Lukas Fisher Resheske joins the show to discuss sleep hacking, productivity biohacking, natural nootropics for performance, and peak performance.
Narrator: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary for you to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival Show is your family’s insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you’ll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.
[iframe style=”border:none” src=”http://html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/2820467/height/100/width/480/thumbnail/yes/theme/standard” height=”100″ width=”480″ scrolling=”no” allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen]
Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show. This is your host Jason Hartman, where we talk about protecting the people places and profits you care about in these uncertain times. We have a great interview for you today. And we will be back with that in less than 60 seconds on the Holistic Survival Show. And by the way, be sure to visit our website at HolisticSurvival.com. You can subscribe to our blog, which is totally free, has loads of great information, and there’s just a lot of good content for you on the site, so make sure you take advantage of that at HolisticSurvival.com. We’ll be right back.
Start of Interview with Lukas Resheske
Jason Hartman: My pleasure to welcome Lukas Resheske to the show. He is an expert on marketing and he runs a freelance agency where he helps people with internet marketing, social media, funnel design, etcetera. But that’s not what we’re gonna talk about today. We’re gonna talk about something today that probably will be his future business but it’s an area of great interest for him now and it’s become an area of great interest for me and that is the area that is quickly emerging known as biohacking. And I’ve been reading a lot and listening to a lot of podcasts and learning a lot about this in recent days and it’s fascinating.
So, Lukas is coming to us from Boulder, Colorado today. And, Lukas, welcome. How are you doing?
Lukas Resheske: Good, Jason. Thanks for having me on.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, well the pleasure is all mine. So, biohacking, what the heck is that?
Lukas Resheske: Biohacking is kind of a ubiquitous term right now. People are using it for all sorts of stuff. I mean, if you’re trying to get different types of sleep or get more productivity out of your day or eat right for a higher activity lifestyle, all sorts of stuff. So, biohacking for me means a couple of different things. So, on one level, biohacking is simply getting to a really high performance baseline. I think someone you’re probably familiar with and your listeners are familiar with is Brendon Burchard. He does a lot of work establishing a baseline productivity in his high performance stuff. But that’s kind of, for me, the baseline of productivity.
So, let’s see, your body is functioning well, you get good sleep and you seem to be getting the work done you want in your business, but you can upgrade yourself from there using all sorts of different techniques and best practices.
Jason Hartman: Good, good. So I was gonna say what is biohacking and is it legal? Hacking isn’t usually considered a legal thing, at least when it comes to computer hacking. So what this, this whole field is kind of a way to use what nature gave us and increase it and use it to its fullest potential, whether it be our physical body, our mind, our level of efficiency. There’s so many areas of biohacking. I guess maybe a good place to start would be to start with sleep since most of us spend a little less than a 3rd of our lives sleeping.
The first question is what’s the optimal length of sleep? I know it depends on your age and your level of activity. But I’ll tell you just personally my own problem. I have no trouble getting to sleep. I mean, my head hits the pillow and I’m asleep but I can’t stay asleep. After about 6 hours, I just naturally wake up. And as soon as I wake up, my mind starts thinking and I just want to get up and do stuff. Is that good or bad?
Lukas Resheske: Well, the next question I’d ask is do you feel fatigued during the day? Like, do you hit a wall at a certain time or do you feel like your brain is sluggish when you do that?
Jason Hartman: It’s not too bad. I feel pretty good mostly. I do exercise, I do eat pretty well. But I use caffeine, I use the most popular drug in the world, caffeine. I do about 2 or 3 cups of coffee a day.
Lukas Resheske: Okay. That’s actually on the low end of normal for a lot of people.
Jason Hartman: I know. I don’t think any more than that. If I do more than 3 cups of coffee, I do not feel good. I do not like it. I think caffeine’s one of those things that’s actually kind of good for you a little bit, but a lot is terrible for you if you ask me.
Lukas Resheske: From kind of the meta perspective, people in general, especially in our western society in the US, are getting way more stressed than the human body was built for. So, they’re getting bombarded with crazy amounts of stuff and they go and use stimulants like caffeine or other types of nicotine, things like that, and so their body is extra stimulated in addition to the stress. So, it’s interesting that you’re able to fall asleep right away because usually the product is insomnia from all that kind of stuff.
