We’ve all been learning a lot lately about what we need to eat. But did you know when we eat the nutrition can be as important as what we eat? We’ll explore chrononutrition with Paul and learn about the impactful reasons he has dedicated his company to raising awareness for mental health.
Show Notes:
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Pretty ok transcript:
[00:00:00] Mason: Welcome to another mostly green life podcast. It’s Sunday. We have Paul of mantra labs. Paul’s been a great friend supporter, investor and collaborator for at least 15 years. Now, when did we meet? At
[00:00:12] Paul: least we must’ve been what? Two years old then?
[00:00:16] Mason: Yeah, exactly. This guy. How I really got to know him is that he truly understands how to get at what people want, not just what they say they want with his market research experience.
He’s a serial entrepreneur with an awesome current venture mantra labs as an innovative approach to nutrient supplementation and an underlying mission centered around mental health. But first, the most important question that I have. Is how do you still have a successful marriage after? How long have you been married?
20 some
[00:00:46] Paul: odd 27 years. I got check my wedding ring inside, but I can’t read it anymore. Doesn’t have the date in grave. It does, but my eyes have gotten so bad. I can’t read it. Definition of successful is a sliding scale on the day Mesa, you know, that. It’s got its ups and downs, right? You’re either kind of my role in life is either getting better or worse.
There is no homeostasis when I forget that my marriage goes to shit. When I remember I got to work on it, it goes well, surprisingly, I have a very forgiving and patient wife. Let me, let me put it that way. So I give her the credit and she’s helped raise a man. I hope
[00:01:26] Mason: she was her
[00:01:27] Paul: high school. She was my best friend’s high school, sweetheart.
Technically speaking, they broke up before we dated. We started dating my freshman year at UT. I’ve known her since we were both 15, so very long time. Wow. Very
[00:01:40] Jess: long, very successful. It seems.
[00:01:42] Paul: Yeah, it’s been a, it’s been a very good partnership. She’s been a great partner. So I got lucky. Okay.
[00:01:48] Mason: You also, based on your posts, it seems like you’re really leaning into exercise.
Has that, have you always done that or is that, and you’re just posting about it or it’s recent.
[00:01:56] Paul: Yeah. I typically have avoided social media. So it probably seems like I’m doing a lot of new things. I ran track in high school, worked as a personal trainer in college and was raised a vegetarian. I was a little hippie child.
So I was the kid that brought his. Tofurkey or soy hot dog wrapped in tin foil to the baseball game to get cooked and all that stuff. So always been health and wellness, and really have just leaned into that. As the older I’ve gotten, I realized I wasn’t just going to stay healthy by doing nothing. So it was going to take some active work, but I’ve always been into health and.
Gotcha. And did you grow
[00:02:34] Mason: up nice is
[00:02:35] Paul: Texas? No, I grew up most of my childhood in Southern California, actually, and a lot of summers in Arkansas and early childhood in New Jersey and Norfolk, Virginia. So a little bit all over the divorced parents moving around in different spots. Yeah. Gotcha.
Yeah.
[00:02:50] Mason: I guess Arkansas is what I remember close to.
[00:02:53] Paul: No worries from Northwest Arkansas back then, it was not on the map, but now Fayetteville. R a build as the next Austin, right? Yeah. Lot of people up there.
[00:03:03] Mason: Yeah. We have, uh, friends and family with places and Fayetteville.
[00:03:07] Paul: Yeah. It’s a beautiful spot. Great. So
[00:03:10] Jess: you have over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur, helping companies with product development and innovation market research, advertising sales, with this immense knowledge, it seems like it’s a no brainer that you’d eventually have your own product or brand one day.
Did you think that you would take this path at some point?
[00:03:26] Paul: That’s a good question. I’ve always started businesses to scratch itches that I couldn’t get to, right. Whether it was on the branding and agency side and building a better software platform to gather customer feedback to now building mantra labs, but really came down to building products that we wanted to use and take ourselves that we couldn’t find in the marketplace.
[00:03:49] Mason: Very cool. Give some advice to entrepreneurs who want to create their.
[00:03:54] Paul: Ah, very good question. I’m almost going to contradict myself when saying we’re building products that, that we want to take. You also have to remember, you’re not the target market at the same time, right? So it’s a tough balance. It’s a tough balance.
I know you’ve done it with many of you at the company is you’ve founded right. That these were products. You wanted the veggie noodles and, but you’re not a typical customer either, right? Like you read the labels more than anybody else. You understand? Organic and farming and supply chain. The person grabbing it off the shelf at whole foods may not understand.
So in terms of developing a product, one of the pieces of advice I give folks is you’ve got to have a mission bigger than making money or the product, right? Because there’s nothing I can do. Or you can do that. Elon Musk can’t hire 50 people tomorrow and build. A faster, better machine behind it for the most part, but it has to do with when you infuse that product with the soul and heart of a mission that you can leap frog.
