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116 HVMN and Ketone IQ: Next-Level Metabolic Health with Ketones | Michael Brandt, Co-Founder & CEO |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DflDyOCbknQ&list=PL5QJhLoabFV1i22TY1jzWHOaou1YADogw |
Transcript |
https://www.outlieracademy.com/episode/116 |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:02:11): |
Michael, I am so excited to have you on Outlier Academy to talk about HVMN and the latest product that you've created called Ketone-IQ. Welcome to the podcast. |
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Michael Brandt (00:02:22): |
Daniel, thanks so much for having me, and thanks everyone for listening in. It's going to be a fun one. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:02:26): |
Yes. There's a ton to explore. We're going to explore, obviously, the nutritional aspect, get into a little bit of the science of how ketones work, and then we're also going to talk about the business of HVMN and how you've iterated on that product. To start, and we're going to cover a ton of ground, so I'm going to t... |
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Michael Brandt (00:03:02): |
Sure. I am a marathon runner. My PR for the marathon is 2:42, so around six-minute miles for the marathon. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:03:10): |
Wow. |
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Michael Brandt (00:03:10): |
So run in Boston and not winning the Olympics or anything like that, but I'm finishing top 1% in any given marathon as a serious hobby, and it definitely dovetails with my interest in human performance and everything that we're building at HVMN. The community and business and everything we're building here, it definit... |
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Michael Brandt (00:03:43): |
My background, I'm from Chicago, went to public school in Chicago, was an international baccalaureate student, had the good fortune to get into Stanford. That's what brought me out to the West Coast. Studied computer science and product design there. After graduating, got really into biohacking and essentially applying... |
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Michael Brandt (00:04:37): |
I started getting really interested in biohacking, performance optimization. My co-founder and I started a business called Neutro Box. We were one of the first to take the concept of nootropics. This was in 2014. We took the concept of nootropics and really made it mainstream. We got covered by everyone, VICE, Wall Str... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:05:42): |
What? |
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Michael Brandt (00:05:44): |
... that's not true to our human evolutionary context and how we're supposed to operate. And then we had this insight around ketones where in 2016, '17, this is when Bulletproof coffee was taking off. Anyone who's anyone or in and around biohacking has at least tried bulletproof, tried taking black coffee, put butter a... |
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Michael Brandt (00:06:42): |
My co-founder and I, we asked the first principles question on it, which was, "Hey, we're going through all these hoops to have our bodies make ketones." We asked that kind of dumb smart question which I think a lot of entrepreneurs can identify with of, "Hey, if ketones are so cool, why can't you just go to the store ... |
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Michael Brandt (00:07:31): |
Earlier this year, we launched a major update, version two of our keto drink called Ketone-IQ, where we brought down the price considerably. The Navy SEAL version was a little bit more expensive and crazy tasting, and we brought it down to spot where it's $4 a serving. I want to get it down to 40 cents a serving, so th... |
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Michael Brandt (00:08:27): |
IT's been a fun journey translating from DARPA lab to consumer movement. It's not an overnight thing, but it's been a really fun journey, and I think it's flexed a lot of different muscles for myself as a founder, my co-founder, and our team across the board. It's been a a fun journey. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:08:47): |
Yeah. Well, and as we're going to explore, there's a lot more left to go and there's a lot that's already happened. I remember first, I think it was maybe two years ago, when I first discovered HVMN, I remember that version one. We'll talk about it a little bit later in the episode. Before we started recording, you de... |
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Michael Brandt (00:09:29): |
Yeah, HVMN stands for Health Via Modern Nutrition. A lot of people are maybe familiar with the quote, "Let thy food be thy medicine," where before you go and take a battery of pharmaceuticals, you're already eating something every day, and what you're eating is directing the course of your life. You are improving or ... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:10:51): |
Yeah. Yeah. I love that background. I want to first start by talking about ketones, and then we'll talk about ketones as a substrate, which is this interesting idea you introduced to me when we were talking about how we might cover in this interview, and then we'll go into version two of the product. But I want to star... |
