Military Tech Goes Public: Think 30% Faster with This Brain Hack | Geoffrey Woo : 1282

When you have lower oxygen, your reaction time increases. Meaning that when you respond to a threat, you trigger pull. You lose about 30% of your reaction time. Or it increases 30%.

You know Jake Paul, Controversial, viral, unstoppable.

You're not even a fighter. Like you do exhibitions and lost like four years ago.

But what if the guy helping engineer his rise isn't a boxing coach or a PR rep? It's this man, Jeffrey Wu, founder of Ketone iq, Stanford trained computer scientist and the brains behind the biohacking elite. He doesn't coach influencers, he programs performance.

Don't lose that childlike curiosity and spirit. A core operating hypothesis I have is that there's two scarce assets in the world of business. One is capital. But I think what's arguably more scarce is actually attention.

He fuels cyborgs, the ones launching billion dollar companies, breaking records and out thanking everyone in the room. Because today's flex isn't followers. It's focus. It's glucose that never crashes. It's willpower on command. You've heard of ketosis, but this, this is performance eng. This is nutrition as code. This is what happens when you stop eating like a caveman and start fueling like a machine. Because your limits aren't physical. They're metabolic. You need ketones at altitude to stop that inflammatory cascade. And they also seem to inhibit Alzheimer's disease. And they're just a straight up nootropic. If your ketone levels are high enough or you have good metabolic flexibility and all the right minerals, all the stuff that makes hardware work, you're unflappable.

I know that ketones post workout increases muscle protein synthesis.

What do you know about ketones, ketones and testosterone? Everyone has a plan until life punches you in the mouth. But comebacks aren't random. They're coded. And yours starts with a shot. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today's guest is Jeff Woo. Jeff and I have known each other for a long time because he's a fellow Silicon Valley nerd and also the founder of Ketone iq. You might have heard me talking about the different types or methods of extending ketones in humans. And you can do intermittent fasting. You can do longer term fasting. You could do a ketogenic diet without too many carbs or too much protein. You could take MCT oil, which I would say is the original exogenous ketone. Too much will make you poop. Oops. Right? And then in my books, I've talked about things like ketone Esters and ketone salts, which I typically don't recommend. And Jeff's company makes something called a ketone dial, which I think hits the sweet spot. So I want to talk with him about ketosis and ketones and performance enhancement. But more importantly, he's a computer science guy and a systems thinker and he's also a very successful entrepreneur, computer science from Stanford. So we're going to talk about how to think about human performance, performance, how to think about biohacking. And I think your latest claim to fame is you're working with Jake Paul on a bunch of stuff. Yeah, this is like a venture fund or what's the thing with Jake?

I started a venture capital fund back in 2021 called Anti Fund and well, one, thanks for having me. And two, it just like, like, it just, it's cool to like go from just friends and acquaintances to like doing some content together. Because I think in terms of just all the attention on longevity, biohacking, all of this stuff, I feel it comes full circle that I think you deserve a lot of credit to being really the father of biohacking, kind of anchoring all these ideas. So cool to trade notes and share ideas here.

It's not a trademarked term for a reason. I want it to be a movement and you're definitely a part of it. There are a few companies who've been really innovating in the ketone space and yours is, I would say the most successful one right now. And I'm not with bulletproof anymore. And we had MCT oil, which is still good, but it doesn't do what your stuff does. So you've really focused and stayed the course and I think it's making a difference. So tell you I don't get on an airplane without using ketone IQ because I know the science.

Right.

Do you ever fly without it?

No. I mean, I think that's actually some of the most, I think like less understood use cases. Right. Just the anti radiation of impact being in ketosis and I think the cognitive benefits. Right. Like I think the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong, like the MMA fighters are big customers, including the military. But I think just for brain, that's my favorite use case personally.

There you go. I have told every professional athlete I've ever consulted with, if you are in a sport where you might get hit in the head, you need to be on ketone IQ before you get hit in the head so you don't have long term brain damage. And I don't know if you can make those claims. Because you're involved with the company. I'm not. So, like, the science is very clear. Ketones stop that inflammatory cascade and they also seem to inhibit Alzheimer's disease. And they're just a straight up nootropic.

Yep.

Right.

Yeah. No, I mean, I mean, just touching on the use cases. I mean, I think the genesis of like the latest versions of Ketone IQ came from a $6 million SOCOM contract. So when you're in, you know, high end special operations, one, it's the performance enhancement and the reaction time. But the second part, these guys are taking traumatic brain injury left and right. You're a breacher or you're just taking concussive hits from grenades and whatnot. So that's some of the recovery use cases that isn't just validated in the field, but we're actually just putting more and more effort to partner with university research contracts.

You know, I was about a year ago here in Austin at a dinner and I met a couple of the black rifle coffee guys.

Yes.

It was a big table. I don't know if you heard the conversation that we were talking about, if it flowed over to you, but Jared saying, dave, you know, we, we got brain injured in the special forces from concussive blasts.

Yep.

So then we're in the CIA in Central America, and the only thing that keeps our brains working is, you know, MCT Oil and butter and coffee. My old brand bulletproof, that I have nothing to do with anymore. And he's like, that was the only thing that worked for our concussed brains. And that was what inspired us to come back and start a coffee focused brain. Because, like, coffee is amazing for your brain. And I'm like, that is the coolest story ever. But you look at the amount of ketones you can get from an MCT oil kind of thing versus what you can get from ketone IQ. I combine that with a guy named Dr. Veach, who, you know who he is, and longtime listeners heard the last interview Dr. Veech ever gave. And he spent 40 years.

That was with you, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he passed unexpectedly. He was, I think in his 80s at the time. And he talked about, well, I've studied ketones and mitochondria for 40 years. I studied with Hans Krebs from Krebs Cycle. And he's the guy who told me, you need to have your ketones high when you fly. And we went into such great detail on it. And he's saying, the ketone esters, there's a problem Right. And ketone salts. There's a problem. Mcts, there's not a problem except you poop yourself and you can't get your levels that high. And then you guys came out with these ketone dial. That seems like it's the sweet spot. What is a ketone dial?

Yeah. So I think just to frame up and I think, I think that Veech interview, I think the super ketosis nerd should really like listen to that because I think Veach through his Krebs to George Cahill, remember like the super long fasting studies at Harvard, that was his mentor, his direct mentor at Harvard Medical School. So I think that lineage of just understanding that like the science and the clinical data, but find fasting and exhaust ketones I think really comes really nicely through that Veach heritage of Krebs Cahill Veach. And I think you deserve a lot of credit to popularizing MCT oils. Right. Like I feel like it's almost mainstay now with like butter coffee and like coconut oil co coffee and like that was you like as I feel like people don't recognize just like the lineage. I feel like there's so many of these like fatty coffee things that they're all knockoffs. Yeah, I mean essentially they are. And this is like a fellow student of the history of this industry. Like I just seen all these like upstart nice, you know, great businesses doing all the variations of coffee.

It's the same with collagen. Like I made MCT and collagen billion dollar businesses. And you'll laugh because you're a business guy. One of my investors at Bulletproof walked in one day and said, hey Dave, we're putting $30 million behind your closest competitor in the collagen space. And we're taking our board observer and we're putting them in their board of directors. And then four months later, that company had a suspiciously similar product portfolio to mine. I'm like, really? You're going to back my company and then back my nearest competitor, steal my ideas? Yeah. And they're like, oh don't worry, there's a firewall between them. I'm like, yeah, uh huh, yeah. So. But it's like any time there's innovation in industry, there's going to be multiple people entering. There's always going to be a high quality one and there's going to be a bunch of cheap knockoffs. Just go to Amazon. There's cheap knockoffs of everything. Right. So sometimes they work and sometimes they're even better. You don't know but you guys@ketone IQ, you've really been at the pioneering, cutting edge. Like I remember, I got your products. This is back what, eight, nine years ago. It was $99 for three doses.

Correct.

And it tasted like gasoline mixed with jello. It was horrible stuff. And my kids will drink the modern equivalent, the modern ketone iq. They don't love it, but it's not unpleasant. And I'm like, hey, we're getting on a flight to Turkey or something, you need to drink this. And then they do.

Yeah, yeah. So maybe just like frame up just like all the categories. Right. Like as you mentioned, medium chain triglycerides. MCT. Right. These are 6, 8, 10 carbon length fatty acid chains. And they're popular for inducing ketosis because they readily convert into ketone bodies. So that's a great benefit. But to your point, you eat too much fat all at once. You poop yourself and you just can't consume that much. It's hard to elevate to a very, very high level. And then there's another class of exogenous ketones, ketone salts. And the downside of ketone salts is you bind beta hydroxybutyrate, the main ketone body with minerals, sodium, calcium, magnesium, and again, if you like, These are like 2000% of your RDA amount of sodium. Right. We can talk about the benefit electrolytes, but oftentimes you don't want to be drinking that much salt all at once.

It's a little hard on the kidneys.

Yes.

To have that much mineral. And I'm the number one, eight grams of sodium a day or your dumb guy for almost everybody. So I don't mind sodium, but you cannot process that much metal if you're going to be on ketone salts for a long time.

