 Again, 60 upwards of 75% of Americans are overweight and or obese, a third of Americans are type 2 diabetic or pre-diabetic. If you look at comorbidities of the most serious presentations of COVID-19, it's obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. If you have one or multiple of these risk factors, you get the worst outcomes with COVID. So we are just a weak, sick population given all these crappy lifestyle choices that we've all passively made as a society. This is Startup at Storefront. Today's guest is Jeffrey Wu, co-founder of Health Via Modern Nutrition or HVMN for short. And what you just heard is uncomfortable, but true. America's obesity epidemic may be even worse than we thought, with the CDC releasing data earlier this year that showed the country's obesity rate reaching 42.4% in 2017 and 2018. There are a lot of causes for this statistic, and so solving it will not be one simple solution. It will require addressing income inequality, education gaps, access to healthcare, fitness and healthy eating. This conversation nicely dovetails with last week's episode with Sergey Young. Both Sergey and Jeffrey are aligned in the quest for a healthier and longer living population. The good news is that no matter who you are, there are steps you can take today in order to increase both the quality and the quantity of your time here on Earth. Because while systemic change is a big part of the solution, it's empowering to know that there's also power in your daily choices. So listen in as we cover everything from the ins and outs of a ketogenic diet, why Jeffrey supports enlightened capitalism and the science behind intermittent fasting. Now, back to the episode. All right. Welcome to the podcast. Everyone on today's show, we have Jeffrey Wu. Jeffrey, thanks for joining. Tell everyone a little bit about who you are and the company that you're launching. Yeah. Thanks for having me in the program, Diego. We've been around for almost six years now, health via modern nutrition, HVMN, and we're a human performance company focused around ketogenic technologies, ketogenic interventions. So you might have heard of ketogenic diets, Kim Kardashian, different celebrities, Halle Berry, all about using ketogenic diet for weight loss. That's a very, very narrow aspect of what we think that ketosis does for a multitude of metabolic conditions, including human performance at the high end of athletics, military applications, as well as longevity applications. So the way I think about our space and where I focus my time is how do we, from a nutrition perspective, optimize, enhance our performance, both from a therapeutic or improving deficiencies as well as pushing the very edges and the boundaries of human performance. So that's kind of a quick snapshot. My background, I'm a computer scientist by training, studied computer science at Stanford, focused on information theory distributed systems, was in the Silicon Valley entrepreneurship kind of community sold my first company right before I turned 24 was that group on for a little bit and that gave me a little bit of time, capital, wherewithal to start thinking, Hey, what do I want to think about work on next? And I always thought that my smartest friends from Stanford were focused on making computers better, making people click more ads, all the kind of Silicon Valley stuff that I think more people are bored of or more disillusioned about. And I had that realization fairly early. Why can we apply our big brain towards making humans better? And that got me down the path of biohacking human performance. And now it's quite a journey where work with some of the best academics with PhDs and MDs, collaborating with top athletes, top sports nutritionists, top sports physiologists. So it's been cool to tap into so many of the elite performers across domains where I used to focus kind of on a very narrow niche of cognitive performers or nerds. Now it's like really cool to bridge all that learning across top, you know, athletes, musicians, military folks and all of that. So it's been a fun ride. Yeah, no, for sure. I want to set the stage too. I mean, we have listeners on all spectrums here. So some are deep into entrepreneurship like you, like me, and then some are maybe just beginning. And so the way I think about my personal journey is like, obviously, we're in Boston, we go to San Francisco, raise all this money, we're working insane hours. And at that moment, and now you start hiring, right? So now you're, you're hiring, now you're responsible for a team meeting with investors and the whole gamut and your schedule is basically like seven to 10 every day. And that's what it is. And so for me, it was like the realization of what you put in your body becomes mega important. Gone are the days of the hamburger and instantly any sort of fast food is going to shut you down, which means now your performance is suffering with with really important meetings, whether you're hiring or just trying to raise some capital. And so it seems like that's the first moment, right, where people start to think, All right, cool, how can I optimize my, my body? And for me, and this is why I wanted to talk to you too, it was like, all of a sudden, I was I was hitting the limits of being a human, whether it's in a comp in a one on one conversation between myself and a developer, and we're using the same word, but they have different meanings, whether it's what's in my head is not what you're hearing. And so I'm like, neuro link needs to accelerate so we can start to, you know what I mean? And I'm like drawing pictures. And so now we're yeah, and it's this whole thing of like, how can we as a company, and it starts with ourselves, but get to the point of just optimizing performance, was that sort of like the, the little thing that let's call it the seed that started you down the journey of what can we do? What can we put in our bodies to do that? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, basically, I wanted to jump on an edge on everyone else. And I think exactly kind of that same cultural milieu where I think probably in a very similar entrepreneurship era, you just see that the number one player in the market gets 80% of the bag. Number two gets 20% and three to 10 are dead. Right. So and the incremental improvements or software or service or little UI improvements and make it a little bit more with delightful experience. Those are the edges. So the way I think about it, maybe it's a little bit more mathematical, a little bit more broad, maybe overly frameworked was that you have a parallel of outcomes, and the difference between outcomes are increasingly narrow. Our competitive edge, we used to be evolved towards some sort of physical prowess, where if we were the strongest caveman, I could whack you on the head, better than the other guy, I would be the tribal chieftain. As we evolved technology, we became more and more cognitive dominant. And I would say that most of us, I'm sure a lot of most of your listeners are probably intellectual workers, right, they're getting paid off their creativity, their intellect, not their physical brain. So that was my focus in, Hey, how do I enhance cognitive performance? How do I improve my brain, my neurological processes? And that was my initial foray into the space. So kind of spot on Silicon Valley, super competitive, right? When you're raising money, you know, the number one company, literally, I'm sure you have friends now, they're like billionaires and other people that are just as smart, just as hardworking, maybe just got didn't get as lucky or just missed that little timing or the little thing. They're so on the grind. And I think when you have the dynamic, it's humbling in one sense, but it's also like, Hey, let's get prepared and really up our game in all dimensions. So that's kind of my personal journey. Yeah. And to me, it's like, this is why I think people love athletics. For me personally, it's like, it's so obvious, right? It's so clear. It's clear as day, the athletics make it so that there's no it's like, obviously, they're better, you're watching it. They're so much better. But then it's a question of like, what are they doing throughout their day to make themselves better? And everyone in their head goes, Oh, they're just putting in the hours in the gym. And it's like the gym has a very small set to do at this, right? You don't know what they're putting in their body, the supplements, the diet is massively important, recovery is massively important. What was the first product that you decided to launch, maybe before you were aware of, let's say the military applications and some of the athletic applications. What was the first thing that you you leaned into for maybe yourself? So we first entered the space of broader biohacking, which I use as a loose umbrella term that I don't really even love, which is what I define as just kind of a more of a systems or engineering approach to human performance, meaning just quantifying interventions, measuring, and then once you can measure, you can optimize, right? There's a lot of engineers who are listening to this or entrepreneurs or startup folks. I think one of the axioms is you can't optimize what you can't measure. So biohacking is applying that same analytical approach towards human performance. Again, I started off focused on the brain, so I thought that was a highest leverage thing to optimize and played around with new tropics. So new tropics are compounds and enhanced various aspects of cognitive performance. And this is circa 2014. And there was not a lot of new tropics available that were that existed in a safe way. So when I started experimenting, I was ordering research compounds off of Alibaba and getting chipmints and samples of random baggies of white powder. And I got like the Mila gram accurate drug scale to weigh out the different ratios that I would want to be testing. So super and to be clear, not illegal, these were just research chemicals. So not like scheduled legal compounds, but essentially like a breaking bad setup where I was just tinkering and just playing around there. And that got me thinking, where, hey, this is kind of interesting. I'm getting some sort of subjective effect, which is anecdotal, which is n equals one, which is fine. And I was doing more research into the peer review literature. There's actually some compounds that have pretty decent randomized control trials done on humans. So that past kind of like the bullshit test where it's like, okay, you know, I'm getting some subjective results, and there's actual good RCT data on this. And then what turned this from more of a hobby into a business idea was that I was just tracking Google Trends on the search term of Neutropics. And it was growing pretty quickly. And also the Reddit community is talking about Neutropics seem to be more and more vibrant. So like, Hey, there seems to be a broader demand of a secular trend behind cotton and performance. Obviously, we can anticipate it a little bit further ahead from Silicon Valley competitive approach. What if I just made a service that made it really simple for you to just get like solid, tested, not crazy, olive oboe bags of white powder, Neutropics. And that's what kicked it off in terms of that first offering. So we had our first Neutropic product called Rise, which is still like a solid and mainstream product for us. It has a Colleen source, has Ash Fagonda has Bacopa Manuri, so a couple botanicals and a CDB Colleen. And they're all each individually have RCT studies on humans, improving various aspects of human cognition. So it's super solid, well evidence stack. And we launched it. And it was a What was the form it was in that you launched it? Was it was it something you ingested a pill? Yeah, so it's like a pill. Yeah. And, you know, I first was just like, Hey, like, can we just like see if this thing would work if people would buy it? And I had like a pre sales landing page. And I still remember it got 32 pre orders. I was like, Oh, man, like this is $1,000 revenue off of some landing page. I'm just like collecting shipping addresses and credit card tokens, right? I got to fulfill these people. Yeah. And that us that got us down the entrepreneurial journey where I think in eight months after that, we were doing $80,000 a month of sales. Wow. This is gonna be a real business. Yeah, that's amazing. And here we are. Two things to touch on there. I mean, one thing is, I think this is so important. I think this is something that a lot of either beginning entrepreneurs or just entrepreneurs in general go wrong. They always ask the question of like, when do I know I have to go full time in my company? Or when do I know I have something? And, and any seasoned person will say when you know, you'll know, right? It's and it's like a very obvious thing. And usually it has to do with revenue or just all of a sudden your demands of your time are just taking off. And usually revenue is a good sign of that pre orders are a great sign of that. And so you're making $80,000 a month. That's amazing. And then what happens to the next thing? Are you like, all right, we got to create another product, we got to we got to continue, we got to create a different way to ingest this. All the