276. The Future Of Supplements & Health Optimisation With Shawn Wells
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Thank you for listening to the Boost Your Biology podcast. My name is Lucas Owen. I uncover the most cutting edge health information on the planet, ranging from hormones, nutrition, supplementation, fat loss, biohacking, longevity, wellness, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Boost Your Biology podcast.

What is up, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to the Boost Your Biology podcast. Today, I have a very special guest joining me on the podcast actually for the second or third time round. He's a mentor of mine. He's the world's greatest formulator. He's a world-class speaker. He's a pioneer in supplementation research and

He's a wealth of knowledge and I'm very proud to say that Sean has mentored me over the years. He's taught me an enormous amount about different ingredients. And so I'm really excited to be chatting here today with Sean Wells. Sean, welcome to the podcast. Wow, man, this is the best, dude. This is the best. So happy to be on. Yeah, dude, I'm stoked to have you back and

Yeah, I guess for, I mean, what have you been up to? I mean, you've been traveling so much. You've been at conferences, presenting, showcasing new ingredient research. Like you are just like crushing it across the board. Well, thank you. You've been crushing it though too, man. Like I've been watching you grow like crazy. I mean, yeah.

maybe I'm the world's greatest formulator, but you're like going for the universe or something. Like you're like trying to get one step ahead of me. You're going to leapfrog me. Uh, no, you're doing amazing. Um, really, I'm really proud of you. Uh, you, your content, especially on YouTube is, has been incredible. Um, you know, I've been glad to, uh, be working with you on a number of fronts with a number of companies, uh,

I talk about you all the time. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm proud to, to know you, to, to even be called your mentor, like anything you ever need. I'm here for you. Like I admire you. And honestly, it's, it's a goal just like, I mean, yeah,

Just like a father would be to a son. Like, I mean, I think I'm more of like a brother to you, but like, like you want someone to, to follow in your footsteps and to really, to exceed you, like supersede me, you know, like, because you've had the blueprint of me and I really had no blueprint whatsoever.

And so I made a lot of mistakes. I kind of floundered. I, you know, looked around and didn't know what was going on half the time. And it's awesome. And, you know, someone, I would challenge you to mentor someone else and, and bring someone into your, your path and bring people along. I mean, not only is it cool just from a perspective of me being able to

um, teach or guide or inspire to like the path that I'm so passionate about. But in supplements, I want supplements to be legitimized on the deepest level. Like every time someone says supplements don't work, it like, it's a pain in my heart. It hurts. Or like someone says supplements are dangerous or, you know, all this stuff, like,

It's frustrating to me. Like I want this industry to be so legitimized and whatever I can do to clean it up, to make it be respected more is what I'm here to do. You know, it's funny you mentioned that. And I really appreciate those kind words. And yeah, every time we jump off or every time we finish chatting, I'm always just so inspired and motivated to achieve great things. But you sort of mentioned around like,

people that don't think that supplements are legitimate and they don't work, I don't even have those people in my life at all. They don't even exist. Everyone that I'm surrounded by is either using supplements or has learned about them

But yeah, I mean, that legitimization. You know, the flip side of it that also causes me pain is something that Amazon has brought a lot of light to via Now Foods, who has been one of the most trusted brands probably for the last 30 years. And now lost a lot of business being kind of like a retail mainstay, right? This orange, white, and

purple brand that everyone knows has like a thousand products, whatever it is. It was quite often like, especially these like mom and pop supplement shops, it was half the store was now Foods. And then Amazon comes along and you got all these brands you've never heard of selling tons and tons of units. Well, now Foods is like, well, hold on. Like there's no way these prices make sense. And so they tested

I think it was about 13 different ingredients, including berberine. I think it was like lycopene, astaxanthin. Yeah, there's several, exactly. And the results were insane. About 80% of the products, I'd say 60 to 80% on every one of these single ingredient products,

did not meet label claim, meaning they might have fell short of. And you're supposed to put overages in to meet label claim for the full shelf life. But about 20% of the products had zero active whatsoever. And these ones that are like, you're like, how can this price be real when they're like,

you know, $14 and everyone else is, you know, 30. You're like, how is it? Oh, I'll just buy this cheap one. Well, you might want to think again. And not only is it scary that they might have no active,

But what do they have that you don't want them to have that's not listed, meaning heavy metals, banned substances, you know, whatever. Like there could be things in there that are scary. And so...

