Barbell Shrugged - [Supplements] Separating Science from Snake Oil w/ Mike Matthews, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash #764

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

Mike Matthews is a certified personal trainer and bestselling author of Bigger Leaner Stronger, Thinner Leaner Stronger, and Muscle for Life, as well as the founder of the #1 brand of all-natural sports supplements, Legion. His simple and science-based approach to building muscle, losing fat, and getting healthy has helped tens of thousands of people build their best body ever, and his work has been featured in many popular outlets including Esquire, Men’s Health, Elle, Women’s Health, Muscle & Strength, and more, as well as on FOX and ABC. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Legion Supplements Mike Matthews on X Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram  

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, Mike Matthews is back on the podcast. For those of you that have been around a long time in the fitness space, you may know him from Legion Athletics. He also has a ton of books. I even joke around in the show that every time I walk in the Barnes & Noble, I love going over to the fitness section with my daughter and pointing to all the people on the shelves that have written books about fitness, nutrition, and telling her that those are my friends because they've been on Barbell Shrugged.

She definitely thinks i'm cool probably not but at least i try to be cool in front of her by showing her that those are all my friends but he's got a brand new book that he's writing and on top of that the way that he is writing it is very cool we're going to walk through that process and then we dig right into supplements legion has been around for a very long time one of the most reputable supplement companies out there and it's always very cool to hear people that like know significantly more about their specific piece of the fitness industry mike knows absolutely everything there is to know about the supplement industry mainly just because he's been in it for so long but also i i always love hearing about

people talking about the quality of it why they make certain decisions inside their business. And the supplement industry is just filled with snake oil salesmen all over the place. Like the number of supplement companies that have started and gone out of business since I started training like 28 years ago. I mean, it's, it's, it's gotta be in the billions and very, very few of them make it because it's just, it's such a hard industry to be in but mike has has made made it through and has done a phenomenal job with legion so i think you're going to learn a ton as always friends make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com forward slash results that is where our dear friend timothy jones the owner of precision nutrition has a case study up how he cut his cholesterol in half and got totally ripped, just like you can inside Rapid Health Optimization. You can read that case study over at rapidhealthreport.com

forward slash results. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Anders Warner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash. Today on Barbell Shrug, Mike Matthews. I have to tell you something, Mike, before we get rolling, you have so many books that sit on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. And I wanted to say this pre-show, but then I realized this would be way cooler because you have a brand new book coming out. One of my favorite things about Barbell Shrug is I get to go on date days with my daughter and she loves going to the Barnes and Noble and just grabbing all the kid books. And I always make her go over to the fitness section. And I point to all the books of people that we've had on the show. And I'm like, that's daddy's friend. That's daddy's friend. And you have like a section in Barnes and Noble,

which is the coolest thing ever. Cause she thinks. Not in my, not in my Barnes and Noble here. I want to go to your Barnes and Noble. Oh yeah. No, you're cool. Better about myself. We have a, we have a brand new one. You walk in there. It feels like like you're in whole foods not even in a barns and noble anymore they got all the like bright bright lights they got rid of all the chairs so you have to buy things now instead of like sitting in there and reading and then putting it away like i used to do every time me too well you have a brand new book coming out i want to uh let's dig right in i'd love to hear

kind of uh what this what this new one looks like yeah so so this new book coming out. I want to, let's dig right in. I'd love to hear kind of what this new one looks like. Yeah, so this new book, it's called Stronger Than Yesterday. And it's a daily reader format, which is new for me. And so that means think like daily stoic, but for fitness. A bunch of short chapters with the idea of reading at least one a day. And the chapters, how I went about producing it is I split up the material to be about 50% kind of motivational, inspirational, and then 50% educational. And then in the educational, there's a variety of different topics, the big things, diet, exercise, supplementation, general health. And I also

looked at all the material and tried to split it up more or less equally between content geared more toward beginners and intermediate fitness folk, and then veteran gym rats. Again, with the purpose of trying to put something in there for just about everyone, male, female, regardless of age, regardless of circumstances, abilities, goals, even diet and exercise preferences. Not that generally in marketing, trying to make something for everyone is a bad idea. However, I guess I'm trying to make something for everyone who meets certain criteria. And so that's the concept for the book. And the workflow was a little bit interesting, a little bit different for me. So I'm sure you guys can appreciate this. And anybody who is listening and who does any sort of content related work understands this, right? It's,

it's annoying to spend any amount of time, but certainly a lot of time on, let's say it's an article or let's say it's a podcast, any piece of content. It can even be a social media post that you put a fair amount of time into, and then you think it's great, or you think it's at least good. Like you've done it, you've done it, you've done it to what you would consider a high standard. And maybe you even have some expectations. You think this is going to do well and it flops completely like, okay. And then, and then there could be a separate article or podcast or post or whatever that

you don't think is really that great. It's good enough to post or it's good enough to put out there, whatever. And then it does tremendously well. And you do enough of this type of work. You obviously learn to spot, you get better at spotting or at least predicting what will do well and what will not.

