The New IQ with Michael Brandt

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there.

Welcome to Lead On Purpose.

I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now Executive Coach to global leaders and high performers. In every episode I bring you an inspiring leader or expert to help you lead your life and business on purpose. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

Would you like to connect personally with some of my podcast guests? They are arguably some of the most impactful, influential leaders and high performers on the planet. Each month, members of my hpc, the High Performers Club, get to connect with a leadership titan in an intimate Q and A. They also get access to powerful high performance leadership coaching and monthly Masterminds. There's only 20 seats at the Leadership Table. You can apply today by going to www.jjlochlan.com HP.

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Foreign.

Michael Brandt does is fast and intense. Aside from being the CEO and co founder of Health Via Modern Nutrition, he cruises through marathons at a cool 6 minute mile pace. With the launch of Ketone IQ, Michael and his team created an entirely new category of Ketone shots which have taken over elite sports and high end workplaces. So if you're an athlete or you're a leader in the corporate space, or any space for that matter, and you want that edge, you need to listen to what Ketone IQ is all about. Remember that thing called caffeine and when people put it In a drink called coffee, it took off. Remember that thing called cbd? And when people put that in a product, it took off. You're about to find out about that next product. That's Ketone iq. If you care about your brain, you're going to love today's show.

Michael, a huge welcome to the Lead on Purpose podcast.

James, so good to be here. Thanks for having me on and looking forward to fun conversation today.

Yeah, me too. Hey, I just wanted to get the conversation started. Obviously, it's the Lead on Purpose podcast, so I'd love to just pick your brain a little bit and ask you a question. Around leadership. When you think of leadership, what comes to mind?

There's a few different things that come to mind.

One in particular that always stuck with me is the general works for the troops and idea of servant leadership. That is your job to make everyone else look good. One thing I always tell myself is pretty much every day I wake up with this mindset where if the business isn't doing well, it's entirely my fault. If the business is doing well, I had basically nothing to do with it. And it's all on the shoulders of the amazing, talented team around me. And it definitely drives me a little crazy. I feel like I can never have a good day as a result. But I think it's the right kind of edge to have where, I mean, I just truly believe it, where I'm lucky that these great people work for me and how can I help make their careers awesome? How can I help make the brand, the business that they're associated with, awesome? And it's very, very sensitive, probably more than a normal person to like things that go wrong and take it. I take very. Take things very personally and.

Go and get after them. But I think I've found that I. That, that. That level of care, that level of taking it personally, that level of putting yourself last on the totem pole for taking credit has been, I think, a good magnet for talent. I think that's the kind of leadership that, you know, I. I haven't always been a CEO myself. I've worked jobs, I've worked at restaurants, I've worked, been a teacher, instructor, professor in the academic setting. Like, I've had all sorts of different bosses myself, and that tends to be the type of boss that I've been drawn to.

And that's interesting you say that in terms of modeling. Often when we think of leadership, it comes through a filter of what's been modeled to us, either good or bad. And so who have been One or two of those good models, either they've done it directly with you or you've watched from the sidelines as they've led a country or a team.

Yeah, I had a early boss mentor when I was an intern in college. I worked at a company called Redfin and maybe people have heard of them. They're a big real estate discovery site and was always, was always very impressed by the CEO there. Always took the time to explain things to people and really put.

Everything that didn't go well, he always put as his own fault. Like if someone did, if someone didn't understand something, if someone didn't understand what was expected for them or didn't understand some part of how the business worked, he always made a point to make sure that that connection got solved and make sure to.

One term, that one term that I've taken to using is whenever we're solving issues, there's always the issue itself as well as the meta issue. Like what's the issue that caused the issue? And this is something I've learned from early days at Redfin. I worked at Google kind of early days a decade ago at this point. And I always thought, yeah, in these high output organizations you always have that accountability from leadership and always that sense of what real accountability means is when there's a problem, okay, when there's a problem, poor leaders ignore it or blame or deflect it. Good leaders solve the problem or figure out a solution to the problem. And exceptional leaders, they solve the problem and they solve that meta around the problem. Like what's the problem that caused that problem? And I think having that imprinted into me early in my career has paid dividends over the years. I'm still getting better at it. It's 10,000 hours type of voyage. It's not a like, okay, you just hear it once and all of a sudden you're good at solving meta issues around every issue.

That's really great advice and it's interesting. I recently had a friend who'd been asked to do something by their CEO. They did it and executed on it perfectly. But then the CEO realized like an hour later, wow, that thing wasn't meant to go to everyone. And then essentially the CEO, she called the person out and said, sorry everyone, this person made the mistake. And actually it was, they'd done exactly what the CEO had asked them to do. And what you're saying is an exceptional leader would have went, hey, team, screw up. My fault. I did it, I've just fixed it. And here's how it Won't happen again.

Yeah, it's, it's.

People are always going to see you as a leader. Like you don't have to really worry if you take the blame or.

Admit an issue. You're going to be the leader because you have the title or you started the company.

