$100M founder predicts 6 trends that will be big in 2030
Pet Health, Home Health, Personalized Wellness - March 31, 2025 (10 months ago) • 55:01
Transcript
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Justin Mares | So, this is actually a company that I've wanted to invest in for so long. If you're doing this, please just email me.
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Sam Parr | Alright, so I wanted to have you on because you are one of my healthiest buddies. Last time you were on, I think you've been on three times already. You didn't get into a lot of the ideas because we were just peppering you with so many questions, and I wanted to be more focused.
I think I asked you what five or six interesting health companies or health trends you are interested in investing in. You hit me back with a very detailed list in a very short amount of time, so clearly you are already thinking and acting on a lot of these things.
Can we go through each of them and you just tell me what they are? Because I'm crazy fascinated. For the listener, you told me in February 2015 that you were quitting tech. You had a software company and you were going to launch a bone broth company. I was like, "Oh man, you're deciding to throw your life away. That sucks. You were going to be one of the greats."
Then it just came out in Forbes, I think, or was it Forbes? Yeah, you had this amazing feature about your company, Kettle and Fire, and how you surpassed a hundred million in annual revenue. It was amazing! I'm like, "You definitely won." I read the article, by the way, and I texted like five friends saying, "Justin does everything the right way." By the way, did I get that right? You guys are at a hundred million run rate or revenue? | |
Justin Mares | Yeah, north of that. | |
Sam Parr | And you said something amazing. I think you said, "We're going to be the best operating e-commerce company in America." Is that right?
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Justin Mares | Yeah, I mean basically, most of the big public food companies were started pre-1900. A lot of these companies are very, very bloated. They're large and, frankly, I think many of them are poisoning people. They pay lobbyists and other opposition research groups to ensure that soda doesn't get removed from food stamps and all these sorts of things.
I think these are just generally bad actors. There's a huge opportunity to both out-innovate these big CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) companies and also run a better business. I guarantee no one in Battle Creek, Michigan, working at Kellogg's is looking at how to use AI to automate a lot of their workflows and processes.
Whereas, we have live work streams going in Kettle and Fire to figure out how to apply the craziest technology—certainly the leap forward of my lifetime—to just running the best possible company that we can. I think it's working so far. We have about 34 people for our size of business, which is quite good scale. | |
Sam Parr | You have only 34 employees? Wow! Is it wildly profitable, or is it working its way to being wildly profitable?
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Justin Mares | No, we're profitable. I mean, one of the things that I'm very proud of is that we've raised only $10,000,000 in primary capital since starting the company. It's been pretty capital efficient. We've been focused on building the trend but also building a good business since we started it, like nine years ago. | |
Sam Parr | Damn, that's awesome that you have proven me, and I'm sure many other people, wrong. You've been early on a bunch of stuff.
Alright, so let's dive deep. What's the first one you want to talk about?
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Justin Mares | Yeah, so the first one I want to talk about is, I think that, you know, there is this huge, huge macro trend where all people are talking about. They're talking about MAHA, they're talking about seed oils, they're talking about all these things from a... | |
Sam Parr | From a health standpoint, make America healthy. | |
Justin Mares | Make America healthy again!
Okay, we're talking about all these things regarding fixing the chronic disease crisis in the U.S. I think that health trends, specifically for dogs and other pets, tend to lag a couple of years behind humans.
Basically, a couple of years ago, you saw companies like Blue Apron and HelloFresh launch. Then, a couple of years later, Farmer's Dog, a fresh dog food delivery company, launched. I think they're well over $100 or $200 million in revenue at this point. It's crazy!
I believe you can look at the U.S. chronic disease crisis—obesity rates, inflammation, cancer, autoimmune diseases—and see the same thing happening in dogs. Something like one in four dogs are going to get cancer. This is unique; cancer rates among dogs are rising. Again, this is because dogs, like humans, exist in an environment that is actively poisoning them. Kibble is total trash, and it is literally making dogs sick.
I think there are a lot of these health trends that people are getting into, and you're going to see them become popular now. In two to three or four years, they will be popular for pets, especially because now it's something like millennials or Gen Z literally have more dogs than babies. The market is growing incredibly quickly.
Although I don't have a dog, I think there's a lot of gold in taking human health trends and applying them to dog health products.
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Sam Parr | Is this true? You say here that in some cities, there are more dogs than babies?
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Justin Mares | Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's certainly true, like the younger you go.
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Sam Parr | The kibble thing is interesting. I had a dog for fifteen years; he was my best friend. In his last five years of life, it hit me what I was giving him.
When I first got him, I was poor, so I would buy the cheapest dog food. Then, as I could afford it, I started buying what they tell you to buy. You know, the shtick they say is to only buy something where it says "chicken" as the first ingredient. Who knows if that's true or not? But that's the more expensive option.
I was eating kibble, like dry dog food, and it would be sort of like feeding me potato chips every day. Yes, do you know what I mean?
And like, when you have a dog and you eat dinner, they all come and obsess over you. You yell at them, but I'm like, if you gave me refried beans for every single meal, of course, I would be desperate for any new food. It's kind of insane, right? That we would feed them the same thing, and it's like a processed, dried thing that doesn't expire.
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Justin Mares | Totally! It's insane, right? It's totally insane. And you look at the ingredients; it's full of trash, full of artificial ingredients. You know, like all of the stuff that people are trying to remove from their diets, we basically put in kibble and feed the dogs for every single meal.
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Sam Parr | For every meal, I remember my in-laws have a dog that comes over. They're like, "Oh, don't give him table food! I don't want him to be unhealthy." I'm like, "I don't know, man. I feel like this asparagus and chicken might be alright."
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Justin Mares | % | |
Sam Parr | And we had Kevin Rose on the podcast. He had funded a company called Dog Aging Project (dogagingproject.org). I believe what they are doing is based on the premise that, for some reason, people are often willing to let their family suffer more than they are willing to let their dog suffer. At the same time, they are willing to experiment more.
