Transcript
Zack Arnold: Okay, I am here today with Dr. Andrew Hill, lead neuroscientist at True Brain, as well as the founder of Peak Brain. So, Andrew, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
Andrew Hill: Great, thanks for having me, Zack.
Zack Arnold: Well, as I was telling you a little bit offline before we started recording the conversation, and as my audience knows, for those that are longtime listeners, I am a giant neuroscientist geek. I love talking brain science. I have no formal training in it, but I read about it a lot. I’ve experimented with neurofeedback. I’ve experimented with several different nootropics, including True Brain, and I just I’m always on the lookout for ways to enhance cognitive function as long as it’s not dangerous and crazy, and there’s all kinds of risks, but if there are ways that I can enhance my focus and just be able to do my creative job better, I’m looking for ways to do that. So that’s why it’s it’s so exciting to have you on the show today.
Andrew Hill: That sounds like a goal everyone should have to hack and take control of their brain. And I mean, why would we not want to do that? Why, if if there’s things within reach and we have a problem? There’s a reason to do it, and if there’s things within reach, and we don’t have any things to remediate, why would we also not, you know, seek enhancement?
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I agree, and I’m not going to go down. There’s so many rabbit holes that I could go down about why people don’t have the focus that they used to, how diet is affecting us, how lack of mobility and lack of movement is affecting your cognitive function. Those are things that I talk about at other podcasts. Really, today is going to be about the science of the brain, digging into smart drugs, digging into nootropics, and really understanding what people can do to enhance their cognitive function. And if we have time, as kind of like a bonus round, I really want people to understand what’s happening with the brain when you sleep and what’s happening if you’re not getting enough of it. So that those are kind of the takeaways that I’m hoping that we can walk away with today.
Andrew Hill: Sounds great. Let’s see how many of those we can tackle.
Zack Arnold: Awesome. Well, let’s get started just so people have a little bit of a background with your knowledge, your schooling, and kind of how how you got to the point where you worked for True Brain and all the things we’re going to talk about tonight.
Andrew Hill: Sure. So I have a PhD from UCLA, from the Department of Psychology, studying cognitive neuroscience. So I sort of do a lot of research, education, and clinical work at the intersection of mind and brain, or what ultimately for me has been about analyzing, assessing, training the brain to figure out how the mind works and to enhance its function, to enhance for for me its performance, things like attention, sleep, stress, some developmental things at both ends of the life course. I teach courses at UCLA now on gerontology, neuroscience, psychology. I also do clinical work at Peak Brain Institute, where I have a neurofeedback practice. We do QEG brain mapping and some research. Several years ago, helped True Brain develop the initial rounds of products, and I continue to help them sort of scientifically vet ingredients and figure out effects on the brain. So I’m their lead neuroscientist. So I’ve got my hands in you know consumer as well as education as well as research and clinical realms, but it’s all the same thrust that I I started on when I went into grad school about you know a little over 10 years ago. It’s it’s about finding ways to enhance our function to to you know so the the rant I started off the the podcast with for you today was was really at the core. Why you know why do we not want to understand or or how how can we understand you know more more positively? How can we understand what’s going on functionally and how can we take control? How can we? I mean that’s trying to understand how the mind and brain work is the play space of every cognitive neuroscientist, every person working in the wet brain space, the wet mind space, so much of what we are learning scientifically and in labs historically over the past 20, 3040, years has taken such a long time to translate into practical application, and and with a bunch of things sort of in today’s milieu, you know, technologically and educationally, and the rapid pace of everything from economic pressure to Moore’s law, which is also partially economic. We we you know we have such an opportunity now to bring tools and technologies to to our fingertips and to figure out to to hold a mirror up and to look in our brains and figure out how we work and to figure out what’s going on. And so it’s things like that that really you know drew me and through that whole process of getting a PhD, which is you know a little bit annoying, and getting into the space and doing these sort of slightly divergent things. That’s a slightly long a long-winded answer about my background, but I think it frames what you know what I’m all about pretty well. So
Zack Arnold: Absolutely, and I think the very short version, the cliff notes are you’ve got your hands in a lot of different brains.
Andrew Hill: I do. Yeah, yeah.
Zack Arnold: You’re you’re definitely a brain guy. We have definitely established that. As much as I want to just jump right into talking about smart drugs and nootropics and all this other cool stuff, I want to give people a little bit of a background, just kind of brain science one on one, brain waves one on one, and for those of you that have listened. This podcast and our longtime listeners, you know that I’ve actually done this two or three times in the past with another friend of mine and neuroscientist, Dr. Michael Mark, and I’m going to put links to those episodes in the show notes because we do a super deep dive into what neurofeedback is, how neurofeedback can affect brain waves. But just for those that are new listeners, can we just kind of get the the elevator pitch version of kind of how brainwaves work, how a QEEG measures them, and then we can use that to connect into our conversation about smart drugs.
