Shownotes Transcript
So this is actually a company that I've wanted to invest in for so long. If you're doing this, please just email me. ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪ ♪ And be what I want to ♪
All right, so I wanted to have you on because you are one of my healthiest buddies. Last time you were on, I think you've been on three times already. You didn't get into a lot of the ideas because we were just like peppering you with so many questions and I wanted to be more focused. I think I asked you what are five or six like interesting health companies or health trends that you're interested in investing in?
And you hit me back with a very detailed list in a very short amount of time. So clearly, you are already thinking and acting on a lot of these things. Can we go through each of them? And you just tell me what they are because I'm crazy fascinated. Because for the listener, you told me in 2014 or 15 that you were quitting tech, like you had a software company, and you were going to launch a bone broth company. And I was like...
Oh, man. You're decided to throw your life away. That sucks. You were going to be one of the greats. And then it just came out in Forbes, I think. Or was it Forbes? Yeah. You had this amazing feature about your company Kettle and Fire and how you surpassed $100 million in annual revenue. And it was amazing. And I'm like, you definitely won. And I read the article, by the way. And I texted five friends. And I'm like,
Justin does everything the right way. By the way, did I get that right? You guys, you're at 100 million run rate or revenue? Yeah, north of that, yeah. And you said something amazing. I think you said, we're gonna, what did you say? We're gonna be the best operating company
e-commerce company in America. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, basically, like, there are most of the big public big food companies were started pre-1900. And so a lot of these companies are very, very bloated. They're large. You know, they've been around. Frankly, I think many of them are poisoning people.
and then paying lobbyists and other sort of opposition research groups to make sure that like soda doesn't get removed from food stamps and all these sorts of things. And so I think these are just generally bad actors. And I think that there's a huge opportunity to both out-innovate these big CPG companies and also just run a better business. Like I guarantee no one in, you know, Battle Creek, Michigan, working at Kellogg's is looking at like, how do we use AI to automate a lot of our workflows and process and things like that? Whereas like, that's something we have
Live work streams going in kettle and fire to figure out like how do we apply the craziest? Technology, you know move like leap forward of you know certain mile certainly my lifetime to just running the the best possible company that we can and I think it's working so far we have like 34 people for you know for our size of business, which is quite good scale you have only 34 employees and
Yeah. Wow. Is it wildly profitable or is it working its way to be wildly profitable? No, we're profitable. I mean, one of the things that I'm very proud of is like we've raised only $10 million in primary capital since starting the company. And so it's been pretty capital efficient. And, you know, we've been focused on building the trend, but also building a good business since we started it like nine years ago. Damn.
That's awesome that you have proven me and I'm sure many other people wrong and you've been early on a bunch of stuff. All right, so let's dive deep. What's the first one you want to talk about? Yeah, so first one I want to talk about is I think that there's this huge, huge macro trend where people are talking about Maha, they're talking about seed oils, talking about all these things. What's Maha? Make America healthy again. Make America healthy again. We're talking about all these things about fixing the chronic disease crisis in the US. And I think that
health trends specifically for dogs and other pets, like tend to lag a couple years behind humans. Like basically a couple years ago, you know, you saw Blue Apron, HelloFresh, a bunch of these companies launch. And then a couple years beyond that, Farmer's Dog, a like fresh dog food delivery kind of company launches. And I think there are well over 100 or 200 million in revenue at this point. It's crazy. And it's
I basically think that you can look at the US chronic disease crisis, obesity rates, inflammation, cancer, autoimmune, all these things.
The same thing is happening in dogs. Like something like one in four dogs are going to get cancer at this point. This is like unique. It's new. Cancer rates among dogs are rising. And again, this is because dogs, like humans, exist in an environment that is actively poisoning them. Like kibble is total trash and it is literally making dogs sick. And so I think that there are a lot of these
health trends that like people are getting into that you're going to see become popular now. And in two to three, four years are going to be popular for pets, especially because now it's something like
I think that millennials or Gen Z like literally have more dogs than babies or something like that. The market is growing incredibly quickly, although I don't have a dog. But I think there's like a lot, a lot of gold in that sort of like take human health thing and apply it to a dog like health product. Is this true? You say here that in some cities there's more dogs than babies? Yeah. Yeah. And it's certainly true. Like the younger, the younger you go.
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uh the kibble thing is interesting i um i had a dog for 15 years he was my best friend and his last five years of life it hit me where i was giving him so when i first got him i was poor so i would like buy the cheapest dog food and then i got you know i could afford like whatever they tell you you know like the shtick they tell you is like only buy something where it says like chicken on the first ingredient who knows if that's true or not but and that's the more expensive thing and then i was like
Eating kibble, like dry dog food, it would be sort of like feeding me potato chips every day. Do you know what I mean? And people's dogs are, you know, what do you do when you have a dog and you eat dinner? They all come in obsessed over you and you yell at them. And I'm like, if you gave me refried beans for every single meal, of course I'm going to be desperate for any new food. It's kind of insane, right? That we would feed them the same thing and it's like a processed, dried food.