Jason Hartman: Well, that’s good to know. But my last caffeine consumption, it’ll never really be after about 4pm and if I go to bed 11 or midnight.
Lukas Resheske: Right. So, I guess the big thing then is if you’re feeling good after you get 6 hours, that’s probably what your body needs if it’s waking up naturtally. Now, if you’re waking up with an alarm and you feel super groggy and you have to hit the snooze or you brain fog up until around 10 in the morning, then there’s an issue.
Jason Hartman: Yeah. Okay, good. Well, I’m glad to hear it. I don’t use alarm clocks. They’re pretty much against my religion. So, that’s one of the great things about being an entrepreneur I guess – you can set your own hours. When you’re an entrepreneur, you only have to work half days, Lukas. You can decide which 12 hours you want to work.
Lukas Resheske: Exactly. Love that.
Jason Hartman: So sleep hacking, how do we hack sleep? I guess there is no exact right amount of time for sleep, right?
Lukas Resheske: Right. It’s very body dependent, body type, body size, things like that. People can train a lot as far as really intense exercise. They’re gonna require more sleep just because the repairing that the body does from that is done during sleep. But I’ve also seen professional bodybuilders. You might have heard of him – he’s one of the Onyx friends, AJ Roberts.
Jason Hartman: Oh, sure.
Lukas Resheske: Professional bodybuilder, I believe he only gets 5 hours a sleep a night and he competes with that.
Jason Hartman: The problem with this kind of an issue is you always have to ask yourself – there’s a principle or saying in economics – you can’t hear the dogs that don’t bark. In other words, you don’t know what might have happened if something was different, right? You only know what happened. And so with AJ’s example, you always have to ask yourself how much better would he be if he got an extra hour of sleep and nobody really knows the answer I guess.
Lukas Resheske: Right. And that becomes the question for personal performance – what do you feel best at and what are you trying to go for? And AJ’s an athlete. So, a big part of his life is training to be that athlete whereas somebody like yourself or somebody like me, we don’t have athletic pursuits that we’re actively pursuing – we’re just trying to stay healthy.
Jason Hartman: Hey, speak for yourself.
Lukas Resheske: Are you running a triathlon?
Jason Hartman: No, I don’t believe in long distance running. I believe in interval training. I think it is much better to go to a local high school or college and run around the track and do the 100 yard dash and then let your heart rate drop to, in my case, about 125 and then get it back up to about 165 and then let it drop and then do it again and again about 5 times. I think that’s a lot better for your body than running a marathon, but that’s just my opinion.
Lukas Resheske: I agree.
Jason Hartman: Although I must say I do want to say I have massive respect for people that can do triathlons, marathons, half marathons, because if I want to go 26.2 miles, I’m gonna do it in an automobile. And that is an amazing level of willpower to overcome the desire to rest and recuperate.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, I definitely agree with you on the intervals. For most body types, they’re the ideal way to train and it keeps you the healthiest.
Jason Hartman: And you can work out literally in 5 minutes a day, maybe 10. You’ve still gotta lift weights, do yoga, etcetera. But for just pure cardio, the interval will do the job.
Lukas Resheske: Right. I think it’s important, too, for your listeners and for everybody who’s trying to biohack, I think one thing you probably don’t notice is how number oriented you are. You know exactly what your heart rate is going to be when you recover and what it needs to be up to when you’re exercising. Part of biohacking is getting those numbers down and understanding what your body type needs and what works for you.
Jason Hartman: You know, Lukas, that’s a great point that you make. I have to tell you I’ve become a little bit obsessed with numbers and measuring stuff. And this is part of the quantified self-movement which I’m sure you’re intimately familiar with although we haven’t talked about it together. But I had my fit bit last year. I was really into that for a while. I didn’t think it was that great, honestly, but it was okay. It was interesting. And then now ever since Christmas I’ve been using the sleep cycle app on the iPhone. All these things have their limitations, but hey, they do give you some sense of what’s going on which is great.
