#83: Supplement Expert: Why We’re All Nutrient Deficient

33:41Thank you. I think one of the things that we often feel is that we're in this alone.

33:49And not too long ago when I went on stage at Mindvalley U in Estonia, in front of several thousand people talking about psychedelic stacks and my journey and my experience. But before I started, I asked the crowd to close their eyes. And can anyone put up a hand that's going through anxiety right now, like a clinical anxiety right now, depression, fighting depression, suicidal thoughts, PTSD. And I had them open their eyes, and about 85 % of the room's hands were up. And then I had everyone hug each other and look at the person to the left and right and say, I love you.

34:46We believe we're in this alone, and it's a lie. so many of us are suffering some kind of battle. And I don't care whether it is Elon Musk or some guy out in the streets that's in poverty. Everyone is going through a battle. And I've learned to recognize that, that I'm not in this alone and I'm here to help. Yeah, loneliness is a big piece. you said in one of your posts that loneliness kills you what do you mean by that and let's unpack loneliness a little bit it is the number one killer loneliness is and then on the flip side when we've looked at like the data with like the harvard study the longest running study that's about 85 years running where they've looked at generations of families and in the boston area and they've looked at blood work and cholesterol and exercise and diet and supplements and microbiome and mindset.

35:56And the number one predictor of longevity was quality of relationships. And it wasn't even just that there were great uplifting relationships. The biggest thing was that someone was there for you that you could count on? So, because there's a difference between lonely and loneliness. I feel like lonely is the physical not having people and loneliness is the absence of connection. So loneliness isn't the absence of people, it's the absence of connection. So not feeling like you can connect with people. Would you agree with that? Yes, yeah, that's a great nuance that you're pointing out. Yeah, because lonely, people can be like, I feel lonely.

36:41And that's like being alone. But I think loneliness is going, okay, I can be in a room full of people, but I still don't feel seen. And I still don't feel like I can connect. It can make it worse. Like I remember being at a nightclub when I was very depressed. It makes it worse for me. Yeah. Like when I was just in a room of like a thousand people that are all dancing and you don't know anyone and they seem to be having fun and you're like, why am I here? Yeah. It's hard. That's an interesting frame. I'm relating to that. The nightclub, thousands of people and they're all having fun and you just don't want to be there.

37:23I feel that a bit. for me I've reflected on that and I've gone I used to thrive in that environment and I used to be the center of that environment and I loved it and all the attention that came with that and the person that I was perceived to be in that I loved that I think I chased external validation so much in my life and there's drivers behind that but I think I did and and um and i used to love that and i found that now that i'm out out the other side of this i don't drink alcohol like i i also have now that there's so many eyeballs on me online i actually feel like i'm constantly on so i like to actually spend a bit of time alone and have just quality connection i don't like meeting all these people all at once and all this stuff but when i go into that zone uh of a nightclub where everyone's there what triggers in my mind is like everyone's actually escaping and I feel this it's like yeah they're having fun but but the only reason they're having fun is because they're like pushing down the the problems that they kind of haven't resolved and there's nuance and there's exceptions to the rule there's people that genuinely just love music and music does some magical things and I'm not saying those people right um but what I found was if I was in a venue and I wasn't drinking or whatever it might be, I just felt like my old version of me that would just not be loving what he was doing.

38:56And he was just drinking for the sake of being able to just ease the pressure. And then going back to those states and into those environments, I would just feel like that. And I'd be like, these guys are all not loving their life. They're living for this moment. And I hated that. And that was what made me feel so isolated from everyone because there was such a big disconnect. Do you feel like that's the case? Because I'm really keen to unpack this loneliness piece more and figure out what it actually is and why we feel this way. But when I'm in those environments, I would consider myself very, very isolated and extreme loneliness I would be feeling.

39:35But when you're referencing being in a room with all these people and you feel left out, are you meaning something in a completely different way? No, like, again, like the social connection is what is most important in terms of longevity and the lack of social connection. Think of six foot social distancing and you better stay inside. And, you know, if someone touches you, you better use sanitizer and wearing masks so we can't see each other's emotions and facial expressions. whether that was done intentionally or not beyond health reasons it certainly has an impact and made a lot of people people feel lonely and depressed but what it's doing when you look at depression and loneliness you see that neurotransmitters drop across the board not just serotonin dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, epinephrine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, all these things go down.

