#143: The World's Most Famous Performance-Enhancement Chemist

Can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question.

Now with a seat? Inappropriate time what if I did the optimal I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. This episode is brought to you by athletic Greens I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably, athletic greens. I view it as all in one nutritional insurance. I recommended it, in fact, in the four hour body. This is more than ten years ago and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals and whole food sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard pressed to find a more nutrientdense and comprehensive formula on the market. It has multivitamins, multimineral greens, complex probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, adaptogens and much more. I usually take it once or twice a day just to make sure I've covered my bases. If I miss anything I'm not aware of. Of course I focus on nutrientdense meals to begin with. That's the basis. But athletic greens makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available from travel packets. I always have them in my bag when I'm zipping around. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all in one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure, so adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com TFS you'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com TFS, as in Tim Ferriss show, athleticgreens.com tfs. This episode is brought to you by five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world, with millions of subscribers, and it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday I send out five bullet points super short of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers have asked me for something short and action packed for a very long time. Because after all, the podcasts, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created five bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free. It's always going to be free. And you can learn more at Tim blog Friday. That's Tim Blog Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with, and little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to five bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with fibull at Friday subscribers. So check it forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot, and you can, of course, easily subscribe anytime. So easy peasy. Again, that's slash Friday, and thanks for checking it out if the spirit moves you. Hello all you freaks out there. And aren't we all freaks at the end of the day? This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. If you liked my episode with Dom de Agustino, the incredible scientist who fasted six, seven days, whatever it was, deadlifted 500 pounds for ten reps and continues to do amazing work for the Department of Defense with exogenous ketones, et cetera, et cetera, you might love this one.

So here we go.

Patrick Arnold is widely considered the father of pro hormones. He's also an organic chemist known for introducing Androstein Dione. Remember Mark McGuire? One Androstein diol, marketed as one ad, and methylhexanamine. If I'm getting that correct, into the dietary supplement market, and I'm going to mangle quite a few of these types of words. Now you may recognize the name and say, why do I know that name? Patrick Arnold. He also created the designer steroid tetrahydrogestronone, best known as THG, or the clear THG, along with two other anabolic steroids that Patrick manufactured, perhaps the best known of the two being Norbolothone, not banned at the time of their creation. This is very important. Were hard to detect drugs at the heart of the BaLCo Professional sports doping scandal, which thrust Barry bonds and others into the spotlight. I was in the Bay Area when this happened. Balco distributed these worldwide world class athletes in a whole slew of sports, ranging from track and field to professional baseball and football. More recently, Patrick has been innovating in the legal world of ketone supplementation, and that's actually how he connected with Dom, including breakthroughs in performance and taste with products like Ketoforce, like Keto canna. And both of those ended up coming up. I believe in my conversation with Dom because they have some very interesting applications. If you'd like to meet Patrick in person, the infamous Patrick Arnold in person, you can find him at the Arnold Classic in Columbus, Ohio, from March 3 to six, 2016. So that's coming up very soon. For those of you who are listening to this, when it first comes out at booth three two eight. So I believe that will be the Ketosports booth at three two eight. Otherwise, you can check out his current concoctions for athletes@ketosports.com as well as prototypenutrition.com. In this sciencedense conversation, we cover a ton. Most of it's related to better performance through chemistry. We also discuss Patrick's biggest successes and mistakes, his path to science, exogenous ketone supplementation for sports, of course, as well as nonsense in the media about anabolics and performance enhancing drugs. For example, the delta two scandal that came out not too long ago, and lots of misinformation related to that. So with one more caveat, let us get into it. This is a dense conversation, and as always with my podcast, with my blog posts, I don't try to put out an episode that everyone will love. There's no such thing. I try to put out episodes that a fraction of my listenership, in this case, will love and really get into, because there's tons of detail in the weeds. If this episode isn't for you, that's okay. You can try something else, like Jamie Foxx or Josh Waitskin, the chess prodigy. My goal is with every, say, five episodes or so, to hit everybody in my audience. But this is a very cool episode. It's highly specific, and I do hope you enjoy it. So here is Patrick Arnold. Patrick, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

I have been looking forward to this and hoping that we might cross paths for such a long time. I've had many requests, and when I look back at the supplements, for instance, that have had an impact on me, and I look at the common thread kind of in retrospect, you've had a hand in pretty much all of them, and it's an area where I have a very high degree of insecurity. I've never studied, say, organic chemistry to any extent, and it's kind of like Latin, insomuch as I've read a lot of these words. But I'm sure I will mispronounce a lot, so feel free to correct me. But I wanted to begin at the beginning, I guess, and just to ask you if you could talk about how you developed a passion for chemistry, because it's not a hot subject. In the same way that, say, computer science is very in. Right. How did that start?

Well, I would say that to tell my story, I'd have to talk about how I gained a passion for weightlifting, bodybuilding at the same time that I grew a passion for chemistry. And I'll start with the weightlifting part, because that happened earlier, and that happened when my grandfather had an old set of York weights in his basement, and we brought them all down to our basement, and we ended up buying benches and whatnot from this guy in Walletford, Connecticut, that had his forgery there, and he made this really cool hardcore stuff and everything. We set up our own little gym. So I was around 1213 years old, so we were one of the first people in our neighborhood to start lifting weights and really got into it and all that. So later on, I've always was very science oriented. My father always had encyclopedias, science books, and I used to read about the universe and astronomy