Lukas Resheske: Right. What gets measured gets managed, right?
Jason Hartman: Yeah, great saying.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, that’s the biggest part of biohacking you would want to take away. You kind of identify the areas of your life where you want to improve. Say you’re not getting good sleep and you just feel foggy all day. Well, then it’s time to look at where your rhythms are, when you wake up naturally, all that kind of stuff, and start tracking those numbers and finding out what happens when you eat a big carb lunch, when you crash after that, when you have your last cup of coffee and when you fall asleep after that. The intricacies of biohacking are really important, but they’re not static. They’re not something that can be applied to every single person all the time. And I think that’s the big trick that a lot of people aren’t realizing. People say, oh, you just need to do this and you’ll feel this way. But biohacking isn’t like that at all. I mean, it’s more about learning what your body does and how it acts and manipulating that to reach a state of high performance.
Jason Hartman: Good. Good points. Okay, so give us some tips. We’re going to talk about several areas here, but sleep hacking, measuring. In every part of area of biohacking, measurement is important. So good – what else after we measure?
Lukas Resheske: So, measuring is extremely important. If you’re gonna sleep hack, you need to first identify what the problem is. So, what I’ve noticed for people for when they’re “hacking their sleep” is that they either have 3 issues – first issue is they can’t go to sleep, second issue is they wake up all the time during their sleep and the 3rd issue is they just feel absolutely terrible when they wake up. And all of those are individual issues that can be hacked. But they’re usually not existent in a vacuum if that makes sense.
So, if you’re having trouble falling asleep, there’s a lot of really easy things you can do that will give you a better space to fall asleep. One of those would be to reduce the temperature of your bedroom to 65 degrees or below.
Jason Hartman: That cold? I don’t keep it very cold. I live in Phoenix, so now this time of year just a sheet on top of me only, no blanket most of the night. And I just let it rise to 77 degrees – is that terrible?
Lukas Resheske: No, it’s not. I mean, if you’re sleeping fine with it, then obviously it works for you. But for most people, having it colder tends to knock them out faster – it’s like a tranquilizer. It might be a little bit uncomfortable when you first get into the bed, but we do fall asleep a lot faster when you have trouble falling asleep.
Jason Hartman: Yeah. Well, that’s not my problem as mentioned earlier. It’s falling asleep.
Lukas Resheske: Do you wake up during the night or do you sleep a solid 6 hours and then get up?
Jason Hartman: Yeah, 6 and a half hours mostly and just get up.
Lukas Resheske: That actually sounds about right. 6 and a half hours is an interesting number.
Jason Hartman: We always hear 8 hours.
Lukas Resheske: It’s funny actually – I’ve got a belief on that. But without going into a rant, the 8 hour thing came from one study way, way back when and people just blew it up.
Jason Hartman: Isn’t it interesting how things just get carried on.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, they just carry it along and all of a sudden the public agrees to it and then it’s fact. But that one study was, like most scientific studies, not exactly perfect. And it only took a small sample of people and it didn’t have a good range. And so the data there is not as conclusive as you would imagine. The reality of the issue is that there’s a lot of other studies out there that say anywhere from 5 hours to 9 hours, depending on your body type and lifestyle. And 5 hours is completely healthy.
There’s actually, interestingly enough, another study out there that says people who sleep 5 hours or 6 and a half hours have a 20% lower chance of getting cancer during their lifetime than people who sleep 8 hours or above. Again, it’s one study and it hasn’t been correlated yet with anything else, but it’s interesting to see different factors like that could be at play. Maybe the people who sleep less have a higher metabolism and therefore are less chance for cancer or something. But it’s important to look at the whole picture rather than just kind of accepting what has become common knowledge.
So, an interesting thing that I would recommend to people, especially your listeners, is to learn a bit about circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythm is just basically associated with the sun and everybody goes through it every 24 to 25 hours. And you have natural rises and falls in your hormones and it will help you track when you sleep best.
