Nootropics Masterclass: New Brain/Body Science Makes You Healthy At Any Age

Nootropics can be a bridge to going, oh, I have more cognitive bandwidth than I thought. I have more opportunity to laterally think, to be creative.

How do we use this leverage for cognition to not just become emotionally resilient, but to become spiritually resilient as well, like what happened for you with the death of your wife.

The way that nootropics work is they get into your bloodstream, they affect some of the neurochemicals that are available in your gut. Often serotonin is the biggest one, 95 of it's made in the gut. And then you've got, you know, adrenaline, you've got dopamine, you've got the blood brain barrier that protects you from toxins. And then they activate certain neurochemical processes in the brain. And they also provide the raw products so that your brain can actually create the neurochemicals necessary as well as doing this really, really important thing, neurogenesis. This is the blooming and creation of new neurons. I had a bunch of opportunities when we became this company to get a big payoff and walk away. And Matt said to me, do you want to sell your company? And I said, no, I want to go change the world. He goes, you're one of us. I've got an infinite horizon on this technology. I just discovered a handful of new molecules I'm going to be incorporating asap. And our research continues to get deeper and deeper because we want everyone in the universe to have biological optimization as an option for them.

Thank you for being here, man.

Thank you.

This. We've been marinating on this.

Well, and. And, yeah. And. And the thing is, we were just talking about this, like, heart chakras right now are just lit up. So. And I think it's really important to be able to get to a point where. Right. Where that flow is happening.

Yeah.

So wherever we go, I can't. I just can't wait.

We're gonna go to some cool places. I can already tell. We were talking about Iowa. Is that your hometown, by the way?

It is now. Yeah. I'm actually. No, I'm from Vancouver, Washington.

That's right.

Right across from Portland, Oregon.

Yes. Yes. And a st. Force. We're not going to have time today to go into your whole life story, but we do have another episode where he talked about it.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, y', all, if you're watching on YouTube, it's linked below and also wherever you're listening, Mark, I am so fascinated with nootropics and enhancing the brain. My. My paternal side. And My maternal side both had neurodegeneration.

Okay. Oh, wow. Okay.

Alzheimer's, things like that. And so today I really wanted to dive into a master class of nootropics. Now, some people call it nootropics. I know.

Yeah, yeah.

Some people call it nootropics. But I found that this was really interesting, and I'm sure you've heard this, but for the audience that has no idea about etymology behind these words, and I love it, you know, the history of words and vibration. We were talking about, like, how whatever we say infuses into what's around us. The water, the parota table.

Yeah. Get this.

I wonder what you feel about this. Nootropics consists of two Greek words. Noose, which means thinking, and. And tropine, which means to guide.

Yes.

So I think that's really interesting because there's. There's a misnomer about nootropics. Some people think it's like Bradley Cooper Pell.

Right. Way.

Maybe it could be like that. But when you get hit with that etymology, what do you feel? Especially with your career?

Oh, absolutely. I, you know, so, you know, we. We won't get into the playing tennis on mushrooms bit. I think we did that. I think we did that in the last episode. Yes, but, but anybody that's done psilocybin at any level or had any kind of a. Of, of an, you know, that kind of an experience. Right, right, yeah. Knows that there is. There is a shift from me trying, you know, my executive function trying to control me and letting loose of it so that something greater can occur, or anybody that's had a great spiritual experience or has done ayahuasca or any of those things. Nootropics can be a bridge to that kind of an environment. So. And what I mean isn't the euphoria necessarily. It isn't the, you know, out of body experience. It's not the loss of ego. It's not those things. But it is, again, a bridge to going, oh, I have more cognitive bandwidth than I thought. I have more capacity to deal with cognitive load than I thought. I have more opportunity to laterally think, to be creative, to explore some of the things instead of that shrinking in of our stuff. And as you're like, I'm 62 now, so as I've aged, right. There's. I've. I've been more and more open to things, but I didn't see that necessarily in my father. I didn't see it in other people. Although my dad was pretty damn cool. I think I mentioned before we started, my dad was a Trappist monk.

Yes.

So, yes, from 15 to 18, he was in a monastery. No speaking, wake up at 4am, sing Gregorian chants, go do your work. Whatever the work was. Yeah, yeah. And then he left the monastery and became a Golden Gloves boxer. And as my mother likes to say, your dad wanted to be a priest, and instead I made him a father. Boom. Right? Wow. Great, great Catholic joke where, you know, those you out there.

Hey, look, the thing that fascinates me the most about you is you've been through so much, and we're not going to have time to go into it too much on this episode, but gosh, man, I. I think about my own journey in life and what I've been through, and then I compare and contrast to, like, your story. To be able to create what you've created with what you've also had to overcome, whether you call it Dharma or some kind of celestial contract that brought you here, it's incredible. I'll just. I'll just say that straight up. So. So here's the big question. Right.

Yeah.

How do we use this leverage for cognition, which is essentially what you put words on with nootropics.

Absolutely.

In order to not just become emotionally resilient, but to become spiritually resilient as well. Because sometimes when things happen, like what happened for you with the death of your wife and just lots of things that have occurred, I just don't see how we can operate in this world from a place of being wounded or traumatized without getting some kind of supplementation, some kind of scaffolding to help us move forward in our lives. And I'm sure we talked about this already about a year ago. I am sure that's why you part and parcel. You founded Neutopia. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Absolutely. So. And that's great. What a great lead in the big issue for me or that. That I wanted to address as. As you know, when Tish committed suicide on oxycodone, oxycontin, it was a. Obviously, it was pretty brutal. In fact, here's a special thing. Over here in the corner is a guy named David McGinnis. When that occurred, I'm watching her body like she's in the master bedroom. The emergency crew has rolled her onto her back. We didn't know how long she had been dead. They figure about 40 minutes. And the emergency guy's looking at me saying, I've got this big needle, six inch needle, and I'm going to put it through her heart, if you're okay with that. And we're going to resuscitate her. She's an organ donor. Okay. And all I could do was grab my BlackBerry and tweet. I think it was maybe a private tweet. And David immediately responded and said, brother, I got you. We don't necessarily know if anybody's out there that's going to provide a softer landing. And you don't know what karmic credits you may have built up. Sure. Right.

It's a mystery, man.

Exactly.

It really is.

And it just so happened that this guy was there going, I got your. And it was really a blessing. And so he flew his jet down and we moved up north to where he was. And it just made a real blessing out of what could have been a curse. But what it put me into a mode of is what were the attributes that make addiction so powerful? Such a powerful. You know, we become slaves to it. Right. And I have a family member who was a heroin addict for, well, gosh, going on 50 years. 60. 50 years. Yeah. And so I got to see that. Like, I got to be. As a. As a little kid. As a young child, just going into youth, she asked me to close the door and kind of monitor the door while she wrapped a tube around her arm and heated up some heroin in a spoon and injected that. So when you see that, it changes your perspective on life, on not just what's possible, but the depth of hell that people can go into thinking that that's how they're going to make it through the next day. So here we are in blaine, washington. We moved from a town From Portland, Oregon, two and a half million people, to a town of 4,500, a third of them being cops, because it's right on the border of the canadian border in washington. And it was just starting to build prototypes going, hold it. There's got to be. What is the release factor? What's the thing that's going to get you out? And I didn't think. And this is. By the way, this is not a jab at all on aa, But I didn't think it was repeating your trauma to a group of people over and over and over. I thought it was maybe having that experience, like a timeline therapy or. Right. Or working with somebody does tapping really well, or those that might be valuable. I didn't know how valuable at the time because I'd seen. I'd been to therapists and I'd spent some time in therapy, and I'd seen family members and friends in therapy. But I didn't see a lot of deeply experiential outcome. A lot of times I saw reinforcement, almost an ego reinforcement of the event. And it more defined them rather than became something in the past that they.

And it almost. It's what they identify with on an unconscious level. So it's like, I'm an overcomer. I'm a cancer survivor. I'm a this, that.

Right.

And that somehow gets embedded in the psyche and then it works against the human.

Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you repeat that story, there are people on their deathbed that are repeating the story from when they were 13 and they were sexually abused or they did, you know, a bad drug trip or whatever.

Yeah.

And that's, you know, that follows them throughout. Hunter S. Thompson didn't even do that, man. And he of all people would have had. Right. So. So that was the thing. And then it was. I had enough of a. Of a chemistry background to be able to start taking individual components, individual things that would affect your neurochemical development, and started to build stacks on that started with pyroglutamic acid, pyroglutamate and pyro. And it's like 6 grams of that a night. And then magnesium and potassium gluconate and started to work with these different components. And then you start to get like a little. You kind of measure your cognitive output the next morning and look at how long that would last. And what I realized that, you know, the first formulations were. Hold it. These actually help me sleep. So they must be doing a cognitive load. Right. But when I come out of it at 7 or 8 in the morning, I feel great for about three hours and then it falls off a cliff. And then I've got to find a way to reboot it. But if I can't take that same thing again, because a cognitive load would make me feel like I've just eaten a humongous lunch and I need to go take a cat nap. Right. The way that nootropics work is a couple of things, as David will say, is they navigate the. They get into your bloodstream. They work with, you know, you talk about gut brain axis, right. Is they affect some of the neurochemicals that are available in your gut. Often serotonin is the biggest one. 90 to 95 of it's made in the gut. And then you've got, you know, adrenaline, right. Norepinephrine, you've got dopamine, you've got all of these different components. You've Got the. The blood brain barrier that protects you from toxins is supposed to protect you from toxins. And then they activate certain neurochemical processes in the brain. And they also provide the raw products so that your brain can actually create the neurochemicals necessary as well as doing this really, really important thing. It's probably the most fundamentally powerful thing. Especially we talked earlier a little tiny bit. We barely touched on neurodegenerative disease and family and genetics. And those things is neurogenesis. And neurogenesis is the blooming and creation of new neurons. So if you can facilitate neurogenesis so that you're not stuck with old dying neurons or ones that are damaged, and you can also get rid of the detritus, the crap that builds up in your brain every day from, you know, whether it's from poor liver, liver function is what they've now discovered is the basis for tau and beta amyloid proteins, the things that create neurodegenerative disease. The two of the key ones of the proteins that build up and cause synaptic decay, as well as a gap between the synapse, basically an insulating layer between the synapses so that neurochemicals can't flow. It's insulation between the two electrical probes. To a certain extent, those are a byproduct of poor liver function, poor kidney function, and the buildup. So that's after 16 years of Alzheimer's research that was suddenly bad research and a path that they were going down saying, oh, we have to get rid of beta amyloid proteins and tau proteins in the brain. No, you need to improve your liver function.

And also, this is about oxygen delivery as well. This is the thing with glucose and oxygen. If my brain isn't getting enough oxygen, if I literally don't have a fire where I'm thinking, then I can't think anymore.

Right.

