Autobiology with Jennifer Little-Fleck
Autobiology with Jennifer Little-Fleck
Making your Mind Work Better with No Bad Days: An Encounter with Mark 'Mr Noots' Effinger from Nootopia
Just imagine, a life where you have far more good days than bad. Our guest for this episode, Mark "Mr Noots" Effinger, the 'King of Nootropics' unveils how he uses plant-based products to manipulate neurotransmitter levels, all in a bid to ensure you experience joy more often than not. Listen in as we navigate through the transformative power of these products, the crucial role neurotransmitters play in everyday mood, and cognitive performance, and the touching personal story that motivates Mark's mission to assist others in having 'no more bad days'.
We take a detour into the realm of business and technology as Mark shares his journey of establishing his company, its evolution through personal tragedy, and his unique approach to creating unforgettable customer experiences. Excitingly, he gives us a sneak peek into his innovative product packaging, shares his background in creating laser light shows and his first love for Macintosh computers. He talks growing up in a blue-collar family, his early experiments with chemistry and vacuum technology, and how his resourceful parents were pivotal in fostering his curiosity.
Our episode wraps up with a stimulating discussion on how nootropics can help us achieve our ambitions by improving our lives. Mark opens up about his personal journey battling ADHD and overcoming negative self-talk. He also introduces some of his innovative products, sucha as Zamner Juice, designed to stimulate the release of GABA and enhance motivation. As a special addition, we engage in a chat on my preferred podcasting stack—Upbeat and BrainFlow—and the intriguing process of creating a new NectarX formulation. Don't miss out on this enlightening voyage into the world of autobiology and biohacking. Tune in now!
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Have you ever woken up on the wrong side of the bed and wish there was something magical other than caffeine Because you just know that caffeine is not going to cut it this morning but something out magical that could help you be in a good mood and have lots of energy and actually be motivated and look forward to what's going on that day, or give you the mental energy to be an awesome presenter in that meeting or just to deal with people, because you're just not feeling people. Today, well, myself and a whole lot of other people, we have discovered what those other things are, and they are Neutropics. And today I have with me the king of Neutropics, mark Mr Knudts-Evanger, who is literally a genius when it comes to this stuff. He is so full of information and stories that our podcast ran two hours.
Speaker 1:So this is actually part one of two, but out of this you're going to start getting a huge appreciation for what can be done through plant-based products when they're paired correctly together, and you're really going to start understanding why neurotransmitters and paying attention to your level of neurotransmitters and you can tell just by the way you feel, but where they're at and maybe what could help you adjust them so that you're not having a bad day anymore. In fact, that is Mark's mantra. He wants everyone to have no more bad days, and this came out of a very personal tragedy for him that I'll let him tell you about. This is fascinating. I really hope you enjoy this.
Speaker 2:You're listening to Autobiology, the podcast where you can learn a little biology now so you can think for yourself later. And I'm your host who dreams of being on an episode of Star Trek as the quirky biologist who saves the day Jennifer Little Fleck.
Speaker 1:They hire me and all the time I'm talking to these folks about, I'll use Nutropix as an example in one of my stories and they'll be like what is that? And I'm just blown away by how few people really know what a Nutropix is outside of the biohacking world.
Speaker 3:Right, right, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:And so that's-.
Speaker 3:By the way, I loved your. You actually have on the bottom. This is so great, your website. The table at the bottom just reminds you. I just remember when I was a web developer doing a lot of SEO and how, if you wanted, there was a point at which Google said if the font, if the text, is the same color as the background, they are going to deprecate that and not index it. And what you've got on the bottom was the difference between right and one of them was biohacking versus what Versus- Versus autobiology?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it was so beautiful and so appropriate, because that is exactly the journey that we're you know we're hopefully taking people on is come with us. We're going to go explore the world of autobiology, right, and you're going to hit. In that journey, you're also going to take a tributary, and that tributary is called biohacking and it's going to get you to these different performance levels, or state operational levels, or cognitive performance levels, and but we're going to we're not going to thrust you in there first, unless you want to. If you want to go take a deep dive, you don't have to dip your toe. You can go hang out with Asprey at his biohacking conference and right, and spend a few days getting deeply submersed. Yeah, so I loved it. Anyway, it was great. It resonated with me very well.
Speaker 1:Oh cool, I'm so glad to hear that. Thank you so much for the feedback. You know, I never know if anybody actually reads my website, so that's kind of exciting I've been always working to it. It's like you know, hello, it's anybody else.
Speaker 3:The echoes go out. Oh, hold it, hold it. We got to do. This is that we just got these in.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love it.
Speaker 3:So no bad days and then. But then what I have to do is is I have to do the the Mr Rogers thing and okay, okay, lay it on me.
Speaker 1:Lay it on me oh right, so then we.
Speaker 3:So then we don the the blue coat, the blue coat and the the cobalt scepter, so that we can now annoy.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, I love it. I love it. I'm all about the merch. I just actually started making merch myself and your stuff is so beautiful, I love it.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you, Thank you. You know. I don't know if you've seen, but we've. We've been working diligently over the last almost 20 months now to create a new. You know, we think that, or we believe that we don't think that. We believe that that every, every touch point of a solution should be special, memorable, it should evoke an emotion, it should connect with with people. So we're just now finishing this. This will come out in about two months, two and a half months, something like that. So this is one of the new Topia boxes.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, I recognize it, yes.