Exactly.

I don't think it's. It's advisable.

Exactly. So that was, I would say like the, probably the early 90s, 2000s era of like the ketone technology. And I remember reading, you know, my introduction into ketones was through fasting, actually. I remember, you know, I think is probably, I think again just recognizing your heroes or inspiration. Right. I remember like you were talking a lot about fasting versus probably circa early 2000s.

Yeah, that was intermittent fasting was the bulletproof diet. I can't find an intermittent fasting book before that that was ever mainstream.

Yeah. So like I was one of those, you know, probably in my mid-20s at the time. Just, all right, let's do 72 hour fast. It's like Figure this stuff out. And then, you know, I started experimenting with fasting, restricting carbohydrates, and, you know, I ended up working to a seven day water fast. But it's not easy, right? Like, it's very. It's achievable. A lot of mental discipline. Your hunger attenuates after three days, so you don't feel any worse. So you actually kind of feel like you're just buzzing on ketones. Actually feels kind of nice. But the whole process, getting the ketosis is like quite challenging for the average person. Right? Like, I think unless you cheat, I.

Mean, just take some ketones.

Exactly.

It doesn't matter.

And that was the engineering part of me where it's like, hey, this is like an interesting metabolic state that more of us should tap into. But can we expect 300 million Americans who are all overweight and diabetic to start fasting and eating keto? No. Right. So that works with the engineering hacking side was like, okay, is there just exogenous technology that can induce ketosis really, really quickly? And like, the first effort was actually ketone ester. So we partnered with kind of like the Veatch line to launch the first commercially available ketone ester. But the problem with the ketone ester was that one, it's super expensive. Like, it's just like a. And then two, the taste is like horrible.

Do you know that back then I was the opposing bidder with Veach to get the same tech that you guys found at the company on.

Yeah, yeah, I think we closed the circle around there.

Yeah, that's right. We might have talked about that before. But yeah, it's. It's too funny. And. But I was like, I don't know if I could sell this. Like, it tastes like crap and it's expensive. And you're. You went out and you got a meaningful amount of funding from Marc Andreessen and people, and you're like, all right, we're going to just keep iterating and solve the problems. Which was brilliant because you have a great product.

Yeah, yeah, no, I appreciate that. I remember giving you a call in 2015, 2016, because we're very, very early exploring the same technology tree asunder. So I think we were just like co exploring this idea maze together in parallel paths. But yes, I do remember that. That you're like, hey, it's expensive. And some of the drawbacks, and I think, you know, some of the people read that you had at the time, I think also played out to be quite true in terms of Just like not just the technology risk and like the technology challenges, but also just the types of people and the way you want to do business, which I think informs the way I want to like do business today.

Tell me more about that. Like, like how do you select the right people to do business with? Because you've got a lot of investments in businesses.

Yeah. I think it boils down to long term games with long term people. I think in this TikTok Instagram real era, it's like everyone thinks that you can be like driving Lamborghinis after like selling some E commerce courses in two weeks. Yeah. And, and I think because TikTok and Instagram Reels is the way young people engage with content and that that's how they learn. Like honestly it's just like they go to learn their news on TikTok, not Google or any of the like textbooks. I just think about just selecting for people that have durability, have resilience and just have like a long term vision of what they actually want to build towards. Because as you know, you've been in this game for decades, like you're a pillar because you didn't just flame out and die like ups and down challenges, but you're there. And I think that's just like, that is the difference between someone like yourself and like the thousand people that come and go. Right. Like how many over the last decade I feel like there's been so many entrepreneurs and brands that have come and gone.

There's a lot of, I'm going to say copycats, not copycatting my stuff. There's people who copy your stuff and my stuff. I'm just saying they'll find something to copy and they'll go out there and say, oh, like I, I found this and I could do the same thing. And I've seen people literally hire a copywriter and say rewrite every blog post on that site. And now with AI they're just saying I wrote a script to steal everything on the Internet. And you're like, what value did you add?

Yeah.

Right. And I look for that in people.

Yeah. And I think it's also the, the game that you played like selling coffee like the first E commerce seller. Right. Like that was like the genius move at the time. But now that's like a commodity. Like you got to play the next playbook. So just copy your blog post from 10 years ago is not going to do it anyways. So like you can go copy our copy or our blog posts or our content doesn't matter. Yeah, like, go copy what I did 10 years ago. Like, can you actually skate to where the puck is actually moving? And I think.

Right.

I think. I think that's like something that like, even when we just like catch up, it just feels like there's so much battle scars and knowledge of like this industry and this whole space that people just like, we've forgotten more about this space than most people have learned. And not to like, overly compliment ourselves, but I think there is something about just persistence and durability and longevity of knowledge and focus in an area.

There is. And there's a pattern matching. You know, we've both been investors for a while. I've worked for VCs, and I have probably more angel investments than I should have. But after all, you start getting pattern matching.

Yeah.

And one of the older VCs I think was Kleiner Perkins, who said it takes about $10 million to make a good investor because they're going to lose $10 million. And this was pre Biden dollars. So that's like 50 million now, right? Yeah, but because you're just going to make mistakes. Oh, I didn't see that. And so I would say the shift in me has been the larger my business grew, the more I realized I needed to find someone who'd already done that. Because it's one thing if you know you're riding a skateboard and you just fall off. It's another thing if you're driving an F1 car and you just fall off. So you have to have better and better advice. And as I get better and better, I'm like, oh, I can be a source of advice. And you do the same thing when you work with companies. There's value in that that maybe I didn't recognize when I was in my mid-20s, but I do now.

Yeah. No, I think that's something I reflect on upon a lot because there's so much knowledge that you and I have that seems obvious to us, but is not obvious for the new entrepreneur.

Yeah.

So I think there is something about that just takes taste. And I think you have to be arrogant to be an entrepreneur.

Yeah.

So like I had to make all those same mistakes of making bad investments and losing money. And I think every great entrepreneur is too arrogant to listen to the other people because I need. Because you think you know better.

Right.

So I think the people that select out of that is. You have the arrogance. I think you're smarter than everybody else. You make enough mistakes for the world beats you in the face. You're like you're actually not that smart. And. But. But you don't give up. I think a lot of people are like, oh, shit.

Like, it's the resilience. Yeah.

And then you become like the mass you could go out of that J curve for. Like, you lose your $10 million or you do your 10 bad investments.

Dude, I. I'm sorry. I'm better than you. I. I just. I lost a hundred million instead of 10 million. So beat that.

Hopefully you. The only advice I would give, like, hopefully you make your mistakes cheap and early while you're young.

That is the best advice maybe that's ever been dropped on the show.

Yeah.

Is because it sounds. It feels like you have a lot to lose when you're 20. You don't have anything to lose. Yeah. What are they going to take your credit report? It'll be fine in seven years. Like, you'll be okay. Like, it's the time to swing for the fences for sure. And if you can just get a little bit of humility. There's a line of guys like you and me who are just happy to give you advice if just. If you'll just listen and take it.

Yeah.

Right. Versus wasting time.

Yeah.

So it's one of the reasons I do the business of biohacking. Conference now. And guys, it's businessofbiohacking.com and this year we'll teach about 200 biohacking entrepreneurs. Here's how I built $100 million business so that they've got the tools and skills. And the whole point is do not suffer as much as I have. That's my motivation for it.

Yeah.

Because, I mean, you've. You've taken some hits along the way, building up Ketone iq, Right?

Yeah.

What's the most difficult, emotionally stressful thing you've gone through as an entrepreneur?

I think in the ketone IQ journey, probably the most stressful moment was probably circa 2021 when we just won a $6 million contract with special Operations Command. But the entire world, and the end point there was testing Ketone Technologies for operating performance. So a lot of this stuff has actually started so we can talk a little bit more about it. But back in that era of the global war on terror, GWOD operators would fight at Afghanistan mountain fighting ranges. So like 14,000ft altitude and up.

You need ketones at altitude. It's so important.

Yes. So that's hypoxic. And when you have lower oxygen, your reaction time increases, meaning that when you respond to a threat and you trigger a pull, you lose about 30% of your reaction time, or it increases 30%. And there's just a number of, you know, six to eight test arms. And we got. That's one of the coolest things in my career. Got to go to the CAG compound, like, all the, like, a lot of the, like, literally going to the Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, the Meat Ranger regiment, and just like, see what, like, our actual warfighters were doing.

Yeah.

So I grew up in. I was born and raised in Los Angeles in Palos Verdes, which is, like, a very nice neighborhood. I went to college at. You weren't for.

You didn't have to. You weren't East Palo Alto.

But I also didn't. Yeah, I was in those areas, but I also just never met people who served our country.

Yeah.

And it was like, oh, like. And I feel like even at that time, I think it's gotten a lot better now. Silicon Valley was almost like, anti military, anti. Like, all this defense tech stuff. Like Anduril is, like, now popular now.

But, like, Palmer Lucky's all over.

Yeah, but Palmer Lucky's a hero now. Right. But, like, Palmer Lucky was like a weirdo who's like, hey, you do a defense tech, like, we're going to ban you. It's like a Vice category.

