Ketones + Fasting: What Is The PRE-DIABETIC Impact? Exploring Ancient Fuel That Reverses Aging

We launched the world's first ketone drink and then the Department of Defense was our first customer. We got a six million dollar contract. We're all pre diabetic, right? We're all pre hearing loss. Like at some age you live long enough, like stuff stops working. Where are you at on that spectrum? Do you want that to happen when you're 100? Do you want it to happen when you're 50?

Like, and how do we slow that aging process or that natural atrophy process of cells?

When you have ketones and protein in your system at the same time, it helps the muscle protein synthesis happen quicker. Ketones, ketogenic diet actually being able to rescue brain function in Alzheimer's patients and reverse Alzheimer's.

How did that come about? This $6 million contract with DOD.

Man.

Michael, I'm so excited to do this podcast. Obviously, we're going to talk about ketones today, but there's so much more in the conversation than just ketones. This is a mental construct for people where they look at ketones and they're like, oh, well, I've heard it in the media. And, you know, there might be some weight loss benefits, there's some fat loss benefits, but something that I've been feeling into in preparation for this interview. You know, you're here this weekend for ketocon and a lot of people there, they probably have a primary goal of like shedding fat. But there's also this energy component that the body naturally produces called ketones. Right? There's exogenous and endogenous. So this is something that's not really new. Like this, one of the most ancient systems in the entire body that happens naturally. But you found a way with HBMN to hack this. So has modernity, has modernity robbed us of our natural ability to create ketones?

This is a great, great kickoff question. Thanks for having me, Josh. I, I love the framing here. A lot of why we're talking about ketones, a lot of why people at ketocon are excited about ketones, is that your body makes ketones by turning fat into ketones. So the dominant narrative over the last decade around ketogenic diet, bulletproof coffee, keto, has been, hey, let's get your body to burn fat and turn it into ketones. And it's been very much this weight loss framing of it. However, your body has always made ketones for 300,000 years ancient. Josh. On the savannah, there's no Fruit Loops. On the savannah, your body isn't having a ton of carbs. So naturally you are making ketones. Whether ancient caveman Josh is trying to get a six pack or not. Like, regardless, your body's supposed to be making ketones, supposed to be fueling on ketones. We are not supposed to be glucose dominant eating processed sugar all the time. We're supposed to be spending more time with elevated ketone levels. We have not lost the ability. It's still in our genetic code. People can still fast. They can go low carb. Even if you haven't done it, you might have a little bit of a growing pain getting off of the standard American diet into a lower carb, more active type of lifestyle where you don't always have elevated glucose constantly, you can still get that back. So I don't want to say that we've lost that ability. We still have that ability, but the modern context has made it very hard.

Why is the modern context made it so hard? Is it the sedentary lifestyle, the nutrition, the soil that's void of nutrients? Like, what is it really about modernity that has maybe not 100% robbed us of our ability to naturally produce ketones, but what is it maybe about the sleep wake cycles or circadian rhythm or just the feeding windows we have? Like, can we go a little deeper into that? You know, modernity steals this ability from us because of what.

Yeah, you mentioned a few of the top items there where basically we've been pushed sugars, processed carbohydrates by some of the best marketers in the world for the last hundred, couple hundred years. And it's very addicting. And there's not really a check on the other side of it like cigarettes at this point, a lot of people know that it's illegal bad. Like, even if you smoke, like you, you know, like Surgeon General's warning. Like, there's a counter narrative. Yes, the counter narrative on sugar. Right now it still feels like you're a crazy tinfoil hat person if you say things like, hey, 90% of what's in a 711 is bad for you. And like 90% of what's inside the inner aisles in a grocery store is not good shop. The perimeter. You sound like fringe still. But that's not fringe. Like 711 is fringe. Like, like Hostess Nabisco, like entire multi billion dollar. Those should be fringe. You're not like high fructose corn syrup should be fringe. We shouldn't be debating over is it okay to eat an egg or not while we're slamming frosted flakes. Eggs good, like steak, animal parts that we've been eating for millennia good, modern, weird sugar, glucose, insulin spiking stuff. That's what should be weird.

Yeah.

So a lot of it is, I would say, on the social framing of things and, and that there hasn't been a counter narrative. Like it was just the 4th of July and there was the like hot dog eating contest and the accompanying. The hot dog eating contest, there's a lemonade chugging contest and you're literally chugging 400 grams of sugar. And like we're having, we're like watching the gladiator Olympics of who can get diabetes the quickest. And there's no like, can you imagine a cigarette smoking contest in 2022? No, like, you can't. Right. But we're still in that world where it's like, it's okay, it's good, it's fine to have this lemonade chugging contest. And there's not, there's not really a counter narrative. We're here talking about it, but it's, it's not in the mainstream the way that like anti smoking is in the mainstream.

I think you're generous with the 90% is deleterious in 7 11. I think it's more like 98, 99% I think about in my own life, you know, I used to be £280. So I had a huge journey with food. And I didn't know this at a young age, but this is something we can unpack. So many people that consume these hydrogenated oils, soybean, canola, wheat, gluten, all the things that are known inflammatory compounds for the human body for some people, and I would even be suffice to say that it's probably more and more people as time goes on. Just because the gut brain barrier and everything that's happening with our physiology dependent on the food that we eat. So from that lens, that understanding of if we don't know what's in the food we're eating, how does that truly impact our metabolism? And how can ketones maybe not heal our leaky gut, but how can ketones help to circumvent some of these really deleterious things, harmful things that happen because of our lifestyle?

Your body is always using energy. The things that you're doing exercise, thinking any activity that your muscles or your brain are doing is using energy and you're eating something to supply that. And it's, you know, let thy food be, thy medicine is. Is that quote everyone loves and like. But like, food isn't necessarily medicine. It's like you could be shoveling dirty coal into your system or you could be shoveling really clean fuel into your system. So not all calories are the same. Some of it as you mentioned is like terrible if you're just chugging margarine, seed oils and sugar like which again like not to beat a dead horse here like 90, 98 of what's in processed foods is like some combination of like very quick acting carbs and seed oils and like weird unnatural stuff that's just like bad fuel. So you're doing stuff throughout your day and you're fueling it with something, but you might be fueling it with something that is causing a ton of metabolic stress, reactive oxygen species and it's super addicting, it makes you spike and crash. It doesn't have any characteristics of that you would want if you actually thought first principles on the, on the fuel that you're providing yourself. There's a whole spectrum here, ketones. What we have with ketone IQ is the best ketone drink where it's just a straight ketone. Like what we have here is a ketone shot that you can just drink. And it's a super clean pure fuel of energy. Cuz ketones don't create, react, they don't create oxidative stress the way that carbohydrates do. They cross the blood brain barrier, they're really efficient, they turn into ATP using less oxygen. They have all these benefits, they're very clean fuel. I don't want to say this like the only thing someone should eat, but it's like if it's like 5 or 10 of your calories in a day are coming from like this very pure form of fuel. And then the other things that you're eating are you know, avocados and organic eggs and meat and vegetables and fruits. If the entire category of food that you're eating is more on that end of the spectrum, you have a lot better outcomes like day to day and then chronically over time you're going to have a lot better outcomes. The standard pattern is like you feed your body dirty the dirtiest coal that has dirtiest, most addicting coal for decades until you get a problem and then you get prescribed pharmaceuticals and it's just like it's not a good loop that we're in.

You bring up a great point because I think like the inputs are going to equal really without any difference in coefficiency the output. In other words, if I'm eating 2000 calories of Twinkies then my output is might be 2000 calories of energy but the way that I feel in order to take in and put out is going to be totally different than if I was eating ketones and high quality proteins and really good fats and some carbohydrates, which we'll talk about. What is the max benefit? I think there's a lot of stuff in the media about ketones and you guys were first on scene. I mean, I remember I was telling you before we sat down for the recording, I remember when you came out with Nootropics and this is before one of our partners, Neurohacker. So I'm like, okay. Not only have you transitioned the business at HVMN from Nootropics to now doing the ketone iq. You have a huge bandwidth of research and development and time that y' all have spent as a company to figure out how do we optimize this human machine? You know, we live in this machine, we live in this meat suit. What is the max benefit of ketones? Specifically ketone iq.

We've, you're right, we've covered a lot of ground over time. We used to be many years. 2014, I, my co founder and I started Nutribox. We were the first nootropics company to go on Shark Tank. We were in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Vice, Bloomberg, all that. We put Nootropics on the map, did our thing there, made a really awesome platform and then from there got more broadly interested in intermittent fasting, metabolic health in general. I got into marathoning. I'm a semi Pro Marathoner. Run 6 minute miles for the marathon. Do a lot of triathlons without stopping. Yeah, yeah, just roll, baby.

So less than three hours, is that the math? Less than three hours to run a marathon.

My personal record is 2:42, so I get after it.

Okay, we'll talk about that later, but keep, keep going. This, this optimum max benefit of the ketones.

Yeah, yeah, just drawing out the story a little. Being really biohacker curious about optimization and performance. Curious first on Nootropics and then broadening out, being interested in metabolism and these conversations around fasting, marathoning. You know, bulletproof coffee and keto diet were trending really hard in like 2017, 2018. And you're doing all these things whether it's fasting or running or, or bulletproof coffee to induce your body to make ketones. And ketones are amazing and they create this, this really nice sense of fuel for your body. Okay, so, so why can't I go to the store and just buy a ketone Then like, we're doing all. We're jumping through all these hoops to get our ketone levels up. I can go to the store and I can buy collagen, I can buy cbd, I can buy whey protein. Why isn't a ketone available as a nutritional primitive, just a pure ketone? And pulling at that thread is what led us to. We launched the first ketone ester drink in 2017. Our first big customer on that was the DOD Special Operations Command. And getting into some of the benefits there. So, like, why are. Why are special operators interested in ketones? They're really interested in it as a metabolic super fuel where basically ketones are really efficient. They can turn into ATP. ATP is your cellular currency. People remember little high school, the Krebs cycle. Yeah, exactly. Krebs cycle. Mitochondria, the power plant of the cell.

I cheated. I looked at my neighbor's test. I'm sorry. Well, you weren't my strong suit. You probably 70% of us, you remember the. In high school.

