Episode 64: Hydration as a Superpower: Zeus Kajita on Brain-First Wellness and Ki Electrolytes

Narrator:

Welcome to 909 Exec, the executive leadership podcast from 909 Cyber where cybersecurity intersects with business strategy. Your host is Den Jones, founder and CEO of 909 Cyber. For more than three decades, Den has led enterprise security at Adobe, Cisco, SonicWall, and Banyan Security, helping executives navigate risk, trust, and transformation. Each episode goes beyond headlines and hype with conversations that matter to leaders shaping the world of technology. So please join us for 909 Exec episode 64 with Den Jones and Zeus Kajita.

Den:

Welcome everybody to another episode of 909 Exec, your show where we try and bring in some executives who have a life or a great journey in their career and we try and prize out some fun information. Hopefully there's a little bit of wisdom and you'll learn something along the way. And today, first of all, this guy has an awesome name, Zeus, and he is a co-founder of Ki. We're going to dig into more about Zeus, more about Ki and more about this guy's life because I met him at a tea shop one day and yeah, great guy, great conversation. So Ki, welcome to the show, man. I'm so excited about this Ki business.

Zeus:

You know what? I could be called Key today. No problem. No, thank you. Thank you for inviting me to this podcast. I think this is the first time I've ever done a podcast, so really excited to know how I'm going to make mistakes or hiccups with this, but yeah, let's get this going. Well,

Den:

The good thing is, man, we do a straight shoot. We try not to edit out the fluff so that everybody knows we're real. We're humans and nothing meant to be perfect. It's just meant to be fun and a little educational. So yeah, why don't you introduce your name, what you do? What Zeus doing these days? Just a quick thing about Key, but then we're going to jump back in time.

Zeus:

Sure. So my name is Zeus Kajita, born and raised in the Bay Area. I've been basically working on this project Ki Electrolytes since around COVID time. I went through a period of, I was overweight, roughly 60 pounds overweight. I was tired, depressed, sluggish, you name it, just everything just not good. And then my father's from Japan. And so growing up, we did live quite healthy in terms of food, lifestyle, drinking tea, all that stuff. And I guess throughout my lifetime, things got a little bit inconsistent. And so I think during COVID when everything shut down, kind of gave me that moment to go, okay, I should get back into being healthy again, not only physically, but mentally. And that's really where Ki started. Ki is really just the concept goes it's a brain-focused hydration ritual or system where the product is actually crafted in Japan and it's only just two ingredients.

One is from the continent of Europe, which is high in potassium. The other ingredient is from the Sea of Japan, which is high in magnesium, both very important for proper hydration. And yeah, microplastic removed. And this is actually quite important because most hydration products out there have microplastics inside the product based on a lot of research. Also, the packaging, they use a lot of single use plastics, which are the plastic sachets then. You've seen those before, little powder packets. Yep, that's the number one plastic problem no one's talking about, which we can dive into later. But we also want to be sustainable so we don't use that. But the goal is we want to create a more healthy lifestyle, not only physically, but also to improve brain performance. And this is where my journey started, doing the hydration protocol, but also just other Japanese daily techniques, daily rituals, daily habits, if you will.

And that kind of got me back to being the hundred percent of myself that I should be on a daily basis. And yeah, that's really very passionate about this because I feel like most people are dehydrated on a daily basis and they're not living up to their full potential. Not only work, but also health and even relationships. It's all tied together.

Den:

Yeah. I think that was some of the conversation we were having when we met the first time. Now you've got a bit of a career journey. So let's go back. So Zeus the kid, so you grew up in the Bay Area, right? So when you were a teenager, early 20s, what did you think you wanted to do for your career and what did you end up doing?

Zeus:

So growing up, my father had businesses around the world. So even as a little baby, I was traveling and even my grandfather, my father's father worked for the biggest, what is it? How would you call it? The biggest company, Mitsui Busan, which is a trading company in Japan. And he also traveled quite a bit in their 1920s and 30s. So I think it's in our blood that we travel a lot, but I really idolized my father growing up, just him owning different businesses around the world. We had gift shops. So if you know what a duty-free shopping is, we had a boutique version of that. And so different parts of the world, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, so many different places. And so I wanted to be like my father basically.

Den:

Yeah, you started a bunch of businesses, right?

Zeus:

Yeah, many failed, of course, but I had to start

Den:

Somewhere. I would twist it the other way and say many learnings really.