Speaker 3:Okay, so this one has a a nice magnetic envelope that actually takes off and and this will have some instructions and guides and insights You'll be able to put on your fridge or wherever you do your news wherever you're.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 3:It says I'm magnetic, stick me where you new to so, and then we've got this, then we've got this, so we got the new Topia logo cut out and then it goes into and then exposing the products and yeah, so you'll do this and then, and then this will be able to go in your fridge, if you want to, for for your different drinkables. Um, your, your Xamarin juice is down at the bottom here, so Xamarin juice sits at the bottom and then here's, here's a really cool. Are you ready?
Speaker 1:I'm ready.
Speaker 3:All right, all right, I just want to make sure it, because otherwise I don't want to blow your mind and then have to. Oh yeah, well you're blowing the pieces off the monitor.
Speaker 1:That's already happened, you've already.
Speaker 3:So, um, what we've done is we've, um, we've created these magnetically enclosing packages I wanted to have. I wanted people think of a big lighter.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Right, and you've got it. You've got it. A 1950s, you know, an Elvis sitting against you know, or um, uh, sitting against a wall and he's, you know, snapping his fingers right, and then he's got his. He's got his Marlboro's wrapped up in his uh, in his T-shirt, right. So we got that. But but that's where, um, so that's how you'll have.
Speaker 1:Ah, that's amazing. You know, mark, your packaging has really evolved uh several times actually since, since I started taking uh your products. I mean, it's really a neat thing to see the evolution. Um, and I, I love that.
Speaker 3:I'm glad that you are a fellow appreciator of good packaging. It matters to me. I'm a. There was a time in my life where when I got my first computer back in 1986, it was great. So this guy came to me in 1986. This guy saw my I had. I had a laser company at the time and it made lasers that give you a laser light show in your living room. So that was my whole, my whole thing.
Speaker 3:I wanted audio files or people that listen to music and you know the people that did vinyl and they could tell the difference between which what needle they were using and what speaker they were using and what right what amplifier they were running through all of those those crazy nuance things and I wanted them to have a laser light show in their living room. I wanted I thought that would be really cool if we could do that and get the price from from you know the first Pink Floyd dark side of the moon laser light show that I saw as a kid. If I could move that forward, you know a decade, and I could make it, so that you could not have to spend a million dollars to get all the lasers together and then have a whole crew running them and instead have have this. And so I built a laser that did that and it was in the. It was in the window of an indoor mall in Portland, oregon, at at a was a Halloween store. So right, so it's a. It's a pop-up shop that's open for two months, right, so it's up to October. And then it's gone. And they let me put a laser in the window and they put me these little cards that said infinite possibilities, and and then it had my, my phone number on it.
Speaker 3:This back in the back again, 1986. And this guy comes by, he sees it, he calls me and he says I love this man. He goes I want to trade you for a Macintosh computer. And I'm going what's a Macintosh? What's a Macintosh computer? Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so so his name is Eric Kinney. We've been in, actually we've done a number of businesses together. He's a great guy, great programmer, technologist, strategist and just overall, awesome friend.
Speaker 3:And so so I go over to his apartment. I was living in the back of a health club at the time, like in a in a garage stall in the back of a health club when I was building that first business. And so I go over to his apartment, which is like a really upscale compared to where I'm living, and and I set up the laser and we do the laser light show and he goes oh man, this is so cool, I love it, and let's put on another song, let's get another thing, you know. And then, and then he takes me into his little corner of his bedroom where he had his, his, his wife had their computer set up and he had his little Macintosh with two floppy disk drives. Right, it was a Mac, mac 512K. And and he goes yeah, it's got a whole megabyte of memory in it and he's playing with the mouse and everything. And he and, and he's in about five or 10 minutes into 15 minutes into it, he's showing me all the software. He's showing me productivity software and animation software and, and you know, painting software and all that.
Speaker 3:And before that, just before that he had he had told, and when I said what's the Macintosh? On the phone, he said go get Mac user and Macworld magazine. And so I did. I went to Barnes and Noble and got those magazines and I opened them up and on the inside, or above the table of contents, it said this magazine made exclusively on on Macintosh computers and laser writer printers, which was the Apple printer, right, the laser printer. And it was like, okay, that's it, that's it, I'm in If you can do this kind of advertising, right, for my lasers with this technology. I didn't know what CMY case separations were. I didn't know, you know, I didn't know squat, but I just knew that if this, this would be the tool.
Speaker 3:And so we're at his house and we're doing this and he turns to me. He goes I can't do it, so can't do what. He goes I can't, I can't get rid of my baby. And so what do you mean? What do you mean? I'm over here, I got the laser, we've done the demo, you love it.
