The Little Known Truth About Smart Drugs And Nootropics (Audio & Article)

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And if today's podcast sounds just a little bit different, it's because I am recording from my hotel room in Sacramento after having raced back to back spartan obstacle racing events down here in Sacramento. But I did not want to wait until I got back to my home office to record today's podcast for you because. Because the guy that I have on is pretty dang cool and a wealth of knowledge on something that I have a big personal interest in and I know that a lot of you are interested in too, and that is smart drugs and neurotropics. My guest today is Dr. Andrew Hill. And Dr. Hill is the lead neuroscientist at a company called Trubrain. And he actually has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA and, and studies how attention operates in your brain. So he's a lecturer at ucla. He teaches courses on healthy brain, aging, on neuroscience, on psychology, and he's basically an expert on everything smart drug and neurotropic related. So we're gonna be delving today into a variety of topics, including a bunch of things that people kind of have the wrong idea about when it comes to smart drugs in neuroprote, barotropics and everything like that. So as you listen to this podcast, if you want to go access the show notes, if you want to check out any of the resources that Dr. Hill and I talk about. The show notes for today's episode are over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com BrainDrugs that's BenGreenfulFitness.com BrainDrugs Dr. Hill, thanks for coming on, man.

Sure, Ben. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

So I'm curious if you're, if we could jump right in here because this is one thing that you told me that you wanted to talk about and something I didn't know about until you sent me an article that I'm gonna publish onon the site along with our podcast episode today, and that's that a smart drug is different than what's called a neurotropic. Can you kind of go into what a smart drug actually is and what a neurotropic is.

So there's a. There's a few different categories of things on the market. And smart drugs, you know, prescription drugs are typically prescribed to people to help cognition in some way, usually focus or alertness, wakefulness, and those are things like stimulants, and they're used for, you know, attention problems as well as staying awake when you work night shifts and things like that. In contrast, nootropic. N o O. Tropic. That word comes from the Greek nous, noosphere, the mind, and nootropic, you know, promoting growth. The strict definition of nootropics is, includes supporting cognition or preventing, again, some risk or some damage long term. But more importantly, nootropics shouldn't have any side effects by definition. So if something has a side effect and it has risks or interactions with other compounds that are. That are adverse, then we would generally call it this sort of gray area called a cognitive enhancer, something like caffeine. It certainly has cognitive enhancing properties. It helps you focus, improves reaction time. But because it has side effects, habit forming, it makes you run to the bathroom a bit more often. Caffeine wouldn't really be considered a strict nootropic.

Yeah, but it's not a smart drug either, because it's not. Why wouldn't caffeine be a smart drug?

Well, it probably is to some extent. The definition we're using for smart drugs is that they're prescribed generally, and they're often used for, or at least designed or used in a medical context to address a specific problem.

What are some examples of smart drugs?

Well, brand names like Adderall, Ritalin, the sort of psychostimulant class of drugs is what most people think of. There are some other drugs being used for various cognitive issues, including advanced issues in aging, Alzheimer's and things like that that have memory components. But most people will be familiar with the psychostimulant class, and that includes methylphenidates like Ritalin and Concerta, as well as the mixed amphetamine salts, including things like Adderall, as well as drugs of abuse like methamphetamine. Those are all psychostimulants to some extent.

What about modafinil, which I hear a ton about? You know, that's like kind of, you know, what a lot of people, I think, originally classified as being similar to the pill from the movie Limitless, like the smart drug pill, you know, a lot of folks talk about Modafinil. Does that fall into smart drug or neurotropic category?

Probably neither. I mean, it's definitely prescribed typically, but it's prescribed for wakefulness, for narcolepsy, and then off label people use it for attention. But, you know, I have some real issues with Modafinil. The cognitive enhancements you get from it are just not that dramatic. And certainly not dramatic compared to things that are really in the nootropic class of substances, as well as interventions like mindfulness training and neurofeedback. Those are both much stronger and more safer approaches than something like Modafinil. And modafinil just doesn't do all that much. There's been some studies out there looking at side effect profiles as well for modafinil and its related compound. And the side effects aren't that great. Like, they aren't that. Not a lot of people have them. But when you do have them, they are dramatic side effects and life threatening.

Like what?

