Justin Mares - Pt 1: The Great American Poisoning

Austin

Well, Justin, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I'm really excited to talk to you today.

Justin

Yeah, super excited to be here, man. Thanks for having me on.

Austin

Yeah, you know, I want to start. It's funny because, you know, you've been on the schedule for a little bit to record this, but I was reading, I'd been hearing Noah Kagan's name for a while. And I think you brought it up in the newsletter. You just like name dropped him. And so I decided to actually just buy his book, you know, million dollar weekend. And as I was reading it over a weekend, I don't know, a few weeks ago, I was like, Justin Mars in one of the chapters, like former intern there, and then how you started kettle and fire with just a landing page. And I think without a product. And then he also mentioned. It's a hundred million dollar company now, which I was blown away by that I didn't realize that, but all that makes sense when I see it all in the grocery store. But to start off with, could you just talk a little bit about how you started? You know, that was your first company, how Kettle and Fire started and where it is now.

Justin

Yeah, for sure. I mean, so, so Noah was, yeah, so Noah, I worked with Noah for a little bit when I was in college, basically, uh, you know, I was, I was, uh, working with him on AppSumo. I built like one of the early courses that he was selling called the Mint Marketing Course. And, you know, that, that was sort of my like internship in a way. Uh, and then, you know, Noah asked, asked me if I wanted to work with him after I graduated. And I said, no, um, not because he's bad, just because, you know, I had a different opportunity I wanted to pursue. But, um, but basically like working with Noah and like one of the things that he. Talked a lot about, uh, a friend, Sam Parr also talks a lot about was this idea of just like testing, uh, testing specific business ideas by putting up a landing page that describes the thing that you're going to sell. And then. sending it to friends or buying paid ads or, you know, some way getting traffic towards that thing and just seeing like, if I spend $2 on a click that then goes to this landing page to potentially buy this product, do people convert? Cause you know, for, for the average person. They don't know. And you kind of assume if you're clicking on an ad that drives you to buy something, you sort of assume that that is a, you know, that that product actually exists. Like there are very few pages on the internet that are selling something that doesn't actually exist. And so I kind of took that way of thinking and that methodology and applied it to one of my very early ideas I had, which was in 2015, I was doing CrossFit in San Francisco. I had a bunch of friends that were getting injured and talking about like how do you get recovery. Um, my brother had also like torn basically everything that he could tear in his knee playing soccer and was bedridden for like eight weeks. And he was like, Hey, what can I do to help improve my recovery? I mentioned bone broth. And when I went online, like literally no one at the time, this was 2015 was selling any sort of product that was like made with grass fed bones, you know, organic ingredients, like all the things that I thought were really important in a really good bone broth product. And so I had this small idea and I was like,

Justin

You know, I'm sort of looking for my next thing. I wanted to start a company, did not think it would be a bone broth company. I thought it would be like a big tech company. You know, I was living in San Francisco drinking the Kool -Aid hardcore. And so I was just decided I'm going to put up a landing page that says we're selling bone broth using grass -fed bones, whatever. Do people want to buy this? And, you know, after spending $500 on ads or so, we fake sold about $2 ,000 worth of product. Yeah, with no product. And like,

Austin

and you had no product.

Justin

That like, I literally paid someone $5 on fiber to put together a little logo, bought the domain bone broths co bone broth with an S dot com. Um, so it was bone broths .com and the company was bone broths co horrible naming. I mean, you can tell it was just like in retrospect, just so slapped together and like, you know, uh, and, and sold these products for $30 a pop. And every time that someone bought one, I would just email them and say like, Hey, products not ready, we're probably like six to eight months away from actually launching it. If you want, I can like refund you in full or, you know, I'll give you half off and we'll like ship it to you once you actually, you know, once we actually launch it. And a shocking number of those people are like, sure, like I'll take 50 % off. And then they would answer my questions about like, why do you care about this product? What do you want? What's your sort of customer profile? What problem is this solving for you? And so it was this really amazing way to... not only validate the idea that I had, but also to start a conversation with a bunch of customers that I found out were really interested in what we had to sell. So that was sort of the genesis of Kettle and Fire.

Austin

Man, that is really cool. That's what I, you know, I loved what Noah talks about in his book. Kind of the main thing that I kind of see is he talks very long and like how everything in business is an experiment because you just don't know. You don't know until you try. You don't know what people are going to want, what people are going to buy. But that is that that takes some some courage to do that. I think I think I would have had a hard time putting up a landing page without a product. I love that story. That's really cool.

Justin

Yeah.

Austin

And then, and so since 2015, and that's amazing, that's when I started drinking, making bone broth myself was a 2015, you know, literally out of the grass fed. Yeah. Yeah. Um, uh, can you talk a little bit, just people listening, like, what is the difference between like, say bone broth and, and just regular chicken broth?

Justin

Yeah, there are no good options, so you are aware.

Justin

For sure. Yeah. So, so normal chicken broth that you find in the store, um, you know, if you look at the bet on the label, it's basically going to be low protein. They use very like low cook time. So two ish hours. And they're often throwing like garbage cuts of meat into water, basically boiling it for a brief period of time. And then a bunch of, add a bunch of salt and you have this like zero nutrition, somewhat meat flavored water that people like drink. Bone broth is a little different in that. you're throwing, you know, bones and the cartilage that are attached to those bones, sometimes like chicken feet or other sort of gelatinous, you know, cuts or joint tissue or whatever into something. You're cooking it for over 24 hours in almost every case. You're adding an acid to help break down the cartilage in the bones. And, you know, what's left is this very nutrient dense, very high protein, very high in like type one, type two collagen, full spectrum amino acids and the like. bone broth that actually has a bunch of nutritional benefits. Like if you look at the average American's diet, you know, most people are eating cuts of muscle meat, you know, ground beef, steaks, things like that, chicken breasts that are high in protein, but that don't actually have a full spectrum of amino acids, glycine, you know, being like one of the main ones, collagen being another, that the skin basically, your skin and body needs to turn protein into gut, skin and joint sort of tissue. And so what bone broth is, is in my opinion, like one of the most nutrient dense sort of helpful things that you can have if you're trying to improve your gut skin or joint health. And there's a reason that like bone broth has been used, like truly every culture basically ever that eats meat has some history of making bone broth of some sort of like cooking or boiling, you know, bones and connect tissue for long periods of time. And then drinking that because it's just so nutrient dense.

Austin

Yeah. And it's a way to use up every, you know, kind of bit of the animal. I remember we actually made some chicken foot broth sometimes and it was so gelatinous. It's like jello when it gets cold, you know, when it's a, but we drink the kettle and fire now. I mean, cause we were just sick a couple of weeks ago, like with a stomach bug and my wife, like the only thing she could take down was the chicken broth. But like we get kettle and fire because yeah, it's got 19 grams of protein in this little box. And if you look at it, it's like two grams or something in a regular chicken broth. So it's really cool.

Justin

Yeah.

Justin

Yeah, exactly.

Justin

Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. I'm glad you and your wife liked it.

Austin

Yeah, yeah. No, we've kind of did it for, you know, joint stuff is great, but really the gut issues and things. Cause like I mentioned right before we hopped on, when we got back from the Peace Corps, we spent two years in Uganda and man, I mean, so many parasites, worms, stuff like that in our stomach. I mean, I was like pretty dang sick and kind of went on some gaps diet and doing fermented food and kombucha and bone broth and stuff. So, you know, you talk about, I was on your website,

Justin

Yeah.

Austin

the kettle and fire website the other day and just looking at the little intro story that you do in a video. And there's a few things that you said that really stuck out to me. You talk about how you guys are investing in a food system that makes people healthier rather than sicker. And that it's not just about our products, our current food system is broken. We wanted to create products to heal. And then lastly, supporting people on their path to improved health and wellness and supporting and elevating a healthier food system. You know, where did you... Where did you get all these ideas? Are those things you already kind of went in in 2015 when you were starting this? Or is it something that that kind of evolved as you started diving in and learning more about the food system and health? You know, what is that with evolution of that story?

Justin

Yeah, I mean, it was definitely not a set of things that I just like came into the space with. I would say that I started, I mean, like I said, I started this company, uh, because I was in health, I was doing CrossFit. I was like reading about this stuff on the side. Um, you know, there was definitely an intellectual interest there, but by no means was I, did I have this like fully robust, well -developed philosophy of how messed up the food system is and how like kettle and fire was there to change it. Like I, I basically, came up with the idea, I tested it, it tested well, and I kind of ran with it from there. But as I got more and more into building the company, as I met more and more influencers and sort of people that are knowledgeable about the state of health and the state of our food system, and as I just read more, saw the incentives that exist, looked like did competitive research on what other companies are doing, I just became more, it became more and more clear to me that... If you engage in the food system, if you look at companies in the food system, it is irrefutable that the most profitable products in the entire food system are the ones that are also the worst for people. Like Coca -Cola is cheaper than water, not because, you know, adding a bunch of other stuff to water, it makes it cheap, but because Coca -Cola is benefiting from massive numbers of subsidies around, you know, high fric corn and thus high fric dose corn syrup. They have huge amounts of capex infrastructure and distribution infrastructure that they can benefit from. And all of this leads to a sort of like a food product or a food like product that has been engineered that has had literally like hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into figuring out how do we make Coke as cheap as water and a thousand times more addictive. And this is true across every aspect of the food system practically, where almost everything that you see in a grocery store that is like pre -packaged.

