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

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. 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 Atkins 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. Veach, 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 turned 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 mitochondrial reasons. But I'm 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.

Well, 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 Andreessen. 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 with Bulletproof, you know, 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, 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 listener 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. So 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 are, you know, up 18 hours on camera and just doing all the, the hard things to do. We need brains and focus and muscle activation. So they're powerful. But the old way was just don't eat for a while or eat a diet that's mostly fat. What are the downsides of doing that?

The first downside is that it's difficult to adhere to.

It's.

It's hard to do. A lot of lifestyle factors come up. You're out to dinner with friends or your significant other is on a different diet. There's. It's hard to adhere to and know a lot of people, that's not, you know, a good enough excuse. Like they'll still do it anyway. But that, that is a real friction point. It's hard to actually do it long term. And then as far as long term health benefits, something you, you know very well and I think a lot of your audience knows well that. Well your point on, on fiber, right? You want to have more soluble fiber. You might not be getting a lot of that on the, on a ketogenic diet. There's certain types of training that you're doing from. For me, I'm big on running, you know, VO2 max maxing like a big athlete. And there's a place that carbohydrates play in terms of peak performance in, in that sport and athletics in general. So there's, but there's also a spot where, you know, fasted exercise plays a, a role. So you really hit the nail on the head with the metabolic flexibility. The goal is not to constantly, I don't think, be in a ketogenic state or constantly be in a fully carbohydrate replete stages overdoing it on, on carbs all the time like standard American diet. You want that flexibility and there's. So there's some nuance. I think a lot of people want to paint with black and White like oh, go full keto or keto is trash. It's, there's a, there's definitely nuance in, in between that. It's not lost on you and your audience.

You know, cycling in and out of ketosis makes sense. And if you're on a high fat diet all the time, one of the problems is that the types of bacteria that you need in your gut that are good for you, they can be bad for you if there's never any food for them. Cuz then they'll eat you as their food. So you can get leaky gut if you go on a zero carb diet for long periods of time. And that said, there are some people who do carnivore. I actually tested what we now call carnivore when I was writing the bulletproof diet, which it can be a ketosis diet if it's not too high in protein. But the difficulty there was it's great for a month or two. But then I found I developed some new allergies that got leaky gut reduction of sleep. So that's a way to do it. And a high fat diet, especially without soluble fiber, it increases the permeability of the gut. So that lipopolysaccharides are gut bacterial toxins that are major causes of aging inflammation. They actually can go into the body better. This is why cycling and nuance is important. Okay, so that's like step one, you know, don't eat carbs. Step two, add MCT oil. And that for me, I found I could eat, you know, a pound of sushi with rice. The next morning I'm zero ketones. I could drink MCT oil and I get myself up to 0.5 on a blood meter for, for ketones. And that's good because that's the entry level for, for ketosis. But it's maybe not as high as you'd want to be. So then a bunch of companies came out and said, oh, we have these ketone salts. And ketone salts take basically the precursor for ketones. They add them to a magnesium or a sodium or something like that. You take them, but they have insane amounts of minerals and they're probably rough on the kidneys and they're actually bad for mitochondria according to the researcher that I think has the most knowledge about this. So I've never been a fan of ketone salts. I actually don't feel good on them. And so these BHB salts are another way and said I'm not going to do that. But then what you did with ketone IQ is you came out with a new form. It's a liquid form, you little package. Little bottles. I throw a couple in my luggage literally every flight. If it's a long flight, I'll do two. If it's a short flight, I'll do one as little bottles. And I, I work with my assistants. When I'm packing, I actually meter them out. How many hours in the air am I going to be and how many bottles of ketone IQ am I going to have? And I do that for mitochondrial protection from ionizing radiation because you feel better when you land. So what do you do different with this? It's not ketone salt and it's not even a ketone ester. And ketone esters are really rough on the liver. I synthesized some in 2014. They were like $40,000 a kilo, they tasted like crap and they uncontrollably raised ketones. So I don't think those are what you want to do. So what do you have here? Why is this different? Why does it work?

