NOOTROPICS | EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE | OUTSMART THE MODERN WORLD w/ Daniel Schmachtenberger | QUALIA

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Wellness Force Radio episode 96 with co founder of the Neurohacker Collective and cognitive enhancement specialist Daniel Schmachtenberger.

How can we optimize our mind, brain, body system for increased quality of experience? The highest stages of human development that we're used to seeing that seem so many standard deviations beyond normal can be the new baseline. It's clear that people have radically increased demands on their cognitive ability. There are more things causing distraction and competing for focus while an increased demand for productivity. But they're looking for creative productive flow states where their cognitive capacities and their creative capacities are fully online and they have the right emotional state that goes along with that. What could a person of normal intelligence do with their life if they fully dedicate themselves to developing themselves comprehensively for the benefit of humanity? You are an emergent property of a universe that made you possible and you're still fundamentally interconnected with and interdependent with the whole thing.

Welcome back to another episode, my friend. I am your host, Josh Trent. Thank you for for spending your time with me here on the podcast. This is where every week I'm bringing you access to global experts in all things wellness, behavior change and new technologies. On this podcast you'll learn from exceptional people who are dedicating their lives to being a positive force for our physical and emotional wellness. My intention with the show is that together we'll discover the connections between our emotions and healthy habits to live our best life and enjoy the process. This episode is brought to you by Perfect Supplements, a company I'm stoked to partner with who actually walks the talk with their values of non GMO pesticide free real food supplements that fuel us for the wellness journey. Head on over to perfectsupplements.com wellnessforce Enter code wellnessforce to save 10% off your entire order. What's up my friends? So excited you are here because we are about to have our hearts and minds expanded from our guest on today's show, Daniel Schmachtenberger. Daniel is a systems designer, strategist, evolutionary philosopher and the co founder of the Neurohacker Collective. He leads a team of scientists, technologists, academics and creatives that are empowering individuals with new tools for optimize well being. I actually discovered Daniel's work and the Neurohacker Collective organization through what seemed like almost weekly conversations and hearing testimonials from colleagues and friends that had been using Qualia, which we'll talk about on today's show. It's this advanced cognitive enhancer that was allowing my friends to be more present and get 10x more done in their lives. So about two months ago I decided to do a little n equals one experiment in this channel of mental performance and cognition which you'll hear about now. We've had a handful of conversations about nootropics and cognitive enhancement from experts on Wellness Force, but today on the podcast, what you're going to get is so much deeper than just how to use new tools to succeed in life. But the understanding of the what and the how to meet and overcome the sometimes overwhelming distractions and attention drains from people and things. I feel so fortunate to have been able to visit Daniel and the team at headquarters in Encinitas because he has been studying health and neurology for over 25 years, which led to Qualia. Now, early in life, Daniel was told there was no cure for his diagnosed neurological and autoimmune illness from either allopathic or complementary medicine. Yet through advanced studies and applications in physiology and pathology, he healed himself. This led him to become a student of Mind Body Medicine and an academic dean of a Mind Body medicine college. Once healed and highly educated, Daniel began working with larger teams to solve global issues through what he calls an omnipositive and omni considerate system. To found the Critical Path Institute and the Emergence Project, a multi organization think tank dedicated to improving our global civilization. I think you're gonna love this episode as much as I did because we're talking about the things that really matter.

In our personal wellness and in our collective world.

You're gonna wanna go through this episode at least twice. Head on over to wellnessforce.com qualia that's Q U A L I A for everything we talk about on this episode, including my N equals one experiment where you can try that out for yourself, which I feel so proud about and which was a labor of love with a message I can really stand behind. You're going to get so much value and growth in the next 60 minutes. So let's jump in to this mind expanding and emotionally engaging in depth conversation with one of the brightest and visionary minds in the world, Daniel Schmachtenberger.

Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the show and for inviting me to your second home. It's your work, so you're here probably a lot. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

Today we're going to talk about things way beyond just qualia, way beyond neurotropics and neurohacking. But what I'm really digging for is something about you that maybe people haven't heard before. You know, something that shows a little bit about your personality from your youth. I know actually there was a space you came from in Iowa. You were homeschooled, and it was from the works of Buckminster Fuller and David Bohm that you had learned from. But how did that shape you? You know, you're this young kid, you're in an environment in Iowa. There's meditation going on. How did you pull from that, and what did that mean to what you do now?

Well, I would say one of the big, unique, fortunate things of upbringing for me was I was mostly homeschooled. And I happened to be in one meditation community, but was in a number of different alternative communities that focused on personal development, activism, different forms and fields of science. Permaculture, right. My parents were interested in evolutionary topics, and so we got to live in proximity to different cool thinkers and evolutionary topics. But the benefit of the homeschooling was my parents were wanting to do an experiment, educational experiment, which was before unschooling was a thing. The idea was, let's give them no fixed curriculum at all and expose them to as many things as possible, see what their interests are and facilitate that. And so this was my education growing up. So I never had a fixed amount of spelling or handwriting or, you know, social studies or. So my spelling still depends on spellchecker completely. My handwriting depends upon the fact that I only use computers because I never developed those things. But I did get to dive into the sciences very deeply, very early, in a way that was untraditional. That is a way that would be the case for any kid if they were facilitated to follow what they were really interested in. And so my early upbringing was all of the sciences, all of the different philosophic traditions, and all areas of activism. But one of the other really neat things was because I didn't learn them in the context of subjects. Right? This is social science, this is biology, this is physics. I didn't even think of them in isolated ways. So I'd be cross applying principles from thermodynamics to astrophysics to cell biology to looking at what is true about how reality works across all of these. Because I Didn't think of them in segmented ways, and I didn't think of them in terms of discrete laws of a domain.

What age were you when you started to be fascinated about systems and about how things work? I mean, because is there a time where you remember, like, I know when I was a kid, I took apart a telephone and my curiosity, I have this insatiable curiosity and I always wondered how things work. So I wasn't satisfied unless I took it apart and put it back together. Did you feel like that in your life? I mean, how has that served you? How would you describe your curiosity?

The same as yours and the same as any other kids. I maybe just had more facilitation. So what happens with kids usually is they want to take apart the telephone, they want to make lasers, they want to do all kinds of interesting things. Boys in particular, those ones, but all genders. Whatever they're interested in is going to be very deep. But. But also things that are more esoteric. Like, I've never met a little kid who, at 2, 3, 4 years old doesn't ask questions like, why is the sky blue? And we give them nonsense answers. But to actually understand how the atmosphere works and how diffraction works and how light works and how that intersects with the way the rods and the cones in our eye work, and what the subjective experience of blue compared to the actual objective experience of light scattering, it's actually one of the deepest, most profound things to answer that. Well, that exposes them to everything from the hard problem of neuroscience to. To atmosphere sciences and what they're going to learn about climate change and stellar formation and physics. They ask, why is fire hot? It's the same kind of thing, right? Like, well, we can talk about what the photon releasing is and how photons are exchanging energy in the hand, but then why am I subjectively experiencing it as hot? And so what happens is we just don't know. So we don't answer their questions well and we instead steer them to things that we do know that are really not interesting, like how to spell something or what the capital of something that.