above, I think on the entrepreneurial journey, especially for folks who are super ambitious, you're like, wow, like, I want to do 17 things. I mean, I think it's almost a matter of focus and actually choosing one of the most valuable, most impactful opportunities. But essentially, you know, our younger versus ourselves are just like hyperactive. I mean, we had additional skews that we wanted to make in terms of metropics. We wanted to export different form factors because we realized that pills are kind of unapproachable. Like I'm handing you a pill, you might be like, what the hell are you handing me? But from handing you a gummy or a drink or a bar or another form factor that comes off a very, very differently, but you can still deliver the same active compounds. And one of the things that I think was especially interesting was that we were pretty opportunistic in terms of just capitalizing on the evolution of the biohacking community. So what I mean by that is that I think metropics was a very good entry point into talking about human performance. But we were also one of the first people talking about intermittent fasting. Okay, so fasting is this again, I mean, I didn't know what like, you know, I mean, this has been done by human cultures for thousands of years, I would not say I invented it. But in terms of Silicon Valley, people talking about fasting, just go Google Silicon Valley fasting, you'll you'll you'll see articles of me and my company. And some of our friends, I know Phil Libin, former founder of Evernote, he's doing a bunch of cool stuff now. He's got a cool video conferencing app. I mean, Tim Ferriss comes to mind, right? Yeah, so like all these folks that are like kind of like these kind of biohackers, we were just dictating fasting as part of this Silicon Valley culture. And what got me onto fasting was this notion that fasting was one of the most consistent ways to induce neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons. And again, we focused on brain performance first. And as we dove into the fasting community, and we saw that there was just such a big upsold interest there, we realized that, well, how does fasting work? And then as you back down the metabolism, you realize that fasting is mediated or controlled by ketones or ketosis. And then that unlocked like a broader opportunity that we're excited about around ketogenic diets, ketosis, exogenous ketones where you can consume molecules that induce ketosis really, really quickly. And that opened up just everything in metabolism, because it's such a fundamental part of how our bodies and brains function is what kind of fuel does our mitochondria process? And that unlocked so much application from therapeutics to as well as performance enhancement applications. So we brought it out our scope around 2017 era. So probably, you know, two, three years into building Neutrobox or Neutropics company, we rebranded ourselves to HVMN, Health Via Modern Nutrition, really speaking towards redefining what we think nutrition should be within the modern science and evidence based context. And from that perspective, so 2017, I imagine you're kind of an early mover in this world, or at least there's a couple things, right? So when I was just talking to Sergey, it's like, if we understood metabolism, like for real, like if we all actually understood it the way some people understand software, it's literally the key to everything. Just understanding it. And I think I it's weird because it's almost like, you might understand it really well, Sergey, that I just spoke to might understand it, I might have like, let's call it elementary level view. But then there's the rest of the world that has no idea. And it's just being fed a lot of, let's call it bad. It's like, what is metabolism is sounds? Yeah, sounds complicated, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. How much of the time do you spend educating your consumer? Or is it just like, you just really focus that so you plant your flag on the people that are super aware of this and sort of like, I don't know if that's a large market, but it sounds like, you know, you've really hit with, let's call it people like us, let's call it the athletes of the world, the military, do you just focus more of your attention on that sort of like that market? I mean, that's where we started. But I think we, I think we're having good tailwinds where, especially with COVID people thinking about their health, think about immunity, I think people are getting more attuned to their health. If you look at the broad macro trends of obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's, these are all skyrocketing. I mean, I think, again, if listeners are based in, you know, San Francisco or LA, we're in a very, very narrow slice of the rest of our country. I just came back from Arizona and people don't, you know, are not, they don't look like, you know, the beach babe or like this, you know, the surfer dude who's like always out there in California, who's super thoughtful about it. Again, 60 upwards of 75% of Americans are overweight and or obese. A third of Americans are type two diabetic or pre diabetic. So I think we're having a reexamination of how our healthcare system works. And more and more people are realizing that the hospital healthcare system is a sick care system. And we got to do so much more in terms of a lifestyle to make us much more resilient. If you look at co morbidities of the most serious presentations of COVID-19, it's obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. If you have one or multiple of these risk factors, you get the worst outcomes with COVID. So we are just a weak sick population, given all these crappy lifestyle choices that we've all passively made as a society. So let me let me just do some some distilling here. So in my head, I go if we could replace sugar, right? If we could just replace sugar for all these people in a meaningful way, is that sort of but I imagine what you're doing is also expensive, right? Anytime anytime something is relatively new, there's a price associated with this. The product that you're that you've created now, how much is it, you know, and obviously there's a in terms of like the liver, it's it's being fed ketones instead of I would imagine sugar. But can you just give us the science into that? Yeah, yeah, let's unpack it. Let's unpack it a little bit. So what you're likely referring to our ketone or ketogenic diet support products. So we have on one hand, we have a ketone ester. And that technology was invented out of a DARPA program by NIH Oxford scientists. And we also have products that