How a Wounded Special Forces Veteran Reinvented Brain Health

into my career.

When your brain gets injured, it holds all the glutes of glucose in your body

straight up.

“Like, man, if I can help my guys to not have this happen, that's what I”

want. And so that's why I got started. Dr. Mike Chessney is a biotech entrepreneur, Army Special Operations Veteran, and the founder of Techton, Catoons. He helps individuals optimize their physical and cognitive performance

through science-driven ketone technology, empowering people to think sharper, move stronger, and perform at their best. I'll take down ketones. It's a liquid problem. So it's something that you would drink.

You could have it in a drink. It's really good in creases, athletic performance, endurance, and just clears your brain. Your thoughts process is up. Human-based middle-driven and using ketones 300,000 years.

It's nature's answer to an energy crisis.

Metabolic health. That's where we're moving towards the next thing. How do we treat people at the cellular level? It spans the globe. Like a super high school.

Internet health is really high. In today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone. It's not over. I'm telling how we're doing. The living your legacy podcast for those who live to leave a legacy.

You can live your dreams. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of "Living Your Legacy Podcast." I've not had my morning coffee yet. I'm stumbling across that.

But we have someone, even the home state of Florida, driving down from Orlando to be here, former special ops,

and it's great to have him here during the World Cup fever of South Beach.

So, introduce yourself with your name and what's good? My name is Mike Chesney, resident like you said, just in the works of Orlando. I've been in Florida for about three years now, grew up, born and raised in Louisiana. But left there in 17 when I joined the military and lived all around after that.

All right, so, yeah, 17 joined in the military. That's a lot of story of a lot of American Americans. Thank you, by the way, for your service. I'll tell you what I tell everybody else. You guys are worth it.

Yeah, I've worked it. Right on, man. Right on, thank you. So, yeah, tell us 17, where did you get shipped off to? Right on a high school.

I wanted to join the military to look all their tests and everything. And they said, what do you want to do? I said, well, I want to be airborne-ranger. Okay. You know, like, okay, you can do anything.

We're computer science. We've got communication that said, I want to be an airborne-ranger. That's it. That's right. I want to do.

And why is that in your head? My dad was an infantryman when he was in the service. I had a really good friend from high school who was in the Rangers when they went to Grenade in 1983, just one of those things. Who's some as a teenage kid, I thought it was cool.

“It's banged up being the best thing I ever did.”

All right. That'd be the best thing I've ever done. Amazing. And why, why is that? So, the adventure, the adrenaline, would just like any other kid.

I'm living in a small town, there's not a lot going on, you know, from not a wealthy, for not even a middle class man. We're very poor family, right on a group, my mom raised in four kids by herself, you know, that kind of thing. So, I needed something to get out of there.

And you know, it is if you got no direction, for me, that was the direction. And I went in, I thought I was going to be able to get some college money. Well, personally, I've seen a lot of kids from high school that went into the military. And they were the kids getting into fights, and I'm sorry, but some of them were F-ups, right? And now they're like, you know, very mature men, and I see what it's done to them.

And I'm just like proud of where they were and who they become, you know. And that's a big part of it. You know, a lot of young, young people today just don't have direction. The same thing with me. I didn't know where I wanted to go, I thought I wanted to go to college.

“You know, that's everybody that's what they teach you, you know, you want to go to college.”

You want to do better, and so that was the plan. Well, it's supposed to do three years in the military to get out and go back to college. Well, yeah, I fell absolutely in love with it. I thought this is exactly what I made. This is what I'm supposed to do.

So join the military, one up to Fort Lewis, Washington, which is as far away as you can get from Louisiana in the United States, stayed up there. I was with the Rangers there for a couple of years, ended up going to the special forces assessment selection course if nobody knows what we started out with around 400 people in the class, less than a hundred made it through, less than 30 of those, actually finished

the course. Yeah. So it's a very, it's, it's, the pipelines pretty, pretty steep at the top. Nice. And did that, is that, is that some of the commercial?

It's like the, the few, the last of the marines, but I love marines. Okay.

of the Air Force or whatever? No, actually, it's, it's a, it's a misnome, most people don't understand that. Yeah. Special forces, traditional combat truth. Okay.

