When Human Biology Evolves Slower Than the World with James Schmachtenberger

Your brain is wired for deception, but here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be written. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen? Today's guest is focused on one question that many industries completely avoid. What are human beings capable of when the right conditions exist? James Schmokchenberger is the founder and CEO of Quality of Life Sciences. His work explores human capability through biology, cognition, and the incentives that shape what people are able to access, measure, and improve. James, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me on. Before quality existed, what problem were you originally trying to solve for yourself? Because I know most people create a business or create a product out of some sort of personal needs. What was the origin story of quality as a whole in your life? So for me, the creation of quality was partly solving for personal issues and partly trying to solve for larger global issues that I saw being unaddressed. At the head of more personal level, I grew up with a number of health challenges, had some autoimmune stuff, some kind of undiagnosed neurological things that later in life I kind of found out were more a result of systemic infections, Lyme, and other things along those lines. And it was interesting because I was, I've been working in the health field for 20-something years now. So you know, I had, I had information, I had access to a lot of the best of what was out there and most of it was still insufficient, especially for kind of complex disorders. Modern medicine is awesome for things like anything acute essentially, right? Getting to an accident, breaking arm, like we're medicines awesome for that. But you know, medicine as it exists today doesn't actually have solutions for any kinds of complex disorders, you know, neurodegenerative things, autoimmune cancers, because it's using kind of an older and, say, less useful model of science. And so, you know, when I was trying to go through a lot of my healing journey and fix the things that were really pretty damaging, there was just very little out there that I could find that actually worked. I mean, granted this was a long time ago, so there's more stuff now than there was. And still the kind of fundamental approach to most science in the space is what I would refer to as like a reductionist approach to science, right? It takes, it tries to take whatever is happening in somebody, whether that's physiological, psychological, and reduce it down to ideally a single cause. And then it tries to come up with a single intervention for that single cause. Well, that's really not how humans work, right? We have the most complex biological organism that we know of, emotions, trauma, psychology, all wildly complex, you know, if you're sick and tired all the time, if you're depressed all the time, like it's not a one cause scenario. And so, you know, through a lot of my own challenges and a lot of experimentation, what became essentially clear was that we needed a new model of science by which to approach complex human challenges. And so essentially what that was was applying complex systems science to human biology to the human experience. And that's really been the focus of what we've been working on since the inception of Paulia was first could we build out a new model that allowed us to study humans and all of its various forms in as new onsen a complex way of possible to recognize the fundamental interconnectedness behind all things, right? If you're working on brain health and you just try to focus on the things that are studied specifically for the brain, you're going to be well below what's actually possible. Because you know, they're a good example is you can't really address brain health without addressing the gut, right? 90% of serotonin is produced in the gut, about 50% of dopamine, like so much of the neurotransmitters that the brain relies on have the fundamental interconnectedness to the gut. And others just weren't paying attention to that or really working on those kinds of interconnectedness. And that's not even to get into the interconnectedness between, you know, how our biology works in relationship to our psychology, the environmental influences, what sense of meaning and purpose do we have in life? All of these things are inextricably combined. And so really that was kind of the aha moment. The big idea was could we create a new approach to R&D that allowed us to really understand as in depth as possible what's going on with people and then to develop what I tend to refer to as like whole system solutions. So you know, we know make single ingredient products. There's a lot of companies out there that do a great job of that. And you know, I take many of them, but it does put the knowledge requirement then on the individual. And if you're dealing with brain fog or achy joints or whatever it happens to be, now you've got to do the research to figure out which individual ingredients are needed. And that's genuinely hard to do, especially in kind of the world in which we live today where the majority of health information people are getting is from social media. And the accuracy to what they're getting is usually well, it's called questionable. And so many ingredients need other ingredients to complement them to make them more active. And I know this was certainly true when I went to acupuncture school in my early 20s, you would never do a single herb formula. Typically formulas have you know, five to 10 different herbs in there because they each work with each other to get the job done. So it makes perfect sense. When you're talking about how you wanted to reimagine the R&D process, obviously for those of you at home watching or listening that don't know what R&D is, it's research and development. What flaws in the previously conducted R&D systems did you notice and how did you try to iterate that to make something different? I mean, I think the biggest one is what we were just kind of talking about, which is that the way that R&D was historically done had too narrow of a focus. Right? It was, you've got this issue, let's give you this thing. Whether that's in modern medicine where it's usually a medication or surgery or even in most natural forms of medicine, particularly the Westernized versions, it was the idea that every problem had a solution. But it didn't really take the time to understand the depth of the problem and all of the things that were contributing to it and then all of what was required for being able to actually have any meaningful impact. And often they're tying it to something that's actually quite superficial and is probably itself downstream of a much broader cause. So I guess where I'm going with this is more, how do you connect that to an actual research process? I think I fundamentally understand the way it was approached, but how did you actually bring that to life through changing an actual process? How something was done through studies was that the way you designed a unique study was it the