are derived from coconuts, MCT oil powder and our keto collagen products. And those are just super yummy accessible ways to mildly boost and kickstart ketosis. So what are we doing? I mean, maybe we just got to step back and talk about how does sugar relate to ketosis and just to find us a little bit better. Sure. So what is a ketogenic diet? A ketogenic diet is where you restrict if not completely remove the carbohydrate intake in your diet. So cut out sodas, cut out bread, cut out noodles, cut out spaghetti, no pizza, because it's basically bread with with cheese on it. So you can have that bread. So what happens when your body has very, very low carbohydrate? Well, glucose is an important fuel, we need it to function, we need it to for our brains to work. But what if we run out of glucose, when we don't eat any carbohydrate, do we just go brain dead? No, our bodies actually have this ability called ketosis, which allows yourself to convert its fat stores. As you mentioned in the liver, your liver converts its stored fat into fuel source called ketones. And these ketones are super efficient backup energy source that both our brain and body can use really, really efficiently. So when people talk about long fast, and they feel like they're just super, super sharp, your brain is running on ketones at that point. So now that we've established ketosis as an interesting metabolic state, which is like, sometimes associated with starvation. But it's really just a carbohydrate restriction. So you can basically not be starving, eat high amounts of fat and protein and be in ketosis. And that's essentially what a ketogenic diet on. And the main thing that's happening from a physiology perspective is that now your body is burning fat primarily, as opposed to burning carbohydrate. So that's why a lot of celebrities like using this for a weight loss or a weight or body composition diet, because you just kickstart your body to use fat as its primary energy source. And oftentimes a lot of us carry a lot of stored fat. So now you just kickstart your body to be like, all right, let's continue to burn a lot of fat. So that's what ketosis is. So to help people get into ketosis, well, you have to eat more healthy fats. And that's what our MCT oil products are. We just launched hazelnut flavor, super yummy coconut. I mean, it just like a yummy way to add healthy fats into your diet. And specifically what MCT is, it's called medium chain triglyceride. It's the form of fat that has eight carbon lengths of in a fatty acid chain that most readily converts into ketones. So that's one aspect of what we're offering. And then on the high end perspective, we have what's called a ketone ester. So this is a synthetically derived molecule that directly converts into ketones in your in your bloodstream. So with MCTs, it's a form of fat, your liver has to process that fat into ketones. What do you have with ketone esters? And this runs at 30 bucks a pop. So pretty expensive use to cost like thousands of dollars per pop in like the super early days where it's like very, very hard to synthesize. This stuff converts pretty rapidly into your blood as beta hydroxy beta or ketones. And it basically is so quick in upleveling your ketones, it looks like you've been fasting for five days with the amount of ketones that we're delivering in 30 minutes. And that's 30 bucks. How much is it? How much volume? It's like a 65 milliliters shot 25 gram of ketone esters. Got it. And then who's usually buying the shot? Just curious, like, is it somebody that's going? Let's say I wanted to start raising money and I wanted to be sharp, right? Whether it's a placebo effect or not, I would be like, Okay, cool, let me let me go do that. If I'm an athlete, maybe with a big performance coming up or the US opens about to happen here for tennis. Who's typically having this? Yeah, you're describing a couple of the main use cases. So a lot of execs. And that's actually kind of funny that you mentioned that. So have you heard of Dr. Rhonda Patrick? She's kind of a kind of a very much. Yeah, science communicator doctor type. She's been on Joe Rogan number of times. Sure. We're friendly with her. And she talked about how she uses ketone ester before big talks and podcasts, because it makes her feel much more clear. And again, because ketones are blood, brain barrier active, meaning it goes and fuels a brain. There's definitely an anxiolytic or anti anxiety effect with ketones. That's a very, very interesting. I know that a lot of executives use ketones for jet lag. And yeah, being sharp in presentations or meetings. But I would say the more broad primary use case is for endurance performance. So the last couple tour de France is we supplied a third to half the tour de France teams. The teams that were our customers done really, really well. For the last tour, there's a bit of a hoopla around all the cycling community about even banning ketones because there's unfair advantage. Good thing about ketones is that what a compliant NSF all that good stuff. So it's not doping, although sport rules are arbitrary, right? Like, right, caffeine at some point was banned. And they decided that you couldn't ban caffeine. So, you know, that's above my pay grade to decide. Although, one way to think about it is that it's just like a, as opposed to having Gatorade or like a glucose bolus, now you can have a ketone bolus, like basically just consuming ketones really, really quickly. Yeah, it's been just super cool to work with a number of different types of athletes from MMA fighters to NFL teams to NBA players. I mean, you know, some of like the use cases that I think have been pretty interesting is that a lot of fighters will say they have better and cleaner reaction times responding to blows coming in. A lot of people are using it for weight cutting. So a lot of combat sports, powerlifting sports have weight classes. I mean, I can just literally go on and on in terms of like little interesting nuggets of how people are applying and using ketones. No, it's really interesting. I mean, obviously, there's like F1 anytime that you need. Yeah, I totally with you. There's a tremendous amount of people. But in terms of like as you build out your business, I imagine that $30 price point isn't isn't for your daily, you know, isn't for everyone, let's say. And so how is it that you think about maybe reducing that cost or getting it down so that you can introduce it to more and more people in the marketplace? Yeah, so that's something that we hope to do it with scale also just have a more robust supply chain. So that's something that we're constantly looking at. How