Can Performance Enhancing Brain Drugs And Nootropics Give You The Edge?

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Alright, got a cool show for you today. This is Brad and today we're going to talk about drugs, smart drugs. Before we jump into the introduction though, I want to let you know that I'm actually looking to hire a marketing intern. I'm going to be looking at different places but I want to do two things with this. I'm looking for somebody who's really eager to learn about digital marketing, e commerce, building an offer, doing a little bit of a lot and really diving in to see what is behind the scenes in a new business. I am launching a brand new business. I do need some help and I figured I can go out there and just search around and hire or I can see if there's anybody who may want to work with me one on one and my team as an intern and learn a lot, get a ton of resources and if you are in college you can do this, you know, potentially for college credit. I don't know, we can talk about that, but also you can see what it takes to launch a new business from the ground floor. I don't have a lot of details that I'm going to give out to you on the podcast but if you want more information on this or you are interested in potentially working with me and my team, simply send an email with who you are and a little basic resume to ask bradaconrappedbusiness.com and I will get back to you. I answer all those emails and if you're not already a subscriber on the show, go ahead and hit subscribe on itunes or jump on the newsletter over@baconratbusiness.com alright, so have you ever seen the movie Limitless with Bradley Cooper where one pill makes him a super genius with also crazy side effects. Have you taken Adderall, Modenafil, Ritalin or any other drugs that help you focus? And do you have trouble with focus? Motivation burnout. I mean if you're an entrepreneur, we all do and we're all looking for the edge, well then this epicle is gonna be just what the doctor ordered. And that doctor is Dr. Andrew Hill. You, he's a lead neuroscientist. For Trubrain and a co founder of Alternatives Addiction Treatment. He's recently opened a peak brain performance center in LA named the Peak Brain Institute. He's joined by Chris Thompson, the founder and CEO of the company Trubrain, who's an online food tech brand leveraging neurotechnology to disrupt the energy drink market with functional beverages that support direct focus instead of caffeine induced alertness. Now we're going to discuss a lot of things today and I'm recording this little introduction after the interview that I did. But let me just tell you a little bit about what you're going to learn about. We're going to discuss the myths and realities of products like the limitless pill, what nootropics can do for your brain and why you may want to look into using them. We're going to talk about the safety of today's nootropics, the role of caffeine in your regimen, how to make coffee work better for you, how nootropics differ from legal and illegal stimulants like meth and these things that just play on dopamine and do bad things for your brain and just how to get better brain performance overall. So I've personally used different nootropic regimens for the past three years and that's why I invited Dr. Hill and Chris Thompson on the show today so I could pick their true brains clean and learn how to get the most out of my noggin. So let's get over to them.

Alright guys, so welcome to the program. I'm really excited to jump into this and really understand more for very personal curiosity reasons, how to optimize my productivity, my performance, my natural brain state. And I know that there's people listening who have probably seen that movie with Bradley Cooper called Limitless, thinking that there's a pill out there that they can take that makes them instantly an Einstein. I know that's not what this is about, but I would love for you to kind of address that. Does that exist? And then how does that compare to some of the technology and some of the pharmaco technology that's out there today?