So, the premise was that they had a drug, what's the longevity drug that starts with an "R"? Ah, rapamycin! Yes, I believe they were selling this to dog owners. What they found was that there is a huge correlation between what we can do with dogs and what we will eventually do with humans, like you're suggesting.
They have noticed that they have gotten dogs to live longer, and their premise is: we are going to start here and then eventually go there to humans. So, yeah, people agree with you.
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Justin Mares | Yeah, well, I think that they're looking at it as like, you know, a drug, and then they'll expand into dog longevity and then move into humans.
I think that the business opportunities exist looking backwards. Everyone is talking about water cleanliness and water filtration and stuff like this. Yet, when they go to feed their dog, they put their bowl under the sink, and the dog gets a load of whatever toxins, chlorine, you know, all of these sorts of things. That's its daily water source.
I think there are all these things where, why is there not a reasonably sized company just doing like Aurora, like a really high-end water filter but geared towards dogs? I don't know. I think dog saunas and dog cold plunges are probably a little too far, but certainly, I think there are a bunch of peptides, supplements, and water filtration things like that.
Even doing dog kennels with more natural materials would probably do quite well for people who already think and view the world through the health lens and have not yet begun the process of applying that lens to their health or to their pets.
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Sam Parr | Can you tell me what Light Labs is? That's amazing! I looked at the website, and it seems like this might be your brother's thing. It might be bigger than everything you guys have done. | |
Justin Mares | Yeah, yeah, yeah... I hope so. I mean, my brother and I started Kettle on Fire together, and we grew it. After some time, he stepped back from the business. His new business, which he started last year, is called Light Labs.
What they're doing is basically addressing the many toxins and other sorts of harmful substances in our food supply chain. At Kettle on Fire, we spend almost half a million dollars a year testing all of the batches of bone broth we make to ensure that there's no glyphosate, no PFAS, no phthalates—like all these sorts of things. As a company, we invest a lot of money and energy to make sure our supply chain is clean, particularly from substances that you can't see as a consumer but probably care about.
So, what Light Labs is doing is building a modern lab testing company focused on toxin testing for consumer brands like Kettle on Fire. They do two main things: they test for the nutrition fact panel and run the normal heavy metals testing, but they also conduct a longer list of rarer tests, such as phthalates, PFAS, glyphosates, and pesticides.
Once they run these tests, they actually expose the results and push the most recent versions of a brand's lab tests to both their website. If you're sold mostly in retail, the goal is to get a QR code that a consumer can scan to see what Kettle on Fire's most recent lab tests show regarding PFAS and other exposures.
I think this is one of the most interesting things happening in the health world right now: this broad push towards transparency. It’s about bringing visibility to harmful substances like microplastics and phthalates—things that people know are bad but don’t have visibility into. This transparency in the food system creates the incentive and energy to make change. So, that's kind of what he's doing. | |
Sam Parr | I've had a ton of questions on this.
Okay, so you and I lived in Austin together, and then before that, we lived in San Francisco together. Both cities are very much like bubble cities. Austin is, you know, very health-conscious, and particularly our friend group is very health-conscious. Then San Francisco was, you know, on the forefront of a lot of tech.
Do people where I'm from in Missouri, where you're from in Pennsylvania, do they care about any of this stuff?
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Justin Mares | Not right now, but I think that it's not like a percentage of people have to care for this to make sense. What is undoubtedly true is that people are spending more time and energy focusing on sourcing toxin reduction. They're spending more money at companies like Whole Foods on brands like Kettle and Fire, and on their health in general.
I think that this is one of the things that people are going to start caring about when they shop. The minute that... yes, it may not be like people, you know, where my family's from or your family's from. They may not be asking about phthalate load in, you know, their hot dogs that they're eating or something like that. But some percentage of people will.
You only need a small increase in order for there to be demand from the brand and consumer side to basically have supply chains and agricultural resources, ranching, and all these practices that incorporate and think about toxin exposure, pesticide load, and the like.
So, I think Light Labs is the type of company that I'm super bullish on. They are bringing transparency to the food system because I think it's just going to... once you bring transparency, then there's energy to try and clean up and improve the food system behind that.
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Sam Parr | And so, this company from... I don't know anything about the space. It's basically like putting an organic label on your food.
So, a food company would pay them, and they would say, "Light Labs is a reputable brand. We have proof that they've tested everything we paid them money to do."
We also have a dashboard where we can see where we are in the process of the testing. Is that right?
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Justin Mares | Yeah, exactly. So, consumer brands like Kettle and Fire, we already have to spend money on, you know, these different sorts of tests and things like that. | |
Sam Parr | Why do you have to? | |
Justin Mares | Because you're legally required to by the USDA or FDA to do nutrition facts panels, you have to conduct heavy metals testing. There’s just a slew of tests that you have to perform.
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Sam Parr | By law. | |
Justin Mares | Run... yeah, by law, before you can actually sell a product, that's something you already have to do.
What Light Labs is doing is they are bringing a lot more transparency to the supply chain. They are making it so that you can look at, you know, Momentous supplements or any number of these things and basically see, "Okay, beyond just metals testing and things like this, what are the other things that they've tested for?"
Oh wow, I can see, you know, like no detectable phthalates. I can see no detectable glyphosate, no detectable atrazine, and some of these other pesticides that people care about.
I think it's bringing what has been hidden in the depths of these horrible lab tests run by companies that are like 60 years old to the forefront and making it influence consumers' buying behavior. That makes me so bullish. | |
Sam Parr | How big is the biggest lab business now, or the couple of biggest ones? When your brother was raising money, or when he was just brainstorming with you on describing how big this could be, or like what his dreams were in twenty years, what was he...? | |
Justin Mares | The biggest one is called Eurofins. I think it's like an $11 or $12 billion company.
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Sam Parr | Like in revenue. | |
Justin Mares | No market cap, but I mean it pretty closely maps to revenue because it's like a service business.