What we've created is something called a ketone dial, which is the immediate precursor to blood bhb. You convert 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 in 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 a 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 to explain to anyone who's catching up is 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, 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 be 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 creation of new tech, which is, which is just amazing. And also, I gotta say, it tastes reasonably good. It's not the most amazing I've ever had, but earlier versions of ketone 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 out 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, the 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 six million dollar 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 availability, 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, in 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 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 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 like 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 done 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 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 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. I, 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. Look, 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 know, cheap and easy to throw into 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 built 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, 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, o, 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. 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 stomach? 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. It's 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. Um, and I can tell you they go well together e. 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've now just stacked ketones on top. So it's. It's this form of fuel again. It's, 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 in 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. And 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 gonna 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 and 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 cuz 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. 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 going to burn more later. And if you have a little bit more calories, you're, you're, your body's going to maintain this energy balance to it. So it's not as, it's not so simple as um, 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, as 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.

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 more, one might 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 can 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 to go into 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, I take a shot of ketone iq. And yeah, it's expensive, but I have it there be most expensive. Ish. But you know, if you're, if you have eight people every week going through this intense brain thing like this is worth it cuz 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 a 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 this, right? So I think Om Shanti might be more work than you think it is.

No, I like that correction. Maybe that, that's not the right black and white. So Om Shanti's up there with solving, you know, the hardest math equation.

It's a lot of work when you're meditating properly, like manipulating your body's energy fields and expanding your awareness and monitoring all these systems that are normally not monitor big. I would say that the, the most passive brain thing you could do other than maybe sleeping is watching a video, like watching TV or, you know, scrolling on TikTok or something. That would be your lowest metabolism.

That's the right straw man for the other side. That's right. Yeah.

But it's funny though, that that data point about ketone IQ and advanced meditation and now I'm just going to put this out there. I didn't talk about this too much on the show. I've done training with Alberto Viotto and shamanism and I've learned with like guru level leaders of multiple lineages. Just over the years, I'm, I'm, I feel like grateful and blessed that, that I've managed to get to know some of these people just kind of through serendipity and they offer, you know, here's a new way to meditate, here's a new thing, here's what I do, and here's the kind of upgrade from what I've learned from my lineage. And then I say, okay, that's, that's cool. Here's what I know and I give them some ketones. Oftentimes it's just all the, the mitochondrial enhancement stuff. Sometimes it's the truedark glasses. And every single one of them who has increased their ketones or increased mitochondrial function comes back and they say, dave, my powers are stronger. Like every one of them. One friend who's in his 80s who is kind of flagging, he actually called me with tears in his eyes and he's like, dave, I got my powers back and it's from ketones, right? Like it, it's that important. It's from mitochondrial function and there's so many ways to improve them. And I just know I had terrible mitochondria in my 20s and when I got my mitochondria Back like this is the thing. But I don't talk enough about the energetic and meditative aspects of this. But I know I have listeners here who do psychedelic journeys. We actually just launched this week, actually was our first psychedelic assisted neurofeedback at 40 years of Zen. And if you are doing a medicine journey, and before you do that, let's say an hour before you were to do ketone iq so you have more metabolic energy in your brain for altered states, guess what's going to happen? You're going to go deeper and you're going to have more control and you're going to have a better experience. This is a broad spectrum way to just upregulate your awareness.

This is huge. And this is not just backed by modern science. This is backed by the fact that for millennia people have done fasting and purging leading into plant based medicine journeys. And why do you think that they're doing that? Well, because in part you're inducing yourself into a state of ketosis because again, your brain is going to be running more efficiently off of those ketones. And so if what we have with ketone IQ is a tool that helps enhance that is a very common stack. When you're doing mind altering substances that increase brain activity, they increase brain energy demand. I learned something new that just meditation, even without plant based medicine learn, it makes intuitive sense to me, learned today that that also increases brain energy demand. It's not a chill state, it's an active state. And that in any increased state, any state of increased brain activity, ketones are going to help you out.