Justin

has been, you know, has tens of hundreds of millions of dollars of food scientists that are figuring out how do we weaponize this food and make it so that your little limbic system, like your sort of mammalian brain goes, ooh, this is sweet. I want more. Or in the case of a Dorito, like, wow, there's a little bit of fat, but it sort of like finishes at the back of the tongue. And so people actually want more of this. And it's like hard to stop eating Doritos once you start. All that to say, like, as I just got more and more into understanding, like, what big food companies are doing and how they're engineering these hyper addictive products. It just became more and more clear to me that most companies and most of the large companies that manufacture almost every bit of the processed calories that Americans eat today. They're not necessarily creating products that are healthier for people by any means, like very much the opposite. And I think that starting running and growing a company that actually is trying to do right by consumers, that is trying not to make trade -offs that end up harming consumers and impacting their health in a negative way is both very important. It's also very hard. Like it's taken us many years to get to some sort of scale and like building a food company is really tough. There's like a lot of challenges in this space. But yeah, so it was something that I certainly figured out and began to believe more and more as I got deeper into the space and as I just started to see that all of these big companies got rewarded the more that they tried to addict Americans and play to sort of like our interests or our sort of inherent desires for salt, sugar, you know, and fat.

Austin

Yeah. And now you're onto, you've started also Shirley like non -alcoholic wines and Perfect Keto too, right? Those are two of the other companies you have started and kind of a similar philosophy, right? Like where you're trying to deliver, you know, a quality, healthy food, you know, and I love how you talk about it even where it's like comes down to even the packaging and stuff too, like everything about it, because there's so many broken elements along the way, whether it's... how the cows are raised. You know, you mentioned grass fed, you know, and the difference I remember learning, you know, reading Michael Pollan's book, and I think I'm quoting this right, but that when you feed cows corn, as we all do in the United States, you know, they're, they're rumens that can actually digest the grass are neutral pH. But when you feed them corn, that turns them acidic. And then that acid eats through the rumen or the stomach lining basically spills out, you know, that bacteria into the bloodstream. And that's why then you have to, give them antibiotics and you're just like, oh my gosh, you know, and we have no idea as Americans because we're so detached from the food system. And also we've really been relying on experts for a long time and like the idea of companies doing the right thing and that, you know, the FDA and these other regulatory bodies are protecting the consumer, but it really seems like they are not.

Justin

Yeah, I mean, they're absolutely not. Like, I don't think that anyone can reasonably look at the rates of chronic disease and like, you know, most of which is in my opinion, like a foodborne illness and conclude that we have a regulatory body that is doing an exceptional job of protecting Americans today. Like if you ask me, I think the FDA is like responsible for more American deaths than like almost any war that the US has ever engaged in. And I think that's actually a fact.

Austin

Can you talk about that? Because I don't know as much in this space nearly as much as you do, but that's kind of my general consensus as well. But at the same time, it's like you've got so many doctors and stuff out there would call that a, I don't know, like it sounds like a conspiracy theorist, right? When you start saying this kind of stuff and then people are going, well, you're not a Dr. Justin, you're not a Dr. Austin. How dare you speak on behalf of the science? And of course I've got lawnmowers.

Justin

Yeah.

Austin

really perfect timing. How loud is that on your end? Is that pretty loud on your end? Oh, okay. Well, we'll just keep going then. Yeah, can you talk about that kind of like regulatory capture and like the state of the... Why are you saying that?

Justin

I can't hear it at all, it's really short. No, I can't even hear it.

Justin

Great.

Justin

Yeah. And so like to your last point, like, you know, Justin or Austin, you're not a doctor. Like if you, if you look, it's, it's very like well -known that 80 % of medical schools in the country require zero nutrition classes. Almost all medical school in the U S almost all medical schools are funded by pharmaceutical companies or these sorts of companies that, you know, we can argue about intent or whatnot, but. You know, the, the sort of standard of care in the way that medical schools teach our potential doctors and the way that these doctors and these, these institutions of learning are funded are by companies who look at something, look at an individual, uh, not as like a person with, who may be experiencing a symptom, but like, if I have throat cancer, they're looking at me as a throat that may be inflamed and like, they're not interested in. you know, how do I treat this whole person? What could possibly be lifestyle or other sort of factors that are leading to throat cancer? They're like, how do I either have a surgery or, you know, give you a pharmaceutical that treats this little part of the, of this human that I'm seeing. And so when people are like, you know, you're not a doctor, you know, what, how could you possibly have opinions on the FDA nutrition? I'm like, yeah, thank God I'm not a doctor. I've like actually read books on nutrition and stuff like this. Whereas like none of, many of these people have not. Not all doctors are bad, obviously, but I think that's like one rebuttal to that. On the like macro picture around the FDA and regulatory, something that has stuck with me is I once read about how cars versus planes are regulated. And so basically like the EU, I promise this is connecting back to the answer, but basically if you look at how cars are regulated, like cars are regulated in a way where There are guidelines given around that are saying like if x, y, or z happens, if like a part is defunct or whatever, you know, it's on you, the carmaker, to follow like this set of rules. And if something violates that, you can do this massive recall that comes at great expense to you, you know, as a carmaker or whatever.

Justin

And the reason for this is because it kind of makes sense. Like the average consumer benefits way more from having cars getting cheaper, being able to travel longer distances, cars get safer on their own through like competition mechanisms. And the regulatory bodies are sort of like, we're going to let the car makers innovate at a faster pace that is not gated by us at every step of the way. However, if someone like missteps or goes around our guidelines, they basically have to go through this huge recall process at their own expense. And this is happened like many times in history, most famous being like the Ford Pinto. Airlines are regulated a different way, which is that the FAA basically has to approve every single step of aircraft as a new aircraft is being built. The reason for this is because in the case of failure, that failure is massively catastrophic. It does mean that there's not competitive forces that are making air travel necessarily look hugely cheaper. Air travel has been pretty expensive and stayed about that for the last 30 to 40 years. But we have had very, very near zero crashes and the like because the FAA takes safety very seriously because the consequences of not doing so are very severe. The way that Europe regulates from a food system standpoint looks a lot more like aircraft manufacturing, where they basically go, there's a very narrow band of chemicals that we know are safe for human consumption. And we are going to allow food manufacturers to use those when they make our different food stuffs. And anything outside of that, there's a huge burden of proof for a food manufacturer or other to say, hey, we want to introduce... Red 40 or something like this, you know a food die that has like never been well tested across You know tens of hundreds of thousands of people in terms of like what that does to to health And so the EU is like no food dies We don't have any believe any reason to believe that this is safe by default the US sort of regulates food by In a way that like car manufacturers do which is they basically say if you can prove something that say, you know You manufacturer can attest?

Justin

that something is generally recognized as safe, which means that you basically do a couple of studies and you just say like, hey, this seems safe. We can't really see if there's like any really bad shit that comes from introducing red dye or red 40 to a bunch of our food products. The FDA is like, sure, whatever, throw it in every food everywhere. And what you, what that means is that practically, you know, there there's like 16 ,000 chemicals that are in our food supply in the U S that are banned in Europe today. And.

Austin

16 ,000.

Justin

Yeah, like tens of thousands of chemicals that are allowed in the US by default that are banned in Europe. It's why, and it's why you see, in my opinion, massively different health outcomes among Americans versus Europe. Like if you look even at Kellogg's cereal, for example, the European version of Kellogg's cereal doesn't have like fake food dyes and all of this sort of bullshit that is in the American version. Why? It's because like the EU doesn't allow it. And also there's now tons of studies that show, you know, that like Kellogg's definitively knows that including red 40 and whatever in a bunch of their cereals leads to worse, worse consumer health outcomes. However, it's like slightly cheaper for them to do so. You know, the food looks more eye popping and appealing and the like. And so they keep it in their product and like, you know, Americans eat it all the time and become sick. Like I think that this is the last thing I'll say, but I think that one of the biggest issues in the country with how we approach, with how we approach like regulating what goes in our food supply and our food system is. Right now we have the approach where there are all these environmental toxins, red dyes, pesticides, herbicides, things like this that are just PFAS, endocrine disrupting chemicals, that are allowed. They're endemic in our food system. They're in our water, they're in our air, they're in everything in the US. And you can't opt out of them. I contrast that to the way the FDA regulates pharmaceuticals, where there are certain classes of pharmaceuticals, there's something called like right to try, where basically if you're really sick, you have the right to try experimental treatments and the like, where you yourself can choose to opt into them. That seems like a good system to apply to the food system. And I think it's absolutely insane that most Americans are part of this hugely unregimented, massive, uncontrolled clinical trial that is what happens to people when we

Justin

enormous amounts of toxins into our food system and give it to people to eat, you know, like for, give it to everyone as an everyday part of their diet. And I think that this regulatory apparatus and framework is literally harming and killing like millions to tens of millions of Americans every decade. And it's why we have the sickest group of Americans we've ever seen in our entire lives.