But what loses you the leadership. It's this weird thing is like if you try too hard to always look correct, always never be the one that made the mistake, never be the one to blame. If you have this like picture perfect version of a leader, then that's the one thing that'll actually decay your stature as a leader. Because it's not, it's not true, it's not believable, it's not relatable and it.

Leads to environment where people don't feel like they can be objective about problem solving. One of the big corollaries to being objective about problem solving is that everybody, including leadership, is subjective and subject to certain biases. And if you can't be wrong and if you can't set that leadership template from the top of, hey, I say things with my best judgment, but sometimes they are wrong. If we can't talk about that, if I'm not willing to admit that, how do you expect to have any culture of objectivity? Like if the leader can't be questioned, then every, it's going to turtle itself all the way down where like every manager who manages anyone is going to have that same stance.

Versus if you're the type of leader that hey, here's like current best understanding. This is the go ahead plan. And if it can be open for having holes poked in it to where it gets to an objectively better spot, it's just like when you think about it that way, it's like there is no other way to lead. There is no other way. Like what is your job as a leader? Is your job as a leader to like emerge with a perfect ego and a perfect sense of like everyone you likes you and you can do no wrong. Or is your job as a leader to drive shareholder value and solve real problems in the real world that create value in the market?

I think the first bucket they get filtered out quick. I think if you're in a leadership spot because you want to feel good about yourself.

Just short time, find a.

Different job, short lived career. Like yeah, as a leader you're almost signing up for getting kicked in the shins and you're, you're almost making yourself the crash dummy of like, okay, how much? Like.

What can I, what Cliff, can I Jump off of here. What can like I sometimes I see my job is to be the biggest risk taker at the business because as you go down the levels of a business, people get more and more risk averse. As a company grows, it gets more risk averse and.

I often dial it even beyond. It's like there's I have kind of the line of what we should probably do but I often will take the even more.

Risk on approach because I figure that eventually it will get watered down to the neutral like the more medium line because people are, are practical. But I will come in with the like super spicy take. Like let's like for the marketing campaign let's do like this extra super duper loud thing.

Because if I'm not doing that then no one at the company is going to be.

In general more like loud spicy risk on than what they see. Leadership is doing such good advice. And so I, I always try to dial it's on a little things. I think the little things can be the big things too. It's like we're doing company merch. This is very little. This is not a major needle drew, but I think it's a fun allegory here which is we're doing company merch and more than half the team wanted to do baseball caps. And then some people on the team want to do very loud bucket caps which at least around LA are very trendy right now. Very loud, goofy, ostentatious. And so you know, we're doing bucket hats. And I was like champion. It was like, look, this is not like a majority decision or whatever, but we're going to go with look, I want people from half a block away when we're wearing our merch, we're at an event or we're doing guerrilla marketing. I want people to notice us. I want to be seen when we're in retail stores.

I want people are going to either love this or they're going to hate it. They're going to have a response to it versus we can always go back later and make a baseball cap. Like you can always do the more risk off the more boring thing later on. It's hard to start with the more neutral thing and then go more risk on later. So this is very little. I don't want to pretend like your company merch is the main thing is just a little, a little allegory and like a simple zoomed in decision of like I take the more louder stance and we can let it water down later over time or you know, or not, you know, people love, and it actually turns out people love the bucket hat. So it's, you know, I think, I think people like seeing the. Some conviction from leadership.

Yeah, 100%. And it's interesting how you do anything is how you do everything. That whole concept of, hey, we're going to do this with a merch with our hats. So this is going to filter into those bigger marketing, budgeting strategy decisions as well.

I like that approach.

Now, let's chat a little bit about the mindset because to me, I think you've got an incredibly unique mindset. And for leaders that are listening, whether they are athletes, whether they're corporate leaders or they're trying to lead their family day to day, what's the mindset it took for you to take your startup and grow that through all the challenges that you get thrown as a startup, what is the mindset you adopted or you developed to get you through it?

Yeah, that's a great question. There's a couple things I can point to. I think one.

Concept helpful to anchor, we can go into it in more detail, but just to anchor what even it is that we do, because I think that is important to how I've been able to maintain focus and stamina through these years is we make a product that's called Ketone IQ. We've made it under development. We have a $6 million partnership with the United States Department of Defense Special Operations Command making metabolic super fuel. And we figured out a make. We figured out a way to make a ketone in a bottle where you can just drink ketones and it's the same ketone that your body makes when you are intermittent fasting or doing a low carb keto diet. It's actually really interesting because when you're looking at the keto diet that's often seen as a weight loss diet where the byproduct is ketones, you're sawing wood and then the sawdust is this thing called ketones. It turns out that the ketones themselves are metabolic super fuel and that's why special operators are interested in it. That's why we do a lot of work with Tour de France teams. Over 60% of the peloton is drinking our ketones at this point. It's branched out further, further. We're going to grocery stores. We're still very early days and I will say 97% of the people I interact with, they try this stuff tastes a little. It's formulated for function, not flavor. It doesn't taste like your grandma's apple Juice, it tastes a little, little weird. Like maybe the first time you had black coffee or red wine, if you can remember that, or dark chocolate, it has like a taste to it. And so okay, 97% of people are like what is this? What is this? Do I need metabolic super fuel? The stuff tastes kind of crazy. And then the like, you know, 2, 3%, it's growing, you know, day by day, week by week, our really into it. And I say all this because I mean we can talk more about the metabolism 101, what is the ketone, all that. But the point is that for me it was very, it's been very motivating to pick a very big weird problem. And this is something I heard from Larry Page when I worked at Google was that look, all problems become hard when you're in the messy, in the middle of it. Messy middle of any problem. So his point was you might as well pick big hard worthy problems because when you pick smallish, medium ish problems, you're still going to be grinding on it for like months. You're still going to have meetings about it, you're still going to be writing memos and emails about it, you're still going to be thinking about it. But if the juice isn't worth the squeeze, if the outcome is like we did something incremental in the world, for me it's like I am personally not interested in making a new flavor of popcorn or you know, like an incrementally better version of this. It's like.

