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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/b74e502b0dc7da04

The marketer me loves everything you're saying, Ral, because the two things you just said, those were actually like, you know,$20 million ad hooks. I feel like I could rule the world and know I could be what I want to.
I'm putting my all in it like a day's all on the road, less travel now. Justin, I'm pumped you're here. You're here because for two well, for two reasons. The first reason is that you've started like six or seven companies that have collectively done something like five hundred million dollars in revenue in the last seven years, which is huge, 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 uh, I think cool. But the problem with people who are in fringe stuff is they can't relate that to like a normal person, you know what I mean? And they'll be like, you know, this like fringe thing that I'm into, this is only like a one percent needle mover as opposed to like a fifty percent needle mover. And so you're very self aware, you're very thought, and you've built a lot of big businesses in the space and
You're a blogger and you have this amazing blog post called the uh great American poisoning that both Sean and I are like obsessed with. And so I thought you could come on and kinda talk a little bit about the blog post, but also business ideas that you're into.
And opportunities related to this space.
I'm I'm super stoked to be here. I mean I
As I've written in that post
I literally think that
The great Amer uh 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, 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 or build value in this space. Sean, what emotion did you feel when you read this blog post?
Dude, you could ask Diego, I went on like a forty eight hour bender. First here's what we did.
No, no, it was like out uh outrage first and then curiosity.
And then s and skepticism. So here's the here's the series of events. Justin writes this post called The Great American Poisoning. I read it, I'm lit on fire. Justin, this was my I I I did an end of year recap for myself over the weekend.
It was the number one blog. It was my favorite blog post of the year was the thing you do.
So you you read that and then I I I told my team, I said, Hey, let's break this ta down point by point because you made a lot of really interesting points. I 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.
And it's like if you go to a nearby Costco today, you'll find, you know, hundreds of people that more of weight than this guy. But that was considered like
circus freak fat before. And you talked about how doctors would go their whole career, a pediatrician would go their whole career and never see a kid with, you know, fatty liver disease or these things like that. And you're like, now it's more and more common. And it's just a
a very compelling case around health. So you you combine three very interesting things. One
You have a very strong
factually based view of health.
You are self actualized around health. You're one of the sort of fittest, most healthy guys that both
Sam and I know and look up to. W we I I've message you before been like, Hey
Water filters. Tell me, what do you like? What brand do you like? Right? Because I trust that you actually walk the walk on it.
And then the third is you're an entrepreneur. So you've started
two brands in the kind of like keto space, each doing you know, tens of millions a year in revenue.
You know, get distribution in ten thousand plus retail stores. You started a non alcohol more than that.
Yeah.
non alcoholic uh beverage brand because you're like, great, drinking is like one of the most unhealthy things we do. 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 D to C experience before starting these.
You went in and you're kind of like
It seems like you t 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. 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. 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 dock of like
five or six new opportunities that you think other people could go to in this space.
You know, I 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. Like uh 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 and you know, not only to say like
when you solve some of the problems that are involved in fixing the chronic disease crisis.
You're also like helping people, you know, you people are living longer, they're living healthier. It's a very rewarding spot, you know, space to work in, as opposed to maybe like day trading NFTs or something like that.
And your blog post is basically summarized, you said the answer to why so you you give all these stats as to how messed up we are, but you said
The answer to all this is simple. Our food system is poisoning us, and the institutions meant to keep us safe, which are 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.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, we we basically we had, you know, call it a hundred years ago, uh, our chronic disease burden was like ninety-five percent lower than it is right now. There were certain acute issues like infectious disease was much more of a real thing. There were 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.
Now the 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 seven hundred percent in the last, you know, 90 years. And so I think that we are running the 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.
And now you we actually have the opposite, which is the average American is unhealthy. And like people have not
internalize what that means, which is, you know, you you walk around almost anywhere in the US and the average person is going to be sick. The average person is going to get cancer, heart disease, you know, any number of chronic conditions at some point in their life. And
Our medical system is not built to service a population where the average person is sick.
And so because of that, we need new institutions and companies, and it 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.
We should get to the ideas'cause they're great, but here's like another like one liner that kinda summarizes uh this, which is
Everyone should update their thinking.
The default outcome of living in the US 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.

Well
Yeah. All right. So um
Let's do it. So what are the ideas? Where do you see the opportunity? You sniffed out the opportunity in
The bone broth key you know, ketone space. You sniffed out the opportunity in non alcoholic wines.
Each of those is doing, you know
Very very well.
What
opportunities do you see today. Where where what should w what ideas do you have?
Yeah. So I see I see a ton. Like
Backing up, I basically think that and I wrote about this in my in my long essay Manifesto, but I basically think that
It's a little unabobber esque, but I'll take it you know, like in uh Jerry McGuire, Tom Cruise writes his manifesto to kick off the movie. That's that's you. This is your uh your Jerry McGuire manifesto. Exactly, yeah. This thing was so much work.
Um and so so yeah, so to back up, like my view on what has changed in the last call it eighty years.
Is that
We went and then humans mostly existed in an environment that was not poisoning people, uh, to one that is basically poisoning them. Like your food, water, you know, lights, air, like all these sorts of things uh are filled with plastics, chemicals, toxins, ultra process, whatever that's making the default person sick.
And so one of the things that I think
is really 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, you know
eighty percent of your time in these like three spaces. It might literally be like 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. And I I have a 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?
Uh it's called Lightwork.
It's do lightwork.com. So they're doing really well, but I think that
There is this whole world of home services. Like home services are a forty billion dollar, you know, uh a year in spend where you can think like H HVAC, lights, plumbing, you know, water, electricity, all these sorts of things.
