Upgrade Spotlight: Enhance Your Performance with Ketones - Michael Brandt | 1191 | Dave Asprey

Guess what's on the counter at 40 years of Zen Ketone IQ. Ketone IQ. You can only do so much meditation before you hit the wall metabolically, and then no matter how much you want to go into deeper states, you just can't do it. Like, there's no more gas in the tank. And when people hit the wall, like, take a shot of ketone iq, and my data says you can go about two and a half times longer in deep meditation if you have ketones present in the blood.

That is so cool.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

Foreign.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today's a really fun interview about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and it is about ketones and what they are and why they're important. Now, before you say, oh, God, I don't need to hear anything else about ketones, there's a lot you don't know. And I met someone recently like, oh, Dave, you invented the keto diet. I'm like, no, I didn't. Robert Atkinson invented the keto diet the year I was born. And this is something that we've learned more and more and more about over the years. I even had a guy on the show who's probably the most preeminent or was the most preeminent ketone chemist on Earth named Dr. Veech, who studied with Hans Krebs. It was the last interview he did before he passed in his 80s. So ketones are not new, but our knowledge about ketones is exploding. You also know a little bit about MCT oil because I turn that into a billion dollar industry category by talking about what it does for cognitive function. I've had interviews with multiple doctors about ketones and MCTs in particular about what they do for cognitive function, what they do for Alzheimer's disease prevention, for longevity. But there's so much more, and we're going to go really deep on this show, including the best way to get ketones. And I can tell you MCT oil is always supportive, but there are new, powerful ways that are safe. I've had concerns for a long time. Number one, I don't think you should always be in on a ketosis based diet because over time you probably want to get some fiber in your diet. Not roughage, but soluble fiber for your gut bacteria. But what if there was a way to raise ketones? There is a safe way. In fact, it's something that I do every single time I fly. I use a product called Ketone iq. And our guest today is the CEO and co founder of hvmn, the company that makes Ketone iq. And I take it every time I fly, and I take it when I'm going to be on stage for very specific mitochondo reasons. But going to teach you in this episode and Michael's going to teach you the pros and cons of the different forms of getting ketones in. And Michael's interesting. He was on Forbes 30 under 30. He's a triathlete. His record on the marathon is 240, which means he's basically a masochist. Just kidding. Michael, welcome to the show.

Good to be here. Looking forward to a fun conversation.

Dave, have you ever been called a masochist in your interview before?

Yeah, I do have a penchant for pain. There's definitely a point of just enjoying it. I don't know what, who hurt me when I was a kid or what I'm punching at. I know a lot of.

Wow. But it turns out my next book, I go really deep on the subject of pain. This is coming out in 2025, because there is actually a really good biological reason where you might choose to do that. You know, even a cold plunge will do it, but anything that's going to just reset your dopamine receptors. But we won't go too deep on that. But I'm always intrigued when you have a CEO of a successful company, hvmn, the makers of Ketone iq, you're actually backed by Mark Andreessen or Andreessen Horowitz. And Mark Andreess and I go way back to Silicon Valley days when he was at a company called Loud cloud that became OpSource, which is one of the early cloud computing companies. So we were partnered with him back when he had just come out of Netscape. So very, very successful venture investor. And I love it that you're one of the first biohacking companies to go out there and get Silicon Valley VC funding. Same thing I did with Bulletproof to get, quote, real venture capital money, which is part of just moving our industry forward. And by the way, are you going to be at the Business of Biohacking conference I'm putting on in September in Austin?

Yes, looking forward to that. It was just catching up beforehand on. On everything going on there. And it sounds like the who's who. So, yeah, very much looking forward to that.

So, guys, if you're interested in learning how to grow a real biohacking company, got more than a hundred executives planning to come and all the people who got me past 100 million at bulletproof, I'm bringing them together to teach you. And I'll be teaching you. What did I do? What does it take in order to grow a business that can change the world? Because it's one thing to say I have a cool biohacking product, I don't really care because if no one uses it, you failed. So you have to make something different and you have to get it out there and that's winning. And what you've done with ketone IQ is, is interesting to me because I've been a skeptic on the ketone front and longtime list are like Dave, you wrote like one of the preeminent books on how to use ketosis for performance like the bulletproof diet, intermittent fasting and ketones. But the point of that book was ketones are something you want to raise for a period of time and then you want to go out of ketosis. You have metabolic flexibility. But if you can have ketones and glucose present at the same time, you can actually call on two power sources, which is great if you're running a marathon. If you're, you know, up 18 hours on camera and just doing all the.

