marketing and me loves everything you're saying around because the two things you just said those were actually like you know twenty million dollar ad hooks i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel justin i'm pumped here you're here because for well for two reasons the first reason is that you've started like six or seven companies that have collectively done something like five hundred million dollars in revenue in the last seven years which is huge and they're all in the health and wellness space you're also here because you're one of my most reasonable friends when it comes to health and wellness because you are like you're into fringe stuff which is i think cool but the problem with people who are in french 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 french thing that i'm into this is only like a one percent needle mover as opposed to like a fifty percent needle mover so you're very self aware you're very thoughtful and you've built a lot of big businesses in this space and you're a blogger and you have this amazing blog post called the great american poisoning that built sean and i are like obsessed with and so i thought you could come on and kinda talked a little bit about the blog post but also business ideas that you're into and opportunities related to this space i'm i'm super stoked to be here i mean i as i've written in that post i literally think that the great and what i call the great american poisoning basically the fact that americans are sick at record levels and are getting sicker like our children are sick everyone is overweight and obese and these problems are getting worse not better is both the biggest problem in the us and also because of that like a massive opportunity for people that wanna start companies or or build value in this space sean what emotion did you feel when you read this blog post dude you could ask diego i went on like a forty eight hour bender first here's what we did what did it fear no no no i was like out outrage first yeah and then curiosity and and then and skepticism so here's the here's the series of events justin writes post called the great american poisoning i read it i'm lit on fire justin this was my i i i did an end of year recap for myself over the weekend it was the number one blog it was my favorite blog post of the year was this thing you did you you read that and then i i i told by team i said hey let's break this down point my point because you made a lot of really interesting points i if people haven't read it which we pull it up on youtube but it's like you have this photo of this guy remember you go this guy was considered so overweight that he was like a member of the circus and it's like if you go to a nearby costco today you'll find you know hundreds of people that more weight in the sky but that was considered like circus freak fat before and you've talked about how doctors would go their whole career a pediatrician wanted to go the whole career never see a kid with you know fatty liver disease or these things like that and you're like now it's more and more common and it's just a a very compelling case around health so you you combine three very interesting things one you have a very strong factual based view of health you are self actual around health you're one of the sort of fitness most healthy guys that both sam and i know and look up to we 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 walk to walk on it and then third is you're an entrepreneur so you've started two brands in the kinda like keto space each doing you know tens of millions a year in revenue you know get distribution in ten thousand plus retail stores you started a non alcohol more than that yeah non alcoholic beverage brand because you're like great drinking is like one of those 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 cp g experience before that you had no d 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 that's a great intersection for us on the pod because we're both interested in health and like living in a good life but also how do we profit from said good life and you've actually done it so i'm excited because not only have you yourself had you know three or four big hits in the health wellness this space but you then brainstorm and sent us a dock of like five or six new opportunities that you think other people could go do in this space you know i i literally think that this space like solving the great american poisoning there's just almost immeasurable opportunity for people and entrepreneurs that wanna solve this problem like like i can read some stats off but it's just staggering the amount of chronic disease and the burden that that's putting on the country and so as an entrepreneur like if you see a big problem like that you just wanna sprint towards that and you know not only to say like when you solve some of the problems that are involved in fixing the chronic disease crisis you're also like helping people you know you people are living longer they're living healthier it's a very rewarding spot you know space to work in as opposed to maybe like day trading entities or something like that and your blog post is basically summarized you said the answer to why so you you give all these stats as to how messed up we are but you said the answer to all of this is simple our food system is poisoning us and the institutions meant to keep us safe which are regulators healthcare care system doctors and researchers are not incentivized to keep us healthy which is like the cause of all the problems that you're discussing yeah exactly yeah i mean we we basically we had you know call it a hundred years ago our chronic disease burden was like ninety five percent lower than it is right now there were certain acute issues like infectious disease was much more a real thing were there were all of these things that we built our medical system on and then life expectancy went up as we got better at solving you know women dying and childbirth infectious as z polio these sorts of things now the the biggest burden that we see from a health standpoint is chronic condition so like cancer asthma heart disease diabetes things like this that have grown seven hundred percent in the last you know ninety years and so i think that we are running the the code if you wanna call it that of an old healthcare 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 you walk around almost anywhere in the us and the average person is going to be sick the average person is going to get cancer heart disease you know any number of chronic conditions at some point in their life and our medical system is not built to service a population where the average person is sick and so because of that we need new institutions and companies and it it creates a ton of opportunity for entrepreneurs that want to try and address the great american poisoning by creating products and services that help people you know stay or move back to a baseline default healthy space we should get to the ideas because they're great but here's like another like one liner that kinda 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 feel like i'm such a depressing person these days i gotta talk about the stuff it's just like well yeah justin debbie downer or mayors over here alright 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 key you know ketones space you sniffed out the opportunity in known alcoholic like wines each of those is doing you know very very well what opportunities