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Michael Brandt (00:41:59): |
It's interesting for endurance because you're basically inducing hypoxia where when you're running really hard or biking really hard, you're getting out of breath. You're reducing over time. You're not at full oxygenation level. Your body's getting tired. You're not getting enough oxygen to everything. So basically inducing hypoxia, which is the exact same thing that is happening when you're at altitude. Altitude is just an outside factor that directly reduces the amount of oxygen you have available. But yeah, if you're panting, if you're out of breath, you're getting less oxygen than your body wishes that it had. |
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Michael Brandt (00:42:41): |
We're also seeing some other interesting effects with cyclists and runners. I mean, I don't think there's a meaningful difference parse between cycling versus running. It's all endurance. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:42:53): |
Sure. |
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Michael Brandt (00:42:53): |
We're seeing something really interesting not just in the performance context but also in the recovery context where there's such a thing as over training, where if anyone's ever gotten to a certain level of sports where you're training for an Iron Man or where you're serious college athlete or you're just really into CrossFit or whatever and you're doing it all the time every day, there's such a thing as over-training where it backfires, where you basically train so hard that your body flips on this stress mode, where you actually get reduced appetite. It's counterproductive because you're training so hard that your body's not getting enough time to recover, so you're not able to go and do it again the next day. |
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Michael Brandt (00:43:39): |
That becomes a really important facto. When you look at something like the Tour de France or military missions where it's not just that you're running a marathon, it's that you're running a marathon every day for 21 days. I mean, the Tour de France, it's three weeks long. It's actually coming up in a month here. In July, we're doing a ton of work with our teams. We're doing partnerships with great cyclists and doing some interesting stuff. I'm actually flying out to Colorado in a month and linking up with Lance and some of the former United States Parcel Service, like the G.O.A.T team from back in the day. |
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Michael Brandt (00:44:20): |
There's really interesting study done around cycling. This is part of why cyclists are so particularly interested in this is that there's a study done a few years ago by this Belgian researcher where they showed that, okay, we know that when you overtrain it is counterproductive. They had two groups of participants. One had ketones, the other did not. They had the participants biking twice a day for three weeks, so it was meant to simulate Tour de France conditions. One of the groups had ketones, the other did not. Aside from that, they were able to eat ad libitum, so as much as they wanted of anything else. What they saw over that course of three weeks is that by week three, the ketone group had a 15% higher training load and also had a 5% increase in final time trial performance. |
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Michael Brandt (00:45:14): |
And then when they looked further into it, they were saying that the ketone group was having less symptoms of that overreaching, over-training, that basically ketones were helping people to recover faster. So not just drinking it and acutely immediately helping performance, but when they were having it three times a day mixed around with their training and then training every single day, they had less of... There's few hormones that are indicative of over-training. You can measure GPT 15, and it shows that you're over-training. In the ketone group, they had less of that. And then on the actual performance, the cyclists that were having the ketones were just performing better. So it's really interesting. This is where it starts having some interesting dimensions to it where it's, okay, it's not just ketones as a source of energy, it's also ketones as signaling. It's basically signaling to your body to activate a parasympathetic rest and recovery mode, and it's helping people to recover better. |
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Michael Brandt (00:46:17): |
There's a few other interesting studies that have been done around this where if you have ketones with your post workout protein that you increase muscle protein resynthesis. So if you work out really hard, you get a lot of micro tears in your muscles. You go and drink protein, the idea is rebuild the muscle bigger and stronger. If you have ketones with that protein, you accelerate the rate of muscle protein resynthesis. So basically, today's recovery is tomorrow's performance. You're able to recover better today and then go out and do it again tomorrow. So that is a angle to ketones that people are getting really interested in, even more so than just acute performance, but the more chronic, hey, if I'm spending more time with elevated ketone levels, seems like my body's recovering, bouncing back faster. |
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Michael Brandt (00:47:06): |