The Amazon of the industry, right? When you have that, people really want a connection with what they’re doing, whether it’s an environmental, a social, cause they want to understand that they’re voting with their dollars. And especially, I don’t want to say that younger generation, but the kids growing up now they see beyond the advertisements.
Right. And the endorsements, like they want to understand. What they’re buying, why they’re buying it and what it means for the world around them. But I think you’re seeing a lot more conscious brands that are operating in that arena.
[00:05:29] Mason: Yeah. You’re also kind of the king of swag. Why has that always been
[00:05:34] Paul: important to, yeah, I love t-shirts I’m king of swag.
That might have to be my new handle. We do try, my wife would say it’s because I have add, so I get bored so quickly, always gotta be branding, something new. I love branding. Right? I love creating things that people get excited about. Um, and, and I view branding as crafting, right? So for me, the beauty of running a business is.
Twofold one delighting customers. If I wasn’t running my own business, I would probably be a concierge at a hotel. I love finding ways to, to make people happy and surprised the hell out of them, by going above and beyond and to as I like something that you can constantly improve and tinker with. And sometimes the businesses that.
Standstill it’s running well, you know, knock on wood. I won’t do it. So we don’t mess up the microphones. And when it is, I’m like, well, what do I do today? What can I build today? And I’m like a new t-shirt I have, we’re going to put this logo on a water bottle. And this thing we had them change the paint.
This is a beautiful, soft, like matte black. It’s just, we worked hard on that. No good reason, except for it came out looking really cool. I think a really nice material. So, you know, I love building a better mouse trap and constantly being able to hone a craft or a product to create something that delights the engine.
Well,
[00:06:55] Jess: Mason loves y’all swag. So I’m glad that I got a t-shirt so we can match sometimes
[00:07:00] Paul: plenty more where that came from.
[00:07:02] Jess: So how did the idea for mantra come about? You mentioned it was because there wasn’t anything in the marketplace that you wanted to take. And so you guys, you created. Yeah,
[00:07:10] Paul: super good question.
I’ll try and give you the short answer to it. I’m a label reader. Like you all are always trying to, you know, vote for the world. I want with my dollars put healthy stuff in my body, that was kind of the perfect storm I had gotten involved in CPG and organic health and wellness. It might’ve been your very first company was probably my first investment in that space, Mason and green laying.
And it just, it feels good to put your time and your. Behind people and things that are working towards a greater good to use a phrase from Richard Branson, right. Using business as a force for good. So I truly believe if you have the privilege of taking someone’s money and being in business, you should leave the world better for that.
And I think too often, people are like, well, business is business and social is social. Let me
[00:07:57] Mason: make my money first and
[00:07:58] Paul: then I’ll do good. Right. It’s just not true. It’s like you can’t beat someone up and then buy them a beer. It doesn’t work that way. I almost feel that way
[00:08:05] Mason: about in rugby in real up and then true.
But that’s pretty outlying guys.
[00:08:10] Jess: He
[00:08:10] Paul: bought a beer after. Yeah. And that’s rugby. That’s reasonable. And so I had gotten involved with what’s called skew here in town, way back in the day I was incubation station. So I got to work with at first mentor. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, the very first with, with Sherry and Joe and Scott and Clayton Christopher, and that group.
So yeah, I was, I loved being the dumbest guy in the room, which is not normally very hard for me. And I definitely made myself the dumbest guy in that room. I didn’t have any of the CPG background, but. The branding and the customer segmentation and the market research. So I got to take that skill set and I had ad agency background and apply it to CPG.
So I got to work with Thunderbird and epic and Katie and Taylor, and then see at day and Austin Eastsiders. So kind of cut my teeth on that side of it. And then built up my software company. We sold that to a private equity firm four years ago. And this is where the story gets interesting is that at that point you’re supposed to be happy and fulfilled.
We all know that story. Who’s the quote from. Dumb and dumber guy, Jim Carrey, you know, I hope everyone gets everything they want the world so they can realize it’s not the answer. Right. And there’s really no better way to get depressed fast and to get everything you want in the world. So I found myself literally depressed for the first time in my life, drinking too much bourbon, which is okay, a few nights, but seven nights in a row and too much coffee in the morning.
And I should’ve had six pack abs and Ben. Instead, I was a miserable sob and started digging into growth mindset versus fixed mindset. I thought I was always this open-minded guy, but I hated being wrong. And realizing that being wrong is a super power, right? Like if you’re wrong, it means you’re growing and learning.
And so dug deep, started digging deep into why am I not getting my shit together? Why am I not treating my wife greater and my children. Great. And why am I stressed? And I shouldn’t be, and I started studying the blue zones. Where do people. Not just longer, but healthier and happier, right? What are those common denominators across those places, which came down to movement community and movement, not running a marathon necessarily, but all day movement, right?
Gardening community, having a sense of purpose, doing something for somebody else. Um, and then what you put in your body. And as I was digging into that, trying to figure out what the best stuff to take morning, noon, and. Not just to go up and down and up and down, but to elevate my whole day so that I could feel better.