You're totally right. To be really clear, Palmer Luckey still is a weirdo. But that's a great compliment. So I've had a chance to hang out with him a little bit.

Yeah.

If you guys are like, who the hell is Palmer Luckey? What was the company you started?

The big. Started. Oculus.

Oculus. Thank you. I couldn't remember. Yeah, Oculus, like the VR goggles. You. That metabot. But now he's just building, like, the coolest. I'm just gonna have to say, like, war stuff. But he thinks about it like a science fiction author and he's like, why would you give $12 billion to the government to lose it when I could just spend 1 billion and make this.

Yeah.

And he's either like an evil genius with a volcano island set up, or he's going to empower the, you know, the US to actually respond to some of this crazy stuff happening.

Yeah. No. I don't know. I'm a happy investor, and I think they're just like, ripping in terms of just like. Like any of that sci fi, autonomous, like, war fighting capabilities. I mean, they're just bleeding edge on it. I mean, it is inevitable. We've already seen Ukraine, Russia.

Right.

So that is where it's going but it was going back to ketones. I mean, I think that was, I think, one formational moment. Just like, oh, like, like there are patriots that really, like, not just like, quote unquote, love the country, believe in the American dream, though they're, like, bleeding, their brothers are dying, they're willing to die for it. Yeah. So. So this was like, right in the middle of COVID like our supply chain. We had supplier issues. And I was this my first, like, military contract. Like, we had to sign a DoD contract. And this was my first time, like, dealing with like, a large government institutional thing. A lot of paperwork, a lot of, like, stuff that I signed off on. And we were having some supply chain and, you know, like, all of those issues. I won't bore with all that details, but I think that was a moment where it was like, can you even fulfill, like, a government contract? Like, if I fail this, do I go to jail? If I, like, like, if this thing, like, doesn't work. Wow. Because, like, we couldn't, like, we didn't know if it could fulfill on some of the supply chain and production of some of the technologies we're working on. So that was like, I think, a crucible moment around one. If you literally aren't getting shot at, like, our soldiers are like, no one's actually trying to kill me. Like, these are just tractable problems. You can improve every single day and problem solve every single day. You just decompose. Like, just do one good thing that moves the needle a day. You do that enough days in a row, you fix it.

It's. It's kind of funny because when there's a threat to your company and you're an entrepreneur, it feels like it's a threat to you.

Yeah.

In heavily meditated my new book, I go through like, threat processing as a system in the body and why it feels that way. But you're going to be reactive. And then you sit down with like, a true warrior. And like, I did a, A Joe Dispenza retreat with a former SEAL friend and like, these guys are just at a different level where they're not going to get rattled by a business situation because they know what real threats look like.

100.

But we feel like a business threat is real. How did you get over that?

I think a very similar, I think, intellectualization of the problem, which is that I realized that the flight or flight response is related to physical threat.

Yes.

But business problems are intellectual threats. Right. Like, I remember, I got, you know, as in business, people sue you for random stuff. You get the first time, you're like, oh, holy. Like a federal court lawsuit. I'm getting served. Like, you maybe get a subpoena. You got to prep with lawyers. You're like, holy, like, someone's trying to kill me. And like, as an entrepreneur, like, you have so much of ego into the business where like, oh, my God, someone's trying to kill me.

They're trying to kill me and my baby.

Yeah, yeah. But then you realize that these are long, brutal processes. Like, a lawsuit's going to take you three years to settle.

Oh, yeah.

So then you realize that that adrenaline dump of like, let's go fight, doesn't serve you well because our evolutionary processes were, okay, this is a tiger attacking. You get cranked up on adrenaline and, like, punch. It's funny. Intellectual battle is you want to be cool, calm, collected, almost robotic.

And that is a secret there. It's funny because the predator types who file these just baseless lawsuits just to get paid to go away. And everybody in business deals with that. They're counting on you to lose your mind and to cause emotional stress. And when you're like, like Neo in the Matrix, like, whatever. Like, like I. I got a team, like, it's not working. And then they go see someone else usually.

Exactly.

So, yeah, just the non reactivity piece. It's important. But one of the primary drivers of ability to stay grounded and to not be triggered is physiological function of your mitochondria. And I found studies about this. So if your ketone levels are high enough or you have good metabolic flexibility and all the right minerals, all the stuff that makes hardware work, you're unflappable. And if instead you have some donuts for breakfast, you got the extra £100 I used to carry around, and then the same quote, threat happens, and then you lose your mind, then you yell at your kids and you act like a total flaming jerk, and then you lose the lawsuit because you couldn't even behave yourself.

Right.

Right. And I haven't gotten that far. I always. Yeah. In fact, I've won all the times when people who didn't have any. Any reason to sue me sued me. But it's like, what. What is going on is way more physiological before it's emotional, but it feels more emotional. And I feel like when entrepreneurs learn that, it changes their whole life. Yeah, but it changes their life at home, too.

Yeah.

As you became a better entrepreneur, as you became more into ketosis, more metabolically fitness, did it change your life at home?

I would say yes, in the sense that you realize that we're a biological system. Like, you could program a computer system like, there. Another way I articulate biohacking is that you're just engineering your biological system for an endpoint that you want to drive more towards.

There you go.

Right?

Resilience and long life and horizontal scalability.

Yeah. So all of these things. I mean, I got into biohacking just from a longevity perspective. I wasn't fasting because I was overweight or feel like a lot of people go towards biohacking from a, like a sickness perspective, but I just was always interested in the enhancement side. So to me, it was like, okay, if I want to induce that type of performance, how do I just structure my life around that? And once you have some systems, then it's like autopilot. So I think a lot of how I orient towards how I spend my time is just building really good defaults.

So what are some of the defaults you built that work for you?

Yeah, I mean, I think ketosis, nutrition, installing exercise blocks. Right. And just like also doing variability. Because, like, I think one thing that for exercise, I'm not training to be an athlete. Like, I'm not gonna win any gold medal. I just want to train variability where if any friend that's like a world class athlete takes me into their domain, I can like, hang. That's like literally my goal. Right. Like, if I'm taking a bike ride with Lance Armstrong, like, I want to just be able to keep up. Or if I'm like in the boxing workout with Jake Paul, like, I want to be able to keep up. That's my. Like that.

That's a big investment. I want to be able to hire someone to keep up for me.

Come on, Dave, I know you're. That's like, that' a strange area, right? But I think that kind of confidence in terms of being adaptive and being kind of quote, unquote, hard to kill in any situation, seems like a very good default physical baseline.

Physical emotional and spiritual resilience combined with long life is. Is the goal. And so there's a consciousness angle to this.

Yeah.

And I look back in history and there's a reason why in Ayurveda and in Hindu scripture, well, let's do some fasting. You go back to traditional Chinese medicine, let's do some fasting. And you look all around the world and all the people who are studying consciousness and altered states work incorporated fasting for ketosis because they realized they could do more. And then when I started testing people's brains, about 11 years ago at 40 years of Zen. And we're looking at, okay, what are the amplitudes, what's the height of the brain waves that you can make? And what endurance do you have for altered states work? We found that if we could raise people's ketones that they could do two and a half times more high level, intense meditation before they hit the wall. So if you go up to 40 years of Zen and you spend five days with my team with electrodes on your head, we're going to be giving you ketone IQ because you literally get a better score and you can do more deep forgiveness and loving kindness and other kinds of work. And it's just physiological biohacking. Yeah, right.

I think there's something to that. I mean, I think you're speaking of like the eastern traditions, but you know, Moses and, and the Jewish tribes were like fasting through the desert.

Yeah.

The Greek Academy people were fasting before they entered the academy to study with plate like Socrates. So I think there's like a. It's not, I think it's like literally every tradition has some sort of fasting. I think to your point, it's like, okay, what is the end point that fasting is targeting? I think a major part of it, if not most of it is ketosis.

Yes.

Because there's something that changes your effectiveness of your brain. So I think there's something to that. And I've just heard so many subjective cases, I want to just put some clinical research dollars behind. But when people do, you know, plant medicine ayahuasca, they were saying that like, because, you know, they have like a special diet that's very clean, they're almost like fasting before they have their plant medicine journey. Right. So I think a lot of these things are related. And I've heard that like when someone like I have an anecdote where these squirrel shoot, squirrel suit jumper guys, that's. And this is like the highest death rate sport. Like I think half of them die.

It looks so fun. And I was like, what I have to do to try this? And I, I went deep on it. I'm like, I really don't want to do this girl suit anymore.

Yeah, like half of like half the people literally die. And so one of these guys was telling me that, I don't know, they're just like some crazy john seekers. But I think he was just telling me that when he blends ketones plus ayahuasca, it's like a very like unique mental experience. So I think there's something to that to further explore. But I think it goes back to like some of the work you've done. Meditative state with ketosis. I think it's an interesting combination.

