Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 29 - Ron Penna

Episode Date: April 2, 2018

Today we have Ron Penna, the Co-Founder of Quest Nutrition, Ketopet, and the Epigenix Foundation. Quest Nutrition grew 57,000% in it's first three years and was ranked the 2nd fastest growing companies in 2014. This is the man behind it all. Re-Watch the Live Stream Here: https://youtu.be/0fTlDfWeT4I Watch all live streams at https://PowerProject.Live ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: https://soundcloud.com/user-921692324 ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell

Any thoughts on aliens? We've kind of talked about quite a bit so far. Yeah, we have. We haven't covered the aliens. Aliens, they probably exist, but do they exist at the same time period we do? If they haven't wiped themselves out, what are the chances of their civilization coinciding with exactly when we're here? So if you think a civilization lasts, what, 10,000 years, 20,000, the chances of them. What would make something an alien?

Not being of this earth. Not being of this earth. What if something was here before us? Dinosaurs. Yeah. I mean, what if there's been aliens living amongst us, quote unquote aliens, but they've been here the whole time? Then they wouldn't really be aliens. That's true.

I mean, I guess maybe partially if they were not of this earth, by your definition, then maybe they would still be aliens. We just got into some weird conversations. I don't know how it happened but uh you everybody listening uh you guys need to get your shit together is what i've learned uh from this uh time period with ron pennant today because ron just thinks that our time's going to run out eventually over here we have uh about 70 more years of existence right that's probably a good number what's happening what's happening the mankind is you we were talking about technology and next thing I know, well, first we started out the day talking about rape and murder and then we drifted off and started talking about the

de-evolution of people because of technology. What is going on with technology? Can it be bad? You may want to clarify the rape and murder before we go any further. de-evolution of people because of technology. What is going on with technology? It's a, can it be bad? You may want to clarify the rape and murder before we go any further. We did not rape and murder anyone. No, but we did. When I landed here in Sacramento, I thought, you know,

this is the land of the golden state killer. I know. And I never heard about it. Now I'm fascinated. You said there's like a TV series, right? There's like, I think it's a four part series.

Yeah. And on ID and, and you know between 76 and 86 there was a guy here in sacramento who was known as the east area rapist another guy down in southern california known as the original night stalker not richard ramirez but the original night stalker and then two separate guys they thought it was two separate guys and then in 2001 with dna evidence they realized oh it's the same guy and he's one of the the most prolific rapists and serial killers out there. it's just insane to me what people will do. But as we were talking about technology, you know, we're talking about this nanotechnology and all these things that get made. People get all excited. Oh,

you know, we have self-driving vehicles and you know, people can get stuff faster and cheaper. And there will be a point where there's self-driving trucks and stuff like that. Probably all throughout the world. Uh, you'll probably get, uh, your car, you know, might drive you somewhere and you can be on your phone or do whatever the hell you want.

Maybe the car, because it's a self-driving vehicle. Maybe it won't even look like a car anymore. Uh, I saw that there's a car that can fly. And as of, I think, next year, you can buy it. It's like 600K. So right in everybody's price range. Plus, a third of all males

work in transportation right now. So within like 30 years, all those jobs will be gone. So forklift operators, because that's the first thing they'll automate. And then ship captains. I'm sorry a third of all males work yeah in transportation worldwide so you can imagine what's going to happen in you know 30 years or so that's crazy

as it gets automated uh i guess like even like even like mailing stuff i'm sure well they'll figure they're going to probably figure out a way to automate all that too right for sure to have like a little robot or something will pop out and he'll get chased by the dog instead of the way the mailman gets chased by the dog now. Yeah. I don't know. Why do you think we only have 70 more years to go? What's happening? Well, if you just look at what's going to happen, you know, people have been predicting the end of mankind for, you know, centuries really. But, um, the only thing that's different is technology

will hit a certain tipping point where ultimately an individual will have enough power in the palm of their hand to wipe out mankind. It's just a matter of how far away is that point. That makes, that makes some sense. I mean, even, even in terms of, uh, uh, being in, being in a supplement industry and being in the food industry, or being a manufacturer of products like I have, slingshots and knee sleeves and knee wraps and all these different things, 40 years ago, that would probably be kind of hard to get going, right? Now it's a lot easier.

Now you can Google stuff. I can look stuff up. And even as far as making a protein bar, maybe I do a really shitty job of it, but I can Google and search around and I could, as you know, sometime this year, I could figure out how to release a protein bar. Sure. to research this technology. There's more and more information out there all the time. Somebody could research how to make a bomb. Somebody could research how to wipe out an entire city, really. There's some scary shit coming up. The self-automated cars, we talked about it recently on the podcast, already killed somebody.

They made it legal recently and they had somebody driving the car. The person was clearly kind of looking at their phone. Now, the person on the bicycle was kind of going kind of fast on their bicycle and they did pull out in front of the car. And they weren't in like a, they weren't at a traffic light or anything like that. They, they, you know, they jetted in front of the car,

but the car should have stopped and it didn't. And now I got somebody dead from that. Yeah. But let's think about in the future. Do you ever listen to radio lab? I have not. You've never listened to the radio lab podcast while we're on a podcast talking about another podcast. But yeah,

radio labs, it's a science podcast, but I'll have to check it out much more interesting than you'd think They were talking about how in the future They're gonna have to program cars to make basically ethical decision You're in your car and there's five people crossing a crosswalk illegally in front of you Does your car smash you into a wall and kill you one person or does it hit the five and kill them? And this apparently came up I think think Mercedes was at some car show

and this whole issue came up and they kind of handled it wrong. And everyone's saying, I'd never buy a car that would maximize human life. I want it to maximize my life. So now you're gonna have car companies saying, hey, our cars, we think about you. We'll kill the other five.

And you got the next company saying, no, no, we maximize human life. We'll kill you, but we'll save the five. So it gets pretty crazy when you're programming. It brings up the topic of like, do we even need that i mean i guess that's irrelevant because we're making it unabomber said go back to horses right yeah yeah he did not though he well he didn't like the idea of cars you know he he had his own crazy thoughts because he thought that uh the invention of cars was uh kind of a lie it kind of made you seem like you were more free and that you could go and do

whatever you wanted. But all it really did is lock people in their car more because it created societies that were built around having transportation, having a vehicle and that vehicle just took you to and from work and people became more enslaved to that and to their work. And there you have it. Yeah. Pretty crazy. Anyway, we are here with Quest Nutrition co-founder, Ron Penna. And Ron has been

somebody that I've known for a few years now. And what I find interesting is a lot of people want to talk business. And in today's day and age, there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there and people want to know the secrets. They want to know all these different things. But when I got around you, I immediately found out. I was like, this guy just loves learning about training. This guy just loves talking about diet and nutrition. This is just kind of a meathead. You know, we sat down and we started talking about keto.

And, you know, as soon as I said, oh, yeah, I've been messing around with keto since like 1994, 1995, your eyes lit up. You got all fired up. And we were it's been a romantic conversation ever since. A bromance. There ever was one. It's been a hell of a bromance. And you started talking about some of the diet stuff that you tried, steak and eggs. And how did you start to find out about nutrition? And how did you start to find out about some of

these things? For me, it was, you know, I was trying, I was in actually pre-college trying to get bigger, stronger. And I was a super skinny kid and lifted for about two years, got sick all the time. My immune system was trashed. Didn't really make any gains until I met a guy who basically said, Hey, write down what you're eating, overhauled everything, took my protein way up. And then it was like magic. It was like, Whoa, all of a sudden I realized it has the training pieces, you know, 10%, 90% was food. And, um, it truly was, you know, you'd eat something and it would show up on your body, you know, a few days later, I thought, what an, this is like, you know, alchemy. I was so amazed.

So that was kind of how it started. And what I love about nutrition is unlike every other science, pretty much you can agree on in chemistry, you put, you know, two reagents together and you get, uh, you know, something that happens and you can replicate it over and over. In nutrition, you can't get the most basic things agreed on. People, saturated fat, it's terrible, it's creating heart disease. And you get other people, no, no, saturated fat's the answer.

That's really what you need to be doing. Keep your insulin low and you can use as much saturated fat as you want. So I always say, if it were aerospace, if the equivalent of aerospace were like nutrition, they'd still be arguing about which way to point the rocket, up or down. You've got to figure that out first. And you look at the USDA, they just reversed a 30-year position on cholesterol.

You don't see any other science that says, hey, we've been building bridges wrong for 30 years. Cars, we've got to go back to the way we did in the 50s. Oh, my God, yeah. That never happens. But in nutrition, that frustrates people. I find that absolutely fascinating. It is happens. But in nutrition, that frustrates people. I find that absolutely fascinating. It is. It is fascinating.

And in today's day and age where we have so much convenience in front of us, we have so many snack foods and we have so many fast food restaurants, Doritos. We got Oreos, all these kinds of things right at our fingertips. And I think a huge problem is just a lot of it's habits, right? People develop these habits. They get used to the flavors of these things. They become desensitized to how food should actually taste. Anyone who's tried a carnivore style diet or anyone who has abstained from eating junk for a long period of time knows how good some almonds can

taste or know how good eggs can taste or butter or a steak can taste fantastic, but you lose how that's supposed to taste when you start eating cereal and you start eating all these other things, your body is really flooded with all this. But in my opinion, what I see is people are kind of behind in almost everything that they do. They're behind all day on everything. They go to bed too late. They wake up too late. They're behind the entire day. And because of that, it starts a cascade of stress. They don't ever really think about where they're going to get their food from. cascade of stress. They don't ever really think about where they're going to get their food from. And therefore they're already stressed. They make poor decisions. All of us make poor decisions when we're overstressed. And I think it's a repetitive cycle and it's it is about the food, but I think

that the food is, it just happens to be there. And it's people's, you know, people are making these poor decisions over and over again because they're stressed from their job. They're stressed from their spouse. They're stressed from all these different things. And I just kind of see it as people are kind of fighting this uphill battle every day. They're behind. And it's very hard for them to get ahead. The only way to get ahead is to win.

The only way to win is develop good habits. But how do you develop good habits when you're behind? Some shit that i'm seeing it's kind of over and over again how are you seeing some of this go down well you talked a little bit about it uh also in the war on carbs which is sleep people think of sleep as i'm going to try this new ergogenic aid over here i'm going to try this nootropic over here but sleep is think about if you live to 90 a third of your life is spent sleeping. So it's also, if you're super well rested, A, you can train better, but you're super resistant to temptation.

You can, you know, your stress level's down. So I really think about sleep. It's also one of the most difficult things because the amount of time it takes. So you can't just squeeze in 15 more minutes and not, I don't know about you, do you use an alarm? Do you wake up with an alarm i usually wake up before it like i don't really i don't really i mean i said it occasionally but i usually wake up before an alarm goes off you should stop doing that just even i don't even set it at all look here's the thing i find people say oh i always wake up before my alarm yeah that's because you're tense and there's some part of

your brain you know we've got you know we've got a clock exactly and the secret is if you need to wake up by a certain time you got to go to bed earlier, which you talked about earlier. And, you know, you got to make it a job where you are, your goal is how much can I sleep? And you do that for, for some people can take weeks, can take months. Once you work off your sleep debt, you start waking up super, super early. And, you know, I never use an alarm and I, I'm super rested all the time. And I'm not a guy who likes sleeping. I know a lot of people,

I'd much rather not need to sleep, but the only thing I hate more than sleeping is being tired. So I always, you know, I sleep as much as I can. Being tired is, is fucking absolutely awful. It's,

it's awful. And people get so used to it. Once you aren't rested, you'll never go back. Once you say, Hey, like people go on vacation and they think, Oh,

it's cause I got away from, you know, stress or whatever. A lot of it is people slept a lot. That's really what it comes down to. Nothing, nothing can really help you when you're, when you're actually tired, you know, you can try to fake it a little bit. You might get like a small spike in energy. You might have some coffee or something, but like, it really just doesn't, nothing really seems to get you out of that except for being able to get some rest. Yeah. When I first met my wife, she, it took her a while to work.

It took her nine months to work off her sleep debt. And then after, so she started sleeping, you know, 10, 11 hours. And then ultimately went back to nine and then to eight. And then sometimes, you know, seven and a half. But you really do need to put in the time. What's sleep debt? I never heard anybody talk about it in that sense. Yeah.

I was just going to ask. It sounds very interesting. Hashtag sleep. Oh, well, William Dement is probably the, it certainly used to be the foremost sleep researcher. And I don't know if he coined the term or not.

What a fucking great thing to be known for. Yeah. Cause you, what do you do for a living? Sleep. It's all about sleep. It's better. Just the other day,

I talked to another guy who's an expert in human fecal studies. Poop stories. So, but, so William DeMette calls it, he says, look, sleep does look like a backpack. People think they can get around sleep, but every hour of sleep that you miss, it's like throwing a brick into your backpack and you're walking around carrying tons of sleep debt. And the only way that they've done lots of things to try to work it off. Throwing a brick in your back. I shouldn't be really jacked by now then. It doesn't make any sense.

Well, it doesn't work for you in that way. But he said, if you want to work it off, let's say you've got 70 bricks. The only way to get out of sleep debt is to re-sleep the 70 hours. I'm not sure I totally believe it, but they have research to back it up. Yeah, they do have more research now

showing that you can kind of make up some sleep, but he's talking about you can make up sleep from like a long ass time ago. Not only does he say you can, he said you will have to. In order for you to ever be, if you sleep, if you lose 70 hours of sleep over a year,

in order for you to get back to normal, you're going to have to repay those 70. He said people think that, oh no, I only need four or five hours. He said that those are people that are just working on chronic deficits. Actually, there's's a guy the book just came out like i don't know about a month ago and the guy said the same thing he said the number of people that are fooling themselves saying i can get by with x amount like five or six hours he said really they studied this

in the lab and i think they say about seven seven hours 15 minutes if i recall or between seven and eight hours pretty much every single person needs that if you're not sleeping that much you're just in sleep debt yeah so and you can measure inflammatory markers and things and you can see and you want to drop those one of the fast not fastest but one of the most effective ways to do it just get people to the point where you know put like a let's say 100 million bucks in their bank account they have no stress and they can sleep really well their inflammatory markers drop it's not very replicable. Right, right, right, right. Mark, let's try it.

I'm down. Let's try it. I'll be your test subject if you're interested. We'll have to take a baseline. So we've got to take his blood now. And then before we deposit the 100 million. Dude, I'll be the lab rat. Yeah, I'm in. I'm glad.

It's so hard to find candidates for this. This is great. I'm down for the cause. When you're talking about, you know, being able to, you know, get proper rest, you know, you and I, we both, we work for ourselves, you know. It's a weird thing working for yourself because, you know, I'm sure you've come to the same realization that I did that you don't really. You end up still being trapped in some weird way into doing some things that you don't always want to do. But anyway, you know, being able to set your own schedule and not having an alarm, not having to necessarily be in a certain spot at a certain time. Or even if you do, just getting the proper rest is going to be key.

So for you, how do you kind of set up your day in order to get the right amount of sleep? Does it always kind of start with you being conscious of, okay, ABC is coming up later in the week. I'm going to have to, are you kind of prepping yourself for that? So, you know, there's, I guess there's two kinds of people. There's people that like similarity and sameness every day. And there's people like variety. I'm definitely not someone that likes sameness all the time. However, I have found my body thrives on consistency. My training thrives on consistency. So to me, I've always been battling, Hey, wanting to have a different day, every day different. So I go to bed the same time, pretty much every day between nine and 10, um, usually like nine 30. Um, and I wake up,

if I wake up in the middle of the night or if i wake up at any time i try to go back to sleep get as much sleep as i can until i just can't stay in bed and then i get out and um you know you you find that your time dwindles down to the point where you're only sleeping exactly what you need um but it's it's a matter of consistency this whole idea i've tried it of like hey weekends i'll stay up later it doesn't work and i think that we're very um susceptible to the amount of light in the environment so right even if you're sleeping let's say eight hours and 15 minutes and you're not using an alarm clock that's good but i think getting those hours that are in conjunction with

the light into your eye um makes a big difference like you know one of the things we we have been kind of scared of uv light but this was something really interesting i read about recently in china in the 60s um kids uh there had about a 20 incidence of myopia so you know they couldn't see far away they had to wear glasses what do you think it is today the percentage of kids that used to be 20 in in the 60s what do you think it is today kids that wear glasses in taiwan and china that's probably double 96 holy shit so obviously not enough time has occurred for a genetic change to happen so they were trying to figure out hey what did it and make a long story short they looked at that four percent of the kids and those were kids that spent a lot of time outside and at first they thought it was that they were maybe looking at

longer distances and they figured out that it was the amount of uv light that they got in their eye that's crazy so we'll get some of that from a tanning bed, right? You can. Yeah. And they figured out, like, I think you need like 10,000 lux, which is 10,000 candle power. And, you know, they're understanding it better and better. But now they're actually holding classes outside because if kids don't have UV light in their eyes, they will actually develop myopia. And it's much more prevalent in Taiwan and China.

