The Complete Peptide Guide for Brain, Mitochondria and Growth Hormone Support
Muscle Intelligence — Longevity, Training & Human Performance with Ben Pakulski
Release Date: 08/24/2026
How to Become the Billion-Dollar Version of Yourself: The Weekly Operating System I Give My Clients
Muscle Intelligence — Longevity, Training & Human Performance with Ben Pakulski
Work with My Team → I coach men who create billions of dollars a year. After six years and hundreds of them, I've noticed something: they all run the same four-part operating system, and most of them don't know it. In this solo episode of the Muscle Intelligence Podcast I'm giving it to you in sixteen minutes. Clarity. Commitment. Character. Capacity. Here's what it costs you to skip this: a billion-dollar version of you already exists, and every week you don't run the system is a week that gap stays open. If you're searching for the success habits of billionaires, this is the view from the...
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Integrative Longevity Medicine: How Peptides, Stem Cells, and Exosomes Work Together (and What Has to Happen Before Any of Them) | Dr. Alexander Grinberg
Muscle Intelligence — Longevity, Training & Human Performance with Ben Pakulski
Apply to work with a Muscle Intelligence Coach → Most people add peptides, stem cells, and supplements in the wrong order. Dr. Alexander Grinberg is the doctor other doctors call when a complex patient wants to try these treatments before the clinical trials are finished, and he says the first step isn't a treatment. It's finding out what's already wrong. Grinberg is an integrative medicine physician in San Francisco with 35+ years in clinical practice, immunology research, and biotech. Ben Pakulski asks him how all of it actually fits together, and his answer is a system rather than a...
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Success Mindset: The Hidden Skill Behind Winning Every Domain
Muscle Intelligence — Longevity, Training & Human Performance with Ben Pakulski
Apply to work with a Muscle Intelligence Coach → What does success actually mean? In this solo episode of the Muscle Intelligence Podcast, Ben Pakulski redefines it: not a number, a title, or a physique, but how fully you show up in every domain of your life, minute to minute. Ben walks through the domains he measures himself against (father, partner, entrepreneur, athlete, man), why most people never close the gap between where they are and where they want to be, and the two things he believes sit at the root of every fulfilled life: personal responsibility and consciousness. He strips...
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Psychedelic Therapy in 2026: The New Frontier of Treating Addiction and Trauma, and What's Coming First | Bryan Hubbard, Americans for Ibogaine
Muscle Intelligence — Longevity, Training & Human Performance with Ben Pakulski
Apply to work with a Muscle Intelligence Coach → W. Bryan Hubbard is the CEO of Americans for Ibogaine, the organization he co-founded with former Texas Governor Rick Perry, and the reason ibogaine is now inside an FDA drug development pathway. He is also a conservative Kentucky attorney who once believed anyone holding a psychedelic belonged under the jail. What changed his mind was a single Scientific American article about psilocybin and alcohol dependency, a family history with alcohol, and a decade running two of Kentucky's largest government systems while the opioid epidemic that...
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How to Focus, Recover and Lead Better by Working With Your Brain's Wiring | Wharton Neuroscientist Dr. Michael Platt
Muscle Intelligence — Longevity, Training & Human Performance with Ben Pakulski
Want help designing your training, nutrition, and recovery around the way your body and brain actually work? Apply to work with the Muscle Intelligence coaching team → Wharton neuroscientist Dr. Michael Platt has spent his career studying how the brain makes decisions, why high performers burn through their attention, and what actually improves brain health and brain performance in people with real demands on their time. In this conversation with Ben Pakulski, he explains why the human brain is still running on wiring built for a world of small groups, constant movement, and natural...
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The Molecule Behind Blood Flow, Energy, and Sexual Health After 40 | Dr. Nathan Bryan
Muscle Intelligence — Longevity, Training & Human Performance with Ben Pakulski
Work with a Muscle Intelligence Coach: Dr. Nathan Bryan has spent 25 years researching nitric oxide, the gas your body produces to open blood vessels and move oxygen into every cell you have. In this conversation he explains why production drops roughly 10 to 12 percent per decade, why a man in his forties is often operating on half of what he had, and what that decline shows up as first. Ben and Dr. Bryan cover the symptom hierarchy of nitric oxide deficiency, why sexual function is the earliest signal and what it says about the rest of the arterial system, why 50 percent of men...
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The Complete Peptide Guide for Brain, Mitochondria and Growth Hormone Support
Muscle Intelligence — Longevity, Training & Human Performance with Ben Pakulski
If you're interested in peptides I have some resources for you → Apply to work with the MI team → Ryan Smith co-founded the first pharmacy in the United States to offer an extensive list of peptides — and he ran the synthesis floor himself. Preparative HPLC, mass spec, chemical synthesis, the lot. Which means he spent years watching the same two failures from the inside: the molecule that works beautifully at a small dose and stops working when someone doubles it, and the vial that looks identical to the real thing and isn't. He is not a peptide evangelist. Ask him about the compound...
