The Secret Sauce Of Brain-Stimulating Supplements - The Most Advanced Smart Drug Formulas Known To Humankind

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life.

Podcast, once you've gone from feeling like crap to feeling like a rock star, it resets your belief system that maybe there's something more than just living or surviving. There's actually this kind of superhuman or at least super optimal performance state that you can achieve.

Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show.

All right, folks, a long time ago, well, not that long ago, I guess it was last year, I released a super popular two part article series on my website that was all about nootropics, like a bunch of different strategies to maximize your brain's performance and what kind of things to pair with these so called nootropic or smart drug esque stacks that a lot of people rely upon now to kind of go after the whole feel of that movie Limitless with Brad Cooper. Right? How can you do more and potentially sleep less, accomplish more, and turn up the dials in your brain? And so this article also went into some crazy formulas, things like one called Nectar and one called Brain Fluoride Flow, another one called Aggressive Strength, one that I'm on right now called Focused Savagery, which I stacked with Nectar this morning. And so these are some of the most unique nootropic compounds and stacks that I've ever found. And so I wrote this article series about them. But a couple of times in that article, the name Mr. Newts came up. And I didn't know who Mr. Newts was at the time because the person who had designed these supplements I was talking about is my friend Matt Gallant of a company called Bioptimizers, which you may know as a company that does magnesium and digestive enzymes, things like that. But anyways, Matt kept telling me and telling me, telling me about his crazy smart friend named Mr. Newts, who he relied upon as kind of the formulator for these compounds that he was making. And so this guy's like a crazy mad scientist with a background from advertising to laser technology to Internet and software. And I'd been asking Matt for a long time if I could interview him. Finally, finally I got connected and I have got Mr. Newts on the show with me today to really dig into all the different ways that you can upgrade your brain, so to speak, and a whole lot more. So I guess my first question is, Mr. Newts, do you go by your full name or do you just kind of fly under the radar and keep yourself as newts? I just want to make sure I don't break protocol here.

No, no, Totally cool, man. Ever since Asprey outed me.

It'S been a combination of Mark, Mr. Newt's effinger.

What do you mean Asprey outed you?

On a podcast with him a year ago. He's going, dude, dude, come on. We got to expose this. This is ridiculous.

Okay, so your actual name is Mark Effinger?

It is.

All right.

But I'm going to put the show notes for everything we talk about@bengreenfieldlife.com Newt so if you guys are listening in everything Mark and I talk about crazy formulas, anything like that, you can go to BenGreenfieldLife.com n o o T S so I don't even want to talk yet about nootropics and brain performance. I want to know how you got into all this in the first place, because it seems like kind of a stretch to go from Internet and software into formulation.

Yeah, so I had a. Have you ever had a health crisis, Ben?

I would say that I'm not much of a wounded healer. No. My journey into health has always been inspired by wanting to kind of push the body from good to great, but I've never really had much of a. What you. A health crisis. I suppose my wife would laugh at me if I said I did, because she just told me she carried twins for nine months. So. Quit crying about your health crisis, Ben.

Hey, you know, all my children were born at home, and so the last one, Livy. Yeah, it was fine. It was fine. As you can imagine. First one in a hot tub, Kaylee. My second one in a birth chair in the masturbating room. Oh, yeah.

I've heard about doing, like, birthing pools, but not hot tubs.

Yeah, yeah. It was an inflatable hot tub we brought into the house, into a spare bedroom, and then had the birth there. It was pretty fun. Even had cameras and journalists there. It was kind of fun. My last one was born on a couch in front of the fireplace. And in reflection of your wife's. Don't be a wuss. I've just carried these sons of guns for the last nine months, and you're complaining about your stubbed tail?

Yeah, exactly.

As my daughter Livy was crowning in front of the fireplace, my wife reached out to my hand, grabbed it, crushed it, as is norm for a woman under that pressure, and said, you're getting cut.

And for those of you unfamiliar with the word crowning, that's literally when a baby's head starts to show through the Vaginal opening. So anyone who didn't have that word in your vernacular, you've now just learned something that might be the only thing you learned this whole show. But anyway, so back to crowning the healing crisis question. Why'd you ask me that?

Well, a couple things. One is I've had a couple of pretty severe health crisis. One, I was a white rat for Accutane back in the 80s, which is a really, really dangerous drug used to control acne. Out of control cystic acne. And I was in the Air force at the time. And so I was kind of a involuntary volunteer. You sign your rights away when you, when you sign that paper that says you're going to go fix airplanes or be a spy. So that was the first one. So I was, I was put on mega doses. I was a bodybuilder at the time, so I was put on mega doses of that and that led to.

Wait, which one? You made mega doses of Accutane?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What that have to do with bodybuilding? You had like, like acne related to bodybuilding?

No, I had, I had cystic acne from like from the time I was 14 or 15.

Oh, okay.

So they saw me as this incredible opportunity because I was, I was 215 pounds and running, you know, 8 to 10% body fat, very athletic endurance, you know, bicycling and motorcycle road racing and free climbing and Yosemite and those kinds of things. And so I was the kind of person they could throw a ton of stuff at. And if I didn't die, you know, the, if the LD50 of, of Mark wasn't too bad, then maybe we can continue to make this drug.

So you just had like a super duper high tolerance for stuff?

I did. Or so I thought. The thing is, as you're well aware, is that there are some things that impact you or that don't impact you today or that you think are great today and, and 10 years down the line, they suck. As was the case for me on this once. The Accutane. So the Accutane does an interesting thing. It burrows itself into what we believe is maybe the muscle fibers and some of those areas of the body that are difficult or challenging to detox over time, depending on what the chemical bond is. So in this case, a decade after that, after taking the Accutane and being on the use and getting out of the military and starting my first startups, is I was at a bed and breakfast, completely burned to the ground, just completely shelled out, chronic nose drip and all. Kinds of stuff. Now, living in the Northwest, as you're very well aware, especially if you're living on the Pacific side, it's not nearly the Spokane ish for beautiful seasons, it's one season of rain punctuated by a very short summer. Right. So I went to bed and breakfast. The doctor who happened to own it, I didn't know he was a doctor and an ND at the time. He put me on EWAT exercise with oxygen therapy.

Oh yeah.

I did a 30 minute EWAT session on a treadmill and a sore opened up in my lat that was the size of a silver dollar oozing clear fluid.

Do you think that was due to the hypoxia, hyperoxia, kind of like driving stuff out of the tissue with the EWAT protocol?

Absolutely. And in fact it became a standard for me. I mean, EWAT is one of the things that we're investing in, um, because it's an incredible technology and there are ways to, there are ways to optimize and amplify it.

I do it three times a week, by the way. I have this thing called a Vasper and There's a live O2 next to it. So I can switch from hypoxia to hyper oxy 21 minutes three times a week. And that's my main form of cardio when I'm home.