do you see today where what should what ideas 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 nobody got to call blogs from now and by the way that's way better it's a little risk but i'll take it you know like in jerry maguire tom cruise writes is manifested to kick off the movie that's this you this is your your jerry maguire exactly yeah this thing was still work and so so yeah so to back up like my view on what has changed in the last call it eighty years is that we went then humans mostly existed in an environment that was not poisoning people to one that is basically poisoning them like if food water you know lights air like all these sorts of things are filled with plastics chemicals toxins ultra process whatever there's making the default person sick and so one of the things that i think is really is a really compelling opportunity on that is you could build a massive company in my view that helps people actually look at their environment their home and or their office and say okay you're spending you know eighty percent of your time in these like three spaces it might literally be like you're bedroom your kitchen in your office how do we make it so that these spaces that you're spending time in are maximally healthy and health promoting and i i have a a friend actually who just started a company in the home health testing space that's doing super well they're testing like water air em ems lights stuff like that what's a it's called light work it's do light work dot com so they're doing really well but i think that there is this whole world of home services like home services are a forty billion dollar you know 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 or thinking about all of like the flame re retarded chemicals that are giving like babies cancer you know then as they spray it on your couches 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 app what is going on in your built environment in your home and your furniture and all this and says how do we make this health promoting like how do we encourage health and try and make this you know this sort of service one that makes the person healthier so so it's like a an annual check up for your house yeah exactly i 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 good make sure like you know your tap water is ro and has mineral 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 do a bunch but what do you do in your home that's worth it that would be included in in your home annual checkup 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 installed actually they installed it it was like this eight thousand dollar system they installed it next time they came around to fix it they like screwed on a twenty dollar part incorrectly and i walked into my kitchen in the next next morning and i stepped on my floor boards and like water came up for around them and was like fuck so there there's a lot of now you got a a mold issue yeah exactly so we had to handle that which was quite annoying but we have like every water that isn't that is coming in and out of our house gets filtered and 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 light which is basically most light bulbs on circadian rhythm sleep they they even impact like if 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 ball is that a normal ball yeah i think of like the edison ball 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 led leds is also one of the reasons that i think i felt much better since switching them out of my house if you have an led light in your house and you take your iphone and you film it on slow mo you can see that led bulb flickering like thousands of times per second and the reason that led lights are supposedly more more efficient than incandescent bulbs is because they're turning on and off all the time and so they're actually like on and using a less electricity because they're you know they're not on the entire time so they do this sub conceptually which you know can cause people to like feel just ic sometimes you walk into a room with bad lighting or like what's going on in my system i don't like this the marketer really loves everything you're saying around because like the two things you just said and like kinda of a throw away thing those were actually like you know twenty million dollar ad hooks when you're talking about do you know how they make chickens fat what's 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 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 eighty ninety percent of the problem but like and no one talks about it except for us in this ad right now it's a secret that you exactly it's a it's a see 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 sal you go it's actually flickering do you know how that messes with your sleep with your whatever us i love all of this from a marketing i i know you're a good at 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 i mean and this this is why i think this is such a big opportunity because you have the home services thing like the healthy 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 em ems in my house you know make sure i don't mold like all these things there there's a tremendous amount of spend that people wanna put into making sure that their home environment is healthy dude i had sam have 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 walks he's like hey you want you want me to just do a quick look around your house just free i'll just take a quick look see if i see anything of concern of course and he walks around the house 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 oh he's like that's the that's you know that's rats and i'm like what rats he's like yeah they're under your floor boards i'm like oh under my floor board and he shows me all these little things that he's like yeah there's my and look we just live out and like you know a hill area there's mice everywhere hey 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 papers sir be my dad exactly he's like great and now i'm paying two hundred seventy dollars a month for this guy to come and do nothing to my house i have no idea what he's doing and 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 the it actually was you know issues it it's just i would not i would not have been aware of the problem i'm a big fan of this kinda like audit method of sales let me do a free audit for you to kinda tell you where you might have some problems and then if you'd like me to fix them i'm happy to do so yeah are there any other things so water filter light bulbs any other like big needle moving things i i think that specifically for your bedroom and places where you're spending like multiple hours it's kind of early but i think that the em thing is going to be much more of a thing that people care about and it sounds very tin foil had and let me explain like why i think this might be important this is why i i like your opinion by the way you're great at this you're you're like like this is what the freaks think and this is like how it relates to a normal person and like where's the truth somehow higher you know what mean yeah exactly so so basically like a hundred years ago we had the we had we had a certain type of of radiation that was i believe called ion radiation it's that or non ion i know this stuff well enough yet but basically it was like think of like what you know you get shot into at at a dentist or something like that 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 