I, I have chosen a path where it's like, hey, like ketones are super interesting. I think this is the next nutritional primitive akin to CBD or collagen or these other breakout multibillion dollar primitives that you now see, you know, a decade later you see in a dozen different brands and hundreds of different formats at the store that like, but you know, maybe that's not true. Maybe, maybe this is all just a science fair project. But the idea to me is that the juice is worth the squeeze. That if we solve this problem, if we're right, this is a massive, massive outcome. And that's very motivating compared to, hey look, we're going to make a slightly better tasting better for you chocolate or something. It's like to me that you wake up every day like you get bored of chocolate. It's like, okay, we made a, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. I don't know what the other analogy is to, to say there. It's that.

The.

The upside of solving that Problem isn't exciting. It's not, it's not weird enough, it's not big enough. And there's something I like about that chip in my shoulder where like 9 out of 10 people are like, don't really understand what I'm doing yet, but they will, and I believe it. It's like I have this big little secret that I know that our team knows that most of the rest of the world doesn't know yet. And that's where you see that's the pattern of emergent new technologies. So that chip on the shoulder that's solving that big weird problem and being on the early end of it, that all is fuel for me over the last five, ten years as I've been an entrepreneur and, and working on this.

General problem, set massively insightful thoughts around that for leaders, for entrepreneurs, people thinking about starting out. And I guess the question here now is, okay, I'm either using a lot of brain power and running a team and there's a lot of cognitive requirement, or I'm a professional athlete or semi professional and I'd like to look at how ketones can help me. So for those two people, one that wants the brain power and the whole idea of brain health, and the other one who wants the competitive edge, how does ketone IQ support them?

Hey, James here.

I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Carolinejlochlan.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes.

Ketones are really interesting in general. And what we've done with ketone IQ has made it. You can have just 10 grams of pure ketones and you can just drink it directly, the same way that you could have 10 grams of protein or 10 milligrams of caffeine. And what, okay, so what is a ketone? Are in a sense ketones the oldest form of fuel that there is because our body has been making ketones for 300,000 years as long as there's been humans. And it's really Interesting, because there's a couple facets to know, which is, okay, our. Our brain can use blood sugar and it can use ketones. It cannot use fat directly. Fat needs to turn into ketones.

Our bodies do not store that much sugar, that much carbohydrates. We have, like, a day or two of carbohydrates and same as, essentially, sugar that. That we can store. So if you take the ancestral context 200,000 years ago on the savannah, if you don't have carbohydrates for a day or two, you're essentially starving or fasting.

Our body immediately starts making ketones. It turns fat into ketones, and that's what powers our brain. So in the ancestral context, we had carbohydrates. Sometimes there was some berries or grains, but, you know, there's no Reese's Peanut Butter Cups on the Savannah. Right. We're mainly not having that much carbohydrates and sugar, and we are mainly. Our body is storing up fat when it can, and then when we don't have access to food, we're turning that fat into ketones to fuel our brain. And so what this is all to say is that the human body's actually really good at making and metabolizing ketones, and they're this, like, backup super fuel for our brain. If you fast forward in the modern context, when we're just, like, eating all the time and everything has hidden sugars in it, and we're leaving the leading these sedentary lifestyles where we're not even properly burning off the excess carbohydrates and that we are eating, then you end up with this energy imbalance where we just have constantly elevated blood sugar and we're spending no time making and using ketones. And so what. What our mission is is to help people spend more time in that ancestral state with elevated ketone levels. And it just so happens, too, that it feels good when you are running on ketones. It's a lot of what people feel when they're. When you have runners high, when you're going for a run, is your body is burning through energy and it's starting to make ketones. And that's part of what makes you feel mentally dialed in. Or if a lot of people have had positive experiences when they're doing some kind of fasting, either extended fasting or even just like a intermittent fast is part of their daily routine, There's a feeling of sharpness that people get. There's a feeling of sharpness people just get when they do. You don't have to do like all the way keto diet. But like I think people, at this point, a lot of people know if you have like that birthday cake around the office at lunchtime, you're kind of tired, you're kind of knocked out for an hour. Like it's, it's maybe not the best idea to have a bunch of pancakes in the morning if you're trying to have a really sharp dialed in day. That, that feeling of excess carbohydrates is not good. On the flip side, that feeling of having elevated ketones is really good. And what I, what we have is, is ketone iq, which is a tool in the toolkit among all these other things. So it's not like okay, magically you can just eat a lot of carbs and not exercise. It's that if you're living a generally healthy diet, not eating too much carbs, active, it's helpful to have this tool in your toolkit where you know, first thing in the morning you can just prime your pump with a little boost of ketones and you feel really sharp going about your day. You didn't have any sugar, there's no caffeine inside of it. You can have it with or without coffee. Kind of dealer's choice of on your own. But you get, you get this nice pick me up. Or like in the afternoon there's this, there's this nice way to get a boost of energy when you're, you know, I'm sipping some right now. Like you get a nice boost of energy with no sugar, no caffeine. And it is very clean metabolic fuel that our bodies are really good at using, especially our, our brain. So a lot of different applications. Yeah, a lot of different applications.

