Michael Brandt - Rogan, Jon Jones & Diary of a CEO: The Playbook They All Believe In (Ketone IQ)

22:20Like, how are you closing these deals? These are massive deals. Rome wasn't built in a day. You don't just on day one, go work with Rogan or Jon Jones. I don't recommend it. The issue with that is you got to come correct. Those deals are expensive. These are seven figure deals. So you got to come correct. There's not a lot of room for error, especially if you're really early. So we're at a spot where a seven figure deal doesn't break our bank account. It's a portion of our spend. So we can have some misfires. That's helpful. We don't have a lot, but like it's one of many bullets that we have. And so we're able to, we don't feel like we're betting the business on John Jones or on Joe Rogan or on Stephen Bartlett, or we just signed with David Sinclair.

23:01He runs the Harvard Longevity Lab, has a podcast called Lifespan. Intermittent Fasting God. He's intermittent fasting God. Yeah, he's like reversed aging in mice, like reversed blindness in mice. He's, the guy's going to win a Nobel Prize. Like he's on the cover of Cell and Nature. you don't you don't start with those folks on day one usually unless it's like a you know celebrity co-founder deal we can talk about that that's something that we haven't done i don't have a celebrity co-founder we have a portfolio of partners that we work with we're not we're not like overexposed when you think about portfolio theory it's like you want to put all your money into nvidia right now today that's what i feel like is the case with the celebrity brands where you have you better have picked the right celeb co-founder who's going to blow this the f up because what I'm in a position of, which I think has a lot of advantage to it, is I have a dozen.

23:47And then when we get down to like, you know, middle or smaller influencers, and a lot of those people are going to be bigger. They're going to be the biggest ones in a year and a few years. It's a portfolio theory. I don't know why people don't stack the deck. I just think taking that one bet, it's just, you're not covering your downside. Like what you're doing right now, especially the fact that you brought a lot of these people at a strike price. You guys already had some run by. You guys were doing tens of millions of dollars already and you didn't go too late either. So these people come in at a fair valuation.

24:16And if they see this thing being a billion dollar plus company, like they can still 10X their money. And I feel like people don't look at it that way. Yeah. Look, if you go to Vegas and you put all your money on lucky number 14 and you hit big, you look like a genius. If your celeb co-founder is Haley Bieber. and I mean, she did her thing with, what's it called? Road. Yeah, that exited for a billion dollars. That had an insane exit. That was amazing. You look at that, you're like, wow, I want to do that. That was just so much value creation in such a short amount of time. Perfect product, perfect celeb co-founder, boom, boom, boom, everything lined up.

24:54That's a lot of survivorship bias. There's a lot of brands where it's like not quite the right partner, the product, market, founder, celeb fit wasn't quite right. And then where do you go from there? If you've given half your company to someone and it's not the right dynamic. Maybe they get, maybe that person gets distracted. Maybe that person gets interested in other stuff. Maybe that's, maybe they're into it, but they're just not the right fit for the product that you're trying to get out into the market. So it's just putting a lot of chips all on one bet. And I like to stair step into it more.

25:25So it's like before we work with, with John Jones, set a multi-year partnership, like we'll do a more limited thing with him. And then before even working with him, we'll work with like smaller athletes in and around the space, just to kind of put a toe in the water of like, hey, is MMA even interesting? Like, does that perform for us? So like before going like all the way deep, like there's a lot that you learn by working with the like micro influencers, medium sized influencers. Yeah, and then you build the conviction, you build the actual business, the muscle around it so that when you go and work with an A tier celeb, like you're good, you know your shit because you already did it with like a long list of, you know, I don't want to call people BCD tier, but you know what I mean?

26:03Yeah, so pick the big pockets, like for you guys, sports science, entrepreneurship, pick someone smaller, smaller influencer, go big with them. And then incrementally start with a small test with someone big. And if that works out, then you go big with them. And then you're making just that big, bold bet into that pillar, which is kind of what you guys are doing with these three pillars, right? That's right. And also a lot of the difficulty is how do I even get in touch with that A-lister? But the thing is like, you know, a lot of people trying to get in touch with Rogan, but like, you know, what helps with getting in touch with Rogan is like, well, if you're already working with Jon Jones, if you're already working with Cam, Cam Haynes is a good friend.

26:34And he's the guy that put Joe Rogan onto bow hunting. So he's been on Rogan like a dozen times. And they're boys. This is the brilliance. Go deeper into this. This is the brilliance right now is what you're saying right now. This flywheel. You get this flywheel going, you know, like on day one, if you want to work with whoever your superstar is, like you want to work with Justin Bieber. How do you get into Justin Bieber? Like it might be hard even to get his agent to pick up your call on day one. You're not going to be taken seriously, but you can start thinking about, okay, who does that fall?

27:04person follow? Like what, if it's an athlete, what's their coach or trainer? What other brands they follow? Who else do they collaborate with? Kind of build out the ecosystem, which like we're just talking about, it helps you as an entrepreneur because you're able to take those baby steps, those iterative steps to test and learn. You're not betting the whole farm. You're sizing up in the right way along the way. And then also you're saturating the awareness around that person that you're trying to get to. So when they hear about you, when you're actually in touch with them. It's like, oh, I actually know who you are.

27:33Like the people I follow have actually talked about you before. And then you're not just coming out of left field talking to whoever it is. You remember Tom Brady is like probably helpful if someone in his sphere of influence, because he's a human too. If someone that he follows or someone that he's influenced by has talked about your product, you have a lot more chance of doing a deal together. Go to the doctors, go to the stylists, stuff like that. Kind of these ancillary people. What you guys have done too is this, again, the sports science and entrepreneurship, the crossover between each of them is like, what is going to happen when Jon Jones goes on Joe Rogan?

28:07That's going to be just fucking explosiveness. That's guaranteed to be explosiveness. And you're going to get content on both sides. He's talking, both of them are talking about it, whitelisting everywhere. It's going to be a colossal tornado. Like that will dominate. Partners working with partners is definitely part of the secret sauce. Getting your science advisor to go on podcast, partners, podcast, mixing around the ecosystem. them, that is a for sure special sauce in what we do. And it's untapped. I think there's even more to do. There's some brands that do amazing job at this of, you know, getting all their partners really inter-co-mingling together.

28:40And I think there's a lot there. Yeah. That's a, that's a huge Chico that not enough people really talk about is just having your partners co-mingle. They just layer on top of each other. On the marketing side, before we get off that, is there anything big that you want to touch on? Obviously 50 % on partnerships, any like big key learnings from a channel perspective, whether it be meta, app loving, CTV, anything else that you've seen lately that you want to talk about? We touched on it briefly earlier, but on every shot of our product, we have a QR code where you can scan and get your first shot free.

29:10And that does a few things, which is retail is notoriously hard to attribute, right? Someone goes and buys your product off the shelf at Target. You have no freaking idea how they heard about you. Like I did a big podcast spend last month. I don't know. Like what's actually motivating someone to go to Target. We put this QR code on our bottle where you get your first shot free. It does a couple of things. One is it lets us do sampling and trial at scale. So instead of me being in a cart or someone on my team being at a sampling table at every grocery store in America, handing out shots of Ketone IQ, that's just always on.

29:44You can always go and scan a shot of Ketone IQ and get it for free. And then we ask a one simple one question survey. It's like a post purchase survey. Hey, how'd you hear about us? And then we're able to see, oh, okay, well, people are hearing about us in retail, we know the attribution. And it's a different, it's a different fingerprint from our D2C because in D2C, of course, like this is nothing everyone does a post-purchase survey on D2C. It's interesting to see the similarities and differences inside of Sprouts versus Target versus Vitamin Shop versus our D2C. And because of this first shot free program, we're able to collect data and we're able to know what's actually working inside of retail, which again, notoriously hard to get retail analytics.

30:21Guys, this is probably the biggest, this is one of the biggest cheat codes. I literally think of the whole, I don't know anybody else doing this. This is literally the CAC arbitrage from another lifetime. You're cutting the labor costs. So I would only imagine, like you probably have to pay like co-op marketing to go in into Whole Foods and set shit up and give people shots. You're cutting that. And then you're also seeing, I mean, you're seeing which retailers are running. You're probably seeing what are the best customers from an LTV perspective? Which retailers are they shopping at? You're seeing everything.

30:51I can send out a text blast. Say I'm trying to blow up my target numbers. We just launched there. I want to make sure the numbers are good. We can send out a text blast to all of our customers or a segment of our customers. And we say, hey, here's a special thing to go get BOGO at Target, but I won't get one at Target. And they go and do that because of how we have it instrumented. We're actually seeing like the checkout data. We can say, okay, that text blast led to X number of conversions in store. So, okay, I did 200 sales inside a target from that text blast. And the ability to operate omni-channel like that, basically, there's a lot of game on D2C.

31:28A lot of people know a lot of the arbitrage. I should say like the specific skills that it takes to succeed on D2C. Retail, it's like two decades behind. It's super old school. You're painting with a super broad brush. No one knows how things are attributed. I see that as a major arbitrage opportunity where we're basically taking, we ramped the business significantly on D2C before going into retail. And we're now just taking our D2C hats into retail and seeing like, how can we make this retail business look like our D2C business? It's not good enough for me to just say like vibes based, do a big billboard campaign and hope and pray that our target numbers go up.

32:04We like to be as attributable as possible, be as scientific as possible on retail, which is just like not done. Like retail, people just assume that it's gonna be more of a mystery box, less attributable. That wasn't a good enough answer for me. Like I wanted to get our DTC motion in retail. Because why? Attribution is important because you got to know where to spend. Our whole mojo with everything we do is I'm always saying it's 0x or 10x. If something is working, like if you like it a little bit, you should love it at 10x. If you like having one share of Amazon, you should want to have 10 shares of Amazon.

32:37If you don't like having one, drop it down to zero. This is in our culture, always pressure testing everything. And so if we love doing a billboard, let's do a bajillion billboards. If we like showing up at a marathon and doing sampling, let's do 10 of those. Let's do one every weekend. And the ability to actually capture attribution in retail lets us move a lot quicker than we would otherwise. And when you think about CPG, when you think about food and beverage, I know we're so digitally savvy here, but like 90 % of food and beverage happens - In retail. In retail. Retail and or Amazon, it's a black box.

33:08It's no longer a black box. You could do anything you want with this information. So from a data collection perspective, I mean, I would think if I can just kind of reverse engineer your numbers, you'd probably have like a couple hundred thousand. I mean, you probably have like a million phone numbers because you're getting all of your buyers in store as well, too. It pays for itself. I'll say that because, of course, we capture the phone number when someone gets their first shot free and then they're in our funnel. They're in our SMS funnel. Have you seen anybody else? I've never seen anybody else do this.

33:37Anybody else do this? I haven't seen it. we're probably going to see a lot of it now that we're talking about it. So I'm in the back of my mind. I'm like, oh shit, should I be keeping this a secret? But we've had it out there for a few years. And you know what? Steal like an artist. That's very much baked into our DNA as well. Everyone's borrowing. I love how Groons does their first subscription discount. I love how Everyday Dose does their thing. We're all, I think, sharing game with each other. That's a big part of why I was excited to be on here. So yeah, it's I think a little bit of an arbitrage that we've had is, you know, doing that first shot free.

34:09I think people, if you want, steal like an artist on it. I mean, you have to have massive LTV. I mean, you're losing. So you're saying basically the retailer is obviously capturing the sale. And then what are you doing? You're just refunding directly to the end customer that you have the information? That's right. Retailers love it because they're getting the full ring. If your target, the ring is happening. You're getting full dollar amount there. I'm Venmo-ing the customer back. The cost of it. Actual Venmo-ing? Vemo or PayPal is how it comes through. It's all automated. It's not literally me.

34:39It's just you take a photo of your receipt. You scan the QR code. It walks you through it. You take a photo of your receipt and then just instantly we're PayPal-ing or Vemo-ing you back the$4.95 that you paid for the thing at Target. So it's a little expensive in the sense that if you do a coupon through Target, you might get reimbursed some of the distributor fees and other fees. We're paying basically the full sticker price to rebate someone, the full retail price that they bought it for. So it does hit our pocketbook a little heavier, but the speed at which we can roll it out, the fact that it's permissionless, like it's just baked onto our packaging, the fact that retailers love it, they don't have to set up a coupon clearinghouse, whatever, it's just on, it just works, they get the full ring.

35:20And then everything we've been talking about, the quality of the data, the ability to have always on sampling, the fact that we remarket the phone numbers that we get, it more than makes up for the fact that it's an expensive transaction for us to rebate the full thing at face value from the receipt. Maybe that's why more people haven't done it because it feels expensive. But I feel like you just gotta let it play out. Like if you let this, you guys have been doing this for years. So obviously you crunch the numbers and it's working clearly. And it's one of those things too, where it's kind of a meme now.