Yeah. You remember the Krebs cycle. So ATP is energy currency of your cell. There's different metabolic substrates that turn into ATP, right? You have fatty acids, you have glucose, you have ketones, you have BCAAs. So amino acids can turn into energy. So you have metabolic substrates that can turn into ATP. And different ones do it with different levels of efficiency, cause different amounts of oxidative stress as they do so, and will require different amounts of oxygen.

And oxidative stress for people that don't know is essentially, oxygen is corrosive. If you cut an apple, it'll turn brown. Certain things that come into the system, they tax the system more as substrates.

Yeah, exactly. So you can think about it like your. Your metabolism is an engine, and if you're feeling fueling it with dirtier fuel, you're gonna have more gunk buildup. Versus other types of fuel are going to not cause gunk buildup and. Or even clean up the gunk. So reactive oxygen species or free radicals, that's considered. It's almost synonymous with aging. Where. Like what. What is aging like, why do some people age faster or slower? It's. It has to do with how much gunk buildup. Like we all have 24 hours in the day. Why do some people seem old at age 37 and other people seem snappy and wy at age 67? It's due to a lot of things, including, you know, mobility and attitude. Right. There's. There's more, but if we just zoom in on metabolism it's that it's like how much oxidative stress are you creating over that area under the curve of your decades on the planet and not.

Just how many trips to 7 11. I mean, that's a lot of oxidative stress. But there's other things too, right? Like psychoneuroimmunology, where my thoughts cause my body stress. There's environmental stress, there's emf, and there's so much in this.

Yeah.

But the max benefit of the ketone, specifically the ketone iq, is that this is a substrate, from what I understand from you, that causes way less oxidative stress. In comparison to what?

In comparison to glucose in particular. So like sugars, which is, you know, any, any carbohydrate that you're eating is going to get broken down into sugar, blood glucose, and that, that the ketones are less oxidative, least stressful than that.

Well, no wonder why the military was interested. Yeah, I mean, they have to keep their, their men and women on the front line incredibly healthy. How did that come about, this six million dollar contract with DOD. Was that 2017 when that happened?

Yeah.

How did that even happen? Like, share what you can.

Yeah.

Backroom meetings you probably can't share. But I mean, if the military is interested in something from a nutritional perspective, there's got to be a huge Runway for something like that.

Yeah. It's this notion of preservation of the force where if you have it, it costs a million dollars to train a Navy seal. Right. Because you have years of training and it's specialized training and not everyone makes it. So those, you know, the people that don't make it, you're basically growing an entire field of apples and like five of the apple trees actually make it. You still have to pay for planting all of the apple trees, so maybe.

Still training as wild.

It's wild. It's years long. It's super specialized training, super specialized weapon systems and everything about it is dialed in. So it's super expensive. So if you can extend that length of performance, then it's better for the bottom line. It's better. Like you have, if you have an, someone who's that skilled of an operator be able to extend their time in the field for five years, 10 years, and that's a major, major plus. So there's, there's two different, at least two different ways to look at it. One is preservation of the force, like how long, how much, how can you increase longevity of operator? And then the other is acute, which is like, okay, in the, in the moment. In the mission, today is go time. How do we, how do we crush the day today and do it again tomorrow? Like more acute. Yeah. And so, and I always say we're all doing metabolism all the time. It affects everything. So it affects you today, it affects your long term outcomes, it affects you if you're a special operator. Also it affects you if you're an old person dealing with dementia or a young person who wants to cut weight. Like we're all doing metabolism. It's like we're all breathing, we're all drinking water, we're all doing metabolism all the time. So it's not like knowing about ketones or knowing about metabolism. It shouldn't be this niche thing that only like biohackers care about. It's like, yeah, it's, do you care about breathing? Do you care about hydration? Like we're all doing it all the time.

We definitely care about breathing and hydration. For people that don't know, I'm a breathwork practitioner facilitator. We have, you know, over a thousand students in the breathe program. And so breath is how we detoxify. But our food also is what creates toxins, especially the water that we drink and the air that we breathe. So there's nothing really in the conversation that I found in the research about ketone IQ or ketones for detoxification. Right. I think this is more an energy and a mental cognition conversation and also a metabolism and a fat burning conversation. Is there any detoxification benefits of the ketone iq?

I would just say that it's, it's a way to replace things that are toxifying. Right. Where like if, if you're having it instead of as an afternoon pick me up. If you're having it instead of a Kit Kat bar then, or another monster drink. Right.

People with these 64 ounce monsters. Yeah, I'm like, you know what sugar is in there? And then of course they have the sugar free. But we can't just mash the gas pedal down. And this is the direction of the conversation is like there's one thing because we talked about inputs and outputs. If I smash the gas pedal down every day, Michael, you know, eventually there's going to be a cost, whether it's disease or increased oxidative stress or like gut microbiome. I mean the body's an organism. Everything connects and there's homeostasis in the middle. Instead of mashing the gas pedal down with another shot of coffee or more caffeine, what does it look like to take ketones specifically ketone iq on a daily basis or a weekly basis? Like how do we support the organism so that it does what it does? Amazing. What does that look like on a daily, weekly basis instead of caffeine?

Yeah.

Pounding caffeine.

Yeah, I, I have a love hate relationship with caffeine. I'm sure a lot of people do. But specific, specific.

Raising my hand.

Yeah, specifically what I mean there is that, is that caffeine works. Obviously it's an adenosine blocker. Adenosine is your sleep hormone. So it blocks a signal that makes you feel sleepy and it works. You have it any time of day. It's going to make you feel more alert. But caffeine doesn't have any calories in it. Maybe that's good or bad, but let's just talk about the fact that it has no calories in it. So caffeine stimulates you, it activates parts of your brain. It creates a brain energy demand. It like, it, it's like it super glues the switch to. On whether that, whether that switch should be on or not. It like does it. So I don't know if you got to go save a baby, drink some caffeine, right? Like if, if you have some mission critical stuff or like I'm not trying to necessarily attack people having their one cup of coffee a day, but like, yeah, in general, it's like if you're super gluing that switch on, okay, you're creating this brain and, and body energy demand. Where's that energy actually coming from? Like you're, you're, it's like you're pulling the string on the lawnmower. You're like revving it. But like what gas is inside of the lawnmower? Like you can pull that, you can rev it up all day, but what's the actual gas? And if that gas is coming from while I'm drinking a monster that has 42 grams of sugar or coke, it's coming from something with, with sugar or it's making me hungry. Like a lot of people get zippy on caffeine and then as they start to crash, they get really hangry hungry and then they go to, they go pop the hostess donuts, they eat chips, whatever. Like once you create that brain energy demand or body energy demand with the caffeine, what are you supplying it with? And so the conversation is really about that fuel. Like what are you, what are you using to fuel your metabolism through that process? Like caffeine is not this cheat code. Like you're, you're super gluing the switch on, but the fuel still needs to come from somewhere. It's gonna. You're. Maybe you're burning your own body fat, maybe you're eating junk food, maybe you're really eating really clean. But like, caffeine is not a complete solution. I would say if you stack caffeine with high quality nutrition and you don't overdo it on the caffeine, it can be, it can be great. It's really effective. It works. A lot of people enjoy the ritual. It's great. But if you're doing it like to duct tape the switch on because like your fundamental fuel in life is not good.

Yeah.

Then that's where you're saying it's like, well, hey, like you're duct taping your rocket engine on and shit's starting to rattle. And the bolt in sector three is just flew off and outer space. Duct tape. Exactly. It's like more caffeine on it.

So there's a. I mean, that is so power. I've never. That's a wonderful analogy and I love that because even a child can understand that if you push the gas pedal down, you have to have fuel in the tank. And if there's no fuel in the tank and you keep putting caffeine instead of nutrition and ketones, eventually there's going to be a tertiary cost. There's going to be some cost where it's like, okay, well maybe your transmission fails or your engine, right. The piston rings start wearing. We're an engine too. So when you say, like, there's going to be bolts rattling and the spaceship is going to fall apart, what does that look like on a metabolic level for us? If we start doing this energy wasting and we're not giving the body proper fuel from nutrients and ketones, like, what does that actually look like?

Yeah, well, one of the key things to look at for metabolic health is insulin resistance, where when you eat sugar in a normal, healthy adult, you eat sugar, your pancreas releases insulin. So that sugar enters your bloodstream, causes an elevated blood glucose, your pancreas releases insulin, that insulin addresses the glucose. Okay, so you eat something, blood sugar goes up, blood insulin goes up, and then the insulin takes care of the glucose. So it either activates the glucose into your cells immediately and you use it, or it packs it away as fat. If you spike your glucose really high, then you need a lot of insulin to address it. If you spike your glucose really high five times a day, then you need a lot, a lot of insulin. If you do it five times a day, every day for a decade, two decades, you throwing a lot of insulin. And then what starts happening is that insulin doesn't work. You get. It's the same way if you listen to loud music every day, like constantly overly loud music on your headphones, you'd expect to experience hearing loss after X decades. Or even less.

When I was a kid, I used to lay on speakers at concerts. So foolish. And now I have tinnitus.

Yeah, in.

In my right ear. So there's a cost.

Just like Lars from Metallica.

Oh my God, I can't even imagine these rock stars, they probably have crazy tinnitus. Yeah, okay, but keep going because I love your analogy.

So, so you can think about tinnitus of the metabolism, which is that if you've constantly barraged your. Your metabolism, your metabolic system of glucose, it. You get insulin resistance. And then what? And then, okay, now I eat glucose and I. The insulin doesn't work, so I feel tired like I just ate. But that fuel isn't activating. Like the insulin isn't working to activate it. So I got to eat even more, you see? So you end up even more addicted. It's like, okay, well, it's like. It's like heroin. It's like, okay, well, one hit doesn't work anymore. Like, I gotta try. I have two, three. And then you do more. And then it cascades and you get into this loop and that's diabe. In insulin sense, insulin resistance is diabetes. And one of the big misnomers about diabetes is that we, we pathologize it until like either this disease state where either you have it or you don't, but just like hearing loss, like, we all are on somewhere on the spectrum. Like, I'm 33. I probably don't hear quite as well as I did when I was 16. I probably have like some degradation in my hearing. Probably have some degradation in insulin sensitivity. I don't have diabetes. But like, we're on a spectrum. We're all pre diabetic, right? We're all pre hearing loss. Like at some age you live long enough, like stuff stops working. Like your joints are going to stop working, your eyesight's gonna diminish, your hearing's gonna diminish, your metabolism, your insulin resistance is gonna. Is. Is gonna increase. So where are you at on that spectrum? Do you want that to happen when you're 100? Do you want it to happen when you're 50? Like, how are your systems tracking as you age? Are you treading lightly? Are you treading rough on the systems.