Zeus:

Yeah. Actually to not even joke, my father would state the best education is actually outside the classroom. And so you're absolutely right, Den. It was definitely really good learning. And I did get paid while learning too. So yeah, it was a good trade-off for sure.

Den:

Yeah. So what was your first ever memory of a job? Did you do little stuff when you were like me out paper round selling shit around the doors? What did you do when you were a kid?

Zeus:

Oh gosh. Yeah, yeah. No, great question. I think I do remember selling lemonade and cookies at the corner street where I used to live, just like almost every other kid growing up. But I think my first fun job was really when I worked at my father's shop in Guam. I don't know if you know where Guam is, but yeah, it's a small little island close to the Philippines. It's a US territory and a very small island. I believe the population of 30, 40,000. I may be wrong, but it's not a big island. And so that was really cool. I worked there straight out of high school actually and lived there for over a year. And yeah, that got me started with the whole journey of living and working overseas actually. Yeah.

Den:

And you have lived and worked overseas a bit. So I want to jump back to the experiences of failure, but I look at it like nobody has ever become an expert at something without being crap at something to begin with. I mean somewhere on your journey. So you're about to start or you are starting this new business. What's one lesson that you learned from the failures of your old businesses that you're going to carry in and help you be more successful in this one?

Zeus:

That's a really good question. I think picking a partner, a right partner for your business is everything. If I look back at all the other ventures, I would say more than half of the reason why it failed was the people that I worked with or collaborated with. Not necessarily that they're bad people, but think of it as we were poorly positioned or let's just say we didn't fill each other's gaps, number one. There were situations where one party did more work than the other. There were situations where even the business or the concept was either too early or just too late to bring to the market. But I think in business, just in anything, I believe we're in the people business no matter what.

Den:

No

Zeus:

Matter what we sell.

Den:

Yeah. And I think the observation there is that when you build a team, a team needs to be diversity of thought, diversity of talent, diversity of scale or whatever. But the reality is when you're looking at what problems you're trying to solve, you're really trying to bring in the right team members that compliment you in solving those problems. And then the one thing is my first IT job was a Japanese company, Shanetsu Handutai in Livingston, making silicon wafer manufacturing, making wafers. I was doing IT stuff there and one of the training sessions they gave us was everyone is your customer. So you always think of the customer being the person that is out external to the business that buys your business's product. That's right.

But really internally like IT, we had lots of customers internally. The people that done slicing versus etching, one was the customer of the other. So when you start to think of it, we're all internal, how do we give the best customer service internally? Because that will result in the better product externally, the better experience. And I think that for me was a huge lesson. So I take things like product market fit is important to your point. If you're too early, you're too late, how do you validate that you've got good product market fit? So what's one thing that you thought you were really successful at in your previous businesses that you want to maybe amplify more in your key adventure?

Zeus:

I think what makes key unique is that I'm good at business development, which means I'm just really good at connecting with people, especially when you and I first connected. I think we have similar qualities. We love asking questions. We're very interested in each other's life and get to know that person real quick to build that trust. I think right now with where we are at with our key launch, which we just launched officially last week, crazy because it's been five. Thank you. It's been five years in the making and so many ups and downs throughout that whole journey. But I think just right now I love promoting this because this is something that almost everyone needs or wants because I think everyone's goals are really, it's very simple. You want to live long, you want to have the best relationships with your spouse, your kids, your friends, and obviously you want to do well financially so you can support yourself and your family as well.

So for me right now, I think just promoting that naturally and we didn't really produce that many products for this first production run dent because we do want to grow this organically. I want to know who my customers are first. Are we going to mess up through the messaging or emails? Probably, but you know what? I'd rather we do it naturally and fix it naturally with people like you. Yeah.

Den:

And that for me is one thing that inspired me in our conversation was you talked about why you were doing it and how passionate you are about what you're bringing and also why you believe you're different. And I think those three things are vitally important. Now we're going to take a brief pause for a quick message and then we'll come back and then we're going to dig into Ki. Hey folks, just want to take a minute to say thanks for listening to the show, watching the show, however you engage with us. If you're liking the conversations, if you think we're ading some value, we'd love you to like, subscribe and share the show with your friends if you know of anyone else that would benefit. Ideally for us, that will help us be able to grow the show, invest more in the quality, get some more exciting guests and keep bringing you some executive goodness.