And I think this is maybe what people get wrong about nootropics is like, oh, I'm going to turn into this like limitless person and I'm going to be able to be cracked out all day and like, do all these crazy things. No, I think what, what they do for me is they give me this ability to, to hyper focus on something and avoid distraction. And I can almost feel like maybe there's a fireplace in my brain that's burning. And it's burning because this is what. And we're linking this on screen right now so y' all can look at this. An NIH study was done about nootropics, and it was about not acting directly by releasing neurotransmitters, but improving the brain's supply of glucose and oxygen, an anti hypoxic effect, and protect brain tissue from neurotoxicity. So you said it in many different words, but really what we're looking at here is how do we get oxygen shuttled to the brain. That's a big portion of the nootropic conversation that I think maybe people don't even understand.

So this is, this is a combination of, it's called metal reboot. This is AM and pm. This is a new packaging. We're doing a special packaging for a limited time only. But, but when I developed this, what happened was, and this is like when you're talking about nootropics and you're talking about increasing blood oxygen, increasing glucose spend or ketone spend in the brain. And they've measured it and they go. The critical caloric burn, which is about 20 to 21% in the brain, doesn't raise when you're doing nootropics. But what does happen is mitochondrial activity dramatically increases. So, and so you get short chain fatty acids that are burning, but you also have this glucose span that you need to actually work with. Too much glucose, bad, too little glucose. Can't think. So there's a balance there. And then you can also supplement with ketones. So quasi ketogenic process, like you can do ketone salts or ketone acids.

You don't have any. Utopia doesn't have any ketones, do you?

Yeah, yeah, we, we use it actually in a couple of our products. Oh, you use ketone salts? Yeah. And now we're getting into ketone acids and we're getting into ketone minerals.

Yeah.

What we found was that you can live on the glucose spikes and the oxygen spikes and you can do that, but you also have the cyclical issues around that. Or, or you can start with glucose, you can supplement with a ketone level. Right. Exogenous ketones, and you can bring it up at a nice smooth level and then you, the, it smooths out the waveform so you get the performance without the peaks and valleys. So pretty important.

You know, one of the things I was feeling into this morning is, you know, I have been going through a lot of personal stress just on a real level. So one thing that I really value is integrity and authenticity. So I'm just going to fucking go for it. And so Carrie and I have been going through the demise of being new parents. And My son is 2.3 years old. My daughter's almost 6 months old. So sleep deprivation, learning about new boundaries, understanding the death and rebirth of a man and a woman in a relationship. I mean, you name it, we're there. And so what I've really been cognizant of is the impact on my personal life, to my dream, to my vision, to my career.

Yeah.

And so even this morning, like, we had an argument this morning, and I'm just thinking, like, huh, what would love do now? Like, what would love actually do now? Not just in some fabricated way, but what would love truly do now? Well, love would first fill up itself with love.

Right.

So I came here, I did some red light, I did some breath work, I drank some water, and I took some call of genius.

Nice.

And then I also had. I took one of the brain flows in the morning. Oh, no, the mental reboot. Oh, yeah, yeah, I tried a mental reboot this morning.

Perfect.

And so I'm like, okay, I have all these tools, and I've designed my life in a way where there's scaffolding around me, where I can fill myself up with love, then I can actually be here for you. But if I choose, and I can be there for her, so I can send a text, I can get on a phone call where I'm just like, hey, you know, I'm really sorry for what I said, or I'm really sorry for what I did and, like, truly own it. That kind of emotional resilience that I guess you could say adaptation or behavioral flexibility, it can only occur once I've satisfied my physiology first. If I haven't satisfied, satisfied my physiology, it's almost going to be impossible for me to show up in a more loving way. And this is just real shit. I mean, all couples go through this. Yes, all human beings go through this when we approach levels of growth. What do you make of this? If you could encapsulate this in a maybe a longer, more unpacked version. When we start taking care of our physiology, when we start supporting our physiology, what have you personally felt and what do thousands of people that are taking the products feel in their ability to actually be loving, be more present and be more, I guess you could say, connected to the people they love. Starting with themselves. When we take care of the physiology first.

Right. It's that. It's the. The oxygen mask in the airplane. We've all heard the metaphor, right? That's it.

That's it.

You put it on first, and then you take care of your kid that's sitting next to you.

I always find it hilarious. That they have to remind us about that.

Right. Really?

Like, have y' all forgotten?

Have you guys passed out as you're getting your kid taken care of?

Yeah, I guess.

And it is really important. And I. I think filling that vessel is such a key. And we don't learn it because. Because we're told that you have to be all giving in order to make the relationship work. And those things. And relationships go through. Gosh, I know this one intimately. Relationships go through these phases, as do marriages or coupling go through these phases. And most people can't navigate that. We don't teach it very well, especially domestically. It's not a part of our culture.

Well, it's just been modeled from parental example and then imprinted unconsciously. And we pretend like it isn't, but we actually are just a product of our environment unless we become more conscious.

My dad told me in. In. In 2000, we were having a family get together, and my dad said. I said, dad, what are the biggest, you know, what's the biggest mistake you made? He goes, I made two big mistakes in my life. He goes, you know, two ones that were life altering. And he said, the first one was, I let your mother divorce me. This is back in 72, I think. 71. 71. And. And he goes, you know, we were. We were still in love. We, you know, there was just an event, a family event that was. They couldn't. Didn't know how to navigate it. They didn't have the tools to navigate it. Yeah. He goes, that was the first one because that changed everything. And the second was, I. Once I had enough money, I quit, I retired. And he goes, you need to have purpose. And the purpose has to be beyond the 18th hole at the golf club and the tennis court and pickleball, you know, before he passed away at pickleball.

Hmm.

You have to have purpose. And he goes, you can make your family purpose. That's a. That's not a bad one. But having a bigger purpose, where you're making a greater impact and you're responsible to get up every day and go do something meaningful. He goes, that's. That's something.

I heard a quote once, A man will crawl through broken glass naked if you give him purpose.

Absolutely.

It's so true.

Absolutely.

It's so true. As entrepreneurs, I'm sure it's for women as well, but I'm. I'm a man, so I'm speaking to another man.

Right, right, right.

Well, I will crawl through broken glass for my purpose.

You know, when I. I'm Sitting at this incredibly beautiful table in a environment that just sparks love that and. And creativity and, you know, everything. I. I could work in this environment. Outside of the natural daylight stuff. I could work in this environment and be so have. My output would be so high. Because this environment says including. Including saging before we started.

That's right.

That's right. I mean, everything is just so great. And most people don't orchestrate their life like that. Most people miss it because they're just trying to. They're just trying to keep up and they're just. Because they don't have the surplus, the cognitive and spiritual surplus, to be able to reflect on and look at their life.

Cognitive and spiritual surplus? You mean capacity to feel and think.

And be in act above and beyond survival.

Yes.

We're all living at Maslow's lowest level and we're spiking above that. But we're all. We're also going down to that level on a regular basis. When relationships start to fail, you start looking at and go, oh, I'm operating from lack. I'm operating from Maslow's lowest level. I'm in survival mode. You get beyond that. You just look at each other and you get beyond that. You go, you know what? Our lives rock and what the hell are we doing? We're beating each other up because it's only peddly little bullshit.

Yeah.

And then also reframing because so many of the characteristics of our lives are in flux. And rather than adapt to that flux and to accept it and. And actually to use it as a boomerang right. To the next thing we want to do, we end up fighting it and getting into this, you know, and. Right.

It's so true.

So we're living in this. This cognitive overhead that we've of. Of our own making, our own creation.

Dude, I love how you said surplus. Can you talk to that a little bit?

Yeah.

Surplus. The capacity is really what we're all wanting.

Right.

But we can't get it just through stimulation.

There's a smarter way. We'll burn it up in stimulation.

We'll eat it up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We. You have to have. So. So I was hypothyroid, like radically. I'm. I'm actually clinically hypothyroid. Okay. So I do. I do organic desiccated thyroid every day. Right. Just a little bit. 120 milligrams a day. And it's a life changer. So in 1993, I was literally at the point of. Don't put A gun in front of me because I'll use it. I was that burned out. I was running multiple companies, and I was successful, but not in the ways that are meaningful. And I go to this bed and breakfast, and the NDMD that owned it just looked at me and he said, and I didn't know him from Adam, and he just held my hand, and he said, tell me something. Your hands are kind of cold. It was a beautiful April afternoon. And he goes, your eyes are a little bit bloodshot. Are you okay? Everything okay? Asked me, like, 20 questions, innocuous. I didn't get it. I didn't realize that he was reading me right. He saw the tea leaves, and he goes, ah, that's where you're at. And he said, you know, I think he might be a little bit hypothyroid. Would you be willing to try some stuff? And he did two things that changed my life. He put me on an EWAT system exercise with oxygen therapy, where I was on a treadmill breathing pure oxygen for 30 minutes, and a sore opened up in my lat and it bled out, this clear fluid. And he sampled it, and he sent it away to a lab, and it came back. And it was a very high concentration of Accutane, a drug I had been on in the military a decade prior. And for six months I'd been on it, and then a year worth total. And that drug was embedded in me as an athlete and a performance athlete. It was embedded me that whole time.

Was it just, like, stuck in the deep fat, like the brown fat?

No, it was stuck in the muscle fiber and the fascia.

That's so wild, right?

And anybody that knows Accutane will. Will go, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's bad. It's pro tumor. It's pro cancer. You got to sign off a thing. And I was. Again, I was in the military. They were looking for people to try it. I had cystic acne, and. And I was working in an oily, dirty environment in central California. So I was a perfect test case. And I was bodybuilding at the time, So I was 215, and, you know, 10%, 8% body fat. And so it was, you know, I was perfect. I would go to San Francisco every two weeks to the Presidio. Right. Right by the bridge was where the military base was. And they would all these samples, hair sample and stuff. And anyhow, so here we are ten years later, and that comes out of my system. And the other thing he did was he got me on desiccated thyroid at the Time. And six months later, I was an indomitable beast. I could do anything. I went from literally not wanting to get up the next day to feeling so happy and delighted about life. My wife and I, our relationship restored itself in a way that I couldn't imagine. We had our first child, you know, after that. And though I didn't navigate my entrepreneurial life as well as I could have or should have, I'm a serial entrepreneur. High distraction. Let me do something new. It's the longest I've ever done anything, you know, in this company, 2008 to now, and continuing on, because I have an infinite desire to see people's lives impacted.

Well, plus, there's just an infinite supply of people that need support.

Oh, my God.

I mean, come on. Globally and mental. Mental health and this surplus of cognition that you're talking about, plus our phones attacking our decision fatigue every single day.

AB decision fatigue.

There's an unlimited amount of people to.

Help Switching cost is real. Learn to master switching. Right. Task switching, life switching, emotional switching. Learn to master that. Learn to not have to do that as much as possible as well. Right. Keep. Put yourself in an environment where you can do that. They were talking about Elon Musk. I was listening to Lex's podcast the other day, and he had an interview with who's the author that just did the book on him. Same guy that did Steve Jobs bio. And he was talking about how Elon Musk does task switching. So he works intense on a problem or an issue, and then he takes a break playing a game or something that is fun for him or a conversation with somebody really brilliant that challenges him, and then that refreshes him, that reboots him, and then he goes into another task. Because when you're managing as many moving parts as he is, that's how you do it. And that's a great example. Now he says when people say, gosh, I wish I was you, he goes, no, you don't. You would never want to be me, because I live a hell of solving a problem and trying to get away from the ones that follow me around.