That you have and how do we slow that aging process or that natural atrophy process of cells? Some people say you can measure it accurately with the telomeres. I've also heard that people use HRV to look into this. But I'm really curious for myself. I'm 42 and it doesn't matter what age you are. I mean, you could be 18 years old, all the way up to in your 80s, 90s or 100. The ketones are still going to benefit you. Because, correct me if I'm wrong, it feels like when you're explaining this, I can see that there's a letting off on the gas pedal and there's actual fuel to coast the vehicle. In other words, we're not just using no calories here. There's some calories in the product. And so you're not just getting that spike. And then insulin delivery. What is it about ketones that give us the sustainable fuel source in comparison to proteins, fats, carbs?

Yeah, so ketones are metabolized irrespective of insulin. They're non insulin dependent. So they don't, they do not require that insulin. So if you have elevated ketones, your body will just metabolize it. And you don't need insulin for that. It will just cross the blood brain barrier, it will go into your neurons, it will turn into ATP, regardless of how insulin resistant you are or not. So it's really interesting when you have, so when you have, if you look at a disease like Alzheimer's, a lot of people consider Alzheimer's to be actually a metabolic disease, not a, like, yes, it's a brain disease, but it's, it's mainly a, you could consider it type 3 diabetes, where it mainly has to do with metabolic dysfunction of the neurons due to things like insulin resistance. And this researcher named Steven Cun, he's done a lot of research around ketones, ketogenic diet, around actually being able to rescue brain function in Alzheimer's patients and reverse the Alzheimer's. Where basically when you have insulin resistance in your brain, the glucose doesn't work right. The insulin's not firing, so the glucose doesn't work. So you're, you're cells are starved, which kind of creates this vicious feedback cycle where they're starved, so then there's further degradation because they're not functioning properly. But if, but ketones can sneak in there and can provide energy and can basically re. Like rewater this withering garden and bring it back to life to where it's not just it like slows the onset of cognitive decline, but it actually can reverse it. You're basically going through this different pathway, this non insulin dependent metabolism and you're able to provide energy to these cells and you're able to reverse this damage that has been done by decades of, of, you know, barraging with over too much sugar.

That's my question. What creates insulin resistance in the brain?

It's likely the same thing that creates it everywhere else in the body.

Okay.

Where it is, there's, there's massive correlation between Alzheimer's and diabetes. There's a lot of research done on this where, where they are considered to be linked and, or actually just the same where insulin resistance is kind of is global trait inside of your body. Like you, it's not like you have insulin resistance only in your big toe. It's like you have insulin resistance anywhere. You have it everywhere. So insulin resistance of the brain is all, of course it's going to track with your overall global body. Insulin resistance.

Yeah. So whether it's the brain or our organs or our blood or our arteries or our heart, the insulin resistance is a global piece in a human body. It's not like it just picks one part. And so obviously we've talked a little bit about what creates that when you mentioned the insulin and the pancreas. So we're super clear on that. And obviously there's an emotional side of that, like what makes people make healthy choices. You know, the interest in ketones, I think for so many people. And it was for me when I first tried it, I was like, okay, so I don't actually have to eat food to get fuel. I can eat this. Which is technically still a food, but it's a different type of food in that conversation of foods. Do you pair foods, specific foods with the ketones or is it best to just have the ketone solo?

It depends what you're going for. A lot of the way that people in our community use it is first thing in the day with your coffee. You can have, if you have like bulletproof or MCT coffee, that's great. If you're having other, you know, Omega 3 supplements, like whatever your morning ritual is, you're. If you're having mushroom coffee or athletic greens or whatever you're having that, that, that kind of witches brew that, that people have in the morning, that ketones would be part of that. That's like the main way that people use it. Just morning wake up energy rise. And then you can also have it throughout the day. As your. If you need an energy, pick me up. You can have it with food, you can have it without food. A big way that people actually like to pair it with. So in the morning a lot of times people will have it, you know, intermittent fasting or like fasting mimicking where you're not, you're not having any carbs or sugar, where you're having your bulletproof coffee in your, your, your stack. One way that people have it with food a lot is athletes will have it with, with food. Cause they'll have it with their standard pre workout or they'll have it with their standard post workout where it basically helps to improve the efficacy of your pre or post workout. So like if you have it with protein after working out, it increases muscle protein synthesis, right? So you work out, you like tear up your muscles with the intent of tearing it up so that they rebuild stronger. That's how, that's, that's the one on one on muscle building. And you need to eat more protein in order to do that. When you have ketones and protein in your system at the same time, it helps the muscle protein synthesis happen quicker.

Oh my God. That's a great visual. I remember from my personal training days the actin and myosin hooks in the sarcomere, they would tear. That creates essentially like the sore feeling that we have. And so what you're talking about is the ketone IQ goes in there with the nutrient, with the protein and it'll actually allow more of that to be shuttled in.

Yeah. Yes. It. One way to think about it is that normally you have ketones present when you are in like endurance mode. There your endurance mode. Hyper efficient fuel for when like if you're running or you're fasting or you just aren't, you aren't eating a lot of like sugar. So when you drink a ketone, it, it snaps your body into endurance mode, like hyper efficient mode. And one way to think about it is your body is essentially like, okay, anything, any protein I eat right now, like I need that to really stick. I'm in like run survive mode. I need that protein to stick. So I'm gonna like it. You accelerate the rate at which it's sticking to your muscles.

That's incredible because I think about the delivery of nutrients and we had Barton Scott from upgraded formulas on the show and we talked about like the absorption of minerals is also dependent on the nutrients you eat. That's a rabbit hole that we don't need to go down. But it's exciting to Me to think, going to be spending money on supplements every month. Why not use the supplements that actually work and possibly can circumvent some of the things that I've done to hurt my body? I mean, that's really the conversation I'm interested in. And then there's a juxtaposition on the other side where I'm like, okay, if the physio, if the human body is really good at, in a starvation mode. When I was in the caveman days, like you mentioned in the Sahara, in the forest, and I didn't eat for five days and my body's naturally producing ketones from the inside out, then is there any negative feedback loop that's created when I start doing exogenous ketones? In other words, will I, will I become dependent on this? Will this somehow hurt my natural ketosis production?

You won't become dependent on it. It is true that if you are creating ketones and then you go and eat anything, whether it's a ketone or an avocado, like if your body is happily creating endogenous ketones, if you're fasting, if you go eat an avocad or a piece of bacon or anything that's gonna slow down your body's creation of ketones from its own fat. So, so in that sense, like, you are interrupting your own ketone production whenever you eat anything. But I'd rather interrupt it if you're gonna, I mean, you gotta eat something. Yeah, right.

Unless you're a breatharian. Have you seen these people?

I've heard. What is your take on breatharian? Is this real? Like, is that it can't be real?

I kind of call it. But I don't know. I, I, I, I reserve the right to change my opinion, get new results or get new information.

They're just photosynthesizing out here. Like, what are they doing?

They open their mouth. There was a documentary on Netflix and it was this guy that had like 10 wives. Really weird dude. But he would, like, drink the sun. You know, he would drink the sun, he would breathe. And he's like, I don't need to eat. Who knows? Most of us 99.9999 exponential don't have that lifestyle. They're busy like you and I, that we have full lives. I'm a parent and, you know, I need energy for my son and my family and my life and my business and a podcast. So I'm always interested in, like, how do this machine, this meat suit that, I mean, which is really like, you know, hvmn it's like the core goal, this optimization of the human species. Like, think about health via modern nutrition. Well, modern nutrition means it's always going to change, it's always going to update, it's always going to be refreshed and renewed. What has surprised you the most in maybe your own life to start, and then also in customer success stories or special operations? What has surprised you the most about your own personal journey with ketones?

Yeah, yeah. I love the way that you framed it. Modern nutrition is always changing and thinking about that in a historical context. Like ancient, ancient human didn't even have fire. And then we, we were just eating meat and whatever was around and that stuff took a long time to digest. And then we started applying what was then modern nutrition, which was, hey, cook the meat. And when you cook your meat, you're helping to break it down before it enters your body. So you can think of fire is like, it's pre digesting the meat. It's an. Fire is an awesome technology to apply to meat because you're able to basically have that same nutritional content but much quicker. So you're spending less calories to access the calories that are inside of the meat. So Instead of spending 100 calories to digest X amount of meat, you're spending 50 calories to digest X amount of meat. And so you're not spending all day like sitting around digesting. You're able to like go and do things and build civilization. Make great libraries, right? Like do the, do the stuff of, of human society. And it's continued on since then where we've applied new modern technologies to food. So I am not like dogmatically probably technology or anti technology when it comes to food. My answer is it always depends where, like there's certain technologies are clearly awesome, there's other technologies clearly bad, and there's a lot that's in the middle. So a lot of people will have the slice of like, oh, well, I don't want to touch anything that's modern. It's like, well, where do you draw the line? Like, are you only eating raw meat? Like, are you only eating, like, where do you draw the line? What do you consider like, like modern enough or too modern or whatever? And it depends. It's like, I would say like a hydroponically grown, healthy spinach is probably great. And if it can be more sustainable and no pesticides, great modern technology at its finest. If you can have a modern stove, like a lot of people like to. There's some science that like, if you, if you cook a meat and then you eat it immediately, that it's got better. Do you know about this, like the purine content? Yeah. That like even having it sit out for like X minutes is, is bad if you eat it like right. Like, like the way a caveman would eat meat right over a fire. That it's, it's like, it's better for you.

Making me hungry.