It's frustrating. It's frustrating. So this is why I deeply recommend going with someone who third party tests, who has a trusted reputation, who doesn't make ridiculous claims, who has full transparency. These kinds of things are absolutely critical. So at what level is it happening, Sean? Is it the supplier, the manufacturer, the

Or does sometimes these brands, you think they actually know that they're doing this or they don't even know? That's a great question. That is a really great question. So I love that you asked that. It's definitely happening at the contract manufacturer level. A lot of contract manufacturers, the lower tier ones, again, the ones that are somehow coming in at this price that no one else can come in at, they can do everything.

a 1,000 unit run while everyone else is doing 10,000. You know, you're like, how can they do it? You know, like, well, this is a good price. Well, the way that they compete is by buying stuff that is not legitimate. And it's called dry labbing is the term when you buy from the

Typically, you know, Chinese raw material source and Chinese is not bad by any means. As you know, like NNB I've worked with for years, 10 million square feet of GMP facility supply for companies like Nestle, over 100 scientists, best in the world, best, you know, best class. And I invite anyone to come out to China to see it. We've paid for a number of people all over the world to come to the facilities.

But there is a lot of shady stuff that can happen there too. And you have these companies that will do what's called dry labbing, where they just print a lab test. They never test it. You know, I can tell you at NNB, just in our HPLC and HPTLC equipment, it's $8 million in this one room. $8 million in just one room that's like the size of an apartment of just these machines to test.

So they're expensive. One, two, you need the people to run them, which can be expensive as well. And you need to properly get the test done properly in terms of like how you get your inputs.

And so you've got these companies that are willing to buy super cheap material from these shady sources and then run it at the contract manufacturer, tell the brand, yeah, we got the same stuff. And they're paying a quarter of the price, sometimes a tenth of the price. They're then charging these brands half the price, pocketing all that money.

profit, and then they look like they can do things at an incredibly cheap price, cheaper than everyone else. This is how they build their cachet, their portfolio. But meanwhile, their products won't test out, have no active, is strict garbage, may have heavy metals, banned substances. Like, what are you paying for?

So this is where, you know, someone like a now foods would never use this contract manufacturer, never use this supplier. And they don't just go to market with only the contract manufacturer or the raw material suppliers labs. They get a third party lab to test it like a Covance, like a Chromadex, like an Alchemist, like a Eurofins.

And prove it out because there is some shady business that's happening. So in some of the brands are down with the whole thing, especially these Amazon brands, the ones that it's all about getting to number one, being the cheapest, getting the most volume as quickly as possible. They're totally in on it. But there's other brands that may not be that that are just new and don't understand the whole thing.

I think I know which brands might be doing that. I'm not going to say much though. Yeah, exactly. With respect to those. But I mean, that process there, like I won't mention the exact ingredient, but you know what I'm pioneering myself at the moment and what's about to drop, which is going to be epic. But we did go through that nine-month process of

um sorting out the filtering out legitimate vendor versus not and we found one that passed the alchemist third-party hptlc assessment which took freaking ages dude when i like um ellen of uh of ellen sudberg of alchemist the ceo he's a good friend he

is the rock star of the industry. Even though Covance, Chromadex, Eurofins, which is all essentially now owned by the same company, is excellent when it comes to testing maybe like pure materials. Think of like a creatine or a tyrosine or what have you. When it comes to herbal extracts,

and testing for DNA, purity, standardization, these kinds of things, no one is on the level of Alchemist. No one. So that's awesome that you went to them. I can't wait to see your product. I already do know the ingredient, but I think it's going to be very exciting. I can't wait to get some and share it and tell everyone to buy it and all that good stuff. Yeah, it's very exciting.

Well, what about in terms of, I mean, there's been a lot happening at NNB Nutrition in the last maybe like six to 12 months. I mean, every time I touch base with, you know, your team, there's always new papers being published. What's hot off the press, so to speak? Yeah. So a few things. I'm trying to think if I'm okay to talk about this. Yeah.

Because it's you, I want to go ahead and talk about it. Let me preface this very clearly that there was data that is animal data. I don't like to venture into drug and disease category, but to really look at the dihydroberberine compound,

We're never going to see as robust a result unless we test with really those that are obese, those that are metabolically dysfunctional, those that are type 2 diabetic. So we did an animal study, and just for comparison's sake, we wanted to look at GLP-1.

And we wanted to compare it to what we're thinking is the gold standard to see if it does really move the needle. And it is the most famous compound in the world that we compared it against. I cannot say the name of it. I don't want to get in trouble. But if you think of about 10% of the American population has tried this compound and it is not a supplement, I'll say that.

What we saw was that the dihydroberberine in these rodents, again, rodents, disease population, outperformed that.

So, you know, look, this is just on a podcast. I'm never going to make these claims. I'm never going to, you know, talk about this like on a sell sheet. It's never going to be on a supplement bottle. But I just wanted to allude to like how powerful this compound is. I believe that of all the things I've ever used in my life, that this is the most important supplement anyone could be taking.

Because not only does it increase GLP-1, but lowers insulin, lowers blood glucose, increases ketones, decreases inflammation, improves dyslipidemia, hypercholesterolemia.

And then you're talking about ages, advanced glycation end products, also improving ales, the advanced lipid end products. And so when you're talking about dysfunction and what could be the precursors to disease pathway etiology, right, like where...

