Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #297 Performance While Fasting w/ Geoff Woo

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Geoff Woo is another one of those smartest dude’s in the room kinda guys. He’s part of the brains behind HVMN and it’s apparent he’s walking the walk as well. Just because he’s a wunderkind doesn’t mean he’s all scientific materialism. He opens up incredibly about his interests in spirituality after growing up very 1’s and 0’s oriented. Oh, we do get into a nice deep dive on different forms and benefits of fasting as well as other optimization modalities though so enjoy some great tips and tricks as well.   ORGANIFI GIVEAWAY Keep those reviews coming in! Please drop a dope review and include your IG/Twitter handle and we’ll get together for some Organifi even faster moving forward.   Connect with Geoff: Website: HVMN.com/kkp - “KKP” at checkout for 20% off Instagram: @geoffreywoo  Twitter: @geoffreywoo    Show Notes: JRE #1691 Yeonmi Park "Life in the Fasting Lane" -Dr Jason Fung, Eve Mayer, Megan Ramos   Sponsors: HVMN - Ketone IQ This is legit jetfuel for your brain. Whether you’re fat adapted or not, this will work. Get 20% off by heading to hvmn.com/kkp  discount is automatically applied at checkout.  Othership App For an incredible mindfulness app and experience and for KKP listeners get 2 free weeks on the app, go to http://othership.onelink.me/loJo/KKP  Bioptimizers To get the ’Magnesium Breakthrough‘ deal exclusively for fans of the podcast, click the link below and use code word “KINGSBU10” for an additional 10% off. magbreakthrough.com/kingsbu  Analemma Coherent Water the science is here to support structured water and these folks have the best and easiest way to get it for yourself anywhere you go. Go to coherent-water.com punch in code “KKP” for 10% off your wand! To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service Academy  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys   Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Welcome back to the show, everybody. Today's guest is Jeff Wu. Jeff is an entrepreneur and investor, and he thinks about compounding technology, systems and organizations, studied computer science, information theory, and distributed systems at Stanford University, and graduated with honors and distinction.

He is interested in the science of human performance and nutrition, founded HVMN, Health Via Modern Nutrition. Extending longevity while improving day-to-day performance is the ultimate personal compounder. To change and master our environment, let's start with changing and mastering ourselves. All right, this is off of Jeff Wu's bio on his website, and it's absolutely fantastic, but it doesn't tell you much about Jeff. I mean, quick background. I like getting into the background of everybody on the show.

And after having Michael Brandt on, the other co-founder of HVMN, one of my favorite companies in the world, learned a little bit about Jeff through Michael and then got to meet Jeff about a year ago, close to a year ago, I guess, or maybe it was two months ago. And I podcast with Michael a year ago.

Jeff figured it out on the podcast and it was fucking longer than we thought it was. So it's been a long time coming. I'm very impressed with both Jeff and Michael's backgrounds at Stanford down the street from where I grew up and very impressed with what they're doing right now. They have one of the greatest supplement companies on the planet, HVMN, which has a $6 million contract with the Department of Defense, U.S. Special Operations Command. They're fucking doing it and they're doing it with the best of the best in the entire world. They're working with some of the best doctors that I've had on this podcast, like Dr. Dominic D'Agostino and many others that are deep into the field of ketogenic diets and

how ketosis can be used under all sorts of different combat situations and circumstances. And one of the things that Dr. Dom points out is that for some reason, the ketogenic diet attenuates a lack of sleep. And that's really fucking cool that it actually can help mitigate lost sleep. If you're getting up in the middle of the night on a fire truck,

if you're working late night on the beat as a cop, whatever the thing is, if you're doing something that is incredibly taxing in the middle of the night, this could be an answer to that. This could be a very good answer for being able to have energy when you need it and not feeling like shit the next day

when you got to get up on three or four hours of sleep. So we dive into a lot of the science, the new stuff, stuff that's just coming to the surface right now, where ketones are headed, where they've been, and really Jeff's background because he's a fascinating dude.

And I love what these guys are doing. Check them out at hvmn.com slash KKP and use promo code KKPH. Check out for 20% off. Support the show by sharing it with a friend. Word of mouth is the name of the game. It's how I built up everybody listening right now. Obviously helped me having the On It podcast to begin with.

But sharing the podcast far and wide with people you know that are interested in the subject matter. So any episode that somebody likes, share it with another person. You can leave us a five-star rating with one or two ways the show's helped you out in life. And that five-star rating, if it's a good one, we'll select it and you'll win. You'll win. It's not random. You write the best review each month and you're going to win my favorite prize from Organifi.com. They're going to hook you guys up all year long. They're doing this once a month

and just leave your Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook handle if you're still on the book and we'll get your goodies out to you. So those are a few different ways to help the show grow. Last but not least, check out our sponsors. They make this show possible. We talked to HVMN. They are the best in the ketone game.

I remember when I worked it on it, I created a ketone supplement that was really damn good. And I was comparing it to the other products on the market using a Precision Extra from Abbott Labs ketone blood meter. And the HVMN ketone ester just out, it outscored anything that I had. It outscored every product that I took from powder, but hands down. And the powder stuff tastes a little bit better, but fuck it. I want performance. And if you want peak performance, you want the best of the best to work. The taste really doesn't matter at the end of the day. I've been running a lot of the HVMN ketones. I was laughing about when I met up with Jeff at the farm because I was like, man,

it's been, I'm on a prescription, a prescription, I'm on a prescription of three a month. And I'm like, I run through them so quick. I don't even know that I'm lasting two weeks with it. So I just doubled that up and we'll see if that does the trick. It's phenomenal stuff. And we dive into all the ways it's phenomenal, but you guys will get all that on this podcast. Look into our other sponsors, look into hvmn.com slash KKP. KKP at checkout for 20% off everything in the store. We're also brought to you today by othership.us slash KKP. That's HTTPS colon forward slash forward slash othership.us slash KKP. Othership is your new mindfulness routine. With over 500 custom guided breathwork sessions, the Othership breathwork app lets you assess and on, lets you access an on-demand library of sessions to help you regulate your nervous system state.

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pre-order list on the Analumba website is up. Check it all out. Coherent-water.com. Use code KKP for 10% off everything in the store. That's coherent-water.com and use kkp for 10 off everything in the store that's coherent dashwater.com and use kkp for checkout 10 off everything in the store and without further ado my brother jeff woo all right y'all we're at the farm jeff was in the house co-founder of hvmn uh we had michael brant on i think two or three months ago apparently the team checked it's like a like a year ago no shit so it's been a long time and we hung up i think in person or three months ago. Apparently the team checked like a year ago. No shit. So it's been a long time.

And we hung up, I think in person two, three months ago. Last time I was out in Austin. Hit a little workout on it. That was two or three months ago. Shit flies. Yeah, time's flying

when you're having fun. But you're telling me about this property and now we finally got the tour. It's amazing. I mean, I think you're talking about all the energy healers and we're reading the land and it's just like, I don't have any of that skill set, but I think you're talking about all the energy healers and we're reading

the land and it's just like I don't have any of that skill set but I think you're just out here you're like wow there's a lot of

thought, tender, love and care put into the land it's cool like this is going to be an awesome success it's going to be a everyone's got to check it out

and that's the thing like you can talk about it it's another thing where there's like a there's a visceral feeling here you know and you don't have to be a

you know light worker or whatever the fuck you want to call yourself. You don't have to have any of these credentials when you come here, if it's palpable and you can feel it, like you go to Sedona and you're like, oh, something's different here. You know, I don't know much about vortexes, but there's a different feel to the land when I'm there. Right. And that's what we're trying to cultivate here. So super happy. I could bring you out here, um, and give you guys the tour. Michael had a blast going on the tour last time and he didn't get to see it where it is now.

