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Episode: $500M Founder: “This is the biggest opportunity in the US today”

Author: Hubspot Media
Duration: 01:06:23

Episode Shownotes

Get our Business Monetization Playbook: https://clickhubspot.com/monetization Episode 662: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Justin Mares ( https://x.com/jwmares ) about the biggest trends and opportunities in health and wellness. — Show Notes: (0:00) The poisoning of America (7:17) IDEA: Home Health Services (25:26)

IDEA: Modern butcher shop (38:58) IDEA: Calibrate for fertility (45:34) Choose one problem for your career (48:50) Building a 9-figure bone broth product (59:18) Zuck donates his gold chain — Links: • The Great American Poisoning - https://justinmares.substack.com/p/the-great-american-poisoning • Lightwork - https://dolightwork.com/ • Blueprint - https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.com/ • Snake River Farms - https://snakeriverfarms.com/ • Calibrate - https://www.joincalibrate.com/ • Inflection Grant - https://www.inflectiongrants.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
The marketer in me loves everything you're saying, Raoul, because the two things you just said, those were actually like, you know, $20 million ad hooks.

00:00:07 Speaker_04
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on a road less traveled.

00:00:16 Speaker_00
Justin, I'm pumped you're here. You're here because, well, for two reasons. The first reason is that you've started like six or seven companies that have collectively done something like $500 million in revenue in the last seven years, which is huge.

00:00:28 Speaker_00
And they're all in the health and wellness space. You're also here because you're one of my most reasonable friends when it comes to health and wellness because you are like you're into fringe stuff, which is, I think, cool.

00:00:38 Speaker_00
But the problem with people who are in fringe stuff is they can't relate that to a normal person, you know what I mean? And they'll be like, this fringe thing that I'm into, this is only a 1% needle mover as opposed to a 50% needle mover.

00:00:49 Speaker_00
And so you're very self-aware. You're very thoughtful. And you've built a lot of big businesses in this space. And you're a blogger. And you have this amazing blog post called The Great American Poisoning that both Sean and I are obsessed with.

00:01:00 Speaker_00
And so I thought you could come on and kind of talk a little bit about the blog post, but also business ideas that you're into and opportunities related to this space.

00:01:09 Speaker_02
I'm super stoked to be here. I mean, as I've written in that post, I literally think that what I call the great American poisoning, basically the fact that Americans are sick at record levels and are getting sicker, like our children are sick.

00:01:21 Speaker_02
Everyone is overweight and obese. And these problems are getting worse, not better, is both the biggest problem in the US and also, because of that, like a massive opportunity for people that want to start companies or build value in this space.

00:01:35 Speaker_00
Sean, what emotion did you feel when you read this blog post?

00:01:38 Speaker_03
Dude, you could ask Diego. I went on like a 48-hour bender. First, here's what we did. Was it rooted in fear? No, no, it was like outrage first, and then curiosity, and then skepticism. So here's the series of events.

00:01:53 Speaker_03
Justin writes this post called The Great American Poisoning. I read it, I'm lit on fire. Justin, this was my, I did an end of year recap for myself over the weekend.

00:02:01 Speaker_03
It was the number one blog, it was my favorite blog post of the year, was this thing you did. So you read that. And then I told my team, I said, hey, let's break this down point by point, because you made a lot of really interesting points.

00:02:12 Speaker_03
If people haven't read it, we should pull it up on YouTube. But it's like, you have this photo of this guy, remember, you go, this guy was considered so overweight that he was like a member of the circus.

00:02:22 Speaker_03
And it's like, if you go to a nearby Costco today, you'll find hundreds of people that are more overweight than this guy. But that was considered like circus freak fat before.

00:02:31 Speaker_03
And you talked about how doctors would go their whole career, a pediatrician would go their whole career and never see a kid with fatty liver disease or these things like that. And you're like, now it's more and more common.

00:02:40 Speaker_03
And it's just a very compelling case around health. So you combine three very interesting things. One, You have a very strong factually-based view of health. You are self-actualized around health.

00:02:54 Speaker_03
You're one of the sort of fittest, most healthy guys that both Sam and I know and look up to. I've messaged you before being like, hey, water filters, tell me, what do you like? What brand do you like?

00:03:02 Speaker_03
Because I trust that you actually walk the walk on it. And then third is you're an entrepreneur. So you've started two brands in the kind of like keto space, each doing tens of millions a year in revenue.

00:03:14 Speaker_03
you know, get distribution in 10,000 plus retail stores. You started a non-alcoholic, more than that? Yeah. Non-alcoholic beverage brand because you're like, great. Drinking is like one of the most unhealthy things we do.

00:03:25 Speaker_03
How do we have the social drink that doesn't sacrifice on health? And what I liked was you had no CPG experience before that. You had no DTC experience before starting these. You went in and you're kind of like,

00:03:36 Speaker_03
it seems like you have this great interest and knowledge and, you know, self hobby around health and wellness, but then you've also done it as an entrepreneur.

00:03:42 Speaker_03
So that's a great intersection for us on the pod because we're both interested in health and like living a good life, but also how do we profit from said good life? And you've actually done it.

00:03:51 Speaker_03
So I'm excited because not only have you yourself had, you know, three or four big hits in the health and wellness space, but you then brainstormed and sent us a doc of like five or six new opportunities that you think other people could go do in this space.

00:04:09 Speaker_00
All right. So when I ran my company, the hustle, I think we had something like 2 million subscribers and we made money through advertising.

00:04:15 Speaker_00
We didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model.

00:04:22 Speaker_00
And so I remember sitting down and I'm like, what are all the different ways that I can make money off the hustle that aren't advertising?

00:04:28 Speaker_00
And so to make sure that you don't make this mistake, Sean, me, and the HubSpot team, we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business.

00:04:37 Speaker_00
And we put it all together in a really cool document where we lay it all out along with our research. And we call it, very appropriately, we call it the Business Monetization Playbook.

00:04:47 Speaker_00
Go to the description of this episode and you're gonna see a link to that Business Monetization Playbook. It's completely free. You just click the link and you can see it. Back to the episode.

00:05:00 Speaker_02
You know, I literally think that this space like solving the great American poisoning, there's just almost immeasurable opportunity for people and entrepreneurs that want to solve this problem.

00:05:10 Speaker_02
Like, like I can read some stats off, but it's just staggering the amount of chronic disease and the burden that that's putting on the country. And so as an entrepreneur, like if you see a big problem like that, You just want to sprint towards that.

00:05:22 Speaker_02
And not only to say, when you solve some of the problems that are involved in fixing the chronic disease crisis, you're also helping people. People are living longer. They're living healthier.

00:05:33 Speaker_02
It's a very rewarding space to work in, as opposed to maybe day trading NFTs or something like that.

00:05:39 Speaker_00
And your blog post is basically summarized. You said, the answer to why—so you give all these stats as to how messed up we are, but you said, the answer to all this is simple.

00:05:47 Speaker_00
Our food system is poisoning us, and the institutions meant to keep us safe, which are our regulators, healthcare system, doctors, and researchers, are not incentivized to keep us healthy, which is like the cause of all the problems that you're discussing.

00:05:59 Speaker_02
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, we basically we had, you know, call it 100 years ago, our chronic disease burden was like 95% lower than it is right now. There were certain acute issues like infectious disease was much more of a real thing.

00:06:11 Speaker_02
There were all of these things that we built our medical system on. And then life expectancy went up as we got better at solving you know, women dying in childbirth, infectious disease, polio, these sorts of things.

00:06:22 Speaker_02
Now, the biggest burden that we see from a health standpoint is chronic conditions, so like cancer, asthma, heart disease, diabetes, things like this, that have grown 700% in the last, you know, 90 years.

00:06:33 Speaker_02
And so I think that we are running the code, if you want to call it that, of an old healthcare system that existed to solve a problem where you took a default healthy individual, they got sick, and the job of the medical system was to bring them back to health.

00:06:48 Speaker_02
And now we actually have the opposite, which is the average American is unhealthy. And people have not internalized what that means, which is you walk around almost anywhere in the US, and the average person is going to be sick.

00:06:59 Speaker_02
The average person is going to get cancer, heart disease, any number of chronic conditions at some point in their life. our medical system is not built to service a population where the average person is sick.

00:07:11 Speaker_02
And so because of that, we need new institutions and companies and it creates a ton of opportunity for entrepreneurs that want to try and address the great American poisoning by creating products and services that help people, you know, stay or move back to a baseline default healthy space.

00:07:28 Speaker_00
We should get to the ideas because they're great. But here's like another like one liner that kind of summarizes this, which is Everyone should update their thinking. The default outcome of living in the U.S.

00:07:38 Speaker_00
today is that you will get one or more chronic conditions and die of cancer or heart disease. Everything to avoid that is worth considering.

00:07:47 Speaker_02
I feel like I'm such a depressing person these days, so I gotta talk about stuff, and it's just like, well.