But here, too, you know, a lot more people wear glasses today than they did certainly, you know, 200 years ago You ever heard the phrase as far as the eye can see? I have Have you ever tried to look that up before? You mean the etymology where it comes from? No, no, which i've done that as well. But uh, just uh, how far how far can you actually see? Oh, um, That's a good question. No, I never have.

It's mind boggling. You can see really fucking far is the truth of it. So it has to do with how big something is, obviously. So you can see something from very, very, very far away if it's large enough or if nothing's obscuring your view. Andrew, if you can kind of look it up and poke around, you can't really find like a real answer, but it's amazing how well your eyes can actually work. Yeah.

And it's something like, you know, I pop up questions like this with my son. He's always really fascinated with something. Somebody will say something and he'll be like, what does that phrase mean? And I'm like, oh my God, I pop up questions like this with my son. He's always really fascinated with something. Somebody will say something and he'll be like, what does that phrase mean? And I'm like, oh, my God, I don't even know. I don't even know what that actually means. I don't even know how far the eye can actually see. You know, in researching some of this stuff, I know you're fascinated with trying to be as efficient as possible in kind of all aspects of your life. It seems like what's the deal with like a bed?

Like, can we sleep on just a normal bed? Do we need to get some special bed or should we be sleeping on the ground? I mean, a lot of people are trying to move towards like more natural things. What's your thoughts on some of that? When I was probably like 19 or so, I was talking to a spine surgeon. And for some reason, he started talking about beds. I said, what do you think the best bed is? And he said, a firm.

I said, is firm good or is really firm even better? He's like, well, it probably doesn't matter. But real firm is better for your spine. And he ultimately said, you know, a futon, something like that. And I think firmness is a big deal. People love super soft beds. I know that if I sleep in a hotel or something, I can sleep pretty much anywhere. I don't have any problems.

But compared to a firm bed, I, you know, your lower back doesn't get tight or anything like that. So I think firmness is a big deal. Obviously, darkness is the other one in a bed. But so technology can can play to our favor sometimes, you know, in some cases. So we don't have like when it comes to food, you know, food has made a lot of advances. There's a lot of different things out there that you can grab a hold of. Even, you know, even as far as preparation of our foods and as I've been kind of diving down this rabbit hole and, you know, experimenting with the carnivore diet and looking at a lot of different things, just trying to open my mind and understand that like,

I could be wrong about a bunch of stuff and just trying to find answers. Really. Uh, you start to learn that like, uh, there's, there's a lot of things that are, you know, inherently wrong with things like, you know, things that you were taught were healthy and you start to learn, well, these things aren't even natural. Um. Something like olive oil, you'll have one, you know, one group of people say olive oil is great. The fats in there are great. And they do this, that, and the other thing. And if someone else say it's terrible, but it's not a, it's, it's not a naturally occurring thing. Olive oil can't really, but humans have made it. Have we made some stuff, whether it be fruit juices, supplements, have we made some things that should be accepted like a bed? You know, like just, I mean, you know, obviously, I think we would all agree that a toilet is a good invention because the other option isn't great.

Not all would agree. Actually, there's people out there saying, hey, listen, the very position that we very position that we go to the bathroom in, you should be in a squatting position. We have the squatty potty here at the gym. I actually noticed that. I was like, wow, these people are really advanced. So, yeah, not everybody would agree with that. But yeah, you're right. We're into our poop.

Well, you guys look at every single aspect, which I love, of health and nutrition and training. Leave no stone unturned. One thing I did just read actually yesterday, they were looking at two types of primates. And they have basically the little guys, they sleep sitting up. And then all the big guys, they sleep lying down. And they actually make a bed. Because somebody was asking the question, why do we use pillows? It seems kind of, you know, a natural, a new invention.

And they were saying, no, if you look at the large apes, they sleep with pillows and they make a bed and they've looked at EEG. So they actually are measuring brain waves. The large apes have much deeper sleep than the people, than the monkey, or the, I should say the primates that are sitting up. So they think that being able to get

to those deep levels of sleep did kind of require a lying position and creation of a bed and a pillow, which is sort of surprising. So that's one thing that may seem a little newfangled, but probably makes sense. Certainly a soft mattress. You know, I know my dogs, if they have the opportunity to lay on concrete or on a bed, they'll always take the bed and they will take, we have a couple of beds, but my wife was saying the other day, they always take the bed that has the little pillow headrest and they put their head on it. So, you know, I think that's pretty ingrained in us.

They want to be, they want to be comfy. They do. They do. And there's something nice about having your head supported. So I think that's actually a fairly natural phenomenon. You've told this story probably 10,000 times, but let's just have you share it with us. told this story probably 10,000 times, but let's just have you share it with us. Uh, tell us kind of how the quest nutrition whole thing got started. Uh, you told me a little bit earlier, earlier that, uh, originally you were kind of into technology and, uh, some of your advancement from there, uh, into quest nutrition. Yeah. So I had a couple of software companies we built and sold some software companies. And at that time, this is probably going back eight and a half years or so. My wife was making protein bars. She was competing in figure. So, you know, wanted to get really lean. And we didn't eat any of the protein bars on the market simply because they had a lot of like maltitol at the time and things. And they were all loaded with carbs.

at the time and things. And they were all loaded with carbs. So she would just make them at home and we'd eat them. And then one day she said, Oh, you know, take these to work. And I took them in and I went into the tech room where we had, you know, like 15 guys that were, you know, programmers and, you know, there's like Dorito wrappers over here in the corner and, you know, regular Coke and, you know, Snickers. And I gave them to him and I said, Hey, you know, my wife made these, they're just the low carb protein bar. And the next day I came back and they said, hey, can we get more of those? And I was thinking, wow, that's kind of strange because these guys are out there. They can eat whatever they want. Why are they asking for this?

And I brought more and they ate those. And obviously that was the genesis of the idea. You know, this could be a business because food was such a big impact in my life. And we wanted it quite selfishly for ourselves so that we could keep our carbs low as we were on the road. And that was really the beginning of it. So that was the genesis of it. Took a long time to actually make it into a shelf stable product.

But my wife made the first 14 bars and she was the R&D department for the first couple of years. What was the transition like into like starting a business now? Did you already have some money from, uh, you know, selling the tech companies and things like that? Yeah, man, we had, um, so I have a business partner of 28 years. We, uh, were college roommates and basically said, Hey, you know what, let's get rich. And, um, that was really the reason we got into business. A lot of people say they want to help other people or they want to do

things, but quite frankly, you know, I'd just seen a lot of people struggle with money. And I said, you know, actually somebody showed me a videotape when I was 18. And one of the things it said is do not work for other people. Don't trade time for money. Find a way to become unimportant to the generation of your own income. And I was young enough and dumb enough to believe that. So I started off and, you know, we started off in the restaurant business. We had three different restaurants. We were like 19 to 21 years old. Um, I remember waiting to turn 21 so we could get our liquor license to sell alcohol and look great with, you know, 60 employees. Everybody

thought, oh, this is amazing. Well, you had a full course load in school. Um, make a long story short. We got, uh, our asses handed to us in the restaurant business and then got beat up in a lot of other businesses. So we learned how to lose a lot of money. Um, and, um, we, we did that and started in technology about 95 and we built and sold two companies. And was there any times in there where you were like, geez, like, uh, a lot of this shit ain't working kind of thing. Oh yeah. I mean, I think for, you know, Micah Osborne and I, you know, my business partner, we looked at each other and said, Hmm, ever since I've been hanging out with this guy, I've been getting poorer and poorer. Uh, so you, you can't, you know, try to move towards a goal and keep getting further and further away. You guys are like, hold on. There's gotta be one good idea in here somewhere. There's gotta be. Um, yeah. And why we kept hanging out,

uh, you know, didn't seem to make a lot of sense at the time. But we always knew that our other option was just to go and get a job, which didn't sound very interesting. So we kept through it. And when we got on the internet, we weren't really particularly enamored with computers or anything like that. But we knew that the internet was going to be this big thing and it was going to change the world. And we said, we better learn it. Otherwise, we're going to kick ourselves. And then we got into software and learned how to write. And when we were coding software, we built teams.

And that's really the big thing I think we learned over the whole time is how do you build a team? Because business is the one sport, if you want to call it that. There is no amazing single person in business. Everything comes down to a team. You know, you've got people that are great singers or maybe a great golfer that can do everything pretty much by themselves.

But in business, there's no way around it. I mean, I've tried to think of ways around it, but you're ultimately going to have to deal with those human dynamics and how well you put those together is what determines the fate of the business. If you have a great team and you know how to like give people what they need at the right time to keep them going, you can build something that's much bigger than you. That's actually very interesting. I think only in the technology space could you learn something like that because with other, with other businesses, there's just not as many facets to it.

You know, with, when it comes to technology, when it comes to building a website, there's, there's just so many other things that go into it. How has, how has that background helped you with Quest Nutrition? building a website. There's just so many other things that go into it. How has that background helped you with Quest Nutrition? That's actually a good point that I've never had anyone bring up, but you're right. Since I don't code and my business partner didn't code, we had to rely on other people. So you had to get good at figuring out who actually could do what they said. And you're right. It kind of forces you to bring disparate groups with different skill sets together. We always, Quest was always kind of a tech company in the sense that our website was very important to us. A lot of protein bar companies, when we

started, you know, seven years ago, they didn't even sell anything on their website. That wasn't a big deal. They were, they were in grocery stores. Would you say that your website oftentimes was maybe a little bit ahead of where you guys were, or was it kind of in line with like where you wanted to go, or was it behind where the company was? When you say ahead or behind, in what sense? Just look, feel, operational. I'd say it was always behind because, you know, what you have in your mind is never. I understand. It's good.

But in terms of efficacy, we, I think really it was two years before we put the protein bars in any stores. And that was really good because a lot of it's controller destiny. Most people, they create a product and they want to get it on shelf. The problem is the value in building a company is building the brand for two reasons. Number one, a lot of people think, oh, if I can just get it into the distributor or get it on someone's shelf, well, it's going to sit there and usually be yanked off the shelf. And that's the worst situation. You need to build the brand. You've got to build followers.

You've got to actually get the product in people's hands. Only then, when it goes on a shelf, now you're enabling that customer to act. And a lot of people don't realize it's your job to build the brand. It's not the distributor's job. They're really just enabling the product to exist so that when people want it, they get it. But you have to let that awareness build. What do you think is something that really separated the company out? For me, being a huge fan of bodybuilding for many years and being someone who's taken every supplement.

We talked earlier about HMB and vanadryl sulfate and all these different weird things that we've tried and done. And I've had nearly every protein bar. At this point, I haven't had every protein bar because there's so many on the market now. But all the old school ones I've tried, you know, I tried many of them. And a lot of them caused, you know, a lot of problems for me. And a lot of them caused, you know, a lot of problems for me. And when the Quest bar came out, I remember right away recognizing that it was different. The texture was almost a little bit more like the original Metrix bar, which was loaded with tons of sugar.

And one of the few bars that actually didn't hurt my stomach. But the Quest bar, you know,, it chose to go a different route. You know, it used a different, different style of fiber and, and all these different things. Do you think there was a particular thing about like the taste of the bar, the design of the bar? Like what, what was it that made it different? Because quest nutrition, uh, I, was, you know, at one point you guys were the fastest growing, one of the fastest growing companies in the United States, period, regardless of the space you were in. Yeah. So I think the accurate thing to say is Quest is probably the second fastest growing food company. Trobani was number one.

They went from zero to a billion in five years. That's unbelievable. You know, we went, so we were number two. And if you want to kind of put your finger on what it was, it's a little surprising to me because you got to give people credit. We were a low carb bar, truly. And we were obsessed with that. We had our own war on carbs simply because giving people more opportunities

to eat carbs is probably, it's not exactly a, a pressing national issue right now. There's plenty of, you know, Doritos are delicious. You got cinnamon rolls that are amazing. Doritos are fucking great.

They are. And the people that, you know, the, the most advanced part of food science really is the taste. Like if you think about cool ranch, the amount of science that has got science that's gone into that it's amazing you can just put one in your mouth and you're like wow these scientists really know what they're doing by the way side

note uh i've done all the research extensively there is nothing better for weight gain than a fucking dorito you're you know i swear to god you can't even tell what a dorito is like in its original form like you don't know what it came from right i mean it they say that you can't make something out of nothing but i think i think a dorito is something out of nothing but you realize one of the best ways to train your mind is to buy a bag of doritos and eat one and leave the open bag there all day your mind will get so strong if you can resist it's pretty amazing they really do like you can actually feel yourself craving it oh man i gotta try that that sounds terrible it is terrible but man you feel

yes can we do that at this gym and no one would survive would they anyway so just to finish up what you were asking about um it was the fact that people saw oh wow this really does have low net carbs because you know the protein bar came from a pretty checkered past like some of the old bars were using sugar alcohols to hide carbohydrate and people got it they were like you know i have plenty of carb sources in my life if i want those but if i want something that's low carb and has protein and fat then that's really the way to go and uh we did sit around and talk about well people get this and we were told you got to remember the year before we started there were 1100 protein bars that were added to the market. And we were told

in the first two years, listen, I need another protein bar, like another hole in the head. And people don't want your kind of bar. They want candy. They want things that are coated and they want things with chewy, gooey nuts. And they don't really care about the nutrition. They want to fool themselves. That's what we were told. We said, listen, that may be true. I remember the first Arnold sports festival we went to, we pretty much couldn't give the product away. We had, you know, we'd hand it out to them. They'd put both hands up and say, I don't eat protein bars. And we'd have to say, oh, you're our customer. And the first two years, people imagine, because, you know, we went from zero to 400 million in four years. And people think, oh my God, it was so

easy. But it certainly wasn't as hard as a lot of other businesses. But the first year, it was so easy, but it, the, um, it certainly wasn't as hard as a lot of other businesses, but the first year it was really surprising how resistant it was. But once people saw the macros, that's really, and that's why I say you got to give people a lot of credit because people really got, yeah, I probably should be cutting my carbohydrate consumption back. That is a huge, uh, a huge reason why it took off in my opinion. When I, I remember years ago and again, I've been on and off a ketogenic diet for a long time and being a power lifter and veering off the diet and having different goals and wanting to be as big as possible. I remember when the Quest Bar first kind of came around and I was looking at it and I was like, man, this is, this is really a great

product because who can I think of that this doesn't fit in their diet? You know, if it fits your macros, right? Yeah. That's a huge thing. Flexible dieting is a huge thing. I'm like, flexible dieting, if it fits your macros, a ketogenic diet, somebody who's bulking, somebody who's cutting.

I'm like, this fits everybody. And it also has fiber. It's like a lot of times we could use that extra fiber with all the protein we're eating sometimes Yeah, and philosophically that's how we look at the company is you want to give people control because people There really is no ideal diet. I mean people have different opinions on this and obviously the science is not straightforward But I think it's probably clear that our diets are going to cycle at different times. And if you don't give people the opportunity to take their fat or protein up or down or fat or carbs, you know, you don't want to create something that's across the board. The macros are the same. Like, so if

you are chips are basically 72% protein, whereas a quest bar is about 40 to 50% protein, you know, by calories. And that's really depending on what you're doing, whether you're cutting, as you said, or whether there's some sort of performance thing you're getting ready for, um, you just want to give people control. And that's ultimately the company promises control over nutrition without having to give up that craving. You know, you can, um, basically indulge your cravings without the, uh, the foods moving you backwards. They're going to actually move you forward. Cause that's one thing we never wanted to do. A lot of companies are now saying, Hey, we're better for you.

We're going to make a chip with a little bit less carb. We're going to make a drink with a little bit less sugar. That was never our philosophy. It's either food or it's not. And you know, we were chasing chicken breast, broccoli steak, and that's what we kind of aspired to.

So when you guys first started, you kind of, you just mentioned that it was like almost for selfish reasons. Like you just wanted to make money. When you guys came out with the bar, was that also for selfish reasons, like you just wanted a bar for yourselves to take because you guys were both into fitness? Yeah, really. I mean, that's what it was, is we were eating, I guess what you'd call the prototype of a Quest bar for probably eight or nine months before starting the company. And, you know, I think we all have things in our lives.

And, you know, I'm sure Mark was, he didn't say, Hey, this is a way to help people. He probably had, um, tricep, shoulder problems, et cetera, and said, Hey, I got to solve this problem for myself. And that's, that's usually how these things start is, you know, it's, it's the typical entrepreneur's, uh, conundrum, like, Hey, what's a problem I can solve. That's one way to go about it. And a lot of times there's something in your life that you see, Hey, here's a problem. Oh, I solved it for myself. Then someone says, Hey, Mark, what the hell is that? And then before you know it, now you're thinking about how you can take over the market in Kuwait. Um, but, uh, that's, you know, so it definitely starts, I think oftentimes starts from a selfish thing. You know, it's an interesting thing for me to go through this learning process. It's been very slow for me because I don't know.

It's a weird thing. I am not really that driven by money. Now, I am driven by, like, doing better, and money is a byproduct of that. The company has to continue to move forward. So, you know, in a sense, nowadays, I am driven by that. I do want to move the needle. I do want to provide more for people. But what you said earlier today really took me back.