The next thing to track, in addition to your circadian rhythm, is your REM cycle. REM cycle is just what your body naturally goes through during a period of sleep. And an entire cycle takes 90 minutes. So, if you can time your sleep in 90 minute blocks – so, let’s say if you sleep for 3 of those blocks – well, now you have 4 and a half hours, right? If you sleep for 4 of them, you have 6 and that’s exactly when you wake up.
Jason Hartman: But put all together, I mean the typical thinking is that they should be back to back, these cycles. And I know about the get into the REM sleep and then come out gradually and all that kind of stuff. But the thinking is they should be back to back. But it’s interesting because I was reading an article about this maybe 2 months ago that talked about how we weren’t meant to sleep that way. And if you think of it from an evolutionary perspective, we’re back living in the caves, reading, number one, the paleo diet, but that’s sort of another discussion, and we’re living in the caves and it would be awfully dangerous to sleep for 8 hours at a time. A predatory could get you whether it be a human or an animal predator. But the idea was that we just take lots of naps according to this article.
It said it would be more like the way a dog sleep. My dog is sleeping now, but she’ll wake up and go for a few hours and then whenever she doesn’t have anything to do, she’ll just sleep for a while. And that’s supposedly the way humans were really meant to sleep.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah. From an evolutionary perspective, humans are polyphasic for sure, which for anybody who doesn’t know, polyphasic just means that you’re sleeping in multiple phases. Each of those typically, if you’re getting a full cycle, is 90 minutes. But this whole sleeping back to back kind of thing is interesting because when scientists actually study it, they notice that there’s this weird white space in the middle of those 90 minute blocks that just doesn’t belong there and doesn’t do anything. And it’s about 15 to 20 minutes in between each block. And the more you stack those phases next to each other, the more time is “wasted” not in those productive REM cycles.
So, I think that’s interesting about the monophasic sleep style is that you’re getting a lot of time that you’re still “sleep” that’s not being useful for you in any way, or at least no way that scientists can measure right now. But the problem is with our modern way of working and being and living our lives, it’s very difficult to adhere to a polyphasic sleep schedule because back in the day humans obviously were able to sleep in packs, have some person stay up and watch and things like that and you don’t get that luxury now.
So, from that perspective, it might be beneficial to try something called biphasic sleep. It’s known on the internet as the everyman cycle. And the everyman cycle is a core sleep block of around 3 hours at night, punctuated by two 30 minute naps or so during the day. And so it equals about 4 to 5 hours of sleep per day, but it mimics a little bit closer to what we were evolutionarily and it’s been shown to increase productivity on a lot of people. The problem is if you start skipping the naps during the day then you start turning into a zombie. So, it’s one of those things where for entrepreneurs it may be easier to structure your schedule around it, but somebody working a 9 to 5 or somebody working a job that requires them to travel all the time may not find it conducive to their lifestyle. That would be one way to hack your sleep if you want to get less and still have the same amount of productivity.
Going back to what we were talking about earlier to hack your sleep where if you’re still going to sleep in one block, how to make it better. Like I said, lower the temperature of your sleeping area to around 65 degrees if you can, shut off all sources of light when you sleep. And that’s getting as granular as your alarm clock, the little lights blinking on it, or your sheets being blackout sheets so you can’t see the street lights or something like that. It actually affects the hormones in your body when your body can sense light. So, that’s another way to do it.
And then sound is actually more preferable than light to sleeping. Like, it helps to have a little bit of white noise. And specifically having like a pre-sleep ritual that you go through every day is extremely important to letting your body wind down after being stressed all day.
Jason Hartman: Okay. So what kind of ritual?
Lukas Resheske: Any sort of ritual that you go through every time. So, it could be as simple as turning the computer off 30 minutes before you go to bed, brushing your teeth, getting a book out and dressing into your night clothes, something that simple. It could be complex. For me, when I’m working really hard during the day and I’m going hard for 12 hours a day and I just need to crash at the end, as soon as I realize I’m getting close to my “bedtime” I will take a melatonin pill that has a couple other natural supplements in it. I will turn down the brightness and temperature reading on my monitor about an hour before I start going to bed.