Austin

Yeah, that I want to talk about that here in a minute, but you're so right that it's something that you're not able to opt out of, you know, in my neighborhood, there's, you know, every other yard's getting sprayed with, you know, these chem, you know, they come out four times a year to just spray a bunch of chemicals on the grass that my little kit, you know, we don't spray our grass, but that doesn't matter because everyone else is getting it sprayed and it's in the air, it's on the streets, it's in the water and uh, Like you're saying, glyphosate is everywhere, which is basically banned in Europe. A lot of these chemicals too are derivatives of things from chemical warfare and things from World War II, from my understanding. I remember reading, we've gone through different versions of say pesticides in our food systems. I forget what the first one was, but I remember I think the second one was like DDT and then now we're on the neonicotides or something. And of course everyone is the safe one, you know, and then we do it and we're like, Oh crap, that one's not safe. And then we do DDT and we're like, Oh crap, that one's not safe. But what was mind boggling to me is they found in the North Pole, and I think the South Pole too, but I'm just going to use the North Pole, the highest concentrations of DDT in women's breast milk than like anywhere in the world, even though they've never ever even like used an ounce of it there. And it's because it's used globally. And then it condenses and evaporates into the air and moves north and then eventually when it gets to a place really cold, it no longer evaporates. And you're just like, oh my gosh, this stuff is serious. And it doesn't just have like these tiny localized consequences. It's a, that's pretty, it really is pretty wild.

Justin

Yeah, yeah, it's super concerning. I mean, if you look at like a lot of the Inuit tribes and others that sort of live up around the Arctic Circle and like it, they are finding some of the highest concentrations of forever chemicals like PFAS, polyfluoroalpal substances in the blood and sort of intestines of, and other vital organs of these tribes that are basically just been eating. you know, seafood. But now that everyone's seafood is contaminated practically all over the world, and because all of these chemicals have gone, you know, into the poles and into like our, our sort of weather systems up there, you have a group of people that has never made a Teflon pan or, you know, a sort of like plastic product polymer in their entire, you know, ancestry that is now getting decimated by these forever chemicals. It's just like, it's really sad. And I think that this...

Austin

Yeah.

Justin

toxicity and this like poisoning of the average American is going to be one of the defining issues of the next like 15 or 20 years.

Austin

I completely agree. And on that note, let's talk about that a little bit. Let's talk about the state of health in the US because a lot of this stuff is not really widely known or talked about from what I can tell. You point out in some of your articles, it's like 60 % of Americans are living with at least one chronic disease, 80 % of Americans are overweight, 50 % teens are overweight. Can you talk about some of the bigger statistics out there that are really on your mind that really concern you? I mean, there's a lot, but.

Justin

Yeah, I mean, you kind of hit on a couple of the biggest ones, but to me, some of the biggest concerns that I have are that today we have the sickest population of American adults that we've ever had. And if you look like, one, that's really bad. People just sort of accepted how it is. If we basically, and another thing I hear people talk a lot about is the cost of healthcare. I think that the cost of healthcare is sort of this like false debate in a way where yes, cost of healthcare is going up. Yes, there's a lot of problems there. But in my opinion, the underlying reality is I would expect the cost of healthcare to go up. Like Americans are sicker than we've ever met. Like I basically don't expect or think that there's any way in which the cost of healthcare is going to. be fixed while the health of the country stays on the same like horrible chronic disease treadmill that we're on currently. Like I just don't think that you can, you know, if you look basically, if you look basically there's, you know, 80 plus percent of the all costs of healthcare is tied to treating and managing chronic diseases. If we got chronic disease levels today, back to where they were in 1970, our cost of health care would go from being something like almost north of 20 % of GDP to around like 4%. And like that basically solves the health care crisis if you just roll back the average American's health to 1970 levels, basically the levels at which our grandparents grew up. I think that that is like one very, very concerning. Secondly, you look at today's crop of Americans, incredibly unhealthy. And what's worse is you look at the kids that today's generation of Americans are having and like kids have never before been as unhealthy as they are. You know, we're seeing record levels of, um, you know, adult onset, what used to be called adult onset diabetes. Um, because basically there were no records of children ever having this type of diabetes, like type two diabetes. Uh, like pediatricians and doctors in the fifties and seventies could go their entire career.

Justin

without ever seeing a child with type 2 diabetes. This is obviously no longer true. About 50 % of teens and under basically are overweight or obese. rates of diabetes are skyrocketing. And for me, I think that the thing that is most concerning is that, you know, is that we are effectively on a treadmill to have a population of Americans that are so physically unwell that they can't like do anything that I think probably you or I would view as life worth living. Like if you are sick all the time, if you're constantly fighting chronic disease, um, like it's just it's just a you're living a less healthy, less sort of joyous, less sort of optimal life, in my opinion, than one that you could be. And I think that the fact that our food system and our regulators are robbing like hundreds of millions of Americans of living better lives, I just think it's like an utter travesty. And unfortunately, it's one that seems as of today's trend lines to be just only getting worse.

Austin

Yeah, the cost of healthcare is utterly crazy. Like you're saying, it is plus 20 % of GDP. And I was reading recently, because I was writing something, I was looking at the statistics of diabetes and 38 .4 or something million Americans have been diagnosed with diabetes. And then another 97 million have pre -diabetes. And in 2022, we spent $413 billion. just on the people that actually have diabetes. So the 38 million people, meaning just if I do the math on that, you know, this is from the CDC too. I mean, like, so I'm guessing that in, in within 10, 20 years, we're going to be spending a trillion and a half dollars on one chronic disease. And this is starting with kids and stuff too. I forget, isn't it a third? I don't know if this is true. I read this a long time ago, but something about a third of kids born after 2000 have, you know, are going to be diagnosed with diabetes, which I guess that makes sense because it's just so prevalent.

Justin

Yeah. Totally.

Austin

And what the crazy thing is, it is one of the most preventable, or at least from my understanding, it's remarkably preventable through diet and things like that.

Justin

Completely. I mean, I think this is the thing that most people will argue is untrue that I just think they're wrong is I think that so like, I think that so many of the people that will say, you know, oh, diabetes, like obesity is genetic diabetes is, you know, genetic, any number of these things, like, to my mind. there was a, like for most of human history, these diseases have not been genetic. Like why have these flipped genetic in the last 50 years? I think has to be like the question that you're asking many of these people and why, if you look at, for example, Japanese Americans in the U S and compare that them to Japanese people in Japan, you know, and see, Oh wow, Japanese Americans have obesity rates that are nearly five times the rate of Japanese Americans or Japanese living in Japan. You just have to go like, this clearly is not a genetic thing. This is like, a disease of the environment. And if you look to at like, for example, zoo animals or something like this, you take zoo animals out of the wild, you put them in the zoo, you put them in an ancestrally inappropriate environment, and these animals start to gain weight. They start to have their hair fall out. They start to exhibit signs of like what is called zucosis, which is literally a sort of catchall term to like designate the sort of coping mechanisms that wild animals start to exhibit when they're held in captivity for a long period of time. in an environment that is not the one that they're suited to. And I think that it is totally crazy to me to say that the record levels of chronic disease in a hugely ancestrally inappropriate environment, in a food system where 60 % of the average American's calories are eating ultra processed foods, it is crazy. 60%. It is crazy to me to look at this and go, oh, this is a genetic problem. Like it's so obviously not.

Austin

60 %?

Austin

Yeah. Yeah, that, that, that is baffling to me. And then you see people, you know, and it's not about like shaming people or something, but the idea of trying to like justify, for example, just an overweight or something, which you see culturally, you know, whether it's in celebrities and stuff like that, where it's, it's kind of like cool or something to be overweight. And I think that's a really damaging message. I don't mean it's about like, making people feel bad, but also being like, this is not normal and it's not healthy either. Now it might not be your fault. Like, it's not like you can do things about it, you know, but, but it's not pointing the finger, but I think between, you know, I really connect, you're, you're talking about the environment and ancestry and heritage. And, you know, this is where it kind of really all ties together for me. Cause you know, where we work in the built environment and I really talk very similarly that you do about food and that. the way we've been building, particularly over the past 60 years, and you can make an argument for really since World War II, but particularly in the past 60 years, we've been building in patterns and ways that are completely detached from all of human history. Now, I'm not saying we should go back and build our cities exactly like Florence, guess what? We have cars today and we have other things and other pieces of technology, but it's like this arrogance where we think we're at the, of all human civilization and we know so much because like we've got microscopes or something now and we do know a lot. That's what's, I mean we really do know a lot but in all our knowledge we seem to know so little. Like we've lost track of even the most basic truths, you know, because I think about, you know, the other thing about Europe is not just the food but the lifestyle is wildly different. Not just how much people are walking on a day -to -day basis. but how much people are interacting with each other on a day -to -day basis, because we've got our isolated suburban subdivisions. And if you're a kid, and if you don't have friends in the neighborhood, what are you going to do? The only time you can do anything is if your mom drives you somewhere. Every playdate, every sleepover, everything has to be so planned. And I recently read that the average teen spends almost five hours on social media per day. And...