Yeah, no, you gotta go. Yeah, grab. Anyway, so if you do that and you, I don't know, using some like modern electronics to do that, like it's, it's a modern application that's probably good, just like your hydroponic spinach. But if you're, if you were talking about modern, like modern, I don't know, margarine or I'm not a big fan of like oat milks or stuff like that that are just basically hyper concentrated sugar and seed oils. Like if you, it depends on what the modern application actually is. I don't consider like pro or myself to be pro or anti modern. I don't think that's a way to think about it. It's like modern, like what, what type of modern? It just depends.

Or what is the most wisdom that we can pull from the wellness that's created from modern science, modern nutrition. In other words, just because something's modern doesn't mean it's wise, doesn't mean it's healthy, doesn't mean it's good for us. But it could be.

It could be.

It reminds me of Lao Tzu's the Middle Way.

Yeah.

You know, the middle way is something that's talked about forever. I mean the most ancient masters and also hopefully the intelligent contemporaries, they all talk about this middle path. How does, how does ketone IQ apply to this middle path?

Yeah, that's, that's where we're going is, is that you have better or worse applications of technology and even, even zooming out from food, it's like, do you fly in airplanes? Do you use the Internet? Like those I would say are categorically good technologies. There's maybe bad ways to use those technologies. But it's like if you don't like technology, I would ask again, where do you draw the line? What's your middle way? Like most people, maybe not our sun breather friend guy, but like most people are like flying in airplanes and using the Internet. And it's like, okay, well how are you selecting what to be smart about? I, I have a very, I, I've thought about this a lot and my answer on it is People like this aspect of Lindy, which is that like, the longer something's been around, generally the better it is. And so I don't touch new things.

It's called Lindy.

Yeah.

What is that?

It's the, it's this, this idea that actually came from early 20th century in, in New York in like the Broadway scene, where basically there's this idea that the longer that something has already been on Broadway, the more likely it will like, continue to be on Broadway. If a show started last week, not a lot of confidence is going to be around in six months. But if it's been on Broadway already for four years, it's probably going to be around for another decade. Like it. That, that longevity is a predictor. So like humans have been eating meat forever. Humans have been eating like if it's something that we've been walking around barefoot forever.

Right.

If there's something we've been doing forever, it's probably going to also last forever. But something new, I don't know, like it's not tested, it's more brittle. I don't know. We invented margarine and then now margarine is terrible for you. Like it's, it's, it's got that like, angle too. I think it's, I think it's a good general idea, but it's incomplete. Right. Because it's like, well, humans have been doing. We've been eating meat a lot longer than we've been riding in airplanes. But I think airplanes are still fine even though they've only been around for 100 years.

There's ways to biohack airplanes so they don't mess you up too much.

Right, right. That's actually a whole interesting subtopic around that, like with how to biohack a good flight. And what I think makes sense is like being Lindy is good, but it's incomplete. And I think what makes sense is like being Lindy to the principle of it, where again, if you're using hydroponics, like modern hyper efficient lights in your closet and whatever, to grow a spinach, spinach itself is Lindy. So you're using the best of modern technology to do something that in its essence is Lindy. But even like hydroponics and light bulbs like that didn't exist a hundred years ago or a hundred thousand years ago. Yeah. So like it's not Lindy, but it is Lindy. I would consider it Lindy. Like that hydroponic spinach leaf ketone. I would consider the same way where it's the. It's the most modern application of tech, but it's doing something to elevate your ketone levels. Where like ancient humans walked around with way higher ketone levels. Because, because, yeah, there was no.

Because they were eating less. They, they naturally fasted because they weren't able to hunt or seasonality or whatever it is. And that's a really big one. So I want to give everyone like the relaxation here. Just because you use a ketone iq, which is coming from outside the body, it's not going to do anything. As far as dependency inside of the body. That was a really big question in our community. People were like, well if I start taking it, like will I get hooked on. I'm like, well you probably get hooked on the way you feel, but you're not going to get physiologically hooked on ketones. Ketone iq.

It's, it's more of a primer that it will prime you to these other good behaviors. Like it will, it will. If you replace. If instead of having like a Starbucks frappuccino, you have, it's like sugar bomb with your caffeine. If you have sugar, if you have caffeine, no sugar, maybe some MCTs and a shot of ketones, then you'll be in a really good ramp to start your day. And you, you won't be hungry hangry and you won't have that like carb addiction. You, you'll start your day by not getting on that carb addicted hamster wheel. And you'll have that much of an easier time for lunch having something reasonable. Having salmon salad with. I'm not like allergic to carbs, but like a salmon salad with like a small piece of bread. And not like hammering the carbs all day and chasing like that hamster wheel that like glucose spike, insulin spike that I. You're not creating a dependency. You're more like priming your pump, priming your behaviors towards doing the right things throughout the rest of the day.

How many people do you think start their day with a donut and coffee? If you had to guess percentage wise in America, I bet you it's 25 to 30. Yeah, I'm just guessing. It's got to be like the research on this, but.

Yeah. Do you feel like it's, it's got to be 25 or like, especially if you expand it broadly to like just like broader unhealthy for you. Carbs? Yeah, I mean it depends how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. Because like, like Kellogg's, the cereal company. If you go down the rabbit hole on like Kellogg's and why it was started, they were doing population control. The, the idea that Kellogg had was that like he was explicit about it, that this cereal, by having people eat a lot of carbs, it will placate the population. He was really religious guy and he saw that he knew that carbs would reduce people's energy and libido and thought that was a good thing.

Why did he think that was a good thing in your opinion?

His interpretation of religion was that like everyone is running around masturbating and screwing too much.

Really. To suppress sexual energy.

Yeah.

The breakfast cereals.

Yeah. And now here we are 100 years later, like Cheerios. Like, like healthy start to your day. And I don't know if Cheerios is technically Post or Kellogg's. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same.

And they're the same height, that's the kids can reach at the grocery store and they have fun characters and million dollars of marketing spent on it. It's not a rabbit hole to me. It's actually a pretty clear well where I can see the bottom of it. And look, there's companies out there like HVMN that are trying to solve what has been really the most harmful thing to our population and that is the things that we ingest. Air, water, food. So to me it's like I get pretty passionate about it. I noticed earlier I could feel your heart kind of expand. I could feel you get more passionate about the diabetes and about the insulin resistance in the brain. And I wonder, on a personal note, and you even spoke up right now, I can feel you kind of expand with the serial conversation. On a personal note, what does this mean to you to bring ketones to the world? And what do you feel in your heart? This is actually solving for the planet, for the world.

There should be more technologists that are pointing in the right direction, not the wrong direction. Right. You can make technology that's really addicting, that makes you a lot of money, that builds a big business that goes public that like that's been done, you can do it. Like again, technology is a, it's a lever, it's a multiplying force.

It's also a double edged sword.

Right? Right where it's like, is it, is it being, is it going towards good or towards bad? Like you can use mass manufacturing for amazing things, you can use it to manufacturer addicting crap. Right? Like it depends what you are, what you're doing with it. So what I want to do, I think there's, there's two levels of it, which is like directly with ketones, I want to, I want ketones to be as accessible as CBD or collagen or whey protein or omega 3s, like any of these other nutritional primitives that are just available that people can have as a tool in their toolkit. And then on the kind of meta level it's hopefully to inspire, build a platform for other people to do the same. To make, to be optimistic technologists like make things that are addicting people or in power, I should say like empowering people into better lifestyle habits. Like empowering people like people get, get empowered or addicted to doing 10,000 steps a day. Like I think that the best mind should be doing that. Like try to get more people addicted to 10,000 steps a day or like a real. Or walking around barefoot or something healthy and good rather than getting people addicted to like clicking on Facebook ads. And I think a lot of times there's a allure of great minds to go just make money kind of agnostic of what you're doing. But I would say like to the extent that you can, I get like we all got to have a job, got it, gotta survive. But like to the extent that you can bend reality towards where you want it to be. I think that's when I think about like what is a meaningful life. It's like take the signals that you think are good in the world and amplify them as much as possible, as much as you can.

When you say bend reality, do you mean be conscious of the thoughts that one thinks and the reality that those thoughts create or how would you define that?

That's a very deep question. Okay, I would say yes to all of that. Bend reality in the sense of make the world a better place. Make more of the signal that you think is good. What do you think is beautiful or good in the world and go and make more of that. And I think that by controlling your own thoughts on a day to day basis and how you think about the world and how you manifest what's going on around you, that you can make that happen at the larger scale. I, I'm not like the, the total manifestation crystals guy and I don't want to, I don't want to like offend anyone either. Here.

It's all good. I just wear this because it helps me ground.

Yeah, no, like I, But I,000% agree believe in manifesting. Like I don't care if you're super into crystals or you're not like you could be the most, least spiritual person in the world and if you still write down your goals every day and spend half an hour breathing and thinking about it, like regardless of if you think breath work is cool or crystals are cool or whatever, if you like or if you do think it's cool, like if you spend that time saying, you know, I will one day own a bike and you just like think about it every day and you decompose it into parts and like, you will manifest a damn bike. Like, you will meet someone who has a bike, you will meet someone who has a job that you can work at so you can save up to buy a bike. You will like, it will happen like whatever. And bike is small, but like whatever your goal is, if you think about it every day and you bend your thoughts towards it and you, you talk about it and you put it out there into the world. Like, I don't care if you're spiritual, not spiritual, like it's gonna work. So it's almost like a non spiritual.

No, I get it.

Person's guide to manifesting. Like, even if you're the least spiritual person, you should still try and manifest.

You're looking through spectacles. Maybe one lens is spiritual, one lens is scientific. They're gonna get you the same result. And you know, it's crazy. I haven't ever. This is why I love podcasting. I haven't ever thought about this. So if I'm supporting the physical self and my biology is optimized and I have like pristine homeostasis and everything's clicking and all the synergies working properly, then my mind is going to be less a slave to my physiology. In other words, my mind won't be distracted. So then I'm probably percentage wise, 20, 40, 50, who knows? I'm much more susceptible to being able to sit and meditate and do my breath work if I'm not distracted by the lack of homeostasis in my physical self. That is wild to consider because doing things like ketones for my physical self can help me have less of an allostatic load. Which then brings me to, I'm able to manifest more. I'm able to have the life that I want to have. And it's not too far fetched. I mean, I'm in real time feeling this with you. Have you thought about that?

