Listen here on your chosen podcast platform.
On this episode of Brave New World, we’re turning our attention to nootropics and neuroscience.
Nootropics are drugs and supplements which proponents say can boost alertness, increase focus, and improve memory.
Today, Evgeny Lebedev meets Nootopia founder Mark Effinger, AKA Mr Noots. Since launching in 2004, Nootopia has helped 300,000 people- including doctors, biohackers, and fitness instructors- unlock their potential.
The two discuss:
- The Nootopia lab and its research methods
- Mark’s journey from child prodigy to entrepreneur
- How the loss of his wife was the catalyst for Mark to start Nootopia
- Why everyone has an ‘inherent Achilles heel’
- The complexities of ADHD treatment
- Natural ways to rebuild neural pathways
Plus more...
The next episode will drop on 22 Aug.
Drop us a line at podcasts@standard.co.uk
Disclaimer: you should always seek own medical advice.
Here’s a fully automated transcript:
Welcome back to Brave New World, the Evening Standard's podcast on all things science, medicine, and the future of humanity.
I'm your host, Evgeny Lebedev, and in this series, we'll be taking a look at the latest developments in neuroscience, longevity, sleep, and much more.
Join me as I engage in thought-provoking conversations with some of the brightest minds of our time.
In this episode, we'll be turning our attention to neuroscience, and more specifically to neotropics, which are drugs and supplements, which some people use to boost their alertness, increase their focus, and improve their memory.
Joining me is Mark Effinger, aka Mr. Noots, the founder of Nootopia, which has helped 300,000 people since it launched in 2004.
Nootopia customers include doctors, fitness influencers, and biohackers.
And the brand products include collagen, pills, and juices.
Mark Effinger, welcome to Brave New World.
It's a great pleasure to have you here.
I'm really excited about this chat, about how to optimize our brain and hence our life.
What's that in the background? Where are you?
I'm in the middle of Burlington, Iowa on the Mississippi River. And this is our laboratory.
We've got about 24,000 square feet of space here that we create newts and create all of our custom formulations and the rest.
So yeah, it's great.
How does the lab work? How does the research actually happen?
That's a great question, actually. It's the first time I've been asked that, strangely enough.
It's very interesting.
So oftentimes we identify a problem, whether it's a neurochemical problem or a physiological issue, that really needs to be addressed and hasn't been done either correctly or well or effectively.
And from there we start to break down the basic building blocks of what that issue is in terms of maybe neurochemical components, like the various amino acids or extracts.
And we look for fundamentally radical components that can do a lot of heavy lifting.
Say neurologically, they can do a small amount, can create a profound and extended result in the brain or in the body.
And then we work from there and we'll make dozens to hundreds to even thousands of prototypes.
We'll get them out to, we have a bunch of VIP individuals, I think you're on our VIP list, where we'll get prototypes too.
And then we aggregate that feedback, we run it through.
We've had tens of millions of data points now that we've extracted from clients over the last 15 years or so.
And then we push this new data through that database and we say, how does this affect overall an individual that is 175 pounds, male, 40 years old, who does OMAD - one meal per day-, maybe is on a keto diet, favorite exercise is cricket, and they do that three times a week.
They're an early riser, they like to go to bed at 10 p.m. and they're not on any meds, but maybe they take a multivitamin.
Oh yeah, and then we'll say, “well, what's your favorite stimulant, or are you a non-STEM, or you're the kind of person that gets agitated on stimulants, and what are your biggest goals?”
And we take all of that data, and out of it, we're able to kind of abstract a bunch of different compounds that can have a meaningful effect on those things.
Some are gonna be huge dose, some are gonna be in the grams or tens of grams, and some are gonna be micro dose of a milligram or less.
And so we try to find the right combination that's going to give the right kind of outcome for the client with the minimum viable dose, and then we potentiate those compounds by stacking them together so that instead of one milligram acting like one milligram, it might act like five milligrams over the space of 16 hours.
So they get this metered input that is able to produce a very predictable output on the client side.
That's what we do.
Okay, and that's how the magic happens.
Well, let's talk a little bit later about what exactly some of these products are and the compounds in them and what they're targeting.
But let's start with you.
It'd be good for our listeners to hear a little bit about yourself, your background, your life.
How did you get here?