Yeah, you know, it's not a great business; it doesn't trade very well.
So what he was saying is basically step one: I think that we can build a competitor and be better than Eurofins.
Like, you submit to a Eurofins lab, you submit an email inquiry, and you get a response maybe in like three or four days.
Then, when they run your test, they don't communicate anything. They dump like 30 PDFs on you that you have to hire someone who understands food science to, you know, translate this stuff. It's really insane.
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Sam Parr | And you go to their website, eurofins.com. It looks like you're making a vaccine or doing some type of embryo work.
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Justin Mares | Like, it's like a... | |
Sam Parr | Very intimidating website. | |
Justin Mares | Exactly. So, they're not the type of company that is going to build an incredible product for consumer brands, and they're not the type of company that's going to build a consumer-facing product.
What he was thinking, my brother was like, "Wow, this is going to be incredibly interesting. We can build a Eurofins competitor. We can do a better job servicing CPG brands. We already know how to do that from his experience at Kettle and Fire."
Then we have the opportunity to build out this entire other business where we can build consumer awareness of these different toxic compounds and turn Kettle and Fire's $500,000 a year of lab testing expense into an actual revenue-generating function, almost like a marketing line item.
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Sam Parr | Dude, this is so awesome! Does he have any revenue now, your brother?
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Justin Mares | Yeah, they launched a couple of months ago, and they've started to get revenue.
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Sam Parr | Did he raise funding or did he bootstrap it?
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Justin Mares | He did... no, no, no. This is definitely the type of company you have to raise money for.
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Sam Parr | It looks expensive to start. | |
Justin Mares | Yes, definitely. It's honestly the type of company that I think is the perfect "act two" company. Nick has experience, domain expertise, and can raise money.
When your first thing is like, "Hey, we have to raise millions of dollars," and we're going to write a check for multiple millions to buy a laboratory and lab equipment, all this stuff, it's tough to make that bet on a 22-year-old. But on a 29-year-old with some experience, it makes more sense. | |
Sam Parr | Is this in Texas?
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Justin Mares | Yeah, in Austin. | |
Sam Parr | Wow, this is amazing! Alright, first of all, this is crazy. How much does... oh, and the labels!
So, like, if you go to McDonald's or fast food, they put the nutritional information there, which is, like, way more challenging, I think, than, like, an M&M or a candy bar, which is more controlled.
But I'm pretty sure I've always believed that nutritional labels are **bullshit**. Like, in my head, I've always been like, "It's give or take maybe even 30% of what is presented." | |
Justin Mares | Calories, right? | |
Sam Parr | The is it like I that would just because I weigh my food. I've tracked almost everything that I've eaten for like four years now in MyFitnessPal. Wow!
I weigh it, and now I eyeball it sometimes. But first of all, I've noticed a few things. One, when people eyeball their food to track, they almost always underestimate by around 30%.
If you go and buy, let's just say, a Big Mac, the degree in which they are different is huge. There's no way that those nutritional labels are accurate with just the calories, let alone whatever else, like the macros and whatever else is supposed to be in it. | |
Justin Mares | Yeah, exactly. I mean, the FDA first, depending on the compound or the nutrient, will have a limit that is often ±10%. For sure, oftentimes it's upwards of like 30, 40, even 50% depending on the compound.
As you can imagine, some of these things are fairly sensitive, like potassium or iodine, or things like this that are present in minuscule amounts. It's really hard to say exactly for every single cookie or piece of bread that you're getting, or whatever, that there is a specific amount of iodine in it.
So, the FDA allows for a reasonably high tolerance on some of these errors, which makes a lot of this nutrition stuff even harder to figure out. | |
Sam Parr | Who owns the certified organic label? Is that a company?
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Justin Mares | It is a nonprofit. I believe it's Oregon Tilth, which is one of them. But yeah, it's like a certifying body. | |
Sam Parr | And I've always contested that that's **bullshit** because, like, I just think that when you... I've seen farms where they have an organic section and a non-organic section. It just seems like when you put medicine on one of them, it inevitably will get in the other one.
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Justin Mares | That is certainly true. The thing that is good for... like I think organic is better than nothing, but it's certainly not perfect.
I think that there is a lot of... you know, there's a fair bit of research that organic vegetables, for example, have far fewer pesticides than their conventional counterparts. But they still have some, right? It's not because they're directly being sprayed; it's because of... you know, wind, water, and all these sorts of things moving these compounds everywhere.
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Sam Parr | What's another good one? Do you want to do function, health, or skin gut health? I'm fascinated by all these.
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Justin Mares | Yeah, let's do function. So, you know, function, health, superpower, like...
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Sam Parr | Explain what those are. | |
Justin Mares | Yeah, so **Function Health** and **Superpower** are basically companies where you can go to their website, sign up, and pay an annual membership fee. They facilitate a telemedicine service where they'll say, "Hey, you can go get your blood drawn at a lab or have someone come to you."
You can test your own blood for over 90 markers. This includes things like PFAS exposure, heavy metals, testosterone, insulin markers, and all sorts of other things. This helps you know if you are healthy or if there are things you need to work on.
I believe that Function is one of the fastest-growing companies in the entire Andreessen portfolio. They are growing super, super fast.
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Sam Parr | I think they announced another fundraising. I believe they mentioned that it reached **9 figures** in revenue in like two or three years. That's something insane!
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Justin Mares | It's crazy! There's so much demand for people wanting to understand their biomarkers, their lipids, and all these sorts of things. I think that in four or five years, we're going to know more about the health of our bodies and what's going on in our systems.
It's definitely more knowledge. What I think Function Superpower and others are doing is lowering the friction for people like you and me to understand what's going on in our bodies and our blood. That information creates a ton of potential for action. | |
Sam Parr | But why? Why is Function growing so fast?
Because I've used InsideTracker for years. Before that, I don't know, there have always been these kinds of things.