Is, then we turn them off to.

Schooling, we turn them off to turn them off to their innate fascination of existing. So when we look at the whole issue of the kind of welfare model dynamic where we think if people are not capitalistically motivated, they'll just watch TV all the time. Kids are so intrinsically motivated to learn everything they can and to build stuff and to create and to, like, want to go to work with mom or dad and Figure out how to do stuff. What happens is when we don't facilitate their interests and then we actively force them to be interested in shit that's just not interesting to them because it has more to do with memorization and getting it right than actually understanding mechanics or dynamics in interesting ways. We break their innate intrinsic interest in life, make them deferring to extrinsic authority, and then they just want to get away from that which ends up looking like play, chill out is some form of, you know, escape from broken interest in life. So the future of education has the ability to have polymath be the new normal. You know, comprehensively developed multimodal genius as the new normal. Because that's actually innate to every child of Radley facility.

Wow. And the way that I hear you explain things, this is something that I think is endogenous to you. I mean, do you feel like your intelligence has blossomed from that environment? How did you get through these stages of learning without going to this traditional schooling? And then maybe tell us a little bit about how you found this cure for your autodegenerative disease that you had. What was that like? Combine those two things for us.

So first part. One of the things that I was struck by early is I was studying. I was very fortunate to come across ORCA Buckminster Fuller early in childhood. And when you see as an older man, he's got 49 honorary doctorates in everything from architecture to mathematics to engineering to most of fundamental sciences and did novel work in those areas. Like how does someone do novel work in mathematics when people have done so much brilliant work specializing in that and do novel game changing work in architecture and language. And it breaks our normal idea of how specialization and human capacity works. But we see that being true in, in Da Vinci and in Jefferson and all the people that we think of as these kind of Renaissance people that are kind of comprehensively developed. And it's easy for us to think that they are just somehow genetically different. But one of the things that Bucky Fuller as an older person would always state in like the beginning of his talks was that he was. He became aware early in childhood that he had slightly below average intelligence by the normal metrics of intelligence that the other kids in school got spelling faster than him, got math faster than him. But some things happened, some specific experiences where he became interested in figuring out what could a person of normal intelligence do with their life if they fully dedicate themselves to developing themselves comprehensively for the benefit of humanity. Obviously there were some unique things happened for him to have an insight like that early on. But you see then all that he developed as someone who he would say he was utterly convinced that he had no endogenous capacities that were beyond normal, but a development process. One of the things that's so interesting for me then was all the people who developed themselves to the kind of highest degrees of comprehensive development said things very similar. And so it's clear to me that, and you know, then we've dove very deeply into all of the evolutionary biology of the topics and educational theory that the highest stages of human development that we're used to seeing that seem so many standard deviations beyond normal can be the new baseline.

What was the stage where you went through where you realized a. That you had something that was neurodegenerative? I think a lot of people deal with illness. I know I had a lot of health issues when I was in my 20s and in my 30s. And was there a point where you realized a, I have something that I'm not exactly sure how to fix. And then what did that road look like for you to heal?

So I was in Undergraduate, I was 18. I was rock climbing, weightlifting, healthy, and then had symptoms start kicking on very rapidly that were kind of neuromuscular joint type things. Did not have a background in bio or health at that point was studying math and physics and other topics. And so I just started studying, seeing all of the doctors and integrative doctors and various kind of modalities I could and ended up figuring out a handful of underlying phenomena from inflammatory conditions and the underlying causes in terms of toxicity and pathogenicity and things that were causing it for myself and ended up reversing it fairly quickly.

What was the time period where it reversed?

Three months.

Wow, three months.

And the initial diagnosis was rheumatic autoimmune disorder. That doesn't have a cure, doesn't traditionally have a cure. So that was very neat. And then I was, you know, free of symptom pathology for. For many years until 30 something. And again, very rapidly had an onset of something. And it was probably the same underlying susceptibilities that hadn't been fully addressed previously. They got re triggered by some new phenomena. And then it was a much more aggressive onset with more complexity involved. And that required me doing a much deeper dive into modeling it. Now this was important. So we look at something like Ms. Or rheumatoid arthritis or ALS or any kind of complex disease or psychiatric issues. But say we're looking at a rheumatic condition, we will see Correlation between that rheumatic condition, statistically significant correlation and things like a particular kind of toxin exposure, whether it's a heavy metal or whether it's an organophosphate or something like that. But we don't see one for one, it's not everyone who has it has had that exposure, or everyone who's had that exposure has that disease. But we see statistically meaningful correlation, we'll see statistically meaningful correlation with a bunch of different forms of subclinical infections of Lyme's disease, of exposure to mold, biotoxins of gastrointestinal pathogens. But this ends up being very hard. The traditional medical model is looking for one disease primarily having one pathway that is primarily causing it. And then it's going to have one chemical that addresses that pathway. But for our current medical approach, is good for acute cause issues. So this is why it's so great for emergency medicine, because the cause is actually pretty acute, it's pretty clear, and you can address it. But where you have chronic diseases that developed over some period of time and oftentimes were multifactorial, they don't have one cause, they have multiple different causes. It's not even the same multiple set for different people. And there was delayed causation in terms of when the first thing happened. And you have some underlying pathophysiology happening before symptomology occurs. It's actually really tricky to figure out how that works. And you don't treat a cluster of symptoms called a disease. You actually have to see what is going on specific pathway wise for that person and be able to address that. Which is the future of personalized medicine.

Do you feel like you were really supporting all the systems underneath so that they were all happening in synergy? What did you do specifically? And then how did the different nootropics and the other supplementations that you were taking, I mean, how did that work for you?

Well, the reason that I got into nootropics, obviously, as someone who's interested in learning, I was interested in intelligence and interested in everything that could optimize that. Everything from, you know, meditation and technology, assisted meditation, like neurofeedback, to specific kinds of brain training, to better forms of learning. Right. Epistemology for how to learn, but also biological enhancement of the hardware that learning operates on. So I had worked with nootropics and cognitive chemistry, but not as deeply or sophisticatedly because there wasn't a need. And Right. Oftentimes an evolutionary need ends up driving. But when those illnesses first kicked on in addition to having like a lot of neuromuscular symptomology, there was cognitive symptomology.

Was it massive brain fog that you were going through or what was it?

Yeah, so decreased cognitive capability, how many hours per day I had that were cognitively viable and peak potency of cognitive capability. And for me, for the things I was interested in, that was much more debilitating than physical debility because at that.

Time you're doing high level thinking, so you had to be cognitively capable. It wasn't an option.

And all the things that I really care about affecting require solving hard problems. Right. And so my focus was, all right, well if I'm going to work on figuring out these kind of underlying disease structures so that I can get. Well, to get back to my focus on the future of macroeconomics and governance and infrastructure and kind of large scale environmental and humanitarian things, I'm going to need a lot of cognitive bandwidth to figure these medical issues out. So first I'm going to focus on how to increase my cognitive bandwidth. So I'm going to apply the limited amount that I have to upregulate it. You know, that was my leverage in. And so that was a very deep dive in cognitive chemistry. And that looked like everything in the nootropic space, the brain, nutrient space, the both kind of neurochemistry and neurostructure, connectomic neurobiology, smart drugs, and looking at what are all the pathways that are involved in various aspects of cognition. So short term memory, long term memory, speed of memory, digit span, verbal fluency, focus, concentration, you know, all of those modeling out where this is being mediated by different neurotransmitters, acetylcholine, glutamate, dopamine, et cetera. With the different pathways, you literally mapped.

