Unlocking Cognitive Potential: The Nootropic Journey - Episode 343

When you take the right nootropic, it makes things seem less effortful. Things become more effortless. Not only does it lower the barrier to entry in the sense of I'm not feeling the resistance to working today or starting my book or even sitting down to meditate. I'm not feeling the resistance to that, but it also makes the thing itself less effortful, which is more analogous to being in a flow state. Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, and today I'm hosting Jonathan Roseland. He's a really interesting character, quite honestly. He's a professional biohacker, entrepreneur. He's a founder of Limitless Mindset. He has a podcast called Limitless that I was a guest on within the last few months. We had a really interesting conversation there. He's done a ton of work on nootropics and mind-expanding memory performance expanding medications and supplements and things like that. And we have a quite a rambling conversation about those topics. It's a really interesting conversation. Hang in there. He's written a novel that also sounds very intriguing. We get into really some strong memory-enhancing recommendations. I think you're going to really like this podcast.

He went from saving hearts as a cardiologist to rewriting the entire aging playbook. Dr. Jeffrey Gladden believes 100 is the new 30, and he's got the science to back it up. This is the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

Jonathan, welcome to the Gladden Longevity Podcast. It's good to, good to see you again. It was, I don't know, maybe 4 or 5 months ago I was on your podcast, something like that.

I think it was less. I think it was less. But perhaps me and you have got a different time dilation thing going. I heard this thing about how light travels at different speeds in different, like, hemispheres of the globe. So perhaps there's, perhaps there's something going on there.

Yeah, I think that's what it's about. But, uh, I'm sure that accounts for at least 6 weeks of it. So anyway, it's good to have you here. You know, most people probably listening to this podcast may not be familiar with you, and I know that you've got a long history of biohacking and exploration of Nootropics, and you're an entrepreneur, and, you know, many other cool things. I believe you have your father as well. So anyway, maybe, maybe you could introduce yourself to the audience, just give them a brief synopsis of how you ended up here.

Sure. I'm Jonathan Roseland with Limitless, and it was about 14, 15 years ago that I saw that movie Limitless with Bradley Cooper. It's worth a rewatch. Anyone who's— yeah, if you don't have weekend plans yet, rewatch Limitless because it's so inspiring on where we can imagine where our brain power, the untapped reserves of creativity, cognition, executive function, motivation. Vision, the untapped reserves that we have.

Just to interrupt for a sec. The other one that was like that for me was Lucy. I don't know if you saw Lucy, but another one of, you know, what percentage of our brain are we using? And in each of these, I think what's interesting is that there's enhanced interconnectivity of the brain that's happening, right? There's, there's parts of the brain that are maybe lying dormant, but I think as I think about these movies, it's really more about bringing more of the global connectivity online and some on some level, I'm not sure how you're thinking about it, but that's kind of my take on it a little bit.

Well, I'll tell you a little bit more about how this movie inspired me. What caught my attention was the gray Maserati in it. Do you remember that gray Maserati in the movie?

In Limitless?

Yeah. Okay. So I think that's right. A Gran Turismo. And I used to drive that car once upon a time in a past life, younger life, I got, uh, entangled with this crazy company that was financed by this older investor who had multiple personality dissociative disorder. And so one of his, his, his main personality, the core personality, was this very successful, uh, accountant and banker. But then he had a couple of other personalities that were like real.

I saw that movie too. The Accountant.

The Accountant. Okay. That, that I haven't heard. Sounds like it might.

Yeah. He's a, he's on the spectrum and he's kind of a multiple personality, you know, accountant by day and vigilante by night kind of thing. It's pretty interesting.

Okay. That's how this guy kind of was. His name was Ed and yeah, some of his personalities were completely insane. And so he started— fine, he financed this entertainment company in Denver. And I was this 22-year-old guy with really hardly any experience doing very much in life, but I was promoted in this company. And then this investor started just throwing a really irresponsible amount of money at us. And he bought us this brand new Maserati GranTurismo from Ferrari of Denver. With 3 miles on the odometer. And, and that was, that was my car for a while until that whole situation just melted down epically.

Sure.

And that's a story I tell in one of my books. So that car just left an indelible mark on me because I will never be as cool as I was at 22 years old driving that car. And so I saw that car in the movie Limitless and I said, okay, I really need to watch that.

Well, I would say this, don't sell yourself short.

Thank you.

You can be cooler than that. So yeah, I'll have to try hard.

I'll have to try real hard.

You don't have to try that hard. You really don't have to try that hard. It's going to come to you.

Okay, maybe that's— I think the Italians call that sprezzatura. The Spanish call that luz con— no, no, I don't speak Spanish good enough anymore. But there's— yes, every language has a phrase for that, for effort, grace without effort. And so I saw that movie and he takes this drug, NZT-48, which is the ultimate smart drug. Unlocks memory, unlocks creativity, unlocks motivation.

And he finishes the novel in like a day that he's been working on for like 4 years or something, right?

So smart drugs can be a hell of a cure for writer's block. That part is not— that part's not fictional. So I said to myself after I watched that movie, and I watched it like twice, I watched it like 2 days in a row, and I said to myself, I have to find that drug. Well, I knew, I knew it was fictional, but I said to myself, in the wide world of pharmacology, there has to be something that approaches that, and I need to find it.

There was a downside to that drug, as I recall. You know, it was going to kill him if he didn't— it was going to burn out his brain, basically. And so he had to be actually become smart enough to actually solve the riddle of how this— how to actually get the benefits without dying from it. That was part of the plot too.

So, and, and at the end of the movie, they leave it kind of a mystery as to whether he's gotten off of that drug or whether he's still in the clutches of the addiction to it.

I think what he did was I think he actually solved the riddle. I think he figured out how to actually maintain the cognitive clarity and creativity and, and everything else and yet mitigate the side effects. I think that, I think he used all the intellectual prowess to solve that part of the equation. That, that was the sense I had because he sort of drives off with this smile and, you know, leaves De Niro behind. And it's like there's a sense that, that he's figured it out, right? Like he cracked the code. At least that was how it left me. I mean, it was ambiguous because you don't know for sure, but anyway, that was my take.

