Yeah, I mean, I burn through it in a month, you know, just because I feel that I strain. And you're, I think the first person other than one guest that I had on named Jake Steiner, he's got an outfit called end myopia.com. And he's, I love contrarians, you know, they're just kind of fly in the face of conventional wisdom, especially wisdom that's not necessarily true or completely true. And his premise is that optometrist or have all been in, well, I'm going to be used very broad in general terms, but he would say, you know, vast majority of them have been indoctrinated into the false belief that your eyes talking about myopia, that your eyes go bad, that there's nothing wrong with your eye and they're not broken. I think our episode, which we'll put in the show notes was called your eyes aren't broken. And then here's how to fix them or something. And he's the one that turned me on to the screens being the issue. And he said that basically what happens is you just, it's like you have a cramp on the back of your eye or an atrophied muscle that just gets stuck because it's not getting the exercise of looking really far away the majority of the time. And it just kind of gets locked there and that you can undo it with active focus practices and things like that, which I haven't done with any dedication just because they require a lot of discipline and a lot of time, you know, you have to look at an eye chart to where it's just barely out of focus and you keep kind of, you got to measure the distance. And it's a whole thing, right? People can listen to that episode. And one of these days I'll get around to it. There's just always some other issue I'm trying to fix. But to your point and the point that he elaborated on even further, one thing I do notice is if first thing in the morning, if I don't look at my phone, which is a great practice just for mental health in general anyway, I don't look at the phone and I go immediately outside and get sunlight in my eyes and just look at far away stuff, my vision is way better the entire day. If I wake up and sometimes I have to look at my phone because I'm running late and I need to check a text or something, if I get stuck on my phone from that dopamine addiction first thing in the morning, my vision is shot for the whole day. And it's reliable, quantifiable 100%, at least for me, subjectively true. I think there's really something to our behavior patterns around how we use our eyes. And then there's added support like some of the nutrients you mentioned and things like that, which is of course smart. But man, I just think so many of us are going to end up having to wear glasses just from the devices. I think that's really end the blue light, like you mentioned too. Like thinking parts of Asia, I

mean, it's an epidemic there of people with nearsightedness, fundamentally, myopia. And it's interesting. So I was Navy, Navy scholarship, Air Force, also, but I have fairly bad astigmatism with some nearsightedness. I think I was 2040, 2060 back at that time period. So I would never have qualified to be a pilot, no matter what, right? So which is fine. I have a passion for flying. But from my original driver's license, when I was 16, you know, I've had a driver's license in Hawaii, Arizona, Connecticut, I never could pass the driver's desk. Because one of the things with astigmatism is letters tend to like an E, the lines of the E would tend to blur together a bit. And often the tester like which way is it pointing? And it's like, it's all blurry. But I moved to California in 2003, and I passed every year. But in part, it was working some of those eye exercises. What did you do the Bates method or any particular protocol? I didn't even know of it at the time. What I would do personally, I would almost rotate my eye in a full range of motion. And almost like when you're stretching and feel like, oh, it's sore here. When I feel that I just like, almost like I'm feel like I'm clenching the muscle there to get it to relax. But since then, the Bates method would be a more reliable method than my backing into it way. But I found the same that especially if I do more of those things or I'm more attentive to how I use screens, my eyes slightly is much better. And if I'm inattentive or do things I know aren't great. So another tip for the audience because of that, we always think of vision just as not nearsightedness that type of way. But we have dark vision. We also have visual receptors that are sensing the change in daylight. They're much more directly tied in with our body clock. But those are sensing the change in the lighting to the sides of us. So if the room's black, but we have a bright screen in front, now we're causing this huge conflict of information. So that's worse. Like it'd be better off if you're on your phone and that's night before bed one, you're better off not using it. But if you are going to use it, it's probably worse to have the black back. And I'll let that's interesting. So I mean, I don't use it, but that's, yeah, because it's more stressful on the eye having that conflicting information. That makes