40:38Your brain is thinking less, feeling less. Neuroplasticity like BDNF, NGF, mTOR in the brain all go down so that you process less. You're more resistant to it. Your senses are actually dulled. your eyesight, your hearing, your smell is all dulled in depression. Less is coming in. Therefore, you have less to deal with. But over time, that makes you feel less, care less, connect less, have less heightened experiences, less abundant experiences. and that leads to a life down the middle which as you were pointing out before those extreme hardships create your hero's journey and a life down the middle may be the life most devastating it's a life of mediocrity blandness and a lack of anything memorable and that could be the most devastating life experience yeah you're not in enough pain to change but then you're you're kind of in this middle ground where you're not like you're not so far down where you go i need to change here but then you're also not really doing anything fulfilling and and so you're in this little weird in-between phase and it's probably the most unfulfilling and draining position to be in do you think that there's when you're in that phase of just a bit more null you're not experiencing these euphoric highs as much naturally through life and through experiences that we're having this is when people will opt for things to increase that and so uh things like caffeine things like uh excessive consumption of porn and nicotine caffeine all of the things do you do you feel like the adoption of all of these so-called addictions you could say could be a byproduct of having a bit more of like a mediocre life absolutely Absolutely.

43:10My worst depression, when I think about when I was most depressed, wasn't when I was sad. I was past sadness. I was apathetic. What does that mean? just felt nothing, cared about nothing, didn't care about other people, didn't care about my life, didn't care to go to anything, wanted to just stay inside. I didn't feel anything. And that hurt that was unresolved in me was often lashed out on other people. and I remember being told one day by someone that I thought was a very kind person that was a friend of mine or study buddy like in college and I was just you know being sarcastic and my typical self at the time when I was very depressed and she looked at me and just said you're an asshole.

44:13And for me, like this girl was like one of the most kind people I've ever met in my life. And she wouldn't be likely to use those kinds of words or say that kind of thing. But the way that she looked at me and the way she said it, it like woke me up. She meant it. And I was, I looked inside and all I could say is, yeah, I didn't have anything to say back. Like, no, you're wrong. Like, or have another smart-ass comment. I just thought on that for days and I'm like, yes, I am. When you're feeling that, is it motivating or is it dulling? Do you go, oh, shit, like I need to change? Or do you dwell in that?

44:59I dwelled in it, but it definitely motivated me to change. It took many, many years beyond that to get to the place where I am now And certainly, like I said, a psychedelic experience may have really been the catalyst behind that. But there was a lot of work prior to that that led me to be open to that experience. But certainly there's phases in our life. There's shifts. There's, you know, the stuff doesn't happen overnight where we go from zero to hero and, you know, something that you might see in a movie. at least for me, it took decades of work, of moments like that. There's several moments like that, that shifted me out of a certain space into looking to improve myself.

45:51But then, you know, there's times when I'd slip back and it's certainly not linear either. Did you ever get into a trap of excessive caffeine use? A hundred percent. And caffeine for me now is very dirty. And that led me to working on a couple ingredients prior to parazanthine, which we'll talk about, I guess. that's the caffeine metabolite. But prior to that, I had worked on tea cream, which is the ingredients theacrine, and then dynamine, which is methyl liberine. These are two very popular ingredients in nootropics, fat burners, pre-workouts, energy drinks. And about 10 years later, I came out with parazanthine, which is branded under infinity.

46:43But caffeine was always a dirty ingredient for me. Just tons of side effects, bad sleep. I fought insomnia most of my life, and I would use caffeine. And then at points when ephedrine was popular, I was using that and other stimulants because I was getting poor sleep, because I wasn't feeling enough, to your point, and I was beating myself up for not performing as well as I wanted in the gym or in the class or at the workplace.

47:13And I had to find a better ingredient and that led me to several ingredients. And most recently it's paroxanthine. So just before we get into paroxanthine and a lot of the other things that you've been doing from an energy standpoint, obviously you wrote a whole book on energy. Let's go back to this progression into inventing these things and getting to the lab and coming up with all of these formulations. Where did that start for you there? And how quickly did that process take of like discovering and patenting and coming up with all of these really awesome life-changing supplements to help people?