All of the worthwhile altered spiritual states. And there's a flow state, there's like samadhi, there's these deep reprogramming states available. And those. The whole focus of my book that's just coming out, all of them require extra energy in the brain and ketones have more electrons than sugar does. So it just makes sense. And my anecdote for that. I used to have an art car at Burning man called the Fatmobile, okay. And it was a giant stick of grass fed butter. We took a Toyota Prius and cut off the top so like a convertible. And it was a huge thing. It would hold like 20 people. And it had a coffee cup from Disneyland that would spin around on top of the. And we would give out 5,000 cups of coffee unbranded, blended with butter and MCT oil. And we do it at night and when people are on medicines and they would get this little dose of MCTs that raise ketones, maybe 0.3, 0.5 if they're lucky, and it drops them back in and it amplifies the experience in a really beautiful way. Because the brain is working and struggling to make these new networks and to make sense of reality. When the default mode network is shut down and all of a sudden this burst of electrons that could not come from anything else other than ketones, when it hits them, they're like, ah. And then they go into their state and it's. It was kind of a beautiful thing to be able to do.

That's super cool. How. I mean, are you still doing that? That's super interesting. I mean, we should bring that back.

I did that for about three years. And then the Burning man dmv, they said, you, car is too commercial. And I'm like, there's zero branding on this. I've never uttered the word bulletproof. I respect Burning man values and all. And I'm like. And we have like another camp I appreciate very much named after a certain soap company. So, like, I'm like, I'm not meaning to violate any Burning man rules here, but they basically said no. And I'm like, I have a $50,000 art car built specifically for Burning Man. I don't know too.

It feels like a great service to the play. I went once. I want to figure out the next time I go back. It's a cool experience out there.

I'll be there again this year. And maybe my most most memorable ketone experience on the Playa. I had just parked the art car, had a bunch of friends on it, and we're gonna go dance at some. Some random place on the Playa. And this really drunk guy comes up, and he goes, is this that bullshit paleo coffee and tequila is not the drug for the playa. It's not an alcohol kind of thing. It's. It's too hot and dry. And I'm just sort of laughing. I'm like, oh, yeah. Can you believe that guy who makes that stuff? He goes, yeah. He goes, I heard he was on Joe Rogan. And I'm like, yeah, I heard Joe Rogan loved it. And at the time, Joe had been trying to counsel me. And so anyway, his girlfriend goes, well, why don't you try it? And he goes, ah. So he drinks some and stumbles off. Whatever. So 15 minutes later, we decided to go somewhere. So I hop in the car and start driving at five miles an hour. And then this guy on a bike is chasing me going, wait, stop, wait. And it's like a different. It's the same guy, but he's so different. He goes, that stuff worked. He's like. And he's suddenly loose. He goes, my brain feels so much better. Can I just have another cup? Like, I want to go back and dance and to go from, like, angry, drunk, unfocused, you know, slurring your speech with some ketones to, I got my faculties back. So we were all laughing because he had no idea it was me, but it was. It was such a neat thing to watch in 15 minutes, someone who's, like, at the edge of their limits, extend their limits out. Just using ketones like that was. I guess caffeine is in there too, but that's not. You can't drink a monster energy and get this effect. So I look at mcts as, like, level one and the ketone dials. There's, like, level five. Right. And at the time when I started talking about mcts, that was all you could do.

Yep.

Right. And so we just have better and bigger ways to do it. And I don't. I don't object to a few MCTs here and there. I still use them on occasion, but it's not. It's not the big gun anymore the way it was.

Yeah. And I think part of it was also just the growth of synthetic biology. So, like, the process in which you make these ketone dials requires genetically engineered E. Coli to ferment Sugar.

Yeah.

So it used to cost super expensive because you needed to do a petroleum chemical engineering process to break down crude oil into the precursors for ketones. So, like, the taste was weird. It was super expensive. But if you could have some, like, basically genetically injured E. Coli through a fermentation process, create the precursor one, it's way cheaper and it just like, it's a much cleaner product.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I think that's what you're doing now, right? Yeah, exactly. So that was like kind of the technical breakthrough from the supply chain perspective.

And you had to invest a lot to do that, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think we had to just like, jack up a new supply chain, essentially.

That's a lot of work.

Yeah. I mean, our VP of product has a master's in chemical engineering from mit. I got from. From Stanford, so she's great. She helped build out method. So it's actually like factory before and earlier in her career. So I think in terms of just like bringing the right supply chain and then also the demand. Right. Because I think it's one of those things where it's like, these are metric ton orders. Like, you're not producing, you know, a liter for your lab bench, like, to get to scale metric tons.

I did produce some ketone esters back in, like 2013. It was $40,000 a kilo.

Yeah.

At my cost to produce them. And this is insane.

Yeah.

Right. And so it's. You've changed the whole industry there. And ketone IQ as it is, they just couldn't have existed.

It couldn't. I mean, I think that's literally why it didn't exist.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, thanks for doing that because I appreciate having it every time I fly. By the way, if you stick around to the end, there's a really big discount code for you on ketone iq. Is there one area of like, a biohacking performance stack that's just still waiting for its iPhone moment, like, where we finally solve a big problem?

I mean, like, to me, it's like I've almost like, reverted back to just getting like, all the basics really, really dialed in. Like, I think so many of us focus on the next shiny object without getting the basics down. So to me, it's like going back to, like, defaults or good baseline. Like, if I can just have a really, really good baseline of consistent sleep, exercise, nutrition, ketosis, that's like a good level one base, and then I'll experiment with everything else. Right. And I think we've just seen like, the CGM CRAZE where like, we're all having these glucose monitors and I feel like there's going to be the next device or this thing. I feel like constant blood testing is now like the invoke thing. But it's like, of course, having more data is more interesting, but like, you know, like, if I. If you got lit and slept for four hours, your sleep score is going to be bad.

Right?

So I don't need like my little smartphone to tell me that, hey, your sleep was bad, like, recover more. So to me, it's like, what can I do? That's the lowest effort to. Consistent baseline performance is like something that I look as a North Star.

I think there's some opportunities out there, and a lot of them are around correlative analysis.

Okay.

Which is, you know, pretty nerdy way of saying it. A while ago, geez, quite a while ago on the show, I had a guy named Paul. Zach called him the love doctor. So he's into oxytocin and he's saying, dave, I've reduced the amount of blood that I draw by 85% because if you let me monitor your heart rate with a detailed monitor, I can predict your oxytocin levels with, you know, 90, 95% accuracy of a blood test. You're like, that's amazing. So we haven't done all the work. And I'm working on some of the stuff with upgrade labs where we get incredible amounts, like 187 million data points per member per year, depending on how often they come in and what they do. But that's enough to start going, wow, what are the things we didn't know? And the first step on this is going to be what are the things that affect our performance or longevity or our awareness that nobody knows? Right. And that's the first thing. And the second thing is how do we reverse engineer that? So it's not just about what are the things we're doing, how do we tell the body what we want it to do, how do we get a signal in more effectively? And that's going to change a lot of things. And then how do we also figure out the kryptonite? Because lately microplastics have come up. I'm concerned about microplastics and I'm more concerned about toxic heavy metals and about glyphosate and about endocrine disruptors and birth control pills in the water. All these things are absolutely real. And there's a reason testosterone is low everywhere, right? Because we did that to ourselves. So I'm like, okay, let me look at my. Eat a nutritious diet. Let me eat less toxins and the right foods. And that's actually a much bigger challenge because nobody knows what's in there. So I think toxin detection and then learning how to send signals into the body that no one's dreamed of. Or like, the.

No, I think that that's actually. I think you describe a very nice iPhone moment. Right? Like, what is the iPhone? To me, it's. You put a supercomputer in everyone's pocket for the first time in a very easy to use way. It goes back to a little bit of what I was saying, which is what is a really good default that millions and billions of people can use without going hardcore nerding out super hard, because we've all been there. Having nine vials of blood drawn every week is not the worst thing, but it's like, hey, it takes money, effort, and time. And it's like, okay, you can actually correlate through heartbeat or heart rate variability. A lot of these endpoints. Okay, that moves the needle.

Oh, yeah.

Because you can tell someone, hey, wear this cool little band. And I have a correlate prediction of every single nutritional marker. Okay. That would change the needle. That would move.

And we're much closer than people think. And with some of the data that we're getting at upgrade labs, we're looking at hemoglobin binding efficiency, brainwave amplitude, muscle output, VO2, max electrical activity of cell membranes, and looking at all of it together with wearable data and going, oh, my gosh, what do we. What is there in the human condition that we don't know about yet? And then do we modify it with ketones? Who knows? Maybe you need a huge amount of glucose right now.

I don't know.

But the data won't lie. I think it's going to unlock not just some longevity things, but it's going to unlock some additional mental states or spiritual states of just, like, peacefulness and just not being programmable because I have enough energy. You can't overcome my firewall right now.

