Paraxanthine: How To UPDATE Your Energy + Cognition... Without Caffeine?

Caffeine is a $1 trillion global market. 93% of Americans consume some form of caffeine every day. 90%, 9 out of 10 want to consume less. If almost every one of us is consuming caffeine and almost every one of us wants to consume less, why don't we. Paraxanthine is where we're seeing all the nootropic benefits and health benefits. Caffeine is where we're seeing most of the side effects.

Caffeine is going to provide you with that jolt of overstimulation and then you crash.

It's all about grinding your way through life and the sympathetic nervous system.

It's going to raise your anxiety levels so you're just not feeling great after you consume it, even though you get that kind of acute boost of energy.

I think what's needed is like an energy source here that's sustainable for society but also doesn't impact our emotional intelligence.

We're switching away from the caffeinated unconscious capitalism and we're going into creative of consciousness.

Caffeine deteriorates you. Paraxanthine is the opposite.

It's the catalyst of creation and that it's going to enhance the way that we are in flow versus just a grinding state so that we can create more. We can create more music, create more content, create more video, create more relationships. There's more creation to come as a result of paraxanthi.

Y'. All. We've been marinating on this conversation for like six months, Daniel. Maybe more, at least. Welcome to the studio. Welcome to the podcast again.

Thank you.

And then welcome for the first time, Daniel, you've done many podcasts, but this is your first time on wellness and wisdom. So what has been top of heart for you guys? I asked you before we hit the little button and we did our breathing, but what is top of heart for you in this world? Like, there's so many ways we could take this conversation. Obviously, we're going to talk about the neurology, the biology, the spirituality, all the things. But what's top of heart for you right now?

I was just at a mastermind in. In Mexico, Punta Mita. It's the Frontier Club. It used to be called the Brotherhood. And it's just a bunch of, like, really great men that are fit spiritually, mentally, financially, you know what, all the things. And in their families as well. And I've been dating for a year and a half. I did a conscious uncoupling a few years back from my former wife, Shelley, who's still a Great friend and business partner and which is something I'm very proud of and navigated very well, I believe. And I believe that also set the tone for my next relationship. And it was important to me that the next lady that came into my life saw that because I'm not ending that relationship. And she saw the value in how I treated someone that mattered to me. But I was bringing to a close as far as a marriage. And I've been dating Hannah for about a year and a half now. And that relationship has been wonderful and challenging in so many ways, challenging me in ways that I've never been challenged. But it's brought out, I believe, the best in me in inner peace, a resilience, a desire to be a protector provider, a leader in the home. Because she has a six year old daughter that now matters to me very much. I was never able to have a child. My former wife and I, Shelly, went through about seven years of trying and did ivf and then we lost it and it was very, very difficult. And so to want to put a lot of my energy in that type of excellence is now top of my heart. Like I've put a lot of energy over the last 25 years into excellence in, in marketing and supplements and business and healthcare and all these things, speaking all over the world and all this stuff. And it's all great, but I feel like I didn't show up to the degree that I wanted to in the other things. And now I'm very much thinking about life and love and legacy and, and I'm trying to show up in a, in a very different way. Not that I am scolding myself or. Yeah, that I, you know, it's just a reflection. Just a reflection. Yeah, it's, it's a matter of, of growth. And there was a comfortability in what we had created before and you know, we were both complicit in before. So it's, you know, there's no shame in that. I'm very proud of all the things I accomplished and I'm ready for the next phase.

Dude, it's beautiful to see you in this realm because like, whenever I feel you or I think about you and you probably feel the same way about him. It's like whenever I look at, I hear the word ingredients, it's like, it's just, I think it's because of our previous podcasts and our relationship and also like the world's greatest formula, the ingredients for life of like what I call the Wellness Pentagon. It's what we talk about in The BREATHE program. The physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial ingredients that we can nourish ourselves with. Dude, people are killing themselves with caffeine. Like, it's one thing for us to be spiritual. It's one thing for us to be connected to the self. Yeah, but I feel like our entire society is built on a fucking scaffolding of caffeine, and it's literally unraveling, like, in front of our eyes. I mean, look at obesity. Look at how that's scaffolded by caffeine. Look at the ways that people are literally using fake energy to have fake relationships, to buy fake things. And obviously, that's a myopic lens. Like, we don't have to only talk about that. But caffeine is a big part of. Of how the broken engine in America and even the world is continuing to run. It's almost like the gas pedal has been mashed down for so long with this caffeine fuel. I mean, like, I'm gonna ask you this question in a second. Like, thank God that there's something out there besides caffeine as a fuel source. Because I think me personally, which we'll jam about. We've all been hurting with caffeine. Some people can handle it, some people can't.

Yeah, we'll get into that. But, like, you know, kind of like, I just told my story. Like, I don't want to, like, fully shame caffeine and that. Like, we would not be where we are in society, period. The end. Like, this is the most important ingredient in human history. There's only two ingredients that I can say that about possibly alcohol and caffeine have shaped our society in so many ways. You think about coffee shops and, you know, workplaces and third shift, and you can go through the history of, like, the Pope approving caffeine and the British Stock Exchange and just how the industrial age, like, everything is related to caffeine. And there's a great book by Michael Poland, who I'm sure you love, like, how to Change youe Mind.

Oh, yeah.

You know, who's an amazing guy and a great documentary series, too. But what happened as a result of caffeine and shaping our history is. Is really incredible. And just like I was talking about personally.

Yeah.

Now there's a better way forward that actually comes from caffeine. That's why we're talking about it as caffeine 2.0. It's really like the. The progeny of caffeine. And I, like, genetically evolved Big Brother.

Or, like, later stage grandfather. The age Of Aquarius.

Caffeine.

It's caffeine from the future, but like it's a metabolite of it. So, dude, I'm stoked to go into the science because that's one love and respect about you. You have been doing scientific literature.

One thing, Just one.

Well, I mean, there's, there's many, Sean, there's many. But the one thing I love about you is like, you understand these things on such a molecular level that the rest of us just honestly don't have time for. There's a small group of people like you in the world. I don't know, 10,000 or less, something like that.

Would you say, I'll take care of them and they'll, they'll have a nerd gas.

But before we get into the science, man, Daniel, like, you are from Oz, right? The land down under. But now you're here in Austin, which is the land down under. California. Because I'm from California, dude. When you feel into your heart, and I'm sure in your relationship with Sean, he's probably taking you deep into your heart because you can't be with Sean and not go into your heart. I don't know if psychedelics have been a part of that or not. Maybe we can talk about that. But, but when I've talked to you and when we've had phone calls and connection, there's a, there's a trustworthiness in you. And I think that's really behind this whole company and behind why you're doing this. Otherwise you'd be doing it just for money, which ain't that fun. So how did you even find this relationship with Sean? And how did you even find this Parisanthine? And what's even the fuel for you to bring this to the market? Because you guys are really like, you know, two peas in the pod. There's some science and there's some business. And you guys married together. I mean, you're not married, but you know, you know what I'm saying? Married in business. And so what, what, what did that look like for you? Like, what was that story and how did that come to be, man? Why do you care so much about this?

Yeah, I mean, I resigned from my former workplace about six years ago in Sydney, Australia, and decided to buy a one way ticket to New York.

Why one way?

Well, I, I thought I had saved up enough money to spend a year in New York and live and have fun and do everything I wanted to do. I told myself in the back of my head, you know, if I Enjoy it. I have to work out how to earn a living because New York's not cheap, and I just have to make it work.

Yeah.

So I land on my feet there. End up kind of buddying up with three other really good friends, business partners today. And we would hang out all the time, and we would love to talk about business and different businesses we're seeing. And we always had this desire to work together. You know, we're like four best friends. We love each other. We love supporting one another, and we thought if there was a way to work together, that would be a really nice way to kind of cement the relationship.

Or kill each other.

Or kill each other. Exactly. TBD on that. We'll come back here in a year from now.

It'll bring you closer together. Or split you apart.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, we had this idea. We also, at the time, were kind of watching what was going on in the nootropic space. We actually were first introduced to them through, like, another. An advisor to our company today. And we started trying these nootropics. And it was the first time any of us had had an experience that I. I don't want to say mimicked caffeine or mimicked an Adderall, but came very close to that euphoric experience you would get from either of those two.

Yeah.

Ingredients or supplements. But there was really no side effects that came with them. You know, when you take an Adderall, you don't want to be social. You kind of want to, like, be tucked away in a corner to do.

Your work, doing spreadsheets.

When you're on caffeine, you're, you know, jacked up, you're jittery, you're overstimulated, and then you, like, inevitably crash. And so we thought, well, what if we could actually come up with a product using these nootropics? And we had this idea that a sparkling water type product or, you know, a canned beverage is really the best way to introduce what we had discovered to, you know, the masses, to everyone else. You know, you don't have to explain to people how to use a can of drink. You know, it's not like a tincture or a supplement that you're playing around with. And then we went down a rabbit hole of, like, what should go in this product. It started off me ordering ingredients off, like, Nootropics Depot and Amazon. I bought all this kind of science equipment, my apartment.

Way before you met Sean.

This is way before I met.

So you were literally just like, what should I. You Were typing it on Google.

Typing it on Google, seeing what, like, Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, Dave Asprey, all these types of people are touting different products.

Yes.

Seeing what are the most commonly used ingredients, the ones that we had used. You know, we had someone helping us on the flavoring on the side. I bought science equipment. Probably didn't need the science equipment. It just felt like it would be a fun thing to do. And, you know, I'm there mixing stuff up in my apartment. Of course, not to anyone's surprise, it tasted awful. And what was interesting, though, was one day I kind of felt focused and alert, the next day I felt nothing. And that was an experience consistent with everyone else who was trying this. And at that point, you know, I realized, like, okay, well, I'm not the world's greatest formulator. There's clearly bio individuality between people who are trying this. We need someone who really knows what they're doing to help. And kind of went down a Reddit rabbit hole. Everyone, multiple people from Ben Greenfield to Luke Story, had been talking about Sean, this guy, the world's greatest formulator. And at that point, I didn't know Sean, but I know started then doing the digging, reached out to Sean and, you know, just through Instagram, and he responded. We hopped on a call. Not dissimilar to, you know, like you and I, when we spoke and explained to Sean, this is what we're trying to build. We're trying to build, you know, a energy drink with nootropics. We don't want to be using caffeine. You know, is this something you can help us with?

But you knew from the jump that you, that caffeine was not going to be in it. Why?

We knew from the jump caffeine, we didn't want caffeine in it because caffeine to us just feels crude. It feels like, you know, something that your uncle was consuming in copious amounts. And what we personally were experiencing was really trying to find healthier ways to feel energized. You know, me personally, in Australia, I was having five cups of coffee a day, you know, double shot espresso coffees. So, oh, my God, I'm probably close to a thousand milligrams of caffeine at that point. And partially because I like the flavor, the taste, but partially because I relied on that. You know, to our point earlier, we live on this, like, caffeinated society. And that was my baseline. And then when I moved to New York, I, you know, started seeing things like Yerba Mate, more Matcha green tea being used more frequently. And that was kind of a trend going around, right. People are looking for these cleaner sources. And almost, I would say eight out of 10 people, you ask, how much caffeine do you drink? You're going to get some sheepish answer, you know, because you're embarrassed about the quantity.

Yeah.

So we knew from day one we. We wanted to find something that was, you know, healthier, that would still give you that utility, that effect you wanted. But caffeine just has way too many side effects.

Yeah, it's painful. It's been so painful for me personally, like, oh, my God, I can remember. I found caffeine. People don't know this. I don't know if you know this about me at all. I was a Mercedes Benz technician right out of high school. I went to, like, auto trade school then I was a Mercedes. I found caffeine in the first job that I thought I was gonna do, that had nothing to do with what we're doing, which is connecting and sharing and talking. And so I use caffeine because secretly my soul was really unhappy with what I was doing. Cause I was just doing it for the money. And that always sucks. Cause that's only a sustainable fuel source that lasts, like, I don't know, a few years. Unless you're really crushing yourself and propping yourself up with caffeine, then it lasts a lot longer. So I found coffee. And it really took me to this place where I would get these headaches at night. I'm like 19, 20 years old, and I was getting headaches. And then ever since then, I went into personal training for 10 years, and it was like I needed coffee just to survive. Like, literally just to get up in the morning. And we've even seen this written on coffee mugs on Amazon. Like, don't wake the bear unless he has coffee. Yeah, just crazy stuff like that. So, dude, it's a blessing like you said, Sean. And it's got a dark side, just like anything. I mean, I don't care if it's ayahuasca or plant medicine or even water. You can drink yourself to death with water. There's this middle way with everything. And I think because of its addictive properties, caffeine, the middle way is harder to find than with something like a paraxanthine. So build us the bridge between caffeine and paraxanthine and actually talk about the addictive side of it. Because you and I have both shared addictions in our past. Food addiction, eating disorders. I used to be 280 pounds. You were 300 pounds. Like, addiction's real for me. So I have to be very mindful about how I approach things. But build that bridge, man, between caffeine and paraxanthine.

