Written by Christopher Kelly
Oct. 16, 2018
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Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly and today I am joined by my very good friend and mentor Jeremy Hendon. Jeremy is a -- He is laughing already. Why are you laughing, Jeremy?
Jeremy: I know you've been planning that mentor bit.
Christopher: It's absolutely true. I think of you as a mentor. Jeremy is a former lawyer turned entrepreneur, author and speaker. Together with his wife, Louise, we've worked on several projects including the Keto Summit in 2016 that I'm sure some of our listeners will be familiar with. Jeremy, thank you so much for joining me today.
Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad to be back. I think it's my second time or third. I can't remember.
Christopher: Third time.
Jeremy: I was in one of your early episodes.
Christopher: Third time. I was just looking at it.
Jeremy: Third? Nice.
Christopher: Yeah.
Jeremy: Yeah. Take that, Malcolm Kendrick.
Christopher: I definitely will get Malcolm Kendrick back. I think that Malcolm has a lot more to say.
Jeremy: Of course. Yeah. I listened to that episode a couple of times. It was brilliant.
Christopher: Tell us about the Keto Summit. I really want to know what you think now. I think of you as a business and marketing expert and one of the things you know the most about is marketing and messaging and the state of the market and health. So, what has happened with ketosis and the ketogeic diet and being able to productize that and with summits as well? Tell me about summits. Are summits still the thing? Are people still able to sell summits? I know that's a huge question. Feel free to unpack whatever parts of it you feel are worthy.
Jeremy: Yeah. I thought it's about three or four questions in there. When you and I did, and Louise and Tommy, did the Keto Summit back in 2016, we were ahead of the curve there to some degree, not with summits but particularly with the keto diet. It'd started taken off but it's nothing like it is right now. Most of your audience is going to know that. They've been aware unless you've been living under a rock for a while, that ketosis has gotten very big.
I think it's actually testament to the age we live in the digital world that, I say this but then I want to draw a caveat in a moment too, but one of the testaments is that things that work actually take off these days. We've seen this even before the digital age. Atkins worked for a lot of people for a long time. Low carb did as well. Now we see keto is effectively new instantiation of that with a bit more refinement.
The fact of the matter is for a lot of people who have had a lot of health issues, I know we're not going to go too much into the health right now, but for a lot of people who've had a lot of health issues all of their life including not being able to lose weight, blood sugar issues, things like that, keto works. I think that's a lot of the reason that it's gotten so popular, is because you can look around the internet -- and it's the same reason that Paleo got so popular, at least one of them, is that you could look around the internet and you see tons of people getting tons of results.
You see tons of your friends posting on Facebook saying, "Hey, I lost 20-30-40 pounds on a keto diet for the past three to five months," whatever. That kind of thing and the tech that allows it really allows a diet like keto to take off. But the question is, productizing, summits, things like that, somewhat has gotten harder partially because even with any product or service, they can still sell and they're still doing really well, we've seen a second instantiation of them, of course, over the past couple of years in terms of the docu series, things like The Truth About Cancer and Broken Brain which Mark Hyman did. Those are doing extremely well.
So, yeah, I mean, all these things come and go. I think that's one of the things that I find really interesting because -- I don't know if you want to get into the tech. I'd love to talk to you about some of the tech because you're a tech guy yourself but I feel like tech has changed everything. One of the things it's changed is that cycles, both product and service cycles but also cycles of trends, everything just moves so much faster these days.
For anybody who is trying to run a business, start a business, that's one of the most important factors that you have to take into consideration these days, is how to stay not necessarily on top of every trend because a lot of businesses don't necessarily need to stay on top of trends, but nonetheless how to stay agile and how to stay moving so that your business can grow and evolve with what your clients are looking for, what they want, what you can possibly offer them. Because what you can offer them is changing all the time too. I don't know if that answered your question.
Christopher: It does.
Jeremy: At least a couple of them.
Christopher: A couple of them, yes. Sorry about that. It's interesting that you should say that we were ahead of the curve with the Keto Summit because I can remember when you suggested the idea I thought surely those are two ships that have sailed. A, the summit ship has sailed. I've seen so many summits now. I've watched so many of them. It's all the same people every single one of them.
And then surely the keto ship has sailed as well because back in 2016 it already seemed so popular and I thought hasn't someone done a keto summit already? How are we going to get people to do this when surely that has been done? It's interesting, it hadn't been done and it was very successful and it was easy to get people to be interviewed for the Keto Summit. And then after the interviews were done we had people emailing us asking if they could be part of the Keto Summit. Let me ask you. How did you know? How did you assess that curve? How did you know that we were still ahead of the popularity?
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Jeremy: I would love to say that Louise and I are fortune tellers but actually Louise is very good at this. She's very good at seeing trends. But one of the reasons that we're able to see these things is because we've been around for a while. We've been around just personally for a while and that -- I'm really old. No, it's what I mean. We've been around personally for a while and that I started low carb around 2004 myself to lose and maintain weight. I started Paleo around 2006 or 2007. And then I started keto, I don't remember exactly, 2012, 2013.
I'm not saying that I've only been keto since then or anything but we've been around this space and the health space in general for a while, which maybe is a knock against me if we consider that I don't know half the stuff that you and Tommy know in terms of health. But we've been around enough that when you're on the ground for a while you can see what's happening and you get a feel for it because you see that certain things are going down and you see that especially some personalities rising.
We see certain trends in the works right now. Because keto is not going to be popular forever. I think it will last like Paleo has lasted. But starting around 2014, Paleo has definitely gone down because you have this huge rise from, particularly from 2011 to 2014, I don't remember exactly -- I'm going to check the numbers lately but sometime around 2014 Paleo really hit a peak. Keto came about maybe a year or two later, started a separate trajectory.
Honestly, this next January 2019 might be the big peak for keto but it's one of those things that I feel like if you're an entrepreneur running a business, a lot of people want to sort of try to predict these trends for markets or for things that they're not working in or they don't have experience in. I rarely see anybody able to do that.
You can look at stock traders, people who day trade or people who trade. A lot of times those guys, or women but it's mostly guys, a lot of time those guys will follow just one or two stocks, often just one or two incredibly small stocks. It's almost like magic. They can predict 90% of the time what's going to happen over a certain time frame but it's because they just know so much about those stocks and they've internalized so much about them. I'm not saying we're quite like that with everything but you really got to be in it. I think you've been around this long enough that you can probably see certain things coming and going particularly with your clientele.