But there are always the anomalies. And again, it's, it's particularly annoying though, with the first scenario where you're put a bunch of time into something and then it just goes nowhere. Right. And so, um, I've experienced that of course, many times, uh, over, over the years. And so in the case of writing a book, I was curious, how could I avoid that experience? What can I do to make the chances of the book not doing well despite my best efforts? And so I came up with a workflow that really a lot of content producers, at least maybe not in fitness, but in other industries that have big followings and so forth, they do, they just don't really talk about. And that is pre-testing a lot of ideas using social media

and then tracking engagement and then seeing the, not just the ideas, but in many cases, the exact phrasings. Because you could have a good idea and you phrase it in different ways. And there's one way that really does well and the rest actually don't do that well. And so then pre-testing a lot of at least the bigger ideas in the book, and in some cases, even the phrasings of those ideas, using social media and keeping track of all of that. And so I'm kind of curious, just as a marketer, if that process will produce a book that has a higher chance of generating a lot of word of mouth, which is ultimately what I want to accomplish on the marketing slash business side of books.

Because to sell a lot of books, you have to generate a lot of word of mouth. You can sell, you can have a good book launch with good marketing, but if you're going to sell a lot of books over a long period of time, it has to be a book that people talk about. And how does that process look? Well, anybody who reads books can tell you, you're reading a book and you're making highlights of things that resonate with you, things you like. Maybe the book makes you laugh as well. It gives you, it makes you feel good. It's entertaining, whatever. And there's a point where you reach a critical mass of engagement with the book where you start to talk about it. And if you don't get to that critical mass, you actually probably just quit

the book and move on to the next thing. And so, and so my theory is that by using social media to pre-test a lot of material that went into the book, and of course, I had to do a lot of finessing to turn it all into a book, but by pre-testing specific things that are in the book, those would be the things that people would highlight, would engage with, would find interesting. And if I can stuff enough of those into a book then theoretically you have a better chance of reaching that that that word of mouth threshold than if i would have just not done any of that and written it strictly to my own tastes and intuitions and so forth so what are some of your rules for testing? Like, you know, when you test on social media, do you make sure you, you post at the same time? Like, what are some of the rules you have that are going to like, you know, to eliminate variables? Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Good

question. I, I didn't want to make the system too complex because if it gets too unwieldy, then it actually just, it, it becomes more of a, of a hindrance than a help. So what, what I did was I primarily used Twitter slash X because you can post multiple times a day and that's acceptable. You don't get penalized for that from their algorithm or from users. So like take Instagram, if you're going to post seven times a day, no, that's not going to work. But if you want to tweet, uh, or now it's just post a seven times a day on X, no problem. Um, and so X was very useful for me in that regard. Also, of course, it's naturally suited to writing. So whereas Instagram less so. And so that's where my testing would start is on X. And so we had a schedule. There was a time when I was posting, I want to say five to seven new posts a day. So I was putting

up a lot of material and then we were, we were tracking engagement. Somebody who works with me was helping with that in a, in a spreadsheet. And then we would go, so we'd have a month of every post. And so also tracked by topic. So, so was this an exercise post? Was it a health slash just fitness kind of general post? Was it a diet post? Was it a supplementation? Was it a motivation? And, um, and then, and then at the end of each month, we then would tally up that we would look at the total engagements. That was really the key metric that I was interested in. So that means on X, likes, bookmarks, reposts or retweets and comments. Those are all just plus one to engagement, right? So we have the total engagements per post, and then we would just grab the median engagements. I found that more useful than the average because averages are skewed. You have a few posts that just do really, really well, and then you have a handful that do basically nothing. And so that can mess with averages a little bit. So we take the median engagement for all posts of that month. And then I just kind of arbitrarily applied a multiplier of 50%.

So I'm looking for things that do 50% better than the median or better than that, of course. And so I would then take those. So somebody who works for me, they'd go through and just highlight all the ones that did at least 50% better than the median. And then I would move those over to my, what I'm, what I just call my short list. So that's a proven post. That's a proven idea, proven phrasing that people liked. And, and then, uh, I would just build up this big short list, which also had all these different posts, um, categorized by topic. And so then when it came time to write a chapter, if I had to write a diet chapter, I would go to my short list and look at, all right,

what diet post do I have? This is an awesome idea. Yeah. And then just as a content creator, as a creative person, you just start looking at it and you're like, oh, cool. Yeah, I can write a chapter on that. I'm going to grab that. That's actually going to be my opening statement for the chapter to pull somebody in right away. And then I'm going to follow it with some explanation. Oh, look, there's another post in there that actually is related to this. I'm going to put that in as well. And then of course, I'm going to craft some interstitial material. Maybe I'm going to talk about some research to support this. I'm going to add some practical tips. There you go. There's a chapter. And so I just did that over and over and over for basically