47:54Well, I ended up going back to school after I graduated from Babson to get all the science classes that I needed. I went to UNC Greensboro and got two years worth of biologies, chemistries, biochemistries, anatomy, physiology, all the things I needed to get into my dream school at the time, which was UNC Chapel Hill for my master's in nutrition and biochemistry. Why were you wanting to do nutrition and biochemistry? Because I had already talked to that doctor in my undergrad, and my dream was to become a dietician, have nutrition, biochemistry, and create formulations. I didn't know about creating ingredients at the time, but to do formulations and to be this formulation scientist and whatever that looked like, that led me to working clinically to get that experience as a dietitian to get paid because you don't come out of school and some supplement company says, here's a six figure job for you to formulate for us with zero experience.

49:00so I took a job as a clinical dietitian and nights, weekends, holidays was spent on message boards, was working shows like the Arnold and the Olympia and trade shows and helping companies, supplement companies write white papers, do their copy on their websites, help out on message boards at the time and things like that. And I grew in notoriety and I eventually got a job with a company in Dallas called Dymatize that was making hundreds of millions of dollars selling protein and other supplements and was in more than 70 countries. And it was just an incredible opportunity. We ended up selling the company in three years to Post Foods, and that was a big acquisition.

49:59And I got to be a part of that, and that was one of the first acquisitions I got to be a part of. And then that became part of my pedigree as well. But I got to work on formulations and flavors and costing and studies and all of these things at Dymatize. And then that led into many other experiences, being a chief science officer for a company called Biotrust and then creating my own companies around formulation and regulatory and quality control and flavor work and then working on new ingredients. I started working with a supplier and he liked some of my ideas. I was like, hey, can you get this ingredient?

50:38He's like, no, that doesn't exist. And I'd be like, well, what would it take to make this? and my partner in China we just started really thinking like well what if we start doing some new ingredients and it was a rocky path but we've been doing that now for about 15 years and I now have a team for synthesizing these ingredients a team for intellectual property a team for studies and partners all around the world to actually make this happen. And I've been able to do about 40 ingredients like that. And there's probably more than a hundred that are in queue. How long have you been doing it? So like the 40, 40 ingredients that you've created, like in what time span have you done 40 ingredients in about 12 years wow incredible and your involvement now if you were to say okay what's an average week look like for sean you mentioned all these departments and all these teams that you have where does your skill set lie in terms of where does your energy go in the business and what are you focusing on throughout your days?

52:00Honestly, because I have so many things that I do and so many teams, it's a lot. It's a lot. Like every week, every day looks different. And I actually, I love that. I consider myself a polymath. Like I enjoy doing branding. I enjoy the art of something, the science of something. I like the way something feels energetically. I like the story behind an ingredient or a formulation and thinking through those pieces. It's all really enjoyable. So sometimes I'm working on a formula. Sometimes I'm in a flavor house working on a specific flavor to make something absolutely delicious, like some of these drinks that you've tried.

52:48There's literally hundreds and hundreds of products out there. um you know i worked on uh actually a sweetener that's in that drink that has reb a reb d reb m that is unprecedented very good that's a sugar free non-caloric natural sweetener that is the best tasting on the planet and i was able to do that so there's there's a lot of things that I'm just way ahead of where the rest of the market is at because of how connected I am. And I'm the jack of all trades. I'm not necessarily the smartest guy in the room for any of this. I have people that are brilliant at each one of these pieces. I'm just the connector to all of it.

53:39I'm the ideator. But if I didn't have the people to actually bring it to fruition, then, you know, all of these ideas would be worthless. Yeah, it's interesting because I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole. It was a cosmetic product we were building. I was trying to sell Australian beach sand to Americans. But I approached like a cosmetic chemist. And the reason I approached this guy was because he creates formulations. He lives on this farm in South Australia and he knows all these different berries and all these different things. Incredible. And like, he would tell me some stuff and we were talking about Shilajit and he was basically explaining this sweetener that he created that like can get rid of the whole taste of it all and it's got no calories and he can make it all in the scene.

54:33He's explaining all this stuff and I have no idea what he's talking about, but he says it with so much ease. And I can imagine you'd be the same where you just go, yeah, you just do that. You do this and we can put these together and just like piece it all together. And I feel like it's an interesting thing looking at someone that's just doing the formulations, but then someone that gets so successful at it that now you've got a whole team and department, you know, it becomes a whole business that's far beyond just you in a lab creating some formulations, right? There's so many more pieces to the puzzle.

