#23: Michael Brandt - the future of web3 e-commerce

Like, I think the smartest people in the space, like the Chris Dixons of the space, are like humble to say— Mark Andreessen, who invented Netscape, the first web browser, are humble to say like, we don't even know.

Like, all right, welcome to another episode of Cyber Patterns. Today we have Michael Brandt on. He is the CEO of HealthVia Modern Nutrition, otherwise known as HVMN. They make a very cool product called Ketone IQ. He generously offered a discount code. You could check that out in the show notes. Uh, today we talk about Web3, marketing, advertising, health, and much more. I hope you enjoy. Yeah, let's just jump in. Um, talk HVMN, talk Ketone IQ, and, um, a little bit about what's going on. Definitely, uh, wondering what's, what's new with the updates.

Cool. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. To introduce myself, I'm, I'm Michael. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Healthvia Modern Nutrition. We make a product called Ketone IQ. It's a result of a multimillion dollar research contract that we have with the US Department of Defense working on advanced nutrition. Ketone IQ is the most efficient ketone drink, is the first ever ketone drink. And what it does is it provides the exact same ketone that your body makes. If people have heard about the ketogenic diet, or your body makes ketones in general, when you're in a low carbohydrate state, the eating low carb, the exercising, fasting, any of these conditions where you are running low on carbohydrates, your body will actually make its own ketones. And ketones are known to be super efficient. But it's really hard to make them. They're kind of your body's backup, super efficient natural fuel source. We figured out a way to make that in a bottle. It's really interesting for elite performers, US military special operators. We work a lot with, with athletes, Tour de France riders, NBA, NFL, MLB, all MMA, all, all the three-letter sports acronym groups. And, and the truth is it's, it's for everyone in the same way that we think about it the same way as like collagen or caffeine or omega-3s or any of these other nutritional primitives. Ketones are a nutritional primitive. Yes, it's helpful at the high end for elite performers, but the truth is we're all doing metabolism all the time. So whether you're a Tour de France athlete or just a normal person sitting at your desk, or you're an older person trying to stay sharp in your old age. We're all doing metabolism every day. Metabolism is at the center of how our muscles work, how our brain, how our neurons work, and we could all use super fuel to be performing better. So really excited with everything going on with Ketone IQ. We're at a really interesting spot where we basically had version 1 of our product going for the last few years at our, our big contract with the DOD, other elite operators and athletes. And in January of this year, 2022, we just launched our version 2, which we were calling Ketone IQ, which is broadly available for consumers on Amazon, on our website, or in stores and gyms and stuff like that. So it's been a big year for us getting out of the, out of Navy SEAL juice mode and into just everyday, like normal people can just have it at their, at their desk, at their job as a pre-workout, post-workout.

Yeah, no, it's, it's incredible. I mean, I've, I've tried it before and I've enjoyed it, especially before working out. And then also, like you said, kind of mixing it with caffeine occasionally is great. So I also, I just read this article on your website, ETH wallets will disrupt e-commerce. And there's this line that I really liked. What if your Nike card can talk to your Barry's Bootcamp card and achievements at Barry's unlock merch or discounts at Nike? What if buying tickets to an event gets you wallet access into an app to socialize with other people who have tickets in their wallet? I mean, that's the future, man. Do you think that's coming soon? And what about with HVMN and everything?