do we make this more ubiquitous because it is a high end super expensive product, just like not, you know, there's no two ways around it, right? A $30 drink is some high end stuff. I want to buy one. I'm like, very curious. I got to get one. Yeah, I mean, we're pretty like, stocked out in inventories. That's just hard to get a hold of. But that's where we have just multiple skews, right? I think our MCT products, super high end, I think it's like, you know, in terms of like, other products out there, I think just like, all the flavor mixability, the level to the ability to induce in elevate ketones, we're just top tier on across the board. I think we just, at this point, just understand what the best performers care about. And we designed the products for them across price points. So that's where I think we're trying to solve the problem, which is that there's a technological supply chain challenge at price points. But can we solve that user problem through a combination of other technologies or molecules or compounds? So ultimately, we're solving or trying to solve user problems in a price point is a part of a user problem. And from your perspective, as you launch these new products, how much of it or how much time do you spend building feedback loops, maybe getting blood tested? Do you do it personally? Or is it like a group of people? Is this all done in a lab? You know, what, what is that like? I'm sure there's some FDA compliance is that you have to go through. But what is that process like? How long does it generally take? Is it, is it helpful to the startup, let's say the speed? Or is it, is it super cumbersome? I mean, so to answer, yeah. So the molecule is FDA grass. So animal studies, human studies showing that it's not going to harm people. You obviously have to make sure you're when you're feeding people, you're not, you know, hurting them. So obviously, that had a regular free pathway to introduce a novel compound into the marketplace. But in terms of like performance indications, there's a lot of just consumer available medical devices, you can do a finger stick, we can actually just prick your finger, get a little bit of blood, and then actually measure your metabolites, your analytes, like glucose, like ketones. So that's actually what we recommend to sports teams, right? Because they're, they care. And to actually maximize performance, you want to actually be controlling your dosage to hit certain thresholds of ketones. So yeah, that's something that we work with a lot of coaches, a lot of teams on an individual, you know, consulting basis, essentially, to just walk people through the specific protocols to try to hit what they want to be hitting. And this is something I'm just curious about. But I always love meeting people like you, because I always want to figure out what's your diet? Like, how much are you sleeping? Right? So let's, let's talk about your personal daily routine. Where to start? So I would say that. I mean, I think a lot of our schedules have changed with shelter in place and with quarantine. So I have found it to be quite nice to have time to just really dial in my schedule and protocol to really maximize my productivity. Yeah, it sounds like you've been able to weather the storm and stay productive as well. But yeah, I think we're just super lucky to be able to work remotely, be able to do business remotely online. I mean, it's like, honestly, for me, I'm more productive than I've ever been at this point, because we're digital natives. I mean, just this is this is how we do business. This is how we do commerce. So what do I do? From a diet perspective, I anchor around intermittent fasting. I think that's like one of the most easy, low hanging fruits to just generally up level a lot of the metabolic pathways that you want to be caring about. So what do I mean by that? I mean, I have pretty tight eating window. So I actually it's 242 p.m. right now, I actually haven't eaten today. And usually I'll have my first meal, probably like one 2 p.m. and then have my last meal before 7 p.m. So I have oftentimes have like an 18 hour fasting window six hour eating window where I have all my calories per day. I'm not calorically restricting I'm not trying to lose weight. Like I'm trying to get my calories of this high nutrient dense foods in but just in a tighter eating window. And why is that beneficial? Well, it gives my time more time to digest and be in a facet state which kicks off all these longevity pathways. Yeah, I find that just having a tighter smaller eating window just encourage a lot of discipline where I'm just like pretty focused and pretty just in the zone for longer blocks of time. I don't have to think about what am I doing? What am I eating in two hours? I'm just like, boom, big blocks of productivity. So when I eat, what do I eat? I prefer animal products, animal proteins, animal fats. A lot of people think that vegan is healthy for them. I think it is not backed by science that that like meme. I think you can make an argument for veganism from a morality or an ethics and maybe an environmental perspective, but from a health perspective, no, I think that the evidence and the science there is does not warrant hay saying that vegan is a healthier diet than a well balanced, you know, mixed diet with animal proteins. I mean, the data is just very, very clear that animal protein is so much more bioavailable than plant protein. I mean, like just just it's I mean, when you're eating all these plant protein shakes, how much processing is it to get your penis? It takes like a freaking chocolate shake, right? I mean, that just that is some synthesized stuff. So just want to put that out there. So I'm not afraid of animal protein, not afraid of red meat, not afraid of animal fat. So what does that mean? I mean, oftentimes have a lot of steak and eggs, you know, steak and egg for late lunch, early breakfast. And I basically just don't have processed carbohydrate. So basically leaving pretty much living a fairly intermittent fasted, sort of a time restriction on the time restriction dimension and from a macro or food choice dimension, focus a lot on fats and proteins and reduce carbohydrate intake. That said, if I'm working out more, doing a lot of exercise up my carbohydrate intake. So to me, it's fueling for the job that needs to be done rather than just sticking to a diet for some random dogmatic reason. Like it's for enjoyment, it's for fueling. Do I turn down like a delicious Michelin star meal? Because I'm like, not even carbs? No, like, this is for enjoyment now. And I'm lucky to be metabolically flexible, metabolically healthy, or if I eat a piece of cake, I'm not giving myself diabetes, right? I can look at my insulin levels, my fast glucose levels, very, very, very healthy. So I think when people are very, very naturally strict on their various diets, you might need that if you're trying to be an Olympic gold medalist, or if you're have type two diabetes or no obese, but if you've gotten like really good foundations, then I don't need to be so strict with I want to enjoy and have a social dinner, and all that stuff. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of a snapshot in terms of diet and how I think about food. But other things in terms of just like staples in my ritual, I think it's important to like, as you wake up, go outside, see the sun, reset your circadian rhythm, I think it's super easy to just sit in our boxes all day long, because especially now your food deliver, yeah, that's what I'm saying. And even before, we would just, if you just think about where you spend all your time, you're going between your house, your office and your gym, and you may that's like the three things, the three boxes that you you you rotate around. And I always make sure to at least sit outside, make sure the sun is hitting my eyes, it's really setting a good circadian rhythm. That's important. And then being physically fit is I think it's super important. I definitely, I think grew up as a science math nerd, right? Like, did science fair science math competitions, you know, did well in SATs, got good grades, right? Like that was that was my wheelhouse. But good playing tennis, which is again, a more of a nerdy sport. And then I think in recent years, I met a bunch of super jacked, smart athletes, or folks in the military, I'm like, damn, like they're fucking smart. I don't know if you can cast on this program, but they're smart. They're they're like, damn smart. And they're also jacked. I'm like, man, they're just better than me. I need to like up my physical game. So definitely spend a little bit of time just thinking about how to like optimize my workouts. And I think it just comes full circle where I think the more healthy and dynamic your body is, the more you can actually put that extra energy and that focus into your cognitive labor as well. So that's like having kettle balls around just carrying some weight, body weight exercises. We can know it all about that if we're into that as well. So that hopefully encapsulates kind of like the day to day. Yeah, no, I think the takeaway is make sure you know what you're solving for right? Like when I was in San Francisco, the tech executive life is just making sure that you're you're aware you're awake your teams early, you're the one bringing the energy to the day you're the one making sure everyone's on the same page. And for me, it was like coffee was the only thing I'd have I wouldn't eat till noon or one. And that was usually just something light. And so whether it was a salad, it was a salad, whether the whether we got take out for the team, I would just something light, I just needed to be to be substantive, like 200, 300 calories, something like that. And then and then I'd move on. And I would try to always have dinner like at five, kind of to your point where I was trying to do it all like a six to eight hour window in terms of eating. And then dinner would always be, again, something healthy. Now in LA, I'm playing a lot of tennis. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to consume a little bit more protein. So I'm adding a lot more chicken into the diet than previous. But same window, same exact window. And then for lunch, especially when it's like today, it's like 90 degrees in here. And so I'll just do a, like, I just make a little, a little green shake. And that's the end of that. But there's a lot of science out there that says coffee doesn't break the fast. But I'm kind of like, is that true? If I have almond milk in it? I don't, is it true? Is it not true? Do you know? Yes. So let's unpack that a little bit. I mean, it's like the funniest thing, because these cultural memes of these roles, like I made some of these roles up, basically, I remember like talking about a 36 hour fast, and like that kind of just became a meme to like hit 36 hours. So why is coffee an interesting substance? Well, it's a caloric, meaning that doesn't trigger a lot of the nutrient sensing pathways that you care about triggering or breaking a fast. And as you unpack the metabolism of how fasting works, it's what pathways in your body detects nutrients in your body. So there's mTOR, which is a protein insulin sensing pathway. And there's pathways to detect other substrates or other other compounds. So in terms of the green levels of fast breaking, coffee is usually concerned not breaking a fast because it doesn't trigger mTOR, there's no calories in it. So you're not getting any caloric intake. But for me, I think that cycling off of caffeine, giving your brain a break from just having constant adenosine blockers, which is what caffeine does, it blocks the tiredness neurotransmitter from binding to its neurotransmitter receiver. I don't necessarily think that it's a good thing to have constant caffeine consumption. So I actually recently cycled off of caffeine for over a month now. And that was because I thought I felt like it's overdoing caffeine, I would have close to 400 milligrams of caffeine a day, which is like two, three, four cups of coffee, and would get caffeine withdrawal headaches. I'm like, okay, do you need to be triggering emergency levels of caffeine to just feel normal? I didn't like that. So I dialed back down. And we can talk about why it might not be good to just constantly drench your brain with adenosine blockers because that would inversely up regulate adenosine receptors. So when you're off of caffeine, you're more sensitive to being tired. Do I want to be in that state? And that was inspired by some of my friends who are elite performers who were like, Yeah, it sucks not have that boost. But I don't want to be out on a mission or in competition, don't have access to caffeine. And like, I'm just literally more sensitive to being tired, because that little adenosine boost, I'm gonna have much more receptors to pick that up. So that got me a little bit around adenosine, or caffeine at the very least. But people talk about other sorts of crutches, I think caffeine is a good kind of entry point to get into fasting, because caffeine is a appetite suppressant. It doesn't trigger m torn these nutrient sensing pathways. So it's like a very reasonable thing to start and push out your first calorie intake. But people play around