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

Shaan Puri

Marketer in me loves everything you're saying ralph because the two things you just said those were actually like you know $20,000,000 ad hooks

Sam Parr

justin I'm pumped you're here you're here because for well for two reasons the first reason is that you have started like 6 or 7 companies that have collectively done something like $500,000,000 in revenue in the last 7 years which is huge and they're all in the health and wellness space you're also here because you're one of my most reasonable friends when it comes to health and wellness because you are like you're into fringe stuff which is I think cool but the problem with people who are in fringe stuff is they can't relate that to like a normal person you know what I mean and they'll be like you know this like french thing that I'm into this is only like a 1% needle mover as opposed to like a 50% needle mover so you're very self aware you're very thoughtful and you've built a lot of big businesses in this space and you're a blogger and you have this amazing blog post called the great american poisoning that both sean and I are like obsessed with and so I thought you could come on and kinda talk a little bit about the blog post but also business ideas that you're into and opportunities related to this space

Justin Mares

I'm I'm super stoked to be here I mean I as I've written in that post I literally think that the great what I call the great american poisoning basically the fact that americans are sick at record levels and are getting sicker like our children are sick everyone is overweight and obese and these problems are getting worse not better is both the biggest problem in the us and also because of that like a massive opportunity for people that wanna start companies or or build value in this space

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 you know I I literally think that this space like solving the great american poisoning there's just almost immeasurable opportunity for people and entrepreneurs that wanna solve this problem like like I can read some stats off but it's just staggering the amount of chronic disease and the burden that that's putting on the country and so as an entrepreneur like if you see a big problem like that you just want to sprint towards that and you know not only to say like when you solve some of the problems that are involved in fixing the chronic disease crisis you're also like helping people you know people are living longer they're living healthier it's a very rewarding spot you know space to work in as opposed to maybe like day trading nfts or something like that

Sam Parr

and your blog post is basically summarized you said the answer to why so you you give all these stats as to how messed up we are but you said the answer to all of this is simple our food system is poisoning us and the institutions meant to keep us safe which are regulators health care system doctors and researchers are not incentivized to keep us healthy which is like the cause of all the problems that you're discussing

Justin Mares

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

Justin Mares

In their life and our medical system is not built to service a population where the average person is sick and so because of that we need new institutions and companies and it it creates a ton of opportunity for entrepreneurs that want to try and address the great american poisoning by creating products and services that help people you know stay or move back to a baseline default healthy space

Sam Parr

we should get to the ideas because they're great but here's like another like one liner that kind of summarizes this which is everyone should update their thinking the default outcome of living in the us today is that you will get 1 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 so I kinda 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 you know 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 where what should what ideas do you have

Justin Mares

yeah so I see I see a ton like backing up I basically think that and I wrote about this in my in my long essay manifesto but I basically think that

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 unabobber 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 is you this is your your jerry maguire manifesto

Justin Mares

yeah this thing was still mcquirk

Sam Parr

alright my friend so a lot of you guys who listen to the show you listen because you wanna start a company but you're not sure what idea to choose or you may not even have an idea and you like our podcast my first million because we've done a lot of the work for you on researching all these business ideas well my friends we've made life a lot easier for you because hubspot they just put together an entire list of all the resources that you can use to find a market opportunity to validate for your next business idea so if you're looking for a market size calculator or tools to identify market trends or a huge list of ideas to get started so if you're interested there's a link below click it and you can have access to the whole thing it's completely free now back to the show

Justin Mares

so yeah so to back up like my view on what has changed in the last call it 80 years is that we went then humans mostly existed in an environment that was not poisoning people to one that is basically poisoning them like your food water you know lights air like all these sorts of things are filled with plastics chemicals toxins ultra processed whatever that is making the default person sick and so one of the things that I think is really is a really compelling opportunity on that is you could build a massive company in my view that helps people actually look at their environment their home and or their office and say okay you're spending you know 80% of your time in these like 3 spaces it might literally be like your bedroom your kitchen and your office how do we make it so that these spaces that you're spending time in are maximally healthy and health promoting and I I have a a friend actually who just started a company in the home health testing space that's doing super well they're testing like water air emfs lights stuff like that

Sam Parr

what's it called

Justin Mares

it's called lightwork it's do light work dot com so they're doing really well but I think that there is this whole world of home services like home services are a $40,000,000,000 you know a year in spend where you can think like h hvac lights plumbing you know water electricity all these sorts of things where none of these people are looking at how do we actually make your environment healthy none of like the people making your furniture are thinking about all of like the flame retardant chemicals that are giving like babies cancer you know then as they spray it on your couch or so for whatever they're not thinking about that and so I think there's a huge opportunity to build a company or a series of companies that looks at what is going on in your built environment in your home in your furniture and all this and says how do we make this health promoting like how do we encourage health and try and make this you know this sort of service one that makes the person healthier

Shaan Puri

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

Justin Mares

yeah exactly I I think like that's the first that's like the input which is do an annual checkup for your house and out the back end of that there's so many long term services where you know someone services your water filtration make sure that your shower water is good make sure like you know your tap water is ro and as mineralization and all these sorts of things

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 in your home annual checkup

