#60: Running on Ketones and Carbs, with Michael Brandt

And this idea of the central governor, that when you bonk, when you need to give up, it's often not your quad or glute or calf that's like making you quit. It's that your brain is running out of willpower. You're like, you're running low on the ability for your brain to connect to your muscles and charge forward. The brain is mediating the performance benefits that you're seeing. So it is true when you drink a ketone, that you have elevated blood ketone levels globally circulating. And it is true that your muscles can use ketones and do use ketones. However, my read on it is that the dominant effect is mediated by your brain's ability to have more willpower, to have more ability to charge forward because you have ketones circulating in your brain as well. Ketones cross the blood-brain barrier, provide you with brain energy in a, in a unique way. And when you're glycogen-starved because you're doing endurance activities, that ability to rescue or maintain brain energy in those states is super interesting.

Welcome to another episode of The Extra Mile Show, where I interview different guests about ways to become a stronger, healthier, and happier athlete. My name is Floris Gierman. I'm a running coach and an endurance athlete, and I'm often looking at ways to optimize my performance and my energy levels in training, racing, but also during the day in daily life. Today we're taking a deep deep dive into the world of ketones. Ketones are a super efficient source of fuel for the brain that leaves you feeling energized and clear-headed. This is a topic that I'm really excited about because there's a lot of innovation happening in the exogenous ketone space with things like drinkable Ketone IQ shots, which is fuel for the brain. 60% of the Tour de France riders are actually using Ketone IQ, and the fascinating thing is none of them are on a ketogenic diet. There are many other people like Andrew Huberman, Sarah Hall, Ben Greenfield, and many more that speak highly about the benefits of Ketone IQ. And that is what sparked my interest to start experimenting with this myself as well. Today I'm sitting down with Michael Brandt. He is the CEO and co-founder of Health Via Modern Nutrition. He's a really legitimate marathon runner and we had a really fun conversation about the topic of ketones. Ketone IQ IQ by HVMN is a supplement that increases your blood ketone levels. Many people, including myself, find that increasing ketone levels by using a supplement such as Ketone IQ can greatly improve your cognitive ability and your physical output for mental performance and exercise, even when you're not on a ketogenic diet. I'm personally not on a ketogenic diet. There's a lot of research supporting the fact that if you are consuming carbohydrates and you're not on a ketogenic diet, then consuming supplements that increase your ketone level can allow you to think more clearly for cognitive work and for physical work for that matter. Also, you can perform at greater output for things like resistance training and for endurance training. That's also what I found. I use it to increase concentration to prepare for things like this podcast or other work projects. Recently, I also started taking it before and during some of my longer runs, especially when I'm doing them in a fasted state. For example, this weekend I went on a long run for a few hours without consuming any calories beforehand. I find that I have a lot more energy when I take Ketone IQ. It also has the property of suppressing hunger. If you would like to try Ketone IQ, you can go to hvmn.com/flow to save 20%. That is hvmn.com/flow to save 20% off your order of Ketone IQ. Michael and his team are focused on increasing education and access to metabolic health and performance. And in today's conversation, we'll discuss how to optimize your energy levels, innovations happening in the keto space, how endurance athletes can optimize their performance with ketosis, and so much more. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Michael Brandt. Michael Brandt, welcome to the Extra Mileage Show. Very excited you're here.

Floris, thanks for having me on. It's going to be a fun conversation today.

Yeah, we started the day off with a nice morning run on the trails over here.

It's perfect. Yeah, what a way to start the day.

Best way. Are you more of a trail runner or more of a road runner?

Typically, I've been more of a road runner, although I like trails. I'm not dogmatic on it. I also ride my bike and go for a swim sometimes too. I would say road running is my primary, but I like all— I like everything. I like skiing. I like everything. Any way to get out after it. I'm not— I'm not dogmatic about it.

There you go. Because we were talking for a little bit earlier, you have ran several different marathons with impressive marathon times too. I believe 2:42 was your marathon time, is that correct?

That's right, yeah, I get after it. I'm not elite, but faster than your average bear and a bit out ahead of your Boston qualifier time.

There you go. Where did you run the 2:42? Where was that?

That was at CIM. California International Marathon in Sacramento. Really nice course.

What year?

2019. I believe you were there as well. I don't think we knew each other at the time.

That's right. Yeah, 2019. That was, it was a tough race for me. Let's say, let's say the least. Yeah, that was a, that's a fun, fast course to fly hard on.

Yeah. Yeah. It was perfect temperature, like, you know, 54 degrees. It's smooth course. Really nice.

The funny thing is that was for me, I noticed some of the humidity actually that day as well. And I wasn't very much used to it. And I just started going out way too fast, but I'm glad you were able to fly on that one.

So good day out. Good day out.

Awesome. Let's start out with a little bit more about your background. Tell us about your background in the wellness space, in the health space, also particularly as it relates to ketones.

Yeah, I studied computer science in undergrad at Stanford. That's where my co-founder and I met. And we both got into biohacking very early on, taking the systems approach, engineering approach to the human body. And the insight being that your body is the most advanced piece of technology that you will ever own. And we're now able to see the body as a system. And it's, I call it the API-ification of the human body where you have your Whoop or your Apple Watch or your Oura Ring or your continuous glucose monitor. We're able to measure all these signals of our body. And it follows from there that when we're able to see the dashboard lights starting to come on, you see your check engine light, you see your oil gauge, all these lights that weren't on a decade ago. You're able to see every 15 minutes now, you're able to see your blood glucose level, your HRV. It follows from there that then you're mindful about what you're putting into your body. A lot of my friends don't have caffeine after noon anymore because they know that their Oura Ring will report a poor sleep score. And so we're getting very mindful about the human body as a system. And rewinding the clock about 6, 7 years, the keto diet was really trending, and a lot of people are trying to eat low carb and get their body to make these ketones. Your body makes ketones whenever you're low on blood glucose. That happens also in an endurance context. If you're on mile 17 or 37 or advanced mileage on a run, you've depleted a lot of your blood glucose and your body's making ketones. The same thing happens when you're fasting as well. I've done a 7-day-long fast with my co-founder and some other folks on our team and our larger community. For a long time, we ran a large intermittent fasting group in San Francisco. In any of these contexts, if we're tracking along, if you're eating a low-carb ketogenic diet or if you're doing endurance exercise or if you're fasting, in any of these contexts, you run low on blood glucose and your body starts making ketones. And we've known for a long time that ketones are this magic molecule. They have these special properties where they're hyper-efficient. They're like your body's backup super fuel that can turn into energy using less oxygen. A lot of people feel really good when they're running off of ketones. And we asked the dumb/smart question of, okay, if ketones are so cool, why do you have to jump through all these hoops to get a ketone? Why can't you go to the store and buy a ketone the way that you can buy collagen or caffeine or omega-3? You can buy all these other nutritional primitives at the store. If ketones are so interesting and so fundamental to the human body as a system, why doesn't that exist in a shot format that you can just grab at the store? And that actually ended up being a pretty complex question. And that's where the journey began in 2017. And we were able to bring to market the world's first ketone ester drink at the time. And it's, it's been a big journey since then.

Yeah, I can— there's so much to unpack over here because there is a lot of innovation happening in the field and where it used to be that only a small amount of people have experimented with it or like, yes, they might have gone into it through like a natural ketosis. Like right now there's other ways of getting into there as well. And let's backtrack a little bit though. Can you just explain in simple terms like what is ketosis, how do you get into ketosis and what are some of the benefits that people can experience with ketosis? Yeah.