It's like putting on fires every day, all day long.

All day long. All fires. Fires, fires. And they're big.

They're not, you know, they burn the building down. Correct.

And they affect the lives of. Of tens of thousands of people of. Of your employees.

There's so much pressure for one human being.

Oh, my God. That's why, you know, there's a. There's a great podcast called mfm My First Million and the two guys on IT have sold their companies to fairly good companies. One to HubSpot and one to Twitch and super cool guys. They're. They're, you know, young and ambitious and everything, and they talk about business in a different frame than I've experienced because I'm not an opportunist. I'm an entrepreneur. I like to create value, scale the value, and then find somebody that's better, you know, better at managing that value than I am or. Or that business or has the. The second vision for that. I love making cool stuff, so I'm a. I'm a product guy. I love making cool products. I like making them beautiful, if possible. You know, I want the. I want every. I want every interface with this to be an experience. No, it's.

It's your expression of art.

Yeah, exactly. It is. Art needs no justification. So I just do art that is experiential, that hopefully will change, make an impact on you in a positive way. And. And then I want to help fill in the blanks with brilliant people that do stuff, like my partners, you know, Matt and Wade and. And all of the people you talked about, Justina and.

Yeah.

Nuria and Vita and. And all we have and Joey and. I mean, I could go on and on and on. There's not a person in our company that I can't, you know, give a high five to and bow before for their.

All right, you got to play this clip at your next all Hands meeting then. So let's. Let's. Thinking of task switching, switching. Let's go back to the beginning of this podcast where I was really feeling like what's most important is that first, people are aware. You know, the temple at the Apollo. Know thyself.

Yes.

You're aware. Then you get intelligent, you become conscious, and then you take inspired action when you. We can't do any of that unless we're.

I love that.

Unless we're aware first.

How did you write that? Better than I could have ever. This is so good. I love it.

I mean, keep going, brother. It could be part and parcel. The Nootropics.

Is that it?

And also just my own journey. Blend those two things together. Let's make it actually more simplistic and maybe a little bit more mechanical for them.

You want a guide?

Let's do a guide, but let's do it in a specific way. So one thing that's on the screen right now is a study about the top five neurotransmitters from a clinical neurologist perspective.

Perfect.

And what he said was, and these are on the screen for y' all with us on YouTube. Acetylcholine, thinking and learning associated with Alzheimer's disease. Dopamine, associated with Parkinson's disease. Y glutamate, allows chemical messages to be carried from nerve cell to nerve cell. And then gaba, which relates to epilepsy, Epilepsy and seizures. And then serotonin, obviously the major cause. I love depression. Let's go into this.

These are my favorite.

Let's go into these one by one, and let's talk about how we can identify we're in. When we're in deficiency. And then also let's talk about that scaffolding where earlier I asked you, like, hey, if we take care of the physiology, AKA my fight with my lady this morning.

Right.

Then I can actually be more loving, be more present, because I've tended to my own physiology. So let's identify the ways that we're out of alignment from a neurological standpoint with these, and then let's go into the actual ways that nootropics can support those pieces of us. I think this is what people need the most, Mark.

Oh, I agree. And thank you so much for pulling it into this direction. I love that. I love. And I really appreciate it.

You're welcome. Yeah.

One of the reasons I consider you one of the best podcasters in the industry, so. And I don't say that to blow smoke up your butt. I think I said that earlier. Thank you. It's really is because you have a passion, you're curious, you're interested, you. You actually do research. You give a shit about the subject matter.

No. Yeah. I want to live my life well. That's the whole message of us being here. That's the whole company mission. How do we live our life?

Well.

Well, we have to ask good questions.

Yeah, yeah. No, no. And there's very few that actually know how to do that and. And have it. It seems to be an organic part of your nature, so that's great. It doesn't feel contrived. It's not.

No. I. I just want to know.

We talked about Charlie Rose. You know, one of my favorite. You know, when I was younger, Charlie Rose was the guide for that. So acetylcholine, one of my faves, obviously, is somebody that. That. That spends a lot of time in cognitive. I just. We just did a Q3 roundup in our company. In the Q3 roundup, we all kind of presented some of the things that are going on. I did a walkthrough with my camera of our. We got a 24,000 square foot lab in Burlington, Iowa that I run. And so I'm doing a walkthrough of that and I'm showing the robotics that we're making that makes the weird capsules that we make. I'm showing our lab tech team going through documentation and research stuff and compiling it and getting it. To me, our prototyping, all of the different. We have 1850 plus raws that increase by 20 to 50 a week. So we're constantly dealing with brand new raw ingredients. How do they apply? How do we use them? What's the best tactic? Do we even want to use them? Like, what does the research say and how can we best leverage that? And then. And our roboticist, Charles, incredible Mr. Robot we call him, and he's just a badass. And then Chastity, who does all the flavoring and she manages everything, every moving part in that facility she manages. She knows exactly what's going on as well as in the other, you know, like a label requirement or another thing that is thousands of miles from her. But she knows that it needs to be.

These are all heavy processing tasks.

Heavy, heavy processing.

So super detail oriented.

Yes, exactly. And you have to recall and you have to be able to go, you. You can't have a 3:00am Oh, I forgot that. You've got to get it before that 3:00am yeah, right. So you've got to be. Gotta be aware. So acetylcholine is this master neurochemical that basically has. It has a high velocity between the synapse, it has a high electrical potential between the synapse. And if you don't have the potential, then it won't jump the gap, it won't cross the chasm, and you won't get the thought. And that's where you start getting verbal loss. Right? We talk about verbal fluency being a key aspect of great podcasting.

So, like, Joe Biden definitely has an acetylcholine issue for sure.

Major.

Where he's talking about tennis courts and shopping carts and little kids and his wife and a Corvette all in the same sentence. I'm like, you're not making any sense, dude. What is going on with your brain?

We need to use him as, as the combination of ADHD and dementia. Right. That compound.

Holy schnikes. So he's definitely got an acetylcholine issue.

He does. He has a SEAL choline issue. He has a dopamine issue as well. So those are very evident from him. He has no serotonin issue. From what I can tell, he's inherently a happy guy. But happy and dumb is not a good leadership characteristic.

Not for the leader of the free world.

No. No. Yeah. No, no. It was great for Chauncey Gardner in the classic movie, but we'll cover that later. So it was Peter Sellers in Being There, a great movie. I suggest you and your sweetheart sit down on that one.

I love how you can just pull movies. That literally reminds me of. There's so many scenes in Limitless that I love.

Yes.

But he goes, and he's talking to this landlord and he looks at a book in her book, and then he remembers a formulation and he takes it back and, like, creates wealth from it and productivity. That's what you do with movies. Do you find that there's, like, a big surplus of movies in you?

There is a. There is. Here's the thing is, I believe that it started with music, and it still is in music. Is. There's not been a. An emotional state or a life state of man that hasn't been articulated well by some brilliant songwriter and.

Yeah, right.

Yeah. And so, you know, it started when I was really young. It was Neil diamond and then Elton John and then it was Zeppelin, and it was. Yes. And Russian and Genesis and Peter Gabriel and, you know, so. And I think that. I think that they give us. They give us the language to use in the construction of our lives. Right. Yeah.

A language that we all understand through just harmony, music and sound.

Yeah. It just. You pick up a note and you go, you know, from Kurt Smith from Tears for Fears, and you go, huh? And that, that, that. We call it surprising. Broca. Bro. Broca's area of the brain. Right. This is rising broke. You go, what's that?

Yeah, yeah.

It's really important. So acetylcholine is super important, but with every neurotransmitter, as well as every nutrient in the body, every component, you have too little. Just the Right. The Goldilocks.

Yeah.

And too much. When acetylcholine becomes too much, you get a foggy brain. You get irritable. You can't make connections because it's overpowering the neurotransmitters. And they just, you know, where the hell do I route this data? I don't know where to route this data. So it's awful. It's brain fog. And other things come from that. Too little. You can't think. You got no brain power at all. Goldilocks. Perfect. So how do you achieve Goldilocks? What you do is you do a couple of things. One is you have supply and signaling. So give the body the raw components to make acetylcholine and give it a little bit of acetylcholine. One of our favorites is CDP choline. So. And then you have all these raw B vitamins and amino acids to create acetylcholine. And then the other is to do a signaling transfer and go, hey, you've got acetylcholine. Do you want to use it? And so say, oh, great. And then keep the flow steady. How do you keep the flow steady? You use an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor. So the brain has the power to break down the acetylcholine after it's crossed the synapse, and it's made that. That signal transfer so that you now have this memory or recall or. Or memorization. Then it says, okay, that's it. We're done. There's a thing called an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor. There's an enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine in the brain after the event has occurred. But you can also have an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor that tells the enzyme, don't break that down. Can you return that cleanly and use it again? Yes, you can. And so a combination of a little bit of acetylcholine, a little bit of. Or a lot of the precursors to acetylcholine and the signaling, as well as the acetylcholine esterase inhibitor, makes it so that you have this really cool balance, or you can create a really cool balance of acetylcholine in the brain that can last for a long time. So you don't get that cognitive fatigue. You start as. You know, if you've ever talked to somebody that wasn't ready to handle the barrage of information you're going to give them.

Sure.

And they go, josh, you make my head hurts, man. Right, yeah.

Too many questions.

Right, right, right, right. Yeah, dude. That's what I'm here for. Yeah. And so. And when they do that, that's acetylcholine used up. They got none. So one of two things. Give them either an acetylcholine precursor or acetylcholine, or give them an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor before you start so they don't burn through all the acetylcholine during the process.

So then out of my big three, the ones that I love, the Zamner, the collagenius, and maybe it's a combination of the brain Flow and the mental reboot is acetylcholine, a core component of all of those.

Perfect. The, the brain flow and metal reboot. Metal reboot AM is a precursor. So I built the metal reboot series, right, which is two products, a nighttime and a daytime product. The nighttime is a capsule you take. The daytime is a sublingual that you put under your tongue. Right.

Can you take it every day safely?

Absolutely. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do, absolutely. And you'll notice when you don't take it, not because you're going backwards, but because you're not going forwards. Meaning that instead of getting a staged, you start to, you go, okay, I'm plateaued.

Okay.

And yeah, you'll notice that. Now the cool thing is that's an infinite goal. That's an infinite horizon. You can continue to get the cognitive performance increase. And once your brain doesn't have a cognitive load from the detritus that builds up from the natural mitochondrial stuff as well as the liver issues and any toxicity that you might encounter, you can reach a really nice peak point. But again, you go from having 10, 20% jumps to 1 2% jumps to 0.5. Right.

The, the detritus is essentially just waste product. Is that.

Yeah, yeah, it's natural. Whenever carbon dioxide and, and essentially burned fat are the byproduct of short chain fatty acids going through the mitochondria. Going through the membrane, becoming carbon dioxide is one of the outputs. That's how you measure. Right. Performance. When an athlete measures performance, right, they put this mask on you, put you on a treadmill and make you go as hard as you can for, you know, seven or 10 minutes. And you, you measure that and you go, okay, how much carbon dioxide did you expend? That's an indicator of your performance, right? Well, the same thing is happening at a cellular level. So you're having short chain fatty acids going through the membrane of the cell, right. Phosphatidylcholine, or a phospholipid membrane into. There's a dual phospholipid membrane around mitochondria, goes into the mitochondria, it processes into this carbon dioxide, right. And this burned acids and. Or oxidized acids, and then they get out. Those oxidized acids then become kind of shit in your body. And you want to remove those.