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The Simple Mechanism Behind Long-Term Performance
Muscle Intelligence — Longevity, Training & Human Performance with Ben Pakulski
Most men trying to change their body are shopping for a tactic. A cleaner diet, a better split, a smarter supplement stack, and lately a peptide protocol they found online. Ben has coached enough high performers to know how that story ends, because he lived a version of it himself. He was an obese fifteen-year-old who decided he was going to compete at the Mr. Olympia, and the obsessive, run-through-the-wall identity that got him there is the same one he had to dismantle at forty-five when it started costing him at home and failing to keep pace with what his life actually demanded. This...
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LDL, Insulin Resistance and The Real Cause of Heart Disease | Dr. Anthony Jay
Muscle Intelligence — Longevity, Training & Human Performance with Ben Pakulski
This episode is sponsored by Super Patch: Apply for Muscle Intelligence Coaching: You cleaned up your diet, cut the carbs, and your LDL went up. Your doctor circled it in red and reached for a statin. Dr. Anthony Jay spent five years doing heart disease research full time at Boston University Medical School — running autopsies, removing plaque from human arteries, publishing on oxidized LDL — and for most of that time he was a statin guy himself. His mentor took them and bragged about it. His textbooks put the men who invented them on a pedestal. Then he kept looking at what was...
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Why Your Testosterone Labs Come Back Normal While You Feel Terrible | Dr. Abraham Morgentaler
Muscle Intelligence — Longevity, Training & Human Performance with Ben Pakulski
Work with the Muscle Intelligence Team: Most men who suspect their testosterone is low get a blood test, get told the number is normal, and get sent home still exhausted, still soft in the middle, still wondering what happened to the guy they used to be. Dr. Abraham Morgentaler has spent thirty-five years proving that those men are not imagining it. He is a urologist on the Harvard Medical School faculty, the physician who overturned the belief that testosterone causes prostate cancer, and the author of Testosterone for Life and The Truth About Men and Sex. He was treating low testosterone...
info_outlineIf you're interested in peptides I have some resources for you → https://go.muscleintelligence.com/form/peptides/
Apply to work with the MI team → https://muscleintelligence.com/apply
Ryan Smith co-founded the first pharmacy in the United States to offer an extensive list of peptides — and he ran the synthesis floor himself. Preparative HPLC, mass spec, chemical synthesis, the lot. Which means he spent years watching the same two failures from the inside: the molecule that works beautifully at a small dose and stops working when someone doubles it, and the vial that looks identical to the real thing and isn't. He is not a peptide evangelist. Ask him about the compound he calls ten million times more potent than BDNF and he'll tell you why he doesn't take it.
His argument here is quieter than most of what gets said about peptides, and harder to unhear afterward: the body is already a competent system, and nearly everything that goes wrong with these compounds comes from handing it more input than it needed. Why exogenous growth hormone removes a brake the secretagogues leave in place. Why ipamorelin became the standard despite releasing less growth hormone than the compounds it replaced. Why two vials of the same peptide, at the same purity, can behave completely differently. He would rather talk about what he refuses to make than what he's excited about — and by the end of the hour it's clear those are the same conversation.
5 Key Takeaways
- Why exogenous growth hormone removes a brake your body doesn't get back — and what CJC-1295, ipamorelin and tesamorelin do instead
- The reason ipamorelin became the clinical standard despite releasing less growth hormone than the compounds it replaced
- Why the same 500-microgram dose of oral BPC-157 works in one form and barely at all in another
- Why the peptide he calls 10 million times more potent than BDNF is the one he leaves out of his own stack
- What a clean HPLC mass spec report still can't tell you about what's in the vial — and why that one blind spot lands on your liver
Chapters
0:00 Why Peptides Took a Century to Arrive
4:54 Specificity, Growth Hormone & the Scalpel Argument
16:22 Thymosin Alpha-1, Epitalon & Natural Testosterone
25:25 Mitochondrial Peptides & the Fat Loss Compounds
32:27 BPC-157: Repair, Dosing & the Salt Form Problem
35:46 Peptides for the Brain: FGL, Dihexa & Cerebrolysin
47:05 What He Takes, What He Refuses & Why
52:36 Side Effects, Purity & What's Really in the Vial
Connect with Ryan
X – https://x.com/ryansmithepiage
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-smith-lexington-ky/
TruDiagnostic – https://www.trudiagnostic.com