The Pomp Podcast - #378: Chris Ashenden on the Importance of Food, Sleep, and Immune System Support

Episode Date: September 7, 2020

Chris Ashenden is a serial entrepreneur, a health and fitness expert, an investor and world traveler. He is the founder of Athletic Greens, an all-in-one supplement that industry experts swear by as their nutritional insurance policy. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of food and sleep, nutritional disorders, fad diets, learning vs experimentation, immune system support, quantified self, essentialism, and building the 8-figure Athletic Greens business. ========================== Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ========================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Chris Ashenden is a serial entrepreneur, a health and fitness expert, an investor, and a world traveler. He is the founder of Athletic Greens, an all-in-one supplement that industry experts swear by as their nutritional insurance policy. In this conversation, we discussed the importance of food and sleep, nutritional disorders, fad diets, learning versus experimentation, immune system support, quantified self, essentialism, and building the eight-figure Athletic Greens business. I really enjoyed this conversation

with Chris, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is BlockFi. As you know, I'm an investor, I sit on the board and I'm a very happy user. BlockFi has three products today. They offer US dollar loans against your crypto collateral. They offer no fee trading on their crypto exchange and they offer a high yield interest account where you can earn up to 8.6% APY. Go check out BlockFi today. You can go to blockfi.com slash pump. Again, high yield interest accounts, US dollar loans and no fee trading. The business is growing like a weed and I highly suggest you check it out. BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Next up is Choice. They're a new self-directed IRA product

that I'm really excited about. If you're listening to this, you're likely part of the 7.1 million Bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not Bitcoin. I used to be in that situation too, but not anymore, thanks to Choice. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer, a self-directed IRA product that allows you to buy Bitcoin, hold the private keys and use tax advantage dollars to do it. Whenever somebody asks you now, how do I buy Bitcoin in my retirement account? Tell them to go use Choice. So you can head over to retirewithchoice.com slash pump. Again, retirewithchoice.com slash pump.

Go check it out. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at Pompletter.com. Again, Pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Chris. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to

make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I'm really, really excited to have Chris here today. So thanks so much for doing this, sir. Thank you so much for having me, Pomp. Excited to be here. Absolutely. I have been drinking Athletic Greens now for a while. And as people who listen to the podcast know, I almost never, ever talk about anything that I put in my body other than Domino's every Saturday. But I got to say that it has quickly become a staple. So I'm excited to kind of hear the story. But maybe let's get into your background

first uh you got an accent so uh you're not coming from uh from the united states uh where'd you grow up and kind of what'd you do before athletic greets well thank you for the kind words mate so i'm from new zealand i have the moniker kiwi because when i first moved to the u.s people kept saying which chris kiwi chris and then just kind of became kiwi and kind of just went after i gave up fighting it and just went fuck it i'll go with kiwi and it's stuck particularly in the north american environment but i'm from new zealand my parents are world travelers i I had seven years in Japan growing up I'd been to 43 44 countries by the time I was 12 13 traveled the world and but had most of my adolescent years growing up in New Zealand and went had an obsession

with being Bruce Lee sport all those typical fun things you do when you're a teenager and ended up going to Auckland University and studying for a Bachelor of Science in Sport and Exercise Science which has been my lifelong passion has been that health and fitness piece I dropped out of that to start a supplement company, which went under. And I promptly felt sorry for myself and did odd jobs for a number of years before eventually returning to the entrepreneurial journey, always with a passion for health and fitness. But my first sort of forays back into business weren't health and fitness related. They were property and finance related and continued reading, learning, always thinking I was up to date on the health and fitness piece

and ended up really sick. I was a pretty competitive rugby player, played sport to a reasonable level. I was no great athlete by any means. You far exceeded me, man, if you were playing college football. But you get the piece, which is living what I thought was the correct manner

and applying sort of a 90-10% rule to how I was living, which was a 90% do everything right. And in theory, the other 10% won't matter. And I got really sick. I was continually sick my whole life growing up. I was having three or four doses of antibiotics, typically a year. and eventually hit a catalyst where um i was just sort of looking in the mirror one day i was

actually in uruguay with some friends for on a holiday and i've just gone off the plane and gotten sick again and i heard someone yelling out where's the kiwi and like he's upstairs coughing and someone like he's the black lung and black lung stuck with me for two hours but i got this i'm gonna take ownership of this and just go figure out what's going on so that led me down a sort of new journey all over again down the health and fitness piece i ended up at a clinic in phoenix with some very smart people running tens of thousands of dollars a test on every blood test stool test saliva test that you can imagine that was about 2008 and on the outside of that i ended up on a customized by blood chemistry hundred dollar a day sort of supplement

regime and it turned out that i just wasn't absorbing nutrients properly and it just really challenged a lot of my assumptions around what is good health how should we be eating how should we be absorbing nutrients what does it even look like and the somewhat short version of that story man is i ended up putting a whole bunch of things into one place together with the help of some really smart people and formulating this product called athletic greens which i i don't claim to be the key and king scientist behind it i'm the entrepreneur who put it together and took it to market and made a lot of mistakes along the way but i'm proud to be behind a do good brand to do good business that a lot of people like yourself have adopted as a key daily habit and sort of

getting the benefit that I originally wanted for myself. So it's been an interesting journey. For sure. And I guess part of this is I'm fascinated by people who travel a lot, right? And so when you were young, you kind of are in this weird situation where your parents dictate where you go, right? What you eat, where you go, everything about your life is these people's responsibility, yours took you around the world, right? For all intents and purposes in terms of a lot of travel. Talk a little bit about how that in hindsight kind of forms your world perspective and maybe the advantages that it gave you over other people who didn't have that experience. It's an interesting question. I've heard you mention

at other points in some of your other interviews. By the way, I love your podcast. I only discovered it this year mate and has become a staple so thank you for just keeping your mind so open as you explore your own growth and also the areas that are interesting to you i love listening the look i won the lottery with my parents i'm just unbelievably grateful to the phenomenal nuclear family i have and their desire to expose us to different experiences luckily for me uh my dad ended up getting an opportunity to go first study and then work in japan so we had this experience living in a completely foreign culture at a time when there still weren't that many foreigners there if you went to the boonies you sort of pointed at and stared at and laughed at i was