A lot of interesting stuff there, a lot of interesting stuff with cycling in particular. I think cycling, it happens to be the tip of the spear because I think cyclists are nuts. I say this as a cyclist. They're very dialed-in on their nutrition and their wattage and their wattage per kilogram, and so they tend to be much more dialed in on performance specifically than... Basketball player cares about this, but they also care about 16 other things, court IQ, ball handling, teamwork. They care about a lot of other things, but cyclists tend to be really, really dialed in on just abject performance. And so, it's been an interesting test group for us. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:47:50): |
Yeah. I mean, even the results that you shared there, like a 15% higher workload or capacity is staggering. That's not small at all. That's a very sizeable difference. Not to mention the 5% in the improvement in recovery. So none of that is small. It seems very significant in terms of the difference. |
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Michael Brandt (00:48:10): |
Yeah, those are real numbers. People are familiar with that level of performance. Gains of that magnitude are hard to come by when you're at performing at that level. It is very tight margins at that level. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:48:23): |
I feel like most people are chasing single digit percentage gain, so you can get double digit in that, it's much, much larger. I'd love to talk about the development of the kind of V1 of the drinkable ketone product you had, and then the latest version of Ketone-IQ. And where I wanted to start with this first version... For anyone that wasn't familiar with HVMN when you guys produced that, it was a super cute, tiny, little bottle and had a nice little form factor to it. So try to find a photo and include that in the show notes just for fun. But where I wanted to start off is it sounds like the origin story in part is finding this DARPA research that basically did quite a bit of foundational research around, yes, it can go through the GI track. It's relatively safe. You can produce it on its own. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:49:07): |
So it sounds like, or maybe I'm guessing, you take this and then you decide, okay, now we're going to go and try to figure out how to manufacture this. How much work did you have to do to figure out manufacturing and get that off the ground? And then just talk about what it was like to work on this version one of the product and when you thought you had something that you were ready to release to some subset of customers. |
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Michael Brandt (00:49:30): |
It reminds me of when you read the early Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak soldering computer parts together in their garage. Steve Jobs, they sold their first 200 computers and then had to run back to the garage and solder some circuit boards together. It was that kind of mode where it was at scale, so it was not just being done by a chemist at a lab bench, it was more professional than that. It was being done at some level of scale. There's scale, and then there's scale, right? There's the ability to make 10,000 units. It's very different from the ability to make a million units. In the abstract when we think about systems design, I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with the principle that every time you 10X the system, you rebuild it from scratch. |
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Michael Brandt (00:50:20): |
That's true in computing. That's true in production. That's true in a lot of areas. Like Moore's law, it doesn't just happen incidentally. The way that computers are getting quicker, the approach is radically changing. It looks like this nice smooth curve, but behind the scenes, there's some really paradigm shifting step functions that are happening. It was that for us, where we figured out a way to get it out at the order of 10,000 to 100,000 bottles, but it was very hard and expensive. What [inaudible 00:50:59] say, there's no regrets on it. In hindsight, everything's 20/20 yet, it's like in hindsight, oh, yeah, Apple should have launched the iPhone in 1992. It's like, well, you had to do what you had to do- |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:51:10): |
[inaudible 00:51:10]. Totally. |
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Michael Brandt (00:51:11): |
Yeah. There's no regrets on it. We just had a expensive process. Even just the core blueprint of what we were building was overly complicated, so it was a little bit of addition by subtraction, right? Like shaving off parts of it to make it simpler and more direct to what we were trying to do, bringing in capital partners, right. Andreessen backed us in our seed round, and we've gotten some amazing investors that have joined the ride. But being able to get great investors, it helps to be able to show, "Hey, we have this imperfect product, not quite ready for the mainstream, but good enough to secure a seven-figure government contract, good enough to unlock the core elite operators and athletes." We had this vision that we can bring it down and make it everyday collagen level. But it's all connected. So it's like, okay, you get your version one, it's the best thing in the world until you have your version two out there. We're working hard on what version three looks like. There's always evolution to it. You cannot let perfect get in the way of good enough. You got to get something out there as a proof of concept and then roll into the next thing and the next thing. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:52:35): |
