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

Shaan Puri

The marketer in me loves everything you're saying, Ralph. The two things you just said were actually **$20,000,000** ad hooks. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Justin, I'm pumped you're here. You're here for two reasons. First, you've started six or seven companies that have collectively generated about $500 million in revenue over the last seven years, which is huge — and they're all in the health and wellness space. Second, you're one of my most reasonable friends when it comes to health and wellness. You're into fringe stuff, which I think is cool, but the problem with people who are into fringe things is they can't always relate that to a normal person, you know what I mean? They'll be like, "this fringe thing I'm into is only a 1% needle mover as opposed to a 50% needle mover." You're very self-aware and thoughtful, and you've built a lot of big businesses in this space. You're also a blogger, and you have this amazing blog post called **"The Great American Poisoning"** that both Sean and I are obsessed with. I thought you could come on and talk a little bit about the blog post, but also about business ideas and opportunities you're into related to this space.

Justin Mares

I'm super stoked to be here. I mean, as I wrote in that post, I literally think that the—what I call the "Great American poisoning"—basically, the fact that Americans are sick at record levels and are getting sicker. Our children are sick; everyone is overweight and obese, and these problems are getting worse, not better. This is both the **biggest problem in the US** and, because of that, a **massive opportunity** for people who want to start companies or build value in this space.

Sam Parr

sean what emotion did you feel when you read this blog post

Shaan Puri

dude you could ask diego I went on like a 48 hour bender first here's what we did

Sam Parr

what did it fear

Shaan Puri

no no it was like out outrage first

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

and then curiosity and then and skepticism so here's the here's the series of events justin writes this post called the great american poisoning I read it I'm lit on fire justin this was my I I I did a end of year recap for myself over the weekend it was the number one blog it was my favorite blog post of the year was this thing you did so you you read that and then I I I told my team I said hey let's break this down. By. Because you made a lot of really interesting points if people haven't read it we should pull it up on youtube but it's like you have this photo of this guy 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 are more of weight than this guy but that was considered like circus freak fat before and you talked about how doctors would go their whole career a pediatrician would go their whole career and never see a kid with you know fatty liver disease or these things like that and you're like now it's more and more common and it's just a very compelling case around health so you you combine 3 very interesting things 1 you have a very strong factually based view of health you are self actualized around health you're one of the sort of fittest most healthy guys that both sam and I know and look up to we I I've messaged you before being like hey water filters tell me what do you like what brands do you like right because I trust that you actually walk the walk on it and then 3rd is you're an entrepreneur so you've started 2 brands in the kind of like keto space each doing tens of 1,000,000 a year in revenue you know get distribution in 10,000 + 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 the most unhealthy things we do how do we have the social drink that doesn't sacrifice unhealthy and what I liked was that you had no cpg experience before that you had no d to c experience before starting these you went in and you're kind of like it seems like you have this great interest and knowledge and you know self hobby around health and wellness but then you've also done it as an entrepreneur so that's a great intersection for us on the pod because we're both interested in health and like living a good life but also how do we profit from said good life and you've actually done it so I'm excited because not only have you yourself had you know 3 or 4 big hits in the health and wellness space but you then brainstormed and sent us a doc of like 5 or 6 new opportunities that you think other people could go do in this space

Justin Mares

Yeah, I mean, I literally think that this space—solving the *Great American poisoning*—has almost immeasurable opportunity for people and entrepreneurs who want to solve this problem. I could read some stats off, but it's just staggering: the amount of chronic disease and the burden that's putting on the country. As an entrepreneur, if you see a big problem like that, you just want to sprint toward it. Not only that, when you solve some of the problems involved in fixing the chronic disease crisis, you're also helping people—people are living longer and healthier lives. It's a very rewarding space to work in, as opposed to, maybe, day trading NFTs or something like that.

Sam Parr

And your blog post is basically summarized: you said the answer to why — so, you give all these stats about 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 — regulators, the health-care system, doctors, and researchers — are not incentivized to keep us healthy."** That is, like, the cause of all the problems that you're discussing.

Justin Mares

Yeah, exactly. I mean, we basically—call it 100 years ago—our chronic disease burden was about 95% lower than it is right now. There were certain acute issues: infectious disease was much more of a real thing. There were all of these things that we built our medical system on, and as we got better at solving, you know, women dying in childbirth, infectious disease, polio, life expectancy went up. Now, the biggest burden from a health standpoint is chronic conditions: cancer, asthma, heart disease, diabetes—things like this have grown about 700% in the last, you know, 90 years. I think we are running the code, if you want to call it that, of an *old health care system* that existed to solve a problem where you took a default healthy individual, they got sick, and the job of the medical system was to bring them back to health. Now we actually have the opposite: the average American is unhealthy, and people have not internalized what that means. You walk around almost anywhere in the U.S. and the average person is going to be sick. The average person is going to get cancer or heart disease—or any number of chronic conditions—at some point. </FormattedResponse>

Justin Mares

In their lives, our medical system is not built to serve a population where the average person is sick. Because of that, we need new institutions and companies. It creates a ton of opportunity for entrepreneurs who want to try to address the **"great American poisoning"** by creating products and services that help people stay, or move back, to a baseline, default healthy space.

Sam Parr

We should get to the ideas because they're great. But here's another one-liner that kind of summarizes this, which is: "**Everyone should update their thinking.** The default outcome of living in the U.S. 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."

Justin Mares

I feel like I'm such a *depressing* person these days. I kind of talk about stuff, and it's just like, "well..."

Shaan Puri

Justin—Debbie Downer mayor's 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—*the ketone space*. You sniffed out the opportunity in *nonalcoholic wines*. Each of those is doing, you know, very, very well. What opportunities do you see today? Where—what should—what ideas do you have?

Justin Mares

Yeah. So, I see — I see a ton. Backing up: I basically think that... I wrote about this in my long essay/manifesto, but I basically think that...

Sam Parr

that's what we got to call blogs from now on by the way that's way better

Shaan Puri

It's a little *Unabomber-esque*, but I'll take it. You know, like in Jerry Maguire—Tom Cruise writes his manifesto to kick off the movie. That's this: "This is you. This is your Jerry Maguire manifesto."

Justin Mares

yeah this thing was still mcquirk

Sam Parr

Alright, my friend. A lot of you who listen to the show listen because you want to start a company but you're not sure what idea to choose — or you may not even have an idea. You like our podcast, "My First Million," because we've done a lot of the work for you researching business ideas. Well, my friends, we've made life a lot easier for you because **HubSpot** has just put together an entire list of resources you can use to find a market opportunity to validate your next business idea. So if you're looking for a market-size calculator, tools to identify market trends, or a huge list of ideas to get started, there's a link below. Click it and you can access the whole thing — it's completely free. Now, back to the show.