Austin

And then we wondering like, why do people have anxiety and depression and suicide and drug overdoses? And, and, um, it's like, well, we're setting everyone up for failure. So not only the lifestyle thing, and then like you're talking about with food where it's not just, uh, you know, you mentioned, I think on your most recent newsletter, you were talking about, um, the, uh, our mental health, like how our physical health really affects our mental health. And that's, there really seems to be a lot of. science coming out about that now, like Andrew Huberman is really big on that and talking about like, hey, if you're feeling bad mentally, the best thing you can do is do something like hard physically. Can you talk about some of that connection between that you know about in terms of your physical body health and your mental health and process and how those relate to each other?

Justin

Yes.

Justin

Yeah, so the way that I have been, sort of like my evolving mental model, well, first off, I would say that this is definitely an ongoing area of research and inquiry. There's some really interesting books coming out about it, like Dr. Chris Palmer. has written a book recently called Brain Energy, where he sort of argues that a lot of mental health disorders that we see today are metabolic disorders of basically the brain. So whereas you can look at someone and say, you have obesity or you're exhibiting X, Y, or Z symptom, those are sort of metabolic disorders that are manifesting where the symptom is obesity. His argument is that there's metabolic dysfunction that manifests as anxiety, epilepsy, ADHD, things like that. like this, which I think is very true. Like if you look today, one of the best treatments for epilepsy for schizophrenia is actually a very strict ketogenic diet, like removing a bunch of sugars and processed carbs from someone's diet and then switching them to extremely low carb, you know, no sugar, basically lower on processed foods is truly one of the best treatments that we have for, you know, treating schizophrenia or you know, like epilepsy is sort of like this class of diseases, mental health disease. That is kind of crazy. Like you hear that and you sort of are just like, oh, cool. That's great. You know, but it's wild that the best intervention, you know, after a hundred years of Freudian and other psychology is not like talk therapy, is not CBT, is not any number of these things. Yeah, right. It's just like a straight up biological food -based intervention. And...

Austin

SSRIs or whatever.

Justin

My strong suspicion is that over the next 20 years, we are going to see vastly more progress in this area of what people are calling metabolic psychiatry or metabolic psychology, which is this idea of addressing mental health disorders via food. We are going to see way more progress here than we are going to see in anything that resembles psychology, psychiatry, or any number of these sort of mental health disciplines. I think that we've had... You know, almost a hundred years of psychotherapy and stuff like this, uh, Skinner, Freud, you know, Adler, and like all these sorts of types of, um, psychologists and psychiatrists. And yet we still don't have a very strong model of if someone is depressed, what should they do? Yet we have very strong models today and we're, you know, they're getting stronger for if someone needs to lose weight. or fixed inflammation or any of the things, we pretty strongly know a set of food interventions that we can conduct on or with an individual that will help them improve those different markers. And I suspect that as we start to understand more about how the gut -brain connection, how 80 % of the serotonin and dopamine that is created in your body happens in the gut, if you get... Yeah.

Austin

Wow, I did not know that. 80 % did you say of the dopamine and what?

Justin

And serotonin, yeah, that's created in your body is basically created in your gut. The... Like if you have there there have been a bunch of studies that show when someone is dealing with like inflammation of the gut They also have more anxiety more propensity to depression things like this You know, like I think that we are just on the cusp of starting to understand how important it is like how the body is truly this like one interconnected thing and and that it is impossible in my opinion to be or let me not impossible but rare to be completely mentally healthy while living in a body that is like dealing with all sorts of physical and other ailments. And I think that... If you are healthy, if you get sunlight, if you eat well, if you feel good in your body, it's exceptionally easier to be, you know, operate in a state of good mental health. Like I have like two bad nights of sleep and you know, I'm like have mental health problems and that like, I'm a little more depressed. I'm like easier and more angry, you know, like people know that this is true. Just after experiencing a little bit of bad sleep or like a weekend of, you know, binge eating and drinking or whatever it is, like all the stuff that I used to do in college. Um, and, and I think that.

Austin

Yeah, me too.

Justin

It's not a big leap for the average person to understand and go, oh, maybe actually what I'm eating all the time impacts how I feel on a day -to -day basis. Maybe my lack of exercise, my lack of mobility, my like, uh, you know, drinking too much or whatever. All of these play a huge role in my day -to -day mental health. And I think this is an area we're going to find out much more about in the next decade.

Austin

Yeah, I'm excited about that. I've heard recently people referring to the gut as like the second brain, a second brain stuff, you know, and I haven't really read into that, but once again, like I was, the reason I was on bone broth and fermented foods and all that was because my stomach was so messed up and I just felt awful all the time. And so how did I deal with that? I dealt with that through diet was the best way I do, you know, I still constantly work on stuff and trying things to try to get, um, healthier, you know, and.

Justin

You too.

Austin

What I love too about what you're saying, and I agree, I see this, this is kind of what I see, is the past hundred years, we've really tried to simplify human beings into just like robots and whether it was behavioral psychology and whatever, and just that, hey, people are just gears and microprocessors for brains and we can kind of control everything. Humans are just complicated. They're not complex, they're complicated. And we can... really understand all the inner workings and we can just do this. Oh, we don't need a gallbladder. Just take it out. You know, we don't need a spleen. Just take it out. We don't need tonsils. Just take it out. And there seems to be, it still seems like a minority to me, but like a bit of an awakening there of just like, holy cow, humans are wildly complex and interconnected, like you're saying. And I think that's a really exciting kind of area for science and all because it's really kind of starting to blend, not just. the hard sciences, but also, you know, I remember this study came out, I think it was this year, they were talking about the top treatments for depression. And of course, SSRIs are like, wait on here, what's up top? Dancing, dancing. It's like statistically from like, this is a scientific study. And then there was like other, a couple other interesting ones up there. I was like, this is...

Justin

Yeah.

Justin

Yeah, it was like dancing, weight training, yoga. It was, it was like 18, like lifestyle interventions and then like SSRIs all at the bottom.

Austin

Yeah.

Austin

Yeah. And then like you're saying, talk therapy, that doesn't mean it's not helpful, but it's there's so many other things ahead of that. And guess what? That are generally speaking cheaper. And that's what's so much of whether it's what's in food. You know, I complain about this all the time in building, you know, we, we build so much disposable crap and it's not just disposable. It's toxic to humans.

Justin

Yeah, totally. No side effects.

Austin

But we build it disposably and it ends up in a landfill in 50, 60 years. But then it just increases GDP because we got it. But so much of it is in service of this kind of industrial machine. And it's not in service of human beings and human well -being. And I think food systems and our built environment, really, the core value should be how do we help people flourish? How do we help people live the healthiest lives? We can't force it. You can't. you know, force people to flourish. I can't build things and force people to flourish, but we can set the stage, you know, give people the tools that they need. Um, gosh, yeah, but there is a lot, a lot.

Justin

Yeah, no, look, I totally agree. I think that for basically most of human history, people's environment sort of constrained, like it was basically for many hundreds of thousands of years, hard to give yourself and basically impossible to give yourself a chronic disease by eating inappropriate foods. Like if you're a hunter gatherer, like if you wanted to get a chronic disease or something, by eating like horrible foods for you over a period of time. It was basically impossible. Like your environment just wouldn't allow you to make that choice. And I think that there've been an amazing, like an incredible number of things that are positive about maternity. I think that one of the downsides that has been lost is that, you know, our environment sort of used to by default take care of this like human flourishing aspect, or at least didn't offer a, you know, unlimited numbers of opportunities for making you sick, you know, giving you chronic disease, you know, giving you X, Y, or Z. I think today, basically, we have an environment where... a lot of the institutions that surround us, in the case of this space that I focus on a lot, big food, big pharma, and our agriculture industry, all of these are sort of like the players within them are not looking at how do I build a food system that encourages human flourishing, but it's how do I build a food product that is maximally profitable to me over a lifetime of consumers that are going to consume this? And if you think about Coca -Cola for example, for example, their best customer in a sense is not like a me or a you who probably doesn't drink this stuff, certainly doesn't drink it regularly, but it's someone that gets addicted to Coca -Cola, drinks it multiple times a day, and kind of hangs on and does it for as long as they can stay alive so that Coke extracts maximum profit from that human lifespan. And...

Justin

One of the big concerns that I have and one of the things I've been thinking about lately is there's not a single institution really that is aligned with human flourishing in a way that that institution has almost the imperative to protect and promote, you know, you or I living our best, healthiest, most productive lives. Like at one point, maybe that was government. You know, certainly at one point that was probably like religion. But I think both of those institutions seem to be less powerful. are like not doing quite as good of a job maybe today as they once were. And so I think we're left to this situation where you have a food system where. Big food is making maximally addictive, maximally profitable, you know, food like products. And these big food companies are regulated by regulators that are, have been completely captured by the big food companies where, you know, they're, they're getting outspent like 11 to one for every, you know, dollar of research the NIH spends on studying nutrition. Big food spends $11. It's just like, it's game over.

Austin

And they perform their own studies too. Right.