00:07:53 Speaker_03
Justin, Debbie Downer-Meyers over here. All right, so let's do it. So what are the ideas? Where do you see the opportunity? You sniffed out the opportunity in the bone broth ketone space. You sniffed out the opportunity in non-alcoholic wines.

00:08:09 Speaker_03
Each of those is doing very, very well. What opportunities do you see today? What ideas do you have?

00:08:16 Speaker_02
Yeah, so I see a ton. Backing up, I basically think that, and I wrote about this in my long essay, Manifesto, but I basically think that- That's what you got to call blogs from now on, by the way.

00:08:28 Speaker_00
That's way better. Manifestos.

00:08:29 Speaker_03
It's a little Unabomber-esque, but I'll take it. In Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise writes his manifesto to kick off the movie. That's you. This is your Jerry Maguire manifesto.

00:08:37 Speaker_02
Exactly, yeah. This thing was so much work.

00:08:41 Speaker_02
And so yeah, so to back up, my view on what has changed in the last, call it, 80 years is that we went, and humans mostly existed in an environment that was not poisoning people, to one that is basically poisoning them.

00:08:53 Speaker_02
Like your food, water, lights, air, all these sorts of things are filled with plastics, chemicals, toxins, ultra-processed whatever that is making the default person sick.

00:09:03 Speaker_02
And so one of the things that I think is a really compelling opportunity on that is you could build a massive company, in my view, that helps people actually look at their environment, their home, and or their office, and say, okay, you're spending 80% of your time in these three spaces.

00:09:22 Speaker_02
It might literally be your bedroom, your kitchen, and your office. How do we make it so that these spaces that you're spending time in are maximally healthy and health promoting?

00:09:32 Speaker_02
And I have a friend actually who just started a company in the home health testing space that's doing super well. They're testing like water, air, EMFs, light, stuff like that. What's it called? It's called Lightwork. It's dolightwork.com.

00:09:48 Speaker_02
So they're doing really well.

00:09:49 Speaker_02
But I think that there is this whole world of home services, like home services are a $40 billion, you know, a year in spend, where you can think like HVAC, lights, plumbing, you know, water, electricity, all these sorts of things, where none of these people are looking at

00:10:06 Speaker_02
how do we actually make your environment healthy? None of the people making your furniture are thinking about all of the flame-retardant chemicals that are giving babies cancer.

00:10:15 Speaker_02
Then as they spray it on your couch or sofa or whatever, they're not thinking about that.

00:10:19 Speaker_02
And so I think there's a huge opportunity to build a company or a series of companies that looks at what is going on in your built environment, in your home, in your furniture and all this, and says, how do we make this health-promoting?

00:10:32 Speaker_02
How do we encourage health and try and make this this sort of service, one that makes the person healthier.

00:10:38 Speaker_03
So it's like an annual checkup for your house.

00:10:42 Speaker_02
Yeah, exactly. I think like that's the first, that's like the input, which is do an annual checkup for your house.

00:10:48 Speaker_02
And out the back end of that, there's so many long-term services where, you know, someone services your water filtration, make sure that your shower water is good, make sure like, you know, your tap water is RO and has mineralization and all these sorts of things.

00:11:01 Speaker_00
What do you do at your house? I know you do a bunch of stuff. I don't remember everything you do. I know you do a bunch, but what do you do in your home that's worth it that would be included in your home annual checkup?

00:11:11 Speaker_02
Yeah, so I think a couple things are very worth it. One, water filtration is a huge one. I basically set up a whole house filtration system that we had these plumbers install. Actually, they installed it. It was this $8,000 system. They installed it.

00:11:27 Speaker_02
Next time they came around to fix it, they screwed on a $20 part incorrectly. And I walked into my kitchen the next morning, and I stepped on my floorboards, and water came up from around them. And I was like, fuck.

00:11:38 Speaker_02
uh so there there's a lot of now you got a mold issue yeah exactly so we had to handle that which was quite annoying um but we have like every water that isn't that is coming in and out of our house gets filtered uh we also recently switched to uh got all of our bulbs um we switched to incandescent actually

00:11:56 Speaker_02
Like, I think that there is a very compelling and pretty early line of research that shows the impact of blue light emitting lights, which is basically most light bulbs, on circadian rhythm, sleep.

00:12:09 Speaker_02
They even impact, like, if you eat under blue light versus eating under non-blue light, it also seems to impact, like, the amount of weight that you'll gain.

00:12:17 Speaker_02
They use this in agriculture, where they use different types of lighting when they're trying to get, you know, chickens to gain more weight.

00:12:23 Speaker_00
What's an incandescent bulb? Is that a normal bulb?

00:12:26 Speaker_02
Yeah, think of like the Edison bulb that it's actually like burning something as opposed to an LED bulb, which is what's in most houses today. There's also, there's a pretty cool thing that you can do.

00:12:36 Speaker_02
So LED is also one of the reasons that I think I felt much better since switching them out of my house. If you have an LED light in your house and you take your iPhone and you film it on slow-mo,

00:12:47 Speaker_02
you can see the LED bulb flickering like thousands of times per second.

00:12:52 Speaker_02
And the reason that LED lights are supposedly more efficient than incandescent bulbs is because they're turning on and off all the time, and so they're actually on and using less electricity because they're not on the entire time.

00:13:06 Speaker_02
So they do this sub-perceptually, which you know, can cause people to like, feel just icky. Sometimes you walk into a room with bad lighting, you're like, what's going on in my system? I don't like this.

00:13:16 Speaker_03
The marketer me loves everything you're saying around because like the two things you just said and like kind of a throwaway thing.

00:13:23 Speaker_03
Those were actually like, you know, $20 million ad hooks when you're talking about, do you know how they make chickens fat? They put them under these blue lights and actually they gain extra weight. Maybe that's why you're fat.

00:13:35 Speaker_03
Have you ever considered that you're just, you're being poisoned by the industry? So you have, the man is out to get you. The people love that. You have, maybe the problem is not what I'm putting in my mouth. It's the light that's affecting.

00:13:49 Speaker_03
And so you, it's like, oh, can I improve? Can I buy this thing rather than like kind of change from within as like, maybe that's 80, 90% of the problem, but like.

00:13:57 Speaker_00
And no one talks about it except for us in this ad right now. It's a secret that you know.

00:14:02 Speaker_03
It's a secret they don't want you to know about. The LED thing, like watch this magic trick of an ad where you take the phone on slo-mo and you go, it's actually flickering. Do you know how that messes with your sleep, with your whatever?

00:14:14 Speaker_03
I love all of this from a marketing. I know you're a good ethical stand-up guy, but when I hear this stuff, I think, What could I use to get this across?

00:14:23 Speaker_03
How could I, if I believe that this is good for people, how can I maximally get that into the hands of people?

00:14:30 Speaker_02
Totally. I mean, and this is why I think this is such a big opportunity, because you have the home services thing, like the healthy checkup for your home.

00:14:38 Speaker_02
But once you understand that the impact that some of these things have on your health, you basically, for many of these people, they're just like, yeah, blank check.

00:14:46 Speaker_02
fix my air quality, fix my water quality, fix my lighting, fix like the EMFs in my house, you know, make sure I don't have mold, like all of these things, there's a tremendous amount of spend that people want to put into making sure that their home environment is healthy.

00:14:59 Speaker_03
Dude, I had a, Sam, have you ever had a pest control guy come to your house? there might not be a better salesman in the world than the pest control guy.

00:15:06 Speaker_03
Because he walked, he's like, hey, you want, you want me to just do a quick look around your house? Just free. I'll just take a quick look, see if I see anything of concern. Of course. And he walks around the house.

00:15:16 Speaker_03
Hey, I'd love to show you a couple things. And then he takes me around the house and he says, you see this? And there's like a tiny screen that's moved over. He's like, that's, that's, you know, that's rats. And I'm like, what, rats?

00:15:26 Speaker_03
He's like, yeah, they're under your floorboards. I'm like, ew, under my floorboard? And he shows me all these little things that he's like, yeah, there's mice. And look, we just live out in a hilly area. There's mice everywhere.

00:15:37 Speaker_03
And he's like, would you like me to just come around once a month and spray and fix some of these things for you?

00:15:42 Speaker_00
as if it's a favor, sir. Be my daddy.

00:15:44 Speaker_03
Exactly. He's like, great. And now I'm paying $270 a month for this guy to come and do nothing to my house. I have no idea what he's doing. Random guy comes in sprays.

00:15:53 Speaker_03
But that idea of like, let me diagnose the problem so I can sell you the solution is generally a good business model. And of course, you know, like, again, He's not wrong, like there actually was issues.

00:16:04 Speaker_03
It's just I would not have been aware of the problem. So I'm a big fan of this kind of like audit method of sales. Let me do a free audit for you to kind of tell you where you might have some problems.

00:16:13 Speaker_03
And then if you'd like me to fix them, I'm happy to do so.

