The marketing really loves everything you're saying around because the two things you just said, those were actually like, you know, $20 million ad hooks.
Justin, I'm pumped for here.
You're here because for two reasons.
The first reason is that you've started like six or seven companies that have collectively done something like $500 million in revenue in the last seven years, which is huge.
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 in the fringe stuff, which is 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 1 % needle mover as opposed to like a 50 % needle mover.
So you're very suppleware, you're very thoughtful, 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 Great American Poisoning that Sean and I are like obsessed with.
And so I thought you could come on and kind of talk a little bit about the blog post, but also business ideas that you're into and opportunities related to this space.
I'm super stoked to be here.
I mean, I as I've written in that post, I literally think that the great American, 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 overpaid and obese, and these problems are getting worse,
not better, is both the biggest problem in the US.
And also because of that, like a massive opportunity for people that want to start companies or build value in this space.
Sean, what emotion did you feel when you read this blog post?
Dude, you could ask Diego, I went on like a 48 hour bender first, here's what we did.
Was that rooted in fear?
No, no, it was like outrage first, and then curiosity and then skepticism.
So 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 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 this thing you did.
So you read that and then I told my team, I said, hey, let's break this down point by point because you made a lot of really interesting points.
If people haven't read it, we should pull it up on YouTube, but it's like, you have this photo of this guy.
I remember you go. This guy was considered so overweight that he was like a member of the circus.
And as if you go to a nearby Costco today, you'll find, you know, hundreds of people that more of weight in the sky, but that was considered like circus freak fat before.
And you talked about how doctors would go their whole career, a pediatrician would go the 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 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.
I, I've messaged you before being like, Hey, water filters.
Tell me what do you like?
What brand do you like?
Right. Because I trust that you actually walked the walk on it.
And then third is you're an entrepreneur.
So you've started two brands in the kind of like keto space, each doing tens of millions of year on revenue, you know, get distribution in 10 ,000 plus retail stores.
You started a non alcohol more than that.
Yeah. Non -alcoholic, uh, beverage brand.
Cause 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 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. Cause not only have you yourself had, you know, three or four big hits in the health and wellness space, but you then brainstormed and sent us a doc of like five or six new opportunities that you think other people could go do in this space.
All right. So when I ran my company, the hustle, I think we had something like 2 million subscribers and we made money through advertising.
We didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model.
And so I remember sitting down and I'm like, what are all the different ways that I can make money off the hustle that aren't advertising.
And so to make sure that you don't make this mistake, Sean, me and the hotspot team, we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business.
And we put it all together in a really cool document where we lay it all out along with our research and we call it very appropriately.
We call it the business monetization playbook.
Go to the description of this episode and you're going to see a link to that business monetization playbook.
It's completely free.
You just click the link and you can see it back to the episode.
You know, I literally think that this space like solving the great American poisoning, there's just almost immeasurable opportunity for people and entrepreneurs that want to solve this problem.
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 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.
People are living longer, they're living healthier.
It's a very rewarding 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 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 basically we had, you know, call it 100 years ago.
Our chronic disease burden was like 95 percent lower than it is right now.
There were certain acute issues like infectious disease was much more of a real thing.
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 biggest burden that we see from a health standpoint is chronic conditions.
So like cancer, asthma, heart disease, diabetes, things like this that have grown 700 percent in the last, you know, 90 years.
And so I think that we are running the code, if you want to call it that, of an old health care 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 we actually have the opposite, which is the average American is unhealthy.
And like people have not internalized what that means, which is, you know, 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 or 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 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 because they're great.
But here's like another one liner that kind of summarizes 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.
I feel like I'm such a depressing person.
It's like I talk about stuff and it's just like, well, Justin, Debbie, Downer, Mary's over here.
All right. So let's do it.
So what are the ideas?
Where do you see the opportunity?
You sniffed out the opportunity in the bone broth ketones 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?
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 that's what we got at the called blogs from now on, by the way, that's way better.
It's a little unibar -esque, but I'll take it.
You don't like in Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise writes his Manifesto to kick off the movie.
That's this you. This is your Jerry Maguire.
Exactly. Yeah. This thing was still in the court.
And so so yeah, so to back up, like my view on what has changed in the last call it 80 years is that we went and humans mostly existed in an environment that was not poisoning people to one that is basically poisoning them.
Like your food, water, you know, lights, air, like all these sorts of things are filled with plastics, chemicals, toxins, ultra -process, whatever that is 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, OK, you're spending, you know, 80 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 have a friend, actually, who just started a company in the home health testing space that's doing super well.
They're testing like water, air, EMFs, lights, stuff like that.
What's it called? 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 40 billion dollar a year in spend where you can think like HVAC, lights, plumbing, you know, water, electricity, all these sorts of things where none of these people are looking at 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 so for whatever, they're not thinking about that.
And so I think there's a huge opportunity to build a company or a series of companies that looks at what is going on in your built environment, 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 an annual check up for your house.
Yeah, exactly. I think like that's the first that's like the input, which is do an annual check up 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 as 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 your home annual check up.