Speaker 3:He goes no, no, no, you don't understand. This is part of me, this is an you know, this is an integral part of me. And I'm going my God, what kind of machine would so ingratiate itself to a person that they couldn't live without it? And I knew at that moment I needed to create things that had that look and feel and engagement and right, that full human experience thing. And I sold the company a couple of months later, made some really good money on it and became the vice president of this company that bought mine and I took $10,000, $8,500. And I went and bought the nicest Mac you could buy, the nicest laser printers, scanners and everything you know. This was like went crazy. But anyhow, today you and I are speaking on a Mac, a MacBook Pro, and yeah, yeah, you know I'm a Mac girl.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so everything I own is Mac. You know, it's so funny listening to your mark when I think about all the things that you've done, all the businesses that you've had and, just for everybody's, you know, knowledge. You built a radio at five years old and then, when you were 10, you built your, your first laser it was a helium neon laser when I was thinking, oh my God, you're like a Richard Feynman, like that's, like that's what I would, so I want to be Feynman when I grow up.
Speaker 1:Who doesn't want to be Feynman when they grow up? Because I am. I don't know if you've read any of the books on Richard Feynman, but it's oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's actually very similar to what you're doing, like he just flippantly talks about his working laboratory in his bedroom when he was 10, you know, and I was like, oh my God, that's like Mark, like totally for sure.
Speaker 3:So this this was my first chemistry set when I was six. Right, yeah, I got it. And then here's my second chemistry set A lot bigger next Christmas. Got a lot better.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is funny. You know you and I, we have you know, we all have our people that we love and worship right.
Speaker 1:Yes, exactly, yep.
Speaker 3:Andy Hues is the band for me right now, but but it's yeah, I was really lucky. You know, I was really lucky because I'm one of six kids and and a great family, fantastic family. But my parents were very blue collar. My dad was a heating and air conditioning tech, so he didn't make big money. We did live in a home modeled after a Frank Lloyd Wright home. My dad built it by hand. Wow. So we had architecture. So architecture, design, aesthetic were a part of our DNA, which was great.
Speaker 3:And and even though we didn't have money, my dad would say, what do you need? And then I would say, well, I need hydrochloric acid, or I need, you know, I need phenolucidate. You know I need phenolucidate, I need a beaker, I need, you know. And he'd go, okay, and he would go negotiate with people and either trade his services for with them or he would go to the local hardware store and you got, you got any returns that you know you can't resell, and and he would go to the used TV store, to the TV repair shop, and say what are the TVs you can't fix? There's just no way to fix them. And he would collect two or three of those, get them to me and in the shed behind the house I would. I would assemble them and solder everything together and make one good working TV. And so I was.
Speaker 3:It was great and so he was very that resourcefulness. It wasn't lost to me. In fact, one of the great like I started doing extractions. So that first, the first chemistry set was Christmas when I was six years old. So and and then my, the guy that became my stepdad, who was my dad's best friend at the time. He was a well known microbiologist who worked on NASA projects for aero jet general and really really brilliant man and had a. Obviously he had a PhD and had a degree in chemistry and so he I was able to kind of glean from him and do my. I would bring in my chemistry experiments and he would make fun of me and and teach me how to do it better. But what I got into right away was was one. I knew that I was going to have to get into vacuum technology in order to kind of get to the next level, vacuum extraction technology, to be able to get things to to in the chemical realm to work right. You've got a bit of a chemistry background. You know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:Yes, I know.
Speaker 3:So it's great. So so I, so my dad, said okay, here's the deal. I, you know, I work in heating and air conditioning. I think we have a broken vacuum pump for for evacuating air conditioning systems in the back of the shop where I work. I'll see if I can get it for you, if the boss will be cool with that and let me get it for you. So he said, just write me a note and put it on my truck in the morning and I'll solve. Remember it. So for two weeks I write hey dad, don't forget the vacuum pump, love Mark. And.
Speaker 3:I spelled. I spelled vacuum, vac, ume, and see. So my dad at the. So at the end of two weeks on, on a Friday, the end of two weeks, my there was a note on his window when I went out and it said hey, Mark, when you learn to spell vacuum correctly, I will get you a pump.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, you gotta love the sense of here, yeah.
Speaker 3:Oh he was. He was great and he had. It was such great. So you got me a vacuum pump and then I started doing. You know I started.
Speaker 3:The first thing was, of course, getting water to boil at freezing temperature. That was like like the first right, by lowering the right by putting a vacuum on it and lowering the atmosphere. And then it was how do you make chemicals do different things under a vacuum versus what they would be? Or how do you get them to? How do you get to separate two, two compounds at temperature? By putting a heat plate underneath it. And, and I would, I would turn the heat plate on and off, because we didn't have like digital controls or anything.
Speaker 3:It was either red or nothing. And you know, turn it off and on and get it to separate two compounds, or or combine two or three compounds and then use a vacuum to get rid of any of the gases and stuff and then use high voltages on it. And it was, it was great. So I got really lucky. I had resourceful parents that taught me to, you know to to that if you can dream it, you can make it, you can make it, and that it doesn't take, it doesn't take unobtainium dollars. It doesn't take multi million dollars to to do this. You just have to, you know, want it bad enough and work hard enough. And and funny how those things started.