Justin Mares

So, yeah. To back up: my view on what has changed in the last, call it, *80 years* is that humans went from mostly existing in an environment that was not poisoning people to one that is basically poisoning them. Your food, water, lights, air—like all these sorts of things—are filled with plastics, chemicals, toxins, ultra-processed ingredients, whatever it is, and that's making the average person sick. One of the things I think is a really *compelling opportunity* is that you could build a massive company that helps people actually look at their environment—their home and/or their office—and say, “Okay, you're spending, you know, about 80% of your time in these three spaces.” It might literally be your bedroom, your kitchen, and your office. How do we make those spaces maximally healthy and health-promoting? I have a friend who just started a company in the home health testing space that's doing super well. They're testing water, air, EMFs [electromagnetic fields], lights—stuff like that.

Sam Parr

what's it called

Justin Mares

It's called Lightwork — doLightWork.com. They're doing really well. But I think there is this whole world of home services. Home services are a **$40 billion** a year industry, where you can think HVAC, lights, plumbing — water, electricity — all these sorts of things. None of these people are looking at how we actually make your environment healthy. None of the people making your furniture are thinking about the flame-retardant chemicals that are giving babies cancer. When they spray it on your couch or sofa, they're not thinking about that. So I think there's a huge opportunity to build a company, or a series of companies, that looks at what is going on in your built environment — in your home, in your furniture — and asks: **How do we make this health-promoting?** How do we encourage health and make this sort of service one that makes the person healthier?

Shaan Puri

so so it's like a an annual checkup for your house

Justin Mares

Yeah, exactly. I think that's the first—that's the input: **do an annual checkup for your house**. On the back end of that, there are so many long-term services where someone services your water filtration, makes sure your shower water is good, and ensures your tap water is RO [reverse osmosis] and re-mineralized, and all these sorts of things.

Sam Parr

What do you do at your house? I know you do a bunch of stuff—I don't remember everything you do. I know you do a bunch, but what do you do in your home that's worth it, that would be included in your **home annual checkup**?

Justin Mares

Yeah, so I think a couple things are very worth it. One is **water filtration** — that's a huge one. I basically set up a whole-house filtration system there. We had plumbers install it; it was an $8,000 system. The next time they came around to fix it, they screwed on a $20 part incorrectly. I walked into my kitchen the next morning, stepped on the floorboards, and water came up from around them. I was like, "Fuck." So, there's a lot.

Shaan Puri

of now

Sam Parr

you got a a mold issue

Justin Mares

Yeah, exactly. We had to handle that, which was quite annoying. But all the water that comes in and out of our house gets filtered. We also recently got all of our bulbs — we switched to **incandescent**, actually. I think there is a very compelling, and pretty early, line of research that shows the impact of **blue-light-emitting** lights (which is basically most light bulbs) on **circadian rhythm** and sleep. They even impact — if you eat under blue light versus under non-blue light, it seems to affect the amount of weight you'll gain. They use this in agriculture, where they use different types of lighting when they're trying to, you know, get chickens to gain more weight or trying to...

Sam Parr

what's an incandescent bulb is that a normal bulb

Justin Mares

Yeah — think of an **Edison bulb**: it's actually burning something, as opposed to an **LED** bulb, which is what's in most houses today. There's a pretty cool thing you can do. **LED** is also one of the reasons I feel much better since switching them out in my house. If you have an LED light and you take your iPhone and film it on slow motion, you can see the LED bulb flickering thousands of times per second. The reason LED lights are supposedly more efficient than incandescent bulbs is because they're turning on and off all the time. That means they're technically "on" but using less electricity because they're not on continuously. They do this *sub-perceptually*, which can make people feel a bit icky. Sometimes you walk into a room with bad lighting and you're like, "what's going on?"

Shaan Puri

"On my system, I don't like this. The marketer in me loves everything you're saying, **Ralph**, because... the two things you just said in kind of a throwaway way were actually, you know, **$20,000,000 ad hooks**. When you're talking about 'do you know how they make chickens fat?' — they put them under these blue lights, and actually they gain extra weight."

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

Maybe that's why you're fat, right? Have you ever considered that you're being poisoned by the industry? So you have the "the man is out to get you" narrative — people love that. Maybe the problem is not what I'm putting in my mouth; it's the *life* that's affected. And so it's like, "Oh, can I improve? Can I buy this thing?" rather than changing from within. Maybe that's **80–90%** of the problem, but... you...

Sam Parr

do it talks about it except for us in this ad right now it's a secret that you know

Shaan Puri

It's a—it's a—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 in slow motion and you go, "It's actually flickering." Do you know how that messes with your sleep, with your... whatever? I love all of this from a marketing perspective. I know you're a good, ethical, stand-up guy, but when I hear this stuff I think, "What could I use to get this across? How could I—if I believe that this is good for people—how can I *maximally* get that into the hands of people?"

Justin Mares

Totally. I mean, this — this is why I think this is such a big opportunity. You have the home-services concept, like a "healthy checkup" for your home. Once you understand the impact that some of these things have on your health, many people are basically like, "Yeah — blank check: fix my air quality, fix my water quality, fix my lighting, fix the EMFs in my house, make sure I don't have mold." All these things. There is a **tremendous amount of spending** that people want to put into making sure their home environment is healthy.

Shaan Puri

Dude, I had a Sam [unclear: "Sam"—possibly a name]. Have you ever had a pest control guy come to your house? There might not be a better salesman in the world than the pest control guy. He walked in and said, "Hey, do you want me to just do a quick look around your house? Just free. I'll just take a quick look to see if I see anything of concern." I'm like, "Of course," and he walks around the house. Then he says, "Hey, I'd love to show you a couple things," and he takes me around the house. He points and says, "You see this?" There's a tiny screen that's moved open. He's like, "That's— that's, you know, that's rats." I'm like, "What? Rats?" He's like, "Yeah, they're under your floorboards." I'm like, "Ew—under my floorboards." He shows me all these little things and is like, "Yeah, there's..." We just live out in a hilly area; there's mice everywhere. Then he's like, "Would you like me to just come around once a month and spray and fix some of these things for you?"

Sam Parr

as if it's a favor easter

Shaan Puri

Be my dad? Yeah, exactly. He's like, "Great." And now I'm paying **$270 a month** for this guy to come and do nothing to my house. I have no idea what he's doing.

Sam Parr

like a

Shaan Puri

A random guy comes and sprays. But the idea of "let me diagnose the problem so I can sell you the solution" is generally a good business model. And, of course, he's not wrong — there actually were issues. It's just I would not have been aware of the problem. I'm a big fan of this kind of **audit method of sales**: "Let me do a **free audit** for you to tell you where you might have some problems, and then if you'd like me to fix them, I'm happy to do so." </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

"Yeah. Are there any other things? So—water filter, light bulbs... any other *big, needle-moving things*?"

Justin Mares

I think that, specifically for your **bedroom** and other places where you're spending multiple hours, it's kind of early. But I think the **EMF** thing is going to become much more of a concern for people. It sounds very "tinfoil-hat-y," so let me explain why I think this might be important.

Sam Parr

"This is why I like your opinion, by the way. **You're great at this.** You explain, 'this is what the freaks think,' and show how it relates to a normal person — and where the truth is, somehow. You know what I mean?"