Out everything that cascades into one another and understood how all these systems work for cognition.

Well, I most certainly did not map out how it actually works because I was looking at the, you know, let's say I looked at few hundred pathways in the interactions, but I've got something like 10 to the 45 actual elements of complexity involved. What I'm doing is still reductionistic, just less reductionistic. I'm not looking at single molecule solutions, and especially not single molecule that are just overriding an endogenous regulatory pathway by providing the in chain chemical. But looking at what is everything we know from the various disciplines about how those endogenous regulatory systems work and where breakdown in those systems can happen and then how to be able to assess what's going on and then support it in a customized fashion. So I started with cognitive chemistry to have the cognitive clarity to continue to work with a deeper neurochemistry. Right. Because that. I knew that was not an adequate solution, but it was a necessary partial solution, which ends up being directly relevant to why this company exists.

And this company is something that's deeply impacted me. I had six weeks of trying the product. We're going to talk about qualia. And for people that don't know, before I tell my story, what are nootropics? I mean, there's a buzz out there, the wellness industry. It's like one of the top seven trends or 10 trends right now for people that want to optimize the way they show up in their life. But if somebody hasn't heard of nootropics, I mean, what is a nootropic?

So the word nootropic is not precisely defined in a way that everyone uses it commonly. But for the most part, we can define nootropic as some chemical that enhances some aspect of cognitive ability beyond normal baseline without meaningful side effects. And so if we're dealing with someone's cognitive capability having dropped below baseline, we're dealing with pathology of some kind, even if it's subclinical pathology. Right. Alzheimer's is cognitive decline from a pathology that we've defined very clearly. Brain fog is generally not a clearly defined pathology, but it is actually dysfunction. So if we are correcting the underlying dysfunction to just come back to baseline, that's very meaningful. We would call that kind of medicine in the psychoneuropharmacology, in the cognitive chemistry space. And it's not medicine that's well understood or well defined. But that wouldn't be nootropics per se, even though a lot of people use nootropics for that space. Nootropics are really looking at optimization beyond baseline. How can I take some capacity and enhance it? Now then, you have smart drugs. So people who use Adderall, not for prescription purposes for an actual diagnosed dysfunction, but are using it for enhancement, and it will enhance something, whether it's Adderall that they're using, or Ritalin or Modafinil, Wellbutrin, or just lots of Red Bull.

Red Bull's a smart drug.

You could. You could think of it that way. Right. Most of the time when we think smart drug, we think pharmaceuticals, some pharmaceutical that's usually for narcolepsy or ADD or some other kind of actual cognitive decline disorder like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. People will use Levodopa, right, as a Parkinson's med for increasing dopamine, different things like that. So we usually think of some kind of pharma med that is being used for an off label purpose for enhancing some aspect of cognitive function. And that does work. But usually it works at the cost of both long term dependency, long term side effects, and usually even fairly narrow up regulation with some real time downregulation. So when people are taking dopamine, for instance, they're seeking to increase dopamine production, but they're not looking at how natural dopamine production and dopamine regulation works. And so we don't want dopamine relatively fixed from outside stimulus. We want dopamine to be able to be adaptive to external stimulus, as is appropriate and adaptive to all of the other chemicals that it exists in quite complex relationships with, with serotonin, with gaba, with the other catecholamines. Right. And we also want to look at the whole chain of how dopamine is produced to say if that chain is damaged somewhere, right? The person is not getting enough tyrosine or phenylalanine, or they don't have enough of the vitamins that are involved in converting it, B6 or C or et cetera, then that can affect other things. So dopamine might be the most obvious, but if it's a tyrosine issue, it might be affecting thyroid function. Right. So not only do we not want to just go straight to the in chain chemical and make them not adaptive, but we don't want to lose the opportunity to optimize the entire chain for all of those purposes. And, and so smart drugs are not nootropics, though people who are interested are oftentimes interested in both what we're interested in in the nootropic space and we specifically have an approach to nootropics that is a complex system informed approach to nootropics is how do we optimize some aspects of cognitive psychological function sustainably where we don't have meaningful side effects in real time, like Adderall increasing focus, but creating irritability or anxiety and also addictive properties as well.

Right.

That would be a long term downside. The short term downside would be being anxious or irritable while you're on it, or having empathy go down or having digit span go down while focus goes up. So our goal when we saw Adderall doing something like multi billion dollar sales, off label, right off label purposes for people doing their tech startup or midterms, or finals or with all the consequences associated. And we saw this exponential curve, and not just on that, but on a lot of smart drugs and on a $15 billion energy drink market. And it's clear that people have radically increased demands on their cognitive ability.

We are slaves right now to notifications. Calendar is being chocked full. I look at my brother's life. I love my brother.

He has three kids and he has a full time job and he's doing all these things and I look at.

Him at the end of the day and he's drinking coffee and I'm like, there's got to be a better way. Because he is a mirror of the consciousness level and of the aptitude that's out there right now about people not really knowing what they can do to let some steam off to refocus their attention. So I had an experience that I want to share, and it was six weeks. Your company was nice enough to give me a great supply, and it was incredible. I took a black label product which is not on the market yet, but what happened is that I woke up in the morning, I did my meditation, I went through my normal process, and Then I'm @ces8 podcast interviews in one day and going on stage to moderate a panel and an after party. And at the end of the day, I was still thinking like, wow, I could actually connect with more people. And never in my life have I been able to be so focused in the same way that I'm feeling you right now. Now where I'm fully present, I'm looking at someone's eyes, there's no response in me where I need to look away or check my phone or not be here. And that's something that's unique. So beyond just the physical energy that I was feeling, I mean, what is that product? Tell us about Qualia. Tell us what I was using to be able to have that incredible day.

So the first thing that we looked at was, you know, as we were saying, we see this exponential rise in products that people are taking to enhance some aspect of productive capability or focus or energy or clarity, even if it is down regulating other things that matter, even if it's causing dependence because the demand is so high, right? The need is so high. So as you're mentioning with your brother and so many people, there are more things causing distraction and competing for focus, while an increased demand for productivity and the net result of those together is very stressful, debilitating, et cetera. So most people know if they take caffeine, they can have increase in certain kinds of focus. But if they take it above a certain level, they're going to get then downsides, anxiety, jitters. And they still, if they actually pay attention and say they use quantified mind or Cambridge online Cognitive assessment or tools like that, quantified self tools, they'll see that some metrics of cognitive capability increase and other ones actually decrease in real time. Right. So we've seen times where people have a lot more energy, but they're actually task switching so fast their follow through sport or things like that.

Right.