Speaker 3:Oh, big time, big time. Yeah, still, I mean I, you know, I don't don't get me in a meeting with, or don't get me in a in a room with, a bunch of really smart people because I'll corner one, put them in a corner, grab a whiskey and go come on, let's do this thing, what's yeah?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, All right, all right. So, speaking of which, mark, your current company, New Topia, and you make all kinds of really amazing new tropics, but let's say that somebody is listening to this and they have never heard of new tropics. How would you explain new tropics to somebody who's never heard of this stuff before?
Speaker 3:So it's. Thank you, jennifer. That's a great intro. So the first thing I do, or I try to do and this was actually done to me when I was building the first stacks back in 2008 to 2012, when I started originally designing stacks is I had a client say have you seen the movie limitless? And I said no, I haven't. And because it? Because it would just been out a couple months, right. And he said, well, the stuff you send us that tastes like crap works like the clear pill in that movie that Bradley Cooper is shlocking. So that was kind of right, that was kind of thing. And so the first thing I say have you seen the movie limitless? Well, that's kind of the ultimate dream newotropic stack. Or it's an Adderall overdose, we're not sure.
Speaker 1:Right, right, I'm tracking. I've tried that too. Yep, yep.
Speaker 3:Yep so. But so newotropics are. Are safe, Meaning like no. There's a thing called LD 50, when you're doing animal tests on things where at 50% right, 50% of the animals die at an X dose.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:So newotropics, at least the ones that we've either developed or use, have no LD 50, meaning that they're not toxic and or and so that's part one, but but they're basically they're.
Speaker 3:They're non toxic, often organic extractions that increase the cognitive performance or your ability to access operating states in the brain.
Speaker 3:So they, they have an elegant way of passing the blood brain barrier, which is a filter that tries to keep crap from building up in your brain or getting into your brain, and and then they they'll typically do an enzymatic process, maybe be vitamin oriented or protein oriented, and then they will maybe increase the seal Colleen, which is going to give you more synaptic activity for memory and for thinking clarity, and those kinds of things might bring some dopamine into the picture, might bring some serotonin into the picture, maybe some noradrenaline, maybe some anandamide, and essentially they're, they're these, there's these components that can, that can dramatically improve the flow of certain neurochemicals and maybe even optimize or regulate that flow and maybe extend the flow if, if your levels are already good, they might extend it, and then they also might include signaling molecules that encourage your body and brain to produce more of that neurotransmitter or neurochemical so that you get these kind of improved results.
Speaker 3:And ultimately, I mean my, my, my definition on top of this that's like that's what a new, new tropics is right, but the definition on top of that is things that encourage or create neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells and blooms of new brain cells, so that you can play with them, get them to perform miracles for you, create new neural pathways so that you can get into either either either either more accessible states of operating states you know whether that's loving operating state, or whether that's highly focused, or whether that's aggression, or whether it's it's clarity, or whether it's wakefulness, or whether it's almost like transcendence, like where you're feeling very much at one with, with your. You know your fellow humans in the universe and maybe your dog, like I like to be one of my dog.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 1:So, um, that's an awesome definition. I love how you laid that out, just for the listeners. So, like a lot of the things that Mark mentioned, so we're talking about, like dopamine, serotonin, ceticoline, those are all neurotransmitters, right, and neurotransmitters, like you said, are often like signaling chemicals and they turn on and off things. What I find so interesting is that we've learned over the last, you know, couple of decades, right, how people have different amounts of receptors for each of those neurotransmitters, what one new tropic might affect somebody completely different from somebody else, right, depending on the amount of receptors that you have for that. So what you said, what I thought was really interesting, was that, even if you're already good, it can enhance the flow, and for me, that that's that was it. It's interesting like people can take the same thing, that feel completely differently, just depending on their internal biochemistry.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, I think about it like a, a VU meter. You know an audio when you're, when you have like you have a base, midrange, treble, right, and if you've, if you've ever taken a look at those, the graphic equalizers, what they're called in the audio space. We're back to audio already. We're going back to 86 already. Is right, you have this graphical equalizer and you can see that on on any of your audio tools. You'll have something that'll indicate beyond volume, it'll indicate frequencies, if you think of those frequencies as the neurochemicals in your brain, and they have these different functions, like you know. We talk about dopamine for reward and motivation, right, and, and also energy. You know energetic. You take dopamine, you get nor adrenaline along with it. Now you've got like vigilance and you're right, you're very aware you put some serotonin on that. Now you get a little bit more softer with the heart. You feel you have more emotion, maybe more positivity, those kinds of things, and so it's managing. Or GABA, right, where you feel chill, like things don't bug you, you don't feel like right, you know you're not rattled, and maybe even pre sleep. You know condition as well.