Justin Mares

yeah so I think a couple things are very worth it one like water filtration is a huge one I basically set up a whole house filtration system there that we had like these plumbers install actually they installed it there was like this $8,000 system they installed it next time they came around to fix it they like screwed on a $20 part incorrectly and I walked into my kitchen the next next morning and I stepped on my floorboards and like water came up for around them and I was like fuck so there there's a lot

Shaan Puri

of now

Sam Parr

you got a a mold issue

Justin Mares

yeah exactly so we had to handle that which was quite annoying but we have like every water that is in that is coming in and out of our house gets filtered we also recently switched to got all of our bulbs we switched to incandescent actually like I think that there is a very compelling and pretty early line of research that shows the impact of blue light emitting lights which is basically most light bulbs on circadian rhythm sleep they they even impact like if if you eat under blue light versus eating under non blue light it also seems to impact like the amount of weight that you'll gain they use this in agriculture where they use different types of lighting when they're trying to get you know chickens to gain more weight or trying to

Sam Parr

what's an incandescent bulb is that a normal bulb

Justin Mares

yeah think of like the edison bulb that it's actually like burning something as opposed to an led bulb which is what's in most houses today there's also there's a pretty cool thing that you can do so led is also one of the reasons that I think I feel much better since switching them out of my house if you have an led light in your house and you take your iphone and you film it on slow mo you can see the led bulb flickering like thousands of times per second and the reason that led lights are supposedly more more efficient than incandescent bulbs is because they're turning on and off all the time and so they're actually like on and using less electricity because they're you know they're not on the entire time so they do this sub perceptually which you know can cause people to like feel just icky sometimes you walk into a room with bad lighting you're like what's going

Shaan Puri

on in my system I don't like this the marketer in me loves everything you're saying ralph because like the two things you just said in like kind of a throwaway thing those were actually like 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 like may have you ever considered that you're just you're being poisoned by the industry so you have the man is out to get you the people love that you have maybe the problem is not what I'm putting in my mouth it's the light that's affected and so you it's like oh can I improve can I buy this thing rather than like kind of change from within as like maybe that's 80 90% of the problem but like 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 on slow mo 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 I know you're a good ethical stand up guy but when I hear this stuff I think what could I use to get this across how could I if I believe that this is good for people how can I maximally you know get that into the hands of people

Justin Mares

totally I mean and this this is why I think this is such a big opportunity because you have the home services thing like the check healthy checkup for your home but once you understand that the impact that some of these things have on your health you basically for many of these people they're just like yeah blank check like fix my air quality fix my water quality fix my lighting fix like the emfs in my house you know make sure I don't have mold like all these things there there's a tremendous amount of spend that people wanna put into making sure that their home environment is healthy

Shaan Puri

dude I had a sam have you ever had a pest control guy come to your house there might not be a better salesman in the world than the pest control guy because he walked he's like hey you want you want me just do a quick look around your house just free I'll just take a quick look see if I see anything of concern I'm like of course and he walks around the house hey I'd love to show you a couple things and then he takes me around the house and he says you see this and there's like a tiny screen that's moved open he's like that's that that's you know that's rats and I'm like what rats he's like yeah they're under your floorboards I'm like ew under my floorboard and he shows me all these little things that he's like yeah there's and look we just live out in like you know a hilly area there's mice everywhere and he's like would you like me to just come around once a month 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

random guy comes and sprays but that idea of like let me diagnose the problem so I can sell you the solution is generally a good business model and of course you know like again he's not wrong like there there actually was you know issues it's just I would not I would not have been aware of the problem so I'm I'm a big fan of this kinda like audit method of sales let me do a free audit for you to kinda tell you where you might have some problems and then if you'd like me to fix them I'm happy to do so

Sam Parr

yeah are there any other things so water filter light bulbs any other like big needle moving things

Justin Mares

I I think that specifically for your bedroom and places where you're spending like multiple hours it's kind of early but I think that the emf thing is going to be much more of a thing that people care about and it sounds very tinfoil hattie and let me explain like why I think this might be important

Sam Parr

this is why I I like your opinion by the way you're great at this you're you're like like this is what the freaks think and this is like how it relates to a normal person and like where's the truth somehow you know what I mean