And what's funny is when it's addiction related to things that are legal or omnipresent, it's very acceptable. Right? Think about how many people can drink every single day, go through a six pack, a case every day when they get home or whatever it is, go through a fifth, go through a bottle of wine as soon as they get home, you know, or cigarettes or food or caffeine. I do have friends that have like 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 bangs in a day or whatever it is. And it's just. I mean, think about that. Or like Daniel was saying, with coffee. I mean, this kind of stuff is. Then it's coffee and cigarettes, and then it's like, I need something to take me down. Right. Like it's. It's all of this stuff. So there's definitely a huge addictive component and a psychological dependency as well as a physiologic dependency. Like, who am I without this? Yes. Like, it becomes, like, woven into the fabric of your identity to where you feel scared or insecure without it. Right. Like, who would you be without it? Like, you won't show up in the same way. And so there's fear around that I've seen. But think about this. Caffeine is a $1 trillion global market. Trillion.

I don't even think I can. I can't even see how many bills that would be. That would be like a football field stacked to the ceiling with $100 bills.

Exactly.

Some insane visual.

93% of Americans consume some form of caffeine every day. But as you guys were just pointing out, 90%, 9 out of 10, want to consume less. So that means 81% of the country is consuming caffeine and wants to consume less every day. And we have definitely shown that there is a physiologic dependence. A habituation is the term. There's actually like a rodent study where after the third day of administration to caffeine, they needed that level of caffeine to get to baseline to where the other rats or mice, I don't remember which, it was in the study where they were already at. Without caffeine. So, like, when you see people as zombies, like in line at Starbucks, kind of like you were saying, like, whatever about the bear, like meeting, don't wake the bear.

Lift as coffee.

Exactly. Like it's a real thing where people, like, they don't know how to function until they have their coffee or slash caffeine.

Somebody's watching, listening, going, that's me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they need that to get to baseline. Not energized, not their best. Not optimized. To get to baseline, to get to where you used to be without caffeine.

And so baseline just mean, like key homeostasis. How else would you baseline? Like, not high, not low. Just like, I'm alive.

Yeah.

So I'm in survive, I'm in surviving mode.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that's a staggering number. There's also adaptation effects. So that's where there's diminishing returns with continued use. So think about this. When you were a kid. When I was a kid, we had a Coca Cola. Right. Went bonkers. Am I allowed to swear?

Yeah, of course.

Okay, cool.

I think swearing is part of the human expression.

Okay.

It's like a fun thing to do. But I don't. I don't use it as filler words. I like it to really prove a point. By the way, fuck is for unlawful carnal knowledge.

So there's Van Halen.

There's beautiful etymology and music behind the word fuck.

Exactly.

I remember that album. So we're good.

Okay, well, I was going to say go ape shit, but anyway, you would go crazy with your, your Coca Cola at 60 milligrams. I remember going bonkers. Like, literally just running around the house screaming and whatever, because I had 60 milligrams. Now people have a 300 milligram bang. People have a 400 milligram pre workout, have two scoops. Have a scoop and a half. Whatever it is, they're consuming 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams of caffeine a day. How far do you remember? I remember, like, Ripped Fuel and some of these products, like 90s, like when ephedrine and caffeine, the ECA stack, all that was popular pre workouts had just really hit to have 200 milligrams. That was the study dose. And that was high, high, like really high level of caffeine. Right now we're at 400 for pre workouts. I mean, it's a stack that's called habituation and adaptation. Like where there's a physiologic dependence and then there's the adaptation effect where it's like diminishing returns. So it takes more and more and more to get that same effect. And of course, that's coming at a cost. And Michael Pollan has an amazing quote in his book that's basically saying this is one of these come at a cost ingredients. It's like you don't get the something for nothing out of this one.

Yeah, yeah. Wow. Okay, so there's so much there. I'm thinking about Prime. You know, this prime drink from the Logan Paul.

Yeah, yeah.

These drinks are 200 milligrams of caffeine in one shot. So when you look at the success of, like, Logan Paul and his podcast and everything else, I'm really curious, like, are they honest about the 200 milligrams in there or is it something in the fine print where they're not really talking about it and they're focused on these other ingredients? You guys on the website put everything out there for people to see. There is no caffeine in the product, which is the most amazing part. There's nothing deleterious to human health in there. You do it in such a beautiful, balanced way. But these, this guy, he's literally poisoning people. I mean, I'm sure he's got good intentions, right? I'm not here to bash Logan Paul, but what do you make of that? Like, Logan Paul, 200 milligrams of caffeine and prime drinks. How is that hurting people? Is that helping people?

I mean, I think with prime, it's like, sure, do I want them to succeed or do I want to succeed instead of them? Like, you know, put the competitive side aside. I think it's important to distinguish between. They have two products. They have like a hydration product going after your Gatorades and then they have the energy drink product as well.

Well, which one's selling more, I'm sure.

Well, the challenge is in like, you know, they're so appealing. Just, you know, Logan Paul and KSI is so appealing to kids that, you know, you run into this issue where stores are now banning them and you're not allowing kids to buy the product. And kids have been buying the energy drink. And that's really the problem. You know, like, if you were to consume 200 milligrams of caffeine a day, you're probably fine. You know, it's not, it's not killing you here, but it's the fact that you're a 14 year old or a 15 year old. I, I can even, like my nephews, for instance, in Australia, the product makes its way somehow to Australia. They save up money. They had paid like $20 to try and buy, you know, just one bottle to try South Park.

South Park.

You didn't see that episode.

They paid for prime to be on South Park.

No, they did a whole episode sp. Like how dark this is and how they're manipulating children. It was called Cred Please tell. And it was like, it was a character that was supposed to be like Logan Paul. That was like putting this out there. But like there was people manipulating him, I'll say. That want to use children, that want to gain access to children because they're the most important consumer. And so they're getting them addicted to not only the caffeine, but also the idea of it's almost like the I'm an Android guy. So it's like there's the blue, green. The blue and green dots and you know, like some kids are getting bullied for being an Android user.

Messages. And instead of the blue text message.

Oh, wow, that's going on with that generation.

Oh, yeah. So it's like a status thing. So like this, with, with these Primes, there's a status element. And so they were making fun of all these kids, like having to have like their credit in their gym bag or, you know, like on them at all times or else they weren't cool. And then there was like ultra limited flavors and that's how they gained the highest status at school. But it's definitely like a real thing. And I have concern. I don't know if you saw with Panera Bread, there was two people that died, including a young girl I think that was 19. What happened. She was drinking a charged lemonade that was around 400 milligrams of caffeine in this charged lemonade. It wasn't labeled as such. And that's a very big amount of caffeine for one drink to not be labeled clearly. It just says charged lemonade and it's 395mg caffeine. And she died. And like another person died. And so, you know, this, this is a concern like this definitely over caffeination and then targeting children is a concern. And I myself made the mistake of grabbing one of the hydra. Like I thought I was grabbing the hydration one, but I grabbed the energy one. And I do not respond very well to caffeine. I get very bad headaches right away. And I remember just being like, dizzy, pounding headache. I'm like, what is going? And it looked exactly the same. I can't tell the difference between the two products. So, yeah, there's definitely some issues there.

So okay. Barring the South Park a demonstration of kids souls being hacked by the drink. Yeah, I I can say based on my own life story. And I mean, I'm talking like, just last year, just last year, I finally was like, okay, I'm good. I tried ketones. I tried other things. I was down to like one double espresso because we have this beautiful Italian espresso machine. I'm half Italian, so whatever coffee might be in my genes, but I still don't metabolize it well. And that's the part that's so important, is like, just because your epigenetics show that even on paper, you might metabolize it. Well, like, even in my 23andMe, it said I didn't have a problem with caffeine. It said that I had dairy issues. But, you know, the proof is in the pudding, right? Like, people that need a coffee. I remember actually a few years back when I was talking to my father, he got up in the morning and he didn't drink coffee. And he said, yeah, yesterday I actually threw up because I didn't have my coffee.

Wow.

He vomited in the morning because he didn't slam his normal half pot of coffee or whatever it was. So even for people that are watching or listening, and they're like, yeah, I don't really have a problem, Sean and Daniel, with caffeine. Like, it's not that big of a deal. Take it away. I mean, your master is something you have to see every day. Otherwise it controls you. So what do you guys think? And just a popcorn question. What do you think is happening for people that are just consuming caffeine as a crutch? And what would actually happen if you took that away and introduced something else?

I mean, I think one. One of the, like, biggest things that people don't really associate is even if you're a fast metabolizer, so someone that can drink an espresso and go straight to bed, and perhaps that's neither of you two.

My brother's wife can do that. I'm like, who are these people that can slam coffee?

You did say you're Italian, so. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah, but. But for those people, it's going to disrupt their sleep. So even though they might be able to get to sleep, you know, and still fall asleep and sleep their eight hours, the level of quality of that sleep is gonna be far, far less than if they didn't consume caffeine. And partly because the half life of caffeine, you know, is such that it's in your system. It can be in your system for like two or three days, depending on how slowly you metabolize it.

Two or three days.

Yeah.

And so, so even if you're that fast metabolizer and you think, I can drink a coffee and I'm all good, your sleep is going to be deteriorated such that then you wake up the next day, you kind of have this like, you know, groggy morning fog. And so what do you do? You reach for another cup of coffee and you just repeat the cycle on and on and on.

I've been there.

I. I see it consistently. HRVs, I don't have the data on this. We were actually about two thirds of the way through a study in Brazil looking at HRVs and sleep quality. And through no fault of our own, the study just was discontinued because of some job firings and whatever. This stuff happens like. And this actually happened with a number of our studies during COVID too. Super frustrating. Just Covid stuff.

Covid theater down in Brazil. Here too, man.

The HRVs are, we're seeing it consistently. The HRVs are absolutely worsened with caffeine, like, without a doubt, just like alcohol, like, late in the day, I don't care fast or slow metabolizer. I've seen everyone worsen their HRVs. I see what their baseline is, then they tell me they had some caffeine later in the day. Everyone I've seen, they get dramatically worse. What's crazy is with paraxanthine, we actually see improved HRVs over baseline. And I really wanted to show this with the data, but we're seeing that consistently. Anecdotally, I'm getting tons of people message me their aura, ring, garmin, whatever, like, and we're actually seeing improvements. I could get into why that is, but it's, it's pretty exciting. It's very, very different, but fast and slow metabolizer that's related to primarily the CYP1A2 gene. And that's, that's. It's cytochrome P450 pathway through the liver. Your. This is a caffeine is what's called a trimethylxanthine, meaning there's. There's three methyl groups, 1, 3, 7, trimethylxanthine. And this is kind of in that stimulant family. So basically, caffeine gets demethylated and turned into a dimethylxanthine of three different varieties. Theobromine, which you find often, like in chocolate, and then theophylline, which is a bronchodilator, controlled substance, lots of side effects. And then paraxanthine. And paraxanthine is Obviously the one we're focused on here, it's called infinity. But what makes that so unique is you're avoiding all of the bio individuality with, with caffeine we see that there's about a 60% number of people that are slow metabolizers and maybe it's only about 20% are, you know, kind of in that Goldilocks zone of like ideal metabolizers. So it's a very small number that actually do well, really well with caffeine that experience not only the benefits, but very little side effects.

What do you think that is? Is it where they're born? Is it their genealogy?

It's a mixture of like one, it's, it's kind of, it was in plants to be a toxin to repel bugs. The original source, Caffeine.

Yeah, caffeine in general.

Yeah. And so it's a repellent, it's a.

It'S a plant toxin.

Yeah. And you know, maybe it was put out there to be addictive so that it like these plants could take over the world. To kind of think of a last of us type scenario like as a, like survival mechanism maybe. I don't know.

I heard that caffeine was found by some goat farmer or sheep farmer and he saw that his sheep or goats were eating the caffeine berries, that it fell exactly wigging out. And he's identify that it felt fermented and it's addictive.

And so we keep think about how much green tea we're growing, how much coffee we're growing, how much of all these plants. Kola nut, all these things, like all these sources. Cacao, Right?

Sure.