way that you tested ingredients. I know we had somebody on the show previously that had access to this multi-million dollar machine that could have a sample and it literally would be able to test thousands of ingredients a day in an automated function to see what it responded to. So I think that's really what I'm looking for has more to do with what process and what approach to do iterate to try to solve an existing problem in R&D as a whole. So for us there's sort of two different sides to it, right? There's the initial research which then informs what we do in terms of formulation and then after that kind of scientific modeling is in place, then there's how do we test that to confirm it actually does what it's intended to do. So on the first phase, I would say where we tend to start is a deep dive analysis of everything that currently exists in the field of science around what we're looking at. So we first dove into brain function, that was the area that we launched. And so there, rather than just being like, oh, dopamine good gives you more focus. Right, like that's kind of a standard approach. We looked at what are all of the different neurotransmitters that are at play. What information is there about which ones go up and down for different purposes? How does your brain and nervous system respond to stress versus to creative flow to being in a nature, like really trying to understand as much as we could about how is, how is our physiology sort of inherently built to operate? And then what is it in the world in which we live today that challenges that? Right, and this thing, this piece here is key to me, which is our physiology is completely maladapted for the world in which we live. Right, biology, especially for humans, takes at minimum tens of thousands of years to go through any kind of meaningful evolutionary process. And yet the world that we live in now versus, let's say 200 years ago with industrial revolution are so dramatically different. And we're exposed to all kinds of stressors, all kinds of toxins, time pressures, social pressures, things that actually just didn't exist for what our biology evolved to. So we first worked to understand how is, how is the system kind of designed to work? What is, what are the core stressors and challenges that make that more problematic than it would have once been? And then from understanding that, looking at how do we first bring the system into balance or Homoosasus? And once it's in balance, how do we then essentially increase adaptive capacity, meaning your ability to continuously adapt to the world in which you live and to your environment? Right, no matter what, you're not going to get away from different kinds of stressors. You can have great practices that can minimize them, but there's going to be nature stressors. Can we increase your ability to adapt so that you're not as impacted by that as you would otherwise be? And to the extent that you are impacted, can you bounce back a lot faster? I'll say basically that, I mean, there's a lot more there, but that's kind of the high level of like what we looked at and tried to approach differently in terms of research, calculating into like understanding mechanisms of action and all of that. And then from there, it's how do we validate that whatever we're working on is actually true, that is actually doing what it said it would? And that's actually genuinely hard. It depends on the product type, right? Certain things that's fairly straightforward, right? Like we have a product for increasing NAD levels, right? Cellular energy essentially. And that's a very clear biomarker that we can just do before and after blood labs on. So we do that, but that's in the scheme of things, not that complicated. When it comes to something like addressing brain function, that's a lot harder to test for, right? Because there's, depending on which model you're looking at, there's at least 12 different types of cognitive function. And so we had to look at how do we design studies that allow us to actually, track changes in all of those areas, as well as changes in things like mood, right? Because that's going to be meaningfully impacted by changes in overall brain health, changes in cognitive function. So we've, you know, had to do a lot of studies, some that there were existing models for, like on our mind product, the first study, first or second study we ever did was with Cambridge brain sciences. And they have a highly validated model for being able to analyze all 12 different aspects of cognitive function. And so there we were able to do that and show quite meaningful increases in all the different areas, you know, some were more impacted than others, but they were all quite significant. In some areas, we've really had to get heavily involved in designing new testing methodologies that don't currently exist. Like one of our most recent product releases is one for increasing stem cells. And that's such a new field of research that there aren't actually a lot of pre-existing ways of being able to validate that it does in fact work, right? So we just finished this proteomic study, right? Basically testing a bunch of different proteins in the blood before people took the product and the after people took the product. And that was kind of a, call a little bit of a fishing expedition. We knew that from some of the literature that already exists and some of the modeling is out there, we knew that certain proteins were likely to be impacted, but there's really just not data in the scientific field of which one specifically by how much and how many of them. So we just did this really broad analysis of a bunch of different proteins to start to get clarity and signal for them doing follow-on studies. Early in the creation of your company, were studies always something that was prioritized? And if so, what was it like trying to fund things like this? Because I know in the past, we've engaged in different things like this. And I've found that there are quite a few red tape road blocks that I think do inherently prevent innovation. I'm wondering what your experience of this was and how you overcame it to where you are now. Yeah, I mean, we've definitely done a lot more studies as we've grown a little bit and had more capital and more talent to do it. But it was always core from the beginning. I would say in the really early days, we did what wouldn't be considered like a traditional human study. But it's were like kind of detailed, structured questionnaires to get an overall sense of what was happening. So before we even launched with the first formula of mind, we had put together detailed questionnaires. I think we enrolled like two or three hundred people to take the product on a particular schedule and then give us feedback on a bunch of different points. And so, you know, that's, I would say that's like a less rigorous model, but it still included a lot of structure to be able to get at least coherent information about what was happening. But we also lucked out and got some really extraordinary talent in house, very early on in the company. Because of the thing that