A Biomedical Look at Resilience and More Interview with Daniel Schmachtenberger

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author of Pivot and your host, Adam Markell. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your Conscious Pivot.

Hey there, Pivot audience. Welcome to the Pivot Podcast on Pivot Radio. I'm so happy to be here with you today and I'm also super excited because the gentleman that I'm going to get to share with you is really somebody special. I'd like to say that I know him well, but that would be a lie. I don't know him well. I've just met him recently. But the people in my life that think very, very highly of him, I know quite well, namely my daughter Chelsea and her boyfriend Matthew. And I venture to say that they're not often wrong about these kind of things. And I got to meet this gentleman at a recent ATL meeting. It's the association of Transformational Leaders and he spoke and moved an audience of transformational teachers, people that have been in the space of helping folks find their the higher versions of themselves, people on the road to actualizing the best parts of themselves, and very open minded folks and people that are very committed to performance and what it takes to really perform at our best in all arenas, including business, our personal affairs, relationships, health, et cetera. And I did get to speak with this gentleman's brother, who is also a spectacular guy, James. But today we get the pleasure of speaking with Daniel Schmachtenberger. And Daniel, it's just so great to have you on the show. I'd love to if you don't mind. My audience is pretty familiar with me doing this. I'm going to pass the baton to you to just sort of, with no false humility, let us know a little bit about yourself, whatever you think is kind of salient for us to know about you, and then we're going to get into a great conversation.

Thanks, Adam. I'm happy to be here and dialoguing with you and sharing with your audience. And I think what's probably salient about me for the conversation here today is I'm director of Research and development for Neurohacker Collective, which is kind of an applied neuroscience biotech company. This focused on new kinds of approach to neurotechnology for mind, brain Optimization. So as you're talking about performance, the physiology side of brain performance, and then the way that affects cognitive and psychological performance, that's a primary thing that we're focused on. But the relationship of physiologic optimization, psychological optimization, interpersonal optimization, and then optimization of the complex system of civilization, biosphere writ large, the inner dynamics between all of those are things that we focus on.

Beautiful. And this is a fairly new company. Is it okay to call it a startup? Is it officially a startup?

Sure. The company started just under three years ago and we've only actually moved from the RD phase to the company phase, which means we're selling product in six months. And so it is early in the venture and it's going really fascinatingly, wonderfully well.

Yeah, we've heard good things. In fact, we're going to circle back at the end of the show just to find out a little bit from you about the products that you guys are offering, because I think they're pretty spectacular. Actually been using a few of those products for the last little bit, little bit more than a month and it felt really terrific from it. So we'll save that for the end. But what I'd love to do. I shared an article with you, Daniel, earlier, and you haven't had a chance to read it, but we. But it led us to a conversation initially about performance. And the article is a Harvard Business Review article that is the making of a corporate athlete. So I'll just. Our team will put that link to that article in the podcast post so you guys can get it as well. But it's actually fascinating that these researchers were looking at top athletes and to see if there's any kind of a connection between the best athletes in the world and the best executives in business in the world. And what they found this area of commonality was recovery and rituals for recovery. And you know, many folks know who've read my book Pivot, I'm a big fan. As part of the momentum section of the book, I talk about resilience and I also talk independently about rituals. But in connection with resilience, the ability to bounce back from setbacks, to be resilient, you know, to be that willow tree in the wind versus the oak that kind of, you know, breaks branches break off, etc. What does it mean to be resilient and mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically, what contributes to that ability to recover quickly? And I wanted to get your thoughts on that and if you could share some of your feelings or your research in that area, that would be Terrific.

Daniel? Yeah, sure. So there's a number of things that contribute to what we call resilience or the capacity for the system to continue to perform and operate well. So rather than just the homeostatic state of the system, the homeostatic capacity to continue to operate well, even in the presence of stressors. And one of the things that is important for resilience is recovery, as you mentioned, and so you were giving the example earlier of that athletes that were very successful had faster recovery cycles, and that means recovering from heavy workouts faster, but also even just in short breaks between their performance still within the game having quicker cycles of recovery. Part of why this is an important thing is any kind of performance is going to have a certain load to it, right? There's going to be a certain set of physiologic processes, psychological processes, that are going to then need non performative time to be processed. And to the more effective the non performative recovery time is, and the faster those cycles are, the more one will be able to continue to operate at peak rather than at a diminished rate, because some of the repair hasn't happened yet. And so this is why sleep is such a big deal. Because while we are regenerating, while we're awake and restful a little bit, the deepest regeneration physiologically and psychologically happens during sleep. REM sleep is a major part of how memory consolidation from the day happens. And psychologic processes, we get to process the experiences of the day into long term memory. And then delta sleep in particular is how the deeper aspects of long term memory memory consolidation happen. And most of physiologic repair, the antioxidant pathways, the anti inflammatory pathways, the immune pathways, tissue repair, are all happening when sympathetic nervous system is at its minimum, parasympathetic is high, corresponding with melatonin high, cortisol low. That's when all the repair gets to primarily happen. So when people start decreasing the amounts of sleep from what their body actually needs, even a little bit, even an hour per night, the decreased repair over not that long starts to lead to profoundly decreased performance. We see this principle everywhere. If you are doing agriculture and you grow crops, the crops are pulling nutrients out of the soil. If you take all of that crop out of the soil and you're not tilling anything back into the soil, so you're not actually regenerating the soil, you end up taking fertile agricultural zones and turning them into deserts and not that many cycles.

This was the dust bowl. I mean, this is the lesson of the dust bowl era, right? That's what led to crop rotation, right?

Well, it was the dust bowl, yes, but it was the reason that most of the ancient civilizations collapsed. You know, one of the big parts of why they collapsed was over agriculture, over agriculture in their soil, actually leading to early desertification, leading to resource shortage and then resource wars and that whole thing. So humanity's been kind of doing that since not that long after agriculture and the areas that figured it out and did appropriate crop rotations and tilling the nutrients back into the soil and closed loop process, in other words, regeneration. We're able to continue because for anything to be sustainable, it has to be regenerative because there is a load to performance.

And so this is true at the.

Level of economics, right? Spending and input. This is true at the level of agriculture, at the level of ecosystems, at the level of fisheries, you know, and at the level of psychology and physiology, right.

We're talking about depletion. It's another word for that, right. That the soil is depleted. And when you talk about load, I don't want to kind of go down too many rabbit holes. But what do you mean by load?

