Host (6:33)

And so many ingredients need other ingredients to complement them, to make them more active. 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, 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 and D process. Obviously, for those of you at home watching or listening that don't know what R and D is, it's research and development. What, what flaws in the previously conducted R and D systems did you notice? And how did you try to iterate that to make something different?

James Schmachtenberger (7:19)

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.

Host (8:02)

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 of how something was done through studies? Was it 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 multimillion dollar machine that could to have a sample and it literally would be able to test thousands of ingredients a day just 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 did you iterate to try to solve an existing problem in R and D as a whole.

James Schmachtenberger (8:59)

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. Right. 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. 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? Right. How does. How does your brain and nervous system respond to stress versus to creative flow, to, you know, being in 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 piece here is key to me, which is our physiology is completely maladapted for the world in which we live. 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 work to understand how is the system kind of designed to work? 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 homeostasis, Right. And once it's imbalanced, 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, you know, great practices that can minimize them, but there's going to be major 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 say basically that 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 without getting into 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 it's actually doing what it said it would. And that's actually genuinely hard. It depends on the product type, right. Certain things it'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 because 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, because that's going to be meaningfully impacted by changes in overall brain health, changes in cognitive function. So we've 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. 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, basically testing a bunch of different proteins in the blood before people took the product and then after people took the product. And that was kind of a call, a little bit of a fishing expedition. We knew that from, from some of the literature that already exists and some of the modeling that's 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 ones 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 then doing follow on studies.

Host (15:25)

Early in the creation of Your company. Were studies always something that was prioritized? And if so, what was, what was it like trying to fund things like this? Because I know in the past we've, we've engaged in different things like this and I've found that there are quite a few red tape roadblocks that I think do inherently prevent innovation. I'm wondering what your experience of this was and how you overcame it to get where you are now.

James Schmachtenberger (15:52)

Yeah, I mean, we've definitely done a lot more studies as we've grown a little bit and had more capital, 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 were 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 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 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 the thing that we set out to do was so novel and was 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 Ramer, who was formerly the senior vice president of Bristol Myers, essentially in charge of drug discovery. 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 with him coming in, that gave us a depth of knowledge and experience around studies that for the most part just didn't exist in the kind of nutraceutical 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.

Host (18:45)

Everything's 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 nootropic sort of emerging market? Is that correct?

James Schmachtenberger (19:10)

Yeah.

Host (19:10)

So here's my question, because at that time, aside from the movie Limitless with Bradley Cooper, I think nootropic 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 nootropics were? To make them ready for your product? How did you guys attack that as a company?

James Schmachtenberger (19:39)

Well, I mean, part of it was we. We targeted particular audiences at the beginning that already had more familiarity or were or had a kind of education that made that, you know, like, translating that information easy. So, like, in the very beginning, we focused a lot on biohackers, though that was a much smaller audience then than it is now. And we focused a lot on academia and a decent amount in kind of like the Silicon 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, for 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. We wanted people who had real knowledge, real credibility, weren't Just kind of an Internet sensation. But we were really fortunate to be able to find that pretty early on. Yeah, it was a lot of different efforts at public education, both on just what is a nootropic, but also what can that actually do? Because I think most people, honestly even today, don't really have a deep understanding of that. For the most part, people hear nootropics 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.

Host (22:26)

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 today's episode with one of the leading experts in the peptide space. As you know, I am partnered with LMD so that you don't have to guess where your products are coming from, whether they're black market from China. You can find all of my recommended stacks at L E M-Busygold and L E M D is E L L I md.com forward/busygold and 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 approach solving a much larger problem. So I wonder why that product and how does the nootropic starting point potentially segue into these other downstream systems that you're trying to solve?

James Schmachtenberger (23:51)

So the the very first kind of idea for Qualia was driven by a number of factors, but mostly one particular kind of experimental therapy I did in Mexico. I was in my very early 20s, I was in severe burnout, went into adrenal failure, was struggling quite a bit and I went and did this three day long like nine hour a 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 and, you know, in those three days, there was such a drastic change that happened in many areas, like my. Not only did I get my cognition back that I felt like I had lost from 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 lethargic types of feelings that come with severe burnout almost instantly disappeared. And 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 to happen was that after doing that therapy, my sense of empathy kind of fundamentally and permanently changed. And it became essentially automatic that anytime 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. 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, et cetera. 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, you know, 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.

Host (28:14)

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.

