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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 try to squeeze in as much as I can into this interview, but to start, can you just share a quick bit about your background? I know you're a marathon runner. I don't know if that was part of the impetus to focus on ketones and building HVMN, but share, if you can, a little bit of your origin story and the origin story of the company.

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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 definitely connects. As I'm sure a lot of other entrepreneurs can recognize that it's nice when your personal and your professional dovetail together.

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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 engineers systems thinking to human body. Your human body is the most advanced piece of technology you'll ever own. We're at this really interesting period right now where we're learning a lot about the body. There's a proliferation of consumer devices, sensors that let us understand and observe what's going on in our body. We are pushing a lot of innovation on the nutrition component of what can you do to drive meaningful output changes in your body as a system.

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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 Street Journal. We were on Shark Tank. We were one of the first ones to say, "Hey, look, caffeine is cool. A billion cups of coffee are being drank every day. What if you stack things on top of caffeine? There are things you can combine with caffeine to improve the performance profile." And so, we followed that along a really interesting path and then began broadening out our interest. I got really into marathoning. Can talk more about that. We got really into intermittent fasting. My co-founder and I did a seven-day fast. We're doing regular weekly fasts and had a big fasting community in San Francisco, got a lot of coverage around that and talking about metabolic health. And hey, it turns out that the human body is not supposed to be eating three meals a day plus snacks of Slurpees and Snickers bars and all that, that that's-

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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 and MCTs in there, and the whole point of that being instead of fueling with sugar, you fuel with fat, which your body turns that fat into ketones. Bulletproof coffee was trending. A lot of people were trying the ketogenic diet. We were leading this movement around intermittent fasting. All of these activities, including also endurance sports, all these activities, they are intentionally reducing your body's carbohydrate store and intentionally inducing your body to create ketones and to fuel off of ketones.

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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 and buy a ketone." Pulling on that thread led to the years of deep work. We started uncovering early work that DARPA and the USDOD had done. We took that work and translated that and manufactured it at scale. We reengaged with the USDOD and secured a $6 million contract with Special Operations Command around our version one of our keto drink. We worked with elite operators all over the board, and then we'd just been cracking at it for years.

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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 there's still orders of magnitude to work at, but we are at a spot where it's about the cost of a latte or a CBD drink or other functional beverage like kombucha, other beverages that people are used to. So we're in the ballpark where high performers can have access to this really cool fuel that has previously only been available to high performers or you can only have it in your system. If you do keto diet and fasting and induce your body to make this magical ketone molecule. So we're not at a spot where it's accessible and we're in stores and gyms and cafes.

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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 described that as a science fair version of what you're building and we'll get into what that is. And is a ton to explore. The one question I wanted to ask just before we go on, I was asking this before we hit record, but obviously the name of the company is HVMN, which you look at and immediately think you fill in the missing letters. You're like, it means human, but it also has a second meaning. Can you talk about what each of those letters stands for?

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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 worsening your biomarkers for health. Your food is putting you into a certain state. It's spiking your blood glucose and inching you closer to diabetes, or it's not. It's making you feel better or it's making you feel worse. It's the step by step, brick by brick. Oftentimes, when we think of medicine, it's this major thing. You're introducing a antibiotic or you're introducing a statin or you're introducing some major abrupt change into your life. But in reality, day by day, brick by brick, step by step, what you're eating, that's the stuff of life. That's what's leading you towards a larger or smaller number of total healthy years on the planet. And so being mindful about that is what was the driving factor behind the company and Health Via Modern Nutrition. How can we be have better health, how can we perform better through the food that we eat every day?

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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 start with ketones because, at least from my perspective, I feel like ketosis is something I've heard a lot about. Obviously, ketones are a key part of ketosis, but I don't know how familiar people are with either ketosis or ketones, so I want to start out with some basics. Can you start by just sharing your explanation or your best attempt at an explanation of what ketones are and talk a little bit about how they're naturally produced in the body?

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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, carbohydrates in general. It is a super efficient metabolic substrate. We evolve the ability to make ketones because glucose crosses the blood brain barrier, fat does not. So if you haven't eaten something with glucose in the last couple of days or if you've been moving around a lot and burning off that glucose store, your body's running low on glucose. You can only store a couple of days worth of glucose. Your body can store a month worth of body fat. Even if you're a lean individual, just to give some numbers around it, you can store around 2,000 calories of glucose, and you can store around 200,000 calories of fat. So we're talking two orders of magnitude.

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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 running low on blood glucose, we haven't eaten something with carbohydrates, or we're been moving around a lot, and we have these large brains, humans famously have largest brain for our body size of any animal, that's part of what makes us special, and what do we use to fuel this brain? Our body creates ketones, and ketones are this super efficient substrate. Substrate has a specific meaning, where they contain calories. They're a metabolic substrate. They enter your mitochondria and they produce ATP, the energy currency of our cells.

