 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, mind pump, with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. So we just did an episode where we railed on some supplement companies. We ran a train. We actually, we banged them. Well, let's show them. We actually named them. We actually named them and list them. Well, so I mean, this is the preview to what's gonna go in this episode. Let them know. We get into the top supplements. We get into C4. We get into pre-gym. We get into the Nitroflex by GAT. We get into the Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde pre-workout. We get into all kinds of the top pre-workouts that are out there. That crack that you love. If you're curious to what is in those supplements, pre-caged, are you someone that's taking that one? All kinds of different supplements. If you guys are somebody that's taking those supplements, we break down all the different things that are being put into these labels that are causing you to feel the way that you feel. And we're basically, we're explaining why they're a waste of money. Now, if you really wanna do something that will enhance your workout, one of the best things you could do statistically is prime your workouts properly. Prime yourself properly, based on the way your body moves, based on your imbalances, based on your recruitment patterns, based on the exercises you're about to go do. So it'll make your deadlifts more effective, your squats more effective, your bench press more effective. All of this with simple priming that takes you five to 10 minutes before your workout. Now, of course, we have a program that tackles this and teaches you how to program what you do when you prime. And it's called Maps Prime. And it's available at mindpumpmedia.com. It costs a little bit more than your pre-workout supplement, but you don't have to buy it every single month. And it's not a waste of money. It'll give you way more return on your investment. You'll see more muscle from it, better strength, better recruitment patterns, better movement. It's not a waste. It's Maps Prime. It's available at mindpumpmedia.com. Hey, guys, I should ask you, Adam, because you're the allergy expert. Is it just, is it fucking crazy right now, or is it just me? It's really bad. T-Dog's got it too. He, we've got- Dude, our parking lot is bad. I stepped out with sneezing like a mother. Is the motherfucker right here comes and blows all that shit around too. There's nothing. It's crazy. When you have really bad allergies, like I can see the allergies. I can be inside. It's visible. You're like Neo in The Matrix. Totally. I'm not kidding. I'll be inside and I'll look at my girl. Yeah. Do you do that cool baby move to avoid pollen? The what move? Oh yeah, no. You guys know what that is, right? Why it gets crazy. So the way plants reproduce is they produce a shit ton of palm. Yeah, it's sperm. You're literally getting semen on it. Not semen. That's from humans. Come all over. You're getting plant. It's plant cum. Yeah, you're getting bukkakeed by a bunch of plants. Pelted with plant cum. All over your face. So I'm not, I don't normally get allergies, but fuck me, man, like. It's like- My nose is pregnant. Dude, it feels like the inside of my nose has ants. I'm sneezing all the time. And then I feel like I'm stuck inside of a cloud. Does it make you tired allergies? Cause that's what it's doing to me. Dude, it's- My eyes are watery. When you have them and you have them really bad, like someone like me, you have so much more patience for people that do and you have an under, like. It's like being sick all the time. And it's crazy- It's fucking annoying. You just get used to it. Like a lot of times, if it's like really bad allergy season and I actually do get sick, I'm like confused for like the first day or two of it. Like I'm like, is this a bad cold or is this just really bad allergies right now? I can't even really tell until I start seeing like the mucus that's coming out or whatever. Then I can see the color of it. Then I'm like, oh fuck, I'm sick. This is from that random chick. And yeah, right. And different, so different times, like will give me different symptoms, right? So if it's grass and that's what's high right now, like then it's like I have itchy eyes, but everything else is fine. If it's like, you know, tree stuff or dust, then it's, then I get like an itchy, scratchy throat. You're like, so different thing, whatever. Like, so if you get, and the news does this like all the time, right? And then there's apps that you can have this that show you like what's high right now as far as allergies. And whichever one it is, I can tell by what my symptoms are, runny nose, itchy eyes. Do you get them up, Justin? I do. Well, not as bad as I used to when I was a kid. I used to get migraines and everything, dude. It was horrible. Really? Yeah, especially like the grass shavings for some reason that really killed me. I would play soccer and everything. And I would just have these like huge migraines afterwards. So let me ask you guys this, do you take allergy meds? I know you have to, right, Adam? No, I try not to. So I have them in every vehicle and I have them at home. In case. Yeah, in case. My goal is always like I haven't taken one today, but I did have to take one yesterday. So I'll go through my day as long as I can and not take them until it's like it becomes unbearable. So here's the thing with allergy medicines. They're all over the counter now, right? And they're promoted as something you take all the time. Like people's attitudes towards allergy medicines, like Claritin or Zyrtec or all the other popular ones, is that they're super, super safe for everyday long, long, long term use. Like anytime I talk to someone about allergy medicines, it's like not a big deal to take them all the time. I don't know if you guys knew this or not, but the all the popular allergy medicines are being starting to be connected to dementia later on in life. Another one. You warned me about Prilosec, now I gotta... Well, what they do is they actually... I'm already forgetting shit. They actually interfere with acetylcholine production of the brain and acetylcholine is a very important neurotransmitter. So one thing that I was thinking is if somebody does take allergy medicines all the time, then they might wanna at least supplement with something like choline. Choline is the building block for acetylcholine and theoretically could help your brain's production of acetylcholine. So hopefully it'll mitigate a little bit of the potential long-term damage. And I do understand that there's a whole quality of life thing, right? If you're just horribly miserable with allergies. It's plagued with it. Yeah, it's like risk versus reward. Like I'm not enjoying my life, everything sucks. Well, that's how I... This is how I treat it, right? Cause that's exactly it. My goal is to not take it. And if I sneeze a couple of times or I gotta blow my nose once or twice, I can handle that. Or you go chop that tree down. But some days it gets so bad that it's like, my nose is running and I got like this, hey, it's awful. And then to me, it's like, okay, there, I'm gonna take a supplement. I'm gonna take my Zyrtec and I also rotate them. Cause I also find it very fascinating how quick you become adapted to those. Well, you know, it's funny with, and that's funny you say that. A lot of people say that. I don't know if there's science supporting it yet, but that's anecdotally like across the board and I hear that all the time. It makes sense to me. Well, the other thing too is the way that these drugs work is they're not handling the root cause of your allergies, right? What they're doing is they're interrupting the symptom of the cause of your allergy. And the problem with interrupting a symptom of something is that your body has these safeguard mechanisms and what it will do is it will start to adapt to this, you know, whatever you're doing to interrupt the symptom and it'll up-regulate or down-regulate receptors. It'll change production of certain chemicals because now it knows that you're blocking this particular symptom. So an easy example would be like if somebody were to take a hormone like testosterone, your body stops producing its own testosterone because it senses it. Well, if you're taking an allergy medicine, what you'll notice when you stop taking it, so let's say you take one for a year, is you have a rebound effect, like you go off of them and your allergies at first are way worse than they were before. And then you have to kind of slowly, so what I did was, because I took Claritin or Zyrtec for probably at least a few years consistently, like every day, consistently every single day. Oh, wow. Is I had to go down to a half a dose and then I stayed on that for a while, then I went down to half a dose every other day, then I went on a half a dose every three days and then I went on none because when I would go full off within three days, I had, I'd get hives, I'd get like all these symptoms I never had before. Walk me through like a natural process of how your body sort of combats this. Is it produces like histamines to combat or to up-regulate that? So with allergies, you wanna be in a state of low inflammation in your body number one, because inflammation will only increase or enhance the symptom of allergies, right? So