thing that doesn't expire. Totally. It's insane, right? It's totally insane. And you look at the ingredients, it's like full of trash, full of artificial ingredients, you know, like all of the stuff that people are trying to remove from their diets, we basically put in kibble and feed to dogs for every single meal. For every meal. I remember like my in-laws have a dog and he comes over and they're like, oh, don't give them table food. I don't want them to be unhealthy. I'm like, I don't know, man. I feel like this asparagus and chicken might be all right. Uh,
A hundred percent. And we had Kevin Rose on the podcast and he had funded a company called dogagingproject.org. And I believe what they are doing, the whole premise is that
for some reason, I believe it was because a lot of times you don't wanna see your, you're willing to suffer or you're willing to let your family suffer oftentimes more than you're willing to let your dog suffer. And the premise, but at the same time, you're willing to experiment more. And so the premise was that they had, what's the drug that is a longevity drug that starts with an R? - Rapamycin. - Yes, I believe they were doing, they were selling this to dog owners
And what they found was like, I guess there's a huge correlation between what we can do with dogs and what we'll eventually do with humans, like you're suggesting. And they have noticed that they have gotten dogs to live longer. And their premise is we are going to start here and then eventually go there to humans. And so, yeah, the people agree with you.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that they're looking at it as like, you know, drug, and then we'll expand dog longevity, and then we'll move into humans. I think what I think that like the business opportunities exist looking backwards, like, everyone is talking about water cleanliness and water filtration and stuff like this. And yet, when they go to feed their dog, they like put their bowl under the sink, and the dog gets a load of like, whatever toxins, alcohol, not alcohol, chlorine, like, you know, all of these sorts of things. And like, that's its daily water source.
And I think that there's all of these things where like, why is there not a reasonably sized company just doing like Aurora, like a really, you know, RORRA, like a really high end water filter, but geared towards dogs or something like that? I don't know. I think like dog saunas and dog cold plunges is probably a little too far. But certainly, I think that there's like a bunch of peptides, supplements, you know, water filtration, things like that, that
Even like doing dog kennels and things like this with more natural materials that probably would do quite well for people who already think and view the world through the health lens and have not yet begun the process of applying that lens to their health or to their pets.
Can you tell me what Light Labs is? That's amazing. I looked at the website. It seems like this might, this is your brother's thing. It might be bigger than everything you guys have done. Yeah, yeah, I hope so. I mean, so my brother and I, we started Kettle and Fire together and we grew it. And after some period of time, he stepped back from the business. And so his new business, which he started last year, is called Light Labs. And what they're doing is basically there are so many toxins and other sorts of like
crap in our food supply chain. And at Kettle and Fire, we spend almost half a million dollars a year testing all of the batches that we're making of bone broth to make sure that like there's no glyphosate, there's no PFAS, there's no phthalates, like all these sorts of things. And so we as a company spend
lot of money and a lot of energy making sure that our supply chain is clean. But we're making sure that it's clean of stuff that you can't see as a consumer, yet you probably care about. And so what light labs is doing is they're basically building a lab testing toxin testing company like a modern one for consumer brands like kettle and fire, where they do two things like they will test for nutrition, nutrition fact panel
uh run the normal like heavy metals testing things like that but they also do a longer tail of rarer tests like pfas glyphosates pesticides things like that and then
Once they run these tests, they actually expose it and push the most recent versions of a brand's lab tests to both their website, or if you're sold mostly in retail, the goal is to get like a QR code that a consumer can scan and see like, what is Kettle and Fire's most recent lab test show around like PFAS and other sorts of exposures. So I think this is like,
one of the most interesting things happening in the health world right now is this broad push towards transparency and like getting a bunch of these things, microplastics, satellites, whatever that people know are bad, but don't have visibility into like,
Bringing transparency to that food system, which then creates the incentive and energy to make change. So that's kind of what he's doing. I have a ton of questions on this. Okay, so you and I lived in Austin together. And then before that, we lived in San Francisco together. Both very much like bubble cities where Austin's like, you know, very health conscious. And particularly our friend group was very health conscious. And then San Francisco was like, you know, on the forefront of a lot of tech. Yeah.
Do people where I'm from in Missouri, where you're from in PA, do they care about any of this stuff? Not right now, but I think that that's not, like not 100% of people have to care for this to make sense. Like what is undoubtedly true is people are spending more time and energy focusing on sourcing toxin reduction. They're spending more money at, you know, companies like Whole Foods, on brands like Kettle and Fire, on their health in general. And I think that this is one of the things that,
people are going to start caring about when they shop. And like the minute that, yes, it may not be like people, you know, where my family's from, where your family's from, they may not be asking about phthalate load in, you know, their hot dogs that they're eating or something like that. But some percentage of people will, and you only need a small increase in order for there to be demand from the brand and consumer side to, you know, to basically have supply chains and
agricultural resources, ranching, like all these practices that incorporate and think about toxin exposure, pesticide load and the like. And so I think Light Labs is the type of company that I'm super bullish on bringing transparency to the food system because I think it's just going to, like once you bring transparency, then there's energy to try and clean up and improve the food system behind them.
And so this company from, I don't know anything about the space. It's basically like putting an organic label on your food. So a food company would pay them and they would say Light Labs is a reputable brand. We have proof that they've tested everything. We paid them money to do it. And we have a dashboard as well where we can like see where we are in the process of the testing. Is that right?
Yeah, exactly. So consumer brands like Kettle and Fire, we already have to spend money on these different sorts of tests and things like that. Why do you have to? Because you're legally required to by the USDA or FDA to do nutrition facts panels. You have to do like heavy metals testing. There's just a slew of tests that you have to run. By law.
And so that's like a thing that you already have to do. Then what Light Labs is doing is they are bringing a bunch more transparency to the supply chain and making it so that you can look at, you know, momentous supplements or like any number of these things and basically see, okay, beyond just metals testing and things like this, what are the other things that they've tested for? Oh, wow, I can see, you know,
like no detectable phthalates. I can see no detectable glyphosate, no detectable atrazine, like some of these other pesticides that people care about. And so I think it's bringing that, what has been like hidden in the depths of these like horrible lab tests run by companies that are like 60 years old to the forefront and making it influence consumers buying behavior. That makes me so bullish. How big is the biggest lab test?
business now are the couple biggest ones. And when your brother was raising money or when he was just brainstorming with you on describing how big this could be or like what his dreams were in 20 years, what was he saying? Yeah. So the biggest one is called Eurofins. I think it's like an 11 or 12 billion dollar company. Like in revenue?