35:49Like a lot of people know you can get your first shot free of ketone IQ. And if you love it and you're telling your friend about it and they're like, I don't know, people just elbow their friend. Yeah, it's free. Like use your phone number. You can get the first shot free. Whenever it's actually for every flavor too. So like when we launch new flavors, people can try the first new one free. And so I like it as just a meme. Like we started out as a campaign, but then I got thinking, instead of just doing it, you know, for a few months or whatever, like I actually want it to just be core part of our DNA that we're just known as a product that you can, anyone can get the first shot for free.

36:20Because I felt like that's really confident to say as a brand that we're so confident that if you try it, you're going to love it, that we'll just bake it into the packaging. Anyone with any phone number can get the first shot free. It's tied to the phone number so people can't abuse it and you can get your first shot free. It sounds counterintuitive, but it actually makes a shit ton of sense if you actually think through it, which is wild. There's definitely somebody out there listening that in the next three to 12 months is probably going to execute this at a high level. Make sure you guys reach out.

36:46It's either Michael or us and we'll highlight you. That's an amazing game that you gave back. Obviously, it's out there. Anybody can know about this, but understanding and knowing what goes into it, I appreciate you sharing that. Most creators are just duct-taping together a bunch of different tools to run their podcast and their newsletter. Your audience, the analytics, the attention, it's all split. Everything is fragmented. This is where Beehive changed everything for us. It's where Open Residency runs our newsletter and they just dropped a new native podcast tool. Upload your audio and immediately get distributed to Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

37:16If you're hosting somewhere else, just paste your RSS feed and your entire back catalog, the metadata and the episodes all carry over. One platform, one login, everything talks to each other. Head to beehive.com slash openresidency for 30 % off your first three months. Just enter code MARK30 at checkout. That's B-E-E-H-I-I-V dot com slash openresidency and code MARK30 at checkout. Stop renting your audience. Start owning it. You briefly mentioned Target. I know you guys are in Target, some kind of like sports lifestyle type retailers as well, like the Equinox and the Lifetimes of the World. Why don't you walk us just through, like, what does that retail kind of pitch look like under the notion that, hey, maybe not everybody knows the science behind ketone quite yet.

38:01What does that look like? Yeah, I think you're tapping on a really important nerve of how our company operates, which is we're doing something super inventive and new. We're creating a category around ketones. We're ketone.com, we're at ketone on social media. It didn't exist. This wasn't a category a decade ago. Like we very much created this and we're first tracks in the snow, which creates a ton of difficulty in what we're doing. It's a lot easier to sell coffee in the sense that everyone knows what coffee is. It's a lot harder to sell coffee because it's a fricking crowded marketplace and you're up against, I don't want to be competing against fricking Starbucks and everyone else in the arena.

38:39But a lot of what we're doing is from this playbook of like, it's literally Gatorade explaining electrolytes to people for the first time ever. Or one of our investors is Kurt who started Vital Proteins. and they made collagen a thing, right? Like it was a smallish thing. And then they just, they were one of the first to work with influencers. They worked with Jennifer Aniston, started just dropping off the pallets at Costco and just do, you know, they were doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year and just focused on collagen, just making collagen a thing when it hadn't been a thing before.

39:09And so a lot of our decision-making process as a brand comes from the fact that we're really creating something new. So we lean a lot into education. We probably have a much higher customer acquisition cost than most other brands. But because we're the only show in town, we have a lot higher LTV as well. So a lot of the ways that we move, I always caveat it to say we do it in a way that's unique to our style, which is, again, inventing a new category. And not everyone's doing that. What about like from a positioning perspective, before we dive into Rita, I want to talk like a little bit about that.

39:41So you're talking about educating, getting product in people's hands. How like are you understanding and knowing like when you're actually getting traction on stuff, like understanding and knowing when people are actually liking the product? That's a great question. How do we know when people are loving the product? That's an area where I love D2C. So I think about us as a true omni-channel brand. We truly have a blend across D2C, Amazon, retail, different channels to trade with in retail. You know, Sprouts is different from Circle K, which is different from Costco. We're not in Costco yet, but it's in the roadmap.

40:17app. All these channels behave differently. I like DTC because of the immediacy of what you get. You know if someone bought it, you know what the retention rate is, you know what the churn is, you know what's working. So right now DTC is the largest portion of our business. As we scale, we start looking more like a five-hour energy, which is mainly in retail. It's not that our DTC shrinks, it's that our retail just grows so much faster and there's so much more headroom there. And because that's a developed category within the retailers. Exactly. When you think about where does someone want an energy shot, They want it at the moment in need.

40:47They want it at the gym. They want it at the convenience store. They want it on the go. As much as we're continuing to grow on D2C, and there's a lot of headroom there, and there's 10 times more headroom inside of retail. What I like about D2C now and 10 years from now is that it provides that immediate signal. It's pretty hard to know if you launch a new flavor into Target, how much are people loving it? It's going to take weeks, probably months to get that data back. It's important data. You need to look at it. But you could do that on your website and know it within like minutes. You can make an ad on your website for a flavor that doesn't exist yet and see how that performs.

41:20Like the quickness of D2C is 100 times quicker than what you're going to be able to do in retail. So I like D2C as a learning platform. You just have that direct connectivity with your customers. You can survey them. You can see the analytics and using that as the innovation engine so that when you launch it into Costco, you come correct, right? So nothing that new in retail. It's always D2C first. That's very well said. I think it's a great lesson that like you don't want to experiment in Costco. Like Costco, when you launch it, should be a$50 million a year business. Like don't be experimenting.

41:53Like that is the whole point of DTC is you should be making easy, quick, like a million zillion AB tests on ads, on messaging, on landing pages, on offers, on flavors, on everything that you possibly can iterate on cheap. And then once you have it all dialed, that's when you bake that in. And in cost, you should know exactly what your unique selling point is and exactly how to talk about it and exactly what's your best performing flavor or is it a variety packer. You got to come correct. You got to highly recommend measure thrice, cut once. Most retailers have a standing rule that if you get discontinued, like if you show up and your shit falls flat, you're done for at least three years.

42:31And so that's three years of no revenue from that retailer. if you're trying to fundraise or sell your business, they're going to look at that giant black mark of, okay, well, not only is that a zero, but it's going to continue being a zero. You're better off to not even have launched. Straight up, you're better to not even have launched if you're trying to sell your business because someone who's buying it, they can use their imagination and say, oh, this could be really big at Costco. If you launched at Costco and you failed, you're going to be in a really tough spot. You're going to be seen as kind of having a black mark on the resume.

43:01The question I asked, it might have kind of sounded like a dumb question, to some saying like, how do you know if like it's working or not? I want to put a caveat on that, make sure people understand that for someone that's creating something that's pseudo new, like you guys, when you say you're going and testing on D2C, it's really about, you don't want to put it because these retailers that buying decisions are so much different. You're talking about convenience versus GNC versus Costco. It's testing on D2C and understanding and knowing if that cohort of customer in that specific retailer would like that.

43:33And you guys are doing all of these crazy surveys and understanding credit card and you're doing everything like that to understand and know that specific person at that specific retailer would like this specific product. That's right. Yeah. And you got to, you got to come correct again, because if you put a display shipper into a retail store, that's going to sit there for 30, 60 days. You're not AB testing that. You don't have a chance to, if it doesn't do well, okay, come back around next year and relaunch it. So like set up your retail merchandising using the best practices of what you learn online.

44:04And you're absolutely right. Like what works in GNC, it's gonna be different from what works in Target. It's gonna be different from what works inside of a Sprouts. And you got to be smart about it. And I like using DTC as a learning engine for what you're doing in retail. You shouldn't be learning in retail in general. You should be coming in with expertise. That's a low key bar right there. Should not be learning in retail. I completely agree. What are some of those big things that you've learned in retail? You know, you guys are in tens of thousands of doors. You know, one thing that's fascinating on D2C that D2C actually lets you get away with is D2C lets you spray and pray with the way that the algorithm works.

44:40You can make 20 different ad sets that say 20 different things about all the benefits of your product, all sorts of different people. And hey, maybe half of those will work. Maybe five of them will work. A bunch of them will work because the algorithm is really good at taking this creative and getting it right in front of the right person who's going to be converted by that creative. in retail you gotta you gotta keep it way way way simpler if you think about a brand like halo top or rx bar they're not saying 20 different things they're not even saying five different things in retail they're saying one thing they've just figured out that laser precise message to what to say at retail and so it's a little bit of a different motion than online where you have more creative freedom ketones do a lot it's true there's we could go into the whole science behind And when I keep it focused, I just talk about brain fuel because that's what we talk about in retail.

45:28But if you actually looked at our Facebook ads library, we have a lot of different things that we say. It helps to control your appetite. It helps to improve your athletic performance. If you have a big run or big day on the bike, it helps with your recovery, but it also helps with your performance. It helps with your long-term metabolic health. It supports all these different things. And on Facebook, we can make a bunch of different landing pages, a bunch of different ad sets that say all these things in the right language. But in retail, you got to pick one. You have a shipper and you're dropping it in a vitamin shop next month.

46:03What's it going to say? You have to be really sharp. And a lot of times I think what's hard for D2C operators is that it feels like you're cutting off an arm. It's like, man, there's all these things I would love to say about my product. Got to be a direct response to say that one thing. Yeah, yeah. And you can't say the five other things. You can't have five different shippers. Like there's one shipper that's going to a vitamin shop and it's got to be good. and we can go into this, but it's part of the reason that a lot of D2C companies don't necessarily automatically cross the chasm into retail.

46:32I think you can, we're doing it. I don't think it's automatic though. There's a lot of businesses that get pigeonholed as D2C and these can be big businesses, businesses bigger than mine, but they sometimes cannot cross the chasm. We saw with Dollar Shave Club, for instance, and they got bought by Unilever. Unilever could never figure out how to cross a chasm. What worked on Dollar Shave Club, the way of messaging it, the offers, all that stuff, they couldn't figure out a way to translate that into retail. A great D2C business doesn't automatically make a great retail business. There's a lot, people love the startup within a startup kind of term.

47:09It is that, it is the, you're really reinventing and like re-looking at your DNA and figuring out how to put that into a new arena that moves pretty differently. You can learn a lot from D2C, but you really got to like condense down, simplify down the messaging. When you go into retail, it's a little bit of a different motion. Yeah, I think for people out there listening, when I look at your stuff, I feel like if you had kind of all of these, let's just call it value props that you're testing, you guys went with the singular, I mean, you can interchange the word value prop that has the biggest TAM and fits the most within the merchandising with where you're going.

47:43It says energy shot, really big for the people out there. But that's not to say that you're testing these other value props, whether it be curb appetite or improve your athletic performance. And then improve your athletic performance starts crushing it. Maybe you put that on the shot in Equinox or in Lifetime. So you can actually just test and test and test in there, but then change your product in retail. Yeah. The retail landscape is just a lot slower, right? So like you got to know what you're doing before you make the launch. Updating your packaging takes months, weeks, sometimes longer. updating your display shippers, all that stuff.

48:20It's a much more expensive operation than just going into the Facebook ads manager. What's your thesis on timing from how big do you have to be or when is the proper time to go from D to C to retail? Because you guys were D to C only for a bit. That's a great question. It's something we talk about a lot internally. When you look at our set at, let's say Target, when you look at our set, we're next to the electrolytes and the protein powder. When you look at our set at Target, everyone that we're next to is an e-com killer, is Liquid IV, it's Seek Protein, it's Armour Colostrum. All of these are formidable D2C businesses.

48:56You asked a few questions ago, what do we pitch when we pitch to a retailer? A lot of what we pitch is our already install base of customers, people who already know. We pitch our D2C business to retailers. That's maybe an area actually that's changed even in the last five years where retailers used to feel more threatened. Oh my God, you're a D2C company. We have to compete with your D2C. Now they welcome it. If you're in Target, they want to hear that you're already doing, I would say mid and 20 mil annual on DTC. I agree with you. I don't think it's a mistake to do 50 or even 100 on DTC before going into something like a Target.

49:32Because think about what that implies. If you're doing 100 million in top line, you're probably spending somewhere between 20 and$40 million on marketing just for your DTC business. That means a lot of people know about your business when you pull up into Target. and that's a lot of awareness that you're just getting from a halo, probably underwritten already by your D2C business that you're getting as a free marketing halo that's gonna move products for you in Target and the buyer at Target wants to hear that. And not all people that buy on your.com are obviously doing subscription. They might be doing one-offs in any other convenient spots to purchase.

