[00:00:00] Luke Storey: I'm Luke Storey. For the past 22 years, I've been relentlessly committed to my deepest passion, designing the ultimate lifestyle based on the most powerful principles of spirituality, health, psychology. The Life Stylist podcast is a show dedicated to sharing my discoveries and the experts behind them with you. Scott, thanks for coming out to Austin, Texas, dude.

[00:00:28] Scott Donnell: Absolutely. Good to be here.

[00:00:29] Luke Storey: Yeah, I see you've got your Hapbee around your neck, all lit up beautifully, for those that are going to end up watching this on YouTube, they will, of course, know what we're talking about. You are someone who is a serial entrepreneur. You look like a youngish guy, but doing my research on you, I found that you have had your hands in a lot of companies and are doing really exciting things.

[00:00:53] So, aside from kind of the main thing we're going to be talking about is mood, regulation, and ways in which someone can change the way they feel without actually putting anything in their bloodstream, tell us about a couple of the other ventures that you've had along the way. And I definitely want to include the work you're doing with kids at the site called myfirstsale.com. So, give us kind of your entrepreneurial background, because I'm fascinated by all the things that you've gotten into.

[00:01:22] Scott Donnell: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. This is going to be a lot of fun. I'm basically a serial entrepreneur, ADD turned into something positive. I think we all have a good thing there. But yeah, I love business. I love solving problems. My first business was in third grade, believe it or not, bead gecko key chains. And that's why we do MyFirstSale for the kids. I want kids to be able to learn the principles of financial literacy, profit, business, build confidence for the future.

[00:01:56] That's why we built that company, to teach them all about how to make and manage money. But yeah, third grade, started making bead gecko key chains. I hired all my classmates. They stopped going to lunch and recess, because they were making me key chains for like 25 cents. And then, I got suspended, and I knew there, my supply chain got cut. They didn't like that none of my friends were going to recess.

[00:02:21] Luke Storey: That's funny. You got suspended for like monetizing your class?

[00:02:26] Scott Donnell: Yeah, but it was voluntary. Anyway, it was a lot of fun, but I fell in love with business super early. Real first business was back in 2010. My wife, Amy, who we celebrate 10 years in a couple of months here.

[00:02:41] Luke Storey: Congratulations.

[00:02:42] Scott Donnell: Thank you. Thank you. That's probably the number one accomplishment. She's a first grade teacher. She was for many years. And she spent money on her kids. 

[00:02:52] Luke Storey: A saint, in other words.

[00:02:53] Scott Donnell: Literally an angel in human form, believe me, man. But yeah, she needed money for her classroom. And the only thing out there at the time was like cookie dough sales and chocolate, whatever it would be to sell, the kids peddle door to door. And I don't really like that. And the schools make no money, by the way. So, like if you buy a cookie dough from a kid at school, that school's only going to get like five of the 20 bucks. Okay. So, it's not teaching the kids really anything. It's not even safe. So, we launched Apex Fun Run. It's a school fundraising program that teaches leadership, and character, and fitness. Here in Austin, I think two-thirds of all of the elementary, middle schools use it, actually.

[00:03:35] Luke Storey: Oh, wow.

[00:03:36] Scott Donnell: Yeah. And we're all over the country. It blew up. Now, we have 100-something franchises. Were in 38 states. Five million kids almost now served. And super fun company. It's a passion, for sure, teaching kids, kind of the next generations. And that's why we do MyFirstSale, too, teaching kids about the business stuff.

[00:03:55] Luke Storey: And is MyFirstSale sort of like an Etsy for kids, where the model that you were creating, these key chains, like kids can create art or tchotchkes and sell them?

[00:04:06] Scott Donnell: Yeah. We got tens of thousands of kids, like t-shirts, candles, sugar scrubs. They basically join the site, we give them a curriculum with like little three-minute, four-minute videos on, what's profit? How do you choose your price? What's a good product for me, and based on my passion and what I care about. And we literally give them their own web page as well to sell safely. And yeah, they launch it, and we've got kids selling thousands of dollars. Like our top kid is at almost 10,000 already sold as like a 12-year-old, I think, or an 11-year-old.

[00:04:37] And they're all over the place. It's been a lot of fun. We're actually building an app right now, so if you're listening to this later in 2021, we'll have an app to teach kids to make and manage money. It's like a bank account for kids. So, that's being built right now. And you can go to the website, MyFirstSale does business fairs for schools now, so school signs up, elementary and middle schools, and we run this whole hassle-free program to teach all the kids how to do a business. And we do a huge business fair, and all the community comes and buys from the kids online, and really, really fun.

[00:05:08] Luke Storey: Wow. That's so cool. I sent that site to my friends, Elliot and Bree. They have, I think she's around—Vera's around nine now. Perfect. And I sent it to them, and they're like, love it, man, she's already on Etsy, but this is better. I was like, oh, cool. Like they already kind of had that idea. I don't yet have kids, so I'm kind of learning these types of things so that I can, down the road, start to integrate some of this. Because I think there are people that are wired to have a job and they love their job if they find the right one, right?

[00:05:40] Scott Donnell: Right.

[00:05:41] Luke Storey: And there are some people that are just not built that way, and I was one of those kids. I just hated school, was not good at school, there were very few things about school that I liked. And what school, traditionally speaking, in this country at least, sort of prepares you for is to be a good employee, a cog in the machine. And when I attempted to do that in my first few jobs, I hated that even more than school.

[00:06:09] At least, in school, you could screw around. You can't really screw around and keep your job. So, thankfully, like you, I found entrepreneurship and discovered, wow, there are talents that I have that I just didn't know that I had, or that they were actually meaningful, or could have some sort of a contribution. And I think it's so important for kids to understand that, because, man, I think the kids that are being born now, based on the ones here in Austin even that I know, they're just different animals, man.

[00:06:35] They are very unique. There's a microevolution, I think, throughout the generations that, I mean, it's palpable to me that these kids are just like very bright. And I can't see them sitting in those little desks that I sat in for however many, six hours a day, just like repeating things by rote, and really training their memorization and cheating skills. So, I really applaud you for that venture. Sounds very cool.

[00:07:05] Scott Donnell: Yeah, thank you. Actually, I believe that this is the future of education. When we were growing up, it was like cogs in a machine. And a lot of the school system is trying to buck that trend right now, right? And I think kids need confidence for the future and they need a skill set for the future. And you have to learn by doing. Nowadays, you can't just pop open a textbook. Most kids don't learn that way. Okay. I never certainly didn't. I knew that if I went out and did something, I'd learn that for life, right? Like I was terrible at reading for the first 15 years of my life, but I had a photographic memory, right? I could see 25 numbers in a row and remember them.

[00:07:45] Luke Storey: Really?

[00:07:46] Scott Donnell: Yeah. I mean, I was so different, they thought that I couldn't read, I was slow. I had a twin sister who was like the smartest kid in class, and they're like, oh, yeah, she got all the brains, but they almost failed me kindergarten, first, and second grade. And I would like avoid school like the plague. Then, third grade, I beat my teacher in chess first time I'd ever played, and they were like, oh, Scott's got something going on inside, he's just different, right?

[00:08:14] And I realized at that point that I just I learn differently. I'm always taking things apart. I'm always thinking about business, as a kid, as a 10-year-old. And 10% of the population is like us. They want to create. They want to start their own business. Some people are really worried about it. But I think if we can get kids to realize that this is an opportunity, because it's not taught in schools. 

[00:08:39] We're starting extracurricular, because it's not something that you can really get mainstream education to take hold of, because it's only something that a minority of the students would actually latch onto. And so, what we're trying to do is, our mission is 10 million kids, teach them about financial literacy, investing, budgeting, saving, and the principles of entrepreneurship. So, that's the mission of the company. I think it's a fantastic way of learning. Here in Austin, Jeff Sandefer, who's one of my closest mentors, he started Acton Academies.

[00:09:11] Luke Storey: Oh, yeah. 

[00:09:11] Scott Donnell: Have you heard of those? 

[00:09:12] Luke Storey: I was looking into that, yeah.

[00:09:13] Scott Donnell: Yeah. So, he started those way back when I went to grad school here for entrepreneurship back in '08. And we've been close ever since. And they've got almost a thousand schools now for kids learning, it's sort of like a Montessori style, one-room schoolhouse, learn by doing. Every Friday, they're doing live apprenticeships throughout the city. No school, they just do like studying or going around with other people in real life, like an eight-year-old.

[00:09:38] Luke Storey: I wonder if any of those kids would want to apprentice on a podcast.

[00:09:42] Scott Donnell: Oh, absolutely.

[00:09:42] Luke Storey: Would be fun. Like teaching the kids how to work the mics and cameras, and preparing your questions and stuff like that.

[00:09:48] Scott Donnell: Why not? This is what you do for a living. It shouldn't just everyone be an accountant, or a lawyer, or an engineer, or a nurse, right? There's a lot—the jobs that the majority of kids are going to have in 10, 15 years, I'm talking about elementary schoolers, have not been invented yet. Think about that for a second. How can you prepare with a cookie cutter education the next generation of jobs that aren't even there yet? Right? Think about that. More millionaires were created in the last 10 years since the recession than all of history before that. 

[00:10:27] Luke Storey: Really? 