No market cap. Um, so, but I mean, it pretty closely maps to revenue because it's like a service business, you know, it's, it's like not a great, it doesn't trade very well. Uh, so what he was saying is basically step one, I think that we can build a competitor and be better than Eurofins. Like you submit to a Eurofins lab, you submit an email inquiry and you get, you get a response maybe in like three or four days. Uh,
And then when they run your tests, they don't communicate anything and they dump like 30 PDFs on you that you have to hire someone that understands food scientists to like, you know, translate this stuff. It's really like insane. And you go to their website, Eurofins.com. It looks like you're like, you know, making a vaccine or you're doing like you're doing like like like some type of embryo work. Like exactly a very intimidating website.
It looks like an academic site from like 95, you know, like it's very intimidating. Exactly. And so they're not the type of company that is going to build an incredible product for consumer brands. And they're not the type of company that's going to build a consumer-facing product. And so what he was like, my brother was...
thinking is he was like, wow, this is going to be incredibly interesting. We can build a Eurofins competitor. We can do a better job servicing CPG brands. We already know how to do that from his experience at Kettle and Fire. And then we have the opportunity to build out
this entire other business where we can build like consumer awareness of these different toxic compounds and turn, you know, kettle and fires 500,000 a year of lab testing expense into an actual revenue generating function and almost like a marketing line item. Dude, this is so awesome. Does he have any revenue now, your brother? Yeah, they they've launched a couple months ago and they've started to get revenue.
Did he raise funding or did he bootstrap it? He did. No, no, no. This is definitely the type of company you have to raise money for. It looks expensive to start. Yes, definitely. It's honestly, it's the type of company that I think
is it's the perfect like act two company. Like Nick has experience, domain expertise, can raise money. And when your first thing is like, hey, we have to raise, you know, millions of dollars and we're going to write a check for like, you know, multiple millions to like buy a laboratory and buy lab equipment, all this stuff. It's tough to make that bet on like a 22 year old, but on a 29 year old with some experience, like it makes more sense. Is this in Texas? Yeah, in Austin. Wow. This is amazing. All right.
- Wow, first of all, this is crazy. How much does, oh, and the labels. So like if you go to McDonald's or fast food, they put the nutritional there, which is like way more challenging, I think, than like an M&M or a candy bar, which is more controlled. But I'm pretty sure, I've always like believed that nutritional labels are bullshit. Like in my head, I've always been like, it's give or take,
maybe even 30% of what is presented. The calories, is it like I would just because I weigh my food, I've tracked, I've tracked almost everything that I've eaten for like four years now in my fitness pal. Wow. And like, and you weigh it, and I weigh it. And now I eyeball it sometimes. But like, first of all, I've noticed a few things. One, when people eyeball their food to track, they almost always overestimate or sorry, underestimate by around 30%.
And then if you go and buy like, let's just say a Big Mac, the degree in which they are different is huge. And there's no way that those nutritional labels are accurate with just the calories, let alone like whatever else, like the macros plus whatever else is supposed to be in it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the FDA first, depending on the compound or the nutrient, like they'll have
a limit that is often it's plus or minus 10% for sure. Oftentimes it's upwards of like 30, 40, even 50%, depending on the compound. Because as you can imagine, some of these things are fairly sensitive, like potassium or iodine or things like this that are present in minuscule amounts. Like it's really hard to say exactly for every single cookie or piece of bread that you're getting or whatever, that there's X amount of iodine in it. And so the FDA allows for reasonably
high tolerance on some of these errors, which makes a lot of this nutrition stuff even harder to figure out.
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The winner gets $5,000 in cash to kickstart their business journey. Plus, we're going to feature them in The Hustle's daily newsletter, which is read by around a million and a half people. And these are the smartest business and tech folks out there. The winner will be announced on April 11. So again, if you have a business idea, go to thehustle.co slash big break. All right, back to the pod. Who owns the... Is the Certified Organic... Is that a company? It is a company.
I believe it's a nonprofit. I think it's Ward and TILF is one of them. But yeah, it's like a certifying body. And I've always contested that that's bullshit because like, I just think that when you, I've like, I've seen farms where they have like an organic section and a non-organic section. And like,
It just seems like when you put medicine on one of them, it inevitably will get in the other one. That is certainly true. The thing that is good for, like, I think organic is better than nothing, but it's certainly not perfect. And I think that there is a lot of, you know, there's a fair bit of research that organic vegetables, for example, have far fewer pesticides than their conventional kind of counterparts, but they still have some. But it's not because they're directly being sprayed. It's because of like, you know, wind, water, like all these sorts of things moving these compounds everywhere.
What's another good one? You want to do function health or skin and gut health? I'm fascinated by all these. Yeah, let's do, let's do function. So, you know, function health, superpower, like. Explain what those are. Yeah, so function health and superpower, they're basically companies where you can go to their website, sign up,
pay an annual membership fee, and they'll facilitate a telemedicine thing where they'll be like, hey, you can go get your blood drawn at a lab or have someone come to you. And you can test your own blood for, I think it's over 190 markers. So you can get things like PFAS exposure, heavy metals, testosterone, insulin markers, all these sorts of things to just know, are you healthy or do you have things that you need to work on? And so I think that
Like, I believe that Function is one of the fastest growing companies in the entire Andreessen portfolio. Like, they're growing super, super fast. Yeah, I think they announced another fundraising, but I think they announced that it got to, like, nine figures in revenue in, like,
two or three years, like something insane. It's crazy. So it's crazy. And like, there's so much demand for people wanting to understand their biomarkers, their lipids, like all these sorts of things. I think that rolling four or five years, are we going to know more or less about the health of our bodies and what's like going on in our systems? It's definitely more. And
What I think Function, Superpower, and the like are doing is they're lowering the friction for people like you and I to understand what's going on in our bodies and our blood and all that. And that information creates a ton of potential for action. But why is Function growing so fast? Because I've used Insight or Insight Tracker for years. And then before that, there was...