Well, when you're taking nutrients out of the soil, converting them into plants and taking the plants out of that soil, there is a load to the soil, right? There is a burden of how much toxicity can get moved into the soil, of what, whatever byproducts of the plants and how much nutrient can get taken out of the soil. Basically, there's a cost, right? So then we have to regenerate proportionally to be able to stay even, regenerate more to get ahead. This would be the same with our physiology. So if someone's lifting weights, they're actually inducing micro tears in the muscle, which then induce regeneration of the muscle where it regenerates with more actual tissue fibers and more densely bundled tissue fibers, which is why strength increases. But if you don't have adequate nutrition and adequate time, adequate circulation support, et cetera, for the regeneration, then those micro tears can turn into bigger tears and injury rather than into regeneration. And if you have faster cycles of regeneration, then you can actually continue to iterate, right?

So what do you believe it is that contributes to a faster, creating a faster cycle of regeneration? Because I think that's what I'm getting out of this is that you're saying you can actually impact the cycle in, I guess, to regenerate more quickly or to actually degenerate more quickly.

Well, I think there's a number of things. The first is to degenerate less quickly, right? So if when you're degeneration is the.

Law we're talking about, there's nothing we can do about the fact that we are degenerating no matter what. It's a universal law. Is that. Yes.

There's a lot we can do about it. There is. So the second law of thermodynamics, which I think is what you're referring to, is the idea that entropy is going to increase in any closed system.

Yes.

Humans are not closed systems. It's a very important topic. We're in taking new energy all the time and we're actually releasing old, you know, structures. And one of the definitions of life, core definitions of what life is in biology, is an entropy externalizing system or an entropy pump. And so like you think about the second law says things are going to get more and more disorderly. But biology is a process of making orderly things. Right. So a plant has these very complex molecules that are organizing from very simple molecules. How does it do that? There's always been this kind of question about how life seems to be syntropic or anti entropic. And it's not violating the second law, but it's working with it in a very interesting way where it's taking energy and externalizing entropy and being able to have self organization as a result. So it's important to get that since we're not closed systems, the idea that we're just subject to fixed entropy is not really true. Now we are subject to entropy all the time, but you can decrease the entropic load. So we look at what is it that ages us. So oxidative stress ages us. Toxicity of various kinds ages us. These are things that can damage cells and then lead to, you know, damaged cells or senescent. Right. Cells, older cells, but old basically here means has some damage. So it doesn't function in the same way. So it produces metabolic byproducts that end up being harmful. It doesn't do all the healthy processes well. So can we decrease oxidative stress? Yes. Can we increase how well our body recovers from oxidative stress through better antioxidant support and pathways? Yes. Can we decrease toxic burden? Yeah. Can we increase our detox system pathways? Totally. Can we decrease psychological stress and increase our psychologic process? Absolutely. Can we make sure that where there are deficiencies of nutrients or other forms of stimulus that are necessary for system optimization, that we address those so we're not dealing with deficiency? Yes. So then, you know, there's of course still some entropy happening, but we can navigate it profoundly better. Yeah.

That's fascinating. I'm going to ask you kind of a funny question. It's just coming up, so I'm going to ask it anyway. Is it theoretically possible that we. That humans could live or what I want to say, what's. What's the. Is there an outer edge to how long a human being can live in it? If what you're saying is that we can control that entropic process, this is.

One of the most active questions in kind of the biomedical sciences world right now. Is not just medicine focused on disease model, but the topic of longevity and radical life extension itself is a totally new approach to biology. And to the degree that we address the dynamics of longevity, we also end up addressing the dynamics of preventing the things that kill us. Right. So medicine can kind of get obsoleted. Much of medicine is just obsoleted in the process of optimizing ongoing system efficiency and function, which can lead to life extension, give or take. Genetic maximum for most people is usually thought of in the 110, 120 kind of range, which is the oldest we see people make it, that we have documented records of. And most people don't live that long. And so most people are dying earlier than genetic maximum because of specific issues. And so they're dying of cancer or heart disease or diabetes, whatever it is. So the first step in life extension is just preventing those causes of death. And so everybody starts to get to genetic maximum. It's very realistic that that will become scientifically plausible in the next not many years, and that, you know, premature death from disease will become a part of history. And, you know, that's something that there are a number of companies doing really pioneering, great work on, and we're working to add to research in that space.

Yeah, beautiful.

Moving us beyond genetic maximum, beyond that 120 is a totally different topic. Because there's a deep question right now on is it simply accumulated stressors that are leading to when we die and we could just stop having those stressors, or is death actually genetically programmed as a way to keep natural selection happening so that we don't have the older species competing with the newer ones for the same amount of finite resource, when the newer ones have better genetics because they've gone through more breeding cycles? There's pretty good evidence that there are aspects of death that are genetically programmed. But this is one of the topics of debate between different researchers in the field of radical life extension. And so if that's the case, there's work that's being done on how would we actually change genetically programmed death. And given that we're in, you know, the post CRISPR world where we are working on being able to identify gene sequences and change them, the idea that we will extend longevity up to the kind of 120 mark regularly and maybe beyond that is very realistic.

Interesting. I think Buckminster Fuller was pretty on target with a lot of his predictions and that was one of them, you know. So yeah, it remains to be seen, of course. But yeah, just the topic of regeneration. It would seem that if you pull back far enough, death, death would be part of the regenerative cycle anyway, right? I mean, how would death, how would we remove death from that cycle? Maybe there's no answering that question.