Justin

Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, or they fund, you know, they fund universities that then create studies that say, oh no, you know, like in something Coca Cola's. I don't know how well known this is, but in like, I think it was like 2009 to 2015, they spent like 200 something million dollars around studies that showed that, no, it's actually not what you eat that leads to chronic disease or obesity. It's you're not moving enough. And so they started something called the global energy balance network that says you just have to move more. It doesn't matter if you have a Coke. Like it's all about, you know, you're not exercising enough. You're not expending enough calories. Like you're fat because it's your fault. It's not because of what you're eating or drinking. Like buy another Coke. And so I think that this is, you know, this is like, that was like seven years ago, nine years ago. Um, these, this is just like the big food playbook. And I think that we today as a society don't necessarily have. institutions or like a sense making apparatus that allows us to respond to this level of like regulatory capture and, you know, misalignment of incentives between you or I wanting to live a healthy life and the companies that are, you know, putting addictive cheap food stuffs in front of us at every turn.

Austin

You know, what's, I don't mean I understand as an, I condone, but like at least I can wrap my head around big food companies that are big corporations that, you know, and I want to talk about this towards the end of, you know, and they're not really owned by anyone. Um, I can understand them seeking to maximize profits and not really caring about the outcomes, even though I obviously don't agree with that in any way, but the one that really gets me. is the healthcare industry itself and doctors and hospitals and stuff. Have you had much experience talking to doctors? What's your kind of take on the state of that industry? And are people aware and they're just not saying anything because they're not allowed to or because they're scared or they're just not aware or they just weren't trained right because of medical school? What's your kind of take on? And I should say, You know, I, there's so many doctors and I don't mean to be disrespectful because these people are very smart. They worked hard. They spent money to go to school. They know a bunch of stuff. I don't know. And then some doctors that I've been to, you know, just over the past decade of my life, I'm like, you know, nothing. They're literally going to my, I'm sitting there like, here's this pill, here's that pill. And there's people I regularly talked to and they're like, Oh my good doctors got me a new blood pressure medication, blah, blah. And of course they're over. And I'm like, have they talked to you about anything? I mean, heck, I got some foot surgeries recently and. without saying any, you know, when it still wasn't working, it was just like, oh, just, just shoot up with more cortisone cortisone. And I didn't even know at the time, cause I was like, I asked a lot of questions. Are there any downsides? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can do as much as you want. Well, then I went and talked to another doctor later and realized like, oh, you definitely don't want to do that. It's going to weaken your ligaments, blah, blah, blah. And I'm going, how, what's going on here?

Justin

Yeah. Yeah. I think that healthcare, like for my money, like food, healthcare, housing, education are probably the foremost broken industries in the US. I'm sure that other people with deep domain expertise probably in other spaces would probably argue theirs is the most. But yeah. But yeah, I mean, if you look right now, I think that doctors realize that there's something like deeply wrong with the healthcare system. You know, like the...

Austin

Yeah.

Austin

Those are mine.

Justin

Like I believe that job satisfaction among doctors is lower than it's ever been. I think it's possibly the lowest of like any major profession right now. Um, suicide rate among doctors is like higher than it's ever been in the last decade or so. Like I, like you take those as snapshots, you take snapshots that the, a GP spends an average of like seven minutes a year talking to one of their patients. And you know, there's, it's not hard to understand that, that these doctors are not, they don't really build relationships. with patients anymore. Their job is no longer, you know, how do I take care of you Austin who is dealing with this foot thing? It is like a foot comes in that is attached to someone named Austin and I as a specialist who only look at foot things, I'm gonna spend as little time as I possibly can on this to look at it and go, yep, this fits like my prior of X, Y, and Z things. I'm gonna write this prescription and then I'm gonna go on with my day and do this as many times as I can to make sure I get paid. I think that one thing that has happened at a very high level is that we've gone from a bunch of a profession of doctors, sort of generalists who could sit with a patient and understand what is going on. They could understand trade -offs, lifestyle, like these things that may be impacting your health outcomes to one of specialists where specialists get paid the highest rates by insurers. They then get to look at very special cases where they get paid more for their specialist And that sort of runs up the cost of healthcare and also ensures that, you know, a specialist in ankle X, Y, or Z things that are happening is just going to see a slew of ankles connected to people as opposed to a doctor that might actually be like, oh, I have this decade long relationship with Austin and have a better sense of what may be going on or what he might need from a care standpoint. You know, and I think that the model sort of of our healthcare system is is very broken. And I think that if I had to pick a fundamental thing that I think is wrong with our healthcare system is we built a healthcare system where the default assumption, and it was true post -World War II, is that the average person is healthy. Occasionally, someone will get sick. And it's our job as a medical profession, as our healthcare industry, to bring them back to health.

Justin

The opposite is true now. Like the average person is sick today. 85 % of all care, all costs goes towards managing chronic conditions, not even curing them, not even doing anything like that. And there is no such thing as taking a healthy patient that is sick and then we boot them back into the healthy population where they're no longer involved in the healthcare system. I just think that we have this model of acute care that we're trying to stretch into the management of chronic disease and, you know, into like overseeing, managing and controlling like all aspects of a patient's life that is suffering with chronic disease. And I just think that the same model does not work. You know, something I think about a lot is there was a saying of like, health isn't found in a doctor's office. And I think, I think that's true. Like, you know, we, again, as I was saying earlier, I don't think that. the fixing the chronic disease crisis in the US, I don't think that that solution is going to run through a doctor's office. I think it is going to run through fixing our environment, our buildings, our food system, you know, any number of these things, and make them health promoting rather than, you know, making them health detracting.

Austin

And yeah, it's a big, it's a big problem. And, you know, even some of the reasons you're talking about the hyper specialization, you know, you see that across industries too. It's, it's not just food. I talk about that a lot. That's why it's funny to talk to you and just read what you're doing. I'm like, man, you know, there's so many parallels to just building and the reasons it's broken down and, you know, architect the term orc, I mean, that's really a new profession, you know, in the past hundred years, like there used to be, you know, essentially. master builders, it wasn't this license thing. And yeah, they knew design, they knew engineering, they knew how to build things. And there might be some more experts within that, but you know, now we've got architects, they're trained in the arts department of universities and you know, and not, and most universities not trained very well, I would also say. And then the engineers are in the science department and the construction managers are in the business department and the developers in the business department, the trades, you know, didn't go to school or whatever. And then no one knows anything about each other's jobs or how to actually produce something. And it's just kind of like, let me just put my blinders on and do what I'm told. And of course the same with the regulatory bodies and cities and zoning and the fire departments and the sewer departments and the planning departments. You know, they just kind of have this, here's what my job is to check this box, fill this out. And then once again, no one's actually got a coherent vision of what are we trying to accomplish? But what strikes me is.

Justin

Super interesting.

Austin

You know, in the food industry, in particular in the healthcare industry, as so many of these really terrible outcomes really manifest and it's becoming just inarguable when you just look at straight statistics, like just how terrible health outcomes in the United States are. I mean, it is horrible. Yet it's almost like instead of dealing with that or actually starting to address it, people are trying to like, double down and prevent people from talking about it. You know what I mean? And not to be political about it, I don't mean it political in a Democrat, Republican way. I just mean COVID was a really big kind of like wake up call for me because when it was, you know, things are going, that's happening and unfolding and, you know, in Oklahoma and I'm like, I'm not going to get the vaccine. Like I don't need it. I'm young, I'm healthy, all that kind of stuff. And then, but it was just kind of that thing. Like, ah, I'm not going to do it. You know, we're doing, and then, and then it was started to be like force. You know, and people started trying to force you to do it and I had to go to New York city while during COVID and that just felt like I was a criminal. Not being vaccinated. I'm not trying to make a statement about whether people are vaccinated, but it was like I've come into that. Like when the force started trying to be applied, it was like, hold on a second. What's going on here and why? And when I look at the.

Justin

Yeah.

Austin

health outcomes and what the FDA and the food pyramid and all that like have been throughout my lifetime. I'm kind of like, why would I trust that? And then I just get told like, trust the experts, trust. How dare you not trust the science? How dare you not trust the experts? Who are you? And I'm kind of going like, I don't know how, you know, have you experienced any of that?

Justin

Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that the, I think that if, if by almost any metric you look at like how, you know, what are, what are measures of Americans trust in traditional institutions and they seem to be all at all time low, like government media, whatever, you know, trust in these institutions are at historic lows. I think this is a big reason why is because I can't tell you like how often I think about this idea that. the default outcome, like you just have to look at. the rest of the country right now. And you go, if I don't want the default outcome, which is that, you know, 80 % of people are overweight or obese, going to deal with one or more chronic diseases, like from a health standpoint, I definitionally have to do something different to avoid the average outcome, which is one that I don't want. You know what I mean? Like if, if I follow exactly the science or whatever the like institutions that, that are creating the dietary guidelines, like these sorts of things are saying, I'm going to achieve the default outcomes and the default outcomes are bad. They're fucking bad. And like why you would follow this advice to achieve a default outcome or be pressured to follow this advice to achieve the default outcome, which is abysmal, is like crazy to me. I think of this, you know, I kind of think of this like sometimes with... Like the, I think the vaccine stuff is like a decent example. I also saw this a lot with, um, perfect keto where when keto was becoming a trend that was growing quite a lot, like we were very early to the trend. We saw so many news articles that were like, why keto is dangerous, you know, why keto is bad for you and all this sort of stuff. And to me, I'm like, Keto is literally like trying to eat fewer carbohydrates and sugars. Like if you stopped eating carbs and sugar for

Justin

30 days and decided that you didn't like that and wanted to go back to your normal way of eating, it is impossible for me to believe that you would have any long -term negative ramifications or repercussions from cutting out carbs and sugar in your life for 30 days and then deciding maybe this keto thing isn't for me. Like... The downside of trying keto is so insanely low that to see articles about this stuff, to see like, you know, doctors going on CNN talking about a keto diet and like why it's bad for people and how it's dangerous just was so preposterous to me. It sort of made me be like, yeah, this is why I don't believe or why I don't think a lot of the sense -making institutions when it comes to health advice are worth following.