I don't know, these have always been a thing. And now I'm hearing so many people talk about function health,
And I'm like, these have been cool and awesome for a decade now. Why is this one particularly awesome? I think that their marketing is great. I think that the value prop is great. It's like one price, one annual membership, get this slew of tests. Like if you had, if you went to your doctor and asked for the same test that Function would give you, it would be like. Dude, they don't let you. Well, well, so if you went to, right, they either don't let you or it would be like seven or $8,000. And so Function is like 500 bucks a year.
I had my friend try to get this testosterone checked and he went to the doctor and the doctor was like, you're 32. You don't you're fine. Like, you don't need to do that.
It's insane. The medical system is so patronizing. It's like they're also there's people talking about how you shouldn't get an MRI or shouldn't get your blood work done because it'll scare you. Cause all these questions scare you and you're like, fuck off. Like that's such an insanely patronizing thing. Yeah, it's crazy. Like I, you know, I've done this before where I'm like, I want this tested and they're like, but you seem perfectly healthy.
And I'm like, dude, just like write it on the paper. It means nothing to you. And it's important to me. Just do what I tell you to do, please. Like exactly like this. This literally requires nothing from you. And I'm just going to learn.
It's exactly right. I think that like the medical profession writ large, there's certainly people that do good, but I think that many of them have this like the patient's an idiot. I know everything kind of vibe. And that is, if you look at the trajectory of American health, certainly I think that we need to change what we're doing. And I think taking like health matters into their own hands is a huge, huge thing. And so why this is an interesting trend to me, function, superpower and the like,
is for the first time i think you are going to see millions and millions of people being onboarded and understanding like what is going on in their blood what's going on in their bodies and then taking steps to optimize or improve that thing and so right now if you take supplements it's like you know
Sam, you probably take creatine or something like that. You probably take it and you're like, eh, maybe I'm a little more shredded. Maybe I'm like, you know, feel better or whatever. But you probably don't, you're not seeing any of your lab markers change. Same is true of like thyroid or cholesterol markers or lipids or other things. I think as people get this information and start to retest over a, you know, six to 12 month period, that we are going to see if,
way, way, way more products and services that sprout up where people, where like there is demand for people who want to optimize their biomarkers. So sort of like today we have personal trainers who help you get shredded. Cause like, that's kind of the only thing people can see. I think in the future we'll have like apps, trainers, services, things like this that are specific to Sam wants to lower his APOB score or Sam wants to improve his, um,
you know, LDL or something like that. Sam wants to improve his thyroid. Like, I think all of these things are newly going to be marketing angles and things that people talk about because they have this insight into their body. This company also took off. By the way, I quit taking creatine. It turned me into a gorilla. I got so big. Like I couldn't, I could not like fit into clothing. Like, have you taken it?
I have. And I stopped. I stopped because a friend freaked me out. He was like, everyone who goes on creatine starts losing their hair, which I like didn't experience, didn't know about. But I was like, huh, I'll cycle off it for six months and see what happens. I went on it. It didn't happen to you, obviously. No, not yet. But like, I like, like I ballooned. Like I just like got so, it just felt like I had so much water. Like it was like 15 pounds in like three weeks. Wow. I got huge. Like I went from like,
202 to like 215 or something. And then I was like, all right, I got to go off it for like eight days. And it just like all went away. Because, yeah, I don't know what happened. But in this function health thing, these guys took off.
because uh i mean what they did was smart they i don't know if mark hyman started it or if he's like considered is he like the the kim kardashian of skims where like i don't know if he had the idea or like someone else had the idea and he was the face but like partnering up with that dude who's got two million or something followers like my father-in-law is like whatever mark says i do uh and so like uh partnering up with a guy like this is so much better than whatever else health influencers sell like uh
coaching PDFs or you know what I mean? Totally. Yeah. Like I generally think also as a side comment, this is how creators are going to monetize more in the future is like owning chunks of very good businesses that rely on distribution rather than just like, I'm Mark Hyman and I get an affiliate fee every time I referred someone to check out function health or something, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. What's this other one about? Functional medicine doctor for your home. That is amazing sounding. Explain that. Yeah, so there's increasing awareness around how
your home can basically be a source of disease. Like lighting can be bad. EMFs, you know, are controversial, but like I think definitely have some health impact. Wait, what's that? EMFs, electromagnetic frequencies, basically like your cell phone, your Wi-Fi router, like all of these sort of things that we're surrounded by all the time.
You know, water toxicity, like off-gassing things called volatile organic compounds. Basically like the, you know, when you walk into a building that's newly painted or something like that, you can smell it. Dude, do you have so much anxiety all day? No, I'm pretty chill. I really believe in the like 80-20 thing on this stuff. Because like everything you're describing in my house is like, you know, like a chainsaw and they're just going to just...