We know glycation, inflammation, oxidation, you know, these things like are all precursors to not only the majority of disease, which is metabolic, like about 99% of disease is metabolic, but also pro-aging. And, you know, when you're hearing the Brian Johnson say like, you know, I'm aging at 0.62 or whatever it was, awesome.

I actually met someone who was aging at like a 0.54, which is bonkers. That's essentially aging at half the rate. I don't know if they can end up living to 200 or not. Maybe the Dave Asprey 180, right? I was actually aging. I just got it done recently and I'm 50 now.

And I had a 0.72 and I was really happy with that. So, so that means that I'm aging 30% slower than is expected. There's a lot of people that are on the other side of that, that are aging at 1.3 or 1.5 or what have you, because they are fighting aging.

obesity, they're smoking, they're drinking, high stress, not getting enough sleep, not taking these kinds of supplements, not using PRP stem cells, not doing different interventions, taking care of their circadian rhythm, getting blue light in the morning, red light in the evening, using blue light blocking glasses in the evening. They're doing all the things wrong and they're on the other side of that. The most powerful thing that I know of right now is dihydroberberine.

And so obviously, if you were kind of more on that metabolic side of the equation, it could be very helpful. But when I look at like 20 years ago, when I started getting into the idea of anti-aging and realizing that there's a movement coming that I like to call youth span, where we know about lifespan, how long you live. We know about health span, which is how long you live free from disease.

That was a pivot, right? That was a change in the way we started thinking and speaking. YouthSpan, this is my idea, is that how long you can live young, not free from disease, how long you can live young. This is why we're seeing people

your age, certainly my age, and you're seeing people in their 20s. Look at PRP, look at resveratrol and NMN and look at doing fillers and getting all this stuff done, right? Whether it's plastic surgery, whether it's anti-aging stuff, serums, all these things. They're getting the blue light blocking glasses. They're wearing the aura rings. They're becoming biohackers.

Why? Because they want to be as young as possible for as long as possible. And they want to be younger than their contemporaries at the same age. It's a thing. We all want to be performing better than the other people our age, including our friends. So now this is shifting everything. And that's why we're seeing things like dihydroberberine be a great tool because for years, like I said,

I was seeing a very popular pharmaceutical be used in this area for anti-aging literally 20, 25 years ago. One of the most popular pharmaceuticals in the world starts with M.

And, and, and really a powerful compound right and we're seeing people that were already thin already super healthy already posting up all their labs when I was on these message boards.

And while there is a within normal limits, WNL, for your blood testing for blood glucose or insulin, they found that the lower it got, the better. It wasn't like there was some negative effect when it got lower as long as they remained healthy.

You know, not like hypoglycemia could be a thing more if you're on the type two diabetic side of the equation, but it's not really much of a thing if you're truly healthy, especially if you're ketogenic. Right. So what we're seeing is when those people do that, even these healthy lean people that are highly athletic.

they would get even better CRPs. They would get even better lipoprotein A's. They would get even better hemoglobin A1Cs. And now we would be seeing in conjunction with that, like a better true age or glycan age or whatever, these kinds of tests to see essentially like their actual biological age versus their chronological age.

And so what we also see when insulin and blood glucose is suppressed is that we see GH elevated and other growth factors elevated, IGF-1 elevated, a number of immunoglobulins elevated. We see autophagy elevated, mitophagy elevated. We see the sirtuin gene activation and telomerase elevated, like all these things elevated.

That, you know, we were given the worst advice ever back in the 90s to like eat six to eight times a day. Make sure you get your carbs all day long, you know, all these kinds of things. And that really is going to set you up for a state where you're never in autophagy or mitophagy, where you never have elevated growth hormone, where you never have true recovery.

And so that's what I love about the dihydroberberine. And if you use it in fasting, what we see is it augments the fasting where it lowers blood glucose further and elevates ketones further. And that's going to accelerate your timeline towards optimized autophagy. You know what would be unreal is if dihydroberberine landed in the hands of Elon Musk. Oh, man.

That would be incredible. Because yesterday, I mean, I was listening to the podcast and I sent you the link with Joe Rogan. He's like, yeah, like steak and eggs for breakfast is a level up. It's a power up. And like millions of people are going to hear him say that.

And it's like exactly this message. Like what is going to happen metabolically if you eat steak and eggs for breakfast? You're not going to get a huge insulin spike. You're going to keep insulin low and you're going to fuel your body with amino acids to create neurotransmitters. But then like if you, I don't know, I'm thinking of an idea with Elon Musk's like, all right, how do we let him know about dihydroberberine? Yeah.

Maybe I call it a gluco vantage X. That would be cool. Now, I agree. I mean, that would be powerful to have someone like that speak about it. You know, he's a little paunchy around the waist and he could use some dihydroberberine in his life because look,

It's not just metabolic in terms of your body weight, right? Like we tend to think of like central adiposity and visceral adiposity, meaning like around the organs, which certainly correlated to worse outcomes in terms of your longevity, greater risk of heart attacks, all those kinds of things.