Yeah. The short answer is no, that there's no limitless pill out there. In general, you have to think about the way the brain works. We have the ability to marshal resources for demand, but not to necessarily keep ramping performance up or even keep ramping physiologic arousal up. And so drugs are compounds that tend to really boost attending or learning, are usually things that support dopamine or Acetylcholine and dopamine. I mean, most of the listeners probably have some experience with dopaminergics. Anything that's a stimulant generally has some effect on dopamine. And things that are really dramatically dopaminergic would be considered like the Ritalin and Adderall class of psychostimulants, which are not the same thing, but there's broad psychostimulants in that class and they're all dopaminergic. The problem with dopamine manipulation is dopamine is also the signal the brain learns from in terms of salience or finding things important or interesting. What that means is drugs that are dopaminergic and that they manipulate dopamine tend to produce learning around that drug. What I mean by that is addiction. So anything dramatically dopaminergic produces tolerance and habituation very quickly. And the strongest dopaminergics would be the sort of drugs and abuse like meth, cocaine, et cetera. And these things produce a dramatic feeling of reward interest in the dopamine. But then they cause a second hit of learning because it's a dopamine signal uses to learn what's important. And what you end up with is sort of double learning from these stimulant class compounds. And very quickly you have tolerance that builds up as the first thing, and then you have withdrawal. And tolerance and withdrawal essentially are two sides of the same coin. And we call that coin addiction. Other things are gently supporting of dopamine, but actually finding something interesting in the world, finding something fascinating, that's dopamine you're feeling too. None of the drugs out there are really sustainable without side effects. I emphasize without side effects because we're talking about nootropics. And radically nootropics improve cognition, memory, sleep, stress response, etc. If you look classically at the definitions, the very first definition included things like nootropics needed to be neuroprotective, they needed to help cell metabolism, and they needed to have few to no side effects. And the dopaminergic class of compounds absolutely fails that last category. Predictive, they produce cardiovascular side effects, they suppress appetite, they disrupt sleep. So anything that would produce dramatic state shifts. And I think again, the dopaminergics are the things that people think about. They just aren't sustainable. There's nothing out there like an nzt, like a limitless pill where you won't get side effects if it alters you dramatically. And we're starting to get into the question about this touch of the topic of human performance to remediate problems versus human performance, to take a good brain and make it better. And when you're in the latter category, performance hacking, peak performance driving, when that's your goal, you have to be very careful to not take on additional side effects from your strategies. Then you're sort of moving backwards. If you have a dramatic deficit of attention or sleep or stress or something, then you might need some significant. And you probably should be talking to your doctor about that. But if you don't have any dramatic issues and you're trying to fine tune and goose the system to a little more performance, a little more focus, a little more calm attention, a little bit better sleep, then you have to be really walking that line of not tolerating side effects simply because of some small boost in performance or gains. And I think that's where nootropics, the sweet spot, the sweet spot is not taking nootropics and then cramming for an exam or taking nootropics and powering through, like learning a new language or becoming a stock trader like Bradley Cooper did. Nootropics are really useful when you're taking them day in, day out. First of all, they're not a spot intervention, I think, and they help you do the things you're already doing. You know, if you're already somebody who powers through your day, you will find that your resources are a bit different when you have nootropics on board. But you're not going to be dramatically different. You have a little more easy time shifting in and out of different modes. You might notice that cognitive fatigue, which is the lack of willingness to engage with a cognitive task, tends to happen around 1pm for most of us or 2pm that will be maybe less of an issue for you. Or you might notice changes in language production or verbal fluency, we call it all things that the racetam class inotropics, which are the heavy lifters of the nootropic world. The racetams are known for producing sort of better oxygenation and better cell metabolism in a bunch of different ways. And this seems to, at least subjectively, we get reports on verbal fluency, concentration and focus and sort of the ability to switch in and out of different modes. And that from our perspective at true brain, is really the holy grail of human performance. Sustained attention, but also flexible attention. Before we hit the record button, Chris was talking a bit about the formula, the algorithm equation of what different things are required for high levels of performance. That's something we're doing both at TrueBrain and at Peak Brain, which is our brain training center. We have a lab, the True Brain Focus lab, running at Peak Brain. And we're looking at quantum data, we're looking at brain waves, putting very expensive EEG systems on people's heads and recording baseline brain activity to look at how trait activity affects performance. And we're starting to look at behaving evoked activity in the brain called erps. We're starting to examine some of the performance metrics in the brain that we can quantify relative to classic brain imaging studies in the literature. There's decades of literature on, and there's a really common or well studied, let's say, phenomenon in the brain called the P300. It's a wave that happens about 300 milliseconds after you see something important and it reflects the amount of attention you're bringing online, so to speak. There's lots of great caffeine studies throughout the literature past 20, 30, 40 years showing that caffeine modifies the P300, that it changes your attention resources. Now, again, I would say caffeine does not actually meet the threat for the definition of a nootropic, but I might call it a cognitive enhancer or even a smart drug instead. And I think there's a strategy here for people to go after nootropics to build sort of performance, maybe to use caffeine. I'm not certainly by any means anti caffeine. I'm anti over reliance on caffeine and thinking that arousal is equivalent to performance, which is a big mistake people make. Oh, I'm not performing abortion. It's not necessarily the best way to go. But classically caffeine is, you know, probably the most used smart drug ever. And The True Brain 1.0 formula, the capsule formula is caffeine free. And the drink formulas have both a caffeine and a no caffeine version. Initially I was sort of the hardcore neuroscientist and Chris was the consumer package guy. And I was really resistant to putting caffeine in trubrain. We've done a lot of things with the product development to sort of run counter to the snake oil that is often present in the supplement industry. And one of those things that we resisted doing, that we decided not to do, was to obscure ingredients, obscure the amount of ingredients behind a proprietary blend label. The other thing we didn't do initially in the capsules was rely on caffeine or sugar. There's no sugar in the capsule. There's no caffeine. And we get great nootropic effects, we think, from the capsule formula. But people are used to modifying and hacking their brains with caffeine, obviously. And so we have a drink that has a caffeine option. Again, we're not anti caffeine. But the question then started becoming, well, you know, which of these formulas is best and which of them produces different types of waves and might be more optimal for different types of performance environments. And so that's what we're looking at now is trying to figure out, you know, the different components we put into trubrain, which, which ones are heavy lifting, what's the. What's the contribution of caffeine to the mix versus no caffeine. And we've sort of taken a step down this path of quantifying nootropics. This is kind of a big deal because nootropics, by their very nature are not things that big pharma wants to invest in. You know, a lot of them are.