Okay, I like that take on that because that connects to a point that I try to make repeatedly, and I hope this stays with our audience, which is, which is which is that nootropics and smart drugs and biohacking are the best gateway drugs to meaningful personal development. Because in—

that's an interesting comment.

Yeah, because in most pathways of personal development, we can think about meditation, entrepreneurship, bodybuilding, social dynamics, learning game, In the vast majority of pathways to real personal development, the Acolyte faces a catch-22 deal where meaningful— real meaningful personal development takes a while to pay off. It takes often at least months, quite possibly years, for meaningful personal development to really pay off. If you want to put on muscle in the gym, unless you're going to be using like a bunch of really crazy SARMs, you need to put in like probably months, probably a year plus in the gym before you really start to see some really good results. And to where you get into this self-perpetuating cycle where your personal development efforts are rewarding you and galvanizing you to step those efforts up to the next level.

I would just interrupt you for a second. I would push back on that just a little bit. I think you can really make significant strides in about 6 weeks. I think the interesting thing about progress is that we all start with a preconception of what's involved, and as we go down that path, we gain insights that modify the preconceptions that enable us to continue to expand. And then that modifies the current preconceptions, and we're able to continue to expand. And I think, I think the cycle for that with, you know, physical fitness is around 6 weeks, actually. That people start to move into that space. I think it's— to your point, I think it's longer with, you know, sort of psychological development or psychospiritual development. I think it can take longer than that. So yeah.

Yeah. So I like nootropics because they start giving you that motivation almost instantaneously. In some cases, you take a particular nootropic or smart drug, hits the bloodstream, 15, 30 minutes later, and you have an extra degree of clarity, of motivation, of creativity, of optimism about what you can accomplish. And so, yeah, so I think when I am— I do like Q&As, or I'll sometimes even do like free consultation calls with people that find me randomly on the internet. And I often, if people are kind of at the 101 stage of personal development or entrepreneurship or something, I'll tell them, get on a real good nootropic as opposed to just relying on inspiration, because inspiration is fickle. It'll come and go. But if you're on some good nootropics, then yeah, you're going to have that degree of momentum to sustain the point where you might not actually even need those nootropics in the future.

Yeah, I think that's— I think it's a good point. I one of the things that when you take the right nootropic, it makes things seem less effortful, right? Things become more effortless. That's the beauty of kind of being on a nootropic. Not only does it lower the barrier to entry in the sense of I'm not feeling the resistance to working today or starting my book or, you know, whatever, or going to the gym or, you know, whatever it might be, or even sitting down to meditate. I'm not feeling the resistance to that, but it also, and you, you can layer your own experience on this. My experience of it is that it also makes the thing itself less effortful. So it's more effortless, which is more analogous to being in a flow state where things are flowing and it's not you're doing, but you're not efforting, so to speak. And there also seems to be more joy in it. Somehow there's the positive feedback loop of being in that productive, more effortless and joyful state is kind of a, a reinforcing wheel. And I think to your point, you can sort of start to enter that wheel with the right nootropic. You can also get real jittery and nervous and paranoid if you get on the wrong one, right? So it's a little bit about knowing, knowing what's going to work for you. But when it's done well, I think you end up in that spot, you know.

I'd agree with that. And there's a couple of nootropics that are pretty consistent performers for the majority of people, but it's a thing where people do have to account some for their own biodiversity. And if you try 1 or 2 different nutri— and I bet most of the people listening to this have— if you try 1 or 2 and they don't really impress you, try 10. Maybe not. Maybe, maybe.

Let me clarify that. What he just said was don't take 10 at one time. He's saying work your way through. A number of different ones to find the one that works.

So exactly. Yeah. If you get that law of large numbers working for you and you sample different, different pharmacological mechanisms, you'll find something that really unlocks grandeur for yourself. For— okay. And of course, people are, people are wondering, I said I spent about 14, 15 years searching for real life NZT-48. And people are gonna wonder if I found it.

Yeah, they are. So why don't you let us know? Did you find it?

I, I think I got pretty close and it's this combination of racetams. Are you very familiar with racetams?

Yeah, it's a prescription drug basically. It's kind of a dopamine agonist, I believe, if I'm not mistaken. But I know that people with different COMT gene configurations respond differently to it. Uh, the people that respond the best have the met, met configuration. The people that respond the worst have the Val-Val configuration. I'm a Met-Val and I don't get much of a boost from it, but I know that the Met-Mets seem to really like it. It does really well for them. So it also can raise blood pressure, do some other things, heart rate, stuff like that.

So, okay. Yeah. Another good reason to get the personal genotyping done. So the godfather of the racetams is piracetam. People consider that the original. Smart drug. It was developed back in the 1960s in Belgium, I believe. And that one, for me, it works on a couple of things most noticeably, which is memory. And interestingly, if you take— you, you take piracetam for in between about 10 days to 3 weeks, and you'll start to notice yourself remembering odd things from your childhood. Something will happen and that'll like remind you of your neighbor that lived next to you when you were 7 years old. And you'll also find that retrieval of semantic and episodic information starts to become a lot more like a Google search than searching through the library.

Yeah, and that's right.

I've talked with so many biohackers about their experiences with nootropics, and I'm always curious what actually works as a memory drug. Because you hear things about— you hear things about Ginkgo biloba, hear things about lion's mane. But my consistent finding, talking to probably hundreds of biohackers now, has been that piracetam is actually the best memory drug for opening up long-term memory storage. So that, so that's an effect that we see there in Limitless. Then I also find that it's the best as a verbal intelligence drug, that you're just going to become more dangerous with your words, and, uh, you'll find yourself talking your way into and talking your way out of more trouble than usual on piracetam, but I'm actually— I'm not on it right now because it's kind of late here, and I hope to not be up all night after recording this podcast with you.

Yeah, it's a little bit of stimulant in that sense, right?