You know, they're, they're very well trained, very skilled, but their job is what we call force multiplication. So you have a small team of 12 people, and it's divided exactly in half.

You have six that do teams, there's basically six.

Yeah. And everybody has their same things. Yeah. Your job is to go over and train foreign militaries, teach them how to fight and then fight alongside them.

Gotcha. And that was, that's the real job. It's called foreign internal defense. That's the base job of special forces. Most people don't realize that.

They think everybody's a commando. They're all, you know, they're all delta force guys. But they're not. I mean, they're, it's a great job, and it, but it takes a special mindset, and a special skill set to be really good at it.

Right on. Yeah. I actually, so I was a photographer in Asia for a while, and did a couple rounds in Vietnam.

“And I met a lot of great Vietnamese, some of our tour guides, right?”

We're fighting alongside the Americans. So someone like you would have gone train some of those men who would fight alongside you. And yeah, I mean, I mean, a lot of cool dudes, some of them would be like, oh my God, I had so many stories, one dude would show his, to all, to all of our guys, right?

He had like, you know, a piece of hair missing, right? And he's like, yeah, we were, you know, jumped out in the parachute. You know, there was a bomb and yeah, I got some shrapnel hidden in the head, right? That's, that's his huge story, but it was like a badge of honor now, right? So amazing.

So yeah, tell us a little bit about your business.

Now, you finally left the military, are the air force, right?

And it was an army, it was an army. Okay, so yeah, all right. So I get mixed up because the air ranger, you said air born ranger. Air born ranger. I mean, we jump out of airplanes.

Yeah, I get to where you're going. Gosh, it's just the way you get to work. Okay. It's, it's just the taxing that flies. And then you jump out of it versus guide now of the door.

Okay, okay. What happened is I was injured in combat, all right, pretty significantly. And where was that? In Iraq. So eventually, after trying to rehab and everything else is what they medically retired

me from the army in 2010. Well, you got a great skill set. If you spent a lot of time doing strategic planning around the world and all that.

“And one of my jobs was I was a combat medic, that's what I'm the most proud of.”

I guess you could say, be in the military. Wow. And part of that was you learned the places that I worked at, you learned how strategic health care works and how, how whole countries need to be, how their medical set-up needs to be.

So that's what I did when I first got out.

I did health care consulting around the world. Okay. All the places that you, you know, you want to go out and go on vacation to, you know, Afghanistan. I react. Or else you had me at Tunisia.

Those are all my bucket lists. Yeah. Those are all in bucket lists, right? Yeah. There's not a lot of people that want to go there.

So that's why, you know, I was one of the guys who got picked to do that. And I did that for a couple of years and I really just got, got frustrated with fraudwaste interviews. That's the easiest way to do that. No matter what happens around the world, no matter what it is, they're greedy people

out there and they have ways of stealing from, yeah, but not just got tired of it.

“It's in the system some of the places because I was in Asia for quite a long time, right?”

And it's almost like, you know, we call it corruption. And they call it just the envelope, right? And so teachers with new books, right? You got to give them the envelope, right? If they want to distribute the books, right, or you know, even in Vietnam at the, at the

Taylor, right, to envelope, right? So everyone gets envelope and you're just like, what's going on with this? You know? Price are doing business. Yeah.

Yes. In places that's, that's just their culture of the way that they're business. So in part in doing that, I ended up running into a guy who was, who was trying to get a product off the market to, in an oncology space, needed somebody to help him with his business plan and all that.

So I started studying what he was doing and it was a supplement. And in the process, I got interested in it. And I was like, man, this is really neat. There's a lot of things that we can do and learn from, from this, and I found a crazy thing that the events, advanced research project agency, DARPA, you know, the people that brought

you GPS and the internet. Okay, you guys. You know, slouches. And once I before we get into that, explain oncology for some of those muggles. Oh, oncology is cancer treatment.

Cancer, okay. So what's this gentleman, a very good guy, West Point graduate, who was working in the pharmaceutical space, had created a high-protein drink for people who were going through chemotherapy. All right. So it's really hard to eat.