50:04Dude, yeah, I've really realized that I might be a huge nerd that loves buying a lot of stuff on the internet. That is not where the world is today. Even in 2026, like 90 % of food beverage. People are buying it out in real life. It's a very niche buying behavior that someone wants to buy a month's supply of a supplement off the internet and wait three to five days for it to show up and be on subscription. Look, it could be niche. You could still have millions of customers. It's a big country. It's a big place. I'm not saying you can't build a big formidable business inside of there, but the universe of possibility that's available inside of retail is just 10 times larger.

50:40People go on a target. They're going to Walmart. Exactly. I'm from Chicago. I I have a lot of just that kind of, you know, tap into the heartland of America kind of thing. Like, yeah, people are going to Target. It's still 85 % plus. I've talked about that before. 85 % plus transactions are in retail. And on the retail side too, we didn't mention at the beginning. I mean, you guys have the ultimate weapon where like you could go into a retailer and John Jones could do a skit with you for that retailer. He could post about that retailer. Is that like an ace that when you're going and talking to these retailers that you can pull?

51:11How big of an ace is that? It's huge. to be able to sell to retail your whole marketing plan. I'm not just selling them a ketone IQ shot. I'm selling them the entire aura around the business. I'm selling them the fact that we have an eight-figure marketing budget that is already pumping tons of demand. So I spend, if I'm in a half an hour retailer pitch, I'm spending like five minutes or less on the product. The product needs to like check some boxes. Okay, cool, that's a healthier, better for you version of five-hour energy. Cool, bing, bang, boom. Okay, what's a ketone? Okay, great. I'm spending the next 25 minutes and we're talking about the marketing program together.

51:42We're talking about, hey, how are we going to make eight figures inside your stores starting from launch? Sell through. Sell through. It's all about sell through. And the best thing you can say to a retail buyer, someone told me this, and it's 100 % true, is you got to look them in the eyes and say, I'm in the business of bringing traffic to your store to buy my product. That just has to be the feel. They have to believe it. You have to believe it in your bones. A lot of people, they pop champagne, bought, oh my God, I got into Target, popped the champagne. That is not the finish line, ladies and gentlemen.

52:10That is the start line. When you get into Target, that's when the work begins. And either you already have the latent marketing going, you're already spending eight figures on D2C and that has a halo that's moving your product in Target, or you're going to be doing Target-specific stuff. Probably, honestly, a mix of both. Maybe you launch and you have an end cap. Maybe you have different stuff, you know, stuck to your packaging to draw attention to it in-store. Maybe you have your influencers, your partners, like specifically shouting out people in Target. You mentioned, yeah, well, it's John Jones.

52:39We're always, whenever we do a shoot together, We're always thinking, okay, what's our like latest, hottest, biggest retail partner? And we go there and we do a skit together. We're selling that in. So we're telling Target, hey, I'm taking the goat of the UFC to Target. We're going to get 20 million eyeballs that know about our partnership with you. And they're going to be driving people into Target. Target loves that. And then we had a lot of fun making the skit. Another kind of sneaky thing that works well too, is that if you make an ad creative at target, it can still perform really well for DTC.

53:14When you think about psychologically what's going on, if someone sees an ad, there's just like some product floating out on Instagram, it's okay, cool. I might buy that. But when they see it, that it's on target shelves, there's something psychological about that. So I don't even see it as an either or when we're talking to our marketing team about, oh, is this a target ad or is this a DTC ad? It's like the best ads can actually do both. You can have an absolute D to C banger. That's literally a product photo of your product on shelf at a legit retailer because as you said, the social proof. I have not like thought about or read like old, like marketing textbooks in a long time.

53:52I haven't talked about like a SWOT analysis in a long time. You guys are so good at integrated marketing. For people out there, you should go Google, Google what that is. You guys just have this like web where everything is working so, so well. Like what you just said, I've never heard that before of someone taking ads in store and then winning on DTC. It makes so much sense. You'll see some of the TikTokers will figure that out organically, right? If you have like an army of 3000 TikTokers, like some of them have figured that out that they'll just go to a store. If they're doing ads for a brand, they'll go to the store and they'll find it on shelf at the store and they'll do their creator piece right there in the store.

54:25So I don't need credit for inventing this tactic. All I can say is that it works. And if you think about the psychology about it for two seconds, It makes sense. Yeah. And you could straight up just back POs and say like, you guys do this PO, we will get X person to post. Yeah. I mean, it's literally that simple. I also, too, going back to this QR code, too, is you can activate any zip code anywhere you want. They could have bought this or hit the QR code anywhere and you can activate them wherever you want. The QR code thing is mind boggling. We're going to take a 15 second break right now and rip a key to an IQ.

54:59Thank you.

55:05What's that one? Apple? Great. It's amazing. We're going to get into product development now. Guys, this used to taste so bad like four or five years ago, three, four years ago. It tastes like battery acid. It tasted so bad. But ironically, this was formerly when you guys didn't have caffeine. I would look at it how I look espresso shots. I just take it for the fuel. That's how I was taking the original ketones without the caffeine. Now with these, I actually like the taste of specifically of grape and they have caffeine. I have a lot to say there on product development because one of our inspirations in the early days is Birkenstocks.

55:46They had an ad that was like a photo of Birkenstocks and said, ugly for a reason. And the whole thing is like Birkenstocks are kind of funky, crunchy, granola looking shoes, but they're so comfortable. Anyone you know who loves their Birkenstocks is like, it molds to your foot. I love my Birkenstocks. Yeah, you don't care that you look like a freaking hippie weirdo. It's like, it's ugly for a reason. It's the shape of my foot. There's a lot of power inside of that, like owning it. We always just say that our product is formulated for function, not flavor. Or we say it tastes like it works. And in the early days...

56:17It tastes like it works. That's nice. Yeah, yeah. It's like, why the hell am I drinking this? And what's cool about shots in general is that that's just true. Like if you're having a ginger immunity shot, or if you're having a gut probiotic shot, a lot of shots taste pretty good. even a five-hour energy shot, a lot of that stuff tastes pretty crazy, but that's not why you're buying it. You're knocking it down in one go. You're having it because it does something. It's almost like a Tylenol or something. You're drinking it because it does a thing. It's not a coconut water. It's not a refreshing soda.

56:47You're not having it with a meal and expecting refreshment from it. You're having it because it does a job. And there's almost this believability in it when it tastes crazy. Red Bull, Red Bull tastes crazy. Coffee tastes crazy. I have a four-year-old, daughter, she doesn't like the way that coffee tastes or alcohol tastes. Those are all things that we developed at some point in our lives. No kid is born liking the taste of gin. At some point in your life, you psychosomatically develop that, oh yeah, gin and tonic at a happy hour on Friday feels really nice. You know who's a true psycho? If someone orders a decaf coffee.

57:24Who the fuck likes the taste of coffee? I'll hit a decaf. You're a psycho person. You're literally a psycho person. I'm going function or dessert with a vanilla latte. It's one or the other. Well, I think my brain is just hijacked to believe that the taste of coffee is good. And when I drink it, because I don't want to overdo my caffeine. I don't have caffeine afternoon. I really do limit myself to one caffeine beverage a day. So I'll have a shot of ketone IQ with caffeine or I'll have a cortado in the morning. And so in the afternoon, if I'm going to have coffee, I'll have a decaf. When I was in college, I didn't like the taste of coffee.

57:59It was gross. And towards the end of college, I got into coffee. And then now my brain just links it up. And I tricked myself into liking it. Like a freaking, I think we all did. Like a Pavlovian rat experiment. Like we've taught ourselves that it feels good. We like the feeling from it. And so then we think that it tastes like productivity. It tastes good. Like I don't think anyone's born liking the taste of coffee or red wine or any of this stuff. I think we just wrap our minds around it because we like the way that it, we like the place that it takes us to i'll try like a decaf vanilla latte this weekend to see if you're not a psycho or not i'll let you know how that goes um yeah it might just be placebo for me who even knows um but but how are you balancing kind of like uh well how did and how are you now balancing kind of speed to market with the actual i'm not gonna say product quality but like the product taste because there's a lot of people out there that are early in cpg and it's like you know this is not a digital product where it's like ship it early ship it early this is like you have to invest there's moqs maybe it's going into retail how do you find that balance that's a great point there's a significant investment it's moqs it's not a social media post exactly exactly a lot of social media posts it's like who cares there's no downside if no one saw your post great no one saw your post get up and post again like there's no downside it is not the case in cpg you're ordering$50 ,000 of product.

59:19And if it doesn't sell, like you're cooked. And that's a small MOQ. A lot of MOQs will be five times as big. It's a balance. You know, in the early days, we were a small lean team. We didn't have a full-time formulator. I had a product who's amazing and she did her best to make it taste like pretty darn good. Ketones are made in a fermentation process. So they taste fundamentally crazy. If you think about kimchi or kombucha or anything that's vinegar, anything that's fermented. Terrible, kimchi's terrible. Yeah. It all has a very strong taste to it. Ketones are the same way, it's fermented. And when you drink it straight up, it has a crazy taste to it, period.

1:00:00And so in the early days, we did some light formulation with it, made it taste reasonable. We ended up selling a ton of it. I think this answers your question, which is like, how good does it need to taste in the early days? Well, look, I didn't have the budget at the time to have four full-time food scientists on staff and one of who is a full-time formulator who worked at Ghirardelli and Tarani Syrups and knows all of the organoleptics of how to make something taste wonderful. In the early days, there's like six of us. It's like, hey, who here is on the team is best at making something taste reasonable?

1:00:32And like, oh, okay, like let's go and do it. So the answer is it has to be good enough. A lot of judgment call, I think that's part of the magic of being an entrepreneur is how good does it have to be? The earlier version of anything is really limited. The early version of Amazon, just books. The early version of Uber, it wasn't even an app. You're just like texting an address and hoping a car shows up. A lot of products in the early days, you launch it good enough. You get your minimum viable product, whatever that is, and you get that out to market. We had the plus and the minus of we invented ketones, so no one knew what it could or should taste like.

1:01:09I think today, look, if you launch electrolyte powder, it's got to taste good. There's not a lot of forgiveness. if you launched electrolytes now and it didn't taste good, like you're cooked. If you're inventing something new that gives people a novel feeling like what we're doing, I don't know. I've eaten some weird tasting stuff that got me feeling a novel type of way. And the market will forgive what you're doing if it's unlocking something new that hasn't been unlocked before. From a function perspective. From a function perspective, whether that's a CPG or an app or whatever. If you're letting people do something new, I remember the early version of Snapchat was always just like crashing.

1:01:46It crashed half the time. But it was cool. It was the only thing that let you send disappearing photos. If you're unlocking a new chamber of the world that people never got access to before, people will deal with a lot of friction. People will deal with some bullshit, texting some number to get a black car to show up. If it's 2010 and that service never existed before, and that's the first version of Uber, people will deal with friction to get to a unique function that didn't exist before. If you're launching a protein powder though today in 2026, that shit better tastes like cookies and cream.

1:02:18So it really depends on how you're coming in. I mean, I had the cough syrup in Arizona. I used to row in my, right in the middle of the garage and I would just chug these and they did not taste good. But I did it from a function perspective. And you guys sold tens of millions of dollars of that OG V1 product that did not taste anywhere close to as good as it tastes now, which I love it now. For founders out there, when you're thinking about product development, you know, we touched on just a bunch of things real quick from like MOQ perspective, ship it early. What are kind of the biggest mistakes that you're seeing founders make directly in relation to product development?

1:02:50It could be things that they're overseeing from a 3PL perspective, co-packs, anything. Like what are the big mistakes people are making? I've got a good one for you, which is founders launch too many products. Invent the flying shoe. Invent the killer product. and if you don't have a killer product, make a killer product. If you're still launching your 10th, 20th product and you don't have a clear one that's running up to 100 million plus top line, I have a couple of things to say. Maybe you should keep launching products until you have that thing. There's something to be said for searching. Maybe it's the 21st product, the 22nd product or maybe you need to revisit your portfolio.

1:03:29Maybe your vanilla OG, whatever, it's not yummy enough. Focus on your vanilla. Maybe the banana sundae one ain't it like focus on your core stuff the mission is to have a core product that really freaking works i do not love the kitchen sink approach and i'm not just talking about flavors here people that have different functionals different this and that you want to find a hero product that works really freaking well and you don't want to have a bunch of complexity to manage across different formats, different whatever. That's my advice is really focus. There's a lot of complexity to manage across a broad portfolio.

1:04:10And realistically, when you look at the, look at Raising Cane's, look at In-N-Out. Raising Cane's just figured out how to make the best damn chicken sandwich, In-N-Out, best damn hamburger. Raising Cane's doesn't sell hamburgers, In-N-Out doesn't sell chicken sandwiches. Southwest Airlines only flies 737 Airlines. Like some of the biggest, best businesses in the world. They're just so freaking focused on their core product. That's what you got to do. You got to look, what is, what is the thing that's going to take your company to a hundred million dollars, billion dollars of top line? You don't tend to see those businesses built by having a portfolio of 20 different products that are each doing a few million dollars.