Mitochondrial stimulant. And, and it releases a lot of choline, so you need to take it with some of those, those choline precursors. And piracetam is— this is unfortunate— it's increasingly becoming kind of like the Quaaludes of nootropics that there's less and less companies that want to sell it. I think the FDA sent like a strongly worded letter once upon a time to one of the companies selling it. And that scared a lot of the like companies in America that are doing the time-of-flight purity verification correctly. That scared like the good kind of companies away from selling it. So it's harder and harder to sell. As far as I know at this point, there's really only one company in North America that I would trust that I get my stuff from. And they actually kicked me out of their affiliate program because I wrote this like 5,000-word article describing all the benefits of piracetam. And we can actually like link that as a resource. For the, for the listeners. I wrote this big long article describing all these benefits based, based on the science, because there's a lot of human clinical science on it. And they said, they kind of said, you're doing too good of a job of pitching our product. We're afraid of the FDA. So we have to show you the door out of our affiliate program. So yeah, but, but I think there's just one source. And yeah, I still recommend them and people can find like an up-to-date list on my website. Of the sources that I deem credible if people are curious about trying that one because you can't get it on Amazon.

Yeah, no, that's right. So it's a prescription.

So no, it's sold. It's a prescription drug in a lot of places, but it is sold as a supplement. Okay.

Okay. I've not seen it as a supplement. I've seen it more as an actual prescription. That's how I've seen it in the past.

It's probably that too. It's probably that too.

So if you're not taking it now, what are, what are you, what are you doing now to optimize your cognitive ability?

Okay. So at the moment I'm on nicotine because like I said, my bedtime is coming up here and that's still, it's really not ideal to take nicotine in the evening, but I find that's a relatively fast burn and nicotine is in my experience and also In the experience of Ayn Rand, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, J.R.R. Tolkien, in the experience of like the great novelists of the 20th century, it's the creativity drug. So that's what I'm on at the moment.

And how do you take the nicotine?

I take it as a USP liquid. Yeah, I don't vape. I don't do like Zynns, I actually take the liquid in a solution where it's, where it's diluted. And I have done that for 8 years now. Yeah. I've had this on-again, off-again relationship with nicotine for 8 years now. And I've never, even taking it orally, I have never had any issues with gum, like, like gum mouth. Cancer or with like caustic effects on my mouth. I'm dentally in pretty good, in pretty good shape. So for me at least, yeah, that's been a very safe way to use nicotine.

Yeah, people, people use it in different ways. I think there are some lozenges. Obviously people use patches and they can use liquid, they can vape it, they can actually smoke it. I think, you know, nicotine is interesting because it does have some very good effects on the brain, actually healing effects effects on the brain. It's actually not bad for the brain. The question becomes, you know, what's its impact on the nervous system and what's its impact on cardiovascular system and things like that. Be interesting for you to get some testing done to look at the status of your cardiovascular system, see how it's holding up.

That I should do. I do know that it, that it overclocks that using my Garmin smartwatch that monitors my HRV. I see it does increase my stress levels and it increases pulse. So I use nicotine cyclically, or okay, or I use it in kind of situations where I really need it. Like if I've got a podcast interview at nighttime, then yes. Or if I have like a book that I'm working on, or I want to create like a course, or I want to create a really epic piece of content, then I'll say, okay, for the next 2 months I'm on nicotine, and I'll be in like this insanely productive kind of monk mode.

Yeah. Do you find that there's what we would call in medicine a tachyphylaxis, where it's, uh, basically when you— maybe a term you're familiar with— it's, it's essentially when the body is exposed to something over and over again. This is true for caffeine, for example. The first— if you haven't had any caffeine in, you know, 3 months and you take some caffeine, you get a pretty good boost from it, the next day a little bit less, the next day a little bit less, a little bit less, a little bit less. There's a tachyphylaxis. In other words, repeated exposure causes a decreased response. The body's kind of downregulating in response to it. So do you notice that when you take nicotine for, you know, 2 months straight, that there's any kind of taper in terms of the impact, or does it seem to be fairly consistent?

It's actually pretty consistent. Yeah, you would expect tachyphylaxis. I did not know that word. Thank you for teaching me a word. Yeah, it's actually pretty consistent, but after 8 years, I've gotten pretty like disciplined about dosage because, yeah, nicotine is a seductress. Nicotine, it's easy to just like keep increasing the dose over time because if you, if you start on it and especially if you have like a project that you're passionate about that you dive into and so you're like you're running off of, off of passion in addition to really strong pharmacology. Yeah. It's easy for that seductress to, to beckon you into her, her lair where the dosage gets crazy. And then, and then I believe you would run into a lot of that. Yeah.

I would, I would, I would wonder about that. There's a seductress. I mean, it's, it's intoxicating is what you're saying to be so productive and creative and feel the joy of that. Right. That's a seductive place to be, and it's a place that we all want to be because we're all kind of, I think as humans, we're at our best when we're creating and feeling the joy of that creation, right? So it's, it's very seductive. That being said, I'm also, nicotine is, and this is somewhat genetically determined as well, some people are more susceptible to nicotine addiction than other people. And so I wonder if part of the seduction is the addictive nature of it as well as, you see what I'm saying, as well as the performance benefit of it.

Yeah, it, it is addictive. There's, there's some silly people on the internet that claim that nicotine isn't addictive, but you, you can try it for yourself and you'll see, you'll see that it is. But okay, I am blessed with a non-addictive personality. My parents weren't like crazy abusive. So, so thanks, mom and dad. I don't have an addictive personality type. I've tried a bunch of things that people tend to get addicted to, and I never got addicted. So yeah, especially with something like nicotine, and then even more broadly speaking with nootropics and smart drugs, the self-knowledge is key. And if you know you have an addictive personality type, then yeah, you probably don't want to stack, uh, nicotine plus modafinil plus like some project that you've been dreaming about your whole life because you're gonna may be drawn into a self-destructive place.

