So this is actually a company that I've wanted to invest in for so long.
If you're doing this, like please just email me.
All right. So I wanted to have you on because you are one of my healthiest buddies.
Last time you were on, I think you've been on three times already, you didn't get into a lot of the ideas because we were just like peppering you with so many questions and I wanted to be more focused.
I think I asked you what are five or six like interesting health companies or health trends that you're interested in investing in.
And you hit me back with a very detailed list in a very short amount of time.
So clearly you are like already thinking and acting on a lot of these things.
Can we go through each of them and you just tell me what they are because I'm crazy fascinated.
Because like for the listener, you told me in 2014 or 15 that you were quitting tech. you had a software company, and you were gonna launch a bone broth company.
And I was like, oh, man, like, you decided to throw your life away.
That sucks. Like, you were gonna be one of the greats.
And then, it just came out in Forbes, I think?
Or was it Forbes? You had this amazing feature about your company, Kettle and Fire, and how you surpassed $100 million in annual revenue.
And it was amazing.
And I'm like, you definitely won.
And I read I read the article by the way, and I texted like five friends and I'm like, Justin does everything the right way.
By the way, did I get that right?
You guys, you're at 100 million run rate or revenue?
Yeah. North, north of that.
Yeah. And you said something amazing.
I think you said, we're gonna, what did you say?
We're gonna be the best operating e -commerce company in America.
Is that right? Yeah, I mean, basically like there are most of the big public, big food companies were started pre -1900.
And so a lot of these companies are very, very bloated, they're large, you know, they've been around, frankly, I think many of them are poisoning people, and then paying lobbyists and other sort of opposition research groups to make sure that like soda doesn't get removed from food stamps and all these sorts of things.
And so I think these are just generally bad actors.
And I think that there's a huge opportunity to both out innovate these big CPG companies and also just run a better business.
Like I guarantee no one in Battle Creek, Michigan working at Kellogg's is looking at how do we use AI to automate a lot of our workflows and process and things like that.
Whereas like that's something we have live work streams going in Kettle and Fire to figure out how do we apply the craziest technology, you know, move like leap forward of you know, certainly my, certainly my lifetime to just running the best possible company that we can.
And I think it's working so far.
We have like 34 people for, uh, you know, for our size of business, which is quite good scale.
Do you have only 34 employees?
Yup. Wow. Is it wildly profitable or is it, uh, working its way to be wildly profitable?
No, we're, we're profitable.
I mean, one of the things that I'm very proud of is like we've raised, uh, only $10 million in primary capital since starting the company.
And so it's been pretty capital efficient.
And you know, we've been focused on building the trend but also building a good business since we started it like nine years ago.
Yeah, that's awesome that you have proven me and I'm sure many other people wrong and you've been early on a bunch of stuff.
All right, so let's dive deep.
What's the first one you want to talk about?
Yeah, so first one I want to talk about is I think that there's this huge, huge macro trend where people are talking about Maha, they're talking about seed oils.
They're talking about all these things.
What's maha make America healthy again?
Okay, we're talking about all these things about fixing the chronic disease crisis in the US.
And I think that health trends specifically for dogs and other pets, like tend to lag a couple years behind humans.
Like basically a couple years ago, you know, you saw Blue Apron HelloFresh a bunch of these companies launch and then a couple years beyond that farmer's dog, a like fresh dog food delivery kind of company launches.
And I think there are well over 100 or 200 million in revenue at this point.
It's crazy. And I basically think that you can look at the US chronic disease crisis, obesity rates, inflammation, cancer, autoimmune, all these things.
The same thing is happening in dogs, like something like one in four dogs are going to get cancer at this point.
This is like unique.
It's new. Cancer rates among dogs are rising.
And again, this is because dogs, like humans, exist in an environment that is actively poisoning Like kibble is total trash and it is literally making dogs sick.
And so I think that there are a lot of these health trends that like people are getting into that you're going to see become popular now and in two to three, four years are going to be popular for pets.
Especially because now it's something like I think that millennials or Gen Z like literally have more dogs than babies or something like that.
The market is growing incredibly quickly.
Although I don't have a dog, but I think there's like a lot, a lot of gold in that sort of like take human health thing and apply it to a dog health product.
Is this true? You say here that in some cities there's more dogs than babies?
Yep, yeah, yeah, and it's certainly true like the younger you go.
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The kibble thing is interesting.
I had a dog for 15 years.
He was my best friend, and his last five years of life, it hit me where I was giving him...
So when I first got them, I was poor.
So I would like buy the cheapest dog food.
And then I could afford like whatever they tell you, like the schtick they tell you is only by something where it says chicken on the first ingredient, who knows if that's true or not.
But that's the more expensive thing.
And then I was like eating kibble, like dry dog food, it would be sort of like feeding me potato chips every day.
Do you know what I mean?
Like people's dogs are, you know what do you do when you have a dog and you eat dinner, they all come in obsessed over you and you like, yell at them.
And I'm like, if you gave me refried beans for every single meal, of course I'm going to want to like, be desperate for any new food.
It's kind of insane, right?
That we would feed them the same thing.
And it's like a process dried thing that doesn't expire.
Totally. It's insane, right?
It's totally insane.
And you look at the ingredients, it's like full of trash, full of artificial ingredients.
You know, like all of the stuff that people are trying to remove from their diets.
We basically put in kibble and feed to dogs for every single meal.
For every meal. I remember like my in -laws have a dog and he comes over and they're like, oh, don't give him table food.
I don't want him to be unhealthy.
I'm like, I don't know, man.
I feel like this asparagus and chicken might be all right.
100%. And we had Kevin Rose on the podcast and he had funded a company called dogagingproject .org.