There's a, a state called samadhi that you'll, you'll hear about if you're into advanced yoga and things like it's a state of sort of merging into oneness. It's a really, really beautiful state. And the traditional ways of getting you into samadhi always involve fasting, but they don't have to, they just have to involve ketones. Right? And it's because the brain energy demands, especially if it's the first few times you've done something like that. It's like learning to do a kettlebell swing or learning a new way of moving a new exercise where it's demanding because you haven't done it before. So there's the learning side and sort of like pushing through and the struggle to feel, oh, that's what I'm supposed to do. If you have enough energy to power that discovery process, the curiosity, the pushing and failing and feeling it out, you get there faster. And then when you get there, like, oh, look, I can lift more. Like it's more energetic spiritual lifting. But I actually go into some of this. The, the new book I have that's coming out, I haven't even announced the title yet, comes out in 2025. I'm going into some of that because it's really important. The difference between mental exercise and physical exercise is not as big as people think. And, you know, the book is not about ketones, but I will, I, I just know any way you can have ketones if you're on a spiritual consciousness awareness path, it will progress faster if you do it. And like I said, there's a free way, there's a cheap way, and now you have a very affordable way that isn't $30 a dose and choking it down. So, like, I'm, I'm pretty excited about this in general. And I have some more questions for you. Yeah, this is from Todd in the Upgrade Collective. He wants to know, are there any sort of like, what the heck? Why is my body doing that? Effects that, that people experience from ketone IQ or just from the, the ketone dial, which is the, the chemical name for it. Do, do people notice something weird?

I wouldn't say weird. I would say your body has the infrastructure to make and use ketones. You always have some level of ketones present. This isn't some outside foreign substance. So your body's making ketones all the time and using ketones all the time in different degrees. And especially if you are a metabolically flexible person, if you do some fasting, if you do some low carb dieting, if you exercise, and your body's gonna definitely be used to making and using ketones. And so it's not this like alien thing. Oh my God. Shock to the system. I mean, in that sense, like, caffeine is more alien to the system in the sense that it's a, it's an outside substance. Your body's very used to making and using ketones. Now, have you had that, that feeling of quickly ramping to 1 millimole plus of blood ketones, that getting that spot that it would normally take a day or two of fasting to get to. That is novel. So you might feel a little bit of like a lift, like you're in the elevator and it's kind of put, you know, feeling that push up. But the feeling itself, it's gonna feel very similar to that clarity that you feel when you're on a, in a good state on a fast, where you just feel Very dialed and clear and in the zone. You're just going to get there very quickly and you're going to be like, wow, that was. That was interesting out there. Got there in 15 minutes.

I sometimes forget how scary fasting used to be. And so back in 2008, before I started the. The whole. I wrote that first definition of biohacking, started the whole bulletproof thing and all that, I. I realized that I was afraid of being hungry. It's because I'd been tossed since I was a kid. If you don't eat six meals a day, you'll go into starvation mode, which is total nonsense. And then I also knew that if I was lonely, I would eat. And so I hired a shaman, dropped me off in a cave, and I spent four days with no food and no people. Like, well, I can't cheat. Even if I just lose my mind, at least I won't get hypoglybicy right. And that was the basis of my Fast this Way book about the psychology and biology of fasting. But that experience, after four days, I could not believe how good I felt. It was. It didn't even make sense. So I. At the end of this, the shaman texted me, and your phone is off the whole time but once and every morning you turn it on just so I'm not dead kind of a thing. And the shaman's laughing, going, I know you're not dead because I'm watching you with my remote powers. I'm like, okay, whatever. But actually, she was. So she says, okay, you know, meet me at that. I'll meet you at your cave. I said, okay, I'll walk to the trailhead. I just feel so good. So I throw my. My sleeping bag and, you know, half a bottle of water is all that's left in my backpack. And I'm like, I'll just go walking. I climbed the wrong mountain after four days, and I felt so good. Better than I felt in years. I literally get up there, go. I'm completely freaking lost. It's four in the afternoon in the desert, and I have no water. I grew up and just like, this could be bad, but I was just so happy. I'd like to. One bar of battery and one bar of signal. I'm like, I'll meet you somewhere. So I ended up walking probably 10 or 15 miles on new food after four days. Not dehydrated, because guess what? When you burn ketones, what does it make as a byproduct? Water. It hydrates your body. And I, I just was like, I'm on fire. I want to feel like this more often, right? And it was soon after that that I. I was really dialing in that first ability to. To turn on ketosis at will with just MCTS, which is again, that 0.5. And you're getting me up to 1.5 with ketone IQ. So that sensation for the first time of fasting, I was so scared I had to be in a cave by myself to do it. And this one of the reasons I wrote this psychology book. A lot of people now are not so intimidated by fasting, but if you're listening, go. I've never thought I could do it. Just try this. Say, tomorrow I'm not going to eat. I'm going to wake up. I'll do a shot of ketone iq. If I feel like I'm going to die, I'll do another one and have some water with electrolytes or salt in it. And the whole day you just won't even think about food. And that night before bed, you go, oh, my God, I didn't eat. You'll go to sleep and you'll wake up and go, I just fasted for 24 hours for the first time in my life, and I didn't die. And then all the fear goes away. And you, you feel so different. It's, it's. It's a beautiful thing. And that, that sense of energy, I don't know how to put words to it other than what I just did, but you know what it's like because you've done it for years, but a lot of listeners haven't gotten there yet. And it's. It's a big deal.