So the first thing we did was we said, all right, so people who are buying off label Adderall or smart drinks or whatever it is, what are they actually really looking for? And what they're looking for most of the time is not just increased arithmetic processing or increased verbal fluency or increased digit span, but they're looking for creative productive flow states where their cognitive capacities and their creative capacities are fully online and they have the right emotional state that goes along with that. So cognitively there's a whole set of functions. It's short term memory and long term memory and speed of memory and digit span and verbal fluency and task switching and depth of focus and attention span, all these classic cognitive metrics. But it's the product of those together, none of them on their own. And we actually really want to look at how do we lift all those together, along with more internal drive and internal agency and more emotional resilience to disruptive external phenomena, creating almost a virtual.

Buffer around distraction and things that want to pull you out of that state, whether it be flow state or just focused attention.

Exactly.

There's 42 compounds and they all work together in synergy. If we have time, at the end of the show, we'll talk about how synergy and the emergence process work, but the synergy of 42 ingredients. I've taken four brands of nootropics actually in the past two years. And what I loved the most about Qualia is that I could go all day long but still not feel that crash. And I think people can relate to this. If they've had too much coffee in a day, that feeling of being jittery towards the end of the day, it didn't occur. So how did you design that? How do these chemicals work together? They're not really chemicals. Right. They're more things that are essential for us, that our body needs. There's some brain vitamins in there. Tell us about those.

We started by modeling what we were trying to enhance. And as you were Mentioning it was actually a lot of things that are not necessarily obvious at first, right? Like increased presence isn't necessarily what people think of when they're going for a nootropic and they think they want increased focus because oftentimes increased focus will lead to irritability if someone tries to distract them. So how do we have. This is a common Adderall thing. It's like if I'm just coding, it's cool, but if someone distracts me, I'm irritable and actually have a hard time task switching. How do we have more focus and more fluid task switching and more presence wherever we are, while enough perspective to then decide where we want to move our attention back to? That's a lot of complex functions together. So we started by doing the cognitive and psychological modeling of what we were actually seeking to enhance the whole set of functions and experiences and then how those relate to each other. Once we had that modeled. And that's again, that's novel, right? We didn't start with here's a disease state and here's the one thing that we're going to try and adjust in that disease state, or even here's an optimization goal and here's the one thing. We started with a synergistic goal. Then we said, let's look at. Since we're not modifying it via a meditation practice, which is totally valid, or a psychotherapeutic practice, CBT or something like that, we're modifying it via modifying the underlying.

What is CBT for people that might not know.

Cognitive behavioral therapy, particular kind of effective psychotherapy for certain things. We're very technology agnostic, by the way. We work with biochemistry, we work with neurotechnology, so transcranial stimulation of various kinds, transcranial lasers, magnetic deep stem, electric stem, ac, dc, et cetera, neurofeedback as well. Neurofeedback, gut brain axis work, genomics and genetic expression work, as well as psychological modalities from mindfulness, meditative modalities to underlying shifting of meaning, trauma, somatic therapies. We're interested in anything that actually works on some dynamics, then being able to know which things are going to be most meaningful for an individual person and their goals. We'll get back to that. But for this generalized purpose, what we were looking for is once we understood what psychological and cognitive functions we're seeking to optimize, we wanted to see what physiology mediates those. And so this is looking at everything from the cell science and the neurochemistry, neuroendocrinology biophysics, what's known about all the things that have causal relationships to short term memory or to emotional resilience, right? So we look at all the pathways where some studies have happened. So we started with a structured review, meta analysis of all the appropriate spaces to say, okay, acetylcholine processing affects these things. Glutamate processing affects these things these ion channels are involved in, right? So then we end up having all these underlying physiologic pathways. And then we model how those pathways, the entire pathway and the regulatory process of those pathways work and how the pathways interact with each other to create these complex feedback mechanisms. Which is why we're taking a complex systems approach to neuroscience and psychoneuropharmacology. Once we modeled that out, we said, all right, we want to actually enhance not just the level of some chemical, right race, acetylcholine, but we want to enhance the regulatory capacity of this whole system so that when someone gets off it, they don't have dependence because they've become, we've just created a big exogenous stimuli and now they're dependent on it. But our exogenous stimuli was actually working through their endogenous, their internal regulatory pathway to robust the resilience of that regulatory pathway. So when they get off it, the effects can be lasting. So then we looked at how does the entire regulatory pathway work and what can we do to be able to increase the capacity of that system.

I'm almost hearing from you. This was an inventory of everything that works to make our cognition fire. Now would you say that nootropics decrease the time from one synapse to the other, that the message gets through? Or is this more making it a folding of the safety of the axon and the neuron?

What is it actually doing with the.

Nootropic in there between that space between the dendrite and everything, what's happening there?

Different things. So say you just look at acetylcholine, right, that one neurotransmitter for a moment. You can use something like Huperzyn A, which is a very common nootropic, which is what we call an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor.

Which was in the four hour body.

Right.

Didn't Tim Ferriss write about that quite a bit?

Probably, yeah. It's a common nootropic. It's a plant derived nootropic. There are other things that are also acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, both pharmaceutical and plant based. And what that's doing is there's an enzyme in the synapse. So you're talking about between the axon and the dendrite. Right. In the synaptic cleft, there's an enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine, so you don't have excessive amounts of it, but it can also break it down too fast, so you then end up having deficient amounts.

Would that cause brain fog? If it's too fast in the breakdown, it can.

Right. But it's important. Brain fog doesn't have one cause, has lots of causes. It can be from neuroinflammation, it can be from deficiency or excess of lots of different neurotransmitters. So. But that could be one of them. So you can actually inhibit that enzyme. So the same amount of acetylcholine that is coming out of the axon can actually get across the synapse more effectively. That's one thing you could do. If you're asking what's happening chemically. So an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor would be one way to modulate the acetylcholine pathway, but once it gets across the synapse, it's going to be actually getting uptaken in the postsynaptic neuron in various receptors. And so we could modulate one of those receptors. So we can use things like racetams, piracetam, aniracetam, etc. To upregulate, say, the acetylcholine uptake on the NMDA complex. That's another thing that we could do. And we could do those in combination or separately. We could actually provide more choline donors or acetyl donors for the body to make more acetylcholine. We could provide the catalysts like vitamin B5 and other things that help take choline in acetylate. So there's a lot of things that we can do to affect the acetylcholine pathway. And that's just one pathway.

Then there's two stages. Why taking the first stage without food and then waiting and then food with the second stage? I had to play around with a bit to find my perfect dose to where I could just be present but then not feel like I was too much energized. Tell us about that. Why you break it up into two. I've never done that before.

Okay, so Qualia currently has two bottles. It's a program that someone would take. Just for clarity, when we were initially modeling what are all of the chemicals that we know something meaningful about that could modify any of those underlying pathways, we created a database of about 500 chemicals and looked at what the primary pathways they affect, secondary pathways, et cetera. And then we did a whole bunch of customized chemistry for this kind of cognitive enhancement goal where we were working with integrative doctors, running very deep blood chemistry on people, clinical chemistry, brain scans, genomics, et cetera, and then really working to optimize in very unique ways. Once we saw that we could get the kinds of effects, we wanted to get really profound up regulation across all the things they were interested in without any of the kinds of down regulation we wanted to avoid, that we could assess. Then we wanted to see what portion of that could we do in a non customized fashion so that we could bring it at scale. Because obviously doing that kind of customization at scale is very difficult. And there's some things that we couldn't work with because they're so specific to one set of genes that what would be beneficial for someone is too harmful to other people. But we wanted to see which dynamics can we work with effectively across most of the population. So then that looked like a bunch of internal product development trials iterations.