You don't have any appetite when you're going through cancer treatment.

Okay. Nutrition from something, and that's where it started. But oncology is the study, actually, of cancer oncology. Gotcha. Gotcha.

So you're looking into this product he's making, and then, and then why, so you get into business with him or he was, no, that's just helped him set his business up, set his business model, find his suppliers, those kinds of things. But in the process, I found there was a new nutritional ingredient or supplement that was

out there that had never been found before, and there's something called an exogenous ketones,

sounds very strange. But no, ketones is out there, and ketones is, what's the diet where you want the ketones? He's a ketogenic diet. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

That's why it's not the same thing. But in order for you on a ketogenic diet, for your body to start to produce ketones

“on a regular basis, you have to be extremely low carbohydrate.”

It's 20 grams or less. It's usually as the standard, yeah, high fats, high fats, high fats, about four to one fats to proteins, and it's, it's really difficult to stay on. So this was a way to get those same benefits without having to go through that harsh diet. So I ended up finding, it's kind of a unique story, found the people who started this program,

and Cole called, and said, hey, what are you doing with this product?

And they said, well, currently we're not doing into it.

I got to play in Flutelund, and went to Oxford and met with this professor at Oxford and said, all right, how can we get this into the U.S. military? That was my thing. I wanted to get it to the soldier, so I worked with her for about three years, learned a lot about biochemistry and physiology, and all the things that go with how this product

works. But we couldn't come to an agreement for the best way to do business in the U.S. And in your mindset for the soldiers, are you thinking the soldiers that are maybe out in the field, they get stuck there, they need protein, and they have a quick packet. I mean, they need these ketones, and they have a quick packet or something or it's a liquid

product.

“So it's something that you would drink, you could have it in a drink or like a gel shot”

a goose shot. Okay, like a goose shot. Yeah, exactly.

Part of the benefits of ketones is they are what's called neuroprotective.

They can protect your brain if you get a brain injury. So a traumatic brain is from a blast or a concussion or anything that damages your brain. And the reason for that is physiology, you know, your body uses ketones in a much more efficient way than they do glucose when your brain gets injured, it pulls all the glucose in your body straight up to your brain.

And so it just starts going through them as fast as it can. Well, all of the mechanisms that normally take all the bi-products of that and use them very efficiently, they're overwhelmed. They get saturated. Yeah.

And so then what happens is you start to build up these things in your brain, long and short, it signals the brain cells to die. All right. Well, ketones don't have that. There are no bi-products of it.

Yeah. And it comes apart and goes straight into the citric acid cycle or the crebs cycle which makes fuel for your cells with no bi-product. Okay. Wow.

So that's the benefit of it. Now your brain is getting fuel from these ketones, but it's not having any of these random oxidative species, not going through oxidative stress. A lot of people call them free radicals.

“You've heard that term before that's what it is.”

Your body just your brain gets full of what could be termed free radicals and it gets overwhelmed. Well, with you when your own ketones, it lowers that threshold. So with a brain injury, the initial insult is damaging, but that's not where all of the long term side effects and the bad things come from.

It comes from what's called the secondary neurone metabolic cascade. So your brain starts to get overwhelmed with these dysoxidage stress. The cells then get signaled to die and as they die off, you start to get all of the symptoms. Sensitivity light, extreme headaches, lethargy, I mean it just goes to this list, just goes on and on.

Yeah. Well, if you're in ketosis, it mitigates that significantly. So that was the reason why I thought about it, I was like, because I was a guy who had brain injury, I got blown up and I rack and yes, that's kind of what ended up into my career. It's like, man, if I can help my guys to not have this happen, that's what I want.

And so that's why I got started on it. What kept me in it is every day, I would find a new and better benefit for it, something else that it would bring in for it. It's really good increases athletic performance and endurance and it just clears your brain, your thoughts process is up.

I don't know if you've ever done any fast or anything like that. Yeah, yeah. Of course. If you fast for 24 or 48 hours, you get just almost a euphoric feeling. It's not like being on drugs or anything, but it's a very euphoric feeling and you just

Well now we could do that.