I love that. And when we think about anything new, the first thing we always think I think anyway is what's the side effects? What's the potential downsides? So obviously you guys have done a ton of research on this. You've got the U.S. you're sending a defense force special operations command really interested in using this. So it's amazing. What are the potential downsides? Are there any.

It's relatively low side effect profile. It's like it's a fuel. So it's, it's not. Ketones are not a drug. You can think of it similar to like protein powder where like protein is a macronutrient. It's a building block. You, in theory you could have too much protein power, but it's, it's not like in the same ballpark of having Too much caffeine, even like too much caffeine, you could have a heart attack. It's like having too much water. You might be uncomfortable, you might pee a lot. If you have like too, too much water. Like way too much water. Okay, you can start running into serious issues. But ketones are generally, they're, they have energy. When they're present in your system, your body prioritizes them, turns them into ATP, which people remember their high school biology. It's the current energy currency of your cell, your mitochondria. Power plant of the cell turns metabolic substrates into ATP and that's what fuels all the cells in your body. Ketones just turn into ATP and low side effect profile. So you're, you're not supposed to like, I wouldn't have, you know.

I wouldn't just like sit there and like chug ketones, but I, I personally have it throughout the day and it's a nice, like I, you know, 10% of my calories are from it and I, I like having it again like first thing in the morning and I just usually have it whenever I want to pick me up throughout the day.

And so for someone who's either a professional athlete or they're, you know, engaging in triathlons and marathons and they're in the outdoor sports, how could this support them at that level? That's really high physical level. Okay.

The really easy recipe is 3 parts carbs to 1 part ketones that a lot of people at this point are comfortable with having some sort of carb drink, whether there's a million powders and mixes and goo shots and all that. And we're familiar with, hey, if you're biking hard and after every 45 minutes have a, have something like re help replete your, your metabolism because you're, you're burning a lot of your on deck energy. Really simple way to think about it is like if you're having, for every, every 3 grams of carbohydrates have a gram of ketones. So the one way to think about this if we're tracking is that like the carbohydrate system in your body is parallel but different from the fat metabolism system. They're like two different, two different highways that go into your cellular metabolism. So what we're doing here when we're, we'll call it dual fueling with carbs and ketones is you're having carbs go through highway A and you're having ketones through highway B.

And you're basically able to parallelize and get more substrate into your cells, so you're able to expend more energy at the same time. So that's textbook how our cyclist, triathlete, pro athlete in general partners will use it. Because it's interesting, right? When you look at, when you look at, like, the modern carbohydrates supplements, like the, your goo shot Mortons, all that stuff, like the, the powders, the. The goo format, the shot formats, what they're already doing, if you look at the ingredients, is they're trying to have a breadth of types of carbohydrates. It's a similar type of mindset where you want to, like, parallelize. You'll have like, dextrose and fructose and glucose because there's like, subtle differences in the pathways are still on the same major highway, but you can maybe think of those as like, different lanes within that highway. So that's already where like, the state of the art of, of performance nutrition has been at. What's interesting about ketones, it opens up this whole other highway that is not gated on many of the same things and can essentially parallelize in. And.

You know, one of the key factors there is that your body is making ketones. Like you're turning fat into ketones. But that's like a slow process.

And so the ability to drink a ketone on top of the carbohydrates that you're eating just means you have more substrate availability. So we like 3 to 1, 3 parts carbohydrates to 1 part ketones.

So that's what I'll be doing.

I'm doing a. Running a triathlon this, this Sunday, and that's what I'll be mixing in my water bottle on the bike.

I love it. And let, let's chat about this because you're a site, and in my mind, you're a scientist, you're an entrepreneur, you're a businessman, but you're also using your product at a very high level and demonstrating that it helps. So let's talk about your marathon times.

Yeah, I'm a big runner. I came into this sport through biohacking. I have a computer science background, and I got into biohacking and looking at my body as a system. And hey, what is, what is the API of the human body? If the smartphone was the technology of the past decade, the human body is the platform for the next decade plus. And it's not just me saying it. You can see the proliferation of whoop and aura and Apple watches and continuous glucose monitors where our body has become a platform and we're able to. It's like we've been driving with the dashboard lights off forever. Maybe you see them once a year when you go to your doctor maybe. And now all of a sudden the lights are coming on and we're able to see our RPMs and how full our gas tank is and what speed we're going. And.