Yeah, so I think a couple things are very worth it.
One, like water filtration is a huge one.
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 $8 ,000 system.
They installed it next time they came around to fix it, they like screwed on a $20 part incorrectly.
And I walked into my kitchen the next morning, and I stepped on my floorboards and like water came up for around them.
And I was like, fuck.
So there's a lot of now you got a mold issue.
Yeah, exactly. So we had to handle that, which was quite annoying.
But we have like every water that isn't that is coming in and out of our house gets filtered.
We also recently switched to got all of our bulbs, 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, they even impact
like if you eat under blue light versus eating under non blue light, it also seems to impact like the amount of weight that you'll gain.
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 what's a what's an incandescent bulb?
Is that a normal bulb?
Yeah, I think of like the Edison bulb that it's actually like burning something as opposed to an LED bulb, which is what's in most houses today.
There's also there's a pretty cool thing that you can do.
So LEDs 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 1000s 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 all the time.
And so they're actually like on and using like 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, you're like, what's going on in my system?
I don't like this. The marketer really loves everything you're saying about because like the two things you just said and what kind of a throwaway thing, those were actually like, you know, $20 million ad hooks.
When you're talking about, do you know how they make chickens fat, they put them under these blue lights, and actually they gain extra weight.
Maybe that's why you're fat, right?
Like maybe have you ever considered that you're just, you're being poisoned by the industry.
So you have the man is out to get you, the people love that.
You have maybe the problem is not what I'm putting in my mouth.
It's the light that's affected.
And so you it's like, oh, can I improve?
Can I buy this thing?
Rather than like kind of change from within as like maybe that's 80, 90 % of the problem.
But like, And no one talks about it, except for us in this ad right now.
It's a secret that you know.
It's a secret. They don't want you to know about the LED thing.
Like watch this magic trick of an ad where you take the phone on Salomon, 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 know you're a good ethical stand up guy.
But when I hear this stuff, I think, what could I use to get this across?
How could I, if I believe that this is good for people, how can I maximally, you know, get that in the hands of people?
Totally. And this is why I think this is such a big opportunity because you have the home services thing, like the health, the check up 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 of these things, 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 because he walked, he's like, Hey, you want, you want me to just do a quick look around your house?
Just free. I'll just take a quick look, see if I see anything of concern.
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 move over.
He's like, that's that's, you know, that's rats.
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, you know, a hilly area.
There's mice everywhere.
And he's like, would you like me to just come around once a month, that spray and fix some of these things for you?
As if it's a favor.
Please sir, be my dad.
Yeah, exactly. He's like, great.
And now I'm paying $270 a month for this guy to come and do nothing to my house.
I have no idea what he's doing.
The random guy comes in sprays.
But that idea of like, let me diagnose the problem so I can sell you the solution is generally a good business model.
And of course, you know, like again, he's not wrong.
Like there actually was, you know, issues.
It's just, I would not, I would not have been aware of the problem.
So I'm a big fan of this kind of like audit method of sales.
Let me do a free audit for you to kind of tell you where you might have some problems.
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 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, you know what I mean?
Yeah, exactly. So, so basically like 100 years ago, we had the, um, we had, we had a certain type of radiation that was, I believe called ionizing radiation.
It's that or non ionizing.
I don't know this stuff well enough yet, but basically it was like, think of like what, you know, you get shot into 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, microwaves, 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 at a high amount.
But this other spectrum of like cell phones and like are also definitely fine.
And then you kind of like get to today, which is most of the FTC safety ratings and levels that have come up or that are used to regulate cell phones, wifi, things like this.
They're basically were tested in an environment on cell phones from like the early 2000s where they were assuming that people would not be exposed to these things for more than like 20 to 30 minutes a day.
Like the, the guy who came up with these rules, they interviewed him, 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 around these just assumed that you'd like take a phone call and you 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 signed like articles that I think are concerning enough where people will like change the electromagnetic fields that mice are exposed to and it will 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 wifi router or next to something that's like emitting a huge amount of EMFs for eight to nine hours a night, that's probably well worth doing.
By the way, one thing I think we should say, you're not one of these guys that's like optimized everything.
Like I've seen you say multiple times, you're like, you know, just get these core four or five things, right?
And you're like, you know, you need to sleep well, don't eat 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 10 seconds of waking up.
And it's like all these, like all these fringe, like the thousand fringe things you could do to like maybe move the needle when you haven't done the core foundational big things, right?
It seems like you're more of the get the core right first, but am I giving you too much credit here?
Where do you stand?
Because you're currently saying things like Thomas Edison light bulbs and like the microwave's going to kill you or something.
Where do you stand on this?
Yeah, yeah. So, so I actually think, so one completely agree.
I think if you get the basics, right?
That is like 80 to 90 % of it.
That said, I also think if you have relatively easy interventions like move a wifi router outside of your bedroom and, you know, swap the bulbs in the rooms that you're spending 20 hours a day in, like those are pretty easy interventions that 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 stunning solves your entire health issues, you know, type of guy.