Your body has these two main energy systems and runners are really familiar with this, where you have a glucose, sugar, carb, it's all the same. You have this glucose energy system and then you have a fat ketone energy system and your glucose energy system is very fast and powerful. If you're going to go zone 5, zone 6, if you're going to be doing, you know, 800 repeats, anything that's, that's shorter, faster, that requires a lot of power. You're really going to tap into your glucose energy system when doing longer efforts, 100-milers, even marathons, even half marathons. When you're doing longer efforts, your body is going to run out of the glucose system and you're going to need to tap into your fat stores and turn that into usable energy, turn that into ketones. And that's what's going to be supplying your brain and body with fuel in the absence of glucose. So this is just natural. This is, you know, 300,000 years of human history. We've had these two systems and. Ancient humans used to use the fat ketone system a lot more because there's no peanut butter cups on the savanna, right? There was no abundance or overabundance of Slurpees and processed carbohydrates and all that stuff that you see at the modern grocery store, 7-Eleven, what have you. So humans are really good at this fat ketone energy system. We also have this glucose energy system that's good for these high-power outlets. So So your body's really good at ketosis. And just to define the term there, ketosis is when you have elevated levels of blood ketones. There's a related concept called ketogenesis, which is when your body itself is making ketones that leads to ketosis. And then there's this concept that we have, which is exogenous ketones, which are ketones that are made outside of the body and, and ingested that also gets you into ketosis. So there's different ways to get into ketosis. You either do it by having depleted your glycogen stores your body is making its own ketones, or, and, or these are not mutually exclusive, and, or if you're drinking Ketone IQ exogenous ketones, then that also puts you into ketosis.

And what are some of the benefits that people can experience? Because even, even stepping back a little bit, like I've done some of my own experiments with different nutritional approaches and some like that, The part that I find interesting with nutrition is you're never going to find a one-size-fits-all approach. Like, there's a lot of different thought processes about this. Like, there's people who swear by being vegetarian, others by being vegan. For others, like, animal products work well. I've done a lot of experiments myself, and even for me, like, at this point I've noticed a relative high-fat, medium-protein, and low-carb works very well for me as far as for consistent energy levels throughout the day. I don't get like the tiredness in the afternoon when I was eating a lot higher carbs. And I would just notice like much more fatigue. I would just notice much more energy spikes. And like you were talking about earlier too, when you look at some of the data, when you're tracking it at your blood sugar levels, they're spiking and like they're crashing much harder if you're, if you're taking in much higher carbohydrates in, in and some of these, some people are more sensitive to carbohydrates than other people. I've also experimented with ketosis where I've gone through periods of time where eating 75-80% of my calories out of fats and like really eliminating or reducing the carbohydrate and sugar intake. For me, that was rather hard to maintain, especially when I have like a young family, when I'm traveling around, when and also I didn't always feel optimal with it, especially during higher intensity sessions or like sometimes people experience keto flu or headaches or any of these kind of things. So I feel that there's a lot, a lot of different things to this.

Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit more about your thought process about different nutritional approaches and where ketogenic diet comes in here too? Because currently at this point I see a lot of people who might be experimenting with fat burning, with low heart rate training, and there's a misconception of you have to be eating a ketogenic diet in order for low heart rate training to work. Well, I don't, I don't eat a ketogenic diet and like I've seen it work for many other people there as well. So I just want to hear your thoughts about ketogenic diet approaches for that, for athletic performance, for like brain health and optimal focus and whatnot?

Yeah, let me start off by saying, just to be clear, I don't do a ketogenic diet. I don't recommend a strict ketogenic diet for most people, for most use cases. There's specific areas for therapeutic use, for strict medical needs, for aggressive weight loss, for some people in particular will just feel really good on that. It does have its place, but it's not what I recommend. It's not what I personally do. And there's a lot of shades of gray between a strict ketogenic diet where you don't eat a single carb, so your body is induced to make its own ketones all the time and you're always in ketosis, versus on the other end of the spectrum, the standard American diet where you're waking up having Lucky Charms, you're having sugar for breakfast, you're having more sugar for lunch, you're sipping Coca-Cola red can throughout the day, you're constantly elevated blood glucose, blood sugar, there's so, so many shades in between where if you're an active person doing something active every day, doing an hour or two of exercise a day, you're mindful about the level of training that you're doing, you're not having straight sugar when you're having carbohydrates, maybe you're having more starches, more complex carbohydrates that don't spike your blood sugar as much, you're maybe spacing it throughout the day in intelligent ways. So You can wake up in the morning, you've fasted overnight, provided you're not like sleepwalking, sleeping. Most people fast overnight. You wake up in the morning. If you do a zone 2 run without having eaten in a fasted state, your body is going to run low on glycogen stores, going to run low on blood glucose, and it's going to be making ketones. If you do, if you wake up and you do a zone 2 run without having eaten, you're going to be exercising that metabolic flexibility. You're going to be training your body to be in a low glucose state and to be making ketones from fat, and that those ketones are what's going to be fueling your brain and your body. And the pie chart of energy demand that your brain and body are using is going to be fat and ketone dominant in that case without you doing a strict ketogenic diet. If you come back from your run, you have some berries, some yogurt, like there can be carbohydrates in your life while you're still getting all the advantages of zone 2, fat max, like ability to tap into that type of energy system. Another important concept to answer the question is that the— I— a ketone in particular, it's a form of fuel. It's a macronutrient. It has calories inside of it, and it has some special properties to it regardless of where that comes from, whether it's your body making it naturally, whether you're having it from an exogenous ketone like Ketone IQ. Ketone, it's like protein is a macronutrient, it has calories in it, it's a building block for your muscles. Ketones are a form of fuel that has these special properties to it, period. Again, whether your body's making it, whether it's exogenous. And when we first got started in 2017, shortly thereafter in 2019, we got a $6 million contract with the Department of Defense Special Operations Command, and they're really interested in ketones as a super fuel stacked on top of regular diets that could help with cognitively and physically demanding missions, including in hypoxia, so low oxygen environments. One of the key features of ketones is that they, they turn into ATP, the energy currency of your cell. They turn into ATP using less oxygen than glucose does. And that's really interesting when you're in a low oxygen case. That's interesting when you're in a low oxygen context, whether that's at altitude or we're all mildly hypoxic at the end of a race as well, right? When you like aren't fully catching your breath, when, when you're in those like, like challenging last miles of a race, you're mildly hypoxic. So being able to have an energy substrate that is lower oxygen, hyper-efficient is advantageous in those contexts. Again, like regardless of where it comes from or a blend of it coming from your body making them or external sources. Mm-hmm.

How did those— so in the early days, you guys got a $6 million contract from the US Department of Defense. How did that go from there? Like, what was your purpose of developing the product at that point? Because there's multiple uses for an actual drinkable ketone. It's not just from an athletic recovery perspective that we can talk later on about athletic performance, but there's also a mental component. Of this all. So what were the initial stages of development? Tell me a little bit more about just your company, some of the expertise that got involved from that. Like, you guys have some really high-caliber people on board too, like on your board, and, um, yeah, in the research phase there.