Yeah.

So you can remove them by going out and running around the track or taking your bike out or doing some kind of exercise in the gym, those kinds of things. But that again, you're also, you know, as you Go from aerobic to anaerobic, you are increasing the level of those. So you still have to get rid of the problem.

So.

And most of us are not so good at watching our, our whatever, our measuring devices that we use for our athletic performance.

Sure.

To be able to go, I'm right on the verge of anaerobic activity. I'm not going to go into there so that I don't build up this surplus of that thing. And sometimes I can hit, you know, high intensity interval training. You want to get into that state because you're not doing an extended marathon, you're doing a bunch of sprints. And so it's really important to kind of measure that. But, but that those outcomes, you're always going to get that, that excess carbon dioxide and those, you know, those oxidated fats and those. You, you really want to remove those on a regular basis.

And we can't just remove those on a regular basis as well without scaffolding and support, essentially. Because.

Absolutely.

Because of the air we breathe, the food we eat, the, the mental, I guess you could say, stress that we accumulate on a massively regular basis. It's almost like we're carrying around IVs, and every few seconds there's like a little drip of stress. Our ancestors had stress, but it wasn't like ours. Like.

No, we are, we are in chronic.

Stress all the time.

If, if. I don't care what you do, I don't care if you run an ashram, you're in chronic stress.

All right, so the rent is still due at the ashram.

Right? Okay, exactly. The rent.

The rent is still due, man.

Yeah. And there's somebody calling you out, you know, and a me too movement thing. So, so it's, it's super important to be able to be, you know, self aware on those things. Yeah. And. And the thing is, is because it doesn't necessarily hit instantaneously, meaning the buildup of these toxins are happening, but you don't notice when it starts happening. It's the boiling frog theorem.

Sure.

Right. Where it suddenly builds up to the point where you go, holy shit, I feel like crap, I'm not responding well.

And this would essentially be massive brain. Brain fog.

Correct. But it comes on as light brain fog or a missed word or a missed lateral thought. Yeah, those things. And you just go, you kind of write it off. Right.

Okay.

And then eventually. So that's acetylcholine. So acetylcholine is super important. It is what gives us the power to have this conversation all Right. So. And again, you don't want too much. You don't want too little Goldilocks. So.

And it's about supporting the body with the slow release. That's what I learned from you.

Correct.

Slow release. So you're not dumping too much into the system and also not starving it.

And also why oils are so essential. Efa, dha. Right. Epa. Get your, get your really good healthy fats in your body and it'll make a marketed difference.

Avocado olive oil. Omega threes.

Great olive oil.

Yeah.

Right. You know, Brian Johnson right now is doing his, his new olive oil. Just, it's just clean olive oil.

And is Brian Johnson the rite guy, the longevity guy? Oh, the longevity guy.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sold his financial services technology company.

Okay.

Lives in Venice beach. And, you know, he's. I'm going to live to 200 or beyond.

Is there, Is there anything else we should know about acetylcholine? Because I definitely want to spend some time on dopamine. That is a huge one.

Well, it's huge and it's great. The cool thing about dopamine, acetylcholine is, is excellent. But 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. So. 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.

Oh, absolutely, yeah.

Conversations on Instagram.

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, is the, the central cause of that. So on acetylcholine, your brain flow is incredible. For acetylcholine, I recommend taking some oils with it, you know, again, you've got it in. In olive oil is fantastic. And. And you know, I always order extra avocado with everything. Yeah, right.

Yeah.

So. And I, in fact, I wait when I wake up in the morning, outside of the. I make some enzymatic activities and is I always have half an avocado in the morning.

Well, you know what's really cool to mention on that too. And. And there's a study linked in the show notes right now about this. Avocado is actually part of the clean 15. So you can get avocados that aren't perfectly organic.

Yep.

Because that husk on the outside of the avocado is so thick.

Yeah.

Pesticides don't penetrate it.

Right.

So even if it's like, oh, my God, I can't buy organic avocados, it's like you could actually just buy avocados and eat them.

Yeah.

Like, they're fairly safe from the pesticide, so.

Exactly. And if you do tests, like we do, if you do tests on them, you'll find that that's a characteristic. They can be toxic on the outside and pretty clean on the inside.

Totally. So there's always a way we. We get to become resourceful, which really centers around all five of these components in the neurology. But also it's like, what are we really doing here? We're just taking care of our body and our mind so that then we can do the things. Like you said, we have the actual energy that these addicts struggle with so that they don't become blocked by their own physiology, becomes their. Their foe instead of their friend.

Yeah. And it's. It's a very powerful thing. When you go from going, I'm really good at this thing that is a troublemaking thing or. Or a problem. You know, I, I just, I'm a kleptomaniac, so I just got to take shit. Or I'm. I, I like to. With people or whatever happens to be your game that you play. Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

And if you can get it, what you do is you twist that around and you find joy in doing the right thing because you get the feedback loop says that was the right thing. And you got a good result of that.

And the good result, hence being the dopamine that.

Well, dopamine is a. Is a component, a huge component of that you got first is the drive. What's my drive? So if my drive is an unhealthy drive and I switch that into a healthy direction, the cool thing is the unhealthy One, the, the outcome is I didn't get caught. Right, Right.

So that's maybe where the dopamine comes from.

Right?

Thrill of doing.

The thrill of doing it, not getting caught. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's those guys on YouTube, you'll find that, that are driving their supercars around town at 200 miles an hour and they outrun the cops, and that's their right. Imagine the dopamine.

That healthy for you or anyone else?

Not exactly.

Yeah.

So that's, that sucks. If you take that and you go, okay, what would be a selection of positive outcomes? It would be positive for the people around me, positive for myself, positive for the environment, positive for whatever. And how could I feed on that outcome? Dopaminergically. How could I feed on that outcome? And how could I create a support environment for that that would actually create. And that's where you guys, you got the guys that, you know, I, we were talking about. What the hell's the guy's name? Mike the pillow. My pillow guy. Right. His original commercials in late night cable were, hey, my name's Mike and I was a meth addict and now I make pillows. You know, like literally, you know. Right.

Oh my God. I mean, it definitely caught my attention.

Right.

It was a nice pattern interrupt.

Totally. And so, and, but that was, that's the thing. Right, Right. So, so, and you, you know, you, you talk. There's a bunch of these guys. Soft White Underbelly is a great YouTube channel of a guy that. He's a, he's a photographer, like a world class photographer who's worked in Hollywood for years. And he said, huh, I wonder about these street people that I walk by every day going to my studio, started interviewing them, started getting crazier and crazier. And then you get guys like, you know, like, like old mobsters talking about, you know, where the bodies are buried and those things. And he's. And they talk about how the thing that, you know, that got them into prison was an unsustainable lifestyle and that since then they've made it, you know the Milken, right? Michael Milken, he's maybe older than you recognize you, young buck. But, you know, but he, he got in trouble for insider trading and went to prison, got out and said, you know what? I'm really good at making money and I don't have to do that shit. I'm going to go turn. And he got cancer. And he goes, I want to create institutions that solve problems and I know how to make the money part happen. So same thing, same Event, different outcome because focused on good, real easy. So dopamine is a really interesting neurochemical in the fact that. 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 mention 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. And once you know what those are.

Yeah.

Try taking those and delaying them. Delaying that by. 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 a hundred 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, logically, 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 this 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.

So it's pretty cold at the end.

Of that 10 seconds, y'.

All. Oh, yeah, it's pretty.

It's like ice cream.

Cream headache, I was gonna say. Yeah, exactly.

But then when I get out, I feel like a warrior.

I'm just like, yes. And it 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, and so don't mean it's 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 a refractory period after orgasm. So again over, you know, a decade and a half ago I, I did 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 h. Having an orgasm and then having another orgasm five minutes later if I want or an hour, you know, is it was going okay do do do right. So like their wait, wait, wait and instead make it a better orgasm and make the next orgasm faster. Especially if you're in like a mortal orgasmic 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, 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. 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 and enjoying that pain. Right? Embracing the pain. What we don't do like, so I used to lift pretty heavy and, and, and I did endurance bicycle. I did century rides and did a thing called a hood to coast relay in, where we go from Mount Hood in, in Oregon to the coast. It's a relay. So we have 12 of us in a van, two vans, and we would, you know, you're, you're doing a relay so you're running seven, seven to nine mile legs at full speed like a sprinter, right. And then you're getting in a van, you got a massage and then you're going out again a couple hours later. As you know, when you're taking over, you're doing three of those. So you're doing, you're basically doing a marathon, but you're doing it in three legs in a van with a bunch of other people, sweaty people doing the same thing. When you take that. And it was like, how do you reboot your system so that you're always performing at that high level while embracing the pain? And we're not talking like, this is not Goggins. Although Goggins would agree. Right. Is David Goggins is when you, you know, as he says he goes, when you hit the wall, you're at 40% of your potential. So, and that's, I think that's the truth, somewhere between 40 and 60%. When I started doing cognitive analysis of intel engineers years ago when I was doing a first, 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 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 AX, 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 Audi 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 nzt 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, a market. 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. 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. 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.

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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 carboxyl 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, 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 release.

Yep, yep. You don't get release 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. 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 phenyl alanine. 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, or bodybuilders who, right, they're grunting in the gym and they, you know, they've just had their dopamine fix. They've done amyl nitrate into the nose and they've. Yes, right.

Sense smelling and all that.

Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, really intense. So then they, 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 dope being 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.

I'm all in. I think the thing about this that is so fascinating is that all of these components, 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 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 you can't make enormous amounts of money on this anymore, like you could charging $1,000 a pill.

This is not a Martin Shkreli for a Pfizer product. Right, right.

So that's really what we're talking about here. Talk to us about glutamate.

All right, so glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter, and so it's very critical for action. And it. It and noradrenaline, adrenaline. Right. Are closely linked. The. The good part of it is that it wakes you up. If you have good glutamate levels, it wakes you up and makes you hyper vigilant. So you're. You're. For. I'm adhd, as you may or may not have noticed. And so. And so my glutamate activities are fairly high, so I'm always looking at the periphery. I can see things in the back of my head, and I can, you know, I can sense activity going on really great for that. Problem is, is that too much vigilance and that excitatory turns into stress.

Totally. I've experienced that personally.

You know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, absolutely. Hyper vigilance in general.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I think a lot of people deal with that well.

And, and this is. That's a very much an entrepreneurial trait.

It is, yeah.

You're. The vigilance turns into finding possibility and opportunity or putting out fires. Yeah, yeah. And being okay with it. Right, right. Because you're gonna. Okay.

I Put out one, where's the next one?

The reason that most. The reason that many people don't become entrepreneurs is, and they maybe even tried, is that the first time they run into problems where they've got to make payroll and they don't know how to do it, they freak out and go, I give.

This isn't for me.