And so when someone says they want to make a lot of money, there's a lot of things that people can do with that money. They can kind of, you know, they can do whatever they want. They started a business and stuff. But I think what you chose to do is, is absolutely fucking amazing. It really blows my mind. What, what you're able to work on with this keto pet sanctuary. I, I think it's, I think it's an amazing cause. I think it's wonderful what you're doing. I have friends who've had cancer. I think it's an amazing cause. I think it's wonderful what you're doing. I have friends who've had cancer. I have friends that have children that have cancer. So to me, that is a really awesome thing that you're doing. And so how did some of this start? Is some of this a fascination with nutrition in in general yeah so i mean that's one

of the things is you know if you have money what do you do with it obviously you know when you're making it rain well yeah that and when you're 18 you want you want the uh lamborghini or whatever but really it ultimately comes down to resources in terms of being able to make things happen in the world and keto pet started well um i guess i'll go back there was two guys that came to our office at quest uh probably five years ago one was dominic dagostino you may know him he's probably absolutely yeah the best connected um uh shit that guy is sharp and is that guy strong he's incredibly strong he is ridiculously strong you know he trains about like 15 minutes in the gym like two times a week that's

he lives in the lab he's got tons of students he's got a lot of responsibilities but he's a keto guy he's done a lot of work with the navy and he was the guy who really put ketogenic diets with hyperbaric oxygen and um and then tom c like lived underwater for like 10 days he did he does a lot of crazy stuff he's he's a really nice and super smart guy and he came with a guy named peter attia who i don know Peter Atiyah? Yeah, absolutely. Peter is a super interesting guy as well. I need to get connected to him because I think he'd be wonderful in the movie. He would be. He would be. Remember though, actually, you know what? He's a closet meathead as well. Like you would never know it, but if you get him talking about training, he will- I love it.

So he'd be a great guy. They basically came to the office and they spent the day with us and they educated us on basically fat metabolism and ketones. And we got a huge appreciation for the importance of fat. And, um, we heard a lot about ketogenic diets, which, you know, you may know, we're starting in the twenties at Johns Hopkins university to help kids who had epileptic seizures. They worked super, super well, actually better than the drug protocols they had and still have today. And they were kind of relegated to epilepsy. And then in the last maybe 10 years or so, people started talking about, wait a minute, you know, cancer. There's a guy named Otto Warburg who in Germany figured out that basically cancer cells have a different type of metabolism than normal cells. And it relies primarily on glucose

for its fuel source. And people started thinking, wait a minute, ketogenic diets, you know, that ketogenic diets increase fat metabolism and they suppress glucose. Maybe that makes sense. Boy, this is getting to be a long-winded story, but make a long story short. They came to the office and we started thinking about ketones. And I wanted to see, hey, is this real? Because I heard about this guy who cured his

cancer with ketogenic diet hey this lady over here did it and i said hey can i see the pet scan oh well he's actually in italy and i i could never get the you know the information because one of these you got to be careful so you're not fooling yourself a lot of people just oh they believe it um so there's a lot of credible there's definitely science i'd say ketogenic diets are the most scientific diet but nobody's ever put any money into determining is it really what it's cracked up to be because there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow there's no pharmaceutical there's no there's nothing there so we said you know the best group of mammals to try this on would be dogs because we can control their diets dogs can't drive to mcdonald's they can't eat Doritos. So if we write it down- Have you ever seen Family Guy?

You're right. I'll say this. Without human intervention, they can't get the Doritos in their mouth. So we got a 53-acre ranch. We did it in Texas because we needed a radioactive materials license because we wanted to get a PET scan.

A PET scan is what you use in human medicine to determine, it's a gold standard to determine if people have cancer. cancer basically you inject them with radioactive glucose and you look at hey which cells are burning more glucose the cells that are burning more glucose are cancer cells and that that's the warburg principle is the actual definition of how we determine cancer in a pet scan so pet scans aren't used in veterinary medicine so we got our own pet scan which was as you can imagine about 50 grand a month just to have one of those. And we basically took dogs from kill shelters.

It sounded like a really simple idea. Hey, we'll go to kill shelters right before they inject that dog. We'll say, stop, we'll take it. We'll put hundreds of thousands of dollars into that dog. And we're going to try to cure it of cancer with ketogenic diet. So we'd go and they were like, hmm, who are you guys? How do I know this dog's not going to end up in like a fighting arena? It's a seven pound Chihuahua. Why would, you know what I mean? Come on. And they were like, Hmm, who are you guys? How do I know this dog's not going to end up in like a fighting arena?

It's a seven pound Chihuahua. Why would it, you know what I mean? Come on. It was very difficult to get the dogs released. Finally, we did make a long story short. We got quite a few dogs with just about every type of cancer out there. We put them on ketogenic diets. We took a PET scan on day zero, day 60 and day 120. And we had amazing results.

That's, that's incredible. What kind of results did you end up having? Um, how, you know, how many of these, these dogs get cured of anything or? So, uh, the word cure is a very charged word. Uh, here's what I can tell you. There's actually a book called the keto pet Bible. It's about 700 pages. It's got every pet scan, every, all the histologies and all the pathology reports. Here's what I can say in a short period of time. There's something very powerful about ketogenic diets and cancer. We have certain dogs that had like hemangiosarcoma. It's the number one killer of dogs. If you type in hemangiosarcoma to Google, you'll see, usually they don't even recommend chemotherapeutics. They say, listen, just enjoy your

time with your dog because it's just a matter of time. We have a bunch of dogs. Some of the ones actually that were on screen there who had hemangiosarcoma and they have no evidence of disease, which is really what, you know, the word cures really never used very much in cancer. No evidence of disease means we can't see it. Gotcha. So if you look at Callie, actually Callie is about to come on screen here. There she is right there. So her first, there she is again.

She, I think when we got her, her first PET scan has six or seven spots. Her next PET scan, which is two months later, has like three spots that are glowing. And then her third PET scan had zero. We PET scanned her a fourth time. And then we've given her about 17 to 20 ultrasounds after that to make sure. She had hemangiosarcoma. She was given, um, I think originally like, uh, six weeks. Uh, and that was three and a half years ago.

So hemangiosarcoma is one we've done mass cell. We've done, you know, all kinds of. In what period of time was this done? How many weeks did there were dogs on this diet? We, we, well, we, we've, we've kept Callie on the diet since that time so for two and a half years but it was 120 day program that was just an arbitrary thing we kind of established um that's fast it's it is fast but remember so let's make sure we get all the the data out here right we didn't cherry pick dogs so we had dogs that died two days after we got them um we have dogs with massive i can show you pictures massive massive uh tumors uh we also did not have a control group so this wasn't like a randomized you know controlled trial a lot of people say you guys are doing great science it's not really science you have dogs so you're connected

to this pretty you know it's not not an easy thing no having these dogs sick and have these dogs die yeah my wife was you know she had to fly into keto pad and, you know, it's not, it's not a lot of fun, some piece of it, but we have so many success stories. So basically if we got a dog early, with a few exceptions, you know,

there, there was a time I remember for maybe the first year and a half of the program, we had zero metastasis, meaning, you know, when you get a tumor, you don't die of that tumor.

Generally you die of when it spreads. And for a while we were able to say we never had any mets, but that's not true. of the program, we had zero metastasis, meaning, you know, when you get a tumor, you don't die of that tumor. Generally you die of when it spreads. And for a while we were able to say we never had any mets, but that's not true. At the end, we had a couple of dogs that metastasized even on the diet. So here's what I can tell you after keto pet, we did three human studies, one with Cedars-Sinai in, um, in Los Angeles. It's a famous, you know, a hospital. We were with brain cancer patients there. We did a breast cancer trial. And it's pretty amazing. The funny thing is the breast cancer trial turned into a weight loss study. So I think it was 20-some women and they lost a collective 360 pounds, even though we were trying not to lose weight.

The goal was just to put them in ketosis and, you know, focus on the cancer. Does that have anything to do with cancer treatment as well? Were they getting radiation? No, because these were women. No, no, these women weren't getting any of the treatment. These were women that had super, super early stage or, you know, stage zero, as they call it. So there wasn't any chemotherapy to worry about. There wasn't anything like that.

But it was just interesting as one of the side effects was, you know, their cardiovascular markers look great. I mean, their inflammatory markers dropped to nothing. And, you know, a lot of the cardiologists were saying, wait a minute, you're eating what? You're eating bacon and all this stuff. But they ended up saying, listen, whatever you're doing, you know, I've been following you for 30 years. I've never seen your blood markers like this. So keep doing it. So that was kind of an interesting side effect. That's incredible.

That's incredible. Obviously, I'm sure that you've had testing done to see if you have cancer yourself since you were learning about a lot of this stuff. Is that right? I have, yeah. How does somebody, how does our average person, someone who's just listening to this, like what, first of all, would you advise that people kind of get that checked out and is it simple or easy or is it really expensive or complicated or anything?

Uh, it's super expensive, super complicated, very confusing. Um, so speaking frankly, right now where we are, it's pretty interesting cause you think about the war on cancer, uh, did they rip that off of you? I don't know. They might have. They may have. cancer, uh, did they rip that off of you? I don't know. They might have. Well, you know, it's an interesting thing because, uh, uh, I, I recently have, um, you know, for the employees here, I try to do certain things for them, little perks and stuff that we, that we do. And, uh, you

know, I paid for everybody to get their blood work done. We got a guy reading the blood work and, um, just trying to help everybody out. Anyone who's interested in, uh, you know, wanting to know what's going on in their body and, uh, all that kind of stuff. And I mentioned it to Bruce and Bruce is like, man, Ron saved my life. He had, you know, these different tests done on some of us. And, uh, somebody came in which is supposed should be an easy process because it's, uh, it's really for somebody else. Uh, giving blood can be beneficial to, uh, someone like myself where my iron can sometimes be a little bit high. Um, but it's kind of a pain in the ass. Um, not the actual act of giving the blood, but you go there, you answer like 50 questions. It's time consuming. It's cumbersome. You could be sitting there for like 30 minutes or so. And it's just to do it once a year. It's worth it. It's a good cause. It could save somebody's life. But it is a pain in the ass. the ass. Even to do certain things like get body fat tests done, it's hard to know what style of body fat test do I do. A lot of these things are just kind of a pain in the balls. And it would be great if things were just made to be a little bit faster and easier. You are totally right. And just getting blood work alone, first of all, you got to find a place to get it. Usually, you got to get a physician. At least in Los Angeles, where I know, there's just getting blood work alone. First of all, you got to find a place to get it. Usually you got to get a physician. At least in Los Angeles where I live, there's a place called Wellness Mart. You can just walk in and you check off what you want and there is a physician on staff and you can get it. So they're making it easier. But the biggest problem is the interpretation of those results because nobody wants to be the guy saying, hey, this means that, you know, you mentioned iron and something I've been reading a lot about, you know, you get a serum ferritin test f-e-r-r-i-t-i-n by the way do we want to go deep or is this like a shallow show no no go for it are you sure your your readers will get it aren't

they meatheads and stuff well we don't have readers so they're all just listening so we're good did i say readers yeah sorry i meant. Yeah, so you're telling the audience it's sophisticated and we want to go deep. Yeah, I mean, might as well. I mean, we might be, this podcast is going to take a really long time, I think. Okay. I think we're just going to be here. If it's not deep, it doesn't count. So let's do it.

So ferritin is kind of interesting. Sorry, I got excited. Ferritin is kind of interesting. This is something I never really thought about. I read about it. I don't know if you remember the book protein power. Uh, yeah. 2001, uh, Mary, Dan and Michael Eads, who I have tremendous respect for. They wrote a book called the protein power life plan in 2001. And they said, you know, you should get your iron tested, get your serum

ferritin levels. And ideal would be probably between 50 and 70 nanograms. And, um, and what they said is that as you get older, especially for males, because males don't menstruate, so they hold onto their iron, your levels are going to get higher and higher and higher. And iron is very, very reactive. It's so dangerous in the body that we actually have ferritin, which actually wraps the iron and protects it.

And, uh, if you look at, you know, breast milk, breast milk has zero iron, um, and there's reasons for that. Iron is, it's a heavy metal. It's very reactive. Um, if you, there's reasons for that iron is it's a heavy metal it's very reactive um if you there's been quite a bit of research if you just take iron from somebody who has high iron their insulin sensitivity gets better just in and of itself so it's possible for you know meatheads that you could actually get leaner potentially but it's a test you want to take and the reference range for iron it cuts off as high as depending on what reference range you use 330 nanograms or i think i've seen some as high as 430 um males as they get older every decade after like 18 you get more and more iron and um you the only real way to get

rid of it is to give blood as you said and uh it's one of the things you want to track and you know this is opinion and i wouldn't say this is established science, but, uh, you probably want to be in the 50 to 70 nanogram range. Um, I had mine done recently. I came back at three 27. So I will be for the next, it'll probably take me eight sessions, which you can only do every eight weeks. Uh, but I'm going to try to get my level, you know, below 70. So, but, but you're right. The pain in the ass factor. I think it's great that you did that here because you know, you can benefit from it so easily. Well, and then there's so many different things that you can get tested. It's hard to even know, you know, what it's hard to even know what you should get tested. Well, I'll give you an opinion on that. So just to maybe make it a little easier, I think HSCRP, which is high sensitivity CRP, that's a really good overall inflammation marker. If that number is high, there's a lot of other stuff going on. So if you come back with a super low, I think that's thumbs up. I think that's a good one. And then there's ways to measure insulin sensitivity, like C protein and fasting insulin. So you basically go in without fasting. fasting. If you look at centenarians, people that live over a hundred years, they smoke, there's ones that drink, there's ones that eat Doritos. But the one thing they all share,

there's really two things that you can say about centenarians. Number one, they're usually lean. You don't really see people over a hundred that are really fat. Secondly, they have great insulin sensitivity. Beyond that, it gets tough. It's kind of disappointing. People thought, oh, let's just look at people that are living forever and we'll see what their secret is. But it, it points to the fact that, you know, controlling insulin is a really, really important thing. So we talked about ferritin.

We talked about HSCRP. That's an easy one. You get high, high sensitivity, CRP C protein, which is a measure of insulin sensitivity and fasting insulin. And if those are very, very low,

they'll give you a reference range and you want to be definitely on the lower end of the reference range. Those are some easy ones. Because, you know, a lot of the things that people measure, in my opinion, aren't really that interesting. And generally, like, you know, looking at like a lot of people were making a big deal about cholesterol. And it's kind of turned out to be that maybe that's not a real indicator of heart disease. Yeah, there's, you know, it seems to be 50% of the people have terrible markers. And 50% of those people that have terrible markers don't get heart disease, and the others do.

And then you got people with amazing, so-called amazing blood work, and they 50% get heart disease, 50% don't. So I think our understanding there definitely is complicated. Additionally, the typical panel people run, if you want to know more, you got to get like an NMR lipoprofile, which goes much more deeply. It's actually counting the type of particles of cholesterol. But I think at the end of the day, 10, 15 years from now, people are going to say, listen, that was a big distraction.

We were looking in the wrong place. There definitely are markers that I think are going to correlate. I just think that we're not there. And, uh, there, there's some people that are doing some pretty interesting work. I think the next 10 years,

it'll, it'll be clarified because right now people just say, Hey, my cholesterol is too high. Well, you shouldn't even say that. That doesn't mean anything. 10 years can't come quick enough.

My dad just had, uh, like two, like a hundred percent clogged arteries. And they, they, they said it was all due to a, a weird high cholesterol level in his body.

Cause his body naturally produced high cholesterol. Yeah. So this Peter Atiyah, uh, we talked about him. He knows he sees, he may be, I'm going to take a guess here.

He's probably the fourth best red, no best, uh, knowledgeable guy on this. You, there's a couple couple things you can measure like desmosterol and uh you can be a hyper responder or hyper producer um which can give you something i'll tell you one thing i just recently had a coronary calcium score done

what that does is it basically is looking in your arteries to determine do you have calcification happening and that's one of the tests your test score is either zero or it's something. If your test score is zero, that's regardless of what your cardiovascular markers say, that's a big deal, but that's where you start seeing it. And had we done that to your dad 10 years ago, we would have seen, ooh, gosh, he's got calcium building up. Yeah.

That is, the bad news about it is by the time you're no longer zero, something's wrong. But obviously, you know, there's a big difference between one, two, three, higher as you go. And then also you can do something called an IMT, a scan of your carotid artery, which stands for intramedial thickness. And basically, you can do it here. We did it at Quest. We had a guy come in with a little ultrasound probe and they just go up and down your artery and they give you the score. And if you start to see stuff building up, it's really powerful to know, oh my gosh,

I'm actually, I'm already seeing the beginning of heart disease. Whereas if you never think about it, it's not that motivating to do anything about it. So unfortunately, like you should definitely get an IMT scan. How old are you? So I'm going to be 33. So a lot of people would say you'd start with an imt super non-invasive if there's a problem you might want to consider a cornea calcium score um but an imt they're cheap they can actually come here to the office and do it or you can just go get all the benefit of all this is that uh you know backing uh into cancer again is that if we know early enough then uh maybe we have a good fighting

chance of being able to do something about it. Yeah, that is going to be the solution to the war on cancer. We're going to be able to detect it because right now, the only way you can detect cancer is a basically the best way and the gold standard is a PET scan. But to see it, you need a trillion cells minimum to be able to get that thing to fluoresce on a PET scan. So at a trillion cells, you already have, you know, quite a bit of cancer. We need to be able to see a hundred thousand or 50,000, and that's going to come in the form of a liquid biopsy. A lot of people are working on that. And I think in the next couple of years, you're going to see some very interesting work in that regard.

