptides are almost like an app on your phone. So imagine before we had apps. I’m old enough to remember trying to log on and do my banking online before we had apps, and gosh, it was painful. There are ways to accomplish things, but they were very inconvenient in a roundabout way. And now all of a sudden we have these apps on our phone that can do just about anything except fold your laundry. There’s some limits to it, but really, the sky’s the limit from an electronic standpoint. And really, that’s what peptides are.
So the thing is, we have peptides that can help you lose weight, like the GLP-1 drugs. We have peptides that can improve skin quality, like GHK-Cu. We have peptides that can help heal your gut, like BPC-157, particularly effective in ulcerative colitis, which is something that’s being investigated with the FDA’s planned upcoming meeting on it. We also have peptides that can help with sleep and with recovering the gland in your brain that’s responsible for melatonin and regulating your sleep-wake cycles.
So the question isn’t what can peptides do? It’s kind of, well, what can’t they do? And if they can’t do that, can we develop a peptide that can accomplish that task? And the answer is probably.
And simultaneously, while there may be resistance from the pharmaceutical industry in these peptides, the ones that we’re most interested in right now, they have signed multi-billion dollar deals with other pharmaceutical companies that are involved in peptide development aided by AI to try and fast-track their own peptide products. And so we are going to see exponentially more of these products come down the pipeline from pharmaceutical companies in the form of commercial products.
Breaking News: The FDA’s Move to Legalize Key Peptides
STEVEN BARTLETT: And it’s worth saying that there was some significant news today. Correct. What happened today, but also what’s going on? And just for anyone that doesn’t know, it’s April 15th.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yes. So today we got a press release from the FDA saying that in July they are going to consider 7 peptides for removing from Category 2 back to Category 1. Legalizing them.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Legalizing them.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Okay.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And some of the heavy hitters from that list include BPC-157, which is the one we talked about to do with repair and injury.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Absolutely. And then we have the brother to that, which is TB-500. This vial over here — this improves blood flow to an injured area. You could think of this as sending the soldiers, as sending the cells that are required for rebuilding that tissue matrix that was damaged by a tear or a cut.
On top of that, we’re also getting something called KPV. That is another peptide that has been linked to angiogenesis and tissue repair. We’re also getting MOTS-C — some patients will call it exercise in a vial. It improves your VO2 max and your exercise tolerance by upregulating the energy pathway, basically making more ATP, the energy that we all use to move. It makes more of that available.
We’re also going to get DSIP, epithalon, and C-Max, which are all peptides that affect cognitive function, so improving thinking. C-Max is a great option for that. And then DSIP and epithalon both have roles in regulating sleep and recovery. Yeah, pretty wild.
How Peptides Are Obtained and Administered
STEVEN BARTLETT: And I’ve got to say, how does— so some of them are becoming legalized, but even the ones that aren’t legal right now, a lot of people are taking them anyway, correct? So my question is, how are people getting them? Listen, I don’t want to promote illegal drugs here. This is not that kind of show, but I just want to know what’s going on.
DR. ALEX TATEM: No, this is— well, this is important to talk about, right? Because we have to understand what’s going on in the marketplace. The moment that these drugs were banned or these medications were banned in 2023, it was kind of like the United States experiment at banning alcohol. It didn’t go very well, right? All of a sudden, the mob came around and we started seeing unregulated saloons and unregulated alcohol production. And it was contaminated with all the stuff that you didn’t want.
STEVEN BARTLETT: People are traveling.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah, exactly. It’s just not a good idea, right? And so what happened is we banned these and the gray market stepped in. And so these are companies that will sell peptides that have on the label “for research use only,” all right? And the idea is that that takes them out of the FDA’s jurisdiction because they’re not selling it for people to inject into themselves, out of the FDA’s hands. “I’m just creating a vial of this magical juice that you can use for your rat.” That’s the idea. We all know that’s not what’s really happening, but because there isn’t any quality control, it’s kind of like getting gas station sushi. Like, yeah, you can do it, but you don’t really know if it’s sushi, and it may not end very well for you.
And so again, not saying that there aren’t some people who have gotten good results with research-use-only peptides, but again, it’s not standardized, which is why I think moving this back into the 503(a) compounding world is the best thing for everyone, which is the legal framework.
How Are Peptides Taken?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so how does one take a peptide?
DR. ALEX TATEM: That’s a great question. So what’s interesting is that, as we mentioned, peptides are just made up of building blocks of amino acids. And if you were to go make yourself a protein shake, what is that going to look like from a Lego standpoint? It just looks like a handful of Legos in your hand, all sort of ground up into individual pieces, right? Well, the thing is, your gut is designed to break up any sort of protein that you ingest orally into these little pieces. And so if you were to drink some of this TB500, your body wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and a piece of chicken because it would break it all apart.
Now there are some very unique exceptions to that. There’s a form of BPC-157 that actually is tolerated in the gut. But by and large, the overwhelming majority of these have to be injected either subcutaneously or into the muscle, and that’s usually a preference. Subcutaneous being my belly, just underneath the skin. As I tell patients, just pinch an inch, inject under the skin. We do that for a lot of other medications as well.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that what this is?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah, so this is a prescription Mounjaro pen. Mounjaro is the brand name for tirzepatide, all right? Tirzepatide being the leading GLP-1 product right now from Lilly. So this produces more weight loss per milligram than any other product that we’ve got out right now.
Compounded vs. Brand-Name GLP-1 Medications
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is this the mechanism in which people inject peptides?
DR. ALEX TATEM: A little bit different. So this is an auto-injector pen, and so what you do is you’re able to actually ratchet the dose there on the right side, and then you pinch an inch in your skin and push it up against, and it’ll auto-deploy. So there’s nothing that you need to do. You don’t have to learn how to draw up medication and inject.
Whenever you’re administering peptides at home, especially for patients that have obtained them from research-use-only markets, they usually come in just little vials that need to be drawn up with a needle. Now, the benefit of that is that you can do custom dosing, right? But the drawback is that you have to know how to calculate that and put it together.
This may be the most controversial thing we have on this table. And by pharma’s estimate, it might be the most dangerous thing to their entire business model because this is tirzepatide, the exact same thing that you had in that pen. But this is made by a high-quality 503(a) compounding pharmacy. And the reason why this is so controversial right now is because it offers an incredible amount of flexibility, because what you have in your hand there is very standardized and you administer it once a week because that’s what’s approved by insurance.
STEVEN BARTLETT: This is like the Ozempic thing everyone’s been talking about. Exactly, right?
DR. ALEX TATEM: But think of that as paint-by-numbers, okay? You are— this section is this color, this section is that color, all right? Think of this as—
STEVEN BARTLETT: The thing you’ve got in your hand.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Right now, yeah, exactly. Just a vial of tirzepatide as having infinite permutations and dosing ability, because you can draw this up with a small syringe and do microdosing. So instead of one large dose once a week — because what many patients will experience is they’ll have a return of their hunger by the end of the week and they end up losing ground — you can actually do multiple mini doses throughout the week with this formulation and with this presentation of the medication.