Justin Mares

Yeah, exactly. So, basically, about 100 years ago we had a certain type of radiation that I believe was called **ionizing radiation** — or non-ionizing, I don't know this stuff well enough yet. But basically, think of what you get exposed to at a dentist: nuclear isotopes, things like that — things that are definitely bad. Then there was a longer spectrum, like microwaves, and then things that we would put cell phones and computers into. For many, many years we basically thought, "Okay, microwaves — everything else is fine." Now we think microwaves are bad. They certainly cause some harm — they cause thermal effects in the body. So we shouldn't expose people to high amounts of microwaves. But this other spectrum, like cell phones and the like, was considered definitely fine. You kind of get to today, where most of the FTC safety ratings and levels that have come up — or that are used to regulate cell phones, Wi‑Fi, things like this — were basically tested in an environment on cell phones from the early 2000s. They were assuming that people would not be exposed to these things for more than 20 to 30 minutes a day. The guy who came up with these rules — they interviewed him, I don't know, like five or six years ago — he was like, "Yeah, all of the assumptions that we had around these just assumed that you'd take a phone call and you'd put it down. We never thought that you'd be walking around with this thing in your pocket." There are a fair number of peer‑reviewed articles that I think are concerning enough. For example, if you change the electromagnetic fields [EMF] that mice are exposed to, it will raise or lower their blood sugar at a predictive rate. It seems to have potential impact on cancer. There's enough there that I'm like, *probably bad*. It's also — I don't think it's as bad as everyone saying, "Oh my God, this is killing everyone and causing every cancer known to man." But I do think if you can avoid sleeping next to a Wi‑Fi router or next to something that's emitting a huge amount of EMF for eight or nine hours a night, that's probably well worth doing.

Shaan Puri

By the way, one thing I think we should say: you're not one of these guys that's optimized everything. I've seen you say multiple times, "just get these **core four or five things** right." You're like, "you need to sleep well, don't eat too much processed food—especially seed oils, exercise, get some sunlight." You're very much a basics kind of guy in terms of what to focus on, which makes me relate to and trust you. I think the people that are like, "well, you need to get 9 micrograms of sunlight in your eye within 10 seconds of waking up," and all these fringe—1,000 fringe—things you could do that might maybe move the needle when you haven't done the core foundational big things right... it seems like you're more of the "get the core right first" person. Am I giving you too much credit here? Where do you stand? Because you're currently saying things like Thomas Edison, light bulbs, and like "the microwave's gonna kill you" or something. Where do you stand on this?

Justin Mares

Yeah, yeah. So, I actually think so — I completely agree. I think if you get the basics right, that is like **80–90%** of it. That said, I also think if you have relatively easy interventions — like move a Wi‑Fi router outside of your bedroom and swap the bulbs in the rooms that you're spending 20 hours a day in — those are pretty easy interventions: one-time, relatively low-cost to no-cost, and could have a big impact on your health. I'm very supportive of those things. I'm definitely not the "butthole-sunning solves your entire health issues" type of guy. You know, there are a lot of those guys... like it'd...

Sam Parr

be it'd be cool if it did

Justin Mares

yeah it could be amazing

Shaan Puri

doesn't hurt to try though right wouldn't you say yeah

Justin Mares

I actually do think this is one of the problems with the health influencer space more broadly. It's just *not sexy* to say, "Avoid ultra-processed foods, get sunlight in the morning, lift four days a week, and make sure you're getting adequate sleep." So these people get attention by moving further out on the crazy-claim curve.

Shaan Puri

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 doing it—because you'd say everything you need to say in **14 seconds**. And what are you going to do tomorrow? What are you going to post the next day? What are you going to post the next day? You're trying to do this for years, so you have to work backwards. All the people that are trying to sell me something have to sell me something that is *complex*. And all the people creating content to try to influence me—the professional content people—have to have something that's interesting, novel, and *evergreen*. They have to have more and more stuff to talk about. So nobody's incentive is to tell you the simple few things that you should focus on and get right, because they'd be done. You wouldn't sell me anything, and you'd be done talking.

Sam Parr

I was trying to find it — Brian, on Brian Johnson's newsletter — and his subject line for his last newsletter was **"Wednesday: Your boners are killing you."** That was the subject line. It was about how the lack of getting nighttime erections is somehow correlated with longevity. It was like, "You're saying it's not sexy to sell," but, "Well, this boner thing got me." You're right. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Can we do a quick sidebar on Brian? I like Brian a lot as a guy—he's a really nice guy. In the real world, I actually really like what he's doing in general. But man, I kinda miss the old Brian Johnson, where it seemed like he was a *missionary nerd* trying to do this for science. Now he's... he's dressed up like a kind of modern Zuck: he's got the chain and the oversized T‑shirt, he looks cool, he's selling products, he's got cool YouTube content, great subject lines for his emails, and a strong social media strategy. I get why all that's good, but it does make me trust him less in a weird way, because what he was doing before was so different—a self-funded science experiment on himself with a noble goal and mission. I don't know, I kinda feel like he's detracting from that. Am I the only one who feels that way? Sam—what do you think?

Sam Parr

I have a lot of trust in him still. I think he's done a good job of — like — he sells an olive oil that's called "Snake Oil." I also think anytime someone makes fun of themselves, trust in them goes up. I don't think I have the same concerns as you. I think I have to acknowledge that he's just a *weirdo*, and that's just how he lives his life, and that's cool.

Shaan Puri

justin what do you think

Justin Mares

I think he's doing an incredible service to humanity — **publishing aggressively** and sharing a lot publicly. Where I would say we differ is twofold. One, he's trying to build a "longevity cult" — a new religion — which he openly says he's not trying to do. Two, he's very much a believer in this "algorithm" idea: that if you live by the algorithm and do everything it tells you, you'll live a longer and healthier life. I think that's fair and good, and I'm all for that. I'm much more interested in why people are uniquely getting sick in today's environment and what in our environment is poisoning everyone. I think **Brian Johnson** is amazing, and it's awesome that someone is willing to try so many risk-on gene therapies, crazy peptides, and all the stuff he's doing and talk about it publicly. That said, I will be very interested to see what happens to him over the next 20 years. After two decades of trying very out-on-the-risk-curve therapies, it's quite possible something doesn't go so well.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, maybe I just have a preference for *the autistic biohacker* rather than, like, the—you know—*content creator/influencer* with a D2C brand underneath it. I think I've just seen a lot of that, and the first thing he was doing felt very original.

Justin Mares

yeah

Shaan Puri

Let me ask you— you had this great phrase that I think we should bring up, which is— or maybe it was you, or it was Cali, I don't remember; maybe it was your cofounder. But you had this thing where you said: "If you had a fish tank and then all the fish inside suddenly started getting sick, you wouldn't drug the fish; you'd clean the tank." You would assume 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 sick— why are all the fish getting sick?" "I don't know, just drug all the fish," rather than maybe the tank is dirty. Maybe there's something in the tank that's causing them to get sick— maybe it's what we're feeding them, maybe it's their environment. I love that metaphor of **cleaning the tank**.