So you, you are a testament to it as well then. So aside from the clarity and the wakefulness that happened from it, don't you find that it resets all of your cycles? So sleep cycle works better, waking cycle works better, sex cycles work better. All of those.

I mean, anything related to oxygen uptake.

Yeah, yeah. And, and performance too. Just like doing, you know, you do good air squats. You do air squats to failure, you know, multiple times. Do those every week and you'll find that your. Not just your hill climb thrust, but anything oriented with running or endurance are increased.

Yeah.

So lose weight too. Cause I do 40 air squats every time I go to the bathroom to control glycemic variability. I picked that up from Tim Ferriss book, Four Hour Body way back in the day. I still do it even on airplane.

I love it. I ended up buying cases of Tim's book when it was coming out as a favor and a friendly nod to the great stuff that he was doing. It's such an important book. So. Yeah, so that's kind of how it started. And what I realized is after. And so what he found out in that process was that I was hypothyroid So I got on supplemental thyroid, desiccated thyroid. At the time, armor was the gold standard.

And.

And that was the kind of aha. Because once you've gone from being from feeling like crap to feeling like a rock star is it resets your belief system that maybe there's something more than just living or surviving. There's actually this kind of superhuman or at least super optimal performance state that you can achieve. And that was the big wake up call. And then I got into human growth hormone supplementation. Secretagogues. Not the actual direct hgh, but secretagogues.

Can you explain to people the difference between an HGH administration and a secretagogue?

Sure, sure.

So HGH administration, you're going to do a shot and that's going to basically get you human growth hormone into your system. The downside to some of now, and that can be really, really powerful for anti aging for repair. It's a critical factor. Human growth hormone is the thing that takes us from birth all the way up or from pre birth, right. All the way up through our max growth somewhere around 25, 27 years old typically. And then it falls off like a cliff. So what's really important is how do you supplement that in an effective way where your body can actually resolve it and do something with it. So I didn't want to get into medical grade HGH because I didn't want what's called down regulation. And there's a, there's a thing that when you start taking exogenous or exterior external components, some of them especially hormone oriented, they can basically tell the body, they signal to the body that hey, I already have enough of that. So it quits making it and that's when you start getting it right. And that helps neurologically with certain meds it can have. There's a lot of things that down regulate systems in the body. So that was kind of a key. And so what I wanted to do was I wanted to say, okay, when you go to bed at night, is there some components you could take, are there some molecules you could take that during the period that your body would normally be releasing human growth hormone, which is anywhere from 90 minutes to two hours to three and a half hours after your head is at the pillow? Once you get into that deep delta sleep stuff, the first sleep cycle that you go into is the optimum time to take advantage of human growth hormone secretion. So if you preload your system with the amino acid and amino acid precursors that are easy to convert, Arginine is a well known one Then suddenly you'll get a, a secondary boost in human growth hormone. And it's really, really powerful. And it doesn't downregulate your own human growth hormone secretion. So you're basically just leveraging that cycle. I got big into that and I created a company with that. I went online with it back in 98 and it was incredibly successful. Very quickly, to the point where anybody that's ever been in the nutrition world will know this one or recognize it, is merchant accounts are skittish about things that they don't understand.

Yeah. Meaning like the way that you process credit cards. I actually know this because I used to have a CBD business, like back when CBD was kind of like new. And we kept having to switch payment processors and switch URLs because CBD was kind of like the wild west. Almost like, probably kind of like Kratom is now, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah. In fact, yeah, I built a couple of products called Kratom Kick that were right around that. It's the same exact thing. And plus your, you know, the merchant account rates that you pay are outrageous and all kinds of stuff, so. And the holdback, hold back fees, how's that? Anybody in the merchant business will recognize this rambling dialogue on what not to do. But anyhow, so I was shut down 30 days after we opened our doors doing our human growth hormone secretag effervescent tablets because they couldn't believe that a company online outside of Amazon could go from zero to over $200,000 in a month. And we did. They thought we were dumpster diving for receipts. So yeah, yeah, we, we corrected them. I actually did a press release and a three page press release on a Friday. I sent it to the CMO with a note. The CMO to the largest credit card processor at the time, Card Services International is who they were. And I said, here's the deal. We didn't dumpster dive. Here's our business plan. Here's how we did it. Here's online. This is what online is. This is this whole Internet thing you may not have heard of.

Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly, man. And, and so I said it to him. I said, if, if we don't hear from you Tuesday at noon, this is going live on PR Newswire. And it basically said, Card Services International does not believe in the Internet and hates small business.

And then it was literally three pages, fully optimized press release. I got a call from the CEO and the CMO on Monday at noon, and we resolved our conflict. So that's that's kind of it. So I, I got into that and then I, and then the Internet was coming along so quickly and I wanted to be involved in the E commerce side. So I developed a product called Quick E Mart named after Homer Simpson's.

But this, this wasn't a supplement, it was a software.

Yeah, software. So. And then sold that and then got really involved in the combination of health and wellness in an external way. Ben, have you ever wanted to create a workout machine? Like have you ever said gosh dang it, I wish they had something that did this? You know what?

I haven't. About the closest I ever got to inventing anything related to workouts was I almost launched a series of airport gyms when I was literally just getting out of college. That was my big money making endeavor. And wound up finding out where it wasn't scalable to the insurance and real estate and airports etc. But as far as fitness devices, no, I never ever got into that. Although the first thing I ever bought to get fit was an as seen on TV ab training device. But I know I never invented anything. Why do you ask?

Did you ever? You never. A couple things. One, you never did a solo flex or a Bowflex.

I actually, my friend's dad invented the Bowflex so I have worked out on it a few times. He was actually a bow hunter. That's why he invented the Bowflex to help him pull the bow back. But no, I, I've, I've never invented anything similar.

All right, well I, I am, I got involved in a company called Trike T R I K E. Okay. It's a three wheeled scooter that you stand on the back wheels and you use cambering throwing it left and right to make it go forward. And so got super excited about that and we helped and helped build that company. It's still alive down in Santa Barbara area. So that got me into this hold it. I can actually have a super optimum body and I can get into a state of fitness just using primarily body we some adjustable hand weights and realized that that and you know and an inflated ball, you know ball could do incredible things to your body. But also that the, that the mind accompaniment with that was important and that I was kind of the poster child for ADHD at the time and I was running, I was the CMO of a company called eagency.com down in Newport Beach California. What I realized was that if I would watch a half hour episode of the, of the TV show Kung F there was a 1970s TV show with a guy named David Carradine. And it was an incredible show about this kind of kung fu artist that came out of the monastery and he traveled in the Old west. And he was always really gentle with people, but he was restrained.

Killer power.

