Read our full review of EBOOST’s Energy Powder here.

We sat down with EBOOST founder Josh Taekman to talk a little about the logic behind their formulations, why nootropic ingredients and brain enhancers are important to their line, and what’s next in store for the NYC-based company.

1. When did you start EBOOST, and what was your motivation in starting the company?

EBOOST was founded by accident to be honest. I had a marketing and branding agency and was going to create a line of G Unit Vitamins / Supplements with 50 Cent back in 2008 with a top manufacturer, and 50 Cent didn’t show up to the final meeting which killed the deal. I was commiserating with one of my best friends John McDonald and he said there is such a void in the market for a healthy & natural Energy & Vitamin Booster. Our mission was to create something we would take everyday to enhance our performance and vitality at work at play and in the gym. That was the spark that made us go down the path of creating and developing EBOOST.

Josh Taekman EBOOST Founder

2. EBOOST powders contain some ingredients we see a lot in nootropics we try (5-HTP, Vinpocetine, others). Tell us about why you chose to include those in your powders.

We wanted to create a product that was of the highest quality and highest efficacy and also natural & non GMO. We also knew we needed to create a product that made you feel great and do more and had to be much more than just an Energy + Vitamins product. Adding [a focus and alert blend from] 5-HTP and Vinpocetine and Huperzine was the perfect compliment to energy.

3. What was your first experience with brain-boosting supplements (aka nootropics), and how did that influence EBOOST products?

I used to take 5 HTP and huperzine for focus & alertness when I was in school and always loved the benefits I got from it. When we were developing EBOOST we felt that had to be an integral part of the experience you felt when you got boosted.

4. How long does it take to develop a new product for your company?

It really depends. We can develop a product and have it packaged and ready to ship within four months if we are focused and making quick decisions during the formulation and sample process. It took us close to a year to develop POW Pre Workout because we really wanted to deliver a product that was unique and different than what was out there and it had to taste great, be natural, non GMO and really enhance performance. We are perfectionists and won’t release a product until we have something that we would take every single day and could be proud of.

5. Are there new EBOOST products in development that haven’t been released yet?

We are doing a deep dive on protein and working with an amazing product development team to come out with something very special from the ingredients, functionalities, and packaging [around it].

Get more from Josh Taekman and the EBOOST team on Instagram.

The post Nootropics for the Masses: An Interview with Josh Taekman of EBOOST appeared first on Brain Wiz.

(Interested in learning more about Driven Performance Labs products? Check out our review of their Max Capacity workout supplement and nootropic here.)

We sat down with DPL President Jason Phillips to talk about where his company is headed, the approach they take, and why fitness professionals need to pay special attention to the world of nootropics.

1. Driven Performance Labs is more than a supplement company. Tell us about what all you guys do and how that influences the products you develop.

DPL is more than a supplement company, it’s truly a lifestyle brand. In addition to supplements, we COACH individuals on their nutrition. I emphasize the word coach, as I truly feel we are the only one’s in the industry that work closely enough with our clients to GUARANTEE results. All of our clients are remote, but have full access to us 24/7 via text and email, its an unprecedented level of access.

As a company we consult with nearly 1000 individuals, and are able to begin recognizing trends in the industry, and gaps in the products available to our clients. This obviously shows us a need, which we subsequently fill with QUALITY formulas. Max Adrenal and Max Capacity are great examples of this.

2. How did you get involved in the nutritional space? How’d you get involved with Driven Performance Labs?

I have been consulting with people for 11 years now.  To make a long story short, I overcame an eating disorder and have done everything in my power to pay it forward and properly educate the world on proper nutrition.

As for DPL its pretty simple, I saw a need, and took action  As mentioned above, I take the results of my clients very seriously, so if that means building my own supplements then I’m ok with that.  It just so happened that A LOT of people really liked them

3. You guy just went through a pretty big rebrand. Why now?

The name Dynamic is one that my business partner has had for a long time. It was originally the name that he used as a parent company for his consulting, and was never meant to be the parent name of a large supplement company.  As we began seeing rapid growth, we knew we needed something that truly represented who we are and what we are about:

DRIVEN – the one word that truly describes who we are as people
PERFORMANCE – what we fuel
LABS – in science, results are created in the lab

4. A lot of companies will release a boatload of supplements in various versions all at once. Your product releases have been more gradual, and your catalog is still pretty narrow. Do you think you approach research and development different than other supplement companies? If so, how?