Where
None of these people are looking at
How do we actually make your environment healthy?
None of like the people making your furniture are thinking about all of like the flame retardant chemicals that
are giving like babies cancer, you know, then as they spray it on your couch or stuff for whatever, they're not thinking about that. And so I think there's a huge opportunity to build a company uh or a series of companies that
looks at what is going on in your built environment in your home and your furniture and all this and says, How do we make this health promoting? Like how do we encourage health and try and make this, you know,
this sort of service, one that makes the person healthier.
So it's like a
An annual checkup for your house.
Yeah, exactly. I I think like that's the first that's like the input, which is do an annual checkup for your house.
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 uh has mineralization and all these sorts of things.
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 an a uh your home annual checkup.
Yeah, so I think a couple things are very worth it. Uh
One like water filtration is a huge one. Uh I basically set up a whole house filtration system there that we had like these plumbers install. Actually they installed it. There was like this eight thousand dollar system.
They installed it, the next time they came around to fix it, they like screwed on a twenty dollar part incorrectly. And I like walked into my kitchen the next next morning and I stepped on my floorboards and like water came up for around them and I was like fuck.
Uh, so there there's a lot of now you got a a mold issue. Yeah, exactly. So we had to handle that, which was quite annoying. Um, but we have like every water that is in 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.
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.
Uh they they even impact like if if you eat under blue light versus eating under non blue light, it
also seem to impact like the amount of weight that you'll gain. Uh 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 or drink. Is that a normal ball?
Yeah, think of like the Edison bulb that it's actually like burning something as opposed to uh an LED bulb, which is what's in most houses today.
There's also there's a pretty cool thing that you can do.
So LED's 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
You can see the LED bulb flickering like
thousands of times per second. And the reason that LED lights are supposedly more more efficient than incandescent bulbs is because they're turning on and off uh all the time. And so they're actually like on and using elect less electricity because they're, you know, they're not on the entire time.
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 and you're like
What's going on in my system? I don't like this.
The market of me loves everything you're saying, Ral, because
Like the two things you just said and like kind of a throwaway thing.
those were actually like, you know, twenty million dollar ad hooks. When you're talking about
Do you know how they make chickens fat?
They put'em under these blue lights and actually they gain extra weight.
Maybe that's why you're fat.
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 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 eighty, ninety percent of the problem, but like And no one talks about it except for us in this ad right now. It's a secret that you think exactly it's a s it's a s it's a secret they don't want you to know about. The L E D thing, like watch this.
magic trick of an ad where you take the phone on Silama and you go, It's actually flickering. Do you know how that messes with your sleep, with your whatever
I love all of this from a marketing
I I know you're a good eth ethical stand up guy, but when I hear this stuff I think
What
could I use to get this across? How could I if I believe that this is good for people.
How can I maximally uh you know get that in the hands of people?
Totally. I mean, and this this is why I think this is such a big opportunity because you have the home services thing, like the check healthy checkup for your home.
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, like 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 these things, there there's a tremendous amount of spend.
that people want to put into making sure that their home environment is healthy. 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.
'Cause he walk 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. Like, of course.
And he walks around the house, 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 moving over. He's like, That's that that's you know, that's rats. And I'm like, What, rats? 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 my and
Look, we just live out in like uh you know
A hilly area. There's mice everywhere.
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?
As if it's character. Be my dad. Yeah, exactly. He's like, Great. And now I'm paying two hundred seventy dollars a month.
For this guy to come and do nothing to my house. I have no idea what he's doing.
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 there actually was, you know, issues. It it's just I wouldn't I would not have been aware of the problem. So I'm I'm a big fan of this kind of like
Audit method of sales. Let me do a free audit for you.
to kinda tell you where you might have some problems and then if you'd like me to fix them, I'm happy to do so.
Yeah. Are there any other things? So uh water filter light bulbs, any other like big needle moving things?
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. And it sounds very tinfoil hatty, and let me explain like why I think this might be important. This is why I I like your opinion, by the way. You're great at this. You're you're like like this is what the freaks think, and this is like how it relates to a normal person and like where's the truth somehow, or you know what I mean? Yeah.
Exactly. So so basically like a hundred years ago we had the um we had we had a certain type of r of radiation that was, I believe, called ionizing radiation. It's that or non ionizing. I don't know that stuff well enough yet. But basically it was like think of like
what you know, you get shot into at at a dentist or something like that. Um, nuclear isotopes, things like that. Things that are definitely bad. And then there was this longer spectrum of like microwaves and then things that we would put like cell phones and computers into. And
For many for many, many years we basically were like, Okay, microwave is everything else is fine.
Now we think okay, microwaves are bad. They certainly cause some harm. It's like
causes thermal effects in the body. Let's also not expose people to microwaves a a high amount
But this other spectrum
Of like cell phones and the like are also definitely fine.
And then you kind of like get to today, which is most of the FTC safety ratings uh and levels that have come up.
Or that that are used to regulate
cell phones, Wi Fi, things like this. Um, they're basically were tested in an environment on cell phones from like the early two thousands where they were assuming that people would not be exposed to these things for more than like
twenty to thirty minutes a day. Like the the guy who came up with these rules, they interviewed him uh I don't know, it was like five or six years ago. And he was like, Yeah, all of the assumptions that we had around uh around these just assumed that you'd like take a phone call and you'd put it down. We never thought that you'd be like walking around
with this thing in your pocket. And there are a fair number of of um
Like articles that I think are concerning enough where people will like
change the electromagnetic f um fields that mice are exposed to and it'll raise or lower their blood sugar at a predictive rate seems to have like
potential impact on cancer. There's there's enough there that I'm like
probably bad. 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 EMS for eight to nine hours a night, that's probably well worth doing. 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
The you just get these core four or five things right. And you're like, you know, you need to sleep well, don't eat too much uh too much processed foods, especially seed oils.