Justin Mares

yeah exactly so so basically like a 100 years ago we had the we had we had a certain type of of radiation that was I believe called ionizing radiation it's that or non ionizing I don't know this stuff well enough yet but basically it was like think of like what you know you get shot into at a dentist or something like that nuclear isotopes things like that things that are definitely bad and then there was this longer spectrum of like microwaves and then things that we would put like cell phones and computers into and for many for many many years we basically were like okay microwaves everything else is fine now we think okay microwaves are bad they certainly cause some harm it's like causes thermal effects in the body let's also not expose people to microwaves at a high amount but this other spectrum of like cell phones and the like are also definitely fine and then you kind of like get to today which is most of the ftc safety ratings and levels that have come up or that that are used to regulate cell phones wi fi things like this they basically were tested in an environment on cell phones from like the early 2000 where they were assuming that people would not be exposed to these things for more than like 20 to 30 minutes a day like the the guy who came up with these rules they interviewed him I don't know it was like 5 or 6 years ago and he was like yeah all of the assumptions that we had around around these just assumed that you'd like take a phone call and you'd put it down we never thought that you'd be like walking around with this thing in your pocket and there are a fair number of of sign like articles that I think are concerning enough where people will like change the electromagnetic fields that mice are exposed to and it'll raise or lower their blood sugar at a predictive rate seems to have like potential impact on cancer there's there's enough there that I'm like probably bad it's also I don't think as bad as everyone is like oh my god this is killing everyone and causing every cancer known to man but I do think if you can avoid sleeping next to a wi fi router or next to something that's like emitting a huge amount of ems for 8 to 9 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 like optimized everything like I've seen you say multiple times you're like you know just get these core 4 or 5 things right and you're like you know you need to sleep well don't eat too too much processed foods especially seed oils you know exercise get some sunlight like you're very much a basics kind of guy when in terms of like what's the what should I be focused on which makes me relate and trust you because I think the people that are like well you need to get you know 9 micrograms of sunlight in your eye within 10 seconds of waking up and it's like all these like all these fringe like the 1,000 fringe things you could do to like maybe move the needle when you haven't done the core foundational big things right it seems like you're more of the get the core right first but am I 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 so I actually think so one completely agree I think if you get the basics right that is like 80 to 90% of it that said I also think if you have relatively easy interventions like move a wi fi router outside of your bedroom and swap the bulbs in the rooms that you're spending 20 hours a day in like those are pretty easy interventions that are like one time relatively low cost to no cost and could have a big impact on your health like I'm very supportive of those things I'm definitely not the like butthole sunning solves your entire health issues you know type of guy and there's 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 I actually do think this is one of the problems with the health influencer space more broadly is it's just not sexy to be like avoid ultra processed foods get sunlight in the morning lift 4 days a week and you know make sure you're getting adequate sleep and so these people get they get like attention from going further out on the the the crazy like claim curve

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 gonna do tomorrow what are you gonna post the next day what are you gonna post the next day you gotta you're trying to do this for years and so you have to work backwards from all the people that are trying to sell me something have to sell me something that is complex and all the people that are creating content to try to influence me that are professional content people they have to have something that's interesting novel and like evergreen they have to have more and more stuff to talk about so not nobody's incentive is to tell you the simple few things that you should focus on and get right because they'd be done you wouldn't sell me anything and you'd be done talking

Sam Parr

I was trying to find it but brian on brian johnson's newsletter and his subject line for his last newsletter was wednesday it says your boners are killing you that was the subject line and it was how the lack of getting nighttime erections is somehow correlated with longevity and it was like you're saying it's not sexy to sell just it's like well this boner thing got me you're you're right

Shaan Puri

can we do a quick sidebar on brian so I I like brian a lot as a guy he's a really nice guy federal 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 and now he's like he's like dressed up like kind of modern zuck where he's got like the chain and the oversized t shirt and he looks cool and he's selling products and he's got like cool youtube content he's got great subject lines for his emails and he's got a great social media strategy and I get why all that's good but it does make me trust less in a weird way because he kinda what he was doing before was so different this kind of self funded science experiment on himself with a noble goal and noble mission and I I don't know I kinda feel like he's detracting from that I think he he's I don't know am I the only one who feels that way sam sam what do you think

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

justin what do you think

Justin Mares

I I think he's doing an incredible service to humanity like how aggressively he's publishing everything I think that he is where I would say we differ is well I mean one he's trying to build a like longevity cult like new religion which he openly says I'm not trying to do that and the second thing is he he's very much a believer in this like the algorithm where like if you live by the algorithm and do everything it tells you like you'll live a longer and healthier life which I think is fair and good and I'm all for that I'm much more interested in like why are people uniquely getting sick in in today's you know environment and what in our environment is poisoning everyone I think brian johnson is amazing and like I think it's awesome that someone is willing to try so many risk on gene therapies crazy peptides like all the shit that he's doing and talk about it publicly but I unfortunately like I will be very interested to see what happens to him over the next 20 years but I think 20 years of trying very like out on the risk curve therapies you know it's quite possible something like doesn't go so well

Shaan Puri

yeah maybe I just have a preference for like the autistic biohacker rather than like the you know content creator influencer with a d two c 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 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 right you would assume that there's something that's causing the fish to get sick and for some reason we have this instinct to just drug the fish the fish is fish is sick why are all the fish getting sick I don't know just drug all the fish rather than maybe the tank is dirty maybe there's something in the tank that's causing them to get sick maybe it's what we're feeding them it's their environment and I love that metaphor of cleaning the tank

Justin Mares

yeah no you capture it perfectly and the only thing I would say is that I don't actually think we have an instinct to drug the fish I think that we have a $4,300,000,000,000 industry that's job it is to propagandize people to think the only way to fix the fish's health problem is drugging them like that that to me is the insane thing that we're you know the same situate situation we find ourselves in is everyone is getting sicker you know overweight everything

Sam Parr

I think I asked chat gpt recently I think it was something like 60% of people have taken pharmaceuticals in the last 12 months or like had a prescription something crazy like that

Justin Mares

it's crazy

Shaan Puri

so let's do the so the first one you had was kind of the cleaning of the tank right check up for the house find find ways that you can make your home environment healthier for you and less interfering with your with your health the second one you have a modern butcher shop so this 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 2 episodes I said I think my 2 predictions for or 2 of my predictions was people are gonna have more plants in their homes because it's kinda nasty and also I thought I was like for there's 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 I'm not saying it either I I