I mean, that's an area I want to unpack more because I feel like what's popular in 2025, biohacking, is I think there's, like, some things that are overhyped and then some things are less underhyped. I think the work you've done with meditation is very interesting to me, and I feel like, especially at this moment where we're all constantly being interrupted by notifications and like, this next, dopamine Drip on when you do the doom scroll. So like, to me it's like, it's. To me it's like pretty obvious that you should try to sleep more. Right. I think it's great that people are popularizing sleep, sleep, sleep great. Like that. That's pretty obvious. Okay. Don't eat like literally poison. Okay. It's pretty obvious. And then you can bend towards like things that are just more healthful. Right. But I think what people don't talk enough about is like the internal, like spiritual work, the mental work, the meditative work, and especially in an information environment where it's like every three seconds you're like scrolling the next hot chick or like the next jack dude running around or like boobs in your face. And I think that the trends that I'm focused on now is like, like literally education level and literacy levels for kids are like, they can't read.

It's really scary.

Do math.

My kids have this cool trick where they have two phones and this one has the boobs and this one has the.

No, but like, I probably. Right. Like that is I think an interesting, interesting problem set that I think is just like of our era.

I. I used to describe to my kids, like, every time you read a book that's worth it, you're installing an app in your head.

Yeah.

Like, it's a new lens on reality. And there's something about reading a book that does something different than watching a video.

Yeah.

And if you watch brain waves or just watch a kid's face, as soon as the video goes on, you go into this like dream theta state. You're like. And it, it's not a good place to learn from.

Correct.

Because it's too passive and you have to be able to think. And so you teach people to learn passively. It.

It's doesn't work.

It's like the stuff for wife thing, if you've ever seen that movie.

Yeah.

So I do know though, and this is really interesting. Studies of the brain looking at listening versus reading. They're actually pretty similar. So 20 minutes a day of either listening to or reading a fiction book has an entirely different effect on the brain than absorbing information. So it's a really good practice to do that. And people say, well, you have to read. You actually don't. You can hear it. And at least your imagination is working. You're forcing the brain to draw a picture for itself instead of having some external force draw the picture for you. So there's a case for that for kids and teaching them to be Bored. It's the best thing ever. Take away their phones. Like, no, this is your two hours of we'll either boredom or find something to do that's not a device. But I'm stressed. Well, great. You should be stressed by being bored, which makes you do stuff. Right. And if you don't do stuff and you're just stressed, I'm okay with that too. And maybe I built a farm and raised my kids on regiment farm where they had to feed the pigs and sheep and all that because I think it is incredibly expensive and it probably took years off my life to get on airplane all the time because I did that. But I think it was the best thing I could have done for them. So comfortableness with boredom is important. And then willingness to install important, but hard to install apps in your brain. And that's why throughout all of at least the last hundred years, there's a set of books that everyone had to read.

The classics.

Yeah. George Orwell would be one of them. And now that's probably banned. They probably burned 1984 these days. Right. But everyone had to read that. So we had a frame of reference. And I think that's fundamental to society and we're starting to lose that and it becomes a meme based society. But not everyone sees the same memes.

Yeah.

And get this, only 6% of the music that people listen to today is new music. And if you were to go back before we invented Napster and streaming audio.

And all that, it's whatever the radio played.

Yeah. And so we all had like, oh, those are the songs of the 80s and there are no songs of the 2025s. There's like 20 of them in some Taylor Swift or something. But the vast majority of what would have been there are gone because this group of kids is listening to Pink Floyd and Those guys listening to 70s Bee Gees and like it's not the same.

Yeah.

So I don't know what we're going to do about that. Is the world going to fall apart or are we going to find a way to.

No, I think it's an insightful way to put it, which is, I think one of the main themes across technology, I know you're a technologist as well, is that decentralization is happening across every single sector. Right. Cryptocurrency, decentralization of banking, biohacking is a decentralization, I would say of healthcare.

Very consciously disrupting the crap out of you hospitals. Sorry, guys.

Yeah, no, I think that seems like a one way path to empower the individual over some like canonical system. That's right. It's driven for like a capitalist incentive that is good for the overall system, not for the individual. And I think there's something interesting about like the information decentralization. So I think to your point, there was like this canonical classics that everyone had the same metaphors and the same language and the same like core what is good for civilization concepts. Yeah, I think it's probably good that we have diverse, like even more increased diversity of thought. Agreed. But then at a certain point, like what is a country, what is a culture? You have like language and patterns that we all agree with. Now I think that's like an interesting world where I think this is manifest in politics. We don't need to get into it. But it's like people look at the same facts and they're like, this is the worst thing ever or this is the best thing ever. And I don't think that's like a durable for a good functioning neighborhood or society when it's the same objective set of facts. But the interpretation given everyone's templates of how they view that set of facts is very different. And I think one thing that really resonated with what you said is that people can't be bored anymore. I like, I like meditate on that a lot, which is that if you don't have boredom, you don't think. I think we're just bombing our brains just of passive stimulus. So I think we're all kind of zombified, controlled by algorithms right now. And I think to your point, like, you have to actively fight against it. And I think a lot of, I think more and more awareness is done around just actively guarding yourself against glyphosates, all these toxins in our environment. And I think probably more important or equally important than just like information defense. Like you got to be more rigorous around just hey, let yourself be bored so you can actually think. So I think that's one of the best things I like is just like I just want to think. I don't know if people think enough anymore. They don't process.

It's a problem I tend to get over scheduled during the day where I don't have thinking time. It's meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, because I have a good EA team. But then I have limits. Like you will not schedule anything in the morning because that's when I'm going to be thinking and I'm going to be taking care of my hardware. Otherwise I would go crazy with the volume of companies That I have now, one of the theories of consciousness that works best is that every life form evolves a user interface on reality that's best fit for purpose. And so when you have two people look at the same fact and they have entirely different conclusions, one is it could be just their user interface doesn't agree, but much more likely their user interface has malware. Yeah, It's. You've actually been programmed without your knowledge. That's what being programmed is. Right. And the more energy you have in your brain and the more you've learned the skills of self regulation, which is basically removing malware from your system and preventing it from coming in. And malware can come from advertisers, it can come from memes, friends, and it can come from deliberate moves from propaganda masters, Whether they're in business or government. I don't care. Same source, all of those things. If you have the electrical resilience in the system and you have good self regulation, your user interface and reality is cleaner. Right? And you will not be disregulated, and you will not be programmed. And so part of the ethos of powerhacking is building people who are unprogrammable. Right? It's like we have all of our malware vulnerabilities patched. And it's like, no, my body and mind will do what I choose, and no force on earth can take that away. And the Buddhists would call that, oh, that's like equanimity. That's on the path to enlightenment. And what I found in biohacking is most people join the journey because, like I said, they have a health problem or they're trying to lose the weight the way I do. They have brain fog.

Right.

But once you get on that, pretty soon you're gonna say, I wanna do the longevity thing. Cause I like my life. I got my energy back. I wanna live forever, and I wanna be happy. So biohacking always leads to consciousness and longevity, and those have been pillars forever. I just never put consciousness towards the front because it was way too out there. Fifteen years ago, when I was starting the biohacking movement, people didn't. I put meditation on my LinkedIn profile and people thought it was nuts.

Yeah, No, I think that's. I think that's well put in terms of just. Yeah. What is the underlying interface for reality? Like, are we in a giant simulation? Like, what is the interface? And I think society now selects for different things than reproduction. Oh, yeah. So it's just like. So it's like, okay, like one. Like good people need to have more kids and then two if you. There's some biological slash cultural limit of how many kids you can have. Right. Unless you like just run straight up like a harem. Plus plus plus plus plus plus I'm.

Talking about a certain entrepreneur.

Yeah. Elon's got a good system going if you want to just like, like build the world towards your image. Right. Like that's literally like the Genghis Khan did that. Yeah.

Like was it like 15 of Asia?

Yeah. That I think was like the primal way to. To spread clones of yourself essentially. So I think that's probably like a reasonable thing to think about from a biological information transfer perspective. But I think also ideas. Right. Like obviously you have some genetic propensity to like things that carry your genetic similarity to you. But I think that's, you know, I could see the argument that if there's cognitive similarities, we think alike. Therefore I want to propagate our shared ideals to the world. I think it's another way to valuable think about it. So I think it's. But I think it's both. You need to have like the physical hardware and you want your id, your memes. Right. Not like the, like the cartoon memes, but like the idea primitives also spread. And I think this is why I think podcasts are super powerful. Because as postmodernism, modernism has I think made religion less relevant for people. I really think that like this is like the modern day weekly pastor talk. Like, hey, here are some ideas you should think about. And I think that's why again, again, I don't. You don't elevate people too high or too low. Right. I think we're just having a cool conversation.

Yeah.

But it's just that like I think a lot of people don't have the opportunity to just like think about these ideas an hour, two hours a day and just like pause. Hey, let's like think about like the operating system of your brain, your own internal programming. I think if you're not intentionally programming your interface, then someone else is. Right. So I think 100 true. You should be. So I wouldn't say like programming is bad. I think programming means you have good automatic functionality. Right. Like you have really good defaults. It's about choosing what those programming is.

You should choose what you're getting from the app Store. Right. And you should be allowed to accept automatic updates or not.

Yeah.

And if there's something that's leaking data back to some company, you should be aware of it.

Yes.

And if you have that in Your consciousness, you're just way more peaceful.

Yeah.

Right. Because every little program that you're running that you don't know you're running sucks electricity from the system.