You know, exercise, get some sunlight. 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
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 ten seconds of waking up. 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.
Yeah. It seems like you're more of the get the core right first, but I am I giving you too much credit here? Where do you stand? Because you're currently saying things like
Thomas Edison light bulbs and like i the microwave's gonna kill you or something. Where do you stand on this?
Yeah, yeah. So I so I actually think so one, completely agree. I think if you get the basics right, that is like
Eighty to ninety percent of it. That said, I also think if you have
relatively easy interventions like move a Wi-Fi router outside of your bedroom and, you know, swap the bulbs in the rooms that you're spending twenty hours a day in. Like those are pretty easy interventions that
are 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, you know, type of guy. And there's a lot of those guys. Like it'd be cool if we did.
Yeah.
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 food, get sunlight in the morning, lift four days a week, and you know, make sure you're getting adequate sleep. And so these people get they get like attention from going further out on the the the crazy like claim curve. Right.
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, dude, because you'd say everything you need to say in fourteen seconds.
And what are you gonna do tomorrow? What are you gonna post the next day? What are you gonna post the next day? You gotta 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.
And all the people that are creating content to try to influence me.
Um, 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. So n nobody's incentive.

the simple few things that you should focus on to get right because
They'd be done. You wouldn't tell me anything and you'd be done talking.
I was trying to find it, but Bri'm on Brian Johnson's newsletter and his subject line for his last new newsletter was Wednesday. It says, Your boners are killing you.
That was the subject line and it was how the lack of getting nighttime erections is somehow correlated with uh longevity and it was like you're saying it's not sexy to sell just like well
Can we do a quick sidebar on Brian? So I I like Brian a lot as a guy. Really nice guy. I actually really like what he's doing in general.
But man, I kinda miss the old Brian Johnson where it seemed like he was a missionary nerd.
trying to do this for science. 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 that he's got like
Cool YouTube content. He's got great subject lines for his emails and he's got a great social media strategy.
And
I get why all that's good.
But it does make me trust less in a weird way because he kinda w what he was doing before was so different.
This kind of self funded science experiment on himself.
with a noble goal and noble mission.
And I I don't know, I kinda feel like he's detracting from that. I think he he's uh I don't know. Am I the only one who feels that way, Sam, what do you think?
Um, I have a lot of trust in him still. I think that I think that he's done a good job of like he ha he sells an olive oil that's called snake oil. And I think any time someone makes fun of themselves by trusting them goes up.
I don't think I have the same concerns as you. 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.
Justin, what do you think? I I think he's doing an incredible service to humanity, like how aggressively he's publishing everything. I think that he is
Where I would say we differ.
is one, I mean, one, he's trying to build a like longevity cult, like new religion, which he openly says. Uh I'm not trying to do that. And the second thing is he he's very much a believer in this like
The algorithm where like if you live by the algorithm and do everything it tells you, like you'll live a longer and healthier life. Which I think is
Fair and good, and I'm all for that.
I'm much more interested in like
Why are people uniquely getting sick in in today's, you know, environment and what in our environment is poisoning everyone?
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.
But I
Unfortunately, like I will be very interested to see what happens to him over the next twenty years. But I think twenty years of trying very like out on the risk curve therapies, uh, you know, it's quite quite possible something like doesn't go so well.
Yeah, maybe I just have a preference for like the autistic biohacker rather than like
The uh
you know, content creator influencer with a D to C brand underneath it. I think that I've just seen a lot of that. And the first thing he was doing felt felt very original.
Oh.
Let me ask y you had this great phrase that I think we should bring up, which is
Or maybe it's you or it was Cali. I don't remember you y maybe maybe it was your co founder, but
Yeah, 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. 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 the fish is sick. Why are all the fish getting sick? 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, it's their environment.
And I love that metaphor of cleaning the tank. 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. I think that we have a four point three trillion dollar industry that's job it is to propagandize people to think the only way to fix the fish's health problem is drugging them.
Like that that to me is the insane thing that we're
Yeah, they're saying situ.
situation we find ourselves in is
Everyone is getting sicker, you know, overweight, everything. I think I asked Chat T P T recently. I think it was something like sixty percent of people have taken pharmaceuticals in the last twelve months.
Or like you had a prescription, something crazy like that.
It's crazy.
So let's do the so the first one you had was kind of the cleaning of the tank, right? Check up for the house.
Find find ways that you can make your home environment.
healthier for you and less interfering with your with your health.
The second one you have, a modern butcher shop. So this is about feeding the fish.
I love wh what is the modern butcher shop opportunity you see? 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 were people were gonna have more plants in their homes'cause it's kinda nasty. And also I thought I was like for there's something about the meat at Whole Foods that I actually think is crap nowadays.
Totally.
Yeah, I'm not I'm not saying you're right or a genius.
But I'm not saying it either. I I you know, I think I've hung out with Justin before, so I'm I'm sure I've stole I stole that.
Yeah, I mean, so 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. Um, but it's it's the first one that I've seen that goes as far as I would like. And and basically let me like set the table through an analogy.
I I think that like in the eighties
Uh 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. And Starbucks came along. There was then that was like big second wave culture um kind of coffee. And now there's like craft, you know, comatier and like
small, like cool roaster and coffee shops in every major city that you go to.