The hard it on first pass metabolism in your liver into beta hydroxybutyrate. So when you're measuring your ketones, if you're measuring 0.5 or 1.0, that you're measuring that BHB level and ketone dial converts into that directly. So there's a couple features of that. One is it's first pass metabolism. It's one step, it happens one to one every. So everything that and the ketone dial converts and it also converts very quickly. And also because there is a convergence up your body's able to regulate it. So you get this smooth curve. You're creating these ketones as you need it. You're not as you said, like you don't have this like runaway dropping a bolus of ketones into your system. You have it titrated by your liver actually controlling that conversion process. So it's nice cuz lot of people know MCT. I'm a big fan of MCTs as well. Medium chain triglycerides is I think a lot of everyone knows, just explain to anyone who's catching up is that medium chain triglyceride converts very easily into ketones. But it's still a couple more steps. Like what we figured out with a ketone dial is much closer to that end product of blood ketones. Blood bhb this is something that, that.

Is just a, a way to think about biohacking. So you'll see people say, well, your body can convert, say protein into carbs by gluconeogenesis. Yes it can. Your body can also. And so that's what you'll see from like the carnivore side on the vegan side. Well, if you just have These plant based omega 3s, your body can convert them into EP and D H A. Well, yeah, but it converts at a ratio of 45 to 1 only if you have all the right cofactors present. And it's metabolically difficult so the body doesn't want to do it. And if you have one thing wrong, it just won't work. So anytime you can get closer to the state that your body will use something, you're relying less on your body to do stuff and more on the substance to do it. So what you're doing is you're taking a step beyond MCT oil and you're moving into this thing where it's just one step away from ketones. And the benefit of that is that because it's one step away, my body still can convert it or not. To control the amount in the blood, if I was to do the really bad tasting ketone esters that I was experimenting with years ago, those there's no rate limiting. So you get, you know, ketone levels in the blood of 10, and there's kind of a contest among low carb people sometimes, like, well, my ketone levels are higher than yours. My perspective on that, that's the same as saying my blood sugar levels are higher than yours. There's no benefit to having more of them. It means your body didn't use them. So artificially spiking ketones into insane levels probably isn't good for you. And certainly I don't see any benefit to it. What I like about ketone iq, the reason I use it is that it's much more affordable than ketone esters and ketone salts. But it actually raises levels in a way that my body controls. But it's like I'm fasting and I could eat a donut if I ate donuts. And I could take a packet or a pouch or a little bottle. By the way, I love the new packets. I know they're not commercially available yet, but thank you. Like that made travel so much better. You know, I can take one of those and my ketone levels will be up, right? And then that's protective. So this is just a new way A ketone dial and ketone iq. I think you're the only guys who make one of these at this point, right?

Yeah. And a big part of how we've brought the cost down is we make it via a fermentation process. It's actually super cool. It's like a high tech kombucha factory where you basically take this very targeted type of bacteria, yeast, and you feed it plant biomass and then it creates the output, in our case, the ketone dial. It's super cutting edge is what's really cool about it, Dave, is that it's metabolism all the way down. It's like you, you have these little bacteria that are, that are metabolizing coconut, but they're into the, this dial, so they're doing like a lot of the steps that you would be doing in your body, but you just have these really friendly bacteria in our lab that are already doing that for you. And then, and then it ends up at that ketone dial state. And then that's what makes it into our product. And that process, that was a big breakthrough for us. To be able to bring the cost.

Curve down, that's huge. I mean, you and I have both been in the ketone business for more than 10 years.

Right.

And I love it also that you're a computer science guy like me. So like, we're both nerds here. And it's really hard to work with these things and to be able to do it by fermentation like that, that's true. Innovative, a creation of new tech, which is, which is just amazing. And also, I gotta say, it tastes reasonably good.

Like it?