There's sort of two forms of things that tend to come with modafinil. One is called erythyma multiform minor, and then there's a major form, and the minor form is essentially hives. This happened to me when I tried Monafinil at a pretty low dose, you know, on a daily prescription as prescribed. And about two weeks in, I woke up and I was covered with hives. And it was dramatic. Like for weeks I was in the hospital. And the more aggressive version is EM major, which is also called Steven Johnson syndrome. And that's where your skin sort of peels off. And if you don't get major, you don't get major medical intervention, you just die fairly quickly.

Why is it the skin that seems to be most affected by something like Modafinil?

Yeah. Well, you have to remember that developmentally speaking, when we're a blob of cells in utero, one of the first things that happens is the tissue differentiates into three different layers. Endoderm, ectoderm and mesoderm. And the same layer ends up turning into the skin as the brain. They're actually sort of developmentally almost a contiguous development. That's why things that affect the brain often affect the skin. You see liver spots in the skin. When you get a little bit older, you have very similar things happening inside neurons. A lipofuscan, a sort of sticky fatty deposit with some phosphorus in it and some other things. And I believe you tend to have some parallels with skin and brain. And we're still not 100% sure what modafinil's doing. The initial theories were that it was flushing sort of a Timing signal and hypothalamus called orexin. It may not be actually doing most of its work through that. It looks like the research which at least partially hangs the results or the effects of an ethanol on histamine. And histamine is a major compound in the body. It's not just an allergy symptom or an allergy sort of allergic system mediator. It's in the brain used as almost a master valve or master control before several other neurotransmitters. So when you affect histamine, you affect all sorts of other things, which is why it works to sort of shrug off sleep and suppress appetite and a few other things, because it's doing those through downstream mechanisms of norepinephrine and probably dopamine and a few other things. I mean, there's a lot of medical use, or at least in the literature, it looks like monophany is a successful drug. If you're trying to quit cocaine, it occupies some of the same dopaminergic sites probably and allows you to quit cocaine more easily. That's one of the things it's been used for. And if you're narcoleptic, go for it.

Modafinil, in terms of its effect on the liver, because it's metabolized by the liver, that that might be an issue in addition to the effects that it has on the skin that you already talked about.

I think that's more about the individual. I mean, all of these things are individualized. One paper that I've looked over, a review article from Modafinil, shows that people that have attention problems have a dramatically increased rate of side effects. Liver stuff would be about which liver enzymes you have the most activity of. And so there'll be some inter individual variability, of course, on these things dramatically. I mean, not everyone has side effects. In fact, it's fairly uncommon to have side effects on Modafinil. But the risks are there. And for me, you have to make a strategic decision about what you're going to risk putting in your body, because the number of chemicals and powders and substances and herbs and supplements and vitamins and amino acids is multiplying. And there's all kinds of things out there and you can't try everything. Not everything's safe. I mean, there's lots of research chemicals out there with names like NSI and lots of other sort of even newer nootropics that are derived from the first class of nootropics that just haven't been tested. They don't have Decades of safety history.

And.

As a personal threshold, you have to decide where your risk acceptance is against what is going to be some small gains. I mean, nootropics do not make you dramatically different. If you take stimulants, you are awake and you might even be sort of pushed by them. They're going to have other effects. You may not want, you know, aggression mania, appetite suppressant, but there's definitely a feeling from stimulants. You know, you are altered early on in the process of taking stimulants. You get euphoria, you know, they get you high to some extent. None of that is true for nootropics. You're not altered, you're not high, you're not euphoric. And so you aren't trying to get a specific effect. You're trying to support longer term, performing longer throughout your day, performing better into your later decades in life.

Yeah. And I want to ask you about some specific ingredients in nootropics that come in handy for things like that. But first, you talked about safety of smart drugs. And I'm curious if you have some guidelines for people listening in in terms of what they can do as far as like, rules to follow when they' looking into whether or not they're going to try something or kind of a way to vet a smart drug.

So some general rules are don't take anything that's super new. Things need to have gone through not only animal and human testing, but they need to have been used by humans for many years for different things before I think they are a good candidate to swallow yourself. There's lots of research, brand new research chemicals out there. So, you know, don't go after something that is brand new that came out last year that, you know, people are saying, oh, this feels really good because there's just no safety. Don't know what long term risks are from research.