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 so at a very high level this is one of the things I'm most excited about there's actually one coming in austin in january which I'm super stoked for but it's it's the first one that I've seen that goes as far as I would like and and basically let me like set the table through an analogy I I think that like in the eighties coffee was basically like folgers it was like burnt there was no differentiation on sourcing it wasn't very good to to go there was no coffee culture and starbucks came along there was and that was like big second wave cult kind of coffee and now there's like craft you know comatier and like small like cool roasters and coffee shops in every major city that you go to I basically think that meat today is where coffee was in the eighties like you go to the grocery store and you're buying meat you're buying like steak you're not no one is differentiating on how is this dry aged what is the cut what is the genetics of the animal you know how was it raised was it regenerative was it not was it fed you know soy was it massaged until it was killed and like did it drink ipas until its last day like all these sorts of things are actual differentiators in buying meat and buying steak and people are aware of them but the market has not caught up yet and if you have you ever bought from snake river farms or like heard of this company

Shaan Puri

yeah I bought from snake river what what's their store I just kinda had an instinct when I saw it it was like almost because it was the only branded meat that was there it's like all the other meat the branding was like 80% 20% right like they had the fat percentage and then there was one with like a brand name on it and it sounded like a place and I thought maybe this is the higher quality are they legit what do they do

Justin Mares

yeah they're super legit so they they are one of the few companies in the us that have an american like wagyu and so they have a wagyu line they imported I believe from japan at some? In the seventies or eighties and they've been like breeding this wagyu line if you buy whole foods best rib eye you're probably gonna cost you like $20 a pound or something like this

Sam Parr

or more

Justin Mares

if you buy like the best rib eye from you know from snake river it's gonna be like 60 to $70 per pound and so the the kind of like skew in pricing and the amount that people are willing to pay for really really high quality meat is massive and I just think it hasn't made its way into retailers hasn't made its way into butchers and so I think there's this massive opportunity to build like what I'm calling like the blue bottle of the modern butcher shop that caters to people that really care about sourcing flavor cut dry age you know all of these things that you're not gonna be able to get at whole foods

Shaan Puri

so this there's actually like seems like there's 2 opportunities 1 is to create the like another snake river farms right a brand that is you know elevated in some some way that would go sell through grocery stores and so just the way we've had you know you know you have oatly selling oat milk you got you have all these brands that come in new brands that come into existing categories and start selling things that are niche in some way alternatives in some way or premium in some way what you're saying is a premium meat brand there's that that's one idea which already sounds like a big idea yep and I could imagine I could totally imagine somebody who takes a like a content approach to this so let's say you were doing this if you go on tiktok and instagram and your youtube and you're telling your story about the unique things you're doing with your the animals there and why it's premium and maybe it's how you're raising them maybe it's how you're feeding them maybe it's maybe it's like a a version where you're genetically selecting in some way the sort of premium or you're you're you're breeding in some way the the more premium that seems like one opportunity and then the other one you had is the butcher shop which is like you said like blue bottle coffee and blue blue bottles sold for what like 500 or $700,000,000 ish 7 or

Justin Mares

800 yeah 7 or 800,000,000

Shaan Puri

and like I don't know if anyone like how popular is blue bottled nationwide because I've never heard of it till I moved to san francisco this is like 10 + years ago I think

Sam Parr

it's like a big city thing it's

Shaan Puri

like sla like a rich guy pet project like all the vcs had invested in blue bottle because they liked having meetings at blue bottle and blue bottle was cooler than starbucks it 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 $800,000,000 and and wow that that thing really worked so yeah I'm a this is like to me this is a 10 out of 10 idea this is an amazing idea

Justin Mares

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

Sam Parr

are are quality meats or in 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 so there are small farmers that are growing really really high quality meats they're selling at farmers markets they're just hard to buy from like it's hard to aggregate enough supply that whole foods is like yep put it in the 500 stores or whatever or you know it can fill up a a meat case in austin and so this really only works where if you're a if you're a butcher you can buy probably an entire an entire herd or an entire amount of farmers or ranchers cattle and sell it through your store over the course of a couple months that is worth your investment from a relationship and like amount that you're gonna make on that standpoint for whole foods it's like yeah we're never gonna work with a small interesting operator that might just have 50 or a 100 head of cattle that they're selling

Sam Parr

and can you freeze and store like beef and it'd still be great months later

Justin Mares

yeah you can I mean the the better thing though is that you can like dry age it and this is the other thing that if if you're taking this like hyper premium approach you can actually just hang meat in these meat lockers and stuff like that and it actually cures gets like a richer flavor and the like the more you age it the reason that they don't obviously is like the more that you age it the less the less amount of like cash that you're cycling through because you're not selling it as quickly and so it doesn't work for the retail model but if you're doing a really really high end thing like a a butcher shop it could actually work

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 too I mean they have like photos of cowboys so they like yeah

Justin Mares

yeah I mean they're they're vertically integrated they've been doing this for a long? Of time as far as I understand but I think that there's enough operators like that that don't have the snake river farms branding that aren't shipping on dry ice all over the country but that could really like like sell into a butcher shop in austin nashville san francisco la new york that that just does really well like I'm frankly shocked that the only butcher shop that I know that is doing this is start is in austin and you know it's opening in like a month

Shaan Puri

and is he trying to just make one or he's trying to make it like a like a nationwide type of thing

Justin Mares

I I think there's like bigger ambitions but yeah starting with just one like let's make it work figure out the economics figure out this business