Why do you think that is?

There's many reasons, I think, I'm sure Chris has.

They can't patent a lot of the stuff to target.

That's the biggest reason. Right? I mean, piracetam has been around since like, you know, 40, 50 years now. And it's so far beyond patentable because of how long it's been on the market that GSK and other big pharma companies would have no profit motive. No profit motive. Why would they want to drop a million dollars in all the human clinical studies required to make it a drug for a specific disorder when they can't patent it? And that money is instantly going to validate any third party wants to come in with a generic version of their drug. So that's the biggest reason. The other reason is, and this may be a cynical reason in this country anyway, in the western sort of world, they have a pretty heavy machine, big pharma machine that pumps out stimulants and stimulants mask symptoms and they change perception, performance. They don't change performance all that much for a lot of people, but they feel it. You feel a stimulant pretty dramatically. And so I'm of the opinion that it's easier to resell another version of Adderall, Vyvanse, Concerta, whatever. It's easy to change the molecule or take a drug that's a stimulant and make it a pro drug or bind it, make it an L molecule versus the R and L racemic mixtures and make a Small tweak, release it again as a patentable drug and you have, what is it, seven years of trailing profit before you have to compete with anyone. That's an easier and a better established business idea than hey, let's really make change in people's lives. I think that the dollar rules this one, unfortunately.

Yeah, I see exactly what you mean. You brought a couple, couple things I want to kind of circle back to. I made some notes here as you're talking about. So first of all, with caffeine, one, I would also imagine, you know, from a business standpoint, because I've given a lot of thought about this as a, as a marketer and business owner myself, like if I was going to do it and also how I feel like the caffeine, it may not necessarily be more effective, but could it be like, it's more fun and it's easier to market because people have that immediate stimulation. So you get a little bit of the, I mean, it's not psychosomatic. It's truly an effect. But probably I know that mentally I've tied in the effectiveness to the rush that I get. And as a neuroscientist, you're probably like, yeah, but that's not what makes it work. It's the other stuff. But I could see that the stuff that gives you the rush might sell better. So you're probably always balancing that out. Yeah, I mean, we're going to get.

Rid of caffeine completely. In fact, like it's. We don't want it in the conversation at all around anything that we do because clouding the fact that it's a completely different approach. I mean, caffeine will make you alert, but it's not going after the same raw material we're going after and are going after. So if you look at the device, think, you know, which is backed by, you know, good VC, worked hard, you know, sort of top VCs, and they talk about it as, you know, neurotransmitter, transmitter support. So I mean, the only reason why we put caffeine into one of our SKUs, you know, a couple years into the business was that patients didn't have the patience to wait around for the more subtle, you know, that's what I'm talking about.

Exactly.

Effects of nootropics. So because you consumers had trouble patients to wait for that, we had to put it in as a bridge, sort of bridge to get to the benefits that we're really going for. They'll be able to feel that. But if they can have A short bridge to that with the caffeine. That was kind of what we're going for.

But yeah, I mean, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah.

So I mean, the real, the real formulas are the non caffeine versions. We don't need it. It's not a crutch. It's not the, you know, immediately I think people think, oh, if you're caffeine and it's another energy drink, this is dime a dozen. Me too. It's absolutely not. And in fact, it's almost a shame that we had to put it in because then, you know, we end up talking about it on calls like this, which makes the rest of the formula seem like it doesn't work at all.

Right.

If we're just going to talk caffeine. Well, interestingly, we're looking to take it out. We'll get it out of there as soon as possible. As soon as, you know, we can find the right formula. That'll, that'll have enough burst at the beginning so people will stick with it.

Yeah. And it's interesting because I've been a customer, you know, True Brain and I never, I in the drink version too. And like I never actually even thought of you guys as an energy drink company, but I know what nootropics are and I, and I've thought of you guys as a nootropic company, not as an energy drink company. But I'm probably in the minority of the mass consumers. But I see exactly what you're talking about. And you know, I love caffeine. I drink at least two cups of coffee every single day. And I like the rush and the effect that I get. But I also know that it's not what is responsible when I'm flowing really well, having been doing nootropics for a while. But that's not where the effect is coming from. That being said, off of caffeine, I wanted to circle back to something you said in the very beginning, talking about certain drugs that really. What did you say that they do to dopamine? That was a word.