Yeah, I think really where we're going with this in our world here at Gladden Longevity is we're really moving into a systems biology approach. We've always had that mindset, but now with the advent of HIPAA-compliant AI and things that we're actually building, being a part of building, the idea of having a systems biology approach for each individual. So what do I mean by systems biology? Well, you know, medicine itself is fairly siloed, right? You've got a cardiologists and pulmonologists and neurologists, et cetera. And yet we all know that that's on some level silly because we all know that we're just one being biologically. The other thing that's silly is to think that our mental state, our psycho-spiritual state doesn't impact our body and vice versa, right? So that's also an artificial demarcation, let's call it, between church and medicine. Apparently that was formulated back in the 1600s, somebody got together with the Pope and said, look, you take care of the spirit, we'll take care of the body. And that was, you know, kind of how that went for the next however many hundreds of years. So that being said, in a systems biology approach, you're really looking at the entire ecosystem, right? And that also includes the environment in which somebody resides. So, you know, we have our 5 circles of life, energy circle, which is the psychospiritual space. We have longevity itself, which are related to the hallmarks of aging, the things that are driving aging. And we have health, which is all the organ systems and subsystems, performance, which is really physical performance, because mental performance is really covered in health. But it also is another part of the nervous system training for performance, physical performance, and then the environments we reside in. So we put all that together. And then if you create a system around that, where you deconstruct an individual to understand their, their past history, right, their psychological history, their medical history, their genetics, their current laboratories, their hormone levels there, and then you couple all that with their aspirations and where their concerns lie, where their fears fly, where their hurdles seem to be for them. Now you take that systems biology approach and now you start to plug in, okay, if we fix the thyroid and we fix the hormones and we fix the gut, right? Where does that leave us? Okay. Well, okay. Now we're at a point where they're at baseline. They're actually feeling quite good, but how do we, how do we actually give them higher cognitive function so they can, you know, enjoy life even more? Well, then in a systems biology approach, because you know their predisposition for heart disease or cancer or dementia or diabetes or, you know, a myriad of other things, you're now making very, very precise choices in terms of which nootropics would be helpful for this person with this set of circumstances, with this context, right? That's the direction that we're going rather than having to try, you know, 10 things or 50 things, or in your case, maybe 200 things to try to figure out what works. With a systems biology approach, we can also almost make in on some level, a digital twin of the individual and see what's likely to work for them. Right? So this is what has me really excited about this. In other words, take the guesswork out and get where you want to go, but take the guesswork out and also mitigate the downside risks because you also understand the individual at a deep enough level to know that if they use nicotine, they're actually prone to. You know, whatever it is, right? Heart disease or whatever else. So it's like you can, you can do something in a very elegant way using the systems biology approach. I think it's— we're super excited about it. I think it's really the next level stuff. And I think the AIs are really helping us to do that because there's a massive amount of data to get your arms around. And yes, we're capable of it, but to do it quickly and efficiently, we need some machine help, right? So yeah.

And that kind of systems approach is smarter and more precise than trying 200 different smart drugs like I did. No doubt. Uh, yeah, that is— that's no doubt a better way to save, save time and money.

Yeah, it's not as adventurous, but, but it is, it is, uh, you know, and even in that, you may come down to here's the top 3 and, and see how these work for you, right? But in other words, you do get away from feeling the need to try 200 And even though you went through 200, what you found is not necessarily applicable to your wife, not necessarily applicable to me or other people you speak with, right? So it's, it becomes your experience. But anyway, I think that's really the nature of kind of where this is headed in terms of longevity and cognitive ability and deciding which nootropics are best.

Yeah. People have to think a bit about their own risk. Tolerance. And I, my whole life, have been a very much a risk-seeking person. I read this book as a young boy entitled Memoir from Antproof Case, and this is the most mind-blowing novel. I just absolutely fell in love with this novel. And here's my favorite line from this novel. It's, I was young again 'As if on the sea or on the air, with everything to lose and everything to gain, made lively by risk, for in the light of risk, the world catches heavenly fire.' And so I read that line when I was like 11 years old, and I said, 'I'm going to live by that.' But my risk-seeking is probably pretty individual too. Me.

Let's, no, let's talk about that for a second. 'Cause it's a really important thing. I think, you know, in one of our tenets, if you will, is living young for a lifetime. And I think in living young for a lifetime, it is being eternally curious and willing to try new things and taking on risk. It doesn't mean that we need to throw ourselves out of a back of a moving car to see what happens. I mean, you know, it's not being silly. Part of the thing about doing risky things is actually learning to modulate and mitigate risk in the midst of that activity. I'm thinking about myself when I learned to ride motorcycles and I learned to ride high-performance motorcycles and crotch rockets and go on racetracks and do all kinds of things with those. And what I learned, I loved, I love the flow of it. I love the, I love the dance of it, right? It was like, it was like playing music with the bike. It was beautiful. I love that. I did have some crashes. I didn't enjoy those. But what I learned was actually not how to push it all the way to the edge, but actually how to stay inside the envelope and mitigate risk while still having the joy of flowing, you know, with the track or the road or whatever I'm doing, right? So I took what I learned there, took it back into the cath lab as an interventional cardiologist and, and applied the lessons I learned in mitigating risk and being in flow states into the cath lab. And I actually became a better interventionalist because of it. So your point about just because something risky doesn't mean that we should avoid it, it just means that we need to go about it with our heads, you know, in the right place to see what we're going to learn here, what we're going to— how we're going to step into flow and joy and creation and joy, right? It's that— that's the idea for me anyway. That's how I think about it.

You found your edge motor— motorbiking. There's— okay, there's a book that described this really eloquently. It's this book called Open Her, okay? And it's a book for men about women. And it's this book, the author is a woman, and she describes, I think, 7 experiences of seduction or of men that she had relationships with, 7 different types of men and the dynamic that unfolded between them. And she describes it reading the book. You cut, you'll kind of vacillate in between saying like, is this woman like a feminist or is she like a crazy, like right-winger? She kind of goes, she kind of vacillates back and forth, but she has some like great storytelling. And at the end, she makes this really eloquent point where she says, I'm not a man. But I think this is what it means to be a man. And I think this actually applies to both sexes. Okay. But she wrote a book for men and she said what it means to, to be a man or to be a person fully alive, fully realized, is that you, you find your, you find your edge. You find that point where, like on the motorbike, where you can push almost to failure, where you can push almost to disaster and you can, and you can ride that edge. And you start by figuring that out in one domain. For you, it was motorbike riding. For other people, it's entrepreneurship. For some people, it's their relationship. For some people, it's in the gym. For some people, it could be surfing or riding a bike.

It could be anything, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Open Her, yeah, that was a good book. We'll make sure to link that, but, but yeah, describe that is that, that value of finding your edge and riding your edge and that that's a, yeah, that's the way to stay young.