Yeah. Where we're talking about ketones, but what we're really talking about is energy. And why are we even talking about energy? Like what are you trying to go and do yeah. And so it's. Yeah, we can talk about ketones in like the. The nerdy biochemistry sense of what, ATP, oxidative, stress, whatever. But like it's. It's just energy and what are we doing with that energy? And if you have better energy in your life, what are you gonna then go and do it? You'd rather have like more of a fuller cup of good energy every day. And then it's up to, you know, choose your own adventure of what you're gonna go and do with that. But like, you can't. You can only do so much if your energy is less good. But yeah, it's like the whole why of like, I don't care about ketones because I care about acetyl CoA, Krebs cycle, this that like I, I do. But like, I mainly care about it as like, you know, like the, the.

Computer scientist and you loves the science.

Yeah.

But the soul in you is. Is speaking right now.

Yeah, it's like, it's like it's. You don't get it in a. Are you building a bridge because you're in love with like bricks and iron, or are you building a bridge because you're in love with the idea of like travel and spanning the gap and like, like empowering civilization to grow and expand? Right. Maybe it's both. Right. Like, you should probably like learn to love a brick in a steel beam if you're going to build bridges. But. But all like, it can't end there. It's like, where. What is the overall vision on it? So that's. That's what has always been that. That would be. I would say how I came into ketones is like, okay, well, it started more in like energy and like, how do you do what you want to do in life? What are the fundamental. What are the bricks and steel that help you to do that? Okay. It's metabolism. Okay. Ketones. That's how I came into just my personal journey coming into the space. Yeah.

And I think about all the marathons. A sub. A sub three hour marathon.

Yeah.

Is that correct? First of all, whoa. I ran a Marathon in 2009 and I was like, never again.

I always say that. And then like a few weeks later.

I'm like, but my body's more like the fast twitch fibers and I'm more of like a stockier frame.

Are you like Viking or something? Or like you have like maybe somewhere?

I did my 23andMe. I'm half Sicilian and then English and German and all the other stuff. So. So I My curiosity for you is like, all right, here's a guy who was incredibly intelligent, still is, goes to Stanford computer science co, founds the company with one of his friends and colleagues, and then starts to be a marathoner. Like, with all your life experience, what do you see the greatest impact of ketones for you on an emotional, physical level? With that background that I just discussed.

For me personally, it's been, it's been a few of those. It's been, it's been, I mean, marathoning. Yeah. It's awesome to have just direct access to like, my own fuel, my own products I make. That's, that's pretty cool. It's been interesting to. You like to have all the pieces in your life work in concert with each other. It's not great if your work is in disagreement with your personal life or vice versa. And on the flip side, if your personal life, it's like, I like to spend time outdoors. I like to be active, do something active every day, run a lot. There's a few different things I could touch with that, but metabolism is definitely at the top of the list. And it's what I've chosen to focus on where it's nice to have those pieces in agreement with each other. Where, like, I feel like my whole life is like ketone machine. Where, like, I'm making it at work and then I'm also my main lifestyle and behavioral things I do running and eating low carb and talking about it and spreading the word, it's all around, like, personally living a more metabolically healthy life.

That right there, I mean, you know, everybody's here with us on wellness wisdom. And that right there, what you just dropped was so wise, truly, because I think about how many. It doesn't have to be in health and wellness could be in any category. Any passion in life. If my life outside of my work, outside of my career, or my purpose is not in alignment, is not connected, there's going to be friction, there's going to be disease, there's going to be all kinds of stuff that you might chase symptomology on for years or decades. And it's because just quite simply, the energy is out of alignment.

Yeah.

The energy's not alignment.

Yeah, yeah. And this is something I learned very tacitly with marathoning. So I, I, I love marathoning. It's a sickness I have where I just addicted to it. So I don't, I don't necessarily recommend everyone go run a marathon or whatever. I think running, I think humans are born to run. I think 26.2 is a long distance and you should do that if and only if you're like, yeah, I can.

Run a quarter mile. Yeah, I was born to run a 0.2 quarter mile.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I mean you did, Proxy. Like a lot of people haven't done like a full marathon. You did it.

So I wanted to see what it was all about.

Yeah.

But I digress. Go. Go ahead.

Yeah. Yeah. Basically. Basically the way that I learned to conquer my own personal marathon was it's not like you get a thousand times tougher as you train and run a sub three hour marathon. What happens is you figure out ways to make it easier so you don't become this like. It's not like I can just like for a lot of people, I think running six minute miles for a marathon would be very painful. It's not like I have like an insane pain tolerance. It's that I got to a spot where six minute miles was able to feel easy to me. And so it's back to that point of like going in flow with it if you're constantly grappling with it. And like I need to run so fast and I need, I'm a wuss and I need to feel, I need, I need to just like, like bite through the pain. Just grin and bear it. That's not gonna work. Like there's no one has a pain threshold so high where they can just like, like you need to chill out. You need to figure out. So what I, what I always. My model on it for anyone who's into running is like, instead of trying to run faster, don't try to run the same speed, whatever that is for you. If it's 9 minute mile, if it's a 12 minute mile, if it's 7 minute, whatever. Instead of trying to run faster, try to run the exact same speed that you're already comfortable with, but just easier. Can you relax one thing? Can you relax your face? Can you relax your shoulders? Can you relax your breathing? Can you breathe through your nose? Can you lean forward a little bit so that you're naturally falling into the next step a little bit more easily? Can you keep your feet a little bit lighter, a little bit better rhythm? So it's not this glomp, glomp, glomp. It's a little bit more like you feel like a little bit more like a nice cricket or something, just rolling can at and do the same speed. And then like butter, you will melt into going faster. So don't try to run faster, try to Run easier and then let faster will just happen. And then, and then. Okay, I, I was doing that at a nine minute mile. Okay. Now I can kind of do eight and a half minute mile. Okay, do the same thing again. Wash, rinse, repeat. So like you're never like oh, I run eight and a half minute miles, let me go eight minute mile today. It's like no, like get, just make eight and a half minute mile. Make it the easiest thing like call your mom on the phone. Like make it make eight and a half, like super easy. And then you will just flow and one day you'll go for a run and be like, okay, I'm doing eight minute miles or 8:15, whatever. You'll take like that next step and it will, you just, the door will present itself and you will walk through it and then you wash, rinse, repeat. So it's not this grappling and it goes back to what you were saying. That, that, that idea of if the, if you're like jamming the puzzle pieces together.

Yeah.

Like you're not going to solve the puzzle. Like the puzzle pieces need to come together and join properly.

We have seasons in life. So you know, as a CEO and co founder of a huge company, like there's times where you have to buckle down and you will have to mash puzzle pieces together. Right. Maybe write emails at midnight. I don't know. I mean there's tons of stuff that you've had to do that, that maybe puts you in that state, but then you bring yourself back. It's like this moving target. You do things in a season and then you come back to middle. But what do you think it is from a mental construct or from a narrative either societal or parental or academic that makes people get stuck in mashing the gas pedal? I think about David Goggins, right? Some people love him. And I've mentioned this ad nauseum. I actually don't think he's good for people. I think he's good for people for like a tiny week or maybe a day or maybe a. But mashing that gas pedal and like you said, going harder. Come on pussy, do your shit. We just don't like, we don't need that type of narrative because it's gonna exhaust the system, it's gonna decrease longevity, it's gonna. I mean the guy's had four surgeries on his heart. Like there's something off here, right? Can you speak to this?

Yeah, yeah. I love that you said it and love David Goggins. David, if you're listening Would love to, love to catch up and debate and all that. He'd probably be like, you're a pussy. Stay hard. Yeah, stay hard, Josh. But it's, but he's not the fastest marathoner in the world. Like the fastest marathon in the world. Way, way faster than him.

Yeah.

It's Elliot Kipchoge, who is extremely smooth. And when you watch him run, he doesn't look like he's trying and he's not peeing blood and he's not having a heart attack and he's like, smooth as shit and he's smiling and he talks about the beauty of the run and he's like a monk runner. Goggins is a monk in his own right. And I agree that those are two different energies to throw at it. And, and I agree. And I, I've used that as an example before. And again, I, I respect the energy that Goggins has and you need to be able to draw on that as a.

Temporarily.

Yeah.

But not sustainably.

Yes. And I think, I think to the extent that he represents a tent pole of that for people, but I think he has his own demons where if, because I think if you're constantly in that mode, I don't know if that's the way I think you. Sometimes it's go time. Sometimes you gotta lift the car, save the baby. Like you gotta, like, you gotta, you gotta pull the all nighter, whatever. Like pull the fundraising round together. Like, make the key higher, fly red eye flight to New York, whatever. Like you do have to have Go juice. Like you gotta be ready to go, but you can't be in this constant state of goji. Or I should say that that's not like when I don't. When Kobe Bryant would talk, he would just say, think it was so smooth. It's like no matter how the game goes today, win it or lose it, I'm gonna be out there practicing in the gym at 5:30 tomorrow. I, I'm here to play as best I can. I'm here to win. Win or lose though, the process is the process. And he was just so smooth about it. And he's not like punishing himself for losing the game. Oh, I gotta do a million three free throws. And he's not like overly rewarding himself for winning the game. It's just like, he just flows. Okay. Like, we're practicing again tomorrow. Yeah. And it's like, and finding that system of, of smoothness where you're, you're not always squeezing the go juice, but you have some reserve tank of it. Like, I don't want to go totally like soft on it either. Like you need that get up and go sometimes, but it needs to be like, like you can't always. It's like if you're playing Madden or something, you can't always be on like turbo mode. Like the turbo meter runs out. You can't constantly turbo yourself.

I haven't talked about video games in a long time. That was a cool analogy.

I don't know why I said that. I don't play that much these days, but I played a lot as a kid.

No, it's great. I remember Nintendo. So. Yeah, and that goes for any of us, like whatever we're doing. And I loved how you answered that because at the core of the question I was thinking and feeling, how do people get stuck in the mental loop of having to go, go, go, go. That burns them out and really is a symptom of a sick society, I believe. And I'm curious how you feel about this. In Silicon Valley and with a lot of probably the investor meetings you've had and a lot of people that maybe are out of alignment, how have you become more aware of this narrative in business, the go, go, go, burn the candle at both ends narrative. And how have you been emotionally intelligent to remove yourself from that narrative?