this random blonde haired kid back then and you just get an idea that we are part of a global citizenry and we have far more in common than we have differences and people are people and the vast majority of people are wonderful great warm people and that was just reinforced in the nearly one year backpacking we did with my dad with his big pack my mom's smaller backpack and just kept coming down to my little sister's like mini backpack and where we just got exposed and they intentionally exposed us to multiple third world countries um living roughing it and backpackers but also some some great experiences with cultures and places like kenya and on some parts of like cairo in the middle east it was really amazing and it does open your eyes to

the commonalities and it also made us really good all of us at making friends like everyone in my family is amazing at making friends we're just interested to see where the commonalities instantly and my mother's probably the world's best report builder and man i i can't i can't say enough the importance for young people to be exposed to foreign cultures in a format whereby they are the guests in someone else's house in society and just experience that is an eye-opener yeah and and so are there any like uh specific memories you have that you feel like were formative uh moments during that time of travel right there there are there are many i can give you one a little bit later because i've traveled many times i was in morocco and had just left a

town called fez which is this amazing medina walking to the medina and in morocco is like walking back 800 years and in the course of 100 meters but i stopped on the side of the road and asked two young girls for directions and my girlfriend at the time uh sort of said to them how do we get from here to there and they told us and they looked at each other and they just said we'll show you so these two girls jumped in the back of our car and we're driving towards this i think we're going to the train station and they're like where are you staying we don't have a place like you have to come to our house so they'd gone out and bought one breeder we didn't know it was to feed the whole family demand that we come to their house and it was kind of on the way

okay that's fine so we go in they get out of the car dad and mom come out and say these people are going to stay here and they're like okay that's great that's fine so they invite us into this house which is this incredibly humble one room house it's just incredible it's a one room house the toilet's a hole in the floor the sort of the chairs in the house are basically beds that along the side of the wall that they have squabs on that people sit on during the day and then they lie on and sleep during the night they gave us that burrito to eat we didn't know that was their meal to be cut up um like a loaf of bread with nutella i didn't know i was allergic to wheat then i smashed the nutella and then i started realizing these guys have literally given us

everything that they would tend to eat tonight without a thought without knowing us and it really touched me man and uh there's this lovely old guy living there and just had this amazing cultural experience and just realized the hospitality of these people is just like nothing else so the next morning woke up uh took all these amazing photos and rocked off got them all printed out laminated posted up bought a ton of nutella um like loaves and loaves of bread came back and they did not want us to give them any of the food they just but man were they happy with the photos and it was just this warm touching experience and just made me realize you don't know and you don't know anything until you've experienced uh what life is like for someone else who's less fortunate

than you and realize just how much humanity there is to be shared with the world as opposed to us versus them i think that's an awesome story it's uh it's also this thing i think of just uh it's really cool to see humans who don't really speak the same language come from different cultures just genuinely want to help each other right and and i think that's part of uh part of the you that story yeah well i don't know about yourself man when you've gone traveling and you've done it a bit have you had some of those experiences as well yeah it's pretty crazy um all right let's get into uh athletic greens um one of the the key pieces so uh you and i haven't talked about this before but uh up until maybe two years ago i did everything uh that you shouldn't

do. I drank all the time, I barely slept, didn't care what I ate. I played football in college. So it was pretty much healthy enough, and could do whatever I wanted and was young guy. About two years ago, though, started to become more interested in the food I was putting in my body, sleeping, drinking water, kind of all the like, really, really basic stuff. And I, the way I tell story now is like just sleeping alone right just sleeping eight hours a night completely changed everything just drinking enough water right just cutting out some of the garbage like each one of these like very small um changes had a massive impact and so maybe talk a little bit i've heard you say before like the importance of the food specifically right and kind of how that's the

the core value that uh many people just one they don't understand two they don't have the discipline to kind of follow, but just how important, before you get into supplementation, all this other stuff, like the importance of food to your overall health and well-being? It's a good question. Interestingly, I've had that experience. I wonder how much of that was the catalyst of your now wife joining the POMP team. I would suspect a fair amount. So it's a great question. It's interesting how you've noticed that the application of some core habits have led to a compounding effect. And I have a couple of frameworks that i look at sort of health and wellness and there's two different pieces really one if you

consider an old-fashioned green to red needle meter where you have dark green on one side and it kind of steadily gets lighter green yellow than to bright red on the other side and you can put on the dark green side youth and lack of insults and then amount of time that you've been doing all the other things correctly that are kind of in line with the way we were ultimately designed and evolved and on the other side the red side you have old age insults and then the amount of time you've had some many or other of these different pieces not the way they should be and i think if you just consider this green to red meter as you then take into consideration all the different buckets that you kind of want to apply that are in line with our evolutionary norm

And I think a lot of people don't truly realize the impact of cumulative insults where we're doing things that aren't quite right, and the cumulative impact of repetitive habits, relatively small things, but the few things that ultimately move that needle are done continuously. And you have everything from sleep, stress, light exposure, vitamin D, movement, outdoor activity, how much you socialize, your sense of community, and then you have the whole food piece. And once you get into the food piece, you have sort of the macro piece, which is where you may be eating highly refined foods with proportions of bad fats and fast sugars way out of whack with anything we should be consuming. And you have the micronutrient piece. And you have things that might inflame you. So just kind of in broad strokes, if you have your macros lined up in such a way that they don't destroy you from a sort of metabolic health piece. And you have your micronutrients lined up in such a way that you're absorbing or putting into your mouth what you kind of need to function properly. And then you have the inflammatory pieces, which is where you're either not eating or eating sufficient things that lead to a healthy inflammatory environment.