I heard a meth,
[00:10:38] Mason: well, do that.
[00:10:39] Paul: Math, you come down eventually I’ve heard as well. And then you got to go to the dentist too. So if those teeth start coming out, Mason, I’m going to come talk to you so long story short at the same time, because when it rains, it pours, my wife was going through a nasty bout of insomnia.
Like not sleeping for days and weeks. Doctors and medication and over the counter, and just looking at this medicine cabinet and pantry full of everything off of Amazon and pharmacies and whole foods and thought, my God, there’s gotta be a better way to do this. And, and there was all this functional stuff out there that even if it worked was bringing you up and down, not necessarily improving your underlying health, which is your circadian rhythm.
So as we dug into the recent. I realized I had found my calling for the next company. I discovered this concept of chronic nutrition, which actually won the Nobel prize in medicine in 2017 and not a single health brand had capitalized on it. And then digging into nutrition. Food is data for your body, right?
Both mental and physical and understanding, you know, seeing the impact that not sleeping can have on you, the impact that not eating. I mean, that’s a huge, I’ll go on a tangent here quickly. There’s a. Group in the UK, I believe they’re called natural justice and their whole thing is around eating and what it does to.
Jail recidivism rates. So when they control someone’s diet, when they get out of jail, that the rate goes down like 90%. Yeah.
[00:12:13] Mason: And they, to some of that research and set some names around a mega threes can have, it can dramatically reduce violence in the prison. They, they supplemented omega threes and violence
[00:12:24] Paul: went down.
Yeah. It’s incredible research. And I think about it just from seeing someone homeless on. Think about how you can’t work very well. And you can’t be very friendly if you haven’t had lunch, let alone lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch, you go to three days. None of us are operating well. So it started digging into that and realizing why do we want to be healthy?
Well, because we want to feel good, actually has nothing to do with what your abs look like it has to do with your whole body. And we feel between. So it really came down to, uh, through SCU. I got connected to, uh, a great guy can, um, that’s master formulator, R and D headed up R and D at several large vitamin companies.
And we basically spent a year and a half. If you had unlimited time and resources, what’s the best stuff to stick in your body morning, noon and night. And that’s where rise go. And rest came from. So rise early morning, vitamin nootropic, hydration. Neural factor. So you basically got focus and energy without the caffeine and a big dose of antioxidants.
It’s kind of your all in one. So the rest of your day goes to hell in a hand basket, your cupboard go is your healthy pre-workout and recovery. I won’t go through all the ingredients, but it’s an awesome little powerhouse. And then rest, we formulated for my wife and it’s, it’s a sleep bomb. It’s a game-changer it works.
[00:13:45] Jess: We use it all the time. So we can attest to
[00:13:46] Mason: that. I remember when I talked to you early on. I try not to use sleep aids every night. And at the time, I think you had said that, that you’re not supposed to, but we’re pretty much using it every night now because it just works so good. Yeah. Do I want a good night’s sleep or an okay.
[00:14:04] Paul: Night’s sleep. Yeah, it’s funny. I was talking to a partner of ours, the high rocks games in Germany. And as we were talking to, I said, I guess we’d taken kind of a German approach to our products, which is very pragmatic, curated, and thoughtful ingredient list. So we’re not giving you 12000% of your B12, right?
We’re not giving you 600 milligrams of caffeine in your pre-workout. So everything’s made to work synergistically work on its own or together. And to take every day. Okay. So for instance, in the rest is 325 milligrams of magnesium citrate. You have pharma Gabba, a hundred milligrams of LT, any in the form of something, meaning three milligrams of melatonin, right?
So it’s not a 10 milligram dosage. Um, it’s just enough to that. That combination works as if you were taking a massive dose of any one of those products. By combining them synergistically. We’re able to dial them all down to where you can take it. I’d probably take it three to four times a week. My wife takes it every night,
[00:15:06] Jess: right?
Yeah. Gotcha. And the lemon cake flavor is delicious. Have you tried it hot? No, I have not heard of hot. It makes
[00:15:13] Paul: a delicious hot tea as well. Now that turning a little
[00:15:16] Jess: cooler. Yeah, we were taking it every evening and we were taking it when we had, or when you were selling the individual packets. And so one day I told Mason, I was like, I feel bad about all this waste.
Can’t we just get a larger size or. And so he had reached out to you and lo and behold, I think a few weeks later, you guys had launched the 30 servings.
[00:15:34] Paul: Yeah. Because we felt bad about it too. And we can dork out on packaging if you want for a minute with the
[00:15:39] Jess: dark out on packaging in terms of making it more sustainable or,
[00:15:42] Paul: yeah.
And we went way down that rabbit hole, we sourced stuff out of the UK. I can tell you that the, um, metalized cellulose comes out of Poland and the issue. There are several issues. One in the middle of COVID supply chain is just broken. I reached out to a couple brands that had what proper fuck. Yeah.