That's a big deal. It's a big breakthrough on a personal level. Just seeing your own transformation through that. It's a big confidence builder. Obviously, it's good to exercise that specific capacity of being able to fast. And then also just knowing that, hey, you're doing things that most people, 95, 99% of people are not going to do. They're never going to punch through that wall. They're never going to do. It's going to sound crazy to a lot of friends and relatives and your parents, significant others, all that until, you know, until you get them on board with you. But that. That feeling of knowing that you can do something very outside of the norm of what a lot of people are doing in their everyday life, I find it very confidence building because we should have that attitude on all sorts of things around our diet, but also around the news that we input into our brains and the career choice that we take. And obviously there's a whole rabbit hole here. But that ability to, you know, break out of the shackles of oh, six meals a day, you must eat it. Don't slow down your metabolism and go to starvation. Like breaking out of the unproductive constraints of the, you know, common path or common knowledge, that's just wrong. Or just, you know, maybe, maybe misinformed is a nice way to put it. It's a superpower to be able to bring that into the other arenas of your life as well.

It is. All right, let's talk Olympics. Are Olympic athletes allowed to use Ketone iq?

Yeah, we actually had a number of athletes using it, including the, the guy named, who won the the 1500. It's basically the closest thing the Olympics has to the mile. Team USA won that. Specifically this guy, Cole Hawker and he's been a partner with us for some time and a number of other Olympians. And obviously at that level you're fighting for every, you know, percent, every fraction of a percentage and your metabolic demands are insane. Cuz not there's the race, but I think just so people know, like if you're training at that level, you're training to run a mile, you're running many, many, many, many miles, you're running a hundred miles a week to be at that level of fitness, to be able to one run one mile at the world champion le level of performance. And so there's a lot of metabolic demand just in your training leading up to that. And so this is the first Olympics that we've really been standing on two feet with a fully commercialized product and all that. It was, it's just been super cool cheering for some of our athletes coming over the finish line and meddling and you know, a lot more to come there. And you know, we also worked with the, the Tour de France team called, called Team Visma. They won two of the last three Tours in France. And I actually got to go out there this year for a couple of the stages and it's been very cool that to see people who are pushing their body to these kinds of limits and really like proving out a lot of what we're talking about that works in a just anyone's body. But seeing it at the fringes, you really see how your metabolism works and how for us how Ketone IQ as a tool helps and those extreme. These are just like super athletes. It's really cool. I, I gets me fired up and you know, I started the company Like, I'm. I'm already fired up and these people fire me up.

Does that seem fair to you? I. I mean, some athletes have access to ketone iq and, and some of them, the losers don't.

It seems fair to me because there's always this leapfrogging of technology and what's available, right? If someone, Someone the next lane over might have a unique blend of carbohydrates that, you know, it's maltodextrin and fructose and glucose in a specific blend that for them gets metabolized quicker. Someone else might have a personalized electrolyte mixture that matches to their exact sweat portfolio. And we're not even some of the next one. The next lane over might have a special shoe that Nike custom molded to their feet. So, like, we're always making these upgrades to human performance. The difference where things get crazy is like, okay, you have these federating bodies, like World Anti Doping Agency, which, to be clear, we're fully in the. On the, on the white side, we're fully WADA compliant. What these governing bodies consider bad is when you're doing something to improve performance, but at the cost of your longevity. So if I dope.

