Ronnie Landis: Greetings. Welcome to another edition of the Holistic Life Mastery Podcast. I’m your host, Ronnie Landis. This is where we dive deep into health, wealth, wisdom, and spirituality, and we tackle A wide variety of topics on human potential that are not covered anywhere else on the internet and, uh, What an incredible episode that we have lined up for you today.

I am so excited to share this with you. I haven’t been this excited about a podcast episode in a long time. And that’s saying a lot because every single episode that I do, Um, Especially recently, I have been extremely excited about. They have all been potent, powerful, nutrient dense, with a wide variety of life changing perspectives and insights.

This one is one for the history books, quite literally. I just got done listening to the entire two and a half, Hour recording between me and a man named Mark Effinger. Mark Effinger is the formulator and the CEO of a company called Nutopia. And if you’ve been listening to a lot of the past episodes, you know that I have.

I have joined forces with a company called Newtopia, which is absolutely the best nootropic brain supplement and cognitive optimization supplement company in the world. Without a doubt, by far. And me and Mark have become friends over the last however many months, particularly when we connected on this podcast and through our relationship with his business partners and my good friends, um, Wade Lightheart and Matt Gallant.

I’m just taking a moment to pause here because we go so deep into this episode. I mean, we covered the full spectrum of human optimization. brain health, cognitive performance, mental health, addiction, recovery. We went really deep into spirituality and both of our perspectives on God and that relationship that we have.

That’s more towards the end, the last 30 minutes of the conversation, we go into how to state change, meaning how to change your mental and emotional state and how to access your unique genius, your innate intrinsic genius that exists within each one of us. But it’s state dependent, depending on the state of mind and the emotional state that you currently reside in, that is going to determine what kind of thoughts, insights, perspectives, and what skills and capacities manifest themselves in your lived experience.

And that’s one of the most amazing things about the Newtopia products is that they are selective state change modalities or mechanisms. I should say tools is the best way to say that. They are tools for how to pre select the mental and emotional state that you want to tap into. And that’s why I love them so much.

And they have been such an incredible arsenal in my personal repertoire. And I recommend them to all my clients, all my audience and my following everyone in my life. Um, I just, I’m getting everybody on these products cause they literally are changing. They’ve changed my life for sure. And they’re changing so many people’s lives.

But it’s really fascinating to actually talk to the formulator, the scientist, who is really actually like a real life Willy Wonka of nootropic brain supplements, if you can imagine that. And as you start to listen to this episode, and you listen to the dialogue that we have, it’ll be very clear what I mean by that.

This man is absolutely a legend, a polymath, which means somebody who’s spe who specializes in studying multiple disciplines. So he’s a multidisciplinary and I would even say multi dimensional genius. And he’s also incredibly heart centered. Like this was one of the most fun, entertaining, um, uniquely nuanced conversations that took many different shapes and forms and went into a lot of different areas, but it’s incredibly fun.

This is one of the funnest episodes I’ve done in a long time. And I know that it’s going to take you on a journey and you are going to learn so much about so much. And by the time you get to the end of this episode, your heart will be more open. Your mind will be more illuminated. Your sense of connection to the divine, to the source of life, to your source, to the magic and the mystery of this life will be illuminated, expanded, and Something magical is going to happen for you by listening to this and you’re going to come out of this with, um, just a, you know, just a new perspective on life I imagine.

So I’ll leave it at that. That’s my little intro for this episode. I’m really excited for my continued partnership and alliance with both Newtopia and Biooptimizers. If you want to learn more about these companies, you can go to www. newtopia. com. The link is in the show notes. You can look over all the products that I have in the links and use the coupon code LifeMastery10 for a discount and you can also go to BioOptimizers.

com Again, the links are in the show notes and whatever you decide to purchase use the coupon code of LifeMastery10 and one of the cool things about this company is that they have a 365 day money back guarantee I And I can guarantee that you’re probably not going to end up using it, but it’s a cool thing to have because there’s a quality and performance assurance policy with that.

And, uh, these products have been life changing for me and every single person that I talk to who’s used them. And it’s just something really, really special that I’m grateful to be part of. So again, go to NewTopia. com and or BioOptimizers. com. The coupon code is LIFEMASTERY10 and enjoy this legendary conversation between me and Mark Effinger.

Mark Effinger: Don’t you love her voice? It’s half, it’s half robot and half like cool chick. It’s kind of the direction we’re going.

Ronnie Landis: Mark Effinger, welcome to the show. 

Mark Effinger: So good to be here, Ronnie. Thank you, brother. 

Ronnie Landis: Yeah. Yeah. It’s an, it’s absolute pleasure. And like I said, before we hit record, you know, I’ve been looking to, I’ve been looking forward to this for some time. I got introduced to you and your work through your company, Newtopia, which anyone that’s been listening to my podcast the last month and a half knows who Newtopia is.

They know about the products. It’s been in almost every intro so far. And I’m really close friends with Wade Lightheart and Matt Gallant. Um, they’ve been both colleagues and peers and Wade’s been a big brother of mine and a mentor for many, many years. And, um, there’s so many cross connections. We were just talking about our mutual friend and peer, Josh Trent.

Um, Ben Greenfield’s also another close friend of mine as well. I’ve been on his podcast and then I found you on his podcast and, and Rosie Acosta, who’s also a friend and just a lot of little trickle seeds along the way, as I went down the Mr. Newt’s Newtopia rabbit hole. And, uh, Yeah, there’s a little bit of a rabbit hole for me to get you on the show and uh, I’m so happy I did and we’re here.

So welcome. 

Mark Effinger: Oh, thank you so much, man. So funny you say that. Um, Ben had just heard a whisper of a new beta product that we’ve been developing and he texted me. He goes, dude, I thought I was on your early list. 

Ronnie Landis: Yeah, yeah, I, I, I assume that’s probably the same one Matt gave me a little bit of a whisper to as well.

We won’t disclose that unless, unless you want to. But I, my first question is what new topia stacks are you on right now? 

Mark Effinger: Oh, it’s funny. So brain flow is always kind of a go to for me. And then upbeat, which I couple those two together because I get a nice long flow of acetylcholine and a little tiny bit of dopamine with this nice serotonin thing going on.

And then there’s about 10, 000 IU of D combined between the two of those that, um, really keeps me going. So yeah, that’s my, that’s my stack. And then of course, of course, um, it wouldn’t be proper for me to not have a little bit of power solution sitting on the sidelines, or if we ever decide that, um, And I expect that you will get me into mental fatigue mode.

So I, as you press, as you press the gears on this. And so, and then I’ve got some color genius that was just made up for me, some chilled color genius. 

Ronnie Landis: Very cool. And if you’re watching on YouTube, they’re in standard, uh, laboratory beakers, of course, how 

Mark Effinger: fitting it is. Yeah, yeah. It’s only appropriate. Yeah.

This is, um, this is a new product that we’re doing right now. So I’m doing flavor testing for my, uh, Flavorist chastity. And, uh, she, she will, it’s so funny. I’ll be in the middle of a, I could be in the middle of a podcast. I could be in a super serious discussion with Matt or whatever. And suddenly I’m brought in what looks like a flight of beers.

And then I’ve got to try to make my way through it. And, uh, it’s great. So I don’t want to do a little Xander juice. Nice Xander juice. Right. To get the GABA going. 

Ronnie Landis: So at some point in the conversation, I do have some time allotted for doing an actual sweep of the exact products and the mental and emotional state selection, which is one of the most interesting things about it.

And so, so we’re going to get there. We’re going to go through some of the, the most interesting products and how you can select your mental and emotional state and the function. So let’s get started. that you want to address for the day. That’s one of the things that I love the most, but we got some, we got some territory to, to cover.

I want to build with you, cause this is such a unique opportunity to be able to have you in a two hour window. Um, so let’s just start here. Why like why brain supplements? Like what got you into this field? 

Mark Effinger: It’s a two part. It’s a three part answer. Um, I read a book from Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw back in the 80s on life extension.

I was already, um, when from youth, by the way, here’s my Here’s the chemistry set I got when I was six years old. Oh, so, and, um, and so I, I had this inherent, like interesting chemistry and electronics and high voltages and, um, uh, all kinds of weird technology stuff from the time I was very young. I built my first radio at five and a half, built my first laser at nine and a half.

So I had this, this kind of geeky thing happening in the sixties and seventies, which means I’m an old guy. And, um, Dirk Pearson, Sandy Shaw wrote this book on life extension. They were actually the founders of life extension, which is a company well known for their supplements and, and their research. And, um, that kind of piqued my mind to wow.

There’s probably some stuff I can do besides being an athlete that would maybe enhance my performance. Always loved doing cognitively challenging things. What if you’ve ever met somebody who in the middle of a conversation with My head hurts like, like they’re probably, they’re trying to process too much stuff and they’re, they’re just not used to riffing like that.

Um, yeah, I’m, I went the other way where I was like, that was my jam was if I wasn’t going to play competitive tennis or motorcycle road race or do free climbing up Yosemite. Um, what I wanted to do was riff with somebody in a really deep conversation that went down all kinds of rabbit holes. So in the early nineties, I had a, I had a essentially a health crisis.

Um, as a result of a, of a drug that I was a test, uh, a test case for back in the mid eighties called Accutane and Accutane had poisoned me and it remained in my system. I didn’t realize even after being, I, like I lived in the health back of a health club when I started my first company back in 1986 and I was a, you know, pretty dedicated athlete.

Um, but 1993, um, I, I got up from my desk in my office. I walked into my wife’s office, she did all our admin and, and buffered me from the attacks of customers. And, uh, and I said, honey, I, I don’t know, I’m, I’ve been staring at the screen for three or four hours. I don’t know what client I’m working with. I don’t want to know the project I’m on and I don’t even know what day it is.

And it just felt like, you know what I mean? And if you’ve. Anybody in the entrepreneurial realm who’s ever worked 24 seven for years, trying to find your footing and figure out what the hell you’re doing and find the limitations. Cause we don’t often understand the bookends that we need to put on our lives.

Cause business will business is a, is a, is a, you know, another being that you’ve got to feed and water and exercise daily. And it will take as much as you will give it. Wow. It doesn’t have.

So, yeah, so that, that was kind of how that rolled. Um, 

Ronnie Landis: you know, you know that gig, right? Oh, 100%. I’m still, I’m still, that’s, that’s my, as you’re talking, I’m thinking that’s my, my core challenge in life is business. Not because I’m bad at it necessarily, but I’m not really money motivated. I was raised as a martial artist since the age of four.

And so I’m, I’m very. Psycho physically centric, meaning my entire upbringing was about physical and mental mastery. So I have all the attributes to be a great entrepreneur, but I’m not a prototypical business builder. So sitting on my computer is actually my great challenge, which is why your products are so useful and helpful because I’d rather just be in my body.

I’d rather be out there training. And, and, you know, that’s, that’s something that I think a lot of athletes can relate to. What I’m hearing from you is you also have that background. Um, so to be able to transfer that mental energy to something that’s not really physical and you can often get in your head, um, and then all the stress and cortisol and all that stuff comes along from it.

That, that for me is like my core challenge. 

Mark Effinger: That’s so resonant. Yes. Um, for me it was, uh, so I was a competitive junior tennis player. And then, um, I, I joined the military to save money to start a company. Like my sole purpose of joining the Air Force was to do that. And, um, and I signed up as an OSI agent and I ended up being a jet aircraft technician in the end.

So pretty interesting journey that I had there, but the, um, Um, the athletic part of it was so deeply embedded. I chose a house off of the air force base so that I could ride my bicycle to and from work every day. My goal was to stay above 30 miles per hour. So I would blow past stop signs and stop lights and anything, um, is I, is from my house to the base, the five miles I needed to be above 30 miles an hour the whole way.

Um, right. And, and then, and I would ride back to lunch from, you know, during lunchtime, I would ride back to the house. I would make myself very specific meals. I was very, very disciplined in what I ate, partly because I made no money. Well, it was shit pay, right? So I was like, my first paycheck was 452. Um, and that was a full month pay.

And then, uh, and it incremented up by the time I left the air force six years later, it was 998 and 21 cents or something like that. I still have that last check. Um, and so, yeah, so that. That thing that you and I have have done was, you know, the biggest blessing in it is that we Kind of can outwork anyone.

Ronnie Landis: Absolutely, 

Mark Effinger: right? That’s a superpower. The challenge is we use brute force and uh, rather than going, okay, hold it. Let’s back off a second. Let me get a 30, 000 foot view of this situation. I’m trying to, to work in and what would be the most systematic process driven. Not that we’re dumb in that. We have a tendency to build process, just like doing Tai Chi, you’re building movements around, right on the modeling of other movements.

Speaking of which in, in later days, in 2000, my, I had a little startup that was acquired and I, and I became, um, the chief marketing officer and fundraiser for a company called e agency. And, um, my ADHD was at its all time peak, during the dot com revolution. I had just. Um, we had just finished the fund, we basically raised money and then spent it for a thing called, um, techhost.

com in Newport beach, California, where we were an incubator that, that helped launch 522 companies. And so, so we were, you know, during the. com craziness, right? And while I was doing it, so when we, we finally, you know, the way you do a fund is you spend it, then you go back to the investors and, and they say, well, we don’t know if the internet’s going to be a long lived thing.

So we’re not going to, we’re not going to refund the rest of this. They go, okay, cool. This, um, uh, this, one of my clients was this company I was working on for free and they ended up acquiring me and my, and my technology. And so it did this thing called e agency. The way that I was able to address my ADHD was I would watch pirated episodes.

Thank you, Napster. 

So 

I would watch pirated episodes of, um, of Kung Fu, David Carradine and his classic TV series from the seventies and somehow watching him Um, in his just being chill when the whole world was, was about to try to beat the crap out of him. And instead of just being violent back, he would use Kung Fu, which is a great martial art in order to, to kind of like.

Like, um, uh, in judo, you use the, the weight and movement of others to be able to execute in Kung Fu, very similar. Um, but the moves are very animal like in terms of modeling, um, animal behavior and the smoothness. And he would, he would take somebody, uh, you know, and this is all, this is in the old West and, um, and he would, he would like.

Take somebody and he would just rotate their shoulders and you’d put him through a fence, um, you know, between two poles of offense and let him go. And so they weren’t hurt. They were just stuck. And he was just this amazing martial artist. He really truly was an amazing martial artist. Um, and, and that was enough watching a half hour episode of that was enough for me to settle my parasympathetic nervous system.

And go from being agitated and flying all over the place to being highly focused for about four hours interesting state modeling, um, by watching somebody else do it right. And just putting yourself in that space. And, you know, I think, I think that’s a really powerful place. You must have that experience on a pretty regular basis being, uh, uh, you know, a hardcore martial artist and somebody with that kind of experience.

Ronnie Landis: Well, it’s interesting that you mentioned that because I’m not going to go into my whole story, but on podcasts, I, I, I always lead with the fact that when I was four, my earliest memory is of Bruce Lee. I don’t remember the, where I was the scene. I just remember the iconography and the imprintation on my consciousness of that superhero in human form.

And it was modeled an but a real living archetype, you know, I was born in 85. So it was about Um, eight or nine years after he had passed, but it was a living, like, totem that was imparted into me. And so it was like a North star. And then, you know, like Donnie Yen and Jet Li and Jackie Chan, and I grew up watching all those movies.

So what you’re saying is very real. Like. It modeled an energetic transference that resonated so deeply with me that it brought those particular like stoic qualities out when that wasn’t modeled in my environment. The people in my environment were not representing those qualities. So that’s a very interesting point.