And there's a lot of those guys.
Maybe it'd be what we did.
Yeah. Doesn't have to try though, right?
Wouldn't you say? All right.
So a while back we had Gary Tan.
He's the president of white commentator, which is the most successful incubator of all time.
We had him on the podcast and he said that the future of businesses is creator led.
And that's why I'm interested in the podcast.
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All right, back to the episode.
I actually do think this is one of the problems with the health influencer space more broadly is it's just not sexy to be like avoid ultra processed foods, get sunlight in the morning, lift four days a week and you know, make sure you're getting adequate sleep.
And so these people get, they get like attention from going further out on 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, Dan, because you'd say everything you need to say in 14 seconds.
And what are you going to do tomorrow?
What are you going to post the next day?
What are you going to post the next day?
You gotta, you 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, 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 nobody's incentive is to tell you the simple few things that you should focus on and get right, because they'd be done.
You wouldn't sell me anything and you'd be done talking.
I was trying to find it, but Brian, Brian Johnson's newsletter and his subject line for his last newsletter was Wednesday.
It says your boners are killing you.
That was the subject line.
And it was how the lack of getting nighttime erections is somehow correlated with longevity and it was like, you're saying it's not sexy to sell.
Just, it's like, well, this boater, they got me.
You're right. Can we do a quick sidebar on Brian?
So I like Brian a lot as a guy.
Really nice guy. I actually really like what he's doing in general, but man, I kind of miss the old Brian Johnson, where it seemed like he was a missionary nerd trying to do this for science.
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 kind of, what he was doing before was so different, just kind of self -funded science experiment on himself with the noble goal and noble mission.
And I don't know, I kind of feel like he's detracting from that.
And I think he's, uh, I don't know.
Am I the only one who feels that Sam, what do you think?
I have a lot of trust in him still.
I think that, I think that he's done a good job of like he, he sells an olive oil that's called snake oil.
And I think anytime someone makes fun of themselves by trusting them goes up.
I don't think I have the same concerns as you.
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 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 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 over the next 20 years.
But I think 20 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 DTC brand underneath it.
And I think I've just seen a lot of that.
And the first thing he was doing felt very original.
Uh, yeah. Let me ask you, 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 maybe, maybe it was your co -founder, but the other 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 fishes, 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 $4 .3 trillion industry that's job it is to propagandize people to think the only way to fix the fish's health problem is drugging them.
Like that, that to me is the insane thing that we're, you know, the same everything.
I think I asked chat to BT recently.
I think it was something like 60 % of people have taken pharmaceuticals in the last 12 months, or like had a prescription, something crazy like that.
It's crazy. So let's do the first one you had was kind of the cleaning the tank, right?
Check up for the house, find ways that you can make your home environment healthier for you and less interfering with your health.
The second one you have a modern butcher shop.
So this is about feeding the fish.
I love this. 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 two of my predictions was people are going to have more plants in their homes because it's kind of nasty.
And also I thought I was like, there's something about the meat at Whole Foods that I actually think is crap nowadays.
Totally. Yeah. I'm not saying you're right or a genius, but I'm not not saying it either.
I think I've hung out with Justin before, so I'm sure I've 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.
But it's the first one that I've seen that goes as far as I would like.
And basically, let me like set the table through an analogy.
I think that like in the 80s, coffee was basically like folders.
It was like burnt. There was no differentiation on sourcing.
It felt there was no coffee culture.
And Starbucks came along, and that was like big second wave culture kind of coffee.
And now there's like craft, you know, comatier and small like cool roasters and coffee shops in every major city that you go to.
I basically think that meat today is where coffee was in the 80s.
Like you go to the grocery store and you're buying meat.
You're buying like steak.
No one is differentiating on how is this dry aged?
What is the cut? What is the genetics to 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.
What's their store?
I just kind of had an instinct when I saw it.
I was like almost because it was the only branded meat that was there.
It's like all the other meat, the branding was like 80%, 20%.
Right? Like they had 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 few companies in the US that have an American like Wagyu.
And so they have a Wagyu line they imported, I believe from Japan some point in the 70s or 80s.
And they've been like breeding this Wagyu line.
If you buy whole foods best ribeye, you're probably gonna cost you like 20 bucks a pound or something like this.
Or more. If you buy it like the best ribeye from, you know, from Snake River, it's going to be like 60 to $70 per pound.
And so 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.
And so I think there's this massive opportunity to build like what I'm calling like the blue bottle of the modern butcher shop that caters to people that really care about sourcing, flavor, cut, dry age, you know, all of these things that you're not going to be able to get a whole foods.
So there's actually like, seems like there's two opportunities.
One is to create the like another Snake River farm, right?
A brand that is, you know, elevated in 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 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's one idea, which already sounds like a big idea.
And I could imagine I could totally imagine somebody who takes a like a content approach to this.
So let's say you were doing this, 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 say you're feeding them.