Andrew Hill: Sure. So essentially, brain electrical activity is complicated and chaotic. We don’t fully understand it, but there’s a lot of information, a lot of data, a lot of stuff going on, and a lot of brain activity can be picked up with scalp electrodes, and so we’re picking up these oscillations, these bursting and firing patterns of groups of you know cell assemblies, 30,000 massive bundles of cells that have all the same electrical output, and they fire these these rhythmic patterns, and we know these patterns are different assemblies in the brain, coming together and coordinating their activity temporarily, often, and then you know joining other parties and doing other dances and other rhythms with other other people, other modes and nodules in the brain. But these these transient, ongoing rhythms do all kinds of things to keep stuff happening, like autonomic stuff that we’re not aware of, like our heart beating and our our lungs moving, as well as the content of thought, which happens often in the cortex, and you can measure different frequencies. And conventionally, we call them things like going from slow to fast: delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma. And those are not in order of the Greek alphabet, of course, because alpha was discovered first, even though it’s sort of in the middle of the conventional brainwave range, around 10 hertz, 10 cycles per second. Starting really slow, we have delta around zero to two or three hertz, and maybe one to one to three, one to four hertz, something like that. These are somewhat arbitrary divisions, and they change a little bit person to person. But delta is mostly a deep restorative automatic frequency. It runs the lungs. The heart can maybe have some delta influence. Deltas involve a slow wave sleep and that sort of deep washing, that car wash that happens when the cerebrospinal fluid sort of you know whisks toxins away from cellular matter, a brain matter, and that’s you know delta is not really a cognitive frequency. You don’t want to do a lot of it with your cortex when you’re wide awake with your eyes open. In fact, if you see delta with the eyes open, wide awake, you you you think cortex damage often. And then theta is the next frequency up four to seven. Theta is involved with sort of wide focus, including things like creativity, abstract thought, pulling memories out of your mind, some evidence that memory access maybe a six and a half or seven hertz frequency, specifically, but somewhere in that neighborhood. But theta is also not especially driven or focused, and so excesses of theta, especially frontal excesses of theta are often seen as a failure of inhibition, and then you have things like emotional lability or reactivity. You have impulsivity, hyperactivity, everything from ADHD to sometimes anxiety can be a excess in slow waves. These theta waves, but they’re also useful for things like deep hypnagogic creative access and flow states can maybe have some access, and you know meditators have been doing a lot of meditation for many many years. Will take their higher frequencies and drag them down sometimes into the theta frequency band. So you know this stuff’s not quite so simple as the band suggests, but broadly it’s access states as well as impulsivity in the theta range. Then alpha is eight to 12, and eight to 10 alpha, which is often alpha one or low alpha, is inactive cortex, idling tissue. You close your eyes, and the visual cortex in the back of the head goes into alpha, because there’s nothing for the visual cortex to process typically with your eyes closed, at least the primary visual cortex. You open your eyes, and the visual cortex alpha one should get blocked and be replaced with beta, the next frequency up, if your visual cortex is processing. And a couple of things can be said about those frequencies in that context. If you close your eyes and your visual, your v1 your your primary occipital cortex that processes the the input of the retina does not go idle does not go into alpha one and it remains in beta, then we typically think of that as hyper vigilant. You’re scanning the environment visually, even with nothing coming in visually. That’s sort of keeping the gain wide open in your sensory system visually, just in case.
Andrew Hill: And when you see that in a brain map, you often think sort of you know anxiety or hyper vigilant markers. You know, your feelers are up. Alpha two, the next frequency up, is around 10 to 12, and there’s some evidence that alpha two is involved with flow states and access to quick thoughts. Also, fast alpha, having your alpha itself, the broad alpha, be at a faster average frequency, is related. Cognitive processing speed, and as you get old, your alpha actually slows down. When you get as you develop from a kid to an adult, it speeds up as your brain myelinates, and the average processing speed of neurons starts to speed up, and the alpha speed indexes that. And then when you get old, around 65 to 75 to 80, you end up with alpha that’s slower. It has slowed down because even though you’ve continued to myelinate most of your life, you’re losing cell bodies now. After about you know 6065 somewhere in there, you might start losing a significant amount of cell bodies enough to slow the speed of your average firing rates. And so you look at these things and you think you know fast alpha, slow alpha developmental markers. You also think of it as sort of the idle speed of your mind, because it’s the rest mode at which you are, you know, from which you are acting cognitively. And ultimately, you can you can look at the speed of alpha and maybe even infer someone’s quickness. And if alpha is faster than average for adult people, alpha is around 10 hertz, 10 cycles per second, on average. If it’s much faster than that, you’re you’re probably either really intelligent, really anxious, or both. And then above alpha, around 12 to 15, we have low beta, which when it occurs on the sensory motor strip, when your motor system is idle, we would call SMR or sensory motor rhythm, which is the core of neurofeedback, at least historically, and then we have other beta frequencies above that. You know, 15 to 18 to 15 to you know probably 30-eight would be considered beta conventionally. There’s different functional cognitive frequencies in there. You get to give as gears going, you know, running gears in a car, and as you get faster and faster, you’re doing you know much faster firing, much faster frequencies, and your mind’s also doing much faster things. And so as you get up there in frequencies, fast frequencies, sometimes those things are problematic. You know spindles and the fast frequencies bursts sort of show up often as little frictions of anxiety or fear or sensation. And then above that, conventionally we stop around gamma, which is 38 to probably 200, actually. But conventionally, it’s 38 to about 42 or 44, and gamma appears to be a slightly mysterious frequency. It may be involved in things like the binding of conscious perception into the moment of experience. The evidence for that sounds really lofty. The evidence for that is twofold. One, certain studies show that schizophrenics have decreased coherence or gamma sort of coupling or connectivity across the scalp, across the cortex, rather, in a way that might be correlated with symptom severity of sort of reality testing. And conversely, long-term 2030-year, meditators, some of some studies show have enhanced gamma production and coherence or coupling across the cortex. So that’s your thumbnail sketch going from slow to fast. And we don’t-that’s about you know we we we know more than that, a lot more than that, and it gets more complex. But we really don’t know everything, and it’s a bit of an epiphenomenological studies to some extent. EEG, we we describe what we see, and we we infer what might be happening. We get closer to understanding things, but you know, in cognitive neuroscience research, we’re always trying to scratch our heads and interpret things. In QEG clinically, we’re you know QEG as I’m sure your other guests clarified, is not strictly speaking diagnostic. You know, you can’t look at a brain and go, “Aha, you have this, but you can say, “Oh, that thing you’re describing, it’s right here.
Andrew Hill: Often, because people’s symptoms often cross diagnostic boundaries, and also, what’s problematic for one person is not problematic for someone else. And so, there’s a certain amount of, you know, it’s likely this pattern we’re seeing your QEG is related to some functional issue in impulsivity or speed of thought or anxiety, and there’s you know dozens of patterns like that. But a lot of unusual is normal. The QEG diagnostically or you know prognostically ends up being informative more than definitive, so to speak.