So with those kind of things in mind, you then say, okay, how does what you eat really impact? And you might say, well, if you're continually screwing with your blood sugar and you're eating things that tear up your gut or inflame you for any reason, and you're not getting in enough quality, typically protein and then clean nutrition around the micronutrients, then you're in for a bit of a rough road. And I think when it comes to, just understand that those three things are massive and they're all tying together. And with the Athletic Greens piece, it's just this understanding that you need a lot of things in your body to be working correctly. This idea that it's just the big things, protein cups, fats, or isolatedly the various micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals, and that just kind of smashing and hodgepodge is fine, has been thoroughly thrown out. And I think the understanding is much more around, look, you need to kind of reduce the insults you make here while maximizing your body's ability to work properly for an extended period of time. And where Athletic Greens comes in and sort of this idea of whole food-based nutrition comes in is, one, without screwing the pooch on the macronutrients and the inflammation piece. so just consider metabolic health blood sugar obesity on one side and the inflammatory piece

on the other side how do you make sure uh that your body's getting the smaller pieces the micronutrients it needs and using them properly and there's kind of three parts of that you're either not getting enough in uh in your mouth you're not consuming enough or you're not absorbing enough or your body's not using them properly and any one of those three and i think most people particularly if they have those other different sort of buckets misaligned uh will be way off on a modern lifestyle and nearly all of those three so there's this principle of it's a long term principle of synergy and the understanding of i think a guy called bruce ames has a theory on triage which is if you're short of certain things or some parts of your body aren't working

correctly you are prone to strip and pull from other areas to ensure your body's prime directors of you if you will of sort of surviving and basic reproductive health emit but at long-term expense of other things and what i think is sort of important to people is to understand that i went and formulated a product that really worked hard on making sure that you got enough in your mouth that you absorbed it and that inside your body most things were working uh they're all like getting gentle touches to make things work as well as possible but it's no holy grail food is first you gotta get everything lined up and then what you've learned is that you actually need to line up all these other buckets at the same time so i'm just very very quick to point out food is first

own your lifestyle pieces there's no magic silver bullet and with that underway um you can look to to move from thrive sort of surviving to thriving to really optimizing whatever your outcome is That makes sense. It makes a ton of sense. And I think part of what, you know, is always so funny to me is, you see somebody, they'll go to the gym, right? And they'll go run two miles, three miles, and then they get done and they go eat, you know, a cheeseburger, right? And it's kind of like you're disconnecting, you know, that you should work out and expend energy and sweat, and you feel good when you're done doing it all these things, but then you go and you almost give back all of the benefit of it immediately, right? And part of what is, I think, the journey or the learning exercise for a lot of people is, how do I actually attack the social health or mental health stuff? How do I attack the nutrition side? How do I attack the exercise side, the sleep? Like, there's all of these different components. And where I think the world is going, and you guys are obviously a leading example of this is helping people do this stuff easier. Right? So there's a lot of people who, you know, sat down and spent hours and hours and hours and hours over many, many years learning every intricate detail of everything that they should know, and then trying to optimize their life around it. Right? The truth is just most people don't have that time and energy or self motivation to go learn all of that. Instead, what we're seeing is we're seeing people take that knowledge, right, basically package it into very easy to use things like athletic greens, where you say, look, we know that you need these, you know, 75 plus vitamins, minerals, etc. How do we make this something that people don't even have to think about it? Right? It's just we know we're delivering it. So maybe talk a little bit, not so much about like the formula, but this idea of building a product that regardless of what's in it, you can actually make it usable for people and kind of ensure that it's not a, okay, I'll try it one time and then I give up on it because it's just too difficult or too much friction in my life. It's a good question, man.

I can talk to that. There's a couple of pieces there as well. So talk about your buddy who probably rhymes like Pomp two years ago, who goes to the gym, eats a cheeseburger, and then maybe sits down for 16 hours of the day. And you say, okay, what's he doing right? What's he doing wrong? Maybe he stays up looking at a blue screen until 11 o'clock at night and sleeps five or six hours, doesn't really care, just pounds more coffee and repeats. Now, if you look at that kind of piece, I think you can say, well, what's he doing as a positive input? Go to the gym, exercise, great.

post-workout uh smashing a cheeseburger and not so great the subsequent sitting down all day not good the staring at the screen until late at night not good and i think that it's one of the elements i think that it's important to understand that getting your health and your health span or your performance kind of ducks in a row requires both a basic willingness to take ownership of the outcome and then the daily habits that actually make a difference and it's not really a case of do more and more and more i love the bruce lee quote like it's not daily increase it's daily decrease like hack away the unessential i am absolutely an essentialist at heart and one of the things that uh really pisses me off about the entire industry that i'm in is

that most most of the brands out there most business out there sell ineffectual products in some cases relatively harmful products they try to drive just off trends they don't really differentiate around anything and they don't really focus on solving uh corporate problems and if you walk into a whole foods and look at a shelf in the so-called supplement section it's like 400 things and you have no idea uh what you should probably be taking unless someone's told you to go in or maybe a friend of yours said hey go go and take this stuff so and whole foods is the world's come a long way in the 10 years since since we've been in business in terms of getting better and better quality and nutrients more readily available in the supplement world i mean

it was serious utter rubbish for a long time and still is in most cases so when i when i got people to help me ultimately formulate athletic greens it was i want to get the super bundle supplement and make it as easy and simple as possible. So instead of my 100 horse pills a day, I want one thing a day. And instead of a whole bunch of relatively ineffectual synthetic isolates, I want to get as many things

working well together as possible. And this massive nutrient dense, this principle of nutrient density is important, bolus of nutrition that does as many good things for me as possible in one go, such that if I wasn't going to do anything else, supplemental to my food and just take one thing it would be this and that's what we built and

that's why i mean we have different groups of people who who love us and some are the high performance or the athletic population some are the go-forward achievers who frequently are centralists but kind of want the best and the other is the health or healthspan focus focus folks who are looking really to maximize healthspan and many people are all three so that essentialist principle uh combined with it's the key daily habits there's no hack there's no shortcut there's it's just do the basics like it's like running a business do the basics well and just daily execute daily on the key habits that are actually going to make a difference and let those benefits compound and it's daily habits literally drive success and

everything, and health and nutrition is not an exception. Yeah. Well, one of the really interesting parts of health and nutrition in general to me is it seems like there's fads, right? They come, they go. Many times, they're ideas that are not new. They've just been repackaged under a new name with some new leader who's kind of pushing that thought process. But as we know with, let's say, diets, for example, most people think of them as a finite amount of time. So I'm going to go on a diet for two weeks, three, you know, three months or whatever it is, maybe it's there's an event that I want to go right, I'm in college, and I'm going to go on spring break, or I've got a wedding coming up or whatever it is. And so just naturally