Thanks everybody. Take it easy and enjoy the rest of the discussion. So let's talk about Ki a little bit more. So let's talk about, I'd love, I mean you and I have had the conversations, but I'd love you to share with the audience, let's talk about this problem that you recognized existed. You see an opportunity to solve it. So let's talk about what is this problem and why should people pay attention?

Zeus:

Thank you for the question, Dan. So I think we all see a lot of hydration products out there these days. It's kind of a very popular product, but I want to get more into how this is actually more important for people who don't exercise. Because I think traditionally electrolytes have been marketed as a workout product. But there's a lot of stats now where, especially the workforce, 80% of the US workforce that includes you and I then are chronically dehydrated. Not just dehydrated, but chronically. Going back to my story of how I created Key, why Key even started? Because I feel like I'm in a position, I was in a position just like almost everyone. I was drinking four to five cups of coffee a day just to keep myself rolling. And then because of my line of work before or still in financial planning, it's also a people business.

And so happy hours is something that was quite common pre-COVID, if you remember those times. Yeah,

Den:

They're picking up again, man. They're picking up again. They're

Zeus:

Picking up again. But back in the day, Den, if you remember, almost every night there's a happy hour event somewhere. You can find these. So for me, it's like, all right, find new clients, find new connections. I'm going to go to this happy hour and that happy hour. And my office was in downtown San Francisco, so it was really easy to just hop on from my office to an event. But that vicious cycle on a daily basis was really wrecking me, not only physically, but mentally, spiritually. It was affecting my relationship with my daughter, my friends, my clients even. I wasn't myself. Sometimes I would cut the meeting short because I just couldn't deal. Sometimes I wouldn't write that last email to close a deal. It affected everything. And so I just thought, and I feel like so many people are in the same situation, but then this is the biggest culprit then.

Because of all that, when you're dehydrated, when you're chronically dehydrated, especially on a daily basis, people take it as their personality traits, like the brain fog, you're just lazy, or you just feel tired, or you just don't want to deal, or you're anxious. These are all real traits of dehydration. And I spoke to many doctors that just bought our bundle recently. They're so fascinated about how we're positioning this. And they should know this too. Actually, we had to remind some of them. We wake up in the morning dehydrated. Not almost everyone. I'm talking about every person living wakes up dehydrated. It's a hundred percent occurrence. We lose up to a liter of water. There's some variables age, sex, size, but on average, up to a liter of water. And that's from breathing, from going to the toilet, from prespiration. When you're in that deficit, when you wake up, you get that brain fog.

You don't want to get out of bed. Yo feel lazy, you just feel tired, you feel anxious even. You don't want to deal. These are symptoms of dehydration. What most people, how they deal with this is they use the traditional hydration protocol, which is what? Coffee. Coffee

In the morning. Absolutely. And I love coffee, and I'll get to that in a second in a bit too. But I'm not against coffee at all. It's all about timing actually. So the goal is this, hydrate yourself, basically refill your tank back up to where it should be. What you lost, fill it back up within the first hour. Very simple technique, very simple science. And if you can do this then, if you can do this every day, it's almost like you're going into life at 100% charge versus a 70% charge. Now, can you still operate in a 70% charge? Absolutely. But you're probably going to crash around 3:0 PM. Your battery's going to die around 3:00 PM. And from there, you become inefficient. And guess what? That compounds over time. So why not start at 100%? And then that will last you longer throughout the whole morning and day.

You'll get more stuff done. And there's a lot of signs where if you're properly hydrated, you're less stressed. That means you can deal with people better. Business, kids, spouse, it doesn't matter. So that's really such a simple technique. It's such a simple science, yet even doctors don't even know how to prescribe this ritual

Den:

To their

Zeus:

Clients.

Den:

And when we talked, and I've done some research since even we met, so just the brain itself, can you share how much fluid does the brain need in order for it to be a healthy, productive brain? Because the brain uses more water than other organs, right? Some of that?

Zeus:

Yeah. I'm not a doctor, but what I've learned is when we wake up, we lose up to one to 3% of water from our brain. And our brain is mostly water, just like our body. But the brain is where it starts. Meaning if you don't hydrate the brain properly, if you don't take care of the brain first, nothing else matters because the brain controls the body. And so there's some research where if you even lose up to 3% of water, it's almost as if you get pulled over and the cop gives you a breathalyzer and you're at 0.08, which is pretty much you're legally drunk.