You know, like every year it just gets better and better. So that's really cool. I mean, I think friends like yourself, I feel like really opened me up towards spirituality

and something that is like not scientific. I just grew up not religious. My parents came from communist China. So it was like not really religion in our family. Talk about that actually

because I've read different things, you know, I mean, people read all sorts of shit about, you know, social credit and all that. And that's a separate story. But from a spirituality standpoint, I've heard that there's some mix of Christianity,

Taoism and Confucianism in China or some play on one of the three. Is that it? Or is it mostly now just modern fucking world and all that shit's on the back burner? I mean, I think there's, I think what is like technically classified as traditional chinese folk religion right like there's like these

mythology stories like he's equivalent to saints he's like historical characters that kind of mythological i think there's a couple like dominant uh philosophical schools like confucianism which is like very uh you know respecting ancestors like a very strict hierarchy, the emperor, the father, the mother. So I think a lot of these philosophical contracts have emerged into, I would say, like Chinese American culture, where like people very value much education

and being with their family, taking care of their grandparents. So I think some of the positive- With a generational home, yeah. Exactly, I think some of those positive attributes come from some of these like philosophical schools. And I think you have just, but I think there's not like,

probably like not like a very strict traditional like top town religious contracts within, I think my understanding of Chinese civilization. You're not born into it at this stage of where especially when,

when the communist revolution happened or is this like, you know, the communist took over and like there was just like, you know, the communists took over and there was like a cultural revolution reset. So all the traditional things were thrown out, like the educated people were thrown out.

They were like, you know, marched around with cone heads. My grandparents were like principals and educators. So I think they were kind of caught in that purge in a little bit. But it sounded like there were some students in the Red Army that like looked up to them. So like they didn't get super hazed. But I remember like just growing up

and my mom telling me stories when she was like 15, everyone got kicked out of school and they all got sent down to the farmland to learn how to be a proletariat farmer and like reset culture. So all the religion, obviously like the communist ethos is no religion, we're gonna all just be this commune essentially. So that's my backdrop.

Yeah, I'm fascinated by it. I remember, was it Yomi Park? Yeah. Went on from North Korea, went on Rogan's and that was a brilliant, I'll link to that in the show notes if you haven't heard. It's a must listen. It's not something, I don't think people in America

really wrap their heads around. You only really hear old farts talking about it, like the Cold War or Cuban Missile Crisis or any of these different things where you're like, why are we so worried about communism? There was a disconnect from my generation to what other people lived with and experienced as a true fear.

And then now, oddly enough, you see something like the great reset and some of these ideologies come through that actually partner and pair really well with communism, socialism, those kinds of things. And it's kind of like, oh, okay, I can see. There's like almost like, I don't know if it's never ending,

but there's a consistent backdrop into trying to play with different models of humanity. And what is that ideology? It could be from Marxist ideology or from different things, but like it is a part of the ecosystem of how humans think and what we think would be the best possible way

to govern and work with this many people on the planet. I mean, I think it comes from like a good heart, right? I don't think people are like, hey, I'm going to be an evil dictator, but it's like, okay, like we want to have everyone being equal and we're going to like have some smart, generous people figure out

how to allocate resources amongst the people. And it like it's never worked in practice and i think i'm almost resigned to the fact that like to your point i think these are just repeating cycles where every generation needs to learn its own mistakes like hey we think that communism wasn't implemented correctly they can do it again now and we'll do it better and it's like i think that is going to be and i think that happened with world war one right right? Like this is going to be the last war because so many freaking people died and it's like the most brutal war, 17 million people died.

We're never going to have a war again. Fast forward another, you know, 30 years later, World War II, and then there's always been like, you know, every decade has been a massive conflict. Yeah. Have you read The Fourth Turning or heard about it? Oh God, you fucking love that one. They talk about 80 year cycles, you know,

with four 20 year seasons, you know, and the season is the high that's like the spring, the awakening is the summer, the unraveling is the fall. And then the crisis period is the winter, right? And so they wrote this in the mid nineties and predicted that the next crisis period would start in 2005, give or take two or three years, 2007 hits, 2008, boom, we're right in it. And they've marked any great civilization, they can map it. So we've gone, this is our fourth big turning. So we had, it started off with America

in the Revolutionary War crisis period, then Civil War, then World War II. And we're in the crisis period now, that was marked with the 2008 housing crisis, COVID, and we're still in it for like eight, you know, till 2028, 2030. So it's kind of like everything's been marked by big war. I mean, you look at World War II and the Great Depression,

you look at the Civil War, which is more American lives lost than any other war, all of the wars combined and the Revolutionary War, which kicked things off. And it's like, I don't live in fear, but there's also like a very strong presence to say, this shit could pop off, you know, in the next eight years in a way that we,

that most people aren't prepared for. Is that egocentric? Because like, hey, we think that we're alive today. We're in the most interesting time in history. Or is it egocentric? Or is it actually objectively like very, very rapid in terms of development, right? Like from COVID pandemic to banking crisis

to potentially already a war in Ukraine and Russia and then just rising tensions with China. I think it is, I think objectively like a very interesting volatile time period, but I don't know. I'm self-conscious of the fact that maybe we are just like, hey, we're egocentric. We're living in the most exciting time in history.

I don't know. Like we'll see AI is happening. Like maybe, you know, DOD is saying that maybe there might be aliens out there. So, I mean, going back to the point, I feel like, you know, same time with like folks like you, like I'm just building like friendships.

I feel like I've been much more open. So I grew up like, I think just very academically oriented, very scientifically oriented. If it didn't have a randomized controlled trial, it was bullshit. But I think I just realized that we are very malleable, living, emotional creatures.

And even like the sense of energy when you're in vivo with like great people in like a room when everyone's doing breath work or there's like an awesome music festival and like there's energy. There is something there that I don't know like

how to best quantify in terms of like scientific metric yeah but i think as emotional humans that respond to energy and it's seeing you know friends achieve a lot of things through manifestation we're talking about a little bit about this i've just become much more open-minded and wanting to be spiritual and tap into that in this notion of faith because the scientific part of my mind says hey even if it's a placebo effect i will take that freaking free placebo because the placebo effect works yeah but i think having that kind of sense of hey there is a bigger story a universal story that we're tapping into. I think that kind of release of sovereignty to something bigger, I think is a comforting notion.

I think if we're all just like, hey, we have 80 years, you're by yourself, you got to figure it out. And that's on your mind every single day. I think that is like a very daunting task that people will have to hold through your lifetime. So having that, I think that yin and yang of pulling and pushing between having agency, being rational, being pragmatic,

and then having some sort of spiritual grounding and like tapping to the emotion and the energy of good people. I mean, I think part of, you know, wanting to spend more time with you is just tapping more in that school, more of that culture. And I think that in some ways,

I think you seem very happy. And I think a lot of people in business who are just super techie are just not super happy people. And like, what is winning? If it's like, hey, you want to like kind of maximize the integral of happiness and like a sense of achievement

through your lifetime of, you know, the 80, 90 years that we, you know, hopefully get to live. Now, where's that metric? Some of the interesting studies that I've loved are people in their deathbed, you know, or they interview all these people in their deathbed and they ask them, well, if you could change, you know, five things about your life, what would it be?

Yeah. You know, and then almost universally, they all have a very, very, maybe there's six of them, right? But they're all saying, I wish I spent more times with friends. I wish I spent more time with family. I wish I invested more in relationships

rather than my work. Like there's a pretty common thread that's told at the end of life with a lot of people. And I think all of us to some degree were brought up, whether our grandparents came here or it was great, great granddad or whatever the fuck that is, like here's the land of opportunity.

Make yourself what you're gonna make for yourself. But that takes hard work and people get caught into, and I don't know if it's salvationist theory through Christian ideology or something else, but it's like, I'll be happy when is an okay thing to live with, right? If I bust my ass now, when I retire, I'll get to do what I want then.