Plain and simple, I never want to be a “me too” brand. Our products are strategically designed to truly fill a gap, or meet the needs of an individual. Let’s also be honest: As a start up I don’t have the purchasing power to make a HIGH QUALITY protein without charging a fortune. I’ll let the big guys play that game, and I’ll continue to completely change the game.

5. Your target market has so far been CrossFitters and strength athletes. Do you see that changing? Why that focus?

I’m not sure this was ever the intent, but it sure has played out this way. As a savvy person, I would be crazy to say that I ever want to limit myself to one niche, but as a fan of CrossFit and someone that actively CrossFits several times weekly I have to continue to support it. The products that are currently in formulation are a bit more diverse, but will absolutely have an application in both the mixed modal and strength arenas.

6. What can athletes get out of nootropics that others can’t?

I’m not sure they truly get anything more, but they may use it more. Nootropics (or any CNS related product) will always help athletes that need to perform at a high level. CNS [Central Nervous System] recovery is the most overlooked part of nutrition, training, and supplementation, so when used properly, these products are game changing.

7. What’s next for Driven Performance Labs? Any new supplements in the pipeline?

Thats the million dollar question, isn’t it? While I won’t divulge too much information, I will say that our next product will revolutionize both the number of carbs an athlete can take in, and how they utilize them. Carbs are ESSENTIAL to performance and recovery, so this product will be game changing!

Interested in Driven Performance Labs products? Use our exclusive Driven Performance Labs Coupon listed here.

The post The Athlete’s Brain: Interviewing Jason Phillips of Driven Performance Labs appeared first on Brain Wiz.

Beyond the screen, Tait’s passion project revolves around helping people take control of their lifestyles through his successful podcast, Pirate Life Radio, and Caveman Coffee, a company specializing in extremely high-quality, single-estate coffees, along with MCT oil and other supplementary products.

We sat down with Tait to talk about mental performance, nutrition, nootropics, and what it means to Pirate your lifestyle.

Tell us a little about how Caveman Coffee came about?

It goes way back. Whenever I get into something, I talk about it a lot. I find stuff out, and I pass it along, and that turns me on to new things. Back in my days as a professional fighter, I was always really nervous about diet, because I had to cut weight AND come in in appropriate condition. I had to preserve the strength and endurance to operate well.

That didn’t allow a lot of variance in my diet. That career ended, but now I’m a professional actor and stuntman, so my body is still a professional tool, and I still want to keep moving beautifully as well as long as I can.

That all led to curiosity to explore a lot of different diets: ketogenic, let’s try that out and be disciplined about it for six months. What does a Paleo diet look like? What effect does insulin suppression have on my body and my emotions?

You were biohacking!

Definitely. I always joke, all you biohackers, understand we see your WHOLE life. You see a lot of these guys talk about a strict ketogenic diet, then they’ll have 15 beers over the weekend! For me, I have to be all in, find out what the result is, and then go from there. I went deep into it, I go into the blood work as well. If I’m feeling great and my outsides are great, maybe there’s something to adjust there. And a lot of folks are asking me about my routine and what I’m doing. That leads to a lot of conversations that are meaty, not just blabber. I got to speak with all these beautiful people who were dialing things in and working to get a handle on it.

I became interested in coffee, interested in mycotoxins, different strains of mold, the ways coffee is procured. I realized a lot of major chains tasted the same, whether I was in South Africa or Boston. And I started learning that’s because the coffee is all burnt to the same degree! They’re not having one roaster, they’re procuring beans that are years old some times, and they just shuffle them together to make blends. That allows them to work the commodity market of coffee greatly.

If you really want to get high quality nutritious coffee, see, I’d never thought about coffee as nutritious before. Coffee is a fruit that’s roasted into a bean, and there are different parts of the roast that affect that. The darker the roast, the more robust the flavor, but a lot of the caffeine and antioxidants are going to be burned out of the bean.