a years if we basically were like okay microwaves is everything else is fine now we think okay microwaves are bad they certainly call some harm it's like causes thermal effects in the body let's also not expose people to microwaves at a 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 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 two thousands where they were assuming that people would not be exposed to these things for more than like twenty to thirty minutes a day like the the guy who came up with these rules they interviewed him 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 of sign like articles that i think are concerning enough where people will like change the electromagnetic fields that mice are exposed to and 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 demand 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 vms for eight to nine hours a night that's probably well worth doing by the way one thing i think we should save you're not one of these guys that's like optimized everything like i've seen you say multiple times you're like you know the just get these core four or five things right and you're like you know you need to sleep well don't need too much processed foods specialty seed oils you know exercise get some sunlight like you're very much a basics kind of guy and 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 micro of sunlight in your eye within ten seconds of waking up it's like all these like all these fringe like the thousand fringe things you could do to like maybe move the needle when you haven't done the core foundational you big things right you it seems like you're more of the get the core right first but i don't 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 is gonna kill you 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 eighty to ninety percent of it that said i also think if you have relatively easy interventions like move a wifi router outside of your bedroom and yeah know swap the bulbs in the rooms that you're spending twenty hours a day and like those are pretty easy interventions that are are like one time relatively low cost to no cost and could have a big impact on your health like you i'm very supportive of those things i'm definitely not be like butt hole solves your entire health issues you know type of guy and there's a lot of those guys like it'd be what did yeah it'd be amazing don't what you say yeah i actually do think this is one of the problems with the health influencer space more broadly is it's just not sexy to be like avoid ultra processed foods get some the morning lyft four days a week and you know make sure you're getting adequate sleep and so these people get they get like attention from going further out on the the the crazy like claim curve right well you can't sell that right you can't sell that advice you can't even just create content you can't become an influencer because you'd say everything you need to say in fourteen seconds and what are you gonna do tomorrow what are you gonna post the next what are gonna post the next 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 interest thing novel and like evergreen to they have to have more and more stuff to talk about so not nobody's incentive is to tell you the simple few things that you should focus on and get right because they'd be done you wouldn't sell me anything and you'd be done talking i was trying to find it but brian on brian johnson's newsletter and his subject line for his last new newsletter was wednesday it says your boner are killing you that was the subject line and it was how the lack of getting it nighttime e corrections is somehow correlated with longevity and it was like you're saying it's not sexy to sell just he's like well does brother they got me you're you're right can we do a quick sidebar on brian so i i like brian a lot as a guy really nice guy yeah actually really like what he's doing in general but man i kinda missed 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 z where he's got like the chain and then oversized t shirt and he looks cool and he's selling products he's got like cool youtube content he's got great subject lines for his emails and he's got a great social media strategy and i get why all that's good but it does make me trust less in a weird way because he kinda what he was doing before was so different this kinda self funded science experiment on himself with the noble goal and noble mission and i i don't know i kinda of feel like he's d distracting from that i think he he's i don't know am i the only one who feels that way saying i was saying 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 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 well i mean one he's trying to build a like longevity cult like new religion which he openly says 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 in healthier life which i think is fair and good and i'm all for that i'm much more interested in like why are people uniquely getting sick in in today's you know environment and what 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 unfortunate like i will be very interested to see what happens to him over the next twenty years but i think twenty years of trying very like out on the risk curve therapies you know it's quite foot possible something like doesn't go so well yeah maybe i just have a preference for like the autistic bio rather than like the you know content creator influencer sir with a d brand underneath it i think i've just seen a lot of that and the first thing he was doing felt felt very original yeah let me ask you you had this great phrase that i think we should bring up which is or maybe you or was cali i don't remember you maybe maybe was your c cofounder but the other thing where you said if you had a fish tank and then all the fish sides suddenly started getting sick you wouldn't drug the fish you'd clean the tank right you would assume that there's something that's causing the fish to get sick and for some reason we have this instinct to just drug the fish the fish is 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 there's what we're feeding them is their environment and i love that metaphor of cleaning the tank yeah no you capture it perfectly and the only thing i would say is that i don't actually think we have an instinct to drug the fish i think that we have a four point three trillion dollar industry that's job it is to propaganda is people to think the only way to fix the fish vicious health problem is drug them like that that to me is the insane thing that we're you know the same situation we find ourselves in is everyone is getting sicker you know overweight everything i think i asked chat to recently i think it was something like sixty percent of people have taken pharmaceuticals in the last twelve months or like you had a prescription something crazy like that it's crazy so let's do the so the first one you had was kind of the cleaning the tank right check up for the house find find ways that you can make your home environment healthier for you and less interfering with your with your health the second one you have a modern butcher shop so this about feeding the fish i love this what what is the modern butcher shop opportunity you see by the way sean remember i told you actually last two episodes i said i think my two predictions for or two of my predictions whereas people are gonna have more plants at their homes because it's kinda nasty and also i thought