[00:10:28] Scott Donnell: Think about that. Like it's growing at a pace that new jobs, new industries, new opportunities are going to not just replace old ones, they're going to expand, right? This is how you grow economy. More people creating more value for other people requires more help. And so, I think that the best way to prepare the next generation for the workforce is to give them real world chances, right? We don't care how much money they make, we just want them to learn this, that you can make something out of nothing with your hands that other people value.

[00:11:05] That is all it is, man. Like have you heard an economist explain it like that? It should be explained like that. It doesn't have to be some PhD only economist, it's create something with your hands out of nothing to serve someone else, and that creates a win-win. And if kids can understand that, then their confidence goes through the roof, because every kid has incredible talents and gifts to give the world, why not unlock them? So, that's what we're doing.

[00:11:30] Luke Storey: Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Well, I'm glad we got to touch on that. Now, in all the things that you have going on, running these different companies. I know you've had a zillion employees through all the different things that you've done. And in doing some research on you, you're recently talking about some pretty tough times that you went through, where the stress of that high-performance lifestyle started to take its toll. Tell us a little bit about that before we really get into the main point of the conversation, because I think that lends itself to obviously finding solutions for these types of issues.

[00:12:07] Scott Donnell: Yeah. Well, just for starters, Hapbee basically saved my life in a very clear way with my mental breakdown. So, we're two-and-a-half years into this company, kind of took off like a rocket, raised nine million bucks or so, went public at the 20-month mark in Toronto. And now, we're-

[00:12:31] Luke Storey: Wow. That's quite soon, is it not?

[00:12:32] Scott Donnell: Way too fast. If you're asking anybody-

[00:12:34] Luke Storey: I don't know a lot about corporate timelines, but seems like from observing companies that that's pretty damn quick. 

[00:12:43] Scott Donnell: Way too fast. And not too fast in terms of a business model, everyone's done great. It's too fast in terms of what you can withstand doing it. And anybody who's been in tech, or had a fast-growing business or a content platform of any kind has kind of understood this, it is a pressure cooker. It's a blender. And a lot of people don't realize the stress that that causes, right? Deadlines, and I was getting, at one point, probably 200 emails a day that had nothing to do with spam.

[00:13:14] They were like six paragraph lawyer email. Like you got to read this and respond by midnight kind of stuff. Like I said, I don't like to read that fast. I remember it if I read it, but I don't read that fast. So, all that added up, and then going public and all the demand. And we go on Dave Asprey, and Jim Kwik, and Ben Greenfield, and everyone just [making sounds] . And so, the whole kind of the functional health community, the counselors, psychiatrists, biohackers, early adopters just totally glommed onto this.

[00:13:45] And so, then we're trying to make up with manufacturing, thousands and thousands of units that are all being like going off the shelves as fast as we can make them. COVID, we literally launched our Indiegogo, which was just a test, right? We've raised all our money, but the Indiegogo was just a test to see how the marketing would work. And we sold like half a million dollars of product in the first like day or two. It was crazy. And then, COVID hit like three weeks later and all the manufacturing got just crushed worldwide. Supply chains, and chips, and semiconductors was about a 25-week lead time, right? 

[00:14:21] Luke Storey: Oh, my God.

[00:14:22] Scott Donnell: Ask any entrepreneur worldwide, how are you going to decide what's going to happen in your business in six months? You have no clue. And you got to order it, right? It's a huge risk. And so, we're like, oh, no, we're way under bid. We got to triple our orders. And so, anyway, all that kind of comes together. We're hiring like crazy. And this was back in September, October, is when it all kind of came to a head last year. 

[00:14:45] And I woke up one morning in my—I didn't wake up, I couldn't sleep all night, my chest was hurting. I thought I was having a mini-heart attack. And I woke up, couldn't see straight. I tried to like look at a screen, like my phone, I couldn't read the words. And I have pretty good 20/20 vision, and it really freaked me out. Terrible headache. And I was like, well, maybe I'm just tired, or not enough water, or just kind of going through the checklist, and turns out I had basically like my brain was in overload. I had a breakdown.

[00:15:21] So, like I had a day of this, where I thought I was slowly dying. And then, immediately went into the doctor, and I was like, what is happening to me? And they didn't know. They had run a bunch of tests. Anyway, turned out I had about 50 problems, not just one thing. Everything kind of piled on itself. So, for starters, I had a parasite in my gut. We did blood work up, stool, urine, everything. We had the full workup. I had a parasite in my gut that I didn't know about that I think I got from surfing in El Salvador. I had celiac disease, have, no gluten dairy for me.

[00:16:03] Luke Storey: Oh, wow.

[00:16:04] Scott Donnell: Yeah, I didn't know any of that. And so, the villi in my gut was just sloughing off every day. And so, I wasn't getting any nutrients to my body, maybe 20% of the normal, and terrible. And for some reason, I just dealt with it, just didn't think about, yeah, I got problems. I had brain issues, I was pre-dementia, pre-cancer, and pre-diabetes. And I had zero trace minerals, like 90% of them were just gone. No vitamin A, no vitamin D, no B5 and 12, no zinc or manganese. Like it's just my body was completely depleted. And the worst one was that I couldn't produce butyric acid, and butyric acid is what helps calm down your GABA nervous system, right? So, my brain was stuck.

[00:16:53] Luke Storey: Oh, you were stuck in a fight or flight. That's interesting. I didn't know that connection. I know that when I did the last round of labs with Dr. Scott Sherr, who's been on the show, he sort of has a functional medicine kind of model, and he said, you don't have any of that butyric acid. So, he got me on like a butyrate supplement, but I didn't know the GABA connection. That's really interesting.

[00:17:16] Scott Donnell: Yeah. If you have the inability to calm down your nervous system, you get stuck in high beta, you get stuck in survival mode, and it's like pressing the gas without gas in the tank in your car, just high rev all the time. And I thought that was just my brain for years, because I'm an entrepreneur, who, when I'm sleeping, I'm thinking about problem solving. I mole in my sleep.

[00:17:37] So, I would wake up with an answer to a problem, or a people issue, every entrepreneur has like a hundred issues at all times, and you're always ranking them, and trying to think through them, and fix them, and I thought that was normal. But what that really was, was my brain on overdrive nonstop, which was completely eating up all of my energy that was left, right? And so, my gut was so unhealthy, because of all that.

[00:18:03] So, I had terrible gut bacteria issues. I was missing like four of the major families of gut bacteria. I was a mess, just to put it simply. And so, yeah, immediately, antibiotics for the parasite, and then changing diet right away, changing workout schedules, going through sleep, packing 50 different things, complete darkness, using the melatonin signal for sleep before every single night, trying to get myself to Oura Ring stats above 80, because I was in like the 50s and 60s.

[00:18:34] Luke Storey: Are you serious?

[00:18:35] Scott Donnell: It was terrible, man. I was going on probably four-and-a-half, five hours. And we have three little kids, too, you got to remember. I got a five-year-old, three-year-old, and almost one-year-old. And they're an incredible blessing. They also don't sleep. So, you just add all this together and I was under fire, man.

[00:18:52] Luke Storey: Oh, man. Wow.

[00:18:54] Scott Donnell: Yeah, doing way better now. Doing way better now.

[00:18:57] Luke Storey: Well, thank you for sharing that in an authentic and vulnerable way. I think a lot of people from the outside look at someone who has success and notoriety, and is buying and selling companies, and investing in this or that, and it appears to be on the surface, a life of privilege and ease, and one could like look at the fact that you're getting a couple hundred emails a day, and be like, oh, big deal. Like I can't pay rent or everyone has their burden, right? But I think that it's very subjective when it comes to stress. It's the same stress, it's just like what you're stressing about, right?

[00:19:35] Scott Donnell: Right.

[00:19:36] Luke Storey: I might have had my car repossessed, and you're complaining about your emails, and you whiz off in a Mercedes Benz, and I'm like, this dick, you don't have stress, you know what I mean?

[00:19:45] Scott Donnell: Right.

[00:19:45] Luke Storey: But it's like all of us are experiencing just the pressures of life in different ways. And sometimes, I find that people that really take on a lot, including myself at times, are way more stressed out than people would think, because on the surface, looks like you kind of have it made, you're successful, right? Our valuation of success is often based on performance rather than our inner state, and how regulated we are, and how vital we are.

[00:20:13] And that's kind of, I think, a cultural issue that we have that I think many of us are growing out of that, but just that performance metric, the definition of success being what you see on the outside rather than, well, how do you actually feel on a day-to-day basis? So, what's the point of owning 10 companies if you want to freaking kill yourself? You know what I mean?

[00:20:34] Scott Donnell: Yeah.

[00:20:34] Luke Storey: It's like I'll go work at McDonald's, before, I could be happy, rather than do that.

[00:20:40] Scott Donnell: Yeah. That's why Elon Musk basically said, you don't want to be me, right? When they asked, how does it feel like to be one of the richest men, if not the richest man in the world? And he just said, you don't understand, right? And I don't actually can understand what he goes through, and no, it's not something that you, at times, wish on your worst enemy, but it also gives you incredible humility to say, everyone's got their own fires, whether you're a parent or you're dealing with a health issue. 

[00:21:10] At least, I've been able to fix the majority of these health issues, right? If that was just going to be me for the rest of my life, there's this incredible quote, I forget who said it, but it's basically, he who has his health has a thousand dreams, he who does not have his health has one. And I thought about that during the sickness and kind of the recovery phase, just saying, thank God I am able to heal from most of this. 