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Michael Brandt (00:11:32): |
Ketones are the oldest form of fuel. Our body has always made ketones for 300,000 years, as long as there's been humans, or even prehuman, homo erectus, like pre-humans were even making ketones. What a ketone is is it's a metabolic substrate. Your body makes it when you have low levels of circulating glucose, carbohydr... |
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Michael Brandt (00:12:42): |
One analogy is it's like RAM versus your hard drive. You can store a little bit of glucose and you can store a lot of fat. The issue with fat is that it cannot cross the blood brain barrier. Humans have a very large brain, so what happens when we are on the Savannah X, 10, hundreds of thousands of years ago and we're r... |
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Michael Brandt (00:13:40): |
Ketones exist to power our brain, they power our muscles as well, and our body naturally produces them when we're low on glucose. And so, fast forward to modern times, in the early 20th century, researchers started looking at this idea of a ketogenic diet, where how do you make your body make a ketone? Well, if you del... |
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Michael Brandt (00:14:46): |
Ketones have these really interesting properties. They're super efficient. They are an alternative to glucose. Whether you're inclined towards seizures or not, ketones can power the brain, they can add functional capabilities. We've been seeing a lot of science pan out over the last 100 years where fast forwarding to t... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:15:32): |
Yeah. Thank you for that overview. I mean, I think it's just enormously helpful. I want to go one level deeper and just compare and contrast a little bit of ketones versus glucose. Because as I was thinking about this, you shared this example, which is obviously really resonant, of ketones being the oldest form of fuel... |
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Michael Brandt (00:16:42): |
Yeah, sugar's really interesting because in the ancestral context, there wasn't an abundance of straight sugar. There's was not table sugar. Table sugar, actually, came up in the last few hundred years where it actually drove a lot of the slave trade as well where there was this discovery around sugar plantations and, ... |
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Michael Brandt (00:17:38): |
We've bred a lot of our fruits to be very high in sugar. If you look at ancient bananas, ancient apples, they looked very different. We've intentionally bred them to be much more palatable, but palatable means a lot of times higher in sugar. Sugar's very tasty, it's very addicting, it's very palatable, and we've done a... |
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Michael Brandt (00:18:50): |
What happens when you eat sugar is your blood glucose rises, and then you release insulin to address that blood sugar. And then over time, if you do that habitually and you're constantly spiking, the insulin stops working. You develop insulin resistance, and that's diabetes. Again, it's not this black and white thing w... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:19:26): |
Yeah, Levels. |
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Michael Brandt (00:19:27): |
... companies like Levels are doing great work here where you're able to see how your diet and life's other lifestyle factors are affecting your glucose levels with the mission being, hey, have less area under the curve of elevated glucose, avoid really steep spikes, and it'll be better for your metabolic health in ge... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:19:57): |
Yeah, I love that description of it being a decay function because I think it's a really clean, interesting way to think about it. We'll link to it in the shown up, we had the team at Levels on previously and we did a deep dive on Levels. One of the things that was most interesting there too, is that what any customers... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:20:52): |
One of the things that I found doing research for this was looking up people's testimonials and just their general experiences of using drinkable ketones and using HVMN. One of the things that was fascinating is, and this goes to the quality of energy I want to talk about for a second, is the way people describe how t... |
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Michael Brandt (00:21:34): |
Basic mechanisms of action around ketones, they're very different from glucose where you can think of them as cousins. They operate opposite to one another where high glucose is low ketones, low glucose is high ketones. One way to think about it is you want to spend your life with less elevated glucose. An equivalent s... |
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Michael Brandt (00:22:43): |
When ketones turn into ATP, they do it more efficiently than glucose. They use about 30% less oxygen to do so, and in that conversion process, they create less oxidative stress. You can think about your metabolism in general is this engine where if you're putting fuel into an engine and that engine is running for years... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:23:46): |
Sure. |
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Michael Brandt (00:23:46): |
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