i was like but there's something about the meat at whole foods that i actually think is crap nowadays totally yeah i'm not i'm not saying you're right or a genius but i'm not i'm not saying of people i i you know i think i've hung out with justin before so i'm i'm sure i've still i stole that yeah i mean so it's at a very high level this is one of the things i'm most excited about there's actually one coming in austin in january which i'm super stoked for but it's it's the first one that i've seen that goes as far as i would like and and basically let me like set the table through an analogy i i think that like in the eighties coffee was basically like fo it was like burnt there was no differentiation on sourcing it wasn't very good tip tell there was no coffee culture and starbucks came along there was and that was like big second wave of culture kinda coffee and now there's like craft you know c and like small like cool roast and coffee shops in every major city that you go to i basically think that meat today is where coffee was in the eighties like you go to the grocery store and you're buying meat you're buying like steak you're not the no one is differentiating on how is this dry aged what is the cut was the genetics of the animal you know how was it raised was it regenerative was it not was it fed you know soy was it massage until it was killed and like did it drink ipa until it's last day like all these sorts of things are actual differentiator 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 what's their store i just kinda had an instinct when i saw it i was like almost because it was the only branded meat that was there it's like all the other meat the the the branding was like eighty percent twenty percent right like they did the fat percentage and then there was one with like a brand name on it and it sounded like a place and i thought 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 a few companies in us that have an american like wagyu and so they have a a wagyu line they imported i believe from japan at some point in the seventies or eighties and they've been like breeding this wagyu line if you buy whole foods best rib eye you're probably gonna cost you like twenty bucks a pound or something like this or you buy it like the best rib eye it from you know from snake river it's gonna be like sixty to seventy dollars per pound and so the the kind of like skew in pricing and the amount that people are willing to pay for really really high quality meat is massive and i just think it hasn't made its way into retailers hasn't his way into bush and so i think there's this massive opportunity to build like what i'm calling like the blue bottle of the modern butcher shop that caters to people that really care about sourcing flavor cut dry age you know all of these things that you're not gonna be able to get at whole foods so this there's actually like it seems like there's two opportunities one is to create the like another snake river farms right a a brand that is you know elevated in some some way that would go sell through grocery stores and so just the way we've had you know you know you have oat selling oat milk you got right you if 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 meet brand there's that that that's one idea which already sounds like a big idea yep 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 it's hey you're feeding them maybe it's maybe it's like a a version where you're genetically select ding in some way the sort of premium or you're you're you're breeding in some way the more premium that seems like one opportunity and the other one you had is the butcher shop which is like you said like blue bottle coffee and blue blue bottle sold for what like five hundred or seven hundred million dollars seven or eight hundred yeah so and like i don't know if anyone like how popular it is blue bottle nationwide because i never heard of it till i moved to san francisco this is like ten plus years ago i it's like a big city thing it's like it 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 bottles cooler than starbucks it wasn't like it was elevated above that and it just seemed like a passion project and then i see that it sells for seven hundred or eight hundred million dollars and and wow that nothing thing really worked so yeah i a this is like to me there's a ten out of ten idea this is an amazing idea i i i agree i mean i think it's a super exciting one i also think that the reason the reason i would personally if i were to start this you know start with like a butcher shop or something like that is that with a butcher shop you can actually have a a a pretty wide range of pricing you can tell the story you can try like do small sampling you can talk about the aging and stuff like that if you took a sixty dollar stake in the whole foods and just plop it on the shelf next to like a twenty dollar one or a fifteen dollar one and there's no story ability there that thing just like won't sell unfortunately are are quality meats or you cows i guess being grown and you just have to source them or do you have to go and do this yourself no so so there are small farmers that are growing really really high quality meats they're selling in farmers markets they're just hard to buy from like it's hard to aggregate enough supply that whole foods is like yep put it in the five hundred stores or whatever or you know it can fill up a a meat case in austin and so this really only works where if you're if you're a butcher you can buy probably an entire an entire herd or or an entire amount of a farmers or ranchers cattle and sell it through your store over the course of a couple months that is worst your investment from a relationship and like amount that you're gonna make on that standpoint for whole foods it's like yeah we're never gonna work with a small interesting operator that might just have fifty or a hundred head of tat leather stuff and can you freeze and store like beef and it'd still be great months later yeah you can i mean the the better thing though is that you can like dry age it and this is the other thing that if if you're taking this like hyper premium approach 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 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 a butcher shop it could actually work how big is this business you think snake river reforms i would imagine it's in the like two to three hundred million in revenue range wow i think it's probably massive are they raising but they're raising their own beef though too i mean they have like photos of cowboys so they like yeah yeah i mean they're they're vertically integrated they've been doing this for a long period of time as far as i understand but i think that there's enough operators like that that don't have the snake river farms branding that aren't shipping on dry ice all over the country but that could really like like sell into a butcher shop in austin nashville san francisco la new york that that just does really well like i'm frankly shocked that the only butcher shop that i know that is doing this is start is in austin and you know it's opening in like a month and easy he trying to just make one or he's trying to make it like a like a nationwide type of thing i i think there's like bigger ambitions but yeah starting with just one like let's make it work figure out the economics figure out this business to an amazing idea it's it's it is amazing it's so expensive though and a lot of this is