But we know that the brain, we're talking about type 3 diabetes with insulin resistance in the brain. This is leading to pro-brain aging. We also have inflammation, meaning inflammation, which is pro-aging of the brain as well. We get that brain fog when we have cognitive inflammation, neuroinflammation. And all of this is related to quite typically not getting enough sleep,

having a high glycemic, high seed oil diet, pro-inflammatory diet. And we're seeing this acutely, like even one time of not getting enough sleep. This is when we're more insulin resistant in the brain. We're not taking up blood glucose as well in the brain to fuel the brain. And if it's done chronically, that's when we get

this type three diabetes of the brain, essentially Alzheimer's of the brain. But even acutely, you're getting acute Alzheimer's if you don't get enough sleep, and I'm talking even six and a half hours. So this is going to help protect even your brain, and how much energy is going to your brain and the substrate that you can use in your brain, whether it's ketones or, or glucose. You know, it's I think a really important message here is like,

for people to understand that so many different ailments and diseases and issues trickle down from like that top level of like, all right, that blood sugar is just very variable. Your insulin's high. Like if we can just get those down with one intervention, like obviously there are many different things we can do, exercise more, sleep better, that sort of stuff. But with something like dihydroberberine, if they look at it,

From that lens, it's like, all right, if there's one ingredient that can be used orally, not injected, this is literally an oral supplement. Dihydroberberine, just for the general population, like for the average person, can benefit so dramatically. Without even making radical interventions, I could incredibly change your life. Without saying...

You need to work out at the gym three to five times a week, high intensity interval training. You need to change your diet to a ketogenic diet. These three things that are so simple, get at least seven hours of sleep, track it hopefully with an aura ring, a loop strap, a Garmin, Phoenix, whatever, dihydroberberine. I recommend a higher dose, 200 milligrams twice a day. And then

Take a postprandial stroll, a walk after you eat. I'm not even talking about sprints. I'm not talking about some like farmer's walk with like the kettlebells and, you know, I'm talking about a 10 to 15 minute brisk walk after you eat.

It's going to upregulate glute for translocation, moving the blood glucose into the cell out of the bloodstream. It's one of the best things you can do for insulin sensitivity, your blood sugar. That's the most important time right after you eat.

Those three things would radically change your blood sugar, your inflammation, how you feel, your body weight, how sharp your brain is, on and on and on. Like if you did that for 30 days, I guarantee you'd feel like a new person. I think someone's energy would just go through the roof. You know, like their day-to-day energy, which people are complaining. Like, isn't this one of the reasons why you've looked into...

unique ingredients like, you know, paroxanthine, you've looked at different compounds to support energy, L-Logothionine, like from the energy standpoint, like, do you always think about like, how do we improve the energy status of the population?

I do because I had my book, The Energy Formula. I'm coming out of the chorus for it. But I had severe issues. I had Epstein-Barr, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, Hashimoto's, brain tumors. I used to have a number of surgeries. I have two discs in my neck. My body was breaking down. I had no energy. I was in bed, literally in bed for six months, could not get out of bed.

My whole body was fighting back against me because there's a lot of mental stuff related to this. I've done a lot of psychedelic work and kind of internal work that's a whole other podcast or story. But there was a lot there that was just truly unhealthy that I was doing to myself on all fronts. I was my own worst enemy and my body as a result turned against me.

Even though it was fighting for its life, you know, just it turned against me. And I think there's a lot of people out there in that position. You know, I was sleeping two, three, max four hours a night.

I was working up to 16 hours a day between work and school. I was taking these pro-hormones that were very toxic at the time, like very liver toxic. I was not eating healthy. I would eat sporadically. I would eat fast food, you know, all these kinds of things. Stress was off the charts. The way I would talk to myself was garbage.

I literally hated myself and gaslit myself to better results. There was no self-love. There was no self-care. There was no, you know, taking care of myself. It was push, push, push more, more, more, and whatever it takes at whatever cost. And it had a, it had a toll. It took a toll on it's my, my body and my brain.

And luckily, I survived it. Luckily, I was able to really, I went back to school that I got the education I needed, but not just education, but started looking into these things to improve my energy and metabolic health.

And that's where the ketogenic diet, eating paleo, fasting, looking at mitochondrial function, looking at immunity became passions of mine. And that's where I became fascinated with anti-aging in my 20s. A lot of this stuff was like how I got well. And then I saw like it was the same things that all these guys that were in their 50s, 60s, 70s were doing to live longer. And I'm like,

Huh, interesting. All these same things make better athletes, make better immune function for people that are younger. It's like, oh, well, that's interesting. There's nothing that's good for you in terms of anti-aging that isn't good for you in your 20s or 30s. I promise.