Yeah. And. And, you know, or any. Or their client doesn't pay them or whatever happens to be doing. Right. Yeah. And so. And for those of us that have gone through that, they've crossed a chasm, they go, oh, the reason that that's good is that it keeps everybody else from doing this thing that I am called to do. Like, I don't do this because I thought it was a great idea to build a bunch of. Of shit, put it in a test tube and sell it to people. That was not my motive at all. My motive was to get people off of addictive stuff and find a solution. And I just happened to notice that. Or my clients, my beta testers said, hey, this really improves my cognitive performance. So if you're addicted, can help you with that. If you're not, can help improve cognitive. Well, that becomes a mission. And then you start realizing spiritually, this is a calling. And then the calling, you know, I can't not do this. How do I not do this? Sure. How do I not impact, you know, in the next conversation, in the next conversation, we'll have, we'll have one about hormones and we'll have one about how you increase. How you, you know, turn that clock back. And how you improve all of the factors, including cognitive health by modulating your hormones. And how do you make it so that muscle mass is easier to go. How do you make it so that your relationship with your sweetheart becomes hotter because you've got more to. To give, you know, Tom Bilyeu 101 type stuff.

Sure. Okay, so talk us back to the glutamate. So with glutamate, it's literally like the messenger packet delivery where one cell can talk to the other.

Correct. And it speeds that up. And it also. And again, the plus side is it makes it so that you get that signaling activity happens faster so you don't have that latency delay between thought and action or thought and resolution. It also has broad spectrum. So it doesn't just. You think about a neuron or a small group of neurons and activating and doing something. This can handle a much larger batch of those, which can be problematic if you're adhd, it can be problematic in that all of them are activating at once and you don't know what direction to go. Instead of somebody that's not ADHD going, oh, that just sped up my ability to go do the thing that I'm supposed to do. So that's good. And then you have agitation at the high end of that, and you also have wakefulness, so that agitation and wakefulness can become problematic. People with high glutamergic. Glutaminergic activity have a hard time sleeping. Their mind races, those kinds of things. Hard to get into meditation when your mind is racing.

What makes us have too high of glutamate and what makes us have too low of glutamate? Is it epigenetic? Expressed?

Part. Part of that, yes. And, and part of it is diet, like bowel flora.

Okay.

Those kinds of things.

Like microbiome diversity.

Absolutely.

Glutamate.

You bet. You bet.

Okay.

And you can also get into very much like cortisol spike is you can get into an adrenal routine. And that routine suddenly drives you, like you need that to feel awake or alive, and then it suddenly puts you into a funk, and then you need it to. And then you're living in this fucking hell of hyper excitivity and death. And hyperexcitivity and death.

I mean, you're kind of describing the 9 to 5 world where people go to a job they hate to then go get drunk at a bar to then go party and watch football on the weekend.

You want to avoid. You want to get yourself out of that cycle.

Yes.

And so, and, and there's a. There's a number of. I mean, there's tons of food that is high in glutamates and that kind of activity, and there's a number of precursors as well. But if we want to talk about how do you manage that or how do you get beyond that, outside of getting your microbiome in balance, GABA is a great companion. Let's go into gaba. So the molecule that helps us to be stable, to be mellow, but not lose our cognitive performance is gaba. And it also increases, I think. You know, we talk about like heart chakra or opening up love.

Definitely.

Right. So GABA is a companion molecule.

I've done the GABA cream or the paste.

Oh, yeah. For sleep. Yeah.

And there was another product. I'm forgetting the name of them right now, but they actually would put GABA on the leads and place it on the neck. And it was like within moments I could feel a total downregulation. Of my whole nervous system. Yes, it's great gaba. GABA is very potent.

GABA is very potent and perfect and that's why it's in. In Zamner. And I don't know if you've ever tried our Gobalicious. If you haven't, I'll send you some.

I would love to try all of these things. GABA is really good because I actually heard, I read that it's safe for children in some doses to do on their neck when they're having trouble sleeping.

Absolutely. In fact, what's really cool is gaba exogenous GABA, meaning externally you take. Right. Internally one is it actually doesn't pass the blood brain barrier no matter what kind of GABA you have. We use a combination of. Of GABA and pharmagaba Pharma. GABA is grown. It's. It's basically harvested out of, grown, grown on some substrates and then. And then taken out through microbial biological activity. So it's really cool. Made by, I think Mitsubishi makes it. Mitsubishi is actually an incredible organic chemistry company.

Wow. I thought they just made the cool little trucks, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

No, no, that's cool. They're great people too. They really, they're really. I just spent some time with them just this last week and. And they're just beautiful people. So. But what it does do is if you have the right components in your, in your gut, it does two things. Vagal nerve signaling to the brain to say, hey, we got some GABA down here. You want to put some GABA up here.

Interesting.

And so you. So then you need the right amino acids that do pass through the blood brain barrier to create GABA up in the brain. And then you need the signaling levels which come from the gut to be high enough to go, hey, let's go do some GABA flood and let's get. Have some B vitamins that are going to, that are going to help the enzymes or the, the amino acids break down into GABA and flow that by the way, GABA and glutamate are partners, so they're not foes. But they are opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how their neurology processes them. So it's really important to have both those. But gaba's really, really critical for being able to make cool decisions under heat of stress.

So confidence and like adaptability to the things that fly at us all day long. If we're low on gaba, that could be a. Because one of the things I'm thinking is out of these five big pieces is like, how does somebody know where they are in what they're depleted from or what they're low, lacking in? And so if I was, like, never able to make a decision under stress, that's probably most likely. It's not medical advice, a GABA issue.

If.

If I could never make a decision.

Yeah. And. And that. It. That it probably some. Some hormone level issues as well.

You could start with the nootropics, and then if those didn't work, then you could go. Or you could do both at the same time.

Yeah, yeah, I. I suggest both the same time. If I would start with nootropics, because you can get that again. You get the clarity right away. Then you can go, okay, what. What underlying conditions am I fighting? Do blood tests, do saliva test, do hair test, do.

Right. There's so many cool tools that we have. I love it.

Oh, it's amazing.

And right now, amazingness.

And it's become. It went from Unobtainium just a few years ago to now, you know, now it's, like, really available.

So it was definitely Unobtainium.

Oh, yeah. What is that? You'd have to know how to find it or you'd have to go to.

Some cave in like Beud or something. That's wild, man. Okay, let's talk. Let's finish up.

Ssri. Serotonin. Serotonin. So we. We think of it as the. Is the happy molecule, right? It's not. Oh, that's a misnomer.

Rock my world right now.

All right. It's a stabilization molecule. It helps to bring your system into a. A, A state that is not cycling heavy. It's not doing this. Now, one of the things you'll hear from people that do SSRIs, often, you know, often what I mean by this is. And again, not medical advice. None of those things. One of the things I. I've heard from many, many customers and clients who were or who have used SSRIs as a way to stabilize their mood is that they also remove their emotions. They blunted their emotions. And that's a byproduct of when you are recycling serotonin, which is selective serotonin. So this type of serotonin. HT2HT1A. Right. If you take the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, if. Instead of transferring, instead of. Of crossing the chasm in a neuron from one to the next, and then the enzyme that dissipates, it says, okay, thank you for that serotonin boost. I just Got. And now I'm going to dissipate that with the enzyme instead. What happens is there's like a calcium ion cloud that surrounds the gap and it signals to the neuron, hey, that serotonin you just gave me, send it back, would you? And. And it recycles. It selective serotonin, the type of serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Instead of bringing it into the new neuron and then dissipating it, it recycles. What happens when you do a reuptake of event when you don't reuptake and you cycle is signaling, says, I got all the serotonin I need. So SSRI is the biggest challenge. And again, I absolutely do not recommend anybody jump off of SSRIs. Find successful ways to and work with your practitioner to supplement and figure out ways to migrate through that and find the solution. Certain people, I mean, Maria Bamford is one of my favorite comedians. She's just a funky, weird, offbeat, and her whole thing is it took me a long time to go from being almost in psychosis to being able to be up here on stage and operate. And she's on three meds and they give her tremors because low dopamine and things like that. So people that are on SSRIs don't jump off. But here's an interesting thing you can do is you start supplementing with the right components. We have a thing called Upbeat, a solution called Upbeat that helps people to naturally increase serotonin levels in their body. And, and what you'll find is if you have the right kind of serotonin available and your body has the signaling molecules to activate that serotonin in the synapse that instead of going through these big swings, you'll raise your baseline of mood to a point where you feel better about what's going on, but without losing the emotional connection. When you have a recycling event that where you're recycling serotonin, that signaling is going to tell your brain, hey, I got all the serotonin I need. And then when it wears off, you're at a depletion of serotonin, you don't feel good. And because that serotonin is recycling like that, you lack the empathetic connection with other people to have that emotional. So, yeah, you don't feel like putting a gun to your head, but you also maybe don't feel genuinely anything.

Yeah, I mean, this is personal to me. I'm going to say this because it's of service to all of us. My mom has been manic Bipolar ever since I was a little kid and she took lithium and I believe still takes a form of it now. And she's got a beautiful heart. I love my mom. She's a wonderful soul. So many great qualities about her. But one thing that breaks my heart is I can tell there's like a gloss where nothing's too high, nothing's too low, which is great for bipolar because that's one of the tendencies as emotional dysregulation, the inability to manage highs and lows, and they get exacerbated because of that. But that's one thing that has, you know, I've really done a lot of work and if I'm being totally honest, which I am, there's still a bit of work for me to do there. My sadness around just people that deal with bipolar because of my experience with my mom.

Sure.

And this, like, kind of gloss blanket that we place over people that really have. If this technology was around when I was young, you know, if that. That's what my hope is with this podcast, if this technology can get to the right hands so that maybe right now, if you're listening or watching your mom, your dad, your grandpa, your sister, your brother, somebody in your life that you love and care about is dealing with really severe issues that could be approached in an intelligent way with their practitioner, with somebody who's, you know, got the legality behind them. And then you listen to this podcast and you start learning about these five neurotransmitters that are so life changing if you supplement them and stack them in the right way. That's my hope, and that's my intention with this podcast, is that people don't have to go through. The suffering that I've gone through, that my mom has gone through, and I've definitely. That you have gone through as well. How can we use this podcast to shorten the suffering curve for so many people that are dealing with this exact issue and issues.

Absolutely. And one of the things you called out, Justina, in a good way from our company, and one of the things that we value. I was going to wear a different shirt today, and it said, I've got gas. Gases give a shit. And I think that one of the things you'll find is that we actually give a shit, we care. And, and I don't say that lightly. I had a bunch of opportunities when we became this company to, to do other, to, to basically get a big payoff and walk away. And Matt said to me, do you want to sell your company? And I Said, no, I want to go change the world. He goes, you're one of us. And I've got an infinite horizon on this technology we have. Again, I just discovered a handful of new molecules I'm going to be incorporating asap. And our research continues to get deeper and deeper because we want to make a monumental impact on every life we touch. And we want everyone in the universe to have biological optimization as an option for them. So let's go back to as we're. You're an individual and you're going, I want that focus, or I want that lateral thinking capacity, that creativity, because I like to. I like to do both of those.