Austin

Seriously. And that, that this is a good segue into your take on veganism and vegetarianism because the same doctors that are like, keto's dangerous, keto's dangerous, we need to get rid of all meat, you know, which has become a cultural, like kind of this, once again, kind of this tyrannical thing coming from regulatory bodies and the government and stuff.

Justin

It's all Bill Gates too. Bill Gates, he's like funding all this stuff, it's so crazy. I know, I don't understand that dude at all, I wish I could talk to him.

Austin

And no one's a bunch of farmland too, I understand, right? Yeah.

Austin

Yeah, it's interesting. You wouldn't expect a guy like that, like to, yeah, he's had a lot of a...

Justin

Dude, just every time I see some hugely technological intervention that will have massive long -term repercussions, Bill Gates is funding it. It's like, oh, I read a thing about someone shooting sulfur into the atmosphere to blot out the sun to prevent carbon change. And you're like, oh, of course, Bill Gates is funding that. Yeah, right, all the fake meat stuff, Bill Gates is funding it. Oh, you're just like, this makes, I don't understand this guy's worldview at all.

Austin

Oh, I saw that. That sounds like a good idea.

Austin

Seriously, do you think you can be healthy eating a vegan or vegetarian diet like in your your personal opinion? Do you know?

Justin

Um, I think, I think maybe for periods of time, um, I think that certainly if you're like intense about it, uh, probably, I think some people can do better than others, but, but I think that the default, like you have to look at, again, most cultures throughout time have incorporated animal products in some way, shape or form. We definitively know that, you know, if you don't feed a child, uh, animal products as they, you know, are. being born and raised, it has huge health impacts. We know that there's a whole slew of health complications that come from being vegan or vegetarian over a long period of time. And so I think you can mitigate those. I don't necessarily think it's like a path towards optimal health. It's not something that I would recommend, but. But honestly, for me, if your choices, I think it depends on your choice. Like if your choice is an average American diet or a standard American diet where you're getting 50 % of your calories from, you know, ultra processed foods or going vegan, I think probably a vegan diet is healthier for you. If you're literally starting from square one and you're going, I'm going to change my diet regardless. And you're sort of looking at like paleo versus keto versus, you know, vegan or vegetarian. And I think that it would be kind of crazy to do a vegetarian or vegan diet that you plan to be on for the rest of your life. But, you know, I'm open to being wrong on that. I don't think I am, but I'm like open to that. Austin (01:00:23.728) Right. Now it's interesting that, you know, it's hard to do studies because I mean, you see so many studies of like meat's bad for you, meat's bad for you. And you're like, what kind of meat are you eating? Because why? I mean, just look at the price, you know, like free range, you know, uh, um, organic chicken breast, you know, you're what, 10 bucks a pound or something. It says just somewhere like whole foods. So not even say like direct from farm or something. And then you can go to Walmart or just another grocery store and get the same quote unquote chicken breast, you know, for. two bucks a pound and you're going, okay, something's got to be going on with the different types of meat or beef. You know, once again, the corn fed versus grass fed and you know, the type of meat and all that seems to be really, really important. Um, Justin (01:01:07.924) Oh yeah. And like most of the studies that vegans and vegetarians point to, to support their sort of, uh, you know, worldview are ones where they're not breaking out the types of meat. Like they're basically just saying meat eaters versus non -meat eaters. And in the meat eating category, they count people. Like I read one study and it was like counting people that ate, like they incorporated processed, you know, processed meats. And I was like, what are processed meats? It was basically like corn dogs, like, you know, like the just stuff that you're like. I would never, like, of course a vegetarian who is sourcing their, being intentional about their food is going to be healthier on this population study than like a population of corn dog eaters. Like I will never die on that hill saying that that is healthier than eating vegan. You know what I mean? Just the way that we've done these studies is just so bad. It's almost hilarious. Austin (01:01:51.728) Uh. Austin (01:01:57.232) That's interesting. And then, you know, not just, this seems to be something that's growing or like, cause I, you know, I follow a lot of functional doc, functional medicine doctors and stuff like true MDs and doctors and stuff like that. And non -doctors as well, I follow, but you know, a growing consensus I see among functional medicine doctors is that even with the perfectly healthy diet. So say it's all grass -fed meat and whatever, and great balance and all that. They're saying. And they're kind of like fundamental base philosophy is we can kind of, we can eat everything we need to be healthy. And they're coming out and starting to say, you know what, after 20 years doing this, I've started to change my mind because our food has so much fewer nutrients compared to just 50, 60 years ago that you kind of have to supplement as well in addition, because, you know, and I can't remember statistics on say apples or broccoli or stuff, but like the number, like the amount of nutrients and a 2024 apple. is completely different than what was in an apple in 1920 or some broccoli in 1920. Have you done much reading or research in that area about nutrient densities in foods and declining, which my understanding is largely because of the use of pesticides and fertilizers and stuff in the way we do our monocultor crops. Justin (01:03:12.66) Yeah, yeah, definitely. So the research that I have done does seem to point towards, I think there's two things that are driving like nutrient deficiency in our food. The one is sort of exactly what you're saying. You know, like we basically went from a model, maybe like, let me back up. Like, where do you, if you think about it, like, where do nutrients come from? Like if a crop is nutrient dense, what does that mean? You can think about for a crop to be nutrient dense, it must be pulling those nutrients from somewhere. That generally means the soil, you know, and over a longer period of time, like you can imagine a tomato or something like that. It is like pulling more and more nutrients into the plant. You know, if the soil has a lot of nutrients to give the plant, then that. tomato will be more nutrient dense and if that tomato has a longer time on the vine to sort of like pull nutrients out of the soil into it, it'll be much more nutrient dense. It's, you know, interestingly, like nutrients also are experienced by humans as flavor. So when you eat something that is like super nutrient dense or something like that, it's also hugely more flavorful. This is why like a massive apple or something at Costco, you know, that's non -organic conventional, whatever, often like tastes a tenth as flavorful as like an apple that you could pick off a tree. and like some orchard or something. I don't know if you ever had that experience, but it's a very, very interesting one. So all that to say, as our farmland and as our soil has become depleted, as the nutrients that are inherent in the soil become depleted, we've had to respond by applying much more fertilizer, which has nutrient -like things, help crops grow faster and the like. As that's happened, soil gets less nutrient dense. We make up for it. that lack of nutrient density by over applying fertilizer. Fertilizer helps crops grow faster. You're basically sort of making the crops that were growing less nutrient dense because one, they're pulling from soils that have fewer nutrients in them. And then secondly, the crops themselves are actually growing faster. And so they have less time to sort of like pull nutrients into them. By many measures, that means that many crops in the US food system are looking at like 30 to 40 % fewer nutrients relative to the crops of like Justin (01:05:24.502) the 60s, 70s. So that I think is part one. The second part that I think is also interesting and confusing is if you look at there's something called like the nutrient decay curve which is basically you pick like a leaf of spinach or something like that. Austin (01:05:26.864) Callie. Justin (01:05:40.724) If you measure the amount of nutrient density of an active nutrients in spinach, the moment you pick it relative to like 72 hours later, the number of nutrients that you will have in like that leaf of spinach is like 80 to 90 % higher at the moment of picking than it is after like a 72 hours. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah, I wrote about this like maybe a year ago. I could send it to you if you want, but. Austin (01:05:58.192) Are you serious? I've never heard of that nutrient density curve. Austin (01:06:07.056) Yeah, please do. That's wild. I'll put it in the show notes too. Justin (01:06:10.196) Yeah, so it's pretty insane. And so if like, to me, one of the concerning things I think is we right now, we have this very, very centralized food system, you know, where food is like grown, harvested, processed, packaged, and then shipped all over. And the time from picking to like ending up in a consumer's mouth is like oftentimes, you know, weeks, in some cases months. And if you look at something like spinach where you're like, okay, this thing is grown on nutrient depleted soils that is, you know, that's less nutritious than it was 50 years ago. And I'm eating this 15 days after it's been harvested. Like you're getting something that is maybe like single digit percentage points as nutrient dense as stuff that like our ancestors were eating, you know, 70 years ago. Like I think that this, Oh, another interesting thing. Austin (01:07:01.904) And that makes you eat more too. Justin (01:07:04.18) Yeah, well, so this is actually, I was just going to say that there's a really, really interesting book called The End of Craving. There's another one called formerly. So good. So another one called Formerly Known as Food that I also formerly known as food that I highly recommend that has a similar has has like pointed to a study where basically they found that in animals. Austin (01:07:11.376) Oh, my sister read this, I think. Austin (01:07:18.672) What was it called? Justin (01:07:30.836) let's say like animals in a concentrated, in a feedlot situation or whatever, they removed a key nutrient from the alfalfa and like grain sort of slurry that these animals were eating. And they found that when they removed this nutrient, animals ate more to make up for, to try and make up in quantity what they were missing of this like key nutrient that they needed. I think that this is potentially a reason, this is pure conjecture on my part, but I think that this is potentially a reason and a mechanism that food manufacturers, are using when they make ultra processed foods, where people become so addicted because they're like, oh, this is missing a