all of the chapters in this book. And so that was the process. And then we also then took these short lists, as I'm calling them posts, and move them over to other networks like Facebook and see how do they do on Facebook, which is a different crowd. The demographics are different. The psychographics are different. And, and just, just out of curiosity to see how they do over there also brought, brought them over to Instagram, which was done in different ways. Sometimes it was a tweet post, like the, you know, a little text post on Instagram where you're meeting with one of these posts that, that, that is proven. And then in the caption, you have more of the material that is maybe part of a chapter. It's not the whole chapter of the book, but it's a chunk of it that I want to see how that does with my Instagram crowd. Or it's, it's, it's a, maybe a reel of

footage of me working out. And then I'm, I'm speaking, I'm just narrating, you know, a quick 30 to 60 second blurb that is going to be in the book. Um, or it's an image post of just me like working out, uh, and, and so forth. And so it was just a lot of that basically. And, um, and so far, uh, I think it's, um, it, it looks promising because it has worked very well on social media and worked more or less as I expected it to work. And so at this point, I would be genuinely surprised if it didn't work well in the book. But we'll see. I love that.

Shrug family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside-out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros, we're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going

on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. Then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone

level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. I remember it had to have been on Rogan at some point in the last decade, hearing a-up comedian talk about almost a very similar strategy and he would like basically like did all of his just brainstorming at the comedy store but then you have like this like very la or la jolla crowd that is looks a certain way and thinks a certain way and then you you go to Iowa to find out that you're just bombing with the exact material that, you know, crushes on the coast, but not in the middle of the country. And finding the common threads that link everybody together before they actually go and put a special together that no matter what the crowd looks like or what part of the country they're in, they get laughs. And then they know that that, that is actually the material that, um, unifies everybody and the way that they're thinking

versus just kind of like only testing things to a, a small audience and a, and a certain demographic. Or even worse, not testing at all. And just going by your own taste and intuition, which no matter how good you are, you're never going to figure it out like you will going through the process never i totally uh you were talking about the kind of the frustration of writing an article and putting everything into it and then it not going anywhere and i all i could think about was my younger self feeling like i had to be published in T Nation to matter in the strength and conditioning world and like writing my heart out and pouring it all into an article just to get the email back. That's like, sorry. And then you go on tomorrow. It's like four exercises for your upper chest.

You're like, no, mine was better than that. What happened? How did I lose the battle today? And then that one goes viral and gets hundreds of thousands of yeah like this is so frustrating i had real i had real content i had things to say yeah i think the the worst um article i've ever written yeah i did this thing one by 20 for jimmy where i thought it was going to be the worst like when they asked me to write it i was like man i've been writing about such cool well i thought was cool concepts like hypergv or you know other science related articles but then i did that one by 20 and it blew up and i was so mad i was like i'm no longer irrelevant because i mean like i have no idea what people like obviously

you got millions of views one by by 20, such a simple concept. Yeah, kind of broke my heart. Isn't it just like we feel like we want to be the smartest person, but you don't need to be? It needs to just actually connect with people. People don't give a shit about how smart we are. None whatsoever. Yeah. So referencing the Daily Stoic like that, that's a book that you can read a page

a day, a page or two a day, and you can read every single day all year long. And then the next year, just start it over because all the material or all the information there is very evergreen. I like the expression, we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught, which basically means kind of, you know what to do. You just need to do the things that you know to do. So is this book like a, just like a daily reminder of the basics? Or is there like some very novel, interesting, kind of new, innovative things in there that aren't just the basics? That's a good question.

I'd say it is probably 80%. Maybe it's not just the basics. It's maybe the basics plus a bit more. So it's mostly that. And again, specifically for people who are new and let's say they're either in their beginner phase or their intermediate phase. So what are the most important things that they need to understand and need to do in the kitchen, in the gym to achieve their fitness goals. And then there's less material, but there's still material for more advanced people who are not just looking to get into

great shape, but they're looking to really achieve most of their genetic potential. They're trying to gain as much muscle and strength as they realistically can given their genetics. And they understand how much harder they have to work for that and diminishing returns and so forth. And so that's how I went about it just because I think that that best reflects my readership. And I think just the general fitness readership, it's a lot of people who are new. That's probably the biggest segment. And then second to that are people who are not brand new. They've been at it for at least a couple of years, but they're not where they want to be yet. And they're looking to learn new things that can help them get better results. So I was thinking with that,

hoping that I could create a book that people would come back to, not just read once and say, okay, that was cool. I learned a few things, but come back to be reminded of the things that matter the most, but then also include some material that I hope is new and new and useful. And that it's easy if you don't really care about the true utility, it's easy to just come up with random things that that are new. Maybe you just I mean, we see this all the time, right? With just contrarian. We see a lot of contrarian marketing in in fitness where oh you've you've always been told to eat vegetables well did you know that vegetables are killing you they're

definitely killing you correct and and so that's that's that's good as you said vegetable i knew i was gonna die why avoid them at all costs absolutely why eat vegetables when you can just eat ribeye steaks and butter and bacon? What are you doing? And so yes, that's marketing. That's actually harmful, but there's no real utility there. It's actually negative utility, but it's just marketing. So it's harder to find things that have that hook or have a hook like that that are actually true and useful. And so I did though, try to include a bit of that as well in the book for people who are very well-versed and who maybe appreciate reminders, but, but maybe don't need them as much as most people, most of us really, and who specifically are just looking for ways to improve their regimen.