Were you using 23andMe tests as well?

That was one of the things. Some people were giving us 23andMe data, some people were giving us Illumina data, some people were going much deeper into also looking at what's actually expressing. But we're also of course, just doing the analysis of all of the journal articles in various spaces and doing structured synthesis. So the 42 is one iteration. It's one iteration that ended up being the right one for us to come to market with first. But it's going to change soon. The reason it was two different things, two different products is specifically some of the ingredients absorbed very well without food. Since these are pills that people are swallowing, we could have things that were injections, IM or IV or intranasal. But there's safety and regulatory reasons.

It'd be hard to sell needles as well. Yeah.

And we don't have any moral issue with that if it's actually safe and effective. We're just simply looking at what the safest way for things to go to the most number of people for the most enhancement can happen. And so since we're having to do GI absorption, then some things really absorb much better without food, where they get to have maximum surface area contact. Other things really need food for absorption and to avoid nausea. And so in the particular stack of chemicals we were working with, we ended up separating it for that purpose.

Yeah. One of the things you have on your site that's fascinating is your quoted we believe fully optimized human beings lead to a better world. People being productive and creative in whatever that is theirs to do. But in many ways our modern world works against us. How do you feel like Neurohacker. Tell us about neurohacker. And what are you doing to address that? To address the onslaught of these weapons of mass distraction, as Gay and Katie Hendricks call it.

Regarding the quote that you mentioned from our website and why Neurohacker exists is obviously we're working on individual human optimization. How can we optimize our mind, brain, body system for increased quality of experience and increased capability? And we're interested in both. Increasing our quality of experience means less subjective suffering, more subjective happiness, quality of life. Right. That's important because human experience is intrinsically meaningful. And increasing human capability and positive predisposition to solve problems and create things of meaning ends up affecting the experience of lots of other people and non people, sentient things. Right. And so if our focus is increasing the quality of sentient experience across everything, then optimizing humans ends up being key to that whole process. Because most of the problems in the world that we really care to change, whether we're talking about economic inequality or war or crime or species extinction, those are problems that are being caused by human action. And human action is motivated by our worldview. It's motivated by economic systems that it predispose certain actions. It's motivated by lots of things. But one of the things that ends up motivating it is our own biology. And so when we realize that empathy runs on certain neural networks, it can be biochemically up or down. Regulated complex thinking requires certain kinds of hardware, right? Neurophysiologic hardware interactions to occur. Everyone who's had their hormones very out of place or who's been sick or very underslept, knows that you can go into biochemical states that make certain emotions or certain cognitive capabilities almost inaccessible and that make other ones almost unavoidable. And so while addressing human physiology is not sufficient for optimizing human experience and capability, it is necessary.

It's a large piece. And how do you feel like Neurohacker as a company? What is your ethos with solving this on a gradual basis? Because these are massive issues that we're facing. I mean it's not like overnight things are going to change. But what are some of the enrollment conversations that we can have with people that we care about that not only can use products like Qualia Nootropics, but they can get behind this Mindset of having increased empathy and compassion for people. We're built to be in a tribe. Jason Silva talks about this in brain games, how there is circuitry in the brain that actually wired us to care for other people in other tribes because that's how we would survive. So that's built into our structure, our A's, our C's, our T's, our G's.

Well, when you talk about how do we share the value system, now you're talking about affecting people's software, right? Actually affecting belief structures, value structures, understanding structures which also predispose experience and behavior. So if we think about people's worldview and their memetics as kind of human software, and that can be affected through education, through psychotherapy, through media, right, through what you're doing, Media is affecting human software directly. And then we think of human hardware as human physiology, which, not just medicine addressing dysfunction, but we can think of kind of bio optimization addressing optimized predisposition. Then we can also think about the hardware and the software of the collective, where infrastructure, where how we meet our physical needs and relationship with the physical planet. So transportation, agriculture, water, energy production, materials, waste are the hardware of the collective. And our social systems, economics, governance, law, language, how we have collective agreement fields for how we do decision making in beyond individual decisions is the software of the collective. The hardware and the software of the individual and the collective represent a taxonomy that is necessary and sufficient for understanding human experience and human behavior. And so not Neurohacker, but the think tank that gave rise to Neurohacker is focused on all of those quadrants and what has to happen within a particular time period to move us off of the current self terminating path that we're on as a species and into a really viable path that is not only not self terminating, but that obsoletes the unnecessary causes of human induced suffering and optimizes quality of life potential now and ongoingly for all life. And Neurohacker is addressing one part of that.

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The elevation of consciousness through biological optimization. So if we're taking care of ourselves, I mean, there's an adage out there. You can't fill up someone else's cup if yours is empty. If you're on a plane, you have to put your mask on first. How do we do both? How do we become either physically, financially or just ahead? How do we get ahead in life and take care of ourselves? While also I believe there's a term that you have omni considerate to other people. How do, how do we do this? And how does supplementation and nutrition and products like Qualia plug into that to being omni considerate?

Think about this. If I ask you who you are, you'll tell me something. But if I say, wait, wait, who are you without plants? And you think about it and you think, well, who would you be without oxygen and atmosphere? You wouldn't exist. Who would you be without the plants that produce the oxygen atmosphere? You wouldn't exist. You are actually the emergent property of a biosphere that made you possible. It was mediated by plants and they were mediated by insects and microbes and a whole bunch of things, right? And so you can define yourself without thinking about the atmosphere and plants. But it's a misnomer, it's a wrong idea because you actually don't exist without all of them. You are fundamentally interdependent with the whole rest of the biosphere. Not just biosphere, but the whole universe. Who are you without gravity? It's a nonsense question, right? Who are you without electromagnetism? It's a Nonsense question. So you are an emergent property of a universe that made you possible, and you're still fundamentally interconnected with and interdependent with the whole thing. So if you think of Earth as actually you zoom out, you look at it from the outside space shuttle picture and you see that it's this tiny, tiny little bitty organic space shuttle traveling to this vast cosmos that's very inhospitable place. And you realize that on this tiny little organic, fragile spaceship together everything in there is interconnected. Profoundly, inexorably interconnected. And the idea that there's this place called away where we can throw our trash and these people called others that we can bomb and it's beneficial, get their resources, whatever that engenders, their enmity back wherever the trash goes is affecting the air, the water that everyone is engaged with. We have a level of technology that gives us global influence in everything that we do when we're talking here. And the headphones that we're talking on have plastics and metals and silicates, et cetera, that came from almost every continent, that had people and supply chains around the whole world that were involved, that took resources from the Earth in ways that were fundamentally unrenewable, caused massive mass, massive problems, extinction level problems for many species, and then turns it into trash on the other side. We're doing these seemingly benign behaviors like buying stuff that is actually affecting this little spaceship that we live on in ways that make itself terminating very quickly. We have a level of population that we never had. It's been an exponential rise since the Industrial revolution and a level of impact per capita within that population that again is exponential, that cannot continue in this way. But we also have the technological capability to make fundamental changes where we don't have an exponential growth society, where we don't have an economic system that requires year over year exponential growth on a finite planet, which, how the fuck would that make any sense to do an exponential growth economy forever or a linear materials economy that turns nature into trash on a finite planet.