[00:21:39] Obviously, there's trauma. And I did 40 Years of Zen for a whole week of counseling work, and trauma work, and a ton of forgiveness. I actually think the forgiveness work I did for the crazy things that happened in my life helped me more than anything in that entire recovery journey. But everybody's got their own history, man. And if you're on social media, you're comparing your backstage problems to everybody else's highlight reel.

[00:22:05] Nobody else is going to tell you their problems on social media with 100,000 of likes, they're going to tell their best side of it, but you don't know what's actually going on. In fact, the opposite is most likely actually going on. Two days ago was the biggest wake-up call I've had in many years. We were down in Mexico, took my family, got off grid, had to just check out for a week, it was amazing.

[00:22:30] It was the first time I've done that since our honeymoon, man. So, turn the phones off, get off the grid, we went down to Rocky Point, Mexico. There's a really cool place there called Sonoran Sky, right on the Baja. And we were there with one of my really, really close friends, one of my best friends in the world, his name is John. And John and I have helped build houses down there for some of the Mexican families that they live in tarps and cardboard.

[00:22:53] And we went down, we've done this for almost a decade now with friends of ours and a lot of the business owners. We do it just to serve the families. Well, he had stayed in touch with one of the local families that he built a house for and invited their whole family over for dinner one night. And there were six people there. The father, two kids, his young son had a wife and a new baby. And that entire house of six lived in a house that we built for them that was the size of this room. 

[00:23:23] And it was like a 20-by-10 or 15-by-10. And they couldn't be more thankful, because before that, it was tarps and cardboard. And he makes $150 a month that they all live off of. Think about that. $150 a month, which is the average there for the locals. And that's what he uses to provide for his family. And I'm sitting there with my three little kids who are playing with their six-month-old daughter, and my five-year-old Reagan is feeding a bottle to her, and it's just the cutest thing.

[00:23:58] And I'm in the back of my mind, I'm just going, holy cow. And they are so excited, and thankful, and grateful to be hanging out with us, smiling. I couldn't believe it, man. And they left and I was just shell-shocked. I was like, this is how a lot of the world thinks and lives, and I'm here stressed out about multimillion-dollar issues, business deals, right? Like who am I? 

[00:24:22] There's a lot of people who just are trying to get their next meal. And so, yeah, there's a whole follow-up to that story, and we're going to be helping his daughter with some med school stuff and things. But that type of stuff is what grounds me and keeps me thinking about, there's a lot of ways to help a lot more people. And I can be okay running my businesses and dealing with day-to-day fires, because we're helping millions of people in these businesses, right?

[00:24:47] Don't forget that. We hire so many people, and provide more for their families, and put food on the table, and that's an honor for me. But yeah, I think if an entrepreneur, anyone who's listening to this, it's important to start thinking about the why of everything you do, because money, really, at the end of the day, if you can cover basic life, like you don't get any happier, it doesn't fulfill you anymore. It's not an end in itself. Money is a measuring tool. That's it. So, yeah, that's my advice.

[00:25:17] Luke Storey: That's great. And that's kind of an unexpected sojourn into the realm of entrepreneurship, which I just wanted to touch on. But I'm glad we got to go into it with a little bit more depth, because I can also mirror that point of view in being at a place in my life where I would say I'm most successful in all areas of life than I've ever been, relationships, finances, mental health, emotional health, physical health.

[00:25:47] Everything's better than it's ever been. However, as I was telling you when you arrived today, have a lot going on, pretty stressful at the moment, all good things, all expansive life changes, but I went to set up my little recorder right here, I plug in the mics, and I hear [making sounds] . Christie is helping me today for those that are listening and don't see her, there's someone over there, amazing young lady that's been so helpful to me, and I'm just getting so pissed off.

[00:26:20] I'm just, what the fuck? And I'm unplugging all the cables and plugging them back in. This is the same recorder I've been using for six years, like what is happening? This is insane. And then, seeing myself in that moment, like you have a great life, but you're still human and you're going to get pissed off when things don't work right. It's a matter of kind of how fast can you recover and get back to center. 

[00:26:49] The resilience level, I think, is what's important. And removing those expectations that you have to be high-performance, optimized, perfect person in all the areas of your life all the time, because it's a fool's errand to think that one can. So, I appreciate that point of view. And I was just thinking about the financial part. I mean, I think I'm definitely doing better right now at this point in my life than ever. And I wouldn't say that I'm any happier than times in which I was a couple hundred grand in debt. Like two credit cards just completely upside down, back taxes.

[00:27:29] And I don't think I'm any happier now, because my financial standing is a little more secure, I'm happier now, because I care about it less. And there are other things in my value stack that have taken precedence over that self-care, the love for my fiancee, the love for my dog, just the basic fundamental human connection, elements of life. And also, just hopefully being a bit more humble about my perfectionism, and just knowing, like yeah, there's a lot of things I'm great at and some that I'm not so much, such as putting on the Hapbee and trying to work a microphone.

[00:28:09] Scott Donnell: Yeah, that's what it was, by the way.

[00:28:10] Luke Storey: So, back to again, for those watching on the video, we're talking about this device here, which is really like the purpose of this conversation, but I love just kind of shooting the shit, too. But we're going to talk about this, but before I do, I want people to know that you cannot wear the Hapbee and work on microphone at the same time. Well, you can, he has this on, but it's not producing the signal.

[00:28:31] Scott Donnell: Yeah, I didn't play the relaxed signal or anything.

[00:28:33] Luke Storey: So, that's what that was all about. But let's jump ahead a bit to you discovering this company, Emulate, and their early technology, and then just kind of bring us through the story of Hapbee as a company and as a technology, because this is one of the coolest things that I've found in a long time. And I'm in a position that's so fortunate. A lot of people send me their products.

[00:28:57] I try things out, some things work, some don't, at least for me, whether it's supplements, wearables, technology, et cetera. And this one, for me, has been like an every day thing full on. I mean, literally every night, I set the deep sleep program and I put it under my pillow. I make sure it's charged. By the way, good job on the battery. This freaking battery lasts forever.

[00:29:19] Scott Donnell: Yeah, thank you.

[00:29:20] Luke Storey: I don't know if it doesn't use a lot of power or what, but a lot of these things, wearables, like they're always dead, and then I forget about them. So, I'm full on board with this whole thing and want to kind of inform the audience about the origins of it, because the technology itself is mind-blowing. The Navy saying this whole thing is just super space age, Star Trek shit, and I want to hear all about it.

[00:29:44] Scott Donnell: Okay. So, just to make sure everyone knows what it is real quick, and then I'll talk about the origins. It's basically a wearable and we have others that we're making right now, so you don't have to wear it around your neck. We have a bed form factor we're making. There's a bunch of ways. But what it's doing is it's triggering a response in the body that would mimic a drug like melatonin. We have a signal for melatonin called deep sleep.

[00:30:07] People use their Oura Ring with it. They show incredible deep REM, increase in stats. We have a signal for caffeine. That's the R alert signal. It mimics a cup or two of coffee. We have a CBD relax signal for your joints and your muscles. I use that on the flight this morning. We have one for alcohol, believe it or not. No alcohol in your body. In fact, we have a ton of recovering addicts. We have one for nicotine as well. 

[00:30:31] Luke Storey: Yeah, me, too.

[00:30:32] Scott Donnell: Yeah, we have one for nicotine. That's our focus signal. It's a nootropic, basically. It's a nice buzz-focusing agent. I was using that right before this podcast. And the technology is actually those molecules, pulling the magnetic signature from them in our labs up in Seattle with about 15 PhDs, including the guy who invented Cialis, Dr. Kenneth Ferguson. He's the chief scientist. But it's an incredible technology.

[00:30:58] So, people use it for productivity, energy boost in the morning, better sleep, less stress, less anxiety, and distressing. And then, a bunch of other things, but those are the main benefits. And we have 30 more signals that we're working on for diet, and performance, and sexual health, and memory. And it's a platform, right? The app can play a thousand signals eventually. And so, right now, you have the first seven, and we're going to be launching them like kind of like a Netflix into the app.

[00:31:29] Luke Storey: I want to interrupt for a second and take you back. I was just thinking about how I found Hapbee. And a friend of mine, who I'm just going to remain anonymous, because the nature of what I'm about to say, but we went to lunch one day. 

[00:31:43] Scott Donnell: I know who you're talking about.

[00:31:44] Luke Storey: And this guy, he's in the know, you know what I mean? Like he would never text me, like, hey, we've got to have lunch, but we're having lunch about something else. He's like, I got something really exciting to talk to you about. And I mean, we're all, like I said, around a million different things, and something has to be really exciting to make a point of taking a meeting or bringing it up.

[00:32:01] So, he said, dude, I found this technology. It's this thing you wear, and you can be like high on weed or alcohol, and you feel high, and then you take it off and you're totally normal. And I don't really get it. He didn't explain it that deeply. But as a former drug addict and alcoholic, when someone tells me there's like a safe way to feel high without any repercussions, it gets my attention, because I just like to feel good. 

[00:32:32] But anyway, so he told me about it, and then sent me an email with the link, and I think it was to your Indiegogo. First round, and so I ordered one, and I liked it, but I couldn't figure out how to turn the Bluetooth off. And I'm an EMF nut, I don't even like wearing these headphones, like there's probably EMF on those. I'm just super paranoid about EMF, and I think rightly so. So, I remember being so disappointed and I sent it back. I was just like, I just can't wear Bluetooth around my head all day.