Yeah. I'd love to dig into the supplement side of things. And we were talking a little pre-show and I feel like for most of my meathead career, 20 something years, finding supplements of high quality was always kind of like one, the marketing side. Um, but also something that was like very challenging for supplements to be like, uh, if you had any standards, yeah. Finding something that was third-party tested was very expensive. Um, and, and, and made that industry very difficult with extremely low margins. And just for as long as Legion has been around, there's probably 10,000 of them that have started and failed.

Where do you feel like kind of a lot of the success has been in keeping that brand around as long as you have? That's a good question. I think my best answer is it comes back to the value proposition of Legion, which there are different definitions for that term. The definition that I like, I think that's very easy for everybody to understand who hasn't heard that term before is, so if a consumer says, hey, if I'm one of your ideal consumers, right? So this brand, I mean, any product or service is if it's well-formulated or if it's well thought out, it's not for everyone. It's for

specific people. And usually in business, it's like three to five customer profiles or avatars. And those are the people that you're trying to sell to, right? So if somebody says, all right, if I'm one of those people, I fit into the health conscious professional avatar, why should I buy Legion rather than any of your competitors? What's your answer, right? And in business, you need to have a compelling answer to that. I mean, that's really the core of good marketing is the messaging and the messaging, the core of that is the value proposition. So in the case of Legion, although I know more about value propositions and creating them, and I'm a bit more, I guess, scientific about it now than in the beginning.

Fortunately, I got enough of that right in the beginning with science-backed ingredients and doses. And everybody says that. But if you go look at how we do it, we're very transparent about it. We cite all the research. We have a lot of customers that are very educated who spot check us on our research. They don't just seeing a study site is not enough. They go and look at the research and see that, oh, we have actual standards too for the research. Standards in terms of study design.

Like, for example, it has that is conducted with animals or maybe it's in vitro. And if you're not scientifically savvy simply because you just haven't educated yourself enough, you might not know that we're not, although we share a lot of DNA, us humans, we're not big rats. So just because something like Garcinia cambogia is great for helping rats lose fat, it does nothing in humans been proven again and again. Right. Um, and so, so that, uh, although again is much more common, the, the science backed claims is more common now than when I started Legion. It was less so when I, when I started and really leaning into it and, and, and, and not just relying on marketing puffery and buzzwords and bullshit to sell, but more of an educational approach. Like here's factually why this product is good. Here's what's in it. Let's be fully transparent. Um, here's, here are the exact studies that are supporting not just the common dosing of beta alanine, if I remember, it was like three to 500 milligrams per serving when you needed literally 10 times that amount to,

uh, to, to equate to what was being used in research supporting beta alanine. So it was, of course, dishonest to say, Hey, look, we have beta alanine and here's some research showing that beta alanine is good when you have one 10th of the dose that's needed. So, um, educating people about clinically effective doses, what does that really mean? And so that was a big, um, element of the value proposition is, uh, and then, and then, and then also naturally sweetened, naturally flavored natural ingredients, no artificial preservatives or fillers or other junk ingredients that you can't even pronounce. That doesn't matter to a lot of people, but it matters to a lot of people and it matters

to a lot of my customers. And so for example, your average 18 year old bro who just wants to get big biceps and abs so he can get laid, he doesn't really care. He doesn't care what he puts into his body at all, actually. However, your average 45 year old guy or gal who has a family who cares just as much about their health as their fitness and who wants to know what they are putting in their body because they understand they're ingesting this stuff. They understand the industry is very under regulated and it's full of fake science and fake products and fake advertising and all other kinds of shenanigans. Well, that person now, they do care that my products don't have artificial sweeteners, artificial flavorings or food dyes,

which I'm not an alarmist about. I'm not wholly against any of those things actually. However, and this was going back to the beginning, and I would say this is more supported now in the literature than it was at the time. And even in the beginning, I kind of I put an asterisk saying there is some evidence of what I'm going to claim, but not a lot. However, I'm just going to this is my opinion. And that is that although let's take artificial sweeteners, controversial topic, although, again, I'm not an alarmist and I don't tell people never have diet soda or never chew gum. It's probably not great for your health, particularly your gut health. If you're going to have like six, eight, 10 plus servings of sucralose or Ace K or