That's one of the things even with, you know, we talked about ketosis a lot on this show and a lot of people ask me why I haven't experimented a ton with liquid ketones like ketoforce, for example, you know, or beta hydroxy butyrate, I believe it's called, BHB salts, beta hydroxybutyrate salts that you would take to enhance cognitive performance during, for example, endurance events. And one of the reasons that I give is that A, it doesn't taste very good, but B, there isn't a ton of research yet on it. And that's certainly something that I always look at because just being in the State that I'm in. As a health blogger and podcaster, I do get offered some of this stuff. Sometimes I get packages of showing up at my front doorstep sometimes. And often it is brand new stuff. And I'm a little bit cautious when it comes to these research chemicals with a bunch of numbers and letters for a name and no human studies.

Yeah, and a couple other general rules. Get your smart drugs, your nootropics from a vendor, from a website, or an individual who provides some safety testing. A lot of stuff is sort of manufactured in bulk powders in overseas labs and then shipped into this country, other countries. And the quality of chemistry is not necessarily equivalent in every laboratory. And you don't want to end up with lead or arsenic or other heavy metals in your bulk nootropics from China, for instance. You want to buy from a vendor who says, yes, we tested this batch. Here's the certificate.

So you would know that based off of information that was printed on the label of the neurotropic or the smart.

Drug or just the vendor's website for a lot of these sort of more novel compounds that are being manufactured and brought in, the responsible vendors will take every single batch that comes in and test it with a third party lab and then share that certificate on their website. So when you're buying your particular brand, you can ask them, hey, where's the testing certificate for this batch? And they'll share that with you, ideally. Another big rule of thumb, Ben, is there's this tendency, especially in flashier blends of compounds, to obscure or obfuscate what's actually in there. And the most common way to do it is to say we have a couple grams of some proprietary blend and they don't tell you all of the individual ingredients. Just list a whole bunch of what I call buzzword compliant compounds and there'll be some of the things in that list of ingredients that would be great to take, some things that might not be great to take. But more importantly, don't know how much of each and every a really expensive, very high end compound might not be in that proprietary blend. Really any effective amount. The term for this is fairy dusting in the industry, sprinkling in tiny little amounts just to give the appearance of efficacy.

Interesting.

Know how much you're getting Fairy dusting, you know, like Tinkerbell goes by and.

Fairy dust, you know, Interesting.

So know your amounts of each ingredient, you know, also, if caffeine is doing the heavy lifting in the nootropic BL that you're taking, it's probably not worth it. Caffeine's wonderful. Coffee's wonderful. I think the health benefits of drinking coffee are not to be understated.

I agree. And one of the reasons I agree with that is one of the things that I've used nootropics for personally is speaking and going to events at night. And a lot of times I know I'm going to be going to bed after I've spoken at a conference or, you know, at like 6 or 7pm or after I've gone to a party and I plan on being whatever, back in my hotel room or back at home by 10 or 11pm and I don't necessarily want to be up till 2am because I slammed something that had 100, 150 milligrams of caffeine in it at 6pm which happens to me if I take a caffeine rich, smart drug. And so that's actually one of the things that I look for when I'm looking at some of these nootropic blends is how much caffeine is added to them. That's exactly a big component in my decision about whether or not going to take something.

Yeah. You know, when Chris, my partner in Trubrain, when he first produced the Trubane 1.0 supplement stack, the nootropic stack, there was no caffeine. It was a very conscious choice not to rely on some subjective feel it in the moment and then a crash. Now Chris has brought out the functional beverages, the think drinks, and there is a caffeinated option for those because people expect caffeine in their beverages and sometimes people rely on caffeine and add it in. But, you know, it's about managing your own caffeine. We don't want to impose it on you from the point of view of a nootropic stack, nor do you want to necessarily have to become dependent on caffeine to get the effects you're looking for.

So I want to ask you about some of the other ingredients that go above and beyond caffeine. When it comes to things that we might or might not see in cognitive blends or in neurotropics. And I just want to ask you about a few of these that I know are pretty common. Piracetam or like things in the aniracetam family. Would those be considered as something that you would kind of find acceptable in a smart drug or anything?

