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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 ind... |
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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 ... |
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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 Jul... |
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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. On... |
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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 da... |
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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... |
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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 m... |
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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..... |
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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 p... |
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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 d... |
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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 st... |
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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 partn... |
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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 gue... |
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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 any... |
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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... |
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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 peop... |
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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, somet... |
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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 tast... |
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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 experie... |
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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 ... |
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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-te... |
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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... |
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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... |
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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 tho... |
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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 righ... |
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