Shaan Puri

this is an amazing idea

Sam Parr

it's it's it is amazing it's so expensive though and it's a lot of this is centered around beef only because like I've always wanted to get like healthier chicken because I I I just don't love eating lots of beef

Justin Mares

so previous like again like 80 years ago the food system had diversity there were multiple types of birds chickens things like that today 99.5% I believe of every chicken eaten in the us is one genetic breed which is the cornish cross which is bread for how quickly it puts on weight and the types of grains that it can basically eat and so it's not bread for deliciousness it's not bread for protein content it's not just bread for like any of the stuff that you or I care about it's just how quickly can it pack on mass and then I can like sell it you know and it gets eaten I think the average life of these birds on average they they're like born to harvest is something like 6 weeks and so what yeah

Sam Parr

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

Justin Mares

and 6 weeks later it's harvested and sold yes exactly and so this is why I think this is such an interesting opportunity is many people are like I don't like chicken I don't like bra I don't like you know whatever and they just haven't had chickens that are actually like delicious and it's it's funny you can read old ads like there was this one this luxury rail line in the twenties thirties that made a big deal about how they had they've like cornered the market on this one chicken genetics and they served it only in their first class cars and all these people were like wow this is the best chicken I've ever had in my life like there's stories like that where it's

Shaan Puri

like yeah what what does the wagyu or kobe version of chicken I've never even heard of 1

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 eighties and he at the time a quartz movement watch was already popular like watch connoisseurs knew about that but it wasn't like impressive like it was just like a normal like table stakes thing for any watch worth more than $50 but anyway he was famous for creating these ads for this wine of light of watches and he popularized the idea of quartz movement watch as if it was like some like epic thing like and then all the watch connoisseurs like yeah dude the the they all we all have this but that's sort of like what you're describing a little bit with these chickens is like you can actually like come up you can and if you you can invent interesting cool stories that are also true and factual but like you know I'll take a lot of like the health nuts like they're always like yeah this is standard we don't give our chickens this or that and you're like yeah yeah I know but like most people don't know that and so we're gonna tell this amazing story about that

Justin Mares

exactly yeah and I I think like the mental model is you know you're having a dinner party and it's like pulling out a nice bottle of wine but people aren't drinking good poor and so you're like okay this is this like crazy genetic really nice steak cut and you'll have the best steak you've ever had in your life like I think that is the underserved market that that you could build a real brand around

Sam Parr

what's your food budget every month and where are you buying are you buying like all of your meat from the snake river farms

Justin Mares

no not all of it I mean their steaks are like super fatty and marbled and everything like you wouldn't wanna actually eat that every day but I I basically buy my meat and most of my food from local farmers around the austin area

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 like a food truck here where it's it's sort of this like refrigerated trailer where they act they it's a combination it's owned by 3 or 4 local farms and they just stock it up and so I just go every week and that's where I buy like all of my normal staples

Sam Parr

are you just like not eating apples in december or whatever like you can't like I guess if there's seasons particularly in austin when it's mostly desert like where does that come from

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 which is like not extreme but like 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 this blue bottle for 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

think it's just business I see it dude I want it to I I would be a customer of it I know that I know where the demand is I know a lot of people listen to this but like I'm not trying to buy a $60 steak that's fine there's a lot of people who are trying to buy stuff like that I I know a lot of people that are trying to do that and I just know that when you go into a category where there is no existing brand it is all commodity simply creating a brand in a commodity space is like a winning business formula and the coffee analogy you gave right like I don't know what a folgers cost per cup of coffee but I think it's in like the sense so you the idea of going to starbucks and paying $4 for a coffee that you can make at home for 15¢ or 10¢ or whatever you know sounded outrageous but of course people did it because they do it for the experience they do it for a perception of quality so I just see the path of that one and if somebody has the right founder fit and you know it's you need kinda like a one of 1 entrepreneur but that is a to me that's a $1,000,000,000 opportunity to do that whether you do it that way or you sell into retail and like you said you know you do need to tell the story of why this thing costs more and that's why you have to tell the story on social media and sell it through retail so you'd have to be great at content on tiktok and instagram and then sell into into retail stores that way but to me that is like a that's a 12 out of 10 idea but 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 wanna invest I think it's such an exciting interesting idea but so calibrate for fertility you all I don't know how aware you are but basically everyone is having fertility issues right now it's getting worse you know ivf or what's called arp assisted reproductive or art assisted reproductive technologies are 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 to $30,000 it injects a bunch of hormones it's super invasive it's super hard you know on the on the female and it's it's just a brutal brutal thing and so I think there is this big opportunity to almost have like a lifestyle set of interventions that are geared towards helping people increase their fertility in the key window when they're trying to actually have kids and so you could think about it like a lifestyle or like a monthly subscription for some 3 to 6 month. Where you get a combination of peptides supplements people do like an environmental review make sure that you're not wearing polyester underwear while you're trying to have a kid or you know any number of things that actually seem to have a really really big impact on how likely you are to conceive during that window and pretty much just say hey before going the 20 or $30,000 very expensive very invasive very hard ivf route do this like you know several $100 a month sort of lifestyle based fertility approach and we're gonna try and help you conceive naturally without having to go through ivf

Sam Parr

I know men can do stuff to increase their sperm count with their sperm count being down that's like a huge issue can women do the same thing