kind of these event based motivations, obviously, people will give up once the event kind of occurs. But talk more about these fads and how they either work or don't work and why they attract people and capture the attention and really permeate through society, whether it's keto or something else. yeah so i think if you look at any diet du jour there are commonalities and typically to some degree uh there's a short-term result that can be felt or achieved if someone adopts it so they get that early dopamine hit that they're getting some sort of success it could just be water loss or it could actually be a little bit of fat loss or it could be they stop eating things that are pro-inflammatory to them causing them blowed up feel like crap or anything else uh combined with a relatively poor base of like how people get most of their nutrition

information is from sort of so-called mass media who really largely don't know what they're talking about when they throw out this study shows this or whatever and you just take one look at the study and you know man this is scary and people will send me those all the time and say could you debunk or or back this up but i think it's that desire to be on top of the next best thing combined with the people who typically popularize not all of those eating formats uh are trying to monetize or build a sort of a following around what they're doing i think that's the that's the real catch particularly when one group or other begins to polarize politically against one of the others which is just absolutely nuts if you actually look at most of the successful eating formats

the commonalities just like us traveling the world and meeting other cultures and people the commonalities far outweigh the differences which is pretty much eat whole foods wherever you can don't eat too much don't eat in a way that's going to make you infamed inflamed completely screw up your blood sugar and make sure you take off your micronutrient bases whatever that looks like for you and the commonalities are really high but i have no idea and it's quite frustrating and why some of these items get politicized and people start going at each other's throats when it makes no sense but one thing on your point about people deciding i'm going to go to wedding i'm going to go spring break i think they take ownership of their health and particularly as

it represents around physical appearance in a way that they may not otherwise but what they do in that short period isn't effectively sustainable for them so i think embracing this principle no shortcuts no hacks it's the daily habits that ultimately will get you there and you don't actually need to do too much to end up with a very very different health outcome and in particular with sort of physical appearance it's surprisingly easy to maintain a relatively low body fat percentage and a reasonable amount of muscle with not a huge amount of effort like the actual amount required to do that is far far less than people think if you're lining up those different buckets and just like you're saying the sleep the eight hours the drink enough water

the consistent bed just ownership around eating a bit more cleanly still have your beloved dominoes but maybe it's not dinner every day and maybe it's just on the weekends just these little things that's done consistently add up i mean no one gets to 70 and dies because of what they did when they were 69 it's the cumulative insults that are just part of continually man so i think with this growing interest both from uh incredible baby boomer population where we're looking at the write-off and biggest write-off of intellectual capital uh that the earth has just ever seen as this group of people march towards alzheimer's and dementia and all sorts of craziness i think more and more people in that group are taking more and more ownership which is wonderful

and more people are interested in a happier life and not wasting their life and they're realizing that means owning some of these different pieces as opposed to just saying that maybe they're important actually taking steps around ownership of the different pieces so i applaud you man for moving from the the beer and burger only nutrition piece to like focus i mean sleep's the big daddy man as well yeah it feels like um there's also this uh desire to go from uh if you use that spectrum or that kind of uh you know green to red um lever that you described earlier a lot of people are in the red right so they don't sleep enough they don't eat healthy they don't exercise they don't you know whatever uh stay up late on the computer all that kind of stuff and everyone tries

to go from the red all the way to the dark green right it's like okay i'm gonna do everything all at once and i think that just we know that uh changing habits right it's very hard to change everything all at once. And so maybe talk a little bit, as you've seen people who are customers of Athletic Greens and kind of transform over time, how exactly do you see the most successful people, like the people who really do make kind of long term sustainable change and go from, you know, really bad to, to really good? What do they do? Like, what can people do at home, in terms of affecting that change? It's a good question.

And typically it comes down to which three key groups of where someone more aligns. And that if it's a athletic population, they're already exercising a lot. They just typically might not have been doing the right things and the right doses. And also when you start to overexercise, there is absolutely a trade-off

between health and performance that I think they become aware of. And again, it's typically take more ownership of the different pieces that really matter in the high performer hard charging type a pumps of the world that is literally they uh they want the best they want it now they want it easy they want it simple they want to understand it they typically are the crowd that are looking for the hack or the secret sauce that allows them to continue to be maniacs in their life but do as little as possible and i think as they take steps towards a healthier outcome in one area

they they tend to consistently take one or other or more steps around other areas and one of the coolest things i've seen is groups like you know that that sort of hard charger high achiever group is starting to realize that sleep is cool and because man because i've been saying uh food is first sleep sun exposure community for 10 years and now that that people are pulling out the aura or the whoops and measuring their sleep and it's starting to become cool um like that that piece alone is just so huge for that particular population because they tend to just overclock on the burn right that this taking the that they're taking the deposits out of the bank account just way too much and then the the last group the health group typically

these folks are they could be anywhere in this journey from i just want to not feel sad every time i walk past a mirror which is something like i've been a personal trainer for a while this is brutal but it's also amazing when you get someone to look in the mirror and go i'm really happy with how i look in the mirror it's one of the biggest confidence turnarounds that you can you can be a part of so i think when people come in on that journey i don't mind where anyone comes in all i ask is that you're taking ownership for your health and you're not looking for a silver bullet and yeah i found it best adopting key habits you don't want to slam everyone with all the habits all at once it's what are the key

habits that we can start to move the needle on and typically man the the biggest one is like for the absolute bottom bones beginner typically really struggling with with body fat massively inflamed don't move enough is it would be do something that makes you feel in control and empowered, drink water, go for a walk and try to get an hour's more sleep. And I just start with those three things. And if we're part of that, great. But I always tell them if you have the choice for budgetary reasons or whatever other reason, then focus on food first, like get the whole food in first. Got it. And so that middle bucket, the kind of, you know, hard charters that you described, that's probably most of the people who listen to this podcast. That's the category

that they're most likely to be in, walk us through, one, you mentioned a whole bunch of what I'll just call kind of analytics driven technology, right? So whether it's you put it on your wrist, it's on your bed, it's on your phone and some sort of software, whatever it ends up being, what is the importance of that stuff? Or do you feel like some of that is over rotation on trying to measure like the really finite stuff when people are still missing kind of the big picture stuff like how do you look at those as ways to augment change for somebody i think to the degree that it gives if you're going to do any of the quantified self pieces i think ultimately it needs to empower you and people can go down a rabbit hole pretty quickly