So like I took all that data, all that knowledge, all this motivation and inspiration from these guys that were trying to not die or live as long as they could. And I'm like, OK, I'm going to learn from all of this information and apply it now. And that's been my passion ever since. That's one of the biggest ways I stayed ahead of the curve is I was applying all of this stuff that was from this one group over here. And everyone thought it was novel and new.

that's a that's a really interesting like crossover or intersection because like yes i'm sure you were super passionate about like sports supplements specifically but now you've sort of like veered more towards like longevity sort of like health optimal like youth span like you said before would you say that's sort of

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I started out with my passion in sports nutrition because I grew up morbidly obese and really being bullied and a lot of other issues, again, psychologically that led to me really feeling deeply depressed, PTSD, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, etc. That's another part of my journey. But

You know, it's it sports nutrition was became a passion because I wanted to look good because I wanted the aesthetics of it. I wanted to look good naked. I wanted to attract the other sex. I wanted because I was looked over my whole life. I was picked last on the teams. I was laughed at.

I had girls that would laugh at me. I had teachers that would laugh at me. Kind of fucked up, to be honest. Like some of it, like it's really hard to get over. But, you know, now I think about where I'm at, but it took a lot of calibration through the years, a lot of deep inner work. But I changed my body radically through weightlifting, supplements, protein, diet, ketogenic diet, all those things. I was able to change my body

But I found that I went from, you know, disordered eating and body dysmorphia in many different forms. Like I went from morbidly obese to anorexic. I went from 300 pounds, which, you know, I don't know how much your listeners are American or not, but like that's like 140, yeah, 140 kilos.

I went from 140 kilos, 300 pounds to 150 pounds, 70 kilos. And I'm six foot two, six foot three. I think that's like 188 centimeters or something like that. I don't remember. And then I went to like orthostatic, like where I, you know, had issues with...

Eating for muscle, where I was thinking about muscle all day, every day. And it was really sad as well, where I would think six to eight times a day, I need my protein. I'm going catabolic. I got to prepare these meals. I got to have my drink. If I worked out and I didn't get the drink within 10 minutes, my whole workout's wasted. I would be angry. I would be frustrated. I'm like, I'd be literally in a panic.

screaming at people like I need the protein now you know it's just like this was just it was never through all these different phases of my body type I was never in a in a good place and so you know it took it really took a lot of deep inner work beyond the supplements but yes like that's where it all started with sports nutrition was the passion but you know like not even

Just finding out that muscle doesn't mean a whole lot that muscles anti-aging but functionality is everything. When I started digging into like the work of people like Paul check, when I started doing like really functional work, even prior to like what was the birth of CrossFit and some of these things like where, you know, your mobility, your flexibility.

Your ability to push, to pull, to have a vertical leap to, you know, like these movements that are natural to your existence. You know, there's a lot of things we're doing in the gym that are really from the 70s and Joe Weider and Arnold Schwarzenegger that have very little to do with the functionality and longevity of your life.

And I'm not saying that bodybuilding is bad. I mean, bodybuilding is awesome if that's your intention to build your body and to look good in a mirror. But it's a whole different thing if you want functionality and you want to have a great life or you want to be highly athletic or you want to be highly mobile. Those are different goals. That's all. So, like, again, I learned to evolve those goals. Yeah.

What I'm curious to learn more about, Sean, is, I mean, you've seen the sports supplement space evolve dramatically. You've seen compounds come and go. You've seen popular ingredients here and there. What's the landscape like at the moment? What is the terrain like?

In terms of, you know, these some of these new ingredients, how do customers perceive ingredients now? Are there certain buzzwords they look for? Are they? Yeah. What's what's the landscape like? That's a great question. I think there's a lot of buzz right now around peptides. You know, I came out with dilucine.

which is L-leucine, a dipeptide of leucine, and it dramatically outperforms regular leucine. And because there's a lot of people talking about bioregulatory peptides, BPC-157, TB-500, epitalon, you can go down the line of so many things. There's a lot of excitement, interest around peptides.

And even MuscleTech leveraged that in the name of their product that features dilucine, the peptide 185, has kind of a clinical look. So that's really interesting.

GLP-1 was all the rage and no surprise when I was at Supply Side West. And there is a form of probiotic acromantia that's associated with GLP-1. Obviously, we talked about before dihydroberberine is the most effective thing I know of. But, you know, cinnamon, Gymnema sylvestre, like some of these other compounds have been shown to increase GLP-1 as well. So,

We will be seeing probably more around GLP-1 as well as GIP. I think there's a lot of interest around these mechanisms of action, these pathways.

Along the lines of probiotics, I think you're seeing synbiotics or even psychobiotics. So synbiotics would be pre, a prebiotic, which is a, let's say, a short chain fiber that feeds the probiotics, the bacterial strains, the flora that would be in your gut or anywhere else in your body potentially.

And then so that you got the pre the probiotics, these actual strains and then post biotics, they're making the short chain fatty acids, things like butyrate, propionate and acetate. So that would be C2, C3, C4. And so, you know, you're talking about things that that there would together collectively be called a symbiotic.

And then psychobiotics, which I feel like the better term would be neurobiotics, but like it or not, it's psychobiotics. So those are bacterial strains that affect the brain function, cognitive function. As you know, it's the whole gut-brain axis that when you're even a fetus in the womb, at one point, those are actually together, and then they separate out.