I hate to use the term because it sounds like I'm blowing smoke, but I was very interested in science at a very early age and ended up doing things that are associated with child prodigy type of stuff.
I wouldn't call myself that, but others have.
I built my first radio at five and a half years old by reading a Scientific American magazine and dissecting what radios are made of, and then just constructing one from scratch.
When I was six, my stepdad convinced my dad to get me a chemistry set.
So this is the chemistry set from when I was six years old from Christmas.
That set me off on a deep direction of using combinations of chemistry, vacuum, and high frequency, high voltage, and doing tons and tons of experiments.
So by the time I was nine and a half, I built my first laser, a helium neon laser, again, from scratch with the money from my paper route and other things to put it together.
It was great.
And then many years later, I got really sick with hypothyroidism after building my third company.
Just felt really bad.
And a naturopathic physician who was also an MD, well-known MD in California became kind of my mentor and guide on natural health.
Got me healthy.
I started feeling like a fricking rock star.
Did a venture capital round on a company that had hired me to be their CMO.
And that kind of made me feel like I was back.
I was back in the business.
And I started focusing on what natural solutions can potentiate neurochemical process so that you can think faster, you can sleep better, you can operate at a higher level.
Your baseline can be higher.
So from the moment you wake up, you're more lucid and more effective.
And then that led to just a tonne of process in that.
In 2008, my former wife committed suicide from an oxycodone overdose.
And that was the catalyst for me to start what we now call Nootopia.
I wanted to help people that had addictive habits to be able to quell those habits through improved biochemistry and neurochemistry.
The byproduct of that or the side effect of that was people that weren't in a really, really negative health or neurological state.
When they took some of these formulas, their performance went up significantly.
The first was a Sports Illustrated photographer who was going to shoot the man they called Blade Runner.
He had the carbon fiber legs.
I was in Washington state at the time.
He texted me from South Africa and he goes, Dude, this stuff is rad.
I need more.
They had 20 handlers for this athlete.
And he goes, I couldn't see any of them because I was so focused on the shot.
I got the shot.
How do I get more of this?
And so he forced me to start making this.
So that started me on the track.
And then about 14 years later, 13 years later, Matt Gallant and Wade Lightheart of BIOptimizers put me on a Zoom call and said, “Hey, I think that we should start working together.”
And we spent a year together feeling each other out and getting to know each other.
And then it was very obvious that they had skills that I certainly didn't.
And they were really good people.
And we're growing a great company.
And so we merged and created this company called Nootopia.
And it's been just a real rocket ship the whole time.
And so, what are the conditions that you're looking at, either conditions with symptoms or just optimizing?
What are the things that you're really, really homing in on?
That's a great question as well.
One of the things that I've spent the last decade plus composing, and we wrote a book about it called Sick to Superhuman.
And what I'd started identifying after I had aggregated enough customer and beta tester inputs were nearly all of us have some inherent neurological weakness, whether we recognize it or not.
For me, it's ADHD.
So my mind works really quickly laterally, but it has a hard time focusing long-term.
So it started with kind of this drilling down on clients.
They originally filled out a very extensive intake form that was like a medical intake form.
I wanted to know every parameter of the individual, all of their habits, all of their eating, all of their exercise, their health issues, age and all those factors.
And that data gave me, after about the first thousand or so clients, 1100 clients, it gave me a kind of a road map to start working with people.
And what I discovered in that was that everyone has an inherent Achilles heel, so to speak.
And that unless they start addressing that Achilles heel, it often can be the downfall of that individual.
And they can otherwise maybe operate at a very high level.
A lot of the CEOs and senior executives in Silicon Valley that I've worked with, they were super performers.
And what they did is they either mitigated the issue that they had that would have otherwise brought them down and covered it with either a virtual assistant or surrounded themselves with really smart people that covered that area, or they found a way to enhance it.
You know, some of them were taking all kinds of kind of edgy drugs or meds, you know, everything from Adderall to cocaine.
And so the objective was, what parts of the neurology are those drugs affecting?
And is there a better way to do that that isn't going to have a significant downside effect?
So the kind of spectrum that we developed is called, you know, so you start at sick, you got a suboptimal, optimal, superoptimal and superhuman.
And very much like a superhero, it's difficult to live in superhuman land all the time.
I mean, you know, Batman's got to come home and be Bruce Wayne.
Got to rest sometimes, right?
Right, right, yeah.