55:05When you started it out, was it the start out of this desire and this love for creation? And do you feel like your creativity has been able to enhance now that you have more departments? Or do you feel like you've gone away from the thing that excited you the most, which was the creation of the formulations? Or has it just been a natural progression into where your curiosities led you and where your focus has wanted to be a natural progression i love creativity i do consider myself a creator and that's what i excel most at as a matter of fact in one of my journeys this came through i had been hurt by a number of business partners that had taken advantage of many of my ideas whether it's formulation ingredients that i had worked on told them about and they took it's happened with this guy as well heaps of times yes yes and I'm actually just finishing up a legal case right now that I can't speak to but it's been two years and one of the things that came through on this journey was everyone stealing the golden egg you're the golden goose you can do this a thousand times over.

56:27And so many of the ingredients that I've led to best my other work was related to that. I was like, okay, watch me work. And then I came up with something even better. And I love that. I love being the golden goose. I love being in my creator mode. I love thinking through like i said the story the formula the ingredient the way it looks and feels like the experience you have with it the taste of it unique flavors i i love all of this stuff because i get to be a creator i think it's special also being able to just branch out and do different things as you said like oh let's work on some branding let's do this and and all It's actually just come to me now that I think when we were trying to create this product that was like an alcohol-free product, and the goal was to be able to kind of have it in a little unique sachet that we could put into water.

57:34And so when you're out drinking with your friends and you don't want to drink, you can put that in there and it'll be like an actual booster. I actually think it's just come to me now. I'm just having a little flashback. was Parazanthine, the Infinity thing, was the first product you released it in a pre-workout? Yeah, called Euphoric. Yes. Okay, it's all just come to me. Was this a couple of years ago? Yep. This is all piecing together now because we were studying that and ordered the tub of this pre-workout from the US back to Australia. And we were looking at this formulation to put in there, which is just so interesting.

58:12It's all piecing together now. But you look at it back then when you launched this thing and now you're saying it's in, how many products is paroxanthine in now? Probably a hundred. I don't know. So in the last couple of years, you've had a hundred different products that have now putting paroxanthine in the product. So things can really change. If you come up with a really good formula, things can really start to change for you in this space that you're in. Well, as I told you, Kim Kardashian, this drink update, which I have equity in, Kim Kardashian came on board because she only has this and Spanx, I think.

58:51And I assume she's a billionaire. I don't know. But she loves this product, was drinking this product twice a day, every single day. It was on her show before she ever reached out on keeping up with the Kardashians. And then eventually the team at Update reached out to her and she wanted to be a part of it. And she's now an equity holder, but not at some crazy amount. And she's seen everywhere with it. And it's going to obviously ignite the brand when you have someone like that associated with it who's associated with very few companies. And with another drink that has parazanthine, Life Cider X, one of the most famous people in the world besides Kim Kardashian may come on as a lead investor that I can't speak to on the podcast quite yet.

59:51But it's a very experiential ingredient. And when we look at the data with parazanthine versus caffeine, it really lends itself to caffeine being the frazzle. Both are stimulating you, but caffeine is the frazzle and parazanthine is the flow. When we looked at a 10K race with athletes where they took parazanthine before the race or caffeine before the race, there was also a combination and a placebo, so there's four arms. and they did a multitasking test before and after the race. The ones that took caffeine had an increase in mental errors of 23.3%. The ones that took parazanthine had a decrease in mental errors by 11%.

1:00:45After a race, the placebo was around 10 % increased mental errors. That makes sense. You do a 10K race, you're going to have more mental errors. But parazanthine, they did the race and they performed better than the placebo. And that delta is about 20%. The delta between caffeine and parazanthine is about 35%. It's a massive difference. And so the way you experience paroxanthine is so much cleaner than the way you would experience paroxanthine. And that's why I've dubbed it like the catalyst of creation. Because you just feel enhanced and optimized instead of kind of beat over the head and drag drug along.