Yeah, it is. It's, it's not being afraid of something because it's quote unquote dangerous. It's, you know, I mean, when you think about it, how many, how many people are killed in, in traffic accidents every year here in the United States? Right. And then it's like, well, right. Driving to work is dangerous. Right. There's a danger to that.. And yet we learn to be aware, to set our mirrors properly, to, you know, if we have some aids in the car that are assisting us with crash collision, you know, warnings or things like that. Right. So we, we mitigate it and then we're able to drive to work and we can be kind of in a flow state with traffic and the road and actually enjoy the drive. Right. So I think a lot of people, particularly as they get older, shy away from things that are quote unquote dangerous. When in actual fact, there's so much to be learned when you are stepping into arena that has consequences. That's really where you learn the most is when there are actual consequences. And yeah, you can taste those and not be killed by them or even hurt by them. But, but it's learning to dance to your point on the edge or inside the envelope is how I would describe it, where you're able to dance inside the envelope and find the joy of flow, knowing that, that it's, it takes all of your attention. To both simultaneously mitigate risk and optimize the flow and enjoyment. That to me is when you're fully engaged, right? Is when you're simultaneously mitigating risk and optimizing the joy. I feel that when I'm in the ocean, when I'm bodysurfing, or when I'm on the mountain bike, it's the same thing. I'm mitigating risk and optimizing joy. And when you get that right, when you go into that flow state, right, that gamma state, oh my gosh, that's like That's like the best. Now you're co-creating with the trail, you're co-creating with the road, you're co-creating with your partner. You know, even in, let's call it making love, this is the best place, right? Where you're on the edge of danger on some level, and yet you're novelty or whatever else, but you're in flow and you're navigating that edge and, you know, it becomes magical, right? So it's wonderful.

You've mentioned surfing a couple of times. Can I tell a surfing story or should I wait until the end of the podcast?

No, you can tell them now.

Okay. The last time I thought I was going to be in a fight was after a surf lesson.

Okay.

I was in Costa Rica because I was doing the digital nomad thing and I ended up there and I would go surfing with my buddy every day on a shortboard. And I was just kind of improvising, kind of figuring things out myself. And I really sucked at surfing. And so people told me, you should get some surfing lessons from this local guy who was named Rama. And Rama was this very, very Costa Rican local character. He was the surf instructor slash lead singer in a band slash drug dealer. Yeah. He was a multiple, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Puta vida. That's how they say it. And so I said, yeah. So I said, okay, yeah, sure. I could get a lesson with Rama. And he was an amazing surfer. He was also, he's also a really good spear gun fisher. I went spear gun fishing with him, which was also disastrous, but that's a different story. So we, we start by doing the pop-ups on the, on the beach, set the surfboard down on the beach and you kneel down on the surfboard on the beach. And you pop up and immediately he starts getting really frustrated with me because I guess I was a bad student. I guess I was distracted by the beauty of the Costa Rican beach. He starts getting really frustrated with me, like about 5 minutes into the pop-up lesson. And then he says, okay, this is enough on the beach. Let's go and get out in the water. And he gives me a longboard. And I had never used a longboard before. I'd been using shortboards and the waves were actually a bit intense that day. And I was just, I just had a real bear of a time navigating the longboard out there. And really, I think I got up once or twice, but I was really, uh, yeah, I was struggling some. And I guess I wasn't doing a really great job of following his instructions. And so he's like yelling at me in the water and eventually he gets really irritated., and he just goes off and surfs on his own. He says, "Screw you, I'm gonna go off and surf." And so he goes off and surfs, and I continue to struggle with the longboard. And but I figure, okay, at least he's off surfing and he'll tranquilo out a bit surfing. But no, that didn't happen. So I don't know, 30 minutes later, we come back together on the beach, and he's more angry than ever at me. He's screaming and yelling at me about I have 1,000 students and you're the worst ever, you idiot, you idiot. And so he's screaming and yelling at me and he's getting in my face, just sucking down a cigarette at the same time. I start yelling at him. You're ridiculously unprofessional. I start yelling at him and I think to myself, we're about 5 seconds away from throwing blows here. And so, yeah. So at that point, I, yeah, I, I, what's the point here? I just walked away. I'm not sure if there's a point. I'm not, I'm not sure if there's—

okay. That's your surf story though. But yeah, I think, I mean, I think that's an interesting scenario to have. And certainly surfing is very challenging for anybody that's tried it, that's listening or not tried it. It is not, it is not easy to, uh, to get the pop-up, to get the wave, to catch the wave, to ride the wave, to all do the bottom turn and all of that. It's, it's tricky business. So I think the other piece of there that he didn't have is I think we need to have patience with ourselves when we're trying to learn something new. A lot of times our identity can be caught up in our competence because as we've grown up, we've been rewarded for being competent, whether it was in school or in business or as a physician or a family person or a father or husband or whatever. And it's our competence, it's our identity. And so we lose our ability to try something new where we may appear to be incompetent, right? Like for somebody who's competent and they say, oh, surfing's hard. Well, I'm not gonna try that because I'm gonna go out there and look like a fool and I won't be able to do it. But that's not a reason not to try it. I think the better way to do it is to take on the 5-year-old beginner's mind and go out and try it because I can guarantee you, you will learn the most that you can learn when you're doing something where it's a little bit of an enigma to you, right? Your brain loves that. It loves to be challenged. It loves to learn stuff. I mean, that's how you learn how to do everything. Think about riding a bike, right? It's how you learned it.

So, Dr. Gladden, I know from your book, 100 Is the New 30, that the, the spiritual aspect of longevity is something that you take like very, very, very seriously there. Like you guys are really, yeah, you guys are really not, ensconced in the dogmatic materialist paradigm on this. And I'm wondering on the spiritual side, for people that are, uh, spiritual seekers in whatever form that manifests in for them, have you found like biohacks for accelerating the spiritual journey or results from spiritual pursuits? Is there, or is there— okay, obviously anything that you do that's good for your body is ultimately probably good for your soul or spirit or whatever you want to call it. But is there, is there any pharmacological, technological, low-hanging fruit for people that want to accelerate spiritual development in your experience?