There's tons of it like all over the planet. We're not cutting back anytime soon. The amount of caffeine consumed is tremendous. Like I said, a $1 trillion ingredient. So this is where it's exciting. And I do want to elucidate one thing, that if you look at the numbers, you'll see that this depends on how you count it. There's some technical aspects, but 70 to 80% of caffeine is converted to paraxanthine. So someone might say, okay, well if I consume caffeine, I get plenty of paraxanthine. Okay, that's kind of true. Here's where there's an important distinction. One, when you consume caffeine, you have to go through all these other chemicals. You have to go through the theophylline, the theobromine, their metabolites. Caffeine itself hangs around and is fairly toxic. And has all these issues with sleep disruption, anxiety, brain frog jitters, all that kind of stuff. But two, because if you are a slow metabolizer, like Daniel mentioned, it's a one and a half to ten and a half hour half life, meaning it takes ten and a half hours for some of us to cut that level in our plasma in half. And to get to a quarter 21 to get, you know, like, you just think about like, you know, that half of a half of a half. So like Daniel said, it can be like three days to get rid of it out of your system, to clear it. So that's where we're avoiding that kind of slow drip drop to paraxanthine. And we're going straight away to it. Paraxanthine is where we're seeing all the nootropic benefits and health benefits. Caffeine is where we're seeing most of the side effects and certainly theophylene and some of those metabolites.

Dude, we have to evolve in spiritually, mentally, physically, emotionally, financially. So the evolution of ourself, it can only evolve by being open to new things. Now, in science, it's tricky because there has to actually be hard data, you know, on the screen right now, there's this study. Paraxanthine supplementation increases muscle mass, strength and endurance in mice. Paraxanthine significantly increased forelimb grip strength by 17% and treadmill exercise by 39%. That's almost half. Okay, that's almost half the performance. So beyond just the neuroprotective stuff that I'm stoked to get into, there's also a cognitive strength benefit, mind to muscle benefit, actual strength benefit, cardiovascular benefit to this, I wonder, for people that have just only done caffeine their whole life, you know, is this a hard transition to do? Is there like a weaning off period when you, when you get off of coffee and you go to one of its. Because it's a metabolite. Correct, it's one of the metabolites. I wonder, have you guys had that come up in conversations where people are like, I. I really miss my cup of coffee, or they just stoked about the parazine.

On the contrary, I think, like, what you find is, as someone, I drink a coffee every day, right? I love the flavor of a coffee. It's a ritual. And I have a cup of coffee every morning. If I go one day without that cup of coffee, I've got a headache and I feel terrible. I drink an update now, one or two depending on how I'm going throughout the day as a replacement to the four other coffees I typically would have been drinking.

Yeah.

And I'll Update vis a vis parazanthine consumption. And what I find is I can go a day or a week without update, primarily because we don't sell it in stores all over the world. So if I'm traveling, it's, you know, hard to get and I don't have a problem whatsoever. And so people, you know, to. To use paraxanthine to wean off caffeine is actually really effective. And one of the things that we continue to hear from people who are trying to cut down their caffeine consumption and, you know, use update instead is when they go back to drink that cup of coffee, it feels much dirtier than how it felt, you know, prior to even consuming paraxanthine.

What do you mean it feels dirtier?

Like how so it's the way I like to describe it is like caffeine is going to provide you with that jolt of overstimulation and then you crash and it's going to make your stomach churn whilst you're doing it. If it's after lunch, it's even worse. And. And then you're going to, you know, it's going to raise your anxiety levels. So all in all, you're. You're just not feeling great after you consume it, even though you get that kind of acute boost of energy.

Yeah.

Whereas with. With Update and paraxanthine, what we're finding is you don't get an overstimulating jolt of energy. In fact, if you're looking for that, you know, this is probably not for you. But if you actually want to feel motivated, focused and alert for a sustained period of time without having, you know, to run to the bathroom without also, you know, particularly like coffee milk, you don't have to digest any of that. So again, your stomach's feeling better and if there's no crash, it doesn't raise your anxiety levels at all. What's actually really cool is if you're someone who's a slow metabolizer. So, you know, Sean is a good example, probably yourself, but. But take someone who is worse than both of you. So like someone who can't even consume a tea, right. Unless it's decaffeinated, they can drink this and consume Infinity Paraxanthine and won't have any anxiety, won't have jitters, won't crash, won't be up all night. And. And that's really amazing.

One way that I've judged it for myself. And you might know the science on this, because I've always wanted to ask somebody this. Actually, every time I would drink an espresso or a coffee, I would get a histamine response. My nose would start getting all clogged, and I have to blow. And it happens like clockwork now. So I don't know if that's, like, my different biochemical individuality or what. I'm sure it is. But when I drink the update, it doesn't happen. My nose doesn't run. I'd be like working at the standing desk when I drank a coffee before, and I'd have to go blow my nose. I don't have to blow my nose anymore. That's real. So I don't know. What is that?

The histamine receptor, like, being modulated actually has a lot to do with alertness. So, like, new vigil Pro Vigil. Like, those modulate. One of the mechanisms of action is modulating histamine, and that has a lot to do with feeling tired or alert. Like, think about how, like, a Benadryl can feel. Sure. So literally, like, drugs. Yeah. That can. There can be, like, a kind of a tying to the catecholamine response with, like, any central nervous system stimulant. So that's where like, you're getting, you know, adrenaline is epinephrine. Noradrenaline would be norepinephrine. Things like cortisol, dopamine. That's like the catecholamine response that's stimulating the central nervous system. So it can be tied to that histamine response. Yeah.

So when I'm. Does that mean that my body is rejecting it? When I have that response?

To some degree.

To some degree. Right.

Yeah.

And. And there's always. In each person, you know, it's that whole neurons that fire together, wire together. Like, you know, over time, like, these things get associated.

Okay. So my body's like, we're getting a down dump of caffeine. We need to exit snot out the nose. It also could be that I've had major sinus issues my whole life, but actually, I've tied an emotional piece to this, and this is my next question. I didn't even think about this until you guys sat down. I'm like, this is why I love podcasting, because I just feel things in the moment that I believe other people need to see or need to hear. There's an emotional component to caffeine that I don't think people even realize. And I have felt it a lot in my Life where I'll snap at my lady or I'll be short with my children. Like, caffeine can turn people into fucking assholes, for lack of a better term. Like, it can really make me in my own life in the past, like a jerk to be around.

Yeah.

I think what's needed is like an energy source here that's sustainable for society but also doesn't impact our emotional intelligence. That is a big piece of this caffeine parazine theme conversation.

There's a lot of, like, I'll let Daniel jump in a second, but like, there's a lot of like, scientific validity to that in that if you're worsening HRVs, that's, that's the marker or measure of resilience. Right. So, like, if you don't have as much physiologic or mental resilience, like with depression, for example, you have low bdnf. Low resilience. Right. I used to stay in loops when I was very depressed. Like, you can't, like, stuff comes up and you're like, you know, just pumping the brakes and screaming and pushing back because you just can't deal with it. You don't have that centeredness, you don't have the resilience. And if you add to this that your blood pressure is up, that your heart rate's up, that all these catecholamines are up and now you're not getting as good as sleep. And this is a perpetual state of being where it reminds me of that, like, commercial in the 80s. Like, I do drugs so I can do more work, so I can do more drugs, so I can do more work, so I can do more drugs. You know, the guy is like, does cocaine and he's going around and around the room. It's like that, this is, this is like that to the degree, like, because you are not getting enough sleep, you have sleep debt. Where am I going to, like, make up for this? Caffeine. Caffeine causes more sleep debt. How am I going to make up for that caffeine? It's like, you stay in this loop and obviously when that's perpetual, your adrenals are going to be burnout.

Yeah.

You know, you're just shot. You're shot physiologically. And of course, like, this is going to be metabolically taking a massive toll on you. And now you're going to start putting on weight because cortisol is consistently up, because you're always overstressed, because you don't have enough, what's called allostatic capacity. Meaning a capacity to deal with stress. So this is like. This is the loop that you're on.

Wow.

Okay. What a freaking rollercoaster ride you just described. No, and I can feel it in my own life in the past, because literally, like, the espresso that I have now, it's just a treat. Like, it's not an everyday thing. In the past, when I would have it for more than a couple days, it wouldn't work anymore. I would actually feel the baseline. The bottom of the gas pedal would hit the floor, and no matter how much coffee I poured in, it wouldn't matter. It literally wouldn't matter. And it would actually make me more tired, almost. I've heard of this, too. If you have too much caffeine, you actually get tired. And so, you know, barring that, going back to the emotional intelligence piece, I'm curious now, because you guys have been on market for a year and a half, something like that. Yeah, year and a half. This is actually V2, which I'm excited to jam on, because there's so many new things and things that got pulled out. And I don't know if that was based on customer feedback or just, you know, things in the lab that showed up. But on an emotional intelligence standpoint, what have you felt and seen personally and then also from all the audience members and the people that have actually been consuming the product, are they less of an asshole?

Anecdotally, yes.

Okay.

No, I mean, I think the biggest part of this is, you know, to that cycle Sean was talking about earlier. You wake up, you're, you know, irritable, so you drink coffee to kind of fix that. Then coffee makes you anxious.

Yeah.

You're irritable. You go to sleep. You have a bad night's sleep, and it's the same process.

Or you might slam two beers to go to bed. It's like.

Which. It's even. Which is even.

Uppers and downers all day long.

And with update, we're not finding that people are having, firstly, a far more consistent experience, irrespective of whether they're fast or slow metabolizers. And you. There's also not this addictive property. And Sean can get into the studies I've done, but like I said earlier, I can drink this twice a day, and then I can go cold turkey for a week, and I don't have any kind of withdrawal that I would from coffee.

Yeah, this is so good. Because the only thing sustainable is something that doesn't hurt you in the long run. In other words, like the opportunity cost of coffee for you said 60% of us that have issues metabolizing or more. There's a huge opportunity cost for that. We're actually burning off parts of the engine. We don't even realize exactly what are some of those parts of the engine that people are burning off with the proposed good use of caffeine. But actually if they were put under a microscope or they looked at their HRV or they tracked their aura or something, there's got to be some hidden deleterious stuff that's happening for people that are consuming caffeine that may not know it's actually breaking their engine in ways they're not aware of.

I mean, you can start with like, I'm kind of mitochondrially obsessed. As dorky as that is.

That sounds like a cool T shirt. Mitochondrially obsessed.

I had to jump on you guys. I'm so obsessed.

My middle name is mitochondria. That would go really well here in Austin if you wore that to like alive and well. Shout out to alive and well.

Yeah, yeah, love alive and well. But starting from there, if that's the cellular powerhouse, the little factory in the cell, as you might remember from seventh grade biology or whatever.

The powerhouse of the cell.

Exactly. The Krebs cycle, called the citric acid cycle, that's creating ATP, which is the energy currency for the body. If you can think about what the cost is of kind of running all three shifts and, and never doing repairs. Kind of like, you know, the idea of like running your car down the road and trying to fix it while it's, while it's running 80 miles an hour. This is the same thing. Our cells need to be cleared out of senescent cells, of dying cells. And that's a big thing of, you know, people are talking about senolytics right now. But also an important aspect is autophagy when cells get cleaned out from the inside. And there's even mitophagy when mitochondria get cleaned out. But when they're always like running and as you talked about, like the gas pedal's always down, none of that's happening. None of these anti aging kind of cleanup maintenance systems are happening.

Even when people drink coffee and fast, because coffee is accepted when some people fast. So they're not getting that cellular cleanup on the mitochondrial level, maybe to a.

Degree, but like, for the most part, like you're, you're really pushing your mitochondria. There's not a lot of recovery there. And you're trying to make up for the Lack of energy coming from calories with the caffeine. And that's not really a good system. No, I don't, I don't like that idea very much of combining those two things. I think that's even harder on your, on your body, on. And again, that's going to demand more of your adrenals.

Yep.

And there is a toll for that. And we've seen that the more mitochondrial dysfunction there is, the more metabolic dysfunction there is. 87% of Americans are metabolically dysfunctional. This means faster biological aging over chronological aging. This means that your basically 99% of disease is not genetic in nature, it's metabolic in nature. You know, go down the line. This is why like the ketogenic diet and a lot of these things are so effective with cancer, with Alzheimer's, with pcos, with coronary heart disease, like on and on and on. They're metabolic in nature. So your propensity to get any and all diseases is much higher when you're metabolically dysfunctional. And you're going to see when you're in these states that you're going to have what I consider like a trifecta of damage on the mitochondria, which would be oxidation, glycation and inflammation. And those all are connected to disease and aging. Glycation is like blood sugar damage, you know, oxidation creating oxidant radicals and then inflammation, as you know. So like that's going to happen over time with just this heavy caffeine consumption. And then think about when you're in these states of, of sleep debt and caffeine consumption and adrenal fatigue, you're going to have decision fatigue. And that gets into a whole psychological realm. We already talked about like your lack of kind of mental and physiologic resilience. So now you're going to make decisions that are like dopamine fixed, like short term fixed, like porn, driving fast drugs, you know, whatever it is like these kinds of things that are going to have an impact on you in terms of your long term well being. And so this is the downward spiral. It's a real thing. Like what I'm talking about is like a real thing. And people have real addiction and real problems.