And what's interesting is if you look at nature, everything has a life cycle. Everything comes up and everything goes down. So there's two 500-year-old Bristlecone Pines, I think, that are on the Earth, but at some point they'll per. There's no such thing in nature as continual unlimited growth. It doesn't exist. So how do we address this here? I'm not saying that capitalism is wrong, or that socialism is wrong or right or any of that. What I'm trying to address is the way we're conscious in our life and the way that we take care of our biology through supplementation through nutrition and exercise. How does that key into the neurohacker mindset?

So we joke sometimes that you can take take qualia as a performance optimizing technology to go do whatever meaningless thing you might have been doing, climbing a corporate ladder for a company that is mostly net harmful to life and the planet and to your own existence. And we really hope you don't. But there are so many people who are actually wanting to create very meaningful pieces of art and science and humanistic connection and human and are actually at the limits of their emotional resilience, facing the difficulties in the world or at the limits of their ability to muster their energy and focus to do the difficult but meaningful things that are there to do. Those are the people we most want to affect and then the people who are currently not engaged in what would be most meaningful for them. We want to help empower them to switch.

I think there's someone listening and they're probably feeling, oh my gosh, he's so right. I am doing something that I know on some level is probably hurting other people or it's probably not in my best interest. What does that look like for someone to change? What are the practices or what are the mindsets that they can instill to first, just be aware of the fact that what they're doing is not aligned with who they are and then secondly, what's the first few action steps they might take?

It's a deep process and we could have a future time. If your listeners were interested, dedicated to things like what does the future of the world look like in terms of the future of economics beyond the current sensation of capitalism, the future of governance beyond the current sensation of representative democracy, the future of the materials economy, the future of medicine? We could get into that and we could also talk about what it looks like transitionally at a macro level for society and what it can look like transitioning for individuals. One thing I will say, just as a, as a partial offering towards this question, is when people ask intrinsic motive questions, so they ask questions like if all my financial needs were already met in perpetuity, what would I do? They start to move in the right direction of what would be innately meaningful to them. When they ask if I could actually direct the Gates foundation funds, what would I do with it? So they think about if I had a lot of resources, what would be most meaningful for me to do? So I'm not Looking at gaining, like winning in a competitive system, I'm looking at, if I've already done that, that now what's actually interesting to do. These are clarifying questions that are important when they ask what problems in the world bother them the most. Those are things that are theirs to actually do something about. What touches them the most. Those are the things that are theirs to actually help protect and proliferate.

I feel like there's so many phases of technology, I just got back from ces that are nudging people in the right direction of conscious living, of being more aware of how they're feeling in their body and what they're doing with their mind and their space. And there was a previous video we'll link in the show notes, and it was from the hive, and it was a profound talk. It was an hour and a half, I think, of just some of the most intelligent minds going over some of the most interesting topics. And one of the things you talked about was the Internet of things. Measure the entire natural and built world commons in real time to allocate resources, tell us about what the commons are, and then how that Internet of things might actually allow us to solve some of these big issues in the world.

So why do we still burn coal for energy anywhere as opposed to renewable energy sources like solar and wind and etc. Well, we have said for quite some time that solar is just not quite cost effective yet. Well, this one, that's not true anymore in terms of having reached grid parity. But even like, why would that be true? Well, we could build a coal plant for less initial dollars and get coal moving into it and generate more watts per dollar, a little bit more watts per dollar than a solar plant until recently. But in the process of doing so, the coal was releasing a huge amount of mercury into the atmosphere and water. So much so that the large fish species have mercury levels that are well beyond any previous safe levels, that then again are potent neurotoxins and biotoxins of all kinds of mines. And putting zinc oxide, nitrous oxide sulfates in the atmosphere that are doing mountaintop removal mining to get the coal that are damaging the ecosystem in so many ways and damaging human health directly. Right. Well, what's the cost of that? If we actually had to fix it, if we accounted for it, if we looked at what is all of the harm that comes to humans from those environmental toxins, what is the total cost of the medical bills of that? And how do you even count the cost of lost life and cancer in Children and et cetera. And then you said, well, let's say someone can burn coal, but they can't leave the commons, right? Which is that which affects everybody, the.

Natural world, the commons is a metaphor for everyone.

The common world, right, that was just common to all of us. So the natural commons is the natural world. The built world commons is the built infrastructure that we all participate in. But let's particularly focus on the natural world commons for a moment. So, so with the coal example, most of the cost, right? The actual negative, the cost of burning coal, the company doesn't have to pay for. It's externalized to the commons in the form of damaging ecosystems, extincting species, externalizing medical bills to future generations. So everybody else pays for it right now, their profit margin goes up because they move the cost somewhere else. That's called externalization. Well, if we said we can burn coal, but you can't leave the commons, net worse. So the same amount of CO2 has to be in the atmosphere afterwards. Whatever it takes to scrub the CO2 out of the atmosphere, scrub the mercury out, mine it in a way that is regenerative to the whole ecosystem. You have to use the technologies that do that. Well, the cost to do that would make coal something like four orders of magnitude more expensive, and solar would have reached grid parity the moment it was invented. And so it's a nonsense economic system that is actually an extinctionary economic system that not only allows but incentivizes externalization of harm to the commons. That is what led to coal making sense over solar. Right? And so many other things like that. Similarly, we can look at that, say we look at any species extinction issue that's been a result of destroying habitat or poaching or whatever. A whale swimming in the ocean is worth nothing on anyone's balance sheet economically. It's part of the natural world commons. We can think of it that way. It has its own balance sheet. It is a part of nature's balance sheet. We just don't measure those balance sheets, and we don't care about them, and we don't care about them in any way that we have metrics associated with. But if there is a fishing boat that can do whaling, that whale's a million dollars in whale meat in Japan or somewhere where that's a part of the commodities trade. So that means that there's a million dollars of incentive to kill the whale and none to leave it where it is, which is why we have been extincting species at the radical rate that we have, cutting down old Growth, forests, overfishing, the oceans, is because everything's worth something to us, commoditized and dead and not otherwise. The commons, the balance sheet of the commons, we don't measure and so we just steal from it, right? We externalize costs there and we take its assets. And the more we can take the assets of the commons and externalize our costs there, the better we're doing in capitalism.

What would it look like for technology to measure this inventory for the commons so that everyone can win? How do we use tech to make a win win when we look at the commons and inventorying, all that?

So the key thing that has to happen in the future of macroeconomics is that we have to make sure that what we're incentivizing people and companies and countries, right, what we're incentivizing agents to do is omnipositive. So we're not giving anyone incentive, meaning they get ahead economically by doing something that is fundamentally harming other agents, harming the commons. Otherwise we're continuing to cause the problems at the deepest level by incentivizing them based on our accounting systems. Right, based on our value systems. And so what we need is to incentivize things in relationship to how omnipositive they are, which means you have to measure everything affected, not just a few of the things, but measure everything affected, internalize all of those positives and negatives into the value equation, and then incentivize things accordingly. So to the degree that we make incentive of any agent more close to perfectly aligned with the well being of other agents in the commons is the degree to which the economic system becomes a source for solutions to everything, rather than a source for problems to everything.