Or I just want clarity when I'm thinking.

Yeah, I would, like, not have a.

By my phone and my calendar and response. I want to be able to just take a deep breath and not be like, if you had too much cups of coffee, you know, you get agitated or you get kind of edgy, or.

If you've done Adderall or if you've done Aderall.

Have you ever been around somebody that's drank like five cups of coffee and not eaten for. For a day, and they're just like, I'm fine.

They're like, you, yeah, I'm fine.

But. So. So we don't want that.

But.

But I really love nootropics in the way where, you know, I let go of coffee a long time ago, and so I only do the mana. The Sheilajit that we tried, and also your products. That's all that I do. Because coffee started to make me feel kind of like an or I would just be like a jerk to the people that I cared about.

Aggressive instead of. We don't want that.

What we want is, like, these lanes of, like, creativity, focus, maybe even euphoria, but definitely productivity, where you and I can connect on a level where there's nothing around us. It's just you and I here.

Exactly.

And I think we want that. And maybe our partners even crave that in the world. And our. Our women, or our. Our men and women, if you're with a man or our businesses, they all want this, but coffee ain't going to do it anymore. You can't get it from just caffeine.

Right.

Why is that?

Well, so because you're. You're jacking up your adrenals, Right? And so if your adrenaline is the main spike with a little bit of dopamine, that's great. If you're in a cage fight, but you're not in a cage fight. We need to have a loving dialogue because we have an issue that we want to address, and maybe that's a third party issue. But because we don't have the same framework to look at it, right, we're suddenly in this, you know, controversial, this really bad conflict state. We don't need to be in that conflict state. What would work better is what if we were both on the same side of the table looking at that problem and what nootropics can do. Especially if you know what your nootropic type is, right, your brain type. Which is why when you go to neutopia, you take a neurochemical analysis. First thing we do, let's just take it, it's quick, it's really just a couple minutes. So let's figure out where you're dominant and where you might have some holes in your neurochemical balance. Then let's take a look at what your age, weight, sex, height, you know, how you train or work out, whichever you do, what your eating habits are, what your diet patterns are, and then from there, what are your goals and you know, what, what supplements do you take? Do you drink alcohol? Do you take bong hits? Do you do acid? What do you, what's your thing that you might do? And then we use all that data and we compare it to millions of data points that we've collected since starting in 2008. And we take that data together and say, oh, here's the profile that fits you. Let's select the products and let's customize those products and optimize those products for your physiology, your neurology, your goals, and let's get you that. And then you work with an app that we provide for you that says, hey, this made me feel this way. I want to feel more this way, or I want to feel more of that. And the next month we customize it to make it even closer to that goal.

But you don't get addicted to these things. They're literally just supporting natural processes that.

Are already occurring anti addictive.

The deal is actually helping people with addiction.

Yes, that right. Because your neurogenesis is doing a rewiring as well. So you create new neural pathways every time you think about a thing. This is why, again, this is why going into a conversation where you're repeating the same shit that you've been through and repeating that reinforcing that is not necessarily a good thing. What if the reframing was this thing happened and you can't believe what amazing things have come out of that? That earlier discussion we just had. And rewiring that now that's the impact. When you think of that quote, unquote traumatic experience, it's now look what cool shit happened as a result of that. Right? I couldn't have gotten there if I couldn't have gone there. If I hadn't had that experience, if I hadn't had that quote unquote shitty experience, then I couldn't have had this awesome experience as an outcome. The people you meet, the events that happen. Right. The outcomes, the handout, any of those are a direct result of these things that we can't predict in our life. When we start reframing our life going, hold it, I'm not a victim of my life. I'm a contributing factor. And I get to have. And I don't even understand the spiritual components that I'm exploring that give me an opportunity to see life through a new lens. If I hadn't done that, I'd be a kid on the street right now. The way that the nootropics came is, of course, how do I be, how do I help people beat addiction? And how do I get. And that first thing was addiction is a byproduct of both bio neurochemical processes and repeated systems. Right.

What do you mean by repeated systems?

So you, you get a, you do X and you get Y.

Okay.

Right. So now we've got a closed loop process.

Yeah.

I take Coke and I'm suddenly the smartest guy in the room.

Okay, so you mean just the reward that you get?

Yeah. The dopaminergic. Yeah, feedback. And it can be, you know, you can do it on your phone, you can do it anywhere. Right?

Yeah.

And I was trying to figure out what was the thing that was going to separate what I'm doing from everything else in a meaningful way that also perfectly aligned with what the products did. I wasn't trying to make a company. I was trying to solve addiction. I was trying to solve cognitive performance. Because this goes back to. I left this thread and let's return to it is if you can start making better decisions and then you have the energy to execute those decisions, you have a modicum of success. And I wanted to create that kind of success because success perpetuates itself. You have a little bit of success. That dopamine rush is real. Right. It's not a false. Right. It's not a false thing. It's not, you know, a great orgasm that's, you know, masturbation or whatever. This is real. This is tangible. This is repeatable. And I Felt that would be a better solution than repeating trauma to yourself and to other people, reinforcing that as your, as your baseline, instead creating this. And so that was a, if I could do that, then I could put people in a spiral of success, an upward spiral of success, or at least help them get there. And so the first thing was, and again, I came from a kind of a high iq, cognitive performance was, was a superpower that I thought everybody should have. But as my, Regardless of what your IQ level was or your cognitive power, if I could help improve that and again, give you mitochondrial energy, not, you know, we talked about caffeine earlier, not this caffeine burst, but actually sustainable long term energy that your body creates, that is every cell in your body is responding to, then you could go execute those things. Because one of the things that a lot of the addicts told me was, okay, now I'm not on the drug, you know, the drug. I'm on a couple of meds that I'm going to be on perpetually and I'm a couch potato because I burned out my adrenals and my body's messed up now and my brain's messed up. So this was in opposition to that. This was, hold it, let's get you off the meds and replace it with something that's going to be a permanent addition to your life. Let's rewire your brain. Let's give you the cognitive oxygen and the neurosteroids and the other components you need to thrive. And then let's give you the mitochondrial support, both repair population and oxygenation or, you know, short chain fatty acid transfer. Right. To make it so that you can outperform. Now you have a high responsibility to go and do something. It's still your responsibility to do the right thing the right way, but at least you'll have the tools to do that and you'll have the repeatability and you're not going to have to be on this forever. We were seeing people in 72 hours perform better than they were in 12 weeks of a rehab program, no addiction, and reduced or eliminated pain. So instead of going through the pain of withdrawal, you could make it a much smoother process.

So are these nootropics, are they something that the pharmaceutical companies cannot patent, for example, like racetams or things like that? Like, are these things not patentable? And that's why.

Yeah, they're way past it. Yeah, yeah.

They haven't grown. Grown because of that. Because what you were talking about was more of a band aid. The dude on the couch that needed just something to get through the day because he messed up his brain from addiction. That's one path to take. Another more empowering path would be like, how do we get more oxygenated blood to the brain so that you have, like you said, the energy to execute on the very thing that you want to do, but yet because of the damage and the trauma, you can't do it. Like, there's two equal things, but one of them has more efficacy. One of them actually you just become.

A slave to the common dialogue was, listen, dude, in 12 weeks they're going to let me out of this place, or six weeks or whatever the term was we're going to go through. And I saw the, you know, they showed me, I worked with the doctors at the rehab center and they showed me the, the, I think it was 14 to 27 different meds these people were going to be subjected to during this period. The detox routine. Right. Then the maintenance routine and then the long term. And they said, look, I'm going to be on two to four prescriptions when I get out of here. If I forget my prescription, I've got my dealer on speed dial. Not the pharmacist. Right, the other dealer.

The one that got you in there in the first place.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah.

So that didn't sound like a very. That didn't sound like a long term solution.

No.

So. So this was a long term solution. And the cool thing was, so let's say it was 72 hours and you've, you know, you finally, you're feeling good, you're feeling clear. Right. Again, this clarity. Right, Clarity, then decision making. Right. Is they started going, hold it. My. The lens through which I'm seeing life is different. I haven't had this before because many of the solutions, the pharmaceutical solutions out there are putting you just in a different state of fog. Exactly.

That's super well said.

And yeah, so instead of that, again, the clarity is a big thing. And then the rewiring that almost none of them do, neurogenesis, I mean the number and, and they're not given in rehab centers. So you're not getting this rewiring of the brain or the capacity to rewire the brain or to re, you know, to, to re trigger the thoughts in a way that is positive and to build this new layer of cognitive performance that results in positive outcomes and the ability to perform. The ability to perform. Yeah.

This is the best part about nootropics and cognitive enhancement is that these are things that I guess you could get from plants. There are some plants that, that provide nootropic effects but then also there's things in the lab that I'm sure you've been in thousands of labs at this point. Is there a difference between the plant derived nootropics and the lab derived nootropics as far as anything negative to the body or any kind of acclimatization that has to happen in a negative way. In other words, does it matter if you do plants or lab grown nootropics?

So, so I've, I've over the last, you know, since 2008 when I started this, I've migrated from, from a deeply chemical, you know, chemistry made in the lab process to almost wholly organic, only natural. And not because there's a toxicity in the stuff that I was working with. The racetams and some of the other, the new Peptor peptides and, and some of those. I still, I, I love certain peptides injectables or, or oral or nasal. Right. Internasal.

I've heard some good things about the tirzepatide peptide as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a good one.

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, and we're seeing a lot of, a lot of activity in the peptide world.

Peptide world's crazy. It's so new.

Oh dude, it's so cool.

15, 20 years old maybe at that.

Yeah. And they have, they have. And you have peptide printers. You go, I want a peptide to do this. There's one right now I'm researching called PNPP19. So PNPP19 is a analog of a Brazilian spider venom. And the reason that I'm interested. So we're doing a lot of stuff in male and female hormone management. Right now we're in R and D, but we've been working for years in this area of R and D. And in fact I'm going to leave you with some stuff.

Some spider venom.

Some spider venom, bro.

Okay y', all, you heard it here first.

So. But what they, the, the reason this is interesting is they've, is when an individual get. And this is a, this is a, this spider will kill you. Okay. But what they found was when, when an individual got bit by the spider and it was a sub death level of venom is they had a, they had priapism which is a permanent hard on. So they're going, well that's interesting. Every time we get somebody in with a spider bite they've got a hard on and it doesn't want to, you know, it's like the viagra warning. If you have a four hour hard on, go see your doctor.

Yeah.

Or your girlfriend or your dog, you know. So, so, so yeah. So he found this. So pnpp dash 19 very simple. Trying to remember how many it was. I think it's 19 chain amino acid chain. Right. That makes up that peptide. So very. And they all the research on it and there's very limited research only because the research ends up in somebody having a very high quality erection. And so and of course you know, as we know the, the pharmaceutical industry is pretty dedicated to their own work in that area. So there's now I can't 50 something variations of Viagra, Silas Levitra that are out there now. And then all the patents of course are running out. That's how hymns and Romans, those two companies that are, that are telemedicine companies in male ed sprung up because they said patents out. Vagra is no longer 25 or $40 a pill. It now comes down to $5 a pill. We have an opportunity and we can get doctors in every state to be able to go on a phone or on an email, say yeah, you're fine, you can take this.