I basically think that meat today is where coffee was in the eighties. Like you go to the grocery store and you're buying meat. You're buying like steak. You're not you're like no one is differentiating on uh how is this dry aged? What is the cut? What is the genetics of the animal, you know, how was it raised, was it regenerative, was it not, was it fed, you know.
soy was it massaged until it was killed? And like did it drink IPAs until its last day? Like all these sorts of things are actual differentiators in buying meat and buying steak. And people are aware of them.
But the market has not caught up yet.
And if you have you ever bought from Snake River Farms or like heard of this company?
Yeah, I bought
From Snake River. Wha what's her story? I just kinda 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 the the branding was like eighty percent, twenty percent, right? Like the 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?
Yeah, they're super legit. So they they are one of the uh few companies in the US that have an American like Wagyu. And so they have a a Wagyu line they imported, I believe, from Japan some point in the
Seventies or eighties. And
They've been like breeding this waggy line.
If you buy Whole Foods Best Ribeye.
You're probably gonna cost you like twenty bucks a pound or something like this.
If you buy like the best ribeye from um you know from Snake River, it's gonna be like sixty to seventy dollars per pound.
And so the the
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. Um, 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 gonna be able to get at Whole Foods.
So this there's actually like kinds like there's two opportunities. One is to create the like another snake river farms, right? A a brand
that is, you know, elevated in some some way that would go sell through grocery stores. And so
Just the way we've had, you know.
You know, you have Oatly selling oat milk. You got you have 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 that that that's one idea, which already sounds like a big idea.
Yeah. And I could imagine I could totally imagine somebody who takes a like
Um
a content approach to this. So let's say you were doing this
If you go on TikTok and Instagram and your YouTube and you're telling your story about the unique things you're doing with your 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
Maybe it's like a a vo version where you're genetically selecting in some way the sort of premium
Or you're you're you're breeding in some way the the more premium
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.
And
B blu bottle sold for what? Like
Five hundred or seven hundred million dollars. Seven or eight hundred. Yeah, seven or eight hundred. Seven and like I don't know if anyone like how popular is blue bottled nationwide because
I had never heard of it till I moved to San Francisco. This is like ten plus years ago. I think it's like a big city thing. It's like it's 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.
And it just seemed like a passion project, and then I see that it sells for seven hundred or eight hundred million dollars and and wow, that that thing really worked.
So yeah, I I'm a b this is like
To me, this is a ten out of ten idea. This is an amazing idea.
I I I agree. I mean, I think it's a super exciting one. I also think that the reason the reason I would personally, if I were to start this, uh, you know, start with like a butcher shop or something like that.
is that with a butcher shop you can actually
Have a
l a pretty wide range of pricing. You can tell the story. You can try like do small samplings. You can talk about the aging and stuff like that.
If you took a sixty dollar steak in the Whole Foods and just plopped it on the shelf next to like a twenty dollar one or a fifteen dollar one, and there's no story ability there.
That thing just like won't sell, unfortunately.
Are 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?
Uh no. So so there are small farmers that are
growing really, really high quality meats they're selling at farmers markets. They're just hard to buy from. Like it's hard to aggregate enough supply that Whole Foods is like, yep, put it in the 500 stores or whatever. Or, you know, it can fill up a a meat case in Austin. And so
This really only works um
Where if you're a if you're a butcher, you can buy probably an entire
an entire herd or or an entire amount of uh farmers or ranchers cattle and sell it through your store over the course of a couple of months.
That is worth your investment from a relationship and like
amount that you're gonna make on that standpoint. For Whole Foods, it's like yeah, we're never gonna work with a small interesting operator that might just have fifty or a hundred head of cattle leather stuff. And can you freeze and store m like beef?
Uh and it'd still be great months later.
Yeah, you can. I mean, the the better thing though is that you can like dry age it. And this is the other thing that if if you're taking this like hyper premium approach, uh, you can actually just hang meat in these meat lockers and stuff like that. And it actually cures, gets like a richer flavor uh and the like the more you age it. The reason that they don't, obviously, is like the more that you age it.
Uh the last
the less amount of like cash that you're cycling through because you're not selling it as quickly. And so it doesn't work for the retail model, but if you're doing a really, really high end thing,
uh like a a butcher shop, it could actually work.
How big is this business, you think, Snake River Farms?
I would imagine it's in the like two to three hundred million in revenue range.
Wow.
I think it's probably massive. Are they raising but they're raising their own beef though, too. I mean they have like photos of cowboys. So they like Yeah, yeah. I mean they're they're vertically integrated. They've been doing this for a long period of time, as far as I understand. 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 like
Like sell into a butcher shop in Austin, Nashville, San Francisco, LA, New York that that just does really well. Like I'm frankly shocked that
The only butcher shop that I know that is doing this is start is in Austin and you know, it's opening in like a month.
And is he trying to just make one?
Or he's trying to make it like a
Like a
Nationwide type of thing.
Uh I 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 business.
That's an amazing idea.
It's it's it is amazing. It's so expensive though. And it's a lot of this is centered around beef only.
Um,'cause like I've always wanted to get uh like healthier chicken'cause I I I just don't love eating lots of beef.
So previous like again, like eighty years ago, the food system had diversity. There were multiple types of birds, chickens, things like that. Today, ninety nine point
Five percent, I believe, of every chicken eat 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. 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 um, you know, and it gets eaten. I think the average life of these birds
Uh, on average they they're like born to harvest is something like six weeks. And so
Yeah. Wait, so I 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.