That’s the UK term for it? Yes. We source stuff out of Vancouver. So brought in all these samples and several issues we discovered. We use a very large co-packer for our products and they’re very good top in the game. They don’t mess around with data packaging when it comes to Paladins. Right? Cause if you run the large runs we’re doing and you get moisture in them, you know, you’re out a quarter million dollars very quickly.
And the issue with many of the. Both compostable and quote, unquote recyclable. We can talk about that. I saw I was listening to your guys’ original podcast. I think you call it wish cycling. Yeah. My kids do that and I, hell I do it. Let me just, let me just admit it. We just
[00:16:47] Jess: recently took a step back from doing as much because we learned about it a few weeks ago.
[00:16:51] Paul: Yeah. It’s like half of what you stick in. Your recycling is not recyclable. Let’s be like all that packaging that, oh, that looks like plastic recycling. We’ll throw that in there. Yeah. And, and the issue is twofold. One. I reached out to a brand that I thought I’d done a beautiful job ditch plastic. I was like, Hey guys, we’re in the same space.
Let’s put our purchasing power together. Like, yeah, we’ve actually gone back to all plastic. We can’t get any more of the compostable, like the supply chains broken on it. And so just being in the middle of COVID, we can’t, we’re, we’re actually working with another packaging company right now to hopefully beta their stuff as soon as it’s ready in the next three months.
Cause it’d be great to get compostable. We looked at PCR. PCRs is such a small amount of post-consumer recycled. So it’ll be up to 20% of co, but then the issue with post-consumer recycled, since it’s a mixed plastic, you can’t recycle the bag that you just used. It’s got recycled material, but you can’t re recycle it.
[00:17:52] Mason: Cause it’s a mix. It turns into that jet number
[00:17:55] Paul: seven there, and then the issue with any of the, you can recycle this material. There’s only two or three locations in the country that will actually recycle flexible packaging. So all the flexible packaging on the cells that says recycle. It’s not, unless you mail it back in, if you put it in your city of Austin recycling, it’s it can’t get recycled.
[00:18:19] Jess: It must feel like they shouldn’t put that recycling sign on it, because I don’t know if it’s misleading necessarily, but everybody recycles it. They should have a different sign.
[00:18:30] Paul: That’s right. I do remember that. Yeah. And we just,
[00:18:33] Mason: so we just did a household waste, deep dive.
[00:18:36] Paul: Oh, this is all very topical. I’m excited to hear that.
Yeah. So we kept going back and forth because I didn’t like throwing away the packets and they had to be multi-layer the packets themselves have to be multi-layer right. So you’ve got moisture for moisture and sunlight. And to give it a two year shelf life. And so like when we just launched the hydrate product, we did those as both a 30 serving tub again, and stick packs that are, have one less layer.
And we actually took a layer off of our sachets too. So before we had done, like I said, we’d dork out on packaging for a minute, but we had done a, a matte layer to give it that nice, soft feel this time we got rid of that matte layer and did a varnish coat on it. So it’s little less packaging, little easier to tear up.
We’re doing what we can, where we can quality of the products got to come first. And then after that, so we will hopefully get something compostable fully recyclable in the next 12 months. It’s just not commercially viable, unfortunately. Yeah. Well, I love hearing
[00:19:35] Jess: how much thought you guys have put into all of that.
[00:19:38] Paul: Yeah, we probably just lost half of your podcast hung up. I’m sorry. You hang up. I’m on the podcast. Fast forward. But back to current nutrition. Yeah. That’s
[00:19:47] Mason: really fascinating concept. How did you formulae Zoot dug into the research? I guess you’re just looking at the benefits of these different
[00:19:55] Jess: compounds.
Can we take a step back and actually just elaborate on what the concept even is? A
[00:20:00] Paul: very valid question. It’s a fancy sounding term. That’s really basic, which is, it’s not just what you eat. It’s when you eat it. And the easiest way I can put that to. Krono nutrition is you don’t need a piece of cake before you go for a run, right?
Or you don’t need a huge weight. Why not? What might be, why you’re running is not going so well, man, it’s really just about the timing of it and where that started for me is the best time to have caffeine. Now I still have my coffee first thing in the morning cause I love the ritual and, and my wife. We have a cup of coffee in the morning.
And that’s our thing, but the best time to have caffeine is actually some time between 10 and one. Cause when you first wake up, your cortisol levels are already super high. You’re going to get this natural alertness. We just don’t wait for it. Or we don’t go exercise or take a cold shower. There’s lots of other ways.
And I love my coffee. I love super coffee. I love that Jimmy and Jake and Jordan moved to town. And if you haven’t talked to those guys yet, awesome. Great product. So I’ve got nothing against coffee. It’s actually part of the reason we formulated rise without caffeine, because I wanted to be able to have coffee and then get all my vitamins minerals and hydration separately.