Dude, what you're describing, it's this perfect salve, this perceived temporary salve for the id, the, the most primal part of the access that Freud talks about with the id, the ego, the superego. So the ID is like partying, give me the food, I don't care what happens. I mean, it's kind of funny to say that because we're half beast and half spirit. Like you can't honor the spirit unless you honor the beast. They're both within us. And so the part that just drives me so wild is like I can feel that within me. The part of me that doesn't want to sit with myself. The part of me that doesn't want to be emotionally intelligent. The part of me that just wants to like eat a bag of siete chips and like watch Netflix, that lives within all of us, you know, and I've had many battles with that. As I know we've talked about on different podcasts like food and caffeine and all these extraneous exterior things. They can become a perceived cover for the emotions. What's emoting from us that doesn't want to be felt. And I've definitely experienced that in my life. I wonder for you. It's not something that I've even thought about on a business level. Like does this show up in business before you started update and before Sean came on, like, have you seen in your own life on a personal level any addictions or anything that's come up for you that you realize, wow, I was using something as a crutch so that I actually didn't have to feel what my body was asking me to feel?

Yeah. I mean, I think two things. Firstly, just what's really cool, just to touch on quickly before I jump into that is when Sean was describing the long term crush. Call it like downsides of caffeine consumption and how that's also very much not anti aging with paraxanthine and the studies Sean's done with Infinity, it's the complete opposite.

Yeah.

So it's actually neuroprotective and all those different, you know, points that Sean was saying, it hits on and it deteriorate. Caffeine deteriorates you.

Yeah.

Parazanthines the opposite. So the long term benefit of actually consuming this is there for you and anti aging, which I think is pretty remarkable. Well, that sounds amazing considering the utility is, you know, I would argue better than caffeine.

And look, people are watching, listening, like, well, of course you guys are going to bring up all the cool stuff. It's your company. Yeah, but they can go on Google online and look at anything they should.

Just try on their own.

Like, you know, take everything we say with the grain of salt. I'm not here to tell you guys you have to drink update. I think you should personally, but you don't have to.

But I think you Know, it's interesting. So like you mentioned, like we have version two in front of us here and previously there was version one and people. The big impetus behind the change was around feedback from around flavor specifically. And we can get into that later. But you know, people, flavor is subjective. People, half the people love the flavor, half the people hate the flavor. A version one, version two, unanimously, everyone likes a flavor. But the effect of paraxanthine was like unanimous. The experience was unanimously positive. And, and you don't get that with caffeine.

So it's something that, what I heard from you, in other words, I heard that it's not something that even if you tried, you could abuse. Or do you, you think you still could abuse it?

I mean, look, I think it was funny we actually had someone ask us this question.

I had a very long answer.

In my opinion, you can abuse anything, right? So you can, you could single out any product or any human being.

Look, it makes you feel good, right?

Yeah, but you're less likely.

It definitely makes you feel good because.

Of the metabolite effect, because of all the things, the neuroprotection. It's just different than caffeine in so many ways.

And I think the, the. So like, firstly, look, with anything that makes you feel good to Sean's like, answer he gave me months ago when someone asked this question is, you know, sure, like whether it's driving fast, whether it's porn, whether it's coffee, whether it's alcohol, it makes you feel good, you're going to consume more of it. Is that addiction, you know, like up to you to make that choice? Yeah, but I think given the structure of paraxanthine and given how you don't get the crash. Right. That you would with caffeine, you don't get the noticeable drop off. You don't get the kind of grogginess or side effects that you feel you need to re up. Right. So with caffeine you feel the need to re up to get back to baseline, whereas with paraxanthine it takes you beyond baseline, but you don't notice that you're coming back to baseline after, you know, 12 hours or so. And so there's, there's not this desire or this frequent need to just re up multiple times a day.

Yeah, there's no, there's no like physiologic dependence that we're finding. But like, there's a lot of nuance to the idea of addiction from a psychological standpoint. That's what I had talked to Daniel about. Like, as he pointed out, like, anything that. That has some kind of desirable effect, there can be, like, a dopaminergic kind of drive towards it and people that have addictive personalities or a psychological kind of codependency on substances. Like, there's always. There's always that potential. But no, like, physiologically, we don't see that. Like caffeine. Okay, so. So that isn't really there.

Dude, I want to pull the E, Bright, because I'm. I'm going to put you on the spot again. So what were the parts of yourself that you found out in business or personal? That because this is a human experience, that it's all a shared human experience? Every single person who's watching or listening to the podcast is just like us. We all have the same blood. I mean, we have different blood types. We all have the same metabolism. It expresses in different ways, but essentially, we're just unique. Humans live in a human experience. You know, lack of self, love, wanting to be accepted, wanting to be part of the tribe. These are all shared human things that I think we've all felt on some level. So has there been, in the formulation of the company and just you as a businessman evolving, meeting Sean, like, yeah. Was there a part of you that you realized in knowing Sean and felt forming the company, that it put a microscope on you and you're like, wow, I actually didn't want to feel that, but now I'm gonna feel it.

Yeah. I guess for me, the biggest thing was probably experiencing imposter syndrome, you know, for context, I have three other business partners, all older than me and well established. And then on top of that, you know, I partner up with someone like Sean who, you know, puts everyone to shame, given his. His pedigree. But, you know, and. And here I am, as, you know, this kid that's, you know, five years ago, flown in to New York, and I'm trying to make it work. And there's this feeling that you're constantly playing catch up, that you're kind of trying to fake it till you make it. I would always get the sense that I'm not doing a good enough job or that others around me, particularly my business partners who put me in the position to run the company, would feel that I'm lacking. And I would always question, like, well, why did. Why did they choose me to run the company? Right? And I would bring this up as well, you know, and I would. It would get to the point where, you know, I'm typically not an anxious person, but things like this Would. Would make me quite anxious. And. And when you bring it up, and I would speak to them about it. And I think to me, what really helped was knowing. And again, I had to hear this several times. It wasn't like a one and done. They could tell me, but hearing that they knew who I was and what I could do and what I knew when they put me into the position, you know, when we started the company and, you know, chose that I would be the one to run the company, you know, there was no me showing a resume of things that I had never done before. And so they were confident in my ability and comfortable in me that I would be able to get this done. But I think that was really hard for me to, you know, I would always question, like, well, why would you choose me? Why wouldn't we go. You know, we had this great idea, right? Why wouldn't we go find the guy who's had multiple successful beverage companies before and tell him to run the company? And I think that that was a really. It was a tough moment to kind of realize that I was going through this, telling myself that I. I'm feeling this way and then talking about it. I'm naturally someone that's more shy and introverted, so bringing it up to them and saying, like, hey, guys, like, I feel this way, you know, why? Why? You know, help me understand. And I think all of that really helped.

Was there a part of you that you were covering up with any extraneous substance or behavior, or how were you. How were you avoiding that feeling?

Essentially, yeah, I. I think. Not that I can really pinpoint. You know, I wasn't doing anything to make myself feel better, per se. In fact, I would argue living in New York is kind of, you know, adding fuel to the fire that's already, you know, I'm already feeling like this and already feeling anxious. And so living in this big concrete jungle certainly doesn't help. Yeah, I. I guess I'm just naturally not someone that lets things really get to me. You know, I think there are very few things in the world that are really worth fighting over. I'm particularly conflict avoidant. And. And I think there are very few things that should really make you so anxious. Now, maybe I'm saying this because I've been fortunate to not experience the flip side of that. And so I. I'm very lucky. I think, that I can't say, you know, I was covering up this with something else.

You weren't doing, like a bag of blow on the weekend.

Exactly. I wasn't doing any of that. And I think that's just naturally because my character is not one to typically stress out.

Sure. I think some people, though, and Sean, I know you can relate to this, like, having a childhood where there was bullying, where there was name calling. Like, this is a. This is another piece of the shared human experience, if you really want to break it down. Like, I think there's just certain parts of my journey that my soul chose for whatever karmic reason that wanted to be born in La Mesa, California, that wanted to be overweight, that wanted to experience life the way I experienced it. Otherwise it wouldn't have happened. So it's all God godding itself.

Right.

But in your life, I remember you had shared on a previous podcast. I'm just flashing back to this, that you actually got to a point where you're like, should I even be in the world anymore? Should I even be on earth anymore? Is my life worth living? Do I love myself enough to stay here? Like, this is. Like, I say that with respect. I say that with honor and with kindness. Like, please talk to the people that feel that way, that are probably slamming coffee and doing everything they can to just make it through the day. Like, please, God, just let me make it through the day. I remember feeling like that. I remember feeling like that when I graduated high school for, like, two, three years, I was like, life sucks. I'll do anything and everything. Any drug. I'll eat 10 cheeseburgers from McDonald's when in my early 20s, like, I would just treat my body like an absolute waste dump because I just hated my life so much.

Yeah.

And I know for you, you've been through that. And, like, you know, you use that for fuel, to learn about supplements, to understand the human body. Like, it's so fucking beautiful the way you did it, but the deep pain is actually the fuel source that made you go there. It wasn't like you had this candy cane life and that's what led you to be the ingredient ologist.

Thank you. Yeah, it was very much what. What Daniel was talking about. I. I feel like I'm actually pretty introverted, even though I've spoken in front of 10,000 people. Trust me, I have, like, an Eminem 8 mile moment every time I go out on stage.

You just do hella breath work backstage.

I do. I do. I have a whole routine I go through. I could walk through it.

I'm glad we did breath work before we started the podcast.

Yeah, yeah, no, I actually do that. I. I hug someone for a long time. I put my hands above my head. You're a good hugger. Thank you.

Didn't know he was already doing his routine when he walked in the door.

That was part of your routine. I do my hands above my head because that' a psychosomatic anchor to that. Like, even blind people do that when they win. So it, like, you know, upregulates neurotransmitters of, like, well, being, winning. I make myself laugh. I anchor to a person that's in, like, the front row that, like, it could be a sea of people that don't give a crap, that have their cell phones out, that are, you know, bored and hate it. There's always one person that came out to see me this talk that's taking notes that is, like, so excited they got there early. And I make that person my anchor. I walk the stage, my eyes go back and forth. I do all the things to make sure I'm looking at everyone in the crowd, but I keep anchoring, anchoring, anchoring, anchoring back to this person that's so excited because they're there for me. And that helps me so much. And then every time after I speak, I always find that person and say, thank you for being that for me. And then it gives them a thrill too. But like, yeah, it's a great point about, you know, I have been suicidal at a number of points in my life. And, you know, right before I did psychedelics, I was ready to either kill myself intentionally, or I could definitely argue I was killing myself just with all the work, you know, as a way to kind of drown things out. And by the way, that's very much been an addiction for me. You know, 80 hour work weeks and being addicted to fires and, like, creating fires. Like, if you're a problem solver, guess what you always find. All I found was problems. I was addicted to problems. I love solving problems. So I'd create problems. And all around me was problems, all around me was fires. And so that's draining. And I definitely had imposter syndrome. I had self loathing. A lot of the biohacking that I've learned prior to my psychedelic experience about four years ago was a way to keep myself going. It wasn't like I was optimized. I was, like, just hacking so I could keep it going and I could do more while still harming myself in the process. Psychologically, I was the, the master abuser of me. I was the master gaslighter of me. And as you pointed out, it's amazing. I used to hate my Body. And actually, the biohacking term, like, is very triggering for me because there I used to have this, like, fantasy about, like, taking a cleaver and, like, hacking fat off my body. So the word hacking is, like, a little, like, triggering to me because I hated my body that much. So, yes, that's what I was doing. I hated myself. Hated every day. But my body withstood that. Withstood the two to three hours of sleep a night, the 80 hours of work weeks, the drinking five nights a week, the constant caffeination. And I was just in physiologic and psychologic hell. And somehow my body is here and I still look pretty good. I'm about to turn 50. And, like, what? That's amazing. That's amazing that I'm here through all of that.

There's so much weight there, literally, like, figurative weight and emotional weight. And I think about when I was £280 at my biggest, what really hurt the most wasn't that I looked a certain way. It's that I just knew that I was better.

Yeah.

There was a part of me that always knew I was better.

Yeah.

No matter what. And I would look in the mirror and I'd be with a woman that I didn't want to be with, or I would just be living my life in a way that didn't feel good. But I would just live it that way anyways because I just didn't literally understand A, what self love was. B was never modeled to me. Love you, mom. Love you, dad. Love you, grandparents. Like, totally. It ain't their fault.

Yeah.

I chose to incarnate at this time.

Exactly.

But this is the deeper conversation when it comes to a scaffolding like Paraxanthine or maybe even like, my favorite. Sup, Mana. Love the fricking Mana. Can't get enough of Mana. Or I love sleeping deep. Or I like the oura ring. Or I like healthy water or whole foods. Like, all these things, they're the ingredients, man. They're the ingredients that allow us to make these little choices every day to love ourselves. And like you said, when you were going through this, like, kind of self hate, not kind of definite self hatred. It was like, I'm going to drink. I'm going to treat my body however I want. Because the love wasn't there. Like, there had to have been maybe a couple moments or maybe one big moment. I don't know, psychedelic or not. I mean, it doesn't have to be through plant medicine. It can just be through shared life experience where you Actually started to learn how to love Sean. Maybe even men are watching this right now and they're like, wow, I haven't even seen men talk like this ever. I think in our world it's easy to feel like these conversations happen all the time. But think about somebody who's watching a podcast like this for the first time and they've never heard men talk like this. There's never been a permission slip for men to actually just get real and get fucking deep, because that's what's there anyways, whether we're talking about it or not. Was there an unfolding of many moments? Was there one moment where you were like, wow, I actually can touch. Maybe not all the time, but I can touch right now what loving Sean actually is.