Yeah, I'm really excited for that. My background initially is actually computer science. I studied computer science in undergrad at Stanford and so did my co-founder. That's where we met. We got into nutrition by way of biohacking. So we're big engineers, computer science guys, got really into intermittent fasting. I became a semi-pro marathoner, run 6-minute miles for the marathon. I'm just a big biohacker about it. I've been doing like continuous glucose monitor and a lot of different Quantified Self approaches to my training and just overall health and performance coming. I come from a computer science background and have gotten into nutrition, into keytones that way, but computer science is really at my heart. And we're mainly an online business. We are— this year we've been getting into stores, but our bread and butter has always been e-commerce, e-commerce, e-commerce. So I'm really excited about everything that's going on. And you've got companies like Novel that are making tools to bridge, you know, make it really easy plugins for Shopify stores like ours to be able to mint their own NFTs or use NFTs for Token-gated experiences. Appreciate you reading that article. Yeah, it's on my site. And I think the whole insight there is that everything used to be its own walled garden. Nike was its own walled garden. Barry's Bootcamp is its own walled garden. Every site that you go to on the internet, you set up a new account and there's a walled garden. There's a Facebook walled garden, there's the Google walled garden. And you know, the Facebook walled garden tries to be really big walled garden where like you can log in with Facebook on all these different sites, but it's still a walled garden. Like not every website in the world takes Facebook and not everyone wants to work with Facebook. And it's still, at the end of the day, it's a proprietary walled garden. The whole insight with wallets, ETH wallets, wallets in general is that like, I own my wallet. Like it is my address. I own bdm.eth. It's my initials backwards. .eth. I own it, and I can then go and log into Nike and log into Facebook, log into whatever, in principle, and it's me, and it's my spot on the overall Ethereum ledger, which is a totally public, unwalled public garden, and I can show everyone, "Hey, I own this spot in the public garden," and I can take that Nike, I can have a relationship with Nike, that can read and write from my garden plot. And then Barry's Bootcamp can read and write from my garden plot. And then so can any other service I want to, but I own it at the end of the day. It's me, it's mine. And that's a huge insight. I, I think that we are just like barely, barely scratching the surface. I think we have some really cool monkey JPEGs and some really cool like alpha beta level concepts of apps that are getting their way, but it's like, it's like trying to guess It's like trying to predict Uber and Snapchat in like 1992. Like there's this giant, like HTTP and SMTP, like core bones of the browser and core bones of email, like just got invented. Like you can't even foresee, like, I don't care. Like, I think the smartest people in this space, like the Chris Dixons of the space are like humble to say, Mark Andreessen, who invented Netscape, the first web browser, are humble to say, like, we don't even know. Like, we are in the infrastructure development mode. We can't even imagine. Like, if it's— if you think you can imagine Uber and Snapchat and Google Maps in 1992, like, I, like, maybe I— like, you're crazy. Like, me— like, you're Leonardo da Vinci. Like, good for you. Go make a trillion dollars. Like, go invent it. Go build it.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I, I think it's so true with, with the wallets and, um, thinking about like, say, uh, you know, I, I'm in the FWB City Club or whatever, and say, you know, FWB partnered with Supreme or Nike. So when you go on their website, if you own 5 FWB tokens, you get like a discount or, or you get access to exclusive merch. Like, I think that that's obviously coming. And I know Shopify— I didn't realize your store was on Shopify, but yeah, I know they have that plugin as well. Also, just speaking to that private garden versus public public garden metaphor. I love that. That idea of public goods really makes sense in my head now. Ethereum wallet, the blockchain is in itself a public good. We all get to build on top of it. And then the second thing as well, by the time this podcast comes out a week from Saturday, Nansen, the blockchain analytics company, they are releasing a Web3 messaging app. So this is currently news under embargo, But I'm telling here because they partnered with, you know, Bored Apes and Moonbirds and Hashmasks and all these other projects to give access to their app. So it's like almost beta users. You give everyone who owns this JPEG or owns this amount of tokens, like it's very cool.