I'll be happy when I have X, Y, and Z. I'll be happy when I have X amount of money and Z. I'll be happy when I have X amount of money and I've got a white picket fence or whatever the fucking thing I was told to get. And most people more and more waking up to the fact that they're like, no, I don't think that's correct. Yeah. I don't want to make that trade. I want to trade my life for money and then live on for like two days out of the week. Yeah. Yeah. What can I do now that's going to be more appealing to me that I can stretch and feed myself with day in and day out while still doing the shit that I love? There is a cultural shift there that's pretty cool to see. So let's dive into you. Both you and Michael, well, maybe it was just you, graduated with honors from Stanford. Is that correct? Yeah. Honors and distinction, meaning that I was good at taking tests and did like an honors thesis. Yeah. A computer science guy. That's badass. And I mean,

having been an ASU dropout, I just have mad respect for... You're a professional athlete, so you're crushing the athletic world. I was like literally pulling all-nighters in the dorm room, coding operating systems and network switches and C and C++. So... Did you always... I mean, coming from that background, you know, obviously there's, there's the emphasis on statistics and like, is it provable and the scientific method? When did you feel like this drive towards human performance and like being the best possible version of yourself? Because that's something that drives you now.

It's not just on the individual level, but like how, how do we increase and optimize a human in a, in a job setting where that then changes the whole fucking workflow and actually changes the scope of the business, right? So you're thinking about this on multiple levels, but where did that itch first come from? I mean, it started off very rational and competitive. So I was always good at taking tests. I was very good at taking multiple choice tests.

So I think a random factoid was that I scored the highest SAT score in the country as an eighth grader. I got like a 1590 out of 1600. I won some award. And I think Pepperdine University was going to give me a scholarship to start college as a ninth grader. And my parents were like, nah,

that doesn't make sense. So when I got interested in biohacking, human performance was really being in Silicon Valley and realizing that there was a parallel of outcome and economic success being the number one player versus number two. For example, right, if you're Uber, you're literally like a 10 times bigger company and you create 10 times more value for your employees and your investors than Lyft. I mean, if you're number one social network, like a Facebook versus like a MySpace, MySpace is like dead. So I think with technology, you get these parallel distributions of value.

So, but then you do, like I just had like friends working at these companies and you just realize that like the amount of smartness and intelligence or savviness is not that different it's like one more insight or one little extra push and one little feature that pushed it over to be number one so the incremental amount of work to be number one or number two and just like in the athletic world right like when you win a fight it's like you got you know timing lucky you got a choke. That like- Yeah, split second faster or yeah. It's like one of those things where it's like

the difference of skill and dedication is so slim, but the outcome is so fucking different. Like you're the champion, you're a loser. So that was my mindset back in, so like I started a company right out of school, sold that company to Groupon, so I had a small exit right before I turned 24, had resources and time to start exploring. And I was really focused right out of school, sold that company to Groupon, started a small exit right before I turned 24, had resources and time to start exploring.

And I was really focused on this notion that, hey, I just need to be a little bit better than everyone else and I can be a billionaire. So how do I, and I literally had friends founding some of the biggest companies and are billionaires. So I'm like, okay, this is possible. Kind of the Stanford American dream,

Silicon Valley dream era. This was like early 2010s. So I was like, okay, I think in the modern landscape, I think you would probably crushed the world when we were competing on who could provide the most in terms of food and family and being a warrior.

But I saw in the modern context, it was like an economic war, right? Not to say that like, I think you're super smart, but like, I think primarily like, I think like the dominant competition set, one of the forms is like, how do you build a better business than other people? So to me, it's like, okay, like just like you compete in sport, how do you find advantages, techniques, training to sharpen your body and mind for athletic competition? What is a parallel analog to sharpen your mind for an economic battle?

So that got me down that rabbit hole of nootropics. And I think that journey of just like looking at the RCTs and the animal data and the human data on like Russian Alzheimer drugs, like Nuupep, the Racetam. There's all these things I was ordering. I remember deep diving the Racetam family

and playing around with my own little guinea pig. And I was just like, and I think at the time, I'm not sure, I haven't been, but I was like buying Chinese or Russian chemical,

research chemicals from like Alibaba, right? Just like importing like bags of powder and then getting like the micro grams drug scales and mixing my own powders. So that was me.

I was just like experimenting with stuff, seeing if it felt subjectively anything or could I get ECAT a little bit more performance, a little bit more endurance, a little bit more resilience. But I think through that journey of being like very self-focused, I just ran into and met just like really, I think that you either come into this world from like wanting to be the best, probably like from your perspective, being like a high performance athlete or being very, very sick. Like some of the most interesting folks I've experimented with alternate methodologies and healing or performance have come from just like literally the Western medical system failing them. Yeah. Marxists and a lot of people that I look up to in the keto space and,

and you know, ancestral living Rob Wolf, you know, they started raw vegans and it's, you know, there's a few people on the planet maybe that can do that longterm, but like they, they'd really were destroyed and came in from like just being annihilated

health-wise to like really start to gain what is going to work for me, you know, and figure that out. Yeah, exactly. So I think like meeting like just good people that were just all searching for truth, all searching for a better methodology to live, I think just really opened the aperture of, hey, like this human performance just for myself is,

I mean, I think having some self-motivated goals is fine, but I mean, it's like a much larger, interesting purpose around just like figuring out like how to live a well-lived life in which like being healthy, being sharp is a huge part of that. And I think going back to having that tribe of people, like how do you spend time with good people

and like build projects with them and create things together? So I think what motivates me a lot now is that I have these projects that give me excuse to like, come hang out with you. Right. Like, and to the point, like, how do you make a living, like just doing stuff that you would love to do anyways. So in some sense, I get to work out with bad-ass dudes and just learn, like, you know, and just hang out. And it just, so in a lot of sense, I've just molded a lot of my...

Not to make it overly cheeky and cute, but you have to build out a very thoughtful infrastructure, how to keep everything moving and going. There is a business model to make sure that you can keep the lights going and have the resources to build and scale. We had a dairy farmer yesterday that kept saying, and she kind of sounded like Ernest from Ernest Goes to Jail. She's like, no, what I mean? She kept saying, no, what I mean? She's like, at the end of the day, you got to eat, right? Yeah, that's it.

That's it. And it's all because we all got to eat. And I think to me, I think the way I think about it now is that no one's going to give you the resources to allocate how you want to create something, right? Like no one said, hey, Kyle, you're the best person ever. You get to have 120 acres out here and build out like this amazing property. No, you had to like prove it, earn it, learn about it, scrap together the resources, inspire people to come and support and help. And to me, it's like we are all on that journey to earn the right to allocate more and more resources, right? Because I think you have this property, you can have multiple other properties, maybe you have a million people coming to the programs.

And no one's giving that to us. We need to earn the right to allocate resources and wield the influence that we have. So a lot of my focus now is how do I earn the right every single day to have team members, have resources, have capital to allocate? That's what I think about a lot. Yeah, that's a very interesting and insightful way of looking at things, especially from a business perspective, right?

So I thought along the lines of just, what do I, Paul Cech is one of my mentors, talked about this from a lifestyle design standpoint, how much money would you earn in an hour? Like very practical shit. And then if you made that, how many hours would you actually work? Because you could work yourself to death

and make all this money and not have any time to spend it or any fucking joy in it. But like really getting clear on that. And I pride myself now that I'm paid to learn. Like I'm paid to learn and implement, not just regurgitate a bunch of fucking facts, but actually embody the things that I'm trying on

and regurgitate that from my own personal experience and to continue to have great podcasts with excellent people that gets me to travel and gets me to meet more experts and more people that I want to be around. So that's cool because you can think about end results and then backtrack. All right, how do I get there now?

But with the models that you're using are really cool because it's thinking outside the box in ways that most people aren't. And it's still in a way that you're working on net positives. You're working on win-win metrics for everybody that's involved with, right? Like Daniel Schmachtenberger talks a lot about game A, win-loss metrics.

That's been the competitive model of humanity for as long as we've had written history. And to shift that into game B or whatever we want to call that is necessary. We'd have to create win-win outcomes. Yeah. And I think I just realized that life is too short to try to fuck people over. Like it just actually stressful to like constantly pushing. And this is like, you know, and I think this is like the philosophical side.