But the challenge is, that is the benefit that allows this to be compounded by compounding pharmacies, because they are able to provide something that is similar to what’s in your hand, but it offers more flexibility that may be the right choice for some patients. So personalization of medicine, okay?
But the challenge is, if you spend however much money on this, you’re not giving it to Lilly. And so as a result, we have seen an unprecedented crackdown in the United States from the FDA trying to shut down compounding pharmacies and prevent them from making these medications, even though the ability to customize — the fact that this is not an exact copy of what’s in your hand right now — should protect it under current legislation.
But there is now enough pressure from the powers that be and from lobbyists from both Lilly and Novo Nordisk, which are the two companies that make the GLP-1 medications, that Marty Makary, the FDA commissioner, has now tweeted more about cracking down on compounded GLP-1 medications than he’s tweeted about diabetes or heart disease in his entire time in office.
The Battle Between Big Pharma and Compounding Pharmacies
STEVEN BARTLETT: And just so I understand, I want to play this back to you to make sure I understand. Sure. In my hand here, I have tirzepatide to my left. Yep. And this is made by Lilly, which is a corporate company who’ve patented it so they can make lots of money from it.
DR. ALEX TATEM: In my right hand, I have tirzepatide. Tirzepatide with niacinamide.
STEVEN BARTLETT: With niacinamide. Yep. And this is not patentable.
DR. ALEX TATEM: So Lilly has a patent on the tirzepatide molecule in that formulation in your hand. And if anyone violates a patent, that can be pursued in US court — patent law, right? But what’s interesting is that Lilly and Novo Nordisk know that what’s different in your right hand doesn’t look the same. You can dose it differently. And they know that if they were going to fight that in court, it would cost a lot of money and take a lot of time.
So you know what’s a lot easier? Calling your friend at the FDA and getting him to step on the competition so you don’t have to. And then who’s paying for that enforcement? It’s not the lawyers that the pharma company is paying for. It’s the taxpayer, paying for the FDA through taxes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And you seem to imply that this was actually better because you could take it in a more flexible dose. You could take a little bit, a lot, you can take it when you want, whereas this is kind of once a week.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Well, what is better, right? So I like this option for many of my patients because it’s flexible. That is something that works for most patients. But then again, this works great for patients too. What you want is an ecosystem where you have choice so you can make the right choice for the right patient.
For a lot of patients, they’re going to do exceedingly well on this, and there is so much data to support that. But I also have a lot of patients who get really ill after they do a large dose of Mounjaro or of a GLP-1 med. And if we take that same dose and we just cut it into multiple doses within a week, we can avoid those side effects.
What Peptides Does Dr. Tatem Take?
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’ve told me that these peptides we have on the table in front of us can improve your skin, weight loss, muscle, energy, chronic illnesses. You talked about the cognitive upsides, and you talk about it very passionately. Yeah. So one should ask you, presumably you’re taking some peptides.
DR. ALEX TATEM: I am, yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Which ones do you take?
DR. ALEX TATEM: So I will tell you that as of right now, the only peptide I’m taking is a small dose of tirzepatide, which is the one we were just talking about.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, okay.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Because a couple of months ago, I was probably close to about 240 or so, and I was into powerlifting. I still am, but it’s really great to be able to deadlift 500 pounds, but then stairs become really hard when you’re trying to walk up. And you’re like, I kind of like being able to not take a break after 2 or 3 flights of stairs. And so I was like, okay, longevity is a priority of mine, I’m going to slim down a little bit. I was like, let me just try this for a little bit. And what I found is that it is incredibly potent and at a very low dose, very, very tolerable.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why don’t you take some of the others?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Honestly, because right now there is not a legal framework for me to obtain them. And the truth is, I want to be an example for my patients, and that’s why I’m out here advocating that we get access to these peptides in a legal, safe way again. Because it’s the best thing for everyone.
STEVEN BARTLETT: If they were legal, which ones might you consider?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Oh man, I don’t know how old you are, Steven, but I’m 33.
STEVEN BARTLETT: 33? God bless you.
DR. ALEX TATEM: I will tell you, once you get over 35, man, that is brutal, all right? I sleep on my neck the wrong way, and I need like a frickin’ brace for like 2 weeks. And so as someone who spends a lot of time in the gym working out, you start to accumulate all these little aches and pains.
And so the idea of, for example — I have a very finicky right shoulder. If I try to do a really heavy bench and I haven’t warmed up, I can tweak it, and it takes me out of the fight for at least a month. I would have killed at various points in time over the past 2 years to have had BPC and TB-500 to hopefully speed that sort of healing.
Also, for example, I suffer from really bad rosacea. It flares constantly.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s that?
DR. ALEX TATEM: So just a redness of the face that makes me look like I’m sunburned. And then I come into the office on a Tuesday, and my staff’s like, “Oh my gosh, did you go out in the yard and do some work this week?” I’m like, this is just my face. For example, that’s something that a lot of people have reported benefits from GHK-Cu from. So again, another compound, another peptide that could be beneficial for a patient like myself.
Can Peptides Build Muscle?
STEVEN BARTLETT: What about muscle mass and gaining muscle?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah, so that is an interesting misnomer because that has been a common selling point you’ll see on social media. But as of right now, the only peptide that you might construe that way would be this guy right here in my hand, IGF-1 LR3. Now IGF-1 LR3 is basically the longer-lasting version of IGF-1, which is the downstream effect of growth hormone. I’m sure you’ve heard of bodybuilders taking growth hormone to increase size and lose fat. In higher doses, it can help contribute to muscle mass, all right? But truthfully, if you’re trying to gain significant muscle mass, this is not the way to do it. Right now, one of the things that peptides can’t do independently is put on significant amounts of lean mass.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You still have to go to the gym.
DR. ALEX TATEM: You still have to go to the gym, believe it or not. And guess what?
Peptides for Metabolic Health, Cognition, and the Future of Medicine
STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, that’s the end of the podcast.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah, I’ll tell you. But something that blows my mind is that I have so many patients that think that they can just take testosterone and just put on muscle naturally, and it doesn’t work that way. You might get a tiny little bit, but you still have to have stimulus. You still have to get in the gym. You still have to put the work in.
And so I tell patients that I am not a replacement for a personal trainer. You also need your personal trainer, and most of you need a nutritionist. And so I’m lucky to work with some great people in the community who partner with me on that. But it’s a full-court press when you’re trying to get people to live the highest quality life.
Peptides and Insulin Resistance
STEVEN BARTLETT: What about some of these metabolic disorders and diseases in terms of insulin resistance? People on the Diary of a CEO, the audience, are very interested to learn about insulin. I see that a lot in the comment section and a lot of the data. So how can, if someone’s struggling with their insulin levels or their glucose response to food, how do these peptides help?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Honestly, the best peptides for that right now are the GLP-1 drugs, hands down. Because what you’re doing is you are slowing gastric emptying, and so you have a slower absorption of that bolus of food that you’ve eaten, so your glucose doesn’t spike. And so as a result, that increases insulin sensitivity significantly.