Zack Arnold: Nice. Well, now my entire audience can qualify themselves as neuroscientists because I think that is an excellent, excellent overview of the different spectrum of brain waves. And I think the two takeaways that I want the audience to get from this, now that we’re all professional PhDs in neuroscience and understand the entire spectrum of brain waves, is that number one, your brain waves are measurable. So when you’re thinking, “Oh, well, it’s just about how I feel, and I, I just I’m kind of depressed, or I’m unfocused, or I have ADD. These are things that are very measurable. And when you have a QEEG, you can look at the brain waves. And like you said, you can’t diagnose something, but you have a much clearer picture than a psychoanalyst saying, “Well, how do you feel today? Okay, well here’s a pill, and I went through that process, and then I went through the neurofeedback process, doing QEEGS, doing 3d brain maps. When somebody could say, “Hey, here’s a spot that’s really red. Did anything happen here? Well, gee, yes, I got hit in the head with a baseball when I was in high school. So we started working on that area, and magically. Things like anxiety, ADD, depression-all these things started to go away in no way that a pill could fix because the pills don’t fix things; they just cover the symptoms. But that’s not really where I want to go too much today. But that’s that’s one takeaway that I wanted the audience to get from that. The other is that because we have these specific brainwave frequencies, where I completely want to go into the rabbit hole today is focus. My the whole thing that I’m trying to do right now with the online courses that I’m building with my program is help people learn how to focus more. And in my opinion, the best smart drug on the planet, so to speak, for better cognitive function and more focus is just movement. It’s moving throughout the day, it’s exercising more, and that’s something that I cover a lot. But now I want to go to that next level where somebody says, “All right, I’m moving a lot, and I exercise, and I’m feeling pretty good now. How do I go to the next level? Which I guess we could go, we could call like the limitless level. Everybody knows the Bradley Cooper film, Limitless, and people are either fascinated by it or terrified by it. So that being the case, and people kind of getting some Hollywood, you know, Hollywoodized version of what smart drugs can do to your brain, I I want to start talking about smart drugs versus nootropics versus you know things that go even deeper. And I want to start because this is a very common question that I know a lot of people in the this industry have is the smart drug versus the nootropic, and I want to start from the simple end of the spectrum, which is the most common and most proven smart drugs in the history of the planet, which are coffee and nicotine. Coffee and cigarettes are what got us most of the great novels of the last five centuries. So let’s go into those, how they kind of affect cognitive function and brain waves, and then I want to start going one by one, going through some of these other nootropic smart drugs, and then of course going into in depth into true brain.
Andrew Hill: I would say coffee, nicotine, you know, caffeine, but coffee as well, you know, broadly has some other psychoactive effects. Coffee, nicotine, maybe alcohol. These are psychoactive. Absolutely, alcohol might not be considered even a smart drug, but it certainly has disinhibited some writers in that example. I think smart drugs are just that. They’re they’re they’re they’re obviously drugs, and they’re and they’re affecting cognition. They they affect some aspects you can quantify or at least point to as likely bottlenecks and function, such as vigilance or the ability to remain alert over time, such as response inhibition, the ability to pick from competing thoughts, competing responses to change gears quickly, to be flexible. That sort of response conflict, which is really a function of response inhibition. You know, memory, sustained attention, which is really function of vigilance, and then things like working memory, which may or may not actually be modifiable. It’s a little unclear. You know, the anything that acts on these that helps you feel more alert, more focused, works on memory, maybe other aspects of learning, is a smart drug. Some of these things have some power. Obviously, caffeine. You know the modern civilization was built on caffeine to some extent. Caffeine is largely an adenosine, I believe, modifying chemical, and it keeps it active longer and has some effect on phosphodiesterase. And so there’s some some complex mechanisms, but essentially it’s a stimulant, as as we all know, and nicotine is more, of course, NMDA, glutamatergic, and alcohol is GABAergic primarily. So, you know, slightly different mechanisms, but but ultimately they modify experience and they and they affect some aspect of cognition. We tune our experience with them. You know, we’re psych we’re affecting our psychoactive sort of modes, and it’s you know it’s not like these things are new. We’ve we’ve been modifying our brains since we’ve had them. You know, since before we were human, we probably have been you know drinking fermented fruit juice and eating magic mushrooms and and other you know various things that alter our minds. I think I think to have a mind is to is to alter it. You know, it’s like you wouldn’t wouldn’t have a car and not part and not drive it, you know. But regardless, the the category of smart drugs is it must be you know defined as such. You know, you really this the the the term drug implies some impact, but but it also implies some potential side effect, and so caffeine definitely has a side effect, and that I think right there is is the primary distinction that you know people need to consider when making a foray into this world of cognitive enhancers is where is the line for safety, efficacy, side effects, likelihood it’s going to benefit me, likelihood I’m going to have some you know major hit to either a risk factor to exacerbate something else, or to just empty my wallet without you know any potential benefit. So it’s a pretty murky area, the cognitive enhancer space, you know, as a marketplace. Unfortunately, the word nootropic’s been co-opted by marketing more than it has than by the sort of strict definition. And the strict definition of nootropic would be that. It is a you know cognitive enhancer of some sort, but it has no appreciable side effects. It’s not habit forming, it’s not tolerance, or you know not much, and the side effects are mild and easily managed. It also tends to be the strict definition. The earliest definitions would say neuroprotective for damage and toxins, things like drowning and other stressors to the brain should be neuroprotected, including aging, and so when you when you consider the must be protected, must enhance, and can’t hurt sort of narrow criteria, what what you have to consider as a true nootropic substance really narrows down, and you know Bradley Cooper in Limitless certainly was on a smart drug, but as as anyone who watched the movie may remember, ridiculously habit forming and had life ending side effects. So smart drug, not nootropic NZT. But in the nootropic space, there are a handful of things out there, and some of them fall into you know synthetic compounds, pure research chemical categories. Some of them fall into amino acids, other natural compounds, plant-derived compounds, and then you know there’s there’s other sort of less well-understood compounds. You know, pure research chemicals that may have some effect.