key nutrient somewhere in their body, your mind, whatever. They're going, this food is missing a nutrient that I'm expecting. So I'm going to eat more of it to make up for the relative lack of this nutrient that my limbic brain is expecting to get by eating this thing. And I think that it's also probably a reason that if you talk to many people that are Austin (01:08:23.248) Uh -oh. Justin (01:08:28.724) eat a lot of processed foods and are obese or overweight, there's always this like hunger loop going in their brain. It's a very common symptom. And my suspicion is that that hunger loop is not related as much to many of the causes that people would say it is, but it's actually related to the body sort of craving and looking for a specific set of nutrients that are not present in many people's foods today. Austin (01:08:50.672) Gosh, which really points back to it's not just effort on people's part. How dare you not, whatever, you're not working out enough, you're blah, blah. It's because people are actually hungry or whatever it is and no one wants to feel like they're starving themselves. I don't want to feel like I'm starving myself. Justin (01:09:11.156) Yeah, I used to be so critical of people that were, you know, overweight or struggling with different like chronic diseases. And at some point in the last like eight years, basically, I was just like, this is insane that I'm viewing people this way. It's like, obviously, when you're looking at population level increases of obesity rate going from 10 to 80 % in the last like 70 years, you know, this. Austin (01:09:32.816) 10 to 80 percent? Justin (01:09:34.292) Yeah, like, this is just obviously not there are not eight times more people that like want to, you know, be overweight and be struggling with their, their weight and things like this. This is so obviously an environmental problem and a problem where, you know, people like our, our sort of inclinations and animal instincts are being weaponized against us by, by these companies that are trying to make highly profitable, highly palatable, very addictive foodstuffs and making money doing so. Austin (01:10:02.48) Man, that's crazy. You mentioned just how long our food from being picked to us actually consuming it. And I think the statistic is something like the average food or something like travel like 1500 miles or something. And you know, you guys at, for example, kettle and fire are very careful with your sourcing where you are getting your bones, whether it's beef bones and stuff. And you said, you know, you're making sure grass fed and regenerative farms and they're probably doing rotational grazing and stuff. You know, in your opinion, and have you thought about this at all? And, you know, you talked about depleting soils and stuff. And I've, I've heard this too, where there's, I don't know, like 30 more crop turnovers or something. I can't remember. Like there's different estimates about number of top soil that is just so much. But. Are these more sustainable practices? Can they be scaled? You know, because, you know, we know just doing monoculture, corn, so are we, even if those things were good for you, which they're really not, but are there ways to grow our food and raise meat that could actually feed not only 330 million Americans, but you know, whatever, 7 billion people, however many people are on the planet now? Do you just. Justin (01:11:12.756) Yeah, 100%. I mean, I also think that this argument, like you have to zoom out. And what I like to ask some of these people and they were like, Oh, can you scale regenerative agriculture? I was like, Let's zoom out. Does scale mean feed every American, but 80 % of them have chronic illness? Like is that, do we consider that as like solving the problem of feeding everyone or does scale maybe mean, you know, can we scale this problem? Will it take time? Yes. But I think that we can eventually over the next 20 years, reach a system that. feeds everyone using regenerative and regenerative principles and does so in a way that actually leads to happier, healthier, more productive humans. Like, I, in, in whenever someone says like, you know, the, the food system of today is like a triumph of scale and engineering. I'm like, I don't know, man. Like you just look around and the health outcomes are abysmal. Sure. We may be saving some money on, on a fertilizer and like, sure. Regenerative agriculture, especially the beginning during the transition period, maybe more expensive, but I have to imagine that we would see massive savings on the backend as you know, our healthcare costs go down like 80 to 90 % and the like. Like one of the things. that I think is lost in this sort of food system, like regen scale argument, is that in my opinion, like, we basically are subsidizing, you know, this sort of like monoculture, highly scaled, like heavily chemically intensive fertilizer, like approach to producing our food. And we pay for it to the tune of like higher healthcare bill than we've ever seen before in the US. Yeah, totally. Like, Austin (01:12:50.992) and trillions of dollars. Justin (01:12:53.716) Yes, if you look at a food basis, the US spends less per human on producing our food than Europe. But our cost of health care is also much, much, much larger than they pay in Europe. And I think those two things are integrally related, are very, very tightly coupled. And I think that if you just look at, can we scale regenerative principles? Austin (01:13:08.464) Hmm. Justin (01:13:16.148) from an economic standpoint and just compare that to our very broken current system, you miss the larger picture, which is like, if our goal is to scale healthier humans, I think that we can do that with a food system that is on net healthcare plus, you know, agriculture far less expensive than the healthcare plus agriculture industry and approach that we see today. Austin (01:13:37.552) Makes a lot of sense. Have you looked into or have an opinion about hydroponics or aquaponics as part of a solution? Or would you say, you know, I don't even know. Like I'm so minimally exposed to it. I'm like in my head, I'm going, I would assume it probably doesn't have the same nutrients, you know, density, you know, stuff like that. But I also get the benefits because you're like, it's a controlled environment in the greenhouse. You don't have to worry about pests. Maybe you can do it organic more easily because they're not going to spray pesticides and all that. Like, do you have a take on hydroponics, aquaponics? Justin (01:14:06.356) I, this has been something that I've wanted to dig into more in the last year. I don't have a great take right now, but I think that my, my sort of, my, my gut inclination is probably that there is a loss of nutrient density. Probably there's a lot of stuff that like I zooming out. I would just say that they very, very rarely do you take something where you have this ecosystem, like plants are part of an ecosystem that, you know, has many facets and many relationships between soil microbiome to the plant actually growing to sunshine to pass to like, and, you know, any sorts of things, very, very complicated multifaceted web of relationships. Almost every time you see an ecology or an ecosystem get replaced by humans who like sort of come in with a blunt instrument and they're like, Hey, we're just. going to take this one part and we're going to bring in our own sunlight and we're going to like feed it x, y, or z, phosphorus, nitrogen, whatever. Very rarely have I seen that situation work out and not have any sort of second order consequences. That makes me skeptical, but that doesn't mean like... You know, probably if your options are eating a organic hydroponic or aquaponic vegetables, as opposed to like buying conventional from Walmart or whatever, probably it's better. But like, it's an area I really want to look into more. Austin (01:15:25.872) Yeah, that kind of makes sense to me on its face, but I'm curious too. And you know, maybe is it a step up from the other stuff? I don't know, you know, but yeah, you know, you started the podcast talking about how you think health is one of the defining issues of our time, you know, over the next 20 years. And I really believe that too, because as we both, I think the framework we both come from is in our businesses, how do you maximize human flourishing? How do you serve people and stuff like that? And. Justin (01:15:33.556) Don't look. Austin (01:15:55.568) You know, in my industry, we talk a lot about trade shortages and all sorts of things. And it's like, guys, building is hard. Being in a trade is hard. You know, whether it's a plumber, you're a framer or brick mason, you cannot do those things if you're not healthy. Like, and, um, on top of that, you know, just the, the social wellbeing and people being able to, you can't have a productive society. One, if you're spending 20 % of GDP on healthcare, which is just going to keep going up. And then people also not being physically healthy to be able to do physical things and also mentally healthy. But the crazy thing is it's like, you just don't really hear it's like climate change is the thing that's going to end the world and the apocalyptic stuff. And, and it's weird that we chose the thing that we can do the least about, you know, versus if we were to just spend the money that we're kind of throwing at climate change for absolutely, you know, minimal. And I'm not saying I'm, I'm very concerned about the environment, but I'm actually way more concerned about the environmental toxicity that we already have in our environment. Justin (01:16:51.988) Take care. Austin (01:16:54.096) than climate change per se. Like that is going to get us, our health is going to get us so much faster than climate change. Like I'm curious, like how would you respond to that? Because that's a fairly controversial stance. Justin (01:17:04.532) No, I totally agree. I mean, my like skeptical take is oftentimes when you see a massive issue introduced that practically no one can actually do anything about that. Oftentimes you'll see that issue being used as a way for some institution to like grab more power. Like you're looking right now in the EU and there's this idea of, I think in the UK, which I guess is not the EU. But I just saw this in the last week, they're introducing or considering introducing a climate tax that would allow them to like sue and garnish wages and do all this sort of stuff to because of the environment, because of X, Y, Z. And you're like, we don't know, there's no mechanism. by which we can put dollars towards X and climate change gets better. And so all of this is just like seizure or a way to seize power or like get power from someone else right now is my opinion. I also think that climate change is, it's this very like, it's so broad and the umbrella is so wide that it's extremely hard for. anyone really to fight it or say that it's bad or whatever, which makes it a very powerful kind of meme. Like basically the only bad guys in the climate change thing are, you know, oil and gas companies. Um, you know, I, I think that if, if you were to say, Hey, why don't we get every American healthier and spend a hundred million dollars or, you know, $100 billion making this happen, you would have a whole. Austin (01:18:33.072) trillions of dollars. I mean, we, yeah, we spend trillions on climate change already and we're just getting