Jason Hartman: Okay, so let me recommend something for that. I use something called f.lux, do you use that one?
Lukas Resheske: Flux, yeah.
Jason Hartman: Well, it’s actually f.lux if you’re gonna search for it, and it’s a great program. It’s on all my computers. I have a laptop in the bedroom and then I have other ones. And so that is awesome, I absolutely love that. I only wish they had it for the smartphone. Like, I have an iPhone and that screen is just bright and blue. And you don’t want those blue lights I guess or the kind of blue one of these screens puts off. It’s bad to get you in the mood to be tired. And I’ve definitely found that lowering and dimming the lights in the house, they tell your pineal gland that, hey, it’s time to think about sleeping here and you get tired automatically.
Lukas Resheske: Exactly. That’s a lot of the biohacking stuff that you learn after a while, like the effect on light that it has on your hormones and how you act. So those are all really awesome tips.
Jason Hartman: Yeah. Do you have a good tip, a recommendation for what type of melatonin supplement you’re taking? Because you said it had some other stuff in it.
Lukas Resheske: I do. I can actually find it for you real quick and I will be able to tell you exactly what’s in it.
Jason Hartman: And let’s talk about hacking some other stuff, too. Let’s get off the sleep topic and we got a few other things I want to cover real quickly.
Lukas Resheske: Sure. I mean, I like talking about sleep the most because I think it’s the highest leverage. Most people, like you said, spend a third of their life sleeping. So, if you can hack that and make that more productive, then you’re instantly about a third better.
Jason Hartman: Good.
Lukas Resheske: But I agree – let’s go on to some other stuff. But I have the supplement here for you.
Jason Hartman: Alright, what’s it called?
Lukas Resheske: It’s just called Super Snooze Melatonin. It’s made by Sundown Naturals and it’s got all the important stuff like vegan capsules and all that, free of gluten and wheat. But a lot of the stuff that they put in there, they put in some calcium and magnesium as well. They have passionflower, chamomile, and valerian root in there as well. So, a lot of those natural calming herbs are in there and it promotes more of a relaxed state rather than slamming your system with simple melatonin which is obviously what’s excreted when you’re going to bed.
Jason Hartman: Right. Okay, good. So, moving off the sleep topic, thank you for telling us about that one. Quickly, productivity, biohacking, nootropics and peak performance.
Lukas Resheske: Sure. Alright, so you got the sleep thing down and you’re trying to amp up your productivity. One of the easiest ways to do that is to chunk your time using a Pomodoro Technique. Have you heard of that before?
Jason Hartman: Vaguely. It sounds familiar, but I can’t remember what it is.
Lukas Resheske: Okay. It’s one of the best productivity hacks I’ve ever seen. It’s a simple way of working where you work for a certain block of time called a pomodoro which is just Italian for tomato, and then you take a very short break – not a break long enough that you get distracted but a break long enough that you kind of step back from what you’re doing and don’t get tunnel vision. People try different pomodoros based on their personal working style – some people are more focused than others. But it’s important to chunk your time so that it’s effective in shorter blocks rather than trying to dedicate 4 hours to doing one thing.
Jason Hartman: So, basically this is interval training versus running a marathon.
Lukas Resheske: It’s exactly that for your brain – yeah, exactly. One thing I found effective is I used to do work on the phones. So, I would call people, making appointments, doing that. It’s grinding work. And when you do the pomodoro effect, you can focus on what you’re doing for say a 25 minute block and just bang out the calls. You don’t focus on anything else whatsoever. And you know as soon as your timer goes off that’s it. The phone’s off, the headset’s off, and you sit back, you relax, you go do a couple of pushups , you take a walk, you give yourself that 5-10 minute break.
And it’s extremely productive for intense work, especially if you’re writing, if you’re making calls, if you’re doing interviews, things like that. It’s very effective for the human mind to take that break every once in a while.