Now again, you have to be careful about what peptide you’re using for what. A lot of these peptides that boost growth hormone and boost, let’s say, IGF-1, those can actually increase serum glucose, and that may not be what you want if you are someone that is trying to work on your insulin sensitivity.
Topical and Oral Peptide Formulations
STEVEN BARTLETT: And do any of these peptides come as creams or as pills or anything like that?
DR. ALEX TATEM: If you look online, you can probably find a version of everything, but if we’re talking about actual legitimate formulations, the best example of a topical cream is going to be GHK-Cu. And this is interesting because this is a copper tripeptide that has been found to decrease in expression and concentration as we age. But when it is applied topically, it’s highly effective.
So putting on a cream on your face — it’s been found to be extremely beneficial in regenerating the quality of skin. Complexion, increasing the amount of collagen and elastin, the things that we need to keep our faces taut and youthful, the things that people will pay lots of money to go get lasered to get improvements. Not that it’s a replacement for that, but that’s a topical form that, believe it or not, you could go out and buy today because topical GHK-Cu is regulated very differently than the injectable form.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is it expensive? Growing up, I thought all these sort of anti-aging creams were bullshit, but you’re telling me that this has actually been associated with improving signs of aging.
DR. ALEX TATEM: I will tell you this: when I was going through college and medical school, I was the biggest skeptic. I did not believe any of the health or wellness claims that we saw coming out at the time. And again, that was at a time where we were getting bombarded with stuff about the Atkins diet and this, that, or the other.
But then all of a sudden you start having patients come back to you and they’re testifying to the benefits they’ve seen from these things. You start to actually look at the biochemistry behind them. You’re like, “There’s a lot of science backing this up. This isn’t just mumbo jumbo.” And so believe it or not, yeah, there are creams that can slow the process of aging, at least from a visual standpoint, when it comes to your skin. I have yet to figure out anything that makes me as energetic as I was in my early 20s, but I’m working on it.
Peptides for Cognitive Performance
STEVEN BARTLETT: But on that point of energy and cognition, if I wanted to become a better podcaster, and I sit here sometimes — sometimes we do 2 in a day, which means I might sit here for 8 hours. I think a couple of times we’ve done 3 in a day. That’s brutal. Which is 12 hours of recording. But what would you recommend if I was trying to improve my cognitive performance?
DR. ALEX TATEM: So again, as a physician who likes keeping my license, I wouldn’t say necessarily recommend. I would say if we’re looking at how these medications have been used, and potentially one that may be legal again coming this July depending on what the FDA says, intranasal Semax. And this was one that was originally studied in Russia many years ago, and what they found is that this 7-amino acid peptide, when it was administered after a TBI — a traumatic brain injury — patients tended to bounce back faster.
Also, they saw evidence of it improving outcomes after stroke, and it also seems to upregulate the same sort of factors that help with cognition and with connecting sentences and bits of data in your brain. And so it’s also one of the — interestingly enough, one of the ones that is available intranasally because it goes through the mucous membranes and gets right where you need it. And so that’s going to be a really, really fascinating compound to see back on the market, and then we can actually get more data regarding efficacy and across a wide regulation.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So interesting. And you sniff that through your nose like you would for any nasal decongestant, right?
DR. ALEX TATEM: You know, if you have allergies or something like that. Also, for someone like yourself, you travel a lot, you’re going in between different time zones, you’re balancing multiple obligations at different odd times of the day. I shudder to think what your circadian rhythm looks like, my friend.
But that is what we have some of these other compounds that are going to be available for. So if we look at D-SIP, that has been shown to be helpful with regulating your circadian rhythm. That is one of the ones that’s going to be approved hopefully here soon, again, in July. And then on top of that, you’ve got things like Selank, which is another one that can help calm you as you’re going to sleep about an hour ahead of time, and help those deep delta brainwaves that are so restorative whenever you actually are resting.
Availability and Prescription Requirements
STEVEN BARTLETT: Where will we be able to buy these when and if they are legalized?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Where is it sourced and dispensed? From 503(a) compounders here in the United States with a prescription from a physician.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you still need a prescription?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Still need a prescription, correct.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s going to be quite a crazy world when everybody is going to be injecting themselves every day. I mean, we’re already getting to that point now with the Ozempic, where I’ve got loads of people in my friendship group that are.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah, and they’re doing great. And that’s what I like about the advent of these GLP-1s — they’re removing the stigma of the needle. And I look at some of my friends who have been on it, I can’t recognize them.
Concerns About Rapid Weight Loss and Muscle Preservation
STEVEN BARTLETT: They look awesome. Are you concerned with any of them? I’ve got a couple of friends in my circle where I’m a little bit concerned. I don’t even know if I should be concerned, but it’s just when you see someone you know change so dramatically, so quickly. I think there’s something in us — something prehistoric in us — which goes, “Oh my God, there’s a problem.”
DR. ALEX TATEM: One thing I am concerned about is the rapid weight loss with GLP-1 medications, because the problem is that when you go into such a radical caloric deficit, your body goes into catabolism, which is breaking down tissue. And you want to break down fat, right? But your body isn’t that judicious. It’s going to break down muscle. And muscle is the most metabolically important tissue that any of us have.
And so if you really want to optimize your insulin sensitivity, well, you need to maintain your muscle. And right now, really, the only compounds that we have that are really good at preserving muscle with resistance training is testosterone. But that isn’t going to be a good option for our male patients that want to get pregnant because testosterone turns off fertility in men. It’s also not a great idea for our female patients, depending on their age. Testosterone, TRT, is a thing in older women, menopausal — won’t go into that. But truthfully, testosterone is not the right answer for everybody.
And so what we are going to see come down the pipe very soon is kind of the older brother of peptides — the more complex form, biologics called monoclonal antibodies that are specifically designed to inhibit the enzymes that break down muscle. These are specifically called myostatin inhibitors. There are 3 that are coming down the pipeline. There is one called bimagromab, which is owned by Lilly, that is going to bind to myostatin’s counterpart, which is called Activin. And then you have aretosumab and travogumab, which are 2 other compounds owned by different pharmaceutical companies that are all designed to maintain muscle even in a significant caloric deficit.
STEVEN BARTLETT: This is getting interesting now. So you’re telling me I’m going to be able to inject myself with an Ozempic to lose the fat, and then inject myself with something else to keep the muscle?
DR. ALEX TATEM: It’s wild. And I’ll tell you, one of the hardest things that I’m sure you’ve heard being on the receiving end of this is just the complexity of it. There are so many levers that are moving at once, and trying to get your head around it and balance it all requires nuance and it requires a thoughtful discussion with your doctor who’s well-educated on them. And that’s one of the challenges — there isn’t broad, great education on these products right now in the medical space. And so that’s something that I’m very passionate about: improving education across my colleagues so that they’re not afraid of these anymore.