The Internet of things is growing exponentially. I follow the work of Peter Diamandis and the X Prize. How do you see neurohacker growing into someone that can be not just at that level of X prize, but also like, how are we going to make the tricorder? How are we going to solve these big problems with that? What do you feel about the future? What are you excited about for the future of neurohackers?

So neurohackers goals specifically are comprehensive human optimization. And so this includes assessment, includes therapeutics, affective technology, and includes the interpretive platforms that can do customization, personalization. And so the way to address brain fog or anxiety or Ms. For different people is different because they have different underlying causal mechanisms going on. So we're interested in the assessment diagnostic system. So right now, neurohacker is not doing medicine, it's doing direct to consumer optimization. But we're doing fundamental research that is related to being able to advance medicine, whether that happens in this company or an associated company. But how to basically synthesize all the diagnostics that exist, where we don't just look at individual biometrics in relationship to a fixed reference range, but we look at the resilience of those biometrics when stressed. So we're looking at the homeostatic resilience of the system, not just current homeostasis. And we get to look at each of the biometrics in relationship to each other to understand complex intercausal patterns. And so we're looking at how we interpret and synthesize all diagnostics, developing new systems of diagnostics that provide higher fidelity, more meaningful data, more affordably, more ubiquitously, more frequently, the right AI interpretive platforms for being able to make appropriate sense of that. And then the ability to vet all the affective technologies to not just this is effective for this disease or symptomology, but for these pathways where then we can look at which pathways are involved for individual people and how they're weighted to then be able to have really personalized bio optimization. And then beyond bio optimization, you can also personalize people's psychotherapeutics because the kind of psychotherapy that's necessary for anxiety, if it came on from an acute incident of trauma in adulthood, versus if it was something that was there since childhood, there are different kinds of psychotherapeutic processes, just like there's different kinds of, you know, physiologic processes for similar symptomologies. So how do we customize everything that is meaningful to optimizing human experience and capability? How do we vet it for what's actually effective, understand what it's effective for, synthesize it, personalize it, and do that progressively better at scale.

This is the dream dashboard I think everyone has been looking for, where we can get all of our wellness effects data, our blood testing data, our 23andMe. We can get our ubiome, our gut microbiome on there. We can get everything. Our activity tracking, having a dashboard where we can just check in with ourselves as a mirror of mindfulness and figure out how can I do 1% better today? I think sometimes people get caught up in the tracking and the tracking becomes like, what device am I going to get? Or what system am I going to use or what supplement should I take? And all these different things and they get lost because the intention behind all of it, to just be this biologically optimized human. That's the intention that people need to be following. You know, the people that are listening and watching, like, don't get caught up in the device. Qualia is an incredible tool. It's not the golden ticket that's going to heal your life. However, it will support you in all those systems you were talking about, so you can make those good decisions. And you might find your golden ticket. Who knows? So in leaving our show today, this has been so much fun. I want to ask you seven questions, and they're really fast so people can get to know you.

Okay, the first question is, what fascinates you the most?

I mean, we already know that you have a high level of intelligence when it comes to biological systems, but what about the brain fascinates you the most in regards to neuroplasticity, the way that the brain can shift and mold and. And change what lights you up when you think about neuroplasticity?

So, interestingly, our team just did a structured review of all the literature on neurogenesis. So adult neurogenesis, specifically development of new neurons, and that there's a lot that's known about specific neurotrophins, ngf, bdnf, gdnf that support the development of new glial cells, new neurons, et cetera. There are things regarding the development of new neural stem cells and then the differentiation of the stem cells. So we did a literature review of everything known in the space and then started looking at what the relationship between all the mechanisms that regulate neurogenesis are and the evolution, evolutionary biology of why humans have as much neurogenic capacity as we have. We're also doing structured review of everything on how to remove senescent neurons. So neural autophagy, what is a senescent neuron? Old neurons that are no longer functioning.

As well, they're not serving us anymore.

And neural protection and new synaptic development, neurite development, and synaptogenesis, as well as synaptic cleaving. So all of these things are neural remodeling, Right? Brain remodeling. So how does. How do we get rid of old brain cells that are not functioning well and causing dysfunction, develop new brain cells, develop new connections between them, develop new algorithms on them. And so this is when we see the kind of learning that can happen in early children that is not available in adults, where adults learn a language and they keep an accent, and children can learn multiple languages, not have an accent, because the kind of neural Restructuring neural plasticity that's available. We are very interested in being able to develop technologies to help advance the field of what's possible for ongoing adult neural restructuring. And this is for anti aging, specifically in the brain side and not just in terms of longevity and just neural health, but also ongoing increased cognitive capacity.

That is fascinating. We're definitely going to have to have another conversation about the brain. Just one hour straight about the brain. Now, when you look back on your journey, has there been one point where you realize, wow, I learned one of the biggest lessons about my own personal wellness and it could have been at any stage in your life. Was there one or was there many where you thought, you know what, this really affected my wellness and I know how to take better steps next time.

So many rather than speak to one. Because so many things in terms of how to take better responsibility for my relationships. And almost every time that I ever thought there was a difficulty in a relationship that was someone else and learned how either it was actually me or the degree to which it was someone else, I set up that dynamic or elicited or didn't create enough discernment taking responsibility there and in physical health and in emotional health and in finance and you know, if you want to look at something meta across all those, it would be really profound, empowered self responsibility. But not just responsibility for my own well being, integrity and quality of life, but also responsibility for the way I impact the whole.

What would you say to somebody who's experiencing anxiety? I dealt with anxiety a lot in my twenties to the point where I would not go out for days. Someone's feeling like that, they're listening. What are some things they can do in addition to taking a smart nootropic or having a healthy regimen of exercise? What else is something that people can do as a first or second step when they're going through kind of paralyzing anxiety?

Well, the first thing I would say is I feel you. I've been there. I know how scary and crippling that can be. One of the things that is trickiest about anxiety is we can feel anxiety about anything. It can be a relationship ending or money or getting on stage or whatever. And then if that anxiety ever gets to a high enough point that it gets scary to us, then we start any source of anxiety, like normal stuff that happens, we become hypersensitized to our own sensations of anxiety, then we become anxious about it and then we get in these feedback loops. And so then we become scared of going to situations that we'll be Scared of. Then we notice a little bit of fear and go, shit, is that thing going to happen again? Right? And so panic attacks are where that just goes to zenith. And then we can get afraid. Well, it's never going to end. I'm going to be stuck in this forever. Which becomes the ultimate fear. And then depression case kicks in. First thing I would say is I worked with a lot of people in panic attack disorder and generalized anxiety disorder and seen people shift from decades of these situations through different mechanisms, different modalities, but it is addressable. That's the first thing I would say, is it is addressable. You need to find the right solutions. They are not one right best solution for different people. Some people have gut disorders and you can feel that you've got gut disorders and you address the gut disorder and the gut brain access. Optimizing makes a tremendous difference. There are other people where just addressing the meditation side of it will make enough shift that they have the energy to start addressing other things. Other people, there were those cognitive loops that are going on where they're afraid of their own symptom of fear. Cognitive behavioral therapy will actually address those cognitive loops quite quickly. So there's different modalities that can be effective. Try them, take responsibility for working at it. And if some are not working, then don't make a generalized assessment that nothing will work or nothing works for you or your anxiety is particularly different or worse. It's not. Just keep working at it.