And I believe what they are doing, the whole premise is that for some reason, I believe it was because a lot of times you don't want to see if you're willing to suffer, or you're willing to let your family suffer oftentimes more than you're willing to let your dog suffer.
But at the same time you're willing to experiment more.
And so the premise was that they had their what's the drug that is a longevity drug that starts with an R?
Rapamycin. Yes, I believe they were doing they were selling this to dog owners and what they found was like I guess there's a huge correlation between what we can do with dogs and what will eventually will do humans like you're suggesting and they have noticed that they have gotten dogs to live longer and their premise is we are going to start here and then eventually go there to humans and so yeah the people agree with you yeah yeah well I think that they're looking at it as like you know drug and then we'll expand dog longevity and then we'll move into humans I think what I think that like the business
opportunities exist looking backwards like everyone is talking about water cleanliness and water filtration and stuff like this and yet when they go to feed their dogs they like put their bowl under the sink and the dog gets a load of like whatever toxins, alcohol, or not alcohols, chlorine, like, you know, all of these sorts of things.
And like, that's its daily water source.
And I think that there's all of these things where like, why is there not a reasonably -sized company just doing like Aurora, like a really, you know, RORRA, like a really high -end water filter, but geared towards dogs or something like that?
I don't know. I think like dog saunas and dog cold plunges is probably a little too far, but certainly I think that there's like a bunch of peptides, supplements, you know, water filtration, things like that, that even like doing dog kennels and things like this with more natural materials that probably would do quite well for people who already think and view the world through the health lens and have not yet begun the process of applying that lens to their health or to their pets.
Can you tell me what Light Labs is?
That's amazing. I looked at the website.
It seems like this might, this is your brother's thing.
It might be bigger than everything you guys have done.
Yeah. Yeah, I hope so.
I mean, so my brother and I, we started Kettle & Fire together and we grew it.
And after some period of time, he stepped back from the business.
And so his new business, which he started last year, is called Light Labs.
And what they're doing is basically there are so many toxins and other sorts of, like, crap in our food supply chain.
And at Kettle & Fire, we spend almost half a million dollars a year testing all of the batches that we're making of bone broth to make sure that like, there's no glyphosate, there's no PFAS, there's no phthalates, like all these sorts of things.
And so we as a company spend a lot of money and a lot of energy making sure that our supply chain is clean, but we're making sure that it's clean of stuff that you can't see as a consumer, yet you probably care about.
And so what Light Labs is doing is they're basically building a lab testing, toxin testing company, like a modern one, for consumer brands like Kettle and Fire, where they do two things.
Like, they will test for nutrition fact panel, run the normal like heavy metals testing, things like that.
But they also do a longer tail of rarer tests, like phthalates, PFAS glyphosate, pesticides, things like that.
And then, once they run these tests, they actually expose it and push the most recent versions of a brand's lab test to both their website.
Or if you're sold mostly in retail, the goal is to get like a QR code that a consumer can scan and see, like, what is Ketel and fire's most recent lab test show around like PFAS and other sorts of exposures.
So, I think this is like one of the most interesting things happening in the health world right now is this broad push towards transparency and like getting a bunch of these things, microplastic satellites, whatever, that people know are bad but don't have visibility into.
Like bringing transparency to that food system, which then creates the incentive and energy to make change.
So that's kind of what he's doing.
I have a ton of questions on this.
So you and I lived in Austin together, and then before that we lived in San Francisco together.
Both very much like bubble cities, where Austin's like, you know, very health conscious.
And particularly our friend group was very health conscious.
And then San Francisco was like, you know, on the forefront of a lot of tech. Do people where I'm from in Missouri, where you're from in PA, do they care about any of this stuff?
Not right now, but I think that's not, like not 100 % of people have to care for this to make sense.
Like what is undoubtedly true is people are spending more time and energy focusing on sourcing, toxin reduction, they're spending more money at companies like Whole Foods, on brands like Kettle and Fire, on their health in general, and I think that this is one of the things that people are going to start caring about when they shop.
And like the minute that, yes it may not be like people, you know, where my family is from, where your family's from, they may not be asking about Thalate load in, you know, their hot dogs that they're eating or something like that.
But some percentage of people will, and you only need a small increase in order for there to be demand from the brand and consumer side to increase, you know, to basically have supply chains and agricultural resources ranching, like all these practices that incorporate and think about toxin exposure, pesticide load and the like.
And so I think LightLabs is the type of company that I'm super bullish on bringing transparency to the food system.
Cause I think it's just going to like, once you bring transparency, then there's energy to try and clean up and improve the food system behind that.
And so, so this company from, I don't know anything about those space, it's basically like putting an organic label on your food.
So a food company would pay them and they would say light labs is a reputable brand.
We have proof that they've tested everything.
We paid them money to do it.
And we have a dashboard as well where we can like, see where we are in the process of the testing.
Is that right? Yeah, exactly.
So consumer brands like Kettle & Fire, we already have to spend money on, you know, on these different sorts of tests and things like that.
Why do you have to?
Because you're legally required to by the USDA or FDA to do nutrition facts panels.
You have to do like heavy metals testing.
You just, there's just a slew of tests that you have to run.
By law. before you can actually just sell a product.
That's a thing that you already have to do.
Then what LiteLabs is doing is they are bringing a bunch more transparency to the supply chain and making it so that you can look at momentous supplements or any number of these things and basically see, okay, beyond just metals testing and things like this, what are the other things that they've tested for?
Oh, wow, I can see like no detectable phthalates.
I can see no detectable glyphosate, no detectable atrazine like some of these other pesticides that people care about.
And so I think it's bringing that what has been hidden in the depths of these horrible lab tests run by companies that are like 60 years old to the forefront and making it influence consumers buying behavior.
That makes me so bullish.