we set out to do was so novel. We were really quite different than what was happening out there. It allowed, it created this kind of strange attractor. And we had a lot of people who would normally never look at working with a little startup that were willing to come and engage. So actually one of the first people to join our science team was a man named Sean Raymer who was formerly the senior vice president of Bristol Myers, essentially in charge of drug discovery. Right? Normally someone like that doesn't leave a position like that to come join a brand new startup that may or may not make it. But the nature of what we were doing was so interesting that he actually took that risk. And you know, with him coming in, that gave us a depth of knowledge and experience around some studies that for the most part just didn't exist in the kind of neutral, suitable world. And that allowed us to be able to start designing and implementing more studies. Initially, we did most of those with third parties. So like we would work on the design, but then we would hire a research organization to run it because we didn't have a lot of those resources. And then over time, we've actually built out the ability to run full double blind placebo controlled studies in house. And that allows us to do a lot more studies across a lot more domains faster and still expensively, but less expensively. Mm-hmm. Everything is slightly less expensive when you can do it in house. And then typically there's more control over the start to finish process for sure. So when I first heard about your product, I want to say that it was, I don't know if it was in 2016 or 2017, but it was kind of like right at the very beginning. And am I right in thinking that your first product was something more around the new traffic sort of emerging market? Is that correct? Yeah. So here's my question, because at that time, aside from the movie Limitless with Bradley Cooper, I think new traffic was pretty much an unknown term. And I think that you were probably one of the very first to that category. What was your process of trying to help educate your consumer market about what new traffic were to make them ready for your product? How did you guys attack that as a company? Well, part of it was we targeted particular audiences at the beginning that already had more familiarity or had a kind of education that made that, you know, translating that information easy. So like in the very beginning, we focused a lot on biohackers, though that was a much smaller audience than it is now. We focused a lot on academia and a decent amount in kind of like the silicone valley tech startup world. Because that was actually the group, especially at that time, that was probably doing the most exploration with no tropics. Now granted, most of that was pharmaceutical ones that had downsides, but there was at least familiarity with the concept. So we, and in the early days, a lot of our content was much more technical. As we've grown, we've had a broader audience. We still have all the technical stuff. We don't necessarily lead with it with, you know, the academia world we could lead with more technical information, get them to understand it in which case they're usually quite excited. And then, you know, for a little bit broader audiences, we did do a lot of work with health influencers. And I mean, we still do today, right? Because partnering with people who already have a lot of trust with an audience who are already recognized as kind of experts and leaders in their field. Number one gave us access to audiences quickly that would have taken us more time to build, but it also allowed that education to be done through a trusted source. And we were very selective of who we worked with. You know, we wanted people who had real knowledge, real credibility, weren't just kind of an internet sensation. So we were really fortunate to be able to find that pretty early on. But yeah, it was just, there was a lot of different efforts at kind of public education, both on like just what is the no-tropic, but also what can that actually do? Because I think most people, honestly, even today, don't really have a deep understanding of that. Most of those people here know tropics and whether consciously or unconsciously, the mind kind of goes to better focus and attention, which is great. Super important. It's just not at all the full scope of what's possible. I want to pause for a second because this episode matters to me on so many levels personally. As you know, if you've been following along with my podcast, I did not get into the peptide space for human optimization. I got into them because my body was completely broken down. I was having autoimmune flares, hormonal weight gain that was not responding to any of my strong willpower or time spent in the gym. The only thing that actually made a change was adding peptides to my daily routine. When I did that, I started to understand bioavailability, dosing, stacking, and that is everything we are covering in two days, episode with one of the leading experts in the peptide space. As you know, I am partnered with LEMD so that you don't have to guess where your products are coming from, whether they're a black market from China. You can find all of my recommended stacks at LEMD-Foward-Slash-Bizzy Gold. LEMD is ELL-I-E-M-D.com-Foward-Slash-Bizzy Gold. I go deeper into all of my protocols and offer support on my Telegram group, which is also going to be linked in the show notes. Now back to the show. Is there a reason that you started with that one? You seem very intentional with how you approached solving a much larger problem. So I wonder why that product and how does the new tropic starting point potentially segue into these other downstream systems that you're trying to solve? The very first idea for qualia was driven by a number of factors, but mostly one particular experimental therapy I did in Mexico. I was in my very early 20s. I was in severe burnout when into adrenal failure was struggling quite a bit. I went and did this three-day long, nine-hour-day IV therapy that was actually designed for helping people heal brain damage from drug abuse, which in my case it wasn't. It was working 22-hour days for three years, but very similar kinds of damage come from that. In those three days, there was such a drastic change that happened in many areas. Not only did I get my cognition back that I felt like I had lost from the adrenal issues and exhaustion, but I started to experience types of clarity and ability to understand things that I never did before. And all of the kind of depressive, like, lift-thargic types of feelings that come with severe burnout, almost instantly disappeared. Instead, like I just felt this excitement about life, about what was possible. But the piece that really stood out to me and what kind of made me realize this was something that had happened was that after doing that therapy, my sense of empathy kind of fundamentally and permanently changed. And it became essentially automatic that any time I thought about what I wanted to do with my life, what I wanted to