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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 deliberately reduce your intake of carbs, your body will start making ketones. The first application of a ketogenic diet or ketosis is in the early 20th century. There was this study done around children who were having seizures. The hypothesis was that these children have some malfunction in their brain's ability to metabolize glucose, so let's put them on a ketogenic diet and see if by powering with ketones instead of glucose are we able to reduce the instance of seizures? It turns out the answer is yes, that they were able to significantly reduce the amount of seizures that these kids were having by applying a ketogenic diet.

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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 the 21st century, we've been looking at ways to actively create a ketone. We discovered a lot around what can happen when you induce your body to make its own ketones. And that just led to the question of, okay, what if you go and drink a ketone? And that's where our part of the story picked up, is, yeah, what happens if you have a direct ketone drink?

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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. And you can think back, obviously, 50, 100, thousands of years and our diet was very, very, very different. And today, obviously, we have an obesity epidemic generally, we have a diabetes epidemic generally. And so, just even in the food that we're eating, I'm always surprised, I look at nutrition labels all the time, I'm always surprised, it feels like literally every product has sugar added to it or glucose added to it in some shape or form. And so, one of the questions I want to ask is, it seems like over time our diet has become much, much more glucose-rich, or glucose is in almost everything, so help people understand the difference, both in the quality of energy and some of the other pros and cons of a ketone versus a glucose. I know, for instance, ketones provide energy with less oxidative stress. I'm sure there are other things. How do you think about the pros and cons there?

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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, hey, we can extract sugar from sugar cane and we can make this really refined, pure table sugar. But for hundreds of thousands of years before that, you didn't have straight sugar. There's no sources in nature of just straight sugar. The closest would be honey, but honey's really hard to come by. It exists in certain regions only, and you got to climb up a tall tree and battle off a bunch of bees, and it's really hard to access.

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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 lot to make our food supply taste yummier, but it's not necessarily a good thing. It's backfired in a lot of ways where we now have... There's a study that showed 88% of American adults are metabolically unhealthy. We have skyrocketing race of obesity. A lot of people are prediabetic, diabetic. I think diabetes is not this black and white switch where one day you just have diabetes, it's similar to noise-induced hearing loss where if every day you're listening to loud music, slowly over time you're going to decay your ability to hear things. Same thing with your metabolism. If you're constantly barraging it with high levels of sugar, your body can only respond to it so much.

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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 where you're completely normal and then one day you have diabetes. It's a decay function over time. It's something a lot of people should be thinking about. I think a lot of people are thinking about not just because of what we're doing, but if people are familiar with continuous glucose monitors-

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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 general. You'll feel better day by day. And you'll avoid some of the largest issues that are causing mortality in the country. It's all through your diet.

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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 that use Levels find is, yes, it is about what you eat, but there's also a really tight, interesting coupling between what you eat and what you're doing from a physical activity perspective. You can actually eat things that are great for you, but if you couple it with the right physical activity, like if occasionally eat a pizza or have a big bowl of pasta, but you then couple that with a immediate walk or exercise for 30 minutes, what they find is you almost have no spike in glucose. And so anyways, the only reason I'm sharing that is I think for me it's always fascinating to learn too, that it's also just very, very complicated. It's a complex system and there's all these factors that are influencing it.

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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 they feel when their body's being powered by ketones was really interesting. They talk about, one, feeling hyper-focused, two, feeling like they're in a flow state both physically and mentally. And so to me, it almost seems like there is literally a quality of energy difference. Do you feel that, and do you find that customers commonly feel that when they switch to and start using drinkable ketones?

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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 statement is you want to spend your life with higher elevated ketones. You want to use more ketones as a fuel. The mechanism of action on it is that when ketones turn into cellular energy, so ATP, if people remember their high school biology, the mitochondria is the power plant of the cell, you have substrates that come into the mitochondria, and there's something called the Kreb cycle where the substrates interchange with other different factors and they create ATP, and ATP is the energy currency of your cell.

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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 and years, there's going to be some gunk build up. An engine cannot run just indefinitely for a thousand years, engine is going to have some build up. But you can use cleaner fuels that cause less damage to the functioning of that engine over time. So straight table sugar, like straight, pure sugar is going to cause a lot of oxidative stress. You can measure free radicals, reactive oxygen species. You can measure that, hey, there is a increase in this bad byproduct of... It's like running off of coal as opposed to natural gas.

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Daniel Scrivner (00:23:46):

Sure.

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Michael Brandt (00:23:46):