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 br I don't like m you know, whatever. And they just haven't had chickens that are actually like delicious. Uh and it's it's funny. You can read
old ads. 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've like cornered the market on this one chicken genetics and they served it only in their first class cars. And all these people were like, Wow, this is the best chic I've ever had in my life. Like there's stories like that where it's like what is the Wagyu or Kobe
Version of chicken. I d I've never even heard of one.
Yeah, exactly. No one knows. I mean there there's no one that is raising these for
Dude, that's insane. By the way, s absolute sick burn to call someone a Cornish cross. That's gonna be my new thing. Anytime I see somebody that's just you're just a ninety nine, you're just like ninety nine percent of the others. You're just trying to pack on just pack on mass. You're a quick flip of a chicken. That's you're just a Cornish cross.

There's this famous ad uh there's a guy named Joseph Sugarman who um
Kind of
pioneered direct marketing, direct response copywriting in the eighties. And he at the time a court's
movement watch was already popular. Like watch connoisseurs knew about that.
But it wasn't like impressive. Like it was just like a normal like table stakes thing for any watch worth more than fifty bucks. But anyway, he was famous for creating these ads for uh this wine of line of watches. And he popularized the idea of quartz movement watch as if it was like some like epic thing, like
And then all the watch kind of serves like Yeah, dude.
Th the they all we all have this. But that's sort of like um
what you're describing a little bit with these chickens is like you can actually like
come up you can in if you you can invent interesting cool stories that are also true and factual but like
You know, I'll think 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 and you're like, Yeah, yeah, I know, but like most people don't know that. And so we're gonna tell this amazing story about that.
Exactly. Yeah. And I 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 more. 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.
Uh like I think that is the underserved market that
that you could build a real brand around. What's your food budget?
Every month and where are you buying are you buying like all of your meat from the Snake River Farms?
Uh, no, not all of it. Um I mean the their steaks are like super fatty and marbled and everything. Like I'm you wouldn't want to actually eat that every day. But I I basically buy my meat and most of my food from uh local farmers around the Austin area. What does that mean? Like you personally have relationships or you go to a farmer's market? No, so yeah, go to a farmer's market. There's also a like a food truck here.
Where it's it's sort of this like refrigerated trailer where they act they it's a combination, it's owned by three or four local farms and they just stock it up. And so I just go every week and that's where I buy like all of my normal staples. Are you just like not eating apples in December or whatever? Like you can't like I guess if there's seasons, particularly in Austin when it's up mostly desert, like
Where does that come from?
Whole foods then is where I'll get like the remainder of like the produce and stuff that's not seasonal. Got it. So you do do like some normal stuff and then you also like
Yeah.
Farmers markets, which is like
Not extreme, but like you're putting a lot of effort into it. That's pretty cool.
All right, let's do the next idea. So annual home checkup, I'm giving that a B.
Uh this
This blue bottle for uh for beef. This blue bottle of the modern day butcher shop. I'm giving that an A plus doing that. You want that to exist or you want to invest or you think it's it, dude. I want it to inv I would be a customer of it. I know the I know where the demand is. I know a lot of people listen to this be like, I'm not trying to buy a sixty dollar steak. That's fine. There's a lot of people who are.
trying to buy stuff like that. I I know a lot of people that are trying to do that. And you I just know that when you go into a category where there is no existing brand,
It is all commodity.
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 folders cost per cup of coffee, but I think it's in like the cents. So you the idea of going to Starbucks and paying four dollars 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. 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 kinda like a one of one entrepreneur, but that is a
To me, that's a billion dollar opportunity uh to do that. Whether you do it that way or you
sell into retail and like you said, you know, you do need to tell the story of why this thing costs more.
And that's why you have to tell the story on social media.
and sell it to retail. So you'd have to be great at content on TikTok and Instagram.
And then sell into and into retail stores that way. But to me that is like a
That's a twelve out of ten I idea. But you have another one on here.
Calibrate for fertility. What is this?
Yeah. Uh well quick, if anyone does the butcher shop thing, I want to invest. I think it's such an exciting interesting.
Um
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. Um, you know, IVF or what's called ARP assisted reproductive or ART assisted reproductive technologies are growing like seven to eight percent a year and it's accelerating. IVF is the best in class option right now and it costs like twenty to thirty thousand dollars.
It injects a bunch of hormones. It's super invasive. It's super hard, you know, on the on the female. And
It's it's just a brutal, brutal thing. And so I think there is this
Big opportunity.
Two
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. 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
Uh people do like an environmental review, make sure that you're not wearing polyester underwear while you're trying to have a kid or you know, any number of things that actually seem to have a really, really big impact on how likely you are to conceive during that window.
And
Pretty much just say, Hey, before going the
twenty to thirty thousand dollar, very expensive, very invasive, very hard IVF route, do this like, you know, several hundred dollar a month sort of lifestyle based fertility approach. Uh, and we're gonna try and help you conceive naturally without having to go through IBS. I know men can do stuff to increase their sperm count, with their sperm count being down. That's like a huge issue.
Can women do the same thing?
Yeah, yeah. I mean women women can improve their fertility for sure.
uh, you know, from people even talk about this all the time. Like stress is a big factor, but they're not they're not talking about at the hormonal level, like seems like progesterone helps with
uh increasing well odds of conception. Uh there's a bunch of interventions that I think are just
almost criminally underutilized.
Justin, have you ever heard us talk about one chart businesses? Have you ever heard this thing we say on this pod? Yeah.
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 two thousand and eighteen. Look at the like relative search volume.
It's up, you know, to from zero to seventy five on this chart all the way to a hundred uh on a hundred scale.