Mark Effinger: Funny, you just, you just sparked the Ryan holiday, kind of reflection there on the, you know, the stoic. It is interesting how, um, In, in successful business, you find it’s all about leverages, right? Find a lever, find a tool to dramatically increase the amount of output from a smaller amount of input. And whether that’s the economic advantage of, of a product that costs you 10 to make, you can sell for a hundred and, and, and the market thinks that’s a value.

That’s really great stuff. We see that in everything from the new movie that just came out air. Um, Yeah, about there’s a, there’s a fascinating book. I highly recommend your listeners read it. If you’re interested in how products are disseminated into the marketplace. Um, there’s a book called the diffusion of innovations and one of the, and it’s a, it’s used in Stanford business school.

It’s used in NYU and, um, Scott Galloway, I’m sure prof Galloway has, uh, shares it with his crew there at NYU and, and on his podcast, but, um, the, the premise of the book is You very few products or ideas ever make it from, from Mon Pai Amber up to the, the highest level of billionaire. They usually start from Elon Musk and they go down and right.

And one of the models they use and it, the book is renewed every couple of years. It’s right. So it’s on, it’s like 12th or 13th printing, um, and they refresh it with new stories. But. It goes into the science of how the, how we disseminate ideas and products. And one of the first stories, and it is a story of Michael Jordan and the Nike air.

And, um, when some of the things that actually propelled it into fame was the fact that in Chicago’s Cabrini green ghetto, the, the projects, the most dangerous projects in America at the time back in the mid eighties, um, I was people killing. You know, these kids killing other kids to get their Nike air, right?

Air Jordans. And that’s a very negative story that also helped become a catalytic. Propellant, um, for the success of this, this brand, which became, obviously this is the biggest economic boon that that company had ever had. Um, and if you ever get a chance to read swoosh and shoe dog, those are the two books, the first one was unapproved by, uh, by Phil Knight and the second one was of course, you know, edited by Phil Knight.

So, um, but there are two different angles on the same company and they’re great, especially if you go see that movie. And if you’re business oriented, um, or just curious about how life evolves around you and you kind of are watching things and you think, Oh, that’s the way things are. This is how you to better understand not only how things are but how they got to be there In the first place when we thought it was just kind of this automatic stuff that happened outside of us We had no idea.

So anyhow great great book. Um, Yeah, stoic. Um So so in that in that process, I have a question on this by the way So you and and bruce lee i’ve i’ve got in fact, hold on a sec. Let me see. Hold on just a second You Of course,

Ronnie Landis: this is going to be really good. Everyone.

Mark Effinger: All right. So Kareem Abdul Jabbar was a client of mine for many years. Wow. And one of the gifts he, so his manager, um, Deborah Morales would make sure that I got a gift from him. Um, when we were doing projects. And one of the gifts, my, my, my employee, my, I have an incredible group of employees. They just organized my office for me, which means I have no idea where anything is.

But one of the images is Bruce Lee with his arms out and Kareem behind him with his arms out. It’s a great, great shot. And, um, from game of death, from the game of death movie, that was a classic. I’m sure you’re aware of that one. 

Um, 

but yeah, and it’s signed by him. It’s, it’s, it was my birthday present that year.

So really sweet. Um, but yeah, I think there’s a. There’s a thing that happens from the discipline you learn in martial arts that directly applies to life, to health and business. And that is the, the reflection and the visualization, visualizing a kata, enacting the kata, experiencing the kata, feeling the kata, right?

Breathing the kata. All of those are super critical things to the growth and success of your mastery of the art. And the same applies to our health and, and the wisdoms that we pick up, you know, Ryan holiday just came into this conversation, uh, involuntarily, but, uh, I’m sure you’d appreciate it is when you start taking a look at the amount of energy that we expend in an effort to.

As Jackson Brown put it between the longing for love and the, and the struggle for the legal tender. Right. Great, great line from, uh, the pretender was the name of the song in the album. I great, great old album proof that I’m old too, but we put so much, we commit so much of our lives to, to, um, trying to make worthwhile relationships.

And trying to make, to bring ourselves to an economic position where money is a secondary thought, not the primary reason for being. And at the same time as entrepreneurs, we have this, like, I, by the way, I’m, I’m much like you. One of the greatest blessings of my life was Matt Gallant, the, the, and, and Wade Lightheart, um, finding me building.

Custom wild nootropics and going, Hey, we, we like the way you, we like the jib of your, you know, the cut of your jib. Um, we think you might be one of us. Let’s go play together and see in the same sandbox and see if we like each other. And because I, not that I don’t give a shit about economics. I do. I like wealth creation and I like, um, I like all the things that come with that, all the good things that come with that.

Yeah. And I’ve had some really successful liquidity events and, and this is my 18th company. So, um, I’m no, you know, I’m no junior to this event, but I, what was really refreshing was meeting two people and then the expanded team with, uh, Andy Wilkinson, our COO is an incredible heart and soul. Um, and meeting these people that, Absolutely valued the economics of business and that what it could do for you, but more so valued the human spirit and experience and the ability to use this instrument, this economic instrument and this health, you know, this thing that we do to create a mission and vision that was much bigger than the economic outcome.

Right. Yeah. And it’s almost that thing of, you know, Do you know, do the right thing and, and, and you know, the economic will come, you know, the economies will come to you. Um, and I think that’s, this is a, this company is a pure, um, it is a pure manifestation of that belief system. So yeah. Yeah. All right.

Sorry. I pulled us into a tangent. 

Ronnie Landis: It’s a perfect setup. And, and I mean, really what, what I’m hearing being conveyed is the heart and the soul of where this all comes from, because we could easily sit here and talk about nootropics and brain supplements and in health products and in a general conversation on health.

And there’s a million thousand of those, but really what is the point and the purpose behind it? And that’s really the heart and the soul. And that actually brings up a good setup for some of the topics I want to get into, which are very technical and practical, but the heart and the soul behind it is important.

One of the things that I’ve been teaching for the last 12 or 13 years as a holistic health practitioner, nutritionist, and just like human optimization specialist is that if you’re going to do any health protocol, nutrition strategy, fitness, workout routine, even entrepreneur in endeavor. What is the point in the purpose?

In other words, am I just trying to get healthy just to be healthy? What is the goal? Where is this diet or this supplement routine leading me? What do I want to do with it? Um, you know, what is the purpose behind it? Where do I want to go with this? Where do I want it to take Um, the intentionality behind it, in other words.

So what I’m hearing from you is that you’re laying a foundation for what the intention is and what the heart and soul behind it is. And then just the form and the function is the actual manifestation of the, in this case, the products. 

Mark Effinger: Yeah, absolutely. You, um, I see obviously, um, so our, in our, our products that we make, not, this is not a pitch.

This is an insight is, um, we do customize nootropics. We do customize brain nutrient stacks, whatever they’re called stacks, right? So that’s the, that’s kind of the product output of nootopia. But the really interesting thing is because all of them are custom, they’re personalized to each individual, every capsule, every drink, every powder, every spray, Is made by a human being in a laboratory who looks at your profile of who you are, what your age is, what your sex weight, right?

Height. What, what kind of exercises do you do? What kind of training do you do? Um, what kind of foods do you eat? Are you ketogenic, right? Are you, you know, what, what are you pescatarian? What are you? Um, which is not a religion, by the way. Um, and, and then what are your goals? What do you want to accomplish?

Where are you and what we found in that we’ve got, we’ve had, we have tens of millions of data points now from customers since the beta tests that I was doing in In 2008 when I first started this to now and what we found is that there are certain people that are running for their life They’re just trying to outrun the you know The effects of aging and the effects of maybe cancer or some disease that they’ve been right or some Um, you know, biological condition that they were subject to, um, or some drug condition that they were subject to.

So those are some of them. And then some of them, the, the, you know, the kind of the, the cream of the crop, the top of this are, and the first adopters of our products, speaking of which, um, you know, Sean Fanning was one of my very first customers, the founder of Napster. Um, Sean Parker was the next one, uh, the, you know, former president of Facebook.

So, um, and they, they were like, shh, this is my secret weapon. Um, but cool guys, really cool guys. And what, what I learned from that was that there was a class of individual out there who understood that one is that they were able to, this goes back to economics, by the way, they were able to set themselves up financially at one point and aggressively attack life.

To the point where they’re going, you know what, I’m, I now, you know, I, I’m not, again, longing for love and struggle for the legal tender. I’m no longer struggling to try to keep up. Now I want to go to the next level. Brian Johnson, um, you know, a classic case, you know, in Venice beach now who’s doing the blueprint, right.

The, um, and he’s doing the life extension, um, age reversal treatment. Um, compound cost him 2 million a year to do a protocol to get him 5 years, um, to reverse his age 5 years. Um, but really cool, really, really interesting what he’s doing. I highly admire the dude. He sold his company for 800 million that, that put about 300 million in his pocket.

And he said, what could I do to make a great impact on the world? And what do I need the most? Well, I’m 45 years old. I don’t want to end up, you know, with creaky bones being 50 and, and wondering how the hell to get out of bed in the morning. And I think that we’re, when you, that, uh, that a significant portion of the early adopters of our product were people that said, I’m pretty good at what I do.

And I figured out how to kind of operate in life. I want to be a rockstar. Now, I want to go from, from optimal to super optimal to superhuman. And as we grew that group of people, as we, as we fostered that group of people, and as they, the word of mouth started spreading. We started getting into another group of people, which were people that were working at suboptimal and they wanted to get to optimal.

Ronnie Landis: And that’s going to be the general public, 

Mark Effinger: right? Exactly. Absolutely. Every, you know, you wake up and you go, I just don’t feel as sharp as I did when I was 16 or 25 or whatever the, how many of the age range. And so they go, you know, what, what. Am I doing that? They don’t typically don’t go. What am I doing different now?

Because people don’t, they typically don’t think that deeply. They go, why do I feel like shit? Why do I need coffee to get me out of bed? Why do I need, you know, right. It’s all of these, um, instead of going internal, maybe meditating a little, maybe journaling, maybe doing some morning pages. Maybe prayer or whatever happens to be the thing where you connect with, you know, your, the greater consciousness and, um, or mentorship and doing those things.

And, and what they find is that, that they’re, you know, their habits have changed, but it’s like the frog boiling and they’ve changed. So, Slowly and methodically that they don’t even realize that they’re, they’re only, they’re only getting movement during the day for a very small portion. When you have to go and look at your Fitbit or your aura ring or your Apple watch and say, gosh, I got to go get 45 minutes worth of, of workout in the gym because I’ve been sitting sedentary all day.

When before, like me, I would ride my bike to and from my air force base, Four times a day at 30 miles an hour, I would then go run three to five miles and then it would go get in the gym and I would train on weights for another 45 minutes to 90 minutes. Right? And then my buddies would go, Hey, We’re going to, we’re going to block off some road.

You want to go road race or they go, Hey, do you want to go, you want to go hang glider? Hey, do you want to go, you know, climb Yosemite energy, right? Infinite energy, infinite activities, low responsibility, right? You had a very fixed deal going on, um, in, you know, military and those things and things change.

And so it’s really important to, to be present and to understand what the hell’s going on around you. And also to be proactive and take control. One of the things that I feel about nootropics, um, again, not a pitch, just an understanding is they are a power tool there. For us, we’ve written a book called sick to superhuman, and they’re a power tool to help you move from an area of weakness in you to an area of strength.

Or to make it from suboptimal or sick to superoptimal or superhuman and to get you to a position where you can reach those states on a demand. So if nootropics are the power tool, leveraging nootropics for state change and state optimization, that’s, that’s a power move, right? Right. So that’s what we want to be able to do with these solutions.

And part of that is taking stock of who you are. Like one of the things we give people when they go to, to Newtopia, our website is we, they take a neurotransmitter analysis. So really quick test takes about three and a half minutes and they just answer a bunch of questions. And that gives us a general idea of where your dominant neurotransmitters are, And where you’re subdominant, where you may be lacking in neurotransmitter activity.

Also, it gives us an orientation to your personality, not unlike a Myers Briggs test, um, or, or a strength finder test where you go, Oh, okay, I’m, I live, you know, I’m Andrew Huberman. I live on dopamine, right? Um, or. Or I don’t, or I’m a, I’m gaba centric. I’m the most chill guy in the world. I’m, I’m Tom Bilyeu.

And, um, you know, and so when you start thinking about these, these people, and the, again, these become the archetypes of the people that we admire and that we love and we’re, we’re interested in, and you can model those behaviors and then you can kind of dig into tools, whether it’s nutritional supplements, um, exercise.

I love what you, you know, I love, you know, Martial arts to me are just magic. Totally. Um, uh, Tai Chi has always been something I’ve had a deep interest in and I haven’t pursued until this year. And it’s, it’s that discovery of, and I’m, again, I’m an old guy, I’m 61 years old. So my interest in it is both the internal harmony that it brings.

The understanding of movement at a higher level as a competitive tennis player. I understood movement at a very high level, um, uh, around a very specific set of a pretty broad set of moves, um, and very creative set of moves, but this is, this takes it to another level. Um, and understanding those movements and how they actually having to discipline to perfect those movements and making them beautiful and making the flow from one to the other, um, is genuinely a powerful state.

Ronnie Landis: I got it. I want to piggyback on, on exactly what you just said about physical movement calibration, like turning something that is technically technically, but, but starts out clunky. Like we’re never good at something until we become good at it, which is also why. We end up quitting something before we’ve given ourself an opportunity to succeed because it’s uncomfortable.

Neuroplasticity hasn’t fully taken effect. We have a lot of conditioning in our mind, our psychology, our physiology. Certain things don’t come natural to us. So Movement patterns, for example, are going to be uncomfortable if you haven’t practiced them until they become beautiful. And that’s actually an amazing quality or a spiritual perspective on life, the alchemy of life of transmuting base metals into noble metals, base or shadow patterns into what we call like, like the light, essentially the beautification of the, of transformation.

Without getting too like esoteric or complicated, it’s it’s becoming becoming adept at something that you were once uncomfortable with. Right. And so what you just said is really interesting to me because now we’re talking about neurotransmitters, brain health, um, compounds and in life affirming behaviors that can support us in our, our, um, performance.

I’d love to taking that same concept patterns to thinking patt a beautification of our m most people don’t think a you’ll really appreciate wait to hear your perspec Our thoughts are like movement patterns, right? They’re not just random things that just arise in our, our mind. Just these thoughts that happen, some thinking patterns or thoughts are more graceful and beautiful and, and adaptable than others.

I’m curious what you think about that. 

Mark Effinger: I’m a hundred percent in. So I do, I use a, uh, an application called the Ziz PZI ZZ. It’s a Barna, a binaural audio source. Um, and it can also, um, it has guided meditations and unguided meditations, but essentially it has a signal path. What if people don’t know what binaural audio is, it’s basically you take a, um, a signal, a certain Hertz, and it can be music or it can just be audio tracks.

It could be white noise or pink noise. Um, and what it does, you’ve, you’ve got them shifted by a few Hertz. 5, 10, 15, 20 Hertz, um, one ear to the other. So there’s slight shifts. So you’ve got these thing about sine waves, a signal, a musical signal and audio signal as a sine wave to a certain extent, and if you shift those sine waves, you’ve got one instead of them sitting right on top of each other and amplifying the sound, you’ve got them shifted slightly.

So they’re off by a few Hertz, Hertz being bring, you know, cycles per second. And. When they’re shifted by that, by that point, what happens is in the middle of the head, if you got one in the left ear, one of the right ear in the middle of your head, you’ve got a central binaural audio. You basically have that the beat frequency is what it’s called.

Which is the compound frequency between those two. So you get this wave, wah, wah, wah, that’s in the middle of your head. That’s basically syncing up with the various alpha data, theta, or a delta theta, right? Gamma, um, waveforms that your brain is in the frequencies. Your brain is resonating at when you’re in different states, operating states, whether it’s complete dead sleep at, you know, one half to one and a half to three Hertz, all the way up to agitation at 46 Hertz.