Indeed, those are sort of the poster childs for nootropics. In fact, piracetam is the first one in that Class, which is shortened to the racetam class. Piracetam is a derivative of the neurotransmitters gaba. I believe it has a pyrrolidine ring in it and all of the other racetams. And you mentioned one. Aniracetam is oxyracetam, paramiracetam. There's three or four others. They're all used for different things, they have slightly different effects. Piracetam is the oldest, best studied and apparently safest and most predictable results. So I think it's.

You said it was similar to the neurotransmitter gaba, but I thought that was like an inhibitory neurotransmitter.

It is. It seems to GABA bind to glutamate receptors, but it's derived from GABA chemically.

Okay, so it doesn't make you tired like GABA would.

Not at all. Not at all. Although, you know, GABA doesn't always. Doesn't just make you tired. It actually allows you to focus when you're stressed. You know, there's a GABAergic nootropic L theanine, which is an amino acid found in tea leaves. And L. Theanine is often in a nootropic blend because it sort of balances the push you might get from caffeine or from some other stimulating.

That's actually a really good point. And that's something I mentioned, how I won't use caffeine in isolation or actually more specifically in the absence of L. Theanine in the evening. But I have found, and from what I understand, research has also shown this to be true, that when taken with L. Theanine, caffeine tends to not have that wakefulness effect and instead provides focus and then you're able to fall asleep afterwards.

Yeah, not the way that you'd say.

Caffeine in like green tea.

Yeah. Not the same degree of push from the caffeine, but, you know, it still has to go through its own elimination profile. And depending who you are, caffeine has a half life of between three and six hours. So you have to figure at least two half lives before you can sleep on it for most people. So we're talking about six to 12 hours, potentially from caffeine dose to good sleep architecture that's not disrupted. I think L. Theanine may shorten that a little bit. I certainly can sleep with caffeine in my system six, eight hours in, if there's been some L. Theanine, it just.

Might not be as high quality sleep, huh?

Exactly. Might Be harder to fall asleep and it might not be as deep in the first half of the night.

Now when you use something like piracetam in enorotropic, one of the other things that I understand is that it somehow depletes choline in your brain. Is that how it works?

Well, I'm not sure about depletion but we think, and this is not well established but we think because of the subjective effects and because of some of the hints in the research that the racetams and other things that improve, you know, memory, focus, attention are probably doing at least some of their job through acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is involved with learning and memory. Because of that, people started administering co administering a choline source with racetams and it does seem like they work better. Some people get sluggish or get a little bit headachy when they don't take choline. Choline by itself though in certain forms is a pretty, you know, nice nootropic. There's a couple of forms out there you'll see in nootropic blends. Citicoline been used for years as an aging supplement and it's in many nootropic blends now, including Trubrain. And Alpha GPC is also in a lot of nootropic blends.

Is it true that you shouldn't take piracetam or an aniracetam in the absence of choline?

You know, I'm not 100% sure. I don't think that's true for everyone. I think I helped Chris design Trubrain so I chose to put it in because I thought it would mean the effects and the experience would be much more consistent across people. But you might be somebody who has a lot of choline resources available, high choline diet anyways and might not need it. It's not a linear. You must take choline if you take piracetam and in fact some forms of choline aren't going to do much. They don't get past the blood brain barrier. People take choline bitartrate often and it just doesn't have much penetrance into the brain.

Which form of choline do you think is best?

The two that I mentioned, Citicoline and alpha gpc. I think those are the best ones in terms of cognitive support they get into the brain. They seem to have slightly different effects on cognition. Cdp, choline or acetylcholine tends to have more of an effect I think in the Cell membrane metabolism.

That's citicoline.

Yes, exactly.

Got it.

Sorry.

Okay, cool. There's another one that I wanted to ask you about. We talked about L theanine, we talked about piracetam, we talked about choline. Now there's another ingredient called tyrosine that I see in a lot of these. Where does tyrosine fit in?