Yeah. Well, especially with what you guys are doing, where you're literally pioneering something that's brand new, that doesn't exist in any other, at least not that I'm aware of, in any other form factor that's similar to what you guys have done, that's meant for the purposes that you guys have built this for. I'm guessing this move to Ketone-IQ was maybe that 10X order of magnitude redesign or rethink. Am I getting that right? |
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Michael Brandt (00:52:58): |
Yes. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:52:58): |
Can you talk a little bit about what you innovated on and changed as you moved from this V1 to V2? Because I know part of it was taste, I'm sure there's other things. |
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Michael Brandt (00:53:07): |
Yeah. There's a lot of innovation going on in biosynthesis where the cutting edge of making any molecule, pharmaceuticals, flavors, any kind of targeted molecule is... The old way of doing it is petrochemical where petroleum products are very dynamic because you have these long carbon chains. You can make into them anything. You can make into all sorts of plastics, pharmaceuticals. There's a reason that we use fossil fuels. They're very flexible and robust, but they're also fossil fuels, they're limited, the production on it can be dirty. There is clearly not the way that things will be made in 100 years from now or 200 years from now. |
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Michael Brandt (00:53:57): |
What we're seeing and what we are doing and one of the big innovations that we had was switching our supply chain to a more biosynthetic way where state of the art of making target molecules instead of using petroleum basis is you make genetically modified yeast. So you specifically change the genetics of that bacteria. It can be yeast, it can be E-coli. It can be specific types of bacteria. You genetically modify it such that when you feed it something normal like a feed stock, you feed it sugar, that because of how it has been modified, it produces as a byproduct the target molecule. This has its own cost curve to it. When first doing this, it's super expensive. First time people mapped out the human genome, it was extremely expensive. And now you have 23andMe. The first instances of doing bacteria-generated pharmaceuticals and other molecules, super expensive, but it's coming down to a spot where it is on par or even lower than the petrochemical way of doing it. |
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Michael Brandt (00:55:07): |
So that's been a big innovation that we've made. We've also made innovations on the ketone itself where... Trying to think the best analogy here. But in a way, our first version was really complicated where we had a couple of different similar ketones that were stratified together. It was very complicated. I think people familiar with product design or engineering in general have this sense of this. Sometimes your first concept is too complicated, and then you shave it off. It's like Tinder was like simpler than match.com, Uber simpler than calling a taxi cab. We had that same dynamic where our first version was this like really complicated thing. We almost did it because we could, it was really scientifically crazy and interesting. And then the insight was like, "Hey, this can be much simpler and work as good or better and be dramatically cheaper." |
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Michael Brandt (00:56:12): |
It sounds so obvious when I say it, that's why I'm thinking hard about it. It seems so obvious, yeah, do the simpler thing, but I was just saying, for our version one, we had something that was more complicated that felt correct at the time. But then as it was on market and as we learned more and just wisened up, sometimes the smarter thing is to go in a simpler direction, and that's a big part of what led to V2. So yeah, updates in manufacturing technology, shifting away from petrochemical towards biosynthesis and then simplifying on the formula itself and then just like, yeah, good old-fashioned product development work, formulation work, figuring out how to make it taste well. |
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Michael Brandt (00:56:55): |
One of the subtasks of our work with the DOD is around organoleptics, which is fancy word for saying how your body senses things that you're eating at the molecular level, not just sipping it and swirling around in your mouth, but at the molecular level, what is happening? What is making this taste the way that it tastes? And then, what can we do to address that? What can we do on the formulation to make it taste more palatable? So a lot of deep science around how to make it taste better. The very early versions of ketones are crazy tasting, what can we do to make it taste better? So a lot of blocking and tackling, a lot of biochemistry, a lot of formulation development that has yielded, I think, really good results. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:57:45): |
I mean, listening to you describe that process in V1 being hyper complicated, but you're not thinking it was hyper complicated at the time, and then we're finding it over time. Anyone listening that's been a designer or an engineer completely understands that use case. With the background in design, I know that experience myself of you don't know how to design it any simpler until you know how to design it any simpler. So you have to go through that progression to be able to get there. So, no, it makes total sense. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:58:12): |