Why? Yeah, like now I'm hearing so many people talk about Function Health, and I'm like, "These have been cool and awesome for a decade now." Why is this one particularly awesome?
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Justin Mares | I think that their marketing is great. I think that the value proposition is great. It's like one price, one annual membership, and you get this slew of tests. If you went to your doctor and asked for the same tests that Function would give you, it would be like...
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Sam Parr | <Dude, they don't let you. | |
Justin Mares | Well, if you went to [the event], they either don't let you in, or it would be like $7,000 or $8,000. So... | |
Sam Parr | My God.
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Justin Mares | $500 a year.
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Sam Parr | I had a friend who tried to get his testosterone checked. He went to the doctor, and the doctor was like, "You're 32; you're fine. You don't need to do that." | |
Justin Mares | It's insane. The medical system is so patronizing. It's like there are also people talking about how you shouldn't get an MRI or shouldn't get your blood work done because... | |
Sam Parr | It'll scare you.
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Justin Mares | You'll cause all these questions or scare you, and you're like, "Fuck off." That stuff is such an insanely patronizing thing.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, it's crazy. Like, I... you know, I've done this before where I'm like, "I want this tested," and they're like, "But you seem perfectly healthy."
Exactly, dude! Just write it on the paper. It means nothing to you, and it's important to me. Just do what I tell you to do, please. Like, this literally requires nothing from you, and I'm just going to learn.
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Justin Mares | That’s exactly right. I think that, like the medical profession writ large, there are certainly people that do good. However, I think that many of them have this "the patient's an idiot, I know everything" kind of vibe.
If you look at the trajectory of American health, I certainly think that we need to change what we're doing. Taking health matters into their own hands is a huge, huge thing.
This is why this trend is interesting to me. For the first time, I think you are going to see millions and millions of people being onboarded and understanding what is going on in their blood and bodies. They will then take steps to optimize or improve those things.
Right now, if you take supplements, like, you know, Sam, you probably take creatine or something like that. You take it and think, "Maybe I'm a little more shredded," or "Maybe I feel better," or whatever. But you probably don't see any of your lab markers change. The same is true for thyroid or cholesterol markers, lipids, or other things.
I think as people get this information and start to retest over a six to twelve month period, we will see significant changes.
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Justin Mares | That we are going to see way, way, way more products and services that sprout up where people are like, "There is demand for people who want to optimize their biomarkers."
So, sort of like today, we have personal trainers who help you get shredded because that's kind of the only thing people can see. I think in the future, we'll have apps, trainers, services, and things like this that are specific to, "Sam wants to lower his ApoB score," or "Sam wants to improve his LDL," or "Sam wants to improve his thyroid."
I think all of these things are going to be newly marketed angles and topics that people talk about because they have this insight into their body.
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Sam Parr | This company also took off. By the way, I quit taking creatine. It turned me into a gorilla! I got so big that I couldn't fit into clothing. Have you taken it?
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Justin Mares | I have... and I stopped. I stopped because a friend freaked me out. He was like, "Everyone who goes on creatine starts losing their hair," which I didn't experience or know about. But I was like, "I'll cycle off it for six months and see what happens."
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Sam Parr | I went on it. | |
Justin Mares | It didn't happen to you, obviously. | |
Sam Parr | No, not yet. But I ballooned. I just got so... it felt like I had gained so much weight. It was like 15 pounds in three weeks.
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Justin Mares | Wow. | |
Sam Parr | I got huge. I went from like 202 to like 215 or something. Then I was like, "Alright, I gotta go off it for like eight days," and it just all went away.
I don't know what happened, but in this function health thing, these guys took off. I mean, what they did was smart. I don't know if Mark Hyman started it or if he's considered... is he like the Kim Kardashian of Skims? I don't know if he had the idea or if someone else had the idea and he was the face.
But partnering up with that dude who's got 2 million or something followers... my father-in-law is like, "Whatever Mark says, I do." So, partnering up with a guy like this is so much better than whatever else health influencers sell, like coaching PDFs or... you know what I mean? Totally.
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Justin Mares | Yeah, like I generally think, also as a side comment, this is how creators are going to monetize more in the future. It's about owning chunks of very good businesses that rely on distribution, rather than just, "I'm Mark Hyman and I get an affiliate fee every time I refer someone to check out Function Health" or something, you know?
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Sam Parr | Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. What's this other one about a functional medicine doctor for your home? That sounds amazing! Explain that.
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Justin Mares | Yeah, so there's increasing awareness around how your home can basically be a source of disease. Like, lighting can be bad. EMFs [electromagnetic fields] are controversial, but I think they definitely have some health impact.
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Sam Parr | Wait, what's that? | |
Justin Mares | Electromagnetic frequencies, basically like your cell phone and your Wi-Fi router, are all around us all the time. You know, water toxicity and off-gassing things called volatile organic compounds. Basically, when you walk into a building that's newly painted or something like that, you can smell it. | |
Sam Parr | Dude, do you have so much anxiety all day?
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Justin Mares | No, I'm pretty chill. I really believe in the **80/20** principle on this stuff.
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Sam Parr | Because like everything you're describing in my house is like, you know, a chainsaw. They're just gonna rip me up. I saw a video by this guy named CarnivoreMD, and he had a video on YouTube explaining his house. CarnivoreMD is like the most extreme of the most extreme when it comes to these types of granola health influencers.
He had a mattress that had only natural fibers, which I don't know what a grounding thing is, but there was like this grounding for electricity. He had a pole that went into the ground of his home, and all the electricity had to touch that grounding pole. Do you know what I'm talking about?
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Justin Mares | That's amazing! Yeah.
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Sam Parr | Like, it was like... and then he had no LED light bulbs. He had no Wi-Fi, so there was no Wi-Fi at his home. You had to plug in if you wanted to use the internet in this one particular area of his home. It was crazy! I was reading it or watching this video, and I'm like, "That's cool," and also, "This is fucking exhausting."