At the same time as people are observing what's going on in their body and seeing their HRV and their sleep score and their blood glucose blood ketones, it only follows from there that people get more mindful about what they're putting into their body. Oh, I don't have caffeine afternoon because it interferes with my sleep score, which I can objectively see. Oh, I don't have. If I have a lot of sugar, I go for a walk afterwards because I want to decrease my blood glucose. I don't like having constantly high ambient blood glucose that makes me feel itchy. And I know it's bad for me and I can objectively see it when I wore that continuous glucose monitor for a couple of weeks, a couple of months ago, right? So that's.

I, I got into this space like a decade ago when or we had to like order continuous glucose monitor off the gray market. And it wasn't, it wasn't like this cool, sexy user experience that is today. And from there started getting into marathoning. I, I've always been athletic and going on runs, but I, I started just measuring, okay, what is my heart rate? Okay, how. And I started doing things on my runs where I could, I would go like, okay, how fast can I go while keeping my heart rate under 140 bpm. Okay, what's the difference when I run fasted versus when I run fully replete? Okay, well, I, there's actually two totally different training goals. When I'm running fasted. I'm not going to be very quick that day, but I am going to get a lot of metabolic flexibility if two days later when I run, I run fully replete. Okay, I'm going to get a lot of speed, my muscles are going to get really strong. And if I, if I vary between these types of workouts, then I get the complete picture where I have like strong fast legs, but I also have, my body's able to run on an empty tank and solve the, the metabolic fuel side of the equation. So I took this systems approach to my own running. And look, I'm not like marathon runner, I run or sorry, I'm not Olympic marathon runner, I run Six minutes a mile for the marathon. So I'm finishing the top 1% of a given marathon. Again, not nowhere close. And I'm sure there's people listening to this podcast for whom the 242 Marathon is. They did that, I don't know, when they were in high school or something. But for me, I'm very, I'm proud of it. I'm, I'm happy of the process I've made there in like a few short years of cracking at the sport and being very.

Biohacker systems. Thinking about the whole endeavor.

Oscar de la Renta put it perfectly. Fashion is about dressing according to what's fashionable. Style is more about being yourself. And that's one thing I always try to do, is try to be myself. Whether I'm interviewing a former head of state, hanging with my family on the weekend, or working with some of my incredible clients, I try to always just be myself as much as possible. And part of that is dressing accordingly. But every now and then a special occasion will call for some special fashion. And I am by no means any expert on fashion. And that's why I'm delighted to partner with Muns. Muns is back and it's better than ever. Located in the beautiful tannery emporium on Garlands Road in Christchurch, it offers a huge range for men with suits for hire and sale, ties, jeans, waistcoats, hats, sunglasses and more. So for all of your menswear needs, head along and check it out at Munz Co nz.

I love it and I truly think that biohacking is starting to become part of our everyday conversation. And certainly I'm seeing it with athletic teams, sports teams that I work with, but I'm also seeing those conversations unfold in boardrooms and incorporate team building sessions. So for someone who's thinking about looking at biohacking, what is it and why is it valuable to a leader?

Yeah, that's such a good point. And I love the parallel that you're driving between pro sports and the boardroom. I think that's really apt. Because pro sports is cool and we love to watch it. And it's. It's forever has its place in the social fabric. Like watching people at the pinnacle of athletic performance. At the same time, most people unfortunately are never going to be a pro athlete. But I would say that the boardroom or being a high powered white collar worker is its own performance sport.

You're still trying to operate at the absolute top of your game. The board meeting is the super bowl for you. The big pitch or selling your company that is your Olympics. And what's interesting is there's just a lot more people that are doing that. There's a lot more doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs and people in that realm than there are of athletes. So where we all watch and admire and are inspired by our favorite athletes, where we're more directly applying it is just everyday people is like, hey, I sit down at my desk every day and I want to drive as much output as possible. We're all staring at this glowing rectangle, clicking and typing, playing a great online game. There's some permutation of clicks and taps that'll make you a million dollars and some.

That will make you a bankrupt and some that'll make you a million dollars sooner and some that'll make you a million dollars eventually in 100 years. Not that fast. And so it's all, it's all a performance sport of like, okay, how do I, how do I optimize this? How do I get the most productivity out of myself and bio? Okay, so if we accept the premise that we're all performance athletes. Athletes in quotes, like, we're all performance athletes. And in our regard, even in the white collar professional realm, okay, biohacking is this idea. And it.

The word biohacking, I think is kind of melting away because of exactly what you said, James, of there is a. It's just going mainstream. So, like, we're calling it. We don't have to call it that anymore. Like, the early computer people in the 80s were hackers, and now we just all have a phone in our pocket. And it's like, you're not a hacker just because you have a computer in your pocket. It's just normal. There's a billion of them, like multiple billions of phones in pockets. I think we're getting there with biohacking, where, yeah, five, 10 years ago, it was like, oh, my God, you sent away your cheek swab to get a genetic profile. Wow. Oh my God. You are measuring your glucose levels with this implant in your arm. Ongoing. That used to be outrageous. And now it's like my aunt tracks her footsteps and like my neighbor down the block.