centered around beef only because like i've always wanted to get like healthier chicken because i i i just don't love eating and lots of beef so previous like again like eighty years ago the food system had diversity there were multiple types of birds chickens things like that today ninety nine point five percent i believe of every chicken eat in the us is one genetic breed which is the corn 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 delicious it's not bread for protein content it's not just bread for like any of the stuff that you or i care about it's just how quickly can it pack on mass and then i can like sell it you know and it gets eaten i think the average life of these birds on average they the like born harvest is something like six weeks and 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 i don't like you know whatever and they just haven't had chickens that are actually like delicious and it's it's funny you can read old ads like there was this one this luxury rail line in the twenties and thirties that made a big deal about how they have they've like cornered the market on this one chicken genetics and they served it only in their first class cars and all these people were like wow this is the best chicken i've ever had in my life like there's stories like that where it's like yeah what what does the wagyu or kobe version of chicken i don't i've never even heard of one yeah yeah exactly no one knows that i mean there there's no one that is raising these for flavor dude that sit by the way absolute sick burn to call someone a corn cross that's gonna be my new thing a anytime i see somebody that's just you're just a ninety nine you're just like ninety nine percent of the others you're just trying to pack on just pack on mask you're a quick flip of a chicken that's you're just a corn cross sure there's a famous ad there's got named joseph sugar who kind of pioneer direct marketing direct response copywriting in the eighties and he at the time a courts movement watch was already popular like watch kinda knew about that but it wasn't like impressive like it was just like a normal like table stakes thing for any watch of worth more than fifty bucks but anyway he was famous for creating these ads for a just wine of line of watches and he popularized the idea of quartz movement watch as if it was like some like epic thing like and then all the watch kinda serves like yeah dude the the 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 you can invent interesting cool stories that are also true factual but like you know i think a lot of like the health nuts like they're always like yeah this is standard we don't give our chickens this or that and you're like yeah yeah i know but like most people don't know that and so we're gonna tell this amazing story about that hey exactly yeah and i i think like the mental model is you know you're having a dinner party and it's like pulling out a nice bottle of wine but people aren't drinking good poor 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 buying like all of your meat from the snake river farms no not all of it i mean the their stakes are like super fatty and marble than everything like you wouldn't wanna actually eat that every day but i i basically buy my meat and most of my food from local farmers around the austin area what does that mean i'm like you personally have relationships so you go to farmers market we know so yeah go to a farmer's it there's also a 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 i just go every week and that's where i buy like all of my normal staples are you just like not eating apples in december or whatever like you can't like i guess if there's seasons particularly and awesome when it's mostly together like where does that come from whole foods then is where i'll get like the remainder of like the produce and stuff that's not seasonal got it so you do do like some normal stuff and then you also like yeah you know go to farmers 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 up i'm giving that a b this this blue bottle for for beef this blue bottle the modern day butcher shop i'm given that an a plus is exactly doing that you want that to exist or you wanna invest or you think it's dude i want it to i i would be a custom customer of it i know the i know where the demand is i know a lot of people listening to but like i'm not trying to buy a sixty dollar stake that's fine there's a lot of people who are trying to buy stuff like that i i know a lot of people that are trying to do and i just know that when you go into a category where there is no existing brand number 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 fo cost per cup of coffee but i think it's in like the sense so you the idea of going to starbucks are paying four dollars for a coffee that you can make at home for fifteen cents or ten cents or whatever you know sounded outrageous but of course people did 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 kinda 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 cost more and that's why you'd have to tell the story on social media and sell it through 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 a that's a twelve out of ten idea what you have another one on here calibrate for fertility what is this yeah i will quick if anyone does the butcher shop thing saying i wanna invest i think it's such an exciting interesting but so calibrate for fertility you all i don't know how where 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 assisted reproductive technologies are growing like seven to eight percent a year and it's accelerating ivf is the best in class option right now it cost like twenty to thirty thousand dollars it inject a bunch of hormones it's super invasive it's super hard you know on the on the female and it's it's just a brutal brutal thing and so i think there is this big opportunity 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 month period where you get a combination of peptides supplements people do like an environmental review make sure that you're not wearing polyester underwear while you're trying to have a kid or 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 twentieth of thirty thousand dollar very expensive very invasive very hard you ivf out do this like you know several hundred dollar a month sort of lifestyle based fertility approach and we're gonna 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 it'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 seems like progesterone helps with increasing odds of conception there's a bunch of interventions that i think are just almost criminal underutilized justin have you ever heard us talk about one chart businesses have you ever heard this thing we say on this podcast yeah this to me is one so so look at this chart so this is search interest for ivf clinic near me and just look at it since two thousand and eighteen look at the like relative search volume it's you know to from zero to seventy five on this chart all the way to a hundred on a hundred scale of ivf clinic near me which is pretty wild because that's not a long time that's something you would expect to see like on a thirty year time horizon not a not like a six year time horizon and what you're saying is there's stuff you can because ivf is obviously very hard on you know it's hard mentally physically emotionally financially hey what if there was a you know an intervention step before that you mentioned calibrate i've