Superman's got to, you know, meet Lois for dinner.
And so in the same way, it's possible to, one, reduce the downside issues that you've got and bring them up to, if not suboptimal, optimal, or even superoptimal.
And what that does is it offloads a bunch of overhead that your body or your brain is trying to handle or manage for you, so you have a lot more available mental bandwidth to be able to address bigger issues and bigger problems.
And that was the kind of big epiphany.
So I started working with people that were high performers, but eventually we found that there was a significant number of them who would be high performers if they weren't managing this kind of deficit, this cognitive deficit or issue.
And so we started working with their sub-performers and started bringing them up to super performance or even superhuman levels.
They could kind of dial into superhuman as needed.
So that's kind of the spectrum.
And then we've also had a lot of people that have been very sick and we've been able to help them to recover a lot of issues.
What kind of things?
First one was lupus.
We had an individual with lupus, which is a neurodegenerative disease that affects the body's functions.
He actually called us.
We were shutting down for the day and he called us.
I hit the space bar on my Mac for Google Voice and he was crying.
And I thought that I hurt somebody because we were doing very experimental processes.
And he goes, “no, man”, he goes, :I've been bed bound for three years and your solutions, your stuff has got me out of bed, got my job back, got my license back.”
He said, it was like a country song played backwards, instead of losing your dog and losing your wife and losing the house, you've kind of got it all back.
And that was the thing that spurred me on to continue doing this kind of work.
Yeah.
And there's a lot of those kinds of stories, a lot of neurological stories, a lot of people that have been through periods in their life where either their physiology, like for me, hypothyroidism was a problem.
They had issues like that and others had brain fog, especially post-COVID type of brain fog or those kind of conditions and started working with them specifically to help them overcome or if not overcome, at least beat enough of it so that they could function at a fairly high level.
So is the objective to try and become a substitute for the pharmaceutical industry?
Sort of.
The last thing I want to do is just be a natural replacement.
I mean, that's a good start, but the real goal is to amplify what's called neurogenesis or the creation of new brain cells, amplify neurogenesis, and help re-build neuropathways, healthy neuropathways.
So rather than replace drugs, which that is one function.
I'd much rather have people on something healthy that's not going to build up toxicity or dependency.
The other is help the individual create a healthy pattern and healthy process using natural solutions so that they can inevitably reduce or eliminate those solutions.
They call it titrating down in the medical industry, right?
Where you maybe you're on a med and to get off that med.
Classics are SSRIs.
You don't just quit taking an antidepressant because it can send you into a spin.
So you cut one sixth of it out or one eighth of it out and then you cut a quarter of it out and then finally half and then eventually you're down to a sliver.
And that's the more effective way.
And I think of building up neurotransmitters, building up neurotransmitter response and building up this neurogenesis process is directly correlated to the reduction in need for biochemical, neurochemical input and the other is if you form a healthy neuro pathway, let's say you had a trauma.
A trauma is typically associated with, you know, you've got some cognitive resolution stuff and then you might have like an adrenaline rush which is then maybe accompanied by a dopamine spike.
All of this together create this flame, this is like putting fire on a flame of a neuropathway development.
And then every time you get that sound or that color or that light or whatever that event is, any component of that event can send you right down that same neuropathway spiral.
My goal would be to rebuild that neuropathway in a healthy way without the knee jerk reaction or without the adrenal spike or without the dopamine spike.
And make it so that instead of feeling like you're in fight or flight mode, you're able to kind of look at it almost in a Zen space where you're backing away from the issue at hand and you're seeing it with a lot more clarity and a lot more lucidity because it's no longer driving you biochemically in a kind of silent way.
I asked Mark about the complexities of ADHD treatment.
Adderall is one of the traditional methods used to manage symptoms.
However, ADHD often has deeper root causes likely tied to life experiences.
So, ADHD, my ADHD is a byproduct of two things and it manifests itself in two ways.
One is almost an OCD function where I am so deeply focused on something that you can't move me off of it.
My mother used to force me to go to bed because if I was just tackling a math problem or a physics problem or a chemistry problem, I wouldn't get up from that until it was done, so it might be a day and a half or two days and I'm just working through the night and making those things happen.
So, you know, that's a high focused function.
After there's a drug called Accutane that I was a white rat for in the military during the 80s, so they put me on a pretty high dose of Accutane to the point where it caused some liver damage and some tumors as well.