Jason Hartman: Alright, so I have a recommendation because, as we talked about sleep cycle and f.lux, there’s an app for that. And I use one called Healthier and it is by Less Apps – that’s the name of the company. And what it does is it goes on my computer since the vast majority of people when they’re working like that they’re working on a computer screen, and it will remind you to rest. And I did it for my eyes, Lukas, because my eyes I was just burning them up. And I’ve done it for years looking at a screen. And you’ve got to remember to look away. And it’ll remind you to rest between 1 minute and 20 minutes anywhere from every 10 minutes to 90 minutes. And what’ll do is it’ll give you a little tip.
So, what it does is it completely covers your computer screen. And of course most of the time I just click it and close it and get rid of it and go back to work, but at the very least it’s making me think about it. I’m reminded constantly to do this. And you look away from the screen and it’ll tell you, okay, for this break we want you to close your eyes. For this break, we want you to cup your eyes. For this break, we want you to go outside and get some fresh air. For this break, we want you to bend your knees in your chair at your desk. And it’s great. It’s a cool little app. It might be free actually or it cost nothing basically.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, that’s awesome. And if you can trigger the times to match your pomodoros, that’d be perfect.
Jason Hartman: How long is a pomodoro? Is it a certain amount? Is it 4 hours?
Lukas Resheske: The traditional way of doing a pomodoro is 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. And you do those just in blocks and then for every 4 pomodoros which is every 2 hours, you give yourself a 15 minute break.
Jason Hartman: Okay.
Lukas Resheske: So, 25 on, 5 off, 4 iterations and then a 15 minute break – that’s the traditional pomodoro. That doesn’t mean it works for everybody which means you have to test it and find out. I found that mine worked really well because it was grinding work and 25 minutes was just long enough for me not to hate my life. So, that works for me really well. If you match that with some focus style nootropics, for instance. . .
Jason Hartman: I just have to tell you before you go on, Lukas, there is a pomodoro app in the iPhone app store for $1.99.
Lukas Resheske: There is.
Jason Hartman: Okay, go ahead.
Lukas Resheske: So, yeah. And you can find any specific tool that lets you do it. I just use the timer on my phone but they’ve got apps, they’ve got actual kitchen timers that are shaped like pomodoros which is awesome. But if you match that with some natural nootropics then you can really sustain an awesome productivity pace for an extended period of time. I’m working with a client right now in my agency who is big into health and he basically teaches 45+ year old men how to be healthier. And part of his thing is he just grinds work on specific days. He’s also a medical student, so this guy is pretty darn productive and he uses pomodoros with what’s called a racetam nootropic and it’s natural and it doesn’t have a whole lot of the side effects that a lot of the pretty popular ones like Adderall or Modafinil have.
Jason Hartman: Well, Adderall is obviously a drug, and if you ask me a dangerous drug.
Lukas Resheske: Yes.
Jason Hartman: Probably a very dangerous drug. It’s mindboggling – I mean, just a note on the FDA here – I’ve done several shows, a few of them with Jonathan Emord who is an attorney who has won some landmark cases in the Supreme Court of The United States against the FDA. And the FDA abuses all sorts of things. They’re not all bad – they do some good work, too. But the drugs that they approve are probably a lot more dangerous than we ever know. I’ve done a few shows on my Holistic Survival Show about these school shootings and the shooting in the movie theater, and it’s like every one of these guys is on SSRI drugs like Prozac or Lexapro or they’re on Adderall, all of these things, and you never hear about that in the mainstream media – it’s just amazing. Because of course, who’s advertising on NBC, right, and CNN? It’s the drug companies.
It’s amazing. If you watch a half hour of TV, literally at times during a half hour you’ll see 9 drug ads. It’s incredible how drugged up our society is. It’s awful.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah. And coming from a biohacking perspective, you have to be really careful on the studies you read because the people who fund them and the people who want specific results are also the drug companies.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, of course.
Lukas Resheske: So, you have to be very careful on that front as well. Because you might be trying to educate yourself beyond what NBC tells you. And even then, they’ve got that semi-cornered. There’s always the whole Hippocratic oath, do no harm kind of stuff with those studies, but you gotta wonder why there was only a simple size of 15 people.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, right.
Lukas Resheske: And they got these crazy numbers that somehow support the drug that also paid for the study.
