A short conversational YouTube interview (Josh Trent) about dopamine: how fast, high-amplitude dopaminergic activities (social media, thrill-seeking) create short attention spans and reliance on quick rewards, while delaying gratification (e.g., cold plunges, deliberately postponing rewards) increases dopamine potential and more meaningful reward. The speaker links this to a product they developed, Dopa Drops, described as a staged three-phase dopamine precursor/release capsule (including velvet bean/L-DOPA, acetyl-tyrosine/phenylalanine precursors) intended to raise sustained dopamine availability and reduce downregulation and refractory periods. The clip closes with a product call-to-action.
Chapters
As we all know that have been to raves before, or maybe some Molly accidentally fell into our mouths is dopamine is interesting in that if we've done dopaminergic activities, I used to hang glide, motorcycle, road race, mountain climb, and all of those are high dopaminergic activities. And manage multiple threads on Facebook when that was cool, right?
Yeah.
And so all those are high dopaminergic activities.
Instagram is the new Facebook.
Absolutely, yeah.
Instagram conversations.
And if you'll notice, anybody that's been. That is active on social media or knows social media or spends their time, you know, on. On social media, and even as an observer, you'll notice that the reason that shorts on YouTube, the reason that TikTok and Instagram are so famous now, is they forced a short attention span because of dopaminergic signaling. So we're. We're. We're priming our dopamine. We're. We're doing this. The problem. The problem is we use up dopamine, and we are starting to rely on it as the source of accomplishment, of fulfillment. As you know, Huberman says, you know, it's drive and desire. Right. Those two are buried, and dopamine is the central cause of that. So dopamine is a really interesting neurochemical in the fact that it can work in spikes or it can be a slow bleed. You get a different emotional feeling, but the outcome is no different. The outcome is I get a reward for doing the thing that I'm looking for, and I have a drive and desire to do it, because I've got enough dopamine available to go, oh, I want to do that thing. One of the things that Huberman talks about, and I only mentioned because he's really brilliant and I'm not a doctor, sure. But, you know, but talking about the drive and desire is if you can hold off on the resolution of drive, you will increase dopamine potential, and the reward will be so much greater. So instead of having quick, easy rewards, try taking those, and once you know what those are, try taking those and delaying them. Delaying that by either working at a higher level, creating a greater outcome, and watch what happens.
Dude, you're literally describing what I do in the morning. No matter if it's 100 degrees or coming up here, 40 degrees. The cold plunge. The cold plunge is my tool for delaying my gratification, which you just said actually enhances that natural system in the brain. So every single time I do something that's hard, that has a payoff way After I do it. Well, it seems way after. It's only five minutes.
Right, right, right.
But, but, but you could extrapolate that to many things in life as to how we behave and why we behave in the way we do. It's delaying the gratification that actually starts to rewire physiologically, neurologically, our brain.
Yes.
And I mean, that's so amazing.
The cold plunge is the hormetic stress we talked about on the plants.
Yes.
Growing in these grow chambers.
Yes.
Is. Is that when you apply the stress, in this case, cold plunge. Right. And do you go all the way under?
I go under for five seconds, then I come up, and then at the very end, I go under for 10 seconds and I hold my nose.
Yeah, perfect, perfect, perfect. So it's pretty cold at the end.
Of that 10 seconds, y'. All.
Oh, yeah, it's pretty.
It's like ice cream headache, I was gonna say.
Yeah, exactly.
Then when I get out, I feel like a warrior. I'm just like, yes.
And is. And your body actually your cellular, you know, fabric is reinforced. You talk about scaffolding that scaffolding is so reinforced at that point because you told your body that you were under. You know, Wim Hof was sitting beside you going, ha, come on, bro, let's take this. And. And so it's. And it's so important to do that. So you find those events that you really love in life and make them bigger, put them off longer, and watch what will happen to your neurology and physiology. Is your desire. One is your. Your systematic ability to complete gets much better because you. You're not looking for that quick. This is not a ping on Facebook, right?
Yeah, yeah.
This. And the other is that the reward becomes so much more significant that you don't want the easy win now. You want a more meaningful win.
You want the real thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Authenticity comes from that. Right. It's so easy to have the. The cheap hit. So anyhow, yeah. And so that means great. So we make a product called Dopa Drops, which was specifically formulated to make that happen. And what I did was I originally developed it for men to. To have. It's called the refractory period after orgasm. So again, over, you know, a decade and a half ago, I. I started working with dopamine as a supply side. Dopamine, meaning. Right. Exogenous dopamine as a way to reduce the refractory period. Again, I'm an old guy, so instead of having, you know, instead of having an orgasm and then having another orgasm, Five minutes later if I want, or an hour late, you know, is. It was going okay. Right. It's like their weight. Wait, wait. And instead make it a better orgasm and make the next orgasm faster, especially if you're in like a more tiorgasmic range. So that's where it started. But what happened was I created a three stage dopamine release mechanism in a capsule form so that I could have these precursor. Precursor and direct dopamine hit and it would last for a very long time and give me this elevated level of natural dopamine and increase my body's ability to create dopamine. More importantly, so that you, only you not only had a more pleasurable life, but you had the reward payoff of these rewards. Like, you know, these, these rewards. We've now set the, we set the goalpost way, way beyond where it normally is, were much better and sustainable.
How do we make it so that we actually enjoy the climb? Can you make it. Is that what you talked about with that the, the, the, this three stage release where you're actually enjoying the climb of the process before you get to the hip?
Yeah. Because what you're doing instead of, instead of getting artificial dopamine release by, you know, by a thing like a, like a, like or, or you know, one of those short ones, what you're doing is you're increasing dopamine levels. So you're enjoying the pain of the process to get to the reward. So you want to reinforce dopamine, but you do not want to downregulate dopamine. Downregulation happens. One is 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 the.
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. When. Well, that's the serotonin side. 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 and but it, it. L dopa does not convert to dopamine until it has a carboxyl, a decarboxyl so, yeah, so that, so you, you wanna have the precursors to dopamine and you wanna 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 1L. 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 under the nose and they've.
The scent, smelling and all that.
Yes, yes, yes. 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 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 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 joy. Check out some of the videos on this screen that are perfectly curated based on the video you just saw. Make sure you follow me, and I'll see you in the next video.