Yeah, I've noticed a lot of people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a week. And we put a lot of pressure on ourselves that we gotta like build Rome in a day today and go, go, go. And like we're always ambitious or we have some feelings of inferiority or whatever that fuel is. Ideally it's ambition and not like a chasing of filling a hole in your soul. Ideally it's like a coming from a good place of wanting to build and self actualize and whatever is driving you, it's making you want to do a lot. But if you wake up and you're like, you start in a spot of like, okay, today I need to do it all, you're gonna be in a bad place because like you're already behind and you're gonna set yourself, you're setting the standard you're not gonna be able to achieve and then like 8, 9, 10, it's gonna roll around and like you didn't build Rome today and you're still clicking on stuff and it's firing off emails and drinking a ninth cup of coffee and then can't, not sleeping. You wake up tomorrow, oh shit, I'm not as Successful as I want to be distracted. Add trying to keep all the plates spinning. Like more, more coffee. Like that's not the way. It's good to be ambitious, but it's just like what I was saying with like with running a marathon where it's not easy to run a sub three hour marathon, but the way to do it is, is you give yourself months and months of training and every day of training is like seven or eight out of ten. Some days are ten out of ten, some days are four out of ten. But you know you're doing a lot of like seven out of ten days. It's like not impossible. You know, you still got to do it, but you got to show up every single day and do. You're not building Rome. You're not, you're not running the train. I can tell you the training for running a three hour marathon is not to try and run a three hour marathon every damn day until you get it. Yeah, there's a lot more like grace to it day by day. And so I would say you take the ambition and just draw out the timeline further. Like whatever you're trying to do, like, okay, give yourself like twice as much time to do it and then actually go and do it and like break it into pieces and then do a little thing, do like less than you think on a daily basis. Give yourself more time and then like do not give up on the process of the brick by brick every day and do not do other stuff. Do not get distracted by side quests. Like if you're trying to build a social media following or build, make, get your first thousand customers. Like figure out like give yourself ample time. Give yourself a nugget that you can do every day and then, and make that nugget easy. Like be easy on yourself on the nugget and then just be an absolute dog. Then I would say then apply the David Goggins ness to the like longevity of that discipline. Like, do not miss a damn day for the next three years of doing that easy nugget every single day.

Wow, there's a lot of nuance there. Oh my God. I think about focus on one course until success. I don't know if it was Brian Tracy or one of my mentors that told me that. We've all heard this before. Focus on one course until success. There's something about the society we live in with its distractibility and also human relationship and then it's very complex. That's why I said there's a lot of nuance here. Our level of trauma, our level emotional intelligence, our physical health, our mental acumen. So many things as a recipe go into us actually being able to, quote, focus. And I think about your background with nootropics and cognition. And most people don't know this because of how we started the podcast. I was like, you're here at Ketocon, people wanna lose weight, they wanna be low carb, they wanna be a fat burner. The mental benefits of ketones, maybe that's why you call it ketone iq. I don't know if you can.

Of course, yeah, I can speak to that.

But give us a few scientific nuggets about the, the cognition benefits of ketones that we actually take from the outside in.

Yeah, my, my keynote talk at Ketocon. My keynote at Ketocon is on ketones in the brain. And one of the major topics there is how depression and metabolic dysfunction are related, like tightly related, and how a lot of the issues of mental disorders are actually metabolic disorders there. And we're talking about a little bit earlier with like Alzheimer's massive correlation with diabetes to where they're almost the same disease. And there's huge rate of people who have major depressive disorder also having metabolic dysfunction or obesity that, that these go hand in hand and it's a chicken or egg, like, which is causing which. And that you can't have a healthy body without a healthy mind. You can't have a healthy mind without a healthy body. They, they like. It's funny because I think everyone knows this and it's like Western medicine is now discovering it with logic and rationality with a capital L and a capital R. And it's like, okay, now a Harvard, Maryland said it, mind and body are connected. Whatever. I'm not the Harvard md. I'm just saying, like, I'm like, when I do my research, it's like now the big institutions are coming around to it. It's like we've come around to like, hey, psilocybin. It's good. Look at this double blind rct and like, you know, we think that certain states are legalizing it and it can be used to deprecate depression. It's like, I don't know, like some dude in a shack in Mexico knows that ayahuasca is helping people reset their mental models in a really healthy way.

There's an intellect, there's an intellectualization of spirituality.

Yes.

I feel like where we need five blind studies to show us that we feel good when we just feel good.

Yes. Yeah.

Or when we receive healing.

Yeah.

We Somehow need. It's. It is chicken and egg.

And. And it's so interesting how nothing is considered real within the Western system until it's been, like, overly intellectualized, rationalized. It's. It's so weird, right? You look at cannabis, it's like, I don't know, people. The plant was free for ever until it became, like, completely illegal. And then now we are, like, intellectually rationalizing it. Oh, well, if you're. If your doctor who went to this many years of medical school and passed this thing and this thing, they say that you can partake. Okay, you can partake because we did this study and it was published in Nature that showed that it can help with this. This pathology that is also, by the way, just a pathology that some other person defined 30 years ago in some other textbook that if you. If you stitch all this intellectualization all together, okay, cannabis is fine now again. And it's like, what. It does beg the question, like, why did we have to do that whole exercise? Like, why do we have to, like, come full circle? I think the answer is that, well, I don't know, not all of the ancient holistic stuff was good. I don't know, maybe bloodletting.

I was literally just gonna say bloodletting. That's why the barber poles are shaped with the stripes. I was literally in this moment, we're tuned in, man, because bloodletting ain't that healthy. You don't want to bleed yourself to death. And that was an ancient practice. Even the old school dental stuff. Did you see clips in black and white of old photos of them doing dentistry in the mid-1800s, late 1800s. I mean, it was like crazy chaos. So not everything that's ancient or that our ancestors did was ultimately wise.

Yeah, and I think I don't have all the answers here, and I think it opens up a general question that no one has the answers to and just overall theory of knowledge and human progress of. Are we going to only accept things that have made it through that ringer of intellectual, rational, deductive thought? Are we only going to accept things that are spiritual and have lasted forever? Or is there some ongoing kind of discussion, debate between the two? Like an ongoing negotiation between the two? How can one inform the other? I don't think it's productive to be all the way one way or all the way the other way. I think one needs to inform the other. Like, we wouldn't have airplanes if we didn't have modern technology and scientific method and understanding modern physics and the models that we have there But I also don't think that you're like MD that you visit for 20 minutes once a year if you're good is like the guiding light for your health and nutrition. And like, there's probably a lot better resources out there like a YouTube channel. Like, there's that are actually going to help you live a better life than your fancy medical doctor at fancy hospital.

The coolest thing about you sharing in the way you're sharing is that you have probably spent hundreds of thousands or, I don't know, millions in R and D heavily focused on science, yet you also have this spiritual, personal, like, really just idealized and rational sense of why we do what we do and the way that we feel being the most important report card. Why is that? How have you blended both the science, maybe to satisfy the logical minds in the world and also to make sure your product works, and also the spiritual coming from the self. How have you blended those two?

I appreciate the compliment and the acknowledgement there. It's the way I think about anything worth doing. So if it's ketones, it's ketones. If it's running a marathon, it's running a marathon. It's okay. This notion exists as like a glowing orb of light in your, in thought space. And you have to transpose that into the different planes of discourse. And one of those planes of discourse is rationality and science and scientific method and white papers. And you need to be a plus at taking that thing that you are trying to do and transposing that into that plane of discussion. You also need to. There's other planes of discussion. There's also spirituality and feel. And you're taking that same orb of light, but you're like casting it. Get into now like the spiritual realm or the how do you feel realm. And it's the same core concept. Like, I can talk about running. We could talk about running for an hour and only talk about biomarkers. Heart rate, heart rate, vary, variability, cadence, maffetone method, zone one, zone two, training. Like, we can talk all bio or we can have an entire conversation about running where we don't talk about that at all. And we only talk about like, like feel and where your mind goes when you run and mindset around running. And we're talking about running for an hour. It's that same glowing orb at the center. We can have our science conversation or we can have an hour, like, spiritual conversation on it. It's all the same glowing orb at the center.

What is the glowing orb?

The glowing orb? What do you think that is the glowing orb? Is the, I don't know, the concept of running or marathoning, the spark of.

Curiosity of the human soul? Like, is it, is it a curiosity spark? Is that a desire? Is it a passion? I mean, that's an interesting way to describe it. A glowing orb that can explore wherever it wants to go.

Yeah, it's. And like, another one would be, would be ketones. Or if you're, if you're, whatever it is that you're making. Like, if it's ketones. Okay. Like, we got to transpose that onto the rational plane. We got to transpose it onto, okay, how does that energy, how does it make you feel? And then I think about when it comes to company building, it's, it's like, okay, well, like the art direction needs to take that same glowing orb and the bottle needs to look like what it feels like and needs to map to what the science shows of what it actually does at the biochemistry level. And all of those. It's like synesthesia. That word means something to people that, like this, the smell and the taste and the touch and the feel, like they all cross over. Like all the wires of our perception are crossed over. Like your brand, your product needs to rhyme across all of the different senses. And it's like when you go to a nice hotel or if you have a nice car, it's like the smell of the car matches the way that it drives, matches the way that the car feels in your pocket when you're not even driving it. Like all of the things sing together in an orchestra. But it's like, what is the thing? It's like, what is the thing? Take your favorite. If you're imagining a hotel or a car or whatever, like, what is the glowing orb of that thing? And then think about how that is then manifesting out onto those different surface areas.

I think for me it's a way of really intelligently describing authenticity.

Yeah.

The glowing orb might just be an authentic interest or authentic curiosity for just the sake of curiosity itself.