Yeah, when we got started, it was really important that we find a serious, large, credible use case for this, and Special Operations Command was super interested in super fuel. There had been this project that was started in the early 2000s called Operation Metabolic Dominance, where the idea was to identify super fuels. And that was the very early days of ketone discovery, where it was tens of thousands of dollars a dose, like $20,000 for like, you know, a small dose of ketones. And that was in the early 2000s. They'd proven out that there was it was possible, but it was kind of this curiosity, this science fair project. And when we brought it to scale in 2017, we were able to hook back in with the Department of Defense Special Operations Command and scale it out, have this real customer, this scenario, this context where it was really used at a larger scale than it had ever been used before. And goal, the big dream with ketones is so much bigger though, that that it started with, everything starts with a niche group. That first computer, it was, you know, the homebrew computing club in the basement, right?

It's so spot on you're saying that because I remember one of the first Apple ads was a man and a woman sitting on a kitchen table looking at a recipe on like the actual computer screen. And that was the only use case they could think about at that point, whereas like fast forward, where we are right now, like 10, 20 years or whatever, 30 years later. And I think that's the case with so many of these things. The early computers, the NFT space of what we're seeing, the AI space, what we're seeing right now, it's still like just the beginning of what's possible with this.

It's super interesting. And it's what's so humbling about it is often the early pioneers don't even know what it will become, that people are able to see, hey, if we could create a computing device, if we could create we have networking computers together in some sort of internet that cool things could happen. And that's, those are breakthrough ideas, but even the people pioneering at the forefront of those don't necessarily know what's going to happen 30, 40 years later. You can't, like the imagination can only go so far in some cases. So early days of ketone research, we were really interested in special operator uses, and it's going to be interesting to see how this continues to play out. I always say everyone is doing metabolism metabolism all the time. We all have mitochondria in all different cells in our body, our muscle cells, neurons. We have cardiovascular, we have mitochondria that are creating energy for use constantly throughout our body. And having access to a new type of substrate for that is just fundamentally interesting. That's why I call it a nutritional primitive, the same way that Water is this nutritional primitive. Water, you know, if you're— if it's 11:00 AM and you're trying to get more energy for your day, you're dehydrated and you drink water, you're going to feel more energized. If it's 11:00 PM and you're dehydrated, you're going to have a hard time sleeping. If you drink water, you'll be more able to go to sleep and be restful. And it's like, how does the same magical solution help with wakefulness at 11:00 AM and tiredness at 11:00 PM? Well, it's because water is primitive. It's this building block for all of these functions that are going on in our body. And I consider ketones the same thing. And it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out where, you know, Gatorade was started in the 1970s with the Florida Gators, the idea being that, hey, this football team, they're sweating in the Florida heat and they're sweating, they're drinking water. But if you give them electrolytes to replenish not just the water but also the salt that's being sweated out, that that could be better for hydration. And now here we are 30, 40 years later, and there's still innovation happening. There's still new brands. There's still new mixtures coming out. Same thing with carbohydrates. You have brands like, you know, PowerBar was the first like pocket-sized carb booster from in like the '90s. And then you had Goo Shots and then Morton is a more recent entrant. And there's, there's continued innovation in things like electrolytes and carbohydrates and in And with ketones, we're still so early. We're still in the first couple of laps around the track as far as it goes. So it's a very novel concept. I think it's massively powerful. I think it's going to be multi-billion dollars of industry around it. And it's still very early and we're bushwhacking. It's really fun. I think the technologist in me is having a lot of fun creating something new. And I'm always careful to not position us as just a sports nutrition company. I run every day. I get after it, you get after it. I think a lot of people listening in. And at the same time, you know, we just partnered with Andrew Huberman and he is a Stanford neuroscientist, athletic guy. I don't think he's in a spot in his life where he's running ultramarathons. He's really interested in it from the neuroscience point of view where ketones are a form of fuel that crosses the blood-brain barrier. It provides your neurons with energy in a different way than glucose, um, and fat cannot power your brain cells. Fat cannot cross the blood-brain barrier. So ketones have this unique ability to— they have different properties from glucose. They feel different and they can fuel your brain cells. And that's just helpful. You know, we're all professional athletes at work when we're sitting in front of spreadsheets, doing a podcast, doing different creative work and having the best form of fuel to be able to power what we're doing during the day. That's, that's powerful. And so I'm always careful to position ourselves where we have something that's really special for athletes, but I, I see the possibilities being much larger too than just being for sports nutrition.

Yeah, it, it is one of those things too. When I, I'm always super skeptical about new products coming to market because there's always this new company that's promising X, Y, Z, and like the amount of promises out there, I'm always very interested in, all right, what do some of the peer-reviewed studies say? What do some of the, like, the users in the field are actually— are people using this? Are they seeing benefits from this? And is this independent verified to that extent as well? So can you talk a little bit more about some of the studies that have come out, some of the results that you guys have seen from those studies? Because I've read both sides of the spectrum, but there's some very promising research out there too. So can you explain a little bit more from an athletic perspective and also from a brain focus perspective?

Yeah, there's been a number of interesting studies in this space. There was an interesting study with this Belgian research group on cyclists where it was a 3-week long study. They had participants drinking ketones 3 times a day. It was, they were exercising every day. It was meant to mimic Tour de France style of condition. So like pro athlete, pro cyclist type of of stamina activity and what they— and outside of ketones, the two groups were able to eat ad libitum. So as much as they would like, and the non-ketone group was given a placebo. So if anyone's tried ketones, like it tastes a little crazy. So the non-ketone wing of the group was given something that also tasted crazy. So everyone thought they were doing ketones. It was, it was controlled in that sense. And then what they showed was at the end of 3 weeks that the ketone group group had significantly higher power output, output on their final time trial. The ketone group had 15% higher power output on their final time trials. And basically they showed that they were able to recover better over this 3-week period. And they had other interesting markers, like they had better parasympathetic activity. Basically your body's like recovery energy system was working better in the ketone group. So There's some really interesting studies there. There's been other interesting studies. So our work with SOCOM, Special Operations Command, this is not like me in the lab doing this. This is like, like highly professional where we get, we are the prime contractor with Special Operations Command. And then we subcontract out some of the subtasks to research groups that have the facilities, the hypoxic chambers, the ability to do the blood readings along the way and all the, all the things that you'd expect from a state-of-the-art physiological testing facility. And what we've seen in those studies is that when people have ketones, they're able to maintain higher cognitive efficiency. So one of the studies is, for instance, you, you're rucking. So you're on an inclined treadmill, you're hypoxic. So you're wearing a mask. If anyone's seen Batman, if you remember Bane from Batman, you're wearing the Bane mask that mimics being at 20,000 feet of altitude. So you have around 70, 60, of the blood oxygenation that you would typically have at sea level. You're carrying weight, you're rucking to mimic the field gear that you'd be carrying. And then at the end of all of that, you're doing target practice. And what we saw was that in the ketone group, you're able to have better cognitive efficiency. You're better, you're, you have better, essentially better accuracy on the target practice at the end of that strenuous activity. So what we're seeing is like maintaining brain state at the end of strenuous straining tasks. And that's where it's super interesting cuz the brain is the central governor. If people have read, there's this book Endure by Alex Hutchinson.

That's a great book.

Yeah, it's a great book. He didn't invent this term. He, I would say popularize it in the endurance community. I, I believe it came from Tim Noakes, who's a large public figure in this space.

He's been writing about it for decades. Yeah.