[00:33:05] It's like even if there are benefits, such as like feeling the elation of THC molecule or whatever it might be. So, I returned it, and then was so stoked recently to find that you guys had installed a feature, where you could turn the Bluetooth on and off. And you did a really great job of it, by the way, because you don't have to manually turn it on and off every time, which can be like after you're using something daily, multiple times a day, it gets really annoying to kind of have to keep resetting it. So, you just sort of set it to Bluetooth off, and then when it ends, you can reconnect to the app. Anyway, good job. Very clean tech there. 

[00:33:43] Scott Donnell: Thank you.

[00:33:43] Luke Storey: Yeah, it's super well done. So, that's how I came into this, was like, wait, you can change the way you feel by putting on this little magnetic coil? I will say that the friend that told me about it, I think, kind of—and maybe he had a beta version, where if I'm not mistaken, he was like, yeah, they have an ecstasy wand, and you feel like super on E, and then you take it off and it's gone. And when I got it, I was like, I don't know, I'm not feeling that strong of a sensation.

[00:34:11] Scott Donnell: Yeah, that's not public. 

[00:34:12] Luke Storey: Okay.

[00:34:13] Scott Donnell: I cannot confirm or deny what's going on in our labs, but I can tell you that we are working on really fun ones that are going to have—all of these have an everyday use, right? I mean, think about it, why do people take drugs? They take a drug for an altered state that would potentially give them a benefit to ease pain, to help them focus, to help them relax, to help them sleep. That's why people do this. I mean, coffee is one of the most used substances.

[00:34:41] Caffeine is a drug, right? There's an incredible benefit to you with caffeine. Now, you don't want five cups of coffee, where your diarrhea, shaky hands, but a couple of cups is incredible for alert energy, right? A billion people rely on that every morning, right? So, there is an altered state that people are trying to get that can help their lives. Okay. The pursuit of a drug is not a bad thing.

[00:35:05] It's the addictive nature and the byproducts of drugs that are the bad thing. I mean, if you drink alcohol, the byproduct out of your liver is formaldehyde. Okay. That's what comes up. And nicotine gets a bad rap, because everyone thinks it's cigarettes. Well, no, it's a nootropic. There's millions and millions of people, and FDA approved products now that have just have nicotine, because of the benefits for memory in your body.

[00:35:32] It's the carcinogens, and the toxins, and the smoke that kill you. And so, all the byproducts that come with drugs and these harmful substances are what messed with your life. If you could click a button, get the altered effect to help your life, to engage in life, not escape it, to engage in your life more, and then within 15, 20 minutes of turning it off, you're back to base. That's why we did this, right? There's a lot of people who want that in all types of industries.

[00:36:03] Luke Storey: Yeah, very much so. And thanks for touching on nicotine, too, because I often talk about nicotine products that I use and I have a love-hate relationship, because I'm very prone to being addicted to them, which I think I currently am. It runs in phases, but it's probably—I mean, it's a toss up between caffeine and nicotine, but the combo of two. Like if you want to focus, nicotine is incredible in a small dose, I'm taking two to four milligrams versus I don't know what a cigarette is, it's probably 50 milligrams or way more. But yeah. Anyway, I like that you guys included that and touched on it, because that one in particular, I think, is useful, because not only it's so effective, but it's so addictive. Like I screw around with a nicotine product, and it's not long before I'm like looking around.

[00:36:48] Scott Donnell: Where the heck is that thing?

[00:36:49] Luke Storey: Yeah. Like I just ordered some of my Lucy gum, and I checked the trucking, I was like, where is it? I'm getting a little antsy about it. Is it going to arrive before our trip tomorrow? And I'm like, oh, yeah, Luke, you're totally hooked.

[00:37:02] Scott Donnell: Well, I was laughing with my wife, because she's in the same boat as like most of the other people who don't really know the chemistry behind nicotine. They all think it's cigarettes. It's just a part of cigarettes is why people go back to it. But nicotine itself is a nootropic. I mean, the list of properties is endless of how it can help you. It's actually much more similar to caffeine than anything else.

[00:37:22] But I've tried those in packs a few times, and once in a while, I'll put one in, and it's about four to six milligrams of nicotine, and it's an incredible focusing buzz, right? That's why people like it. You focus, but you get a relaxing buzz, too. It's like the best of both worlds. And you have to be very careful about dosage and you don't want to use it over, where's that box kind of a feeling? But my wife's giving me crap about it while we're driving to Starbucks, so she can get a super large hundred grand-

[00:37:55] That's a good one.

[00:37:56] Luke Storey: ... Venti Chai with foam. And I'm sitting there like, you're choosing a drug. Your drug is going to be a thousand calories. It's going to mess with your gut and it's going to be way worse for you than my nootropic that I'm taking right now. So, we're just laughing about that and I get the bad rap.

[00:38:14] That's hilarious. Well, I would use that argument with my Alyson, but she literally does nothing habitual or anything at all. She just has no tendencies toward addiction, whatsoever, apparently. But yeah, when I first started kind of using the nicotine a bit more than normal, she did look at me a little sideways for a moment there. And then, I think she just figured out like, this guy is just a nut and he's going to do his thing.

[00:38:41] Scott Donnell: But now, think about Hapbee, right?

[00:38:42] Luke Storey: Yeah, I know.

[00:38:43] Scott Donnell: In Hapbee, we have a focus signal, which is from nicotine. It's the magnetic signature of actual nicotine, right? And so, it triggers the nicotinean receptor sites. It's giving you a nice, pleasant, subtle buzz. And then, you turn it off, you're back to base. There's nothing in your body there to get you chemically addicted.

[00:39:01] Luke Storey: So, take us back to the EMulate company and the origin of this technology, because I'm sure people are listening, going, wait, what? What do you mean the frequency signature of a molecule? How does that work? And this part to me it's just so bizarre with the submarines and that whole bit.

[00:39:18] Scott Donnell: Yeah. Okay. So, the reason why you haven't heard about it is because it was under wraps for the first 15 years. So, back in the early 2000s, this started with a guy named Mike Butters and he brought in over a dozen other scientists, physicists, biochemists, doctors with one hypothesis, what if a drug molecule has a frequency? And the reason why they thought that is because a non-covalent bond in the body, right? 

[00:39:51] There are two types of bonds, covalent, non-covalent, when you take a drug. A covalent bond, you physically need something there. It's a chemical bond to receptor sites, the lock-in key, substrate, enzyme model. It's like food, okay, vitamins, amino builders. You have to have it there. I can't fill your stomach with a frequency. But non-covalent bonds are where it gets really interesting. A non-covalent bond, which is two-thirds of all drugs, it's like a remote control trigger in the body.

[00:40:21] When you take ibuprofen, for instance, there's no chemical bond there. It is free-ranging electrons exchanging, causing a frequency, okay, causing a resonance that triggers certain receptor sites in your body. And that's why Einstein thought this, Richard Feynman thought this, but no one had been able to prove it. And so, they got together, and they said, what if we could figure out a way to do it?

[00:40:45] It's got to be possible. And the only technology they found was a naval technology called magnetometers. Magnetometers are these propane-looking tanks that are point fifteen zeros of sensitivity. It's the world's most powerful magnetic frequency recording device. The Navy actually uses them to try to find out where the nuclear subs are, because a nuclear sub has an EMF, right? 

[00:41:09] Luke Storey: Yeah, I bet. 

[00:41:10] Scott Donnell: And fighter pilots. Yeah. So, it's actually used as a defense technology as well. And so, they got a hold a couple of these things, blew their money almost 18 years ago now. And they started messing with them to see, okay, instead of listening outward, could we listen inward to a molecule, a drug molecule, put it in, in liquid form, and see if it throws off a magnetic wake. Okay. Almost like a little boat going through a harbor.

[00:41:34] It has a wake that ripples to the shore. What if you could record that? And what if you could play it back on the body, what would it do? That was their hypothesis. Okay. So, they started working on it, Faraday cages, and liquid helium, and a bunch of 40 patents later, 38 patents later, and 80 million dollars, they got a reading. And I was actually there the day they got nicotine. It was dissolved in propylene glycol and turned into liquid form. Put it inside of this and you could really see. 

[00:42:06] Like I was watching it be at the sound floor, and then all of a sudden, it would jump between DC and 22 kilohertz once they put the molecule in there. And so, what you're getting is a 2D recording of this molecule that has electrons oscillating and throwing off a wake in 3D, but if you can get a 2D recording over time, a minute or so of that recording, the body is almost tricked to think that there's something in it, but there's nothing in the body. And so, your receptor sites are like, huh, I think we have caffeine, I think we have melatonin, and then [making sounds] like go on, like goes off, cause and effect. And so, that was the incredible discovery. I invested in the tech over 14 years.

[00:42:51] Luke Storey: God, I would, too. I'll be like, honey, we're selling the house, all in on this.

[00:42:56] Scott Donnell: Oh, I gave him hundreds and hundreds of thousands. I gave him almost everything I had at the time. And I was right out of college and I had some money, because I'd done really well in the sales thing. And I was like, oh, this is it, this is the multibillion dollar opportunity, here we go. And little did I know that it was decades of FDA work that they're going through, right? So, EMulate Therapeutics is the parent company.

[00:43:19] They are doing all the medical work. So, they're working with people with brain tumors right now, with cancer patients. They've worked with hundreds of people, because they got the signal for Taxol, which is the chemo. And they have been helping people with recurrent glioblastoma tumors and they've had incredible results. And they've been doing that since 2011, I think, 2012.