Don't make excuses for wada. Why does a bunch of Luddites, they literally just come in and say, you can do this, you can do that. And it's not about the health of the athletes, because if it was about the health of the athletes, middle aged men and women would be allowed to use bioidentical testosterone and other hormones to stay young. They actually cause these athletes to age more quickly and to not be able to recover by restricting access to technologies of biohacking. So what I do if I'm looking for a new biohack to see what works, I go straight to the WADA list of banned substances. And that's where all the gold is. That's so good. Literally, half the biohacks that everybody uses except pro athletes are the ones banned by these people who hate humans. So I'm, I'm a fan of the Olympics, but mostly because, like, in the, the pistol shooting thing, you got the guy from Turkey who just, like, walks up and takes a shot. And then you got the guy from South Korea with, like, special optics and, like, all this cool tech who got, who won gold. But I'm like, let's just take the gloves off. Tell us what you're doing so we can all learn from it and don't harm yourself. So the, the deal is you have to share, but that you're free because let's face it, every Olympic sport you might get injured. So if the goal was safety, we should ban the Olympics. So clearly they're choosing danger. See what I did there? But they're choosing danger under this artificial set of rules. So I, I'm sad that you're WADA compliant because it's a sign that your stuff might not work. But I know it works. So there we go.

Yeah, I mean, look, pro protein powder is water compliant. MCT is water compliant. I know, I know. Tongue and cheek comment like that, that, you know, drinking a. Drinking water on the sidelines is water compliant. But that is a very interesting take, provocative take for sure. That a lot of like taking testosterone in your middle age probably is gonna help your overall longevity and health span. And to be against that under the guise of that you're helping health outcomes doesn't exactly line up. That is a very provocative point. I mean, what they're trying to avoid, like I'm not here to, to stand for water or anything. What they're trying to go against is like, you know, you're doping blood, young blood or something that's gonna help you perform better, but you're gonna end up with blood clots, like 20 chance you get, have a heart attack overnight. They're trying to remove the like, perverse incentive to do something performance enhancing, but that comes at this cost. I think you're correct in raising a lot of objections to whether how well they're actually embodying that or is that even consistent or hypocritical if the games themselves are just, you know, it's a.

Bit of a thought experiment, but I mean, let's talk about marathons. You know, the number of marathon runners who have permanent cardiac damage from chronic cardio. It's not trivial.

Yeah, yeah. You don't want to overdo it.

Right?

For sure. I mean it's, it's this balance. Cuz like VO2 max is one of the largest indicators of overall health span. Right. Your body's ability to use oxygen, it just correlates with a lot of other things, correlates with cardiovascular health. If you have more muscle mass, then you'll be more adept at turning oxygen into usable cellular energy. So VO2 max. I think doctors should measure your VO2 max. Like, I don't, I think it's silly that you just sit still and they measured like some seeded blood biomarkers. I think they should measure more measures of physiology. And if I was to pick one, I would say VO2 max. But there is that. There is that line of, like, too much of a good thing. Like, if you exercise too hard and you have, hey, you can overdo it. You can. You can stress out your heart.

Like the Peter Attia effect of all you have to do to live forever is just exercise for two hours a day. I'm like, I don't think that's what it takes. But actually, he doesn't say, you could live forever.

Yeah, there's a way to do it that is like, you can do it without overdoing it. Um, but, you know, I do. I do think exercise, it's the good old thing that works really well. Like, if you could.

It's the right dose.

Yeah. And the right dose.

And to be really clear, if you are metabolically healthy or if you're running ketones and glucose at the same time, you can handle more exercise without damaging the body. Like the.

That.

That works. And so I, I totally support that. I just. I kind of laugh when wada, who clearly supports sports that are dangerous, like skiing, and they say, well, wait, we can't do anything dangerous. I'm like, hypocrite. So that leads us to the PED Olympics or the enhanced games for 2025. What do you think about that?

Yeah, yeah, I saw, I saw you making that prediction. I think it's interesting that. That there could be a PED Olympics, because I think about things like, okay, what if there was actually World War III? Like, I want all the PEDs, or what if we're actually trying to go to Mars? Like, what, someone's got to survive on a spaceship for decades? Like, I. If that's me or someone, like, I want all the peds for that person as well. Like, there is a case to be made for these contexts where you actually just want the best abject human performance out of it. And it would be interesting to see that, like, short of, you know, we don't want World War three to happen, and short of, you know, people going to space and really having to ped their. Their way to Mars, it could be interesting to see in Olympics Games where people are act, hey, no holds barred, and anything goes. And let's see. Let's see how hard you can take it. And. And I think that'd be very interesting. I think that would get a lot of viewership. It might get more popular than the actual Olympics.