Yeah, I think that there's, you know, we have double-stranded DNA, right? So you have the double helix as an image in your mind right now. I think there's a double helix of psycho-spiritual, right? There's a psychology, right? We've all been imprinted with experiences, and because of those experiences, we live in reaction to them, right? And that can be true for shame or guilt, as well as, you know, anxiety, depression, things like that. So there's, there's psychological strand there. And then there's a spiritual strand, which is really about connection and love and self-love and learning what forgiveness means. And then also profoundly feeling safe. This is one of humans' greatest quests. If they really peel back the onion on this is, you know, why am I doing this? Okay, well, why are you doing that? Well, why are you doing— well, I need to make my— well, why are you doing that? Right? Well, 'cause I don't want to— well, and if you go back far enough, it's like, I need to feel safe, right? I need to feel safe. And so one of the things that history tells us is that there's nothing external to us that can ever make us feel safe. Truly. Mm-hmm. Nothing. All of it can be taken away. History has shown that, you know, thousands of times, probably hundreds of thousands of times, everything can be taken away. Right. And so how do we ultimately feel safe? Well, that becomes kind of an inside job, right? How do we ultimately be— feel loved? That's an inside job also, right? Unconditional self-love. Is there. Nobody else can love you as, as well as you can love yourself, right? Nobody knows you. Nobody understands all the nuance of that. So having unconditional self-love, and when you connect to source or energy or God or, you know, whatever your framework is, then you can actually start to feel safe knowing that you're connected, knowing that you're loved, knowing that you're safe in that, right? And that provides so much calming and healing into the nervous system, which then translates into the physical body, right? So this is why, you know, people that have a spiritual practice, they live longer, they recover faster, they get better. People that have people praying for them actually recover quicker. There have been many studies done on this. It's not woo-woo. We've kind of divorced spirituality and psychology from medicine. It's like, no, they're two separate camps. But they're not. It's one integrated system. And humans are at many levels designed to be spiritual. We can deny that. We can take on the hardcore, you know, kind of materialistic scientific model approach, whatever. I believe in science, you know, kind of comments, which are to me quite funny. It's like, oh, you believe in science? Tell me about that. What is science actually? Well, science is actually just a It's just a construct that's trying to explain what did happen, what is, why things are the way they are and predict what's going to come in the future. But it's not reality. It's just an overlying construct to try and predict, right? So you believe in that? Yeah, I believe in that. Okay. Well, that's not reality. So what's your experience with reality? Right? So it's kind of like, you know, getting down to, I think, things that are super important. And we know that it, that it's important because when people are optimized in their nervous system, they have a much healthier life. They take so much biological aging pressure off and they recover faster. Data now shows that if you're gonna have a regenerative procedure, if you're in that parasympathetic nervous system state, you are gonna get a much better result than somebody that comes in highly stressed. So it's not, it's, it's completely integrated. It's been missed. And what we've seen is that in going down that path, you really are optimizing joy and life satisfaction and purpose and meaning. Safety, love, all those things come into focus instead of chasing things outside of ourselves to try to find them. They're already inside. We just need to remember who we are and that they're in there, right? So anyway, that's how we think about it. To your point, it takes a lot of self-reflection and working with some therapists and some other things like that, but there are some nootropics that help for sure. They fall into the psychedelic category.

Okay. So I did. Ayahuasca once in the Andes Mountains, and it was pretty underwhelming to me. I, I'm actually not that big of a fan of psychedelics because I try to be pretty mindful of the tools that I use to hack my personality. And I had done some— I'd done a real deep dive research on psychedelics a while back, and I found— I think it 2 University of Barcelona studies where they found that how psychedelics permanently affect personality is that they increase openness to experience. And so that, that's kind of a good thing, right? And that kind of confirms the stereotype of the hippie dippy person that does a lot of psychedelics is they're pretty, they're pretty open to experience. But these studies on personality also found that they decreased risk assessment. And that also kind of, if you, if you go on YouTube and you watch a bunch of vlogs of people talking about their psychedelic experiences, you'll come across a lot of people that sound like, especially repeat users, that sound like they're losing their risk assessment ability. And yeah, that's, again, I think risk is what makes the world alight with heavenly flame. But like, like on the motorcycle, it's a dance with danger. And so I don't want to decrease my risk assessment abilities. So the, the only time that I do anything approaching psychedelics now is I will do— I have some homeopathic water memory technology where I can download the homeopathic essence of, uh, say psilocybin into water. And so I'll do that sometimes before meditation, or most recently my wife and I took a vacation to the mountains here in the Balkans, and there was this beautiful, uh, shooting star show. I think it's called the— yeah, there's the one of the most brilliant shooting star nights of the year.

And the Perseid meteor shower is a big one in August.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so what I did was I downloaded the psilocybin into a non-alcoholic beer, and then we just hung out there underneath the, underneath the blazing cosmos and, and watched the— and it was a little, yeah, it was a little trippy, but that's about as dangerous as I get with psychedelics these days.

Yeah, I think, I think you raised a good point. I think any, any mind any mood-altering drug can decrease your ability to assess risk. I think that's true for alcohol. I think that's true for THC. I think that's, you know, I think that's true for almost anything that alters perception, right? Is you're going to have less ability to assess risk. I mean, think of all the, all the things that happen with alcohol for that matter. I think that's more of an acute effect. I think if you are going to do something in a therapeutic way, as opposed to a recreational way, if you're going to do something in a therapeutic way with psychedelics, it's very important to understand what container you're in and who's there to care for you, you know, as you go through different experiences. If you're in the right container with the right people and coming in with the right intentions, and it's not about, oh, I just want to try something and see what it's about, it's more, uh, more intentional, let's say, than that. Then what I've discovered is that you can learn a lot. You can really learn a ton. In my experience, I've been able to learn massive amounts of things, heal many, many things, uh, understand my purpose for being here, you know, many, many things like that. So there's also longevity benefits now that are being shown with things like psilocybin and cognitive enhancement with psilocybin microdosing and things like that. Again, you talk about creativity and things like that. The thing about the 5H2A receptor though, when these are stimulated by things like LSD or psilocybin, is that there's a pretty strong tachyphylaxis, right? So, you can't, like, use it every day, but the receptors will reset after a few days and you could use it again. So, anyway, it's just— it's not necessarily for everyone. And, I'm not arguing that everybody should do it. That's not the case. But, I'm saying that in the right set and setting with the right set of intentions, it can be really transformative, particularly if you're working with a therapist, right? It's like who is schooled in psychedelic-assisted therapies, right? It's not the only therapy, but it's, it's a tool. It's a tool.