Right? So it very much is a real axis. And when we look at neurotransmitters, the majority of the neurotransmitters are actually in the gut. You could actually make an argument

that the brain is the second brain and that the gut is actually more of the brain. And that argument could be made. And we're now seeing the gut more than, you know, when I was a kid, it was just digestion. And then maybe in the 90s, we started hearing a lot about immunity. Oh, that's where 70 to 80 percent of the immunity lies.

And then over the last 10 years, now we're hearing so much about depression and neurotransmitters and all these things that are happening in the gut. Even like your drive, you know, from like, let's say, related to dopamine, related to dopamine, acetylcholine, serotonin, like that could be deeply related to a dysbiotic gut.

So, you know, there's a lot there that we just don't fully understand yet. And just like there's leaky gut, there's also leaky brain. And so, yeah.

there's a lot that in this area that we're looking at. And then I would say nootropics has exploded. The term has kind of hit the zeitgeist, like where people now know that word. 10 years ago, if I said nootropic, no one knew what I was talking about. Maybe on a message board that you or I would be on. But if I talk to like

Joe at the barbershop and I said nootropic, they would be like, what is that? Now people are knowing this word. They're hearing the word. And it helps that people like Joe Rogan, going back to him and some of these podcasters, Tim Ferriss was big for that. Certainly Dave Asprey and biohackers are talking a lot about these things. But nootropic is a word that's now well understood. People are seeking out

And what's interesting is just 10, 15, 20 years ago, everything was about weight loss. And interestingly, we're fatter than ever. But I'm seeing weight loss be less of a focus. And look, with that one pharmaceutical that I was alluding to before,

It's supposedly as high as if you include the whole class of GLP-1s. It's as high as 15% of Americans are either currently on it or have tried it. That is a massive number. We're talking about around...

what is that 50 million 40 million like it's it's a lot of people so you could imagine what the money looks like around that and that's now the focus versus stimulants for weight loss that's a that's a lot of muscle mass lost across the population isn't it true and that's where yeah dilucine could like really have a lot of advantage as well as i actually think

You know, we're big fans of TSI here too. They distribute my parazanthine, my team's parazanthine called Infinity, which we can get to, but they have HMB, both the free acid and the regular form. And that is the ultimate anti-catabolic, meaning preventing muscle protein breakdown. And so the ultimate combination in my mind

And they've actually shown D3 optimizes HMB. So if I was going to put together my dream product for muscle, it would be dilucine, 60% more muscle protein synthesis, gram for gram overleucine, 86% more leucine in the muscle, 189% faster.

and then you add in HMB as the anti-catabolic to pair with the anabolic. You add in the D3 to optimize the HMB. Creatine, obviously, to protect muscle, to improve muscle strength and power. That's an incredible combination. Maybe if you really go in for the gold here, phosphatidic acid,

Now you've got like the ultimate course is probably like $100 product. But, you know, that would be the ultimate product. And that would be the ultimate way to protect and build muscle, especially as you age. And I think TSI has a great product as does NNB with the dilucine.

Do you want to, because paroxanthin is, I mean, I've spoken about it a little bit to my audience, but since we last spoke, I mean, it is exploded. You know, that particular ingredient is now in world famous products like, you know, energy drinks. I think you've got one maybe nearby. Yeah.

That one there. What is that one? The name? Life Cider. Life Cider. Parazanthine. It's Life Cider X. It has Parazanthine in it. Euphoric from MuscleTech, one of my absolute favorite products. The Update Energy Drink, a nootropic biohacking drink. Peak Performance has pure Parazanthine capsules.

I mean, there's a ton of products. There's some really great products out there. There's probably at least 25, 30 products out there right now. And I can tell you from TSI's booth at Supply Side West, they were jamming. There was some massive companies, I will say, like companies ready to drop a $20 million PO. Like there's some big companies out there that are looking at it. So, yeah.

This year's well 2025 is going to be a very big year, I think, with some, some big companies coming into the mix. So, Parazanthine, the brand name is Infinity. Parazanthine is a metabolite of caffeine. What does that mean? That means that when you consume caffeine as an exogenous supplement, meaning outside of the body,

that endogenously in the body, it's going to break down into three different things. It's going to get demethylated. Okay? So it's going to convert, you're going to remove one methyl group and depending on where it removes that one methyl group, which just means a hydrogen,

it's going to convert to either theophylline, theobromine, or parazanthine. About 70% of parazanthine converts into, or sorry, it's about 70% of caffeine converts into parazanthine. What we're seeing is that the majority of the population, about 60% of people are slow metabolizers of caffeine. That includes me. And the range is significant.