never heard of this company what does calibrate yeah that's a crazy set that you have on them as well say that yeah so so calibrate was a company they they got acquired somewhat recently but they basically started out by being they paired gl ones ie with lifestyle interventions and so their whole thing was like oz people are meant to be on it for the rest of their lives what cal did is said we're gonna prescribe oz we're also gonna introduce coaching accountability lifestyle interventions like this whole suite of things where the goal is to get you off of those epic at the end of a six or twelve month period like a like a new meats or kinda of i mean weight watchers is trying to do this yeah exactly exactly and so they do does the companies always scale fast no did something similar pre oz and they an advertiser with my old company to the hustle it's like within a year of launching they were spending hundreds of thousands but those this is it's i don't know how these guys grow so so big yeah i mean there's a lot of demand for this and what tal figured out is how to actually get it covered by some to some degree by insurers and insurers we're okay with it because they're like great we're not gonna have to pay twenty grand a year for oz indefinitely we can actually get people off of this this drug after a six or twelve month period and so in the first two years they got to like over a hundred million dollars in revenue and just scaled insanely quickly that it does look like calibrate kinda went on went under though or something i don't know i see look i was looking for their funding stuff but it looks like they they've got restructured private equity but basically for twenty million they got seventy five percent of the company now so i think it's it it definitely ran into some trouble yeah but that means they could be bad operators but the demand still existed yep yeah that that would be my contention basically is that they were doing this and they launched a think twenty twenty one something like that and and i basically think that insurers went from they were like early on the oz plus lifestyle thing and then there's been this massive record amount of lobbying spent to just keep people on oz zap basically forever which i think probably did not do them any favors well percentage of people needing ivf or and you probably don't know this but of like the average age of the first time mother has gone up i think it's nearly thirty at this point i think it's twenty nine or something like that in the seventies it was twenty one so it's gone up a lot what percentage is it just because of people waiting longer to have families versus like american suits system being poisoned good question i 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 seventy percent of it comes from people that previously would have had three to four kids now having one or two and so it's not like people are just deciding not to have kids they're just having fewer and i do think that the biological fertility issues are a huge huge amount of what is driving down the average number of of kids that you know a family or woman has these days dude pretty crazy how many of my friends my male friends tell me that they're like like in in austin we used to go to asana all the time and i would have somebody friends they're like i'm not going in the son of this week we're trying to get pregnant and my balls aren't working and so i'm trying to like like i can't cook them right now you know what i mean like there were so many people that i knew you and i justin and our friends yep and they're like i can't do this i can't do that i need to go do this because we're we're struggling and it's my fault it's pretty wild sean if you had a bunch of friends out have a complained of similar stuff they're like it's my sub hate working you lost me have you had a bunch of friends now i i think it is this like under the radar thing very few people are talking about but almost everyone i know that is trying to have kids right now has some amount of fertility challenges and even if that's six to twelve months and men they get pregnant even still you know if you do that across like two to three kids you're basically going from you're now having one to two kids instead of like three to four if every time it takes you six or twelve more months to get pregnant so you've mentioned three kind health related start ideas you've started i think for kind of successful that i know of health health related companies can you describe this approach because i'm the kinda guy that bounces around from industry to industry model to model i'm like i'm like a variety seeker and i don't think that's good like just when i learn about of a space i get intrigued by something i'm a beginner in and i go in and i i'm i stop the compounding of that so i don't think that's too smart can you describe your approach to entrepreneurship versus you know somebody like me who's just bouncing around and trying a hundred different trying to solve a hundred different problems and a hundred different spaces and the hundred different business models totally yeah i i think for for me at least what has been very rewarding is basically choosing one problem which for me is a chronic disease crisis that i wanna spend the rest of my career on like i i think that there's a massive amount of compounding like relationship compounding even personal brand compounding like people think of me as like into health which pay some dividends that's probably gonna you know be even more so over the next decade you understand the space you understand the problems you understand the players and relationships like i think that if you decide this is the problem that i am the most interested in the world that i deeply care about that i read about for fun and just orient your career around trying to start things or be involved in things that make that problem better or solve that problem like you get so many shots on goal even if they may look different like i started kettle and fire thinking like the american food system is poison and there needs to be a bone broth company what did you read or consume that made you buy into that and then how long were you into it before you're like this is my thing yeah so i was going to crossfit in san francisco in twenty fifteen and a bunch of crossfit where like you should do bone broth i'm a terrible cook like almost never cook for myself and so i basically was like great i'm gonna go buy some of the store and no one was selling some and so after that i was like seems like there's an interesting opportunity here and did i think it would grow to like be a nine figure annual business definitely not but it was a big enough opportunity that decided to take swing but did you get into health and wellness because you're like that seems like a cool opportunity or were you're like i'm obsessed with this topic and this is like a really good way to address it yeah i was was just obsessed with the topic basically like i've been reading about paleo and reading about you know all these sorts of things since i was basically in college like i was a weird dude in college who my senior year i went paleo and so i like wasn't drinking beer wasn't eating pizza french fries all my friends were like hell was wrong with you like what's going on and so i i just got very into this idea this like secret in a sense of like why is everyone getting sick record levels and what could be kind of underpinning that and so it was this deep