Justin Mares

yeah yeah I mean women women can improve their fertility for sure you know from people even talk about this all the time like stress is a big factor but they're not they're not talking about at the hormonal level like it seems like progesterone helps with increasing odds of conception there's a bunch of interventions that I think are just almost criminally 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 yeah this to me is 1 so so look at this chart so this is search interest for ivf clinic near me and just look at it since 2018 look at the like relative search volume it's up you know to from 0 to 75 on this chart all the way to a 100 on a 100 scale of ivf clinic near me which is pretty wild because that's not a long time that's something you would expect to see like on a 30 year time horizon not a not like a 6 year time horizon and what you're saying is there's stuff you can because ivf is obviously very hard on you know it's hard mentally physically emotionally financially hey what if there was a you know an intervention step before that you mentioned calibrate I've never heard of this company what does calibrate do

Sam Parr

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

Justin Mares

yeah so so calibrate was a company they they got acquired somewhat recently but they basically started out by being they paired glp 1's io ozempic with lifestyle interventions and so their whole thing was like ozempic people are meant to be on it for the rest of their lives what calibrate did is said we're gonna prescribe you ozempic we're also gonna introduce coaching accountability lifestyle interventions like this whole suite of things where the goal is to get you off of ozempic at the end of a 6 or 12 month.

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 this is it's I don't know how these guys grow so so big

Justin Mares

yeah I mean there's a lot of demand for this and what calibrate figured out is how to actually get it covered by some to some degree by insurers and insurers were okay with it because they're like great we're not gonna have to pay $20 a year for ozempic indefinitely we can actually get people off of this this drug after a 6 or 12 month. And so in the 1st 2 years they got to like over a $100,000,000 in revenue and just scaled insanely quickly

Shaan Puri

it does look like calibrate kinda went went under though or something I don't know I see I'm looking I was looking for their funding stuff but it looks like they they've got restructured private equity but basically for 20,000,000 they got 75% of the company now so I think it it definitely ran into some troublesome

Sam Parr

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

Justin Mares

yeah yeah that that would be my contention basically is that they were doing this and they launched I think 2021 something like that and and I basically think that insurers went from they were like early on the ozempic + lifestyle thing and then there's been this massive record amount of lobbying spent to just keep people on ozempic basically forever which I think probably did not do them any favors

Sam Parr

what percentage of people needing ivf or and you probably don't know this but of like the average age of the first time mother has gone up I think it's nearly 30 at this. I think it's 29 or something like that in the seventies it was 21 so it's gone up a lot what percentage is it just because of people waiting longer to have families versus like american food system being poisoned

Justin Mares

it's a good question I I don't know honestly but what I do know is from reading stats it seems like most of the decline in birth rate it's about 70% of it comes from people that previously would have had 3 to 4 kids now having 1 or 2 and so it's not like people are deciding not to have kids they're just having fewer and I do think that the biological fertility issues are a huge huge amount of what is driving down the average number of of kids that you know 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 like in in austin we used to go to the sauna all the time and I would have so many friends that like I'm not going in the sauna this week we're trying to get pregnant and my balls aren't working and so I'm trying to like like I can't cook them right now you know what I mean like there were so many people that I knew you and I justin 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 that have like complained of similar stuff they're like it's my stuff ain't working

Shaan Puri

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

Justin Mares

I I think it is this like under the radar thing very few people are talking about but almost everyone I know that is trying to have kids right now has some amount of fertility challenges and even if that's 6 to 12 months and then they get pregnant even still you know if if you do that across like 2 to 3 kids you're basically going from you're now having 1 to 2 kids instead of like 3 to 4 if every time it takes you 6 to 12 more months to get pregnant

Shaan Puri

so you've mentioned 3 kinda health related startup ideas you've started I think 4 kind of successful that I know of health health related companies can you describe this approach because I'm the kind guy that bounces around from industry to industry model to model I'm like I'm like a variety seeker and I don't think that's good like just when I learn about a a space I get intrigued by something I'm a beginner in and I go in and I I stop the compounding of that so I don't think that's too smart can you describe your approach to entrepreneurship versus you know somebody like me who's just bouncing around and trying a 100 different trying to solve a 100 different problems in a 100 different spaces with a 100 different business models

Justin Mares

totally yeah I I think for for me at least what has been very rewarding is basically choosing one problem which for me is the chronic disease crisis that I wanna spend the rest of my career on like I I think that there's a massive amount of compounding like relationship compounding even personal brand compounding like people think of me as like into health which pays some dividends that's probably gonna you know be even more so over the next decade you understand the space you understand the problems you understand the players and relationships like I think that if you decide this is the problem that I am the most interested in the world that I deeply care about that I read about for fun and just orient your career around trying to start things or be involved in things that make that problem better or solve that problem like you get so many shots on goal even if they may look different like I started kettle and fire thinking like the american food system is poison and there needs to be a bone broth company

Sam Parr

what did you read or consume that made you buy into that and then how long were you into it before you're like this is my thing

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 like almost never cook for myself and so I basically was like great I'm gonna go buy some at the store and no one was selling some and so after that I was like seems like there's an interesting opportunity here and did I think it would grow to like be a 9 figure annual business definitely not but it was a big enough opportunity that decided to take the swing