But it just think about it like this. The cells that make up your body are dying and new ones are being born and the regeneration of your whole system is happening that way. How life extension technologies are working is to actually help the old cells die faster so that they aren't underperforming, causing metabolic problems and new cells come in faster. So if you can, the body has a natural process for killing old cells because if the old cells keep. And by old what we mean is they are somewhat damaged though their metabolic processes are somewhat damaged. So rather than produce ATP cleanly and have clean genetic transcription, they end up having damage in genetic transcription, that is cancer probability and over producing histamine, which leads to inflammation or whatever, things like that. So autophagy is the process by which the body identifies and can kill older cells. There are things that we can do to actually increase autophagy so that we aren't dealing with the problems of senescent cells. So fasting actually triggers, you know, as soon as the body's in caloric deficit, significant caloric deficit for a while, it starts cutting life supports to certain systems and it actually cuts it to old senescent immune cells first, which is great, super helpful thing. So interesting research on 72 hour mark water fasts and we start getting purge of senescent immune cells which cause major inflammatory and autoimmune kinds of issues. So great. There are also drugs and herbs and things that are being worked on to do that. Our body is actually producing new stem cells all the time and those new stem cells are then differentiating into tissues. If we could increase the rate at which we produce stem cells, which means new stuff being born, and we could increase the rate at which those differentiate into tissues and increase the rate at which the old cells are recycled, then also protect healthy cells from damage. Well, that's A whole different system, right? Yes, that's true at the level of a human body, but it's also true at the level of humanity and civilization. So there's definitely this place where one of the really interesting philosophic questions, ethical questions in life extension is would it be a net good thing for civilization? Because if older people's rate of learning decreases and younger people have higher rate of learning, if you keep older people alive longer and then you can have less younger people, right? You've got to have less birth rate to then have a steady state population. Do you have more people that are obsolete for a longer period of time and that are less adapted to the new world that's changing faster? Or the other perspective would say we actually only start to meaningfully mature around the time we die and that we don't really understand how to navigate universe or even ourselves very well for most of our early life. And that if we could actually be regenerating our physiology well enough that those older years were still actually vital and that our learning was optimized, that people who could live to 150, etc. Would have basically a much longer developmental childhood and then a much longer period of productivity with a much more comprehensive human development. So without answering which of those it is or the dynamics between that, I'd say that's a. It's an interesting question.

It is, it's a great conversation. Maybe this explains even why there's so many, I'm going to make a joke here, but so many 30 and 30 plus year olds living, still living in their parents basements.

There's no question that we breed older than we used to, right? So we went from breeding throughout much of history pretty much as soon as breeding was possible, right. As soon as we went past puberty to having economics and education and social structure start changing that where 30 and moving towards 40 are getting much more common while we're being exposed to more.

Information earlier and women are having babies later in life. And I don't know if there's any, there must be studies that track that. But just seems like anecdotally we see friends that have had babies right up to kind of 50, which is pretty remarkable actually.

This is actually one of the really also deep ethical topics in life extension is if we could extend longevity without extending menopause, it would suck. Because if, I mean it already kind of sucks, right? If women basically are going to have the decision to be parents or not, and it has to end its 40 or maybe a little somewhere into their 40s and men could make that decision much later. There is a kind of biologic inequality in choice making capacity where he can do other than parenting things for much.

Longer, preparatorily, she hasn't been able to do that.

Right. Right now.

So extending not just longevity, but extending reproductive longevity is one of the very interesting topics too.

Yeah. Wow. Well, I'm going to bring us back to the original point of our discussion, which was resilience. I'm a big fan of recipes and formulas. I know you dig formulas too. So I'm just going to ask you with just a few ingredients, what would your formula for resilience be? And you've already spoken about one, which was sleep. So what are some of the other things that you think are really key? Because I believe in that, you know, the results of that study, that Harvard study, they go really telling. And when I counsel people on their ability to pivot, make changes in their life, whatever it is, sometimes I mentor people in business as well. And you just got to be able to recover quickly. I mean, there's constantly setbacks, the rate of disruption, the rate of change is exponentially greater all the time. And you just got to be more resilient. So what is that? What would that recipe look like for you?

Well, even though I didn't get to read the article yet, just briefly, as you shared it with me, they spoke about physical, emotional, mental, spiritual resilience and that there were relationships between each of those and that you've got kind of a Maslow's hierarchy of those resilience types. I think it's meaningful topic. Physical resilience is necessary but not sufficient. So if someone is eating well, sleeping well, exercising well, and doing good, preventative and integrative medicine for optimum physiology, that's going to make a huge difference. Because physiology affects emotion and cognition. Mental and emotional are going to be very affected. Pretty much everyone who has felt their physiology out of balance for any reason, whether their hormones were out of balance, or they felt like their neurochemistry was out of balance, or they had, you know, infection going on, knows that their emotions and their cognition were inexorably affected. Right. There are certain emotional states that were just like not accessible and other ones that were unavoidable. And so almost think of the physiology as like being tunable, like a musical instrument where if it's out of tune, all the music messed up. Right. And so before we even talk about upgrading the instrument, just having it in tune makes a huge difference, but it's not sufficient. Right. That's the kind of hardware layer, then we start looking at the software, the thoughtware layer of how we make meaning, what we focus on, where our attention goes, what our frameworks for understanding and perspective taking are. And so, you know, when we start physical resilience, since you asked for recipes, let's just kind of address that. Even though I think the basic things, everybody knows. And then maybe I'll add some novel things. Basic things are true and basic. The first one is sleep. And I would put sleep in a category separate from nutrition and exercise and everything else in terms of its overall importance. And I'm not underweighting the importance of the other ones. I'm just actually weighting as heavily as it should be weighted, the role of sleep. Because given that almost all physiologic repair and regeneration happens during sleep, the whole purpose of nutrients is to regenerate new tissues, et cetera. When is it going to happen? That's going to be a major part of what happens. The exercise, the regeneration that's going to occur is largely going to be during that time. So if people are sleeping not enough or not sleeping well, I would say it should be their first priority to address that beautiful scope of what we're gonna do here to really talk about how we'd be happy to do that sometime, but I would put it as a tier one priority. Nobody likes to hear that because there's so much shit that we want to do. That's like the most uninteresting thing it seems like, to use our hours. But having all the rest of our hours in tune makes a much bigger difference than having more shitty hours.

Yeah, this is what inspired me earlier, because before we hit the record button, folks, we were having this conversation because I asked Daniel, how many hours do you sleep? And he said, you know, eight. Eight's the right number for me. And it's. And anybody that's telling you differently is kind of full of it on some level. I mean, there are outliers for sure, but I don't think people can hear it enough. Even though, as you said, it's basic. I think people need the reminder, and I'm glad you're. You're providing that reminder right now.

And some people really focus on when you sleep early to sleep, early to rise kind of dynamics. I think that is a good thing to explore. But I don't stress on that too much. I think you should find out when you feel like you perform the best, because there is a meaningful reason to think that most humans are diurnal animals. We are daytime animals where our circadian rhythm is in relationship to light and sun and that the quality of sleep that happens in dark is better than not dark. And I think that's a general truth. It also does appear that there are a sub populations that are genetically adapted for sleeping. Waking up earlier and waking up later that were probably had to do with rotations, rotations of who is awake to keep the tribe safe. So whatever you find actually works best for you. Go ahead and ride that. Do make sure that you're sleeping enough. Sleeping enough means you can wake up without an alarm energized and if you wake sustainably, because anyone, when they're just kind of on the adrenaline run of a really exciting or busy time, might do that for a short period. If you can wake up with good energy, have energy throughout the day, that's enough sleep. If it's less than that, you might wish that you needed less sleep than that. And there are things you can do with your health that can decrease sleep need because you have less to repair. If someone has health issues that lead to increased rate of oxidative damage or increased rate of inflammation, then they'll need more sleep than they would normally genetically need because they're getting damaged faster. At the same time though, if someone's doing very heavy athletics, they're going to need more sleep. Bodybuilders need more sleep because they've just got more net repair to do.