Justin Mares

Yeah, no—you captured it perfectly. The only thing I would say is that I don't actually think we have an instinct to drug the fish. I think that we have a **$4.3 trillion industry** whose job it is to propagandize people into thinking the only way to fix the fish's health problem is drugging them. To me, that is *insane*. We're, you know, in the same situation we find ourselves in: everyone is getting sicker—overweight, everything.

Sam Parr

I think I asked *ChatGPT* recently. I think it was something like **60%** of people have taken pharmaceuticals in the last 12 months, or had a prescription—something crazy like that.

Justin Mares

it's crazy

Shaan Puri

So, let's do the — the first one you had was kind of the *cleaning of the tank*, right? A checkup for the house: find ways that you can make your home environment healthier for you and less interfering with your health. The second one you have is a *modern butcher shop* — this is about feeding the fish.

Sam Parr

I love this what what

Shaan Puri

is the modern butcher shop opportunity you see

Sam Parr

By the way, Sean, do you remember? I told you—actually, last two episodes—I said I think two of my predictions were: people are going to have more plants in their homes because it's *kind of nasty*. Also, I thought there was something about the meat at *Whole Foods* that I actually think is *crap* nowadays.

Justin Mares

totally yeah

Shaan Puri

I'm not—I'm not saying you're right or a genius, but I'm not saying it either...

Sam Parr

you know I think I've hung out with justin before so I'm I'm sure I've stole I stole that

Justin Mares

Yeah, I mean, so—at a very high level, this is one of the things I'm most excited about. There's actually one coming in Austin in January, which I'm super stoked for. It's the first one that I've seen that goes as far as I would like. Basically, let me set the table through an analogy. I think that in the 1980s coffee was basically Folgers — it was burnt; there was no differentiation on sourcing. It wasn't very good. There was no coffee culture. Then Starbucks came along, and that was the big second-wave coffee movement. Now there's craft, you know, *third-wave* coffee and small, cool roasters in every major city you go to. I basically think that **meat today is where coffee was in the 1980s**. You go to the grocery store and you're buying meat, you're buying steak, but no one is differentiating on: How is this dry-aged? What is the cut? What are the genetics of the animal? How was it raised — was it regenerative or not? Was it fed soy? Was it massaged until it was killed? Did it drink IPAs until its last day? All these sorts of things are actual differentiators in buying meat and steak. People are aware of them, but the market has not caught up yet. If you've ever bought from Snake River Farms or heard of this company?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I bought from *Snake River*. What's their store? I just kind of had an instinct when I saw it. It was almost... because it was the only *branded* meat that was there. All the other meat labeling was like "80/20," right? They just had the fat percentage. Then there was one with a brand name on it, and it sounded like a place. I thought, "Maybe this is higher quality. Are they legit? What do they do?"

Justin Mares

Yeah, they're *super legit*. They're one of the few companies in the U.S. that have an American-like **Wagyu**. They have a Wagyu line they imported, I believe, from Japan sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, and they've been breeding this Wagyu line. If you buy **Whole Foods'** best ribeye, it's probably going to cost you about $20 a pound or something like that. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

or more

Justin Mares

If you buy the best ribeye from Snake River, it's going to be like $60 to $70 per pound. The skew in pricing and the amount people are willing to pay for really high-quality meat is massive. I just think it hasn't made its way into retailers or butcher shops. So I think there's a **massive opportunity** to build what I'm calling the **"Blue Bottle of the modern butcher shop"** that caters to people who really care about sourcing, flavor, cuts, dry-aging — all of the things you're not going to be able to get at Whole Foods.

Shaan Puri

So, there are actually **two opportunities**. One is to create another **Snake River Farms** — a brand that is elevated in some way and that would sell through grocery stores. Just like we've seen new brands enter existing categories (for example, **Oatly** with oat milk), these brands offer products that are niche, alternative, or premium. What you're describing is a **premium meat brand**. That's one idea, and it already sounds like a big opportunity. I can totally imagine someone taking a **content-driven approach** to this. If you were doing this, you'd go on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube and tell the story about the unique things you're doing with the animals and why it's premium. Maybe it's how you're raising them, maybe it's how you're feeding them, or maybe it's a version where you're genetically selecting or breeding in some way. The more premium that seems, the more opportunity there is. The other idea you had is the **butcher shop**, which is, as you said, like **Blue Bottle Coffee**. Blue Bottle sold for what, like $500 or $700,000,000‑ish?

Justin Mares

800 yeah 7 or 800,000,000

Shaan Puri

"I don't know if anyone else knows—how popular is **Blue Bottle** nationwide? I never heard of it until I moved to San Francisco. That was more than 10 years ago, I think."

Sam Parr

it's like a big city thing it's

Shaan Puri

Like, so—like a rich-guy pet project. All the VCs had invested in Blue Bottle because they liked having meetings at Blue Bottle, and Blue Bottle was cooler than Starbucks. It wasn't—like—it was elevated above that, and it just seemed like a passion project. And then I see that it sells for $700–$800 million, and wow—that thing really worked. So yeah, this is, to me, a **10 out of 10** idea. This is an **amazing idea**.

Justin Mares

"I agree — I think it's a super exciting one. I also think that the reason I would personally, if I were to start this, is to start with a **butcher shop** or something like that. With a butcher shop you can actually have a pretty wide range of pricing. You can tell the story, do small samplings, and talk about the aging and stuff like that. If you took a $60 steak in Whole Foods and just plopped it on the shelf next to a $20 one or a $15 one, and there's no ability to tell a story, that thing just won't sell, unfortunately."

Sam Parr

Are the quality meats—or are cows, I guess, being grown—and you just have to source them? Or do you have to go and do this yourself?

Justin Mares

No. So, there are small farmers that are growing really, really high-quality meats. They're selling at farmers' markets, but they're just hard to buy from. It's hard to aggregate enough supply so that **Whole Foods** will say, "Yep, put it in the 500 stores," or so it can fill up a meat case in Austin. This really only works if you're a butcher. You can probably buy an entire herd — or an entire allotment of farmers' or ranchers' cattle — and sell it through your store over the course of a couple months. That makes the relationship and the investment worthwhile from the standpoint of the margin you're going to make. For Whole Foods, it's like, "Yeah, we're never going to work with a small independent operator that might just have 50 or 100 head of cattle that they're selling."

Sam Parr

And can you *freeze and store* beef and have it still be great months later?

Justin Mares

Yeah, you can. I mean, the better thing, though, is that you can **dry-age** it. This is the other thing: if you're taking this *hyper-premium* approach, you can actually just hang meat in these meat lockers and it develops a richer flavor the more you age it. The reason they don't, obviously, is that the more you age it, the less cash you're cycling through because you're not selling it as quickly. So it doesn't work for the retail model. But if you're doing a really, really high-end thing — like a butcher shop — it could actually work.