Rip me up. Like I saw a video, there's this guy named CarnivoreMD and he had a video on YouTube explaining like his house and CarnivoreMD is like the most extreme of the most extreme when it comes to like these type of granola health influencers. And like he had like a,
uh, a mattress that had only natural fibers, which I don't, I don't know what a grounding thing is, but there was like this, like it's grounding for electricity. He had like a pole that went into the ground of his home and all the electricity had to like touch that grounding pole. Is that a thing you don't talk about? That's amazing. Yeah. Like it was like, and then he had like, um, uh,
no LED light bulbs. He had no wifi. So there was no wifi at his home and you had to plug in if you had to, if you wanted to use the internet on this one particular area of his home. Like it was crazy. Uh, and I was reading it or watching this video and I'm like, that's cool. And also this fucking exhausting, uh,
Yeah, definitely. It's very exhausting. Like when you just named all of these things, I'm like, I don't know, man. Like I kind of would just fucking kill me early. Like, you know what I mean? Like maybe I'll just take that as a consequence. Yes. So I agree. It's exhausting. It's a multifactorial problem. It's like a thing that people are aware of, want to fix, but don't know where to get started. This is actually why I think that
a like functional medicine or like trainer that makes your, you know, your house healthy is a very interesting idea. I actually invested in a company called Lightwork. Um, it's do lightwork.com, but they're, they're basically doing this where they can send someone to your house
and do a test around, you know, what are the things that, what are the things that are potentially causing disease or stress or other sorts of things in your home? And it's, it's like shocking what they have found. Like they tested a, you know, a billionaire's home recently and across like all sorts of things like air quality, water quality, VOCs, EMF exposure, all of this, you know, it rated very, very badly. Like
people are not looking at the home through the lens of health and chronic disease. And when you start to, there's like a ton of changes that you want to make. Many of those are, which are, you know, confusing or, you know, people don't really understand. So I think that there is a huge opportunity for people to start thinking about, you know, home health or housing through the lens of health. And I think that a company like Lightwork or
that brings this sort of home health test assessment, almost like function, you know, function health for your house is like a really, really big opportunity. So they have a list on their website. So water quality, I assume that includes putting some type of filter. They have lighting, which I imagine that means like no LED lights or a certain type of bulbs. They have EMF, which I guess that is the grounding thing we talked about. Like basically... Somewhat, yeah. Yeah.
It's more like, are you sleeping over a Wi-Fi router? Are you spending a lot of time in areas that have a very high power electromagnetic frequency? Dude, they're going to get so pissed at me when they find out that I sleep with Family Guy playing in my ear from my cell phone when I sleep on my phone.
Oh, God. I'm going to fail this test. They have air quality. So that means like, do you have plants inside your house or what? More like what is the quality of your air? Mostly that's contributed like things that are bad are some of the paints that are doing off-gassing. Some furnitures off-gas quite a lot. You know, microplastic fibers kind of like floating around in the air from your like carpet or something like that. So a lot of these things. Do these guys make money?
They just started. So the answer is sort of so far. How much does it cost? It depends on the house size. But anyway, it's definitely a premium product. Like $5,000 or... Like $10,000. Yeah. And I would say that it is one of these companies that starting out is expensive, concierge, like all that kind of stuff. Over time, I think there's a huge amount of potential there.
especially using AI and whatnot, to have people kind of do a version of this assessment almost themselves, where you walk around your house with a camera and all these sorts of things. And this company just tells you like, change this, do this, this is probably bad. This is not like there's a there's a really cool potential technology solve here, I think. And the guy who started this, does he have a background in this stuff?
Yeah, so he got incredibly sick. He and his wife actually moved into a house. That house was on top of a power line. That house had like a bunch of mold issues that they didn't realize about when they moved in. And over the course of a year, their health on like every marker, energy, everything just like collapsed.
And so they went, you know, they went, they're healthy. They're 31. They went to normal doctors. They went to all these people. And only after a crazy amount of experimentation and talking to doctors, they realized, wow, it's our health that like our home is actually making us sick. And that's what kind of got them down this rabbit hole of trying to understand the problem, which is that many people are getting sick, feeling low energy, feeling all these things because they're being slowly poisoned by the house they live in.
Dude, I feel whenever I hear this story, I think I'm broken because like, you know, I describe my family, like my, where I'm from in Missouri, we're basically, we're just mules. Like we like,
you know, you eat donuts in the morning, you eat cheeseburgers and fries in the afternoon and you eat steak and pizza and French fries at night with tons of beer. And you just do that every single day and you just don't complain. And like, if you were to tell, like, you tell me that these people, like if, if my house was full of mold, I would just think I have allergies. It just, eh, whatever. Like, this is just how I feel. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? And so like, I wouldn't, I wouldn't know, you know, to like do, I've just thought, I would just think this is just life.
And I wouldn't ever complain about it either. I would just be like, "Ah, fuck it. Like rub some dirt on it. It's fine." You're not alone. I mean, this is like how most people respond to this, right? I just think that as people are becoming more aware of these things, were you not raised that way?
My mom was one of the early like into organic people. She was granola-y? Yeah, she would buy milk in a glass jug that was like unpasteurized. So it held these nasty clumps and you'd like pour it into your cereal in the morning and a clump would hit it and the whole like bowl would explode all over you. It was so gross. Your mom's a freak. I know. At one point, I think I was like in fourth or fifth grade, the health food store where she was buying all this stuff literally burned down and all the kids like threw a party. We were like, yay, no more, no more.
- Crafty milk. - That's insane. It is funny, as my wife, as we've had kids, started having kids, it's so funny. Once the baby comes out of you, you automatically become granola.
There's a subreddit. Have you seen the subreddit? It's called like a granola mom. Is it moderately granola moms? Yeah, moderately granola moms. And yeah, moderately granola moms, a place for almost hippies. And honestly, it's like one of my favorite places to get information because it's people who are hippie, hippie, hippie, hippie, but they're self-aware, which is like why I like you. So like, I want like someone who's like,
you know, loves the extreme stuff, but can also dumb it down to me. Who's more, uh, like, you know, I don't really want to learn everything. I wish you would just tell me what to do and tell me like, what's like experimental versus what's like actually proven. And like, you know, you like kind of can help me as a more normal consumer, figure it out. And, uh, I've noticed that my wife, the second, you know,
We had a kid. It was like no more Teflon, plastic bottles are no go, things like that. And frankly, I love it. I love it. We hung out with Joe Gebbia recently.