I started talking to my business partner Keith Jardine about this, and then another partner, Lacie Mackey, who’s a high level trainer and athlete. We got on this road of coffee and nutrition together, then I started having discussions on twitter about people’s favorite single origin roasters, and I started trading bags with people, sort of like an informal coffee club.

Then Keith introduced me to a guy named David, he and his brother Juan immigrated from Colombia and have a coffee roaster in Albuquerque. They have the roaster here and a family plantation in Colombia, they get the beans from the plantation there and roast them in New Mexico.

Single origin is from the same region, single estate is even better than that, it’s all off the same farm. All the beans we do are hand picked, cold washed, come from the same estate and same family. They’re the highest quality coffee beans in the world. And I realized I needed and wanted to share that with people. We thought up a brand around that, and we went from there.

Our parent company is Pirate Life, and the whole idea is to educate ourselves about our own wellness. The conversation a lot of times is that we get sick, and we need some pills to get us back on the track to wellness. We’re all victims of our lifestyle, whether you’re a hang glider or a rodeo rider or professional chef.

But I want to empower people to Pirate their Lifestyle, help people find out what consumption does to them. The only vote that counts for me is to vote with my dollars. My good friend Joe Rogan says voting in the national elections is like pro wrestling. It might make you feel better, but it doesn’t affect the outcome. So where I spend my dollars makes the difference, which is why I spend my money on small based community companies. Maybe that costs a little more, but real food costs more in this day and age, crazy enough.

Caveman Coffee rose out of that, as did my Pirate Life podcast and a few other things we have in the works. We didn’t want a business, we wanted a movement to empower people.

Caveman sells high quality coffee, and you also sell MCT oil. Is that something you incorporate into your own routine?

I travel a lot, and I’m always warding off fatigue. Wherever I end up, I need to be on and 100% present. My nutrition is super important for me.

MCT is a nice healthy fat that you can derive from coconuts or palm oil. But with palm oil, you have destruction of rainforest and great ape habitat, so we try to be careful of how we source, and we do it from coconuts. I use it in my coffee to keep my fats high. I keep my fats high because I feel better that way. I spoke a little bit on the ketogenic diet; personally, I’ve found that keeping my carbohydrate count to 50 or 30 grams a day or less, I feel great. But in order to do that, I have to eat a ton of fat. Then my body creates ketones, and my body is fueled off adipose tissue.

MCT oil supplants the use of cream in my coffee. I have a little whip that I blend it up with, it’s nice and creamy and delicious. That and fish oil I take religiously.

What are some some tips to fighting fatigue and staying your best on the road?

For me, it’s diet, so much of it is diet. I used to have really bad mood swings when I was a sugar burner. When I burn sugar as fuel, I crash, and then I’m on this roller coaster all day long, and it played with my emotions, I got surly. I’m a slave to food in this way.

That’s one of the reasons I went on the ketogenic diet, fats don’t do that to me. If I need to take a little cat nap, I can wake up good and present. And I take Alpha BRAIN at night before I go to bed, which is a great product that Onnit puts out, your readers are probably familiar with it. I sleep deeper.

That’s just me, a lot of people take it throughout the day for mental clarity, I don’t do that, I take like four or five of them at night. And of course, it’s probably against the recommended dosage on the bottle, but I’m 240 pounds and I’m used to taking a lot of things. I get into REM sleep a lot quicker than I normally would, and even shorter duration sleep I’m getting more benefits out of. But that’s what biohacking is all about, getting the most out of what you’re doing.

We get a lot of questions from folks on supplement dosage, especially when it comes to Alpha BRAIN. We’ve noticed a huge amount of variation about how it will work for some people.

I just spent the weekend with [Onnit CEO] Aubrey, and he was talking about how different people are affected differently by it. Experience is the best information we have, and my experience is going to be deviated from yours.

And one more supplement I take daily is ZMA. I find the zinc, magnesium, and B6 highly useful for my rest and recovery.

How I work out these days is different than how I worked out as a professional combative athlete. Now I do higher volume in a shorter duration. I try not to have any metabolic conditioning workouts that last more than 8 to twelve minutes.

Where can people find out more about you, and what’s the best way for people to get in touch?