eat healthy, don't eat foods that you're tolerant to. So you're saying like high inflammatory foods can actually increase like the allergies? So allergies on their own are inflammatory, right? So when you get sinus allergies, your sinuses get inflamed. Yeah, I get that. So reducing being in a low inflammatory state theoretically, and again, I don't think there's any evidence to support this on a scientific level, but anecdotally, lowering, for example, kids with asthma, they'll notice that when kids, you talk to a lot of parents who have kids with asthma, if they like don't have dairy, for example, like, oh, I don't get as much asthma when I don't have as much dairy, or if I eliminate gluten, I don't get asthma symptoms. This is true for, this could be true for all allergies. So a low inflammatory state would be no foods or little foods that you have intolerances to. Good sleep. I think you'll notice when you're in a shitty, like real bad sleep and you're real tired, you'll probably get worse allergy symptoms. So basically being a state that's low inflammatory. Well, that makes sense because your body has all these different operating systems. And if you have a bunch of operating systems that are under a ton of stress, and then you're also on top of that allergic and high allergies right now. So that makes sense to keep other operating systems, like suppressed or lower, or not having to run hardcore. So I get that. And then the other thing is exposure. So the first thing we wanna do is avoid allergens completely. You know, like, okay, I'm allergic to the grass outside. So I'm just gonna fucking stay inside and put the AC on all time. And what happens is you actually get worse allergies towards that grass when you do get exposed. So you wanna expose yourself little by little. There's also evidence. Do you still build a little bit of a hormetic effect as you adapt to it? So for example, children who grow up on farms statistically have far fewer allergies than kids who grow up in urban areas, in air-conditioned, you know, cleaning environment. Is that also too, you know, with local honey and local honey? Like that's a, that's something that- Yes, there's a little bit of, there's some evidence to show that consuming honey produced locally because the bees, of course, produce the honey off of pollen that's on the local allergens or whatever, that that will also desensitize your body and prevent and help over time reduce allergies. Lastly, you can use natural things to kind of help mitigate the symptoms. For example, if you have lots of sinus inflammation, you could take bromelain on an empty stomach a couple of times a day and you will have reduced sinus, actually reduced systemic inflammation, but definitely in the sinuses. So just a few, just a few little tips. And then, you know, like again, you gotta, it's kind of that, you know, risk versus reward thing, you know, the reward being like, if I'm completely miserable and I can't do my work and I'm just hating life, like, then it's worth it to take this allergy medicine. But if I can do it without it, then I may be better. Well, chronic yeast is always something to be somewhat, you know, concerned about always having to take something for something that your body can naturally sort of fight off and produce on its own. Absolutely, absolutely. So, I mean, and this, I think this brings us right into the topic we wanna talk about, right? Well, I love sharing or being transparent with what's going on behind the scenes with the business and something that we're going through right now for all the listeners that care about the business side is we're restructuring and building the website out. And, you know, this entire time, this business has survived off of just organic growth. People listen to the podcast and it's full of tons of free information. They go over to our- They send it to their friend or whatever. Well, and then you also have the YouTube channel that we've built out over 250 videos. There's over 25 different playlists on there that we've created all of this. And then you've written all kinds of blogs. We put all kinds of information. So tons of free content. So we've grown pretty well organically, but we really haven't marketed ourselves or tried to advertise it all. And we were really hesitant. And I remember we hired a company last year and ended up firing him. And we finally found somebody who we're excited to work with. And so we're in the process right now of, you know, how do we do that? How do you build these funnels on the internet to drive traffic to people to podcasts that have never heard who the fuck we are or what we're all about. So we're in the process right now of kind of revisiting some of our early on topics that we used to talk about. And one of the things that gave a lot of traction to Mind Pump was when we started coming out and telling people what pre-workouts were really all about. Pre-workout supplements. Yeah, and how much money you could save because they really are fucking worthless for the most part. It's funny because a lot of kids right now, and kids for me as anybody under the age of 30 who are working out, they have no idea that the pre-workout category of supplements didn't exist until, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago. Before that, there was no category of supplements called pre-workouts. And what supplement companies are very, very smart at and what they've been smart at is attaching a supplement to something that people do every day when they go to the gym, which is workout. They're like create rituals around what you're already doing. Yes, exactly. It's brilliant, right? It is brilliant. It's brilliant. So instead of taking your supplement like whenever, it's like, hey, you're gonna work out every day anyway. You're consistent working out. Take this before your workout. So now it becomes a part of your workout or take this after your workout. And it was brilliant. Don't you think it's so crazy and strange that how hard it is? Like, so think of all the people that you've coached and trained and you've had this conversation with. I had the hardest time with 20 to 29-year-olds or lower, even 15 to 29-year-olds that asked this question. And it didn't dawn on to me to literally, you just said that right now when you were talking about when this came about. And I'm like, fuck, that's why. Yeah, this is all I know. Yeah, if you've never like pre-workout, not only is pre-workouts the, if you look at like bodybuilding.com, like can you just Google top 10 supplements? Like literally like five to seven of them are pre-workouts. So to think that if you're somebody that's younger than 30 years old, you've pretty much grown up with being marketed to that, you know, pre-workout, pre-workout, pre-workout. And so trying to convince those people that that's not necessary for you to have a very productive or successful workout or to build muscle or burn fat. No, and if you read articles online on fitness, like how to workout better, how to get a better bench, how to do whatever, all of them will tie you to, or most of them will tie you to a supplement. And a lot of them, it's pre-workout supplements. So you'll read this article and it'll tell you the best chest workout. And then in the workout itself, I've seen this a million times. They will literally map out your workout, which they spent a grand total of 30 seconds doing. They just said, okay, throw some chest exercise up there because programming means nothing to them. But then in there, they'll say 15 minutes before, drink, you know, super blast, whatever. And you know, intro workout, make sure you drink this supplement. And after you work out, you do this. So you're reading this thing, like here's my new workout that I'm gonna do today in the gym and oh, it says to buy these supplements. And so to the point that I guarantee you guys are just like me where a majority of people don't ever ask me a programming questions. A majority of people ask me, what supplement do I take? Oh my God, it's crazy. What supplement do I take? What time do I take it? When's the best? What's the best? Like that's always what people hit you up with. And I wanna just pull what little bit of hair I have left out of my head because I'm like, dude. Don't do it. If you only knew how little of a difference this is going to make. It makes no difference. And the amount of money that you save, like they're not fucking cheap, man. I'm telling you right now, you know, if you were to look at the top selling supplements. Let's pull it up, Doug. Show me what's the, what are the top supplements? What I wanna do is I wanna click, I wanna actually call supplements out and I wanna click on them. I wanna look at the ingredients. Oh wow, we're gonna do that. And we're gonna fucking clown on them. Well let's take the top ones. But before we do that, let's just real quick little overview, okay? There's a few reasons why it's pre-workout because I know people are thinking, well, if they're not, if they don't do anything, the way of this will be popular. I'll tell you why. Number one. Sometimes people are cheap. Yeah, sometimes the majority just means all the fools are on the same side. Well, yes, and here's the thing. Number one, they've attached it to a ritual, which is exercise. So that's number one. Very, very, very smart and brilliant tool. And