And that seems to be the root cause of where my ADHD came from.
So that would seem to be an exogenous neurochemical input that caused this kind of long-term separation, because otherwise I was hyper focused prior to that.
So to overcome that, I tried everything.
You know, and I could take Adderall, but when my employees would come in, I was running a software company at the time, and when an employee would come in and they would see me on Adderall, they would know immediately and they say, “hey, you're on that asshole drug.”
“I'm gonna get out of here until you've burned through that so that we can talk”, because it would make me bite their heads off.
I would just be almost violent with them, and it just didn't work very well for me.
I did get stuff done.
I was really focused.
And Adderall, does it up your dopamine?
Yep, it ups dopamine and norepinephrine, noradrenaline, so the way it does it though is has a lot of downside.
One of the issues with, whether it's that or specific SSRIs as well, which are kind of the opposite, serotonin is their primary, whereas Adderall dopamine is your primary.
The challenge that you have with those is that, an SSRI is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
So what it means is that it's going to help you produce more serotonin, send it through the synapse and then capture it after it's gone through the synapse.
And instead of using the enzyme that would normally break that down again, it's going to re-circulate it in the synaptic gap.
The challenge with that is you got like a calcium ion cloud, some component in the brain that will try to harness that and keep that circulation going, which is what the SSRI promotes.
And it starts to stress the neuron, the neuron gap in the neuron.
And when it does that, it also signals to the brain, I've got plenty of serotonin, I don't need anymore.
Or in the case of Adderall, I've got plenty of dopamine, I don't need anymore.
So the body quits producing its own sources.
And so now you run out.
And that's why when you get off, when the drug wears out that day, if it's an SSRI, you may feel depressed or you may feel just weak or incapable or foggy.
Same thing with Adderall, you might feel unmotivated.
If you don't take it the next morning, you may not want to get out of bed.
In contrast, what we've done with our product, we have a thing called Ultimate Focus.
We said one of the core functions is the ability for the brain to metabolize dopamine correctly and effectively.
And usually the body lacks the neurochemical precursors to create enough dopamine.
So we correct that by giving you a surplus of precursors to dopamine, not dopamine itself, but precursors.
And then we send a signaling molecule into battle for you and it basically signals the brain saying,
“hey, we've got all this dopamine available or precursors for it.”
“You can use it as you need.”
And instead of flooding the brain with dopamine, so it's out of your control, it's dopamine on demand, which becomes much more manageable and doesn't have that same kind of brutal effect on your communication where you can't think.
When you're on Adderall, if you try to think laterally, it almost pisses you off.
On our solution, you feel great because you're going, “oh, I can take some of these collective objects that I've studied over the decades, and I can pull them into focus, and I can manage them and utilise them.”
So, it’s really health, right?
It's bringing the neurology back to a state of optimum health and then triggering it and giving it these kind of surplus of neurochemical precursors or neurochemicals themselves that can go to do the work that you wanna do that previously you might have had a deficit of.
So would you say, Mark, that your product could be as effective for pain or ADHD or depression as some of the main pharmaceuticals that are used for?
You know, Evgeny, I'd love to say yes, but the FDA restricts me a bit.
What I can say is I have a very long extended list of people that have been utilizing those pharmaceutical solutions for a long time who, when given a preference, believe that the things that we're providing for them are not only either close to or equal to or even better than, but also don't have the side effects that they're trying to get away from.
Yeah, that's for sure.
Well, while we're talking about neurotransmitters and the connections in the brain, why don't we just stop on that for a moment. If you could explain to our listeners a little bit about the science of the main neurotransmitters that most people have heard of and what their functions are.
Sure, that sounds great.
We'll start with acetylcholine, which is a primary for memory and for recall.
It's a really interesting neurotransmitter in that when it's released within the synapse, its voltage, which is the brain is bioelectrical and the voltage coefficient there, especially when coupled with the sodium atom, is very high and so it has this kind of high resolution of being able to transmit the data through all of the different sensing areas of the body, but also to be able to organically align with pre-existing memories or pre-existing inputs, ideas you've read, thoughts you've gone through, and to actually create novel outputs from those.
And so it's one of the key neurotransmitters very necessary for cognitive performance.
Alpha GPC, CDP choline, are two great sources of that, which you can either get through solutions like we have, or you can get it through certain foods.