with like fat coffees, right? Like butter and coffee or MCT and coffee. Right. And the reason why that doesn't necessarily break a fast is because fat doesn't trigger an insulin response or an m tour response. So your body doesn't think it's it's not sensing nutrient intake, because in nature, you don't really eat fat by itself, usually eat fat with like protein, which does trigger that nutrient sensing pathway. So fat sometimes people incorporate in because then they're a little bit more satiated, they don't feel as tired, maybe helps boost ketosis for incorporating MCT oil. So people consider it a fat bomb or a fat fast, where it doesn't like break the fast in terms of m Torah insulin, but it obviously breaks the fast in terms of taking in calories, you're no longer burning your stored fat, you're burning obviously this exogenous fat that you're intaking. And then people talk about bone broth amino acids, again, amino acids trigger some of the nutrient sensing pathways. So you can cut quite specific and nuance and what you consider breaking a fast or not a fast. To me, look, just a strict water fast, meaning just drinking water is going to be the best. And it's better to have some sort of fasting behavior. So if you really need the coffee or the bone broth or MCT oil coffee, great. It's better than just eating a breaking fruit loops in the morning, and a donut. So 100%. So it's all about what we can do. Get away from processed food. That's that's certainly one thing in general. So it sounds like almond milk for sure breaks my fast. It's got m Torah, I would imagine there's I mean, if you look at almond milk, it's basically bashed up almonds with some sugar in it. Yeah, I drink a four ingredient almond milk we actually invested in this company. It's basically just almonds, water, they add a little bit of date syrup and then sea salt. And that's it. And so cool. Yeah, I mean, that's much cleaner than a lot of the stuff they see have canola oil or some weird, because like the mouth feel is off. Yeah, and I don't I don't like stuff like Oatly, which has like canola oil in there. So you're drinking processed seed oil to make up for the fact that there's no fat, like normal like actual milk fat. You're helping my investment by saying that. Thank you. Yeah, no, I think this is something that there's a lot of thought leadership about the science. I mean, just I think it's just from a science perspective, like I'm just speaking strictly from a nutritional perspective, like I think your label is clean, right? Like I might pick around with you need dates or whatnot. But like, hey, sure, like it's probably pretty mild and you want some sweetener in there. But at least you're not adding like processed seed oils in there. Yeah, that I mean, that's the challenge. I think with food in general today is the shelf life is something that it's a choice, right? If you want to make a consumer good, and you want a long shelf life, then you're going to be adding a bunch of things into it that make this thing steady, or, you know, make the product. And that's the issue. It becomes a real challenge. And so it becomes I guess, easy to take shortcuts, which is unfortunate. And I think the whole society and culture is built around, you know, I want it when I want it, how I want it. And now we have aquaculture and farming for food, or farming for like seafood. And, and this is just it's not ideal, I guess, but hey, capitalism, money's there's a demand. And so people will always feel it. Yeah, I believe in capitalism, I just think that the costs aren't fully understood. But I think the costs will be more fully understood. So the marketplace will sort itself up. And what I mean by that is that people don't realize that eating this junk food is gonna is killing them and causing diabetes and all this hidden cost to that transaction. Right. So I think that's where it's like, okay, people need to be educated. So they're realizing that they're super cheap, whatever milk is actually not as cheap as they think, because it just gave them a 10% more likelihood of getting diabetes. And that's gonna be super expensive. So yeah, I mean, I mean, education problem, I don't know if I necessarily need to bring in capitalism versus other economic systems, but sure, no, no. But I mean, I think you might is that capitalism, well, I think it's like, I think a more enlightened capitalism is that people actually understand the true costs of the transactions. So people then can make a better informed decision. What's next on your horizon for you guys? Like as you think about five years from now, coming out of COVID, obviously, I feel like there's been an enlightenment time will tell history will tell what happens after this. But what are some of the things that you're working on at your company, or new goals, maybe getting more into some of these grocery stores, if you're already there, you know, what are some of the things that you're working on right now? What's top of mind? Yeah, we're thinking of I think as you're anticipating, how do we scale out how we can help more people and feed more people? So we're developing a couple of new SKUs will be launching a new product in early Q4 Octoberish time frame. So check that out on HVMN.com. Constantly R&Ding. One thing that we've just seen good success in is doing podcasts, right? So like, I also run a podcast called HVMN Healthy Amounted Nutrition podcast, some of the top 50 nutrition related podcasts as ranked by Apple have 50,000 subscribers plus. I think education part is so important because while I think we have tailwinds and people are searching for this information organically, how do we be proactive pushing it out there? And we just got featured on a Netflix docu series called Unwell. You can see me running around San Francisco on episode four around fasting. And that gave us a huge boost of interest and influx of interest. So I mean, I think part of how I see the future unfolding is that brands must become media companies and media companies become brands. And I think you just see that that loop becoming closer and closer and closer where I think the best brands will be just vertically integrated media companies. So, you know, if we're going to be futurists, how do we get closer to that eventual future? I totally agree. I totally agree. Our primary business today is real estate development. And we started this podcast and people were like, what are you doing? Those two things are not related. And it's just like traditionally, in the real estate world, people will buy a building and then they'll do a bunch of work to it. They'll put it for lease sign up and six months