[00:43:41] Luke Storey: And I'm going to just interject for a second. When it comes to the medical side, I know that's not what Hapbee's doing, and we're not going to make medical claims and all that, but with the EMulate, the FDA cleared procedures and things like that, I know when an alternative modality kind of threatens an existing drug, there's often conflict and pushback, and it's hard for people to get things approved, because there are these power monopolies, and lobbyists, and things like that. So, if you own the patent on a chemo drug, there's going be a lot of force coming back at you, oftentimes, to prevent you from coming up with something that is more natural or alternative and things like that.

[00:44:24] Scott Donnell: Novel, yes. 

[00:44:24] Luke Storey: But because these technologies and frequencies are patentable, are they just kind of like in the game with the rest of the more pharmaceutical-based treatments, or is it still way outside of the box and is it difficult to break through the medical system?

[00:44:43] Scott Donnell: That's a great question.

[00:44:44] Luke Storey: Because if you cure someone, and I'm not saying EMulate or Hapbee cures anyone, let's just say I'm a doctor, you come to me, and what I give you cures you, you're no longer a customer of mine or of the pharmaceutical industrial complex. So, it's really from a business model. It's a horrible business to get people well. If I own the chemo company and I wasn't a good person, I would want to keep them on chemo as long as I could keep them alive, and that's how a lot of the model, not all, but a lot of the model is set up. So, how does that work in terms of patents, and legality, and FDA clearance, and things on the medical side with EMulate?

[00:45:21] Scott Donnell: Yeah. So, great question. Brass tacks, there is no patent for the digital side of this, because no one else has ever been able to do it. We can own literally thousands of those patents. The problem is in practicality, we don't want to pick a fight with Big Pharma.

[00:45:36] Luke Storey: Yeah, right? Me neither.

[00:45:37] Scott Donnell: And so, what we are doing is Taxol is an off-patent chemo drug. Okay. It's already passed its 20-year patented time window. So, when they got that recording, it had already passed. And so, they're not picking a fight with a currently held patented drug, which is why we're not going to go after other RXs until we have maybe a big partnership or just we're not going to touch them for many years.

[00:46:00] Luke Storey: That's interesting. So, you can't even compete with an existing valid patent, even though you're not introducing an exogenous molecule into the body?

[00:46:09] Scott Donnell: Can we or will we? If the question is, can we? It's we could. Will we? It's like these guys are worth $100 billion each, why would I pick that fight?

[00:46:20] Luke Storey: Oh, that's so interesting.

[00:46:22] Scott Donnell: But we're open to talk. I mean, the parent company who's doing the medical side, we're consumer side. And so, this is how it happened. So, I've been investing in these guys forever. I go off and build Apex, we're doing these other businesses, and the company is basically older. This is almost 20 years in. These guys are in their 60s, some are in their 70s now, late 50s. And I kept saying, you guys, there's an incredible opportunity for the pets, for agriculture, let's create a consumer technology that doesn't make the medical claims that just help you sleep better, help you relax, help you stay focused, help you have more energy.

[00:47:00] Those aren't medical claims. Those are general wellness claims and easily backed up by our placebo-controlled, blinded studies. We're doing a big sleep study right now. We've done animal testing with blinded lab. Blinded lab techs where the animals themselves showed the behavior of the underlying molecule, and the lab techs didn't even know if there was a signal or not, right? So, we've done a lot of that background work to back up what we're saying, but we don't want to create the medical side. 

[00:47:29] The parent company, they're going after pain, they're going after anxiety next. They're recording some much stronger signals that are going to be coming out here later, hopefully in the next year to the public. We're just doing basic fun stuff that you and I talk about on this podcast. So, I think that they came to me, and said, we don't know anything about tech, about apps, and consumer tech, and ecomm, and all that kind of stuff, why don't you do it?

[00:48:01] And I said, okay. So, I brought in a team to run my other businesses and launched this, and so here we are. That's how it all happened. And it's just because I invested in them and I've known this technology for over a decade, so I can talk about it. I'm not the scientist who created it, but I can talk about it like the back of my hand, because I've been with it so long.

[00:48:24] Luke Storey: So, these non-covalent bonds, just to circle back to that, these are signaling molecules. So, it's not a biochemical reaction with this type of substances that could affect, whether it be on the medical side or just wellbeing, like what you're doing with Hapbee. So, essentially, that's sending a signal to your body, go off and do these other things, and then you feel a certain way as a result of those things that your body is doing. So, it's really not important that you actually have the molecule in you.

[00:48:56] Scott Donnell: Actually, it's a detraction. If you really want to get down to it, putting that stuff in your body might taste or smell good, but the byproducts, I think, could be harmful to you. And so, what we're doing is we're just bypassing.

[00:49:11] Luke Storey: I mean, certainly with something like alcohol, right? Like I've never believed the hype that like a glass of wine a day is good for you. I mean, maybe you have the polyphenols and you have the things, but like is it really worth the detriment of the formaldehyde that so ensues?

[00:49:25] Scott Donnell: The community that comes from having a nice glass of wine is probably the healthiest part.

[00:49:29] Luke Storey: I mean, some of the things I do, I'm sure, have side effects, but the net benefit outweighs it. There might be a device I use that has some EMF, and I go, well, I'm going to lay on this thing for 20 minutes and get some EMF, but the benefit of my nervous system relaxing for 20 minutes is going to outweigh the detriment. So, I think that's the case with some things. And of course, moderation and frequency has a lot to do with that. 

[00:49:53] Scott Donnell: Well, and don't get me wrong, because I love a good cigar once in a while with my friends.

[00:49:58] Luke Storey: I wish I could.

[00:49:59] Scott Donnell: I love a Manhattan once in a while. That's my family's drink. In fact, my dad's dad, who passed away 20 years ago, he, on his tombstone, is the perfect Manhattan recipe. I'm not kidding. John Donnell. And he's buried in The Dalles, Oregon, and it's just his name, I don't even think it says when he died. It just has the perfect Manhattan recipe on his tombstone.

[00:50:19] Luke Storey: Tell me he didn't die of alcohol-related.

[00:50:21] Scott Donnell: No.

[00:50:22] Luke Storey: Okay.

[00:50:22] Scott Donnell: He died skiing on his 72nd day skiing.

[00:50:25] Luke Storey: Actually, I'd really respect if an alcoholic died of alcoholism, it was just like, fuck you, guys, I'm going down like this, this is my martini recipe.

[00:50:33] Scott Donnell: Yeah, on my tombstone. So, anyway, I love a good Manhattan once in a while, but I will cut back, right? And so, instead of three more or more, I'll have one, and I'll play the Hapbee signal, which comes from scotch and it doubles the power.

[00:50:48] Luke Storey: That's what I want to ask you, because I was thinking about my tendency, I do this [indiscernible] spray called Meditation Mist that I love. I unfortunately don't do it while talking, because it makes my eyes water and I go blow my nose after. But I do various forms of nicotine, or say, I get up and I have a coffee, and then I run the Hapbee signal that's mimicking that molecule. I was thinking that it was like canceling itself out, but you can actually kind of just double the effect or whatever the metric of multiplication is there?

[00:51:22] Scott Donnell: Yeah, or you can extend the feeling.

[00:51:24] Luke Storey: Oh, that's cool.

[00:51:25] Scott Donnell: So, yeah. I mean, it just depends on receptor sites.

[00:51:28] Luke Storey: So, I want to open the app here. For those again that are watching the video, I don't know if you guys could see that on my red phone, but-

[00:51:37] Scott Donnell: You got your audience a discount as a gift.

[00:51:40] Luke Storey: Oh, yeah. Thanks for mentioning that, because I always forget to do it in the middle of an interview, and then I'll plug something for the guest like in the intro and the outro. I'm like, people don't listen to those things. So, it's hapbee.com/lukestorey is the link. It's H-A-P-B-E-E.

[00:51:58] Scott Donnell: Yeah, the logo is a bee, if you want to remember, Hapbee with bee. We want to make you happy.

[00:52:02] Luke Storey: So, hapbee.com/lukestorey. And then, what's the deal you're giving our-

[00:52:06] Scott Donnell: I think we'll give, there's like a lifetime, where you never have to pay a membership for any signals ever again that's like a hundred bucks, and that's 200 off of the 1000-dollar price. And then, we're giving 80 bucks off of the basic 300-dollar. So, 380, and then we'll give you 80 buck off to 299. And then, that's like a 19-dollar a month membership, like basically two drinks at the bar pays for this membership, and you'll get unlimited access to all this.

[00:52:31] Luke Storey: That's a great model. So, just to repeat the link, it's hapbee.com/lukestorey for those of you guys listening. We'll put it in the show notes. and you can always find the show notes, for this one, we'll call this one lukestorey.com/hapbee. There we go. I'm learning how to get those links in, in the middle. What I wanted to cover was the different signals and which things they emulate, because some of them say so, and some of them don't.

[00:53:04] And I also think that's a really cool model, where you buy the actual physical tech one time, done, you own it, and then the subscription model, wherein you get value adds as new programs start to be released. Because when I got this app, it didn't have the last one on here, which is called bedtime, it just had the deep sleep one. And I got to say, I feel like I'm very erratic today, because I have so much going on in my mind and I'm so pumped about this. But what's really interesting is I track my sleep, of course, like all of us with the Oura Ring, with, of course, the Bluetooth turned off.