Christopher: Yeah, for sure. I mean, the Keto Summit filled our practice with keto people. That's for sure. And then we probably spend more time persuading people to eat carbs than we did to have them measure blood levels of beta-hydroxybutyrate. There's different people, [0:07:40] [Indiscernible] and all that. I mean, that was predominantly what we saw, was endurance athletes who just needed to eat some more carbs. I think I was one of them, actually. Let me ask you this. Why do you think people are watching--
Jeremy: That's true. When I met you, you weren't eating many carbs at all.
Christopher: No. I don't think it was working well for me. It took me a while and Tommy to notice that. Now I feel like I'm feeling much better. But I still have all the gains. It was something that I needed to do, to restore my metabolism from its very damaged state. If you've just seen what I was eating in 2004 when you were eating the Atkins diet, it was about as opposite as you could possibly imagine. And maybe going through that therapeutic phase of ketosis was really, really helpful for me.
Let me ask you this. Why do you think people are still watching? I still see these summits. They still hit my inbox every now and again and then there's the SIBO Summit is one that I've seen recently. Maybe the topics are becoming more and more niched like these tiny little very specific things and somehow you found 30 experts to be interviewed for this particular topic. I wonder if the reason why people are watching has changed. It's just totally overwhelming amount of information on such a small topic and people can't possibly be watching in order to recover their health or are they?
Jeremy: I thought you were actually going a different direction for a moment. I think part of the reason people tune in to these things now is for curation because there is so much information that we are overloaded with every day, not even with jobs and kids and family and whatever, but if you hop on the internet for anything -- If I look at my podcast, I have maybe 30 podcasts that I'm subscribed to in there and I have to flip through episodes to figure out what I want to listen to.
And not just podcasts. I mean, if I hop on any of the websites I read or I -- I don't really go on YouTube or anything that much but it would be the same there. I think people are so overloaded with just information that people are really looking for curation. I actually think that's a big reason that summits and things like them still do okay.
I think it's a good lesson for anybody running a business is that if you can really establish yourself as someone who curates well, that's really a long term play. One of the -- he's an entrepreneur but he coaches and he's just really, really well known in direct response marketing, Jay Abraham, he has a concept where really what you're trying to do is become the preeminent authority in your field, that is, you're trying to become the most trusted adviser for anybody who comes to you.
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And this changes, of course, with what kind of clients you're serving, what level or what sort of customer. It's different if you're selling a $5 widget versus selling a $22,000 program. But in every case, you, for the most part, want to become their most trusted adviser. He calls it the strategy of preeminence. I think it's more important than ever these days because realistically people are bombarded left and right in their inbox, with billboards, TV ads, even in the middle of podcasts with ads.
They're bombard with things that they're supposed to be listening to, supposed to be thinking about. I do think that that's -- Summits, that's one of the niches they still fill and one of the reasons that they still work to some degree because if I tell you, "Hey, look, we've got together the 25 best experts on thyroid health," then somebody who's overwhelmed, they've got a thyroid issue, they've been reading around but they don't know who to trust, it's an easy sell to say, "Hey, look, why don't you tune in. We've put all the best experts in one event. You just got to listen for seven days, listen to these things."
I think there's still a lot of appeal to that as the market become a little bit saturated such that you see a summit every week and that definitely makes people a little bit less interested. But still, I think that curation aspect and putting everything in one place is a big reason that people still want to pay attention. I don't think it's just in health either. I think it's in pretty much everything in our lives.
Because, as you know, I mean, you're very knowledgeable in health. You're very knowledgeable about certain things in your life. But I imagine that there's certain things in your life where you let them go. I don't know how knowledgeable you are on finances or economics right now or things like that.
Christopher: [0:11:38] [Indiscernible]
Jeremy: Right.
Christopher: And it's interesting that you should say that because that was really Tommy's main offering for the Keto Summit. I can still remember seeing him work in real time on the spreadsheet that had the list of guests. He can do that. It's actually really fun to watch Tommy write in real time. I've done that before in Google Docs when he’s writing an abstract or something. It's incredible.
I mean, first of all, you see him get all of the words out and then he edits himself and seeing it in real time is absolutely extraordinary. But he did it with a spreadsheet and so not only did he pick the 30 best people in the industry that needed to be interviewed but he also said, there was another column, this is what this person's going to be really good for. And then it was me that did the bulk of the interviewing and Tommy was the one that loaded me up with all the right questions before we went into it.
Obviously, I'm not -- I don't want to claim I'm completely brain dead and I'm just Tommy's puppet but there's definitely something to what you just said, the ability to do really, really good curation.
Jeremy: It's not quite a Pinky and the Brain situation but there are a very few people of Tommy's breadth of knowledge in biochemistry.
Christopher: Pinky and the Brain. You realize you just forever branded us Pinky and the Brain? I'm okay with that.
Jeremy: Yeah, as well. That would be my lasting contribution to your podcast, Chris.
Christopher: Thank you. Let's talk about other areas of doing business in health. Sometimes I get really down on some of the productization of health. it seems like the only thing that people can make money doing is selling cookbooks, meal plans, maybe supplements, some food like bars and things like that. Exchanging your time for money is just the hardest thing to sell especially health coaching. That's really the business that we're in. And trying to convince somebody to want what they need is so difficult. So, do you see that changing at all? Do you have any advice for somebody that's in the business of exchanging their time for money?
Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. I have a lot of advice and, hopefully, some of it is right and good. The thing is, what you alluded to there, and health coaching business is really hard to convince somebody to want what they need or to want what they don't necessarily want yet. That is honestly one of the hardest things you can try to do in business and usually one of the least profitable and one of the quickest ways to kill business is to try to convince people to want or to buy something that they're not already wanting or looking for.
I understand it because all of us -- I remember when we first got into health. We were in our late 20s when we really got into it. This is before we started a business or anything, but we're in our late 20s, all of our friends were in their mid to late 20s, because my wife is a few years younger than me. We got into low carb and we got into Paleo in our mid to late 20s, and all of our friends were starting -- They just started working three or four years before that because most of them had gone to law school or grad school or something.
They're all starting to work. They're all starting to put on a little bit of weight, starting to have some minor digestive issues, but not a ton. Maybe some of them needed or wanted to lose five or ten pounds. Maybe some of them have a little bit indigestion. Nothing severe, but things that were a little bit painful both psychologically and physically. We really for, I don't know, a year or two tried to convince them they should go Paleo. This is great. That it was going to be great for them in the long run.
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It's not going to only help them lose weight but help them feel better, have more energy, prevent diseases down the road. And I still believe all of this. But what we realized is that that was an incredibly, incredibly losing battle because none of our friends were nearly enough pained to actually want to do something about it.