Sam Parr

but did you get into health and wellness because you're like that seems like a cool opportunity or were you like I'm obsessed with this topic and this is like a really good way to address

Justin Mares

it yeah I was I was just obsessed with the topic basically like I'd been reading about paleo and reading about you know all these sorts of things since I was basically in college like I was a weird dude in college who my senior year I went paleo and so I like wasn't drinking beer wasn't eating pizza or french fries all my friends were like the hell is wrong with you like what's going on and so I I just got very into this idea this like secret in a sense of like why is everyone getting sick at record levels and what could be kind of underpinning that and so it was this deep interest and as I got deeper and deeper understanding and appreciation of the problem I just really understood like this is literally I think the biggest problem in the country and I can spend the rest of my career trying to solve or take stabs at various instances of this problem whether that's starting a brand or trying to fix like the incentives through trumed you know I basically was like I think I'm just gonna try and solve or work on fixing this problem for the rest of my career

Shaan Puri

so let's go back to that kettle and fire example so you you you're doing crossfit trying to live healthier crossfitters are telling you should do bone broth you're like cool where do I get some of that and you go you look there's not like an easy brand that you could just pull off the shelf and buy it so you think somebody should do that now at that time you've got no experience doing that you've never built a dtc product you've never built like an actual you know consumer brand can you just describe like the the 3 or 4 bullets that happened that 1st year to like make it happen that like because I think you know all these ideas are cool but you gotta be the type of person that can make shit happen you made shit happen at that stage can you just describe what what you made happen for kettle and fire

Justin Mares

yeah totally so we basically we first tested a landing page put up a landing page with no product started buying ads to see like who would click on it what would they pay

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 on 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 did facebook ads in at facebook and adwords and then some bing at the time because they were like there was an arb there which is 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 a month like that gave you the was were you looking for conviction or you already had conviction what what what happened in that first month for you

Justin Mares

yeah I was I was looking for conviction so basically we'd put in $500 we built this landing page and I think sold like a little over $2,000 worth of product inside of about of a month and so I ran the numbers and I was basically like okay we can build a business and I think just given existing traffic we can turn this into at least like a 2 to 300 grand a year kind of business and based on like what I felt the margins would back into I was like that would should be about a 100 grand a 150 grand a year in profit which seemed like a worthwhile thing to take on

Shaan Puri

and then what okay so you you do that and where did it get much bigger than that what what happened to make it much bigger

Justin Mares

so we validated the idea the next thing is we do it we had to figure out how to make it and so we emailed and called over 500 different manufacturing partners to just like please someone help us figure out how to make this product and eventually what ended up working is my brother who's 19 at the time who I cofounded the business with he emailed mark cuban as like I'm a 19 year old entrepreneur like please help and mark cuban introduced us to a manufacturing partner who we ended up working with and still work with today to make our first like version of the bone broth product and so 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 was like talk to my food person and then his food person introduced us to our co packer I was like yeah you should talk to this this group over here

Shaan Puri

and just to clarify that those first $2,000 worth of orders did you just go refund them because you didn't have a product yet

Justin Mares

I I emailed all of them and I said hey we are not gonna have a product for like 6 to 9 months I can either refund you in full right now or 50% off and we'll we'll like eventually ship it and people that didn't respond I would just refund them

Shaan Puri

yeah okay great so mark cuban gets you a food person so that's the second thing that now now you know how to now you can get the product made

Justin Mares

yeah and so and then basically what I realized is the product is 2 year shelf stable I put literally every dollar of my life savings at that. I was 25 into doing the first run of our product they had $30,000 minimum runs it was like 120 k kind of run budget so I was like either this is gonna work great or I'm gonna eat bone broth for 2 years either way I'll I'll like feel pretty good and so we bought the first product and year 1 we basically did 2,800,000 in sales and after about 6 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 wanna bring you guys into whole foods and we basically we we did extraordinarily well in whole foods and got national rotation the following year and that just kinda like started our our journey

Sam Parr

I think I was with you 8 or 10 months after you started it in san francisco we went bowling I don't know if you remember that and yeah you were telling me about this and I was like oh well I mean it seems like you got a really good career why are you throwing it away at this like I just remember thinking of like what like why does he wanna ruin everything

Justin Mares

yeah starting a bone broth company in sf at the height of like the tech boom was definitely not a consensus opinion

Shaan Puri

my sister when she moved to san francisco she had she was working in a corporate career she worked for deloitte I think so she was like a management consultant she had gotten her mba she'd gotten her got an undergrad in electrical engineering got an mba from a good business school was a management consultant and then she she's like she's like I'm sick of this life I wanna I need a business that I can own and not have to go to a job every day and she was so tired of like the consulting hours were so bad that she would come home and her like her kids would be asleep and she would just pick them up from the crib just to hold them for a few minutes because like she hadn't been there when they to like even play with them before before bed and like after 4 nights of that she's like never no I'm not doing this never had started a business before decides to start a an in home daycare so she kicks me out of the apartment I'm living in and says I'm gonna use that apartment which my my parents owned apartment they're like she was like kick you out I'm gonna use that to start this business and I'm gonna she needed 6 kids so 6 kids to come to this like in home daycare and my dad was like you have an electrical engineering degree you have a job that pays you whatever 150 k a year you're a management consultant and you're gonna change diapers and she just felt so bad you know quote unquote throwing it away and then you know fast forward now she's got like 3 or 4 schools in san francisco and she's been able to like scale this business up she works just like a few hours a week and has like this amazing business and a lot of the I say that because a lot of people will hit that crucible moment where it feels like you're throwing away this known and socially accepted thing to do this kind of fringe weird thing from scratch on your own with no safety net and I'm not saying that it always works out but every time something works it almost always has that story at the beginning of like you you're doing what and that's totally normal even though it feels abnormal in the moment it feels bad in the moment