We need to die from something, right? Something's going to catch us. Yeah. I guess it's hard to tell what would be the best thing to die from. But I've heard some people say, you know, that, you know, obviously you don't get to pick, but some people, you know, have kind of pointed out, like, everyone's so fearful of a heart attack, but most of us are going to die either from that or some other weird complication.

So I think what you said about people may be focused in on some of the wrong things. You're not going to be able to stop heart disease. You can. 100%, you think? I mean, look, again, now we're totally in the realm of opinion. I think that you basically have growth processes and repair and you've got damage processes. And I think that the machinery could be pushed a lot further if we understood it. Um, I think that diagnostics are going to change. Like I think, you know, here we're having a conversation 50 years from now, people are

going to laugh saying, Oh my God, those guys had no idea. I mean, think about this. Um, when you started in 1994, I think was when you first did your diet, you couldn't even have tested your ketones and blood. And I remember the first time I tested my blood glucose, I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. This is the secret to everything. And now I can actually predict within usually like a tenth of a millimole what my ketone level is. And, you know, that's one kind of- You can like feel it. I can kind of feel it, yeah.

That's amazing. Yeah, it's, you know- It's very ner one kind of, you can like feel it. I can kind of feel it. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, it's very nerdy. It's very nerdy. Yeah. A few years ago, I had never measured my ketones. So the testing is going to get better and better. There's going to be urine tests.

There's going to be things where you're really going to be able to see, because I find it when it's kind of like a video game, when you get instant feedback, it makes sense. Like, um, you know, you, um, eat a health meter. That's what we need. We need to be walking around with a health meter that's what we need we need to be walking around with a health meter like over our head yeah like um all the time a little health bar uh here's a crazy cool during ufc fights it would be that's right peter attia actually has an implantable glucose monitor that he wears 24 7 and what he watches what how everything eats so he'll you know he put us to the test at the office. If you, um, it's going back about a year and a half,

maybe two years. And he would, you know, if he eats a burger and fries, he gets a very different blood glucose spike than if he eats steak and eggs. Um, and, uh,

it made a big, big difference. And he would actually see, Hey, this is how food impacts me. And when she can see it in his body or something connected to him somehow. Yeah. So the only one they have now Dexcom makes it,

they use it for type one diabetics cause they have to be very careful, but it's basically a tiny little needle that he puts in like on his oblique area. And then he tapes over it to make sure it doesn't come out because, you know, obviously if you get dressed or turn around or even just do a twist and then it goes to his phone and it allows you to see what's going on

and we actually I actually met with Dexcom trying to get them to add ketones to it because then you could imagine the war on carbs you want to talk about diagnostics for that

you would literally see oh my god I can tell what that cheesecake did to me whereas when I did the coffee fast my blood glucose was super super low

listen people we don't need fucking technology we need to just not eat carbs yeah i mean you're totally correct you don't have to be like a super nutritional now that i see it it does for some people like it's like whoa no it helps to know it helps to know what's going on inside of your body do you still test ketones and stuff like just uh kind of a personal curiosity or or is it something that's like part of your nutrition plan in some way um i used to test i i was probably doing 30 readings a day sometimes um if you were to come into the r&d department at quest there was a time if you looked

in the trash can the amount of blood and strips was you know disgusting or inspiring depending how you looked at it yeah so we were really geeking out on it i test i probably test a few times a week especially if i did something different to see you know hey what's going on but i i can kind of tell where my ketones and glucose i can tell ketones i can't really predict blood glucose very well sometimes it's much higher than i think and what about the uh a1c a lot of people are making a thing of that. Is that, does it seem like a big? So here's the thing about A1C. A1C, okay, here's what I will say for sure. For diabetics, it works really well. A1C works on a scale of something between, you might get it, see it as low as three to, I don't know, 25, six between six and 6.5 is considered pre-diabetic. If it's 6.5 or above, it's considered diabetic. Um, and I would say from six and above, it works super, super well. You can actually just go to Amazon and you get something called an A1C now, and you can just,

you can get two tests. Uh, well, you get one test kit, but it lets you take two readings and it tells you essentially the amount of glycation that's happened to your red blood cell meaning how much of your red blood cell has been cooked by the blue by the glucose in your bloodstream so um have you ever taken your ha1c by chance i've had to test them for you so yours i'd guess by the way you eat is probably between you know 4.6 and um six for sure um but it seems to me from the research that I've been doing on a lot of different people, it doesn't work.

It's not as accurate as you get lower down the scale. It seems to have that sweet spot for pre-diabetes and diabetes. But my, you know, I always compete with my wife. She's gotten hers as low as 4.9. I've never cracked five, but I know other people that eat terrible diets just recently and they're in like the four six four five range. That's

So it's I hope it's what was your prediction on mine? Oh yours. I'm gonna guess yours is 5.6 It's 5.6. There you go. Yeah, so so mine is like It's like, uh, I guess according to The information I have here. It's a little I guess, according to the information I have here, it's a little bit high, right? Well, here's the problem. If we looked at your fasting insulin, one of the things that's out there- So my fasting insulin was really good.

It was like super low. Yeah, so here's what I think's happening. Mathematically, they figure that your red blood cell is going to live 120 days, and they use that as the math. The problem is, I think the way you eat, your red blood cells live a little live 120 days and they, they use that as the math. The problem is I think the way you eat your red blood cells live a little longer. So they pick up more glycation.

That's right. Motherfuckers. Yeah. So my red blood cells are living on. You got to feel it. You got to be careful because you can fool yourself with this stuff. It's kind of like, Hey,

my numbers aren't where I want them. Maybe it's this or that. But I do think we're working right now on canine with dogs, with the keto pet dogs and our dogs so here's what's interesting our dogs run their average blood glucose for all the thousands of readings we did non-postprandial meaning not after a meal was about they were running about 60 the dogs that were fed normal diets kibble or you know know, regular dog food, they were running 93. So that's a 50% Delta, 50% difference. So they're an HA1C basically is the average of your blood sugar for the last 120 days,

more heavily weighted towards the last couple of months, but it should correlate. And I would guess your blood sugar with the way you eat your HA1C should be lower than five, six. And I actually think the test just isn't that accurate. That that's, I've been working with a lot of people that eat super low carb diets. It just seems like once you get North of six, it's very accurate, but once you get below six, I think it's, it's questionable. So I'm looking at it. We will know in the next few months, probably. What are some other things you think are important to test? Um, I mean, you've tested everything, so. Well, you know, it's funny. It's amazing. I've actually learned just a lot about this recently.

I've tested a lot of things. Let's see. Well, obviously, you've got hormone panels, and that depends. Obviously, for males and females, that can go over. Thyroid is a tricky one because a lot of people say, oh, you know, low-carb diets suppress your thyroid. Well, does it suppress your thyroid or does it normalize it? I think your thyroid probably does run a little lower when you're eating low carbs. But I have a feeling that's the way it's supposed to be.

And obviously... That might be like a bowel movement as well. Like people are always like, man, I can't take a shit for nothing. But it's like, well, you cleaned up your diet a lot. So maybe you shouldn't be on the toilet as much. Yeah. Yeah, that's very possible. You know? you cleaned up your diet a lot. So maybe you shouldn't be on the toilet as much. Yeah. Yeah. That's very possible.

You know, and when it, when it comes to, when it comes to testing all these different things, you know, I get a lot of questions about it all the time. And, you know, people are,

the first thing people ask me every time is, you know, doing the carnivore diet. They want to know what's your cholesterol, which I find interesting that they want to know your blood work right away. you mentioned that you're on a diet as opposed to like, no one ever talks about blood work otherwise. Yeah. You know, so it's like, man, people are eating really, really poorly all the time. Yeah.

And those people are getting their blood work done. A lot of times it's us guys that are dieting that are meatheads. That's right, but they see you eat the steak. Oh, what do you, oh, that steak. Yeah, you're going to be like, are there some precautions though with some of the food that we're ingesting? Are there any precautions?

I mean, here's the thing. If you look, the paleolithic argument is you go back before 11,000 years, before agriculture existed, what were we eating? We were eating meat.

I mean, meat and some vegetables, but not really starchy vegetables. I saw a thing recently that you can google it where they were showing what vegetables looked like before agriculture and if you look at vegetable or vegetables or fruit nowadays they're completely different they've been so cross-bred um that you know if you eat a if you've ever eaten an apple in the in nature it barely has any sweetness if you've ever eaten a strawberry in the field it tastes more like water maybe a tiny touch of sweetness but you go to the

supermarket and you eat a strawberry it's like a candy bar so same with corn if you look at what corn used to look like a long time ago it had like a little bit here there a couple of um kernels but now that these things are you know ripe plump with sugar so um i think all of our ancestors were just the amount of available carbohydrate is was much much lower we're kind of screwed when it comes to food in a lot of ways uh because even even a cow is like uh an animal that came from something else right like even a cow like 10 000 years ago they they kind of bred it as food for us yep right yeah yeah but if you look at if you look at just pretty much all mammals and you look at their muscle tissue it all kind of comes around the same even the fat composition like a lot of people think oh i got you fat fats there's a ton of saturated fat well remember the

primary fat in beef or any red meat is almost always monounsaturated. So there is saturated fat, but usually it's like 45% mono and then 40 or less percent saturated. So you're right that they have been messing around with that in agriculture, but I don't think it's as big of a deal in meats. I'll say this, you know, if you look at a bison 10,000 years ago

versus a cow today, it's not nearly as different as a stalk of corn or something like that. That's a fruit for sure. For yourself, in all this testing, have you noticed any difference in eating vegetables versus not eating vegetables? Surprisingly, no. You'd think, I used to always make sure, oh, I got all my vegetables, but lately I've been playing with less and less. If anything, I've gotten leaner. I mean, I got all my vegetables, but lately I've been playing with less and less. Um, if anything, I've gotten leaner.

I mean, for, for sure. And, and it seems like, um, and then health markers. No,

my, my, you know, my same ish. Yeah. The, the biggest things that, that I think really make a difference is inflammatory markers tell you,

Hey, something's going on. And once they get so low, it's kind of tough to really, you know, unless obviously if you did something and they went back the other way right but no i haven't seen any like you know smoking gun you can say hey look at this i think that inflammatory markers are great as a first place for people to look at

just because you know that sleep can influence that diet can influence that um and there's a guy named jack cruz who wrote a book called epipaleo RX, you know, and he's looking at things like what type of polyunsaturated fat, like the amount of six to three in your cell membranes. That's another thing that you can look at, you know, really they're looking for like a four to one or less ratio in your cell membrane. So four parts omega-6 to one part omega-3. And people are always saying that we need vegetables. You need them to be healthy. You need them to go to the bathroom we need the fiber do we really need that i think the answer there is a lot of people would try to kill me for this but uh probably not and

if you think about it i think all of our ancestors certainly if you have like you've got light eyes and uh so your ancestors definitely thank you for noticing your ancestors certainly spent more time in the cold probably than mine did uh and i think if you if you come from the cold during the winter ron's eyes are pitch black people were eating um pure meat uh here's the crazy thing if you if i were to give you a piece of paper and i said hey mark i'm gonna put you in a in the hold of my ship for four years you can write one food down and that's all you're going to eat for the next four years your mission is to arrive not only alive in port for you for now but in better shape than you are now what would you

write down choritos well there you go and you would be dead and the crazy thing is you really basically have two choices you've got some sort of meat, red meat, could be seal meat, bison, anything has enough fat or eggs. Anything other than that, there's no single food you could subsist on. And does that mean that we should only be eating that food? No, of course not. But I think it's pretty interesting that meat, like for example, people say, what about vitamin C? You're going to die of vitamin C deficiency. And that's not true.

I mean, the Chinese spent months and months at sea, but they had access to live. They had these huge wide ships and they had access to fresh meat. And as long as you have access to meat, you'll never get scur have said that there's no vitamin C at all in meat, but he, he says that there is, he says it, they just say that it's 0%, but he's like, there's, there's not a lot, but there's small amounts of vitamin C. So we just, you know, it's hard to, uh, really know like, you know, what the hell it is we're being told sometimes. Yeah. And, and, you know, the good news is it's all measurable. I mean, sometimes like the vitamin C thing, you think about it, we're, we're made of meat. So, and we have vitamin C in us, obviously. So if you eat us or meat, you're essentially getting some of that, but it is strange how it seems like when the, the British went to eating hard tack, which is

basically like a carb cracker, that's when they got scurvy. And if you don't, if your carbs are low, your vitamin C requirements are definitely lower. And there's lots of people who have gone decades eating just meat and they never, they never get scurvy. What's the deal with vegetables? Like, you know, in a supermarket, they put all kinds of, like I've heard, they put weird stuff on them. They put like collagen or they put plastics on them to help them, uh, last, you know, last longer, longer shelf lives and stuff. Have you heard anything about any of that?

I do know of a red gadget reminding me. Yeah. A few years ago they were putting a, um, like some sort of polymer on it. I remember reading about it. It didn't seem like it was anything troubling because I remember it was like a food grade polymer, but it did keep the, basically it stopped as much oxygen exchange, which really probably isn't a bad idea i know people get freaked out right uh but but there could be other things they're using that that we don't know i'm just talking about one in particular yeah so that that brings up another good point i mean sometimes some of these things they might be dangerous in some ways but they might be beneficial in others they may and one of the things you got to think about is it's the whole parito principle, the 80-20 rule. Like people focus so much on like these tiny pieces of it, but their macros are totally out of whack or they're, you know, they're not paying attention to the types of fats they're eating. So those are the big places to focus on. And if that's, if that's all clear, then you're a nutritional geek. Yeah, you can go and focus on what the vegetables are sprayed on. But, you know, all this stuff should be measurable.

And a lot of these things, they aren't. So they can't be too crazy important compared to other things that have huge, you know, looking for the auxiliary markers. How do you have time for all this? It seems like you're into a lot of different things. You've got your hands in a lot of different things. You mentioned to me that you read a lot.

I do. You read like sometimes four hours a day. Yeah, I like to read. And reading is reading is like man you're transported to another place um so i yeah and i read all the time on my phone like a lifetime student yeah learning is really what it's about you know and i think it just depends on what you read like you could like facebook for example i'm not a huge facebook fan because people are controlling the information that they're presenting so usually i'm researching something and then that clicks into something else and that clicks into something else. And you just, you got 15 browsers. So you're not on social media that much.

Um, you know, I, I use Instagram cause I learn about stuff. Um, I think that's great. I'm totally that, you know, social media has been really important for the growth of the business. I don't spend a lot of time Facebook in particular, just that's me. important for the growth of the business. I don't spend a lot of time Facebook in particular, just that's me. I know people who, a lot of it is Instagram. You basically build a community based on what you're interested in. So it's very relevant. And I know with Facebook, you could do the same thing. Like, Hey, I'm only going to basically link up with people that are of mindsets that I'm interested in, but Facebook, because it tends to be more social a lot of times

like, Hey, it's like, you're just seeing kind of crap. We had a pretty good question on the chat room over here. We have a 48-year-old police officer. He's been working at a graveyard shift for years. He's wondering, should he be eating, like, breakfast when he gets off work, which is usually about 1 p.m.? Or, sorry, that's when he wakes up. So should he be eating, like, a typical breakfast when he's waking up at his random hours or should he just be focusing on just eating clean? Wow, this is an interesting question that we can-

He's getting plenty of sleep. So I asked him, he says he's getting about seven hours of sleep after kids and family stuff. But he is also curious, like should he be training like a normal person? Well, I know what Mark's gonna say. Mark's gonna say, get Mark's going to say, get divorced, stop being a cop, stop seeing your kids and train all the time, which I think is

very bad advice, but luckily you're here. Get your ass in the gym. Yeah. No, it's interesting. His question was, should he be eating? So one thing that's really cool, you know, you touch a lot on this Mark in a war on carbs is the whole concept of intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is something a lot of people have heard about. They're, they're kind of confused. So two things I'll say on that, which will ultimately come back to this question. You can take two groups of rats. Well, I lost a step back one more time. The only thing that probably everybody can agree on a nutrition, there's probably only one thing that I can think of,

and that's caloric restriction. And caloric restriction has been done on rats. It's been done in primates. It's been done in lizards. It's been done in yeast. It's been done in flatworms. Not only has it been done across the board just about on every animal, it's also been replicated time and time again.