00:16:16 Speaker_00
Yeah. Are there any other things? So, uh, water filter, light bulbs, any other like big needle moving things?

00:16:22 Speaker_02
Uh, I, I think that specifically for your bedroom and places where you're spending like multiple hours, um, it's kind of early, but I think that the EMF thing is going to be much more of a thing that people care about.

00:16:33 Speaker_02
And it sounds very tinfoil hattie. And let me explain like why I think this might be important.

00:16:37 Speaker_00
So this is why I like your opinion, by the way. You're great at this. You're like, this is what the freaks think, and this is how it relates to a normal person, and where's the truth somehow? You know what I mean?

00:16:46 Speaker_02
Yeah, exactly. So basically, like 100 years ago, we had a certain type of radiation that was, I believe, called ionizing radiation. It's that or non-ionizing. I don't know this stuff well enough yet. But basically, it was like, think of like,

00:17:00 Speaker_02
what you get shot into at a dentist or something like that, nuclear isotopes, things like that, things that are definitely bad. And then there was this longer spectrum of microwaves and then things that we would put cell phones and computers into.

00:17:13 Speaker_02
And for many, many years, we basically were like, OK, microwaves, everything else is fine. Now we think, OK, microwaves are bad. They certainly cause some harm. It's like, causes thermal effects in the body.

00:17:24 Speaker_02
Let's also not expose people to microwaves at a high amount. But this other spectrum of like cell phones and the like are also definitely fine.

00:17:31 Speaker_02
And then you kind of like get to today, which is most of the FTC safety ratings and levels that have come up.

00:17:39 Speaker_02
or that are used to regulate cell phones, Wi-Fi, things like this, they basically were tested in an environment on cell phones from the early 2000s, where they were assuming that people would not be exposed to these things for more than 20 to 30 minutes a day.

00:17:55 Speaker_02
The guy who came up with these rules, they interviewed him, I don't know, it was five or six years ago, and he was like, yeah, all of the assumptions that we had around these just assumed that you'd take a phone call and you'd put it down.

00:18:06 Speaker_02
We never thought that you'd be walking around with this thing in your pocket.

00:18:10 Speaker_02
And there are a fair number of articles that I think are concerning enough where people will change the electromagnetic fields that mice are exposed to, and it'll raise or lower their blood sugar at a predictive rate, seems to have potential impact on cancer.

00:18:26 Speaker_02
There's enough there that I'm like, Probably bad.

00:18:29 Speaker_02
It's also I don't think as bad as everyone is like, oh my god This is killing everyone and causing every cancer known to man, but I do think if you can avoid Sleeping next to a Wi-Fi router or next to something that's like emitting a huge amount of EMFs for eight to nine hours a night That's probably well worth doing

00:18:45 Speaker_03
By the way, one thing I think we should say, you're not one of these guys that's like optimized everything. Like I've seen you say multiple times, you're like, you know, just get these core four or five things right.

00:18:54 Speaker_03
And you're like, you know, you need to sleep well, don't eat too much, too much processed foods, especially seed oils, you know, exercise, get some sunlight.

00:19:01 Speaker_03
Like you're very much a basics kind of guy when in terms of like, what's the, what should I be focused on? Which makes me.

00:19:08 Speaker_03
relate and trust you because I think the people that are like, well, you need to get, you know, nine micrograms of sunlight in your eye within 10 seconds of waking up.

00:19:15 Speaker_03
And it's like all these, like all these fringe, like the thousand fringe things you could do to like maybe move the needle when you haven't done the core foundational big things, right?

00:19:26 Speaker_03
It seems like you're more of the get the core right first, but am I giving you too much credit here? Where do you stand? Cause you're currently saying things like, Thomas Edison light bulbs, and the microwave's gonna kill you or something.

00:19:37 Speaker_03
Where do you stand on this?

00:19:39 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah. So I actually think, so one, completely agree. I think if you get the basics right, that is like 80% to 90% of it.

00:19:45 Speaker_02
That said, I also think if you have relatively easy interventions, like move a Wi-Fi router outside of your bedroom and swap the bulbs in the rooms that you're spending 20 hours a day in, those are pretty easy interventions that

00:20:00 Speaker_02
are like one time, relatively low cost to no cost, and could have a big impact on your health. Like, I'm very supportive of those things. I'm definitely not the like, butthole sunning solves your entire health issues type of guy.

00:20:12 Speaker_02
There's a lot of those guys. It'd be cool if I did. Yeah, it'd be amazing.

00:20:17 Speaker_03
Doesn't hurt to try though, right? Wouldn't you say? Yeah.

00:20:26 Speaker_00
All right, so a while back, we had Gary Tan. He's the president of Y Combinator, which is the most successful incubator of all time. We had him on the podcast and he said that the future of businesses is creator led.

00:20:36 Speaker_00
And that's why I'm interested in the podcast Creators Are Brands. Creators Are Brands explores how storytellers are building brands online. They're going to cover the entire creative process. They're going to talk about navigating brand partnerships.

00:20:49 Speaker_00
They're going to talk about what you need to know about growing your social media platforms. Everything you need to know on this topic, Creators Are Brands is the pod. So, check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

00:20:59 Speaker_00
Again, it's called Creators Are Brands with Tom Boyd. All right, back to the episode.

00:21:07 Speaker_02
I actually do think this is one of the problems with the health influencer space, more broadly, is it's just not sexy to be like, avoid ultra-processed foods, get sunlight in the morning, lift four days a week, and make sure you're getting adequate sleep.

00:21:20 Speaker_02
And so these people, they get attention from going further out on the crazy claim curve.

00:21:27 Speaker_03
Well, you can't sell that, right? You can't sell that advice. You can't even just create content. You can't become an influencer, Dan, because you'd say everything you need to say in 14 seconds. And what are you gonna do tomorrow?

00:21:36 Speaker_03
What are you gonna post the next day? What are you gonna post the next day? You got to try to do this for years. And so you have to work backwards from all the people that are trying to sell me something have to sell me something that is complex.

00:21:46 Speaker_03
And all the people that are creating content to try to influence me that are professional content people, they have to have something that's interesting, novel and like evergreen to they have to have more and more stuff to talk about.

00:21:57 Speaker_03
So not nobody's incentive. is to tell you the simple few things that you should focus on and get right because they'd be done. You wouldn't sell me anything and you'd be done talking.

00:22:07 Speaker_00
I was trying to find it, but I'm on Brian Johnson's newsletter and his subject line for his last newsletter was Wednesday. It says, your boners are killing you. That was the subject line.

00:22:17 Speaker_00
And it was how the lack of getting nighttime erections is somehow correlated with longevity. And it was like, you're saying it's not sexy to sell. Just like, well, this boner thing got me.

00:22:28 Speaker_03
You're right. Can we do a quick sidebar on Brian? So I like Brian a lot as a guy, really nice guy. I actually really like what he's doing in general.

00:22:37 Speaker_03
But man, I kind of miss the old Brian Johnson where it seemed like he was a missionary nerd, trying to do this for science.

00:22:44 Speaker_03
And now he's like, he's like dressed up like kind of modern Zuck where he's got like the chain and the oversized t shirt and he looks cool. And he's selling products. He's got like, cool YouTube content. He's got great subject lines for his emails.

00:22:57 Speaker_03
And he's got a great social media strategy.

00:23:00 Speaker_03
And I get why all that's good, but it does make me trust less in a weird way because what he was doing before was so different, this kind of self-funded science experiment on himself with a noble goal and noble mission.

00:23:13 Speaker_03
And I don't know, I kind of feel like he's detracting from that. I think he's, I don't know, am I the only one who feels that way? Sam, what do you think?

00:23:22 Speaker_00
I have a lot of trust in him still. I think that he's done a good job. He sells an olive oil that's called snake oil. And I think anytime someone makes fun of themselves by trusting them goes up. I don't think I have the same concerns as you.

00:23:36 Speaker_00
I think that I have to acknowledge that he's just a weirdo, and that's just how he lives his life. And that's cool.

00:23:41 Speaker_02
Justin, what do you think? I think he's doing an incredible service to humanity, like how aggressively he's publishing everything.

00:23:48 Speaker_02
I think that he is, where I would say we differ is, I mean, one, he's trying to build a longevity cult, new religion, which he openly says. I'm not trying to do that.

00:23:59 Speaker_02
And the second thing is he's very much a believer in the algorithm, where if you live by the algorithm and do everything it tells you, you'll live a longer and healthier life, which I think is fair and good, and I'm all for that.

00:24:12 Speaker_02
I'm much more interested in, like, why are people uniquely getting sick in today's, you know, environment, and what in our environment is poisoning everyone?

00:24:20 Speaker_02
I think Brian Johnson is amazing, and, like, I think it's awesome that someone is willing to try so many risk-on gene therapies, crazy peptides, like, all the shit that he's doing, and talk about it publicly.

00:24:32 Speaker_02
But I, unfortunately, like, I will be very interested to see what happens to him over time. for the next 20 years.