Well, most of the cyclists will dopamine burst, essentially. And that's why you get a sense of salience, a sense of finding things interesting and motivation, essentially. That's a dopaminergic for us.

That's the hard side.

That's the hard side. It's 1, 2 is the real problem. But Adderall falls into that category as well. Look at the structure of Adderall and the structure of methamphetamine. Not that different.

That's where I wanted to go, because I really want to talk about the difference, because so many people are using Adderalls and Ritalins with adults. You're seeing a lot more, I think, people using Adderall, whether it's to party or to study or to just get through work. I do know from some basic research that I've done that there's a. There's a pretty big difference in the mechanism of why Adderall makes you really attentive versus good nootropics. So you said. I'm trying to repeat this just so that I know that I got it, but. So Adderalls and Ritalins in that class of the pharmacy drugs, those are playing on a similar mechanism to the harder drugs, Right? Like the real stimulants that are.

Yes. To the cocaine, the methamphetamine, the amphetamine. Yes, exactly. Those are.

Right. So then the Racetam families and the other types of things that, like I know, that you guys include in true brain, etc. Those are using a completely different mechanism that aren't creating the withdrawal and the heavy side effects and everything else. So you get the. You get the good side, but you're not getting the downside.

Exactly. We're not directly going after manipulating dopamine in general in the brain. If you go at an end product, if you manipulate things in the synapse, or the release of neurotransmitters into the synapse, or you affect receptor activity in the synapse, you're affecting the whole circuit. And the brain notices that if you're monkeying with the end product, the final step, it will do everything in its power to adjust back to some other baseline because it doesn't like to be driven very hard in one direction. So this is why you develop tolerance and habituation and many things. This is why we have to go up in drugs and abuse, otherwise we stop having effects. The brain adjusts with that, though. There are things you can do to the dopamine system to support dopamine without adding a final burst of dopamine in the synapse. The strategy we've used in True Brain is using tyrosine. Tyrosine is actually the raw material in the brain for making dopamine. And a dopaminergic neuron will use tyrosine and run it through several enzymatic sort of steps and end up with dopamine as an end product and then packages into vesicles to be released. So it's not actually making Dopamine shoot out of the cell. But if you're somebody who has an, maybe an issue with dopamine metabolism or someone who has abused their dopamine system with lots of stimulants historically, then we decided to put tyrosine into trubrain just so the raw materials would be plentiful and you wouldn't have any issue manufacturing dopamine if you need to. This gets out of the issue of overdriving a system and lets the system regulate how it wants to, but with no limits on raw materials. So it's a much more conservative approach, but it also produces sort of a more sustainable day in, day out support dopamine system without it being hijacked the way that, you know, cocaine or Adderall or meth might hijack the dopamine system.

Absolutely. So speaking about other drugs and the comparisons to this, some of the other readings I've done, which I guess in some circles could be pretty controversial, is that one of the most proven quote unquote nootropics or I guess cognitive enhancers is pure nicotine. Can you, can you address that? Because I know that that's really controversial, especially right now. But can you address the.

Yeah, I mean, I also think it's, it's not a great substance in my, my perspective. And the reason is because it fails almost every one of the nootropic check marks. For me it is habit forming, potentially dramatic. Nicotine has an addictive potential that is more the learning that is created is potentially harder to break than that of heroin. The withdrawal symptoms are not severe as heroin is. But the learning, the addiction is actually dramatic with nicotine. And also nicotine by itself is carcinogenic. Not as dramatically carcinogenic as burning tobacco and cigar and everything else. But nicotine by itself is pro tumor. So I mean those two reasons alone.

People who think they can kind of get around the. And I've never been a smoker, I've never used nicotine as nootropic. I've just read, that's why I bring it up. But I've heard of some people for the cognitive effects getting into the using the patch even though they never smoked, just in order to get that. But you don't see any real upside with all the other great alternatives out there.