aspartame more or less every day, more or less forever, which is when, when you look at a different kind of customer avatar, particularly the more dedicated gym goer, you can get there pretty quickly. If you're going to have a few scoops of protein per day, let's say you're generally going to have a pre-workout. Maybe there's a post-workout in there. Maybe there are BCAAs. There's no reason, but let's say BCAAs are in there as well, or some sort of intro workout, plus maybe one or two kind of random, maybe a green supplement. You can do that fairly easily. And so going back to the beginning again, I didn't want to do that myself and I wanted to be able to use all of my products. And so that's one reason why I went the direction that I did. But I also recognize that there was a large in absolute terms, although maybe not in relative terms. It's bigger now than it was in the beginning, that there were enough people I

believed out there who also cared about that to make it worth the expense. And the expense is significant. I mean, I'll give you an example. So to naturally sweeten and flavor a bottle of protein costs me, I want to say like three to four dollars, probably closer to three now because of economies of scale. But if I were using artificial ingredients, it would be probably 50 cents to a dollar. And that differential, that's straight to the bottom line. And we're going to sell probably, let's call it one and a half million bottles of various things. We'll do about $50 million in revenue this year. So you can do math. And the cap table is just me.

I mean, I gave equity to key employees. But so there is a personal interest, you could say, if you're just looking at it for pure economics, to not bother with natural sweeteners, natural flavorings, natural food dyes, and you just go artificial because when you reach a certain scale, it's literally millions of dollars of profit. And that's one of the reasons why there aren't many companies doing it. And you spoke of margins and it's generally a difficult business. Yeah. It seems like it's a race to the bottom almost

with all of these companies that they don't have product market fit immediately. The next thing that happens is they're cutting prices and they're not cutting prices off or cutting expenses. It's typically all margin. But even that, that just, the next step is you're out of business. Yeah.

It's a race to the bottom that nobody... Or what I see kind of on the retail side, I'd love to hear your thoughts on staying like an e-commerce versus getting into the retail spaces. Like if I go buy a bag of my 13-year-old to now 28-year-old, like the optimum nutrition whey protein. But if you buy it in the wrong store, like you're getting like a quarter of the bag and protein, and it still is the same $45 for two and a half pound bag or something like that. Like, I feel like the, they have just destroyed the actual volume of what you're buying to, because it's such a race to the bottom.

Interesting. I haven't experienced that only because I don't buy supplements in retail, but we've certainly seen that even because you'd mentioned Legion is still 100% e-commerce. We're getting started in retail, something we actually really should have done some time ago, but here we are. And we've seen it, what do they call it? Shrinkflation, right? Where prices are going up, but you can just see it in servings. Number of servings have gone down 10%. Price has gone up 10%. In the case of protein, we've seen it where a product that was like 22 grams

of protein per serving is now 20 grams of protein per serving, same number of servings, same price, right? And so that's certainly a strategy that I don't think it's immoral or unethical per se. It depends how you go about it. There are realities. We raised our prices over at Legion for the first time. We raised prices a couple of years ago, which was a mistake. I mean, in business, unfortunately, even though as Legion has grown, yes, there are some economies of scale, but the price of everything generally goes up. And so really what that meant is that my margins were actually just getting slimmer. And my margins were slim to begin with because in supplements, and this is something that is unfortunate about the industry, you can't have great products and great margins. You simply can't.

You can choose one. And so I chose great products, which means great margins. You simply can't. You can choose one. And so I chose great products, which means okay margins. I mean, only now are we, if you look at gross margin, which is, it hovers between 40 and 45%. Now that's gross margin for people listening, not net margin, but gross, just top line takeout cost of goods. And that's what's left over to run the whole business. And we've only recently really been able to steadily maintain 40% to 45% gross margin. But in business, that's table stakes. That's not very good. Under 40%, anyone who knows business would say, you need to fix that. You don't know what you're

doing. You need to fix that right away. Because downstream of that, for example, that's going to limit how much you can spend on marketing. And if you're trying to build your business, you're going to have to spend a lot on your marketing. In supplements, for example, if you're not spending at least 20% of your revenue on marketing, you're probably doing it wrong. When you start looking at Red Bull's marketing budget, I want to say it's like 70 start looking at like red bull's marketing budget i want to say it's like 70 or something like that it's an insane number i believe that and the vat of red bull that they're mixing that that they're cooking that stuff up in has got to be so large uh because and and gross margins are so high oh i crazy. I mean, and that is a way to go about business.