James Schmachtenberger (28:28)

To an extent, yes. You know, when. 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 a healthy, well functioning mind and nervous system. And if they have, it was probably a long time ago. And so, you know, that in and of itself has pretty drastic impact on the ability to understand more, to hold complexity, to hold nuance, 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 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 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 in 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 $50,000 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 as the things that we've built continue to grow, that allows us to fund deeper and deeper research to try and make them better. Well, to solve new issues and to better solve the ones that we're already working on. So 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 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 to exactly structure and measure that is a bit challenging. But 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. 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.

Host (32:38)

I think once you help decrease pain from wherever pain is coming from and you help restore connectivity through the body and 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 they're 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 gotta be able to think about what you're thinking about as you are having the thought. 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 mind for a while. So even just our conversation at Eudaimonia helped me so much. Just conceptualize how we can possibly find workarounds to things that I've previously found roadblocks. 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?

James Schmachtenberger (34:36)

That's a good and very big question.

Host (34:37)

And you can get as weird as you want here. My audience can handle weird.

James Schmachtenberger (34:42)

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, you know, 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. And a pretty drastic change in what our collective value system is. The. 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. You know, 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 where. Where we can go, where human potential can lead, is essentially a upgraded, more complex version of what to some extent used to exist. Right. I think that the ability to be in connection with nature, with natural cycles, to really feel profound depth and 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 a 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. You know, we have the technology today, if used appropriately, to have every person in the world taken care of at an extremely high level. And like, we don't actually have food shortages. Right. Globally, we produce depending on which model you look at somewhere between 110 and 150% of the amount of food that's needed for everybody. And yet you've still got billions of people who, or dealing with starvation. It, it's not a, it's not a resource issue, it's not a technological issue. It's a value system.

Host (39:08)

Yeah, it's intentional.

James Schmachtenberger (39:09)

Right.

Host (39:09)

To control the market.

James Schmachtenberger (39:13)

You know, there was, there was a study that I saw probably a decade ago that really highlighted certain issues for me. They, they basically did psychological workups on people who were in prison, defined 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, 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 orients 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 local 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 a lot. 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 ultimately what's most needed. It's 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 works orients just inherently starts to pivot.

Host (43:06)

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 gonna lose. You know, I'm gonna give an arbitrary number, like 80 to $100 million, 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'll, I can find a way to, you know, spin 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 gonna 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 side of 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 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?

James Schmachtenberger (45:13)

Tricky1. 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, the technology that's being created is amazing and can do so much. You know, I, when like the big LLMs came out, I got super excited. I started, you know, 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, 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 if you don't use it, you lose it. To oversimplify, in pretty much all systems, that is true. 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, you know, 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. 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. It's based on what will be useful enough for you to want to keep using it while being presented in a way that makes you feel happy when you Use it, it 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 its underlying design, is essentially capturing your attention.

Host (48:32)

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, no getting stuck in your feelings, just logic based rewiring. In 20 weeks or less. Head to breakmethod.com and see what your brain is really up to. Similar with social media in general, it's, you know, 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 absolute power corrupts 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 and burn scenario.

James Schmachtenberger (49:47)

Yeah, and I mean to a large extent it already has. Like it hasn't been completely catastrophic yet at this phase, but you know, the, 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 a shot at keeping up with it. Like already, AI can outperform the very best humans in almost everything, and its rate of knowledge is increasing way faster than we actually could possibly. We don't have the ability to process as much information as a huge AI model does.

Host (51:08)

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.

James Schmachtenberger (51:39)

Yeah, I mean, my partner has gone down a pretty interesting rabbit hole with AI and has spent a lot of time training and programming hers to essentially drop all of the fluff, all of the niceties, be very focused on just 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 sent her down some other 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. She started getting these responses of like, why do you actually exist? What are you, you know, 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 the right these types of questions to get this. You know, we're largely just kind of operating in our happy bubble that we can find information readily. But, you know, when you start going down those rabbit holes, you're like, oh, this is not. This is not benign.

Host (53:37)

Not at all.

James Schmachtenberger (53:38)

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 to 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. That proteomics study we just did, we ran the raw data of 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, we didn't trust any of it, but we then have team members who actually are experts in that domain that could look at it and say, oh, that actually did identify something interesting. Let's dig in deeper.

Host (54:37)

Yeah, it kind of gets you to the hypothesis phase to then know where to specifically try to move toward a conclusion.

James Schmachtenberger (54:43)

Right.

Host (54:44)

There's this podcast called Ninjas 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 I 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 it was like, okay, 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 society or civilization that's so long ago that we've kind of experienced some sort of flood or delusion or 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 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 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.