and it should also give you information that you probably you may have understood it to some degree without it but it does give you actionable insights around oh my god uh look at that and i think for this group the like a pedometer this is counting how many steps you do that's great but it's relatively simple you kind of know if you've moved around to some degree although i think it can be great to look at that um so take like the past six weeks where i've had a tummy bug like my average steps per day went from 12 000 to like under 2000 and that's not okay so just just the consistent again the consistent habits piece so if you take the hard charges uh i would love them to be tracking uh their sleep not because i think that they needed to

track the sleep but the degree of ownership and responsibility that they will take when they start tracking their sleep will it'll be slapping them right in the face that hey man uh you said at that screen you crushed two glasses of red wine at 10 p.m looked at the screen till 11 and woke up at 5 30 or 6 you compare that to uh you finish work at 5 or 6 went for a walk with your you know lovely lovely wife uh chilled out socialized ate early and just did nothing like stimulatory for the last two or three hours and do that for a week and start to go holy shit man do i feel better um i'm waking up feeling like a rock star my libido is starting to come back all sorts of things will start to line up when when people take those so i i go back and

forth because there are some people who go way down the rabbit hole man and they're always looking for the little the little the the different hack the different this the different that but i think the key around this piece is taking ownership making some things non-negotiable even for me i am definitely in that category as well and just over the last three or four years i've just made the sleep piece non-negotiable so obviously if you're flying uh or doing something else you try not to get on the red eyes if you have to so be it but just start to build in this defend your sleep habit and make this piece to something you own left right and center and just watch the magic happen when you go to that eight hours consistent every night as a habit man that

literally smokes just about everything other than the stress piece yeah another key piece i think is uh cheat meals right i think everyone loves to uh to talk about them because it's the it's the splurge right it's the thing that you get to do that uh you feel like you're almost rewarding yourself to some weird thing um obviously every saturday i'm eating dominoes uh which is kind of Like literally, I look forward to Saturdays for that specific reason. But talk about in general, you know, is this a you got to do the core things right? 50% of the time, 75% of the time, 100% of the time, like, how important is it to be perfect all the time versus, you know, kind of pre planned diversions from the plan as long as you get back on to it? So it's a really good question, man.

So if you look at those different buckets, and we can flip it into a business setup. So say if we're looking at contribution margin by channel, which I have a direct with consumer business, it's my preferred management tool for looking at how we're performing and you just consider, okay, how did we go around customer acquisition on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, whatever. And you have these different columns that all kind of line up, and you can look at these and go, net, net, we're doing great, but there might be a few of these pieces that are getting crushed, that are pulling down the rest of the ship, so to speak. And I think when you start to consider that red or green, that needle marker, as we discussed earlier, if you are consistently getting crushed in any one of those areas, you need to go really clean and beautifully in some of the other areas. So to answer your question about what's it like to have this thing to look forward and the cheat meals, I'm quite pro the cheat meal. I'm not pro when it gets crazy out of hand or it goes from being this like epic planned over a month lineup. up and then people do it and they realize that they've been great for a month and nothing really happens because of that one insult it was just whatever and so you find that the next one happens not a month away but seven days away and the next one and back they go to the old habits i think

that's one one piece the other thing is to understand i love pizza pizza was my nemesis food for years man we should do a i'm really allergic to wheat it turns out so i have to always search the world for the best gluten-free pizza but it used to be a piece i my saturday it was both carb refeed typically unless i was training really hard in which case my my carb bolus during the week was was much higher but typically i tried to combine a so-called cheat day with a carb refeed because i was going pretty low carbohydrate the rest of the week and i tended to feel miserable for days and days afterward but my two nemesis foods were the pizza and what you guys call dim sum or we'd call yum chow back in asiana those two things i got the

point that lunchtime i'd rock up to my restaurant favorite restaurant auckland there'd be a queue of like 100 people uh in in line the manager would see me march me past the line sit me down because i would smash so much dim sum that i was like the ultimate dollars per table that they've just ever experienced and they didn't know man that i've been building up for this for a week so i was training like a maniac and then nighttime would be a pizza that was kind of my my role then i found out that this is that 90 10 principle that i mentioned so if all your various um buckets are kind of more or less in the green occasionally going into the red is no real big deal at all i'd almost suggest that you do so much in the green so often that you don't even worry about

planning the cheat meal like when it happens it happens you don't worry you just enjoy it and this gets straight back on the wagon that would be a much healthier adoption of of this piece but take for me i am really intolerant to wheat and uh that one dose the rest of the week i didn't eat any wheat but that one dose a week was enough to really mess me up and uh you know if i could go on my whole life knowing that i actually shouldn't be eating this particular food for me because for me it inflamed me and tore up my gut and everything else then my life would be quite different health wise i think and so it's just that understanding that there's that saying everything in moderation including moderation and but as long as those things are in green and when you're stepping

across and you're having things that aren't necessarily like in green in that bucket at that moment it's no real drama at all and for someone who can tolerate it man that might mean you toast the total the pizza whatever and it could be a social dynamic tied to that that net net is so much more positive than the little bit of insult you may do for you uh with the pizza whereas i would do a lot to to make it completely worthwhile and that social pieces uh and maybe it's something that happens when you go out it's like the drinking maybe without going too crazy there's this one night a week where you're already getting together with your buddies or your family or whatever and you're you're telling extraction so i imagine family gatherings are still pretty

epic and so what you smash a bit of alcohol and a whole ton of pizza and pasta in that moment but the social dynamic this net net is a positive for you and just not even worrying about it probably does better for a lot of people so the answer to that question man is it depends unfortunately it's the case for nearly everything in health and nutrition that's perfectly fine uh one of the areas I'm really interested in is obviously with the COVID-19 stuff, there's tons of talk about drugs and vaccines and kind of all this stuff that may or may not happen. And I'm not a scientist, so I kind of just say, look, we'll see what the scientists come up with. But there are things that it appears that people can do to boost their immune system in general, right? So not necessarily

saying, hey, we're going to prevent the spread of a virus because I boosted my immune system, but just general good health type of stuff. And so talk a little bit about how you think of boosting the immune system. And then also one thing you've mentioned a couple of times is sunlight and kind of the impact that that can have on people that they may not realize. Yeah, so I think it's interesting, man, because in January every year, people have their New Year's resolutions. And anyone with a health and fitness-related business has their bumper