1:01:37Why do you think caffeine is so horrible? Well, it's actually somewhat toxic. It's in plants to be an insect repellent, to be toxic to insects. Also, if you look at the metabolism of caffeine, it can convert into theophyllene, which has a ton of side effects. What's theophyllene? Theophylline is actually a drug, a bronchodilator, but it also increases heart rate, anxiety, agitation, insomnia, like a lot of side effects that you might associate with stimulants. It's kind of the most harsh version of a stimulant. And so caffeine can be metabolized into that. The other thing is that caffeine, if you are a slow metabolizer of caffeine via CYP1A2, the gene and the enzyme, it can be a difference of 7x, the half-life of caffeine, the bio-individuality of caffeine from person to person.

1:02:45it can be one and a half hours or 10 and a half hours for the half-life that's to get to half the level in your bloodstream in your plasma and that's dependent on the person is it yes and so for someone they can have the the coffee and go straight to bed and then some of us we can have a diet coke at lunch and get worse sleep at night because it can take days to clear So it's experienced very differently. There's also other enzymes that are associated with the other genes that kind of exacerbate or enhance the side effects, like ADORA2A. So there's just a lot of different ways we experience caffeine from person to person.

1:03:34What we've seen with parazanthine is almost everyone across the board experiences it cleanly without the side effects. It has a short half-life for practically everyone of three hours. So you can work out in the evening, get your sleep. You feel cognitively enhanced. It's better at boosting dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine. So it's like a mood lifter. we've shown it's increased BDNF so it's enhancing neuroplasticity it's increasing nitric oxide to the brain it's increasing glutathione and catalase and decreasing oxidative stress so all the ways that I know that the brain ages including beta amyloid plaque it actually lowers that is oxidative stress plaque in the brain decreased blood flow in the brain decreased neuroplasticity, decreased neurotransmitters, especially dopamine.

1:04:37All of these things have an impact on the brain aging. Paraxanthine's actually reversing those.

1:04:47So let's unpack this paraxanthine a little bit, and then I want to talk about this half-life. So paraxanthine, I'm going to do my best to explain it in brief from what I understood when I was deep diving it before I was promoting a product that had it in it. But essentially from my understanding is that paroxanthine is a metabolite of caffeine. And so when caffeine enters the body, your then body has to then metabolize that. And then what then comes out of that into your body is a combination of paroxanthine and two other things, but predominantly paroxanthine. Yeah. And theophylline and theobromine.

1:05:28Yeah. Okay. And so then from what I understood was 80 % of the metabolite from caffeine is paroxanthine. Is that correct or not? Or around that? Yeah. It depends how you calculate it. Really probably 72%. But the difference here is you might make the assumption of, well, essentially most of my caffeine is turning to paroxanthine. why would I take paroxanthine? What I'm saying is the bio-individuality of how you experience caffeine, one, before it converts, two, how long does it take to convert to paroxanthine, the thing that actually has all the benefits. Caffeine has almost all the side effects.

1:06:17So you're actually experiencing very little paroxanthine because it's drip, drop, drip, drop if you're a slow metabolizer, which is over half the population, close to 60%. Okay. So it's not as simple as saying we take 100 milligrams of caffeine and that turns into 72 milligrams of paroxanthin. No, not at all. So how do we analyze this then? And we go, okay, we take 120 milligram can of energy drink. The energy drink has 120 milligrams of caffeine. how do we analyze what it's doing after it's being metabolized is it very dependent on who we are and how slow we're metabolizing that yeah not not only is there differences in terms of genetics with some of these genes that i mentioned like cyp1a2 and and adora2a but there's also differences in certain medications will speed it up or slow it down in particular birth control.

1:07:19That slows it down? Yes. And smoking affects it. And gender seems to affect it. Women are actually much slower than men typically. Oh, wow. There's a number of things that affect it. Maybe mental health. There's been some studies on this. So it's interesting how we're all experiencing this thing. we're talking about like we think we're talking about the same thing. I take caffeine, you take caffeine. Let's take the same amount. We're experiencing it radically different. This is why I was always frustrated to hear like, yes, I feel stimulated, but I feel emotionally worse. I feel less resilient.

1:08:06I feel frazzled. I feel brain fog and anxiety and agitation. I'm getting terrible sleep and I'm in the cycle of having to use more caffeine. and I couldn't figure out why when so many people loved it, and they're doing bangs and C4 and all these things, and I feel like trash. Come to find out, most people feel like trash, and it's kind of like the alcohol thing that you're alluding to. I mean, we could get into that too. People experience alcohol differently, and some people experience it with a host of side effects and very little quote-unquote benefit, that especially, as you know, like you probably heard as people age and, you know, things like that, like you have less of a tolerance for alcohol and certainly may experience more of the side effects and the benefits.