So you've got lots of different researchers at different universities, and pretty much they realize if they subtract about 20% to 30% of the calories of an animal, it lives longer. And if you look at the late stage animals, they look like the young ones. And that's, I think, very well established. Now, somebody then said, well, wait a minute, what happens if I feed an animal whatever it wants today, nothing the next day, whatever it wants the third day, nothing the fourth day? Well, the animal's not dumb, it doubles its caloric intake on the days it can eat. So it's not calorically restricted, but it has the same benefits of caloric restriction, which means it's not the calories.

It's actually the time periods without food. So just two weeks ago, I was reading an article about Huntington's disease. Huntington's is like the classic genetic disease. If you're either your mom or your dad has the allele for it. It's kind of a rare disease, right? It's pretty, it's pretty rare, but it's not, not super, super rare. Like you don't hear about it. And the reason it's used as the classic genetic disease is if you get one, if either of your parents have it, you've got a 50% chance.

And if you have it, you will die pretty much at the same age your parents died. Now I use this because what they did is they then started intermittent fasting these rats. And they noticed that just by changing the eating period, so the two groups of rats were eating the same thing, but the one group was getting it, their fasting period was longer. They saw they were measuring the markers. The disease progression was much slower just by changing the eating window. they were measuring the markers, the disease progression was much slower just by changing the eating window. So I think the question this police officer is asking is a good one because, you know, he's, he's not, um, he's awake at night, which is tough because of the, you know, the light,

the circadian, uh, rhythm is, is screwed up there. But should he be eating breakfast? I think the most important, he could eat breakfast or he could eat dinner. Um, one of the things I know you, you do like a 16, eight. Is that what you, when you intermittent fast uh i i use a lot of intermittent fasting but i don't try to like put like an exact clock on it um i know there's some research that shows like you know if you go longer get a little bit more benefit uh but i also am a believer in stress and so i i don't like to like overstress myself on anyone. I don't want to be like, oh, I can't eat yet.

If it's time to eat, I'll sometimes just, I'll be like, okay, that's time to, I'm going to eat. Yeah. I think for this guy, you know, a really simple thing is just, uh, when you're home eat, you know, because it's, it's just easier to cook and prepare food. Yeah. And so, yeah, that, so in his case, um, one of the things you might want to consider, uh, he may want to consider. So a 16, eight means you're going to fast for 16 hours,

eight hours of which are going to be asleep. So that really means you only have eight hours and not eating. And then all of your meals are going to be consumed in eight hour window. A lot of us come from the fitness orthodoxy that said, Hey, carry a cooler around. If you don't eat six times a day, you're destroying your metabolism. Don't skip meals. I did that for 13 years. And I believe that. Um, and now I think it's pretty clear, like two years ago, there was a breast cancer study that came out. Women who had a 13 hour or less fasting period had like a 36% chance, increased chance of getting breast cancer again. So there's something magical about periods without food. So for this police officer, I think the most important thing isn't so much when he eats, it's how much time he has

between meals. So, you know, it sounds kind of counterintuitive, but smashing your eating window together, you really want to make sure that for a good 16 hours is a good number. You can go, some people go 24, meaning 20 hours of fasting, four hour, all their meals written in that four hour window. I think that's probably the most important thing. And a lot of people get leaner just from that. They just find, wow, I didn't do anything different. I didn't change what I ate. I just smashed my eating window. Um, when I first started intermittent fasting, you know, one thing you say in the book, which I thought was really smart, don't start intermittent fasting right away. Usually you go keto. Cause the first time I fasted, I was like, this feels terrible.

I have a headache. People start it all right away. They do it all right away. And the problem is calorie deficit, intermittent fasting. I'm going to train. I'm going no carbs. Like,

man, you just really do a lot of stuff at yourself. That's right. When I first keto adapted, it took me a long time because I, um, I was still addicted to glucose. My body was screaming for it.

So I got headaches. I felt terrible. Um, and that's the first step. Look at you now screaming for it. So I got headaches. I felt terrible. And that's the first step. Look at you now. Oh, yeah. So to finish up there, I think that focusing on macronutrients, getting into a ketogenic state is the first step.

And then you can play with intermittent fasting. And I think that how he does his fasting window is more important than whether he eats breakfast or night. It's just you need 16 hours is a good number. Have you seen studies on intermittent fasting and a ketogenic diet? Have you seen anything about that? Because I think I've never personally tried intermittent fasting without being on a ketogenic diet. But I also have a hard time understanding how well it would work.

I'm not saying that it wouldn't work in the same way, and I'm not thinking that you would lose a lot of muscle or anything, but, man, having those glucose spikes up and down and craving carbohydrates, I think, would make it that much harder. I totally agree. I think you put your finger on it. I used to say that the gateway to intermittent fasting or fasting of any kind is keto.

If you try to fast when you're still glucose addicted, it's brutal. I remember the first few times I fasted, I thought, this is a terrible idea. And then once I went keto, I just kind of automatically ended up intermittent fasting. And that's what you find is people that are like, let's say, if they have a high percentage of carbs, they might eat four, five, six times a day. Once they keto adapt, and that can take a long time. Like you talk about it in the book. It's not like three days. It's, it could be weeks and weeks to get there where you're feeling really, really good. All of a sudden people say, yeah, I'm eating about twice a day. I used to never forget to

eat meals. I heard people say, oh, I forgot to eat today. I was like, wait a minute. I've got a clock in my head. I know exactly when my next meal is going to happen. I used to think that was insane too. Somebody say, I forgot to eat. I'd want to punch him. I'd be like, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life. I totally to think that was insane too. Somebody would say, I forgot to eat. I'd want to punch him. I'd be like, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life. I totally agree with you on that. And now, I could easily forget.

And also, if you don't have access to food, you might get a little hungry, but you don't get hangry. And the big, big difference. When you're on carbs, it's like,

man, you're feeling like you want to tear the wallpaper down to get to something. But, yeah. What was that weird noise? I still get hangry. Jessica's saying she still gets a little hangry. But, yeah. What was that weird noise? I'm still getting angry.

Jessica is saying she still gets a little hangry. But, you know, girls, you know. You know, some people, when they're on a ketogenic diet, they'll talk about, you know, how they get like keto flu and they get, you know, these different kind of side effects of kind of starting up a ketogenic diet. And you mentioned yourself, it was a difficult, what's something somebody can do in the first couple of days to get on a ketogenic diet that maybe help avoid that a little bit. Yeah. So this is something that I didn't fully appreciate till I did put a lot of other people on ketogenic diets, salt, which you talk about in the book.

Um, and then you can do potassium and magnesium. And if you want to cover your bases, you really have to really heavily salt your food. I actually, there's a guy named Jamie Caporoso. Do you know him? Has he ever been on your show? I do not know him, no. He's a good guy to get on your show. He told me he has something called epi, I'm sorry, paleo, keto paleo.

He's a power lifter. He's always at the shows very interested in nutrition etc and he told me ron you should be salting your food more and i usually when i hear something if it sounds interesting i do it for some reason i didn't do this for about like two years and he said if you're super low carb he said if you go before you go in the gym if you salt your food you basically have it feels like you have more to push against. It's not quite like a pump. So anyway, I started doing it and all of a sudden I was like, whoa, I, I, because you're not holding on any water. So you, you know, when you're, when you're keto, um, even though I was way past the keto flu, so keto flu is something that happens usually for

the first few weeks when people first start keto adapting and you should focus on sodium, potassium and magnesium. And you can just go to a store and just get, you know, those supplements, but salt your food heavily and then take potassium, magnesium. That's how you get rid of it. Any, have you heard about any particular recommendations on how much? I'll tell you a book that does a good job. I don't know if you, have you read the ketogenic Bible? I have the, yeah.

Yeah. So ketogenic Bible is a great book. I've recommended a lot. People ask me all the time and I was like, Oh, read it. I don't read the basics anymore. It's insane how much information's in there. That book is insane. Um, it pretty much covers everything. And it's, it's the book that I've been kind of recommending lately just because people, you know, if you can read it from cover to cover if you're a nutrition geek and you can just dip into the section and they talk about keto flu they talk about all the resources i looked at it a lot you know and writing the war on carbs because i was like uh i don't

know like i don't want to say the wrong shit you know it's interesting you know the war on carbs and the ketogenic bible are kind of opposite books the war on carbs you can read and you're on your way and you know 10 minutes if you read really fast or a couple hours if you read really slowly and it's there you can like every page is what you need to go the ketogenic bible goes to the other degree it goes deep and that's that's you know when i i was inspired by the book because i was like i want to go the complete opposite direction that they went and they did such a good job covering everything. I'm like, I don't even know this information. Like I, you know, I've been on a ketogenic diet for a long time. I don't know half the information that these guys know that they put in this book.

And it's amazing. It has a lot of great info. But as I was looking at it and as I was digging through the science and the history, I'm like, I don't truly know that. I do know, I do know what I know and I'm going to write about that. Well, it's interesting, you know, that's, you're making me think about it. The two books are very similar and on opposite ends of the spectrum at the same time. Like if your goal is to be able to do this stuff, yeah, the war on carbs is going to, you're going to be able to read it. And obviously referencing, you can go back through and I love the way you did that um like the coffee fasting something we both do a lot of yeah and the way you just showed how your week looks with with a visual graphic um and

yeah the ketogenic bibles for someone hey they're getting peppered with questions they want to understand the the science more that's there um but that's that's uh let's talk a little bit about the keto there the um uh coffee fast yep how do you how do you do it well i you know i um i've never really been a huge coffee drinker i don't feel coffee so i don't um i don't get any stimulus indestructible some people uh what how what how does that work some people just uh like don't break down the caffeine enzyme or something like that right i think it's the opposite so i i if you get 23 the caffeine enzyme or something like that, right? I think it's the opposite. So if you get 23andMe. Metabolize it or something, right? Yeah, you metabolize it super fast.

So 23andMe is something you can get. It's a, you know, a buccal swab. You just basically, you know, stick a Q-tip in your mouth, send them the thing, and there's a genetic test. And they'll come back and they'll give you a lot of information on your DNA. They don't tell you much about it because the ftc uh or the fda i think or maybe both of them said hey you're making too many claims so they had to really back down what they were saying but there's a section in there that shows you what type of metabolizer of caffeine you are you can be like a cc which is a very slow metabolizer a ct or tc which is

kind of in the middle and you can be a tt i happen to be a TT, which is why if I drink coffee, I don't feel that I can go right to sleep afterwards. Also, if I drink coffee for nine months and stop, I don't get a headache. I don't notice caffeine. So for me, it's just, especially when it's cold, I like to drink it, but I could take it or leave it. But I find that it's amazing for appetite suppression. And the one thing I think everybody can agree on is if you, if you can get control of your calories, that's a great place to be. So the way I use it, I use either butter or cream, sometimes MCT or some of the MCT powder. And I just use it in the morning and then I won't eat till noon or one or two, depending on how long of a fasting window. If my last meal was at 6 p.m., I can easily get 16 hours in.

And I think the way you said it is really good because it's basically, you call it a coffee fast or a fat fast. You are taking fat and people say, wait a minute, I thought a fast meant you're not eating anything. And that's technically true. But when you're not eating anything that can convert to glucose, meaning carbs or protein, it's different. And I still think your fat burnings is super high and you still feel kind of like euphoric a little bit because it feels just like you're fasting but it does take an edge off the appetite a little bit and i think it's a great technique in some weird way it's almost like uh your body didn't truly register that you had a meal

uh because there's really i i could be saying this wrong but i don't think there's anything that happens to your insulin or your glucose when you have just fat by itself is that correct yeah that's right and you can test it for yourself just get a you know a blood sugar kit and you can take a reading right before take your coffee take a couple others you'll see fat is different than the other i remember when i first learned about uh the bulletproof coffee stuff and um you know having you know putting having, you know, putting butter, MCT, coconut oil, whatever these combinations of things are in your coffee. And I remember the first thing that came on my mind, and it actually ended up being something that kind of

stuck with me forever was, I was like, that's disgusting. And I can see how it would make you not want to eat. And, and I think that that I think that that's a kind of forgotten thing about that particular thing. Now, some people might think it tastes good and whatever, but it is a weird combination. You know, it's a weird combination for somebody to kind of take on. And I was like, that's kind of disruptive to your stomach in a lot of ways. I totally forgot that. But, you know, when I first heard about butter in your coffee, I had that same reaction.

I forgot because I love it so much now. Yeah. I like it too. But that's a good point. I do remember getting that kind of like, Hmm. Yeah. That's I had forgotten about that.

In some weird way. It's kind of like, you know, somebody gets a bodybuilding diet and the coach is like, yeah, go ahead. Eat, eat as much tilapia as you want.

It's like, who really enjoys tilapia that much? That's right. Exactly. Right. It has it. Yeah. And so I yeah, go ahead, eat as much tilapia as you want. It's like, who really enjoys tilapia that much? That's right. Exactly right. It has, yeah. And so I think, you know, it has a satiating factor to it because of that partially. And then also, I think, yeah, you do get used to it. What about bone broth?

Have you messed around with bone broth at all? Why are you interested in bone broth? I love bone broth at all. Why are you interested in bone broth? I love bone broth. I'm not really sure to be honest with you, but it's just something that kind of came up that has been part of the food selection that I've kind of boiled everything down to, I guess. You know, Rob Wolf had this kind of elimination diet where you eliminate a lot of stuff from your diet. had this kind of elimination diet where you eliminate a lot of stuff from your diet. I started playing around with that years ago. And then also in doing the war on carbs and then venturing into the carnivore diet, the bone broth was something that kind of stuck around.

I do remember years ago, you know, when I first started to learn about collagen protein, they were like, oh, this is the greatest thing ever. And then all of a sudden it fell out of favor and it was the worst thing ever. And I know that collagen protein, I don't think has a great like amino acid profile or anything like that. And some people will say it's completely useless for muscle building and whatever. I actually like the bone broth. Hopefully it's not doing anything detrimental to me, how you're going to tell me coming up here, but it's not gonna make me grow tits or anything like that. But I really, I really enjoy it. A lot of times I'll mix some heavy cream in there or some butter or something like that. And so for me, it's something I usually add to, I have it with a meal. Sometimes I'll have

it at night. I think having something hot, I think helps you with control, controlling your foods, controlling the amount of calories you're taking in. And so that's the reason why I utilize it. So you, this is something I've thought a lot about. I've read a lot about, I'm actually thinking about it right now. I can tell you just things that I've thought about. I really don't have an answer on this, But people think, hey, our connective tissue is made of collagen. Therefore, take collagen and your connective tissue will be better. And they've even studied it. And, you know, Carl Lenore from Superhuman Radio.

You've heard of him? You don't know him? I don't know him personally, no. I've never met him. He's amazing. Oh, yeah, he's amazing. You definitely want to. I got to introduce you.

He's really, really a cool guy. He actually had a guy on who did research on basically jumping rope and they were looking at collagen and how it would repair connective tissue. Here's the interesting thing. If you take somebody who has scurvy, their teeth are falling out of their mouth, their connective tissue is completely broken. And if you feed them hundreds of pounds of collagen, what happens to their scurvy? Does it get better? No.

So when you eat that collagen you break it down to its constituent amino acids and then you have to rebuild your own collagen and if you don't have vitamin c you can't do it so clearly eating collagen to improve your own collagen is not a simple equation of how you are what you eat not really you basically eat something convert it to amino acids and you might rebuild it into that or you may not. So I'm a little bit skeptical of collagen because you're correct. Basically, we eat protein for a lot of reasons, but for amino acids in particular. You got your methionine, which is how you make IGF-1. You're probably interested in that because you can grow on that.

Then you got your three branch chains. Those are the three amino acids as well as others that are super low in collagen. So no one's going to argue that collagen is some amazing source. And basically what you're going to do is you're going to feed a lot more calories to get the amino acids. And so bone broth may have other benefits. I think the warm thing you said, absolutely. I think we were talking about that earlier, how that can suppress appetite in and of itself more than like a cold drink. Absolutely. I think we were talking about that earlier, how that can suppress appetite in and of itself more than like a cold drink. And Jamie Caporoso, the guy that I mentioned earlier, that's actually how he would get his salt in with bone broth and things like that.

I just think that you got to be careful thinking that I know collagen is the hot rage right now. And as a product formulator, I can tell you collagen is an amazing protein. It's so easy to work with. You can put it in your coffee. It goes into solution, but it's not a great protein source. So I don't use bone broth. And if there's other things, I think marrow is different. So bone broth actually is more than just collagen. Straight collagen, I think, is more questionable. Bone broth with some of the marrow and the fat, that's very different. That could be very interesting because if you look at ancient people, they wouldn't eat the muscle meat, they wouldn't get the steak, they'd go right for the liver, they'd go right for the intestines, and they would break bones and suck out the marrow. Bone broth is definitely a really weird thing. There's some bone broth in this grocery store

that's just on the shelf in a regular spot. And there's some that's refrigerated. The ones that are refrigerated have like coagulated fat on it. And the ones that are on the shelf don't really have any fat. So it's like I'm not sure, you know, which one does what. But it sounds like that makes some sense. The one that has the gelatins and the different things in it might be more beneficial in some way. Yeah, well, actually, I'd say the ones that have the fat because they're going to need to be refrigerated because they're going to go rancid.