Addressing Skeptics: Why Not Just Eat Well and Exercise?
STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you say to people that are listening to this now and go, “F*in’ hell, why don’t you just eat your greens and go to the gym and just be more human and you’ll be fine?”
DR. ALEX TATEM: I love that. I love eating your greens and going to the gym. But the unfortunate reality is that here in the United States, it depends on what database you look at, but obesity rates are estimated to be 40% to 70%, depending on what BMI cutoff you’re using. BMI is not perfect, but it is what it is. And the thing is, eating greens and going to the gym are not working for us as a society.
And we could talk about how we don’t have real food anymore, we have food deserts, we have this calorically dense but nutritionally poor food. I’ll tell you, the most disturbing thing I see as a surgeon is I’ll see a patient come in the door and they’re morbidly obese — they’re a large individual — but I have to do surgery on them. And the connective tissue, the stuff that’s made up of protein that makes them them, that literally holds them together, is paper thin because they’re eating an incredible amount of calories, they’re gaining fat, but they don’t have any protein in their diet. And that’s not something that’s rare. I see that on a daily basis.
And so the truth is, we’re talking about this from the angle of biohackers and people that are super engaged in our health, but the truth is that this is going to be able to be used to help our population at large and ultimately hopefully avoid a lot of the terrible disease states that we’re seeing overwhelm the medical system right now.
The Size of the Peptide Industry
STEVEN BARTLETT: How big is the peptide industry right now?
DR. ALEX TATEM: If we look at the top 4 large language model companies — all the heavy hitters — the revenue is estimated to be between $58 billion up to maybe $62 billion. Yet the income and the revenue from just semaglutide and tirzepatide alone is going to be over $55 billion this year.
And so what we have is peptides, without even considering all of this happening in the research space or the research-use-only space, without even considering the peptides that we’ll see come from compounding pharmacies, we’re already approaching parity with what we’re seeing in AI as far as revenue goes. That is the demand that we’re seeing in the marketplace.
What Patients Ask About Peptides
STEVEN BARTLETT: When your patients come and see you, Dr. Alex, what are they asking you most frequently as it relates to peptides? What are like the top 3 questions you get asked the most?
DR. ALEX TATEM: The first thing I get asked is, “What peptides do I need?” And then I just look at them and I’m like, “Well, what’s your problem? What’s bothering you?”
And then they’ll come in and they’ll start talking about energy, sex drive, and that sort of thing. So I’m like, “Okay, if that’s it, well, we need to check your testosterone levels, brother.”
So instead of looking for peptides, you don’t walk into a Home Depot or a Lowe’s like, “What tools do I need?” You’re like, “Well, what are you trying to do?” And then you start to talk to someone there like, “Well, I’m trying to build this.” “Okay, you need a saw, you need a screwdriver, you need this.” And some of those tools might be peptides. But some of them may be hormones, some of it may be diet and exercise. And so peptides are just another type of tool that we can use.
STEVEN BARTLETT: We all want a shortcut though, doctors. We all want a quick way to be better. And ideally not to have to do hard work. That’s like what most, the average person is looking for. And we hear about these peptides, we hear other people are taking them, we hear the fantastic results in skin, hair, muscle. And we go, “What about me?”
DR. ALEX TATEM: You know what I tell patients? I’m like, “Me too, man.” But my alarm went off at 4:45 this morning so I could hit the gym before I made it to clinic. Because there are no real shortcuts. There are things that can help, right? GLP-1s are the best example of that. This is the closest thing to a shortcut you’re going to get. But the truth is, this isn’t going to go to the gym for you, and it’s not going to lift the weight. So you can maintain that muscle mass, you get the best possible result, and try to hold on to your muscle while losing the fat.
There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
STEVEN BARTLETT: One thing I’ve learned from doing this podcast that has really grown with me over time— people ask me all the time, “What’s the one thing you’ve learned from the podcast?” One of the answers that I’ve never given that I’m going to give now is that I’ve learned that there’s no such thing in life as a free lunch.
DR. ALEX TATEM: No, absolutely not.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And what I mean by that is like everything is a trade-off. And if you ever hear on a podcast or in any medium that something has tremendous upsides, the first question one should ask is, “What’s the trade?” And just with everything, you can apply this to having a relationship with a partner. Huge upsides, also trade-off.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Kids— I love my children. I haven’t slept in years. This is just life, right? There are trade-offs. And even with great tools, there are trade-offs.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So what are the trade-offs of these peptides?
The Trade-Offs of Peptides
DR. ALEX TATEM: The biggest trade-off right now is you don’t know if you’re even getting what you want, because you’re ordering this from some research-use-only compound. You don’t know whether or not they’ve gotten out all the appropriate endotoxins. You don’t know if you’re getting what you actually paid for. So that’s the biggest thing.
And also, these have a good example of preventing or helping heal injury. But let’s pull tesamorelin as an example. This is actually interesting — it’s a peptide that is commercially available right now. I could write the script for you. You could go pick it up from CVS or Walgreens. This is available as a commercial product. And people really like it because it’ll help boost growth hormone and it happens to be uniquely good at stripping abdominal fat, or visceral fat.
But the moment you stop taking it for a brief period of time, if you haven’t changed anything about your lifestyle, you’re going to go right back to where you were. It’s good at stripping belly fat specifically. Bodybuilders actually really like it for that particular application.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I had no idea there was a peptide for stripping belly fat.
DR. ALEX TATEM: And here we’ve got another one. So this is Melanotan-2, a melanocortin receptor agonist. Melanocortin is what makes you tan. So you could administer this and it will actually end up giving you a deep tan in response to just a little bit of UV sun exposure.
Now, I’ve embraced my pasty whiteness, so it’s not necessarily my bag, but it’s real. There are some safety concerns with this because could that potentially stimulate a melanoma or something like that? But this is a peptide that gives a wildly different result than tesamorelin because it’s a different mechanism. It’ll also give you some of the most impressive erections you’ve ever had in your life, so be warned.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Wait, it’s literally turning you into a Black guy.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Finally! And it’s wild. There’s even a derivative of Melanotan-2 called PT-141, bremelanotide, that is a commercial product right now that you can write as a prescription, but that doesn’t have the tanning benefit but has the sexual benefits.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh wow. Keep those ones over here.
Retatrutide: The Next Blockbuster Drug
DR. ALEX TATEM: We have to talk about this. Another really interesting phenomenon that we’ve seen is that now we’ve got all of these companies that are making these research-use-only compounds. It used to be that you would have a compound that’s in drug development and you’re seeing all the advertisements for it, but you don’t get access to it.
Well, believe it or not, the next blockbuster drug that Lilly is going to come out with probably in the next couple of months is this guy called retatrutide. And retatrutide is fantastic in that it is the first 3-receptor agonist GLP-1 drug.