I give you a shot of my product. You take it and you start feeling that way within 30 minutes. That last street of six hours depending on your metabolism. That sounds amazing. And that was the reason I got started.

“So going back, you would said you had talked to the company they weren't using it, right?”

So what would you do? So they weren't using it and we were trying to get a business model when academics aren't the best business people and from somebody who has a PhD, I'm saying that kind of with my tongue and my cheek, but they're just not. They don't understand.

Then if they want a 15% royalty rate of things, it's the C students that hire the A&B students, right? And the A&B students become academia, right? And so it's just the business model didn't work. But what I figured out during that, I mean, I learned a lot about biochemistry and physiology

and how this stuff worked and why it worked. So what I did is I just went back to the drawing board and said, this is what I need to do. I need to deliver this particular ketone body, which is called BHB or beta hydroxyb rate. Yeah.

I need to deliver this. But your body can't use it if you just take it by itself. It has to be attached to something else to be bio-available for your body to be able to use. I thought what's already in your body that would work for this and my idea was glycerol.

So glycerol is another form of fuel. Your body breaks it down into glucose in and it uses it. Well, they're both made naturally in your body. So both of them are extremely safe.

I mean, human beings in mid-11 and using ketones for 300,000 years since they're first

to the right. So it's pretty safe. The cholesterol is also extremely safe in the amounts that we use are microscopic, so it's very small amounts. But it also provides a secondary fuel source.

So that was my idea. So I said, okay, this is a drew it up on a piece of paper. This is what I like to do. And talk to a couple scientists, friends of mine, they said, yeah, the theory of this sounds good.

So I found a lady who was an adjunct professor at Georgia Tech. She connected me with her science department and this scientist at Georgia Tech, I did

“a statement of work when I said, hey, can you create this in a lab?”

And let me see, you know, I'll do all the analytics and see if it works. Well, he created exactly what we were talking about six months. But what he did is he created that through a chemical process. So he, you know, in a lab, mixed a bunch of different chemicals together to clean stuff and whatever else and it came out to be a great product.

I'm not, we can't use harsh chemicals to make something that I'm going to then recommend for you as a professional athlete or me as a soldier or professional soldier athlete. Yeah, I'm not going to recommend you to take something that I don't completely feel safe in natural. So spent the next seven years working on the process to turn it from a chemical process

to a natural enzyme. Wow, process. It's been a long way. It has been a long way. But in that same process, we were able to go through all the correct regulatory steps.

So the first thing that we did is we went through a year and a half long process to study

the safety of it. Yeah. The 28 day and 90 day toxicity tests, everything that you can do with it, and it was very safe. It's extremely safe.

And no envelopes have to be given. No envelope. No envelope. No envelope. A lot of over the top info.

But not under the tape. No, under the tape. They're straight up.

“I mean, it's about a half a million dollars to do one of those studies.”

Yeah. Yes, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's there for purposes to make sure what the products that you can put on market are safe. So that gave us what's called a generally recognized as safe recognition. It's what foods get so that foods are safe.

You know that, that they're safe. Nice. What congratulations? Then we started looking at doing this as a supplement. It's a dietary supplement.

Well, the FDA has another regulation regulatory pathway for that. It's called a new dietary ingredient process. So we went through that process. And I will tell you, for me, it was absolutely painless because we had all the data from the toxicity, all the safety data.

So when we turned it in, I may have had two more interactions with the FDA before we got this. So to put that in perspective, we have what's called a new dietary ingredient notice from the FDA. Okay.

We're number 13, 54, since 1950. All right. So there's only been 1,300 products in the United States that got it approved to be new dietary ingredients since these regulations have come on board. Yeah.

So it's a pretty prestigious thing. And there are people that vitamin E doesn't even have. I want it here in greed. Okay. Now, that may be because it was in a market a lot longer, but even something like that,

something as common as that, they don't have this regulatory process. So we've gone through every step so that we can sell it as a food, sell it as a supplement.

was going through an investigation and a drug process. All right. And that's where you're at. Now, that's where we are now. We've done products on the market.