If you look at things like intermittent fasting, and you look at cold therapy and all of that, that is really around getting rid of unhealthy cells. That’s the whole purpose behind that. Exactly when we’re overfeeding our body, we’re keeping unhealthy things alive because there’s enough energy in the body for it, or there’s enough heat and cells get unhealthy when the mitochondrial clock gets off.
And so the holy grail is if that clock never gets off, you quote unquote, live forever, right? Like that’s when you get that escape philosophy for me. Now that’s not going to happen, taking rise, go and rest or any other way in our lifetime. But what you can do is help get proper sleep control, your blue light control your screen time, wake up with the season at different times.
So it really was looking back at that. How do we get our biological clocks to work for us? And the strange thing is we have a huge following in shift workers, right? So nurses, doctors that need to flip. Chronological clock. And there hasn’t been a non-narcotic way to do that. Well, rise go and rest, help them do that.
And a big part of our research as we were looking into it is actually the it’s called the special ops warfare fighters manual. And it’s research done by DARPA and the government. If you’re looking for non-biased research, that’s a pretty good source and they do deep, deep research around nutrition focused hydration.
When you’re off in the battlefield, being hungry is the difference between life and death or focusing or not focusing. And so they’ve studied it quite a bit as well. So we really dug deep into all of that science. And then we basically honestly started off with about 900 ingredients. Wow. A massive basically matrix and Excel sheet and had tried to fit them all in one pill, we fit a lot.
We honestly overbuilt all three of them. They’re expensive. And what, in terms of what’s denim. If you split out rise is probably six or seven products you would go buy for the same price that you would buy for rise. Not as a sales fish is just what it is. Like. Our neural factor is one ingredient. Neural factor is sold on its own as a pill, right.
It’s just part of what it is. Same thing with S seven and spectra and all of those in there. And it came down to, we had this overlay to explain
[00:23:35] Mason: all this in the show
[00:23:36] Paul: notes. Yeah. It came down to, it had to have human clinical trials that were peer reviewed and back of the particular ingredients of the particular ingredient of each ingredient.
So that’s how we start with these 900 then we’re like, what’s what has clinical backing? Everything had to be vegan and plant-based, so that’s everything on our line from day one, til the end of time, we’ll all be plant-based and vegan. And then it had to work synergistically together where the sun was greater than the parts.
And it had to not fuck up your mind or body to have one or the other work. So it’s like, you can get a great pre-workout that jacks you up. And then you’re grumpy and crashing, right? Like to me, that’s not moving you in the right track. So that, and then that started bringing our list down and then luckily through Ken’s connections, we had some great connections that very large.
Biopharma and manufacturers that had big research teams and a lot of patented products. So we got to leverage all of their R and D team and say, look, this is the function we’re trying to build here. Like we’re looking for a pre-workout plus a recovery midday energy boost. That’s the cleanest in the world that leaves no jitters and no crash.
Like what do we, what do you got in the pipeline? What don’t we know about and what works well together. And so we basically brought all these research groups and started building out these different products. Then we did the same thing for hydrate too,
[00:25:06] Mason: and they love hydrate. I mean, we’ve done hydration, powders.
But the hard part is the glucose and the sugars in it. Most of them have a ton of sugar. And so we’re excited, the chairs, don’t where we had one other that was low sugar and still had pretty good flavor. But then when we saw your ingredients and coming from sea minerals, we very quickly
[00:25:27] Jess: made the shift.
Yeah. That was interesting to see. Can you help us understand what the benefits are?
[00:25:33] Paul: Yeah. Now I’m going to get on a soap box here because this one is an interesting
[00:25:38] Jess: one. So there’s sorry. There’s so many. Hydrating powder options, not so many, but there’s a few outcomes. Okay. There’s a lot out there. And a lot of the ingredients seem to be relatively the same, but then there’s maybe one or two that have something different.
And so this was the first time we saw the oceanic electrolytes
[00:25:55] Paul: there. A lot of the hydration products are sold and predicated on what’s called oral rehydration therapy, which is based on it does. And it’s based on. The world health organization’s oral rehydration recommendations. All sounds good so far right at, which is basically a salt and sugar mix, which is absolutely awesome.
If you’ve been starving for 30 days in, in Africa. Stuck in the middle of nowhere. Oh, you’ve had explosive diarrhea for the last two weeks, because then you don’t have the glucose to transport the electrolytes, which is what you’re trying to get back in and the water into your body. The issue is if you’ve eaten in the last 48 hours, you’ve got all the glucose you need in your body.
Now, the caveat I’ll give to that is if you’re running an ultra or you’re exercising more than two hours, You want that glucose and you want to kind of be alternating some glucose, some slow burning carbs, some pure hydration in and out. But what everyone has been doing during COVID especially is it’s almost a saying, stay hydrated, bro.
Like everyone’s like, how are you? You hydrated. All right, good, good for you, man. It’s become this weird over, almost over hydration, but we’ve been hydrating with sugar and salt. And I don’t know when the last time you went to a doctor or read a health manual that said, you know what you need to do. You’d add sugar and salt, every glass of water you drink today, and then you’re going to be healthy.