Yes. How big is the biggest lab business now or the couple of biggest ones and when your brother was raising money or when he was just brainstorming with you on describing how big this could or like what his dreams were in 20 years?
What was he saying?
Yeah. So the biggest one is called Eurofins, I think it's like an $11 billion or $12 billion company.
Like in revenue? No, in market cap.
But I mean, it pretty closely maps to revenue because it's like a service business.
It's like not a great...
It doesn't trade very well.
So what he was saying is basically, step one, I think that we can build a competitor and be better than Eurofins.
You submit to a Eurofins lab, you submit an email inquiry, and you get a response maybe in like three or four days.
And then when they run your tests, they don't communicate anything and they dump like 30 PDFs on you, that you have to hire someone that understands food scientists to like, translate this stuff.
It's really like insane.
And you go to their website, eurofins .com.
It looks like you're making a vaccine or you're doing some type of embryo work.
Like it's a very intimidating website.
It looks like an academic site from like 95, you know?
Like it's very intimidating.
Exactly. And so they're not the type of company that is going to build an incredible product for consumer brands.
Uh, and they're not the type of company that's going to build the consumer facing product.
And so what he was like, my brother was thinking is he was like, wow, this is going to be incredibly interesting.
We can build a Eurofins competitor.
We can do a better job servicing CPG brands.
We already know how to do that from his experience at Kettle and Fire.
And then we have the opportunity to build out this entire other business where we can build like consumer awareness of these different toxic compounds and turn Kettle and Fire's five hundred thousand a year of lab testing expense into an actual revenue generating function and almost like a marketing line item.
This is so awesome.
Does he have any revenue now, your brother?
Yeah, they've launched a couple of months ago and they've started to get revenue.
Yeah. Did he raise funding or did he bootstrap it?
He did. No, no, this is definitely the type of company you have to raise money for.
It looks expensive to start.
Yes, definitely. It's, honestly it's the type of company that I think is, it's the perfect like act two company.
Like Nick has experience, domain expertise, can raise money.
And when your first thing is like, hey, we have to raise, you know, millions of dollars and we're going to write a check for, like, you know, multiple millions to buy a laboratory and buy lab equipment, all this stuff.
It's tough to make that bet on a 22 -year -old, but on a 29 -year -old with some experience, it makes more sense.
Is this in Texas? Yeah, in Austin.
Wow. This is amazing.
Wow, first of all, this is crazy.
Oh, and the labels, so if you go to McDonald's or fast food, they put the nutritional there, which is way more challenging, I think, than an M &M or a candy bar, which is more controlled.
but I'm pretty sure, I've always believed that nutritional labels are bullshit.
Like in my head, I've always been like, it's give or take, maybe even 30 % of what is presented.
The calories - That's exactly right.
Like, I would just, because I weigh my food, I've tracked almost everything that I've eaten for like four years now in MyFitnessPal Wow.
And you weigh it. And I weigh it.
And now I eyeball it sometimes.
But first of all, I've noticed a few things.
One, when people eyeball their food to track, they almost always overestimate or sorry underestimate by around 30 % and Then if you go and buy like let's just say a Big Mac the degree in which they are different is huge and there's no way that news those nutritional labels are accurate with just the calories let alone like Whatever else like the macros plus whatever else is supposed to be in it.
Yeah, exactly I mean the FDA first depending on the the compound or the nutrient like they'll have a limit that is often And it's plus or minus 10%, for sure, oftentime it's upwards of like 30, 40, even 50%, depending on the compound.
Because as you can imagine, some of these things are fairly sensitive, like potassium or iodine or things like this that are present in minuscule amounts.
It's really hard to say exactly for every single cookie or piece of bread that you're getting or whatever, that there is X amount of iodine in it.
And so the FDA allows for reasonably high tolerance on some of these errors, which makes a lot of this nutrition stuff even harder to figure out.
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All right back to the pod.
Who owns the is the certified organic, is that a company?
It is a, I believe it's a I think it's Word and TILF is one of them.
But yeah, it's like a certifying body.
And I've always contested that that's bullshit.
Because like, I just think that when you I've seen farms where they have like an organic section and a non -organic section, and it just seems like when you put medicine on one of them, it inevitably will get in the other one.
That is certainly true.
The thing that is good for, like, I think organic is better than nothing, but it's certainly not perfect.
And I think that there is a lot of, you know, there's a fair bit of research that organic vegetables, for example, have far fewer pesticides than their conventional kind of counterparts, but they still have some.
But it's not because they're directly being sprayed.
It's because of like, you know, wind, water, like all these sorts of things, moving these compounds everywhere.
What's another good one?
You want to do function health or skin gut health?
I'm fascinated by all these.
Yeah. Let's do let's do function.
So, you know, function, health, super power, like explain what those are.
Yeah. So function, health and superpower.
They're basically companies where you can go to their Web site and sign up, pay an annual membership fee.
And they'll facilitate a telemedicine thing where they'll be like, hey, you can go get your blood drawn at a lab or have someone come to you and you can test your own blood for like I think it's over 190 markers.
So you can get things like PFAS exposure, heavy metals, testosterone, you know, insulin markers, all these sorts of things that to just know are you healthy or do you have things that you need to work on?
And so I think that I believe that Function is one of the fastest growing companies in the entire Andreessen portfolio.
Like they're growing super, super fast. Yeah.
I think they announced another fundraising, but I think they announced it got to like nine figures in revenue in like two or three years like something insane.
It's crazy. And like there's so much demand for people wanting to understand their biomarkers, their lipids, like all these sorts of things.
I think that rolling four or five years, are we going to know more or less about the health of our bodies and what's like going on in our systems?
It's definitely more.
And what I think Function, Superpower and the like are doing is they're lowering the friction for people like you and I to understand what's going on in our bodies, in our blood and all that.