later, eight months later, right? The pro forma is broken at that point. But whenever in some future time, said company will take a lease at this thing. And typically that company comes in and they'll basically undo all the construction and make it their own. And so in our model, we just flip it. We just say, okay, let's begin with the tenant in mind, right? So let's hustle hard and meet really good business operators and almost take like a like a event investor type approach. And then once we have them and know exactly what they want, let's acquire the building with them. And then let's do construction once really straightforward. And it's kind of a known pro forma. The risks here are just construction delays, COVID obviously, who couldn't predicted that. And then we started this podcast and the podcast is a way to meet really interesting business owners, right? Who at some point need space and buildings. And so the whole thing to me is vertically integrated. And it makes a lot of sense. And to your point, there's a media component to this whole thing. And I just wish more and more people leaned into that or even for you to say that, I think is you're obviously aware of it, right? And I think there's so many people who aren't aware that any company, the primary drivers to your growth are one, if you're bringing something novel, education is key. How do you do it? You're going to spend a tremendous amount of money, probably not smart, hiring PR firms, which, you know, whatever. Some are great. Not all of them are good. Or you're just going to do it yourself and sort of set that vector. But it's difficult, right? I think it's because it feels so different. It's like, oh, but is PR the right move? Is education the right move? Is the media company the right move? And the answer is 100%. 100%. That's the only way you can survive. Look, I've spent, I mean, I've spent millions of dollars on paid social, right? Like, that's why Facebook, Google are fucking like super rich because every company is paying them to distribute their message. Right. And great, like, I'm in, I have shares in both Facebook and Google and I'm super happy. I mean, X-Ox are through the roof, all time highs. It's a strange world, right? But yeah, they're super valuable platforms. And like, I'm okay paying them a cut to get my message out. But you have to rely on them. Do you want to be relying on them solely as a way to get your message out? Probably not. So that's why I think, I mean, so, yeah, so in terms of like how I think about business or structure of my time, yeah, a lot of my times focused on human performance, but super fascinated in general e-commerce and marketing technologies because I'm almost going full circle back to my computer science roots. It just, especially with COVID, just all businesses. I mean, this is something that people have known, right? It's going to get digital at some point. And this has just jumpstarted like that process of 5, 10 years happening in 5, 10 months. So it's exciting. So I think I just feel a little bit awkward, but I think I've just gotten comfortable with it in the sense that I know a lot of people are struggling. Like a lot of people's jobs are not coming back. A lot of people's jobs are going to be very, very different. But do we cry about it? I mean, do we try to help people about it? Right. And the way I think I want to help people with it is that, okay, let's just like go super aggressively into the future. What does the commerce, what does the business of the future look like and build businesses, the infrastructure, the services that need to exist for this new economy to work? And that's where I spent a lot of my time thinking. Yeah, there's a lot of pain, but with a lot of pain, there's going to be a lot of opportunities. So yes, like let's not belittle the loss of life, the struggle, the bankruptcies, the loss of job. I mean, it's terrible. None of us chose this. Right. But while we're here, do we just follow in our sorrow and feel bad for ourselves? No, we got to keep moving forward. So that's what I'm focused my time on. I love it. Yeah. I mean, look, every, I'll be honest in saying that, you know, despite this narrative that exists today around so much loss, and obviously that's happening, every founder we've had on this podcast since March is thriving. I mean, in terms like record setting months in some cases and for them, what COVID has done is just really make it clear on what is working and what they were pushing uphill. Right. And so it was like all of a sudden they had this moment of, oh, I'm not going to do this anymore because this is not making any money. And I have to make concessions. I have to make layoffs. And so let me lean heavy into, and it's almost like every company, right? Lean heavy into what's working. All of this sounds obvious. The second one was we can't sell right now because of supply chain. So let's educate. All of them went so hard into educating media, building out their brand on social. And the ones who have done all of those three things and pivoted almost immediately are doing incredible, you know, and who doesn't love a product that's waitlisted, right? Obviously, the consumer doesn't love it, but it's actually plays kind of nicely in terms of like, look, we'd love to get you the product, but hey, it's on back order. And they've all just leaned in so hard and podcasting, I think, is, I mean, we just set this up in our room and our, my dining room and it's been fantastic. And it's easy to talk to you. I love it, right? It's like, you don't have to come to LA. And as long as we both have microphones, it's, you know, we don't compromise too much quality. So I'm, I'm right there with your brother. Well, listen, I appreciate you coming on. Tell everyone where they can find you, where they can get your products. Yeah. Again, thanks for the platform here. So you can find me. I'm pretty active on Twitter and Instagram at Jeffrey Wu, G-E-O-F-F-R-E-Y-W-O-O and our company handle is at H-V-M-N, stands for health via modern nutrition, but just a four letter acronym there on all the social channels. So check us out HVM.com, try some of our products out. That'll be much appreciated. And yeah, just love to continue the conversation. And it sounds like you guys are pretty tuned in audience here. And I like how you're thinking about meeting all of that. So it's something that I just nerd out about all the time. So it's fun to chat. Same. This is like therapy for me. And you said Netflix episode four on Unwell. Check them out. Yeah. So that just dropped a couple weeks ago. So fun Netflix new series. All right. Thank you, brother.