A YouTube interview (Josh Trent with Mark Effinger) about designing cognitive-enhancement supplements inspired by the movie Limitless. Mark describes early work with acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (e.g., huperzine A), his product Nectar X (launched ~2012), and formulations that modulate dopamine safely by supplying precursors (phenylalanine → L‑tyrosine → L‑DOPA from velvet bean) and staging conversion to avoid spikes/downregulation (also marketed as “dopa drops”). He emphasizes balancing neurotransmitter systems (acetylcholine, dopamine, glutamate, GABA, serotonin) and delivering extracts/actives correctly (e.g., proper heating/extraction).
Chapters
When I started doing cognitive analysis of intel engineers years ago when I was doing a first, a first product called Huperzine A, that was an acetylcholine estrase inhibitor. Back in the 90s, when I did my first nutrition product, I wanted to get people off coffee. So acetylcholine was why. And what I found was that when we measured them, after we got them off coffee and got them on acetylcholine esterase inhibitors and saw their performance, number of activities that they were able to manage per day. Right. Which means task switching and it means cognitive. Being able to dive deep into a subject and really penetrate through the wall and solve a problem, is they were running at 45 to 65% of their performance. And once you got them. And the interesting thing is it's not a linear curve. When you go to. When you start at 65%, let's say, or 60%, and you go to 80% performance, you've more than doubled. Because the outcome of that in the real world, outcome is much greater than just, I solved four more problems today. It's, you know, because it multiplies really quickly.
Because those outcomes, I can imagine.
Yeah, yeah. So. And once you get people up to that 85 to 90%, they're dangerous. That's where you have the.
That's where you truly can be Bradley Cooper Limitless.
Yes. You're master. You're a mastermind. Yeah. You're master of the things. And when, you know, when we came up with our first product, which is called now called Nectar X and that was 2012 when we launched that, I talked to all our beta customers and I said, what do we call this thing? And these were people from Genentech and Nike and big out agencies that used my software who are now using our wetware, our product that. Right. That gets the brain moving. And they said, it's so much like the thing in that movie. Why don't you just call it nct? So I called a good friend of mine I'd been in business with prior and said, what do I do with this? And he looks it up on USPTO and says they haven't trademarked NCT and they haven't. So that's. We wrote. Bradley Cooper was, you know, that's sweet.
You named it from the movie.
Yeah. He was the unacknowledged marketer, you know, market engine. And it really helped us grow in this thing. So. So that's great. So go back to dopamine. So you want to reinforce dopamine, but you do not want to downregulate dopamine. Downregulation happens once you. If you deplete it, you get too many likes, too many things. You suddenly are look or you're. So you're a rat in a cage. You're just looking for that Pavlovian. Push the button, hit that. You know, to get your.
You need your fix, essentially.
Absolutely. And you're unhappy without it.
And this is what happens to people that come off too quickly from SSRIs.
Correct. Well, that's the serotonin side. I'll. We'll talk about that in a second. That's huge. And yes, you're absolutely right. So what you want to do is you want to give the body dopaminergic precursors, maybe a tiny tickle of real dopamine. We get ours from velvet bean extract, the real dopamine. So it's called L dopa. But L dopa does not convert to dopamine until it has a decarboxylizer. Very much like if you were taking weed and you wanted to make a THC extraction from it, you need to heat it up to 160 degrees. If you don't, you're just going to get weed flavored oil with a bit of thc. But if you heat it up to the right temperature, or actually you bake the weed first in an oven and then you put it in the oil and then you macerate it and do those things, otherwise you get just a very low level. You can't release the terpenes. They're buried inside of it very much like mushrooms. If you do not heat the mushroom to enough temperature to break down the chitin that surrounds each cell in the mushroom. The. You have a really great mushroomy, tasty thing that doesn't do anything. You break it down and you do the extraction and it's all of the really critical components.
So the magic is in the heating process to the specific temperature.
It's a release. Yep, yep. You don't get released without it.
So that sounds like a whole nother podcast.
It's great.
How to make mushrooms and weed the right, the most conscious way with the right amount of.
Oh my God heat. It's true. It's true. So, yeah. So that. So you, you want to have the precursors to dopamine and you want to have the process and then you want to do. You want to stage it so that, so that you don't get this big spike of dopamine and then it falls off a cliff. You want to get a flow of dopamine by having the right precursors at the right time. Acetyl tyrosine is 1, phenylalanine is 1. L phenylalanine. So and if you look at the way that, if you look at the way that dopamine is created in the body is it starts with phenylalanine, then it converts to L tyrosine, which converts to dopamine. So what we did is we built a capsule with the signaling molecules to tell it to convert. So here's the raw product. Convert. Here's the raw product. After that's done, convert, here's the closest thing to the molecule that you want. L dopa. And let's convert that. And it graduated that way. Instead of a direct injection of dopamine, which is going to give you that dopamine, you've seen pro athletes or bodybuilders who, right, they're grunting in the gym and they've just had their dopamine fix. They've done amyl nitrate into the nose.
And they've one more repent smelling and all that.
Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, really intense. So then they pump out another couple reps, they shred the muscle and they look like badass. But the downside of that is once that's over, they got no motivation and they're assholes because they don't feel good. So you don't want to do that. What you want to do is you want to say, hey, hey, I've got all the stuff you need to make all the dopamine you want. Do you want to use some? I've got it available to you and you want to get your body into that kind of a process. Once that happens, then it's available on demand, you know, you're not going to run out. So you don't have that fear of running, running out. If you've ever been in a physiological situation where you're, you're dopamine deprived or you're just unhealthy and you're going, I can only afford one event, negative or positive today. And then I'm, I'm used up. And once you have something like that, where ours is called dopa drops, is it gives you that radical additional bandwidth to be able to handle both stress and enjoy.
I'm all in. I think the thing about this that is so fascinating is that all of these components, you know, the acetylcholine, the dopamine, the glutamate, the gaba, the serotonin, which we'll run through the glutamate, gaba and serotonin quickly here. The part that fascinates me is that, you know, modern science and pharmacological intervention knows about all of these aspects, but you literally cannot patent them. You can stack them in a synergized way.
Right.
You can give them in a delivery mechanism where it gives somebody a really efficacious result.
But.
But you can't make enormous, like, enormous amounts of money on this anymore. Like you could charging $1,000 a pill.
This is not a Martin Shkreli plan.
For a Pfizer product.
Right, Right.
So that's really what we're talking about here.
Check out some of the videos on this screen that are perfectly curated based.