Yeah, and stress, I mean, that's the thing about that article that's pretty key I think, is that the stress involved in being and the people listening to this for the most part, and almost everybody I know is under greater stress now than kind of ever before. I mean, there's entrepreneurs, people in business, whether you're working in somebody else's business, but there's just more plates spinning, you know, with family and work and everything else. So it feels like there's more, there's more stress, which would seemingly require a better system to repair and recover and regenerate. And as you said, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically.

So let's say you've got stress on each of those dimensions. Physiologic stress can come from toxins in the environment, from physical stress, from injury, from exercise, from poor posture, from too much computer hours, from not enough exercise leading to circulation issues, from food. That's not right for you. All of those are sources of extra physiologic stress, then it's just a given. And so I would say decreasing physiologic stress while increasing Physiologic regeneration is key. You want to eat food less inflammatory stuff, less artificial anything, less sugar, more micronutrients in general, in general, people do better with less calories than they're used to eating, unless people are really severely under eating. But caloric restriction is still the main thing we know about life extension. Periodic fasting is intermittent fasting is one way of achieving it. But diets that had about 30% less calorie than was normally considered adequate. So calorie means macronutrient, sugar, fat, carbs, fats and proteins live longer from a.

Number of reasons, increased AMPK levels and activation of sirtuin genes and things like that.

So.

But we want lots of micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, enzymes. So if people can have a diet that is higher in micronutrients and lower in total calorie, they will in general do better. If you think about if people lived in a hunter gatherer environment where they were eating a lot of vegetation, vegetation is going to be very high in micronutrient, raw, organic, etc. And relative to the total amount of calorie in it. So one thing, and just in general, saying eating in a way that is closer to the living ecosystem and less processed is going to be a general rule of thumb before you get into specific dietary ideas, because you will have people who do better on different diets. And each time we go from being really into high fiber or high fat or ketosis or we're just learning a.

Little bit more about physiology, which is a very complex system.

But eating in ways that are closer to our evolutionary environment is a good starting place. So. And specifically avoiding stressors from food, Right? So that would be inflammatory foods, foods that are hard to digest, processed toxic, sugar, etc.

Actually really cool. I just want to stop there for a second because, you know, talking about food and stress in the same same sentence I think is unusual for people to hear because my dad always said food is medicine. So I've had a different kind of a beat on, on it for a while.

But.

But to hear that food actually causes stress, that you can actually eat food that causes stress, I think is something that's worth, you know, underscoring so.

Well, think about when we think about an airplane and we talk about the.

Stresses on an airplane, the tensional forces, the shearing forces. We're talking about stress in terms of mechanical physics, right? Mechanical stressors. Stress doesn't just mean an emotional or a mental thing. Stress means any force on a system that if it gets high enough will produce an alteration of that system.

Right.

The alteration is what we call strain in physics. Stress is the force that will lead to strain if the stress gets higher than the dynamic capacity of the system to endure. And so that's a kind of wider way to think about what stress means. And so then we have destructive and constructive types of stress. And so when we work out, we're stressing a muscle, but if we stress it where it is within a range that we can recover, and then we do the adequate things to support recovery, then what's happening is the system says, whoa, I'm not adapted to be able to deal with this kind of stimulus. So I need to change to be able to adapt to it. So it gains bigger, you know, develops bigger muscles to deal with the stimulus called heavy weight. And this is why, like Wim Hof's work and cryotherapy, cold therapy is very interesting if you think about, in our evolutionary environment, we, for air conditioners and heaters, we were regulating our own body temperature. I mean, some through clothes and, but largely our own metabolism changed to deal with external temperature much more dynamically than it does now. And so as warm blooded creatures, how.

Do we get warm?

Well, we could, you know, catabolism is the force where we break molecules and release energy and heat from it. And so if it's cold and we need to actually generate more heat, that means we need to increase those metabolic processes. That means we need to increase the thyroid hormones, the, you know, the sex hormones, etc. That are involved in doing that and those catabolic processes. If it's too hot, we need to cool down, we need to change other metabolic, you know, and cooling processes. So it's one of those things where it's like, if you don't stress the system enough, it will lose capacity because there's no evolutionary purpose for it to keep the capacity. And so this is what we would call adaptive or healthy stress. Just saying, hey, this is a kind of thing that this kind of stimulus that we're going to keep being exposed to. So we need the capacity to respond to it. But if I put myself in a cold bath or a cold chamber where I can produce enough heat if I put myself in an amount of cold that I don't really feel any stress from, the system can all its current capacity can already handle it. It doesn't need to upregulate capacity. It has to actually be at the edge of my current capacity. So the system says, hey, we need to upgrade capacity to be able to deal with this. But it has to not be so far beyond the edge that it causes.

Damage, that is frostbite or hypothermia here.

Or lifting in a way where you damage a tendon rather than micro tears in muscle. So healthy stress is where you expose yourselves to a stimulus that is beyond your current capacity to manage easily. That leads to the system upregulating its capacity in a way that you actually can upregulate in relationship to damaging stress is where you can't upregulate in relationship to it. You don't do what's necessary or it's.

Just too far out.

And then the system actually just down regulates from going into strain.

Right.

It's something that needs repair.

At that point, it needs more repair.

Than it can get.

So it's damaged. Right.

Is it irreparable in that instance?

Depends.

Is a torn tendon irreparable? But if. No, up to a certain point, yes.

Beyond that point. Right.

Without surgery or some other artificial means. Right. So two things that just come up for me and I want to. So one is this the, you know, the side of me that, that works in a personal development and business development arena. I'm constantly wanting to encourage people, inspire them, and sometimes, you know, other things to keep them on their growth edge for the reason that you just said. And that's a, that's a very interesting line of where. Where someone's growth edge is versus where there's, you know, kind of gone past the point of repairability or if not that, there's some damage that, you know that's caused as a result of it. And that's, that's a really interesting point there. And the other thing you said earlier about recovery, because in talking about resilience in pivot, one of the things, it's a three part process and the third part is our rituals for recovery. So I'm curious, do you have rituals for recovery, things that you're doing continuously on a regular basis to ensure that you recover?