00:24:37 Speaker_02
But I think 20 years of trying very like out on the risk curve therapies, you know, it's quite possible something like doesn't go so well.

00:24:45 Speaker_03
Yeah, maybe I just have a preference for like the autistic biohacker rather than like the, you know, content creator influencer with a DTC brand underneath it. I think I've just seen a lot of that. And the first thing he was doing felt very original.

00:24:59 Speaker_03
Yeah. Let me ask, you had this great phrase that I think we should bring up, which is, or maybe it's you or it was Callie. I don't remember. Maybe it was your co-founder.

00:25:06 Speaker_03
You have this thing where you said, if you had a fish tank and then all the fish inside suddenly started getting sick, you wouldn't drug the fish, you'd clean the tank, right?

00:25:17 Speaker_03
You would assume that there's something that's causing the fish to get sick. And for some reason, we have this instinct to just drug the fish. The fish is sick. Why are all the fish getting sick?

00:25:25 Speaker_03
I don't know, just drug all the fish rather than maybe the tank is dirty. Maybe there's something in the tank that's causing them to get sick. Maybe it's what we're feeding them or it's their environment. And I love that metaphor of cleaning the tank.

00:25:36 Speaker_02
Yeah, no, you capture it perfectly. And the only thing I would say is that I don't actually think we have an instinct to drug the fish.

00:25:42 Speaker_02
I think that we have a $4.3 trillion industry that's job it is to propagandize people to think the only way to fix the fish's health problem is drugging them.

00:25:52 Speaker_02
Like that to me is the insane thing that we're, you know, the same situation we find ourselves in is everyone is getting sicker, you know, overweight, everything.

00:26:02 Speaker_00
I think I asked chat to PT recently. I think it was something like 60% of people have taken pharmaceuticals in the last 12 months, or like had a prescription, something crazy like that. It's crazy.

00:26:13 Speaker_03
So let's do the, so the first one you had was kind of the cleaning the tank, right? Check up for the house, find ways that you can make your home environment healthier for you and less interfering with your health.

00:26:25 Speaker_03
The second one you have, a modern butcher shop. So this is about feeding the fish.

00:26:29 Speaker_00
I love this.

00:26:30 Speaker_03
What is the modern butcher shop opportunity you see?

00:26:32 Speaker_00
By the way, Sean, do you remember I told you actually last two episodes, I said, I think my two predictions for, or two of my predictions was people were going to have more plants in their homes because it's kind of nasty.

00:26:40 Speaker_00
And also I thought, I was like, there's something about the meat at Whole Foods that I actually think is crap nowadays. Totally.

00:26:46 Speaker_03
Yeah. I'm not, I'm not saying you're right or a genius, but I'm not, I'm not saying it either.

00:26:51 Speaker_00
I, you know, I think I've hung out with Justin before, so I'm sure I've stole, I stole that.

00:26:56 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, so it's at a very high level. This is one of the things I'm most excited about. There's actually one coming in Austin in January, which I'm super stoked for. But it's the first one that I've seen that goes as far as I would like.

00:27:08 Speaker_02
And basically, let me set the table through an analogy. I think that like in the 80s, coffee was basically like Folgers. It was like burnt. There was no differentiation on sourcing. It wasn't very good. There was no coffee culture.

00:27:22 Speaker_02
And Starbucks came along, and that was like big second wave kind of coffee. And now there's like craft, you know, Comatier and like small, like cool roasters and coffee shops in every major city that you go to.

00:27:34 Speaker_02
I basically think that meat today is where coffee was in the 80s. You go to the grocery store and you're buying meat. You're buying steak.

00:27:43 Speaker_02
No one is differentiating on how is this dry-aged, what is the cut, what is the genetics of the animal, how was it raised, was it regenerative, was it not, was it fed soy, was it massaged until it was killed, and did it drink IPAs until its last day?

00:27:59 Speaker_02
All these sorts of things are actual differentiators buying meat and buying steak, and people are aware of them, but the market has not caught up yet. Have you ever bought from Snake River Farms or heard of this company?

00:28:13 Speaker_03
Yeah, I've bought from Snake River. What's their store? I just kind of had an instinct when I saw it. I was like, almost because it was the only branded meat that was there. It's like all the other meat, the branding was like 80%, 20%, right?

00:28:24 Speaker_03
Like the fat percentage. And then there was one with like a brand name on it, and it sounded like a place. And I thought, oh, maybe this is the higher quality. Are they legit? What do they do?

00:28:33 Speaker_02
Yeah, they're super legit. So they are one of the few companies in the US that have an American wagyu. And so they have a wagyu line. They imported, I believe, from Japan at some point in the 70s or 80s. And they've been breeding this wagyu line.

00:28:49 Speaker_02
If you buy Whole Foods best ribeye, you're probably going to cost you like 20 bucks a pound or something like this. If you buy like the best ribeye from, you know, from Snake River, it's going to be like 60 to $70 per pound. And so the

00:29:04 Speaker_02
kind of like skew in pricing and the amount that people are willing to pay for really, really high quality meat is massive. And I just think it hasn't made its way into retailers, hasn't made its way into butchers.

00:29:15 Speaker_02
And so I think there's this massive opportunity to build like what I'm calling like the blue bottle of the modern butcher shop that caters to people that really care about sourcing, flavor, cut, dry age, you know, all of these things that you're not going to be able to get at Whole Foods.

00:29:29 Speaker_03
So this, there's actually like, seems like there's two opportunities. One is to create the, like another Snake River Farms, right? A brand that is, you know, elevated in some, some way that would go sell through grocery stores.

00:29:41 Speaker_03
And so just the way we've had, you know,

00:29:44 Speaker_03
you know, you have Oatly selling oat milk, you got all these brands that come in new brands that come into existing categories, and start selling things that are niche in some way, alternatives in some way, or premium in some way, what you're saying is a premium meat brand, there's like that, that's one idea, which already sounds like a big idea.

00:30:01 Speaker_03
And I could imagine I could totally imagine somebody who takes a like, a content approach to this. So let's say you were doing this.

00:30:09 Speaker_03
If you go on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and you're telling your story about the unique things you're doing with the animals there and why it's premium and maybe it's how you're raising them, maybe it's how you're feeding them, maybe it's like a version where you're genetically selecting in some way the sort of premium or you're breeding in some way the more premium.

00:30:28 Speaker_03
That seems like one opportunity. And then the other one you had is the butcher shop, which is like you said, like blue bottle coffee. Blue Bottle sold for what, like $500 or $700 million? $700 or $800?

00:30:38 Speaker_02
Yeah, $700 or $800 million.

00:30:40 Speaker_03
And like, I don't know if anyone, like how popular is Blue Bottle nationwide? Because I had never heard of it till I moved to San Francisco. This is like 10 plus years ago.

00:30:48 Speaker_00
I think it's like a big city thing. It's like SFLA.

00:30:50 Speaker_03
It seemed like a rich guy pet project. Like all the VCs had invested in Blue Bottle because they liked having meetings at Blue Bottle and Blue Bottle was cooler than Starbucks. It wasn't like, it was elevated above that.

00:31:00 Speaker_03
And it just seemed like a passion project. And then I see that it sells for $700 or $800 million. And wow, that thing really worked. So to me, this is a 10 out of 10 idea. This is an amazing idea.

00:31:12 Speaker_02
I agree. I mean, I think it's a super exciting one. I also think that the reason I would personally, if I were to start this, start with a butcher shop or something like that,

00:31:23 Speaker_02
is that with a butcher shop, you can actually have a pretty wide range of pricing. You can tell the story. You can do small samplings. You can talk about the aging and stuff like that.

00:31:35 Speaker_02
If you took a $60 steak in a Whole Foods and just plopped it on the shelf next to a $20 one or a $15 one, and there's no story ability there, that thing just won't sell, unfortunately.

00:31:48 Speaker_00
Are quality meats and cows, I guess, being grown and you just have to source them? Or do you have to go and do this yourself?

00:31:55 Speaker_02
No, so there are small farmers that are growing really, really high quality meats. They're selling at farmer's markets. They're just hard to buy from.

00:32:02 Speaker_02
It's hard to aggregate enough supply that Whole Foods is like, yep, put it in the 500 stores or whatever. Or it can fill up a meat case in Austin. And so this really only works where if you're a butcher,

00:32:16 Speaker_02
you can buy probably an entire herd or an entire amount of farmers or ranchers' cattle and sell it through your store over the course of a couple months.

00:32:27 Speaker_02
That is worth your investment from a relationship and amount that you're going to make on that standpoint.

00:32:32 Speaker_02
For Whole Foods, it's like, yeah, we're never going to work with a small, interesting operator that might just have 50 or 100 head of cattle that they're selling.

00:32:39 Speaker_00
And can you freeze and store beef and it still be great months later?

00:32:46 Speaker_02
Yeah, you can. I mean, the better thing, though, is that you can, like, dry age it.