1:04:47And you get obviously the economies of scale and anything and everything, the learnings, leveraging against the vendors, LTV. I mean, a zillion different things that we talk about with that. Absolutely. You want to make a perfect product. Yeah. If all you're doing is purchasing one product, your cost of goods are going to come down. You're going to get really freaking good at marketing that product. When you're in retail, you're going to be dealing with one buyer. You're not going to be dealing with buyers who are across a bunch of different aisles inside of the store. There's a lot to be said for focusing.

1:05:17And I think sometimes, honestly, it's cope. I think when you make a product that's like pretty good and then you launch another product and another product. It's like, you need to either be like honest with yourself that you're still searching for your hero product. You're still pivoting, or you maybe need to revisit one of your earlier products and make that into your hero product. Yeah. I would say like the counterpoint to that, just for people out there listening is I think that there's LTV products and non LTV products. You guys are obviously LTV products, but like someone like Sean from Ridge, like if you buy a wallet, you're probably not going to buy another wallet.

1:05:46So that's when you have to kind of potentially start expanding into other categories. But if you have high LTV, someone like you, someone like AG1, like go all in on one product. You have no excuse if you have LTV. That's a great point. I appreciate the nuance there. I would say in Sean's point of view, he probably has like the main ones that bang down the door. And those are also doing like, they're doing pretty heavy volume, each one of those. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like they're doing like five million, like doing like 50 million, each one of them. Yeah. I bet he's at a certain volume where he can bend a lot of the rules because yeah, he probably has multiple 50 to $100 million SKUs.

1:06:19And that's just a different game from someone who's doing$10 million across 10 SKUs. It's different when you're at that scale. And I bet if you looked at Sean's ad library, that he's mainly acquiring new customers with a small handful of his best SKUs. And then the other products are LTV filling in was the key for SKU. Understanding which SKUs drive people into the funnel and then winning on the back end. What about like data and metrics to like inform your products? Cause like right now it's really just these core products, the regular ketone and then the one with the caffeine. So like all these flavors and stuff, like how are you making these decisions?

1:06:57Is this subjective decisions? Is this taste tests? Are you polling the audience? How are you guys going about that? It's a few different things. We keep our eyes open to what's going on in the market. You know, what's it's, this is a fashion component to it too, is like, what's the next trending flavor. What's the next season going to be? We're at that spot where we're thinking through a lot of LTOs. You know, what's, is there a cool partnership? What's an LTO? Limited time offering, like licensing. I know we've had some fun conversations around licensing. Like what can you do that is kind of lights up?

1:07:28What's in the zeitgeist right now? Like what's a cool movie going on right now? Or is there a cool celeb or sometimes flavors just trend? Like blue raspberry is really hot right now. So we have a blue raspberry flavor. It's kind of reading the tea leaves of what's going on in the broader culture. I think the first thing first is like launch the evergreen flavors. If you're doing a beverage, like probably you should have something that's like lemon, lime flavored. We have a raspberry lemonade, right? Like figure out the evergreen flavors and make sure those are good. And then you can start getting creative with the fun stuff that is kind of a cultural touch point.

1:07:59Maybe it's a collab, a limited time offering, more fanciful. Like maybe we should make a salty pickle flavor because like most people are going to hate it, but some people are going to freaking love it and it'll get a conversation going. Like that's, that's how we think about continued flavor development. I had no idea that there was like trending flavors. You're the, you're the first person I've ever heard that from. I didn't know that was a thing. It's apparently these, these pickle flavors are, are trending right now. I want to get into, you sent me over some of these kinds of internal principles at Ketone IQ.

1:08:27I thought they were absolutely amazing. I want to walk through a few of them just to list them all out. Just I'll probably pop them up here on the screen. Play to win, growth mindset, customer obsession, ownership, communicate clearly, think in bets, healthy debates, teamwork. Those are the eight. I want to just riff off some of the stuff. You have this rule internally you talked about that 10x or 0x. We touched on it briefly. What does that look like in actual practice? There's nothing at our scale that is moving the needle to do it at 1x. If we put$1 ,000 or$10 ,000, even$100 ,000 to work on something, it doesn't move the needle.

1:09:09But that's occupying a big chunk of someone's brain. And so I'm always pushing, okay, how do we get that to a million dollars to spend? Min or ideally even more. Otherwise stop doing it and find something else that you can push up to that level. You should always think about your poker chip size. If you're doing a million dollars a year, your poker chip is 100K. It's take your total, whatever you want to call it, your total revenue base or what's in your bank account. Let's say revenue base and just divide it into 10. Those are your poker chips. That's what you should feel comfortable with. Like putting 10 % of your bankroll into something.

1:09:44That's a real bet. If you go too small, think about your personal stock portfolio. If you buy Intel, you buy one share of Intel for$45 and it 10 Xs. Congratulations, Mark, you made$450. Has your life changed? Like it doesn't change. But meanwhile, you're going to be on your stock portfolio checking Intel every day. And that's a huge amount of overhead. Overhead in your brain too, wasting your time. And you're talking about, you could buy a hundred of these key terminal cues for the cost of that. That's what I mean. It's a huge amount of mental overhead that if you're going to make a move, if you're going to invest into Intel, put 10 % of your portfolio in it, where if it doubles, okay, cool.

1:10:19That one poker chip became two poker chips. That's real. So if you have a million dollar net worth and you have high conviction on something, put a hundred K to work on it because if that doubles, that's meaningful. It should feel like a high conviction bet that you're making. I like thinking about that even as you scale. So if you're operating at a level where you're making a million dollars, maybe 100K is your poker chip size, a new product launch or a new partner launch, like putting 100K to work on that feels comfortable. If that works well, if that 10Xs, holy shit, I doubled my business. If it two Xs, okay, I did all right.

1:10:50If it goes to zero, okay, I lost a bullet. I still have nine. That's a good framework for thinking about how you're - Like venture. It's just like venture. Yeah. We're all managing portfolios. What's the job of a CEO? It's a resource allocator. You're figuring out where to point resources on whatever you're at. You could be at Amazon scale. You could be at our scale. You could be at trying to make your first million dollars. It's finite. And you got to think about where you're placing bets. You don't want to be in a spot where you're placing your entire company balance sheet on a bet. He's not telling you to do that, guys.

1:11:24Do not do that. Take whatever you're at. Put 10 % into it. maybe if you have really high conviction on something, put two poker chips in, put 20 % into it. You go too small on the bet sizing, it doesn't move the needle. You go too big on bet sizing and you run the risk of going bankrupt if it doesn't work out. And so wherever you're at, you readjust every few months. Your business gets bigger, then hey, your poker chip size gets bigger. So we're at a scale now where a million dollars is a poker chip around that size. So if we go and sponsor the OC Marathon and we put$20 ,000 to work and we're having calls about it, our CMO is on the call, I'm on the call, blah, blah, blah.

1:11:59Like we're figuring it, like it's a active waste of time because we're only putting$20 ,000 to work. And so the narrative you're asking, like, how do we put this to work on the call? The narrative inside of the team is like, is this so good that we're going to 10X it? If the OC marathon works, I want to be in every freaking marathon every freaking weekend. How do we systematize this so that we can be at a scale where we're putting real capital to work? Because from my point of view and my CMO's point of view, From a strategy point of view, it doesn't take any additional work. Like figuring out how to strategize to make our product succeed in a marathon.

1:12:31That's one. Yeah, and then you're compounding off the learnings there for sure. Exactly. It's basically what you did with partnerships. You had success with partnerships and now you're going ham on partnerships. Most people are doing this on meta. You're doing it on partnerships. I think the other thing too is just to make sure, I mean, you said you made the example of like 20K. It's like if you have your C-level team working on it for even two weeks, if you just back into the burn rate of their salary. You're actually losing money on it. So it's like, it's just about committing real resources.

1:13:00Like you have to make big, bold bets. And it's so funny, man. This is probably, I don't even know. I've shouted it out like three, four times. I want to have months so bad. You ever made it up, Frank Slutman? Yeah. It's all about like incrementalities for losers. And you guys are not incrementality. You guys are fucking going for the fucking home runs. No singles or doubles. You're going for home runs. That's right. You're striking out or you're going for a home run. And then you know, you're going to hit a grand slam next. A lot of people get lost in the singles and doubles where it feels like you're busy.

1:13:28It feels like, oh, we're doing this collaboration with this. We're doing this over here. We're doing this. And you look at it, it's like, it's a lot of overhead for like a$20 ,000 project or this or that small thing that like, say that succeeds wildly. That's the question I encourage people to ask themselves. Like say that that doubles or say that that 10Xs. Does that change the outcome of your business? If not, you don't have enough skin in that game. You should stop doing it or you should do 10x as much of it. Why do we do a 1x effort? You do a 1x effort because of the data. The data is valuable.

1:13:58The data should indicate if you should 10x it or 0x it. But usually when you're doing that, that 1x value, you nailed it. You're burning so much time, so much salary time, so much attention on the overhead of even doing it. It's not worth it. Nothing is ever static in business. If it's working, you should be absolutely jamming more resources into it. And if it's not working, I should absolutely be stopping it. And you have to have that energy every single day on every single plane of attack across your business. And is there any like frameworks which you're looking through to see this? Like, again, I keep iterating, which I love that when I looked at anything with you guys, I kept finding it.

1:14:35It was sport, science, and entrepreneurship. I would imagine like probably sport and science are kind of like your lead cohorts that you're going after. Are you guys just looking at, these are kind of our three pillars and we're just looking to drive distribution and sales through those three pillars. What is the POV that you're looking to take these big bets in? Yeah, we know partnerships works for us. So that is not an experiment anymore. We know partnerships works. And so within partnerships, we have kind of sub bets inside of that. We know the verticals that we perform really well in. We perform really well in endurance sports, marathon runners, triathletes.

1:15:06We perform really well in MMA. We perform really well in the cognitive entrepreneur world. We perform really well in the longevity world. Golf? I don't know. We haven't really touched golf too much yet. So that would be a next up experiment to rerun it again from scratch. We start working with some of the smaller influencers. We see if it's pickup. You're going to change your marketing message a little bit to meet that audience. You're definitely going to want to work with different people who have authenticity in that market. So it basically fractals out to like, we know partnerships work. We have a general partnerships playbook, and then we'll apply it to a new vertical that we maybe don't have experience with.

1:15:41I like that. And yeah, when I was looking at kind of all of the people that you're partnering with, for people out there listening to, you're doing a great job of going leader, macro, and then niching down. Like you say, John Jones in MMA. I'm a big MMA guy. So I saw that in BJJ, the guy Mikey that was on Rogan that eats like intermittent fast and just has like a pizza for dinner. What's his name? Mikey Muscat. Mikey Musumichi. Mikey Musumichi. He's a legend. Exactly. He's like a legend in a subset of MMA and BJJ. And that's like a new sub pocket that you guys are going to win in. Yeah, you know ball.

1:16:10I'm big into MMA. One of my first companies was a mixed martial arts apparel company. like 2000, well, 14 years ago. So cool. Yeah. Yeah. The sport's taken off and it's actually super interesting. A lot of the biggest tastemaker, thought leaders are into it. Lex Friedman, Rogan, Zuck is into it. It's got this interesting, maybe what we're just talking about golf and like golf is kind of has that rep of being the affluent executive sport. I feel like that's still partly true, but I feel like a lot of those guys have gotten into... FJJ is going to be a flex. that's like a different type of the different type of flex because i think i think once you're like command the boardroom and whatnot if you're a bajillionaire the next thing on your mind is like yeah i want to have that presence just like in real life as a human and you get into combat sports i think zuckerberg is like low-key driving that whole net new cohort in mma like he's like front row and like the ufc fights and shit i think that that he's gonna and lex freeman is another one and rogan but i'd really say zuckerberg is huge there and another thing too is i love it because I would imagine, and I'm not talking about other people's money here, but like, you probably get a great deal with that guy, Mikey, because that's like, that's an asymmetric bet.

1:17:17He's the Michael Jordan of BJJ. The Kager is probably going up. It's probably a growing market, but it's still like kind of small. So you're getting like the Michael Jordan in like a new growing sector. Yeah. Yeah. We're bigger than we used to be, but we're nowhere near the size of like Gatorade where our budget's less than a percent. So like we have to find those arbitrage moments. We can't just go to peak LeBron and like do a deal. That's your entire, we were just talking about poker chips. That's all your poker chips. So like you got to find, there's riches and niches. You got to find, yeah, find the Michael Jordan of no-gi Brazilian jiu-jitsu, right?