Did they want to lose five pounds? Did they want to get rid of indigestion? Sure. But they're just going to take a Tums and go on a diet two days a month and hope that solve the problems. A lot of those friends are in their mid to late 30s now and they're actually getting more serious about diet at this point as you could imagine they would. But for anybody who's trying to run a business or you're trying to start one or you're trying to be health coach or you're trying to sell anything in health, or really this applies outside, but one of the hardest things you can do is try to sell people something they don't want.
Like I said, I understand the drive for it because we want to give people what we think is going to be best for them but you can't start by judging what they want. And so, for instance, last year, I talked to a small group of chiropractors. My friend was running a retreat here where I lived. I went in and we were talking about what they help their clients with.
As you know, chiropractors, they don't just help with back stuff. A lot of times they take more holistic approach. A lot of them were helping their clients with weight loss, with nutrition, with other things in their practice. I said okay. I said, "Well, what are you trying to sell your clients?" To a person, most of that room was trying to sell their clients on taking a more holistic approach, a more thorough approach to their health.
They were trying to get them to take their overall health more seriously, to make effectively also lifestyle changes so they get much better results. And I said, "Well, what do your clients come and say that they want?" To a person, all of them, "Well, they come in, they want weight loss and they want to fix their back pain." One of those two. Maybe a couple of other things but mostly that was it.
I said, "Well, why don't you offer them that?" They said, "Well, we don't think they should just be focusing their weight loss or just their back pain because there's underlying issues and they should want to fix the other issues so that these things will go away in the long term. They shouldn't just want a quick fix." I said okay. I said, "That's fine. But you do realize that all you're doing is judging your clients and not giving them what they want?"
To a person, the initial reaction to that is that, "No, I'm not judging my potential clients or my potential customers." But, in fact, is. You're judging them for not wanting what you think they should want, for not knowing as much as you think they should know, for not doing the things that you think they should do. That's fine on a personal basis if you want to judge people that way. But on a business space, it's a killer.
And anybody getting in, you've got to realize -- I mean, we sell cookbooks and meal plans in our business. We sell other stuff too. And just like you and everybody else, we want to move people along a spectrum of getting a lot more healthy, eating real food, taking their lifestyle seriously. I'd love to get everybody sleeping well. In fact, that's one of my main weaknesses, is that I still don't get sleep on time. I sleep plenty but I go to bed a little bit late.
My point is, we would like to do all of that for them. But the fact that I'd realized, that's not what most of them want right now. And we hope that by selling them what they want we can start to give them little bits of what they need and move them down the path. So, by selling them a cookbook, hopefully, we give them a few experiences at the very least of eating healthier food and starting to feel better, starting to feel like they have more energy and act less groggy and like they're losing a little bit of weight so that then if they two weeks later go off of that for a month they look back a month later and say, "Hey, that worked really well. What the heck have I been doing? Can I try it again?"
Hopefully, we move them along that path a little bit. Because things don't always happen for people immediately. If you were trying to run a business, like if we're talking to somebody, and I do talk to people who are trying to start a business or running them, that's one of the biggest hang ups that people have, is thinking that they want to sell people what they think is absolutely best for them.
But traditional marketing principles still apply with as much as changing in tech. Traditional marketing principle that's most important is that you've got to sell people what they want and then give them what they need. You've got to know exactly what they're looking for. You got to know your customer extremely well. And if they're looking for quick weight loss then find a way to give them quick weight loss but that's going to help move them wherever you want to move them.
So, for instance, I'm fine giving people a weeklong or a three-week long program in Paleo or keto that's going to help them lose weight quickly or at least probably going to help them lose weight quickly because in my mind if I do that, A, they're going to trust me more and hopefully use me down the road or use our company down the road and the other things we provide which are more holistic.
Or, B, even if they don't trust me and use that, they're going to look back and they're going to say, "Hey, that worked for me. Why don't I try that again? Why don't I make that more part of my lifestyle?" And so we'll sell them the short term solutions to try to get them to move towards a long term mindset. Honestly, I think that's one of the most important things that any entrepreneur or most businesses could do a lot better at and probably become a lot more profitable at.
Christopher: Do you not think that this squashes potential innovation? So, you're reminding me of that very famous Henry Ford quote which was, if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse, right? We would still be riding horses had it not been for Henry Ford's innovation. Do you not think that this approach is going to squash innovation and it creates rooms for companies like Apple, say, that are just totally changing the game with things that people perhaps they didn't say they wanted?
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Jeremy: You're absolutely right. You can't just survey people and say -- Because Henry Ford is right. If you ask people like, "Hey, what do you want me to sell to you?" It'd be like, "I don't know. My horse, it keeps having leg problems. Can you sell me a horse that doesn't have leg problems and need to have new shoes every week?" Whatever. Or a faster horse. Whatever they would have said. You're absolutely right.
I'm not opposed to innovation. Actually, you know me pretty well. I'm actually a big tech enthusiast. I love tech. I don't code as much in machine learning as you do but I love machine learning. I love robotics. I love BR. I love blockchain. And I'm actually pretty deep into all of this stuff. I really, really like innovation. But that said, even with innovation, you're still actually looking at what people want.
Henry Ford jokes that people would have said they wanted a faster horse. But when he actually looked at it, what they actually wanted was to get from one place to the next in a safer faster and more convenient way and in the end probably a cheaper way as well. I mean, that's what people wanted at that time. That's what people still want, is to get places safely and quickly and easily and cheaply.
That's why, for instance, Uber has worked so well or Jump with the scooters, things like that. Because you could have asked people what kind of car do you want and they would have said a car that's quicker, whatever, maybe a self-driving car, something like that. But Uber solved it. What people really want is they want to be able to get from one place to another without having to carry cash for taxi, without having to worry about tipping.
They solved the complaints. They actually knew what people wanted and then they innovated. Airbnb is the same. You could have asked people what they wanted when they were traveling, where they were staying, they might have said, "Oh, hotel that has better service, a hotel that allows later check in, a hotel that's half priced, a hotel that has rooms that are twice as big," whatever it is that people want.
But Airbnb looked at that and say, okay, they want these things where they get a local experience, it's well placed, it doesn't cost as much and they said, "Well, why don't we do that with people?" I don't know Joe Gebbia's mindset but I do know when they started it they went out and they actually talked to the initial people who were using it. They went to New York and started talking to these people and they realized exactly what they were getting out of it, what they were liking and what they were wanting in that product. That's what they built more and more.
So, even though it's an innovation, it was still with a solid eye towards what people are actually getting out of it and what they were looking for rather than what Joe Gebbia thought would be the best thing for them to want.