It's not the most amazing I've ever had, but earlier versions of keton esters, it was like drinking gasoline. Like you were sad that you did it, but then you liked how you felt afterwards. I got my 15 year old to take these and he doesn't ask for them, but when I toss him one on a flight, he's like, all right, I'll do this. And then, you know, you get those benefits. And let's talk about benefits of raising ketone levels. Do they actually cause mitochondria to work better or do you grow new mitochondria? What do they do?

We're seeing both that we see increased mitochondrial efficiency and a few different ways to measure that. There's one is the conversion of substrate into ATP of energy currency of the cell. Ketones convert into ATP in your mitochondria using less oxygen than other metabolites. So you're basically able to get energy for easier. And the first customer that we had, that my company had was I in 2019, we got a $6 million contract with the United States Department of Defense Special Operations Command. And they were specifically interested in fatigue states and fatigue states at hypoxia. So at altitude or deep sea, where you have less oxygen, you have less oxygen availability. When you're at altitude, you also just have less oxygen availability when you're training really hard, when you're out of breath, when you're not able to get enough oxygen to feed the needs of your muscles and your neurons and and all the cells in your body. And the ability of ketones to turn into at ATP more efficiently ends up recovering significant performance across muscle cells and especially cognitive cognition markers. Because of that ease of conversion into ATP again requiring less oxygen. And the same holds true at sea level as well. When you're not in a hypoxic state, you just have easier creation of energy create. It costs less energy to deliver energy to your cells. And then there's other factors too that we've seen where too which is that ketones clean up reactive oxygen species. They reduce oxidative stress, which you know, oxidative stress is the gunk in your. If your body is an engine, then you're creating engine gunk as you age. And oxidative stress is one of the key biomarkers of aging. And ketones actually clean that up. And so that's not something you're necessarily going to feel right away. What you will feel is like your brain is is able to function more clearly. But also what's going on in the background is you're cleaning up oxidative stress and you're doing just cleaner metabolism.

That's what the preeminent researchers are finding. Certainly that's been my experience. And a lot of people just feel so much better. Even on something very basic like MCT oil, which itself was inspired by the Tibetans. Their yak butter tea drink is also a ketosis beverage. And they don't always take it without carbs. But what they're doing there is they're taking the processing the body would have done to turn the water in yak butter tea into the kind of water we use to make ATP. They're actually doing that outside the body. So you drive efficiencies in the body by doing as much processing outside the body. The preeminent way we do this as humans is called cooking. So we can process our food in the kitchen to make it so it's more bioavailable for us, we can do it in a good way or a bad way for our biology. You're using a fermentation process to make this stuff. So my body doesn't have to do all that and I don't have to create the low carb conditions to do it. And it comes in and you're seeing an improvement in mitochondrial biogenesis and an improvement in mitochondrial function because ketones actually have more electrons than carbs. So this is like the direct mechanistic way. And there are lots of studies now that support that ketones have all these benefits, including the anti Alzheimer's effect. In fact, even MCT oil, which is a very weak donor. Since the 90s it's been available as a medical food at very high cost with lots of studies supporting it's that it improves Alzheimer's. So you look at something like Ketone iq, which is much stronger. The effects on brain function are, are crazy. You mentioned working with special operators. I had a chance to meet my friends over at Black Rifle Coffee and these guys are all former CIA and special operator guys. And they're saying, Dave, when we were in the CIA out of special forces, we all had brain damage from all the concussive blast. This is real common in veterans. And our brains were fried. So we were drinking bulletproof coffee all the time because it was the only thing that would turn our brains on. It was an inspiration for us to get into the coffee business because coffee is such a powerful thing. And so you find these things where people's brains are stressed or they aren't working as well. And that's always true in a special operations thing because even if you haven't had any traumatic brain injuries, you're still, you know, in a high stress situation, circadian disruption, you know, doing really dangerous things. So more electrons in the brain, a reduction, oxidative stress equals. Even if you do get a brain injury, which can happen in the field, you're much less likely to have long term problems from it. Same thing. Guys like Nick Foles, who just retired yesterday when he won the super bowl, he was on MCT Oil and coffee and he wrote about it in his memoir because, well, if you're quarterback and your brain doesn't work, you're in trouble, you're going to get hit. Should you have ketones present? Yes. Should you have ketone IQ present? Yes. So if I was an MMA or I was in any kind of a situation where I'm likely to hit my head, I am always going to be on Ketone IQ in those situations because, well, I had better functioning brain and I have more energy to deal with any type of injuries that happen. So I, I think this is a pretty profound way to do it.