It's super cool. And it changes the whole game where You don't even have to have permission. I, on my web store, can make a cool widget, a cool addition of my product that I only sell to people who own a Bored Ape, and I don't have to go ask Bored Ape for permission. It's like I can just say, hey, the old analogy would be like, hey, anyone with a Soho House membership or anyone with a Y&K membership or anyone who's got a Hawaii driver's license can come on use this service, except you don't have to ask for permission, and the verification is like, is, is flawless. Like, it's, you don't— it's on the blockchain. It's kind of hard to prove someone lives, has a Hawaii driver's license, or that their YMCA card is legit. But it's super cool, and it lets you jumpstart a lot of activities. Like, you can say, hey, for this new project that we're launching, it's only members of FWB, or it's only one of my favorite groups is Club CPG. They have a token-gated Telegram chat where, where we can all, you know, trade notes with each other in there. And it's, it's cool that you don't have to ask permission on, like, you don't have to go ask Bored Apes for permission to make like, hey, discount, you know, Bored Apes special this weekend, discount, everyone gets half off, like prove that you own the NFT. I think it's really cool. Um, it's, it's definitely a new model for the way that we interact as citizens on the internet.

Yeah. Um, let's talk Steepage because I've talked to people who are in it. Um, and if I was to like invest some more money into Web3, like that would be one of the things that I would drop. Like that, it seems really interesting. I personally, like I've run a little Shopify store when I was younger. Like I love the idea of like, you know, if I wanted to like create a new clothing brand and do it, you know, Web3 merch and then partner with some, you know, FWB or whoever, like that would be my plan, you know? But yeah, what's CPG been like and has it been helpful?

Yeah, it's been great. It's been a great resource for people to trade know-how in Web3, as well as general business operations in general, and physical goods, and fundraising, and all that stuff. And it's cool. It reminds me of certain— there's nothing quite like it. I was going to say it reminds me of when you first get into college and you have the Facebook group of everyone in your college, but it's like that, but way way cooler. And, and it's, and it's interesting that the dynamic where people can kind of opt in, they can buy or sell their pass. Like, it's, it's like self-selecting and it's kind of always dynamic in that way. And it, it's cool that people— is this a virtual community? It's, it very much is that like Soho House Or, um, I've never been a part of these, but there's like, you know, CEO or mentorship networks where you're like friends with a bunch of other CEOs. It just feels like the cool version of that. It's like the people that— it's only worth being in there if you're like doing something. Like, I wouldn't just like buy it and camp on it. It's worth being in there if you're like actively transacting and building partnerships and doing collaborations and all that stuff. And so as a result, everyone who's in there is doing all those things. So it's this very like virtuous feedback loop where like the people who are buying in are in full hustle mode, like apex of their career, and they want to work with everyone else. And like everyone else is in there is doing stuff. And so it's got this energy to it that you don't see other places. And I've been like, you know, in and around Web3 for a while and it's, I don't want to like overly I definitely don't want to like talk ill of any other communities. What I think is cool about Club CPG is like, it was that way from the start. I think FWB has similar genetic code to it where it was built from the start. These are, these are groups that are like built from their start with a community purpose in mind. I think there's some other projects that started, they almost like luck-balled their way into something where it's like, hey, this, our JPEG is really popular. Let's, let's like back calculate how to do something with all of the buzz that we're seeing off of this. And sometimes they're doing some— sometimes those JPEG communities are like doing extremely well on it, and sometimes they're not because it like wasn't in their founding DNA. I think I like these groups. Another one that I like a lot is, is LynxDAO. Like, they're cool because like from the get-go they're like, we are going to buy, build a golf club. I'm not a big golfer, but I've at all. Like, I'm— I like barely have golf. I've gone like mini golfing a few times, um, but I'm in Lynx DAO because I just like that they're mission-driven. I think it's a very cool proof of concept where, yeah, sure, they're golf, but there's going to be a Lynx DAO for everything, and there's no reason why not like pre-selling membership into this community that has a specific charter that's going to go and do something specific. It just makes a lot of sense to me. Like, we're going to go build an airline and anyone who holds this NFT gets like first class on the airline. Like there's gonna be things like the next Coachella, the next Burning Man, like it's gonna be NFT first. And I think it's really exciting to see that. And it's exciting to have front row seats to everything going on there.