Speaker 3:So, but, but you can have, you can have high GABA and not have sleep. You can have high dopamine and not have focus, you can just have agitation. So it's really modulating and regulating all of the neurotransmitters, or a select series of neurotransmitters, to be able to get to a state that is meaningful for you and powerful for you. So if I, if I want to get focused, I'm, I'm Mr ADHD, right, I could be the poster child for ADHD. So for me, I want to modulate my dopamine just so I don't want to have too much, nor adrenaline, I don't want to have too much of that. You know the agitation or that focus, and or I become a highly focused jerk. And you know they call my employees used to call it. They'd say, hey, mark, are you on that asshole drug again? You know, if I tried, if I tried Adderall.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Right. So that's you know. And that's when you start. When you start focusing on single, you know which is what a lot of a lot of clinic, you know clinical meds do. When you start focusing on a single neurotransmitter instead of the chorus or the symphony of neurotransmitters, and putting them in the right area, you start getting some real aberrations. It can be good for some things, but most of the time you want to have that course, you want the, you want the horns to come up a little bit, or you want the bass player to.
Speaker 3:You know, I was just listening to a blur song just before we got here, called out of time Great, great altitude. Even Al Barn is my new favorite vocalist. Okay, and so you know you fall into these people and and anyway, it's a great song. It's a song about time, but it's just so beautiful. But it leads with this incredible baseline, right.
Speaker 3:But then it builds, then they get, then this little tiny guitar piece comes on, a little repeating riff comes on, and then his smooth as silk voice comes in, just as the drums, the light drums coming on, and our, our neurotransmitters and our neurochemicals can be orchestrated like that so that you're building this beautiful symphony and you can say, okay, the piece that I'm trying to create today, I need to this, this orchestral piece, to operate for 12 hours effectively. And then I need that. I need that, then I need to come down right, I need the kettle drums to finish and then I need to go into a very. I just want to have the seashore, the ocean coming up and the waves going out, and I need to have that as a follow on. So, building systems, process and tools to be able to optimize that and eventually be able to reach those states, with or without the assistance of these outside neurochemical precursors, that's the ultimate goal. So, so right. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:You know what's so? So amazing to me is that we haven't understood any of this for for really all that long. No, I mean, I think it's. I think in 1998 was when we realized that adults actually had it, had neurogenesis, had the ability to generate new brain cells. I mean that's only 1998. I mean that is right oh yeah, like 22 years ago Maybe, I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And before that, you know, scientists thought that we were just born with all the brain cells and neurochemicals that we were ever going to have and that that was it. Like we just had to deal with that and and now we're seeing not only can we influence neurogenesis, but there's all kinds of really cool ways that we can influence the flow of the neurochemicals as well.
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely, and you can. What's what's really interesting and it's been super fun for me on this journey which is I've Matt Galant, our CEO and my business partner in this, and and Wade Lighthart, who just competed in his last professional bodybuilding tournament Fantastic, he did it all all vegetarian, by the way.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've met both Matt and Wade. Yeah, they're, they're astonishing, yeah.
Speaker 3:They are incredible human beings. And Matt's actually the one that helped build that metaphor of the, of the symphony. Because, you know, as we were starting to talk about, about joining forces and creating something, that was his angle was let's create a symphony of moods or a symphony of of, I'm not sure. Oh, there we go, a symphony of, of biochemical processes that we can then orchestrate and turn into something, you know, really valuable. So that was it, that the.
Speaker 3:When you realize that you are no longer subject to your moods, you are the master of your moods, you are the master of your neurochemical processes. Things change and you realize you, it really puts you in a position of superhuman or superpower position. Right, like, instead of a blue coat, maybe it should be a cape, because that's what happens. You. You know, you end up having, as, as we so stated at the beginning, right, you have no bad days because you're now the master of that. You say, okay, I'm feeling X today, but I want to feel Y. Here are the pieces that, right, the neurochemical pieces that I can take that are going to get me there. And eventually, and again, people have come to me and said hey, mark, are these things addictive or is this going to be a problem for me long term? And I said no. I mean I yeah, I've been doing them since the mid 90s, off and on, but but what has happened is it's my baseline cognitive performance level and my ability to deal with stress with you know, my ability to love more, to have a bigger heart, to be able to deal with a lot of cognitive challenges all at once right Anarchy and mental anarchy, those of all right, those of all dramatically increased. We had, it was so funny so we had a management meeting yesterday with with all of our management teams, which is another a lot of people now, and it was funny because we were doing that.
Speaker 3:Matt leans into the mic and he goes embrace the anarchy. You know, because when you're growing fast, when you're doubling, you know every year and sometimes every few months, it's not an organized process. It is. It is a lot of of holding on for dear life and getting suppliers to align with your goals and and you know, and all of the supply chain issues, as well as teaching people and bringing you know, bringing new people in and hiring right and and then getting them to to ascribe to your philosophies and understand and and you know, and you never, and you never hit it at 100%. So it's really important to be able to go okay. So we we've kind of barely missed the goal, but we're still in the game. Let's let's keep playing. You know, and those kinds of things happen.
Speaker 1:So how did this even become a thing for you, like? How did you decide one day that you needed to do this for people to help them get out of the mood that they're in and and become a just a happier, more productive, more cognitively focused human?