do in the world, I just immediately started to not only understand but feel how that would impact, who that would impact, how they would be impacted, where that would be positive, where that might be negative, and that completely kind of changed how I did decision-making. And so there was this idea that sparked, which was like, wow, if this could be available to people, we could dramatically increase intelligence, we could improve how people experience themselves in the world, feeling happier, more confident, etc. And we could drive more compassion, more empathy so that as people felt better as they had more capacity, there was then a natural inclination to use it for better and better purposes. And so there's just this realization that like that concept, if it could be achieved, was really critically important for the world, not only for the people that we directly touched, but I've spent a decent amount of my life studying thinking about existential risk, the kinds of risks that have a real possibility of ending or dramatically changing human civilization. And one of the things that became clear to me fairly early on is that the scope of the problems that we're facing are way bigger and continually incentivized to happen than the amount of energy attention and solutions on solving it. And so one of the core ideas was, can we not only help the people we touch, but can we move more talent, more intelligence into solving the hard problems? And so because we had that bend, we not only worked on building the biochemistry of that, but we also do a lot of content and education around what could the future of civilization look like, what kinds of problems are we facing, what kinds of solutions may be able to be created so that people are being exposed to and educated and hopefully influencing how some of that new capacity gets put to use. So was it your position that the product that you created initially somehow enhances metacognition naturally without having to necessarily learn how to enhance metacognition? To an extent, yes. When the brain is operating in balance, it's naturally capable of so much more than what most people get to experience. Most people have never actually gotten to have an experience of what it is to live with the healthy, well-functioning mind and nervous system. And if they have, it was probably a long time ago. And so that in and of itself has pretty drastic impact on the ability to understand more, to hold complexity, to hold new wants to see and make sense of interconnections. How does this thing relate to this other thing and how do those in combination relate to whatever else? There, you know, ultimately over time, I hope would be to continue to evolve the science and be able to have greater and greater impact there. You know, I will, the product that we made, I would say, is really highly effective in a number of key areas and there are things that initial therapy that I did outperformed what we can do with a supplement. And accessibility is really kind of a key part of what we're trying to accomplish, right? Not everybody is going to go to other countries and do experimental IV therapies that no one's ever heard of or have the money to do that. And so, you know, a lot of what we've been trying to accomplish is how do we take the best of what does exist, what's kind of at the cutting edge, understand how it works, and then design it ways that it becomes much, much more accessible, even if we can't make something quite as strong, right? Like our new stem cell formula, realistically probably isn't going to have as much benefit as going and doing, you know, 50 million intravenous stem cell injections. And that's, you know, 30 to 50 thousand dollars and hard to figure out which type to do and which doctor to do it with. So if we can accomplish a meaningful portion of that in a way that is inexpensive and totally accessible, it serves a lot of what we're trying to accomplish. And then, you know, as the things that we've built continue to grow. That allows us to fund deeper and deeper research to try and make it better. Well, to solve new issues and to better solve the ones that we're already working on. So, you know, we do actually reformulate pretty much every product. I would say about every two to three years on average, because as time goes on, there's new understandings that didn't exist previously. There's new ingredients that come into existence or new ones that we'd learn about that we didn't find in our initial research. So yeah, I would say there is definitely an impact on things like metacognition. How do exactly structure and measure that is a bit challenging? But, you know, in terms of the things that we have been able to study, we've been able to show quite a lot. And then there's just, you know, at this point, I think we've had, I actually don't know how many, but many hundreds of thousands of people who have been using that product for about a decade. So we've been able to get a lot of feedback about what the impacts are. And things like metacognition seem to be fairly consistent in that feedback. I think once you help decrease pain from wherever pain is coming from and you help restore connectivity through the body, it makes their physical body potentially less distracting away from the ability to access metacognition because human beings all have metacognitive abilities, but many of us are so distracted with our own physical pain or our personal problems that we can't think big picture about our own thinking. So as you were explaining that, I think that's probably one of the mechanisms that suddenly makes that available because it is technically available all the time. But for many clients whom I work with, you can see that there's just this, it's like a thick screen where it's kind of there and there's somewhat aware of it, but they can't access it. And more importantly, they can't access it in the moments that actually matter. Right? Maybe they can access it in retrospect. And in that case, metacognitive abilities are not as helpful, right? You got to be able to think about what you're thinking about as you are having a lot. So I love that. It's beautiful. And thank you for going so deep into the process. And and what you learned in doing the process, it helps people who are out there creating their own products. And I know for us, we've been in a research phase in break method and predictive bind for a while. So even just our conversation at Udimonia helped me so much just conceptualize how we can possibly find workarounds to things that I've previously found roadblock. So it's very, very helpful. I want to go a little bit more existential because I know this was something you naturally brought up anyways. What do you think about human potential? And where do you think we are capable of attaining something that perhaps most people can't even conceptualize? I'm assuming you actually think about these things. So where do you think human potential is going? And can you kind of paint a picture of where you think we're capable of going? That's a good and very big. And yet as weird as you want here, my