Yeah. And this idea of the central governor that when you bonk, when you need to give up, it's often not your quad or glute or calf that's like making you quit. It's that your brain is running out of willpower. You're like, you're running low on the ability for your brain to connect to your muscles and charge forward. And so the ability to maintain brain energy through strenuous tasks is really interesting. And that's where My read on the science, all the literature that we've seen, all the different studies, all of what I've heard from different pro athletes using it, not pro athletes using it, is that the brain is mediating the performance benefits that you're seeing. So it is true when you drink a ketone that you have elevated blood ketone levels globally circulating, and it is true that your muscles can use ketones and do use ketones, However, my read on it is that the dominant effect is mediated by your brain's ability to have more willpower, to have more ability to charge forward because you have ketones circulating in your brain as well. Ketones cross the blood-brain barrier, provide you with brain energy in a, in a unique way. And when you're glycogen-starved because you're doing endurance activities, that the ability to rescue or maintain brain energy in those states is super interesting. There's a couple other studies that have been done. Not every study on ketones has shown great results. There are some studies that have shown that it doesn't work. And part of what's interesting there is that not all ketones are the same. There's different brands, there's different types, there's different ways to make a ketone. There's different like cheaper ways, there's different more clever ways to—

Yeah, because there's ketone salts, there's quite a few ketone products out there on the market, right?

Exactly. So our version 1 was something called a ketone ester. Like ketone ester, which was state-of-the-art back in 2017, where it combines something called a ketone dial with— there's different esters out there that they basically— an ester is a chemical bond between two different molecules. And our first version was a ketone dial esterified with something else that was also a ketone. And what we found was that that spiked blood ketones too quickly and you got some drawbacks on it. You got stomach upset. Some people, like, it was just tough to get down, tasted really crazy. It also—

the taste of some of the early stuff was horrific. Yeah.

Yeah. RV1 was, was crazy tasting Navy SEAL juice for sure. Yeah. And it tastes crazy, had some GI issues and also spiked when you spike ketones too much, you Ketones are technically an acid, so you spike blood acidity if you have that drop in pH. The raise in acidity drops your pH. That can have its own performance drawbacks. We then updated, so our V2, which is Ketone IQ, is just pure dial. It's pure ketone dial. We really like the dial. That is now the state of the art of ketone delivery because of the pharmacokinetic curve, which is a fancy way of saying the speed the magnitude of the spike and the duration all have a really nice performance profile where you're able to more gently and longer and be in the optimal zone. It's this Goldilocks zone. You don't want to be— if you're low ketones, well, you're not getting the benefit from ketones, and if you're over spiking and that spike is dissipating, then you have all the issues just mentioned. So ketone dial is the state of the art based on what you want for the optimal zone. So there's all these different forms of ketones. So some studies have shown, hey, The headline will be like, "Oh, ketones didn't work." And so, like, well, when you double-click into that, it's like, well, what type of ketone? There's a lot of nuance in this space, and we're always trying to— there's clearly something there. Ketones are clearly a novel fuel source. They clearly rescue brain energy, even if it's a ketogenic diet. There's a bunch of studies that have nothing to do with exogenous ketones, except that they have the word ketone in common, because they have to do with your body making its own ketones, where they've shown, for instance, in Alzheimer's Alzheimer's disease patients that when they did a ketogenic diet and had MCT oil, that's a type of, that's a type of fat that converts into ketones, that they were able to rescue brain activity, pause, and in some cases reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's. There's this big study by Stephen Cunnane, Canadian researcher, that showed with ketogenic diet, by having elevated circulating ketones, that they were able to mitigate symptoms of Alzheimer's. So there's clearly something going on with ketones. And then the question then becomes, okay, what is the best ketone delivery technology and what are the exact right use cases for it?

Yeah, and I'm trying to like take it a step back sometimes as well as far as for like, all right, there's a lot of non-elite athletes even listening to this podcast looking to improve in their performance, in their everyday life, in their focus, energy levels. So how applicable is it to them? Because I will take a step back to myself, like literally like a few months ago, like I got in contact with you guys and I'm curious. I always go into it with a sense of skepticism, but I am curious to see of like, all right, what's going on over here? You guys have Andrew Huberman on board. You have 60% of the Tour de France or like a large percentage of the Tour de France athletes using it. Heard about it on Ben Greenfield. I heard like Lance Armstrong was talking about, like there were a lot of different people talking about this that it sparked my curiosity enough to start trying it. Yeah. And so for me, it wasn't necessarily as far as for like right away, like, oh, how much athletic improvement can I get out of this? But it was also like, all right, I am doing everything I can to optimize my energy levels throughout the day. Yeah. Like I'm a busy dad, two young kids, startup world, like going a million miles an hour. And just trying to get the most deep work, deep focus, especially in the early morning stages. So I do whatever I can from like improving my sleep. I think sleep is a very important component, like doing a lot of low heart rate training, adding in some high heart rate training, like the right nutrition, like all of these different things. But once the basic fundamentals are covered over there, I have experimented with some other things. Like from coffee, from Bulletproof Coffee. I've tried different nootropics. I've tried like all of the different things to just see where can I cognitively improve further for maximizing focus. And then like this is one of those things where you take a shot and within 15 minutes you have a noticeable difference of being in ketosis without having to take a ketogenic diet. Right. And I think that has been the interesting part when I send a few bottles to some friends the first instance was to like, oh, instantly can notice a difference over here. Yeah. And this is where I think it's not like you were saying earlier too. Andrew Huberman doesn't use it in a way maybe to increase his performance during workouts, but then there's like the cognitive improvement or like there's other areas as well where this becomes interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. It's got a lot of range because metabolism is happening all over your body all the time for 8 billion people. There's always this energy need at some part of your body. And if you're a busy dad with 2 kids, that's an endurance sport on its own, putting aside all of the running, that we are all using some form of fuel. And to have a better form of fuel, it lets you self-actualize more. It lets you get more of what are you trying to— like, who are you and what are you trying to do in the world? What dent are you trying to make make in the universe. And if you have more fuel behind that, then you're able to do better. It's something I think a lot about too, which is like when I was first getting into it, I was like, you know, there's only gonna be one person that wins the Olympics in the marathon. There's only gonna be, you know, two people that make it from the United States to even go to the Olympics. Like it's so thin at the top and that's not relatable for most people. Like what do I care It's like, well, like, yeah, if you're doing an Ironman, do you care about aero bars? Do you care about being hyper aerodynamic in your, in your speed suit? Do you care about what the apparel that you're using? Do you like, do you need the best of this? Is that, and I think the answer actually comes out to, to yes. Like within, within reason, maybe you don't get like, you know, every single thing that Kipchoge is doing that you, you don't necessarily need for everything, but you want You want good shoes, like it, you want shoes that help you go faster, have better, better cadence, better foot strike on the ground, better comfort, better recovery. You want better clothing, better apparel, stuff that's more performant, more comfortable while you're running, while you're recovering. Same with nutrition, because I think we're all, we're all professional athletes of our own journey. Like whatever we're trying to do in life, we're trying to do it well, whether it's being a parent, being a professional, winning the local 10K, like whatever it is, we're trying to do it the best we can and we want the best form of fuel and we should have access to the best form of fuel to be able to do that. It's all on a relative basis. Yeah, there's only going to be a couple people that are like at the absolute top of the game for a certain sport. There's only one Jim Wamsley, right? Like there's only, there's only one Zach Bitter, right? But all doing things all the time and having access to Better nutrition, better apparel, it helps us, I think, self-actualize and be the best version of ourselves and make the dent in the universe that we're put here to do.

What are— let's talk through some of the protocols. As far as for when you're in ketosis, what are some of the levels that you want to be in to feel optimal? As far as for focus and as far as for athletic performance or recovery as well.

Yeah, normally at steady state, it depends what your diet is and your activity levels, you'll be between like 0 to 1 depending on if you haven't had any Ketone IQ.