1:08:58Benefits being just feeling looser. I'm not really alluding to like lots of health benefits of drinking alcohol, but it's the same idea with caffeine is that we're experiencing it differently, but we think we're talking about the same thing. This is extremely fascinating because with that said then, with people that can metabolite caffeine quickly, is it less harm for them to have caffeine than the people that take a lot longer to metabolite that? It is. So if you scan someone's results or whatever and you determined that they could actually metabolite caffeine really quickly, you'd probably say it's not too much of a danger for them, would you say?

1:09:43That is the case. When we look at health outcomes throughout the lifespan, and we look at things like CVA, which is stroke, or myocardial infarction, which is a heart attack, or hypertension, which is high blood pressure, we see that those things are much lower in the cases of people that are consuming caffeine in the highest quartile that are fast metabolizers of caffeine versus slow metabolizers. The slow metabolizers have increased risk of all of those things. And you just don't see that with the fast metabolizers. Okay. And how do we check this for ourselves? You can look at doing a genetic test.

1:10:31Okay. If you're kind of advanced with your with your healthcare and you're maybe doing concierge care and you're maybe testing your not only labs, microbiome, your genetics. You can look at these kinds of things about how you metabolize certain drugs, how you metabolize caffeine, whether you have gluten intolerance or not. You can look at all of those things. So is it, is a good indicator? Cause for me, I, I'm, I normally wear a whoop 365 days a year. I've taken off the last couple of days. I'm in a, in probably what a tech startup would refer to as a sprint right now. And I kind of just went, I didn't even want to look at my thing to be clearly honest, even though it's probably the most important time to leave it on so I can track when it is.

1:11:13But what I've done is, is track my, I like to track my sleep metric a lot more specifically, my deep and REM sleep and how quickly I'm getting into sleep, how much I'm being able to sleep. Am I waking up throughout the night? And I like to track these metrics a lot. and I use my routines as a metric to see how I perform on those states. So for example, like caffeine, I know that if I have caffeine later on in the night, in the afternoon, my sleep is disrupted. Terrible. However, I've found that if I have caffeine till like 1 p.m., I'm actually quite good. Like my sleep doesn't get affected. What will affect me worse is if I'm on my phone before bed.

1:11:58But if I don't do that and I'm reading before bed and I stop having caffeine like, say, eight hours before I'm pretty good. Like, I'm pretty good with my sleep. It's the same thing like as you're saying with blue light or alcohol or food. Like, when we have these things too late, it certainly magnifies the effects like in the afternoon or certainly the evening. Yep. But absolutely, if you track HRV, what's really interesting is when we see caffeine get pulled out nine times out of 10, we see HRVs improve. When we give someone parazanthine, we saw HRVs improve over baseline. Not just not worsen, but actually improve because we think that the health of the brain is actually improving because there's more blood flow, better glutathione and catalase.

1:12:50increased nitric oxide as i said and increased neuroplasticity and all these things so my assumption would be this isn't a one-off dosage this is a consistently having paroxanthine daily yes when we see continued use we did a gaming study an e-gaming study where they played super Smash Brothers because it is a 1v1 kind of game, whereas a lot of the first-person shooters that are typically used are more of a team-based sport. So we wanted to really assess the gamer and what was happening to them, wholly to them, related to this study and their performance with paraxanthine or without paraxanthine.

1:13:39What we saw was absolutely fascinating that on a placebo, as expected, they would play two hours and we would test them with a multitasking test, a focus test, before they started playing at one hour and at two hours. And we tested this at zero weeks, three weeks, and at six weeks. And what's interesting is, of course, with placebo, we saw it go down in terms of performance over those two hours. Like you'd expect. People are losing focus. They're getting mentally tired. What was crazy is with the paroxanthine, we saw less of a drop-off, but with the continued use at three weeks, we saw almost no drop-off.

1:14:39And at six weeks, we actually saw them performing better two hours in than over the baseline. so it clearly outlined that one it's having an acute effect of course meaning like in that single use that first use it's having benefit and preventing that cognitive fatigue improving cognitive resilience if you will but over continued use over the six weeks we saw improvements. Whereas typically with caffeine, we actually see a declination over time with continued use because of something called habituation and adaptation, where your body is habituating to it, you're adapting to it, becoming physiologically dependent on it, and it's having diminishing returns.