1:17:52Like find the right people to work with. That guy's an interesting character. We're going to pop him up. Some more of these principles. I love your line to your team. Everyone should be selfishly aligned. What does that mean in practice? I really, really like that. I love the word selfish because it really grips you. It's like, oh, what do you mean selfish? Like it's not usual that you hear a leader telling people to be selfish. I'm honest with people. I know people are not waking up in the morning thinking, gosh, how do I make Michael Brandt rich today? Zero people on my team are thinking that.

1:18:20Everyone on my team is thinking about their own family, their own bank account, their own career. And I'm honest with myself and with them about that. So if you're joining my team and you're running design, I know that you selfishly want a great career as a designer. You want to get the bag and you want to have growth and you want to do cool stuff. So how do we take that selfish intent that you have with what we're trying to do as a business? And you know what? I see a ton of overlap in those Venn diagram of those two circles. Let's talk about that. And let's have a really honest conversation.

1:18:51I think a lot of leaders come in and it's just so myopic. It's like, here's what the company is doing when they're interviewing new candidates. The candidate's got to, you know, march in and pretend to tow the company line. And yes, like I've always dreamt of shitting out 20 Facebook ads a week for you, sir. Like, it's like, I know that you have, like, you don't bullshit me. Tell me what you actually want to do with your life and your career. And let's talk about where we're going as a company. Let's find that overlap. And like, I want to see you get promoted. I want to see when you eventually spin out and start your own company, I want to be the first seed check into that.

1:19:23Like having just that real conversation as a leader that you're working with humans who have their own passions and drive and interests. And they're there for a reason. They're there to learn. They're there to save up some money. They're there to have a certain lifestyle and just being really real about that and finding that overlap with what the company's going. I just find it makes things like real clear. It also helps you find the right people too because you don't want mercenaries. If you're hiring a designer, you want someone who's like waking up and like scrolling through design inspiration.

1:19:55Missionaries, not mercenaries. Exactly, yeah. You want missionaries, not mercenaries. You want people that, if you're working with someone who's in partnerships, you want someone who's like just super friendly, extroverted, like if they didn't work for your company, they would still be making their business to be on the scene, to be shaking hands, to be having fun, to be social, to make a lot of friends, to make connections, to go to different events, to mix and mingle. Like you want someone who's doing that on autopilot already because that's their own selfish intent. Like that's the kind of human that they are.

1:20:25And then, okay, how do we pair that with, you know what, someone with that kind of energy, given the amount of opportunity that we have on partnerships, they're going to be an absolute stud on this team. So let's talk about how we can make it really work together. Yeah, I love that. And I think for people out there listening that have maybe a smaller team of three, four, 10 people, it's something that I've had to get better at and I have gotten better at. And it's, I know that people care about it that are on my teams is making sure, like you set a cadence to check in and talk to these people.

1:20:53Like I have these conversations often with people on my team. Like, what do you want in life? What do you want to do? It's funny that you You just said like cranking out the creative, like an example is like Tyga, who's our editor. It's like, okay, what else do you want to do besides editing? And now we kind of have this like 80, 20, where 80 % is editing and then 20 % is kind of this net new creative because he wants to do random creative stuff. So one day a week we're doing that. That goes such a long way. And if you don't like systematize that, it could get lost in the sauce. And before you know it, it could be seven, eight, 10 months.

1:21:23And you don't even ask the people on the team, like what the fuck do you want with your life? And right now it's like, you know, we're having a conversation, like often, bro, because this AI shit is obviously crazy and stuff is changing so much. It's like, where do you see this going? What do you want to do with your life? Like, these are just such important questions that I think it's like the number one most important thing as a leader is to check in on your team. Totally. A couple more of these operating principles I just want to touch base on. I listened to a pod and you said something that every problem is two problems.

1:21:53I'd love for you to just like break down that framework. Again, a lot of this stuff, guys, is sounds simple, but it's not easy. And they're just good frameworks for you to process in all your decision making. So what does that mean to you? Every problem is two problems, meaning that say that a pallet of product didn't get picked up on time. That's a problem. Let's get that product picked up. That is due to target next Tuesday. Get that pallet picked up. Then what's the problem that caused that problem? What happened systemically? Who didn't pick up what phone call or check what email or what system isn't in place.

1:22:28Why are we missing pallets, guys? What's the problem that caused that problem? So every problem has the problem. We call it the meta problem as well. So there's the direct problem and there's the meta problem. And if you're really serious about building a system that self-improves over time, like you want your system to get better and better. A lot of systems, when you have more people, more dollars, more products flying around, they get more chaotic. The universe tends towards entropy. And so if you don't have this baked in cultural value of, hey, when we see problems, we fix the problems. And we also figure out what caused the problem, you want to be getting more powerful, you want your organization to be self healing, as it scales.

1:23:04And especially as a leader, as you scale, you're not there to solve every problem. Certainly, you're not there to even ask the meta question of like, what's the problem behind the problems, you really want to build that language into your team. It makes people move a little bit, maybe in a sense, you move slow, but it's one of those things where like, you move slow to move fast. Like we're going to really harp on why that palette pickup didn't happen so that it never happens again. Cause I don't ever want to have this conversation again. And then it's, you want to write that down and you want to document it, you want to systematize it.

1:23:33And then that just drives everything faster. Exactly. And that by spending like what feels like a lot of time on that specific problem and the meta problem behind it. Well, the good thing is you're never going to have to face that again. If you create the right system around it. Good internal check that everybody have in their brain. Just when something goes wrong, just think a layer deeper. And again, sounds very, very simple, but it's not easy. It's just looking underneath the hood. What's up guys? My vision with Open Residency is to bring the world's best operators and entrepreneurs that are currently in the business arena to share their principles, frameworks, and tactics all to you guys for free.

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1:24:17I want to go into fundraising. You've raised a shit-fucked ton of money, over$13 million. So you've raised from A16Z, Stephen Bartlett, Joe Montana, John Jones, Jake Paul, some CPG founders, Vital Protein, Koa, Olipop, Hugh Chocolates. What do you think is the most important lesson that you've learned from raising that$13 million? We have some really cool people on the cap table. I'm thrilled to have along for the ride and look forward to continuing to pump their bags, make them really happy with their decision to invest. and there's a few different lessons I've learned along the way. It takes thick skin.

1:24:51If you're going to invest, you got to be willing to get a lot of no's. If you're going to have conversations with investors, and it's going to hurt because you're going to open up your entire business, your life's work. And a lot of people are going to say no for reasons that have nothing to do with you. People are, it's not the right fit for their portfolio. They don't have liquidity. There's this, there's a million reasons. Even if you're a great, it's like in baseball, right? If you're an amazing hitter, you're hitting like 300, right? By the way, baseball players make amazing salespeople for this exact reason.

1:25:21Because when you think about the dynamics of baseball, you're good at baseball if you're like three and 10 connecting with program to lose seven out of 10. Exactly. And getting back up, being professional, doing it again and again. Other sports like basketball, like you're making more of percentage of your shots, 5 % of your free throws. Yeah. Not to say we love athletes in general, just something interesting aside about baseball. And for fundraising, one of the key lessons that I learned early on is that you're not just selling your product. You can't sit down at the table and start being like, here's a ketone and here's how it works.

1:25:53And here's the metabolism behind it. And here's how we discover the product is only a portion of the business. You got to speak like a PE bro, a private equity bro. You got to speak like a finance professional. You got to speak like you're selling a company. You're selling shares of a company. You got to talk about the cash flows of the business. You got to talk about the moat of the business. You got to talk about how this exits for a billion dollars in the future or IPOs. What's the optionality around it? You got to be a private equity professional around the business that you created, which creates some detachment.

1:26:28You have a lot of ego. I have a lot of ego in the idea of the business I created. It's my baby. You got to totally detach it. So the ability to sell a product, which you get really good at when you're making landing pages and ads and talking about the unique selling propositions, all that stuff. You got to have a wider aperture on the conversations that you're having with investors. It's not just about your product. It's about everything around it. The total addressable market, the moat that you have around it, the team that you're building, the IP that you have. You're telling a whole all-encompassing story.

1:27:02How does this ultimately exit? That's a big one. If someone's investing in your company and it's worth$10 million today, like how credibly do you sell the business for 10x that or 100x that in the future and who are you selling it to and why would they buy it and be able to speak in those terms that took some learning for me that isn't it's not obvious if you just like have a hit product to be able to talk in in those terms that investors expect to see you need at bats on that because i mean you always learn at least one thing from each pitch and it's again you can be like eight pitches deep and you're like you look at the first one you're like what the fuck was i thinking i'm gonna quickly we go to Brooks Brothers right now, throw in a suit, come back.

1:27:36We're back in the PE world right now. What are those big numbers, metrics, KPIs that really gets people excited? I think you mentioned TAM. What are some of those other kind of big ones? I always like to hear, because everybody has like one or two different ones. I always work backwards from the TAM, the total addressable market. I start every conversation with an investor talking about the$85 billion energy drinks, energy shots market. Talk about how Monster is a$30 billion publicly traded company Red Bull is a private company that's the same size, maybe bigger. Celsius is a 10 to$12 billion publicly traded company.

1:28:13Five hours private, but it's significant. You have, in the last couple of years, you've seen Ghost, C4, Alani New, all three of those exited for a billion dollars plus. They got bought up by Kirk, Dr. Pepper, and by Celsius. So I always paint the picture that there's a lot of money flying around in this space. Who doesn't want more energy, right? 8 billion people on planet Earth could use more energy. And that's evidenced by the fact that you have this$85 billion of energy products that are consumed every single day. So plant is a fundamental human need. There's a lot of dollars flying around on the consumer side.

1:28:47There's a lot of people buying energy drinks. And then there's a lot of big public companies and companies that are buying other companies. It is an acquisitive, active market. And that paints, look, if I have like a frozen mochi ball startup in my, you know, it's my grandma's mochi ball recipe. Frozen mochi ball. I don't even know what the fuck that is. What's a frozen mochi ball? Exactly. You see some crazy stuff in CPG world. It's the opposite spot where it's like, what's the tam? Like, where does that go? Who buys that? Is there a billion dollars of mochi? Is there a million dollars of mochi balls going around in the world?

1:29:20Like, where does that go? Like, you want to be tapping into a really large vein so that it feels like, oh man, this person's crazy. But yo, if this person gets like 1 % of the energy drink market, this thing's worth a billion dollars. Like you want that sense of there's just the energy behind it. There's a giant wave that this person is serving, that this company is serving. There's a giant amount of tailwind to it. You don't want to have to feel like a bunch of miraculous things need to come true. Like no, you know, you're very realistic, your situation. Like when we've talked about, it's very realistic.

1:29:52This thing could be a billion dollar plus company. Totally. Very, very clear path. If I come to you and I'm selling like, I don't know, walnut milk. like what's the market for walnut milk like what is like you you might have to tell a lot of do a lot of gymnastics about like how that becomes sounds like a gymnastics exercise yes you want to come in you want to maybe hey maybe walnut milk is a great idea if i was pitching walnut milk if i was pitching walnut milk i would come in talking about the size of the milk category and about how i don't know 30 percent of people who buy milk fart too much and walmart walnut milk makes you not have to fart and you know what i mean like you you still try to anchor it to the overall milk and why is it better than almond milk and oat milk and all the other alt milks?

1:30:32The point is work backwards from the opportunity, get people's eyes lit up from the opportunity of how big it could become and then talk about, okay, yeah, right now today, here's where we're at. And here's the credible plan to make a real dent in that total addressable market. You know what? It's a good ninja play that you have too is it was actually, I don't even know, episode two or three with a Manny from Slate Milk, but his thesis was combining TAMs. You have the same thing. Like you're talking about the energy shot space, but then it's also, I mean, you're in the wellness or sports nutrition category, let alone, I mean, if it becomes the fourth micronutrient, then there's going to be a third big category.

1:31:06It'll just be like ketones and it'll probably be absorbed through different things outside of shots. So you have all of these kind of hedges on these other growing temps. It's absolutely correct. People want to feel like, you know, when you're landing an airplane on an aircraft carrier, I've never done this, but you know how in the videos of people landing an airplane on the aircraft carrier, there's a couple of hooks. If you miss the first hook, there's the second, there's the backup hook. You want to give investors that sense of security that you're overlapping in a couple different large markets or a couple of different meta trends that are going on right now where if the first one isn't true, the second one will be true.

1:31:41People want to feel like they want the hedge. But when it comes to where this goes in the future, you want to hear from a founder that they're really good at creating optionality. That, hey, I could sell this company to Coke or Pepsi or Kirk Dr. Pepper or Nestle or Unilever. And here's how we're building it out. And they could all be interested for different reasons. You want to paint the picture for how you're actually creating a lot of exit optionality for down the line. Because ultimately people are investing. They want to get a return. It doesn't need to be tomorrow. People can be patient, but they want to hear eventually that there's a credible plan to how this thing returns.