Speaker 3:You know I hate. I hate when people talk their origin story and it and it sounds cooked, but mine was a, was a. The origin story on this was three parts. First part was I had my own health, radical health challenge crisis back in the early nineties. That fortuitously led me to a, an ND MD, who took me in, dusted me off and said we can, we can repair this right. We can, we can fix this Somewhere between Roy and Blade Runner going to his master and right, um, but. But the doctor didn't die in the process and I didn't kill him either. So, um, so that, um, so that was. That was in the early nineties.
Speaker 3:I was a white rat for a drug called Accutane. When I was in the military 10 years prior and the Accutane had made it. I had basically, um, just done damage on my GI tract, so I wasn't creating B vitamins. My thyroid was calcifying, so I had very low thyroid. I was living in the Pacific Northwest, which doesn't help when you're low thyroid, because if you ever get sunlight you're lucky. Um, yep, and all of those factors combined and then I had high stress. I I owned a couple of companies at the time and I was trying to start another and it was just not the right mix. And I was about to have a baby and um, and so I didn't. I I wasn't actually, my wife at the time was about to have a baby.
Speaker 3:So all of these combined stresses, um, uh, almost put me in the hospital and this doctor grabbed me and said hey, I think you're low thyroid. Um, I would like to put you on an oxygen therapy. Um, an EWATS system exercise with oxygen therapy to detox you and see if maybe something happens. And a sore opened up under my lat. It was the size of silver dollar and it was 80 plus percent, um, accutane. So after 10 years of being a performance athlete, this thing opens up under under 30 minutes of oxygen therapy and indicates to me that maybe I'm toxic. So we sampled it, sent it to the lab and came back and it was awful. So so that was part one, and that was like aha, you can do something. He got me on on thyroid and that was super helpful. My life changed completely, um, because I finally felt like myself again, or better, I felt better than I had felt in so many years that you can't remember feeling that good.
Speaker 3:And so right, you feel like a rock star in there?
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, it was. It was incredible. And then I started, I started eating better as a result of that. Feeling good leads to better habits, leads to better thinking, leads to better decisions. So, and then in, and then we we had our first baby in a hot tub, um, we had our second and a birthing chair, and we had our third in a on a couch nice Italian leather couch, in front of the fireplace. She's okay, my wife at the time, she, um, she squeezes my hand as my, my youngest daughter is a crowning, which is where the baby is. The crown of the baby's head is coming out of the vagina. She goes, she goes, um, you're getting cut, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Having been through that several times like I can understand the sentiment.
Speaker 3:You know where I cover right. So, um, but she tore a little bit. They handed me scissors, they handed me the snips to give her an apesia to me, and I said I, I can't cut my wife's vagina, I like it, it's a great vagina just like it is. And so so she tore a little bit, um, and she'd started tearing before they had these snips, but anyway, she tore a little bit, and so they handed her. The midwife ended her for oxycodone and um, and she fell in love. She built a relationship with oxycodone, um, that was a bond.
Speaker 3:And, uh, a decade later she committed suicide on oxycodone, methadone and alcohol, and so the, the relief of pain killing was no longer relieving her Um, and she wasn't necessarily in pain, but but it also blunted her emotions and a lot of other critical thinking skills. So, um, don't think that the painkillers just do the damage on the pain receptors, the opiate receptors. They, they will have a tendency to influence decision making, they'll influence joy, they will reduce pleasure, um, they'll make it. So you're, you're just not a human anymore, and it's a really sad thing to see, um, your, your most precious uh person in your life, laying on the ground with a uh emergency tech with a six inch needle about to to do a scene out of a, out of a movie, um, and thrust it through her heart to try to get her started again.
Speaker 3:That led me on the journey of how could I help people with addictions get out of addictive behavior so they weren't a slave to whatever the drug of choice was. And that was the first part. And then from there I also at the same time I was co-founder, or my co-founder was a founder of Century 21. We had this software that was brainstorming software, so we helped people think laterally and we helped people ask the right questions to come up with the appropriate solution to any problem. So we had 16,000 questions in here and little question banks. And then we had a lateral thinking engine with quite a few tens of millions of data points, of information that was being input on a daily basis into these databases in the cloud and you would have access to it. On this idea Fisher product, my business partner the founder of Century 21, was a guy named Marsh Fisher, hence the idea Fisher. It just worked right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it totally works.
Speaker 3:So I had a group of about just under I had 396,000 customers and I took a very small subset a little over a thousand of them and I started taking test tubes blank test tubes of neurochemical precursors, starting with pyroglutamic acid and different forms of choline Choline by Tartrate was my first one and sending it to him and saying, how does this make you feel? And they were kind enough to give me feedback. My best friend at the time and still close, close, close friend, david McGinnis, the founder of PR Web, he would take me to lunch every week and I would give him another one of these test tubes and he'd go. The reason this makes me more wakeful is it tastes so bad I'm about to puke my guts out.
Speaker 3:But I went through iteration after iteration of combining two neuro molecules or neuro precursor precursors to neuro molecules, doing a lot of deep study and NCBI and talking to the neuroscientists that were that had used our software, who I could tap into, and in exploring that found that there were different combos that gave you different results and that those two, that pairing of molecules, I could put to the side and go, okay, that one works, and then take another pairing of molecules and build on that and then I started solving. There were other problems that people had that weren't associated they weren't directly associated with neurochemical performance or addiction or habit formation, but they were super critical, like they were Rhonda Patrick type of insights, which were what about neuro inflammation? What about gut right Having a poor, a biome microbiome?