Yeah. So we only mentioned a few types of breath in the physiologic dimension. We didn't mention the other dimensions yet or repairing them. But I'll go ahead and jump to ritual physiologically rituals. So there's, there's things that are just what I call foundations. So healthy diet, healthy good hygiene and movement would all just be foundational.

And those are all. They're physiological things. Right.

Physiologic foundations. Other things that I would say, you know, I've kind of do regularly enough that they're Ritualized on top of that are things like cryotherapy, hot cold therapy and particularly cold therapy as a method for increasing system resilience. Very meaningful. Other kinds of therapies like pemf, pulse electromagnetic field therapy, which has enough of really generally healing physiologic dynamics, increases the zeta potential of the blood, you know, so things like that, active physiologic restoration. So, you know, beyond restoration that's happening from rest while sleeping, conscious restoration while awake, you call meditation, which is both, you know, psychological and physiologic.

Right.

And then I do a lot of things, physiologic therapies that increase the resilience of the system. So that's a lot of nutrients and kind of biomodulators. So supplements, medicines as well as not just things that are orally, but IV nutrient therapies, things like that. Because when you realize that you can take more responsibility for how your, you know, physiology ages or not processes something like to start to learn and do and as far as other rituals, psychological stress. So, you know, meditation is valuable for being able to learn how to focus the mind, being able to learn how to witness it and have space for the kind of neuroplasticity dynamics, for the increased body awareness proprioception, for the increased parasympathetic process. But beyond that, not all there are a lot of stresses that are just made up. Right. And so there's a lot of psychological stresses in particular, where it's not what's happening that's stressing us out, it's the meaning that we can give them to what's happening and we can change the way that we give them.

Yep.

And so going through processes of looking at where am I psychologically stressed about some world dynamic or some relationship and asking can I change the meaning to things that either just make me more comfortable with it or actually increase my sense of empowerment, responsibility within it. Rituals to kind of continuously inventory those made up stresses and then change them are really key.

Yep. You know what, it's. I'm just thinking that those three parts to that resilience process. The first one is reframing. So I'm just thinking about what you just said. Taking a look at a situation and the frame that you put it in will determine whether you're stressed by it or not. So if you've made a poor decision and you believe that you made a poor decision because you're an idiot or you always make poor decisions, well, that's one frame that'll keep you stressed and create will be a lot that flows, that domino will tip over a lot of other dominoes. And then the second piece is really how have you applied or have you learned something from the experience that you can thereafter apply? Because I think that's a part of the natural. The regenerative process is that we learn from the feedback that we get. Whether it's biofeedback or any feedback really we know. And that's how we've adapted. That's how the species has survived. Right. We've just continually been able to assimilate information, make adjustments from that feedback and then adapt and thrive and continue to.

I love that you actually enumerated both.

Of those as methods of framing, which is kind of cognitive behavioral therapy, meaning making, reframing, and then also really focusing on the lesson rather than the difficulty and the lesson moving forward as something that increases your adaptive capacity. When you look at life through the lens of alright, so what are all the things that happened today? They're all the things that felt wonderful and you are grateful for those. So you're focusing on actually giving attention to the things that were wonderful. And then there were things that were difficult. And you say, is there anything that I could learn that would allow me to deal with situations like that better in the future? So that rather than just being difficult, difficult and I try and let it go, I increase my system resilience and response to them. And then you get the insights and focus on the insight rather than the difficulty. The day is just filled with things that felt great and things that made you more capable and those are the things that you focus on.

Have you read.

I'm just question. I didn't. I didn't think I'd ask you in this interview, but have you read the Presence Process, Michael Brown's work? Interesting. So everybody that has not yet kind of checked that work out, I recommend that. It's pretty incredible. And one of the things that he writes about which has really been, man, it's been inside of me now for several weeks. I don't want to shake it because it's shaken up a lot of things in a really great way, which is that he doesn't talk about healing and often, especially when we talk about emotional trauma imprints from when we're young and how it is that imprinting from when we're very young actually determines how we frame the world. Like you say, how we give meaning. We're meaning making machines. So where does that all start? And so if you trace it back to this imprinting that occurs when we're young. A lot of people, A lot of people out there that are talking about, not talking about, that are engaged in helping people heal. I mean, I'm in a healing industry, in the healing arts of any kind. And it's. I'm not against any form of healing. But he's talking about, instead of using the word healing, it's about integrating and this integrative therapy as opposed to healing therapy. As though healing. I mean, healing makes you think immediately what, that there's something that must be healed with something that's wrong, that's in the system, that doesn't belong in the system, as opposed to something that might just not be integrated into the system. Which is why it's. It's the, you know, it becomes the cancer. So, you know, it's just, it's just one of those things I'll look forward to, maybe we chat about in the future. Love to get your opinion there. So I'd say in the. Just the remaining time, this is a show about conscious pivoting. So it's just wonderful to be able to speak to somebody that's really committed to what it is, how we're all kind of built and made up. And before we talk about what your business is doing to sort of assist in the world, because I think you're doing something really profound. And that's what I told your brother James. I said, what you're doing makes more than makes sense to me. It's just something I feel good about supporting. And before we get to that, I'd love to just know if there's a. If there's some pivot in your life that you've had more recently, perhaps, or some time ago, if you wish, either in your personal life or your business life, you were able to glean some special lessons, fun that you'd like to share.

You know, the first one that came.