Yeah.

And just it has to like, that's how it works. Right.

So I think like, that's like something that like going back to like what I'm like most focused on. I think that that's an area that I think is under discussed, under thought about. And I think going back to just also like happiness, it's just like unclear to me. And I'm sure you have a very successful friends who just aren't that happy.

Tons of them.

And it's just like, it's like weird because like you won capitalism, but you don't seem very happy. But if you're so smart, why don't you make yourself happier?

In fact, I would argue that there's an inverse correlation. The people I know with the most money, there's a higher percentage of unhappy people because they're suddenly surrounded. They don't know who likes them for their money versus who they are. There's people constantly trying to steal from them. So it's like, who do I trust and who's a real friend? And their social circle shrinks and then they're worried about losing it. And I've seen this over and over with some of the people who come through the neuroscience stuff I work on. And there's a lot of work you have to do to be able to hold wealth or power without turning into a psycho.

Yeah.

Or fame. Yeah. And I think fame might be the most toxic of all.

Yeah. Which I think that's where it's like. Because I'm sure people that haven't made it at that level are like, fuck these dudes. Like, they're like, I, I want that. But I, but I, but, but, but it is like true, I think both ways, where it's like, yes, having the optionality for abundance is probably better, but it's also like, it's also a new set of challenges. And like you could f yourself up.

Yeah. Well, it's. Even before you get into like the big money thing, the number of young people say, I want to be an influencer. I'm like, do you know what kind of poison you're drinking? I even did a whole show on the effects of fame with a guy who'd studied all kinds of Hollywood people. And it is worse than wealth for happiness. And by the way, having enough money to not have to worry about your basic needs does increase happiness. Above that Studies repeatedly show more money is nice, but it doesn't make you happier. And there is a downside, but fame is worse than money. And I'd just say for anyone who's going down that path, have a brain that works. And then you can maybe work on the more esoteric, emotional, spiritual problems of that. But if you're trying to navigate newfound wealth or new found fame, or even just a promotion at work, try to navigate that with a broken brain. And with 50% of the mitochondrial energy you should have, you just, it's insurmountable.

Right.

And that's why biohacking starts inside the cells. It starts at the physical hardware and you get that mostly right. And then you start doing, oh, under my emotions. Oh, what's this whole altered states work. And it's a designed in order. I actually did some like a long conversation one night with one of the AI models. Like biohacking is now, it's, I know it's probably been 10 billion times mentioned. It's been vogue and wired and like, like all over the place in many languages. So it's a part of society at least for this like 50 year cycle.

Yeah.

Right. You know, 100 years from now, will people know about biohacking? I have no idea. I'll be around to like, see, that's my plan, but I don't know. And frankly it's not about me. Like, it's like, this is a thing. But like if I wanted to make it stick around, what's the best strategy? Like, how do you make something permanent in society? Right. And you can do it through a cultural lens or through a institution lens, which is pretty much start a religion.

Yeah.

So is it ethical to start a religion to get people to do what you want them to do?

I, I, that's a good question. I, I've thought about religion starting from a business perspective. I think the tax treatment for religion is very interesting in terms of amplifying the capital you have.

Are you ordained?

No, no, no, no, no. I mean, but I, I have, I have not actioned this. I guess, like, what do I think about, I think, I guess like as I've thought about religion as like a project, I get increased like respect for the traditional religions.

Me too.

Right. It's just like there is a level of conceit to say Jesus is your competition or Buddha is your competition. And those traditions have been durable for literally millennia. So I think to think about religion and to compete with Jesus or compete with Buddha or compete with Allah or Muhammad. Right. Like, I think One should come at like, I think from a very pure spiritual place. I don't think I am like fully self actualized to even like start thinking about like what those contracts could be.

The big question to be is Jesus competing with you? And the answer is no. It doesn't matter if you're competing with any deity. I promise you that they're not competing with you if you understand the nature of deities. But if you're Buddhist or in some of the Hindu faiths, they may be competing with their gods. So when I went to this is a Buddhist monastery in Nepal and I spent 10 days and I was just learning about this and they're like, oh yeah, our gods have their gods and they're jealous of them. And I'm like what? And their gods have their gods and they're jealous of them. And it goes up at least 10 levels. And I'm like, is there like a big master monster like end of the round God who's like at the top of that I'm jealous of you pyramid? And we don't know yet. And this is so mind blowing. What do you think?

I guess what I try to tease out of that is that I think there are just streams of, to me, I think there's a combination of religion and mythology. I think those probably start from the same roots that there are just characters and stories that are anecdotes that are useful for societal cohesion. Right. But I think there's like probably just like universal truths that are less symbolic or less mythological that I try to like, like really embody. So like, I don't know about like if each specific miracle like literally physically happened or like I think there's like, you know, variations of Christianity where there's literally like angels and saints and I mean that's like the equivalent of like a burning memoir. Mini gods, right? Oh, I think you just like, I like to just like try to distilled down to the most axiomatic truths of these principles. Right. And I think for example Jesus story around just like sacrificing for others I think is like a. And also just that if, if you believe you're part of our tribe, I think it's like a very good narrative.

For example, the using tribal operating system parameters in humans to build long term scalable beneficial behaviors that increase human happiness is a really good use of that part of our, of our settings. It's just culture with structure. And if you go back to the original like pre Gnostic Christianity, it was practice forgiveness. And I can show you the Brain waves of people who practice forgiveness, they're fundamentally happier, higher performing. They can enter altered states of flow state easier, and they like their lives better. It reduces suffering. Oh, wait, that's also a Buddhist goal, to reduce all suffering. So maybe we could just build forgiveness into our society. And I don't care if it has to be an organized religion where we all have, you know, school buses with teepees on them. I just don't care. I just want people to understand this is what works for humans. The problem is that when you and I were 15, would we've done anything we were supposed to do? No, because that's a flaw in our. In our operating system. Right. And if we did learn from our elders, we'd probably all never evolve and the world would be dumb too. I don't know how to fix all that, but I do know less toxins, more electricity. And I've often looked at religion. People don't know this. I was one class away from a minor in religious studies, not because I was that interested other than to figure out why people were crazy enough to believe it, but because I was trying to pad my gpa. And how could you get anything but an A in a religious course? Just make up some shit. And I like it. So I went really deep on this. Low carb was a religion, starting with the Atkins stuff in the 90s. And I was a proud member of the Atkins cult where, like, if anything that's a carb is bad. Anything that's not a carb, you can eat it. And I have been to conferences, especially the very, very early days of forming, biohacking, like, low carb conferences. And it's the fattest people you've ever seen. Like, fatter than I used to be. And I was, you know, 100 plus pounds from where I am now. And I'm like, guys, you know, I'm here. I've also been obese, but it doesn't look like it's working.

Yeah, And I've observed some of the things too. Like, they're super hardcore. It's like, it's not working for you, brother. Yeah, you're like, right?

And. But here's what they would say. They'd say, Well, I lost £100. I know I'm £300 now, but I used to be £400 and it totally worked. So I know the problem is I'm doing 12 grams of carbs a day, and if I could just get down to eight, and then it never works. And they're not thinking it's because of the NutraSweet and the Aspartame and the canola oil and the soy protein that's in there. Right. Because it wasn't part of the religious view. And one of the. The difficulties I've had in the world of biohacking. Okay, read a book on intermittent fasting. It's like, do it for a brief period of time. The whole reason I wrote this thing is I could have just said, read the Atkins diet, except it doesn't work. So you have to cycle in and out of ketosis. Right. That works much better. And the type of protein and fat that you eat really matters. So we've got to bring these in and pretty soon, full respect. Jack Dorsey has a bulletproof coffee setup in his office. They've invited me to Twitter to go talk about doing a bulletproof cafe at their headquarters in San Francisco before Elon bought it, moved it to Texas. Go, Elon. And all this stuff. But then Jack's like, I'm doing one meal a day Monday through Thursday and not eating on the weekends. And pretty soon, like, Jack, your cheeks are a little bit sunken in there. And so people are overdoing these things. And so there's gotta be some way of installing a new idea into society with appropriate brakes on it. And I feel like data is that. So what are the pieces of data that you, as a computer science guy, would want to know for us to improve the human condition?

Yeah, no, I think it's a great frame and great question. And before talking about the data part, I want to just go back to the religious part. I think as part of the religion, I think one thing that makes me skeptical of new religions, that I think requires a human messenger. And I think humans are just tough critics of each other. So I think it's very hard to be a. So, like, maybe just a way I think about it, like, what is, like, the most modern at scale religion? It's probably bitcoin. And I think there's something about anonymous archetypal. The Great Satoshi. Yeah, the great Satoshi. Right. Like Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, they're not humans. They're like mythical, perfect creatures. So I think it's like, if I were to try to, like, instantiate a religion, it would have to be superhuman in terms of the character. Like, I think when you're a human, you're like, hey, I'm Jesus. Like, man. Like, that's a very hard challenge to be like, hey, you are the person. But satoshi, an unknown pseudonymous figure that, like, dropped like, some basically Biblical like, clauses to like, anchor some sort of thoughts. And people are interpreting it as like, you know, as if they're the Gospels. I think it's an interesting template to think about. So, like, if I were to instantiate a religion, I would think about pseudonymy and making the characters like, superhuman as like a thought starter.