Well, it's happening. So the first One is in 2025. Peter Attil is. Is a backer of it, from what I understand. And. And Peter's an interesting guy. Way back in the early days of bulletproof, he was the first guy to offer to fund it. He said, dave, if you'll build a bulletproof coffee shop near my office or my home, I'll write you a check for half a million dollars. And, and I, I said, peter, there's no foot traffic near your home or your office. A coffee shop would die. There he goes. Yeah, that's a good point. So he never invested, but I was, I was impressed with that one meeting. And just he's sort of like, all right, like, let's allow some freedom here. So I'm, I'm a fan of it. And I will tell you that everyone in the enhanced games, I'll bet you will be on ketone iq, because if you just look at the data like this is what you can do. And I think we're going to see some incredible, incredible barriers that we thought were real barriers just completely smashed. And when we get to things like the space program, Got a chance to ask the president of SpaceX, I'm like, you've done a lot to harden computer chips and spacecraft for space. What are you doing to harden astronauts? And she looked at me and she goes, In 17 years, no one's ever asked that. Like, we're not. Well, I'm pretty sure that if we're going to make it to Mars, it's not as much about the spaceship as it is about the people in the spaceship getting there and still being functional. And that's going to take some serious work.

That's so cool. I mean, we just submitted a grant application for the International Space Station Lab to look at some of these factors. Because when you're in space, I mean, it's a more magnified version of what you see when you're flying, right? When you're flying, there's less atmosphere protecting you. You're exposed to more oxidative stress. And when you're outside of the Earth's atmosphere, when you're in literal space, there's a lot of cosmic radiation that you are exposed to. And if you can be eating, drinking, consuming a diet including ketone iq, that cleans up reactive oxygen species, that reduces oxid oxidative stress. It's like, you have to do that. To me, it's like, it's not even like, oh, they, that would be a good idea. It's like, I have the same attitude in the, in the NFL. It's like, yo, if, if you, if all your employees of the NFL are like, getting a concussion is like a Normal line of business. That's the job requirement. Like, it's a dereliction of moral responsibility to not have them drinking ketone iq. And the same thing. Space. You're going to send people to space and you're, you're, you're not going to give them everything within control to reduce the damage of space travel. Like, when you put it that way, it's, it's, it's crazy. Like, yeah, we're hardening all the spaceships and all that. Like, harden the people too.

Dr. Veech, the guy who studied with Hans Krebs, you know, the guy who figured out the citric acid Krebs cycle for mitochondria. In that last interview with me, he said that he thought ketone enhancement was critically important for humans going to space because of ionizing radiation and its effect on mitochondrial DNA, and it causes mutations in it. And mitochondrial DNA mutations are linked to cancer and all sorts of bad things. And you get a lot of that when you fly. So I mentioned at the beginning of the interview, I use ketone IQ when I fly because I'm planning to live to at least 180 and like my life. And that means that when I'm doing things that increase my exposure, that I want to have ketones present in the body. So I would say if I was an astronaut, I would be insisting on this stuff instead of astronaut ice cream or whatever nonsense they're trying to feed them.

I completely agree.

What else should people know about ketones that they don't know?

We're doing some stuff at the edge with some of our pro athletes. We have a study going on in Europe and Belgium at KU Leuven looking at just some specific biomarkers for athletes where ketones help with EPO production. EPO is the what your red blood cells need in order to carry more oxygen to your cells. So ketones have the, have these signaling effects above and beyond just the fact that they're a source of fuel. They have these signaling effects that help trigger other positive responses in your body. Stimulating natural EPO production is super interesting. EPO is one of those things that, that, that's actually squarely on that list. If you were looking at the WADA list, like, EPO seems like it's really good for you, and it's so good for you that WADA has decided to ban it. So people, this is why people do altitude training. When you. One of the big benefits that you get when you train at altitude, which is, you know, seen as like the best thing you could do as an Athlete like you go to Boulder, Colorado, whatever you like. You train at altitude. Guess what's going on. You're making more epo. You're inducing your body to make more of this substance that is really good for you. But it's illegal to take directly anyway. Do without.