Jordan Peterson kind of talks about that. You want to be strong and restrain that strength. It's a really, really powerful place to be. Watching this 30 minute old 70s TV show would get me in this amazing state of focus for about four hours. And that combined with some meditation. Meditation was really. And I started getting into binaural meditation, eventually buying a pizz device that was actually a hardware device in 2004.

What was it called?

Pvizz Pziz P Z I Z Z.

Okay, because that's where you say that, by the way. Because I used to have an app that I really liked that produced binaural beats called Ziz P Zizz on my phone. But it wasn't hardware. It was just a piece of software, like an app on the phone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I still use it today. I use it actually. I just. I just used it before I came into this call.

Same thing.

Yeah. 20 minute. And it's just incredible. Yeah, right. So learning how to cycle energy and how to actually achieve a state, like I'm an introvert that acts like an extrovert. So for me, I want to get. When I want to get into a group of people, I've got to kind of psych myself up. And then I try to. I typically try to find somebody in a crowd who's responsive or who's saying something interesting or who looks like they've got the intellectual depth that we could actually go way, way, way deep down to a subject like yourself. And I'll pick them out and then I'll isolate us and we'll have martinis and talk until 3am okay. So anyhow, so that. That was it. So this state change thing became a big thing. So now fast forward. In 2008, my wife commit suicide on oxycodone from giving that was a byproduct of the birth she gave on that couch. Holy cow. So they. Yeah, yeah. The midwife, my wife tore a little bit. They actually handed me some scissors and some. And they said, hey, do you want to cut your wife's vagina? And I said, no, I don't want to cut my wife's vagina because we're having a hard time getting the baby out. Maybe was crowning. Crowning, but not crowning. Coming out. And we didn't want to do a C section.

And that's the thing you would use scissors to cut a vagina.

Yes. It's called an episode.

I've never heard of that before.

Wow. Yeah. Ask your wife about it.

Okay.

A pz.

I'll ask her at dinner tonight. Great conversation.

Yeah.

Over stakes. So the midwife gave her four oxycodone. At that time, the Sackler family hadn't been outed. And those. She just fell in love that it was like, oh my God, this is the best thing in the world. And she was very good at. At kind of hiding or covering her. So a decade later, 2008, she commits suicide on oxycodone, methadone and alcohol. So, yeah, it was a devastating loss. You know, great mom with three kids and. And. But man, you know, and just proof again that these addictions can hit anyone. Yeah, it's non discriminatory. So I moved to Northern Washington to Blaine Washington, and a good friend of mine, David McGinnis, who founded prweb.com and I sequestered and spent the next four years. I started going, how do I get people out of addictive states? How do I get them to perform? Well.

At the time, I was in business with the founder of Century 21 Real Estate. And we did brainstorming software. We did stuff that helps people think laterally. Like Drew Carey used it for writing his comedy and writing his book and Hallmark cards. Uses it, I think still today to write their cards, which is not necessarily a great statement, but still something. And so teaching people how to think creatively and how to be effective in going from concept to cash flow or creativity to productivity was the thing that I taught all over the United States and Canada. And so I already knew a little bit about how neurons fired and what neurochemicals were key to achieving certain states. But I didn't have the programming talent to be able to go, okay, take this and it'll get you there. Outside of meds.

Right.

So what I did was I started combining. I went back to my past of doing these HGH secretagogues and said, hold it. What amino acids convert to what Neurochemical precursors that convert to what neurochemicals that excite or can be signaled with what other components, what other molecules can excite them and get them to perform.

This would be based off the idea that amino acids are kind of like precursors for neurotransmitters or building blocks for neurotransmitters.

Absolutely perfect. Yeah. And it was a Big deal. So I started with pyroglutamic acid, which is a really great kind of mainline precursor to a number of neurochemicals. And then I started compounding and compounding. What I do is I would pair molecules together. I had a Group, almost 400,000 customers in our software company. So. And a lot of them were. I mean, these are super bright people. They're interested in getting smarter. They're interested in thinking more creatively or being more focused. So I had this perfect test bed to be able to send people blank test tubes of crappy tasting powder and saying, how does this make you feel? And I put up an online form that they could fill out. They could log in and fill out and tell me what their performance was on it or off it or how they took it or what kind of conflicts. And so that's kind of how I started. And so I just started pairing molecules, sending out test tubes, getting response, pairing out more molecules, trying it myself, of course, trying them on my kids, trying them on the neighbors to guinea pigs and. Yeah, exactly. Anybody was. It was creative of. It's kind of funny when Matt and I are at events like Dave Asprey's or something like that, or Runger or any of those is. You know, there are two kinds of biohackers. There are the biohackers that you. You hand a product to, they take it and they go, hey, what's that and what's it do? And what's in it? And then there's the other biohackers that grab it. They stand back from you and they go, tell me exactly what's in it.

And how much, and then I'll tell.

You if I can take it. Right, right. And so I was really lucky. Out of the 400,000 people, I could get a little over a thousand that would say, hey, I don't care what's in it. You've never killed me yet. In all of our stuff that we've spent time with. Keep sending me that stuff. I'm interested. And so it was really great that I had this warm group of people who trusted me already and who I had a relationship with, who I knew were really bright that I could hand this stuff to, and they could give me honest feedback. And so that's exactly what it did. So that became the core of starting to build these stacks up. And then I wanted to build a pill, I really did, but I couldn't fit everything that we needed to put.

You mean kind of like the one pill to rule them all Type of thing.

That's it. You know, if we could all make NZT and just have a little clear pill in a cello bag, it would be like the ultimate solution to getting people, you know, for me it was how do I get people off drugs? Like, what would happen here was the three stage process that I was thinking. If I could get you to think clearer, let's say that you were an addict in anything, I don't care, you could be a billionaire and be an addict, or you could be, you know, struggling on the street, right? If I could get you or help you think clearer and then I could give you the second part of the formula was a lot of people that became addicts, they burn out adrenals, they burn out brain cells, they burn out physiology and neurology. And so you get them off the drug, but then they're either addicted to something else. You know, the thing that helped them get off the drug, right, the, the drugs they give you in the rehab center, those kinds of things. But the other side of that was they didn't have the energy to execute after that. So what happens is, okay, so now I can think clearly, but I can just barely function as a human being. That's, that's kind of the, the thing. And I want it to go above and beyond that. So, okay, if I could give you cellular energy, ATP based energy, and the neurological components that would help you to perform well. So you're thinking clearly now. You have the energy to execute, you're going to get some level of success. And repeated, good, positive, reinforceable thinking just supports itself, right? And then you get the spiral of success that goes up and you start getting the kind of feedback loop of not only you're recognizing the success you have, but other people recognizing it. And that will change the world for anybody that's ever been down that route. So that was kind of the basis for this.