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 thirty year time horizon. Not a
Not like a six year time horizon. And what you're saying is there's stuff you can d because I VF 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. I've never heard of this company. What does Calibrate do? Yeah, that's a crazy stat that you have on them as well. Say that.
Yeah, so so Calibrate was a company uh they they got acquired somewhat recently.
But they basically started out by being
They paired GLP1's IA OZEMPIC with lifestyle interventions. And so their whole thing was like Ozempic, people are meant to be on it for the rest of their lives. What Calibrate did is said, we're gonna prescribe you Osempic, we're also gonna introduce coaching, accountability, lifestyle interventions, like this whole suite of things where the goal is to
Get you off of those empic at the end of a six or twelve month period. Like a like a Noom meets or kind of I mean, Weight Watchers is trying to do this. Uh Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. And so they companies always scale fast. Noom did something similar pre O Zempic 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. This is it's I don't know how these guys grow so so big.
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of demand for this. And what Calibrate figured out is how to actually get it covered by some insur to some degree by insurers. And insurers were okay with it because they're like, Great, we're not gonna have to pay
twenty grand a year for Azempic indefinitely, uh we can actually get people off of this this drug after a six or twelve month period. And so in the first two years, they got to like over a hundred million dollars in revenue uh and just scaled insanely quickly.
It does look like Calibrate kind of.
Went under went under though or something? I don't know. I see I'm looking I was looking for their f funding stuff, but it looks like they
They've got restructured private equity, but basically for twenty million, they got seventy five percent of the company now. So I think it's it it definitely ran into some trouble. Yeah, but that means they could be bad operators, but the demand still existed. Yeah.
Yeah, that that would be my contention basically is that they were doing this and they launched a
I think twenty twenty one, something like that.
Uh, and and I basically think that insurers went from th they were like 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, uh, which I think probably did not do them any favors.
What percentage of people needing IVF?
You probably don't know this, but uh of like the average age of the first time mother has gone up. I think it's
nearly thirty at this point. I think it's twenty nine or something like that. In the seventies it was twenty one. Um so it's gone up a lot. What percentage is it just because of people waiting longer to have families versus like American food system being poisoned?
It's a good question. I I don't know, honestly, but what I do know is from reading stats, it seems like
Uh most of the decline in birth rate
It's about seventy percent of it comes from people that previously would have had three to four kids now having one or two.
And so it's not like people are deciding not to have kids, they're just having fewer.
And I do think that the
biological fertility issues are a huge, huge amount of what is driving down the average number of of kids that uh, you know, a family or a woman has these days. Dude crazy how many of my friends, my male friends tell me that they're like
Like in s in Austin, we used to go to the sauna all the time and I would have so many friends that are like, uh, 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'em right now. You know what I mean? Like there were so many people that I knew uh you and I, Justin, our friends.
And they're like, uh, I can't do this, I can't do that, I need to go do this because we're we're struggling and it's my fault. It's pretty wild.
Sean, have you had a bunch of friends that have like complained of similar stuff? They're like it's it my stuff ain't working.
You lost me at have you had a bunch of friends, so no.
I 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.
Uh right now has some amount
of fertility challenges.
Uh and even if that's six to twelve months and then they get pregnant.
Even still, you know, if 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 twelve more months to get pregnant.
So
You've mentioned three kind of health
related startup ideas.
You've started
Well I think
four kind of successful that I know of. Uh
health health related companies. Can you describe this approach?'Cause
I'm the kind of guy that bounces around from industry to industry, model to model. I'm like
I'm like a variety seeker.
And
I don't think that's good. Like just when I learn about an o a a space, I get intrigued by something I'm a beginner in and I go in and I I'm I stop the compounding of that. So I don't think that's too smart.
Can you describe your approach to entrepreneurship versus
You know somebody like me who's just bouncing around and trying to
a hundred different pr trying to solve a hundred different problems in a hundred different spaces with a hundred different business models.
Totally, yeah.
I I think for 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.
Like I I think that
There's a massive amount of compounding, like relationship compounding, even personal brand compounding. Like people think of me as like
into health, which pays some dividends. That's probably gonna, you know, be even more so over the next decade. Um
You understand the space, you understand the problems, you understand the players and relationships. Like I think that if you decide
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.
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, uh and there needs to be a bone broth company.
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?
Yeah. So I was going to CrossFit in San Francisco in twenty fifteen.
And a bunch of crossfitters were like, You should do bone broth.
I'm a terrible cook. I'm like almost never cook for myself. And so I basically was like, great, I'm gonna 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. And did I think it would grow to like be a nine figure annual business? Definitely not.
But it was a big enough opportunity that decided to take the swing. 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?
Uh yeah, I was I was just obsessed with the topic, basically. Like I've been reading about paleo and reading about um, you know, all these sorts of things since I was basically in college. Like I was a weird dude in college who my senior year, I went paleo. Uh, and so I like wasn't drinking beer, wasn't eating pizza or french fries. All my friends were like
The hell's wrong with you? Like what's going on?
And so I I just got very into this idea, this like secret in a sense of
Like why is everyone getting secret record levels and what could be kind of underpinning that?
Uh and so it was this deep interest.
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. And I can spend the rest of my career trying to solve or take stabs at various instances of this problem.
whether that's starting a brand or trying to fix like the incentives through TrueMed, um, you know, I basically was like, I think I'm just gonna try and solve or work on fixing this problem for the rest of my career.
So let's go back to that kettle and fire example. So you you're you're doing CrossFit, trying to live healthier, CrossFitters are telling you should do bone broth. You're like, Cool.