I took a trip to Iceland and actually did breath work. I did a biohacking retreat with my friend, Dr. Kayla Osterhoff. And Pavel was there. If you know Pavel, I love him.

All right, so he's a friend.

Yeah. So we did this breath work and biohacking experience and I had a very psychedelic experience on breathwork where I was just sobbing, you know, doing holotropic breath work. And then we also did that ecstatic dance thing with like the blindfolds and the headphones. And Pavel's so amazing at.

Yeah, he's so good.

And. And that was beautiful. And that set up me feeling that there was. I don't even like the term cognitive dissonance. It was for me, spiritual dissonance where I just felt like so out of line with, you know, like, you're talking about, like what I wanted to be, that I'm like, I was. It was just a desperate moment. And I think part of me, like superficially said, oh, I want to go biohack like Tim Ferriss, Ben Greenfield and Dave Asprey with this psychedelic thing because, you know, it's going to elicit like greater performance.

It'll help my mitochondria. Yeah, it's such an intellectual top down concern.

Like, okay, so I get to a very famous person's house, very well known person that's had like, you know, 10 best selling books and been on all these TV shows. And there was about 20 celebrities there, including maybe some people that I even just mentioned or whatever. So it was intimidating, you know, like Daniel was just talking about imposter syndrome. Like I felt very much imposter syndrome. And I used to walk into rooms and always give my whole resume about why I'm important, why you should love me, and why you should care about Me. Here's why I'm relevant, you know, Please keep me in this room.

Yeah.

But this time I was so intimidated, I didn't say anything. And into the journey, when I did five and a half grams my first time, which was a pretty decent dose, I laid there in a cuddle puddle. One, I didn't get a whole lot of touch in my life, and that was just nice, just being in kind of a loving space. But then two, like, people were just holding space for me. Like, laying around me, sitting around me, cuddling next to me. People were just sitting up above me and just making sure I'm good. And this is their journey. These are people that are very well known, very affluent people that didn't know my name, and they're holding space for me during their journey. And I kept saying, why the would they do this? Like, I didn't earn it. And that was the thing. Like, I kept coming back to, like, I didn't deserve this. I didn't earn it. I didn't earn it. And so I had this breakthrough of, wait, I can just be loved for human being, not human doing. I don't have to earn love. I don't have to achieve for love. Love isn't conditional. And that was like, a breakthrough for me. It sounds like. So, like, if. If someone had walked up to me the day before I took this journey and said, hey, hey, you can have love. You know, like, love isn't conditional. I'd be like, okay, cool. Like, yeah, it makes sense. But making sense and then anchoring it in your heart are two very different things. And for me, I was, like, staring at the ceiling, like, hours after everyone went to sleep, and it, like, shifted my whole world.

Yeah. Oh, my God. The potency of that. I. I don't know if it's part of, like, my own. Well, it is. It's part of my own journey that there's been times with breathwork and plant medicine and just actually even being in a space without taking medicine has done this to me as well. Just, like, helping be part of the space. It reminds me to actually be here, to be inside of Josh, because that was the whole thing in my life. I actually didn't feel safe just being in my body. And I would use food and drugs and caffeine, which kind of everything we're talking about so relates to caffeine, because caffeine is like this cover crop, this cover emotion that's really keeping the weeds underneath that are getting just enough sunlight so they can grow, AKA distraction. And all these Things that numb us out. It's actually the real work of doing the spiritual inner deep dives. And then on the outside, then we can make different choices of what foods, what drinks, you know, do we want parazanthine? Do we want whole foods? But I find, man, in our world, especially in wellness or fitness or health, it's always top down. It's only like this show and you know, some of our friends here in Austin and maybe some of our friends on the west coast, like, we're finally shifting the conversation to, like, nah, it's not that top down shit. It's not just intellectual healing. We're not going to intellectualize our healing anymore. We're actually going to do the work, the deepest kind of work in ceremony with breath work. Some of the things that actually maybe scare people because they do deserve respect. But I'm curious, like, has this come up in conversation? I mean, I'll go to you, I'll go to Daniel. Like, has it come up in conversation where when somebody makes a new choice to have the paraxanthine instead of the caffeine, does that in a way motivate them or inspire them to do other things differently? It's kind of like one domino that affects the other dominoes.

There's the whole, like tiny habits kind of, you know, the BJ fog. Right, right.

Stand on one foot and brush your teeth.

Yeah, he's a great guy. I've got to meet him through some of these groups that I've been in. And that's a great model. And this isn't just a tiny one. This is like saying, I'm gonna go from four hours to sleep to consciously getting eight hours of sleep. Yeah, this is like massive. I just told you that. 93%. Dude, 93% of Americans don't go the bathroom every day. 93% of Americans may not take a shower every day. 93% of Americans May not eat every day. 93% of Americans have caffeine every day. Do you, like, feel that, you know what I'm saying? Like, how, like, core this is to, like, our being and woven into the fabric of society and our identity. This is so to shift that to something healthier, to where you feel different. And when I just told you 9 out of 10 people want to consume less, think about how, like, what that statement means. If almost every one of us is consuming caffeine and almost every one of us wants to consume less, why don't we. Oh, man. I mean, think about that.

That's a spiritual and philosophical question.

For sure.

Because then what you're really touching upon is you're touching upon, why does the unconscious capitalistic model thrive? I'm all about conscious capitalism. I think Update's a very conscious company. I mean, otherwise we wouldn't be here chatting, right? There's consciousness behind what you're doing. It's not just like, hey, we're going to sell widgets, we're just going to put shit out there like there is. In order to change the tide, we have to literally reposition the earth. I mean, it's not an easy task at a trillion dollar market cap. Trillion dollars is more money than I can even fathom. Like, the spiritual meaning behind this is very significant beyond just changing the way that people consume caffeine, how they change their game. Like, what? What for you, Daniel, what's the spiritual motivation? What is the emotional motivation for this? Because when it's hard, because being an entrepreneur and growing a business is super hard. I've never done a CPG company. Like, consumer packaged goods is a whole different animal. I have challenges on a soul level. Growing the podcast, right?

Yeah.

But I can't even imagine when you're like, should I even do this anymore? Like, this is so fucking hard. You have to have some kind of spiritual or emotional hook that makes you stay in the game when you want to leave, you know, what is that?

I mean, look, I think for me, being someone, I've had this, like, you know, visceral experience consuming paraxanthine for the first time, the second time, the third time, and the end time, and every time I have this experience, and as someone who also drinks coffee can so noticeably tell the difference, it is objectively healthier and better and less toxic for you. And so when, when I have that experience and I'm not someone that's a slow metabolizer, right? Like, I'm not someone that's going to get anxious and jittery for drinking the coffee. I can. I just want everyone else to have that experience. But more so I know that there are, you know, 59 or 60 of people who are averse to caffeine, that this would just be a game changer for them. And you think about, like, the world that we live in and how it was built on caffeine. Now imagine what world we would live in if, you know, after four hours, people wouldn't crash or people wouldn't get anxious or, you know, people wouldn't be jittery. We could quite possibly be living light years ahead today. And so I think, you know, we will be able to create this new world where hopefully for the majority of people, you know, paraxanthin is really that like foundation and it will allow us to go beyond baseline or decaffeinated baseline. And to me that's really exciting I think because I had the experience and continue to have the experience. I just want other people to have it. And to your point earlier, like we're not trying to tell people to go out there and buy update and we're not trying to tell people to, you know, that if they do buy update they're going to like it. But just try it and you'll notice the experience for yourself. And that's what we say to people when, when people are skeptical, we just say just try it.

Yeah, I, I have a friend of mine that's an AI billionaire, his name's Howard Getson in Dallas. And I was telling him about all the science and then he's like, you know, he's like jumps in with his, you know, he's heard like probably a million pitches and he's like, you know, there's a lot of science there. Like you got to break it down to like, you know, 10, 15 second, like what is it? Like I'm like, dude, just try it. Like it's so experiential, I don't have to worry about selling you on it. You'll sell yourself on it when you try it because it works. And we talked about how, mostly about how we're avoiding the side effects of caffeine and how caffeine has such a negative impact. But as Daniel alluded to before, I mean one, we have human studies, but we also have pre clinical studies that are mind boggling where we showed increased bdnf, which is brain derived neurotrophic factor, which is neuroplasticity. Like that means like the protecting your brain cells and creating new ones. This is like fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. Meaning like your ability to take on new tasks. This is why when you're younger you have much higher BDNF when you're older. So this is like essentially your cognitive resilience.

Is that neurogenesis for the brain? Essentially?

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. NGF is another.

So the blooming and creation of new neurons.

Yep, yep, exactly. And so we also showed increased dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine. So all the things associated with kind of mood well being, focus performance. We showed increased glutathione and catalase, which are master antioxidants and reduced oxidative stress. We showed decreased beta amyloid plaque, which is one of the mechanisms for aging in humans. And in animals, we've shown increased nitric oxide, 50% increase to the brain and to the muscles. So, you know, more blood flow. You know, you're feeling again that mind muscle connection on both sides.

Yeah.

Basically every way the brain ages, paraxanthine is reversing for. I don't, I don't know if I can say that, but like essentially the FDA may not be thrilled with that terminology.

None of this is medical advice.

We're just talking. Yeah. So I mean basically like all the mechanisms that are pro aging, you know, we're basically combating. I'll say. So it's, it's very exciting. And like one of our. We have several human clinical trials that are, we're waiting to publish, so we're working on that. We have an E gaming study, we have a training study. We did one with cyclists doing a 10k and we tested them on kind of what we would call like a multitasking test. Even though no one's a multitasker. It's really called task switching. We tested them on that before and after the race, after they were fatigued, after the race, when we tested them again, mental errors went up fairly dramatically in the caffeinated group, stayed about the same in the placebo group, and then went down dramatically in the paraxanthine group. So then the delta or difference between the two, between caffeine and paraxanthine are quite massive. This is why it's not just a healthier caffeine. It's literally like a whole different experience and it's protecting the brain. We pulled some early data from the, the E gaming study that actually shows that there's a positive time effect. So whereas like with caffeine, there's kind of that declination over time of, of performance like I was talking about with, with paraxanthine, we're actually seeing each time you use it, it's improving the outcome. So your brain's getting healthier and this is where it gets like really exciting. And like I talked to you, we're seeing HRVs improve. So people are getting better quality sleep. Even people that are having this, you know, as a pre workout, like, you know, six, seven o' clock at night at the gym, they're, they're still getting great sleep. So this is, it's, it's a whole new thing and it really is truly caffeine evolved for us.

Dude, why do you guys think it took so long to find Parisanthine like when did. Usually it's like the Russians, they're like, the Russians were the ones doing the wrestling early.

Yeah.

The space aeronautics, like, it's like, oh, it was found in a Russian lab 40 years ago. What's up with Paris and theme in the scientific community? Why did it take this long for it to pop through?

I have some answers on. I get this question a lot and like some of it is like, it's crazy. 2. I like to say that some of the greatest inventions are things that were sitting there right in front of everyone's eyes, but they just didn't see that way. So many of us say, I guess that's the way it is. Caffeine is so omnipresent and so cheap. I think parazine is very expensive to make. Daniel can tell you that.

I think also to what, what Sean was saying earlier as well. Right. Everyone, you know, 90 something percent of people consume caffeine. Paraxanthine, or when caffeine is metabolized, 80 of it turns into paraxanthine. So you have this, you know, preconceived notion that, well, if I'm consuming caffeine, I'm getting paraxanthin anyway. And so even if you were someone who did the work to find out what paraxanthine was, which is, you know, very few people.

Yeah.

And, and you can like just go on like Twitter or Reddit and maybe like half a dozen people had spoken about parazanthine over the past, whoever knows how long. So you, you had this assumption that you were getting it anyway. But if you're that slow metabolizer, it's drip feeding into your system. But, you know, we didn't, we only more recently started to learn about the different way we metabolize caffeine. Right. We all thought we caffeine and we metabolize it the same way. Right. Five years ago, I didn't think that you'd drink an espresso at night and can't get to bed when I drink it and I'm passed out.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so we just didn't ask the question.

And my partners, we, we really pioneered the cost kind of breakthrough on this. Like right now it's about 10 to 15 times the cost of caffeine. It like when we initially started working on this, it was about 200 times the cost of caffeine.

You've gotten it cheaper than a latte at Starbucks.