marketers have known this for a long time. There's an old saying that during the gold rush, the people who became rich during the gold rush were the guys that sold the pickaxes and the shovels. So it wasn't the guys going to look for gold. Very few people became rich finding gold. It was everybody who supplemented that, right? So what they're doing is they're trying to supplement something that people do when they're into working out, which is working out. So they made that ritual. But number two, they did this very effectively as well, is they put ingredients in this pre-workout that when you take it, you feel fucking amazing. You feel like you're on fire and you build a very strong tolerance to and there's an addictive property. I was gonna say, and there's an addictive property to it. Let's not forget that. That's right, and it stimulates. And you adapt to it really quickly. Very quickly. And so they're heavy in stimulants. So what happens is, if I'm the, let's say I'm a 20 year old kid, 20 year old guy or girl, and I'm really serious about working out. And I'm inundated with all this information, all this bullshit information on supplements. And you gotta take this pre-workout, helps you build muscle, helps you build muscle, helps you burn fat, whatever. And I go to a convention and I get a free sample of a fucking pre-workout. And I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna try this out. I'm gonna see what happens. And the first time I take it, I'm on fucking fire. Like I drink it and the stimulants- You wanna go run laps. The stimulants hit my system. My brain is just flooded with dopamine and all these, you know, all these neurotransmitters that are making me high as fuck, because that's what's happening. I'm super hyper. I have a crazy workout. And remember, most people connect the intensity of the workout to the effectiveness. So now I'm thinking, holy shit, I worked out way harder than I normally do. And I was in the gym for like an hour and a half and I did cardio and I feel so great. I feel so hyped. Now I'm like, I wanna buy this amazing product. Because it feels so good. And what happens over time is I take the supplement, take the supplement. It starts to slowly not work. I start to feel shitty. And I end up looking for one that's even stronger and that's what ends up happening. Actually, matter of fact, there's forums dedicated to people going off pre-workouts because it's lost its magic is what they'll say or I need to find a different one. Now, in terms of what it's doing for you, it's not helping you build more muscle. It is not helping you burn more body fat. In fact, it's probably doing the opposite because of all the stimulants that burn fat. Okay, well, before you talk about what it's not doing, let's talk about how they can get away with that. Why can they say that this pre-workout helps you burn fat? We'll address that first because the ones that say they can build muscle are different than the ones that burn fat. Because it's a energetic effect, bro. Right, which is what? Which means, so I can take the same, so you can take the best pre-workout on the market and you can read all the science behind it that supports why it helps you burn fat. I can take that same shit behind a cup of coffee and say the same stuff. Of course. Because the idea is that anything that affects your central nervous system, that elevates your heart rate, that's thermogenic like Justin said, is going to speed your heart rate up. If we were to take your day and count how many times your heart beats the entire day, right? Let's just say for hypothetical reasons, it beats 100,000 times. I have no idea if that's even close or not. So 100,000 times it beats, you get on pre-workout, it beats 110,000 times. Those 10,000 more heart beats throughout the day require more energy, more blood, more calories are having to be spent. Therefore, I can say this supplement can help you burn fat. You can say that and we, look, fat burning supplements just don't work. If they did, then they would have solved the obesity epidemic. They don't work. What they do is they feel great, but you do build up a tolerance very quickly. In fact, fat burning supplements that pro-bodybuilders use that are illegal, like Clem Buterol, they work for a very short period of time. They'll take them for a week or two and that's it, because after that, your body gets adapted. Same thing happens with stimulants and you know this if you've taken a pre-workout, is you get great fucking workouts for like a week and a half, two weeks or whatever, and then they kind of stop. And by the way, great workouts I put in quotation because really you're just working out harder, but it's not necessarily better. You may be adding more damage that you gotta recover from. And here's what you need to realize. When I flood my body with stimulants, what I'm doing is I'm putting my body in an artificial fight or flight response. I'm elevating stress chemicals and stress hormones, all of which are detrimental to building muscle. You take lots of stimulants, you do get a spike in cortisol. Now you keep that up over, now in the short term cortisol will give you more energy, but in the long term, it starts to burn muscle. And I know, I've known plenty of people, I've trained who I've taken them off, fat burners or pre-workouts, gotten their body to readjust, their workouts got even better, and they started building muscle again because they were so gacked on this high stress, their body was in this high stress state all the time that it was catabolic. They were actually burning muscle the entire time. Really the only ingredient in a pre-workout supplement that'll do anything for his creatine, which by the way you could find super cheap online and pure form. By the way, not all of them have that. Very few have that. This is where they really get you. Now they market you like this, pre-workout, intra-workout, post-workout. So now I'm gonna fucking hit you. Are they really intra-workout? Yes, there are intra-workout supplements, there's post-workout supplements, and so this is how it works. You get all your shit that are stimulants, right? That's in there. Then you get your intra, which is typically your branch chain, your creatine, those type of stuff, and then your post, which is like a combination of all that stuff, except for the stimulants at the end, right? So that's what you're not getting. So they like, and so you get these three, and then what ends up happening, right? Is all these companies. Here's your pharmacy, yeah. The battle and the shit talking that goes back and forth is like, which is pure, which has more of the better things. So like when you talk to guys, I remember like- Oh, more is always better. I remember like when we had Joe D on the show and like his whole marketing scheme behind his supplement is like, dude, look at the back of how many grams of like caffeine and shit. Like he has like all the highest. Like if you're not a pre-workout person, then you took his, you will be flying because it's so strong. And so that's their marketing strategy is like, oh, okay, we're gonna attack all these- We're gonna make you feel this the most right away. Exactly, we're gonna make you feel the stimulant more than anybody else. And then we're gonna call out all these other supplement companies that, oh, they barely put any of that in there. Oh, this is the most effective piece of the supplement. They only have 0.5 grams. We have 1.5 grams. And then they'll market it like this three times more or three times more effective than this. Well, it has three times more of the fucking caffeine so they can get away by marketing that way. I was shaking for three hours. In reality, it's really not that much better. No, and here's the thing, like even something like protein, like we know protein is essential for the body. We know protein is used to build muscle. Does more protein build more muscle? Up to a certain point in that at all. In fact, if we go infinite with that, and I'm like, I'm gonna eat 1,000 grams of protein today. I'm gonna hurt myself, get sick, not build more muscle. And that's true for almost any ingredient. So if they say, hey, studies show that 150 milligrams of caffeine improve fat oxidation, improve concentration. People were able to do two more reps based to fatigue or whatever. That doesn't mean 500 milligrams of caffeine is better. In fact, 500 milligrams of caffeine for a lot of people will be far worse, will reduce performance and cause lots of problems. So that's just the supplement mantra, right? If something works a little bit more, it works better, which is never- So pre-workout, and the reason why we're talking about stimulants is because if you eliminate the stimulants at a pre-workout, nobody would buy them. It's a fact, like pre-workout supplements that have no stimulants, don't sell shit. They just don't make any money off of them at all. Because you can't feel them. You can't feel them. They don't do anything for you. It's all about the stimulants. The most popular ones have a lot of the most powerful stimulants. Now the way pre-workouts are marketed is like this. They're supposed to give you more energy to work out. That's the stimulants. They're supposed to give your muscles better things for recovery. Those are the random amino acids or the branched amino acids or whatever they put