Did you know, did you ever go to Airbnb's office? Yeah. So I don't know if you remember this, but they were wild. So this was back in 2000. I think they did this actually from the beginning, but they had 2000 people working out of that office, something like that, maybe 1000.
And they made 100% of their own food and to an extreme. So for example, they had air bowl, which was some type of like Airbnb Red Bull. They had, so the condiments, the ketchup, the mayonnaise was literally made on site by the staff. And so, and their meats were all from butchers. Every single thing they had. So they had trail mix where it was like nuts with like chocolate that they had made.
It was crazy. And I distinctly remember that. And I thought it was crazy. And then I started thinking about it. I'm like, that's kind of amazing. And we hung out with Joe Gebbia and I asked him about that. I go, why did you guys do this? He goes, man, that's how I was raised. Like my mom, I think he grew up in Vermont or somewhere, somewhere rural New England.
And he was like, my mom was basically into this stuff and I was raised doing all this. And I just thought it was good for the planet and it was good for our bodies. And so we insisted at Airbnb that we did this. And so back then, you know, I don't know how maybe Joe's 40 something. So he was raised in the late 80s, early 90s. Back then, if you did that, like your mom, you were a freak. Now, all the young cool guys that like we follow on Instagram who are friends with all do this stuff. And I think it's like pretty amazing. That is so cool. Yeah.
You don't remember that about Airbnb? I went there. I didn't. Yeah, I went there to like meet up with friends and then see a talk. So I only went two or three times and didn't actually get that that level of detail. That's so cool. It was wild. I don't know if they still have an office. I don't know if they still do that. But during the pandemic, they had to lay people off. And unfortunately, the culinary staff was probably the first to go.
Yeah, that feels like the first thing that a public company like activist investor kind of yells at you. Yeah, but you know, I understand that it's could be tough to justify. There's like no need for an office. But that was the story. It honestly was amazing. I tell the story all the time. And when I saw that I was kind of on board with Airbnb even further because I'm like, if they sweat the details with this, they probably sweat the details with other stuff.
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All right, let's do two or three more. You had one on about skin gut health. What is that? And whenever someone says gut health, it freaks me out because the, what's it called? Leaky gut is the world's greatest branding. Yeah. So this is actually a cosmetics company that I've wanted to invest in for so long. I haven't seen anyone do it.
If you're doing this, like, please just email me. My email is very easy to find or ping me on Twitter. But the thing that I think should happen is like, there's, I don't know how many hundreds of billions a year are spent on the skincare kind of space. And if you look at research,
There are certain things that work, like certainly there's classes of peptides and things like that, that I think maybe work decently well from a skincare standpoint. But for most people, if you're buying any sort of skincare to look younger or whatever, it's just like a waste of money or it's like marginally effective. Say that again. So your stance here is that skincare is mostly a waste. Yeah.
Skincare is mostly a scam. Yeah. Yeah. Minus like a couple of things like certain peptides, sunscreen, moisturizer. Sure. If you want your skin to be like more moist, but a lot of the anti-aging stuff, anti-wrinkle cream, all these sorts of things. Is that a, is there one that starts with an R? Well, retinol A is one of the few things that's actually, that's actually relatively effective. It's like, oh, but this is the thing. It's like basically only peptides are the things that work. That's a peptide. Yeah.
Yeah, so it's a peptide. Things like One Skin uses a peptide. There's something called like Copper. It's Copper GKU, I think, which is another peptide. These things seem to actually work as well as some compounds like methylene blue and whatnot. But other compounds, like any sort of random $50 thing that you're going to buy on Amazon that is like anti-aging and uses jojoba oil or like any of these things, like just do not work. Or if they do, they're so marginal, it's basically not worth doing, in my opinion.
What does work is... And you don't wear sunscreen either, right? No. That's one of your like bold stances, which is that sunscreen is not good. I basically think like most sunscreen is carcinogenic. Again, this is another thing in the US, we allow things like oxybenzones that are not allowed in the EU. It's in almost every sunscreen in the US. It is definitively carcinogenic. And so like why we encourage kids to put this on and like use it eight hours a day, I have no idea. So do you use zinc?
So I use a non-nano zinc oxide sunscreen just for my face if I'm going to be in the sun for like a very long period of time. Yeah. Dude, just so controversial for a white guy. I know. I don't know. Like, I feel like I am happy with my skin. So, yeah. So the thing that I want to invest in is there is...
a lot of research that shows the relationship and the link between gut health and skin health. And so like if you have a healthy gut or if you work on probiotics or you work on like, you know, drinking bone broth, doing things like this that are going to improve your gut health generally, there's research that shows that that is reflective in skin. There's something called, I think it's called like bioluminescence basically, but there's a way that you can measure how much light someone's like skin cells are emitting and that improves as your gut health improves, which is kind of a wild fact.
How long is the change? So like, for example, I don't have like the greatest, I have dry, flaky skin. I just thought it was just because I'm just like,
Super white dude and like in the winter time my skin gets destroyed in the summertime. I'm great But yeah, like you know I always thought that it was just like the lack of Sun cuz like just like my style My scalp will get like so dry during the during the winter time and I like need to get under the Sun Yeah, so if I was like red light chicken lamps, does that do stuff? Oh
Yeah. It's helpful. Dude. Like during winter time, I feel miserable. Like I, I like, I'm like, I need like the sun to like burn off everything on my head and on my face. So if I started drinking, what's the routine? If I started doing that, how long would my skin take for my skin to get better? I bet it would take like six months basically. Um, but basically I think it's going to be summer by this, by that time. Start now. You'll be great in December. Yeah. Um,
But I think that the macro like business opportunity is people treat skincare as just a topical thing that you apply to your skin, not like an expression of your gut health and skin health and all these sorts of things. And so I think there is an opportunity to build an incredibly large cosmetics company, you know, and skincare company combining topical applied skincare that's actually effective with gut based interventions that are going to like
improve your skin from sort of the inside out. And I've like wanted this company to exist for seven years now. But isn't that bone broth? I mean, what does this look like?