Christopher: And do you see space in the health industry for a platform like Airbnb or Uber? We talked offline about the idea. I really would love to create that platform where the producers are health coaches and the consumers are people who need help. And wouldn't it be lovely to build a platform where you brought those two groups of people together and as is often the case with these platforms somebody who's originally a consumer later becomes a producer.
Think about YouTube. You probably watch YouTube videos, in fact, lots of them before you decided you were going to start making them. You can say the same is true of Uber and Airbnb as well. Do you think there is the potential for that in health coaching?
Jeremy: Let's start from another part. I think there is huge potential for different forms of platforms in health. For instance, I mean, you're big into machine learning. I think at some point somehow there's going to be some sort of platform. In fact, we've already seen instantiations of it with things like doc.ai. And regardless of whether or not these initial instantiations are great or useful what I think we'll eventually see, for instance, is some sort of platform where you can post your information, maybe even post various test results and have various people around the world or algorithms or machine learning, whatever it is, take that and for, let's say, a reward or something or some sort of payment, take that and actually resolve it into a diagnosis or into some solution.
I do think we'll see that at some point. That's what doc.ai and a couple of other platforms have tried to do, is there's actually a crowd sourcing one right now. I forget the name of it. You can put up, you can say, "Hey, I'll pay somebody $5000 or I'll pay two or three people who solve this $5000 if they can provide a diagnosis. Here's the history. Here's the set of conditions. Here's all the test results."
I have a friend in Canada and his wife has fairly serious health condition that she's been battling for about ten years. They put this up pretty recently, not the site but they put something up on the site to try to get somebody to diagnose her condition better because none of the doc, even though they're going to a lot of the best doctors in Canada and in the US, they still don't have a full diagnosis or a full idea of what's causing certain relapses in the condition. And so I think we will begin to see more and more of those platforms.
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And I know it took a different route than talking about health coaching. The thing about health coaching is with a platform -- and I like talking about this because I love thinking about the tech. One of the biggest changes in the digital age has been that, some of the biggest changes have been that distribution costs have gone pretty much down to zero.
It used to cost you a lot to get anything that you wrote or anything that you recorded either on audio or video out to people. To distribute it to people costs a lot. You either had to get a newspaper, to take it out to the newspaper. You had to get a TV station to broadcast your video. Now, you put something up on the web and you put something on YouTube or you put something up as a podcast and the distribution cost is effectively zero. It's very close to zero. It doesn't cost you anything at the margin to produce and release new episode of this podcast.
The transaction costs are close to zero too. I mean, you still pay fees to Paypal or your credit card companies, your merchant account. But realistically, any time that somebody buys something from you or does business with you, the marginal cost is pretty close to zero whereas it used to be a lot more. One of the things that's done is the companies that win in this environment are the companies that are able to create a user experience and create a customer consumer experience that is so much better than the other companies that they accrue more and more customers.
The biggest companies, the Googles, the Amazons, the Apples, what they then do is they turn that user experience into a platform by connecting them with producers who are not themselves. I mean, Amazon is moving more and more away from producing its own goods or selling its own goods. I think they're up to about 50% goods sold by third parties in Amazon now and they want that to be much, much higher.
They're connecting producers with consumers and the more consumers that they get, the better it is because if you get more consumers on Amazon then more producers come on trying to sell things which means that consumers have more choice, that means more competition, lower prices for consumers which means even more producers want to come on there. It's a virtuous cycle.
The problem is in health to create that virtuous cycle you need some sort of platform where people would want to keep going back to again and again. And the difficulty there is that outside of a clientele like yours where you've got professional athletes or semi-professional athletes or certain other places where people want to constantly improve their health, the vast, vast majority of people do not want to think about their health.
For 98% of people, the ideal situation is that they could eat whatever they want, they could exercise as little or as much as they want and they would have perfect health. That's literally the ideal situation for most people.
Christopher: I mean, it's what we're wired for, right?
Jeremy: Yeah. Even for your athletes, I imagine, they all would like to just be able to eat what they want and have perfect health and be able to perform as well as they want. Maybe they actually want to train a lot more. But the point is that most people don't want to engage on an ongoing basis in the way that you would say in business. Entrepreneurs constantly want to learn. They constantly want to grow. They want to build bigger businesses. They want to make a bigger impact. They want whatever goes along with building a business.
Athletes want to get better and better. They want to perform better. They want to get healthier. They want to get in better shape, improve their time, improve their performance. You've got various places like that in life where people want to do more. And then you've got things like Google and Amazon where, of course, I'm going to search 100 times a day on Google. I'm going to go back to Amazon. I don't know how often it is, five or ten times a month, because I'm always going to be buying some sort of things at least until my machine learning appliances do it for me.
You've got all of these situations where people go back again and again and health is one where people don't really want to. I think there will be some platforms that will come up but I think it's a tougher sell because outside of either chronic illness or chronic athletes you don't have too many people who want to engage with health in that way too often.
Christopher: Can you say that's true of some other platforms I can think of? So, for example, I met my wife on OkCupid. So far so good. I haven't been back there looking for another wife, right?
Jeremy: Yeah. They cannibalize themselves, right? Too good at what they did in your case. Yeah. It is true except that, A, most people don't find somebody in the first week and then stop using it. Most people go back for a long time. I think the average user length -- I haven't looked recently but I actually think the average user length is going up. That might say something else about our current society and culture in terms of we're just not getting into long term relationships as much.
You're right, there are places like that where certain portion of your clientele are not going to go back but I think that's fine because you've got enough people on there. Again, that's a network effect as well. This is one of the biggest things in business these days too. Network effects have always been super important but they're much, much more important in a world where distribution and transaction calls are close to zero because you can now reach pretty much the entire world, about seven billion people potentially. When you can do that -- Let's put it this way. Think if you were living in Tulsa in the mid 1970s.
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Let's say you wanted to sell your health coaching services. In the mid 1970s, pretty much all the people you're going to be able to legitimately reach are people in the middle of Tulsa because how are you going to advertise to people outside of that? How are you going to reach them? How are they going to get to know you and trust you?
Honestly, Tulsa in the mid 1970s, I'm guessing, was not a very big city. Let's say it had 50,000 people. How many of them were semi-professional, professional athletes or people who are executives who would have been willing to not only pay the prices but want the kind of thing that you're offering? It was a very, very small amount of people.