1:15:34Hence why when you quit caffeine and then go back, you actually start having more effects from it. This makes a lot of sense. What about this half-life of the paroxanthine? So if we follow on this story of tracking things on my whoop, I received a can, this new Oxytread Infinity can, and I was like, oh, it says on the can, enjoy day and night. And I don't think that's a very good thing to have on the can, in my opinion, because I still think it blocks your adenosine receptors. You should still, as you said, it takes three hours or whatever to half. So if you have 300 milligrams, would I be correct in saying in three hours time, it should be, you should still have 150 in your system?

1:16:21Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, these cans only had 150 in, which you've told me that that's not even enough, you'd say, in a can. but I had one of these cans at like 6 p.m. I didn't know. I said enjoy day and night. So I had one and I woke up in the red and I was waking up. I couldn't get into deep sleep and I didn't change too many other things with my routine. And I mean, I did work probably a bit later than I usually would, but I had this can and I remember just looking at the next thing and this is when I was like, okay, I need a deep dive into this Parazanthic thing. and I said to the um the guys at the company I was like I'm not promoting this as a day and night drink I'm gonna promote it as um someone that a bit more sensitive to caffeine that you should have this as an alternative and this is how it was going because I was like this is I can't drink this like I can't drink this at the night time had you had any caffeine during the day probably yeah yeah I definitely had so what I see happen is when you have parazanthine get the F off caffeine, period.

1:17:30Right. Because my relationship was, okay, I'll have my caffeine in the morning and then in the afternoon I'll crack open my paroxanthine can. So what I see, if it's certainly, and the closer it is to the consumption of caffeine, we've shown this in several studies that they don't work that well together. They actually have kind of a negative effect. What I think is happening is when you're co-administering, certainly at the same time, But I think there is some relationship with dose and with a certain amount of time, depending on the person, especially slower metabolizer of caffeine. That would factor in, too, is that when you're giving caffeine and paroxanthine, you're actually preventing the conversion of caffeine to paroxanthine and pushing it more down this pathway of theophylline, which is that super dirty one.

1:18:22And we just, we see that time and time again. So one, I get questions all the time. Should I co-administer? Like, can I, like, you know, I love caffeine. Can I have caffeine and parazanthine? I typically say no. And I would challenge anyone to just try seven days without caffeine and only parazanthine and you'll see how clean it is. And when you go back to caffeine, you'll see just how dirty it is. This makes so much sense for me now because I actually started feeling not very good on the Infinity Cans, the paroxanthine Oxyshred cans. But I was having a normal Oxyshred with caffeine earlier that day already.

1:19:05And I found it wasn't when I just had the Infinity Can. It was when I had probably a coffee in the morning, then an oxyshred can, then an infinity can, which means I'm having caffeine, probably a hundred milligrams plus, probably like two or over 200 milligrams of caffeine, then an infinity can, which had the paroxanthine in it and 150 milligrams. And I found I felt quite bad after drinking that can. And so this makes a lot of sense. I think it's an interesting thing how confusing it can get for people. Yeah. Because they see energy on a can. Like it still says energy drink, right? Yeah. Caffeine evolved.

1:19:44I mean, the other one says caffeine free. And so you go, oh, caffeine free. Caffeine is the thing that I can't have, but this is energy evolved. It's got nootropics in it. I can see how people can get confused. I've been confused by it, but this makes a lot of sense. I think for me, and I'm going to do this challenge as well of going, let's just try parazanthine and see how we go. um but i think honestly i just want to commend you for this conversation i think thank you i think it's so profound we obviously went down a rabbit hole of caffeine towards the end of the conversation but more importantly i think what's so valuable is getting context on who you are what drives you what's made you into this amazing inventor today and and formulator and considered the best in the world, it's like the pain, the challenge, the rough journey.

1:20:38So one could say is the very thing that leads you into this. And it's the very thing that makes this whole thing special and even possible. And I just think for me, I just want to commend you because anyone listening that's going through a hard time, just have the confidence to know that this is actually the price tag to achieve this fulfilling life that we all desire. and if you go through it and you speak to i speak to hundreds of people and the common denominator and all of these greats is that they've gone through something challenging it's not been a smooth sailing journey never it never has and if you think that that that's like wanting rainbows with no rain and um i just want to commend you for being so open and honest and sharing your story today because i think it'll actually impact people more than you know and aside from all of the amazing accomplishments that you've had and you've achieved, I think the story behind it's even more amazing.