If you're—

if you fast overnight and you go for a run in the morning, when I do that and I do a blood finger prick, I'll be like 0.7 just from having cleared out my natural blood glucose and from my body starting to make its own ketones. Ketone IQ, depending on how much you have of it, it gets you into this— what we like is the ideal performance zone is anywhere from 1.0 to 2.5 tends to be the zone where once you start going north of that, you start getting— it's not clear that the added ketones are worth the drawback in what I was saying earlier. Like, they're like, you, you end up spiking your blood acidity, which has performance drawbacks. So 1 to 2.5 is a really nice zone and you start to feel it. That's where you start to feel switched on, depending on how sensitive you are, how dialed in and aware you are. Some people can start feeling it at like 0.5. Um, and just to make sure that this is kind of de-jargonize it, what I'm talking with this, the unit of measurement is millimoles of ketones per liter of blood. It sounds complicated. It's not really that basically if you have a breath meter or the really the best way to do it, it's actually kind of fun. If, if, if you're interested in some light biohacking. You can buy on Amazon, you can buy like a Precision Xtra by Abbott where you do a blood finger prick, you take a tiny bead of blood and you can see what your ketone levels are. The unit's going to be millimoles of ketones per liter. It's really cool. When you do, you can do the same thing. If people know Nutrisense, Levels, Sapiens, that's the same thing, but for glucose. And glucose and ketones are kind of cousins. They go like, they work together as the two main metabolic substrates in your body. And it's cool to see what's going on inside your body. And with, with ketones, you generally start to feel it at 0.5, certainly at 1.0. And that's where you start to feel like, okay, well, yeah, like substantial amount of energy that my brain is running off of is coming from ketones. And it just feels a little bit different. It's interesting because when you, when you run, you get runner's high. That's due to a lot of things. One of the components is that you're starting to create your own ketones and that your brain is running on ketones. And so I think about it as when I'm explaining what ketones feel like, it's a, it's kind of like runner's high in a bottle where it gives you that, that same brain energy, that same fuel source that you're naturally getting to when you're, you know, you just start feeling good after sometimes it takes like 4 or 5, 6 miles, you start feeling good. Like it's cool when you can just like snap into that at your desk when you're you're like jamming on a PowerPoint or doing some reading, some research, it's nice to be able to like, like flip into that. Um, you were mentioning earlier, like with sometimes when you eat a carb-heavy diet, you feel like kind of these spikes and these crashes. And it's really interesting, right? Because like when you eat a lot of carbs, your blood sugar goes up. You're like, the carbs turn into blood glucose, your blood glucose rises. When your blood glucose rises, your body releases insulin. In order to address that blood glucose. Insulin packs all the blood sugar away. It stores it as glycogen. You can also, if you have too much, you start storing the glucose as fat. And then that insulin is still hanging around. And that insulin, when you have high insulin and your blood glucose has gone down, that's what sends a signal that you're hangry, tired. You get into that slump that like you get that sugar high and then that sugar crash. What's interesting— well, there's a couple interesting things about that. One is that if you do that too much over the course of your life, you end up with diabetes. Diabetes is insulin resistance where it doesn't work. It's like listening to loud music your whole life. If you are constantly listening to loud music, you're gonna expect to have some hearing loss at some point. It's the same thing if you're constantly spiking your blood glucose levels. Your body is gonna stop listening to insulin. You're gonna have insulin resistance. And this can happen everywhere. This happens in the brain as well. And that's where things get really scary, where when you have insulin resistance in the brain, you have deterioration of cognitive performance. Your brain is not able to metabolize glucose. Ketones are not mediated by insulin. So ketones don't need insulin to turn into cellular energy. And so they're a really interesting alternative fuel source. Again, whether your body is making it yourself or whether you're having it from an exogenous source, ketones don't require insulin. So they're able to turn the lights back on in your brain. If you have insulin resistance, they're able to just in general provide you with a fuel source that's not doing that damaging insulin spiking. And so that's why a lot of people prefer it. Cause like you're, it's true. Like if you were to wear a Levels continuous glucose monitor and you're able to see the spikes and the crash. You'd be able to, like, you can see the objective data of what's going on inside your body and ketones don't have that spike and crash profile. It's much more gentle rise and fall.

It's so interesting you say that because I experienced one of my first experiments with this was the day after Thanksgiving where I ate like, I ate all out during Thanksgiving and then the next day I was like, I really need to chill out and I'm going to just just like fast for 24 hours. And I actually drank one Ketone IQ in the morning and then one in the afternoon. I had zero hunger symptoms because there's an appetite— or what is it? What is it called again?

It has an appetite control.

Yeah, appetite control. But also I had a CGM on at the time just looking at the blood sugar levels and they were exceptionally stable throughout that 24 hours. So that was quite an interesting one to see.

Have you ever done the CGM in the cold plunge.

Oh yeah. Like CGM in the cold plunge and the other one in the sauna. Yeah. When you see how much like your blood sugar levels actually drop when you go in like heat exposure and cold exposure too, it's like both heart rate variability like increases. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's super cool on the overall level of what we're seeing with the human body as a platform. It's so cool that you can see What's going on with your biomarkers in real time inside a sauna, inside a cold plunge, when you're having this diet or that diet. And that's— I'm just super bullish on this overall space. I'm obviously excited by what we're doing. I think we're part of something so much larger that what I see is a lot of the smartest brains of our time. A decade ago, everyone was making apps because, you know, Uber wasn't invented yet, Snapchat, like all the— like the smartphone was the coolest platform. Platform to innovate on. And I think the smartphone is pretty robust, pretty built out. I'm not going to say, like, never say never. Like, I'm sure there's some other cool app, but there's multiple billion-dollar apps that have been created using some permutation of the camera, the other camera, the GPS, the, right? Like we've, we've seen a maturity of that platform. The next platform is the human body where we're seeing all these innovations on hardware, sensors, measuring devices, nutritional inputs, and I think it's super cool. It feels like sci-fi. I always think that even something like Apple AirPods are borderline an implant. I don't know about you, but myself, I know people just wear them all the time and it's not quite an implant, but it's kind of Apple's first implant where they've just figured out a way to have there's Apple like kind of in your body all day, every day. And it's gonna be exciting to see this space continue to—

Oh, for sure. Some of the innovations in the works, even with the continuous lactate monitor, with the continuous— there's so many of these continuous monitors. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see where we're gonna be in, in 3, 5, 10 years from now.

So yeah. Abbott that creates the continuous glucose monitor, they power a lot of the technology behind even a lot of the other CGM companies we've been talking about. Abbott has a project called Project Lingo where they're doing lactate and ketone and alcohol.

Continuous ketone monitor too. Yeah.

Yeah. CKM there. So that's all super interesting. The idea that glucose monitoring is pretty established at this point. And the idea that you could have like 2, 3, 4 other biomarkers that you're measuring in real time. Look, if I could take a continuous glucose monitor and just actually hard install it, I would do that. Like personally, that to me, the only drawback on a continuous glucose monitor is the fact that it lasts a couple of weeks or I'm pretty active. So I'm like running or getting out after it. And like, sometimes it comes off sooner or like it gets uncomfortable. I wish if I could just like put it in, just always know, that'd be super fascinating. Cause there's counterintuitive things. Like for instance, And it's not just your diet, it's that when you're sleeping less and you have elevated cortisol when you sleep less, then your body is less good at metabolizing glucose.