They almost have to be when people are doing the reset process, which is at the core of 40 years of Zen. And I'm teaching this in my new book. Guys, I just want you to run the process. It's better with tech, but you don't have to. So it's kind of like the most precious thing I've ever learned is in heavily meditated. But one of the things you do is you instantiate in your mind a deity of your choice. And it can be a light bulb that's infallible. It just can't be any person who's ever been alive. Because humans are fundamentally flawed.

Yes.

Not that we're bad people, original sin or anything like that. It's just we have a limited ability to perceive reality because we're wearing meat suits. Like they, like they can all. Time doesn't even exist in math. We just see time because it's useful to not get eaten by things, right?

Yes.

So with all of that, you have to be able to have this mythical, non existent thing. And you're totally right. So bitcoin may not have happened without Satoshi being. We don't know who it is. It's like behind the curtains. I never thought of that. That's really brilliant.

Yeah, yeah. So that's that. Yeah, I think that's the frame. Right. Because I think every single movement, they get some traction. And then people start hating on the people around it. And it's like, okay, how do you solve that problem? You become superhuman. And then going back to the data point, like, what are end points? I think are most. I go back to, how do you not get caught up in data porn? Right. Like, I think they're just like all these epigenetic clocks for longevity. Like, do they work? Do they not work? No one actually really knows. Right. And people just tweak with the different epigenetics and the parameters. Okay. Like, you can kind of tweak, tune these things. Right. So I almost revert to, can you kill me? Or like, are you actually smart? And like, you're teaching me things like actual functional endpoints that show like, prowess in the environment that we're actually in or competing with. Right. So when I think about like, physical attributes it's like, okay, I can talk about, like, my VO2 max score or like my, you know, different weird, like, flexibility routine, but, like, can you outrun me or can you, like, beat me up?

It is an interesting frame. Like the hard to kill idea. I like that I have moved from that, which would have been a way I would identify. Like, not only can you not kill me, like, I can kill you.

Yeah, right.

And I can still turn that on if I need to have that vibe in a tough neighborhood or something. But it's actually, am I worried about dying?

Yep.

And if I have zero shits given about dying because I've resolved all my fear on that, it makes me really dangerous. Yeah, right. Because you can't threaten me with that. I'm like, okay, like, let's throw down. One of us will die. I'm okay with that. And predators hate people like that. They go the other way.

Yeah, they're all right. I don't want to. I don't want to scrap at this. Yeah.

And that kind of thinking, some people are like, well, Dave, you know, liquid death has bad energy in it. And I actually agree with that. Kudos to the entrepreneurs who did it. And like, but danger coffee, it's a no danger. Who knows what you might do? Like, you should be in full control of yourself because that means you can be dangerous and you can choose to do scary things. And without that, you're just like, locked in a cubicle. So to me, it's fundamentally important that you have enough energy to be free. And that's fundamentally dangerous. And if we have values in society layered on top of that, then we have like an amazing world. But if we create weakness because we're afraid, the world sucks. And weakness starts with toxins and it starts with food and then it moves into metabolism. And that's why biohack is cool. That's why the ketone IQ formula is cool because, oh, let's just reboot that. Let's just get it going. Right? And then all of a sudden I got this right. And then you can start becoming less fearful of things.

But like, that said, I think there are like core biomarkers I think have stood the test of time.

What are they?

Like, I think hemoglobin A1C. Right. Like low fasted insulin. Right. Like, I think if you're trying to induce ketosis, like an elevated ketone level. Right. 1.523. Right. Like, are you actually in ketosis versus, you know, you're. You just think you're eating a lot of Protein. Yeah. Or you're not actually in ketosis. Right. I think like hormone, like, like sex hormones are just super interesting. Right. Like what is it? What is like a end product of health? Like it you're supposed to be abundant enough to reproduce. So like what is your testosterone level? So I think it's like we can so, so I think those are to me have stood the test of time. Like all these like biomarkers like feed into the end testosterone endpoint. Like if you could optimize this thing at the tail end, that's one of a hundred components that feeds into testosterone pathway. But like, okay, let's just look at the testosterone pathway. Like you can tell me that you have the most bio optimized this thing. What is that going to do? But testosterone, okay. Muscle, protein, sexual health, reproductive capability. Okay. Like those are endpoints that actually matter in your environment.

Yes.

And then I think I like, I think I was a little bit flippant thing. Okay. This is hard to kill. It's like, I think all of those like basic blocks end up being to like. Like if all those things are correct, you should be hard to kill.

Yeah. You're highly resilient. I might add thyroid into that.

Yes.

It's like thyroid controls energy, testosterone controls motivation.

Yep.

Right. If you get through dopamine pathways, if you get those two things dialed in and maybe the third one would be inflammatory markers like C reactive protein and homocysteine. And those are like the core biohacking, biohacking blood tests that I've looked at for years along with with what you said, HbA1c, which is like. Is your metabolism messing with your sugar? Right?

I think, yeah. C reactive protein. I think it's like under talked about. Like that is like the core inflammation pathway. I think people don't really measure it. I don't even see really people talking about that much anymore.

Actually it's kind of sad because I can take anybody with those four lab tests or five lab tests and, and 80% of the time you'd be like, yeah, you're like fix what's going on and tell like oh look, you have a sugar pill. You haven't metabolic, you have a metabolism problem, hormone problem or crp, that's an infection problem. And homocysteine, you have a problem with your methylation pathways. Like those are easy to fix. Yeah, well, almost easy.

Or then I think you could probably throw an ldl, hdl, triglycerides. Right. I think there is some question around like is high LDL in of itself Bad. Right. Like, I think you can get into that really kind of energy transport theory behind that. But I think. Yeah, right. I think then it's like, okay, you have a good enough picture. I think that's like 90% of it. I think everything else is almost like data porn.

It certainly is. Unless you have a specific problem.

Yes.

Like, if you have a catecholamine issue, you might want to go deeper on genetic whatevers, but for most people, they don't know any of those numbers, and it's not expensive to do it.

Yeah.

So what do you know about ketones and testosterone?

Is there a relationship there? I don't think that's actually been studied. That's actually a very, very good question.

I haven't seen a specific study. I just know that if your ketone levels are higher, your mitochondrial function is higher, your mitochondria do make sex hormones.

Yes.

And they certainly do power the parts of the body that make more sex hormones, basically. I think the word is gonads.

Yeah. Gonadotrophin.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the way I would think about the mechanism would be I know that ketones post workout increases muscle protein synthesis. So I think in terms of recovery, I think there's, like. Like, as far as I know, and I know the literature quite well, there's been no study on ketones and testosterone and how they correlate.

All right, let's see if Dr. Cunane at UC San Diego will do something like that. He's. He's probably the right guy to do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You could create any new human performance product you want. What would it be?

Human. Okay, so it's like magic wand. What would I, like, like to see exist? I think, like, if there's a way to just switch off, like, social mimicry. I feel like most people don't know what they want. They just copy what other people around them want. So I think, is that something around, like. And I think that generally makes sense from evolutionary perspective. Right. It's like, okay, the herd is moving this way. They think that the herd thinks this is valuable. We should just all do it. But I think the power of having, like, a healthy civilization is just, like, brave people fighting and exploring new things on the frontier. And I think, like, to me, we're in, like, this weird world where there is a simultaneous decentralization of culture, but also centralization of culture. Right. Like. Like the algorithms kind of control what is cool or not. Right. Like, you kind of tell that, like, I see, you know, your. Your short form content. Some of them go super viral and some of them don't. And it's like not very obvious to me why. I think the content's all relatively good. Right. You wouldn't put it out there if you didn't think they're all equally pretty reasonable. But some would have 5 million views and some, I mean, I think, okay, is it like insult? Is it more like spicy hot take? Are you talking about something interesting? Sure. I mean, I think we're playing to the algorithm, but if you could lower. I think some of the mimicry, especially around like, I think like branded fashion products to me, like, don't make any sense. Like this is all the same Italian leather luxury product. I'm sure there's better quality Austin American made leather products here. But we want the Italian fancy logo on it and we'll pay literally a thousand times more for it. Like that to me, like, like makes it makes sense because it is a social signal that you have money to burn, so it telegraphs wealth. But people are just like skipping to actually being wealthy and just taking their life savings to buy a bag. And it's like, I don't. That's like a weird hack that the luxury brand makers have programmed us to value.

What kind of car do you drive?

I had a, I'm driving a BMW right now. I had a Tesla before.

Okay, so you're not doing the supercar? Just checking.

No, I feel like I'll ding it. Like one of my mentors, this guy David Sheraton, he was like a legendary Stanford computer science professor and I did research underneath him. He started the distributed Distributed systems group at Stanford, was like the first angel investor in Google. So he's like a multi billionaire. You can look him up. David Sheraton. And I remember in his lab meeting one day, I was like, yeah. He was just like, I don't want fancy stuff because it adds stress to my life. Like if I have a really nice car, I have to like worry about where to park it.