1:32:15Is this thing going to be big enough that it goes public? If not, that's fine. But is it going to be big enough that it sells to a large strategic company that pays hard cash for what you've built here. A lot of people, I don't blame them, but a lot of people, they get started out of the passion. It's Nona's special recipe that they're now making at scale. And what I would always encourage that person to do is really think it through from, it could be a decade from now, but like think through, have a credible plan for how your thing exits. Plan to the end. Yeah, plan to the end. And you don't have to start doing it.

1:32:46You're not trying to sell the company next week, but be pointing that direction, right? If you're lost in the middle of the woods, like know generally where the clearing is that you're headed towards. Like I talked to Stephen Ellsworth at Poppy about, like when did you start exit planning? He's like, yeah, a year after starting the business. And like they weren't anywhere near selling it yet, but he started thinking like what needs to be true to sell this company for billions of dollars to Pepsi? And then you start building towards that general direction. And that helps you filter a lot of decisions, helps you focus.

1:33:20a lot of what we talked about kind of inherits from that like we were talking about before about you know i don't love being in too many different formats or too many different skews when a company goes to buy you when pepsi goes to buy you the way the acquisitions take place is usually by desk it's like there's someone who's buying bars yeah there's someone else who's buying shots there's someone else who's buying something i will just say it's a harder transaction if you have more more products you want to be deep and narrow and give them meat on the bones to then take this and put it in a different format and they can put it elsewhere.

1:33:52That's right. When you look at like RX bar that exited to Kellogg's for$600 million, like all they had was the bar. And then after they got bought by Kellogg's, they started launching like a oatmeal and a this and a that. That's awesome. But to get there, someone at Kellogg's woke up one day and was like, hey, we're under indexed on bars. We need to go buy the fastest growing bar company in America. And if your company was part bars, part this, part that, part the other thing, they're going to, that buyer is going to discount your other things if they're not interested in them. I'm not saying it's not, I have my own point of view on the world.

1:34:23Like there's everyone, there's going to be people breaking every rule that exists. So if I say it's a rule that you need to focus, someone's going to show me, you know, Siete Family Farms that was in every aisle of the grocery store, frozen foods, chips, whatever. And they just had a great big exit. So it can totally happen. I was saying my point of view and what I think generally increases your optionality for an eventual exit is deep and narrow, as you said. Because if they need help in that one category, they get the second hedge too. You could fill the gap for that one category and then they can take you, i.e.

1:34:54Rx bar, into other categories as well. So you get both the hedges. There's a lot to be said for leaving white space on the table. Look, I haven't sold my business yet. So I'm just here talking, flapping my gums. It's something I think a lot about. So I can bring that credibility that if you've looked under every possible stone, if you've tried every retailer, if you've tried every possible format that your product could go into, your story's kind of done. Like you've explored every possible outcome versus if you stayed really focused. So you have like some really well-performing SKUs. You're not in every retailer under the sun, but the ones that you're in, you're doing really freaking well in.

1:35:27Think about what that implies for the buyer. They look at that. They're like, wow, so much white space. They're inside of their spreadsheet dragging it. Okay, you're in 50 ,000 doors. Okay, once I buy you, I'm Coca-Cola. once I buy you, I'm gonna put you in$500 ,000. I'm gonna 10X your business. Oh, you haven't launched this product, this product, this product. Oh, cool, we're gonna launch those. That's also gonna 10X your business in that dimension. So there's a lot to be said for leaving the right amount of white space on the table, which then goes to the point of be really deep and narrow in a really compelling area so that all things considered, if you say you're making$100 million on your business, you'd rather make it on like less things than a broad set of different products.

1:36:06I never understand why, you know, someone has an apparel company and they're doing$20 million in men's apparel and they go into women's. It's like, bro, run that up to$100 million in men's apparel and then either A, sell the company and give them the women's and or then do women's and then you can come up with a third category to sell them. I don't get that. I completely agree. And you put it out, Ridge, earlier, which has been in the back of my mind here. They're just at a different scale. I think people need to know that. Hundreds of millions of dollars, guys. Yes. If you're selling$100 million in men's apparel, then cool, start thinking about women's apparel.

1:36:36that's the right way to think about it. Don't start thinking about it when you're at$10 million. Like figure out what's the key. What is your key? It's probably a shirt that everyone is obsessed with. And that's why everyone's coming to your brand. Like sell them that, sell them men's apparel. And then maybe eventually, maybe not. Maybe you just only just be the best at men's apparel. You don't need to be everything to everyone. You're better off. Like if you're selling to men, sell to men golfers and then sell to men tennis players, right? Like find where the existing opportunities that you've executed on the business have given nutrients into the soil for the next thing that you're about to do.

1:37:10Don't go to the other side of the garden because you're just ADD. I think a lot of founders, ADD gets the best of them. And I say this as someone who's pretty ADD. Guys, I got ADD a little bit. ADHD. I focused on the test though, and I did not, I don't have ADD or ADHD. Dude, I think it takes real meditative work to control the beast because you and me, man, and I'm sure everyone listening, we're really curious. I love the way the world works. I'm curious about AI technology. I'm curious about just whatever, everything. There's a lot going on in the world. What I think about though is like what you focus on expands.

1:37:47Everything is a fractal. So if I actually put all my creative energy actually into ketones, there is lifetimes of work to do inside of that. Talking about Ridge earlier, like if Sean goes and obsesses over wallets and like the related areas, you know, carrying stuff around with you. There's a universe of possibilities inside of there. And don't get too distracted by the shiny thing on the other side of the world. Just it takes almost like a meditative state to like, I'm curious about all these things. But how do I, how do I focus that into this one really narrow corner of the world and see that there's a universe of possibilities.

1:38:21It's like when you look at something under the microscope, it looks like a fleck, it's like nothing there. When you look inside of it, it's like, there's entire like active life of a million little microorganisms playing around inside of there. And business is the same way. I want to tie a bow on just fundraising. And we've gotten all different types of advice from all different types of people. If you could just distill it down to kind of one fundraising principle to share with the younger generation, what would that be? You have to leave people with the impression that by investing in your company, they're going to get rich.

1:38:53It sounds really obvious when you put it that way, but you really got to think about it. Chill out on getting people so excited about your product, about your this, about your that. Think about it as an asset that is going to return money to the person investing in it. If you can achieve that, that's the thing that's going to make someone leave from being just, okay, I like that person, but I don't have high conviction. You want someone to believe that you're going to triple their bag, 5x their bag, 10x their bag. Focus on that. Give a really credible story to how you're going to make them money.

1:39:28People aren't, I'm sorry to say, people are not mainly investing in your mission. That's part of it. We like missionaries. We like people with high conviction. We love good products. We like that. But tell that story full circle of how that person, when they invest 50K into your business today, how does that become 250K in their bank account in five years. Be really sharp on that. It would be my advice. Love that. Everyone's got different advice. I like that one. We haven't heard that yet. I want to talk a little bit about team and culture. You're obviously at like, you know, a pretty mature scale, mid-eight figures.

1:40:01What's the most important lesson you've learned about leadership at scale? Because things just drastically change from 1 million to 5 million to 10 to 20 to 50 to 100. What's the biggest learning lesson? You change a lot as a leader, as your company grows. And a lot of the growth of your organization is endemic to your own personal growth. That the things that it takes to get your first million dollars, you got to be willing to do everything. And then as you grow and it grows, you got to get out of your own way. You got to hire people way smarter than you. You got to convince them to work for you.

1:40:34You got to be a talent magnet. My role right now, the most valuable thing I can do right now is indicate who on the team should be making a decision. In the early days, you're making every decision. You're the smartest person in the room. As a business grows, the most helpful thing I can do is say, hey, Mike Lee, our CMO, this is your call. Multi-factors on this. There's a more expensive way, a cheaper way to do it. Maybe it's more impactful, non-impactful, multiple decisions. You're the most equipped. You're the best position to make this decision. Or our head of retail is going to make a call.

1:41:05The most effective thing I can do as a leader when we're in a conversation and there's a lot of voices is nominate who's going to be the decision maker. and note that I'm not saying that I'm the decision maker. I see it as a flaw. If I have to be the decision maker, there's a very small set of decisions at the company at this scale where I should be the decision maker. It's like fundraising and key hires and a handful of smaller things. If I'm making the decision on like what the next new flavor is gonna be, I've lost my way. Like we're at a scale where that should not be a CEO level decision.

1:41:39And so my job is who on the team has the most believability on knowing what the best next flavor to launch is going to be and empowering that person and telling everyone else on the team to listen to that person. So a lot of it is talent selection, talent development, and then just really empowering people, giving them the spotlight when something comes up and making sure it's really clear who I'm delegating the decision to. Yeah, I think so many people with all the bullshit that's online now, it's like understanding and knowing and having good judgment on who to believe and who to take advice from.

1:42:10I think that in itself, I mean, people are using the word like high agency now. That's like the new buzzword. But it seems like you're just saying is you're, you just have to make the decision of who makes the decisions. And it's just your judgment on that. Ultimately, that's what it comes down to. Yeah, you know, you try to make it obvious, give people areas of responsibility, make it really clear on people's title. Like a lot of decisions are automatic. Okay, we know that. Where things get interesting, a lot of times when things come across my desk, it's because it's a jump ball. It affects multiple different parts of the org.

1:42:37And that's why it's come up to me. I'm always trying to push it back though. I'm always trying to say, oh, interesting. Like, well, for this specific decision, for decisions that look like this, Alice, Bob, whatever, you're the owner on this because I'm always, I can't be, I can't be in the day-to-day. There's too much decisions going on. I thought I could in the early, in the early days, you can, it doesn't matter what your IQ is. I'm smarter than average, but there's a lot of people smarter than me. So like in the early days, I mean, we thought I can handle a lot of load and whatever you're at, it's going to break at some point.

1:43:09I don't care if you have 200 IQ. There's a certain point where there's just like too much decisions flowing across and you need to be really good at delegating to the right people around you. There's almost an advantage, Mark, to being a little dumb as a CEO. There's so many names that are going through my head right now of people that are that exact DNA. And that's a winning DNA. Yeah. It's like you're self-aware to know that you're not super smart. On the other side of the coin, there's a type of person that's like to know it all. And you end up choking yourself where it's like, if I asked you, hey, would you rather have like an IQ of 150 or an IQ of 110.

1:43:42You'd probably say 150. I want to be smart. But I think a fallacy that a lot of smarter people run into is like, they're so they're the smartest kid in their high school. They're smartest at solving all these problems. And they're just their go to answer to solving everything is like, well, what do I think we should do? Versus there's a way of being of just like getting out of your own way. Like you almost want to be the IQ 110 person who's hiring the IQ 150 people. I mean, they always there's always that joke of like, like people would go to Yale or whatever, end up working for the guy that went to state school.

1:44:09College dropout. College dropout. Yeah. Like the A student works for the C student. It's not a joke. And what I would say is I've like learned to get out of my own freaking way that like, however smart I think I am, there's someone else who have the time to think about this deeply, can be a subject matter expert, has been doing this for a decade. And my job is to get that person. My job is no longer to be making decisions. My job is to get the right talent on the team, develop them, make sure that it's really clear what decisions they get to decide, make sure they have mandate when those decisions come.

1:44:40The best thing I'll do is like, hey, Christine said this, I'm the CEO, so we're all doing what Christine says. So do you see what I'm saying? It's not me saying like, hey, I thought about this and I'm the CEO and we do this. It's I'm using my mandate as a CEO to get behind someone else on the team who's smarter than me. And then you got to listen to me because I don't know, I'm the boss, but like you're not listening to me because it's my idea. You're listening to me because I'm telling you the smartest person on the team says we're doing this. The smartest person on the team at this type of decision has decided.

1:45:09And so we're all going to rally behind that. For people out there listening, that works 1000 % of the time. Empowering that person, they feel real good about themselves. And it creates clarity in who makes the final decisions. I think, man, like, I think IQ, I mean, it's basically done. I think the new IQ is going to be who can see around the corner and what's coming. because of how much change is happening right now. It's like, this sounds kind of crazy to even say, but it's like, who can take the time to really think through the sequencing of if-then situations of if this happens, then this will happen.

1:45:45And really, really look and take a lot of time to see all the different scenarios that can happen. That's what I think the new high agency person is. That specific skillset. What is coming down the pipeline, quite frankly, specifically with AI. That's what I think. I think that's the best human right now to have on your team. I think that's right. I think being able to predict the future with high resolution is still a fundamentally human skill. I don't think it was really that relevant like three years ago. Or maybe three years ago to know what was happening right now. It's interesting, right?