That's probably a smarter way to do it than in a hut in the Andes like I did.

Yeah, just, just because I walked in and let me try it.

All right, so in, in my new book, I have a chapter where the protagonist does an ayahuasca ceremony, and all of my advanced readers when they finish that chapter, they said, oh my God, what happened when he does psychedelics? I did not expect that at all. They— all my advanced readers have said that chapter is the most— that's the most crazy plot twist. That is not what I expected at that point when this protagonist does psychedelics.

Interesting. I've not read the book, full disclosure to the audience here, although I've seen the table of contents and I have a copy downloaded on computer now, so I, I can't speak to exactly what he's talking about. But I can tell you this, that if you go into these not from a recreational standpoint, but you go in with a deep and profound respect for the fact that these plant medicines have been around for thousands of years and used by humans for thousands of years to enhance their perception and understanding of, you know, who they are, why they're here, and things like that, there is a there is an incredible amount of wealth of wisdom to be found there. Wisdom and insight, I would say. So anyway, that's— I'm not advocating anybody use them. I'm just saying that that's been my experience.

So, okay. So switching gears a little bit, I thought we— I could maybe for the audience that I could share my stack for memory enhancement.

Yeah, we were asking you about that. So go for it.

Yeah. Okay. I found that there's a combination of things that works the best for the most number of people with enhancing memory, which every— like, so much of our lives is downstream from our capacity for memory. And so the first thing on that stack is mnemonics, which is the memory systems that were developed millennia a go for creating memory palaces and creating association around memory. And mnemonics are the— it's a crime that mnemonics aren't taught to children. I'm going to teach my son mnemonics.

Which ones are you using?

I use Memory Palace and I use word association and phonetic pegging.

Oh, those exercises.

Okay. So I'll give you an example. Okay. So like in your book, you have like this really dense book with a bunch of amazing factoids in it. And I want to remember more of those factoids, right? I want those to— if I'm going to read a really long, dense book, I want to actually remember some of the good stuff in it. So I created a mnemonic around— in the book you describe the gene that neutralizes xenobiotics. Okay.

You're using structures. I get it. So you're using like, see, see Jane run or something, and then that's the mnemonic for what you're going for. This is what you're talking about.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like for the gene you name in your book, CYP1A2, which is the gene that neutralizes xenobiotics, that determines how quickly our bodies can process like things like caffeine. So CYP1A2. So as a mnemonic, I turn that into a mnemonic. Okay. And so the mnemonic for that is CYP-SIP. Okay. SIP. Okay. 1A2. 1A2 is tan. Okay. Because 1 is ta-da in phonetic language. And then there's an A in there and then there's a 2. And so, and 2 is N in phonetic alphabet. This take— and so I visualize myself sipping tanning lotion. Okay, doesn't that sound ridiculous? Sipping a coffee cup full of tanning lotion. And so now I can, because I've created this absurd picture, I can remember that CYP1A2 is the gene that determines that. And that's actually kind of useful information because I'll work with like coaching clients and they'll say like, should I be drinking coffee at 5 PM in the afternoon? I'm like, well, it depends on your genetics. You got to look up CYP1A2, right? So, okay, okay. So now I get it.

So mnemonics, right? So yeah. And then what else?

Okay, then there's an app. There's an app that I really like. This has been a game changer for me. It's helped me to learn about 2.5 languages now. Now, and that's the SuperMemo app. And this is this flashcard app where you insert little factoids. I inserted a couple factoids from your book into it, and then it has an algorithm that predicts when you are going to forget that piece of semantic information. And based upon your prior— based upon obviously a universal model, but then based upon your own performance in the app, and it prompts you to try to remember that factoid in like a Goldilocks zone of when you're closest to forgetting it. So that way you're like optimizing your memorization practice.

That makes perfect sense. That's how the brain— the brain has those pathways need to be reinforced. You can hear something one time and it's, it's there transiently, but to move it from kind of like short-term memory into longer-term memory, that nerve pathway has to be stimulated multiple times, right? So there's repetition involved. So yeah, the flashcards are a good way to reinforce that.

And SuperMemo is the best app in my opinion, and it's free. Somehow it's like one of these awesomely free things with no ads. Okay. Number 3, another app, Dual N-Back training.

Yeah, I know that. I know Dual N-Back.

Yep. As people should be aware, with memory, there's this constitution to reconstitution thing. Where we absorb the information. And then when we're sleeping that night, it hopefully, if we're sleeping well enough, unlike I will tonight after taking nicotine to stay up all night to talk to you, if people are sleeping well, then it gets translated back into long-term memory. And then when we remember it again, it gets reconstituted back into our, our, our present reality.

So let's, let's describe Duolingo for the audience here. It's, it's essentially a— a memorization game where you're— you have a grid of squares. There's no center square. They're just in the periphery. So imagine like tic-tac-toe and it's just in the perimeter. And then it shows up with a— is it a letter and a color? I think it's a letter and a color, right?

There's a couple different variations. The most common one is where it's at a location on the grid and there's an audio signal that goes with it. Like a lot of times it just says 1, 4, 7, 3, 5. It just does random numbers or letters that it— so you're training the visual memory and auditory memory at the same time.

The idea is— that's right, you have to remember, it'll show you something in one of those squares and it'll, it'll speak. Yeah, it'll speak something, either a letter or number, and then if that shows up again in the same place with the same thing, then you would click that it's in the same location with the same letter, let's say. But if the same letter shows up the next time in a different place, you would click just for the same letter. But then they space it out to where you've got to remember 2 or 3 moves back as to location and letters. And that's when it gets more complicated, right? So, yeah.

The, the highest I've gotten to is the 7-back level. So that means that—

Wow. Yeah, that's impressive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that means my mind is keeping track of 14 different things at, right, at the— so what that does is it upgrades essentially like the RAM of the mind, and that executive function makes your mind a lot better at that constitution reconstitution of factoids. And then it also makes you better at— it makes you better at a bunch of different things. Like it's made me It made me a better web developer where I could keep track of web development things. It helped me deal with my anger problem that I had earlier in my marriage. Yeah. Dual N-Back is that it's like really cheap. There's a couple of free versions of the app. There's a couple of cheap versions of it.