Jason Hartman: And it’s all how the study is set. That’s a whole show in and of itself.
Lukas Resheske: One of the nice things about it is most nootropics are not covered. Well, I say Adderall is a nootropic because it technically improves brain function in some ways. I would not recommend using it at all. There is another drug that I don’t recommend really but another biohacker, David Asprey. . .
Jason Hartman: Yeah, he has the Bulletproof Executive Podcast.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, the Bulletproof Executive Podcast. He’s a huge fan of Modafinil. It’s a military grade stimulant essentially and it was originally developed for overnight, fighter pilots on bomber missions so that you could stay focused. And it is extremely effective but it also has addictive qualities and also has stimulated type qualities. One thing I would recommend if you’re gonna work in the nootropics at all. . .
Jason Hartman: So Modafinil is what it’s called? Is that a prescription drug?
Lukas Resheske: I think it’s the generic name for a different type of drug. You actually can’t get it without a prescription in the US. However, you can order it from other countries via the internet.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, and then you never know if it’s real.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah. I would stay away from that. There’s a lot of fake Chinese stuff out there that has caused some issues. So just be careful.
One of the nice ones that is available very readily and is healthy and does not have a lot of side effects are what are called racetams. And there’s a couple different types of them. They give you a little bit more of a steady focus and not a stimulated focus. And they don’t come in as high of doses, so they don’t last as long which is really, really helpful if you’re just grinding out a specific block of work rather than if you’re trying to sustain an inhuman level of performance similar to like a hedge fund manager or stock picker or something like that where they’re working 20 hour days nonstop. Those are the guys who are taking Modafinil, Adderall, caffeine, maybe a couple other Colombian imported nootropics if you know what I mean. Those are the kind of guys that do that level of stuff.
Racetams would be what I would recommend if you’re interested at all in the nootropic game because they are, in my opinion, just better overall for health.
Jason Hartman: Okay. So, is that a prescription drug?
Lukas Resheske: No, it’s not. You can buy it off of Amazon.
Jason Hartman: Okay. So, I type “Racetam” into Amazon and I see a bunch of things come up. None of them are called Racetam but I suppose that’s an ingredient or it’s mentioned in the description somewhere. And there’s a NOW Foods Alpha GPC 300 mg supplement here for $22 with 4 star reviews. I have no idea what that is or anything, so cognitive support. You always sort of wonder if this stuff really works. I mean, of course, these companies can’t really make claims because the FDA will put them in jail which is a whole other subject I’ve done shows on, and that’s good and bad, too. But the problem is with these things that can’t be patented is that the drug companies never take up their cause because they can’t have the exclusive rights to them. So they may be very effective, but if you don’t go through FDA approval and you’re not like a drug-drug, then you can’t make a claim. It’s kind of like this catch-22.
Lukas Resheske: It really is. And that’s why a lot of the biohacking stuff, especially with nootropics, is very anecdotal. It’s just by people who have done it and had talked about it and have recorded the results and basically are a one man experiment. That’s the downside to biohacking right now. Biohacking is trying to circumvent or manipulate the body into doing things that it either wasn’t naturally set up to do or just has been beaten down by modern society to be not optimal at. I’m more on that side. I’m on the building the body up to where it was. And I think that a lot of these nootropics can help with that when combating things like constant stress, lack of focus, kind of like perpetual media induced ADD. They’re helpful for that, but they’re certainly not like military grade level stimulants that are gonna jack you up.
Jason Hartman: I think that these energy drinks and this whole what I call the caffeine culture but it’s really more than caffeine, it’s other ingredients also obviously, I think these people in 10 years are just gonna blow out their adrenal glands. I think they’re just not gonna have a response anymore because they’ve artificially jacked themselves up as you say for so long. Tell us about that, what’s happening.
Lukas Resheske: It’s already happening. There’s massive issues going on with people who have made like constant coffee a habit, people who are jacking their adrenal glands with energy drinks and stuff. I’ve had a guy that I talked with who is super young – I mean the guy is only like 21 years old or 20 years old. And he’s a double engineering major and he tries all this stuff and he burned himself out so bad a few years ago that he had to go to the hospital. And this is like a 20 year old kid who’s just doing energy drinks and trying some sleep hacking type stuff and he burned out his adrenal so bad that he had to take a semester off and go to the hospital.