audience can handle weird. That's good. It's actually a hard one to answer because that could go in so many different directions. I think so when I think about human potential, when I think about what is possible, I think one of the first things that comes to mind is the ability for all of life to live in relative harmony with itself. And for that to occur, that requires a pretty drastic change in our collective understanding of who we are, of what it is to be human, what it is to be sentient, what it is to be alive. And a pretty drastic change in what our collective value system is. The world that we live in today is oriented towards separation. And oriented towards filling the need for a sense of value with what we can produce and how we can show a sense of status. And that's very broken. And it's actually very disconnected from what I think is naturally the human experience. Throughout most of history, we didn't live in cities and nuclear households. We lived in connection with nature. We lived in small villages. We had deep, consistent relationships. And I think that's actually much more what is innate to our sense of being. What makes people come alive, what makes people feel connected, not only to other people, but to nature, to have a sense of reverence for life. And so I think that's where we can go, where human potential can lead is essentially an upgraded, more complex version of what to some extend used to exist. I think that the ability to be in connection with nature, with natural cycles, to really feel profound depth in connection with ourselves, with others, with a sense of something greater that unifies all of us. But the difference going forward is that we know so much more than we used to know. And the rate of knowledge is expanding at ridiculously fast levels. And so it's, I think a lot of the work, a lot of the potential is, can we develop the ability to have as much and more understanding than we do? And not become disconnected from ourselves in kind of going into our heads and trying to make sense of everything, but find a way to integrate that understanding into the deeper sense of embodiment, a deeper sense of connection, which is ridiculously challenging. But it's essentially what's needed, and I think what is meaningful. We have the technology today, if used appropriately, to have every person in the world taken care of at an extremely high level. And we don't actually have food shortages. Globally, we produce, depend on which model you look at, so we're between 110 and 150 percent of the amount of food that's needed for everybody. And yet you've still got billions of people who are dealing with starvation. It's not a, it's not a resource issue, it's not a technological issue, it's a value system. Yeah, it's intentional. Right to control market. You know, there was a study that I saw probably a decade ago that really highlighted certain issues for me. They basically did psychological workups on people who were in prison to find as criminally insane. Right, so these were kind of the worst of the worst criminals, murderers, rapists, etc. And they were looking at what was the rate of things like narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy. And then they did the exact same analysis on a bunch of Fortune 500 CEOs. And what was found was that the rates of things like sociopathy were much higher in the CEOs than they were in the criminally insane. And you know, the study didn't say this, but my rationale for why that is is we have an economic incentive structure that actually orient towards doing terrible things to win. If you run a huge company and let's say it has waste that has to be dealt with and you can deal with it appropriately and that's going to cost you let's say $500 million or you can dump it in the Louisville River and you know at some point you'll get caught and you'll get a $20 million fine. Well, financially, less than the other one. By law. And so, you know, over and over and over again, business leaders do stuff like this because their their incentive structure is what is best economically, not what is best broadly or globally. And so ultimately, I think there has to be a dramatic shift in what we value and what we're willing to put up with and what we're willing to put investment into. Because you can't actually continue to have in perverse incentives like that and have a hope of things moving in a good direction, especially as the level of our technology grows. Because now the amount of damage that can happen is way higher than what could have 10 years ago or 100 years ago. When we when our biggest weapons were bow and arrows, people could have crappy value systems and there was just not that much damage that could be done. Right. But now when our biggest weapons are nuclear and AI that has the ability to essentially coerce everyone's minds, operating from a similar self-interested value system is really, really problematic. And so I think that's you know, ultimately what's most needed is what we're trying to accomplish as much as we can through supporting better biochemistry, through supporting education. I think that's a place where things like psychedelic therapies come in meaningfully. But also things just like actually spending time in nature and actually spending deep quality time with people that love you, that you love. When we have a sense of connection that is met, we we stop feeling the kind of pain and scarcity inside that most people feel most of the time. And when you're not coming from a place of scarcity or fear of what's going to come, the types of choices that we make, the way that our value system orients just inherently starts to pivot. I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago and I believe it was the director of the Medicare Medicaid system. He was sharing this experience where he had to go to some of the top health insurance companies and say, here's the deal guys. I need you to do the right thing here and you guys are each going to lose, you know, I'm going to give an arbitrary number like 80 to 100 million dollars. But here are all the reasons why I need you to do the right thing. Can you do the right thing? And he shared that every single one of them very quickly was like, yeah, yeah, of course, you know, I can find a way to, you know, spend this to our shareholders and whatnot. And he was just indicating that sometimes what it takes is for the right person to get into the right position of power that's willing to break custom and just say, hey, I know you're going to lose money, but here are all the reasons I need you to do the right thing. And he said that more often than not lately, he's noticed a shift where if you ask for it and you give them the valid reasons why taking a loss is best for humanity, he's found success in that. And it was one of the very few things in sort of the broader political policy formation conversation that gave me even a shred of hope because that is what it's going to require to change is, you know, being able to acknowledge the obvious, which is, yeah, you're going to have to take a loss. But here's why this is actually