To mind that might be interesting for listeners here was there was a pivot to actually decide to engage in business at all. My work previous to that was all in either nonprofit or academics. And specifically a lot of the. The nonprofit was think tank work mostly. I mean, some of it was working in environmental work and social justice and animal rights, but then quickly realized that despite the good work being done in for benefit businesses and government and in nonprofits, there were key issues like ocean acidification and biodiversity loss that were getting worse rapidly heading towards points of irreversibility in the face of the collective work that was being done by everybody. And that we didn't just need more of that kind of work, we needed a fundamentally different set of approaches. So we worked with a number of other think tanks and developed a think tank that was focused on comprehensive civilization upgrade. What is the future of macroeconomics that only incents positive behavior that aligns the incentive of all agents with the well being of other agents in the common. So there's no externality. What is the future of governance and decision making that can really inform omnipositive decisions, decisions adequate to the speed at which we need to make decisions, the complexity of the decisions, the inner number of interrelating factors? Representative democracy can't do it. Retrofits of capitalism can't do it. We have to move into but no other previously proposed systems can either. But the technologies that are mandating us to move into these systems also make possible fundamentally new systems. The technological automation that's going to obsolete 30% of all jobs in the next 15 years is also what makes it to where we don't need the jobs. One of the core ideas of capitalism was how do you incent people to do the shitty jobs of the labor economy? Because they need done, who's going to do them? Well, they don't need done by humans. As soon as you can automate them, which means when the jobs don't need the humans anymore, you can also move the economic systems where the humans don't need the jobs and start to move into commonwealth economics. It's one of many examples where the technology that requires us to shift is also changing the axioms of how we thought about it. So given that, you know, I having worked on economics so deeply, because we realized, all right, as long as we have war, then we learn how to manage war. And as long as we have capitalism and war together, then we make military manufacturers that are for profit. Right? You look at all that together and you have a for profit military industrial complex complex supply and demand. If they've developed the capacity to supply a demand, that demand has to continue for them to continue to have supply. So how do we have a world without war and a for profit military industrial complex coexisting? You can't, right? So this is a big set of shifts. How do you have a world with robust health that prevents disease while having a health care or sick care system that only makes money when people are sick? You can't. You have to change underlying structures deeply. How do you have it where whales are worth a million dollars dead on a fishing boat and they're worth nothing alive in the oceans to anyone and not hunt all the whales to extinction. You can't. Which is why we've been hunting all the oils extinction. But so we have a system of macroeconomics that incense exactly the opposite of collective well being in heaps of places that are foundational to its structure. Given that and that I've been focused on the transition of economics to post capitalist economics my whole life. Wanting to build a business was the last thing in my mind, right?

Like counterintuitive for sure.

I wanted to obsolete what we think of as businesses. And all the nonsense of intellectual property where right now is the best phone, an iPhone or a Google phone or well, not the best phone that could exist, can't exist because intellectual property keeps the good parts from being able to synthesize. And so there's so much to the. There's so much radical duplication that occurs and then so much that goes into marketing shitty stuff as opposed to product development. So it had an evolutionary relevance. It's now a profoundly inefficient but also, you know, destructive set of systems. But as I was working in just, you know, kind of the science and strategy and architecture of how future systems could work, and then wanting to be able to influence current nonprofits and current for profits to be able to do better things, I saw that their structures were just not well enough set up to do a lot of the things that I wanted to do and that we'd actually have to be able to take responsibility for prototyping the things we wanted to prototype. And so I didn't see a way forward that didn't involve starting things that look like businesses, even though the eventual goal is to transition the underlying structures of what we call business and capitalism. And so in order to do that, I had to from a pivot point of view, the idea of being an entrepreneur was the farthest thing from my identity. Right. Philosopher? Yes. Scientist, yes. Activist, yes. Entrepreneur, Fuck, no. Right. That doesn't mean not entrepreneurial in the outside of capitalism sense of creative. Right? But that was inventor, right? Entrepreneur. As we thought of it within capitalism, the idea of marketer was like the worst thing ever, right? Because I'm like, marketing is what actually.

Only second to being a salesperson.

And you know, if you think about it from the point of view of look at how much we put into marketing budgets rather than into profit development to have me too products just. Not add more novel value to people's lives. I've always wanted to get rid of marketing as a whole, to get rid of the entire space, synthesize all of the Product technology and then have people have access to the best shit without a marketing layer in between that misinforms what is actually good with emotional marketing, conversion analytics and so having to say, okay, so I'm going to marketer and whatever to be able to actually develop the science and technology that I want prototype wise, even though it will eventually move into other systems. That was not trivial for me. It was not trivial at all. That required saying, even though this is very different than what my long range goals are, it is the best step in service to it. And I actually have to download an entirely new element of personality, right. Because I can't continue to feel that conflicted with it.

No, you feel like a sellout otherwise.

And so it was how do I actually download the identity of entrepreneur of marketer that sees the beauty rather than the dysfunction in it and then it integrates with the other parts that doesn't do the dysfunctional part and uses it in an adaptive way. And so that was actually a very interesting non trivial pivot to say I actually want to take science, tech, philosophy, strategy and move it into business because it's a vehicle that in the current landscape I can actually advance further, faster, meaningfully. The key there was so interesting because that was an identity level pivot, right? It wasn't a strategy level pivot because it was have to add a module to identity.

You went into the phone booth like you're like Clark Kent, you know, you walked in as Clark Kent but you know, merged with a different identity. Same person by the way, but different identity. And there has to be a shift in that phone booth, right?

And that's interesting is, you know, my value systems of what I seek to serve are deeper to me than what I have skill at or what I like. Because what I like would have been different had I grown up in a different culture. What my skill sets are would have been different had I done a different college program, whatever. And that's still changeable. But what I ultimately love the most and seek to serve the most is deeper and less changing the those other things are. So I'm like, oh, if actually adding.

Entrepreneur and marketer allows me to serve the things that I care about more in this particular environment, in this particular time period, then it is actually in.

Service to the deepest aspect of self.

Which is the values to bring in.

New modules of identity.

Yeah, beautiful. So share a little bit about the business that you pivoted into because I, I think that's more than a little fascinating.

So the business right now is called neurohacker Collective. It's in the process of going through.

A.

Roll up merger with some other companies that we really love and we're partnering with. So see that in the hopefully not too distant future. But we are focused on technologies of well being that can right now optimize neurologic function, physiologic function in the near term future, also psychologic function to increase quality of human life, human experience and human capability. Our specific approach, which is different than other wellness or medicine approaches, has to do with complex comprehensive system science approach. So when we're looking at this involves a few things. It involves personalization, it involves addressing multiple systems simultaneously, it involves synthesis of multiple different strategies and applied synergy, you know, those kinds of things. I can speak more about that in a minute. But basically we saw that there were major sources of human suffering, physical pain, anxiety, depression, etc. That as well as chronic illness, that we had an approach that we believed could do something really novel to address.

And.

Our early testing showed that was true. And that we were able to actually make major changes in things that hadn't believed, hadn't been believed to be modifiable or correctable things. But that beyond addressing human suffering and increasing individual human quality of life, as we look at the major macro issues of the world, whether we're talking about religious extremism and female genital mutilation, or violence towards children, or overfishing of the oceans, or total biodiversity loss, like all these issues are human behavior mediated. And so changing them requires changing patterns of human behavior. And as I was talking about earlier, you know, the focus of changing economics is because economics drives patterns of human behavior. You make a whale worth a million.

Dollars dead, nothing alive.

And that incentive system drives human behavior. So you have to change macroeconomic incentives. But you also. So economics is one thing that affects human behavior.