Measures his sleep score and is always posting about it. You know what I mean? It's crossed that chasm. So, okay, this idea of biohacking, whether the term itself is like evaporating away as it comes, mainstream or not just to define it, is this idea of seeing your body as a system, which it is, it's arguably the most advanced piece of technology you'll ever own. Is your own body. And we are understanding the outputs of our body. We're getting better sensors and wearables and insights into how our body is doing. And we're getting better inputs into that system on the nutrition side to be able to modulate those intended outputs. And so being a biohacker, it's, you know, it's not a, I wouldn't say a binary thing. It's definitely, definitely a lot of shades of gray in the middle. It's like, how.

How much do you want to apply your systems thinking to your own body as a system? How much do you want to optimize your own outputs? And.

What'S interesting there, and there's dozens of tools now at our fingertips for relatively affordable prices where you're able to both on both sides of the equation, you'll be able to measure and monitor better on that side and you're able to modulate the inputs better on the nutrition side. So it's really exciting time right now, I think, and I think it's only accelerating. To be honest.

I have to agree with you. The amount of executives I see and they've got their wedding ring on and then they've got this other ring, I'm like, hey, let me guess, is that an aura ring? And they're like, yeah, they're so proud of it. And they're like, you know, yeah, you got yours on. I love it. They are so proud of it. And I was like, tell me why you do that. Like, well, sleep is like the most important thing and I want to measure it because I know when I do this I can do this as an output. I think it's quite amazing. So in the executive, corporate, you know, white collar world, coffee certainly here in New Zealand it's like the go to. And I've been in North America a lot. In the uk coffee is what we do in the morning. So if we were to replace that with ketone iq, what might the benefits be? Because I know for coffee, like with caffeine I get the jitter. Sometimes I actually feel physically sick. It can impact my sleep. I can be a little irritable later in the day. If I was to take ketone IQ instead, yes, it might not be as tasty as my coffee. Although when I first had coffee it tasted like crap, so I just became accustomed to it. So what might be the benefits of going ketone IQ versus the downsides of the coffee side of things?

It's interesting what you said, by the way, just psychosomatically how we get used to A taste and it starts priming us. That first sip of a gin and tonic, it already makes you feel something before the actual feeling of the alcohol sets in. Like the smell of the coffee seems to wake you up because it's priming you on this flavor that you know, when you were 14, whenever you had your first cup of coffee, like you spit it out. But now that same taste, psychosomatically you link it to a certain feeling of alertness. In that case.

Okay, for swapping ketone IQ for coffee. Like I, first of all, I'm not like a die hard, like anti caffeine person. I think a modest small amount of caffeine is good and like not harmful and arguably beneficial and the routine and all that around it. But I'm talking about like a cup in the morning to kickstart your day and you know, just get the, get the engine going. I do think there is a steep fall off where you start having three, four, five cups a day. You might want to revisit something more root, root level about what you're doing, the sleep quality you're getting, the stress you're under and unpack what's going on there.

So there's a couple, there's a couple of different things you could do right with ketone iq. You can have it with your coffee. So a lot of people are, are familiar maybe with this idea of bulletproof coffee where you take coffee and you put MCT or you put grass fed butter into your coffee. And the idea with those, so mct, like we sell an MCT product too. Mct. The whole idea, we didn't invent it, we have a really good one. But I don't want to take credit for inventing this whole category of mct. Mct, what even is the point? MCT is a medium chain triglyceride. Why is that interesting? It's because that particular type of fat converts relatively efficiently into ketones. That is why people eat mcts. That's why this whole bulletproof coffee thing exists, is because when you eat this type of fats it converts relatively easily into ketones. But I say relatively because it's like a tenth as effective as drinking straight ketones. It's like you're getting, you're having the pre.

The what's it called, it converts into ketones, but there's like, there's a drop off in the efficiency. And so it's just like if that's what you're going for, I would say have that and also have just the direct ketone itself. And.

It'S interesting how they stack together because caffeine itself is a, it's a drug. You could consider it as that because it's blocking your hormone. You have adenosine is the sleep hormone and caffeine is blocking that very specific pathway. And so you're, you're not feeling tired and you are then feeling more alert. But caffeine itself doesn't have any calories in it. It's not a metabolic substrate, carries no energy. So, so you're stimulating your body and your brain, but you're not providing it with any energy. It's like you're yanking at the chain of the lawnmower, but you're not giving it any actual gas. So then that begs the question of, okay, where's the, where's the fuel coming from? And that's, that's where people like putting, that's where people like being in ketosis at the same time that they have their coffee. Whether it's through a bulletproof coffee or taking a shot of ketone iq. It's, it's like, okay, I'm, I'm revved up. But I mean, the other option is you can have a frappuccino and start your day off with a milkshake with 45 grams of sugar and that's going to be your gasoline. But I say that's a very dirty gasoline and you're going to crash later in the day and you're going to want another one, another one. And you're not, you're not going to be feeling great and you're not going to be doing yourself any favors for your long term metabolic health. If you're constantly spiking your sugar like that. So you can replace caffeine with ketone iq, that's definitely something we see in our community. They have like some Venn diagram overlap of how they feel. It's like different feeling of energy. It's not exactly the same. But I would say we have a lot of people who kind of complement it and a lot of times tends to be that bulletproof coffee type of, of crowd of people who like that smooth, even feel that they get when they have some source of energy that is ketone oriented and not sugar oriented and that having that with a modest amount of caffeine seems to be this nice synergy of functionals that starts your day off really well.