sense. Yeah, he just reminded me there was a guy head on the show, brilliant guy, Dr. Alexander Wunch a couple years ago. And he's a just absolute genius about all things light, just light guy. And he was explaining that overhead lighting is really bad for your eyes and your brain. And we all went into all the different color spectrums of light and talked a lot about why blue light sucks and all of that. But one thing I learned that I didn't know was overhead lighting is really bad because again, going back to nature and evolution, it's very rare that the sun is directly above your head. That's the only natural light source part from fire or moonlight starlight, I guess. So I forget exactly how he broke it down scientifically. It was way over my head, no pun intended, but it's just one of those common sense things. You're like, Oh, duh, only at a certain time a year at solar noon is the sun pointing at the top of your head and your eyes are sort of acclimating to that bright light being above. Most of the other time throughout the day, it's kind of off to the side in the periphery. Right. So it would make sense if you were lighting the interior of a home that you would want to use. And he recommended using sconces, like if you're able to build a house, like don't use overhead lights at all, just have all sconces and then adjust the color temperature according to what time of day it is. And I'm like, Oh, God, it's going to be a few years before humankind is like, Oh, it's like asbestos, EMF, lead paint, DDT, all these stupid ass things we do. There will be a time hopefully in my lifetime when we look back. Oh my God, I remember when we used to put all the lights in the ceiling, how stupid that was. And you can even tell when you walk in a room at night, say with like amber lights from lamps, like on table tops versus walking in a room with bright blue light up above your head. I mean, it's a market difference to your nervous system. If you're attuned to that kind of thing.

Yeah, even I'm sorry, you would use the idea of naturalistic light, right? Like the more, you know, that would be something I think the more closely we commit nature, the better. And even if we were out, you know, full exposure, middle of the day to sun, our ancient ancestors would have been in trees and the leaves were filled right now. Yeah, a bit of it, right? Like we're designed to freak out from things that are above us, probably because our mammalian brain once, like we were the prey, not the predators. When we were a little tiny. And you mentioned the light flicker. Yeah,

I had this thought one day. Or maybe I heard someone say it even more likely. And I just don't remember who, but when we look at, you know, like these LED bulbs and fluorescent bulbs and even some TVs and computers, if they're shittily designed, you know, have the 60 Hertz flicker, right? Where it's turning on and off 60 times per second. And it's in perceivable to the conscious mind, but it's really irritating to the nervous system. And if you think about evolutionarily, the only time we would experience a bright flickering light would be chasing prey through the woods or running from a predator through the woods, right? Of that light flickering through the trees, like never in nature as they're flickering light, it's always, always static, unless we're moving quickly. And there's only two reasons we're moving quickly to get toward something or away from something. In both cases, your nervous system is going to be in a heightened state. It's really interesting. I love stuff like that. Yeah,

me too. I wrote a book around 2012 on it's basically like how would Sherlock Holmes approach weight and issues, but one of the chapters is on light and lighting and how it impacts that. But you know, all kinds of things. So it's crazy important. And again, in our world, like we all know about it. But if I was to hold my cousins and siblings and nephews and nieces, I don't think it's crossed

out of our little niche. If you go to your average person, go, hey, do you know, blue light exposure makes you obese? Like what? How does that work? And you dig into the science and it's there. It's true. All right, before we jam here, I have a list here of some of the neurohacker and qualia stuff here. And some of these I didn't even know about. There's a sleep, there's an NAD one, resilience, qualia life, skin, then energy. Oh yeah, I have had the energy shot actually before. Are there any of these that you're really excited about? Yeah. So I'll

just now share what I use. So this, this is relatively new, the gut brain product qualia symbiotic. So that's a most days for me. I'm a big fan of, so I would use one of our neuro tropics on a work day. Sometimes it's qualia mind. Sometimes it's qualia focus. Sometimes it's the energy shot. So today it was the energy shot just because traveling it was easy to throw one of those in my bag, then take a bottle of qualia mind for this trip. The qualia NAD is brand new. So that's only launched within the last month. So that's an exciting one that we, so far it's been great out of the gate. That one I take, I think, for the audience, if you do things to boost NAD, I think it's really important just to do that first thing in the morning, or is it early to that? Not a lot of studies so far on what I think of as chronobiology, like circadian rhythms in the NAD system. But sometimes you have to live with what you have. And then one of the only studies I know of, when they gave NAD on any booster or infused NAD, like more as an IV, to animals at the end of their day. So the equivalent of our dinner time, it actually made metabolic function worse. Oh, and metabolic health book. When they did it at the beginning of their active cycle, it made it better. So until I know more, like I would say, take NAD boosters at the beginning of your day. And that's how I do it. So I usually take our quiet NAD fairly shortly after I get up. That's good