Justin Mares

totally and sam I'd actually love your thoughts my experience frankly was almost every single person that I knew who was starting a business or or trying to start a business like between 22 and 25 has made it in some way shape or form like it's insane

Sam Parr

yeah so justin and I both started roommate matching companies we are both we are both 20 and so between the ages of like 2025 we were like in the same industry and so all of our sf friends you know were similar age and dude it is crazy how many I actually just tweeted about this today I was like I grew up in sf from age like 20 to 30 it's crazy how many of our are successful just because they're around you know what I mean yeah

Shaan Puri

totally naval has a great phrase where he says yes and you hear the stats about start ups oh 90% of businesses you know new businesses fail and he goes yeah start ups fail but founders don't and I love that phrase because he said oh basically if you just fast forward 10 years any of the founders that stayed in the game like the success rate goes from your 1st business success rate might be 10% but the 10 year saga of you trying a bunch of shots on goal and getting smarter every year like the odds are now like if you just look at our cohort of friends right sam we were at a mastermind together back in what was that 2013 something like that like our cohort of friends which is probably like you know 30 to 50 founders that we used to hang out with and know regularly they hit rates like 80 or 90% success rate you know for the people that actually stuck with it I got a couple friends that packed up their bags and moved to you know connecticut and just said you know if I'm not doing this anymore not you sam sorry this is like literally I'm just thinking of like a couple of friends that did that they were just like hey like the san they're burnt out from san francisco startup culture those people you know they didn't fully make it but all the people that stayed in the game made it

Sam Parr

we could like wrap it up with one quick story which is I remember gog and beyond east started this thing called udemy and it was like courses what this is like what tai lopez does and I remember both justin and I were like I guess we should get in on this like this seems like a really good way to like make $100 or $300 a month which would be like life changing and so we both did that stuff and I think that you know I I could say for justin for sure people look up to you and I mean I look up to you and I admire you it's crazy how like if you look at like 8 or 10 years ago which wasn't that long ago you were doing many things that like you know people like will pooh pooh like maybe course creation or like buying a car and renting it on toro or whatever it's like man the people you admire start way scrappier than you think I I know I for sure did

Justin Mares

yeah say I mean I 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 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 which was like attending ces on the cheap or as I said southwest southwest on the cheap and it was basically like his playbook for how to have a badass time at a conference when you have no money and he's like alright here's what you're gonna do you're gonna get to the airport but never never take the taxis here's what you can do instead here's what you're gonna do for for staying at someone's house you know here's how you're gonna skip the event but still get in to the after party because that's where the magic happens when you get there here's what you're gonna say and he had this like really scrappy approach to how to just like you know wedding crash a 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 just stay at his house in san francisco it's part of the magic of a city like san francisco is like he used to say if you're and the reverse was if you're coming to san francisco and you got no money and but you're a founder he called his house the jam pad and he would have like people constantly just coming and crashing on his couch and he would host people over late into the night and everyone just jamming on different ideas and he used that to kinda 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 you tweet that justin I was like is that real 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 so basically probably a crypto person to be honest but yeah so a couple years ago 3 years ago I started something called inflection grants which is effectively just giving small like 2 to $3,000 grants to people under the age of 24 that are high potential you know it's inflection grants dot com if anyone wants to check it out but basically someone made an offer to me when I was in my twenties when I was like graduating college where he was like hey you should keep running with your startup if it doesn't work I'll just write you a check and you can use that to cover your living expenses until you find a job or whatever

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 and I think he just knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur also saw that I didn't come for money and I think knew at this very key time that that offer would make a big difference in how in my decision making and he was right and so I started inflection grants 3 years ago since then you know we've given out like 50 grants and long journey who one of the gps is ariel zuckerberg has gotten behind it in a big way and so this year ariel convinced mark to auction off one of his already worn gold chains and we had to make sure that it was cleaned no dna residue or anything like this but and sold you know

Sam Parr

candy actually did you actually have to like do some of that stuff for sure did you get to did you get to talk to him at all

Justin Mares

no no but yeah so he gave it away and we auctioned an offer $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 like a third of it there's so many more cool things that you have to come back and talk about like a lot of people don't know this but sean did you know that justin was like a co author on the book traction with the duckduck go founder like there's like 5 or 10 other things that you have really amazing stories behind and are really insightful on and so thanks for coming on and and doing this I'm like literally sitting here taking notes on like incandescent bulbs and like farmer's markets and shit like that and you're gonna be getting a lot of follow-up text on me where it's just like just tell me what to do

Shaan Puri

tell people where to where to follow where to get more

Justin Mares

yeah so I'm substack justin mears subs you know dot substack.com I write a monthly newsletter on health and business stuff and then also on twitter at j w mears

Shaan Puri

and go read the great american poisoning we didn't do it justice in this in this podcast but go read that blog post it is 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