started. Justin (01:18:36.532) Totally. I mean, yeah, but like you would just have a whole host of special interests, big food companies, agriculture companies, healthcare companies, like all of these groups that would all of a sudden be very, very angry and upset about what you're doing. So, yeah, I think it's, I would way rather we spend money on making Cubans healthy and reducing the environmental toxicity that we're seeing right now, which I think is honestly like one in the same. But, you know, that's politics. Austin (01:19:04.56) Well, that, you know, kind of wrap up here. I kind of want to end with a little bit of continuation of this and, you know, in your most recent newsletter, I can't remember exactly what you said, but you said something on the lines of, um, you know, like I'm, I'm a capitalist. I've, I've benefited from capitalism. I think it's an amazing system in a lot of ways. And that's my, would be my take two. It was kind of like reading them. I'm like, yeah, that's about how I feel. But like things are really broken right now. within that and you're like, I don't know what the answer is. And that's kind of where I'm at because you mentioned at the beginning of this, where you're talking about like the government and I'm like, in my job, I have to deal with the government actually a lot, both at the local level, the state level and the federal level. Cause I, whether it's permitting or zoning or all the utilities or the inspections, the banking stuff is regulated, the financing stuff is regulated. Um, and it's like, none of it is a very good experience. Um, You know, and then, and then, you know, then you look at the FDA and all these other things and you're just going, okay, that like handing more power to that system and all that doesn't seem like a, that's not my solution. You know, that kind of is terrifying to me actually. But at the same time, I had serious concerns about these corporations and stuff. And, you know, you mentioned, that's one of those, you mentioned that, you know, the kind of the, the people that founded the companies are long gone. And there are CEOs and it's kind of like, I think Mark Andreessen talks about this, like the managerial, you know, there's not really owners anymore. It's just managers of things and like no one really owns anything. Like, I don't know. What's your kind of, what's your take on this? What are you thinking about right now in terms of what are solutions? Justin (01:20:51.22) Oh man, I have no idea. But I'm pretty early in thinking about this, but one of the things that I find interesting is that some of the companies that I think are doing some of the worst things in the U S are, you know, big food and pharma companies. And I just find it interesting that these companies are in many cases, like over a hundred years old, the CEO for Kellogg's for example, um, You know, the CEO owns like 0 .1 % of the company, like not enough where he can make any possible change and like force an agenda on it. And so even if that CEO really strongly believes that Kellogg's is like killing people and harming kids and whatever. He effectively can't really do anything about it. He doesn't own enough of the company. So like, he doesn't really have control and ownership enough to make a change. And so when that happens, you basically have these. massive corporations that are sort of run by shareholders, this like abstract, you know, non, not like agentic, you know, group of people. But you have this company that their goal and their their explicit goal is just grow earnings per share, move up the stock price, like And that is the only thing that they can basically optimize for. And I think that I don't know any solutions yet. This is just something that I've been thinking about, which is it's very strange to me that the. companies in the country that I view as doing maybe the most harm to the US are ones where there's practically no single individual that has any control of these companies at all. That they're just these sort of like, you know, to use like an AI person, you know, an AGI like, or AI skeptic kind of phrase, they're like these paperclip maximizing entities, where their goal is just make more profit, like, no matter the expense of human health, you know, well being anything like that. And I just think that's kind of weird. And I don't know what to think. Justin (01:22:42.294) about it more than that. Austin (01:22:43.664) Yeah, it's something I think about a lot. I don't have any answers, but it comes back to me a lot for that ownership and scale. Because we see it in the building industry through institutional money. The way the world looks like it does, and there's multiple reasons, but one of them is increasingly looks the way it does because of institutional money, centralized money that are investing from a boardroom somewhere across the country in your neighborhood or my neighborhood. They don't care about your neighborhood. It's not that they're bad people per se, right? It's just like, When you're at that scale and you're at that distance, how do you completely lose track of the idea that it's actually like humans, like human beings actually using these things or eating these things or whatever it is. It reminds me of, you know, driving a car and there's all sorts of studies that you know how easy it is. Someone like cuts you off in a car and you're just like, ah, like road rage is a real thing because you don't actually experience them as people. You see, you experience them as these moving vehicles and it allows you to kind of dehumanize them. And I think when you get scale, as big as a lot of these corporations are, some of that's happening. I remember reading a book, this was like 10 years ago. So I'm going to misquote some stuff. It was called Gangs of America. And it was about how the founding fathers of America were almost equally skeptical of giant corporations as they were of, you know, kind of a unlimited government. And originally like, corporations, corporations had almost no rights and they couldn't even own assets outside of the very specific industry that they were in. Like the railroad company couldn't own a manufacturing facility over here somewhere. And then over the past 200 something years, it wasn't legislative bodies through Congress that made the rights that they have now. It was actually all these just small Supreme Court decisions and precedent. that over 200 something years and suddenly corporations have more rights than human beings do, you know, and, and, you know, you've got citizens United and stuff like that where, you know, money is speech and all that, or I can't remember all that stuff, but, um, that, that one is really sticks out in my mind of just like how, how corporations came to be and how concerned people early on were about the idea of like big faceless corporations, just like this. Cause then the new East Indies company did a lot of, you know, Austin (01:25:00.592) inhuman stuff. Justin (01:25:01.94) That stuff. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I basically think that it is, it is maybe impossible, certainly very hard to have given institution power and, you know, over time, expect that that institution will not at some point use its power for its own benefit. And you know, against the benefit of, of other people. Like you see this in governments, you see this in corporations. And I think that basically governments and, you know, big public companies are two of the biggest, two of the most common instantiations of, of power. And like power can do some amazing things and power can also do some horrible things. And like, I, I don't know. Yeah, I don't, I just don't know how to solve that problem. I'm like totally at a loss. This is like a new thing I'm just starting to think about. Austin (01:25:51.888) Well, it's interesting because, you know, like, uh, I'm at a loss to accept. Okay. It's like, okay, governments aren't going to save us. Of course we both, I would think, I mean, I don't mean to speak on your behalf, like I believe in good regulations. Like I want the environment and food systems better regulated, you know, but like our hope can't be there or in giant corporations. And it really, it kind of comes down back to. There's not anything going to come and save us. It's really about like human beings choosing like. individuals and stuff, choosing to do good. Like that is how you build a great society is individuals, communities, choosing to pursue good things, you know, and that also means though that they might not, you know, and living with the consequences of that, I don't know because, yeah, it's a, but I do have a lot of, still hope for the future, frankly, like what we started off the early before we hopped on here was just. There are a lot of people working on these problems. There's a lot of people doing amazing things. And because we are an American, there's other countries too, but like we still have the ability to go build an amazing company and companies like you have, um, and solve these problems, which I think is just so exciting for me. Justin (01:27:05.204) Yeah. I look, I totally agree. So I'm very hopeful, but we'll, you know, we'll see what happens. Austin (01:27:13.936) What are just to close out, what are some of the things that you are kind of most excited about right now, whether it's companies or people out there doing things, you know, what are some of the top things that are on your mind? Justin (01:27:24.756) Let's see, things that I'm excited about. Honestly, I think that the... The things that would make the biggest difference, like in my view, some of the things that would make the biggest difference in the US would be, or in the world would sort of be solving energy problems. I think that like, you know, even like talking to the most doomer climate alarmist people, like everyone sort of recognizes that if we had, what is the equivalent to free energy? Like we could basically solve our climate problems or like get very, you know, make a huge dent in it. So I'm very bullish and interested on fusion stuff. You know, the AI stuff I think is potentially scary, potentially really interesting and amazing. I don't totally know what to think about it to be totally honest. And honestly, the thing that I'm most excited about is I feel like I'm seeing over and over again, a resurgence and interest in local decentralized sort of food systems and institutions that are... actually going to compete against many of the very centralized sort of large institutions that I think are causing so much pain and reaching so much havoc in our society today. And so that's something that I'm pretty bullish on, I would say. Austin (01:28:42.32) That's cool. Well, Justin, thanks so much. Where can people find you, follow you, your newsletter? Justin (01:28:49.909) Yeah, so I'm at, if they Google just Justin Mares sub stack, you know, I write a monthly newsletter called The Next. I'm also on Twitter at JW Mares, M -A -R -E -S. And yeah, that's probably the best place. Austin (01:28:56.688) I'll put that in the show notes. Yep. Austin (01:29:04.72) Cool. Well, Justin, appreciate it. And thanks so much also for what you're doing out there. You know, we drink kettle and fire and enjoy the other products and stuff. So it's just awesome. And it was great to have you on chat. Justin (01:29:14.516) Yeah, thanks for having me on, man. This was really fun.