So that's kind of a primary one.
If you don't have that working...
Oh, and here's the other side of that though.
Like, okay, so if a little bit of acetylcholine is good, then a lot must be great, right?
Not true.
The brain is very critical in its balance of these neurochemicals, hence the reason that we have a stand on the way we develop products to make sure it's neurochemical precursors primarily.
Because though we may use a micro dose of a actual neurochemical or something very close to it, we don't want to downregulate neurochemical production in the brain, we wanna produce more of it.
If you have too much acetylcholine functioning in the brain at the same time, it will make you foggy and you'll get depressed.
So you want enough to accomplish the goal, enough to optimise that synaptic activity and to be able to build these neural pathways or to reinforce the neural pathways and reinforce recall and those things.
But not so much that you're going to go into that fog or depression land.
Yeah, what foods, eggs?
Eggs is one thing.
Fantastic, eggs are, yeah, my favorite of all.
That actually leads to a really good point.
There's a thing called the cholesterol hormone cascade.
So hormones are a critical part of our operating, our physiology and our operating performance.
Hence, the reason that many men and women over the age of 40, 50 start supplementing with for men, it might be testosterone, TRT.
For women, they might get to a estrogen or progesterone therapy.
Because if you look at a graph of the decline of a human being over age, those are the critical things.
If you have the hormones running really well, many of the other subsystems within the physiology and neurology operate at a very high level as well.
So when you mention eggs, eggs are a tremendous source of cholesterol.
The yolk is critical, which is also a radical source of choline for the brain.
You know, there's a witch hunt out for high cholesterol producing foods or varieties.
In reality, cholesterol is what the body absolutely needs for proper operation.
But those statins, there are some statins that have shown incremental improvement in mortality.
In the long term, having high levels of cholesterol in the bloodstream, in a healthy individual, are going to give you tremendous amount of potential for things like neurochemical production, and even more importantly, for hormone production.
The way that hormones are created, you've got this cholesterol hormone cascade.
You start with cholesterol, it turns into a form of pregnenolone, and then it splits and you get the androgens, the male hormones, you get the female hormones on the other side.
But they all come from cholesterol.
And if you start blocking cholesterol production in the body, you can very quickly start seeing a dramatic decline in overall health.
There's potential hardening of arteries, you'll get some other characteristics that would seem to be in opposition to the goal of statins.
So, I didn't mean to go off on a tangent on that, but I think it was really important to understand that when you're looking at some of these foods that there might be a witch hunt on, like sometimes eggs, that actually three to five eggs a day is not a bad idea.
Yeah, well, I think the signs on cholesterol has changed quite dramatically lately, particularly now that we know that it's not just purely the cholesterol that is the culprit, but there's other things being the other lipids and homocysteine that is involved in calcification.
But yeah, it's a critical path.
So, we got acetylcholine on there.
Dopamine is another one.
Dopamine is the drive, desire and recall.
It's the motivator.
We created a solution called DopaDrops.
We're looking at a rename right now, but currently it's called DopaDrops.
It's a great product.
And it does a three stage release of dopamine.
And I built it originally to actually improve short and male refractory response.
So, post orgasmic response to be able to improve the ability to have another orgasm sooner.
But what happened was as I started developing that, the people that were getting it were saying that it really made them feel motivated and optimistic without making them feel like they were on a med.
So, it's a great solution to that.
But dopamine helps you feel like you want to do something.
That's the motivation, right?
The desire.
And it gives you the reward at the end of it.
One of the things that Dr. Andrew Huberman talks about is when you're doing tasks, when you're doing work tasks, and you're about to head into one, and you're doing kind of that task switching time, maybe you take a break or whatever, don't do a high dopaminergic activity like reading Facebook or Instagram likes or TikTok.
Do a low dopaminergic activity so that you're bored, so that when you go back to the work function, you're excited and motivated to do that work.
The other is dopamine as a kind of a feel good molecule is super important in maintaining good dopamine levels so that you are operating at a high level of satisfaction in life.
And when individuals forget that, when they get to a low level of dopamine, which when I first spotted it, it was people that were coming out of raves and they were doing MDMA, molly, or ecstasy.
They were dopamine deficient and though some of them were fine with it, they functioned really well, surprisingly, the majority of them felt like they wanted to go crawl into a hole for two or three days because they were, you know, they needed to recover the dopamine.