The GLP-1 drugs — whenever you’re talking about semaglutide and tirzepatide — they have slightly different profiles. This is the Ozempic category. GLP-1 is the primary receptor that they work on, and what that will do is it slows gastric emptying and it limits caloric intake. Then in tirzepatide — not semaglutide, but tirzepatide — it is a dual agonist, so it has effect on GIP, which is a different receptor.
Well, retatrutide adds in glucagon receptor activation. Your liver actually acts like a repository of energy where it stores glycogen and fat that your body can use as energy. But that’s a problem if you get too much fat there — if you have a caloric excess, then you could end up having what’s called NASH cirrhosis, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis — basically inflammation of your liver due to accumulating too much fat.
But by stimulating the glucagon receptor while simultaneously hitting GLP-1 and GIP, what we found is not only do patients lose an incredible amount of weight, but they also get the best improvements we’ve ever seen in their liver health. And people have been buying that from research-use-only websites and using it for about 2 years now. Bodybuilders have already made this the standard in their protocol when it comes to cutting for a show, and it is wildly effective. We’re now seeing the population using a drug at scale that hasn’t even made it through commercialization yet.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why are you smirking? You’re using it.
DR. ALEX TATEM: No, I have not. I can honestly say I have not used retatrutide, but I find it fascinating. It’s absolutely wild. Talk about power to the people, right?
CJC-1295, Ipamorelin, and Growth Hormone
STEVEN BARTLETT: What else have we got here that you think is interesting?
DR. ALEX TATEM: We’ve got these two here that I think are really interesting — CJC-1295 and ipamorelin. The whole idea is, can we stimulate growth hormone?
There’s an interesting story behind that. Growth hormone itself was very, very popular for many, many years as an anti-aging compound, but then we changed some laws in 1990 that made it a little dicey to prescribe growth hormone. And also, it’s kind of a blunt instrument. We wanted something to stimulate more natural growth hormone release. So we have this entire class of medications called secretagogues that help stimulate natural growth hormone release. And these are two of the most potent ones that are often combined together.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What does growth hormone do?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Growth hormone acts like a signal that tells your liver to make more of another compound we talked about, IGF-1. Growth hormone actually stimulates building muscle. It also strips fat. And it’s also been found to help with tissue healing. So there’s a significant benefit in that regard.
People want to boost their growth hormone — it improves quality of skin, improves quality of hair and nails and that sort of thing. These two compounds together are particularly potent. CJC-1295 being a growth hormone releasing hormone derivative, and then you have ipamorelin, which is a ghrelin receptor agonist — improving the release of growth hormone through two different synergistic mechanisms.
And then on top of that, somatotropin — another word for growth hormone. Just a different word for it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So what would happen — let’s just take this one. Somatotropin. If I bought this for research purposes and I started injecting some of this into me, what would change?
DR. ALEX TATEM: It depends on how much you do and when you do it. If you injected that at night, it would improve your quality of sleep. You would get a boost in the quality of your hair, your skin, nails. Theoretically, it’d be easier for you to recover from injuries, hopefully put on a little bit more muscle a little bit easier, maybe lose a little bit of fat.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So why don’t I take it?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Well, because if you take a little bit too much, you can actually get insulin resistance because your glucose levels will go too high for too long. If you abuse too much for too long, you will actually get acromegaly — that’s development where your bones continue to grow, but only in certain junctures. And so there’s a very specific look that bodybuilders who abuse growth hormone at high amounts will get. It’s an irreversible change to the facial bone structure.
It could also theoretically, if you had a cancer, maybe make it worse. We’ve never shown that it causes new cancers, but that could be a concern. And if you take too much, it could potentially make your hands numb in the morning because you get effusions into the joint space. Bodybuilders will talk about lifting a dumbbell and having to drop it because their hand goes numb temporarily if they’re taking too much growth hormone too soon.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And what else have we got here?
Epithalon and Telomere Health
DR. ALEX TATEM: Oh my gosh. So, epithalon. So this is a medication that is theoretically going to be available to us in July. And so the hope is that this is going to expand cell life. So epithalon, the purpose of it is it works to enhance telomerase. So at the end of your cells, imagine it this way: you’re trying to copy the genome, but the little copier that copies it, it takes up space in and of itself, so it’s kind of like it cuts off the last couple letters every single time.
This is when you’re aging, right? When you’re aging, you’re creating new cells, right? Cells divide through this process called mitosis where they split, all right? Well, if you got to make an exact copy, well, you’ve got to read through all these lines of code, but because the way that we’re built, we always end up cutting off the last little bit of code.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Which is how we age, which is how we age.
DR. ALEX TATEM: It is one of the things that contributes to aging, all right? Now, that is considered to be “junk information.” It’s at the very end called the telomere, all right? But we know that shorter telomeres are associated with aging, potentially worse health outcomes. Then there’s an enzyme that can help heal or repair the telomere called telomerase. Epithalon helps encourage that. And so some people are looking at that as being one of the Fountain of Youth compounds. I’m very skeptical as far as that goes, but it does show some benefits when it comes to healing parts of your brain that are associated with regulating your circadian rhythm.
Who Should Consider Taking Peptides?
STEVEN BARTLETT: So the average person listening now, they’ve heard a lot of stuff about a lot of things. How do they know if they should pursue getting and taking peptides? How do they know?
DR. ALEX TATEM: What are they looking for? So what I will say is that think of peptides as falling into 3 categories, all right?
You get Category 1, which are peptides that you can prescribe right now, legal, from a commercial pharmacy. That includes the GLP-1s, PT-141, bremelanotide I mentioned to you earlier. Oxytocin is another one. We have these different compounds that are available.
And then we have what we call Category 2, which we don’t have anything in right now, but that will consist of the 7 peptides that are hopefully going to be approved in July whenever they get moved from Category 2, cannot compound, to Category 1, can compound.
And then everything else is kind of in this Category 3 where it’s only available for research use only. And so my recommendation for patients is don’t go out and buy research use only compounds. You don’t know what you’re getting, and you don’t know if you’re dosing it right. We don’t know if it’s contaminated. So really what the public should be doing is educating themselves on this and then going and talking to their doctors about what problems they have. And then potentially when those options become available, a peptide might be part of the answer for their problem.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so speak to your doctor. Consult with your doctor and make it a conversation with whoever your medical professional is about your symptoms and what might be useful and what the range, the toolbox, the options are, correct, to attack those symptoms. Yes, absolutely.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Talk, collaborate with your doctor. Your doctor should be your partner in you getting as healthy as humanly possible.
What Happens When You Stop Taking GLP-1 Medications?
STEVEN BARTLETT: We talked about tirzepatide, Ozempic, semaglutide. One of the questions that’s front of mind for everybody, whether they’re taking them or watching others take them, is what happens when you stop.
DR. ALEX TATEM: We’ve looked at that. You actually regain the weight. And so, because the truth is, is that you have introduced something into your life that has moved the needle in one direction, but if you don’t change anything else, well, you take that back out, well, you’re going to go back to where you were.