1:46:15Because AI can do kind of the bottom 70 % of your work now, like plus or minus. It can do a lot of the menial stuff. So there's an increased value on that higher order thinking. Like it's not that valuable to just like munch through spreadsheets or something. AI can do that. Now, if you have a job, your job is to be doing the higher order stuff. It's like back in the day when... It's what to work on. Exactly. It's taste, it's selection of types of problems to solve, what's worth solving, maybe unexpected combinations of ideas and solutions coming together that AI is really good at reading the fact pattern of the past.

1:46:54But I think humans still have a spark of ingenuity of knowing where things are headed, especially on a cultural level. Like what's going to be the next thing that's going to take off and why. You had a nice bar there. Unexpected combinations of different things. I completely agree with that. How to mesh kind of different worlds together. I just want to finish on just team culture and leadership. Just last quick question is, what do you think is the most surprising thing you've learned about just like team dynamics and culture? I got a good one for you, which is that I got into my position as a founder, as a leader, because I get along with all sorts of people.

1:47:27I went to public school in Chicago and it was just a mixed bag, all different types of people. You had your like IB, AP, honors students. You had your high school dropouts. You had kids walking around the high school pregnant. I got robbed a few times. You had the full, and I ended up being class president of this like insane melting pot of a high school. And so I get along with kind of everyone. I get along with the nerds. I was on the math team, chess team, but I was also varsity soccer. I got along with a lot of different types of people. because you call it code switching or whatever you want to call it.

1:47:59Like I can kind of hop into a lot of different areas. That's a superpower as a leader, I thought, because I can bring in this person and that person. What I've gotten bit by as a leader a few times is like sometimes they don't get along with each other. And there's actually, I don't know the full answer here. There's something to be said for if everyone you hire in your company is like real homogenous, they're all going to get along with each other. If you actually just only hang out with hockey players and everyone that works on your team plays hockey, they kind of all have the same language, same way of being, same priorities.

1:48:32But like for me, I don't like, I have a really easy time with a lot of different types of people, but then they don't necessarily always know how to... You need a healthy debate between everybody. I feel like, yeah. That's what I benefit from is I get very different vantage from very different people. But then maybe they've never had a friend like each other. So then once they're both on my team together, I have to make a concerted effort to help sometimes break bread between people. I don't have this fully resolved because I think it is fundamentally good to have diversity of thoughts and different types of people on your team.

1:49:04But there's something interesting about, it doesn't always come together in this beautiful like kumbaya moment. There's a lot of, there can be a disconnect between people and it's something I'm still actively working on. I don't have it like fully resolved. I think it's one of those things where it introduces a fundamental tension into the org. And maybe that's just a good thing. And maybe that's partly what my job is as a leader is to collate those opinions down together and go forward with it. And maybe that just is what it is. There's no world where everyone's just perfectly speaking each other's language.

1:49:34I'm gonna tell you something, and I've said it to you guys a thousand times. Bro, personality tests, undefeated, a thousand for a thousand. If you have not done personality tests, insane. They cost$25. Get a cheap one. It's called workinggenius.com. Make everybody take it. It will blow your mind, bro. You'll get a 20-page PDF about you. There will not be one word on that 20-page PDF, Michael. I hope that is wrong. I feel my team's energy because I've said it a thousand times. It is a thousand percent every single time. Do it with your significant other. Do it with your friend. Do it with everybody.

1:50:07It's insane, bro. And then you put it into an LLM with all the different people and you start saying, this person gets along with this person. We're missing this type of skill set. Mind-blowing. I love this. Bro, it will change your whole entire business. You're implementing this on Monday. I'm telling you right now. I love it. We'll change your business. I want to go into personal development. you most definitely are going to be the most fit human that quite frankly will ever step foot on this podcast and it's very very bad to make like a one-way decision like that saying that without knowing who's going to come on but you do a sub six minute pace for a full marathon i cannot do one mile in sub six minutes how does that bleed how does the the sports and the running bleed into into business how has it changed your life first of all i think you're being far too kind I'm sure we both know you're going to have pro athletes on the pod within the next few months, if not sooner.

1:50:57So I'm a advanced, you know, it's still a hobby to me. My main job is my main job, but I do run every day. I run 10 miles every day going for a run right after this. And I'm a competitive marathon runner. And it definitely ties into what I'm doing for like, there's no world where I'm running my business without also being a runner for so many reasons. Like the way I even came up with the idea for ketones was because I was pushing myself as an athlete and pushing my own personal metabolism and started testing around things. That's just on like the literal science discovery level. And then on the day-to-day level, it's just where I go to blow off steam.

1:51:31I have so many good ideas when I run. It's the one time of day where I'm like reliably not on my screen, out in the world. I'm actually marinating. There's so much inputs flying at me every minute of the day. And that running period is a time where I can really coalesce, get everything down and let my subconscious mind chew on things. I get so many good ideas. And then there's this visceral thing where when I'm running, sometimes it's hard. I mean, I run fast, but it doesn't get easier. You just get faster. Like if I go to the track, I'm ripping it hurts just like anyone else like I'm just I'm pushing the limits of my capabilities just like anyone else it's just as painful for me maybe even more painful I'm out there for longer like it's really freaking painful but then a couple things happen which is like later in the day just the aura that I bring to other activities is like well I've already whooped my own ass today and yesterday and tomorrow like there's nothing that someone can say that's going to be more painful.

1:52:35Like, oh, we don't, this deal didn't go through or this didn't happen. I already voluntarily put myself through an extremely painful experience. It just kind of zens out the rest of my life. And it also teaches me that, you know, everything is painful, that like there is no progress without pain, that comfort isn't the way that anything ever got done. You don't get better as a runner by chilling out on your couch. Like there's fundamental pain involved. If you want to sell your company for a billion dollars or a million dollars or any, like if you want to create something outsized value in the world, you're going to have to chew on more glass than the average person, just period.

1:53:10And so getting yourself, there's something about running in particular, there's something about just being an athlete at a, at a reasonably high level where you just at an animal level, every morning, you're baking that lesson into your mind that you have to go through pain and that pain is progress. And I mean, entrepreneurship is a long road, takes a lot of discipline, a lot of pain, a lot of things that don't get your way. And you get up and you do it again the next day. Anyone, you keep finding out a way to compound it. And so to me, I feel like I have a book to write about running and running a business and how they stack on one another.

1:53:45What does that look like from like a scheduling perspective? You're just running 10 every day. Is it 10 on zone two? And then you're running track stuff fast. Like what does that look like for someone out there that's looking to get faster? Yeah, if you really want to get into running, the science of being a good runner, or you're throwing different kinds of miles out there. So at the start, you're throwing a lot of volume. Like no one ever got good at marathoning without doing a lot of volume. That if you wanna get like a decent marathon time, like you're putting many multiple dozens of miles out.

1:54:13You just, you gotta run a lot to be good at running marathons. And then within that, there's different types of runs. So I'm in a spot where I'm running every day. I don't necessarily recommend that for someone going from zero, you know, start running three days a week, four days a week, five days a week, build up to it. I'm in a spot where I've been in the sport to where my body can handle it. I'm running every day and different runs are different. Some runs, you call it, I think, pretty well, which is like sometimes I'm going to the track and I'm doing absolute anaerobic stuff. I'm doing 400s, I'm doing 200s.

1:54:43I'm working on just how do I move my body faster at that peak speed? And it's a lot of your mechanics. How are you driving force into the ground? How are you just getting like faster at your top end? And then other days it's zone two, just getting miles. you know your your heart actuates at the full capacity even when it's only at 60 percent of your maximum heart rate meaning basically you're getting a full rep of your heart muscle when you're at zone two and when you're at like a light jog type of you're just looking to improve that base yeah you're looking to improve that base and you're actually not trying to cook overly hard because you want your hard days to be hard you want your track days to be hard and then you want your easy days to be easy where you're still getting some exercise but you're not like you're actually deloading because it's relatively easier than your harder days.

1:55:32And then there's the long runs. You can't be a marathoner without doing, you got to put up some like two stacks runs, get the 20 mile runs in on the weekend. A lot of times mixed inside of there, you'll do like a tempo where you're doing, you know, stretches of three miles or five miles and maybe repeats of that at like a faster pace. Maybe it's not your full track speed, but you're maybe, you get zippy with it. Like you're moving at a fast pace. It's maybe a little bit faster than your marathon pace and you're training your body to be able to move with good speed for a extended amount of time and so it's all it all comes together it's a you're hitting different systems of cross your body from anaerobic to to neuromuscular to aerobic long-term stamina metabolic flexibility you're kind of hitting those in different ways on different days and it's stacking it up it's fun it feels like you're kind of a sculptor like building yourself into a different type of human when you become a runner.

1:56:24I've never heard that analogy. All right, I'm going to ask you a million different questions on QuickStrike. Let's get into it. One word to describe Jeffrey Wu. Iconic. That's my co-founder for those who don't know. He's a one-on-one human. He's one of the smartest people I met at Stanford. And when it came time to start a company, I worked at YouTube for a couple of years. I was on the technical side as a product manager back in like, remember Gangnam Style? Yeah. Yeah, that's when I worked at, that was the time I worked at YouTube. I left YouTube and Jeff in that period, just a couple of years out of college, had already gone through Y Combinator and sold his company, had a great exit.

1:57:00And when I was thinking about who to start the next company with, we got together and we were both really curious about human performance optimization. And that's when the whole adventure began. What is the biggest misconception about Shark Tank? That you have to win in order for it to be a really great business experience. I think a lot of people go on Shark Tank, they're trying to do a deal. Like if you go on and you don't do a deal, it's still a primetime ad for your company that not just once, but like it replays multiple times. It's a truly evergreen piece of content. It's a great, great story for cocktail hour.

1:57:35I had a lot of fun going on Shark Tank. I think most of the deals are bad. Sorry. Sorry, Shark Tank. Most of the deals are bad. Let's just call a spade a spade here. It's true. They can be pretty aggressive. I'm surprised at the deals that some people take on Shark Tank. Agree. You know, have those deals fall apart afterwards too. 100%. I mean, they don't talk about any of like the actual core deal breakers of anything. Yeah. Of anything. Yeah. So a lot of times after the curtains close and they're doing diligence on the business, a lot of times they fall apart on both sides. A lot of times, I think one savvy way to maybe game it, I don't think Shark Tank would like hearing this, but that like go on and do a deal, get the optics of winning and doing a deal.

1:58:15And then afterwards, like get caught up I mean, that happens. That happens pretty often. Yeah, it's like, oh, sorry. I don't know, sorry. Like, I don't know, Mark Cuban. I don't know if the, but like diligence them back. I don't know if you have the right amount of time to actually commit to this. I'm getting, you know what I mean? Like back away from the deal after doing it, getting the optics left. They might fucking delete your episodes. So don't listen to my advice, but there's something there. I'll just say that. I think that there's two tiers to it. I think I'm in the minority on tier one.

1:58:40I think very few people do tier two. Tier one is like, okay, I'm listening. I'm watching with my wife. Check Instagram. is this company still a thing? And then tier two would be like, did they even get the deal? I don't even think anybody goes to tier two. So that's a pretty good strategy. I don't know if you'll make it on camera and get that Evergreen commercial, but. There's a few, like Scrub Daddy did a deal and Poppy did a deal also. That guy cashed out. That guy, I believe was the single largest shareholder, actually, the shark that did the deal. I ended up being the largest owner of the company because he invested twice, I believe.

1:59:13You signed UFC legend John Jones. as your chief performance officer, what is one thing everyone gets wrong about Jon Jones? He's a really friendly, funny guy. He's the baddest dude on planet Earth, but he knows how to really control his energy. So he brings that into the octagon. Outside of the octagon, he's loose as a goose. As you'd expect, you can't be that amped up. And he actually told me this interesting way that he approaches it, which is that even in the octagon, he never goes to absolute 100 % intensity. he has this alter ego called feather man that he brings into the octagon where it's just a little bit light on his toes he never totally goes to 100 where you're like you know that feeling when you're like running as hard as you can and you're punching something as hard hard hard as you can and it's like everything is tensed up in your body and it's not good because you're like you're tensing up your freaking jaw and your toes and your shoulder and it's like none of that's helping you so there's something to being like 90 where you're like you're throwing the punch but that's all you're throwing and you're not expanding all this unnecessary energy so he only ever brings it up to 90 and so he stays a little bit just relaxed for him i mean 90 is it's better than anybody else 100 exactly and so he's able to find that kind of float between being really freaking dialed but not being stiff and then yeah outside of the octagon he's he's a friendly guy.