No, 100%. Um, yeah, I, there's no good community right now for Web3 writers. Um, there's been like a couple that have popped up occasionally, Um, I guess, right? Yeah, I guess Mirror. Yeah, Mirror is one, and then Scribe is, is one. I like, um, maybe I just need to dip my hands in them more, dip my toes or whatever, but I want to, I want to see one where people are writing things together. Um, Cabin does that a bit. Um, I don't know, I don't know. Uh, but back to, uh, advertising and branding in general, When you guys were like thinking about the new, new generation Keto IQ, like how, how are you guys thinking about branding? What, like, what do you guys think about, like, I know as a writer, sometimes I'm like, what, what emotion do I wanna evoke with like a word? Does that, is that like what you guys think about when branding sometimes?

Yeah. One of the first forks in the road you have with branding is do you wanna go literal or abstract poetic? Because you can go, you know, Zillow, Expedia, like you make up words and that they have a certain phonetic sound to them that maybe feel a certain way. And then you load a certain sentiment into that brand word. You can go with words that already have a dictionary meaning that already have some sense of feeling to it. Chipotle, right? It's already a, it's That's already a word for like spicy Mexican food. So you can, you can go with brand names that already look— Nike was, you know, God or God-like creature that was really fast. So like you can go with words that already have a preloaded meaning. You can make up a meaning or you can go super duper literal, 5-Hour Energy, Ketone IQ, and, and some— there's pluses and minuses to both, right? From the get-go, no one knows what the hell Zillow is or what Nike is exactly. You have to build that up over time versus the more literal ones. Muscle Milk, like the more literal ones, they have a head start from the, from the, from the get-go because you're saying what your product literally does. Apartmentlist.com does more than Zillow.com. From the get-go, but the more poetic ones, especially if you invented a word, they, they give you a lot more freedom and potentially scope to go and make that into whatever you want it to be. It's easier to expand. Like apartment list, it's kind of weird. It can't really be a condo list or a house list or office sales list. It's called apartment versus Zillow can like broaden out, right? Nike, they're not just called Like trackshoes.com, they're Nike. And so they can go into basketball shoes and golf shoes and everything, because what is Nike? It's this more poetic sense. So I think that's one of the big forks in the road. And there's like forks in the road down from there. I can say, I can say for us, when we named Ketone IQ, we were batting around with a lot of stuff. Like the way that one, one word that we liked on the more poetic side was Ember, like the way that, the way like a fire, like the ember is at like the core of the fire. And sometimes when you go camping and you have that campfire, sometimes in the morning, like the embers are still like glowing at the, at the core, core of the ashes. Like the embers seem to never go out. They're just burning red hot. And that's, that kind of felt the way that ketones feel. And so we liked that in a poetic sense, but what we didn't like about it is that With ketones, a lot, like a lot of people don't know what they are yet. And so with Ember, it's like, it requires a couple of levels of questions. Like what's Ember? Oh, it has ketones in it. Okay. What's a ketone? Like it requires a couple of like questions. And then it's possible that the user gets bored by the time they ask a second, third question. Like you're, you're making me work too hard for this versus going more literal. Hey, Ketone IQ. Okay. I get the sense it's IQ. It's like switching something on in my brain. What's a ketone? It leads more directly into the conversation by being more literal. We can't— it's always gotta have ketones in it though. Like it's always got, it's very like pegged to that. And we lose, we lose maybe like the mystique around calling it something like an Ember, but then we may, you know, We really want to go brand strategy. There's other surface areas to play with, like the visual design, photography, photographic language. It's a lot else you can do to like add mystique and sex appeal and everything. Like the iPhone, pretty literal, right? And, but they've done a lot with that positioning.

So yeah, no, that's, that's really cool. So I just talked to John, um, Swatnam, uh, yesterday or two days ago, and he's gonna be This week's podcast, so a week from a week ago, uh, I don't even know how to— the future backwards. It— the podcast will air on Saturday. But anyways, what we were talking about was the idea of mental real estate. So he's a Hollywood screenwriter, has movies with HBO and Netflix and all that stuff. And, and so when you're naming a project, like, do you want to go with something like Anchorman where people already like have it in their head? He's like, why don't you just choose that? It's easy. The Hangover. Everybody knows what to expect. It's like, you know, for a product like a movie is, or like Keto IQ is, it makes sense. Like, you know, maybe for a brand, you know, something a little more intriguing or mystique. But yeah, it gave me that idea of mental real estate. I had never heard that before, but it makes so much sense. Like, as soon as you say it.