advice. I played around with some of the precursor products over the years. And now mostly just do straight NAD. There's a company called ion layer that has these transdermal stickers. Now, truthfully, not to shit on them, because I still use them, but they irritate my skin quite a bit, but I just ask. But one thing I noticed that's interesting about that NAD, and it's way cheaper and a lot less harsh than getting an IV, like an infusion. You don't even notice it. You just have a lot of energy. But I have taken a put one on later in the day. And then I'll be afraid it's going to interfere with my sleep because I have so much energy. But it doesn't seem to affect my sleep negatively, which is strange, because most things that give you more energy and kind of ramp you up will make sleep suck. But to me, in terms of if one does get a crappy night of sleep or you're traveling, the traveling is the thing I find to be the most deleterious to my energy levels. NAD precursors or NAD, like nothing beats that. There's just something about it. I don't know. You probably know scientifically why that is the case, but I think there's a lot of value in NAD products for energy. But I'm going to take note of that and not use them at night.

Yeah, so that makes sense. And unfortunately, most of the human studies today, similar to most studies and things, right? They do the easiest default is like do summit breakfast, summit dinner. And I think I think only can think of one or two studies that only bolas did all that breakfast. And they've tended to have the best results and the things that have been measured today in humans. Cool. So that's my default. I'm a big fan of quality resilience, but it's another one of our products that it seems like it hasn't really found like a big audience. And it's cool for a lot of reasons. But the simple story is a stress product, right? So we may actually rename it, quality of stress just to be clearer for people. Yeah, you probably sell more of them. But the people respond to that word because we all have it. Yeah. And so that's part of the reason we made it. In part, some of the compounds that help the most with stress are also almost too calming. So like Ashwagandha would be as an example, you know, it's one of the better adaptogens, a subset of people, especially over time, if they take it, it's almost too calming. So what you'll sometimes see on subreddits, it's, you know, people describe it almost like kryptonite for motivation and be a neurohacker collective. The last thing we want for our stress product is to be an anti-neutropic. So when we created quality resilience, we use a special form of Ashwagandha in it. That's been made to remove the more calming things and just leave the stress adaptation compounds in it. So, you know, like I'll periodically instead of taking one of our new tropic stacks like quality of mine, I'll just do quality resilience for a month. And you know, my productivity motivation is essentially unchanged on that product. So I'm gonna have to try that. The people that have used it love it. It's just one that there's certain things I think we're more skilled at making people aware that we have it and how cool a product it is. And that one, I don't think we've done as much promoting it. But it's, I was just on Daddeus Owen podcast recently. And like me, it's one of his favorite products. And we were joking, like we've got to do our best to keep this whole life. So it doesn't go the same way. Yeah.

Yeah, there's shit, dude. Yeah. I think putting the word stress in there, I mean, you know, marketing is marketing for a reason. But yeah, that raises a good point. I find sometimes I'll take so many things that are stimulating during the day for the new tropic factor and things like that. And then by the end of the day, I'm amped up. And so I then I'll start taking all the calming stuff and then I'm toast, you know, like a strong CBD. There's a CBD, I really like called element element health. And I don't know what my buddy Adam makes it. I don't know what he puts it. It must be super concentrated because when it comes CBD, you know, it'll say like, Oh, take half a dropper. I'm like, yeah, I do two or three droppers. And I'm like on my ass, like kind of borderline stone, you know, not like a THC high where you're, you can't make sense of anything, but just the body high kind of, you know, and so I know to stay away from that during the day, because I'll just want to lay on the couch and relax and I won't get anything done. There is kind of a slippery slope there with things that are meant to help with being resilient to stress, but can knock back your energy or productivity. Yeah, and that's a quality night. So that would be our sleep product. But that's