Dr. Exactly. It's more about that. Exactly. If you didn't have any options and nicotine the only game in town, there might be some rationale for it. But there's so many other things that do not have habit formation or addiction as One of their side effects where the toxicity, if you put another nicotine patch on by mistake you get very sick. You know if you leave one on for too long you can get very sick. Nicotine's poisonous. Nicotine historically before we used it in cigarettes was an herbicide. You know, Native Americans have been using it for years, years to kill plants. It's really, really toxic tobacco and it's really nicotine. And slightly large amounts, more than you're used to will produce dramatically painful physiological side effects. So it fails that dose response safety thing for me it's not necessarily neuroprotective does have some risks in carcinogen land and there's that really dramatic habit formation potential and so why not use nootropics? True nootropics that do not have any habit formation. In fact the racetam class from all reports we're getting seem to work better the longer you take them. There's a reverse tolerance. So people are concerned about.

One of the things I've noticed about this that the more nootropics I take and almost all the nootropics I've ever taken with the exception of a handful of experiments and with different non Rastam based have been racetams just because they work so well for me. And I've noticed the more often that I've taken them the less I need in order to get.

We don't know why, I have some theories but what we're discovering is this is why it works better as a regimen. Because taking them at a moderate dose or a low dose, day in, day out, things start to shift after a few weeks. I mean you get some effects a couple days in from the capsules, often from the first day. It's great, it's exactly what we're looking for. Something else happens five or six weeks in and from a business perspective that's really hard to market. I mean for me personally five or six weeks into my first piracetam experience and for the next several months what I noticed was memory access. So I suddenly for about six months straight I was taking this is before trubrain I was sort of self hacking and I was taking a couple grams of piracetam a day and for like six or eight months I was recalling an unbelievable array of childhood memories of places that I had been not experiences. Places like close my eyes and see my fifth grade classroom with its brick wall and its lowercase and uppercase outfit across the top and see it in full 3D. I mean it was a very intense experience and not to suggest that everyone who tries racist ams will have that experience. But there's something going on and we get effects in the first couple of days, but something else deeper, more subtle and more memory based effects seem to show up later in the process. Very difficult to market, very difficult to tell people, oh yeah, here's some effects you're going to get on day one or two or three. And then there's other effects you might get a month or two in. So we just don't talk about them for the most part in the product marketing.

Take it up and you'll remember your past lives.

Right?

Yeah. I think that might fail the snake oil test too, for many reasons.

I think so. A little bit, yeah.

A little bit, yeah.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. No, so I, and I noticed that the. It looks like the primary racetam that you use in True Brain is the oxyracetam. Right?

Well, the capsules I think are still piracetam based, although we also have some piracetam and oxyracetam capsules. And the drinks are mostly oxytam based. Again, we have some piracetam and oxyracetam drinks that were.

Now, can you tell me kind of the difference between the two?

They're the most similar of all the racetams. I would say they're the most similar to each other. Oxyracetam is very similar to piracetam with a couple of differences. And this is, I think, why we chose it really for the drinks. The flavor of the raw powder is much less aversive.

Piracetam tastes like butt. It's terrible.

And it's not even that bad for nootropics, unfortunately. But oxyracetam is much milder than piracetam. Oxy is also sort of better soluble and oxy tends to be a little bit longer lasting. We considered anti racetam, for instance, which some of the people on the team really like. I don't love it, it makes me kind of low energy. But we avoided antiracetam because it has a window of about 90 minutes of effect, which just isn't really good for a product. Piracetam.

I haven't used phenylpiracetam, but I've heard of phenyl. What's the story on that one?

Phenyl's wonderful. It's very paracetam based or very paracetamol like in effect, but it's also got the phenylethylamine group kind of like a stimulant. So it does this sort of stimulant, like it's sort of stimulant like effect.

Probably why these people like it.

Exactly. And phenylpiracetam is not something that is probably useful day in, day out. Phenylpracetamine does produce pretty quick tolerance the second or third day you take it. And it's probably not because of the paracetam component. Probably because of the phenyl group or the phenyl group. That's probably why it's a lot closer to a stimulant structure. So it has that sort of quick habituation. We wouldn't put phenylpiracetam in a day in, day out blend, although we are actually experimenting with it now. We have a new product coming out soon. I think it's actually available if you go to the site directly. But it's a coffee product that has these boost sticks. The sticks have.

Yes, I was going to talk about that. I actually have some at home. Yes, I was going to bring that up.

The gold colored sticks then, which are theanine and alpha GPC based. But Chris and Derek have been working on. Chris, what do you call them dynamite sticks now? And they're phenylpiracetam and choline.

Yes, we do have. We're calling them jumpsticks.

Jumpsticks. Same problem.