Yeah.

Like, if I got to, like, I can't, like, I just want to be scraped. I got to think about it a lot. So I colored a lot of like, but be all fair. Like, I like nice stuff, but I think about it in a way of like, what am I using it for? And most of it is just signaling to other people, like, why do I want a Ferrari? It's like I want other people to think I'm cool and successful. So I, I. So I don't know if I'm like a more of appreciation of cars. Like, I think I appreciate watches more than cars, but I think you have to be. To me, I think about the intentionality of why you like this stuff.

Yep.

But I appreciate craftsmanship. I understand, like, the feats of engineering the material, carbon fiber for this and that. Like, cool. Like my business part. Jake Paul has a couple Ferraris. He's really excited about them. But I don't know. I don't. I, like, I don't. I think he literally drives him like once a year. He doesn't even drive. You know what I mean? Like, so just like, okay, cool. If you have it and you like it and you have money, sure. But I think as an endpoint, you.

Talked about not knowing what you really want. Not you specifically, but just as a society, we have this problem. And the best book I've ever read for women in personal development is called A Woman's Guide to Power by Kasia Urbanik. And she's speaking at the biohacking conference this year. Very highly sought after. And she's a daoist nun who paid for all of her studies as a professional dominatrix. So she's like, I've studied power. And you think that's the oddest combination ever. But she explains how society programs people, particularly women, because that's her. Her subject of study. How they're programmed to not know what they want.

Y.

And it has to do with, you're either too much or not enough. And she developed exercises that you can do, like on paper or with a friend, for women specifically, to help you become aware of what you want that you don't know you want. And it's so transformative. I probably bought a couple hundred copies of her book for friends, and they go through like, oh, my God, I had no idea I wanted that because society, like, puts blinders on us. And I think men have an equivalent system that's probably driven by different inputs. But this idea that how do we install that new product that we just talked about so that people just start become, oh, what are my real motivations? Like, why am I doing this? What do I want? And I think most people genuinely, when they clear out most of the garbage. And working with people on that process for a decade using tech, it's usually, I want to have meaning, purpose, community and intimacy. Oh, and I want some good food. Right. And there you go. It's not that hard. But just have it flipped around for most of us where I just want to not be afraid and distracted. And you just like, like, you peter out before you get to the good.

Stuff or like Goldman Sachs markets you, hey, you need like to work at a prestigious Wall street firm or something, right. Like you add all these prestige things that are just like bombing you. Hey, you should aspire to this. Yeah. And I think it's like you shortcut to the end point. I think that's like well said.

Let's get back into biohacking. What's a biohack that once impressed you until you looked at the science.

I think the GLP1 stuff is probably most top of mind for me right now. These things obviously are like the magic weight loss drugs that is very popular with celebrities and everything. But I think the second third order stuff around it is pretty interesting around just suppressing a lot of I would say like spontaneous behavior. Right. Like what does that mean for like gambling for example? Right. Like people have reported side effects of like not wanting to smoke and smoking cessation or like drinking and it feels like it is like an interesting tertiary effect that we don't understand that well as a society. And then on the other side, right you hear of all the side effects where like you, it crushes your actual digestive ability. Like people have like these weird, really weird edge cases around all of that stuff. So I think I like to me this is like a very interesting like social experiment that we're running because like there's millions of people on this stuff. People have like really great initial outcomes. But like the way it impacts the brain is not well understood at all.

Interesting.

So that's I think an area that I think is interesting. I think maybe the, I think the sleep tracking stuff I am just super skeptical of in general that it doesn't.

Work or that's not useful.

More on it's not that useful. Meaning that like you know what your interventions should be. Don't look at blue lights before you go to bed.

You know that now though. But I've been tracking my sleep for 17 years. There was nobody writing about that until like I became aware of that.

But I guess do you actually change your behavior now that you are like the 17th year plus fifth day? Oh, I don't like do you actually change your intervention?

Surprisingly in the last month I've been developing a different sleep stack and I have increase my heart rate variability by 50% and actually a bunch of other variables in a positive way. And I am like you go to sleepwithdave.com like I've taught a hundred thousand people how to sleep through the night. Like I, I'm pretty Good at sleep. Like I, I missed, like, how do I tune my catecholamine levels for optimal sleep?

Yeah.

Right. So for me, I only track what I hack. So I, I'll go a year. I'm like, I don't really care.

I feel fine.

Like I'm just not going to pay attention. But if you look, you're like, oh, there's a two month trend, right? Like I got mycoplasma pneumonia in Las Vegas right before Christmas. And like, wow, there was like a six week dump in my readiness that I hadn't really felt. I was like, oh, I noticed that something's not quite right. But even after I healed it in a week, like the, to climb back up to my like baseline was longer than I would have thought. So I do find that there's many things that you can feel and the awareness is useful. But obsessing every morning over it.

Yeah.

Is great for the first six months.

And maybe what I'm getting to is that I just want to make sure we don't offload the, the animal intuition of how we're performing. I think maybe that's like what I'm getting to versus like sleep tracking versus like glucose monitoring. Because I was like saying that like, yeah, like I think our brains, to your, to your point, these are interfaces to understand reality. And I think that primal versions of ourselves just had a really good understanding of your physical state. And we don't know our bodies that well. So I think it's like, okay, how do you maybe flip the question? What should we focus more on? Is like, how do you actually train your brain to actually understand your physical state better?

Oh, now we're getting into the fun stuff. You mean with real time feedback, which is. I used to go to the quantified self meetings. Like I remember in 2011 I saw the poster from that. So somewhere and I get this, that.

Was the original term for biohacking. I felt like, yeah, it was like quantified self. I haven't heard that term in years.

Oh yeah. It turns out the quantified self community, they just wanted the data, but they didn't want to do anything with it. And I was kind of frustrated. I'm like, I'm doing real time feedback to train my heart rate variability, to train my brain waves and to change the temperature on my finger. And I remember I'd met this couple, they're like, we have eight years of her monthly temperature variation to predict ovulation. Isn't that cool? And I'm like, great, what do you do with it. And they're like, no, we just have the data and these are stamp collectors.

Like, you make a bunch of babies with it. What's the point?

It was like data fetishism. And I'm fine. I'm not kink shaming.

Right.

You can do whatever you want. But for me, I'm like, how do I train my body to not need those? So what for me was just transformative. I did six weeks of heart rate variability, real time feedback training to consciously control it.

Yeah.

And then it's like inside your brain is a panel from a 747 with knobs and dials and switches everywhere. And you don't know. You can't even see them and you don't know what they do. And then you do this kind of training and all of a sudden, oh, that gauge. I can see it now. And it just went into fight or flight mode. Oh, and if I twist this knob, it goes back down to parasympathetic. That's cool. And so my, my whole goal has been I want to turn on every. Every lever, every knob, every gauge so that I intuitively know the state of my body and I have full control over it. And I'm fine to use, you know, an adaptogenic herb if I need to, but I'd rather just be like, these are not the droids you're looking for in your own head.

These aren't the droids you're looking for.

These aren't the droids we're looking for. Notice how I did Star wars and Star Trek? That was intentional to offend everyone. If you're just listening, I just did the Spock thing with my hand while making a Star wars reference to offend all of my friends. But this whole. This whole idea of building in awareness and control, I think it's fundamental to human freedom. It just doesn't work if you have enough power. Which is why the ketone conversation. The work you're doing is pretty fundamental. And the harder you work, the more at risk you are. The higher altitude you are, the more you're a warrior, the more you're an entrepreneur, the more, heck, you're a mom who just stays up all night breastfeeding. The more you need metabolic efficiency and the more you're going to need ketones. Maybe not every day, but some of the time, 100%. So thanks for coming up. Some cool stuff. And I don't think a lot of people who've heard of your product know the degree of evolution that has happened.

No, I think it's a perfect conversation because I don't think like without a dance partner that actually also knows the history that well. I think this is a fun conversation beyond just ketones, but I think otherwise philosophy stuff. I think it's fun dialogue here.

It's a great time to be alive. Right? I always ask entrepreneurs who come on the show to talk about all their cool stuff. You gotta throw a bone for listeners, of course.

Gotta support the OG Dave community. The special link is ketone.com Dave D.

A V E. All right, and you're giving them what, 30% off plus a big free gift on the second order.

Yes.

That is actually really serious discount. Thank you. And guys, I'm not kidding. I pay for this stuff. For people who go to 40 years of Zen high level CEOs spending five days reprogramming themselves, I have them drink this before their afternoon session so they can do the deep work. It actually works. It's ketone.com Dave and if you're a road warrior like both of us and you fly all the time, I'm gonna just be a little bit judgy here. You're an idiot if you don't drink Ketone IQ before you get on a long flight. It will protect your DNA. According to the top experts in the world who I have interviewed and this is something Jeff is telling me, although you know this is true, you can't make these claims. I can. So I'm just telling you this is a permanent part of my longevity and biohacking performance and longevity stack. Ketone.com Dave save a bunch of money, all that kind of stuff. See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

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