Right. So the ones that are on the shelf are going to be more collagen. And the ones that are going to be bone broth that have like the coagulated stuff that you were talking about, that's almost certainly going to have more fat. It will rot. So from a nutrition standpoint, I mean, yeah, that's going to get you something very different than just the spirit collagen.

What's the weirdest thing you've ever done in terms of nutrition? Because there's like, you know, this is a weird rabbit hole we go down in terms of, not nutrition,

but in terms of your health, period. I could probably write a book on it, but the first one that came to mind, do you remember Cybergenics? You're pretty young,

so you may not remember Cybergenics. Dude, don't, don't come at me like that, bro. Of course. I remember fucking cybergenics. Kidding me.

Well, so sore from that shit. Well, if you remember cybergenics, do you remember it was basically a, uh, there was two days. It was a program and a supplement regimen as well.

It was, it was. And if you remember the, there's a couple, one of the strangest things about cybergenics is that you were not allowed to drink any water that wasn't. Cybergenics. God damn. Bringing back some memories.

And the first two days you were supposed to eat twice your BMR in pure protein. That means you could eat egg whites or egg whites. I mean, you know, because you couldn't have any fat. Can I just say this? I'm glad that we're out of the egg white era me too and that was i think most of us are at least anyway yeah shit man that was a tough time we went through some rough times i could never i could never get enough down i could never i couldn't do my bmr let alone twice my bmr pure protein oh there it is. Cybergenics. He found it. Oh, he found like a video on it.

Wow. Good job, Andrew. Can you name the spokesman, the male spokes, the male model for who cybergenics was? I don't think I'm going to get it right. I'll make a guess.

I'll say Rich Gaspari. Franco Santorio. Oh, there we go. I don't know. I knew I was goingpari. Franco Santorio. Oh, there we go. I don't know. I knew I was going to be off on that. Yeah, no, that was quite some time ago. Damn, cybergenics.

Anyway, go back to your cybergenics story. So that was one of the weirdest things, trying to eat. So you take your BMR, which, I don't know, 2,200 calories. This commercial is fantastic. It is. The guy with the long hair. Was that you, Ron? No.

I thought it was Fabio. I thought it was Fabio. You look great in your 20s, Ron. No, let me say I did not. Oh, this is great. Now, I wonder why you and I tried to. Does that make you more? Can you name that guy?

No, I cannot name that guy. I'm not a crazy bodybuilding nut. You know who that guy? No, I cannot name that guy. I'm not a, I don't, I'm not a, I'm not a crazy bodybuilding nut. You know that guy, who that guy is. I actually do. Yeah. That's embarrassing. Yeah. Okay.

Next move on. Roger Stewart. Roger Stewart. He was known for his calves. Yeah. He was out of Florida. So according to the commercial, his name is Joe Babics. His success

story. Oh, you know, it's a little grainy, but I... Oh, the pixels. Oh, you know what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he looks a lot like Roger Stewart. It might be him, but... Let's bring up Roger Stewart's calves so we can get to the

bottom of this. Yeah, you just have been Roger Stewart calves and bam, I'm sure it'll be. Back to the cybergenic story. I'm sorry. It's actually E-W-A-R-T. Yeah, the cybergenics, you had to eat two times your BMR. So about 4,000 calories in just egg whites. And we tried it for a few weeks and we were never able to and just got super, super sick.

There's those calves. Yeah. Inch on the arms in one day. You've done that workout before? I've done that workout. Yes. Never got an inch in my arms in one day. What was the protocol that went into that inch on the arms in one day?

It was basically, it was two sets every hour. So one for tricep, one for bicep. And you had to just rotate through. There's lots of different ones on the internet, but that was just craziness. I think we need to have a day here at super training. That's like that. What I remembered about that is it involved a lot of food. It did involve a lot of food. It involved tremendous amounts of food. You had to like, uh, every time you, uh, worked out, you had to eat as well. Actually. Yeah. That's what came later. The one I did didn't really talk about food. So's what came later the one i did didn't really

talk about food oh so i basically did all the sets and i didn't didn't gain and it was before i knew anything about nutrition yeah and it was did not work you didn't have version uh version 2.0 uh going on i got very sore and that's all i got out of it oh my god anything else crazy that you've done health-wise or anything weird? Like, do you get weird about like your wifi and you get weird about, you know, chemicals in your food and just blue light? Like what do you eat a burger from like in and out or just never under any circumstances? Yeah. So I am definitely not that weird guy. I researched that stuff and I think about it,

but I heard a couple of things. I think that grass fed versus non grass fed, it's measurable. The difference, um, like I was just reading about on the plane actually coming over here. Uh, there's like, like, um, the amount of polyunsaturated fat and grass fed beef in this particular study was like, um, 2% if it came from grass fed and it was about 4% if it came from commercially fed. So, and you know, the Omega six and three changes a little bit, but it's not a big deal. So yeah, I'll, I'll eat burgers at McDonald's. I think that's a perfectly fine. Um, what was the other thing you said? You got me thinking about something. Um, I asked you about blue light and that sort of thing. Oh, so I've got a screen protector on my phone right now this actually blocks out 90 of blue light because um you know one thing i didn't realize how much research there is i have a red light machine have you ever done that so you might be interested in this that they've actually done a lot of studies with animals etc so red light you get red light from the sun and red light actually goes into your uh skin and infrared goes into your mitochondria and actually has effects there.

And there's people that have been playing with increasing their testosterone levels by shining red light on their scrotum. So you can get a red light machine. I need some red lights. Well, actually, this would be really interesting. I think you should buy one here at Super Training. Take everybody's- Scrotum.

No, don't take their scrotum. Take their baseline testosterone level and take their free test. Do all that. Then make them, every day they have to do 20 minutes a day of exposure to the red light in every room. Just block off a room here. Is this red light like a flashlight or like a gun? Can we shoot each other?

No. Well, there's a lot of red light devices. The one I have is a panel. A red light district. But it's really red and infrared. And you just need to stand about six inches away from it. You can read about it. Does your wife know about this?

My wife uses red light. Oh my gosh. She actually posted on Instagram a lot. People are like, what the hell is that? But yeah, red light directly, you know, it actually affects, you know, the respiratory complexes in your mitochondria and interferes with nitric oxide in your like breaks it off

with cytochrome c oxidase so i mean people have really looked at it and i just think you know red light blue light doesn't matter the big thing that most people think of is if you have a lot of blue light at night it keeps you awake and you don't sleep as well and um that's something that i'd say is a little bit out there that I've looked at. And that really does hold up. I had a guy come out to my house recently and do an EMF screen. There's four different types of EMF radiation. I think that's kind of much ado about nothing for most people.

Now, if you live in an apartment and you sleep. Yeah, actually, there you go. That's actually one of the articles I was thinking about right there. And that's Ben Greenfield. It's actually. of the articles i was thinking about right there and that's ben greenfield uh it's actually it says the article i think it's that's funny that that it's funny because he's on his way here now he's actually here now yeah um so that that's one of the things and i had this guy come in and checked out my house and if you live in an apartment and your head is right next to what's called a um like those power meters that yeah wi-fi it it could have an effect because you got really strong magnetic fields.

But I mean, in general, I think that that people are terrified of EMF. And right now, I don't think that's compared to so many other things to focus on. And I think that's the place. You got to live your life too, right? So what about, you know, cheat meals and anything like that? I mean, do you indulge here and there? I think you said it really well. Cheat meal, you said it's not to raise your metabolism.

It's not, basically cheat meals are, it's a social component. And I think the way you did it, I cheat the exact way you said it. I do fasts before and after. Like I used to think- Yeah, fast in, fast out. Fast in, that's exactly right. And what that does is it lets you indulge a little bit and you don't get the damage of it. And one of the things we never think about is people think food has X impact on the human body. It doesn't. What state are you going into when you eat that? If you go

run sprints and you train and you fast for 16 hours and then you eat a meal, it is completely different what's happening in your body than if you just walked out of Thanksgiving dinner and you're trying to stuff one more piece of pie in your mouth. So Thorny on YouTube here, he wants to know, when are you training if you're having these long periods of fat, well, you know, without food, that's what we've been saying. But since you're fasting, when do you mix in your training? Well, for me, I think that

depends on when you're trying to gain muscle or not. So I'm not really trying to gain muscle. I still train for strength, but I train in the morning. I train fasted. And then depending what I trained, I will either intermittent fast till like noon, or I will sometimes eat, you know, after. But if you're trying to get leaner, it's amazing. And I think it simplifies everything. If you're trying to add muscle, then intermittent fasting, there are some, you know, groups out there like lean gains where they talk about it. Um, it's probably going to be slower, but whatever you do put on, it's going to be muscle. So the post-workout meal is not the, uh, it's not important for you right now. For me, no. But if I were trying to add muscle, I could do a post-workout meal. And then I just, if I wanted to do,

it's kind of weird. Would I intermittent fast if I were trying to add muscle? Probably not because you know, lipolytic enzymes and things like that are maximized on intermittent fasting. You bring up a good point. Like if you were still, you mentioned that you were very thin when you were young. Yeah. If you were still in that state, maybe you wouldn't have chose keto either. You know, it's interesting. Probably not. However, I will tell you this. I, I got fat when I put on muscle and I think that if I had done it with keto, I would have, I would have put much less scale weight on as quickly, but it's pretty hard to get fat on keto. So, and whatever you do at, if you're, as long as your weight,

we're still going up here, you know, the weights you're using in the gym. Um, I think it's probably the most efficient way of putting super lean, uh, muscle on. However,

I think you're going to hit a point of diminishing returns where you may, maybe, maybe low carb might've been a better life. So, you know, absolutely. Yeah. It keeps popping up on the show over and over again.

The word control. I mean, it's, it's everything. It's, it's the hugest component. And I think what you did with the quest bar and the cheat clean message that you guys have promoted, you now have the quest cookies out. You guys make a protein that you can cook with. I think it's, I think it's great. You know, people ask me a lot of times about, um, you know, rule.me and some of these other

things, you know, these, um, you got a fathead pizza and you got these different versions of, uh, you can make your own ice cream keto. There's a lot of things that you can do that still fall into remaining in a ketogenic state. I have kind of often took the stance of, you know what, it's still kind of a cheat because I don't want people to get too used to these like these crazy bursting flavors over and over again to the point where that's where 90 percent of their focus is. I want their focus to be on things that aren't packaged, things that don't have labels on them. And yeah, occasionally you're going to eat some of these things to help keep you guided and to help keep you on track so you don't, you know, jump ship completely and end up completely off your plan. And so I really liked, I've always liked the Quest Bar.

I've always liked a lot of the stuff that you guys are bringing into the picture because it allows people, it's almost a friendlier way to say, hey, you know what, come try some of this out. You know, when you create something off of Ruled.me, a lot of this stuff takes, tastes awesome. My wife has made, um, you know, a keto cheesecake and it's, it tastes fantastic. We had a keto Superbowl. We had all these different treats and all these different great things. What are some of your take on, I mean, I know that you sell a product that's kind of in this spot, but what is your take on some of these things? Well, it's funny you say that because the original vision of quest was the Super Bowl party that we could go to, where normally you go to a Super Bowl party, you eat nothing and you just fast basically. Well, we wanted to go to a Super Bowl party where you had two tables, one where you had nachos and you had Oreos and everything. And

you had another table right next to it that looked identical, tasted identical, but had completely different impact in your blood profile and your health. And that was really what Quest was trying to be is how do we take foods that we love, but we just don't eat anymore. And, you know, Quest existed at that nexus between being a foodie and being on a nutrition plan. And I think your point is really good because it's really scary for some people to say, so you're saying I'm never going to eat ice cream again. Yep. You're never going to eat it again. I'm never going to have a cookie again. Nope. Never going to have a cookie. And even for guys like us, we do this all the time. It's not painful for me. It was at a time, but there's a guy in Los Angeles who made me this ice cream one time. And I still think about it. His name is Chris. Do you know this guy? Is he not that tall? He's a super nice guy. he's like really really into this stuff

that keto ice cream yeah he made he made keto pro you remember actually you don't remember because you weren't there and i wasn't i actually went out of my way he like bruce cardenas was making a big deal i said you got to try it it was like i don't know if it's maybe we've been doing this so long it was like wow it's funny i haven't had that in so long. And you want to talk about keeping people on the wagon. You have it, you indulge that, but you don't feel like you threw everything in the trash. A lot of people have a problem when they go and they eat Ben and Jerry's, forget it, the whole weekend that now they just, you know, they just can't stop themselves. Yeah.

So I do think food is such a weird thing. It's such a social construct for us. It's, it brings us together. It's like, if we can share ice cream, if I can make it, you know, I need, you said rule.me. And I don't know if you've seen this stuff on like ketogenic.com. I don't know why you would eat a regular cheesecake because cheesecake is one of the things you can make keto as good or better than the real thing. Other things, Hey, they're, you know, you're not going to make a Dorito. Um, yeah. Uh, but, uh, that's something that there's no reason to eat. You can make keto cheesecake. You can give it to, you can give it to a child, which is the best thing. If you can trick them, then, then you got it made. So they're sort of the best because they're

totally honest. They're like, Oh, this is terrible. Oh, when, whenever people are like, Oh, I love wine or I love beer. I'm like, try giving that to a kid. Yeah. They'll tell you how it tastes. You know, it doesn't actually taste good. You somewhere along the line convinced yourself that you like that. And there's other things going on other than you actually liking the flavor. I think the same thing with coffee. I don't truly enjoy the taste of coffee. Do you drink?

Do you drink alcohol? I drink here and there. Yeah. You do. I thought, like, yeah, it's like. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty, it's pretty rare. Like, I don't, I don't really, I don't, again, I don't enjoy the taste. That's right.

I think maybe if I like the taste of it, maybe I would drink more, which is a good thing that I don't, but, uh, I've never really, uh, love the flavor, the flavor of it. And even with coffee, I mean, I mix coffee and I mix my keto pro in there and I mix different things in there sometimes and I can make it taste better. Um, but something else, no one likes sometimes and I can make it taste better. You know something else no one likes? Salad. They like dressing. People love dressing. Oh, there's some salad there. But I've never seen somebody, rarely have I ever seen anyone eat a salad without dressing. Well, again, because a lot of people are desensitized to how things are supposed

to taste. If you actually have abstained from eating a lot of junk and you have some spinach, it actually tastes pretty good. I know most people are listening. They're going, no, it doesn't taste any, it doesn't taste good. Trust me. Which is funny. Cause you said in the book, when was the last time you heard someone say I'm craving spinach? And it's true. You don't, people say I'm craving pizza, but. Right. And when we're talking about nutrition and we're talking about, um, you know, uh, carnivore diet, you know, people are like, well, you know, this all this red meat, this and that. And when you go to a restaurant, what's the most expensive thing they have on the menu? Steak.

It's always steak. I mean, you're not going to get a, you know, $95 plate of spaghetti and meatballs, you know? Very true. And if you, and if you are, you're getting, you're getting, getting ripped off pretty bad. What are some things coming up for you guys? I know, you know, at Quest, you guys are always trying to innovate and always trying to do new things. The big thing now that's, you know, we just came back from the Arnold Sports Festival. It's the cookie. I mean, the cookie is, that's been a product. So, you know, we've been kind of late to the game there. A lot of people have had cookies on the market for a long time.

That was technically a lot more difficult than you'd think. It's basically got four net carbs per cookie. Just to get it to work, there's- What's a net carb? A net carb is a carb. So fiber is considered a carbohydrate, which is technically the chemically structured. That's true. But a net carb is a carb that you don't metabolize.

So when you eat fiber, it goes into your stomach, goes through your small intestine, and it gets fermented by bacteria in your large intestine at the very, very end of the cycle. And then it gets turned into fat. So you eat fiber. You don't actually digest any fiber, your bacteria digest it, they turn it into fat and you absorb that fat and fiber can give you calories, which you have to take into account. But it's not really a digestible carbohydrate. So fiber, erythritol, which is a sweetener, it has zero calories, you eat it, you pee it all out, you can collect it all in the urine. So anything that doesn't impact,

they always say blood sugar, and that's true. But essentially, it's not metabolized. It can't raise blood sugar because it's not getting absorbed. You know, the essential fats are, but that gets way absorbed in the colon. And that's what a net carb is. So a lot of times people say, should I count? Some people just count everything that's carbohydrate. The problem with that is fiber does not act as a regular carbohydrate, and it really limits

your food choices. So you can test it for yourself you can take take your blood before you can use the cookie as an example there's fiber in that uh but it won't it won't impact your blood sugar um when it comes to the regular uh or the original quest bars um were people able to eat those and if they were diabetic? Yeah. Uh, when you say original, what do you mean? Uh, just, I'm against the ones you have now. Yeah.