I bring a lot of Taoism as well as I think Stoicism. I think very Eastern and Western philosophy of a Roman emperor and a Chinese court official all like thinking about how to govern and master themselves in the world around them in a very chaotic time. It's, I think they converge in some senses that like flow with the stream, right?

Like there's some things that you cannot control. You gotta just be stoic about like the absurdity around us. But there's some things that you cannot control. You gotta just be stoic about like the absurdity around us, but there's some things that you really care and are willing to die for. And I think to me, it's like, how do you like, where is that tribe of people that are gonna be side by side with you fighting for a cause and a mission?

So in some sense, it's not like, hey, I'm like, you know, we're super granola hippie. Like, I think we're super ambitious. But it is finding a way where if we win, we all win together. I think just aligning value created and captured, it makes like life so much. And I think the business side of partnerships so much simpler because it's not like, hey, I'm going to want more from you and we're going to start fighting. No, no, like let's align all the energy on fighting on the outside because it's so fucking

hard to make anything new anyways. And if we're spending any energy like trying to grab from each other, there's some other team that's just much more aligned. That's not internally fighting. That's going to just eat your lunch. Yeah, they're going to work as a team. It reminds me of Mark Gaffney, who's a Jewish Kabbalistic mystic.

Awesome dude. He's been on the podcast. My favorite book of his is The Erotic and the Holy. It's on Audible. It's a lecture series of him, breaking down some of these core principles. One of the things he talks about in a different book is you have role mate,

which is like typical in relationships. I go make the money. She folds the laundry and keeps the house clean and feeds the kids, whatever, you know, that's a standard role mate. And then you transcend and include, you know, like Ken Wilber's model of consciousness, transcend and include to get the soulmate, right?

Like that's your person, that's the person you're gonna be with. And this works too outside of, you know, marriage and shit like that. Like this works on a business model. And then from what you're speaking about now, you transition from soulmate and include to whole homemade, which is where you find your team. And the team is one that has a shared vision of the horizon. When you guys look out into the world,

you see the same picture and you have the same method of how you're going to go after it. And that's really important. Yeah. Yeah. I think that part is actually very important to me because I think that when we get more and more busy, we have more responsibility. I think sharing projects is actually so important to have that real deep relationship. Because I think that sometimes, how do you make friends? I don't think a lot of busy people have time

just for friends that don't actually share overlapping interests and projects. So I think my hack around that is like, hey, let's just find low-hanging projects like work on together. So there's actually something that we are shared building to like have a baseline of a relationship.

Otherwise it's like hard to be like, hey, like, I don't know, maybe I'll, you know what, you do like a once a quarter call. I don't know. Like I like to just like round up, like we're brothers or like, hey, like we'll just, we'll be friendly,

but it's just like hard to keep in that in between. Yeah, you're finding brothers in arms, right? Who am I going to be on the front lines with? We can go through something, challenge together, create something together. You'll give birth to something together, right? That's an important thing, no doubt. So where did you, when you first,

you know, you got into the nootropics game, I did the exact same thing somewhere towards the end of my fight career. I was hearing a lot about it, listening to Tim Ferriss' podcast with Dr. Domique Agostino, some of our mutual friends, getting into ketosis, Peter Attia, guys like that, and really started just experimenting with different things. I'd had a decent amount of experience with plant medicine, but didn't have a whole lot with nootropics. I loved alpha brain, and so obviously that brought

me to Aubrey and on it. But that was just one little piece of the pie, right? Like, let me tinker with the neurochemistry and you talk about biohacking. And I think it can be an overused kind of silly word and it can be something that returns you to basics that actually matter. You know, like you have a juve light, I have one, it's fucking awesome. And I'm outside in the sun every fucking day. I'm not going to use that in place of the sun, you know? So talk a bit, a little bit about some of the things that kept you into the human performance model that wanted you to drive you further into different aspects of it. Yeah. So I think, I think it sounds like just very analogous parallel journeys. So I think nootropics was

really just like the test bed and there was just like this whole aperture of getting really into intermittent fasting and fasting. So around, I think this was like on 2015 era, Valter Longo at USC had a pretty seminal paper around fasting for longevity. And again, just very self-oriented at the time. Yeah, I want to live longer, why not? And we started off actually pretty hardcore. And I think there was not a lot of fasting literature

back eight years ago. So me and a couple of buddies at H4N, we just did 72-hour fasts, just off the gun. Water only? Yeah. That's cool. We didn't know it. There was OMAD and one meal a day or whatever. We were just like, all right, we kind of need to do long.

And I think this was based on the equivalent of a mouse studies that he was doing. So it was like pretty long for humans. So we do Sunday night and it would break fast together at Wednesday morning. And we would, we just started doing that. And long story short, like a lot of our friends in San Francisco and the Bay area and Silicon Valley wanted to join us to do this fast. So we ended up actually running one of the largest, I think the largest intermittent fasting group in Silicon Valley. I think at the peak, we had like 80,000 people in like a Slack and Facebook group. And people were just like talking about like their fasting and people are hosting their own breakfast in New York and other cities. And I think subjectively, it was a great just mental discipline to realize that I think for folks that hadn't heard of fasting, I thought you would just die if you didn't eat for like a day. Like I was like just like inculcated.

I think when I was growing up, like don't skip meals. Bad for you. Skin and bones. I mean, I guess like back in, you know, like I guess, you know, if you're growing up in communist China, like my parents were literally starving. And again, like we actually have food now. Don't skip meals. So I was very much back in that, don't waste a grain of rice. So realizing that, hey, our mind and body are actually quite resilient.

And actually, as they were getting better keto adapted and actually getting into ketosis, feeling actually very sharp and clear on it. It just really kind of unlocked, hey, why is this working? How do I accelerate it? How do I hack this or improve this process of fasting? And that got me down that pathway of ketogenic diets and keto. And then around a similar time, around 2016, there was a seminal paper published out of an Oxford research group showing that exogenous ketones, ketone esters, could enhance athletic endurance performance in cyclists. And I happened to be going to Europe, and I just stopped by the research group out in Oxford and realized, hey, this technology was kind of just sitting and languishing on the lab bench. It actually originated from a 2003 DARPA

program called metabolic dominance. So there's some military funding way back in the day. It was taking such a long time to bring up the scale. It's super expensive to manufacture. The classification as a food or a supplement or as a research chemical was still hazy. And I realized that my skill set as an entrepreneur, as an engineer, maybe we could partner together to really scale what I thought was a very interesting technology into an actual

usable consumer product. This was a research chemical on the lab bench when I saw it. Literally, Oxford chemical engineers were making this by hand from crude oil petroleum product. What was the cost of it then?

You mentioned that on count. Yeah, it was like $2,500, $25,000 a dose. It was just super expensive because it was, again, like most organic molecules, right? Most organic molecules in cosmetics and food are actually derived from crude oil, just purified processed crude oil because crude oil is just decomposed dinosaur and plant matter. So it's the same carbon link chains. You just need to replace the hydrogen and oxygens and nitrogens around the

form, like the molecule that you actually want. So that got me down the journey around, okay, if fasting is an interesting intervention and if the pathway of ketosis drives a number of the benefits of fasting, could you short circuit the hard work, the effort required to do caloric deprivation or carbohydrate deprivation to get into ketosis? Can you short circuit with a ketone beverage? And long story short, working with athletes,

receiving two multimillion dollar military contracts through Special Operations Command, the data is proving out that yes, you can get a lot of the benefits of fasting through a ketone beverage. And in some instances, improve the physiology in a way that could not be normally achieved. Yeah, I mean, you can't get it another way. That's something that, I mean, there's one of the,

I read the Complete Guide to Fasting by Dr. Jason Fung. And one of the takeaways from that book is that almost all forms of fasting, if you're doing them correctly, are going to work. If you're doing 16-8, fasting for 16, eating for eight hours, if you do a 24-hour fast once a week, if you do just water for three or four days, right? Even Walter Longo's Prolong, which I'm not a huge fan of, but the fasting mimicking diet, I am a fan of. So we'll make like a thousand calorie ketogenic state where it's nutritionally at 80% fat, 10% carbs, 10% protein. And we'll run that for five days. And you see benefits for six to fucking 12 months just from doing that for five days. It's pretty gnarly that Yeah. You know, that you can have some low hanging fruit like that.