Okay, so now when I, for example, like the first time, I wanted to get one of these boxes that have each of the different stacks in them that I wrote about in this article, like the one for brain flow or the one called Apex, or there's like the Zammer juice that you spray in your mouth, the focus savagery one for a pre workout, all these different formulas, I went and I took a questionnaire and the questionnaire was asking me a bunch of stuff. It kind of reminded me, I don't know if you read my book Boundless, but in chapter I think three of Boundless, I get into the idea of neurotransmitters amino acid, neurotransmitter imbalances, and even some of these dominances, like people who are choline dominant or dopamine dominant, serotonin dominant, et cetera. Now the quiz was kind of like asking me a lot of these questions along with, you know, what do you struggle with? Sleep, energy, focus, et cetera. So based on that is what you're trying to do to determine what neurotransmitter deficits or imbalances somebody might have and then ship them the exact formulas that would address those specific needs.

That's it exactly. And it's a symphony, right? Your neurochemicals. It's not just one neurochemical that you want to affect. You want to do a symphony of those, you want to do a balance of those. You want to create an orchestra or a band. Like for me, I want to create a rock band.

Right.

And you want, you want that band to have these different neurochemicals, whether it's dopamine, serotonin, gaba. Right. Norepinephrine. You want to have these working in concert together so that you get the desired outcome. Like do you want motivation? Well, that's. And do you want reward? Right, That's a dopaminergic activity. But if you just jack up the dopaminergic activity, you become an asshole because you start to find that the emotional connection goes away and your ability to handle things like interruptions or sideline activities.

That sounds like somebody who's hyped up on Modafinil, for example, which is that off label narcolepsy drug that a lot of people use for productivity. But that's a comment a lot of people make. It's so dopaminergic it kind of turns you into an asshole robot.

Right, right, exactly. Yeah, you lose the connection with people. So bringing up dopamine and then, and so now you know, you're going to get motiv and reward. Right? And those two things which are really key, really key to success, but then also bringing up serotonin enough that you don't lose that intimate connection with people. And you recognize, whether through body language or speech styles or the rest, that they're, you know, they have some need and you're able to kind of address the whole human, not just that one aspect. You know, Spock was a great example on Star Trek. Spock was a great example of a guy that was just brutally logical and, but had zero emotional connection. And we don't want that. You want to be able to, you want to be able to optimize all of the neurochemicals, but you also don't want to bring them all up at the same time to the same level because that, that's a different state and it's a burnout state as well. So you want to bring up, you know, you want to bring up the necessary neurochemicals to provide the specific state change you want. Like you and I were talking about these in some of the emails we sent back and forth. So you got like the thinking and memory stuff, right? Acetylcholine 101.

Right.

So thinking, memory, right. But those are anchored with dopamine. So you want that, so that's a, that's a primary acetylcholine. You want to bring your acetylcholine up and then you want to anchor it with a dopamine, that reward thing that starts to burn, that, that neural pathway and I mean burn in a positive way.

Now is that something similar to like the, the, the new formula that you sent me these, these dopa drops? Because I've used those a few times. You said the label says dopa drops. It's, you know, you just have these like little handwritten labels, like they came out some mad scientist laboratory. But, but the one that I, that I had that actually I tried and really like said dopa drops, plus it said like euphoria, but it was spelled weird. It was like y o u 4e a is, is that the acetylcholine dopamine combination? Is that what that is?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in fact, that's a, that's a great example of that. We, so we just released the dopa drop, which, and I built that as a, as a multi stage dopamine release mechanism that doesn't downregulate your own dopamine stores. That's one of the big challenges with dopaminergic heavy stuff like Adderall is a great example, right. Is that you start burning up available dopamine and that's why when you go off of it, when it burns out, right. For the day, right?

Crash.

Feel like crap, lack of motivation, right? There's nothing there. So what you want to do is you want to bring the precursors of dopamine up, you want to bring them in the system of the get neurochemical precursors that bring the dopamine up and you want to do it in the stage that the body normally uses phenylalanine to L Tyrosine, right. To dopa. And then you want, right. Then there's decarboxylation of the dopa and those and then B vitamins. Make sure you get the proper enzymatic activity in the brain and some C in there as well.

Yeah. And is that why it seems a little more advanced? Like you gotta take one and then you gotta wait a certain period of time to take the next, next one. Like, like you have these, these kind of like time release strategies.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's what you didn't see inside of the euphoria capsule, which we haven't released yet. We're, we're doing a secondary tertiary testing on it to make sure that we can make it really, really reliable. Is there's a capsule within a capsule on that. So the, the outer capsule breaks down in the gut.

Okay.

Right. And so that's, that's going to break down at around a 4 acid level and then the inner capsule is going to break down in past the duodenum. So it's going to break down right around six, six and a half and those two. So what you're doing first is you're basically. In fact, I heard you speak on this recently in one of your podcasts, which is monoamine oxidase inhibitors, and how they modify the behavior and the way, the breakdown rate of certain neurochemicals, you know, and then use the vagus nerve and the gut brain connection to be able to facilitate some of that activity. That particular capsule, what it does is it basically the outer, the outer part of the capsule breaks down in the, in the gut, in the acid, in the gut. So then it starts to mute the monoamine oxidase.

Okay.

Which then allows the secondary part of it to release more norepinephrine as well as dopamine and serotonin. And it does it in these nice peaks and valleys. So you feel it, you kind of come on. It's what I like it for is if I need to do something where I know there's going to be resistance, like Steven Pressfield type resistance, I use the euphoria and the dopa drop euphoria accommodation, knowing, you know, and I basically program it in an hour to 90 minutes before I have to hit that activity wall. And then that, that is one of those things where it's a tool that I can use to get me through that wall and to the next stage of what I'm doing. And it's really powerful because it makes stuff that normally you dread. It turns it into a game. It gamifies the crap in your life so that you can get through that crap and do something meaningful and valuable.

That's exactly what I noticed. Incredible amounts of motivation and things I would normally have a little bit of cognitive resistance to including a workout. Just jumping into the workout smooth as silk with no resistance, actually getting in and doing it. I really like that formula, the dopa drops one, But I have to ask you about another one because it's probably my favorite, and I want to know how it works, because I feel so freaking good on it. And I mean, these ingredient labels on these powders and these formulas, I mean, it's like Omnipep, Uridine, citrulline, phenylalanine, arginine, ribose, rhodiola. It's like these crazy blends in these stacks. But this one in particular I want to know about. Probably my favorite one besides those dopa drops so far. Nectar X. It's like the powder that you pour into water. Tell me about that one. And why do I like that so much? What's it doing?