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Justin Mares | Yeah, definitely. It's very cool. | |
Sam Parr | Like when you just named all of these things, I'm like, "I don't know, man." I kind of would just... *fucking kill me early*. You know what I mean? Maybe I'll just take that as a consequence.
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Justin Mares | Yes, so I agree. It's exhausting. It's a multifactorial problem. It's like a thing that people are aware of and want to fix, but they don't know where to get started.
This is actually why I think that a functional medicine approach or a trainer that makes your house healthy is a very interesting idea. I actually invested in a company called Light Work (dolightwork.com). They are basically doing this where they can send someone to your house and conduct tests around what are the things that could potentially be causing disease, stress, or other sorts of issues in your home.
It's shocking what they have found. For example, they tested a billionaire's home recently, and across all sorts of factors like air quality, water quality, VOCs, and EMF exposure, it rated very, very badly. People are not looking at the home through the lens of health and chronic disease.
When you start to, there are a ton of changes that you want to make. Many of those changes are confusing, or people don't really understand. So, I think there is a huge opportunity for people to start thinking about home health or housing through the lens of health. A company like Light Work, or others that bring this sort of home health test assessment—almost like functional health for your house—is a really, really big opportunity. | |
Sam Parr | So, they have a list on their website. For water quality, I assume that includes putting some type of filter. They have lighting, which I imagine means no LED lights or a certain type of bulbs. They have EMF, which I guess is the grounding thing we talked about, like basically.
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Justin Mares | Somewhat, yeah. It's more like, are you sleeping over a Wi-Fi router? Are you spending a lot of time in areas that have a very high power, you know, electromagnetic frequency? | |
Sam Parr | Dude, they're going to get so pissed at me when they find out that I sleep with *Family Guy* playing in my ear on my cell phone. I sleep with my phone.
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Justin Mares | Oh God.
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Sam Parr | I want to fail this test. They have air quality, so that means, like, do you have plants inside your house or what?
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Justin Mares | The quality of your air is mostly affected by various factors. Some of the bad contributors include certain paints that are off-gassing and some furnishings that off-gas quite a lot. You also have microplastic fibers floating around in the air, which can come from your carpet or something similar. So, a lot of these things impact air quality. | |
Sam Parr | Do these guys make money?
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Justin Mares | They just started, so the answer is sort of, so far.
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Sam Parr | How much does it cost? | |
Justin Mares | It depends on the house size, but anywhere, it's definitely a premium product. | |
Sam Parr | 5,000 | |
Justin Mares | Or $10. Yeah, $10. I would say that it is one of these companies that, starting out, is expensive—concierge, like all that kind of stuff. Over time, I think there's a huge amount of potential, especially using AI and whatnot, to have people kind of do a version of this assessment almost themselves.
You walk around your house with a camera and all these sorts of things, and this company just tells you, "Change this, do this, this is probably bad, this is not." There's a really cool potential technology solution here, I think.
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Sam Parr | And the guy who started this, does he have a background in this stuff?
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Justin Mares | Yeah, he got incredibly sick. He and his wife actually moved into a house that was on top of a power line. That house had a bunch of mold issues that they didn't realize when they moved in.
Over the course of a year, their health—unlike every marker, energy, everything—just collapsed. They went to normal doctors; they went to all these people. Only after a crazy amount of experimentation and talking to doctors did they realize, "Wow, it's our home that's actually making us sick."
That's what kind of got them down this rabbit hole of trying to understand the problem, which is that many people are getting sick, feeling low energy, and experiencing all these issues because they're being slowly poisoned by the house they live in.
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Sam Parr | Dude, I feel whenever I hear this story, I think I'm broken. Because, like, I describe my family and where I'm from in Missouri. We're basically just mules.
You know, you eat donuts in the morning, cheeseburgers and fries in the afternoon, and steak, pizza, and French fries at night with tons of beer. You just do that every single day and you don't complain.
If you were to tell me that these people... if my house was full of mold, I would just think I have allergies. It's just whatever. This is just how I feel.
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Justin Mares | Yeah. | |
Sam Parr | Do you know what I mean? So, like, I wouldn't know, you know, to do... I've just thought I would just think this is just life. I wouldn't ever complain about it either. I would just be like, "Fuck it," like rub some...
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Justin Mares | You're not alone. I mean, this is how most people respond to this, right? I just think that people are becoming more aware of these things. Were you not raised that way? My mom was one of the early people into organic products. | |
Sam Parr | She was granola, yeah. | |
Justin Mares | She would buy milk in a glass jug that was unpasteurized, so it held these nasty clumps. You'd pour it into your cereal in the morning, and a clump would hit it, causing the whole bowl to explode all over you. It was so gross. | |
Sam Parr | Your mom's a freak, I know.
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Justin Mares | At one point, I think I was in fourth or fifth grade. The health food store where she was buying all this stuff literally burned down. All the kids threw a party. We were just like, "Yay! No more crappy milk!"
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Sam Parr | That's insane! And you know, it is funny. As my wife and I started having kids, it's so amusing that once the baby comes out of you, you automatically become *granola*.
There's a subreddit—have you seen it? It's called "Moderately Granola Moms." It's a place for almost hippies, and honestly, it's one of my favorite places to get information. The people there are hippie-dippy but self-aware, which is why I like it. I want someone who loves the extreme stuff but can also dumb it down for me. I'm more like, "I don't really want to learn everything; I wish you would just tell me what to do."
I want to know what's experimental versus what's actually proven. You know, you can help me as a more normal consumer figure it out.
I've noticed that my wife, the second we had a kid, was like, "No more Teflon plastic bottles are a no-go." Things like that. And frankly, I love it!
We hung out with Joe Gebbia recently. Did you ever go to Airbnb's office?
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Justin Mares | Yeah, yeah. | |
Sam Parr | So, I don't know if you remember this, but they were wild. This was back in February, I think they did this actually from the beginning. They had 2,000 people working out of that office—something like that, maybe a thousand. They made 100% of their own food, and to an extreme.