in there. And they're supposed to improve blood flow, which is supposed to give you a better pump, which is never been proven and has been shown in study after study after study that it does not equate to more muscle. So I think we should break them down. I think we should go on some supplements. Let's take the top supplement. Let's find the top supplement, pre-workout. Let's break down like the top three or something. Is this it right here? Where are we sourcing this? This is bodybuilding. This is gym pre-gym. So we're on bodybuilding.com, which is one of the largest supplement retailers online. In fact, I think bodybuilding.com is one of the largest websites. Okay, so this is more of a popularity contest. Yes, what sells the most? So they're ranking their top 10. And so the number one ranked pre-workout according to bodybuilding.com is gym pre-gym. 4,136 reviews just on that supplement. So let's look at the product, Doug, if you don't mind. And let's look at the ingredients of this product. Can I go to that first page you had up, Doug? Oh, there you go. So before we look at where they're trying to sell you. Wow. Go down to the actual ingredient ingredient. I want to see what the, like, you know, where it shows like the other ingredients. Here we go. So first ingredient, dextrose sugar. Which let's talk, okay, hold on, let's teach you how to read a little bit. No, no, no, I'm serious. A lot of people don't understand that when you read the ingredients, they order them in the of what has the most inside the supplement. A lot of people don't know that. And I typically tell people the first three is a majority of what is in that. And this goes for all food labels. So if you flip a food label around and it says where the ingredients, the order that it is written in is the order of what's most abundant in that supplement. Right. So first ingredient, dextrose, sugar, natural and artificial flavors. Is the second highest thing in there. So it's probably sucralose, I would assume. Red number 57. Yeah, because sucralose, oh, there's sucralose right there. Right after calcium silicate. Calcium silicate, I believe, is in there to keep it from binding if I'm not mistaken. Sucralose is the very popular artificial sweetener. Another sweetener. Which has been shown pretty conclusively to fundamentally alter gut flora. And if you've been listening to Mind Pump, you know how bad of an idea it is to fuck with your gut flora. Everything from health to your cravings to gaining fat and building muscle is tied to gut flora and altering that will fuck with all those things. And if you take a pre-workout, every single time you work out, you're taking a lot of sucralose. Some more artificial flavors and then bunch of artificial coloring, which you gotta ask yourself this, okay? If you're listening to this, I can understand why there's artificial flavoring, right? People wanna drink something that tastes good. Color? Like what the fuck is on it? Why? Because people like shit to be colored. For milliarized. Well, let's put it this way. Remember when ketchup came out with like green ketchup? Nobody bought it. The black ketchup? It's fucking disgusting. No. It's this weird like perception, like we have, we expect things to look a certain way. Yeah, and I want- And they play into that. And I want people to be intelligent and be objective. Think of it this way. Think of your, what is your objective with supplements? What is your desired outcome? Is my desired outcome to drink a tasty, fruity, colorful drink? If that's my desired outcome, I will bet you, I'll tell you this right now, there's a million and one different drinks I could take that taste better and have better colors than the supplement I had. Well, you know what's interesting? You know why there's super bright colored and like crazy like that? Like think about the commercials we grew up with. Like in all of those- Gatorade and so like that where they would do black and white and then you see like this crazy, vibrant orange. Well, not only just Gator, but I'm talking about like sugar cereals and like Kool-Aid and all this. Everything was like super bright colors. You do realize that humans naturally are attracted to bright, vibrant colors because in nature, that signifies high nutrient content. Like if you go in nature and you're walking around and you're hungry and you see a tree with fucking bone fruit all over it that's just vibrant colors or berries or roots that have these wonderful colors. And you know, when I crack an egg from a chicken that's bright orange, yellow. Yeah, bright orange, you know, yolk. Like it means high nutrient content. What they're doing is they're tricking you by putting in some bullshit, which by the way, artificial colors now are more and more connected to health problems including problems. And the irony is they serve no purpose in this. Nothing, just color. Like so when we make our, because we make a, I remember we put this on our website way back when is we used to, you know, tell people, okay, if you won't give up your pre-workout, here's how you make it from the raw ingredients. So at least you're eliminating some of the shit that you don't even need in there, which is all this fake coloring and stuff. So here's the one that I think is crazy. Caffeine, 300 milligrams. Let's talk about- What's serving? Okay, a cup of coffee is what? 35 to 50 milligrams is a cup of coffee. No, no, no, no. So a shot of espresso will be about 75 milligrams. That's a shot of espresso. One cup of coffee is less than an espresso. Per volume, but the fact that you're having this like more volume. So a typical Starbucks eight ounce cup of coffee will be around 200 milligrams. So they're giving you a pretty strong cup of coffee per serving. How many scoops is per serving there, Doug? One scoop. Yeah. Now if you- 26.5 grams. Now if you go to the bottom, does it say take one or two scoops? It says serving size is one, so it's one. One scoop. Yeah, so it's one scoop. So 300 milligrams just from the cabinet. So it's basically like taking a venti cup of coffee from Starbucks. Oh, by the way- Before you put the other stimulants in there. By the way, the red, the red number 40 dye, I knew there was an issue with it because I have a family member who's got lots of allergies and all this kind of stuff. Red 40 number dye has been linked to hyperactivity in kids and has been shown to give some side effect to mice as well. Reproductive side effects. So red number 40, very popular food coloring and it's been connected to some things that aren't so good for you. So I wanted to make sure I said that. Yes, caffeine, 300 milligrams. It's a nice hefty dose of caffeine. That's what you're feeling when you take pre-gym. That's what's making you get all hyped up. But let's look at the other ingredients, right? Because it's gonna say, oh, here's all these great things that are gonna help you build muscle. So creatine hydrochloride. So two grams of creatine. Creatine will help you build muscle, definitely. Yeah, but let's talk even about that. It's such a low dose of it. Well, it's two grams. You typically wanna take between- Three to five. Three to five. You can get, I can get way more servings of creatine for less money than buying this particular pre-workout. So if you wanna take creatine cause it does work for most people, I would buy pure creatine monohydrate powder. Is it the beta-alene or the citrulline that gives you the tingly fingers? So they have beta-alanine in there, which is they call carnosine, which is a brand name of beta-alanine. Beta-alanine will increase histamine under the skin. So you might get a little tingly sensation. Beta-alanine in studies was shown to improve endurance. So endurance athletes will have a little bit more endurance because it buffers lactic acid in muscles. Is the effect large? Not really. Probably, you won't be able to tell. In fact, if we eliminated the caffeine and the creatine and you just took everything else, and we'll go over all the other stuff, you're not gonna really notice much of a difference at all. So there's beta-alanine. Betaine is in there also. Also one of those supplements that was shown to reduce certain markers within muscle. Torine increases certain neurotransmitter production in the brain theoretically. If we go down the list, citrulline, here we go, let's talk about citrulline for a second, because that's a main ingredient in a pre-workout. It used to be arginine, but now everybody's using citrulline because citrulline raises arginine levels in the blood more than arginine does because arginine gets destroyed by the liver and the kidneys, whereas citrulline doesn't. So why do you want more arginine in the blood? Because arginine is used to make nitric oxide. Why do you want more nitric oxide? Nitric oxide relaxes blood vessels. So theoretically, it will increase blood flow. Oh, wait a minute. I'm gonna get, pump needs blood flow. That means if I take this, I'll get a better pump. No. And the theory behind- Pump your brakes right there. Well, and the theory behind that and where they will say that supplements build muscle is, okay, I can get more blood flow to my muscles, more oxygen to my muscles, which means speeding up recovery and more nutrients are getting to the muscles to help build them. That's right. So that's how they take that little bit of science, manipulate it to