What do I
And you go, you look.
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 D D C product. You never
build like an actual consumer brand.
Can you just describe like the
The three or four bullets happened that first year to like make it happen.
Like'cause I think, you know, all these ideas are cool, but you gotta be the type of person that can make shit happen.
You made shit happen at that stage. Can you just describe what what you made happen for Kettle and Fire?
Yeah, totally. So we basically
We first tested a landing page, put up a landing page with no product, started buying ads.
to see like 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. I'd send three brands at the kettle on fire. You just made it yourself, you just mocked up an ugly landing page? Yeah, we mocked up a ugly landing page on Unbound, paid someone on five or ten dollars to make a terrible logo, and basically started selling a
box at twenty nine ninety nine. And when you say started selling what? Facebook ads? How'd you get the track? Yeah, we did Facebook ads and at Facebook and
afterwards and then some Bing at the time'cause they were like there was an orb there, which is much cheaper. Dude, Bing Bing clicks back then. I I w they were so cheap.
And they converted way higher. I know. I know. I was always like, I don't know who people are, but they're in the world. What was that first few weeks or maybe month like that gave you the was were you looking for conviction or you already had conviction? What what what happened in that first month for you? That yeah, I was I was looking for conviction. And so basically we'd put in uh five hundred dollars.
We built this landing page and I think sold like a little over$2,000 worth of product inside of about a month. And so I ran the numbers and
I was basically like, okay, we can build a business. And I think just given existing traffic, we can turn this into at least like a two to three hundred grand a year kind of business. And based on like what I thought the margins would back into, I was like, that would should be about a hundred grand, 150 grand a year in profit, which seemed like a worthwhile
Thing to take on.
And then what uh okay, so you do you do that and where did it get much bigger than that? What what happened to make it much bigger?
So we validated the idea.
Uh the next thing is we did we had to figure out how to make it.
And so we emailed and called over five hundred different manufacturing partners to just
Like
Please someone help us figure out how to make this product. And eventually what ended up working
is my brother, who was nineteen at the time, who I co founded the business with, he emailed Mark Cuban as like
I'm a nineteen year old entrepreneur. Like please help. And Mark Cuban
introduced us to a manufacturing partner who we ended up working with and still work with today to make our first like version of the bone broth product. And so 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. He was like, Talk to my food person. And then his food person introduced us to our coatbackers. Like, Yeah, you should talk to this this group over here. And just to clarify, that those first two thousand dollars worth of orders, did you just go refund them because you didn't have a product yet?
I I emailed all of them and I said, Hey, we're not gonna have a product for like six to nine months. I can either refund you in full right now or fifty percent off and we'll we'll like eventually ship it. And people that didn't respond, I would just refund them.
Yeah.
Okay, great. So Mark Cuban gets you a food uh person. So that's the second thing that now
Now you know how to now you can get the product made.
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 twenty five, uh, into doing the first run of our product. They had thirty thousand dollar minimum runs. Uh it was like a hundred twenty K uh kind of run budget. So I was like, either this is gonna work great or I'm gonna eat bone broth for two years. Either way, I'll I'll like
Feel pretty good. Uh and so we bought the first product and
Year one, we basically did two point eight million in sales. Um, and after about six months of being in business, one of the buyers at Whole Foods saw an influencing about our product, reached out and was like, Hey, I wanna bring you guys into Whole Foods. And we basically we
We did extraordinarily well in Whole Foods and uh got national rotation the following year and that just kinda like started our our journey.
I think I was with you.
eight or ten 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 well I mean it seems like you got a really good career. Why are you throwing it away at this? Like I I just remember thinking of like
Let uh like why does he want to ruin everything? Yeah, starting a bone broth company in SF at the height of like the tech boom was definitely not
A consensus opinion.
My sister when she moved to San Francisco, she had uh
She was
uh d working in a corporate career. She worked for Deloitte, I think. Uh so she was like a management consultant. She had gotten her MBA. She got gotten an undergrad in electrical engineering, got an MBA from a good business school, was a management consultant.
And then she um she's like I she's like I'm sick of this life. I wanna I need a business that I can own and not have to go to a job every day.
And she was so tired of like
the consulting hours were so bad that she would come home and her d like her kids would be asleep and she would just pick them up from the crib just to hold them for a few minutes'cause like
She hadn't been there when they to like even play with them before before bed.
And like after
Four nights of that. She's like, Never, no, I'm not doing this.
Uh, never had started a business before, decides to start a um an in home daycare. So she kicks me out of the apartment I'm living in.
And says I'm gonna use that apartment, which but uh uh my
My parents owned a apartment. They're like she's like, kick you out.
I'm gonna use that to start this business.
And I'm gonna she needed six kids. So six kids to come to this like in home daycare.
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 gonna change diapers. 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. She works just like a few hours a week and has like this amazing business.
And um a lot of the 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.
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
And uh that's totally normal, even though it feels abnormal in the moment. It feels bad in the moment.
Totally. And I I Sam, I'd actually love your thoughts.
S my experience, frankly, was
Almost every single person that I knew who was starting a business or st or trying to start a business like between twenty two and twenty five has made it in some way, shape, or form. Like it's insane.
Yeah, so Justin and I both started roommate matching companies. We are both we are both twenty, and so between the ages of like twenty and twenty-five, we were like in the same industry. And so all of our SF friends
W uh you know, are s we're similar age. And um
Dude, it is crazy how many uh I actually just tweeted about this today. I was like, I grew up in S from age like twenty to thirty. It's crazy how many of our six are successful just because they're around. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Totally. Naval has a great phrase where he says, Yes, you hear the stats about startups. Oh, ninety percent of businesses you know, new businesses fail.