And that information creates a ton of potential for action.
But why are, why is function growing so fast?
Because I've used insight, insight or insight tracker.
Insight tracker Insight tracker for years, and then before that there was, I don't know, like there's these have always been a thing.
Why? Yeah. Like, and now I'm hearing so many people talk about function health, where I'm like, these have been cool and awesome for a decade now.
Why is this one particularly awesome?
I think that their marketing is great.
I think that the value prop is great.
It's like one price, one annual membership get this slew of tests.
Uh, like if you had, you, if you went to your doctor and asked for the same test that function would give you, it would be like, dude, they don't let you.
Well. Well, so if you went to it, right, they either don't let you, or it would be like seven or $8 ,000 and function is like 500 bucks a year.
I had my friend tried to go get this testosterone check and he went to the doctor and the doctor was like, Ah, you're 32.
You don't, you're fine.
like, you don't need to do that.
It's insane. The medical system is so patronizing.
It's like there also there's people talking about how you shouldn't get an MRI or shouldn't get your blood work done because it'll scare you, you will cause all these questions or scare you.
And you're like, fuck off.
Like that's just such an insanely patronizing thing.
Yeah, it's crazy. Like I, you know, I've done this before where I'm like, I want this tested.
And they're like, but you seem perfectly healthy.
And I'm like, dude, just like write it on the paper.
It means nothing to you, and it's important to me.
Just do what I tell you to do, please.
Like, this literally requires nothing from you, and I'm just going to learn.
It's exactly right.
I think that like, the medical profession writ large, there's certainly people that do good, but I think that many of them have this, like, the patient's an idiot, I know everything kind of vibe.
And that is if you look at the trajectory of American health, certainly, I think that we need to change what we're doing.
And I think taking health matters into their own hands is a huge, huge thing.
And so why this is an interesting trend to me, functions, super power and the like, is for the first time, I think you are going to see millions and millions of people being onboarded and understanding like what is going on in their blood, what's going on in their bodies, and then taking steps to optimize or improve that thing.
And so right now, if you take supplements, it's like, you know, Sam you probably take creatine or something like that, you probably take it and you're like, maybe I'm a little more shredded, maybe I'm like, you know, feel better or whatever.
but you're not seeing any of your lab markers change.
Same is true of like thyroid or cholesterol markers or lipids or other things.
I think as people get this information and start to retest over a six to 12 month period, that we are going to see way, way, way more products and services that sprout up where there is demand for people who want to optimize their biomarkers.
So sort of like today, we have personal trainers who help you get shredded cause that's kind of the only thing people can see.
I think in the future, we'll have like apps, trainers, services, things like this that are specific to Sam wants to lower his APO B score.
Or Sam wants to improve his, you know, LDL or something like that.
Sam wants to improve his thyroid.
Like, I think all of these things are newly going to be marketing angles and things that people talk about because they have this insight into their body.
This company also took off.
By the way, I quit taking creatine.
It turned me into a gorilla.
I got so big, like I couldn't, Like I cannot like fit into clothing.
Like have you taken it?
I have and I stopped.
I stopped because a friend freaked me out.
He was like, everyone who goes on Creatine starts losing their hair, which I like didn't experience, didn't know about, but I was like, huh.
I'll cycle off it for six months and see what happens.
I went on it. It didn't happen to you obviously.
No, not yet. But like, I like, I ballooned.
Like I just like it got so, it just felt like I had so much water, like it was like 15 pounds in like three weeks.
I got huge. Like I went from like 202 to like 215 or something and and then I was like, all right I gotta go off of it for like eight days and it just like all went away Because yeah, I don't know what happened but in this function health thing these guys took off Because uh, I mean what they did was smart they I don't know if Marc Hyman started it or if he's like considered it's he like the the Kim Kardashian of skims were like I don't know if he had the idea or like someone else had the idea and he was the face, but like Partnering up with that dude who's got 2 million or something followers
like my father -in -law is like, whatever mark says I do and so like Partnering up with a guy like this is so much better than whatever else health influencers sell like Coaching PDFs or you know what?
I mean? Totally. Yeah, like I generally think also as a side comment this is how creators are gonna monetize more in the future is like owning chunks of very good businesses that rely on distribution, rather than just like, I'm Mark Hyman and I get an affiliate fee every time I referred someone to check out Function Health or something, you know?
Yeah, yeah. For sure.
What's this other one about functional medicine doctor for your home?
That is amazing sounding, explain that.
Yeah. So there's increasing awareness around how your home can basically be a source of disease.
Like, lighting can be bad, EMFs, you know, are controversial, but like, I think definitely have some health impact.
Wait, what's that? EMS, electromagnetic frequencies, basically like your cell phone, your Wi -Fi router, like all of these sort of things that are, that we're surrounded by all the time.
You know, water, toxicity, like off gassing, things called volatile organic compounds, basically like that, you know, when you walk into a building that's newly painted or something like that, you can smell it.
Dude, do you have so much anxiety all day?
No, I'm pretty chill, I really believe in the like 80 -20 thing on this stuff Cause like everything you're describing in my house is like, you know, like a chainsaw and they're just gonna just rip me up Like, I saw a video, there's this guy named CarnivoreMD And he had a video on Youtube explaining like, his house And CarnivoreMD is the most extreme of the most extreme when it comes to like these types of granola health influencers.
And like, he had like a mattress that had only natural fibers, which I don't know what a grounding thing is, but there was like this, like this grounding for electricity.
He had like a poll that went into the ground of his home and all the electricity had to like touch that grounding pole.
Is that a thing? You know what I'm talking about?
That's amazing, yeah.