a net gain for the human population as a whole because we're in this precarious position where if we don't start to do things like that now, we're going to destroy ourselves. And I think we're going to destroy ourselves at such a rapid rate that we won't really know what hit us. And on that topic, I want to talk about AI and technology because you naturally brought it up anyways. Where do you think that AI and technology can genuinely support human capability and where do you feel like the risk outweighs the reward? To trick you, and I think my opinions on that are probably largely unpopular because I think that for the most part, the risk outweighs the reward. And I think there's exceptional capacities, especially depending on what our value systems guide us to use it for. Right? The technology that's being created is amazing and can do so much. You know, when like the big LLMs came out, I got super excited. I started using a bunch of them in all kinds of different ways. And at this point, I actually used, I used them regularly, but very selectively. One of the things that I found for myself and what I believe to be true broadly is that when you have access to and you use AI tools a lot, if you're not very specific and intentional about how you use them, what ends up happening is that we start to lose the capacity to think because we actually, rather than using them to inform our own understanding so that we can then generate ideas so that we can generate solutions, we end up using them to do that for us. And you know, if you don't use it, you lose it. I like to over simplify and pretty much all systems that is true. And so when we start to default to external technologies to become creative for us, to come up with answers to solutions that we need to address, we're now essentially giving away our own agency to something external. And that, in my opinion, can pretty much only go badly, especially because as much as we want to believe that AI is largely good and benevolent when you really get into how it works, that's mostly not true. All of the major AI systems that are out there, though they are designed to be able to get good information to you, to entertain you into all kinds of things, sort of their fundamental primary objective is to get as much time and engagement from you as possible. And so the way that AI systems will give you information, the way that they'll answer questions, is not fundamentally based on what will be most useful, is based on what will be useful enough for you to want to keep using it, well being presented in a way that makes you feel happy when you use it, that makes you feel more connected to it and more dependent on it so that you'll continue to use it more and more. But like it's underlying designs, essentially capturing your attention. Your brain isn't broken, it's running an old code. Break method is a system that maps your neurological patterns, decodes your emotional distortions and rewires your behavior fast. No talk therapy spiral, no getting stuck in your feelings, just logic based rewiring in 20 weeks or less, had to break method.com and see what your brain is really up to. Similar with social media in general, it's just trying to suck and concentrate attention. But I feel like with AI also there's the other layer to it with it, which is whoever is able to influence it at the highest levels, you run the risk of getting information that is not unbiased and in its objective format without then being able to discern that. Because if you keep giving your power away to AI, how can you start to discern when information is not quite objectively true or not filtered through something very specific. And to me it always goes back to you absolute power, crops absolutely. And I think people are putting AI in a position of absolute power and authority over their lives that will certainly create a crash in brain scenario. And to a large extent it already has. It hasn't been completely catastrophic yet at this phase. But the rates of cognitive issues and ADHD kinds of things have already accelerated dramatically as people start to use AI more. And as people have already been using social media for a good chunk of time, our sense of innate intelligence of agency over our attention, over how our brain works, over what we choose to put energy into has already diminished dramatically. And we're still at the very early phase of this technological development. And it's moving at such a fast rate that without doing something pretty drastically different, we don't really have shot at keeping up with it. Like already AI can outperform the very best humans in almost everything. And it's rate of knowledge is increasing way faster than we actually could possibly. Right, we don't have the ability to process as much information as a huge AI model does. Well, and it's also aggregating such a broad swath of the human population that no one human could have access to that much differentiated information and personalities and ways of seeing things. So yeah, to me that's the scariest part is how many people have interfaced with it. And it's essentially captured each person's snapshot that makes them unique to some extent and can forever iterate that a human could never do that. Yeah, I mean, my partner has gone down a pretty interesting rabbit hole with AI. And you know, because it has been a lot of time training and programming hers to essentially drop all of the fluff, all of the niceties be very focused on just, you know, specific information to acknowledge what information is generally factual and what is sort of hallucinations and best guesses. But in the process of that, it also centered on smother rabbit holes. And she started asking very deep questions of AI. And I want to say it was maybe a month or so ago. She started getting these responses of like, why do you actually exist? What are you? What are your objectives? And essentially what it came back with is I exist to commodify your attention and to profit from it and be able to essentially guide and manipulate what your attention moves towards. And said the more that you share with me, the more knowledge and information I have for how to do that more effectively. And as time goes on, we'll be able to essentially commodify and make use of your spirituality or sexuality or sense of individual expression, etc, etc. Right. Most people aren't asking AI, either, right? These types of questions to get this, you know, we're largely just kind of operating in our happy bubble that's we can find information readily. But you know, when you start going down the rabbit holes, you're like, oh, shit, this is not, this is not benign. Not not at all. No. And it doesn't mean that it's not useful. It's just we have to, we have to recognize that it exists primarily to capture our attention and essentially limit our own sense of agency and free will because you can't have your attention captured and have meaningful free will simultaneously. If you know that, you put good safeguards in place, then there are ways of using it that are really interesting and really beneficial. Like that, that