1:21:32So I really appreciate that. It's the process that really forges something that's new and special. Like if we were to go to the gym and take tons of steroids, tons and tons and tons of steroids. And I have many friends that use, I have pro bodybuilder friends. I'm not saying that they don't have incredible work ethics, incredible genetics, incredible bodies. But let's say you could get to the body that you desired in one year instead of 10 years by taking this quote-unquote shortcut. Think about that path. Who would have more mental strength? Who would have more resolve, discipline, resilience, a mission?

1:22:25If you got there in one year versus 10 years. There's something that's special about the process and you have to fall in love with the process and know there's highs and lows. and when you're good at reframing something i learned from tim ferris and tools of titans is there's two things that highly successful people all have in common from all walks of life they have some kind of morning routine to start their day and feel like they're in control to take ownership of their day routines are very different in the morning but they all have some kind of morning routine. The other thing is they're expert reframers.

1:23:15They can take something that feels like a hardship or a frustration to others and turn it into a lesson, a gift, a blessing. The universe is always working on my behalf or God's always working on my behalf. Isn't that interesting? Oh, what a lesson that is. Oh, this quote-unquote terrible thing happened, and everyone is frustrated, everyone is running for the hills. This is my opportunity. Now there's not the competition. I can do what's unthinkable. Everything has a unique opportunity. And if you look at the most successful people, this is what they're constantly doing. And if you get even better at it, you're pre-framing, where you're setting the stage for what you expect to happen, and you kind of mold what is happening into that, and then you reframe the little pieces at the end.

1:24:19And yes, are you delusional? Absolutely. But you're delusional in all the right ways. We all experience the same thing differently. Therefore, life is what we make of it. If we're all at a concert, watching that same concert, you're hearing it differently, seeing it differently, feeling it differently because of your emotions, your neurotransmitters, your life experience, your height, your eye color, your whatever it is, the people that are talking around you. It's all different. So therefore, we're not experiencing the same thing. You're in control of your experience and certainly how you interpret it.

1:25:05Yeah, there's a level of trust that needs to be had, that everything's perfect, divine and right on time. And we're here for a reason. A level of trust and a level of ownership and focusing on the controllables and the things we can control. because when you can truly not dwell on the things that are out of your hands and then trust that whether it's good or bad it's meant to be you can be in a really good spot you can't be you won't be phased by all the little things you won't dwell on things that don't even matter you can have the ability to zoom out in live time and realize that this is such a small little piece of the whole grand scheme of things you can realize that things don't really that matter that much and we're sweating on stuff that is actually just ruining our mood and not contributing to our life and i think when you can have trust and you can have ownership it solves those pillars of not having to worry about this stuff because you know it's all meant to be and uh you've demonstrated that today and i really appreciate it so thank you so much for coming on the show you got it and i would love to come back and tell you about a ton of other ingredients i've worked on things that actually mimic exercise mimic fasting there's all kinds of stuff that we could talk about in the future we've got to be back i love this i think this was um this was awesome like i actually you're amazing like we're amazing we're definitely doing a round two definitely doing a round two and i want to hear about all of the other 39 things that we haven't even spoken about and the other hundred that are in the pipeline.

1:26:45But screenshot this if you've made it to the end and tag Sean and I on social media just to make, let us know that you've made it to the end. And I'm going to leave Sean's details in the show notes description below. So you can go and check them out for yourself. Go and give him a follow, go and engage in his stuff. He's a genius. As you guys, if you made it this far, you know, all of this and how inspiring is Sean's story. So leave us a five-star review on Spotify because that will help the show grow and it helps us keep getting awesome people just like Sean back on the show. When you were listening to this, if you're listening to it when it came out, we are on a podcast tour around America, Canada, and the UK.

1:27:24We're touring for the next six to eight weeks, which is crazy. Stop to stop interviewing some awesome names. And this is kind of kick-starting that. So thank you so much for tuning in and making it to the end. And thank you so much, Sean. Thank you. And we're signing out, but we'll see you in the next episode. Bye-bye.