That's huge. And that's a big area of continued research that we have. We have a project going with the Navy Health Research center looking specifically at TBI concussions and how ketone IQ can mitigate the symptoms of acute TBI as well as chronic TBI and rescue brain energy in those contexts. Because in addition to everything that you're saying is also that your ketones in your brain are not mediated by insulin. It's a different pathway to metabolism than carbohydrate glucose metabolism. And so when you have that impairment, when you have blunt trauma to your, your head, you have this damage done that, you know, there's, there's damage on in the moment, but then there's this continued damage done. If you continue starving your neurons and if you're able to provide additional substrate via ketones, you're able to rescue a lot of the, what would be follow on damage from the starving neurons. And then we also see people, you know, someone who had a concussion a year ago and they're just like, have foggy brain sometime. They feel like. We do a lot of work with a special operator this, the general military community, veteran community, and people say. There's one guy I was talking to, talking about how it felt like the rust was coming off the chains. Like the first time he tried ketone iq, he's like, wow, I feel like the rust is coming off my chains. I feel like I'm thinking the way that I used to think 15 years ago. And I mean, that's what motivates me every day, right? Like, I think someone like, like you and me, I think a lot of the listeners in, like, there's a lot of ways to make money, right? There's, you can make money, I don't know, a lot of flipping real estate. This, like, you know, a lot of successful business people. But why do we do what we do in particular? It's, it's for that exact moment of like someone who's served the country and they have paid a price with their body and we're able to help bring them back to another level. That's cool. Like that money can't pay. Like, I hope everyone on the team here, I hope all our investors, I hope we make. My job is to make it a good financial outcome for everyone. And that's all tracking. But what really excites me, I think what it really excites this whole mission here. Ketone IQ is being able to help people in a deeper way is very mission driven. And I know, I, I know that's something you, has always inspired me about our conversations as well, Dave. It's just like, yeah, you could have made a bajillion dollars in software if you really wanted to and instead you went into making humanity better. And it's, it's inspiring, honestly, it's, it's cool and glad to, you know, be part of, I feel like the same mission that you started all these years ago, excited to be continuing and helping carry that torch forward.

Thank you. I, I genuinely appreciate that. And I mean both of us, if you're in Silicon Valley and working for VCs and tech companies, you can make a lot of money, but if it's not improving lives, it doesn't, it doesn't feel good. You know, I, I tell the story sometimes I feel like lately I haven't talked about that much, but having hit 300 pounds and arthritis and, and chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia before I was 30 and, and like literally going to the doctor going, I feel like I've been poisoned. I don't know if I can keep doing my job that I love because my brain is just cooked and just that feeling of helplessness and just realizing no one's going to come for me because no one seems to understand this and just say I'll hack it. That's been my motivation here. And I feel like you're on that same path where you're just saying like, this is more impactful in the world than another social media metric or something. So you know, you have to like what you do. So kudos to you for, you know, doing this for this amount of time. And, and the biggest thing that impressed me is ketones. MCT oil is not very expensive, but it doesn't raise ketones that much. It's like just barely enough to get an effect. But it's you cheap and easy to throw under your coffee or your smoothie or whatever. But it's, it, it's supportive, we'll put it that way. But it used to be like $30 a dose, like it was way expensive. So if you were going to, not, not for mct, but for the powerful ketone, things like this. And so for you to just use real science to cut the cost by 2/3, actually more than that at this point it's BU. On a PER dose basis and to make something that works better, I, I Just love that. Like, that's. That's how it's supposed to be. So I, I respect just the innovation, and I think a lot of people don't know that that stuff's happening.

Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. Just look behind the curtain as an entrepreneur where we've been jamming on ketones for some time now. Like, our very first ketone product we brought out in 2017, got this big contract with Special Operations Command in 2019. It wasn't until actually 2022 where we figured out that full fermentation stack and a. And a way to get this out to market at under $5 for a shot. And that entrepreneurial journey, I don't regret any step of it. Everything happened, had to happen in the order that it happened in where you have to have. I always think about the, you know, those pictures of like, the computers from the 1970s, and it's like, here was a kilobyte of Ram and it's like the size of a U Haul and you have got like eight dudes, like, full on deadlifting this, like, kilobyte of RAM into this U Haul truck. I always think about how, okay, now, now we have a terabyte in our pocket that's connected to the cloud. You always have to start there. And I think a lot of times that story is lost in the entrepreneurship journey where we had to make the $35 tastes like battery acid, and the only people in the world using it are Navy seals and Tour de France riders. And that was a necessary part of our journey. But you know what? We. There was a thousand of them. Like, we had our thousand true fans, and then we had some flywheel that was going. It's like, okay, well, if this works in these really extreme conditions, you know, Tour de France riders are riding the equivalent of a marathon a day for three weeks. Like, high, high metabolic demands. Special operators, high, high metabolic demands. As you were describing, if you're able to solve something for those people that's really interesting, okay, now you can fundraise a story on it or around the story on it. You can recruit a killer team you can start investing into. Okay, well, what. How could I scale this up? How? Like, if I could solve the same problem, but, like, much cheaper and lower friction. You know, everyone's doing metabolism all the time. Eight billion people. Like, that's the tam. That's the total addressable market. If we could figure out how to scale this down from there. But it always starts, I think, when you're doing something really novel. You always have the, you know, u haul sized truck of, of a kilobyte of ram and whatever that analogy is into, you know, anything you're doing, like Uber, when it first started, you were like texting a number and like some guy would come pick you up in a car, right? Like everything starts out a little bit expensive or clunky or niche or weird. And I think it's the job of the entrepreneur to battle through those early stages and make sure, I mean, you always have to connect the dots into making sure that it doesn't stay niche. Like you want it to connect into a generalizable human need that you could get to, provided that you bring down the cost and increase all the other factors of scalability on it.

You sound like such a tech guy. There's two criticisms of biohacking that just come up routinely. One of them is people say, oh, it's only for men. Or I'm like 60% of biohackers have been women since day one. Literally that's what the traffic levels look like. You go to an event, it's men and women and there's dozens of preeminent women biohackers. And like so that, that's just not data. That's not what the data says. And the other one is that biohacking is only for rich people and all of the biohacks, including ketones, it's a principle and the definition of biohacking. Change the environment around you and inside you to have control of your biology. You can get ketones for free. Don't eat, that will do it, right? It's less comfortable. And then there's the low cost stuff like mcts, right? And then there's what the, I call the crazy billionaire level, which used to be $30 for a dose of gross tasting stuff. And if you're like, oh, okay, $30 a day. And if I do just one a day, I'm spending, you know, a thousand dollars a month on the stone's going to do that unless you have money to burn. So what the very wealthy are doing is they're burning their money to figure out how to do it so the rest of us get access. And it's the same thing with mobile phones. It was $20aminute and 40 grand in the trunk of your Mercedes thing in the 80s and it barely worked. So they funded what's now a dollar a month for phone service in Africa. And what happened in the ketone space is exactly that you had this very high end high performance. You know, we might Die if we don't have this. I'll spend $30 on that. I'm the department. And then now you're taking the cost down by more than two thirds and you're making it more and more accessible. And if people keep seeing these results and you keep scaling it, someday it'll probably be a dollar a day. You'll say, well, should I go to McDonald's or should I have a shot of Ketone IQ for breakfast? And you go, I think I want that more than a McMuffin. Right? And this is how innovation in biohacking happens. And so I'm really stoked because you really did that. You cut the cost dramatically so it becomes more and more accessible. And that's all these technologies. Red light therapy used to be really expensive, and now, you know, it's, it's quite affordable. So it's coming down for everyone. And I just think you've done something pretty magical with this because you didn't actually cut efficacy, you increased efficacy and cut costs, which is what we do in chips and technology. Not necessarily always biohacking.

I love it. I love the tech optimism. Yes, yes, yes.