Andrew Hill: You know, there’s sort of a trend these days for you know again for the same reason I mentioned earlier that technology is bringing things within reach. There’s a trend now for these sort of elite power user psychonaut to dig up a compound from a research paper that showed promise in mice, and like have it synthesized overseas and have it shipped in and start self experimenting. There’s some of that going on these days, which is a little terrifying because one, we aren’t mice and our brains don’t often react exactly the same, and so you know, but there’s there’s other promising compounds that that are you know in clinical trials with humans that other similar sort of psychonaut pirates have taken into the marketplace because of the likely promise. So there’s some risk out there when you’re entering the space. I think you need to give yourself some permission to move slowly and cautiously, and start with some very simple, very straightforward, you know, beginner nootropics, if you will. One that I always recommend, you know, if you overdo it, it can cause some problems. But one that I often recommend is called L-theanine as a first place to start. If you mix it with caffeine, I mean, most people have some sort of caffeine regimen, dare I say, habit. They have a relationship with caffeine of some sort, you know, a large number of people, and I hope it’s with some form that includes other lovely antioxidants like you know black tea or really any form of tea or coffee. I hope it’s not just caffeine capsules for or energy drinks for folks that are listening. But if you have a caffeine or tea or some other caffeine regimen, and then you add in L-theanine, it modifies it, and it suddenly takes it to a very nice level. And I think it brings a lot of the alpha waves back online. Caffeine’s a stimulant, so it tends to produce beta waves and a bit suppression of theta and delta, so you become alert and awake. An enhancement of beta with caffeine, so you’re processing faster and and more to some extent. At least you’re more stimulated. It’s not 100% clear if you’re really more accurate with caffeine. There are some things that change in the brain. The the sort of inhibitory commands appear to require more neural resources when caffeine is on board. You know, you react your brain reacts more to the no condition or the stop condition or the don’t do that condition when you’re trying to stop yourself or choose from some competing results. So inhibitory resources or response inhibition appears to take a little more resources when caffeine’s on board, but it’s not clear if it takes more resources or if you give it more resources and you just do it better. It’s it’s really not totally clear. The research is is split because people respond widely differently to caffeine, and because the research has been quite different. So, it’s starting to cohere around some of the more narrow features of EEG, like ERPs, which are very characteristic averaged evoked responses in the brain. But for ongoing EEG, EEG bands, like we’ve been talking about, things are always a little bit less clear because they’re more individual and they’re more variable, but caffeine definitely suppresses slow, increases fast. Alcohol increases slow and decreases fast brain waves. So you get more alpha, more theta, and less beta with alcohol. This is why it’s relaxing. It’s GABAergic. It’s releasing GABA GABA, which is an alpha-promoting neurotransmitter in the brain, and then nicotine. I forget what the brainwave signatures of nicotine are. They’re what I’m. What I what I typically concern myself with in terms of EEG effects of substances, unless I’m investigating them in a research context, you know, in a carefully controlled environment. Clinically, I tend to pay attention to how long does something affect your EEG because I’m doing assessments in QEGs often on people, and caffeine you know has a pretty big masking effect on slow brain waves in the in the EEG, and so you got to control for that. Nicotine’s not that bad. Things affect the EEG and and to some extent our our behavior for about five. Five half-lives of the substance, and nicotine is a very short half-life elimination half-life. It’s under an hour, and so it’s only a few hours at most that nicotine’s active.
Andrew Hill: And I think it’s actually quite shorter than that. I’m forgetting what the actual time is. I know psycho stimulants; those are about 48 to 50 hours for most of them, and so you have to control for that. Psychostimulants like Adderall, Ritalin are also in the smart drug category, and they also do things like suppress slow RAM of activity and enhance fast RAM of activity. Some other smart drugs, you know, some people might consider them smart drugs if they’re anxious. Those would be considered some of the beta blockers used for blood pressure or used off-label for ADHD, and those have a paradoxical effect on the EEG. Those actually enhance slow activity, but also tend to seem to produce focus states. So they’re doing something a little bit more subtle. We haven’t figured out quite yet. Some anxiolytic drugs like Buspar, Busparin has a paradoxical. Most anxiolytics work like alcohol. They they increase slow brain waves and decrease fast, but some things like boost par will actually suppress slow brain waves and have an attention boosting effect. So there’s some you know pharmaceutical smart drugs out there. It appears, and Ritalins and Adderalls and other you know brand names like that would fit into that pharmaceutical category, and they’re prescribed as such. You notice I haven’t listed modafinil.
Zack Arnold: It’s funny. I was literally just thinking in my brain. I don’t want to interrupt him, but I want to say modafinil.
Andrew Hill: Yeah, I’m not gonna. I’m not gonna. I’m not gonna include that in the list of things that are that are a good idea and that are a smart drug. And there’s a few reasons why. One is the effects are fairly minimal on cognition. It’s mostly a wakefulness promoting agent does that by boosting histamine. It looks like and some other you know, hypothalamic factors. It tends to, it seems to affect the the buildup of orexin, which is involved with timing, so you stay awake longer. Seems to have a, you know, bimodal window of action that’s seven to 16 hours long, so you can get really long, you know, single dose effects from it. But it’s really for people that are trying to stay up, they’re trying to fly jets, that are trying to fight wars, that are trying not to be narcoleptic and crash cars. It’s fairly powerful substance, and the side effect profile is somewhat low, in terms of the incidence is low, but when they occur, the side effects are life-threatening, and profound, and dramatic, and you might not notice them until it’s way too late, and and modafinil almost killed me personally, actually, and that’s why I’m so vehemently opposed to it. So I’ll say more about the side effects in a moment. But there’s a couple of good early review papers on modafinil. One’s called what the title of one which is available if you search around is called approved and investigational uses of modafinil. And if you look through that paper, you’ll discover that the side effect profile, the side effect in these several different studies of modafinil, dramatically spike when they’re working on populations with ADHD because banafinil is used sometimes off label for attention stuff by psychiatrists, and there’s been some studies looking at the effects on attention, and unfortunately, the side effects go way, way up when you look at people that have attention problems. So what you need to consider is, you know, if you’re going to mess with your with your own system, it’s not a smart drug. The side effects that I that I got were head to toe, body covering, pressure hives, and lungs closing up for several weeks.
Zack Arnold: That sounds like fun.
Andrew Hill: Yeah, great fun. Days in the ER and in urgent care. Weeks of steroids to keep my immune system from you know shutting down with histamine overload. You know, I have an ADHD brain. I’m left-handed, weirdly wired. You know, have some quirks and some skills and some deficits. I’ve done a lot of work on my own brain, and you know, have ADHD pretty much managed. But modafinil just took me hard to a really risky health place. I didn’t know the side effect profile was you know quite so high for ADHD people. It’s several times the background rate for non-ADHD people, and so you know it has such a high risk for some people, and if you’re somebody who’s seeking enhancement, you may already have some unique or you know challenged or some attention that’s not totally under your control. And so I think the people who might self-select for seeking nootropics, cognitive enhancers, etc. may be disproportionately represented in the in the ADHD population, or at least the impulsive or you know sort of wide hunter thinker type, you know, novelty seeking population, and I think that the the emphasis on modafinil as a legitimate smart drug is irresponsible and doing a massive disservice to people who are finding out about this drug, who have some sort of ADHD risk, and you’re going to end up with histamine issues and other problems, you know, in in a more than a significant fraction of people, for me, it rules it is ruled out because the smart drug effects, quote unquote, are weak. If you’re getting enough sleep, nutrition, and exercise, it’s not sustainable apparently. You know, long term unless you have some need, you know, deep need for it. You know, you only risk side effects when you have a real problem. You have narcolepsy, but after. Is probably a good idea, you know. If you’re profoundly narcoleptic and can’t stay awake for minutes at a time, it can’t function. But if you’re not, then you know why would you risk side effects for such for such small gains cognitively? Because they’re just not that noticeable, especially compared with a handful of other things that are more dramatic, more accessible, legal. You know things like neurofeedback, meditation, you know basic nootropics. These are all more effective on on cognition for most people than than anti narcolepsy drugs that have side effects. So I’m really, as you can tell, somewhat opposed to endorsing modafinil as a as a rational choice in this space. I think it’s I think it’s stupid. I think it’s absurd. I think it’s dangerous, reckless. You know. So
Zack Arnold: Then, basically, you’re saying that an ADHD workaholic that’s incredibly sensitive to medications like I am, modafinil is probably not the best choice.