It's not the only thing. Right?

So all of the social systems that lead to incentive and status and you know, the kind of game theory, dynamics are certain things that we need to change. Environmental psychology and the way environments, condition and pattern human behavior is another set.

Of things we need to change.

The thought where, which is, you know, largely where, you know, I imagine you focus with your clients in terms of changing people's definition of success, their definition of self, definition of other, working with integration, healing, trauma, you know, their strategies.

For how to navigate the world.

All of that is key to patterns of human behavior. So is physiology. And this is one of the things that we really started to look at was in order to address the problems of the world at scale, we have to have humans that are not predisposed.

To continue causing those problems. That's a big deal.

We also have to have humans that.

Are predisposed to solve the problem problems.

And to create beauty. And so this means humans that are oriented towards more empathy, more emotional resilience, more creativity, more multi perspective taking and perspective synthesis, right? More complex thinking to actually be able.

To solve complex problems.

And while all of that can be affected at the level of thought where and must be, we saw that, you know, empathy is mediated over certain neural networks, mediated by certain neurochemistry, and that there it can be down or up regulated physiologically. So could complexity of thinking, so could impulse control, right? So could so many of those dynamics. And we started looking at neurochemical and neurostructural predisposition for psychopathy, for sociopathy on one extreme and how to not only prevent and correct those dynamics, but also continue to support the evolution of vicarious experience, empathy, etc. Beyond baseline intelligence. Ultimately we talk about increasing human sovereignty. And by sovereignty we mean the product of people's intelligence agency and sentience. Their sentience is their ability to sense the world. And this means sense themselves, have more inner awareness because of that vicarious sensing of other people, empathy and more perceptivity about world around them, mindfulness, etc. Depth of feeling. This means their intelligence to process all of what they sensed, to make meaning out of it and to understand causation and dynamics and what effective solutions could look like. And then their agency, their ability to actually act on and in the world with increased adaptive capacity and power. And so this is sensory input, information processing, actuator output, closed loop cycle, right? And how do we increase that whole thing which is both going to relate to their quality of life individually and the way that they are an agent.

For the quality of life of everything we touch.

And so we were interested in this particular company, Neurohackers, focused on how do we increase human sovereignty? What are all the technologies that are relevant to that? And as far as the biology goes, what can we do to support the human biosystem to predispose more sovereign adaptive agents, right? Increase quality of human experience and human capacity and choice making. And so that's through chemistry that affects cognitive ability and psychological resilience, etc. It's through chemistry is just one pathway. We are very interested in every pathway. So on physiology, eeg, neurofeedback, transcranial stimulation, closed loop neurofeedback microbiomics in the Gut. All of those were basically technology agnostic. So it's not particular technology categories we're interested in. We're interested in technologies that work by increasing system resilience rather than overriding it.

To put you in a particular range.

And so fundamentally different than the traditional medical approach, our goal is not to identify a specific range of a biomarker. We want people to be in. And if they're too high, give them something that externally lowers it, and if it's too low, give them something that accidentally raises it. But to identify what's going on with their own regulatory systems and increase the.

Regulatory capacity of their system so they.

Are more adaptive, more resilient, as you talked about. And so that's the gist of what we're working on doing here, is how do we optimize human quality of life and human capability to be a positive force for the quality of life of everything else? Because realistically, if we look at the balance sheet of nature, if we think about the earth's balance sheet, most humans are on the liability side of nature's balance sheet. And the humans all have to move to the asset side, which means that they are doing more net positive to the balance sheet of the commons than they are net negative. And we're not even in the realm of that. And we need to be very quickly. And so we want to increase the balance sheet, the psychological, emotional balance sheet of the human and where they live.

On nature's balance sheet. Wow.

So your technology agnostic and at the moment you develop certain products that you're, you're using to move that, move tip those dominoes, get them started. Right. So just take a couple of minutes. We could share. You know, this is, this is not. I know how you feel about this. Anyway, so it's not marketing or sales, but I love people who are curious to just know a little bit about the products that you've got. And then last thing I'll say is, you know, where can people find out more information that way? They can. When I follow their curiosity, they actually can.

So, you know, the company started just under three years ago. We only moved into sharing products with people about six months ago. We, you know, were in testing with people over that entire time. But in terms of, you know, actual marketing.

And so we have.

You didn't even choke when you said it.

It's good, right? Like I said, we added that model.

But.

And so of course, the essence of how we do marketing is education. And if people are interested and aligned, great. So we have one product that is currently for sale that's available. It's called qualia. And we have a handful more that are in various phases of development that will be coming available soon and then a number of other ones that we're in just kind of early R and D on. And why we started with qualia, number of reasons one is taking pills is a much more familiar thing to people than hooking up transcranial devices to their head. So there's much lower barrier of entry to something that you know, there's already familiarity with. It requires almost no deep behavior modification. So it's also low barrier of entry from like a total behavioral input point of view compared to intermittent fasting or exercise or something that takes, you know, some will work. And it can actually lead to increased predisposition to do those other things by its dynamic on motivational chemistry and specifically you were talking about the pressure for productivity and how we have simultaneously an increasing pressure for productivity while having an increasing number of topics that we're trying to be productive across simultaneously while having more and more that is distracting and shortening attention span and things relevant to productivity in a world where we also have more physiologic stresses from indoor outdoor pollution, shittier diet, et cetera. So that's a lot. And as a result of it, we've seen an exponential increase in off label.

Adderall spike sales of people who are.

Trying to deal with their productive capacity, which is totally reasonable, and energy drinks and five hour Energy and other smart drugs and most of these are psychostimulants.

Billions of dollars in things to help people sleep. So it's just truly incredible.

And so, you know, chemistry to sleep, chemistry to wake up and be productive.

Chemistry to chill out.

And we're fans of chemistry, but we're fans of chemistry that have more comprehensively positive effects and have longer term positive and at minimum longer term neutral rather than negative effects. And so that means that it's going to have to work with the way that the body regulates its own chemistry rather than override the way the body does chemistry. So most of the kind of psycho stimulants that people have used for productivity enhancement, cognitive enhancement, Adderall is a great example. And I'm not talking here about actual prescription Adderall for relevant things. And we could argue whether or not they're ever irrelevant. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about off label use, which is huge, whether it's people studying for midterms or finals or whether it's, you know, people's Tech startup or whatever.

When.

