PRIME: The Dark Forces Controlling Logan Paul

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, I think with prime, it's like, sure, do, do I want them to succeed or do I want to succeed instead of them? Like, you know, 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 it's.

Well, well, the challenge is in, like, you know, they're so appealing. Just, you know, Logan Paul and KSI are 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, and kids have been buying the energy drink and, 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.

So 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 spoofing, 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.

Green text messages instead of the blue text message.

Oh, wow.

That's going on with that generation.

Oh, yeah. So it's like a status. 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 cred 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? 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 demonstration of kids souls being hacked by the drink, 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 are just consuming caffeine as a crutch. And, and, and what would actually happen if you took that away and introduced something else?

I mean, I think one of, 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, his 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. Um, but. But for those people, it's gonna disrupt their sleep. So even 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, so 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 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 three, 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 plant toxin. Yeah. And maybe it was put out there to be addictive so that these plants could take over the world. To kind of think of a Last of us type scenario as a 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 like, try that.

It ferments 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. Like, 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 fog, 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. Parazanthine 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.

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