In the case of Red Bull, I'm not too familiar with what kind of claims they make, like what's their quote unquote value proposition. But if it's fundamentally just, hey, it's a drink, you know, you like how it tastes, it has some caffeine, whatever, then that's actually fine. Do you really care if they're marketing up? Like sewer water with caffeine? Right? But I feel jazzed. Exactly. I love Red Bull. Red Bull. And if that's all they claim, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, think about a shirt,

that shirt you're wearing. If you know for a fact that they marked that up 15 times, and their gross margin is huge, it's 80%, it's 70%. Do you care? No, you don't care because you were fine with the price. You thought it was a fair value for what you're getting and you like the shirt and that's it. You move on with your life. But of course, supplements are not like that because you have to make very specific claims. Why should I drink your protein powder? It's not just because, uh, because it, you know, uh, it, well, you just, it's just a protein powder. That's it. Like you, you either drink it or you don't. It's maybe at best you say, Oh, it, cause it tastes good. Fine. No, you have to make more claims than just,

it tastes good. Uh, like take BCAA is a good example. That's our number one, most requested product is BCAAs that we don't sell. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever sell because at this point, the amount of evidence against the utility of BCAs, it's so large. What would it take to overturn that? How much evidence would it take to the contrary to now be able to say, hey, the weight of the evidence is that BCAs- That's gone. It's gone. It's gone. It's just, it's just what we know is you just eat enough protein and you're good. You're fine. You don't need BCAAs. So we get

asked all the time. Why don't we have BCAAs? Can we make BCAAs? And, and there's like kind of a standard canned response that our customer experience people share to explain why. And, and it comes down to, okay, so what's the value proposition of that product? If you're going to be honest, it's just tasty water. I mean, if you just want tasty water, then that's fine. You could do it in many different ways. But if that, and that's not going to sell BCAAs

to at least people who are looking for more than just tasty water. No, they want to be told that it's also going to help them gain muscle faster and recover better from their workouts. And yeah. So can I drink $5 salt water this weekend? Sure. You can't beat that.

The, the electric, I hate a little bit of, a little bit of water,. A little bit of watermelon flavoring. Five bucks. That's another supplement category that I hate as much as BCAAs, as much as testosterone boosters. And that's another highly requested, an electrolyte. Why don't you make an electrolyte or a hydration supplement? I would love to. There's a huge market for it. But unfortunately, I can't make a good evidence-based argument for why anyone should care. Even people who do a lot of endurance training, even when they do it in hot climates. Yes, you need to stay hydrated.

You need to drink water, yes. But as far as the salt goes, do you need to be drinking a bunch of salty water? No, you can just salt your food and you'll be fine. Should you have more than the two, two and a half grams, that's been the longstanding recommendation of sodium per day? Yeah, possibly, especially if you are sweating a fair amount. Yeah, I think that that's been the longstanding recommendation of sodium per day? Yeah, possibly, especially if

you are sweating a fair amount. Yeah, I think that that's fine. But do you want to just salt your food a little bit more or even just put some salt in water and just drink it in the morning? Have a handful of cashews. Enjoy. Or just eat some salty foods or whatever. Do you want to do that? Or do you want to drink extremely overpriced salty water? And I mean, it's fine if that's how the product were presented. If it was, there's nothing special about this. You could just salt your food or eat some cashews or whatever. You can do that. Or you can even just put some salt water and you can just like drink it in the morning, which is what I do because I don't have a low sodium diet, but it's, it's a kind of low to kind of eat very many

prepackaged foods. And so I have probably about four grams of sodium per day. So it's a little bit of salt and water in the morning. And then a little bit of salt with my dinner is really, those are the two salted meals. Otherwise it's like a salad and whatever. And so you could do that, or you could pay $5 for a sachet of salt with trace amounts of maybe some potassium, which you don't have to supplement with. You could also just eat well. You can do that too. You can supplement with potassium if you want, or you can eat well, and maybe one or two other minerals. And talk about gross margins. Insane. Insane because of the amount of marketing hype around electrolytes right now the the amount that people are willing to pay for salty water yeah is is great they just

want one we're gonna drop 10 whole dollars yeah i know ocean full of it no doubt but i mean do you think what about marathon triathlon you know athletes Do you think there's a time to place for it in that case? That's, you know, it's interesting because, um, six, no, probably about 12 months ago is when I really was looking into this because I wanted to, I wanted to be able to sell an electrolyte supplement and, and sell it to the standard that I've sold, or at least tried to sell everything, which again, is high quality, well-designed, well-executed research that shows that this product not only works as I say it works, but it also works. It does enough to warrant buying because you could make products that have good ingredients and good

doses, but there's not enough that actually happens to make it worth anything really. Like you're not, you're not going to really notice any difference one way or another. Right. Right. And, and so, and so that's, that's how I've tried to approach formulations. And, and it's not just me. I mean, I work with PhDs and professors, people who know a lot more about particularly formulating than I know at this point, I honestly, I work with PhDs and professors, people who know a lot more about particularly formulating than I know at this point. I honestly, I rarely even have all that much to useful information to add to those conversations, but I do drive them from a higher level now of like, what products should we be looking at and why can we do a product like this? It's worth anything.