Yeah. Do you want to jump into something where you already inherit some meaning, good, bad, and ugly around, around that word. Like Anchorman already has some meaning. Maybe some people met an Anchorman that they didn't like. And when your movie's called Anchorman, they're gonna think of that person, right? Like whatever connotations or dictionary meaning, or, you know, reading between the lines in the meaning, it's, you're gonna get that for, for good, bad, ugly. Facebook. Okay. Like that's the chronicle of all of the people that I went to college with. All in one book. Okay. I kind of get that. This is Facebook. The Facebook is the online version of that. Like it's an easy copy paste, but yeah, it comes with all of the, all the, all the weirdnesses of that, you know, quote unquote real estate. Like if the real estate has, has termites or like the view is blocked or whatever, like you, you bring all that with you too, but you also get the benefits of what people know that real estate to be. I think inventing your own word is a good idea. It really, really depends on the context. If I was to say it depends, it depends how much education you need to do. Like how much, how much do you need to import meaning already with the name versus your product already being kind of simple and intuitive? And then you can maybe afford to be more poetic on the naming because once people get to your product, it's going to be really obvious.

Fair, fair. So I wrote this article last week called From Newspaper Ads to Airdrops, and it was basically just talking about how like airdrops are a form of advertising. You just send out, you know, whatever, how many, a million OP tokens for Optimism or whatever, and it gets the word around very, very quickly. You know, I like, I know it's a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, but do I really know what that means? Am I really going to use it again? Maybe not. Probably not. Like, I know what it means, but probably not going to use it. And I still got $350, which is cool. And then I talking about it now, I talked about it last week because I got free money. Like, that's amazing. Um, and it's, it's like the new paid acquisition. So wondering, um, Wondering what you think of that and, and where that's going. Uh, I'm, I'm doing research right now on what the actual ROI of airdrops is, like, for revenue, long-term users, because I'm not sure, I'm not sure if it's actually good or not.

So yeah, I have, I have two thoughts on it. One is, one is, what's, what is the distribution cost on it? What is the gas fees on it, you know, doing all those airdrops? What is the actual cost and how does that compare to any other cost of distribution, taking out ads on the side of buses or taking out Google Ads or YouTube ads or any of the online, offline ways to go and get a million eyeballs, just what is the cost there? And then what is that present day on Ethereum, which is arguably dominant blockchain in Web3 versus where is it going to be in 3, 5, 10 years? Is it going to be Ethereum? Is it going to be other other blockchains, uh, is it going to be at a spot where it says— my sense is like the gas is more expensive than mailing a postcard, but, uh, that part could change. My, my second question or consideration around it is on the user side, there's— if, if it really does take off towards like dirt cheap to do airdrops, it's going to start looking like email where It's super cheap to send an email. And then you have, you know, most people are using something like Gmail or Yahoo or whatever that has a built-in spam filter. And you don't even see, like the average user doesn't, you don't even see how much is getting filtered, but it's like 90% of the email that's coming to you is getting filtered out as spam. And there's super advanced machine learning that is looking at a ton of signals to filter out what's spam. And even then, like some amount of spam still gets through. You can mark it as spam. That will help. The Google algorithm learn what you consider spam, and it will share some of that across how it assesses spam in everyone's inbox. But to me, it's gonna— it seems like whether this is on the OpenSea type of level, something that your wallet plugs into, or whether it's within your wallet itself, seems like if, if the first consideration I mentioned is solved, like if, if cost truly comes down to where like everyone from Nike to Nigerian princes that are trying to scam you, like if everyone is sending you airdrops all the freaking time, then like the second thing also would need to come true too, which is some level of spam filtering. I'm just curious, yeah, curious what that looks like, if it's going to happen at the Rainbow Wallet, MetaMask level, or is it at the OpenSea level, or is it something else? What's going to make it so that it doesn't just become a spam fest?