I'm seriously excited over this next four to five years to see how ketone IQ plays out, because I really feel like people are highly aware of what they're ingesting and how it's impacting them. They're measuring things more than anything. And I truly feel that when we.

You know, whatever we measure matters, when.

We measure anything, it actually matters to us. And so when people are measuring sleep, they're measuring heart rate variance, then they want to be putting things in the other end that are supporting and empowering that. So I have no doubt that there's going to be huge swell of interest globally with ketone iq. And as that swells and grows, I guess I want to take you back to like the beginnings before you get to that point where it's like globally exploding. And I know already it's doing crazy cool things, but why do you do what you do?

That's a, that's a great question.

There's so many levels of answer on that, James. It's. I can, I can break it into pieces. I think there's the more practical and then there's the more philosophical what is the meaning of life? Types of answers which is there. Did you can, did you intentionally leave it reader's choice here?

Yeah, let's do this. Let's unpack the different pillars of that. I love that there's more than one. That's good.

Yeah. Look, the job is to create shareholder value. That's what I promised my investors and stakeholders, including employees, including myself, my family. Create a lot of value in a short period of time. Ethically do something that, that creates a lot of value for the world. That, that part's exciting to me. And a fun problem to solve is on an intellectual level like it's. Yeah, I think we are solving a multi billion dollar problem here because of everything connected into people's desire to want to perform better. Metabolic health crisis in general. And hey, we really shouldn't be eating so much sugar. And if this, if we've create, we've created something here that helps you reduce your sugar cravings and have something that. It's essentially the opposite of sugar. Essentially a good clean metabolic fuel. I think there's so many different ways to assess it and say okay, like there's, there's a reasonable chance that this is a big thing. Okay. So like that, that's one reason is, is solve the, solve a big problem. And it's going back to that point earlier. Like I think if you're solving a smallish, medium ish problem, it's, it's actually harder. Like the easy problems are hard problems because when doing an easy problem there's not that much value to create around it. And then why should someone invest in you and why should someone work with you? And it actually. The hard problems are the easy problems. Because.

Everyone could kind of get why it could be cool to solve world hunger or go to outer space or do these big audacious problems. It's like, hey, maybe it'll work or maybe it won't, but that's audacious. And if that works, huge. And.

So, yeah, that is one reason is I think just looking at all of the macro trends, kind of superimpose the human body as a platform, all your whoops and your auras and general interest.

It seems like a efficient way to create value in a relatively short amount of time, solve really important problems in the world. I think going on a more philosophical side, it's that.

I want to be a conduit of what I see as good in the world. There's so many people before us and after us that have created beauty in the aesthetic sense and have created.

Architecture and literature and music. And I think the meaning of life is to take the signals that you think are positive and amplify those and try, if you can also turn down the volume on the signals that are not positive in the world and be a conduit for that unending stream of.

Of the universe just unfolding. Like, try to amplify the good vibration. Like, try to make something that is adding value, a lot of net value into the world. Like putting the kind of capitalist hat, shareholder maximization hat aside, I think there is some pretty good alignment where I think if you do the ladder here, if you create a lot of value for people and you're smart about it, you will also capture economic value. But I think in the more just.

Like.

Touchy feely, philosophical sense that, yeah, I want to.

That same feeling that I've been on the receiving end of, like, it's really cool to have a computer that just works. And like, the Internet's amazing. And while these running shoes are amazing. Wow. Flying in an airplane, amazing. Like, all these amazing things that just walking down the street, like, wow, who paved this road? Like, if you put me on a desert island, I wouldn't even know how to make a number two pencil. Like, like you were just the recipient of this, like, absolutely insane abundance of ingenuity that has come before us. I want to do my part of contributing into that stream of ingenuity.

And there's without even any ego. It's almost like that is the stream. Like, that is the dance of life and we're just dancing.

And.

That'S Just the dance. There's not even like another.

Option that's that interesting. It's like, yeah, like that is what is. That is what we're all here to do. That is the dance. Let's just do it. Let's make cool, clever things in the world.

Thank you for sharing that. I really, I really love hearing both aspects and both, both sides of what drives you. And for the person that's listening right now, that's going, oh, I want the edge. Yes, I need that. Either physically or cognitively. I'm going to give Ketone IQ a try. I'm going to order it right now. So University College of London did a study around habit installation and how long it actually takes to install a habit to see the true benefits of the new habit that you're trying to install. Most people think it's 21 to 28 days, but the average time to install new habit, 66 days. So if I was to take Ketone IQ for 66 days, so a couple months, would I start to feel those benefits? And is it compounding or is it like, no, you'll have it today. And within three hours you'd be like, I'm a different person. What would you recommend in terms of our bodies starting to feel the difference?