At that point in time you really couldn't reach nearly as many people. But now that you can, the network effects are so much bigger. And so that means when Okcupid gets -- this is all in the past now. When OkCupid got ten million people using their platform, all of the sudden that makes that platform that much more viable. I mean, Facebook is the exact same way, right? It's the reason that nobody can come along and challenge Facebook absent a major technological shift because you've got whatever it is, a billion monthly users using Facebook.
If I want to connect with my friends and family, I'm not going to go use another social app because none of them are on it. And so the network effects are super, super powerful. In the health niche, if anybody is starting a business, if you want to start a huge one you got to take them into account. But even if you're starting small one, what that means is that you're probably not going to be competing with the Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazons of the world.
What it means is that you actually got to establish a stronger and more direct customer relationship and it's what you've done so well with your podcast, is that you have built a ton of trust, you've built a ton of connection with your audience and you serve them in a particular way much more strongly than anybody else could because nobody else does the things that you do, nobody else targets your clientele and then offers them the services that provide them effectively better testing and better diagnosis and better solutions than anybody else in the market offers.
You've got a better product and service but you've also got a more targeted and better relationship with them. It's that customer relationship that's crucial these days because if you can control that customer relationship then everything else in your business flows from that and works much, much better. We're actually in a time and place right now where people don't trust large institutions as much and so what means is they don't trust governments as much, churches. People want to tear down corporations.
It goes back and forth. This is a generational thing. What that means is that the customer relationship is more important than ever because they're not turning to these big corporations, these big institutions as much anymore. So, if you can create an amazing customer relationship like you've done and a great experience then people are going to stick with you. And on the bigger scale, that's really how Google, Apple and Amazon have all went out.
Christopher: I should tip my hat to Tammy and Elaine, the wonderful women that run the backend of my business because those are the people who are creating a great relationship with our clients. But to bring it back to something you said, the platform, I understand the value of the rare diagnosis. There are a lot of people that have very rare diseases and medicine sort of ignores them because there's not enough people for anyone to really care.
And so a platform that does machine learning and other fancy stuff to try and make that diagnosis is valuable. I wouldn't want to detract from that. But the main problem that western cultures are facing today are the diseases of too much comfort and not enough stress. The diagnosis is trivial. In fact, we've already done it. You can do a basic blood chemistry. Just measure glucose, hemoglobin A1C, fasting triglycerides, I'll tell you whether you're insulin resistant or not. The latest numbers are suggesting that maybe 50% of the US population is either diabetic or pre-diabetic. Those people, the diagnosis is not terribly helpful.
Jeremy: Well, I didn't know it was that high now.
Christopher: Yeah, it's really, really high. And so this is why I think the art of coaching is so important because these diseases they can only be treated with diet and lifestyle modification. And so when I look at all the problems that even we face in our practice, they're all behavior change problems. The real underlying problem is getting people to change their behavior. A platform that does the diagnosis to me is somewhat trivial. I'm a bit disappointed that you don't think that health coaching as a platform is ever going to work. I don't disagree with you but I'm still disappointed.
Jeremy: I definitely didn't say it was not a platform that was never going to work. It's one that's harder than others. For instance, one of the things that we know, without a doubt changes behavior pretty easily is very strong accountability. That's actually you've got apps like stickK and other services that make it easy. If you wanted to actually change your health and take it seriously you could put up a $1000 that says, "Hey, you're going to do XYZ and if you don't do that every week then $1000 gets paid to something, a charity, whatever."
The fact of the matter is some people are willing to do that, not many. And this is one of the things that makes a health coaching platform hard, is that people are, like you said, I mean, the irony it's effectively how you started this. You said one of the biggest problems with modern life particularly in western, like North America and European societies is it's too easy.
We've got too much comfort. The comfort is what causes a lot of these problems. It causes a lot of psychological problems but it also causes a lot of the physical problems. The problem is, as humans, we are, like any other animals, creatures that to some degree seek security and comfort. We also seek insecurity in certain ways, and a little bit of stretching, but we mostly seek security and comfort because, well, as ancestors you had plenty of insecurity and discomfort in your life, whereas people living a long time ago.
And so one of the things that happens is when you try to sell people coaching, what you're effectively trying to sell them is discomfort. It's hard because their pain has to be so great that they are willing to go and venture into that realm of discomfort in order to overcome that pain. And so it's not that I think that sort of platform will never work. I think we're seeing to some degree on the negative side behavior change in massive ways.
The way that Facebook, the way that YouTube, the way that Snapchat, the way that all these big companies capture attention and change behavior, they change behavior every single day in terms of the amount of time people are spending, the ways of reacting. I mean, was it two years ago when Pokemon Go came out and the stats were insane. People who played Pokemon Go walked an average of 60% or 70% more than they were before that and kept it up for as long as they played Pokemon Go.
Now, that's an ancillary example, but my point is that we have at our fingertips and we have good examples of behavior change. And you might say, well, a lot of the things are bad behavior changes. Well, fine, but that doesn't mean we aren't starting to get the tools and don't already have a lot of the knowledge for what changes behavior.
The problem is I don't know that that will come in the form of just selling people health coaching. It might come in the form of innovation. It's where I think it will more likely come. So, I'm not bullish on health coaching per se. I think it's great. I might sound bullish. It's not that I dislike it. I love coaches. Coaches are one of my favorite things in life. But at the same time I don't think it's where we're going to see the most growth and the most impact over the next ten to 20 years and so I think that's what makes that platform tough.
Christopher: It's somewhat surprising to me because personally I find feeling good very addictive. I found that I become exquisitely sensitive to thinking like shit. Even recently I've just realized that I need to stop drinking coffee again because the quality of my sleep has been mildly compromised and ten years ago there was so much noise. I never would have found that signal in all the noise. But now, I feel so good. It's like I really notice those things very, very acutely and sharply. And so the behavior change, I guess, the behavior change thing has always been easy for me. I guess, my point is, I'm surprised that more people don't find feeling good addictive because it is. It's not really a question, is it?
Jeremy: I mean, I think they do but you got to -- Addiction happens over time. There's other things that are equally addictive.
Christopher: That's true. That's absolutely true. Hyperpalatable.
Jeremy: Hyperpalatable food is quite addictive.
Christopher: That's true. Well, let me ask you an even more difficult question. So, if you were in my position surrounded by all the amazing people that I have many of whom you know, for example Megan and Tommy and Simon, all these incredible experts that I have, and I'm not mentioning all of them there, what would you do? From a business perspective, what would you be working on if you were me?