That's, that's, that's, that's impressive. It's impressive to see that you guys have really taken something that I've been fascinated with. And not only have you been at the forefront of the research and really diving into, does this work, you know, who you guys are working with says a lot. Like you're working with some of the best operators on the fucking planet to see if this works in the most real situation. And something I loved about fighting, probably the main thing I missed when I stopped was that there was no

greater test. You know, like if I, how does this work on my body? Let me try that, you know, when I hit the gym. It's like, cool. Let me try that when I'm sparring, you know, like, does that actually, does it actually influence when I spar? Does it actually influence when I, when I have somebody, um, not in a life or death situation, but when the stakes are high, right? And they're at the highest stakes. And this is, I think, part of my transformation going from being much more open-minded towards more spiritual practices. Because I felt like a lot of the academics, and that was kind of my orientation, and we published and I've been a co-author of a number of peer-reviewed papers within top metabolism papers. There's a difference from a professor telling you how metabolism works and how high performance works versus like, hey, you fought in a cage with elite athletes or you've been deployed

downrange. And I think through those conversations and those N equals 1 case studies where, yeah, what is a randomized controlled study? If it's 10 average Americans who in this day and age are basically overweight, diabetic, and pre-diabetic, and using that as a sample test bed, and we're talking about elite athletes and operators as the test bed that we actually care about, how translatable are those protocols and metrics? So I think realizing that there's a limitation of what science can do. And I don't think it's because like the scientists are dumb or they just like do not have like the resources

or the funding or the access to the right people to actually test these things in like the specific context that I think the high performance side cares about. I think just to start opening up the aperture that there are boxes where science really helps solve questions, where engineering solves questions. And there's other modalities

that can answer broader types of questions or like these N equals one anecdotal stories, which I used to overly dismiss. I'm just much more open-minded to learning and listening and just like getting a sense of which i think is like a very genuine real experience and like achieving like metrics that are not seeable before right like lance armstrong doing like 500 watts of on a bike for like hours at a time like if we'd all done like a peloton class i just you know like like doing 200

300 that's like a sprint for a normal person. He's doubling a sprint for 30, 40, 50 minutes. You can't run a randomized trial on a normal average person and then translate it to Lance Armstrong. Yeah, but it does kind of go back. If you're tinkering with the best in the world, some of that stuff does trickle down.

And I think that's one of the cooler things that I've drawn to. Fighting, it was all about performance. And then as I retired, it almost immediately switched over to longevity, healing, cognitive dysfunction, TBI, that kind of stuff. And plant medicines were great for that. But really, I mean, listening to Ferris, 2014, he had Dominic D'Agostino on, Peter Attia, he had Jim Fadiman who wrote the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide and really broke down microdose before it became a thing in Silicon Valley. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly the point where I think now, like the biohackers now, I think are, I've seen that resurgence of that term

where like I think it was cool and it was like not cool because it was like all these like nerds like geeking out. Like they're not even like, they don't look that fit. Like they're just idiots. Now I feel like it's coming back because like plant medicine psychedelics are like literally the most popular research topic in academia now because of just the data that it works in ways that like ptsd there's like not there is no classic therapeutic that works for that but there's a lot of success stories and anecdotes. And I think that is causing researchers realize,

hey, there is real results here. We need to update our language of science and the aperture of science to be able to account for drugs or molecules that may be scheduled or research chemicals. So I think to your point, it is like taking the interesting observations in nature in situ and how do we actually then

prove it out in a more randomized controlled in a reproducible way so that i think that's where it's like okay and i think that's a little bit of i think where i've come to myself which is like how that you have to know the rules of science and the principles of science but don't be so arrogant to think that you know what was in a textbook defines everything that we know about human in the universe because that's probably what uh newton thought back in the 1600s when he invented calculus and classical physics but obviously physics has changed a lot so like do we think that our modern understanding of biology is like the final page in that textbook hell no so i think it's like then where do you find inspiration to update

that textbook? And I think it is like folks like yourself, just being at the bleeding edges. Some of the people in the biohacking world are going to be doing some completely dumb shit and like fuck themselves up for sure. But like in that wilderness, people are going to find like very valuable paths that hopefully trickle down to the rest of us. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's funny for me. I think when Dave Asprey went on Rogan's and he was talking about how he lifts once every two weeks

and Joe was like, no, dude, no, no, no. There's no fucking biohack where that works, you know? And you could tell, like you look at Joe's body, you know, it was over 50 and you look at Dave's and you're like, there's a fucking difference there, right? Don't work out once every two weeks. Yeah, I'm with you. That's why like I put myself through exercise. I didn't want to be that guy. Oh, I'm going to just talk about like

some research papers and talk at it, talk at you while you're just like throwing up weight. I'm just like, I'm just like watching like, oh, cool. Right? Like I didn't want to be that guy. And I think just spending time with like people in the, in the ring, right? It's like, I'm, I, I'm never going to, you know, be a fighter, like a It's like, I'm never gonna be a fighter or like a professional athlete, but I want to have that empathy, that understanding, at least that personal challenge

of understanding as close to mimicry of that experience. Just to have a better empathy towards people that I respect. Yeah, yeah. And I still, I mean, I still love having the, I don't want to get brain damage and I'm certainly not paid to fight or anything

like that. But every now and then I'll spar again, just because it's fun. So we can actually, here's the test, right? Here's the real life situation where I actually have punches coming back in my face. And that takes a little bit more endurance and a little bit more finding my center than hitting a bag does, right? Like it's a different fucking experience. And yeah, I was telling you beforehand, I had a workout with Tim Kennedy. We worked my workout once a quarter. He'll hit me up and be like, hey man, I'm going to this gym or let's do this thing. And I'm like, yeah, it actually works for my schedule.

Let's do it. And went to this new boxing gym. And it was early in the morning. So I had fasted. I had like a little bit of coffee and I ended up having some HVMN right before I went because I was like, fuck man, if I'm gonna be fasted, let me get this.

And he's big on the EMOMs and high intensity intervals and Tabatas. Like the warmup had me fucked. Like I burnt through all glycogen. I was fucking like, man, I can barely keep my hands up. And then the ketones kick in and slowly, but surely I get more and more endurance while I'm on the bags. And then when we're sparring, I was breathing through my fucking nose. Like it was a cakewalk at the end of the hour. And it was a full fucking hour. Like anyone who works out with Tim. Like you're not, there's no part of that workout where you're like,

cool, now I get to rest. Yeah. You know? So I was like, that was a true testament is that I'm not doing that, you know, often,

but then to get to see that the proof's in the pudding. All right. If I do have a big test. Yeah. This shit works when it matters, you know, and that's, that's a big fucking deal.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, yeah. Yeah. No, I was just gonna say that,

like, yeah, I did a workout with him yesterday and it's like yeah you know we need more tims in our lives right like is someone just like hey keeping you on that accountable for like that rest period i think too many of us um will show up to the gym just like we show up to our work and just kind of check in and check out like i'm tired i'm gonna like take an extra five minutes and check my Twitter and post something versus like every minute on the minute. All right. We're doing 30 sets of this. Oh yeah.

I was like, I was like, fuck I'm gassed after just 30 rounds of this EMOM stuff. Yeah, no, I think we need all, we all need like our inner Tim's view. No,

be accountable, have the timer on, look at it and just be like, no, you're fucking doing it. Part of that is the tribe though, right? Like you're feeding off each other. I remember when I finished ASU football,

I was, it was one of the most depressed times of my life. And, you know, I went from having a hundred guys in the weight room screaming when I was coming up from a squat, right? Like fucking get up, Grizz. It was Grizzly Adams.