Sure. I mean this, this is, yeah. The update drink is great. Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah.

So going back to the Russian in the lab, like, what happened there? Was it the 70s, 80s? Like, when did it actually even come on scene? And why now? Because it seems like it's only been a year or two. And really you guys are leading the ship.

Yeah, no there even exist. Its existence was certainly well known data I've seen in the 70s. We started getting some really preliminary kind of data early 2000s on it. But like, it just wasn't viewed as something that would have benefit, physiologic benefit for whatever reason. Like, as Daniel pointed out, like, I think we just assumed you got some of it. Like caffeine works. Like, why do you need it?

I mean, dude, I'm a conspirator. I always look for, okay, what finance interests wouldn't want this to replace it. Like, is there a caffeine board of America or, you know, look what happened with the u. S. Sugar group.

Yeah, yeah.

Where they were like, yeah, fat will make you fat. And then they were like, oh, sorry, we lied. Is that caffeine and paraxanthine? Have you guys seen any tinfoil stuff there?

Like the caffeine board?

We haven't, not that I'm aware of. We haven't run into or like anything. Maybe it's coffee.

Like some governing. Whoever taxes the coffee is like, well, we can't have parazanthine come out because then we'll lose, you know, billions of dollars on taxing coffee.

Yeah, I think possible.

I think so.

Not running into that issue probably implies one of two things. One, either that board doesn't exist, or two, we're not big enough yet.

Hopefully.

Hopefully it's not big enough.

They're. You're going to get a letter in the mail.

Hopefully it's the latter. But also, like, you know, what Sean didn't tell you is, you know, he and his team, when we first touched base with them, you know, must be three or four years ago now. They had been working on this for five years. Right. And you know, he had known about it, you know, prior to that. But him and the actual team he put together had been working on this for five years, spent millions of dollars to manufacture this. Then we find them, we partner up with them. And it took us a further. I mean, it's been three years since we started working on update or three to four years. And I would argue, you know, we're now just coming out with V2. And that's, you know, the biggest part of it is really the flavor improvement. And I would argue that, you know, we're still you know, working on, you know, paraxanthine and how. How we can make it palatable to, you know, people to consume. So, you know, if you add all of that up, we're talking about nine years.

Million dollars, and we're 23 patents filed and 13 studies in right now.

So, yeah, well, now is the time. I mean, there's never been more of a threat existentially, energetically. The collective unconscious right now is kind of freaking out. I'm not here to Fear Monger, but, like, there's a lot going on in our world. There's a lot of instability, economically politicized things that are actually not true, fake news, I mean, you name it. Like, we're kind of in the cosmic soup bumping shoulders with everyone right now. It's a gnarly, crazy time to be alive. Of course we focus on the positive because we can only control ourselves. We can't control what politicians do or anything like that. But my point is, when you turn up the heat on the stove and the stove is already on fire from a unconsciousness level, like the collective unconscious is really heated right now. The last thing I want to do is put more heat on my own stove. Like, I've got to take care of my mind, my psyche.

Yeah.

You know, anytime I'm overloaded. You talked about allostatic load earlier. If my bathtub. And this is a visual on the screen right now for everybody. If you're watching on Spotify or YouTube, there's a bathtub. Right. We only have so much stress before the water starts pouring out of the bathtub, and that's when things go absolutely haywire. I start having sex with people I don't love. I start watching pornography. I start buying things I can't afford. I start working 15 hours a day. Like, the wheels fall off the wagon once we've hit our stress load. And I think just to be a human, you guys, it's like we're at that load almost every day. And then I have two children, right? So stacking, sleep deprivation and holy. It's a cocktail for just insanity sometimes. So I wonder, on a collective level, like, let's say you had a magic wand. I mean, I told you, you guys, before we recorded, like, let's bring out the young boys to play. So what does young Daniel and young Sean say about bringing out a magic wand? Like, pretend we're just playing in the field. If you could wave a magic wand over America and you could just for a day, replace everyone's caffeine with paraxanthine. What shift in the unconscious collective do you think would be felt?

So, on one of my journeys, I had this epiphany about paraxanthine that instead.

Of all good stories start like that.

Yeah. On one of my journeys, I know. I really had a very potent feeling that this will reshape society. And I mean that. Like, I don't mean that as hyperbole. There's nothing related to hyperbole here. When you're talking about caffeine being as ingrained into our zeitgeist as it is to have a much better version of that ingredient can reshape the way that we're living and we're producing. And I feel like as we're switching away from the caffeinated unconscious capitalism and we're going into creative consciousness, that that was what I felt like paraxanthine was instead of this come at a cost ingredient that's all about grinding your way through life and the sympathetic nervous system, that it's the catalyst of creation, that it's a seed for creation, that it's going to enhance the way that we are in flow, like really in flow states versus just a grinding state so that we can create more. We can create more music, create more content, create more video, create more relationships, create more friendships, love. Like there's more creation to come as a result of paraxanthine versus the burnout on the edge of existence that comes with caffeine.

Fucking mic drop. I don't really have. I think that was the most eloquent description. I mean, talk about the intelligence that came through you. And people that don't do journeys, they may not be able to connect with what you said, but anyone that's ever held their daughter or son for the first time or fallen in love or just have touched God in some way, they can understand what you just said. Because every one of us knows that there's certain parts of this world, specifically this society in America, and maybe even North America and the world that is begging for change. Oh, my God. Like, dude, we're so unsustainable in so many ways. And the caffeine paraxanthine conversation is honestly just one mirror of that, of the unsustainability of our species. Like, we've got to become more mature. Like, this is a call for maturing. I know that this podcast has taken a lot of weaves and a lot of twists and turns, but it's all related to the same thing. It's behavior change. How do you change someone's behavior? You know, your colleague BJ Fogg. You might do it with habits that are tiny steps. You might do the Charles Duhigg model. Right. There's many different ways to. I'm not going to say the phrase about the cat. I don't understand why they say many ways to skin a cat. I think that's kind of stupid. There's many ways to do things. We can all get to the same peak with a different trail. So I'm curious, Daniel, like, on a collective level, like, Sean talked about, literally, the journey he had, he had sought, like a divine download. Like, that's a true divine download. Not just like something that someone says when they're at a cafe, but for you. Like, do you. Do you have something where when you close your eyes and you connect with the youngest part of yourself, the part of yourself that's the most excited about what Paraxanthine could do for the world, Is there a story there? Is there, like, a fun, youthful, vibrant story that you could see Parazanthine changing? Something that would connect to that younger part of you, the most vital part of you?

Yeah. Pity I can't start it by saying this one time when I was on a journey.

We're all on a journey.

I. I think it's one of those things, you know, to the point earlier, you just have to try it to, to feel the power of it and to understand or to make you question why I consume caffeine so often.

Oh, that's good.

Yeah, that, that, that, that was really my epiphany. It was, you know, you try this and you, you feel the effects of it. You know, it's been described by several people as, like, the optimal amount of Adderall, you know, that euphoric kind of feeling that you get.

Bradley Cooper, Limitless.

Limitless. I mean, when we first incorporated the company, the entity name was Limitless Beverages, based off, you know, Bradley Cooper and Limitless. And, and that. That's really it. You, you, you get this feeling, and I think it makes you question, well, you know, there's a better alternative here. And if you feel better, you do better, and it will pay off for you and everyone else down the line. And I, I think that's really it. I think we also see in, like, history, you know, people would drink alcohol because water wasn't, you know, healthy enough or, you know, clean enough at the time. Then you had coffee come into it. But who would have thought you could switch from water to alcohol, from alcohol to coffee, from coffee back to water, or, you know, they coexist now there's, you know, room for people to learn that there's something else and something better.

That's evolution. I mean, that's literally what we're talking about. To update. I like the name Update.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because you can update your software. We're kind of like wetware actually.

So you should, you shouldn't stop either, right?

Oh my God, I hope I never. I Hope I'm like 90 years old wearing like checkered shorts on a freaking wraparound bench somewhere next to the ocean and still learning and hungry like I am now.

I would.

I actually know that will always be a part of me. So I'm not worried about that. But the only way I get there is by treating this meat suit well. And if I just slam caffeine, gosh, I'm almost like, can I, can I even go back, Sean, and like heal the damage I've done? You ever feel like that in, in your life? Can you go back and can you from this day forward do the best you can to heal the damage that you did to your body, that you did to your brain? Like, can we reverse some of this stuff? Is that even possible?

Yeah, I think there's a. There's such a part of me now that looks back with just such grace and fondness to like the old part of me that I don't even think that way anymore for sure.

But he rode the car hard. No shame to the guy.

No, I get it.

The best he could.

I get it.

No shame.

But at the same time, like, I wouldn't be here sitting in front of you. I wouldn't have the friends I have, I wouldn't have the affluence. I have the creativity and the abilities to travel like I do. So I've been able to do journeys, I've been able to, you know, do, you know, alive and well and genetic testing and, you know, cool nad things and. Yeah, and breath work ceremonies and Masterminds and experience 60 different countries and so if I didn't do all that stuff, like, I wouldn't be experiencing all these things that are longevity for me. You know, it's, it's.

And you're open minded about it, right? You're open minded enough to say there might be something better than caffeine, no doubt. And then find it and you know. So you don't have regret?

No regret. I feel what you guys are saying, like I'm not. It's not a regretful question. It's more just like, hey, we've a arrived at this top of the Mountain. Because there's going to be another mountain.

Yeah.

When we think we're at the top of one, like, here comes another mountain. But can we, with the unconsciousness that we had in our past, love that version of Josh?

Right.

The version that would do ecstasy, smoke weed, play PlayStation to like five in the morning, eat two California burritos and pass the out. That was my life in my early 20s.

Yeah.

But like there were some serious ramifications to my liver and my pancreas from that, you know, so looking back on him with love. No, no.

Shame. The body. Yeah. I mean, the body is so regenerative. I mean, if you look at something like the liver, like it can be 90% necrotic and you can come back from it. Like there's. I. I've had a woman that I worked with that had 40% of her brain was a tumor with glioblastoma multiform. She had six weeks to live with, taken off of chemo and radiation. I worked with her on diet, supplements, mindset. Six weeks later there was a 90% reduction in her tumor and she was very much alive. Like, it is all very feasible to do, but I do believe what you're talking about and what I was saying with kind of spiritual dissonance is where it starts, like getting aligned with who you really want to be. And how did you get dissonant from that? And if you can start making decisions every day. One of the most profound things for me, I actually did quite recently is dopamine fasting 2.0, like a dopamine detox. And I've found like that's really helpful is like avoiding, you know, all these things like the porn, like the whatever, and just, you know, showing up. And like, literally if I say I'm going to do something, I have to do it, have to do it no matter what it is. Even if I say it to myself, like, you know, I'm going to do 10 push ups in the morning. I'm making sure that I'm not lying to others and most importantly myself. So when I say something, I need to follow through on it. So I'm now much more careful about what I say. But I think that's really important. And that's where like a lot of this change comes in. So for these, I mean, think about what I said before. This is like total spiritual cognitive dissonance with 90% of the population or more taking caffeine and 90% or more wants to consume less. So think about that dissonance that everyone is walking around with in all of their lives.

It's again, just the weight of it that I feel. It's such a weight. And there's only so long we can carry the weight. Like whether it's a relationship that's not working or food that's not working, or just a way of being that's not working. Like I told you before, there was a part of me that was like, I just knew that I was better. I literally just, I knew I was better. I didn't love myself enough to figure out how to actually treat myself better and tap into that self love. And it's a fucking journey, you guys. Like, it's still going. I mean, I'm about to be 44 this year and I'm still uncovering layers. Thank you. I'm still uncovering layers of the onion. And every time I peel the layer of the onion, I cry. So that is like literally the culmination I think we've arrived at in this conversation. And it is, how can I sustainably treat my body with love and how can my purchasing decisions? Because people don't make the connection all the time. When you spend 5 bucks, 10 bucks, 3 bucks, 20 bucks here and there, it's literally an act of self love and it's figuratively an act of self love as well. So, Daniel, like, how do you see this sustainability aspect when it comes to the solutions that'll really give people fuel they can use for a lifetime? How do you see just this whole market, you know, because you're really just one window of a market that is sustainable fuel sources for human beings to love and optimize themselves. That's really the world you're in. How do you see that playing out, man, in the next three, five, ten years?