And so in between there, you’ve got these different states that you operate at. Some are high wakefulness and awareness, some are deep focus. And so understanding how that works in your head is super important and you can do that like there’s certain songs, um, you know, in the, in the last dozen podcasts or so, um, often the podcast, uh, interviewer has said, what’s your go to book and I’m, I, as I’m starting my own thinking about the, about the podcasting world is what’s your go to song.

Like, what is the song or what are the songs that you go to when you need motivation or when you need focus or when you need joy? Um, you know, and, and so, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got my, my list of songs that I, it’s funny. I just default to could be an incubus tune. It could be a Peter Gabriel tune. Um, it could be, uh, it could be dirty Vegas.

Um, so there’s all these different, you know, it could be dead mouse. There’s, there’s all these different tunes that have a deeply spiritual effect on how I feel and how I operate. They might get me in a, in a sense of joy that then translates into my relationship with the people around me. And I may use them as a primer before I get on a call before, like a zoom call with all of our crew.

We got about 120 employees now. Um, and so I may use that as some juice. To motivate me to love people more through the screen on a zoom call and I may use another one to kind of isolate myself So that I the only thing I have is me and those and that the thing in front of me that I need to focus On I’m I’m the poster child for ADHD.

So having that is really powerful as having those tools And it’s often the rhythm or the rest so Yeah, being able to, being able to understand the, the, it’s not a chasm between our physicality and our mentality, they’re extremely tightly linked when, if I can get into a slight tangent here, but very relevant to this, when I was 16, um, I was a state tennis player at district, I was in a doubles match and I was losing.

My, my partner and I were losing John Hewitt and I, John was a New York Bronx guy, six foot forward. He’d kill you. He’d take you, kick your ass. That’s how Bronx guys do it. And John was great. Um, and John was a frenetic tennis player who had an unpredictable game. Uh, he was my doubles partner. I’d already done one single singles and we were doing doubles and Jesuit.

The, the tough car, you know, hardcore Catholic school. They had all the money, 

Ronnie Landis: what a name, 

Mark Effinger: right? So we’re playing these dudes out of Portland, Oregon. And um, and they’re kicking our ass and we’re down two sets Um, it was best three out of five and it was um If we would have lost another couple of points, we would have been out of the game and I took some mushrooms Um, some psilocybin at the time, 

and I had 

a very, I was a very critical thinker when it came to tennis.

I had six or more rackets. Each one was a different kind of racket with a different string tension with a different kind of string with a different grip. Oriented towards whether I was playing on plexi pave, you know, or concrete, or if I was indoors or outdoors, or I was playing on grass or clay, um, if I was going to be doing a, uh, top spin game, or if I was going to be hitting a lot of flat Jimmy Connors esque shots.

If I was going to be McEnroe outrageous, or if I was going to be a Liana Stassi smooth, and I modeled all of their tennis moves, I, they had, they had these stop action shots in tennis magazine. And I would just model those by looking in the sliding glass doors of my, the home I lived in and just swinging my tennis racket, just like them looking at their stroke, seeing it, and then feeling it, closing my eyes and feeling it until it grooved and became part of my subconscious.

But I was also a critical thinker, so the control area of my brain was constantly worried about my grip being right, the string tension being right, my stroke ending right, or going into it right, did I take it back enough, did I position my feet right, all of those frickin variables that you can overthink, and what the psilocybin did for me at the time was it kind of successfully removed I saw the game as, uh, as making music, playing music.

I actually had a really sophisticated yes tune in my head. That was a seven, eight time signature. Um, I thought it was 98 time, but I just recently looked at it. It was seven, eight time. So very interesting time signature. It would basically felt like it was constantly keeping up and it was actually 15, eight is the time signature.

And, um, Um, there’s a there’s a great, you know, some of these people like rick beato on on youtube will kind of he teaches these things He does breakdowns great studio guy Anyhow, the cool thing was I had a song going through my head and that song set the pace for the match And I no longer gave a shit about my grip I didn’t care about the racket I had, I didn’t care the ball, I didn’t care about the sun, I didn’t care about the fact that these guys were 6’4 and they were custom built to play tennis.

Uh, you know, they were all going pro, they were gonna get Stanford, you know, they were gonna go to Stanford, they were gonna go to one of the big tennis schools, and um, and they were gonna get full ride scholarships because they were badass. And we beat the shit out of them, not because we were better than them, but because we got into flow state.

Yeah, we were steven kotler models At the moment and we just got into the flow and the flow was a combination of getting out of your heads Own chatter and its own fears and its own guidance and getting into almost cosmic guidance, not to sound woo, woo, 100%, it was, it was incredible. And the point that did it was, um, my doubles partner, John, he lofted a short ball to the, at the, you know, that it went up, which is perfect for them to come forward and to be able to, to smash an overhead and just kill us.

And that would, again, put us like one point from failure. From losing the match and instead they did that. I went back to the baseline. I’m running back to the baseline and I’m, I, the shrooms had taken off just about a minute before and I said, Oh, I know where that ball’s going. I wasn’t looking at the ball.

I just intuitively knew where the ball was going. It was going behind my back. So as a, you know, a kid that practiced all kinds of moves for that, that you saw the pros do in there, you know, in a clutch, um, is I hit the ball behind the back, down the line. It was a winner. And it changed the whole feel of the game.

I was no longer working at tennis. I was playing tennis. I completely changed how I received the ball. I, I moved in from the baseline to halfway between the baseline and the, and the service box. And which is totally counterintuitive because they’re serving at 115 miles an hour, 120 miles an hour. And you want to move back normally so that you have enough time to be able to do the stroke.

I just. Triggered my head. I’m going to be a cat. I’m going to be, uh, right. I’m going to be a leopard and I’m going to leap at the ball and I’m going to do an 18 inch to 24 inch stroke. And I’m going to punch the ball back faster than it’s coming at me. And by moving in, I also changed the angle of incidence.

So they didn’t have as much angle to hit because. They couldn’t hit it way far to my backhand because I didn’t have to go far because the angle wasn’t going to go far because I was moved in where the angle becomes shorter. And all of these little things he didn’t think about. I wasn’t thinking about it.

I was exploring and playing and enjoying. And I had this tune going in my head and I knew that they weren’t listening to a song in 15, eight, they were listening to a song in two, four, or three, four. It was going to be disco or country or rock. And so I beat them because the song in my head and the joy of participating in a sport from an elevated perspective, I watched myself play on the court.

I just enjoyed it. I had none of those inhibitions. And when we start operating in life like that, where we go, all right, I’m going to quit fucking with my proven understanding of this thing. I’m going to, I’m not going to read the next book on success. I’m going to go apply what I know. I’m going to go be the ball, right?

Bill Murray and, or, you know, Chevy chase and in Caddyshack, um, it’s, it’s that same thing is that, is that when we start getting out of our way, we’re A couple of things happen. I think that people show up who are critical to your next move, the forward momentum, some of them may see like assholes, some of the people you didn’t, you never knew, um, the lesson will become a critical thing there or the observation they have, or the critical insight that they might have will become a piece that will help to put you on a route to greater success.

And yes, absolutely. And then the mentors and the guides. The spiritual guides will show up. I’ve had, I’m the luckiest guy in the world, bro. Um, you know, I should be roadkill. I dropped out of school after I was 16. I dropped out of high school. Um, and, um, and I’m just very lucky that, that I didn’t end up, you know, a statistic, um, and instead I was very lucky to have great mentors.

I mean, people mentored me all the way from the time I was a little kid that chemistry set. Was a byproduct of the guy that was my dad’s best friend who became my stepdad who owned a clinical laboratory. Um, after getting fired from the, from the biggest clinical laboratory in Portland area, after getting fired from there, he took over a small failing clinical laboratory and ended up selling it to Corning for 17 million.

Um, just 10 years after he had taken it over from a losing preposition. And I got to see that and experience that. Um as this young kid and he was the one that told me when I was young to you know You never make it working for the other guy. You got to be the other guy And so 

Ronnie Landis: you so that leads to being prepared life was preparing you every step of the way, 

Mark Effinger: dude I’m in line in 1986 i’m and i’m making laser light shows To put on top of your stereo to give you a laser light show in your living room.

I’m standing in line at a plastics company, buying used plastic, like these cut rolls and things like that, that, that other companies that needed the product, the piece of plastic that they didn’t need, this company cut the plastic for them, had these scraps. I would buy the scraps and I would turn them into product.

And I’m standing in line with this guy in a nice suit, um, behind me. And he asked me, he said, Hey, what are you here for? And I said, Oh man, I guess I’m going to, I’m gonna make lasers. We’re going to put lasers on top of every stereo in America. It’s going to be, we’re going to change the world with making a laser light show at every, you know, every living room.

And he goes, wow, that’s pretty ambitious, man. That’s pretty cool. He goes, where are you from? And he goes, I go, I’m from here. I’m from Portland, Oregon. He goes, he goes, dude, he goes, I’m from Silicon Valley. You sound so Silicon Valley. And I say, well, I just got out of the air force and I was in Silicon Valley when I was in the air force.

He goes, yeah. Yeah. He goes groovy and he became a mentor of mine. He and I built a company to six and a half million a year Doing professional laser light shows like five years later like five years after that I mean he hired me to do projects when I was broke You know as I was trying to build my business and I was I was living in the back of a health club He you know He’d hire me to go cut circuit boards or or do soldering or repair stuff that came back bad from From his manufacturer and stuff like that and just guide me and eventually he became a mentor.

Um, I’m Adam. I’ve been a bad amway presentation in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and this guy sitting beside me, very dapper, older man with a gray beard and a really nice hat. Um, he looks at me and he goes, you want to go? And I said, yeah, man, let’s get out of here. So, so we take off, right? We break the presentation.

We go out and we’re talking and he’s driving a really cool old Chevy, um, Bronco or Ford Bronco. And it had this really cool sign on it. It said, laugh hard. Uh, let me see. It said, it said, ah, shit, I forget. It’s a, but you know, Dirt Brothers was the middle logo. Uh, laugh hard, hang tough, lend a hand. That was it.

And I said, who are you? And he goes, my name is Jack Nichols. And I said, well, why should I know you? And he goes, I’m the guy that funded Nike. And then I funded mentor graphics and I funded floating point systems and then I funded a via and I founded flourish systems are funded. And he was the, basically the, the venture capitalist for the Pacific Northwest.

Um, the godfather of venture capital. Yeah. Great, incredible man. And we became best friends and we were best friends until he died. Um, just died a few years ago. And those people, I could not have willed to come into my life. But had I not showed up for life, had I not, had I backed off on invitations? Had I backed off on things that were uncomfortable?

Um, these people would have, the universe would have said, you know what? You’re not ready for this. There’s somebody else that that’s going to do this. And again, I’m not special. I’m, I’m a, I’m the guy that should have been, uh, you know, I was voted one of the top three people in my school. Um, the top three people to never succeed.

I was going to be the biggest failure in school. And it was even announced over the intercom in Salem, Oregon. 

Ronnie Landis: Crazy. Is it that they even do that? 

Mark Effinger: Yeah. Yeah. It was my tennis coach. Did it? Don Degg was his name because Don was trying to, to egg me on to coming back to school. Cause I was dropping out of school.

Um, and, and right. And, Um, and I did, I, it wasn’t a, it wasn’t just me dropping out of school. I was systematically dropping out of school. I’ve, I made too much money. I was making parts for nuclear reactors when I was 16. And I went to U of O for a week and talked to my buddies who were the tennis, the seniors in the tennis team.

Um, they took me to a sports frat. And so I just interviewed everybody going into the frat at U of O. And said, you know, how long is it going to take you to get out of school? What are you doing here? Um, you know, is there any money involved in one way or the other and how much are you going to make when you get out?

And I was making 7. 35 an hour and, um, and that’s minimum wage was a buck 75 and so, or a buck 35. And, and so it was like, you know, screw you buddy. So I just, I went home, I called my, I called the dean of boys, Don Dagg, and said, Hey Don, convince me to stay. And he said, Mark, I’ve never convinced you of anything.

And then he had me fired from my job because it was a cooperative work experience job where, you know, you got credit for going to school half a day and going to work. But the way that that translates into today is, Back then I had no mastery outside of this event of doing psilocybin mushrooms while playing tennis.

I had no mastery of my state. I didn’t know how to be happy on demand. I didn’t know how to be eloquent. I didn’t know how to be focused. I just was, you know, I would wait for those events. I didn’t know how to call the muse, Steven Pressfield, like to like, when is the muse going to show up? When am I going to be creative?

How stone do I have to get to feel motivated? How drunk do I have to get to be fun? Right. It was all of those things. I was waiting for those events to happen. The differences today. Thanks to what we do at Newtopia and to my buddies at, at BiOptimizers and all the folks like yourself that I’ve met that, that share their wisdom openly is, as I said, you know, Neutropics are a power tool, leveraging Neutropics for state change is kind of a power move, right?

Like, like if you want to operate a certain way and get a specific outcome or specific, uh, of that, the, one of the cool ways to do it is to update your brain. And your body with the, the nutrients, supplements and extracts, um, that are going to programmably give you those performance outcomes that you’re looking for.

You’re not guessing. You’re not hoping, it’s not Modafinil, it’s gonna have a, you know, like Modafinil and Adderall are, you know, the quote unquote student drug, you know, performance drugs. They’re very powerful and they can be really interesting on a short term basis or once in a while, but the challenge is, is 24 hours from the time you take them, you have to write a fucking check that is pretty expensive for your recovery.

Um, because you feel like shit the next day, you don’t sleep very well at that night, um, or you got to use it perpetually and then you start burning out your adrenals and, and the rest. And in contrast, Making solutions and creating an environment where you have predictability of outcome, but you also are upgrading your state and your baseline so that, um, over time, over time, your baseline becomes a new level of high.

And you’re able to actually work above that, right? 

Ronnie Landis: Your low gets higher and higher. It doesn’t get lower or stay the same. The low becomes higher. So your default operating setting predictably and progressively upgrades. So my. So the thing that’s cool is that with these in particular, my experience is that I can actually feel what neurogenesis actually feels like.

I can feel the neurostem cells being stimulated. I can feel that kind of neuroplastic in between space of the circuits kind of finding their synaptic groove or the synaptogenesis. These are all really great terms. I’d love to like kind of just explore for people to Kind of familiarize themself with how the brain actually reforms and reshapes itself and develops new novel connections when the inputs are conducive to how the brain is designed to function.

Um, so it’s, it’s really incredibly interesting. 

Mark Effinger: I, I, one, as I love that angle, by the way, I am now, because you said that I’m going to take. We are in the deep development of a new, um, a new capsule technology, um, and oil technology that gives you dramatically increased, uh, DHA and, um, EFA levels. Um, and when I say dramatically, we’re talking about anywhere from, 500 percent to 7, 000 percent increase in bioavailability of those key factors.

Interesting.

Ronnie Landis: I can’t wait for that. Um, and that’s one of the interesting things too, with like Omega 3 supplements and that’s a whole rabbit hole. We don’t need to expand too much onto until maybe another interview. But that’s a huge thing with that particular aspect of nutrition because it’s so critically important.

And most of the supplements are oxidized. They’re rancid, they’re rancid oils. They’re fished. The, the, the fishing market is just absolutely toxic for the, for the most part. Um, most of the other supplements just aren’t bioavailable. 

Mark Effinger: Yep. It’s, um, yeah, in fact, and oil most, not all, um, there’s a bunch of water, supplements, but even many of those benefit from an oil base.