Sam Parr

how big is this business you think snake river farms

Justin Mares

I would imagine it's in the like 2 to 300,000,000 in revenue range

Sam Parr

wow

Justin Mares

I think it's probably massive

Sam Parr

Are they raising—? But they're raising *their own beef*, though. I mean, they have photos of cowboys, so yeah.

Justin Mares

Yeah, I mean, they're vertically integrated. They've been doing this for a long time, as far as I understand. But I think there's enough operators like that — that don't have the *Snake River Farms* branding and aren't shipping on dry ice all over the country — who could really sell into butcher shops in Austin, Nashville, San Francisco, LA, and New York and do really well. I'm frankly shocked that the only butcher shop I know that's doing this is in Austin; it's opening in about a month.

Shaan Puri

Is he trying to just make one, or is he trying to make it a *nationwide* type of thing?

Justin Mares

I think there are bigger ambitions. But, yeah — starting with just one: let's make it work. *Figure out the economics. Figure out this business.*

Shaan Puri

this is an amazing idea

Sam Parr

It's... it is amazing. It's **so expensive**, though. A lot of this is centered around beef, only because I've always wanted to get healthier chicken. I just don't love eating lots of beef.

Justin Mares

So, previously—like 80 years ago—the food system had diversity. There were multiple types of birds: chickens and other varieties. Today, **99.5%** (I believe) of every chicken eaten in the U.S. is one genetic breed: the **Cornish Cross**, which is bred for how quickly it puts on weight and the types of grains it can basically eat. So it's not bred for deliciousness. It's not bred for protein content. It's not bred for any of the things that you or I care about. It's just about how quickly it can pack on mass so it can be sold and eaten. I think the average life of these birds—from birth to harvest—is something like **6 weeks**.

Sam Parr

wait so it comes out of the egg and 6 weeks later it's big enough to eat

Justin Mares

And six weeks later it's harvested and sold. Yes—exactly. So this is why I think this is such an interesting opportunity. Many people say, "I don't like chicken. I don't like, you know, whatever," but they just haven't had chickens that are actually *delicious*. It's funny—you can read old ads. There was this one luxury rail line in the 1920s–1930s that made a big deal about how they'd cornered the market on a particular chicken genetics, and they served it only in their first-class cars. All these people were like: > "Wow—this is the best chicken I've ever had in my life." There are stories like that where it's...

Shaan Puri

Like, yeah... what does the *Wagyu* or *Kobe* version of chicken look like? I've never even heard of it.

Justin Mares

yeah exactly no one knows I mean there there's no one that is raising these for flavor

Shaan Puri

Dude, that's insane. By the way, absolute sick burn to call someone a **Cornish Cross**. That's gonna be my new thing. Anytime I see somebody that's just... you're just a **99** — you're just like **99%** of the others. You're just trying to pack on, just pack on mass. You're a quick flip of a chicken — that's... you're just a **Cornish Cross**.

Sam Parr

There's this famous ad. There's a guy named **Joseph Sugarman** who kind of pioneered direct marketing/direct-response copywriting in the 1980s. At the time, a quartz-movement watch was already popular—watch connoisseurs knew about that—but it wasn't impressive. It was just a normal, table-stakes thing for any watch worth more than $50. Anyway, Sugarman was famous for creating these ads for this [unclear: "wine of light of watches" — likely "line of lightweight watches"]. He popularized the idea of the quartz-movement watch as if it were some epic thing. Then all the watch connoisseurs were like, "Yeah, we all have this." That's sort of what you're describing a little bit with these chickens. You can actually come up with—and invent—interesting, cool stories that are also true and factual. I'll take a lot of the health nuts as an example: they're always like, "Yeah, this is standard. We don't give our chickens this or that." And you're like, "Yeah, I know." But most people don't know that, so we're going to tell an amazing story about it.

Justin Mares

Exactly. Yeah, and I, I think the mental model is: you're having a dinner party and it's like pulling out a nice bottle of wine, but people aren't drinking it. So you're like, "Okay—this is this crazy, genuinely really nice steak cut, and you'll have the best steak you've ever had in your life." I think that is the **underserved market** that you could build a real brand around. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

"What's your food budget every month, and where are you buying? Are you buying all of your meat from **Snake River Farms**?"

Justin Mares

No, not all of it. I mean, their steaks are super fatty and marbled, and you wouldn't want to eat that every day. But I basically buy my meat and most of my food from local farmers around the Austin area.

Shaan Puri

what does that mean like you personally have relationships do you go to a farmer's market what do you guys

Justin Mares

So, yeah—go to a farmer's market. There's also a *food truck* here; it's sort of a refrigerated trailer that's a combination operation. It's owned by three or four local farms, and they just stock it up. I go every week, and that's where I buy all of my normal staples.

Sam Parr

"Are you just, like, not eating apples in *December* or whatever? Like, you can't... I guess, if there are seasons—particularly in *Austin*, where it's mostly desert—where does that come from?" </FormattedResponse>

Justin Mares

whole foods then is where I'll get like the remainder of like the produce and stuff that's not seasonal

Sam Parr

got it so you do do like some normal stuff and then you also like

Justin Mares

yeah

Sam Parr

You know, go to **farmer's markets**. It's not extreme, but you're putting a lot of effort into it... That's pretty cool.

Shaan Puri

Alright, let's do the next idea. So: *annual home checkup* — I'm giving that a **B**. This *Blue Bottle for beef* — this Blue Bottle, the *modern-day butcher shop* — I'm giving that an **A+**.

Sam Parr

is that because you doing that you want that to exist or you want to invest or you

Shaan Puri

I think it's just business. I see it — dude, I want it. I would be a customer of it. I know where the demand is. A lot of people listen to this, but I'm not trying to buy a $60 steak. That's fine — there are many people who will buy stuff like that. I know a lot of people who are trying to do that. I just know that when you go into a category where there is no existing brand, it is all commodity. Simply creating a brand in a commodity space is a winning business formula. The coffee analogy you gave: I don't know what a Folgers cost per cup is, but I think it's in the cents. So the idea of going to Starbucks and paying $4 for a coffee that you can make at home for 10¢ or 15¢ sounded outrageous. But of course people did it — they do it for the experience, for a perception of quality. I just see the path for that. If somebody has the right founder fit — you need kind of like a one-of-one entrepreneur — to me that's a $1 billion opportunity. Whether you do it direct-to-consumer or sell into retail, you do need to tell the story of why this thing costs more. That's why you have to tell the story on social media and sell it through retail. So you'd have to be great at content on TikTok and Instagram, and then sell into retail stores that way. To me, that is a 12-out-of-10 idea. You have another one on here: "calibrate for fertility" — what is this?