Maybe it's, maybe it's like a version where you're genetically selecting in some way, those sort of premium, or you're, you're breeding in some way, the more premium.
That seems like one opportunity.
And then the other one you had is the butcher shop, which is like you said, Blue Bottle coffee, and Blue Bottle sold for what?
Like $500 or $700 million?
700 or 800. Yeah, 700 or 800.
And like, I don't know if anyone, like how popular is Blue Bottle nationwide?
Because I had never heard of it till I moved to San Francisco.
This is like 10 plus years ago.
I think it's like a big city thing.
It's like, It seems like a rich guy pet project.
Like all the VCs had invested in Blue Bottle, because they liked having meetings at Blue Bottle and Blue Bottle was cooler than Starbucks.
It just seemed like a passion project.
And then I see that it sells for 700 or 800 million dollars.
And wow, that thing really worked.
So I'm a, this is like, to me, this is a 10 out of 10 idea.
This is an amazing idea.
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, you know, start with like a butcher shop or something like that is that with a butcher shop, you can actually have 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 $60 steak in the Whole Foods and just plopped it on the shelf next to like a $20 one or a $15 one and there's no story ability there, that thing just like won't sell unfortunately.
Are quality meats or cows, I guess, being grown and you just have to source them or do you have to go and do this yourself?
No, so there are small farmers that are growing really, really high quality meats.
They're selling at farmer's markets.
They're just hard to buy from.
Like it's hard to aggregate enough supply that Whole Foods is like, yeah, put it in the 500 stores or whatever, or you know, it can fill up a meat case in Austin.
And so this really only works where if you're a butcher, you can buy probably an entire herd or an entire amount of farmers or ranchers cattle and sell it through your store over the course of a couple months.
That is worth your investment from a relationship and like amount that you're going to make on that standpoint.
For Whole Foods, it's like, yeah, we're never going to work with a small, interesting operator that might just have 50 or 100 head of cattle leather selling.
And can you freeze and store like beef and it still be great months later?
Yeah, you can. I mean, the better thing though is that you can like dry age it.
And this is the other thing that if you're taking this like hyper premium approach, you can actually just hang meat and these meat lockers and stuff like that.
And actually cures gets like a richer flavor and the like, the more you age it.
The reason that they don't obviously is like the more that you age it, the less amount of like cash that you're cycling through because you're not selling it as quickly.
And so it doesn't work for the retail model.
But if you're doing a really, really high end thing, like a butcher shop, it could actually work.
How big is this business you think Snake River Farms?
I would imagine it's in the like 200 to 300 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, I mean, 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 sell into a butcher shop in Austin, Nashville, San Francisco, LA, New York that just does really well.
Like I'm frankly shocked that the only butcher shop that I know that is doing this is in Austin and it's opening in like a month.
And is he trying to just make one or he's trying to make it like a nationwide type of thing?
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.
It's an amazing idea.
It is amazing. It's so expensive though.
Totally. A lot of this is centered around beef only.
Because I've always wanted to get healthier chicken because I just don't love eating lots of beef.
So previous, again, like 80 years ago, the food system had diversity.
There were multiple types of birds, chickens, things like that.
Today, 99 .5 % I believe of every chicken eat in the US is one genetic breed, which is the Cornish cross, which is bread for how quickly it puts on weight and the types of grains that it can basically eat.
And so it's not bread for deliciousness, it's not bread for protein content.
It's not just bread for any of the stuff that you or I care about.
It's just how quickly can it pack on mass and then I can sell it and it gets eaten.
I think the average life of these birds, on average they're born to harvest is something like six weeks.
What? Yeah. Wait, so it comes out of the egg and six weeks later it's big enough to eat?
And six weeks later it's harvested and sold.
Yes, exactly. 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 bro, I don't like whatever.
And they just haven't had chickens that are actually delicious.
And it's funny, you can read old ads.
There was this luxury rail line in the 20s and 30s that made a big deal about how they had they've cornered the market on this one chicken genetics and they served it only in their first class cars.
And all these people are like, wow, this is the best chicken I've ever had in my life.
There's stories like that where it's like - What is the Wagyu or Kobe version of chicken.
I've never even heard of one.
Yeah, exactly. No one knows.
I mean, there's no one that is raising these for flavor.
Dude, that's insane.
By the way, it's absolute sick burn to call someone a Cornish cross, that's going to be my new thing.
And to have my see somebody that's just, you're just a 99, you're just like 99 % of the others.
You're just trying to pack on, just pack on mass.
You're a quick flip of a chicken, you're just a Cornish cross.
There's this famous ad, there's a guy named Joseph Sugarman who kind of pioneered direct marketing, direct response copywriting in the 80s.
And he at the time a quartz movement watch was already popular, like watch kind of sewers knew about that.
But it wasn't like impressive.
It was just like a normal like table stakes thing for any watch worth more than 50 bucks.
But anyway, he was famous for creating these ads for this line of watches.
And he popularized the idea of quartz movement watch as if it was like some like epic thing like, and then all the watch kind of serves like, yeah, dude, they all we all have this.