So tyrosine is really used in most of these blends under the theory that it is providing raw material for dopamine. Tyrosine is an early chemical amino acid that is synthesized into dopamine. And dopamine is the neurotransmitter involved with salience, interest, reward. It helps you learn what's important to do. Psychostimulants are a dopaminergic drug. They produce large amounts of dopamine. So you're very interested and very energetic. Bees, when they're flying around and find a flower full of extra pollen, get a huge dopamine hit. And that tells them that this is important to learn, important to pay attention to long term. So we think that as you're focusing, attending, working, a lot of attention resources are dopaminergic. And alterations in dopamine metabolism and differences across individuals do contribute to differences in attention, performance and ability. People with ADHD have different dopamine receptors, different types and amounts of receptors than the average person. And so we're just sort of front loading the dopamine system with raw materials. When you include something like L tyrosine.

Are there certain foods that you can eat along with smart drugs to enhance their effects? Things like, I mean, I've heard of like walnuts and fish and eggs, stuff like that, but I mean, does that stuff really make a difference or does it does.

However, you're starting to get into what you touched on earlier about the ketogenic diets a lot. And the sort of, the summary is that you really need to be avoiding almost all sugars and lots of starches and maximizing good fats. And the foods you mentioned, walnuts, eggs, things like coconut, macadamia nuts, pecans, those all have large amounts of omega 3 fatty acids. And so do deep sea, cold water fish, salmon, tuna and animals, lamb and beef that have been fed on grass, that are grass fed, grass raised animals, very high omega 3 profile in their meat, omega 3 fats, and the omega 3 fat that you eat. Actually all the fats that you eat get incorporated into cell walls pretty much the body's very greedy for fats and it's one of the primary things we need to survive. If you don't eat fats, you will die and die quickly. So eating lots of fats is good and the body will take them up and incorporate them into cell walls. But if you're eating lots of really low quality fats, omega 6 fatty acids, lots of saturated oxidized fats, small molecules of oxidized fats, this is going to degrade the functioning of cell walls directly and degrade how well the cells work long term, as well as having secondary effects of inflammation, probably promoting atherosclerosis and sort of interior blood vessel inflammation and plaques and things. So yes, I do suggest that people for a brain healthy diet lean heavily towards fats, heavily towards grass fed and sustainable meats, things that you can eat that are not heavily processed and avoid sugar. In fact, in the absence of sugars, in the absence of excess sugar and a dysregulated insulin system, it appears that fats, even saturated fats, are not unhealthy. And in the presence of sugar, almost any fat is going to be a problem. So long term, I think brain health is a lot more about managing insulin response and sugars than I think it's about anything else. In terms of you can link a lot of the ages of, sorry, the diseases of aging, diabetes, cancers, you can link a lot of those to insulinogenic processes.

Yeah. So don't eat a banana with your bulletproof coffee. Right?

Exactly. Yeah. I have a rule of thumb, I don't ever consume. I try not to consume more than 20 grams of free carbohydrates. Any one sitting for me as an adult male who's relatively healthy and has a little bit of insulin stuff, but no dramatic dysregulation. 20 grams doesn't seem to spike my insulin and I hold my daily consumption down to about 65, 70 grams a day of carbs at most. Most days, except when I cheat, which I do. And that seems to be a low enough level of carbohydrate to reap all of the benefits that people get from a real hardcore paleo primal ketogenic diet, but without any of the real risks. You're not stressing the kidneys out so much. You aren't really working that hard. 65 grams or 70 grams of carbs a day is not that dramatic. It just means not eating sugars.

Right, exactly. So I got another question for you. I hear a lot about these smart drugs or these neurotropic blends that to get the maximum effect from them that you need to take them frequently, like you'd take them Every day, for example.

