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You can see certain types of fuel have a dirtier outcome than other types of fuel. So ketones are really efficient on those aspects where they use less oxygen to begin with, and then they create less oxidative stress as you are metabolizing them. And it has all sorts of downstream effects where, subjectively, you feel ... |
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Michael Brandt (00:24:43): |
So subjectively, a lot of people feel switched on when they're drinking ketones, when they have elevated ketone levels. Again, rolling back to what the insight was, a lot of people feel really sharp when they're eating low carb. They feel really sharp when they're doing an intermittent fast. They feel really sharp when... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:25:25): |
Sure. Yeah, it's fascinating. I want to talk for a second about ketones as a substrate because one of the analogies you used when we were first talking about ketones is that ketones are similar to hydration. You talked about that water is another substrate, helps everything. One, during the day if you're hydrated, you ... |
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Michael Brandt (00:26:09): |
To draw the line there, caffeine is not a substrate. Caffeine is a- |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:26:12): |
Okay. |
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Michael Brandt (00:26:13): |
... is a drug that's really specific where caffeine is an adenosine blocker. Adenosine is your sleep hormone, so if you have caffeine, you're blocking your sleep hormones. You're going to feel less sleepy. You're going to feel more alert. It does this really specific thing. Drugs in general tend to be very targeted. Th... |
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Michael Brandt (00:26:45): |
Substrates on the other hand, they go anywhere where there is a demand. So they are not inherently targeting a single pathway with a sledge hammer, they're just widely available. So hydration is an interesting analogy if we're thinking about what a substrate is, where if it's 11:00 AM and you're dehydrated and you drin... |
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Michael Brandt (00:27:54): |
The way to think about it is your circadian rhythm. So throughout the day, you have an energy rise. So if 11:00 AM, your energy is rising or peaking, your body is going to be pulling what it needs in order to do that function as dictated by your circadian rhythm. At 11:00 PM, you're going to be dipping or at the bottom... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:28:29): |
Terrible. |
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Michael Brandt (00:28:29): |
... at 11:00 PM. But something like water or something like ketones where it is broadly helping your body do what it is trying to do at that given moment, it's more broad and dynamic than a drug. So when we say substrate, it's that it goes to wherever your body needs. Like whatever function your body is trying to accom... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:29:08): |
Yep. Yeah. So just to maybe flush that or put a point on that, it seems like ketones... The analogy is similar to water but only in the sense that your body always needs energy. And if it needs energy, then ketones versus something like glucose, as we talked about earlier, is a much, much, much cleaner form of energy, ... |
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Michael Brandt (00:29:48): |
Yeah, that's right. That's why there's so much interest around it. What really clicks for us was in 2016, '17 when we were looking at fasting, ketogenic diet, hey, can you drink a ketone, when we started looking through the literature, we saw that in the early 2000s, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency.... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:30:30): |
That's amazing. |
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Michael Brandt (00:30:31): |
... in that they were looking at ketones because of a lot of what we've been discussing here, where they had these hypotheses that, hey, ketones are substrate, they can help with all sorts of things. What happens if we give them to soldiers in these different contexts? What about in hypoxia, low oxygen? What about when... |
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Michael Brandt (00:30:56): |
DARPA did the foundational work in early 2000s with the National Institute of Health. And they created... It was extremely expensive, it was $20,000 a drink, and tasted absolutely insane, battery acid crazy. But they did some of the basic science around it where they showed some of these key findings around the effici... |
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Michael Brandt (00:31:56): |
We were the first to make it at scale, bring it out to the market. You tried it out, the HVMN Ketone version one. It was so pretty expensive. It was $30 a dose. Still tastes pretty crazy, but it was like you could drink it. For us, that then unlocked a $6 million contract with US Special Operations Command where once... |
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Michael Brandt (00:32:38): |
I mean, at that price point, we say it was broadly available, you'd buy it on our website, but realistically, $30 a drink... The people who were having it were all extremely high performance. Tour de France athletes was a big market for us. Super baller execs were drinking it here and there. It was still a very upper e... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:33:23): |