Speaker 1:Right, because that directly impacts. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I started addressing that. So I said okay, cool, I didn't know the term stack, I was ignorant to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I started building these stacks and started realizing if I could get rid of, if I could get an antioxidant, a super antioxidant stack, I could combine it with a super B vitamin stack and then I could combine that right, cause you need B vitamins become enzymatic precursors, very healthy for the body to be able to utilize, and you'll notice that if you have healthy B vitamin levels, that the amount of overhead that your physiology has to take on to do important stuff is reduced. And if you reduce that overhead, then there's more bandwidth left to do important things. So I just kept doing that and eventually. So I got an anti-inflammatory right, I got a B vitamin stack, I got a choline donor. One of the things with neurotropics is almost every neurotropic, or one of the components of almost every neurotropic, is to increase acetylcholine flow, because that's your cognitive performance and memory and some of the other things that are key. So doing that well, what happens when you do that is you can very quickly deplete the amount of available acetylcholine in the synapse. And when that happens, what happens? Your body goes oh, I'm gonna go get some more choline, and it starts getting it right out of here, out of your traps, and it'll start to. Really you'll get these headaches, or you think it's a headache, it's actually a neck ache and a shoulder ache and a traffic because it's trying to pull from the fibers, it's trying to pull this acetylcholine out and make available neurotransmitters. So having a choline donor that's what they call it kind of choline, some level of choline, helps to solve that problem. And then having the neurotropic stack with two or three or four, five or seven different neurotropic compounds or extracts to be able to go to build that symphony right, to build those different. I want a little bit of dopamine, I want a little bit of acetylcholine, I want some serotonin over here, and then I want to finish with GABA four hours later and to be able to build that. So you had each of those aspects happening and then finishing it up with like vitamin D and vitamin K2 and other things that are maybe hormone centric. We don't think of D as a hormone, but it's a hormone and it helps to relieve some of the again, some of the overhead that your body's going through, so it improves that performance. So that's kind of how that whole thing came about and it was great. It was great I mean it was a sad situation that I'm really thankful. I'm not thankful that it happened, I'm thankful that we got through it and didn't decide to join her in that situation. So I was blessed.
Speaker 3:My youngest daughter. She were walking across. We moved to Blaine, washington, which is right below Vancouver, bc, on the Canadian border, us border. And we're walking across the road one day and she goes hey, dad, plug or trigger. She was like 12 years old. She goes, plug or trigger. I go. What do you mean plug or trigger? She goes, well, cause she saw her mother on life support and then they pulled the plug on her right and instead of being able to control the destiny of her life, somebody else was doing it because she had relinquished control by trying to commit suicide. So my daughter goes, plug or trigger. And I said what do you mean? She goes well, two things dad. One, remember that. And again, young kid obviously my offspring she goes, she goes. I remember dad, energy is never neither created nor destroyed. Right Laws throw them on dynamics. I'm going first, who taught you that? And second, you're right, she goes. Mom's not gone, she's just distributed throughout the universe in some form of energy. I'm going. Holy crap. That's an insightful thing, for a little regret to say.
Speaker 1:It really is, but I'm totally tracking with her.
Speaker 3:yes, Right, so it's great. And then she says and her name is Livy, she still works for me, by the way, she still works for a company, she's head of special operations, so she's SOS special operations. And then the next thing she said was plug or trigger. And I said what do you mean? She goes well, do you want somebody to pull the, to pull a plug on you, like they did, mom, or do you want to be able to pull the trigger on your life? Do you want to be able to live up until the day that you don't want to live and be able to, elegantly, but you know, turn the switch off and go? You know, kindly to this, you know this forgotten man and it was like what a beautiful way to go.
Speaker 3:And she knew she was watching me speak with these neurochemists and people that are saying, and the people at Genentech and saying you know cause we're? I'm taking blood tests and saliva tests and the rest to try to see how these substances are working with my physiology and neurology. And they're saying, you know, mark, one of these great guys said he said you know, mark, you can live to be 120. Your kids are going to be able to live to be 150 and maybe more because we're getting good at this genetic engineering and genetic repair and these things. Right, you know V cells and other technologies.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, yeah, don't even get me started.
Speaker 3:Right. Yeah, it's great stuff and it's cool and it's accessible, it's not unobstanium, it's not $100,000 anymore.
Speaker 1:No, no, it's not, it's. Yeah, that's a whole other podcast, but yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but it's important one. So, anyhow, it was that conversation that leads to what. What if we could, jennifer, what if we could orchestrate almost every element of our lives in the way that we think about it, like from our self-talk, our motivation and the neurochemistry and physiology that is a precursor to successfully executing on those ideas, those goals, those ambitions, those loves, those Right. What if we had the ability to do that? And I think that's what these tools that we have here, these neurotropics and these formulations, give us. They give us that edge that allows us to get closer to the ideal of being able to program ourselves in a way that maybe we I'm not saying it is everything, I'm just saying that it is a tool that, for me, has been profoundly powerful in helping me to achieve things that I never believed I would have been able to. I'm the Maybe the poster child for ADHD, but I'm also I was at one point voted one of the three least likely to succeed in my high school. So yeah, yeah, they actually announced it Don Dagg, who was the dean of boys and also my tennis coach, and I was a state tennis player at the time. I had quit going to school because I had a job making parts for nuclear reactors when I was 16. So I'm playing state tennis, but then I'm also working 40 hours a week making titanium and hafnium and zirconium and molybdenum parts for the nuclear reactor industry and I was making really good money at the time.