[00:53:41] And as I said, I'm doing this deep sleep, and you can run it for eight hours, and I track my sleep, and every night that I've used that, my deep sleep has been two, two-and-a-half hours, which like I'm able to achieve here or there from doing the other things, but this has become so reliable. But one thing I've actually struggled with is getting higher scores in REM sleep. So, I think last night, I got two-and-a-half hours of deep sleep, but I got the little red warning from the Oura app that I only got maybe an hour of REM sleep. Are there any molecules in the can that you're working on that improve the REM sleep?

[00:54:25] Scott Donnell: Yeah.

[00:54:25] Luke Storey: The only one that has ever worked for me is Lion's Mane. If I pound a bunch of like life-cycle Lion's Mane extract, my REM scores go up immediately. But that's the only thing I've ever found that actually does that.

[00:54:36] Scott Donnell: What we're building now, I love that you hit on this, it's never a one-size-fits-all, right? Like some people who use deep sleep, which is melatonin, right?

[00:54:43] Luke Storey: Okay.

[00:54:44] Scott Donnell: It's the digital fingerprint of melatonin. They get way more REM than deep, right? It's how your body responds to that molecule is how you're going to respond to this. Oka. But the bedtime signal, for instance, which is the newest one we put in, it's like a buildup of adenosine. And so, we're basically mimicking adenosine, which is a sleep trigger, which builds up in your body throughout the day.

[00:55:07] And then, it makes you tired. When you go to sleep, it releases. So, we're basically just helping pile on some before you go to bed to help you get tired. So, people that do bedtime around their neck during their bedtime routine for half hour or so, and then when you go to bed, you put under your pillow with the melatonin, they're showing an increase in REM so far from what's we're seeing.

[00:55:28] Luke Storey: Interesting. Okay. 

[00:55:29] Scott Donnell: Because of the adenosine that's built up. It's never perfect. Some people report all over the map. But overall, they're getting better sleep. That's what we love to see. But our job is to get them out there. We're creating playlists next. Okay. So, like the relax and calm signal, right? Two forms of the endocannabinoids trigger, like a CBD and kind of a THC mix, we want to pulse those for people. Same with bedtime and deep sleep.

[00:56:01] So, we want to give you back and forth so that every 90 minutes, hopefully, you could get back into a deep REM, and the rest would be light REM based on your circadian rhythm. And so, we're trying to create these playlists so that people can almost play with it, do a general level that helps you, and then if you really want to get into the deep biohacking, you figure out what you need. Our bed topper we're building right now is amazing. There are three sections, one for your head and neck, one for your midsection, one for your waist and down. Imagine being able to play like relax on your lower back, CBD, and then melatonin and adenosine pulsed on your top.

[00:56:40] Luke Storey: That's so badass.

[00:56:41] Scott Donnell: And then, what time do you wake up in the morning?

[00:56:43] Luke Storey: 7:00 or 8:00.

[00:56:45] Scott Donnell: So, imagine not having to have an alarm clock go off by setting alert, set alert, and so it plays, and it's pressure-sensored, by the way, on the bed that we're making. And so, you just lay down and it starts. So, based on the internal clock of the device, no Bluetooth needed. You could really just set seven days of playlists and forget it. So, if you're like, I want to go up at 7:15 tomorrow, so at 7:10, we play alert onto you to wake you up feeling great.

[00:57:12] Luke Storey: Wow. That's badass. And the alert one is the caffeine signal, right?

[00:57:15] Scott Donnell: Yeah.

[00:57:16] Luke Storey: One of the things I do, too, because, I don't know, I've just always been groggy morning person. I don't care if I get nine hours sleep and a great sleep score, it's very rare that I wake up, and I'm like, let's do this. I'm just slow guy. So, what I do is I'll have the deep sleep running in the device under my pillow, and then like right when I wake up, I put it around my head and I put it on the alert. And by the time I get to the kitchen, drink a glass of water, go take a leak, I'm like, I'm awake. It's amazing. But what's cool about it is it doesn't ruin my meditation, because if I wake up and have caffeine, and then I try to go meditate for an hour, I'll be ruminating a lot more, and then I lose that nice deep early morning meditation.

[00:57:57] Scott Donnell: Yeah. That's well said. And part of that's because of the other things that you're getting from a cup of coffee, right? And I have nothing against coffee. I mean, one of my main investors is Dave Asprey, father of biohacking, who created Bulletproof Coffee, right? I got nothing wrong with his stuff, I do have a problem if you're not using it in moderation, right?

[00:58:15] Luke Storey: Yeah.

[00:58:15] Scott Donnell: The moment it becomes addictive, then it causes a whole Pandora's box of other problems to deal with. And we need to be very careful, because different people have different personalities. Everyone has a vice. Everyone has an addiction, whether it's social media, or sex, or food, or achievement.

[00:58:37] Luke Storey: Speaking of social media, can you make a dopamine signal?

[00:58:42] Scott Donnell: Are we off camera? I actually can say, or serotonin.

[00:58:48] Luke Storey: Yeah, imagine that you're finding like I am in this constant like push and pull with my phone, because I know that I'm more addicted to it than I would like to be, yet it's such a useful tool, and it's the way that I get my content out and obviously connect with people in my life and people at large. But it's like it's riding the tiger, it's one of these things.

[00:59:10] It's like it's something that is so potentially addictive, but you kind of have to use it, sort of like someone who would be a food addict or a sex addict. It's not black and white. It's not just like, oh, I got addicted to my phone, I'm never using a phone ever again. Today's my sobriety date of no phone, and I'm going to follow that forever. It's just not feasible for most of us.

[00:59:32] Scott Donnell: Right. Because you got to talk to your mom on there once in a while. 

[00:59:35] Luke Storey: Yeah.

[00:59:36] Scott Donnell: Check in with your friends, like there's good on that, too.

[00:59:39] Luke Storey: I got to publish this podcast on my Instagram.

[00:59:41] Scott Donnell: See, there's good and there's bad tech, right? One of my friends, his name's BJ Fogg. He's the Behavior Science Director at Stanford. He wrote a book called Tiny Habits. It's the number one business book on Amazon. It is killer. And I've read that thing forwards and backwards. It is so good to teach people about tiny habits. Everything is about MAP, M-A-P, motivation, ability, and a prompt. You could hack any habit in your life.

[01:00:08] You could stop any habit in your life. You could start any habit in your life just by understanding the motivation to do it, make it easy enough to do it or hard enough to not do it. The ability to do it, the understanding, the emotional pull, the excitement level, the ability to do it is easy enough, you'll do it. If it's hard enough, you won't do it. And then, prompt, if you have the right prompt and the right place at the right time, you can do or remove that prompt, and you won't, right? 

[01:00:37] So, you can do or not do anything based on what BJ has in this book. It's a fantastic book. But when you think about that, anything in your life can be hacked, and anything in your life, you can have a prompt or you can remove a bad addiction. So, when it comes to good versus bad technology, he, thank God, puts Hapbee in the good tech column, right? Because with Hapbee, you're not staring at a phone, getting a slot machine dopamine hit for 10 hours on social media, or TikTok, or whatever it be. 

[01:01:08] You're actually able to click play, put your phone away or turn the app off, and they'll still play the signals right here. And so, it can play an eight-hour signal or an hour signal, whatever it is, and I can go about my life, right? I can engage with friends. I can go on a run. I can travel. It's an engagement tool rather than a detractor from real life, right? That's how I categorized good and bad tech. And if you can remove the EMF, oh, we're actually good EMF, right?

[01:01:34] This is like the sound floor. We're using a signal that's between DC and 22 kilohertz. There's 22 million signal points in every signal coming from the molecule. It has to be that precise. But it's 130thousandth of what that phone throws off. So, if you're thinking about EMF radiation from your phone, I saw your clip on the back, the blocks, that I have that, too, we are 130 thousandth of the amount. And so, our goal was first do no harm, right?

[01:02:03] Luke Storey: That's like less than probably the ambient radiation when you're just living your life, and there are cell towers, and Wi-Fi routers around, and things like that.

[01:02:11] Scott Donnell: Remember that buzz we were talking about? The [making sounds] it's because we're blocking out the other EMF.

[01:02:18] Luke Storey: Oh, really?

[01:02:18] Scott Donnell: Yeah, it's a copper coil. So, this is just a 28-gauge wire wrapped around. It's creating a very small white space to play our signals on to, I mean, the quieter the better. The body is incredible. For us, it's the quieter, the better. Most of what we're doing is between DC and 7 kilohertz. Even though signals go up to 22, most of the impact is just that first little bit. So, the smaller the signal, tiny little changes in the body are causing these effects that people are experiencing.

[01:02:47] Luke Storey: That's so interesting. Yeah. So, from the DC level, which would be—I mean, actually, you want DC current, really. I just got a new ice bath, and we tested it for EMF, and found that, obviously, you're grounded, you're in a body of water, it's metal, and then it's plugged into the ground wire and your power outlet, but it had massive amounts of DC current in it. We're like, yes, it's like the opposite of an EMF problem. It's like the good EMF like you would get from grounding or earthing in nature. So, that's really interesting.

[01:03:20] Scott Donnell: I got to tell you this, too, before we go to these signals. We thought, okay, so I was kind of doing basic math, okay, we got thousands of people using this thing every few days, so far, a couple of hours a day, and I'm just doing the math. I'm like, okay, we're probably like a couple hundred thousand hours of playtime now. I just got the stats back. We're at 900,000 hours of playtime. We just started giving these out like in August of last year, and only to a few people, right? The first big launch was like October. And so, we're talking like in the last seven months, eight months, we're at 900,000 hours of play time.