You feel hungry in the morning after a night of poor sleep. Yeah, some of these things, like it just directly impacts your metabolism.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's super interesting, counterintuitive, when you, you know, sometimes when you eat less, you actually get less hungry because you're you have more ketones, you feel more satiated.

It's— and then going back though, at the other hand, speaking with like someone like Achillea Njornae, who is also like, keep it simple. Like as far as for like us also just listening to the signals of our body is a very important one as well. Sometimes having the data is good, but then obviously it comes in with our own intuition too, because yes, as much as coffee and drinkable ketones and all that stuff can give you a boost of energy, When we're tired, obviously it is a signal from our body too that we might actually need more sleep or we might need to listen to some of those things too. And that at the end of the day is super important there too.

It's so true. And something I've seen working with super elite athletes, like we just signed with Sarah Hall. She's— we're now partnering with her, fastest American marathoner, working with Don, Run with Don. He holds several world records on long-distance treadmilling, which sounds like besides the physical aspect, and he'll be the first to admit, not trying to dunk on his, how he gets his kicks, it's extremely boring, the mental—

Running for 24 hours on a treadmill, and this is the Marko Gazzella treadmill, the one that doesn't even have an engine. That is hard mentally and physically, for sure.

Don is hardcore, and as we've been working with some of these athletes like Sarah and Don, clear that at that high level of elite performance, you know, you're 5-time Ironman winner. Like at that level of performance, people get very intuitive. Like it goes full circle where it's kind of like, you know, that meme where you have the like bell curve and it's like the dumb dumb on one side and the galaxy brain wizard on the other side. And then like the midbrain, it's like, I see that in the, in the endurance world as well. It's general sports performance world where like Dumb dumb is just like, just run harder, listen to your body. The wizard genius is like, yeah, run harder, listen to your body. And it's like the middle brain that's like, oh, let me track all my signals and just, I have all these dashboards. And I think there's some truth to that where you do need to dial your intuition and listen to your body. And there's no magic supplement, there's no magic shoe, there's no magic anything that's gonna, do that for you. I do believe that you can make updates to your intuition along the way. A lot of the times the people that are super elite and they say, oh, just listen to your intuition. Well, their intuition is guided by decades of high-end coaching, high-end training regimen. Like they, so their intuition's really smart. It's like, say like Picasso had good intuition on how to draw a bowl. And where did that intuition come from? Like that, not to get too philosophical here on Extra Mile List, but that the purpose of the conscious mind is to train the subconscious mind, to train the intuition. And so you can take it piece by piece and you can learn when you're feeling a certain way, objectively, what is driving that and correcting your behavior around it. And you can, you can basically, if you think of your intuition as like the firmware of your body and your brain that you can develop better intuition over time. I do think ultimately intuition is extremely powerful and that along the way we can train our intuition to get better and better. And we don't, we shouldn't always just be living off of a spreadsheet. Yeah.

All right. Let's talk a little bit more of how this becomes applicable for actual for example, marathon athletes. Like I know earlier you talked about Tour de France, like users for 3 weeks in a row training back to back to back. There's going to be a lot of fatigue coming into play. Like, so one of the use cases is like faster recovery. And there's the actual, like in, in studies, the faster recovery was one big one that came through. And then there was like the athletic performance, which was to a smaller degree.

Food.

And then there was like the mental focus part. Talk to me a little bit more about how an average marathon runner could implement something like this within that training and, and within that racing as well.

Yeah. In, in a race, what we always say to do is have a ratio of 3 to 1 carbs to ketones. So a typical gel has around 20 grams of carbohydrates in it. So like every 1 or 2 gels have a shot of Ketone IQ, which has 10 grams of ketone dial. You can play around with that based on what works for you. If you have water bottle that has Morton in it and you put Ketone IQ inside of that instead, you can choose your own adventure on it. Start with a 3 to 1 ratio as a guideline, like the Morton 320 has 80 grams. So I would put in 25, 30 grams of Ketone IQ in there. Just try that, keep that 3:1 ratio. That's what we see works. And you're able to dual fuel, right? Carbs have a different pathway than ketones. So you're able to— it's like two different turnpikes on the highway. You're able to go through two different channels at once. We like that 3:1 ratio. You can play around with it from there. Larger than that, that's just like race day performance. Like You know, if every 20 minutes during the marathon you're having something like just goo goo ketone, goo goo ketone, that's a very simple pattern. If we're zooming out and just say, hey, well, I'm doing a 12, 16 week build for my next race. What am I doing? You know, just 24 hours a day for months before that. It's important to remember that your body's always using fuel. You're using fuel on your long run, but you're also using fuel when you're recovering. Afterwards, you're rebuilding muscles, you're building more capillaries, more ability for your blood to get to all of your muscles, right? Like you're building all the adaptations that happen from training. A lot of that's happening after your run and recovery, that all takes energy. And so what, what we see and what our pro athletes and special operators do and the protocol that we recommend is to have it throughout the day. So having it 3 times a day is nice. So you have it like around. Your training, and then you have it after your training. So typically people have some gold standard recovery drink with carbohydrates and proteins. And one of the interesting ways where you're referencing the study where ketones helped with recovery over extended period, we've seen that ketones accelerate muscle glycogen reuptake. So they accelerate the speed at which your muscles take on glycogen in, in that recovery phase, right? Because you run a lot. As soon as you're done running, the goal is to recover as quickly as possible so you can go do it again tomorrow. If you can accelerate muscle reuptake of glycogen, that helps with that. The other thing that ketones help with is muscle protein resynthesis. Part of what happens when you're doing any kind of training is you're damaging the muscles in a way that is net productive, because when you rebuild the muscles, they, they will have new adaptation, will be stronger. Muscle protein resynthesis gets accelerated by ketones as well. So that's where you have it during the long effort, the hard effort, you have ketones during that. You also have it during recovery throughout. And then look, a lot of people are kind of hybrid athlete and professionals. There's, I'm sure some people listening in are pure professional athletes and that's what you do all day, every day is train. A lot of people I know are. Semi-serious athletes where we run a lot and then we got to go be a father and, you know, got to change a diaper, got to do a podcast, got to do like talk to an investor, got to do all the things throughout our lives and our whole life is a performance sport. So in that sense, ketones, they bleed from being this sports nutrition product into just like a life nutrition product, a fuel for everything that you're doing. So generally, if you want this like super simple answer, hey, I want to, you know, qualify for Boston, have it in that 3:1 ratio. Do that in some of your longer training runs. Uh, if you, if you're liking the way you feel, our most popular way that people use the product actually, even beyond running, is just having it every morning with their Athletic Greens or coffee as part of their morning stack of what they have. They just have a shot of ketones. Start out the day feeling really good and then throughout the day for energy lift as they want.

So just putting a skeptical hat over here, right? Like, if the product improves performance, even if it's by 1%, 1.5%, 2%, just like with the carbon plate shoes 10 years ago, no one was using them. Now everyone is using them. Same with like, if this were would totally have like that much of an increase, wouldn't every athlete in the world be using this to set new world records here in the coming years?