For example, they had "Air Bowl," which was some type of Airbnb for Red Bull. The condiments, like ketchup and mayonnaise, were literally made on-site by the staff. Their meats were all from butchers. Every single thing they had was made in-house. They even had trail mix that was like nuts with chocolate that they had made. It was crazy!
I distinctly remember that and thought it was crazy. Then I started thinking about it, and I was like, "That's kind of amazing." We hung out with Joe Gebbia, and I asked him about that. I said, "Why did you guys do this?" He replied, "Man, that's how I was raised. I think he grew up in Vermont or somewhere in rural New England. My mom was basically into this stuff, and I was raised doing all this. I just thought it was good for the planet and good for our bodies."
So, we insisted at Airbnb that we did this. Back then, you know, I don't know how old Joe is—maybe he's 40—so he was raised in the late '80s or early '90s. Back then, if you did that, like your mom, you were a freak. Now, all the young cool guys that we follow on Instagram, who we're friends with, all do this stuff, and I think it's pretty amazing. | |
Justin Mares | That is so cool.
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Sam Parr | You don't remember that about Airbnb?
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Justin Mares | I went there... I didn't, yeah, I went there to meet up with friends and then see a talk. So I only went two or three times and didn't actually get that level of detail. That's so cool.
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Sam Parr | It was wild. I don't know if they still have an office or if they still do that, but during the pandemic, they had to lay people off. Unfortunately, the culinary staff was probably the first to go. | |
Justin Mares | Yeah, that feels like the first thing that a public company, like an activist investor, kind of yells at you. | |
Sam Parr | For a week, you know, I understand that it could be tough to justify when there's no need for an office. But that was... it honestly was amazing. I tell the story all the time. When I saw that, I was kind of on board with Airbnb even further because I'm like, if they sweat the details with this, they probably sweat the details with other stuff. So I think that's awesome.
Alright, let's do two or three more. You had one about skin and gut health. What is that? Whenever someone says "gut health," it freaks me out because what's it called? Leaky gut is the world's greatest branding.
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Justin Mares | Yeah, so this is actually a cosmetics company that I've wanted to invest in for so long. I haven't seen anyone do it. If you're doing this, please just email me. My email is very easy to find, or ping me on Twitter.
The thing that I think should happen is that there are, I don't know how many, hundreds of billions a year spent on the skincare space. If you look at research, there are certain things that work. Certainly, there are classes of peptides and things like that which I think may work decently well from a skincare standpoint.
But for most people, if you're buying any sort of skincare to look younger or whatever, it's just a waste of money or it's marginally effective. | |
Sam Parr | That way, so say that again. So your stance here is that skincare is mostly a waste?
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Justin Mares | Skincare is mostly a scam. Yeah, yeah. Like a couple of things, like certain peptides, sunscreen, and moisturizer—sure, if you want your skin to be more moist. But a lot of the anti-aging stuff, anti-wrinkle cream, and all these sorts of things... | |
Sam Parr | Is there one in touch with an R?
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Justin Mares | Well, Retinol A is one of the few things that's actually relatively effective. It's like, oh, but this is the thing: basically, only peptides are the things that work.
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Sam Parr | Anything else that's a peptide? | |
Justin Mares | Yeah, so it's a peptide. Things like one skin use a peptide. There's something called copper... it's copper GKU, I think, which is another peptide. These things seem to actually work, as well as some compounds like methylene blue and whatnot.
But other compounds, like any sort of random $50 thing that you're going to buy on Amazon that is anti-aging and uses, you know, jojoba oil or any of these things, just... they do not work. Or if they do, they are so marginal it's basically not worth doing, in my opinion.
What does work is...
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Sam Parr | You don't wear sunscreen either, right? No.
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Justin Mares | Do you? | |
Sam Parr | What are your bold stances? Which is that sunscreen is... yeah.
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Justin Mares | I mean, I basically think that most sunscreen is carcinogenic. Again, this is another thing. In the U.S., we allow things like oxybenzone that are not allowed in the EU. It's in almost every sunscreen in the U.S. and is definitively carcinogenic. So, like, why do we encourage kids to put this on and use it for eight hours a day? I have no idea.
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Sam Parr | So, do you use zinc?
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Justin Mares | So, I use a non-nano zinc oxide sunscreen just for my face if I'm going to be in the sun for a very long time. Yeah. | |
Sam Parr | Dude, it's just so controversial for a white guy to just... I know.
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Justin Mares | I don't know, it's like I feel happy with my skin. So, the thing that I want to invest in is the research that shows the relationship and the link between gut health and skin health.
If you have a healthy gut, or if you work on probiotics, or if you drink bone broth—doing things like this that are going to improve your gut health—there's research that shows that this is generally reflected in your skin.
There's something called, I think it's called bioluminescence. Basically, there's a way to measure how much light someone's skin cells are emitting, and that improves as your gut health improves, which is kind of a wild fact.
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Sam Parr | How long is the change? So, for example, I don't have the greatest skin. I have dry, flaky skin. I just thought it was because I'm a super white dude. In the wintertime, my skin gets destroyed, but in the summertime, I'm great. I always thought it was just the lack of sun because my scalp gets so dry during the wintertime, and I need to get under the sun. Yeah, yeah, so I... | |
Justin Mares | Those like red light chicken lamps.
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Sam Parr | Does that do stuff? | |
Justin Mares | Yes, it's helpful.
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Sam Parr | Dude, during wintertime, I feel miserable. I need the sun to burn off everything on my head and on my face. So, if I started drinking [water/sunlight], what's the routine? How long would it take for my skin to get better? I... I... | |
Justin Mares | I bet it would take like six months, basically. But I think that's going to... | |
Sam Parr | Be summer by this time. | |
Justin Mares | Start now; you'll be great in December.
Yeah, but I think that the macro business opportunity is that people treat skincare as just a topical thing that you apply to your skin, not like an expression of your gut health and skin health and all these sorts of things.