[01:03:59] Luke Storey: That's crazy. So, that tells you that your customers are actually using it. It's not in a drawer somewhere.

[01:04:06] Scott Donnell: Yeah, which is exactly why we're a membership model. I would never urge anybody or suggest anyone to buy something that doesn't have a monthly or an annual-type membership, because those companies make all their money selling it to you upfront. They're not going to reinvest in R&D, they're not going to reinvest in innovation, they're going to pull that profit and be done with you.

[01:04:25] What's their incentive to have great customer service? Right now, we're plowing all of our money back in. Hopefully, that's not the case forever, but we're plowing everything back into R&D and innovation. We want to have a whole suite of products that helps your life. That only is possible through a membership model. We want to have a million people that are absolutely in love with how this helps their everyday life.

[01:04:46] Luke Storey: I mean, it's better for the customer, too. There's a tech that I like, actually, I combine it with this quite often, it's called NuCalm. I don't know if you heard NuCalm. 

[01:04:53] Scott Donnell: I love NuCalm.

[01:04:53] Luke Storey: It's a neuroacoustic software, I call it like a forced meditation or a nap. You think like I couldn't possibly relax right now, I'm really stressed out. Oh, yeah, you can, you put NuCalm, little biosignaling disc on your wrist, put on the tracks, an eye mask, and you're out. So, I use it with this, but when it first came out and when I discovered it, it was like I think like $4,500. And you're just getting, I mean, "just", you're just essentially getting an app and these biosignaling discs.

[01:05:23] So, I saw the value in it, but it was difficult to share with people, because they're like, what, I'm paying a few grand for an app? And then, they did some more kind of internal development, and then made, basically, the product, because there's not much product except for the disks, free to start up. And then, it's a subscription model and you get more disks.

[01:05:46] So, it's like then there's no initial buy-in and buyer's remorse potentially, where someone's like, oh, I paid all this money for this thing, and I don't really like it, I don't really use it. It's like you're incentivized as the user, because you're like, wow, I'm paying for this thing 20 bucks a month, I should be using it. And if you're not, then you cancel, which I think is, I don't know, it's just a more kind of customer friendly way to do things.

[01:06:08] Scott Donnell: It's meritocracy. We have people that love it. We have some people that hate it. They're like, I don't feel a thing, this thing sucks. And we're like, okay, here's your money back. We have a money back guarantee. We don't want anybody to get harmed, or hurt, or angry.

[01:06:22] Luke Storey: Speaking of harmed or hurt, so you have this very low EMF level with this magnetic field that's broadcasting these signals to your body, would it be possible or is it just legally not feasible where you could make stronger versions of the signals?

[01:06:45] Scott Donnell: I get that every time.

[01:06:47] Luke Storey: So, instead of like two milligrams of nicotine, like however much is in a cigarette, or you're dizzy, or the alcohol, or any of the other ones that you have in development or currently, or is there a liability there where someone puts it on driving, and runs over a bunch of school kids at the crosswalk, and then you've got problems?

[01:07:07] Scott Donnell: Yeah. So, safety-wise, the good news is that since there's nothing physical in your body, we have never had a serious adverse event in almost a million hours of playtime now. And this is us and our parent company working in the cancer space, trying to give basically poison, which is chemo, to your body. They are helping people, but they're not having these negative side effects that the actual drug would.

[01:07:31] That's the beautiful thing about this. Now, about signal strength is one of the bigger questions we get. If there's a trauma buildup that someone has, I'm talking like deep trauma, where they're not in touch with their feelings, they don't know how to feel, what's going on in their body. It's these people that go to the dentist and they get a Novacaine shot, five of them, and they don't feel anything, right?

[01:07:53] Some people are impervious to alcohol and how it makes them feel until they're blackout, right? This happens to some people. Huge Stanford study that came out 10 years ago said 10% of people don't feel anything under their neck, like really don't until it's so bad that they need help. That's something that we deal with all the time, because people, like they put it on, they're like, am I supposed to feel something?

[01:08:15] It's like, well, yes and no. It's not like an electric shock. Okay. You're not going to hear anything, it's inaudible. But you will start to feel certain sensations in your body if you can be in tune with that. And so, we coach people all the time, right? Let's do a 10-day onboarding. If you just do 30 minutes of alert, and then 30 minutes of sleepy or deep sleep, and then back to it, like if you just do that a few times, you'll get the entrainment, your brain will start to recognize this.

[01:08:45] And then, in terms of strength, the more you do it, the quicker you feel it, right? It gets stronger as you go, not forever, but it gets to a level of strength as you do it more and more. And we, right now, in the labs are recording much, I will just say this, much stronger. Okay. And we do have to be careful with how we launch these and to what audience we launch these.

[01:09:09] Luke Storey: Yeah. Can you do like a 21 and over app?

[01:09:12] Scott Donnell: Yeah. We're trying to figure this out every day, right?

[01:09:16] Luke Storey: Potentially, scientifically, it would be possible for you guys to crank one of these up?

[01:09:21] Scott Donnell: Or just pulse them, right? Maybe like for some of our customers, it's too strong. They're like, this is too much, I need less, because maybe two or three milligrams of nicotine is perfect for you and I. It's too much for other people. They love the focus it gives them, but they're like, I need less. So, what we would do with those people is give them a couple of minutes, and then stop them for five. 

[01:09:42] So, we want to go down to medium to low, maybe low. Right now, it's about a medium, I'd say, and then a higher would be maybe a different molecule that gives maybe a certain effect, right? Like right now, we're using like a fun scotch signal for Hapbee, right? Just because most people flushed cheeks, takes the edge off, makes them a little happier, and they're enjoying themselves.

[01:10:06] It's a social lubricant signal. Well, we are looking at straight up like things like dopamine and serotonin-type signals. And that would be way better than a scotch. We would put them in separate categories for people. And so, the idea here is to just let people have a playground, right? And then, what do you want? Do you want better sleep? Do you want more energy? Do you want more productivity? Do you just want to destress at the end of a long day, or maybe you're a customer service rep who should be playing relax most of the day, right?

[01:10:35] We actually have a company, Strategic Coach, they bought hundreds of them for all their employees, and they've said, it was the best investment they've ever made in their teams. Their teams loved it as a Christmas present, but they loved the results they're getting from it, because their teams are healthier, they're happier, they're enjoying themselves. It's a very thoughtful gift. It's incredible for the company. So, we think enterprise sales is going to be huge for us in the future.

[01:11:01] Luke Storey: Is DMT a non-covalent bond?

[01:11:06] Scott Donnell: No. DMT is covalent. 

[01:11:08] Luke Storey: It is?

[01:11:08] Scott Donnell: Psilocybin, ketamine, and MDMA, those are more non-covalent.

[01:11:13] Luke Storey: Interesting. 

[01:11:14] Scott Donnell: Yeah, it's all I can say about it now.

[01:11:18] Luke Storey: We're going to have to talk after this.

[01:11:19] Scott Donnell: Oh, yeah, we have beta groups. 

[01:11:22] Luke Storey: And then, okay, I'm going to go back to the signals here before I take us off the rails.

[01:11:26] Scott Donnell: And yes, you'll be at our beta group. So, we'll talk about this later.

[01:11:28] Luke Storey: Bring it on. No, I mean, I don't mean to sound like a hippie or anything, I think there are so many valuable compounds out there in the world that get a bad rap.

[01:11:41] Scott Donnell: Yeah. And look, I'm not a plant medicine guy. I've never done a huge journey or anything like that. And I'm not telling anybody to do that. But I've talked to, I won't say any names, but like the world's leaders, the world's leaders, if it comes to all these different industries and thought leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, doctors, holistic practitioners, everybody says, if you could get a minor effect of some of these things, a ketamine, a psilocybin, or something like that, that they use to help so many people and you don't have those addictive chemical effects in the body, those are potent.

[01:12:23] But what if you get an extremely dumbed down, dilutive signal that would help you with meditation, for instance? We call it experience or meditate. That would have, I think, so many positive net benefits to society. I know, aside from the stigmas that some people have, if they could help you reach a little bit more of a euphoric, meditative, feeling loved state or a parasympathetic response, I think the benefits would be astronomical.

[01:12:52] Luke Storey: Yeah, I agree. And that's why I mention that stuff. I mean, take something like ketamine that, I mean, I knew about that stuff a long time ago, I would never have taken it.

[01:13:01] Scott Donnell: Me neither.

[01:13:01] Luke Storey: It's like gross. Like it just never appealed to me at all. And then, some people in my space started using it for either deeper therapy or just sort of microdosing it for meditation and things like that, one of my guests gave me a little ketamine troche one time, and I've done it on a number of occasions, definitely, for me, not a habit-forming thing, but there is benefit in it to go into just a really still open awareness, meditative state if you get the dose right, but there are also some nasty side effects at times, kind of a headache afterward, grogginess.

[01:13:35] So, that's one of the reasons I don't do it more often. I really like the 20 and 30 minutes when I take it, and stack it with NuCalm or something like Hapbee, the Apollo device, things like that, just kind of stack a bunch of things that just go away for half-an-hour, but it's not really practical to do so if then the rest of your day is shot. So, I think that these things have benefits.