Yes. And we're seeing a lot of that. And it's funny, 'cause a lot of that is even kept secret from me where we have interesting people that will buy it, where there's people that are be in like the associated with the 1:59 project at Nike. It's not Eliud Kipchoge calling me directly and ordering a Ketone, IQ, it's that, you know, someone in a sphere around an athlete, you know, be a, an assistant professor at a university that does a lot of work with some pro cyclists that we're working with. So a lot of it is it's at this breaking point where it's becoming not a secret anymore. And a lot of people are just using it all over the place. And for a while it was this competitive edge. Everyone wanted to keep a secret, but I don't know, the cat's out of the bag or, you know, my, I'm not trying to keep it a secret. I think everyone should be using it whether they're a pro athlete or not. It's interesting with shoes because it's more obvious. We were talking about this earlier that like when you're wearing a shoe that looks a little different, it's like, hey, what's that guy wearing? Versus I don't know what's in a water bottle at the 10K mark of the marathon. It's just, who knows what's inside of there? And ketones, it's completely WADA compliant, right? We do full batch testing on every batch, there's no issue whatsoever with anti-doping. And it'd be super hard to test because as we've been talking about, your body's making ketones anyway. If you did a finger prick at the end of a marathon, whether someone had drank ketones or not drank ketones, you're going to have elevated ketones because your body's making ketones. So it's in a way been able to fly under the radar for a while, but more and more it's It's interesting because running is the father sport or mother sport, whatever you want to call it, of so many other sports. Running is like, it's the oldest sport, maybe running and wrestling. This is the oldest sport that humans have always done. And all the other sports kind of inherit from running where if you're playing basketball, you're running, if you're playing soccer, you're running, if you're playing football, you're running, you're running in all these other sports. What makes running really interesting is just how like primitive it is and how it's inherited by all these other sports. And for that reason, it's been the early testbed for us. And runners are super dialed. Like, all we really have to go off of is our splits and our— like, there's one thing we're looking at versus a soccer player. They're looking at stamina, but they're also looking at team chemistry and touch and ball handling, all these things. And so stamina is one piece of many pieces in the pie for a soccer player. We've seen in endurance sports, especially like runners, cyclists, that there's, there's so much attention to that one dimension of your stamina that it's been a really powerful test bed for us. And we're now, we're just seeing, it's like, we do a lot of work with, you know, Jake Paul is an investor. Conor McGregor was in, we were in, we were working with him for a period of time cuz his coach was like, well, what are the best people using for stamina? And then you go, you see what the, what are the runners doing? What are the Tour de France cyclists doing? Where again, like, like boxing, MMA requires a lot of dynamism beyond just stamina, but stamina is an important part. So how do we fuel that? So it's in a transition where it's like, you know, it's not like 8 billion people are drinking ketones every day, but it's growing for sure.

Well, and even looking at it from my own perspective, I qualified for the Boston without Ketone IQ. I qualified for it through consistent high training volume them, like putting in all of the work, like making all of the right steps. However, at some point I was always— as much as like carbon plate shoes were out there, I was still like, oh, I can improve my running a lot more outside of even using that last icing on the cake. But when I'm looking right now, I'm 40. I know some of my recovery is taking a little bit longer. And if at this point I'm like, all right, I want to do everything I can in my toolbox outside of— once I've checked all the boxes, optimizing sleep, nutrition, stress levels, any of those kind of things— then it is like, all right, the carbon-plated shoes. I notice a significant increase. I can run faster at the same heart rate, 10, 15 seconds. There's like no denying about it. If I go to a running track and I wear those shoes or I do not wear those shoes at the same heart rate, I'm And so at some point it also becomes like maybe it's not even necessarily the athletic performance on race day, but even if it is faster recovery to be able to handle more training volume outside of just the focus component, which during the day I just look at it like I'm, like I mentioned earlier, I'm doing everything I can to maximize my output from a work perspective. Yeah. And that includes like, I have a lot of different things. I have two different phones. One of it has social media on it that is in a different room that I do typically like put away during the day. And I have one phone that's next to me without any social media apps. Like I go pretty extreme with some of this stuff. Like I use a superhuman email platform that you don't need to use your mouse and it just saves you 5 seconds every email you send. But do that times how many emails you send in a day or in a week. And so all of these different things, even when I'm looking at some of this stuff, I'm like, well, there's something interesting going on over here that like, yeah, I'm going to like, I've never raced with any of this, but I am going through more test and experiment phases because I think there's something interesting going on. Can you, can you talk to me about what is your protocol for you personally of how you implement Ketone IQ during the day?

Yeah, I have it every day. I wake up in the morning and I'll have my typical supplement stacks. I, I like omega-3s. I think it's really good for brain health, cardiovascular health. I'll have, I like Athletic Greens. I think they, they've put together a really great product. I'll have black coffee or sometimes I'll put MCT, uh, no sugar in the coffee and I'll have Ketone IQ. I like to start the day with getting my SuperStack and starting the day in ketosis, probably already in light ketosis just from overnight fasting, and I'm not eating a ton of carbs and active lifestyle. So starting the day in light ketosis and then having Ketone IQ on top of that, I just feel like razor sharp. I feel really focused. I like spending the first part of my day just in, in more of a flow state, really playing offense on the day, thinking ahead constructively on what I want to do with the day. Not touching my phone, not getting pulled into the Slack messages, emails, social media pings, all of that. Really, what, what shape do I want to give to the day today? And to me, this all goes together. And then I go for my run. And then I'll let the day flow from there. I'll then throughout the day, like I'll, you know, I'll eat lunch, I try to make sure I have especially a lot of enough protein and fats. I don't like a lot of carbs. If I have carbs, I will have it. I'll have more complex carbs. I don't like— what I really don't like is like the spike. I feel very itchy if I have something, if I have like a donut or something, I just don't feel great. Um, it's a very short, like, I like the taste of a donut, but that lasts like 45 seconds. And then I don't, I don't love the way I feel for hours afterwards. So I try to avoid that and I'll sip Ketone IQ throughout the day. Like I'll sip it. Whenever I'm on a podcast, if I'm in flow state, for me, it just really clicks me on to what I'm trying to do. And it's interesting, right? Because the idea of having a form of fuel that there's no caffeine and there's no sugar in it, and it's just an immediately bioavailable fuel source, it's pretty novel. Like there's nothing else like that. And yeah, I don't want to have caffeine at 2, 3:00 PM. I don't want to have a Kit Kat bar, Snickers bar to feel energetic. So I like to just sip on it and have it during the day, throughout the day. My sense on it is like, I'm going to go through 2,000, 2,500 calories a day. And I like, I think the profile of ketones, the way that they are low oxidative stress, basically the way that they're metabolized creates less free radical buildup. It's basically like less of the aging process compared to sugar. I'm just, I just want more area under the curve of ketones. And I'm obviously very pro-ketone here. And I want, and anti-sugar, and whether that's through not eating a lot of sugar and making my own ketones and then supplementing that with Ketone IQ on top. So I'll have it throughout the day. Like I ended up having it several times throughout the day to kind of to fuel me up.

There you go. You gave a presentation at KetoCon 2022 and here you showed an actual graph about how much of your energy is being used by your brain. Can you talk a lot, and especially from a young age all the way to a later age, can you talk about that graph a little bit more because I found that quite fascinating.