Yeah, we were talking over each other. I'm sorry about that. Yeah, so I've liked those. I've been trying those now for about a week, week and a half, and those have been really good. I've noticed when I drink them in my coffee, I'm talking to you guys. Like I'm kind of forgetting that my podcast listeners are out there. They're like, huh? What is all this they're talking about? So you can see this on True Brain T R U B R A I N dot com. You look at the coffee, but you guys have your own beans. But you also have these sticks. They, you know, these little golden sticks you put in the coffee. They're tasteless, but they help. Basically the ones right now with the L theanine and alpha gpc, it helps. What would you say? Not only smooth out and extend the word.

I like.

The buffer.

Yeah, yeah, buffer. Because the choline stimulates you a little bit and the theanine takes the top edge off the caffeine when you mix it with your coffee or tea. And this is actually why tea itself produces a more smooth push and coffee's more of a jitter. There's no theanine in coffee by default. There is theanine naturally occurring in tea and so we basically took the inspiration from tea and we're then dosing our coffee as if it's tea. But then we add the alpha GPC choline for just a little bit more of cognitive push. We're really trying to sort of make something that's between coffee and tea an effect, if you will.

I love it. It's funny because it looks like a little stick of honey. I got these and I did not tell my wife and I have them by the coffee machine and she comes in the other day and she's sucking on one of them and she's like, where'd you get this honey? Doesn't taste like honey. It's not honey. I said, it's a very hard drug. You probably want to go lay down for a while. And she's like, are you serious? I'm like, no, but ask me before you start sucking on my stuff. How come you didn't tell me? I was like, I didn't want you to use them. Those are mine. But anyway, that was funny. But no, I've absolutely noticed a better coffee experience using that. So I've really, really liked what you're doing there. And see, listeners, they're not against caffeine. They've got you to use it.

No, we're definitely not against caffeine. I mean, I'm, no, I'm the kind of guy that wakes up in the morning and makes like a 32 ounce pour over and then goes to work. Espresso. And then, you know what's, what's the old joke? You wake. I wake up with too much blood in my caffeine stream.

Yeah, exactly.

And I'm definitely overdoing it. You know, I have, I keep a bottle of L Theanine around in my office for the days where I go, okay, that was one cup too many, you know, and I'm absolutely a culprit. I'm the kind of person we're trying not to encourage to drink too much coffee. We're giving folks another option with the racetam based active nootropics.

That's great. What are some of the other cool developments that you guys are seeing out there in this kind of. In this world that really aren't necessarily either on the market by you guys or anything else? I mean, is there anything just that you're seeing that is really exciting, whether it's technology based, whether it's pharmaco, I.

Think the tech is where we're most excited about, but there's also a lot of vaporware there. The sort of Wearable space isn't quite mature yet. A lot of devices that users don't really do them, most of the EEG devices out there are total bunk, to put it generously. And that being said, we're starting to see devices show up and wearables come down in cost and down in complexity to the point where we're starting to be able to do research to validate some of these things. And that's really, to me as an EEG researcher, incredibly exciting, maybe less so to other people. But when I first got involved with eeg, it would take me about half an hour to stick wires to 25, whatever spots in your head. And I've been doing EEG for 15 years or something and it's a very messy, involved, tricky process. And we now have some completely wireless dry and Bluetooth headsets. Really the process of putting on an EEG now in my focus lab is putting on this little headset, kind of fitting it to your head, adjusting some of the sensors so they sit flat against your hair and then stepping back and hitting record. It's about a 30 second, two minute setup and there's no cleanup. Your hair is not full of poop. So this really sort of frees you up.

What are some of the benefits of that? Because a lot of people probably are like, whoa, we just switched topics. What's going on here? And I've got some friends who've done some of this work, some of them in order to cure really bad concussions. They've got or back. Yeah, neurotabic. Yeah.

What Andrew and I are doing, what we're really trying to do together here with this is, you know, when we look at our customer base and you know, people that we had been involved with, it's, you know, how can we help these ambitious people who want to, you know, they really want to be somebody. You know, these are driven people, they want to do more, they want to, you know, work smarter, better, more efficient. And I think it's like that efficiency that really trying to address. And if you think about what it is to be more efficient, you know, you want to understand that like equation that you have for productivity. And we believe that the equation all starts with the human brain, right? That the brain sort of trumps all the other things that you could be, you know, trying and doing and you know, as a way to think about like quantifying your performance, that's a function of, you know, a lot of different factors like sleep, meditation, workouts, diet and, you know, true brain. You know, we started Sort of narrow, if you think about that big equation, equation we started narrow and, you know, we're pretty humble about charter, that, you know, true brain is only one piece to the, to the equation that fits under diet. Right. And there's a lot of other things in diet, but this is just one, you know, functional drink that we think, you know, based on the data and based on what we measure in this, in this algorithm is the best there. But the bigger piece that I think fascinating that Andrew and I are working on together is how can we, we quantify each of these pieces and see how you deal with distress and distractions and, you know, multitasking and, you know, a lot of people love to brag, I'm so good at multitasking. Well, but that's not a good thing necessarily because it's, you know, depleting resources in your brain and, you know, and Andrew can tell you kind of exactly what that is. But in Andrew, he's done this, you know, so we have this collaborative that we've opened up. I mean, he's done this for CEOs, hedge fund guys, I mean, artists, celebrities, and, you know, looking exactly at what's happening when you have a good night of sleep, you don't. Everybody's talking a big game about getting you and telling you how you can get more into that flow state or like the zone. Right. But we're out there actually measuring. You know, this is, to me, it's the equivalent when I'm out and I tell people, well, what does that actually mean that you're measuring the brainwaves?