Yeah, I, I like the way that you put it. And it's interesting because it almost doesn't matter what the orb is. If you're famous cellist or you're Maya Angelou or you're Kobe Bryant. Like, you. All those people have their same, have their totally different, like Maya Angelou's out here writing poetry, Kobe Bryant's shooting buckets. But like they're, it's. What they have both independently done is excellent, like world class manifestation of that, of a glowing orb of Their glowing orb. What they made into their glowing orb. I don't know if they were born with it or what if they just early and like, selected. Maybe they just reached into a bag of marbles and selected one. Like, I don't know, like, whatever it is. Like, they picked a good orb and they manifested it excellently. And so what I think is interesting about. It's interesting when you think, when you see how, like, masters across all domains, they, like, meet each other. Like Muhammad Ali hung out with the Beatles. Like, when you're great, you can hang out with other greats who, like. And when you're great, you're not great at all things. You're usually really great. Like Kobe Bryant's in the gym, right? Like Maya Angelou, probably not as good at basketball. Like, you have that dedication, that focus that makes you excellent at expressing your small, single, sparse set of glowing orbs that you care about. And when you get really good at it, you then relate with the people that have done the same on their glowing orb. So you're. I don't like Drake hangs out with Thomas Keller, right? Like the best musician hangs out with the best. Yeah. Cook the best chef. Like, the best of like to hang out because. And I think what they have in common, I think why people like to relate with each other, that level of mastery is because they have taken it. Like the orb almost doesn't matter. Like, Serena Williams has. Has her orb and she can relate to a musician who has a totally different orb. But that, like, obsession, that dedication, that ability to take that, that authenticity, as you said, what is authenticity? I would say it's like high fidelity expression on a single orb repeated over ten thousand, hundred thousand hours.

Alignment knows what alignment feels like. Purpose knows what purpose feels like. We use the same energy. Like I consider myself. This is next year will be our eighth year of podcasting. Millions of people, millions of human beings, which I'm like, genuinely, genuinely honored that they would spend their time with us. Millions of downloads and I'm thinking, wow, this just came from my orb.

That's your orb.

It came from my orb. And the ultimate question that I always ask all of my guests is around this Pentagon, the mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, financial self. Money is part of our game here. This product helps people focus, which then can turn into more money. It helps people cue into their physical self. And that's all related to the mental, emotional and spiritual. I wonder for you before we say goodbye and we round this out, because we could go for a while.

Yeah, this is fun, man.

This has actually been one of my favorite podcasts so far. And I know that people are feeling it, watching it with us and hearing it with us too. And the reason I think this is so great is because there's a shared reality that we have. There's a shared passion that we have about optimizing the human experience.

Yeah.

You know this optimization piece for you, when you look at the landscape of everything you've been through, what do you think people get wrong about optimization and ketones?

I think there's a few things that people get wrong in different ways. And one thing I'm really glad that you said is financial money. I think sometimes, especially in more mindful circles, like around spirituality and wellness, there's almost this anti money.

Money's evil. Money's all evil. Yeah, it's a, it's an old narrative.

I think it's not productive. I think it's actively bad. And one of my main, one of my biggest inspirations on that is Yvonne Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. He, he writes his book Let My People Go Surfing. And he talks about how he could have been just shaking a picket. What do you call it, like, shaking this protest sign about environmentalism. Or he could make a X hundred million dollar a year business that's actively better. Sourcing every textile for everything that they're making, contributing back to the planet, reviving salmon hatcheries, making clothes that actually last, that you're not throwing away every season, that, like, you're passing down from like, grandparent to parent to child. Like, and his point is like, okay, I am an environmentalist. That is my glowing orb deep down. And the expression of that, if I'm one man shaking a picket sign versus if I'm building this major global brand that's actually making a dent in how people even think about their clothes and how we even think about making clothes and our whole relationship with that. And like, that's his point, is that there needs to be a money aspect to that. Like, that business needs to have a profit and loss statement that is above water. Yeah. Like, you need to have a operating margin on it. You need to have salaries to pay bright people to come and work there. You need to have money in the bank to pay for production. You can't order too much of the wrong thing that customers don't. Like, you need to actually be a MBA about it, whether you have your MBA or not. Like, you need to be an astute business person about it. Like, you can't just say you can't be anti Money I don't. Like. Like, capitalism is the system that. That we are inside of, and you need to be good at it if you're trying to make a dent in your personal life, in the world at large. And I don't think it's a. I don't think it's productive to be against. I think you need to figure out how to incorporate it in harmony with other four aspects of the Pentagon.

Yeah. It's a screwdriver. I could kill someone with a screwdriver. I could also build a house. Yeah, right. So money is the same way. It's a vehicle for energy transmission. Yes.

So.

And that sounds spiritual, because it is.

Yeah. If it works.

I mean, spiritual, y'.

All.

It just. It just is. I found this out when I, you know, went through, I guess you could say, the dark night of the soul around the podcast where things weren't working, and I realized I was out of alignment. So I had to get back in alignment. I had to really take an honest look at money. I had to take an honest look at how I felt about money, my stories about money, the ways that money controlled me. Instead of, I'm the master, you're the slave.

Yeah.

And that was like, the turning point for me about three, four years ago. Oh, yeah. Where everything shifted. And y' all can trust that. I'm speaking from life experience here. Like, I really believe that money is a. Is a vehicle for. For transmission of energy. I truly believe that. I'm curious. I'm curious how you've changed your viewpoints over money. And it goes back to. There's so many things that dissect in our conversation, but it goes back to you being in boardrooms with Silicon Valley investors and things like this. How do you remain true to your North Star of science and spirituality and also making sure that your personal Pentagon is satiated.

Yeah. I have the good fortune of I did not grow up around a lot of money. And over my life, my career, I've had the good fortune of being around a lot of money. So I can speak both languages. My. I worked jobs in high school. My first job was I was a waiter, busboy. Like, worked at a couple of different restaurants around my house, like. Like, ground up. In college, I always had a job. You know, 14 bucks an hour. Being a TA. Like, my job always got better and better. Okay. I'm not a busboy now. I'm like, TA in a computer science class. Okay. Now I'm teaching public speaking or I'm tutoring kids. Like, it always got a Little bit better. Better. And that value around a dollar was helpful, but also I don't think perfect because there was a lot of like, well, why? You know how it is in a blue collar life. It's like, why would you pay someone to fix the thing if you like, don't pay someone to 500 to fix your toilet if you can fix it yourself. And I think going to Stanford and then being a leader in a venture scale business and learning the power of having money work for you of, well actually if there's someone better than you at a job and you can delegate it and get your time back to focus in your own zone of genius, you should always take the option, pay someone else to fix it. What do I know about toilets? Like, and at this point as a CEO, it's like, it's increasingly like what do I know about anything in a good way. It's like I know a little bit about a lot of things across the company. But I'll tell you, our research lead who has a PhD in cardiac metabolism, knows the Krebs cycle a lot deeper than I do. My head of design, like, I don't know, we talk about our packaging design together, but it's so cool. But she is way sharper on the pixels than I am. Like she has her 10,000 hours there. Our head of product. I have ideas and thoughts around product, but she's better than me at everything there. But at the same time, I think just to cover the issue all the way, I think if you're only around the big money conversation, like if you're born into wealth and you're very good at delegating and knowing the time value of your money, that stuff is all amazing. But I think what you maybe miss out on is the like the value of a dollar or like the, I guess the appreciation of what most people's relationship is with money, including most people that you'll ever like, that will ever work for you or with you or just understanding some level of compassion towards that. Because people were born like they've never had the concept of having to have a salary. Like they never applied. Like they're born into a certain level and like they're going to be a great investor because they can always live in, in the thought space and they never have had to deal with like how am I going to pay next month's rent or next year's rent or anything. And it's beautiful in a way I'm, I think that's enviable. Like if you're born wealthy to where you can get a PhD in math and just do theorems all day and never think about salary. Or you can. You can be. You can spend the first five or 10 years of your career doing whatever job that's going to light up your mind the best and set you up for making gobs of money later because you never had to, like, bus tables or work a corporate job or any of that. Like, I. It's enviable for sure.

I love what you're saying. I used to be an automotive technician for Mercedes Benz, so I was, like, deep into the technology and how to wire a car. Parallel series, parallel. Like all the electronics. I would fix cars with laptops. But I look at that old lifestyle and I think, wow, I took a piece of my life experience and I brought that to wellness and podcasting and understanding human physiology and then going to personal training for 10 years and understanding the mechanics of the body and kinesiology. And then now the art of the conversation and drawing out the nuggets and the things that we can trust, like, everything truly does fit together at some point. And I'll speak for myself, and I hope you all can feel this. Every time you're in a position in your life where you feel like you're at a dead end or something's not working or you're in depression or anxiety or just you feel like shit, you feel stuck. I promise you, I promise you, there is some part of your experience unfolding that is bringing you to the next highest level of yourself. I just got chills telling you that because this is a cool moment for me. We're here in the new studio that we're building out, and you're one of the first few guests that we've had here. And I think about where I started seven plus years ago in a spare bedroom that I was renting out on a rickety plastic stand. And where I was then versus where I am now, the conversation is so different. And it really, like, brings up emotion in me just to. To feel that, like, the transition I've gone through. And I know you've gone through a transition with your company as well. There was a point where you actually couldn't afford your own product. It was like $33 a serving.

That's right.

And now it's really affordable. I think it's three or four bucks a serving.

Yeah.

Which is amazing. And then you had like 33. 33 or 34,000 plus people that were on the wait list early this year.

Yeah.

Did that cause you stress and can you share that story as we say goodbye. Like the transition of how did you squeeze all that expensive science down into this little three to four dollar serving? How do you do that?

Yeah, it's very much that. That kind of like the second quarter of a. Of a game or like if you're running a mile, it's four laps around the track. I think like mile, like the, the first track. The first lap is easy because you're excited.

Yes.

Gun just went off. Doo, doo, doo. Last lap is easy in its own way because, like the end is in sight. But I would say the middle two laps, especially that, like that right around the middle, like lap three. I think it is the hardest lap if you're running, running a mile because, like, you're pretty tired. Half the tank is empty. The finish line's not really in sight yet and you still gotta juice it. So I always think about whenever I'm doing that, whenever I'm doing anything, I always think about, like, if I'm feeling an energy wane and it's like, okay, am I in that, like, third lap around the track or, you know that feeling where you get really hype on the new project, on a new this or that, talking with your friends, or you're. You had an edible and you're writing a million notes down. Whatever it is. Like you're, you're just, you're flowing. That's the first lap. Like, okay, I'm ready. I'm rambunctious, ready to go.