2:00:39Shout out to Uncle John. You work with tons of world champion athletes. What is the most common thing you find in world-class athletes? Dude, they actually are way less nerds than like a lot of people I know who are totally glued to the data from their whoop sensor, aura ring, sleep score. The best athletes, they're really intuitive driven. They just know how their body is feeling. They're not going on every run and measuring their heart rate and making sure they're in a certain zone. And like they're, they're going off a feel. They probably got that initial 60, 90, 120 day kind of baseline and now feel.

2:01:19Is that what you think? I think their intuition is highly dialed so that if their coach says, Hey, go on a light run or go on a tempo pace or whatever, like they know exactly how to click into that. I think that's right. Makes sense. How much do you pay for ketone.com? Guys, I'm just throwing it, throwing it out there. How much do you pay? It was, we got a, it was a good deal. It was, it was five figures. I'll say that. So less than a hundred K, which I think was a really good deal. Wow. Whoever gave you guys that for, are you serious? Under a hundred? We got a good deal. Whoever that is, we're going to go check up on the register.

2:01:53They should have held out. They should have held out less than 100. That's like protein.com or like carbohydrates.com. It will be. I think that the arbitrage is it's not there yet, but you're absolutely right. That's how I think about it is that it's like buying cars.com or flowers.com. That's like an actual asset that when you sell the company, it's like I have ketone.com. That's like an actual real asset. 100%. I highly recommend people buying domains because of exactly what you just said. It is not a marketing expense. When you spend money on Facebook, that money is gone. That left your bank account, bought a bunch of ads, and that is no longer there.

2:02:29When you buy a domain that is an asset that you own, it can show up on your balance sheet as an asset that you own. It's like if you bought property on Main Street. And in my case, if I bought ketone.com and I make the ketone market a thing and the ketone market just grows organically, the value of the asset goes up. If you bought protein.com, And then the protein market doubles in size. Hey, the value of protein.com just doubled too. Maybe it more than doubled. And so I highly recommend it can feel expensive. We happen to get a good deal. I think that it's maybe worth people paying even more than you think you should for a given domain.

2:03:03Well, it's direct correlation to when you, in two years, when you raise$100 million at a billion dollar valuation, they could just keep gouging, gouging. Like you gotta get in early before you're too big publicly. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Come on, guy. I'm very curious about this one. So you got a$6 million Department of Defense contract. How did that happen? Is that non-dilutive capital? Is that on the P &L? And like, I really want to know how it happened. And how does someone go and get these contracts? We got a$6 million contract with Special Operations Command to R &D Ketones as high-performance energy.

2:03:39It's been an absolute thrill of my career to be able to work with service members and veterans and be able to help people perform better, be able to help people make it home and they're sharper in the battlefield. They're able to succeed better, have higher success rate. To me, that's the most thrilling and one of the most personally satisfying parts of everything that we've built here has been working with the special operator and just broader armed forces. And that was in the beginning too. You guys got that like right out the gate. Yeah, that was early on when it was like very early prototype.

2:04:10At that time, we didn't have a large scale supply chain. We had the product, but it was very manual, very expensive tasted like super crazy$30 a shot it was a very very much a science fair project in their early days but this does not live on the pnl right it's like a grant like it's they're investing into the the science and the research of ketones correct it was a contract so it came in as you know top line revenue and then we had to do a lot of science so we had to spend that money. It wasn't just like, here's$6 million. They basically had us do this 130-page report about ketone physiology and how it works in different scenarios.

2:04:52And so we owed them this research project that had seven different subtasks to it. And so we basically got$6 million. It's not like I went and bought a Ferrari, right? It's like$6 million, then you're going to go and spend $5.9 million on research. And so that involved a lot of subcontracting because the way ours that were structured. Like I don't own a physiology lab. So we're paying to have tests done. It's like an agency deal. They gave it to you as kind of the hold code to then deploy the resources to get the answers that they deliver back to them. Totally. So we're the primary contractor.

2:05:24And then we had subcontractors that we would pay to. So one of the big areas of investigation was hypoxia. So it's a low oxygen environment. If you can think about like altitude, if you're on top of a mountain or in a fighter jet or deep under sea, that was a big area of investigation for Special Operations Command and particular interest for ketones because part of how ketones work is they turn into cellular energy using less oxygen. So it turns into ATP, the fundamental cellular currency of all of our cells using less oxygen than carbohydrates or other sources. And so that's great if you're at altitude.

2:06:01It's also great if you're just exhausted. If you've been running for five miles, you get a little hypoxic. Like you're running low on oxygen because you're exerting, you're in a stress strain scenario. And so the ability for ketones to be able to provide you with energy, especially brain energy, when you're in a depleted state, that was super interesting to the special operations command. And so that was the initial gist of it. As far as how to do it, it's one of those things that's hard to replicate because like there happened to be a pocket of money around different grants, different contracts for...

2:06:35Is this the movie War Dogs? Where'd you find it? Was it like a website? Yeah, there's, you know, small business innovation research grants, but like that doesn't exactly exist in that form anymore. The U.S. government's massive. There's pockets within the DOD, NIH. There's always money going out. A lot of it in the military goes out to weapons development. And there happened to be this big push around the human factors of, okay, how do you help someone to perform better but with less cortisol spike? How do you help someone to have better target accuracy? How do you help someone have better cognitive efficiency?

2:07:05it takes a million dollars to train a navy seal just when you all of the preparation the years of preparation the fact that for every one navy seal you have four that four people that went through training that didn't make it all the way and that cost money so you have a significant expense and so if you can actually improve and extend the performance of a single fighter that's worth a real amount of money they need that incrementality they need a little 10 better totally and they were there's a spot where like these guys all have like all the stimulus and all the uppers, right? They're on like 600, 800 milligrams of caffeine a day.

2:07:37They got everything you can imagine under the sun. And so that was super interesting to the, the DOD in the early days. And yeah, we continue to grow that. Like we continue to work with the DOD in a few different ways. We continue to do research. We have direct procurement where they buy directly. And then we also sell on base. So like AFI's, Nextcom, like the on base retail. And so we continue to work. It's awesome. It's like the, I think that is like the core, the molten core of how this all got started and continues to this day. Yeah, I feel like that's like the genesis of everything. What did you learn from being a product manager at Google?

2:08:10Being a product manager at Google was super fun. I worked at YouTube in particular not long after Google bought YouTube. And it was a fun time because they bought Google, Google bought YouTube for like$1.6 billion and everyone thought that was insane. And now YouTube makes like$30 billion of revenue for Google a year. It was like the best acquisition ever. But I was in that kind of in-between period where they bought YouTube, but it hadn't started to print cash yet. And so there's a lot of creativity in the air. And as a product manager, what you're hired on as a product manager, you need to be able to speak all the different languages.

2:08:42Like you gotta be able, if you're launching a new feature, you're the one that's working with the marketing team or the PR team. You're the one that's working with designers to come up with different options for how it could look. You're technical, so you're able to dive into the weeds of knowing what's possible within the constraints or what new things need to be true in order for this new product to launch. When I was there, we were working on things like autoplay the next video, like back in the day when that, remember that when that wasn't a thing, like videos used to not autoplay. And like, and that was a significant stretch of resources that if you're going to autoplay the next video, like we're going to play a shit ton more videos.

2:09:16So like technically how is that possible? Wow. Like just going through all the drip on that. And then obviously more views have to pay out more people, like going through all of. Totally. Wow. That's wild. Yeah. Yeah. But the idea is, you know, if you, every time you play three videos, you get to play an ad. So if you can autoplay, you can generate more ad revenue. But then, okay, how do you make sure that people aren't spoofing that or someone didn't just like leave the room and they're on autoplay? Like, how do you make sure they're actually awake and attentive? Anyway, so you kind of get to be the mini CEO of a product, which I think was good founder training where you just learn how to speak legal, speak PR, speak design, speak engineering.

2:09:54You just learn all the different functions that it takes to get a product off the ground. And I thought that was super fun. I didn't love the big company thing. I loved a lot of the people I worked in, a lot of the projects I worked on. I didn't love just the kind of rate. It had immense scale. Once you launched something at Google, it was launching to like tens, hundreds of millions of people on day one. That part was cool, but it would take like nine months to launch something. And so that was formative for me and teaching me like, okay, I really want to go to entrepreneurship. Funny you said mini CEO as a product manager.

2:10:24I actually was thinking that. I didn't know much about product managers when I started this. And I'm starting to see that's like a very good kind of entry role to kind of be multifaceted in a lot of things. Last four questions, man. I've had a great time. It was fun, man. Favorite book or podcast and why? I had separate answers for those. I love Diary of the CEO. I think Steven has on just really dynamic guests. I think he's even getting more interesting and varied in who he brings on. I love the Acquired podcast. Great podcast. That one's awesome. and they deep dive into different businesses.

2:11:00Long deep dives, like three to eight hour deep dives. Hell yeah. Did you hear the NFL episode? That's the only one that I have listened to. That's the only one I listen to in full. I love it. It's a great podcast. It's fun. They break stuff down really well. As far as books, I mean, I love Shoe Dogs, the Nike book. That's an oldie but goodie. A lot of people's favorite. It's just such a good book. It's Bill Knight's autobiography and building Nike. There's just so much inside there. I find I have a hard time, honestly, with like business books that are just telling you what to do. I love an autobiography or a biography where you're getting to see someone actually interacting with the world in real time.

2:11:39Context. Yeah, the context is everything. It's just like so much more enjoyable. I hate the frameworks or this or that. It's like a business school professor telling you what to do. I just have a harder time relating to that than just reading a book. Shoe Dog, I think is the best at it. But there's other ones like I love the Lululemon book. the guy that started Lululemon. Yeah, Chip Wilson. I've not read that. I heard it was good. It's called Little Black Stretchy Pants. Mark Randolph, who was the first CEO of Netflix, his book that's next on my docket. I just love reading the founder story. Entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and why?

2:12:11Think through this one, my man. You had him on the podcast. I think Ross at Cadence is doing a lot of things super well. He's super sharp. I think, yeah, he's moving really quickly. He started Cadence less than two years ago. Two and a half years ago, yeah. Yeah, they're absolutely ripping. I love what they're doing. I think they're attacking a super interesting space in the ready-to-drink hydration world. I think they have a phenomenal product. There's a ton of waste space. There absolutely needs to be in every fridge in America a ready-to-drink hydration drink, and I think they've nailed it.

2:12:48I think he's just one of those people that you would bet on almost whatever he does. he's just a force of nature. There's certain entrepreneurs you meet and you're just like, okay, that person is like never going to fail. Yeah, that person is going to win. And the product and brand is good. Great episode, guys. I'm going to pop that one up. That was a couple episodes ago. Completely agree with you there as well too. Last question, man. How big can ketone IQ be? Ketones will be as big as creatine, collagen, electrolytes, these other nutritional primitives that are just part of a daily pantry staple.

2:13:23I think ketones can be even bigger. When you look at how fundamental it is to our metabolism, there's so much unbounded upside to how big ketones can be. I think it could be 10 % of global calorie intake. I think the sky is truly the limit to how big the opportunity is on ketones. What about the underlying asset? I'm not talking about the category. I'm talking about the hold cow. The Keto and IQ company, how big can it be? I think it can be big. I think that it's not crazy to sell it for a billion dollars or IPO at that level. And I don't think it would be crazy if it 10x from there or even then some.

2:14:02When you look at the size like Monster Energy Drink, Red Bull Energy Drink, those are in the$30 billion types of company range. I don't think that that's crazy to be at that scale. And then I could make an argument of how ketones could be even bigger than that because it's even more novel and more fundamental to human physiology. You don't need caffeine. Ketones work in a really fundamental way in our metabolism. They help with all sorts of things. We're just beginning to unpack that they can help with the way that your brain ages, the way that your overall body ages. It's not just that you drink a ketone and you feel good right now for a few hours.

2:14:40It's actually just a better quality of fuel. So you go to the gas pump at the gas station and you get the premium fuel. It's running your engine more clean. And so I think that there's this unbounded upside in how big it can go. Yeah. Billions. We'll leave it at that. Where can they find you? Personal and the company. Ketone.com. This guy. There we go. We're going to find this guy. We're going to pop his face up over here. Ketone.com and at Ketone on all the social media. and my personal is at Michael D. Brandt on everything. Instagram, X, everything. Hope you guys enjoyed the episode. We're actually gonna drop down below.

2:15:20They're a company's core values. We talked about a couple of them. They have eight. I love it. You sent me that Notion document and we're gonna put it down below. Michael, amazing time. Love the product, love the brand. Great talking to you and I'm excited for everybody to learn from you. Mark, it's great to be here. Thanks for taking the time. What's up guys? If you guys got this far in the episode, I would assume that you enjoyed it. If you got any value, it would mean the world if you hit the subscribe button. Give it a like, post a comment, tell a friend. We could keep going bigger, bigger guests, bigger locations, more value.

2:15:47See you in the next episode.