Yeah. Is that true? It seems to be. And the reason is, I mean, we touched on it with choline. Choline, when you swallow, it can be taken up and turned into cell wall material and then converted eventually into things like phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylserine. And there's really some basic cell wall processes. And your body is, in an ongoing fashion, rebuilding cells. So some of the components that are nootropics on an ongoing way improve and change the cell's metabolism. Another example is inside the cells we have mitochondria. They are little powerhouses that pump out cellular energy in the form of ATP. And mitochondria become damaged after a while and they eventually get old. And in a perfect world, they receive a signal that says, hey, you're damaged, and they commit suicide. And then a new mitochondria or two is born in their place. When mitochondria get old and damaged, they actually don't receive this signal to self destruct very well. Taking piracetam appears to do a whole bunch of things in the body, and a lot of them are involved with cell membrane metabolism and flexibility and fluidity. They also appear to help mitochondria receive this signal. Hey, self destruct. You're pumping out free radicals. You aren't pumping out ATP anymore. You're pumping out some ATP, but mostly free radicals. You're not helping. And then they clean up some of the interior metabolism of the cell as well as. There's another neuroscience primer here for your audience. A lot of how cells do their job in terms of changing activity is driven by the membrane of the cell. And we have receptor proteins that pass through the membranes, that are channels allowing things in and out. We also have lock and key sort of receptors embedded in the cell wall that change how the cell behaves. And to a large extent, how the cell regulates what those receptor proteins do is by changing how fluid or how flexible or how stiff the raft of proteins is right around the cell's membrane protein. So by changing flexibility and fluidity, you're changing all kinds of very long downstream effects on the cell's health and metabolism. So, yeah, daily basis, you will continue to provide support as your cells rebuild each other. And that's probably especially true for the good fats, the dha, the dietary stuff for piracetam.

Right.

To neurotransmitters as well, like L, tyrosine and, you know, things like that.

So tell me, tell me about this, this true brain blend.

Yeah.

What exactly is in it because. And just to back up here, like you guys have, you guys have sent me some of the True brain and it seems like I think I've gotten like three different kind of iterations of it from you over the past few years. The thing was formulated, but what's kind of the final product right now?

So there's a capsule version and a liquid. The liquid we're calling a think drink or a functional beverage, a focused drink. Little 1oz bottles with tear off tops. The formulation is slightly different, but it's pretty similar. And in both cases the capsules or drinks, we made a strategic decision to only include a few ingredients. There's seven or eight things in the product, not some absolutely absurd long list of minuscule amounts of things. And we tell you exactly what's in it. We sort of follow the rules that I laid out at the beginning of the segment. But what's in the capsules right now is we have a magnesium and that's a buffer. It sort of helps cells fire when they're not firing as well and calm down when they're firing too much. We include citicoline, we include piracetam, tyrosine, acetyl, L carnitine. Carnitine is involved. It's a protein that's found in meat. It's involved with cell metabolism and energy as well. Helps your mitochondria, you know, pump out more energy. L theanine for the gabaergic effects, you know, the calming. Again, buffering. And then some dha, some fish oil. DHA is profoundly better for the brain than many other types of fats. DHA is an omega 3 fatty acid. People may get it already in fish oil, although after using fish oil for a while in Trubrain, we decided to get our DHA from algae. And a lot of folks don't realize this, but the DHA that you get from fish, well, the fish get it from algae. They're eating algae. Or actually most fish are eating krill, small little shrimp. The shrimp are eating algae. And there's a sort of food chain effect. And as you go up the food chain, you get more of the potential things that the animals are eating. So by going very low at the food chain, we avoid any risks of metal contamination from the fishes, as well as getting a version that is vegan. People don't want fish oil if they're vegetarian or vegan often. And we were able to sort of drop down to the lowest level and find a DHA source that was algae. Chris jokes about cutting out the middle Man, Just going straight to the sea floor for the algae.

Cool, cool. And it's a good vegan absorbable DHA source too, right?

Yeah, exactly. And then that's the capsules. That.

Okay, that's the capsule. What's the. The drink?