Jeremy: Well, that's a huge question. I'll bring this thing because you and I talk about this a lot because we talk pretty much once a week. Your business comes up a lot. If it were me and I were trying to run your business or I were trying to grow your business with the brilliant people you have around you -- I don't know everything about your business so I do have to throw in a couple of caveats. That is, I don't -- I know some of your numbers and I know some of these things but I'm not so deeply involved that I know, for instance, how well you have saturated the markets that you're currently targeting.
I know a lot of your clientele are pro or semi pro bikers, triathletes, runners, these people, and I don't know, for instance, how much of that market you are reaching. I don't know how much of very closely related markets you're reaching like semi pro swimmers or [0:39:23] [Indiscernible].
Christopher: Yeah. So, I should comment here. It's actually less athletes than you think. So, for example, my last call on Friday was with a gentleman who has been suffering his entire life with fatigue, eventually got the diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome, and he said to me something which I thought was fascinating which was, "I'm an athlete in waiting." And I thought how very growth mindset of you. Essentially, to rephrase what he said and what Simon would say is, "I'm not something yet." That's what you say to your kids. You can't play the flute yet. You can't ride your bike yet.
[0:40:00]
You're an athlete in waiting. It just hasn't happened yet. And so he doesn't strongly identify as an athlete right now but he would like to in the future. Yeah, it's not all just Olympic swimmers.
Jeremy: Yeah. I think that's a really good point. When you said that, in my mind, if it were me with yours, I would go one of two directions and very different directions. I don't think either one is right or wrong. I don't usually think they're right directions. I think there are a lot of wrong directions to go. But with yours, for instance, you have an amazing product. Pretty much 100% of your clientele is not just pleased with your product, they are uber pleased.
People that come out of your program are like, "Wow, that works so well. I'm willing to keep doing it. I'm going to pay you for a second year to get even better results." I mean, your retention rate, your customer satisfaction rate is through the roofs. You have an amazing product and service partially because you've got such great people working for you, partially because you've done such a good job of just building out what really, really works for people.
I think you've got two options. One of them is just to really expand your markets. Like you said, it's not all athletes. But at the same time I know because I know you well that you don't go out and speak at major business conferences, you don't go out and speak on major business podcasts. But I can tell you that -- and I know because I know some of your clients -- that a lot of people in Silicon Valley, a lot of people who are tech execs, a lot of people who are business execs in New York, these are people who would easily come in and do your program if they trusted you just a little bit, if they heard you speak at a conference, immediately gave you authority because you're on stage.
And if you had a really well prepared presentation where you explain all the results that you normally get through your clients who are in similar situation to them, how much it increases their functionality, their brain function, their sleep, how much better they'll feel, how much more productive they are, that sort of thing, you could easily do that. I think it's possible for you because you have brilliant people on the practice, like you said Tammy and other people who are running the back end now where you could step out and do a lot more of that if you really wanted to expand it.
Now, of course, that would take some time. You'd have to do some traveling. There are downsides to it. I mean, there are always some tradeoffs. Not always, but usually some tradeoffs in some of these ways. The other way is you do a lot of programming. We've talked about this. You do a lot of machine learning. If you wanted to go for the moon shot, the way number one is a tried and true way because you know you've got an amazing product, you know that people love it, you know the kinds of people who love it, and you know the markets that you're reaching more or less right now and which ones would be tangential but very strongly related to those markets.
Pretty much anybody who's running a business in health or otherwise could do this easily. They know who are their best clients. They know where those best clients hang out, that is, what magazines they read, what conferences they go to, and just getting in to more of that could grow on that side quite a bit. The other way for you would be a moon shot because you can -- I mean, you are a machine learning engineer.
So, you could build more of that and actually start getting it out in the masses in different ways. That's more of moon shot because it's a much higher risk. It might not work. You might not have as high of a success rate in terms of what it does for people. People might not find it as useful. It would take a lot, lot more work on your part. You'd probably have to build a team, maybe even take some funding at some point.
I think these are the options that I would think about if I were you or pretty much in any situation similar. You got to think like what do I want? Do I want to grow this business? In which case, if you've already got a great product that people love, the easy ways to grow it are to ask for referrals, and there are particular ways to do that. I don't know if you're actually doing that in your business but there are actually specific ways to engineer referrals, easy things like, "Hey, have you mentioned Nourish Balance Thrive or the program to anybody in the past year? And if so, why or why not?"
With that one question they'll tell you why they have or haven't. And then you have follow up questions. Then ask, do they know anybody in their life who they think would benefit from it? Effectively, they've already replied. They're going to say, "Yeah. I know so and so." And you'd say, "Hey, would you mind shooting them an email and copying me?" That's the kind of thing that you can orchestrate that's super easy that doesn't take a whole lot of time and that you can proceduralize.
Like I said, a lot of people think of marketing as this bad thing but everybody who comes through your practice or -- I don't want to say everybody but 99% of people who come to your practice absolutely love the results they get. They love the service. They love the product. They love everything about it. So, why not give them the opportunity and encourage them to help other people on the same way?
Because you know what, if they help their friend and their friend actually does it, their friend is going to come back and say, "Wow, thanks so much for sending me over to Chris because that was amazing." It's such a great thing and it's going to improve their friendship or their relationship or whatever relationship they have with them. It's actually a really, really good thing to do.
There's that. Like I said, there's speaking. But then there's also you got to decide where you want the business to go. If you wanted to build a billion dollar business out of this, it's probably not going to happen by doing a few more referrals and speaking a bit more. On the other hand, it might happen with innovation, the kind of innovation that you're capable of at this point. But it's a different path. You got to decide if you want to go that route while your kids are young.
[0:45:03]
Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. Let me turn the tables on you now. I know that you've got your fingers in a number of different pies. You've started many businesses over the years and not all of them are health related but you're still very much involved in the industry. What's next for you? What are you most excited about in the health space? What are you working on?
Jeremy: In the health space? My wife and I built a company called Nourishing Brands and she is CEO and runs that company and has to spend a little too much time on the company. She's actually a far better entrepreneur than I am so I'll put that on record. I tell her this. I tell other people this. I'm not sure they believe it partially because I tend to speak a little more confidently than she does. I have to sound like I know more, sound like I'm more successful but she's way, way better at this stuff.
She doesn't have quite the confidence that I have for some reason. I'm not going to get into the psychology of that. We are working on a number of things. We're still on the keto space to some degree. We still run ketosummit.com. We are running a bundle in early September. That's always exciting because people really like that. We get a lot of best people in the industry to put together products. That's one of those things where it's almost an overwhelming amount of recipes and information and things.