So bringing in healthy, like I do, um, in the morning, I do a, um, an algae DHA, uh, an algae EPA, um, and EFA and six krill oil, um, along with a, uh, with K PAX, which is a product that Bioptimizers makes. Um, and that’s one of the cofactors or there’s an enzyme in there and another cofactor that helped to dramatically increase that.

And then at, when I’m in the lab here in Burlington, Iowa. I go ahead and I make these custom oil capsules. We’ll be introducing those later on this year. Um, and so, and, and I’m again, I’m the luckiest guy in the world. I get to work with bleeding edge technologies that do things like neurogenesis. And, um, you know, neuroprotective states.

So, so you talked about neurogenesis, which is a really, really, really important, um, key idea that I think that that is valuable to expand on. And as you mentioned, you can feel it. It’s an experiential thing. It’s not a guess. So, um, and one of the, one of the definitions of a nootropic is that it is, it is, you know, mind expanding or, or brain enhancing.

Right. And one of the first things that I noticed as I was formulating these and to kind of close the loop on a previous question was how did I get into this is my wife and I were having children back in the nineties. And we’re all over. Children were born naturally. We found that the, um, the, the, um, having a child at the same home that you’re, that, you know, you’re biologically active in has a, is a much safer environment outside of critical things like a C section or some other, you know, a situation that might be difficult to benefit from having a doctor.

We have doctors there, by the way, we had, we had, you know, Two doctors and three midwives. Um, our first baby was born in a hot tub. The second one in a birthing chair, my son Dustin and um, my daughter Livvy who works for me. I just had a great, um, call with her before our podcast here. Um, and she was with me from the start of this company, by the way.

Um, she’s, it was very important. She was very critical. I’m homeschooled, but, um, They were all born at home. My, my daughter Livvy was born on a, on a leather couch in front of the fireplace, roaring fireplace at 10am in the morning. And my wife who had small hips, she tore a little bit and they had actually handed me some snips and said, Hey, do you want to cut your wife’s vagina?

Um, no, I really like my wife’s vagina just how it is. And so, right. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so no, I handed it back to her. And so anyhow, she tore a little bit as, um, as my baby crowned and as Libby crowned and they, the midwife, again, this is back in the, this is 1998. Um, they handed her four oxycodone, not knowing, right?

Because at that point, the Sackler family convinced everyone that they were safe and there was no addictive potential and, and my wife found her muse. That was it. So a decade later, she committed suicide on that very same drug. So what got me into Nootropics was an early experience in the mid nineties of using Nootropics as a way to enhance brainstorming power at a small group of Intel engineers and having that experience and going, oh wow, you can actually take a nutrient.

That will accelerate acetylcholine through the synaptic gap and keep it from breaking down called an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor. There’s enzymes that break down acetylcholine, which is kind of the thinking and memory and recall neurotransmitter. And this thing called Hooperzine A is a, is a, uh, basically it’s an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor.

So it inhibits. The enzyme that breaks down choline in the synapse and by by inhibiting that enzyme, you get more choline to flow and you get it to flow longer and you get it to flow repeatedly. It doesn’t break down so you can use it more, which means that you’re able to actually have more important and vital connections and also.

To have more substantial recall. So this was an interesting thing. And I worked with some engineers at Intel to help them, um, get off of coffee. At the time I wanted to get them off coffee, get them on an alternative and see if it improves their performance. And it improved it measurably over 30%. So, and when I say 30%, they, they measurably had 45 to 60 percent productivity during the day using coffee is their mainstream, their mainline stimulant.

Right. 

Ronnie Landis: Totally. Yeah. There’s a world that’s running on coffee. 

Mark Effinger: Oh, we are, man. Yeah. And I’m not against coffee, but I do think that there are ways to do it. A Huber, Huberman has this great insight on don’t take, don’t take caffeinated coffee first thing in the morning. 

Ronnie Landis: Totally. 

Mark Effinger: Wait 90 minutes, two hours if you can.

And and take it after you’ve had you know, 20 or 30 minutes of sunlight on your face is Have have your coffee then and it’ll it’ll let the adenosine Wear down you start using up adenosine, which is kind of the sleep, you know cofactor And so now instead of having that crash at 2 p. m or 3 p. m Um, you don’t have that adenosine that’s been building up and because you plug the receptor with caffeine, right?

And so now you get your denizens mitigated and you’ll feel wakeful much more wakeful throughout the day But you can also do that By titrating yourself off of caffeine, meaning, you know, like either, either blend it with decaf and do a, you know, half and half. And then eventually you’re just doing decaf or doing nothing or doing tea, you know, a green tea or something like that.

And then replace it with a, you know, a, a neuro enhancing solution that is either non caffeine, non STEM, that kind of thing. And, and we, we, you know, provide that in our solutions, but it can make a really monumental difference because when you wake up clear. You don’t have that. I need to have the caffeine to feel like I’m a human being.

Ronnie Landis: That addictive attachment. 

Mark Effinger: Yes, exactly. So that is great languaging, by the way. That’s, that’s perfect languaging. Ronnie is that addictive attachment is a, is a thing that, that again, back to the kind of frog boiling is we, we fall into it. It gently massages us and eventually it takes over. And we don’t realize we’re serving it.

It’s no longer serving us, right? That’s right. So, so back to the, so, so when that happened to my wife, I was so pissed off because when I found her body, she was surrounded by a halo of empty pill bottles, a gallon of shitty wine and, um, methadone from, from somebody that had been renting from her. And so all of that together ended up, you know, becoming her, um, her sign off.

To from this this world and so I started going and I also had a family member that had been a heroin addict for four decades. And so the addiction thing was interesting to me because I had, I should have been an addict because I really knew. I mean, I could clear six foot bong when I was 16. I could, or actually when I was, even before I was 12, I could, I could do more mushrooms than anybody in my class, you know, at a time I could do, um, I could, they would pour a pitcher of beer at parties.

They would pour a pitcher of beer and drop one 51, like a, uh, eight or 12 ounce glass of one 51 in it. I’d chug it and be a badass and go play pool, you know, right. That kind of shit so just ridiculous stupid stuff that you do when you’re an idiot and you’re you know You’re a party favor for other people 

Ronnie Landis: And so that’s a good term.

That’s a really good term. You just party favor for other people. Wow 

Mark Effinger: Yeah, you know I I because I didn’t have high self esteem Um, you know, it’s something i’ve always struggled with and I was the kid With a pockmarked face from, you know, some from really shitty acne and I was super skinny. And, um, you know, the only way I got the girl was because I could, I could think quickly, it could be funny.

Um, and I wasn’t afraid to do really stupid. I love Steve Martin and I could, you know, I could channel Steve Martin or Robin Williams when required. And so, right. In fact, the first time I got high on mushrooms was the debut of Mork and Mindy. That’s it. It was great. It was great. Um, so, so the, this thing of how do you get people out of addictive states where I didn’t understand it as a state.

I just, I, I, I knew it was something that pulled at people and it wouldn’t let them go. And so I, I hung out at a rehab center and I asked people on Friday nights why they were. Why do we’re finally signing into this deal to take the next six to 12 weeks in this, this place that was as much an institution as it was, or, you know, rehab facility and, um, and why.

And, and so they would tell me consistently, um, so funny. Brad Costanza is the guy that introduced Matt and I met Glenn and I, and Brad was the first guy he introduced us by opening a podcast. A box of my products in, in these test tubes and, and, and saying, this is the shit or something like that on a Facebook post.

But Brad was the first guy to do a podcast with me back then, back in 2012. And he, um, I’m coming back from the rehab center and I had to pull over into a Safeway parking lot and do a podcast for two hours while he’s drilling me with questions. I’ve got incubus running in the background, um, their second or third album, um, and it was great.

And. So we’re, we’re doing this. It was super cool. And, um, so, but it was that, but what I found was a state change stuff. I was coming back from the rehab center and what it was, was they were embarrassed to go into rehab, right? It’s an embarrassing thing to admit that you’re, you know, that something powers you, that you don’t have enough power on your own to write, to face down this demon.

That was part one. Part. Right. I don’t know if you, I don’t know if you’ve ever had an addictive behavior that you had to address. 

Ronnie Landis: Well, let me, let me just bring this into the conversation right now. Two summers ago, I released my eighth book called the addiction free lifestyle. Love it. I definitely wanted to share that with you.

I know we’re, this is our first like introduction to each other, but this is a 400 page book and it’s probably the most complete and integrative and holistic book on addiction. So. I certainly have some history with it, and I’m working on my next book, which is called The Dopamine Solution, Becoming Anti Fragile in an Unstable and Over Stimulated World.

Oh, 

Mark Effinger: dude, I, I, can I say this? I fucking love that. That is, I, those are, uh, two things. One I need to buy a copy of your former book. As long as you’ll sign it, I’d love that. Yeah, 

Ronnie Landis: of course. I’m going to send you, send you over one. And that’s why I wanted, you know, finish your thought, but I wanted to talk to you about addiction and dopamine and brain chemistry, because I know that you, you obviously, you went through it with yourself, with your wife.

And my oxycodone many years ago and alcohol. And it was, and talk about a state change. Like I actually had to Separate myself from her for a while because I’d get these belligerent, very guilt ridden texts and it was both scrambled. And it was like, I just could not be around it until she cleaned herself up.

So I, I know a thing or two about it. 

Mark Effinger: I love it. Thank you so much, by the way, that’s a great contribution to the universe. Uh, that, that is a, yeah, I, uh, dude, that, that rocks. Um, the last, the last words I ever got from my wife were, Were voice messages that she had left on my phone. I never pick up my phone for, for, you know, to answer calls.

I schedule calls. Right. And she had left a bunch of just, just insanely crazy belligerent screaming fast, because I had to, I, I had to protect my children. I, I, I took the children out of her custody into mine. Um, and, um, she was just hated that fact because it was the only thing that she kind of felt like she could hold on to.

And, but it was dangerous for them and not a healthy thing for them to watch their mother going down that rabbit hole. So anyhow, yes. Um, so here’s what I learned, man. So, and this, I don’t know if this aligns. I would love to know from you if this aligns with your insight. So feel free to interrupt and to interject.

I would, I would, I welcome it. And, uh, because I’m always looking for more pieces of this puzzle. Um, it’s not one dimensional and it doesn’t right. So, so what I found was they said it’s embarrassing. It takes a long time, six, 12 or more weeks. So they’re going to be black, blacklisted at work. If they’re employed, if they’re CEOs of company, they’re afraid that they’ll come back and they won’t have respect.

Um, there were all these factors. It can be expensive, especially if it’s not their first rodeo in the rehab center. Um, Oh, at a certain point, the insurance companies go, fuck you. We’re out. And so that can be problematic. It can be very detrimental to relationships as well. Uh, especially if you’ve been abusive in your relationship as a result of the, of the drugs or the alcohol or whatever happens to be your habit, um, happening and all of the other things that come with that.

There are a bunch of ripples that happen as a result of addiction that are out of control. So I came in and I said, I knew enough about nootropic, um, compounding, and I’d been working on compounds. I was in, uh, business with the founder of Century 21 Real Estate, and we built brainstorming software for the smartest people in the world.

So we had about 400,000 customers. And so I had, uh, I had flown all over the US and Canada teaching these people how to be creative, how to think creatively and how to use our software as a, a tool to, to expand your creativity and do it more on demand. I think about kind of like mind mapping, except it was associative thinking tools that used, um, dynamic data databases that were upgraded.

So, so I had this great group of people and I was sending them test tubes of shitty tasting powders that were just basically combinations of different nootropic elements, um, and saying, Hey, um, you trust me that I’m not going to kill you. Could you give me feedback on how this makes you feel or operate?

And when I got to the rehab center, I said, I’m going to You know, so these were the problems, right? It was the embarrassment. It was the time, it was the cost. And it was the, the critical factor. This was one that I didn’t know. And I didn’t understand was that I should have understood by my family member who is, you know, former heroin addict that was on methadone was once they get out of the rehab facility, they’re going to be addicted to two to four meds.

Anyhow, and what I heard time and time again, from, especially from the more successful people was just keep in mind that if I forget to get my prescription refilled at Walgreens or CVS, my dealer is a, is a speed dial away. So real easy for me to call them and get. My speed or my meth or my or my coke or my right or my weed or whatever it is You know that happened to be either poison and so so and i’m going yeah, that’s that’s bad and I started looking at the the compounds that they used to try to treat them outside of rehab and they were Pretty shitty to the brain and body.

They were often compounds that were very caustic and toxic and, and also demotivating and everything else. And then the other thing, and so, so here’s what I got. So here’s, here’s my, my idea of how to build the perfect nootropic stack or how to build the perfect solution for addiction. If I could help clear your brain up in say 72 hours, right?

Or a week along would be a week short would be four to eight hours. If I don’t clear your brain up so you could actually think clear, that clarity of thought would lead you to better decision making because when our, when our mind is fogged from the meds or from the habit or from the right is we just don’t make good decisions.

We make decisions based on how do we get closer to that thing that we want to feel that dopaminergic, right? Feedback loop that says yes. Right. Or that, you know, the, or the oxytocin or the nanomide, whatever it happens 

Ronnie Landis: with my internal distress. 

Mark Effinger: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes. So how do we get closer to that? So yeah.

And, and cover, how do we, how do we spackle over? The, the real issues in our lives, the relationships that we’ve destroyed, the right, the, all the stuff. I mean, the reason that, um, that, you know, when you people go on a 12 step program, one of the steps is, you know, clear the air with everybody you’ve ever, you know, caused any shit with and get it out in the open.

And at least. Be proactive and do it. And even my business partner, um, even said, you know, he’s, he’s been clean for 13 years and sober for 13 years. And, um, and he, there was this one person that was very hard for him to get hold of, like they were, you know, you couldn’t like, he’d have to really dig it, like have to do a background search and all that.

And he went to his sponsor and said, do I really have to do all of them? And he goes, yeah, you got to do all of them. Do all of them. Clear the air. Don’t be right. Don’t leave any stone unturned. Yes. Yeah, it’s, it’s credible. So, so that was part of it. So the, so the first part was clarity. And by the way, this also goes back to the neurogenesis part.

Okay. So let’s get you detoxified enough, especially neuro neuro detoxification, which by the way, happens primarily at night. Okay. Um, we build up neurotoxicity during the day, especially during stressful lens and, um, you know, in cortisol driven and, and all the, the, the amplitude of, of, you know, whether it’s a dentistry or, or some other cofactors and even the good stuff, even the, the ATP generation from, from, Right.

From mitochondrial output 

Ronnie Landis: byproducts of the neurotransmitters of the ATP production. Like some of it. So it’s like, it’s like in toxicity research, you realize that a lot of the actual toxicity is actually the byproduct or the metabolic byproduct that’s left over from the metabolic process of the neurotransmitter or the compound.

Right. 

Mark Effinger: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the detritus or the exhaust. Right. So even, even a healthy individual, there’s, there’s a scene in blade runner where, um, where Roy who’s looking to find Terrell, his maker. They only have a four year lifespan. They give them an, uh, they give them an artificial or synthetic background.

And then they’re born and they’re 33 years old when they’re born or they’re 30 years old and they’re born. Roy is this incredibly, um, he’s the most advanced, uh, Android that, that Terrell had ever designed. And he’s a killing machine as well. And he finally makes his way. He tricks the, the, the genetic, um, scientist into introducing him to Terrell up in his skyscraper.

And so he walks in and, and, and he goes, and Terrell recognizes him right away. He’s a Nexus seven, the most powerful of his instruments he’s ever created. And he goes, he goes, Oh, you’re a Nexus seven. And, and he goes, what do you want? You know, how can I help you? And he goes, look, um, you know, I know that my clock is ticking.

And It’s, you know, I’m at three years and, and 11 months and seven days or whatever. And I got a, you know, I, I, we got to turn the clock back and he goes, well, we tried genetic engineering and you melt down on the operating table. We tried, you know, um, uh, we tried changing the protein. Um, and you know, and again, you turn into an acid creature and, you know, we tried all of these different things we can’t do.