Well, a couple things. One is, you know, there's a right around 20, depending on who you are. And because we remember, we custom and optimize these for your physiology, neurology, and the tests you take. So everyone is made custom for you, right? So you're gonna have anywhere from 24 to 27 different compounds in there, maybe up to 30. And that was the first product I developed. It was actually what I developed starting in 2008. And what came out of that is Nectar X. And Nectar X. What's really cool about it, and this is kind of our stack design methodology, is what we found is that most people have a resistive component in their brain and body that they're fighting. They're fighting inflammation, they're fighting adaptogenic response. Right? The adrenals are burned in there, are burned out. They're not flowing very efficiently or effectively. They may have a deficit in dopamine or maybe a surplus of dopamine. Same thing with serotonin. GABA may be totally out of whack. They can't relax when they need to. They don't know how to chill. Their heart rate is running at an excessive rate all the time. It never really comes down to a 40, 50, 60. That would be more healthy for their age. And so the idea was, let's make sure that for every solution that we make. And you'll see the same thing, Ben, in our capsules.

The reason there are multiple levels and that the stacks are so complex isn't because we thought it would look cool or that it would be a really interesting place to play. What we found was that to make stacks really, really effective, you need to start systematically eliminating the biggest problems that people have so that you can actually get the nootropics to be effective. We said the first thing that people are dealing with that seems to be one of the primary causes of ineffectiveness in other nutritional compounds that they're taking is they've got excess inflammatory response. So their inflammatory response is up. And we needed to put that in check. So we built an anti inflammatory stack component to each of our stacks. So a sub stack within our caps and our sprays and our drinks and our powders is this anti inflammatory stack. One of the other issues that people are really dealing with is their adaptogenic response. They're responding too hardcore to stress. And so we needed to mute that to a certain extent to, so that they handling stress in a much more effective way. So we built an adaptogenic stack in there. Well then the next thing was, as we start getting into the nootropic area was B vitamins. A lot of people were very low in specific nutrients or vitamins that were critical to the enzymatic activity going on in the body and brain. So we built a very, very powerful methylated B stack in every product we make. And that was a key. That was actually a really, really critical key. What people don't realize is B vitamins are also enzymatic activators within the body. When you've got the B vitamins, especially methylated B vitamins, working effectively in the body, all of these co processes are happening much more effectively. And that was the key that got into the fact that when those enzymatic activities are happening, especially within the brain, in other words, beyond the blood brain barrier, which is this kind of protective barrier between the body and the brain, that helps to filter out all the crap that otherwise might get into your brain. Once you get the nootropics and other neurochemical precursors within the brain, then you've got this enzymatic activity happening. The B vitamins are helping the nootropics to break down into the acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, gaba, anandamide and other neurochemicals that are necessary for the performance increase. So while that's happening, that's actually an activity or it's a weight on the system, right? Because this thing is happening. Well, what we did with that was we said, okay, so since that's happening, let's build a very gentle, very progressive, very effective stimulant layer that's going to bring them an increasing wakefulness without getting them too much buzz or too much any grittiness to it. So that you could effectively convert those neurochemical precursors into the primary neurochemicals that you need to really, really rock your day. And so we did that. So we did this gentle stim layer, multiple layers of different stimulants and co factors that help the stimulants to not get too gritty. And then from there we have two other factors. One was the neurotropic that we're using or the, or the combination of nootropics we're using. And those are going to basically be the really, really radical, strong precursors to the key neurochemicals that you need to operate at a superhuman level. And then the next component of that is when your neurons are operating at this very fast level. One of the key neurochemicals is acetylcholine. If you don't have enough acetylcholine in your body, what happens is it starts taking it from your traps and your neck and it'll start pulling it from the muscles. Well, when it does that, the problem is, is that it tightens those muscles up and it makes it so that you get a headache as a result of these very tight muscles. Again, it's sucking the choline out of.

Your, out of your body.

What we did is we put what's called a choline donor and the choline donor lends enough choline to the process that it doesn't have to take it out of your body. And it's a very, very effective way to build a stack. So every one of our solutions is built with this stack technology in mind and it helps it to make it so that you always get the proper amount and spectrum of neurochemicals without having a drag on your system. Very, very effective. But the problem was, how do you get these to more than your top thousand plus customers on your software company? And that's where therein lies the rub, right?

When I was building these, I was getting, in fact I got, when I was building these, everybody that I talked to when I said, hey, I'm going to do this thing as an, as a nutrition solution for people, but it's going to be completely customized and optimized for every individual. So we're going to fill out a customization form, an intake form, and then I'm going to figure out how to measure out and weigh out each of the components and stack them in a capsule and make it functional and deliver it to the customer. And everybody said, dude, when pigs fly. So as the company started growing, I started getting these flying pigs from people. They were, they would send them from all over the world. So I've got a nice collection of flying pigs now.

How's that even scalable to do that? I mean, obviously people are doing customized supplements, but are you literally going through the results of every single quiz and then like hand packing these capsules and powders based on somebody's replies, or do you kind of like have a set, you know, like 12 different supplements and you know, well, this, this person needs this, this person needs that versus, like customizing it, you know, based on, I don't know, weight or something like that.

Oh, no, it's very customized. Weight, age, sex, what stims you take during the day, you know, how much coffee you drink, what meds you're on, what vitamins you take or nutritional supplements you take. Are you ketogenic? Are you?

Yeah, it's a pretty big question. I mean, it's not that long, but probably take about 20 minutes filling this whole questionnaire on the website.

So the first way on and when you come into the website at Nootopia, the first thing you get is let's do a neurochemical analysis of you. Let's figure out where you're dominant, where you're subdominant, and where you've got challenges. And then the second one is, who are you? What, you know, what, how do you operate, what are your biggest challenges and what are your goals? And we break that out into sections. There's about six different sections on that. And then you get these sliders at the end. You say, well, I want more of this. I want more focus. But I, I don't want to be jittery, right? I want more chill, but I don't want to be unmotivated, those kinds of things. And then we, those go to our Vancouver, Washington facility and our people there, we've got some incredible people there. And what they do is they basically take a look at that. They. We have an analysis that compares everything to the, you know, the millions of data points that we, that we have in place. And we go, oh, okay, based on these factors, this person could benefit from this stack design. And then they put it together for them and then they, you know, and critical factors like, are you sensitive to caffeine? Are you sensitive to, are you allergic to anything? All of these components. Then we custom stack them from there.

And then some of them can be combined, like for Example, you've got one. I don't know, like, the social command stack is one that you guys talk about that I wrote about in the article. That's for, like, the ability to be verbally adept and have verbal fluency and emotional intelligence. But it's not just one of the supplements. It's like, what is it? Upbeat with power solution. And you time it in a certain.

Way with Brain flow. Yeah, actually.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. And so. And Brain flow is another example of a capsule inside a capsule, but floating in oil. It's kind of cool. And we didn't do it just because it's. Again, not just because it looks cool, but because it's actually super functional. But yeah, and that's a really important one, right? So you want to have enough GABA flowing that you're able to stay on task, but you want to have enough serotonin flowing that you're connecting with people and you actually are enjoying the connection with people. Right. And you want to have enough energy that you can execute on that conversation and you have enough lateral thinking capacity that you can pull the ideas together in a very fluid manner so that you get that verbal fluency that's super important for having effective conversations. I know for a fact that when we are face to face at some time there will be guns going off as we're just going down these rabbit holes of really cool things. And we'll be coming up with solutions and we'll be queuing these solutions. Right. You'll have this.