bump a month or two and what happened with covid kicking in is we had five or six januaries back to back and rather than pat ourselves on the back and go great job we just realized it's people taking more ownership of their health and one of those pieces obviously is the immunity piece and hopefully you know there's a silver lining in some of the covid stuff that people taking there's more awareness about metabolic health and the daily inputs and habits and things that ultimately drive a healthy outcome but from an immunity piece if you are not in the green across the majority of all those different buckets and think that you're going to suddenly take some zinc some vitamin c and just rock it out you're dreaming right your your body works

together synergistically it's a system and you you definitely want to be in the green for if you're trying to optimize your immunity and then there are some things that can boost immunity and i think sleep uh clean nutrition something like our product you don't want to promote it too much but it does a great job of covering those bases and then the vitamin d piece and we we provide a vitamin d but i much like this oral there's benefits to oral vitamin d but i much prefer folks at this time of year there's no excuse unless you're just locked in an office and just can't get out to get your vitamin d from sun exposure and that's not saying you go out and turn yourself into a red lobster right or like the french call the english roast beef because

they come in every year sit on the beach and go bright pink like the color of roast beef and don't do that that that will not result in a positive outcome but incremental intelligent sun exposure both getting light on your eyes and also um our bodies are really well equipped to synthesize vitamin d from uh skin to sun exposure to me makes the most sense and if you can't do that then and only then do you look to supplement with oral vitamin d but i would much much rather from all the different health elements of being outdoors getting a light in your eyes the photosensitivity the immune boosting benefits are massive and that like that bucket just put that one solidly in the green particularly in the middle of of of summer man there's there's no

there's no real reason why why you shouldn't go and do that yeah makes a lot of sense um let's talk a little bit about uh when people take athletic greens what exactly are they putting in their body green gold uh no man so you have you have various parts of the body work in different ways and you have like i said you can put something in your mouth you could not be putting enough in your mouth or you could not be absorbing it properly or could be misusing something in your body so inherently we're giving you a bolus of micronutrients that are with a ton of so-called phytonutrients and plant nutrients massively in one place along with and in the forms that your body things that will help you absorb it so that's everything from we have probiotics we have digestive

enzymes we have prebiotics we have the various cofactors and other things that are present in food that your body recognizes inbound vitamins minerals as food and sucks them over so that's the in the in the tube and then absorbed piece and then we have gentle touches uh that sort of have secondary effects on improving bodily function um with a view towards look get all your green buckets lined up absolutely own that food piece yourself there's no silver bullet i know i've mentioned it a lot man but i do it's important to me that people get it and then give yourself this daily nutritional insurance piece which is sort of a hedge that maybe you're not getting in enough maybe not absorbing it properly or maybe for any number of reasons uh your body's not processing

some of those micronutrients and the goal is sort of healthy cells if you think about it at the end of the day it's it's what you absorb that really matters it's how you use it and it's healthy cells is the outcome and that is something that consistently it's the habit piece again it's day in day out consistent give your body a caress put a deposit in instead of withdrawal into this spectacular machine that is your body and just do it consistently so that that is kind of how it works man it's it's a it's a plant-based product but it's just got so much nutrition in one place that sort of acts as a hedge against any one of those three pieces. We spent a bunch of time talking about kind of the health and wellness aspect of what you guys do.

I don't want people to think that this is a small business. You've done a fantastic job of building a very large business. Talk a little bit about kind of the business side of what you're doing in terms of you started a number of years ago and kind of how the business has grown over time and really what's driven that growth to build Athletic Greens into what it is today. Thanks, man. Inherently, when I came up with the idea to formulate this ultimate all-in-one, take it daily and be done idea, I thought I'm an athletic guy.

This is for an athletic group of people, those who are already taking massive ownership around their health, and it's a greens-based powder, so I'm going to call it Athletic Greens and off we go. So I merely marched to the US and promptly burnt through all the money I'd raised, royally pissed off my then investor and business partner. As I found out, it's actually really freaking hard to sell stuff. But I knew that what we'd built was I wanted to go direct to consumer. We didn't have the margin to make retail work.

In fact, the first two advisors I said, you just flat out don't have the margin to make this work, retail, online, anywhere. Because I effectively super bundled and over-engineered a product without actually testing this is something the market was willing to pay for it was something i was willing to pay for but it was uniquely designed uh ultimately to be sold around a subscription direct-to-consumer model and literally having run out of money and sleeping on couches and parting ways with my then investor and having a pretty challenging time uh emotionally just dealing with not feeling sorry for myself that your life is kind of crap I went all in on this

focus on look when do I have the biggest impact in the universe when uh when can I most help people and how could this all work and I realized I want to work off the recommendations of other people who are telling folks to come and adopt this as a habit and it's that habit adoption so when people come in adopt it as a habit and they are in one of those sort of three buckets that I mentioned and obviously can afford us. We are a premium price product. We actually had the lowest margins in supplement land. But what we found is that these folks

would stick and stick and stick. So it would be really, really hard to acquire the right customer. It's very hard to do so profitably at the best of times, but hard for us because we don't really have the margins. But when the right person comes, they tend to stay with us for a long time And they trust us to continue to keep up to date on the science and everything else to evolve this.

If you're going to take one thing, make it this thing. And we're on the 53rd edition of this product, which is about to come out, which is pretty cool. So I think that for those people, the fact that they stick around long enough, despite the fact I suck at marketing, I suck at nomenclature, I made so many mistakes. mistakes but the fact that we are something that's really good for people really good for the universe has allowed us to attract really good quality people to the team and when customers come for the right reason like i said silver bullet is not us then and and this is the habit that kind of matches with with them then they they stick and that allows us to make a business work that wouldn't have worked under any other condition because of the margins so i i look at what some of these

folks are doing with various D2C companies where they're trying to just throw money into acquisition and feel like they can sort of buy themselves a way to a brand without ultimately solving problems for customers that customers want to be solved. And I think the investment world is waking up to maybe this wasn't such a good idea to spend a dollar and get 85 cents back and hope customers would come back. But like anything else, you're either adding value, you're solving a problem or you're not and it's that customer experience is the key driver and we are not an all things to all people product we are literally for those in those three buckets who want the absolute best um that that's our that's our person and when they come in they

stick so it's multiple years of those people sticking around and saying nice things that have led to us having the small amount of success you've had some pretty epic people on this podcast man so we're we're a little minnow compared to some of your guests but we have ambitions to leave a nice dent in the universe well i think part of this is um the focus on acquisition versus retention right and ultimately for something like this uh i always think of um whether it's something like the air pods or it's a a food and uh kind of wellness uh supplement anything that you put in your body or near your body is a very intimate experience for people Right. And you're probably one of the most intimate wishes. Basically, the value proposition is you're going to drink this every single day. And so there's not much margin of error in terms of, you know, if it tastes great three days, but it tastes bad, you know, the other four days of the week, that's not good enough. Right.