And he goes, Roy, the light, the brights, the burns twice as bright burns half as long, I know you burn so very, very bright. Well, the higher the performance that you achieve, the more, the more exhaust you make. You can’t hot rod a car and not create exhaust. Right. And no matter how efficient you get it running, there’s some amount of exhaust, even if it’s somewhat, you know, a negligible exhaust, even a hydrogen car makes water.

Right. Right. So, so, so in order to be able to address that, you’ve got to be able to detoxify that detoxification in our case. Um, comes with the fact that during sleep, especially during Delta sleep, the first phase of sleep at night, that deep sleep that you reach, um, when that’s happening and then also during the REM cycles that you’ll achieve REM is primarily memory consolidation.

That’s why all the dreams are happening. It’s playing with all these, these thoughts and ideas and events that have happened during the day and it’s putting them in the places they need to go to, to be able to have recall later on about them and also arrange them. And I think there’s also some spiritual stuff going on.

I’m not unconvinced that there’s some really interesting directional stuff that, that the universe is trying to guide us in without sounding too woo. I know that sounds really woo, but I’ve just had too many events in my life that have been guided through dreams that, that I couldn’t account for otherwise.

Absolutely. So, um, so that’s happening. So at night, your brain shrinks slightly when it shrinks. Cerebral spinal fluid flows around the capillaries, which are very, very thin. They’re, they’re one. Um, you know, they’re one molecule thin. And so this detritus, this poop, uh, this exhaust is extracted out of those, which are primarily in that case, it’s, it’s tau proteins, right?

Beta amyloid plaque and, and this, you know, the output of, um, Uh, the mitochondria and any of these, you know, the, the neurotransfer of the different neurochemicals is going to cause some friction somewhere. It’s not, you know, no process is a hundred percent friction free. And so that friction is going to translate into some kind of a compound.

Some of those compounds are benign. Some of those are, are, you know, dangerous. And so the brain knows to send cerebral spinal fluid through those capillaries, Suck it out of the body into the brainstem. Down and then out the body. So what we did as a way to address that, especially for people that were starting to smoke weed or other things, or if you happen to be an addict and you had these tendencies is let’s amplify the process that the body does anyhow.

So we created this thing called, called middle reboot. And mentally, we’ve got two of them. We got a nighttime and a daytime and, um, and the nighttime one takes advantage of that process. Then the daytime one is a sublingual that you kind of, you tap it, it settles powder, you pour it under your tongue. And when you take that, it essentially sets a new baseline so that you have all of the precursors to the neurotransmitters that you need during the day.

And then you can say, I want more dopamine. So I’m going to take a brain flow. I want more serotonin. So I’m going to. I’m going to take an upbeat. I need more GABA. So I’m going to do either GABAlicious or I’m going to do Zamner juice or, you know, I need dopamine. So I’m going to go dopa drops or I’m going to do, I need, I need, uh, dopamine and I need, uh, uh, norepinephrine.

And so I’m going to do, right. And ultimate focus. And so we built these pieces that do that, but. In that, as you start taking these components, these nootropic stacks, what, one of the key factors that separates these products, and I’ll get back to the end of the, the addictive process in a second, is you’re basically doing a thing called BDNF, brain derived nootropic factor, and you’re accelerating the brain’s ability to grow new neurons.

And if you grow new neurons, one of the cool things is you have a election, an opportunity to program those neurons and neural pathways to to make a shortcut to the things that you need, the ways you want to operate and the state you want to be in. And you can reinforce those neural pathways, just like I reinforced through muscle memory, a Guillermo Villas topspin backhand is you’re able to reinforce in your brain a state of happiness or a state of sensuality or a state of connection or a state of focus or a state of aggression or a state of whatever you need to be.

You can program that state and then make it Easy to snap into that state. 

Ronnie Landis: Uh, so in other words, what I’m hearing you say is there’s one part is the external compound, which is like the, almost like the cognitive permission slip that just primes the neurochemistry and gives you that, that, that. Um, that cognitive neurochemical activation, but then there’s this also piece, there’s this other piece about how you program it with your own direct intent.

So like what I experienced with a lot of quote unquote, nootropics or brain supplements is that. Herbalism. It’s unidirectional, meaning it’s not neuromodulatory, it’s not an immune modulator, meaning it has an intel like it, it, it infuses its intelligence into, let’s say your immune system, meaning like a REI mushroom, for example, is an immune modulator.

So it’s just gonna help your immune system do what it needs to do naturally versus stimulate it in a unidirectional meaning only one way. Halfine is uni directional. It’s got one trick. It’s up and that’s it. With these, it feels like there’s a, there’s an intelligence or at least it’s tapping into the innate intelligence and how you decide to program it with your own purpose.

It just accentuates that. 

Mark Effinger: Yeah. Well said. Um, it’s an orchestration. Okay. You don’t want to, you don’t want to have a hyper dominant neurotransmitter at the expense of other neurotransmitters. You want to be able to bring them up at a level, and then you want to say, I need a little bit more base, or I need a little bit more trouble, or I need some mid range on this, and by doing that, which, you know, so that may be dopamine, and anandamide, and a little bit of serotonin, and some GABA to take the edge off, you want to modulate those, and by doing that, you are able to actually, um, slide into a state Seamlessly.

Everybody reflects on anybody that’s seen the movie limitless remembers when Bradley Cooper takes the clear pill for the first time, takes NZT for the first time, and he walks up the stairs right of his apartment building and suddenly the colors get brighter. The light gets brighter. He can hear the tick, tick, tick, tick of the bicycle wheel.

As it spins, he can see his landlord’s wife. Uh, as she’s trashing him and calling him a loser and saying you’re late on your rent again, but he doesn’t get lost in it. He’s able to float above it and be an active observer of the situation. He’s able to see the glimpse of the law book that she’s got in her book bag and be able to recall almost instantaneously that research paper, that book that he had read while he was waiting for a girl to get out of her panties so that he could do her from, you know, when he was hanging out at this school.

And it was all of those events came together and he was able to kind of orchestrate them in a much more elegant way Um, and to the point of he got the girl that day, right? Um, and she didn’t care if he paid the rent It was Bradley Cooper. So that is, that is a, you know, that’s kind of the promise of nootropics is that event.

And all the, all the subsequent events that happen, you know, he becomes, you know, he starts running, he gets in shape, he cleans his apartment. He writes the, you know, the, the novel, um, he does the day trading, he becomes the millionaire, he becomes a Senator. You’re right. All of those things, he starts orchestrating life.

I wouldn’t. And of course you condense it all into a 90 minute movie. Exactly. Right. Oh, to have that life of, but there is a reality to that. And the reality is, is that sometimes that gentle push that gentle, that tool, right? Like again, nootropics are, are like a, you know, they’re, they’re a power tool. And then the power move is state change.

And so most of us are victims of state change, right? We’re on the other side of it. We’re waiting to get into the state. We’re waiting for the muse to show up. We’re made for all these stuff. And as Pressfield says, do the work, the muse will show up. And so the same way. So nootropics puts you in the driver’s seat.

You become the instigator and operator behind the change. You own the mood, you master the method. So, and it’s so important for us to understand that. That it’s now, it’s no longer a guessing game. And part of the reason that we build a, you know, like, like in the, we, we have these different boxes of different products that we do.

Um, this is kind of a, for, for your viewing audience, um, the new Topia box is called a nation box. So it’s, it’s kind of cool. And it’s got, it’s got a, uh, instructional. Yeah, this is a new one. Yeah. So this, let me see if I can do this. Yeah. He thinks he’s got physical coordination. So this is a magnetic, this got your instruction booklet on how to use it.

Um, and then it’s got these, these flaps. So this kind of tells you what 

Ronnie Landis: that’s the new packaging. Oh, this is the first time I’ve seen this. That 

Mark Effinger: is, you know, you can grab, let me see here. I’m sorry to do this behind backwards, right? Cause I’m on video is, so you’ve got your tubes. You can put this in a fridge and refrigerate your, your drink mixes.

And then you’ve got your, you know, your, your, where are they? They’re down here. There we go. Um, so these are your, your examiner, right? So your sprays, right? And again, you put that in your fridge if you’d like. And then you’ve got these, you’ve got these mag packs. So these are, these are the magnetic packs.

Let me open one of these for you. And again, Not a pitch, but these are bad ass. Um, 

Ronnie Landis: a huge part of why we’re doing this podcast is to, to really showcase this in a, in a, a way that does it justice. Cause these are just like little supplements. These 

Mark Effinger: are, yeah. Wow. Look at that. So I did. So if you imagine James Dean with a pair of, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his t shirt, right.

Leaning against the lamppost smoking a cig, And as he’s, as he’s lighting up, right, he’s got his Zippo lighter. And I was thinking, how could we introduce people to a solution that has the same groove as a Zippo lighter? Yeah. Cause that’s right. Cause that’s a, you, you feel a Zippo lighter when it goes click, click, right.

It’s got that little, like, like a little bit of friction as it opens up. And then that. And then as it closes. So, so we created this thing called a mag pack and, and it holds in this particular one, what I’ve done is I’ve done, um, and no bad days is one of our, like, you know, when you control States, right, you got no bad days.

So in this particular one, I’ve got, this is my, what I do before podcasts, I’ll do a brain flow right here and I’ll do an upbeat and so I package them together and that way it’s easy access, but yeah, man, so that’s, that’s kind of the product, but When you can master the method, um, there’s a, there’s an old Van Morrison album called no guru, new teacher, no method.

Um, and it’s, it’s, um, when you can actually kind of relax into again, a flow state, but you can relax into the state you need to be in. You know how to go there. I’m sure that you Ronnie can close your eyes before you do a defensive move or an offensive move or get into the right, right as you’re about to fight, you can get you get into a state that is hyper aware, but also very relaxed, very loose.

Ready to go. Um, if anybody’s looked at the one inch punch that Bruce Lee was so, you know, famous for that state and it was lightning fast and it was, you couldn’t believe that a human being would have that much force in that short of a span, but it’s because he was so in tune with his state. He absolutely no, he knew he was already through the punch before he ever punched.

He had already envisioned it. He had already known how far back his opponent was going to be knocked. He knew all of these factors and he envisioned it and then he did it. But that envisioning, once you try it a few times, once you do the Alina Stassi slice back and or Guillermo Villas top spin backhand a thousand times or 10, 000 hours, right.

As is the, is the, uh, book. You get it, you, you find that, that getting into that state is automatic. I literally today that’s I’m 61. I was 16 back then I grab a tennis racket. I’ve got a lab here, 24, 000 square foot lab in, uh, in Burlington, Iowa, in the Mississippi. When I go upstairs to the third floor, which we’re turning into a really bad ass podcasting room with a full weight room with a bunch of other stuff.

Um, is I’ll go hit the tennis ball on the wall up here. The minute I grabbed that tennis racket, all of those strokes flood in and I know how to do all of them. It is Neo being jacked into the matrix and knowing exactly how to do Kung Fu or right, or any other martial art. I mean, we all have that ability.

Ronnie Landis: I mean, this is so deep and it’s like, Now I know we’re like, I don’t know if you have a hard stop. I certainly don’t, but we’re, we’re 25 minutes away from the original, the original endpoint, and there’s still, there’s some pieces here I really want to dive into with you and you’re bringing up such a, such a fascinating aspect of the, the idea and the reality that.

Not only do you, do you have the ability to access a multitude of different states that are also compatible with each other, but you also have the ability to tap into a the state, but then the state itself gives you the ability to exercise. Whatever it is that, that you’re looking to exercise based on the state.

I mean, what I’m saying probably sounds so, so stupidly obvious, but it’s, it’s kind of a profound idea because it’s not something that most people experience, um, regularly. 

Mark Effinger: So have you ever done karaoke? Begrudgingly? Yes.

So, uh, you know who, uh, Stone Temple pilots are? I don’t. Okay. They’re, they’re like, uh, um, take Eddie Vedder and take Pearl Jam and, um, stir and mix with Chris Cornell. And, um, and you have some nipple pilots, so, um, it’s great. So I, um, I have a musical background and every once in a while I would go do karaoke downtown Vancouver, Washington, right next to where utopia is located right now.

And, um, I, uh, uh, three times I won like for, for doing these very songs, right? Um, I’m not a professional singer and I don’t even play one on the internet. So, but it was interesting is, is going into those places is the only way to win at that game, the only way to be a great singer. In the moment is to pretend that you’re a great singer in the moment.

Ronnie Landis: Thank you. That’s amazing That’s kind of where I was leading with that. 

Mark Effinger: Yeah, the only way to Do a perfect ilia nastassi backhand is an envision ilia nastassi and then you become them, right? There was a I was in a uh, I had an investor in a house in a home and she got super pissed at me one day Um, like super pissed at me And so we’re outside on the front deck of our home that we co own and she’s cussing me up and down.

She’s about five foot three, little tiny thing. I’m six foot three. So, um, and, and, um, and I, Absolutely could outpower her instead of fighting her instead of trying to use brute force to win I started looking at how I had handled a lot of these High conflict situations in the past and I I’m not I’m not one to seek out conflict Yeah, and so I watched it and I said, all right, I can do Three things I can overpower her I’m much bigger and stronger and I can write I can lie to her I can tell her something I can basically diffuse it by just not being honest or obfuscating the the obvious and those kinds of things and make her kind of second guess herself or I can allow everything to happen, whatever’s going to happen, happen and not give a shit about the outcome, not be so committed to the outcome that I have to have my way, whatever my way would be, and be, and understand that overall, most of the time, good shit happens to me.

So if I resign myself to the good shit that could happen to me. And just allow the universe to do whatever’s going to happen. No, you know, I don’t have any, like, like my commitment to the outcome isn’t there where I just get to watch. And what happened was I suddenly found myself again, very much like taking, you know, mushrooms and playing tennis.

I found myself floating above the situation, um, unaided by drugs of any kind, and just watching her vent. And again, if she was going to, and she had a lot more money than me at the time, she had 20 million in cash. She could do anything she wanted. And, um, and I was, you know, and, and, and so, so I’m watching this and I’m looking at her going, holy shit.

Um, as a result of just not giving that situation energy. And being open to an outcome, regardless of what the outcome was, is she diffused herself of all of her hate and fear. And, um, and suddenly she fell into me, gave me a big hug and said, I’m so sorry, I just can’t handle life right now. And I didn’t know who else to, you know, to, you know, diffuse on and you were it.

And so we ended up becoming friends and, and, uh, you know, things turned out good. But more amazingly is I realized that I had this new tool in my toolbox and that tool was Rather than giving a necessary outcome, all my power. Yeah, it was giving the universe the opportunity to teach me a lesson and to guide the situation Without a fixation on the outcome that that has to be what I think it has to be I don’t need to buy the Ferrari I don’t need to have that because it’s everything to me and if I don’t have it People would think less of me in Newport Beach, California, right?

I don’t have to I you know, I don’t all the situations I don’t have to win at like I got to tell you the reason that You Um, the reason, I mean, if you, if you looked at the circuitous route to get from my wife committing suicide to me meeting Matt and Wade and having them, us merge companies and create this entity called New Topia, there is no fucking way to get there from here.

You can’t, right? Right. Um, and it had to be something above our own consciousness. And into our subconscious and into our, our kind of spiritual being and our intention was always to make a, like my intention from, from the 1980s was I was, I felt called to make a monumental contribution to every life I touch.

That was kind of my mantra that was kind of given to me that kind of fell on me one day while I was in meditation was, you know, what am I here for? What am I supposed to do? And then here I meet a bunch of people that when, if I never told them that every Monday on our meeting with all of the company of bioptimizers and utopia is we have a one minute, you know, meditation or prayer and that meditation is to make biological optimization, optimization available to everyone on earth.