Jason Hartman: So what do they do for him? How do they fix that? Or is it unfixable?
Lukas Resheske: No, it’s certainly fixable. The adrenals are pretty robust. What you have to do is basically quit cold turkey and do a lot of cleansing type stuff. He jumped into juicing. He did a lot of mineral type work which is a whole other podcast trying to get his hormones balanced and his internal vitamin mineral count balanced, things like that, just the stuff that you burn out trying to put too much caffeine. And it’s just a whole slew of things our society sets you up for where this constant go-go-go mentality is burning people out as young as 19.
Jason Hartman: Wow, that’s just terrible.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, it’s certainly not a long term issue which I’m sure it will be. Another story for you, I shouldn’t get off on tangents but I’m in the military as well and one of my sergeants had such a bad caffeine addiction for Monster specifically, the Monster energy drink, if he didn’t have 4 Monster energy drink a day, in those big old cans, he was non-functional as a member of the military. So, it was to that point where he was so dependent on that level of caffeine to just function as a normal human being that he couldn’t even do his job after like a day of not having that in the field. It was pretty bad.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, that is terrible. Well, Lukas, this has been a fascinating discussion on biohacking. And of course there’s more to it. Maybe we’ll have you back in the future to talk about it some more. But give out your website or any resources or blogs where you read this stuff that you want people to know about.
Lukas Resheske: Sure. My personal website is for the agency. Like I said, the biohacking things I do, I just do it for myself and talk to a couple of people about it. It’s LukasFisher.com and that’s the name of the website. And for resources on this kind of thing, I would say that The Bulletproof Executive is a really good primer for it.
Jason Hartman: My complete is it’s too long and too detailed. I’m like get to the point.
Lukas Resheske: That’s the main problem that I had with him. He likes to talk about how much he knows and not how much it helps.
Jason Hartman: It’s funny for a guy who’s really into focus he doesn’t stay focused. I get critical of myself for going off on a tangent but man, that really show is really. . .I just want the information and then I’ll go. Then I’ll listen to the next episode for more information.
Lukas Resheske: Exactly. He’s a good primer. He’s got a couple good pillar articles that’ll teach you a little bit about that stuff. Biohacking really is a holistic kind of activity. You can’t focus on one specific thing without noticing that other parts of your life affect it like exercise, sleep, all of it. If you get more interested in it and you have way too much time on your hands in my opinion, you can always go to Reddit. Reddit has an extremely prolific nootropic community and just biohacking community in general. If anybody hasn’t heard of Reddit, it’s reddit.com.
Jason Hartman: I hope everybody’s heard of reddit.
Lukas Resheske: I hope so. But you never know. And they’ve got all stuff there. So those are two good resources for you.
Jason Hartman: Alright, good. Well, Lukas, thank you so much for joining us.
Lukas Resheske: Yeah, Jason, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
Announcer: What’s great about the shows you’ll find on JasonHartman.com is that if you want to learn about some cool new investor software, there’s a show for that. If you want to learn why Rome fell, Hitler rose, and Enron failed, there’s a show for that. If you want to know about property evaluation technology on the iPhone, there’s a show for that. And if you’d like to know how to make millions with mobile homes, there’s even a show for that. Yep, there’s a show for just about anything, only from JasonHartman.com or type in “Jason Hartman” in the iTunes Store.
Narrator: Thank you for joining us today for the Holistic Survival Show, protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Be sure to listen to our Creating Wealth Show which focuses on exploiting the financial and wealth creation opportunities in today’s economy. Learn more at www.JasonHartman.com or search “Jason Hartman” on iTunes. This show is produced by The Hartman Media Company, offering very general guidelines and information. Opinions of guests are their own and none of the content should be considered individual advice. If you require personalized advice, please consult an appropriate professional. Information deemed reliable, but not guaranteed.
Transcribed by Ralph
The Holistic Survival Team