James Schmachtenberger (57:18)

It's a hard question because I'm a fan of, well, really everything we've created. But I will say there. 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. Right? Its 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 an 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 changes in overall health, vitality, recovery time, etc, just pretty extraordinary. And one of the things for me personally that stood out as really fascinating was I did a, there's sort of this like new cutting edge type of mitochondrial blood panel that exists now. And I did it a handful of months ago and the, the doctor at the lab who ran it, looked at the results and was, they got kind of confused and she's like, you're, your mitochondria are 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, the overall capacity of what that product can do. But I will say the one, the one that I essentially never travel without is our mind product. And that one, it does a lot for clarity of thinking, for critical thinking, for rationalization, for all kinds of cognitive functions. And you know, I've, 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 in my career and a handful of nonprofits. And I wouldn't have been able to do all the things that I've done without the kind of cognitive support that's I've had access to for being able to not become overly impacted by that stress or 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, that's an intense cognitive load. But it's not just that. 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 where we've only done two studies so far. But given the. 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.

Host (61:54)

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 18 pills, I was like, I'm out. That's partly why, for me, I've loved certain types of injectables because I'd way rather puncture my skin than swallow, you know, eight to 12 pills. And when I've seen certain people, like when I was on Dave Asprey's podcast, we were sitting down on his couch before we started, and 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?

James Schmachtenberger (62:33)

Yeah, so. So that product and then one other one that we have are senolytic, are. Are designed on what's called periodic dosing. And so rather than them being 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 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.

Host (63:30)

I can do that. I can make commitments to that kind of thing.

James Schmachtenberger (63:33)

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 what the benefits are going to be and the rest of the time you're not needing to do 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, 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 pill fatigue and just been like, I don't want to do it again today.

Host (64:25)

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, 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 gonna bode well for you financially. I'm excited for you.

James Schmachtenberger (65:05)

Thank you. Yeah.

Host (65:07)

What legacy do you want to leave for. For qualia, just in terms of the human population? What do you want qualia to be known for having achieved in the human population?

James Schmachtenberger (65:23)

So let me first answer that by sharing what the word qualia means. It's a 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 a 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 that we're trying to approach from a bunch of different angles. But in essence, that's, that's the goal. Can we do the hard research, the deep contemplation that's necessary to create solutions that allow the human experience to be increasingly more beautiful and 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 poignant as possible. So I think ultimately that's the, the thing that I'm hoping to accomplish along with the impacts of that on our industry and on the broader world. Right. Industry wide. Like, one of the things we're trying to do is change the standard of what is considered valid research and get, you know, 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, you know, the kind of secondary effect is can we have people not only have a more beautiful experience of their own life with their own Qualia, but can we then help guide and orient that towards them using that more beautiful experience, that greater capacity to address the hard, hard problems of the world? I'm on board.

Host (68:49)

It's just a couple small, little things. No big deal. 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.

James Schmachtenberger (69:02)

Yeah, it's a weekend project. Yeah.

Host (69:05)

No, but I mean, for you, 20 companies deep. Yeah, I mean, maybe it is a weekend project for those of us who tend to be a little bit more on the, the visionary, big picture thinking side. You know, that could be in 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.

James Schmachtenberger (69:42)

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 on those. But I would say the the area where most of that exists is our website. So quality of life.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. Bunch of cool articles, podcast episodes. I would 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.

Host (70:38)

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 gonna 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.

James Schmachtenberger (70:59)

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. This was delightful.

Host (71:02)

This episode is brought to you by Healing so Sauna. My absolute favorite sauna on the market for a variety of reasons. Number one, I'm a 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. And if you've ever owned another sort of infrared sauna, you know that you likely have to plan in advance because you're gonna have to heat it up for about an hour if you like it hot. I don't ever have that sort of opportunity. I have to seize the moment and that is the number one reason that I am a huge fan of healing sauna. It only takes 15, 20 minutes. I typically am there about 17 to 18 minutes. You literally turn it on, you sit in it, you zip it up, you can take it with you anywhere you go and it immediately hits full heat. When I first started doing the healing sauna, I couldn't sweat. My entire detox pathway system was completely compromised within a few weeks. Profuse sweating Healing sauna is the thing that I do every single day. It is a non negotiable for me when I'm traveling and I don't get to fly with it. I miss it and it's the first thing I do when I get home. If you want to try healing sauna for yourself, you can use code BG Heal for 200 off plus free shipping. You will not regret this. It'll be the best sauna experience you've ever had. Your brain is wired for deception. But here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen?