Justin Mares, who has started six or seven health and wellness companies doing a collective $500M+ in revenue, joins Sam and Shaan to discuss his viral blog post “The Great American Poisoning” — his argument that chronic disease is the biggest problem in America and a massive opportunity for entrepreneurs. They dig into three business ideas: an annual home health checkup service, a premium butcher shop (the “Blue Bottle of meat”), and a lifestyle fertility program as an alternative to IVF. Justin also tells the origin story of Kettle and Fire and makes the case for spending your career focused on one deep problem.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Justin Mares (guest, health entrepreneur)
Introduction: Justin Mares and the Great American Poisoning [00:00:00]
Sam: The marketing guy in me loves everything you’re saying, because the two things you just said — those were actually like $20 million ad hooks.
Sam: Justin, I’m pumped you’re here. You’re here for two reasons. The first reason is that you have started six or seven companies that have collectively done something like $500 million in revenue in the last seven years, which is huge — and they’re all in the health and wellness space.
You’re also here because you’re one of my most reasonable friends when it comes to health and wellness. You’re into fringe stuff, which I think is cool, but the problem with people who are into fringe stuff is they can’t relate it to a normal person. They’ll be like, “This fringe thing I’m into — this is only like a 1% needle mover,” as opposed to a 50% needle mover. So you’re very self-aware, very thoughtful, and you’ve built a lot of big businesses in the space.
You’re also a blogger, and you have this amazing blog post called “The Great American Poisoning” that both Shaan and I are obsessed with. So I thought you could come on and talk a little bit about the blog post, but also business ideas you’re into and opportunities related to this space.
Justin: I’m super stoked to be here. As I’ve written in that post, I literally think that the Great American Poisoning — basically the fact that Americans are sick at record levels and getting sicker, 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, because of that, a massive opportunity for people who want to start companies or build value in this space.
Sam: Shaan, what emotion did you feel when you read this blog post?
Shaan: Dude, you could ask Diego — I went on like a 48-hour bender. Was it fear? No. It was outrage first, then curiosity, then skepticism. 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 did an end-of-year recap for myself over the weekend, and it was my favorite blog post of the year. So you read that and then I told my team, “Hey, let’s break this down point by point,” 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 a 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 hundreds of people who weigh more than this guy — but that was considered circus-freak fat before. And you talked about how a pediatrician would go their whole career and never see a kid with fatty liver disease. Now it’s more and more common. It’s just a very compelling case around health.
So you combine three very interesting things. One, you have a very strong, factually-based view of health. Two, you are self-actualized around health — you’re one of the fittest, most healthy guys that both Sam and I know and look up to. I’ve messaged you before being like, “Hey, water filters — tell me what you like, what brand?” Because I trust that you actually walk the walk. And three, you’re an entrepreneur. You’ve started two brands in the keto space, each doing tens of millions a year in revenue, with distribution in 10,000-plus retail stores. You started a non-alcoholic beverage brand because you’re like, “Drinking is one of the most unhealthy things we do — how do we have the social drink that doesn’t sacrifice on health?” And I liked that you had no CPG experience before that, no DTC experience before starting these.
So you have this great interest and knowledge and self-hobby around health and wellness, but you’ve also done it as an entrepreneur. That’s a great intersection for us on the pod, because we’re both interested in health and like living a good life, but also: how do we profit from said good life? And you’ve actually done it.
I’m excited because not only have you had three or four big hits in health and wellness yourself, but you brainstormed and sent us a list of five or six new opportunities that you think other people could go do in this space.
Justin: Yeah. I literally think that this space — solving the Great American Poisoning — has almost immeasurable opportunity for people and entrepreneurs who want to solve this problem. I can read some stats, but it’s just staggering, the amount of chronic disease and the burden that’s putting on the country. As an entrepreneur, if you see a big problem like that you just want to sprint toward it. And when you solve some of the problems involved in fixing the chronic disease crisis, you’re also helping people live longer, healthier lives. It’s a very rewarding space to work in, as opposed to, say, day trading NFTs or something like that.
Sam: And your blog post basically says: the answer to why is simple. Our food system is poisoning us, and the institutions meant to keep us safe — regulators, the healthcare system, doctors, researchers — are not incentivized to keep us healthy. Which is kind of the cause of all the problems you’re discussing.
Justin: Yeah, exactly. A hundred years ago our chronic disease burden was about 95% lower than it is right now. There were acute issues — infectious disease was much more of a real thing, women dying in childbirth, polio, those sorts of things. We built our medical system on solving those. Life expectancy went up as we got better at them.
Now the biggest burden from a health standpoint is chronic conditions: cancer, asthma, heart disease, diabetes — things that have grown 700% in the last 90 years. We are running the code of an old healthcare system that existed to solve a problem where you took a default-healthy individual, they got sick, and the job of the medical system was to bring them back to health. Now we have the opposite: the average American is unhealthy. People have not internalized what that means, which is that almost anywhere in the US, the average person is going to get cancer, heart disease, or any number of chronic conditions at some point. Our medical system is not built to service a population where the average person is sick. Because of that, we need new institutions and companies. It creates a ton of opportunity for entrepreneurs who want to try to address the Great American Poisoning by creating products and services that help people stay or move back to a baseline of default good health.
Shaan: We should get to the ideas because they’re great, but here’s another one-liner that kind of summarizes this: everyone should update their thinking. The default outcome of living in the US today is that you will get one or more chronic conditions and die of cancer or heart disease. Everything to avoid that is worth considering.
Justin: I feel like I’m such a depressing person these days. I talk about stuff and it’s just — well.
Sam: Debbie Downer Mars over here. All right. So let’s do it. Where do you see the opportunity? You sniffed out the opportunity in the bone broth and ketone space, you sniffed out the opportunity in non-alcoholic wines, each of those doing very well — what ideas do you have?
Business Idea #1: The Annual Home Health Checkup [00:08:30]
Justin: So backing up — I basically think that what we need to call blogs “manifestos” from now on, by the way.
Sam: That’s way better. It’s a little unassuming, but I’ll take it.
Justin: Like in Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise writes his manifesto to kick off the movie. That’s this. This is your Jerry Maguire manifesto.
Sam: Exactly, yeah.
Justin: So my view on what has changed in the last 80 years is that we went from humans mostly existing in an environment that was not poisoning people to one that is basically poisoning them. Food, water, lights, air — all of these are filled with plastics, chemicals, toxins, ultra-processed ingredients — all of these things that are making the default person sick.
One of the things I think is a really compelling opportunity: you could build a massive company that helps people look at their environment — their home and/or their office — and say, “Okay, you’re spending 80% of your time in these three spaces. It might literally be your bedroom, your kitchen, and your office. How do we make it so these spaces are maximally healthy and health-promoting?”
I have a friend who just started a company in the home health testing space that’s doing super well. They’re testing water, air, EMFs, light — it’s called Light Work. Lightwork.com. They’re doing really well.
But I think there’s this whole world of home services — a $40 billion-a-year space that includes HVAC, lights, plumbing, water, electricity — where none of these people are looking at how to make your environment healthy. The people making your furniture aren’t thinking about the flame-retardant chemicals that are giving babies cancer when they spray it on your couch. None of them are thinking about that.
So I think there’s a huge opportunity to build a company or a series of companies that looks at what is going on in your built environment — your home, your furniture — and says, “How do we make this health-promoting? How do we make this service one that makes the person healthier?”
Sam: So it’s like an annual checkup for your house.
Justin: Exactly. That’s the input: do an annual checkup for your house. And out the back end of that, there are so many long-term services — someone services your water filtration, makes sure your shower water is good, makes sure your tap water is RO with mineralization, all those sorts of things.
Sam: What do you do at your house? I know you do a bunch of stuff. What would be included in your home annual checkup?
Justin: A couple things are very worth it. Water filtration is huge. I basically set up a whole-house filtration system. These plumbers installed it — it was like an $8,000 system. Next time they came around to fix it, they screwed on a $20 part incorrectly, and I walked into my kitchen the next morning and stepped on my floorboards and water came up from around them.
Sam: Now you’ve got a mold issue.
Justin: Exactly. So we had to handle that, which was quite annoying. But every water coming in and out of our house gets filtered.
We also recently switched all of our bulbs — we switched to incandescent, actually. There’s a very compelling and pretty early line of research showing the impact of blue-light-emitting lights — basically most light bulbs — on circadian rhythm and sleep. They even impact how much weight you’ll gain if you eat under blue light versus non-blue light. They use this in agriculture: they use different types of lighting when they’re trying to get chickens to gain more weight.
Sam: What’s an incandescent bulb?
Justin: Think of the Edison bulb. It’s actually burning something, as opposed to an LED bulb, which is what’s in most houses today. There’s also a pretty cool thing you can do: if you have an LED light in your house and you film it on slow-mo on your iPhone, you can see the LED bulb flickering thousands of times per second. The reason LED lights are supposedly more efficient than incandescent bulbs is because they’re turning on and off constantly — so they’re technically using less electricity. But they do this sub-perceptually, which can cause people to just feel icky. You walk into a room with bad lighting and you’re like, “What’s going on? I don’t like this.”
Sam: The marketer in me loves everything you’re saying here, because those two things you just said in a throwaway — those are $20 million ad hooks. When you’re talking about: “Do you know how they make chickens fat? They put them under these blue lights and they gain extra weight. Maybe that’s why you’re fat. Have you ever considered that you’re just being poisoned by the industry?” People love that. You have the man out to get you. You have: maybe the problem is not what I’m putting in my mouth, it’s the light that’s affecting me. So you have: can I buy this thing rather than change from within? No one talks about it except for us in this ad right now. The LED thing — watch this magic trick of an ad where you take the phone on slow-mo and it’s actually flickering. Do you know how that messes with your sleep?
I love all of this from a marketing perspective. I know you’re a good, ethical, standup guy — but when I hear this stuff I think, what could I use to get this across? How can I, if I believe this is good for people, maximally get that in the hands of people?
Justin: Totally. And this is why I think this is such a big opportunity, because you have the home services thing — the healthy checkup for your home — but once you understand the impact some of these things have on your health, basically for many people it’s just: blank check. Fix my air quality, fix my water quality, fix my lighting, fix the EMFs in my house, make sure I don’t have mold. There’s a tremendous amount of spend that people want to put into making sure their home environment is healthy.
Shaan: Dude, have you ever had a pest control guy come to your house? There might not be a better salesman in the world. He’s like, “Hey, want me to just do a quick look around your house? Free. Just a quick look.” Of course. He walks around and he says, “Hey, I’d love to show you a couple things.” Then he takes me around and says, “You see this?” There’s a tiny screen that’s been moved open. He’s like, “That’s rats.” I’m like, “What? Rats?” He’s like, “Yeah, they’re under your floorboards.” He shows me all these little things — and look, we live out in 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?” As if he’s my dad.
Sam: Exactly.
Shaan: He’s like, “Great.” And now I’m paying $270 a month for this guy to come do nothing to my house. I have no idea what he’s doing, the random guy comes and sprays — but that idea of: let me diagnose the problem so I can sell you the solution. And of course he’s not wrong — there actually was an issue. I just wouldn’t have been aware of it. So I’m a big fan of this audit method of sales. Let me do a free audit for you to tell you where you might have some problems, and if you’d like me to fix them, I’m happy to do so.
Justin: Yeah. Are there any other things — water filter, light bulbs — any other big needle-moving things?
I think specifically for your bedroom and places where you’re spending multiple hours, it’s kind of early, but I think the EMF thing is going to be much more of a thing people care about. It sounds very tinfoil-hatty, but let me explain why I think this might be important.
A hundred years ago we had a certain type of radiation — ionizing radiation, I believe — think of what you get shot with at the dentist, nuclear isotopes, things that are definitely bad. And then there was this longer spectrum including microwaves and the things we put cell phones and computers into. For many years we basically said, “Okay, microwaves are bad, everything else is fine.” Now we think: okay, microwaves cause harm, let’s also not expose people to those at a high amount — but this other spectrum of cell phones and Wi-Fi is definitely fine.
Then you get to today, where most of the FCC safety ratings and levels used to regulate cell phones and Wi-Fi were basically tested on cell phones from the early 2000s. The guy who came up with these rules — they interviewed him, I think five or six years ago — and he was like, “Yeah, all of the assumptions we had just assumed that you take a phone call and put it down. We never thought you’d be walking around with this thing in your pocket all day.”
There are a fair number of articles that are concerning enough. People will change the electromagnetic fields that mice are exposed to and it’ll raise or lower their blood sugar at a predictable rate. It seems to have potential impact on cancer. There’s enough there that I’m like: probably bad. But also I don’t think it’s as bad as everyone saying it’s causing every cancer known to man. I do think if you can avoid sleeping next to a Wi-Fi router or next to something emitting a huge amount of EMFs for 8 to 9 hours a night, that’s probably well worth doing.
Shaan: By the way, one thing I think we should say: you’re not one of these guys who has optimized everything. I’ve seen you say multiple times: just get these core four or five things right. Sleep well. Don’t eat too much processed food, especially seed oils. Exercise. Get some sunlight. You’re very much a “basics first” guy when it comes to what should I be focused on. Which makes me relate to and trust you, because the people who are like, “Well, you need to get exactly 9 micrograms of sunlight in your eye within 10 seconds of waking up” — it’s like all these fringe things you could do to maybe move the needle 1% when you haven’t done the core foundational big things right.
But am I giving you too much credit here? Because you’re currently saying things like Thomas Edison light bulbs and the microwave is going to kill you. Where do you actually stand on this?
Justin: So — completely agree, I think if you get the basics right that’s 80 to 90% of it. That said, if you have relatively easy interventions like “move a Wi-Fi router outside your bedroom” and “swap the bulbs in the rooms you’re spending 20 hours a day in” — those are pretty easy, one-time, relatively low- to no-cost interventions that could have a big impact on your health. I’m very supportive of those things.
I’m definitely not “butthole sunning solves your entire health issues” type of guy. There’s a lot of those guys.
Sam: It’d be cool if it did, yeah.
Justin: It’d be amazing. Doesn’t hurt to try, right?
Sam: I actually think this is one of the problems with the health influencer space more broadly: it’s just not sexy to be like, “Avoid ultra-processed foods, get sunlight in the morning, lift four days a week, make sure you’re getting adequate sleep.” You can’t even create content around it — you can’t become an influencer on that because you’d say everything you need to say in 14 seconds. What are you going to post tomorrow? What are you going to post the next day?
So you have to work backwards from: all the people trying to sell me something have to sell me something complex, and all the people creating professional content have to have something interesting, novel, and evergreen. Nobody’s incentive is to tell you the simple few things you should focus on, because they’d be done. You wouldn’t sell anything and you’d be done talking.
Shaan: I was trying to find it, but I’m on Brian Johnson’s newsletter and his subject line for his last newsletter said — it was Wednesday — “Your boners are killing you.” That was the subject line. It was about how the lack of getting nighttime erections is correlated with longevity. And it’s like you’re saying it’s not sexy to sell simple stuff — but they got me.
Sam: Can we do a quick sidebar on Brian?
Shaan: I like Brian a lot as a guy — really nice guy. I actually really like what he’s doing in general. But man, I kind of miss the old Brian Johnson where it seemed like he was a missionary nerd trying to do this for science. And now he’s dressed up kind of like modern Zuck — he’s got the chain and the oversized t-shirt, he looks cool, he’s selling products, he’s got great YouTube content, great subject lines for emails, great social media strategy. I get why all that’s good. But it does make me trust him less in a weird way, because what he was doing before was so different — this self-funded science experiment on himself with a noble goal and mission. I don’t know, I kind of feel like he’s detracting from that. Am I the only one who feels that way?
Sam: I have a lot of trust in him still. I think he’s done a good job — he sells an olive oil called “Snake Oil,” and I think anytime someone makes fun of themselves my trust in them goes up. I also just have to acknowledge that he’s a weirdo and that’s just how he lives his life, and that’s cool.
Justin: I think he’s doing an incredible service to humanity in how aggressively he’s publishing everything. Where I would say we differ: one, he’s trying to build a longevity cult, a new religion, which he openly says — I’m not trying to do that. And second, he’s very much a believer in: if you live by the algorithm and do everything it tells you, you’ll live a longer and healthier life. Which I think is fair and I’m all for it. I’m much more interested in: why are people uniquely getting sick in today’s environment, and what in our environment is poisoning everyone?
I think Brian Johnson is amazing and I think it’s awesome that someone is willing to try so many high-risk gene therapies, crazy peptides, all the stuff he’s doing, and talk about it publicly. But I will be very interested to see what happens to him over the next 20 years. Twenty years of trying very out-on-the-risk-curve therapies — it’s quite possible something doesn’t go so well.
Shaan: Maybe I just have a preference for the autistic biohacker rather than the content creator influencer with a DTC brand underneath it. I think I’ve just seen a lot of that, and the first thing he was doing felt very original.
The Fish Tank Metaphor [00:22:00]
Sam: Let me ask you — you had this great phrase. Maybe it was you or your co-founder, but: if you had a fish tank and all the fish suddenly started getting sick, you wouldn’t drug the fish. You’d clean the tank. You would assume something is causing the fish to get sick. But for some reason we have this instinct to just drug the fish — “The fish is sick? Just drug all the fish” — rather than asking: 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. I love that metaphor of cleaning the tank.
Justin: You captured it perfectly. The only thing I would add is that I don’t actually think we have an instinct to drug the fish. I think we have a $4.3 trillion industry whose job it is to propagandize people into thinking the only way to fix the fish’s health problem is drugging them. That, to me, is the insane situation we find ourselves in. Everyone is getting sicker and overweight — I asked ChatGPT recently, and I think it was something like 60% of people have had a prescription in the last 12 months. Something crazy like that.
Sam: It’s crazy. So let’s do it. The first idea was kind of the cleaning of the tank — a checkup for the house, finding ways to make your home environment healthier and less interfering with your health.
The second one you have is a modern butcher shop. This is about feeding the fish. What is the modern butcher shop opportunity you see?
By the way, Shaan — do you remember I told you this, actually on the last two episodes? Two of my predictions were that people were going to have more plants in their homes, and also I thought there’s something about the meat at Whole Foods that I actually think is crap nowadays.
Shaan: Yeah. I’m not saying you’re right or a genius, but I’m not saying you’re wrong either.
Sam: I’ve hung out with Justin before, so I’m sure I stole that.
Business Idea #2: The Blue Bottle of Meat [00:24:30]
Justin: At a very high level, this is one of the things I’m most excited about. There’s actually one opening in Austin in January which I’m super stoked about — the first one I’ve seen that goes as far as I would like.
Let me set the table through an analogy. In the 80s, coffee was basically just Folgers. There was no differentiation on sourcing, it wasn’t very good, there was no coffee culture. Then Starbucks came along — that was the big second-wave coffee culture. Now there’s like craft coffee, small cool roasters and coffee shops in every major city.
I basically think that meat today is where coffee was in the 80s. You go to the grocery store and you’re buying steak — no one is differentiating on: how is this dry-aged, what is the cut, what are the genetics of the animal, how was it raised, was it regenerative, was it fed soy, was it massaged — all these sorts of things are actual differentiators in buying meat, and people are aware of them, but the market has not caught up yet.
Have you ever bought from Snake River Farms?
Sam: Yeah, I bought from Snake River. I had this instinct when I saw it — it was almost because it was the only branded meat there. All the other meat, the branding was like “80% lean/20% fat,” and then there was one with a brand name on it that sounded like a place. I thought, oh, maybe this is the higher quality one. Are they legit? What do they do?
Justin: They’re super legit. They’re one of the few companies in the US that have an American wagyu. They imported wagyu from Japan, I believe in the 70s or 80s, and they’ve been breeding this wagyu line ever since.
If you buy Whole Foods’ best ribeye, it’s probably going to cost you like $20 a pound. If you buy the best ribeye from Snake River Farms, it’s going to be like $60 to $70 per pound. The skew in pricing and the amount people are willing to pay for really high-quality meat is massive — and I just think it hasn’t made its way into retailers or butchers yet.
So I think there’s this massive opportunity to build what I’m calling the “Blue Bottle of the modern butcher shop” — one that caters to people who really care about sourcing, flavor, cut, dry aging, all of these things you’re not going to be able to get at Whole Foods.
Shaan: There seem like there are actually two opportunities here. One is to create another Snake River Farms — a brand that is elevated in some way, that would go sell through grocery stores. Just the way you have oat milk brands, all these new brands that come into existing categories and start selling something niche or premium. That’s one idea.
And then I can imagine someone who takes a content approach to this. If you’re on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube telling your story about the unique things you’re doing with your animals and why it’s premium — whether it’s how you’re raising them, how you’re feeding them, maybe you’re genetically selecting the more premium breed — that seems like one opportunity.
And then the other one you had is the butcher shop itself — the “Blue Bottle Coffee” model. Blue Bottle sold for what, $700, $800 million?
Justin: Yeah, $700 or $800.
Shaan: I don’t know how popular Blue Bottle is nationwide. I had never heard of it till I moved to San Francisco like ten-plus years ago. It seemed like a rich-guy pet project — all the VCs had invested because they liked having meetings there. It was cooler than Starbucks, it was elevated above that, and it seemed like a passion project. Then I see it sells for $700, $800 million and I’m like — wow, that really worked. So this is a 10 out of 10 idea.
Justin: I agree. It’s a super exciting one. And the reason I would personally start with a butcher shop rather than going direct to retail is that with a butcher shop you can have a wide range of pricing, you can tell the story, you can do small samplings, you can talk about the aging. If you just plopped a $60 steak on the Whole Foods shelf next to a $15 one with no story, that thing just won’t sell.
Sam: Are quality cows being grown somewhere and you just have to source them, or do you have to do this yourself?
Justin: There are small farmers growing really high-quality meats selling at farmers markets — they’re just hard to buy from at scale. It’s hard to aggregate enough supply that Whole Foods would say, “Yeah, put it in our 500 stores.” Or that could fill up a meat case in Austin.
This really only works if you’re a butcher who can buy an entire herd or an entire amount of a rancher’s cattle and sell it through your store over a couple of months — that’s worth the investment from a relationship standpoint. For Whole Foods, it’s like: “We’re never going to work with a small operator that might have 50 or 100 head of cattle to sell.”
Sam: Can you freeze and store beef and it’s still great months later?
Justin: You can. But the better thing is dry aging. You can just hang meat in meat lockers and it actually cures and gets a richer flavor. The more you age it, the richer it gets. The reason they don’t do this obviously is: the more you age it, the less cash you’re cycling through because you’re not selling it quickly. It doesn’t work for the retail model. But if you’re doing a really high-end butcher shop, it could actually work.
Sam: How big do you think this business could be? Snake River Farms — I imagine they’re in the $200-$300 million revenue range?
Justin: I think they’re probably massive. Are they raising their own beef though — do they have their own ranch?
Sam: Yeah, yeah. They have photos of cowboys. They’re vertically integrated, they’ve been doing this for a long time.
Justin: Right. But I think there are enough operators like that — who don’t have the Snake River Farms branding, who aren’t shipping on dry ice all over the country — that could really sell into a butcher shop in Austin, Nashville, San Francisco, LA, New York, and do really well. I’m frankly shocked that the only butcher shop I know doing this is opening in Austin in January.
Sam: Is he trying to make just one, or is he trying to make it a nationwide thing?
Justin: I think there are bigger ambitions, but starting with just one — let’s make it work, figure out the economics.
Sam: This is an amazing idea.
Shaan: It is amazing. It’s so expensive though. And a lot of this is centered around beef only — because I’ve always wanted to get healthier chicken.
Justin: Great point. Again, 80 years ago the food system had diversity. Multiple types of birds, multiple types of chickens. Today, 99.5% of every chicken eaten in the US is one genetic breed: the Cornish cross. It’s bred for how quickly it puts on weight and the types of grain it can eat. Not bred for deliciousness, not for protein content, just for: how quickly can I pack on mass and then get harvested?
The average life of these birds — born to harvest — is something like six weeks.
Sam: Wait. It comes out of the egg and six weeks later it’s big enough to eat?
Justin: Yes. Exactly. And this is why I think this is such an interesting opportunity. Many people say “I don’t like chicken” and they just haven’t had chickens that are actually delicious. There are old ads — there was this one luxury rail line in the 20s and 30s that made a big deal about how they’d cornered the market on this one chicken genetics and 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.” What is the wagyu or Kobe version of chicken? No one knows. No one is raising these for flavor.
Shaan: Dude, that’s going to be my new insult. “You’re just a Cornish cross.” Anytime I see somebody who’s just trying to pack on mass, quick flip — “You’re just a Cornish cross.”
Sam: There’s this famous ad guy named Joseph Sugarman who pioneered direct response copywriting in the 80s. He was famous for creating ads for a line of watches and popularized the quartz movement watch as if it were some epic thing — when all the watch connoisseurs were like, “Yeah, we all know about this.” But that’s sort of like what you’re describing with these chickens: you can invent interest, you can find cool stories that are also true and factual, and a lot of health nuts are like, “Yeah, this is standard, everyone knows this” — but most people don’t know that. So you’re going to tell this amazing story about it.
Justin: Exactly. The mental model is: you’re having a dinner party, people aren’t drinking, so you pull out this amazing genetic steak and say, “You’re about to have the best steak you’ve ever had in your life.” I think that is the underserved market that you could build a real brand around.
Sam: What’s your food budget every month, and where are you buying? Are you buying all your meat from Snake River Farms?
Justin: No, not all of it. Their steaks are super fatty and marbled — you wouldn’t want to eat that every day. I basically buy my meat and most of my food from local farmers around Austin.
Sam: What does that mean — you personally have relationships, or you go to a farmers market?
Justin: Yeah, farmers market. There’s also a food truck here that’s sort of like a refrigerated trailer owned by three or four local farms. They just stock it up and I go every week. That’s where I buy all my normal staples. Then Whole Foods is where I’ll get the rest — produce and stuff that’s not seasonal.
Sam: So you do some normal stuff and you also go to farmers markets — not extreme, but you’re putting effort into it. That’s pretty cool.
All right, let’s do the next idea. Annual home checkup — I’m giving that a B. The modern-day butcher shop, the Blue Bottle for beef — I’m giving that an A+. Do you want that to exist, or do you want to invest, or you think it’s a good business?
Shaan: I just see it. I would be a customer of it. I know a lot of people listening are like, “I’m not trying to buy a $60 steak.” That’s fine. There are a lot of people who are trying to do that. And I know that when you go into a category where there is no existing brand, it’s all commodity — simply creating a brand in a commodity space is a winning business formula. The coffee analogy: I don’t know what Folgers costs per cup, but I think it’s cents. The idea of going to Starbucks and paying $4 for a coffee you can make at home for 10 cents sounded outrageous — but of course people did it, for the experience, for the perception of quality.
So I just see the path. If somebody has the right founder fit — and you need kind of a one-of-one entrepreneur — that is a billion-dollar opportunity. Whether you do it that way or you sell into retail, you need to tell the story of why this thing costs more. So you’d have to be great at content on TikTok and Instagram and then sell into retail stores. But to me that’s a 12 out of 10 idea.
Business Idea #3: Calibrate for Fertility [00:42:00]
Shaan: But you have another one on here — calibrate for fertility. What is this?
Justin: Quick note first: if anyone does the butcher shop thing, I want to invest. It’s such an exciting idea.
So, calibrate for fertility. Everyone is having fertility issues right now, and it’s getting worse. IVF — or ART, assisted reproductive technology — is growing 7 to 8% a year and accelerating. IVF is the best in-class option right now and it costs like $20,000 to $30,000. It involves a bunch of hormones, it’s super invasive, it’s super hard on the female — just a brutal thing.
I think there’s a big opportunity to have a lifestyle set of interventions geared toward helping people increase their fertility in the key window when they’re actually trying to have kids. You could think of it like a lifestyle subscription for a 3- to 6-month period: you get a combination of peptides, supplements, an environmental review — make sure you’re not wearing polyester underwear while you’re trying to have a kid, you know, any number of things that actually seem to have a really big impact on how likely you are to conceive during that window.
And basically say: “Hey, before going the $20,000 to $30,000, very expensive, very invasive IVF route, do this several-hundred-dollar-a-month lifestyle-based fertility approach. We’re going to try to help you conceive naturally without going through IVF.”
Sam: I know men can do stuff to increase sperm count — that’s a huge issue. Can women do the same thing?
Justin: Yeah, women can improve their fertility for sure. Even people talk about this all the time — stress is a big factor. But they’re not talking about it at the hormonal level. It seems like progesterone helps with increasing odds of conception. There’s a bunch of interventions that I think are almost criminally underutilized.
Sam: Justin, have you ever heard us talk about “one chart businesses” on this pod?
Justin: Yeah.
Sam: To me, this is one. Look at this chart. This is search interest for “IVF clinic near me.” Since 2018, relative search volume has gone from 0 to 75 on this chart — all the way to 100 on a 100-point scale. Which is wild, because that’s not a long time. That’s something you’d expect to see on a 30-year horizon, not a 6-year horizon.
And what you’re saying is: there’s stuff you can do because IVF is hard — mentally, physically, emotionally, financially. What if there was an intervention step before that?
You mentioned Calibrate. I’ve never heard of this company — what does Calibrate do?
Justin: So Calibrate was a company — they got acquired somewhat recently. They basically started out by pairing GLP-1, Ozempic, with lifestyle interventions. Their whole thing was: Ozempic is meant to be on forever. Calibrate said, “We’re going to prescribe you Ozempic but we’re also going to introduce coaching, accountability, lifestyle interventions — this whole suite of things — where the goal is to get you off Ozempic at the end of a 6- or 12-month period.” Like a Noom meets Weight Watchers is trying to do this.
Sam: And calibrate-type companies always scale fast. Noom did something similar pre-Ozempic and they were an advertiser with my old company The Hustle. Within a year of launching they were spending hundreds of thousands with us. I don’t know how these guys grow so big so fast.
Justin: There’s a lot of demand for this. And what Calibrate figured out was how to actually get it covered by insurers to some degree. Insurers were okay with it because they’re like, “Great — we’re not going to have to pay for Ozempic indefinitely. We can actually get people off this drug after 6 to 12 months.” So in the first two years they got to over $100M in revenue and just scaled insanely quickly.
Shaan: It does look like Calibrate kind of went under though, or something. Looking at their funding, it looks like they got restructured — private equity got 75% of the company for $20 million. So I think it ran into some trouble.
Justin: Yeah. But that means they could be bad operators while the demand still existed.
Shaan: That would be my contention — they were doing this and launched I think in 2021, and insurers were early on the Ozempic-plus-lifestyle thing. Then there’s been this massive record amount of lobbying spent to just keep people on Ozempic forever, which I think probably did not do them any favors.
Sam: What percentage of people needing IVF — and you probably don’t know this — is it just because people are waiting longer to have families versus the American food system being poisoned? The average age of first-time mothers has gone up, I think it’s nearly 30 at this point. In the ’70s it was 21.
Justin: I don’t know honestly, but what I do know from the stats is that it seems like most of the decline in birth rate — about 70% of it — comes from people who previously would have had three to four kids now having one or two. So it’s not that people are deciding not to have kids; they’re just having fewer. I do think that biological fertility issues are a huge amount of what’s driving down the average number of kids a family has these days.
Shaan: It’s pretty crazy how many of my male friends tell me — like in Austin we used to go to the sauna all the time, and I would have so many friends be like, “I’m not going in the sauna this week, we’re trying to get pregnant, my balls aren’t working, I’m trying to not cook them right now.” So many people I knew were like, “I can’t do this, I can’t do that, I need to go do this because we’re struggling.”
Justin: I think it is this under-the-radar thing. Very few people are talking about it, but almost everyone I know who is trying to have kids right now has some amount of fertility challenges. And even if it’s six to twelve months and then they get pregnant — if you do that across two to three kids, you’re now having one to two kids instead of three to four.
Justin’s Career Framework: One Problem for Life [00:52:00]
Sam: You’ve mentioned three health-related startup ideas. You’ve started I think four successful health-related companies. Can you describe your approach? Because I’m the kind of guy who bounces around from industry to industry, model to model. Just when I learn about a space I get intrigued by something I’m a beginner in and I go in — and I stop the compounding of that knowledge. I don’t think that’s too smart.
Can you describe your approach to entrepreneurship versus someone like me who’s trying to solve a hundred different problems in a hundred different spaces with a hundred different business models?
Justin: For me at least, what has been very rewarding is basically choosing one problem — which for me is the chronic disease crisis — that I want to spend the rest of my career on. I think there’s a massive amount of compounding: relationship compounding, even personal brand compounding. People think of me as “into health,” which pays dividends that are probably going to be even more so over the next decade. You understand the space, you understand the problems, you understand the players and relationships.
I think if you decide, “This is the problem I am most interested in, that I deeply care about, that I read about for fun” — and you orient your career around trying to start things or be involved in things that make that problem better — you get so many shots on goal even if they may look different from the outside. I started Kettle and Fire thinking: the American food system is poison and there needs to be a bone broth company.
Shaan: What did you read or consume that made you buy into that, and how long were you into it before you were like, “This is my thing”?
Justin: I was going to CrossFit in San Francisco in 2015 and a bunch of CrossFitters were like, “You should do bone broth.” I’m a terrible cook — I almost never cook for myself — so I was like, “Great, I’ll go buy some at the store.” No one was selling it. After that I was like, “Seems like there’s an interesting opportunity here.”
Did I think it would grow to a nine-figure annual business? Definitely not. But it was a big enough opportunity that I decided to take the swing.
Sam: Did you get into health and wellness because it seemed like a cool opportunity, or were you like, “I’m obsessed with this topic and this is a really good way to address it”?
Justin: I was just obsessed with the topic. I’d been reading about paleo and these sorts of things since I was basically in college. I was a weird dude in college — my senior year I went paleo and wasn’t drinking beer or eating pizza or french fries, and all my friends were like, “What’s wrong with you?” I just got very into this idea of: why is everyone getting sick at record levels, and what could be underpinning that?
As I got a deeper understanding and appreciation of the problem, I just really understood: this is literally the biggest problem in the country. And I can spend the rest of my career trying to take stabs at various instances of this problem — whether that’s starting a brand or trying to fix the incentives through trade or whatever. I basically said: I’m just going to try and work on fixing this problem for the rest of my career.
Kettle and Fire Origin Story [00:56:00]
Shaan: So let’s go back to Kettle and Fire. You’re doing CrossFit, trying to live healthier, CrossFitters are telling you to do bone broth, you look and there’s not an easy brand you can just pull off the shelf. So you think somebody should do that.
At that time you’ve got no experience doing that — you’ve never built a DTC product, never built an actual consumer brand. Can you just describe the three or four things that happened that first year to make it happen? Because all these ideas are cool, but you’ve got to be the type of person that can make things happen. You made things happen at that stage.
Justin: So first, we tested a landing page. Put up a landing page with no product. Started buying ads to see who would click, what they’d pay. We called it Bone Broth Co at the time — a horrible idea, since rebranded to Kettle and Fire. Mocked up an ugly landing page on Unbounce, paid someone on Fiverr $10 to make a terrible logo, and started selling a box at $29.99.
Sam: When you say “started selling” — Facebook ads, how’d you get traffic?
Justin: Facebook ads, Google AdWords, and some Bing because there was an arb — Bing clicks were so cheap back then and they converted way higher.
Sam: Bing clicks back then — I know, they were so cheap. I always was like, “I don’t know who these people are, but they’re buying.”
Justin: Basically we put in $500, built this landing page, and I think sold just over $2,000 worth of product in about a month. I ran the numbers and was like, “Okay, we can build a business. I think just given existing traffic we can turn this into at least a $200–$300K-a-year kind of business.” And based on what I felt the margins would back into, I was like, “That should be about $100K, $150K a year in profit” — which seemed like a worthwhile thing to take on.
Shaan: And then what happened to make it much bigger?
Justin: So we validated the idea. The next thing was we had to figure out how to make it. We emailed and called over 500 different manufacturing partners — “Please, someone help us figure out how to make this product.” Eventually what worked is my brother — who was 19 at the time, and who I co-founded the business with — emailed Mark Cuban saying, “I’m a 19-year-old entrepreneur, please help.” Mark Cuban introduced us to a manufacturing partner, who we ended up working with and still work with today, to make our first version of bone broth.
Shaan: Wait — 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?
Justin: He was like, “Talk to my food person.” And his food person introduced us to our co-packer.
Shaan: And just to clarify — those first $2,000 were actual orders. Did you just refund them because you didn’t have a product yet?
Justin: I emailed all of them and said, “Hey, we’re not going to have a product for six to nine months. I can either refund you in full right now, or you can take 50% off and we’ll eventually ship it.” People who didn’t respond I just refunded.
Shaan: Okay, great. So Mark Cuban gets you a food person — that’s the second thing. Now you know how to get the product made.
Justin: And then I realized the product is two-year shelf stable. I put literally every dollar of my life savings at that point — I was 25 — into doing the first run. It was $30,000 minimum runs, so it was like a $120K budget. I was like, “Either this is going to work great, or I’m going to eat bone broth for two years. Either way, I’ll feel pretty good.”
So we bought the first product. Year one we did $2.8 million in sales. After about six months of being in business, one of the buyers at Whole Foods saw an influencer talking about our product, reached out, and said, “I want to bring you guys into Whole Foods.” We did extraordinarily well in Whole Foods, got national rotation the following year, and that just kind of started our journey.
Shaan: I think I was with you eight or ten months after you started it, in San Francisco. We went bowling. You were telling me about this and I remember thinking, “You’ve got a really good career — why are you throwing it away at this? Why does he want to ruin everything?”
Justin: Starting a bone broth company in SF at the height of the tech boom was definitely not a consensus opinion.
Founders Who Stick Around Win [01:05:00]
Sam: My sister when she moved to San Francisco — she had worked in a corporate career, worked for Deloitte, she was a Management Consultant. She had an undergrad in electrical engineering, got an MBA from a good business school. And then she was like, “I’m sick of this life. I need a business I can own and not have to go to a job every day.” The consulting hours were so bad that she would come home and her kids would be asleep and she would just pick them up from the crib just to hold them for a few minutes because she hadn’t been there to play with them before bed. After four nights of that she was like, “Never, I’m not doing this.”
Never had started a business before. Decides to start an in-home daycare. She kicks me out of the apartment — my parents owned it — and says, “I’m going to use that apartment to start this business.” She needed six kids to come to this in-home daycare. My dad was like, “You have an electrical engineering degree, you have a job that pays you $150K a year as a Management Consultant, and you’re going to change diapers?”
Fast forward, now she’s got three or four schools in San Francisco and she’s been able to scale the business up. She works just a few hours a week and has this amazing business. 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 fringe, weird thing from scratch on your own with no safety net. I’m not saying it always works out. But every time something works, it almost always has that story at the beginning — “You’re doing what?” — and that’s totally normal even though it feels abnormal in the moment.
Justin: Totally. And Sam, I’d actually love your thoughts — my experience was that almost every single person I knew who was starting a business or trying to start a business between age 22 and 25 has made it in some way, shape, or form. It’s insane.
Sam: Justin and I both started roommate-matching companies when we were 20, so between ages 20 and 25 we were in the same industry and all of our SF friends were a similar age. Dude, it is crazy how many of our friends are successful — just because they’re around, you know what I mean?
Justin: Totally.
Shaan: Naval has a great phrase: you hear the stats about startups — “90% of new businesses fail” — and he goes, “Yeah, startups fail, but founders don’t.” I love that phrase. If you just fast forward 10 years, any of the founders who stayed in the game — the success rate goes from your first business success rate of maybe 10% to the 10-year saga of you trying a bunch of shots on goal and getting smarter every year. The odds are now — if you just look at our cohort of friends, Sam, from that mastermind we were in around 2013? That cohort of 30 to 50 founders we used to hang out with regularly — the hit rate is like 80 to 90% success for the people who actually stuck with it.
I’ve got a couple friends who packed up their bags and moved to Connecticut and said, “I’m not doing this anymore.” They were burnt out from SF startup culture. Those people, you know, they didn’t fully make it. But all the people who stayed in the game made it.
Sam: We could wrap this up with one quick story. I remember Gagan Biyani started this thing called Udemy — it was like courses, what Tai Lopez does. And I remember Justin and I were both like, “I guess we should get in on this. This seems like a really good way to make $100 or $300 a month, which would be life-changing.” And we both did that. I think people look up to you, Justin. I look up to you and I admire you. It’s crazy how, if you look back 8 or 10 years, you were doing many things that people would poo-poo — like course creation, or buying a car and renting it on Turo. Man, the people you admire start way scrappier than you think.
Justin: I don’t know that anyone admires me for my Mac keyboard shortcuts Udemy course, but I was definitely hustling.
Travis Kalanick’s Jam Pad and Scrappy Beginnings [01:10:00]
Shaan: Have you ever read Travis Kalanick’s old blog? The guy who started Uber — he had this amazing blog called something like “Awesomeness Bro.” Very bro-ed out. But he had this post about attending CES on the cheap — or South by Southwest on the cheap — and it was basically his playbook for how to have a great time at a conference when you have no money.
“Here’s what you do: get to the airport but never take the cab. Here’s what you do for staying at someone’s house. Here’s how you skip the event but still get into the after party because that’s where the magic happens. When you get there, here’s what you say.” This really scrappy approach to wedding-crashing a major conference on a budget. And he was 31 years old when he wrote that — not a college kid.
He also used to invite people to just stay at his house in San Francisco. He called his house the “Jam Pad” and he’d have people constantly just coming and crashing on his couch, hosting people late into the night, everyone jamming on different ideas. And he used that to kind of build his momentum, his network, his energy.
Sam: It is pretty wild. So cool.
The Zuckerberg Gold Chain Charity Auction [01:12:00]
Sam: Can we finish with this Zuck story? Zuck is auctioning off his gold chain for your charity — what is this?
Justin: I saw you tweet that and I was like, “Is that real?” You totally downplayed it, you said “Zuck’s auctioning my chain” and nobody replied.
Justin: Yeah, I had a bad Twitter day that day.
Shaan: I saw people were bidding for it. How much did it end up going for?
Justin: Almost $41,000.
Shaan: Oh wow. Who won? Do you know?
Justin: Some anonymous person. Probably a crypto person, to be honest.
So a couple years ago I started something called Inflection Grants, which is basically giving small $2,000 to $3,000 grants to people under the age of 24 who are high-potential. It’s inflectiongrants.com if anyone wants to check it out.
Basically someone made an offer to me when I was in my 20s — 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.”
Sam: Who did that and why?
Justin: It was a mentor I had built a relationship with in Pittsburgh where I was going to school. I think he just knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, saw that I didn’t come from money, and knew that at this very key time that offer would make a big difference in my decision-making. And he was right.
So I started Inflection Grants three years ago. Since then we’ve given out about 50 grants. One of the GPs, 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. We had to make sure it was cleaned — no DNA residue, anything like that — but it sold for $41,000, which goes to the charity. That’s 20 people getting these $2,000 grants.
Wrap-Up [01:15:00]
Sam: You gave us this document before we started and I think we only touched like a third of it. There are so many more cool things you have to come back and talk about. A lot of people don’t know this, but Shaan — did you know that Justin was like a co-author on the book Traction with the DuckDuckGo founder? There are like five or ten other things you have really amazing stories about and are really insightful on. So thanks for coming on and doing this.
I’m literally sitting here taking notes on incandescent bulbs and farmers markets, and I’m going to be sending you a lot of follow-up texts that just say, “Justin, just tell me what to do.”
Justin: Tell people where to find you.
Sam: Yes. I’m on Substack — justinmares.substack.com. I write a monthly newsletter on health and business stuff. And then on Twitter at JW Mars. And go read “The Great American Poisoning” — we didn’t do it justice on 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: All right, that’s it. That’s the pod. Thank you Justin.