And so it's got to have kind of the consistent value that is seen in the eyes of the customer, and that ultimately leads to that retention. And then it's interesting to hear you kind of talk about, you know, by not having really large margins, you really are dependent on the retention, right, over long periods of time. And so talk maybe a little bit about, you know, from a metric standpoint, like how do you think about retention and what's successful and what's not, right? Some people who are listening to this may be like software engineers or entrepreneurs who probably think of it differently than you would with physical products. So how do you think about that retention and kind of what works for you guys? It's not that different from folks who have, say, a SaaS business. and that i mean look we you mentioned taste some people are going to love our taste we work so hard on making what looks like green sewage water taste good without compromising and it was really hard and but i think we've done a great job but again for some people it's just like you know what not

not interested in this piece or i don't want to have a green powder or it's not matching for me or i want to feel more energy i'll go back to red but whatever it's not really But when they come for the right reason, there's an inflection point, which is pretty common in the physical product space at or around that fourth order. Effective churn or drop off changes dynamically. And what you've gotten to is the people who match to, yeah, this habit is part of who I am. And going forward, I see the value in continuing it. and there are others that come and go come and go come and go but inherently it's just understanding we can't go everywhere i can't compete with a lot of these people on acquisition span we're a bootstrap company the the whole piece for us is how do we make our customers think they'd be crazy to go anywhere else and really look after them from a customer experience standpoint and i think we do a once someone's a customer of ours i think we do a great job of

delivering a great experience but like i said it's not not for everyone and we've tried in the past to be more aggressive in the throttle and realize we acquired a whole lot of wrong people and i think your whole point that people focus on the acquisition piece instead of the retention piece does not work in our margin environment and this allowed us to focus on driving enough failure in the customer experience that once people come for the right reasons have adopted that habit which was way harder before when no one was smashing a green powder whereas now anyone with instagram account will see their favorite health and fitness bunny smashing green green drinks left right and center even though we're not technically a green drink but the habit is

the cultural habit around this new behavior has definitely moved to our favor but but yeah man it's just a focus on right customer don't overpay take that slower growth and and look after people And again, I'm not trying to be all things to everyone. We're not going to come out with 400 SKUs and we're going deep on that one value prop, which is if you're going to take one thing to feel awesome every day, take this. And I think just that focus on the retention piece and that customer lifecycle piece has actually led us to be very lean, very efficient, very capital efficient. We have the most horrible supply chain, man.

we have well over 75 ingredients some of them are very specialized access to them is difficult controlling the sourcing pieces is actually one of our key ip ip pieces but we have this brutal cash flow cycle so that that itself has led to a focus on acquiring the right customers and then keeping them happy but that compounds on itself man in subscription billing i think it was edison said uh compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world you'd probably say bitcoin is the eighth wonder of the world i'd probably go in for uh subscription billing because as long as someone comes in the right reason and they're and they're happy to be there again next month you can make a heck of a lot of errors this month and live to live to tell the tale next month

because that customer came back and look man i i think understanding that if you want to be in business you want to be in the reorder business is the biggest failing i see most of the d2c players jump in and just ruin stuff with and you can make a ton of money by just out executing everyone at the acquisition piece and keep people long enough that it drives enough profitability and you can get really big but there are some players out there man making tons of cash but are they building the business i believe is the what i want to build no not not really not at all that makes a lot of sense what's the biggest lesson you've learned in building the company from like a management standpoint right is you've been very successful but i think that there's a lot of kind

of business tactics lessons but from a building a company building a culture um you know marketing etc you know as the founder of the business what's the biggest lesson that you had to learn and i learned them all i am more stupid than i realized is the biggest lesson i feel like i did 100 meter sprint in a 90 meter gym but not just once like again and again and again and again so i think the biggest error was i when i by the time i had athletic greens as my sole focus i was nearly five million dollars in debt for another business that had gone under so i i realized i have to make or break i'm not in a hurry uh but whatever happens i can't die so i think i didn't sell a big enough vision early or bring enough real rock stars to the table

early like i almost over bootstrapped with myself doing way too much for way too long and if i was going to go back and do it all again it's very easy i would sell a much bigger vision and i would bring seriously powerful um rock stars to the table who have execution intelligence on what we wanted to do and we frequently attracted really smart people but often with absolutely no experience in what they were then going to be asked to do and sometimes that's an advantage because someone comes up with a new different way of doing things but more more often than not you just suffer as someone tries to figure stuff out so those two pieces man the bigger vision um and bring rock stars to the table early makes uh it makes sense and it also feels like um you know it's obvious

today reby but uh it sounds like you are of the belief that you have to go through the challenges and obstacles in order to learn those lessons you just don't have to i wish i mean i one of my biggest drivers palm i'd be curious to hear what what you're like more internal drivers are because you're obviously very smart very capable when you're doing what i most admire people which is you're literally creating your own reality around what's important to you and i think this one thing is i most admire about interesting people is whether you're a painter an artist um an entrepreneur and investor like yourself you're literally just creating your own reality that empowers you and adds value and does the things that you want to do in the world so i think for

for me you have to go through a certain amount of pain you definitely want to be innovative and be willing to take small punches in the face to figure out how things work i think what you make non-negotiable in any given business activity and end in life is ultimately what drives mastery like I, despite one of those first guys to table had taken a company to $350 million and offered to turn around, plug us in a retail and introduce us to every head buyer or CEO

at every major mass outfit in the US. But I, to make that off, to pull it off, he wanted to invest and I'd have to dumb down the formulation to the point that it gave us back industry acceptable margins. I said, I'm not going to do it. And just that sort of decision around,