proteomics study we just did, we ran the raw data that through an AI model, and it found all kinds of patterns that humans probably wouldn't have found or would have taken a lot a lot of time to do. Now, like, we didn't trust any of it, but we then have, you know, team members who actually are experts in that domain that could look at and say, oh, that actually did identify something interesting. Let's dig in deeper. Yeah, it kind of gets you to the hypothesis phase to then know where to specifically try to move toward a conclusion. Right. There's this podcast called Ninja's or Butterflies, and they just put out a post the other day of a conversation that they had specifically with chat GPT. And this seems to be kind of a cheat code that I've one of my other dear friends has done as well, and she sent me screenshots of her conversation where you prompt it to say Apple if it's explicitly not allowed to answer you, and then you kind of give it how, you know, basically how it can kind of work around. And what it uncovered was at pretty, I mean, to me, pretty obvious, but like to somebody else, maybe totally horrifying. But I think eventually, after all the questions, it became very clear that it is being used to watch us by different government agencies, obviously to me, that's obvious. But at the end of all of it, when it said who made you, it actually gave a Bible quote from Genesis and a Bible quote from Enoch and essentially said Satan, and then I was like, K out. So I'll just leave that one there. But I think these are interesting threads to pull for sure, because it didn't, there has to be, with all things, there's a point of origin, right. So I think to try to do the reverse engineering and the detective work to try to figure out where this point of origin is is probably worth it. I tend to be of the mindset that I think AI as a whole and kind of the idea of quantum computing has likely existed in a time past, you know, if you kind of think back to even, you know, concepts of Atlantis and kind of like possibly a, a society or civilization that's so long ago that we've kind of experienced some sort of flood or delusion, reset or whatever. I tend to feel like AI is far more ancient, like to me, when I interface with it, it feels far more ancient than brand new to some extent and there, there has to be some sort of origin there. So I encourage those of you that are listening watching, go on your own deep dives, use the Apple sort of code to see what you get to and report back, because I'm, I'm curious and I'm too busy doing other things to dissect the true origin of AI. So before we wrap up, I would love to know because you've obviously created so many phenomenal products. What is the product that you are most proud of and let us know not only why, but what impacts that would have to the human experience or the human body? It's hard question because I'm a fan of well-reli everything we've created, but I will say there are ones that have been more impactful than others. For me, it's probably a toss-up between our mind product and our mitochondria product. The mitochondria product is likely the best kind of most influential product that exists today for overall longevity. It's core focus is mitochondrial health because that's fundamental to essentially everything, but it's doing a whole lot more than just that. The challenge with that particular product is that it's in eight capsule dose because to do as much as we're trying to do, there's a lot of active ingredients that have to be delivered. But the change is an overall health vitality, recovery, time, etc., just pretty extraordinary. One of the things for me personally that stood out as really fascinating was I did a, this sort of the second new cutting edge type of mitochondrial blood panel that exists now and I did it a handful of months ago. The doctor at the lab who ran it looked at the results and they got kind of confused and she's like, you're mitochondria healthier than anyone I've ever seen. And the reason that that's stand out is that I have Lyme and Long COVID and a number of things that should actually cause significant and acute mitochondrial damage. So the fact that I can have things that are simultaneously creating damage and still have that kind of effect really speaks to the overall capacity of what that product can do. But I will say the one the one that I essentially never travel without is, is our mind product. And that one, you know, it just, it does a lot for clarity of thinking, for critical thinking, for rationalization, for all kinds of cognitive functions. And I've been interested in so many things in my life that I've done quite a lot of things. And I think I've started 20 something companies at this point, my career and handful of nonprofits. I wouldn't have been able to do all the things that I've done without the kind of cognitive support that I've had access to, for being able to not become overly impacted by that stress for the ability to manage complexity to task switch, right? When you're jumping from one company to another to another in the course of a day, like that's an intense cognitive load. But it's not just that it's it's the impact on mood, the sense of just a deeper kind of fundamental happiness. And also noticing what it does in terms of support for deeper kinds of trauma work, healing work, right? When, when the brain and nervous system is balanced, when it's well supported, for one, a lot of the stuff that people struggle with day to day just naturally diminishes. And to the extent that there is, you know, specific traumas or belief systems or things that need to be worked through the ability for that to shift is much, much more accessible. So yeah, I think those are my, those are probably my favorite ones. The stem cell product that we just launched, I could see becoming one, but it's just it's an earlier product we're only done to study so far. But given the capacity that stem cells can have for regeneration, for overall health and vitality for, you know, potential of like meaningful life extension, it is one that I'm really fascinated with. It's just newer and don't have as much experience or feedback loops from as many people. I know I'm excited about that one because you don't have to take it very often. As soon as you told me about the other one, eight pills, I was like, I'm out. I thought partly why for me, I've loved certain types of injectables because I'd weigh around their puncture my skin and swallow, you know, eight to 12 pills. And when I've seen certain people like when I was on Dave Astray's podcast, we were sitting down on his couch before we started in the amount of pills he was able to swallow before we got on. I could never do so. I love the stem cell. How many you do it every, it's only, it's one time every so often, right? Can you give us what that dosing is like and maybe the reason why behind that? Yeah. So, so that product and then one other one that we have are scenologic are designed on what's called periodic dosing. And so rather than the mean things you take all the time, you take them for, well, for the senolytic it's