Like, it was like, and then he had like, no LED light bulbs.
he had no Wi -Fi so there was no Wi -Fi at his home and you had to plug in if you had to you wanted to use the internet on this one particular area of his home like it was crazy and I was reading it or watching this video and I'm like that's cool and also this fucking exhausting yeah definitely like when you just named all of these things I'm like I don't know man like I kind of would just fucking kill me early like you know what I mean like maybe I'll Right?
Take that as a consequence.
Yes. So, I agree, it's exhausting.
It's a multifactorial problem.
It's a thing that people are aware of, want to fix, but don't know where to get started.
This is actually why I think that a functional medicine or trainer that makes your house healthy, is a very interesting idea.
I actually invested in a company called LightWork.
It's dolightwork .com.
But they're basically doing this where they can send someone to your house and do a test around, you know, what are the things that what are the things that are potentially causing disease or stress or other sorts of things in your home?
And it's it's like shocking what they have found, like they tested a, you know, a billionaire's home recently and across like all sorts of things like air quality, water quality, VOC's, EMF exposure, all of this, you know, it rated very, very badly Like, people are not looking at the home through the lens of health and chronic disease.
When you start to, there's like a ton of changes that you want to make.
Many of those are which are confusing, or, you know, people don't really understand.
I think that there's a huge opportunity for people to start thinking about home health or housing through the lens of health.
I think that a company like Light Work or others that brings this sort of home health test assessment, uh, almost like function, you know, uh, function health for your house is like a really, really big opportunity.
So they have a list on their website, so water quality, I assume that includes putting some type of filter.
They have lighting, which I imagine that means like no led lights or a certain type of bulbs.
They have EMF, which I guess that is the grounding thing we talked about.
Uh, like basically somewhat.
Yeah, it's, it's more like a, it's more like, are you sleeping over a wifi router?
Like, are you spending a lot of times in a lot of time in areas that have a very high power, uh, you know, electromagnetic frequency, dude, they're going to get so pissed at me when they find out that I sleep with family guy playing in my ear from my cell phone, I sleep on my phone, fail this test. They have a, uh, air quality.
So that means like, do you have plants inside your house or what, or more, More like our is, what is the quality of your air, mostly that's contributed, like things that are bad are some of the paints that are doing off -gassing, some furnishers off -gas quite a lot, micro -plastic fibers kind of like floating around in the air from your like carpet or something like that.
So a lot of these things.
Do these guys make money?
They just started. So the answer is sort of, so far.
How much does it cost?
Depends on the house size.
But anywhere it's definitely a premium product.
Like $5 ,000 or 10 grand.
Yeah. And it's, I would say that it is one of these companies that starting out is expensive concierge, like all that kind of stuff over time.
I think there's a huge amount of potential, especially using AI and whatnot, to have people kind of do a version of this assessment almost themselves, or you walk around in your house with a camera and all these sorts of things.
And this company just tells you like, change this, do this.
This is probably bad.
This is not like there's a, there's a really cool potential technology solve here I think.
And the guy who started this, does he have a background in this stuff?
Yeah, so he got incredibly sick.
He and his wife actually moved into a house.
That house was on top of a power line.
That house had a bunch of mold issues that they didn't realize about when they moved in.
And over the course of a year, their health on like every marker, energy, everything just collapsed.
And so they went, they're healthy, they're 31.
They went to normal doctors.
They went to all these people and only after a crazy amount of experimentation and talking to doctors, they realized wow It's our health that like our home is actually making us sick And that's what kind of got them down this rabbit hole of trying to understand the problem Which is that many people are getting sick feeling low -energy feeling all these things because they're being slowly poisoned by the house They live it dude.
I feel whenever I hear this story I think I'm broken because like, you know, I describe my family like my where I'm from in, Missouri We're basically we're just mules like we like you know you eat donuts in the morning you eat cheeseburgers and fries in the afternoon and you eat steak and pizza and french fries at night with tons of beer and you just do that every single day and you just don't Complain and like if you were to tell like you tell me that these people like if my house was full of mold I would just think I have allergies at just whatever like this is just how I feel Yeah, do you know
what I mean? And so I wouldn't know, you know, to like, dude, I would just think this is just life.
And I wouldn't ever complain about it either.
I would just be like, fuck it, like rub some dirt on it.
It's fine. You're not alone.
I mean, this is like how most people respond to this, right?
I just think that people are becoming more aware of these things.
Were you not raised that way?
My mom was one of the early, like into organic people.
She was granola -y. Or, yeah, she would buy milk in a glass jug that was unpasteurized, with all these nasty clumps.
And you'd pour it into your cereal in the morning and a clump would hit it and the whole grill would explode all over you.
So gross, yeah. Your mom's a freak.
I know, at one point, I think I was in 4th or 5th grade, the health food store, where she was buying all this stuff, literally burned down.
And all the kids threw a party.
We were like, yay, no more crafty milk.
That's insane. And you know, it is funny as my wife, you know, as we've had kids started having kids.
It's so funny. Once a baby comes out of you, you automatically become granola.
There's a subreddit.
Have you seen the subreddit?
It's called, like, a granola mom.
Is it moderately granola mom?
Yeah. Moderately granola Moms. And yeah, moderately granola moms, a place for almost hippies.
And honestly, it's like one of my favorite places to get information because it's people who are hippie -dippie, but they're self -aware, which is like, why I like you.
So like, I want someone who's like, you know, loves the extreme stuff, but can also dumb it down to me who's more like, you know, I don't really wanna learn everything, I wish you would just tell me what to do and tell me like, what's like experimental versus what's like, actually proven and like, you like, kind of can help me as a more normal consumer figure it out.
And I've noticed that my wife, the second we had a kid, it was like, no more Teflon, plastic bottles are no go, like things like that.
And frankly, I love it.
I love it. Yeah. We we hung out with Joe Gebbia recently.