What we've done as a business model is we have taken this and we're treating it as a holistic agreed ingredient. Okay. So we've found so far two licenses in the United States. One is in the medical food market.

So they can sell a product that is for a specific need. But it has to be a physician or a physician's office that recommends it and or a pharmacist that recommends it. So it has to go through a process. You can't just buy it directly through that's a medical food.

And the one that we have in the medical food space, they're using it now for movement disorders. And examples of movement disorders are essential tremor.

There's about 10 million people in the US that suffer from essential tremor.

People with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, they have movement disorders. Yeah. This is not just treatment. This is something that's going to treat the disease. And it does help. It's an adjunctive therapy or an adjunctive supplement that you

can take to help you feel better to lower your, you know, lower the amount of movement. And also epilepsy. I mean, absolutely. That's what keto diet was created for. Not in the 1920s for children who couldn't take who didn't respond to the epilepsy medicine.

They put them on ketogenic diets, they stopped having seizures. Yeah. Funny thing is they still can't figure out exactly why. All the science we have as advanced as we are, we still can't figure out exactly why that is.

Yeah. All right. Real quickly, we're coming towards the end of the episode.

“But what, what do you most excited about right now?”

Well, I'm most excited. We've only been the market for about two months with our newest products for shots that are on the market with this group called TechThought Keytoons, great group. TechThought and Keytoons. I feel like I've heard of that.

And it's, we've been on Amazon for almost two months now. Okay. We started out ranking in the 200s, we're now on the top 10. All right. And that all happened through organic growth, but we're not doing a bunch of paid ads.

Any other kind of stuff. We're just trying to get the education and the information. Yeah. Yeah. Education takes a long time.

But where the age of social media, where the ketone diet is really popular, right? And yeah. So I'm sure that you know, you have a lot of areas where you can go out and get that information out. That's it.

How do people find you?

People get found as first on TechThought, Keytoons.com.

All right. That's our, the website for our products. You can also find us at Amazon.

“If you want to get a hold of me on Instagram, I'm Dr. Mike Chesney.”

Okay. It'll be simple. Yeah. And Facebook, Mike Chesney, pretty easy. Yeah.

I'm all in there. I'm trying to do a lot more on there, reaching out to some of our veteran communities, trying to get them involved in what we're doing, make sure they're supplementing the correct way, doing that kind of stuff. And yeah, that's the easiest way.

We have also TechThoughtLife.com, which is another website, but it leads you to the science part of our. All right. And that's TECT-O-N. That's correct.

All right. Well, you heard it here. So if you want to learn more about his journey and more about his products, then tune into his episode. It seems like he's got a lot of great stuff to share with us.

It's all on kind of the future of health and wellness, right? Metabolic health. That's where we're moving towards. Yeah.

“So the next thing, how do we treat people at the cellular level?”

Yeah. It's funny how a lot of technology and supplements start from the military and from the army, right? You know, people used to think of that in a negative way with weapons and stuff, right? But you can see here, it kind of started up in a positive way.

It's like, hey, you know, so we'll just would need this and it kind of like, you know, you've got the skills from from the army and your past, so yeah, a lot of good stuff comes out of it. Yep. Last thing out there's something I wanted to point out to people is, again, like we

said earlier, ketones have been human beings have used this since the dawn of man. It is part of how God created us to have fuel when we're in an injury crisis. It's, it's nature's answer to an energy crisis. So I've kind of told my guys, I said, it's basically evolution to this revolution. This is where we're going in a revolution in metabolic health care.

What was it B, B, C, P's, right? What's that? B, C, P's, you said, B, H, B, so you dealt with B, H, B, yeah, you know me, right? Oh, we got this. It's nice.

So yeah, it all sounds amazing.

It doesn't sound like snake oil, right? This is like the doctor. Get in the certificates, right, from the military, that is, that's amazing, right? Appreciate.

Oh, it's my pleasure. Absolutely.

“And thank you for joining us for another episode of Inside Success, living your legacy”

podcast.

And I do need my coffee people.

“I messed that up a second time, which I never do.”

Well, all right, cheers guys.