And so if you’re going to maintain that weight loss, you have to make lifestyle changes associated with that. And what we found is that people do regain — if they do make lifestyle changes, they do regain some of the weight, but not necessarily all of the weight. And there’s also data showing that you could potentially stay on that medication but at a much lower dose and then maintain your weight. So there are options to minimize your medication burden long term.
The Most Exciting Peptide on the Horizon
STEVEN BARTLETT: And of all the things we’ve talked about today, if you had to just pick one thing that excites you the most, that’s either coming down the pipe or here already, what is the thing you’re most excited about? I see your eyes wandering.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Hands down, it’s that one over there, Retatrutide, because the changes in body composition that we have seen both in clinical trials and in anecdotal reports from users who have obtained it on their own are wild. We’re talking losing 20 to 25% of total body weight within a relatively short period of time. And I think that this is going to be basically the Ferrari of GLP-1 medications when it comes out. It’s not for everybody, right? It’s going to go faster than everything else, but it’s going to change the game. I think this is going to be a trillion-dollar drug when it comes out.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And no one’s going to own the patent, so everybody will be able to access it? Is that right?
DR. ALEX TATEM: No, no, that is going to belong solely to Lilly. And so you are going to see them enforce it as aggressively as they’ve ever enforced anything. But you will see profound results in patients.
Why Silicon Valley Is Obsessed With Peptides
STEVEN BARTLETT: People are referring to peptides as Silicon Valley’s miracle drug. And I wondered why that was, why it’s been associated with Silicon Valley. Have you heard that at all?
DR. ALEX TATEM: I have, and I’ll tell you, I’ve seen some peptide stacks from Silicon Valley founders and individuals that blow my mind. I’m like, oh man, even I think that’s a lot.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why would people in Silicon Valley, why would founders be interested in peptides?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Well, I think it’s because we all want to live our best version of our own lives, right? We want to perform at the highest level. And so people will do whatever they can. They’ll drink caffeine, they’ll pop a Zyn in their mouth, and they’ll try to tweak whatever variable they possibly can to get the best possible performance.
And the thing is, anabolic steroids come with significant side effects, and that’s not everybody’s cup of tea, right? And the health consequences from high-dose androgens dwarf anything that you might experience with peptides. And so peptides offer a lot of flexibility in pulling many different levers that are interesting to your regular average person.
And honestly, it requires a little bit of DIY right now because of the nature of these peptides. And I think you combine that with kind of rogue founder spirit that is common in Silicon Valley, and I think it’s a perfect fit.
Common Questions Patients Ask About Peptides
STEVEN BARTLETT: I asked you a second ago, what are the 3 questions that people come to you and ask you as a doctor? The first one, as it related to peptides, was which peptide should I be taking? Are there any other questions we haven’t covered off that are commonplace in your practice?
DR. ALEX TATEM: The second one is, can you prescribe me? And then I have to explain to them the regulatory environment surrounding peptides that, as of right now, the only peptides that I can prescribe are the ones you can get from CVS or Walgreens, which is going to be your GLP-1 medications and a handful of others that usually aren’t applying to the young men that I see in my practice.
Peptides for Skin and Anti-Aging
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there a super peptide for anti-aging and skin and some of those issues?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Oh, for skin, GHK-Cu. Yeah, so this is probably the most well-known peptide for use for skin complexion. And it may have small benefits when it comes to hair. Those reports are a little bit more spotty.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. And then so outside of the world of peptides for a second. I’ve got these 3 vials in my hand.
The Male Fertility Crisis
DR. ALEX TATEM: I’m so scared. Do you know what those are? Oh yeah. This is unfortunately our future if we’re not careful.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Explain.
DR. ALEX TATEM: So what we’ve got here is we have 3 different canisters containing water that has a little bit of coloring in it. And what you can see is that all the way back in 1973, this is pretty opaque. Like, you can’t see through it. And then 2026 has a little bit of color to it. And then we’ve got over here 2045, which is totally clear.
This unfortunately is actually representing the fertility trajectory for young men because what we’re seeing is that back in 1973, total motile sperm counts — so how many healthy swimming sperm do we have in each ejaculate — the population is exponentially higher and more dense than what we’re seeing today. And so what we’re seeing is a progressive decline in male fertility over time, and that’s been demonstrated in multiple studies.
We’ve debated this at multiple meetings. People tried to argue that it’s a measuring difference, but as we give it more time and as we give it more scrutiny, this is real. We are experiencing a significant decline in sperm quality and motility and concentration.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?
DR. ALEX TATEM: So the leading culprits are going to be, yes, microplastics and environmental toxins, things that are put in our environment that we have been exposed to that we can’t help. But again, the biggest modifiable risk factor is insulin resistance and metabolic disease.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Obesity.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Obesity. And so a downstream effect that we may see from peptides, like we discussed before, is we may be able to help reverse this for the first time in history by trying to prevent the development of metabolic disease using some of the peptides we talked about earlier.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Exactly.
DR. ALEX TATEM: I gave you the example of a patient that I saw in clinic this past week that increased his sperm count 10 times over. Imagine if we had given that to him before he even got that obese, when he just started to get a little bit overweight, and at a lower dose. Well, he may have never ended up in my office, right? Because his primary care doctor would have identified that, treated it, and he never would have needed the specialist.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s crazy. It’s wild.
Men’s Health, Metabolic Disease, and the Enhanced Games
DR. ALEX TATEM: So ultimately, if you look at what are the ills that are affecting healthcare in any first world nation, the number one offender is metabolic disease and metabolic dysfunction. And this is something that was actually hinted at by RFK whenever he was talking about root cause of disease.
Well, yes, we have many, many diseases and many, many infections that don’t stem necessarily from insulin resistance. But if we look at cardiac disease, if we look at issues with lack of perfusion— my specialty, erectile dysfunction— we look at cancer. All of this is related back to obesity and metabolic dysfunction. And so if we can eliminate that as a society, or we can minimize it to as little as possible, well, maybe I’d finally work myself out of a job.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Your specialty is erectile function?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah, so my specialty is this branch off of urology that we broadly call men’s health. And so what that incorporates for us is going to be low testosterone, advanced hormone management— I take that a little bit further than most people, that’s totally cool— and then also erectile dysfunction, Peyronie’s disease, which is damage to the penis that causes curvature, and then male fertility on top of that. And I do a little other thing, treating leakage after a prostate cancer treatment. And that’s basically it.
I treat like 5 things maybe, and that’s it. So I’m very, very specialized because I was the kid that liked to take my sandwiches apart and eat it one at a time. I was very precise. And I figured, you can do a lot of things in this world and be okay at them, or you can pick like 4 or 5 and get pretty good at them. So that seemed to work for me.
A Grueling Journey Through Medical Training
STEVEN BARTLETT: I was looking at a photo of you 5 years ago and you were very different.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah, you’ve changed a lot. Medical training in the United States has gotten better, but it is grueling. It’s absolutely grueling. For 5 years, I worked anywhere from 80 to 100 hours a week in a hospital. No eating, very little sleep, did not care for yourself at all. And again, we can argue whether or not that’s necessary all day long. But the truth is, it really beat me down. It absolutely took me apart physically and psychologically.