Well, how close is that to my own calling that I’ve had since the eighties? And it’s not that I declared it. I don’t have a poster of that hanging in my back room somewhere. I don’t have it in my business card. It’s just something that I felt in that I, that it, you know, that is when I’m at my deepest low is what am I, what is my purpose?

Why am I doing this when the shit’s going down and I, and you know, we’ve had cashflow challenges or, or we had an employee bank on us, or we had a client become a competitor. Um, you know, whenever any of this shit happens, I go, you know what? That doesn’t mean my calling is any weaker. My calling didn’t go away.

This event happened. Do I give a shit? No, if we’re expanding the calling to make a monumental contribution of your life. Cool. I’m in. And, um, and it’s really important thing to understand. So, 

Ronnie Landis: I mean, that, that brings up, that brings so much up there, brings up so much for me from a spiritual perspective. And I’m very spiritually orientated as are most people that listen to this podcast.

So many of the conversations that we’ve had, especially the last couple of months have been primarily spiritually foundational, no matter what the topic is. Um, I’m curious what your lived experience and perspective is on the concept of surrender. And I think this is also interesting when we talk about the new topia products, because there is this interesting.

Phenomenon that I’ve experienced where the skills, the capacities, the, the, the mental and emotional intelligence that I’ve developed over my life has been more accessible. So it’s not, so it’s not as if, I think this is the point I was trying to make earlier. It’s not as if the, the pill is giving me skills and attributes that I don’t have.

And I think that’s a misnomer. I need to make that clear. I’ve developed attributes within myself over time, but it’s because of the state availability, it’s made it that they’re more accessible on demand. And then they’re almost more refined as they express themselves in unique novel situations. And there is this thing around Being able to surrender or release control like the executive control mechanism and the limbic friction.

I’ve been able to just notice a natural releasing of the pressure valve, which has made it easier to tap into that flow state or into a state of just non attachment like, Oh, this is what’s happening. Great. The old version of me that was more sympathetically overloaded would be have a harder time releasing my attachment to outcome.

Mark Effinger: All right. I love that. I love that. So, um, a couple of things that you hit on there. One is when these are, again, these are, these are these power tools, right? Um, and what we don’t, we don’t know our inherent capacity until we push ourselves to that limit, right? You, you didn’t know that you could do the same kick a hundred times or a thousand times in an afternoon until you did it.

And then, right. And, and I think I’m trying to think of Jocko Willink, maybe you’re somebody close to that, or maybe, um, who’s the other guy that was a Marine that, that, you know, Goggins. Yeah. Goggins is a great example. Right. And he says that you hit it by the time you think that you’ve just done it, done as far as you could, as hard as you could, you’re at about 40%.

Of your capacity And and you and again this and this goes into the sick to superhuman spectrum that we’ve developed There’s a spectrum. It’s it’s sick suboptimal optimal super optimal superhuman Is most people don’t have never had the opportunity to experience what superhuman feels like They might have felt super optimal at one time whether it’s on speed or Or meth or just a great day, or it’s Christmas and you’re eight years old or whatever, right?

That’s the super optimal feeling you have that right. Endorphins and dopamine and everything are just flowing through your system and you’re relying on those neurochemicals and physiological enhancements to, to like put you there. So one thing is everything psychological is biological, right? So, so, and that’s vice versa, right?

Everything biological affects your psyche. Um, and so it’s, and, and conscientious intention is discipline. So when you want, and you believe that you are called to do something or that you need to do something, or it’s important that you do something right. You develop the disciplines necessary. Hopefully, uh, people, you develop the disciplines to get you there.

I’m going to go back to a second to the addict. 

Ronnie Landis: Perfect. 

Mark Effinger: Yeah. Once I started working with addicts, I found that once we got them clarity and they started making good decisions, the second most important thing that we found was that because of the abuse they’d given their bodies and their brains, their neurochemistry, their adrenals, all of it, their, their bowel flora, all these things that they had abused.

Now we’re fighting, they were fighting those things to try to get above, you know, to get just a zero, not negative, but did it get zero? So what, what we found is that If we could then help to bolster their ATP, their adenosine triphosphate output, so their natural energy could be there, they would move from being couch potatoes.

Now they’re, now they’re, um, making better decisions, but they can’t move on those decisions. Once we gave them the natural energy and the motivation that necessary, neurochemical replenishment, so they could actually execute on those decisions. The majority of the time they would suddenly find a little bit of success.

They would, they would have the clarity to make the good decision. They would have the energy to execute on that decision. They would get the feedback, right? Which is what dope means all about. It’s about getting it right. You’re the reward and motivation and you go, Holy shit, that worked. It’s cool. I’m rocking it.

And, and then they go, man, if this works, what happens if I do more of this? And they start fueling themselves instead of by the drug, they start fueling by their own internal mechanisms that say, Hey, I’m You’re not an asshole. You’re not a loser. You’re not going to be a failure your whole life You made a successful decision.

You’ve done two of them in a row, the three in a row, right? And then you can start seeing the poor decisions as mistakes, not your life. You’re not defined by those mistakes. Right. And that, that redefinition of your heart and soul becomes a catalyst for further growth. And then also like one of the things they do in 12 step is, is, you know, you become a mentor for other people going through the process, right?

You become a sponsor. And. I was, before I met Matt, I was very undecided on 12 step program. I still don’t know if it’s the cool thing. There’s some insights on both ways. But what I do know is that, um, I’ve been lucky enough to have some of the greatest mentors in the world who have changed my life. The guy that founded Covey seven habits.

Was my mentor on, on business culture and, and a great friend, dear friend, Will Murray was his name and, and it’s big and Jack Nichols, you know, from Nike and Wyatt Starnes in business. And, and it goes on and on and on. I could go all the way back to when I was a little kid doing soldering in a guy’s garage when I was six, seven, eight years old, he was an MIT grad and a Xerox park guy, and he just let me have his lab and garage so I could be a weird little kid and try this stuff.

Every one of those people came into my life as a result of inherent curiosity, my own and their, and their love to see that curiosity take shape and blossom. When we start making good, you know, decent decisions and the feedback loop and the energy that we have to execute on those gives us a feedback loop that says, that was a good decision.

This is cool. Stay on this track. The outcome of that, that successful outcome will make such an enormous impact on your life. That it becomes a direct spiritual magnet to pulling people into your vortex. And what I found is that the people that come in are the people like Matt and Wade who took my little fledgling Company and turned it into a powerhouse in this industry and into a much more powerful solution to help heal people’s minds and bodies so it it is One is being open to the fact that dude.

I was never good enough Right. I’m not the guy that’s got the fucking PhD or the MBA. Um, this is my 18th company. I was just lucky not to die in any of them. Right. Do we take it down? Um, so, and we have to remember that the human spirit is both more capable than we believe it’s capable of incredible feats of awesome, but it also it’s fragile beyond measure.

And so in both sides, right. It’s like. Understanding that the words that come out of our mouth, the phraseology, the understanding, the insight, is that if we do it with the right intention, um, even the, the wrong things we say, um, can be repaired and they can be built on in a, in a positive way. And the other is, let me, let me show you something.

I mean, I’ll pick it up.

My dad was a Trappist monk. My dad was, um, he, from the time he was 15 years old, he graduated school early and then he went into the monastery. So for, for three years, he didn’t speak. 

Oh, he 

did. He sang Gregorian chants in Latin and he had used a sign language to say pass the potatoes. And so, um, and he was vegetarian as well during that period.

And so my dad was in fasting. So when he left the monastery, of course, the next thing he did is became a golden gloves boxer. Oh, 

Ronnie Landis: of course. So natural progression. 

Mark Effinger: Yeah. So this is my dad. And this is the thing that my dad would say to me, he’d say, be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a battle. You So perfect.

And this is my dad at one 76 fighting welterweight. And that’s That’s us. Yeah, when, when we think that somebody has got their shit together and that they, they don’t stink, that’s that same shit doesn’t stink. Fact of the matter is, is everybody’s got some struggles that they’re dealing with. I’ve, I’ve met billionaires and though they can write a check to cure a lot of things, That’s still not going to change the fact that they’ve got a tumor that they can’t control.

They can’t control the fact that, that their spouse is sick and tired of, of the bullshit that they have to go through to be who they are, that they’ve got a security detail, right? There’s their, their life is an open book and, or movie stars. We, we work with, um, you know, we work in Hollywood and there’s a lot of these people, they’re just under, you know, they’re under the watchful eye of the paparazzi on a daily basis.

Yeah. And there, there’s, um, do you know that? I don’t know if you know, the singer performer Sia, Sia Fuller, the reason that she appears on stage now, she has a wig that comes down and she basically the wig is like her face and she turns around and faces the opposite direction of the, uh, the crowd and sings her songs.

The reason is she’s actually doing, it’s almost a protest. Um, and it is, she goes, nobody prepared me for. The fact that I was going to walk down the street and be mobbed by people. Nobody prepared him for that. So, so it’s really, yeah, no, no, no. You didn’t sign up for that, right? I signed up for being an artist.

I signed up for doing this thing that I do. I, you know, um, but it becomes a freak show after a while and it’s very difficult for you to get out of it. Cause you’re defined by, you know, like Madonna has to reinvent herself every few years. Um, you know, movie stars, they go in and out of favor. Um, you know, you see new ones, new ones appearing all the time.

And it’s, it’s a fight for who’s got the best jawline. Um, so, so for us and for the solutions that we’re creating, Our goal is to help people become more empowered. We want to give the tools and techniques to dial up your inherent power because everybody’s got these inherent strengths. We believe in the strength finder.

Um, there’s a strength in your book and it’s a test you take in the book. And basically what it does is, but it was very powerful tool. It was first given to me. I was dating the Tony Robbins, executive assistant and a girl named Christine gun in Newport beach. And she handed me the book. She took a picture of me.

I was working in this company. That was run by a guy that, that, um, really drove me hard. And he made me basically the, the, the dictum of the, of his belief system was you come in earlier every day, you leave later every day, you do more interactions every day. And you dress nicer every day. So by the time I was in the company, about eight months, um, I was wearing an Armani suit.

Um, and, and I’m, uh, and before I did that, I was, um, I was in pretty fricking good shape. I had, um, helped launch a company called trike, a three wheeled scooter. You stand on the back wheels and you, you, but, and it just, I was ripped and, and doing 12 mile trike rides every day. They were like, like, that’s like the equivalent of doing a century bike ride every day.

And. And she took a picture of me on my couch in my condo. And I was, I was down to like, I weighed 210 right now. I was down to about 182, 185, something like that. I’m six foot three. Um, and so I was just a stick. I was pale. I had no color to me. My suit was kind of hanging on me. I had a very nice tie, a very nice tie.

Um, and, and she’s going, and she took a picture of me and she showed it to me. Digital camera early day digital camera and she said this is not the man that I started dating a year ago And and it was kind of this huge epiphany like holy shit. What was I becoming? I was I was a Fragment of myself. I was a ghost of myself.

Yeah, I had bought into This thing, I’d signed up for this thing and I was paying the price that I, I, you know, I, I, again, I couldn’t write the, I was making really good money and really like, I, I kind of enjoyed most of my, my job, but this treadmill I was on, I couldn’t get off and I couldn’t find that way.

I think that a lot of people are on that treadmill. Young entrepreneurs, you’re doing your first startup, your second startup, your third startup, and you can’t find your way out of what’s going on. Real estate investors right now that are going, holy shit, can I hang on long enough to make, take advantage of the downturn?

Um, you know, those kinds of things, um, people that are deeply invested in the stock market that have taken a hit people in cryptocurrency that are, that are, you know, flailing. Um, it’s really important to understand that that is not a defining, that’s not your defining life. Yes. Um, If you have set yourself up for that to be the definition of you, um, take some time to reflect, start doing some journaling, do some morning pages.

If you don’t know morning pages, I highly recommend them. Just Google it. You can get the PDF and, uh, or, or by the artist’s way, the book, the artist’s way. And take a look at that. Julie Cameron, great, great, powerful tool for getting out of your own shit. Um, go buy Dave Barry’s, uh, uh, greatest hits, a great, great, funny book on it’s just.

Stream of consciousness stories. He’s a comedic writer, but it helped get me through my, my separation and eventual divorce, um, and make it in one piece and, and be a human at the end of it, there’s a bunch of tools that I think are really important for people to start looking at, like, I don’t, what’s, what’s a favorite book of yours that you read that made, like, what’s a profound book for you, 

Ronnie Landis: man.

I mean, there’s so many, the one that’s coming up right now is it’s a book by the philosopher Seneca. Um, on the shortness of life. I don’t know if you’re, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The, the great quote out of that is life is life is long. No, life is short for those who don’t know how to use it. But life is long for those who know how to use it.

But the, you know, but most people don’t know how to use it. Therefore, life is short. 

Mark Effinger: I, I love it. Tim Ferriss is a huge advocate of that. Um, and, and, uh, yeah, that’s where I first heard the book and ended up getting it, you know, years ago. 

Ronnie Landis: And as a man, think of J Mal, classic like that, you know, and Wallace Waddles, you know, and Flora Shovelshin, the game of life, like those old classic kind of like niche, personal development, spiritual.

Mark Effinger: Can I, can I throw it into the, uh, into the ring with you? So there’s one called, um, the great divorce by, um, CS Lewis. Okay. Yeah. It’s a, it’s a bus trip from hell to heaven or actually from purgatory to heaven. He was a, all right. Um, you know, where he came from the book of, or the church of England, but it’s an incredible book on motivation, people’s motivations.

And, and to me, I, by the way, I used to get when I was, I was dating online at one point I had like 76 dates the first year when match. com had just come out and, and I would use it as a tool to see if a girl was kind of the kind of girl that I was looking for was, um, um, get the book. Let me know how you like it.

Ronnie Landis: Yeah. Yeah. C. S. Lewis is definitely somebody that I need to go deeper into. 

Mark Effinger: So this, yeah, this is one of the books that for me, it was transformational because it showed the reason, like, like if we were to define life, if we were to define a, like a, a dark place, which we know we all have shadow shadow spirit and a light place, like a heaven, right.

Where heaven and hell or some kind of is. We all meet people in this journey we call life who have a very dark side to them, or they, they are so committed to their binary belief system that they can’t see outside of it. Yeah. And as a result of it, they live a very, Maybe shallow, maybe disproportionately negative life compared to what they could have.

And the power of that book, again, bus trip, hell to heaven. Um, the power of that book is when, when these people get to heaven on this bus, um, they get off the bus and they, they get there. They’re all in, um, in a barefoot, bare feet. They get off the bus. And as they, their feet touch the grass, the grass cuts right through their feet.

And it’s because they may be spiritual beings, but in reality, the, the construct of heaven in their case is more physical than the spiritual, but they achieve being in the dark side. Right. And, and the really powerful thing is, um, is that you find out what people’s motivations are. Why if somebody would want to live a life in hell, why they would want to live a life less than joyful and He really breaks down those things, not in a technical term, but in story fashion and right in, in character reveals so powerful to understand that, Oh, the reason that that woman, um, wants to hold on to this hate is because it gives her an upper hand over this performer mate.

Um, and even though that’s going to put her in a dark place, like the bus goes back to hell and they can either get back on the bus or they can change because they can’t live in this place where you can’t drink the water because the water is more solid than they are. It goes right through them. They, you know, they can’t eat the food.

They can’t do any of this until they become more solid. They become less transparent, more authentic. And, and I think that’s a really good definition of. Where we are in our lives is we’re constantly battling our social veneer. The thing that people see as us and the real, true, authentic, vulnerable us. Um, Brene Brown is a, you know, one of my mentors in that, like, how do you get so authentic without the fear of retaliation?