interest and as i got deeper and deeper understanding and appreciation of the problem i just really understood like this is literally i think the biggest problem in the country and i can spend the rest of my career trying to solve or take stubs at various instances of this problem whether that's starting a brand or trying to fix like the incentives through t med you know i basically was like i think i'm just gonna try and solve or work on fixing this problem for the rest of my career so let's go back to that kill fire example so you you're you're doing crossfit trying to live healthier crossfit are telling you should do bone broth you're like cool where do i get some of that and you go you look there's not like a an easy brand that you could just pull off the shelf and buy it so you think somebody should do that now at that time you've got no experience doing that you've never built a d product you never built like an actual you know consumer brand can you just describe like the the three or four bullets that happened that first year to like make it happen that like because i think you know all these ideas are cool but you gotta be the type person that can make shit happen you made shit happen at that stage can you just describe what what you made happen for kettle far yeah totally so we basically we first tested a landing page put up a landing page with no product started buying ads to see like who would click on it what would they pay you you had the brand name that time we called it bone broth c which was a horrible idea at century branded the kettle on fire you just made it yourself you just mocked up an ugly landing page yeah marked of ugly landing page on un balance paid someone on five or ten dollars to make a terrible logo and basically started selling a box at twenty nine ninety nine so and when you say started selling what facebook ads how'd you get the track yeah we did facebook ads and at facebook and afterwards and then some bang at the time because they were like there's was an ar there it's much cheaper did bing bing clicks back then i i there was so cheap and they had burned way higher no i know i was always like i don't know who hundred people are but they're in the middle what was that first few weeks or maybe a month like that gave you the was were you looking for conviction or you already had conviction what what happened in that first month for you that yeah i was i was looking for a conviction and so basically we'd put in five hundred dollars we built this landing page and i think sold like little over two thousand dollars worth of product inside of about of a month and so i ran the numbers and was basically like okay we can build a business and i think just given an existing traffic we can turn this into at least like a two to three hundred grand a year kind of business and based on like what i thought the margins would back into i was like that would should be about a hundred grand hundred and fifty grand a year in profit which seemed like a worthwhile thing to take on and then what okay so you you do you do that and where did it get much bigger than that what what happened to make it much bigger so we validated the idea the next thing is we do we had to figure out how to make it and so we emailed and called over five hundred different manufacturing partners to just like please someone helpless us figure out how to make this product and eventually what ended up working is my brother who nineteen at the time who i c founded the business with he emailed mark cuban as like i'm a nineteen year old entrepreneur like please help and mark cuban introduced us to a manufacturing partner who we ended up working with and still work with today to make our first like version of the bone broth product and so anyway what did you what did he your brother's like hey mark we're entrepreneurs but we don't how to make a product do you know any bone broth manufacturers and he said yes here's just one happened he was like talk to my food person and then his food person introduced us to our cop was yeah you should talk to this this scoop group over here and just to clarify that those first two thousand dollars worth orders did you just go refund them because you didn't have a product yet i i emailed all of them and i said hey we're not gonna have a product for like six to nine months i can either refund you in full right now or fifty percent off and we'll like eventually ship it and be that didn't respond i would just refund them yeah okay great so mark cuban gets you a food person that's the second thing that now now you know how to now you can get the product made yeah and so and then basically what i realized is the product is two years shelf stable i put literally every dollar of my life savings at that point i was twenty five into doing the first run of our product they had thirty thousand dollar minimum runs it was like a hundred twenty k kinda run budgets so i was like either this is gonna work great or i'm gonna eat on broth for two years either way i'll i'll like feel pretty good and so we bought the first product and year one we basically did two point eight 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 adam and was like hey i wanna bring you guys into whole foods and we basically we we did extraordinarily well in whole foods and got national rotation in the following year and that just kinda like started our our journey i think i was with you eight or ten months after you started it in san francisco we went bowling i don't know if you remember that and yeah you were telling me about this and i was like oh well i mean it seems like you got a really good career why you throwing to get away at this like i i just remember thinking of like let like why does he wanna to root everything yeah starting about roth company in s staff at the height of like the tech boom was definitely not a consensus opinion my sister when she moved to san francisco she had 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 got got an undergrad like school engineering got an mba from a good business school was a management consultant and then she she's like i she's like sick of this life i wanna i need a business that i can own and not have to go to a job every day and she was so tired of like the consulting hours were so bad that she would come home and her like her kids would be asleep and she would just pick them up from the crib just to hold them for a few minutes because like she hadn't been there when they to like even play with them before before bed and like after four nights of that she's like never no i'm not doing this it never has started a business before decides to start a an in home daycare care so she kicks me out of the apartment i'm living in and says i'm gonna use that apartment which but my my parents owned apartment they're like she's like kick you out i'm gonna use that to start this business and i'm gonna she needed six kids so six kids to come to this like in home daycare care and my dad was like you have an electrical engineering degree you have a job that pays you whatever hundred and fifty k a year your magic consultant and you're gonna change diapers and she just felt so bad you know quote 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 the i say that because a lot of people will hit that crucible moment where it feels like you're throwing away this known and socially accepted thing to do this kind of fringe weird thing from scratch on your own with no safety net and i'm not saying that