Yeah, I mean, I think just from my own personal experience, I'm learning a lot more about what better options there are out there. I think, you know, blessing, curse, social media, just the, the amount of content out there. And if you're someone that's curious how easy it is just to absorb information and you are able to learn about these things and hear about things like Paraxanthine to then go and make those decisions. When you think about, you know, what, what should I spend my money on this week? I think it's, you know, things are becoming increasingly more expensive. The world is becoming, you know, increasingly a more up place. And you're making more conscious decisions when it comes to what you're purchasing. And you also, I think, are making more conscious decisions around what you want to, you Know how you want to live for yourself, for the future. And so I think people, people are trending towards learning about, you know, these things, learning about what's better for them. You know, and the hope is that, you know, whether it's update, whether it's paraxanthine, these things become more accessible to people. You know, I think that's one of the biggest challenges is a lot of these, you know, new or, you know, new things. Whether it's like an update. Parazanthine, they're so expensive. You know, we have people complain all the time that it's too expensive and you know, four bucks a can sometimes. And I get that. But you know, the, the idea is, you know, if there's a way to make these more accessible, if there was programs out there, grants out there to businesses and individuals who are trying to actually move the needle, I think that would be a really sensible thing.

I can see your little dude come online right there. Yeah, so that was it. Like, it's really shifting the narrative, shifting the tide. But dude, when you, you guys are played. Battleship.

Yeah.

When. How long does it take to sink a battleship or to turn a battleship? It's got all the little dots on it. Like you got to really work to. To change a battleship. A trillion dollar market cap is. I don't know of a bigger battleship. I mean, actually maybe healthcare and pharmaceuticals, right? That's probably many trillions. But like right there with it. A trillion dollars is a big market to turn. I could see some of the. What I'm really excited about with your patents and you know, whether you're spiritual or scientific, this means a lot to all of us if we're able to see this spread out to like other beverages. Right. Your technology and other beverages. Is that something you guys have explored.

In terms of paraxanthine? Like just kind of taking hold across, like.

Yeah, like literally taking the IP and taking what you've created and putting it in other beverages that already have audience that already have, you know, whatever they're doing and they just license your technology.

Like coffee and tea and things like that.

Totally. Or actually not coffee because you know that one caffeine's already in there, but like other, other drinks, maybe smoothies.

Like I mean, exists and you know, Sean's partnered with another company like Muscle Tech. They have a pre workout powder called Euphoric. Oh, cool. It's great.

Yes.

So you can also get paraxanthine that way. I think, you know, for larger companies we have this conversation all the time. The battle of like, you know, I want Update to be the only drink out there with paraxanthine at the moment. But at the same time, you know, if Red Bull were using it, everyone would know what paraxanthin is and therefore it would help updates awareness.

Absolutely.

Part of me hopes, at least for now, that it's too expensive for Red Bull to buy. You know, the price of Paris Anthem is too expensive. So we can get a little bit bigger. And then I'm all for. For friendly competition.

Isn't it interesting like this? Because competition in nature is real. And anybody. That said, I understand the whole pie in the sky thing where people are like, there's no such thing, brother, as competition. And I'm like, yeah, that's true. Sometimes. Like, sometimes there isn't any. Like, I don't feel competition with other podcasters, you know, because we're sharing messages. But for companies like yours, that you literally have to get to a certain place on the mountain before you're high enough for people to hear you, you know, you have to climb the mountain high enough. So I do. How do you. How do you hold both of those worlds, right? Like, how do you make sure that you're growing the company enough and get to the top of the mountain to speak with a megaphone? But then also you have this other, like, genuine intention to get caffeine out of people's bodies.

It's crazy to think there's no competition. Like, I am a huge, huge animal person and like, I watch animal documentaries. Like, I love nature, dude.

I don't know if you've seen Nova series.

Yeah.

So good. My son's name is Nova with an H. So beautiful.

I don't know if you've seen Chimp Empire, but that was absolutely incredible on Netflix. Like, amazing. The. The biggest, like, group of chimps that's ever been studied. It's 150 in this specific clan. And there's love in this group for sure, but there's also like alpha male status and jockeying for that. And then they go on these kind of warring circles around what's their territory, to kind of push out their territory and grab more fruit trees to have more abundance. And there are battles to the death in this kind of grab for territory. So I mean, just even competition for sperm, like, you know, it starts at. At that level.

If you're unbaxed, it's really expensive. Now, have you seen this? If unvaxed sperm is like sometimes a thousand dollars a donation, that's pretty good.

Wow.

That say you have money issues if you. If you went the noble path and did not get the job, donate some sperm anyways.

No, I mean, there's. Yeah, there's competition everywhere, and that's what brings out excellence. I mean, that's the idea of, you know, going back to Darwin and natural selection and things like that. I mean, competition has to exist. The question is, how do we proceed with the competition or does it consume us and that's all we become focused on? I think there's. Yeah, a healthy competition. I mean, if you think about, you know, these athletes that are. That are dominant but enjoy what they do, I hope that's there versus, like, the idea of, like, competition consumes every fiber of your being. That's a really dark place to be. But there certainly is a need for competition. I mean, it's. It's, you know, when you see these animals, like, wrestle and play, and it's like, it's how they're learning how to, one, get their food and two, protect themselves, you know, when it becomes nature's real. I don't know about all this. Hey, brother, like, there's no competition.

Like, watch.

Watch a nature documentary and stuff gets real, real fast.

Yeah.

And this is, you know, we're kind of held in this little bubble of, you know, conformity and control, and we think there's all this comfort there, but, you know, all this stuff goes down in two seconds. Watch how everything shifts. And so we need competition. And there can be a healthy competition and there can be collaboration. You know, maybe update, ends up working with Red Bull, gets bought by Red Bull. You know, it's like, it's. It's, you know, that's the way it is.

I think, you know, the. The biggest thing that really annoys me is as I've learned about the retail environment for whether it's beverages or anything, there are gatekeepers to what you have on the shelf. When you walk into your H E B or central Market mafia, and, you know, there's a buyer, say, for energy drinks, there's a single buyer. Hopefully none of them are listening to me, but there's a single buyer. And you essentially, you know, try to get a hold of their email, which is, like, almost impossible to find. You try to send them product. You then send them product, and that single person more often than not will decide, you know, do we want to take the product in or not? You know, will I let Josh be able to buy it at central market or not? And that person, more often than not, isn't someone, you know, that might be a frequent consumer of the product. So, for instance, one of the, if not the largest, convenience store chain, I was speaking to the head of Energy drunk purchasing at the time, and we had a call, and at the end of the call, I said to him, you know, do you even drink energy drinks? And he. His answer was no. And his answer was, I haven't even tried, you know, most of the stuff that we put on the shelf.

So how does he make his decisions?

Because, you know, they. They know that they'll make money selling Red Bull and Monster.

Okay.

And. And they take. They would be taking a risk if they put update on the shelf. And so I think what, you know, if we want to change and we're consciously trying to make an effort to, you know, be curious and find things that are better for us and that might really move the needle in our lives, you know, I hope that at the gatekeeper level, when it comes to, you know, most people shop at a retail store. You know, you're lucky if you can buy stuff online and have it delivered to your doorstep. We need those people to make the change and to be more accepting. That's like what I would love to see really evolve.

It sounds like you need an inside source, like almost like somebody behind the enemy line that can tell you who this person is, what food they like to eat. You send them a basket with like honey ham in it or something. Like, get on their good side. Otherwise, what are you going to do? How do you get it into the store?

They caught onto this, right? So that used to be the case. And so you would be able to form a relationship or, you know, bribe these people.

I'm sure it still goes.

But now, now what the stores have caught onto is that. So the guy who's buying energy driving.

Up in a Porsche.

Yeah, it's like a Porsche with update branding on the side. The guy who's buying energy drinks today in six months might be buying toilet paper. Right? So, like, they pull these swaps on you to make it even more challenging.

What's frustrating to me there, that's a wild world. My whole career, I have made sure that everyone associated with me that does formulating or when I've been in charge of R and D or a CSO of supplement companies. Everyone on my team has to consume our products, use our products, use supplements, be passionate about supplements. I don't care if you're a good buyer. You have 20 years experience. Anyone who told me they don't use supplements, I will not hire them. I remember reading Michael Jordan's book About not letting anyone at the Jordan brand wear, like, Reeboks or whatever it is. It's like, no, you have to live our brand. It's like when you're at Mercedes, like, if someone drove up in an Audi, you'd be like, yo, that's the wrong dealer. Yeah, that's not. You can't do that. That is dissonance. Like, you have to believe in what you're doing. I consume at high points. I've consumed as many 100 supplements a day. I'm probably at about 20. I've got it way back. But I believe in supplements. I consume them every day. And as a result, I not only know about supplements, I have experience with all these ingredients, and I am very passionate about them. I think about them. I think about fully dosing them. I think about, what if this could make someone sick? And all that kind of stuff. I do not cut corners, period. The end. Because I take these. My mom takes these. I believe in these. I'm telling my friends, like you to take them. I don't screw around with this stuff. So that's. It's sad to me.

I wonder if there's benefits to just this change of life through Paris and things. That's really what it is. Like, the culmination of this is really behavior change. Like, that's what this is all about.

Yeah.

How do you. I've always been fascinated by that because it was so hard for me to change my behavior in the past. That's why I was like, oh, my God.

Who.

Who are the people in the world that can, like, actually change people's behavior? So in the beginning of this podcast, I interviewed, like, Gretchen Rubin and Charles Duhigg and people that were just behavioral people, and they all essentially said the same thing. You have to give somebody a reward that they can actually look forward to. There has to be this variable or even near ayal with his model, the loop model of behavioral reward that comes from the limbic brain. That has to be novel. You have to give somebody novel reward on a societal level. You know, if. If there's an emotional and health piece to this that's really centered around behavior change, I wonder how this would stack with that.

Right.

If we were gonna. Let's say you went into schools or look at. Look at jfk, how he was so passionate about fitness. And we've really gone down from there like high schools now. I think it's like three have to do three push ups. Back in the day, there was kids doing peg boards, and it was crazy. Like, we've really gone down in certain ways. But I wonder, like, on a societal level, are there some benefits that, that might be hard to quantify by changing someone's behavior from caffeine to something healthier? Like, how would you even go about quantifying that on a societal level? On an emotional level, I wonder.

You speak about caffeine, and I think caffeine is a great example where when it was introduced, it really plays on your reward receptors and you do get that reward from consuming caffeine, at least immediately, and then, you know, you suffer the consequence after. And I think the same to our point earlier, like, you know, people who are skeptical about update, it's like, well, just try it. You do get that same. If not, you know, a better reward from it.

And also, just keep caffeine out of schools. There's no reason that Maybe that's why the south park episode came out. You were talking about, yeah, keep caffeine out of the kids hands. Why are kids having caffeine at all? There is no reason a child should have caffeine.

Combine that with like the, the blue light that they're getting from, you know, cell phones in dark rooms when they're sexting or whatever.

The Adderall they're taking.

Yeah, the Adderall to make up with it. Then they're like taking mom's, you know, whatever. Oxycontin, Melatonin, and you know, every other thing to try and come down. Yeah, it's a really, it's a really sad place where things are at right now. I've heard like some students tell me, I don't know what the actual number is, but for, you know, Adderall, Concerta, you know, these kinds of drugs that people have told me in high school is like, half the kids are on them, like more than a third. Like, I've, I've heard consistently numbers like that. And it's like. And then, you know, speaking of blue light, I could do like a whole biohacking thing on how much blue light exposure we're getting from laptops, iPads, cell phones, TVs late in the evening, that's literally preventing the release of melatonin. Now we're about to go into this Apple Vision Pro where we're like strapping this like HD light to your eyeballs.

Yeah, no, than there was this meme where it was like, meta.

You can keep your universe on your own.

In the 90s, parents were always, you know, sit further back from the tv, you know, don't sit too close and now you're wearing the tv.

Exactly. And so add that to the Adderall, the caffeine, the, you know, whatever. And it's like these kids are going to get zero sleep and they're just going to be cracked out. Adrenal fatigue at 18, not, not at 40, not at 50, having heart attacks. We're going to have 17 year olds having heart attacks.

There's already, there's already kids that have type 2 diabetes. And so all of the, like, so it's blue light, caffeine, Starbucks when you're 12, which should never be happening. My son will never do that. Oh, my God, what a nightmare that is. One of the things I love about your research, man, is you actually told me at an earlier time that there's a dopaminergic effect to the paraxanthine. So with clean energy, that means that there's no crash. Like that happens with caffeine. And this to me is like, honestly the most important thing, because if it feels good, most people are gonna do it. If there's like instant gratification of something, people are gonna drink it. That's why people drink alcohol. It's the next day that everybody hates.

Yeah.

So if there's really a source, if this is a true source of clean energy and really what people are chasing is that dopaminergic effect, what's the biology on that? Like, how does that actually work?