Speaker 3:It was back in the 70s and I couldn't and I went to. I spent a week at University of Oregon at a sports frat and I asked everyone that came into that frat that summer what are you? Why are you here? How long is it going to take you to get where you want to go? What are you going to make when you get out, and a bunch of other questions. And I was making. This is staggering, right. I was making $7.35 an hour $7.35 an hour at the time, right?
Speaker 1:Hey, that was really good money back then. What are you kidding me?
Speaker 3:It was. That was money, bro. That was yeah, and my friends were making. My friends were making a buck $35 to a buck $55 an hour. I'm driving a 68 Mustang, right, beautiful mint blue Mustang, it was just. And so my life? I mean, I was rolling, I was a roller, yeah and right, and how short-sighted and everything.
Speaker 3:But I came back from that adventure that summer and I called my tennis coach, the Dean of Boys, and I said, don, convince me to stay in school. I'm making this much money. I see a career path of me being a precision machinist doing stuff that I love. I loved working with tools and tooling and we had one computer numerical control CNC mill, which was the first of the computerized technology with a green screen and all the stuff. And I said I could see me doing stuff around that technology in the future. Convince me to stay in school. And he goes Mark, I've never convinced you of anything. He goes, but I'm going to get you fired because you were part of a school program. That education was part of the school program. So he did. He got me fired. They rehired me a week later they got I had to go get my GED.
Speaker 3:I got a 97 or 197 on my GED, and so they said, okay, you're back, you're good, but it's those events that shape our lives. If you put that in context, I had a voice in my head that said you're a loser. I had a voice that said you're not going to be successful. And I had to beat the shit out of that voice. Every day I would go running or I would hit against the wall and I'd go you're the greatest tennis player in the world. Vlosts and Bjorn Borg, they can't compete. Or I'd go run and I would say you're the smartest kid in school, you're going to be a champ, you're going to be rich one day. And I had to kind of like build a new vocabulary that defined my life. But that you're a loser voice by a person in power. It follows you, it haunts you, it becomes the thing when you're asleep and you wake up in the morning. You have to kind of rewrite that script and one of the things that Neutropics have been so powerful for me and that will tell you we go and do these trainings and we have these meetings on a regular basis where we get together and we talk about we're always upgrading our technology and our solutions and, like I've got.
Speaker 3:We have this GABA-ergic thing called Xamarin Juice. Right, it's a, it's a, it's a sublingual spray, you know. You just take some hits, you know right, and releases GABA very quickly. It stimulates you. I actually developed it because a woman who owned medical clinics in the Northwest came to me and said I'm going to commit road rage, I'm going to be like you know, the movie falling down. Yeah, I'm going to be that guy, and so, yeah. So I made that for her and it became something that and Matt loved it, because Matt loves that that kind of balance of power and stability. You know power and not being a jerk.
Speaker 3:And here we got we've got version 2.5. So you know new font and everything. And then we have we just finished, this is a super beta prototype version 2.5.1. And so we're always iterating. We're always iterating because we discover new things in the process. We've got, you know, over I think we got 160,000 customers between the combined companies and continuing to grow at a very rapid rate, and we think it's really important to be able to go. What are the new molecules and the undiscovered technologies that we can apply to what we're doing to get even better outcomes for our clients or better programming of those outcomes, or to be able to, you know, to move the needle right, like you know, like, like you know, an upbeat which is right.
Speaker 1:Yes, I was going to tell you so. My podcasting stack is BrainFlow and Upbeat.
Speaker 3:Awesome, I'm with you. And today I did. I actually took a new, I'm building a new NectarX formulation and we're actually going through all of them. And, yeah, by Q1 of next year I should be through with each of them and taking there's so many cool I just got.
Speaker 3:I just got back from Supply Side West as a trade show in Vegas. They have twice a year in the East and West and this is where all of the new, the new growers and extractors and vendors of new molecules get together and expose their wares. And then my job is to go in there and be a ninja and try to find the ones that are real, the ones that we can use, the ones that are safe, the ones that have grass compliance and FDA compliance, so that we can actually create the next beautiful stack out of them. And while it was there, I found a couple of that were just blew my mind and and so I started formulating and, and so you know you'll, and then you know, and then, and then next year, you know you'll go, you'll go, mr Newt, can I, can I get something out? And I'll go. Oh, jennifer, here let me send you a sample of of my newest, you know, and then we'll do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm, I'm getting for everything. All right. That's the end of part one. Crazy, awesome, interesting guy right. Well, be sure to listen to part two, coming right up.
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