Did you know, did you ever go to Airbnb's office?
Yeah. So I don't know if you remember this, but they were wild.
So this was back in 2000.
I think they did this actually from the beginning, but they had 2 ,000 people working out of that office, something like that, maybe a thousand.
And they made 100 % of their own food and to an extreme.
So for example, they had Air Bowl, which was some type of like Airbnb Red Bull.
They had, so the condiments, the ketchup, the mayonnaise was literally made on site by the staff.
And so, and their meats were all from butchers.
Every single thing they had, so they had trail mix where it was like nuts with like chocolate that they had made.
It was crazy and I distinctly remember that and I thought it was crazy.
And then I started thinking about it.
I'm like, that's kind of amazing.
And we hung out with Joe Gebbia and I asked him about that.
I go, why, why did you guys do this?
He goes, man, that's how I was raised.
Like my, I think, I think he grew up in Vermont or somewhere, somewhere rural new England.
And he was like my mom was basically into this stuff and I was raised doing all this And I just thought it was good for the planet, and it was good for our bodies.
And so we insisted that Airbnb that we did this.
And so back then, you know, I don't know how maybe Joe's 40 something.
So he was raised in the late 80s, early 90s.
Back then, if you did that like your mom, you were a freak.
Now, all the young cool guys that like we follow on Instagram who are friends with all do this stuff.
And I think it's like pretty amazing.
That is so cool. You don't remember that about Airbnb?
I went there. I didn't.
yeah, I went there to meet up with friends and then see a talk.
So, I only went two or three times and didn't actually get that level of detail.
That's so cool. It was wild.
I don't know if... They still have an office, I don't know that they still do that, but during the pandemic, they had to lay people off and unfortunately the culinary staff was probably the first to go.
Yeah, that feels like the first thing that a public company, like activist investor kind of yells at you for.
Yeah, but you know, I understand that.
It's could be tough to justify when there's no need for an office, but that was the story.
It honestly was amazing.
I tell the story all the time.
And when I saw that, I was kind of on board with Airbnb even further.
Because I'm like, if they sweat the details with this, they probably sweat the details with other stuff.
New York City founders, if you've listened to my First Million before, you know I've got this company called Hampton, and Hampton is a community for founders and CEOs.
A lot of the stories and ideas that I get for this podcast, I actually got it from people who I met in Hampton.
We have this big community of 1000 plus people and it's amazing.
But the main part is this eight person core group that becomes your Board of Advisors for your life and for your business, and it's life changing.
Now, to the folks in New York City, I'm building a in real life core group in New York City.
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So go to joinhampton .com and apply.
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So put that you heard about this on MFM.
So I know to give you a little extra love.
Now back to the show All right, let's do two or three more you had one on about skin gut health What is that?
And whenever someone says gut health it freaks me out because the what's it called?
Leaky gut is the world's greatest branding Yeah, so this is actually a cosmetics company that I've I've wanted to invest in for so long I haven't seen anyone do it if you're doing this like please just email me my emails very easy to find or ping me on Twitter, but the The thing that I think should happen is like, there's, I don't know how many hundreds of billions of years are spent on the skincare kind of space.
And if you look at research, there are certain things that work, like certainly there's classes of peptides and things like that, that I think maybe work decently well from a skincare standpoint.
But for most people, if you're buying any sort of skincare to look younger or whatever, it's just like a waste of money or it's like marginally effective.
That way, so say that again.
So your stance here is that skincare is mostly a waste?
Skincare is mostly a scam.
Yeah, minus a couple of things.
Like certain peptides, sunscreen.
Moisturizer, sure, if you want your skin to be more moist. But a lot of the anti -aging stuff, anti -wrinkle cream, all these sorts of things.
Is there one that's such with an R?
Well, Retinol A is one of the few things that's actually relatively effective.
It's like, but this is the thing.
It's like basically only peptides are the things that work.
Right, and that's a peptide.
Yeah, so it's a peptide.
Things like, one skin uses a peptide.
There's something called like copper.
It's copper G K U I think, which is another peptide.
These things seem to actually work, as well as some compounds like methylene blue and whatnot.
But, other compounds, like any sort of random $50 thing that you're going to buy on Amazon that is like anti -aging and uses, you know, jojoba oil, or like any of these things, like just frac, like, just do not work.
Or if they do, they are so marginal, it's basically not worth doing, in my opinion.
What does work is - And you don't wear sunscreen either, right?
Mmh no. You, that, that's one of your, like, bold stances, which is that sunscreen is not good.
Yeah, I mean, I basically think, like, most sunscreen is carcinogenic.
Again, there's another thing in the U .S., we allow things like oxybenzones that are not allowed in the EU, it's in almost every sunscreen in the U .S., it is definitively carcinogenic.
And so like why we encourage kids to put on put this on and like use it eight hours a day I've no to use ink So I use a non nanosink oxide Sunscreen just for my face if I'm gonna be in the Sun for like a very long period of time Yeah, dude just caught so controversial for a white guy Like I feel like I am happy with my skin so so yeah, so the thing that I want to invest in is there is a lot of research that shows the relationship in the link between gut health and skin health.
And so like, if you have a healthy gut, or if you work on probiotics, or you work on like, you know, drinking bone broth, doing things like this that are going to improve your gut health, generally.
There's research that shows it as reflective in skin, there's something called things called like bioluminescence, basically.
But there's a way that you can measure how much light someone's like skin cells are emitting, and that improves as your gut health improves, So just kind of a wild fact, how how long is the is the change?
So like for example, I don't have like the great.
IO. I have dry flaky skin I just thought it was just cuz I'm just like a Super white dude and like in the wintertime my skin gets destroyed in the summertime.