Den:

If you're Scottish, you're probably fine.

Zeus:

Well, yeah, you're speaking about through the experience.

Den:

Oh wait, legal disclaimer, don't take that as advice.

Zeus:

You guys are definitely tougher, that's for sure. But yeah, I truly believe that in the way key is positioned, we are not a hydration system for athletes. Although of course we compliment healthy people, but we're taking care of a neglected segment, which is huge, which is hydrating the brain first. And that's what makes us unique. And we're ready to really spread the word with this.

Den:

Yeah. And there was a couple of things. One was Alzheimer's and dementia and these kind of diseases. I mean, I think, and again, neither of us are doctors. We're wizards and stuff. We're other things, but we're not doctors. We're creative. I think there is correlation between dehydration of your brain and these diseases, right?

Zeus:

100%. 100%. I love analogies because I'm not that smart, but I like to paint the picture and try to explain something to a five-year-old. Imagine we're like plants in a sense. If you don't water your plants correctly or sorry, consistently, you know how your plant can either shrivel up or even get yellow and even the leaves may fall off eventually if you don't care for it properly, hydrated properly. Think of your brain as similar. It's like if you look into our website, we have a little picture of a grape and a raisin. So every morning our cells, including our brain, forms into a raisin. That basically means the former grape became dry. And so what's dangerous is that most people live through having their cells as a grape on a daily basis. If you do that, then are there going to be issues in the near future?

Absolutely. And think about it, Alzheimer's and dementia, a lot of science now is tied to just daily dehydration. It makes total sense. And one thing to add, my parents were my first guinea pigs when I started this

Den:

Hydration. Always good to choose people that you love as your first guinea pigs.

Zeus:

And they were easy access too. I was like, "Hey, mom, dad, I'm trying to start this business. Can you help out? I need to create a testimonial. You're easy to experiment with. " But no, they were the perfect experiment then. And I'll tell you why, because I'm almost 50 and there's research where once you hit 50, you tend to lose your thirst receptors, which basically means imagine every day you'll be thirsty les and less, which also means you may drink less and less as long as it's not intentional. As long as you're trying to... Oh, let me rephrase. If you're doing it intentionally, then that's one thing. But if you're just living life, you're getting drier and drier by the day. You know how there's some old people, they tend to look older than they should. And I'll be honest, hydration is a huge reason why they're there.

So going back to my parents, I taught them this protocol and it's so simple then. It takes literally a couple of minutes every morning, just two minutes. It's so simple. All it is is you just create a bottle with the electrolytes, mix it up, put it right next to your bed. And then when you wake up, that's the first thing you do. And now they learn this is what they do. But like I said, if you don't have a proper routine that's simple, it doesn't stick. So this is a very simple routine. And so far it's been years, they're still applying this routine without

Den:

Me having to - Yeah, I'm on the website and it's pretty impressive. So I saw this guy talking about visceral fat, burning visceral fat. So one of the things that he said was when you wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is you drink water. He talked about salt, but I got a sneaky feeling when he's talking about salt, your electrolytes that you guys are talking about, it's really achieving a goal. But the biggest piece of the goal is get room temperature water, not cold water, room temperature, and then add your magic ingredients and don't drink coffee straight away. And he said this, he went, the caffeine kicks something in which then gets your body into this heightened state. And when you're in that heightened state, then your body wants to hold onto fat for the emergency.

I think for me, I only drink one coffee a day. And I usually, like you said, I drink it first thing in the morning. So I always have water by my bedside. So I'm like, "Well, I'll do this. I'll do the keyway. And then also get a little bit of walk and a little bit of sunshine."Because the other thing like a plant, if you can get natural sunlight, even if it's cloudy without sunglasses, and you can go outside, not stare at the sun, but be outside in it, get 15-minute walk. So drink your water, 15-minute walk in the sun, don't have coffee for the first hour or something like that. And then that not only hydrates, but it also helps burn visceral fat.

Zeus:

That's right. That's

Den:

Right. And there's something this kid needs to do is burn some fat. So I was pleased with that one. I'm like, I can do that.

Zeus:

Yeah. And let me add to that too. So first of all, most people don't know this, but electrolytes is really just a medical word for salt. And salt doesn't mean sodium also. Salt can be, if it's a natural salt, it has other minerals, potassium, magnesium, calcium and such. And so what that person was talking about, especially in the morning time, you're at your highest stress levels. Your cortisol is at this highest stress levels when you wake up. What you don't want to do is ad onto that with coffee. Coffee will give you that extra jolt for maybe an hour or so, but after that you're going to crash because not only it's a diuretic, you dry up even more so than where you are, but your cortisol levels will skyrocket even more. And hence, that's where you're talking about how the body just holds onto the fat.