Andrew Hill: Yeah, you would probably have the you. I mean, you sound like me. You know, really sensitive, ultra ultra reactive system. You know, really low doses of everything works really well. Hyperactive, highly productive. You know, moving in nine directions at once. Aided them successfully.
Zack Arnold: Hey, you just described me to a T. That’s just me on a poster right there. Those are all my bullet points.
Andrew Hill: Zack, I have a hunch that people like us, that that sort of special flavor of ADHD, that’s a little bit burning bright, is is at least partially mediated by histamine. That’s why you tend to get in that population allergies and other sort of weird, quirky sort of immune things.
Zack Arnold: Right. I had all of that growing up. I’ve eradicated all of it, mostly through dietary changes. But yes, histamine issues, allergy issues, incredible responses to very low doses of medications growing up. Like my parents were at the point where they’re like, “Don’t even give them Tylenol. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Right. Yeah. And so
Andrew Hill: I-that’s to me that combination. I have to believe there’s a histamine ADHD phenotype, and I think that that exact you know person is the worst person to take a histamine boosting agent.
Zack Arnold: I’m very very glad you brought that up then, because that was one of the things that’s always kind of been on my someday to-do list of oh maybe I’ll I’ll give that one a try because it you know it sounds interesting it didn’t sound like it was too terribly dangerous but it certainly sounds like for me it’s a really really really bad idea and I’m certainly not flying jets I’m not narcoleptic and I’m not a a brain surgeon working 14 hours straight so yeah
Andrew Hill: And you know you you you you move often you yes well you sleep adequately, and so now you know you have three or four other things for next generation building, including managing the the sort of filter the stress in out, so you don’t over maximize your, you know your your yerkes Dodgson curve, so to speak. Don’t don’t spend all your time reacting versus choosing. Right. That’s one you know piece of the algorithm. The other pieces are things like meditation and neurofeedback, and you know managing carbohydrate or insulin sensitivity. Really, it’s really about insulin sensitivity for keeping inflammation down and keeping the brain sharp, and managing other you know forms of nutrition. Ultimately, those are all accessible and within reach. So I would say you get way more bang for the buck from you know, buying yourself a neurofeedback kit and learning to use it than buying a couple months of anathen.
Zack Arnold: Absolutely. Well, it’s good to know that. I’m going to step backwards one second because there were a couple of things that I wanted to note for people. The the first one was when you were talking about caffeine and how you don’t want to just take caffeine straight and you want to do it with coffee or tea or something natural, you also mentioned that if you can enhance it a little bit with a nootropic called L-theanine, and it’s funny that you brought that up because I recently started drinking Chimera coffee, which is a premium coffee that is infused with some of these nootropics, and I’ve been an advocate of bulletproof coffee for a long time, mainly because, in stepping another further step back, the reason that I’ve gotten so deep into neuroscience was out of necessity because of several TBIs, traumatic brain injuries, because of severe ADHD, not being able to focus on things, severe depression and anxiety. So all this came out of necessity, and I’ve been and I have like you, I’ve completely managed it, and I’ve learned to focus on all of the positive things that I get from it, but I couldn’t even drink a cup of black coffee. Like that would send me off the rails, and the crash would completely debilitate me. But then once I was introduced to bulletproof coffee and the slow drip using the fat and the oil, that stuff works for me like a dream. To me, the best nootropic that I’ve still ever experienced is bulletproof coffee with zero side effects, but all the cognitive enhancements. But then when I discovered chimera coffee, which also has the L-theanine, the taurine, the alpha GPC, and the DMAE-I’m not sure what what that one is. I haven’t heard of that one. But having those infused in the coffee, this stuff is like bulletproof coffee plus another 10% and it’s an all natural way. Like what one thing that I really like that you said about the nootropics versus smart drugs is nootropics have very manageable, if negligible, side effects. And I’ve been down the nootropic road for a couple of years now. I’ll just kind of list off some of the ones that I’ve experimented with. I’ve done I’ve done Alpha Brain. I’ve. Done Siltep, I’ve done True Brain recently. Obviously, that’s how you and I connected. I’ve done GABA Wave, I’ve done Unfair Advantage, and then the most recent one, other than True Brain, being the Chimera coffee. And none of them gave me any adverse side effects. And like I said, I’m extremely sensitive. The most common side effect between all of them universally was just a feeling of being tired, and I know that that’s fairly common. And so maybe talk a little bit about what was going on there, and then I want to start diving right into true brain and the idea that it is actually modifying your brain waves, and you’re measuring the effect that it has on cognition.