But that's sort of like, what you're describing a little bit with these chickens is like, you can actually like, come up you can and if you can invent interesting cool stories that are also true factual, but like, you know, I'll take a lot of like the health nuts.
Like they're always like, yeah, this is standard.
We don't give our chickens this or that.
And you're like, Yeah, yeah, I know.
But like, most people don't know that.
And so we're going to tell this amazing story about that.
Exactly. Yeah. And I think like the mental model is, you know, you're having a dinner party.
And it's like pulling out a nice bottle of wine, but people aren't drinking.
And so you're like, Okay, this is this like crazy, genetic, really nice steak cut.
And you'll have the best steak you've ever had in your life.
Like I think that is the underserved market that that you could build a real brand around.
What's your food budget?
Every month? And where are you buying?
Are you No, not all of it.
I mean, their steaks are like super fatty and marbled and everything like you wouldn't want to actually eat that every day.
But I basically buy my meat and most of my food from local farmers around the Austin area.
What does that mean?
Like you personally have relationships?
You go to a farmer's market?
No, so yeah, go to a farmer's market.
There's also like a food truck here, where 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 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 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, you know, go to farmer's markets, which is like, not extreme, but like you're putting a lot of effort into it.
That's pretty cool.
Alright, let's do the next idea.
So annual home checkup, I'm giving that a B this this blue bottle for for beef blue bottle, the modern day butcher shop, I'm giving that an A plus as you want that to exist or you want to invest or you think it's good.
I just see it, dude, I want it to, 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, but like I'm not trying to buy a $60 thing.
That's fine. There's a lot of people who are trying to buy stuff like that.
I know a lot of people that are trying to do that.
And I just know that when you go into a category where there is no existing brand, it is all commodity.
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 Folger's cost per cup of coffee, but I think it's in like the sense.
So the idea of going to Starbucks and paying $4 for a coffee that you can make at home for 15 cents or 10 cents or whatever, you know, sounded outrageous, but of course people did it because they do it for the experience.
They do it for a perception of quality.
So I just see the path of that one.
And if somebody has the right founder fit and you know, it's, you need to kind of like a one of one entrepreneur, but that is a, to me, that's a billion dollar opportunity to do that.
Whether you do it that way, or you sell into retail.
And like you said, you 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 through retail.
So you'd have to be great at content on TikTok and Instagram, and then sell into, into retail stores that way.
But to me, that is like, that's a 12 out of 10 idea.
But you have another one on here, Calibrate for fertility.
What is this? Yeah, well, quick, if anyone does the butcher shop thing, I want to invest.
I think it's such an exciting and interesting idea.
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.
You know, IVF for what's called ARP assisted reproductive or ART assisted reproductive technologies are growing like seven to 8 % a year, and it's accelerating IVF is the best in class option right now and it costs like 20 to $30 ,000.
It injects a bunch of hormones.
It's super invasive.
It's super hard, you know, on the female and it's just a brutal, brutal thing.
And so I think there is this big opportunity to almost have like a lifestyle set of interventions that are geared towards helping people increase their fertility in the key window when they're trying to actually have kids.
And so you could think about it like a lifestyle or like a monthly subscription for some three to six months period, where you get a combination of peptides, supplements.
People do like an environmental review, make sure that you're not wearing polyester underwear while you're trying to have a kid or, 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 20 to $30 ,000, very expensive, very invasive, very hard IVF route, do this, like, you know, several hundred dollar a month, sort of lifestyle based fertility approach.
And we're going to try and help you conceive naturally without having to go through IVF.
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.
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 it seems like progesterone helps with increasing odds of conception.
There's a bunch of interventions that I think are just almost criminally under utilized.
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All right, back to this episode.
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 2018.
Look at the relative search volume.
It's up from zero to 75 on this chart all the way to 100 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 30 year time horizon, not like a six year time horizon.
And what you're saying is because IVF is obviously very hard on, it's hard mentally, physically, emotionally, financially.
Hey, what if there was 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 Calibrate was a company, they got acquired somewhat recently, but they basically started out by being, they paired GLP1's IEO Zempic with lifestyle interventions.
And so their whole thing was like, Osembic, people are meant to be on it for the rest of their lives.
What Calibrate did is said, we're going to prescribe you Osembic, we're also going to introduce coaching, accountability, lifestyle interventions, like this whole suite of things where the goal is to get you off of Osembic at the end of a six or 12 month period.
Like a Noom meets, I mean Weight Watchers is trying to do this.
Yeah, exactly. Those companies always scale fast.
Noom did something similar pre -Osembic, and they were an advertiser at my old company the Hustle.
Like within a year of launching, they were spending hundreds of thousands with us.
I don't know how these guys grow 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, to some degree by insurers.
And insurers were okay with it because they're like, great, we're not going to have to pay 20 grand a year for Osembic indefinitely.
We can actually get people off of this drug after a six or 12 month period.
And so in the first two years, they got to like over $100 million in revenue, and just scaled insanely quickly.
It does look like Calibrate kind of went under though or something.