I had this giant beard. They call me Grizz for short. And I'm like, get the fuck up, Grizz. And you're just like, it was music just blasting in the ASU weight room. To now I'm at 24 hour fitness by myself. And it's like masturbation. Like I'm not kidding. There's, it's, it's, it's night and day different. There's no one there. I'm fucking got headphones in. Some guy's upset because he wants to use the bench that I'm on. You know, it's like,

there's just a different vibe. Right. So, but if you can figure out ways to surround yourself by people that inspire you like Tim or who or any other situation wherever you live, like that makes such a big difference. Yeah.

Such a big difference. And that's like, again, it goes back to the energy and the treadmill community that like, I think it's like not very quantifiable by something like how, oh, like measure the vibes

in this room. And it's like, what we're going to try to measure some like electrical magnetic fields that are emanating off of us and trying to quantify that. Like, I don't know, maybe it's something there, but Hey, heart math's doing it. Right. But I think that's like the point where it's like,

there's something clearly there when you're experiencing for like, yeah, you have a hundred of your boys cheering you on. You're going to like fucking push that extra little bit to like get that weight up. Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things I wanted to ask you about, cause there, no, there's a, there's a ton going on and maybe there isn't updates because it moves at the speed of science. But one the name of the book. I should find it if I'm going to talk about this, but there was one psychologist who cured schizophrenia with a longer term nutritional ketosis diet. Yeah. Two, he did two and equals one, right? So like, this is something that's uncurable, right? So it's like, when we're looking at whether it's psychological issues or neurodegenerative diseases, there's something that is a standout and it's non-medical and it's some form of fasting,

you know, caloric restriction, things like that, and then ketones as well. Yes. Our research lead, Dr. Lattman, and I actually were getting approved for a Frontiers in Psychiatry paper around applications of ketones for psychiatric disorder, actually. So this is actually something super top of mind. So I think, yeah, just to make sure we're not like totally just not talking about ketones. So I think a lot of the popular knowledge around ketones has been around athletic endurance. And I think the merging in, I think, a lot of your applications and also the recovery side how do you get you got better performance on endurance perspective um but i think like the deeper and i think the most personally interesting applications of ketones exactly relate to neurological conditions

um i think especially with alzheimer's and in this notion of it being type 3 diabetes essentially when you look at the al's brain in a brain scan, there's less glucose uptake, less sugar uptake in the brain. And the etiology there is that there's insulin resistance in neurons. You need more and more insulin to pass glucose into the cells of your brain cells to then fuel it.

That's exactly what diabetes, type 2 diabetes is of the body. You need more and more insulin to have the same amount of energy, sugar, in the form of sugar going to your cells. But what if you have an alternate substrate that does not require insulin to pass energy into these cells? And that's where ketones comes in. So, there's a bunch of early data around MCT oils, ketogenic diet, fasting as early adjuncts for Alzheimer's. And there's actually an NIH study going on around exogenous ketones that has been going on during COVID. I need to actually follow up on that because I think the recruitment kind of stopped. A lot of research studies actually stopped during COVID.

But I think that is actually one of the most exciting applications as well as TBI and concussion. So the interesting thing about a TBI concussed brain, it actually looks very similar profiles in Alzheimer's brain. Same issue. When you get an immediate acute hit to the brain, your brain starts inflaming and to suppress inflammation, the neuron shuts down glucose uptake. So there's actually an inhibition again of energy going into your brain. So the penumbra, like the surrounding damaged tissue of neurons, so like there's going to be some dead neurons that are just dead. You cannot recover them. There's like these damaged neurons that are recoverable and it requires energy to heal but there's no glucose in that brain uh all those penumbra damaged tissue continue to die

so if you have an alternate substrate like ketones that cross the blood-brain barrier act really quickly don't require insulin to act can you recover so there's actually really good data out of ucla on a rat model where they were dropping like controlled weights onto a mouse some fucked up studies so thank you sorry sorry to the mice and the rats so and then the basic the brain energy deficit was like recovered and like the overall activity in the brain it was uh much superior on ketones also lactate versus control so actually you know i have i co-authored a paper in uh in front of neuroscience actually talking about how ketones are interesting substrate but also lactate it's also it's like a you know we

hear about lactate in the form of lactic acid, but it's actually an alternate substrate that fluxes really rapidly when you're doing workouts. It's recyclable, correct? Yes. So I think a lot of this notion of lactate being bad, it's actually just fluxing in and back and forth. So it recycles very, very quickly. And lactate is actually an interesting fuel for the brain as well. So there's a lot of actually, I think Rhonda Patrick was talking a lot about how the lactate and ketones have interesting parallels. But I think long story short is that I think the TBI concussed brain actually may have a much more related etiology as an Alzheimer's brain. And they all are in some effect caused by brain energy deficit caused by glucose uptake issues in the brain, either through insulin or any other,

something along that metabolic pathway. Can you have a rescue pathway that's separate from that pathway to refuel and re-energize the brain? Yeah, it's big. My son, when he was, he's eight and he's going to be eight in a couple of months. When he was three, we were away to,

my wife and I were away to a fit for service event. And I got a call from my mom that Bear had a really bad concussion. He was actually at the ICU at Stanford. I was like, fuck, what happened? And he was climbing up there. My sister took him up to a place. He was climbing up on the cubby holes

where you put your socks and shoes, no pads there, just concrete. And he fell straight back and he got a hairline fracture. We were fucking besides ourselves. We flew home the next day. But in Tulum, I was sitting right next to Dr. Dan Engel, who wrote the concussion repair manual

and Dr. Craig Conover, both have been on the podcast multiple times. And immediately they said the same thing, like full spectrum CBD. This is kind of a microdose of THC, which is neuroprotective. Ketones, if you'll have them. And just load up a little MCTs on whatever he's eating,

in his oatmeal or whatever like that and see, because that'll convert pretty quickly. And it's N equals one, but in three days he was 100%. He was literally 100%. And then for six weeks we had to be like, hey, you can't run. We can't wrestle.

You can't get re-injured in that time, right? That's even worse. So there's something where I just, and of course he's young and he's healthy, but he bounced back so quickly. And I was like, that's pretty, I felt like a gift sitting next to these people as the shit went down, you know,

because they had the resources to figure that out. I'm glad to have that. I mean, that's scary. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Super scary. But yeah, I think about that, you know,

like with all of the people coming back and the piss poor job of the VA, you know, like trying to figure out what to do with people who on every level, because there's hardware damage to do with people on every level because there's hardware damage to military operators that's undeniable, right? It's like, what's the best move for them to work on hardware? And there's a lot of software shit too. And I think that's where plant medicines come in.

But at the same time, ketones could really be some form of a miracle for a lot of people that are suffering from hardware and software issues with the brain. Or at the very least, an adjunct to apply as a part of like an overall nutritional package, right? I mean, I think we actually recently brought on Brian Ray, who served 20 years in the US Army, 15 years in social operations.

His last billet was actually running the Advanced Special Warfare Mountain School out in Fort Carson. So was like the subject matter expert for advanced mountain fighting for SOCOM. And I think

one, I'm honored to have him work with us, but I think it just didn't even come from a business side. I think he really saw that all his brothers in arms all took damage to the brain. Like they all have, like no one really after 20 years

like gets out of war unscathed, especially with TBI concussions and all that kind of impact on the body. And I think that it just really feels like it has accelerated over the last, I would say three, five years where ketones,

other modalities, plant medicine, I think it will have to be just standard of care very, very shortly. Like you just can't have like some of the best and brightest of our country going to GWAT wanting to kill themselves all the time. I mean, it's like literally sad.

I talked to veteran friends and like every now and then, like, yeah, I had to like go talk down my guy because he was going to shoot himself. I was like, fuck, I had to like go talk down my guy. Cause he was going to kill, shoot himself. I was like, fuck dude. Like, well,

I mean, you hear what they're prescribing. It's like, that's not going to help anything. Yeah. Like fucking nothing. You know? And then they know that.