Andrew Hill: Yeah. So the the tiredness thing. Every so often, we people hear. I hear that from other nootropic users, users of True Brain, users of you know various types of compounds. It seems to be a pretty common effect. I’m not 100% sure what it is. I think that acetylcholine is probably being mildly overdriven by most of the nootropic you know compounds out there, and acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter involved with sort of memory to some extent, but but it also has a has a an effect. I mean, you you really can’t talk about neurotransmitters in a vacuum. They affect each other to some extent, and so things that affect memory affect attention, and vice versa. So there’s some sort of salience binding and some sort of a focus thing happening with acetylcholine. It helps you you know encode information perhaps, and of course, you know, as the name suggests, it’s built from choline, and so this is why often there’s a choline source in in these nootropics. You know, in alpha an alpha brain, it’s alpha GPC. In true brain, it’s either alpha GPC or CDP choline, depending on which version you’re using. It’s alpha GPC and several others of those version DMAE that you mentioned is actually a choline sort of analog. It’s used in lieu of choline, if you will. And so choline is often a core of a nootropic strategy, but unfortunately, you can’t just swallow you know choline bitartrate and choline citrate and malle and other forms like that because those molecules don’t really get into the brain; they don’t cross the blood-brain barrier in any any appreciable concentration. So you’re just dosing choline with your body, and you often get cholinergic side effects. I believe you know subtle ones, especially if you’re doing not getting good choline absorption, because you know the the brain uses acetylcholine in cholinergic neurons for encoding what I’m saying and what I’ve already said memory to a large extent, but the body uses acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junction, and so at the junction of the nerve and the muscle, you have a choline synapse, a cholinergic synapse, acetylcholine, and this causes your muscles to fire, and so if you’re getting cholinergic hit to the body and not the brain, I have to believe that that the tiredness that some people experience is simply downstream choline muscle fatigue, because the muscles are being a little bit driven. I don’t know. I don’t have any evidence for that, but that’s my that’s my that’s my theory. I also think it’s possible that the brain is being driven a little bit too hard in choline, but it’s really it’s really interesting. The the research in in what is happening in many of the nootropics out there is really having a hard time finding dramatic effects because a lot of the nootropics that have subtle effects appear not to bind directly to any receptors, any specific receptors. They appear to have indirect effects or modify, you know, some cellular structures in some way that aren’t receptors. And choline, you know, not only is it used to make a sort of raw material and make acetylcholine, it’s also used in the cell membrane. Some some the sort of phospholipid bilayer uses phosphatidylcholine, and certain types of nootropic CDP choline is one that is much more readily incorporated into the the phosphatidylcholine sort of membrane uptake, if you will. So the different forms of choline have different effects, and some people I think are more sensitive to some, and they absorb them better. And I think that the body fatigue stuff is is must be at least partially about that. And then another ingredient that’s often a component of nootropic solution is erasitam, paracetam, oxyracotam, aniracetam, and those things we think affect indirectly GABA and glutamate, maybe acetylcholine, and they’re definitely having some effect on cell structures like cell membrane fluidity, which definitely has some, you know, slightly poorly understood effect on how cells work. And when that works, you know, we get those things in your body. Cells start to change a little bit. We can measure them downstream, as you said, with EEG. We can see some effects, but just like we don’t understand brain waves all that well, even having you know them be the the sort of oldest neural signal that we’ve been looking at-you know, ridiculously old technology.
Andrew Hill: We’ve been able to visualize EEG since you know we had electricity, or maybe even before, by by by some experiments using reflected light to get waves in the brain. But there’s this is a very old technology. We don’t understand it very well. Neutropics are also you know not that. The the good ones, racetams, choline forms, herbal forms, amino acids like L-tyrosine, which is the you know found in in food. It’s also the precursor to the to dopamine, so it’s a salience and interest and reward neurotransmitter. These are sort of the nootropic modifiers, and I think that when you drive this stuff, you drive interest, you drive energy a little bit, you drive memory and attention. I think fatigue is not uncommon. When you maybe haven’t tuned your nootropic strategy right, or your nutrition isn’t good, I think some people get weird issues on nootropic extracts not because there’s any direct side effect, but because they, you know, might bonk their blood sugar a little bit because they’re using more fuel than they realize, and they aren’t hydrating and feeding themselves enough. But I, but I think all these side effects are fairly subtle, right? I mean, I haven’t really gotten dramatic reports, definitely not from true brain users of fatigue, and I’ve only heard incidental fatigue reports out there in the Reddit posts and communities, and you know people who are sort of self hacking around with other substances, unless you’re taking, again, other things I would consider anti-neutropic. There’s this compounds out there that people are are trying to claim are nootropic that are not. Things like phenibute, which is another GABA urgent compound that is very similar to alcohol in its effects. Things like Craton that have both stimulant and opiate effects. You know, people are are lumping these in often in more sort of more marketing drives with nootropics, and they have to be careful because those are you know profoundly habit forming and have you know poorly understood safety profiles and definite understood, definitely well understood or emerging risk profiles. Well,
Zack Arnold: I can definitely tell you without you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I never had fatigue or I was falling asleep. It was just when you when you take nootropics for the first time, you think you’re going to be Bradley Cooper, and you think the world is going to open up and everything is going to saturate in color, and you’re going to start writing the next great novel. Yeah, and then an hour later, you’re like, “Huh, I’m kind of tired. Okay, I didn’t really, I really didn’t expect that. But then, what one of the things about nootropics is that it’s not you pop a pill and all of a sudden you’re Einstein. It’s something that has to build up slowly over time, and that’s when you start to feel more of the cognitive effects, more of the focus, more of you know, getting into the flow, getting into the zone. So let’s really dig in to what True Brain is and how it can actually help you enhance your cognitive function and your focus if you’re doing highly creative tasks, which is what my audience is looking to improve: is being able to do creative tasks longer and better.
Andrew Hill: Yeah. So you know, as you said, True Brain is a nootropic blend. We call it a blend versus a stack. A little more elegant. We sort of have three different versions of True Brain now that we’re a few years in, but the original version was largely a capsule, and it was it was sort of an answer to a problem. I mean, I was in the middle of grad school, and I discovered that my attention was you know my ADHD was coming back because it was largely been largely eliminated through neurofeedback and some you know other other practices, but then I you know I ramped everything up dramatically in my life, and I thought I had come back. Obviously, modafinil didn’t work, and I was looking around for other solutions. Psycho stimulants, as a slightly older guy, had stopped working. I assume my liver aged out of you know a candidacy for psycho stimulants, but I had known about nootropics for a long time, but never really dug into them. And I was taking courses in psychopharmacology and pharmacokinetics and all kinds of interesting things, and learning actually a fair amount about the brain and how some of these these neurochemicals work. And then started digging into nootropics a little bit in some of the research and discovered very quickly that there it was a wild west and this was you know many years ago and even back then there was a proliferation of random compounds and chemicals and things imported in gray markets from you know random countries and it was a little bit daunting and I had a you know I was halfway through, three quarters way through a PhD in in cognitive neuroscience, and I was having you know some difficulty wrapping my brain around what this stuff was, and so eventually I sort of came up with what I thought was a good first stack, and you know share it with friends and family and refine it that way. And a couple years later, got involved with True Brain and helped them formulate what ended up being the True Brain 1.0. You know, we put a lot of neuroscientists in a room and didn’t let them out until we had you know reached consensus about what we thought the best possible version of a of a nootropic blend would be, and that’s you know there’s been a few minor changes to the capsule format since we we started a few years ago, but it’s actually pretty close to our to our initial formulation, if anything, it’s a little bit better. It works a little better now, and it’s a it’s a combination of you know the the sort of broad nootropics that I that I’ve described many of them, and we and then eventually after a couple of years, a year and a half, our users demanded a drink, and now we have a one ounce energy shot, so to speak, or we call it a think drink instead of energy. And it’s many of the same nootropics. And more recently, we have a coffee additive, which is a you dose your coffee with a combination of L-theanine and alpha GPC to modify your coffee experience. And you can buy our coffee as well. We have sort of high, you know, high-end beans and a bunch of dosing sticks. We’ll sell you right now. Ooh,
Zack Arnold: I didn’t know you guys had coffee. I’m definitely jumping on that.