So wait, I'm confused, Mark. Why do you want me to take the spider venom? What's this all about?

So here's the deal. Yeah, here's the deal, Josh. Okay. Is human performance on the cognitive side is super important as well as reversing the biomarkers of aging and some of those other characteristics. And to be clear, I'm not a fan of David Sinclair. I think he's bs. I've seen what he's done to the industries that he's gotten involved in. So on the anti aging front, I'm opposed to David Sinclair's process. But a lot of the research is good. Some of the research is bullshit. And also I think he's done terrible things to the industry. But the biomarkers of aging I think are critical and it's important that we look at that. The need for us to be able to move the needle in terms of anti aging characteristics is really high. One of the key primary components is how do you modulate and optimize hormone levels so that you don't get into. If you, if you, if you do a knee jerk reaction to hormone levels and you boost them too high for too long, as any bodybuilder will tell you, you, you go through the other side of the curve, right? Degenerative processes, even pro cancer, pro tumor, if you bring it right up to the level and you do A closed loop measurement and refresh of that system you can have, you can basically freeze time or even take the clock back and move your life forward. I would love nothing more than to be able to have the. I used to weightlift pretty heavy and do bodybuilding stuff back when I was in my twenties. My twenties. I would like nothing more than to be able to have that level of energy, clarity, output, strength, endurance, sexuality, all of that at 62, as I did at 26. So my goal now is to make that happen. Part of that is obviously cognitive, part of that is natural detoxification levels so that you're not fighting this ongoing battle with the toxins that are naturally going to build up in your business, your body, but your body has less and less of an ability to, to excrete it, get rid of it.

Why is that? So why do, why do we become, as we age, less able to detox in a way? Is that what I heard you say?

Correct.

Why is that?

Yeah, there's degradation of our, of our tissues as your liver rebuilds itself every couple years, as your skin rebuilds itself. We don't, you know, we're shortening of the telomere right on the DNA strand. And there are other characteristics where we just have less performance. But part of it is that we spend a lot of our lives toxifying ourselves with poor food and poor diet. And gosh, when David and I, when David was building PR Web, he and I would have talks at 2, 3 in the morning on a regular basis, weekly, because we were the kind of guys that could work all night and the ideas sprung to us at one o' clock in the morning or whatever. So that's probably not a healthy thing because your brain doesn't detox.

Yeah, your brain is literally swimming in its own excrement.

Right, exactly.

Like the glymphatic cells. Like nothing's being cleared, so your brain's just sitting, but you can operate that for a period of time. And then once I hit my late 30s, I was like, nope, I can't do that anymore.

Right.

I can't treat myself like I used to treat myself in my 20s. It's just not possible. So is it because we have to care more about the systems that are in us as we age, or is it just this natural process where things just age and then we do our best to kind of supplement them?

When we're young and we're getting cellular rebuild at a much faster, at an accelerated rate, it's. And we don't have a bunch of Detritus that's, you know, legacy detritus. Because we didn't live back then, it's much easier for the body to do this replenishment process. But as we age, some of that detritus continues to right to build up, whether it's arterial plaque, cognitive plaque, any of those factors. So we have a responsibility to ourselves and to those people we love and to the impact we want to make in the universe to eliminate those things at an, at a rate that keeps up with our goals and, and the, and the relationships we want to have. And then to augment with, as I'm talking about, hormone restoration and some of those things. And then here's, here's the two big impact points. These are easy. Anybody can do these. Cellular restoration. So get the phospholipid wrap around every cell, restore that. And then cellular respiration, mitochondrial health. You do those two things, and you and I'll be talking here at 120 years old going, you want to party? When we're done here, what's your favorite.

Way to do those two things?

So one is, you know, obviously we make solutions to doing that. So you want to get, you want to get as much of a phospholipid intake as possible on a regular basis. There's a balance. Again, not too much. You don't want to be excreting it for nothing. Just like, you know, when you, when you start, when you start peeing yellow, probably back off a little bit on your B vitamin intake.

Yeah, right.

Yes. So. And when, you know, and in the same way, so you want to get your phosphor, phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylserine. You want to have healthy levels of that on a regular basis, a daily basis. I take. And then your omega threes. Right. Lots of oil. Right. Kinds of oil. I do a combination of algae oil, krill oil, and, you know, freshwater salmon.

Right.

Or northern salmon oil.

Well, you're not concerned with the mercury in those. You just source them.

Well, we source them well. So here's one of the things we do at our company, which I think is really important. Not a pitch on the company, but.

I mean, we're here talking about it. You may as well.

All right, all right. So we have, we've got 20. I can't remember. It's 23 or 25 now. PhD, PhD candidates in Bosnia. We basically sponsor a wing of Birch University. These people are absolutely brilliant. Their whole lives are about how do we make microbiological improvements to mankind. So they Take every raw component that we use in our, in our company, in our products. Every raw ingredient goes to them and they do full microbiological studies on them to make sure that they are free of heavy metals, free of toxins, that they are pro human. And then we give the okay. Here's an interesting thing that we found. I just, by the way, I just traveled here from what's called supply side west, which is the number one show in the U.S. we have Splice size west, supply size east. Those shows are all about raw ingredients from all over the world. Obviously China is a huge part of that, but all over the world. And what we do is we send the raws in split. We send some of them to my lab in Iowa and we send equal sample to Bosnia. They do tests on them. 80% of the products that we receive do not match the what's called a Certificate of Authenticity CoA which is attached to every raw ingredient. It's a kind of almost a legal thing. It's a legal attachment that says this is what's in the product. Here are the active components of that product and here are the heavy metal levels and the rest of it. 80% of them don't match, are sub or over in the wrong areas of the COA that they provide.

That's crazy. How does, how does that happen? How's that legal?

Right, Exactly.

Like what are people paying for? If you get this big pallet of stuff and it's 80% of it is not correct.

That's all right. It was a low cost, you know, it was a low cost provider, dude. So that's the problem with the nutritional industry. Now I'm, as you know, I'm an advocate for the supplement industry, nutritional industry, and for. But I'm really an advocate for health and wellness and longevity. Kind of like the name of your podcast. So it's super important to us as so Bioptimizers is our, you know, is our parent. And we continue to be a double digit growth rate company. We're inc 500 two years in a row, earning 5,000 two years in a row. And one of the things we do every week, we get all of our employees together on a zoom call every Monday and for an hour we go through. Anybody have any shout outs they want to do to other team members, you know, thank you for performance, cool things that are happening in the company, cool events that we're doing, and then we spend one to two minutes every call in meditation on our desire to make biological optimization available to everyone on earth. And we feel that that meditation is one of the most important things that we do during the week, is all of us in quiet meditation helping to focus on the fact that we believe that biological optimization is our contribution to mankind and that we have a responsibility. We don't do it just out of desire to grow the company. We have responsibility to do that. So that goes down to. Here's the really cool part of that. So what we found was that as we started doing this, we started just sending our RAs to our Bosnian lab. As our Bosnian Lab grew from four people to now 25, I think, or 23. And it's continuing to grow and we're building a DNA research center there and we're doing some really cool stuff, is we found that the RAs that we'd been using were good, but that we could find either another farm or another source or another extraction method or another technology that would make those raws significantly better. Some as much as 700% better. So the same product, the same formula, the same components in that formula is markedly better. Like we could make. It would be like a brand new product even though it contains the same ingredients. And so we're finding that in all of our products. And so we're continuing to innovate in that area and we are setting a new gold standard for. When you're making a product, it's not about the name of the ingredient, it's about that quality of that ingredient, how it was grown, when it was grown, what area of the world it was grown, how it was processed, when it was extracted, what the temperatures were, what the soil was, what the, the, the quality of water.

Does a lot of it come from Brazil?

We have a lot of stuff from Brazil.

Supplementation?

Yeah, a lot of stuff from Brazil, a lot of stuff from Poland. We have a few from China, a lot from domestic. We have domestic growers. I mean, our goal is, one of our goals is to see how much we can do domestically. We're doing. Have you ever heard of Magical butter?

No, it sounds great. Magical butter. It has nothing to do with cannabis, I'm sure.

Exactly.

It's. What. What is it?

So, yeah, it does have to do with cannabis. Oh, it does, yeah. Yeah. So there's a, there's a company in Florida called Magical Butter. Cool guys. His whole focus, the founder of it, his whole focus was to make, was to make THC extraction and CBD extraction affordable, easy and doable in your home, where you could control parameters and you didn't have to guess. Love it. Super cool guy. And so last year he Developed a, a standup box. It's the size of a refrigerator that controls every parameter of growth. For if you were growing weed for, you know, cannabis. Right. You could control that. Or if you're growing anything, if you're growing mushrooms, you're growing anything. So all the light is controlled, the heating is controlled, the wind is controlled, the humidity is controlled. The fertilizer, whatever you're fertilizing it with the natural fertilizers. He's got a peristaltic pumps of each of the key, you know, minerals that you need to grow that plant successfully and have the greatest outcome. And then the. What's called hormetic stress. The hormetic stressors on there, like, you know, if you, if you make it a little bit dark for a little bit too long, the plant goes, I need light. And that causes it to create more of a specific, you know, terpene that might be very effective for you, but normally wouldn't come out of that plant because it would be getting the right light cycles that are in nature. So you can slightly stress it in a good way, in a healthy way and make that plant much more fruitful for you. So we're building a farm of these to be able to figure out the parameters on each of the compounds that we grow. Like Solastris paniculatus, it's my favorite. So celastrus is a wild rooty vine with a beautiful orange yellow seed pod on it. And when you grind that seed that's in there, so last panic seed, it becomes one of the great oxygen contributors to the brain. So we use that in a lot of our stuff. Our apex is absolutely principally based on that. And then almost every product we have that's a component of it.

What's another plant that maybe you get from Brazil or somewhere where you have to like go almost cave diving or something to get it? Is there something that's super rare that, that maybe you guys have figured out how to grow in these controlled settings with hormetic stress?

Yes. Some of the mushrooms are, are really big. Did you see the Last of Us, the series?

No.

I recommend it. Be a great way to sit down with a sweetheart and go, hey, okay, so do you know cordyceps? You know?

Yes, of course.

Okay.

Cordyceps reishi Turkey tail.

Yeah, yeah. So cordyceps are really cool right now. They're originally. Cordyceps are grown. They basically implant themselves into an ant or a bug and then they control the brain and they tell it to go off of the beaten.

The zombie ants Zombie clip. We're going to link that clip. That is a crazy clip that. That literally. The cordyceps controls where the ant goes on the tree and then the sunlight hits the ant. It's the zombie ant taken over by the cordyceps. Cordyceps is both beautiful and evil.

Isn't it wild?

Yeah, pretty evil.

So come on, you can do that if you do wild cordyceps. Like, I don't know if you've seen our college genius or had our college call of genius.

The. The Zamner, the call of genius. And the brain flow. Is my stack like that. Those are the three things. Those are the three things that I hit every single day. I mean, it's. Right. I'm actually using it during the podcast.

It's one of my.