One of my best friends ever lives in Spokane. His name is Eric Kinney. He's been a programmer and a business partner of mine through five different companies.

What's his last name?

Eric Kinney.

Kinney. Sounds familiar. I might have run into him before.

Lives in Deer Park. Great guy. Great guy. And what Eric would do is I would go over to his lab. He had a. It would do all this software development with me, and he would. As we're in these conversations about what the big problems were that people were having, we would go into these, you know, we'd go down rabbit holes and we had these. He would start pulling his fingers out, and you go, okay, thumb and then forefinger. And then. And as he got to 10, he would then go, stop. And then he would, you know, put his thumb in, and he would continue down that hole and say, let's solve this problem. And then nine, let's solve this problem. And he would whiteboard them out and write them out. And we would suddenly have these incredible, kind of like a Mind map, if you know what that is. Yeah, yeah. We'd have a visual mind map of here are all the problems and here's kind of where this Venn diagram of the problem, the cost matrix and the solution all come together. And in the middle of it was where we should focus our energies. It was a very powerful thing. So, and. And our, you know, our product, what you talked about there, and especially when you're talking about verbal fluency, that's where, like, brain flow and the upbeat come together to go. Okay. I want to laterally think, and I want to do it in a smooth way that isn't on the edge. And I'm not feeling like my heart's about to beat out of my chest. But I also want to be able to connect with that person and not be afraid to answer more intimate questions. You know, how's your wife today? Right. What's going on? Those kinds of things. So really key.

Yeah, it's fascinating. Okay. So the other one that I wanted to ask you about was something I put into my smoothie this morning because I knew I was going to be interviewing you. So I figured, what the heck, I might as well stay on brand and do this. I took wild blueberries, a little bit of bone broth, some ice, a touch of yogurt, and then some stevia and sea salt. And I mixed in a few scoops of this stuff called collagenius. And it's like, it didn't come in my new topia box. It was kind of like separate from that, but it's like a brown, kind of like a chocolatey powder. Tell me about that one, because it seems to work really well. But I'm just curious how it actually works because it's not like a traditional protein powder, but it's something a little different from what I understand.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, it's radically different. The design of it came from a conversation that Matt and I were having one day about the fact that he said, you know, Mark, this is a couple years ago, he said that lion's mane was one of the most incredible molecules for helping him repair his brain after addiction and drug abuse.

Yeah, he did like super high dose, didn't he?

Oh, yeah, yeah. He was doing 6 grams a day, 8 grams a day, 11 grams. Yeah, yeah. Just. Yeah. To the point of gastric upset. I mean, I'm sure that's where mass zymes probably came from. Was trying to keep up with that. So. Which is a bio optimizers product. Great one. So he said that and so I'm trying to make these highly concentrated capsules. My whole thing is, is concentration, you know, extraction technologies and what we call potentiation where you take, you know, you take a little bit of something onto this molecule that you're trying to increase the effectiveness or the absorption rate or. Right. The bioavailability or one of those factors and you combine the two together and it turns half a gram into 10 grams. Right. So those are, you know, everybody kind of knows the curcumin Piper in paradigm. You know that, that whole thing.

You mean like when you blend turmeric with black pepper and you get better absorption?

Exactly, yeah. In fact clinically it's 2000% higher absorption by combining piperine or pepper with turmeric.

Or curcumin, which is actually not something to do if you're taking turmeric or curcumin for the gastric anti inflammatory effects because it winds up just getting absorbed. So you leave the bioperine out in that case.

Right, exactly. Yeah. It's really, isn't that an interesting dynamic? Right. So call of genius was developed. What happened was my assistant Chasity was pouring all of these things and indexing them and getting the certificate of authenticity and the source and the extraction method and all those things. She was taking all that data down for me, pouring it into things and she's going, wow, this smells really chocolatey. As we started going from a 1 to 1 extraction to a 10 to 1 to 20 to 1 to 50 to 1 to 100 to 1, these mushrooms started getting more and more chocolatey. She's also a chef, an incredible chef. So she goes, hey, why don't I just make some stuff? We'll combine these together and make some stuff and see how that works for you. So she did that and she started making this really delicious drink. And she was also, she just turned 50, I just turned 60. So we said, okay, cool, we could use some collagen in our diet. She's going, great, I'm going to put collagen in this because they're really complementary. And some of the mushrooms help the collagen in its absorption and its half life extends the half life. So started doing that. We gave them away as Christmas presents a year ago or so. And Matt said, this is awesome, let's refine it. He gave some incredible input on how to make it even better. And so what we did is we made a BDNF brain derived neurotrophic factor product which is what we get out of the mushrooms combined with a really, really Great. You know, one, three collagen blend that essentially is not just great for the brain but also great for the body and the skin. And so it's a. And it, and it naturally tastes like chocolate. We did add some cocoa butter and some other things because it helps the absorption and it smooths out the, what they call mouthfeel. So it just makes it better. But it's a, it's an incredible product for again, I call it an OS for the brain. So it's an operating system for the brain. So you take collagenius and you'll feel this rise in wakefulness, but it doesn't, it's not the kind of thing that if you take it in the late afternoon it's going to keep you awake like a coffee might do or a caffeinated drink might do.

It's not like a central nervous system stimulant.

Correct, Exactly. So we build that as the os. So now that's doing this what we call bdnf, Brain derived neutrophic factor, which is the precursor to. Right. To neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells and the facility of those. And so now when you take the nootropics, right, and you do an upfeed or you do an apex. I don't know if you've had tried APEX yet.

Yeah, I have. That's one of the ones that comes in that black box. I forget what that one's advertised as being good for. Was that the one that you're just supposed to take on an empty stomach? Because it's got those oils in it that you don't want to compete with proteins because you have some very specific instructions on some of these capsules. Was that the one that's like a blend of like calmness and energy? The Apex one?

Yeah, exactly. It's a, it's about a 12 hour energy, but it's not an energy like people think of in a stem way. It's a nice wakefulness and it, it has this really cool ability. You can kind of ping it by thinking like, like okay, I need, I need a little bit more endurance on this. It automatically puts you in this state, this operating state of no problem. So it's got enough of this very steady dopamine flow without jacking up your adrenals. It has a very smooth adrenal flow, very, very low level. Again, you can fall asleep at any time on it if you want. But it also is one of those things that at 11 o' clock at night or 12 o' clock at night, you're going. I could go another two or four hours on this project if I wanted. I could pull an all nighter without feeling fatigue, but it'll let you sleep when you want to sleep. It's really, really powerful. One of my favorite products that was one of the hardest ones to develop in terms of getting it to operate at a level within a single capsule that would give you that kind of performance. And I have some new ones going to you, Ben, that I just created before, before I was leaving tomorrow to go meet you that are incredible. So I've got some upbeats and some apex that I've dramatically modified will be coming out with these, but I wanted you to have first crack at them.