I don't know, I see.
I was looking for their funding stuff, but it looks like they've got restructured private equity, but basically for 20 million, they got 75 % of the company now.
So I think it definitely ran into some trouble.
Yeah, but that means they could be bad operators, but the demand still existed.
Yeah. Yeah, that would be my contention, basically, is that they were doing this, and they launched, I think 2021, something like that.
And I basically think that insurers went from, they were like early on the Osembic plus lifestyle thing.
And then there's been this massive record amount of lobbying spent to just keep people on Osembic basically forever, which I think probably did not do them any favors.
What percentage of people needing IVF, and you probably don't know this, but like the average age of the first time mother has gone up, I think it's nearly 30 at this point, I think it's 29 or something like that.
In the 70s, it was 21.
So it's gone up a lot.
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 don't know, honestly, but what I do know is from reading stats, it seems like most of the decline in birth rate, it's about 70 % of it comes from people that previously would have had three to four kids now having one or two.
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 kids that a family or woman has these days.
Dude, it's pretty crazy how many of my male friends tell me that they're like, in Austin, we used to go to Sana all the time, and I would have so many friends that like, I'm not going into Sana this week, we're trying to get pregnant, my balls aren't working.
And so I'm trying to like, I can't cook them right now.
There were so many people that I knew you and I just in our friends, and they're like, I can't do this, I can't do that.
I need to go do this because we're struggling and it's my fault.
It's pretty wild. Sean, have you had a bunch of friends that have complained of similar stuff?
They're like, my stuff ain't working.
You lost me. Have you had a bunch of friends?
No. I think it is this like under the radar thing, very few people are talking about.
But almost everyone I know that is trying to have kids, right now has some amount of fertility challenges.
And even if that's six to 12 months and then they get pregnant, even still, if you do that across like two to three kids, you're basically going from you're now having one to two kids instead of like three to four, if every time it takes you six or 12 more months to get pregnant.
So you've mentioned three kind of health related startup ideas, you've started, I think for kind of successful that I know of health related companies.
Can you describe this approach?
Because I'm the kind of guy that bounces around from industry to industry, model to model.
I'm like a variety seeker.
And I don't think that's good.
Just when I learn about a space, I get intrigued by something I'm a beginner in, and I go in and I stop the compounding of that.
So I don't think that's too smart.
Can you describe your approach to entrepreneurship versus somebody like me who's just bouncing around and trying to solve 100 different problems in 100 different spaces with 100 different business models?
Totally. Yeah. I think for me at least, what has been very rewarding is basically choosing one problem, which for me is the chronic disease crisis, that I want to spend the rest of my career on.
I think that there's a massive amount of compounding, like relationship compounding, even personal brand compounding.
People think of me as into health, which pays some dividends.
That's probably going to be even more so over the next decade.
You understand the space, you understand the problems, you understand the players and relationships.
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.
You get so many shots on goal even if they may look different.
I started Kettle and Fire thinking the American food system is poison 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. I was going to CrossFit in San Francisco in 2015 and a bunch of CrossFitters were like, you should do bone broth.
I'm a terrible cook.
I almost never cooked for myself.
I basically was like, great.
I'm going to go buy some at the store.
No one was selling some.
After that, seems like there's an interesting opportunity here.
Did I think it would grow to Pia nine figure annual business?
Definitely not. 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?
Yeah. I was just obsessed with the topic basically.
I'd been reading about paleo and reading about all these sorts of things since I was basically in college.
I was a weird dude in college who my senior year I went paleo.
I wasn't drinking beer, wasn't eating pizza or french fries.
All my friends were like, hell is wrong with you?
What's going on? I just got very into this idea, this secret in a sense of why is everyone getting second record levels and what could be underpinning that?
It was this deep interest and as I got deeper and deeper understanding and appreciation of the problem, I just really understood this is 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 the incentives through TrueMed, I basically was like, I think I'm just going to try and solve or work on fixing this problem for the rest of my career.
Let's go back to that kettle and fire example.
You're doing CrossFit, trying to live healthier.
CrossFitters are telling you, you should do bone broth.
You're like, cool. Where do I get some of that?
If you go, you look, there's not an easy brand that you can just pull off the shelf and buy it.
You think somebody should do that.
Now, at that time, you've got no experience doing that.
You've never built a DTC product.
You never built an actual consumer brand.
Can you just describe the three or four bullets that happened that first year to make it happen?
Because I think all these ideas are cool, but you've got to be the type of person that can make shit happen.
You made shit happen at that stage.
Can you just describe what you made happen for Kettle and Fire?
Yeah, totally. We first tested a landing page, put up a landing page with no product, started buying ads to see who would click on it, what would they pay.
You had the brand name?
At that time, we called it Bone Broths Co, which was a horrible idea.
It sends three brands to Kettle and Fire.
You just made it yourself?
You just mocked up an ugly landing page?
Yeah, mocked up an ugly landing page on Unbounce, paid someone on Fiverr, $10 to make a terrible logo, and basically started selling a box at $29 .99.