when we created that. So I thought of it as more of a nighttime new tropics. So just like, you know, like a neutral pick stack like quality of mind, be the beginning of the day, right, to kind of get alertness and focus and all those neurotransmitters up and going. We're at our physiology is so different. Come the end of the day in darkness, right? Like, GABA is starting to take over a melatonin starts to ramp up eventually. So quality and night was really to me like, Oh, like, take this at dinner to release up the table to have a more calming and relaxed night. And if, you know, if I guess the way I described it at the time, right, a lot of sleep products are designed to take right before bed. And it's almost like slamming the brakes on to force you into sleep. But let's just gradually, you know, decelerate into sleep over a couple hours and make your evening more calm and relaxed. That was call you night. And the goal was that you'd wake up the next day feeling like more ready to get at it. You know, matter how, you know, subjectively you felt sleep because your brain like sometimes like, so if I take quite a night on my or ring, sometimes my first plunge into deep sleep seems so quick that I also pop up like almost like, you know, that you put a ball under water, I pop up in a, like, aware that I woke up, like all of us wake up multiple times, a night that we're not aware of. But with quality night, sometimes I'll go so deep so fast, you know, pop up and I'll, you know, be aware.

Yeah, I'm familiar with that. That happened to me last night. I've been going to bed much earlier lately, which is a great habit. But if I go to, if I fall asleep at nine 30 or 10, it's pretty much inevitable. I'm going to wake up at one or two with full energy, like it's morning. What happened? I think I got too much good sleep in that, in that crucial window. And then I wake up kind of energized. Yeah, it's weird. The sleep thing is just an endless mystery to me and how to really dial that in. There's so many contributing factors.

Yeah, sleep. I think it's, you know, people of all age sleep is just a huge issue, right? You have sleep neglect, people not allowing enough time, but then a lot of people that even realize sleep's important and trying to, for them, trying to get it dialed into sleep well, can be challenging. And then there's, like I just was here, you know, one night in a hotel. Yeah. And scientists would call that the first night effect, first night in a new environment. It's almost like our brain's not sure it's safe and a big part of what, you know, I already want to keep us safe. So it's, you know, not going to let us get quite as deep asleep because it wants to make sure that that environment's safe. So I always feel super lucky that, you know, I'm 61, I never get up to go to the bathroom at night, I go to bed, I wake up seven or eight hours later, like pretty much like clockwork. And it's unusual when I would have a night like you just

described. Yeah, it's weird to tracking the sleep because if you're playing around with sleep supplements, you find that some make you get great room, but then your deep goes down. You do something that helps you. It's like the sleep architecture gets to gets the point where, okay, I'm sleeping great subjectively, you feel good and you have energy and you feel rested in the morning. But then when you look at those scores, it's kind of a mind F, you know, because you like, where's the sweet spot of the architecture? Like I've been taking an amineet, mushroom extract, and my REM sleep is insane, especially if you do a decent dose of it, crazy lucid dreams. And it's almost like a bit of a journey in the night if you take enough of it. And I'm not recommending that people do that. I'm just experimenting. That's what I do. And then I'll look at my REM. I'm like, I got three and a half hours of REM sleep. This is amazing. I look at deep and it's like 40 minutes, you know, like, God damn it. So then I'll take some DSIP peptide and then get a couple of two and a half hours of deep sleep and the REM goes down, you know, it's like trying to find that perfect architecture is a real balancing act. Yeah, there's such different