So it's anywhere from one and a half to 10 and a half hours for a half-life. That's a 7x difference. That's a huge range of bioindividuality. So that means you may have cleared it in a couple hours. I can have coffee and go straight to bed. Those people. And then me, I can have a Diet Coke at lunch and I'm not sleeping 10 hours later.

because I still got it in my system. And guess what? I'm still trying to clear it the next day. And we're seeing that most of the side effects are associated with caffeine. It's actually in plants to be toxic to insects. It's actually an insect repellent naturally. What we see most of the benefits are from is paroxanthine. There's very little benefits coming from theobromine. Theophylline is a potent bronchodilator that has a lot of side effects.

including like arrhythmia and anxiety, et cetera. It's like kind of like the worst side of caffeine, but even more. And paroxysm, we don't see those side effects. We don't see the brain fog, the anxiety, the agitation, the sleep disruption. And we see all the benefits without the bioindividuality. We all tend to experience it the same way. It's all about three, three and a half hour half-life. So people that have it in the evening and go work out end up getting a great sleep.

They actually see improved HRVs, where with caffeine, we see worsened HRVs. When people continue to use paroxanthine, we see improved results over time. With caffeine, we see worsened results over time. We actually see, like we're doing an e-gaming study where we'll have results coming out really soon, and I'm really excited about it. But we see that. We see that time effect where it gets worse over time with caffeine and better over time with paroxanthine.

And when we look at the preclinical data with parazanthine, we see improved glutathione and catalase decreased oxidative stress. We see improved serotonin, dopamine, acetylcholine, dopamine about 50% greater than caffeine. So that's that feel-good drive productivity. We see increased BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, more neuroplasticity.

We see decreased beta amyloid plaque. We see increased nitric oxide to the brain about 50% greater. If I was to tell you all the ways that the brain ages, less blood flow in the brain, less neuroplasticity, less resilience cognitively, more oxidative stress, increased beta amyloid plaque, right? Associated with Alzheimer's, decreased dopamine associated with Parkinson's and neurodegenerative diseases.

It's reversing all of those things. It's pretty crazy. So that's what we see is over time, it gets better and better. And we have a study where there's a 10K race with athletes, and we gave them a multitasking test that's quite difficult before and after the race. And when we looked at, we looked at caffeine, caffeine plus paroxanthine control and paroxanthine.

And this is one of the many studies where we looked at the combination, and the combination actually has worse results, certainly than control or than paroxysmthine itself, which performs the best. But caffeine is the worst of all scenarios, but caffeine plus paroxysmthine is kind of like throwing dirty water in your clean water.

So what we see is that there's a 23% increase in mental errors post-race. Makes sense. After the race, they make more mental errors than before the race because they're exhausted with caffeine. And when we look at caffeine and parazanthine, it's around 13%. When we look at control, it's around 8%. But when we look at

the paroxysm group, there was a decrease in mental errors post-race. They performed better after the 10K race because of the paroxysm, they decreased mental errors 10%. So then the delta, meaning the difference between the two is 33%, which is a massive difference. And so these are not the same and it's experienced very differently.

It's so much cleaner than caffeine. I cannot do caffeine. People like want to ask me like, what's 200 milligrams of paroxanthine like compared to caffeine? Is it like, you know, 150 milligrams caffeine? It's like, it's not at all. I couldn't take 100 milligrams of caffeine without feeling terrible. I can take 300 milligrams of paroxanthine and feel amazing. What I've found are the synergists for caffeine.

for parazanthine would be these other dopaminergic compounds. So I think tyrosine, N-acetyltyrosine, L-dopa, Makuna, you know, compounds like that. And then certainly L-theanine, if you want to go up with like higher doses combined with other nootropics. And then the cholinergics, things like alpha-GPC in particular, absolutely amazing to combine with it. So those are great synergists.

But man, like we're seeing, we're not seeing the habituation and adaptation effects. That's what I was alluding to before the e-gaming study that you see with caffeine. With caffeine habituation means that there's a physiologic dependence over time. So that's like, there's a rodent study with caffeine where after the third day, that rodent needed that caffeine to get to baseline to where you already are without any caffeine.

So it's this not only habituation, this physiologic dependence, but an adaptation effect where it takes more and more and more and you're getting less and less and less. And this is why we're not seeing this with parazampine. It works the same way for every single person every single time. We're not seeing the bioindividuality. We're not seeing the CYP1A2 gene difference. We're not seeing the adaptation or the habituation.

We're just seeing it work great at two or 300 milligrams every single time. Add to that, we're seeing that we had a study, a thermogenic study. We took the gold standard study that everyone uses on caffeine that looks at free fatty acids, glycerol, showing like liberation of fat, thermogenesis, and

and caloric expenditure. And what we saw was at 200 milligrams, paroxanthine is as good as, if not better in some categories than caffeine. So we're seeing that paroxanthine

is less a CNS stimulant, central nervous system stimulant with associated side effects of arrhythmias and blood pressure, heart rate and elevation and all these different things that you associate with that. And you're still getting the fat loss, the metabolism benefits. You're getting more of a mood lift

You're getting more of a, because again, you're lifting all those neurotransmitters. You're getting more blood flow to the brain. So you're like performing better. You're seeing less, less of the, I like to talk about the frazzle. Like you're getting, when you're talking paroxysm, you're getting more flow. When you're talking caffeine, you're getting more frazzle. And so it's the, it's the flow without the frazzle. And it's really the way to look at it because it's a completely different experience.