I'm great but like, you know I always thought that it was just like the lack of Sun cuz like like my My scalp will get like so dry during the during the wintertime and I like need to get under the Sun. Yeah So a nice like red light chicken lamps.
Does that do stuff?
Yeah, it's helpful like during wintertime, I feel miserable like I Like I'm like I need like the Sun to like burn off everything on my head and on my face So if I started drinking, what's the routine if I started doing that?
How long would my skin it take for my skin to get better.
I bet it would take like six months basically Gonna be summer by this by that time Start now you'll be great in December.
Yeah But I think that the macro business opportunity is people treat skincare as just a topical thing that you apply to your skin, not like an expression of your gut health and skin health and all these sorts of things.
And so I think there is an opportunity to build an incredibly large cosmetics company, a skincare company, combining topical applied skincare that's actually effective with gut -based interventions that are going to like improve your skin from sort of the inside out.
And I've like wanted this company to exist for seven years now.
But isn't that bone broth, I mean, what does this look like?
Yeah, so I think it would be a like a combination of specialized probiotics that that are geared towards you know, improving skin health.
I think it would be probably a crash diet of like 30 to 60 days, where you're removing a bunch of like toxins and other inflammatory foods from your diet, incorporating bone broth and then some sort of like effective topical skincare.
And I think that regimen would outperform basically anything that exists in the skincare world today.
Do you eat any processed foods?
I try not to. But on a weekly basis, how often?
Probably none. Zeroed in one.
So like, that's easy.
I understand that for meals, so you probably cook or do leftovers.
What about for a snack?
What's an example? I use these...
Actually, I just had one earlier.
so it's a Maui Nui venison stick.
Oh, I have one as well.
I got I got my my my kettle and fire collab with them.
There we go. Hell yeah.
Yeah. Dude, they're so you got you guys sent me a bunch of them.
I think like each stick is like three dollars.
Yes. It's like three or four dollars.
Yeah. I have like a thousand dollars for these at my house.
Amazing. So I do those like meat sticks.
I'll do fruit, a couple bone broth like those are kind of the go to snacks.
I've kind of been addicted to dried mangoes recently, which that's a process.
no, like, is that not considered, beef jerky's not considered processed?
I wouldn't consider it processed.
Like, if you're sourcing it, you know, sourcing it from a good place, like it's not gonna have a bunch of additives.
It's basically just like meat that has been dried and then some spices.
Yeah, I do dried mango.
I do it from Whole Foods.
But the problem is that like, I can do like a bag a day, which is like - It is a problem.
800 calories. And like, it's basically like four cokes.
Yeah, yeah. Although I don't know.
I've been eating like, there's this interesting diet online that I'm currently trying.
It's called the honey diet, but basically you just eat fruit and honey before noon each day, and then have like a high protein meal in the afternoon.
Why are you doing this?
Just to experiment, frankly, and just see how I feel.
But so far, I feel pretty fucking good.
So the mangoes fit within that diet.
I've been doing, my snack lately has been dates and butter.
Have you ever had that?
No. Oh my God. It's the great I think I saw a carnivore MD do it and I was like Let me try this because I got a sweet tooth Like I have a very addictive by personality and when I quit drinking alcohol, it totally went to sugar so I'm always having to combat that but I think everyone is and so Half a tablespoon of butter in a date.
It's like the greatest thing on earth I'll give it a go actually Carver MD is very into this like meat and fruits thing Like honey fruit and meat is basically his diet and he's very into this so I don't know I actually think that there's a good chance that honey, fruit, like we're on the very early stages of like people realizing that sugar is not that bad for you when it comes in fruit or honey form.
That's an interesting take because I would have thought you would have said the opposite, which is like glucose is glucose.
No. Oh, that's interesting.
So you do high sugar fruit as well, not just low sugar.
This is something I'm just starting to experiment with and so like, I'm not even sure.
So I literally, I got my labs done recently and then like last week started this honey diet thing, so I'm going to test again in like three months and see how I, see how things look.
That's pretty fascinating.
I would not have thought that that's something you would do because I like I've read about like bananas.
Sam Korkos actually told me he said this in passing, so I don't want to like attribute this to because I could have, I could be listening to him wrong, but I believe he said that a modern banana is candy and the way it used to be was like a carrot.
He was like, they were not like this as delicious but we've like genetically you know, it's kind of like a Honeycrisp apple like you know, like it's basically like genetically predisposed to be like, you know ways we yeah.
Yeah, like it's I think the new apple that's popular is called cotton candy Apple.
Have you seen they have that at Central Market was called cotton candy Apple.
I'll have to try it.
I've not seen that so like you would eat that.
I mean, I would experiment with it for 90 days for sure.
I don't think a lot of this stuff, if you're optimizing for sweetness, I understand that you could argue maybe it's bad, but I think that nature tends to keep trade -offs within a certain band.
I don't know if you're having organic produce or whatever, I think that this stuff is not bad to experiment with it and just see how you feel.
Do you eat vegetables?
Yeah, I do. Well, Ari's laughing at me, and so are you.
But some of these guys are, like I think carnivore MD in particular, is on some parts anti -veg, on something anti -vegetable.
He's come off that a little bit.
I mean, like, to me, I think that you just have to have a macro lens on this which is, like, what have humans been eating for hundreds of thousands of years?
It's not like, you know, in the year 1900, year it rolled around, in 1970, when like the chronic disease crisis really started ramping up, that all of a sudden, people are rampantly eating vegetables and getting sick all the time.
It's like, obviously, in my view, not like we are in the midst of a vegetable eating epidemic that is making everyone sick.
It's like, clearly, like the ultra -processed foods that are new to our food system.
And so, does he have some good points?
Like maybe our vegetable's less good than most people think?
Like, I could believe that.
Do I think it is a thing that is worth optimizing, and to never eat vegetables, definitely not.