And by the way, if you're listening, going, all right, Dave, I know you're gonna drop a code because anytime someone comes on with a product, I ask them to do that. So go to ketone.com dave and they'll give you 30% off a subscription. And this makes this really affordable. And you don't have to use it every day. You might want to use it when you need to focus, use if you're going to write a book or go on stage or do a heavy workout or very specifically if you got crappy sleep or if you're going to be traveling a lot, it's really, really effective. And I want to go through some questions from the Upgrade Collective. One of the questions, and if you're listening and you're new, the Upgrade Collective is my mentorship group and it's highly affordable. You go to our upgradecollective.com and then you get to be live in the podcasts and ask questions that I'm not asking. So one of the questions here from Leah is can you take it with black coffee? I recommend Danger, by the way, Danger coffee. But can you take it with creatine and aminos as a pre workout or do you need to have it on empty stomachs? How does it work?

Yeah, you can stack it with all of those things. It doesn't interfere. It's complimentary, really standard to stack it with Caffeine, creatine, whatever. Whatever's in your, your typical morning starter pack to start the day. Yeah, it, it stacks well with all those things. Doesn't have any interactions or, or anything like that is strictly additive.

I actually ran a test. So in the last three weeks, I was in mostly remote parts of Turkey, visiting the oldest ruins on the planet called Gobleki Tepe with my son. And then we were in Rome seeing just really old, like old, old technology history stuff. It's really magical. But in Europe, I don't respond nearly as poorly to gluten. Uh, so I'm like, all right, I'm gonna be eating some gluten here. So I actually tested eating five baklava, which is my favorite dessert ever, and then having a ketone iq. And I could tell you they go well together either way. So. So you can take it with whatever you want. I don't even think activated charcoal would stop it from working. Like this is just gonna go in like it, it's, it's innocuous.

Yeah, it's what's really cool about it is. It is. You can think of it as energy. It's this nitrogen source of energy. You're getting very pure ketones into your system and it stacks on top of whatever you're doing. So if you're fasting, cool, you're now fasting. Plus you have added ketones available. If you eat five baklavas and you have ketone iq, you're, you're, you're now just stacked ketones on top. So it's, it's this form of fuel again. It's, it has calories in it, which it may be surprising to people or not that there's, there's calories and ketones and you are just stacking those on top of what you're already eating. Now, they're very special calories for all the reasons that we discussed. And another reason that we didn't discuss is that it's been shown there's not a lot of literature around how when you elevate your blood ketones, you actually also increase. Sorry, you suppress ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone. And so not all calories are the same. And we know that, right, that like a very sugary calorie makes you not very satiated. You're very hungry. Steak and eggs is very satiating. Ketones are on that end of the spectrum where when you have ketones present in your system, yes, there's calories, but they are a very appetite suppressing type of calorie. Which opens up a lot of interesting use cases.

They also can't be stored as fat.

They can't go backwards. Yeah, they can't. Like your body will just use them.

And it's really funny because, you know, there's still some of those really angry, like 23 year old fitness influencers who are saying, I had a Diet Coke and a Snickers bar and they canceled each other out because calories, like I, I've seen those guys for years. And then when they're about 28 or 30, they're like, my whole biology's broken, my brain doesn't work and I gained 20 pounds and I have sore joints and I'm like, welcome to biohacking. And then all of a sudden they, they realize that it matters where the calories come from. And ketones will not store as fat. And you can take ketone IQ at the beginning of a fast, so the fast doesn't hurt. And you're still fasted even though you had calories because what your body was doing was making you feel like crap for three days as it was working to turn on its ketone production. So since you already gave it ketones, it's like, thank God. But here's a question from one of our listeners. If I take ketone iq, is it going to suppress my own production of ketones?

Anything that you eat is going to suppress your production of ketones. If you work backwards from max ketone production is when you're fasted, you are burning energy, you have an energy need, you have no new calories coming in and you need to produce energy. And especially for your brain, you're going to make ketones. Anything. Any calories that you add to your system are going to slow that down to a degree. If you eat an avocado, if you eat an egg, if you eat mct, any new calories into your system are going to reduce your body's energy need deficit from what you're pulling on your own body fat stores. Now. Within that there's just different cal, different quality of types of calories where if 70 calories of ketone IQ helps you feel satiated and able to push through another 12, 24 hours of your fast, that's a really effective use of those calories. And on the net you're going to be in a calorie deficit from that. If you're, if you're operating your life for 24 hours and all you've had is a couple of shots of ketone iq, you're going to be in A net calorie deficit? Well, you'll be in slightly less of a deficit than if you'd eaten nothing if you just did a fast. Again, that's the best way to maximize.