00:32:49 Speaker_02
And this is the other thing that if you're taking this, like, hyper-premium approach, you can actually just hang meat in these meat lockers and stuff like that, and it actually cures, gets, like, a richer flavor and the like the more you age it.

00:33:02 Speaker_02
The reason that they don't, obviously, is, like, the more that you age it, the less amount of, like, cash that you're cycling through because you're not selling it as quickly.

00:33:10 Speaker_02
And so it doesn't work for the retail model, but if you're doing a really, really high-end thing, like a butcher shop, it could actually work.

00:33:17 Speaker_00
How big is this business you think Snake River Farms?

00:33:21 Speaker_02
I would imagine it's in the $200 million to $300 million in revenue range. Wow. I think it's probably massive.

00:33:27 Speaker_00
But they're raising their own beef, though, too. I mean, they have photos of cowboys. Yeah, yeah.

00:33:32 Speaker_02
I mean, they're vertically integrated. They've been doing this for a long period of time, as far as I understand.

00:33:37 Speaker_02
But I think that there's enough operators like that that don't have the Snake River Farms branding, that aren't shipping on dry ice all over the country, but that could really sell into a butcher shop in,

00:33:49 Speaker_02
Austin, Nashville, San Francisco, LA, New York, that just does really well. I'm frankly shocked that the only butcher shop that I know that is doing this is in Austin and it's opening in like a month.

00:34:01 Speaker_03
And is he trying to just make one or he's trying to make it like a nationwide type of thing?

00:34:06 Speaker_02
I think there's like bigger ambitions. But yeah, starting with just one, like, let's make it work, figure out the economics, figure out this. This is an amazing idea.

00:34:14 Speaker_00
It's it's it is amazing. It's so expensive, though. And a lot of this is centered around beef only. Because like, I've always wanted to get like healthier chicken because I just don't love eating lots of beef.

00:34:26 Speaker_02
So previous, again, like 80 years ago, the food system had diversity. There were multiple types of birds, chickens, things like that.

00:34:33 Speaker_02
Today, 99.5%, I believe, of every chicken meat in the US is one genetic breed, which is the Cornish cross, which is bred for how quickly it puts on weight and the types of grains that it can basically eat.

00:34:45 Speaker_02
And so it's not bred for deliciousness, it's not bred for protein content, it's not just bred for like any of the stuff that you or I care about, it's just how quickly can it pack on mass and then I can like sell it, you know, and it gets eaten.

00:34:57 Speaker_02
I think the average life of these birds, on average, they're like born to harvest is something like six weeks.

00:35:04 Speaker_00
What?

00:35:05 Speaker_02
Yeah. Wait, so it comes out of the egg and six weeks later, it's big enough to eat? And six weeks later, it's harvested and sold. Yes, exactly.

00:35:12 Speaker_02
And so this is why I think this is such an interesting opportunity is many people are like, I don't like chicken. I don't like, you know, whatever. And they just haven't had chickens that are actually like delicious. And it's funny, you can read

00:35:27 Speaker_02
Like there was this one, um, this luxury rail line in the twenties and thirties that made a big deal about how they had, they'd like cornered the market on this one chicken genetics and they served it only in their first class cars.

00:35:40 Speaker_02
And all these people were like, wow, this is the best chicken I've ever had in my life.

00:35:43 Speaker_03
Like there's stories like that where it's like, what is the Wagyu or Kobe chicken? version of chicken.

00:35:49 Speaker_02
I've never even heard of one. Yeah, exactly. No one knows. I mean, there's no one that is raising these for flavor.

00:35:55 Speaker_03
Dude, that's insane. By the way, absolute sick burn to call someone a Cornish cross. That's going to be my new thing. Anytime I see somebody that's just, you're just a 99, you're just like 99% of the others.

00:36:04 Speaker_03
You're just trying to pack on, just pack on mass. You're a quick flip of a chicken. You're just a Cornish cross.

00:36:12 Speaker_00
There's a famous ad. There's a guy named Joseph Sugarman who pioneered direct marketing, direct response copywriting in the 80s. At the time, a quartz movement watch was already popular. Watch connoisseurs knew about that. But it wasn't impressive.

00:36:27 Speaker_00
It was just a normal table stakes thing for any watch worth more than $50. But anyway, he was famous for creating these ads for this line of watches. And he popularized the idea of quartz movement watch as if it was some epic thing.

00:36:42 Speaker_00
And then all the watch connoisseurs were like, yeah, dude, we all have this. But that's sort of what you're describing a little bit with these chickens.

00:36:51 Speaker_00
You can actually come up... You can invent interesting, cool stories that are also true and factual. you know, I'll take a lot of like the health nuts. Like they're always like, yeah, this is standard. We don't give our chickens this or that.

00:37:04 Speaker_00
And you're like, yeah, yeah, I know. But like, most people don't know that. And so we're going to tell this amazing story about that.

00:37:09 Speaker_02
Exactly. Yeah. And I think like the mental model is, you know, you're having a dinner party. And it's like pulling out a nice bottle of wine, but people aren't drinking. for.

00:37:17 Speaker_02
And so you're like, okay, this is this like crazy genetic, really nice steak cut, and you'll have the best steak you've ever had in your life. Like, I think that is the underserved market that that you could build a real brand around.

00:37:29 Speaker_02
What's your food budget every month?

00:37:32 Speaker_00
And where are you buying? Are you buying like all of your meat from the snake river farms?

00:37:36 Speaker_02
No, not all of it. I mean, their steaks are like super fatty and marbled and everything like you wouldn't want to actually eat that every day. But I basically buy my meat and most of my food from local farmers around the Austin area.

00:37:48 Speaker_03
What does that mean? Like you personally have relationships or you go to a farmer's market?

00:37:51 Speaker_02
No. So yeah, go to a farmer's market. There's also like a food truck here. It's sort of this refrigerated trailer where it's a combination. It's owned by three or four local farms, and they just stock it up.

00:38:04 Speaker_02
And so I just go every week, and that's where I buy all of my normal staples.

00:38:08 Speaker_00
Are you just not eating apples in December or whatever? I guess if there's seasons, particularly in Austin when it's mostly desert, where does that come from?

00:38:17 Speaker_02
Whole Foods then is where I'll get the remainder of the produce and stuff that's not seasonal.

00:38:21 Speaker_00
Got it. So you do do some normal stuff, and then you also go to farmer's markets, which is not extreme, but you're putting a lot of effort into it. That's pretty cool.

00:38:31 Speaker_03
All right, let's do the next idea. So annual home checkup, I'm giving that a B. This this blue bottle for for beef, this blue bottle, the modern day butcher shop, I'm giving that an A plus.

00:38:42 Speaker_00
Is that because you want that to exist? Or you want to invest?

00:38:45 Speaker_03
Or you think I just see it, dude, I want it to, I would be a customer of it. I know that I know where the demand is. I know a lot of people listen to this, but I'm not trying to buy a $60 steak. That's fine.

00:38:54 Speaker_03
There's a lot of people who are trying to buy stuff like that. I know a lot of people that are trying to do that. And I just know that when you go into a category where there is no existing brand, it is all commodity.

00:39:04 Speaker_03
Simply creating a brand in a commodity space is like a winning business formula. And the coffee analogy you gave, right? Like, I don't know what a Folgers costs per cup of coffee, but I think it's in like the cents.

00:39:15 Speaker_03
So the idea of going to Starbucks and paying $4 for a coffee that you can make at home for 15 cents or 10 cents or whatever, you know, sounded outrageous, but of course people did it because they do it for the experience.

00:39:25 Speaker_03
They do it for a perception of quality. So I just see the path of that one. And if somebody has the right founder fit and you know, it's, you need to kind of like a one of one entrepreneur, but that is a,

00:39:34 Speaker_03
To me, that's a billion dollar opportunity to do that. Whether you do it that way or you sell into retail. And like you said, you do need to tell the story of why this thing costs more.

00:39:44 Speaker_03
And that's why you have to tell the story on social media and sell it through retail. So you'd have to be great at content on TikTok and Instagram and then sell into retail stores that way. But to me, that's a 12 out of 10 idea.

00:39:56 Speaker_03
But you have another one on here. Calibrate for fertility. What is this?

00:40:00 Speaker_02
Yeah. Well, quick, if anyone does the butcher shop thing, I want to invest. I think it's such an exciting, interesting idea.

00:40:06 Speaker_02
But so Calibrate for Fertility, you all, I don't know how aware you are, but basically everyone is having fertility issues right now. It's getting worse.

00:40:16 Speaker_02
IVF, or what's called ARP-assisted reproductive, or ART-assisted reproductive technologies, are growing like 7% to 8% a year, and it's accelerating. IVF is the best in class option right now, and it costs like $20,000 to $30,000.

00:40:30 Speaker_02
It injects a bunch of hormones. It's super invasive. It's super hard on the female. And it's just a brutal, brutal thing. And so I think there is this.