The drinks are almost the same. There's no DHA in the drinks. Shelf life was a much bigger issue when you're talking about a liquid product instead of a powder. So we wanted to get at least six months or more of shelf stability. And the flavor of the DHA also wasn't that great and it wasn't dissolving well with all the powders we were trying to incorporate. So we changed things around a little bit. The drinks have a flavor that the capsules don't have, obviously. I think there's a cranberry flavor and there's a pomegranate flavor. We use a little bit of sugar, just a little bit, but you know, plain old generic cane sugar. And then I think each beverage has maybe one or two grams of sugar. It's not much at all. And then we use a combination of stevia, blue agave and monk fruit to get a better flavor profile. Because I'm guessing a lot of your listeners will have tried nootropics or heard about them and read about them. And one of the things that you'll discover very quickly is all of these powders taste absolutely horrible. Somewhere between battery acid and baby poo. I mean, they're just really vile substances for the most part. And masking those flavors in a liquid drink was actually an engineering challenge that we found non trivial. And we ended up being really excited with the final product. Garrett, our neurochemist, spent a long time in a sort of mad scientist lab. We basically locked him in and threw in some samples and flavors and different compounds and let them out once he had a relatively okay tasting product, but it dropped the DHA out. And I believe Chris is going with oxyracetam instead of piracetam in the final version of the drinks as well. They're very similar. The oxy right now is in the boost. Both the drinks and the, the capsules have a boost packet for a little different effect on days we need more of an effect or working on a weekend like you are right now. And the boosts, we've always had a different racetam in the powders. The boost is pramiracetam. Just to mix it up a little bit and give it a little bit more of a push on days where you're trying to get more done and Then the drinks, it's the Oxyracetam. And the flavor profile of Oxy is significantly better than Piracetam, but they're also fairly similar in many ways. So I think we're going to eventually shift everything over to Oxy because of the flavor profiles. You mentioned aniracetam on your list of Racetams as well. That's one your listeners may enjoy trying. There's some others. Annie is fairly different than Oxy or Pracetam or Pramiracetam in that Annie tends to have an anxiolytic effect. It tends to be very calming. Personally, it's too calming for me. I get almost a little bit depressed or blue on Aniracetam. And Annie also has a window of effect that's probably 90 minutes or less. And so given the slightly more variable response on Annie and how short acting it was, we decided against that for Trubrain and we used Piracetam for the first. You know, the product's been on the market for about 18 months and it's been Piracetam based because primarily that's the Racetam and all the other ingredients that I came to myself over many years of both poring over the literature and doing sort of self experimentation and experimenting on my friends and family actively, to some extent, give them things to try. We're sort of in the decade of the brain, actually on the second decade of the brain. So being a neuroscientist, if you're a medical doctor and you go to a party and people find out you're a medical doctor, they want you to look at all their weird moles, right? Well, if you're a neuroscientist, people want to ask you their interesting brain questions and it's usually what they are experiencing. And so over many, many years, the second half of my PhD program, when I was getting into nootropics and trying out these different things, people were coming to me and saying, oh, I have a risk of Alzheimer's, I have a risk of Parkinson's. Oh, I'm not as sharp as I want to be, I can't handle stimulants. And I work in areas of peak cognitive performance and I work in quantified self areas as well. I'm a QEEG and neurofeedback clinician. So I help you retrain your brain actively in a very quick, aggressive way. But my mom can't necessarily fly to California from Florida for neurofeedback sessions, so she wanted to know what she could take. And I helped her design a Blend of nootropics. And eventually I got tired of writing down the sort of list of ingredients for people or sourcing them. And that's about when I met Chris. And we decided to instantiate that blend with a few Minor tweaks into TrueBrain 1.0.

Cool. Cool. Well, you also wrote an article for people who want to dig into this even more on Smart Drugs vs Noratronics Tropics. And that article is over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com it's at BenGreenfieldFitness.Com BrainDrugs if you want to check out the article that Dr. Hill wrote. The other thing is that if you want to try this True Brain stuff, you know, try, try it out for, you know, whatever, 30 days or experiment with it for a week. True Brain, it's, it's T R U Brain. You can get it@BenGreenfieldFitness.com TrueBrain TruBrain. They're giving all of our listeners a 20% off discount with the code BEN20.

That's actually great, Chris. For the past 18 months, getting a 5 or 10% discount from Chris was about all you could get. And 15 was rare. I was giving out 15% discount coupons on podcasts in the past. So the fact that he's giving you a 20% discount, Ben, he must really like you.

I guess so. I don't know. But that's, that's what he sent over. So that's, that's great. So I published so that we'll take it while we can get it. All right, so cool. So go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com BrainDrugs if you want to read the article that Dr. Hill wrote. It's really good. And go to BenGreenfieldFitness dot com TrueBrain that's T R U Brain if you want to grab a discount on Trubrain with the code BEN20. So, Dr. Hill, thanks for coming on the call today. This is cool stuff and my pleasure. And I'm hoping that I, I am that much smarter now after I go find my, my choline and my oxiracetam, my magnesium, my dha, all this other stuff. So sounds good. All right, man, I'll talk to you later.

All right, Ben, take care. Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice. Music.