So coming to electrolytes, I wanted to do it because there's a big market for it. And so when I started to look into the research and started to talk with some people who know a lot of the research much better than I did biases from companies that their entire business is selling electrolyte sugar waters. So that was a problem where quite a few of the studies actually that you might want to point to, to support such a product were very flawed when you really get into the details. And, and then when you look at research that doesn't have such biases, that's better, better designed and better conducted. Um, what you find is that, yeah, you let's take salt, right? You can sweat out salt. Of course that that's, that's obvious. However, what you will find is that the sodium levels in your blood do not change much, regardless of how

much you sweat, regardless of how much you exercise. And, and I'm referring now to studies that were specifically conducted with like high level endurance athletes that are running marathons and beyond that are sweating a large, large amounts over long periods of time. And, uh, you'll, you'll find also that with electrolyte supplements in and endurance athletes, because they tend to taste, uh, good, they can actually cause over consumption of water, which then further dilutes electrolyte levels in your body, uh, which, which can cause various problems. And so that's, uh, that's, that's, that's the rule as I understand it. And, and again, I've, I've looked into this pretty, pretty thoroughly

and spoken with some very educated people who had no, um, had no skin in the game one way or another, whether I sold a supplement or not, like I wanted true, just third party unbiased opinions. And so that's, that's basically the rule as I understand it is that most people, regardless of how much or how little they exercise do not need to take electrolyte supplements. Some people may want to increase their sodium intake. We may want to make sure that they're getting enough potassium, which for most people, that's probably going to be around five grams per day. Um, and, and make sure that their mineral intake just generally speaking is where it needs to be. Most people can get there though, with simple table salt and just eating food,

uh, that enough nutritious food, fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and maybe there's a multi, uh, multi-mineral supplement in there, uh, maybe. Uh, and so that's, that's going to be the rule. There are always exceptions to rules. So sure, there may be individuals who do marathons or ultras, especially in very hot climates where they know for a fact that they do better, not just with drinking water on their ultra through Death Valley or whatever, but water plus some salt, for example, or water plus maybe a, an electrolyte supplement, a mineral mix. And so that, um, that that's my understanding of the weight of the evidence. And if anybody, anybody listening wants to fact check me on that, you can find a breakdown

of all that over at legionathletics.com. If you search for electrolytes, you'll find an article I wrote on why I think these supplements are mostly a scam. And I would love to be wrong if, and I've, I've said this many times on my podcast. Hey, if there's anybody out there, who's very familiar with this literature. And if you think I'm missing something, please, please reach out to me. I would love to be wrong because then I could make a product. Then you could actually go sell the $5. Exactly. I could, I could, I could drain the ocean, a whole bunch of raw product out there for you. Correct. Correct. So that's, that's, that's the story as I currently am telling it with electrolytes. Before we wrap, I wanted to,

I wanted to ask as I'm sure you're not getting younger, maybe, maybe you're the only one, but I'm not. The adrenochrome, you know, the regular infusions. Once you start selling that, then we're, then we're good. The best supplement out there. Spiking. You can't openly sell it. You just spike, you make like a vitality supplement and you spike it with, right. And it's a, it's a thousand dollars a bottle.

Ah, I'd buy a lot. I have the most gain and all of us here. Noted. Have you noticed, because one thing that's very cool about Legion is that it's you. Like everybody knows you and that's your company. And you've got all the books and the social media and the articles and kind of like the trust that comes along with buying Legion supplements. Whether somebody's read the articles or the studies or not, they've just seen you around for a long time, which also probably lends your clientele to being a little bit older or aging in this non-meathead space and a little bit more focused. Have you noticed a transition from like pre-workouts to more like vitamins and

minerals and, and like the, the less kind of like hype things and more longevity focused purchasing going on just since you started the company? Yeah, I would say from the beginning, the target demographics, they skewed, I wouldn't say older, but I knew from the beginning, and this is because before I started Legion, I already had sold a lot of books. I had built up a decent sized email list. I mean, I started with writing one book and then wrote more and have always been writing and then started a podcast and so forth. That the people who most resonated with my work skewed a little bit older, I would say, and this hasn't changed much since the beginning, 25 to about 50, 55, a fairly even split between men and women, but mostly people who are, they're not professional bodybuilders. They're not professional strength athletes. They're more kind of quote unquote everyday people. Fitness is

important to them, but they also have a life to live. They have maybe three to five hours per week to give to their fitness. And they're willing to give a lot in those three to five hours a week. They care. But it also, their regimen needs to fit into their lifestyle. Like they're willing to follow a meal plan, but they're not willing to give up everything that they enjoy and never drink alcohol again and never have sugar again and so forth. And so that hasn't shifted much just because coming back to the value proposition of Legion, this point of the work that I've been doing over the years, it fits into that. That's kind of woven into the DNA of the company, which is an emphasis on education and, and helping people understand that supplements are supplementary by definition.