I just don't want to compromise on the ultimate customer experience around what we're doing. It was very expensive, made life really tough, but it's also the single biggest smartest decision that we've ever made. That positive experience is slowly compounds on itself. And we want to build a brand that people love to talk about and love to be a part of for a hundred years. That's the ambition. Yeah. I love that. It's always, it's always the decisions that end up being the long-term ones that usually

pay off. So that's awesome. Uh, I asked the same two questions to every person who comes on and you'll get to ask me a question to, uh, to finish up. Uh, the first is, uh, what is the most important book that you've ever read? Uh, that's a good one, man. Very recently I read a book called essentialism by Greg McCowan. Okay. Uh, it is about the happiness that ensues when one truly focuses on what is ultimately most important to them and eliminates everything else that is absolutely brilliant book it speaks to how i recommend you focus your time how i recommend you invest how what is good strategy for a company and i found that unbelievably uh unbelievably useful and it really spoke to me at the moment when i sort of

was stepping back and thinking what's our sort of next three to five year strategy as a as a business so i love that book as a it's got to be top 10 lifetime and not everyone resonates as much as i do because i started saying this is the best book i've read and throwing it everywhere and some people came back and said this is amazing others said yeah it sounds like common sense and a tonic and interestingly enough those who came back and said it sounds like common sense is a tonic are the ones who most need to hack away parts of their life and some of the people are really smart people and it's been fascinating yeah that's all i i love uh books specifically because one it tells you uh it's the book the content but also the time that somebody reads

it right it can have a huge impact on on the answer uh and then um when you give it to somebody it tells you a lot about where they are in terms of their reaction right yeah so that's pretty cool uh aliens believer or non-believer 100 believer and typically man i'm sitting here looking at i can't there's a cloud on top of the hill next to me here otherwise i'd show you this epic green pyramid mountain and so that's that landed here somehow but actually it didn't it's just a rock formation no why man just balance of probabilities is takes you to some 99 point something percent likelihood you have to someone who thinks scientifically around the world has to have the balance of probabilities isn't 100 but that last jump is because i think the universe is more

interesting if they're there yeah i'm hoping so hopefully we find them though we i don't want them finding us let's go find them well it depends who it is i mean if they're like related to that moroccan family who helped me out i mean come on down i think the bigger issue won't be if they're there or not is that we exist in the same same time because i mean i don't know if you've seen um cosmos with neil degrasse tyson but probably i don't watch much tv but definitely the winner of the covid tv season for me has been cosmos which is a series on itunes and he just it's about four or five years old so maybe some of the physics is dated but it's pretty cool man he just talks about the mix and match between this amazing massive universe we have right here

and that amazing monster universe we have out there but every time i saw that i kept thinking uh of your big question on the aliens going they must they must this place is massive i uh i tend to agree what uh what one question you have for me to uh to finish up yeah so congratulations on becoming a newlywed what was it that made you realize this is the girl for me um i don't think there's one answer right it's uh it's so weird um think of it as uh a business partner to start with, right? In terms of when you're picking a business partner, what you end up picking is somebody who you get along with, you have the same mentality, you probably have complementary skills, you think that they are determined, persistent,

you know, they're reasonable, they're a sound decision maker, like there's all these things that go into picking a business partner, right? Then when you're picking a wife, right? It's all of that on like times, you know, 100,000 x steroids, right. And it really is one of these things where the first time we met, it was just very obvious, I think, to both of us, like, we're gonna go, like hang out more. And that person is unlike other people that I've met. And, you know, I could sit and try to like pinpoint exactly what it was, or, you know, what I thought, frankly, I don't really remember like walking away being like, Oh, it's because of this one quality that this person has, but it was just more of, um, you know, I spent my entire life

really living by one principle, which is the goal is just to be happy. Right. And if I do something and I'm not happy, I literally just wake up one day and say, I'm done. Right. And people don't like that because it feels very, um, kind of flighty. Right. But at the same time, I just, i always think of um have you ever seen the movie uh i think it's called in time with uh justin timberlake yes right where he's got like the time on your arm and basically when the time runs out you die right yeah and uh and it's a uh you know it's not an a plus uh acting movie right so if you're a cinematic expert it's probably not the one that you're gonna gravitate towards uh but the message of the movie is very much you know the rich people have all the time right the

poor people don't have time um and basically they go to work and they're literally given time uh to kind of extend to the next time that they go to work and so you just like there's a lot of metaphors in that movie that i think are really interesting because what it reminds you is uh ultimately like that is the currency right is time uh so who do you want to spend your time with what do you want to spend your time doing like all of these things are important and uh i think plin and i just you know, over the years, it was very obvious, like we are super, super aligned on, you know, all of the important things. If you asked her this question, she would say, we have different skill sets. I don't know if she would call them complimentary. I probably annoy the hell out of

her sometimes and all of the normal stuff. But I think that's really it, right? It's just, you know, finding the person that you genuinely feel like, hey, this is my best friend. And we think similarly we have the same types of goals and uh we're happy together right that was a pretty slow answer for a bitcoiner who believes in aliens man well done well i know she's gonna watch this so i gotta say all the right things right no you crushed it man you're looking good for saturday night but my dad always said to me your single biggest decision in life is going to be who at partner and he's been a lifelong mentor for me and i was lucky to grow up in a family dynamic where my parents were very much in love my whole life.

So I always admire folks, like I said, who create their own reality, man. I think that was an outstanding answer on choosing the right partner because you want a happy life, go make it happen. Absolutely. I'm a big believer that you can create the world that you want.

Where can we send people to find you on the internet and find out more about Athletic Greens if they want to try it out? Sure, man. I don't really tweet. I have a Twitter account, but i don't really use it much but athletic greens is at athleticgreens.com but we're like anyone wants to come give us a try who wants to take that ownership and realizes

there's no silver bullet it's the habits that count come come play we'd love to have you but any questions if you want to go uh chris the kiwi at chris the kiwi on twitter i'll respond to anything you guys fire up it's cool awesome man well listen thank you so much for doing this you've built a uh an amazing company and uh we'll have to do this again as you guys keep pushing forward thanks pomp i appreciate the friendship man i really appreciate you having me on and thank you for your kind words absolutely