So it's like, they're just like, they're just like thrown out. And like, yeah. And again, I don't want to denigrate like people's efforts. I think people like in,

you know, in the traditionalism are want to do well for these guys, but like the results are pretty clear. That's it. because I think people in the traditional system want to do well for these guys, but the results are pretty clear. You can't keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. Whatever is the stat and standard of care is not really great for people. I'm sure you're familiar with the metabolic theory of cancer

and a lot of that stuff. Is there any research now that's going on around ketogenic diets and metabolic theory of cancer and a lot of that stuff. What is being, is there any research now that's going on around ketogenic diets and certain forms of cancer? Yeah, I mean, I think our mutual friend, Dom D'Agostino is probably like the most active researcher in that space. So kind of the interesting things

that I would highlight with cancer and ketones are that there's actually different subtypes of ketone bodies. So there's D-beta-hydroxybutyrate, which is the primary form of ketones that actually gets converted to acetoacetate before it goes into the Krebs cycle. So you can- So it's going to enter the whole thing will be acetoacetate? Or is there some- Yeah, D-BHB converts to acetoacetate, turns into acetyl-CoA, and then it goes into the Krebs cycle. And there's different ratios that

happen when you're doing ketogenic diet or different forms of exogenous ketones. So I think some of the subtlety or the chemical engineering side of house is that there are ketone esters that have D-beta-hydroxybutyrate or butanedial or ketone dials. There's acetoacetate esters. There's MCT oil esters. So I think the amount of technologies are increasing quite rapidly and I still think a lot of the common language is calling them all the same thing

but there are the Warburg theory is that many forms of cancer are very glycolytic meaning that they cannot do respiration meaning the more efficient form of generating ATP is oxygen plus acetyl-CoA.

You generate like 34, 36 ATP. Fermentation, or basically non-anaerobic, this is aerobic versus anaerobic metabolism. Anaerobic is you don't need oxygen. It's much less efficient. So the idea for these anaerobic cancer cells is that they go to a more primitive form of metabolism. So very kind of primal and like almost like turning to like single cell bacteria

and they constantly regenerate and replicate. So like that is what a cancer is like something that's just like growing and unformed there's a mass in your body it's doing its own thing it's at its own pace yeah yeah so uh for those types of cancers there's early works showing that ketones ketogenic diets are useful for that type of uh cancer because you essentially starve out the carbohydrate the glucose load, take as much carbohydrate out of the diet, and then fill your healthy cells with ketones, which can only be metabolized aerobically. And then you kind of shrink and starve that cancer. But that said,

there are forms of cancers that also, for some reason, also can metabolize ketones. I think certain types of brain cancers have that sort of effect. So yeah, Dom would be the expert in the space on the specific types of cancers and glastroblomas and all these solities. But I think if there is like an anaerobic respiration type cancer, I think that a ketogenic approach could be valuable.

Cool. Cool. Where have you guys, I mean, you're looking at all sorts of shit from the performance side and obviously now looking at different medical aspects of where the application of ketones can go. Is there anything that goes outside of the cancer space or neurodegenerative space that you guys have some promise in that you're looking into? Yeah. I think we were talking about this like off camera like a few months back,

but I've not tried this, but I've heard just anecdotal interesting stories around stacking ketones and plant medicine. I can't answer that now, but I will be able to answer that next month. Because like my understanding of of a lot of these ceremonies that you eat a pretty clean, purified diet and you're oftentimes not going to be able to hold a lot of food down because you're purging and whatnot. And that to me shows that you're probably getting ketosis at some point in

that multi-day ceremony. And your brain might be relatively fatigued in terms of just deprived of fuel. But you have like a very quick bolus of energy in the form of ketones. Like the anecdote I heard was from this... I need to like go find this guy again because he was like one of the best squirrel suit jumper, like crazy dudes in the world.

And he was pretty fucked up. He basically said like, hey, this is the highest death rate of any sport. Like 20% of us die. So we're always dealing with shit. So he's experimenting all the plant medicine stuff and then doing this stuff. And a lot of the people that do that sport

are like adrenaline junkies that come from special operations. And yeah, that death rate is just actually legitimately super high. Like a lot of people die. And he was like telling me this story, like he was in San Francisco at the time. I've lost touch with him. Hopefully he's still around.

But I would love to like just like actually piece back like some of his experimentation to see, you know, exactly what his protocols were. But he was saying that like he was feeling like almost euphoric combining these things together. Yeah. So. Well, I mean, euphoria is an aspect of when you're talking about something challenging like ayahuasca,

it's certainly not the only thing you experience. It's not a fucking party, right? Yeah. But that makes a lot of sense. I was at Sultara in 2019 and they said that you can fast if you want. You're going to have, it's going to change how much medicine you drink

and things like that. But there is an aspect to working with that particular medicine where fasting's a benefit. And that makes sense to me, you know, especially considering like the purifying of the body through dieta that could be six weeks, it could be six months, or it might just be six days beforehand.

But either way, there is some level of that, like I'm going to strip away. And in part, that's how you pay it forward, you know, so that your ceremony is able to, the medicine's actually able to do the work that you're there for with your intention. But I'm very curious about that. And I will be guinea pigging this like mid-April. Okay. So let me know.

I'm actually super, super curious because I think, again, I've not tried plant medicine, but I'm very open-minded to it. And I think I am like tentative to be like, I don't want to just like throw it out there because I know there's like a lot of just like oral tradition and like practices around it. So like adding something that like probably wasn't there naturally, I don't want to like fuck people up.

But like, it would be interesting to like more study. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. I mean, and that's, the thing is, I mean, the fact that fasting is okay tells me that ket like more study. Yeah. Yeah. No doubt. I mean, and that's the thing is, I mean, the fact that fasting is okay tells me that ketones are okay. Yeah. You know, and,

and yeah, there's, there's a lot of old school thought. Like, you know, you don't have any oils, no refined processed food, no protein powder,

even if it's good for you, you don't have any of that shit ready for you. You don't even have salt. So I understand that aspect of it too. But I think, yeah, the energetics of ketones, even, even the ability to go without food longer,, yeah, the energetics of ketones,

even the ability to go without food longer if you're supplementing with exogenous ketones would be really cool because then you could actually manage that. And like a lot of Dom's work on how ketones are a huge benefit when you're not optimizing your sleep. Yeah. Like so for special operators or if you're drinking your first cup at 9 p.m.

and not going to bed until 3 a.m. while you're drinking ayahuasca, that seems like it would really help with some of the mitigation around sleep and things like that. Yeah, I think that you mentioned it. I think that's actually probably one like the more interesting,

another application area that we're studying is ketones in sleep. So there's been a lot of just HRV or a ring loop data that shows that on, you know, do like a 10 gram dose of ketones before bed and you'll have higher HRV data, which is interesting. And it kind of makes sense in the sense that like if you're in ketosis and you're sleeping, that is pretty protein and muscle sparing. There's some like just benefits from a metabolism perspective so you can recover faster. So I'd love to just see some RCT data around that as well.

And that's why I think ketones are like super wild because like, hey, we're talking about like athletic endurance. Now we're talking about TBI, concussion, Alzheimer's, and maybe sleep. So I think that's where I think people like, why does this potentially do everything? And it's like, well, the way I think about ketones is that it really should be thought of

as like a fourth macronutrient, right? So there's protein, fat, carbohydrate. These are the only things in your food label that have calories. Things like vitamin D, calcium, they are micronutrients. They don't have calories. They don't produce ATP, but they are enzymes or coenzymes that allow you to be more efficient either as building muscle or creating ATP. But the actual substrate that gets converted literally into ATP has to come from a macronutrient protein, fat, carb. But ketones is really just like a new paintbrush color that you add to the three.