tell you that it builds muscle, increases the pump, and does all these magnificent things that are just supposed to be game-changing. That's right. So exactly what Adam said. Oh, wait a minute. Nitric oxide opens blood vessels. Oh, and then they'll start connecting the dots. So the rest of it is them making shit up. Like the first part, citrulline increases argonine in the blood, correct. Does that mean you get a rise in nitric oxide? Studies will show in people with blood pressure issues and in some cases of erectile dysfunction due to blood pressure that it does. Does this mean it will do it to healthy people? Not necessarily. And then they take it a step further. More nitric oxide means a better pump. No. Actually, there's no science. There's zero studies showing that you get a better quote-unquote pump and a pump is so subjective. I don't even know how you would fucking study that to begin with. You know, what's gonna give you a better pump and so many things are connected to having a pump. You measure that. And not only that, but a lot of the reasons why getting a pump leads to more muscle, a lot of it has to do with the environment your body's in that allows you to get a better pump. So you're more hydrated, you have a better diet, you're more recovered, better sleep. So now I get a better pump, but is it the pump that built more muscle or is it the environment that I was in that allowed me to get a pump, better pump? Does that make sense? Totally. So, but will the pump itself maybe build more muscle? Perhaps it will. But is that tied to supplements or is it more tied to diet and your workout? Yeah. That's the key. Sure. So here's the thing that I always ask people when they debate me on pre-workout supplements. Take out the creatine, okay? Cause if you give it someone creatine who's not taking it, they're gonna build more muscle. Take the creatine out. Take a pre-workout and I wanna see the study that shows taking a pre-workout builds more muscle than not. I wanna see that study. Guess what? None of them exist. It does. They don't exist. They've done studies on it and they've all shown it doesn't do shit. This is a feel thing. People buy this for the feeling into their work. Now it also pre-gim also contains the branched chain amino acids. Now, branched chain amino acids demonstrate or show in studies better muscle recovery when people take them who also have a low protein diet. So if you are a vegan athlete and your protein intake is really low, you're eating like 60 grams of protein a day or you're just eating your essential protein, will supplementing with branched amino acids before your workout help you with recovery? Perhaps. Will branched amino acids help you for eating adequate protein? Nope. Which is so ironic because the guy who recommends three grams of fucking protein per pound of body weight also has a pre-workout that gives you more fucking amino acids inside the pre-workout that you don't fucking need because you're already doing three grams of fucking protein. That's right. You're already... You can never over-protein. That's right. Doug, can we go to the next... I think we've hammered this particular one even more. Adequately. Number two, oh, here you go. Cellucor C4. Let's see how... I bet it's gonna be pretty similar. It's gonna be pretty similar. Of course, by the way, I love that they put vitamin C there because everybody thinks vitamin C is so good for you. Every single one of these supplements will have a lot of vitamin C, mainly because they're using absorbiic acid, I think, as a preservative. So it's almost like we gotta throw this in there anywhere. Anyway, Owen, let's listen. Hey, you're getting vitamins. Here you go, kids. Okay, so here's the... Okay, I already see the major difference in this one. So the major difference that this one has, this is gonna target my people that just love to break that sweat because it's got niacin in it, right? So if you've ever taken, try this, if you don't believe me, take some... Ooh, my skin's hot. Take 30 to 60 milligrams of niacin by itself and sit in your fucking room and don't move for an hour and watch what happens. It's sauna. You'll start sweating your dick off, not even exercising. So when you take a pre-workout like this that has all this niacin in it, you all of a sudden notice right away which you'll start to sweat. You'll sweat earlier and you'll sweat more because you've got this niacin in there. What else does it have that's different? This one's got the argonine, the citrulline, it's got the beta-alanine in there. It's got caffeine, of course, but here's, okay. So creatine, this one's only got one gram of creatine. Yeah, 1.6. Oh, by the way, and I'm not speaking in specifics with either one of these supplements or the ones we're gonna cover because we have not taken them to a lab and broken them down. But I will say this, every single investigation that goes into supplements where they take supplements and they test them to see what's in them, every single one comes back bad. Like, I've never seen a report come back and be like, hey, the FDA- I know, look, it's FDA- FDA's ingredients it says. Oh my God, like, they'll come out with a report and be like, FDA tested the top 10 selling multivitamins and found not one of them met label, what the label said. Some of them had heavy metals in them and some of them had nothing in them. Well, they just- There wasn't one of the worst defenders, it was like a Walgreens chain. They had all these like- They're horrible. There was an article that came out last year where they took the five top selling protein shakes and all five of them, none of them met the requirements of what they said were inside them. In fact, all but one were 50% less than what it said it was in. So, and the reason why they can get away with that is so people are going like, how the fuck can you do that? Nobody checks them. Well, yeah, because, okay, supplements, and the irony in this is it's in the grocery store. So you think it's in the grocery store with food so you assume like, oh, okay, food obviously is regulated and we make sure it's safe and everything. Okay, well guess what? Supplements are not. Supplements are not FDA regulated so they do not have to go through this process of what's in it says it's in it, right? Or what's actually, it says is actually inside of it. So literally the three of us could put together a supplement in our garage, put together all that we can order all, and trust me, we've thought about this, ordering all of these raw ingredients, putting it in a bottle, slapping our label on it and sell it. And you know what? Even worse, we can- Because we want to save money on a scale, we're just going to eyeball it. You know what I'm saying? So you don't have to disness it and we can get away with it all day and the worst that's going to happen, okay? We're not going to get sued. We're not going to go out of business when it comes. Yeah, we'll get a letter to fix it. That's it. And it'll be like, oh, my bad, we'll start putting more of that in there. So there's actual supplement companies that thrive on this, that make supplements and sell them until they're told to stop and then they go to the next one. And these are all the gray market ones. And the supplement industry is a fuck industry. It's a shit fuck industry. It's not good. And again, every report that comes out that tests these products, they, I've never seen a report come out that'd be like, hey, we tested the top five, whatever. All of them came back accurate. It's always, you know, seven out of 10 showed all this wonderful shit. Way worse offenders versus like, you know, offenders. Yeah, like they'll say like the best one was at 80% of the label. I'm like, 80%, like- I know. That's so bad. You're missing by, I don't know, I can't imagine if I was hired, as a personal trainer. And someone bought 10 sessions for me and I gave them eight. And I'm like, there you go. Like I'd fucking be out of business in a second. Or- What's the most common filler? Like they'll just throw in there just to kind of like- Probably baking soda or sugar. Well, the protein powder companies were doing what's called amino acid spiking. So like a cheap way to test a protein powder to see if it has, let's say, 30 grams of protein per serving is they'll test the particular amino acid. And based on that level, then they'll say, oh, they'll say it's got, you know, this many grams of protein. So what companies were doing is they understood the testing process. And rather than putting 30 grams of protein, they put 15 grams of protein, but they put 30 grams worth of whatever amino acids they were testing. I would love to develop like a little like, like TestTube lab to sell to people to like, you know, take their supplement and test and see themselves, you know, like what some of these products really have in them and stuff would be awesome. Bro, it's, we're getting there. The market's actually starting to- I don't have that food scanner. I think we're gonna see it. I think we're gonna see a lot of it die. I think the more and more people find out how much of it is a gimmick. And I think the consumer is becoming smarter, man. And these companies- 100%. And you already see, and we called this out two years ago, you already see this transition of these all these big name companies starting to go to this natural flavor