00:40:40 Speaker_02
big opportunity to almost have like a lifestyle set of interventions that are geared towards helping people increase their fertility in the key window when they're trying to actually have kids.

00:40:51 Speaker_02
And so you could think about it like a lifestyle or like a monthly subscription for some three to six month period where you get a combination of peptides, supplements, people do like an environmental review, make sure that you're not wearing polyester underwear while you're trying to have a kid or any number of things that actually seem to have a really, really big impact.

00:41:10 Speaker_02
on how likely you are to conceive during that window, and pretty much just say, hey, before going the $20,000 to $30,000, very expensive, very invasive, very hard IVF route, do this several hundred dollar a month lifestyle-based fertility approach, and we're gonna try and help you conceive naturally without having to go through IVF.

00:41:29 Speaker_00
I know men can do stuff to increase their sperm count, with their sperm count being down, that's a huge issue. Can women do the same thing?

00:41:37 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, women can improve their fertility for sure. People even talk about this all the time. Stress is a big factor. But they're not talking about at the hormonal level. It seems like progesterone helps with increasing odds of conception.

00:41:51 Speaker_02
There's a bunch of interventions that I think are just almost criminally underutilized

00:42:02 Speaker_03
Hey, can I tell you a Steve Jobs story real quick? So Jobs once said that design is not just how something looks, it's how it works. And a great example of that is my new partner, Mercury. Mercury has made a banking product that just works beautifully.

00:42:14 Speaker_03
I use it for not just one, but all six of my companies right now. It is my default. If I start a company, it's a no-brainer, I go and I open up a Mercury account. The design is great. It's got all the features that you need.

00:42:24 Speaker_03
And you can just tell it was made by a founder like me, not a banker somewhere who hired a consultant in an agency to try to make some tool.

00:42:32 Speaker_03
So if you want to be like me and 200,000 other ambitious founders, head over to mercury.com and open up an account in minutes. And here's the fine print. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank.

00:42:42 Speaker_03
Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members FDIC. All right, back to the episode. Justin, have you ever heard us talk about one chart businesses? Have you ever heard this thing we say on this pod? Yeah.

00:42:55 Speaker_03
This to me is one. So look at this chart. So this is search interest for IVF clinic near me. And just look at it since 2018. Look at the like relative search volume. It's up, you know, from zero to 75 on this chart, all the way to 100 on a hundred scale.

00:43:12 Speaker_03
of IVF clinic near me, which is pretty wild, because that's not a long time. That's something you would expect to see like on a 30-year time horizon, not a, not like a six-year time horizon.

00:43:22 Speaker_03
And what you're saying is there's stuff you can, because IVF is obviously very hard on, you know, it's hard mentally, physically, emotionally, financially. Hey, what if there was a, you know, an intervention step before that? You mentioned Calibrate.

00:43:35 Speaker_03
I've never heard of this company. What does Calibrate do?

00:43:37 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's a crazy stat that you have on them as well, say that.

00:43:40 Speaker_02
Yeah, so Calibrate was a company, they got acquired somewhat recently, but they basically started out by being, they paired GLP-1s, i.e. Ozempic, with lifestyle interventions.

00:43:50 Speaker_02
And so their whole thing was like, Ozempic, people are meant to be on it for the rest of their lives.

00:43:54 Speaker_02
What Calibrate did is said, we're gonna prescribe you Ozempic, we're also gonna introduce coaching, accountability, lifestyle interventions, like this whole suite of things where the goal is to get you off of Ozempic at the end of a six or 12 month period.

00:44:07 Speaker_00
Like a like a Noom meets or kind of I mean Weight Watchers is trying to do this.

00:44:12 Speaker_02
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

00:44:14 Speaker_00
And so they... Those companies always scale fast. Noom did something similar pre-Ozempic and they were an advertiser with my old company, The Hustle. Like within a year of launching, they were spending hundreds of thousands with us.

00:44:25 Speaker_00
I don't know how these guys grow so big.

00:44:27 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of demand for this. And what Talibrate figured out is how to actually get it covered to some degree by insurers.

00:44:35 Speaker_02
And insurers were okay with it because they're like, great, we're not gonna have to pay 20 grand a year for Ozempic indefinitely. We can actually get people off of this drug after a six or 12 month period.

00:44:46 Speaker_02
And so in the first two years, they got to like over $100 million in revenue and just scaled insanely quickly.

00:44:52 Speaker_03
It does look like Calibrate kind of went under, though, or something. I don't know. I was looking for their funding stuff, but it looks like they've got restructured private equity, but basically for $20 million, they got 75% of the company now.

00:45:05 Speaker_03
So I think it definitely ran into some trouble.

00:45:07 Speaker_00
Yeah, but that means they could be bad operators, but the demand still existed.

00:45:11 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah, that would be my contention, basically, is that they were doing this and they launched, I think, 2021, something like that.

00:45:18 Speaker_02
And I basically think that insurers went from, they were early on the Ozempic plus lifestyle thing, and then there's been this massive record amount of lobbying spent to just keep people on Ozempic basically forever, which I think probably did not do them any favors.

00:45:33 Speaker_00
What percentage of people needing IVF, and you probably don't know this, but of the average age of the first time mother has gone up? nearly 30 at this point. I think it's 29 or something like that. In the 70s, it was 21. So it's gone up a lot.

00:45:48 Speaker_00
What percentage is it just because of people waiting longer to have families versus American food system being poisoned?

00:45:55 Speaker_02
I don't know, honestly, but what I do know is from reading stats, it seems like most of the decline in birth rate, it's about 70% of it comes from people that previously would have had three to four kids now having one or two.

00:46:10 Speaker_02
And so it's not like people are deciding not to have kids, they're just having fewer.

00:46:13 Speaker_02
And I do think that the biological fertility issues are a huge, huge amount of what is driving down the average number of kids that a family or a woman has these days.

00:46:24 Speaker_00
Dude, it's pretty crazy how many of my friends, my male friends, tell me that they're like, like, in Austin, we used to go to the sauna all the time.

00:46:30 Speaker_00
And I would have so many friends that like, I'm not going in the sauna this week, we're trying to get pregnant, my balls aren't working. And so I'm trying to like, like, I can't cook them right now. You know what I mean?

00:46:37 Speaker_00
Like, there's so many people that I knew you and I, Justin are friends. And they're like, I can't do this. I can't do that. I need to go do this. Because we're struggling. And it's my fault. It's pretty wild.

00:46:49 Speaker_00
Sean, have you had a bunch of friends that have like complained of similar stuff? They're like, it's my stuff ain't working.

00:46:54 Speaker_03
You lost me at have you had a bunch of friends, so no.

00:46:59 Speaker_02
I think it is this like under the radar thing very few people are talking about, but almost everyone I know that is trying to have kids right now has some amount of fertility challenges.

00:47:10 Speaker_02
And even if that's six to 12 months and then they get pregnant, even still, you know, if you do that across like two to three kids, you're basically going from, you're now having one to two kids instead of like three to four, if every time it takes you six or 12 more months to get pregnant.

00:47:25 Speaker_03
So you've mentioned three kind of health-related startup ideas. You've started, I think, four kind of successful, that I know of, health-related companies. Can you describe this approach?

00:47:39 Speaker_03
Because I'm the kind of guy that bounces around from industry to industry, model to model. I'm like a variety seeker, and I don't think that's good.

00:47:49 Speaker_03
Like, just when I learn about a space, I get intrigued by something I'm a beginner in, and I go in, and I stop the compounding of that. So I don't think that's too smart.

00:47:57 Speaker_03
Can you describe your approach to entrepreneurship versus, you know, somebody like me who's just bouncing around and trying to solve 100 different problems in 100 different spaces with 100 different business models?

00:48:08 Speaker_02
Totally, yeah. I think, for me at least, what has been very rewarding is basically choosing one problem, which for me is the chronic disease crisis, that I want to spend the rest of my career on.

00:48:20 Speaker_02
I think that there is a massive amount of compounding, relationship compounding, even personal brand compounding. People think of me as into health, which pays some dividends. That's probably going to be even more so over the next decade.

00:48:35 Speaker_02
You understand the space. You understand the problems. You understand the players and relationships. I think that if you decide,

00:48:41 Speaker_02
this is the problem that I am the most interested in the world, that I deeply care about, that I read about for fun, and just orient your career around trying to start things or be involved in things that make that problem better or solve that problem.

00:48:54 Speaker_02
Like, you get so many shots on goal, even if they may look different. Like, I started Kettle and Fire thinking, like, the American food system is poison, and there needs to be a bone broth company.

00:49:04 Speaker_00
What did you read or consume that made you buy into that? And then how long were you into it before you're like, this is my thing?

00:49:10 Speaker_02
Yeah, so I was going to CrossFit in San Francisco in 2015, and a bunch of CrossFitters were like, you should do bone broth. I'm a terrible cook. I almost never cook for myself.