It's in survival mode.

Den:

Yeah.

Zeus:

So that is actually one of the reasons why you want to not only hydrate with water, you want to hydrate water with electrolytes. Basically the whole concept then is that water is better than nothing obviously. I always preach just drink water first no matter what. But if you can, drink water with electrolytes because your body absorbs the water even more so. It's almost like if you can run for an hour and burn 500 calories, but then there's another method where you can burn 500 calories with just doing it for 30 minutes, which path are you going to take?

Den:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Zeus:

So if you want efficiency, you want to drink the water with electrolytes. You're going to get absorption even quicker. And actually once you do that, there's a lot of research then where your cortisol levels just drop once you drink that water, especially with electrolytes.

Den:

Yeah. So one thing I started doing was filtering my water. Not filtering. I have a whole house water filler. I have a filter in the fridge and still the water in San Jose coming out my fridge still doesn't taste great. So then I got... Oh God, I'm totally spaced on the word right now. A water filter

Zeus:

Anything else?

Den:

No, no, no. It boils it, drips it down. Quiz for the audience. No it's anyway. Oh, distilled. I distilled my water. Right. Got that quiz. Hopefully the audience got that quicker than us. So I distilled my water and somebody said to me, "Well, when you You distill your water, you're removing a lot of the minerals, so you need to add something back in. So is this an opportunity here as well for people that do water distilling?

Zeus:

100%, but think about it like this then. Until the water treatment facilities became available, we were all drinking electrolyte water, believe it or not. We were drinking from the rivers and from the lakes, and we were naturally drinking water without minerals and electrolytes because of the water treatment facilities that happened during the industrial age. Yeah, I get it. They removed the bacteria, but they also removed the minerals. And so I see a huge amount of people that have an electrolyte imbalance and a lot of the times it's because they're dehydrated and they're not replacing the minerals back. And so that's why they're not up to their full potential in terms of just living their life daily. And so people who do clean their waters from reverse osmosis, distilling, yeah, you still don't have the minerals inside. So the water may be clean, but you know what?

You would have to drink twice as much just to get the body to be absorbing the water. That's not efficient. That's just not... You hear the same gallon of water. I don't know. Drink half a gallon and add some electrolytes and call it a day. That's so much more efficient, right?

Den:

Yeah. Well, I don't know how much I drink in a day, but I certainly... I'm probably about 10 glasses of water a day. That's why I look so young. I mean, you don't know I'm 74, right? Holy shit.

Zeus:

You're

Den:

Doing so good. I

Do like it because my iron doesn't get all crappy now and my kele doesn't get all hard water stains. So from that perspective, I do like my distilled water for that. But I did have a friend, he said, "You need to get some electrolytes in your water." I'm like, "Okay." And I've never done it, but now I got something here. Cool. So you guys just launched in the US and I do see you're limited to a thousand bundles. Yes. I'm sure you're selling through those pretty quick. What do you see as the future? How do you get this out to people? How do you expand it? Yeah, what's the future hold here?

Zeus:

What's the game plan? Yeah, thanks for asking. So right now it took us up to this point to produce a limited production run of a those bundles. The ingredients are not easy to come by. Just imagine it comes from two different continents. After that, it's produced and crafted in small batches in Japan. Not only that, we're removing the microplastics in Japan, which is another proces in itself. Plus we're importing it from Japan to here. So we want to make sure that we did this not only correctly, but we wanted to grow this organically because we're not here to try to sell this to everyone and anyone. We want to do this to where we almost educate people almost by one person at a time because the way we're positioning this is quite unique from any other hydration product out there. We want to inform people that, "Hey, this is what we went through and this is our first production run.

So we want to provide this to you to hopefully this may, if you do it consistently, it'll change your life hopefully for the better." And so our limited production run for this year, this will be probably our only production run for this year, like I said next year. Our second phase, we want to expand this more as because the way we're positioning this, this is more of a work performance lifestyle type of ritual. We've already have people interested in the wellness retreat market, so having maybe a collaboration with hotels for their wellness retreat clients. Also, one of my close friends, he's the CEO for a big insurance company, he wants to potentially explore this as a group wellness benefit for his employees because he truly believes that health and wellness is important. Work performance is important, but just adding more things that's good for the company and he really cares about his employees.