Yeah, so the methylxanthines in general tend to affect these catecholamines. But what's cool with paraxanthine is we don't see as much of the CNS stimulant side of the equation, but we do see the dopaminergic aspect and it has to do with where these methyl groups are placed. So, like that theophylline that I was talking about, basically there's none of that cerebral lift, but all the kind of side effects, essentially where it, you know, is a bronchodilator, meaning it's like it's jacking up your central nervous system pretty hardcore, which can open up your alveoli in your lungs, which is, you know, like, basically like those inhalers are hardcore stimulants, like ephedrine. Ephedrine was a bronchodilator. Right. So paraxanthine is mostly affecting. There's a small, like, CNS component, but mostly it's affecting, you know, these other neurotransmitters, including dopamine. And that's where you get this mood lift. And once, once you have like this Dopaminergic effect, you're going to seek dopamine less like, and it's longer lasting. So like a workout is a long lasting effect of dopamine. Cold plunge is a many hour effect of dopamine. Whereas, like cocaine is like a 15 minute hit of dopamine. Right. So it's like, that's why these things that are like, these short hits of dopamine, it's not just dopamine, it's short hits of like high velocity dopamine that like will keep going back, keep going back, keep going back. And this is not like that. This is more like a sustained lift, a mood lift. We actually filed a patent around the word swagger because people are bringing it up so much. Literally we have.

Hold up, patented swagger.

Yes.

How did that play out?

It's still pending.

That is so amazing. Is it a molecule? What is it?

Well, it's. It's a cocktail of, of dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine.

Okay.

So the.

It's lit. I love that because.

No, we, we kept. We had literally pro quarterbacks. There's multiple. We had three different pro quarterbacks in the NFL saying like, they said the same word. They're like, I don't know, I just feel like more swagger. Yeah, they literally like kind of did that with their body language too. And it's just like, we're like, okay, like, let's own that word. Right?

How could you have good swag unless you're happy? You got to be happy to have swag.

And like caffeine does a complete opposite. If you're. If you're in a irritable mood, caffeine helps you double down on that.

Yeah.

Wow.

Whereas this, if you're. I was actually at a live and well yesterday, and one of the people, like employees there, they have, they sell update. If you're in Austin, go to alive and well. But one of the employees, they were saying, you know, like, when they're not feeling happy in the morning, they'll drink an update and it just completely flips their switch.

And again, they get swag. They get swag if on the occasion you do drink alcohol to excess, this is your ticket out of hell, I'll tell you that. Okay. A couple times it's come up and I've had friends tell me and they're like, man, it was my get out of jail free card, so.

But it's not the prickly pear cactus. It's not the B12. It's something else.

What do you Think the paraxanthine. I mean, because again, it's not just energy, like the idea of caffeine. It's enhancing blood flow, it's reducing oxidative stress, it's improving, improving these neurotransmitters that would essentially be decimated from the acetaldehyde, really from the alcohol, it's removing beta amyloid plaque. All these things that as far as ways that our brain is taking a hit either from acetyl aldehyde or just aging or caffeine, this is, you know, going in a very different direction. But I mean, first and foremost the blood flow is, is very noticeable. Like it will bring your brain back online.

And if you were going for a, if you will, if you, if you were.

Sound like an ad.

Yeah, exactly. That's our next product update, alcohol. But if you were going for like vodka Red Bull as well as like for your night out.

Yeah.

You're going to. Please don't have a terrible night's sleep. Yeah. Just do it together, you know, read. Should, should you happen to try one of our flavors with tequila or vodka that happened to taste really good still, you're going to be able to still sleep really well.

Yeah, that's beautiful. But we can't end the podcast there. I'm not encouraging people to drink.

No.

But if you are right, there might be some things that are good for you with the update.

Right.

What do you think?

We missed you guys. We covered some freaking ground on the pod today. It's been awesome. I didn't know we were going to go to the spiritual Emotional depth. Although that's my favorite place to go.

That's. That's so you.

That's my favorite place to go because why are we doing anything by the way, unless it's for the service of our emotional, physical, spiritual.

Okay, I forgot to tell you one massive thing. Okay. So all of our studies so far in humans have been done like all typical studies and I would love to get to women by the way, but that I could do a whole hour long topic on that 18 to 23 year olds, college age population, healthy human males, like all studies, those are. That's your most accessible population that you can recruit for cheaply, that will show up, that will get paid, that will do these studies. And it's great, it's great data. That's where we're working from largely in research, whether it's academic or CRO based. But I can tell you sometimes I like pre clinical data more. Now this is. That means animal data. Yes, that means like rodents and mice. Why I like that is because they're very controlled. Their metabolism can be the same, their genetics can be the same. If you want to control the genetics, their diet can be the same, their, you know, wake sleep cycle can be the same. I can control a whole lot that I cannot control in humans. Also, it's hard to recruit older people in studies. We really want to do this very badly because there is an obvious age related cognitive decline. Right. So we can theorize that paraxanthine would have a much greater effect in an older population. Older being like even Josh at 44, Sean at almost 50. I'm not 20 anymore, right. I'm not that college age kid that's 20 years old. So even for us, what's called mild cognitive impairment, it's kind of like pre Alzheimer's, if you will. But where are those car keys? We all get that sometimes. But if that's coming up kind of consistently, that's kind of the precursor, almost like pre diabetes, all this kind of stuff, right? So in our pre clinical study where we were looking at all those different things that I mentioned before, the glutathione and catalase, the bdnf, which is neuroplasticity, the neurotransmitters and the beta amyloid plaque. So there, these mice are put into like this kind of black pool. Like if you can think of something about the size of a dinner table. You know, if you go out to a restaurant and it's like a black pool of water, so it's inky black, so they can't see the ledges. There's. There's a ledge in that pool right towards the edge. And let's say that that ledge is maybe about like 8 inches long in what's called escape latency, like how quickly they can go find that ledge. When we took older mice without the paraxanthine, it took, I think it's, it's like 58 or 61 seconds somewhere. It's about a minute, okay. That it took for them to find that ledge, and they were already shown that ledge and then dropped in the water. And it on average took him about 60 seconds with the parazanthine. These are older mice. Like, like Sean as a mouse, it took 23 seconds. That's not like a 20% improvement. That's cutting your time in about a third. That is an absurd difference.

The mice went hummed, by the way.

No, they didn't drown when they fell. No, no, no, no, no. So this is incredible research that, like, I know, as good as the results are, and they're insane with humans like, that are healthy, you know, males that are young, that when we start looking at older populations, we're going to see dramatic differences, like probably like 2, 3x differences over our younger populations.

Even most of our customers are older. I'd say like 3/4 are older than 25.

Why do you think that is?

Partially probably because of what Sean's talking.

About because they've been blasting coffee for.

Decades and they can't take more experiential for them. Got it.

Okay. Well, again, what an incredible pod. I love that you threw that in with the Blackpool. That was a cool visual. I really, I love it whenever it's cool on podcasts like this. And not everyone's as special as this one because there's been many moments in this podcast where I felt like a listener. And it's not always like that. Like, I always do the best podcasts and we have the best conversations like this. When I can feel the people with us, like, I can actually feel them watching and listening. And I want to just speak to that because I know that we all make buying decisions, and the buying decisions we make, they're from money that we earn. And that takes our life force, our chi, to be able to do that. So I just want to say thank you guys for, for the hookup. Like right now, it's on the screen. Joshtrent.com Drink update. The code is Josh25. That's a big discount, especially with how expensive it is to produce the paraxanthine.

Very expensive.

So, yeah, guys, take advantage of this. Like, I don't know how we don't.

Make money on, on your sales. We, we just want, we want your audience to really try it because, yeah, you know, to our point, you'll notice the effect.

Also, can I add that I've always believed this is something I've learned over time is that the most important person, the most powerful person in the room is the listener. That's not the loudest talker. And I think you're a very powerful person. And it's a real skill to not want to just jump in and talk over people or make the show about you. I think, like, that's where, you know, I was always impressed with people like Tim Ferriss and they, they read up, they were educated, they knew what they were learning and about to talk about. But they made the guest the star. But the deepest skill lied with the interviewer to make them look like the star. And that's a real Skill. It's a really powerful skill to be a very acute listener. Instead of just having a list of questions and just going down the. The questions, that question may have already been answered in the conversation, or the conversation may be going a really beautiful direction and you're steering it the wrong direction because you're staying on track. Yeah. And so it's powerful to me. I love chemistry when it comes up in podcasts. Like, I really like to show up for these kinds of podcasts. So I appreciate you as well.

Thanks, man. Feels good to receive that from you. Yeah, thank you very much. And thank you, Daniel, for being here as well. This is probably podcast number 10 or how many podcasts have you done?

This is probably podcast number four or five.

Okay, so knocked it out of the park. I mean, just really, like, letting our. This is something on a personal level as we say goodbye. Gosh, how can I let young Josh come out to play? It's such a serious world out there. It's almost like our buddy Luke, he's like, over. Seriousness is a mental health issue. It really is. Like, when I'm too serious, sometimes I snap myself out of it and I just start laughing at myself. Dude, look how serious you were just being over something that doesn't deserve any seriousness at all. Approach this. That's my call to action for all of us here. Like, approach this with playfulness. Like, give this a shot. Play with it. Just let go of the pressure of, like, everything that we're doing in our lives and just play more. So hopefully this brings out the playful spirit in y' all when you try something besides something that's making you tired, like caffeine. So as we say goodbye, I've asked you this question before, so I'll ask Daniel with everything that you've learned up to this point, you know, coming from the New York and the one way ticket and going through the layers of imposter syndrome and meeting your business with courage and getting excited about how this could shift people's metabolism and energy. Like, these are not small rocks. These are big rocks. How do you balance it all? Is there even such a thing? And ultimately, like, how do you define wellness? You know, what does wellness mean to you? What's your definition of. Of living life?

Well, that's a really good question. I think my answer today is different to what my answer five years ago would have been.

I mean, I hope so, dude.

I. I think, you know, five years ago I would have said eating well, going to gym every morning, getting eight hours of sleep, you know, being able to work 12 to 18 hours a day and then do it all over again.

Damn.

And I think now all of that is kind of set aside. And I think to me, the way I balance this and. And what wellness really means is firstly being comfortable with myself, with where I'm at, kind of getting over that imposter syndrome, still recognizing that it exists to some degree, but instead of looking at it as me being the victim, rather using it as, like, giving me the chip on my shoulder and really focusing on spending increasingly more time with the people that mean a lot to me, you know, friends and family, and have no ulterior motive and just do it. Because I think, you know, if you spend 18 hours a day, you know, like a workhorse, maybe you'll have some financial success after several years or however long, but you'll turn around and you'll say, well, who. Who's there to share it with? And I'd much rather be in the camp with, you know, people like you guys to share life with. And, you know, if I'm fortunate financially, so be it. That's only, you know, added upside. And I think if you're a lot more comfortable and. And really happy with and the people around you, and I really. I truly love everyone I surround myself with. I think five years ago, my friendship group would have been much bigger. You know, I would have felt, you know, I felt the need probably then to have more friends and, you know, commingle with different people all the time. And I think now, you know, the focus is on, like, a small group of people I truly love, who I would do anything for and who would do anything for me. And that's far. That far outweighs, you know, going to the gym every morning at 6am and eating, you know, the right diet every single day and being so strict on myself.

Thank you for that. Yeah. Because why are we here unless we're doing it to share? Is this conversation even worth sharing? Is our business even worth sharing?

Yeah. Is sharing.

Is it worthy of the share?

Yeah.

If not, why, then? Don't do it. I think don't do it.

I think an element of play is gratitude, forgiveness is grace. And what, like, kind of came through for Daniel with me is like, sometimes people are abusing themselves to make, quote unquote, healthy decisions of certain foods, of going to the gym, of all these things, and it's still a grind. It's still taxing to your psyche. They're all good things if you let them be good things that you enjoy. I would find the things that light you up and give you energy and seek those out, that's, those are the healthiest decisions. And of course, those long term hits of dopamine, not short term hits of dopamine, is what's going to be sustainable. Going back to your idea of, of sustainability is how do we get these long term hits. And it's going to come from friendships and it's going to come from, for me, I love playing volleyball or you know, something that, like, I get to meet people, I get to be out in the sunshine, I get to move my body. It's like, like that's good. Like being around a group of men and getting inspired and having deeper conversation. These are long term hits.

And they just feel good too.

Yeah.

Which is like the barometer for almost everything.

Yeah.

Just because it feels good doesn't mean we should always do it. That's a whole other podcast. But yeah, doing something that's healthy for you and it feels good. I mean, you can't do anything. But when. Sean, Daniel, thank you for being here, guys, so much.

Epic.

I just love, I love that we get to have this conversation. Do biz together. Joshtrend.com forward/drink update. The code is Josh25. It's on the screen. Thank you guys so much for being here. Your generosity and just the cool places we got to play in today. I really felt young Daniel, young Sean, come out to play. Young Josh was coming out to play, too.

Nice.

So that is my, that is my wish for all of us, is that this one choice can be something that gives you more energy so you can play. So from my heart to yours, thank you for being here, guys. Until we see you again, all three of us are wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon. Hey, don't go anywhere. Now that you're here, let me say thank you for being a part of this podcast. Click any of the buttons on this screen here or here or anywhere, because these are specifically matched episodes that you'll really love based on what you just saw. Just tap one of these buttons on the screen and while you're at it, subscribe to the podcast.