Of your weaknesses or, you know, or those things that you’re so afraid of your addictions and everything else. 

Ronnie Landis: This is also a piece around something that I’ve termed addiction logic, which is the, the conscious and subconscious and interpersonal motivations for why we seek out external coping mechanisms to numb, sedate, medicate, and tranquilize.

Whatever that internal disconnect is that that trauma disconnect, emotional wounding, whatever, whatever the neurotic tick is, we have reasons and stories for why we do what we do. And when you start to go deeper into the story, it doesn’t actually make sense, but like, practically, it’s not logical. This is not, we know that the cigarettes or the alcohol or the pornography.

Or whatever it may be is detrimental and is actually taking me on a destructive path. But why do we do what we do? There is some sort of narrative. There is some sort of reasoning behind it. And that’s, that’s what you’re alluding to. And that’s also why state change is so important because if we’re not able to manage or enter into a preferable optimal state, then all we’re going to be doing is seeking coping mechanisms to, to medicate.

The suboptimal or lower than suboptimal state, because the state is going to dominate the logic or the, you know, whatever the belief system that we’re trying to achieve from personal development modalities. 

Mark Effinger: Oh, that’s beautiful. I’m going to probably do that as a pull quote. Thank you. Um, there is, you’re right.

There’s a dearth of great people hibernating under poor neurological state management. Give them the right solutions to optimize states and demand and watch miracles happen. That’s kind of where it, where it happens, right? Is. So that I, it’s so powerful to understand the narrative that we write. There was a, there was a time when my father and I, my dad, this one here, he passed away a few years ago.

What an incredible man. I mean, what a great example also of a honest, ethical, principled guy. Um, I’m one of six kids and he, he did a hell of a job of raising us. Um, I can’t, I’ve, I’ve had a hard enough time with my three kids. It’s, you know, I can’t imagine six. The, the thing is, is there was a time when my dad and I didn’t get along.

You know, there’s a, there’s that. That, um, I, you know, that journey, the, the hero’s journey type of thing where, um, and my dad, I felt like I was abandoned at one point and I just remember how much that hurt me and how I started writing this narrative that was, that was, Honest, but it was the bad side of these things.

It wasn’t the whole of these things, right? And once I started, you know as I got more mature later on And I started understanding the whole of those things and what I gained from our relationship and what a what a badass guy He was and how much he supported me when i’m a geeky kid, you know, we didn’t grow up with money But he made sure I always had The technologies I needed to do the science that I needed to explore the depth and the breadth of my capabilities, not understanding that he was, my mother cried one day when she found a quarter in my dad’s coveralls from, he was a heating and air conditioning tech because it allowed her to buy some more powdered milk to make more milk for his kid, for her kids.

Right. And it was, you know, it wasn’t, we, we never thought we were poor. We just, you know, cause my parents were, were incredible parents, but, but when I look at that and I go, holy shit, man, we were those people that were one paycheck from, you know, on the street at times. And, but we always lived in a nice home.

We, you know, we lived in a, in decent neighborhoods. We had great friends, great quality of relationships. We always ate good food and those things. Um, but the narrative I had built up in my head was one that was very detrimental to our relationship. And it propped up, it was, it was kind of like rusty scaffolding propping up.

The belief system that the reason that I wasn’t a success at that time or the reason that I wasn’t as great as I could be was because my dad didn’t love me as much as he should have at that time. Right? And once I got rid of that, once I disassembled that scaffolding completely and I changed the narrative and I actually wrote my stepmother a love letter, try to mend the fence.

And it completely changed everything because in the process of writing the love letter, by the way, highly recommended for people that are having conflict with somebody is even if you never give it to them, write down the experience of being with them, all the shit that you hated and all the stuff you loved.

And then really focus on the stuff that you loved and look at that and see If it doesn’t make the shit that you hated pale in comparison, 

Ronnie Landis: that’s great 

Mark Effinger: And it really becomes a powerful tool again Even if you don’t give it to them when my when my wife died when she committed suicide my kids and I a few months later, we wrote down Things that she would say that we thought that were interesting.

She was super talented and really capable and things we thought were interesting. And then also the things that we hated about the fact that she left us early. And then we built a nice fire in the backyard and we made little paper airplanes and flew them into the fire and let it burn. Let it be the end of it.

And it was very powerful because the fire took away the pain. The fire became the, you know, the catalyst, literally a catalyst for, for those events. And we were able to rewrite the script. And instead of the script being, you left us early, you didn’t love us. Right. It was, I can’t, I can’t believe how much pain she was in.

And yet she wasn’t letting us, she wasn’t challenging us with the pain. She was just dealing with it. I mean, how brave is that as, as, you know, as awful as it was. Right. And. Yep. And how much she loved us, that she didn’t want us to be subject to her depth of hell. And by re crafting that, it gave us a new lease on life and an ability to, and then the miracle of miracles happened is at her wake, a little faceless car, a little, a conal box drives up the driveway and a guy gets out.

And And he hands my daughter a handmade paper box and leaves, we have no idea what it is. He would just have to sign for it and we open up the box and in the box are letters from the people who received her organs. And my daughter, Livvy, um, the one that still works with me, she read off how the trucker got a new set of eyes, how her kidneys fueled another person’s, a little girl’s future and all of these different things.

And so her. Death was really, literally more of a transition. 

Ronnie Landis: Wow. Wow. Well, talk about grace, you know, you know, and it’s like, I know we’re at the two hour mark and this just keeps getting just more profound and I guess like I have, there’s two, there’s two. The things I want before we complete there’s, there’s, there’s two things I’m hoping to do with you.

Um, on, in this moment, I guess I just want to ask you on that point. Cause the word grace came up for me and what came up on the backend of that is capital G O D. 

Mark Effinger: Yeah. 

Ronnie Landis: I was on Josh Trent’s podcast. We did a two hour deep dive on addiction and we went deep into so many things. And in my book, there’s a phrase that I’ve been using a lot lately, which is essentially that Addiction is not your problem.

It’s an attempt to solve the problem. And deep down, the problem is the God shaped hole in your soul that you’re trying to fill with an external coping mechanism, person, place, or thing. Right. Uh, he asked me at some point, he was like, what do we need? And I didn’t even think it did. It just came over me. It was just like, we need God, essentially.

That’s what we need now to each their own and how you interpret that. It means nothing to me. But I know what that means for me. I’m curious. What, what comes up for you? You’ve lived a full life. You’ve experienced so much and you’ve shared so much. I’m curious. What are your, what, what’s your relationship with, with what we call God?

Mark Effinger: Can I tell two stories on that? 

Ronnie Landis: Please. 

Mark Effinger: All right. Thank you. Um, the first one I’m in the air force, my big brother and I both went in the air force, um, and we both, I think privately had the opera or had the objective of, of, um, saving money to start companies. So mine was going to be technology. I didn’t know what his was going to be, but, um, he’s always been a, my brother is, um, Forrest Gump in nine out of 10 ways.

And so literally, I mean, I’ll, I’ll tell you his story sometime. We’ll save that for the next podcast, but my brother, Doug is Doug. I love you, brother. Um, so one thing is, so I, so my brother becomes, uh, my, my little brother, Tom, my youngest brother, who’s like the super talent of us boys. He’s incredible musician and, and he owns a really successful heating and air conditioning company as a great wife, and it’s just really an icon to me in many ways.

He, um, he became a Jesus freak. He became a solid, you know, a sold out Christian is back, um, many years ago is back in the, in the, uh, late seventies. And, um, and so he starts writing letters to me and my brother as we’re in basic training and tech school and all those, he’s writing letters, um, as Paul would do.

And so Paul, the apostle, the one that was referenced in there, that Paul, um, Or Paul Carrick the singer, um, and and so he’s writing letters to us and everything and i’m not I think it’s interesting, but I’m not swayed. Like I saw my dad and my dad was really cool. He let me study, you know, when I realized that Catholicism wasn’t my, my gig, I was six years old.

And so he let me study Taoism and Buddhism and transcendental meditation and all kinds of stuff. And I had a really great, you know, he was, he got on his haunches one day when I was asking that quite, you know, what the hell’s going on here? We’re, we’re learning Latin and Latin’s dead, um, at the Catholic church.

Right. And he goes, he goes, you know what, one of the things I noticed when I was meditating is, uh, um, in the monastery is, is God is so much bigger than any book. So he goes, you know, he says, what do you want to do? And I said, I just want to, I want to see what’s out there. And he goes, great. Where do you want to start?

I said, I don’t know. Where should I start dad? And he goes, well, Buddhism is a good place to start. So, so I studied Buddhism, right? And I studied, and then I had an eight, when I was eight years old, there was a school teacher’s assistant who loved the fact that I, I really had a shiny Schwinn bike that I rode at 10 speed, uh, Schwinn varsity.

And, um, and so. He said, let’s go writing one day. We went writing one day and, and that guy happened to be a transcendental meditation practitioner and he taught me TM. And so then that led to Taoism and that led to, um, Kung Fu with a neighbor who was practicing Kung Fu and learning that as a, as a, both a discipline and a martial art at the same time.

Uh, Kevin, Kevin King Ray, Kevin King Ray was my girlfriend’s brother, but anyhow, all right, Kevin Ambrose. There we go. Kevin Ambrose, who’s neighbor, but, but so we have all these experiences. Fast forward my brother’s writing letters and everything. I go to I ride my motorcycle down to my brother at a three cycle Or a two cycle three cylinder suzuki Bike, it was badass And when it came on the pipe, it would do it would just pull a wheelie I rode down from central california to southern california and I met with my brother and we got drunk And then the next day the next morning he said hey, man, why don’t you come to church with me?

I’m going now. Come on, brother. I’m not i’m not dressed for it. I knew what church meant for me. It meant You know, putting your knees on a hard pew, uh, singing certain songs, saying certain responses to a very programmatic, by the way, not a trash on Catholic Catholicism at all. Just it was my experience with Catholicism at the time, my limited insight on how spiritual that belief system could be.

But, um, so I go, I go, okay, he goes, he goes, Hey, there’s going to be chicks there. I’m going, all right, cool. I’m in. So, so I, and I’m in shorts and a t shirt, you know, and, and, um, so I rode my motorcycle there and. We go in and there’s um, there’s these round tables and there’s people around these tables and they’re eating donuts and drinking coffee, which I thought was really unusual.

Um, and there’s a band that sound like Crosby, Stills, Nash playing really great, like acoustic harmonies and really cool tunes. I’m going, man, that’s awesome. Cause we’re a musical family. We really loved music. And every one of us played music at some point. And, um, And so that was like really cool. And then this, this, I, I find this hot smoking, hot blonde.

It happens to be the pastor’s wife. Brent Rue is the guy’s name. And so I sit down as one of these round tables right next to her and my brother sits on the other side of me. And, um, and we got my donuts and coffee and things are going cool. The pastor gets up and he does minutes and then he goes, He goes, all right, let’s talk about heaven.

He goes, let’s talk about infinity when I was young I was so entranced with infinity and einstein’s theory of general relativity That I literally woke up in cold sweats Every month and a half or so, like, like fearful of infinity of being insignificant because all I saw myself was insignificance in the scope of infinity, the scope of the grains of sand in the biblical perspective, right?

We’re all his grains of sand. Well, for all his grains of sand that I’m not were squat because the beaches never change. And so. I meant this thing in the, in the, and the pastor goes, all right, let’s talk about the Funkin Wagnall encyclopedia series. Now there used to be these things called encyclopedias.

They were big books and they were in the library and they had all the knowledge and wisdom that we had in the, you know, in the world, we’re all in these books. I think they were very, you know, there was like 26 volumes and there was a concordance at the end of it. That was a reference to all the rest of it, kind of a shortcut.

And so he goes, you open up page one of a And, and that’s, and it’s aardvark and you’re going, Oh shit, man, that is so cool. And for a thousand years, you’re super excited about aardvark and you turn the page and you got another letter, right? You just keep doing that. And he’s, and he’s, you know, we’re all laughing and he’s six foot six, maybe at the time, I think he was so tall and skinny and he put his leg over the, over the, the, uh, podium, you know, as he’s speaking, like he’s that tall.

Very cool. Good. And, um, and he’s very excited about this whole thing, by the way, the movie, the movie, um, Jesus revolution, um, that just came out recently. If you get a chance, I would highly recommend you watch that. It’s an incredible, those are the pastors and the assistant pastors and the catalyst for my.

Young christian background. Okay So chuck smith and and greg laurie who was mentored under great chuck smith Were the the super pastors to my spin off from that church the calvary chapel church that was in central california So great stuff and and it’s really cool cool time where hippie ism met You’re right, right met spiritualism, right?

so So he does all this stuff and he gets to the end and he goes, he goes, okay. And finally you get to the last page of the last page of concordance. And it’s, you know what it says? It says, turn to page one of a. And so this whole problem that I had my whole life is when I was a little kid of being insignificant in infinity, he put into a catalyst and he goes, and then he goes, you know, he does what’s called an altar call where he goes, you know, and it goes, okay, is anybody here interested in, in understanding more about Jesus Christ?

Cause this was a Christian church, right? But it was kind of one of these edgy, hippie Christian churches. Everybody wore shorts and, you know, and knee socks and, and, you know, and. And, you know, and so you kind of close your eyes and then you raise your hand. Oh, see, we want to stand up. Right. It’s kind of like increasing your commitment to this thing.

And, and he says, if you want to have, if you want to like understand more, um, just make a commitment to, to kind of, of allowing this spirit to flow into you like this Jesus Christ thing, this Holy spirit to kind of flow into you. And he says, I guarantee that you’ll have this expanded experience. And I, I kind of opened my heart to this event.

And what happened was I saw a, the vision that we’ll, we’ll call it God, the vision that the spirit or God or the universe gave me at the moment was this brick wall at a 45 degree angle, it burst open and it This word and I, I absolutely swear to God that this word came to me like it was louder than a human being in my ear said, You now have the key to all wisdom, creativity and knowledge.

Go use it. It wasn’t go preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. It wasn’t go, go, you know, it was just, it was like, Oh, holy shit. What happened? And then I get in my motorcycle and I’m riding home and the girl, the first girl I ever had an intimate relationship with Krista Lewis happened to be, and I hadn’t seen her in two years, three years.

She happened to be on the freeway in Southern California. I’m from Portland, Oregon. Had to be in the freeway in Southern California, driving North on the four Oh five. And, um, and I, I look over and I see her and I’ve got, of course, a helmet on and I keep waving at her and, and she keeps going faster in the diamond lane and, you know, and it’s on a Sunday afternoon, you know, keep going and finally I pull my helmet off.

She recognized me and cuts my hair and I try to tell her about this experience and she’s like looking at me like, dude. No, we had sex don’t tell me about this jesus guy, right? I get to my dorm room. I get to my dorm room in the air force on my base And I come in and all and and my roommate is drinking with a bunch of buddies They got a 24 pack of really shitty cheap beer And I say, you guys, I just got saved and they close the door, they get a towel and they put it under the door and they go, awesome, bro, light up.

And so we took a bong hit. And so the right, all this stuff, eventually I became a Jesus freak. I, you know, I got plugged into a church and again, the church is that Calvary chapel that they have in that, that thing was really great. A guy named Brad Haven on Trinity court was starting a church. So I did a thing called church planting where you become the early members of a church and you start finding it.

So we fast forward a couple years and I’m in this church and I’m studying Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Aramaic. And I’m, I’m studying all of the different Bibles that are available, the new American standard, the, the hippie Bible from the 1970s that they had, you know, they created this cool kind of colloquial Bible, um, the, the new King James, the old 1611 King James.