00:49:20 Speaker_02
And so I basically was like, great, I'm going to go buy some at the store, and no one was selling some. And so after that, I was like, seems like there's an interesting opportunity here.

00:49:28 Speaker_02
And did I think it would grow to be a nine-figure annual business? Definitely not. But it was a big enough opportunity that decided to take the swing.

00:49:36 Speaker_00
But did you get into health and wellness because you're like, that seems like a cool opportunity, or were you like, I'm obsessed with this topic and this is like a really good way to address it?

00:49:44 Speaker_02
Yeah, I was just obsessed with the topic, basically. Like, I'd been reading about paleo and reading about, you know, all these sorts of things since I was basically in college. Like, I was the weird dude in college who, my senior year, I went paleo.

00:49:56 Speaker_02
And so I, like, wasn't drinking beer, wasn't eating pizza or french fries. All my friends were like, what the hell is wrong with you? Like, what's going on? And so I just got very into this idea, this, like, secret, in a sense, of,

00:50:08 Speaker_02
Like, why is everyone getting sick at record levels? And what could be kind of underpinning that? And so it was this deep interest.

00:50:16 Speaker_02
And as I got deeper and deeper understanding and appreciation of the problem, I just really understood, like, this is literally, I think, the biggest problem in the country.

00:50:24 Speaker_02
And I can spend the rest of my career trying to solve or take stabs at various instances of this problem.

00:50:31 Speaker_02
whether that's starting a brand or trying to fix the incentives through TruMed, I basically was like, I think I'm just going to try and solve or work on fixing this problem for the rest of my career.

00:50:41 Speaker_03
So let's go back to that kettle and fire example. So you're doing CrossFit, trying to live healthier. CrossFitters are telling you, you should do bone broth. You're like, cool. Where do I get some of that? And you go, you look.

00:50:51 Speaker_03
There's not like an easy brand that you could just pull off the shelf and buy it. So you think, somebody should do that. Now, at that time, you've got no experience doing that. You've never built a DTC product.

00:51:03 Speaker_03
You've never built an actual consumer brand. Can you just describe the three or four bullets that happened that first year to make it happen? Because I think all these ideas are cool, but you've got to be the type of person that can make shit happen.

00:51:16 Speaker_03
You made shit happen at that stage. Can you just describe what you made happen for Kettle and Fire?

00:51:21 Speaker_02
Yeah, totally. We first tested a landing page, put up a landing page with no product, started buying ads to see who would click on it, what would they pay. You had the brand name? At that time, we called it Bone Broths Co., which was a horrible idea.

00:51:35 Speaker_02
It sends free brands into the kettle on fire.

00:51:36 Speaker_03
You just made it yourself? You just mocked up an ugly landing page?

00:51:39 Speaker_02
Yeah, we mocked up an ugly landing page on Unbounce, paid someone on Fiverr $10 to make a terrible logo, and basically started selling a box at $29.99.

00:51:47 Speaker_03
And when you say started selling what, Facebook ads? How'd you get the track?

00:51:51 Speaker_02
Yeah, we did Facebook ads, and Facebook and AdWords, and then some Bing at the time, because they were like, there was an ARB there, it's much cheaper.

00:51:57 Speaker_00
Dude, Bing clicks back then, they were so cheap, and they converted way higher.

00:52:03 Speaker_02
No, I know. I was always like, I don't know who your people are, but they're in the boomerang.

00:52:06 Speaker_03
What was that first few weeks or maybe a month like that gave you the, were you looking for conviction or you already had conviction? What happened in that first month for you?

00:52:14 Speaker_02
Yeah, I was looking for conviction. And so basically we'd put in $500. We built this landing page and I think sold like a little over $2,000 worth of product inside of about of a month.

00:52:25 Speaker_02
And so I ran the numbers and I was basically like, OK, we can build a business. And I think just given existing traffic, we can turn this into at least like a $200,000 to $300,000 a year kind of business.

00:52:36 Speaker_02
And based on what I felt the margins would back into, I was like, that should be about $100,000, $150,000 a year in profit, which seemed like a worthwhile thing to take on.

00:52:46 Speaker_03
And then what, okay, so you, do you do that? And where did it get much bigger than that? What happened to make it much bigger?

00:52:52 Speaker_02
So we validated the idea. The next thing is we do, we had to figure out how to make it. And so we emailed and called over 500 different manufacturing partners to just like, please someone help us figure out how to make this product.

00:53:04 Speaker_02
And eventually what ended up working is my brother, who was 19 at the time, who I co-founded the business with, he emailed Mark Cuban as like, I'm a 19 year old entrepreneur, like please help. And Mark Cuban,

00:53:15 Speaker_02
introduced us to a manufacturing partner who we ended up working with and still work with today to make our first version of the bone broth product.

00:53:23 Speaker_03
And so- Wait, wait, wait. What did you, what did he, your brother's like, hey, Mark, we're entrepreneurs, but we don't know how to make a product. Do you know any bone broth manufacturers? And he said, yes, here's one.

00:53:31 Speaker_02
How did that happen? He was like, talk to my food person. And then his food person introduced us to our cook back. I was like, yeah, you should talk to this group over here.

00:53:39 Speaker_03
And just to clarify, those first $2,000 worth of orders, did you just go refund them because you didn't have a product yet?

00:53:45 Speaker_02
I emailed all of them and I said, hey, we're not going to have a product for like six to nine months. I can either refund you in full right now or 50% off and we'll like eventually ship it. And people that didn't respond, I would just refund them.

00:53:55 Speaker_03
Yeah. Okay, great. So Mark Cuban gets you a food person. So that's the second thing that now, now you know how to, now you can get the product made.

00:54:03 Speaker_02
Yeah. And so, and then basically, uh, what I realized is the product is two year shelf stable. I put literally every dollar of my life savings at that point. I was 25, uh, into doing the first run of our product. They had $30,000 minimum runs.

00:54:15 Speaker_02
Uh, it was like 120 K, uh, kind of run budget. So I was like, either this is going to work great or I'm going to eat bone broth for two years. Either way, I'll, I'll like, feel pretty good.

00:54:25 Speaker_02
And so we bought the first product and year one, we basically did 2.8 million in sales.

00:54:31 Speaker_02
And after about six months of being in business, one of the buyers at Whole Foods saw an influencer talking about our product, reached out and was like, hey, I want to bring you guys into Whole Foods.

00:54:41 Speaker_02
And we basically, we did extraordinarily well in Whole Foods and got national rotation the following year. And that just kind of like started our journey.

00:54:51 Speaker_00
I think I was with you eight or 10 months after you started it in San Francisco. We went bowling. I don't know if you remember that. And you were telling me about this and I was like, Oh, I mean, it seems like you got a really good career.

00:55:02 Speaker_00
Why are you throwing it away at this? I just remember thinking of like, why does he want to ruin everything?

00:55:10 Speaker_02
Yeah, starting a boat Roth company in SF at the height of like the tech boom was definitely not a consensus opinion.

00:55:17 Speaker_03
My sister, when she moved to San Francisco, she was working in a corporate career. She worked for Deloitte, I think. So she was like a management consultant. She had gotten her MBA.

00:55:28 Speaker_03
She had gotten an undergrad in electrical engineering, gotten an MBA from a good business school, was a management consultant. And then she's like, I'm sick of this life. I need a business that I can own and not have to go to a job every day.

00:55:42 Speaker_03
And she was so tired of the consulting hours were so bad that she would come home and her kids would be asleep.

00:55:48 Speaker_03
And she would just pick them up from the crib just to hold them for a few minutes because she hadn't been there to even play with them before bed. And after four nights of that, she's like, no, I'm not doing this.

00:55:59 Speaker_03
and never had started a business before, decides to start an in-home daycare. So she kicks me out of the apartment I'm living in and says, I'm going to use that apartment, which my parents owned an apartment. She's like, kick you out.

00:56:12 Speaker_03
I'm going to use that to start this business. And she needed six kids. So six kids to come to this in-home daycare.

00:56:19 Speaker_03
And my dad was like, you have an electrical engineering degree, you have a job that pays you whatever, 150K a year, you're a management consultant, and you're going to change diapers.

00:56:27 Speaker_03
And she just felt so bad, you know, quote unquote, throwing it away. And then, you know, fast forward, now she's got like three or four schools in San Francisco, and she's been able to like scale this business up.

00:56:38 Speaker_03
She works just like a few hours a week and has like this amazing business.

00:56:41 Speaker_03
And I say that because a lot of people will hit that crucible moment where it feels like you're throwing away this known and socially accepted thing to do this kind of fringe, weird thing from scratch on your own with no safety net.

00:56:57 Speaker_03
And I'm not saying that it always works out. But every time something works, it almost always has that story at the beginning of like you you're doing what?

00:57:05 Speaker_03
And that's totally normal, even though it feels abnormal in the moment feels bad in the moment. Totally.

00:57:09 Speaker_02
And I Sam, I'd actually love your thoughts. So my experience, frankly, was almost every single person that I knew who was starting a business or trying to start a business between 22 and 25 has made it in some way, shape, or form. It's insane.