Yeah, only rich athletes who can afford to go do that get that kind of epo. But the rest of us, you could inject it for 20 bucks a month or whatever it costs. We can't do that because a bureaucrat said no. I don't know if that's fair. But here's the hack. For all these pro athletes who don't want to violate any W rules, there is an amazing substance called xenon gas. It's one of the noble gases, X, N, o N. And it is the best surgical anesthetic you'll ever find. Problem is, it's three times more expensive than the crap they use that poisons your mitochondria. So most doctors don't use it. It's not available, but you can get xenon, and at the right doses, by the way, if you breathe pure xenon for several breaths, you probably will die, so don't do that. But when you're getting the right mix of oxygen and xenon, not only do you trip balls, it radically upregulates your own production of epo. So if you wanted to turn up EPO without an oxygen tent and all that stuff, you could take a couple huffs of xenon gas, and since you just talked about it, you could probably have some ketone IQ present. No, I've never tried this, but it stands to reason that you might have more red blood cells to be able to deliver oxygen more effectively if you just had the right natural gases from the atmosphere, just highly concentrated, and you had some ketones that you didn't have to fast for three days to get. So there's all kinds of like, this is just a. It's a substrate for biohacking, and I'm. I'm pretty stoked on it. Guys, it's ketone.com. dave. They'll give you 30% off. And Michael, I got one final question for you in our interview. If you could be as healthy or healthier as you are right now, how long would you want to live?

Forever. There's no upper limit. What?

I'm.

Life is amazing. It's exciting. We're living in a movie here. If I could be this healthy forever, I like, why would I ever want it to end?

Yeah, it's Funny, I, I'm with you there. Like, I would only want to quit if I was done. You know, if I'm bored and I can't find anything else worth doing. But so many people say, oh, I would never want to do that. Like I, I only want to live to 87. And you get some people who are like, well, there's no scientific evidence we can extend human life. I just wrote a book that had 20 different substances that extend human lifespan in different studies. So I think there's some evidence. But there's. People say they're naysayers and people say I don't want to. And I'm not surprised just given your kind of visionary tech perspective. Like, well, why would I not want to do that?

Right?

So like when you're done, you're done. But I, I like your perspective on that and I share it. So, like I'll live forever unless I decide not to.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a fun dance. We're here with all these other humans. It's a gift to be alive. Like once it, once you die, you don't, you don't come back in the same form again. So, so, yeah, well, I don't want the dance to end. I mean I'm not, I think most likely case will not live forever. Right. So like I'm comfortable with the inevitability of death and all that. It's. Yeah, I'm not in a hurry to die either.

Yeah, I've been in the longevity field for 25 years and I remember James Clements who's been on the show and just one of these true believer long term longevity advocates. The guy who flew around the world and gathered DNA from super centenarians to give to George Church to find out the genetic like this. Just a great human being. He's been on the show years ago and when I first met him in Florida 20something years ago, I said, no, it's inevitable, we're going to die. And he actually got mad at me and he what do you mean? Look man, the universe will eventually collapse in on itself. Like, it's all right. You have to be comfortable with this fact. You're going to die, but you don't want to have a crappy biology before you die and you want to die way, way, way later. But if you're just resisting that and saying I'm never going to die, you might be drinking your own Kool Aid. And so I'm like, let's not do it at any planned time in the foreseeable future. Seems good enough for me.

Yeah, well said Michael.

Thanks for all the innovation you're doing and thanks for cutting the cost of this to make this so it's reasonably affordable to use even a couple times a week for a lot of people for those high performance times or for travel and whatever. I think it's it's a meaningful innovation in the biohacking space. So again guys, ketone.com Dave, save 30% and you are very likely to see Michael at the Business of Biohacking conference. Go to businessofbiohacking.com I will teach you. If you're a biohacking entrepreneur, I'll teach you and I'll bring in all the experts who taught me how to grow $100 million company from scratch. That is a very rare thing. There's only $17,100 million plus companies public or private in the US so if you want the the cheat codes for that business of biohacking.com I'd love to teach you. I will see you all on the next episode. If you've liked this, I love it when you share it. I love comments on YouTube. Make sure you're subscribing to the channel on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is you consume the podcast. I appreciate your time, your attention, your listenership, and I do my best to make these entertaining, but more important to make it way more than worth the hour we just spent together. See you soon. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

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