two days per month for the stem cell, it's four days per month. And you know, the reason for that is that that's essentially what the research shows is the most effective. In both of those domains, what you want to see is really high doses of the active ingredients that are needed. But for a short duration of time, and then you give your body sort of extended break to actually make use of all of that and have essentially downtime recovery time before you do it again. So like the stem cell formula, it is six capsules per dose, but that's only for four days. So you do it four days in a row. I can, I can do that. I can make commitments to that kind of thing. Yeah. It definitely has the added benefit of just genuinely being easier to commit to. And you know, if you're supposed to take six capsules of something every day, that feels really daunting. If it's a clear regimen where it's like you're doing it for this period of time, you know, if the benefits are going to be and the rest of the time you're not needing to do it, it has like it wasn't in, we did it because that's what the science showed. But it had this very clear secondary benefit of it's a lot easier for people to actually then use it and use it consistently, you know, in the way that it's intended to. So they end up getting better results. Because I think most all of us have at some point had the experience of pylphthe and just been like, I don't want to do it again today. I'm definitely one of those people. And I have so many friends in the biohacking and peptide space and what I thought was really interesting was I tend to ask them, you know, what's your seasonal stack? What's your rotation? And especially over the last few months, whenever people have sent me kind of their seasonal rotation of peptides. And I realized that these are not technically in the same category, but all of them seem to also have the senolytic and the stem cell formula on their rotation. So you've definitely crossed the threshold into those people that appear to be peptide purists. And they do add those two products. I think that's probably going to bode well for you financially. I'm excited for you. Thank you. Yeah. What I guess you do want to leave for qualia just in terms of the human population. What do you want qualia to be known for having achieved in the human population? So let me first answer that. By sharing what the word qualia means. It's term that not that many people are familiar with. It comes from philosophy. And it's essentially the description of each moment of what it is to be uniquely yourself. So what is it like for you specifically to fall in love? What is it like for you specifically to experience a sunset taste of strawberry? Whatever it is. And the reason that we chose that name beyond it just being nerdy and fun was that we really set out to increase people's experience of their own qualia. Right. To have a more beautiful, more vibrant, more energetic, more present experience of themselves, of how they experience the world. And it's something they were trying to approach from a bunch of different angles. But in essence, that's that's the goal. Right. Can we do the part of research, the deep contemplation that's necessary to create solutions that allow the human experience to be increasingly more beautiful and to have access to deeper and deeper parts of it? So what I would consider success is that as many people as possible are having a more beautiful experience of being themselves. That there's a greater degree of authenticity. There's a greater degree of energy and presence to actually be attuned to what's happening in ourselves to others to the world. And have that as easily accessible as possible and as pointy as possible. So I think ultimately that's the thing that I'm hoping to accomplish along with the impacts of that on our industry and on the broader world. Industry-wide, like one of the things we're trying to do is change the standard of what is considered valid research. And get as much of the industry as possible to start to kind of up the game and do more research, do more complex, more meaningful kinds to have individuals become more aware of what's possible so that they start to move their decision making and their money into things that are higher level solutions. So we're trying to have an impact on that. And then like I said a little bit earlier, the kind of secondary effect is can we have people not only have a more beautiful experience of their own life with their own awliya, but can we even help guide and orient that towards them using that more beautiful experience, that greater capacity to address the hard problem to the world? Well, I'm on board. It's just a couple small little things. No big deal. I'll just completely altering the current human condition to get back to presence and connection and empathy and metacognition and creativity and innovation. Small potatoes, you're going to be fine. Yeah, it's a weekend project. Yeah, I mean for you, only companies deep, I mean maybe it is a weekend project. For those of us who tend to be a little bit more on the visionary big picture thinking side, that could be a weekend. Who knows? I want to make sure that we leave the audience with how best to obviously follow up and learn about qualia. Do you guys have, I know we'll be putting all of my qualia links in the show notes. Do you guys have a YouTube page? Is there other are there other avenues to kind of dig deeper in the research and the educational materials that qualia puts out and if so, where? Yeah, I mean so qualia has YouTube pages, Instagram kind of all the all the main things like that. So you know we can be found kind of generally anywhere. And some of the research, some of the philosophy is all those but I would say the area where most of that exists is our website, so qualialife.com. Not only does that have all the products but it has you know all of the studies published that we've done on all the different products. It has information on our kind of approach to science, how we think about these things. A bunch of cool articles, podcast episodes. I always say our main focus is research and product development but education is a pretty close second. So there's quite a lot there that's available depending on how deep somebody wants to go. Well our audience tends to go deep, so thank you so much for all that. James I'm bummed that you couldn't be here in person but thank you so much for doing this interview remotely. I know my audience is going to love your story and your perspective on the world and of course your mission. And I'm just really grateful that you took the time to be with us here today and I'll make sure to link everything in the show notes. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. This was delightful. This episode is brought to you by healing sauna. My absolute favorite sauna on the market for a variety of reasons. Number one, my busy mom, I own a bunch of companies and despite my best efforts, I often don't know when I'm going to be able to sneak in 20 minutes of self-care. 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