it always works out but every time something works it almost always has that story at the beginning of like you you're doing what and that's totally normal even though it feels abnormal in the moment it feels bad in the moment totally and i i'd sam i'd actually love your thoughts my experience frankly was almost every single person that i knew who was starting a business or or trying to start a business like between twenty two and twenty five has made it in some way shape or form like it's insane yeah i think so justin and i both started roommate matching companies we are both we are both twenty and so between the ages of like twenty and twenty five we were like in the same industry and so all of our s friends we you know our were similar age and dude it is crazy how many i actually just tweeted about this today i was i grew up in s from age like twenty to thirty it's crazy how many of our six are successful just because they're is around do you know what i mean yeah totally naval has a great phrase where he says yes i mean hear the stats about startups oh ninety percent of businesses you know new businesses fail and he goes yeah startups fail but founders don't and i love that phrase he said oh basically if you just fast forward ten years any of the founders that stayed in the game like the success rate goes from your first business success rate might be ten percent but the ten year saga of you trying a bunch of shots on goal and getting smarter every year set like the odds are now like if you just look at our cohort friends right sam we were a mastermind together back in what was that twenty thirteen something like that like our cohort of friends which is probably like you know thirty to fifty founders that we used to hang out with and know regularly the hit rates like eighty or ninety percent success for the people that actually stuck it i got a couple friends that packed up their bags and moved to you know connecticut and just said you know i'm not doing this anymore not you i'm sorry there's like literally i'm thinking of like a couple of friends that did that they were just like hey like the san they're burned out from san francisco start of 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 up with one the quick story which is i remember gag and beyond he started the thing called u and it was like courses why this is like what ty has 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 one hundred dollars or three hundred dollars a month which would be like life changing and so we both did that stuff and i think that you know i i could say for justin for sure people look up to you and i i look up you and i'd admire you it's crazy how like if you look at like eight or ten years ago which wasn't that long ago you were doing many things that like you know people like well poo like maybe coarse creation or like buying a car and renting it on tour or whatever and it's like man the people you admire or start waist scrap than you think i i know i for sure did yeah say i mean i i don't know that anyone admire me that's taken my keyboard shortcuts for mac users ut course but definitely i was hustling back to the day i've ever read travis clinic the guy who started uber his his old blog he had amazing blog that he was call called like awesome miss bro it was called like something silly like that right it was heavily brought out but he had this blog blockbuster was just like attending ces on the cheap or southwest on the cheap it was basically like his playbook for how to have a badass time at a conference when you have no money and he's like 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 in the instead here's what you're gonna do for for staying at someone's house know here's how you're gonna skip the event but still get in to the after party because that's where the magic happens when you get there here's what you're gonna say any of this like really scrappy approach to how to just like you know wedding and crash a major conference on a budget and he was thirty one years old by the way he was thirty one when he wrote down post just not like he was a college kid and he also used to invite people to just stay at a house in san francisco was part of the magic of a city like san francisco was like he used to say if you're and it the reverse was if you're coming to san francisco and you got no money and you're a founder he called his house the jam pad and he would have like people constantly just coming and crashing on his couch and he would host people over late into the night and everyone just jamming on different ideas and he used that to kinda build his momentum his network his energy it is pretty wild yeah so cool can we finish with this z story z is auction off gold chain for you for your charity what what is this well i saw you tweaked that justin i was like is that real yeah you just read he totally downplayed it you said z auction in my chain and no one like it looked like no one replied to that yeah had a bad twitter that the were bidding for it how much did it in up going for it's like forty one grand but a wow that's one do you know some anonymous person i'm not sure but we so 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 twenty four that are high potential you know it's inflection grants dot com if anyone wants to check it out but basically someone made an offer to me when i was in my twenties 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 i was going to school and i think he just knew that i wanted be an entrepreneur also saw that i didn't come for money and i think knew at this very key time that that offer would make a big difference in how in my decision making and he was right and so i started inflection grants three years ago since then you know we've given out like fifty grants and long journey who one of the gps is ariel zuckerberg has gotten behind it in a big way and so this year ariel convinced mark to auction off one of his already worn gold chains and then we had to make sure that was cleaned no dna residue or anything like this but sold you know did you really did you actually have to like whatever that stuff for sure did you get the did you get to talk him at all no no but yeah you give away and we auction off for forty one grand which goes to charity which is great so that's twenty twenty people are gonna get these two thousand dollar grand exactly you 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 like a lot of people don't know this but sean do you know that adjust like a c author on the book traction with the duck founder like there's like there's there's like there's like five or ten other things that you have really amazing stories behind and are really insightful on and so thanks for coming on and and doing this i'm like literally sitting here taking notes so i'm like clan incandescent bulbs and like farmers markets and shit like that and you're gonna be getting a lot of follow text on me where it's just like justin tell me what to do tell people where to where to follow where to get more yeah so i'm subs stack trust in mayors subs you know dot subs dot com i write a monthly saying newsletter on health and business stuff and then also on twitter at j w mayor's and go read the great american poisoning we didn't do it justice in this in this podcast but go read that blog post it is ab amazing we'll put the link of the shown to that specific blog post alright that's it that's a pod thank you justin i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back