So it's like you can have a very different metabolic profile when you have ketones adding like a fourth color like if you can only paint with red green blue but now we have like this fourth additional color can we paint something more beautiful so that's like that's why like it makes much more sense to me like why is this so interesting for so many different applications well it's actually just kind of a new like nutritional primitive it has some of the attributes of fat in the in the metabolism meaning that it's does not require insulin does not trigger m like like you know mTOR AMPK and it's similar to glucose because it's fast acting and it's a preferred fuel while not triggering insulin right so like

you get like some of the different attributes of fat and carbs in like its own form and like that likely if you have a like a new letter in alphabet or like a new number it's like okay well you can do like things that you wouldn't normally do what can we do just adding one but you only had three so that's that's a pretty significant thing to add one when you only had three to begin with what have you seen around anything with the microbiome i remember originally uh some of the stuff that come out were that nutritional ketosis would actually shift the microbiome in a way to where it would create more gaba than glutamate so as far as the parent neurochemicals glutamate

being excitatory and gaba being relaxing and centering you know a lot of people fucking take gaba pent and different forms of that ph gaba whatever but if your body was creating more of that it seems like that would be a good But if your body was creating more of that, it seems like that would be a good way to sleep better, more effectively and just feel more calm. I've been thinking about that pathway from more of like a caffeine adjunct or a caffeine replacement. Because I think I don't have that many vices,

but I think just being overly caffeinated is probably like one of my biggest vices. So I've been thinking, okay, can I rotate caffeine with ketones, maybe having nicotine lozenges and just like cycle back and forth. But yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely applications in terms of just like, how do you, you know, not be, I think that's probably one of the larger problems in our society. Everyone's always like ripping too much coffee or energy drinks. So I think that's an interesting application. I think there's, I know that

in the microbiome that there's certain gut bacteria that really like short-chain fatty acids that seem to be very beneficial. There's a lot of these butyrates that are very popular. But I actually don't think that anyone has studied ketone dials, ketones in

the gut. I think a lot of the research applications have been much more functional endpoints. So that would be like a great PhD thesis around. Yeah, that'd be really cool. Actually, I would say that I'm pretty up to speed on the literature of this space. And I would say I don't think anyone is actively looking at ketones in microbiome.

I think that would be a very interesting area, actually. It would be very cool. Yeah, what you just mentioned with beta-rate and some of the shorter carbon chain is that a lot of those first get reabsorbed into the intestines. The local area, if they want it, they say, oh, give me that. Give me it back. The microbiome produces it, and then locally, it's going to say, all right, let's do that to make our junctions a little tighter. Let's actually shore up the intestinal wall or help the microvilli. And so it gets used locally and then it goes out systemically and is anti-inflammatory and does a number of other

cool things. But it'd be cool to see, is it being used locally as well as systemically, right? Is this only affecting the brain brain or is it affecting the gut brain? How does that look? That'd be a cool thing. Yeah. I mean, it's also, imagine if you can trace it, because I think that's been, a lot of these tracer studies show exactly where this gets absorbed. So a lot of it goes into the heart and the brain, actually. But it'd be interesting if you could trace if it's like, especially from a

gut microbiome perspective, like where exactly is it being upticked in the small intestine? That would be an interesting thing to look at. Oh, yeah. Well, have they used methylene blue as a tracer? Because that'd be fucking rad, because then you'd have the benefits of methylene blue stacked with it. That's one of my favorite stacks.

Yeah. A little methylene blue with ketones, just fucking rocket ship fuel. Well, usually you need to get like a radioactive isotope to track it, right? Because like methylene blue is a bigger molecule than the ketones themselves. Gotcha.

So you want to actually be tracking like through a radioactive isotope within the molecule itself, exactly track where it goes. I think that, I mean, what do you think of methylene blue? I just remember going to some biohacker conferences and meeting people with blue tongues. I'm like, you look like you ate a bunch of candy.

Dr. Ted Achikoso is hilarious because he makes the little lozenges and he's got all these blue papa smurf or something like that. That's how you get the blue tongue. I think at the right dose, it's amazing because similar to ketones, it's a nootropic as well as a performance enhancer, right? And there's not a whole lot of things that do that. Like nicotine is amazing to tune me in,

sharpen my focus. If I'm learning or if I'm podcasting, it's a must have. But when it comes to like something that tantrums both for cognitive function and endurance as well as performance enhancement, methylene blue is right up there. Yeah. Yeah, right up there. Yeah, cool. I've been much more... I think nicotine, the data there is actually quite

robust. I think it's been overly demonized by vapes and tobacco smoking. Yeah. I mean, well, the problem with vapes too is that you're inhaling oils and the lungs aren't necessarily very good at getting rid of that, right? Even with Paul Cech, who, like I mentioned earlier, he does a lot of vaping through a volcano bag. I mean, he uses really good

high-end organic tobaccos and then we'll add some really good essential oils from essential oil wizardry where we can actually have like an extract of bobin sauna, which is a plant medicine in the Amazon. You can add in the elements of that or cover and just to change the feel and

the experience of what's going into our bodies. It's like, if you're not working out or hitting the sauna, like it's very hard to excrete that you're still going to have to get that out right through, through breathing hard or, or hitting the sauna. And most people vaping just have no idea.

And they're constantly clogging. Yeah, very little interest in that. I mean, I think the data around nicotine, around it being kind of a estrone, esterase inhibitor. So like there's something interesting, like kind of like actual physiological data, but also just like social commentary data where like there was just much more smoking back in the day.

And like that actually elevates testosterone by blocking estrogen conversion actually. It's like one of the side effects or applications of nicotine. And also it's like

anti-Parkinson's. It's like that pathway is Parkinson's preventative. So like people that were smokers had less incidences of Parkinson's. No shit. So there's a kind of

like interesting like sociological impact where like yeah, I think on net net, like having people not smoke to cause lung cancer, all that stuff, probably not beneficial,

but some of these like side effects. Well, it's what it is. You know, like you learn, like we see some of these documentaries like what the health and they're saying

that eating a fucking egg is the same as smoking a pack of cigarettes. And it's like, where are you getting this from? What you're studying actually matters, right? If all my meat studies are done on fucking McDonald's beef and factory farmed animals, it's not going to have the same outcome as like what we're doing here with regenerative

agriculture. And organic tobacco, the way nature made it is completely different. That's one of the things that drew me to it was the science of the application from a nootropic standpoint, but then also the fact that this was used across cultures indigenously. A lot of people thought that that was the first plant medicine that spoke to the curanderos and taught them how to work with ayahuasca. This is the first bridge to the spirit world.

And yeah, in Northern and Central American indigenous cultures believe that was the bridge to the ancestors is the way that the prayers would be carried to all the things. So that that would be used you know in ceremony for those purposes but there is it it is awesome it's it's you know it's in a category where i really treat that plant hold it with the highest regard but it's a it's a special one when you're using the right version of it yeah and i think like the coffee bean is like a plant medicine in some

extent too it's just literally a freaking bean that we grind up and turn into a soup i mean we but we all love it and it's like it's very very socially acceptable so like i think from my approach i just like try to understand if i was an alien i just drop in like okay this plant medicine bean is like great and legal and two billion cups are consumed a day this plant medicine thing that you smoke getting unpopular and this other hot soup of vine is straight up potentially illegal. If you're an alien dropping in, you're like, what's the difference between this bean and that bean and that vine and that leaf? It's like, I don't know. There's actually no technical difference

other than a a regulatory legal human law perspective. So I actually like exploring in that lane because then it's like the thinking around it is constrained by human artifact not by science or application. Yeah.

I think those are the most interesting place to explore and think about. Yeah, I can tell you're curious. Maybe when we have this conversation next time, you'll have jumped in. Dude, it's been absolutely great having you on the podcast. We'll do it again for sure. Absolutely love what you guys are doing at HVMN. Where can people find you?

Of course, you guys are a sponsor. KKP at checkout will get you 20% off. But where can people find you if they want to connect with you online and see what you guys are doing? Yeah. Follow me personally, Jeffrey Wu, G-E-O-F-F-R-E-Y-W-O-O.

Pretty active on Instagram and Twitter. And then HVMN, all of our channels are there. Awesome. Thank you so much, brother. Always a pleasure, man. Hell yeah. Thank you.