Justin Mares

Yeah, well—quick: if anyone does the butcher shop thing, I want to invest. I think it's such an exciting, interesting idea. So, calibrate for fertility, y'all. I don't know how aware you are, but basically everyone is having fertility issues right now; it's getting worse. *IVF*, or what's called *ART* (assisted reproductive technologies), is growing like 7% to 8% a year and it's accelerating. **IVF** is the best-in-class option right now and it costs like **$20,000 to $30,000**. It injects a bunch of hormones, it's super invasive, it's super hard on the female — it's just a brutal, brutal thing. I think there is this big opportunity to almost have a lifestyle set of interventions that are geared toward helping people increase their fertility in the key window when they're trying to actually have kids. So you could think about it like a lifestyle or a monthly subscription for some 3- to 6-month period, where you get a combination of peptides, supplements, and an environmental review — make sure that you're not wearing polyester underwear while you're trying to have a kid — or any number of things that actually seem to have a really, really big impact on how likely you are to conceive during that window. Pretty much just say, "Hey, before going the $20,000 to $30,000 — very expensive, very invasive, very hard — IVF route, do this: a several-$100-a-month, lifestyle-based fertility approach, and we're going to try and help you conceive naturally without having to go through IVF."

Sam Parr

"I know men can do things to increase their **sperm count**. When a man's sperm count is low, that's a huge issue. Can women do the same thing?"

Justin Mares

Yeah, yeah. I mean, women—women can improve their fertility for sure. You know, people even talk about this all the time: stress is a big factor, but they're not talking about it at the hormonal level. It seems like *progesterone* helps with increasing the odds of conception. There's a bunch of interventions that I think are just almost criminally underutilized. Justin, have you...

Shaan Puri

Ever heard us talk about **one-chart businesses**? Have you ever heard this thing we say on this pod? To me, this is one. So, look at this chart. This is search interest for "ivf clinic near me." Just look at it since 2018. Look at the relative search volume — it's up from about 0–75 on this chart all the way to 100 on a 100-point scale for "ivf clinic near me," which is pretty wild. That's not a long time; that's something you would expect to see on a 30-year time horizon, not a six-year time horizon. What you're saying is there are opportunities here, because IVF is obviously very hard — mentally, physically, emotionally, and financially. What if there was an intervention step before that? You mentioned *Calibrate* — I've never heard of this company. What does Calibrate do?

Sam Parr

yeah that's a crazy stat that you have on them as well say that

Justin Mares

Yeah, so, **Calibrate** was a company — they got acquired somewhat recently — but they basically started out by pairing **GLP-1s** (i.e., **Ozempic**) with lifestyle interventions. Their whole approach was that "Ozempic — people are meant to be on it for the rest of their lives." What Calibrate did was say, "We're going to prescribe you Ozempic, and we're also going to introduce coaching, accountability, and lifestyle interventions" — this whole suite of things where the goal is to **get you off Ozempic** at the end of a six- or twelve-month program.

Sam Parr

Like a like a noom meets or kind of I mean weight watchers is trying to do this

Justin Mares

yeah exactly exactly and so they dude

Sam Parr

Those companies always scale fast. *Noom* did something similar pre-*Ozempic*, and they were an advertiser with my old company, *The Hustle*. It's like—within a year of launching, they were spending 100 of 1,000 with us [unclear: original phrasing "100 of 1,000" preserved]. This is... I don't know how these guys grow so, so big. </FormattedResponse>

Justin Mares

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of demand for this. What **Calibrate** figured out is how to actually get it covered, to some degree, by insurers. Insurers were okay with it because they were like, "Great — we're not going to have to pay $20 a year for **Ozempic** indefinitely. We can actually get people off of this drug after a six- or twelve-month period." And so, in the first two years they reached over $100 million in revenue and just scaled insanely quickly. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

It does look like **Calibrate** kind of went under, though — or something. I don't know. I was looking for their funding info, but it looks like they've been restructured by private equity. Basically, for **$20,000,000** they gave up **75%** of the company. So I think it definitely ran into some trouble.

Sam Parr

yeah but that means they could be bad operators but the demand still existed

Justin Mares

Yeah, yeah. That would be my contention, basically: they were doing this, and they launched—I think in 2021, something like that. I basically think that insurers went from, early on, supporting the "Ozempic + lifestyle" approach, and then there has been this *massive, record* amount of lobbying spent to just keep people on Ozempic basically forever. I think that probably did not do them any favors.

Sam Parr

What percentage of people need **IVF**? And you probably don't know this, but the average age of the first-time mother has gone up. I think it's nearly 30—I think it's 29 or something like that. In the 1970s it was 21, so it's gone up a lot. What percentage of that increase is just because people are waiting longer to have families versus, like, the American food system being poisoned? </FormattedResponse>

Justin Mares

It's a good question. I don't know, honestly. But what I do know is, from reading stats, it seems like most of the decline in the birth rate—**about 70%**—comes from people who previously would have had three to four children now having one or two. So it's not that people are deciding not to have kids; they're just having fewer. I do think that **biological fertility issues** are a huge part of what's driving down the average number of children that a family or a woman has these days.

Sam Parr

Dude, it's pretty crazy how many of my friends—my male friends—tell me that they're like... in Austin we used to go to the sauna all the time, and I would have so many friends say, "I'm not going in the sauna this week; we're *trying to get pregnant* and my balls aren't working," so I'm trying to, like, I can't cook them right now, you know what I mean? There were so many people I knew — you and Justin are friends — and they were like, "I can't do this, I can't do that; I need to go do this because we're struggling and it's my fault." It's pretty wild. Sean, have you had a bunch of friends who have complained of similar stuff? They're like, "my stuff ain't working."

Shaan Puri

you lost me at have you had a bunch of friends so no

Justin Mares

I think it is this *under-the-radar* thing. Very few people are talking about it, but almost everyone I know who is trying to have kids right now has some amount of *fertility challenges*. Even if that's six to twelve months and then they get pregnant, still—if you do that across two to three kids, you're basically going from having one to two kids instead of three to four, if every time it takes you six to twelve more months to get pregnant.

Shaan Puri

So you've mentioned three health-related startup ideas you've started. I think four successful health-related companies that I know of. Can you describe this approach? Because I'm the kind of guy who bounces around from industry to industry, model to model. I'm like a **variety seeker**, and I don't think that's good. Just when I learn about a space I get intrigued by something I'm a beginner in, and I go in—and I stop the **compounding** of that progress. 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 things—trying to solve a hundred different problems in a hundred different spaces with a hundred different business models?

Justin Mares

Totally. Yeah—I think, for me at least, what has been very rewarding is choosing **one problem**, which for me is the **chronic disease crisis**, that I want to spend the rest of my career on. I think there's a massive amount of compounding—relationship compounding, even personal-brand compounding. People think of me as being into health, which pays some dividends and will probably be even more so over the next decade. You understand the space, the problems, and the players and relationships. If you decide this is the problem you are most interested in—the one you deeply care about and read about for fun—and you orient your career around starting things or being involved in things that make that problem better or solve it, you get so many shots on goal, even if they look different. For example, I started **Kettle & Fire** thinking the American food system is poison and there needs to be a bone-broth company.

Sam Parr

What did you read or consume that made you buy into that? And then, how long were you into it before you were like, "This is my thing"?