It's super interesting how the human brain is is completely unique. We have the largest ratio of brain size to body size. The brain has massive energy demands, and even from a young age, our brain requires a ton of energy. I have a 1-year-old daughter. Starting from even pre-birth in the womb through the first few years of infant development, the brain is using a ton of energy. It's developing massively, very rapidly, and fat cannot cross the blood-brain barrier. Your brain cannot use fat for energy. It can use glucose, but babies don't have enough glucose just via breast milk or even as they're eating whole foods, there's not enough glucose availability. One really interesting aspect of humans is baby fat. So chimpanzees, monkeys in general, do not have any baby fat. Humans have baby fat, and where that baby fat goes is it melts into ketones to supply the brain energy demands of that rapidly expanding brain. And these are all evolutionary adaptations that part of what allowed humans to evolve, what allowed Homo sapiens to evolve, to evolve, was the ability to store fat, to use fat, to turn it into ketones. And that mechanism is built in. It's been built in for 300,000 years. It's built in from birth in every human to be able to make and use ketones. And that's why we're really fundamentally good at them and they're, they're nature's super fuel. And at a very young age, you, a massive amount of energy. It's like 80% in that graph of your energy is going to your brain. And then as we grow into adulthood, it's still, your brain is around 5% of your body weight. And it's 20, 25% of your total energy demand. So it's huge, right? It's a major organ and anything that you can do to get percentage point improvements in brain activity through better fueling, better metabolic substrates available for your brain energy, like those, those wins, those incremental gains stack up very quickly in not a lot of time. Yeah.

It's so fascinating, this whole topic. I certainly think we can keep talking for hours. I want to be respectful of your time. A few last closing questions here. Like, what are some of the other things that excite you right now in the space here in the coming years?

It's really interesting how far we've come and how far we have to go. Very early days, this came out of DARPA. DARPA famously created things like the internet, like the first version of the internet came out of of DARPA. DARPA is a wing of the Department of Defense. It's the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They've always incubated these frontier technologies that later become these massive society-shifting technologies. They incubated things like the internet, they incubated ketones in the early days. And where we're at now is that there's still so much out ahead of us that initial premise, you know, 10 years into the internet, the internet was still very young. 20 years into the internet, internet's still very young. And there's so much further to go with ketones. One really specific area I'm super interested in is traumatic brain injury. When you have a concussion, there's damage that's done at the moment of impact, like the glass is shattered. And there's also, there's a couple of things that happen. There's for the trailing 72 hours to, it can be multiple weeks. You have this swelling that takes place. That continues to impact brain metabolism. And if you can rescue that with ketones, because ketones are just— hopefully the point has come across that ketones are metabolized differently from glucose. And so when you have ketones as an available substrate immediately after a TBI, the ability to recover cognitive ability, the ability to provide energy to the neurons so there's not further damage after a concussion, where there's damage done at the impact, but that swelling, if that swelling causes starvation of neurons over the following days and weeks, then it's added damage. So if you can rescue brain activity in that crucial period, that's super interesting. And then over the longer term, say you had a concussion 2 years ago, okay, there's like some dysregulation in a portion of your brain. Again, if you are able to rescue brain activity Because there's scar tissue, there's dysregulation in that part of your brain. If you're able to rescue brain activity with ketones, that's super interesting. I think that opens up a huge pocket. So we have a lot of NFL athletes that are starting to catch wind of this and just having it as a prophylactic that if you are a— if you're getting paid tens of millions of dollars, pro athlete, but you're also expecting to have some career after the days in the NFL are over. You know, there's massive rates of mental depression disorders, suicidality coming out of the NFL. I don't think that it is because if anything, like these are like super strong guys. Like these are like very mentally dialed guys. What's actually happening is that all of the, the concussions and the brain damage are messing people up. And if there's a way to recover that in a permanent way, Or at least recover it, minimize the impact. Yeah. Yeah. If you can make a substantial dent in what's going on there, that's super interesting, whether that's NFL players or just football players in general, college, high school, every, a lot of this very popular sport in America is like, if people are able to have ketones to, as a, to prevent that as a prophylactic, I think that's super interesting. So we have a study going with the, or we have a, we've submitted a research grant. The study is not yet active. We submitted a research grant. With the Navy Health Research Center around traumatic brain injury to investigate this. So this is something that, that there's a body of literature around this for, largely around ketogenic diet showing that when you get your body to make its own ketones, which again is very hard, it means not eating carbs, it means being very diligent, jumping through these hoops to naturally get your ketones up, that you can rescue brain activity. So what happens with immediately bioavailable ketone source can that be used instead of or in conjunction with a ketogenic diet to rescue this brain activity? And that's super interesting because whether you're a super athlete or not, like the TBI and just broadly brain health, mental health, it affects a lot of people. I mean, we all— it affects everyone. And then more specifically, there's a lot of people with different types of metabolic dysregulation in the brain. And if we can provide a solution to that, that's not just pharmaceutical treatment or not just like putting a bandaid on the problem, then that's super interesting. I think that opens up a whole Pandora's box outside of like, it's also really fun to like get it set up PR on a marathon or an ultra, but it just, it opens up a whole Pandora's box of exploration for what ketones can do.

Yeah. This is the next 5, 10 years will be A lot going on for you guys and the industry as a whole, for sure.

It's fun. I always joke it's that I wouldn't be able to do this if I didn't also have a massive stock of Ketone IQ. There's a lot going on. It's similar to like, you know, when you work at Apple, like, it's cool, you have unlimited— you get to use Apple devices all the time. When you work at Google, I'm sure you're Googling things all the time. You get like the new— I worked at Google for a little while— you get like the alpha version of Google that has all this all these cool features. It's fun to be dogfooding your own product and using it to— it's very meta. Like you mentioned Superhuman, I'm sure at Superhuman internally they use Superhuman and they probably use it at some like—

The plus version or like—

Yeah, they probably use it as some like plus version with all sorts of modifications, shortcuts.

Shortcuts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Last two questions over here. Where can people find out more about you and about ketones?

IQ. I'm on all the social networks, Twitter, Instagram. Find me @bdm_runner. My company is called HVMN. It stands for Health Via Modern Nutrition. You can find us at HVMN. Check out hvmn.com. Love hearing from people. Love hearing what people are up to. Like very, uh, it's, it's called social media for a reason. Love hearing what people are doing. Love if people are experimenting different biohacks or that people are or chasing a marathon or starting a startup or whatever. Love to hear what people are up to out there.

Over here, last question. Do you have any closing thoughts that you wanna share with the audience here?

I'm excited for where this sport is at. I really like how running is this analogy for all of the rest of life. And I, it's really fun to see how these innovations in the sport and personal development in the sport. I feel like as I've gotten to be a stronger, runner that I've also become a stronger father, stronger business leader. And I think a lot of us share that. And it's, it's really cool what you're doing here, building that community. It's so much more than running. It's like running is running, but it's just a super powerful analogy for all of the rest of life. So I'm really stoked to be part of the community. I really like what everything that you're doing to support it and encourage it. And I'm glad that we can continue to, to learn and draw those points of comparison across what makes us a better runner and to what makes us a better human.

So let's appreciate sharing all of your thoughts over here. And, uh, yeah, we'll have to go for some more runs in the, in the coming months here.

So, hell yeah, brother.

All right, thanks so much. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to try Ketone IQ, go to hvmn.com/flow to save 20%. Again, they're That is hvmn.com/flo to save 20% off your order of Ketone IQ. Also, if you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to my weekly newsletter, a running newsletter with a lot of different tips and insights. You can go to extramilest.com/subscribe. Once again, extramilest.com/subscribe. Subscribe. All right, I want to let you guys in on a little secret here. So we're going up a steep hill, and what you do when you're running with a friend, you always ask open, long-ended questions on the uphill. That's exactly what I've been doing with Michael, to have him explain things about ketosis and performance, the mind focus, whatnot. And yeah, that's the secret sauce. So next time you're running out there with a friend, open answer, open questions on the uphills.

You get very good answers when you have to choose your words wisely between gasps of air. And you know, people have to be honest when they're pushed to their limits. They're going to give you the honest truth when they're gasping for breath. You're going to get straight answers.

Yeah, seems to be working out quite well here.