Here's one for some of these health trends.
I think that polyester clothing is gonna, there's gonna be, I mean, there's already a niche of people, I'm one of them, where I don't wear, if a clothing has polyester, I tried always to avoid it, unless it's like, you know, special or particularly amazing, where, but in general, it's gotta be all natural fibers.
Or are you on board with that?
Oh yeah, I mean, polyester clothing is like the number one contributor to microplastics basically.
They like shed like crazy when you're washing them and there's some studies that have been done around, they basically took dogs and had them wear polyester underwear and their sperm count went down like 60 or 70 % and then they switched them off of polyester underwear and like it came right back on.
No shit, no way. So what underwear do you wear?
Do you wear underwear?
So there's a company called Nads that does like organic stuff.
There's another company called PACT.
P -A -C -T. And I usually wear those.
How interesting. Is women's...
I mean, I don't know.
Does this matter to women?
So it's unclear to me right now.
I would say potentially, but it seems like the thing that is causing the lossless firm is like there's some sort of electrical charge thing that happens between polyester and the skin that seems to impact, impact like, you know, sperm generation.
And so it's, it's not clear to me yet.
I haven't like gone super deep on it.
How fascinating. So, yeah, pretty wild though, right?
That dog thing is crazy.
So are you - There you go, that's another great dog health idea.
You know, dog all natural dog underwear.
That's insane to me.
So I use ex aficionado and I loved it because it was, uh, it like would dry quickly after you cleaned it and they never stretched out, but I think it is highly synthetic, uh, and so, but honestly, cotton underwear for the most part sucks, but there's some companies that are making like really good cotton workout gear and cotton underwear that I really appreciate.
So like, for example, what I like to do is a lot of my workout shorts, I just get sweatpants like all cotton sweat pants and i'll cut them uh but like i'm a big fan of like all cotton workout gear because Lululemon and uh like it has like underwear in the shorts so your junk is just on the polyester even harder do you know what i mean totally there there's actually a company uh there's a company called Riker i love Riker i love their stuff i love Riker yeah it's so good it is so good it's the only a short company for men.
And they have shirts and stuff too, but the shorts are particularly are hard to do.
Because if a workout short doesn't have the underwear, then you're just kind of like flop it all over, you know what I mean?
But it's hard to do with cotton.
Totally. Yeah so their stuff is great, I really, really like what they're doing.
And I use their stuff for all my workout clothes.
That's great. Can you tell me really quick, I just want to know what Justin does.
Are there any other, do you have any other stances like this?
So this is like so fascinating to hear some of your stances that might be controversial or uncommon. I feel pretty confident that like our current vaccine schedule is very much not good from a chronic disease standpoint.
I don't like make any claims around autism or whatnot, but from a food allergy standpoint, certainly the U S is like the worst chronic disease issue and is the most vaccinated.
and has like the most egregious vaccine schedule of any developed country.
So what are you suggesting, spacing it out or not taking them?
Yeah, I basically think like fewer shots more spaced out is like what I'm planning to give kids.
I wrote a very long post on this.
It is pretty incredible.
Like for example, they give a kid a hep B shot like literally five minutes or less, two minutes out of the womb.
And I was like, well I don't know if she's gonna be around like someone with hep B anytime soon.
Well the only way you can get hep B is through sexual, you know, sexual activity and blood transfusions, and they test the mom for hep B before birth, and so like, you're just vaccinating a kid against something.
And the immunity wears off after a decade.
And also not that many people have, I don't think hep B is particularly common. Like it's basically drug users, I believe.
I mean, and the other thing is, like my view is that our health organizations have been captured and, you know, by large companies.
and I think like you look also the COVID mRNA vaccine was added to the infant childhood immunization schedule this year, it's like that is not a scientific position.
That is purely something else is going on.
So I think that's like a relatively controversial take that I have that I wrote a very long piece about, that I think is defensible.
Any other last ones?
Yeah, so against like the health tribe, I think that the fruit and sugar one is probably like the biggest one that I'm focused on right now.
And then I also think that this like demonization of, I think that the tribal stuff, tribalness of like food cultures is something that I think is not good.
Like I basically am much more into nutrient density.
And I think if you're eating nutrient dense, like pizzas and carbs and all that stuff, as opposed to like conventional, you know, vegetables, fruits, and meats all the time that are like maximally sprayed and processed and all this stuff, Like I actually think that eating a bunch of carbs that are from a very, very good source, probably your health outcomes will be better.
That stuff's like impossible to find.
Like for example, in order to do that, you'd have to find someone that mills their own grain or something like that.
Like, that's like, it's virtually impossible or not virtually impossible, but it's a job.
Yeah. Yeah, it is. I very much agree.
Dude, you're the man, thank you.
I just like, you know, I text you these questions anyway.
And so it's fun just to get now every time, just to pepper you with all types of questions that I have, but I appreciate you.
Yeah. No, this has been super fun, man.
Uh, thanks for having me on as always.
And we didn't even promote your company.
Yeah. So my, my company, um, Kettle & Fire is a bone broth company, which we talked about.
Uh, my, my company now is called true med.
We're basically making it so you can buy.
Um, exercise, healthy food supplements using tax free HSA or FSA money.
So if you go to true med .com, you can see a bunch of the brands where you can spend tax free dollars.
And then if you are interested in like some of the health stuff I talked about, I also have a newsletter, which is Justin Mares Substack.
And a new podcast. True Med has a podcast. It's great.
I like it. Yeah, we're, we're doing like a couple episodes on, you know, movement exercise, nutrient density.
Dude. I appreciate you.
Thank you so much. God bless.
Thanks for having me on.
That's it? That's the pop.
Hey Sean here. A quick break to tell you an Ev William story.
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All right, back to the episode.