So right now our thing is this. Our community is really important to us. We're trying to expand this just within our friends and family like yourself and then your friends and family. Again, we want to make this as close knit as we can because your testimonials, everything, like I said, we're growing this organically. We don't want to spend investor money. We've been bootstrapping up to this point, but we want to do this right. And so even though we've been sending emails to people when they started the ritual recently, there were some glitches in the email, but because they're my friends or family, they text me back, "Hey, there's a little glitch." I'm like, "Thank you so much. This is why we're doing this organically." So just to give you an idea, before we really lift off, we want to make sure we do this right.

Den:

Yeah. No, that's brilliant. Yeah, no, this is true. Yeah, I'm really excited. I mean, I think it's interesting because like you said, when I think of this market, when people talk about electrolytes, they do think of, I'm going to the gym, I'm an athlete, I'm a this, I'm a that. And that's a nice segment of the market and good for some sugary drinks out there. Good for some sugary shit that I actually never touch. I got to have a really bad hangover before I'll jump into buying some of those drinks. But for me, something like this, and I love the thought of it being a corporate wellness benefit, because I think that is absolutely rock solid because most companies from a performance perspective, they see a benefit. If you can do something like this and meditation and yoga and some of these other things, I know people love to give a gym the work and a gym's cool and all, but I think the reality is sometimes we actually just need some natural wellness stuff.

I mean meditation

Zeus:

Is something - Sorry to cut you off. Even some type of accountability ritual system. And going back to the gym, there's a funny stat, right Den? I think more than 50% of people who have gym memberships don't even go to the gym often. So you can offer it. I got

Den:

One

Zeus:

Of them. Are they going to go or not? So that kind of defeats the purpose. For us, to give you an example, when people start the system, and it's so simple, but still we're humans. We're just going to do our thing. We all have habits. The question is, is it serving you or not? So for us, we at least, let's say you buy the product then starting tomorrow, then we start sending you emails at least once a day. It's very simple. It's like, "Hey Den, this is what you do. Drink 16 ounces or five milliliters of water. Don't forget. Second day, how you feeling? Maybe you might feel something or maybe not, keep going. After the seventh day, you may feel better." So I think we just need not only health and wellness, but accountability coaches or just someone that can help us out or at least even as partners.

You and I, let's say, "Hey, Den, let's go to the gym." I think I could get a better workout if I work out with you versus by myself just because

Den:

I'm just

Zeus:

Motivated. Your energy around just makes me want to work out too, right?

Den:

Really? Oh, I have never heard that.

Zeus:

But one of the things we're going to also try to do is we're going to also create a community with walking, fasting. We don't want to just sell a product. We want to build a community. And actually then a lot of the things that got me to losing 60 pounds and being my hundred percent self, it wasn't just a hydration. Hydration was actually the starting point. Hydration got me to the hundred percent charge. After that, it gave me the motivation to want to change my life, if that makes any sense. So I had no struggle going to the gym after that. I had no struggle doing all these business deals. I had no struggle being the best version of myself to my loved ones. It was a lot easier for me. And that was consistent because every day I was myself at 100%. And that's to me magic.

Den:

I love that. And I think the one thing is funny, so on my podcast I've had breath work coaches. I actually had the psychic medium as well, Ayurveda coaches, a lot of life or business coaches. And I think this is the one thing I really enjoy the conversations more about wellness and living and a healthy, pure lifestyle than the conversations about whose AI is going to secure your ass better. We're in the valley, there's a lot of that conversation and I do enjoy it. But when I have guests coming on the show and you really want to have a conversation, it's like I really want a conversation that benefits all executives in a way that they don't always think about. And I look at this like if I'm an executive and I'm applying my trade, you don't just need to be, if you're technical, technically good, you don't need to just be a good leader.

You don't need to build just a good team. So I was talking about the team earlier, but then there's these other things that if you add them to your toolkit, you will be a more robust, well-rounded professional and versed in life than if you ignore it. And that's how when we had the conversation, I'm like, holy shit, man, I got to get you on the show because the reality is this is another tool in someone's toolkit. I have no doubt that if your team, yourself, you wake up in the morning and the ritual's pretty tricky. You take one thing when you wake up in the morning and 45 minutes later -

Zeus:

You did the same thing.

