Alexander Cortes

Core Ideas

• Choose your hard. Anything worth doing will be difficult, so pick the difficulty you want. Health and companies both compound over years.
• A lot of success is timing. When the market, the money and the government all want the same thing, put yourself in the middle of that stream.
• People respond to incentives more than outcomes. Design for small wins you can feel today, and the long-term result builds from them.
• Sixty percent for five years beats a hundred percent for four weeks. A real change in how you see yourself takes about a year.
• Exercise is a technology, and so are GLP-1 drugs. There's no virtue in making weight loss hurt. The drugs still need training, protein and water alongside them.
• Ageing takes speed before strength. Moving fast, reacting fast and staying mobile slows the slide from lost power to lost muscle.
• All knowledge starts at n=1. A study is not proof by itself, and much formal research begins with people trying things on themselves.
• Build an audience by educating people. Chase attention and your audience ends up running you.
• A founder's job is to keep the vision alive, keep the team aligned with it, and not die. He tells his team the likeliest way Athanor fails is that they get tired, so he still trains every day to stay fit enough to see it through.

Resources & References

• Nothing in this episode is medical advice. Most of the peptides discussed are not approved medicines, so speak to a doctor before trying any of them.
• Connect with Alexander: The Power of BroScience by AJAC (his free Substack, where he publishes his health writing), @AJA_Cortes on X (where he is most active), and YouTube (his health and mobility videos).
• Alexander's writing:
  • The Missing Middle of Industrialization: Everything is Chemicals (March 2026): why he started Athanor
  • Why Creatine Supply is Essential For American Industrialization (March 2026): how one supplement anchors a wider chemical supply chain
  • Beginner Peptides: his introduction to peptides
• Companies:
  • Athanor Inc: Alexander's specialty nitrogen chemistry company, based in Austin, Texas
  • Tesla and SpaceX: Elon Musk showed the flying Roadster at a SpaceX test site in Texas on 15 October 2026, the day before we recorded (news coverage)
  • Eli Lilly: maker of Mounjaro and Zepbound, and in November 2025 the first healthcare company to reach a $1 trillion market value
• People:
  • Elon Musk: Alexander's example of an outsider who builds fast-moving teams
  • Preethi Kasireddy: RareErth Season 1 guest
  • Frank Herbert: author of Dune
  • Aristotle: who, in Alexander's words, said everything there is to say about human relationships
  • Hillel the Elder: the source of "If not now, when?", which Alexander echoes when he explains why he started Athanor
  • Vladimir Khavinson: the Russian gerontologist behind the "bioregulator" peptides Epitalon and Pinealon
• Places:
  • Bengaluru: where Alexander and Preethi hosted an event a couple of years ago
  • Thailand: where Alexander and his wife stayed through 2020, he trained in Muay Thai, and he had the best meal of his life
  • Hollywood: where he worked as a personal trainer for many years
• Books:
  • Dune by Frank Herbert (1965): the book he has reread most. He recommends the first book over the rest of the series.
  • The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987): his shorthand for what happens when social classes collide
  • The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien: the kind of against-the-odds story he says we copy too closely when we plan our own lives
  • The Bhagavad Gita and the Bible: proof, he says, that people have always looked for shortcuts
• Music:
  • Michael Bublé: his covers of 1960s big band songs, which Alexander loves for ballroom dancing
  • "Suavemente" by Elvis Crespo (1998): his pick for the song that gets him dancing anywhere
• Health and science:
  • GLP-1 receptor agonists: the drug class behind Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound
  • Gallup's 2026 figures on GLP-1 use and obesity: 11% of US adults were taking a GLP-1 for weight loss, and adult obesity fell from 39.9% in 2022 to 36.4%
  • The peptides Alexander names: BPC-157, TB-500 (a synthetic fragment of thymosin beta-4), GHK-Cu, Epitalon and Pinealon
  • FDA panel votes to loosen restrictions on four peptides (July 2026): a narrow vote to let pharmacies compound BPC-157 and others. It is not approval, and no rule had been published as of 2 October 2026 (status check).
  • Powerpenia should be considered a biomarker of healthy aging (2024): the paper that named the loss of muscle power with age, which comes before sarcopenia
  • Prognostic value of grip strength (The Lancet, 2015): the PURE study of nearly 140,000 adults in 17 countries
  • Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science (Science, 2015) and the wider replication crisis
  • N-of-1 trials: the formal version of the "n equals one" testing Alexander describes
• Other references:
  • India 1, India 2 and India 3: Blume Ventures' way of splitting India's consumers, from its Indus Valley Annual Report. Alexander's "India one" refers to the same affluent slice.
  • Bharatanatyam: the classical dance Alexander's wife took up as an adult. She is working towards her arangetram, the debut performance.
  • Land value tax and Henry George: the thinking behind Alexander's defence of property taxes
  • Parenting styles: background on the structured and permissive approaches Alexander contrasts
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