You actually don't need any supplements. I mean, we say it right on the homepage. You don't have to buy anything that, that we sell to, to gain muscle, to lose fat, to get healthy, to achieve your goals. There are supplements that can help, but they are only supplementary by definition. And so even, again, my personal kind of mission, so to speak, with the business was not just to sell pills and powders, but also to sell people on the education that they need to be able to achieve their goals. And so that approach from the beginning attracted certain types of people and it was totally unappealing to other types of people. So although of course, we have customers who are young, who are 18, 19, 20 years old, a brand like Ghost is probably

generally more appealing to an 18, 19 or 20 year old. 16. Six to whatever. Yeah. Those kids are wearing Crocs and they're doing bench press. You think they're 16, but they're actually 20. And so that was deliberate. And as we've continued, that hasn't changed that approach. It has grown in scope, but it hasn't

changed. I haven't seen much of a shift in, in the demographics and maybe you could say the psychographics of our, at least our best customers. Yeah. Fantastic, man. It's always great catching up. I'd love to know where people can find you and when's the book coming out? Yeah. So where people can find me. So I guess the kind of the, the hub of a lot of my work is Legion's website. If you go to legionathletics.com, you go to the blog, for example, they're like, I shit, probably a couple thousand articles now and always putting out new material. And it's a blend of, of SEO driven, but also trying to make sure it's useful and addressing actual questions that people are asking, actual things they care about.

So that's a place to find a lot of free, longer form, practical, evidence-based material. I have books you can just find on Amazon. Most popular is Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, which is more for men. Thinner, Leaner, Stronger, more for women. Shredded Chef, which is a cookbook, kind of a macros, fitness-friendly cookbook. And I'm on social media.

I'm not that active. I'm more active on X than anything else for reasons that we spoke about previously. And so I think my handle there is Muscle for Life. I'm more active on X than anything else for reasons that we spoke about previously. And so I think my handle there is Muscle for Life. And then I'm a little bit active on Instagram. I post once a week and play around in stories, mostly just post offensive memes, basically. Perfect. Yeah, that's at Muscle for Life Fitness on Instagram. on instagram enough that you said it quietly uh yeah

enough that like every few months or so i get penalized by meta for for something you know the album catches me yeah and yeah and then and then i get suppressed and i lose my dm rights or um or you put in the penalty box for a little while. Correct. That's happened to me many times. There you go. And even though I'm not doing it intentionally, I try to ride that line.

You know what I mean? It's like, how, how, how politically uncorrect can I be without getting banned? I love it. That's kind of, that's kind of my Instagram stories, right? Yeah. And, and, and then finally the, the new book will be out

in a couple months. It's going to be out in October and yeah, I haven't been speaking too much about it, but I'm going to not now that it's up for pre-order in the next probably month or so I'm going to, I'm going to talk a bit more about it on, on my platforms and in my channels. I'm not doing a big book launch for it because I don't want to, I just want to get it out, get it selling and start getting feedback and see if my hypothesis that I, that I heard earlier, if it pans out the way that I think it,

it may. I like it. Coach Travis Mash. Mashley.com. You can read all my articles and see my videos on uh jimware.com there you go doug larson you bet i'm on instagram douglas c larson uh mike great to see you brother um very quick story you don't know this but i'm actually a huge fan of legion my brother who's a software engineer and has a real salary and plenty of money and can afford a premium product asked me

you know five six months ago like what protein I would recommend for him. It should taste good, good ingredients mix as well. I feel like if you get those three things, right, that's, that's a very good sign for, um, for, um, a high quality product that I'm going to keep buying over and over and over again. So that was, that was the first product I recommended over to him. So you're doing good things in the world, man. You got, you got good stuff and I appreciate you coming on the show. Well, thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it. And one other thing I'll just, I'll mention quickly on the way that a lot of customers, just for anyone listening who has this issue and that is bloating or gastrointestinal discomfort with whey. We've used the same material, which is sourced from Ireland. It's a very expensive

material. It's kind of a pain in the ass, but it's a very, very high quality material. Part of that has to do with Ireland is known for being very strict with their dairy in particular, and they've produced very good dairy for a long time. And there's almost like this multi-generational advantage that they have in the soil and so forth. And so what we've heard since the beginning, because I chose that, I mean, I have not, I've used that same material even during COVID when it was costing me to sell, to produce a 2.2 pound bottle of that protein at that whey isolate, it was costing me over $30 for costing me. And some of the people working with me

were saying, we need to find another material. This is ridiculous. We were selling it for like $40 or $50. It does not work, right? And I refused and said, no, we have to wait this out and prices will come down and it's just too good of a material. And getting to the point here is that we've heard from the beginning from so many customers that our way is the first or the only way that doesn't upset their stomach. And I actually, it's funny, I just reached out to the manufacturer to just ask them, do you have a more in-depth kind of technical, maybe even science-based explanation for why this is? Because it's not a coincidence. We've heard been, we've heard it so many times over the years and sure you can just chalk it up to, to quality, but what is, I think there's more to it. So anyway, for people, if, if way bothers your stomach, um, there's a very good chance based on past experience that ours will not. So very cool. I'm Anders Varner at Anders

Varner, and we are barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. And make sure you get over to RapidHealthReport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin is doing a free video on the three steps we use to optimize your true physiological potential. Essentially, how we make the best in the world better. You can access that free video over at RapidHealthReport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.