I'd love to change with just a few simple closing questions, and one of the ones I wanted to start with was, clearly what we've talked about a couple of times is, and this is why I find what you're building and working on so fascinating, is one, the implications of this. To make maybe a weird analogy, I'm a big fan of adaptogen. I think if you can have... Well, I'll just talk about myself rather than proselytize. I've tried to make the intentional switch, it is about 18 months ago, of cutting out coffee during the middle of the day and drinking adaptogens. The brand that I drink is [inaudible 00:58:49] just because they have really high quality adaptogens and herbalists and stuff. And that's another example of I just feel like it's been a massive quality of life improvement just by changing one simple thing I'm doing during the day. |
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Daniel Scrivner (00:59:00): |
And so, when I think about what you're building with ketones and bringing the affordability down and more people being powered by ketones as opposed to by glucose, I mean, massive, massive implications. You're doing that and bringing the cost down in order of magnitude and you're trying to get it to 40 cents as long-term goal is fascinating. So what I want to talk about for a second is, when you think five years out, and feel free to share or not share as openly as you might want to, what might we all see from HVMN in terms of products? You have a drinkable ketone now, what does this future roadmap look like? And/or what state of the world do you hope to have in five years? |
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Michael Brandt (00:59:38): |
Yeah, that's a great question where right now what we've created is the primitive. Always considered a nutritional primitive, and meaning that in the computer science or mathematical sense where it's a fundamental building block. What we're doing right now is we're selling just the primitive and we've been iterating on the primitive of what is the best ketone delivery mechanism. And so, right now, Ketone-IQ is the best. As we continue to innovate on that, that's the more short to medium term. The more medium to long term is you're asking is, and I think you touched on this with where we see collagen today, whereas it's in bars- |
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Daniel Scrivner (01:00:18): |
It's everywhere. |
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Michael Brandt (01:00:19): |
... different drinks, you get collagen in your coffee. It's in all sorts of different formats. Without giving too much away, that's how we're thinking about it, where, hey ketones, it's interesting primitive. How does that start looking if we build on top of ketones as a platform? So Ketone-IQs is primitive. Okay, well, what if we use Ketone-IQ specifically for an endurance product, like a goose shot that you can take on your bike? It should have things besides ketones in it that complement that use case, where it's powered by Ketone-IQ but it also has an array of different carbohydrates in it, because if you're biking, you want all the substrates that you can possibly have. You might even want BCAA because that's technically a protein, but your body can turn it into energy really quickly. You want as many different types of energy as possible. That's just for the endurance sports use case. |
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Michael Brandt (01:01:17): |
We also have a lot of people that are using Ketone-IQ as a alcohol replacement. So totally different use case. But it's because you feel a little bit of a lift from drinking ketones. A lot of people know alcohol's not great for you, so it's cool that there's other non-alcoholic options out there, but a lot of times those are just flavored water. Okay, I can make a nice little cocktail out of Ketone-IQ, and it's not alcohol, so I'm not getting ethanol and [inaudible 01:01:47] buildup, but it's also not this inert flavored water. It's healthy for me. It makes me feel pleasant. So what about if we make a alcohol replacement that is more decidedly alcohol, where you think about a nice glass bottle and partnering with a premier chef or sommelier, like you really build into that use case? So you take this primitive of Ketone-IQ and you draw out the line to, okay, the endurance sport subbrand or sister brand looks like this, the alcohol replacement subbrand or sister brand looks like this. |
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Michael Brandt (01:02:26): |
That's an area where we almost have... I'm chomping at the bit, we have too much creativity on it. There's so many ideas to do there. One of the challenges as an entrepreneur is to really focus where, okay, as exciting as all those things are, I want to be a little bit patient and continue to push on the primitive right now. It's allowing people to go and make what they want. So if someone wants to go on a bike ride, you got to mix Ketone-IQ with the rest of your stack, make your witches' brew, make your water bottle of your special concoction that works for you. If you want it as an alcohol replacement, cool, we're providing you with the primitive. You can go and mix it with soda water and lime. You can do that. And pushing and just keeping really focus and getting the primitive out there and holding back just a tick before launching all of the secondary, tertiary extensions off of it. |
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