When you say started selling what, Facebook ads?
How'd you get the track?
We did Facebook ads at Facebook and AdWords, and then some Bing at the time, because there was an orb there, which is much cheaper.
Dude, Bing clicks back then.
It was so cheap, and they converted way higher.
I know. I was always like, I don't know who the people are, but they're in the Bone Broth.
What was that first few weeks or maybe a month like that gave you the ...
Were you looking for conviction, or you already had conviction?
What happened in that first month for you?
Yeah, I was looking for conviction.
Basically, we'd put in $500.
We built this landing page, and I think sold a little over $2 ,000 worth of product inside of about a month.
I ran the numbers, and I was basically like, okay, we can build a business.
I think just given existing traffic, we can turn this into at least like a two to 300 grand a year kind of business.
Based on what I thought the margins would back into, I was like, that should be about 100 grand, 150 grand a year in profit, which seemed like a worthwhile thing to take on.
Then what ... Okay, so do you do that, and where did it get much bigger than that?
What happened to make it much bigger?
We validated the idea.
The next thing is we do.
We had to figure out how to make it.
We emailed and called over 500 different manufacturing partners to just please someone helpless figure out how to make this product.
Eventually, what ended up working is my brother, who was 19 at the time, who I co -founded the business with.
He emailed Mark Cuban as like, I'm a 19 -year -old entrepreneur.
Please help. Mark Cuban introduced us to a manufacturing partner who we ended up working with and still work with today to make our first version of the bone broth product.
Wait, wait. 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?
He said, yes, here's one.
Yeah, that happened.
He was like, talk to my food person, and then his food person introduced us to our co -packer.
He was like, yeah, you should talk to this group over here.
Just to clarify, those first $2 ,000 worth of orders, did you just go refund them because you didn't have a product yet?
I emailed all of them and I said, hey, we are not going to have a product for like six to nine months.
I can either refund you in full right now or 50 % off and we'll eventually ship it.
People that didn't respond, I would just refund them.
Yeah. Okay, great. Mark Cuban gets you a food person, so that's the second thing.
Now you can get the product made.
And then basically, what I realized is the product is two -year shelf stable.
I put literally every dollar of my life savings at that point.
I was 25 into doing the first run of our product.
They had $30 ,000 minimum runs.
It was like 120K kind of run budget.
So I was like, either this is going to work great, or I'm going to eat bone broth for two years.
Either way, I'll feel pretty good.
And so we bought the first product and year one, we basically did $2 .8 million in sales.
And after about six months of being in business, one of the buyers at Whole Foods saw an influencer talking about our product, reached out and was like, hey, I want to bring you guys into Whole Foods.
And we basically, we did extraordinarily well in Whole Foods and got national rotation the following year.
And that just kind of like started our journey.
I think I was with you eight or 10 months after you started it in San Francisco.
We went bowling. I don't know if you remember that.
And you were telling me about this and I was like, oh, I mean, it seems like you got a really good career.
Why are you throwing it away at this?
I just remember thinking of like, what, 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 was working in a corporate career.
She worked for Deloitte, I think.
So she was like a management consultant.
She had gotten her MBA.
She'd gotten an undergrad in electrical engineering, got an MBA from a good business school, was a management consultant.
And then she's like, I'm sick of this life.
I need a business that I can own and not have to go to a job every day.
And she was so tired of like, the consulting hours were so bad she would come home and her kids would be asleep and she would just pick them up from the crib just to hold them for a few minutes.
Cause she hadn't been there when they even played with them before before bed.
And after four nights of that, she's like, never, no, I'm not doing this.
Never had started a business before.
Decides to start an in -home daycare.
So she kicks me out of the apartment I'm living in and says, I'm going to use that apartment, which my parents owned an apartment.
She's like, kick you out.
I'm going to use that to start this business.
And I'm going to, 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, 150 K a year, you're a management consultant and you're going to 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 a lot of them, 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 that's totally normal, even though it feels abnormal in the moment, it feels bad in the moment.
Totally. And I, Sam, I'd actually love your thoughts.
My experience, frankly, was almost every single person that I knew who was starting a business or trying to start a business like between 22 and 25 has made it in some way, shape or form.
Like it's insane. Yeah, so Justin and I both started roommate matching companies.
We were both, we were both 20 and so between the ages of like 20 and 25.
We were like in the same industry.
And so all of our SF friends, you know, are similar age.
And, dude, it is crazy how many I actually just tweeted about this today.
I was like, I grew up in SF from age like 20 to 30.
It's crazy how many of our six are successful just because they're around.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, totally. Naval has a great phrase where he says, Yes, can you hear the stats about startups?
Oh, 90 % of businesses, you know, new businesses fail.
And he goes, yes, startups fail, but founders don't.
And I love that phrase.
He said, oh, basically, if you just fast forward 10 years, any of the founders that stayed in the game, like the success rate goes from your first business success rate might be 10%, but the 10 year saga of you trying a bunch of shots on goal and getting smarter every year.