[01:13:58] And speaking to the plant medicines and psychedelics, I mean, God, they're done in the right set and setting, with the right intention, the right guide, I mean, they can be hugely transformative, but tons of side effects. Could be vomiting, could be kind of an emotional hangover, physical hangover. It's not for everyone, although the benefits probably would serve most. It's just those barriers to entry are that it's quite taxing on your body in some cases. 

[01:14:24] Scott Donnell: And that's really the holy grail for us is if we can take away not just the toxicological side effects, which we've done, but if we can take away the stigma, right? If you could experience these things without anything actually in your body, it's like playing a song, right? I told the story, I think, before, but my grandma was the reason I did this. She was the first person to try the CBD signal.

[01:14:52] And she'd never touched anything. Okay. She's like teetotaller kind of lady. I love her to death. Rest her soul. But this was years ago, when we got the first signal, the relax signal from CBD. And she's had arthritis since the '80s, couldn't sleep, barely at all, a lot of pain, a lot of issues. And I just was like, alright, if it works on grandma, it's going to work. Okay. I didn't tell her anything.

[01:15:17] I didn't want to like placebo trick her. So, I put it on her. I didn't even tell her what it was. I was like, hey, this might help you, just try it out. So, she didn't know what it was. And so, 15 minutes later, she's like bouncing around, like feeling amazing, given hugs, like she looked like a complete different person. I was like, okay, this is amazing. Well, that night, she played it again and she slept 11 hours, which she hasn't slept more than five or six for 20 years. 

[01:15:44] The next morning, my grandpa walked up to me and gave me $100,000. And we don't do this. Our family's not like invest in each other. We always give away. We don't want to mess up with the next generation. We're four generations of making a lot of money and giving it all the way. I'm into the same thing, right? I'm so glad for that, actually. But he gave me $100,000. He was like, you need to do this with a billion other people. What you did for Grandma is so life-transforming, this needs to happen with as many people as you can. 

[01:16:13] And we don't need this money. We're going to die someday soon, take it, and help people with it. And that was, where the moment, I was like, alright, I'm in. And that was way back at the beginning, a few years ago, when I was thinking, should I try something as crazy as this? Like should I really bring something this insane to market, where I know millions of people are going to be like BS, that's bullshit, you're snake oil. And then, Grandma's experience was the first one, where I was like, alright, I can't not.

[01:16:42] Luke Storey: Well, I think some of these things are hard for people to understand, because there is a lot of snake oil out there. And also, it's like that too good to be true thing. But anyway, having subjectively experience it, obviously, and digging it, I'm sold. I know we're almost out of time here, so run me through just the existing signal. So, alert is caffeine, calm is from THC.

[01:17:12] Scott Donnell: And it's like a little bit of a proprietary blend. That's why we don't say straight THC, because it's a claim I don't want to have out there in the public. But it's a kind of a mixed concoction. 

[01:17:20] Luke Storey: Okay. Something that origins off cannabis plant. And focus. 

[01:17:24] Scott Donnell: Nicotine. 

[01:17:25] Luke Storey: And happy.

[01:17:26] Scott Donnell: That one is scotch. Yeah, the magnetic signature of all these.

[01:17:30] Luke Storey: Yeah, got it. And then, relax. 

[01:17:32] Scott Donnell: CBD.

[01:17:33] Luke Storey: Okay. And deep sleep is melatonin. And bedtime is the other funky one you said.

[01:17:39] Scott Donnell: Adenosine, which is just a signaling molecule that makes you tired.

[01:17:41] Luke Storey: Okay, cool.

[01:17:42] Scott Donnell: It's a sleep trigger, and then deep sleep is a sleep regulator. That's why we wanted to have both of those. And then, a bunch more coming. The cool thing is once you have it, this holds a bunch of signals, so that is going to get the signal on to the app just for all of our members. We have the next one coming hopefully end of June.

[01:17:59] Luke Storey: So, basically, when you have the subscription, then you're just automatically, every time you update the app, the new signals are on your app, and you rock and roll.

[01:18:08] Scott Donnell: Yeah.

[01:18:09] Luke Storey: Alright. In the last five minutes here, give me some of the stats with the studies that you guys are doing. I think you mentioned them earlier around the rats or mice studies, the placebo blinded. I've heard you talk about some of that stuff, and it's pretty impressive, where a pretty high percentage of people using it know that it's on or if it's not on, they can tell what signal it is, blind studies, that kind of thing.

[01:18:34] Scott Donnell: This was step one, by the way. This was like, I don't want anyone touching this until we figure it out, because the science, it's got to speak for itself. And so, before I even started, our parent company has been doing many rounds of FDA trials. They've done their own tests. They've done animal studies. They've got six peer-reviewed journal entries in CNS Oncology, Journal BioMeds and other ones like that.

[01:18:57] But when I started, I want to make sure that our signals worked, placebo and blinded. So, first thing we did was animal tests. No signal will ever touch a human until we've tested it for safety and efficacy on the mice. And so, we use a third-party CRO called Crown Bio out of San Diego, and they have blinded lab techs that do those studies on them. And we'll do duration studies with pathology workups afterwards just to make sure.

[01:19:24] And then, we check basic behavior, right? So, on the melatonin signal, we saw hypoactive or somnolences. On the CBD, we literally saw them with their paws splayed out. We weren't in there. The lab techs were. We watched it on camera. We saw on the caffeine, they're grooming, they're jumpy, they're alert. And you're comparing it all against the norm, like the neutral group or the control group. And so, we check that first.

[01:19:48] And then, after we do all those safety tests, we get cleared, and then our doctors allow us to move it into humans. So, we'll start with anecdotal, how do you feel? Give us responses. We tell some. We don't tell others. And then, once that clears, we'll go more into a study like, okay, now, the last one we did was 92 sessions of people playing a signal and they don't know if it's on or off or they don't know if it's alert or sleepy, right?

[01:20:15] And they were almost 100% accurate. It was 100% knowing it was on or off. They could feel something. It was almost 100% which signal between two signals. Now, if I gave you a blind all six, that's hard, right? But if I just gave you alert or sleep, it's either that or off, they were 100% accurate. And they were 100% accurate between like alert and calm, focus and relax, right? 

[01:20:43] The only one that didn't work was sleepy and relaxed, because that's CBD and melatonin. I mean, if we took one of those each, we wouldn't know who's got what, right? It's like merlot versus malbec, right? So, that one was like 72% accurate. The other ones were 100% or near 100%. And so, that was huge for us to be able to showcase. Here's what's going on.

[01:21:04] Luke Storey: That's super impressive.

[01:21:06] Scott Donnell: And then, we're doing the sleep study with one of our customers right now, it's in the middle of it, so I can't give full results. But anecdotally, we've had many, many people show Oura Ring stats, improved stats. So, we know something's happening while they're sleeping, which is great news. Now, there could be some placebo if you're putting it under your pillow, you're like, okay, it's there, and I can get a good night's sleep, that's for sure happening, some, but I have an opinion of placebo that once you've proven it, once you're showing it scientifically in control against placebo, pile on the placebo, why would you want someone to doubt it for the rest of their life?

[01:21:42] Right? The same is true with anything, like if you really want to feel good, placebo should help you, not hurt you. So, anyway, those are the studies we're doing right now. We're also doing a Cambridge brain science study on a memory with our focus signals. That's coming up in the next month or two. And then, we continue to do these as we go. Every new signal gets tested.

[01:22:02] Luke Storey: And are these studies published on the site? You guys have a blog on there or anything, where you're showing this for people that want to go in and really geek out on it?

[01:22:09] Scott Donnell: Yeah. We have a blog and we have hapbee.com/science. If you want to go to that page, it'll outlink to the parent company's science and their peer-reviewed journals. You can see all of our placebo-controlled, blinded studies. You can see the mice studies. We have a white paper even that just is basic education on how electromagnetic fields affect biology and how that works.

[01:22:32] Luke Storey: Wow, badass, dude. Alright. We're going to wrap it up. So, this is going to be a quick answer for you, and I'm going to put you on the spot here, Scott, who have been three teachers or teachings that have influenced your work and your life that you might share with us?

[01:22:45] Scott Donnell: Okay. What comes to mind initially is Keith Cunningham. The book is called The Road Less Stupid. It's the best book I've ever read on thinking, how to set up thinking time, the questions to ask yourself in any situation. It's incredible for entrepreneurs, people that are trying to advance careers, families, relationships know themselves. That's probably my favorite book I've read. Tiny Habits is amazing with BJ Fogg. I referenced that earlier. I'm a big old literature man. I love Greek literature. I love scripture. I love reading. The [indiscernible] , Jesus is probably my favorite character of all time. As a Christian, obviously, he's influenced my life big time. So, read the Gospels. There you go.

[01:23:30] Luke Storey: Awesome. The Gospel of Luke, my narcissistic favorite.

[01:23:36] Scott Donnell: There you go. 

[01:23:37] Luke Storey: And in closing guys, again, go to hapbee.com. It's pronounced happy, but spelled H-A-P-B-E-E-.com/lukestorey. And Scott's kind generosity will be shown there for those of you that want to check this out. And with that, my friends, I will let you go. Thank you so much for coming out and joining me. Enjoy your call with Dr. Gundry. Tell him I said, what's up?

[01:23:59] Scott Donnell: Will do.

[01:24:00] Luke Storey: And we'll see you on the next one.

[01:24:01] Scott Donnell: Thanks again. This was great.

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