Andrew Hill: That in because you mentioned how much you like dosed coffees. Yeah,
Zack Arnold: I love the chimera coffee. I absolutely love it. I’m not a coffee drinker at all, and I have to do it bulletproof, or I will go just nutty on the caffeine. I need the slow drip, but the chimera. I’ve really noticed the difference. And if you guys have the same formulation or similar, I’m definitely going to try that.
Andrew Hill: Coffee’s called brewed B R U with an umlaut and d. You know the little joke there. And then we and right now we’re we’re change the formulation I think in the next couple of months. But right now it’s shipping you know a bag of beans that are really high-end, quick roasted, get you quickly. You know small small batch, smaller signal origin. And then I think they ship with 20. They look like honey sticks. It’s a little misleading. They’re not honey sticks. What they’re full of is actually a mixture of L-theanine and alpha GPC and a couple. Yeah,
Zack Arnold: Those are the jump sticks, right? Or is that what they’re called? Yeah, I’ve I’ve done those before.
Andrew Hill: Okay, good. Yeah, there’s the yellow ones, and there’s also some red ones now that Chris has in in sort of. I think you can get them if you ask for them, and those are phenylparasitam. Yeah,
Zack Arnold: Those are the ones I’ve done. Are the dark ones? Yeah, those
Andrew Hill: Are those are pretty stimulating. I wouldn’t consider phenylprostium a true nootropic because it does have quick tolerance, and it’s a bit more of a stimulant in some ways. In effect, it’s not a stimulant in an actual molecule, but it’s it feels a little pushy. It can it can disrupt sleep, you know, in a way that most nootropics should not be able to, and it doesn’t work well, you know, three days in a row the way most nootropics do. So phenyl is a sort of you know ad hoc every so often treat nootropic if you will versus a daily nootropic, but the gold sticks have just L-theanine and alpha GPC, and the red sticks, if you will, are phenyl and and might be centrophenazine actually, which is you know breaks down into choline and DNA basically. So, so so we have a couple of the formulations of we’re definitely on the coffee train, so to speak. And I would love if you would, you know, grab some brood. I’m sure we can get Chris or Derek or someone to send you some brood, and maybe can report back what you think if you bulletproof it and and how how it compares. You know, your experience as somebody who is super sensitive and has dialed it in so carefully, I’d be interested to hear what you think of, you know, bulletproofing one of the gold sticks.
Zack Arnold: Oh my God, I would be all over that because I literally cannot touch a cup of black coffee at all. I mean, it’s I have had the worst experiences with coffee, and I hated it until I learned about the bulletproof method, and that’s kind of when my whole life completely transformed. So yeah, being able to to dope it with these really low, you know, there’s there’s no real stimulant in them. It just you know you kind of the experience that I have is I just feel like I’m actually slowing down a little bit. I get into a flow state easier. I can kind of just snap my fingers and say, all right, 50 minutes. I’m on. I’m just going through. I’m writing. I’m editing whatever the task is, and I get out of it, and I’m fine again. So it’s not like this crazy like smoke coming out of the typewriter kind of thing, where you see like these these writers that are just downing coffee and cigarettes in the movies. It’s nothing like that at all. It’s just this the sense of calm focus that I will get when I work with these nootropics, like you said, with no real side effects other than if I don’t have enough glucose, because like you said, the brain is using more energy and burning more glucose. That’s when I’ll kind of hit that sense of being tired. And once I kind of realize that, because I’m doing a high fat, low glucose diet in the morning, I have very low carbohydrates in my breakfast until pretty much lunch. I don’t have any carbs, and then I realize I was doing the bulletproof coffee, high fat, no carbs, and then I was doing True Brain an hour or two later, and I was like, “Oh, that’s why I kind of feel the drain factor because I don’t have any glucose for my brain to burn. Right,
Andrew Hill: And you know, if you’re if you’re getting good at sort of sipping from adipose stores, so to speak, and you’re cycling in and out of high low, you know, carb fat, then you end up transitioning well, but it’s really difficult, really stressful. I mean, it’s why why people do it to shred off the adipose in the gym is to sort of go to that that route. But but but as you’re right, as you you suddenly shift glucose, unless you’re a highly tuned, you know, well-fed, fat-burning machine, there’s going to be a dip, and I think that sometimes the the ramp up that we get metabolically from nootropics may actually overwhelm even sort of well-tuned metabolisms a little bit as you get used to it. Sure. And this, of course, is different across different nootropics. You know, we we sort of tuned, if you will, true brain to really try to hit the sweet spot. And that’s, you know, I know we want to get into the ingredients. That’s really why we added all of the things that are in true rate. Is to take the one-two punch of a choline, a really good choline source, and a racetam, and take those two things and eliminate some of the inter-individual variability, the sort of odd results where some person gets, you know, the windshield wiper fairy and crystal clear vision and verbal fluency and you know lots of. Really great, sort of subtle, but but really good effects. And other folks are like, never felt anything. It’s a placebo, and so you know, I thought a lot about why that was happening, and and we we ended up putting into True Brain all a lot of the other ingredients are there to buffer the likelihood that someone’s going to respond too much or too little to a typical racetan approach. And so, with CDP choline in the capsules, or alpha GPC, and I think in the sticks, sticks might actually be CDP at this point. We’ve gone back and forth, and then the racetam, the prasitam or oxyracetam, in the capsules or drinks, you’re getting a really nice support to your choline-introducing system, even though we don’t necessarily know in the literature why. We do see some brainwave differences. I’ve definitely done some quantification, you know, myself, and there are some things in literature that that show from choline and racotam sources. Some of the first racotam literature shows that it increases the complexity of microstates, actually more chaos in the EEG, which is which doesn’t sound good, but it actually is good. The more states the EEG can move into quickly, the more you have complex brain activity, so it’s you know chaos in the EEG is a good thing. Chaos in the heart is a bad thing. Just to give you a little bit of neuroscience, because I know you’ll geek out on this Zack, the the neurons in the brain and the heart aren’t all that different. They’re they’re fairly similar types of cells, and they actually have similar regulatory constraints, but they act very differently. And you’ve of course seen an EKG; it’s a very regular wave. It’s it’s many cells all firing perfectly in synchronous order, very tightly controlled. But the brain brain waves are very chaotic and random, and they’re they’re you know variable and and messy, and essentially they’re operating at different ends, opposite ends of the regulatory stability phase space, and so you have the same kinds of parameters, same kinds of cells, or even equations you can think of them, but on one set of the way they’re regulating one set of modes they can be in, they’re chaotic, and one set they’re ordered. So through that logic, when the heart, when the EKG looks like EEG. You’re having a heart attack, and when the EEG looks like the EKG, you’re having a seizure.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I was I was gonna guess I didn’t actually know the answer, but I was gonna guess you’re probably either catatonic or which is essentially like with a seizure you are I guess in a way catatonic. You’re not you’re not immobile, but you basically seized up and nothing’s happening, and that would have been my guess.