[00:27:23] Jess: Otherwise you would never have that much sugar and salt in a serving, but there’s a packaging that says, this will hydrate you. I, the hydration. And you’re like, I guess I should take this. It’s going to
[00:27:31] Paul: be good. And there’s a lot of, I’ve had people say, I won’t call brands out there. Like, oh, I buy that brand at Costco and I love it.
And it’s got no sugar. Like actually it has 11 grams of sugar. Two teaspoons of sugar. So grab two teaspoons and dump that in your glass of water right now, and then dump it in at lunch and then dump it in, in the afternoon. So you’re basically negating your workout or any other healthy eating you’re doing.
Cause you just quadrupled your sugar intake by trying to hydrate. So the goal is you’re trying to replace electrolytes. You’re not just trying to play. Sodium potassium and chloride. You’re trying to replace broad spectrum electrolytes, right? So there’s seven electrolytes. We have all six except for the sodium bicarbonate, because that can upset your stomach.
If you have too much of that in there. And then you were talking about the Marine minerals. So we use. Um, which provides 72 trace route. No Aquaman, not man, not man. Don’t get too excited. Nascent. I’m sure Aqua man is moving to Austin at some point, too. Everybody else from Hollywood is so we put in these broad spectrum electrolytes, all the oceanic minerals in there.
So you’re basically being able to replace what you’re sweating out throughout the day. A hundred percent of your vitamin C and D 12, and then instead of sugar for a flow agent or a bunch of filler, we did prebiotic fiber. So chicory root fiber keeps it all from clumping and also gives you 500 milligrams of.
In each survey. Very cool
[00:28:58] Mason: about that. So what if your dehydration comes from alcohol? Does
[00:29:02] Paul: it all still work? It we’ve had people mix this with tequila and vodka on it. I can tell you I’ve done the Bhakta and it tastes good. A little sparkling Topo Chico on there. Yeah.
[00:29:13] Mason: That’s a great idea. Hydration,
[00:29:15] Paul: ranch, water.
Yeah. And speaking of Hollywood, I left off my co-founding launch partner cause we haven’t gotten there yet. Lives near nearby you Jared paddle Lackey, which was a great vote of confidence. We were an early beta. I reached out to his wife, Jen, we had some mutual friends. She’s awesome. Tried the product, loved it.
Jared had just come back from filming his final season of supernatural. So they’d been up in Vancouver for 15 years, basically flying back and forth. She gave him rest rise and go. When he got home, we talked about. Or two weeks later, he’s like, it was the first product that’s changed my life. Egos, not to brag, but I get stuff sent to me every week.
Like everybody else does. That’s been in men’s health and on TV and GNC sends me everything goes, I’ve never posted, never invested, never done a hell. Cause I’ve never felt a difference from taking something. He’s like, I love this and I love the mental health aspect. So from day one, we had always had that mental health.
Which I may be jumping ahead on your list of questions now, but those were
[00:30:17] Jess: our listeners who aren’t as familiar with Jared, just from his name or if they hadn’t watched supernatural, would I best know him from his being Rory’s boyfriend Dean on Gilmore girls.
[00:30:26] Paul: Yup. And now he is Walker, Texas ranger, so, oh yes.
So and great guy. He’s born and bred texts and he grew up in San Antonio.
[00:30:36] Jess: You know, I saw him, I think I was in middle school at the time, but I saw him at Alamo cafe, which is a very popular restaurant in San Antonio and got a picture with him. So
[00:30:45] Mason: Tanya, I’m from
[00:30:46] Paul: San Antonio. You have a picture with them.
Yeah. And he’s still really cute. I’m just going to go on the record, man. I will get you some mantra gear with Jared’s signature on it. How’s that? How’s
[00:30:58] Jess: he involved?
[00:30:59] Paul: Yeah, he had tried it. We talked, we were in the middle of raising a small convertible. And, you know, one of the rules I have is we don’t do pay to play.
We don’t just grab influencers for the product. Like you’ve got to use the product, like the product, and we’ve got to have a genuine conversation and connection around our mission. One of our rules is we don’t do booty shots. It’s just not part of the brand, not the wrong way. If that’s you, if that’s your.
But there’s enough of it out there, right? It’s just like on social media, we’re on social media, but we’re not going to engage in arguments or trolls or anything else. Like there’s enough garbage going on there that we’re going to put as much positive energy in there as we can. And when we can’t, we’re just going to step aside and let it happen.
So his involvement was first being a customer, loving it, talking to his wife, and then he invested and he came on board as a co-founder kind of, as we were launching and came up and he’s been great. We’ve had lots of taste testing at my house and his house and part of talking to him and Jen and, you know, that’s where hydration came from is like, we want something to get the kids that doesn’t have sugar that tastes good.
I can shout from the mountaintop, everyone take this thing no matter what. And I was like, great, we’re going to build that. And then we actually have another top secret project coming out. That’ll be out later in the year. Similar to hydrate, but completely different category, but just building the cleanest, most functional version of that product in the marketplace.