It's.

It's kind of just like all the progress, progression of the biomarkers that we look at. You know, you used to say, used to go on a run and say, oh, you know, that was a really hard workout. I was sweating a lot. Well, I mean, that's like very imprecise, right? Like very qualitative. And now you can wear a garment with a heart rate monitor and you can measure versus your friends, track over other workouts and look at the exact heart rate and, you know, look at all these different biomarkers. That's where we think it's going with the brain. And we think that the brain trumps the entire equation for everything else that you might be looking at that doesn't, you know, more productive. We're like, really excited about here. And of course, like, we have analog, non digital, you know, products as well that we sell, but we think that, like validating them and work that in wherever we can help in the equation and be like that resource for people. And we've actually been selling more and more packages where we'll have people come to la, you know, meet with Andrew and the team and also have, you know, we'll bundle it together with our drinks. We just had a holiday promo that was really successful as well, where people are going to be flying into, you know, Andrew in la. And, you know, I'm always trying to pepper Andrew with ideas like if we can, you know, we might do a truck, like a food truck and go around and try to do, you know, validation that way as well to get this out there. Because nobody's building this type of thing that we're building in this, in this way so that we're. We're super excited about on the, on the tech side.

Nice. That's. Yeah. That is really exciting. And so you guys do. So is the neurofeedback part of this? So you, you know, you not. So I haven't had my True Brain this morning, but as the.

Yeah, if you think about it like, you know, the measurement comes first.

Right. If you think about the neurofeedback, is that more like the treatment?

It is, yeah. So that's one adjustment. There's two companies here, right. So there's Trubain and Peak Brain. And Trubain is something Chris and I are working on together. We help design product and then Peak Brain is my brain training center in Los Angeles where we have a focus lab for True Brain hosted inside of Peak Brain Center. And we also do QEEG brain assessments and neurofeedback training at Peak Brain for broad brains, not just the True Brain user, so to speak. So it's a little bit True Brains in Santa Monica, Peak Brains in Culver City were three miles apart or something. And so there's a lot of collaboration. But we're also. The things that we're most excited about the overlap is, as Chris said, the quantification of essentially the effects of performance, fatigue, sleep on the brain and how that is changed by the sort of active nootropic tool set that we have to offer.

That's exciting. Yeah.

So really simply like kind of like 1, 2, 3. Right. Like step one, measure and understand like the brainwaves.

Right.

And that happens in both. And step two is like make adjustments to optimize to whatever your goals are, Their performance. Right. Like concentration, efficiency. So True Brain is one thing that you could optimize in that diet piece, other thing to try to optimize and then you3 is measure and adjust and sort of repeat.

Right.

So it's just like anything else. If you're going to measure your speed and your heart rate on a run and then you're going to get a better sleep the next day, or you're going to do whatever adjustments, diet, et cetera, and then you're going to try to test it again. It's the same thing with the brain, why it's such a good. Bringing together what we're doing.

Yeah, that's really why we're focusing on quantified stuff. I mean, to break it down a little more concretely. One example is we're looking at brainwaves, but then we're looking at algorithms for measuring cognitive fatigue or lack of willingness to keep performing. And we're looking at how the brain changes over an hour of performance. And that's usable data. Even outside the context of true brain, that's usable data. But in the context, can true brain modify that? Can racetams modify that? Is it caffeine or no caffeine? These are all questions that need to be answered to take the nootropic space and make it a little bit more respectable, a bit less of a wild west. We feel that we are best poised to. To make those assessments.

That's great. One of the last questions I want to ask you, and especially this kind of popped into my brain here at the end, but we were talking about Adderall and Rilin and stuff before. So when it comes to children, these are obviously. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, they're very safe. But do you recommend true brain or other nootropics for.