Right. And I’m reading all these and I’m dissecting every scripture and I’m teaching Bible studies to kids that I’m leading some worship, you know, music and those kinds of things. And, um, and doing home groups and those things. And one night I’m playing it. This is part two, by the way. One night I’m playing guitar and I’m, I’m just alone and I’m studying the Bible, I’m studying all the stuff in Latin and I’m literally, I’m, I’m reading about Paul, the, the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus, and I’m reading this one scripture that was related to that.

And it was, um, it was, uh, Mark 36 something. And it was, uh, essentially it said, love your Lord with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. And in that you fulfill all what they called all the laws and the prophets. So basically loving your God and loving your neighbor, um, basically fulfills all the Jewish tenants, right.

That are the old Testament. They make up the Old Testament and I’m trying to figure out literally the word the in Hebrew in, um, you know, in, in, um, like, like, you know, to a, uh, a D. And I’m trying to put all these pieces together in this very structured, you know, there, I’m trying to like build the story around this and have it make sense.

Cause I’m going to teach kids the next day at the church. And the epiphany was love your God, love your neighbor and love yourself. Yes. And in that, you fulfill all the laws and profits. By the way, I have a really cool Michael Hedges raga acoustic guitar thing, you know, like hammer ons and pull offs and stuff going while I’m doing that.

So it had a musical background. It was really cool. Love to do it now. Um, and And, but what it is, and, and I had, I, I mentioned that I had low self esteem because I was an acne riddled kid. I hadn’t started bodybuilding yet. So I was really skinny and, and, you know, I’m in the air force, which is like 90 percent guys and 10 percent girls.

So, you know, there are few and far between, and I had no relationship and I was lonely and my fellowship was everything. And, you know, the church I was in was everything. And, and, you know, and, and I, and I just was going through a very dark period in my life. Um, and, and I realized that I didn’t love myself.

And if I didn’t love myself, how was I gonna love my neighbor? And if I didn’t love my neighbor, how was I gonna prove my love for God? Mm-Hmm. And so I went to church and, and we, you know, we had a great church time and, and some music and stuff. And, and then the pastor Brad says, anybody have anything to share?

And, and that was my epiphany. I said, yeah. I said, we’re masturbating on the word, which is not the term you wanna use in front of the pastor’s wife. Right. Is we’re masturbating on the word and what we need to be doing is just going out and showing our love to people. And in that probably building up more self love because I didn’t have any.

And in that. Kind of being an instrument of God and we don’t even have to have say god bless her Or or you know, jesus lives or anything like that We just need to be the example and in that we are playing the part that god would play physically if they’re right And it will be this natural extension and I was asked to leave the church not soon after that.

But um, but for for many reasons, but that was uh, It was one of them is that the pastor’s wife thought that I was a little bit of a troublemaker Um, because it’s not dogma. There’s no dogma in that right? You Best ones are. Yeah. Yeah. And it was, it was great. It was really super good lesson for me. And, but it was a key thing.

So when we talk about God, um, when we talk about one is that I have a, uh, you know, I had, I had this traditional Judeo Christian background growing up, my dad, You know, Trappist monk and then Catholic church. And then, you know, studying the Eastern philosophies and then, uh, you know, becoming a Jesus freak.

And then suddenly leaving the church, my wife and I left the church, you know, one point and feeling the vacancy that happens when, you know, that God filled whole that you and, and, uh, Josh were talking about. Um, and it’s, it’s huge. It is a big thing. And You know, I got to tell you, um, if I can, if I can share this insight is I was doing some biofeedback, some neurofeedback.

I was in the middle of the desert, um, at an 18 million mansion owned by one of the Hollywood guys. And my business partner, Matt says, Hey, if you’re interested, there’s a, there’s a lady I’d like you to meet. Her name is John D and she does a thing called, um, Uh, emotional freedom technique. And if you’re interested, she’s going to zoom in for you and you, you can go to your, you know, go to your room and, and see if you, you know, want to do it.

You’re not, you’re not obligated to do it, but I think it might be really interesting. And we sat down and she did kind of the, this timeline therapy with me, where she brought me back to my earliest trauma, the earliest one I remember when I was young. Little tiny child and um, and then just kind of walk me forward and we, we got to know, you know, we did this stupid thing of meeting my younger self and getting to know him and then going through the event in my mind and my heart and feeling the trauma of it and then kind of systematically diffusing that trauma and holding that little boy’s hand and then going to the next event and it was just a really incredible thing.

And I found in that event, this Understanding of God in a way that I didn’t know that when I left the church, you kind of, it’s kind of a hard line. It’s kind of a binary event where you go, okay, I’m out of it. There’s no redemption. There’s, you know, this whole Jesus Christ thing that I’ve been leaning on for all these years doesn’t exist.

And there’s, you know, and, and the, the atheist. 

Ronnie Landis: Yeah. Yeah. 

Mark Effinger: Yeah. And it’s scary. And then what I realized was. Regardless of the validity of that, of that, you know, the, the Christian narrative, the idea of, uh, of You know, I, I look now at the cellular mechanisms and, you know, being a scientist, I go back and understanding how things work.

Can you go, there’s very little fucking way that that stuff just arrived. 

Ronnie Landis: Oh, totally. Right. 

Mark Effinger: My dad used to say, you know, his thing was go ahead and take all the parts. My dad would give me his broken watches and clocks and say, go ahead and put those in a garbage can and wait a million years, they’re not going to form a clock.

They’re not going to form a watch. Um, there must be something else that is a coordinating thing that is able to understand, I mean, and then look at an atom and Adam is, you know, 99 percent open space and a little, a little tiny, you know, uh, electrons revolving around neurons, neutrons and protons. And, and somehow they’re, they’re held together.

What is the glue that holds them together? You know, I’m going to call it God. I’m going to call it spirit. I’m going to call it, you know, right. Magic. 

Ronnie Landis: Absolutely. And how do you explain all the. All the perfectly time synchronized moments of zero point precision, surgical precision moments in your life that you’ve alluded to that were so improbable that you could never plan or predict or map out.

There certainly wasn’t any user’s manual. And going from tragedy to triumph and that not just being like a movie phrase, but that being your lived experience and all the scenes that had to happen. I mean, I, that’s why I’m asking you the question, like, what would you, how do you explain that? What, what, what, you know what I mean?

I, I, 

Mark Effinger: okay, we gotta, we gotta whisper this. God is everyone’s superpower. 

Ronnie Landis: That’s what, that’s what I’m trying to get to with this, 

Mark Effinger: right? Is I can do all of these neurochemical gymnastics and I can help people achieve a state of, of dominance, a state of power, a state of focus, a state of joy, a state of happiness, a state of whatever, but inherently there’s a crystalline structure within you that is just hoping that one day you will, you’ll do a trust fall and say, there is something out there.

There is. And, and, you know, and once you understand that the, the level of confidence that it gives you that you can go into something, if you feel called to, or if you feel the, the, the. You know, the impetus or the prompt, um, there’s, you’re going to have a conversation in a coffee shop that is going to change your life.

You’re going to have, you’re going to, you’re going to be talking to one of your employees or one of your bosses, and they’re going to say this flippant remark that you have no idea. And suddenly you’re going to cogitate on it. And it’s going to lead you to a book and a phrase inside the book that you’re reading, that’s going to lead you to a song lyric that is going to lead you to driving to a place on an alternate route that you would normally never take.

That is going to lead you to, to meeting some guy on the side of the road, right? It’s the hero’s journey is real, right? And we all go through it time and time again, but we often don’t realize what’s happening. We don’t understand who that character is and how they fit into the, to the great theme of things, and we don’t give.

Spirit or universe or energy or God, or we don’t give, we don’t understand that we don’t understand the events to a point of being grateful. And once we integrate that gratefulness of, you know, thank God that, that, you know, thank whatever, right? Thank the universe for whatever they all have, but thank whatever it is that you, when you realize that you are, um, you’re not.

Not in control, but more importantly, if you allow the bigger picture to. To guide you, let me, let me try this one on you. So there’s, I, I’m going to like for all those people that are non Christians or don’t ascribe at all to Christianity are going to go, Jesus, man, this guy talks so much about God, but there’s Paul, the apostle was this dude who was a radical, he was an entrepreneur.

He made tents for a living and he was next in line to become one of the high priests in the Jewish religion, the Jewish faith and as in Judaism. And so as a result of that, he was not exactly bullish on Christians. The Christians were a problem. They were, uh, you know, a flagrant group. They knew enough about, about the faith, the Jewish faith to be very strong in that.

They knew how to, how to play the game, but then they had this new game that was coming, which said, Hey, we got this, this character that’s kind of fulfilled all of this, this law, this Jewish law, all of these fricking things we got to do to become, you know, right. Uh, good with God. So Paul’s on the road to Damascus to go persecute Christians.

This is a long road between cities. As he’s on this road to Damascus, there are these, these, um, prickly pair type of things there, right? That he’s, they’re called goads. And at one point, he sees this light, this blinding light, and it’s not the desert sun. It’s something else. It’s so powerful that it literally blinds him.

He gets down on his knees and he said, Lord, Lord. And the voice says, Yes, Lord, um, Paul, don’t you find it hard to kick against the goads? And what he was talking about was, don’t you find it hard to kick against these people that are trying to exhibit this expanded faith? This is not a, uh, you know, this is not a, the Jewish faith doesn’t count.

This is fulfillment of the Jewish faith. And he goes up on a rooftop and he meditates for three days and prays for three days and then gets direction in his life. And you know, and now he’s, and now he’s 180 degrees turned around going, all right, I’m going to be the guy that’s going to spearhead this state.

Wow. When we are passive, waiting for the fucking thing to come to us, that’s, that is, And sometimes it’s important to do that, to be able to meditate, to be insightful, to again, journal and to pray and to meditate and kind of like the just kind of call the spirit in, but As Steven Pressfield would say, go and do the work, build the work in the process of doing the work, even if it’s fucking wrong thing, there are guiding spirit will come in and say, Hey, cool.

You’re doing shit. The universe will come in and say, cool. All I’m looking for is people that are doing shit, people that have right. And then I can work with those people. It can be completely the wrong thing, but I can work with them. And you find that time and time again, you find that time and time again, in whether it’s, it’s, you know, it’s in the kind of things we’re doing where we’re trying to communicate a big picture and give people the tools to get, to, to create something more out of their lives.

Sarah van breath match, I think was her name. She wrote this great book Years ago about about being and doing more right like once you realize what you’re capable of you can do more But most people have no inkling of how capable they are and and there are period people in the spiritual Realm who are trying to meditate or pray their way into something significant I’m not saying that’s wrong.

I can’t absolutely can’t say that wrong, but I also know that You There’s a certain commitment to just like, let, let the spirit bring in a vision for you. Let the, like, feel that thing that catalyzes into a vision and then go act and do stupid shit, do stuff that’s, that’s wrong or broke, just do stuff.

Get the energy and commit yourself to the energetic activity of getting, you know, incredibly closer to something of meaning and watch the people show up, watch the events show up, watch your resources appear in your life that suddenly helped to put the guardrails around and guide you into a much more powerful thing than you could even ever imagine you doing.

So that would be my spiritual encouragement and that’s my definition of God. God is that thing that comes in and fills in those blanks, who encourages the people to come in. The person that showed up at that coffee shop that said that word, that got you reading that book, that got you taking that alternative route, that got you meeting that person on the roadway with a flat tire, that got you suddenly realizing that, I mean, I, dude, I’ve had all of those fucking experiences and they’ve all been catalysts for great change.

All of them go and do go buy somebody a lunch anonymously see somebody at a at right at a grocery store and buy their their you know, their bags of grocery for them at Whole Foods. Don’t tell anybody just do it and receive the joy of doing and being in that. And watch the fucking blessings flow in and I don’t say that like I know that sounds like the you know The the old lady that you went to church with oh, just bless those people There is a reality To going and doing shit that sounds stupid But doing stuff in a place of abundance in your heart and soul It just seems to feed on itself.

I can’t explain it And it’s the reason that I believe that there’s probably a much bigger You Entity power, strength, creative thoughts, idea, brain out there. That’s doing a lot of work. And all I got to do is kind of like commit myself and that thing will come in and give me a bunch of tools and solutions and guidance.

And so there, that’s God. 

Ronnie Landis: Is amazing. And I full heartedly agree with that from my own lived experience, philosophically, psychologically, I mean, on every level, and that that that God spark that’s activated when when you give of yourself in ways that I want to use the word intelligent, but it’s unique to the, it’s unique to the individual.

It’s not like random acts of quote unquote service. It’s things that actually call you that resonate with you that, that there’s some kind of spark. There’s some kind of intuitive nudge and that joy that you feel inside of you. That is the healing force. That is actually the thing that heals you beyond.

Anything external, the external things in large part are actually state change mechanisms to help tap you into the state where you can be an inner alignment and the life force can activate and flow through you. Um, and who you become in that process is actually the dopaminergic goal. It’s not the outcome.

It’s actually the goal of who you’re being in the flow of life. And. Um, and I, I completely agree with you and I’m so grateful I asked the question because that was an amazing answer. 

Mark Effinger: I, I, I appreciate your insight and also I appreciate you giving the breadth and for us to be able to have that dialogue.

Very cool, Ronnie. Thanks, brother. 

Ronnie Landis: Yeah, Mark, this has been absolutely incredible and we’ll definitely have to do a part two. Um, 

Mark Effinger: Love it. 

Ronnie Landis: But what an incredible deep dive, what incredible great way for us to connect. Um, you’re definitely a kindred soul and I’m so grateful for, for the company that you’ve created, the formulations, your partnership with two other men that I, I respect and admire.

And yeah, if you’re looking on YouTube, you get to see this amazing packaging. Of the most amazing cognitive performance, brain health, optimization supplements that that currently exist. I mean, look at this. It’s so cool. The, Oh, the dopo drops. Yeah. I I’m looking forward to continuing to explore and experiment with, um, with all that myself and, um, yeah, all, all the links for new topia, all the products are in the show notes.

Coupon code life mastery 10. Um, there, yeah, there, there’s so much more. Um, um, I love being part of this whole journey. And so I’ll end all that by saying thank you. And where can anybody find more resources, um, that you have to share? 

Mark Effinger: I love it. So, um, I occasionally poke my head out on Facebook and I do it also.

So it’s Mark Effinger on Facebook, uh, facebook. com slash mark M A R K E F F as in Frank. I N G E R. Um, you can also find me. I’ll also contribute to our utopia Facebook group. So Facebook slash, uh, new topia, new topia brain on, on Instagram, utopia brain on Instagram. And then, um, feel free if anybody wants to just reach out, email or whatever, and say, Hey man, um, you know, I heard you on Ronnie’s podcast, would love to know more, or I’ve got a specific condition or issue I want to address.

I just had somebody reach out to me the, um, just from a couple of podcasts ago. Reach out because they, um, were in a relationship with an alcoholic and, um, and needed some insights on that, which obviously you would be a, a great insight and expert on that. Another one reached out to me because they were addicted to Adderall and they were having, um, restless leg syndrome and other characteristics, and they felt like they needed the focus.

But the side effects were starting to compound. And so, um, working with them to help to solve that was something I really, I really enjoy. I mean, again, this is, this happens to be what I do for a living, but this is my calling. And so I’m, I’m obliged to be able to help anybody, anybody that needs it. So.

Ronnie Landis: Amazing. Well, it’s an honor and pleasure. I look forward to continuing to connect with you and, um, yeah, develop this relationship and all that you guys are doing with the new topium bio optimizers mission. So with that said, thank you, Mark. And, uh, I look forward to connecting in the future. 

Mark Effinger: Awesome, Ronnie.

Thank you, brother. And I give Trent, give Josh my love as well. Will you? Oh, I will do that for sure. All right.