I think there is an opportunity to build an incredibly large cosmetics company, you know, and skincare company, combining topical applied skincare that's actually effective with gut-based interventions that are going to improve your skin from the inside out.
I've wanted this company to exist for seven years now. | |
Sam Parr | But isn't that bone broth? I mean, what does this look like?
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Justin Mares | Yeah, so I think it would be a combination of specialized probiotics that are geared towards improving skin health. I think it would be probably a crash diet of like thirty to sixty days where you're removing a bunch of toxins and other inflammatory foods from your diet, incorporating bone broth, and then some sort of effective topical skin care. I think that regimen would outperform basically anything that exists in the skin care world today. | |
Sam Parr | Do you eat any processed foods?
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Justin Mares | I try not to.
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Sam Parr | But like, do it on a weekly basis. How often? | |
Justin Mares | Probably very, probably none. Zero to... yeah. | |
Sam Parr | One, maybe that's easy for... I understand that for meals. So you probably cook or do leftovers. What about for a snack? What's an example?
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Justin Mares | I actually use these. I just had one earlier. It's a Maui Nui venison stick.
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Sam Parr | Oh, I have one as well. I got my kettle and fire collaboration with them.
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Justin Mares | There we go! Hell yeah! Yeah, dude, they're so... | |
Sam Parr | You guys sent me a bunch of them. I think each stick is like $3.
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Justin Mares | Yeah, it's like $3 or $4. | |
Sam Parr | I have like $1,000 for these at my house.
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Justin Mares | Amazing! So, I do those like meat sticks. I'll do fruit, a couple of bone broth; those are kind of the go-to snacks. I've kind of been addicted to dried mangoes recently, which... | |
Sam Parr | But that's processed. No, like, is that not considered... Is beef jerky considered processed?
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Justin Mares | I wouldn't consider it processed. If you're sourcing it from a good place, it's not going to have a bunch of additives. It's basically just meat that has been dried and then some spices.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, I do dried mango. Where do I get it from? Whole Foods. But the problem is that I can eat like a bag a day, which is... like it.
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Justin Mares | Is there a problem?
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Sam Parr | Like 800 calories. It's basically like four Cokes. | |
Justin Mares | Yeah, yeah. Although, I don't know... I've been eating like... there's this interesting diet online that I'm currently trying. It's called the **honey diet**. Basically, you just eat fruit and honey before noon each day and then have a high-protein meal in the afternoon.
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Sam Parr | Why are you doing this? | |
Justin Mares | Just to experiment, frankly, and see how I feel. So far, I feel pretty good, dude. The mangoes fit within that diet.
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Sam Parr | I've been doing my snack lately: dates and butter. Have you ever had that? No? Oh my god, it's great! I think I saw CarnivoreMD do it, and I was like, "Let me try this."
I have a sweet tooth; I have a very addictive personality. When I quit drinking alcohol, it totally went to sugar, so I'm always having to combat that. But I think everyone is.
So, half a tablespoon of butter in a date is like the greatest thing on earth.
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Justin Mares | I'll think of it as a go. Actually, Carnivore MD is very into this meat and fruits thing. His diet consists of honey, fruit, and meat. He's very passionate about it.
I don't know, I actually think that there's a good chance that honey and fruit... like we're in the very early stages of people realizing that sugar is not that bad for you when it comes in fruit or honey form.
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Sam Parr | That's an interesting take because I would have thought you would have said the opposite, which is like "glucose is glucose." No? Oh, that's interesting. So you do high-sugar fruit as well, not just... | |
Justin Mares | I'm just starting to experiment with a low sugar diet. I'm not even sure how it's going to go. I literally got my labs done recently, and then last week I started this honey diet thing. I'm going to test again in like three months and see how things look. | |
Sam Parr | That's pretty fascinating. I would not have thought that this is something you would do.
I've read about bananas. Sam Korcos actually told me this in passing, so I don't want to attribute this to him because I could have been listening to him wrong. But I believe he said that a modern banana is like candy, and the way it used to be was more like a carrot. He was like, "They were not like this delicious, but we've genetically... you know, it's kind of like a Honeycrisp apple." You know what I mean? It's basically genetically predisposed to be like... you know.
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Justin Mares | Way sweet, yeah. | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, like, I think the new Apple that's popular is called "Cotton Candy Apple."
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Justin Mares | That's funny.
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Sam Parr | I have you seen they have that at Central Market? It was called the cotton candy apple.
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Justin Mares | I'll have to try it. I've not seen that.
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Sam Parr | So, like, you would eat that?
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Justin Mares | I would experiment with it for ninety days, for sure. Yeah, like I don't think a lot of this stuff... like, yes, if you're optimizing for sweetness, I understand that you could argue maybe it's bad. But I think that nature tends to keep trade-offs within a certain band.
So, I don't know, if you're having organic produce or whatever, I think that this stuff is not bad to experiment with and just see how you feel.
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Sam Parr | Do you eat vegetables?
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Justin Mares | Yep, yeah, yeah, I do.
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Sam Parr | Well, Ari's laughing at me, so are you, but a lot of these guys are, like, I think Carnivore MD in particular is on some parts anti-vegetable.
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Justin Mares | He's come off that a little bit. I mean, to me, I think that you just have to have a macro lens on this.
What have humans been eating for hundreds of thousands of years? It's not like, you know, in the year 1900 or 1970, when the chronic disease crisis really started ramping up, that all of a sudden people were rampantly eating vegetables and getting sick all the time.
It's like, obviously, in my view, not like we are in the midst of a vegetable-eating epidemic that is making everyone sick. It's clearly the ultra-processed foods that are new to our food system.
So does he have some good points? Like, maybe. Are vegetables less good than most people think? I could believe that. Do I think it is a thing that is worth optimizing to the point of never eating vegetables? Definitely not. | |
Sam Parr | Here's one for some of these health trends. I think that polyester clothing is going to... oh yeah, I mean, there's already a niche of people. I'm one of them. I don't wear clothing that has polyester. I try to always avoid it unless it's, you know, like special or particularly amazing. But in general, it's got to be all natural fibers. Are you on board with that?