You take a dopamine agonist like that, that is going to synthetically increase the dopamine specifically, and you aren't supporting the entire dopamine production regulatory process, then the body becomes dependent upon an external, right, an exogenous dopamine stimulation process. So if you do that long term, then you get down regulation of your own endogenous dopamine process, which means addiction, addiction, dependence. Also if you are doing exogenous stimulation, you get a more fixed level of dopamine as opposed to more adaptive capacity for your body to change its own dopamine levels based on what it's doing. Because when you want to chill out.

You don't want your dopamine high, right?

And dopamine by itself is not really going to produce the kind of cognitive effect someone wants. It's going to increase focus and it's going to increase drive, it's not going to increase working memory. It's going to decrease some of the things that really matter. And so you get a very narrow increase in some things, you get a decrease of other things that are actually meaningful to your goal in real time and then longer term downregulation. So our goal was could we produce a much more comprehensive set of real time increases to the things that matter while having our long term effects be neutral to positive on those same metrics and you know, other metrics which would require a fundamentally different approach.

It's not going to be, you know.

Any kind of pharma approach just because the way the economics are structured, where it has to be patentable to ever be able to make enough money to go through FDA approval. So it has to be synthetic, it has to be single molecule. How could a synthetic single molecule ever comprehensively upregulate meaning synthetic? Meaning it's not part of, it's not part of your normal endogenous chemistry. And your normal chemistry involves so many simultaneous parallel and sequential pathways. How could that comprehensively upregulate?

It just couldn't, right?

It's just structurally not a reasonable approach to that kind of thing. So medicine, so far, western medicine has done a really good job with acute illness. And so if there's one cause of the issue like an acute infection or an acute injury, then it can deal with an acute, acute solution to that Single molecule can deal with that if it's a single pathway. But if we're talking about lots of pathways, then we need a different way of approaching it. And so when you look at when people are taking cognitive enhancers, when you look at what they really want. They want a kind of creative, productive flow state where their cognitive capacities are engaged, which is different than the flow state and athlete want, where their cognitive capacities being online, their linguistic capacities aren't really relevant. In fact, you know, you hear the flow genome guys talking about flow states where prefrontal cortex is shutting down and people are in a very just kind of automated response set. But if you're trying to write a book, if you're trying to do science, if you're trying to do a midterm, if you're trying to figure out how to do your tech startup, you need a different kind of flow state than that. What does it mean to have a sense of flow, a sense of heightened creativity, a sense of heightened productivity, to actually have heightened productivity and where all of your cognitive abilities are online? Well, it involves cognitive capacities like speed of memory, total working memory, short term, long term memory, digit span, verbal fluency, all those things in intensity of concentration, duration of focus, task switching. Now these are very opposite things, which is why it's usually hard to increase them. Usually if I get intensity of focus, I get pissed off if someone distracts me. Usually if I have task switching fluid intelligence, I can't focus that hard on anything. We actually want the ability to be deeply present to something and then be able to move.

If we need to be deeply present, come back.

So how do we do all of those different functions simultaneously? Those are cognitive abilities while also having increased sense of purposefulness, meaningfulness, drive, emotional resilience, you know, etc. Analysis, critical thinking, synthesis, creative thinking, a lot of different things. So that we started by kind of modeling the space of what we're actually seeking to affect from a cognitive science point of view and then looking at what are all the physiologic pathways that are known about the, that are involved in mediating all of those functions. Then what chemistries can support those pathways and then which of those chemistries are generally well tolerated, synergistic with each other, have really good data on them. And that was the beginning of our hypothesis process for generating a complex chemistry formula has lots of different ingredients affecting lots of different pathways, different neurotransmitters for kind of short term effect, but also longer term effects of support supporting neurogenesis, synaptogenesis for actually affecting structure and brain. And then we went into of course an iterative process where we were taking our initial hypotheses and testing them and then getting feedback and iterating until we.

Got to a place that we were really happy with it.

And of course there's continued iteration forever because that's nature of evolution. So that's qualia and I obviously.

It.

Is not intended to treat any disease. We make no medical claims about it, et cetera, et cetera. But the experience, people have been reporting on it over quite a lot of people now has been remarkable for a lot of people.

Yep, I'm one to add to that. So I've had a very good experience with it. And what's the best way for people to follow their curiosity and learn more. As you said, educating. And that's the best marketing there is. So I agree with that.

So neurohacker.com is our website and imagine you post this, might be able to put a link so it'll be easy for people. And we've got a science section that.

Describes our approach and the formulation and.

Sites research and all that fun stuff.

And it's really just kind of focused.

Around quality right now because that's the first product that's available. As the other products come online, they'll be there and the total kind of education information on the site will continue to increase. There's a lot of projects that we're engaged on that aren't referenced on the site at all yet because putting things up as they're actually available for people to engage with. But we look forward to having more to share soon.

It's exciting. Yeah. Daniel, I don't know how long we've been on, I haven't even looked at the, the clock but it's been a blur. Very quick and incredibly valuable. So thank you for your time. Thanks for. I know at this point when people will be listening, you know, viewing, etc. It'll be all times of day and night. But this is your fifth, this is the fifth of these interviews that you've done all different today. So I appreciate you taking the time and I know your day is just, you know, just getting started. So I appreciate, appreciate your time and what you're doing in the world because it's a different type of solution than I think I've heard come from really a company before.

And.

I'm intrigued by it and I want to support it. I mean that's what our company is committed to.

Peace.

That's our vision is to create peace through self actualization. So we're all about helping people just do the things that create peace for themselves. Because I have this very simple philosophy. It's when enough people are selflessly focused on just creating their own peace. We'll have a tipping point where there's just more peace in the world. In any given moment, there'll be more peace in the world than there is anything else. I think that's a shifting event for all of us. So really, really value brother, thank you so much.

Likewise. Thank you. It was a blast to be here. We're not really a company. We happen to be a company right now. And I think you would hold this. We're people with a mission that happens to be the vehicle that allows the mission to exist right now. The reason why even as a company we have collected in the name collective is to really achieve the mission, given the scale, we need to participate with everyone that's doing really wonderful work. And so if there we will only make products. If there is a major gap between the best of what's currently available and what we know how to make, if there's something that's already near the best of what's scientifically possible, we'd much rather partner because it's really hard to make stuff right. It takes of a lot, lot of cycles. If anyone's done a good job with it, we'd love to partner kind of in any space. So this already is the beginning of partnership between us, and I'm honored.

Collaboration. Beautiful. Cheers. Thank you, brother.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over@adammarkel.com podcasts for more tips, strategies and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot community on facebook@pivotfb.com.