In part, it’s designed to do that, because the idea is that as a surgeon, you have to be able to perform when all the lights are on, when everything is against you. You have to be the one to hold it together in the operating room and command that ship and save that patient.
I remember being totally devastated towards the end of training, and I did a very challenging surgery on a very needy patient. The gentleman was about to go into renal failure, did not have a lot of kidney left, and he had a very challenging kidney tumor that was in a very treacherous location. It was in a location where he should have lost that kidney by all measure if we were going to take out that cancer. And he was at a county hospital, he had no insurance, and we swung for the fences and did a very, very challenging operation on him.
Against our best efforts with having everybody there, he ended up having a bleed postoperatively that night. And I remember getting the call — I was on call — that his blood pressure had dropped and that he did not look well. And I knew exactly what it was because, again, this was a very treacherous surgery.
I went in in the middle of the night with my attending, who was a different attending than the one I did the initial surgery with, and I remember just opening him up and just being covered in blood that we were taking out of the abdominal field that we were evacuating, eventually identifying the area of the bleed, and there was no way that it could have been avoided. I remember my attending yelling at me, and we ultimately had to take that guy’s kidney.
I remember walking out of there just being totally shattered, covered in blood, crying in a hallway by myself, wondering what was the point. Like, is there going to be a tomorrow after this? I spent all this time in this training — am I good enough? Am I going to be able to make this?
I wasn’t well put together, wasn’t healthy, and I ended up spending a lot of time with that patient, literally held his hand throughout the rest of his hospital stay, and he ended up recovering against all odds.
Afterwards, I took a strong interest in not only taking care of my patients, but also practicing what I preach, taking care of myself and prioritizing my own health. I got evaluated, I was diagnosed with low testosterone myself. Turns out not eating or sleeping for 5 years will do a number on you. I bet it was all stress. Through the roof, 24/7.
I cannot even imagine — there’s a part in the brain called the hippocampus that, when they do MRIs on soldiers that come back from war, will be degenerated in them. I wonder if we did that in surgical trainees, what that would look like.
But I made a commitment to take care of my patients, to take care of myself and make that a priority, and to be simultaneously the best doctor and the best father and husband that I could be. Not perfect, made a lot of mistakes along the way, but what you’re seeing from 5 years ago is where I was. I’ve been in training now for 7 years, so it took a while to kind of recover from that. But what you’re seeing is what focusing on health and wellness can potentially look like.
A Calling to Care
STEVEN BARTLETT: The emotion in you is palpable when you talk about this, and I’m wondering where that comes from. What is it? Because you’re looking off into the distance at something. I don’t know what you’re looking at.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah, when I’m caring for my patients and I see a young man that is struggling with his fertility and he wants to be a father — I was that guy. Me and my wife couldn’t get pregnant when we first tried. We ended up having to do in vitro fertilization, IVF. I remember feeling like I wasn’t a man because I was sitting in that room holding her hand and not having an answer as to why things weren’t working.
When I see my patients who come in that are struggling because their hormones are out of whack and no matter how they try to take care of themselves, something just isn’t clicking — I’ve been that guy. And then when I see my other patients that are further on in life and struggling with things like prostate cancer or erectile dysfunction, whatever the case may be, I see my father, my uncle, my grandfather. And they are someone’s father, grandfather, and uncle. These are our brothers. And this is who I have been called to care for.
I care for my patients deeply. And it’s because I care for my patients — this is a calling for me — that I care about stuff like this. Because I want my patients to have every tool physically possible to live their best quality of life so that they can be whole and they can be happy and so that they can be the best version of themselves for their loved ones.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, thank you for caring, because it matters. And a lot of this stuff is quite opaque and confusing to an average person like me, but I’m so glad that we have people out there in the world like you that are demystifying all of this for us and explaining it in simple terms, but also championing it.
Because one of the other things I’ve learned from doing this podcast is solutions to problems that a lot of people are suffering with are often right in front of us, but they need voices and educators like yourself out there leading the charge so that these types of things are available to everyone, not just the few. Not just the billionaires who can get whatever they want straight away any day.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah, it’s one thing I love — I’ve been very blessed in my practice to take care of people that are much fancier than I am and sit in boardrooms and that sort of thing. But you know what? I love taking care of my regular patients who are farmers, iron workers, tradesmen, guys that truthfully I have more in common with than anyone else. I joke with my patients, I’m just an overeducated plumber at the end of the day, right — urologist. Health is for everyone, not just for the fortunate.
The Enhanced Games: Doping Olympics?
STEVEN BARTLETT: The last thing I wanted to talk to you about is linked but random.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s the Enhanced Games.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Let’s do it. I am so excited about these. Do you know them?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I do very well.
DR. ALEX TATEM: So for those who may not know, the Enhanced Games is a project based off of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s own data. Potentially up to 40% of athletes that are competing at the Olympic level have either currently used or have used banned substances at some point in time. And also, we know that a lot of the compounds that are used for enhancement maybe aren’t quite so dangerous if they’re being administered by a trained medical professional with proper oversight. And as of right now, that’s not happening.
Also, at the same time, we know that Olympic athletes aren’t paid enough. These are the best of the best of the best, and they’re not even making the poverty line a lot of years. And so the idea is, well, what if we go ahead and strip away those rules? We allow athletes to use medications that can enhance performance, we watch them very closely, and we have a team of doctors and medical professionals watching them. And then let’s see what they can do at these traditional Olympic events and see if they smash world records. Oh, and they’re going to give $250,000 to any first-place winners and $1 million to anyone that hits a world record.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And just for comparison, how much are Olympic athletes getting paid?
DR. ALEX TATEM: They don’t get paid to compete at all. So they don’t get paid to be an Olympic athlete. They end up getting sponsorship deals, and that’s potentially the money that they can make. So, yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting. So it’s basically the doping Olympics where everyone’s allowed to dope. That’s the idea.
DR. ALEX TATEM: There are some caveats in there. They’re trying to say that only FDA-approved medications can be used. So you couldn’t use something like trenbolone, which is for veterinary use only. Or theoretically any of the compounds we’ve talked about today, because they’re not FDA approved. But also at the same time, they’ve said that they’re not going to test for those things. And one of their athletes, Magnussen, has openly admitted to taking BPC-157 and that sort of thing. So I think we can kind of figure out that it may just be a wide open playing field, maybe.
STEVEN BARTLETT: The International Olympic Committee does not pay athletes a single cent for winning a gold medal.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yep.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Which is crazy.
DR. ALEX TATEM: How many billions do you think they make off of those with all the advertisement?
STEVEN BARTLETT: So much money. And this is taking place in Las Vegas.
DR. ALEX TATEM: May 21st through the 24th, I believe. Are you going to go? I’m going to be watching, that’s for sure. Do you want to go?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I would love to go. That would be incredible.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Well, if you want to go, I know a few people that are putting the event on, so do let me know.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m there, man. I’m already interested. You got my attention.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Is there anything else we should have talked about that we didn’t talk about as it relates to this subject we’ve discussed today?