I think the research on that shows that's cause they would, they either were dancing too much and sweat and sweating or they were drinking alcohol with it.
Absolutely.
And it puts the body into a real critical imbalance.
So that's a critical one.
Obviously serotonin, we spoke about that on the, on the depression side, but it's really not an anti-depressant.
Serotonin is not an anti-depressant.
It's a mood stabiliser.
Hence there's a scale when you're looking at an individual for their, their depression level, there's a scale on that.
And one of the things that was noted on many, especially in the early, like Prozac and other early SSRIs is, so let's say that 10 is like your ultimate orgasmic release feeling of optimism.
Zero is kind of your baseline normal, and then minus 10 is suicidal ideation.
An individual might go from zero and they might feel like they're about a negative two, negative three in the depression scale.
You know, what a doctor might recommend is to have a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and SSRI.
They take that, they're now recirculating serotonin in the brain.
What the majority of the feedback on that is, is that the individual initially feels better, especially if they're manic, they're not cycling anymore.
But the big challenge is, is that over time that minus two or minus three, as a result of the decline in natural serotonin production, and this kind of very controlled serotonin release, they end up going to a minus four, minus five, over say a six month period.
Even after adjustment, like upping the dose of the drug, which typically happens at somewhere around six weeks, two to six weeks.
And so they start to feel numb.
And that too much serotonin recirculating in the synapse is going to give this lack of feeling of anything, which is one of the scariest feelings.
That's worse than depression is to not care.
Any mass shooter will tell you that they don't give a shit.
That's why they're out there with a gun.
But it's a super critical for you to feel good.
90 to 95% of it is made in the gut.
The vagal nerve is a transmitter to encourage serotonin production in the brain.
So it's very critical.
It's easy to manage by the way.
We have a solution called Upbeat, which is a serotonin precursor solution with some B vitamins and other amino acids.
And again, it does the same thing that our ultimate focus does, which is to increase the level of available serotonin without pushing your body and then signal to the brain that it's available if you need it.
Serotonin basically makes you feel good.
Yeah, it makes you not feel emotionally out of control.
So it doesn't necessarily make you feel good and it doesn't make you feel bad.
It manages that whole process.
But if you don't have enough serotonin, you will have a tendency to lean towards depression or just kind of a blah state.
If you have too much, you might go manic, which is also scary.
You're super excited and then suddenly you're crying in the corner and super excited and crying in the corner.
And so you want to be able to manage the serotonin levels.
And the way you do that again is with signaling.
Signal the brain to go, “okay, I've either got enough or I need more and do it in a way where the brain can call up dopamine as it needs it and manage that level”.
The big problem with many individuals that are serotonin deficient is they either have poor diet, they have poor sleep habits, you need sufficient sleep to be able to produce serotonin.
Their gut bioflora is bad, you know, not efficient.
I mean, it can be as simple as taking sugar alcohols accidentally and excess of sugar alcohols like xylitol, which I love xylitol, but in excess it can destroy your bowel flora or put it out of balance.
Let's talk a little bit about some of your other products.
You've talked a little bit about some of them already.
Perhaps you could talk about one or two amino acids that people could try just to see if they want to get on the ladder of the things that you and I love very much.
Yeah, that's actually a great idea.
One of my favorites is acetylaltyrosine.
Acetylaltyrosine is a great precursor to dopamine, to L-Dopa.
Is that different from tyrosine?
It's more bioavailable.
Putting an acetyl group on to tyrosine allows an increase in bioavailability, and so you'll find the uptake will be faster and the smaller dose will get more done.
Those are some benefits to that.
It's available at any vitamin store or Amazon, and really inexpensive too.
It's pretty cheap.
But yeah, a good acetyl-alto-tyrosine, 250 milligrams is a nice dose, and you should feel a rise in wakefulness, a rise in energy, and a rise in kind of that reward cycle that we talked about with the dopaminergic system.
It has a relatively short half-life.
If you are a caffeinated person, if you drink coffee, it's very effective with coffee.
If you're a bulletproof coffee type person where you're doing butter or MCT oil with your coffee, it's a fantastic addition because it'll, that oil factor along with the caffeine will dramatically extend the half-life of the acetyl-L-tyrosine.
Caffeine itself is a dopaminergic to a certain extent.