One of the cool things about it is it's both. You'll feel it right away, you'll feel it in 15 minutes because you're, and you could measure it too. Your, your blood ketone level would be elevated. So if you have there's at home ketone measurements just like there's at home glucose measurements. And you can objectively see a lot of people who are into the more deeper.

Avenues of biohacking, maybe have this at home already. But yeah, there's breath ones, there's blood ones, there's urine ones. You can see your blood ketone levels. So you just immediately have elevated ketone levels within 15 minutes. And most people feel that because your, your brain is going to start using that you will start.

Doing metabolism on ketones in your brain. And for a lot of people that just feels like that kind of fresh feeling from waking up after a nap or that that runner's high. And then habitually, like if you, if, if you're doing this for 66 days, I think what you'll see, everyone's experience can be a little bit different. But if it's, if it's helping you to reduce your cravings in general or cravings for sugary foods, if you're swapping it out for something else, like that if it becomes your go to pick me up instead of something sugary, I. There's a lot of different ways that can compound where you could just be having more hours of flow state in the day. It could, it could be helping you to. I mean, if you, if you go 66 days of also having less sugar, you're just gonna feel great. You'll probably be more shredded. You'll probably be more like have increased body comp. And there's. There's a lot of different ways that these little lifestyle benefits can compound. When you start really doing it habitually.

I love it.

And let's fast forward 12 months, you and I reconnect, we have another conversation. Where are we at? If you say, James, in the last 12 months, it's been incredible. It's been epic. This is what's happened. What would have happened for you to say that.

We have a lot of exciting things going on? I would say what would make it.

Incredible is.

I think I've laid out a lot of the, what the big picture kind of galaxy brain idea here is. Like right now what we have is Ketone iq. We can drink a shot of ketones. What's planned up next on the docket is to use that as a platform and make other products off of it. So.

The same way that you see a lot of products have CBD in it, for instance, right now.

If we're doing our job right with Ketone iq, there's a lot of other products with that inside of it. And it starts being more like you can think about developing different opinionated product lines for like, very, very specific applications. Like the way that someone uses it for a certain sport might. It might be different from another sport altogether. It might also be different from someone who's having it for more longevity benefits or someone who's having it for more appetite control benefits. And so you can think, right now we're just stoked because we have the Pure Primitive out on market. It's like early days of electrolytes or like you had just like Gatorade in the 1970s. You just had like the raw powder. It makes a giant vat of it. And now there's a lot of different instances of ways and brands of like, there's a lot of electrolytes and a lot of stuff. Now early CBD was just like tinctures, right. Of pure hemp extract. Cbd. Now it's in same thing. It's in beverages and bars and this and that. Same with protein. You can just go down the list of Nutritional Primitives and if we do our job then in a year I would say.

It'S yeah like launching many of those with interesting partners. I think that's always a fun part of the job too is, is there's only so much we can do directly as a brand but you know, partnering with other people or bringing interesting other people into the fold to co launch different spin off brands together that are powered by Ketone IQ and having it really feel like.

A platform that would be I think a big win for us.

I'm looking forward to having that conversation and to celebrating those moments.

Thanks so much, James. Yeah, I appreciate it.

Now I've got one question. I always like to wrap up with this question and before I ask I just want to say a huge thank you for sharing what Ketone IQ is all about and really going deep, being honest, being open about it and for committing the time that you do to developing a product that's going to have such great impact on people that use it. So last question is this. So we'll fast forward many, many years. It's your last day on earth. You know, you've got five minutes left and someone very dear to you in your family who's very young, just a young child, they come up to you and they say, hey Michael, or it might be dad or granddad, how can I lead my life with purpose? What would your advice to them be?

Well, I would say put smiles on other people's faces and.

Maximize that. So if you can do it one on one interpersonally, that's already an amazing start. And then when you can start building businesses, communities, platforms where you're able to make.

Art or commercial goods or what have you, that puts smiles on people's faces even when you're asleep, even when it's people that you've never met, like think about ways to even scale that out from there, but that the end goal is.

Maximize the area under the curve of smiles on faces. Do it one on one, do it on any platforms that you're building and see how much leverage you can build up to be able to create the most net smiles on faces on the planet.

That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. That's a great piece of advice for that young person out there and for the person that's listening right now that's young or not so young. Take that on board and think about what Michael just shared. And Michael, I'm going to make sure and put in the show notes where people can go and actually purchase Ketone IQ where they can get in touch with your company and connect with you. But there's nothing like trying it, thinking about trying it while we don't really understand the concept. So I think for me, it's okay, let's get it, let's try it, let's experience it. So I'm very excited to see it grow and for everyone to give it a try. And I look forward to reconnecting again someday soon.

James yeah, looking forward to the next one. This is a lot of fun.

Thanks a million.

Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button. And I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks. And leaders, it's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.

Sat.