Yeah, that's been one of the big major questions. And I listened to Vitalik talk about sort of just the same idea with Soulbound tokens, but how do you make sure you're not getting sent tokens that you can't get rid of? And there's no like, there's no great way right now from what I understand, but definitely something to focus on in the future. Um, I also, back, back to branding, uh, branding and Web3. Are there any, uh, brands off the top of your head, uh, that you think, uh, just do a spectacular job?

I would say just a shout out to another startup. I know FWB collaborated with Taika. They make a really cool, like beverage with caffeine and other adaptogens. And I thought that was a really cool collaboration, like good, good partnership between like community Web3 know-how and physical CPG. Nike obviously doing interesting stuff with the acquisition of Artifact. Other Other brands doing interesting stuff. Coachella did some interesting things where they sold lifetime passes. I actually think they could have done more there, but I think it's an interesting step in the right direction. I do think that ticketing as NFTs is going to make a lot of sense. Like if you're— Burning Man, every year, I've been to Burning Man 4 times, and every year it's a whole clusterfuck to get a ticket and you have to trade it on, you have to find someone on Craigslist and like all this, and they use like Eventbrite and it's really, it always gets, the server goes down on sales day and all this stuff. And it just seems like a really good application of NFTs where you should be able to buy and sell your ticket. I'm really excited for ticketing. I think even just stuff like airline tickets, like if there's an easy secondary market to be able to resell your ticket or buy a secondary ticket from someone else, But like in a, in a trusted way, with keyword being trust. Like, I don't want to buy someone else's airplane ticket off of Craigslist. It's like, I don't, I don't trust that. Like, Craigslist does not add trust. Facebook Marketplace does not add, add trust. It's fine if you're buying a piece of furniture, but if you're buying something with like more value that's like, you know, easily spoofable, if you just print out a different airplane ticket or Burning Man ticket or Coachella ticket That seems like a really cool application. So I'm excited to see events do it. Um, there's another company that the name doesn't come to mind, but it— they're doing it around, around shoes, sneaker collecting, where you get to— so you can own the shoe, but you don't ever have— but they like will keep it for you. You can always like burn the NFT and get the shoe and then like send the shoe back and like make it an NFT. It's cool. Cause like a lot of sneakerheads, they're just in it for the fun of the game or for like collection value. And they don't necessarily need to have all the sneakers in their own garage. I think there's a lot of cleverness going on. I'm like crossing the, crossing the seams between offline brands to online Web3 representation.

Fair. Yeah. I, I agree completely. Um, there's, there's so much neat collaboration going on that I, I mean, I work for the Defiant. I love their branding. Like our designer, Pob, is just incredible. Every, every single art piece, uh, is like this weird glitchy bluish green for the most part. I just think it's, it's cool. Um, Optimism is pretty, pretty solid just off the top of my head.

Um, yeah, but what's going on? I mean, I just, on that note, like The art, it seems like a new, yeah, whole school of art. Like Defiant is obviously amazing, but it seems like there's a whole renaissance. Like if you're an art historian looking back on now, it's like, yeah, it's right. Like, yeah.

Yeah. I don't know. It's just a whole new color wave of just something to do with Figma. I think the simplistic colors and, and whatever, it feels like everybody's using the same color wave in, in different forms, almost like. Rainbow Wallet and a bunch of other ones, Boys Club, like they're all doing like pastels and it's not like neon, but it's more just pastelly.