It's also been studied at Johns Hopkins in detail. It's one of the, one of the apps that actually has, if, if it's important to you, has real scientific backing for its ability to improve memory and recall and things like that. DUAL, it's DUAL, D-U-A-L, then the letter N, and then BACK, B-A-C-K, DUAL-N-BACK. Yeah.

Yep. I'm going to, I'm going to have that linked up on the link below wherever people are watching or listening to us. And then fourthly on the memory stack is the drug that I already talked about, Piracetam. Maybe it's not right for everybody, but for, for a lot of people, it's the best memory drug. And so, yeah. So if people are like taking. If people are losing their car keys and taking ginkgo biloba and saying, why am I still losing my car keys? Try implementing that stack and it'll make a difference actually pretty quickly. The dual N-back makes a difference in upgrading your brain power pretty quickly. On my podcast, I spoke with Dr. Mark Ashton-Smith, who's one of the top— he's one of the top people in the world studying this. And he was pretty convinced that anyone could increase their IQ after doing it for about 30 days.

Yeah, no, I think it's, I think it's helpful. They want you to do 20 rounds of it. So you basically play it 20 times a day. Just to let you know, there's going to be some commitment of time. It's going to take, you know, 2, 3, 4 minutes to play around. If you get up to level 7, it's going to take 5 or 6 minutes. And then to do that 20 times in a day, I don't know if you were doing it 20 times a day or if you found you were getting better benefit of a lower number?

No, I was doing this when I was like living in Colombia and chasing girls and going salsa dancing every night, so I, I only did it once a day, but I did it every day.

Okay, did it once a day. Okay, well, that's interesting.

Yeah. Okay, maybe, maybe I would have gotten even further than 7 back if I was doing it 20 times a day.

Okay, and so that's your stack: the mnemonics, the SuperMemo, the Duolingo back, and piracetam.

Yeah, that's, that's the 4-part stack for people that actually want to move the needle on, on, on memory, because your mind is a palace. Okay. Even, even if you feel kind of shoddy, you are the product of like divine architecture or billions of years of evolution conspiring to create something great, whatever you prefer. Like you have a palace. In between your two ears. You inherited that, and it's your duty as a human being to maintain that palace. And yeah, that stack is, I think, the best way to keep that palace shiny.

Yeah, I think that's true. Here's a really interesting thing, and that is that, you know, the mind is— I'll use this, some people don't like this demarcation, but we have our, let's call it, our conscious cognitive mind, and then we have our subconscious mind, right? And I was just in a training this past week where they were emphasizing that the conscious mind basically reduces everything down to about 10 bits a second. We're exposed to, you know, thousands of bits, millions of bits a second of information, but we distill it down to about 10. The subconscious mind, however, has a capacity to function at billions of bits per second. So we can almost think that we have an analog computer right? Not analog, but a digital computer in our cognitive abilities. And in our subconscious, we have a quantum computer. And when you're working on the spiritual side of life, the psycho-spiritual side, you're really fine-tuning that quantum computer, right? For discernment, understanding, energy perception, safety, things like that. So I just want to put that out there that it's a really, really important thing to work on that side of your brain as well. As a cognitive part. And of course, without the cognitive part, if you have no memory, you're in memory care, right? So super important. And I love, I love what you're bringing up here, the, the mnemonics, the, the different apps to help and piracetam. There are probably other ones that are, you know, in a systems biology approach, we'll find the right ones for each individual, but also important to understand that when you do focus on that psychospiritual side, you're obviously upgrading your brain in, in massive ways as well. So that's interesting.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's really worth exploring.

Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna wrap up here. But Jonathan, I know it's late for you and I do appreciate you being on. So I'm going to let you go, but thanks for everything. Is there anything, where can people find you or get ahold of you? What would you like them to know?

Okay, so my website is limitlessmindset.com and then I have a podcast. That is just called Limitless, which people can find anywhere. But if, uh, people are interested in jumping into my material, I suggest that people read my recent book. There's a million books about health and biohacking and personal growth, like nonfiction books, and I decided to do something different, which was to write a thriller novel. So I took, I took my 14, 15 years of obsession with this topic and I wove it into a thriller novel that's about a biohacking cybercriminal that uses all of the kinds of stuff we've talked about here and a bunch of other crazy biohacks. And this cybercriminal gets drawn into a war for the dying soul of mankind. And this— the protagonist has to save civilization from the same comet that destroyed Atlantis 12,800 years ago. With this book, so it's, uh, it's like sci-fi slash cyberpunk genre, and it would have been really easy for this book to kind of turn into like a cautionary tale about our collective overreliance on technology and the way that we are all kind of succumbing to devouring AI. It would have been really easy for it to turn into another story like that, but there's already like a million books and movies that are kind of on that topic. And so what I did was I wrote a book about how the individuals, uh, in this case a man, how the individual's agency and free will over their sexuality, how, how the individual's agency over lust, using lust as a tool as opposed to lust being a master, how that individual battle could mirror a cosmic cycles of civilizational destruction, uh, hence the Atlantis aspect of the, of the story. Yeah, so that book is— thank you, thank you—

Hourglass, it's called Hourglass.

Yeah, and that's a double entendre referring to the cyclical mysteries of time and the, the, and the figure. Yeah, yep. And, and the, and the beauty of women. And so, and that book's actually banned on Amazon because I got, I got banned on Amazon a long time ago because of, I wrote another book that was kind of spicy that we don't need to talk about.

Okay.

So if people, yeah, people have to go elsewhere, they'll have to go to my own website or they can order print editions via links that we will provide. But yeah, people are kind of intrigued by some of the stuff that we're talking about. That book is actually, it's my magnum opus. I spent 1,300 hours writing it. That's actually kind of like the most interesting, entertaining thing that I have to, that I have to offer. So people can check that out if they want.

Well, Jonathan, thank you for that. Thanks for sharing that with us. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. We've kind of gone over time here a little bit from what we usually do, but, um, I appreciate you staying on late. Really good to catch up again. So, yep. Thanks.

Sure thing. Look forward to a continued conversation with you.

Yeah, thanks.

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