I don't agree. Oh, okay, here's why.

What's your take?

Yeah, There are studies that show that if you have a standing desk or a treadmill desk, you automatically eat more and then sit more later to cancel it out. So what's going to happen if you take ketone IQ during a fast, even though it has 70 calories, your body will consume 70 calories or more because you feel better. So we're only looking at calories in, but your calories out are higher when your metabolism works better and your body will naturally use those. So I, I, I'm so tired of these. I, I would just call them like fasting bullies. And you see vegan bullies, fasting bullies. And you know, keto bullies. And the fasting bullies, you're like, well, in the studies mice only had water. I'm like, mice didn't have ketone IQ and espresso machines. But here's all the reasons you're still fasted when you do that. And it works better and it creates less human suffering. So I would, I would just say you're crazy. If you're doing your first fast and you're just gonna say, I'm gonna go hardcore. Now you might do that to prove to yourself that you can handle suffering, in which case, yes. But if you're saying, I actually, I'm a parent, I've gotta take care of my kids, I need to just not deal with all these distractions from going and feeling keto flu and all that. So you take a ketone iq, right? And then you didn't have any hunger that day and you did your first 24 hour fast ever, I would say that that works better than what I used to have people do, which is you could take a teaspoon of butter and a tablespoon of MCT oil and put it in black coffee. Yes, calories. But you're still fasted because your insulin levels don't change and more importantly your MTOR levels don't change. And there's, you're going to be in.

A net calorie deficit. Well, you'll be in slightly less of a deficit than if you'd eat nothing if you just did a fast. Again, that's the best way to maximize.

I don't agree. Oh, okay, here's why.

What's your take yeah, There are studies.

That show that if you have a standing desk or a treadmill desk, you automatically eat more and then sit more later to cancel it out. So what's going to happen if you take ketone IQ during a fast, even though it has 70 calories, your body will consume 70 calories or more because you feel better. So only looking at calories in but your calories out are higher when your metabolism works better and your body will naturally use those. So I, I, I'm so tired of these. I, I would just call them like fasting bullies. And, and you see vegan bullies, fasting bullies and you know, keto bullies and the fasting bullies, you're like, well, in the studies mice only had water. I'm like, mice didn't have ketone IQ and espresso machines. But here's all the reasons you're still fasted when you do that. And it works better and it creates less human suffering. And so I would, I would just say you're crazy. If you're doing your first fast and you're just gonna say, I'm gonna go hardcore. Now, you might do that to prove to yourself that you can handle suffering, in which case, yes. But if you're saying, I actually I'm a parent, I've gotta take care of my kids, I need to just not deal with all these distractions from going and feeling keto flu and all that. So you take a ketone iq, right? And then you didn't have any hunger that day and you did your first 24 hour fast ever. I would say that that works better than what I used to have people do, which is you could take a teaspoon of butter and a tablespoon of MCT oil and put it in black coffee. Yes, calories. But you're still fasted because your insulin levels don't change and more importantly your MTOR levels don't change. And there's third parties who validated that. So it's, you're eating a small amount of calories, but you suffered less and you were still in a fasted state metabolically. And you can also do that with soluble fiber. There's certain forms of soluble fiber that only raise fatty acids when they're fermented. So you have that, you feel more full, but you're still getting the metabolic benefits of a fast. So it's, it's very nuanced. But I'll just say if you're new to fasting, number one, read fast this way and then try Some black coffee. Danger coffee is better. And try a ketone iq. You don't mix them. That would taste gross. You just take a shot of the ketone iq. It's like in a shot glass kind of thing. And then drink some coffee because it's good and has caffeine. And then like, oh, my God, I went 24 hours without eating and I didn't notice. Like, that's when you're winning. And like, I suffered greatly today. Like, if you're a masochist, as we were talking about before, or you, like, wanted to show yourself that you could stand up to the food demon in your head, cool, man. But if you have a family and a job and a mission, like, get it done. And, and this is the kind of tech, once you do that.