What if someone just wants to increase emotional intelligence? I mean, what's made a difference for you from emotional intelligence? How do we grow that besides just making it a point to connect? Here we are, we're connecting today, and I made it a focus. That was my intention before we sat down, to connect. But for somebody that's not in the regular practice of connecting or being present, what does that look like in the first one or two or a handful of steps for them to be more emotionally present?

One practice I'll share. There are many important ones, but one simple, extremely powerful one is practice looking at the world through other people's eyes, really deeply. So if you are upset with a partner or a friend or a family member, step out of being. You completely step out of your background, your history, your perspective, and really try and be them and say with their history, with the things that they value, with the ways they've been hurt, with the et cetera, and without knowing what your actual intentions were, how you came across to them, how they could have, what is it like, why are they feeling what they feel, why are they asking for that? Are they upset? And you know, you've got it it if you grok exactly why they are feeling the way they are and you're like, wow, I would totally be there too if you're like, no, they're still lame in their position. I would such and such differently. You haven't got it because you're not being them, you're being you in their physical position without actually getting their inner experience.

A lot of the work that you do is kind of serious in nature. I mean, you're solving some big problems here at Neurohacker. But what do you do for fun? And what's something in your life that just cracks you up? I mean, what's something that makes you laugh?

My wife makes me laugh consistently. It is one of the great fortunes of my life. So I'm very fortunate in that way. I think everyone should pay attention to who they surround themselves with and have people that uplift them in various ways and also work to uplift everyone around you so that you know, people who are uplifting are engendered to want to do that. So that's one thing.

Can you share one thing that she might do that really cracks you up the most?

One of the reasons that we are together is very, very balancing for me. She's an extremely embodied, playful person and so waking me up in the morning. She has different characters and she's just basically talking in different accents, playing and entertaining me most of the time.

What can the Wellness Force community do to support you to get in this real conversation like they've been involved in today, with us around doing things that matter to them on a fundamental and on a moral level, but also taking care of their body. Body. What does that look like for them and how can we support Neurohacker?

Three things that come to mind. First is go to neurohacker.com check it out, read about it, see if you are interested. If the product that we currently have is interesting for you, try it, give us feedback. If it is positive for you, share it with people. That's awesome. It is a first product. We have many more products this year that are coming out and then a lot of things that are going to test take more years and a lot of research and development to be able to generate. But our goal is ultimately developing everything that is most leveraged and meaningful for mind brain optimization. It's a huge task. We need a lot of support in it and actually engaging with the current offerings is one of the things that Helps us to grow. So I would say check it out. If it's useful to you, awesome. If it is not a right fit for you product wise, but you still are interested in what we're doing and just kind of of follow the information. Awesome. So that's one way. Another way is since our goals are ultimately, you know, we. There's one meta imperative that we all share, which is how do we optimize the quality of life for all life. Right? We all share elements of that. So upregulate how you do your part of that and that helps synergistically with everything that we care about and that we're doing. Doing. Third thing I would say is if you are specifically interested in the future of human capacity, human wellness, psychiatry, psychology, biology, and the extended future of civilization projects that we're working on and you have resources that you'd like to add to that, whether it's scientific capacities or specific business or organizational skills or resources of some kind. Contact.

My last question for you is really profound because you have such a depth in your life. You've come from a place where you were meditating as a kid and you've created so much and what you're doing with Neurohacker I so connect with. But with all that said, I mean, what is wellness to you? How would you define wellness in your life?

As we were mentioning earlier, our direct personal experience is intrinsically valuable independent of anything that it affects. Right? The universe is experiencing itself through our experience of it. And so wellness is the depth and the choice and the profundity and the beauty of our experience that's part of it. And what we do that affects the experience of everyone else, everything else is also fundamentally part of wellness of the whole that we are inextricably interconnected with. So optimized human wellness is both depth of experience and depth of meaningful contribution. Capacity and orientation for meaningful contribution.

That was definitely the most unique answer I've ever heard. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I know that we're gonna have a ton of questions about this. The links from today are gonna be at WellnessForce. Qualia, you've also given us 10% off this incredible product. So I know people are gonna go and pick this up to not have it be the golden ticket, but to have it support all those systems that can allow us to find whatever ticket we want. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. This was fun. And thanks for coming in for what you do, for educating and supporting and empowering your community.

You made it to the end of the episode and that is a great thing because I'm going to share with you personally how much this interview and Qualia have impacted me so far in 2017.

I also want to give you a.

Few key takeaways from the show. If you're listening on your phone, just tap the show artwork and you'll be able to go right to Wellness Forces. That is where we're going to have all the links and downloads and the directions for your n equals 1 experiment with qualia in the Show Notes page. If you just want to begin today, you can go directly to neurohacker.com that is n e u R O H A C k e r neurohacker.com Enter code WF10 and start the process it's no surprise that all human problems, including stress and overwhelm and anxiety or disease are universal. Whether you live in San Diego, San Antonio, Delaware or even France, I think it's safe to say that our current industrialized society does not come without a bombardment of notifications, tasks and calendar appointments. I think you can relate when I say that in 2016 especially, I found myself becoming more of a slave to my phone than a master. I even started to notice it with my friends where they'd be looking down at their phone as I was speaking to them. And I know you know how that feels because it sucks when someone's not fully present. So beyond the cognitive effects I talked about on the show, after taking Qualia now for almost three months, I can share with you that I just feel more present in the moment. And that is something that can't always be quantified. It can only be felt. So if what we talked about on the show today inspired you to give it a shot in your own N1 experiment, head over to the Show Notes page and give Qualia a month test drive to see how your mind and body and emotional bandwidth will improve. When you're done, shoot me an email or even during the process, message me josh wellnessforce.com let me know how the journey is unfolding. Be sure to use your discount code WF10. That's WF10 to save you a nice.

Chunk of money on the Qualia as well.

So the top two takeaways from today's show. The first one that hit me the most was from Daniel where he mentioned a fully optimized human being being will lead to a better world.

Yes, it's true. If you're walking around stressed or with.

Brain fog or overwhelm, it's going to be more difficult to treat other people as you want them to treat you. So by seeking your own optimization and empowering your own wellness, you're actually giving gifts to the people around you. And next was curiosity. I mentioned on the show how I've been insatiably curious for most of my life, specifically with this podcast. I think my curiosity drives all the questions where I dig. So staying connected to that curiosity, that fundamental spark in all of us from when you were a kid to this very moment has been such a force of wellness in life. So do not lose that curiosity spark. The next time you're feeling curious about something, dive in. This is your sign. So now there's one thing left to do when you turn off the episode and step into life, and that is to go out and create an amazing day for you and the people you care about. So until I see you again real soon, soon, I'm wishing you love and wellness.