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Justin Mares | Oh yeah, I mean, polyester clothing is like the number one contributor to microplastics. Basically, they shed like crazy when you're washing them.
There are some studies that have been done around this. They took dogs and had them wear polyester underwear, and their sperm count went down by 60 or 70%. Then, they switched them off of polyester underwear and...
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Sam Parr | Came right back up. No shit, no way. So, what underwear do you wear?
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Justin Mares | Do you wear underwear?
Yeah, so there's a company called **Nadz** that does organic stuff. There's another company called **Pact** (P-A-C-T), and I usually wear those.
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Sam Parr | How interesting is women's... I mean, I don't know. Does this matter to women?
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Justin Mares | So, it's unclear to me right now. I would say potentially, but it seems like the thing that is causing the loss of sperm is that there's some sort of electrical charge that happens between polyester and the skin. This seems to impact sperm generation. It's not clear to me yet; I haven't gone super deep on it. | |
Sam Parr | How fascinating! | |
Justin Mares | Yeah, pretty wild though, right?
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Sam Parr | That dog thing is crazy. So are you. It's crazy.
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Justin Mares | There you go! That's another great dog health idea: all-natural dog underwear.
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Sam Parr | That's insane to me. So, I use Ex Aficionado, and I loved it because it would dry quickly after you cleaned it, and they never stretched out. But I think it is highly synthetic.
Honestly, cotton underwear for the most part sucks, but there are some companies that are making really good cotton workout gear and cotton underwear that I really appreciate.
For example, what I like to do is get a lot of my workout shorts as all cotton sweatpants and I'll cut them. I'm a big fan of all cotton workout gear because Lululemon has underwear in the shorts, so your junk is just on the polyester. Even harder, do you know what I mean?
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Justin Mares | Totally, totally! There's actually a company called **Ryker**. I love Ryker! I love their stuff; it's so good. Yeah, it's so good.
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Sam Parr | It is so good! It's the only short company for men. They have shirts and stuff too, but the shorts are particularly hard to do. If a workout short doesn't have the underwear, then you're just kind of flopping all over, you know what I mean? It's hard to do with cotton.
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Justin Mares | Totally! Yeah, their stuff is great. I really, really like what they're doing, and I use their products for all my workout clothes.
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Sam Parr | That's great! Can you tell me really quick, are there any other stances like this? I just want to know what Justin does. This is so fascinating to hear some of your stances that might be controversial or uncommon.
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Justin Mares | I feel pretty confident that our current vaccine schedule is very much not good from a chronic disease standpoint. I don't make any claims around autism or whatnot, but from a food allergy standpoint, certainly the U.S. has the worst chronic disease issue. It is the most vaccinated and has the most egregious vaccine schedule of any developed country. | |
Sam Parr | So, what are you suggesting? Spacing it out or not taking them?
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Justin Mares | Yeah, I basically think that fewer shots, more spaced out, is like what I'm planning to give kids. I wrote a very long post on this.
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Sam Parr | It is pretty incredible. For example, they give a kid a Hep B shot literally five minutes or less, like two minutes out of the womb. I was like, "Well, I don't know if she's going to be around someone with Hep B anytime soon." So the...
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Justin Mares | The only way you can get Hepatitis B is through sexual activity and blood transfusions. They test the mom for Hepatitis B before birth. So, you're just vaccinating a kid against something, and the immunity wears off after a decade.
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Sam Parr | And also, not that many people have it. I don't think Hepatitis B is particularly common. No, like it's basically drug users, I believe. Totally. | |
Justin Mares | I mean, the other thing is, my view is that our health organizations have been captured by large companies.
You know, if you look at it, the COVID mRNA vaccine was added to the infant childhood immunization schedule this year. That is not a scientific position; something else is going on.
I think that's a relatively controversial take that I have, and I wrote a very long piece about it that I believe is defensible.
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Sam Parr | Any other last ones? | |
Justin Mares | Yeah, so against the health tribe, I think that the fruit and sugar one is probably the biggest one that I'm focused on right now.
I also think that this demonization of the tribal aspects of food cultures is something that is not good. I am much more into nutrient density. I think if you're eating nutrient-dense foods, like pizzas and carbs, as opposed to conventional vegetables, fruits, and meats that are maximally sprayed and processed, your health outcomes will probably be better.
In my opinion, eating a bunch of carbs from a very good source is more beneficial for your health. | |
Sam Parr | That stuff's like impossible to find. For example, in order to do that, you'd have to find someone that mills their own grain or something like that. Yes, like that's virtually impossible... or not virtually impossible, but it's a job. | |
Justin Mares | Yep, yeah, it is. I very much agree. | |
Sam Parr | Dude, you're the man! Thank you. I just, you know, I text you these questions anyway, and so it's fun to get, now, every time, just to pepper you with all types of questions that I have. But I appreciate you.
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Justin Mares | Yeah, no, this has been super fun, man. Thanks for having me on, as always.
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Sam Parr | And we didn't even promote your company.
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Justin Mares | Yeah, so my company, Kettle and Fire, is a bone broth company, which we talked about. My company now is called TrueMed. We're basically making it so you can buy exercise and healthy food supplements using tax-free HSA or FSA money.
So if you go to TrueMed.com, you can see a bunch of the brands where you can spend tax-free dollars. If you are interested in some of the health stuff I talk about, I also have a newsletter, which is Justin Maher's Substack.
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Sam Parr | **And a new podcast, TrueMed, has a podcast. It's great; I like it.**
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Justin Mares | Yeah, we're doing a couple of episodes on movement, exercise, and nutrient density.
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Sam Parr | Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you so much. God bless.
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Justin Mares | Thanks for having me on.
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Sam Parr | That's it. That's the part.
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