Yeah, I think that's a really good nuance on this, the pragmatic approach to it, that there's an easier way to do it versus less easy. And then also just on the. The fact that we're always in an energy balance. And yeah, if you're standing up, you're probably gonna burn more later. And if you have a little bit more calories, you're.

You're.

Your body's gonna maintain this energy balance to it. So it's not as. It's not so simple as your body just must burn 2000 calories a day. There's nothing written in stone about it. It depends on what you're doing and what you're eating. And yeah, I think the nuance there is, is super well said.

If only we could make things more simple than they were. Except there's a level of simplicity. And after that, it stops working. And this whole idea of, here's how many calories your body burns every day, it's like, what was the atmospheric pressure that day? Oh, you didn't track that. What was the temperature of your bedroom? You didn't track that. How much water and electrolytes did you? All of those are meaningful variables. You have no idea how many calories your body burned today. None. 50% of them are not from exercise. How hard did you think today? Because that's up to 20% of your calories. So people in calories in calories out. You can't measure your calories out. It is completely made up number. And it's the same thing as, you know, I was in Rome. You know, you cross yourself a certain way when you go in because you believe it does something. And who knows, maybe it does. But this belief in you knowing how many calories you Burn is absolutely a religious belief that is not backed by any science.

That's such a good point. I would love to, I would love to know what the exact setup rig you could build to accurately measure that. Like if you had a perfect bubble around you that measured every single.

Oh that. That's how they do it. Yeah. In a real calorie chamber. When they do these studies, they're fascinating. They measure everything you, you breathe in and out because then you're telling exactly the amount of CO2 and oxygen. But they're measuring temperature of the room and air. Everything is measured and then you can really tell on that day under those conditions how many calories did you burn.

Energy balance to it. So it's not as. It's not so simple as like your body just must burn 2000 calories a day. There's nothing written in stone about it. It depends on what you're doing and what you're eating. And yeah, I think the nuance there is is super well said.

If only we could make things more simple than they were. Except there's a level of simplicity and after that it stops working. And this whole idea of here's how many cells.

And then there's other factors too that we've seen where too which is that ketones clean up reactive oxygen species. They reduce oxidative stress which you know, oxidative stress is the gunk in your. If your body is an engine then you're creating engine gunk as you age. And oxidative stress is one of the key biomarkers of aging. And ketones actually clean that up. And so that's not something you're necessarily going to feel right away. But if you solve a really hard math problem in your head versus you're just like Om Shanti the whole time. Like one might burn calories, burn more calories.

It's really funny. But it turns out the Om Shanti stuff is as intense as. As hard thinking. And I know this because 40 years of Zen, my, my neuroscience company. Guess what's on the counter at 40 years of Zen?

Ketone IQ.

Ketone IQ and what I found out years ago. I've been training entrepreneurs and celebrities and pro athletes their brains a five day intensive program. And it's one of the reasons I could do what I do. And I've been doing this for more than a decade. And they can. You can only do so much meditation before you hit the wall metabolically. And then no matter how much you want deeper states, you just can't do it. Like there's no more gas in the tank. So I've been for years using MCT and butter and decaf coffee and all the mitochondrial supplements on the planet. And when people hit the wall, like, take a shot of ketone iq and yeah, it's expensive, but I have it there be most expensive is. But, you know, if you're. If you have eight people every week going through this intense brain thing, I'm like, this is worth it. Because every minute of time they can train their brains in advanced meditation. They're trying to do 40 years of meditation in five days. It's like calories your body burns every day. It's like, what was the atmospheric pressure that day? Oh, you didn't track that? What was the temperature of your bedroom? You didn't track that? How much water and electrolytes did you? Oh, you. All of those are meaningful variables. You have no idea how many calories your body burned today. None. 50% of them are not from exercise. How hard did you think today? Because that's up to 20% marathon for your brain in meditation every day. So, yeah, I use ketone IQ for that because it actually lets you meditate harder and longer and you can measure the improvements in the amplitude in the brain. And my data says you can go about two and a half times longer in deep meditation if you have ketones present in the blood.

That is so cool.

So there's a reason for what you.

Will feel is like your brain is. Is able to function more clearly, but also what's going on in the background is you're cleaning up oxidative stress and you're doing just cleaner metabolism.

That's.