He goes, Yeah, startups fail.
But founders don't.
And I love that phrase'cause he said, Oh, basically if you just fast forward
Ten years.
Any of the founders that stayed in the game, like the success rate goes from your first business success rate might be ten percent.
But the ten year saga of you trying a bunch of shots on goal and getting smarter every year.
S like the odds are now s like if you just look at our cohort of friends, right? Sam, we were in a mastermind together back in what was that, twenty thirteen, something like that.
Like
our cohort of friends, which is probably like, you know
thirty to fifty founders that we used to hang out with and know regularly.
The hit rate's like eighty or ninety percent success. You know, for the people that actually stuck with it. 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 USAM, sorry. Like literally I'm just thinking of like a couple of friends that did that. They were just like, hey, I like the San 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. We could like wrap it up with one quick story, which is uh I remember Gag and Bianni started this thing called Udemy, and it was like
Courses. What? This is like what Ty Lopez does, and I remember
Um
Both Justin and I were like
I guess we should get in on this. Like this seems like a really good way to like make one hundred dollars or three hundred dollars a month, which would be like life changing. And so we both did that stuff. And I think that, you know, I I could say for Justin for sure, people look up to you, and I mean I look up to you and I admire you. It's crazy how like if you look at like eight or ten years ago, which wasn't that long ago, you were doing many things
that uh like
you know, I people like will poo poo like maybe course creation or like buying a car and renting it on Toro or whatever. And it's like
Man, the people you admire start way scrappier than you think. I I know I for sure did.
Yeah, same. I mean, I I don't know that anyone admires me that's taken my keyboard shortcuts for Mac users Udemy course, but uh definitely I was hustling back in the day. Um have you ever read uh Travis Klanick, the guy who started Uber, his uh his old blog? He had this
Amazing blog that is. Was it it called like Awesomeness Bro? It was called like something silly like that, right? It was he heavily browed out.
Um but he had this blog post like
Attending CES on the cheap. Or is it Southwest Southwest on the cheap. It was basically like
His playbook for how to
Have a badass time at a conference when you have no money.
And he's like, All right, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna get to the airport, but n never never take the taxis. Here's what you can do instead. Here's what you're gonna do for for staying at someone's house. You know, here's how you're gonna 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 gonna say.
And he had this like really scrappy
approach to how to just like, you know
Okay.
Wedding crash.
A a major conference on a budget.
And he was thirty one years old, by the way. He was thirty one when he wrote that post. Just not like he was a college kid.
And he also used to
invite people to just stay at his house in San Francisco. It's part of the magic of a city like San Francisco is like
He used to say if you're c and the the reverse was if you're coming to San Francisco and you got no money
And but you're a founder?
He called his house the jam pad 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 kinda build his m momentum, his network, his energy. It is pretty wild.
Yeah, so cool.
Can we finish with the Zuck story? Zuck is auctioning off his gold chain for you for your charity? What is this? Well, I saw you tweet that, uh uh, Justin. I was like, Is that real?
Yeah, and he totally downplayed it. You said Zuck's auctioning auctioning my chain and no one like it looked like no one replied to that.
Yeah, I had a bad Twitter day that day. Uh people were bidding for it. How much did it end up going for? It's her like almost forty one grand.
But one, do you know?
Uh some anonymous person, I'm not sure. But we basically probably a crypto person, to be honest. Um but yeah, so a couple years ago, three years ago.
I started something called Inflection Grants, which is
effectively just giving small like two to three thousand dollar grants to people under the age of twenty four that are high potential. Uh you know, it's infectiongrants.com if anyone wants to check it out.
But basically someone made an offer to me when I was in my twenties, uh when I was like graduating college, where he was like, Hey, you should keep running with your startup. 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?
Uh, I was a mentor that I had built a relationship with in Pittsburgh where I was going to school.
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 how in my decision making. And he was right.
And so I started inflection grants three years ago.
Since then, um, you know, we've given out like fifty grants and Long Journey, who one of the GPs is Ariel Zuckerberg, has
gotten behind it in a big way. And uh so this year
Uh Ariel convinced Mark to auction off one of his
already worn gold chains and then we had to make sure that it was cleaned, no DNA residue, anything like this. But uh sold, you know, did you really did you actually have to like that stuff. Did you get to did you get to talk to him at all?
Uh no.
No. But yeah. So he gave it away and we auctioned off for forty one grand, which goes to charity, which is great. So that's twenty twenty people are gonna get these two thousand dollar grants. Exactly.
You g gave us this document before we started and I think we only touched like a third of it. There's so many more cool things that you have to come back and talk about. Like
A lot of people don't know this, but Sean, did you know that Justin was like a co author on the book Traction with the Duck Duck Go founder? Like there's like
There's like uh there's like five or ten other things that you have really amazing stories behind and are really insightful on. And so uh
Thanks for coming on and and doing this. Um
I'm like literally sitting here taking notes on like incandescent bulb and uh like farmers markets and shit like that. And uh you're gonna be getting a lot of uh follow up text on me where it's just like just a just tell me what to do. Tell people where to where to follow, where to get more.
Uh yeah, so I'm
Substack Justin Mares.
subst you know dot substack.com. I write a monthly newsletter on health and business stuff. And then also on Twitter at JW Mayers.
And go read The Great American Poisoning. We didn't do it justice in this
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.
All right, that's it. That's the pot. Thank you, Justin.
I feel like I can rule the world I know why
Be what I want to
I put my law in it like my day's off On the road less travel never looking back