Well, we look
[00:32:34] Mason: forward to the invite to his house for the taste test party. We’ll go
[00:32:37] Paul: over there tonight after this.
[00:32:39] Mason: So let’s move on to your mission. Let’s talk about.
[00:32:43] Paul: Yeah. So this is where it gets real personal, real quick. There we go. So I grew up with a manic depressive mother, you know, somebody, she amazing woman, but you know, checked her in or out of mental hospitals and dealt with those cycles.
That were horrible. And didn’t even realize what they were as a kid. When our first daughter was born, I was up for 24 hours. She was born. I had to go drive, find my mom and check her into a mental hospital. So it was this thing that was never talked about. And Sally’s parents both worked in mental health.
They were both mental health counselors for 30, some years in Southern California. Her dad worked at Kemah real state hospital. They retired and he killed himself about a year, year and a half later. They were visiting here in Austin. Sally was pregnant with Evan. She was six months pregnant. We had dinner, they went back to their hotel room and got a call the next morning that he killed himself in the bathroom, um, here in town.
So yeah. Talk about a fucked up situation and, you know, hats off to my. Handled it beautifully and, and, um, create a great things out of it, but just seeing those. And then when I had my first depression at, I think even then I’m like, oh, I’m embarrassed to say that. Right. Like I was depressed. Why should I be.
Which really has nothing to do with it. It doesn’t have to be a reason for it. And I was part of the reason why middle-aged men like you and I it’s one of the top causes of death is suicide, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. And my wife throughout all of this, as I was working on this company, she was volunteering for crisis texts.
And she was literally saving lives just by listening and having people reach out. When I thought, you know, I should be doing something like that. If we’re building this brand and we’re going to have a platform, we need to use that platform for something good. Not just selling more stuff, like let’s really engage and use this media budget.
We have to make the world a better place. Yeah. Let’s sell a modular lab. Let’s make a really good product that we can feel good getting behind, but let’s make part of that. Why are you taking this product? Why are you working out it’s about mental and physical health? You know, just like you using your platform around environmental health and making smarter simpler decisions in how you run your household.
We’re trying to do the same thing. Make healthy. Simple easy and delightful. Well, and
[00:35:04] Mason: it’s actually part of the, uh, mostly green ethos. We actually say sustainability starts from within, and you have to have a healthy body in order to be an advocate for the plant. Yeah.
[00:35:13] Paul: I love that actually. And so that really became part of the mission.
As we knew from day $1 one. We wanted to be aligned with elevating the conversation on mental health and having every purchase give back to mental health. And that’s part of what attracted Jared to the business and the brand as well as he was one of the first stars actually, you know, props to him 11, 12 years ago, came out about his mental health struggle.
And it’s been really nice getting to know him and us talking and learning back and forth, like where we have our struggles, where we have our bad week. Once you start talking about it, as we were developing the product, you know, we were talking to a vendor in Tokyo or someone in Chicago and they’re like, oh, you guys do stuff around.
I suffer from depression, my son, my daughter, my husband committed suicide, whatever it was. They’re like, we back you guys, 110%, you need access to R and D you need access to marketing PR. So it really became this kind of groundswell of support for the brand and something that everyone could get behind.
And just knowing that when we woke up in the morning, The first product we sold did something good. Yeah. And
[00:36:26] Mason: it’s great to give space for that conversation. I had never, through my whole life, I’ve never talked about my mental health struggles. And as a kid, I got diagnosed with depression and. He just asked me some questions and decided that.
And so I always pushed it down and, but I knew that I was bipolar. I could feel the swings, the ups and downs. And then a few years ago, you know, through playing rugby, I hit my head a lot and had a couple of accidents and
[00:36:55] Paul: I was worried about, he struck me as the guy that hit your head a lot. It
[00:36:59] Mason: explains love.
Right. I was worried about atrophy in the Britain as it started to age. At an EEG E a brain scan. And so they did a full brain map. They were like, well, why are you here? I said, well, I’ve had some accidents. I want to make sure that I brain is okay. And if not get the right kind of treatment for it, because now they can even, they can re awake parts of your brain really bruise.
Yeah. They can send an electrical signal and get things moving through there. So that then it starts to remap that. I went in for the results. And they were like, there’s no sign that you had a head injury, even though they classified mine as severe, because I felt almost two stories onto my head and that brain swelling.
And they were like, there’s no residual effects from it. So your brain has recovered from that. And I’m like, great. They’re like, but why didn’t you talk about the Bible? And I go, what do you mean? And they’re like, you’re are between moderate and severe bipolar, uh, brainwaves. At that point I was 40 and I’ve learned how to deal with it.
And I still, you know, we’ll have depressive states, but they manifest more as I just sleep for two to three days. And I just don’t want to get out of bed, but I find ways to kind of cover for it. And so it, it just had been where I developed coping mechanisms for it. And so it hadn’t come up in a long time, but when they were like, your brain is still wired this way, it was a mind.