But for somebody who's just getting into it or somebody who has recently gotten into keto, it's actually really, really great set of tools because often even though there are 30 or 40 different tools including a bunch of books, cookbooks, video courses and also a ton of extra bonus, discounts and things like that, people won't obviously use all of that but people get in because they see one, two, three, five things in there that really, really appeal to them and then they download all of it, they get all of it, they start using those things.
That's the kind of thing that in small doses can actually move people along the spectrum of just wanting to quickly lose weight or just wanting to quickly feel better down toward starting to make more wholesale life changes. And so that's exciting. We're doing that. We're working on a lot of other stuff. We're actually trying to expand. We want to realistically become a company that makes every aspect of health healthier.
It's not the way I usually describe it. That wasn't quite as articulate as I would like. What I mean by that is we work in the Paleo space. We work in the keto space. We work in the autoimmune space. We have a supplement company called CoBionic where we're focusing on gut health supplements. I'm actually really excited about it. I'm going to actually talk to you and Tommy because I'd like to put together a small study, just an internal study on that one because we did not create--
I've been using this supplement for about four years before we created it earlier this year. We actually had a number of clients who have healed various autoimmune diseases -- not healed but have effectively eliminated all the symptoms of things like ulcerative colitis. That's not what we created it for at all but we're getting comments from people who are using it and have tried tons of other things including tons of very strong probiotics and not getting same results.
We don’t want to do a study on that. We'd like to do a study on some basic health measures like oral glucose tolerance test. But point being, people are using this and loving it because it creates a lot of instant ways that they feel better, a lot of instant things that are happening for them that's very, very beneficial. And so we'd actually like to see if the evidence, we're actually testing if it supports that because it's all anecdotal right now.
We're doing that. And we'll probably expand in other niches. We'd actually like to make plant based diets a lot healthier because that's one of the trends that is getting much, much more popular. People are going vegetarian or at least very close to vegetarian or pescetarian, things that they're eating a lot less meat. The problem with that niche right now is that a lot of people do it for more on ethical reasons but then other people do it because think just cutting out the meat is going to be the thing that makes it healthy.
Of course, I mean, I think, as you and I know, that's not really the case. Most of the studies that say meat are bad suffer from a huge healthy user bias. And so the thing that we'd like to do -- we're not opposed. If people want to stop eating meat, fine. Maybe long term is a bit of a problem in terms of fat soluble vitamin deficiencies that you and I were talking about earlier. But realistically, I think there's a space to make that much, much healthier and to start educating people and helping people do that in a way that doesn't lead to long term deficiencies and where they're also cutting out a lot of inflammatory foods. So, they're not just living on meat free pizza and Doritos.
Christopher: Soy and wheat.
Jeremy: Yeah, right?
Christopher: Yeah. I mean, that must be -- I mean, it's kind of sad but it does sound like a fantastic opportunity for supplement salesman to me.
Jeremy: That's probably true as well. We have a supplements company that would fulfill that niche. But, yeah, it's a huge opportunity for somebody if you can break through and actually convince people that, yeah, living on wheat and soy is going to lead to some problems.
Christopher: Can you repeat the name of the gut health supplement that you mentioned? I'll link to it in the show notes as well.
Jeremy: Yeah, sure. Although we're bad at inventory management. We're only going to get stock back around mid to late September, but it's called CoBionic Foundation. CoBionic is the name of the company. Foundation is the main prebiotic supplement we sell.
[0:50:09]
Christopher: And I can tell you that Tommy absolutely would be very excited about doing some experiment and then writing up and getting it published.
Jeremy: The study? Yeah.
Christopher: Yeah, that's definitely.
Jeremy: We talked to him very briefly about it but we haven't followed it up. As with everybody, we're just super busy. It's funny we talk so much about business and I always joke that if people could see behind the scenes in pretty much any small business, they would be shocked that it works at all. It's the case with our business. I'm sure it's probably the case with your business. It would be like, "How does this work?" Everything is going wrong all the time. Nothing is optimized.
Christopher: It's absolutely true.
Jeremy: It's one of those things that if you haven't been there and seen it you think from the outside it looks like everything is working. It looks like, how do you do all of this? How is it running? When you're in the machine you're like, it's only moments away from falling apart completely.
Christopher: That sounds like an excellent segue into talking about some potential job opportunities that you have.
Jeremy: Actually, let's skip that part. I don't know if you're going to cut out that line or not but I know we were going to talk about that but we're going to have to hold off from the job opportunities because we're looking for somebody but not the position we thought we were looking for. I'll tell you long term, because we're going to leave this in here. Long term, we're looking for somebody with really good ops experience. That is, somebody -- it doesn't even have to be in health.
I mean, ideally, they would have some experience in health. But ideally, somebody who has really, really great experience on the op side, that is, effectively growing a business, building a team up to a certain range. I'd love to see somebody who built into the $20 to $50 million range. So, we're looking for somebody who has that experience building a team, building that culture to some degree but also systematizing the operation side.
I'm not sure that we're ready right at the moment. I don't have anywhere to send them. Louise and I have been talking about this but, yeah, I'll mention it. Because if anybody does know somebody or you feel like you're that perfect fit, that's something we're going to be looking at and it's going to be a long term hire. That's one of the positions that we would really like to hire for over the next six to nine months.
Christopher: You just reminded me of something with the supplement. Do you think that science could be a good marketing strategy? Rather than some of the usual tactics that you see online, a lot of storytelling, a lot of before and after pictures, that type of thing, do you think you could actually publish some real data and that be an effective marketing strategy, that is getting people ready to make a sale?
Jeremy: Not by itself.
Christopher: Not by itself, okay.
Jeremy: I'm a big student and fan of direct response marketing particularly for small businesses. I mean, once you get to a certain size like Coke or Pepsi, direct response just doesn't make that much sense in some ways anymore because part of it is everybody has heard of you. It's more about branding to some degree. But your question, look, I mean, science always plays a role. People who are brilliant at this or brilliant at marketing really weave in science. You can't do it to the exclusion of everything else because other things you mentioned like story, I mean, story is how our brains work.
Christopher: I know.
Jeremy: It is how we think.
Christopher: I'm being facetious to some extent.
Jeremy: Yeah, I know, but seriously, I mean, people forget this. Story is the way that we remember. It's the way that we think about potential threats and dangers. It's the way that we imagine new futures for ourselves. Story is the whole structure of our brain. A lot of times people will try to market without actually crafting a good story. And also people try to market by telling the story of themselves or their company. It has to be in there a little bit but really you got to learn how to tell the story of your customer.