00:57:25 Speaker_00
Yeah. So Justin and I both started roommate matching companies. We were both 20. And so between the ages of 20 and 25, we were in the same industry. And so all of our SF friends you know, we're similar age.

00:57:38 Speaker_00
And dude, it is crazy how many, I actually just tweeted about this today. I was like, I grew up in SF from age like 20 to 30. It's crazy how many of our six are successful just because they're around. You know what I mean? Yeah, totally.

00:57:51 Speaker_03
Naval has a great phrase where he says, yes, you hear the stats about startups. Oh, 90% of businesses, you know, new businesses fail. And he goes, yeah, startups fail, but founders don't. And I love that phrase.

00:58:02 Speaker_03
He said, Oh, basically, if you just fast forward 10 years, any of the founders that stayed in the game, like the success rate goes from your first business success rate might be 10%.

00:58:12 Speaker_03
But the 10 year saga of you trying a bunch of shots on goal and getting smarter every year.

00:58:17 Speaker_03
So like, the odds are now like, if you just look at our cohort of friends, right, Sam, we were in a mastermind together back in what was that 2013, something like that. Like,

00:58:24 Speaker_03
our cohort of friends, which is probably like, you know, 30 to 50 founders that we used to hang out with and know regularly, the hit rates like 80 or 90% success rate, you know, for the people that actually stuck with it.

00:58:34 Speaker_03
I got a couple of friends that packed up their bags and moved to, you know, Connecticut and just said, you know, if I'm not doing this anymore, um, not you, Sam, sorry. Literally, I'm just thinking of like a couple of friends that did that.

00:58:43 Speaker_03
They were just like, Hey, like the, they're burnt out from San Francisco startup culture. Those people, you know, they didn't fully make it, but all the people that stayed in the game made it.

00:58:52 Speaker_00
We could wrap it up with one quick story, which is, I remember Gagan Biani started this thing called Udemy. And it was like, courses? What? This is what Tai Lopez does. And I remember both Justin and I were like, I guess we should get in on this.

00:59:06 Speaker_00
This seems like a really good way to make $100 or $300 a month, which would be life-changing. And so we both did that stuff. And I think that I could say for Justin, for sure, people look up to you. I mean, I look up to you and I admire you.

00:59:18 Speaker_00
It's crazy how if you look at eight or ten years ago, which wasn't that long ago, you were doing many things that people will poo-poo, like maybe course creation or buying a car and renting it on Toro or whatever.

00:59:33 Speaker_00
It's like, man, the people you admire start way scrappier than you think. I know I for sure did.

00:59:39 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, I don't know that anyone admires me that's taken my keyboard shortcuts for Mac users Udemy course, but definitely I was hustling back in the day.

00:59:47 Speaker_03
Have you ever read Travis Kalanick, the guy who started Uber, his old blog, he had this

00:59:55 Speaker_00
amazing blog that wasn't called like awesomeness, bro. It was called like something silly like that, right?

00:59:59 Speaker_03
It was heavily brought out. But he had this blog post, which was like, attending CES on the cheap, or Southwest on the cheap. And it's basically like his playbook for how to have a badass time at a conference when you have no money.

01:00:13 Speaker_03
And he's like, all right, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna get to the airport, but never Never take the taxis. Here's what you can do instead. Here's what you're going to do for staying at someone's house.

01:00:20 Speaker_03
You know, here's how you're going to skip the event but still get in to the after party because that's where the magic happens. When you get there, here's what you're going to say.

01:00:26 Speaker_03
And he had this like really scrappy approach to how to just like, you know, wedding crash a major conference on a budget.

01:00:35 Speaker_00
And he was 31 years old, by the way. He was 31 when he wrote that post. It's not like he was a college kid.

01:00:40 Speaker_03
And he also used to invite people to just stay at his house in San Francisco.

01:00:43 Speaker_03
It's part of the magic of a city like San Francisco is like, he used to say, if you're, and then the reverse was, if you're coming to San Francisco and you got no money, but you're a founder, he called his house the jam pad.

01:00:53 Speaker_03
And he would have like people constantly just coming and crashing on his couch. And he would host people over late into the night and everyone just jamming on different ideas. And he used that to kind of build his momentum, his network, his energy.

01:01:06 Speaker_03
It is pretty wild. Yeah, so cool. Can we finish with this Zuck story? Zuck is auctioning off his gold chain for you, for your charity? What is this?

01:01:13 Speaker_00
Well, I saw you tweet that, Justin. I was like, is that real? Yeah, it's real. And he totally downplayed it. You said, Zuck's auctioning my chain. And it looked like no one replied to that.

01:01:24 Speaker_02
Yeah, I had a bad Twitter day that day.

01:01:26 Speaker_03
I saw people were bidding for it. How much did it end up going for? It's his gold chain.

01:01:29 Speaker_02
It went for almost 41 grand. Oh, wow. Who won?

01:01:32 Speaker_03
Do you know?

01:01:34 Speaker_02
Some anonymous person, I'm not sure. But basically, probably a crypto person, to be honest.

01:01:42 Speaker_02
But yeah, so a couple years ago, three years ago, I started something called Inflection Grants, which is effectively just giving small, like $2,000 to $3,000 grants to people under the age of 24 that are high potential.

01:01:54 Speaker_02
It's inflectiongrants.com if anyone wants to check it out. But basically, someone made an offer to me when I was in my 20s, when I was graduating college, where he was like, hey, you should keep running with your startup.

01:02:05 Speaker_02
If it doesn't work, I'll just write you a check, and you can use that to cover your living expenses until you find a job or whatever. Who did that and why? It was a mentor that I had built a relationship with in Pittsburgh, where I was going to school.

01:02:16 Speaker_02
And I think he just knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, also saw that I didn't come for money, and I think knew at this very key time that that offer would make a big difference in my decision making. And he was right.

01:02:28 Speaker_02
And so I started Inflection Grants three years ago. Since then, we've given out like 50 grants. And Long Journey, who one of the GPs is Ariel Zuckerberg, has gotten behind it in a big way. And so this year, Ariel convinced Mark to auction off one of his

01:02:44 Speaker_02
already worn gold chains. And then we had to make sure that it was cleaned, no DNA residue, anything like this. Did you really?

01:02:51 Speaker_01
Did you actually have to do some of that stuff? Did you get to talk to him at all? No, no. But yeah, he gave it away and we auctioned off for 41 grand, which goes to charity, which is great.

01:03:02 Speaker_03
So that's 20 people are going to get these $2,000 grants? Exactly.

01:03:07 Speaker_00
You gave us this document before we started, and I think we only touched a third of it. There's so many more cool things that you have to come back and talk about.

01:03:15 Speaker_00
A lot of people don't know this, but Sean, did you know that Justin was a co-author on the book Traction with the DuckDuckGo founder? There's five or 10 other things that you have really amazing stories behind and are really insightful on.

01:03:29 Speaker_00
Thanks for coming on and doing this. I'm like literally sitting here taking notes on like incandescent bulbs and like farmers markets and shit like that.

01:03:38 Speaker_00
And you're going to be getting a lot of follow up texts on me where it's just like, Justin, just tell me what to do.

01:03:43 Speaker_02
Tell people where to where to follow where to get more. Yeah, so I'm substackjustinmayors.substack.com. I write a monthly newsletter on health and business stuff, and then also on Twitter at JW Mayors.

01:03:56 Speaker_03
And go read The Great American Poisoning. We didn't do it justice in this podcast, but go read that blog post. It is amazing. We'll put the link in the show notes to that specific blog post.

01:04:07 Speaker_00
All right, that's it. That's the pod. Thank you, Justin.

01:04:09 Speaker_04
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

01:04:34 Speaker_03
Hey, Sean here. A quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story. He started Twitter, and before that he sold a company to Google for $100 million. And somebody asked him, they said, Ev, what's the secret, man?

01:04:42 Speaker_03
How do you create these huge businesses, billion-dollar businesses? And he says, well, I think the answer is that you take a human desire, preferably one that's been around for thousands of years,

01:04:52 Speaker_03
And then you just use modern technology to take out steps. Just remove the friction that exists between people getting what they want. And that is what my partner Mercury does.

01:05:01 Speaker_03
They took one of the most basic needs any entrepreneur has, managing your money and being able to do your finance or operations. And they've removed all the friction that has existed for decades.

01:05:09 Speaker_03
No more clunky interfaces, no more 10 tabs to get something done, no more having to drive to a bank, get out of your car just to send a wire transfer. They made it fast, they made it easy. You can actually just get back to running your business.

01:05:20 Speaker_03
You don't have to worry about the rest of it. I use it for not one, not two, but six of my companies right now. And it's used by also 200,000 other ambitious founders. So, if you want to be like me, head to mercury.com, open up an account in minutes.

01:05:32 Speaker_03
And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC. All right, back to the episode.