It's still novel. You're not exhausted. There's something in the tank.

Yeah. And you're going, going. And then, and then at a certain point, it's like it become everything. Everything becomes a grind where it's like you. Are you setting up the studio? I don't. You Amazon ships you the wrong camera or you get the right camera, but it's the wrong this. It's like there's all always some, like, grind out of. Oh, how does this connect with that? Oh, this doesn't work how I thought. Like, there's all. You always have to, like, prosecute that extra inch of grinding, making sure the actual thing works even when the end isn't just yet inside. So I'm speaking abstractly with ketones in particular. Yeah. For. For V1. So we were. I've been in around the human performance space since 2014. 2014, we launched Nutribox. It was the first nootropics company to go on to Shark Tank. We were in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal.

Did you do A deal.

We didn't.

Okay.

But we were kind of trolls about it because we. We came on and intentionally asked for the most valuation that anyone had ever asked on Shark Tank ever.

What'd you ask for?

Well, we asked. We put ourselves at a $40 million valuation, which was just, like, super high, because a lot of people that are like, hey, hey, Mark Cuban, give me $200,000 for half of my company. And so we just came in, like, sky high, kind of, in retrospect, kind of troll about it. And then the sharks kind of ate us up. But it was all. It was all love. It was all good because. Because, I mean, being on primetime tv, even if you, like, don't do a deal, it's good television, media. Yeah.

And media is good.

Me. All media is good media. And weirdly, because of how we gamed it, like, our show got replayed a lot. And so it's kind of love. It depends what story you want to tell yourself in life. Because, like. Like, it is funny, my friend. Like, people randomly see it on a, like, airplane on the. On a little screen on the seat in back of them, and it's like, we're getting dunked on by the Sharks. They don't want to invest, whatever. But, like, at the end of the episode, people still know who we are and go check out our products, and they can make their own judgment of, are the Sharks stupid or dumb or whatever. But, like, yo, we're in the arena. We're over the fence. You know who we are. Hi, like. And I think that. I think that that was a big lesson. I think a big test of the metal with. With me and my founder were just, like, really internalized. Hey, there's no such thing as bad pr. Like, you go on Shark Tank, you get dunked on the Sharks. It is still probably the best thing that ever happened to you from a PR angle. Like, you should take that all day and then go, like, build then from there. Like people now. Okay. People know who you are. There's a conversation. There's a. Like, okay, go from there. Okay, so. But talking about Shark Tank a little bit. Nutribox in general did amazing. We got out there, built this amazing brand platform, subscription platform for nootropics. And then we started getting. Our curiosity expanded beyond there. We started looking at intermittent fasting. I got into marathoning. Everyone. This was like, 2016, 17, 18. Everyone is talking about bulletproof coffee, keto diet. We had one of the largest intermittent fasting groups. We got a lot of press, again, around intermittent fasting. Where I used to work at Google. And like Google is famous for feeding all their employees all these amazing things. And then here I was, I started this startup. We're like starving our employees. No, we weren't starving anyone. And fasting was always optional, but there, there was Business Insider and buzzfeed ate that up. No pun intended. They ate it up. That, that we were promoting fasting. We made, we made fasting. And ketones became a major topic around all. Whether you're fasting, whether you're doing keto diet, whether you're running like you're getting your body to make ketones. We already talked about a lot of the metabolism there and we asked the question of, okay, well why can't you go buy a ketone at the store? And then pulling at that thread, we then launched the world's first ketone drink. And this was still, I would say, like lap one of our ketone journey where we, we, we created a platform for ourselves with Nutribox and we launched the world's first ketone drink. And then the Department of Defense was our first customer. They wanted. We got a six million dollar contract.

That was when it was $33 serving.

Right. And it was, and we knew it was like, I knew it was insanely expensive. Yeah, you couldn't even, I couldn't even afford it with the employee discount. And I'm a marathon runner. Like it. And, and it tasted crazy. And but like the allure of it being new and like we have this big contract with the DOD and like Tour de France cyclists, like elite athletes who could afford $33 or knocking down our door, they want. That was all the first lap. But then it got into the second and third lap of like, okay, well there's only so many Tour de France cyclists, right? There's only so many super, super high end people. If this is an actual business and not just like this novelty science fair project, we got to think through a lot of stuff. And then pulling on that thread, it's like, well, does our supply chain actually work for that? Does like, do we actually have the pieces in place here to scale this to be way more affordable? And the turnout, the answer a lot of that was was no. Like we, we'd gotten off to a really great lap on our first, our first lap around the track was great, but we had to take a, we had to like rebuild. So like we're in, we're in lap two, three. And we're saying, okay, well that was great. But in order to really make this something special, we need to rebuild basically everything that we'd done to launch it the first time. And it was that, like, dark, you know, that dark moment where basically we got to a spot where our version one, we took off of the market because we were entirely focused on building version two and version one just like, it was not scalable supply chain, and it was dark because it was like. And it was just off of conviction of like, hey, I think that if we retool this, spend two years retooling this while we're not selling our V1 anymore, that when we launch it, it's going to be ten times bigger than V1 ever could be.

Because it serves more people where they are rather than just movie stars and athletes.

Right, Exactly. It's more affordable. We have a lot more ability to make a lot of it, can make it taste a lot better, can do a lot. A lot more is under our control. We made it work better. So that. That was a very, like, hard period. As a founder, did you ever have.

Moments where you're like, shit, this isn't going to work?

I think there's those moments of doubt. Like, it's healthy to have some moment of doubt, but generally, no, it's like we're like, the yeses always outweighed the no's. Like, the. The like, is this gonna work? Always outweighed it. Always some vision, always some. Like, even if it doesn't work, like, let's at least try. Let's at least try to manifest our glowing orb. Let's at least try. And if we don't, well, at least we'll have gotten good at manifesting something. Like, that's what I always think is like, even if. Even if it doesn't work, even at this point, even if it doesn't become everything we think it could, at least myself and our team and all that, we're building the muscle around how to make things happen in the world. And I think this is the thing, a thing, A big thing in my life. And to me it's like, win, win. There's no lose. Because either it is, either I'm right, which I think I will be, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it. Or even if I'm wrong, it's like, okay, well, I just got amazingly good at building things. I'm sure the next. Whatever the next mile we run, the next race around the track is gonna be that much easier from the lessons learned. So I see. I try to see it as all. It's all winning.

Yeah, it's clear to me I mean, whatever the orb is directing you towards, even if you, quote, fail, which I don't believe in, that there's just learning you got closer to what the orb wants, right?

And so you might as well try.

You might as well try it. There's pain on either side. Like, I have people that write to me like, I want to launch a podcast. I want to do what you do. And I'm like, okay, start. Because if you don't start, years will go by. The shortest space between myself and a goal isn't how long it's going to take. It's the time that I actually choose to start. It's not about like, it could be three years, seven years, 10 years, 15 years, but it'll be none of those years if you just don't have the courage that you developed to put your foot forward and do the thing. Man. So this has been incredible. We've covered so much ground when it comes to ketones. Thank you so much for the discount for our audience. It's amazing. I know how much money and heart and soul and blood and tears you've put into this product. So thank you. You can go to hvmn.com the code is Josh, it's 10% off. You can also just go to our store page. We have this product and all the products that I trust and that myself, my son, my family, my partner, everyone at my household and my friends come over and raid the pantry for they're all@joshtrent.com store. So make sure you go and support Michael and this company. I really believe in you guys. It's been a long time since I found something like this that wasn't just some kind of CNS stimulant giving people a quick short fix. This is a long term solution. So I feel fucking awesome from Ketone iq. I know you guys are gonna feel great from this too as we say goodbye. It's the signature energy that I love to leave people with. How would you define well being? You know, the chakras are behind us. We've talked about the Pentagon. We understand that wellness is not just one part, it's not all five put together. How would you define wellness? How does Michael Brandt define wellness and well being in his life?

One of my all time favorite quotes is, if you're so smart, why aren't you happy? And I would say we over intellectualize so many things in this world and we talked about that a lot today and turn that big brain towards being happy. And instead of ruthlessly chasing the relationships in your life or the career track or the this or the that. Put yourself as the main only project. Like you are truly the project of your own life. It is not your career, it's not your relationship, it is you. And well being means honesty and authenticity to the project of you. And what do you like? What makes you tick? Do you have the right systems in place to go build towards that? Is your relationship building towards that? Is your career building towards that? But do you. Are you standing on two solid feet of knowing who you are, what you want and are you trying for that? It's not perfect, as you know, as we all know, it's like you're not. Not. I'm not saying like go magically be there 10 out of 10 every day. But like, like that is your Everest. Like that, that needs to be the thing that you are chasing every day. And you might not be 10 out of 10 every day, but well being, I would say is defined as the pursuit of that and that, that knowledge of what is that? Everest? What is that? North Star and going after it every day.

Mike Drop, thank you so much for being here in the studio. Thank you for being on the show. Give people a location besides the two places I said to get involved in their own health in a deeper way with the Ketones. Give them a starting place. And if you want to shout out your socials, I don't even know if you have time for Instagram. Do you even go on the gram?

I do a little bit, yeah. People can check me out there. It's a good question because I'm always. Yeah, it's hard to. It can be hard to build a business and also be a influencer at the same time. But I think it's actually something I've been thinking a lot about. You can follow me on all channels. I'm at bdm, Underscore Runner, and then our business is Health via Modern Nutrition. So at hvmn and we love to hear from people. We love to hear what people are working on personally, if they're biohacking, if they're training on something, if they're building a. You're building a business. If you have a new brand or logo or whatever you're working on. I'd love to hear building in public on yourself, your projects, whatever that is. Drop a line. Love to hear from people.

Excellent. Thank you again from my heart to yours for coming on the show, you guys. Until we see you again, Michael and I are both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon. Hey, thanks for watching the podcast. I appreciate you being here. If you haven't done so already, click the subscribe button and the little notification bell so you never miss any of this free weekly content delivered from my heart with care right to yours. If you love this video, you'll love any of the videos on this page. Just click the one you want to watch next.