If you wanted to serve somebody you've got to actually learn to tell their story because if you can tell their story better than they can they're going to trust you all day long. And they should because you understand them better. And if you can tell that story better you understand them better on a way that allows you to actually serve them better, to create better products and to create better services because you understand them and their story so well. You understand their pains. You understand their anxiety. You understand how they see themselves.
And once you understand all that, it makes your job that much easier, not just selling but actually serving them. I love science and anything we sell we try to put a lot of the science in there. But then again, science is one of these things particularly in nutrition where you can't run 20-year controlled trials on two huge groups of people. You can get science to say whatever you wanted to because nobody, like you said, talks about mechanisms, not unless they're Tommy, because nobody knows the mechanisms. You can support whatever you want to and we see it all day long with everybody putting science out for anything.
Christopher: I mean, you're absolutely right. of course, I'm being silly when I say that storytelling because even -- I'm in a middle of the book at the moment, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, that's written by an academic. But the book is really all about storytelling and what a rich source of stories the psychopaths. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think even academics. In fact, I just see one academic who I won't mention at the Ancestral Health Symposium that started his presentation by lampooning people that tells stories in talks and my response was exactly the same as yours was just then.
[0:55:00]
Jeremy: Yeah. We were talking about podcasts earlier that we listened to other than Nourish Balance Thrive.
Christopher: Of course.
Jeremy: I told you about one of them that's my favorite, The Memory Palace. I didn't discover this. Nate DiMeo is quite well known. The Memory Palace is brilliant. But another one, and I don't know if this would interest you or your listeners but I have digested every single episode, I've listened to all of them, and it's about three or four years with their episodes, it's called the Story Grid. Shawn Coyne, he's been an editor for, I don't know, 25 or 28 years or something.
He edits a lot of famous people. He's had hundreds -- I don't know if hundreds. He's had at least dozens of books in New York Times bestseller list. I mean, he is one of the best editors in the world. And he created this podcast with this other guy who is trying to become a writer particularly a fiction writer although they were writing some nonfiction.
If you want to understand just how much we know about story particularly, I mean, how much Shawn Coyne knows about story, how much we know about story but also how influential story is in our life, listening to that podcast, even though it's about writing an even though it's about story in terms of fiction and books and nonfiction, it is incredibly fascinating and enlightening because it will show you just how much story is wired into our brains.
There's actually a great book called Wired for Story as well that talks about that and also Robert McKee's book on story. There are a lot of great books. But as far as podcasts go, Shawn Coyne's podcast is, with Tim Grahl, the other guy who runs it, is just absolutely phenomenal. I can't recommend it enough. Just a little tidbit if anybody is interested in listening and hearing more about story. I love recommending things that I think are just phenomenal.
If you're an entrepreneur, if you're a marketer, I do a lot of copywriting and we're pretty good at copywriting and I actually think about my copywriting a lot more these days in terms of a lot of the terminology and framework that Shawn Coyne puts out for Story. It's particularly useful if you're running a business or if you're trying to sell anything too.
Christopher: I will, of course, link to everything you mentioned in the show notes for this episode that you can find over at nourishblancethrive.com/podcast. Jeremy, where can people find you online?
Jeremy: Yes. Me personally, they can go to my personal site, jeremyhendon.com. I write some on there. I write for a few other publications. That's the easiest way to find me. We have, obviously, Nourishing Brands. We have ketosummit.com. We have Paleoflourish.com, healingautoimmune.com and then there's CoBionic. But for me personally really, my personal site is an easy way to see generally what I'm up to.
Christopher: Well, this has been fantastic. I very much enjoy your company and your advice. I think you've been fantastic for me over the years. I should give thanks to my sister who first made the introduction. I think she bought one of your cookbooks and said, "Oh, you really must meet these guys."
Jeremy: Is that right?
Christopher: Yeah.
Jeremy: I didn't even realize.
Christopher: Let's go back four or five years now. My sister bought one of your cookbooks. I think it's still in our kitchen. I swear to you, the last time I went back that cookbook was still in her kitchen and there was only one or two.
Jeremy: Wait. So, here's the crazy thing. I didn't actually know you had a sister.
Christopher: Yeah, I've got two sisters.
Jeremy: Okay. I feel like I should have known that but I don't think I did.
Christopher: Yeah. Don't worry. I won't hold it against you. Yeah, I'm sure you get a lot of email and you can't possibly remember that but I probably could dig it up out from my inbox and find that email that my sister sent. She like cc'ed you and said, "Oh, you really must meet this guy because he eats a Paleo diet too." I was like, "Okay, Debbie, thanks." Yeah, it turned into something wonderful.
Jeremy: I actually think she might have emailed Louise first.
Christopher: Yeah, that's possible. That's possible.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Christopher: Is there anything else you want people to know about, Jeremy?
Jeremy: No. I think that's it. If people are thinking of getting into business -- Actually, there's one other thing because you and I chatted very briefly about this because you were saying you get a lot of people who either like have done their PhDs or are thinking about they've revolutionized their own health, they changed their own health and they're thinking about getting into it, entrepreneurialism is great and it's one of the things that makes the world go round in a lot of ways.
I'm actually a big fan of capitalism in general in terms of I think that a lot of big advances in the world have come through people starting businesses and innovating and doing things not just to make money but as part of the market, as part of society. If you're so inclined to that, I think it's a great, great thing to do. However, I would also say that it gets glamorized a lot in our current society and culture.
It's one of those things that you and I were talking about this earlier that it's not right for everybody. Some people are just brilliant at what they do in terms of thinking about things or in terms of creating awesome products or designing beautiful things. Realistically, if that's the case, then it's probably going to detract them if they're trying to start a business. So, maybe it makes sense to find somebody to work with who is more geared towards starting that side of the business.
I know that can be hard but sometimes it's just better in the long run both for your health, happiness and for your pocket or your wallet. That's the only thing I'd say because we talk a lot about business and I'd love to see more and more people innovate, more and more people start amazing companies but at the same time I see a lot of people get into it who end up not being happy in it at all and having it not serve them well. It's one of those things to really got to do a little bit of soul searching about and figure out if you think it's the right thing for you.
[1:00:01]
Christopher: I totally agree. I sometimes miss the days when I used to be an employee at a hedge fund and I could leave the office at 1:15 when the market is closed and then just go ride my bike and not think about work until the next day. That just doesn't happen when you're running a small business. I mean, you can ride your bike but you're still going to think about work whilst you're doing it.
Jeremy: Yeah. We know that as well as anybody.
Christopher: Well, this has been fantastic, Jeremy. I very much appreciate you and I look forward to speaking with you again soon.
Jeremy: Awesome. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it.
Christopher: Cheers.
[1:00:32] End of Audio
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