Yeah. So actually, in fact, if you look on Instagram or there's a lot of people that will write to us, um, I've got some on my phone where they basically said, um, a lot of type one diabetics are great because they have the implantable monitor and you can't fool them. And we get letters without exaggerating every week saying, I cannot believe I can eat this because my food choices are very limited. You know, I've got to always titrate my insulin to what I'm eating and literally my blood sugar. And they'll send us a picture of the, wow, it's like three, four points or something. So yeah. And the great news about it, there's nothing better than validating for yourself. You can take a baseline, eat any other food, and then see what happens.

And then you can take a Quest bar or a Quest cookie or something and do it. And you'll see the same thing. Same with the chips. So it's easy. Yeah, that's an interesting thing. What was the deal with, you know, years ago, you guys came out with this head. And I had a chance to talk toiel rego a little bit about it and he mentioned uh things making a comeback what was the deal with this this punching and kicking

head thing that you guys have okay um because i when i was this is before i knew you and i saw all the different things that quest was doing at the time and i was like man that's really an offshoot from you know what they're currently They have, they have a protein bar at the time. That was pretty much the only product I think you had. And then I was like, this thing is very sideways, you know, compared to what most people talk about in business. You know, you're trying to, trying to go like vertical and trying to be good at one thing. I'm like, this is a real offshoot. Where'd this thing come from? So this is, this is, yeah, totally not a business move. We're just

you know daniel and i daniel's a friend of mine he was on your show a couple of weeks ago yeah that's right uh we've always trained in martial arts and um we just saw a problem and in our own world we wanted to fix it which was you know whenever you do like striking everything that's out there for striking practice is you it's one plane so if you're throwing punches guys hitting the pads and everything yeah hitting pads i've always got to be adjusting the pad based on the kind of strike if you're gonna throw an uppercut i gotta you know twist the pad one if you're throwing punches, you guys hitting the pads and everything, yeah, hitting pads. I've always got to be adjusting the pad based on the kind of strike. If you're going to throw an uppercut, I got to, you know, twist the pad one way. You're going to throw a left hook. I got to throw it this way. So I got to keep twisting it. Well, if you had a head, that's something that was anatomically correct. You can throw whatever you strike you want. I don't have

to adjust and I don't limit you. So one of the frustrating things about pads is I'm limiting and I'm kind of governing you because if I'm not turning the pads in the right way, you can't throw the strike. So I'm basically controlling you. Well, we said, why don't we just make an anatomically correct human head? That's a striking target that you can go crazy on. Plus as a head, I can actually use the head in a way that I'm actually trying to avoid your punches. So now it's the next best thing to sparring. So it was just kind of a, a story we made, it's called the all strike and, um, it's now being sold by rev gear. And, um, it's, you know, a lot of people have used it. We, a lot of, you know, well-known people in UFC, et cetera, they just use it because it's a lot more realistic than, than a straight flat pad. I, um, I saw you, uh, throwing some, uh, kicks

and punches there. Um, how long you've been uh into martial arts for oh uh i don't know i'd say since march uh 31st 1984 if if you had to if you had to take a wild a wild guess at it yeah about that do you like watching uh ufc you're into some of that stuff yeah no i like ufc for sure there's some guys that I really enjoy. Yeah, the training for that kind of thing is awesome. Do you still practice that? Do you still practice martial arts? I do, yeah. I mean, that's kind of one of the reasons why I started lifting and martial arts is sort of the culmination of everything. You need strength, you need flexibility, you need control, you need endurance.

So it's just a good test you know in martial arts they kind of teach you in mind body spirit type deal they you know that everything's kind of connected um and there's a discipline to it um you know you don't just learn how to kick and then go kick the shit out of people on the street and and uh things of that nature. Do you think that you would have a different company, perhaps, if you were never exposed to martial arts? Yeah, I'd be a completely different person. And, you know, I grew up in the era of martial arts where it was kind of mystical.

You know, I think now it's really a sport. So UFC has broadened the appeal and, you know, a thing you couldn't even imagine. And it's also removed a lot of the BS. Like in the 70s, my hands are so deadly, I can't even train with you. I'm so dangerous. I mean, they're not sure what to do with me. Well, all of a sudden, 1993, the first UFC, two guys get in a ring.

They tried to kill themselves. No one died. And they realized, you know what? Humans are really resilient. Now, granted, that's because when you get knocked out, the ref's there, obviously you could stomp on the guy's head and that would change that. But, you know, striking when two guys are on their feet, it's very difficult to hurt somebody to that degree.

So it removed a lot of the mystique, but at the same time, I think we lost a lot of that whole thing. I mean, there was kind of that spiritual element. You remember the karate kid? I remember the first time he starts doing the blocks after his, you know, wax on, wax off period. People were like, this is amazing. And the Bruce Lee era, it really was about becoming a better person. And that I think we've definitely lost. And a lot of kids growing up with martial arts today, they don't really even get that because they don't see it unless they look at something like, you know, Kwai Chang Kane, he would travel from city to city learning and gathering wisdom. I kind of wish more people would take that approach with lifting. Yeah. cane he would travel from you know city to city learning and you know gathering wisdom i uh i kind

of wish more people would take that approach with lifting yeah a lot you can learn about yourself through diet and through nutrition here's a scary thought you look at um lifting is a perfect metaphor for so many things that you know we deal with in lives but a lot of people are really good in the gym and they suck outside of it and other people take you know schwarzenegger he took the lessons he learned there he applied it to a lot of different fields, but most people aren't able to make that leap. And it isn't talked about very much, but it should be the ultimate training ground because all of the forbearance, all of the skills you need in the gym can apply, you know, elsewhere. You talked about that at the deadlift competition. Yeah.

In, uh, at the Arnold and it's, you and it's you know it hopefully people were listening because you're right you're taking the exact same things there and that's one thing you can buy your way to a lot of things but strength and size and a physique you can't yeah you you can't um i mean you literally can't yeah buy buy the build that you have you can't really buy the bench press that you have the squat that you have it's it many, many hours of hard work in the gym. And I mean, part of the reason why I'm so passionate about a lot of this stuff, part of the reason why I hop on this podcast all the time and trying to produce a lot of content is to kind of show people that. Like, if you make this part of your life, your life can be a lot better. For sure.

It can make you a lot more driven. What's something that drives you? For me, it's learning. Mystery and learning. I love anything where like you can't figure it out. There's like a puzzle, like the cancer thing we talked about.

A lot of really smart people have chewed on that. And that excites me. Some people that are as intellectual as you are, a lot of times they're paralyzed by it and they won't take action. What do you think separates you out that has made you, a lot of times, a lot of times it's people that are maybe not, maybe not thinking of all the steps that are down the road. They're not, they're not, they got the ability to be dumb enough

to not see the obstacles, I guess, in some way. Yeah, that's a good point. When you're intelligent and you read a lot and you're well-educated, sometimes you're like, uh, yeah, we were talking about that when we were looking at your warehouse, how you didn't, yeah, it's a pallet of stuff and then pretty soon it grows.

And it's a good thing you didn't know how big it was going to get otherwise you would you wouldn't have gone down the path so ignorance can be a pretty nice gift and we're all ignorant at something and i knew nothing about food manufacturing and if i had we might not have gone down that path so we always think of acquisition of knowledge is always a great thing i actually think it's always a great thing but sometimes you can use your ignorance to your advantage. And, uh, cause you're right. If you know so much about something, either you can get paralyzed or you stop thinking about things. Elon Musk talks about that a lot. He says, you got to go to, you know, first principles, like, Hey, who says the car needs gas at all? Let's go. Wait, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

You know, maybe we could make a 50% gas car hybrid, something. And I said, no, no, no, no. Let's go to the very, very bedrock and say, why do we need gas? Hey, why do we need drivers? You know, so you can go take it all the way and see what you can create. Awesome, man. Well, is there any more questions popping up over there, Andrew? No, just somebody asking if you still take supplements like vitamins, but that's about it. Yeah. Yeah. You a vitamin mineral guy? No. Here's the interesting thing.

I'll tell you my thoughts on that. So if you look at, let's look at blueberries. People say, hey, blueberries are amazing. It's got all these anthocyanins. It's really good. They're really strong antioxidants. And I think our understanding of antioxidants is really going to change. If you look in someone's bloodstream after they eat blueberries, you don't see any anthocyanins.

You see superoxide dismutase. You see other, you know. A lot of people feel that antioxidants are bullshit, right? It's not that they're bullshit. They're real, but they probably move you backwards. So it's one thing that to say, hey, they're bullshit. There's no need for it. But if you look at, there's like like i think three major studies on antioxidants two of them show that the people

that took antioxidants were worse and the other one showed no no effect i think it's good to be skeptical on that because what we were you know there's people that put forth the theory that if you look at vegetables the reason they're good for you is because they're bad for you and the things that make vegetables good for you is they're perceived as a threat by your body when you eat them. And then you up-ramp your own levels of antioxidants that you make in your body, but you don't actually measure the levels of antioxidants

that you find in the vegetable. So you know the whole concept of hormesis? No. Hormesis is the idea that a little bit of a poison is better for you than none. So it's a weird idea but um it's so anyway that that's why vitamins is probably that's why something i don't take but uh and and the research doesn't seem to be bearing it out yeah scargar wants to know if you take any

right now mark vitamins type of supplements yeah no i mess around with some vitamins here and there um mainly because you know while on the carnivore diet you know i i just have it pounded in my head that maybe i'm missing missing some things but you know uh according to my blood work which i didn't take a lot of vitamins for maybe i'm not you know vitamin d is probably the one supplement that if you're not i think it's better to get it from uv exposure But if you're not, I mean, vitamin D is something to consider. I don't, I don't take it cause I get on my, uh, vitamin D from, from UV, but I would if I didn't. Yeah. I, I, uh, my vitamin D was good. So I, I probably don't really need to mess with the ton of that either. Um, do you eat like right? Like you did the, uh,

to run to diet, Vince to run to diet for a long time with steak and eggs and stuff like that. Are you still eating that same way? No, I did that like super strict for 19 weeks, which was basically two meals a day, steak, eggs, and butter. You could eat pretty much as much as you wanted. And then a carb meal every fourth day. as much as you wanted. And then a carb meal every fourth day. And I did that for 19 weeks, got leaner, felt great. Um, and then now I, I still eat mostly a carnivorous diet, but, um, I do eat vegetables and, you know, it's much looser and I'm not just, uh, strict on just those three sources anymore. So you just, you opened up the playbook a little bit, you're eating some different things and. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, obviously it's a lot easier to be able to either

eat just a steak somewhere or whatever you were talking about stress. You, I did it for 19 weeks because I wanted to see it, but to go beyond that, I mean, it starts to become, you're like, okay, where am I going to eat now that I can get eggs and beef and you know, it's easier not to. There's definitely a part of it where you just don't want to be so damn weird yeah that and also i that was actually a lot of carbs for me because every third every fourth day i was eating a carb day and that's because my calories were super low so it's basically starving myself during the first three days and then the fourth day i would and i could feel like my i'd get much colder but then after the carb meal, you know. When you said carbs, is that like you'd eat anything or is it just like rice or whatever?

I did cheat meals and I did like oatmeal and stuff like that. And definitively, because my calories were so low, if I didn't have a cheat meal, I just, it was hard to make it to the next one. And it's a hell of a lot more fun, obviously, but I wouldn't want to do that. Um, and, um, I did, that was one place I saw my blood markers weren't quite as good because I was eating more carbs than I normally would be. So what's your favorite, uh, favorite kind of food? Inauthentic Mexican. So people always say, did you mean authentic mexican uh no inauthentic like taco bell yeah taco bell is is amazing yeah you know it's that typical tex-mex american bs uh mexican because i've been to like authentic mexican restaurants and i never like it as much yeah well probably

not used to it well yeah although i might i like fake stuff like i love like fake cheese and shit like that i really do i grew up eating like velveta is fucking great yeah my wife actually sent me to the store to get velveta one time and i had no idea where the fuck to go in the grocery store to find it i'm like what is it next to like i i still don't remember where it was but it definitely was not near any cheese. I'll tell you that much. It's like, yeah, you're right. I guess some, it's some weird fucking chemical.

You're right. Because it's in, it's in the middle of the grocery store. It's not on the dairy aisle. Do you think a lot of these, uh, a lot of these foods, do you think a lot of these things are, are, are really problematic or is it just a overconsumption of it? That's, that's the issue. Uh, I think certain kinds of fats hang around for years. You got, you know, they stay in your cell membranes.

And then you really have the effect on blood glucose. Because, I mean, the crazy thing is the difference between- You're talking about like trans fats or something like that? Well, trans fats are the easy one. Everyone goes after trans fats. You can't really get trans fats anymore. That's one thing, you know, 10 years ago you could. But they're pretty much out of the food supply except for you can get them in restaurants but if you look at packaged goods at

the um supermarket i guess the fda made it you can't get even half a gram otherwise it's it's not legal um so trans fats are no longer a problem but um there are other fats like polyunsaturated fats that get rancid when you eat those they become part of your cell membranes and they can create problems. That's that whole PUFA thing, right? That's right. PUFA is a mixed bag. Have you heard of anything from Ray Peet? Have you heard that guy before?

Wow. How do you know about Ray Peet? Yeah, Ray Peet is interesting. In fact, some of the most thought-provoking stuff is his. Now, I think he's off base on a lot of things, but he says some things that are so amazing. is interesting in fact some of the most thought-provoking stuff is his now i don't i think he's off base on a lot of things but he says some things that are so amazing yeah i think i actually read a lot of rape he talks a lot about like iodine and stuff coming from cranberry juice and um he's got some really uh you know for guys like us who kind of gone on the low carb side

uh he'll talk about drinking orange juice. And it just, it just brings up really interesting topic that I find fascinating is like, yeah, I mean, I don't know, maybe like maybe all this stuff, maybe everything that we created,

maybe it's not all bad. Yeah. He he's, it's interesting because about maybe 50 or 60% of what he says, you and I would totally be on board with. And then he's got 40%. That's almost the opposite. He talks about,

he uses a lot of sugar. Right. He makes a very compelling. He does. He makes a very compelling argument that every time I read his stuff, I find myself, wow, he's really making me think.

And he, have you played around with any of that? Have you ever had like a, you ever have orange juice post-workout or mess with anything like that? I, I did. And you know, orange juice post-workout or mess with anything like that i i did and you know orange juice post-workout is really strange because we always think of it as you know fructose can't replenish muscle glycogen right if there's any sugar that's going to more likely make you fat a thousand calories in fructose will make you fatter than a thousand calories in glucose so it really doesn't make sense and from a performance

standpoint everyone's been said you know been taught eat things that convert to glucose not things that you know fructose for example can't um so i haven't played with that i've obviously eaten sugar in the past right he's his he doesn't really give specific dietary recommendations but his um forum has some of the most thought-provoking things he talks a lot about co2 carbon dioxide and how it's the opposite of what many people think. So he's got a lot of stuff that I find absolutely interesting. I got my own theory. And I think the reason why women outlive men, there's probably a lot of reasons, but I think it's just because they eat less.

I'll disagree. Okay. I'll tell you why women live longer than men um and i'll make it sound really authoritarian so you believe it here's here's what i think i've just been recently we're talking about this earlier with iron so if you look at a man men uh will get heart attacks sometimes at 20 or 30 but women almost never and they said said, well, you know, it's estrogen. Women are protected by estrogen. The only problem is if they give estrogen to men, they don't get any protection. And if you look at women who have had a hysterectomy,

so if you have a woman who's had a hysterectomy at 19, she basically has the same chance of heart attack and cancer as a man. If you look at a woman that's on hormonal birth control, she has about a 50%. She's about 50% of the way to the men's line. heart attack and cancer as a man. If you look at a woman that's on hormonal birth control, she has about a 50%. She's about 50% of the way to the men's line. So really what it comes down to, very likely, a big part of it is iron. It's not so much the estrogen. It's the fact that women menstruate, they lose iron, and iron is super, super reactive. And they've known for years that people that give blood have better health outcomes. Now, is that because they self-select and the people that are healthier are the people that are out there giving blood?

That's also quite possible. But I don't think estrogen is protective. Ray Peet talks a lot about this. And he actually says estrogen is a real problem. And he gives very compelling rationale as to why. So I think iron is one of the big things. Because women's iron levels are much, much lower. I think iron is one of the big things because, you know, women's iron levels are much, much lower.

I just recently had my dogs tested and they're both females, but they're spayed and both of their iron levels are high. So that's probably something in canine health that's undiagnosed. And the only way to do that is I got to find someone now to take their blood. And, you know, they don't, you can't do blood donation. I think at three years old is the cutoff. So you got to basically throw it in the trash. Any poop stories from all these protein bars you've had to eat over the years? It's interesting.

I don't have a single interesting poop story that I can tell you. I have a really good GI system. You guys had to test a lot of stuff. I'm sure. Right. I remember one, you're reminding me of one time in particular, no poop stories, unfortunately,

but I do, I did make a room of 11 people sick once. Cause basically we bought like 40 protein bars before we started quest. Actually, we kind of started quest already and we went around the room because people were sort of, they didn't know what the, you know,

the competition was doing. And it was one of the most important times because people became evangelist requests. This is our own employees. And they were like, oh my God, I had no idea. Because a lot of the people, they'd never eaten like dozens of protein bars. And when you eat 40 protein bars,

remember we were only eating a bite of it in one day. That's a lot of protein bars. I'll tell you that if you ever start a protein bar company, you should have all your employees do that because they'll be like, wow, this feels like a mission now. So, yeah, that's, they did, they didn't feel great. Oh my God. That's, that's absolutely brutal. Now there, there's a few years back.