Yeah, so I think it would be like a combination of specialized probiotics that are geared towards, you know, improving skin health. I think it would be probably a crash diet of like 30 to 60 days where you're removing a bunch of like toxins and other inflammatory foods from your diet, incorporating bone broth and then some sort of like effective topical skincare. And I think that regimen would outperform basically anything that exists in the skincare world today. Do you eat any processed foods?
I try not to. But like on a weekly basis, how often? Probably very, probably none. Zeroed and yeah, one thing maybe. So like that's easy for, I understand that for meals. So you probably cook or do leftovers.
What about for a snack? What's a an example? I use these actually I just had one earlier. So it's a Maui Nui venison stick Oh, I have one as well. I got I got my my kettle and fire collab with them. There we go. Hell yeah Yeah, dude, they're so you got you guys sent me a bunch of them. I think like each stick is like $3. Yeah, it's like three or four dollars Yeah, I have like a thousand dollars for these at my house amazing
So I do those, like meat sticks. I'll do fruit, a couple bone broth. Like those are kind of the go-to snacks. I've kind of been addicted to dried mangoes recently, which... But that's a process, no? Like is that not considered... Is beef jerky not considered a process? I wouldn't consider it a process. Like if you're sourcing it, you know, sourcing it from a good place, like it's not going to have a bunch of additives. It's basically just like meat that has been dried and then some spices. Yeah, I do dried mango. I do it from whole foods, but the problem is that like...
I can do like a bag a day, which is like- It is a problem. 800 calories a day.
And like, it's basically like four Cokes. Yeah. Yeah. Although I don't know. I've been eating like, there's this interesting diet online that I'm currently trying. It's called the honey diet. But basically you just eat fruit and honey before noon each day and then have like a high protein meal in the afternoon. Why are you doing this? Just to experiment, frankly, and just see how I feel. But so far I feel pretty fucking good. And so the mangoes fit within that diet. Yeah.
I've been doing, um, my snack lately has been dates and butter. Have you ever had that? No. Oh my God. It's the great, I think I saw a carnivore MD do it. And I was like, let me try this. Cause I got a sweet tooth. Like I have a very addictive personality. And when I quit drinking alcohol, it totally went to sugar. So I'm always having to combat that. But I think everyone is. And so, uh, uh, uh,
Half a tablespoon of butter in a date. It's like the greatest thing on earth. I'll have to give it a go. Actually, CarnivoreMD is very into this like meat and fruits thing. Like honey, fruit, and meat is basically his diet. And he's very into this. So I don't know. I actually think that there's a good chance that honey, fruit, like we're on the very early stages of like people realizing that sugar is not that bad for you when it comes in fruit or honey form.
That's an interesting take because I would have thought you would have said the opposite, which is like glucose is glucose. No. Oh, that's interesting. So you do high sugar fruit as well, not just low sugar. This is something I'm just starting to experiment with. And so like, I'm not even sure. So I literally, I got my labs done recently. And then like last week started this honey diet thing. So I'm going to test again in like three months and see how things look.
That's pretty fascinating. I would not have thought that that's something you would do because I like I've read about like bananas. Sam Korkos actually told me he said this in passing. So I don't want to like attribute this to because I could have I could be listening to him wrong. But I believe he said that a modern banana is candy. And the way it used to be was like a carrot. He was like, they were not like this as delicious. But we've like genetically, you know, it's kind of like a honeycrisp apple. Like, you know, like, it's basically like genetically predisposed to like,
be like, you know, way sweet. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's, I think the new apple that's popular is called cotton candy apple. That's funny. They have that at central market. It was called the cotton candy apple. I'll have to try it. I've not seen that. So like you would eat that?
I mean, I would experiment with it for 90 days for sure. Yeah. Like I don't think a lot of this stuff, like, yes, if you're optimizing for sweetness, I understand that, um, that you could argue maybe it's bad, but I think that nature tends to like keep trade-offs within a certain band. Um, and so I don't know if you're having organic produce or whatever. Like, I, I think that this stuff is like, not, it's not bad to experiment with it and just see how you feel. Do you eat, uh, vegetables?
Yeah. Yeah, I do. Well, Ari's laughing at me and so are you, but like a lot of, some of these guys are like, I think Carnivore MD in particular is, uh,
on some parts anti-vet on something anti-vegetable he's come off that a little bit i mean like to me i think that you just have to have a macro lens on this which is like what have humans been eating for hundreds of thousands of years it's not like you know in in the year 1900 year rolls around or 1970 when like the chronic disease crisis really started ramping up that all of a sudden people are rampantly eating vegetables and getting sick all the time
It's like, obviously in my view, not like we are in the midst of a vegetable eating epidemic that is making everyone sick. It's like clearly like the ultra processed foods that are new to our food system. And so does he have some good points? Like maybe our vegetables less good than, than most people think. Like I could believe that. Do I think it is a thing that is like worth optimizing and to never eat vegetables? Like definitely not.
Here's one for some of these health trends. I think that polyester clothing is going to there's going to be. I mean, there's already a niche of people. I'm one of them where I don't wear if a clothing has polyester. I tried always to avoid it unless it's like, you know, like special or particularly amazing. But but in general, it's got to be all natural fibers.