Like the odds are now, like if you just look at our cohort of friends, right, Sam, we were in a mastermind together back in what was that 2013, something like that, like our cohort of friends, which is probably like, you know, 30 to 50 founders that we used to hang out with and know regularly, the hit
rates like 80 or 90 % success rate, you know, for the people that actually stuck with it, I got a couple friends that packed up their bags and moved to, you know, Connecticut and just said, you know, if I'm not doing this anymore, not you, Sam, sorry, this is like, literally, I'm just thinking of like
a couple of friends that did that they were just like, Hey, like the same, 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, I remember Goggin Biani started this thing called Udemy.
And it was like, courses, what this is like what Tai Lopez does.
And I remember 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 $100 or $300 a month, which would be like life changing.
And so we both did that stuff.
And I think that, you know, 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 10 years ago, which wasn't that long ago, you were doing many things that like, you know, 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 know I for sure did.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know that anyone admires me.
That's taken my keyboard shortcuts for Mac users Udemy course, but definitely I was hustling back in the day.
The, um, have you ever read, uh, Travis Kalanick, the guy who started Uber, his, uh, his old blog.
He had this amazing blog that was called like awesomeness, bro.
It was called like something silly like that, right?
It was heavily brought out.
Um, but he had this plug.
This was just like attending CS on the cheap or as a Southwest on the cheap.
And it was basically like his playbook for how to have a bad -ass 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 never, never take the taxis.
Here's what you can do instead.
Here's what you're going to do for first thing at someone's house.
You know, here's how you're going to skip the event, but still get in to the after party.
Cause that's what the magic happens.
When you get there, here's what you're going to say.
And he had this like really scrappy approach to how to just like, you know, wedding crash, a major conference on a budget.
And he was 31 years old, by the way, he was 31 when he wrote that post.
It's not like he was a college kid.
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, and 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's just jamming on different ideas.
And he used that to kind of build his momentum, his network, his energy.
It is pretty wild. Yeah, so cool.
Can we finish with this Zuck story?
Zuck is auctioning off his gold chain for you, for your charity?
What is this? Well, I saw you tweet that, Justin.
I was like, is that real?
You just totally downplayed it.
You said Zucks auctioning my chain and no one like it looked like no one replied to that.
Yeah, I had a bad Twitter day that day.
I saw people were bidding for it.
How much did it end up going for?
It's his gold chain.
It's almost 41 grand.
Oh, wow. Who won? Do you know?
Some anonymous person, I'm not sure.
But basically, probably a crypto person to be honest.
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 24 that are high potential.
It's inflectiongrants .com if anyone wants to check it out.
But basically, someone made an offer to me when I was in my 20s, when I was 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?
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.
I 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, we've given out like 50 grants and long journey who one of the GPs is Ariel Zuckerberg has gotten behind it in a big way.
And so this year, Ariel convinced Mark to auction off one of his already worn gold chains.
And we had to make sure that it was clean, no DNA residue, anything like this.
Did you actually have to like do some of that stuff?
Oh, 100%, for sure.
Did you get to talk to him at all?
No. No. But yeah, he gave it away.
And we auctioned off for 41 grand, which goes to charity, which is great.
So that's 20 people are going to get these $2 ,000 grants.
Give 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.
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?
There's like five or 10 other things that you have really amazing stories behind and are really insightful on.
And so thanks for coming on and doing this.
I'm like literally sitting here taking notes on like incandescent bulbs and like farmers' markets and shit like that.
And you're going to be getting a lot of follow up text on me where it's just like, Justin, just tell me what to do.
Tell people where to follow, where to get more.
Yeah, so I'm Substack Justin Mares, substack .com.
I write a monthly newsletter on health and business stuff.
And then also on Twitter at JW Mares.
And go read The Great American Poisoning.
We didn't do it justice in this podcast, but go read that blog post.
It is amazing. We'll put the link at the show notes to that specific blog post.
All right, that's it.
That's the part. Thank you, Justin.
Hey, Shawn here. A quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story.
He started Twitter and before that he sold a company to Google for a hundred million dollars.
And somebody asked him, they said, Ev, what's the secret, man?
How do you create these huge businesses, billion dollar businesses?
And he says, well, I think the answer is that you take a human desire, preferably one that's been around for thousands of years, and then you just use modern technology to take out steps, just remove the friction that exists between people getting what they want.
And that is what my partner, Mercury does.
They took one of the most basic needs any entrepreneur has managing your money and being able to do your financial operations.
And they've removed all the friction that has existed for decades.
No more clunky interfaces, no more 10 tabs to get something done.
No more having to drive to a bank, get out of your car, just to send a wire transfer.
They made it fast. They made it easy.
You can actually just get back to running your business.
You don't have to worry about the rest of it.
I use it for not one, not two, but six of my companies right now.
And it's used by also 200 ,000 other ambitious founders.
So if you want to be like me, head to mercury .com, open up an account in minutes.
And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and evolved bank and trust members.
FDIC. All right, back to the episode.