I try to answer all my messages. I’m on Twitter and Instagram, Taitimus Maximus is my Snapchat, and I’m responsible to all of those. You can find out more about our coffee and MCT on Caveman Coffee’s website. And of course Pirate Life Radio, I’m honored to be able to have the conversations I’ve had with some really fantastic people. I get to talk to people I really admire who are living high octane lives and have found fantastic success and serenity by walking an alternate route than what they were given as kids generally.

The post The Pirate Biohacker: Interviewing Tait Fletcher of Caveman Coffee appeared first on Brain Wiz.

We sat down with Geoffrey, Nootrobox’s CEO, to talk about the supplement industry, quantifying brain enhancement, and what’s next for the California company.

What was your first exposure to nootropics?

One way I look at the space is the home brew tinkerers and computing clubs of the 70s and a bunch of hobbyist hackers tinkering with hardware. Two or three years ago, I started seeing an analog of that with human hardware, the quantified self movement adjusting inputs and outputs of the human body, essentially treating it as hardware. From that point, it was a super interesting trend.

The reason we started building Nootrobox was because if you look at a lot of the existing vendors, people were either playing with grey market stuff, bulk powders imported from abroad, things that weren’t well studied with randomized control trials in humans. That’s an important distinction to make, randomized control trials with young, healthy, adult volunteers. It’s easy to see effects in therapeutic cases like Alzheimer’s or dementia, it’s another standard to see effects in healthy human adults. That transparency and that rigorous approach toward science was something I saw lacking in the space. As a computer engineer, my background was to be skeptical.

And after looking into that, I saw strong bodies of evidence toward certain nootropics. And sometimes you don’t know exactly what’s in proprietary blends. That’s something [BrainWiz] has identified as well, and a stance we’ve taken, you should actually know you’re getting the right potency of active ingredients.

So out of that, we saw an opportunity to do it right and to lead in terms of running our own trials and also building software around it.

You’ve teased in some announcements about Nootrobox software to track performance. Tell us more about that, when will we hear more?

We have an alpha group of people, and hopefully we can unlock some invite codes to your readership soon on this. If you’re not measuring quantitatively, you can’t tell how much of an effect you’re feeling. There’s a broad notion of mood tracking and cognitive states. You can think of it as an analogy to MyFitnessPal, which is used in diet and exercise. Why doesn’t that exist for mental states and mental health? There should be a MyFitnessPal for cognition.

What’s your personal daily stack?

I take RISE daily, and I’ll either switch between SPRINT or GO CUBES as well. GO CUBES are our new chewable coffee product, they’re just coming off the production line and we’re launching them soon. It’s an interesting effect, because you get some sublingual absorption of the actives as soon as you chew them.

So you’re getting an impact on them twice, when you chew and when you digest?

Yep, it’s a different feel than a straight capsule or softgel.

What gaps still exist in the market, and how are you going to address those?

People are getting more and more sophisticated. The supplement industry has been more marketing driven, and that’s one approach to market. Our approach is very much actually producing and running randomized clinical trials and publishing papers. That’s going to be the best way to market moving forward.

We’re running a clinical trial with Maastricht University, and we’re piloting and working on a second clinical trial with an Australian lab. So we’re excited to actually show clinical effects.

In terms of products, we’re very excited about something we’re R&Ding around omega-3 oils and DHA especially. If you think about omega-3 oils, just EPA which is typically associated with heart health, and DHA is more associated with cognitive function and health. So we’re prototyping an omega-3 based product. In terms of other form factors, we’re doing some R&D around sublingual spray products, because it’s a different feel effect than oral digestion, taking something in a capsule. Digestive acid basically makes inert a bunch of potentially interesting compounds. So that’s why we’re playing with sublingual products.

You got a lot of press for raising a large round of funding from big name investors, including Andreessen Horowitz. What’s the main focus of that round?

Research and development, that’s where some of the proceeds are going to running proper clinical trials and product development. Again, the difference is quantifying it. Andreessen Horowitz is a tech venture capital firm, they invest in technology companies. And technology is in our pipeline.

Learn More About Nootrobox

Interested in Nootrobox’s nootropics? Read our reviews of their RISE and SPRINT supplements. And see how we felt after trying Geoffrey’s daily stack of RISE and SPRINT.

The post What’s the Future of Nootropics? A Conversation with Geoffrey Woo of Nootrobox appeared first on Brain Wiz.