Justin Mares

Yeah. So I was going to CrossFit in San Francisco in 2015, and a bunch of CrossFitters were like, "You should do *bone broth*." I'm a *terrible cook*. I almost never cook for myself. So I was basically like, great — I'm going to go buy some at the store. But no one was selling it. After that I thought, "Seems like there's an interesting opportunity here." Did I think it would grow to be a *nine-figure annual business*? Definitely not. But it was a big enough opportunity that I decided to take the swing.

Sam Parr

But did you get into **health and wellness** because you were like, "That seems like a cool opportunity," or were you like, "I'm obsessed with this topic and this is a really good way to address [it]"?

Justin Mares

It started as an obsession. I'd been reading about *Paleo* and related topics since college. I was a weird dude in college — my senior year I went Paleo. I wasn't drinking beer or eating pizza or french fries. All my friends were like, "What the hell is wrong with you? What's going on?" I got very into this idea — this kind of secret: why is everyone getting sick at record levels, and what could be underpinning that? As I dug deeper and developed an appreciation for the problem, I came to understand that *this is literally, I think, the biggest problem in the country*. I decided I could spend the rest of my career trying to solve it or take stabs at various instances of it — whether that's starting a brand or trying to fix the incentives through Trumed. I basically thought, "I'm just going to try and work on fixing this problem for the rest of my career."

Shaan Puri

So let's go back to that **Kettle & Fire** example. You're doing **CrossFit**, trying to live healthier; CrossFitters are telling you to do **bone broth**. You're like, "Cool—where do I get some of that?" You look and there's not an easy brand you can just pull off the shelf and buy, so you think somebody should do that. At that time, you had no experience building a DTC product or an actual consumer brand. Can you describe the three or four key things that happened that first year to make it happen? Because all these ideas are cool, but you have to be the type of person who can *make shit happen*. You made shit happen at that stage—can you describe what you made happen for Kettle & Fire?

Justin Mares

Yeah, totally. So, we basically... we first tested a *landing page*. We put up a landing page with *no product* and started buying ads to see who would click on it and what they would pay.

Shaan Puri

you you had the brand name

Sam Parr

at that

Justin Mares

time we called it bone broths co which was a horrible idea I'd sense rebranded the kettle on fire

Shaan Puri

you just made it yourself you just mocked up an ugly landing page

Justin Mares

Yeah, mocked up an *ugly* landing page on Unbounce, paid someone $5 or $10 to make a *terrible* logo, and basically started selling a box at $29.99.

Shaan Puri

and when you say started selling what facebook ads how'd you get the traffic

Justin Mares

Yeah, we ran **Facebook** ads, **AdWords**, and some **Bing** at the time, because there was an *arb* [arbitrage] there, which was much cheaper.

Sam Parr

dude bing bing clicks back then I I it was so cheap and they converted way higher

Justin Mares

I know I know I was always like I don't know who these people are but they're in the middle of the

Shaan Puri

What was that first few weeks—or maybe the first month—like? Did that period give you the *conviction* you were looking for, or did you already have conviction? What happened in that first month for you? </FormattedResponse>

Justin Mares

Yeah, I was looking for conviction. Basically, we put in **$500**, we built this landing page, and I think we sold a little over **$2,000** worth of product in about a month. I ran the numbers and thought, okay—we can build a business. Given existing traffic, I think we can turn this into at least a **$200,000 to $300,000**‑a‑year business. Based on what I estimated the margins would be, I figured that should be about **$100,000 to $150,000** a year in profit, which seemed like a worthwhile thing to take on.

Shaan Puri

"And then what? Okay, so you do that. Where did it get *much bigger* than that? What happened to make it *much bigger*?"

Justin Mares

We validated the idea. Next, we had to figure out how to make it. We emailed and called over 500 different manufacturing partners, pleading, "Please—someone help us figure out how to make this product." Eventually, what ended up working was my brother, who was 19 at the time and with whom I co-founded the business. He emailed **Mark Cuban** as a 19-year-old entrepreneur asking, "Please help." **Mark Cuban** introduced us to a manufacturing partner who we ended up working with—and still work with today—to make our first version of the *bone broth product*. And so... wait.

Shaan Puri

Wait—what did you... what did he? Your brother's like, "Hey, Mark, we're entrepreneurs, but we don't know how to make a product. Do you know any bone broth manufacturers?" And he said, "Yes—here's one." Yeah, yeah, that happened.

Justin Mares

He said, "Talk to my *food person*." Then his food person introduced us to our co‑packer. I replied, "Yeah, you should talk to this group over here."</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

And just to clarify, did you refund the first **$2,000** worth of orders because you didn't have a product yet?

Justin Mares

I emailed all of them and said, "Hey, we are not going to have a product for 6 to 9 months. I can either **refund you in full right now** or give you **50% off**, and we'll eventually ship it." People who didn't respond, I would just refund.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, okay — great. So **Mark Cuban** gets you a food person. That's the second thing. Now you know how to get the product made.

Justin Mares

Yeah. And then, basically, what I realized is the product is two-year, shelf-stable. I put literally every dollar of my life savings into that. I was 25 when I did the first run of our product. They had $30,000 minimum runs. It was like a $120,000 kind of run budget. I was like, *either this is going to work great or I'm going to eat bone broth for two years.* Either way, I'll feel pretty good. So we bought the first product, and in year one we basically did $2,800,000 in sales. After about six months of being in business, one of the buyers at Whole Foods saw an influencer talking about our product, reached out, and was like, "Hey, I want to bring you guys into Whole Foods." We did extraordinarily well in Whole Foods and got national rotation the following year, and that just kind of started our journey.

Sam Parr

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. You were telling me about this, and I was like, "Oh... well." I mean, it seemed like you had a really good career. Why are you throwing it away for this? I just remember thinking, like, what—why does he want to ruin everything?

Justin Mares

Yeah. Starting a bone broth company in San Francisco (SF) at the height of the tech boom was *definitely* not a consensus opinion.</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

My sister, when she moved to San Francisco, was working a corporate career. She worked for **Deloitte**, I think, as a management consultant. She had an undergrad degree in **electrical engineering** and an **MBA** from a good business school. She was like, "I'm sick of this life. I need a business that I can own and not have to go to a job every day." The consulting hours were so bad that she would come home and her kids would already be asleep. She would pick them up from the crib just to hold them for a few minutes because she hadn't been there to even play with them before bed. After four nights of that she said, "Never—no, I'm not doing this." She'd never started a business before but decided to start an *in‑home daycare*. She kicked me out of the apartment I was living in and said she was going to use that apartment [the apartment was owned by our parents] to start the business. She needed six kids to come to this in‑home daycare. My dad said, "You have an electrical engineering degree. You have a job that pays $150k a year. You're a management consultant and you're going to change diapers?" He thought she was, quote, "throwing it away." Fast forward: she now has three or four schools in San Francisco. She's been able to scale the business, works just a few hours a week, and has an amazing business. I say that because a lot of people hit that **crucible moment** where it feels like you're throwing away a known, socially accepted path to do something kind of fringe and weird from scratch with no safety net. I'm not saying it always works out, but every time something does work it almost always has that story at the beginning—you're doing what? It feels abnormal and bad in the moment, but that's totally normal.