Fuck. It was just like I spent about two weeks just not knowing what to do with that information, because while I always knew it, I was in this camp of like, you’re not supposed to talk about it. And it’s, there’s something embarrassing about it to talk about. And so I never talked about it and I also thought some of it, you know, there’s a lot of America that’s being overmedicated right now.
And so I was like, how do you actually know that’s what it is? And I would never give myself permission to be that way. I was always Mason, just get up and go to work. You can’t lay around for days. And so, you know, same thing, support your mission. And we want to elevate the conversation on mental health
[00:39:12] Paul: as well.
Yeah. And you bring up some really good points where. You know, there’s a fine line between accepting it and talking about it and then doing something the fuck about it, versus thinking that accepting, it means wallowing in it. It’s, it’s that yin and yang it’s accepting what you can change and what you can’t change.
And then knowing all you control is your reaction to it. And even sometimes. Yeah. You know, give or take sometimes the
[00:39:39] Mason: lizard brain takes over. Yeah,
[00:39:41] Paul: exactly. So, no, that’s a super, super interesting perspective around that going into COVID, as we did this, it was very nervous to put that on the packaging and right.
To make that core to the brand. And then the conversation exploded during COVID around mental health. Right now, it seems like it’s being talked about everywhere, which is amazing because. I’m going to misquote the stat, but if someone talks about committing suicide, their chances of committing suicide. Go down dramatically.
It’s the people that don’t talk about it. Sally’s dad. I was listening to Devin. Lovech talking with the attorney general today and he shared his story, which I didn’t even know. He’s an investor in the fitness space, a great fitness influencer and guy between Austin and New York. He had a 16th birthday. I don’t want to steal his story, but he had a 16th birthday.
Dad was his hero. No outward signs walked in front of a truck seven days later. Right. And you’re like, holy hell. Like how do you and Devin such an incredible human being an example of moving on and growing with that. But you know, if his dad talked, chances are that goes down and Sally’s dad talked, chances are that goes down.
Right. So it’s just about having that conversation. If you and I keep talking, hopefully we never have that issue. Call me anytime. I’ll call you anytime. Sometimes that’s
[00:41:03] Mason: all it takes. Yeah. And our kids, you know, I worry about that childhood suicide rates are increasing. Yeah. I
[00:41:09] Jess: think it’s like the number one killer of children.
Number two, number two, I
[00:41:15] Paul: believe. Yeah. Video games, maybe number one is talking to one of our bankers the other day. He’s like, oh, it was a rough day. I just came home from my cousin’s. You know, kid just killed himself, captain of the rugby team or this team and no outward signs. And it’s like, I don’t even know as a parent, how you recover from that.
And
[00:41:35] Jess: you hear that story
[00:41:35] Paul: too often for sure. Way too often. Yep. So yeah, that’s why mental health, you know, for our thing is like, if we go out of business next year and someone heard our message and one person decided not to kill themselves, I can lose every dollar I put in this business and I’ll be okay, that’ll be worthwhile.
Definitely. Let’s not go out of business.
[00:41:55] Mason: And going back to your products, I’ve always known that when I eat too much sugar, my swings are much more severe. And so nutrition is the central component to.
[00:42:10] Paul: Yep. And that an exercise, which all goes to that kind of homeostasis or back to the, where we started, this is you’re either getting better or you’re getting worse.
Unfortunately, I’ve come to realize that. And almost every aspect of either working out and getting healthier, or you’re not, you’re getting less out there. We all think we’re going to reach this. When I get there, I’ll be happy when I get there. My marriage will be great. When I have a million dollars in the bank, then I’ll finally chill out and spend time with my.
It never happens. And that’s because the goalposts always move. The goalpost is moving. And it’s a quote on the bottom of our bag, which is the quality of your life is a direct result of the decisions you make today. And I heard that it’s almost a paraphrase from Tom Bilyeu. I heard that. I was like, that’s totally correct.
We don’t want to believe that we want to be victims of circumstance or this or that, but you can look at, and we’re like, oh, well, you’re well to do, or you’re a male or you’re. I mean, you’ve got Victor Frankl, which is a great book, right? Man. Search for meaning, plug for it. If you haven’t read it, read it, I’ve read it and I need to reread it.
Right? Yeah. It’s something that you kind of need to read every, every year and remind yourself.
[00:43:16] Jess: Yeah. You recommended that to me. I read
[00:43:18] Paul: that as well. Yeah. No matter what your situation is, what you control is your reaction to the situation like that’s where you get to choose or not choose to be a victim.
There are people that have had horrible circumstances growing up the in raped, whatever it is. And they turn out to be incredible, powerful, wonderful human beings. And then we all know there’s people that grew up with every privilege. And then a worst a-hole you’ve ever dealt with. So you tell me that there’s not nurture and nature in there, and that it is a result of the decisions we make.