and naturalness. Even at the end of the day, natural or not natural, it's still- Yeah. I mean, it's always gonna be there because people just want quick fixes and then want that answer in a pill. But their market share is shrinking. Yeah, I'm gonna say, I don't know. You think, I think we're evolving as humans, man. Dude, it's- You know where I think- You know where you see it? There'll be more snake oil salesmen in like neuro-priming. Well, exactly. You know all these kinds of different biohacking type devices. There you go. Because we're finding more stuff out about biohacking, increasing performance, increasing things like that, that I see stuff going more that direction. And let's be honest, it's better for you. There's more- I know. There's more science supporting that than sucking down some overpriced colored drink. Well, here's what you do. You look at the whole market of products and this is how you can kind of see what's happening right now. The supplement market as big as it is is still small compared to the food market, for example. And if you look at soft drinks, soft drinks, always strong sellers. Like Coca-Cola is a fucking powerful, it's one of the most powerful brands in the world. And I believe it's the most recognizable brand in the world. Coca-Cola sales and soda sales have been dropping consistently now for like the last five years or so. And you can already see Coke start to scramble by creating, you know, flavored with real sugar and this one has stevia in it. And they're already starting to scramble to figure out, you know, what they're gonna do. Cheerios. I looked at Cheerios like and it says on a gluten-free, I'm like, oh, you guys are, they're starting to, they're trying to stay ahead of what's, what they see happening. Oh, you, I mean- And the supplement market is gonna follow. Actually, you know what, Doug, do pull this up real quick. You're calling with all the- Can you pull up protein to everything? Companies owned by Coca-Cola. So I think Coca-Cola's already doing it. I think they're way ahead already. Oh yeah, you know what they're doing. They'll just buy up, like so if you're a- They're hedging their bets, right? Yeah, absolutely. So let's see what their, I'd be interested to see, I don't know, I haven't looked at this in a long time, but Coca-Cola, I mean, when you're that big of a powerhouse, all, you don't, there's no stress. They're not worried. If the market shifts- Move the money in that direction. Yeah, they'll just, yeah. If the market shifts, I've already got our green Coke to handle all the natural sweeteners like real cane sugar instead of- Oh, I'm sure they bought companies like on Walla. Yep, they owned Desani, they owned a lot of these companies. People don't realize that. So they're already on, they're already, watch, let's see what the companies are. I guarantee they're, you know, they're already heading in the health direction. It just hedges their bets. Let's see, product description, do we have any- Did you Google Doug what products do- Well, they owned a bunch of soda companies. Then they owned Desani Water, they owned, hold on, or of course, Vitamin Water, which is, by the way, they had a huge lawsuit. There was a huge lawsuit against Vitamin Water because they were advertising something. Smart water. Smart water, Fuse, Fuse Tea, Honest Tea, Odd Walla. Oh well, Odd Walla and Honest Tea, there's some of your health ones right there, right? Yep, yep, yep. So Nestle is another one. Like there's these major, these huge companies that buy all these organic kind of healthy brands because they're hedging their bets. So let's go break, let's keep breaking down the supplements a little bit. Oh wait, look at that list. Holy shit. Was there all the companies they owned? Yeah, it would be just too many to talk about. Holy shit, that penny? Yeah, it's too many to talk about. I mean, that's just the letter. That's categorized by letter. Holy shit. That's how many categories, that's how many things- Coca-Cola owns that many companies? Yeah. Damn. Doug, let's go- Talk about having a monopoly. How about talking about having a monopoly on the fucking drink world, dude? That's crazy. Let's go back to the supplements because I'm not done, I wanna finish off on the C4 and then we'll look at the next one there. So one more thing about the C4 supplement and you'll see a lot of these in your pre-workouts is there's some kind of a proprietary blend. So C4 has an explosive energy blend consisting of anacetyl tyrosine, caffeine which then they list the amount of caffeine which is 150 milligrams, velvet bean, which is something that's supposed to increase al-dopa I guess in the blood theanine which is good to combine with caffeine. We actually don't know how much of each of those things is in there because it's a blend and in reality that's of course the stimulants is what you're feeling in the supplement. That's the secret sauce. So another supplement, that's another pre-workout that's a waste of money. Let's go back and look at what comes next on the list and start to break them down. So we had pre-GMC4 and then we have caged muscle, pre-caged. Isn't that what's his face? Caged muscle. I don't know who that is. Yeah, that's a tattooed big old buff dude. Is it really? Yes, yes, yes. Okay, cool. So let's again go down to the ingredients all the way to the ingredient part. Yeah, there he is. Oh my God. Other ingredients. Well, beetroot powder, they're using that for color. Sunflower, lecitin, citric acid. What can we say just, that's a lesser evil. It says stevia and sucralose. Annie's using the beetroot powder for color versus red dyes or something like that. So here's an example of a supplement company or product trying to attract the slightly informed consumer. And what I mean by that is you've heard once or twice that stevia is a better sweetener than sucralose or aspartame, right? So you buy this, you look at the ingredients, you quickly see stevia, you're like, boom, I'm buying this. Now realizing that the ingredient right afterwards is also sucralose. So they've just added stevia and mixed it with sucralose to give you this kind of the same product. Scroll back up, let me see what else is in here. Let me see, go to the top. There's a whole bunch of shit. Yeah, right there, what is that? What is that? It's their ORAC blend, which is a bunch of antioxidants in there, so it's just a bunch of extracts of fruit. 100 milligrams, basically nothing. Basically a little drop or squirt of each of these things. It's so funny, like when you look at a list like that, like if we were to count, right, each thing that's listed in here, just by glance, I'm gonna guess probably 60 plus. So if that's got 60 plus things inside of it and it fits in this little tiny fucking scoop this big, just like, do think about that for a second. Like, how much are you really, like you're getting like a booger's worth of all that stuff at best, you know? How much, what's the average cost of these supplements, Doug? 25 to $50 would be my guess. No, it's more than that, dude. More than 50? Well, it's more than 25, that's for sure. Never mind. I don't think it's 50, but 25 would be a cheat. Well, aren't we on the order page here? Yeah, right there, 35, 98. So this is, so it's $36. So you're probably looking at between 36 to 40 bucks, right? So you figure this has 20 servings, so it'll last you maybe about a month. People are spending, you know, $30 to $50 a month. Pre-workout primer, huh? You like that, they threw that fucking. I see that. I see that word in there. Everywhere now. So you're spending $35 to $50 a month, which is, you know what's funny? The irony is that's more than most people are spending for their gym membership. Right, yeah. They'll complain if it's more than 10 bucks. Yeah, okay. I don't want to spend 60 bucks a month on a membership. No, he's got 6.5 grams of citrulline versus the other ones that were at like... Three. Three, so he's got double the citrulline, he's got niacin in there, he's got the same amount of niacin as C4, so he likes to sweat his dick off too. He's got... Who doesn't? Right, where else? Where's the caffeine? I can't see the caffeine. Was that saying... 274. Does that say, I love this, does that say Neuro Focus Matrix? Yeah. That fucking sounds fucking awesome. Oh, man. So, you know what they're grabbing onto? The whole trend of Nutropix. Right, yeah. You know what I mean? Because now you're not like, hyper energy like Neuro Focus. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sounds so sciency and awesome. Sounds so, and by the way, the caffeine they make sure to put is from Green Coffee Beans. From Green. That makes it better. So, does that say 274 milligrams? That's his name. So, a little less caffeine, a little more citrulline, and the exact same amount of niacin as C4. Same, same waste of money. Yeah, I mean, figure you're spending 40, 50 bucks a month on this. Then you add your protein powder, which is probably another 50 bucks a month, right? The amino acids are extremely low. Okay, total 3.5. Muscle, God, look at the names. Anabolic Activator. Yeah. Lucine. Lucine. Needs an anabolic activator. So, what would you say? I like to give people analogies too. Sal, could you, maybe Doug can figure this out, is I would like to see what a 12 ounce or an eight ounce steak provides. Like how much, how much? Oh, amino acids? Yeah, how much amino acids are in a, I would guess a steak would probably be one of the best places, right? To get all these covered. Or an egg. I'm gonna do one egg. You guys just say, let's do an egg. Let's, one egg? You need more than one. I wanna show you something here. I just wanna see. Let's say a breakfast is four to six eggs. I think you need to do more than one egg. Bro, you would be surprised at how many amino acids are in, you know, a particular, yeah. I think that's where this can get really convoluted for a lot of people. So they'll be reading this and they'll be like, well, it's got, I mean, it's got a muscle activator. It's got the neurotransmitter going on here. It's got the anabolic enhancer and it's giving me energy. Like, you know, guys, it's worth my 36 bucks. Okay, you ready for this? A three ounce serving of meat will give you- Three ounces. Three ounces, that's fucking nothing. Is about one and a half grams of leucine in just a three ounce piece of meat. Okay, so one, three, okay. Nobody eats three ounces of meat now. Here's another one. Okay, no, no, no, wait, stay right there. Stay right there if we confuse everybody, okay? This has three, okay, that's the anabolic activator in this is leucine. It has three grams of that. Six ounces of steak gets all of that. Gets, yeah, all of that. Yes. Kills it. Here's an even better one. One cup of vegetarian baked beans has about one gram of each of the brand shaming of acids. Whoa. Yeah. So eat some baked beans. You eat two cups of baked beans, man. So steak and beans, it's a wrap, dude. Steak and beans, you already got, you already have, you already doubled up on all the anabolic activators that are in here. Wow. That you just took care of that whole category. Let's take care of another category. I'm gonna steal that word, I got ideas. Let's take care of another category here. So, well, we can take coffee, we'll take care of the, into Dura-Burn, what's that say? In Dura-Burn. In Dura-Burn. In Dura-Burn, Matrix. Dura-Burn. Is pretty much, Let's see here how much is in there. Caffeine, okay. Okay, that's pretty much covered. By the way, too, which the steak we didn't cover, a six ounce steak has, I think, close to three grams of creatine in it, too. Yep, I think you're right. So that the steak would also cover the, what's that under? Is that pro-pump? What's that under? Patented, creatine, H-C-L. What the fuck is patented about it? 1.5 grams. So they put creatine under the... Can they say that if it isn't patented? It must be, like, they must have added something, too. I don't know what the fuck this is about. I don't know if you can say that. Sure you can, the blend of it. You can put it with something else. Patented? But you actually have to file and patent it. Well, I don't know. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. Get your lawyer after it. I will, I will. Well, let's come after you, man. No, we're not, we're not the point of this. So by the way, we're not like, we had no idea. We're not haters or nothing. We had no idea that our favorite guy would be the number one on here. That just happened to be that Jim. No, no, you can go to bodybuilding.com and see yourself. We will put the link in the, this is the top 10 pre-workouts and we're just literally going, this is one, two and three right now. So I've got nothing personal against any of these guys. So here's what I wanna do. I wanna leave the listeners with some, like, constructive, like what they can do, okay? So that's what I was doing with the whole steak concept. Oh, there you go. Yeah, that's what I was trying to give. I'm trying to give people an idea of where this is naturally found in foods. And so, you know, if you're a vegan, I can see some of these type of things, right? Like, cause you miss a lot of the steak, right? And you're not getting a lot of meats in general that are gonna have a lot of these amino acids. Cause probably the most valuable things in here, I would argue to say is the creatine and amino acids. Well, it's not just that. You're right about that. Cause I think like creatine, for example, the greatest benefit is for vegans. In fact, vegans get, they actually get a brain boost from taking creatine. And it's mainly because they have such low creatine levels because they don't eat meat. So, you know. But steak, eggs, and an orange, ought to handle all the top 10 pre-workouts and some. Literally. Have a steak, an orange, and some baked beans. And what else am I missing on their salad? Coffee. Oh, coffee. There you go. So your breakfast. So for breakfast. I have breakfast. And some steak and eggs and some beans with a cup of coffee and you pretty much shit on every pre-workout that's in the industry. So. Especially if you have it in the morning and you do your work out later in the day. And it tastes fucking great, right? I'd much rather have that for a meal. Well, look here. If you wanna have a great workout, first of all, don't spend, you know, 40 bucks on your monthly pre-workout. That's a waste of money. Take that money and invest it in something that's actually gonna do something for you. If you're trying to get in shape, invest it in education, invest it in, you know, maybe save up your money for a few months and hire a trainer for a session, you know, invest in good programming, you know, maybe spend more. How about this? Instead of spending, you know, 30 bucks a month on your gym and 40 bucks a month on your supplement, maybe take 70 bucks a month and go to a better gym. That's gonna give you way more, you know, benefit than the supplement. If you wanna get hyped before your workout, drink a cup of coffee. If you don't like coffee, you can buy caffeine pills for dirt cheap, like 200 milligrams a pill, 90 pills, you could probably buy it for under 10 bucks. Yeah, they're cheap. Way, way, way cheap. And then prime your workouts properly, like go into the gym and do some actual priming. Yeah, do actual priming techniques and, you know, even work on your breathing and get like good and oxygenated before you even start the workout and hydration, you know, do these like simple things you're gonna get the immediate energy boost just from doing that alone. I'll give you this challenge right here. Take your pre-workout supplement, stop taking it. Stop taking it for like three months. If you wanna take creatine, keep taking creatine, but just stop taking your pre-workout, track your workouts, look at your progress, look at how things are going. If you wanna stimulate, just drink some coffee. You don't even need creatine. And you will not notice a thing. If you're eating enough steak and eggs and beans and shit like I said, if that's in your diet pretty regularly, then you don't even need creatine. Doug, can you go back to, I wanna see all 10 supplements that happen to be up there. I just had a curiosity. We don't need to go through all 10 and pick them apart, but I'm just interested to see what... So E-Core has another one at four. So what is the difference between COC450X? Now 50% more explosive. I think it's probably just got more just seen in it. Explosives. Evolution, nutrition, shred. There's another one by them called engine. Then there's Mr. Hyde. Click on that Mr. Hyde one for me. A lot of people talk about how that one's got like, like that one will make your fucking C. That will make you C sounds. So this is a company that had a big, I think it was a big lawsuit over this one. Holy shit. One serving has 300 milligrams of caffeine, regular caffeine, 300 milligrams of dikithin caffeine malate. So no, 369 and then 50 of three different types of caffeine. So you're actually getting a grand total of over 400 milligrams of caffeine. On top of that, they also have Yo-Him-B in there, which Yo-Him-B is another central nervous system stimulant. You take this shit and you're gonna be, I mean, if you're sensitive to stimulants, you're fucked. Well, so let's talk, okay, this is what happens. This is what the consumer, like when you hear people in the locker room talking like, hey bro, what are you taking? Oh, what are you taking? Oh bro, you gotta try this. I remember when I was in C4, now I'm doing animal bass fuck. Right, so that, what is, what is going on? I had to go deep, man. That got escalated real quick. What's going on there is the major difference between their pre-workouts is just the amount of fuck. So seriously, if you want that feeling to be just ramped up, go spend $9 on caffeine pills and be careful, start off with one, but start to work your way up a half a pill at a time until you fucking shit on the way you feel from that, you'll be twice as wired. If that's what you're chasing, if you're chasing this, I wanna be so amped, my hands are shaking, my eyeballs are sweating, and my forehead's red, like if that is what you're chasing, you can pretty much achieve all of that through niacin and through caffeine pills, which you can get for dead cheese. I mean really, if you're really, really, really tied to pre-workouts and you're like, no, I love them, I wanna take them. All you got, okay, fine, do this, buy citrulline powder, buy branched shanimino acid powder, buy caffeine, and take those, and you're pretty much set. If you wanna throw in some beta-alanine, you could do that too, you've made your own, you've probably spent a quarter of the money that you would normally spend. That don't