And there's something, there's something like lo-fi about it. It's like, I think we spent the early 2000s, like just Photoshopping, Instagram filtering things until they're deep fried. And making things like super duper perfect to a point where like everyone knows that absolutely everything can be Photoshopped and made absolutely perfect, right? You could take like a picture of me right now in my office and like Photoshop me to be on a beach in the Bahamas and make it look perfect. If you have like a few hours in Photoshop and you know what you're doing, you can do literally anything and make it look perfect. And I think culturally there's a counter swing against that where Like Gen Z thinks millennials are fucking tools because millennials are like putting this perfect Instagram filter. Oh my God. Like brunch with whatever. It's like, no one cares. And what's, what's popular now is it's like the TikToks that are like super lo-fi. You don't, you don't even put a filter on it. It's just very like thrown together. And I think art in general, the aesthetic in general is that same feel where it's like, it's like not cool to try. Like, we all know that you can super try and make something look amazing. It's more on the conceptual level. I feel like art and design in general is going more conceptual and like playful. And like, you want to flex on some cleverness or some concept level. You still like, sometimes there's still little like, I won't say it all looks crappy because people like designers, artists will still like flex a really like high level of technical skill, but that it's like, it's self-aware and it's not trying to take itself too seriously. It just seems like people are having a lot of fun. Like, it's, it's, it's a lot more, it feels a lot more countercultural and dynamic than how like earlier Web2 started to feel, where like every Instagram photo was just starting like converge to just pixel perfect, but really boring. And now it's just like, hey, there's no like one aesthetic. There's a lot of different ways.

Yeah.

People can just have fun with it.

Honestly, I think it's, it's also just to do with like, there's so many micro communities on the internet at this point. And like tech Twitter is, is one very large micro community, but then within tech Twitter and startup Twitter, there's like smaller micro-communities, like you're very deep in the health one. I'm, you know, very deep in the Web3 one and ours converge as well, but like there's just so many fricking micro-communities. And also the people who are like designing are like all just young for the most part. Yeah. And, and goofy. And like when you're young, like I know me, like when I was young and 16, 17, I made a lot of money selling stickers, Grateful Dead stickers, and like just screwing around making tie-dye shit. 'Cause I was like being young and stupid and like, I don't know, now if I was to design stickers or something, I probably wouldn't be as creative as I was when I was 17. And I don't know, exploring life for the first time and going hiking and falling in love for the first, like, you know, when you're 17 and just, I don't know. And some of these founders are just so damn young, but yeah, that's my rant on that. But yeah, while it just popped in something in my head. That I wanted to bring up as well, which is just Web3 and health. Where, like, where do you think the overlap is? Is, is like play-to-earn and move-to-earn, is that like a viable thing? Or I feel like there's research that shows that it's not like good mentally. So I don't know, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, there's, there's something there. At the same time, I haven't seen it yet. And this is coming from someone like, I, you know, I run 7, 8 miles a day. I'm a big marathon runner. That's, that's me when I'm like not super training. When I actually get in a full marathon training mode, I'm running more than that, like twice a day and everything. So this is coming from someone who runs a lot, does— I do triathlons and all that. So I— and I'm into Web3, so I see the potential around a move to earn, but I haven't seen the execution yet. That is, that is stellar. And I think it's a matter of time and I think it might be what we were talking about later, where it might have to come from a couple of different players, all working together where it's like Nike is giving you rewards based on your Strava score or Strava. The big running app where you track your, track your workouts, where, where it might be hard for one company to build the entire stack of like building your running shoe and building the app that's tracking it, or the wearable that's tracking it, and building the points reward structure around it, and building the prize that you want to earn off of that. But what Web3 enables is that it doesn't have to be one company that does it all. That's the thing is that In Web2, you need to go to MyFitnessPal, and MyFitnessPal needs to like build that whole stack or do some, you know, business development partnerships with XYZ other companies, and all that stuff takes time. A lot of times it doesn't work that well. Like, it, it's really hard to build the full— any kind of full stack. But what Web3 enables is just very smooth, permissionless connecting— like, Web3 is the public database that everyone has an API into. So the dream UX here, the user experience here, might be stitching across several different apps that you're using your own ETH wallet to log into, and you're getting— you're doing some tracking with your Oura Ring or with your Whoop, and then your favorite apparel brand is giving you rewards based on how many Oura Ring points you have. And Oura and your favorite running brand, whatever, like they don't even need to be talking to each other. That's, I think why things are gonna move quickly is that the, just the permissionless protocol layer enables these invisible partnerships to take place. Where like the companies don't even have to know each other. You can just get rewards based on what's showing up in your wallet from some other app.