Andrew Hill: Yeah, having two organized EEG, a spike discharge, a single spike is an ickle event like that. Is the is the onset of a massive spike storm, essentially? Yeah,
Zack Arnold: Exactly. So, as far as the true brain is concerned, now that we have a really clear idea of the mechanisms in the brain, we know about the ingredients. Now, give me the two-minute marketing elevator pitch for what True Brain can actually do for the casual user that just says, “I just I’m down in the five-hour energy. I feel like crap. I know it’s not good for me. It’s not good for my liver. What the heck can True Brain do for me?
Andrew Hill: So True Brain is designed to support cognitive output to keep you focused, to keep you performing longer, and to help you overcome cognitive fatigue, to keep firing longer, so to speak, and to get through your day. You know, we 20 years ago we had the ability to add an extra few hours to our day and get ahead in the world. Today we don’t. Every moment is scheduled, and so what we need to do is get more out of our day, get more productivity, stay focused longer, manage interruptions better, get into that flow state, and use an algorithm of productivity to really manage your own resources and keep them maximal. And to that end, we you know we think True Brain is the best solution for supporting long term day in day out as a regimen. It’s not a spot intervention. It’s a regimen to support brain health performance. It’s designed to do these things and to keep you functioning well long term. So the sort of moral pitch is that you have power over your brain in lots of ways. Everything from what you eat to what you learn to how you meditate to what how you sleep to how you move. You also have power over you know the organ. You can feed the brain through things like nootropics and and other other you know information feeds the brain complexity of of knowledge and experience. New environments feed the brain and can make you you know can be nootropic as well. In fact, hippocampal plasticity, for instance. But the the elevator pitch is that it can help you get more out of your moments because you’re you’re you’re you’re firing better in them. You’re on more. It makes good brains better. Hopefully, is is the idea.
Zack Arnold: So that having been said, I really want to encourage my audience to not be so terrified about the idea of trying something that might or might not end up being the limitless drug. Because, like we talked about, nootropics are going to have far less side effects than something like a cup of coffee or downing five-hour energy or even drinking three cokes a day to stay awake. That’s infinitely more dangerous for you than trying something like a nootropic, especially like True Brain. And I do my research. I do not do anything crazy or risk. Whatsoever, because I’m so sensitive, and like I said, I’ve had a good experience with True Brain. So if you want to, you can learn more about it. Just go to fitnessimpost.com/truebrain, and that’s T R U B R A I N. Kind of funny that you know brain scientists spell the word true wrong, but whatever. And the the cool thing is, you guys have been gracious enough to give my listeners a coupon code, so you can get 25% off any order at True Brain by just using the code fitness non case sensitive. So that is awesome that you guys did that for me. I really appreciate
Andrew Hill: It. Yeah, we’re happy to.
Zack Arnold: So that having been said, this has been just a terrific, total geeked out deep dive into brain science, and I’m walking away knowing even more about how this crazy thing inside my skull works, and how I can manage it better for creative focus and just mental stamina, and just being able to function, like you said, in this ridiculous world that we have devised in the 21st century, where we never have any downtime, we are on 24/7, and that this stuff helps.
Andrew Hill: It’s all high bandwidth. Think about you know. I mean, how old are you, Zack? If I may ask, you want to just
Zack Arnold: 36
Andrew Hill: Okay, so you’re old enough to have lived in a time when you weren’t flooded with information from from multiple screens constantly.
Zack Arnold: Oh yeah, I remember getting the internet and getting email my junior year of high school, and I didn’t have a cell phone until my sophomore year of college, totally dating myself. But yes, I know what the old world felt like. I know what my brain felt like in that world, and I’ve gone through that transition. And this is totally tangential. But having small kids now, we’re the first generation in the history of evolution to raise kids that are surrounded by the internet and Facebook and Netflix and all these devices. We have no roadmap for how to manage it, and that’s why I’m looking into these different types of substances and just any way to manage focus and creativity because the world is just so overwhelming. And if we think it’s bad now. Wait 10 years. Wait until virtual reality takes over. You think scanning through Facebook now is distracting and hearing the ding of your email is distracting? Wait a decade. If people don’t learn how to manage their environment, learn how to manage their focus, and learn how to eliminate distractions, we are going to be destroyed over the next decade, which is why
Andrew Hill: Zack, just to continue the tangent, I have to believe that part of what that technology will bring us is the ability to create environments that are not distracting.
Zack Arnold: That is a really good point. I’d never looked at it that way, and I very, very much hope that all the people designing those worlds are thinking about that. I just, I’m not sure about
Andrew Hill: It. Yeah, I hope so.
Zack Arnold: So that having been said, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for all the work that you’ve done and for creating True Brain. It has definitely made a difference for me, and I hope that it makes a difference for my audience and my listeners. So once again, fitnessimpost.com/truebrain t r u b r a i n to learn all about it and use coupon code fitness for 25% off. So thank you, sir.
Andrew Hill: My pleasure, Zack. Thanks for having me.