cost, so I've done this before, right? It'll taste like shit. It'll cost you, on Amazon, it'll cost you, so what we should do, we'll do links, okay? If you wanna make your homemade, no crap, no fake shit, like I want to be able to control how fucking crazy strong it is, we'll show you how to make that. I'll give you links on Amazon so you can go straight to that. I think it cost me about 150 for all the raw ingredients, but that shit lasted me like six months worth of pre-workouts. So it'll, it's gonna taste like crap, it tastes kind of, it's like lemon water is what it ends up tasting like. That's the citrulline that you're tasting. Yeah, exactly. You taste the citrulline is the only thing you really taste, it's the only thing that has any sort of, all the other stuff is completely raw. So when you mix the citrulline with the creatine, with the branch, with all those things, and the caffeine, and the water. And not only that, but if you make it yourself, you're also taking like stronger doses of things that you should probably wanna take stronger doses of, and, cause the funny thing is if you actually matched the doses that are in these supplements, it probably would have lasted you two years. Oh yeah. Instead of six months. Oh yeah, what I did, I ramped up the citrulline and I ramped up the caffeine and creatine, and then all the other stuff I didn't worry about cause it's, there's, you know, it's very- Now let me ask you this, Adam, do you take anything pre-workout? No, I don't take anything. I haven't taken anything pre-workout. I actually still have those bottles that we're talking about on my refrigerator. They've been there for about two, two and a half years now. So, but I mean, there's gonna be people that, you know what, they feel like, here's where I get it. Maybe you're not a coffee drinker, and you get up really early in the morning, and this is, you take it because you absolutely need to be woken up, and you're not, we're not gonna get you to stop doing that, that's okay. So, you know, but hey, let's save some money. Let's do this the smarter way, and it will let me tell you what is making you sweat, what is giving you that crazy energy, and I'm telling you right now, it's the caffeine, the sweating part is the niacin, and you can buy that by itself, and you can control your dose. So, if it's not, you can start with a 200 milligram dose, if that's not enough for you, and you go to 400, I guarantee, that'd probably be enough for most people. Yeah, now what I would like to see is, I would like to see, these supplement companies have a lot of money, right? They got tons of money. Why don't they take an independent, research company, and actually do a double-blind placebo-controlled study, and show not-improved performance right away, because all stimulants would do that. If you take someone who's never taken a stimulant and I give them one, they're gonna have improved performance. That's easy, take that out, take the stimulants out, take out the creatine, we know those things, what they do, give them everything else, and let's see at the end of three months if they've built more muscle and burn more body fat, all things being equal. You know why they won't do it? Because they know it'll happen. They know the study will come back and it'll show that it's fucking bullshit, that there was no real benefit, no more muscle, no more fat loss, they lost weight in their wallet, and that's about it. So my advice, throw that shit away, or sell it on Craigslist to somebody. Use bottle of Mr. Hyde, or sell your pre-gen. Don't do that to your bro. Go back to it, let's go back to the main list, I wanna see all of them again. So C4, we saw the cell you core did, basically you're stronger than Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde stuff or whatever. Yep, no, keep going down. You have GAO, German something, so GAT, nitroflex, then there's muscle tech, good ol' muscle tech. Wait, the nitroflex may be the first actual, not focused heavily on the caffeine, and maybe this will be more towards nitric oxide and that. Does it say it says helps promote energy strength, testosterone, and reduce feelings of fatigue? I will bet you $100 that there's hella stimulants in that. Guaranteed it's not. Well of course, it says promotes energy. Not only that, that's a top seller. This is not just not gonna sell anything if they don't have a stimulant in there. The main reason why it's selling. I wanna see the testosterone boosting supplements. I don't see anything that could, oh wait, clinically studied testosterone enhancing complex. Wow, this company still gets away with a proprietary blend bullshit. I've never even heard of CFB, and there's a US patent on it, better look that up. Can I see who it's attached, this must be attached to a big name, because it's right to you. Although GAT is the name of the company. I forgot what it's named for. John Jones was part of that for a while, got big Rami. Got any truth in it. It's cheaper too, so it's 29 bucks. Yeah, testosterone boosters. By the way, do they raise testosterone? Some of them do, and in people who have low testosterone, and people with healthy testosterone, there's really nothing that raises testosterone. How about this? Okay, this is really shadier. They do this Nitroflex proprietary blend, and it has all the things the other supplements have, but it doesn't list how many milligrams of each are in it, which that's a huge fucking red flag right there. But what they're smart enough to do is they list by themselves the three grams, a citrulline, 1.5 of beta, and then Argonine, 1.5, so they can see. Say they have those at least. Yeah, I don't see, where's the caffeine at? Yeah, that's a nice, by the way, that's a classic trick that supplement companies will do with their blends, is they'll, they can say something's in there if they put a little bit of it in there. So they'll, what's called pixie dusting, they'll put a tiny amount of each of these things, and if you're reading the bodybuilding magazines and you read about all these ingredients, next thing you know you look at the supplement, you're like, this one has everything in it, it's gotta be the best one. A lot like crop dusting. It's the, basically like crop dusting. Oh, clinically, what does that say at the very bottom, the clinically suited testosterone enhancing complex? Studied. Oh my God, clinically studied testosterone enhancing, you don't even get the name of it. We had, we had, is that what they're doing, is they're listing that, or is that something totally different? No, that's something totally different. You gotta add a lab coat and everything. They're not even telling you what it is, it just says clinically studied testosterone enhancing complex. You know what that means? They could literally have a 0.001 of. Well, what the hell is that? K, of horny goatweed, and they can claim that. If you've got 0.001 of horny goatweed in that supplement, you could say these words instead, clinically studied testosterone enhancing complex, and that sounds way cooler. Yeah, it's the complex. Yeah, very. That's what got me. Yeah, very, very interesting. Anyway, that's the bottom line, right? I tell you what, save your money. Spend it on your gym or some education. Hell, get maps prime. That'll blow you the fuck away. You don't have to buy it every month, by the way. You just get it once and you're set. I mean, I don't know, any other advice you could give these guys? Wow, cellulite core has. I don't know, I'm tired of looking at it. Yeah. Yeah, but you know what? I know they're popular. Exactly. I mean, we hadn't talked about, and I know if you've been a listener since day one, you've listened to all 500 episodes, I apologize, because we have ranted on supplements before, at least more than once, but it's actually been a while since we talked about this. I felt like this was a good topic. We were in the middle of, those that enjoy the business side, like we're right in the middle of, we're going to market towards these people. So our goal right now is, we're gonna go after all the market, which is, we had to wait till we were at this point where we could actually hire a company to handle this first, because that's a monster. Most of these companies are multimillion-dollar companies that have a whole department around marketing to people, and we are now gonna try and counter that. So we had to build a little bit of muscle, man. We had to get some staff and some people. Yeah, flex a little bit. Before we could start pumpkin some of these people, we needed to staff up a bit, get a crew and hire a company to help us out with that. So we are in the middle of doing that. So look forward to coming after these motherfuckers. Beautiful. Look, if you go to mindpumpmedia.com, we still have 30 days of coaching for free. In fact, I think we cover supplements in one of those days as well. So you get great information. It's absolutely free. Just go to the site and you opt in. Also, if you ever have any questions you wanna ask us individually, or if you just wanna look at the content that we all put out individually, you gotta check out our Instagram pages. My page is Mind Pump Sal. Adam is Mind Pump Adam. Justin's Mind Pump Justin. And the Mind Pump page is Mind Pump Media. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. 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