Yeah. Yeah. Completely agree. And then last question for you. Do you ever experiment with coding still? Like you were a comp sci major at Stanford. Do you hop back in that stuff?

I wish I did it more, honestly. Super busy. I've hired amazing people who, who run our tech stack. And I, I get pulled around a lot of different areas. It's, it's, it's my dream, honestly. Like people want to like retire and hang out on a fishing boat or something. Like my dream is to, I'm not in a hurry. I'm really excited by everything going on with ketones and there's a lot of work to do out in front of us. But, but one, one dream I have is to You know, if and when I ever would like sell— we sell the company or go public or pass the torch to another— like, you know, founders don't need to run the company forever, forever. Um, Jeff Bezos doesn't run Amazon anymore, right? There's— at some point, my dream is like to sit down and like full stack build apps again. I just— it's just like not the best use of my time right now because I can pay someone to run it. So I can pay someone who can spend like all day every day being amazing at coding. And then like, there's all the rest of everything. There's like, we're doing research grants with the US military. We have a supply chain with production stuff. We're running a sales process, getting in all these like gyms and fitness studios. I'm getting, I'm going on podcasts. I'm like, I'm everywhere. It's hard for me to get into like dedicated, you know, I just had a kid like a few months ago, a baby daughter. Like, it's hard for me to get like blocks of flow state time to code. But to me, it's like so pure and like fun. It's like, I feel like, you know, Picasso in the studio. I'm not Picasso, but I feel like, like the way I imagine that Mozart felt like writing out his sheet music. Like, I love just like that sitting down one-on-one building something end to end. But to answer your question, yeah, I don't, I don't do enough of it. I don't think it's the best like ROI for me in my position, what my company does for me to be like actively coding a lot, but it's a dream I have. Yeah. To get back more in it. Cause it is a lot of fun.

No, I love that. I feel that, man. Like for writing longer pieces, like, you know, when I was in college, I wrote like a novella and like a script and stuff. Cause I just had free time. Like I could sit down for 3, 4 hours and not like, I wasn't writing articles every single day and like, you know, putting stuff out and I miss that. I miss like working on longer pieces. So I have some things planned that hopefully I'll be able to spend more time on when I can. So yeah.

No regrets. I see it as a positive of like, I do think that I do think about my business, like a giant computer program with like different methods. And what is the API between the accounting department and the supply chain department and then the product? Team, like what are the APIs, what are the connections, what are the methods, what is, what is like the error catching around it. I love having a computer science background. I think it's super helpful to be able to think about the world in that, in that way. And like, like any problem in computer science can be solved with like decomposing or adding a layer of abstraction. And like these terms and these, these mental models apply to a supply chain. They apply to org chart. They apply to. All these things in business. So in a way, I feel like I use a lot of the concepts, like the core systems thinking concepts every day. And like, I mean, with you too, it's like you're writing this body of work and you're gaining a following and then everything in life has chapters to it. Like whenever this chapter is over and you're in the next chapter and you write your next novella or screenplay, like, you have— you're gonna have 100,000 followers and be like a known person in the— like, an even more well-known person in the tech world and Web3 world. You have this whole audience for it. So everything in due time.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's exactly how it is, man. One day at a time. Just, uh, just keep on putting shit out there, you know? But man, it's, it's been great talking. I, I really appreciate your time. I'm gonna go cook some dinner with my girlfriend. And, uh, but it was great talking.

Amazing. Yeah. Thanks for the time, Jason Levin. It's a lot of fun.

All right. Thank you.