Add acetyl-L-tyrosine, it becomes a super dopaminergic and it's very effective.
And again, it's not gonna overwhelm you with dopamine.
It's just going to provide a basis for you to get more of it as you need it.
That's a great one.
Phenylalanine, L-phenylalanine is another one.
A wonderful one for serotonin production.
And one of the interesting characteristics of it is L-phenylalanine will optimize the serotonin neurotransmitters.
But it also decarboxylates or it actually becomes tyrosine, which then becomes L-dopa.
So it's at the upper end of the conversion chain, and then it'll convert to each of those key neurotransmitters or neurochemicals.
And so you get this initial feeling of stability, where you're kind of happy and you're feeling good.
Again, you're not manic.
And then you'll feel the dopamine come on.
So now you have a good serotonin balance, and now the dopaminergic activity will come on, and you'll start to feel motivated, and you'll feel a little bit of a, you know, you'll even see a smile sometimes come to your face about 40 minutes into it.
I wouldn't do that daily, not because it would hurt you, but because you'll build tolerance fairly quickly where you just won't feel it.
But if you take that, say, every other day, it's a great way to preload your body with the key neurotransmitter precursors so that you can activate in either a creative way, in a verbal fluency in speaking podcasts and things like that, and focus without being overdriven in one specific area.
You know, some of the meds, to patent a med, you need to be able to have a very specific goal, and you have to test for that goal, and you have to validate that goal, and then you patent around that goal.
Yeah.
Outside of off-label application.
The challenge with that is that oftentimes the chemistry that makes those up makes them so singly focused on this one outcome that they imbalance the body very quickly or the mind very quickly.
And so then you're dealing with another med, maybe to overcome that side effect of that imbalance, and then maybe that creates a side effect, so you have another med that does that.
And over time you have a, it's called polypharmacy, where you're basically layering on meds to try to solve the by-products or the negative side effect of the original med, and that's when things get really bad.
My doctor used to call it rattlers.
Well, it's actually quite fun, particularly for scientific nerds, such as yourself and myself.
I grew up with a family of scientists.
I quite like to, particularly, everyone's brain is very, very different, and you might be more sensitive, less sensitive, which is why what you're doing is really interesting, because, for example, there's a lot of sleep remedies out there that I've tried that do the opposite for me, that actually keep me awake.
Does that include melatonin?
Interestingly, yes, unless it's really, really tiny.
So I find that I take three micrograms, and that works for me.
And before that, I've tried and tried different doses that never kept me awake.
So now I've discovered through experimenting that if I take a really tiny dose, then it works.
It's fun, but it's quite a commitment, trying sort of upping, upping, reducing, and eventually you get somewhere which...
So sleep is the world's most powerful stimulant.
If you don't have your sleep working, your neurochemicals are going to be out of whack.
And what you'll do is you'll try to compensate for it, either with stimulants, five hour energies, or Red Bulls, or coffee, or meds, drugs, or you will suffer and become sub-performing, and you'll just try to cycle your day.
I mean, I'm a huge proponent of binaural audio power naps.
I often take one a day.
I might even take it first thing in the morning, kind of like a transcendental meditation type of 20-minute cycle where I'll put the headphones on.
I put on an application called Pizziz, pzizz.com.
Once you are used to it, once you're familiar with what the cycle is going to go through, I can recover 90 minutes of lost sleep from the previous night in anywhere from 18 to 22 minutes of binaural augmented sleep.
It took me a while to get there.
I do some breathing exercises along with it, but it's really effective.
One of the reasons I'm not sleeping very well is because I've got a niggling pain in my back.
Are there any of your products that are particularly good with pain?
It's so funny you say that because we have a client here who's a mycologist.
I mean, he's here for a couple of days and same problem, doesn't sleep at night as a result of back pain.
I have an S1L5 that's shattered as a result of a car accident.
The airbags in Mercedes are great, but there's a lot of them.
Yeah.
And so it shattered that, so I have numbness in the legs as well.
So in order to correct that, I created a solution that was originally also meant for men.
But what it does is it's a PDE5 inhibitor.
PDE5 is an enzyme that is in the line of nitric oxide production in the body to be able to, whether improve the quality of an erection or to just, it's a cardiovascular enhancement.
And that oxygenation and blood flow over the vertebrae is really, really valuable.
It helps that.