We don't. Only because there's no research on them and we've been really cautious in terms of recommending the LD50. The toxicity of paracetam is significantly higher than salt. So you have to. You basically can't eat enough paracetam to have it hurt you. That being said, there's just not been studies on normal children, and so therefore we wouldn't want to recommend it. But if I had a teenager who had some attention problems, I would probably be him or her.

Yeah. Especially if it was like Adderall, Ritalin versus Nootropics. I have a feeling I know what your answer would be.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Nootropics.

Every time.

Yeah. Bingo. Well, guys, this has been fantastic. I don't know if there's anything else you want to add. You definitely answered a lot of questions that I've had and satisfied a bunch of curiosity. And I know for my listeners, if you are, if you've been playing around like I have with various nootropics and cognitive enhancers, whether it's just caffeine or methamphetamine before work and you want to, if this made sense and you want to give it a try, I definitely recommend trubrain T-R-U-B-R-A-I-N.com and you can go see all the various products that you guys have. You can check out peakbraininstitute.com and you can see some of the advancements in neurofeedback and brain mapping, etc. That Dr. Hill is doing. Is there anything else that you gentlemen want to add on to my listeners? Anything we kind of missed out on that I didn't ask.

So, Chris, anything to plug for the holiday season?

Oh yeah, we do have some holiday promos going. It is, you know, you can email in about it. I believe the URL is promo trubrain.com gifts. We have some really cool, unique holiday packages that we put together and I think for your audience if you want. I don't. If you give out promo codes, we had one made up for you guys, just the promo code bacon, which is 25% off. Yeah, anything that we have going.

So that's great. So yeah, guys, just to reiterate that, go over to True Brain or go to promo trubrain.com gifts for the holiday season. But anytime you're listening to this, use the promo code bacon and you will get 25% off. So that's really generous of you guys. I really appreciate it and I know I'll be using it for my own orders as well. So if there's nothing else, guys, I look forward to connecting with you offline and keeping this relationship going and letting you know how my experience goes both with your various supplements, but also looking forward to the new coffee sticks that you guys are coming out with as well that are the rest 10 based. So just all around fun. It's a fun, fun topic. I know my audience loves it. I love it. And with as many distractions and as many pulls on the attention and focus and energy levels of entrepreneurs. I mean, everybody out there is facing this, but my audience are business owners and entrepreneurs themselves. And there's probably not many people that I can think of who are more taxed and stressed and full of a million things that need to be performing at the top of their game than us. So I know that there's going to be some people out there. It's Like, I mean, I got to give this a try because any edge that I can get is not only going to help me perform better, but potentially keep my business from falling apart. So. Right, guys. Yeah, guys, good. Check out Trubrain and everybody else. If you're listening and you've listened this far, that means you like what we're doing. So if you want more of this, if you have any feedback, if you want to tell me that we're doing great or that we're doing terrible, either one, send me an email to ask bradbaconraftbusiness.com if you have not subscribed on itunes, subscribe. Hit that little button. And if you're not on my newsletter, you can also do that. Just go over to baconrapbusiness.com jump on my newsletter, because I do send very special trainings and promotions out to people that, you know, they don't get it on the podcast. And the one thing I don't want you to do under any circumstances, leave a five star review on itunes. Don't do that. I'm employing reverse psychology right now to try to actually get you to do that. But, Dr. Hill, Chris. Guys, I really appreciate your time on the show today.

Yeah, thanks for having us. We really appreciate being here.

My pleasure.

Yeah, that was great.

Absolutely. You guys are doing great things. So until next time, guys, I will see you soon. This is Brad Costanzo, over and out. All right, that was good.

Cool. Thanks, Brad.

Yeah, my pleasure to do a little bit of editing. We had some audio issues, obviously, but in general, this should be out. I'm going to try to get it out next week. What is today? I may be able to get it out at the end of the week, but probably not. But probably Monday or Tuesday, this will be coming out.

Okay, sounds good.

Yeah.

Sorry about what happened there on the. On the audio. It sounded fine to me. I mean, like, I couldn't tell, but yeah.

Yeah.

Well, hopefully it's hard to tell. Magic of post production. Cool. Yep.

All right, guys, thanks.

And by the way, if there's anybody else I know, a few other, you know, podcasters with some really good audiences, if you'd at least been interested, I'm happy to make some other introductions, help you guys continue to spread the word. I don't know if I should just do that with Derek or with you guys.

Yeah, you can start with Derek probably. He's probably a little bit more bandwidth for chasing those things right now. That'd be great.

Yeah, Perfect.

All right, well, gentlemen, thank you very much and I will talk to you soon.