Penile Implants and Erectile Dysfunction Solutions
DR. ALEX TATEM: I mean, honestly, I think that we’ve gone pretty deep on peptides, and so I think we’ve covered that. But one thing that I did want to just leave with you, because I think it’s pretty humorous, and I think you’ve talked to some of my colleagues about this before, but one of the things that I deal with as a surgical specialist is the end stage of vascular disease, the end stage of diabetes, which is going to be erectile dysfunction.
And believe it or not, whenever we’re dealing with that in male patients, they eventually get to a point where things like Viagra and Cialis do not work. And that is a dark place to be as a guy. So you’re taking these medications, all you’re getting is a headache and nothing else. And then maybe you have other options. There are actually injections you can do in the penis, which is about as appetizing as you might imagine. But men want a better solution and they’ll come to us as sexual medicine specialists, seeking that. And that’s what I do.
So the bulk of my surgical practice is actually fixing erectile dysfunction with a procedure called implant placement. So now I think — did Reena show you one of these last time?
STEVEN BARTLETT: She brought it and I didn’t ask her to. It makes me — I get full body shudders. Really? About this stuff. Yeah. The thought of putting that up my penis — well, so you can show me. No, you can show me.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Well, I would tell you, the good news is you don’t have to. Like, that’s what we have a job for.
The way I explain to patients is like this. Ultimately, the male erection is just two inflatable tubes that start in the pelvis and go out the shaft of the penis. It makes sense, right? It is a hydraulic motion. What happens is you get stimulated, get a rush of blood into those tubes, get a rigid erection, able to use that for intimacy, and then when you climax, pop-off valve opens back up and everything drains out. So if you can understand brakes on a car, you can understand erections.
But the problem is that when you have long-term metabolic and vascular dysfunction, the brake lines, the blood vessels that feed those erections, they fail. And all of a sudden you can’t get enough blood flow for it to work. And believe it or not, you can actually get atrophy of the penis over time and you actually lose size. Which no man is eager to see.
But whenever the easy things like oral medications, Viagra and Cialis, don’t work anymore, the next best option — if we’re looking at patient satisfaction, durability, concealability — is this little thing that I do, which is: what if we took our own tubes and we put them inside your body’s natural ones? It’s invisible. Nobody looking at you could ever tell that you’ve ever had anything done.
But all of a sudden, when you want to get an erection, instead of having to rely on pills that don’t work or putting a needle in there, you could reach down and there’s a small pump that we hide underneath the skin down in the scrotum. So I joke it’s like a third testicle, but again, nothing external, nothing you can see. And all of a sudden, whenever you squeeze this, what it does is it moves saline that we hide in a little reservoir that goes in the belly — you never feel that — into the cylinders. And all of a sudden, men are able to get a firm, rigid erection that looks natural, feels natural, and they can use it as long as they want or until their partner’s sick of them, and then press a button and it goes back down.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do they still feel the same pleasure?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Yeah, so it does not affect sensation. The nerves that affect sensation run along the top of the penis. If you’re looking at the 12 o’clock position, we stay totally away from those.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So this is surgically put inside the penis, all internal.
DR. ALEX TATEM: And believe it or not, that takes me about 13 minutes to do.
STEVEN BARTLETT: How many people have these?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Well, I’ve put in about 1,100 or 1,200 personally.
STEVEN BARTLETT: 1,100 or 1,200? Yeah, it’s quite a lot of people. There’ll be people listening now that have these.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Well, this is what’s interesting. If you look at the United States right now, there are 30 million men with erectile dysfunction. That’s more than the population of Australia. And if you look at statistics, the oral medications are going to fail in 15 to 40% of those men. And so you’re talking about millions and millions of men who aren’t responding to oral medications and need a better option.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So where’s the button to get rid of the erection?
DR. ALEX TATEM: You see those two little bars right there? These two? Yep. Go ahead and put your thumb on it. Yep. Do that. And then squeeze from the end of the device back towards the pump. So squeeze it. Yep, right there. There you go, it’s down. And then you would have the weight of your natural tissue push things down. And then, yeah, okay, there you go.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, okay. Well, you know, I’m happy people have the options because I can imagine what that would be like to not be able to get an erection. It would be devastating, frankly.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Well, I’ll tell you this, I get more hugs and high fives than anybody else in my practice, and that includes the peptides that treat kidney stones and cancer. So I feel like we’re doing some good work here until peptides put me out of business.
Closing Thoughts and Final Question
STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. And you have a great YouTube channel. Thank you, I appreciate that. Which I think everybody should go check out because you really are great at explaining all this stuff in simple terms. So I’m going to link Dr. Alex’s YouTube channel down below. We’ll try and collab. So if you just click on the Diary of a CEO icon now, you’ll see Alex’s channel.
And I highly recommend you go check out his content because he’s really, really leading the charge on the subject of peptides. When I spoke to my team and said, I want to have a conversation about peptides, they gave me lots of options of lots of different types of doctors. And you were by far and away our preference because of the very fact that you’re very, very good at communicating. You understand people. And as you’ve demonstrated today, you have a very big heart. And you’re clearly — it was wonderful to see what’s actually driving you. And you did that in a way which is irrefutably authentic. So please go check out Alex’s channel. You’re around 100,000 subscribers on that channel now?
DR. ALEX TATEM: I’m so close. We’re at like 98, 99, any minute now.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Hopefully we can help push you over that milestone. We have a closing tradition, Alex, on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. The question left for you is: if you could give $1 billion to one person you don’t know personally, who is it and what do they have to spend it on?
DR. ALEX TATEM: Honestly, I would give it to Elon Musk. And it’s not because I think that he’s hurting for a billion dollars right now, but if you look at what he is working on to accomplish for us as a human race, I truly believe from what I’ve seen that he has a similar heart for humanity that I’ve seen in a lot of physicians. But on a macro scale, as an engineer and an entrepreneur, he’s trying to solve some of the greatest problems that are facing us today.
And I think that what we are going to see, hopefully, coming from the TeraFab down in Austin is going to be wild with recursive feedback and engineering on AI chips that are going to get better and better and better in a short period of time, and increasing independence when it comes to chip foundries for the United States. It’s wild. And I think that that billion dollars would go further and do more for more people than anywhere else I could put it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And he’s also working on Neuralink, which is a really interesting company which puts sort of brain chip interfaces to allow people to hear again, see again, allow paraplegics to walk again, which is really, really incredible.
Dr. Alex, thank you so much. It’s so illuminating, and I can’t wait to have you back again sometime soon to talk about all the other things we could have talked about today. We focused on peptides predominantly, but I know that over on your YouTube channel, you talk about a lot more than that. So highly recommend everybody go check out Dr. Alex’s YouTube channel, and it’s been a pleasure.
DR. ALEX TATEM: Thank you. Thank you, Steven.
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