Some of my guests are like, what is this? And they'll spray it and they'll just be like, I'm talking. So great. I'm like, yeah, it increases verbal fluency. It's amazing. That's my stack, though, those three things.

This funny because that is a. That is a massive. So it does a light acetylcholine and it does a heavy gaba.

Ah.

So Joe Rogan, right? So Rogan talks about. About their, you know, the. On its GABA product, right?

Yeah.

So. And alpha brain. And. Because GABA induces alpha state, but GABA doesn't. You know, you. If you put GABA in the gut, GABA stays in the gut. Now, it can do some signaling, molecular signaling, to be able to go, okay, let's create GABA in the brain. Or you can do something like this where it actually gets through the blood brain barrier, and it helps to perpetuate the GABA because of the raw ingredients. The B vitamins we have in there do that in. In their formula with the amino acids. So it's great. But cordyceps, really interesting. So Chastity, my sweetheart, is the actual creator of. Of, you know, of our Call of Genius. And Call of Genius is a name that's really. We're actually renaming it Mushroom Breakthrough because. Because it is a cognitive adaptogenic mushroom blend that happens to also have a powerful amount of collagen, both bovine and fish collagen. And we're doing a vegetarian collagen or pre collagen. There's not really a vegetarian collagen, but pre collagen version of it as well. But I was making mushroom capsules, highly dense, extracted mushroom capsules. And she, being a chef, came along and said she was pouring them into containers and marking them for Me and getting all the data points and getting the COA in there and everything. And she said this smells kind of cocoa and started blending together. And then we brought him to one of Dave Asprey's events and. And everybody loved him. And so then it became a product.

I love it. I put a scoop or two in my protein shake.

It's perfect.

It is the best. And actually it gives me a lift. Not just like a coffee lift like we've discussed before.

Right, right.

It gives me this almost like I'm on a little bit of a cloud. Like it gives me a. A cloud lift.

That's exactly right. It bridges your baseline and then stack.

That with verbal fluency. And then when I'm doing my zoom calls with work or just any of us that have, you know, professions.

Right.

Or whether you're an entrepreneur or entrepreneur, like a lot of these tools, people just don't know about them, which is why I'm so stoked to do this podcast. Like, literally, people just don't know how good they could feel exact.

And. And perform that, you know, so, you know, we're gonna. We rewind a little bit. So two things. So. So first finish the.

That was a cool sound.

Good. Yeah. My next. My next.

It was like a time I'm getting.

On fiber and fiber now do that. It's a time machine. So. So on the cordyceps side, we could go out and we could go find those ants. We could go find the cordyceps on those ants on those trees in the hilly areas of China and we could do that and it would be about $800 a kilo or more. Or what we can do is say, what are the. What are the organic attributes that the cordycep is looking for? And let's put them in a controlled environment and let's provide that and see if the spores will propagate. And they do. So we have this beautifully controlled environment by a fifth generation Chinese family that all they do is grow cordyceps for us. And then we do an extraction process, a dual extraction process, what it called part water, part alcohol, specific heat, specific extraction, microporous membranes to isolate certain nutrients that come out of that and then a reassembly to get all the right parts in the right ratios. So that's an example of kind of some of the. It's so cool, the science that we.

Do that, because you're literally taking nature and you're bringing nature into a controlled environment where nature can thrive, which is so awesome. I mean, that technology never really existed before. Until now.

Right. And we don't have to use anything caustic and we can avoid environmental issues right now. Like I was just at the show, I was just at. We're working with a lot more algae oil type stuff. We're making a really, really cool product this next year and we've been working on it for four years now. This solution to the oil crisis, the body oil crisis. And so I'm talking to a company called, called Arizona Algae. And we've been good friends with them since they started. Really great story about Russian mobsters taking over his company. And really cool. You would love this guy.

It's like a movie.

Oh yeah, yeah. Hank is a cool guy. He was a champion in the semiconductor industry. His technology, which was thin film technology, where you're building up one atom at a time on a silicon wafer to make transistors for intel and tsmc, the largest chip makers in the world. And he got into bioreactors and the bioreactors led to him building algae and propagating algae in environment. And we talked about the number one algae oil company out there and how they use open. They're called raceways, where you've got this spinning, you've got this huge vat of algae grown in water environment and you've got filters and you've got all kinds of things. But the largest company uses open raceways. And. Which is awesome except that you can't control any of the environmental factors and you also are subject to environmental toxins that come through the air. And so, and you know, and this is, and you can, you can extra, you can clean some of that stuff up at the expense of the quality of the outcome of the, of the oil outcome. And, and so his. All of his raceways are covered and then all of his bioreactors are covered.

It's so cool that it exists where you can take nature in its original form, bring it into a controlled setting and then essentially you're able to replicate that and amplify nature so you can scale your products across the world. It's not, it's not just in the US it's. It's also international. Yes, correct. Utopia.

Yeah. Yeah, we're. We're in, we're in. We're in 22 countries now. Is. We have, we have employees in 22 countries.

Amazing.

And, and again, we're there. Last year we were the 245th fastest.

Growing private company in the U.S. shout out to Justina. She's great. She.

She. Do we have a killer crew or what?

Come On Justina, we just came out.

With a book called the Ultimate Nutrition Bible. And Matt and Wade took their decades of insight on health and wellness and diets and everything, which is cool because.

One was vegan and one was keto.

Totally. Oh, yeah, yeah. That we think of. There's a great shot of them.

It's great.

A great shot of them. Matt's got like a big, you know, he's got a big pork chop, and he's about to beat Wade, who's got, like, cauliflower, and he's, you know, and they're at it and. And they are, you know, and they've been business partners for decades. And. And it's really important. So our thing is we. We want to make that impact. We. We want to take as many people with us in on this journey, and we also want the discovery that. That our, that our customers give us are. Are folks like you who go, hey, I did this and it gave me this in product. You go, oh, cool. Why don't we find creative ways to amplify that? And let's go into that area. Yeah. You know, it can. Whether it's mood regulation, whether it's cognitive performance, whether it's. It's health and wellness, longevity, strength, anti aging, mind, body energy, sex, sleep. Right. You know, what are those? Those are all key. I mean, that's. That kind of is like, if these are all working, I'm alive.

Absolutely.

If one of them's out of whack, I suck.

And if those are all working, this is honestly where law of attraction manifestation energetic change happens. That's where people get wealthy. That's where people accomplish things. When they're taking care of their physiology and their neurology and actually really doing it. Not just giving it lip service, but really, really supporting it and stacking it in a way where it's loving the self, then we can go out and we can create massive change and we can connect and love others, man, if that is where it all begins.

If you find. When you find great entrepreneurs, you will find people that have this unique ability to double down on life. Right. The great entrepreneurs that, you know, they're. They have this unusual ability to go. It's not just about the opportunity, it's about the impact. Yeah. And they have that. It's an inherent part of them. Yeah, they, you know, when you talk to them, it's not about. Yeah, man, we're, you know, it's not Lambos and, you know, hookers and blow.

Some of the unconscious ones, but not the ones.

Yeah.

The ones I hang with.

Right. That's a different group here in my garage.

The Ferrari. Get the out of here.

Oh, God. Yeah. Tie 101, right? Oh, my God. Taiwan on. Yeah. That's so funny.

It's so hilarious, man. I've really, really loved our time together.

Thank you so much.

I honestly, one thing that I've heard you speak about in little clips that I've seen online and also even our hour and a half conversation we did last year.

Yeah.

Was there's just this element of flow to you. And I know you said that you experienced experience adhd. I actually think that might be one of your superpowers that you're able to jump from one thing to another and close the loops and like almost play hopscotch and just. And just like, have fun with it. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome, man. My parting question for you is this. You know, with everything we've explored and we gave people the really mini master class of the big five, the way to identify where they are, the way to heal themselves, the way to support themselves, and also just like on a spiritual level, when we start taking care of the physiology, then we can actually be. Be open to higher power. We can have the luxury, really, of doing deeper dives on ourself because we're not at Maslow's bottom of the triangle. We can actually really be there for ourselves. How do you speak to someone right now that's watched this for the third time? Because there's been a lot of concepts and maybe, maybe they had to watch it a few times. How do you speak to somebody right now about a simplistic way. I'm going to put you on the spot. A simplistic way for them to live their life. Well, it's the question I asked you a year and a half ago. How do you live your life well, how can we live our lives well in a practical way that will really make an impact?

Yeah. I think it all it boils down to reflection is don't be so caught up in the activity that you're doing that you don't look back at yourself and say, who am I and why am I doing this on a regular basis? And by doing that, you'll find that 70, 80, 90% right. Pareto principle.

Yeah.

Is we're spending so much of our time doing shit that doesn't matter for people that don't give a shit. Instead, we need to be. We can take that as an opportunity to go, how much of that can I cleave off of my life and start focusing that energy that I've got now. I've got an abundance of this extra energy and to be able to move forward and move those people in our lives forward. What happens, what I find happens when people do this and everybody has a different way they do it. You know, a different kind of work is once you start finding that extra 10, 15, 20, 30, 50% of available surplus in your life, the things that will show up. This is, you know, not to be woo woo, but kind of woo woo is the things that will start showing up that give you positive reflection. And if you internalize them and say, what does that thing mean to me? I guarantee you will find some event or some person or some possibility or opportunity that will become the catalyst for the biggest future. And it may even be temporary. It may be six months or a year or two years or five years. Long enough for you to grow and to become the next thing that you're supposed to become and then give you an opportunity to jump out again. This is my 18th company. I've been through this process before. The process of change is the thing that I finally mastered. The process of building technology, that was pretty quick. The process of understanding what marketing was or what finance was. Those are disciplines that. I've had great mentors that have guided me through the process of change that had to come from within. And yes, I've had some great mentors and great folks that have guided me. But if I didn't reflect, take that moment to go, hold it, why am I doing this again? I wouldn't have been able to make the change and I wouldn't have been able to cross the chasm into where we are today.

It's so good. It's so good. I can, like, feel that in my body. When you said it, I really appreciated that. I've loved so many things we've talked about today.

Thank you, brother.

We could probably do another podcast. Podcast. But let's stop here. Let's pause here, y'. All. It's on the screen. Joshtrand.com forward/newtopia. The code is Josh10. Thank you for the discount, by the way.

Oh, you got it, brother.

Stuff is not easy or cheap to make and source from caves in Brazil and all, all the places that you bring it from. So joshtren.com forward/newtopia. It's on the screen now. And the code is Josh 10. I really appreciate you, man. Thank you for coming by. Thank you for doing the podcast.

Thank you so much. Hey, one thing I want to. I want to remind your. Your viewers, no risk. We have a 365 day guarantee. You don't like 365?

Are you kidding me?

I'm not kidding you, brother.

Wow.

Take it. Try it.

That's pretty much zero risk.

Exactly. If it's not working for you, man, let us know. We're not interested in you being a. I didn't know that. Unless.

Yeah, I actually did not know that.

We want again, we want to make a monumental contribution to every life we touch. The only way we can do this is to remove all the barriers and to also contribute people like Justine and the rest who literally give a shit about you and care about your livelihood. So thank you.

Thank you for being here, man. Until I see you again, until Mark and I see you again, we're both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon.

You rock. Appreciate it.

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