And then I've created a couple of other solutions within that realm.
I'll send you some of those.
What I did for a couple of years was create a kratom based product called Kratom Kick.
And it augmented kratom so you could use a micro dose and make it act like it was a full dose.
So you wouldn't get the side effects of a, you know, three gram or a 10 gram kratom intake.
Mark, will you just explain to listeners what exactly what it is?
Oh, so kratom is a Polynesian herb.
It's a bit of an analgesic.
So it acts a bit like an aspirin or like an NSAID, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory.
But more importantly, it acts on the opiate receptors.
So it's a great replacement for any kind of an opium addiction, although it can have its own addictive qualities as well.
The downside is because of the way it approaches the receptors, the opiate receptors in the brain, is you build tolerance very quickly.
So in order to mitigate the pain levels for you, and it also does, it's great at reducing anxiety.
So you get pain and anxiety reduction at the same time, which often are in work together.
Like you have that kind of anxiety of, if I just turn my back a little bit, I'm going to be hurt.
So you're in this kind of state of anxiousness all day.
It can mitigate that.
But where a three gram dose on day one might be sufficient, at the end of the week, you might be doing 10 grams.
And at the end of the two weeks, you might be at 15 to 20 grams.
And the end of a month, you might be on 30 grams.
And that causes gastric upset.
You'll back up because it does slow down digestion, almost like a GLP-1 agonist.
And then that's a whole other series of problems, especially if you have back pain and you can't go to the bathroom, you get backed up.
But at microdoses, potentiated correctly, 250 milligrams can act like three grams.
And if you clear the system on a regular basis, you can increase receptor activity so that you're getting the benefit of low inflammation, and opiate receptor agonism so that you're actually satisfying that pain threshold and kind of blunting it to a certain extent, and it's sustainable.
I don't have any of those available, and I don't know if we can even ship kratom to the UK, but I do have some alternatives that might be interesting in that, and using Fossil Tidal Serine and some other components that help to not just reduce the inflammation, but also help the pain receptors to not be so agitated.
Mark, just one last thing I wanted to ask you before I let you go is just like addiction, this can become very, very obsessive optimization.
I've noticed this on myself, and I've seen people I've met and interviewed who are really, really into bettering themselves.
There's a streak of obsession.
It's a great quality, but it does come with its own price.
One of the things that you want to do that I think is super important is just as you're doing things like whether it's nootropics or health foods or exercise or whatever, is to sit down and reflect on the results you're getting.
I journal regularly to be able to go, “okay, what am I really looking for?”
And “have I achieved what I'm looking for?”
Or “am I at a level that I'm very happy with the performance?”
And “how do I put another performance layer on top of that”, rather than going crazy with trying to hyper optimize within micrograms or milligrams.
These are certain things, which are really, really powerful at the front end, but you have a diminishing return at the back end, right?
Once you get to 70, 80% performance on that thing, the last 10% can take 10 times as long as it took to get to the 80%, 90%.
So one of the key things you can do is a lot of reflection.
Like it's valuable to, you know, a couple of times a day I sit down for five or 10 minutes and say, “how do I feel?”
“How do I wanna feel?”
“What do I have coming up that I need to accomplish?”
And “how do I need to either get into the mindset”, which can simply mean closing my eyes and saying, “I need to be super focused or I need to be very articulate or I need to have a very spirited discussion with someone.”
And so I need to have that fun kind of mindset.
And your neurochemicals will start aligning with that.
And so rather than just supplementing it, take the med to get the result, take the dose to get the result, is be confident that, you know, especially if you've kind of worked with those things for a while, that you're in a pretty good spot and then start using your brain to modify the neurochemical inputs in a more spectacular way.
So I think it's that reflection that taking some deep breaths.
Yeah, it's mindfulness, right?
It's mindfulness.
Mindful what you're doing rather than just doing it on autopilot or it's about becoming the observer.
I know it's a very tall order to get there, but that's the aim.
Thank you very much, Mr. Noot, Mark.
Thank you, Evgeny.
I really enjoyed that.
Thank you.
Yeah, so good to see you, man.
Thanks for listening to today's episode.
If you enjoyed what you heard, please consider subscribing to Brave New World on your favorite platform and don't forget to leave us a rating and review.
Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you.
Also, be sure to share this episode with friends and family who might benefit from the discussion.
Until next time, take care.