I can't wait to check them out. Now there's this whole kind of separate category of nootropics that people use traditionally. Things that would normally be psychedelics, psilocybin or Wachuma, even people doing LSD or lsa. Now do you ever stack any of this type of stuff with some of the traditional plant medicines people use for microdosing? And if so, do you notice any type of. Of effect?

So one of the great things about nootropics is that you can create custom stacks that address various neurotransmitters. And in the same way you can say, okay, so I'm going to be on a certain psychedelic, or I'm going to be going through this experience, or I'm going to a place where it's legal, or I'm doing some therapy with psychedelics and I want to improve the performance of the psychedelics, but I don't want to do it by taking a greater and greater dose. This is where nootropics can become really, really valuable, is that they allow you to take a reduced dose of the psychedelic and utilize the leverage or the potentiation of the nootropic to expand on the potential of those as well as increase the neurogenesis that occurs with really good psychedelics. So my experience with those has been.

When I was very young, when I.

Was 16 years old, I had done psychedelics and had some really profound experiences, including playing district and state tennis on mushrooms and being very competitive. But I hadn't done anything after that. I had a number of clients who have done psychedelic experiences and they've used the nootropics as potentiators for those experiences as well as for an avenue to be able to get greater results with again, less psychedelic and expand the results and get actually potentiated results that are more predictable by knowing that they've got a certain amount of serotonin or dopamine or GABA in the synaptic cleft so that they're actually getting this kind of outcome that they're looking for and increasing predictability for it. Those are the kind of factors that I'm intimately aware of in terms of how psychedelics work with nootropics. And I think you're going to see more and more of that. I think you're going to see stack development done with nootropics and with psychedelics in the future, especially as they become legal. This will be something I think you'll see more and more popular in this process, especially when it comes to therapeutic results of these compounds.

That's interesting. Now a lot of people stack psilocybin with lion's mane. Have you ever tried doing something like that? Like make it a collagenous smoothie, but then putting like a microdose of psilocybin in there for enhanced creativity?

My friends have done that, yes. And been very successful. That collagenius is a great base for those kinds of experiences. Really, really effective. And the cool thing is when there are people that are just looking to trip and there are people that are looking for a profound experience that brings them to another, a permanent another level. Back to Jordan Peterson, he talked about that recently in the fact that these kind of pseudo spiritual type of events. And I know that you've been writing on it recently as well, Ben.

Yeah. And my take on it actually of late, after a great deal of study and reflection and prayer on the matter, is that I actually think the best use for these type of compounds is actually in a microdosing, controllable context where one isn't out of their mind slobbering on their back on the floor somewhere with an eye mask on. And occasionally I think there's some use cases for things like trauma therapy, perhaps end of life therapy, depending on the type of compound used. I'm a fan of these so called clarogenics where you actually do have some impairment of motor function. But it's really not like this dark, spiritual, weird entity like energy with these things. It's more like kind of like your brain turns into a supercomputer, but your body kind of goes limp for a while and you can still talk and record what you're saying. And I think those are interesting. But where I've drawn the line of late is that I feel like people began to use a lot of these medicines as a crutch for a spiritual experience or to find God or to seek wisdom from the universe or whatever you want to call it. And I feel like it's. I didn't want to send the message any longer to people that you got to somehow use drugs to find God or use medicines to have some kind of a spiritual experience. So I don't think that they're that great for that. Even though short term you might have some pleasurable experiences, I think long term it just kind of becomes a crutch and actually distracts or detracts from true spiritual growth. That's my take on it.

I'm in great alignment with you on that.

The other one that I wanted to ask you about was what you're doing with sleep because kind of similar to how you mentioned with the dopa drops you take and they take another certain amount of time. Later you sent me some sleep stuff and you said, well, you got to take this, you got to wait a little bit of time and then do a few more sprays explaining what you guys are doing with the sleep stuff. Because I helped to formulate a product recently for Kion, my supplements company. Kion, it's called Kion Sleep. That's some theanine, some GABA precursors, tryptophan, et cetera. But this one that you formulated seems a little bit different. What's going on with the sleep stuff, by the way?

I really appreciate you getting into that. What I mean by that is it's super important that those of us that are on the side of super high performance don't err in the side of, well, sleep's not a big thing or, you know, going crushing it with Gary Vee, 247 is probably not a great way to live. You know, that that kind of out of balance thing will eat you alive eventually, both in our heart and soul and also in our relationships. The sleep side of it. What we were doing was a couple of things. One is there is we talk about down regulation or we talk about adaptation is the other way to kind of phrase that is the sleep solutions that were on the market that we found. The majority of the sleep solutions on the market that we found relied heavily on melatonin as their key component. And then they just built around it and not a bad thing. Melatonin is incredible. Antioxidant has some really great benefits, but it also has rapid adaptation. Taking exogenous melatonin, just a single dose of exogenous melatonin has a tendency to create an interrupt cycle. So you have a very short cycle, like a four hour sleep Cycle on typical melatonin.

I've had that happen before.

Yeah.

So of course what the typical companies do is they go and they add more and more melatonin. Well, okay, so we're going to beat the four hour thing by going to 5 milligrams or 10 milligrams of melatonin. And clinical studies have shown up to 60 milligrams a day. Is your body will adapt to it eventually and it'll actually have some, there's some positive stuff, but that's not exactly the way you want to live because the pineal gland, which is responsible for secreting the majority of the melatonin, you do not want to mess with that sucker in any kind of a way that might create adaptation or down regulation because then you start messing with everything. So what we did is we created a non melatonin based drink that you've got there, you got the powder and.

Then there's no melatonin in the powder.

No melatonin in the powder.

No.

And what we did is we looked at what are the typical deficits in people's chemical makeup and let's go and correct those. And then on that side of the, of the, you know, sleep. Right. And pre sleep, let's focus on those elements so that you can have that quality of sleep and duration of sleep without the hangover. That was the big thing.

Right.

Because you can get, you can, you can take, I mean some people drink themselves into a coma night after night or they take meds to get to sleep. You know, diphenhydramine or things like that that are typically used. And those, those are really, really bad for quality sleep. Your delta sleep kind of goes away with those typically and your heart rate is increased and there's some other sideline effects and you wake up with a hangover, you don't wake up clear, fresh, clean, ready to go. So we solve that with a powder and making a drink and then we augmented it. Whether you're using it for jet lag or if you're using it as an augmentation, you need to get a specific amount of sleep. Sleep. So I put together a spray that does have melatonin in it and it has California poppy seed, among other things.