Den:

God, I don't know, man. If you can't follow that routine consistently, then you're screwed. But it is pretty simple. And when I wake up in the morning, I did get into that before my coffee. I'll have a glass of water. And for me, now if I'm going to do this, can I prep this the night before so when I wake up, it's already got the electrolytes on?

Zeus:

Yeah, no, you said a really great question. So that's my technique and only because, well, two reasons, because I want to drink the water at room temperature, which makes the absorption even more smooth. But I'm lazy. I want to drink the water right when I wake up. I want it to be right in front of me ready to go to make myself unlazy. And that's the beauty of it. I'm like, how do I switch myself from being lazy to unlazy when I wake

Den:

Up? Yeah. Well, I mean habits, having a coffee in the morning is actually a habit.

Zeus:

It is.

Den:

That's all it is. And if you change the habit to say I'll have a glass of water in the morning, 45 minutes later I'll have another one and then I'll have my coffee if I want a coffee. But you and I met a tea shop, a very fantastic tea shop.

Zeus:

Absolutely.

Den:

And the one thing for me is I actually drink green tea most of the day as well instead of coffee. So rather than coffee, I'll do green tea, I'll do a matchulate, or I'll just drink lots of water. And water is actually the laziest, easiest option for me because it's pour out my jug in the thing. So yeah. Awesome. Hey, Zeus, this is brilliant. I really am excited by it. Folks, there will be a link to the website in the show notes and Zeus's bio will be there. You'll get to connect with him. I am excited. So it's available in the US, but what's the plan for beyond the US?

Zeus:

Great question. Before I answer that, I want to add one thing before we get to that segment. The coffee part. So I want to make this really clear. I'm all about coffee. I love coffee. It's all about timing. And guess what? Imagine this, have you ever been to an ER? Have you been in an ER situation before, Den? Oh,

Den:

Yeah. Yeah, several times. Yeah.

Zeus:

So what's the first thing they administer to you?

Den:

Yeah, usually it's a hydration thing, like a little saline bag or whatever it's called for $700 million in the US.

Zeus:

Yeah, an IV, right? Yep. An

Den:

IV water.

Zeus:

Salt water in a bag, in a plastic bag, right?

Den:

Yeah. Very expensive, that stuff.

Zeus:

Yeah, it runs from 100 to a couple hundred bucks. It's not cheap. And there's research, there's some microplastics in there as well. But quickly, so imagine this, before they perform any surgery on you, before they even give you the most powerful medicine right then, they cannot do that unless they establish your foundation, which is your hydration. So that's the whole thing about everything else. Your coffee actually works better once you establish your foundation, your baseline. Your medicine actually runs smoother and more and you can absorb your medicine, your supplements, everything so much better once you establish your baseline. So I'm all about just create the foundation first. After that, everything else actually works a lot better and that is the key.

Den:

Yeah, yeah. You get a better coffee impact.

Zeus:

Better coffee impact. And like what you said, I only need one. And so that's the beauty of it. But sorry about that. The question about you just asked, we are actually getting some... It's funny, we literally just started in the States last week, but tonight we're having a potential meeting about potentially opening up Canada and even England. And so we're getting some interest outside of America, but I think the goal really is we want to create our foundation here first.

Den:

And to your point, get the product refined a little bit through this first batch, right? That's brilliant.

Zeus:

Yep.

Den:

Zeuss, thank you very much, man. Great having you on the show. I'd love to have you back again at some point because I think when you start rolling this out a bit more, we're going to have a lot more to talk about. There'll be a community that you'll be building. We'll hear more about that stuff in the future too. So I'm excited for you. Congratulations.

Zeus:

Thank you so much, brother. I appreciate you inviting me to this podcast and it's an honor and looking forward to the next one.

Den:

Excellent. Zeus, thank you very much everybody. Ki electrolytes, you're going to hear and see a lot more about these guys. This is some awesome stuff. Their website will be in the show notes. Thank you very much, Zeus. And we'll speak again soon, mate.

Zeus:

All right. Cheers, mate. Take care.

Narrator:

That wraps up this episode of 909 Exec. If you found value here, subscribe and leave a rating to help others discover the show. To learn more about 909 Cyber, our advisory services, and how we help organizations secure growth, visit 909cyber.com. Thanks for listening. And until next time, lead with clarity, build trust, and stay secure.

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