Are you on board with that? Oh, yeah. I mean, polyester clothing is like the number one contributor to microplastics, basically. They like shed like crazy when you're washing them. And there was, there's some studies that have been done around, they basically took dogs and had them wear polyester underwear and their sperm count went down like 60 or 70%. And then they switched them off of polyester underwear and like it came right back up. No shit. No way. So what underwear do you wear? Do you wear underwear? Yeah.
So there's a company called NADS that does like organic stuff. There's another company called PACT, P-A-C-T. And I usually wear those.
How interesting is women's, I mean, I don't know, does this matter to women? So it's unclear to me right now, I would say potentially, but it seems like the thing that is causing the loss of sperm is like there's some sort of electrical charge thing that happens between polyester and the skin that seems to impact like, you know, sperm generation. And so it's not clear to me yet. I haven't like gone super deep on it.
How fascinating. Yeah, pretty wild though, right? That dog thing is crazy. It's crazy. There you go. That's another great dog health idea. Dog, all natural dog underwear. Yeah.
That's insane to me. So I use Ex-Afficinado and I loved it because it was, it like would dry quickly after you cleaned it and they never stretched out. But I think it is highly synthetic. Almost certainly. And so, but honestly, cotton underwear for the most part sucks, but there's some companies that are making like really good cotton workout gear and cotton underwear that I really appreciate. So like, for example,
What I like to do is a lot of my workout shorts, I just get sweatpants, like all cotton sweatpants and I'll cut them. But like, I'm a big fan of like all cotton workout gear because Lululemon and like it has like,
underwear in the shorts. So your junk is just on the polyester even harder. Do you know what I mean? Totally. There's actually a company, there's a company called Riker. I love Riker. I love their stuff. I love Riker. Yeah, it's so good. It is so good. It's the only...
Short company for men and they have shirts and stuff too But it's the only but the shorts are particularly particularly are hard to do because you like if a if a workout short doesn't have the underwear Then you're just kind of like flop it all over. You know what I mean? So you like but it's hard to do with cotton Totally. Yeah, so their their stuff is great. I really really like what they're doing And I use their stuff for all my workout clothes
That's great. Can you tell me really quick, are there, I just want to know what Justin does. Are there any other, do you have any other stances like this? So this is like so fascinating to hear some of your stances that might be controversial or uncommon.
I feel pretty confident that like our current vaccine schedule is very much not good from a chronic disease standpoint. I don't like make any claims around autism or whatnot, but from a food allergy standpoint, certainly the U.S. is like the worst chronic disease issue and is the most vaccinated and has like the most egregious vaccine schedule of any developed country. So what are you suggesting, spacing it out or not taking them?
Yeah, I basically think like fewer shots, more spaced out is like what I'm planning to give kids. I wrote a very long post on this. It is pretty incredible. Like, for example, they give a kid a Hep B shot, like literally five minutes or less, like two minutes out of the womb. And I was like, well, I don't I don't know if she's going to be around like
someone with hep B anytime soon. Well, the only way you can get a hep B is through sexual activity and blood transfusions. And they test the mom for hep B before birth. And so you're just vaccinating a kid against something. And the immunity wears off after a decade. And also not that many people have, I don't think hep B is particularly common. It's basically drug users, I believe. Totally. And the other thing is, my view is that our health
organizations have been captured and, you know, by large companies. And I think like you look also the COVID mRNA vaccine was added to the infant childhood immunization schedule this year. It's like, that is not a scientific position. That is purely something else is going on. So I think that's like a relatively controversial take that I have that I wrote a very long piece about that I think is defensible. Any other last ones? Yeah. So against like the health tribe, I think that the
Yeah, the fruit and sugar one is probably like the biggest one that I'm focused on right now. And then I also think that this like demonization of, I think that the tribal stuff, tribalness of like food cultures is,
is something that I think is not good. Like I basically am much more into nutrient density. And I think if you're eating nutrient dense, like pizzas and carbs and all that stuff, as opposed to like conventional, you know, vegetables, fruits, and meats all the time that are like maximally sprayed and processed and all this stuff. Like I actually think that eating a bunch of carbs that are from a very, very good source, probably your health outcomes will be better.
that stuff's like impossible to find. Like for example, in order to do that, you'd have to find someone that mills their own grain or something like that. Like, like that's like, it's virtually impossible or not virtually impossible, but it's a job. Yeah. Yeah, it is. I very much agree. Um, dude, you're the man. Thank you. I just like, uh,
You know, I text you these questions anyway. And so it's fun just to get an hour of your time just to pepper you with all types of questions that I have. But I appreciate you. Yeah, no, this has been super fun, man. Thanks for having me on as always. And we didn't even promote your company.
Yeah. So my, my company kettle and fire is a bone broth company, which we talked about. My, my company now is called true med. We're basically making it so you can buy exercise, healthy food supplements using tax-free HSA or FSA money. So if you go to true med.com, you can see a bunch of the brands where you can spend tax-free dollars. And then if you are interested in like some of the health stuff I talk about, I also have a newsletter, which is Justin Maris sub stack.
And a new podcast. TrueMed has a podcast. It's great. I like it. Yeah, yeah. We're doing like a couple episodes on, you know, movement, exercise, nutrient density. Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you so much. God bless. Thanks for having me on. That's it. That's the pod.
Hey, Sean here. I want to take a minute to tell you a David Ogilvie story. One of the great ad men. He said, remember, the consumer is not a moron. She's your wife. You wouldn't lie to your own wife. So don't lie to mine. And I love that. You guys, you're my family. You're like my wife and I won't lie to you either. So I'll tell you the truth.
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