Okay, so the spray does have melatonin.

Yes, it does.

Okay, cool.

And the purpose of the spray was sleep onset. If you're having trouble with sleep onset, meaning the period of time from the time your head hits a pillow to when you actually go to sleep, if you're having trouble with that, this is A great way to get you into this deeper sleep. Sleep with or without the powder, with or without the drink that we make. The other part of it is if you want to use that sleep onset, but you don't want to wake up four hours later. And if you haven't trained hard enough that day or some other factor that kind of you're aware that you're probably going to be up later than you'd like to be. My recommendation is take a spray or two or three or even four sprays under your tongue, sublingual, let it dissolve over a couple minutes and then 20 to 30 minutes later you'll start to feel that sleep onset happening. You'll start to feel the eyelids getting heavy and you'll hear your brain start to quiet down and the distractions and you'll maybe even start to feel kind of that pre dream state where you start going, is that reality or is that dream?

Yep.

And then take another spray or two or three. And what that does is during that 30 minute window between those two, that overlap, that overlap extends in the early morning. In other words, it's growing bigger and bigger. That overlap or that 30 minutes between the first sprays and the second spray. So at 4:00 clock in the morning, when you know you're going to wake up, when you think you're going to wake up, that's covered because of this. Those two different sprays at different times are overlapping to the point where instead of getting that typical wake up call, right, where your body temperature changes, you're suddenly getting and your cortisol levels. So instead of all of that waking you up and keeping you awake, it covers that area so that now you can wake up at six or seven or eight, whatever your cycle is. And again, you wake up clean. You don't have that hangover.

Well, they seem super unique and they do seem to work like that. You actually don't have that interrupted four hour wake up when you take a sleep supplement, which I think is pretty common now. Do you guys have anything just while I have you on the podcast, you know, and again, I'll put all the shownotes@bengreenfieldlife.com Newt N O O T S Anything you can open up the kimono on in terms of stuff coming down the pipeline that you think is going to be pretty cool you guys are working on.

One of the things that we've talked about here is that the nootopia nootropics are deeply focused on getting into state optimization. Meaning how do you want to operate how do you want to feel? What's the kind of operating state that's going to make you most effective for the kind of thing that you need to go out and do today? So we talk about things like thinking in memory or focus or flow or intensity or even aggression or your mood or your happiness or your love, kindness, sensitivity, your connection with other people or your loved ones, your fun, your joy, humor, lateral thinking, creativity and those kinds of things. Your energetic nature and fulfillment, reward, execution, those kinds of things. All of those. We're basically building the ultimate stacks to be able to accomplish those things. And we're making the current ones that we have significantly better. On the dramatically new product alignment, we have a new product that'll be coming out sometime next year and it is a DHA and omega 3 dominant oil stack. It's kind of beyond cool, man. It's incredibly powerful even at low doses. And with as much as a 7,000% increase in key bioavailability factors, we think that's a pretty much a game changer. As the brain is, you know, primarily dha, we believe that this kind of a solution can both enhance the nootropic benefits, but also in the effects of helping to do both anti aging and to help solve some of the challenges right now in dementia and Alzheimer's and other factors. So that's one of the big ones. We have a gaming solution coming out. Pretty excited about that in the near future. I can't say more, but think of what would happen if professional gamers could select their optimum state and jack it to the limit without burnout. That's what I'm talking about. So we're also upgrading every product. We make everything on the bioptimizers line as well as the Nootopia line. And we're doing it with this molecular madness. With our PhD team at international Birch University, we've greatly expanded the team both in depth and breadth. Really incredible brain trust dedicated to making bioptimizers and Utopia solutions more powerful and backing it by unmatched scientific rigor. So that to me is really critical because we want to be known as a company that doesn't just just produce really cool stuff that makes a radical change or improvement in your physiology and neurology. We also want to back it up with absolute accurate scientific research. That's a big thing. And then of course our personalization techno personalization technology, the ability to create these nutrients, supplements, extracts and compounds that are matched to your physiology and neurological neurology and your goals are really important. So one of the things we've done is we've created a robotics division, we've hired a guy we call Mr. Robot and he's creating precision automation technologies so we can serve more people with greater accuracy, higher levels of personalization and keep that closed loop effect of being able to have you tell us what you need, giving you that thing that you need to help you improve your condition and then being able to continue to escalate that over and over and over again. So. And I really can't wait to give you a tour of our facility in the coming year. I think you're really going to dig it. That's some of the stuff that's on the drawing board man.

Absolutely love what you guys are doing. And obviously as you guys can probably imagine, like to go take the questionnaire and get all these smart drug esque type of compounds shipped to your house in this sexy little black box. It's not inexpensive. I think it's like 400 bucks. Get the whole box full of stuff. I mean you get the apex, the brain flow, the nectar, the power solution, all this stuff. And then you can get the call of genius too to go along with it. It's probably one of my favorite stacks right now as far as really, really cool ways to get energy without the crash. Again, that nectar stuff I'm hooked on. I've been using the call of genius in the smoothie. Kind of mess around with the sleep stuff. I love the dopa drops. And so I just had to get you on mark to or Mr. Newts I should say to actually make sure people are aware of what's going on behind the scenes here. Because this is not just like any open old nootropic and I've been using them long enough to where I had to ask all my dumb questions. And so I'm pretty grateful to have you on the show. And what I'm going to do is if folks go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Newts N O O t s I will include some discount codes and things like that to a lot of the compounds that Mark and I just got done talking about. Mark, I wish you could have come out to Spokane. I know just so folks know, we had some hurricane, some flight issues. So Mark and I weren't able to have this chat at our kitchen kitchen table as I had planned on. But we'll get, we'll have to get you out here to your old stomping grounds it Spokane. Sometime you and I can play some tennis or perhaps even my new infatuation pickleball.

Oh, dude. Yeah, we're building where I'm building in, in our lab right here. I'm building a pickleball court upstairs.

I'm building a new house in Idaho and I'm gonna put a like a cover, all covered pickleball court out there in, in Biola, Idaho. So should be, should be pretty cool. That'll be another year or so. But anyway, so we'll, so we'll get together, we'll take some nootropics and we'll go play pickleball or tennis or both.

Awesome.

I appreciate you, man. I appreciate you coming on the show and share all this with us.

Oh, thank you, brother. Really appreciate it. And there's so much more stuff. I'll make sure and send you some notes over afterward.

Sweet.

It may be included. All right.

Anything you send, I'll add to the show notes. And again, folks, it's going to be at BenGreenFullife.com newts n o o T S Until next time, I'm Ben along with Mr. Newts. Mark Effinger signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com have an amazing week.

More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed, and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. If you liked it or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.