So paroxanthine, I really feel like it's one of those things that there's a lot of science here that I can go through. But like, if you try it, you get it. Yeah, definitely agree with the paroxanthine there. I mean, you've sort of alluded to the fact that, and I love what you said around, you know, caffeine is the frazzled state and paroxanthine is the flow state, which people are

People are desperate to achieve. People are really, really wanting to unlock that flow state because they know the implications on their productivity, their focus, their ability to ultimately... What happens to people when we look at consumers nowadays is they want that level of focus and flow. If you keep asking the question, why...

Why do you want more flow? Why do you want more focus? It's because they want to get more work done in a shorter amount of time, right? They want to be more productive. Then it's like, why? Because then I can earn more money. Why? You know, so I can have more freedom. It's true. Actually, Vishen has told me, I created a product called Focus for Mindvalley, Mindvalley States, and Vishen Lakhiani is the CEO of Mindvalley.

And he's a highly productive person. And he told me that he's gained like 60 to 90 minutes more a day to either work more or to just take 60 to 90 minutes off and still gets more done than ever. So you got to understand like most, I'd say 99.999% of us don't know like

ourselves to the degree to which Vishen knows himself, he would tell you that he's on the spectrum. This guy is a working machine. He is a visionary. He's a brilliant person. And for him to say he's gained 60 to 90 minutes back a day is a massive number because he's working very diligently all those hours every day. So

That's a game changer right there. Was that a pun, Sean? You said he's a visionary. Visionary. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Oh, man, that's incredible.

I mean, we could bounce between so many different topics and there's so much to cover. I mean, you've done such an amazing job as per usual at explaining and talking my language, which is so much fun. My audience would have understood hopefully most of what you were sort of alluding to with

changes in different biochemical pathways associated with these compounds, looking at the integration between longevity molecules and sports performance, muscle mass. I mean, you've done such an incredible job, as always, at breaking things down in such a simple way for people to digest. And so if my audience wants to

Connect with you. They want to like either hire you as a formulator. They want to use your ingredients They want to connect with you just on a personal level. Where can they do that? Probably best places is Sean Wells comm sh awm W ELL s I just got the new website done and at Sean Wells sh awm W ELL s on Instagram or probably that the best places and

We're about to hit 100,000 at the time of this. So like, that's pretty exciting. And the website's looking really good. I'm going to like go back. I remembered something I said incorrectly. I said orthostatic. I meant to say orthorexic. O-rexia is to do with eating. So orthorexia is when you're kind of like obsessed with when you eat and how you eat.

Anorexia I also had when I was literally eating 300, 400 calories a day, which is crazy. So also the other thing I want to say quickly, alpha GPC, we have that with NNB. It's incredible. It's called Genius Pure. We just got a new study where the only form of choline to show acute benefit nootropically.

we showed 108, depending on the dose, and 150% more focus acutely. And if you're talking about wanting to formulate a pre-workout or wanting to have an energy drink, all you should care about is acutely. So other forms of alpha-GPC, certainly CDP choline, usually takes like six to eight weeks to show any benefit. Alpha-GPC,

in the form of Genius Pure where it's not soy based, it is not on a maltodextrin GMO carrier like the other guys. It's a 90% concentration versus a 50% concentration like the other guys. So you can fit more in the capsule. This is just a much cleaner product and we're showing incredible results.

as a result and genius pure. So that one's been really exciting. Obviously, great in combination with the parazanthine and then dilucene, as I told you, like that one's just taken off like that. Those are the ones that everyone was talking about at the show. It was the the dilucene, certainly parazanthine with from TSI.

Ergothionine, which we talked about, I love the mitochondrial antioxidant, our Genius Pure Alpha GPC, and the GlucoVantage dihydroberberine were the ones that we were just getting so much feedback on. So just wanted to bring up all the highlights on this show with you and really appreciate you, buddy.

And can't wait to see you soon in the in the US of A and I'm very mad that. My friend Dustin that I brought on to get to gets to hang out with you in Australia and beat me to it. So.

I would love to see the beautiful place that you live, but I can't wait to see you in Austin. I can't wait, man. I'm looking forward to connecting with Dustin and hanging out with yourself at a conference and perhaps be speakers together. It's going to be absolutely awesome, man. Well, anyway, for those who've heard about the Genius Pure podcast,

I will be having a long form AlphaGPC Junius Pure video breakdown coming out on YouTube in the next couple of weeks. So for those wanting to know more about that one, they can definitely check out my YouTube channel for that. But otherwise, Sean, it was an absolute pleasure chatting and we'll certainly be keeping in touch.

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