I want to say maybe it's two years ago. You had to change what was in the quest bar what what what prompted that and uh like it seems like that's a really hard uh ship to try to to try to steer you know because this is a this is not a you're not a small boat you know you're not you're a giant fucking aircraft carrier yeah with uh you know a few thousand employees on it probably, right? And you got to steer this whole thing back around. So what happened and why did it change? So that's a great question.

So when we first started, the fiber source we used was chicory root fiber. The problem with chicory root fiber is that it's highly fermentable. I didn't know. A lot of GI. I didn't know that's where you started. Yeah, that was the first one. And then we said, you know what? Let's go to the next level.

Let's keep improving it. And then we went to a fiber source called isomaltooligosaccharide, known as IMO, and did that for a couple of years. And then we got an email from a group of diabetics in Colorado who said, hey, you know what?

And this is before we were sophisticated at all. They were like, you know what? Our blood sugars are going up a little bit on this. What's, what's going on? So we started looking into it and we were working with them and we said, is there something we're not being told? Cause what IMO at the time was being said, oh, it's 90% fiber. Um, I'll give you the short version to not bore you. Um, no, I like it. I like knowing the story cause, well, I find it fascinating because I think a six of the top fiber experts in the country. And we said, you know, we're a little suspicious. We brought the manufacturer in, they assured us, no, no, this is great. The problem is the way IMO was, you couldn't use the standard testing method. And they had this whole rationale as to why you couldn't.

We got so nervous about it. We said, you know what, let's explore other forms of fiber. And then, so we were basically making Quest bars, different types of fiber. And then I got a phone call from somebody who said, Hey, you know what? There was a conference, a fiber conference in Paris where they released some information. I love this whole story, the fiber conference that changed Quest Nutrition forever. I got a phone call. I remember it was about 1 PM on a Saturday, my business partner, Mike Osborne at 28 years. He said, Hey, listen, I just got phone call. I remember it was about 1 p.m. on a Saturday. My business partner, Mike Osborne, at 28 years, he said, hey, listen, I just got some information. And what we decided to do, really within a matter of weeks, it should have taken nine months to a year to gradually transition. We changed it in like a four-week period.

And a lot of customers got really pissed off because our bars went from a certain texture to, ooh, they're harder or there were inconsistencies. It was a tough year. People were writing stuff saying, you guys change your formula because it's cheaper. I think the fiber, if I'm not mistaken, was six times more expensive. You guys are doing this because you know, there was a whole bunch of things quite simple. Here's what it is. You take an old quest bar, take your blood sugar, eat it, take it again. And now you take a quest bar today and it's, it's completely

different. One would spike your blood glucose, the other didn't. And that's before we were really testing blood glucose. So it was essentially just to make a better product. We're always playing with that, but it was just, was that just you like just saying, this is what we're doing? Had a lot of support. I mean, here's the cool thing. So you bounce the idea off some other guys that you work with, girls that you work with, and they, they gave you some feedback saying, hey, we support it. Let's go. Yeah.

Well, everybody was on board just because we were starting to get, hmm, this doesn't seem like it's a good thing. But it was just the speed with which we did it. Everybody was on board. And the question is, the minute you know there's a better product, like if anything, we can be accused of, hey, you guys are making too many tweaks. Most like Oreos. They try not to touch the recipe at all, but we're a nutrition company, forced and firm us. So if new research comes out or there's a new approach, we got to go with that. And R and D is usually kind of relegated to the corner and Hey, here's the business guys usually run by marketing and the top execs at quest R and D. That was the lifeblood of the company.

So, you know, I think there was maybe, I'm going to take a stab, 42 guys and gals in the R&D department at one point. So it's a big part of what we do. Quest has become a huge company. I believe you guys grew 57,000%. I don't know how somebody came up with an amazing number like that in three years. Ranked number two fastest growing company in 2014.

Had 200 employees in 2013. 1,300 employees in 2016. And 1,000 ambassadors to go along with the company. The growth was incredible of the company. How has the company changed from that point? Because I know that you mentioned you guys used to kind of, you guys did a lot of stuff in-house and now the company has changed quite a bit, right? Yeah, so in the last, I'd say about two

years ago, we started realizing, hey, you know, Quest has gotten to a certain size where it needs a different skill set. So about a year, in fact, almost exactly a year ago, we brought on a new CEO. His name is Dave Ritterbush. And rarely in life do things work out as well as you envision them. Were you ever the CEO of the company? I was a CEO for the first six years. Yeah.

Okay. I got it. Yeah. So, and about a year ago, we brought this guy on, and we said, hey, this is going to be an experiment. Wow. It's funny how, you know, I'm not a structure guy, because I don't like people imposing structure on me, so I don't want to impose it on other people.

And it was interesting watching this guy come in. He basically came in and learned, and we could just feel like to get to the next level, we needed to do more systems and things. He has a lot of experience. He was with dryers for 17 years. He's been in nutrition, CEO of Premier. Ice cream. Yeah. And he basically added a level of structure that's allowed us to grow much faster. So if you look at what's going to happen over the next two years, the number of products we're going to launch much, much bigger, you want to talk about a, I mean, an amazing experiment. The guy is, you know, Mike and I are basically in note-taking

mode because it's one set of skills to grow a company from zero to, you know, a hundred million or 300, 400 million. It's a different skill set to go from 400 to a billion. And, and, uh, so that's one thing that's changed. The other thing is we used to make all of our own products here in California, a city of industry. We had like, I think 11 or 1200 employees at that facility at one time. And we have now moved to a, um, a fractured model. We now have, I think 11 different facilities throughout the country that we work with that are outsourced because we just couldn't keep bringing on that much expertise and that much machinery, especially since some of the products coming out in the next couple of years are very far away from protein bars. We just could never be able to do that. And our goal really is, as I said earlier,

is that Super Bowl table. You want to be able to eat all that kind of stuff. And that's a very, very disparate skillset than just making protein bars. Yeah. People don't know about our ice cream experiment that we have going on behind closed doors. That's right. That's, that's. We're not supposed to say anything about that, I guess. No.

Too late. So last question. Yep. Here it is. You know, you could easily kind of like, you know, walk away from the company a little bit and, you know, sit there and, uh, you've, uh, accumulated a lot of, a lot of cash. Um, but you don't, you're still there. You're still, uh, you're still at a lot of the trade shows. I see you there. Um, I see it like this year, uh, you and Bruce are walking around,

which was actually kind of funny. Cause I don't think Bruce has ever kind of took you around in that way before. He's a machine. And you found out that Bruce was the actual owner of Quest Nutrition, which is news to you, right? You know, why are you still going to the shows? It's really easy. When I was in software, I'd go to the trade shows. I'm not going to them now because I wasn't that interested in software, but this is what I'm interested in. And, um, it's actually better position to learn. I mean, here, here we are talking about all kinds of weird stuff and I'm going to go back and use it. That's what's neat. Uh, so that's why it doesn't, um, I don't like working as much as you don't,

but just as you've created here, when I walked through the halls here, it's like, wait, people are laughing. People are smiling. You're talking about doing blood work for employees. And that's, it's the geek stuff that is, is what's fun. So that, that's why it's, it's not like I have to even think about it. I'm going to do it one way or another. I may as well. You're not like, oh, I got to go to the show.

Definitely not. I think that was my ninth Arnold. Have you been to a bunch of them? Yeah, I've been to a ton of them. And you actually, I'm sure you met Arnold before, but I saw you got a picture with him at the Arnold this year, I think. Right? No, he got a picture with me. Oh, Hey now I'll have to, when I get a chance to interview him, I'll have to ask him what it was like to meet. Actually, I'll tell you the story that had nothing to do with me. Um, my wife is, um, the reason actually she's cut out of that picture there but you've seen the video or

whatever uh her dad is chet yorton and chet is a very famous bodybuilder from the golden age of bodybuilding one of three men ever to beat schwarzenegger in competition holy shit so he comes by that's right arnold what's up he comes by bruce does a really good job because he'll say hey don't you want to meet uh chet yorton's daughter he's like oh my gosh i haven't seen her since she was in diapers. So that's how he entices. Bruce is amazing. Bruce is, you know, he's a former police officer, Marine recon.

And generally when you think about that person, do you think about like a super nice guy who can get in anywhere? No, that background leads you to be tough guy. Yeah. Absolutely not. I have been in situations where he gets you like beyond the, you know, the little velvet ropes and things. And he doesn't piss people off. He has an ability to make it seem like it's not a big deal. He does.

Like, oh, here's a couple of bars, you know, and then he'll start talking about something else. That's right. And he just kind of like leaves them there and he's like, never show up empty handed. And what was great is when we had, we had a, an event here. We had a deadlift competition up this way, bench and deadlift competition. Bruce came up to it. He sent a bunch of products up.

Of course he comes, he checks out our party. I didn't know where the boxes were. I wasn't sure. I don't, you know, I don't really handle a lot of that kind of stuff, you know? So we have tables set up. We got food out. We're having a party here at the gym. And we invited friends and family and stuff like that.

Bruce shows up and he's like, he's like, where are those quest cookies? You know, and he goes, he goes on a mission. He just starts, you know, rifling, rifling through stuff. And he gets them himself. He sets them up and everything. And I was just like, man, you know what? That's just what it takes. I sometimes run into people and I don't, I'm like, man, I don't want to force this guy to put a slingshot on.

But if I don't tell him what I do and I don't show him, he'll never fucking know. Look, you put your finger on it. I am terrible at that. I never have product with me i never talk about it bruce is a machine and you want to talk about where the rubber meets the road in terms of actually building a brand he goes around you saw this year at the arnold he was taking me around introducing me to people he's given product he's just a he understands the mechanics of building a brand at the human level and he's's, he's, he's unabashed and he does it in a really cool way where people feel like he

did them a favor. You know, you probably feel like, Oh, I don't want to like push this on someone. That's how I feel. Bruce is so elegant in the way he does it. He,

he's just, he's a high powered weapon. And he's a consistent. And so then you're kind of just like, okay, that's just the way he is. So you're not like, Oh, you know, what is it? A lot of times in this industry, we're always thinking someone trying to like do something.

They're trying to like put one over on you. They're trying to snap a picture with you with some product that you don't have any association with. Or, you know, maybe you're already with another company. So it's a little weird. You know, they put, you know, here, you mind holding this? It's like, I don't know what, you know, but he's, he's not really that way. He's just like, Hey, try this. I think you'll like it. You know, he kind of, and he kind of just leaves it there. It's not like he's giving you a dissertation about, about all the reasons why you, why you need this product,

but yeah, he does a great job of getting you guys in great places. What I find really awesome about the company is that you guys stay connected to a lot of the smaller things. You know, people can figure out, you said the human connection, the human connection of the brand. And that, that is, that's everything. It is. It's everything. Facebook ads, Instagram ads, trying to, has these sponsored ads and stuff and spending money on, on educating people on what you have and your website and all these things, obviously, they all play into it.

They're all a piece of the puzzle. But it is a huge, huge part of it to have a human connection with people. And no one does it better than Bruce. No, and you think about how many people we've talked about, just kind of like we talked about the guys at ASPI and the ketogenic Bible. We talked about Daniel Arrego. We talked about, you know, it's just, it's in our circle. And I can tell instantly if you were bringing up, if I were bringing up half of this stuff and you were like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? You're not in the group, so to speak. And you're right, that human connection,

we just, we're doing this and we're just sharing it spontaneously. And Bruce is, he's completely there. He spends more he's completely there. He spends more time on a plane. I don't quite understand. I see Bruce quite a bit. But if you open Instagram up, how can a person be in 17 places in one weekend? I don't know. I mean, it's crazy.

It's truly, truly crazy. He takes pictures with a tremendous amount of beautiful women, I noticed. I noticed. I think that's probably the, when people think about Bruce, it's probably the number one they think they know. What a terrible side product of that job. He's got to meet all these bombshells all the time. He's talked to me about this. He suffers a lot, but he's willing to go through it.

He will do it if he has to, to keep building a brand. Yeah, you're right though. He's with, you know, look, even in that right there, he's with Arnold. He's with Bradley Martin. He's hanging with me. He's hanging with all these fitness chicks. And it's just, he's just everywhere. Anyway, man, it was awesome having you on the show.

I don't know if you have anything else you want to add on your way out here. No, it's just really cool to come here. You know, there's a powerlifting gym on one side of the building. And then on the other side, I'm looking at pictures of world domination, how you guys are getting into Finland and you're getting into Kuwait. And I was thinking, wow, that is, that's, it's, it's rare because usually people that have a business side, it's boring. And then people who are on the powerlifting meathead side, oh, they can't, they can't build a business to save their lives. It's too much organization. And to see the warehouse and how you guys have the shipping set up.

It has been a big learning process for me because I kind of would fashion myself, if anything, as an inventor. I've always been curious about product. And for several years, I just messed around with a lot of power thing gear, bench shirts and squat suits and knee wraps and stuff. And I just developed a kind of feel for them and I would mess with them all the time and try to do different things. And I'd wrap my elbow because I had pain from a certain thing or I'd wrap my knees and I was just always like really fast.

And I'm like, there's got to be, there's something here. And I just keep tinkering and messing with it. So to take an idea and to turn it into a product and then to put it on the market, it's weird. Cause it's like, okay, well I put it on the market. Now I'm just getting started. And now I don't even have any clue on what to do. Cause I don't have any education in any of this. Well, see so many people are the inventor side.

Hey, I got this product. Well, that's probably the easiest. It's also maybe the most fun if you're an inventor but very few people that say hey i see all these other skills i suck at them and i'm still going to do it anyway and that's really what what separates the men from the boys in the sense that you yeah you're right you did suck at that you told me your whole story about how you started with your next door neighbor and you kind of convinced him to help you out shipping. And now you would think, oh, yeah, he probably had these skills his whole life. But that's really what is, you know, people always ask, hey, what's the secret to entrepreneurs?

It's building that team and then being able to pick up new skills. Because if you think you're going to have it all there, no, but you might be able to make a slingshot the first time out. And then there's 17 steps you still have to go. Yeah, I've been a big believer in, you know, putting the cart before the horse. You know, I'll do it every single time. And if I have to pull the cart myself, I'll figure it out. Yeah, it's putting yourself in a situation where you can't really stop. I started this momentum.

And everyone's looking at you saying, hey, what's next? I have no idea. Let's kind of make it up as we go, which is a lot more fun. And you get to see that here when you walk through the halls. Do you have any desire to get into any other type of business or anything like that? Yeah. I'm focusing on biotech right now because there's some things that I want to do with cancer. Well, I think early diagnosis of cancer.

I will certainly be back on your show when i have a couple of experiments done but the the keto thing turned into there's something powerful there early detection uh is going to be really the future and liquid biopsies the ability to take someone's hear about this woman that uh developed uh some sort of process where you can just prick your finger and you can get a full blood analysis rather than you know taking out tons of blood from you from you yeah you heard about that sure i know about it so then they uh something happened where somebody stripped the woman of her invention or something like weird like that has happened and and uh no one's doing anything with it at the moment or something like that. Are you talking about Theranos?

I believe so. A woman, from what I understand, she wanted to make this thing that you could just prick your finger and you can, you know, get, get your blood work done that way. Yeah.

So here's the story on that. She raised a lot of money. I don't remember the exact amount. She had a board of directors of some of the most recognizable people, none of whom were scientists, or at least none of people that were in the diagnostic space. And the, she just got convicted of fraud last week.

Yeah. So the company is, look, I think she truly was trying to do something amazing. I think what she set out to do, take a little finger prick is going to one of the worst things like blood. Like you had to do that for your employees. It's a pain. You have to get a phlebotomist out here. If you could just prick your finger, like you do with like a blood sugar test, it would be amazing. The problem is the technology didn't match the reality and they raised more and more money.

And it looks like, you know, allegedly, I think you're supposed to say, um, they knew it was crashing. And, you know, I think, I think we've, I have a guy that I know ended up committing suicide. He, they just got themselves into this situation where they just, they can't back away cause they've made so many promises and they just have to keep running with it and the whole thing came crashing down. So it actually turned out to be fraud at the end, but a great idea. Yeah. Hopefully we can see more stuff like that.

Anyway, good luck with everything. Awesome having you here today, guys. That's Ron Penner. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. We are out of here unless you got something else you're going to have. I just want everybody that's on the live stream, first off, thanks for being there. But we're actually going to be podcasting with Ben Greenfield coming up next.

Maybe, hopefully, a couple hours, maybe, or 15 minutes. Yeah, probably in a little bit. Sooner than later. So, yeah, hang on for a little while and we'll be back soon. Catch y'all later. Bye.