physiological states in our brain, right? Sometimes what helps one hinders the other, you know, and then, you know, sleeps noisy. You know, it's I think it's super important for people that are tracking not to get fixated on a day or even, you know, a couple days, like, you know, look over the course of weeks to see how you're doing before you make any big decisions about that's a good point. You know, whether something worked or didn't work. You know, with call Unite, we've even seen that that, you know, sometimes people will respond poorly. Maybe the first dose or two and, you know, a month later, it's really helped their sleep a lot. So one thing I did, I know we teased earlier and I wanted to make sure we covered was we just did our placebo control. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for remembering that results came in and can we put a link to it in the show notes? Yeah, I'll be writing it up. We'll have it. Okay, cool. I don't have the we may not have the link for a couple weeks, but I'll be right. Okay, I think it'll it should come out in time. Yeah, so, you know, we had done two pilot studies, science would call them open label, so I'm not placebo controlled, just, you know, to get a sense like, oh, is it there's formula tolerable? Is it doing some things that are showing up in measurable ways? And one of those had to do with joint function and to that I mentioned earlier, like discomfort, activities that daily living, things like that. And it did really well. And what we did in that study, we did two days, then, you know, break from it. So just to get people through three dosing cycles, so each dose of cycles two days, we had dosing cycle and 12 days off than another one. So instead of doing one two days once a month, we were doing two days basically every two weeks. And so we were able to get three dosing cycles into five weeks. And so we replicated that study, but with a lot more people and a placebo this time. And so the same like three dosing cycles, so two days, 12 days off, two days, 12 days off, two days. And what we saw was about a 68% increase in the issues showing somewhere, which is crazy big. And it's statistically significant compared to placebo. There's there's usually a big placebo response in things, you know, that you use questionnaires like with gut health or with joint health is an example. But you know, it was more than double the response that we had in the placebo. So we're super excited to that's always a little bit, you know, you do a study and quite often, you know, more often than not, things don't translate, right? Like placebo response can be big study that separates from that is hard. I, you know, I've probably read it just on cognitive ingredients, you know, I bet over the last two years, 300 studies. And so few of them show much compared to placebo. So you know, it's, you know, there's, we could go into a whole episode of like how, you know, you balance, you know, how I would balance that out. But bottom line is, you know, no hack or collective is super excited

to know, you know, have a study on quite a analytic. That's the thing with the studies is you have to pay for me. Even if you don't get the results you're looking for, you know, I can only imagine everyone kind of waiting for the email like, Oh, God, you know, studies are expensive. You know, especially the more, you know, the higher levels of sophistication, you know, and time as well.

Yeah. So it was a great timing. Because like I said, you know, the, I got the email with the results about an hour and a half before I Uber to your home. Amazing dude. Perfect timing. Well, I think we'll be able to get it into the show notes and share it with

people. Tell us about the collective insights podcast.

So the collective insights would be the neuro hacker collective podcast. We have what I think of as a couple different hosts. So we don't have it just just a Luke story. And they've changed over time. So originally Daniel Smocktenberger was the sole host and some of the archive shows he's the host and they're great. And then for a while, Jamie Wyle had his own kind of channel and then a naturopathic doctor Heather Sanderson did kind of the health people. She's incredible. First of all, and I think she was a brilliant host, but she's practicing naturopathic doctor and doing the bredness and protocol for Alzheimer's disease and has a medical home in the San Diego County area that's does that she has a recently published study on it. So she just got too busy. So because of that Dan stickler, you know, took that over and more recently, I've taken over like, you know, Sudan and I rotate and I tend to like my specialty, what I've been focusing on is reading like books that I love, getting that author on so that they can talk about a book that I think was brilliant and share it with our audience and share them. So awesome. I like that idea of having rotating a host that way.

I should try that sometime. Cranking these things out five times a month is it's a lot of work. It's a lot of time. No one realizes I'm, you know, now you're in the podcast production game, but I think few people realize after a few years of doing at least this type of show that's two or three hours sometimes for episode, you know, it's it's a lot after I mean, I enjoy it. I'm not complaining by any means I get to talk to brilliant people like you every freaking week. It's the greatest gift ever, but yeah, I like the idea of having a few. You could take a week off here or there might be someone about a guest about whom you're less fast passionate and you're, you know, your rotating host is more passionate and so on. You know, I'm just a good cherry picker. I just talk to people that I'm personally vested in in

speaking to. But yeah, that's that's a cool idea. I'm going to check the show and Dr. Stichler. There's there's areas that he's just, you know, I mean, he's a practicing doc in the longevity space. I mean, there's things he's just, you know, in the real world sense, right? He's using and, you know, as the people he's just a better fit to interview them. And then, you know, some of the people that I get is because, you know, I love their book or, you know, I like them or, you know, we're planning to interview Jim Quik coming up a couple months from now because our schedule goes, you know, but you know, like I've been on his podcast. So, you know, I've thrilled to get a chance to have him, you know, in the opposite seat and get to, you know, really share him with our audience and collective insights. Right on.