Literally. |
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Michael Brandt (00:33:23): |
... or this is big, like the way that collagen has proliferated or the way that CBD has proliferated or the way caffeine has proliferated, like ketones- |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:33:33): |
Adaptogens. |
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Michael Brandt (00:33:33): |
... either we're insane or ketones are the next caffeine or CBD. I don't know, [inaudible 00:33:40]. The only way to know is to observe. My co-founder and I and our team, we had enough conviction around it based on what we were seeing from our work with SOCOM, based on what we were seeing with elite performers that, he... |
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Michael Brandt (00:34:32): |
It seemed very hard and challenging. And as an entrepreneur, it's been interesting seeing other companies succeed and fail and move as we've been focused on what we've been doing. It's been fun. It's been a challenge but we've turned this corner in the last, I would say, six months where basically everything that we've... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:35:13): |
Yeah, no, you've moved on to the next level of the game. You've said this, and I want to underscore this because it's big, but anytime you see a company able to reduce cost by order of magnitude, that is huge. I mean, we're talking about a literal 10X reduction in cost or going to a 10th of the cost of what you had pre... |
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Michael Brandt (00:35:38): |
40 cents. 40 cents. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:35:39): |
Sorry, 40 cents, yes. We've talked about adaptogens as a comparison collagen, CBD. You see these things now, like CBD I think is an interesting example, where that now you can buy snacks with it. You can buy desserts with it. You can buy sparkling water with it. And so, it truly is this... One, it's seen somewhat mass ... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:36:08): |
I want to talk for a second about the performance benefits of ketones, and I want to double click a little bit on the Special Operations piece that you talked about there. Well, just to walk that back a little bit. You won a $6 million contract to be able to sell this V one version of the product to the Department of D... |
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Michael Brandt (00:36:51): |
Yeah. We went through the process via SBIR, STTR. Those acronyms might mean something to folks who have been looking at government contracting in some ways. The government is the enterprise of all enterprises. As far as developing your business in there, there's a lot of work to do to get it done. But in doing that, th... |
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Michael Brandt (00:37:25): |
So you're right, it was not the case that they just bought $6 million of ketones and we shipped it over on a pallet. It was $6 million contract to advance the research and understanding around it. So some component of that $6 million was for ketones per se, but there was also significant amount of that was around, "Hey... |
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Michael Brandt (00:37:58): |
One of the most interesting findings, the Special Operations Command was really interested in pushing people to their limits and then seeing how ketones can negate some of the detriment, a double negative where... Okay, if you're at hypoxia, if you're at 20,000 feet of altitude, you have a reduction in blood oxygen. At... |
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Michael Brandt (00:39:13): |
And as expected, right, if you're at altitude and you're doing something really physically challenging, you're going to expect to see some decrement. At T equals zero, before you do the rucking at altitude, you're going to be at 100% performance. After the physically demanding work, you're going to have some decrement.... |
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Michael Brandt (00:39:43): |
So you see a significantly less of a decay in cognitive performance. People are shooting more accurately. People are able to have better short-term memory, short-term reaction time. So it's really cool. It's like when pushed to your limits, how can you recover cognitive performance? And that's where we're seeing ketone... |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:40:45): |
To ask the obvious or dumb question, I'm guessing what this is leading to is at some point in time, there could be a world where special forces soldiers are literally given ketones as just part of supplements before they go and do very challenging tasks. Am I understanding that right? |
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Michael Brandt (00:40:59): |
Yes. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:41:01): |
I think it would be interesting to talk about... With your back with your background as a marathon runner, I guess it would fall into the realm of a long distance sport. I know people that also do runs that aren't marathons, but they'll literally run for 2, 5, 10 hours and do these courses overnight. You talked about T... |
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