Justin Mares

Totally. And, Sam, I'd actually love your thoughts. My experience, *frankly*, was that almost every single person I knew who was starting a business—or trying to start a business—between ages 22 and 25 has *made it* in some way, shape, or form. It's insane.

Sam Parr

Yeah, so Justin and I both started roommate-matching companies. We are both 20, and between the ages of *like* 20–25 we were in the same industry. All of our San Francisco (SF) friends were a similar age. Dude, it's crazy how many of them are successful. I actually just tweeted about this today: "I grew up in SF from age 20 to 30 — it's crazy how many of ours are successful just because they're around." You know what I mean? Yeah.

Shaan Puri

Totally. Naval [Naval Ravikant] has a great phrase where he says—yes, you hear the stats about startups: like 90% of new businesses fail. And he goes, **"startups fail, but founders don't."** I love that phrase because he basically said if you fast-forward 10 years, any of the founders that stayed in the game see their success rate change. Your first business success rate might be 10%, but the 10-year saga of you taking a bunch of *shots on goal* and getting smarter every year increases the odds. If you just look at our cohort of friends—right, Sam—we were at a mastermind together back in, what was that, 2013 or so? Our cohort of friends, which was probably 30 to 50 founders we used to hang out with and know regularly, had hit rates like 80% or 90% success for the people who actually stuck with it. I do have a couple friends who packed up their bags and moved to Connecticut and just said, "If I'm not doing this anymore..." They were burnt out from San Francisco startup culture. Those people didn't fully make it, but all the people that stayed in the game made it.

Sam Parr

We could wrap it up with one quick story. I remember "Gog and Beyond East" started this thing called **Udemy** [name unclear]. It was courses — the kind of thing **Tai Lopez** does. I remember both Justin and I were like, "I guess we should get in on this." It seemed like a really good way to make $100 or $300 a month, which would be *life-changing*. So we both did that stuff. I could say, for Justin for sure, people look up to you. I mean, I look up to you and I admire you. It's crazy how, if you look eight or ten years ago — which wasn't that long ago — you were doing many things people will pooh-pooh: maybe course creation, or buying a car and renting it on **Turo**, or whatever. The people you admire start way scrappier than you think. I know I for sure did.

Justin Mares

Yeah. I mean... I don't know that anyone admires me that's taken my "Keyboard Shortcuts for Mac Users" Udemy course, but *definitely* I was hustling back in the day.

Shaan Puri

Have you ever read **Travis Kalanick**, the guy who started **Uber**? His old blog... He had this amazing blog that he used to call...

Sam Parr

was it called like awesomeness bro it was called like something silly like that right

Shaan Puri

It was heavily broed-out, but he had this blog post titled "Attending CES on the Cheap" — or, as I said, "Southwest on the Cheap." It was basically his **playbook** for how to have a *badass* time at a conference when you have no money. He was like, "Alright, here's what you're gonna do." You're gonna get to the airport, but never—never—take taxis. Here's what you can do instead. Here's what you're gonna do for staying at someone's house. "Here's how you're gonna skip the event but still get into the after-party, because that's where the magic happens." When you get there, here's what you're gonna say. He had this really scrappy approach to how to, you know, crash a major conference on a budget.

Sam Parr

And he was **31 years old**. By the way, he was 31 when he wrote that post—it's not like he was a college kid.

Shaan Puri

And he also used to invite people to stay at his house in San Francisco. It's part of the magic of a city like San Francisco. He used to say, "If you're..." The reverse was, "If you're coming to San Francisco and you've got no money but you're a founder." He called his house the **"Jam Pad,"** and he would have people constantly coming and crashing on his couch. He would host people late into the night and everyone would just be jamming on different ideas. He used that to kind of build his momentum, his network, his energy.

Sam Parr

it is pretty wild

Justin Mares

yeah so cool

Shaan Puri

can we finish with the zuck story zuck is auctioning off his gold chain for you for your charity what is this

Sam Parr

Well, I saw your tweet, Justin. I was like, "Is that real?" He said, "Yeah, real," and he totally downplayed it. You said, "Zuck's auctioning my chain," and no one—like, it looked like no one replied to that.

Justin Mares

yeah I had a bad twitter day that day

Shaan Puri

I saw people were bidding for it how much did it end up going for it's his gold chain

Justin Mares

like almost $41 but

Shaan Puri

oh wow who won do you know

Justin Mares

Some anonymous person—I'm not sure, but he was probably a crypto person, to be honest. A couple years ago, three years ago, I started something called **Inflection Grants**, which is effectively just giving small $2,000 to $3,000 grants to people under the age of 24 who are high-potential. It's **inflectiongrants.com** if anyone wants to check it out. Basically, someone made an offer to me when I was in my twenties, when I was graduating college. He said, "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."

Shaan Puri

who did that and why

Justin Mares

It was a mentor that I had built a relationship with in **Pittsburgh**, where I was going to school. I think he just knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and also saw that I didn't come for money. I think he knew at this very key time that that offer would make a big difference in my decision making—and he was right. So I started **Inflection Grants** three years ago. Since then we've given out about 50 grants; it's been a long journey. One of the GPs, **Ariel Zuckerberg**, has gotten behind it in a big way. This year Ariel convinced **Mark** to auction off one of his already-worn gold chains. We had to make sure that it was cleaned—no DNA residue or anything like that—and sold, you know.

Sam Parr

Candy, actually, did you have to do some of that stuff? For sure—did you get to talk to him at all? </FormattedResponse>

Justin Mares

No, no. But yeah — he gave it away, and we auctioned it off for $41, which goes to charity. *Which is great.*

Shaan Puri

so that's 20 people are gonna get these $2,000 grants

Sam Parr

Exactly. You gave us this document before we started, and I think we only touched about a third of it. There's so many more cool things that you have to come back and talk about. A lot of people don't know this, but, **Sean**—did you know that **Justin** was a co-author on the book *Traction* with the DuckDuckGo founder? There are like five or ten other things that you have really amazing stories behind and are really insightful on. So, thanks for coming on and doing this. I'm *literally* sitting here taking notes on incandescent bulbs and farmer's markets and shit like that. You're going to be getting a lot of follow-up texts from me that are just like, "Just tell me what to do."

Shaan Puri

tell people where to where to follow where to get more

Justin Mares

Yeah. I'm on **Substack**: justinmears.substack.com. I write a monthly newsletter on health and business stuff. I'm also on **Twitter** at "j w mears".

Shaan Puri

And go read *The Great American Poisoning*. We didn't do it justice in this podcast, but go read that blog post — it is amazing. We'll put the link in the show notes to that specific blog post.

Sam Parr

alright that's it that's the pod thank you justin